Breaking India

Title: Breaking India – Western Interventions in Dravidian and Dalit Fault Lines

Author: Rajiv Malhotra, Aravindan Neelakandan

Publisher: Amaryllis, 2013 (First published 2011)

ISBN: 9788191067378

Pages: 650

When the British replaced the Mughals as the sovereign of India in the eighteenth century, they wanted to have in place a legal system in consonance with the liturgical principles of the subject nation. Many British scholars studied the Hindu religious and secular texts in Sanskrit. They were astonished to find striking similarities in the structure and vocabulary of Sanskrit and European languages. This common origin of languages implored thinkers to postulate a common race called the Aryans who were the ancestors of Europeans. This race was supposed to have invaded and conquered India in the distant past just like what the British had done in recent history. About a century later, Christian missionaries working in South India conjured up another construct called Dravidians in order to establish a dichotomy between the north and south in the anthropological arena so as to correspond to a few differences in linguistics. This racial theory was held as sacrosanct till genetic studies among the people tore it to pieces. However, the Dravidian idea took a life of its own when it gained political centre stage in Tamil Nadu. Dravidian and Dalit identities are exploited to the hilt by western organisations intent on Balkanizing India because the concept and unity of India in the face of diverse societies, languages and customs is so alien to the ideals these troublemakers cherish. This book handles invented histories, identities and racial categories that was formed and nurtured by colonial powers as it gave cultural superiority, economic advantages and political dominance over the controlled civilization. Rajiv Malhotra is a public intellectual on current affairs, world religions and cross-cultural encounters between East and West while Aravindan Neelakandan is working with an NGO in Tamil Nadu serving marginalized rural communities in sustainable agriculture.

Malhotra explains the compulsions which led the colonial bureaucrats to delve into Indian linguistics. European romanticists of eighteenth century needed a historical basis for their views to escape the rigid framework of Judeo-Christian monotheism. Similarity of Sanskrit with Greek and Latin were quickly noted by early Indologists. This so pervaded the colonial mind as to create a notion of Aryans as harbingers of civilization to all humanity. Europe spun a wide and nauseous web of Aryan master race theory that engendered Nazism and the Holocaust. It was Max Muller who first applied the word 'Arya' as the name of a family of languages and of the people who spoke them. Muller did try to propose an amicable divorce between philology and ethnology, but only after his work had found its way into race sciences. However, after the Second World War, European academics and social institutions made a great effort to exorcize the Aryan race theory from European psyche, but they still continue to apply these ideas to India.

Many Indians are thankful to Max Muller for his in-depth study of classical Sanskrit literature. It is beyond dispute that Muller’s studies still illuminate the path of Sanskrit scholars. This book notes a lesser known aspect of Max Muller. He served as a functionary of evangelists and observed thus: "the Veda is the root of their religion and to show them what the root is, I feel sure, the only way of uprooting all that has sprung from it during the last 3000 years”. On another occasion, Muller wrote: “the ancient religion of India is totally doomed and if Christianity does not step in, whose fault will it be?” (p.26)

After creating the Aryan myth, the colonialists created another myth to oppose and hence to balance it. The authors claim that evangelical and colonial interests worked in tandem with ethno-linguistic scholarship to fabricate the Dravidian identity. In that sense, Bishop Robert Caldwell may be thought of as the father of Dravidians. This missionary scholar of the Anglican Church created the ‘Dravidian race’ through his studies. He proposed the existence of Dravidians before the coming of Aryans, but got cheated by Brahmins who were agents of the Aryan. Simple-minded Dravidians were kept in shackles by the Aryans through exploitation of religion who needed to be liberated by Europeans like him. He proposed the complete removal of Sanskrit words from Tamil. Once the Dravidian mind is free of the Aryan superstitions, Christian evangelism would reap the souls of Dravidians, or so he thought. In parallel with the creation of a Dravidian separate identity in South India another similar mischief was going on in Sri Lanka. A new alien identity was off loaded onto Sinhalese shoulders by using Buddhism as the religion, Sinhalese as the language and Aryan as the race. We have seen the gruesome bloodshed this wicked categorisation has caused in that small island. G U Pope, another Christian scholar, claimed that Thirukural was the result of Christian influence of the Alexandrian school. Other missionary scholars attributed Thirukkural to Jain origins, with the conviction of the ethnic inferiority of Tamils as Caldwell surmised that a treatise on ethics with such lofty ideals couldn't have originated from within the indigenous Tamil tradition.

Evangelists and Christian missionaries try to appropriate Tamil culture as their own in a bizarre theological experiment by claiming powerful Christian influence in the development of Tamil culture. To buttress this claim, they proposed the myth of Saint Thomas as the apostle who came to India in 52 CE. There is absolutely no historical evidence for this but the evangelists propagate that the Tamil classics were composed under his influence. To add force to the argument, they also propose that Tamil spirituality later got infiltrated by ulterior Aryan influence. This book includes the profile of several evangelists who carp on Aryan invasion and Dalit suppression. Deivanayagam and his daughter Devakala have put forward another outlandish theory to ascertain the primacy of Tamil culture. It is said that Tamil race originated from the sunken continent of Lemuria - also called Kumari Kandam in Tamil - and that Tamil civilization and language is the true source of all world developments.

The authors point out liberal discourse on Dalits exceeding the limits and stray into seditious ground. Dalits were severely oppressed in all parts of India in the past. This atrocity still continues at some places, but now there are enough safeguards to fight this menace from inside the system. Still, the academic Dalit studies encourage Dalit writing only from a separate and divisive perspective and not as an important contribution to mainstream Indian literature. Double standards are also at play here. While the sense of national identity in the West is getting stronger, in the less developed countries, scholarship is encouraged toward self-deconstruction. Colonial anthropology transformed Indian community units that were distinguished by their occupational roles into racial groups. Caste is erroneously equated to race and such academics invite the international community led by the US and EU to take punitive action against India according to international laws on racism. Evangelists desire to drive a wedge between Dalits and the rest of Indian society with a design to engineer conversions upon the former. Numerous US institutions take the atrocity literature being produced by evangelists-funded entities, repackage it in a professionally compelling style and feed it to the policy makers of the US centres of power.

This book attempts to look at the historical origins of the Dravidian movement, Dalit identity and the role of the West in exploiting them with a view to divide India into pieces. The book’s right wing leaning is undeniable but the authors have made a thorough objective study to bring all contemporary aspects of the interminable flow of foreign funds to India for religious conversions and stoking sectarian dissent by building up strife where none existed before. The book’s very informative Appendix B on ancient Tamil religion in Sangam literature clearly spells out the basis of Tamil religion on Vedic culture. Many examples from Sangam literature are also listed.

Readers who close this book after reading it are reminded of a clear warning that pervades the book’s entirety - that the forces of dissolution co-opts Indian intellectuals at various levels ranging from lowly data gatherers to identity-engineering programs in the murky backwaters of Non-governmental organisations (NGOs), to mid-level scholars in India, all the way to Indian Ivy League professors and award-winning globetrotters. This is the author's mission statement. Each chapter begins with an ideogram that succinctly puts the main points of discussion in the chapter in graphic form, similar to an algorithmic flowchart. It also lists prominent academics and evangelists as well as profiling major foreign and local advocacy groups who strive to Balkanize India.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 4 Star