STATUS OF WOMEN IN T.NADU IN THE 19th CENTURY - 'MISSIONARY POSITION' IS AIMED AT DEPRECATING HINDU SOCIETY !!

Whatever be the actual facts on the ground , Missionaries deliberately distorted and gave a deprecating account of  Hindu society. This could be garnered from their published narratives. -Missionaries thus had left evidences at the crime-scene.

In this post, the Protestant Christian Missionary, Bishop Robert Caldwell , first says that Women enjoyed a high status in Tamil society , they were NOT slaves. But  in the next paragraph he says that Hindu women had a servile status in society, bordering on SLAVERY. Thus he tries to obfuscate the reader with his narrative about Hindu religion, society & culture. Here it is evident that he is deprecating the VALUES inherent in ancient TAMIL/HINDU culture.

What is surprising  as well disturbing is the fact that Indian historians & social reformers of the 20th century, considered Missionary narratives as sacrosanct , and taking that as the Gospel

truth, 'fabricated' our historical past, unwittingly tarnishing the reputation of our inimitable past. New generation of Indians are thus made to believe that, there is nothing worthy of value belonging to the past.

Women/Mothers caring for  their husbands and children's daily needs and displaying respect towards other menfolk are deemed as SERVILE by the Missionary. A wife waiting or serving food for her husband, is construed as  women not

having equal rights with the men. The Missionary is trying to find fault with the Hindu society, conveniently forgetting their status in Britain. His religion ie Christian percepts are such that women do not have a soul or possessing only  1/360 th of the soul of a man. (Because they were made from the material, ie  a rib bone of man/Adam.) Thus they never can attain equal parity with men and

are mere material objects, inert matter as per Christian civilization. In Britain , women received the right to vote on the same terms as men (over the age of 21) only in 1928.- When a woman married in the 18th and 19th century in England and Ireland she had no rights. Source: L.M.Reid

Overall, the status of Hindu women in India were better than those of Christian women in Britain.

Excerpt from the Missionary Literature published in 1857, Year of the First Indian Mutiny  "It is a mistake to suppose that Hindu women are treated like slaves, if hard work is regarded as an essential feature of slavery ; for, perhaps, in no country in the world have women less work to do than in India. They live an easy, shady life, with little to do and less to think about; they are well fed, better clothed than the men, well hung out with jewels, rarely beaten when they don't deserve it, and generally treated like household pets.In their own opinion, they have nothing to lament as a class, but are as well treated as women could wish to be, and are perfectly content.On the other hand, if slavery means social degradation, Hindu women must be regarded as slaves; for not only are they denied equal rights with the men, but they are regarded as having no claim to any rights or feelings at all.

The Hindu wife is not allowed to eat with her own husband ; her duty is to wait upon her husband whilst he is eating, and to eat what he has left. If they have any children, the boys eat with their father, and, after they have done, the girls eat with their mother. Nor is this the custom among the lower classes only; it is the custom amongst every class of Hindus, in every part of India where I have been. When they are assembled together on any festive occasion, you never see the women seated on the same level with the men : if there is a dais or any elevated place, the men occupy the elevation, which is the place of honour, and the women squat cross-legged on the ground, or stand. If a party are going any-where on a visit, the men always walk first, the women humbly follow ; the wife never so far forgets her place as to walk side by side with her husband, much less arm in arm. The husband, it is true, is not forgetful of his wife's comfort; if they can afford it, a conveyance is provided for the female portion of the party, and the men are content to walk. Still, they generally take care to preserve their dignity by walking on in front, and the conveyance must keep behind. In the Telugu language, the language of fourteen millions of people in southern India, the relative position of the women is illustrated by the pronouns of the third person. There is no feminine pronoun—no word signifying "she"—in the ordinary spoken dialect! The only pronouns of the third person commonly used are vddii, " he," and adi, c: it." " He" of course denotes ''the lords of the creation," and to whom or what does "it" apply ?—to women and cattle and irrational things in general. Worse than all this is the circumstance that Hindu women are unable to read, and are not allowed to learn .[…]"

All Excerpts From

Caldwell, Robert, 1814-1891. “Lectures on the Tinnevelly missions : descriptive of the field, the work, and the results : with an introductory lecture on the progress of Christianity in India.” London : Bell & Daldy, 1857. iBooks.  -PAGES  139 & 140 of 185

 

DEVADASI' S PORTRAYED AS 'TEMPLE PROSTITUTES' BY CHRISTIAN MISSIONARIES

DEVADASI's portrayed as TEMPLE PROSTITUTES BY CHRISTIAN MISSIONARIES LIKE AMY CARMICHEL

M.S.Subbalakshmi,'s mother was from the DEVADASI
community  !!!!

One of the book reviews in today's The Hindu (05/08/2014) is about "NAUTCH-GIRLS'. The degraded version of their performance in modern- times is in the Dance-bars of Mumbai.

Excerpts from the review " The book traces the social downfall of the courtesans who were once patronised by royalty and enjoyed considerable influence. Their decline began in the colonial era during which the census identified them in negative ways, classifying them as prostitutes. Then came laws meant to protect British officers from venereal disease. This included laws providing for relocating courtesans outside the city’s borders. The Criminal Tribes Act which targeted nomadic tribes, also worked against them.

Yet the categorisation of “nautch” as a social evil continued even after Independence with the performers targeted by obscenity regulations and laws against soliciting and trafficking. The loss of princely courts also threw many traditional performers into destitution and prostitution. At the same time, classical dance forms saw the purge of hereditary dancers and increasingly became the preserve of upper caste “respectable women.” Link http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-features/tp-bookreview/dancing-on-the-fringes-the-shadowy-world-of-courtesans/article6281901.ece

Similar description about Devadasis's is given in Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devadasi. But Amy Carmichel described this religio-cultural aspect of Hindus in vulgar terms. She 

denounced this practice as "TEMPLE PROSTITUTION" through

which the priests made money.              Chapter XXIV "Married to the God" of her book, 'Things as They Are', refers obliquely to this. But this is made explicit on Christian websites.
Refer to the folllowing Christian Website from UK one of many such sites relating to Amy Carmichel http://www.christianvoice.org.uk/index.php/heroes-of-faith/ .

"CASTE, like the BRANCH ROOTS of the BANYAN TREE ARE THE PRIDE & JOY OF INDIANS" - AMY CARMICHAEL

Amy Wilson Carmichael,  the Protestant Christian Missionary  calls out to God, to DESTROY and take-away, the Pride and Joy experienced by millions of  Indians. The following paragraphs  are excerpts from her book. Similar WESTERN CHRISTIAN  hubris, modern world experienced in Iraq, Afghanistan etc etc.

Contrary to Modern-View, CASTE was a joyous institution !!!!!


Excerpt "All trees have roots. To tear up a full-grown tree by the roots, and transplant it bodily, is never a simple process. But in India we have a tree with a double system of roots. The banyan tree drops roots from its boughs. (bough = a main branch of a tree). These bough roots in time run as deep underground as the original root. And the tap root (tap root = a primary(main) root that grows vertically downward and gives off small lateral roots) and its runners, and the branch roots and theirs, get knotted and knit into each other, till the whole forms one solid mass of roots, thousands

of yards of a tangle of roots, sinuous and strong. Conceive the uprooting of such a tree, like the famous one of North India, for instance, which sheltered an army of seven thousand men. You cannot conceive it; it could not be done, the earthward hold is so strong.

The old in India are like these trees; they are doubly, inextricably rooted. There is the usual great tap root common to all human trees in all lands—faith in the creed of the race; there are the usual running roots too—devotion to family and home. All these hold the soul down.
 

But in India we have more—we have the branch-rooted system of Caste; Caste so intricate, so precise, that no Western lives who has traced it through its ramifications back to the bough from which it dropped in the olden days.

This Caste, then, these holding laws, which most would rather die than break, are like the branch roots of the banyan tree with their infinite strength of grip. But the strangest thing to us is this: the people love to have it so; they do not regard themselves as held, these roots are their pride and joy. Take a child of four or five, ask it a question concerning its Caste, and you will see how that baby tree has begun to drop branch rootlets down. Sixty years afterwards look again, and every rootlet has grown a tree, each again sending rootlets down; and so the system spreads.

But we look up from the banyan tree. God! what are these roots to Thee? These Caste-root systems are nothing to Thee! India is not too hard for Thee! O God, come!"

Excerpt  From Chapter VIII, Chapter Name : Roots, Pages 113 & 
 114 of 374 pages,

Carmichael, Amy. “Things as They Are / Mission Work in Southern India.” iBooks. 

This Book Freely available as e-book.

 Amy Wilson Carmichael was a Protestant Christian missionary in India, who opened an orphanage and founded a mission in Dohnavur, Tamil  Nadu

 

BRAHMINS - PEOPLE TO BE DISTRUSTED AND HATED !!!

Strident portrayal were resorted to by Christian Missionaries of Brahmins, as a people not to be trusted or taken into confidence. Missionaries tried hard to mislead the people of India that Brahmins

posed the real obstacle , in the path towards "progress" of other communities. The following picture is from missionary literature. The detailed caption of the picture is self explanatory.(Enlarged caption (alone) provided below the picture with caption )

Imagine, a priest from a temple in India going to England for the sole purpose of converting the Christians there to Hindus. Further imagine, him writing in similar calumnious terms against the Nobles, Lords , Bishops and other socially outstanding men there, with their photographs.- Thus you will realize what sort of men had plagued our land posing as MEN of GOD, doing God's Work.

If the men at the apex of a society are made the objects of hatred, so that society dismisses and side-lines them, not heeding their words of wisdom, such a society is surely on the path towards destruction !!!!!

The above photograph with captions taken from the following book:-

AXE LAID AT ‘OUR’ ROOT & Mathew 3:10 - INDIAN PAST - GURU vis-a-vis GORU

“The profession of a cook, as well as that of a teacher, is highly honourable in India,” wrote the LMS Missionary,Rev. Samuel Mateer, while ‘labouring’  in the Hindu kingdom of  Travancore . (p.63, Chapter IV,of the book The Land of Charity, 1870).

So these men knew about the wellspring of our strengths.

Therefore they set their minds on destroying the very sources that  nourished our people and  culture. If one refers to Wikipedia about Alexander Duff (missionary) this is what he/she will come across. “Alexander Duff, D.D. LLD., was a Christian missionary in India;(Kolkotta) where he played a large part in the development of higher education.” – So what is the nature of his ‘bequeathal’ to higher education in India. Consider the following :-

“[Alexander] Duff had developed an elaborate system for inculcating  CHRISTIAN concepts through close questioning, careful relation of concepts, and association of ideas with their precise linguistic equivalent. The same associative technique was used for undermining reverence for BRAHMINICAL concepts. [Lal Behari]  Day recounts his first class of instruction by Duff, in which the subject was a catechism on the cow. Duff asked his students to  supply the Bengali word for cow, which is  GORU. He next asked whether they knew another Bengali word resembling it in sound, which happened, of course, to be  GURU, or Brahmin teacher. Dwelling at ample length on the patterns of similarity in form and sound  between the two words, Duff quietly  built up to his solemn query about what purpose was served by a GURU and whether GORU was not more useful than GURU. “He then left our class,” writes his student, “and went into another, leaving in our minds seeds of future thought and reflection”. (p.58, Chapter 2, Masks of Conquest, by Gauri Viswanathan, Oxford India, 1989)

‘They’ purposefully undermined our timeless  institutions engaged in preservation and transmission of precious knowledge &  wisdom.

Now they are hell bent on subverting the very sources of supply of our FOOD, through various means like GM seeds/crops & WTO treaties. Damn them & Do not Forget Mathew 3:10, from the Christian Viewing Point.

Mathew 3:10 “The ax is already at the root of the trees, and every tree that does not produce good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire.”  Again contrast this with Manusmrithi Chapter 8, verse 285 –“For injuring any kind of tree, (without purpose), a fine should be imposed proportionate to its utility – that is the fixed rule” For our culture  a tree is a tree, whether good fruit or bad fruit !!