Indian Cultural Quotes & Sayings

You can begin to see an amalgamation of cultures, the real beginning of one world. Ten years ago, it would have been impossible to imagine a Cockney singing group with a Southern Negro style and Indian and electronic music. I wonder if people have even noticed what a tremendous cultural signal the Beatles are. — Alan Arkin

Without the Indian Subcontinent, in other words, there could not have been a Vietnam in any cultural or aesthetic sense. — Robert D. Kaplan

We twentieth-century Mexicans, even those of pure Indian descent, look on the pre-Columbian world as a world on the other side, not only distant in time but across the cultural divide. — Octavio Paz

What we deplore is not that the gate of western knowledge was thrown open to Indians, but that such knowledge was imported to India at the sacrifice of our own cultural heritage. What was needed was a proper synthesis between the two systems and not neglect, far less destruction, of the Indian base. — Syama Prasad Mukherjee

When physical genocide ran its course, cultural genocide followed, reflected in the "compassionate" counsel of Captain Richard Henry Pratt: "A great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one. In a sense, I agree with the sentiment, but only in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man." Then — Brian D. McLaren

I'm sure I went through a stage when I resented being Indian because in every other manner, in terms of cultural reference points and vocabulary and all the rest of it, I was way ahead of everybody else - so the one thing that set me back was being Indian. And I couldn't do anything about it. — Sanjeev Bhaskar

...Such a subcontinental thing to do, no? To bury what is difficult and painful in cerebral things. To let the intellect soak up the blood from a fight. This is what we do. Not because we lack sensitivity, but because we lack the right language for emotion. English has such a jealous hold over us, but it is a hard and brittle thing in our hands. It doesn't suit the easy melodrama of our natures. And it has a way of making matters of the heart seem at once inert and deeply shameful. So what do upper-class Indian men do when they are too wretched to do anything else? They talk of the Russians! Of Dostoevsky and Belinsky, of "cultural schizophrenia" and "the lackeyishness of thinking"... — Aatish Taseer

At least half the country thinks the mascot issue is insignificant. But I think it's indicative of the ways in which Indians have no cultural power. We're still placed in the past. So we're either in the past or we're only viewed through casinos. I know a lot more about being white than you know about being Indian. — Sherman Alexie

They now endure incessant cultural appropriation by a majority society in the United States that celebrates an idealized American Indian but ignores reservation life - the economic blight and marginalization of what are, in effect, national internment zones, exacerbated by federal inattention and mismanagement. In Indian country there are also thriving cultural traditions and creative genius, but these often receive little more recognition than the problems. - — T. J. Stiles

I think a lot of Indians want Indian artists to be cultural cheerleaders rather than cultural investigators. — Sherman Alexie

Europeans were always trying to stop the outflow. Hernando de Soto had to post guards to keep his men and women from defecting to Native societies. The Pilgrims so feared Indianization that they made it a crime for men to wear long hair. "People who did run away to the Indians might expect very extreme punishments, even up to the death penalty," Karen Kupperman tells us, if caught by whites.49 Nonetheless, right up to the end of independent Native nationhood in 1890, whites continued to defect, and whites who lived an Indian lifestyle, such as Daniel Boone, became cultural heroes in white society. — James W. Loewen

Growing religious fundamentalism is directly linked to globalization and to privatization. The Indian government is talking about selling its entire power sector to foreign multinationals, but when the consequences of that become hard to manage, the government immediately starts saying, "Should we build the Ram temple in Ayodhya?" Everyone goes baying off in that direction. Meanwhile, contracts are signed.
It's like a game. That's something we have to understand. It's like a pincer action. With one hand they're selling the country out to multinationals. With the other they're orchestrating this howling cultural nationalism. On the one hand you're saying that the world is a global village. On the other hand governments spend millions and millions patrolling their borders with nuclear weapons. — Arundhati Roy

West Indian cultural mentality and a North American life equals the perfect balance. — Melanie Fiona

A community that engages readers and culturally enabled people to connect, support and harness intellectual and cultural capabilities. — Ashwin Sanghi

Readers anticipate that a significant element of every story will be additional exposure to the ways of the Ojibwe. The truth is that I enjoy this aspect of the work. Although I have no Indian blood running through my veins, in college I prepared to be a cultural anthropologist, so exploring other cultures is exciting to me. — William Kent Krueger

Women are outperforming men in almost every sphere of life in our society and the women of East Indian ancestry are no exception to this rule. They have broken the cultural mould. — Kamla Persad-Bissessar

As the global expansion of Indian and Chinese restaurants suggests, xenophobia is directed against foreign people, not foreign cultural imports. — Eric Hobsbawm

These stupid biases and discrimination are the reason our country is so screwed up. It's Tamil first, Indian later. Punjabi first, Indian later. It has to end. National anthem, national currency, national teams - still, we won't marry our children outside our state. How can this intolerance be good for our country? — Chetan Bhagat

Muslim sociologists and anthropologists have argued that Islam in rural India is more Indian than Islamic, in the sense that the faith as practiced by the ordinary Muslim villagers reflects the considerable degree of cultural assimilation that has occurred between Hindus and Muslims in their daily lives. — Shashi Tharoor

It is said, that South Indian Music, as known today, flourished in Deogiri the capital city of the Yadavas in the middle ages, and that after the invasion and plunder of the city by the Muslims, the entire cultural life of the city took shelter in the Carnatic Empire of Vijayanagar under the reign of Krishnadevaraya. Thereafter, the music — Gaurav Mishra

No, no, my friend. You are kind, and you mean well, but you can never understand these things as I do. You've never been oppressed. — S. Alice Callahan

A poignant example of what it often takes to bring about an end to a superstitious barbaric act may be seen in the Indian practice of suttee, or the burning of widows. The British government abolished suttee by outlawing it, and followed up by severely punishing transgressors. As the nineteenth-century British commander in chief in India, General Charles Napier, told his charges who complained that suttee was their cultural custom that the British should respect: Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs. — Michael Shermer

After 9/11, there was so much distress in America that it led to an inter-cultural breakdown. Some of our communities were targeted. Many of our adults shut themselves off from other cultures. I tried to bring children of Indian and other cultures together in my literature. — Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

Rabindranath Tagore's family, connected to the British East India Company right from the settling of Calcutta in 1690, was a prominent beneficiary of the British economic and cultural reshaping of India. His grandfather was the first big local businessman of British India, and socialized with Queen Victoria and other notables on his trips to Europe; his elder brother was the first Indian to be admitted by the British into the Indian Civil Service (ICS). — Pankaj Mishra