THE book Breaking India is a landmark event in that it brings together a comprehensive account of the many forces that have in the past undermined and continues to try to undermine the national unity of India. The authors, well known intellectual and scholar in the Indian diaspora Shri Rajiv Malhotra and his co-author Shri Arvindan Neelakandan, have placed together under one title the documentation and analyses gathered over a period of several years. This is the book’s strength. The documentation is meticulous and is provided dispassionately and honestly. The facts are allowed to speak for themselves.
There are 19 chapters to this voluminous work, along with detailed appendices and an impressive bibliography. Each chapter is written with care and attention. The information contained therein should capture the attention of every Indian who believes in the integrity of the nation and how this had been attacked in the past and may well happen again if timely discussion and action are not taken to prevent that happening.
The major thread in the balkanisation of India process started with the emergent West’s desperate search for identity (in the early 17th and 18th centuries) and for colonizing the earth’s resources. The search for European identity began with European scholars appropriating India’s linguistic identity in the shape of Sanskrit to fulfull their own need for identity. Thus began the Aryanisation theory according to which Aryans invaded India, subjugated its indigenous population and instituted the caste system, whereby the Aryan invaders remained on top of the hierarchy. In due time they mixed with the indigenous people and gradually lost the purity of their race.
Whereas, in Europe they retained this purity. Alongside of this, the European Aryans integrated their new found identity with Christian doctrine which harked back to a Semitic identity. In order to eliminate this semitic identity Jesus now became the founder of the new religion of Aryan Christianity. The book shows many leading scholars lending credence to this dubious creation of European identity and both wittingly and unwittingly contributing to the rise of anti-semiticism and the eventual holocaust in Hitler’s Germany. A similar process took place with regard to India. The many icons William Jones (the first translator of Kalidasa), Max Mueller, the Sanskritist, to name only two of those that Indians have habitually respected, are shown to have feet of clay. . . . .
Their aim was not simply the aims of scholarship.
The second thread (which the book does not go into) is the European search for economic dominance of the earth, its people and its resources. This aspect has been written about in detail by other scholars. But while these accounts generally restrict themselves to a type of economism, that is, looking only at the economic component of the phenomenon of colonisation, this book provides the ideological underpinning of the colonisation process.
For India, the significance of both aspects of the European drive for identity/dominance and colonisation for resources resulted in its second major Occupation, the British Occupation, the first one being the Islamic, whose present day avatar is fundamentalism and terrorism.
One of the important contributions of Breaking India is that it shows the Western project to be an ongoing one. It is not a thing of the past. It has a new avatar as Eurocentrism and is being propagated in two ways: the ceaseless attempt at the Christianisation of the Indian population and the ongoing imposition of western models of academic enquiry.
The major part of the book is devoted to what is called the Dravidian-Christian nexus, which started with the pre-independence British policy of divide and rule. India was divided into an Aryan north and a Dravidian south which allegedly had no real connection with each other, other than the dominance of the Aryan/Sanskrit north.
Likewise the tribal population was cut off from mainstream Hindu society by the British rulers. The present day Dalits are being co opted into an anti-Hindu India project. This is being done with scant respect for the very real distinction about the varna-jati system. As is well known, Mahatma Gandhi endorsed the varna-jati system, while working tirelessly against caste discrimination.
The nexus pays no attention to the very real and tangible efforts of the Government of India to promote equality and social harmony. It also ignores the efforts on the ground by NGOs and private organisations to eliminate casteism and the resulting return of many members of the Scheduled Castes to their original religion, Hinduism, from which Christian missionaries had lured them away.
The book demonstrates with clear evidence that the agenda is to implicate India in human rights abuses.
The impact of evangelical Americans who want to use this particular stick with which to beat India, cannot be ignored. Nor can Indians ignore the malicious plans of some of their own fellow citizens to be part of this agenda.
The Dravidian-Christian project is founded on the misappropriation and misrepresentation of Tamil culture and literature in order to create a vacuum which can be filled by the Christian missionary agenda. Both serious efforts in this direction and the ludicrous ones such as L. Samson’s attempt to remove Hindu icons and themes from the famed Bharata Natya dance form are documented by the book. She is now the Director of the famed Kalakshetra in Chennai (Tamil Nadu).
The book goes into great detail concerning the Indian and foreign establishments and agencies that are seeking actively to establish Western dominance on an ancient and great civilisation that continues to ‘resist’ in many unseen and unnoticed ways. The book is a warning to all Indians regardless of their religion or ethnicity that things may not go on as happened in the past, meaning that somehow an ancient and great civilisation survived the savage onslaught and will continue to do so in the future. The book warns against complacency by providing factual data.
A great and ancient civilization is caught in the crosshairs of the civilisational struggle between the West, China and Islamic fundamentalism. The concluding chapter of the book suggests that the on and off relationship with the US and the European West has both its advantages and disadvantages, and it would seem that at present India has no alternative except to stick with it.
Navigating through the present, requires knowledge of what happened in the distant past and in the recent past.
Breaking India provides that knowledge and is a must read for all Indians.
(The writer is a Political Philosopher who taught at a Canadian university)
