"Perhaps they did not hate us after all"

The Financial Times of March 12, 2010 has a piece on Indian Art. Titled Face Values, it describes a current exhibit at National Portrait Gallery in London.

The article is informative and easy to read. What caught my attention, however, are the writer's musings on why there is a string of shows about India. Instead of paraphrasing, and losing part of the meaning, here is her direct quote.

So why, with all these exhibitions pulling in the crowds, do the British have such a taste for Indian art? The obvious answer is the fascination with the colonial past that all ex-colonisers have. Beyond that, we seem to scan these images for echoes, traces of ourselves, and are happy when we find them. Perhaps they didn’t hate us after all? Perhaps the enduring legacy of that time was a rich one? And perhaps this world is knowable, perhaps we can learn to read it, and the people who made it, and live well together in our own times.

Perhaps they didn't hate us after all? Does the current generation in India really hate the British? I don't think so. So, where is this "inferiority complex" coming from? I don't know. In fact, until I read this article, I did not even realize that it existed. The view from the other side of the fence is different, and as in this case, sometimes very different.