POSTCOLONIAL HINDU STUDIES- HINDU UNIVERSITY OF AMERICA
Hindu University of America offers many courses such as Vedic courses, Sanskrit language courses, Vedic studies courses, Hindu Veda.
Introduction
For at least the past thousand years, Hindus have not defended themselves or their lands very well. They were invaded, colonized, converted, impoverished and repeatedly forced to live under the heel of a hostile government. It has recently been estimated that over a period of about 200 years, the amount of wealth that England drained from India was about $45 trillion1 in today’s terms. Karl Marx, who was living in England at the time, wrote for the New York Daily Tribune in 1853 and noted that the loss of the Hindu world was perhaps a permanent and irreversible event.
“All the civil wars, invasions, revolutions, conquests, famines, strangely complex, rapid, and destructive as the successive action of Hindostan may seem, do not go deeper than its surface…England has shattered the whole framework of Indian society without any symptoms of reconstitution. .. This loss of the old world without the gain of the new brings a kind of melancholy to the present misery of the Hindoo, and separates British-ruled Hindostan from all its ancient traditions and from all its past. History.” – Karl Marx, Quotations taken from articles written in the New York Daily Tribune, 1853
In his lifetime, Karl Marx was an advocate for the underdog, the oppressed and the marginalized. His entire life’s work was based on a passionate articulation of the inherent evils of capitalism, and in his own judgment the entire phenomenon of colonization was a by-product of the search for easy wealth and capital. However, when it came to India, Karl Marx somehow managed to rationalize its colonization and reframe it not as the perpetually violent phenomenon it was, but as an inevitable event of world history, i.e. India was conquered, colonized and impoverished by the British for its own good.
“Thus India could not escape the fate of conquest, and her whole past history, if anything, is a history of the successive conquests she underwent.”
“Indian society has no history at all, at least none known. What we call its history is only the history of successive invaders who have established their empires on the passive basis of that unresisting and unchanging society.”
So the question is not whether the English had the right to conquer India, but whether we should prefer India conquered by the Turks, Persians, Russians to India conquered by the British. England had to fulfill a double mission in India: one destructive, the other regenerative – the destruction of the old Asian society and the laying of the material foundation of Western society in India.2
– Karl Marx, Quotations taken from articles written in the New York Daily Tribune, 1853
By any objective empirical measure, Hindus are primarily victims of colonization. In fact, Hindus have been victims of at least two distinct eras of colonization; Islamic and European, both of which resulted in the conversion of millions of people from Hinduism to Islam and Christianity. However, very little academic effort has been devoted to examining the cultural consequences of such permanent colonization. What were the consequences of such permanent colonization and invasion on Hindu society? How has Hindu society fundamentally changed? What is the current state of Hindu society? What is his future? Is the restoration of ancient Hindu culture and civilization possible? What is the nature of the hybrid society created by colonialism? These are the kinds of questions to ask.
On the contrary, huge ink is spilled over the constant demonization and dehumanization of Hindus and their presentation as aggressors and persecutors. Meanwhile, India’s so-called minorities (Muslims, Christians, and all) are today being portrayed in academia and in the media as victims of majoritarian aggression (for example, the statement by the American Academy of Religion and the 10,000 signatures accompanying the blatantly bogus petition). Anyone who reads current analyses, both in the media and in academia, will come to the erroneous conclusion that Hindus are the aggressors and Hindutva as one of the greatest threats to India and the world today. This is the intent behind the falsehoods that are embedded in the campaign of the AAR and associated academics and public intellectuals. In the case of Hindus, how is it so easy to achieve a reversal of the relationship between the oppressor and the oppressed? How is it that the oppressed could so easily turn into oppressors? How is it that any attempt by Hindus to defend their culture and way of life against sustained and systematic aggression is problematic and turned into a real problem that needs intervention? Why are Hindu voices so completely absent in the fight against this in academia and the media, both in India and globally?
Marxist framework
The Marxist analytical framework identified the capitalist class (the oppressor) and the working class (the oppressed) as a fundamental dialectical opposition, arguing that both have a class consciousness that is inherently hostile to each other. This analytical template is valid in the area of economic inequality in the form of an intractable conflict of interests between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie resulting from the internal tensions and contradictions of capitalism. This tends to create vast piles of wealth for the very few and vast poverty for the vast majority. However, his prediction of a violent socialist revolution as the logical and inevitable evolutionary outcome of capitalism turned out to be grossly unrealistic, despite the number of Marxist experiments under Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot running into the hundreds of millions.
However, the evolution of classical Marxism into neo-Marxism (Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937)) and further into cultural Marxism (Frankfurt School of Social Research) allowed the discourse of the oppressor dichotomy to be moved into the social and cultural spheres. Women’s studies and African-American studies are two examples that seek to correct historical wrongs committed against a certain group of people.
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