Coping and Non Western Societies

The waking moments of non Western society and of its representative polity can be best characterized by the concept of "coping".
It is this civilizational response, to having to choose between being on the inside of the fences or outside of the fences, erected by post Industrialization Western thought, that has often made the so called Eastern societies, look profoundly inwards looking, escapist and in fact, non dynamic and non creative.
In politics, the Gandhian form of confronting, and rejecting this way of looking at life, as being either inside or outside the fences, erected by the Western man in his waking moments, was a major rebuttal of this choice.
In his initial characterization of the ability of the new, post Green Revolution Farmer's Movement in India, in being able to grasp the opportunities, thrown up by a modern and globalizing world, Sharad Joshi used a concept called the "Bharat - India divide". India for him was the set of institutions and agricultural surplus appropriation mechanisms, that the British had set up, as part of a global colonization agenda and then left for the new set of brown sahibs to take over and operate.
Now Sharad Joshi himself was very clear, that the strength of Bharat to organize itself, to decisively take control of agricultural surplus, could not come from the peasant and rural population - what he called Bharat. Joshi was often very dismissive of the revivalist tendencies among some historians and political thinkers, who sought to derive inspiration from pre British Indian society.
He was firm that leadership had to come from among the brown sahibs and that the peasants, kheduts, Jats, Hindutva elements or religious, caste based polarizations could never broaden their appeal sufficiently, to wrest control of agricultural surplus mechanisms that were controlled by India from Delhi, and efficiently erected by the British.
He often used to say that it is not the dhoti kurta clad farmer who would be able to lead India but the cotton jeans wearing, urban educated, passionate representative of India, who would be able to unleash the creativity of the Indian peasantry. He was absolutely convinced that it would not be possible for a Tikait and his ilk, to wrest control over Delhi.
This did prove to be the case.
Dharampal Ji, when asked about the so called brown sahibs, the Westernized elite that governs India from New Delhi and the state capitals, figuratively, from "inside the fences" said - " Those who have become Westernised - the Western type of commodities may be used by a very large number of people, but those whose minds have been Westernised - I think are not more than half a per cent of us.
Probably less, basically not more than half a million people - the officer class in the European sense of the term, which could mean scholars, administrators, army personnel, high dignitaries, managers of industry, etc.
And those who are completely lost, among these half a million wouldn't be very many, maybe a few thousand or so - the rest I think can be brought back by a movement backed by spirit and courage and hope.
Such a movement however has to be of much greater dimensions and inner energy than even the freedom movement under Mahatma Gandhi."