***

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?"

(source: The Great Patriotic Revolt II. Imperial Nostalgia and Cultural Genocide – By Fatima Shahnaz - radianceweekly.com and The history of the Church Missionary Society: Its environment, its men and its work - By Eugene Stock 1899 page 210).

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')  ISBN 0333936000  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 William Jones with Brahmins at his feet. 

Sir William Jones (1746-1794) the first British to master Sanskrit and study the Vedas, wrote to Sir Warren Hastings how to spread "our pure faith" (Christianity) as "no mission from the Church of Rome will ever be able to convert the Hindus."

Watch Scientific verification of Vedic knowledge. Watch An Invasion through Conversion - youtube.com. Watch video - Brahmins in India have become a minority. Refer to Be wary of English translations of Hindu scriptures - By Sheena Patel

Refer to Why Indians Should Reject St. Thomas And Christianity - By Koenraad Elst

Refer to Why Britain Failed to Subvert the Hindu Narrative – By Bhaskar Menon

***

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. 

Watch Scientific verification of Vedic knowledge. (Refer to chapter on Aryan Invasion Theory). Refer to Jesus Christ: Artifice for Aggression - By Sita Ram Goel. Refer to 60 pc Britons' think Everest is UK's highest peak!

The Rich Ironies of the Aryan Invasion Theory

This is not to say that the British did not succeed in taking control of the overall Indian narrative by conceptualizing its history in communal terms and by outright fabrications such as the “Aryan invasion theory” postulating an imaginary proto-European parent of Indian civilization. But that was as much self-deception as it was manipulation. In fact, the invention of the “Aryan Race” proved disastrous for Britain: it became the basis for the racist ideology of Nazi Germany and, in one of history’s rich ironies, mobilized under the Swastika the armies that demolished its capacity to hold onto India.

(source: Why Britain Failed to Subvert the Hindu Narrative – By Bhaskar Menon).

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).

Watch Scientific verification of Vedic knowledge.  Refer to Be wary of English translations of Hindu scriptures - By Sheena Patel

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’.

(source: Trenchant Analysis of Hindu Revival and its Chanllenges - By  N.S. Rajaram).

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.

G. Beckerlegge writes in Culture and Empire: “Muller was a British agent, especially employed to write the translations of the Vedas in such a demeaning way so that the Hindus should lose faith in them.”

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