1. Sita Ram Goel wrote that the greatest damage that any civilizational siege engine did to India was – Macaulayism in education. They changed India’s education and turned Hindus into anti-Hindus. How?

2. Macaulay was in the favor of completely displacing India’s education system and implant it with British education system with the medium of English with the expected goal of producing deracinated Hindus who hated everything about their own culture and civilization.

3. He would argue not for a perpetual continuation of British Raj in India which seems like a benign thing to do. But actually he favored an absolute ethnocide – annihilation of Hindu culture – by replacing Hindus’ habits and thinking by changing their education.

4. Secularism, India as a secular state, and Indian education being constitutionally adharmic are all a logical culmination of the processes that Macaulay set in. He created, in those famous words, ‘Indians brown of skin but English in taste and temperament’.

5. Sita Ram Goel believed that Macaulayism is like a ‘creeping toxaemia which corrodes the soul of a culture and corrupts social system in slow stages’. Here are some of its paralyzing effects on Hindu society: (all quotes are from Sita Ram Goel)

6. (1) “A sceptical attitude towards Hindu spirituality, cultural creations and social institutions with solemn airs of scholarship and superior knowledge. Nothing in Hindu India, past or present, is to be approved unless recognized/ recommended by an authority in the West;”

7. (b) “A positive, if not worshipful, attitude towards everything in Western society and culture, past & present, in the name of progress, reason and science. Nothing from the West is to be rejected unless it has first been weighed and found wanting by a Western evaluation;”

8. (c) “An intellectual inclination to compare Hindu ideals and institutions from the past not with their contemporaneous ideals and institutions in the West but with what the West has achieved in its recent history-the 19th and the 20th Centuries;”

9. (d) “A mental mood to judge the West in terms of the ideals and utopias it proclaims, while judging the Hindus with what prevails in Hindu society and culture at the present time when the Hindus have hardly emerged from a long period of struggle against foreign invasions;”

10. (e)-1 “A psychological propensity to scrutinise, interpret and evaluate Hindu culture, history, society and spirituality with the help of concepts and tools of analysis evolved by Western scholarship…”

11. (e)-2 “It is never granted that the Hindus too have well-developed concepts and tools of analysis, derived from their own philosophical foundations, that it would be more profitable to use these concepts and tools of analysis for a proper understanding of the Hindu heritage.”

12. (e)-3 “And that it is not fair to employ alien and incompatible methods of evaluation while judging this heritage. If Hindus use their own concepts & tools of analysis to process & weigh the Western heritage, Macaulayists denounce the exercise as unscientific and irrelevant.”

13. Every pūrva pakṣa that has been done of the West from India’s side in this way owes their inspiration to Sita Ram Goel and his analysis in this small and yet powerful work ‘Hindu Society Under Siege’.
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Credit – Pankaj Saxena

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