Highest Sageness -23

Indologists

It is clear that the motives of Western scholarship in pursuing Indology were far from altruistic. Motivated western scholarship in India's religious, cultural and historical spheres has a checkered history. The pioneers in this field have been western Christian missionaries.

It was Pope Honorius IV (1286-87 A.D.) who first encouraged the study of oriental languages as an aid to missionary work. Soon after, the Ecumenical Council of Vienna (1311-12 A.D.) decided that "the Holy Church should have an abundant number of Catholics well versed in the languages, especially in those of the infidels, so as to be able to instruct them in the sacred doctrine." In 1870, The First Vatican Council, Hindu beliefs were specifically selected for condemnation in the "five anathemas against pantheism" according to Jesuit John A. Hardon in the Church-authorized book, The Catholic Catechism. 

The first Westerners to investigate the Vedic literatures were the British in the last half of the eighteenth century. It was the British Sanskritists and educators in India, during the 1700 and 1800's, who first portrayed Vedic literature and culture as something barbaric, inferior, and recent. This cultural prejudice was the result of deliberate undermining with the disguised intention of asserting the superiority of their own Christian-based values and outlook, as well as the perpetuation of colonial rule. 
India was the centerpiece of Britain's imperialistic exploits. And many of the notable professors at the time had the audacity to consider themselves to be better authorities on their questionable translations of the Vedas then the Indian scholars. Western Indology itself, has its roots in European colonialism and Christian missionary propaganda. 

History of Indology:
"I saw in the whole Christian world a license of fighting at which even barbarous nations might blush. Wars were begun on trifling pretexts or none at all, and carried on without any reference of law, Divine or human"
                                     -  Hugo Grotius (1583- 1645) Dutch legal scholar, playwright and poet. One of the pioneering natural rights theorists of the late 16th and early 17th centuries.

"Christianity is a missionary religion, converting, advancing, aggressive, encompassing the world; a non-missionary church is in the bands of death."  

                                              - Friedrich Max Muller (1823-1900) German philologist and Orientalist. 

 "Every aspect of the Empire was an aspect of Christ"
                                     - James Morris author of Pax Britannica: Climax of an Empire  (source: hamsa.org. Refer to Jesus Christ: Artifice for Aggression - By Sita Ram Goel.  Refer to World Conquering Creeds - By Dr. Koenraad Elst - chapter on Glimpses XVI

"Evangelical Christianity, born in England and nurtured in the United States, is leaving home."

                                    -  Paul Nussbaum, author of Evangelical Christianity shifting outside West - Philadelphia Inquirer Feb 20, 2006. Refer to British Imperialism: Gold God Glory - By Robin W Winks. The motives for classical imperialism were frequently associated with the three G’s - Gold, God and Glory.

"As Eurocentrism is becoming identified with ignorance and oppression, Asia ’s emergence as the true center of culture and civilization seems inevitable."

                                                  - Thomas Beaudry in the book, Kumbha Mela

Ngugi WaThiong'o (1938 - ) who renounced English, Christianity, and the name James Ngugi as colonialist; a Kenyan author of Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature, 1986 writes on the effect of devaluing our native languages:

"The effect (of a cultural bomb) is to annihilate a people's belief in their names, in their languages, in their environment, in their heritage of struggle, in their unity, in their capacities and ultimately in themselves."

Henri Cordier (1849 - 1925) French scholar quoted in The Adventures of Ibn Battuta
“Westerners have singularly narrowed the history of the world in grouping the little that they know about the expansion of the human race around the peoples of Israel, Greece and Rome. Thus have they ignored all those travelers and explorers who in their ships ploughed the China Sea and the Indian Ocean, or rode the immensities of Central Asia to the Persian Gulf. 
In truth the larger part of the globe, containing cultures different from those of the ancient Greeks and Romans but no less civilized, has remained unknown to those who wrote the history of their little world under the impression that they were writing world history."

Sir (Dr) Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (1888-1975) was one of the most profound philosophers of this century, author and educationalist. In 1926, he was deputed by Calcutta University as the university delegate to the Congress of the Universities of the British Empire. He was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 1940, first Indian to be thus honored.  

He succinctly said: 

“The West tried its best to persuade India that its philosophy is absurd, its art puerile, its poetry uninspired, its religion grotesque and its ethics barbarous”.

(source: The Decline of the West - By Oswald Spengler  p. 13).

***

The first Westerners to investigate the Vedic literatures were the British in the last half of the eighteenth century. It was the British Sanskritists and educators in India, during the 1700 and 1800's, who first portrayed Vedic literature and culture as something barbaric, inferior, and recent. 
This cultural prejudice was the result of deliberate undermining with the disguised intention of asserting the superiority of their own Christian-based values and outlook, as well as the perpetuation of colonial rule. India was the centerpiece of Britain's imperialistic exploits. And many of the notable professors at the time had the audacity to consider themselves to be better authorities on their questionable translations of the Vedas then the Indian scholars. Western Indology itself, has its roots in European colonialism and Christian missionary propaganda.

It was Indologist W.W. Hunter who said: “Scholarship is warmed with the holy flame of Christian zeal.” 
On November 7th, 1919, "The Daily Telegraph (London), wrote: "There is no Civilization known to the world except that of Christianity." All then who are not Christians are uncivilized." Cardinal Bourne, speaking about this time at Waterford, said: 
" When you come to nations where Christianity had not penetrated, there was no civilization in our sense of the word except fragments which they had picked up from the Christian Civilized Nations."

(source: Is India Civilized: Essays on Indian Culture - By Sir John Woodroffe  p.28). For more refer to chapter on Greater India: Suvarnabhumi and Sacred Angkor
Refer to QuickTime trailer and Part One of the film The God Awful Truth.  Refer to Christian persecution against the Hellenes - ethnicoi.org. Refer to Things They Don't Tell you about Christianity.
Catholic Bishop of Plymouth wrote of the books "dignified" by the Sanskritists under the name "Sacred Books of the East" as being "gibberish". 

At first the British government was careful not to force any change in religion upon the Indian people. This policy seemed judicious for ruling the several hundred million Indian citizens without precipitating rebellion. It can be easily summed up in the words of a tea-dealer  Mr. Twinning, "As long as we continue to govern India in the mild, tolerant spirit of Christianity, we may govern it with ease; but if ever the fatal day should arrive, when religious innovation shall set her foot in that country, indignation will spread from one end of the Hindustan to the other, and the arms of fifty millions of people will drive us from that portion of the globe, with as much ease as the sand of the desert is scattered by the wind". Another point of view in support of that policy was by Montgomery. "Christianity had nothing to teach Hinduism, and no missionary ever made a really good Christian convert in India. He was more anxious to save the 30,000 of his country-men in India than to save the souls of all the Hindu by making them Christians at so dreadful a price". 

Despite facing such resistance in the beginning, missionaries won the battle in 1813 resulting in full right to visit and preach their religion in India. The Christian population in India in 1893 was around 600,000 but today it has grown up to 24 million, an increase of 4000% in 106 years!

However, soon, "the company manifested a laudable zeal for extending, as far as its means went, the knowledge of the Gospel to the pagan tribes among whom its factories were placed." The British showed very little interest in Hindu scriptures in the beginning. Doubtless this was in part a reflection of the usual British attitude to India during most of the period of the Raj: that India as a whole was a profitable nuisance. 
Lord Cornwallis (1738-1805) a contemporary of William Jones, made his famous and bold announcement in  "Every native of Hindostan, I verily believe, is corrupt."

The missionaries in India were always supporters of colonialism; they encouraged it and their whole structure was based on "the good of Western civilized world being brought to the Pagans." The Christian missionaries had no sympathy for Hinduism which, in their view, was  "at best,  work of human folly and at worst the outcome of a diabolic inspiration."

(source: Ancient India - By V. D. Mahajan p. 1).
Preacher, William Archer, wrote in his book, India and the Future:
"The plain truth concerning the mass of the [Indian] population — and the poorer classes alone — is that they are not civilized people."
Reverend A. H. Bowman wrote that Hinduism was a:

"…great philosophy which lives on unchanged whilst other systems are dead, which as yet unsuplanted has its stronghold in Vedanta, the last and the most subtle and powerful foe of Christianity."
In the word of Charles Grant (1746-1823), Chairman of the East India Company:  
"We cannot avoid recognizing in the people of Hindustan a race of men lamentably degenerate and base...governed by malevolent and licentious passions...and sunk in misery by their vices.." 
Charles Grant, who exercised a tremendous influence in the Evangelical circles, published his Observations as early as 1797 in which he attacked almost every aspect of Indian society and religion, determined the "true place" of Indians "in the moral scale" by describing them as morally depraved, "lacking in truth, honesty and good faith"and "in every way different" from the British, enriched the ideological armoury of the Christian missionaries, and provided a justification as well as an agenda for the British rule.
(source: Aryans and British India - By Thomas R. Trautmann p.103)

In 1792, Charles Grant who for his over zeal for the conversion of the Hindus was known as the only Christian chairman of the East India Company wrote his infamous tract, Observations on the State among the Asiatic Subjects of Great Britain, particularly with respect to morals and means of improving them, written chiefly in the year 1792. In its pages, Grant had advanced the theory that all problems of India and of the English of India could be reasonably traced and satisfactorily solved if the Hindus of India were converted to Christianity.
Grant had been an active member of the Clapham Sect known also in the British Parliament by the name of Evangelical Party which had William Wilberforce as its leader. 
Grant argued: "We proceed, the, to observe, that it is perfectly in the power of the country (England) by degrees, to impart to the Hindoos our language, afterwards, through that medium, to make them acquainted with our easy literary compositions, upon a variety of subjects; and, let not the idea hastily excite derision, progressively with the simple elements of our art, philosophy and (Christian dogma and tenets) religion. These acquisitions will silently undermine, and at length subvert the fabric of error (Hinduism); and all the objections that may be apprehended against such a change, are it is confidently believed, capable of solid answer."

(source: The Hindu - By Krishna Vallabh Paliwal and Brahm Datt Bharti p. 1-2).

"Aryan," a word that today evokes images of racial hatred and atrocity, was first used by Europeans to suggest bonds of kinship, as Thomas Trautmann shows in his far-reaching history of British Orientalism and the ethnology of India. When the historical relationship uniting Sanskrit with the languages of Europe was discovered, it seemed clear that Indians and Britons belonged to the same family. Thus the Indo-European or Aryan idea, based on the principle of linguistic kinship, dominated British ethnological inquiry. In the nineteenth century, however, an emergent biological "race science" attacked the authority of the Orientalists. The spectacle of a dark- skinned people who were evidently civilized challenged Victorian ideas, and race science responded to the enigma of India by redefining the Aryan concept in narrowly "white" racial terms. By the end of the nineteenth century, race science and Orientalism reached a deep and lasting consensus in regard to India, which Trautmann calls "the racial theory of Indian civilization," and which he undermines with his powerful analysis of colonial ethnology in India.)
As Thomas Trautmann puts it, " Evangelical influence drove British policy down a path that tended to minimize and denigrate the accomplishments of Indian civilization and to position itself as the negation of the (earlier) British Indomania" that was nourished by belief in Indian wisdom." 
(source: The Invasion That Never Was - By Michel Danino and Sujata Nahar p. 23-24).

The Evangelicals, horrified by the idea that Christians could take the idolatry and improprieties of a pagan culture seriously, seeing in India an unlimited field for missionary activity, and insisting that it was part of a Christian government's duty to promote this. 
In 1790, Dr. Claudius Bucchanan, a missionary attached to the East India Company, arrived in Bengal. He was convinced that God had given the Company dominion over India for the specific purpose of India's christianization. "No Christian nation," he wrote, "ever possessed such an extensive field for the propagation of the Christian faith, as that afforded to us by our influence over the hundred million natives of Hindoostan. No other nation ever possessed such facilities for the extension the faith as we have in the government of a passive people, who yield submissively to our mild sway, reverence our principles, and acknowledge our dominion to be a blessing. Why should it be thought incredible that Providence hath been pleased, in a course of years to subjugate this Eastern empire to the most civilized nation in the world, for this very purpose." 
His conviction was fully shared by William Wilberforce who proclaimed in the British Parliament in June 1813, 
"Our religion is sublime, pure and beneficent. Theirs is mean, licentious, and cruel."
(source: History of Hindu-Christian Encounters - By Sita Ram Goel South Asia Books July 1990 ISBN 9990049173 p.33).

Doctrine of Christian Discovery

C K Raju (1954 - ) holds a Ph.D. from the Indian Statistical Institute. He taught mathematics for several years before playing a lead role in the C-DAC team which built Param: India ’s first parallel supercomputer. His earlier book ‘Time: Towards a Consistent Theory’ set out a new physics with a tilt in the arrow of time. He has been a Fellow of the Indian Institute of Advanced Study and is a Professor of Computer Applications.  

He has observed that:

"According to which only Christians could be regarded as discoverers.

The church decreed that ownership of a piece of land must go to the first Christian to spot it. (Hence, the claim that Columbus “discovered” America , or that Vasco da Gama “discovered” India). The people already living on the land did not matter, and the church encouraged their killing on a mass scale, where possible, as actually happened on three continents. 

This doctrine was made into a law by the US supreme court, and that is where the current US law on land-ownership vis-a-vis the “Red Indians” stands."

(source: Newton as Theologian - By C K Raju). Refer to Five Hundred Years of Injustice

Note: The Doctrine of Discovery provided that by law and divine intention European Christian countries gained power and legal rights over indigenous non-Christian peoples immediately upon their “discovery” by Europeans. Various European monarchs and their legal systems developed this principle to benefit their own countries. Refer to Native America, Discovered and Conquered: Thomas Jefferson, Lewis & Clark, and Manifest Destiny - By Robert Miller

Sesha Samarajiwa ( ? ) from Sri Lanka is interested examining foreign religious agents’ role as Fifth Columnists of neocolonialism/neoimperialism. He has written:
"Evangelists belong to a long line of pests from the West who have come and keep coming like locusts to colonize our souls and cannibalize our cultures.
The latest incursions are merely a continuation of the 500-year-old sorry saga of Asia, Africa and South America , which began with the arrival of the Portuguese and the Spaniards. Some have never recovered from the machinations of their priests and the savagery of their conquistadors. The baton of imperialism has passed from the Europeans to the Americans. That is not to say that the rest of the West has dropped out. They have not. They are very much in the game. It’s just that the Americans are in the lead, the new Romans on the rampage. 
We know well how the Europeans won the West. They won it through mass genocide of the native populations in North and South America . In South America , hundreds and thousands of natives who resisted conversion were garroted. There is a poignant painting depicting such conversions. It shows armored Spanish soldiers garroting native priests, while a Spanish priest holds up a large cross. More terrified natives await their turn. On the side, another Spanish priest feeds stacks of ancient gold-leaf books of the Mayans into a fire. On the face of the Mayan priests, a look of utter sadness mixed with resignation.
In places like India and Sri Lanka , they were no better. They too faced abject horrors. In his book, Christianity's scramble for India , Navaratna Rajaram says that “the Christian Missionary is neither a Christian nor a missionary. In fact, he is a racist and a white supremacist in priestly guise.” Their Buffalo Bills and their Wild Bills, their Custers and their Cortezes, and the long line of predators and priests made sure that the sorry remainder of once-proud nations would remain so, while they ruled the roost in lands drenched with native blood. Many weaker cultures succumbed to the relentless onslaught from the West. They either slaughtered those who resisted or they sowed the seeds of abjection and their eventual self-destruction. Even today, we see the pathetic dregs of once-noble nations staggering around native reservations and barrios in North and South America, in Australia , in Canada , in New Zealand . They have lost their spirit. They have lost their will to live. They seem embarrassed to be alive. They are self-destructing. At best, they are performing monkeys titillating whites with a thirst for the exotic. These are abject peoples, vanishing tribes. Now, not satisfied with ruling their large chunk of raided real estate, they are hell-bent on extending their hegemony over the whole world. They howl in protest when the natives resist. Human misery is happy hunting grounds for these spiritual cartels. They strike when their targets are at their weakest or bomb them to submission to make sure they are at their weakest. Thus softened up, they are susceptible to inducements and brainwashing. They are canny. To ‘convert’ people, you must first make them despise and reject what had sustained their people for millennia. So they vilify their faith or convince them it is a spent force or dark superstition. In so doing, they make us spit on our heritage."
(source: Beware of wolves in sheep’s clothing - By Sesha Samarajiwa - Asian Tribune October 9, 2007).

An Englishman getting a pedicure from his Indian servants.

The Tyranny of British Rule: "The British have set themselves up as the master race in India. British rule in India is fascism, there is no dodging that."

"It is in India, of all places on the earth, that the superiority of the white over the colored races is most strikingly demonstrated."

Watch Scientific verification of Vedic knowledge.  Refer to the chapter on European Imperialism. Watch An Invasion through Conversion - videoyahoo.com. Refer to Be wary of English translations of Hindu scriptures - By Sheena Patel

Not long after his arrival, Claudius Bucchanan went further:
"Neither truth, nor honesty, honor, gratitude, nor charity, is to be found in the breast of a Hindoo." What a comment to make about a nation that gave the world the Vedas and the Upanishads, at a time when Europeans were still living in their caves!
Bucchanan traveled to Puri in Orissa and witnessed the annual Ratha-yatra (or as Bucchanan called it, ‘The horrors of Juggernaut’). His description of Jagannatha – ‘The Indian Moloch’, has been recorded by the historian George Gogerly as- "…a frightful visage painted black, with a distended mouth of bloody horror." Perhaps, by seeing the face of Lord Jagannatha, the British hallucinated and saw a projection of their own international destiny of bloodshed and carnage. In any case, from the time the British observed the ‘terrifying’ sight of the Lord on His gigantic chariot, the word ‘juggernaut’ entered the English language and became synonymous with any great force that crushes everything in its path.

Gogerly went on to write:

"The whole history of this famous god (Krsna) is one of lust, robbery, deceit and murder…the history of the whole hierarchy of Hindooism is one of shameful iniquity, too vile to be described."
To most 18th century Englishmen, religion meant Christianity. Naturally racism played its part also. This attitude of Europeans toward Indians was due to a sense of superiority - a cherished conviction which was shared by every Englishman in India, from the highest to the lowest. Upon his arrival in 1810, the Gov. General marquis of Hastings wrote in his diary on October 2, 1813:

"the Hindoo appears a being merely limited to mere animal functions, and even in them indifferent........with no higher intellect than a dog or an elephant or a monkey, might be supposed capable of attaining.."
(source: The History and Culture of Indian People - By R. C. Majumdar volume X, 2nd edition, Bombay, 1981, p. 338).
William Carey (1761-1834)

Without governmental sanction or license, the Christian evangelists came to India and proselytized to undermine the "superstitions of the country". The history of western (missionary) scholarship in Oriental Studies in India can be traced to William Carey, the pioneer of modern missionary enterprise in India. Carey was an English oriental scholar and founder of the Baptist Missionary Society. From 1801 onward, as Professor of Oriental Languages, he composed numerous philosophical works, consisting of 'grammars and dictionaries in the Mahratti, Sanskrit, Punjabi, Telugu, Bengali and Bhatanta dialects. From the Serampor press, there issued in his life time, over 200,000 Bibles and portions in nearly 40 different languages and dialects, Carey himself undertaking most of the literary work.' (Encyclopedia Britannica, 1950, Vol. 4, p. 860). Carey and his colleagues experimented with what came to be known as Church Sanskrit. 
He wanted to train a group of 'Christian Pandits' who would probe "these mysterious sacred nothings" and expose them as worthless.  
He was distressed that this "golden casket (of Sanskrit) exquisitely wrought" had remained "filled with nothing but pebbles and trash." He was determined to fill it with "riches - beyond all price", that is the doctrine of Christianity

(source: Richard Fox Young, Resistant Hinduism, Vienna, 1981, p. 34).
Carey a cobbler by profession, had published a book, An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians to use means for the Conversion of the Heathens, in 1792 while he was still in England. 

Baptist William Carey learned to speak and read classical Indian languages with the help of Pandit Mrityunjay.

In the 19th century, Christian theologians  were  highly  critical  of Hinduism. William Archer wrote in his book, India and the Future, "The plain truth concerning the mass of the [Indian] population — and the poorer classes alone — is that they are not civilized people." However, these uncivilized people proved unenthusiastic about missionary promises that conversion would mean prosperity,  wealth and education. Reverend A.H. Bowman wrote that Hinduism was a "great philosophy which lives on unchanged whilst other systems are dead, which as yet un supplanted has its stronghold in Vedanta, the last and the most subtle and powerful foe of Christianity."
 
Alexander Duff (1806-1878) a prominent missionary, founded the Scots College, in Calcutta,  which he envisioned as a "headquarters for a great campaign against Hinduism."  Duff sought to convert the natives by enrolling them in English-run schools and colleges, and he placed emphasis on learning Christianity through the English language. He wrote, 
" While we rejoice that true literature and science are to be substituted in place of what is demonstrably false, we cannot but lament that no provision has been made for substituting the only true religion-Christianity - in place of the false religion which our literature and science will inevitably demolish… Of all the systems of false religion ever fabricated by the perverse ingenuity of fallen man, Hinduism is surely the most stupendous."  
(source: The History and Culture of Indian People - By R. C. Majumdar volume X, 2nd edition, Bombay, 1981, p. 155).
Duff received remarkable success in his educational and missionary activities amongst the higher classes in Calcutta. The number of students in the mission schools was four times higher than that in government schools. It is an axiomatic truth that the aim of missionaries like Duff was not so much education than conversion. They were obliged to use the excuse of education in order to meet he needs of the converted population, and more importantly, to train up Indian assistants to help them in their proselytizing. Duff remained unsatisfied with converting Indians belonging to low-castes and orphans – his chosen target was the higher castes, specifically the brahmanas, in order to accelerate the demise of Hinduism.

"India was the chief seat of Satan's earthly dominion"

John Muir (1810-1882) had come to Calcutta in 1828 as a civil servant of the East India Company. He was, for some time, a student of William Carey. He published his first draft of his Matapariksha in 1839. It drew three rejoinders from Hindu pandits, Somnatha, whose real name was Subaji Bapu, a Maharastrian scholar, Harachandra Tarkapanchanana and Nilakanth Gore.
In his publication, Muir asserted that miracles mentioned in Hindu scriptures were false and 'merely ornamental in that religion instead of being at its very center as in Christianity. This way of arguing is pompously called Evidential Apologetics in Christian theology. At one point, however, Muir was deliberately dishonest. He criticized the cosmography of the Puranas as erroneous. Surely he must have known what Galileo and Copernicus had done to the cosmography of the Bible and how they had suffered persecution at the hands of the Church. 
(source: History of Hindu-Christian Encounters - By Sita Ram Goel p. 78 . The Shadow of the Cross - By Sisir Kumar Das 1974 p. 51-78).
Refer to QuickTime trailer and Part One of the film The God Awful Truth.
Sir Charles Trevelyan, an officer, with the East India Company asserted in a widely circulated tract: 
"The multitudes who flock to our schools ... cannot return under the dominion of the Brahmins. The spell has been for ever broken. Hinduism is not a religion that will bear examination... It gives away at once before the light of European sciences." 
"Educated in the same way, interested in the same objects, engaged in the same pursuits with ourselves, they become more English than Hindus...The young men brought up in our seminaries, turn with contempt from the barbarous despotisms, under which their ancestors groaned....Instead of regarding us with dislike, they court our society...the summit of their ambition is, to resemble us."
(source: Christianity's Scramble for India and The Failure of the Secularist Elite - By N S Rajaram p. 70).
The Crown of Hinduism, by the Scottish missionary, J N Farquhar, who worked in India in the cause of his brand of Christianity during the period 1891 to 1923.  What this book tries to project is that while there may well be some good points in Hinduism, ultimately the true salvation can only be achieved through Jesus Christ, who is the crown of Hinduism.

Richard Temple, another high officer, said in a 1883 speech to a London missionary society intended to generate donations to missions: " India presents the greatest of all fields of missionary exertion... India is a country which of all others we are bound to enlighten with external truth...But what is most important to you friends of missions, is this - that there is a large population of aborigines, a people who are outside caste....If they are attached, as they rapidly may be, to Christianity, they will form a nucleus round which British power and influence may gather. He addressed a mission in New York  in the most explicit terms: "Thus India is like a mighty bastion which is being battered by heavy artillery. We have given blow after blow, and thud after thud, and the effect is not at first very remarkable; but at last with a crash the mighty structure will come toppling down, and it is our hope that someday the heathen religions of India will in like manner succumb." 

"According to European nationalism, other traditions and earlier ones were expressions of mythological beliefs only: Christianity was an expression of historical fact. "

"To this day, the most threatening appositional phrase that an avowed Christian can be presented with is 'Christian Mythology.' To accept its validity is to shake the ground of her/his belief."

           -  Dr. Marimba Ani - active organizer in the Afrikan Community.

Author of  YURUGU: An African-Centered Critique of European Cultural Thought and Behavior Africa World Press. Sixth reprint 1996.p. 141.   

Refer to Defaming of Hinduism-I – By V Sundaram – newstodaynet.com and Defaming of Hinduism-II – By V Sundaram – newstodaynet.com, For more on Christian Intolerance refer to chapters on The Goa Inquisition, European Imperialism, Conversion. Refer to Things They Don't Tell you about Christianity.

According to Kate Teltscher in her book India Inscribed: European and British Writing on India 1600-1800. p. 94, 22

"One Professor McKenzie, of Bombay found the ethics of India defective, illogical and anti-social, lacking any philosophical foundation, nullified by abhorrent ideas of asceticism and ritual and altogether inferior to the 'higher spirituality' of Europe. He devoted most of his book 'Hindu Ethics' to upholding this thesis and came to the conclusion that Vedic philosophical ideas, 'when logically applied leave no room for ethics'; and that they prevent the development of a strenuous moral life."
All efforts were made by the missionaries to portray Hinduism as backwards, illogical, debauched and perverse.  
As one preacher exclaimed,

'The curse of India is the Hindoo religion. More than two hundred million people believe a monkey mixture of mythology that is strangling the nation.' 'He who yearns for God in India soon loses his head as well as his heart.'
The missionaries opposed the government’s efforts to take a neutral stand towards Indian culture and worked with more zeal for the complete conversion of the natives. Thus India became an arena for religious adventure.

"Hinduism was often perceived as the enemy to be conquered by Christian forces. Efforts were made to depict Hinduism as poetry, fiction or mythology. Hinduism was a manifest work of Satan, provides Christianity with devils to destroy; an element lacking in 18th century Europe with the decline in witch-craft prosecution. The devil is defeated through conversion. Proof of God's victory is provided by the accounts of multiple baptisms that regularly appear in the Lettres edifiantes. In one day, Father Bouchet baptizes 500 hundred converts. Such scenes, where a single missionary saves huge numbers of pagan souls from damnation, emphasize the thrilling drama of conversion. They present the reader with an exciting image of heroic enterprise and a flattering representation of Western influence over Indians.  Efforts were made to show Hinduism as strangely illogical and perverted. Thus, India was turned into an arena for religious adventure. 
In the words of Edward Said's Orientalism, produces an unshakeable assumption of European superiority, with the East always functioning as the West's negative foil." 
(source: India Inscribed: European and British Writing on India 1600-1800 - By Kate Teltscher p. 94, 22).

"The Christian resolve to find the world evil and ugly, has made the world evil and ugly."

 Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), German philosopher. Refer to Proving that Bible is Repulsive video - godisimaginary.com. Refer to Things They Don't Tell you about Christianity.

Anti-Brahminism have deep roots in Christian theology

To be against "Brahminism" is part and parcel of the political correctness of progressive scholars in twenty-first-century India. This indicates that something is very wrong with the Indian academic debate. Promotion of animosity towards a religious tradition or its followers is not acceptable today, but it becomes truly perverse when the intelligentsia endorses it.  In Europe , it took horrendous events to put an end to the propaganda of anti-Semitism, which had penetrated the media and intelligentsia. It required decades of incessant campaigning before anti-Semitism was relegated to the realm of intellectual and political bankruptcy. In India , anti-Brahminism is still the proud slogan of many political parties and the credential of the radical intellectual.

Both anti-Semitism and anti-Brahminism have deep roots in Christian theology.

The contemporary stereotypes about Brahmins and the story about Brahminism also originate in Christian theology. They reproduce Protestant images of the priests of false religion. When European missionaries and merchants began to travel to India in great numbers, they held two certainties that came from Christian theology: false religion would exist in India ; and false religion revolved around evil priests who had fabricated all kinds of laws, doctrines and rites in order to bully the innocent believers into submission. In this way, the priests of the devil abused religion for worldly goals. The European story about Brahminism and the caste system simply reproduced this Protestant image of false religion. The colonials identified the Brahmins as the priests and Brahminism as the foundation of false religion in India . This is how the dominant image of "the Hindu religion" came into being. The theological criticism became part of common sense and was reproduced as scientific truth. In India , this continues unto this day. Social scientists still talk about "Brahminism" as the worst thing that ever happened to humanity.  

The Bible-derived creeds are founded on a central figure (Jehovah, God, Allah or History) who commands the exclusive and overriding allegiance of the believers. 

He is jealous, cruel and brooks no rival. 

To equate or identify Him (e.g. Allah) with gods worshipped by people of other faiths (e.g. Rama or God of the Bible) is to insult him by denying his supremacy.

Refer to Religious conflict: Tracing the roots   - By Virendra Parekh - vijayvaani.com

Some Jews began to believe that they were to blame for what happened during the Holocaust; many educated Brahmins now feel that they are guilty of historical atrocities against other groups. In some cases, this has led to a kind of identity crisis in which they vilify "Brahminism" in English-language academic debate, but continue their traditions. In twentieth-century Europe , we have seen how dangerous anti-Semitism was and what consequences it could have in society. Tragically, unimaginable suffering was needed before it was relegated to the realm of unacceptable positions. In India, anti-Brahminism was adopted from Protestant missionaries by colonial scholars who then passed it on to the secularists and Dalit intellectuals. The question that India has to raise in the twenty-first century is this: Do we need bloodshed, before we will realise that the reproduction of anti-Brahminism?

(source: The Indian Jews - By Jakob De Roover -  Outlookindia.com June 20, 2008).

William Wilberforce (1759-1833) British politician declared: 
"The people of India are today enslaved by, they today groan under the yoke of "a monstrous and absurd superstitions of their native faith." The evils of that faith, he noted were "inveterate", not jut long-lasting but inherent. He talked of the "dark and degrading superstitions," the inhuman cruelties of Hinduism, of its "mean, licentious, and cruel" nature. On the testimony of many like-minded persons, Wilberforce said Indians to be mean and petty, to be liars and thieves, widow-burners, and murderers of infants.
In 1813, Wilbeforce spoke to the House of Commons on behalf of the missionaries toiling in India: "On the principle, we might have anticipated the moral condition of the Hindoos, by ascertaining the character of their deities....
"Their divinities are absolute monsters of lust, injustice, wickedness, and cruelty. In short, their religious system is one grand abomination."
(Note for Mr. Wilberforce - Did he consider worshipping a corpse-on-a-stick (Jesus) not only monstrous but irrational ?).

He maintained, quoting the Directors of the East India Company, that these traits of character flowed directly from “the nature of their superstitions and the degraded character of their deities, as well as the almost entire want of moral instructions.” Further, “I scarcely need to remark that in its superstitious rites, there has commonly been found to be a natural alliance between obscenity and cruelty, and of the Hindoo superstitions it may be truly affirmed, that they are scarcely less bloody that lascivious” .

Wilberforce went on to say that “we might have anticipated the moral condition of the Hindoos, by ascertaining the character of their deities.” The perpetrator of a crime “found precedent in one of its national gods … in the adventures of the countless rabble of Hindoo deities, you may find every possible variety of every practicable crime. … Every vice has its patron … their divinities are absolute monsters of lust, injustice, wickedness and cruelty. In short, their religious system is one grand abomination.”

Some years later, in 1853, Reverend J. Tucker addressed the Select Committee on Indian Territories, citing the progress made in native conversions through missionary schools, and through “cordial support and assistance to missionary proceedings” of civil and military government individuals. He was particularly proud to present a letter written by the Tinnevelly Congregation of Indian Protestant Christians. It read in part:

"To Her Most Gracious Majesty Victoria,
By the Grace of God,
Queen by the Grace of God,
Queen of Great Britain and Defender of the Faith

We, native Christians … have embraced the Christian religion in number of 40,000 persons, presume to approach the feet of your Gracious Majesty, with all humility and reverence, presenting this humble memorial.

We desire to acknowledge in your Majesty’s presence that we, your humble subjects, and all our fellow-countrymen, placed by the providence of Almighty God under the just and merciful rule of the English Government, enjoy a happiness unknown to our forefathers in the inestimable blessings of peace. … by the gratitude we feel, we humbly acknowledge it to be our delightful duty, heartily and incessantly, to beseech Almighty God, the King of Kings, to “endure our Gracious Queen plenteously with heavenly gifts, to grant her health and wealth long to live, to strengthen her … and finally, after this life, attain everlasting joy and felicity.”

Incalculable are the benefits that have accrued … we who are Christians are bound to be especially grateful for having received … the privilege of ourselves learning the true religion and its sacred doctrines, and of securing it for our sons and daughters … (emphasis added).

… Our countrymen (seeing) the vast number of boys and girls, children of Christian, Heathen, Mohammedan and Roman-catholic parents, learning gratuitously both in Tamul and English, at the expense of English missions, repeat their ancient proverbs, and say, “Instruction is indeed the opening of sightless eyeballs”…

The British Debate on Christianization of India 1813 

The moral and spiritual state of the people of India was discussed, as if threadbare, by the British House of Commons in June-July 1813. It can be said that this debate has been the high point of British interest in India during nearly 200 years of the British-India encounter. Despite some differing views, as articulated by quite a few members of the British parliament, the overall picture which emerged from this debate was of the Indian people being “deeply sunk, and by their religious superstitions fast bound, in the lowest depths of moral, and social wretchedness and degradation.” Further, it was said that “their minds are totally uncultivated.” That “of the duties of morality they have no idea.” 

That “they possess a great degree of that cunning which so generally accompanies depravity of heart.” That “they are indolent and grossly sensual” that “they are cruel and cowardly, insolent and abject” that “they have superstitions without a sense of religion” and that “in short, they have all the vices of savage life” but “without any of its virtues”. The long debate thus was not so much for the Christianization of India as to paint India’s past and its people in the darkest possible hues. 

The chief vocal architect of this debate was Mr. William Wilberforce, later known as “Father of the Victorians”, who in a major way shaped British opinion about the world, especially about the non-christian world, and British opinion about Britain itself and its policeman’s role in the world. 

According to Mr. Wilberforce, Hindu “divinities are absolute monsters of lust, injustice, wickedness and cruelty. In short, their religious system is one grand abomination.  

Several members of the British House of Commons disagreed with Mr. Wilberforce. Sir Henry Montgomery, a British officer in India for 20 years, stated that the commitment for crimes in London alone were 150-200 times of those in the Deccan where he had served, that they need only to attend “to the number of loose women that they would see in the streets” of London every night. Mr. Stephen Lushington stated “it was asserted that the literature of India was destitute of morality”, but he “had never found it so; on the contrary, the books which he had read in that country were perhaps too much taken up with the lessons of morality. Moral sentences intervened so often, even in their books of amusement.” “With respect to the charge made against the Hindoos, of the infidelity of the sexes towards each other” Lushington believed “their moral sentiments with respect to the conduct of women, were as good as ours, and their general practice, better.” 

Mr. Forbes and several other members felt that the clause on “propagation of Christianity in India” was fraught with much danger as the Indians would take it as an interference with their religion and customs. Sir T Sutton felt it would “irritate and alarm the feelings of the people of India” and was of the view that “if too open and avowed efforts were made to propagate Christianity” the natives of India might say, “you have taken from us our territories, you have seized upon our revenues; and not content with taking our country from us, you wish to deprive us of our religion. But our religion, you shall not take from us.” 

But to Mr. Wilberforce, Christianity is the religion of the British empire in Europe, the religion of Brahma and Vishnoo is not to be the acknowledged system of our Asiatic dominion.” 

While the issue of Christianizing India was the ostensible purpose of this debate, the main consequence and objective of it was the presenting of India, its people and culture in the way narrated above. Their continued subjugation required such a public spectacle and the debate gave high-level legitimacy and sanction to a multi-pronged attack on India, its civilization and its past and to the British extortions, plunder, and to the deliberate smashing of Indian institutions, and disorienting the mind of the Indian elite who had by stages begun to collaborate with British rule, and become the instruments of silencing and tormenting the people of India.

(source: Despoliation and Defamation of India: The Early Nineteenth Century British Crusade - By Dharampal p. 49 - 59).

Another leading missionary, a Baptist, William Carey (1761-1834), smuggled himself into India and propagandized against the Vedic culture so zealously that the British government in Bengal curbed him as a political danger. The missionaries actively denounced the Vedic literatures as "absurdities" meant for the "amusement of children". How close was the nexus between the 'neutral' British rulers and Christian missionaries? "It is not only our duty," declared Lord Palmerston, the Prime Minister, "but in our own interest to promote the diffusion of Christianity as far as possible throughout the length and breadth of India."

"Every additional Christian," declared Lord Halifax, the Secretary of the State, "is an additional bond of union with this country and an additional source of strength to the Empire." "They are doing for India," as Lord Reay introducing a deputation of Indian Christians to the Prince of Wales, said "more than all those civilians, soldiers, judges and governors whom your Highness has met;" "They are the most potent force in India," declared Sir MacWorth Young.
And so the effort to civilize India, to secure it for the British Empire, to gather it up as the rich harvest for the Church proceeded as a joint endeavor: the civil servants helped by many devices, including among these their "religious neutrality": :the soldiers of the Cross" reinforced each other's efforts; and the scholars helped working to "undermine" and "encircle" and  thereby prepare the way for "the soldiers of the Cross" to finally storm" the strong fortress of Brahminism".

(source: Missionaries in India: Continuities, Changes, Dilemmas - By Arun Shourie ASA Publications ASIN 8190019945 p.109-132).
Refer to QuickTime trailer and Part One of the film The God Awful Truth.

William Dalrymple, (1965 - ) author of The Last Mughal, and award-winning travel writer and historian, has recently written:
 "By 1813, a change in the charter of the East India Company let loose a wave of evangelical missionaries on India . The act was pushed through parliament by William Wilberforce, who told MPs that "the natives of India , and more particularly the Brahmins, were sunk into the most abject ignorance and vice".  The Rev R Ainslie was typical of the new breed of missionaries filling the cantonments, or military stations, of India during the 1830s. Ainslie wrote of his visit to Orissa: "I have visited the Valley of Death ! I have seen the Den of Darkness!"  According to another outspoken evangelical, the Rev Alexander Thompson: "Those who between 1790 and 1820 held the highest offices in India, were on the whole an irreligious body of men who approved of Hinduism much more than Christianity: some who hated Missions from their dread  of sedition; others because their hearts 'seduced by fair idolatresses, had fallen to idols foul'."
(source: Gods and Monsters - By William Dalrymple - guardian.co.uk).

Colonial Mischief: The De- linking of Tribes by the British Empire
Adi Deo Arya Devata – By Sandhya Jain - excerpts

During the freedom struggle, Mahatma Gandhi and other nationalist leaders expressed displeasure at the mischief perpetrated by colonial administrators among backward and disadvantaged sections, and stoutly affirmed that tribals constituted an inalienable part of Hindu society. 

Colonial rhetoric not withstanding, tribals have never been passive recipients of Hindu upper class (what Max Mueller labeled as Brhamanical) cultural models, but have rather contributed actively and enormously to the infinite variety of India’s civilization from its primordial beginnings. The colonial state insisted that Brahmins, peasants, untouchables and tribals were separate groups with distinct customs and beliefs, and that Brahmins sought to subjugate all others to establish their hegemony. Special attempts were made to delink tribals from the main body of Hindu society through imposition of racial categories and subterfuges in Census classifications. 

The nationalists (anthropologists Verrier Elwin, Sarat Chandra Roy, G S Ghurye and K Suresh Singh) emphasized the strong affinity between the tribal concept of divinity and Hindu dharma, as evidenced in practice, mythology and recorded history. 

The agility with which tribal gods overcame their native forest or mountain environment and acquired all-India eminence symbolizes an eternal verity of the Hindu spiritual traditions. Notable examples of this outward mobility include the pan-India tribal phenomenon of worshipping snakes (naga, nag devata) and the Earth Mother (Devi), which permeates equally the forest community, village, regional and classical ethos. The Mother Goddess is variously worshipped as Prithvi Mata, Dharti Mata, Kail, Parvati, Durga et al. 

Nagas are even worshipped today in several temples and places, and the special festival of Nag Panchami in the month of Sravana commemorates society’s enduring attraction for the strength and wisdom represented by the serpent. The naga in Hindu mythology is an attribute to Shiva, a god with strong tribal links. Ancient Indian literature, from the Vedas to the Mahabharata and the Puranas, and even the Jataka tales, confirm the widespread nature of snake worship, as also the existence of a powerful tribe or group of tribes known as Nagas.  In Bengal, live snakes are worshipped in several reputable Shiva temples. This is also the practice in Shiva temples in Thirukalacheri near Tranquebar in Kerala. In many places in eastern India the snake goddess Manasa Devi is worshipped as the daughter of Shiva. So integral are snakes to the Hindu notion of divinity that Vishnu is also intimately linked with them. The mighty serpent Sesha, on whom Vishnu rests during the intervals of creation, is reputedly a form of the god himself (Sesha-Narayana), though he is also identified as Balarama (Baladeva), elder brother of Krishna. The Mahabharata says Balrama’s head is protected by snakehoods, and that when Balrama died, his soul took the form of a snake and exited through his mouth. One of the most popular tales about Krishna centers around his battle with the snake Kaliya, who poisoned the waters of the Yamuna and caused the death of precious cattle.  

The serpent also has intimate links with Krishna, who also has impressive tribal credentials. In Bauddha and Jaina traditions, which too have tribal links, the snake is the guardian diety of the Buddha and the Tirthankaras. As is well known, Gautam Buddha hailed from the Sakya tribe while Vardhaman Mahavira was scion of the Jnatrikas. Cult and sect have negative connotations in Christian tradition and were used by missionaries and colonial administrators to belittle native gods. Yet, the worship of Devi and naga is so pervasive on a pan-India basis that it is hardly possible to demarcate specific as tribal or classical.  

For millennia, tribals and caste Hindus alike have worshipped the powers of the universe in the form of the sun or fire (Savitur, Agni), forest powers (Vandevi, elephant, lion, eagle), plants (tulsi), sacred trees (papal), river waters and natural springs. Shiva and Vishnu, two of the greatest gods of the Hindu pantheon, exhibit strong traces of tribal origins. Shiva was worshipped by forest-dwelling communities in large parts of the country. Vishnu’s incarnations as Varaha (boar) and Narsimha (lion) bear the strong impress of the forest and reinforce tribal inputs into classical dharma. Vishnu is generally held to have evolved out of several distinct deities. These include Vasudeva, supreme lord of the Vrishni/Satvata tribe, whose worship was recorded by the grammarian Panini as early as the 5^th – 6^th centuries BC; Krishna, deity of the Yadava clan; Gopala, god of the Abhira tribe; and Narayana, lord of the Hindu Kush mountains. Yet, Vishnu also has a solar origin (Vishnu Divakara) and among Vedic deities personifies the light and the sun.  

Jagannath: Tribal God Par Excellence:   

Jaganath Puri’s tribal origins are undeniable, though the god is today inseparable from the ‘high’ Hindu panorama and is key constituent of Orissa’s regional identity. The tribal-Hindu dynamic achieved its most glorious fruition at the Jaganath temple of Puri, where the wooden images of the gods and the traditional priests (daitas, daityas) bear testimony to the deity’s archaic origins. These tribal images, rituals and priests coexist peacefully with a classical Hindu iconology, ritual, and Vedic Brahmin priests giving rise to a truly composite spiritual tradition that has elevated a tribal god of obscure origins to regional icon and all-India eminence.  

Creating a Division in Hindu Society
Animism  - Disparaging terms to denote Nature Worship?

Colonial anthropologists introduced a division in society by designating or ‘scheduling’ whole groups as tribes. Disregarding centuries-old intimate ties between caste Hindu and casteless tribal society, they classified the tribals as ‘Animist’. Animism was another disparaging term, used to denote the worship of spirits and forces of nature as opposed to a ‘true’ (monotheistic) god. 

This bias persists in Western thought to this day, and rather than being debunked as a phoney concept, animism is even now described as the belief that natural phenomenon are endowed with ‘life’ or ‘spirit,’ and as the tendency to attribute supernatural or spiritual characteristics to plants, geological features, climatic phenomena and so on.

Little wonder then that Mahatma Gandhi bemoaned: “We were strangers to this sort of classification – animists, aborigines, etc., but we have learnt from the English rulers.” When the missionary Dr. Chesterman queried if this objection applied to the ‘animist’ aboriginal races of the Kond hills, Gandhi insisted, “Yes, it does apply, because I know that in spite of being described as animists these tribes have from time immemorial been absorbed in Hinduism. They are, like the indigenous medicine, of the soil, and their roots lie deep there.”  

In 1901, the British government directed census officers to designate the religion of Adivasis as “animism.” Census officers found that it was virtually impossible to distinguish between an animist and a Hindu in practice, as they all worshipped God in many forms. The result was that a community was listed as “animist” in one census and as “Hindu” in another. 

H H Risley concluded that it was impossible to differentiate between Hinduism and Animism as each merged imperceptibly into the other. Hinduism itself was animism more or less transformed by philosophy.” E A Gait observed in his 1901 Report on the Lower Provinces of Bengal and their Feudatories: “The dividing lines between Hinduism and Animism is uncertain. Hinduism does not, like Christianity and Islam, demand of its votaries the rejection of all other religious beliefs; and …amongst many of the lower castes of Hindus the real working religion derives its inspiration, not from the Vedas, but from the non-Aryan beliefs of the aborigines…” 

Tormented at the near impossibility of such an endeavor, Sedgwick, Superintendent of the Census of 1921 for Bombay, asserted: “I have, therefore no hesitation in saying that Animism as a religion should be entirely abandoned, and that all those hitherto classed as Animists should be grouped with Hindus at the next census.”

(source: Adi Deo Arya Devata – By Sandhya Jain p. 2 - 235). For more refer to chapter on European Imperialism and Aryan Invasion Theory and Conversion and Nature Worship. Also refer to Towards Balkanisation, V: Adivasis - By Varsha Bhosle - rediff.com).
Refer to QuickTime trailer and Part One of the film The God Awful Truth.

In fact, the façade of neutrality was a convenient strategy. As Reverend Tucker told the Select Committee on Indian Territories, in 1853, "I should be sorry to see the Government departing from its present position of strict neutrality. If the Government openly announces Christianity to be a part of the education it imparts, Christianity will immediately lose the high vantage point it now occupies." (ibid, p. 120).
Sir William Muir (1819- 1905) a representative of the mighty British Empire, wrote various articles in the Calcutta Review, put it bluntly: "From all the varieties of heathen religions Christianity has nothing to fear for they are but passive exhibitions of gross darkness which must vanish before the light of the Gospel." 
In 1845 he said, "the Hindu, sickened by idolatry (Islam's and Christianity's common name for Hinduism), turns to the other two religions which surround him, and inquires into their respective claims.. we must be ready at hand to meet him with the proofs of our most holy faith...the comparison of the two religions, Christianity and Islam, cannot fail to be of essential service, under God's blessings, to lead to practical results."
(source: Hindu View of Christianity and Islam - By Ram Swarup Publisher: Voice of India p. 16-55).
While in India Baptist Christian missionaries used their time in collecting materials derogatory to Hinduism. Dr. R. C. Majumdar, author of The History and Culture of the Indian People, writes:
" A number of people including William Wilberforce, sought to refute these arguments by painting in black colors the horrible customs of the Hindus such as sati, infanticide, throwing the children into the Ganga, religious suicides, and above all idolatry. Vivid descriptions were given of the massacre of the innocent resulting from the car procession of Lord Jagannath at Puri, and the Baptists put down the number of annual victims at not less than 120,000. When challenged they had to admit that they did not actually count the dead bodies but arrived at the figure by an ingenious calculation."
(source: The History and Culture of Indian People - By R. C. Majumdar volume X, 2nd edition, Bombay, 1981, p. 152-153).
Bishop Heber's (1783- 1826) Hymn

From Greenland’s icy mountains, from India’s coral strand;
Where Afric’s sunny fountains roll down their golden sand:
From many an ancient river, from many a palmy plain,
They call us to deliver their land from error’s chain.

What though the spicy breezes blow soft o’er Ceylon’s isle;
Though every prospect pleases, and only man is vile?
In vain with lavish kindness the gifts of God are strown;
The heathen in his blindness bows down to wood and stone.

Shall we, whose souls are lighted with wisdom from on high,
Shall we to those benighted the lamp of life deny?
Salvation! O salvation! The joyful sound proclaim,
Till earth’s remotest nation has learned Messiah’s Name.

Waft, waft, ye winds, His story, and you, ye waters, roll
Till, like a sea of glory, it spreads from pole to pole:
Till o’er our ransomed nature the Lamb for sinners slain,
Redeemer, King, Creator, in bliss returns to reign.

The hymn was published in the Evangelical Magazine in July 1821. It is considered one of the finest missionary hymns in the English language. It is one of the many specimens of contempt which Christians have shown for Hindus. The hymn was included in the official hymns of the Anglican Church in England and elsewhere. 

Mahatma Gandhi had chided the Christian missionaries for misrepresenting Hinduism. 
"You, the missionaries," he said, "come to India thinking that you come to a land of heathens, of idolators, of men who do not know God. One of the greatest Christian divines, Bishop Reginald Heber, wrote the two lines which have always left a sting with me: 'Where every prospect pleases, and man alone is vile.'  I wish he had not written them. My own experience in my travels through out India has been to the contrary. I have gone from one end of the country to the other, without any prejudice, in a relentless search for truth, and I am not able to say that here in this fair land, watered by the great Ganga, the Brahmaputra, and the Jamuna, man is vile. He is not vile. He is as much a seeker after truth as you and I are, possibly more so...."
He further commented: "I have read several missionary publications and they are able to see only the dark side and paint it darker still. The famous hymn of Bishop Heber's - 'Greenland's icy mountains' - is a clear libel on Indian humanity. I was favored with some literature even in the Yervada prison by well-meaning missionaries, which seemed to be written as if merely to belittle Hinduism."
(source: The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi Volume 27 New Delhi 1968 p.214- 436).
Christian missionaries were attacking the Puranas for containing passages which they considered obscene. Swami Vivekananda had studied the Bible and knew that it contained a lot which was far worse. "The Chinese,' he wrote, "are the disciples of Confucius, and the Buddha, and their morality is quite strict and refined. The Christian missionaries translated the Bible into Chinese tongue. Now in the Bible there are some passages so obscene as to put to shame some of the Puranas of the Hindus. Reading those indecorous passages, the Chinamen were so exasperated against Christianity that they made a point of never allowing the Bible to be circulated in their country...They raised a cry, saying: "Oh, horror! This religion has come to us to ruin our young boys, by giving them the Bible to read...."
(source: The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda Calcutta, 1985 Volume V. p. 503).

The First Scholars 

Such are the settings in which the first Indologists first appeared.

Sir William Jones, the first British to master Sanskrit and study the Vedas, drew fire from the eminent British historian James Mill, author of History of India, for his "hypothesis of a high state of civilization". Typically, Mill believed that the:

"The people of India were never advanced and that they had no right to a claim a glorious past. And that it was a historical fantasy...."  

James Mill, father of John Stuart, had published his history of India in 1818. Though Mill spoke no Indian languages, indeed had never been to India, his damning indictment of Indian society and religion had become the standard work - required reading for all who would serve in India.

At any rate, by translating the Vedas for the Western reader and thus evincing the ancient Vedic genius, the scholars increased India's prestige in the West.

Sir William Jones (1746-1794), Charles Wilkins (1749-1836) and Thomas Colebrooke (1765-1837) are considered the fathers of Indology. Sir Jones was appointed a judge of the Supreme Court in Calcutta. He translated a number of Sanskrit works into English and his works into the investigations into languages mark him as one of the most brilliant minds of the 18th century. Yet he was not prone to invective against another's religion, particularly the Vedas, which he admired. He described the Bhagavata Purana as “a motley story”. He speculated that the Bhagavad Gita came from the Christian Gospels, which had been brought to India and "repeated to the Hindus, who ingrafted them on the old fable of Kesava, ( a name for Krishna). Of course, this theory has been discredited since records of Krishna worship predates Christ by centuries.
“Discrediting is the better part of valor.”

The British in India were much more gentlemanly and subtle than the Spanish in Mexico. Rather than destroying, the British had a different style:

 “Discrediting is the better part of valor.” Initially, at the end of the 18^th century, the first British to study Vedic texts tried to consider the literature and its stated antiquity seriously. But their appreciations were drowned out by the uproar of negative scholarship that so characterized the bulk of Indology’s development in the English language. 

James Mill (1773 - 1836)  in his History of India brought out in 1817, took special care to remove the halo around William Jones, the internationally acclaimed Calcutta Sanskritist and linguistic scholar: 

“It was so unfortunate that a mind so pure, so war in the pursuit of truth, and so devoted to oriental learning, as that of Sir William Jones, should have adopted the hypothesis of a high state of civilization in the principal countries of Asia. This he supported with all the advantages of an imposing manner, and a brilliant reputation; and gained for it so great a credit, that for a time, it would have been very difficult to obtain a hearing against it.”   

From the year 1823 we have the words of an early British Indologist, John Bentley, thrashing an Englishman who had dared to write in praise of the Vedic texts: 

"By his attempt to uphold the antiquity of Hindu books against absolute facts, he thereby supports all those horrid abuses and impositions found in them, under the pretended sanction of an antiquity…..Nay, his aim goes still deeper; for by the same means he endeavors to overturn the Mosaic account, and sap the very foundation of our religion: for if we are to believe in the antiquity of Hindu books, as he wish, then the Mosaic account is all a fable, or a fiction.” 

We should not misconstrue the Calcutta Sanskritists’ passion for India. They had no doubt that the European civilization of their day was superior. What distinguished them from the Mills and the Grants was their willingness to credit India with ancient glories. William Jones, Colebrooke, Wilkins, and other British doyens of the Oriental renaissance were convinced that within the Vedas dwelt an ancient and primeval truth – the remote source of all religion and civilization. They knew Europe was certainly the zenith for everything – except, perhaps, creative imagination. Still, the Calcutta crew reveled in the hidden marvels of Indian antiquity.   

The picture symbolizes how academic Indians today often remain under the glass ceiling as “native informants” of the Westerners. Yet in 19th century Europe, Sanskrit was held in great awe and respect, even while the natives of India were held in contempt or at best in a patronizing manner as children to be raised into their master's advanced “civilization.”

Sir William Jones wrote to Sir Warren Hastings how to spread "our pure faith" (Christianity) as "no mission from the Church of Rome will ever be able to convert the Hindus."

Watch video - Brahmins in India have become a minority. Watch Scientific verification of Vedic knowledge. Refer to the chapter on European Imperialism and Greater India: Suvarnabhumi and Sacred Angkor. Refer to Be wary of English translations of Hindu scriptures - By Sheena Patel

Mills, however, with his Utilitarianism, punctured the Orientalist euphoria and slashed it to pieces. Ancient humanity was crude, barbaric, and ignorant. Forcing this edict upon Indic Studies, Mill urged modernization as the key for rescuing India from its dark past. Meanwhile, Grant called on Britain to save India’s soul. Both of these justifications for colonization carried the day. Indian culture and knowledge was redefined as primitive and wicked. Consequently, a deliberately constructed negation of Indian civilization became the British social norm.

(source: Searching for Vedic India – By Devamrita Swami   p. 183 - 184). Refer to Geopolitics and Sanskrit Phobia - By Rajiv Malhotra - sulekha.com).

According to Thomas R. Trautmann, author of Aryans and British India, "neither Jones nor any of the British Orientalists had any doubt as to the present superiority of European civilization to that of India".

" The Aryan idea was a unifying idea in the initial phase of British expansion it ceased to be so later when the British stranglehold on India tended to be strong and the emphasis on affinities between Britons and Indians would more hinder than facilitate the consolidation of the British power in India. The heart of the matter, therefore, remains that British imperialism spoke in different voices at different times, though its goal was always the same, i.e., to devise new mechanisms of control and administration of the Indian colony in consonance with the policies of the home government. In 1861 John Crawfurd went to the extent of saying : "I am not prepared to admit the claim of a common descent between Hindu, Greek, and Teuton, for that would amount to allowing that there was no difference in the faculties of the people that produced Homer and Shakespeare and those that have produced nothing better than the authors of the Mahabharat and Ramayana; no difference between the home-keeping Hindus who never made a foreign conquest of any kind, and the nations who discovered, conquered, and peopled a new world"(p.181). His contempt for Indians and their civilisation was accompanied by his belief in "the dangers of intermarriage between races widely apart on the scale of civilization"(p.181). For him, Trautmann points out, "philology is bad for racial hygiene"(p.181)."
(source: Aryans and British India - By Thomas R. Trautmann http://www.indolink.com/Book/aryans.html). Refer to chapter on Aryan Invasion Theory.

H. H. Wilson (1786-1860), described as the greatest Sanskrit scholar of his time", became the Boden Professor of Sanskrit at Oxford in 1833. Wilson felt that the Christian culture should simply replace the Vedic culture, and he believed that full knowledge of the Indian tradition would help effect that conversion. He felt hopeful that by inspired, diligent effort the "specious" system of Vedic thought would be "shown to be fallacious and false by the Ithuriel spear of Christian truth. He also was ready to award a prize of two hundred pounds.. "for the best refutation of the Hindu religious system."
The famous French Missionary, Abbé Dubois, wrote a whole chapter on Hindu temples in his book, "Hindu Manners, Customs and Ceremonies." Coming to Hindu idols he says "Hindu imagination is such that it cannot be excited except by what is monstrous and extravagant" (p.607). Abbé Dubois' book has run through a dozen of reprints in England and remains the best primer for the average western traveler to India to this day.

Abbé Dubois influenced James Stuart Mill's malicious History of British India which was written in six volumes in 1818. The volumes were compulsory reading for candidates wishing to appear for the I.C.S. exams. Mill's history has in fact mesmerized the best Hindu minds. 
To illustrate, James Mill’s tripartite periodization of Indian history into ‘Hindu’, ‘Muslim’ and ‘British’ epitomized in his infamous The History of British India was not an innocent exercise. It is well known that throughout Indian history the frontiers of the religion(s) of ruler(s) did not overlap with those of the people. If at all the defining criterion of Mill was the ruler’s religion, the logic of such a formulation demanded that the third period should have been designated as ‘Christian’. It is now recognized that Mill’s periodization stemmed from the imperialist objective of fomenting a religious divide in India (no wonder Mill’s History was one of the prescribed texts at the Haileybury College, where the prospective English officers received their training before coming to India).

(source: Aesthetic deceptions - By K. M. Shrimali - hindustantimes.com The writer is Professor of History, Delhi University).
Mill comments on the Hindu's pretensions to a remote antiquity as an example of the boastful and turgid vanity of the oriental nations...
He has nothing positive to comment on the Hindu manners. 'the vices of falsehood, indeed, they carry to a height almost unexampled among the other races of men. "the languid and slothful habits of the Hindus." 
The level of Hindu fine arts was lower than " the height of even of the Egyptians, much less of the Greeks and Romans. " This is the first major racist elaboration of the ancient Indian history and culture in Western Indology, and all that we note here is that Mill's contempt for ancient India extends to the other Asian civilizations as well as that much of Mill's framework has survived in the colonial and post-colonial Indology.

(source: Colonial Indology: Sociopolitics of the Ancient Indian Past - By Dilip K. Chakrabarti p. 92-94).

Another renowned pioneer Indologist was Fredrich Max Muller (1823-1900). He is best known for his series Sacred Books of the East. Muller speaking at the Christians Missions in Westminster Abbey in 1873 he declared that Hinduism was dying or dead because it belonged to a stratum of thought which was long buried beneath the foot of modern man. He continued: " The worship of Shiva, Vishnu, and other popular deities was of the same and in many cases of a more degraded and savage character than the worship of Jupiter, Apollo or Minerva. 'A religion', he said ' may linger on for a long time, it may be accepted my large masses of the people, because it is there, and there is nothing better. But when a religion has ceased to produce defenders of the faith, prophets, champions, martyrs, it has ceased to live, in the true sense of the word; and in that sense the old orthodox Brahmanism has ceased to live for more than a thousand years." 
(source: Hinduism: a religion to live by - Nirad C. Chaudhari Oxford University Press February 1997 ISBN 0195640136 p. 116 -117).
In 1876, Muller wrote to a friend, " India is much riper for Christianity than Rome or Greece were at the time of Saint Paul." 
(source: Vedic Literature: The Tradition Speaks for Itself - By Satsvarupa dasa Goswami Bhaktivedanta Book Trust ISBN 0912776889 June 1985 p. 178). 

"The rotten tree for some time had artificial supports ...but if the English man comes to see that the tree must fall...he will mind no sacrifice either of blood or of land...I would like to lay down my life, or at least lend my hand to bring about this struggle" 
(source: Life and letters of the Rt. Hon. Fredrich Max Muller, Vol. I, pp. 190-92.).

"I do not claim for the ancient Indian literature any more that I should willingly concede to the fables and traditions and songs of savage nations . I simply say that in the Veda we have a nearer approach to a beginning, and an intelligent beginning, than in the wild invocations of the Hottentotes and Bushmen, "

(source: The Hindu world, an encyclopedic survey of Hinduism' - By George Benjamin Walker, New York: Praeger, 1968. 2v.)
Watch Scientific verification of Vedic knowledge

Max Muller wrote: 
"This edition of mine and the translation of the Veda will hereafter tell to a great extent... the fate of India, and on the growth of millions of souls in that country. It is the root of their religion, and to show them what the root is, I feel sure, the only way of uprooting all that has sprung from it during the last 3000 years." 
(source: The Life and Letters of the Rt. Hon. Fredrich Max Muller, edited by his wife. Longmans, London, 1902, Volume I, p. 328) Vedic Aryans and the Origins of Civilization - By N. S. Rajaram & David Frawley p. 10).

"The rotten tree for some time had artificial supports...but if the English man comes to see that the tree must fall...he will mind no sacrifice either of blood or of land...I would like to lay down my life, or at least lend my hand to bring about this struggle"  
(source: The Life and Letters of the Rt. Hon. Fredrich Max Muller, edited by his wife. Longmans, London, 1902, Volume I, pp. 190-92). 
In another letter, Mueller wrote to his son:
"Would you say that any one sacred book is superior to all others in the world?...I say the New Testament, after that, I should place the Koran, which in its moral teachings, is hardly more than a later edition of the New Testament. Then would follow according to my opinion the Old Testament, the Southern Buddhist Tripitaka, the Tao-te-king of Lao-tze, the Kings of Confucius, the Veda and the Avesta."

(source: Life and letters of Max Mueller  Vol. II, Ch. XXXII., page 339).
Refer to QuickTime trailer and Part One of the film The God Awful Truth.
In an audacious letter to N. K. Majumdar, a social reformer, Mueller wrote:
'Tell me some of your chief difficulties that prevent you and your countrymen from openly following Christ, and when I write to you I shall do my best to explain how I and many who agree with me have met them and solved them...From my point of view, India, at least the best part of it, is already converted to Christianity. You want no persuasion to become a follower of Christ. Then make up your mind to work for yourself. Unite your flock - to hold them together and prevent them from straying. The bridge has been built for you by those who came before you. STEP BOLDLY FORWARD, it will break under you, and you will find many friends to welcome you on the other shore and among them none more delighted that you old friend and fellow labourer."
(source: Western Indologists: A Study in Motives - P B Dutt     http://www.philosophy.ru/library/asiatica/indica/authors/motives.html).
Mueller harshly criticised the view of the German scholar, Dr. Spiegel, who claimed that the Biblical theory of the creation of the world is borrowed from the ancient religion of the Persians or Iranians. Stung by this statement Max Mueller writes: 

‘A writer like Dr. Spiegel should know that he can expect no money; nay, he should himself wish for no mercy, but invite the heaviest artillery against the floating battery which he has launched in the troubled waters of Biblical criticism.’
Dr. Spiegel was not the only target of Mueller’s bigotry. In 1926 the French scholar Louis Jacolliot, Chief Judge in Chandranagar, wrote a book called La Bible dans l'Inde. Within that book, Jacolliot theorized that all the main philosophies of the western world originated from India, which he glorified thus:
'Land of ancient India! Cradle of Humanity. hail! Hail revered motherland whom centuries of brutal invasions have not yet buried under the dust of oblivion. Hail, Fatherland of faith, of love, of poetry and of science, may we hail a revival of thy past in our Western future.'

Mueller said while reviewing Louis Jacolliot’s book that, 'The author seems to have been taken in by the Brahmins of India.'

Another revealing incident of Mueller’s glaring ignorance was when a brahmana came from India to meet the famous Sanskrit scholar. When he came face to face with Mueller and spoke to him in chaste Sanskrit, Mueller admitted that he couldn’t understand what the gentleman was saying!
No wonder Arthur Schopenhauer acerbically said, "I cannot resist a certain suspicion that our Sanskrit scholars do not understand their texts any better than the higher class of school boys their Greek and Latin."
Swami Dayananda Saraswati, the founder of the Arya Samaja, was so disgusted with the level of Mueller’s knowledge of Sanskrit that he likened him to a "toddler learning to walk". He wrote: 
"Prof. Max Mueller has been able to scribble out something by the help of the so called 'tikas' or paraphrases of the Vedas current in India." 
(source: Satyartha Prakash Third Edition p. 278). Note: Swami Dayanand Saraswati commented very negatively on Max Mueller's knowledge of Sanskrit by saying that his depth of understanding is like a Aak plant among the trees (Indian Sanskrit scholars).
It was Max Mueller who said: "I do not shrink from saying that their religion (Hinduism) is dying or dead. And why? Because it cannot stand the light of day. The worship of Siva, Vishnu and other popular deities is of the same, nay, in many cases of a more degraded and savage character than the worship of Jupiter, Apollo and Minerva. It belongs to a stratum of thought which is long buried beneath our feet…"  

(source: In the matter of conversions…- By M V Kamath  indiainfo.com).

Om Tat Sat

                                                        

(Continued...) 

( My humble Pranam, Honour  and also gratefulness  to   Ms. Sushma Londhe ji for her  noble, magnanimous and eminent works on the   peerless  Wisdom of our Sacred Scriptures)

  

_{(My humble salutations to   , H H Swamyjis, Hindu Wisdom, great Universal Philosophers, Historians, Professors and Devotees   for the discovering  collection)}

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