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The
Goa Inquisition
Perhaps
the most barbaric and most horrendous Human
rights violations ever committed in
history.
 The
Followers of the Prince of Peace and Love,
as they called Jesus Christ, got busy with conversion of the Hindus, because
they had been commanded by Jesus: Go ye, therefore, and teach all nations,
baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy
Ghost" (Mt.xxvii:19). Therefore, they set up in Goa (A.D. 1560) the
Inquisition to teach the Hindus the tenets of their religion which, they
claimed, like the Muslims, was the only true religion in the world!. They called
it the Holy Office; the Hindus who suffered at its hands called it the Bloody
Inquisition. The followers of Jesus Christ made free and forcible use of the
faggot, the thumbscrew, the whip, the stake and the scaffold to teach the Hindus
what the true religion.
(source: The
Hindu - By Krishna Vallabh Paliwal and Brahm Datt Bharti p.10).
For
Cruelty inflicted by Christianity - Watch Constantine's
Sword movie - By Oren Jacoby. Refer to Documentaries - The
Holy Inquisition – History Channel
and Secret
Files of the Inquisition – PBS. Watch
video - Church's
Inquisition -Torturing Those Who Disagreed (1 of 6).
Refer
to Index
of Forbidden Books
and
Mexican
Inquisition
Refer to
'Goa
Inquisition was most merciless and cruel'
and
An account of the Inquisition at
Goa, in India -
By
Gabriel Dellon, Archibald Bower and
NaMo & The Truth About
US Visa -
Mediacrooks.com
Here
are some observations of Babasaheb Ambedkar
on the ruthless exploits of the Portuguese missionaries in Goa in the 16th
century:
“The
entry of the Catholic Church in the field of spread of Christianity in India
began in the year 1541 with the arrival of Francis
Xavier. He was the first missionary of the new society of Jesus
formed to support the authority of the Pope. The Syrian Christians shrank
with dismay from the defiling touch of the Roman Catholics of Portugal and
proclaimed themselves Christians and not idolaters. The other is that the
Malabar Christians had never been subject to Roman supremacy and never
subscribed to the Roman doctrine."
“The
inquisitors of Goa discovered that they were heretics and like a wolf on the
fold, down came the delegates of the Pope upon the Syrian Churches. Don
Alexis de Menzes was appointed Archbishop of Goa. It
was his mission less to make new converts than to reduce old ones to subjection;
and he flung himself into (the) work of persecution with an amount of zeal and
heroism that must have greatly endeared him to Rome. Moving down to
the South, with an imposing military force, he summoned the Syrian Churches to
submit themselves to his authority.
“Fraud
took the place of violence; money took place of arms. He bribed those whom he
could not bully, and appealed to the imaginations of men when he could not work
upon their fears. The persecutions
of Menzes were very grievous for he separated priests from their wives;
excommunicated on trifling grounds, members of the Churches; and destroyed old
Syriac records which contained proofs of the early purity of faith.”
(source:
Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar Writing and Speeches,
Volume 5, pg 435-37). 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.
Refer to
Goa’s rich Hindu past can’t be brushed away - By Anirban
Ganguly
One
Jacinto Frere Andrade in his
Life of Dom Joao Casho (1664) cites the
decree of the king of Portugal, Joāo III who ruled from 1521-1557, to his
Viceroy Joao de Castro, commanding him to discover idols and to demolish and
break them up in pieces where they are found, proclaiming severe punishments
against anyone who shall dare to work, cast, make in sculpture, engrave, paint
or bring to a light any figure of an idol in metal, brass, wood, plaster or any
other matter… and against who publicly or privately celebrate any of their
sports, keep by them any heathenish frankincense or assist and hide the
Brahmins, the sworn enemies of the Christian profession”. Joāo III directed de
Castro to punish them severely “without admitting any appeal or dispensation in
the least”.
Reputed
historian of Goa and a Goan Christian himself Dr
Teotonio R de Souza, founder of the Goa-based Xavier Centre of
Historical Research in his The
Portuguese in Asia and Their Church
Patronage, (1988) explicitly cites how
Hindu temples were destroyed and idols annihilated. By
1540, says de Souza, all Hindu idols and temples were destroyed in Goa and
building materials were in most cases utilised to erect new Christian churches
and chapels”.
It did not stop
at that, de Souza continues as saying, “Various viceregal and church council
decrees banished the Hindu priests from the Portuguese territories” and the
“public practice of Hindu rites, including marriage rites, was banned”. Temple
properties were confiscated and de Souza says that the Portuguese Government of
the day transferred to the church and religious orders the properties and other
sources of revenues that had belonged to the Hindu temples that had been
demolished”. Entire villages were taken over for being considered rebellious and
handed over with all their revenues to the Jesuits’ for monitoring. De Souza
also describes a “particularly grave abuse in Goa in the form of ‘mass baptism’,
Hindus would be seized and their lips smeared with a ‘piece of beef’ forcing
them to convert.
Uruguay-based
Alfredo de Mello, a Goan born historian, in
his Memoirs
of Goa (2003)
writes how in a span of 252 years, the inquisition held sway in Goa “with a
power that Stalin and other tyrants would have liked to hold.” Referring to the
dreaded Goan Inquisition de Mello calls it “the worst of the existing
inquisitions in the Catholic orb of the five parts of the world”. De Mello also
cites from the memoirs of Judges Magalhāes and Louisada (1859), who described
what they witnessed, “…The inquisition, this tribunal of fire, thrown on the
surface of the globe for the scourge of humanity, this horrible institution
which will eternally cover with shame its authors, fixed its brutal domicile in
the fertile plains of the Hindustan. On seeing the monster everyone fled and
disappeared, Mughals, Arabs, Persians, Armenians and Jews. The Indians, i.e.,
Hindus even more tolerant and pacific, were astounded to see the God of
Christianism more cruel than that of Mohammed, [and] deserted the territory of
the Portuguese …In this fashion, the fields and cities became deserted as are
today Diu and Goa”.
A K Priolkar, leading historian of the Goan
inquisition in his The
Terrible Tribunal for the East: The
Goan Inquisition (1961)
cites from primary sources a 41 point-plan of 1545 sent to the king of Portugal,
found in the Archivo Nacional of Torre de Tombo, the Portuguese National
Archives, for the suppression and conversion of the natives in Goa. The third
point of the plan asks the king not to tolerate or allow idolatry which is ‘so
great an offence against God’ and says that an ‘order should be promulgated in
Goa to the effect that in the whole island there should not be any temple public
or secret, contravention whereof should entail grave penalties…no Hindu festival
should be publicly celebrated in the whole island; that Brahmin preachers from
the mainland should not gather in the house of the Hindus; and that persons who
are in charge of St. Paul’s should have the power to search the houses of the
Brahmins and other Hindus, in case there exists a presumption or suspicion of
the existence of idols there”.
The truth is that Hindus had historically existed and thrived in the entire
region of Goa, the truth is that they were gradually exterminated or exiled
through a genocidal process known as the Inquisition and the truth is that for
such a past treatment, the Hindus never sought to retaliate or seek redressal.
The truth is also that in today’s Goa such past historical wrongs have not
coloured the Hindus stand on the need for peaceful co-existence with the
Christians.
(source:
Goa’s rich Hindu past can’t be brushed away - By Anirban
Ganguly).
Refer
to World Conquering Creeds - By Dr. Koenraad Elst
- chapter on Glimpses
XVI
***
The Inquisition made its way to India under the Portuguese
Jesuit, St. Francis Xavier in 1545. The
first demand for the establishment of the Inquisition in Goa was
made by St. Francis Xavier. In a letter addressed from
Amboina (Moluccas) to D. Joao III, King of Portugal, on May 16,
1545, he wrote:
“The second necessity for the Christians is that your
majesty establish the Holy Inquisition, because there are many who
live according to the Jewish law, and according to the Mohammedan
sect, without fear of God or shame of the world. And since there
are many who are spread all over the fortresses, there is the need
of the Holy Inquisition, and of many preachers. Your majesty
should provide such necessary things for your loyal and faithful
subjects in India.”
The eminent Jesuit historian, Fr.
Francisco de Souza, describes in the following passage
an incident which served as the immediate cause for the
introduction of the Inquisition in Goa:
“Whilst in the island of Goa, heated efforts were made to
destroy Hinduism, father Provincial Gonslavo da Silveira and
bishop Belchior Carneiro were moving about in Cochin persecuting
the insidious Judaism. These priests came to know how in that city
were living some descendants of the Israelite people, rich and
possessing much, but infected with Judaism…”
Francois Pyrad, a French
traveler, was in Goa during the period of July 1608 to January
1610. In his account of his travels he gives the following
information of the Inquisition in Goa:
“The Inquisition consists of two fathers, who are held in
great dignity and respect; but the one is much greater man than
the other and is called Inquisitor Major. Their procedure is much
more severe than in Portugal; they often burn
Jews, whom the Portuguese call Christianos noeuous,
that is to say, ‘New Christians.’
It came into existence in 1560. The Jesuit historian Father
Francisco de Souza tells us that the goal of the Inquisition in
India was to destroy Hinduism and also persecute Indian Jews who
had lived peacefully with the Hindus for centuries. Francois Pyrad,
a Frenchman who lived in Goa from 1608-1610, tells us that the
number of victims persecuted was very large. We have eyewitness
accounts telling us that it was far worse than in Europe. J
C Barreto Miranda, a Goanese historian, in his book
Quadros Historicas de Goa p.145,
wrote of the Inquisitors sent by the Pope:
“The cruelties which in the name of the religion of peace
and love this tribunal practiced in Europe, were carried to even
greater excesses in India, where the Inquisitors, surrounded by
luxuries which could stand comparison with the regal magnificence
of the great potentates of Asia, saw with pride the Archbishop as
well as the viceroy submitted to their power. Every word of
theirs was a sentence of death and at their slightest nod were
removed to terror the vast populations spread over the Asiatic
regions, whose lives fluctuated in their hands, and who, on the
most frivolous pretext could be clapped for all time in the
deepest dungeon or strangled or offered as food for the flames of
the pyre.”
Campo
Sancto Lazaro in Goa, where condemned prisoners were burnt.
For
Cruelty inflicted by Christianity - Watch Constantine's
Sword movie - By Oren Jacoby. Refer to Documentaries - The
Holy Inquisition – History Channel
and Secret
Files of the Inquisition – PBS. Watch
video - Church's
Inquisition -Torturing Those Who Disagreed (1 of 6).
Refer
to Index
of Forbidden Books
and
Mexican
Inquisition
Refer to
'Goa
Inquisition was most merciless and cruel'
and
An account of the Inquisition at
Goa, in India -
By
Gabriel Dellon, Archibald Bower
***
A vivid idea of the feelings of deep-rooted terror with which
the Holy Office in Goa was viewed by the common people is provided
by the following story recounted by F
Nery Xavier in Instruccas do
Marquez du Alorna as seu successor p. 38:
“The terrible acts of the Inquisition during the early
period of its existence had caused terror to be so deeply rooted
in the memories of the people that none dared to name the place
where it was housed as the house of the Inquisition, but gave it
the mysterious appellation “Orlem gor”
(The Big House).”
Fr. James Brodrick, well
known biographer of St. Xavier and himself a Jesuit wrote in his
book, Saint Francis Xavier p. 201 footnote, about the limitations
of the understanding and outlook of St. Xavier:
“St. Francis Xavier’s knowledge of Hinduism, was, if
possible, even less adequate than his few notions of
Mohammedanism. Though the Portuguese had been in India for over
forty years, none of them appears to have made the slightest
attempt to understand the venerable civilization, so much more
ancient than their own, on which they had violently intruded.”
Francis
Xavier hostility
towards the heathen (Brahmin) priesthood:
“These are the most perverse
people in the world….they never tell the truth, but think of nothing but how
to tell subtle lies and to deceive the simple and ignorant people, telling them
that the idols demand certain offerings, and these are simply the things that
the Brahmans themselves invent, and of which they stand in need in order to
maintain their wives and children and houses…They threaten the people that, if
they do not bring the offerings, the gods will kill them, or cause them to fall
sick, or send demons to their houses, and through the fear that the idols will
do them harm, the poor simple people do exactly as the Brahmans tell them…If
there were no Brahmans in the area, all the Hindus would accept conversion to
our faith."
(source: The
Heathen in His Blindness - by S. N. Balagangadhara
Brill Academic Publishers ISBN 9004099433 p.120-121).
Refer to QuickTime trailer and Part
One of the film The
God Awful Truth. Refer
to World Conquering Creeds - By Dr.
Koenraad Elst - chapter on Glimpses
XVI
Alan
Machado-Prabhu records how the Portuguese conquered Goa and
ruled by terror:
In its two and a half centuries of existence
at Goa, the Inquisition burned at the stake 57 alive and 64 in effigy. Others
sentenced to various cruel punishments totaled 4,046. The people who were
converted but still continued secretly to perform Hindu rituals were treated
even more harshly… The manner in which the Church enriched itself was just
scandalous. Half the property of a person found in possession of idols went to
the Church…The Church acquired urban and rural properties on an impressive
scale. The open performances of Hindu ceremonies were replaced by great public
processions on Christian feast days. One of the worst criminals was Francis
Xavier, later to be made into a saint.”
The
Anglican historian Dr. Fryer wrote:
“In the principal market was raised an
engine of great height, at top like a Gibbet, with a pulley …which unhinges a
man's joints, a cruel torture.”
(source: The
Ethics of Proselytizing - By Rajiv Malhotra). Refer to Jesus
Christ: Artifice for Aggression - By Sita Ram Goel
Goa
gained a reputation as an important distribution point for Arab horses. Fine
Arab steeds were very much in demand in India, and the Portuguese importers
found this trade very lucrative. But another profitable trade had developed in
another form of livestock - human beings! S.C. Pothan tells us that:
"The
Portuguese also inaugurated slave trade by seizing able-bodied men and women in
the neighbouring Indian territory and selling them. They opened a slave
market in Goa." ("The Syrian Christians of Kerala",
1963, p.31).
Apparently
this market not only served the export trade but was in much demand by the local
Portuguese whose lifestyle was extravagant and profligate. But we are also told
that there was a lively trade in Kaffirs, a derogatory term for the natives of
the Portuguese colony of Mozambique. The girls who, we are told, were very much
in demand, were paraded for sale in the nude. (B. Penrose - "Goa, Queen of
the East" p.67).
In 1592 the viceroy of
Goa "proclaimed that slaves of infidels who converted
themselves to Christianity would be freed." (Cunha Rivara -
cited by Priolkar, "The Goa Inquisition" p.141).
"Those
who have escaped death by their extorted confessions, are strictly
enjoined, when they leave the prisons of the Holy Office, to
declare that they have been treated with great tenderness and
clemency, in as much as their lives, which they justly merited to
lose, should be spared. Should anyone, who has acknowledged that
he is guilty, attempt to vindicate himself on his release, he
would be immediately denounced and arrested, and burnt at the next
Act of Faith, without hope of pardon." (Dellon, quoted by
Priolkar "The Goa Inquisition", Sec.2, p.34).
Dr
Dellon described the Archbishop's prison as:
"The
most filthy, dismal, and hideous of all I ever witnessed, and I doubt if there
can be any other in the world more repulsive."
Another
particularly odious Edict of Faith
was the obligation of Goa's citizens to spy on behalf of the Inquisition.
[Its]
"infamy never reached greater depths, nor was more vile, more black, and
more completely determined by mundane interests than at the Tribunal of Goa, by
irony called the Holy Office. Here the Inquisitors went to the length of
imprisoning in its jails women who resisted their advances, and after having
satisfied their bestial instincts there, ordering that they be burnt as
heretics." ("A India Portuguesa, Vol.11, Nova Goa", 1923, p.263 -
cited in "The Goa Inquisition" p.175).
(source: The
Inquisitive Christians - By H.
H. Meyers).
Refer
to The
Myth of Saint Thomas and the Mylapore Shiva Temple
Anti-Hindu
Laws in Goa
In
his book Goa Indica: A Critical Portrait of
Post Colonial Era:
"The
impact of Christianity is there for all to see. "For almost four hundred
years since he conquered Goa the Portuguese king acted like half-emperor,
half-Pope. Not just the privilege of clerical appointments, the king even
appropriated to himself the right to examine all the Papal Bulls, allowing their
enforcement in his conquered lands only if he found nothing detrimental to
Portugual’s interest in them," says Arun Sinha
quite forcefully.
(source: TribuneIndia.com).
The
Hindus living within the Portuguese dominion, were forbidden to
observe their ancestral rites and customs, even behind closed
doors, and subjected to many other discriminatory laws. The
Inquisition took a prominent part in enforcing these measures and
the resulting harassment was so great that many of the Hindus also
emigrated to neighboring territories.
Various
measures were taken by the Portuguese rulers in Goa with the
object of converting the natives to Christianity. Firstly, there
were those measures to make it difficult for the natives to
continue to retain their old religion. The temples and shrines of
the Hindus were destroyed and they were forbidden to erect or
maintain new ones even outside the Portuguese territories;
practice of Hindu rites and ceremonies such as the marriage
ceremony, the ceremony of wearing the sacred thread, ceremony
performed at the birth of a child, was banned; priests and
teachers of Hindus were banished; those who remained were deprived
of their means of subsistence and ancestral rights in village
communities; they were also subjected to various humiliation,
indignities and disabilities; orphan children of the Hindus were
snatched away from the families for being baptized; and men and
women were compelled to listen to the preaching of Christian
doctrine. In 1560, the Viceroy D.
Constantino de Braganza, ordered a large number of
Brahmins of the island of Goa. The result of such orders was that
the Hindus migrated to the neighboring lands en masse. The Hindus
of Salsette approached the Viceroy and clamored against this order
but their appeals fell on deaf ears. They thereupon returned home
“and placing in carriages the idols, whose temples were threatened
with ruin, they moved to the other side where there were no
Portuguese to persecute them.” The image of Shri
Mangesh was probably moved from Cortalim (earlier
known as Kushasthali) at this time
in 1566. (The temple was dedicated to Lord
Shiva). The Jesuit historian Francisco de Souza writes that: “The Church of Cortalim is erected in the same site, where formerly
the idol of Mangesh was worshipped.”
Other measures were incentives for convesion to Christianity,
such as jobs, altering the laws of inheritance in favor of those
who changed their religion.
Use
of Torture by Inquisition
Torture was used freely and with all severity by the
Inquisition in Goa may be inferred from the following passage in Dr.
C Dellon’s in the book, Relation
de l’Inquisition de Goa:
“During the month of November and December, I every morning
heard the cries of those whom the torture was administered, and
which was inflicted so severely, that I have seen many persons of
both sexes who have been crippled by it, and amongst others, the
first companion allotted to me in my prison.”
Torture was used by the Inquisition as an expedient to obtain
a confession where the evidence against the accused was
incomplete, defective or conflicting.
Water torture and torture of
pulleys
For
Cruelty inflicted by Christianity - Watch Constantine's
Sword movie - By Oren Jacoby
For
Cruelty inflicted by Christianity - Watch Constantine's
Sword movie - By Oren Jacoby. Refer to Documentaries - The
Holy Inquisition – History Channel
and Secret
Files of the Inquisition – PBS. Watch
video - Church's
Inquisition -Torturing Those Who Disagreed (1 of 6).
Refer
to Index
of Forbidden Books
and
Mexican
Inquisition
Refer to
'Goa
Inquisition was most merciless and cruel'
and
An account of the Inquisition at
Goa, in India -
By
Gabriel Dellon, Archibald Bower
***
During the torture the only words to be addressed to the
accused were “Tell the truth.” The notary faithfully recorded
all that passed, even to the shrieks of the victim, his despairing
ejaculations and his piteous appeals for mercy or to be put to
death, nor would it be easy to conceive anything more fitted to
excite the deepest compassion than these cold-blooded matter of
fact reports.
The Manual of Regulations provided that ordinarily the
‘torture of pole’ (pulleys) should be administered but where
the physician or surgeon feels that on account of weakness or
indisposition the accused could not stand it, ‘the torture of
potro; may be given.
The Inquisition at different times and places made use of a
variety of other forms of torture also. Referring to the forms of
torture used by the Inquisition, E T
Whittington, writes as follows:
“As to the torture itself, it combined all that the
ferocity of savages and the ingenuity of civilized man had till
then invented. Besides the ordinary rack, thumb-screws, and leg
crushers or Spanish boots, there were spiked wheels over which the
victims were drawn with weights on their feet; boiling oil was
poured over their legs, burning sulphur dropped on their bodies,
and lighted candles held beneath their armpits.”
Alexandre
Herculano,
a famous writer of the 19th century, mentioned in his “Fragment
about the Inquisition”: “...The terrors inflicted
on pregnant women made them abort....Neither the beauty or
decorousness of the flower of youth, nor the old age, so worthy of
compassion in a woman, exempted the weaker sex from the brutal
ferocity of the supposed defenders of the religion....”
“...There were days when seven or eight were submitted to
torture. These scenes were reserved for the inquisitors after
dinner. It was a post-prandial entertainment. Many a time
during those acts, the inquisitors compared notes in the
appreciation of the beauty of the human form. While the unlucky
damsel twisted in the intolerable pains of torture, or fainted in
the intensity of the agony, one inquisitor applauded the angelic
touches of her face, another the brightness of her eyes, another,
the volluptuous contours of her breast, another the shape of her
hands. In this conjuncture, men of blood transformed themselves
into real artists !!”
(source:
History
of the Origin and Establishment of the Inquisition in in Portugal
1926 - By Alexandre
Herculano).
Scholars are generally agreed that
the Inquisition of Goa had earned “a sinister renown as the most
pitiless in Christendom.”
The story of the Inquisition in Goa is a dismal record of
callousness and cruelty, tyranny and injustice, espionage and
blackmail, avarice and corruption, repression of thought and
culture and promotion of obscurantism.
(source:
The
Goa Inquisition - By Anant Kakba Priolkar p. ix -
57).
Refer
to The
Myth of Saint Thomas and the Mylapore Shiva Temple.Refer to Jesus
Christ: Artifice for Aggression - By Sita Ram Goel.
Refer
to QuickTime trailer and Part One of the film The
God Awful Truth. Refer
to World Conquering Creeds - By Dr.
Koenraad Elst - chapter on Glimpses
XVI
Refer
to Columbus,
The Indians, and Human Progress
- By Howard Zinn
 Arthur
Schopenhauer (1788-1860),
German philosopher and writer. He was one of the greatest philosophers of the
19th century. He was the first Western philosopher to have access to
translations of philosophical material from India, both Vedic and Buddhist, by
which he was profoundly affected. Counted among his disciples are such thinkers
as Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, as well as Sigmund Freud, who takes a large part
of his psychological theory from the writings of Schopenhauer.
He comments on the
atrocities inflicted on the Hindus:
"...on
the fanaticism and endless persecutions, the religious wars, that sanguinary
frenzy of which the ancient had no conception! Think of the crusades, a butchery
lasting two hundred years and inexcusable, its war cry 'It is lasting two
hundred years and inexcusable, its war cry 'It is the will of God,'
Think of the orgies of blood, the inquisitions, the heretical tribunals, the
bloody and terrible conquests...in three continents, or....in America, whose
inhabitants were for the most part, not looked upon as human! And above
all, don't lets forget India, the
cradle of the human race, or at least of that part of it to which we belong,
where first.. were most cruelly infuriated against the adherents of the original
faith of mankind. The destruction or disfigurement of the ancient temples and
idols, a lamentable, mischievous and barbarous act still bear witness to the
monotheistic fury...carried on from Mahmud, the
Gahaznevid of cursed memory, down to Aurengzeb,
the fratricide, whom the Portuguese...have zealously imitated by destruction of
temples and the auto defe of the Inquisition of Goa..."For the sake of
truth, I must add that the fanatical enormities perpertrated in the name of
religion are only to be put down to the adherents of monotheistic creeds...We
hear nothing of the kind in the case of the Hindoos and Buddhists."
(source: The
Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer - By T.
Bailey Saunders p. 1 - 42). Refer
to World Conquering Creeds - By Dr. Koenraad Elst
- chapter on Glimpses
XVI
Missionary Oath:
 Missionaries
had to take an oath which enjoined them, “to be loyal to
Portugal in all the countries discovered or to
be discovered, conquered or to be conquered, by Portugal. And
to warn Portugal of any activity which may be contemplated against her”.
The British prescribed
a similar oath: “I include in this promise exact obedience to any rules laid
down by His Majesty’s representatives, and also an undertaking to refrain from
doing, saying or writing anything either publicly or privately, to the prejudice
of the British Government in India.”
K. M. Pannikar
author of Asia
and Western Dominance
published in 1953. Panikkar’s
study was primarily aimed at providing a survey of Western imperialism in Asia
from CE 1498 to 1945. Christian missions came into the picture simply
because he found them arrayed always and everywhere alongside Western gunboats,
diplomatic pressures, extraterritorial rights and plain gangsterism. Contemporary
records consulted by him could not but cut to size the inflated images of
Christian heroes such as Francis Xavier and Matteo Ricci. They were found
to be not much more than minions employed by European kings and princes scheming
to carve out empires in the East. Their methods of trying to convert kings
and commoners in Asia, said Panikkar, were force or fraud or conspiracy and
morally questionable in every instance. Finding that “missionary
activities… which became so prominent a feature of European relations with
Asia were connected with Western political supremacy in Asia and synchronised
with it” He concluded: “It may indeed be said that
the most serious, persistent and planned effort of European nations in the
nineteenth century was their missionary activities in India and
China, where a large-scale attempt was made to effect a
mental and spiritual conquest at supplementing the political
authority already enjoyed by Europe. Though the results were
disappointing in the extreme from the missionary point of new, this
assault on the spiritual foundations of Asian countries has had far-reaching
consequences in the religious and social reorganization of the people…”
(source: Vindicated
by Time: The
Niyogi Committee Report On Christian Missionary Activities
- By
Sita Ram Goel). Refer
to The
Myth of Saint Thomas and the Mylapore Shiva Temple
For interesting information about
Democracy in Ancient Indian
please refer to chapter on Hindu
Culture II
The British rule
often claim to have given India - Democracy. If
so, Why did it take
200 years to give India Democracy?
For more read:
Democracy
in Ancient India
- By
Steve
Muhlberger
St. Francis Xavier
wrote from Cochin on 20 Jan. 1548 to
King John
III of Portugal,
" You must declare as
plainly as possible ......that the only way of escaping your wrath and obtaining
your favor is to make as many Christians as possible in the countries over which
they rule.' (source"
Macnicol, The Living Religions of India
1934 p. 268. )
Vasco da Gama
told
the first Indians he met on the Malabar coast that he came to seek "Christians
and spices."
***
Eminent Indian Historians? (excerpts)
http://www.indiastar.com/wallia19.html
Included as principals in this group of Marxist
historians are Romila Thapar, Satish Chandra, K.M. Shrimali, K. M. Pannikar, R. S. Sharma, D. N.
Jha, Gyanendra Pandey, and Irfan Habib. This group has, Shourie charges,
"worked a diabolic inversion: the inclusive religion [Hinduism], the
pluralist spiritual search of our people and land, they have projected as
intolerant, narrow-minded, obscurantist; and the exclusivist, totalitarian,
revelatory religions and ideologies -- Islam, Christianity, Marxism-Leninism--
they have made out to be the epitome of tolerance, open-mindedness, democracy,
secularism!" By promoting each other's publications and puffing up their
reputations, this group has long been "determining what is politically
correct." (note: Romila Thapar is totally ignorant of Sanskrit,
though it has not stopped her from posing as an authority on Vedic
India! In fact, a recent newspaper column by a
retired bureaucrat — which reads like a paid advertisement — goes on to call
her ‘India’s most eminent historian’!)
For several decades, these "eminent historians" have striven hard to
continually denigrate Hindu cultural history,
the oldest surviving civilization in the world, by "blackening the Hindu
period and whitewashing the Islamic period." Indeed, Arun Shourie should
have challenged them to refute American historian Will
Durant's assertion in his The Story of
Civilization: "The Islamic conquest of India is probably the bloodiest
story in history. It is a discouraging tale, for its evident moral is that
civilization is a precious good, whose delicate complex and freedom can at any
moment be overthrown by barbarians invading from without and multiplying from
within." Or that of French historian Alain
Danielou's statement, in his Histoire
de l' Inde : "From the time Muslims
started arriving, around 632 AD, the history of India becomes a long, monotonous
series of murders, massacres, spoilations, destructions. It is, as usual, in the
name of 'a holy war' of their faith, of their sole God, that the barbarians have
destroyed civilizations, wiped out entire races."
The largely Marxist
membership of the Indian Council of Historical
Research appointed by the socialistic Congress
party, which was in power for nearly all of the fifty years since independence,
was reconstituted in July 1998 by the Bharatiya Janata Party, currently ruling
at the center. Unfortunately, it will take a
long time for undoing the harm done by the Marxist historians to the Indian
psyche: "they have used these institutions to sow in the minds of our
people [the Hindus] the seeds of self-hatred."
***
According
to columnist, Meenakshi Jain: "Leftist historians in India have
deliberately omitted in
the entire discussion on the Delhi Sultanate, the words dhimmi and (hated)
jaziya tax are deliberately omitted, though they are crucial to understanding
the dynamics of that epoch. Overlooking
all forms of Hindu persecution, the book states that Brahmins and ulema were
equally permitted to propagate their respective faiths. References to the
infamous 'pilgrimage tax' are conveniently dropped.
The
Mughal period, too, is selectively purged of its unpleasant facets. Akbar's
early measures like the re-naming of Hindu holy cities, the imposition of the
jaziya and forced conversions are ignored, as also the fact that as much as
seventy percent of his nobility consisted of foreign Muslims. The limited Hindu
participation in the upper echelons of the nobility (besides the Rajputs, just
four other Hindus) is not alluded to."
(source: Selective Memory - By Meenakshi Jain -
Hindustan Times, May
8, 2001).
Refer
to QuickTime trailer and Part One of the film
The
God Awful Truth.
***
Books Used for this Chapter:
1. Asia
and Western Dominance - By K. M.
Panikkar
2.
The
Case for India - By Will Durant
3. India
in Bondage: Her Right to Freedom - Jabez T. Sunderland
4. The
Raj Syndrome: A Study in Imperial Perceptions - By Suhash Chakravarty
5.
The
Goa Inquisition - By Anant Kakba Priolkar
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