Workinprogress eta 3 weeks

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Declaration of war against BHARAT : Comprehensive documentation of all interventionist models

Introduction.

As we know the warfare against BHARAT occurs from innumerable venues in academia and the media.The assault against BHARAT are constantly being renewed, acquiring real substance and momentum from assaults from abroad and by their established coomerdom within the borders of BHARAT. The critical modus operandi of ideological assault is still inspired by the original essentially vatican-protestant critique and denunciation of the legitimacy of the moral integrity of the heritage of ancient BHARATA to which its people might look for their contemporary identity. The international media’s depiction of India, almost in entirety, and its offensive on it today adopts a simple strategy, which is to slander and libel without respite and ignore the truth and any alternative narrative that might contradict its own blatant fabrications. This global media obtains additional legitimacy for its serial disinformation campaigns by paying individuals who enjoy personal prominence in society and are willing to do the bidding of BHARAT’s adversaries for payment and other forms of social recognition.

There is enough evidence that this so called european academic discourse on BHARAT is the bedrock for institutionalising a negative perception of it among dominant global elites who refract and diffuse the public’s ideological outlook. They are wholesale psychological intimidation and occupation of the intellectual space and its denial to those who do not conform to the extant narrative of assault against BHARAT.

Coomers are a full partner in propensity for genocide, undertaking research into deadly weaponry and engaging in espionage even as it permits a chorus of dissent at the margin. However, the radical denunciation of all things Indian / BHARTIYA by its own former citizens who espouse human rights, feminism, equality, religious freedom and pluralism to challenge the legitimacy of their erstwhile former nation are all functional to the real purposes of India’s foreign adversaries. It serves their goal of attempting to weaken the inevitable rise of India by discrediting purposeful governance in it. In the end, intellectual life remains an unavoidable adjunct of national goals for the amerikunts european world.

The fulcrum of the discrediting of Indian society by european coomers is the allegation of innate hierarchical caste racism, stemming from a “false religion of VEDAS SANATANA DHARMA ” and the multitudinous resultant spin-offs of everything, from patriarchy to inequality, which are supposedly validated by a fundamentally unethical conception of social relations in the BHARTIYA world-view.

What we have found out should sound the alarm bell for every Indian concerned about our national integrity. India is the prime target of a huge enterprise—a 'network' of organizations, individuals and churches—that seems intensely devoted to the task of creating a separatist identity, history and even religion, for the vulnerable sections of India. This nexus of players includes not only church groups, government bodies and related organizations, but also private think-tanks and academics. On the surface they appear to be separate and isolated from one another, but in fact their activities are -coordinated and well-funded from the amreekunts and eurofags with high degree of interlocking and cooperation among these entities. Their resolutions,position papers and strategies are well-articulated, and
beneath the veneer of helping the downtrodden, there seem to be objectives that would be inimical to BHARAT's unity and sovereignty.

A few Indians from the communities being 'empowered' are in top positions in these coomers organizations, and the whole enterprise was initially conceived, funded and strategically managed by amreekunts and eurfags. However there are now a growing number of Indian individuals and Ngos who have become co-opted by them and that receive funding and mentorship from these .

The south Asian studies in the amreekunt eurofags universities invite many such 'activists' regularly and give them prominence. The same organizations had also been inviting and giving intellectual support to Khalistanis, Kashmir militants, Maoists, and other subversive elements in India. So I began to wonder whether
the campaigns to mobilize Dalits, Dravidians and other minorities in India was somehow part of the foreign policy of these hostile countries, if not openly then at least as an option kept in reserve. I am unaware of any other major country in which such large-scale processes prevail without monitoring or concern by the local authorities. No wonder so much has to be spent in India after such a separatist identity gets weaponized into all-out militancy or political fragmentation.

It has happened in Sri Lanka, where manufactured identities had made the civil society of the island nation go into one of the bloodiest civil wars and had resulted in one
of the ugliest ethnic violence in the very backdoor of Indian mainland. It has happened in Africa where it erupted as the worst ethnic genocide ever witnessed by humanity after the Holocaust of the Second World War. And the brutally true answer, to the question which we can no longer afford to dodge... is BHARAT ready?


There is no doubt post 2014 ad there has been a paramount reckoning and rise of BHARTIYA Civilisational conciousness among Hindus and complexity of Sanatana Dharma has allowed BHARAT to survive all the invasions and endure when all other civilisations egypt sumerian greeks romans persians have been annihilated. The only way forward is the as early as feasible integration of BHARTIYA people into HINDUTVA and aim to occupy intellectual spaces and voids out there as historically BHARAT had occupied it for thousands of years. Let there be no doubt that Intellectual hegemony has since time immemorial been a paramount vehicle for the exercise of political and socioeconomic power within society and between them internationally. A long line of intellectuals has observed the nature of the exercise of power, both political and personal, through the dominance of ideas.


If as Indians we do not do this, our posterity may well end up in refugee camps in humiliating sub-human living conditions. Kashmiri Pandits,
Jamatiyas of Tripura, Reangs of Mizoram and Tamil refugees from Sri Lanka are living examples as reminders to what may happen to our own posterity if we do not act now, intelligently and collectively as a nation and civilization. It is of immediate importance that every BHARTIYA tbe conscious of these forces subversive
operating in our magnificient country, and to counter it intelligently and collectively, setting aside the divisions of caste, creed, language and political identities.

Therefore we need to acknowledge the formemost rule of survival which is an all round integration of Hindus viz Hindutva because Hindutva is the assertion of Hindu’s political identity, and HINDUTVA's unbeatable rise is an inevitable force of history.

 

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What are we up against and a proof how christianity sole agenda is destruction of BHARAT and DHARMA .

Clearly this treacherous trojan horse called wycliff is biggest protestant organisation probably also linked to soros.

 

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You all wonder where did all this begin? This is here and how. This is further proof positive why it is of utmost importance for us to have a DHARMIC Academia a powerful academia that not only challenges these retarded narratives but also allows BHARAT to tell his own story.

As you see.


In this european identity crisis, cooemrs began to hypothesize and construct an idealized 'aryan race larp' through a distorted reading of BHARATIYA scriptures. Fed by virulent german nationalism, anti Semitism and race larp, this manipulation ultimately led to the rise of nazism and the Holocaust of jews.

In parallel, the church evangelists working in South India constructed a fictional dravidian race identity in vermin attempts to de-link Tamil culture from its pan-BHARATA cultural matrix, and claimed that it could be labelled closer to christianity than to the North Indian culture.

 

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In Sri Lanka, the Buddhist revival spurred by the theosophical Society also spread similar chooran theory. That coomer bishop caldwell categorized the Tamils as Dravidians and the Sinhalese as Aryans.This division was encouraged by colonial administrators. Gradually, many south Indians who had assumed a dravidian identity adopted this division and turned it into antagonism toward the so called Aryans. The result has been the deadly ethnic civil war that continued in Sri Lanka for a few decades.

Back in Africa the Hamitic myth of the Bible, in which the descendants of Noah's son Ham were cursed, was used by slave traders and slave owners to justify slavery. Hamitic linguistic groups were identified and separated from the rest of Africans. African civilization's contributions were explained as the work of an imaginary sub-race of melanin deficients invading and civilizing Africa. So the european classification of traditional African communities into races led to bitter rivalries, including genocide, as in Rwanda.

The fact is that biblical larper called noah had an important role in the way europeans saw themselves. He had three sons ham shem and japheth.Ham was cursed because he saw his father naked and was cursed by noah to be slaves. 19th century europeans saw ham's children to be black africans or hamites.The descendants of shem became Semites or shemites who included the yehovas chosen sheep were equally hated by europeans.The last who remains japheth was labelled as forefather of rest of melanin deficient aka european themselves.

But all this meant nothing to our europeans who first saw magnificent ruins of cities mentioned in the bible in Syria and were overwhelmed and envy with anxiety that the hated jews or Semites had a historic one on them. The fact that archaeological findings in Assyria and northern Iraq which indicated a very old Assyrian empire older than greece and bible with tremendous cities and statues as well as inscriptions in langauges that were later deciphered to reveal stories older than bible calling into question many assumptions and obliterated retardation based on the bible.

So the europeans needed something to project as the "superior" in history. The archaeological findings of Assyrian history had threatened to topple europeans from their delusional exalted position as gods favoured people. But the problem was japheth too was a Semite and Jews are like final boss of semites. So this was a huge butthurt for europeans you know having no history of own that they had to borrow it from the very semties they hated.

Back in Africa the Hamitic myth of the Bible, in which the descendants of Noah's son Ham were cursed, was used by slave traders and slave owners to justify slavery. Hamitic linguistic groups were identified and separated from the rest of Africans. African civilization's contributions were explained as the work of an imaginary sub-race of Whites invading and civilizing Africa. Western classification of traditional African communities into races led to bitter rivalries, including genocide, as in Rwanda.

 

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Blaming the Indian Civilization.
Despite the fact that it was european scholarship which had misappropriated, distorted, and abused Indian traditions for the benefit of european identity politics, there is still a tendency among certain western scholars to put the blame for european racism and Nazism at India's door. Sheldon Pollock, professor of Sanskrit at Coloumbia University, promotes this view. According to Pollock, 'high Brahminism' as represented by the Mimamsa school, contributed to the 'ideological formations of precolonial India', and Nazism tried implementing this 'at home' in Germany. Pollock argues that it was this that ultimately led to the 'legitimation of genocide'. However, the truth is entirely different. The historian Raul Hilberg, in his seminal three- volume work, The Destruction of European Jews , had presented what the historian William Nicholls calls:

. . . a remarkable table of comparison between canonical laws of the Church in the medieval period and the later measures of the Nazis, showing beyond doubt that the latter were not original but followed a known precedent.

(In 2010, Pollock was honored by the cucksgress with the Padma Shri award.)

Wilhelm Halbfass takes Pollock's thesis to fabricate far- reaching speculations:

Would it not be equally permissible to identify this underlying structure as 'deep Nazism' or 'deep Mimamsa'? And what will prevent us from calling Kumarila and William Jones 'deep Nazis' and Adolf Hitler a 'deep Mimamsaka'?

We can see the implications of Western Indologists continuing to use the idea of the Aryan in the Indian context, with references to 'Aryan invasions' and so forth European racial ideas conveniently made their way into India, where they were reframed in terms of light-skinned 'Aryans' and dark-skinned 'Dravidians'. These retardations were first promoted in colonial times, but remain prevalent to this day in the various studies of India in absence of Bharat's own academia.

Imperial Evangelism and Indian Ethnology.

Biblical stories were imposed as historical facts on colonized communities, and were used to justify colonial dominance.

Mosaic Ethnology.
European scholars and explorers explained Asian and African societies through the Biblical myths of Noah's deluge, the curse on Ham, and the Tower of Babel. This resulted in what Trautmann has called the 'Mosaic Ethnology', which then became the standard interpretation regarding the histories and cultures of various kinds of colonized people. Dissenting voices existed, but were ignored or suppressed.

Myth of Ham and African Colonizers.

Africa witnessed armed expeditions as well as slave raids from Europe, transferring large numbers of captured African peoples to distant lands. The institution of slavery became a major constituent of European and American economies. The Bible's Hamitic myth, in which the descendants of Ham were cursed by Noah into perpetual slavery, was used by the Europeans as the established truth to interpret the skincolor of Blacks and justify the institution of slavery. This Hamitic myth was merged with Aryan invasion theories, and then became the dominant explanation for ethnic diversity in India. Appendix C traces the centrality of the Hamitic myth in the narrative that led to the recent African genocides.


Babel Myth and Indologists.
The leading Indologist of the late 1700s, Sir William Jones, explained the relationship between Sanskrit and European

languages through the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel. Hindu mythologies and scriptures were classified as corruptions of 'Christian Truth', and the original peoples of India were described as descendants of Ham who went to India after Noah's deluge. This Biblical myth became the blueprint from which later racial stereotypes and racist interpretations of Indian society were constructed. It also justified the British rule in India as a civilizing mission to rescue the Indians, who had corrupted the 'original Biblical truth'.

Institutional Mechanisms.
Many of the academic institutions that study Indian culture today were created during the colonial period. Some of the main axioms of Biblical ethnology continue to be extant and influential in this study to this day.


Biblical Theory of Race and the Myth of Ham
According to the Bible, there was a great flood in ancient times, after which the descendants of Noah repopulated the earth. Noah's three sons were Ham, Shem and Japheth. On one occasion, Ham laughed at Noah's nudity, who felt insulted and cursed the descendants of Ham that they must forever live in servitude to the descendants of the other two sons. 1 This Biblical account of how the world was populated

by the three descendants of Noah, was accepted as veritable history in Europe.

When European colonialists captured various parts of the world, their missionaries and merchants encountered unfamiliar non-Western cultures. Very soon, European accounts were constructed to fit all the populations of other cultures into the Biblical framework as descendants of one of the three sons of Noah. There was considerable debate amongst rival European intellectuals as to how each given non-European community should fit into this framework, because that would determine the community's status in terms of Biblical hierarchy. The narratives of natives were dismissed as 'myths' and 'superstitions'. The Europeans considered it their moral authority, and indeed, responsibility, to compose the 'true history' of all cultures. In most such accounts, the dark-skinned peoples were identified as the descendants of Ham. Any culture that got branded as Hamitic was classified as barbaric, uncivilized, immoral, at times cunningly intelligent, and therefore deserving servitude.

Stephen R. Haynes, a Biblical historian, explains that this tendency to associate skin-color with the character of a people—particularly their ability to accept Christianity—had been institutionalized within Christianity right from the beginning:

For over two millennia, Bible readers have blamed Ham and his progeny for everything from existence of slavery to serfdom to the perpetuation of sexual license and perversion, to the introduction of magical arts, astrology, idolatry, witchcraft and heathen religion. They have associated Hamites with tyranny, theft, heresy, blasphemy, rebellion, war and even deicide. 2

The founder of the Protestant movement, Martin Luther, besides being a virulent anti-Semite, 3 believed categorically that Ham and his descendants were possessed by 'Satanic and bitter hatred'. The Bible, thus, supplied the theological legitimacy for using the physical attributes of the body as the basis for moral degeneration and justification for servitude.



Origen of Alexandria (185–254 CE), one of the founding fathers and prominent theologians of the early Christian Church, wrote that the Egyptians went into bondage because 'Egyptians are prone to degenerate life' and indulge in vices. He wrote:

Look at the origin of the race and you will discover that their father Ham, who had laughed at his father's nakedness deserved a judgment of this kind that his son Chanaan should be servant to his brothers in which case the condition of bondage would precede the wickedness of his conduct. Not without merit, therefore, does the discolored posterity imitate the ignobility of the race. 4


Goldenberg explains the use of the term 'discolored' by analyzing Origen's approach to skin color:
One must ask why Origen chose to mention the Egyptians' skin color while describing their bondage. . . . The answer, I think, can be deduced from Origen's extensive exegetical treatment of dark skin elsewhere in the Bible. He explains the dark color of the maiden of Son 1:5 saying darkness is due to prior sinful condition . . . 'black because of the ignobility of birth.' 5

Between 1517 and 1840, it is estimated that twenty-million Africans were captured, transported to the Americas, and enslaved in a manner that can only be considered a holocaust. 6 By the eighteenth century, as slavery became a core institution supporting Europe's economy, the Hamitic myth dominated the discourse on race relations by providing justification for slavery. Haynes writes that the advocates of slavery included 'respected professionals such as doctors, lawyers, politicians, clergymen and professors', who regarded the 'Curse of Ham' as historical fact. 7

More importantly, even the Africans who converted to Christianity themselves accepted this version of their history, as taught to them by the European masters. Thus, the slave and Black poetess, Phyllis Wheatley, wrote in 1773: 'Remember Christians, Negroes black as Cain may be refined and join the angelic train'. 8 In 1843, a book titled Slavery as it Relates to the Negro or the African Race appeared in America. Its writer, Josiah Priest, justified black slavery by dramatizing how Noah had cursed Ham:

Oh Ham, my son, it is not for this one deed alone which you have just committed that I have, by God's command, thus condemned you and your race; but the Lord has shown me that all your descendants will, more or less, be like you their father, on which account, it is determined by the Creator that you and your people are to occupy the lowest condition of all the families among mankind and even be enslaved as brute beasts going down in the scale of human society, beyond and below the ordinary exigencies of mortal existence . . . and must be both in times of peace and war, a despised, degraded and oppressed race. 9

The book immediately became a bestseller in America: during 1843–5, it was reprinted three times in New York, and in 1852–64 it had six editions in Kentucky alone. 10 The book was later called Bible Defense of Slavery , and the author, Josiah Priest, became a celebrity.

In 1895, Troup Taylor, another devout Christian, wrote a pamphlet that became very popular and saw many reprints. It was titled The Prophetic Families or The Negro – His Origin, Destiny and Status. It explained how the curse on Ham was passed on through Cannan to the entire 'Negro' race:

Cannan, who is certainly the father of the negro family, was adapted to a destiny suited only to an inferior people. The prophecy begins by saying, 'Cursed be Cannan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren' . . . Let us see how literally the prophetic law embraced in this verse has been fulfilled by the negro and negro alone.

To be continued.

 

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William Jones and Mapping of Indians onto Biblical Ethnology.
The idea of a hierarchical 'family tree' structure for the races has a long history in the Western mind. Moses is traditionally considered to be the author of the Book of Genesis, which describes nations and races that originated from the descendants of Noah. Trautmann refers to this idea as 'Mosaic Ethnology'.

Aristotle's 'scale of civilizations', when combined with Mosaic Ethnology, prepared the West to embrace a hierarchy with the white man naturally placed at the apex. This became the normative European paradigm from about 1780 to approximately 1850 CE, as successive colonial Indologists theorized and debated how best to map the Indians onto the Biblical framework. These luminaries included William Jones, Max Müller, Brian Houghton Hodgson, and Bishop Robert Caldwell, among others. As will be demonstrated, their imprint has left modern Indian identities divided and fragmented.

William Jones adopted this framework as the template onto which he mapped the languages of the world. 13 Thus, Indian linguistics was mapped onto Biblical ethnology. Jones is famous for praising Sanskrit, and arguing that the European renaissance was brought about in part by the study of ancient Indian texts. But he is less well-known for his project of racial profiling of Indians, which as Trautmann explains, formed 'a rational defense of the Bible out of materials collected by Orientalist scholarship . . .' 14 Noah's three sons, Ham, Shem, and Japheth, were, within the Biblical framework, considered to be the ancestors of all civilized peoples. Jones mapped Indians as the offspring of Ham, Arabs as the offspring of Shem, and Tartars as the offspring of Japheth. 15 Jones used his newly discovered Sanskrit materials to claim that the Hindus had the character of Ham, and that Sanskrit literature was linked to Biblical events.

Through the extrapolation of coincidental syllabic similarities, Jones related the Hindu deity Ram to the Biblical Raamah, and Ram's son Kusa to the Biblical Cusa the grandson of Ham, and so forth. Using similar-sounding names and other accidental homophones, Jones attempted to extrapolate their Biblical origins. His theory was that soon after Noah's flood, Rama reconstituted Indian society. India was therefore one of the oldest Biblical civilizations. His project extracted Biblical correlations to verify Hindu concepts and terms. He intended to prove that the Sanskrit texts confirmed the truth of Moses' narrative in the Bible.

In doing so, Jones mapped Manu as Adam and located Vishnu's first three avatars within the story of Noah's flood. Jones then created a different Manu, whom he claimed, was Noah. In this fantastic version, the Biblical legend of eight humans aboard the Ark is really also about Manu plus the seven rishis sailing in the ship. 16 The fourth Vishnu avatar,

Narasimha, is translated as Nimrod, a descendant of Ham who is associated with the Tower of Babel. In other words, the legitimacy and relevance of Sanskrit literature was measured and based on where and how much it fit incidentally into the Biblical master-narrative. 17

Those Indian elements that did not naturally fit into the Bible were either distorted to force them to fit, or simply rejected. For example, Jones used the Biblical time-scales established by the earlier British Protestants, such as Archbishop Usher's seventeenth-century proclamation that God had created the world in 4004 BCE, and the flood of Noah had taken place in 2349 BCE. This meant that the Indian yugas had to be rejected because they involved huge time-spans running into millions and billions of years (which, incidentally, are very close to contemporary scientific estimates regarding the age of the universe). If something was mentioned in Sanskrit texts that somehow did not fit into the Bible, it was labeled as mythology. Whatever could be made to 'fit', became the history of the Indian peoples according to Jones. In this manner, the Vedic and Puranic texts were digested into Biblical chronology. This Bible- centric framework of timescales is what led Max Müller many decades later to establish his dates for the socalled Aryan invasion of India, which influences scholars to this day.

European scholars also saw ancient Greece and Rome as the source of western civilization. Jones endeavored to make his translations of Sanskrit fit into the Greco-Roman frameworks. He formulated a series of parallels between the Hindu deities and the pagan gods of Greco-Roman times. He perceived that all these civilizations were descendants of Ham who had fallen into idolatry. Ultimately, the Greco- Romans were saved by European Christianity, but the Hindus remained pagan. Jones's correlation of Hindu deities to Greco-Roman gods has endured till today, and is assumed true by both Hindus and non-Hindus.

Jones's mapping of ancient India onto the Mosaic framework also served as evidence against the atheists who opposed Christianity. He used Hinduism as an independent corroboration of Biblical history following the Great Flood. He exaggerated areas of similarity between Hinduism and Christianity to serve this agenda. Indeed, Hindu texts were used by him to argue logically in support of Christianity. Because of this overarching agenda, Jones thus positioned Hinduism from being a threat to a passive reinforcement of Christianity.

Rasiah S. Sugirtharajah, a scholar of Indian Christianity, has remarked how William Jones's philology became a theological project to fit Hindu texts into a Biblical mythology. Sugirtharajah writes:

With a concern to reinforce Christianity, Jones' hermeneutical tactic was to redraw the chronological map of the world. He summarily dismissed outright the cumbersome and long-drawn-out Indian history, which did not fit in with his timeframe. [. . .] The history recorded in Genesis became the benchmark for discerning other histories, and those which did not fit in had to be squeezed in, erased or dismissed as wild allegorical imaginings. 18


There was no doubt in Jones's mind that Christianity was the only true religion. He mapped the Hindu trinity of Brahma, Vishnu and Siva as the degraded version of the Christian Trinity, caused by the pagans' fall from grace into polytheism. Europeans, he believed, had superior reasoning skills and were far ahead of Asians in civilization. Asians were 'mere children' in the area of science. The interest in studying Indian astronomy and science was to understand history, and not because they could possibly make significant mathematical and scientific contributions relevant for the present or future. 19 Regardless of all his scholarly study of Sanskrit, Jones expressed a strong dislike for the Indians, whom he described as:

. . . deluded and besotted . . . who would receive liberty as a curse instead of a blessing, if it were possible to give it to them, and would reject as a vase of poison . . . 20


Trautmann shows the compromises Jones made to fit Indian society into the Biblical ethnology. For instance, he was very familiar with the Manusmriti , having translated it in 1794. However, his description of the jati (caste) structure was a distortion of the way it is described in the Manusmriti , thus enabling Jones to fit Indians into Biblical ethnology. After his death, the East India Company in England erected a statue of him in St Paul's Cathedral, showing him carrying the books of Manu. Sanskrit texts were now positioned as a boost to Biblical history, and not as a heathen threat. Jones served as an early appropriator of Hinduism in order to enhance the credibility of Christianity. The conservative Protestant establishment recognized him for this complex if convoluted role. Another reason for early Indologists' infatuation with India was the work of Lord Monboddo (1714–99), who linked ancient India to Egypt. However, the eventual decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphics disproved his theory of the unity of Egyptian and Sanskrit. It was an academic fashion at that time to map Puranic descriptions of Indian places onto Biblical geography and European topography. Ancient Ireland's history was 'proven' by evidence from Sanskrit texts, with Mosaic Ethnology serving as the governing paradigm. 23 In other words, the integral unity of Indian civilization was compromised, as its various components were separated from each other and from the Indian context, and selectively used as devices to boost Biblical and European delusional supremacy.

In summary, Jones's work brought together three implicit principles:

• He used Moses' account in the Bible of the origin of all the peoples of the world as his ethnology to classify everyone.
• The chronology of events found in non-western texts had to fit the time-periods mandated by the Christian officials. What did not fit was either distorted to make it fit, or rejected as myth, or simply ignored.
• The ancient wisdom found in Sanskrit texts was given great respect in the context of humanity's shared heritage, and selectively appropriated and used as evidence to argue in favor of Christianity.

Following Jones's work, German and British strands of Indology shaped the Victorian era's ideas and policies on India. Unlike the British, the Germans were not obsessed with colonialism, but were interested in mining Indian knowledge to build a Germanic identity. Some Germans plagiarized Indian thought while others argued against it, and both these camps shaped what became known as the German thought.

Some British evangelists, such as those in the Pritchard School, co-opted Jones's works into their own notions of the racial inferiority of Indians. Other evangelists, like Robert Caldwell, sought to separate north Indians from south Indians and foster an anti-north Dravidian identity British Sanskritists have had an enduring effect on the British conception of India and influenced subsequent Eurocentric constructions of Indian history and ethonography. Trautmann describes how they shaped the 'principles of classification and interpretation at the highest level of generalization, which gave a degree of overall organization and intelligibility to the vast masses of ethnographic materials the personnel of the British Indian administration generated'. 24 This process can be seen as an Indological legacy, which established overarching categories and presumptions about India, that have been passed down through generations of scholars.

Yale linguist Joseph Errington's recent book, Linguistics in a Colonial World , 25 explains the role of William Jones to pave the way for the claim that the earliest speakers of Sanskrit belonged to the Aryan 'race'. This view was denounced by some European scientists at that time, but managed to become mainstream due to the rhetorical power of the early colonial Indologists who worked unchallenged and were exalted by colonial authorities. Gradually, in certain circles the idea of an Aryan race was seen as inappropriate and consequently, the terms 'Indo-European' or 'Proto-Indo- European' slowly became acceptable euphemisms for the imagined race. Errington writes about the immense power of colonial linguistics in these fabrications:

One influential approach to colonialism as a world historical phenomenon, then, is to read complex, scattered events of four centuries into patterns of more and stronger flows of people, goods, capital, and technology around the globe . . . From this angle, linguists can be regarded as a small, rather special group of colonial agents who . . . devised necessary conduits for communication across lines of colonial power. However different the methods they used or objects they described, they transformed familiar alphabets into images of strange speech: their writing systems, or orthographies, were the common beginning point for the work of writing grammars, dictionaries, instructional texts, and so on . . .

Colonial Indologists developed the discourse that even though the initial Aryan invasion from Europe to the Indian subcontinent had brought an infusion of civilization, the Indians had later degenerated. Colonialism was, therefore, seen as a good thing since it was a continuation of the previous infusion of the civilized Aryan-European culture into the corrupted Asian milieu. Europeans were needed to lift the degraded Indian brothers to their past glory. By the early twentieth century, it became seen as a matter of fact that the British colonizers were simply following in the footsteps of the earlier, so called Aryans entering India. The Oxford History of India , a standard textbook for candidates in the Indian Civil Service and higher education, made the idea of race explicit by blatant mis interpretation of Rigveda.

To be continued.

 

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One Hundred Years of british Indological Institutions.
The newfound Indological knowledge became recognized as an efficient tool for undermining Indian civilization and establishing British supremacy. A vast educational infrastructure was set up both in India and Britain to deal specifically with the production and dissemination of information about India from a colonial perspective. These institutions employed native Indians as collaborators to gain their knowledge, in an effort to map Indian texts and Sanskrit terms onto European frameworks. Also, the colonists wanted to use the Indian informants to influence other Indian scholars, using them as intermediaries to alter the dynamics of native scholarship in the long run.

Protestant evangelists and colonialists of the East India Company set up separate Indological institutions. Many of these institutions were constituted with mandates to weaken the Indian civilization and strenghen the British side. Some of the primary institutions established by Britain in the early years of Indology are shown in Fig .

The role of such institutions in producing skewed knowledge about India is further illustrated by a remark in the prefaceto the famous Sanskrit–English Dictionary by Sir Monier Williams (1819–99). As the professor occupying the prestigious Boden Chair for Sanskrit Studies at Oxford, Monier Williams explained the objective of Col Joseph Boden, who endowed that prestigious Chair. Monier Williams wrote:

Col Boden stated most explicitly in his will (dated Aug. 15, 1811) that the special object of his munificent bequest was to promote the translation of the scriptures into Sanskrit; so as to enable his countrymen to proceed in the conversion of the natives of India to the Christian religion. 31

Monier Williams also famously wrote:
When the walls of the mighty fortress of Brahmanism are encircled, undermined, and finally stormed by the soldiers of the cross, the victory of Christianity must be signal and complete.

Colonial Indology was based on collaborations between Western academics and Indian scholars. 33 This approach can be compared to similar arrangements in today's south Asian studies, which involve collaborations between the US government, corporations, private foundations, universities, and human rights groups. These linkages, and their ability to control Indian institutions, will be explored later in the book.

To be continued.

 

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Risley Morphs Jati-Varna into delusional concepts of race.

Once the eighteenth-century European scholars had invented 'Race Science', colonial administrators were quick to recognize the potential of this emerging field and utilized it as an effective governing tool. Employing imaginary racial categories based on vague Biblical reference points, they imposed these racist categories like signposts on top of the many distinctive regional and linguistic communities in India. These imported classifications led to greater fragmentation and conflicts within the country. Max Müller's interpretation of Vedic literature in terms of a clash between two racial groups, led him to search for physical features in the Vedas that would identify the groups physically. And so, Müller tentatively interpreted nose-length as one such differentiating feature.

Herbert Hope Risley (1851–1911) was a powerful colonial bureaucrat at the Royal Anthropological Institute, and developed the Nasal Index based on Max Müller's speculation. This Nasal Index, much like Phrenology, became a tool of Race Science in an effort to classify the traits of Indian communities. During the four decades of his stay in India, Risley made an extensive study of Indian communities, based on the Nasal Index. His goal was to separate the Aryan communities from the non-Aryan communities.

His taxonomical classification and massive documentation of Indian jatis froze the dynamic quality and mobility found in the jati system within the varna matrix. 1 Various colonially inspired studies transformed jatis into racial categories rather than identities based on occupation. The Nasal Index not only separated the jatis into Aryan and non-Aryan, it also classified those considered non-Aryan as distinct from mainstream Hindu society. Risley compared the black plantation-workers in America with the so-called non-Aryan communities in India. This foreshadows the Afro- Dalit-Dravidian projects of today, which are essentially the expansion of Risley's project of ethnic fragmentation of India.

Building on Max Müller's Work.
Prior to colonialism, the Jati-Varna system in India had little, if anything, to do with race, ethnicity, or genetics. It was better understood as a set of distinctions based on traditional or inherited social status derived from work roles. Jati is a highly localized and intricately organized social structure. One of the important aspects of jati, which was conspicuously overlooked by western Indologists, is its dynamic nature – allowing social mobility as well as occupational diversification. 2 These rural social structures were more horizontally organized than vertically stratified. It was this inherent feature of the jati-varna system that led Gandhi to postulate the model of 'oceanic circle' for the ideal Indian village society, rather than the Western pyramidal model. 3

Nevertheless, the colonial imposition of the hierarchical view, coupled with distortions of jati in order to fit it into a racial framework, grossly distorted the characteristics of jati and greatly amplified its negative features. Max Müller, who was largely responsible for entrenching the racial framework for studying jati, had his own evangelical motive. In his view, caste:

which has hitherto proved an impediment to conversion of the Hindus, may in future became one of the most powerful engines for the conversion not merely of the individuals, but of whole classes of Indian society.


Max Müller's interpretation of the Rig Veda claimed that only the first three varnas are Aryan, while the fourth, shudra, is not Aryan. However, he explicitly admitted that there was no evidence of physical differences between Aryans and non-Aryans in Sanskrit texts. He made only one incidental reference to physical differences – that noses were described differently for different tribes in the Rig Veda . He based this notion on a single Sanskrit word, anasa and by mistranslating it. Müller himself drew no important conclusions from this casual observation. But his prejudice was passed on through others who were more eager to do the dirty work openly. One of the common threads throughout the West's study of India has been the manner in which subsequent scholars pick and choose from someone else's work, often out of context, and with their own arbitrary assignment of priorities. This is what happened between Max Müller's writing and its manipulative use by Risley years later.

However later on Muller had realized the grave mistake on his part and said.

But it was too late by then and the quote whoring had picked up by coomers.

The younger Risley was greatly influenced by the senior and legendary figure of Max Müller. The development of racist theories between these two men was an important step in shaping the future identities of people across India. Publicly, Müller was cautious and wanted to protect his image, so he criticized the use of linguistics for racial profiling. But indirectly and privately, he encouraged it in various ways. For instance, Müller gave the following input in a private letter to Risley, prior to Risley's census of 1901:

It may be that in time the classification of skulls, hair, eyes, and skin may be brought into harmony with the classification of language. We may even go so far as to admit, as a postulate, that the two must have run parallel, at least in the beginning of all things.


In the same letter, he encouraged Risley by saying that students of ethnology have regarded 'the skull, as the shell of the brain' to be an indicator of 'the spiritual essence' of the person. In other words, Max Müller spoke from both sides of his mouth when it came to racial implications of cultural and linguistic factors. This ambiguity was often deliberately nuanced in codified terms, which enabled more blatantly racist men like Risley to proceed further.

Ronald Inden has pointed out that Max Müller's caution against conflating language with race was an act of hypocrisy:

We should not be misled by this into thinking that these scholars were anti-racist. They did not have to rely on a theory of race as such, for they had their own global theory that was fully able to inferiorize the languages (and by implication the cultures) of the other purely on linguistic grounds. Max Müller's linguistic taxonomy was a Hegelian hierarchy in which . . . cultural geography [becomes] the same as world history.


Risley's Race Science.

Risley took the casual Vedic nose-reference in Müller's writings, and turned it into the centerpiece of his racist ethnology of India. He further distorted Müller's interpretations of the Rig Veda . Without having any Sanskrit knowledge and relying solely upon Müller's works, he falsely stated that the Vedas had 'frequent references to the noses of the people whom the Aryans found in possession of the plains'. He commented that nobody who glanced at the Vedas could miss such accounts. He wrote that the Aryans 'often spoke' of the noses of the aborigines. This was simply not the case.

Risley became the leading authority on Indian ethnology. His long and powerful tenure in the British civil service in India lent strength to his ideas. His work became institutionalized within the workings of the British Empire. He was appointed the commissioner for India's censuses, from where he imposed his taxonomy and racial framework for Indian people. He created mutually exclusive ethnic categories and using the census assigned them legal signifcance. In 1910, Risley became president of the Royal Anthropological Institute. 8 To this day, Indian society's legal framework is Risley's creation, and his taxonomy of India's communities dominates today's caste wars and shapes Indian politics.

Risley wrote that he wanted his 'scientific' research to 'detach considerable masses of non-Aryans from the general body of Hindus'. 9 He adopted the popular Race Science measurement methods used by French experts, according to which physical traits, such as the size of the nose, were a more reliable measure than skin color. Risley was an enthusiastic champion of the newly fashionable science called anthropometry, which measured various parts of the head to characterize different peoples. He used his measurements of people in India to conclude that there was a remarkable correspondence between two kinds of data, namely, (i) the 'gradations of type' as brought out by certain indices of head measurements, and (ii) the 'gradations of social preference'. This, he wrote, 'enables us to conclude that the community of races, and not, as has frequently been argued, the community of function, is the real determining principle . . . of the caste system'. 10 His 1891 ethnographic study of Bengal became the model for similar studies across India. His program measured Bengali heads and noses with calipers in order to establish hierarchies based on physical body dimensions.

Risley's Nasal Index became the standard in the science of anthropometry for British classification of Indians, with data pouring in to compare Dravidians, Santhals, and other communities, based on nose dimensions. Risley used his clinical data to pronounce farreaching conclusions. Besides claiming to validate his two-race theory of Aryan and non- Aryan populations in India, he graded various castes according to the Nasal Index. He wrote: 'The social position of a caste varies inversely to its Nasal Index'. 11 Using his Nasal Index data, he went even further and classified jatis as Hindu, and tribes as non-Hindu. This is how the category of 'tribes' became officially institutionalized, the definition of which is still used for legal purposes in India. Risley was particularly interested in measuring what he called the 'wild tribes' of India. He claimed that different castes were biologically separate races. These classifications were enforced through the British censuses of India that were carried out every ten years and required every jati to submit its data based on the official classification system of the British.

The Vedas were interpreted to show clear and emphatic racial distinctions between Aryans and aborigines. A major reference work in 1912 translated Vedic Dasas and Dasyus as 'dark-skinned savages', whereas classical Indian interpreters like SAYANA RISHI had explained their differences as being one of faith and language only. Colonial Indologists also stretched and distorted Max Müller's interpretation of varna and used it to mean white/black races, citing the histories of the south of the United States as well as South Africa to claim that the same kind of racial north/south divide existed in India as well. The mapping of Aryan/non- Aryan Indians to white/black in the sense of Western racism was made explicit and decisive. Trautmann criticizes this 'over-reading' and 'text-torturing' of Vedic literature to fit into Western racism. He concludes:

The racial theory of Indian civilization alludes to racial attitudes of whites towards blacks, found in the segregated southern United States after the Civil War and in South Africa, as a constant of history, or rather as a transcendent fact immune to historical changes that is as operative in the Vedic period as it is now. 13


Risley Freezes the Castes.
Risley took Max Müller's linguistic hierarchies and turned them into a solid link between language and race. He reasoned: 'That some races produce sounds which other races can only imitate imperfectly is a matter of common observation, and may reasonably be ascribed to differences of vocal machinery'. 14 His Aryan/non-Aryan divide was very concrete and based on anthropometrical larp rather than philology. 15 The British colonial administration claimed that science was being used for partitioning Indians into divergent camps.

Based on his research, Indians were classified into seven major races located on a linear scale, with Aryans and Dravidians as the two opposite poles. He also organized 'social types' into seven groups. To protect himself, he wrote numerous disclaimers against blatant racism, and against taking things too far. Yet that was precisely what he did and wanted others to do. He claimed that according to his data, 'the correspondence between the two sets of groupings', namely, the seven races and the seven social types, was sufficiently close. He thereby concluded that Indian tribes had turned into castes. He described the various tribal types in the order of their primitiveness, positioning the Dravidians as the lowest, assigning manual labor as their 'birthright', along with human sacrifices to a goddess. 16 Those tribes that had developed professional specialization became castes, while those that had remained in a limited geographic territory were still classified as tribes.

Scholars such as Risley retarded claimed that the European society had evolved quite differently. He wrote that: 'In Europe, indeed, the movement has been all in the opposite direction. The tribes consolidated into nations; they did not sink into the political impotence of caste'. Following shows Risley's larp of how races ended up forming nations in Europe, while India lacked any sense of nationhood due to caste as the form.

As the commissioner of the 1901 census of India, Risley wrote the section on caste, which was published in the highly influential Imperial Gazetteer of India , 22 and became the template for academicians and colonial administrators to do their studies. He decided that Indians consisted of 2,378 main castes and tribes (with sub-castes), and 43 races. To implement his hierarchy of castes, he decided not to list them in alphabetical order in the census forms, but rather in order of what he considered 'social preference' based on his evaluation of 'native public opinion'. 23 Thus, a hierarchy was constructed and made official.

These false racial categories paved the way for the subsequent Afro-Dalit-Dravidian movements. It also fanned the flames of anti-Brahmin movements.


To be continued.

 

[asaffronladoftherisingsun]

Coomer puts the blame on Indians.

Once his structures got established in the colonial bureaucracy, Risley wanted to distance himself from the racial implications he had set in motion, and to blame the whole thing on the peculiarities of the Indian mind. Having created a ridiculously complex and administratively unworkable system, he blamed the Indians for lacking the intellect to apply it. For example, he claimed that India's negative condition had been:

. . . promoted and stimulated by certain characteristic peculiarities of the Indian intellect – its lax hold of facts, its indifference to action, its absorption in dreams, its exaggerated reverence for tradition, its passion for endless division and subdivision, its acute sense of minute technical distinction, its pedantic tendency to press a principle to its farthest logical conclusion, and its remarkable capacity for imitating and adapting social ideas and usages of whatever origin.


Ambedkar Demolishes Nasal Index racist larp.

Dr Ambedkar (1891–1956), a Dalit leader who was also the architect of the Indian constitution, was a historian and scholar of ancient Indian society. After studying the voluminous Nasal Index data of various castes across India that had been published by anthropologists, he came to a striking conclusion using Risely's own data to disprove his retarded thesis:

"""
The measurements establish that the Brahmin and the Untouchables belong to the same race. From this it follows that if the Brahmins are Aryans, the Untouchables are also Aryans. If the Brahmins are Dravidians the Untouchables are also Dravidians. If the Brahmins are Nagas, the Untouchables are also Nagas. Such being the facts, the theory . . . must be said to be based on a false foundation. 33
"""

Appendix A.

Dr Ambedkar (1891–1956), who was a scholar of history as well as the architect of India’s constitution, used the european Nasal Index criteria to prove that the whole theory rested on what he called a ‘false foundation’. 1 Nevertheless, the ghost of Risley has continued to lurk, and his successors in the academy have tried similar ploys using genetics and biased assumptions of history. The most recent work in genetics linguistics literal evidence from RIGVEDA, however, disproves the Aryan invasion theory that underlies both the Dravidian and the Dalit claims of separate races.

Caste Chromosomes.
In 2001, Michael Bamshad of the Institute of Human Genetics, University of Utah, studied the genetic markers of caste groups from Visakhapatnam district and compared them with various castes and regional groups of India as well as with Africans, Asians, and Europeans. Bamshad announced that the ‘genetic distances between upper, middle, and lower castes are significantly correlated with rank; upper castes are more similar to Europeans than to Asians; and upper castes are significantly more similar to Europeans than are lower castes’. 2

This was reminiscent of Risley’s Nasal Index as the ‘scientific proof’ that Aryans originated caste in India. It triggered an avalanche of enthusiasm among race scientists masquerading as human rights activists keen to prove the racial difference of the downtrodden. Anil Ananthaswamy bought the conclusion wholesale, and wrote a provocatively titled article ‘Written in Blood’, in the prestigious New Scientist , where he repeated Bamshad’s conclusions: ‘Upper-caste Indians are genetically more like Europeans, while members of India’s lower castes are more like other Asians, says an international team of researchers’. 3 Despite being a scientific journal article, the article was mixed up in its categories and cited the pro-missionary scholar, Robert Hardgrave, as an authority:

Based on such larp , most historians believe that waves of Indo- European-speaking people from eastern Europe and the Caucasus set up the caste system as they moved into the Indian subcontinent about five thousand years ago and went on to mistranslate BAUDHAYANA SHRAUTA SUTRA which coomers later on retracted their claim.

A lone dissenting voice.
India Today also reported the study but presented it as ‘a controversial genetic study’. 9 The article drew parallels with Risley’s ‘scientific proof’ of the racial foundation of caste, from a century earlier. After providing the accolades heaped on the new study by its supporters, the magazine also gave voice to its critics. India Today brought out the observation of Dilip Chakravarti, a Cambridge University archeologist, that ‘race itself is not so easily defined when one is speaking of entire continents. Asian, African and European are geographical terms that do not indicate homogeneous populations’. 10 Equally uncomfortable with the study was leading sociologist Andre Beteille, professor emeritus at the University of Delhi, according to whom, ‘There’s no question of the genetic diversity of the Indian population, but it is quite another thing to be divided into races.’ 11 India Today also questioned the methodology of the study, showing its serious limitations and errors. 12 The article ended with a caution:

A hundred years ago, Risley’s nose-based theory of the European origin of caste had met its match in B.N. Dutta’s nose-based theory of caste. Dutta, Swami Vivekananda’s brother, had then disproved the theory that higher castes have ‘European’ noses merely by making more measurements. Times have changed, and tools too. Now it’s genetic tests and it may take many more of these to set to rest the controversy that has returned after a hundred years of quietude.


Y-chromosome exorcised of Risley’ s ghost.
In 2006, a major genetic study of the Indian population was taken up by a team of twelve scientists, among them, Sanghamitra Sahoo of National DNA Analysis Centre, Central
Forensic Science Laboratory, India, and V.K. Kashyap of National Institute of Biologicals, Noida, India. The study produced results that contradicted Bamshad’s study but did not receive the kind of politicizing and publicity that Bamshad had evoked:

The Y-chromosome data consistently suggest a largely south Asian origin for Indian caste communities and therefore argue against any major influx, from regions north and west of India, of people associated either with the development of agriculture or the spread of the Indo- Aryan language family. 14

This was followed by yet another research paper published in The American Journal of Human Genetics . Among the fifteen scientists who submitted this paper, were L. Luca Cavalli- Sforza, Department of Genetics, Stanford University, and Partha Mazumdar of Human Genetics Unit, Indian Statistical Institute, India. This study was not charitable towards the much-publicized Bamshad studies and similar works. It refuted the invasion/immigration model and also exposed as a falsehood the idea that Dravidians were pushed from the Indus Valley by invading Aryans into peninsular India. It concluded:

‘Our data are more consistent with a peninsular origin of Dravidian speakers than a source with proximity to the Indus . . .’ and that ‘the distinctive south Asian Y-chromosome landscape’ had not been shaped by Indo-European migrants.

Referring to the Bamshad study of 2001, it confirmed the doubts raised by India Today in harsh words atypical of a scientific journal. It said that the Bamshad study had been ‘framed in the context of the contemporary social hierarchy and/or linguistic fabric of various groups’. It alleged that the Bamshad study suffered from two major errors: It used

‘ethnically ill-defined populations, limited geographic sampling, inadequate molecular resolution’, and ‘inappropriate statistical methods’. 16 Reflecting on the 2004 study by Richard Cordaux et al., the paper criticized the reliance upon ‘specific historical events’, and pointed out several alternative ways of explaining the data that were ignored. ‘In other words, there is no evidence whatsoever to conclude that Central Asia has been necessarily the recent donor and not the receptor of the R1a lineages’. 17


Another attempt in 2009.
Despite such discarding of the racial basis of jati, modern genetic studies are being twisted to claim just the opposite. In 2009, a paper was published in Nature . A team led by scientists at the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) in Hyderabad, together with US researchers at Harvard Medical School, the Harvard School of Public Health and the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, studied more than 500,000 genetic markers across the genomes of 132 individuals from 25 diverse groups, representing 13 states, all six language families, traditionally ‘upper’ and ‘lower’ castes, and tribal groups. 18 A report in The Times of India declared that the paper ‘has established the antiquity of caste segregations in marriage’, and linked it to the 2009 session of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, which had suggested declaring ‘caste-based discrimination as a human rights violation’.

However, core of the authors of the paper (Thangaraj Kumarasamy, Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology) categorically rejected this:

Our paper basically discards Aryan theory. What we have discussed in our paper is pre-historic events. Data included in this study are not sufficient to estimate the time of ANI settlement. However, our earlier studies using mtDNA and Y-chromosome marker, suggests that the ANI are approximately forty-thousand year old. We predicted that the ASI are part of Andamanese migration, therefore they could be about sixty-thousand years old. Our study shows that the Indian populations are genetically structured, confirming that they practice endogamy for thousands of years. Every population is genetically unique, but we cannot assign genetic information to differentiate whether he/she belongs to higher/lower caste. As one is aware, Jati/ caste has been introduced very recently. 20

Kumarasamy further confirmed that the study ‘concluded the fact that castes grew directly out of tribal-like organizations during the formation of Indian society’. 21 In other words, the jati structures emerged tens of thousands of years prior to any arrival of the so-called aryans into India. Furthermore, this Jati structure was not one of higher/lower status but simply one of marriage within a given community.

Furthermore it is now established that whatever steppy ancestry entered modern Indian Populations post 900 BCE only.

Author : VASISTHA.




In this post, I analyze the date of steppe admixture with local ancestry in Swat Valley Iron age samples (avg 910 BCE) and RoopkundA (avg 850 CE) samples from Uttarakhand, India. These are the only 2 sets of good quality ancient DNA samples from the Indian subcontinent, and therefore extremely important to study the genetic changes in the subcontinent.

In one of my earlier posts, I analyzed all 23 RoopkundA samples and show that in that set of 13 male samples, the steppe component is not correlated with Y-HG R1a1a, instead, it is correlated with Y-hg J2.

Before I proceed with the admixture dating, there is something important I need to address regarding Swat Valley IA (SPGT) samples. With the Tarim basin aDna from 1900 BCE being published, I now see the need to change the model for SPGT. The informal G25 models show affinity to Tarim Basin ancestry and reduced Sintashta admixture. I caution though that this is based on informal modeling, and I am yet to do formal qpAdm models for SPGT with this new idea.

I model Swat samples in G25 using the Vahaduo tool with the following sources
1. Tarim_EMBA1 - Xiaohe culture China 1900 BCE
2. Shahr_Sokhta_BA2 - Indus periphery samples from Iran (3000-2500 BCE)
3. Steppe - Sintashta MLBA 2000 BCE
4. Dzharkutan_BA - BMAC samples (1900-1500 BCE)

The site from Swat valley called Aligrama is different from the others. It shows almost no steppe ancestry even by 850 BCE. I call these 3 Aligrama samples Pak_lowsteppe later in this post, along with select other samples.

​

Aligrama_IA shows elevated Tarim_EMBA and almost nil Steppe ancestry

​

​ The new model for SPGT shows reduced steppe ancestry from 18% to 12%.

All the other Swat_IA/SPGT labels from 800-1100 BCE show around 12% steppe ancestry in this new model. This is down from 18-20% earlier, Tarim_EMBA seems to have eaten 6% from steppe ancestry.




Steppe ancestry in Swat medieval samples (1100 CE and 1700CE) jumps to 30+%, like moderns from the region today. I will come back to this later.

As shown in my previous post on Roopkund, BMAC ancestry is not needed to model Roopkund individuals, thereby eliminating Swat ancestry as a source for 800 CE Indians, Swat ancestry being rich in BMAC ancestry.

Admixture Dating using DATES for Swat_IA

DATES is a tool developed to estimate the date of admixture of 2 specified sources in a target population. The theory is detailed in Narasimhan et al 2019 supplement section 6.2.1.

Using this tool, Narasimhan et al give the date of steppe admixture in Swat_IA as 1815-1479 BCE (S6.2.4.2 Narasimhan et al supplement)

I improve the methodology used in that paper by including multiple DATES models using multiple sources for local ancestry (Shahr_Sokhta_BA2, Aligrama_IA, Pak_lowsteppe) and using the common range of the 3 outputs to narrow the final range of admixture dates. Pak_lowsteppe is a subset of 8 samples from Swat_IA, including the 3 from Aligrama, with minimal to no steppe). The parameters for DATES were kept at default, the param file can be seen in the supplementary data linked in the relevant section below.

I confirm Narasimhan's dates but narrow it down to 1700-1600 BCE for the 12% avg. steppe admixture into Swat.

Admixture Dating using DATES for RoopkundA.

As detailed in my Roopkund post, it was found that 23 of these Roopkund lake Individuals were Indians seemingly from differing jAtis and geographies within India. 10 were women, and 13 were men. They all died between 700CE and 900CE, possibly in separate incidents. It is likely that these people were going on a 'teerth' to Nanda Devi temple and had an accident/bad weather during the mountainous trek. So far, it is the only high coverage group of ancient DNA that we have from India.

What makes this group A so fascinating is that all these individuals are unrelated and are like a snapshot of the whole of India at that particular time (800CE).

I ran DATES for RoopkundA with Sintashta_MLBA and ShahrSokhta_BA2/Irula as sources to find out when these two mixed.

I also ran the algorithm on only the samples in Roopkund with >20% steppe ancestry to eliminate low steppe samples as a possible source of error. The results show that the admixture of steppe with the IVC-like component occurred 53 generations before the samples dates, with std errors and 28 yrs per generation (Moorjani et al 2016), gives admixture date between 920-410 BCE.

​

DATES shows Steppe admixture range for Swat & Roopkund

Conclusions.
1. With the use of the latest Tarim bronze age genomes as a source in the model, the Steppe component in iron age Swat reduces to around 12%.

2. The steppe component entered ancestors of Swat samples between 1700-1600 BCE. This date agrees with the date of the Narasimhan et al paper, only the range is more narrow. It is not clear if and when this same spurt of ancestry entered the Indian mainland.

3. The steppe ancestry admixed with ancestors of RoopkundA samples between 920-410 BCE. Many of these samples look like brahmins on the PCA. In that case, does this late date justify the theory that the steppe component brought languages to brahmins and thus to India? It does not.

4. A big chunk of steppe ancestry in modern Indians and Pakistanis must have arrived post the Iron Age, as evidenced by DATES and Pakistan_medieval ancestry.

Edited to add:

5. There seem to be 2 pulses of steppe ancestry into the Indian subcontinent. First came admixed with BMAC ancestry around 1650BCE, localized to the region around Swat valley.

The second pulse came deeper into India post 900BCE, this time with minimal to no BMAC ancestry.
In my view, it is possible that this steppe admixed population was residing in current Pakistan, Afghanistan, and NW fringes from 900-400BCE, and this ancestry made way into Indian populations through the annexation of these regions by the Mauryans (320-180 BCE) who enabled mass movements within its large kingdom. The population of India during Mauryan times is estimated to be 15-30 Million.

References

Zhang, F., Ning, C., Scott, A. et al. The genomic origins of the Bronze Age Tarim Basin mummies. Nature 599, 256–261 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-04052-7
Harney, É., Nayak, A., Patterson, N. et al. Ancient DNA from the skeletons of Roopkund Lake reveals Mediterranean migrants in India. Nat Commun 10, 3670 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-019-11357-9
Narasimhan VM, Patterson N, Moorjani P, et al. The formation of human populations in South and Central Asia. Science. 2019;365(6457):eaat7487. doi:10.1126/science.aat7487
Moorjani P, Sankararaman S, Fu Q, Przeworski M, Patterson N, Reich D. A genetic method for dating ancient genomes provides a direct estimate of human generation interval in the last 45,000 years. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2016;113(20):5652-5657. doi:10.1073/pnas.1514696113

R1a L657 in Roopkund lake, Uttarakhand from 800CE, but no Steppe


Supplementary Data/

Results of various DATES models can be found here. In each subfolder, the output file with the No of generations and std errors has the extension .jout. The model can be identified by the name of the subfolder. On Linux, all these files can be viewed by a text editor, on windows these files can be downloaded and the extension changed to .txt so it can be viewed in notepad.

Furthermore..

Authors is VASISTHA The Archaeogenetics blog

R1a L657 in Roopkund lake, Uttarakhand from 800CE, but no Steppe .


In 2019, a paper1 was published with the analysis of the remains of 38 individuals whose bones were found in Roopkund lake, Uttarakhand at an altitude on 5000m above sea level.

Context of Roopkund Lake. a Map showing the location of Roopkund Lake. The approximate route of the Nanda Devi Raj Jat pilgrimage relative to Roopkund Lake is shown in the inset. b Image of disarticulated skeletal elements scattered around the Roopkund Lake site. Photo by Himadri Sinha Roy. c Image of Roopkund Lake and surrounding mountains. Photo by Atish Waghwase

13 of these skeletons were confirmed to have died around 1800CE in a single event. These 13 individuals had east mediterranean ancestry, ie. they were foreigners. They were also accompanied by 1 person of Malaysian/vietnamese descent.
On the contrary, it was found that 23 of these Individuals were Indians seemingly from differing jAtis and geographies within India. 10 were women, and 13 were men. They all died between 700CE and 900CE, possibly in separate incidents. It is likely that these people were going on a 'teerth' to nanda Devi temple and had an accident/bad weather during the mountainous trek. It is this group which is called Roopkund_A that I will analyze in this post. So far, it is the only high coverage group of ancient DNA that we have from India.
What makes this group A so fascinating is that all these individuals are unrelated and are like a snapshot of whole of India at that particular time (800CE). The sample size is also decent. The PCA below will explain.
PCA for Roopkund A

16 of the 23 A group samples, and note of which modern population is closest to each. Click to enlarge.

All 23 Roopkund_A samples and best qpAdm models.

Sample ID​	Gender​	Y HG​	p-Value​	I8726​	Sintashta​	Irula​	WSHG​	Mongolia_N​	Tarim_EMBA​
I3351​	M​	J2b2a~​	0.8420​	31%​	34%​	34%​	​	​	​
I6938​	F​	-​	0.2296​	27%​	29%​	38%​	​	​	6%​
I2872​	F​	-​	0.0772​	41%​	28%​	31%​	​	​	​
I3406​	M​	J2a1a1b1​	0.1210​	47%​	26%​	15%​	4%​	10%​	​
I6943​	M​	J2b2a2b~​	0.8163​	37%​	24%​	39%​	​	​	​
I2871​	F​	-​	0.1623​	44%​	23%​	33%​	​	​	​
I3349​	F​	-​	0.3871​	31%​	22%​	47%​	​	​	​
I3346​	M​	E1b1b1b2a1a~​	0.0375​	32%​	22%​	47%​	​	​	​
I6945​	F​	-​	0.0743​	10%​	20%​	70%​	​	​	​
I6934​	F​	-​	0.4091​	54%​	18%​	28%​	​	​	​
I6944​	F​	-​	0.3330​	21%​	18%​	61%​	​	​	​
I3352​	M​	R2a2b1b2b​	0.1488​	48%​	15%​	37%​	​	​	​
I7036​	M​	R2​	0.0670​	18%​	14%​	59%​	​	10%​	​
I3344​	F​	-​	0.0945​	45%​	11%​	44%​	​	​	​
I3343​	F​	-​	0.2011​	28%​	11%​	61%​	​	​	​
I3402​	M​	H3b​	0.0067​	41%​	11%​	33%​	​	15%​	​
I6941​	M​	R2​	0.1235​	8%​	10%​	74%​	​	8%​	​
I3342​	M​	H1a1a4b​	0.1230​	29%​	9%​	53%​	​	10%​	​
I7035​	F​	-​	0.1260​	20%​	6%​	74%​	​	​	​
I2868​	M​	H1a1b1​	0.2126​	20%​	6%​	74%​	​	​	​
I3407​	M​	H1a1a4b​	0.0880​	15%​	4%​	81%​	​	​	​
I6946​	M​	R1a1a​	0.2905​	​	​	100%​	​	​	​
I6942​	M​	R1a1a1b2a1a1a1f~​	0.1593​	​	​	100%​	​	​	​

I8726 = Indus periphery sample from Shahr-Sokhta Iran with least AASI (Onge like) component
Irula are Dravidian (also called Irula language) speaking tribals from Tamil nadu
WSHG = Western Siberian Hunter gatherers, samples found in Tyumen and Sosonivoy (Russia)
Mongolia_N = Mongolia North Neolithic samples with east asian ancestry
Tarim_EMBA = Tarim basin samples from the Xiaohe culture 1900BCE
All qpAdm result files can be found here

Irula itself can be modeled as (Rakhigarhi + Onge) or (Darra-i-kur_afghanistan + Onge) with -ve coefficients for Sintashta, or negligible noise level steppe ancestry considering std errors (results in folder link above)



On performing statistical analysis on the above data we can say that

1. Irula component is statistically significantly associated with Y hg R1a at 99% confidence interval (independent t-test p value = 0.0000107561) compared to non R1a. Click for report.
2. Sintashta component is statistically significantly associated with the J2 y HG at 99% confidence interval (independent t-test p value = 0.00595690) compared with non J2. Click for report. This is only possible if Sintashta autosomal ancestry was ultimately incorporated through steppe rich females (as Sintashta male samples are all R1a). A similar result is seen in the Swat valley IA data (Narasimhan et al 2019).
3. Y Hgs R2 and H are not statistically significantly associated with any component. Low sample size becomes relevant here as null hypothesis could not be rejected like in above 2 cases.

Above is my proof to all those who say and keep saying that there is a very high correlation between Steppe ancestry and R1a in modern Indians. The only proper aDna sampleset we have from India shows exactly the opposite correlation.


On Y-Haplogroup R1a-L657/
Y haplogroup can be determined from analyzing the Y chromosome of a male. Non recombining portion of Y chr is passed on only from father to son, and thus paternity can be determined. Once in many generations, one male undergoes one or many mutations in the Y chr (eg C -> T, G->A etc) and thus a subclade is born. This mutated subclade will now pass on through his son.

This is how R-L657 was born from Z93. (Brackets denote ISOGG notation)

R>R1>R1a>R1a1>R1a1a>R1a1a1>R1a1a1b>

> Z93(R1a1a1b2)> Z94(R1a1a1b2a)> Y3(R1a1a1b2a1)> L657(R1a1a1b2a1a)

Sample id I6942 is the only R-L657+ (+ means DERIVED or presence for the particular mutation, - means ANCESTRAL or absence of that mutation) found in ancient DNA so far. R-L657 is that subclade of R1a which is now common in Indian subcontinent and the middle east, but not found in modern Europe or ancient europe/steppe. The ISOGG name for it is R1a1a1b2a1a. Technically, I6942 is + for R-Y5 (R1a1a1b2a1a1a1~) and R-Y928 (R1a1a1b2a1a1a1f~) which implies that it is + for L657 as well.

It is safe to say that R-Y3 & R-L657 and its subclades were born in the Indian subcontinent given its absence in modern and ancient steppe and Europe (except Indian immigrants and the Romanis). I have always maintained that given that the formation and spread of R-Y3 is 2600 bce and R-L657 is 2200 bce respectively (YFull), that their paternal ancestors (Z93 and Z94) were somehow present in Indian subcontinent but without the presence of autosomal steppe ancestry which enters Indian subcontinent only post 1500 bce.

How did R-L657 reach India?
Here, it is worth noting that the oldest Z93 samples have been found in Fatyanovo culture, Russia dating to 2500 bce. So it is likely that this Z93 did enter India around the same time from Russia, however it would not be accompanied by any noticeable change in autosomal ancestry. Autosomal ancestry is that which recombines and is present in chr 1-22, and is passed 50-50% from both parents to child. Steppe autosomal ancestry only enters india post 1500 bce.

The other option of course is that India was the source of R1a to Europe, to prove which we need tonnes of ancient DNA which we don't have. Europe also has ancient samples of ancestors of Z93, like Z645 and M417 and so on, which makes european origin of R1a much more likely. So I will not consider this option yet, although its plausible. There can always be haplogroups which reach multiple places due to some travel savvy ancients

This has happened before, we see y hg J2 and J1 (and subclades) from Iran, caucasus and SC asia neolithic in european samples in Karelia_EHG and Austria LBK, Hungary_Sopot without any apparent autosomal ancestry from the source regions. Autosomal ancestry from a parent can dilute to ~0% easily in 7 generations if the sons end up marrying local women (50%>25%>12.5%>6.25%>3.125%>1.5%>~0) ie 150 years.

Some make the argument that the lack of R1a in Shahr Sokhta, BMAC, Turan eneolithic proves that R1a was absent in this region. To which my response is that these regions saw population turnover starting 4th mill bce or even earlier by a population like Tepe Hissar/Seh Gabi to the tune of >60% and a resulting Y HG turnover. This is the reason why west asian Y haplogroups like E1b and G2 appear in the record in the regions adjoining NW India. This turnover never happened in Indian subcontinent as Indians lack this anatolian heavy component. So I don't consider this evidence very strong, more data is needed.

Summary.
1. Sintashta component not correlated with R1a in RoopkundA samples, whereas Irula component is.

2. J2a/J2b significantly correlated with higher steppe ancestry in RoopkundA samples, steppe ancestry mediated through females.

3. I discuss possibilities regarding R-L657 reaching BHARAT.

With this, I present the results of the L657 poll, I guess it's clear that Indian subcontinent won this one.



Also read.

Scratching my head! - Criticism of Narsimhan VM et al 2019 - Pt 1


1 Harney, É., Nayak, A., Patterson, N. et al. Ancient DNA from the skeletons of Roopkund Lake reveals Mediterranean migrants in India. Nat Commun 10, 3670 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-019-11357-9

To be continued.

 

[asaffronladoftherisingsun]

Inventing the 'Dravidian' joke.

Colonial administrators and evangelists wanted to divide and rule the peoples of the Indian subcontinent, based on imaginary histories and racial myths – to the extent of inventing an entire race called 'Dravidians'. This application of Race Science to India included many conflicting concepts and contradictions that are too numerous and preposterous to explore in great detail here. Instead, this chapter traces how evangelical and colonial interests worked in tandem with ethno-linguistic scholarship to fabricate the Dravidian identity.
British Colonial administrators, such as Francis Whyte Ellis and Alexander D. Campbell, studied the grammar of Tamil and Telugu and proposed that these languages might belong to a different language family from other Indian languages.

Another British administrator, Brian Houghton Hodgson, invented the term 'Tamulian' to refer to what he considered to be the non-Aryan indigenous population of India. While Ellis and Campbell proposed a linguistic theory, Hodgson had a race-based perspective.
But the catalyst who is credited with the construction of the 'Dravidian race' was a missionary-scholar from the Anglican Church. His name was Bishop Robert Caldwell (1814–91), an evangelist for the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, who combined the linguistic theory of Ellis with a strong racial narrative. He proposed the existence of the Dravidian race in his Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian Race, which enjoys extreme popularity with Dravidianists to this day. Bishop Caldwell proposed that the Dravidians were in India before the Aryans, but got cheated by the Brahmins, who were the cunning agents of the Aryan. He argued that the simple-minded Dravidians were kept in shackles by Aryans through the exploitation of religion. Thus, the Dravidians needed to be liberated by Europeans like him. He proposed the complete removal of Sanskrit words from Tamil. Once the Dravidian mind would be free of the superstitions imposed by Aryans, Christian evangelization would reap the souls of Dravidians.
Fig 6.1 summarizes the role played by colonial administrators and the Anglican Church in this racist enterprise.



Hodgson Invents 'Tamulian'.
In 1801, H.T. Colebrooke (1765–1837) published an important article which claimed that all Indian languages originated from Sanskrit. But by 1816, when Franz Bopp (1791–1867) was establishing the foundations of comparative philology, a critical role was played by Alexander D. Campbell and Francis Whyte Ellis, collector of Madras, who claimed that the south Indian family of languages was not derived from Sanskrit. Ellis had influential friends at College of Fort St George in Madras, which was an active center for producing colonial knowledge about India and teaching new officers arriving in India. Trautmann refers to this as the 'Madras School of Orientalism'.

There was rivalry between the Calcutta and Madras schools of colonial Orientalists. Ellis explicitly broke ranks with the thesis supported by William Carey, a missionary-scholar in Calcutta's College of Fort Williams, that Sanskrit unified all the Indian languages. The Campbell- Ellis book, Grammar of the Teloogoo Language (1816), opened the door for later intervention in India's internal sociopolitical structures. It argued that Tamil and Telugu had a common, non-Sanskrit ancestor. No Indian thinker had made such a claim before.

Because the retardatuib of Mosaic ethnology was well established, it was important to secure both families of languages within that framework. Ellis claimed that Tamil is connected with Hebrew and also with ancient Arabic. Their logic was that since William Jones considered Sanskrit to be the language of Ham, and other scholars claimed that Sanskrit descended from Noah's oldest son, Japheth, by the process of elimination the remaining son of Noah, Shem, must be the ancestor of the Dravidian people. This made Dravidians a branch of the Scythians or in the same family as Jews.


The next major milestone came in the 1840s, when Reverend John Stevenson (1798–1858), who was sent by the Scottish Missionary Society, and Brian Houghton Hodgson (1800–94), proposed a category of 'aboriginal' languages. Into this category they lumped all the languages that are today classified in the Dravidian and Munda families that allegedly predated the arrival of Sanskrit from outside of India. In 1848–9, Hodgson came out with a very clear theory of Tamilians as the aborigines of India whose many languages were spread across the nation prior to the non existent alleged invasion.

In 1856, the aboriginal thesis received a major boost among scholars with the publication of Comparative Grammar of Dravidian Languages by Bishop Caldwell. 4 This work claimed that Dravidian was one of the major language- groups of the world. 5 Caldwell coined the term 'Dravidian' from the Sanskrit dravida , which was used in a seventh- century text to refer to the languages of south of India.


Caldwell Transforming Linguistics into Ethnology.
Bishop Caldwell became one of the pioneering missionaries in South India who shaped what now flourishes as the Dravidian identity. 7 At the age of twenty-four, he arrived in Madras with the London Missionary Society, and later joined the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. He divided Indians linguistically and religiously, and mapped some of these religions on to Biblical frameworks. He became the Bishop of Tirunelveli, and his extensive horseshiet resulted as various books on south Indian identity: A Political and General History of the District of Tinnevely (1881), published by the East India Company's Madras Presidency.
His work had far-reaching consequences. It established the theological foundation for Dravidian separatism from Hinduism, backed by the Church. It was accompanied by Christian usurpation of many of the classical art-forms of South India. The concept of dissociating Tamils from mainstream Hindu spirituality provided Caldwell an ethical rationale for Christian proselytization. Eighty years after his death, a statue of Caldwell was erected in Chennai's Marina Beach alongside the statue of another missionary scholar,G.U. Pope. It is a major landmark in that city today.

Timothy Brook and Andre Schmid, in their work on the creation of identities in Asia, explain Caldwell's importance as the founder of today's Dravidian identity.

It was through his Comparative Grammar (1856) that he systematically laid the foundation of Dravidian ideology . . . It was not so much the philological findings in the work that had such a profound impact, as the way Caldwell interpreted and expressed them in the lengthy introduction and appendix. He not only managed to erect a racial, linguistic, and religio-cultural divide between the minority Brahmin and majority non-Brahmin (Dravidian) population of South India, but also provided a systematic project for reclaiming and recovering an ancient and 'pure' Dravidian language and culture.

The missionaries' strategy was two-pronged. First, they intensely studied the devotional Tamil literature and praised it in glowing terms to Tamil scholars. Second, they projected the Tamil culture as being very different and totally independent from the rest of India. Their work provided the ideological underpinnings of later Tamil racist politics. Chandra Mallampalli, a Christian scholar, explains:
South Indian political culture of non-Brahminism drew its inspiration from Dravidian ideology: this ideology posited a distinct linguistic and racial identity for south Indians. Non-Brahmin agitators pitted Dravidian culture, which most often championed the Tamil language, against Hindu, Aryan or Sanskritic cultures from the North. Champions of Dravidianism and non-Brahminism drew upon the cultural and linguistic resources provided by missionaries such as Robert Caldwell and G.U. Pope. 10


Missionary scholarship stimulated a new local ethnic identity, which was instructed to reject its Hindu nature. It became strategic to show that Tamil religion had strong ethical underpinnings, on par with 'civilized' religions, and that 'civilized' meant monotheistic. These positive features were isolated and claimed to be indigenous to the Tamils, and shown to be in opposition to the 'foreign' traits that were attributed to the steppy zombies. Historical and philological works were produced to 'discover' that quasi-Christianity had already existed in the earliest Tamil literature. Among these discoveries emerged the myth that St Thomas had preached Christianity in South India shortly after the death of Christ, an idea promoted mainly by the Catholic Church to bolster its standing. To achieve this new Christian-friendly identity, two kinds of Tamil religious literature became privileged. One kind was a universal, 'nonsectarian' humanism, that was best embodied in the Kural belonging to the post-Sangam Age. The other was the Saiva Siddhanta corpus of scriptures, seen as representing a native monotheistic counterpart to Christianity. Brook and Schmid identify two key steps in the way these Tamil classics were used: first, separating Brahmins and non-Brahmins using the Kural ; and second, linking Dravidian ideology with Saiva Siddhanta as an interim step towards further linking it with Christianity:

Caldwell's central retardation was that Dravidian languages, peoples and cultures had a genealogy independent of those of Brahmans. This independence and difference followed, as coomer claimed, from the joke that the Dravidians were of a completely different racial stalk, what he called a Scythian stalk . . . This radical distinction underpinned Caldwell's celebration of Dravidian 'identity'. Present day science has thoroughly refuted this old larp.

Caldwell essentialized the Dravidians by constructing their racial 'others' as Brahmins. He claimed that Sanskrit was read in the South only by 'the descendents of those Brahminical colonialists'.

Through this manipulation, the Brahmins were made into the colonizers while the actual colonizers like Caldwell were projected as saviors of the Tamil people!


A Conspiracy Theory is Born - Cunning Brahmins Exploited Innocent Dravidians.
On the one hand, Caldwell emphasized Dravidian identity for the purpose of dividing them from the pan-Indian body of Hindus, and on the other, he considered Dravidians as inferior to the Aryans because the Aryans were seen as racially derived from the Europeans. According to him, Dravidians had derived their 'mental culture' and 'higher civilization' from the alleged superior Aryans. But they did not achieve parity with them, because the gifts of the alleged aryans were 'more than counterbalanced by the fossilizing caste rules, the impractical pantheistic philosophy, and the cumbersome routine of inane ceremonies, which were introduced amongst them by the guides of their new social state'. So Dravidians were inferior, but they could be civilized. However, the cunning Brahmins, in the guise of civilizing them, had actually subdued them by making them unaware prisoners in the 'new social state'.

Caldwell's recommended objective was that south Indians should disown Sanskrit influences and rediscover their original culture through Biblical categories. Those elements in the south Indian religious life which could thus be seen as similar to Christianity were the 'real' Tamil religion, while those that did not fit such mapping were blamed as Brahminical influences that ought to be removed. For instance, he claimed that Tamil did not have its own word for 'idol', and that such words had been brought from Sanskrit, and ought to be removed.

Tamil can readily dispense with the greater part or the whole of its Sanskrit, and by dispensing with it, rise to a purer and more refined style . . . Of the entire number of words which are contained in this formula there is only one which could not be expressed with faultless propriety . . . in equivalent of pure Dravidian origin: that word is 'graven image' or 'idol'. Both word and thing are foreign to primitive Tamil usages and habits of thought; and were introduced into Tamil country by Brahmins, [along] with the Puranic system of religion and worship of idols.

De-Indianizing the Tamil Traditions.
Since colonial days, there has been an ongoing attempt to construct an ethnic-religious Tamil identity separate from the rest of India, and to find Christian roots for this so-called 'Tamil religion'. Once the Tamil language was mapped on to a non-Sanskrit framework, particularly an anti-Sanskrit framework, the same process began with the Tamil literature. This entailed manipulating the interpretations of the literary core of Tamil tradition, which consists of three main elements: (i) Thirukural , a classical Tamil text containing ethical literature that is very much a part of the Indian Smriti tradition; (ii) Saiva Siddhantha, a Vedanta branch of Saiva philosophy; and (iii) a huge body of classical devotional literature. These are briefly discussed below, followed by a more in-depth treatment.

Thirukural.
From Robert Caldwell's point of view, nothing ethical could emerge from the Dravidian mind, either by itself or under the influence of Vedic religion. Consequently, as coomer attributed-

the Thirukural to Jain influences. G.U. Pope, another evangelist, maintained that it was Christian influence on Thiruvalluvar that produced this literary work. Christian scholars at his time, and for decades later, rejected this theory. However, it is being revived today by evangelical movements in Tamil Nadu.

Saiva Siddhantha.
Dravidianist scholars have tried to position Saiva Siddhantha as something unique to Tamil spirituality and not linked to Hinduism. Although the traditional works on Saiva Siddhantha cite the VEDAS of BHARAT as their authority, this is circumvented by conjuring up a separate Tamil spirituality from a distant past. For G.U. Pope and other evangelists, Saiva Siddhantha is seen as an approximation to, but not an equal of, Christianity. Thus, it is to be used as an indirect and diluted form of Christianity that works as a stepping stone towards direct, pure Christianity. Once people are convinced that for many centuries they have practiced a corrupted version of Christianity, it would be easy to upgrade them to the accepted or contemporary Christianity.

Tamil Devotional Literature.
A great body of Tamil devotional and mystical literature composed by devotees and mystics over a period of centuries, forms the basis of Tamil spirituality. Though written in Tamil, this literature has a pan-Indian nature. Thus, all Saivaite hymns written in Tamil speak of Siva as living in the Himalayas and even address him as 'Arya'. Evangelists and Dravidianists fabricated the origins, and distorted the interpretation of their contents to suit their subhuman agendas.

Christianizing the Thirukural.
George Uglow Pope (1820–1908) was another coomer missionary Indologist who played the lead role in claiming Tamil classical literature to be un-Indian, un-Hindu, and linked to Christianity. Pope's first translation was of the Tamil classic Thirukural (often simply called Kural ), which is a Tamil treatise on ethics and conduct, written by the great sage Thiruvalluvar. Through the ages, this has been one of the most cherished works of Tamil literature, as explained in the closing remark of the entry for Thirukural in The Encyclopedia of Indian Literature: 'If a Tamil is asked to name one work in Tamil literature of 2,000 years, Thirukural would be the immediate response. Kural that encapsulates a whole universe in an atom, this tribute is more than a millennium old'. Even predating christianity.

Once this decoupling of Kural from Hinduism had been achieved, Pope pushed the missionary case further. He declared that Thirukural was the result of Christian influence, that Thiruvalluvar was a great pioneer who learned ethics from Christianity, and that he was sharing it through his poem so that the simple-minded Tamil people could benefit from Christian ethics. In the introduction to his translation of Thirukural , Pope constructed a scenario of how Thiruvalluvar composed this work by borrowing the 'Sermon on the Mount' from Christian coomers.

We are quite warranted in imaging Tiruvalluvar, the thoughtful poet, the eclectic . . . pacing along the seashore with the Christian teachers, and imbibing Christian ideas, tinged with the peculiarities of the Alexandrian school, and day by day working them into his own wonderful Kurral . . . the one Oriental book much of whose teaching is an echo of 'the Sermon on the Mount'.

He unhesitatingly claimed that Thirukural derived its inspiration from Christian sources.
Christian influences were at the time at work in the neighbourhood, and that many passages are strikingly Christian in their spirit. I cannot feel any hesitation in saying that the Christian Scriptures were among the sources from which the poet derived his inspiration.

Evangelists in the nineteenth-century India encouraged such horseshiet. Their basic premise claimed that St Thomas, a direct disciple of Jesus Christ, preached in India starting in 52 ce. But these ideas had been rejected centuries earlier by mainstream Christianity, and even sometimes labeled as heresies. Even many pro-missionary Dravidianist scholars found it hard to accept such spurious claims.
Many of those who rejected the theory of Christian influence claimed Thirukural as a Jain work because Jainism was not a threat to be overcome, whereas Hinduism was. In fact, this trend can be traced to Bishop Caldwell himself, who surmised that a treatise on ethics with such lofty ideals could not have originated from within the indigenous Tamil tradition. Attributing Thirukural to Jain origins fit with his conviction of the ethnic inferiority of Tamils. This also compelled him to ascribe very late dates to classical Tamil literature.
Caldwell was convinced that in the absence of Brahminical influence, the chief obstacle to the evangelization of Dravidians was the 'density of their ignorance'. 23 Therefore, attributing Thirukural to Jain missionaries, who had been in South India since ancient times, would provide a code of ethics relatively higher than aboriginal/Dravidian ethics, but still inferior to Christianity. It should be noted that Caldwell himself had no respect for Jainsim as such, considering it a form of atheism. However, mapping Tamil ideas on to the Jains was a useful method. Brook and Schmid point this evangelical strategy through Caldwell's own words:

. . . it may be expected that the Dravidian mind will ere long be roused from its lethargy, and stimulated to enter upon a brighter career. If the national mind and heart were stirred to so great a degree a thousand years ago by the diffusion of Jainism . . . it is reasonable to expect still more important results from the propagation of the grand and soul-stirring truths of Christianity.

Thus, the claim of Jain origins of Kural was an interim vehicle to counteract Hinduism, in anticipation of a full- fledged Christian takeover that was hovering on the horizon. Pope's Christian-origin theory gradually became a cottage industry of evangelists and academicians repeating the fiction until it became the 'established fact'. Over time, the dissenting scholarship faded away, leaving the playing field to the divisive ideologues.

Assault on the Hindu Nature of Kural.
One has to understand the unmistakable Hindu ethos of Thirukural in order to appreciate the damaging effect of this distortion on the subsequent generations of scholars. For example, the Hindu dharma recognizes pleasure or 'kama' as an integral part of life. This is reflected in the 250 couplets of Thirukural's third book, that are devoted to Kama Purushartha, and stands diametrically opposed to the Protestant puritanism professed by missionaries like Pope. Kamil Zvelebil explains that it was 'the nineteenth-Century Christian-oriented morality' which made early missionary translators declare the third book of Kural (the Kama Purushartha) as untranslatable 'without exposing the translator to infamy'. Pope admitted that his own Christian prejudice had 'kept him from reading the third part of the Kural for some years'. 25 Even after Pope eventually overcame his Christian narrow-mindedness and translated.

the third book of Kural , he apologized for it in the hope that, 'I shall be regarded as having done good service in doing so.

Also, there are many couplets in Thirukural that go directly against the cardinal concept of Jain ahimsa (non-harming). For instance, there is a Jain injunction against ploughing fields because it brings harm to the organisms in the soil. 27 The Kural violates this. It also opposes the Jain doctrine of ahimsa by advising that the king should execute murderers just like weeds are removed from the crop field.

28
Additionally, Kural refers to the Puranas and other Hindu texts in many of its couplets, including frequent references to Hindu gods. Indra is mentioned in several couplets. 29 There is an obvious reference to the measuring of the world by Vamana, an incarnation of Vishnu. 30 Kural states that the goddess of wealth resides in the houses of men who show hospitality. 31 It warns against sloth as something disrespectful to Lakshmi. 32 In tune with the Hindu shastras, it links the prosperity and spirituality of the land to the rule of a just king. 33 It further states that the power of the king forms the mainstay of the scriptures of Brahmins and SANATANA DHARMA of BHARAT.

Christian retards used Kural as a weapon to mobilize the Dravidians against Hinduism, by claiming that it was originally egalitarian and got later contaminated by Hinduism. But Kural 's statements on egalitarianism are mixed. It explicitly condones the social norms of Indian society prevalent at that time. It says that even if a Brahmin forgets the Vedas he can learn them back, but that he must not lapse from the morality with which he is born. 35 It also states that those whom a king employs as ambassadors should be from a noble family. 36

However, Kural does not mention the fourth purushartha of Hindu DHARMA , concerning moksha (liberation). Pope used this as to make half assed claims that Tamil society was morally degraded and uncultured, and hence Thiruvalluvar had left out moksha because he 'thought his people were not prepared for the higher teaching'. 37 Today's Dravidian scholarship has a different strategy, and interprets the absence of Moksha to claim that the Kural rejected the other-worldly metaphysics of the native Vedic Aryas of BHARAT. 38 But there is a simple non-convoluted explanation for this. Ratan Lal Bose points out and confirms that many other Indian texts such as Arthashastra, discuss only three basic motivations (purusharthas ) and that this is in tune with 'the traditional Indian view that there should be a perfect balance of the trivarga (three pursuits) – i.e. dharma (ethics), artha (material resources) and kama (fulfillment of sexual and other desires)'. 39 Justice Rama Jois points out that the popular Hindu law book Manusmriti also speaks of Trivarga.

40 Thus, there is nothing unique about Thiruvalluvar mentioning only the three purusharthas and leaving out the fourth; this has been a pan-Indian practice in works of ethics.


To be continued.

 

[asaffronladoftherisingsun]

Mapping Saivism on to Christianity.
The attempts to co-opt Saivism into Christianity were neither spontaneous nor the natural responses of missionaries who had discovered the beauty of a local spiritual tradition. It was a strategy used by colonial scholars only after the Saivite theologians effectively rebutted the initial attacks on Saivism.
In their very first encounter with Saivism, the protestant missionary scholars condemned Saivism in the strongest words possible. For example, the amreekunt Missionary Seminary (in Batticotta, Sri Lanka), a fundamentalist Protestant group working among Tamils, used its Tamil- English journal, Morning Star (1841), to attack Saivites and Tamils as living in darkness:

There is nothing in the peculiar doctrines and precepts of the Siva religion that is adapted to improve a man's moral character or fit him to be useful to his fellow men . . . If the world were to be converted to the Siva faith, no one would expect any improvement in the morals or the happiness of men. Every one might be as great a liar or cheat – as great an adulterer – as oppressive of the poor – as covetous – as proud, as he was before – without sullying the purity of his faith.

The missionaries further claimed that Saivism was merely a creation of the Brahmins, that it contains nothing of value, and that it shares nothing with Christianity. This attack on Saivism proved to be counterproductive because it was too disrespectful towards such a cherished tradition, and was effectively countered by Sri Lankan Tamil Saivite scholars, such as Arumuga Navalar.

Therefore, the strategy was changed into one of appropriation rather than denigration. Because Saiva Siddhantha is closely related to devotional music and dance,

G.u. Pope considered it the most attractive target for Christian appropriation. In 1900, he brought out his translation of one of the most popular texts of the Saiva Siddhanta, called Thiruvasakam . He explained that its importance to missionaries was that Saivism could be respectfully projected as an earlier form of Tamil religion that shared common features with Christianity. For example, both taught that there is one supreme personal God and not a mere metaphysical abstraction of unity, as in Buddhism and Jainism. The Saiva text gave importance to the notion of Guru/ Rishi , which Pope equated with Christ. Coomer wrote that the author of the text:
. . . also taught that it was the gracious will of Siva to assume humanity, to come to earth as a Guru [] He announced that this way of salvation was open to all classes of the community. He also taught very emphatically the immortality of the released soul [] It will be seen how very near in some not unimportant respects the Saiva system approximates to Christianity . .


Pope is remembered with gratitude by many Tamils for translating into English the devotional hymns of Manichavasagar, a great Saivaite saint of the ninth century CE, whose devotional songs are sung in every Siva temple in Tamil Nadu. 44 However, Pope's introductory note clearly reveals his elaborate evangelical intentions to map Saivism on to Hebrew psalms and Christian poetry:

The fifty poems which are here edited, translated, and annotated are recited daily in all the great Caiva 45 every MANDIR of South India, are on every one's lips, and are as dear to the hearts of vast multitudes of excellent people there as the Psalms of David are to Jews and Christians. It should be earnestly desired that the transfusion of much european and sacred poetry into popular, easy, rhythmic Tamil verse resembling that of Manikka-Vacagar should be attempted. If a foreigner has bestowed infinite pains (would that it had been with greater results!) on the study of the Thiruvasagam, perhaps some of the native scholars of South India, versed in English and Tamil, may be induced to inquire whether they cannot find fitting material for study, imitation and translation in that inexhaustible mine of beauty and profound thought which is opened up on English sacred verse, from the Hebrew psalms down to Christian poetry of the present day.

Whenever Pope finds something positive about the Tamil poetry he wants to show it as resembling Christianity. Whatever he finds 'corrupt' is blamed on Hindu superstitions:
It will be seen how very near in some not unimportant respects the Saiva system approximates to Christianity; and yet some of the corruption to which it has been led by what almost seems a necessity, are amongst the most deplorable superstitions anywhere to be found.

Later Christian theologians taking their cue from Pope started portraying Saiva Siddhanta as closer to Christianity, and yet falling short of it. For example, a britfag -based Christian publication claimed in 1942:[Saiva Siddhanta] believes fully in a God of love. It also believes that this God of love, out of His boundless compassion, comes to the world to help His devotees. But it does not go further. The Christian belief is that Love goes further. God identified himself with man. He was born as Christ. 48

Pope was ruthless when it came to eliminating every trace of Hinduism that contradicted Christian theology. In 1853, when a Christian Tamil cuckvert, Vedanayakam Sastri, composed Tamil hymns for church liturgy, Bishop Pope vehemently opposed him on the grounds that the composition contained a traditional Tamil poetic signature element, which Pope rejected as un-Christian. Stuart Blackburn, a scholar on Indian literary history, writes-

Sastri defended, to no avail, the signature verses in his hymns as part of an ancient Tamil tradition of sacred poetry, intended to express and celebrate the devotee's devotion to his God with no connotations of
self-aggrandizement . . . In 1853 the very year of Pope's appointment to Tanjore, the amreekunt missionary E. Webb published Christian Lyrics for Private and Social Worship , the first major published collection of Protestant hymns by Tamils, Webb noted in the title page that Vedanayaka Sastri was the author of most of the hymns in the collection, but he did not include the signature verses from the poems in this or in the edition that followed in 1859. 49


This missionary horseshiet in selectively appropriating and spreading confusion has permeated academic Tamil studies ever since.

Revisionist History of Classical Tamil Literature.
M.s. Purnalingam Pillai's book, A Primer of Tamil Literature (1904), took the missionary thesis as its basis and framed Tamil literary history in terms of the Dravidian struggle. The Kural and Saiva Siddhanta were recontextualized as part of this framing. Pillai assigned the Kural to the Sangam period up to 100 ce, which he claimed was the most influential Tamil period and free from the influence of Sanskrit. He echoed Pope's praise for Kural as the greatest masterpiece of the ancient Tamil paradise describing highly developed forms of religion and philosophy. He felt that the treatise contained a universal code of morals, that could be appreciated by the whole civilized world. 50
According to Pillai's history of Tamil literature, the Sangam period was followed, between 100 CE and 600 CE, by the age of the Buddhists and the Jains. Coomer emphasized that Buddhists and Jains (both as peoples and their religions) were non-Tamil outsiders. During this period, the Tamil nation was populated by three different ethnic groups: Tamils, Brahmin outsiders and Buddhist/Jains. According to Pillai, while
the Buddhists and Jains also came from North India, they, unlike the Brahmins, 'lived peaceably with their neighbours', 'never attacked the ancient, unadulterated Saivaism', and were not caste-oriented. 51 Dravidianist-Evangelist narratives portray this period as conducive to the growth of Tamil literature, though ironically it subverted the native Tamil religion which was always based on SANATANA DHARMA.

Pillai calls the next period 'The Age of Religious Revival', from 700 CE to 900 CE. He claimed that this was when the ancient Tamil religion began to reassert itself after several centuries of darkness, though it underwent several shameful compromises with 'Aryanism' in order to do so. He claims with delusions of course.
In the course of centuries the Tamil Saivas, who were vegetarians and who had looked upon the Aryas as mlecchas for their [habits of] meat-eating and drinking intoxicants and as untouchables came, by the force of juxtaposition, of aryan adaptability, and of political contingencies, to be reconciled to the ways and habits of their neighbours and to accept the authority of the Vedas, [. . .] Saivaism, accepting the Vedic rule, became metamorphosed into Vedic or Vaidika Saivaism.' 52


Pillai appealed to Tamils to purge the Saiva Siddhanta of all its Aryan and Puranic influences, and to return it to the pristine condition it had enjoyed in antiquity. He wrote:
The Saiva Siddhanta is the indigenous philosophy of South India and the choicest product of the Tamilian intellect. [. . .] This high and noble system, based on the Agamas or Saiva scriptures, was corrupted by the puranic writers, whose sole object was to reconcile the Vedas and the Agamas [. . .] The Tamilar, overbourne by the political ascendancy of the Aryans, accepted the system, [. . .] Bhakti or loving piety, the root idea of the Saiva system, ennobled the persons, whatever their caste, colour or creed [. . .] Such a widely tolerant, ennobling, rationalistic faith has been made to assume the garb of a thoroughly intolerant, fictitious, and meanly selfish system. The Tamilar, therefore, are in duty, bound to throw off the puranic veil which dims their vision and to realise the old conception of Him as enshrined in the ancient Tamil poems based on the Tamilian Agamas. 53

A Primer of Tamil Literature was written specifically to fulfill university examination needs, and even included an appendix with sample questions for students. Through its widespread usage, it became what Ronald Inden has called the 'hegemonic text', and hence the prevailing consensus on the true, original 'Tamil religion' before it was allegedly corrupted by Hindu DHARMA.

Thus, we see how Tamil nationalism emerged in the search for a glorious past to counteract the inferiority complexes instilled by colonialism. It accomplished this by positioning itself against the 'Aryan religion'. This construction of a Tamil religion played to subaltern aspirations by claiming caste-free ethics based upon egalitarian BHAKTI. 54 Still, Pillai warned that the contemporary Saiva Siddhanta could not be called truly egalitarian as coomer claimed that SAIVA SIDDHANTA sanctioned the social divide between high-caste and low-caste non-Brahmins which is basically total lies. He called for the return to a purer Saiva Siddhanta of an imagined ancient pristine past.


How 'Tamil Religion' should become 'Early Indian Christianity'.

The subsequent theories constructed by the missionaries were attempted to show that the Kural and Saiva Siddhanta were anti-Brahmin and similar to Christianity. Recently, the highly endorsed evangelist propaganda book India is a Christian Nation, 55 builds upon the foundations started by Caldwell and Pope to reinterpret Tamil spirituality as a part of Christianity. It discusses 'the great possibilities to discern the hidden truths of Saivism and Vaishnavism as nothing but " Early Indian Christianity" '. 5



Dravidian Racism and Sri Lanka.
We have seen how the academic frauds of languages played a role in retarded european Race Science, and how colonial administrators and evangelicals adapted this scholarship for a divide-and-conquer strategy. In Sri Lanka, pure fantasy was added to deepen the divisions of the racial identities. These are so strong today that people shed blood over them.

Joke of Sinhalese-Aryan-Buddhist Identity.
The Theosophical Society, founded in the amreekunt, used its South India base to trigger Buddhist revivalism in Sri Lanka by fashioning a Buddhist-Aryan-Sinhalese identity. This was meant to be a way to oppose aggressive colonial evangelism. The Sri Lankan Sinhalese began to see themselves as Aryans who had discovered Sri Lanka and brought civilization to it. In the process, they stigmatized Tamils as an inferior race. Things got out of control over time.

Sri Lankan Dravidian Identity.
Meanwhile, the Theosophists propagated the idea of the non existing continent of Lemuria, and this became popular in Tamil Nadu. From there it became integrated into the Dravidian grand-narrative and generated Dravidian racism, and finally started to spread to Sri Lankan Tamils. Already alienated by Sinhalese nationalism, the Sri Lankan Tamils embraced this form of Dravidianism to boost their own claims to a great antiquity. The Dravidian myth of the Lemurian origins allowed Tamils to claim that they were the indigenous population of Sri Lanka, and to describe the Sinhalese as alien aryan Brahmans intruders.

The Clash of Identities.
Thus, two racial identities crystallized on the small island. The seeds sown by evangelical ethnography and nurtured by colonial administration created a harvest of human disaster that left about a hundred thousand dead in a long civil war.
Following summarizes the process.

Outdated Geology Mixes with Theosophical Fantasy.
As a reaction to coomer Caldwell's early depiction of Tamil inferiority, native Tamil scholars began to construct a chauvinistic Tamil identity. They attempted to remove the racially inferior position given to Dravidians in Caldwell's narrative. Toward this end, they incorporated the invalidated theory of the lost continent of Lemuria, which had been formulated in 1864 by the britfag zoologist Philip Lutley Sclater (1829–1913). 1 According to this theory, a massive continent called Lemuria once spread across the vast Indian Ocean region from present-day Madagascar to India and Sumatra, and then it became submerged beneath the Indian

Ocean. This was Sclater's explanation for similarities between the plants and animals of the two continents of Africa and India. This was yet another instance in which an idea from the natural sciences was used to support racist notions. In 1876, Frederick Engels added a Marxist twist to these fancy geological theories and helped to spread the Lemuria fantasy further.

In the 1880s, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831–91), cofounder of the Theosophical Society, took this retardation of Lemuria and popularized it among the occult circles. She claimed that Lemurians had 'built large cities, cultivated arts and sciences and knew astronomy, architecture, and mathematics to perfection'. 3 Blavatsky arrived in India in 1879, settled in Adayar, Madras, where she relocated the headquarters of the Theosophical Society. She combined the fashionable Indo-Aryan ethnology with her spin on 'Karmic evolution', to construct a mystical form of racism. She said that all races had originated 'from one single progenitor . . . who is said to have lived over 18,000,000 years ago, and also 850,000 years ago – at the time of the sinking of the last remnants of the great continent of Atlantis'. 5 Blavatsky believed that the non existent aryans were superior to others. Thus, in Theosophical fantasy, Atlantis (home of the white melanin deficient europeans) came first, and then Lemuria, but the details varied depending on where the story was being told. Before the south Asian audiences, Atlantis was never mentioned, and Lemuria was discussed mixed with ancient Tamil memory of the sea devouring their old civilization.

Hindu DHARMA and image-worship was a gross superstition, according to Blavatsky, and this proved that Hindus were a race which had degenerated from the pristine aryan religion. She wrote:

Esoteric history teaches that idols and their worship died out with the Fourth Race, until the survivors of the hybrid races of the latter (Chinamen, African Negroes, etc.) gradually brought the worship back. The Vedas countenance no idols; all the modern Hindu writings do.

Thus, the Vedas belonged to the foreigners she claimed which is basically complete horseshiet because Vedas neither prohibit nor recommend specific rituals to please ISHVARA. Vedas discuss the concepts alone and leave it to individual to discover the truth through his own efforts. There is no force, fear, threat, lure .


But being uneducated in the Sanskrit Shlokas she built her retardations on fantasy flingings.

However, the Dravidians were now being given their own glorious past with their origins in Lemuria. Once brought into prominence by the Theosophists, this 'history' made its entry into the official manuals of britfags colonial administrators in India. Charles D. Maclean of the Indian Civil Service introduced Lemuria as the likely origin of the Tamils. 7 The Lemurian theory of Dravidian origins was also cited by Lord Risley, albeit with mild skepticism. Risley was the administrator, as we saw earlier, who classified all Indians by the sizes of their noses.

Native Tamil scholars felt proud of this mythic sunken continent of their ancestors, and linked it to the ancient deluge mentioned in Tamil literature, that was said to have destroyed many Tamil cities. M.S. Poornalingam Pillai's book, A Primer of Tamil Literature (1904), explained the origin of Tamils thus: 'The Tamils or Tamilar were certainly the natives of the ancient Tamilaham or Lemuria, a continent in the Indian Ocean about the equator, submerged a hundred centuries ago'.

Subhuman retarded european racist histories were thus accepted and internalized by native Tamil scholars, who added their own ethno-supremacist spins to the narratives.

T.R. Sesha Iyengar's book, Dravidian India, published in 1925, is hailed even today by anti-Hindu ideologues as 'one of the major pioneering books of Dravidology'. 10 The book constantly repeats malicious lies of the Lemurian origins of the Tamils:

Who then are these Dravidians? They are distinguished, says H. Risley, by their low stature, black skin, long heads, broad noses and long fore-arm, from the rest of the inhabitants of India. They form the original type of the population of India . . . The Hebrew scriptures have preserved a distinct account of an appalling deluge . . . Geological research has shown that the Indian Ocean was once a continent and that this submerged continent, sometimes called Lemuria, originally extended from Madagascar to Malay Archipelago connecting South India with Africa and Australia . . . There are unmistakable indications in the Tamil traditions that the land affected by the deluge was contiguous with Tamilakam and that after the subsidence the Tamils naturally took themselves to their northern provinces .

Thus, coomer Risley's racist retarded classification of Indians by different body-types became gradually projected into the common psyche of Tamil people as a scientifically proven fact. The Lemurian fantasy was mixed with the Biblical story of the Deluge and the sons of Noah. Now the Tamils had a new history and a new racial identity – all constructed using european notions.

Lemurian Origins Linkup with Bishop Caldwell the biggest coomer.

Devaneya Pavanar (1902–81), an Indian Christian Tamil scholar, combined the Lemurian theory with Caldwell's conspiracy theory of the 'cunning alien Brahmin keeping the Tamil subservient'. In the preface to his 1966 work, he wrote:

Westerners do not know as yet, that Tamil is a highly developed classical language of Lemurian origin, and has been, and is being still, suppressed by a systematic and coordinated effort by the Sanskritists both in the public and private sectors, ever since the Vedic mendicants migrated to the South, and taking utmost advantage of their superior complexion and the primitive credulity of the ancient Tamil kings, posed themselves as earthly gods (Bhu-suras) and deluded the Tamilians into the belief that their ancestral language or literary dialect was divine or celestial in origin.


Pavanar's view continues to enjoy axiomatic status in Tamil studies. Even the Tamil Nadu state government's museum at Kanyakumari has an exhibit showing Lemuria (also known as Kumari Kandam). Many university textbooks as well as academic papers speak of Lemuria as a proven fact, even though for more than a century the idea of a sunken continent has been discarded by geologists.

In 1970, for example, the education minister announced on the floor of Tamil Nadu legislative assembly that a Jesuit scholar had proven the Lemurian origin of Dravidians. He proclaimed that:
Father Heras has shown how [Dravidian] civilization moved from Lemuria to southern India, and then reached Harappa and Mohenjodaro and from there latter went to the Tigris and Euphrates and Rome and so on . . . This also I learnt when I was studying at Annamalai University. 13

The stranglehold of the Lemurian theory on the academic establishments of Tamil Nadu can be gauged by the following passage, excerpted from a research paper that was read at a seminar organized by Pondicherry Institute of Linguistics and Culture with Tamil Nadu government sponsorship in 2003.

Speaking about Lemurian Tamils, Paavaanar will trace the development of Tamil between 100,000 and 50,000 bc. Spencer Wells and his team of scientists have now found out that the first man originated before 60,000 years. We Tamils somehow have become addicted to the use of the phrase 'two-thousand years old' to claim a hoary past for our culture. Christian calendar alone cannot be the period of inception of the Dravidian culture. Millions of years ago what happened, we have to indulge in a quest, and not be satisfied with the accidental unearthing of the Indus Valley Civilization.

K.P. Aravaanan, former vice chancellor of a south Indian university, uses the thesis of Lemuria to assert an ethnic kinship between Dravidians and Africans.

The Dravidians and black Africans might have belonged to one stalk of race once there must have been some kind of land bridging both the African and Dravidian continents in the Indian Ocean . They called this lost continent 'Kumari'. Modern geography confirms the legendary theory of 'Lost Lemuria' (Kumari).

The modern Afro-Dravidian movement sprang up by drawing on both the Hamitic myth and the Lemurian myth.


To be continued.

 

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Theosophy – Buddhism Uses Brahman aryans to Counter Evangelism.

In parallel with the creation of a Dravidian separatist identity in South India, another similar mischief was going on in Sri Lanka. A new identity was in the process of being created by fusing Buddhism as the religion, Sinhalese as the language, and Aryan as the race. In 1856, Robert Caldwell, in his comparative grammar, claimed that there was no direct affinity between the Sinhalese and the Tamil languages. In 1866, another scholar, James D'Alwiss, seized upon the idea that Sinhalese belonged to 'the aryan or Northern family, as contradistinguished from Dravidian or the Southern class of languages'. 16

However, D'Alwiss, who could be considered as the first Sinhala language nationalist of britfags Sri Lanka, rejected the thesis that Sinhalese language was a Sanskrit derivative; rather, both came from a common ancient race. He also rejected any kinship of Sinhalese with the mainland Indian populations.

The coomer british also imposed racial categories on the inhabitants of Sri Lanka by requiring the people to identify their races in the 1871 census.

There was also the opposing view by scholars like Christian Lassen and James Emerson Tennent, who grouped Sinhalese and Tamil into one language family. Then there was the distinguished Sinhalese scholar W.F. Gunawardhana, who pronounced as early as 1918 that there were affinities between Sinhalese and Tamil languages. 19 But the Max Müller–Caldwell camp won in shaping the consensus that Sinhalese and Tamil are two separate linguistic and racial categories. This became decisive in bifurcating the island and its future destiny.

Dharmapala was a Sri Lankan Buddhist monk who was highly influenced by Theosophy and became instrumental in popularizing the Sinhalese-Buddhist-aryan identity among the Sri Lankan public. In 1886, when Theosophists C.w. Leadbeater and Henry Steel Olcott visited Sri Lanka, Dharmapala accompanied them. 21 An important figure in this process was a dutch convert to Buddhism, Alfred Ernst Buultjens, who travelled around Sri Lanka, lecturing on Buddhism. Sri Lankan Buddhists began to take Buultjens seriously, feeling proud that an educated white man had endorsed them. According to one report from that time.

At such a time while the europeans are in Sri Lanka stating Christianity is the whole truth and Buddhism completely untrue, theBuddhist people gathered to hear Buultjens [and were] surprised that such educated people would embrace Buddhism.

Thus, when a magazine run by Buultjens in Sri Lanka, The Buddhist , published an article in 1897, titled 'The Aryan Singhalese', it exerted considerable influence among the national intelligentsia. 23 Another Theosophist, Dr Daly, encouraged the Sinhalese public to emulate Buultjens. Criticizing western misinterpretations of Buddhism, Buultjens argued that Buddhism was more rational than Christianity. Using his own translations of Pali Sutras, he depicted his version of Buddhism as a Western ideal.

Clash of fraud colonial Constructs - aryan-Buddhist- Sinhalese vs. Dravidian-Saivite-Tamil.
In its fight against the proselytizing activities of Christian missionaries, Sri Lankan Buddhism started re-inventing itself as a respectable rational faith. Gananath Obeysekere explains.

Sri Lankan monks and educated laypersons found the Western interpretation of Buddhism especially appealing in their fight against the Protestant and Catholic missions. Soon the indigenous scholarship, strongly influenced by Western critical methods, carried on into the present day a rational view of Buddhism, treating the mythic, cultic, devotional elements as inessential to the religion, as accretions or interpolations superadded to a pristine, pure form of Buddhism. Concomitantly, the folk beliefs of ordinary peasants were viewed as animism, or superstitions, unworthy of the rational theosophy of old religion.

This newly constructed, 'pure' Buddhism was designed to be respectable in front of Westerners, and it also identified some enemies, chief among which were the Tamils, now described as inferior non aryans. Dharmapala, the chief protagonist of this movement, started referring to Tamils as hadi demalu (filthy Tamils). In the 1880s, Blavatsky had started to classify Sri Lankan Tamils and Africans as essentially inferior to Aryans: 'No amount of culture, nor generations of training amid civilization, could raise such human specimens . . . to the same intellectual level as the aryans, the Semites, and the Turanians so called'.

From these beginnings, the cultivation of racial animosities turned Sri Lanka into the scene of a thirty-year civil war that has killed over 80,000 people, 28 displaced more than 900,000, 29 and boosted global weapons' trade. 30 In 2008, Sri Lanka was one of the 20 nation states listed by Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, as failing states that were closest to collapse. 31 The ethnic conflict peaked in the summer of 2009, when 20,000 civilians were killed. 32 Even though violence has ended after the death of the Tamil separatist leader, the deep wounds of suspicion that became ingrained by manipulated histories, identities and linguistics, are yet another horrible legacy of Indology.

Sri Lanka is certainly not alone in acting out extreme violence along racial lines established by the european subhumans. Appendix C traces a similar process that contributed to the Rwandan genocide. We discuss that a bit later.


The preceding documentations have shown how invented histories, identities, and racial categories were formed and nurtured by colonial powers. Even with the end of colonialism, such categories survive because they serve vested interests. Control of narrative offers the colonizing civilization not only cultural superiority but also economic advantages and political dominance over the controlled civilization. Once the native peoples have passively accepted the imposed narrative, civil wars can be triggered. This has been true of both Rwanda and Sri Lanka, where the internal fragments were nurtured to the point of genocidal conflicts. Such conflicts then give the controlling powers a reason to interfere once again, now under the cloak of humanitarian concerns.

In BHARAT , such internal fragmentations have also been attempted and groomed by vested interests. These fragments have now networked with international forces. Therefore it is of immediate need that BHARAT fuels his own DHARMIC Academia that will provide effective antidotes against the subhuman retarded malicious fraud going on in the name of academia in Non Asian and Non African countries.

Coomers have already destroyed Africa to the extent that there is very little hope if it could ever rise up.

To be continued.

 

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Attempts at digesting the SANATANA DHARMA into 'Dravidian' Christianity.
A series of processes in South India has started to assimilate Hinduism into Christian history and dogma. It uses a version of Dravidian history according to which St Thomas came to India and that the Tamil classics were composed under his Christian influence. The allegation is that these classics are not Hindu, but rather, a form of Christianity that is distinctly south Indian. The Tamil classics, it is asserted, should actually be called Dravidian Christianity. In this manner, the Dravidian movement and Christian evangelism collaborate to undermine a common enemy. As we shall demonstrate, it is the Christian side that is co-opting the Dravidian side, because of the former's superior funding-capacity, its globally positioned nexuses, and its long-term experience in strategic thinking – all of which the former lacks. The discourse further claims that Tamil spirituality got infiltrated by ulterior Aryan influences, which contaminated the purer Dravidian spirituality, and that this earlier Dravidian spirituality was similar to Christianity. Various institutional mechanisms have been involved in these large-scale programs of fabrication. Some of the leading institutions that are involved will be discussed in this chapter.
Referring to Fig , each of its building blocks of this process mentioned will be introduced next and elaborated later in the discussion.

The Myth of St Thomas.
The story that places the Apostle St Thomas in India in 53 CE is a lingering medieval myth. 1 It implicitly includes colonial and racial narratives; for instance, that the peaceful apostle ministered to the dark-skinned Indians, who turned on him and killed him. This myth, however, has no historical basis at all. Nevertheless, it has been shaped by various Christian churches into a powerful tool for the appropriation of Hindu culture in Tamil Nadu, by giving credit to 'Thomas Christianity' for everything positive in the south Indian culture, while blaming Hinduism for whatever is to be denigrated. It further serves as a tool to carve out Tamils from the common body of Indian culture and spirituality.

Rejection by Indian Christian scholars.
When first proposed, the myth of St Thomas was rejected by Christian scholars. This included Father Henry Heras (1888– 1955), the famed Jesuit Indologist, who hotly contested the claim that Thomas's grave had been found in Madras. The attempt of early missionary scholars like G.U. Pope to appropriate Tamil culture through this myth was aborted after Christian scholars failed to find any trace of Christian influence on ancient Tamil literature.


Revival of the St Thomas Myth.

However, in the 1970s, a zealot named M. Deivanayagam began twisting the Tamil classical texts by superimposing on them a Christian meaning. At that time, the ground politics was such that the powerful Catholic clergy started to promote his thesis in academic circles. Though repeatedly rejected by the well-established Tamil scholars, Deivanayagam's work was promoted by academic bodies that were controlled by Dravidian identity politics. This included the International Institute of Tamil Studies and the specially created Christian Studies Chair at Madras University. Thus, a St Thomas Dravidian Christianity took shape in a well-planned segment of the academy.

Fabrication of Archeological Evidence.
Some enterprising churchmen went on to fabricate archeological evidence with heavy financial support from the Vatican. Suddenly, startling 'discoveries' were announced of St Thomas crosses being found near famous Hindu pilgrim centers. Naturally, this provocation created social tension, which provided fodder for international Christian propaganda claiming that the Hindus were attacking Christianity. One such hoax concerning the St Thomas myth involved the archbishop of the Madras diocese, and this was publicly exposed in the Madras high court in 1975.

Institute of Asian Studies.
In parallel, the Christian-controlled Institute of Asian Studies in Tamil Nadu embarked on a project to divide the Tamil culture and spirituality into two parts: Aryan and Dravidian. The 'good' components of Tamil spirituality were thus classified as Dravidian Christianity and the 'bad' portions condemned as Aryan Brahminism. The stage was set to digest Tamil Hindus into Christianity in a manner that feeds their Dravidian pride.

Evangelism and the Dravidian Movement.
Earlier , we saw that missionary scholars such as Robert Caldwell spearheaded the idea that Brahmins were foreign invaders who had used the Varna system to subjugate the Dravidians under a sacred pretext. The crystallization of this anti-Brahmin discourse into a political ideology was led by non-Brahmin Tamils, with the support of British administrators. The Justice Party, founded by Tamil natives in 1916 and encouraged by the British, became the first political vehicle of this ideology. It labeled Brahmins as destructive alien intruders of a different race. This later evolved into the Dravidian movement, which rapidly became virulently anti-Brahmin in a very explicitly racist sense. It allied with jinnah's separatist demands. By 1944, the movement was demanding the establishment of an independent nation-state, to be called Dravidasthan. The movement was subservient to British colonialism. It went to the extent of proclaiming India's Independence Day, 15 August 1947, as a 'black day'. 3 Soon, this movement evolved to become a very powerful political party of the present times, called Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, or DMK, which means Dravidian Upliftment Association.

The earlier conception of Robert Caldwell became the basis for the Dravidian movement's construction of anti-Brahmin discourse in racial rather than socio-economic terms. A scholar of South Asia, Peter van der Veer, explains:

The general conviction underlying much Dravidian radicalism—that the subjection of non-Brahman Dravidian peoples and cultures was based on the Aryan conquest of the Dravidian south—was in large part an invention of Robert Caldwell. Caldwell, who labored for fifty years in the Tinnevelly Mission . . . like most other missonaries who had to justify the fact that they could only report conversions of the very lowest caste groups, was especially resentful of the Brahmans, who frustrated his effort to proselytize. . . . Caldwell's antipathy toward Brahmans . . . has secured a hallowed place in the citational structures and justificatory rhetorics of anti-Brahminism up to the present day.


According to Peter van der Veer, Dravidianists have dropped one of Caldwell's main points from their discourse, which concerned conversion to Christianity. 'Caldwell's dislike for

Brahmans was directly connected to his concern over Brahmans' resistance against conversion to Christianity and their considerable influence over lower social strata, who resisted as well'. 5 This removal of Caldwell's agenda has enabled Dravidianists to make Caldwell seem secular enough. Another Caldwell point that did not suit the Dravidian movement was his strategic demand that 'until caste was abolished there would be no hope for Christian conversion'. 6 This too was dropped, because the DMK movement was built on non-Brahminical caste identities.

The evangelical strategy planted at the heart of the entire Dravidian movement was camouflaged by the rhetoric of social emancipation. Today, the Catholic as well as Protestant evangelical movements are aggressively reviving the Christian–Dravidian nexus at different levels.


Evangelical retarded Pseudo-scholarship.
Until the late 1960s, the Dravidian movement was multi- religious and unified across various religions, its identity being defined entirely by language and ethnicity.

This started to change subtly in 1969, when M. Deivanayagam, a young Hindu convert to Christianity, published a Tamil book titled Was Thiruvalluvar a Christian ? The central thesis was that St Thomas had converted Thiruvalluvar, the most important classical Tamil writer, to Christianity. This would make Thirukural a Christian text written to oppose Brahmins and Aryans. 7 His Christianized interpretation of Thirukural , for example, claims that verses praising the glory of rain are actually praising Christianity's Holy Ghost. Verses praising the glory of those who renounced the world became interpreted as praising Jesus the sacrificed son of God. The first three chapters of Thirukural, according to this reinterpretation, were meant to
be a tribute to the Christian trinity of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost.


Encouraged by political support, Deivanayagam produced further works that distorted and mapped the explicitly Hindu concepts of Thiruvalluvar into Christian concepts. 8 He borrowed the discredited speculation of G.u. Pope that Thiruvalluvar was influenced by Christianity, and added the further claim that Thiruvalluvar had, in fact, met St Thomas.

What catapulted the book from being crackpot speculation to a political weapon, was the backing it received by politicians. At that time, Tamil Nadu was being run by the pro-Dravidian DMK party, whose chief minister gave a laudatory preface to the book, while the same party's state minister released it. The book received another boost in 1972 when the director of Christian Arts and Communication Center in Madras organized a symposium to promote it under the leadership of well-known Christian Dravidian supremacists. 9 These sudden developments shocked the Tamil Hindus, who had adopted what they naively felt was Dravidian ideology without suspecting it to be a preparation to sneak in Christianity.


Initial Rejections and Eventual Church Acceptance.

These works of Deivanayagam were at first widely attacked by Tamil Christian theologians as well as academic scholars. For example, S. Rasa Manikkam, a Tamil Jesuit and department head of Tamil Studies at Venkateshwara University in Thirupathi, rejected the claim that Thiruvalluvar was a Christian. He wrote:
Now let me analyse the work of Deivanayagam, who has been recently propagating the idea that Thiruvalluvar was a Christian. He is giving new interpretations to many non-Christian ideas present in
Thirukural . Further, he has published many books under titles like Is Thiruvalluvar Christian? , Who is the Renounced? , Seven Births , Who Are the Three? etc. Despite reading his works deeply, we cannot accept the interpretations he is giving. He says that Thiruvalluvar did not accept the concept of rebirth and that it was Jesus whom Thiruvalluvar means when he talks about one who has overcome the five senses, that the glory of rain is actually praising Holy Ghost, and by noble person Thiruvalluvar meant Christianity, etc. Neither these interpretations nor the methods he uses to put forward these ideas are satisfactory. Thirukural does not show any of the specific Christian ideas.

Even the name of Jesus does not figure in it. Rather, Thiruvalluvar explicitly uses many Hindu Gods like Indra (25), Vishnu (610, 8, 103), Lakshmi (167, 84, 617), Kama (1197), celestial Devas (906, 1073, 18, 346), etc.

In 1975, yet another Tamil scholar, Kamatchi Srinivasan, who had converted to Christianity and was specially appointed by the Tamil Nadu government for Thirukural research, wrote: 'When one reads the books written by Deivanayagam, doubts rise in the mind as to whether this man has really understood Thirukural , and also it is doubtful if this man has properly studied the history of the origin and development of Christian religion'.

A 1979 PhD dissertation at Madras University, titled 'The Developments in Thirukural Research in the Twentieth Century,' reached the following conclusions about Deivanayagam:
He has designed his research in such a manner to prove that his Christian religion's Biblical concepts form the inner core of Thirukural. Thus, the research contention that began in the start of this century asserting Thirukural as a Saiva Siddhanta text has ended in modern times with the claims that Bible provided the concepts of Thirukural .

However, no amount of scholarly criticisms stopped Deivanayagam from using the Dravidian identity politically. This was a way to alienate the Tamil speakers from Hinduism, and subsequently encourage them on to Christianity. 13 He not only survived a decade of attacks by Christians against his theory of the Christian origins of Dravidian culture, but published yet another Tamil book in 1980, titled Thirukural and Bible. He was on a roll. In 1983, his PhD dissertation, titled Bible, Thirukural and Saiva Siddhanta, was accepted by the Madras University. The prestigious International Institute of Tamil Studies published Deivanayagam's dissertation as a book.


Leading exponents of the Saiva Siddhanta exposed the dissertation's numerous flaws, misinterpretations and distortions. Dharampuram Atheenam, a traditional Saiva monastery and seat of Saivite learning, organized an elaborate two-day symposium in 1986 on the matter. Subsequently, the late Saiva Siddhanta scholar, Arunai Vadivel Muthaliar, wrote a 300-page rebuttal, which was published by the International Saiva Siddhanta Association in 1991. 14 Rather than face his critics and debate to offer evidence in support of his thesis, Deivanayagam organized Dravidianists and leaders of lower castes to issue a declaration that the 300-page rejoinder to his work was an attempt by aryan Brahmins to enslave the Dravidian race.

Deivanayagam publishes a Tamil magazine from Chennai, called Dravidian Religion . His preposterous claims have expanded to include a certain sect of Jainism as well as Mahayana Buddhism as movements arising out of Thomas Christianity.

Hoaxes: Archeological and Literary.

While Deivanayagam was busy fabricating textual interpretations, the archbishop of Mylapore was manufacturing archeological evidence to prove the myth of St Thomas. In 1975, he hired a Christian convert from Hinduism to fabricate epigraphic evidence proving the visit of St Thomas to South India. When this hired gun failed, the archbishop sued him in court. The Illustrated Weekly of India raised questions alleging corruption in this case.

Meanwhile, in a very famous Hindu pilgrimage center in the forests of Kerala, a Catholic priest proclaimed that his parish had unearthed a stone cross established by Thomas in 57 CE. The location was close to the ancient Mahadeva temple at Nilakkal, in the sacred eighteen hills of the deity of Sabarimala. 18 Soon, a church with a five-foot granite cross was erected and consecrated by top Catholic clergy, and daily prayers were started.

Many eminent citizens were suspicious of the newly discovered cross, including prominent Christians such as Dr Cp. Mathew, who published the following letter in a prominent newspaper:
A piece of granite in the shape of a cross [that is] said to have been recovered from the site is going to strike at the very root of communal harmony in the state. If at all it has any significance, it is for the
Department of Archeology [to decide]. Some narrow-minded, selfish Christian fanatics (both priests and laymen) are behind this. The Christian community in general is not interested in this episode.

The Hindus saw this as an invasion of one of their most popular pilgrimage sites, and Hindu temples throughout Kerala hoisted black flags and priests wore black pendants in protest. A Hindu swami challenged the church to prove that any such cross had been installed by St Thomas, and questioned the right to build a church near the sacred temple on Hindu lands. The Bishop's subcommittee announced that it would shift the church to another location. The mysterious cross suddenly disappeared when Hindus insisted that under the law, any ancient archeological piece would be subject to the scrutiny and independent research of the Archaeological Survey of India, a government body which controls all archaeological sites and findings. Being afraid of the independent scrutiny of the Archaeological Survey of India, the perpetrators of the fraud preferred to retreat.


A historian of Kerala, Dr C. Isaac, explained that the first Christian communities in Kerala were merchant centers located only at the seacoast. He wrote:

The church hierarchy claims that there was one more Christian hinterland settlement called Chayal near Sabrimala pilgrim centre; but it was not a Christian settlement because the place was not an abode of human beings and is still not a habitable one. Scholars have not so far identified whether the place Chayal is near Sabari hills or not, beyond doubt. Therefore, this argument of the church has no locus standi. 22


Fabricating the History of St Thomas.

The central claims of Deivanayagam and his associates may be listed as follows:

• St Thomas visited India around 52 ce, which resulted in the emergence of Sanskrit as a tool forpropagating Christianity in North India, though the language was later appropriated by evil Brahmins.
• Vedas were written after Jesus, as late as second century ce.
• Saivism, Vaishnavism and all sculptural, iconographic, and devotional developments in Hinduism are traceable to the influence of Thomas Christianity.
• Brahmins, Sanskrit, and Vedanta are evil forces that need to be eradicated in order to re-purify Tamil society.

The Church has now forged an intimate strategic alliance with Deivanayagam in order to produce evidence for the visit of St Thomas to India, and to highlight Christian goodness contrasted with Hindu intolerance. As a result of this alliance, the St Thomas Museum was formed by the Roman Catholic Church in 2006. 23 It houses many stone sculptures and inscriptions which are claimed to be originals from the time of St Thomas. One such sculpture shows two figures, under one of which is the following explanation:

The double-figured pedestal was found near the tomb of St Thomas. One figure is claimed to be of St Thomas holding a book in his left hand, with the right hand in the 'blessing' or 'teaching' pose.

Under the other figure, the explanation reads:

This figure is identified as that of Kandappa Raja (Gondophares) the supposed king of Mylapore whom St Thomas converted.

However, Gondophares was not the king of Mylapore, but the first Indo-Parthian king who ruled over Kabul valley located over a thousand miles away. The museum website dates the sculpture as belonging to the seventh century, but Gondophares ruled in the first century BCE. The website also makes yet another strange claim about the sculpture:

The left hand seems to hold a book or some instrument. If it is a book, the figure may represent an apostle too! Perhaps St Bartholomew who is said to have brought to India St Mathew's Gospel . . . Two Apostles of India! Though the Apostolate of St Bartholomew in India is not yet as much proved as that of St Thomas. It is rather significant that the new Divine Office (after Vatican II) has this note on 24 August: '. . . after the Lord's ascension, tradition has it that he preached the gospel in India and there suffered martyrdom'. 24

However, since the New Testament was compiled in the fourth century ce and Bibles in bound-book form became popular only after the printing press was invented in 1455, St Thomas could not have been carrying a pocket-sized Bible when he came to India. Even the earliest Biblical papyrus belongs to a century later than St Thomas. Nonetheless, in combination with St Thomas, the inclusion of St Bartholomew into the south Indian Christian pantheon prepares for yet another movement in Dravidian India, in which St Bartholomew brings about further changes to SANATANA DHARMA !

The altar at the Mount Church of St Thomas displays a painting of Jesus with Mary, clearly belonging to the Italian renaissance period. Yet, the Church declares it to have been brought by Thomas himself and painted by none other than St Luke. A recent western visitor, Martin Goodman, while being sympathetic to the Thomas myth, writes facetiously about this fabrication:

Beneath the altar is a portrait of the Madonna and child brought to India by Saint Thomas and attributed to Saint Luke. In its prefiguring of skills acquired in the Italian Renaissance, it is almost as much of a miracle as a bleeding cross. 25


At the mount there is a stone cross, which is said to have been carved by St Thomas himself. 26 A board placed inside the altar states:

It was on this sacred spot that St Thomas the apostle was pierced with a lance and killed. There is recorded evidence that the stone cross on the altar was carved by St Thomas himself.


The picture placed inside the altar shows a dark-skinned Hindu with a typical Brahmin hairstyle piercing the apostle from behind while St Thomas is solemnly engaged in prayer before the cross. Official Catholic publications have described the death of St Thomas as an assassination by Brahmins:

On 3 July 72 AD, the apostle on the way to the Mount encountered some Chennambranar Brahmins proceeding to the temple for a sacrifice. They wanted St Thomas to take part in the worship; he of course refused to oblige and on the contrary destroyed the place of worship with a sign of Cross. The Brahmins in their fury pierced St Thomas with a lance. 27


But centuries of testimonies contradict these claims. In the thirteenth century, Marco Polo described the legend of Thomas in India, but he made no mention of any Brahmin killers or martyrdom. In tales associated with St Thomas, his death was always described as an accidental killing by a tribal who was trying to shoot an arrow at a peacock. According to Marco Polo's story:
Thomas was outside his hermitage in the woods, raising his prayers to the Lord his God. All around were many peacocks . . . As St Thomas was saying his prayers, a certain idolater belonging to the race and lineage of Gavi, shot an arrow from his bow, in order to kill one of the peacocks that were gathered round the Saint.



W.W. Hunter details how this simple story, which had been in vogue in Christendom, collected an overlay of fraudulent fabrications over time:

Patristic literature clearly declares that St Thomas had suffered martyrdom at Calamina . . . The tradition of the Church is equally distinct that in 394 AD the remains of the Apostle were transferred to Edessa in Mesopotamia. The attempt to localize the death of St Thomas on the south-western coast of India started therefore, under disadvantages. A suitable site was however, found at the Mount near Madras, one of the many hill shrines of ancient India which have formed a joint resort of religious persons of diverse faiths – Buddhist, Muhammadan and Hindu . . . Portuguese zeal, in its first fervours of Indian evangelization felt keenly the want of a sustaining local hagiology. [. . .] A mission from Goa dispatched to the Coromandel coast in 1522 proved itself ignorant of or superior to the well- established legend of the translation of the Saint's remains to Edessa in 394 AD and found his relics at the ancient hill shrine near Madras, side by side those of a king whom he had converted to faith.

They were brought with pomp to Goa, the Portuguese capital of India, and there they lie in the Church of St Thomas to this day. The finding of the Pehlvi cross . . . at St Thomas's Mount in 1547 gave a fresh coloring to the legend. So far as its inscription goes, it points to a Persian, and probably to a Manichaean origin. But at the time it was dug up, no one in Madras could decipher its Pehlvi characters. A Brahman impostor, knowing that there was a local demand for martyrs, accordingly came forward with a fictitious interpretation. The simple story of Thomas's accidental death from a stray arrow had, before this grown into a cruel martyrdom by stoning and lance thrust, with each spot in the tragedy fixed at the Greater and Lesser Mount near Madras. 29


The history of the Indian Church is replete with examples of its keen ability and sense of timing regarding the miraculous unearthing of relics strategically discovered near Hindu sacred sites that it wants to appropriate or occupy. Certainly, it is nothing new for missionary scholarship to blame those 'wily Hindu heathens' for any fraudulent fabrications that may be brought to light, such as the unnamed Brahmin impostor who was blamed for the fraudulent translation of the inscription on the crucifix. 30


Archeological Evidence Concerning San Thome Church.

The identification of the tomb discovered by the Portuguese as that of St Thomas has been thoroughly repudiated even by those scholars who are sympathetic to the Thomas legend. For example, Jesuit archeologist Fr H. Heras writes: 'Some early Portuguese writers have kept the details of the original account, and these details are quite enough for disclosing the untruthfulness of the discovery'. 31 Another Christian scholar, T.K. Joseph, states with regard to the burial place of Thomas: 'I am fully convinced that it has never been in Mylapore. I have stated that many times'.

There is also evidence to show that the present San Thome was built on the remains of a Hindu temple, which was originally the Kapaleeswara Temple. For example, a PhD dissertation done years before the recent re-surfacing of these controversies, states:

From the artifacts discovered by archeologists at San Thome, one can infer that the temple should have existed elsewhere and most probably it existed at San Thome beach . . . because remnants of the old temple were discovered at San Thome beach. In 1923 when archeologists conducted excavations at San Thome cathedral they discovered inscriptions and statues. The inscriptions indicated a temple. [. . .] Saint Arunagiri Nathar also mentions that Kapaleeswara temple existed by the side of the beach. Hence, in conclusion, one
can state that the old Kapaleeswara temple was destroyed by Portuguese in the fifteenth century and was built in its present place by Nattu Nayiniappa Muthaliar and son in the sixteenth century. 33

Archeological studies by the Government of BHARAT confirm that the Portuguese built the church on the ruins of a Hindu temple. They have recovered an inscription of Rajendra Chola, the Imperial Chola who was devoted to the Vedic religion. A 1967 report of the Archaeological Survey of India on the recovery of the eleventh-century inscription of Rajendra Chola from San Thome Church in Madras states that the inscription mentions the Chola king as favored by Lakshmi, 'who grants him victory and prosperity'.

Nevertheless, these independent reports are downplayed and suppressed. For example, in the sixth-standard social science textbook taught across Tamil Nadu, it is blatantly stated as a matter of fact that St Thomas 'stayed at St Thomas Mount and preached Christianity. He was murdered due to religious strife. His body was buried at Santome Church'. 35 None of this is substantiated by empirical evidence. (See Appendix D on the same hoax played against the natives of America by the missionaries interested in conquering them and taking their land.)

Further reading on this particular topic.

Demolished : myth of saint thomas

Demolished : The Myth Of st. thomas. Author : TRUE INDOLOGY and NS RAJARAM According to Christian leaders in India, the Apostle Thomas came to BHARAT in 52 ad., founded the Syrian Christian Church, and was killed by the fanatical Brahmins in 72 ad. His followers built the St. Thomas Church...

defenceforumindia.com

To be continued.

 

[asaffronladoftherisingsun]

The Silver Screen.
Recently, a mega-budget film on St Thomas has been planned by the Catholic Church to propagate this myth. A newspaper reports:

With Hollywood epics such as Ben-Hur and the Ten Commandments in mind, and with a budget to match, the Archdiocese of Madras- Mylapore will produce a rupees thirty-crore silver screen version of the life and ministry of St Thomas, one of the twelve apostles who is believed to have spread the message of Christ in India. Work on the 70 mm, two-and-a-half-hour feature film with Hollywood collaboration and the bigwigs of the Indian film industry [. . .] The film has special significance for Kerala and Tamil Nadu, where St Thomas spent a major portion of his time in India. He is believed to have established seven churches in Kerala, before being martyred in 72 AD at
Mylapore. Films such as Arunachalam of Thiruvannamalai and Annai Velanganni have had the effect of people receiving spiritual consolation, said the Archbishop. He felt [that] a film on the life of St Thomas would have a similar effect, as it evolved around the theme of equality and dignity for all people. 36


Rumors that Thiruvalluvar would be shown as a disciple of St Thomas in the film led to protests that it was a false claim. The film's scriptwriter, Paulraj Lourdhu Sami, defended the script by stating that Deivanayagam's PhD dissertation accepted by Madras University had provided the evidence for Thiruvalluvar meeting St Thomas. 37 This is how crackpot speculation has traveled, via academic legitimization, into mainstream discourse and popular culture.


Hinduism Declared as Aryan-British Conspiracy.

These St Thomas fabrications merged with earlier ideas about conquering Aryans and caricatures of 'evil' Brahmins. In 2000, Deivanayagam published a book titled India in Third Millennium, a grand attempt to usurp Hindu spirituality and reduce it to a subset of Christianity. Predictably, the Aryans are portrayed as the quintessential villains:

Aryans do not have a religion of their own. In reality, Aryans are a people without any religion. They do not have any knowledge on the concepts of monotheism, heaven, hell, rebirth and so forth. They used to bake the meat of cattle and sheep in fire and eat it with drinks called soma and sura. They were a gay people enjoying nature – worship, dancing and singing folk songs. In course of time, these folk songs were known as the 'Vedic Hymns' . . . The term 'Aryan' is a common collective name given to the Persians, Greeks, Romans, Sakas, Kushanas and Huns, all of whom were foreigners who entered India without any religion of their own. 38


He elaborates his conspiracy theory that Hinduism started as an 'evil' joint venture between foreign Brahmins and British colonialists:

The color of Britishers is white. The Britishers noted that already in the Hindu law (Manu Dharma) the non-white Dravidian Indians (Avarnas) are condemned as inferior and white coloured foreigners (Savarnas) are treated as superior. . . . Hindu religion is born out of
joint conspiracy. Aryan Brahmins and Britishers, both of whom are foreigners, joined together and conspired against the Indian people. They jointly created and started spreading a concept that the English word 'Hinduism' (which originally meant Hindu Law) also can mean 'Hindu Religion', i.e., Indian Religion. 39



He further claims that Sankara, Ramanuja and Madhva were Aryan Brahmins who distorted the earlier writings of

Vedavyasa, who he claims was a Dravidian. 40 In other words, those aspects of Hinduism that can be accommodated with Christianity are credited to Christian influences, whereas those that contradict it are denigrated as the distortions of foreign Brahmins. While he was originally seen as a crackpot, Deivanayagam's tenacity and persistence gradually made him important among mainstream churches. By 2004, evangelical missionaries were attending his formal courses that are up to six months of duration (as of 2010).

Institute of Asian Studies.
The Institute of Asian Studies was founded jointly by a Japanese Buddhist scholar and an Indian Christian named John Samuel. It has brought out a large number of books and a periodical called Journal of the Institute of Asian Studies . While the Institute had benign beginnings, Samuel took it over from the Japanese partner and shifted its research and education agenda towards decoupling Tamil identity and culture from Hinduism. To appeal to local sentiments, it started out by glorifying the Tamil culture as the origin for everything positive, while downplaying pan- Indian identity and cultural history. Hindu traditions were positioned as separate, alien and fragmented, while Christianity and Buddhism were presented as coherent religions. The website of the Institute shows that it teaches religions that are classified as: Buddhism, Christianity, Kaumaram, Panniruthirumarai, and Folk studies. 41 There is no such thing as Hinduism at all. The Institute has gained importance by establishing research connections with University of California, Berkeley, and through that with the Institute for Indology and Tamil Studies, University of Cologne and other worldwide projects. 42

Siva and Nataraja Declared 'Dravidian'

A typical example of the Institute's scholarship is found in a book it published in 1985, titled Ananda-tandava of Siva Sadanrttamurti . The author, a noted Czech Dravidianist named Kamil V. Zvelebil, declares emphatically that the concept of Siva as the divine dancer, and in particular, as performing the ananda tandava, is 'no doubt an Indo- Dravidian invention'. 43 He emphasizes that, 'we must distinguish between the North and the South of India'. 44 Then he flippantly dismisses all evidence of Siva in North India as being insignificant:
Although there exist a few pre-Chalukya, pre-Vakataka and pre- Pallava representations of Siva as a dancing deity found in the North of India, there can hardly be considered anything but early precursors of the Siva Nataraja theme. 45


Zvelebil acknowledges the archeological evidence of the fifth-century dancing Siva in North India from the Gupta period, but is quickly dismissive that 'in Gupta sculpture, the Nataraja theme was not too important', and that, 'in fact the few representations of Siva as dancing deity occurring in the late Gupta period were created under the impact and inspiration of the concept of Nataraja originated and evolved in the South'. 46 This brief analysis allows him to conclude with confidence that Nataraja is a Dravidian from South India. He ignores the massive evidence of Siva's organic association with the North that has developed over the millennia into the collective spiritual psyche of India, such as:
•

The artifacts of Prabhu Siva found in the SINDHU SARSAVATI civilization :

Siva's abode of Mount Kailash lies in Tibet
The Himalayas are regarded as his sacred geography
Siva's Ganga flows in the North
The famous cave in Amarnath attracts pilgrims specifically because of its Sivalinga


Archeological findings of Saivite sites in central Asia

In his effort to further decouple South India's culture from the rest of India, Zvelebil cites early post-Sangham literature mentioning Siva's dances, and concludes:


It is clear that the Tamil South had an important independent tradition of a dancing god which began to fully flourish and develop during the Pallavas of Kanci. 47



Even scholars who work within the Aryan/Dravidian divisive paradigm, have pointed out that in Rig Veda itself there is mention of Rudra's (i.e. Siva's) dance and music. 48 An image of Siva bearing a musical instrument belonging to the north Indian Sunga dynasty of second century BCE has been pointed out by C. Sivaramamurthi, who is considered an expert in Nataraja iconography. 49 Though Zvelebil extensively cites the other work of C. Sivaramamurthi, he ignores this data.

South India has made a vast contribution to Indic spirituality, specifically in evolving and perfecting the divine icon of Siva as Nataraja. However, some Dravidianists aim to establish that South Indian traditions are entirely independent traditions which are only artificially linked to pan-Indian or Vedic traditions . This decontextualizing of South India's spiritual traditions from Indian culture then becomes an interim step for re-contextualizing these traditions as Christian.


Appropriating Skanda-Muruga.
In 1991, the Institute of Asian Studies published another book authored by Zvelebil, titled Tamil Traditions on Subrahmanya-Murugan . It further illustrates the agenda of propagating the Aryan/ Dravidian divisiveness. The book repeatedly equates Brahmins with Aryans, and describes Hinduism as their mechanism to annihilate Buddhism and Jainism. It explains that the 'strategy' of the cunning Brahmins has 'always been to adopt the most prestigious features of their opponents'. Hinduism is thus, 'a product of a particular mind in a particular environment, a special kind of religion which must be met in its own terms'. 50

To position himself as a balanced scholar, Zvelebil first cautions against 'the pitfall of the simplistic view of Indian cultural development, which reduces everything to the tension between autochthonous features (primarily Dravidian) and imported Indo-Aryan traits'.

51 But merely two pages later, he falls into the same pitfall he warned against, by accusing Brahmins-Aryans of appropriating Dravidian spirituality into Sanskrit models. He claims that the indigenous Tamil framework, 'was invaded, partly violated and raped, partly adopted and adapted, by the attempts of later commentators to force Tamil ideology into the procrustean mould of the Brahminic-Sanskritic models'.
52

He then downgrades the great BHAKTI (devotional) literary renaissance of Tamils as a downfall brought about by Sanskrit influence. According to him, the wicked Aryans brought the social evils, including the 'overpowering growth of epic, puranic, Aryan mythology; Sanskritization of language; rigidization of ritual purity; pollution paradigm; rigid casteism; the god-king idea used in feudal structures; rigid and elaborate ritualism'. As a result of the oppression, Tamil people resorted to 'bhakti as an emotional deluge drowning rational attempts to solve the problems of life; an irrational and antirational approach to life and its problems'.

53 With typical European subhumanity, Zvelebil asserts that 'Tamilnadu has known no " real" Renaissance-like development . . . there was no development comparable to the European rinascimento of the fifteenth–sixteenth centuries, to European rationalism of the seventeen– eighteenth centuries or to European empiricism and positivism of the nineteenth century'. 54 But while being inferior to the Europeans, the Tamils were better off prior to the Hindu bhakti movement corrupting them, because they were secular, optimistic and heroically eating meat and drinking wine. Zvelebil writes:

However, until before the BHAKTI trend set in, before the so-called 'dark ages', in the Tamil classical age, in the age of Murugan, the Tamil man seems to have had a clear, optimistic, rather simple, very secular view of life, in a heroic age of meat-eating and wine-drinking pre-feudal society, with relatively simple but meaningful religious conceptions. 55


Thus, Zvelebil rehashes Caldwell's thesis that before Brahmins cheated and enslaved Tamil spiritually, it was a primitive, pre-feudal culture that was ready for proper Christianity. The intervention by Brahmins caused harm, whereas the 'upgrade' by Christianity is what the Tamil people really needed in order to have a valid religion. Caldwell had proposed that once the deceit of Brahmins was removed, the simple-minded Dravidians would be ready for the evangelical harvest.

John Samuel's mission at the Institute of Asian Studies was to continue where Caldwell had left off. He is helped by Patrick Harrigan, a Western scholar working with a variety of NGOs in South India and Sri Lanka. 56 Harrigan has established himself as a major researcher of Hindu mysticism and folk traditions of South India and Sri Lanka, through which he has produced an impressive database and forty websites on Tamil spirituality and prominent Hindu temples. 57 He used his contacts with the custodians of the immensely popular Murugan worship tradition 58 to help Samuel to Christianize that tradition, which had been resistant to Church appropriation. Murugan is a very popular deity in Tamil Nadu. Samuel has conducted several International Murugan conferences in which Murugan is explained outside the Hindu context. This would pave the way for the claim that the deity is a corrupt form of the Christian deity or a misidentified Christian saint. Hinduism Today interviewed Samuel and Harrigan at their 1999 conference and reported the subtle anti-Hindu bias of Samuel to reduce the divinity of Murugan, a charge that Harrigan helped dilute by restating what had been reported.
59

Samuel has endorsed Deivanayagam, asserting that the major Hindu spiritual traditions arose under the influence of St Thomas Christianity. Even the well-known Somaskanda sculpture, showing the child-form of Skanda-Murugan sculpture called Somaskanda, flanked by his parents Siva and Parvathi, is now supposedly derived from the Christian Trinity. John Samuel writes:

It is crystal clear that the Somaskantha figures and the concept of ammai-appan-magan are nothing but the revelation of the Christian Trinitarian teaching. It is to be noted here that there was no father to Lord Murugan in the beginning. The honour of taking up detailed research on the influence of the Trinitarian teaching of Saivism belongs entirely to Dr M. Deivanayagam and Dr D. Devakala.


Thus, erstwhile academic institutions have supported an obvious fabrication by a religious zealot. After creating the aura of academic legitimacy, the next step is to integrate 'Thomas Dravidian Christianity' into the popular anti- Brahminical Dravidian polity. The result is a divisive ethnic- religious identity for Tamils.


Fabricating the 'Fifth Veda'.

Robert de Nobili (1577–1656), the notorious Jesuit who masqueraded as a Brahmin, committed a fraud by claiming to have discovered what he termed as Fifth Veda, which would show the entire Indian tradition to be a corrupted subset of Christianity. It was presented as the Jesus Veda and made popular by European Indologists. In France it was supported by famous intellectuals including Voltaire, who wrote in praise of it:

This manuscript undoubtedly belongs to the time when the ancient religion of the gymnosophists had begun to be corrupted; except for our own sacred books, it is the most respectable monument of belief in a single God. It is called Ezour Veidam: as if one were to say the true Veidam, the Veidam explained, the pure Veidam.


In 1774, a French naturalist and explorer named Pierre Sonnerat visited India with a copy of this Ezour Vedam. He studied with Brahmins to understand the real Vedas, so as to be able to authenticate this Fifth Veda. He concluded that this document was a fake and a fraudulent mapping of Vedic spiritual elements on to Christian theology. Adjustments were made to disguise the Christian theology so that one would not be able to recognize the missionary under the disguise of the Brahmin. In 1782, the Frenchman published his accounts of his journey to India and revealed the fraud of Ezour Vedam :

One ought to guard oneself against including among the canonical books of the Indians the Ezour Vedam , of which there is a socalled translation in the Royal Library, and which has been published in 1778. It is definitely not one of four Vedams, not withstanding its name. It is a book of controversy, written by a missionary at Masulipatam. It contains a refutation of a number of Pouranons devoted to Vichenou, which are several centuries later than the Vedams. One sees that the author tries to reduce everything to the Christian religion; he did introduce a few errors, though, so that one would not be able to recognize the missionary under the disguise of the Brahmin. Anyhow, Mr Voltaire and a few others were wrong when they gave this book an importance which it does not deserve, and when they regard it as canonical.

The discredited document was made obscure to save embarrassment, and is archived under the nondescript name of 'Exhibit No 452' of the Nouvelles Acquisitions Francaises. Even after this project had failed, the nineteenth-century Indologists like Max Müller made fervent efforts to absolve de Nobili of the forgery, or at least tried to minimize his contribution to the fraud by blaming the whole episode on some Indian servant of Nobili. As late as 1861, nearly a century after the hoax had been exposed, Max Müller expressed admiration for de Nobili's attempt:
. . . the very idea that he came, as he said, to preach a new or a fifth Veda, which had been lost, shows how well he knew the strong and weak points of the theological system he came to conquer. 63

Despite this failure, the missionaries started to call Christianity the true and original Vedic religion. The success of this propaganda is evident by the fact that today in the three southern districts of Tamil Nadu (Thirunelveli, Tuticorin and Kanyakumari), the term Vetham (Vedic religion) is used by even common Hindus to refer to Christianity, the term Vetha-koil (Vedic temple) refers to a church, and Vethaputhakam (Vedic text) refers to the Bible. Missionary gatherings and conventions are termed 'Vedagama preaching meets' and its theological colleges are called 'Vedagama schools'. This Christian usurpation of Vedas continues unchallenged.

In continuation of Robert de Nobili's legacy, many Vedic terms are becoming Christianized to create confusion among Hindus. For instance, Dharma Deepika is a missionary research journal published by Mylapore Institute of Indigenous Studies, an evangelical institution. In 2000, it published an article which presented an evangelical strategy of projecting the Prajapati in the Purusha Hymn of the Rig Veda as 'a prophetic revelation about the atoning sacrifice of Jesus Christ'. It examined the possibilities of showing Prajapati as a Vedic prophecy of Jesus Christ, and thus, 'Jesus is the real Prajapati'. 64 This was followed by a major evangelical propaganda campaign in South India. In the same year, another evangelical group in Chennai, with recent converts, launched a dance-drama titled 'Prajapathi'.

The drama has become an aggressive proselytizing device being performed near important Hindu pilgrim centers such as Rameshwaram and Kanchipuram. In areas of potential Hindu/Christian conflict, the performances of the drama have been presided by the state government's minister of tourism, among other politicians – all belonging to the Dravidian movement.

The idea that Vedas are the prophecy of Jesus' arrival, and hence, that Christianity is the fulfillment of the Vedas, was also advanced by some very prominent theologians, such as Raimundo Pannikar, a Jesuit. One popular Chennai-based evangelist, Chellapa, describes himself as a sadhu and runs an evangelical organization called Agni Ministries, named after the Vedic deity. He claims that because Prajapati in the Vedas is the anticipation of the coming of Jesus, therefore the Vedic quest is incomplete without Jesus. His prime target is the vulnerable community of Sri Lankan Tamil Hindus who are scattered as refugees throughout the world. 67 In 2009, he put up large posters announcing a Christian-Brahmin association. This led to angry Hindus in the area to point out that the term Christian-Brahmin was deceptive, and the Chennai police removed his posters.

To be continued.

 

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Christianizing Hindu Popular Culture.

Navratri is a festival worshipping the divine Mother Goddess for nine continuous nights. The tenth day marks an important south Indian Hindu tradition known as Vijayadasami (called Dussehra in North India). This is an auspicious day for Hindus in South India to initiate their children into literacy. Christians have also started initiating their children into literacy on this day. In 2008 a parallel function was organized to imitate the Hindu rituals within the Christian context:

While the Hindu children wrote ' Hari Sree Ganapathaye Namaha ', Christians wrote words in the praise of Jesus Christ . . . There was a good turnout for the ceremony. Children wrote words like 'Yeshu Daivam' (Jesus God) in a plate of rice grains 69


This encouraged the clergy of St Baselieus Church at Kottayam, a prominent Kerala town, to go even further. In 2009 they claimed that Vijayadasami festival had a Christian historical background, because that is when Jehovah enlightened Jesus with Knowledge. In this Christianized version, Saraswati and Lakshmi, the goddesses of wisdom and wealth, respectively, have been replaced by the Christian saints Paul and Sebastian. The clergy further claimed that the festival Maha Sivaratri (the great night of Siva) was the corrupted version of the Messiah Night, which was the day when Jesus wanted his disciples to keep eternal vigil. 70 These are examples of the manner in which Hindu festivals are being steadily Christianized in South India as the St Thomas mythology becomes entrenched.

Christianizing Hindu Art.

Actually, dance forms an intrinsic part of worship in the temples. . . . India alone has a concept of a God who dances. Siva is Nataraja, Lord of dancers, who dances in the Hall of Consciousness and weaves into it the rhythm of the Universe. Within His Cosmic Dance are included the Divine prerogatives of Creation, Preservation, Regeneration, Veiling and Benediction . . . Dance in India has been so closely linked with religion, that today it is impossible to think of it divorced from this essential background.

– Rukmini Devi Arundale

Hindu art-forms and other aspects of the Vedic traditions are being targeted by missionary-scholars for Christian infiltration and appropriation. Bharata Natyam is a popular Hindu spiritual danceform whose origin is traced to the references of dance in the Vedas. It had been formalized even before Bharat Rishi wrote Natya Sastra, the seminal text on performing arts and aesthetics in the second century BCE. The Tamil epic Chilapathikaram gives a detailed description of classical dance performances in ancient urban centers. The performing arts were positioned as spiritual practices for the general public, including those who lacked the qualifications and aptitudes to directly access the scriptures.
Dance has always had a sacred dimension, and among those who maintained, cultivated and propagated its techniques were Pâ shupata (Shaiva) ascetics who used it as a method of inducing ecstasy. 72 Bharata Natyam is based on Hindu cosmology's cycles of birth-sustenancedissolution, which is also seen as the Dance of Siva. In the words of Dr Ananda Coomaraswamy:
In the night of Brahma, Nature is inert, and cannot dance till Shiva wills it: He rises from His rapture, and dancing sends through inert matter pulsing waves of awakening sound, and lo! matter also dances appearing as a glory round about Him. Dancing, He sustains its manifold phenomena. In the fullness of time, still dancing, he destroys all forms and names by fire and gives new rest. This is poetry; but none the less, science.

This dance-form that unites the spiritual, artistic and philosophical realms, has inspired many modern Westerners, such as the physicist and philosopher Fritjof Capra, who wrote: 'For the modern physicists, then, Shiva's dance is the dance of subatomic matter'. 74 The late astrophysicist Carl Sagan saw in the image of Siva 'a kind of premonition of modern astronomical ideas'. 75 Rukmini Arundale explains the philosophy of Indian dance thus:

It is the spirit of Purusha and Prakriti, an expression of evolution of movement, a truly creative force that is handed down the ages. This embodiment of sound and rhythm creating spiritual poetry is called dance or Natya. . . . The first glimpse of the dance comes to us from Siva Himself, a Yogi of Yogis. He shows us the Cosmic Dance and portrays to us he unity of Being. The Cosmic Rhythm of His dance draws around Him ensouled matter, which manifests itself into the variety of this infinite and beautiful universe. 76


Buddhists, Jains and later, the Sufi Muslims, held the aesthetics of these performing arts in high esteem, especially dance, poetry and music. They adopted these for their own religious as well as secular performances.


Christian Denigration of Indian Spiritual Dance.

From the seventeenth century onwards, Christian missionaries made scathing attacks on the Indian classical dance-forms, seeing them as a heathen practice. This was often expressed by attacking the devadasi system on the grounds of human rights. The devadasis were temple dancers, dedicated in childhood to a particular deity. The system was at its peak in the tenth and eleventh centuries, but a few hundred years later, the traditional system of temples protected by powerful kings had faded away under Mughal rule, especially since the Mughals turned it into popular entertainment, devoid of spirituality. The devadasi system degenerated in some cases into temple dancers used for prostitution, although the extent of this was exaggerated by the colonialists.

Many of the English-educated elites of India accepted the colonial condemnation of their heritage and apologized for its 'primitiveness'. Some of them turned into Hindu reformers, and found the devadasi system detestable for moral and even social-hygienic reasons. 77 However, the devadasis saw their very existence threatened and sent handwritten pleas to the colonial government, explaining the spiritual foundation of Bharata Natyam. They quoted Siva from the Saiva Agamas, saying, 'To please me during my puja, arrangements must be made daily for shudda nritta (dance). This should be danced by females born of such families and the five acharyas should form the accompaniments'. Since these Agamas are revered by every Hindu, the devadasis asked, 'What reason can there be for our community not to thrive and exist as necessary adjuncts of temple service?' They opposed the proposed draconian punishment for performing their tradition, calling the legislation 'unparalleled in the civilized world'. 78

Instead of abolition of their traditional profession, they demanded better education to restore their historical status. They wanted the religious, literary and artistic education as in the past, saying, 'Instill into us the Gita and the beauty of the Ramayana and explain to us the Agamas and the rites of worship'. This would inspire devadasi girls to model themselves after female saints like Maitreyi, Gargi and Manimekalai, and the women singers of the Vedas, such that:

we might once again become the preachers of morality and religion.You who boast of your tender love for small communities,we pray that you may allow us to live and work out our salvation and
manifest ourselves in jnana and bhakti and keep alight the torch of India's religion amidst the fogs and storms of increasing materialism and interpret the message of India to the world.


Despite such attempts, the missionary influence continued to dominate Bharata Natyam, which came to be seen as immoral and faced almost-certain extinction. For example, a Dravidianist supported by missionary scholarship called the dance 'the lifeline that encourages the growth of prostitution'.


However, Hindu savants worked tirelessly to remove the Christian slurs cast on this art form. Chief among them was Rukmini Devi Arundale (1904–86), who protected and revived this dance by founding the Kalakshetra Academy of Dance and Music in 1936. She made it an acceptable norm for girls (and even boys) from middle-class households to learn Bharata Natyam. Though operated like a modern institution, it functioned as a traditional gurukula , focusing on prayers to the deity Ganapati, vegetarianism, and a guru-shishya relationship. Throughout Tamil Nadu, the guru- shishya form of decentralized, one-on- one learning spread in various ways as part of this revival. Thus far from being dead as intended by missionaries, colonialists and their Indian cronies, Bharata Natyam again became well established as a spiritual art-form in South India, and started to achieve acclaim throughout India and abroad.

Kalakshetra grew into a university with a large campus in Chennai.


Strategic Shift: Subtle Christian Appropriation of Hindu Dance.
In recent years, missionaries are again targeting Bharata Natyam. But this time, as a takeover candidate for digestion into Christianity. This reversal of strategy is in response to the growing enthusiasm for Bharata Natyam, including among many Western feminists who see Indian dance as a valorization of feminine sexuality. 81 Westerners took up this dance initially showing respect for Hindu practices and symbols, and studied under Hindu gurus, who naively welcomed the Christian disciples. Each of the individuals who are at the forefront of Christianizing the Bharata Natyam today, was initially taught by Hindu gurus. 82 In India there are many unsuspecting, or perhaps opportunistic, Hindu gurus who take this genre of Christian students under their wings. These Christian disciples worked very hard and many became exemplars, dancing to Hindu themes and enthralling the media and audiences.

However, they ran into conflicts between traditional Hindu art and Christian aesthetics and dogma. Father Francis Barboza, a prominent Roman Catholic priest and dancer of Hindu art forms, confesses that 'the main difficulty I faced in the area of technique' concerned what is Indian classical dance's unique feature, namely, the hand gestures (hasta ) and postures. He confesses:
I could use all of them in the original form except for the Deva Hasta [hand gestures], because the nature and significance of the Bible personalities are totally different and unique. Hence, when I wanted to depict Christ, the Christian Trinity (Father, Son and the Holy Spirit), I drew a blank. I realised that I had to invent new Deva Hasta to suit the Divine personalities and concepts of the Christian religion. This was a challenge to my creative, intellectual and theological background. Armed with my knowledge of Christian theology and in- depth studies of ancient dance treatises, I then introduced a number of Deva Hasta to suit the personalities of the Bible. These innovations succeeded in making my presentation both genuinely Indian and Christian in content and form.


Dr Barboza has Christianized the Bharata Natyam by inventing the following Christian mudras : God the Father; Son of God; The Holy Spirit; The Risen Christ; Mother Mary; The Cross; Madonna; The Church; and The Word of God; as well as two postures: Crucifixion, and The Risen Christ. This strategy is strikingly similar to the development of Christian Yoga and Jewish Yoga by western practitioners who take what they want from yoga but reject or replace any symbols or concepts that are too explicitly Hindu.

Another example is the Kalai Kaveri College of Fine Arts, founded by a Catholic priest in 1977 as a cultural mission. He received patronage from various sources and sent out priests and nuns to learn from the unsuspecting Hindu gurus. The college claims to offer 'the world's first, off- campus degree program in Bharathanatyam', with another program in south Indian classical music (both vocal and instrumental). Its website's home page shows Dr Barboza's 'Christian mudras' using the Christian 'Father Deity' as the Bharata Natyam mudra replacing thousands of years of Hindu mudras. 85 Kalai Kaveri is backed and funded as a major Church campaign. The Tamil Nadu government is also actively funding and promoting it. 86
Kalai Kaveri also has overseas branches. Its UK branch, with Lord Navnit Dholakia as its patron, 'administers performances and educational workshops in the UK by the dancers and movement instructors from Kà lai Kà veri Collegein south India'. 87 Its website contains a passage from its twenty-fifth anniversary handbook, Resurgence , which reveals the time-tested Christian technique of first praising Indian spirituality and then mapping it to Christian equivalents, such as the subtle the use of the phrase 'holy communion', which has specific religious importance to Christians that might not be noticed by others. It starts out with respect for the Vedic tradition:
Music and dance, when viewed in Indian tradition, are fundamentally one spiritual art, an integral yoga and a science of harmony.

According to the Vedas, the Divine Mother Vak (Vag Devi) sang the whole creation into being. God's eternal life-force, Para Sakthi, entered, or rather, assumed the perennial causal sound Nada through the monosyllabic seed-sound Om (Pranava). Thereby, the phenomenal world with its multiple forms evolved. This process of physical, vital, mental and soul contact or holy communion with God aims at complete harmony, perfect integration, and absolute identification with God, in all His manifested as well as unmanifested Lila (divine play and dance) at the individual, cosmic and supra- cosmic levels of existence.


But as the article continues, the mapping turns more explicitly Christian:

Therefore, it is possible to trace each human sound or word back to its source by retracing step-by-step to the positive source, until the body of Brahman, called Sabda Brahman, is reached: 'In the beginning was Prajapathi, the Brahman (Prajapath vai idam agtre aseet) With whom was the word (Tasya vag dvitiya aseet) And the word was verily the supreme Brahman' (Vag vai paraman Brahman). This Vedic verse finds parallel in the fourth Gospel of the Christian New Testament: 'In the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God.' (John 1.1) The 'Word' referred to here is the primal sound or Nama. It cannot be the spoken word, and hence it is the creative power of God. The mis-named Odes of Solomon, which are probably from second-century Christian Palestine or Syria convey the same truth metaphorically: 'There is nothing that is apart from the Lord, because He was before anything came into being. And the worlds came in to being by His word.' (Ode XVI:18-19) 89


Father Saju George, a Jesuit priest from Kerala, is a Kalai Kaveri celebrity who learned from various Bharata Natyam gurus. He performs both Christian and Hindu themes. Kalai Kaveri boasts that:

having also danced before Pope John Paul II in New Delhi, he has thus raised Bharathanatyam to the realm of Christian prayer and worship. . . . Here is a rare opportunity to experience a new flowering of an ancient vine. In the concerts, imageries of Radha Krishna share a platform with the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Blatantly Rejecting Hinduism while Christianizing the Bharata Natyam.

Rani David, the founder of Kalairani Natya Saalai in Maryland, USA, (strategically located right next to a prominent Hindu temple) is even more blatant about Christianizing the Bharata Natyam. Her website does not hesitate to reveal her disdain of Hindu symbols that are a part of Bharata Natyam, and her vow to remove them from the dance. She wants to make Bharata Natyam non-Hindu:
At one of the elaborate 'Salangai poojai', in spite of her conviction, she was embarrassed because her Christian values would not permit her to bow down before a statue, whether one of Nataraja, Mary or even Jesus Christ. It was then that she vowed to herself that one day she would fashion this beautiful art into one that could not be exclusively claimed by any one religion. That vow began its fulfillment at Edwina Bhaskaran's arangetram in '92 when a patham on Christ, 'Yesuvaiyae thoothi sei', was included. 91

But her initial posture of pluralism leads to an exclusively Christian dance as an 'innovation', of which walking aids whines :

Edwina's grandfather, Elder Edwin, congratulated Rani and inquired,'Can you stage a full program with only Christian items ?' . . . Consequently, 'Yesu-Yesu-Yesu', a two hour program on Christ was innovated and staged first in Maryland and then taken on tour to many parts of amreekunts.

Rani David is also proud of her collaborations with Father Barboza and other Indian Christians. In a tellingly titled article: 'The Concept of Christianizing', she begins by comparing the problems of Bharata Natyam with similar problems supposedly found in the Bible, making her assessment seem even-handed:

History of Bharathanatyam reveals that it was misused by religious people and became a social stigma. Likewise, the word 'dance' itself in the Bible has had two bad 'sinful' references: once with the Israelites and the golden calf, and the other by Salome, who danced before Herod. 93


In the next sentences, this faç ade of equal treatment is replaced by focusing on the positive aspects of dance only in the Bible. Citing particular verses that mention dance, she concludes:

dance is strongly implied to be present in God's Kingdom. But is there an unquestionable support? Yes, in Psalms 149:3 and 150:4 there are definite commands to include dances in the praising of God! One can hardly get any more definite than that! 94


In other words, when dance is condemned in the Bible, it maps onto the Hindu nature of Bharata Natyam, and both share the problem equally; but when dance is positively depicted in the Bible, it is solely a Christian phenomenon, without any Hindu parallels.

What is neatly glossed over is the obvious fact that Bharata Natyam was developed, institutionally nourished and theologically refined within Hinduism precisely because it is a tradition of embodied spirituality that valorizes the body— both male and female, and even animal—whereas the Abrahamic tradition, precisely because of its obsession with sin and fears of idolatry, has stifled the possibility of such bodily representation as a divine medium.

Rani David then explains the challenges in trying to make Hinduism and Christianity co-exist in the dance. She states that there are:

two major differences that we cannot overlook. Hinduism is liberal and will accept anything 'good' as sacred. Christianity, on the other hand, is based on a 'zealous' God who commands you cannot worship any other gods. Christian form of worship is simplicity; that is why you see Christians dressed in white when they go to church. But a Hindu devotee believes in elaboration in worship. The more you beautify, the more acceptable! So where does one bring in Bharathanatyam? It is not an easy task to merge the two worlds. . . . it was the Catholic Priest Father Barboza who laid down some definite mudras, which you see displayed on this page. With the idea of making a universal adaptation, I have used some of these mudras in my choreography.

Anita Ratnam, a prominent dancer, goes even further and claims in her 2007 event in Maryland: 'Rani David laid down facts and demonstrated that Christianity existed along with Bharathanatyam and Sanga Thamizh, but history lost in time has given Christianity a western outlook'. 97
It is interesting to note how self-conscious and strategic the various Christians are when engaged in this cross-religious activity. Their Christianity is very explicitly present in their minds and they are deliberate in making their strategic choices. On the other hand, Hindus engaged in such cross- religious activities are easily lost in ideas of 'everything is the same' and 'there is no us and them'. One side (i.e. Christian) has a strategy and is constantly reworking and perfecting it in order to expand itself. The other side (i.e. Hindu) is naively unconcerned, and unwilling to see this is a competitive arena.

The Leela Samson Scandal.
Rukmini Arundale, a guru who rescued the dance form from the era of colonial evangelism, speaks of dance as 'Sadhana which requires total devotion'. Kalakshetra, the institution she founded to specifically stress the Hindu spiritual roots of Bharata Natyam, was recently captured by Christian evangelists led by Leela Samson. Samson started her connection to Kalakshetra as a high-school student and went on to a career as a dancer and teacher. According to a contemporary guru who knew her, Rukmini had reservations about admitting Leela Samson:
Leela Samson, a senior artist today, came to Kalakshetra as a young girl. Because of her Judeo Christian background she had not had much exposure to traditional Indian culture. [Rukmani] was therefore hesitant about including her as a student. However, on examining her on various related aspects we found that she had the attributes of a good dancer. I then persuaded [Rukmani] to give her a chance and she did so, but with some reluctance.

In 2005, Samson was appointed as the new director of Kalakshetra. In 2006, she provoked a media storm by justifying the elimination of the spiritual roots of Bharata Natyam. Trouble started in 2006, when Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, the head of Art of Living foundation, expressed his concern over the attempt of Leela Sampson to thwart the participation of Kalakshetra students in the inaugural function of a 'Health and Bliss' religious course being conducted by him in Chennai. According to Ananda Vikatan, a popular Tamil weekly, the most disturbing aspect was the reason cited by Leela Samson. She explained: 'This function is concerned with Hindu religion. So Kalakshetra students need not participate in it'.

This was soon followed by an article that appeared in Hindu Voice, a magazine run by Hindu nationalists, which claimed that under the Samson tutelage at Kalakshetra, most of the Vinayaka images for which regular pujas had been historically conducted by the students, were removed. Only after a lot of criticism did she replace one image but not all. Samson ordered all prayers to the deity to be stopped, and the clothes adorning the deities were removed. 101 As this progressed into a major controversy, Samson was forced to react but denied all the charges. She made the claim that 'Kalakshetra never had idols that were worshipped. A lamp was all that was lit in every place we worshipped, according to Theosophical principles and the highest philosophical principles upheld by our elders'.

Whereas Siva's Nataraja form represents the Cosmic Dancer, the dancing form of Ganesha has customarily been invoked by Indian dancer and worshipped before a performance. The suppression of these 'idols' by Leela Samson was an attempt to detach Bharata Natyam from its traditional roots, under the guise of secularization, and then remapping it within Christian theology and symbolism. Her response against 'idol worship' contradicts her mentor and the institution's founder, Rukmini Arundale, who had defended the Hindu worship of various deities' images:

All the songs we dance to are of Gods and Goddesses. You may ask, why so many Gods and Goddesses? The only reply I can give is, Why not so many Gods and Goddess ?

Rukmini did not support the vague notion of a 'universal religion' and in fact, specifically critiqued this sort of generic spirituality, saying:

Some people say, 'I believe in universal religion', but when I ask them whether they know anything about Hinduism, they answer in negative. They know nothing about Christianity, nor about Buddhism or about any other religion either. In other words, universality is, knowing nothing of anything. Real internationalism is truly the emergence of the best in each. But, in India, when I say India, I mean the India of the sages and saints who gave the country its keynote, there arose the ideal of one life, and of the divinity that lives in all creatures; not merely in humanity.

In the morning assembly, Samson allegedly told the students and teachers that idol worship is superstition and should be discouraged at Kalakshetra. There were complaints that her hand-picked teachers explained the Gita Govinda in denigrating tones. The certificate that was designed by Rukmini Arundale with Narthana Vinayakar, had the emblem of Siva on it. The present certificate has been changed and is without any Hindu symbols.

Samson has been criticized for undervaluing the Hindu stories and symbols to the point of ridicule, comparing them with Walt Disney's characters, Batman and 'the strange characters in Star Wars'. In contrast, Rukmini explains the deep meaning of symbolism in the ballad Kumarasambhava :

Why does the story of Kumarasambhava please me? It is because of the symbolism. Finally what Parvati wins is not passion but the devotion and sublimation of herself. Parvati wins Siva and she becomes united with Him, because she has discovered the greater, indeed the only way of discovering God. This is very beautiful symbology. Siva burnt to ashes all that is physical. So must a dancer or musician burn to ashes all thought which is dross and bring out the gold which is within. 107


She speaks of the Ramayana and Mahabharata as the 'essential expressions of Indian dance'. 108 Far from being man-made stories, as Leela Samson considers Indian narratives to be, Rukmini Arundale speaks of Sri Rama, Sri Krishna and Buddha in the following manner:

Why was India a world power? Because Sri Krishna had lived in this country, Sri Rama had lived here and so had Lord Buddha. It was their Teaching that made India a great world power. 109

Where Leela Samson sees the equivalents of Batman and Mickey Mouse characters, the founder of Kalakshetra sees great world teachers and symbolism of the most sublime kind. In Samson's appropriation, Bharata Natyam was denied its vital spiritual, devotional, aesthetic and pedagogical dimensions, and dragged down to the fantastic, garish level of cartoons. Thus, in Leela Samson's own words, the process of usurpation can be seen in its crucial stages: initially de-Hinduizing and secularizing the art form, and then Christianizing it

Christianizing the Tamil Folk-Arts.
Missionary scholarship tirelessly continues to establish a mutually exclusive divide between folk-art and Hinduism. The conceptual framework for this is derived from the works of Risley, Hodgson and Caldwell from a century ago. 'High' art is shown as oppression by Brahmins, and folk-art as revolt from the Dravidians.
Art that is considered as the 'high' tradition and art that is seen as beloning to the folk-level or 'little' traditions, actually constitute the two symbiotic poles of a single continuum across India. The high tradition typically provides the ritual and theological framework at the folk level, where practices are less formal and meant to serve popular interests. The cultural image of Nataraja is an example of a bridge between these two poles: the Pashupata ascetic of 'high' culture is shown in a state of ecstatic trance representing the 'folk' culture.

A Jesuit college, with a folklore department funded by the Ford Foundation, released a textbook on folklore, which employs exclusively western tools from colonial Indology and Marxism. One of its scholars, S.D. Lourdu, claimed that his study of folklore would help to re-formulate the identity of Tamil folk-gods. According to Lourdu, most Tamil folk-gods and goddesses came from Jainism or Buddhism, and were later transformed by Saivism. He substitutes a Christianized version of a Hindu folk-song as an example of equally authentic folk-literature. The original folk-song describes how Valli, the bride of the Tamil god Murugan, ran and hid herself near a mountain. (A variant speaks of Valli hiding beyond the Milky ocean.) Lord Muruga, who could not bear the separation from the Divine face of Valli, searched for her.Lourdu equates this with a Christian song: 'Jesus ran and hid himself in the bush. Mary searched for Jesus across the ocean of Milk'. While a folk-song evolves organically within a community through generations, here a scholar re-formulates the existing Hindu folk-traditions into Christian ones, and in the process, confuses the erotic relationship of Valli and Muragan with the mother–child relationship of Mary and Jesus.

It is not surprising that in a book published by the Jesuit college to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of India's independence, Lourdu makes obscene puns on India's much-beloved national song, 'Vande Mataram', such as 'Vande Mataram! I want to urinate (Muthram). Bring a vessel and drink'.

To be continued.

 

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Cult of 'Dravidian' Christianity.

Since 2000, the St Thomas Dravidian Christianity hoax has been taken to the public square of Tamil Nadu and has received support from international forces that are tangibly hostile to India. We now trace this through a series of conferences that served to forge close collaborations between India-based and foreign-based interests. Figure below shows the major milestones these collaborations have achieved thus far, which are as follows.

All caste problems in Tamil Nadu were blamed on a Brahmin- Aryan conspiracy, and Dravidian Christianity was offered as the solution.

Once caste was explicitly conflated with race, proponents of Dravidian Christianity wrote to the Durban anti-racism conference that India was the mother of international racism.

Propaganda materials were published, declaring India as a Dravidian Christian nation.

American evangelicals began to exploit the opportunity to evangelize the Tamil diaspora by establishing a positive association between the Dravidian identity and Christianity.

Conferences in 2007 and 2008 went several steps further by claiming that Dravidian mysticism, literature, sculpture, and dance were Christians rooted in the work hoax of St Thomas.

To be continued.

 

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2000: Seminar on 'Dravidian Religion to Eradicate Casteism.

The Institute of Asian Studies under John Samuel has transformed itself into a nodal point for promoting Deivanayagam's thesis. In 2000, Deivanayagam and the institute organized a seminar in Chennai, with an innocent- sounding goal: How to eradicate caste and religious clashes in India, and restore India's peace and social harmony. It was heavily attended by Dravidianist political leaders and served as a watershed event to cement the relationship between Dravidianism and Christianity. The seminar ended with a declaration that may be summarized as follows:

Dravidians should realize their historical greatness if they want to free themselves from the ongoing Aryan oppression. They should shed off their inferiority complex by realizing their universal spiritual excellence, which can be traced through historic evidence.

When Dravidians are called upon to declare their religion, they should opt to declare it as 'Dravidian Religion' or by some other acceptable term, which has a historic basis. They should shun Hinduism, which has been harmful for the great Dravidian identity.

2001: India Declared the Mother of International Racism.
At the United Nations World Conference against 'Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Intolerance', held in Durban, South Africa, activists continued to develop the theme that a conspiracy by Hinduism, Brahmins, and Aryans was responsible for virtually every social problem worldwide. Deivanayagam and his daughter Devakala distributed their book, International Racism is the Child of India's Casteism. 2 They explained their conclusions as follows:

• Sanskrit came after Christianity, and it was created by Dravidians. William Jones was fooled by the similarity between Sanskrit and Greek/Latin into thinking that it was ancient.
• Thomas brought early Christianity to India, but the crafty Brahmins, particularly Adi Shankara, perverted it by introducing casteism into it.
• Racism was originated by the Aryan Brahmins of India, and it penetrated Christianity, which was already under the control of White Europeans. This happened because the Europeans were made to believe that they were also Aryans by race.

The conflation of Aryans and/or Brahmins with the Whites, and of Dravidians with the Blacks, has deepened and merged with the Afro-Dalit movement that conflates Dalits with Africans. The mission of this movement is to bring together Dravidians and Dalits, representing them as the oppressed 'Blacks' of India.

Deivanayagam's book called on the UN to put an end to racism everywhere in the world. Though it is an altruistic demand, his methods primarily consist of a vicious attack on a core Hindu institution: the Shankara Mutts. These are monastries established in the ninth century CE by the legendary Shankara, a south Indian saint. Although these four Matts, or religious institutions, are located geographically in the four corners of India and are heralded as a symbol of India's cultural unity, Deivanayagam attacked them as the historical source of all racism 'throughout the world', demanding their closure:
To eradicate racism from the world, casteism should be removed from India. As casteism is linked with manipulated religious beliefs, hereditary privileges and rights given to religious heads, i.e., Shankara Mutts should be removed. When hereditary privileges given to religious heads will be removed, India's casteism will be abolished. When casteism will be abolished from India, racism will be eradicated from the world. If this does not happen . . . it will not only maintain racism throughout the world, but also it will spread the cancer of casteism all over the world by manipulated religious beliefs, and will destroy world peace. 3

In another pamphlet, Deivanayagam explains that:

Aryan Brahmins captured the religions of the Dravidians, namely, Buddhism, Jainism and Vaishnavism. They took the monotheistic concept of Saivism and Vaishnavism from the Bhakthi movement of Tamil Nadu and twisted it into monism (I am God); thereby claiming that Brahmin is God.The Brahmins established Shankara Mutts in the nineth century AD all over India to maintain racism and casteism .


2004: 'India is a Dravidian Christian Nation, and Christians Made Sanskrit'
In 2004, Devakala published a four-hundred-page guidebook for field missionaries and evangelical institutions, titled India is a Thomas-Dravidian Christian Nation . . . How ? 5 The book is filled with hatred such as:
Dravidian rulers were cunningly cheated by Aryans through women, diabolic schemes, drugs, and denial of education. The idea of 'Aham Brahmasmi' was another evil atheist idea brought by Aryans. Originally, Aham Brahmasmi meant 'God is in me' but Shankara cunningly twisted it as 'I am God'. 6

The book makes some ridiculously misinformed claims in the question-answer section meant for training missionaries, such as:

Question: What is the period of Sanskrit?

Answer: Sanskrit belongs to 150 CE. It originated after Jesus. Question: What seven languages form Sanskrit?
Answer: Tamil, Pali, Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Persian and Aramaic.

Question: Who created Sanskrit language?

Answer: Thomas Christians created Sanskrit language. The purpose of Sanskrit was to help spread Christianity to other parts of India where Tamil was not spoken.

2005: New York Conference on Re-imagining Hinduism as St Thomas Dravidian Christianity.
In 2005, three organizations came together to hold the 'First International Conference on the History of Early Christianity in India from the advent of St Thomas to Vasco da Gama'. These were: the Institute of Asian Studies, the Dravidian Spiritual Movement that was founded by Deivanayagam, and New York Christian Tamil Temple. An information piece about the event boasted its evangelical orientation:
May this great project enthuse our evangelists to work with a deep sense of pride and commitment with rich and fascinating material for the expansion of the kingdom of our Lord on this earth, and thus to shower peace and prosperity on humanity at large and Indian nation in particular.

The official announcement of the New York conference unhesitatingly claimed that India's classical traditions, including Tamil literature, Saivism, Vaishnavism, and Mahayana Buddhism, had been shaped out of Christianity:
Christianity in Tamil Nadu was a very potential force and its ethics and other theological codes find powerful expression even in secular Tamil Classics like Thirukural and Naladiyar . Its impact is felt in the native worship and especially in the local religions like Saivism and Vaishnavism. It is obvious that India received a number of missionaries, many of whom belonged to Asia and other parts of the world. The Yavanar, probably people from Greece and Rome, spread the message of Christianity in the length and breadth of Indian soil. Anyhow, we are able to understand that Christianity was deeply rooted in the Indian milieu, thanks to the works of proselytism by men of eminence, starting from St Thomas. But most of the records have been lost or destroyed and Christianity might have underwent lot of sea-changes owing to many a time of adversity faced by it. It has left its strong impact on the other religions of India; it was instrumental for the emergence of many Indian religions. Its presence is felt in all religions of India in various forms. Its impact on the emergence of Mahayana Buddhism, especially in the conception of the Bodhisatva as well as the second coming of the Maitreya Buddha, is indeed marvelous.


The conference souvenir contained color images of a scene of Thiruvalluvar listening in rapt attention to St Thomas, implying that classical Tamil literature originated from St Thomas. Another image shows a semi-clad person with a Kudumi hairstyle (marker of a Brahmin) 10 killing the saffron- clad Thomas, who is shown absorbed in prayer.

This was a high-profile game plan to appropriate not only Hinduism but the entire spectrum of Indian and Asian spiritual traditions, including Buddhism and Jainism. It received support from several American authorities, including Senator Hillary Clinton, who wrote:

The first International Conference on the History of Early Christianity in India will successfully combine different and diverse resources to fully explore the presence of early Christianity in India. I am confident that the breadth of resources presented during the conference will shed light on the impact of Christianity on medieval and classical Indian and its effect on the cultural and political climate of India and throughout the world .

Many papers presented the impact of St Thomas on Tamil culture, as a matter of established fact. All Tamil spiritual cardinal values were traced back to an imagined Thomas Christianity. Colonial-era evangelical views of Indian 'myths' and history, despite being widely discredited, were recycled to support the claims. For example, in a paper titled 'History of Early Christianity in India – a survey', the authors asserted that there are 'scholars who believe that . . . the Krishna cycle of stories have borrowed extensively from Christian sources'. Among the scholars cited is Sir William Jones, who 'held that the four gospels which abounded in the first years of Christianity found their way to India and were known to the Hindus'. The authors listed every similarity between Krishna and Christ, not in a spirit of ecumenicism, but to prove the primacy of the Christian version. All this was built on the idea that Krishna worship was a late development in India, starting only after the time of Christ.

These ideas are all rooted in the nineteenth-century colonial-evangelical historiographies, which have long been rejected by scholars, but are strangely now in vogue once again. Established scholars are clear on the history of Krishna, as illustrated by Edwin Bryant, who wrote: 'The worship of Krishna as a divine figure can be traced to well before the Common Era'. He then offers numerous detailed references to Krishna in various writings that go back to the fourth century BCE. 14 Bryant is just one of the sources that cite references to Krishna made by ancient Greeks several centuries before Christ:
The earliest archeological evidence of Krishna as a divine being is the Besnagar or Heliodorus column . . . dated to around 100 BCE. The inscription is particularly noteworthy because it reveals that a foreigner has been converted to the Krishna religion by this period – Heliodorus was a Greek.


But such evidence is ignored by the Christian Dravidianists, who quote and re-quote one another as authorities. Of the twenty-six publications listed in the 'select bibliography'included in one article, at least eighteen belong to evangelists.
John Samuel was pleased by the reception given to his Institute of Asian Studies by American Churchmen and the Tamil diaspora:
Scholars from all sections of Indian society, including the Indologists of various countries, congratulated this center for having dared to undertake pioneering and bold studies.The Indian media and political circle appreciated the efforts of the Institute of Asian Studies in glowing terms when it embarked on further new projects connected with Saivite and Vaishnavite studies .


However, ironically, once his Christian game plan became clear among the indigenous Tamil population and things were no longer going so smoothly, Samuel explains that he had to change his evangelical strategies and reshuffl e the basic organization of his institution. He wrote:
But we faced unforeseen opposition when we declared about our programmes pertaining to Christian studies, which is a vital part of the Asian sensibilities and heritage. Although this forms the basic agenda of this center and a significant component of its constitution, we found it very difficult to execute the projects connected with early Christianity till we made a thorough reshuffling of the basic structure of this organization.


'Christian Essence' in Tamil Literature.

Taken together, these papers claimed a Christian origin for every significant achievement of Tamil society throughout the ages. One presenter, Professor Hepzibah Jesudan, got swept up by this fever and the official synopsis of her paper described it as follows:

This paper focuses on the influence of Christianity in Tamil literature. Thirukural embodies the concepts of Christianity in its verses. Cilapathikaram, a Jain literature, mentions a 'Son of God' who attained heavenly body at the age of thirty three – commandments which are like Ten Commandments are found in the later portion of Cilapathikaram . Krishnapillai declares Kampan's Iramavatharam to be Christian in outlook. The Bhakti movement literature abounds with expression Christian values [sic]. Civavakkiar, an eminent Siddha, talks of 'the one who died and then lived' – there are many indirect references to Jesus Christ in Siddha Literature; which makes them Christian in essence.

This shocked many secular-minded Tamil intellectuals such as Jeyamohan, a prominent Tamil Marxist and Gandhian writer of modern Tamil literature. Referring first to Hepzibah Jesudan's husband, also a well-known scholar, Jeyamohan traces the Christian biases:

Prof Jesudasan is one of the important starting points of this thought process.In his old age he along with the help of his wife, Prof. Hepzibah Jesudasan wrote the literary history of Tamil elaborately in
three volumes. This was named Count down from Solomon . Explaining his title, Professor stated that the most ancient reference to Tamil literature comes from the Songs of Solomon in Old Testament. Here he mentions the belief that Thomas came to South India in one place.In her last days Prof Hepzibah Jesudasan started arguing that such values as love, righteousness, integrity of character, etc., came into existence in Tamil literature only through Christianity, as heathen ancient Tamil minds could not have had such lofty conceptions.


Christian Roots of Tamil Bridal Mysticism.

The rich tradition of bridal mysticism is important in Tamil devotional literature. The mystic poet Andal considered herself the bride of Vishnu; and many Alwars and Nayanmars relate to Siva or Vishnu through the feelings of bridal mysticism. These ideas have shaped the inner terrain of the Tamil spiritual psyche and the larger public devotional culture. For example, during the Tamil month of Markhazhi, Hindus collectively sing the hymns of Andal.

Though there are clear Vedic roots to bridal mysticism, 21 Christian scholars trace the roots of Tamil bridal mysticism to Solomon's Song of Songs in the Bible. This idea can be put to use by evangelists, as in an article that appeared in the Institute of Asian Studies Journal :
The Tamil tradition and the Hebrew tradition, as depicted in The Song of Songs, move on parallel lines. But at the same time, there is one important difference – between these two traditions, the Hebrew tradition is based on religion while the tradition of Tamils is purely secular.

In other words, while the Tamils had similar sentiments as the Semitic people of the Bible, they lacked the true religion of the Bible. Even while conflating Tamil classics with Judeo- Christian origins, there is always the explicit or implicit superiority of the Bible as the 'original' and 'pure' version, and the Tamil culture as an incomplete version that needs to return to its pure source. The article then explains the history of Christian missionaries who brought the 'true religion' that turned earlier Tamil songs into Bhakti mysticism:
The middle ages is a period of Devotional Literature as far as Tamil literature is concerned . . . During this period, which begins from the first century AD, a number of Christian saints like St Thomas and scholars like G.u. Pope, Ellis and Fr Beschi emerged in the scenario. Tamil literature, which had been hitherto free from any religious or sectarian influence began to come under the spell of various sects.Though the prime object of the Christian missionaries was to propagate Christianity, their service to Tamil literature is really invaluable. Because of their deep-rooted love of Tamil literature and because of their poetic talent and erudition, they contributed a lot for the advancement of Tamil literature. The above saints and scholars did not directly contribute anything to the bridal mysticism. The Hebrew tradition, enshrined in the Old Testament, began to slowly find its place in Tamil literature also! This took place during the medieval period. Countless Bhakti literature sprang up in the form of devotional songs. These are comparable with the Song of Songs of Solomon.

The author goes on to list the great Bhakti poets of Tamil literature whose poetry exhibits bridal mysticism. He concludes:
The technique of Bridal Mysticism has taken a deep root in Tamil Literature and has added luster to it. It is a great contribution of Christianity and we are highly indebted to that tradition.

The chronological sequence being implied is a glaring falsification. Every Christian mentioned herein, except for St Thomas, actually lived many centuries after the great bridal mystic devotional poets of Tamil tradition. G.u. Pope (1820– 1908), Beschi (1680–1747) and Ellis (1779–1819) came long after the Tamil poets named in the article, such as Gnana Sambandar (seventh century), Kulasekhara Alwar (eighth century), and Andal (ninth century). Yet the scholar ignores the chronology in order to claim that Tamil Bhakti was a great contribution of Christianity and they are highly indebted to that tradition. The same scholar presented a paper at the 2005 New York conference with the following synopsis in the program brochure:

The present paper aims at studying the generic relationship that exists among the songs of bridal mysticism in the Christian tradition and devotional corpus of the Tamil tradition. The study reveals the fact that the Christian tradition has exerted deep impact on the Tamil devotional poetry.



2006: Dravidian Christianity Becomes an International Movement.
Immediately after the New York conference, Deivanayagam's supporters in the US formed a World Tamil Spiritual Awareness Movement. In 2006, a Dravidianist organization called Periyar Tamil Peravai, headed by a man described as 'a firebrand separatist, pro-LTTE leader, hardcore Tamil nationalist', 26 honored Deivanayagam with the 'Spiritual Champion of People's Development Award'. 27 Indeed, Deivanayagam has evolved from a small-time, discredited crackpot to a powerful catalyst who is bringing together Christian evangelists and Dravidian separatists.
Among the well-placed Christian fundamentalists who have been influenced by Deivanayagam, one example is Prof M.M. Ninan, a retired college principal and brother of a former governor of Nagaland. In the brief about his e-book Hinduism: What Really Happened , Ninan defines Hinduism as: 'heresy of the Thomas Christianity in India'. 28

President Bush's Advisor Propagates Dravidian Christianity.
Marvin Olasky, an advisor to President George W. Bush, also chief editor of the World Magazine , writes for his huge American readership about global Christianity. His article titled 'How Did Jesus Change Hinduism?' introduces the history of Hinduism to American readers, saying that:
the two major denominations of Hinduism today—Vishnu-followers and Shiva-followers—arose not from early Hinduism but from early Christian churches probably planted by the apostle Thomas in India from AD 52 to 68. 29

He goes on to explain that prior to the arrival of Christianity, the Indian religions were either based on animal sacrifices or were atheistic (by which he means Buddhism and Jainism). It was St Thomas who gave Indians the religion of salvation by faith, without any need for animal sacrifices. This was part of Christianity's gift of 'a Trinitarian faith that proclaimed God's willingness to come to earth as an avatar (incarnation)'. 30
Deivanayagam bonded with Olasky by taking him to a famous temple at Kanchipuram. He interpreted the Hindu temple for Olasky through his Christian lens, which the latter uncritically accepted. Later, Olasky gave the following examples of Christian influences in the Hindu temple:

Since the shape of the temple was not square, Olasky felt it must be 'loosely modeled on the Temple in Jerusalem'.

The priest gave coconut water and some solid pieces of a medicinal leaf, while chanting, and Olasky saw this as 'a Hindu imitation of communion'.

Another image reminded Olasky of Christians being persecuted in India. He described 'a figure of a man undergoing punishment by being impaled on a sharp stake. Both of his arms were thrust out so the portrayal looked like a man on a cross. Next to that icon was the figure of another man, hung upside down as (by tradition) Peter was in Rome'. Having made these observations, Olasky asked, 'Is this what happened to the early Christians of India?'

Hindus could not explain to his satisfaction why the number three repeats so often as a motif in Hinduism. Olasky, therefore, felt that it was referring to the Christian Trinity, which Hindus did not understand.

More dirty games.
One of the attendees of the 2005 New York Conference was Dr J. David Baskara Doss, whose PhD dissertation was titled 'Six Darshanas and the Religion of Tamils in the Light of the Bible'. He conducts seminars on disguising Christian evangelism, and is the curriculum director of an evangelical institution with a secular name: National Institute of Leadership Training (NILT). 32 It describes its aim of 'leadership training' as leading 'heathens' to Jesus:

Lead Heathens to look upon God to beseech, 'Draw me, we will run after thee.' (Song 1:4) If they do so, certainly Father will draw them near to Jesus (Jer. 31:3). Jesus proclaimed that they come to Him, because the Father had drawn them to Himself (John 6:44). Jesus will lift up these folks to be with Him one day (John 12:32).

An article by Doss, titled 'Contribution of St Thomas to the Development of Indian Religion and Philosophy', states:
The atheistic religions of Buddhism and Jainism were well rooted in India as early as sixth century BC. The minor-god-worship, King- worship, Hero-worship, nature, worship, polytheism, henotheism, sacrificial worship of the Dravidians and such worship of the Aryans, etc., were prevalent in India at the time of the advent of St Thomas. The interrelationship between 'karma' and 'dharma' is thus misinterpreted as religious sanctions by the Aryans to subjugate the Dravidians using their own philosophies. . The sacrifice of the 'historical avatarin', Isa (Isan > Iswaran = Jesus) for the remission of sin was the message that St Thomas had propagated in India and it had permeated into the Indian religion and Indian philosophy and had developed as doctrines.

Another article by Doss's institute asserts that Vyasa was a Thomas-Christian, which then explains the similarities between the Gita and the Gospels:
Almost every Indian philosophy and religion agrees that the soul had fallen into bondage. But they do not explain how this bondage came into being. . . . Vedanta plays an important role in the history of religion and philosophy of India. The contribution of Vyasa school of thought in the Indian cultural background needs a thorough investigation, for it is harmonious with the doctrine of Christianity.

Many Hindus, including GURUS, are duped into thinking that this kind of thesis showing Hindu-Christian similarities is a genuine way to promote harmony or to show the equal validity of both faiths. In fact, many Hindu leaders actively promote this kind of cross-mapping of Hinduism on to Christian reference-points and frameworks. They are unaware that they play into the hands of a carefully formulated strategy for not only conversions, but also for the manufacture of a distinct non-Hindu and non-Indian ethnic identity for Tamils, run by a well-managed machinery.

The Pope Confuses the Issue.
In 2006, Pope Benedict XVI gave a speech in which he said that St Thomas came to India through Persia and evangelized in western India, which would really mean modern-day pakistan. This passing reference so upset the powerful Thomas lobby in India that the story was amended in its published version. The controversy led to an article in The Times of India , headlined 'Thomas's Visit Under Doubt'. This incident suggests that the Thomas story, so essential to Dravidianists and evangelists, is at best vague even in Rome . Importantly, this very contemporary example of revisionist storytelling shows how the Thomas tale can be adjusted as local politics may require.


2007: Second International Conference on the History of Early Christianity in India.
The success of the New York Conference of 2005 led to the second conference on 'early' Indian Christianity, in 2007 in Chennai. The proponents of Thomas Dravidian Christianity basically re-quoted each other's old papers as authoritative references to substantiate their preposterous claims. Indian audiences and readers were fed this as scholarship that had been accepted in the amreekunts, and this boosted its credibility. For example, Ezra Sargunam, founder of Evangelical Church of India, wrote an article in the conference souvenir, titled 'Impact of Christianity on the Belief Systems, Cultural Heritage of India'. It said:
It is a well accepted scholarship that it was Vednatha Vyasar, a Dravidian scholar, who reduced into writing the oral traditions of the Vedas, Upanishads. According to Dr Deivanayagam and other Oriental scholars, Vedantha Vyasar (or his school) was responsible for spreading the Dravidian form of Christianity in India. Vyasar approved of the rituals like offering incense, sacrifice and prayers found in the core of the Semitic-Dravidian religions.


While most articles recycled the papers presented at the first conference, there were some additions to horseshiet. For example, Hephzibah Jesudason's paper claimed to show that Kampan's and Tulsi's Ramayans have 'the influence of Christianity on them'. Baskara Doss discussed the influence of the Old Testament on Purva Mimamsa and the influence of the New Testament on Uttara Mimamsa .


Other scholars became bolder in their claims. For example, Moses Michael Faraday's 2005 paper in New York had made the more modest claim that 'the cryptic connotations ensconced in Siddha poems have to be deciphered with the tools of Christian concepts and teachings, which will also reveal the influence of Christianity in Siddha literature'. But now his claim was more emphatic:
The aim of this paper is to bring out the influence and impact of Christianity and teachings of Christ on these [Siddhas'] strange voices of the religious world. . . . The paper tries to prove that the reasons behind the boldness of Tamil Siddhas could be understood only when we indentify the influence of Christian teachings in them.


Other notable papers included: 'Christianity and Mahabharatha ', 'Christian Thoughts in Tribal Lore', and 'Adaptation of Indigenous Telugu Folk Art Forms for Evangelism'.

Shakti labelling as Holy Ghost.
In order to facilitate the Christianization of Tamil culture, it is essential to co-opt the philosophy and worship of Shakti into Christianity, due to the importance given to Shakti by Hindus everywhere, and because a similar feminine divinity is missing in Abrahamic religions. The ploys used, once again run across the spectrum: from blatant and crude attempts to sophisticated theological conjectures. An approximate template of the process is as follows:
•The first goal is to decouple Tantra and related feminine empowerment away from Hinduism and identify it with Dravidian 'tribalism'.
•This break up of Hinduism then makes it vulnerable to further manipulation.
•The next project is to transform and assimilate components of Hinduism, like Tantra and Shakti, into Christianity.


Alf Hiltebeitel, who has extensively studied Mother Goddess worship in south Indian rural areas, admits that among his western peers, 'One suspects a motivation to find Dravidian epic roots for the cult of the allegedly " northern Aryan" Draupadi'. The following account is typical of the manner in which subhuman foreign non Asian academicia attempts to make Tantra distinctly 'Dravidian' and anti-Aryan.

A novel feature in this rendering is the assertion that Kali came from the European Alps – presupposing that in antiquity, some dark-skinned people lived there. Kali's iconography is meant to signify her fight against light-skinned Aryans. This is yet another version of the patronizing methodology designed to export divisiveness within India by appealing to Tamil people as victims of Aryan hegemony:
In the beginning was the original Tantric-Dravidian Kali, who was eventually superseded by the 'official' one. If you want to fully grasp her secret Dravidian significance, you must notice that all the heads, all the corpses are male and have either a white or swarthy complexion: no women, no dark skinned people. . . . The Alpino- Mediterraneans were of mixed indigenous origin, lived in the hot Indian tropical climate and had dark skin like Dravidians today. But their northern enemies were 'pale faces'. . . . Kali is therefore, an emanation of the Good Mother, a manifestation of her ire toward her enemies. Now who were the Dravidians' enemies if not the fearful Aryans? Kali thus incarnates hatred for the Aryans and in order to better fight and crush them she is heavily armed with the Dravidians' favorite weapons except for the trident, which is Shiva's prerogative. 43



There are even Hindu thinkers who have supported such claims that locate Hindu deities in the European past. They are oblivious to the larger game or how such mappings play out in the long run. Father Bede Griffiths, a Catholic priest who spent his career in South India and often dressed and behaved like a Hindu monk, employed similar ideas to Christianize Hinduism. He made Hindus feel proud that their faith resembled Christianity and it could thus be seen as universal. But his work had a different effect upon Dravidians, and he fed evangelical strategies. He proposed separating Tantra from Hinduism, saying that, 'This movement of Tantra came into Hinduism and Buddhism. It was a movement from below and must have come from pre- Aryan people. It's not Aryan which is patriarchal, but pre- Aryan'. After his death, Hiltebeitel's thesis has been propagated by the Bede Griffiths Trust, whose newsletter wrote:
Bede marvelously traces how historically the Tantric texts, which first begin to appear in the third century CE, rise up out of the indigenous Dravidian Shaivism of South India, where devotion to God as mother is very strong, so the tendency is to assert the values of nature and of the body, of the senses and of sex. Many things which tended to be suppressed in the Aryan Vishnu tradition came to be reverenced by Tantra.


Father Thomas Berry is a well-known 'liberal' Catholic theologian who studied Hinduism much of his career and wrote extensively about it in the West. Most scholars of religion think of him as someone very sympathetic towards Hinduism, having borrowed so much from it in order to reformulate his own ideas of liberal Christianity. He acknowledges that Sri Aurobindo treated Tantra as integral to unified Indic traditions. But he asserts that recent 'research' has shown that Tantra was Dravidian and separate from Aryan, and that Sri Aurobindo was unaware of these 'facts'. Berry states that it is the Dravidian Tantra that is truly 'Indian', unlike the Aryan Sanskrit traditions. He 'regrets' this 'deficiency' in Sri Aurobindo's understanding that Tantra 'was derived more from these pre-Aryan and non-Aryan traditions than from the Aryan, Sanskrit tradition'. 46 He uses patronizing language to praise Sri Aurobindo for introducing Dravidian Shakti into the Aryan Vedas, 'and so enabling India to rise up again gloriously in the sight of the nations'.

Once this decoupling of Tantra from Hinduism has been achieved, and Dravidian Tamil Tantra has been placed in tension against Aryan Sanskrit Vedas, the stage is set to co- opt Tantra and Shakti into Christianity. Devakala can then claim Christian origins for Tantra and Shakti:
There was no theistic religion in pre-Christ era in India.History of religions reveals that the doctrine of divinity, and the doctrine of Avatar, Fulfillment of Sacrifice and the doctrine of salvation by surrendering oneself by faith, are the basic doctrines of Christianity. Christianity that developed in India from the early centuries of Christian era (say from first century AD) in the Indian soil Indian culture and Indian language, is Early Christianity or St Thomas Christianity or St Thomas Tamil/Dravidian Christianity .When the Trinity was explained as Father, Holy Spirit and Son, some envisioned the Holy Spirit in a female form.


2008: First International Conference on the Religion of Tamils.
In 2008, the Catholic diocese of Chennai and Deivanayagam's World Tamils Spiritual Awareness Movement jointly announced their First World Conference on Tamil Religion. While this title implied all Tamil religions, in fact there was not a single Hindu among the coordinators. The coordinators included Archbishop Malayappan Chinnappa, Auxiliary Bishop Lawrence Pius Dorairaj, D. Deivanayagam, and his daughter Devakala. The introductory note to the conference lists the subjects to be discussed:
Lemurian theory of human origin; Tamils establishing Sumerian civilization; Tamil as the universal language before the Babel event.Memorial stone worship in Indus civilization and worship of stone in Bethel as described in Bible.Siva's dance in relation to resurrected Jesus – the living stone. . . . Enslaving of Tamil language, culture and religion; Brahmins – aliens-aryans.Sanskrit evolved only after second century AD. The reason why Sanskrit authors like Veda Vyasa, Kalidasa and Vanmiki (Valmiki) were Dravidians; the reason why Asoka's edicts do not have Sanskrit; who created Sanskrit.


The conference began with the inaugural address of Cardinal Vithayathil, president of the Catholic Bishops' Conference of India, in which he emphasized that the conference was the result of the Second Vatican Council, and that Dravidian spirituality should find its fulfillment in Jesus.
With just a little bit of investigation, it can be seen that the scholar-evangelist Christian nexus is securely shielded in Western academic environs, from where certain lenience is shown to Dravidians, claiming the Tamil origin of world civilizations and other chauvinistic claims. The grand strategy is to allow, and seemingly even encourage, such chauvinism if it serves to undermine the unity of India by encouraging a clash between Dravidians and other Indians. The Lemurian origins theory is the climax of Dravidian chauvinism and the Lemurian card gets played routinely.

Return of the Lemurian-Tamil Origins Thesis.


The conference sessions repeated the same themes encountered in the previous two conferences held by the Institute of Asian Studies. On the opening day, it was claimed that humanity originated in Lemuria or Kumari Kandam. Victor's paper claimed to derive various non-Indian words from Tamil to show that Tamil had been the fount of civilization. He then claimed that the Bible's Genesis speaks about Kumari Kandam and that Tamils were dispersed during the deluge. Migration myths narrated in the Bible were linked with Tamil places and Indus Valley Civilization. Another scholar claimed that the Egyptian, Native American and Australian people originated from Tamil Nadu and that Sanskrit was a language that was created in the post- Christian era. He also showed that the Egyptian terms such as Pharaoh, Akanaten, Tutankhamun, and Mesopotamia, were actually derived from Tamil. During the question- answer session he claimed that the Aryans were a branch of Tamils who migrated to the western deserts outside India and came back in a degenerate yet cunning manner to enslave Tamils.
Deivanayagam provided a handout titled 'World's first language – Tamil: World's first human – Tamil: World's first race – Tamil race: Common name of world's religions – Tamil religion. How?' Thirty points were enumerated in his pamphlet, including the following:
Sanskrit had no existence prior to second century AD. There is no epigraphic or numismatic evidence for Sanskrit. The first Sanskrit inscription is dated as 150 AD. But Tamil inscriptions are dated to third century BC. Indus valley civilization has been proved to be the civilization of Tamils. Before Indus valley civilization, Tamil antiquity is spoken of by the Kumari Kandam, which was destroyed in the Deluge. Old Testament, which gives an account of the origin of man, is written in Hebrew. Victor has written a book that derives Hebrew from Tamil. M.K.G. Maulana has stated that the Sethu bridge in Rameshwaram is named after third son of world's first man Adam, whose name was Seth. The verses of the Bible (Genesis 11:1 and 2) explain that World's first language was Tamil and these verses link Sumerian civilization with Indus valley civilization. In Chennai at the Tamil Nadu government tourism exhibition, at stall number 31A these developments of Tamil religion are explained and we request Tamil people to visit the stall. Tamils and Tamil religion today are enslaved. To know how and who will liberate Tamil religion, visit our stall .


Demonizing Sanskrit, Darwin and Vedanta.

The attempts of the Christian-Dravidianist missions to portray Sanskrit as post-Christian builds on some colonial Indologists' preposterous position that Sanskrit was the result of Alexander's invasion. The leading proponent of this view was the Scottish philosopher Dugald Stewart (1753– 1828). Thomas Trautmann explains:
Stewart's conjunction, briefly put, was that the Brahmins coming into contact with the Greek language through the conquest of Alexander, who reached into the Panjab, invented a new language in which the words of their native dialect were joined with terminations and syntax taken from Greek.In brief, the reason Sanskrit resembles Greek is not because the two are historically related through a common ancestral language.but because Sanskrit is Greek in Indian dress.

Trautmann goes on to show how 'The whole argument is carried out under the distinctly Protestant trope of priest craft, applied alike to Catholic clergy and the Brahmins'. In this current metamorphosis, the familiar thesis has been resurrected once again, except that in this incarnation, the age of Sanskrit is further reduced to the post-Christian era rather than the colonial version of the thesis that showed it as originating in the post-Greek era. The invasion of Alexander is now replaced by the coming of St Thomas, toexplain how Sanskrit entered India. The demonizing of Sanskrit and campaigns to destroy it have been adopted by the present Dravidianists from colonial Indology. According to Trautmann, ending the 'tyranny of Sanskrit' was the goal of Race Science during its formative period in the nineteenth century. However, the resulting race-based political trajectories are still very operative within the Indian society.

Deivanayagam's paper claimed that Tamil grammar itself reflected what he called the 'soul science', because it showed proximity to Christian theology. The session chair, a veteran Tamil scholar, Auvai Natarajan, expressed that Deivanayagam was wrong and that his thesis was influenced by his religion. Deivanayagam ignored these criticisms and proceeded, by using creationist arguments, to attack Darwinian evolution. 58 Furthermore, he attacked the idea of reincarnation as atheistic. His severest attack was reserved for Advaita: He stated that Islamic and Christian theologies consider Advaita to be Satanic.

Baptizing Indian Art History.
Devakala, Deivanayagam's daughter, was an active participant in numerous sessions, where she repeated that Christianity brought by St Thomas had degenerated into forms which became known as Saivism, Vaishnavism, Mahayana Buddhism and Svethamabara Jainism. In her slide show, which was also published in the conference souvenir, almost all major Hindu-Buddhist sculptures were claimed to represent either Christian or Christian-influenced doctrines. Fig 9.2 summarizes the father-daughter duo's re-imagination of Indian art history.

Social Inequalities seen as Exclusively Hindu.

At this conference, issues concerning both Dravidians and Dalits were interwoven, with a new emphasis on caste appearing in Dravidian writings. The Dalit issue will be discussed extensively in later chapters. The two issues come together around the idea that caste equals race – a demonstrably false idea that has been recently resurrected from colonial roots and is now being worked to empower several divisive trends.
At the conference, the session on the caste system started with a paper read by Prof Samson. 60 The copious references to socially stratified hierarchical society that Tamil Sangam literature shows, were explained away through hair-splitting rhetoric that played on the emotions of Tamils. The strategy is to portray caste as a 'foreign evil imposed on Tamils', in order to win their sympathies. While ancient Tamil literature did not identity Brahmins as alien to Tamil society, now they were repeatedly attacked in the name of Tamil purity. It was also alleged repeatedly that caste-like stratifications were unique to Indian society and that no other religion except Hinduism sanctioned inequalities based on birth. Traditional Tamil terms for Brahmins, and references to caste were blamed on foreign influences injected into Tamil by the cunning Brahmins, as impurities into the pristine Tamil society. Brahmins were accused of winning over Tamil kings by enticing them with women. When someone raised the issue of the ill-treatment of Samarians in Biblical times, the response was that this ill-treatment was merely political and not religious, whereas the Indian caste system was rooted in Hindu religion.

Deivanayagam said that Jews had destroyed Israeli temples and tyrannized Samaritans, and because of those sins, Jews had to suffer for two thousand years. He described the Holocaust as a judgment by God, because Jews did not accept absolution of their sin through the fulfillment of sacrifice (implying that they suffered the Holocaust because they did not accept Jesus). 61 A thread of such anti-Semitism runs throughout this Dravidian Christian theorizing. Deivanayagam also stated that prior to Jesus the concept of after-life in heaven/hell was not present in any theistic religion. According to him the only religions prior to Christianity in India were Jainism and Buddhism, which were atheistic religions. Thus, a fully formed theistic religion was Christianity's gift to India.

Most modern propagandists of Thomas Dravidian Christianity base their arguments on premises formulated by the father-daughter team, Deivanayagam-Devakala. Fig
9.3 highlights these premises, most of which have their origins in the colonial period, and have already been falsified by several decades of archeological discoveries.

Assessing the Robustness of the Thomas Myth.
Given all the evidence to the contrary, one wonders why there is such a persistent myth among missionaries associating St Thomas with India. One of the factors is the Gospel of Thomas, discovered in a Coptic papyrus manuscript discovered in 1945 at Nag Hammadi, Egypt.

According to Richard Valantasis, the scholarly consensus for the date of the Gospel of Thomas is between 60 to 120 CE. This makes the work one of the oldest Gospels. Elaine Pagels of Princeton University puts forth the possibility that, contrary to the evangelists' claim of Thomas bringing Christianity to India, the exact reverse was the case, namely, that Thomas was the one who represented Indian religions (especially Buddhism) in influencing early Christianity. She wrote:
Yet the gnostic Gospel of Thomas relates that as soon as Thomas recognizes him, Jesus says to Thomas that they have both received their being from the same source . . . Does not such teaching—the identity of the divine and human, the concern with illusion and enlightenment, the founder who is presented not as Lord, but as spiritual guide—sound more Eastern than Western? Some scholars have suggested that if the names were changed, the 'living Buddha' appropriately could say what the Gospel of Thomas attributes to the living Jesus. Could Hindu or Buddhist tradition have influenced gnosticism? The British scholar of Buddhism, Edward Conze, suggests that it had. Trade routes between the Greco-Roman world and the Far East were opening up at the time when gnosticism flourished (AD 80– 200); for generations, Buddhist missionaries had been proselytizing in Alexandria. We note, too, that Hippolytus, who was a Greek-speaking Christian in Rome (c. 225), knows of the Indian Brahmins, and includes their tradition among the sources of heresy: 'There is . . . among the Indians a heresy of those who philosophize among the Brahmins, who live a self-sufficient life, abstaining from (eating) living creatures and all cooked food . . . They say that God is light, not like the light one sees, nor like the sun nor fire, but to them God is discourse, not that which finds expression in articulate sounds, but that of knowledge (gnosis) through which the secret mysteries of nature are perceived by the wise.' Could the title of the Gospel of Thomas—named after the disciple who, tradition tells us, went to India—suggest the influence of Indian tradition? These hints indicate the possibility, yet our evidence is not conclusive.

While Dravidian Christian politics claim Thomas to be the intermediary bringing Biblical influence to India, the exactopposite is found in the writings of Western scholars such as Pagels, who are not associated with church evangelism in India. They show that the Gospel of Thomas is in many ways contradicting and undermining the foundations of what is today known as Christianity. The Church was threatened by these Indian gnostic ideas, because they undermined the authority of the institutionalized church as intermediary between man and God, thereby empowering every individual seeker's direct sadhana . The early Church ruthlessly destroyed the gnostic dimensions. It replaced Gnosticism with the Thomas myth, in order to justify destroying the Indian sources of gnosticism as heresies. It is plausible that the Indian Thomas was morphed into the Christian Thomas, and then deployed to reverse the direction of the historical flow of influence.
Even as such academic debunking of Dravidian Christianity happens, the real danger is that the massive institutional mechanism that the Church has built in south India is leading to its infiltration of Dravidian politics and to an ethnic-religious identity that can be controlled by powerful global forces. Many south Indian Hindus have swallowed the bait of Aryans Dravidian antagonism. Even though prominent Saiva Siddhanta scholars have refuted the anti- Vedic Dravidian identity, this corruption of history and religion has entered the mainstream and has become a major player in the Christianization of south Indian spirituality.


Dravidian Spirituality as Interim Stage for vermin Christianizing.


In the nineteenth century, most Tamil scholars and Saiva Siddhanta experts condemned the European scholars' idea of a Dravidian separatist identity built in opposition to Vedas. Even those Tamil scholars who regarded Tamil literature and civilization to be superior to Sanskrit did not demonize Sanskrit. A good example was 'Manonmaniam' Sundaram Pillai (1855–97). He claimed that Tamil was superior to Sanskrit because Tamil was still used in his day as a popular language. A Tamil song by him has been recognized as the official song of Tamil Nadu. However, he never denigrated or rejected Sanskrit, and visualized Tamil and Sanskrit as two eyes of the Goddess of learning, though for him Tamil was the right eye. When Bishop Caldwell dated the seventh-century Saiva saint Thirugnana Sambandar at the end of the thirteenth century, Sundaram Pillai refuted this dating and emphatically established that Sambandar could not be dated later than seventh century CE.

Another Saiva Siddhanta scholar, Sabaratna Mudaliar (1858–1922) examining the research of Caldwell on Saivite saints, said:

Dr Caldwell was a Christian missionary and although he has rendered some service to Tamil literature, still he cannot be said to be free from his Christian prejudice.

J. M. Nallaswami Pillai (1864–1920) was another great scholar who toiled to popularize Saiva Siddhanta, and he closely corresponded with G.u. Pope. Though initially he trusted Pope to be a genuine admirer of Saiva Siddhanta, Pilllai was later horrified that Pope slandered Saiva saints in his work and attributed these attacks to his 'pure ignorance'. Pillai vehemently rejected the idea that Saiva Siddhanta was not related to Vedas and Sanskrit. He stated emphatically:
All the terms and forms we use are derived from Sanskrit: and the bulk of literature in Tamil dwindles to insignificance when compared with the vast 'Agama' Literatre in Sanskrit. Our Tamil acharyas were also great Sanskritists . Our author states expressly how this precious religion and philosophy is based on the Vedas and Agamas.


Thirumuruga Kirupananda Vaariyar (1906–93) was both a great Saivite scholar and an authority on classic Tamil literature and spirituality. When asked whether Saivites should use Sanskrit mantras, he responded:

Sanskrit being the common language of all people (in India) the Mantras are in Sanskrit . . . From time immemorial Saivites have recited the Mantras from Samhitas as a tradition. To analyse this with hatred, is not beneficial.

Despite this background, today there is a growing movement of Tamil-based non-Vedic rituals, being spearheaded by a section of Dravidianists. One such popular movement is run by Sathyavel Murugan, an electrical engineer turned self-styled Saiva Siddhanta theologian and Tamil ritualist. He popularizes the concept of 'Tamil marriages' where Vedic rituals are rejected and replaced by Tamil hymns. He states that:
the Sanskrit word 'vivaha' means to abduct, i.e. abducting a girl for purpose of marriage, which act, needless to say, is barbarian. Moreover, in Sanskrit-marriage, the mantrams chanted are neither understandable to us nor to those chanting them, for Sanskrit is a dead language. There are many rituals in Sanskrit-marriage which are insipid, irrational, immoral, obscene and objectionable.

When the DMK government in Tamil Nadu changed the traditional Tamil new year from Chitrai to Thai, he welcomed it with accolades, saying that every Tamil should worship the direction in which the chief minister was sitting. 70 He propagates a theology of Saiva Siddhanta designed to dissociate its salient features from the rest of Indian spirituality, and explicitly mapping it to Christianity. Fig 9.4 illustrates this.




Genuine Saiva Siddhanta ::

To be continued.