Januar y 31, 2015

Also sprach / zeichnete Hebdo

January 31, 2015

Unwinding Culture
Teotonio R. de Souza
Teotonio R. de Souza is the founder-director, Xavier Centre of Historical Research, Goa (1979-1994). He
presently resides in Portugal, where he is a University Professor and Fellow of the Portuguese Academy of
History since 1983 and tweets @ramkamat

Julio Gonalves, a Goan who served as secretary of the prestigious Sociedade de

Geografia de Lisboa, reviewed in its Journal of October-December 1956 the book of
K.M. Panikkar, published in London in 1953 as Asia and the Western Dominance.
The title of the book review was Also Sprach trying perhaps to convey to the
western reader the madness (or rather the audacity) of the Indian critic of the
European colonialism, if not also the superior Nietzschean wisdom of the Western
civilization.
Much of the pressure today of the western political elites to enforce a condemnation
of Hebdo tragedy, rather than any critical analysis of its causes, seems to be a repeat
of the knee-jerk responses of the West which is unable to swallow contrary views.
That is a clear symptom of what is diagnosed as Huntingtons disease. Curiously, its
literary expression was presented to the world by S.P. Huntington in a first abridged
version in Foreign Affairs Review in 1993 [http://bit.ly/1hYkiCF]in response to F.
Fukuyamas The End of History (1992),and later as a book entitled The Clash of
Civilizations, in 1996.
It is but natural that five centuries of Euro-American colonial and imperial terrorism
that ransacked the globe, destroying cultures and robbing world resources in the

name of mission civilizatrice and scientific progress, is now haunting the exploiters
in their own home countries. It is the natural justice that forms the essence of the
Hindu law of karma, which in terms of western physics corresponds somewhat to
Newtons third law of motion.
One

of

my

recent

op-eds

entitled

Scum

hailed

as

western

value[http://bit.ly/1yDUCqx] provoked an angry, irrational and ad hominem response

from someone in Europe, accusing me of trying to show off my erudition. It looks as
if only a European has the right to show off erudition. I have come across in my long
professional life as professor much crass ignorance among the westerners that
would make many of my Asian and African students sad.
The response to my op-ed revealed the characteristic of western arrogance suffering
from Huntingtons disease which I mentioned earlier. It is this stubbornness of the
West that will be its graveyard. It was responsible for two World Wars, which do not
seem to have been sufficient to teach much. Such callousness is tragic and unworthy
of those who still proclaim that they civilized the world.
Unless and until the West recovers its good sense and regains capacity to be selfcritical, including humility to accept that its former victims may have something to
teach, the West may have to face the insecurity that it made the rest of the world
face during the past five centuries of colonial domination. Hence, it is important that
it listens to the causes of the Hebdo tragedy, and not expect the world to join in like
slaves hoarded in Paris to condemn the murders.
The western colonialist, be it English, French or any other, would go to India or
elsewhere with little or nothing in his pockets and become a saheeb or nabob,
expecting the natives to prostrate before them and do their biddings. The colonialists
had convinced themselves that they had to be despotic because the natives could
not be ruled any other way, or that their despotism was more enlightened than that
of the earlier rulers they had replaced! The native nationalisms and the end result as
decolonization was the socio-political consequence of such pretensions. That
process took some centuries to materialize, and we need not be surprised if a fresh
process is in the making.
I recall a series of essays on Nationalism ( N.Y.: The MacMillan Co., 1917) published
by Rabindranath Tagore following his visits to Japan, Europe and USA, responding
to invitations as the first Asian Nobel prize winner for literature. Beneath the award
seems to lie the usual dirty politics of the attribution of that prize, a strategy to drive
a wedge between two leading figures of the Indian society who held opposite views
about nationalism. Curiously, M.K. Gandhi was never considered fit for that award.

Describing the Nationalism in the West, Rabindranath Tagore had the following to
say: The truth is that the spirit of conflict and conquest is at the origin and in the
centre of Western nationalism; its basis is not social cooperation. It has evolved a
perfect organization of power but not spiritual idealism. It is like the pack of predatory
creatures that must have its victims () The slavery that it gives rise to unconsciously
drains its own love of freedom dry.
We may need to ask why the Hebdo tragedy took place. To avoid it happening again
we need an answer which does not hide any prevailing unfreedom. Rabindranath
Tagore had prayed for such freedom for India:"Where the mind is without fear and
the head held high. Are the Muslim immigrants in France and many other former
colonial powers allowed to hold their heads high?