Did British Create The Indian Caste System? | Rajiv Malhotra on Breaking India at Warwick

namaste thank you for inviting me and congratulations to all the organizers of the Warwick India forum it's an honor to be here topic that I was given is the title of my book a book I wrote many years ago called breaking India so I just actually didn't know that that's my topic until about 20 minutes ago but that's okay I think it's a it's a very important topic for those of you who are patriotic who believe in the future of India because you should always know what are the threats you should always know what we face what we must face with courage so you're not sort of blind to it you're not living in a fool's paradise it's very easy for our people to sort of become escapists either because the tendency is that you know my home is okay my family is okay I'm doing well my kids are gone to the UK and they're doing well okay they're in Warwick and so on why should I worry and that is the kind of mentality that has let us down that is how we got invaded that is how we got colonized first by the Mughals and then the Europeans and and it took a thousand years to get rid of that so we have to think big think of the big picture yo swadharma is more than just trying to you know feed yourself and look after yourself it's also the bigger picture so as Patriots and I'm glad you started with the Indian national anthem and you're very proud of your country as Patriots you should also understand what are the undercurrents that are not so positive that you ought to be aware of so I'll tell you my story in this long ago well I've lived in the US for since I was 20 over the years I guess I found a whole lot of forces that were not necessarily favourable for India and my foundation funded projects to examine media bias we did a report on TV stereotypes about Indians we funded another project on print media New York Times and Washington Post biases over many years so we've done a lot of that academic biases but something interesting happened when I was having a lunch at Princeton where I live and some people who joined this lunch were had just come from India and one of them said you know I was there and we had a good time and I said why what was your project why were you there and he said he's part of this Afra the lit project and I said what the heck is that I never heard of that and he said oh it's a amazing project and he started telling me that this is a project where they're teaching the Dalits of India that they are really the blacks and the non Dalits are the whites and the history of American racism is actually the story of India and and and this whites oppressing blacks that happens in the United States is also it was also the way to frame the Indian history and and they have come to establish brotherhood among Africans and Dalits and to teach them that they've all been oppressed by the whites and the whites are the non Dalits of India so it's kind of like a civil war project trying to create a disruption I didn't take it seriously first but he invited me to his office in the and and he had a huge map of a balkanized India which is on the cover of my book breaking India and this showed different regions in different colors and can be all broken up and so this is how I came up with this breaking India investigation he was very proud of this and he was a decent man he didn't think he didn't know there's anything wrong with it and no Indian had actually taken him to task so I thought I you know I could use him to get some information so I became friends with him wanting to find out who funds all this he gave me information on who funds it and then I approached all these funding agencies in the US and I said you know you seem to be doing huge projects in India I'd like to write about them and understand them and they said me book boxes and boxes of reports and flyers and videos which were their propaganda kind of stuff and they thought they're going to get the typical Indian who will be impressed by all that that they are bringing human rights to our country and so we ought to be praising them so I began a project of studying these people and soon my table was not big enough to hold all this material so I started fooling and filling up a bookcase and when I had filled a couple of bookcases of all this material from many agencies I thought this is a huge thing so I started hiring some interns from Princeton University to come and scan this and build a huge soft copy kind of online database for myself and we started searching we started searching and coming up with who funds it how much money is going what are their what is the ideology their export exporting to India how they do training of leaders under the garb of human rights and leadership training they're giving them by brainwashing them and really turning them into kind of a civil war army and I started plotting where in India these on the map these kind of things are happening so then I decided that I should find out where this money lands and what do they do with it because obviously when it lands in India it lands under the pretext of starting a school or water project or food or whatever it comes in the guise of philanthropy but it's different now no one had done so much research because I'm one of the problems these are people talk a lot but they are not willing to do so much hard work I put in years and years full time and a lot of money to pursue all this so then I started hiring people in India where the money lands so if a particular church group in Texas has a series of projects in India I sent my people there to see what exactly goes on because it seems that you got to look at both ends you got to look at what what the US side is doing sending this money and what the Indian side is doing and what's going on you got to connect the dots people in India can do this sitting in India you need somebody in the Western world where the money starts the money you got to follow the money trail and sometimes the money trail is not direct but indirect it goes through all sorts of intermediaries along the way and changes its character so I put a team together in India especially I figured I should start with Tamil Nadu because I had some people there and a lot of such stuff is going on so what I discovered led to this book breaking India and here's what I came up with the forces I call them breaking in their forces are a kind of for collaboration between people based in India and people based in United States Canada Britain European Union there's parts of many many countries you know the Scandinavian countries have this project Germany has it there are lots of countries involved and I found that these breaking India forces are well networked they have annual meetings and more often more frequent meetings they go and train their people how to go to India and what to say what not to say there well many of them know languages they were Indian clothes there he they really kind of infiltrated and they have a large army of such people based in India doing work for them now I thought I'd get help from some friends of BJP or RSS people or vhp people in America or some Hindu gurus or at least the Indian Embassy because this is a kind of a subversion and nobody was interested helping me either they were too busy or you know we're doing so great and we won this cricket match recently and we're going to have so much GDP and they're just not interested or it was somebody else's job or you know maybe it wasn't true or you know we deserve it there were those people who said we deserve it because we are horrible people we have this cost problem and we are burning women and we are doing all these kind of things and so you know and then some would argue that you know we have never really were a nation so if these breaking in their forces are kind of fragmenting us into different identities and different narratives and making them hate each other then you know maybe that's that's good because maybe this concept called India is a bad idea so I heard I saw all of this and it distressed me and as a one man for 25 years I've taken early retirement from all my professional activities and I pursue this kind of work full-time and what I'm describing is one of dozens of projects different different kind of projects this breaking India is just one of them so I started working on this very seriously and in the end we produce this book now what the book shows is that this breaking India the project to show India as not a legitimate state not unified is a very old project it just has a new face it's just as new it gets reincarnated and born again in different forms but this was going on in early times British times many many people have come and tried to break up India with the creating divisive nests the whole Aryan Dravidian divisive theory was born in the 1800s I mean if if the Davidians were truly a separate people being so literate being so prolific they would have written about it themselves they were have written about being oppressed by some North Indians but nothing in the in the huge cannon and the huge library of tamil works from thousands of years nothing is there which complains about these outsiders coming and invading us and nor is there a literature from the North saying that we've entered in very those guys so this is entirely a new narrative built in the 1800s by British people by well max Miller was a German but hired by the East India Company he came up with the orient theory and various British era missionary types built the Dravidian theory and they started creating this divisive nests and then this whole Lourdes Risley wanted a way to classify Indians and there was recently something called the recently at that time Darwin's theory of evolution some people had turned it into race science it was a topic studied all over the Western world they were departments of race science and they were classifying based on different parameters and your body and this and that the different races and trying to stratify them into who's more evolved and so on and apply the theory of evolution to human races so when he went to India as the head of the Census Bureau he came up with his brilliant idea that India will be the experiment that is where there's a large amount of data because there's diversity and he's going to create this idea of how the diversity of India can be turned into a hierarchy as races some more evolved than others so he came up with this structure of castes that was the first time that somebody had formally introduced this hierarchy of castes and he writes after the first census then when he goes to the different caste leaders asking them to count and asking them to you know define their characteristics they reward that they don't belong into this hierarchy so actually there's proof of resistance from the so called castes who do not want to be classified that way many caste people complained that you got it wrong we are not like this but he insisted it was imposed on them so every ten years the census was repeated and then the amount of resistance went down and gradually the people of India kind of started accepting it and they started behaving that that's okay that's how we are and stupidly the after independence the government of India adopted the same structure of Lord Risley in the Constitution and that is the caste system we have so the caste system is an invention of Lord Risley now we have diversity and we have struck we have different communities that call jetties not castes and we have Varna which is the qualities and individual has not by inheritance but by personal aptitude so some people are more skilled in this country and some people are skilled in that way and this is not because you're born a certain way this fluidity has been there for a very long time and always there have been abuses and there has been people who fixed those abuses so India India is a long story without any external force bringing human rights to us or anything of that sort where people have sorted out these problems on their own and there has been this fluidity but with the Lord Risley project it became a British project to divide it became a formal part of the British system to divide and to come up with you know quotas and to treat different castes differently and to make them fight each other etc so this unfortunately has become a reality in India so when people ask me why are you concerned about academic biases how does it affect me in the real world I mean it's amazing we haven't learnt our history I tell him that one of the biggest problems we face is the caste system that was an academic project starting in Britain and look where it ended up and this Arion Davidian divide is real a real nuisance in India there's a whole Dravidian ism in the South and it's an academic project started in England and look where it ended up so you see these are not just isolated ivory tower thinking projects they have a way of travelling into the real world so that's what the breaking India forces are about the breaking India forces based in different countries have very systematic ambitious projects for gaining more and more market share in India in the form of evangelism in the form of maoism some places now the ISI from Pakistan has joined the breaking India forces they're involved and very active in many parts of India so you have the three expansionist ideologies all at work in India you have the Western ideology which has a sub sub part which is Christian and a sub part which is left-wing human rights kind of an a you know ideology and then you have Chinese and Maoist in certain regions operating and then you have the Islamic the ISI Islamist kind of people operating so the three expansionist ideologies wanting each having a very open public statement to take over the world and to be the dominant worldview each of them sees India as the blarg elephant you there's plenty of food for everybody we can keep eating it for a while and even though outside India they're fighting each other they're at war there is that clash of civilizations going on between you know now between China and the West and between the west and Islam and so on that that clash is going on but in India they all fighting a common enemy so they're even collaborating so this is very interesting you have collaborations of the extreme right wing in India with the extreme left wing all working together targeting the Indian state and when you look at who funds them the funding agencies in the West that are extreme right-wing and the other funding agencies in the West that are extreme left-wing are actually fighting each other in the West I mean it's like it's like taking your extreme right-wing British people leaders and taking the extreme left-wing British leaders and finding out that you know they're all funding people in India and those people are collaborating that's so strange but nobody has pointed this out and my book points it out the left-wing breaking India forces and the right-wing breaking India forces in their international headquarters are bitter enemies but for a temporary project of you know killing this elephant and have em feeding off of it and then having to fight each other also eventually right now they're okay with collaborating so this is this I I found that governments are involved foreign governments the US Britain many foreign agencies CIA and other intelligence agencies I had to go and study that what they're up to academic people a whole lot of people who are into South Asian Studies in dollar G these kind of departments are you know very aligned with the breaking India forces there are church groups involved there are these foundations that give grants many of them are involved so the network is huge and nobody in India has really taken this on as a serious problem that we got to fight that we have to have we have to champion I didn't get any help from anybody it's a private you know project it's not a project that a religious group in India wanted to help me with or some political organization was willing to help me with even though they claim to be patriotic or government or anybody for that matter in fact I became unpopular and controversial so rather than being considered a champion who's out there risking his neck and giving up all his God his thunman done towards his cause people are saying hey let's turn this guy because he's controversial so it's like somebody is out there fighting for you sticking his neck out and he is the head of this one-man army and you are privately very happy and very feeling very glad that he's out there to protect you but publicly you're too afraid to say that hey listen we are behind this guy let's that's a that's a shame for our country a lot of people actually attacked me some people in Oxford wrote an email saying this guy is a dangerous guy to bring because he wrote this book breaking India they cited my book they actually cited my book and they said he's dangerous because he claims he accuses us he was one of the breaking in your people he accuses people like us that we are out there to break India we are actually out there to do human rights work in India so this business of bringing human rights is a nice camouflage so I remind them there would have been no America without Columbus and he was looking to find a route to India he was not trying to go to India to bring human rights he was going there because India was a very wealthy country and the Ottomans had blockaded the routes the land routes to Europe so Indian goods were not able to reach Europe that's like OPEX you know oil embargo this is the medieval era version of the OPEC oil embargo the ottomans had captured the land routes from Asia to Europe and Europeans were hungry for Indian goods and Chinese Goods these were the most prized goods at that time there's a lot written about it in European chronicles and there was a huge trade in there was a very wealthy country because it had a massive export economy textiles steel medicines all of that agriculture products and the only thing India would accept because the what the Europeans had nobody in India needed any of their goods because they didn't have anything worthwhile at that time this is before the Industrial Revolution the only thing India would accept is gold so the huge amount of world gold end up in India and that's how the reserve then using gold as the reserve currency starts with India demanding gold payments so you when you look at the history of how this gold standard starts it's actually Indians Indian traders of huge part of world economy demanding gold payments so this was the India at that time and since the goods got blockaded by the Ottomans they wanted to find sea routes so they sent Columbus in one direction and Vasco da Gama in the other direction and that begins a whole new chapter of history and the rise of Europe happens as a result of that I told them in the British Parliament that you should remember your history and the history of the greatness of your empire and all that doesn't start with some brilliant European guy sitting one day having a shower or sitting in their bathtub and having this big big breakthrough idea it's not like that even Newton's eye borrowed very heavily from Indian mathematics and the Industrial Revolution borrowed very heavily from India's textile which was a very big global economy for India and India steel these two were the first successful products in the British Industrial Revolution and and you cannot ignore the Indian influence and what they took from India to make these two industries in Britain so the whole history of the world has to be rewritten unfortunately our own people our own people I call them sea boys because they're working for the Empire not like the original sepoys fighting like the ones who fought in jellia wala bug under general Dyer firing bullets at their fellow aliens today's sea poison our intellectual sepoys they're sitting in American universities British universities in these humanities and liberal arts departments I'm very glad that many of you are tech people because you're spared the brainwashing and people who come for engineering medicine business at least you are learning things that are more practical and useful and not as biased and whereas the fellows who studying history and religion and you know anthropology and political thought and social sciences are filled with these kind of western-centric Eurocentric theories which is a very kind of a racist lens to look at other people I wanted a debate with Lord make not this eye who's invited here for a talk later because he's made some statements supporting what I would call the breaking India forces he's made some statements and I would like to have a clarification but I'm told he was not available or whatever for a debate but he's made some statements that India is not really a nation it's a lot of little pieces he's made this statement in India and he's made this statement here and I like some clarification from him rather than secondhand sources because I don't believe in putting something putting somebody on the spot based on hearsay I'm often accused of things that I've not even true that I haven't even said but it's all hearsay and so I wouldn't do that to someone else I would like to just ask him straight on camera point-blank do you feel that India has had a unified history for a long time see it's a very common popular theory that Indians unfortunately aboard into that India was never a nation a unified nation until the British made one but this is all humbug because you look at the Western idea of a nation-state is a different kind of a concept of what constitutes a nation but if you look at India I mean we have you know if you look at remind Raman talks about journeys from the northernmost area to the southernmost area all the way to Lanka and all the villages it describes villages and rivers and mountains and forests along the way and this is a grand narrative of the Indian geography as a very unified landscape and the people who respect the Raman all over India they see themselves as part of this unified nation unified geography certainly there is a unity of geography certainly the people of the south understand the value of the Ganga and what it means to them certainly people in the north nor amesh waarom in the south southern tip certainly adi shankara went to the four corners of india to set up the four p terms so there was a sense of unity that's why he went around certainly the kumbhamela attracts people for thousands of years from all corners of india who need to go there for a certain reason at a certain time astrologically so the sense that we are a unified people has been there for a long time in our pilgrimages in our in our rituals in our stories etc and this unity also has encourages a lot of diversity so we didn't conquer and invade each other and impose my language on you and this sort of thing and so therefore we've remained a diverse people but we does doesn't mean we're not a common nation so I I wanted to I really wanted to have this debate on are we a unified people or not or do we all this as a gratitude British that they gave us this sense of nation and and maybe Monday I'll have this opportunity I thought this was going to be my lucky day so we have started a project called Swadeshi ontology Swadeshi means indigenous Indian point of view in dollar G is the study of India the Venetian dollar G which is the Western view is where in dollar G in Dali was started in Britain right couple hours from here in Oxford Sir William Jones and various other people to study India through their perspective the Germans were involved the French were involved and you know we are reversing the gaze we are looking at in dollars you through the Indian lens that's our point of view so the job at hand is to reimagine India through our own lens not to the making India lens and this is a very long-term project this will take a very long time and I can do so much I can basically do my best leave you some texts leave you some research leave you some intellectual Kshatriyas I'm training and then after a while it's your turn I'll move on and you guys have to take over and do what you want to do with it so that's my message today thank you for coming and listening namaste thank you for watching you can subscribe here and also hit the bell icon to make sure you get notified to donate please click this button [Music] you

Channel: Rajiv Malhotra Official

Views: 166,981

Rating: 4.8261294 out of 5

Keywords: British Raj, Indian caste system, British India, Break India, Hinduism, Swadeshi Indology, Hinduphobia, Global Left, Indian Sepoys, Intelectual Kshatriya, Islamic Fundamentalists, CIA, ISIS, ISI, Rajiv Malhotra, Lord Meghnad Desai, Rajiv Malhotra Books, Breaking India Book, Battle For Sanskrit, RSS, BJP, Sangh, Pakistan, Imran Khan, General Bajwa, Gafoor Khan, Hindu Gurus, Left Propoganda, Indian Left, CPI, CPI(M), Arundhati Roy, Romila Thapar, Irfan Habib, Dhruv Rathee, The Hindu

Id: FrTUp2mKbWs

Length: 28min 33sec (1713 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 09 2020

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I am sure it predates Britishers,even the Mughals(who came to Odisha in 16th century). Every year a festival is celebrated in Odisha based on 'Laxmi Purana' written in 15th century.I know that purana are not considered authentic but message of the book was 'Jagannath scolded Laxmi for going to house of a lower case women,so she left him.The two brothers struggled but finally met her and apologised'.