Virchad R Gandhi A Gandhi before Gandhi

Author(s): Bipin Doshi, Pankaj Hingarh
Publisher: Bipin Doshi, Pankaj Hingarh

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Personality
think that they are Pauls, and what they think they believe. These new Pauls go to vent their platitudes upon India. They go to India to convert the heathens in a mass, but when they find their dreams melting away, as dreams always do, they return and pass a whole life in abusing the Hindus. Abuses are not arguments against any religion, nor selfadulation, the proof of the truth of one's own. For such I have greatest pity.
"If the present abuses in India have been produced by the Hindu religion, the same religion had the strength of producing
a
society which
made the Greek
historian say: 'No
Hindu was ever
known to tell an untruth, no Hindu
Himalayas to Ceylon, and, without exception all these calumnies proceed either from the missionaries or the English officers. We accord them their rights as we do even to the tiniest animalcule the right to live and be happy in their own way, if they let us alone, but when we find that these little creatures are annoying us, we have to brush them aside. The statements of these missionaries made about the Hindus, their religions and life, are never an admirable illustration of their methods and zeal. When I first came to know in this
country, from missionary sources, that in India women threw their babies into the Ganges and that people threw themselves under
the car of Jagganath, I doubted whether in the blackest and most intolerant days of the Christian Church, any villainous priest ever invented more bare-faced falsehoods or malicious slanders like these."
He corrected the false and perverse impression of India as being the land of maharajahs, tigers and cobras. He narrated an incident from King Akbar's life and praised him for respecting all other religions. He spoke as an Indian first but kept Jainism at his heart. When one con
"We accord them (missionaries) their rights as we do even to the tiniest animalcule the right to live and be happy in their own way, if they let us
alone, but when we find that these little creatures are annoying us, we have to brush them aside."
woman
ever
known to be unchaste'. And ever in the present day where is there a chaster woman or a milder man than in India? The oriental bubbles may be pricked, but the very hysterical shocks sent forth from this platform from time to time show to the world that sometimes bubbles may be heavier than the bloated balloons of vanity and self-conceit.
"It has become an article of faith with most of the orthodox Christians that the Hindus are liars. All sorts of abuses are heaped on the people of India from the
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