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Anti-Indian sentiment

Prejudice against Indian people

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History

British India

The relationship between Indomania and Indophobia in the British Indology during the Victoria era was discussed by American academic Thomas Trautmann who found that Indophobia had become a norm in the early-19th century British discourse on India as the result of a conscious agenda of evangelicalism and utilitarianism, especially by Charles Grant and James Mill. Historians noted that during British rule in India, "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."

In Grant's highly controversial 1796 work Observations on the ... Asiatic subjects of Great Britain, he criticised the Orientalists for being too respectful to Indian culture and religion. His work tried to determine the Hindus' "true place in the moral scale" and he alleged that the Hindus are "a people exceedingly depraved". Grant believed that Great Britain's duty was to civilise and Christianize the natives. This paper has often been cited as one of the foremost examples of Eurocentrism and the ideological foundation upon which colonialism was built, that is, the notion that the Western world had a duty to "civilize" indigenous populations. This problem was further exacerbated by the lack of a nuanced understanding of the natives' religion and culture and the perception of Christianity being the one true faith, which was not only widely used to justify colonialism but also to legitimise forced conversions and brutalisation of the masses. Russian commentator Minaev once wrote that white Britons in British colonial India referred to Indians using the racial slur "niggers," which he cited as evidence of racial hostility and distance between the British and their Indian subjects.

Lord Macaulay, serving on the Supreme Council of India between 1834 and 1838, was instrumental in creating the foundations of bilingual colonial India. He convinced the Governor-General to adopt English as the medium of instruction in higher education from the sixth year of schooling onwards, rather than Sanskrit or Arabic. He 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." 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 reigns thirty thousand years long – and Geography made up of seas of treacle and seas of butter".

One of the most influential historians of India during the British Empire, James Mill was criticised for prejudice against Hindus. Horace Hayman Wilson wrote that the tendency of Mill's work was "evil". 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 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."Dadabhai Naoroji spoke against such anti-India sentiment.

Stereotypes of Indians intensified during and after the Indian Rebellion of 1857, known as India's First War of Independence to the Indians and as the Sepoy Mutiny to the British, when Indian sepoys rebelled against the British East India Company's rule in India. Allegations of war rape were used as propaganda by British colonialists in order to justify the colonisation of India. While incidents of rape committed by Indian rebels against British women and girls were virtually non-existent, this was exaggerated by the British media to justify continued British intervention in the Indian subcontinent.

At the time, British newspapers had printed various apparent eyewitness accounts of British women and girls being raped by Indian rebels, but cited little physical evidence. It was later found that some were fictions created to paint the native people as savages who needed to be civilised, a mission sometimes known as "The White Man's Burden". One such account published by The Times, regarding an incident where 48 British girls as young as 10–14 had been raped by Indian rebels in Delhi, was criticised by Karl Marx, who pointed out that the story was propaganda written by a clergyman in Bangalore, far from the events. A wave of anti-Indian vandalism accompanied the rebellion. When Delhi fell to the British, the city was ransacked, the palaces looted and the mosques desecrated in what has been called "a deliberate act of unnecessary vandalism".

Despite the questionable authenticity of colonial accounts regarding the rebellion, the stereotype of the Indian "dark-skinned rapist" occurred frequently in English literature of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The idea of protecting British "female chastity" from the "lustful creepy Indian male" had a significant influence on the British Raj's policies outlawing miscegenation between Europeans and Indians. While some restrictive policies were imposed on white women in India to "protect" them from miscegenation, most were directed against Indians. For example, the 1883 Ilbert Bill, which would have granted Indian judges the right to judge offenders regardless of ethnicity, was opposed by many Anglo-Indian people on the grounds that Indian judges could not be trusted in cases alleging the rape of white women.

Leo Amery wrote in his private diaries that upon learning Indian separatists were refusing to resist the Japanese and contribute to the war effort, Winston Churchill, in private conversation, said out of frustration, he "hated Indians" and considered them "a beastly people with a beastly religion". According to Amery, during the Bengal famine, Churchill stated that any potential relief efforts sent to India would accomplish little to nothing, as Indians were "breeding like rabbits". Leo Amery likened Churchill's understanding of India's problems to King George III's apathy for the Americas. Amery wrote "on the subject of India, Winston is not quite sane" and that he did not "see much difference between [Churchill's] outlook and Hitler's".

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