2015, സെപ്റ്റംബർ 26, ശനിയാഴ്‌ച

Surveys, Media, Colonization and Proselytization, Chapter Eleven.



Players, Behind the Curtin

Another organization which gets involved in such surveys is “SIL International” (formerly the Summer Institute of Linguistics). This is a US Christian non-profit organization, which says their main purpose is to study, develop and document languages, especially those that are lesser-known, in order to expand linguistic knowledge and promote literacy. Yes, sure they promote literacy; the literacy of the bible. They do translate bible into almost every language. In other words, their aim is to teach bible all over the world. In the same pretext only an earlier Missionary put together Malayalam-English Dictionary. He also got credit for making the first Dictionary for Malayalam language. We can easily see what the real intent behind that work was. What a great undercover evangelism.

This organization, ‘SIL International’ was founded by a Presbyterian priest, William Cameron Townsend an American missionary. Initially Townsend founded SIL to educate missionaries on linguistics to work in Mexico and other South American countries. This organization works along with other Evangelical organizations such as “Wycliffe Bible Translators”. They gradually extended their work to other regions of the world for the purpose of Proselytization. (1) Another organization engaged in similar work is an Indian organization named "Navsarjan". They also operate with the charity label using the grants from different sources including Evangelical organization. Few of their financiers are; ‘Christian Aid’, ‘Unitarian Universalist Association’ and ‘Ford Foundation’. (2) The sad part of it is that the Government and the UN gives such organizations recognition in the name of “Charity”. They get away with lot of their Proselytizing work under that “Charity” label.

The academic sector is an easy way of Proselytizing in disguise and linguistic studies and related topics are very good form of camouflage for their work.  And most early Dictionaries between Indian languages and English were made by missionaries who did not have even basic knowledge of our languages. We do not know even they had enough knowledge of their own language, (as we can see plenty of local missionaries whose basic knowledge of their own Mother tongue very much lacking.) Of course, they took help of the local linguists. However the final decision as to ‘which meaning should be accepted’ was made by the British official/Missionary who was in charge of the process. Here is how they generally “manufactured” such Dictionaries.

The official in charge “assembled a group of learned assistants and collected upward of a dozen manuscript versions of the texts”. Probably all copies of ManusmRithi. One of such official wrote that the texts were “swarmed with errors, which his assistants ‘adjusted by guess’ as they went along.” They had copies made of each manuscript, leaving alternate pages blank with the verses numbered. (Blank pages were probably to be used as worksheets to note down the different meanings which came up in the discussion.) This official had a number of clerks with several copies of the manuscript in front of them, as well as three assistants whom they called professors, and “masters of grammar and prosody”; in local language and SamskRutham. “The verses were then read out, discussed by the assistants (pundits)”, and the British official “deciding which version was correct.”(3) In short the British official who was a missionary and had no knowledge of the language and the culture or had only some basic knowledge of them selected the equaling of the local language word for the English word or vice versa.

The Westerners thought, or pretended that they were creating “an authentic text” using this procedure. With the advent of printing” (on paper) “in India, which was now developing along with the European ideas, they were sure that their about how texts were constituted and transmitted will sure have a powerful effect in standardizing” the “language and its literature”. Here remember that this is a British standard, (not ours); a standard they created under the assumption that their knowledge is the top most, that too without having or getting even basic knowledge of our culture, history and languages. “Implicit in this process were several European assumptions about literature” (again a literature they have no knowledge of any standard). “In European theory, texts have authors who create or record what had previously been transmitted orally or through writing”. They assumed that, before the advent of printing, our “Spiritual Treasures”, which they referred to as ‘texts’ were “swarmed with errors” because they thought that our “manuscripts were unreliable of the scribes, leading to the corruption of the original and pure version created by the author”. (4) This was purely an assumption made without any qualifying knowledge.  A lot of decisions were made on wrong assumptions without any knowledge of the subject they were making decisions about.

“Europeans in the nineteenth century saw literature as being conditioned by history, with an author knowing and building on great works of thought that he or she, through all act of genius and originality, could affect.” This was contrary to our standards. Some of the Westerners did know that it was different and some of them wrote and did argue that we “do not handle our literature in a ‘temporal linear’ fashion, but rather by structure and type”. They said that “Literature in India has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order.” And they also “pointed out that persons are constituted differently in India than in the West” and thus the perception of life and anything connected to the life is very much different from what people in the west has. As per those few; “In India they [meaning we] are less unique individuals and more incumbents of positions in a social order that existed before they did and will continue to exist after their deaths”. They also argued that in India, writers before the nineteenth century, “did not invent or create a poem or a literary work”, rather they [meaning we] could “only express “an unchanging truth in a traditional form” and by “following traditional rules.”(5)    Yes, this is what our forefathers did. They were expressing the unchanging “TRUTH” in traditional form. They were expressing the “TRUTH” in its entirety, in its full glory of Omni potency and Omni presence; in all its glorifying power; spread all around, as wide, long, deep and high as there is and all around the entire and countless galaxies. But most of the Westerners failed to understand this “TRUTH”. And which they did not understand they labeled as “Myth”. And a lot of our own people, (majority of those who went through the “British Education System” also did the same. Even now, a lot of us do the same, and call them “Myths”.

Very often we see Christian organizations claim to be fighting for “Dalit’s'”. But a very strange fact is that the “Dalit’s'” are not Christians and almost all of the leaders are. Once a person becomes Christian or Muslim they cease to be a Dalit or Brahmin; because “there is no Caste in Christianity” or “Islam”, as per their own claim. So there cannot be any “Dalit” in Islam or Christianity. Then why all leaders of “Dalits” are Christians? This fact that all their leaders are Christians was admitted by one of the “so-called Dalit leader” Paul Divakar in an interview with Radio National of Australia. (6) Why Christian leaders for (non-Christian) Harijans’? Does anyone think that there cannot be leaders for them from their own community? If so study the life of Dr Ambedkar and Mahatma Ayyan Kali, Pandit K.P. Karuppan and T. T. Keshavan ShAsthri. (7) It is very clear that these Christians who act as Harijan leaders are aiming for the Proselytization of that Community only; nothing else. They use the “up-lift” of them; as a pretext. The help they get from Christian aid, Ford Foundation, Joshua Project etc. are all for Proselytization. Also remember they all, the real leaders of the downtrodden and the oppressed, they all remained within our system, custom and culture. They never accepted a Semitic dogma.

One of the activists, Teesta Setelvad, who popularized the account of Hindu rioters ripping open a pregnant Muslim woman and throwing the fetus into fire, and went from “A person who was not in a position to deposit even Rs 500 per month into her account continuously for two years (from 1st Jan., 2001 to 31st Dec, 2002), could manage to get deposit of Rs. 1.49 crores in her account and Rs. 92.21 Lakhs into her husband Javed Anand’s account after 2002 Gujarat riots”. (8) Now there is a case under investigation on this subject and the truth may come out from the investigation. She and some of her friends also did visit the United States for lecture tours, and also had given testimony before US commissions. However, a Special Investigative Team appointed by the Supreme Court of India to investigate the 2002 riots, in its report has cast doubt on the occurrence of such a nightmarish incident. (9) And recently a photograph included in that publicity material with which they made the claim did appear on the internet with the description that it was actually a photograph from incidents happened in Nigeria!! It may be true or may not be. But in the light of the Special Investigative Team’s report it can be assumed as true until otherwise proved.

Bibliography

1.    http://www.sil.org/what-language-development

2.    http://navsarjan.org/grants/grants. 

3.    Colonialism and its forms of knowledge by Bernard S. Cohn, Page 55.

4.    Colonialism and its forms of knowledge by Bernard S. Cohn, Page 55, 56.

5.    Colonialism and its forms of knowledge by Bernard S. Cohn, Page 56

6.    Breaking India by Rajeev Malhotra Page 317.   

7.    Sarasakavi Mooloor S. Padmanabhappanicker, biography by Kumpalamchira Vasavappanicker, Page 277, 303, 304 to 311.

8.    Breaking India by Rajeev Malhotra Page 241 and 515.

9.    Breaking India by Rajeev Malhotra Page 92.93.

(Will continue; Copyright © Udayabhanu Panickar)

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