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Opinion National Interest PoV 50-Word Edit

ThePrint On Camera Videos In Pictures

Society & Culture Around Town Book Excerpts Vigyapanti The Dating Story

More Judiciary Education YourTurn Work With Us Campus Voice

The 3 M’s Of Hinduphobia: Mill, Macaulay and Marx

Indians tend to fuss more about the damage done to the Indian psyche by Thomas B Macaulay’s infamous Minute of 1835, but he was preceded in this unholy endeavour by James Mill.

The damage that colonialism does lives long after it formally ends. Just as a butterfly flapping its wings in the Amazon ends up triggering a storm in Europe, one single book, written by a racist intellectual in faraway Britain about a people he does not know anything about and the land he has never seen with his own eyes can cause immense damage to an entire people for centuries.

A path-breaking book by authors Kundan Singh and Krishna Maheshwari deserves high praise because it connects the dots from the mischief done in one book with the long-term damage it inflicted on colonised people. A few chapters in The History of British India, written by James Mill, father of the more famous John Stuart Mill, have influenced – and continue to influence – western misrepresentations of India, and more specifically Hindus and Hinduism. This misrepresentation endures even today, though in more politically correct form. The book, Colonial Discourse and the Suffering of Indian American Children: A Francophone Post-Colonial Analysis, uses the post-colonial works of three French thinkers, Aime Cesaire, Franz Fanon, and Albert Memmi to shred Mill’s History of British India, published in 1818, to pieces. The book was entirely based on second-hand readings of India, and written with a biased mind to boot. All three, Cesaire (author of Discourse on Colonialism), Fanon (Black Skin, White Masks, and The Wretched of the Earth) and Memmi (The Coloniser and the Colonised) got their first taste of colonialism in Francophone areas like French Caribbean or north Africa. But their assessment of the impact of colonial denigration of native populations is applicable to all colonised nations, especially the dialectical relationship between the coloniser and the colonised.

To Memmi we owe the blinding insight that the coloniser and the colonised are not two separate entities: the former imagines the latter in order to justify his own sense of superiority. The authors summarise Memmi’s views thus: “…the colonised, and all the attributes of the colonised, are constructs by the coloniser, fabricated through the work or an army of scholars claiming rationality and objectivity.” The coloniser knows that his rule over the colonised is not legitimate, but he seeks to assuage his guilt by painting the colonised as “immoral and unethical people, having laws that border on savagery and immorality.”

Of which more later, but let’s get back to Mill.........

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