It was 2020, when the well-known Indian chef Vikas Khanna, based in NY, started an initiative called ‘Feed India’ to help his native country. As a sardonic, racist question, he was asked by a BBC news anchor, if his inspiration for such a noble initiative was because he belonged to India. To this, Vikas Khanna’s terse reply was, “...I was born and raised in Amritsar and we have a huge Community Kitchen where everyone gets fed. The entire city can eat there, but my sense of hunger came from New York.”

That was neither the first nor the last of such stereotypical, run-of-the-mill remarks against India. The Western media likes to portray that everything is fine at home and that the real problems are elsewhere. Barring the ‘progressive’ and ‘affluent’ West, everyone must have barely survived starvation and poverty. It's a typical Western stereotype rooted in racism.

"Colonial Discourse and the Suffering of Indian American Children: A Francophone Postcolonial Analysis" by Kundan Singh and Krishna Maheshwari is a book that brings innumerable portrayals of the heavily biased approach West has been illogically implanting on India, and more specifically against Hindus and Hinduism for last few centuries.

As a famous quote goes, ‘The world is a mirror. The faults you see in others are your own’ holds for this East-West dialogue, too, and becomes the guiding idea to understand this book. On similar lines, the book argues that what Europeans think they know of India tells us more about Europe than it does about India.” It brings out how the ‘epistemic violence,’ with a heavily tainted and biased knowledge perspective of the West has been conspicuously damaging for the Hindus and Hinduism. The East and the West are addressed as two opposing categories, the colonised and the colonisers, respectively. The colonisers describe themselves as civilised and the colonised as savage and primitive. This was followed as a global pattern wherever the colonisers spread their imperial wings. 

Colonial Discourse comes as an extensive post-colonial effort to reveal and help recover from the colossal damage which was done to Hindus and India by James Mill, one of the topmost officials in the imperial East India Company, and his three-volume magnum opus, the History of British India.

The book gives the gory details of how Mill left no stone unturned to describe Hindu people as ‘savage, uncivilised, brute, primitive, uncouth, rude, coarse’, and their social structure, social laws, governance, and taxation systems as hierarchical and oppressive, their manners and customs as totally ‘irrational, superstitious, incoherent’. Hinduism was described as being synonymous with the caste system with a predominance of Brahmins. Mill portrays Hinduism as a primitive religion because ceremonies and rituals take precedence over giving importance to morality. This description may be understood as the first layer of revelation.

On the second layer, comes why Mill has been so abusive and hateful towards Hinduism and ancient Hindu values. Mill represents the Hindus and Ancient India in light of the conditions he wanted to transform in his home country. The book explains in detail how Mill concocted his narrative on India, Hinduism, and Hindus in light of the social and political conditions that he wanted to reform and expel from British society.

When Mill spoke about dominating the Hindu Brahmins, he categorically was talking about the English clergy. If Mill comments on the social stratification of the Hindus, the Brahmins and the Indian monarchy, he is primarily articulating the utilitarian understanding of his class-based society, the clergy of his own country, and the absolutist European monarchical system, respectively. (Pg.111)

It is noticeable that Mill never visited India, took the effort to learn any of the Indian languages, or even had familiarity with any Indian language, yet so authoritatively wrote about imaginary discourse on India, “rooted in projections and fantasies”. (pg. 12) 

Mill supported the mantra given by Jeremy Bentham that the greatest good lies in the greatest number. However, when Mill felt that because of the privileged class in his society, only a few were enjoying all the privileges, leaving a scar on morality, he ended up expressing his concern which was mapped onto Hindu society. Because he did not have the liberty to say things directly, Mill’s description of the flawed Hindu form of governance and taxation structure mapped onto the regressive British form of governance and taxation that Mill did.

The argument comes out loud and clear through the book that the derogatory terms and vocabulary used by Mill were from the Indian and Hindu context, but they had nothing to do with the Hindus or Hindu dharma. “The discourse was a complete sleight of hand; it was about Britain and nothing about Ancient India, Hinduism, and Hindus.” (pg. 175)

Now, coming to the third layer, the authors theorise the intimate connection between Mill’s colonial-racist discourse and the current school textbook discourse. Mill’s skewed representations of India and Hinduism, even after a century, leave consequences which are pervasive in Western academia. The only difference that those crooked ideas have been cosmetically pruned to be staged for the middle and high-school textbooks in California school textbooks and elsewhere.

The authors talk about how the impact of such an interpretation had been so damaging that even in the 21st century we are bearing the repercussions of some wrongdoing done in the past. Such racist portrayal of Hindu heritage leaves an indelible mark on young minds and it produces in the Indian American children a psychological impact which leads to “shame, inferiority, embarrassment, identity confusion, assimilation and a phenomenon identical to racelessness where the children dissociate from the tradition and culture of their ancestors. (viii preface) 

As a contribution to post-colonial study, the book does rigorous epistemological and theoretical analysis of British texts as an academic task to unclog the deadly impact on people's minds. The book leaves the readers with deep angst as it shows how the misguided colonial representation is still alive and kicking and how it is negatively impacting the Indian American children in the present.

The book suggests that such narratives developed in a colonial setup have almost nothing to do with truth but it has to do with power. “The coloniser and the colonised are bound in a reciprocal and dialectical relationship. They are not independent categories but mutually dependent or contingent categories. The former creates the latter.” (pg. 21) The coloniser thus dehumanises the colonised. The culture, language, and cosmology of the colonised are entirely transformed and substituted with the coloniser’s. (pg. 25)

The authors briefly discuss Thomas Kuhn's concept of paradigm shifts; it does have some relevance to any postcolonial work, talking about paradigms. In general, both frameworks consider how dominant narratives and worldviews shape knowledge and understanding. Kuhn's idea of a dominant paradigm, or a shared set of assumptions and beliefs, is analogous to the colonial discourse that has historically shaped the understanding of the colonised world.

However, author Kundan Singh finds Kuhn’s argument as self-referential and self-refuting, so he finds refuge in the epistemology of Buddhism and Vedanta where the recognition and transcendence of dualities, dichotomies, and binaries are discussed in great detail.

The book explains how both Mahayana Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta recognise the existence of binary pairs in interaction with each other. Mahayana Buddhism’s Pratītya Samutpāda (Dependent Co-origination theory) says that all phenomena, including binary pairs, are interconnected and mutually dependent. Similarly, Advaita Vedanta, a school of Hindu philosophy, also proposes that the world of duality, including binary pairs, is an illusion (Maya). The ultimate reality is non-dual (Advaita) Brahman, which is beyond the limitations of subject-object distinctions.

The book, in a nutshell, suggests that Western cosmology limits itself because of the binaries; one category always takes precedence over the other e.g. mind over body, conscious over the unconscious, and so on. Singh consequently says that it is a serious issue if reality is understood on two different levels as both have to be considered. “True and false, right and wrong, and absolute and relative exist as pairs; for one to exist, the other must exist. For the absolute to exist, the relative must exist; conversely, if the absolute is taken away, the relative too will go away, just like it will become tough to recognise the night if the day ceases to exist.” (pg. 100). In other words, real knowledge lies beyond binaries and dichotomies.

Coming to the last leg of the book, the authors say that “A sanitised and politically correct version of Mill’s discourse is what is introduced to the Indian American children from sixth grade onward.” (pg.179). The California Department of Education begins the process of discourse production in school textbooks by setting the “History-Social Science Content Standards” or HSS Content Standards; this is, unfortunately, heavily impacted by the descriptions given by Mill, centuries ago.

The Aryan Invasion Theory (AIT) of HSS Content Standards and the consequent Aryan Migration Theory (AMT) of the HSS Framework take precedence when it comes to describing Hindu society. AIT and AMT are both intimately tied with the colonial and racist projects. Furthermore, the caste system of Hindu society is unnecessarily highlighted. In brief, direct colonial rule may have ended, but the paradigm running the colonial enterprise that it is only the European people or people with European lineage who are capable of establishing civilisations is solidly intact!

The book has raised serious concerns. It is a heavy read and requires some background in contemporary issues with Indic studies to make sense of the book. The authors’ contribution is commendable. We should appreciate that at least more scholars are coming forward to decolonise our minds with their in-depth research and revelations, most logically and systematically.

The book fills the readers with deep disgust and shame. Not towards Mill's representation of the Hindu society long ago, but towards us Hindus, the so-called ‘richest community in the USA’ today, who are barely concerned about the issue. We need to understand that colonisation, with its racist underpinnings in the textbooks for our students in the US, has been known to cause psychological consequences. Such books should jolt Hindus from slumber and raise concern about the issue on different levels in society.

Enough of victim card playing. Hindus have to take the bull by the horns. Preach and practice at home and don’t let the external influences predominate. Being the richest community in the USA where are we investing our time and money? Are we so intellectually and emotionally pathetic that we are getting dominated by a philosophy given two hundred years back?

The book is not evenly divided when it comes to its chapters. Some chapters have a lot of repetitions and at times it seems like an unnecessary drag. Addressing Kundan Singh as a third person in his own book also is confusing at times. Professor Kundan Singh, PhD has been teaching at the Sofia university since 2009. Currently, he is also associated with the Hindu University of America as a Core Doctoral Faculty. Krishna Maheshwari is the founder and CEO of Hindupedia, the online encyclopedia of Hindu Dharma.

Image source: Hinduism Today