An Indian look at the crises of the west

Claude Alvares lives in Goa, India, where he and his wife, Norma, are local heroes for protecting the coast that so many Westerners visit for its beauty. We wanted to speak to Claude to get an outside perspective on the existential struggle that seems to plague the West. Could someone who had seen the effects of colonialism on his own culture offer any insights on the source of the West’s crisis about meaning?

‍

evolve: Your experience as an Indian who grew up in post-colonial times may offer an important angle on what we are calling the meaning crisis. How did being subject to the legacy of colonialism affect your life?

Claude Alvares: One of the things that the modern education system did for India was it totally cut people off from their culture. Being part of this culture for all my growing years put me into a system of thinking and learning with which I've got no emotional connection. I don't have any emotional link with Emmanuel Kant, with Heisenberg, or whomever. Our culture was first Persian, Sanskrit. And at the same time that I was cut off from my culture, I was cut off from nature.  

The British and the Portuguese wouldn't allow the local populations to practice their religion. There was persecution such that people would hide their temples. In Goa, I can show you a couple of houses that look like normal houses, but inside they are temples. So this population of Indians has been dumbed down over years and decades because they have been told, not just in the education system, that whatever is Indian—your philosophy, your poetry, your architecture, your languages—all these are worthless. This is the substrate on which the entire modern education system is still based, including that there is still a drive to teach and speak English. We have an entire generation of students who don't have even any reasonable competence with their own sacred texts, their own philosophical texts, or with the traditions of this country—for nearly 200 years. It has taken many years of political independence for them to really feel the worth of their traditions and what they believed in.

e: So one of the effects of colonialism is the disconnection with nature and from a depth of tradition.  

CA: First, the local languages were pushed out. Language is most important because language encapsulates meaning, the universe, and your cosmology. There was a degeneration of our languages and they were all thrown out. Now, when you get back that language, you get back everything. It comes back to you all over again. The local cultures have become very strong now. At one time, the English language newspapers were dominant—the Times of India and so forth. But over the last couple of decades, the local language papers have come back and they arenow the dominant papers. Locally, there are very vibrant cultures. They are very strong—in many ways it's unshakable. Still, there is a lot of damage to be undone. Parents still want their children to go to Harvard, and they become de-culturated. They want the stuff that you have.

When you come to India, people don't have a lot of stuff. They don't have washing machines. They dry their clothes on the clothesline, or they put them on the road to dry. They will drink water from a pond and take it from a river. We are organic beings. We are living beings. We are not designed to function for 24 hours like a machine designed to function. We need to talk. We need time to rest. We need time to talk, to converse.

‍

The capitalist production system is completely intolerant of any individuality, any connection with wife or family or emotion or culture or dreaming. The notion of productivity becomes paramount. Compensation is related to the capacity to be able to produce. That's something, from an Indian perspective, we don't understand. How can you evaluate all people on the basis of a value that has come from a machine associated with machines?

e: How did all of this affect your life?

CA: I had the advantage of not only growing up in a culture with my mother tongue, but I also had the good fortune to spend two to three years in Europe and in Holland, observing the way that people were organized. I said, “Thank you very much, I would like to go back to where I belong.” After looking from both points of view, I de-professionalized myself completely from my academic tradition. I had to leave the university. I had to live in the village where my neighbors were, people who had never been to university. I had to go back to ordinary farmers, people who whitewashed walls, who cultivate the fields, carpenters, masons, people who work with their hands. After a couple of years, I could say that finally I had begun to stand on a place on planet Earth. Before that, I was a disembodied mind floating anywhere, but with no direction or meaning whatsoever.

THE CAPITALIST PRODUCTION SYSTEM IS COMPLETELY INTOLERANT OF ANY INDIVIDUALITY.

Both societies have their value, the Western way of living and the Indian ways. I'm not saying that Westerners are not normal human beings, I'm saying that they've created a system that does not allow them to function as normal human beings —normal people who love having conversations without all sorts of other things mediating those conversations. In our state of what is often called “backwardness,” a lot of this normal humanity still remains with us.

I don't know if it can be a solution for people in the West because you are so much enmeshed in a cage. I had to physically get out of the cage. My classic advice to young people is to not join the corporate world or the government. If you get into this, then it's over for you. There's not much chance that you're going to get out of it with your soul intact. We are all human beings, but when it comes to how to flourish as a human being, I think our society is a little bit more liberal than yours.

When we link with the rest of the world on an equal basis, as human beings like you and I did in this conversation, we will be able to solve a lot of problems. There is a commonality still there. We should get people from all over the world to join this conversation about how to demobilize the system that we have created. This system is still expanding and still creating oppression everywhere. But we need to find a way of living together so that the next generation can survive.

‍