Learning about how the British forced last names on us really does open a nasty can of worms. Like how the british brought in laws which forced women to take on the “lastnames” of their husbands which really didn’t exist in most parts of India before these laws were brought in and somehow we ended up internalising these colonial hangovers and began calling it “Indian parampara”. The Hindu marriage act, thank fuck doesn’t necessitate the change of lastnames for the women and we are not obligated to do so. These colonial laws are also a reason why marital rape isn’t being criminalised as the law states that “consent is implied in a marriage.”.
So many ways in which our systems failed to educate us about the impacts of colonisation on our society and exactly how deeply it has changed us.
Relentless AI slop mixed with colonial era propaganda in Katherine Mayo style, with extraordinary AI made caricatures of Brahmins and some more lies. They show Tamil Nadu but somehow in the video the grandma is speaking Marathi. Here's a much better and more nuanced video on courtesans and Devadasis of ancient and medieval India.
In pre-colonial India, Devadasis (and related communities like the Maharis) held a highly respected position that completely subverted standard patriarchal norms: 1) they were among the few groups who could legally inherit, own, and manage land and wealth independently, 2) they were the primary custodians of classical Indian arts, they were experts of the natyashastra, and they composed devotional poems still chanted by millions, 3) they were Nitya Sumangali (eternally auspicious) because they were married to the deity rather than mortal men, freeing them from the strict social codes of widowhood.
To explain how evil the British colonial rule was and what damage the Christian missionaries have done, please go through this post. The British actually created an entire separate "caste of prostitutes". The anti-nautch movement dehumanised Indian woman just because of the way they dressed was not suiting Victorian sensibilities
💬 6 🔁 10 ❤️ 16 · I found that book on Project Gutenberg and on archive.org too and the British rule was infinitely more horrible than peop
Anyway, thanks for giving me the heads up. We must fight against this relentless propaganda.
In December 1948, at the height of the Malayan Emergency, British troops massacred 24 unarmed civilians in the village of Batang Kali.
It was May, 2012. Inside a gloomy, oak panelled courtroom in the Royal Courts of Justice in London, a group of bewigged British and Malaysian lawyers confronted a legal team from the British Foreign and Commonwealth office in front of a panel of judges. Led by John Halford of the Bindmans law firm and Dato Quek Ngee Meng, the legal team was in court to argue the case for a public enquiry into what they called “a grotesque, on-going injustice” committed decades earlier in British Malaya. This was the period of the ‘Emergency’: a war without a name fought in the Malayan jungles against communist insurgents who wanted an immediate end to British rule.
On the other side of the court sat lawyers for the defendants, the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office. In that rather claustrophobic courtroom, British justice was being asked to make a judgement about history and moral responsibility.
For me as an historian and journalist, it was a highly charged moment. As they spoke, the words of the lawyers seemed to evoke the restless spirits of 24 Chinese workers shot dead in December, 1948 by British soldiers on a plantation close to the Malayan village of Batang Kali.
Just one man was left alive. His name was Chong Hong and he was in his 20s at the time. He had fainted in terror and the British soldiers left him for dead. By 2012, Chong Hong was long dead. But a handful of eye-witnesses remained alive. Loh Ah Choy, just seven when the soldiers rampaged through the plantation; Tham Yong, aged 17. In Court 3 that day in 2012, three of the villagers – now in their late 60s and 70s, who had long ago watched the slaughter of their menfolk – sat apprehensive and rather frail beside their lawyers. I talked briefly to Loh Ah Choy during a break in court proceedings. After so many years, there was still pain in her eyes as she talked about the men who had died.
The ‘Batang Kali massacre’ has sometimes – and not entirely accurately – been called ‘Britain’s My Lai’: referring to a Vietnam War atrocity when ‘Charlie Company’, led by Lt. William Calley, murdered hundreds of unarmed civilians on March 16th, 1968.
Since the killings, successive British governments refused to hold a public enquiry into what had taken place and why the men were killed. At the time, it was claimed that the victims were ‘bandits’. This was baseless. No apology was, it seems, considered by the British. For decades, the relatives of the dead men like Tham Yong and Loh Ah Choy kept their silence. They had been left destitute after the killings – and survival had more meaning to them than a search for justice.
In the end, the legal case failed. The lawyers’ arguments were rejected by the UK Supreme Court in 2015 – but for the British establishment, the Court’s judgement made uncomfortable reading. For Lord Kerr, one of the court’s justices said the “overwhelming preponderance of currently available evidence” showed “wholly innocent men were mercilessly murdered and the failure of the authorities of this state to conduct an effective inquiry into their deaths.” The problem for the Court was time. The killings may have been unlawful, Lord Neuberger concluded, but they occurred more than 10 years before the critical date when the right of petition to the Strasbourg court of human rights was recognised by the UK and created a duty to investigate.
The lawyers generated a great deal of new historically valuable information – not only about what happened in Batang Kali, but about how and why a ‘very British cover up’ was maintained for so long.It was thanks to the efforts of the legal teams that we now know what happened on that day in British Malaya. There is now no dispute that on December 11th, 1948 a 14-man patrol from the 7th Platoon, G Company, 2nd Battalion Scots Guards, led by two lance-sergeants, Charles Douglas and Thomas Hughes, entered Batang Kali where they encountered 50 or so unarmed villagers.
The tiny settlement was part of the Sungei Remok rubber estate in the state of Selangor, which at the time was a British protectorate. By the time the platoon left the village the following day, 24 men had been shot dead. The first report of the killings in the Singapore-based Straits Times sounded a shrill note of triumph: ‘Police, Bandits kill 28 [sic] bandits in day … Biggest Success for Forces since Emergency Started’. It would not take long for the official story to unravel. ‘Good news’ like the Batang Kali operation was in short supply at the end of the first year of the Emergency. The roots of the conflict go back to the Japanese occupation of Malaya and Singapore, which began in February 1942. The traumatic loss of Singapore to a grossly underrated Asian foe shamed and humiliated the British and led many Asians to reassess their former masters.
In the first months of the occupation the Japanese slaughtered many thousands of Chinese civilians in Singapore and across Malaya. Japan had been waging a brutal war in mainland China since 1937 and alleged that the Chinese in Malaya were a security risk. Many young Chinese fled into the dense Malayan jungle, where they began to organise guerrilla units to fight back against the Japanese. The Malayan People’s Anti-Japanese Army (MPAJA) was dominated by the Malayan Communist Party (MCP) and by the end of the war was backed by the British ‘Force 136’, a branch of the Special Operations Executive. After the Japanese surrender in 1945 the British honoured the MPAJA , awarding its future leader Chin Peng an OBE.
As India moved towards independence the chronically indebted postwar British government clung onto Malaya, with its valuable tin and rubber resources. Although the returning colonial power signalled that independence was on the agenda, it seemed to both a new generation of Malay nationalists and the Communists that it was ‘colonial business as usual’.
This was intolerable. The MPAJA now became the vanguard of anti-British resistance, as the Malayan National Liberation Army (MNLA), turning their British-supplied guns on the returned colonial authorities. The MNLA was backed by a secret army of supporters known as the Min Yuen (People’s Movement). MNLA fighters depended on the Min Yuen and Chinese villagers, willing or unwilling, for essential supplies. This was the background to the events that unfolded in December 1948. It explains why, to begin with, the British could claim that shooting Chinese civilians on a rubber plantation was a ‘success’: in the eyes of British troops, any Chinese-Malayan villager might be a ‘bandit’ – and so ‘fair game’.
The ‘successful operation’ story crumbled rapidly. A few of the surviving villagers told their story to Li Chen, the Chinese consul-general, who held a press conference on December 21st. The following day the British owner of the Sungei Remok Estate, Thomas Menzies, who had serious clout in the British estate-owners’ community and was dismayed by the loss of 24 workers, publicly stated that his men had a long record of good conduct. By December 24th the Straits Times was calling for a public enquiry.
At the end of January the British Communist MP Philip Piratin demanded that Arthur Creech-Jones, the colonial secretary, explain the actions of the Scots Guards. Creech-Jones replied that an “enquiry by the civil authorities” had concluded that “had the security forces not opened fire, the suspect Chinese would have made good an escape, which had obviously been pre-arranged”. Creech-Jones’ ‘enquiry’ into a “necessary but nasty operation” quashed the debate about the killing.
But then there was an unexpected turn of events. In December 1969, a former National Serviceman called William Cootes confessed his role in the killings to a journalist from the People, then a British Sunday newspaper. Cootes said he was motivated by the furore unleashed by US journalist Seymour Hersh’s revelations about the My Lai massacre the previous year. The scandal provoked a debate about whether British troops would have been capable of committing such an atrocity. Public opinion resisted such slurs, but Cootes knew better. He had been one of the 14 Scots Guardsmen who had entered Batang Kali.
Cootes claimed that his commanding officer, George Ramsay, had briefed his men that they were going to a village and would “wipe out anybody they found there.” Other former members of the platoon also came forward and backed up Cootes’ allegations. Alan Tuppen testified that: “He [Ramsay] said we were to go out on patrol and that our objective would be to wipe out a particular village and everyone in it because, he said, they were either terrorists themselves or were helping terrorists in that area.”
Tuppen provided shocking new detail about the killings: “Instinctively, we started firing … at the villagers in front of us. The villagers began to fall. One man with bullets in him kept crawling … He was finally killed when a bullet went through his head.” Yet another former guardsman, Victor Remedios, testified that after the platoon returned to base “we were told by a sergeant that if anyone said anything we could get 14 or 15 years in prison.” No one had been shot trying to escape.
In the aftermath of the People story and the media storm that had followed on February 13th, 1970 Denis Healey, the secretary of state for defence, referred the matter to the director of public prosecutions (DPP). At the end of the month, DPP lawyers recommended further enquiries to be conducted by the Metropolitan Police – much to the dismay, as we learnt in court, of the Foreign Office.
All the former members of the Scots Guards platoon who had testified to the People were interviewed again under caution. Plans were made for the British police team to fly to Kuala Lumpur to continue with their enquiries. Then on June 18th, 1970 the Labour government was ousted by the Conservatives – and just weeks later the Batang Kali enquiry was stopped with a view “to uphold the good name of the army.”
The long battle for a public enquiry after determined efforts by the survivors’ legal team collapsed. This legal battle is unlikely to be joined again. Nevertheless, the UK Supreme Court was minded that the killings were unlawful and that “wholly innocent men were mercilessly murdered”. There was another disappointment for historians. When the UK National Archives announced a release of secret colonial papers in 2012, many of us rushed to Kew hoping that some of the reports made just after the killings had survived. There was bad news: it turned out that when the British pulled out of Malaya in 1957, any incriminating evidence about the events of December, 1948 had been destroyed.
For historians of the British Empire and the traumatic process of decolonisation that followed the Second World War, the discovery of new information about the tragedy that unfolded in Batang Kali casts new light on the longest war fought by British troops in the 20th Century, the Malayan Emergency – and the counter- insurgency techniques developed in Southeast Asia that influenced American strategy in Vietnam and impact bitterly contested campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan today.
Europeans stealing and appropriating from Hindu civilisation while pushing 19th century European racist and eugenicist myths - how can we Hindus combat this?
Some months ago, a Brazilian white supremacist account made a post claiming that "Indians had no idea about its history, Ashoka, and the Mauryans, until the British deciphered the Brahmi script".
First of all, James Prinsep was not a trained Sanskritist nor an epigraphist. He had no expertise in Prakrit either. He "worked" with local Indian scholars, for example Pandit Kamalakanta Vidyalankar, to decipher scripts. Ancient physical records of the Brahmi script remained widely visible and documented long before Prinsep. The Brahmi script is the parent writing system for nearly all modern Indian scripts. The Ashokan Brahmi evolved into Gupta Brahmi, Siddham, which then evolved into the Nagari scripts. What Prinsep actually achieved was deciphering an archaic Ashokan form of Brahmi, which had fallen out of use around the 5th century CE, by looking at the Indo-Greek coins that had both the Ashokan Brahmi and Greek. Naturally, after the Islamic invasion, Hindus' connection to the Greeks was severed, so the study of Ashokan Brahmi also became obsolete. This doesn't mean that India forgot Ashoka. Mauryan genealogies listing Ashoka (as Ashokavardhana) appear in multiple Puranas like the Vishnu, Matsya, and Vayu, showing the dynasty was documented in Indian textual traditions long before colonial scholars. This shows that British Indology did not "re-discover" Ashoka. Early Western scholars just treated the Puranic references as mythical.
Do you know where this phenomenon of Europeans believing that Indians forgot their history comes from? It comes from their habit of applying the same framework they apply for the Middle East and parts of Europe to India. For example, the Iraqis forgot about Hammurabi, Ashurbanipal, etc., the Egyptians forgot about Khufu, Hatshepsut, etc., the Greeks forgot their foundational civilisations like the Mycenaeans. The aforementioned were "re-discovered" by British and German archaeologists and epigraphers in the 18th-20th centuries. Therefore, Europeans have the tendency to think that Indians also must've forgotten rulers like Chandragupta, Ashoka, etc. prior to the arrival of Westerners.
This is not true at all. Westerners, or even Indian lay people, who've been taught Eurocentric history, underestimate the intellectual rigour of Indian scholars, and the continuity of India's indigenous traditions. Chandragupta (Sandracottus of the Greeks) was well known through texts and plays like Vishakhadatta's Mudrarakshasa, which were completely independent of Greco-Roman sources like Megasthenes. The names of Ashoka Maurya and his sons Dasharatha and Samprati are recorded in the Puranic vamshavalis and he is glorified in Buddhist sources such as the Divyavadana (which contains a section known as the Ashokavadana) and Srilankan chronicles like the Dipavamsa and Mahavamsa. A manuscript of the Divyadana in Sanskrit was discovered in Nepal in 1824, so the text was continually being copied.
What about the Vedas? Did Indians forget them? For example, modern Persians had no knowledge of Old Persian for over 1,500 years, until the script was deciphered in the 19th century, and they had minimal knowledge of Avestan. Yet in the case of the Vedas, there is an unbroken chain of recitation reinforced by the shikshas, vyakarana, chhandas, niruktas, and pratishakhyas. This means that unlike texts that were written down and were susceptible to corruptions due to copying errors, the Vedas were passed down purely through structured, mouth-to-ear chanting. This chain, including the permutations, has survived intact for over 3,000 years. Moreover, Indian Hindu Pandits, such as Bhattabhaskara, Sayana, Venkatamadhava, Skandasvamin, Mahidhara to name a few, have been writing bhashyas on Vedas long before the Europeans set their feet on Indian soil. So, the formal study of Sanskrit (including "Vedic Sanskrit") never disappeared in India unlike what white supremacists try to claim. In fact, it was the bhashyas of Sayana (14th century CE), that served as the foundational guide for the likes of Max Müller.
The European racists often write things like "whole texts and traditions claimed to be known for thousands of years in India by the Indians are actually archaeological rediscoveries by the European scholars". This couldn't be farther from the truth. The Vedas and the Itihasa never required archaeological excavation to be known, because they were both in the daily life of Hindus, and recited across the Indian subcontinent. Whether a Pandit doing yajna or a rural housewife putting hands together praying for Agni before lighting up the oven to cook a pot of dal and bread. Moreover, many written texts were accessible and safely preserved in temples, granthagarams or bhandars (traditional library repositories) and royal courts across India. The East India Company systematically "collected" manuscripts during their military campaigns and "territorial annexations".
For example, Kamasutra was NOT "re-discovered" by the British. They got to know of it from native Indian scholars, got the desire to translate it, hence they looked throughout India for old texts. The original text by Vatsyayana is lost, but Indian scholars have been making copies of the text since beginning. These texts have been found in Jammu and Kashmir, Gujarat and Nepal.
To claim that Indians were primitive savages who had to be taught their own history by the white people is a colonial myth to justify British colonialism of India.
Review on a book review: conversions to another faith and the "Hindutva narrative"?
I came across this post shared by a friend, it's a book review on the book by Nusrat F Jafri on the Instagram page "The Polis Project", a New York based publication founded by Suchitra Vijayan.
Let's analyse this post and it's alarming inconsistencies. Jafri writes that her own family history has "voluntary conversions". She writes that during the British rule, her own maternal great-grandparents belonged to a "Bhantu tribe" (also known as Sahasi samaj, the "brave community"). Apparently, this tribe was declared as a criminal tribe by the British administration. She writes how the "European racial science and the Hindu caste hierarchy reinforced each other". First of all, the European eugenicists considered Hinduism backward, superstitious and a subhuman religion. They established an education system in India that sought to eradicate Hinduism. European colonialists have a history of murdering Hindu priest Brahmins, as they were seen as the seat of knowledge in India. 
Yet look how Jafri is blatantly trying to connect Hinduism with European racist colonialist eugenics. And her "brilliant" logic is that to escape the "criminal tribe" tag, her great grandparents converted to Christianity (Methodism, a protestant denomination). Jafri frames this as her great grandparents escaping the "Hindu caste system".
It should be a crime to lie this much. When the European colonialists first came to India, let's take a look what they said. The Catholic "Saint" Francis Xavier wrote that "Indians are black and they believe that their gods are black and their idols too are black and they are dirty, ugly, and horrible to look at". How can Jafri even equate Hinduism and Hindu values with racist European colonialist eugenicism?
💬 0 🔁 36 ❤️ 83 · Source - the writings of “Saint” Francis Xavier.
Found this accidentally while replying to an ask I got earlier.
An exa
How is Jafri blaming Hinduism for the British declaring her great grandparents as a criminal tribe? I was reading a bit of history about this Bhantu tribe (also known as the Sahasi samaj), I even checked the Joshua Project, that creepy American Christian missionary database about different "unreached" peoples, and it says that the vast major majority of Sahasis are Hindus, and only some converted to Christianity during the British colonial occupation. Sahasis' own historiography says that they were soldiers in Maharana Pratap's army against the Mughal emperor Akbar, who then got dispersed in the jungles after the Battle of Haldighati. They became nomadic cattle herders, but they were subjected to the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871, resulting in intense policing, stigmatization, and relocation to, or confinement in settlements, because during the times of famine they resorted to stealing from the British.
So, these people became disenfranchised because of Muslim Mughal occupiers, and they became again stigmatised by the Christian British occupiers. And who is the guilty one according to this genius Jafri? The Hindus 🤡. I get that sometimes it is very hard to accept the fact that your ancestors were violated and that their religious identity was not necessarily chosen out of free will, but there should be a limit to coping. Why is it so hard to just admit that "Yes, my grandparents converted under dire circumstances, but now I am okay with this and I choose to remain in this religion they were forced to accept". Why must they project their trauma and insecurities on Hinduism for no reason? It is so insidious that Hindus' genuine worry about two cults that have a history of attacking and carrying out a genocide on Hindus, is framed as "Hindutva supremacy". Everywhere else in the world, the people who were colonised and subjugated are afforded humanity, only when it comes to Hindus do people seem to side with the colonisers. 
YouTube's pop historians and their interest towards Indo-European and Indology studies - how they weaponise history and science against Hindus or India
I came across this post by Tom Rowsell, who runs the Survive the Jive YouTube channel. He has a big following, and he has been making videos on genetics, archaeology and Indo-European migrations and mythologies for a while now. I'll tackle his post point by point, but first, I'll tell my observations about his channel.
The reason why I am discussing Rowsell's channel is because he frequently pushes subtle Hinduphobic and racist narrative. What makes Rowsell particularly sinister is that he utilises peer-reviewed scientific papers on Yamnaya steppe migrations, Bronze Age cultures, and ancient DNA, in interpreting the data in a way that pushes his views that are reminiscent of the 19th century racist European eugenicist theories.
Rowsell frames his channel as an objective response to corporate or academic institutions and "politically correct biases." However, his historical analysis is highly selective. He routinely boosts fringe, neoreactionary, and identitarian authors, such as Alain de Benoist or Aki Cederberg, who view history not as an objective study of the past, but as a spiritual and political toolkit to awaken "European tribal consciousness". The fundamental flaw in Survive the Jive's historical methodology is treating haplogroups and autosomal DNA as a direct proxy for cultural, spiritual, and national identity. Rowsell frequently implies an intrinsic, biological link between Indo-European DNA and European "pagan spirituality". He promotes the pseudo-historical idea that modern Europeans possess a genetic inheritance to the "proto-Indo-Europeans" who composed the Vedas (the Vedas were composed by 100% Indians). Now, let's get to debunking his post.
Claim: Charles Masson first described the ancient ruins of Harappa in the 1840s.
Status: Misleading. Masson stumbled upon the massive brick mounds but he did not realise he had found a 5,000-year-old civilization. Instead, he mistakenly hypothesized that the ruins belonged to the settlement of Alexander the Great. It was in 1921 that Indian archaeologist Rai Bahadur Daya Ram Sahni began systematic excavations at Harappa. Rakhaldas Banerjee discovered and excavated Mohenjo-daro the same year. These two Indian archaeologists proved that the unknown artefacts they found beneath the layers of ruins from different periods of time belonged to a far more ancient civilisation. In 1924, ASI Director-General Sir John Marshall formally announced to the world the discovery of the "Indus valley civilisation".
Claim: Alexander Cunningham founded the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) in 1861. He and later archaeologists mapped, surveyed, and excavated hundreds of ancient sites across South Asia.
Status: True, but misleading. Cunningham is the founder of ASI, he introduced structured methods for surveying, recording inscriptions, and publishing official archaeological reports. He did map and survey many ancient sites. Cunningham had the institutional support to do so. While he did immense work for mapping archaeological sites, decades before Cunningham founded the ASI, Indian historians and archaeologists laid the foundational intellectual framework for studying Indian antiquities. For example, Ram Raz (Rama Raja) was a scholar from Bangalore who penned the groundbreaking work An Essay on the Architecture of the Hindus in 1834. He was the first scholar to bridge the gap between ancient Sanskrit texts (Vastu Shastra) and surviving structural ruins. He had to study because the British scholars claimed that ancient Indian monuments were built haphazardly without any mathematical logic or written architectural science. Raz proved to the Western world that Indian temple building was a highly sophisticated, standardised, based on rigorous geometry, and completely independent of Greek or Roman influence. Radhakanta Deb collected, translated, and preserved ancient epigraphic inscriptions and numismatic coins that Westerners could not read without local expertise in the early 1800s. Rajendralal Mitra began his career at the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1846. He became the first Indian to explicitly demand that Indians interpret their own antiquities using rigorous, scientific methodology. He famously led major documented research expeditions, such as his 1868 survey of the temples of Odisha, publishing monumental analytical volumes like The Antiquities of Orissa. He engaged in a decades-long intellectual battle with James Fergusson, the leading British authority on Indian architectural history, because Fergusson had asserted that Indians had no knowledge of stone architecture prior to Alexander the Great's invasion and that Indians learned stone-carving entirely from the Greeks. Mitra famously wrote that history should be evaluated through rigorous facts rather than racial theories. Source.
Claim: H. C. P. Bell discovered/excavated the old capital of Sri Lanka, Polonnaruwa, which was forgotten since the 13th c.
Status: Misleading. H. C. P. Bell did not "discover" a completely unknown city from scratch. Instead, he relied heavily on historical Sri Lankan texts to locate the ruins. Source.
Claim: The Dravidian language family was first discovered/ identified as a distinct, non-Indo-European group of languages in 1816 by Francis Whyte Ellis, a British civil servant. Dravidian was later properly identified by Robert Caldwell.
Status: True, but misleading. It is true that Ellis, working alongside local scholars like Shankara Shastri, compared the grammatical structures and vocabulary roots of Tamil, Telugu, and Kannada, and proved that their core vocabulary and grammatical systems were distinct and belonged to a separate, non-Indo-European "South Indian family" of languages. Later, Scottish missionary Robert Caldwell published his book A Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian or South-Indian Family of Languages (1856). He took the Sanskrit word dravida (historically used to refer to Tamil) and applied it as the formal name for the entire language group. It is misleading because Indian grammarians recognized the distinct nature of South Indian languages centuries before the British. However, their approach and objectives were completely different from modern European philology. Astika philosopher Kumarila Bhatta in his 7th century CE text Tantravarttika noted that people in the south spoke what he termed "Andhra-Dravida Bhasha". Bhatta wrote that these southern dialects lacked the standard grammatical case endings, vowel structures, and suffixes found in Sanskrit. Source. Another work, Lilakatikam from the 14th century CE, detailed how the syntax, internal phonetic rules, and verbs of the southern dialects were different to Sanskrit grammar, treating them as separate systems that required careful poetic bridging. Source. Traditional Indian grammarians acknowledged the differences between southern dialects and Sanskrit, and they documented these to create translation and poetic rules. Indian grammarians viewed Sanskrit as a universal cultural matrix, and the interaction was natural. The western linguists intention was a mix of practical colonial governance, an obsession with global racial mapping, and religious missionary strategies. Source.
Claim: Indo-European, first identified in 1786 by the British judge in India, Sir William Jones. Jones' linguistic work also looked at mythology and contributed to the idea of a unified "ancient Indian religion" - this was popularised by Max Müller who formalised the idea of a single "Hindu religion" based on Sanskrit texts - and he used the term "Hindu", which first appeared in a 1787 letter by Charles Grant, a British East India Company official.
Status: Half true, misleading. It is true that Sir William Jones was the first to recognise the Indo-European language family based on comparative and philological studies, shattering Europeans' previous belief that the European languages descended from Hebrew. Why didn't Indian scholars discover this connection, despite the ancient Greeks interacting extensively with the ancient Indians? Especially when India possessed an exceptionally sophisticated tradition of linguistics, most notably pioneered by the grammarian Panini in the 4th century BCE? It's because Indian scholars worked in geographical and intellectual isolation from European languages. They focused strictly on analyzing Sanskrit phonetics, grammar, and Prakrit. They had no exposure to classical Greek or Latin texts. Even the presence of Alexander the Great, and the subsequent Indo-Greek Kingdoms, and bustling maritime trade networks, the connection between Ancient Greek and Sanskrit was not noted by either civilisation. Perhaps it was not a big deal to either? Greeks did notoriously call non-Greek languages as barbarian, even their fellow sister languages like proto-German in Europe. Indians had no interest in other languages except Sanskrit. While they missed the language connection, both Indians and Greeks were fascinated by similarities in their philosophies and mythologies. Greeks frequently embraced Indian gods onto their own pantheon (for example, identifying Shiva or Krishna with Dionysus or Herakles). Similarly, Indian texts wrote an entire treatise on the astronomical skills of the Yavanas (Greeks), even integrating it in formal use alongside with the Vedic astrology. Perhaps the Greeks and Indians noticed linguistic similarities, but it was not a strange or noteworthy thing to them. What about the word "Hindu", was Müller really the first to formalise the idea of a single Hindu religion? No. Several Indian poets, scholars and kings have used the word "Hindu" to define a shared religious and philosophical identity centuries before British colonization. Read here more about the word Hindu. King Bukka Raya I of the Vijayanagara Empire in 1352 CE was given the title "Hinduraya suratrana" (Hindu king among sultans) as a political identity to resist the expansion of the Islamic Sultanates that had captured northern India. In the 15th century, poet Vidyapati, in his Apabhramsha work Kirttilata, wrote about Hindu dharma and how it was different from the Turaka (Muslims). In Kashmir, this Sanskrit scholar Jonaraja used the term Hinduka in his continuation of the historical chronicle Rajatarangini to differentiate the non-Muslim populations from the surrounding Muslims. The medieval Gaudiya Vaishnava works Chaitanya Charitamrita and Chaitanya Bhagavata wrote about "Hindu dharma" being a unified cultural and spiritual identity that was different from the Mlecchas (which denoted Muslims in their context). Eknath and Tulsidas wrote about unified philosophical, cultural and moral identity of the Hindus too. Charles Grant himself learned the word "Hindu" from the Persian language records in Bengal.
Claim: James Prinsep deciphered the Brahmi script in the 1830s which unlocked forgotten knowledge of the Ashokan inscriptions and early Indian historical chronology.
Status: Half true, misleading. I wrote about the Brahmi script and Ashoka in this post.
Claim: Henry Thomas Colebrooke rediscovered the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali lost since 16th century. Helped establish academic Sanskrit studies in Europe.
Status: Misleading. While it is true that the Yoga Sutras had fallen out of widespread popular practice and mainstream philosophical dominance, the claim that they were completely forgotten or unexamined by Indian scholars is not true. The narrative of "total oblivion in India" was popularised by some Western historians, such as David Gordon White in his book The Yoga Sutra of Patanjali: A Biography. Indian scholars actively preserved, debated, and wrote extensive bhashyas (Sanskrit commentaries) on the Yoga Sutras during the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries - immediately leading up to Colebrooke’s arrival. For example, Vijnanabhikshu from 15th century Bihar wrote Yogasarasamgraha and Yogabhashyavarttika on Yoga Sutras. Colebrooke did not find a long forgotten text that was not practiced by the Hindus, he relied heavily on the living tradition of the Pandits who read, taught, and preserved these continuous lineages of commentaries.
Claim: Buddhism mostly disappeared in India during medieval times, but ancient literature was rediscovered in Nepal, Tibet, Sri Lanka etc by Brits; Brian Houghton Hodgson collected the Mahayana sutras and Vinaya (monastic rules). Charles Henry Allan Bennett introduced Buddhism to the West and fostered its growth in Burma and Sri Lanka.
Status: Misleading. Regions like Ladakh, Sikkim, Himachal Pradesh, Tawang (Arunachal Pradesh), and parts of Bengal (Darjeeling), Tibetan and Himalayan forms of Mahayana and Vajrayana Buddhism were continuously practiced for centuries. Small, isolated communities of Theravada Buddhists preserved their traditions uninterrupted in eastern Bengal and Assam, dating back to pre-medieval times. Despite its decay, the Mahabodhi Temple in Bihar remained a known sacred site. It drew continuous, small-scale pilgrimages from Burmese, Tibetan, and Sri Lankan monks throughout the medieval and early modern eras. Mahabodhi was protected by Shaiva priests until 19th century. The decline in Buddhism happened because Indian Buddhism was centralized Sanghas, such as in universities like Nalanda. When these centers were destroyed in the 12th-century Islamic Turkic invasions, the institutional backbone fractured. This happened for Hindus too when temple and royal institutions crumbled in the Indo-Gangetic belt, but Hinduism survived better in those regions in two ways: 1) the folk Hinduism that survived the invasion, some Brahmins survived and preserved their knowledge and went into geographically isolated areas, 2) Hindu kings resisted, which gave Hinduism the necessary breathing space. Over centuries, Buddhists went to Hinduism or Jainism as those were the communities that survived in the Indo-Gangetic belt. This is the time when caste identities started getting more rigid - Jains formed their own merchant guild identity, Hindus isolated themselves in order to avoid assimilation in the new world order. However, Hindu scholars were aware of the Astika (orthodox/Vedic) and Nastika (heterodox/non-Vedic) classifications centuries before British colonisation. In traditional Indian intellectual centers like Kashi, Mithila, and Nadia, the dominant system of philosophy was Navya-Nyaya. To master Hindu logic, a student was strictly required to study the arguments of great Buddhist logicians like Dignaga, Dharmakirti, and Ratnakirti. Hindu treatises from the 14th to the 18th centuries are filled with refutations of Buddhist concepts like Kshanikavada (the doctrine of momentariness) and Anatman (non-self). Scholars could not refute these ideas without thoroughly memorizing and understanding them. Moreover, In the 11th century, a Kashmiri Hindu scholar named Somadeva compiled the Kathasaritsagara, a massive 20,000-stanza Sanskrit masterpiece, where several Buddhist Jataka tales were integrated. Hindu scholars reading this text in the aforementioned intellectual centres were fully aware of stories like the selfless King Shibi (who gave his own flesh to save a dove), but they viewed it as a universal Indian moral tale of Dharma and ultimate sacrifice, rather than a sectarian Buddhist text. It is disingenuous to frame it in a way that Buddhism was mostly forgotten in India, completely omitting historical realities of India, and ignoring the fact that in native scholarship and folklore, Buddhism did exist, even after a collapse. When colonial scholars began translating the Pali Canon from Sri Lanka and monastic manuscripts from Nepal, they realised that the fables popular in European folklore (like Aesop's Fables or La Fontaine) and Indian folklore had similarities, and that they had their roots in Buddhist Jataka tales and Hindu Pancharatra tales. The Europeans at the time simply had access to texts from various countries and the leisure to study them. 
Claim: A. H. Fox Strangways made important early contributions to documenting Indian classical music traditions - recording and systematising observation of Indian music.
Status: Misleading. While Strangways' systematic approach to analyzing Indian melody and rhythm laid critical groundwork for comparative musicology, Indian musicology is backed by an ancient, uninterrupted textual tradition called Sangita Shastra. There's Bharata Muni’s Natya Shastra (2nd Century BCE – 2nd Century CE), which is the foundational text on Indian performing arts. It categorised instruments, outlined the emotional essence of performance (rasa), and mathematically divided the octave into 22 microtones (shrutis). Matanga Muni’s Brihaddesi (6th Century) was the very first known text to define and use the word Raga as a formal melodic framework. Sharngadeva’s Sangita Ratnakara (13th Century) is regarded as one of the most definitive structures for both northern and southern musical systems. During the 16th and 17th centuries, Mughal court scholars frequently wrote musical manuals in Sanskrit and Persian to preserve the core repertoires and canonize the music of the era. Right before and during Strangways' lifetime, Indian scholars were already leading a major, self-driven movement to standardize and preserve Indian music via modern print technology. Strangways did not introduce musicology to India. Instead, he tried to translate the pre-existing Indian musicology into a Western musicological framework. He worked alongside the living traditions and contemporary scholars of his time.
In conclusion, we can appreciate the work that some of these British scholars did to collect and translate Indian texts an artefacts, but let us completely debunk the notion that is being perpetuated that Indians forgot their own history, or that Indians had no scholarship of their own.
You are absolutely right to use crude language when writing about liberandus. They deserve it. Its always ironic when they say "hindus are brainwashed by godi media"- when they themselves are the biggest victims AND propagators of colonial and islamist/missionary propaganda. And you are also right in saying that most of them come from a place of privilege. They loooove to post and virtue signal others from their ivory towers!
Like sorry sweetie you might believe the same old recycled "hinduism is evil and demonic", "hindus are kafirs" bullshit- but im NOT! I'm a proud hindu! Really fucking entitled of them to think that they represent all hindus. They are so fucking servile and willing to lick the boots of radicals and foreigners! Just throw some money at them and they will start barking against their own religion and motherland! Their own interests! They are like circus monkeys! Throw in some "funding" and tell them to dance- and they will!
And im really fucking tired of the excuse "their parents didn't teach them anything about hinduism🥺!" So??? SYBAU ALREADY! The internet is free! Google is free! Are they so fucking lazy?
Guess what? My parents too did not have time to teach me anything about my religion when I was a kid! It is I myself who took the effort to learn- and am still learning!
I wonder what will happen if one day islamism really does takeover india. We have already seen what it does to minorities in bangladesh and pakistan. Will the lefties and wokies still parrot anti-hindu and anti-india rhetoric? Bcs realistically hindus (esp indian bangladeshi pakistani) practically have no other safe space in the indian subcontinent except india. If one day we become refugees in our own land- we will actually have nowhere to go. Where will this secularism go then?
Exactly! I resonated with this line
// And im really fucking tired of the excuse "their parents didn't teach them anything about hinduism🥺!" So??? SYBAU ALREADY! The internet is free! Google is free! Are they so fucking lazy? Guess what? My parents too did not have time to teach me anything about my religion when I was a kid! It is I myself who took the effort to learn- and am still learning!//
My parents were also working and on top of that I grew up abroad, and the only way my school has ever taught me about my religion is slap a picture of the "caste pyramid" and call it a day. Not only did I get bullied for being brown immigrant Hindu but also I faced institutional Hinduphobia. But I refused to let others dehumanise me so I took the time to ask my parents whenever possible, and when they didn't have all the answers, I read on my own. And I'm still learning and I bow to Maa Saraswati for giving me this hunger for knowledge. It aggravates me so much when I see Gungadin Sepoys bootlicking colonisers claiming that Mughals and British civilised them. Like no ma'am/mister, speak for yourself.
Also, You're absolutely correct. The Islamisation of the Indian subcontinent was very recent. Even in 1920, the Kafiristanis were practicing a para-Vedic religion which had similar deities as we do, such as Yama, Indra, and they're related to another group the Kalasha people. The comments under this reel by Pakistanis, criticising the Kalasha rituals for sending their deceased to the afterlife, as the Kalash too believe in reincarnation. Kalashas are currently endangered and it is possible that in a couple of decades they might be gone too.
After Afghan emir Abdul Rahman Khan was given free hands by the British occupation in the Durand line, this emir forcibly converted this tribe and called them Nuristanis after their conversion. Around half of Karachi used to be Hindu, Sikh, Jain. They're gone. East Bengal was 50% Hindu in the 19th century until British policies. Entire districts are rapidly Islamising in West Bengal with state support. Hindus are having fewer children, used to be devastated by higher infant mortality before 2014, sex selective abortions were brought in by Ford Foundation and Congress government in order to cull Hindu birth rate, etc. By the way, the "overpopulation" scare is racist ecofascism by westerners who are more worried about brown people population exceeding white population hence they put all the onus of saving the planet on us rather than changing their own horrible eco disaster behaviour. In this racist fervour, Hindu TFR has been systematically brought down. It is highly possible that Muslims, who, despite their education level, don't care about limited resources and such because of their apparent stronger community bonding, their population may one day cross the critical threshold and Islamisation can be a reality. I want Hindus to understand this that their future is hanging on a thread.
Out of all the points people use to defend the mughals- the "india enjoyed the highest gdp under mughal rule!🥺 it was overflowing with wealth"- will always be the funniest. Bcs even if it was true- it does not erase the mughal attrocities! It does not erase the fact thst hindus were burdened with jizya, targetted and killed.
"Highest Gdp" MY ASS!
Also the "highest GDP under Mughals" is a myth, which, if I recall correctly, was propelled by Shashi Tharoor. The narrative that India accounted for about 23% of the world's GDP during Mughal era but after British rule the share plummeted to mere 3% is central in the book An Era of Darkness. He quotes economic historians such as Angus Maddison to support his claims about pre-colonial economic dominance. First of all, the demerit of Tharoor's claim is that focusing solely on a large share of global GDP without accounting for population size is an elementary mistake in economic reasoning. A large country can have a significant share of the world economy even with a poor populace. India had a high GDP simply because our population was much bigger thanks to our fertile soil.
Moreover, India's large share of global GDP began to decline even before British rule took full effect, because India already lagged behind in naval supremacy, hence it couldn't dominate in trading. Yes, the British did largely de-industrialise India, but it is also true that Mughals had drained India of its wealth and resources, which is why martial and scientific innovation could not reach its zenith. India was using advanced printing press in pressing patterns to textiles which were exported rather than printing books. Also, Tharoor overlooks the fact that rapid industrialisation of Britain and other European powers quickly overrode India's GDP despite having smaller populations because the industrial output of Europe beat the output of India. Lastly, the modern concept and calculation of GDP did not exist in the Mughal era, making any figures an estimation.
I also want to add that historical sources indicate that Babur transferred significant amounts of wealth out of India following his conquest, primarily to support his projects in Central Asia. He viewed India largely as a resource base to fund his original Timurid homeland. This is all recorded in Baburnama. So yeah, Fuck mughals and Fuck firangis.
