The 3 M's Of Hinduphobia: Mill, Macaulay and Marx. Mill's was the original sin

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. There were merely seven chapters on Hindus in his three volumes of History, but these reinforced the negative colonial attitudes to India and Hindus - with huge consequential damage to the latter’s psyches. The authors say that this bias endures, and is now leading to the psychological  suffering of Indian American children, who are being taught the same garbage that Mill published more than two centuries ago, but in a more sanitised form. Mill’s book, and especially its chapters on India, were used as instruction material for officers and administrators or the East India Company in India, which was then handed down to officers of the British government who ran India directly after the 1857 war of independence, or Sepoy Mutiny, as the British preferred to call the uprising. The book impressed the British so much that Mill soon got nominated as a member of the board of directors of the East India Company, from where he guided its India governance model. This position helped get his son John Stuart Mill a job as clerk in the East India Company at the age of 17.

The authors emphasise that Mill’s History is a “hegemonic text”, as described by Ronald B Inden, “because Mill wrote it to assist the British governance of India.” It is thus a “colonial text” insofar as it pertains to its views on Hindus, but Mill boasted that it was not necessary to actually come to India and learn about its people. The authors quote Mill as saying: “A man who is duly qualified may attain more knowledge of India in one year in his closet in England than he could obtain during the course of the longest life by the use of his eyes and ears in India.”

Nobody, not even his critics, could have accused him of this kind of arrogance and self-indulgent objectivity. 

Chapter 1 describes Mill’s background and his writing of The History of British India, while Chapter 2 deals with the work of Francophone thinkers and their contributions to understanding the coloniser-coloniser dialectic. Chapter 3 describes in graphic detail how Mill demonises Hindus as oppressive and hierarchical, people who have no sense of history (which is why the colonial powers had to write them), and whose governance was despotic. Chapter 4 situates Mill’s negative portrayal of Hindu society in his own political and social context, where Mill sought to project the things he wanted to change in British society onto Hindu society, including his characterisation of Hindu Brahmins as the equivalent of the English clergy, against whom Mill had many criticisms. Thus the Hindu Brahmin becomes the oppressor of the masses in the same way he imagined the English clergy as doing the same to his society.

Chapter 5 is the core of the book, which connects Mill’s demonisation of Hindus to current education in the US, where Indian American children have to learn to live with the same negativism. Singh and Maheshwari show how sixth-graders in the US are asked to engage with the same nonsense thrown up by Mill, though in sanitised and politically correct ways. They show the California Department of Education’s History-Social Science (HSS) Content Standards closely follow Mill’s ideas. 

In his first chapter, Mill claimed that the Indian sub-continent was so bountiful that the early Indians saw no need to settle anywhere and this nomadic life made them more savage than other savages elsewhere. They also had no sense of history. The California HSS Content Standards mirror the same broad direction of thought, but couched in different words. The first two topics ask students to locate and describe the physical settings of India and how they may have influenced this civilisation. Then they have to discuss the significance of the Aryan invasions. Later they dive into Mill’s anti-Brahmin diatribes, and ask students to explain the major beliefs of Brahmanism and how this may have influenced early Hinduism. Then, of course, you have to outline the social structure of the caste system. And if you are not sufficiently turned off by Hinduism, we get two more topics, one on the moral teachings of the Buddha, and another on the Mauryan empire and Emperor Ashoka’s political and moral achievements.

Singh and Maheshwari conclude that “six of the seven topics of the HSS Content Standards bear a direct relationship and correlation with the “highly degrading, demeaning, toxic and racist discourse of James Mill.” Chapter 6 deals with the damaging psychological consequences on Indian American children as a result of the Mill-influenced curriculum.

Singh and Maheshwari focus on Mill’s work and critiques of colonialism based on three Francophone thinkers’ insights, but the tragedy is that these racist tropes are now part of mainstream education about India and Hindus in the US. It is thus possible to draw not only conclusions about how this negativity feeds into the psyches of Indian American children, but also the media and policy think tanks based in Europe and America. The next time you read a negative New York Times report on India, blame Mill and not just the NYT.

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. Macaulay made sweeping and negative judgments about Indian literature. Like James Mill, who rubbished Hindus without setting foot in India, Macaulay dismissed the whole of Indian literature in one or two devastating sentences despite being largely ignorant of it. He wrote: “I have no knowledge of either Sanscrit (sic) or Arabic. But I have done what I could to form a correct estimate of their value. I have read translations of the most celebrated Arabic and Sanscrit (sic) works. I have conversed, both here and at home, with men distinguished by their proficiency in the Eastern tongues. I am quite ready to take the oriental learning at the valuation of the orientalists themselves. I have never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.” He proposed that western literature was “intrinsically superior”, and that the purpose of British administration was to develop a class of Indians who were Indian by race, but English in orientation. He wrote: “We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern, a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect.”

Karl Marx, who never visited India either, noted that British rule in India may be vile and unfair to the natives, but it was creating a social revolution that would ultimately help the natives evolve. He wrote: 

“England, it is true, in causing a social revolution in Hindostan, was actuated only by the vilest interests, and was stupid in her manner of enforcing them. But that is not the question. The question is, can mankind fulfil its destiny without a fundamental revolution in the social state of Asia? If not, whatever may have been the crimes of England she was the unconscious tool of history in bringing about that revolution.”

So when Prime Minister Narendra Modi called for ending the Indian elite’s mental slavery of Macaulay vintage, he could more usefully have referred to the original racist: James Mill.

Three M’s, Mill, Macaulay, and Marx, did more to damage India’s sense of self than any military defeat at the hands of invaders, including the British.

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About the book

Colonial Discourse and the Suffering of Indian American Children: A Francophone Post-Colonial Analysis. Published by Palgrave Macmillan, 259 pages. Hardcover price: Rs 4,410. The book can be freely downloaded under a Creative Commons Attribution and International Licence.