“How strange to find, in free India, this attitude of conqueror, this attitude of plundering— a frenzied attitude, as though the opportunity might at any moment be withdrawn— in those very people to whom the developing society has given so many opportunities”
“This attitude of plundering is that of the immigrant colonial society. It has bred, in Trinidad, the pathetic philistinism of the renonçant (an excellent French word that describes the native who renounces his own culture and strives towards the French).”
“And in India this philistinism, a blending of the vulgarity of East and West— those sad dance floors, those sad ‘Western’ cabarets, those transistor radios turned to Radio Ceylon, those Don Juans with leather jackets or check tweed jackets— is peculiarly frightening”
“A certain glamour attaches to this philistinism, as glamour attaches to those Indians who, after two or three years in a foreign country, proclaim that they are neither of the East nor the West”
“The Trinidadian, whatever his race, is a genuine colonial. The Indian, whatever his claim, is rooted in India. But while the Trinidadian, a colonial, strives towards the metropolitan, the Indian of whom I have been speaking, metropolitan by virtue of the uniqueness of…”
“his country, its achievements in the past and its manifold achievements in the last decade or so, is striving towards the colonial”
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