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The first Westerners to investigate the Vedic literatures were the British in the last half of the eighteenth century. It was the British Sanskritists and educators in India, during the 1700 and 1800's, who first portrayed Vedic literature and culture as something barbaric, inferior, and recent. This cultural prejudice was the result of deliberate undermining with the disguised intention of asserting the superiority of their own Christian-based values and outlook, as well as the perpetuation of colonial rule. 

India was the centerpiece of Britain's imperialistic exploits. And many of the notable professors at the time had the audacity to consider themselves to be better authorities on their questionable translations of the Vedas then the Indian scholars. Western Indology itself, has its roots in European colonialism and Christian missionary propaganda. 

History of Indology
Colonial Mischief: The De- linking of Tribes by the British Empire
The First Scholars
Thoughts of Modern Indian Scholars
Women in the Age of Imperialism
Technology and Culture in India
Current Indologists - Evangelical Mindset?
Marxists Distorians
Macaulayism
Conclusion - The Perennial Hindu mind
Articles

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History of Indology:

"I saw in the whole Christian world a license of fighting at which even barbarous nations might blush. Wars were begun on trifling pretexts or none at all, and carried on without any reference of law, Divine or human"

                                     -  Hugo Grotius (1583- 1645) Dutch legal scholar, playwright and poet. One of the pioneering natural rights theorists of the late 16th and early 17th centuries.

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

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

 "Every aspect of the Empire was an aspect of Christ"

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

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

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

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

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

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Henri Cordier (1849 - 1925) French scholar quoted in The Adventures of Ibn Battuta

“Westerners have singularly narrowed the history of the world in grouping the little that they know about the expansion of the human race around the peoples of Israel, Greece and Rome. Thus have they ignored all those travelers and explorers who in their ships ploughed the China Sea and the Indian Ocean, or rode the immensities of Central Asia to the Persian Gulf. 

In truth the larger part of the globe, containing cultures different from those of the ancient Greeks and Romans but no less civilized, has remained unknown to those who wrote the history of their little world under the impression that they were writing world history."

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The first Westerners to investigate the Vedic literatures were the British in the last half of the eighteenth century. It was the British Sanskritists and educators in India, during the 1700 and 1800's, who first portrayed Vedic literature and culture as something barbaric, inferior, and recent. 

This cultural prejudice was the result of deliberate undermining with the disguised intention of asserting the superiority of their own Christian-based values and outlook, as well as the perpetuation of colonial rule. India was the centerpiece of Britain's imperialistic exploits. And many of the notable professors at the time had the audacity to consider themselves to be better authorities on their questionable translations of the Vedas then the Indian scholars. Western Indology itself, has its roots in European colonialism and Christian missionary propaganda. 

Pope Honorius IV encouraged the study of oriental languages as an aid to missionary work.

Watch Scientific verification of Vedic knowledge

Watch An Invasion through Conversion - videoyahoo.com

Refer to Things They Don't Tell you about Christianity.

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It was Indologist W.W. Hunter who said: “Scholarship is warmed with the holy flame of Christian zeal.” 

On November 7th, 1919, "The Daily Telegraph (London), wrote: "There is no Civilization known to the world except that of Christianity." All then who are not Christians are uncivilized." Cardinal Bourne, speaking about this time at Waterford, said: 

" When you come to nations where Christianity had not penetrated, there was no civilization in our sense of the word except fragments which they had picked up from the Christian Civilized Nations." 

(source: Is India Civilized: Essays on Indian Culture - By Sir John Woodroffe  p.28). For more refer to chapter on Greater India: Suvarnabhumi and Sacred Angkor

Refer to QuickTime trailer and Part One of the film The God Awful Truth.  Refer to Christian persecution against the Hellenes - ethnicoi.org. Refer to Things They Don't Tell you about Christianity.

Catholic Bishop of Plymouth wrote of the books "dignified" by the Sanskritists under the name "Sacred Books of the East" as being "gibberish". 

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

A British Protestant missionary expounds on Christian doctrine to the natives.

(source: What Life Was Like In The Jewel In The Crouwn - Time Life).

Watch Scientific verification of Vedic knowledge

Refer to Things They Don't Tell you about Christianity.

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

However, soon, "the company manifested a laudable zeal for extending, as far as its means went, the knowledge of the Gospel to the pagan tribes among whom its factories were placed." The British showed very little interest in Hindu scriptures in the beginning. Doubtless this was in part a reflection of the usual British attitude to India during most of the period of the Raj: that India as a whole was a profitable nuisance. 

Lord Cornwallis (1738-1805) a contemporary of William Jones, made his famous and bold announcement in  "Every native of Hindostan, I verily believe, is corrupt."

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

(source: Ancient India - By V. D. Mahajan p. 1).

Preacher, William Archer, wrote in his book, India and the Future:

"The plain truth concerning the mass of the [Indian] population — and the poorer classes alone — is that they are not civilized people."

Reverend A. H. Bowman wrote that Hinduism was a:

"…great philosophy which lives on unchanged whilst other systems are dead, which as yet unsuplanted has its stronghold in Vedanta, the last and the most subtle and powerful foe of Christianity."

In the word of Charles Grant (1746-1823), Chairman of the East India Company:  

"We cannot avoid recognizing in the people of Hindustan a race of men lamentably degenerate and base...governed by malevolent and licentious passions...and sunk in misery by their vices.." 

Charles Grant, who exercised a tremendous influence in the Evangelical circles, published his Observations as early as 1797 in which he attacked almost every aspect of Indian society and religion, determined the "true place" of Indians "in the moral scale" by describing them as morally depraved, "lacking in truth, honesty and good faith"and "in every way different" from the British, enriched the ideological armoury of the Christian missionaries, and provided a justification as well as an agenda for the British rule.

(source: Aryans and British India - By Thomas R. Trautmann p.103).

Britannia, a lion at her feet, examines a string of pearls she has taken from a cushion held up by an Indian woman.

Soon India would be depicted as a naked black female submissively offering her rich jewels to Britannia.

  India now entered in the cataclysmic epoch which has left few native cultures of the world intact – the Era of Colonialism. The Indians, bearers of the world’s oldest civilizations were treated like children by people who thought themselves as superior race.

(image source: British Library. Refer to India: Empire of the Spirit - By Michael Wood).

Refer to What Every "Ugly American" Must Know about the "Civilized British - www.larouchepac.com.

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In 1792, Charles Grant who for his over zeal for the conversion of the Hindus was known as the only Christian chairman of the East India Company wrote his infamous tract, Observations on the State among the Asiatic Subjects of Great Britain, particularly with respect to morals and means of improving them, written chiefly in the year 1792. In its pages, Grant had advanced the theory that all problems of India and of the English of India could be reasonably traced and satisfactorily solved if the Hindus of India were converted to Christianity.

Grant had been an active member of the Clapham Sect known also in the British Parliament by the name of Evangelical Party which had William Wilberforce as its leader. 

Grant argued: "We proceed, the, to observe, that it is perfectly in the power of the country (England) by degrees, to impart to the Hindoos our language, afterwards, through that medium, to make them acquainted with our easy literary compositions, upon a variety of subjects; and, let not the idea hastily excite derision, progressively with the simple elements of our art, philosophy and (Christian dogma and tenets) religion. These acquisitions will silently undermine, and at length subvert the fabric of error (Hinduism); and all the objections that may be apprehended against such a change, are it is confidently believed, capable of solid answer."

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

"Aryan," a word that today evokes images of racial hatred and atrocity, was first used by Europeans to suggest bonds of kinship, as Thomas Trautmann shows in his far-reaching history of British Orientalism and the ethnology of India. When the historical relationship uniting Sanskrit with the languages of Europe was discovered, it seemed clear that Indians and Britons belonged to the same family. Thus the Indo-European or Aryan idea, based on the principle of linguistic kinship, dominated British ethnological inquiry. In the nineteenth century, however, an emergent biological "race science" attacked the authority of the Orientalists. The spectacle of a dark- skinned people who were evidently civilized challenged Victorian ideas, and race science responded to the enigma of India by redefining the Aryan concept in narrowly "white" racial terms. By the end of the nineteenth century, race science and Orientalism reached a deep and lasting consensus in regard to India, which Trautmann calls "the racial theory of Indian civilization," and which he undermines with his powerful analysis of colonial ethnology in India.)

As Thomas Trautmann puts it, " Evangelical influence drove British policy down a path that tended to minimize and denigrate the accomplishments of Indian civilization and to position itself as the negation of the (earlier) British Indomania" that was nourished by belief in Indian wisdom." 

(source: The Invasion That Never Was - By Michel Danino and Sujata Nahar p. 23-24).

The Evangelicals, horrified by the idea that Christians could take the idolatry and improprieties of a pagan culture seriously, seeing in India an unlimited field for missionary activity, and insisting that it was part of a Christian government's duty to promote this. 

In 1790, Dr. Claudius Bucchanan, a missionary attached to the East India Company, arrived in Bengal. He was convinced that God had given the Company dominion over India for the specific purpose of India's christianization. "No Christian nation," he wrote, "ever possessed such an extensive field for the propagation of the Christian faith, as that afforded to us by our influence over the hundred million natives of Hindoostan. No other nation ever possessed such facilities for the extension the faith as we have in the government of a passive people, who yield submissively to our mild sway, reverence our principles, and acknowledge our dominion to be a blessing. Why should it be thought incredible that Providence hath been pleased, in a course of years to subjugate this Eastern empire to the most civilized nation in the world, for this very purpose." 

His conviction was fully shared by William Wilberforce who proclaimed in the British Parliament in June 1813, 

"Our religion is sublime, pure and beneficent. Theirs is mean, licentious, and cruel."

(source: History of Hindu-Christian Encounters - By Sita Ram Goel South Asia Books July 1990 ISBN 9990049173 p.33).

Sesha Samarajiwa ( ? ) from Sri Lanka is interested examining foreign religious agents’ role as Fifth Columnists of neocolonialism/neoimperialism. He has written:

"Evangelists belong to a long line of pests from the West who have come and keep coming like locusts to colonize our souls and cannibalize our cultures.

The latest incursions are merely a continuation of the 500-year-old sorry saga of Asia, Africa and South America , which began with the arrival of the Portuguese and the Spaniards. Some have never recovered from the machinations of their priests and the savagery of their conquistadors. The baton of imperialism has passed from the Europeans to the Americans. That is not to say that the rest of the West has dropped out. They have not. They are very much in the game. It’s just that the Americans are in the lead, the new Romans on the rampage. 

We know well how the Europeans won the West. They won it through mass genocide of the native populations in North and South America . In South America , hundreds and thousands of natives who resisted conversion were garroted. There is a poignant painting depicting such conversions. It shows armored Spanish soldiers garroting native priests, while a Spanish priest holds up a large cross. More terrified natives await their turn. On the side, another Spanish priest feeds stacks of ancient gold-leaf books of the Mayans into a fire. On the face of the Mayan priests, a look of utter sadness mixed with resignation.

In places like India and Sri Lanka , they were no better. They too faced abject horrors. In his book, Christianity's scramble for India , Navaratna Rajaram says that “the Christian Missionary is neither a Christian nor a missionary. In fact, he is a racist and a white supremacist in priestly guise.” Their Buffalo Bills and their Wild Bills, their Custers and their Cortezes, and the long line of predators and priests made sure that the sorry remainder of once-proud nations would remain so, while they ruled the roost in lands drenched with native blood. Many weaker cultures succumbed to the relentless onslaught from the West. They either slaughtered those who resisted or they sowed the seeds of abjection and their eventual self-destruction. Even today, we see the pathetic dregs of once-noble nations staggering around native reservations and barrios in North and South America, in Australia , in Canada , in New Zealand . They have lost their spirit. They have lost their will to live. They seem embarrassed to be alive. They are self-destructing. At best, they are performing monkeys titillating whites with a thirst for the exotic. These are abject peoples, vanishing tribes. Now, not satisfied with ruling their large chunk of raided real estate, they are hell-bent on extending their hegemony over the whole world. They howl in protest when the natives resist. Human misery is happy hunting grounds for these spiritual cartels. They strike when their targets are at their weakest or bomb them to submission to make sure they are at their weakest. Thus softened up, they are susceptible to inducements and brainwashing. They are canny. To ‘convert’ people, you must first make them despise and reject what had sustained their people for millennia. So they vilify their faith or convince them it is a spent force or dark superstition. In so doing, they make us spit on our heritage."

(source: Beware of wolves in sheep’s clothing - By Sesha Samarajiwa - Asian Tribune October 9, 2007).

An Englishman getting a pedicure from his Indian servants.

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

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

Watch Scientific verification of Vedic knowledge  

Refer to What Every "Ugly American" Must Know about the "Civilized British - www.larouchepac.com.

Refer to the chapter on European Imperialism. Watch An Invasion through Conversion - videoyahoo.com

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Not long after his arrival, Claudius Bucchanan went further:

"Neither truth, nor honesty, honor, gratitude, nor charity, is to be found in the breast of a Hindoo." What a comment to make about a nation that gave the world the Vedas and the Upanishads, at a time when Europeans were still living in their caves!

Bucchanan traveled to Puri in Orissa and witnessed the annual Ratha-yatra (or as Bucchanan called it, ‘The horrors of Juggernaut’). His description of Jagannatha – ‘The Indian Moloch’, has been recorded by the historian George Gogerly as- "…a frightful visage painted black, with a distended mouth of bloody horror." Perhaps, by seeing the face of Lord Jagannatha, the British hallucinated and saw a projection of their own international destiny of bloodshed and carnage. In any case, from the time the British observed the ‘terrifying’ sight of the Lord on His gigantic chariot, the word ‘juggernaut’ entered the English language and became synonymous with any great force that crushes everything in its path. 

Gogerly went on to write:

"The whole history of this famous god (Krsna) is one of lust, robbery, deceit and murder…the history of the whole hierarchy of Hindooism is one of shameful iniquity, too vile to be described."

To most 18th century Englishmen, religion meant Christianity. Naturally racism played its part also. This attitude of Europeans toward Indians was due to a sense of superiority - a cherished conviction which was shared by every Englishman in India, from the highest to the lowest. Upon his arrival in 1810, the Gov. General marquis of Hastings wrote in his diary on October 2, 1813:

"the Hindoo appears a being merely limited to mere animal functions, and even in them indifferent........with no higher intellect than a dog or an elephant or a monkey, might be supposed capable of attaining.."

(source: The History and Culture of Indian People - By R. C. Majumdar volume X, 2nd edition, Bombay, 1981, p. 338).

William Carey (1761-1834)

Without governmental sanction or license, the Christian evangelists came to India and proselytized to undermine the "superstitions of the country". The history of western (missionary) scholarship in Oriental Studies in India can be traced to William Carey, the pioneer of modern missionary enterprise in India. Carey was an English oriental scholar and founder of the Baptist Missionary Society. From 1801 onward, as Professor of Oriental Languages, he composed numerous philosophical works, consisting of 'grammars and dictionaries in the Mahratti, Sanskrit, Punjabi, Telugu, Bengali and Bhatanta dialects. From the Serampor press, there issued in his life time, over 200,000 Bibles and portions in nearly 40 different languages and dialects, Carey himself undertaking most of the literary work.' (Encyclopedia Britannica, 1950, Vol. 4, p. 860). Carey and his colleagues experimented with what came to be known as Church Sanskrit. 

He wanted to train a group of 'Christian Pandits' who would probe "these mysterious sacred nothings" and expose them as worthless.  

He was distressed that this "golden casket (of Sanskrit) exquisitely wrought" had remained "filled with nothing but pebbles and trash." He was determined to fill it with "riches - beyond all price", that is the doctrine of Christianity 

(source: Richard Fox Young, Resistant Hinduism, Vienna, 1981, p. 34).

Carey a cobbler by profession, had published a book, An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians to use means for the Conversion of the Heathens, in 1792 while he was still in England. 

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

Watch video - Brahmins in India have become a minority

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In the 19th century, Christian theologians  were  highly  critical  of Hinduism. William Archer wrote in his book, India and the Future, "The plain truth concerning the mass of the [Indian] population — and the poorer classes alone — is that they are not civilized people." However, these uncivilized people proved unenthusiastic about missionary promises that conversion would mean prosperity,  wealth and education. Reverend A.H. Bowman wrote that Hinduism was a "great philosophy which lives on unchanged whilst other systems are dead, which as yet un supplanted has its stronghold in Vedanta, the last and the most subtle and powerful foe of Christianity."
 
Alexander Duff (1806-1878) a prominent missionary, founded the Scots College, in Calcutta,  which he envisioned as a "headquarters for a great campaign against Hinduism."  Duff sought to convert the natives by enrolling them in English-run schools and colleges, and he placed emphasis on learning Christianity through the English language. He wrote, 

" While we rejoice that true literature and science are to be substituted in place of what is demonstrably false, we cannot but lament that no provision has been made for substituting the only true religion-Christianity - in place of the false religion which our literature and science will inevitably demolish… Of all the systems of false religion ever fabricated by the perverse ingenuity of fallen man, Hinduism is surely the most stupendous."  

(source: The History and Culture of Indian People - By R. C. Majumdar volume X, 2nd edition, Bombay, 1981, p. 155).

Duff received remarkable success in his educational and missionary activities amongst the higher classes in Calcutta. The number of students in the mission schools was four times higher than that in government schools. It is an axiomatic truth that the aim of missionaries like Duff was not so much education than conversion. They were obliged to use the excuse of education in order to meet he needs of the converted population, and more importantly, to train up Indian assistants to help them in their proselytizing. Duff remained unsatisfied with converting Indians belonging to low-castes and orphans – his chosen target was the higher castes, specifically the brahmanas, in order to accelerate the demise of Hinduism.

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

John Muir (1810-1882) had come to Calcutta in 1828 as a civil servant of the East India Company. He was, for some time, a student of William Carey. He published his first draft of his Matapariksha in 1839. It drew three rejoinders from Hindu pandits, Somnatha, whose real name was Subaji Bapu, a Maharastrian scholar, Harachandra Tarkapanchanana and Nilakanth Gore.

In his publication, Muir asserted that miracles mentioned in Hindu scriptures were false and 'merely ornamental in that religion instead of being at its very center as in Christianity. This way of arguing is pompously called Evidential Apologetics in Christian theology. At one point, however, Muir was deliberately dishonest. He criticized the cosmography of the Puranas as erroneous. Surely he must have known what Galileo and Copernicus had done to the cosmography of the Bible and how they had suffered persecution at the hands of the Church. 

(source: History of Hindu-Christian Encounters - By Sita Ram Goel p. 78 . The Shadow of the Cross - By Sisir Kumar Das 1974 p. 51-78).

Refer to QuickTime trailer and Part One of the film The God Awful Truth.

Sir Charles Trevelyan, an officer, with the East India Company asserted in a widely circulated tract: 

"The multitudes who flock to our schools ... cannot return under the dominion of the Brahmins. The spell has been for ever broken. Hinduism is not a religion that will bear examination... It gives away at once before the light of European sciences." 

"Educated in the same way, interested in the same objects, engaged in the same pursuits with ourselves, they become more English than Hindus...The young men brought up in our seminaries, turn with contempt from the barbarous despotisms, under which their ancestors groaned....Instead of regarding us with dislike, they court our society...the summit of their ambition is, to resemble us."

(source: Christianity's Scramble for India and The Failure of the Secularist Elite - By N S Rajaram p. 70).

The Crown of Hinduism, by the Scottish missionary, J N Farquhar, who worked in India in the cause of his brand of Christianity during the period 1891 to 1923.  What this book tries to project is that while there may well be some good points in Hinduism, ultimately the true salvation can only be achieved through Jesus Christ, who is the crown of Hinduism. 

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

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

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

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

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

Refer to Defaming of Hinduism-I – By V Sundaram – newstodaynet.com and Defaming of Hinduism-II – By V Sundaram – newstodaynet.com

For more on Christian Intolerance refer to chapters on The Goa Inquisition, European Imperialism, Conversion.

Refer to Things They Don't Tell you about Christianity.

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

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

All efforts were made by the missionaries to portray Hinduism as backwards, illogical, debauched and perverse.  

As one preacher exclaimed,

'The curse of India is the Hindoo religion. More than two hundred million people believe a monkey mixture of mythology that is strangling the nation.' 'He who yearns for God in India soon loses his head as well as his heart.'

The missionaries opposed the government’s efforts to take a neutral stand towards Indian culture and worked with more zeal for the complete conversion of the natives. Thus India became an arena for religious adventure.

"Hinduism was often perceived as the enemy to be conquered by Christian forces. Efforts were made to depict Hinduism as poetry, fiction or mythology. Hinduism was a manifest work of Satan, provides Christianity with devils to destroy; an element lacking in 18th century Europe with the decline in witch-craft prosecution. The devil is defeated through conversion. Proof of God's victory is provided by the accounts of multiple baptisms that regularly appear in the Lettres edifiantes. In one day, Father Bouchet baptizes 500 hundred converts. Such scenes, where a single missionary saves huge numbers of pagan souls from damnation, emphasize the thrilling drama of conversion. They present the reader with an exciting image of heroic enterprise and a flattering representation of Western influence over Indians.  Efforts were made to show Hinduism as strangely illogical and perverted. Thus, India was turned into an arena for religious adventure. 

In the words of Edward Said's Orientalism, produces an unshakeable assumption of European superiority, with the East always functioning as the West's negative foil." 

(source: India Inscribed: European and British Writing on India 1600-1800 - By Kate Teltscher p. 94, 22).

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

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

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Anti-Brahminism have deep roots in Christian theology

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

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

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

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

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

William Wilberforce (1759-1833) British politician declared: 

"The people of India are today enslaved by, they today groan under the yoke of "a monstrous and absurd superstitions of their native faith." The evils of that faith, he noted were "inveterate", not jut long-lasting but inherent. He talked of the "dark and degrading superstitions," the inhuman cruelties of Hinduism, of its "mean, licentious, and cruel" nature. On the testimony of many like-minded persons, Wilberforce said Indians to be mean and petty, to be liars and thieves, widow-burners, and murderers of infants.

In 1813, Wilbeforce spoke to the House of Commons on behalf of the missionaries toiling in India: "On the principle, we might have anticipated the moral condition of the Hindoos, by ascertaining the character of their deities....

"Their divinities are absolute monsters of lust, injustice, wickedness, and cruelty. In short, their religious system is one grand abomination."

(Note: Worshipping a corpse-on-a-stick (Jesus) is not only monstrous but irrational ?).
 
He maintained, quoting the Directors of the East India Company, that these traits of character flowed directly from “the nature of their superstitions and the degraded character of their deities, as well as the almost entire want of moral instructions.” Further, “I scarcely need to remark that in its superstitious rites, there has commonly been found to be a natural alliance between obscenity and cruelty, and of the Hindoo superstitions it may be truly affirmed, that they are scarcely less bloody that lascivious” .

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

The British Debate on Christianization of India 1813 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

William Carey baptizing Krishna Pal.

"Every additional Christian," declared Lord Halifax, the Secretary of the State, "is an additional bond of union with this country and an additional source of strength to the Empire." 

Refer to What Every "Ugly American" Must Know about the "Civilized British - www.larouchepac.com.

***

 
"Every additional Christian," declared Lord Halifax, the Secretary of the State, "is an additional bond of union with this country and an additional source of strength to the Empire." "They are doing for India," as Lord Reay introducing a deputation of Indian Christians to the Prince of Wales, said "more than all those civilians, soldiers, judges and governors whom your Highness has met;" "They are the most potent force in India," declared Sir MacWorth Young.

And so the effort to civilize India, to secure it for the British Empire, to gather it up as the rich harvest for the Church proceeded as a joint endeavor: the civil servants helped by many devices, including among these their "religious neutrality": :the soldiers of the Cross" reinforced each other's efforts; and the scholars helped working to "undermine" and "encircle" and  thereby prepare the way for "the soldiers of the Cross" to finally storm" the strong fortress of Brahminism". 

(source: Missionaries in India: Continuities, Changes, Dilemmas - By Arun Shourie ASA Publications ASIN 8190019945 p.109-132).

Refer to QuickTime trailer and Part One of the film The God Awful Truth.

William Dalrymple, (1965 - ) author of The Last Mughal, and award-winning travel writer and historian, has recently written:

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

(source: Gods and Monsters - By William Dalrymple - guardian.co.uk).

***

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

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

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

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

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

Nag Panchami in the month of Sravana commemorates society’s enduring attraction for the strength and wisdom represented by the serpent.

Watch video - Brahmins in India have become a minority

Watch An Invasion through Conversion - videoyahoo.com

Refer to Things They Don't Tell you about Christianity.

***

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

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

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

Jagannath: Tribal God Par Excellence:   

Jaganath Puri temple and Wooden images of Lord Balabhadra, Devi Subhadra, Lord Jagannath
       & Chakra Sudarsan

Watch An Invasion through Conversion - videoyahoo.com

***

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

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

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

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