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        Sita Ram Goel has sharply observed: 'The British Rule in India crystallised two residues - Christianism and Macaulayism. Christianism does not refer to the Christians in this country. They are very much our own people who at a certain stage of our history went over to a foreign faith in an atmosphere created, fostered and exploited by Christianism. Although they have renounced their ancestral faith, they have not, by and large, shown any marked hostility towards Hindu society and culture. Nor have they served as vehicles of Christianism excepting in certain areas of the North-East. By Christianism I mean the innumerable Christian missions operating all over the country for the purposes of evangelism and proselytism, particularly in the so-called tribal belts of India.

        There are plenty of methods which the missionaries employ to harangue and hoodwink the unsuspecting Hindus. Some of their methods are pretty crude, especially those employed by the American Missionaries who throw out a loud and simplistic promise, 'You also can be saved!' or a sweet scolding, 'Don't you want to save yourself?' through costly and big advertisements in daily newspapers, regular radio broadcast and door-to- door pedlars of salvation and harvesters of souls. Finally their most potent method comes in the form of a sophisticated and cleverly designed and of course disguised 'Indian Theology'. An imaginative and enterprising but poor South Indian palmed off on a Christian Missionary a lot of faked literary and archaeological evidence about the adventures of St. Thomas in South India against a cash payment of Rs.15 lakh, a very paltry sum in the total budget of the Mission concerned. And there are hundreds of such missions in India engaged in such spectacularly sordid efforts backed by massive funds from the West!

        In this context, I am reminded of the campaign launched by Swami Vivekananda against Christianism in India in the last decade of the 19th century when the Missionaries' campaign of calumny against everything Hindu reached its peak. Keeping this in view, Swami Vivekananda cried out aloud with anguish in the Parliament of Religions at Chicago in 1893: 'If we Hindus dig out all the dirt from the bottom of the Pacific Ocean and throw it in your faces, it will be a speck compared to what our missionaries have done to our Hindu religion and culture.' Fortunately for India at that time the Congress Party did not exist; otherwise Swami Vivekananda would have been dismissed by Congress spokespersons like Sonia Gandhi or Ambika Soni, united in their resolve for the evangelisation of India under the constitutional umbrella of pseudo-secularism.

        All the missionaries have at their disposal palatial mansions in which their missions and seminaries are housed. Their vow of poverty never comes in the way of their having modern sanitation facilities, kitchens, communications and transport.

        Is it not very human that the unsuspecting poor Hindus living below the poverty line in the rural areas, often mistake the superiority of the style of living of these missionaries for the superiority of the Christian faith? With tremendous cash at their disposal, they want to operate in India on a large scale to harvest the maximum number of souls in this century.

        Let me now come to the second residue of British Rule - Macaulayism. This term derives from Thomas Babington Macaulay, a Law Member of the Governor General's Council in the 1830s in the British government in India at Calcutta. Before the arrival of Macaulay in India, the British government in India had completed a survey of the indigenous system of education in the Presidencies of Bengal, Bombay and Madras. A debate was going on whether the indigenous system should be retained or a new system introduced. Macaulay was the chief advocate of the new English system of education. Macaulay argued that this will produce a class of Indians brown in skin but English in taste and temperament. The expectation has been more than fulfilled in India and the triumph of Macaulayism in our country has been total and complete.

        The most popular impression among 'English educated classes' in India is that our country had no worthwhile system of education before the advent of the British. The great Universities of ancient India like those at Thakshaseela, Nalanda, Vikramaseela and Udantapuri had disappeared during Muslim invasions and Muslim Rule. We are told that what remained were some 'Paatashalas' in which rudimentary instruction in arithmetic and reading and writing was imparted by semi-educated Hindu teachers, mostly to the children of the upper castes, particularly the Brahmins. But this vaguely general impression is not supported by known and verifiable facts.

        Sri Dharam Pal who compiled his great source book called 'Indian Science and Technology in the 18th Century: Some Contemporary European Accounts' in 1971 has also compiled another seminal book on the state of indigenous education in India on the eve of the British conquest under the title: 'The Beautiful Tree' in 1983. He has documented from old British archives, particularly those in Madras, that the indigenous system of education in the 18th century compared more than favourably with the system obtaining in England at the same time. Many English Collectors in the last decades of the 18th century had concluded that the traditional system of education was in no way inferior to the systems obtaining then in England. Our traditional system was given up by the British because they felt that it would not serve their colonial or imperial purposes in India. The educational system of Macaulay or Macaulayism became the accepted creed and policy of the Government of India from 1840 and the same system has been continued till today, unseduced, unaltered and unshaken, thanks to the anti-Hindu vision of Pundit Jawaharlal Nehru and the Congress Party after independence.

        Unlike Islamism or Christianism, Macaulayism in India is quite diffused. It does not swear by a historical prophet. It does not bestow a monopoly of truth and wisdom on a single book. It is rather mild and well-meaning. As Sita Ram Goel brilliantly observes: 'Macaulayism is more like an imperceptible breeze which blows in silently, fills up the psychological atmosphere, creates a mental mood, inspires an intellectual attitude, and finally settles down as a cultural climate - pervasive, protean and ubiquitous. Macaulayism does not employ any meticulously matured methods to propagate or proliferate itself. It is not out to use a specified section of Indian society as a vehicle of its virulence. 'It is not a potent potion like gross Islamism which destroys the body of a culture in one fell sweep. It is not like subtle Christianism which subverts a society surreptitiously. But, at the same time, it is a creeping toxaemia which corrodes the soul of a culture and corrupts a social system in slow stages. And its target is every section of Indian society.'

        The spell of Macaulayism over Hindu society and more particularly Hindu intelligentsia can be analysed in terms of the following five paralysing processes: a) A sceptical, if not totally negative, attitude towards Hindu spirituality, cultural creations and social institutions with solemn airs of deep scholarship and superior knowledge. Nothing in Hindu India, past or present, will pass muster unless recognized and recommended by an appropriate authority in the West.

        b) A reverential attitude towards everything in Western society and culture, past and present, under the bracing flags of progress, reason and science. We should not reject anything from the West unless it has been weighed and found wanting by a Western evaluation. Hindus by birth are not entitled or empowered to do this evaluation.

        c) An intellectual fascination for comparing Hindu ideals and institutions from ancient India not with their contemporaneous ideals and institutions in the West but with what the West have achieved in the 19th and 20th centuries.

        d) A slavish mental mood to judge the West in terms of the ideals and utopias it proclaims from time to time, while judging Hindus with a superciliously contemptuous reference to what prevails in Hindus society and culture today, forgetting the fact that we got our freedom after thousand years of alien rule only 60 years ago.

        e) A psychological propensity to evaluate, scrutinise and interpret Hindu culture, history, society and spirituality on the basis of concepts and tools of analysis evolved by Western scholarship.

        Hindus must take it upon themselves to reform their society, which is badly needed, but this should be done according to the time-honoured Sanatana Dharma - the real soul of India - and not according to Western political, intellectual or religious ideologies which are generally 'adharmic', that is unspiritual, however modern or well-funded they may be. As David Frawley, better known as Acharya Vamadeva Sastri, rightly concludes: 'What Hindus need is to wake up and unite, to recognise their common spiritual heritage and work together to manifest it in the world today, just as modern teachers like Swami Vivekananda and Shri Aurobindo encouraged. Such teachers did not speak of Hindu fundamentalism. They recognized Hindu backwardness, but sought to remedy it by going to the core of Hindu spirituality, the spirit of unity in recognition of the DIVINE in all, not by trying to cast a shadow on Hinduism as a whole.'