Transcript
The British came to India to economically exploit an inferior country. Their mentality was that, whenever they saw a militarily inferior country, they would simply conquer it and exploit it for economic profit. They saw nothing wrong with such blatant exploitation, and treated the natives like animals to be enslaved. Amazingly, they thought they were helping the Indians by educating them. They classified the Indians as benighted heathens, which means ignorant, foolish people living in darkness.
The British were more than just expert military conquerors. They were experts in diplomacy. The Muslims had conquered large parts of India, but they didn’t attempt to indoctrinate the Indians. In the 19th century, the British, however, recognized that cultural and ideological conquest facilitated economic exploitation.
“We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern, – a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect” Thomas Macaulay’s minute on education, 1835.
The British also recognized that the unusually strong adherence to traditional values of the Indians was based on the Vedas and Puranas. Thus, part of the British indoctrination strategy was to break the faith of Indians in the Vedas and the Puranas.
They began brainwashing the Indians. Some Indians refused to abandon their tradition, but many were attracted by the superior technological capabilities of the British. After all, the British had introduced such technological marvels as trains, which revolutionized transportation in India. Less intelligent Indians thought that superior technology meant superior culture. Therefore, many Indians began to adopt British culture and thought European culture to be superior to their native Vedic and Puranic culture.
The British looked for what they considered foolish or outmoded concepts in order to convince the Indians to abandon their faith in the Vedas and Puranas. They found that, among other objectionable items, the Puranas state that the Sun is billions of years old. Although the best European scientists of that time were already aware that the Earth must be much older than the mere 6000 years assigned by Biblical scholars, this knowledge had not yet filtered down to the brutal British Imperialists and machiavellian diplomats. Thus, these imperialists and diplomats regarded a multi-billion-year old Sun as ludicrous. Ironically, these imperialists turned out to be themselves foolish because of the development of radiometric dating during the 20th century. Through the pioneering research of Henri Becquerel, Pierre and Marie Curie, and Ernest Rutherford, radiometric dating was born. It took another hundred years of arduous technological development to reach a level of accuracy comparable to that of the Puranas. Thousands of years ago, the Puranas recorded the age of the Sun as 4.563 billion years, which differs from the latest radiometric dating by only 0.08%. It should be noted that scientists cannot directly date the Sun itself. Since the Sun is as old as the Solar System, scientists infer the age of the Sun by dating the oldest meteorites in the Solar System. The significance of the corroboration between the Puranas and modern science may escape the non-scientist, who is not aware of the enormous difficulties involved in dating rocks. To the naked eye, a rock that is 2 billion years old looks exactly the same as a rock that is only 2000 years old. To distinguish between these two rocks requires highly sophisticated techniques, including filtration, ionization, mass-spectrometry, and precise atomic measurement. Not only the age of the Sun, but the age of the Universe and ages of major mass extinctions from the Puranas are stunningly close to the modern scientific dates for these events. This means that the Puranas can no longer be labeled fantasy.