“Opinion | Who Really Suffers From A Cultural Inferiority Complex?”, News 18, 2025
“In a recent book by Romila Thapar titled “Speaking of History”, in which she discusses Indian history, caste, gender, religion, myth, and nationalism with Namit Arora, one of the questions explored concerns what Arora calls the “cultural inferiority complex” of Indians.
Arora suggests that this sense of inferiority helps explain why many Indians respond enthusiastically to comforting historical myths and to assertive, majoritarian forms of cultural nationalism promoted in contemporary politics. He then asks Thapar where this inferiority complex originates.
Thapar argues that its primary source lies in India’s experience of conquest. As might be expected, she is careful to distinguish between different kinds of conquerors, particularly between the Mughal rulers and the British. In her account, the Mughal period was marked by economic prosperity, state support for mathematics and the sciences, and encouragement of traditional culture alongside philosophical and religious dialogue. By contrast, British colonial rule introduced a fundamentally different dynamic. Colonialism, she argues, was premised on the assumption of Indian inferiority and sought to legitimise this assumption through racial theories presentedas objective knowledge. As Thapar puts it: “There was the constant supervision of an alien people who regarded Indians as inferior. This was sought to be justified by theories of race, claimed as knowledge, and which underlined the theory of inferiority of the Indian. The consistent repetition of inferiority did the damage…….”
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