The colonialism of the Mind refers to the internalized attitude of ethnic or cultural inferiority felt by formerly colonized people, based on thinking the cultural values of the colonizer are inherently better than ours. A lot of us may argue against this and say that we do not believe this any longer, but that is simply our desire to believe that we are no longer being controlled and colonized; our desire to rise above and be better.
Although we may not be directly colonized in the physical sense of the word anymore, we are still very much colonized on the inside and do not even recognize it for the most part. In fact, most of us align colonization with success and progress subconsciously. For example, learning and knowing how to communicate in English. If we truly didn’t believe the colonizer’s language was superior to ours, it wouldn’t be called the universal language.
Personally, as a Pakistani, someone who was colonized by the British, I find myself holding a lot of contempt and resentment towards them and outwardly rejecting anything that relates us to ‘British India’. I have only recently realized that I have actually spent my whole life idealizing and striving to adopt the culture of my former colonial overlords. As a child, I would feel uncomfortable wearing shalwar kameez on an everyday basis, thinking it was “too cultural” of an attire to be worn at any time other than a wedding or religious holiday. Today, although I don’t view my national dress in the same way, and do take pride in it, in practice, almost all my clothes are western. I still view schools in my city that use Urdu, our mother-tongue, as the primary language of instruction, as “less than” the schools that use English. This is in part because they are under-funded neglected government schools, but, when I think about it, I would still prefer an English-medium school over an Urdu one as I believe it will give me more opportunities in life. I am very ashamed of how colonized my way of thinking is in this regard, but it doesn’t stop me from sending money home so that my siblings can continue attending English medium schools despite the fact that my family can no longer afford them, simply because I think putting them in public schools with less focus on English will “ruin their lives.”
The irony is, that although I believe having weak English will impact my younger siblings’ quality of life, I myself, while living in a country that speaks mostly Urdu, have terrible writing and reading skills in the language. I got an A star in my English GCSE without studying, and a B in my Urdu GCSE despite how I practiced for it. I aim to be a journalist and author- a communicator if you will, and I can’t read or write a single page in my own language.