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

V.SUNDARAM I.A.S.

Front cover of the book

In Chapter III titled “History of Indian History Writing’ Professor Makkhan Lal and Professor Rajendra Dixit. have clearly pointed out that the planned and diabolic distortion, manipulation and misrepresentation of Indian History became one of the main planks of Colonial State Policy from the beginning of the 19th century. Indian history started being looked down upon, and devilish denigrations and deliberate distortions began because of political and racial considerations and an upsurge of racial superiority complex among the British, in particular and Europeans in general. Thus the attitude of British Indo-Mania reflected in the writings of John Holwell, Nathaniel Halhead and Alexander Dow on the one hand and French Indo-Mania reflected in the writings of Voltaire, Pierre de Sonnerate and J.Michelet gave way to a malicious and virulent attitude of Indo-Phobia with the beginning of the 19th century.

Thomas Trautman

Here the words of THOMAS TRAUTMANN are very relevant: “British Indo-Mania did not die of natural causes. It was killed off. The Indo-Phobia that became the norm in early 19th century Britain was constructed by Evangelicalism and Utilitarianism and its chief architects were Charles Grant and James Mill. British Indo-Phobia was above all, a deliberate attack upon the built-up structure of a just and fair treatment of Indian History; it was devised to oppose it and destroy it”.

According to Professor Makkhan Lal and Professor Rajendra Dixit, a search for the roots of systematic distortion of Indian History during the last 200 years began with the establishment of the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1784, which contributed towards the writing of Indian History in a deliberately twisted and mischievous way.

It was an intellectual conspiracy between the British Civil Servants, British Missionaries and British Indologists to run down the cultural heritage of India. Many European scholars and Christian Missionaries got worried and disillusioned when the greatness of India’s past started becoming known in a wide-spread manner in Europe and elsewhere, and when Indian Philosophy, Logic and Writings on such things as the Origin of the Universe, Human Life and the Age of the World started gaining general acceptance. For 1500 years, much of Europe had accepted the Old Testament as the final statement documenting the history of human beings.

A missionary and a noted oriental scholar and historian Rev. THOMAS MAURICE (1754-1824) was shocked over the general European appreciation for and acceptance of India’s past, its philosophy, logic etc. He was totally prejudiced against Hindu Cosmogony, Hindu religion and Hindu Culture. Reverend Maurice wrote in 1812 about “The daring assumptions of certain sceptical French philosophers with respect to the Age of the World.....argument principally founded on the high assumptions of the Brahmins.....which have a direct tendency to overturn the MOSAIC SYSTEM, and, with it, CHRISTIANITY”.

Scholars like Rev. Thomas Maurice were very worried about the increasing trend of questioning the Biblical story of Creation. Bishop Usher had calculated that the Universe was created at 9 am (British Colonial Breakfast Time!!) on 23 October 4004 BC and that the Great Flood took place in 2349 BC. These dates and creation stories were facing the threat of being proved wrong in the face of Indian belief which talked in terms of the 4 YUGAS and several hundred million years. This threatened the very foundations of the Christian Faith.

It was in such an environment of open threat to the Christian faith that Sir William Jones came to India as an employee of the East India Company in December 1783. He took up his position as a Judge in the High Court of Judicature at Calcutta. It was he who established the Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal in January 1784. He wanted to study the Indian languages and literature vis-à-vis Christianity. William Jones’s concern was second to none. This will be clear from what he wrote in 1788: “Some intelligent and virtuous persons are inclined to doubt the authenticity of the accounts delivered by Moses…..either the first Eleven Chapters of Genisis are true or the whole fabric of our national religion is false, a conclusion which none of us, I trust, would wish to be drawn…I am obliged of course to believe the sanctity of venerable books of Genesis”.

Sir William Jones (1747-1794)

In this context, I fully share the views of a brilliant scholar Dr Radhasyam Brahmachari, M.Tech, Ph.D., now serving as a Professor in the Department of Applied Physics, University of Calcutta. Despite being a man of science, he is equally conversant with literary, historical and spiritual spheres, including Vedic philosophy, philosophies of other Indian schools and Western philosophy. At present, he is widely acclaimed as an outstanding authority on Comparative Religion. He says that a rational mind may ask–--Despite having so many older chronologies---why the shortest of them, the Christian chronology has been given the status of an international calendar? Why the 21st birth centenary of a person is to be observed as the 21st century of the entire world? Even if just a moment’s genuine thought is given to this matter, without any racial, regional, political, colonial, sectorial or religious prejudice and preconceptions, the Hindu calendar alone deserves the right to be treated as the calendar of the whole world, since it is the oldest and based entirely on astronomical science. So, it carries much more scientific sense in saying that we have entered the 52nd century of Kalyabda (from the beginning of the Kaliyuga) in 2009, than in saying that we have entered the 21st century of the Christian calendar in 2009.

We should not get deceived by the extravagantly lavish praise of the Sanskrit Language by Sir William Jones in his famous III Anniversary Discourse delivered in January 1786. He came to India with the main colonial aim of proving that the Genesis Chronology was correct and that it was corroborated by the traditional Brahminical sources. WITH THIS CROOKED AIM IN VIEW, SIR WILLIAM JONES RESORTED TO THE NEFARIOUS PRACTICE OF NARRATING THE CHRONOLOGICAL EVENTS DESCRIBED IN THE BIBLE AND THE PURANAS AS CORRESPONDING AND PARALLEL HAPPENINGS. EXACTLY FROM THIS POINT BEGAN THE WILFUL DISTORTION OF INDIAN HISTORY. From then on Indian History came to be seen as an appendage for the corroboration of the Genesis stories which had come under fire in the West due to the scientific discoveries and the confirmation of the higher antiquity for the existence of the Earth and the Universe, as described in Ancient Sanskrit literature.

Sir William Jones in his First Presidential Lecture on the topic of ‘On the Gods of Greece, Italy and India’ delivered at the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1794 laid out his scheme both in terms of religious semblance as well as the Mosaic Chronology vis-à-vis the Hindu faith, beliefs, customs and chronology. Sir William Jones said: “It is my design, in this essay, to point out such a resemblance between the popular worship of Old Greeks and Italians and that of Hindus”. But in practical colonial terms, he not only talked of “resemblance” between the Gods of two different worlds but also their chronology. Talking of the Deluge described in the Puranas and the First Incarnation of Bhagawan Vishnu, i.e., Matsya Purana, Jones stated as follows: “This epitome of the first Indian History ... though whimsically dressed up in the form of an allegory, seem to prove a primeval tradition of this country of Universal Deluge described by Moses and fixes consequently the time when the genuine Hindu Chronology actually begins. ... We may suspect that all the Fourteen Menus (Manus) are reducible to one, who was called NUH by the Arabs, and probably by the Hebrews, though we have distinguished his names by an improper pronunciation of it. Some mere relation between the 7th Menu (Manu) and the Grecian Minos may be inferred.”

In this very Paper, Jones came out with a typical Imperial and colonial declaration to the effect that to any layman it must be indubitable that their (Hindus) doctrine is in part borrowed from the opening of Genesis. In the beginning God created the Heavens and the Earth. And the Earth was void and waste ... and God said: “Let Lights Be..” and Light was. Let me quote the barbarous words of Jones here: “The sublimity of this passage is considerably diminished by the Indian paraphrase of it, with which Menu, the Son of Brahma, begins his address to the Sages on the Formation of the Universe”. In other words, according to Jones Hindu doctrine and Hindu mythology have been borrowed from the Genesis. Jones absurdly declared Lord Rama to be an imagined God — Dionysos — of Greeks, a God of wine and worldly pleasure, rather than an embodiment of idealism and virtue.

Finally in 1790, Jones concluded his researches by claiming to have “traced the foundation of the Indian empire above 3800 years from now”, that is to say, safely within the confines of Bishop Usher’s date of the Creation of the Universe in 4004 BC and more importantly, within the parameters of the Great Flood (The Deluge), which Jones considered to have occurred in 2350 BC.

In view of the growing concern of the Christian faithful, the Boden Professorship of Sanskrit was endowed by Joseph Colonel Boden at Oxford University in 1830 specifically to promote Sanskrit learning among the English so as to “to enable his countrymen to proceed in the conversion of the natives of India to the Christian religion”. Awards and prizes were specially given to literary works undermining the Indian tradition and religion. The first occupant of the Boden Chair in 1831 was Horace Hayman Wilson. Writing about a series of lectures he delivered, Wilson mentions that “these lectures were written to help candidates for a prize of Pounds Sterling 200 given by John Muir ... for the Best Refutation of the Hindu Religious System”.

I have already stated above that we should not get deceived by the extravagantly lavish praise of the Sanskrit Language by Sir William Jones in his famous III Anniversary Discourse delivered in January 1786. He came to India with the main colonial aim of proving that the Genesis Christian Chronology was correct and that it was corroborated by the traditional Brahminical sources. With this crooked aim in view, Jones resorted to the nefarious practice of narrating the chronological events described in the Bible and the Puranas as corresponding and parallel happenings. EXACTLY FROM THIS POINT BEGAN THE WILFUL DISTORTION OF INDIAN HISTORY by the criminal British Colonial rulers. Their natural spiritual heirs today are the Congressmen and the Communists

Sir William Jones effectively concealed his real intention to draw up or to redraw the chronology of ancient Indian history based on Bishop Usher’s date of the Creation of the Universe in 4004 BC and, more importantly within the parameters of the Great Flood, which geological incident Jones considered to have happened in 2350 BC. The following quotation from his writings will prove this point: “I propose to lay before you a concise history of Indian chronology extracted from Sanskrit books, attached to no system, and as much disposed to reject Moses’s history, if it be proved erroneous, as to believe it, if it be confirmed by sound reason from indubitable evidence”. 

Despite such assurances, Sir William Jones functioned clearly as a political colonial evangelist trying to Biblicise the chronology of Indian history in the most devious and diabolical manner like the smuggling of contraband opium like the drug mafia!

In 1790 he concluded his ‘researches’ by saying: “he had traced the foundations of the Indian Empire above 3800 years from now”.

Thomas Trautmann in his great book ‘Aryans and British India’ has exposed the gigantic intellectual, cultural, political, evangelical fraud on stilts of Sir William Jones as follows:

All of us can have a hearty post-colonial paganish heathenish joke by paying our humble third world tribute to the original creative imagination of Sir William Jones by referring to how Jones’ attempt at reconciliation of the story of the past in Sanskrit literature with a biblical narrative in accordance with a predetermined imperial colonial plan led him to the list of Vishnu’s ten avatars or “descents” into earthly forms to save the good from destruction by forces of evil. Jones’ imagination runs wild when he identifies the fish incarnation with the Biblical Flood, carrying Manu (the first human), his family and the seven sages (rishis) in a ship (the Ark of Noah)! God only knows why he chose to compare Narasimha with the Biblical Nimrod! In an outlandish way Jones compared King Ram, son of King Dasarath of Ayodhya with the Biblical Raamah, who was the son of Cush.

Assessing the impact of such colonial Indological works raised on a superstructure of contrived fraud and falsehood, Thomas Trautmann has beautifully concluded: “Jones in effect showed that Sanskrit literature is not an enemy but an ally of the Bible, supplying independent corroboration of Bible’s version of history. Jones’s chronological researches did manage to calm the waters somewhat and effectively guaranteed that the new admiration for Hinduism would reinforce Christianity and not work for its overthrow”.

Sir William Jones nefarious game plan for the chronology of Indian History

Sir William Jones died in 1794. By 1800, the British Indologists in India and England gave up once and for all their efforts to forge imagined similarities between the Indian Puranas and Gods and Goddesses on the one hand and Greeks and Roman on the other. Yet in keeping with the original pre-meditated plan of Sir William Jones, THE DUBIOUS CHRONOLOGY OF ANCIENT INDIAN HISTORY BASED ON THE BIBLE BECAME ESTABLISHED AS A BENCHMARK OF PERMANENT REFERENCE AND REMAINS SO EVEN TO THIS DAY.

In this context Professor Makkhan Lal and Professor Rajendra Dixit have concluded that this Indian chronological framework fixed by Jones with reference to the Bible and based on Bishop Usher’s framework of the Genesis Chronology became an impregnable fortress and remains so even today. I can very easily prove this point with irrefutable documentary evidence. When the Government of India issued a postage stamp to commemorate the 250th birth anniversary of Sir William Jones on 28-09-1997, in the postal pamphlet issued on that day it has been clearly printed as follows: “Jone’s paper ‘on the chronology of the Hindus’ presented to the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1788 is the first known attempt to draw up a comprehensive chronology of ancient India”. In short, even today the Genesis chronology of Sir William Jones continues to hold sway so that no Vedic or Brahminical thought is able to disturb the Mosaic (of Moses) chronology, irrespective of what geology, palaeo-biology, astrophysics, and palaeontology etc say about the origins and chronology of the universe, earth, human beings etc

The most important factor that contributed to the distortion of ancient Indian history was the British imperial interest in India. By 1804 a marked shift in British attitude towards India had taken place. After the defeat of the French forces in the Carnatic and the gradual weakening of the Maharatta power in the West, the British had become confident of their permanent rule in India. The top British authorities in Indian and London were very worried about the fact that the British civilians coming to India were getting ‘Brahminised’ and developing an inferiority complex.

Professor Makkhan Lal and Professor Rajendra Dixit have indicated that in order to overcome this problem and to inculcate a superiority complex in the British officers in relation to the Indian culture they adopted a two-pronged strategy. First these officers were made to study the six volumes on the History of India written by James Mill (1773-1836) between 1806 and 1818. Mill never visited India and he had no idea of any Indian language. He divided Indian history into three periods — Hindu period, Muslim period and British period. Like the Marxists and pseudo-secularists of today, Mill presented an extremely denigrating picture of the Hindu period. He condemned every institution, idea and action of that period. He held the Hindus responsible for all the ills of that the country had been beset with. These history volumes of Mill were prescribed as text books in the Haileybury School in England which was established by the English East India Company to educate and train young Englishmen coming to India as administrators and civil servants.

As a sample let us hear the scorching, biting, poisonous and vicious words of James Mill against the Hindus: “The same insincerity, mendacity and the perfidy; the same indifference to the feelings of others; the same prostitution and venality ... our ancestors however, though rough, were sincere; but under the glossing exterior of the Hindu lies a general disposition to deceit and perfidy. In fine, it cannot be doubted that, up on the whole, the Gothic nations, as soon as they became a settled people, exhibit the mark of the superior character and civilization to those of the Hindus.” Based on this premise of James Mill, the bloody Congress party under Maulana Nehru has raised the fraudulent superstructure of anti-Hinfu, Pro-Christian and Pan-Islamic Secular India after our Independence. The Hindus in majority have become stateless citizens in their own homeland. The terrorist Muslims and the Sly Christians have become the most favoured citizens of the Sonia emasculated UPA II non-Government today.

So the history books of James Mill shaped the minds and hearts of British civil servants and other authorities in India from 1804 to 1835. In 1835 Macaulay system of English education became the rule in India. In these columns, I have already given innumerable examples from the writing of Lord Macaulay to show that he had nothing but contempt and hatred for the Hindus of India and their great heritage. Even Mountstuart Elphinstone (1779-1859), the Governor of Bombay, was not far behind James Mill and Lord Macaulay in denigrating India in his ‘History of India’ in 1841. 

Friedrich Max Mueller is rated to be one of the most famous Sanskritists of the 19th century. Most pseudo-secular Indians, essentially ignorant about the scriptures of the Hindu religion and Dharma (even very proud of their ignorance in this regard like Pandit Nehru!) and yet fundamentally anti-Hindu in their conception and perception, wax eloquent on the writings of Max Mueller on Hindu religion and Hindu philosophy with out realising the fact that he was working as a covert evangelical agent of the English East India Company in India. Though many of his writings are camouflaged with incredible ingenuity in praise of Hindu religion, philosophy and literature, their real nature and purpose can be understood better in the light of his private correspondence with his family members, several British officials and missionaries.

This is what he wrote to his wife in 1866 regarding his monumental work of editing 50 volumes of ‘Sacred Books of the East’ “I feel convinced, though I shall not live to see it, that this edition of mine and the translation of the VEDA, will herein after tell a great extent on the fate of India and on the growth of millions of souls in the country. It is the root of the religion and to show them what the root is, I feel secure, is the only way of uprooting of all that has sprung from it during the last three thousand years.” No.10 Janpath in New Delhi is operating today as the operational headquarters for giving final shape to this dastardly dream of Max Mueller for giving a death blow to Hinduism and Sanatana Dharma in India.

Two years later in 1868, Max Mueller wrote to the Duke of Argyll, the then Secretary of State of India: “The ancient religion of India is doomed, and if Christianity does not step in, whose fault will it be.” He wrote to Dr Milman, Dean of St Paul, on February 26, 1867: “I have myself the strongest belief in the growth of Christianity in India. There is no other country so ripe for Christianity as India.” Firangi Memsahib and her extended family and Congress slaves have come to the same conclusion today about the glorious future of proselytizing Christianity in India.

Max Mueller was not alone in writing this type of history and desiring to “uproot” all Hindu traditions from this soil. Monier-Williams, famous for his Sanskrit-English and English-Sanskrit Dictionaries, and a Boden Professor of Sanskrit at Oxford, wrote in 1879: “When the walls of the mighty fortress of Brahminism (Hinduism) are encircled, undermined and finally stormed by the SOLDIERS OF THE CROSS, the victory of Christianity must be single and complete.”