[continued from previous message] 
  
 A wilful ignorance of other people's cultures and histories encourages the 
 notion that freedom, democracy and tolerance are intrinsically western. As 
 Amartya Sen has argued, the subcontinent has long been home to traditions of 
 free-thinking and debate. Participatory governance was not Britain's gift 
 (recall Gandhi's indigenous village republics), even if parliamentary 
 democracy as an institutional form was adopted in some ex-colonies. Free 
 trade is another mythical western contribution to world history. Amitav 
 Ghosh has reconstructed the forgotten history of a vibrant trade culture 
 between medieval India and Africa. When the Portuguese arrived, they 
 demanded that the Hindu ruler of Calicut expel Muslims, "enemies of the 
 Holy-Faith", from his kingdom. He refused and was subjected to two days of 
 bombardment. 
  
 Indeed, one legacy of European colonialism that we all reckon with is the 
 self-fulfilling prophecy of the "clash of civilisations". The claim that 
 east and west are bound to come into conflict is merely an extension of 
 imperial practice which found it useful to seal off porous cultures into 
 fixed categories. This tragic "lie of the colonial situation", as Frantz 
 Fanon called it, rebounds on us tragically in the terror unleashed in the 
 name of Islam and Bush's "war on terror". If we are to undo the destructive 
 legacies of empire, it won't do to invest celebratory falsifications with 
 credibility. To make sense of a shared present and look towards a more 
 humane future, we need to start with a little informed honesty about the 
 past. 
  
 [Priyamvada Gopal (pg268@cam.ac.uk) teaches postcolonial studies at 
 Cambridge University and is the author of "Literary Radicalism in India: 
 Gender, Nation and the Transition to Independence."] 
  
  
  
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