Highest Sageness -29

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"Christianity’s rapacious evangelical agenda has caused, and will continue to cause, incalculable damage to humanity’s spirit. Because of its steadfast conviction that it is “universal” and that it can transplant itself into any culture at any time and any place, as if it were somehow making things they way they should be, Christianity fails to recognize the damage it is inflicting upon religion as a collective human experience when it compromises the integrity of other faiths. Just as industrialization has caused countless environments across the globe to erode due to overpopulation, pollution and massive clear-cutting efforts, I believe that Christianity’s ruthless evangelization efforts that resulted in the destruction of countless religious traditions has caused a spiritual erosion of sorts around the world." 
                           - By Tim Mitchell - Freedom of Religion, Freedom of Destiny. 
The Dum Diversas, issued by Pope Nicholas V in 1452, authorized King Alfonso V of Portugal to reduce any "Saracens (Muslims) and pagans and any other unbelievers" to perpetual slavery, thereby ushering in the West African slave trade.
The Romanus Pontifex, also issued by Pope Nicholas V in 1455, sanctioned the seizure of non-Christian lands, and encouraged the enslavement of non-Christian people in Africa and the Americas. Specifically, it gave the green light to "invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all Saracens and pagans whatsoever, and other enemies of Christ wheresoever placed," all for profit, and in the name of Jesus Christ.
The Inter Caetera, signed by Pope Alexander VI in 1493, states, "... we (the Papacy) command you (Spain) ... to instruct the aforesaid inhabitants and residents and dwellers therein in the Catholic faith, and train them in good morals." This papal law sanctioned and paved the way for European colonization and Catholic missions in the New World. These three edicts opened the floodgates for everything that followed, the raping, pillaging, kidnapping, genocide and enslavement of millions. They established the groundwork for the global slave trade of the 15th and 16th centuries, and the Age of Imperialism.
Before the Portuguese arrived, Calicut was reported to be larger than Lisbon, and the people of India, even though "heathen," were recognized to possess a complex civilization. 
The Christian missionary enterprise in earnest started with the dogged efforts of Don Henry the Navigator ( 1394-1460), the third son of the king John I of Portugal. Henry was a militant Christian fired with a bitter hatred for infidels. He was obsessed with the idea of reaching and converting Indian, and believed that he had received a command from God for this purpose. He had at his disposal the immense wealth of the Order of Christ of which he was the Grand Master. In 1454 Pope Nicholas V issued a Bull granting to the King of Portugal "the right, total and absolute, to invade, conquer, and subject all the countries which are under rule of the enemies of Christ, Saracens or Pagan...."
Issue of suzerainty
Portugal and Spain towards the end of the 15th Century were at loggerheads as to who should claim suzerainty and where. The pope was invited to give a ruling. According to the Treaty of Tordesillas (signed in June 1494) it was agreed that everything beyond the meridian of longitude passing 370 leagues west of Cape Verde Islands was to be exploited by Spain. All the world to the east of the 'Pope's Line' went to Portugal; this embraced Africa and the entire India Ocean. The Treaty of Tordesilhas: the insouciant division by the Pope of the globe into two parts, one for Spain, the other for Portugal and the unilateral, overnight declaration of ownership over unknown lands and peoples. The treaty showed Europe's pathological drive to power, its demented urge to intervene and impose itself on the lives of others.

To say that the Pope of the Catholic Church is not responsible for the atrocities committed by the Portuguese is to fly in the face of facts. The Papal Bull had allocated the two halves of the world to Spain and Portugal. The kings of Portugal fitted and sent several naval expeditions to India, and King Dom Manoel "assumed for himself the title of "The Lord of the Navigation, Conquest and Commerce of Ethiopia, Persia, and India." Henceforward Portugal became the base of the missionary enterprise in Asia. 
(source:  Asia and Western Dominance - By K. M. Panikkar p. 25 -280). Refer to Jesus Christ: Artifice for Aggression - By Sita Ram Goel. 
Refer to Columbus, The Indians, and Human Progress - By Howard Zinn.
Until Vasco da Gama discovered the sea route to the East in 1497-1499, the "West knew little about India let alone the countries further east. It is not that there was no awareness of India in the West, meaning thereby mainly Europe. Marco Polo had come visiting India and there certainly was a lively trade between north India and central Asia. Indian silk, among other commodities, was justly famous. So were Indian spices. It was India's misfortune that it should have been 'discovered' by a Portuguese sailor with criminal intentions.
India's first major contact began when Vasco da Gama landed with gunboat and priests. The newcomers were not only merchants but also devout Christians. They had the pope's mandate to convert heathens in the lands they conquered. They found that the natives had a flourishing religion of their own. They destroyed their temples. 
Vasco da Gama came with twenty five ships under his command, of which ten of them contained "much beautiful artillery, with plenty of munitions and weapons! During his visit to Calicut he found twenty trading ships in the harbor. Vasco da Gama plundered them and the 800 odd crew were taken prisoners''.
Notes author Richard Hall: "With Calicut at his mercy ... da Gama told his men to parade the prisoners then hack off their hands, ears and noses. As the work progressed all the amputated pieces were piled in a small boat. The Brahmin who had been sent out by the Zamorin as an emissary was put into the boat amid its new gruesome cargo. He had also been mutilated in the ordained manner". 
As soon as Vasco da Gama was back in Lisbon after his first successful contact with India, the Groce King of Portugal, Dom Manuel, adopted a new and pompous title of "The Lord of the conquest navigation and commerce of Ethiopia, Arabia, Persia and India". Obviously, the safeguard this lordship and ensure his patent he hurriedly conveyed the news of the discovery of the "spices and christians" of India to the royal rivals of Castille and to The Holy See in Rome.

(source: Western Colonialism in Asia and Christianity - edited by Dr. M.D. David p. 11). Refer to Things They Don't Tell you about Christianity.
For Cruelty inflicted by Christianity - Watch Constantine's Sword movie - By Oren Jacoby
The historian Gaspar Correa is quoted by Hall as to what the Vasco da Gama did next, thus:
"When all the Indians had thus been executed (sic), he ordered them to strike upon their teeth with staves and they knocked them down their throats; as they were put on board, heaped on top of each other, mixed up with the blood which streamed from them; and he ordered mats and dry leaves to be spread over them and sails to be set for the shore and the vessels set on fire... and the small, vessel with the friar (brahmin) with all the hands and ears, was also sent ashore, without being fired".
A message from da Gama was sent to the Zamorin. Written on a palm leaf, it told him he could make a curry with the human pieces in the boat.  And the atrocities committed by Vasco da Gama and his men lives in infamy. The story is one of brutality, betrayal and colonial ambition.
(source: Empires of the Monsoon: A history of the Indian ocean and its invaders - By Richard Hall p. 198). Refer to Jesus Christ: Artifice for Aggression - By Sita Ram Goel and Refer to QuickTime trailer and Part One of the film The God Awful Truth.
"The fathers of the Church forbade the Hindus under terrible penalties the use of their own sacred books, and prevented them from all exercise of their religion. They destroyed their temples, and so harassed and interfered with the people that they abandoned the city in large numbers, refusing to remain any longer in a place where they had no liberty, and were liable to imprisonment, torture and death if they worshipped after their own fashion the gods of their fathers." wrote  Sasetti, who was in India from 1578 to 1588. 
(source: Forgotten Empire (Vijayanagar) - By Robert Sewell p. 211). The Portuguese reign was devoid of scruples, honor and morality. 

Grim Reminders of European Barbarity

Nazi brutality looks like picnic here
Hall gives a vivid description of what Vasco da Gama did next which is too gory even to contemplate. When the Zamorin sent another Brahmin to Vasco to plead for peace, "he had his lips cut off and his ears cut off". The ears of a dog were sewn on him instead and the Brahmin was sent back to Zamorin in that state. The Brahmin -- no doubt a Namboodiri had brought with him three young boys, two of them his sons and the other a nephew. They were hanged from the yardarm and their bodies sent ashore. 
(source: Where the missionaries come in - Now, Vasco da Gama's misdeeds - By M.V. Kamath - Empires of the Monsoon: The History of the Indian Ocean and its invaders; by Richard Hall; Harper Collins; pages 575).

(This article has been featured at the end of this chapter).
Within decades of their occupation of small coastal parts, they had destroyed, according to their own records, 601 temples in 131 villages--all important Christian Orders taking part in this pious work. Franciscan friars destroyed 300 Hindu temples in Bardez, Jesuits 280 in Salsete.   
Francis Xavier had come to India with the firm resolve of uprooting paganism from the soil of India and planting Christianity in its place. His saying and doings have been documented in his numerous biographies and cited by every historian of the Portuguese episode in the history of India. 
(source: History of Hindu-Christian Encounters - By Sita Ram Goel ISBN 9990049173 p. 10). Refer to Jesus Christ: Artifice for Aggression - By Sita Ram Goel
St. Francis Xavier whom the Catholic Church hails as the Patron Saint of the East, participated in this meritorious work, wrote back home:
 "As soon as I arrived in any heathen village, when all are baptized, I order all the temples of their false gods to be destroyed and all the idols to be broken to pieces. I can give you no idea of the joy I feel in seeing this done."
According to a Christian historian, Dr. T. R. de Souza: 
" At least from 1540 onwards, and in the island of Goa before that year, all the Hindu idols had been annihilated or had disappeared, all the temples had been destroyed and their sites and building material was in most cases utilized to erect new Christian Churches and chapels. Various viceregal and Church council decrees banished the Hindu priests from the Portuguese territories; the public practices of Hindu rites including marriage rites, were banned; the state took upon itself the task of bringing up Hindu orphan children; the Hindus were denied certain employments, while the Christians were preferred; it was ensured that the Hindus would not harass those who became Christians, and on the contrary, the Hindus were obliged to assemble periodically in Churches to listen to preaching or to the refutation of their religion."
"A particularly grave abuse was practiced in Goa in the form of 'mass baptism' and what went before it. The practice was begun by the Jesuits and was alter initiated by the Franciscans also. The Jesuits staged an annual mass baptism on the Feast of the Conversion of St. Paul (January 25), and in order to secure as many neophytes as possible, a few days before the ceremony the Jesuits would go through the streets of the Hindu quarter in pairs, accompanied by their Negro slaves, whom they would urge to seize the Hindus. When the blacks caught up a fugitive, they would smear his lips with a piece of beef, making him an 'untouchable' among his people. Conversion to Christianity was then his only option."
(source: Western Colonialism in Asia and Christianity - edited by M. D. David Bombay 1988. p. 18-19). 
Refer to Why Indians Should Reject St. Thomas And Christianity - By Koenraad Elst

Even today the archdiocese of Goa boasts: "The glorious chapter of the expansion of the Catholic Church in the east can be said to have begun after the European 'discovery' of the sea route to India in 1498. This helped the  coming of the European fathers to these lands, one of them being St. Francis Xavier, the great Apostle of the East and Patron of the Missions. Goa is privileged to have been the starting point of his Church work labours and the place where his sacred remains are preserved. Goa was called the "Rome of the East" due to the central role it played in the evangelization of the east."
Historian Alfredo Froilano de Mello (1924 - ) describes the performers of Goan inquisition as "nefarious, fiendish, lustful, corrupt religious orders which pounced on Goa for the purpose of destroying paganism and introducing the true religion of Christ"
The Goan inquisition is regarded by all contemporary portrayals as the most violent inquisition ever executed by the Portuguese Catholic Church. It lasted from 1560 to 1812 though in Europe it ended by 1774. 
(source: Hindu Holocaust). For more refer to The Goa Inquisition at the end of the page. For interesting article on missionaries - Pleaser refer to The problem of Christian missionaries - By Koenraad Elst ). Refer to Jesus Christ: Artifice for Aggression - By Sita Ram Goel and Refer to QuickTime trailer and Part One of the film The God Awful Truth.

Paulo Coelho's paean to Francis Xavier

In a propoganda coup that would leave a Jesuit missionary strategist breathless, popular author Paulo Coelho has written a romanticized eulogy of the notorious 16th century Jesuit missionary Francis Xavier. Coelho is a born-again Catholic who has received a certificate from the Pope and is a candidate for Opus Dei. 
Francis Xavier was the pioneer of anti-Brahmanism which was adopted in due course as a major plank in the missionary propaganda by all Christian denominations. Lord Minto, Governor General of India from 1807 to 1812, submitted a Note to his superiors in London when the British Parliament was debating whether missionaries should be permitted in East India Company’s domain under the Charter of 1813. He enclosed with his Note some “propaganda material used by the missionaries” and, referring to one missionary tract in particular, wrote: “The remainder of this tract seems to aim principally at a general massacre of the Brahmanas” (M. D. David (ed.), Western Colonialism in Asia and Christianity, Bombay, 1988, p. 85). Anti-Brahmanism has become the dominant theme in the speeches and writings of Indian secularists of all sorts. 
For more refer to hamsa.org. Refer to Things They Don't Tell you about Christianity. For Cruelty inflicted by Christianity - Watch Constantine's Sword movie - By Oren Jacoby

Lord Thomas Babbington Macaulay (1800-59) was the first Law Member of the Governor-General's Legislature and is best known for introducing English education in India. Speaking in the British Parliament, he said on February 2, 1835 the following:
“Such wealth I have seen in this country (India), such high moral values, people of such caliber, that I do not think we would ever conquer this country unless we break the very backbone of this nation, which (backbone) is her spiritual and cultural heritage. And therefore, I propose that we replace her old and ancient education system, her culture, for if the Indians think that all that is foreign and English is good and greater than their own, they will lose their self-esteem, their native self-culture and they will become what we want them, a truly dominated nation”.
For more refer to chapter on First Indologists and Aryan Invasion Theory.
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The belief of European Christians that other races were inferior, led to colonisation and large scale abuse. The extirpation of native peoples in the Americas , in Australasia , and elsewhere around the world was of little consequence since these peoples were only pagans and might not even possess souls. They were slaves by nature. God had made them like that. Christian scholars and pseudo-scientists concurred. Sample non-Christians were kept in western Human zoos - Racist theme parks for Europe ’s colonists in the nineteenth century. There was an Australian aborigine in London Zoo. 
A Congolese pygmy named Ota Benga (1881- 1916) shared a cage with an orang-utan in the Bronx Zoo as late as 1906 .
Colonisation by European powers was seen as a God given opportunity for spreading the gospel to the heathen. It was a Christian duty, even when it led to the deaths of millions. God encouraged colonisation. He showed the way. He spoke to churchmen. He cleared the path for colonialists. His Churches were keen to convert or replace native heathen populations. Both Catholic and Protestant Churches encouraged colonialism. Typically, in Africa , missionaries would advance into new territories. Sooner or later they would sow discord, encouraging rebellion against unsympathetic local rulers. When bloodshed followed the Churches would appeal to European governments to intervene, and another territory would be annexed. This process seems to have accounted for more than half of the European colonies in Africa .
Churches were often guilty of complicity in massacres and atrocities resulting from colonial policy. For example King Leopold was granted control of the Congo in 1885 explicitly to bring Christianity to the benighted heathen. The atrocities perpetrated by his government in the Belgian Congo - the extensive use of slave labour and assorted murderous practices - were first concealed, then minimised by the Roman Church. 
Colonization was regarded by almost all Christians as wholly good, divinely sanctioned and necessary, well into the twentieth century.
(source: Christianity, Apartheid and Racialism - heretication.info).
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1981 -   ) Russian author and historian, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970. In his work Solzhenitsyn continued the realistic tradition of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy and complemented it later with his views of the flaws of both East and West.
He once put it:
"The mistake of the West is that it measures other civilizations by the degree to which they approximate to Western civilization. If they do not approximate it, they are hopeless, dumb, reactionary."
(source: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, interviewed in Time of 24 July 1989).  Refer to The parade of the vanquished and On A Neglected Aspect Of Western Racism – By  Kurt Jonassohn.
 V S Naipaul 1932 - ) Nobel laureate, He is the author of several books including Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples,  Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey, and India: A Wounded Civilization.
In his masterly travelogue, Among the Believers – An Islamic Journey, shares his intimate insight into the ways an alien religion destroyed indigenous cultures. 
“Because I was soon to discover that no colonization had been so thorough as the colonization that had come with the Arab faith. Colonized or defeated peoples can begin to distrust themselves. In the Muslim countries I am talking about, this distrust had all the force of religion. It was an article of the Arab faith that everything before the faith was wrong, misguided, heretical; there was no room in the heart or mind of these believers for their pre-Mohammedan past. So ideas of history here were quite different from ideas of history elsewhere; there was no wish here to go back as far as possible into the past and to learn as much as possible about the past."
“Now, traveling among non-Arab Muslims, I found myself among a colonized people who had been stripped by their faith of all that expanding intellectual life, all the varied life of the mind and senses, the expanding cultural and historical knowledge of the world, that I had been growing into on the other side of the world. I was among people whose identity was more or less contained in the faith. I was among people who wished to be pure ... No colonization could have been greater than this colonization by the faith.”
Naipaul describes the effects well. Christianity and Islam are just two sides of the same intolerant coin.
(source: Beware of wolves in sheep’s clothing - By Sesha Samarajiwa - Asian Tribune October 9, 2007). Refer to Stolen Kingdom: An American Conspiracy - By Budnick, Rich (1992). Honolulu : Aloha Press.Refer to Loot: in search of the East India Company - By Nick Robins and How India became poor - indiarealist.com. Watch An Invasion through Conversion - youtube.com
Vishal Mangalwadi is a Indian Christian Missionary in his book, The Grand Experiment, absurdly and comically asserts: 
"India's independence was actually the fruit produced by the 'Gospel of Jesus Christ'". 
He continues, "The transformation of India into a free and modern nation was a grand experiment that was envisioned and carried out by leaders who were driven by a biblical world view". 
I sincerely doubt that Mahatma Gandhi was driven by a Christian world view!
Dilip K Chakrabarti in his book Colonial Indology p. 68, has remarked: 
"The study of Hinduism was undertaken by the British for political control of the land and the conversion of its people to Christianity."
 Dr. Dipak Basu of Nagasaki University in Japan has written:
"The British historians glorify the Muslim rule in India and dismiss the Hindu period as myths and fantasy. They dismiss the Marxian analysis of the British oppression of India. They emphasize the improvements in administration, construction of railroad, universities, abolition of ‘Sati’ and ‘Thugis’ from India and ultimate peaceful transfer of power to Gandhi-Nehru. In that history, there was no freedom movement in India , no man made famines, no transfer of huge resources from India to Britain, no destruction of Indian industries and agriculture by the British rule, but only a very benign and benevolent British rule in India. 
History according to the JNU or AMU is not much different."

(source: CPI(M) and Karl Marx - By Dipak Basu - indiacause.com). Also refer to East versus West: a false Western idea - By Dipak Basu. Watch Scientific verification of Vedic knowledge Watch Scientific verification of Vedic knowledge
***
Reverend Midgley John Jennings Christian chaplain of Delhi and founder of St Stephen's High School in 1854 and who vowed to uproot the religions of India: 
"The roots of ancient religions have here, as in all old places, struck deep and men must be able to fathom deep in order to uproot them." The Christian crusader saw the British empire as "the mysterious sway of God’s Providence " to convert heathen India. Jennings believed that in return for the Koh-i-noor diamond that had belonged to the Mughal dynasty, the British should "give in return that "pearl of great price" (Christianity). "As the course of our Empire is so marvelously taking its course from the East of India towards its West, so should the British be preparing to conquer the subcontinent for Anglicanism and the one true God."
The great divide between Indians and the increasingly insular British grew under the Victorian Puritanism of the East India Company in the 1840s and 1850s. Herbert Edwardes (1819 - 1868) Commissioner of Peshawar, and founder of the Edwardes College in Peshawar, believed that Britain ’s empire was a god-given right: 
"The Giver of Empires is indeed God" and Britain was given the Empire because England had made the greatest effort to preserve the Christian religion in its purest apostolic form." 
The Bible was read two or three times a week "in Hindoostanee to large numbers of natives who were assembled in the compound to hear him." The English Delhi Gazette described the Christian evangelists as preaching in the religious wilderness of India: "They have been daily preaching to the masses, but I should say without a shadow of success, having to compete with the four great anti-Christian powers – trade, crime, pleasure and idolatry – in all their most frantic forms."
Nor were the Hindus spared the Christian assault: Jennings tried to convert millions of Hindu pilgrims at the Hindu festival, the Kumbh Mela, on the banks of the Ganges , openly denouncing their "Satanic paganism." He provoked the naga sadhus as well as Muslim mujahedeen. The East India Company became the vehicle for converting India to Christianity: "The time appears to have come," wrote Edmunds, a Company colleague of Jennings in Calcutta, "when earnest consideration should be given to the subject, whether or not all men should embrace the same system of religion. Railways, steam vessels and the electric telegraph are rapidly uniting all the nations of the earth … The land is being leavened and Hinduism is being everywhere undermined. Great will some day, in god’s appointed time, be the fall of it." 
"Our missions, then in India, is to do for other nations what we have done for our own. To the Hindus we have to preach one God.."
Charles Grant, the first director of the Company, shamelessly bashed Hindus: 
"It is hardly possible to conceive any people more completely enchained than they [the Hindus] are by their superstitions." He believed they were "universally and wholly corrupt … depraved as they are blind, and wretched as they are depraved." The karma of the British empire, the crusaders believed, was not just conquest but conversion: "Is it not necessary to conclude that our Asiatic territories were given to us, not merely that we might draw an annual profit from them, but that we might diffuse among their inhabitants, long sunk in darkness, vice and misery, the light and benign influences of Truth?"
The ideology of the British empire: the concept of a civilizing mission, the triumph of civilization over barbarism, ardently supported by the missionary organizations. In reality, colonialist motives were mainly those of material profits. The malaise of India was aggravated in full measure by the East India Company with its indiscriminate  exploitation, corruption, and bribery. It is cruel irony of history that whilst two major revolutions - the French and the American  - upholding the human rights to liberty and equality were taking place in the West, India was in the throes of losing her own freedom to Western mercantile imperialism. The British domination of India has been described as a "political and economic misfortune." In 1937, a distinguished British civil servant, G. T. Garratt, declared that the period of Indo-British civilization had been most disappointing, and "in some ways the most sterile in Indian history." 
(source: India and World Civilization  - By D. P. Singhal  ASIN 0870131435 p. 198-277). Refer to Jesus Christ: Artifice for Aggression - By Sita Ram Goel.  For more information refer to chapter on First Indologists and Aryan Invasion Theory). Refer to QuickTime trailer and Part One of the film The God Awful Truth.
Refer to Bush-sponsored Evangelisation of India -I  - By V Sundaram
Refer to Bush-sponsored Evangelisation of India -II – By V Sundaram
Refer to Bush-sponsored Evangelisation of India -III – By V Sundaram
According to Guy Sorman: "It was here (India) that the West started to colonize what was to become the Third World, a shameless process of systematic exploitation without any moral or religious justifications. And it was here that was raised for the first time the demand for decolonization: this revolution of the mind shook the supremacy of Europe, and the arrogance of the Europeans. 
(source: The Genius of India - By Guy Sorman  ('Le Genie de l'Inde')     p.156).
Hindus got some relief from this active religious persecution when the British came. But they too had powerful missionary lobby of their own whose aims were no different from the Portuguese missions. Though the missions were not allowed to apply their usual strong arm methods, they were free to propagate their religion. Their aim was conversion of heathens to the true faith, and to that end they began to attack Hinduism in different ways. They attacked it for having too many Gods while none of them was the right Biblical one. They attacked it for being idolatrous. They attacked all its leading ideas --karma, incarnation, moksha, caste, compassion for all beings, etc.
The attack on the Hindu religion was supported by attack on people and society. Hindu rites, customs, were all evil, and their morals and manners even worse, if that were possible.  They looked forward to a Christian India in a not-too-distant future. In the beginning,  it was hard to preach their doctrines in India.  Because India had a prosperous, evolved civilization, complete with a vast recorded history, a comprehensive system of philosophy, art, science, and healthcare, and humane methods for disseminating knowledge. 
The tragic consequences was that the convert now found himself cut off from his ancient roots, attached to a foreign godhead and a foreign culture, and taught to despise and revile everything that for millennia had been an object of worship for his ancestors - including his own country.  This proves how the so called "just and merciful rule" of the British was indeed barbaric tyranny. The burning of ancient books on Ayurveda in Kerala, so as to impose the European system of medicine on the natives, the cutting of weavers' thumbs in Bengal with a view of crippling the production of superior Indian cloth and ensuring the sale of British products, the ruthless, often bloody, extortion of revenue from the peasants for decades on end, even in the midst of the worst famines, the whipping, hangings and tortures that awaited those who opposed the Empire - these are only a few among the unending examples of the "providential character" of the British rule. But they took place too far from the "civilized" world to attract any notice. The Britons like the relief of high-sounding speeches in London's salons, adorned with a few pagan objects d'art purloined from India. )

(source: Readings in Vedic Literature: The Tradition Speaks for Itself - By Satsvarupa dasa Goswami ISBN 0912776889 p. 173-181). For more information refer to chapter on First Indologists and Aryan Invasion Theory).
History as a Colonial Tool
Sir W. M. Williams, a Sanskritist with great missionary sympathies, prophesied,
"When the walls of the mighty fortress of Brahminism are encircled, undermined and finally stormed by the soldiers of the Cross, the victory of Christianity must be signal and complete."
The colonial administrator was not unsympathetic to the missionary attack.  He knew that Hinduism was India's definition at its deepest and also its principle of unity and regeneration and unless this principle was attacked, India could not be successfully ruled.  Hinduism also upheld India and its political struggle. A people who had lost pride in themselves, and were demoralized, were welcome to him.
Colonial scholars reinforced the missionary attack by their own from another angle. They taught that India was not one country, that it was a miscellany of people, that it had never known independence, that it had always been under the rule of foreign invaders. This is where the Aryan Invasion Theory came into existence. Their future native pupils learned their lesson well and even outdid their teachers. They were to find in these invaders the main principle of their country's renewal and civilization. To account for the common origin of Indo-European languages, several nineteenth- century European scholars hypothesized that in ancient times an invasion of India from Europe, by a people who spoke the original Indo-European language -- an "Aryan" invasion--must have occurred. 
In typical Eurocentric arrogance, they assumed, without any evidence, that the Aryans came from outside India. Principal among these "scholars" were Max Muller and Monier-Williams, both committed to denigrating India's cultural heritage in order to persuade Indians to convert to Christianity.
In picking a date for the supposed Aryan invasion of India by a supposed race of people, Rajaram writes: "Muller was strongly influenced by a current Christian belief that the creation of the world had taken place at 9:00 a.m. on 23 October 4004 BC. Assuming the date of 4004 BC for the creation of the world, as Muller did, leads to 2448 BC for the biblical Flood. If another thousand years is allowed for the waters to subside and for the soil to get dry enough for the Aryans to begin their invasion of India, we are left at around 1400 BC. Adding another two hundred years before they could begin composing the Rig Veda brings us right to Muller's date of 1200.BC...he used a ghost story from Somadeva's Kathasaritasagara to support this date."
In a letter to his wife, 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."


Muller's purpose was to uproot Hinduism. I would simply like to note that a lot of ideas have become fixed because Max Mueller was a devout Christian, who believed existence started in 3760BC or so, as all devout Christians of his time (and ours, too) did and do.  When you have an authority who is so constrained by virtue of his dogma, assertions upon dating of pre-historical matters become questionable.
The rulers had a clear motive, a clear goal. They wanted an India which had no identity, no vision of its own, no native class of people respected for their leadership. They were to be replaced as far as it lay in their power by a new class of intellectuals.  Meanwhile, the concerted attacks succeeded. They were internalized, and we made them our own. There came a crop of "reformers" who wanted India to change to the satisfaction of its critics. Above all, there appeared a class of Hindu-hating Hindus who knew all the "bad things" about Hinduism. Earlier invaders ruled through the sword.
The British ruled through Indology. 
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, Conversion, and First Indologists. Watch Scientific verification of Vedic knowledge
Prior to the nineteenth century, it was piously believed in western civilization that the earth was created in seven days around 5,000 years ago. These ethnocentric blinders that some western thinkers unconsciously wear before venturing into the past have resulted in the tunnel vision view of history as we know it today. The western tradition of writing history may be traced to the Judeo-Christian scriptures wherein one group of people writes about the people outside that group. The Hindus do not think of time in linear terms with a beginning and an end. Rather, they think in terms of great cycles of thousands and millions of years.
In conclusion, it can be said that ( the 19th century European scholars) their work often reflects the bias of their times; the imperialism, materialism and Christian missionary spirit, the tendency to look down upon Asia and its culture as inferior, to even blame the spiritual traditions of Hinduism and Buddhism for the political decline of these cultures.
Through the Imperial Glass
The remarkable Tenacity of Imperial perceptions- The Lindsay Commission
A learned commission under Professor A D Lindsay, master at Ballicol College, Oxford, reported on Christian Education in India in 1931:  
It maintained that although a ferment was in process within Hinduism, "Vedantic philosophy still retained its control and moulded consciously or unconsciously the fundamental attitudes of a vast majority of Hindus."
"The ascendancy of a superficial secularism, typified in the Nehru plan for an Indian constitution and in the personality of the Indian leader, Jawaharlal Nehru, the Lindsay Commission declared, breathed new life into the spirit of easy accommodation of a pantheistic attitude blurring distinctions between truth and untruth and between right and wrong. With regard to the various efforts by eminent Indians to recondition Hinduism, two superficial motives were discerned. The first was the desire to give Hinduism a place in the modern world of activity and competition and the other was to render it respectable before a Western audience. Thus although the Gita with its call for action became a breviary of inspiration to Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, Aurobindo Ghosh, Swami Vivekananda and Dayanand Saraswati, the Lindsay Commission opined that the outcome was warped, desultory and perfunctory.  
The Lindsay Commission, however, unanimously concluded that Vedanta, in that awkward position, occupied ‘an uneasy seat’. The dominant figure in the Indian landscape’, the Commission pronounced, ‘is still the Hindu ascetic and sceptic sitting by the Jamuna’s bank watching the phantasmagoria of existence with indifference mingled with contempt’. “ India is too old to resent us’. There was a familiar ring in the exasperation. ‘Yet who can doubt that she will survive us? The secret of her permanence lies, I think, in her passivity and power to assimilate. The faith that will not fight cannot yield.”  
"The city of Benares was frequently upheld as representing the incongruity of this intriguing development. Eternal India persisted there with more ardour and enthusiasm than anywhere else despite the definite assault of Western science. The insolence and defiance of a superstitious Hinduism amazed the learned Commission. Hinduism at Benares , the Lindsay Commission reported, still continued to unfold itself, unheeding a Muslim emperor’s opposition, quite oblivious of the purifying and uplifting efforts of the Buddhist monastery of a neighboring Sarnath and in sheer indifference to the challenge of a Western and Christian civilization symbolized by the steel bridge.” Christianity, and along with it, Western civilization, the Lindsay Commission lamented, found Hinduism so firmly entrenched in the Indian ethos that they could only touch it marginally. The future seemed uncertain and this uncertainty released a feeling of melancholic frustration which, in turn, reinforced the claims of righteousness and dressed imperialism with a touch-me-not aloofness."  
The Lindsay Commission further stated on page 51 – 55:  
“Secularism is indeed the common enemy of all the religions since it demands in India, as it does elsewhere, in the name of religion and progress, that religion shall be rejected in a world where religion has no right…Hinduism is far too deeply entrusted in the soul of India to be reckoned as defeated as yet. As a matter of fact, the philosophy of Vedanta and the life of secularism are perfectly natural allies. Both alike reject many of the values that Christianity seeks to create and preserve, and with them, therefore, Christianity can make no terms.”  
The imperial mind in utter bewilderment, was overwhelmed by a creepy feeling which stood between it and Hinduism with its ‘ugly gods’, devastating ‘evil eyes’ and ‘sure charms’ all shrouded in mysterious forces that were beyond any rational explanation. It shivered at the infinite and immense secrets of India.  
(source: The Raj Syndrome: A Study in Imperial Perceptions - By Suhash Chakravarty Penguin Books. 1991 p. 69 - 239).
According to author Paul William Roberts,
"Conversion has largely failed in India because Christianity offers nothing that is not already available somewhere in the many forms of Hinduism. Hinduism never rejected the teachings of Jesus. Those who have converted either agreed with a gun pressed at their skulls as in Goa, or because it provided an escape from caste tyranny, as well as a guaranteed professional advancement. Through its Vedic legacy, Hinduism respects all faiths. It clearly states that God is one, but has many forms. The Christian message must sound preposterous: that God is indeed one, but has only one recognized form, his son. The "savages" of India were sophisticated - so sophisticated that the imperialist mixture of church and state in Europe could not grasp such sophistication."
"The sheer power of Hinduism terrified the Christian soldiers."

"The British were more cunning at the game than the Portuguese, careful to show respect for Indian religions. Yet they sneered at the pagans behind their back, educated the Indian elite in British-run schools, or at Eton and Cambridge - which, if it did not guarantee conversion to Christianity, resulted in lapsed Hinduism, agnosticism, or an intellectual humanism. 
In India, Anglo indoctrination produced a generation of "brown sahibs" who looked down on the religion of the masses, the opium of the people. Such is the power of colonization that a whole generation must pass before the paralyzing spell wears off." 
(source: Empire of the Soul: Some journeys in India - By Paul William Roberts ASIN 1573226351  p. 323-325). Refer to Jesus Christ: Artifice for Aggression - By Sita Ram Goel and Refer to QuickTime trailer and Part One of the film The God Awful Truth. For more information refer to chapter on First Indologists and Aryan Invasion Theory).
Dilip K Chakrabarti in his book Colonial Indology p. 12, has written:
"Western Orientalists took an interest in Buddhism because they thought that its study would show that Hinduism was not the only religion of India and thus weaken the position of Hinduism. Secondly, by weakening the position of Hinduism this would also make the task of propagating Christianity in India easier."  
(Note: Western scholars have tried to portray Buddhism as an improvement over Hinduism. It is as similar to portraying Christianity is an improvement over Judaism). However, Karma and Nirvana are both Hindu concepts and Pali was born out of Sanskrit, just like Italian came out of Latin).
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). Refer to The Bible Unmasked 
William Robinson, missionary and author of By Temple Shrine and Lotus Pool, wrote on p. 66 of his book:
"The fortress of caste cannot be taken by external assault. Its wall will only crumble when the garrison within ceases to repair them. The only real discipline that India has maintained is the discipline of caste. If you really could create genuine democracy in India it would destroy caste. If it destroyed caste it would destroy Hinduism and if it destroyed Hinduism it would destroy India , at least the India that has existed for so many thousand of years… Far, far better that they remain good Hindus than become rampant atheists!"
(source: The Raj Syndrome: A Study in Imperial Perceptions - By Suhash Chakravarty p. 233).
(Note: The British began to isolate the North East regions of India in the name of 'protecting' the local indigenous people at the same time converting them to Christianity). Refer to First English Bible Fueled First Fundamentalists - livescience.com
Professor Ashish Nandy is a political psychologist, sociologist and director of Delhi's Center for the Study of Developing Societies. He's also a versatile author, having written books on post-colonialism, alternative sciences, psychology has also referred to the colonized minds of present day Indians thus:
"The pressure to Westernize is the most conspicuous form of this colonial mentality. Colonialism has a long way to go before it is vanquished.! Our nation is ostensibly independent, but our minds still remain enslaved..."
"The Indian press, like most of its Third World counterparts, puts a premium on all that is modern and condemns as degenerate all that is traditional...In order to put the stamp of legitimacy on modernization, we have to believe that the traditional civilization was inhuman."  
"Instilling guilt about the "evils of Hindu society" is indeed a favorite weapon of the secularist elite."
He further says, "First our leaders were colonized  and now they are post-colonized without ever having been decolonized."
(source: Decolonizing the Hindu Mind - Ideological Development of Hindu Revivalism - By Koenraad Elst ISBN 8171675190 p. 49 and The Genius of India - By Guy Sorman  ('Le Genie de l'Inde') ISBN 0333936000 p.154). Watch An Invasion through Conversion - youtube.com
Koenraad Elst, author of Decolonizing the Hindu Mind - Ideological Development of Hindu Revivalism, contends that the Hindu civilization is now in the process of coming out of a thousand years of colonization— first by Islam and then Britain. This is exactly the view of V. S. Naipaul also who noted that the first step in this is for the Hindus to regain their sense of history. This deloconization process is running into fierce resistance from residual colonial interests on two fronts— the Islamists and the ‘secularists’.
Consider the view of a Christian missionary Vishal Mangalwadi, on India's quest for freedom
"Many starry-eyed Indians, who are ignorant of Indian history, think that India was free before the British colonized it. The fact is that Hindu India, never, I repeat never, knew what freedom was, until the Evangelical movement began to set us free...India's freedom is a fruit of the Christian Gospel, not a result of Mahatma Gandhi's work."

(source: The Quest For Freedom And Dignity - By Vishal Mangalwadi).
Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, Founder of the Bangalore based Art of Living, an International Foundation. He recently addressed the UN Peace Summit on Aug 28. He is the only non-westerner to serve on the advisory board of Yale University's School of Divinity and is author of the book - Hinduism and Christianity. He has said: 
"Christians are proud that they brought education to India, but it is not true: there were for instance 125,000 medical institutes in Madras before the British came. Indians never lacked education, the Christians only brought British education to India, which in fact caused more damage to India by westernizing many of us." 
(source: Arise O' India - By Francois Gautier ISBN  81-241-0518-9  p. 62). Watch An Invasion through Conversion - youtube.com. Refer to Be wary of English translations of Hindu scriptures - By Sheena Patel
In Vedic India, homosexuality is recognized as a separate and third nature (tritiya-prakriti). Third-gender citizens were fully tolerated and incorporated into society. But during the British Raj, homosexuality was considered a sin. Two years after the 1857 rebellion, the British passed the anti-sodomy law of 1860 is enforced upon the entire empire that now includes India. The law, which remarkably is still in place in India today as Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, reads: “Whoever voluntarily has carnal intercourse against the order of nature with any man, woman or animal, shall be punished with imprisonment for life, or with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to ten years, and shall be liable to fine.” This law was taken to be an improvement for Great Britain, which had previously punished homosexuality by execution and torture, but for India it was a great step backward since Hindu culture had never previously criminalized homosexuality.
The British also enact legislation outlawing castration and cross-dressing in an attempt to eliminate the eunuch class that had thrived under Islamic rule. Despised by the British, eunuchs are forced into the darkest shadows of society where they must now live as outcastes. Also during this time, puritan scholars translate India’s Sanskrit texts into English, but they omit or hide any reference to homosexuality because it is shocking to them. By British estimation, India was a backward country with a barbaric culture and primitive religion. The British Empire would impress upon the Hindus their Christian values and educate them in proper, civilized behavior while simultaneously exploiting their country’s resources for another full century.
(source: India’s Slow Descent Into Homophobia - By Amara Das Wilhelm - galva.org). For more refer to chapter on thoughts and Women in Hinduism. For more information refer to chapter on First Indologists.
Colonial Mischief: The De-Linking of Tribes in India by the British Empire
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 Brahamanical) 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. 
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.”  
(source: Adi Deo Arya Devata – By Sandhya Jain p. 2 - 235).   Watch Scientific verification of Vedic knowledge. For more refer to chapter on FirstIndologists and Aryan Invasion Theory and Conversion and Nature Worship. Also refer to Towards Balkanisation, V: Adivasis - By Varsha Bhosle - rediff.com). Refer to Jesus Christ: Artifice for Aggression - By Sita Ram Goel and Refer to QuickTime trailer and Part One of the film The God Awful Truth. Watch An Invasion through Conversion - youtube.com

The contribution of British Orientalists in the second half of the 18th century to the growth of self-awareness and pride in their past cultural achievements among educated Hindus is well known. As David Kopf, author of British Orientalism and Bengal Renaissance: The Dynamics of Indian Modernization 1773-1835, has put it: " The intellectual elite that clustered about Hastings after 1770 was classicist rather than 'progressive' in their historical outlook, cosmopolitan rather than nationalist in their view of other cultures, and rationalist rather than romantic in their quest for those 'constant and universal principles' that express the unity of human nature."
Much of this was to change for the worse in the 19th century when nationalism and racism came to dominate the West European mind. The earliest expression of this change in our case is James Mill's History of India published in 1817. It was, in large part, written to refute the views of Sir William Jones. 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. It marked the triumph of the Anglicists (read detractors of India) over the Orientalists who were admirers of Indian civilization.
Thomas Babbington Macaulay (1800-59) is best known for introducing English education in India. Macaulay was the first Law Member of the Governor-General's Legislature. He clinched the issue in favor of the Anglicists with his famous minute of 1832. English was to become the medium of instruction and not Sanskrit or Persian which the Orientalists had favored. In the House of Commons, Macaulay directed his attack towards Hinduism:
 "In no part of the world has a religion ever existed more unfavorable to the moral and intellectual health of our race."

(source: India Discovered - By John Keay   p  77-78).
He wrote in his notorious 1835 Minute that Hinduism was based on " a literature admitted to be of small intrinsic value ...(one) that inculcates the most serious errors on the most important subjects ... hardly reconcilable with reason, with morality...fruitful of monstrous superstitions. " Hindus had therefore been fed for millennia with a "false history, false astronomy, false medicine ...in company of a false religion." 
"A war of Bengalees against English men was like a war of sheep against wolves, of men against demons."
Dismissing with incredible arrogance the profound speculation and beautiful language of the Sanskrit classics, he said, " I doubt whether the Sanskrit literature be as valuable as that of our Saxon and Norman progenitors."

(source: India: A World in Transition - By Beatrice Pitney Lamb  p. 194)). Refer to chapter on First Indologists.
Oriental Renaissance began to invite opposition. Missionaries were one obvious source of it. Another source was Imperialism. European powers were becoming self-conscious imperialists and they could not rule with a clean conscience over people who were proud possessors of great cultures. Another source, a natural result of Imperialism, was growing Eurocentricity. Europe became less and less inclined to believe that anything worthwhile could be found anywhere outside of Europe . 
Therefore, the Oriental Movement began to be downgraded. It was called “romantic” and even “fanatic”; its fascination for India was a form of “Indo-mania”.  
Indians were allowed to possess the Vedas, the oldest literature of the Aryans, but the Aryans themselves were made to migrate, this time from Europe to India as conquerors. Thus the tables were turned. Migration remained but its direction changed. India which was hitherto regarded as the home of European languages and people now became the happy hunting ground of the same people who came and conquered and imposed their will and culture on India. 
The theory of Aryan invasion was born.  
(source: On Hinduism Reviews and Reflections  - By Ram Swarup  p. 107 - 108). Refer to chapter on First Indologists.  Watch Scientific verification of Vedic knowledge
In the 1830's, Macaulay had poured scorn on Asian cultures: "A single shelf of a good European library he held to be worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia..."  
Ever since the days of Macaulay's reform in the 1830's, all higher education in India had been conducted in English. Anglomania became the fashion among the social and intellectual elite, whose derision of their own Indian culture was a token of their Europeanization.  It produced a generation of young Indians who found themselves rootless, out of touch with their own country and its enduring culture..."
It had been Macaulay's aim to train a large class of men who would be: "Indian in blood and color, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals and in intellect," who would stand between the British and the illiterate masses.."
(source: The Soul of India - By Amaury de Riencourt   p. 288 - 292).

In this new Anglicist discourse, India was misunderstood, misrepresented and run down in almost every conceivable way. This shameful history of the imperialist and hegemonic discourse and perversion in the name of knowledge made it out that Hindu society had got frozen just above the primitive level. This distortion produced alienation in the Hindus, if anything, has grown since independence.

(source: The Hindu Phenomenon - By Girilal Jain p. 38-40. Jain, was doyen of Indian journalists and editor of The Times of India from 1978-1988). Refer to chapter on First Indologists. For more information refer to chapter on First Indologists. Refer to QuickTime trailer and Part One of the film The God Awful Truth. Watch An Invasion through Conversion - youtube.com
***
No Ten Commandments east of the Suez Canal?
Sahibs of British India
Swami Vivekananda explained the effects of British education in these words:
“Oh, India, this is your terrible danger. The spell of imitating the West getting such a hold upon you, that what is good or what is bad, is no longer decided by reason, judgment, discrimination or reference to the Sastras.

‘Whatever ideas, whatever manners the white men praise or like, are good; whatever things they dislike or censure, are bad! Alas! What can be a more tangible proof of foolishness than this?”
***
Edmond Taylor writes: "In the golden age of empire, both in official propaganda and in their private mythologies of the white man's burden, the sahibs placed the main emphasis upon their own superiority rather than the natives inferiority. 
"The sahib is accustomed to being obeyed, to being feared, to being surrounded with deference and servility. He belongs to the British middle-class himself but in the East his life is filled with the symbols of domination and grandeur. He may not be enjoying fantastic luxury but deference is a more deeply rooted symbol of power than luxury, and on the scale of deference, as far as his relations with the natives go, he lives like a pre-revolutionary grand duke of Russia." 
"The British have set themselves up as the master race in India. British rule in India is fascism, there is no dodging that."
(source: Richer By Asia - Edmond Taylor p. 105 and 248).
A German professor, George Wegener, expressed the heart of the matter as far back as 1911:
"It is in India, of all places on the earth, that the superiority of the white over the colored races is most strikingly demonstrated. If the Asiatics were to succeed in destroying English mastery there, then the position of the whole white race throughout the world would be fatally undermined."
(source: The Case for India - By Will Durant  Simon and Schuster, New York. 1930 p. 178).
The Hindi word loot entered English lexicon after the Battle of Plassey. English historian William Digby estimated in 1901 that the amount looted from India was 1 billion dollars.

"If British empire-builders could have kept racialism out of their policy, I'm sure they could happily have stayed on in India to this day. That racial discrimination was absolutely blatant as and when Indian fighting forces came in contact with the British fighting forces. If an Indian had any kind of self-respect, he couldn't help resenting it. Even today, after so many years, I hesitate to go to any white man's country. During that impressionable period of my life, the treatment I got from Britishers, from white people, was so bad that even today I fear I might meet the same thing."  - B.C. Dutt (ex-rating the Royal Indian Navy and a leader of the Mutiny of 1946).

(source: Indian Tales of the Raj - By Zareer Masani p.120).

Greed and Arrogance was the hallmark of European Imperialism
A handbook published in 1878 recommended twenty-seven servants for a well-to-do British family in Calcutta and fourteen for a bachelor.

(source: Colonial Overlords: Time Frame Ad 1850-1900 - Time-Life Books. The Scramble for Africa ASIN 0809464667 p. 8-27).

A Nation of Shopkeepers wants to rule India
Sir Josiah Child, appointed chairman of the East India company, had once declared, " the time was ripe to lay the foundation of a large, well-grounded, sure English dominion in India for all time to come."

(source: Colonial Overlords: Time Frame Ad 1850-1900  - Time-Life Books. The Scramble for Africa ASIN 0809464667 p. 13).
Sir William Joynson-Hicks, Home Minister in the Baldwin Government, expressed : "I know it is said in the missionary meetings that we conquered India to raise the level of the Indians. That is cant. We conquered India as an outlet for the goods of Great Britain. We conquered India by the sword, and by the sword we shall hold it."
(source: The Case for India - By Will Durant Simon and Schuster, New York. 1930 p.163-164 and India in Bondage: Her Right to Freedom  - By Jabez T. Sunderland p.138).
As the 19th century progressed, British power and population increased: The Moghal empire shrank to an impotent enclave around Delhi; and independent princes, one by one, became British clients. Indian participation in government was reduced to a minimum; social intercourse was limited and distant. The British began to see- and treat-all Indians as an inferior and conquered people, and to make maintenance of British power and aloofness a policy. The spread of the evangelical movement, with its horror of the non-Christian, only added to Britons' concept of their inherent superiority.
According to Indian Labor Journal, "For the same amount of work a white man got three times the salary as an Indian would get."

(source: Indian Labor Journal, was founded during the peak of Freedom Movement, a weekly tabloid that stopped publication on the eve of Independence in 1947. Its founder-editor, the late G V Rahgavan managed to rattle the British with his telling commentaries in the column Epistles Brief and Frank. Raghavan, who was initiated into politics by C Rajagopalachari, was one of the famous socialist leaders and freedom fighters of the region. Closely associated with Mahatma Gandhi, Subhash Chandra Bose, Jawaharlal Nehru, Jay Prakash Narayan and V V Giri, he served in the Bengal Nagpur Railways for three decades and initiated many welfare measures for the employees.

(source: http://www.expressindia.com/ie/daily/19970812/22450223.html)
Birds of Passage and of Prey
The British who go to India to carry on the government never for a moment think of the country as home; it is merely their temporary tarrying place, their "inn". Edmund Burke described these British countrymen of his by the striking phrase, "birds of passage and prey." The British in India are no part of India; they do not settle down to make homes there; they make their 'piles' and return to their country, where all who have been in government service continue all the rest of their lives to draw  fat pensions from India.
(source: India in Bondage: Her Right to Freedom  - By Jabez T. Sunderland p. 299).
Speech in House of Commons on India, 1783 - By Edmund Burke:

Despite the act if 1773, there were still concerns about the administration of India.

" ... Our conquest there, after twenty years, is as crude as it was the first day. The natives scarcely know what it is to see the grey head
of an Englishman. Young men (boys almost) govern there, without society, and without sympathy with the natives. They have no more
social habits with the people, than if they still resided in England; nor, indeed, any species of intercourse but that which is necessary to making a sudden fortune, with a view to a remote settlement.. Animated with all the avarice of age, and all the impetuosity of youth, they roll in one after another; wave after wave; and there is nothing before the eyes of the natives but an endless, hopeless prospect of new flights of birds of prey and passage, with appetites continually renewing for a food that is continually wasting. Every rupee of profit made by an Englishman is lost for ever to India."

(source: Internet Modern History Sourcebook).

Lord Canning (1812 - 1862) Governor General of India from 1856 - 1862 and the first Viceroy in India. In the middle of the 1857 uprising, he wrote to a British official: 
“As we must rule 150 millions of people by a handful (more or less small) of Englishmen, let us do it in the manner best calculated to leave them divided (as in religion and national feeling they already are) and to inspire them with the greatest possible awe of our power and with the least possible suspicion of our motives.”  
(source: The Muslims of British India - By P Hardy p. 72). Refer to chapters on Aryan Invasion Theory and First Indologist.
"The institution of separate electorates for the Muslims was the first expression of the pernicious two-nation theory, which ultimately resulted in the foundation of Pakistan. Published documents fully establish the fact that this was created by deliberate policy as an effective method to keep the Hindus and Muslims apart. Lady Minto, the wife of the Viceroy who was responsible for this piece of political Machiavellianism, noted with glee that her husband had by this act ensured for a long time the authority of the British in India. The system of separate electorate was a simple device. It provided that Muslims should be represented only by Muslims, that no Muslim could represent a Hindu constituency or vice versa. By this expedient the Muslims in India from Cape Comorin to Kashmir became a separate political entity, perpetually at odds with the Hindus and judging all issues from the point of view of a religious community. As the Muslim candidates to the legislatures had to depend on a religious franchise, their views and policies, came to be molded by considerations of religious fanaticism. India took over forty years to be rid of this vicious system and that, too, at the terrible cost of a partition." 

(source: Asia and Western Dominance - By K. M. Panikkar  p. 120).
"On its colonies the sun never sets,
but the blood never dries." 
  - Ernest Jones (1819 - 1869) Chartist and socialist, 1851.
By the sword  
“The War of 1857 was undoubtedly an epoch-making event in India’s struggle for freedom. For what the British sought to deride as a mere sepoy mutiny was India’s First War of Independence in a very true sense, when people from all walks of life, irrespective of their caste, creed, religion and language, rose against the British rule.”
The British conquest of India, begun in the 18th century, was completed in the 19th century by a succession of bloody wars of aggression. One historian has described the campaigns conducted in a 30 year period from 1824 until 1852-53 somewhat over enthusiastically as “little short of awe-inspiring”. These wars involved countryside laid waste, cities sacked, civilians robbed, raped and murdered, and tens of thousands of soldiers killed, and mutilated.  
Richard Cobden (1804 – 1865) the radical MP whose opposition to the Opium wars is well known. In 1838 he became one of the seven founding members of the Anti-Corn Law League in Manchester, argued that just as “in the slave trade we have surpassed in guilt the world, so in foreign wars we have been the most aggressive, quarrelsome, warlike and bloody nation under the sun.”  
In October 1850 he wrote to fellow radical Joseph Sturge (1793 - 1809) that if you looked back over the previous 25 years “you will find that we have been incomparably the most sanguinary (bloodthirsty) nation on earth.” Whether it was “in China, in Burma, in India, New Zealand, the Cape, Syria, Spain, Portugal, Greece, etc. there is hardly any country, however remote, in which we have not been waging war or dictating our terms at the point of the bayonet. Indeed, he believed that the British, “the greatest blood-shedders of all”, had in this period been involved in more wars than the rest of Europe put together. Colden blamed this militarism on the aristocracy that had “converted the combativeness of the English race to its own sinister ends.”  
Public opinion in Britain was inevitably mobilized behind the war to suppress the Great Rebellion by the atrocity stories that appeared in the press. On 30 October 1857 Lord Shaftesbury, in a widely reported speech told of how “day by day ladies were coming to Calcutta with their ears and noses cut off and their eyes put out” and that children were being “put to death under circumstances of the most exquisite torture”. The speech was immediately published as Lord Shaftesbury’s Great Speech on Indian Cruelties. Prompted by this, Lord Ellenborough, himself a former governor general of India, called in the House of Lords for every man in Delhi to be castrated and for the city to be renamed “Eunochabad” Even Charles Dickens could long for the opportunity “to exterminate the race upon whom the stain of the later cruelties rested…to blot it out of mankind and raze if off the face of the earth.”  
Although privately Richard Cobden could still confess that if he were an Indian “I would be one of the rebels” and that "Hindustan must be ruled by those who live on that side of the globe", discretion proved the better part of valor. He reluctantly came to accept that the rebellion had to be put down. 
Lord Canning, the governor general, complained to Queen Victoria of a “rabid and indiscriminate vindictiveness” having gripped the British in India . People seemed to think “that the hanging and shooting of 40 or 50,000 mutineers besides other rebels can be other wise than practicable and right.” He confessed to “a feeling of shame for one’s fellow countrymen.
(source: The Blood Never Dried: A People’s History of the British Empire - By John Newsinger  p. 66 - 67 and 80 - 82).
***
By the middle of the nineteenth century, the British had come to believe they were a chosen race; chosen to distribute the benefits of western civilization to the backward areas of the globe. That the inhabitants of such areas often didn’t want these benefits and certainly not the accompanying British control of their lives was immaterial to Britain’s sense of a mission. In 1857, the Indian Mutiny broke out and it rapidly became the greatest of all the imperial wars. It was followed avidly by the British public and as the myths of the Mutiny grew it came to be seen almost as a latter-day British Iliad with gentleman-warriors of homeric proportions manfully defending the position, dignity and God-given duty of their race. It was even called the 'epic of the Race' by the historian Sir Charles Crostwaithe and though this may sound ridiculous to the modern ear it was nothing more than a reflection of the confidence, indeed arrogance, with which the British of Victoria's 20th year on the throne viewed the world in general and their empire in particular. 
For more than a year the people of northern India trembled with fear as the British sated their thirst for revenge. 
The Indians called it 'the Devil's Wind'.

(source: The Epic of the Race: India 1857 - http://www.geocities.com/Broadway/Alley/5443/indmut.htm )
The British retaliation against was severe. In Delhi one eyewitness boasted that " all the people found within the walls when our troops entered were bayoneted on the spot...These were not mutineers but residents of the city, who trusted to our well-known mild rule for pardon. I am glad to say they were disappointed." At the site of the massacre of women in Cawnpore, the British made their captives lick the dried blood off the floor before hanging them. The war rumbled on until late in 1858, but the executions continued until well into 1859, rebels being hanged or shot without trial, convicted mutineers being lashed to the muzzles of guns and blown to pieces.
Lord Canning tried in vain to curb the "rabid and indiscriminate vindictiveness " of his compatriots, pointing out that "the government which has punished blindly and revengefully will have lost its chief title to the respect of its subject." 
A death sentence was passed on the East India Company, too. 
(source: Colonial Overlords: Time Frame Ad 1850-1900  - Time-Life Books. The Scramble for Africa p. 25-26).
Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru wrote: "A great deal of false and perverted history has been written about the Revolt and its suppression. What the Indians think about it seldom finds its way to the printed page. 
Veer Savarkar wrote: "The History of the War of Independence" some thirty years ago, but his book was promptly banned.
The book was, of course, banned in India, but still appeared "on the Indian bookstalls, wrapped in a cover labeled Random Papers of the Pickwick Club".
Neera Kuckreja Sohoni has remarked:
"It took a Savarkar's intellectual vigour and aggressive reasoning to question and replace the biased Anglophile historical branding of the 1857 outbreak as a "mutiny" with the "the first war of independence" nomenclature. "

(source: Nothing singular in revisionism -  By Neera Kuckreja Sohoni dailypioneer.com).
The British were not only greedy for money and for land. They wanted to Christianize and denationalize India . 
The Chairman of the Court of Directors of the East India Company as saying in the House of Commons:
"Providence has entrusted the extensive empire of Hindustan to England in order that the banner of Christ should waive triumphant from one end of India to the other. Everyone must exert all his strength that there may be no dilatoriness on account in continuing in the country the grand work of making India Christian”.
Justin McCarthy wrote: “The fact was that throughout the greater part of northern and northwestern provinces of the Indian peninsula there was a rebellion of the native races against the English power. It was not the sepoy alone who rose in revolt. It was not by any means a merely military mutiny. It was a combination of military grievance, national hatred and religious fanaticism against the English occupation of India . The Mohammedans and the Hindu forgot their old religious antipathies to join against the Christian….”

Charles Ball wrote: “At length the torrent overflowed the banks and saturated the moral soil of India . The movement now assumed a more important aspect. It became a rebellion of a whole people incited to outrage by resentment for imaginary wrongs and sustained their delusions by hatred and fanaticism”.
Sir W. Russell, of the London Times correspondent as writing: “Here we had not only a servile war, but we had a war of religion, a war of race and a war of revenge, of hope, of national determination to shake off the yoke of a stranger and to re-establish the full power of the notice chiefs and the full away of native religion.”
Rev Kennedy as saying: “Whatever misfortunes come on us as long as our empire in India continues, so long let us not forget that our chief work is the propagation of Christianity in the land. Until Hindustan from Cape Comorin to the Himalayas embrace the religion of Christ and until it condemns the Hindu and Muslim religions, our efforts must continue persistently”.

The Christian missionary propaganda was not only violently aggressive and widespread; it was also supported by the government agency.
According to Kaushik Roy writing in Economic and Political Weekly (May12) “the number of civilians and Indian soldiers killed exceeded one lakh (1,00,000). There was not a tree in some places which did not see a dead Indian hanging from the branches. In comparison just about 2,034 British soldiers died in action another 8,978 died form disease. British terrorism did not frighten Indians.
The EPW quotes a British lady residing in Lucknow noting in her journal on May 16, 1857: “You can only rule these Asiatics by fear; if they are not afraid, they snap their fingers at you”.

(source: An essay on 1857-II : The British were greedy for money, land and wanted to Christianize- orgainser.org).
'A Holocaust, one where millions disappeared...'
British reprisals involved the killing of 10m, spread over 10 years
A controversial new history of the Indian Mutiny, which broke out 150 years ago and is acknowledged to have been the greatest challenge to any European power in the 19th century, claims that the British pursued a murderous decade-long campaign to wipe out millions of people who dared rise up against them.  
In War of Civilisations: India AD 1857, Amaresh Misra, a writer and historian based in Mumbai, argues that there was an "untold holocaust" which caused the deaths of almost 10 million people over 10 years beginning in 1857. Britain was then the world's superpower but, came perilously close to losing its most prized possession: India .
"It was a holocaust, one where millions disappeared. It was a necessary holocaust in the British view because they thought the only way to win was to destroy entire populations in towns and villages. It was simple and brutal. Indians who stood in their way were killed. But its scale has been kept a secret."
There is a macabre undercurrent in much of the correspondence. In one incident Misra recounts how 2m letters lay unopened in government warehouses, which, according to civil servants, showed "the kind of vengeance our boys must have wreaked on the abject Hindoos and Mohammadens, who killed our women and children." Misra has done well to unearth anything in that period, when the British assiduously snuffed out Indian versions of history. "There appears a prolonged silence between 1860 and the end of the century where no native voices are heard. It is only now that these stories are being found and there is another side to the story," said Amar Farooqui, history professor at Delhi University . "In many ways books like Misra's and those of [William] Dalrymple show there is lots of material around. But you have to look for it."
What Every "Ugly American" Must Know about the "Civilized British
One of the tragedies of English-speaking British colonies is that their history under the British rule was written by the British historians, or by those natives who were trained by the British historians. However, it seems the time has come to record history in its true light-- at least so in India.  
Amaresh Misra, writing about India's first war of independence in 1857, in his recently published book, In War of Civilisations: India AD 1857, said that there was an "untold holocaust" that caused the deaths of almost 10 million people over 10 years, beginning in 1857. British-fed historians, claims Misra, have counted only 100,000 Indian soldiers who were slaughtered in savage reprisals, but none have tallied the number of rebels and civilians killed by British forces desperate to impose order.
(source: What Every "Ugly American" Must Know about the "Civilized British - www.larouchepac.com).
"The spread of Christianity was to cause great unease among the Indians. Evangelical Christian missionaries had little or no understanding and respect for India 's ancient faiths and their efforts to convert many natives quickly brought clashes with the local religious establishments. As the missionaries were mostly British citizens, the Colonial Administration often had to intervene to protect them, which naturally gave an impression of official condolence for Christianity."

The Christian missionaries are back to their mischief - Need we another mutiny against the powers that be?
(source: The Epic of Race: The Indian Mutiny of 1857 - victorianweb.org). Refer to the Havoc un leased by Christian Missionaries today to destroy India's Ancient culture in the chapter on Conversion.
The Devil's Wind
Unparalleled Ferocity and Torture of Indians
Michael Edwardes has argued that during the Indian Rebellion “the English threw aside the mask of civilization and engaged in a war of such ferocity that a reasonable parallel can be seen in our times with the Nazi occupation of Europe.” This was the considered opinion of a historian who had spent his life studying and writing about India.  
In Thomas Lowe’s Central India During The Rebellion of 1857 and 1858 he laments that the column in which he was serving had become encumbered with prisoners. While the policy was to take no prisoners, he told his readers that:  
“We must remember that flesh and blood – even the hardy Anglo-Saxons – cannot go on slaying from sunrise to sunset. However willing the spirit may be, physical force cannot endure it."  Not to worry though. On this occasion all 76 of the men taken prisoners “were tried, sentenced and executed.” They were “ranged in one long line and blindfolded” with their executioners positioned “couple of yards” in front of them. When the bugle sounded “a long rattle of musketry swept this fleshy wall of miscreants from their earthly existence”. Lowe himself acknowledges how “terrible” the scene was.  
This was not an exceptional occurrence. It was routine, repeated on numerous occasions, sometimes with fewer victims, sometimes more, often with greater brutality. The violence with which the British put down the Indian Rebellion has only been approached in the history of the empire by the suppression of the United Irish rebellion in the 1790s and of the Mau Mau rebellion in the 1950s.  
According to Karl Marx writing in 1853, the British had “a double mission in India: one destructive, the other regenerating”. They had accomplished the destructive in a way that unveiled before our eyes "all the profound hypocrisy and inherent barbarism of bourgeois civilization…turning from its home, where it assumes respectable forms, to the colonies, where it goes naked.”  
Writing about the outbreak of the Great Rebellion, he discussed “the official Blue Books on the subject of East India torture, which was laid before the House of Commons during the seasons of 1856 and 1857”. These reports established “the universal existence of torture as a financial institution of British India .”  
Karl Marx pointed out:
“From the real history of British rule in India. In view of such facts, dispassionate and thoughtful men may perhaps be led to ask whether a people are not justified in attempting to expel the foreign conquerors who have so abused their subjects.”
What did this torture involve? It ranged from rough manhandling through flogging and placing in the stocks and then on to more extreme measures:
“Searing with hot irons….dipping in wells and river till the victim is half suffocated…squeezing the testicles…putting pepper and red chillies in the eyes or introducing them into the private parts of men and women….prevention of sleep…nipping the flesh with pincers…suspension from the branches of a tree..imprisonment in a room used for storing lime..”  
What is remarkable is how little this regime of torture has figured in accounts of British rule in India. 
It is a hidden history that has been unremarked on and almost completely unexplored. Book after book remains silent on the subject. This most surely calls into question the whole historiography of the Raj. One last point is worth noting here: the extent to which everyday relations between the British and Indian subjects were characterized by abuse and violence. Servants were routinely abused as “niggers” and assaulted and beaten by their masters, something that worsened during and after the Great Rebellion. 
Lord Elgin (1811- 1863) writing in August 1857, described British feelings towards the Indians as consisting of “detestation, contempt, ferocity.” This everyday abuse and violence continued until the end of the British Raj.  
(source: The Blood Never Dried: A People’s History of the British Empire - By John Newsinger  p. 65 - 71).

According to the great historian R. C. Majumdar the activities of Christian missionaries was a major contributor to the great uprising of 1857:
“The sensitiveness of the sepoys to their religious beliefs and practice and the dread of conversion to Christianity worked as a nightmare upon their minds….A vague dread that the government was determined, by hook or by crook, to convert the Indians to Christianity pervaded all ranks of society, and the sepoys, fully shared these apprehension with the rest…The aggressive attitude of the Christian missionaries …in matters of proselytization has been frequent subjects of complaint.” 
Among such aggressive activities, Majumdar noted the practice of missionaries of "open unchecked denunciation of their cherished social usages and customs in most violent language, and filthy abuses of their gods and goddesses by bands of Christian missionaries."
(source: Christianity's Scramble for India and The Failure of The Secularist' Elite - By N S Rajaram Hindu Writers Forum 1999 New Delhi. p. 38-39).
In my own city and district of Allahabad and in the neighborhood, General James Neill (1810 - 1857) held his ' Bloody Assizes.' Soldiers and civilians alike were holding Bloody Assize, or slaying natives without any assize at all, regardless of age or sex. It is on the records of our British Parliament, in papers sent home by the Governor-General in Council, that "the aged, women, and children are sacrificed as well as those guilty of rebellion." They were not deliberately hanged, but burnt to death in villages - Volunteer hanging parties went into the districts and amateur executioners were not wanting to the occasion. One gentleman boasted of the numbers he had finished off quite "in an artistic manner," with mango trees as gibbets and elephants for drops, the victims of this wild justice being strung up, as though for pastime, in the form of figures of eight. 
British memorials of the Mutiny have been put up in Cawnpore and elsewhere. There is no memorial for the Indians who died.
(source: The Discovery of India - By Jawaharlal Nehru p. 324-325).
Indian JNU historians and Negationism
In spite of Islamic Onslaught and British Imperialism, our children should read what the West Bengal's leftist government is teaching kids. Refer to an extract from the, textbook for Class V. 
"Islam and Christianity are the only religions which treated man with honor and equality..."

(source: Does Indian history need to be rewritten? Times of India 12/02/01 http://www.hvk.org/articles/1206/69.html). Refer to Eminent Historians: Their Technology, Their Line, Their Fraud.
Claude Alvares has written: "The English establishment themselves as a separate ruling caste; like other Indian castes, they did not inter-marry or eat with the lower (native) caste. Their children were shipped off to public schools in England, while they themselves kept to their clubs and bungalows in special suburbs known as cantonments and civil lines."
(source: Decolonizing History: Technology and Culture in India, China and the West 1492 to the Present Day - By Claude Alvares p. 191).

"Dogs and Indians not allowed” 
           - Such a barbaric signs clearly classified Indians as belonging to some other-than-human species.

One of the claims oftenest made by Great Britain is, that she has given to the Indian people better laws and a better judicial system that they ever had before or could create for themselves....and this fully justifies her in retaining possession of the land.
Sir Robert Fulton, an eminent British official in India:
"The foundation of our empire in India rests on the principle of justice, and England retains its supremacy in India mainly by justice. Without justice we could not hold India for a moment, for it is that which inspires the people of India with a confidence in us and with a belief that in all our dealings with them we never act otherwise than fairly and justly, and which renders them on the whole satisfied and contented with our rule."
This is what the British are constantly saying to the world in justification of their holding India in subjection. Is it true?
In large part it is untrue. The Indian people submit to it only because they have been disarmed and British battleships are in all their harbors ready to bombard their cities; British canon and machine guns are ready to mow down their men, women and children; and British bombing airplanes are ready to blow up their villages, if they attempt to throw off the yoke of their foreign masters.
Mr. John Dickinson, in his book, "Government of India Under a Bureaucracy," describes the kind of legal system set up by the British and the results it produced. He says:
"We, the English, ignorantly assumed that the ancient, long civilized people of India, were a race of barbarians who had never known what justice was until we came among them, and that the best thing we could do for them was to upset all their institutions as fast as we could, among them their judicial system, and give them instead a copy of our legal models at home...it would have been the grossest political empiricism for force it on a people so different from ourselves....and the reader may conceive the irreparable mischief it has done to India..."
Sir Henry Cotton in his book "New India" p. 170 says:
"The people of India possess an instinctive capacity for local self-government. It is by the reason of the British administration, only, that the popular authority of the village headman has been sapped, and the judicial power of the Panchayat, or Committee of Five has been subverted. "
The gravest charge of all against the British legal system in India, was that of partiality, favoritism towards Europeans, especially Englishmen, resulting in serious and widespread injustice to the Indian people. Says a prominent Calcutta daily: "No man in this country can knock an Englishman down without promptly being arrested and sent to jail. But an Englishman may knock a dozen Indians down and go scot-free. If the Indian attempts to defend himself against his British assailant, the officer is on him in no time, and he goes to jail for heavy sentence."
Says a Bombay daily: "A European kicks his servant to death. The local magistrate finds him guilty of simple assault and fines him one pound, six shillings and eight pence. An appeal to the Bombay High Court increases the sentence to nine months imprisonment."
In another case, an Englishman kicks a sweeper, rupturing his spleen, which results in his death, and is ordered to pay a fine of 50 rupees with no imprisonment. Yet in another case, an Indian is sentenced to 20 years imprisonment for attempting to rape an Englishwoman, while in the same province an Englishman who gags and rapes a Hindu girl of 18 is acquitted, with no punishment at all. 
In November, 1923, some British soldiers who had been out fox-hunting near the village of Lohagaon, in the vicinity of Poona, fell into an altercation with the villagers, when one of the villagers was shot dead by a soldier named Walker. The soldier was tried by the Sessions Court before European jurors and British judges and acquitted. 
Mr. K. C. Kelkar, President of the Poona City Municipality and Editor of the weekly Kesari commented editorially in the paper as follows:
"Such farces of trials of Europeans accused of crimes against Indians are not new among us. They date back to the times of Warren Hastings. The thing to be most regretted is that with such things taking place before their very eyes there are persons who keep singing the praise of British justice. By good rights a pillar ought to be erected at Lohagaon having engraved on it the full details of this case, as a memorial showing what value is attached to the lives of Indians under British rule."
(source: India in Bondage: Her Right to Freedom - By Rev. Jabez T. Sunderland p.105-119).

In a ‘letter to a Member of the National Assembly,’ written in 1772, Edmund Burke (1729-1797) British statesman, parliamentary orator and political thinker, played a prominent part in all major political issues for about 30 years after 1765, and remained an important figure in the history of political theory, describes the colonial relationship between England and India as poised between courtship and rape: 1767, he declared, marked the year when the “administration discovered that the East India Company were guardians to a very handsome and rich lady in Hindostan. 
Accordingly, they set parliament in motion; and parliament….directly became a suitor, and took the lady into its tender, fond, grasping arms, pretending all the while that it meant nothing but what was fair and honorable; that no rape or violence was intended; that its sole aim was to rescue her and her fortune our of the pilfering hands of a set of rapacious stewards, who had let her estate run to waste, and had committed various depredations. By 1787, Burke amplified his criticism of Warren Hastings, the Governor General of Bengal between 1774 and 1785, charging him not only with promoting the economic rape of India but also with the literal rape of Indian women. Moved by his inflammatory rhetoric, Burke’s colleagues in the House of Commons initiated proceedings to remove Hastings from the seat he then occupied in the House of Lords. 
During the trial Burke enumerated his charges against Warren Hastings, proclaiming not only that he had countenanced the use of sexual violence as a strategy of control by his colonial subordinates but that he had also personally “undone women of the first rank” in India, noting especially his humiliation of the Princesses of Oude in 1772-1773. In one speech, Burke vividly catalogued the barbaric treatment that Indian women received at the hands of Hastings and his men: 
" Virgins, who had never seen the sun, were dragged from the innocent sanctuaries of their houses, and in the open court of justice…(but where no judge or lawful magistrate had long sat, but in their place the ruffians and hangmen of Warren Hastings occupied the bench), these virgins, vainly invoking heaven and earth, in the presence of their parents…publicly violated by the lowest and wickedest of the human race. Wives were torn from the arms of their husbands, and suffered the same flagitious wrongs, which were indeed hid in the bottoms of the dungeons in which their honor and their liberty were buried together…But it did not end there. Growing from crime to crime, ripened by cruelty for cruelty, these fiends….these infernal furies planted death in the source of life, where that modesty, which more than reason, distinguished men from beasts, retires from the view, and even shrinks from the expression, there they exercised and glutted their unnatural, monstrous, and nefarious cruelty." 
In short, Burke charged Hastings with implementing policies that destroyed “the honor of the whole female race” in India.
Burke’s criticism of the rapaciousness of the British colonial policy in India was minority voice at the time. Though his powerful descriptions of Hastings’s unspeakable colonial acts inspired agitation in the large audiences attracted to the trial, Burke failed, nonetheless, in his efforts to convict Warren Hastings, and, after a trial that lasted seven years, the latter was acquitted in 1795. Burke died two years later, so by 1797 his inimitable and inflammatory rhetoric about the rape of India by the lawless agents of the East India Company was silenced forever. 
One of the features that made Burke’s speeches about colonial policy in India so memorable was that they skillfully exploited the rhetoric of surprise, since most English readers, regardless of whether they endorsed or opposed state sponsorship of the East India Company or the colonial wars in India conducted in its name, were more likely have read Oriental tales that focused on seduction rather than reports of the violently transgressive acts of rape that he so vividly described. 
In cataloging the violence suffered by the colonized during the British retaliatory campaign after the massacre at Kanpur in 185, Manohar Malgonkar’s disturbing novel details, The Devil’s Wind: Nana Saheb’s Story, the “orgy of killing, rape, and vandalism” perpetrated by Colonel James Neill and his soldiers, events that are censored in nearly all British mutiny novels and, in fact, in many British nineteenth-century imperial histories as well.  
Thus, Malgonkar reveals why “romances” and “boys adventures” about the mutiny were the preferred form, since in these genres the moral uprightness of the heroes is an uncontested given, which means, as the narrator in G. A. Henry’s Times of Peril insists, that British soldiers simply do not rape.
Malgonkar counters such claims with numerous graphic representations of the rapes of Indian women by Englishmen that challenges colonial myths about the purity and righteousness of the British acts of “revenge.” Malgonkar’s novel thus invokes imperial history to correct it, by maintaining that British soldiers did, indeed, rape as well as pillage and burn as they swept through the countryside: “Women were dragged out screaming and pounced upon in bazaars, so that the word “rape” itself acquired a plurality, a collective connotation, and people spoke of villages and townships raped, not a single women.” 
(source: Writing Under The Raj: Gender, Race, and Rape in the British Colonial Imagination 1830-1947 - By Nancy L. Paxton).
" Every day ten or a dozen niggers are hanged. [Their corpses hung] by two's and three's from branch and signpost all over town ... For three months did eight dead-carts go their rounds from sunrise to sunset, to take down corpses which hung at the cross-roads and the market places, poisoning the air of the city, and to throw their loathsome burdens into the Ganges."    

-- Lieutenant Pearson - on the punishment of rebels in Allahabad, in a letter to his mother.














Om Tat Sat
                                                        
(Continued...) 




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