Thread by @shrikanth_krish

All very well to blame Macaulay

But the fact remains - Indian encounter with modernity was a troubled one

We did not have our own cultural equivalent of Meiji restoration

Traditionalists made no serious attempt to study the West
No Indian equivalent of "Honyaku Bungaku"

https://twitter.com/ChamuKShastry/status/1172273743713857536

The "Trads" of the 19th century had a pretty outsized ego

The Brits were Mlecchas after all. Impure thugs

So there never was an acknowledgment of how far behind India had fallen intellectually

So whatever intellectual interaction happened between the two civilizations - it was restricted to the liberal elites

Men like Ram Mohan Roy, Vidyasagar, or later Vivekanand - were all a part of that liberal elite

Not quite traditionalists

There was no civilization-wide acknowledgment of the need for course correction

If there was, we'd have had some rough equivalent of Meiji.

With concerted attempts to translate all Western works to Sanskrit, Hindi, Telugu etc

The Trads felt -

Hey...let Western Ideas remain in a Western language

Let's not embrace them...let's not get everything on to our own languages.

So you don't really have Newton's Principia in Sanskrit or Khariboli, or Telugu

At least I am not aware

With this kind of an attitude, the "traditionalists" were fighting a losing battle from the start, when it comes to language

English became the language of "modernity"

Almost inevitably so

Some of this resistance was understandable

Unlike Japan, India was under British rule

This naturally meant a certain resistance to the foreign usurper

Had the interaction with Europe been mostly through trade, the attitude would likely have been different

But that was not to be