The Raj path of Delhi will now be called the duty road. What was once called Conn aught Place has become Rajiv Chowk many years ago. What was Raj Avenue becoming Dindayal Upadhyay road? Irwin Hospital is now Jayaprakash Narayan Hospital and Wilmington Hospital is known as Ram Manohar Lohiya Hospital. The statue of George V has already been removed from India Gate. The name of Victoria Terminus of Mumbai has also been indigenized. So do we assume that we have figured out a way to get rid of the symbols of slavery? If this is the case, then the government should make a list of all the places, monuments, streets or markets with English or European names in the country at once. Naming him an Indian can kill the memories of colonization by shooting a single arrow. If you want, change the name of Central Vista also to a Sanskrit name.
The question is if the process of changing the name is completed, will it change the way we look at the country, society and the world? Can a change of names guarantee that when we think about the polity of independent India, we will be more dependent on Kautilya's Artha shastra or Bhishma's teachings than on the ideas of Hobbes, Locke and Mill? Wouldn't we then fall in love with the theories of John Rawls when it comes to jurisprudence? Instead of turning to Jameson, Eagleton and Lukach for literary theory, would we explore the discourses of Abhinava Gupta and Ananda Vardhan? When discussing public life will we have anything other than Haber mas' Public Sphere Theory? Will we take the help of the father-in-law or Bhartrihari to consider the structure of languages? What's more, when the name-changing exercise is over, will we have any framework for writing an informative dissertation other than the one-handed down by Western scholars and the social sciences in English?
There are no answers to all these questions. India has not even taken the first step towards real indigenization. Real indigenization happens when language, knowledge and education are indigenised. The problem is that it doesn't work in a jiffy. Nor can it be associated with the foundation stone laying or statue-unveiling programs. If the program of indigenization was taken immediately after independence, then at least twenty-five years-long blueprints would have to be made. Entire generations of nation-builders would have been consumed in this. The Prime Minister who starts this work, may not be completed in his life. Since this was neither done then nor is it being done now, books ranging from a grade 6 Civics or Civics book to an MA in Political Science are full of knowledge created by Western scholars.
It does not matter which party and ideology are in government at the Center or in the states – no government has dared to challenge the wisdom created by the colonial greats. We are compelled to study our society, culture and history in these foreign forms of knowledge. The irony is that we do not consider this knowledge a symbol of slavery. Our intellectuals have developed a special method to avoid the dilemmas that arise from the study of this knowledge. They place the economic exploitation and loss of political sovereignty by the colonialists in a separate category and the knowledge produced by the discoursers who supported colonialism in the second category.
A reading of the New Education Policy document gives an impression that perhaps education policy-makers have some sense of this responsibility. But this obligation cannot be fulfilled just by mentioning it in the document. This will happen only if the Indian traditions of knowledge are followed by suspending the study of Western social theory. Our intellectuals have been studying western knowledge for two hundred and fifty years.
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