a r t i c l e s    o n    a r y a n    i n v a s i o n

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: 

    wpeB.jpg (19231 bytes)"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) 

 

 

Copyright © 2001 - All Rights Reserved.

a r t i c l e s    o n    a r y a n    i n v a s i o n