Gandhi Before Gandhi

Author(s): Bipin Doshi, Priti Shah
Publisher: Jain Academy Educational Research Center Promotion Trust Mumbai

Page 37

GANDHI BEFORE GANDHI
educational system supported? It is supported out of the revenues derived from taxation. The taxes levied on Hindus also go to support the missionary institutions to which government gives grants-in-aid. When the East India Company got possession of India, they posed as friends of the Hindus against the Mahomedan oppressors and they remained the friends of the Hindu religion until these missionaries landed in India. From that time, instead of the government supporting the Hindu religion, the Hindu is forced to support the Christian religion out of his own pocket and to look at his own expense at the solemn farce which is carried on in the mission schools.
the British bayonet to back with a conquered nation and force them to support Christianity, will not succeed. Every bit of Protestant Christianity in India is maintained by the money flowing from England or America. . If
you mean that three hundred millions of our people are going to be converted, that is to say, to be bought off by American or English money, you are mistaken.
Bishop Thoburn in his work on India honestly admits that stratagems had to be used in getting children into the so called secular and Sunday schools; he mentions how successful the missionaries were in establishing a dozen or so Sunday schools in Lucknow in 1877, but he fails to mention that before that time there was not one drinking saloon in that city, but now there are more than a hundred.
I do not think that the missionary has a realization of the enormity of his stupendous undertaking when he attempts to Christianize the teeming multitudes of India. There are many factors which stand in his way. The people of India as a whole are saturated in religious and spiritual thought they think and contemplate on spiritual matters from childhood to death even the average street-sweeper is frequently more profoundly versed in the subtle metaphysics and divine philosophy than the missionary sent to convert him.
Not a shadow of hope of Christianizing India
My brothers and sisters of America, there is not a shadow of hope of Christianizing India. You send the missionary to my country to make converts but every convert he makes, he transmits an industrious tiller of soil into an idle worthless loafer and frequently a drunkard and he becomes a charge or a burden on the contributions which are yearly sent by English and American societies to convert the heathens to Christianity, After two hundred years, and after spending millions of dollars, and with
The Aryan Hindu will not change his religion simply because some one tells him to do so. He has an active brain and an intellect that will not blindly bend at the will of any man; there must be a reason, there must be philosophy; mere assertion is valueless.