ENGLISH EDUCATION TO DESTROY TIMELESS BHARAT’S NATIONAL HINDU IDENTITY-I

 

V.SUNDARAM I.A.S.

The most potent and powerful instrument of education — Primary, Secondary and Higher Education — has been viciously abused by the Government of India and all the State Governments after our independence only to deface, deny and destroy the spiritual, religious and cultural identity — nay, soul — of Bharatvarsha. This irrefutable fact has been clearly brought out in bold relief in a graphic and telling manner by two brilliant authors Professor Makhan Lal and Professor Rajendra Dixit in their outstanding book titled ‘EDUCATING TO CONFUSE AND DISRUPT: Defiling History and Education System of India’. I can see that both of them are great patriots dedicated to the service of Bharat Mata, in the age-old tradition of Sanatana Dharma envisioned by Sri Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, Swami Vivekananda and Sri Aurobindo.

FRONT COVER OF THE BOOK

This book has been published by India First Foundation, New Delhi. This great publishing house is rendering unmatched and unsurpassed national service in the field of publishing great books bringing out all facets of Bharatvarsha’s eternal heritage and how it is under a planned siege by the inimical and anti-national forces of Macaulayism, Marxism, Mullaism, Missionaryism and Nehruvian pseudo-secularism, with the full political and official support of the government of India today.

I have no doubt that the famous American woman historian Barbara Tuchman (1912-1989) had great books like the ones brought out by India First Foundation when she wrote as follows about the revolutionary impact of books on human culture and civilization: “Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. Without books, the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are agents of change, windows on the world, ‘lighthouses’ (as a poet said) ‘erected in the sea of time’. They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind. Books are humanity in print.” 

PROFESSOR MAKKHAN LAL

I have been greatly inspired by the grand vision which animates the India First Foundation in all their magnificent publishing efforts. According to their Vision Statement, the timeless stream of Indian civilization has been viciously obstructed and impeded during the last several centuries and more particularly from the days of Arab conquest of Sindh in 712 AD. A very significant fact that is often ignored is that Indian civilization rooted in Sanatana Dharma struggled and survived through the fiery storm of Islamic and European invasion which had blown other nations and civilizations to smithereens. Great Rishis, Mahatmas and other intellectuals of Bharatvarsha, starting from the first quarter of the nineteenth century, made Herculean efforts to revive, revitalise and reassert the voice and soul of our ancient heritage which in the fullness of time created a new national and political awakening, ultimately leading to the attainment of our freedom from the British COLONIAL yoke on 15 August 1947.

PROFESSOR RAJENDRA DIXIT

Professor Rajendra Dixit has served as Professor of English and Head of Department of Education and Dean (Co-ordination) in NCERT, New Delhi. He played a key part in the formulation and framing of National Curriculum Framework for School Education – 2000 (NCFSE) and the preparation of new Textbooks of NCERT from 1999 to 2004. Poetry, language education and teacher education are his main interests.

These two outstanding scholars belonging to two different disciplines have made an interdisciplinary approach to the study of evolution of educational system in India both before and after independence. The adjective interdisciplinary is most often used in educational circles when researchers from two or more disciplines pool their approaches and modify them so that they are better suited to the problem at hand.

All countries which have suffered under the tyranny of colonization or alien political subjugation have had a similar experience — total destruction of their local national system of education, languages, cultural icons, social values, faiths and beliefs, denigration of their past and the wholesale negation of their achievements and glories. Here the words of these two authors are very appropriate: “Whenever some part of India was grabbed by the Muslim invaders, the educational institutions and religious establishments of the land became their victims. The destruction of the educational institutions like Takshashila, Nalanda, Udantpuri and Vikram Shila is too well known to recount here. The dastardly destruction of temples and renowned seats of learning, the imposition of discriminating taxes like the Jazia and the forced choice between the conversion to Islam and cruel executions did certainly dampen the spirit of non-Muslims and demoralized the society in general. However, the indomitable soul of India, by and large, remained alive even under the threat of the sword”.

The same sentiments have been echoed by Sri M. R Vaghela in the Hindu Voice, UK; “Ancient faiths like Buddhism and Zoroasterism were almost obliterated from the Middle East, Central Asia and India but the Hindus rose in defiance to emerge even stronger at the end of the blood soaked millennia.”

A death blow to the traditional gurukula system of education in India was given by the British colonial rulers starting from the second decade of the 19th century. Lord Macaulay defined the purpose of the new education system in 1835 in his famous Minute on Education: “Our aim is to create a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect”. This was achieved through the introduction of ENGLISH as the MEDIUM of higher education to begin with and this was later extended to both primary and secondary education.

Alongside the introduction of English as a medium of education, the British also simultaneously launched a policy offensive for the complete mental enslavement of the Indian population, denigration and destruction of our country’s history and our native culture, customs, temple traditions, literary and scientific achievements and the like. English educated Indians were strategically used at various levels to proclaim the superiority of British culture, customs and achievements. These cleverly brainwashed, State-favoured Indians were encouraged to ape and emulate the British and look down upon their own countrymen, their own society and their own religion and culture. Such toadies of the British Raj, including the converts to Christianity, were made to feel ashamed of their own hoary past and deride it with gusto. The same policy has been continued by the Congress government of India ever since our independence. The convent educated pseudo-secular Indians are even today ashamed of their national Hindu heritage.

The Patriot-Saint of India, Swami Vivekananda (1863-1902) had clearly indicated this possibility at a public meeting in Madras in 1897: “Shall India die? Then from the world all spirituality will be extinct, all moral perfection will be extinct, all sweet – souled sympathy for religion will be extinct; and in its place will reign the duality of lust and luxury as the male and female deities, with money as its priest, fraud, force and competition its ceremonies, and human soul its sacrifice.”

Professor Makhan Lal and Professor Rajendra Dixit have rightly concluded: “It was with the help of the servile fidelity of these natives that the British ruled over India. Against this backdrop, there developed in the country an education system that was totally devoid of all social, moral and ethical values. It had little concern for and accountability towards, the nation and the native populace. India’s history and heritage were unscrupulously defiled in the new system. The country’s glorious achievements in the realms of science, literature, philosophy and education were either completely written off or distorted beyond recognition. The beginning of the 20th century did, of course, witness some systematic attempts to correct the things and project a clear picture before the nation, but because of the alien control over the policies, programmes and the administration, these efforts failed to go far. Then, it was legitimately hoped that political freedom would ensure the country’s freedom from its education system as well and the ultimate emergence of its glorious history, rich with numerous accounts of achievements of crucial importance”.

Let me now come to the book on national-soul-destroying system of Indian education today, authored by Professor Makhan Lal and Professor Rajendra Dixit. Professor Makhan Lal is an archaeologist and historian of world repute. He has taught in Banaras Hindu University and Aligarh Muslim University. He was the first Charles Wallace Fellow in Cambridge University and Senior Fellow at Clare Hall. Later he became the Founder Director of Delhi Institute of Heritage Research and Management. He has written 9 books and more than 110 research papers.