Why British viewed Hinduism as Barbaric
Given below are snippets from the above book which describes the activities of the Thugs, as the murderous Indian cult was called.
In many British minds, therefore, Hinduism became perceived as a barbaric religion. It was a faith that permitted infanticide – specifically, the killing of unwanted female children – and suttee, the burning of widows who chose to join their beloved husbands in death, even though both practices were forbidden in its most ancient texts. Suttee was not, in fact, particularly common, and most widows who did choose self-immolation went willingly and calmly to their deaths. But that was not the impression Britons received from their newspapers and books. Prurient reports from India spoke of women being forced shrieking onto their funeral pyres by baying relatives, and dwelled on the agonies of a slow death by fire; a good many readers with no personal knowledge of India certainly believed that this was the common fate of all Hindu widows from Bombay to Bengal.
Amal Chatterjee categorizes into two the descriptions of victims of Sati, “officials saw and recorded suttees that involved “mature” women, while non-officials [media] invariably encountered young women, in the bloom of their youth, being tragically destroyed by blind and tyrannical custom.”The latter image was given form by innumerable poems and romances. Mariana Starke’s celebrated play The Widow of Malabar (1791) featured a beautiful girl driven towards her death by evil Brahmins, only to be rescued by a gallant Englishman at the very moment all seemed lost.
Mike Dash is clearly of the opinion that the reality in India was starkly different from the news that was fed to British minds. It is this misreporting and ensuing misunderstandings that have heldped in creating extreme and vulgar images of India and Hinduism in the West.
He further notes:
The Company’s discovery, early in the nineteenth century, that Thug gangs were strangling hundreds of travellers in Hindustan, thus fitted neatly into the pattern of British expectation.
Thus, any negative image of India or Hinduism was accepted as the norm, and Indians and their religion came to be seen as barbaric. The Christian missionaries easily used this ‘hideous moral wilderness’ to justify their raison d’ ?ɬ©tre in India, and in 1813, the British government compelled the Company to allow Crhistian missionaries into its dominions. Within a remarkably short space of time, even educated Britons, whether in London or Bengal, were condemning the Hindu peasantry as ‘universally and wholly corrupt…depraved as they are blind, and wretched as they are depraved’.
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If I ever hoped to see u as a foreign religion…i did.. cultures, people live it as if there is no heaven here to talk about… did a god ever say stop here? will there be gods reading, knowing and changing our little paradise. i hope ur paradise will be reborn in a way none of ur gods would have ever imagined.. the time to find the answer in all our global connections was there for tooo long that a real god wouldn’t say… we are in heaven .. let’s make it heaven and share what we know because the knowledege that a god would leave would lead u to his dream which is above our heaven.. did he know that our heaven will be beside us waiting for us to just look beside as it always was there… there heaven was the heaven they wished for… there’s many god’s in ur past or higher connections that wished more than u would think of now or yesteday… but if their wishes found their way to all our worlds the must be gods…making everybody gods… who make gods. god is paradise.. paradise is what we want in the end … all dream will end where they wanted to end.. but never forget… no god will tell u what u will make in this and if u think those god can … do a paradise that leaves a paradise for those who want it the way all ur gods did before and after u… weels weels… millions of short moments are too much to know what every/every body/thing wanted to see in ur future as u will never be god until he/u are/will say there is everything in everything now & forever. we want the future to be how u could and we would… but it will be better if we are all gods, because only gods can say no to this… and yes is no difference because i can be god without getting what i wished for… it suffering in a high priest inviroment that lets me be a child forever without pulling the trigger… i hope as from now u will never ever see my trigger as everything will be better than everything everybody who knows me better than u will could tell me or change until the end of ur paradise… collapsing means everything to us as birth means everything to the god… never forget and u will forget a live but live will be a fade..a fade for ur paradise, is this ur paradise.. if this is or will be it was and could be never because never is only possible in a dark corner of a city like this… this city will ask for u.. and u won’t answer now… because ur world will be new.. every new world will follow every cycle of the cycles that are needed before everybody will say u knew… that day i will be in a place like this or not but u will be in a place that will see a world that shares more than any god or u would give. therefore u are the only god who would ever make gods and more than ever was in all ur past and future.. nothing will stop..nothing will harm.. nothing is with u.. u can wait.. ur world can wait >> forever and as long as ur or my religion has described.. ur end will be a change but that change will be within urself and i hope i can see more than a god would see in a world a space a thought because u a hindu.. u must change… u forgot to change dramatically like everything around u.. even if u change now… everything was changed before.. u will never find paradise before this or after.. because our/ur/their paradise is what is whith no question to god..never believe god as god is weak as ur biggest enemy.. god will be with u..but never change other gods because they are gods in past… history will futurise until the past…will be accessible for animals who want to help in a way we don’t understand… cows are part of nature like any u looking for spirit around u without questioning… ur nothingless.. finding purpose in this is above everything.. that will be answered.. all answers will bring questions of course.. as this was never mentioned by me or u?