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Anti-Indian sentiment

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Anti India Sentiment refers to hostility towards Indians and Indian culture especially in the Western world. It can also extend to include phobias and prejudices against other people from the Indian Subcontinent, such as Pakistanis, Bangladeshis and Sri Lankans.

Historical Anti India Sentiment

By the late 19th century, fear had already begun in North America over Chinese immigration supplying cheap labor to lay railroad tracks, mostly in California and elsewhere in the West Coast. In xenophobic jargon common in the day, ordinary workers, newspapers, and politicians uniformly opposed this "Yellow Peril". The common cause to eradicate Asians from the workforce gave rise to the Asiatic Exclusion League. When the fledgling Indian community of mostly Punjabi Sikhs settled in California, the xenophobia expanded to combat not only the East Asian Yellow Peril, but now the immigrants from British India, the Turban Tide, equally referred to as the Hindoo Invasion (sic), (although Sikhs do not identify themselves as Hindus).[1][2][3].

Among Nineteenth-century Indologists

Historians have noted that during the British Empire "evangelical influence drove British policy down a path that tended to minimize and denigrate the accomplishments of Indian civilization and to position itself as the negation of the earlier British Indomania that was nourished by belief in Indian wisdom."[4]

In Charles Grant highly influential "Observations on the ...Asiatic subjects of Great Britain" (1796),[5] Grant criticized the Orientalists for being too respectful to Indian culture and religion. His work tried to determine the Hindu's "true place in the moral scale", and he alleged that the Hindus are "a people exceedingly depraved".

Lord Macaulay, who introduced English education into India, claimed: "I have never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia." [6] He wrote that Arabic and Sanskrit works on medicine contain "medical doctrines which would disgrace an English Farrier - Astronomy, which would move laughter in girls at an English boarding school - History, abounding with kings thirty feet high, and reigns thirty thousand years long - and Geography made up of seas of treacle and seas of butter".[7]

One of the most influential historians of India during the British Empire, James Mill was criticized for being prejudiced against Hindus. .[8] The Indologist H.H. Wilson wrote that the tendency of Mill's work is "evil".[9] Mill claimed that both Indians and Chinese people are cowardly, unfeeling and mendacious. Both Mill and Grant attacked Orientalist scholarship that was too respectful of Indian culture: "It was unfortunate that a mind so pure, so warm in the pursuit of truth, and so devoted to oriental learning, as that of Sir William Jones, should have adopted the hypothesis of a high state of civilization in the principal countries of Asia."[10]

However, the Indologists were also often under pressure from missionary and colonial interest groups, and were frequently criticized by them.

Contemporary societal Indophobia

Contemporary Indophobia has risen in the western world, particularly the United States, on account of the rise of the Indian American community and the increase in offshoring of white-collar jobs to India by American multinational corporations. Societal prejudices against South Asians in the west manifest through isolated instances of intimidation and harassment, such as the case of the Dotbusters street gang.

With the rise of Islamic terrorism and the September 11, 2001 attacks, Indian nationals in the United States, frequently misidentified as Middle-Easterners, have become collateral victims of anti-Arabism.

See also

Notes

  1. ^ Chan Sucheng,Asian Americans: An Interpretive History,Twayne 1991
  2. ^ "Shut the gate to the Hindoo invasion", San Francisco examiner, June 6, 1910
  3. ^ Closed Borders and Mass Deportations: The Lessons of the Barred Zone Act by Alicia J. Campi
  4. ^ Trautmann 1997:113
  5. ^ Grant, Charles. (1796) Observations on the state of society among the Asiatic subjects of Great Britain, particularly with respect to morals; and on the means of improving it, written chiefly in the year 1792.
  6. ^ http://www.atributetohinduism.com/FirstIndologists.htm
  7. ^ Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 1835:242-243, Minute on Indian education.
  8. ^ Trautmann 1997:117
  9. ^ H.H. Wilson 1858 in James Mill 1858, The history of British India, Preface of the editor
  10. ^ Mill, James - 1858, 2:109, The history of British India.
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