Directions: Read the following passage carefully and answer the questions.
DECOLONIZING THE NORTH
The white man’s burden is becoming increasingly heavy for the earth and especially for the South. The past 500 years of history reveal that each time a relationship of colonization has been established between the North and nature and people outside the North, the colonizing men and society have assumed a position of superiority, and thus of responsibility for the future of the earth and for other people and cultures. Out of the assumption of superiority flows the notion of the white man’s burden. Out of the idea of the white man’s burden flows the reality of the burdens imposed by the white man on nature, women, and others. Therefore, decolonizing the South is intimately linked to the issue of decolonizing the North.
Gandhi clearly formulated the individuality of freedom not only in the sense that the oppressed of the world are one, but also in the wider sense that the oppressor too, is caught in the culture of oppression. Decolonization in the North is also essential because processes of wealth creation simultaneously create poverty, processes of knowledge creation simultaneously generate ignorance, and processes for the creation of freedom simultaneously generate unfreedom.
In the early phases of colonization, the white man’s burden consisted of the need to ‘civilize’ the non-white peoples of the world –– this meant, above all, depriving them of their resources and rights. In the later phase of colonization, the white man’s burden consisted of the need to ‘develop’ the third world, and this again involved depriving local communities of their resources and rights. We are now on the threshold of the third phase of colonization, in which the white man’s burden is to protect the environment, especially the third world’s environment – and this, too, involves taking control of rights and resources.
Ethical decolonization:
From the democracy of all life to man’s empire over nature, most non-western cultures have been based on the democracy of all life. As a schoolgirl, one lesson I learnt in the Hindi class was that human beings are part of Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam or the earth family. As a part of the earth family, one participates in the democracy of all life. Rabindranath Tagore, our national poet, wrote that the peak of Indian culture consists in its having defined the principles of life in nature as the highest form of cultural evolution.
The culture of the forest has fuelled the culture of Indian society. The culture that has arisen from the forest has been influenced by the diverse processes of renewal of life which are always at play in the forest, varying from species to species, from season to season, insight and sound and smell. The unifying principle of life in diversity, of democratic pluralism, thus became the principle of Indian civilization.
As a source of life, nature was venerated as sacred, and human evolution was measured in terms of the human capacity to interact in harmony with her rhythms and patterns, intellectually and emotionally. In the final analysis, the ecological crisis is rooted in the mistaken belief that human beings are not part of the democracy of nature’s life, that they stand apart from and above nature.
