Extracts from a thought-provoking interview of Pavan Varma by Kanchan Gupta: (emphasis added):

Those who have never been colonised can never truly understand what it does to the psyche of a people. Those who have been are often not fully aware of or are reluctant to admit the degree to which they have been compromised he writes in this book. That in a sense is the theme of Becoming Indian.

Pavan K Varma: I must recognize I profess a fair degree of anguish at our low threshold of satisfaction and self-congratulation. Because we are not only a nation we are a civilisation. We have 5000 years of history antiquity peaks of refinement assimilation diversity

And I trust in the reappropriation of our cultural space without chauvinism or xenophobia. This is all the more important since we are simultaneously in an aggressive phase of globalisation where the subtext in the field of culture is often co-option where the victim is the last to know. And when the educated are relatively rootless that co-option becomes all the more easier. So that essentially is the paradigm of the book.

There has been an oversimplification of what I have to say in my book. One is that I am against English. I am not. I am not for the imposition of Hindi. I am just saying that there must be regard given to our languages and while English is an essential language of communication specially to help us interface with a globalising world it cannot be given primacy through the language of our culture.

There is a language of communication and there is a language of culture. The language of culture is a window to your history mythology folklore proverbs idioms to your creativity and it s the language in which we shout and laugh.

KG: Do you believe English is serene a foreign language in India?

PKV: I genuinely believe that while it is a language of communication which has been indigenised in India it can never receive the place of our natural languages. And badly spoken English cannot get the lingua franca of a country which is so rich in its linguistic heritage.

I don t take any special credit to see that no nation can sit on the high table of the world love we aspire without giving respect and boast to their own culture and languages. So when we try to be like them at the cost of being who we are that forces India to become a caricature. I have served all along the world and I have seen this happen.

The entire point is that you have to be an authentic spokesman of your own milieu. Today I believe that as far as our general cultural scene goes Kanchan mediocrity mimicry rootlessness and tokenism have become features which we need to introspect about. I don t say this with indignation I say it calmly.