Decolonising Our Minds Should Be Our First Priority
One of the biggest obstacles to India’s progress is not something imposed on us from outside anymore. It is the way many of us have learned to see ourselves.
The vast majority of Indians I speak to seem to carry an unspoken assumption that anything Indian is automatically inferior to its foreign counterpart. Foreign is sophisticated; Indian is backward. Imported is premium; local is cheap. English is aspirational; our native languages are somehow lesser. And travelling abroad is treated as an achievement in itself, while exploring our own country is often seen as something secondary.
Take tourism. For many Indians, the passport stamp seems to be the point of the holiday. A foreign destination automatically carries more prestige than a domestic one, even when the experience of travelling within India can be far more culturally transformative. For someone from Kochi, travelling to Sri Lanka may involve less cultural shock than travelling to Rajasthan, yet the former is often considered the more impressive trip simply because it is international.
The same mindset is even more visible in language.
Speaking English is often treated as a marker of intelligence, education and status, while speaking our native languages can be perceived as unsophisticated. People are actively discouraged from using their own languages in professional and academic spaces. Some of the highest levels of academia and public discourse in India still operate almost entirely in English, even when the people participating in them are based in communities with rich native languages of their own. What makes this particularly striking is that languages elsewhere in the world have not been forced into the same dependence. European languages with populations of only a few million speakers routinely develop their own vocabulary for science, technology and other specialised fields. Yet many Indian languages are expected to borrow English terminology whenever a concept becomes more complicated than a 5-year-old's everyday conversation.
We have reached a point where even saying dhanyavada instead of “thank you” can make someone uncomfortable because they worry that the other person might be offended by the assumption that they don't speak English. But when did English become our priority over our own languages?
Even our infamous language wars often miss this larger picture. Arguments over Hindi versus regional languages are legitimate, but English remains the far greater threat to the vitality of all Indian languages. It is entirely possible to spend an entire day in an Indian city without using the language spoken by the people around you.
Look at my own generation, Gen Z. Many young Indians either speak almost exclusively in English or speak what they call an “Indian language” that is often 90% English vocabulary with a few native-language connectors. There is nothing inherently wrong with speaking English when necessary. The problem is when English becomes the default measure of intelligence, sophistication and social status, while our own languages become something to be embarrassed about.
The same hierarchy exists in what we consume.
Imported food and products are routinely assumed to be better simply because they are imported. There are countless examples like this, but we often fail to appreciate them because we have already decided that foreign equals superior.
And this mindset extends even to people.
Foreigners are frequently perceived as more attractive, more capable and more sophisticated. Indians can internalise the idea that being foreign automatically makes someone desirable, while being Indian makes someone ordinary or even undesirable. We see this in everything from beauty standards to professional competence.
Even in sports and physical activities, the explanation is sometimes reduced to genetics. I climb and I surf, and whenever I do these things in India, I have repeatedly encountered some version of the same reaction: Why are you doing this? Beneath the question is often the assumption that these are things foreigners do. Somehow, an Indian person participating in them is unusual simply because they are Indian.
That is the absurdity of the mindset we have inherited.
We have been taught, consciously or unconsciously, to associate foreignness with excellence and Indianness with inadequacy. Going abroad is treated as the ultimate achievement. Behaving like a foreigner is considered cool. Acting as though you don't belong to this country can be a status symbol. Anything Indian can be dismissed as “cringe” while anything foreign is automatically considered sophisticated.
And this mindset has survived for generations, even though the invaders that shaped so much of it had the last of them kicked out nearly a century ago.
That is why decolonising our minds should be our first priority.
This does not mean rejecting everything foreign, nor does it mean pretending that everything Indian is inherently good. There is plenty we can learn from the rest of the world, and there is nothing wrong with speaking English in an international context, travelling abroad, eating imported food or appreciating foreign cultures.
The problem is the assumption that foreign is better by default.
We need to be able to look at something Indian and evaluate it on its own merits. We should be able to criticise what deserves criticism and celebrate what deserves celebration without automatically assigning higher value to something simply because it came from somewhere else.
Because ultimately, the world will see us only as highly as we see ourselves.
If we constantly tell ourselves that our languages are inferior, our products are inferior, our culture is inferior, our people are inferior and our country is inferior, it should not surprise us when that perception eventually becomes a widely held belief outside India too.
Decolonisation is therefore not about hating the West. It is about removing the hierarchy in our own heads.
We don't need to become less open to the world to stop believing that being Indian makes us less than the world.