'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

Unfettering the Hindu mind - Part 1

Unfettering the Hindu mind – Part 1

"I have travelled across the length and breadth of India and I have not seen one person who is a beggar, who is a thief. Such wealth I have seen in this country, such high moral values, people of such calibre, that I do not think we would ever conquer this country, unless we break the very backbone of this nation, which is her spiritual and cultural heritage, and, therefore, I propose that we replace her old and ancient education system, her culture, for if the Indians think that all that is foreign and English is good and greater than their own, they will lose their self-esteem, their native self-culture and they will become what we want them, a truly dominated nation".

Lord McCauley in his speech of Feb 2, 1835, British Parliament

With the above quote as a backdrop, I have been struggling with the thought of starting this piece for many months but could not figure out how to make a beginning. The start is important here as the problem is multi faceted and has its roots buried deep in forgotten history. I say forgotten because that's what it was meant to be, forgotten and lost. This is an attempt to bring to light on what has gone wrong with how we Hindus perceive our religion, our history and civilisation which has been distorted by disinformation and deceit, spread through vested political interest.

The reason I have titled this ‘’unfettering’’ the Hindu mind is because it is my attempt to break the chains of bondage which has wedded us to ignorance and has kept us away from knowing our true identity and why we are so refreshingly and positively different from the rest of the world. Its is important that we take pride in our civilisation, in our history, in our religion, in our cultural and social achievements and acknowledge the contribution made to science, medicine and the fine arts and in every other walk of human life from time immemorial by our ancestors and carry forward this legacy bequeathed to us and not let others with vested interest deceive us. 

The systematic dilution and erasure of Hinduism and our Vedic civilisation with its accumulated wealth of wisdom in every sphere and replacing it with lies and distortions programmed to ensure the enslavement of the Hindu mind by spreading false propaganda against the Hindu people, culture, civilisation and their belief system was started during the British rule of India under McCauley. For the uninitiated, McCauley is the person who proposed and then implemented the current education system and the overall philosophy of the teaching methodology and approach, through its vast network of schools, educational institutions, government and missionary organisations. The opening quote will give the reader an idea of his intentions. The idea was to completely and totally undermine and subvert India’s Vedic past, its teachings and its philosophy to such an extent that it was even made to seem alien to India. Nothing Indian or Hindu was good and was cast out as obscurantist, redundant, superstitious belief systems - relics from another age with no relevance in the modern world. This is what were and are still being taught, completely deceiving and subduing impressionable minds.

Why would anyone go to such an extent to create such a elaborate hoax, to deny people the truth?

To rule one needs a subservient population, people who can be influenced and controlled. To rule a foreign land and people completely different in race, religion, philosophy and way of life, this subservience had to be turned into enslavement, the conquered cannot be allowed to have even a shred of pride in what ever they and their belief system stand for and this can be achieved only by denying the people their glorious past, their history, their achievements.The over riding desire and objective behind this was to perpetuate the British rule in India for ever.

With the above premise in mind, when the apparent strength of the Hindu philosophy and its people and the superior Vedic past and the comparative insignificance of their own history and achievements dawned on the British, it became apparent to them that the only way to perpetuate their rule was suppress this knowledge. The conquered cannot be acknowledged as a superior civilisation in any which way. For the British revelation of the truth would make their rule untenable in such a vast and complex country.

We are told that the time can never come when the natives of India can be admitted to high civil and military office. We are told that this is the condition on which we hold our power. We are told that we are bound to confer on our subjects every benefit - which they are capable of enjoying? No; which it is in our power to confer on them? No; but which we can confer on them without hazard to the perpetuity of our own domination. 

Lord McCauley in his Government of India Speech on July 10, 1833 in the British House of Commons

How do we educate people to serve us but not reveal the ‘’truth’’ was the dilemma facing the British administrators. The problem was increasingly becoming complex and magnified as more and more people in India were educating themselves encouraged by the British to fill up positions in the vast administration and education system. To ensure that this vast educated class at some point in time in the future armed with the ‘’truth’’ does not become a van guard in a rebellion, the British resorted to the ‘’distort, divide and rule’’ policy of which they were past masters, only this time it was an attack on the very soul of India and its people. A program was initiated to rewrite Indian political and religious history in a way  that people were divided by race and religion, caste and region.

We are to teach false History, false Astronomy, false Medicine, because we find them in company with a false religion. ....And while we act thus, can we reasonably and decently bribe men out of the revenues of the state to waste their youth in learning how they are to purify themselves after touching an ass, or what text of the Vedas they are to repeat to expiate the crime of killing a goat? We are a Board for wasting public money, for printing books which are of less value than the paper on which they are printed was while it was blank; for giving artificial encouragement to absurd history, absurd metaphysics, absurd physics, absurd theology.
  

Lord McCauley in his Government of India Speech on July 10, 1833 in the British House of Commons

The new education system that was created for the above purpose, portrayed India and Indians as primitive and backward with only a history of invasions starting with the Aryans to the Muslims to the British justifying in the process that India belongs to no one in particular and no one can claim it as theirs originally. It was propagated that Hindus are called weak and Brahmins foreign and part of a white skinned Aryan race who settled in the north west and eventually created the caste systems to subdue the original dark skinned Indians. Hinduism was portrayed as a abomination full of superstition and redundant rituals and archaic practices, falsely glorifying Islam and the erstwhile Muslim rulers, exaggerating Islamic contribution to India and Indian culture. Jainism, Buddhism and Sikhism were delineated as a separate religions and racial groups. Many other such distortions and lies were spread through schools and other academic books to enslave the hitherto proud Hindus and paint them into a corner by making them the cause of all the evils of the society, prop up the Muslims and Islam with a false sense of glory, break the strong brotherhood of Hindu sects in separate religions and above all break up the Hindu society on caste lines and pit them against each other.    

Sadly, today we still carry forward this self denigration of our religion, history and civilisation, a legacy of the British colonisers through a education and administration system established by them, perpetuated by Marxist historians and pseudo-secular academicians funded by Nehruvian politicians to cloud and confuse young unsuspecting Hindu minds with lies.

Its time we collectively endeavour to attain the truth for ourselves and for the future generations because in truth is where we will be secure and strong. Else we will become a nation, rudderless and disoriented with no sense of pride in our religion, culture and civilisation allowing everything to be eroded away by the waves of false propaganda and disinformation which gain ground in every minute of inaction on our part.

“We are responsible for what we are, and whatever we wish ourselves to be, we have the power to make ourselves. If what we are now has been the result of our own past actions, it certainly follows that whatever we wish to be in future can be produced by our present actions; so we have to know how to act.”

Swami Vivekananda