Western Culture Dbq Essay

The people of India had many views on how to handle western culture ranging all way from assimilation to complete rejection. Many things such as religion, social class, and political ideology influenced an Indian’s position on whether to westernize and to what extent. For example, Mohandas Gandhi in a private letter following his experiences living with the peasants of India insisted that all western technologies and customs must leave with the British and all upper-class Indians must give up their wealth and status. The arguments presented in this letter are, like many of his, completely unrealistic and harmful since Gandhi was often overly idealistic and ignorant towards the benefits of British rule (Doc. 4). This view was not a popular one as virtually everyone benefited from these technologies and getting rid of them would send India fifty years backwards and drastically decrease quality of life. …show more content…
Somewhere between these two extremes was Abul Kalam Azad, an Indian Muslim leader and political activist. Azad expressed in a Muslim newspaper that the lack of centrism Muslims showed on adopting western culture sickened him. Azad criticized both extremes, the fundamentalist religious leaders who refused to advance and the western-educated modernists who refused to associate with Islam and traditional Indian-Muslim culture. Azad’s opinion was one shared by many in India and even some British that westernization helped India and that it could be completed without renouncing one’s cultural roots (Doc. 5). There was many different reactions towards western culture in India, but most believed in some form of compromise between westernization and retention of cultural and religious