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Anglicists versus Orientalists
The contribution of British Orientalists
in the second half of the 18th century to the growth of self-awareness and pride
in their past cultural achievements among educated Hindus is well known. As David
Kopf, author of
British
Orientalism and Bengal Renaissance: The Dynamics of Indian Modernization
1773-1835, has put it: " The intellectual
elite that clustered about Hastings after 1770 was classicist rather than
'progressive' in their historical outlook, cosmopolitan rather than nationalist
in their view of other cultures, and rationalist rather than romantic in their
quest for those 'constant and universal principles' that express the unity of
human nature."
 Much of this was to change for the worse
in the 19th century when nationalism and racism came to dominate the West
European mind. The earliest expression of this change in our case is James
Mill's History of
India published in 1817. It was, in large part,
written to refute the views of Sir William Jones. Though Mill spoke no Indian
languages, indeed had never been to India, his damning indictment of Indian
society and religion had become the standard work - required reading for all who
would serve in India. It marked the triumph of the
Anglicists (read detractors of India) over the Orientalists who were admirers of
Indian civilization.
 Thomas Babbington Macaulay
(1800-59) is best known for introducing
English education in India. Macaulay was the first Law Member of the
Governor-General's Legislature. He
clinched the issue in favor of
the Anglicists with his famous minute of 1832. English was to become the medium
of instruction and not Sanskrit or Persian which the Orientalists had favored.
In the House of Commons, Macaulay directed his attack towards Hinduism:
"In no part of the world has a religion ever existed more unfavorable to the
moral and intellectual health of our race."
(source:
India
Discovered - By John Keay
p 77-78).
He wrote in his notorious
1835 Minute that Hinduism was based on "
a literature admitted to be of small intrinsic value ...(one) that inculcates
the most serious errors on the most important subjects ... hardly reconcilable
with reason, with morality...fruitful of monstrous superstitions. " Hindus
had therefore been fed for millennia with a "false history, false
astronomy, false medicine ...in company of a false religion."
"A war of Bengalees against English men
was like a war of sheep against wolves, of men against demons."
Dismissing with incredible
arrogance the profound speculation and beautiful language of the Sanskrit
classics, he said, " I doubt whether the Sanskrit literature be as valuable
as that of our Saxon and Norman progenitors."
(source: India:
A World in Transition - By Beatrice Pitney Lamb
p. 194)). Refer to chapter on First
Indologists.
Oriental
Renaissance began to
invite opposition. Missionaries were one obvious source of it. Another source
was Imperialism. European powers were becoming self-conscious imperialists and
they could not rule with a clean conscience over people who were proud
possessors of great cultures. Another source, a natural result of Imperialism,
was growing Eurocentricity. Europe
became less and less inclined to believe that anything worthwhile could be found
anywhere outside of
Europe
.
Therefore,
the Oriental Movement
began to be downgraded. It was called “romantic”
and even “fanatic”; its fascination for
India
was a form of “Indo-mania”.
Indians
were allowed to possess the Vedas, the oldest literature of the Aryans, but the
Aryans themselves were made to migrate, this time from Europe to India
as conquerors. Thus the tables were turned. Migration remained but its
direction changed.
India
which was hitherto regarded as the home of European languages and people now
became the happy hunting ground of the same people who came and conquered and
imposed their will and culture on
India.
The
theory of Aryan invasion was born.
(source:
On
Hinduism Reviews and Reflections - By Ram Swarup p.
107 - 108). Refer to
chapter on First
Indologists. Watch
Scientific
verification of Vedic knowledge
In the 1830's,
Macaulay had poured scorn on Asian cultures: "A single shelf of a good
European library he held to be worth the whole native literature of India and
Arabia..."
Ever since the days
of Macaulay's reform in the 1830's, all higher education in India had been
conducted in English.
Anglomania became the fashion among the social and intellectual elite, whose
derision of their own Indian culture was a token of their Europeanization.
It produced a generation of young Indians who found themselves rootless, out of
touch with their own country and its enduring culture..."
It had been
Macaulay's aim to train a large class of men who would be: "Indian in blood
and color, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals and in intellect,"
who would stand between the British and the illiterate masses.."
(source:
The Soul of India
- By
Amaury de
Riencourt
p. 288 - 292).
In
this new Anglicist discourse, India was misunderstood, misrepresented and run
down in almost every conceivable way. This shameful history of the imperialist
and hegemonic discourse and perversion in the name of knowledge made it out that
Hindu society had got frozen just above the primitive level. This distortion
produced alienation in the Hindus, if anything, has grown since
independence.
(source: The
Hindu Phenomenon - By Girilal Jain p. 38-40. Jain, was doyen of Indian journalists and editor of The Times of India from
1978-1988). Refer to chapter on First
Indologists.
For
more information refer to chapter on First
Indologists. Refer
to QuickTime trailer and Part One of the film
The
God Awful Truth.
Watch
An
Invasion through Conversion
- youtube.com
***
No Ten Commandments
east of the Suez Canal?
Sahibs of British
India
Swami
Vivekananda explained the effects of British education in these
words:
“Oh,
India, this is your terrible danger. The spell of imitating the West getting such a
hold upon you, that what is good or what is bad, is no longer decided by reason,
judgment, discrimination or reference to the Sastras.
‘Whatever ideas, whatever manners the white men praise or like, are good;
whatever things they dislike or censure, are bad! Alas! What can be a more
tangible proof of foolishness than this?”
***
Edmond Taylor
writes: "In the golden age of empire, both in official propaganda and in
their private mythologies of the white man's burden, the sahibs placed the main
emphasis upon their own superiority rather than the natives inferiority.
"The sahib is
accustomed to being obeyed, to being feared, to being surrounded with deference
and servility. He belongs to the British middle-class himself but in the East
his life is filled with the symbols of domination and grandeur. He may not be
enjoying fantastic luxury but deference is a more deeply rooted symbol of power
than luxury, and on the
scale of deference, as far as his relations with the natives go, he lives like a
pre-revolutionary grand duke of Russia."
"The British
have set themselves up as the master race in India. British rule in India is
fascism, there is no dodging that."
(source: Richer
By Asia - Edmond Taylor
p. 105 and 248).
European Imperialism - A Christian Enterprise was backed and blessed by the Pope
The Romanus Pontifex,
also issued by Pope Nicholas V in 1455,
sanctioned the seizure of non-Christian lands, and encouraged the enslavement of
non-Christian people.
Enslaving the Heathens? 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."
"According
to British
history, there was no freedom movement in
India, no man made famines, no transfer of huge resources from
India
to
Britain
, no destruction of Indian industries and agriculture by the British rule, but
only a very benign and benevolent British rule in
India
."
Refer to
Loot:
in search of the East India Company - By
Nick Robins and
How
India became poor - indiarealist.com
and
Why Indians Should Reject St. Thomas And Christianity -
By Koenraad Elst
***
A German professor, George
Wegener, expressed the
heart of the matter as far back as 1911:
"It is in India, of all places on
the earth, that the superiority of the white over the colored races is most
strikingly demonstrated. If the Asiatics were to succeed in destroying English
mastery there, then the position of the whole white race throughout the world
would be fatally undermined."
(source: The
Case for India - By Will Durant Simon and Schuster,
New York. 1930 p. 178).
The
Hindi word loot entered English lexicon
after the Battle of Plassey. English historian William
Digby estimated in 1901 that the amount looted from India was 1
billion dollars.
"If British
empire-builders could have kept racialism out of their policy, I'm sure they
could happily have stayed on in India to this day. That
racial discrimination was absolutely blatant
as and when Indian fighting forces came in contact with the British fighting
forces. If an Indian had any kind of self-respect, he couldn't help resenting
it. Even today, after so many years, I hesitate to go to any white man's
country. During that impressionable period of my life, the treatment I got from
Britishers, from white people, was so bad that even today I fear I might meet
the same thing." - B.C.
Dutt (ex-rating the Royal
Indian Navy and a leader of the Mutiny of 1946).
(source:
Indian
Tales of the Raj - By Zareer Masani
p.120).
Greed and Arrogance
was the hallmark of European Imperialism
A painting by
an Indian artist showing a British child accompanied by three Indian servants, enjoying
a horseback ride in Calcutta gardens in 1840s.
***
A handbook
published in 1878 recommended twenty-seven servants for a well-to-do British family in
Calcutta and fourteen for a bachelor.
(source: Colonial
Overlords: Time Frame Ad 1850-1900 -
Time-Life Books. The Scramble for Africa
ASIN 0809464667 p. 8-27).
***
A Nation of
Shopkeepers wants to rule India
Sir Josiah Child,
appointed chairman of the East India company, had once declared,
" the time was ripe to lay the foundation of a large, well-grounded, sure
English dominion in India for all time to come."
(source: Colonial
Overlords: Time Frame Ad 1850-1900 - Time-Life
Books. The Scramble for Africa ASIN 0809464667 p. 13).
Sir William
Joynson-Hicks, Home Minister in the Baldwin Government, expressed :
"I know it is said in the missionary meetings that we conquered India to
raise the level of the Indians. That is cant. We conquered India as an outlet
for the goods of Great Britain. We conquered India by
the sword, and by the sword we shall hold it."
(source: The
Case for India - By Will Durant Simon and Schuster,
New York. 1930 p.163-164 and
India
in Bondage: Her Right to Freedom - By Jabez T. Sunderland p.138).
As the 19th century
progressed, British power and population increased: The Moghal empire shrank to
an impotent enclave around Delhi; and independent princes, one by one, became
British clients. Indian participation in government was reduced to a minimum;
social intercourse was limited and distant. The British began to see- and
treat-all Indians as an inferior and conquered people, and to make maintenance
of British power and aloofness a policy. The spread of the evangelical movement,
with its horror of the non-Christian, only added to Britons' concept of their
inherent superiority.
(source: What
Life Was Like in the Jewel of the Crown: British India AD 1600-1905
- By The Editors of
Time-Life Books.
p. 93).
According to Indian
Labor Journal, "For
the same amount of work a white man got three times the salary as an Indian
would get."
(source: Indian Labor
Journal, was founded during the peak of Freedom Movement, a weekly tabloid that
stopped publication on the eve of Independence in 1947. Its founder-editor, the
late G V Rahgavan managed to rattle the British with his telling commentaries in
the column Epistles Brief and Frank. Raghavan, who was initiated into
politics by C Rajagopalachari, was one of the famous socialist leaders and
freedom fighters of the region. Closely associated with Mahatma Gandhi, Subhash
Chandra Bose, Jawaharlal Nehru, Jay Prakash Narayan and V V Giri, he served in
the Bengal Nagpur Railways for three decades and initiated many welfare measures
for the employees.
(source: http://www.expressindia.com/ie/daily/19970812/22450223.html)
Birds of Passage
and of Prey
The British who go
to India to carry on the government never for a moment think of the country as
home; it is merely their temporary tarrying place, their "inn". Edmund
Burke described these
British countrymen of his by the striking phrase, "birds of passage and
prey." The British in India are no part of India; they do not settle down
to make homes there; they make their 'piles' and return to their country, where
all who have been in government service continue all the rest of their lives to
draw fat pensions from India.
(source:
India
in Bondage: Her Right to Freedom - By Jabez T. Sunderland p.
299).
Speech
in House of Commons on India, 1783 - By Edmund Burke:
Despite the act if 1773,
there were still concerns about the administration
of India.
" ...
Our conquest there, after twenty years, is as crude as it was the first
day. The natives scarcely know what it is to see the grey head
of an Englishman. Young
men (boys almost) govern there, without society, and without sympathy with the
natives. They have no more
social habits with the
people, than if they still resided in England; nor, indeed, any species of
intercourse but that which is necessary to making a sudden fortune, with a view
to a remote settlement.. Animated
with all the avarice of age, and all the impetuosity of youth, they roll in one after another; wave after
wave; and there is nothing before the eyes of the natives but an endless,
hopeless prospect of new flights of birds of prey and passage, with appetites
continually renewing for a food that is continually wasting. Every rupee of
profit made by an Englishman is lost for ever to India."
(source: Internet
Modern History Sourcebook).
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