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Oct-19-2007
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Ever since Friedrich Max Muller’s effort in translating the Vedas, with a desire to "change the fate of India and the growth of millions of souls’, and an objective of "uprooting all that has sprung from it during the last 3000 years’, the western world has relentlessly worked to undermine Indian culture and civilization and continue to do so even today. Starting from the creation of the myth of the nomadic Aryans invading India and writing the Vedas, to the concoction of the Indo-European originality of the Sanskrit language to the current attempts to dissociate yoga from Hinduism and create "Christian yoga’, the colonialists have tried to plagiarize the glories of the Indus – Saraswati civilization. On the other hand, they seldom fail to miss a chance to humiliate or discredit India and Hinduism and will go any length to create an opportunity to do so even when none exist.
As an Indian and specially a Hindu, one feels a sense of disgust at the numerous publications that comes out in western media and even western-owned Indian media, whose main theme seems to be India bashing and Hindu denigration. The western tunnel vision prevents them from thinking, writing or publishing anything different about a country which houses one-sixth of the world population and is the only continuous civilization lasting over 5000 years or about a religion which is the third largest with over 900 million followers worldwide. It does not matter even if it is the largest democracy, a projected economic superpower with the second largest pool of engineers and scientists, a country united despite the diversity of its population, which speaks over 18 major languages and consists of believers of all the world religions. Indians and Hindus have been "complimented’ before for their poverty, illiteracy, savagery and above all their caste based social system, thanks to the British imperial rule. After all, the British had to give something back for the successful "loot’ of over a trillion dollar (in today’s value), that transformed India from a producer of about 25 percent of world GDP in 1750, to only 2 percent in 1900 and funded the British Industrial revolution. Those 190 years of "benevolent’ British rule, left India with 20 million famine-related deaths, a literacy rate of 11% (1947) and a life expectancy of 25yrs (1921). (After sixty years of independence, India now has a literacy percentage of 67% and an average life expectancy of 65 years).
None of the imperial gifts from the colonial era, however, compare to the destruction of the social and cultural system of the country, based on their divide and rule principles along the line of religion and caste. One of the favorite topics of western concern is the "plight of lower castes’ in India. For people who care to know, there is ample evidence that the ancient "varna’ system of the Vedic Hindus (later termed caste by the colonial regime) was once an essential part of the Indian society, based, not by birth but by occupation and vocational skills, that kept the civilization going for over 5000 years. "Caste-ism’ or caste discrimination, as seen over the last few centuries, is acknowledged in India as a degenerated socio-politically motivated system and has been declared illegal in modern India. The ills of contemporary Indian society (poverty, caste, etc.), which were exacerbated in part due to centuries long foreign occupation, exploitation and domination, are conveniently blamed primarily on Hindu religion. It has been used to justify Christian proselytizing and domination over the Indian populace and continues to be the case today. It is the greatest hypocrisy on God’s earth that the spiritually destitute western civilization, despite its record of slave trade and colonialism, holocaust and apartheid, keeps on trying to civilize and liberate the whole world and promises "equality for all’.
Conversion to Christianity does not seem to eradicate caste prejudice in India any more than it eliminates racial separation in the US as evidenced by the need for English-speaking African-Americans and Hispanics of Christian faith to maintain separate places of worship? The Dalit (a term coined during the British era) Christians, who account for over 70% of the 25 million Christians in India, have been largely converted by exploitation, coercion and the false hopes of egalitarian status but still suffer from the same segregation, oppression and discrimination, only now at the hands of their fellow Christians of the upper castes. Conversion into the new faith has not redeemed them from the stigma of untouchablity. Indian society understands its responsibility of bringing the lower castes and Dalits back into mainstream and have thus approved the reservation for Dalits, overriding the principle of “equality of opportunity” enshrined in the Constitution to recognize and compensate the Dalits for their earlier oppression. Despite a slower than desirable progress again due to sociopolitical reasons, in sixty years of independence, democratic India has already had a Dalit person as President and Chief Justice. It is worth remembering that such charitable disposition is rare to be shown by the white Christians towards the nonwhite Christians in America. The money, manpower and effort spent by the western world, in the sinister design of dividing the Dalits and uprooting them from their age old religious and social traditions, may better be spent in their own land to uplift their own people.
Within the Indian Christian community, it is the usual practice that a Dalit Christian has minimal say in the leadership and control, has minimal access to education (despite a wide network of Christian missionary schools and colleges), job opportunities and entrepreneurship development. Even in the local church communities, controlled by Christians of the "upper castes’, Dalit Christians often have separate entries, separate place to sit, separate cups at the Eucharistic celebration, separate communion rails, and even separate cemeteries. Thus ends the Christian promise of equality, human dignity and egalitarian status through conversion.
Mahatma Gandhi once compared the book, "Mother India’ by Katherine Mayo (1927) to a "drain inspectors report’ because of the filthy representation of India. Today’s western experts on India and Hindu society, true to their imperial heritage, continue to produce more editions, on the same theme, oblivious to the truth and their own dirty hands. Interestingly, such a view of India has never been shared by the towering icons of American civilization - Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman or the giants of science such as Einstein or Oppenheimer. William Durant, American philosopher, historian and writer wrote a century ago, “It is true that even across the Himalayan barrier India has sent to us such unquestionable gifts as grammar and logic, philosophy and fables, hypnotism and chess, and above all our numerals and our decimal system. But these are not the essence of her spirit; they are trifles compared to what we may learn from her in the future.”
While Christianity’s popularity seems to wane in the west and while the Pope frantically calls to re-Christianize Europe and evangelize Asia, it is noticeable that Hindu beliefs and spiritual practice are silently attracting more and more people worldwide without ever an attempt of proselytization. Despite the denial to acknowledge their Hindu origin, concepts of ahimsa, yoga, meditation, pranayam, karmaand reincarnation are common topics of discussion and practice in the west today. Indians and Hindus over centuries have been known to be pluralistic, tolerant and peace loving and have given shelter to the Syrian Christians, Jews and Zoroastrians centuries ago and to the Buddhist Dalai Lama in recent times. In today’s world, endangered geopolitically from the ongoing clashes of religions and faiths, Hinduism"s ancient wisdom of "Vasudhev Kutumbkam’, that the whole world is a family and that in spite of diversity, all life is sacred and all souls, irrespective of the sinners and the believers, are part of the one "Brahman’, may be the need of the day. In this context it is worth reminding the words of Arnold Toynbee, the British historian, "it is already becoming clear that a chapter which had a western beginning will have to have an Indian ending if it is not to end in the self-destruction of the human race….in the 21st century, as religion captures the place of technology, it is possible that India, the conquered, will conquer its conquerors.”
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