We Didn’t Just Inherit Their Goods. We Inherited Their Gaze.

On colonial mentality, intergenerational trauma, and the beliefs we carry without knowing where they came from.

There is a particular kind of shame that lives in Indian households around language. The child who speaks English fluently is praised at family gatherings. The one who stumbles, who thinks in Hindi or Tamil or Marathi before translating, who makes a grammatical error in front of company — is quietly corrected. Sometimes not so quietly.

Where did that come from?

Not from us. Not originally. It was handed to us — carefully, systematically, over centuries of colonial rule — and we have been passing it down ever since, wrapped in the language of aspiration and progress, without always stopping to ask whose idea of progress this actually is.

What Colonial Mentality Actually Means

Psychologist E.J.R. David coined the term ‘colonial mentality’ to describe the internalisation of the coloniser’s values, aesthetics, and hierarchies as inherently superior to one’s own. It is not simply the adoption of foreign customs. It is the belief — absorbed so deeply it feels like personal conviction — that those customs are better. That the original was inferior. That the replaced was worth replacing.

India was colonised not once but repeatedly — by the Mughals, the Portuguese, the British, and others — across centuries that reshaped not just governance and economy but the deeper architecture of how Indians understood themselves. What was civilised. What was educated. What was beautiful. What was worth aspiring to.

Lord Macaulay’s 1835 Minute on Indian Education was explicit about this aim — to create a class of Indians ‘Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.’ The educational system was designed not merely to teach, but to replace. And it worked — not just institutionally, but psychologically. The effects of that replacement are still being lived, three generations after independence.

The Trauma That Travels

Historical trauma — first documented in Holocaust survivors by psychiatrist Vivian Rakoff in the 1960s, and later studied extensively in Indigenous communities by Dr. Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart — describes the cumulative emotional and psychological wounding of a community across generations. It is not merely memory. It is physiology. Research in epigenetics has shown that trauma alters gene expression in ways that can be passed from parent to child biologically, not just behaviourally.

For colonised communities, this trauma carries a particular complexity — because it is layered with shame. The coloniser did not simply take land and resources. They took self-perception. They replaced indigenous knowledge systems, aesthetic traditions, languages, and ways of organising life with their own — and named the original primitive. Backward. Uncivilised.

And communities, in order to survive, adapted. They learned to see themselves through the coloniser’s eyes. And that learned gaze — internalised over generations — is what we now carry as preference. As aspiration. As common sense.

What It Looks Like Today

It looks like the imported brand valued over the local one — not because it is objectively superior, but because ‘foreign’ has been synonymous with ‘better’ for so long that the association feels like fact.

It looks like the modular kitchen that replaced the chulha. The dining table that replaced eating together on the floor. The sofa set that replaced the takht. Not because these changes were wrong — but because many of them were adopted not from genuine preference but from the belief that the Western way of organising a home was more civilised than our own.

It looks like fairness cream — an entire industry built on the colonial equation of light skin with beauty, status, and worthiness. It looks like the preference for English medium schools regardless of whether the child learns better in their mother tongue. It looks like the dismissal of Ayurveda until it was repackaged and sold back to us by Western wellness brands.

And it looks like the boy preference — still deeply embedded in large parts of Indian society — which is not purely indigenous but was hardened and institutionalised under colonial governance systems that excluded women from property, inheritance, and public life in ways that pre-colonial India, for all its own complexity, did not uniformly practice.

Why This Matters Psychologically

Colonial mentality has measurable psychological effects. Research consistently shows associations between internalised colonial beliefs and lower self-esteem, higher rates of anxiety and depression, identity confusion, and difficulty forming a stable, positive sense of cultural self. When the culture you were born into has been coded as inferior — and you have absorbed that coding — the self that emerges from that culture carries the wound of that assessment.

It also operates largely unconsciously. Most people do not choose to believe that English is superior to Hindi. They did not sit down and decide that an imported product is more valuable than a local one. These beliefs arrived pre-installed — through education systems, media, advertising, family hierarchies, and the accumulated weight of generations who learned to survive by deferring to the coloniser’s standard.

And unconscious beliefs are the hardest to examine — because they do not feel like beliefs. They feel like reality.

The Beginning of Something

This is not an argument for rejecting everything Western or foreign. Cultural exchange is not the problem. The problem is the hierarchy — the internalised belief that one culture’s ways are inherently more valuable than another’s, and that to aspire upward is to aspire away from your own.

Healing from colonial mentality — individually and collectively — begins with the same thing that all psychological healing begins with. Awareness. The willingness to ask: where did this belief come from? Did I choose it? Does it actually serve me? Or am I carrying it because someone, somewhere, needed me to?

These are not comfortable questions. But they are worth sitting with.

Because the gaze we inherited is not the only one available to us. We can learn to see ourselves differently. It just requires knowing, first, that we have been seeing through someone else's eyes.