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?
by what measure is india a major hotspot? i think most tourism in india is domestic.
In hippy-ish baby boomer and millennial circles, portraits of hindu figures can be common. I would see them on random people’s social media pages after they got into psychedelics. When I was a kid, I overheard the beginning of two adults, who just met, discussing their own seperate trips to India. I didnt hear beyond a few sentences since I minded my own business and left.
This all gives me the impression that interest in India is common. Idk if many foreigners to India actually travel to India. Perhaps I’m wrong.
Only the top like 5% of hippies travel to India. I think the peak of Indian spiritual export to the US was in the late 60s/early 70s. You had a lot of people looking for answers outside of their cultural norms. They did sex, drugs, rock and roll, and “eastern spirituality”. A bunch of Indian “gurus” capitalized on this interest and established branches of their cults in “the west”. Many persist to this day, though they mostly fall off pretty hard once the old Indian guy dies.
yeah i know the kind of people you’re talking about but i actually don’t think there are that many of them. i certainly havent met someone like that in years and years.
Imo, it comes out of having to sell the partition of India and Pakistan as ‘natural religious divides’, and then selling hindivatu nationalism as the ‘deep spiritual ancestry’ of a country that was historically multiple petty kingdoms with a myriad of faith traditions, with one of the most historically overwhelming not being a unified Hinduism, with is a faith practice that attempts to amalgamate myriad traditions into a singular whole that reifies a singular ruling elite and was typically practiced by the upper caste, but Buddhism, which came as a response to Hindu elitism or local animistic/ancestral faith practices and of course areas of Islam sprinkled throughout.
That and it created an anti-colonial ‘spiritual alternative’ to baby boomers who understood that capitalism was eating their lives but still had communist brain-worms, or baby boomers who were extremely successful under capitalism but had rejected Abrahamic faiths as being too ‘impure’ (as they actually understood what was being talked about, nothing helps faith like not understanding what the fuck is actually happening). Basically, people who don’t actually understand what karma actually is.
Hinduism, with is a faith practice that attempts to amalgamate myriad traditions into a singular whole that reifies a singular ruling elite and was typically practiced by the upper caste, but Buddhism, which came as a response to Hindu elitism or local animistic/ancestral faith practices and of course areas of Islam sprinkled throughout.
Was Bhuddism was originally rejection of casts and to express equality of worth? One legend I heard about Bhudda was how he was displeased and unsatisfied with a sheltered royal life and a endless bounty of any material good he could ask his dad for. So he ran away, slept under trees, and starved because he rather be among those who were once his subjects than live a life with next to no human connection.
It was one of the most politically important Buddhist doctrines that anyone, regardless of caste, gender, age, etc. can reach enlightenment in this very life, where the Hindu dogma at the time is that such a thing is impossible for the lower castes.
The very abbreviated origin story is that Buddha was a great prince who had endless bounty as you say, but due to a revelation that came from a series of hardships that he witnessed, he came to understand that suffering is inherent to the nature of our world and could not be escaped even through his wealth, because he too would grow old and die (etc.) He then set about to discover a solution to this problem, which at one point involved studying with yogis who were extreme ascetics, which escalated to him starving himself nearly to death before being nursed back to health from a comatose state by being fed rice porridge. He concluded from this that neither extreme indulgence nor extreme asceticism could save someone, but that moderation was a necessary element of right living. Following this, he meditated under a tree for 49 days and reached enlightenment, at which point he began proselytizing about the Four Noble Truths that he discovered over the course of his life, and his solution, the Noble Eightfold Path.
This is an extremely pared-down telling, so I’d appreciate if other users not jump on me, but I would appreciate any necessary corrections or additions for bettering the explanation. Probably the biggest issue is that it doesn’t cover the issue of non-attachment adequately.
That is generally my understanding of it.
hindivatu nationalism
What is hindivatu?
Sorry, It is hindutva, and it is basically a Hindu supremacist movement. They’re the people that killed Gandhi.
India’s rep as a spiritual destination has taken a nuclear attack in recent years lmao
One thing that helped India become a tourist destination in 60s and 70s among Anglos was the London-Calcutta bus route that ran from 1957-76. After the Iranian revolution and other conflicts the route closed and fewer people made the trip. But this era was formative in the aesthetic of new age/hippy culture, so nag champa incense, yoga, the clothing style and such stayed popular.
There is some info about the phenomenon on Wikipedia talking about the ‘hippie trail’, the route from western Europe to India https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippie_trail
Cool read
Its really the hippy movement with the advent of acid and a “modern” interest in third world brown people for being spiritual noble savages (as a result of being closer to precapitalist relations to production compared to the west), as well as the bourgeoning capitalist class wanting to promote nationalism on an international scale especially in regards to tourism (look at japan).
India and the whole subcontinent genuinely has an incredible cultural history that deserves to be shared with the world, but under capitalist relations a big part of it revolves around bourgeois nationalism.
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.
The process of India being colonized wasn’t immediate and neither was the incomplete, arguably never even started process of decolonization.
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.
