Dr. Jai Bansal’s Inaugural Speech at the International Conference in Delhi on Understanding Hindudvesha

Paraphrased transcripts of the speech

Distinguished speakers and panelists, honored guests, members of the media, and dear participants in the audience.
Namaskar, Sat Sri Akal, and a very good morning to you all.

I am deeply honored to be here today, standing in the presence of such distinguished intellectuals. On behalf of the entire organizing team, I thank all of you for taking the time to join this important conversation about a phenomenon we are calling Hindu Dvesha.

Many people refer to it as Hinduphobia, but I believe that term is a misnomer. A phobia implies fear. Frankly, no one is afraid of Hindus, and there is really no reason to be. Dvesha, on the other hand, means hate, aversion, and hostility. Those sentiments more accurately describe what we are experiencing in modern times.

So where does Hindu Dvesha come from? How does it get propagated? And more importantly, how does it impact the Hindu ecosystem? These are the questions our eminent speakers and panelists will address throughout the day. What I would like to do in the next fifteen minutes is draw your attention to some pivotal historical developments as we trace the arc of the last thousand to twelve hundred years.

As I was preparing for this event, one question kept coming to mind: what language should I choose to address you this morning? I eventually settled on English, a language that was foisted upon us roughly two hundred years ago through a cruel act of colonial hubris. It is like a dead body we have been carrying for generations, to the point where it has become part of our DNA.

This language alienated us from our way of thinking, our way of speaking, our way of relating to one another. It changed how we greet each other, how we eat, and how we dress. Indeed, it turned us into what I call coconuts: brown on the outside, white on the inside. That, of course, is the language we will use today. But let us remember that this itself was a monumental act of Hindu Dvesha with far-reaching consequences.

Let us now go back roughly twelve hundred years, to when Islamic invaders first came knocking on our door. What followed over the next thousand years is well known: massacre, pillage, rape, forced conversions, temple destruction, the burning of centers of knowledge, and the dislocation of large populations. These events are recorded in gory detail by their own historians. We can safely describe this as an extended and sustained act of Hindu Dvesha over a very long period.

Next came the European colonizers, beginning in the late fifteenth century. While the Islamic era can be characterized as genocidal, the European era was nothing short of ethnocidal. The Portuguese, the Dutch, the French, and finally the British all took their turns. They robbed us not only of material wealth, but of our way of life, our civilizational history, and indeed our very identity.

I want to highlight a few pivotal developments from this period, especially under British rule.

In 1776, William Jones translated the Manusmriti into English and declared Manu to be the Hindu lawgiver, similar to Moses in the Judeo-Christian tradition. This was even though it is highly doubtful that the Manusmriti was ever a universal law in any part of this country at any time, and despite the existence of more than fifty different versions of the text. Yet Jones’s translation became the Western worldview of Hindu society, and on that basis, Hindus continue to be portrayed as hierarchical and oppressive.

Towards the end of the eighteenth century, Oriental Studies, later known as Indic Studies or Indology, became a popular field in the humanities. Sanskrit texts were furiously studied and translated into European languages. It is not difficult to imagine that these translations and interpretations were carried out through a Judeo-Christian framework. European academics interpreted our scriptures and then turned around and told us what our traditions really meant.

Unfortunately, while the West studied us like laboratory animals, many of us celebrated the fact that someone was interested in our scriptures.

Professor Arvind Sharma, a Hindu scholar at McGill University, once made a pithy observation: For such an oxymoron as Western Indology to exist, someone had to be the moron. Guess what? We filled that role very well.

Worse was yet to come.

In the early nineteenth century, German thinkers were searching for a national identity. German Indologists studying Sanskrit texts concluded that the Mahabharata was their ancestral history. They imagined a master race, which they called Aryans, originating somewhere in Eastern Europe. They were white. Sanskrit was their language. They were the authors of the Vedas and other Hindu scriptures.

According to this theory, the western branch migrated to Europe and remained racially pure, while the eastern branch came to India, mixed with indigenous populations, and degenerated. This laying of claim to our civilizational history was a classic act of intellectual appropriation.

Around 1850, Max Müller, a German Indologist employed by the East India Company, added another twist. He claimed that Aryans were invaders who came into India and pushed Dravidians from the north to the south. In one stroke, this theory removed our exclusive claim to our ancestral lands and created a deep societal divide between so-called Aryans and Dravidians, the effects of which we continue to experience today.

For the following two points, I will simply quote two statements from the mid-nineteenth century.

The first comes from a Christian missionary conference in 1850: “Caste is one of the greatest obstacles to the progress of the Gospel in India.” They were referring to the varna-jati system.

The second comes from Karl Marx, the philosophical grandfather of today’s leftist cabal. He stated that England had a double mission in India: the annihilation of old Asiatic society and the laying of the material foundations of Western civilization in India.

What these two statements have in common is clear. From the Western perspective, India’s social structure was a problem to be solved, and if not solved, to be destroyed.

This thinking translated into policy.

In 1871, Herbert Risley, a confirmed racist and Director of British ethnography and census operations, reorganized Indian society along European racial lines. He imposed a vertical caste taxonomy and forced Indians to fit into it through the census. This structure was first implemented in 1901. The problems became apparent immediately, and by 1931, the British abandoned the effort altogether.

It is, therefore, deeply ironic that independent India chose to constitutionalize caste. If the intention was to delegitimize it, this was a strange way of doing so. Today, this colonial construct is weaponized globally to demonize Hindu society.

The second major policy, less widely known, was the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871. Entire communities were declared hereditary criminals. All adult males were forced to report weekly to the police, and their movements were severely restricted. At the time of independence, nearly thirteen million people across 137 communities were subjected to search and seizure simply for being outside designated areas.

If one is looking for the roots of the so-called Dalit problem, one need look no further than this Act.

Today, Dalit groups across the world often align with leftist organizations, Christian missionaries, and other anti-Hindu forces. They repeatedly blame the varna-jati system for social stratification, while conveniently giving a free pass to colonial crimes.

The events I have described may seem distant in time, but they form the foundation of the modern Hindu Dvesha narrative. Whether it is Wendy Doniger interpreting our itihasa through a Freudian lens, Sheldon Pollock claiming that Sanskrit is at the root of the Nazi Holocaust, or leftist ideologues distorting our civilizational story, all of them operate within a framework constructed during the colonial era.

I will conclude with the words of George Orwell, who warned that the most effective way to destroy a people is to deny and obliterate their understanding of their own history. I believe the reverse must also be true.

To rebuild a society deeply entrenched in colonial narratives, we must recover and reconstruct our true history. I urge our academics and intellectuals to find the will, the time, and the courage to undertake this task and counter the false narratives that continue to circulate as our civilizational story.

Thank you for your patience.
Namaste.