In the middle of posting this, someone just told me that many previously colonized countries have to outport their goods at an uneven exchange, and India has their culture as a product. Is there a lot of white washing disrespectful appropriation? Are there lots of cults too?
The person you talked to told you right and imagine the worst answers possible to your questions and you’ll have the correct ones!
What I’m attuned to isn’t properly “whitewashing” where the culture, ontology and history is attributed to white people, but more like hindu nationalist and caste-washing, where the same thing happens but it’s attributed to hindu figures who form a backbone of culturaly hindu/indian nationalist identity and the caste system is reified in practice.
The process of India being colonized wasn’t immediate and neither was the incomplete, arguably never even started process of decolonization.
Anyway all this comes from being around a lot of diaspora Indians and Pakistanis in America and just soaking shit up so take it with however many grains of salt.
Curious to hear why you say this. India’s economy isn’t beholden to the US (And Europe) the way SKorea, Japan, Europe are. It’s a really poor country but its heavy industry and agriculture are robust enough to keep the country’s self-reliance afloat. Although Indian capitalists are just as bad as the Western ones in their treatment of the populace.
India mainly sells “low value” labor products and raw materials to America. That’s literally neocolonial extraction.
That’s changing and iirc this past year was the first one where the us wasn’t the number 1 importer or trader by volume or whatever, Indias electronics manufacturing is starting to take off (lol at Apple having to gb2 China over qc tho…) and the mohdi government is keeping their options open, but self reliance isn’t the measure of decolonization, it’s your relationship to the history of colonization and your mode of production and trade. I also think it’s really hard to call a place decolonized when it’s got a strong ethnofascist movement.
Just off the top of my head, serious interrogation of these will probably lead me to clarify but not abandon these positions:
“Independence” movement started by man who wanted to be treated like the British subject he was, not one subject to black codes.
Post “independence”, made no substantial, long lasting moves to integrate or protect muslim and buddhist minorities leading to a resurgent hindu nationalist movement.
Failed to undo the caste systems effects
Extensive system of secondary educational institutions function primarily to export skilled workers to other countries where they often work under indentured servitude (like in the us) rather than build national industry.
Failed to make peace with Pakistan over the British saying “now fight!” a long time ago.
I’m really interested in your argument that significant progress has been made towards decolonization tbh. Some lib wrote comparing the outcomes of India and China over the same time period and at the time it was published there was ink to be spilled letting the whole world know how good China had done but in the present day it’s hardly necessary.
OP
meantdid not mean whitewash like painting a fence.death to english death to america
I heard Israeli soldiers sometimes vacation in India and listen to trance while taking ecstacy. Is that whitewashing in any way?
You may be right, I’m not confident in using the term whitewashing. I more reserve it for visual examples, like American football fans wearing Native American feather headresses at games with colors of their team painted on their face.
When it comes to actions, I don’t have many examples… I feel that if you go into the process of spiritual self work in a space where you’re a guest, and corrupt it with a white colonial attitude, that is whitewashing.
Whitewashing has two meanings:
Most commonly, it means depicting something as “good” that is evil, like making excuses for crimes.
But the term “___washing,” derived from the above, is used to talk about various ways of misrepresenting things. For example, “pinkwashing” or “rainbow washing” is when someone uses queer identity as a way of laundering their reputation, like talking about how progressive it is that the drone program has lesbian pilots. I suppose it’s possible that portrayals of Jesus or Ancient Rome could be called “whitewashing” in the sense that they are misrepresented as being white, but that’s an abnormal use of the term.
oh uh there’s colorism and a bunch of like skin bleaching kinda shit in Indian media, i thought you meant sanitizing atrocities and stuff.
i think you’re describing appropriation rather than anything i’d call whitewashing.
Oh okay, I’ll just say appropriation.
Yeah whitewashing is a great word to use because in a fence it’s a periodic activity to not just change the color of something, but to make that natural color a part of the built environment and keep the now completely dead object from decomposing.