The White Man’s Burden of Educating Natives for Self-Government and the Counter-Claim about the Democratic and Socialistic Heritage of Buddhism

Abstract

England’s liberal justification for its domination, tutelage and accompanying advantages in such ‘native’ countries has been its claim of acting as “a trustee for civilization in order to ... build up those conditions of liberty and opportunity for the individual in which the people can learn to govern themselves.”¹ Since Edwardian times such claims that the peoples of Indic civilization had yet to be trained for fitness to govern themselves came to meet militant contradiction — first in terms of West European borrowings of liberal programs of self-determination, and then in terms of reinterpretations of pre-European Indic traditions in the direction of self-determination aspirations. Precisely British imperial claims of ruling subject peoples like the Burmese “in order to educate them in the responsibilities of self-government” produced counter-claims about Democracy being part of Buddhist tradition. Interpretations of India’s Buddhist heritage as democratic tradition permitted to refute British claims about the White Man’s Burden and White Man’s Mission to impose tutelage on native peoples until they should have advanced far enough in their “education” to “learn the responsibilities” of governing themselves.²