“Does Europe have a Civilising mission in India?” – excerpts
Some thought-provoking excerpts from: Does Europe have a Civilising mission in India? by Jakob De Roover*, published on 16 June 2008 – Issue : 786.
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Recently, the European Parliament hosted a meeting on “caste discrimination in South Asia”. At the meeting, participants stated that “India is being ruled by castes not by laws” and that they demanded justice, because there “is one incredible India and one untouchable India.” The EU was urged to come out with a policy statement on the subject. One MEP, referring to the caste system, said that “this barbarism has to end.” This is not the first time. However, before the EU decides to publish policy statements on caste discrimination in India, we would do well to reflect on some simple facts.
First, the dominant conception of the caste system has emerged from the accounts by Christian missionaries, travelers and colonial administrators. Rather than being neutral, these accounts were shaped by a Christian framework. …Especially the Protestants rebuked the “evil priests” of Hinduism for imposing the laws of caste in the name of religion. They told the Indians that conversion to Protestantism was a conversion to equality. Thus, Indian souls were to be saved from damnation and caste discrimination.
Second, this Christian account of “the Hindu religion” and its “caste system” informed colonial policies in British India…
Building on the theological framework, scholars now wrote “scientific” treatises on Hindu superstition and caste discrimination.
The Christian mission found its secular counterpart in the idea of the civilising mission, which told the West that it had to rescue the natives from the clutches of superstition and caste.
Third, the colonial educational project had a deep impact on the Indian intelligentsia. Hindu reform and anti-caste movements came into being, which reproduced the Protestant accounts of Hinduism and caste as true descriptions of India.
…Political parties and caste associations were created to safeguard the interests of the “lower castes.” The elites of these groups united in associations and received financial and moral support from the missionaries and other progressive colonials.
Fourth, the “Dalit” movement of today is the product of these colonial movements. The notion of “Dalits” makes sense only within the colonial account of India, which had postulated the existence of one single group of “outcastes” or “untouchables” that was supposedly exploited by the upper castes. In reality, it concerns a variety of caste groups, with no criteria to unite them besides the claim that they are all “downtrodden.” Indeed, many of these groups are poor and discriminated against by other caste groups.
…In the name of the downtrodden, these elites establish NGOs and then travel from conference to conference and country to country in order to reveal the plight of the “Dalits” to eager western audiences and secure funding from donor agencies.
Fifth, when present-day Europeans rebuke Indian society for the “barbarism” of caste discrimination, they are reproducing the old stanzas of the civilising mission. Such a stance of superiority perhaps worked in the context of colonialism. But today, at a time when Indians buy some of the European industrial giants and Europe is in need of more collaboration with India, it is ill-advised to continue this type of civilisational propaganda.
In fact, such propaganda derives its plausibility from a series of assumptions that no one would be willing to defend explicitly. It attributes all socioeconomic wrongs of the Indian society to its structure and civilisation. The implication is that there is only one way to get rid of socio-economic wrongs here: one has to eradicate both the social structure and the Hindu civilisation. It is as though one would blame the racism, bingedrinking, pedophilia, poverty, homelessness and domestic violence in the contemporary West on its age-old civilisation.
The times have changed. As Europeans, we need to reflect on our deep-rooted sense of superiority and how this informs our moralising discourse on human rights in other parts of the world. To appreciate the impression we give to Indians with our statements on caste discrimination, just imagine a possible world in which the Indian government regularly castigates the US for its racism against African-Americans and the disproportionate death penalties, and the EU for the treatment of South Asians in England, Turks in Germany, women in Romania, the Basque movement in Spain, gypsies in Italy …
just imagine Indian members of parliament consistently blaming the very structure of western societies as the cause of all these wrongs. Europe needs to wake up fast. The time of colonialism is over. If we do not change our attitudes, the irritation towards the EU will grow in countries like India and China. So will the unwillingness to collaborate. In the fast-changing world of the early 21st Century, Europe cannot afford this.
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Related Posts:
The British ‘Caste System’ – excerpts
Hinduism, “Caste System” and discrimination – Join the debate
Caste, Varna and Jatis: The need for clarity in intellectual debate
* Jakob De Roover is a Postdoctoral Fellow of the Research Foundation (FWO) at the Research Centre Vergelijkende Cultuurwetenschap, Ghent University, Belgium.
Excerpts from “I am provoked to write this” by M.S.N. Menon
Yes. When I’m told that Hindus “live in darkness” I’m provoked.
I’m a Hindu, not the usual one, for I took the trouble to make a special study of human civilisations and religious atrocities. Naturally, I see religions in a different light. Not the way the “faithful” see them.
Religions are full of lies and false claims.
Take Christianity. What is its claim and what is the reality? It claims to have civilised Europe. In fact, it destroyed one of the greatest civilisations of man—the Greek civilisation….
And it also destroyed the Roman empire. One of the first acts of the Christians (that of Emperor Theodisius), when they came to power in Rome, was to order the destruction of the most splendid library in the temple of Serapis. Obviously, the Church had no desire for enlightenment. The Hindus pray for light daily.
The Church converted the pagan temples into tombs…And a Christian mob stripped and cut into pieces a gifted, virtuous and beautiful lady in Alexandria. What was her crime? That she was the leader of the Neo-Platonists!
…The Church had a big hand in slave trade. If there was a conscience problem, it helped to ease it by saying that the black man was the son of the Devil.
…
The genocide of the Incas, Mayas and others has no parallel in human history. They were more civilised than the Europeans. “By millions upon millions” says Draper “whole races and nations were remorselessly cut off. The Bishop of Chiape affirmed that more than 15 million were terminated in his time. From Mexico and Peru, a civilisation that might have educated Europe, was crushed out.” (Intellectual Development of Europe, Vol. II)
What about Islam? Space compels me to make it a short review. In his book “In the path of Mahatma Gandhi”, George Catlin, the American philosopher, asks: “What has Islam to offer to compare with the philosophy of Vedanta and the Upanishads?” So much for its “Superiority” claim!
Be that as it may, what is the record of Islam’s atrocities? “The Islamic conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history,” says Will Durant, the American historian.
The Muslims do not want to be reminded of their past. But it is necessary, says S.Bashiruddin, former Vice Chancellor of Dr. Ambedkar Open University. (See his ‘Deen and Dharma”). He says: “Through the present generation of Muslims is not responsible for what has been done centuries ago, an awareness of such a legacy can sensitize the Muslim opinion leaders…”
With such a record of their past, I would like to know from Christian and Muslim brothers, in which way they are “superior” to the Hindus. Do not tell me that your religious texts do not permit these things. This is an easy explanation. I don’t take it. Men are judged by what they do, not by what they believe or by what is written in their scripture.
May be christians and hindu rulers might had done attrocities on minorities of that time like roman and greek pagans , jews by christian rulers and buddhists or jains by hindu rulers.
But i dont speak bad about these religions, all religions speaks good, only the followers dont follow.
But when you speak of muslims, i would like to protest on the fact that, if muslim conquest would had been bloodiest in indian history, two muslim nations would not had sprang up from indian subcontinent and even you would not had found 20% muslims in india. Think over it.
If you say people were forced to convert, there would not had been 80% non muslims remained in India.
This clearly indicates that neither did muslims practiced forced conversions nor was there any bloody conquest, for if there would had been forced conversions, it would had been very easy for muslim rulers to convert all indians to muslims in their approx. 1000 yrs of rule.
And if there would had been bloody conquest, no indian would had converted to islam. People accepted Islam by their choice and we should respect evryones choice and wish.
Bloody conquests only means that muslims entered india through warfare, and if in the battlefield there is killing, so on the other side even muslims were killed in battle field.
There may be a few exceptions among muslim rulers who might had been tyrant, but it doest not mean their act is blown out of proportion and applied to all muslim kings and muslim rule in india.
And for your kind information islam spread in india due to the preaching and noble deeds of muslim saints. And for your information Saint Khwaja Moinuddin Chisti alone was repsonsible for 90 lacs conversions.
Thats why you will find more non muslim people attending the tombs of muslim saints.
Its very easy to fabricate false claims and blame others but to find truth and understand it by sacrificng prejudices, is something more difficult.
From an email by Dr Gautam Sen:
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I have to laugh whenever I observe all this hand wringing about Caste, helpful and interesting though the research below is. I did not know what caste I was until I came to live in England involuntarily more than 40 years ago as a teenager (after a second attempt by communist thugs to murder my father). It was only when white Britons expressed curiosity I troubled to find out. This is how casteist middle class Bengalis were! I only found out last year that the prominent Bengali middle class family (my closest friends) that lived down the road in Calcutta is some splendour were from a lowly caste background (‘teli’). Both my friend’s mother and sister were very beautiful (the former a badiya and both sister and brother married to badiyas as well – suspect caste background notwithstanding!). The ‘teli’ caste father was one of the most capable and upright people I have ever met and I will always recall with gratitude that he regarded me as a son and told me so before he died.
But even today, I remain a second class citizen in the UK by virtue of my skin colour. Discrimination is rife socially and professionally even in allegedly upright universities like the LSE and Oxbridge – you never get into the old boy’s clubs that disburse privileges quietly to their own!. And so bad is the situation that most Asians are in denial (especially cowardly and morally bankrupt Hindus, particularly the money-making lowly East African Asian collaborators who so love the white British). They will instantly deny there is any discrimination at all, even while they are getting kicked in the teeth and crawling on all fours in front of whites. I have seen this countless times in every social situation and the worst are the titled Asians in the House or Lords.
Hindu caste discrimination, my foot. Dear fellows ,you cannot escape the mark of Cain that is the colour of your skin in Europe and many of my Iyengar friends are extremely dark and some of the so-called Dalits fair!
Gautam Sen Dr.
(retired LSE academic)
From an email by Rajiv Varma…
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Another area that remains unexplored is the impact of British colonial policies, early 1800s and after. This era of British colonialism has not been analyzed for its impact on the Hindu social system. Some of the British policies (of taking caste census and absolute categorization of population) led to frozen Jaati boundaries. Much of today’s “caste” problems stem from this phenomenon in the early 1800s.
It seems Jaatis in pre-British times may have been organized around professions, social habits and were endogamous, but they were not frozen by heredity forever. Thus, a sonaar family (goldsmith) belonged to Sonaar jaati as long as they professed that particular profession – which may have lasted for a few generations. But as soon as the son of Sonaar, took up another profession, he gradually moved out of that jaati.
However, in the post-Bentinck era, i.e. 1830-35, the jaati boundaries were frozen, which remains the case even today.
Thus one could conclude that older system of Jaatis transformed into Castes of today in early 19th century due to British colonial policies. The fluidity that was present before the British, was frozen post-Bentinck.
Another unexplored area that need to be investigated is the internal colonization that happened in the Hindu society, largely after the British gained supremacy in Indian affairs. We have to devise a new term for this phenomenon. For a lack of better term this could be called “Recursive Colonialism” (to borrow a technical term from computational sciences).
Recursive colonialism refers to a colonized peoples colonizing their own kind – due to various factors. This is when Indians who were colonized by the British colonized other Indians. There were two dimensions of recursive colonization, viz (a) economic, and (b) social.
Internal economic colonization manifested in zamindari system where ownership of land (and forests) became person or family oriented instead of community ownership. The concept of a family owning a piece of agricultural land and being passed through inheritance is definitely a 19th century phenomenon. There is very little anthropological data prior to colonial times that indicates families owning large tracts of lands and passing ownership through inheritance. I am not saying this to make any contemporary political point. All I am doing is comparing how it was and what it is today.
And …
The social dimension in Recursive Colonialism may have manifested and institutionalized in a in perverse form of untouchability – chooa choot – as was the case in Kerala and Tamil Nadu, and other parts of India. The social dimension of Recursive Colonialism put the British on the top, and their Brahmin/Bhadralok intercessors (in Bengal, Madras and Bombay presidencies) under them, but the same Brahmin/Bhadralok intercessor classes may have done the same to the Dravida/Mondal classes in 1800s. This may have resulted in the stratified society as seen today (though a lot of it is melting with economic liberalization).
Overall, a lot more inquest is needed to understand the complexities of caste vs. jaati.
Only then we as a society will be able to deal with it.