My question falls on the border line of literature and history (I think it inclines more towards history) but then also I’m thinking of asking it over here.

Count Leo Tolstoy wrote his book The Kingdom of God is within You and published it in the year 1894, at that time India, the land of Hindoos, was under exploitation by Britishers. In the book, Tolstoy writes

Humanity! Where is the definition of humanity? Where does it end and where does it begin? Does humanity end with the savage, the idiot, the dipsomaniac, or the madman? If we draw a line excluding from humanity it’s lowest representatives, where are we to draw the line? Shall we exclude the negroes like the Americans m, or the Hindoos like some Englishmen, or the Jews like some others?

For negroes it is understandable that European whites stained all the humanity by taking slavery up to such a high point that their own people started feeling disgust about them, for Jews he may be referring to the advent of Christianity but did Englishmen really consider Hindoos to be out of human species? Hindoos were subdued by the Englishmen, but the way Tolstoy has written it seems to suggest the darker side of the colonisation on a particular religion. What Tolstoy really meant by it? How Englishmen treated Hindoos that made Tolstoy to mention it exclusively in that paragraph?

Hello Knight. This year I read a wonderfully informative but highly disturbing history book that pertains directly to your good questions.

Anarchy, by the celebrated author William Dalrymple, is a new history of the rise of the British East India Company, drawing for the first time on Indian records.

This monstrous company was started by English pirates, and its goal was to loot the world. It provided much of the moral inspiration for capitalism through the joint stock company, an invention that enabled people to become extremely rich by dispensing with any scruples about starving and murdering millions of people.

The fact that the British Crown gave power to an allegedly private company to plunder an ancient rich civilization at will required deft invention to retain a sense of conscience, legitimacy and justification.

Asserting that Indian people were subhuman was an important part of this process, including the belief that animals with economic value were of greater importance than human beings.

So the answer to your question of how Englishmen excluded Hindoos from humanity is that they did so by a heartless focus on personal enrichment, which required systematic political inequality, justified by the venal deception of racial inferiority. This method proved so enormously successful that the glorious British Empire used it for its systematic rape of the world.

As Lewis Carroll explained, glory just means "which is to be master — that's all."

Robert Tulip wrote:Hello Knight. This year I read a wonderfully informative but highly disturbing history book that pertains directly to your good questions.

Anarchy, by the celebrated author William Dalrymple, is a new history of the rise of the British East India Company, drawing for the first time on Indian records.

This monstrous company was started by English pirates, and its goal was to loot the world. It provided much of the moral inspiration for capitalism through the joint stock company, an invention that enabled people to become extremely rich by dispensing with any scruples about starving and murdering millions of people.

The fact that the British Crown gave power to an allegedly private company to plunder an ancient rich civilization at will required deft invention to retain a sense of conscience, legitimacy and justification.

Asserting that Indian people were subhuman was an important part of this process, including the belief that animals with economic value were of greater importance than human beings.

So the answer to your question of how Englishmen excluded Hindoos from humanity is that they did so by a heartless focus on personal enrichment, which required systematic political inequality, justified by the venal deception of racial inferiority. This method proved so enormously successful that the glorious British Empire used it for its systematic rape of the world.

As Lewis Carroll explained, glory just means "which is to be master — that's all."

Thank you, it’s an excellent reply. I shall also read Anarchy, but the gist you have given is that East India Company was established by the Pirates (that’s why, I think, it appears in the movies of Pirates of Carribean) and not by the British government, although the latter was in support.

Humanity! Where is the definition of humanity? Where does it end and where does it begin? Does humanity end with the savage, the idiot, the dipsomaniac, or the madman? If we draw a line excluding from humanity it’s lowest representatives, where are we to draw the line? Shall we exclude the negroes like the Americans, or the Hindoos like some Englishmen, or the Jews like some others?

In addition to Englishmen excluding "Hindoos" from humanity, at another level the caste system in India excludes the Dalits (untouchables) and other lower caste members from humanity. You might be interested in joining BookTalk's discussion of the book Caste by Isabel Wilkerson where caste systems in Germany, India, and the USA are exposed in detail.
https://www.booktalk.org/caste-the-orig ... -f295.html