Let Indians become genuine Indians

By Dr Jay Dubashi

When you imitate the West, as we have been doing for the last two hundred years ever since they conquered us, you first start imitating their dress. This is how one culture drives the other culture out.

Unlike Gandhiji, Nehru had a complex about Britishers and he simply had to dress like them. Neither Gandhiji nor Lokmanya Tilak dressed like Englishmen. They were genuine Indians and Tilak was a genuine Hindu. It is because of this complex that Nehru made a mess of everything he touched—Kashmir, China and relations with the West—and annoyed everyone without making a single friend.

We Indians are a simple people. We dress simply—just a dhoti and a kurta or a kurta-pajama will do for most of us men; sometimes, particularly in the South, just a dhoti will do, with nothing over it, as I found to my great surprise when I called on a famous writer in Bangalore. We live simply too, often in a house with little or no furniture. I am talking about the average Indian, not those who live in five-star hotels at taxpayers’ expense. Then, of course, there are no limits to what you spend, or somebody else pays for you.

I went out recently to buy a dhoti for me, a simple hand-spun dhoti, such as Gandhiji used to wear. I could not find one. I walked through dozens of lanes in the crowded alleys of Pune—but no dhoti. They could give me fine-spun three-piece polyester suiting, the kind Dhirubhai Ambani used to wear, but no dhotis. And this in Pune, where until recently elderly people used to go about with the headgear known as pugdi, which Lokmanya Tilak used to wear, and so did his arch-rival, Gopal Krishna Gokhale. About sixty years ago, when I was a student in Pune, I used to see many people wearing pugdi, especially the Poona pugdi, and even I purchased one for my grandfather, who, for some reason, refused to wear it—I never could understand why.

Now, there are no pugdis in Poona and no dhotis either. The only people who wear dhotis are fruit-sellers in bazaars and priests in temples. I often go to temples in the evenings and listen to priests singing kirtans. If reminds me of my younger days when, as a child, I used to accompany my grandmother to temples. The Poona temples are still very crowded and the priests, handsome in their silken finery, regularly sing their kirtans, but the younger generation has taken to shirts and trousers, many of them imported, and they wouldn’t know a pagdi, if they saw one.

When you imitate the West, as we have been doing for the last two hundred years ever since they conquered us, you first start imitating their dress. This is how one culture drives the other culture out. After all, you ask, what is the harm wearing a shirt, and maybe a tie, instead of a kurta? Why not wear a pair of shoes instead of a pair of chappals? If you are wearing a shirt, why not a necktie to go with it? And so on and on, until you find you have gone totally Western, not only in your dress but also in your thinking. You not only dress like them, you also think like them. And ultimately you succumb as completely that you become a caricature of the Western man, as Pandit Nehru became and almost destroyed himself and the country.

Nehru’s grandfather was a kotwal of Delhi and worked for the last remnants of the Delhi Sultanate. Go and see his picture in an old Nehru book. He is dressed just like a moulvi from Lucknow, complete with churidar pajama and Fez cap. He also looks as a Muslim, which probably his forefathers, who came from Kashmir, were. I am quite sure he and his family spoke Urdu at home, just as today’s babus speak English at home. Their food was probably no different from those of the Muslim rulers. For all practical purposes, they were Muslims, and Nehru himself once said that he was born a Hindu by accident. Nehru was an accidental Hindu, just as his grandchildren and other brood are accidental Britishers. Nehru had also said that he was the last Englishman in India, just as his grandfather, a minor functionary of the fading Moghuls, would no doubt describe himself as the last Moghul in India.

It is this cultural dislocation that is responsible for most of our troubles today. Though most of us know who we are, our leaders, particularly the Nehru types, do not. These are men who have nothing of their own, neither dress nor culture, nor even food, who imitate those who rule over them, and who follow slavishly one conqueror after another, who are neither Indians, nor Muslims nor Westerners, but a horrible mixture, a hybrid lot with nothing genuine about them.

Whatever you might say about Gandhiji—and I am not one of his great admirers—he was, with all his faults, a genuine person. Like all great leaders, he was simplicity personified. Gandhiji had simple tastes and his meals were simple—often raw vegetables and fruits, and goat’s milk to go with it. His dress was the simplest anybody could think of—the dress of an Indian farmer. The only costly thing he used to have was his watch, which must have cost a few rupees. Even when he visited London, the imperial capital, and saw the British King in his Buckingham Palace, he wore the same clothes as he did back home in Wardha, and he washed and pressed them himself, just as Abraham Lincoln, another genuine person, shined his own shoes and peeled his own potatoes.

Nehru was entirely different, not at all a genuine person. When I first saw him in London in 1948, a year after Independence, he looked so funny in his suit and tie, I failed to recognise the great leader we were used to. Krishna Menon was our High Commissioner in London then, so he had asked some of us to receive Nehru at the embassy, as he himself was unable to come down to receive him. Nehru arrived in a Rolls-Royce—an embassy-owned car which we used to ferry special guests like Nehru around town—and had to walk a few paces as the car was parked a few yards away from the entrance. Nehru looked like Charlie Chaplin—but for his polished shoes and his hat. It was the first time many of us were seeing Nehru in that kind of dress—and I doubt whether he would have had the guts to appear before Gandhiji in that ugly dress.

Unlike Gandhiji, Nehru had a complex about Britishers and he simply had to dress like them. Neither Gandhiji nor Lokmanya Tilak dressed like Englishmen. They were genuine Indians and Tilak was a genuine Hindu. It is because of this complex that Nehru made a mess of everything he touched—Kashmir, China and relations with the West—and annoyed everyone without making a single friend. Unless Indians become genuine Indians, not always imitating the West as they do, will India demand and receive the world’s respect, which it deserves