Religion in India: A Historical Introduction

With her own maternal hand

Mid the waves her babe she throws.

Hark! I hear the piteous scream;

Frightful monsters seize their prey,

Or the dark and bloody stream

Bears the struggling child away.

Fainter now, and fainter still,

Breaks the cry upon the ear;

But the mother’s heart is steel

She unmoved that cry can hear.

Send, oh send the Bible there,

Let its precepts reach the heart;

She may then her children spare –

Act the tender mother’s part.^2

This attitude persisted in much of the literature on India into the
twentieth century. Katherine Mayo, an American writer, published Mother
Indiain 1927. Purporting to be a friend of India, after a six-month trip, she
nonetheless described India as a chamber of horrors from child-marriage
and the low status of widows to unsanitary conditions, untouchability, the
arrogance of brahmansand a host of other presumed shortcomings.^3
Needless to say, Mayo’s “friendly advice” generated a hailstorm of reactions.
While this pejorative attitude was often the handmaiden of colonialism,
it has not been the possession of Westerners alone. Certain Indian
expatriates or their descendants have entertained pejorative perceptions of
the homeland of their ancestors. Nobel-prize winning V. S. Naipaul, for
example, after his first visit to India, wrote India: A Wounded Civilization, a
book in which he recorded his embarrassment and revulsion of anything
which he did not appreciate. Naipaul’s views of India have moderated and
become more sympathetic with subsequent visits, but the first impressions
as expressed in his first book on India clearly revealed an “expat” delighted
to be away from the subcontinent.
Pejorative attitudes continue to be expressed even into the present day.
They surface in some American responses to the increased visibility of
Hindus and Hindu temples in the US from “dot-busters” who harass Indian
women to those writers of letters to the local paper in Aurora, Illinois, who,
worried about the building of a Hindu temple in their city, voiced concern
that the city would now be overrun with rats! Vandalism on newly dedicated
Hindu temples (such as at the Jain-Hindu temple near Pittsburgh) and

On Wearing Good Lenses 3