Oh Albion, beware India...

I shall carry on with the thread of what I was musing over in the last blogpost, especially with reference to the two articles whose links have been provided in the comments, one by Swapan Dasgupta and the other by Ian Jack. Those who dislike any kind of serious discourse, please stay away.

Arnold J. Toynbee is generally associated with the theory that nations (he would have preferred civilisations) experience epochs of rise and fall, and that the interplay of challenge and (corresponding-) response decides what sort of historical track a nation will follow, and for how long. Also, the greatness of a nation is certainly pivoted, in the first instance, on how rich and militarily powerful it manages to become, but mere wealth and power have never completely defined greatness: that depended upon how strongly one nation could influence, even impress others, fill them with admiration, respect, and a strong desire to emulate. I don’t think historically conscious people will doubt that England’s rise to greatness started with the Tudors coming to power in the mid-16^th century (everything started then or soon after, from global explorations of discovery to defeating the Spanish Armada, the founding of the East India Company to the kind of social ambience that could produce and lionize geniuses on the scale of Shakespeare, Milton and Newton, the huge political upheavals that firmly secured the foundations of the most enduring of democratic societies…), and reached its apogee in the last days of Queen Victoria, in the final decades of the 19^th century, not merely because Britain had by then become the first as well as biggest industrial economy in the world or that it ruled the largest empire ever, but because she had self-consciously and proudly achieved an incredible number of things which she taught or dared other countries to follow: from creating the infrastructure for universal education and social security and the most organized and efficient police service in the world to kindness to animals to missionary activity on an unprecedented scale, from mapping the planet to creating the greatest body of literature the world has ever known, from setting up the first ever society geared to science and technology to delineating a culture of suavity, understated decency and humour and good manners that spared none, from the monarch down to the ragpicker, and creating a more widely diffused will to greatness than has ever been seen before or after…

Then  came the two world wars, with the Great Depression thrown in in between. Britain emerged nominally vindicated and victorious, but something precious and essential had been lost – although they didn’t know it then, back in the 1940s. There followed Keynesianism and the welfare state and the post war construction boom, James Bond and the Beatles and drugs, ‘progressive’ ideas about education and the Commonwealth and the British Council, prime ministers assuring the nation that they had ‘never had it so good’, the invasion by mass-consumerist American culture and hordes of immigrants, and the country rode an artificial high for a long, long time: in fact, even in the 1980s, there were intellectuals pointing out how Britain should rejoice that she was much ‘richer’ in the post-colonial era. There were grumbling voices growing ever louder that they had made a country of lazy, irresponsible, uncivic buffoons by the million (witness the obesity epidemic, the degree of functional illiteracy and the culture of the football beer gangs), and it couldn’t afford it much longer. What followed was the long night of Thatcherism, during which much of the best of the welfare state was demolished, and over the ruins was raised once more the ramparts of capitalism of the most rapacious, shameless, ostentatious variety … success means the rich getting richer quick (Ronald Reagan might have actually learnt this from the Brits) and nothing else. Thirty years have passed since then, too, and now, as the very recent urban riots show, the chickens are coming home to roost. Note two things: the vandals stole no food and no books, only laptop computers, iPods, flatscreen TVs and Nike trainers, besides the odd water bottle, lifted just for the ‘fun’ of it. And now the incumbent PM is lamenting over a broken society: a culture of  ‘irresponsibility, selfishness, behaving as if your choices have no consequences, children without fathers, schools without discipline, reward without effort, crime without punishment, rights without responsibilities…’ This is obviously a very far cry from the England people like us knew, adored, even worshipped. But the question is, has it happened by sheer accident, or, as the Americans say, they had it coming? And the far more important question for us Indians – citizens of the greatest wannabe country in the world – is, can we see the writing on the wall, meant for us?

The increasing crassness and arrogance and boorishness of an increasingly rich class of upstarts, the epidemic of social dysfunction all around us, the persistence of great poverty amidst great opulence, the skyrocketing graphs of environmental pollution and natural-resource depletion, the rapid loss of not only the physical treasure of cultural heritage but awareness thereof (‘Who was this RaOne dude? Was he, like, cool…?’ and ‘Why go to Aurangabad, yaar? No malls there, just some dirty old caves with stupid pictures on the walls…’), the stench of corruption everywhere, the increasingly moron-friendly quality of examinations (an expression that a very wise British boy has just taught me) which allows millions to get the tag of ‘educated’ with no effort at all, the policy paralysis that has engulfed the highest levels of government, the total dishonesty that pervades every kind of relationship, from the one with your bank advisor to the one with your so-called love interest… how much more evidence do we need that mere anarchy is loos’d upon us, and the ‘blood-dimm’d tide’ might not be too far off?