Dharampal's Writings

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<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->In 1813, this bold intention was publicly and powerfully expressed by William Wilberforce when he depicted Indians as being ‘deeply sunk, and by their religious supersti-tions fast bound, in the lowest depths of moral and social wretchedness.’90 T.B. Macaulay expressed similar views, merely using different imagery. He commented that the totality of Indian knowledge and scholarship did not even equal the contents of ‘a single shelf of a good European library’, and that all the his-torical information contained in books written in Sanskrit was ‘less valuable than what may be found in the most paltry abridge-ment used at preparatory schools in England.’91 To Macaulay, all Indian knowledge, if not despicable, was at least absurd: absurd history, absurd metaphysics, absurd physics, absurd theology.

A little later, Karl Marx seems to have had similar impressions of India—this, despite his great study of British state papers and other extensive material relating to India. Writing in the New York Daily Tribune on 25 June 1853, he shared the view of the perennial nature of Indian misery, and approvingly quoted an ancient Indian text which according to him placed ‘the commencement of Indian misery in an epoch even more remote than the Christian creation of the world.’ According to him, Indian life had always been undignified, stagnatory, vegetative, and passive, given to a brutalising worship of nature instead of man being the ‘sovereign of nature’—as contemplated in contemporary European thought. And, thus Karl Marx concluded: ‘Whatever may have been the crimes of England’ in India, ‘she was the unconscious tool of history’ in bringing about—what Marx so anxiously looked forward to—India’s westernisation.

The complete denunciation and rejection of Indian culture and civilisation was, however, left to the powerful pen of James Mill. This he did in his monumental three volume History of British India, first published in 1817. Thenceforth, Mill’s History became an essen-tial reading and reference book for those entrusted with adminis-tering the British Indian Empire. From the time of its publication till recently, the History in fact provided the framework for the writing of most histories of India. For this reason, the impact of his judgments on India and its people should never be underestimated.

According to Mill, ‘the same insincerity, mendacity, and perfidy; the same indif-ference to the feelings of others; the same prostitution and venality’ were the conspicuous characteristics of both the Hindoos and the Muslims. The Muslims, however, were perfuse, when possessed of wealth, and devoted to pleasure; the Hindoos almost always penurious and ascetic; and ‘in truth, the Hindoo like the eunuch, excels in the qualities of a slave.’ Fur-thermore, similar to the Chinese, the Hindoos were ‘dissembling, treacherous, mendacious, to an excess which surpasses even the usual measure of uncultivated society.’ Both the Chinese and the Hindoos were ‘disposed to excessive exaggeration with regard to everything relating to themselves.’ Both were ‘cowardly and unfeeling.’ Both were ‘in the highest degree conceited of themselves, and full of affected contempt for others.’ And, above all, both were ‘in physical sense, disgustingly unclean in their persons and houses.’
Compared to the people of India, according to Mill, the people of Europe even during the feudal ages, (and  notwithstanding the vices of the Roman Church and the defects of the schoolmen), were superior in philosophy. Further, the Europeans ‘were greatly superior, notwithstanding the defects of the feudal system, in the institu-tions of Government and in laws.’ Even their poetry was ‘beyond all comparison preferable to the poetry of the Hindoos.’ Mill felt that it was hardly necessary to assert that in the art of war ‘the Hindoos have always been greatly inferior to the warlike nations of Europe.’ The agriculture of the Europeans ‘surpassed exceedingly that of the Hindoos’, and in India the roads were little better than paths, and the rivers without bridges; there was not one original treatise on medicine, considered as a sci-ence, and surgery was unknown among the Hindoos. Further still, ‘compared with the slavish and dastardly spirit of the Hindoos’, the Europeans were to be placed in an elevated rank with regard to manners and character, and their manliness and courage.

Where the Hindoos surpassed the Europeans was in delicate manu-factures, ‘particularly in spinning, weaving, and dyeing’; in the fabrication of trinkets; and probably in the art of polishing and setting the precious stones; and more so in effeminate gentle-ness, and the winning arts of address. However, in the arts of painting, sculpture, and architecture the Hindoos in no way ex-celled Europeans. Further, ‘the Hindoo loom, with all its appurte-nances, is coarse and ill-fashioned, to a degree hardly less surprising than the fineness of the commodity which it is the instrument of producing.’ The very dexterity in the use of their tools and implements became a point against the Indians. For as James Mill proclaimed: ‘A dexterity in the use of its own imper-fect tools is a common attribute of rude society.’

<!--QuoteBegin--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->These reflections and judgments led to the obvious conclusion, and Mill wrote:
Our ancestors, however, though rough, were sincere; but under the glossing exterior of the Hindoo lies a general disposition to deceit and perfidy. In fine, it cannot be doubted that, upon the whole, the gothic nations, as soon as they became a settled people, exhibit the marks of a superior charac-ter and civilisation to those of the Hindoos.92<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

As to James Mill, so also to Wilberforce, Macaulay, and Karl Marx and the thought and approaches they represented (for it is more as spokesmen of such thinking and approaches that they are im-portant in the context of India rather than as outstanding indi-viduals), the manners, customs and civilisation of India were intrinsically barbarous. And to each of them, India could become civilised only by discarding its Indianness, and by adopting ‘utility as the object of every pursuit’93 according to Mill; by embracing his peculiar brand of Christianity for Wilberforce; by becoming anglicised, according to Macaulay; and for Marx by becom-ing western. Prior to them, for Henry Dundas, the man who gov-erned India from London for twenty long years, Indians not only had to become subservient to British authority but also had to feel ‘indebted to our beneficence and wisdom for advantages they are to receive’; and, in like manner, ‘feel solely indebted to our protection for the countenance and enjoyment of them’94 before they could even qualify for being considered as civilised.
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