Mihir Bose goes on to provide points after points of data of how deep rooted the hatred towards Hindus was in the colonial mind.



Again this hatred and prejudice had historical consequences for India. In British India, for a considerable number of decades, a Muslim law officer delivered a fatwa and the English man sitting next to him would then pass the sentence. Bose gives us quite a shock when he quotes Charles Dickens who wrote that he wished to the Commander in Chief in India that he would ‘exterminate the Race (Indians) … proceeding with all convenient dispatch and merciful swiftness of execution , to blot it out of mankind and raze it off the face of the earth’.



Hitler could well have borrowed words from Dickens.

The inherent anti-Hindu pro-Islamist nature of Western media was evident even then. Agha Khan led eminent Indian Muslims and petitioned the British not only against democracy in India but also demanding more jobs for Muslims ‘commensurate not merely with their numerical strength’ but also due to the ‘value of contribution they make to the defence of the Empire’. Mihir Bose says ‘The Times’ then praised the demand as ‘the only piece of original thought which has emanated from modern times.’.

The West constantly produced anti-Hindu literature in the decades to come. Combined with vast missionary literature that showed Hinduism and India in a bad light, academic attacks also continued. William Archer, a British art critic, wrote in detail how Hindus could not call themselves cultured. Not only did Bernard Shaw republish his essays, he also agreed with him. It was then that the American writer Katherine Mayo came with her ‘Mother India’. Mihir Bose places these attacks on India in the context of ‘British fighting to preserve the Empire’ who felt ‘the need to open a new front against Hinduism’.

It was then that Nichols came with his Verdict on India. He too considered Muslims superior to Hindus. Comparing Jinnah to the ‘typical Hindu politician’ (Gandhi), he declared the difference to be of that a ‘surgeon and a witch doctor’.

Even after independence, hatred against Hindus and Hinduism has been steadily cultivated in Western media. Two years after 1947, Walter Lippmann, one of the most famous journalists of the US, came to India and felt ‘the Hindu world more alien’. Studying Indian art he emerged ‘with increasing loathing and terror, positive terror that such trains of thought and such feelings should exist’. But in comparison, he felt Islam to be ‘familiar and intelligible’.



Hindu hatred in the United States has a long history though. Swami Vivekananda in an insightful observation pointed out how missionary literature included false stories of Hindu mothers throwing their children to crocodiles, with the child was shown as white and mother as black to invoke maximum contempt for Hindus.

Bose points out that Mill almost celebrates the demolition of Somnath by Mahmud of Ghazni. He produces the passages from the book which could well be mistaken for the flattery of the courtiers of Mahmud of Ghazni. Looking at the references one finds that the edition Bose uses, is the fourth edition edited by Percival Spear. Percival Spear, was the co-author with Romila Thapar of the prestigious A History of India and he defended Aurangazeb's iconoclasm saying that he was 'maligned by Hindu fundamentalists'.



Going through the academic and media representation of Hinduism in the United States, from Steven Spielberg’s Temple of Doom to the recent CNN documentary, animosity against Hinduism is very much there.



Sometimes American Hindus think that the left liberal establishment in the West may understand them better. However, the left liberal establishment in the United States sees Hindus through the colonial eyes and stereotype them. So some Hindus in pure desperation turn to the Right which they consider as pro-Hindu because of the Islamophobic noises and gestures. They cannot be more wrong.



The right wing in the United States also has at its core a more pro-Islamist dispensation and would find Hindus culturally, religiously and racially inferior. David Duke for example considers Hindus as degraded because of mixing of Aryan and aboriginals. At the same time he also shares podium with Islamist leaders who gathered in 2006 for ‘scientific denial of Holocaust’. So, for many of the rightwing in the United States, Hindus, if not already, would soon become objects of hatred more than the Muslims. After all, with Islam, their fundamentalism shares a worldview.



Now consider this: The left dominates the media. It has inherited from the colonial legacy the hatred for Hinduism, which it continuously portrays as an amalgamation of an oppressive caste system, evil priest-craft and barbaric savagery. Meanwhile, the Christian right has Islamophobia but only as an equal competitor. There can even be handshakes, as it happens, between honourable enemies. The dirty job of eliminating Hindu interests from the discourse can be handled by rightwing zealots of the West; like they did away with the Indian descendants of Roma who too perished in the gas ovens under the Iron Cross of Nazis. Unsung, and to this day never a dominant part of Holocaust memories.

The CNN documentary distorting Hinduism and the sporadic killings are independent, yet connected events. They may be pointing to the shape of worse things to come in the future. So Hindus have to transcend the binary of the left wing and right wing. They have to network with the indigenous cultures and spiritual traditions world over and learn from the Jews how to keep their memories intact, and in a sustained way, study all forms of hatred against them. Ultimately they need to fight centuries of the narrative of hatred with the light of knowledge.

Further reading:

Mihir Bose, From Midnight to Glorious Morning?, Vikas Publishing House, 2016 , pages 472, Price: Rs. 349/-