When speaking about feudalism, there is a tendency to make generalised assertions. Actually such generalisations are quite stupid and more or less point to the lack of profundity of the scholar who does it. The word feudalismdoes not mean the same everywhere. In Continental Europe it is one thing. In ‘India’, Asia, Africa, South America and many other places, it has another meaning. In England it is quite another, far removed from all this.
I have seen many new-comer US citizens speaking about the British nobility and class system with a mental framework of their own native land feudalism in their mind. They do not clearly understand what they are speaking. When English is the language, the meaning of the word ‘feudalism’ is astronomical distances away from the meaning of the word as understood as Janmi-Kudiyaan (feudal lord-serf) relationship in a remote village in erstwhile Travancore kingdom or in Malabar.
Look at this image: It represents a cross-section of people from the feudal heights to the bottom layers, as they looked in their stark looks of the Indian subcontinent when the Englishmen came to this area. The heights and lowliness visible here are not really based on financial power, but on something that moved through the communication system as an unseen code. The ‘respect’ versus ‘pejorative’ words in the language. It is a terrorising code that can distress both the higher man as well as the lower individual. The terror is of the possibility that the lower individual may not exhibit his lowliness and ‘respect’ in words, tone, speed of action, gestures, abruptness of requests and such things.
As to the lower castes, it is their own lowliness as understood by them, that imposed on them, their need to be aware of what is the boundary, and also their own understanding that they have the power to despoil the higher individuals by a mere change of word, a mere glance with a difference tone, a change in tone in voice and even by touching, that makes them the bearers of evilness as understood by the senior castes. It is a terrible feudalism that has no connection with English feudalism. In fact, compared to this, English feudalism is in the heights of celestial paradise.
Look the image of these individuals. They are the persons who got English education during the British rule times. Moreover, they were all rich. So that they existed on the higher levels of the feudal usages. English learning enhanced their individuality.
Inserting spaces between peoples
Over the centuries, the English nobility has strived to protect the shores of the English nation from the onslaught of many other outsiders. The issue at hand was not a few people coming ashore, but of persons of very inimical social codes coming inside, setting up beachheads and spreading the social infections which they have within them, to the vital areas of the English countryside. Once this infections gets activated, social relationships starts getting sloppy and fragmented. Even though there is a class system inside England, there is no dirtying of the common man by means of pejorative words of address and reference. When these dirtying codes start ticking inside the soft interiors of the English nation, people start moving to far extremes with some elevating to unusual levels of nobility, even if they are not from the noble blood. Others get wrenched to the far corridors of filth and dirt. The English nation then stands spoiled beyond recognition.
I am not sure if this has happened. But then, I have a feeling that in the last four or five decades, England has changed, and changed for the worse. I make this assertion based on my information on language code.
Visualising the working of language codes
How do I do this? Well, when I study language codes, I can visualise how a man would speak and what would be the affect of his words. When a Malayalam speaking person says that he went to see a government official, I can visualise his words, and then the words of the officials. And then the physical postures each one of them would act out. The common man seeking out the best of obsequious postures and words that would lend feudal comfort to the official. Well, this is how Malayalam works. If the same man with Malayalam as his innate language of thoughts were to interact in English, there would be a slight change, for many of the self-degrading postures and words are difficult to find in English. However, the scene would still not be like an interaction between an English common man and an English official. For the Malayalam speaking man knows Malayalam and he would be speaking in this language to other Malayalees about the English official.
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