Invasion
that Never Was (excerpts) - By Michel Danino and Sujata Nahar
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/swar/Invasion.htm
When, in the
eighteenth century, a few European thinkers began to try and fathom India's philosophy and
religion, they were so struck by the depth, the ancientness, the richness they saw, that
they soon declared India to have been the "cradle of the human race" and the
"birthplace of civilization" in the words of Dohm, a German scholar, and the
Hindus to be "the gentlest of people." The great Voltaire lent his name to this
view:
"We have shown how much we surpass the Indians in courage and wickedness, and
how inferior to them we are in wisdom. Our European nations have mutually destroyed
themselves in this land where we only go in search of money, while the first Greeks
traveled to the same land only to instruct themselves."1
He concluded,
"I am convinced that everything has come down to us from the banks of the Ganges,
astronomy, astrology, metempsychosis, etc."2 Many of the early travelers
to India of the time (the exceptions being found mostly among the missionaries) tended to
share this enthusiasm. "All history points to India as the mother of science and
art,"
William Macintosh wrote. "This country was anciently so renowned for
knowledge and wisdom that the philosophers of Greece did not disdain to travel thither for
their improvement."
Pierre Sonnerat, a French naturalist, concurred: "We find
among the Indians the vestiges of the most remote antiquity.... We know that all peoples
came there to draw the elements of their knowledge.... India, in her splendor, gave
religions and laws to all the other peoples; Egypt and Greece owed to her both their
fables and their wisdom."3
This generous estimate
started changing as Britain's hold over India grew more firm and widespread, especially
after the victories over Tipu Sultan and the Marathas at the turn of the nineteenth
century. The supremacy of the British over most of India was left with little challenge,
and they could now embark in right earnest on their set task: the draining of India's
fabulous wealth. While most eighteenth-century European travelers to India described her
as "flourishing," less than a century later she had sunk into depths of dismal
misery. One British historian noted in 1901: "Time was, not more distant than a
century and a half ago, when Bengal was much more wealthy than was Britain."4
Another even asserted that Britain's Industrial Revolution could not have taken off
without the influx of money that followed the conquest of Bengal: "Very soon after
Plassey [in 1757], the Bengal plunder began to arrive in London, and the effect appears to
have been instantaneous, for all the authorities agree that the 'industrial revolution'...
began with the year 1760.... Possibly since the world began no investment has ever yielded
the profit reaped from the Indian plunder."4 Voltaire, too, had painted
the motives for Europe's interest in India in stark language:
"No sooner did India begin to be known to the Occident's
barbarians than she was the object of their greed, and even more so when these barbarians
became civilized and industrious, and created new needs for themselves.... The
Albuquerques and their successors succeeded in supplying Europe with pepper and paintings
only through carnage."7
But unlike the Portuguese, the British were anxious to clothe their greed in
lofty ideals: the "white man's burden" of civilizing (and, naturally,
Christianizing) less enlightened races, the "divinely ordained mission" of
bringing to India the glory of Europe's commercial and industrial civilization, and so
forth. Articles, pamphlets, speeches, thick volumes began pouring forth by the hundreds
year after year in praise of the "tremendous task of rescuing India" from the
darkness into which she had fallen. Understandably, the recognition of India's far more
ancient and refined civilization made such noble motives untenable. Thus began a
systematic campaign to disparage not only this civilization, its culture and society, but
the very roots of Hinduism. (Please refer to the book and link for
more)
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