Neo-Colonized Delusion

By Bishnu Prasad Aryal

TO know English, in fact, a logo for progressive achievement, is to understand the whole world.

Good

This is not the bad case to copy others who are practically senior when it comes to learning. Today, human civilisation has advanced due to people’s hunger for learning new things and their style of thinking differently. As such, learning is the most glorious process which activates inherent capability towards knowledge through one’s intuition. So, knowledge is not anyone’s sole possession but the universal foundation human being can have as his/her natural right. When it is learned, it is no more concerned with the giver but the possession of the taker.

In the Nepalese context, a person who knows English, not regarding the absolute knowledge, is highly respected. Like anyone else, this pen pusher has also very much experienced such a scenario when they feel mesmerized and amazed upon coming in touch with me simply because I somehow know English than they do. In the countryside where I live there are hardly anybody who have done a masters degree, that too in English.

English here is such a dramatic means that functions as a magic rod to spread and sow a seed of the knowledge. And we study each and every reading materials, texts in English language since all the activities and developmental concerns are related to it, either American or British, German or French. Only the speaking people have advanced their civilization aspiring for man-kind. Science and Technology, and other fields of knowledge are to be learnt through English. English speaking people, we think, are more civilized and developed, superior to us. We, mimic phenomena, enjoy imitating them and boast upon our self-loathingness and submissiveness, keep our existence and dignity at stake and follow them thinking that they are always right.

To anglicise culture and accumulate on the Nepalese mind has become a new culture, a kind of so-called dignitarious advancement of ourselves. So, now-a-days, a Nepali teacher in a school or soceity likes to speak English by partially substituting Nepali words. On the one hand, renamina caprice has lured our generation in competing to title themselves in English as well as Nepali, so far as their single name becomes burden for them who are not able to justify or bear it. On the other hand it is not a curse but an opportunity, we can exploit it, because it is a means not an end, for our progress. Therefore, it is a cumpulsion since we depend on English and each and every factor concerning to knowledge and development because we still have not forwarded ourselves ahead of them. Until we culminate the point of a certain height, if so, they should be obliged to follow us, we should not ignore them and will be compelled to depend on English language.

A Nepali writer says that Nepalese communist parties are not nationalistic and patriotic since they are mentally colonized by western communist thinking and philolosphy. Colonisation itself, is not bad but our colonial mentality where we accept to be colonized is guilty of this. So we should have a patience to analyze colonization, not mere negatively but positively. Not with inferiority complex, though some under-developed countries have been colonised, they will not be able to challenge the colonizer in the present scenario. For example, the USA itself was colonised and after independant became so powerful and developed. No one can deny its progress.

Pride

We now feel proud to call Mt. Everest to Sagarmatha. I felt that I should not oppose colonized and anglicised civilization since no language is one’s property. If we know English well, we can understand really what and how they are, so that we could reveal their weakness and reject their flattering. We can self-realize and self-understand what we are. Otherwise, opposing only with foolishness and not developing ourselves is another kind of follishness. Therefore, knowledge is undefeatable power which is becoming a mode of neo-colonization.

Kathmandu Saturday June 29, 2002 Ashadh 15, 2059. The Rising Nepal