When Lumpens Hijack Culture

When lumpens hijack culture, the meaning gets distorted by association. We lose what we consider good and clean and precious.

A case in point is the Swastika symbol. Through history and across many cultures - not only Indian - swastika has been a positive, auspicious symbol. It remained so until Hitler and the Nazi party came along. Today, especially in the Western world, swastika symbol has become a emblem of the nazis and neo- nazis. The symbol's meaning stands degraded and corrupted. The word Aryan has suffered a similar fate.

This point was sharply brought to me during a visit last week to my wife's non Indian colleague. The conversation had taken a turn from discussing words common between colloquial Hindi and Bulgarian, to commonality in Indo- European languages. I had used the example of how Hitler had hooked onto the Aryan theme and that swastika was and remains an auspicious symbol amongst Indians, particularly hindus, buddhists and jains. Even as we were talking, I could see what may have been a shade of incredulity on the carefully polite faces of the listeners. Wasn't this a loss of my culture too? Not by what I had done, but what some lumpen, somewhere else, had done?

That both Indians and the nazis shared swastika and Aryans is known to most educated Indians. But in some instances, it is used an argument to support our pride, "Look how the glory of Aryan race and culture was acknowledged even by Hitler!" Dead wrong. Hitler had approached it from a different direction. If that is in doubt, just consider what the nazi's ideal of the master race, the (nazi) Aryan, looked like: tall, blond, blue eyes. This was a Nordic look, not that of Indo Aryans. We can easily guess that if Hitler had gotten around to occupying India, the (Indian) Aryans would have also gone the way of 'inferior races' and 'mixed blood' types, to the concentration camps, where we Indians would have learnt the superior value of work (camp motto was 'work shall set you free', arbeit macht frei) and also solved our population problem.

By the way, London is trying to fight with similar- themed problem, that of yobs and gun- crimes, as within the past fortnight, three teenagers have been shot dead in South London suburbs. Responding to this, Alan Duncan, a senior Tory politician, said, "The greatest problem we need to address in Britain is that it is steadily becoming decivilised." (London Metro, February 16, 2007; www.metro.co.uk)

The silent majority actively needs to be on its guard if it is to protect its culture, civilisation and values against the yobs and anti- social elements, whether it be in India or Britain. After all, yobs across the world share the same value, that violence is 'cool'. It is time for the majority who think that violence is 'uncool' to also be heard.


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For a detailed note on swastika, see wikipedia entry (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swastika) . A word of caution, wikipedia entries may be very interesting and mostly accurate, but are neither absolutely reliable nor academically rigorous. So be careful before you use it as a formal reference.