Macaulay's Children
There's this thing Hindus do. It's cringing. That involuntary full-body recoil when someone mentions anything remotely dharmic in mixed company. The quick glance around to see who's watching before you touch your parents' feet. The way "spiritual" is acceptable but "religious" makes you sound like a rube.
Ever watched a Hindu professional explain their background at a Western dinner party? The apologetics. The performance of being one of the good ones—rational, modern, not like those people with their superstitions and their gaudiness and their lack of taste.
They call it sophistication but it's really a colonized brain firing on all cylinders.
The British pulled off something extraordinary. They convinced an entire civilization to participate in its own psychological demolition. And that demolition is still happening, long after the demolition crew went home.
Think about the mechanics. You've got the longest continuous intellectual traditions on the planet—philosophy that was parsing consciousness while Europe was figuring out which end of the sword to hold. A culture that gave the world mathematics. Astronomical calculations that mapped celestial movements with stunning precision. Medical knowledge, architectural genius, literary traditions that make Homer look like a rough draft.
And now? Go to any elite Indian gathering and listen to how people talk about their own civilization. Like it's something that happened to other people. Something vaguely embarrassing that needs contextualizing, softening, translating into acceptable Western frameworks before it can be taken seriously.
The empire isn't gone. It's just speaking in your voice now.
What they did was simple but brutal. They made English the language of administration, education, success. Every ambitious person had to learn it, think in it, dream in it. And baked into that language was an entire value system—assumptions about what counts as knowledge, what signifies sophistication, what marks you as civilized.
Look at a child raised in an elite Indian household. Fluent English. Passable Hindi. Religious festivals treated like quaint ethnic theater. Western music, Western shows, Western metrics of cool. Sanskrit? That's for priests. Classical arts? Cute, but not really us.
That child isn't rebelling against their heritage. They're performing exactly what centuries of cultural programming designed them to do—preference everything Western while treating indigenous knowledge as historical curiosity.
Nobody had to force this. That's the genius. Create the right conditions and people will colonize themselves.
The stranglehold is making you believe that the contempt you feel for your own civilization is your own sophisticated judgment rather than inherited imperial propaganda.
Every "I'm not religious but spiritual" is running British code. Every "I'm modern, not traditional" is executing colonial logic. Every aesthetic cringe at Indian design while considering European minimalism sophisticated is the virus replicating.
You think you're making independent choices and that your preferences are your own. You think when you find traditional practices embarrassing or dated or unsophisticated, that's your rational modern mind evaluating reality.
Except it's not.
It's Macaulay's education policy from 1835, still compiling. It's Max Mueller's Orientalism. It's the entire apparatus of colonial knowledge production, still determining what you find beautiful, what you find credible and worthy of respect.
They created a class of people—brown on the outside, completely colonized on the inside—who would do the work of cultural destruction for them. People who would feel superior to their own civilization. Who would measure everything against Westminster and Oxbridge and find it lacking. Who would raise children embarrassed by their grandparents' accents and religious practices.
Watch what happens when Hindu identity tries to assert itself. The immediate response—from Hindus themselves—is discomfort. Cringing. The fear of seeming backward, fundamentalist, not-modern. That response didn't fall from the sky. It was engineered. Carefully. Over centuries.
You're living inside the most successful psychological operation in human history. One that convinced its targets that their subjugation was enlightenment and cultural erasure was sophistication. That internalizing your conqueror's contempt for you was a sign of education and progress.
This is what cultural genocide actually looks like. Just entire populations quietly abandoning their civilizational memory because carrying it feels heavy, and embarrassing.
No one needs to burn libraries when you've convinced people the books aren't worth reading. No one needs to ban languages when you've made speaking them a marker of being unsophisticated.
The occupation is complete when the occupied become their own occupiers. When they police their own thoughts for insufficient Westernization and when they feel relief at passing as more Western, more acceptable to those who never respected them anyway.
Right now, reading this, some part of you is uncomfortable. Maybe defensive. Maybe thinking this is overblown, reductive, playing victim. That discomfort? That refusal to see how colonized you are? That's the program running.
The genius is you never feel conquered. You feel enlightened. Refined. Finally free from all that "embarrassing tradition". You're not free. You're just running their program smoother.
The gore sahib is still winning. Still extracting. Just the resource now isn't spices or textiles. It's your own civilizational self-respect, harvested so efficiently you don't even notice it's gone.
