Inventing the Dravidian Race Part - 3, Appropriation of Shiva, excerpts from the book 'Breaking India'

Protestant missionaries in the beginning attacked Saiva Siddhanta vehemently, the American Missionary Seminary in Sri Lanka used a Tamil English journal called the Morning Star (1841) to launch an attack on Saivites, calling Tamils barbarians living in darkness.  This attack proved counterproductive, caused much angst among the people for the Christian disrespect towards a cherished tradition. The attack was also effectively countered by a Sri Lankan Saivite Arumuga Navalar. Therefore the strategy changed from denigration to appropriation. 

G.U. Pope used this strategy very often, whenever he found something suitable and in line with his Christian belief he attributed it to Christian influence on Tamils and whenever he found something not fitting into his Christian belief and dogma, he blamed it on Hinduism. He states:

It will be seen how very near in some not unimportant respects the Saiva system approximates to Christianity; and yet some of the corruption to which it has been led by what almost seems a necessity are months the most deplorable superstitions anywhere to be found.

Later Christian missionaries started using this strategy to start portraying Saiva Siddhantha closer to Christianity. This missionary success in selectively appropriating and spreading confusion has permeated academic Tamil studies ever since.

Source:

Breaking India by Rajiv Malhotra and Arvindan Neelakandan

Inventing the Dravidian Race Part - 2, De-Hinduising Tamil Traditions excerpts from the book 'Breaking India'

Since colonial times to this day there has been attempts to construct an ethnic-religious identity separate from the rest of India, and to find christian roots for this so-called 'Tamil religion'. This entailed manipulating  the interpretations of the literary core of Tamil tradition, which consists of three main elements: 

i) Thirukural, a classical Tamil text containing ethical literature that is very much a part of the Indian Smriti tradition; 

ii) Saiva Siddhantha, a Vedanta branch of Saiva philosophy; and

iii) A huge body of classical Tamil devotional literature.

 


Thirukural

As per recorded statements of Robert Caldwell, the so called saviour of the Tamil people noted on number of occasions that nothing ethical or civilised could come out of the Dravidian mind, either by itself or under the influence of the Vedic religion. But at the same time he did not want to credit Vedic tradition, so he chose another source. He attributed Thirukural to Jainism. Even if for a moment this is believed to be true, Caldwell in his attempt to create fake origins and sources forgot that Jainism is also part of the Vedic religious system which in effect puts the Thirukural within the Hindu tradition. At any rate Caldwell's claims have been demolished. G.U Pope another missionary maintained that Thiruvalluvar was under Christian influence (St. Thomas) that produced this literary work. This claim for decades has been rejected even from within the christian missionary community. However, it is being revived today by evangelical movements in Tamil Nadu.

Saiva Siddhantha

Dravidian scholars labour to position Saiva Siddhantha as something unique to Tamil spirituality and not linked to Hinduism although the traditional works of Saiva Siddhantha refers to Vedas as their authority. G.U Pope and other missionaries positioned it as a monotheistic approximation of Christianity but not exactly pure Christianity. They then attempted to hoodwink people into believing that they were following a polluted form of Christianity and they could help people in upgrading to pure Christianity via conversion.

Tamil Devotional Literature

All hymns written in Tamil speak of Siva as living in the Himalayas and even address him as 'Arya'. Evangelist and pro Dravidian scholars fabricated the origins and distorted the interpretations of their contents to suite their agendas.

Chrisitian historian Stephen Neill rejects Pope and Caldwell's fraudulent claim with a tone of empathy: 'Their brilliant imagination has produced a beautiful romance. The sober verdict of historical judgment must be that any Christian influence on Tamil literature is unlikely...what we see is devout minds working on similar problems and arriving independently at comparable results'.

Source:

Breaking India by Rajiv Malhotra and Aravindan Neelakandan  

'Atrocity Literature' British colonial policies, excerpts from the book Breaking India

If the nation state were severely undermined in its external capacity to deal with other forces, the result could invite invasions, re-colonisation, cultural and psychological imperialism, and other unwanted intervention. This has happened numerous times in India's history; for instance, when the British used human-rights cases as pretexts to act against many Indian rulers.

Ironically, the British themselves committed many horrible acts while justifying them by compiling what is known as Atrocity Literature* to depict the savagery of Indians. They claimed that for their own acts were designed to help bring about civilisation for Indians. Here are some examples:

• The Criminal Tribes Act was passed in 1871 and made it lawful to perform genocide against a list of Indian tribes deemed to be criminals, including every member of this tribes right from birth. Many tribes were condemned not because they were criminals but because they were fighting against the British destruction of their jungles and other habitats. The Thugs were one such group that got so badly maligned via atrocity literature that their name has entered English language as being synonymous with criminals.
• Atrocity literature played its part in downgrading women's rights too. Veena Oldenburg's seminal book, Dowry Murder, gives details of how the British encouraged Indians to list out cases of atrocities that could be blamed on native culture. They systematically compiled these anecdotes, mostly unsubstantiated and often exaggerated and one-sided. This became a justification to enact laws that downgraded the rights of the common citizens. The book shows how the dowry extortion that have become so common in middle-class India today, were actually started when women's traditional property rights were taken away by British through convoluted logic. 
• Girl child infanticide [from a earlier post of mine]
• Nicolas Dirks is one of the many scholars to have shown how the British used atrocity litrature in order to exacerbate conflicts between 'jatis' in order to 'solve' their problems by intervening. This helped the British to gain further power and extort Indian wealth.
• Claims of atrocities against workers were used to outlaw various Indian industries, including textiles and steel making, in which India had a lead over Britain. Meanwhile, the British started own Industrial Revolution to supply these goods to India as a captive market, turning Indians from world-class producers and exporters into importers and paupers. According to British authros WilliamDigby, between 1757 and 1812, the inflow of profits from India into Britain was estimated at between £ 500 million and £ 1 billion. The value of this sum in todays purchasing power would be over a trillion dollars. British were very diligent in documenting alleged cases of atrocities against workers, by the Indian manufacturers who were their competitors, and then outlawed many Indian industries on the charges of violating workers rights. The massive poverty and unemployment that resulted, only made the workers plight worse.

In a land mark monograph written a century ago by Mahatma Gandhi discusses how Indians working for the British were unwittingly helping to sustain the empire.

If one pays attention some of these policies are being carried forward by our present government run by the Congress party and infested with the Left liberals intelligentsia.

*Atrocity literature is a technical term referring to literature generated by a Western interest, with the explicit goal to show that the target non-Western culture is committing atrocities in its won people and hence need of Western intervention

Source:
Breaking India by Rajiv Malhotra