By Ziauddin Sardar, Ashish Nandy, Meryl Wyn Davies & Claude Alvares

George Bernard Shaw said that ‘history always lies’, but I never knew to what extent it lies. Well, this small tome of 92 pages tells how far the human history has been ‘engineered’ and designed by ‘explorers’, ‘discoverers’, and ‘conquerors’ who were simply out to self-certify their own loyalty to their chosen faiths, their own perceived greatness, and their adventurous voyages. 

In 1492, on October 12, one Christopher Columbus landed in the Americas and inaugurated their political conquest on behalf of his Spanish masters. Six years later, in 1498 Vasco da Gama landed on the spice coast of India, in Calicut and commenced what is euphemistically called “the Vasco da Gama epoch” of Indian history.  

As the history books confirm, the consequences of these conquests, or discoveries proved to be exceedingly traumatic for the rest of the non-European world: they led to the extermination of millions of people in the North and South America by Christian zealots and to the forceful occupation of their lands. Ensuing slave-trade disrupted the lives of millions more on the continent of Africa. They also ‘invented’ large-scale poverty and misery in India and China through their acts of plunder and through systematic colonization. 

Unlike many other writers, the authors of this small booklet don’t entirely blame Columbus or Vasco da Gama for all their misdeeds. These voyager-Conquerors were men of their times, driven by the ideas of their period. Columbus landed in Americas believing it to be India, which was, according to his belief, inhabited by dog-headed sub-human people.  

These authors come out, not scape-goating Columbus for all the mishaps of colonial history, but say categorically that all the crimes committed against the people and environments of Asia Africa and South America are the sins of the European civilization. When Columbus did not find those monstrous dog-headed people where he had landed, he invented them: he branded the natives as cannibals and proceeded to enslave and then convert   them to Christianity. Those who resisted were mercilessly slaughtered. 

And five centuries down the lane of time and history, his ‘cultural clones’ and successors, through their ideas of ‘development’ are still carrying on the same enterprise, branding people as ‘inferior’, ‘ignorant’, ‘lazy’, ‘inefficient’ ‘underdeveloped’ and ‘superstitious’ and under those pretexts continue to interfere in their lives and play havoc with their cultures, religions and economies. 

This book, THE BLINDED EYE, as the blurb says, is perhaps the first post-Columbian mansifesto. It is also the first major intellectual collaborative effort between scholars and intellectuals of India and Pakistan. This is a devastating critique of ‘development’ and an exhaustive analysis of occidentosis, what could/ should be declared to be ‘the plague of the West’. 

 —L. Lerner