Masala
A fusion lifestyle
Since I’d heard the word ‘decolonisation’ I can’t seem to shake off this odd feeling. DE-COLONISATION. What do we really mean?
Revert? To what? To remove? To separate?
Through this project I have learnt that in India, there is no undoing, there is no going back. India has always been about inclusion. We have an innate love for Masala. For fusion. We’ve got fusion dance, fusion cuisine, fusion clothing, and of late fusion weddings! ‘Appropriation’? What’s that?
Sugar, Spice and Everything Nice! What’s in the Chemical X? Our freedom to pick and choose and make things our own. Indo this and Indo that; of many worlds. How else does the most diverse nations in the world hold its own? Genuinely acknowledging, accepting and being aware of the various facets that make us is perhaps the best way to move forward.
Back when we had started working on this project I searched the web for any ‘decolonisation’ panels or events that had taken place in India. I didn't really find much but there was this one site that summarised the proceedings of a discussion. It didn’t quite make any sense to me back then, “what sort of conclusion is that?”, I wondered, but when I re-read it now, it seems to sum up our entire discovery. Like I said I’m starting to see everything differently.
Dr Paranjape said that we should stop blaming the west for what it did and rather get ahead with our own task of researching and writing. He said that decolonization is a negative term. Swaraj is a better term to describe the mind and perspective that we aim for. Indian nationalism is not for dominating others. It is different than other forms of nationalism. For India, it can be said that ‘In my Swaraj lies your Swaraj’. He also cautioned the audience against misunderstanding or misinterpreting the process of decolonization. If Indian decolonization is chauvinist, it will be great loss to the mankind. He also said that there are various levels at which we need decolonization. It is not just in our history textbooks or education system.
Are we decolonized spiritually? Then there are different societies for which colonization meant differently. Example, the tribal population in the North-eastern regions of the country remained unaffected from the hubris of the colonial empire. Recollecting the glorious past that India had is not sufficient. That past was brutally defeated. We have to think what was missing in the past. There was a lack of political unity. We had spiritual, cultural unity but no political concept of an Indian state. The thesis of total self-sufficiency of Indian past is not feasible and is misleading. However, throwing it away will also not suffice. We have to take up different elements from the world including our own past and make the Indian state. He ended his submissions by maintaining that there is a strong need to do some introspection of our history and the glorious past and whether is it appropriate to harp on the continuing legacy of it with no acknowledgement of the present.
From “Decolonising the Indian Mind” — a discussion organised by India Foundation, led by Dr. Koenraad Elst, Belgian Scholar and orientalist and Dr. Makarand Paranjape, poet and Professor at Jawahar Lal Nehru University.
It’s unbelievable how spot on this was and how quickly I had disregarded it— perhaps it takes a process to truly know it, simply reading or speaking about it may not be the most effective method. That’s where I believe this project should head, as storytellers we have the power to push this towards an experiencial sharing of the process itself, way past the documentation of our own.
I strongly believe this is one of those projects that can go on endlessly, way beyond me and my time here at the Royal College of Art. Now that we’ve got it spinning, there’s no stopping it.
