Page 25 - GOTIL (ENG) Sample

Introduction xxiii

prepared to enter into its intricacies. And the difficulty in
comprehension is compounded by negative propaganda
inflicted for over two hundred years by Western scholars
upon Indian culture and religion. 4

Europeans attempted to justify their forceful domination
of India, which they dubbed “civilizing the natives,” by
labeling her great heritage as superstition. An example is
found in Hindu Manners, Customs, and Ceremonies, by Abbe
Dubois, a French missionary who lived in South India in
the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Dubois
minutely observed and recorded the intricacies of life
in India, and his 770-page volume is so interesting that
it is still in print. However, Dubois was a bigot who saw
only with the eye and not the heart. Although he mixed
intimately with the local inhabitants, inwardly he held
them in utter disdain and considered that the sole hope
for their improvement lay not merely in conversion to
Christianity but in wholesale Westernization and rejection
of their tradition.
Stalwart Christian that he was, Dubois hardly could have
foreseen Western man’s becoming more heathen than the
pagans he sought to civilize. Yet Western man is no less
enthusiastic to benevolently impose upon the uncivilized
peoples his latest fetish: science and technology.

Until recently it was widely believed that scientific progress
would usher in paradise. A book published in 1965 by the
4. For a summary of the British attitude, see “The First
Indologists,” a chapter of Elements of Vedic Thought and Culture,
by Satsvarūpa dāsa Gosvāmī.