Revelation Movement

Dr Vishal Mangalwadi's 76th Birthday
Menu
Menu
Donate
Contact Us

History

Modern & Post Truth Education

Modern vs. Postmodern Education

Leave a Comment / Education, History, Lectures, Truthpedia, Vishal /

The Spiritual Warfare of Our TimesFrom Comenius and Descartes to Our Post-Truth Era John Amos Comenius and René Descartes led the “Modern” West in two opposite directions: Godly Wisdom vs. Humanist Knowledge. Nevertheless, because of the Bible’s impact, both of them sought truth: Both thinkers wrote their books during and after the Thirty-Year Religious Wars (1818-1848). Descartes won many followers because the wars between Roman Catholics and Protestants prepared some people to think that both Roman Catholicism and Protestantism may be wrong. Some class-conscious European elites did not like Comenius’ emphasis on educating everyone. They preferred Descartes’ bias in favor of an elitist education. Descartes attracted some Christian intellectuals because he seemed to be defending Christian ideas of soul, God and morality by logic alone. This planted the seeds of what became modern Liberal Theology. It put the human mind above God’s word. This made John Amos Comenius cautious about the dangers of Descartes’ philosophy. European thinkers such as David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud destroyed Descartes’ confidence that human reason can know the truth without God’s revelation. Hume demonstrated that Descartes had failed to prove that he exists as a thinking self. Kant proved that the human mind can never know reality (noumena) as it is in itself. The mind imposes its pre-existing categories upon everything. Therefore, at best, it can only know the Phenomena—filtered reality as it appears to us. Comenius was seeking godly wisdom. Descartes was seeking man-made truth. Humanism’s failure to know truth birthed today’s pessimistic Postmodern education. Postmodern philosophers know that by himself (without divine revelation), a finite man can never know the truth. That compelled French thinkers such as Jean-Paul Sartre to embrace existential Absurdity, Meaningless and Amoral Fragmentation of Truth. Postmodern education was forced into replacing Truth (metanarrative) with privatized narratives. Several French intellectuals contributed to replacing “Modern” education with “Postmodern.” Among the most influential were: 1.           Jean-François Lyotard (1924-1998) 2.           Michel Foucault (1926-1984) 3.           Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) 1. “Truth” and Education “Modern” education, biblical as well as Humanistic (secular), was grounded in the belief that objective truth and wisdom exist. Human beings are given the gift of mind to seek and find wisdom through God’s revelation, human reason, science, and humble, disciplined, private and corporate inquiry. Knowledge grows through sharing information and skills. Generations stand on the shoulders of their elders. Postmodern education, by contrast, rejects universal wisdom and objective truth. It dismisses “truth” as a social construct, a product of specific historical contexts. It distrusts existing knowledge as an attempt to manipulate and dominate others. Parents want power over their children and teachers over their students. Postmodernism perceives “Knowledge” as something private. Therefore, it has to be plural—many narratives, not one—taught by parents or teachers. Making knowledge individualistic and a product of a culture makes it fragmented, not unified. Narratives told by individuals and communities ought to compete. Postmodernism permits no common Light that nations can follow. 2. Purpose of Education The purpose of Modern education was to unite rational, free individuals into a harmonious and progressive intellectual community. It was assumed that a people who shared a common understanding of the world—e.g., truth, wisdom, goodness and nobility must prevail—would contribute to the progress of the whole society. Education will produce enlightened citizenship that shares a worldview. This will enable them to master disciplines of their choice and apply their insights for everyone’s welfare. Postmodern education rejects that Modern vision of education. Instead of building on existing wisdom, it prefers critique. Critiquing the past is more important than mastery in a field that could enrich everyone. Postmodern rejection of Truth and Wisdom undermines consensus and shared progress. It delights in deconstructing dominant narratives, institutions, norms and traditions. Postmodernism turns Education into a battleground for resistance and private identity affirmation. It suspects intellectual unity as a hidden attempt to grab power. 3. Role of Reason and Science Modern education, born in a biblical milieu, saw reason as a capacity God gave to human beings to govern His world as His children. It viewed science as a special way of exploring the natural world. The Bible’s logo-centric worldview enabled the Modern Age to look for logical coherence, evidence, and methodological rigor as crucial ingredients in the knowledge of Truth. Postmodern education, in contrast, questions the neutrality of reason and science. Because modern science developed in the West, out of a worldview derived from the Bible, some postmodernists question it as a culturally controlled practice. They place scientific knowledge alongside other “ways of knowing,” such as lived experience or private, identity-based perspectives. 4. Curriculum and Knowledge In Modern education, the curriculum was organized around disciplines such as mathematics, history, physics, philosophy that had internal standards of truth and excellence. Following a biblical tradition, Modern education valued Canonical texts or “Great Books” for their enduring insights. Postmodern education fragments the curriculum. It looks at all classical canons with suspicion. It criticizes them as exclusionary. It shifts the emphasis from what is taught to whose viewpoint is being taught. 5. Is Teaching a Gift and a Call? Following the Bible’s idea that teachers were God’s gift to society, Modern education saw the teacher as an authority in his field. He/she was responsible for transmitting knowledge. The student needed to cultivate peculiar virtues—not blind belief but intellectual clarity, rigor,  courage to question, as well as humility before facts and evidence. Postmodern education questions parents’ and teachers’ authority. It has lowered the teachers’ status to that of a facilitator. Authority is suspected to be problematic. Like all hierarchical relationships, a teacher’s authority is also attacked for seeking domination. 6. The Student – A Learner or a Knower? Modern education viewed students as apprentices. They needed encouragement, inspiration, discipline, formation, as well as correction. Freedom was self-mastery or governance. Postmodern education views students primarily as knowers of their own experience. It tends to put personal identity and subjective perspective above

Modern vs. Postmodern Education Read More »

The Bible Created the ‘Steel Frame’ of India

Leave a Comment / Education, History, India, Truthpedia /

by Vishal Mangalwadi, Samuel Davidson and Ishita Davidson Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel (1875–1955), India’s first Deputy Prime Minister and Home Minister, described the colonial Civil Services as “The Steel Frame of India.” Who or what built that frame?  The short answer is: the Bible.  Between 1765 and 1820, British rulers were as corrupt as today’s Indian civil servants. Most Indians feel that our criminal politicians use civil servants to loot our tax money and extract bribes from helpless citizens. Now they are also using the police to persecute political opponents and religious minorities. Why then did Patel, India’s “Iron Man,” describe colonial-era civil services as the “steel frame” of justice and fairness that held India together?  Vallabhbhai Patel, who fought against the British Raj, praised civil servants on 21 April 1947 at Metcalf House in Delhi. He argued that after independence, the Indian Civil Services (ICS), created by colonial rulers, should continue serving the new nation. Its name would change from ICS to IAS (Indian Administrative Services). Patel’s phrase “the steel frame” came from a 1922 speech by British Prime Minister David Lloyd George.  Management guru Peter Drucker described colonial civil services as a model of public administration and management. It was the reason, he asserted, that colonialism survived for two centuries. Many of its cadre were sons of British pastors. Their parents and churches prayed that these young men would serve India with diligence and integrity. Their prayers were answered.  Drucker does not defend colonialism. He knew that the British Raj was marked by muddled policies, indecision, misdirection, and failures.  It survived for as long as it did because the Bible-based Evangelical movement built the Indian Civil Services. The ICS, says Drucker, was Britain’s “supreme administrative accomplishment”:  [The Civil Servants] were younger sons of poor country parsons, with no prospects at home and little standing in English society.  Their pay was low, and such opportunities for loot or gain as their predecessors had enjoyed in the swashbuckling days of the East India Company a hundred years earlier had, by 1860, been completely eliminated by both law and custom. These untrained, not very bright, and totally inexperienced youngsters ran districts comparable in size and population to small European countries. And they ran them practically all by themselves with a minimum of direction and supervision from the top. Some, of course, became casualties and broke under the strain, falling victim to alcohol, to native women, or—the greatest danger of them all—to sloth. But most of them did what they were expected to do and did it reasonably well. They gave India, for the first time in its long and tragic history, peace, a measure of freedom from famine, and a little security of life, worship, and property. They administered justice impartially and, at least as far as they themselves were concerned, honestly and without corruption.  They collected taxes by and large, impartially and equitably. They did not make policy, and in the end, they foundered because they had none. But they administered, and administered well. (Peter Drucker. Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices, pp. 403-404. Emphasis added.) Robert Clive, a clerk in the Madras office of the East India Company, laid the foundations of the British Raj in 1757 by defeating Bengal’s Nawab, Siraj-ud-Daulah. Clive supported the appointment of the new Nawab, Mir Qasim, who ruled until 1763. In 1762, Mir Qasim described British corruption in a letter to the Governor and his council. And this is the way your gentlemen behave; they make a disturbance all over my country, plunder the people, and injure and disgrace my servants… They forcibly take away the goods and commodities of the peasants, merchants, etc., for the fourth part of their value, and by way of violence and oppression, they oblige the peasants to give five rupees for goods which are worth but one rupee. (Philip Mason. The Men Who Ruled India. pp. 38-39) As mentioned earlier, seven decades later, one of Britain’s greatest historians, Lord Macaulay, confirmed Mir Qasim’s testimony regarding the corruption of British rulers. In his Essay on Clive, Macaulay wrote that the British East India Company was a “gang of public robbers” that “had spread terror through[out] the whole plain of Bengal.” Its governance was as “oppressive as the most oppressive form of barbarian despotism… strong with all the [military] strength of civilization. It resembled the government of evil Genii rather than the government of human tyrants.”  The British Parliament denounced Clive as a corrupt “Nabob.” He was followed by Governor-General Warren Hastings, who expanded British rule in India. Hastings, too, was tried for corruption. During his trial, Edmund Burke, the father of modern conservatism, put his finger on the root of a philosophical problem. Accusing the British East India Company, Burke said, “. . . these Gentlemen have formed a plan of Geographical morality, by which the duties of men in public and private situations are not to be governed by their relations to the Great Governor of the Universe or by their relations to men, but by climates, degrees of longitude and latitude…. As if, when you have crossed the equinoctial line, all the virtues die… as if there were a kind of baptism, like that practiced by seamen, by which they unbaptise themselves of all that they learned in Europe and commence a new order and system of things.”  Burke’s charge was that in India, a corrupt East India Company was practicing a ‘Geographical’ or relative morality that was not governed by God’s moral (absolute) laws. In his influential work, The Men Who Ruled India, Philip Mason points out that this moral relativism was justified to maintain British rule and trade in India. Trade interests overruled God’s moral law.  The Company presumed that “to be fair to Indians was to be prejudiced against the English.”  Burke’s accusation, confirmed by Charles Grant and others, inspired  British Evangelicals to reform the Company. Anglican Evangelicals were  just beginning to emerge out of the Wesleyan revival of the late eighteenth century. They were

The Bible Created the ‘Steel Frame’ of India Read More »

A Revolution in Education: Truthpedia

Leave a Comment / Education, History, Truthpedia, Vishal /

This is a revised version of the chapter “Towards a Third Education Revolution” first published in the book The Third Education Revolution. (Pasadena, Sought After Media, 2020. Truthpedia is a vision becoming reality. It is a 3-in-1 education ecosystem—high school, university, and encyclopedia—that reintegrates knowledge, truth, wisdom, virtue, skills, research, and community. Using available educational technologies such as AI, Truthpedia attempts to restore education to the Church as her God-given obligation—to disciple nations (Matthew 28:19–20) and to fill the earth with the knowledge of God (Isaiah 11:9). The success of this education revolution will depend on the Church shedding anti-intellectualism and proactively seeking the “Spirit of Truth” to cultivate the spirit, mind, body, character, and relationships (John 14:16–17; 15:26–27; 16:13). For a thousand years, the church has sent students to the universities for their education. Truthpedia will bring professionals into the church, making it possible for schools and universities to send students to the local church. Imagine students enrolling in accredited universities and schools but attending classes from their local church. Expert teachers will come to their church online. Even the poorest student will get to learn from the world’s best teachers. Academic Pastors (APs) trained by Truthpedia, credentialed by universities, and approved by local churches, will mentor students individually and in small groups. Students will save up to 75% on tuition. Learning from the best teachers within a local church-based educational community will free the students to contribute to their family’s economy and health. Students who cannot live with their parents will room and board with elders and deacons trained to teach necessary life skills. Students will go to universities, science labs, industries, institutions and offices to learn what cannot be taught online. “Academic Pastor” (AP) revives the lost idea that teachers are God’s gift to build up wisdom and godly character. A youth pastor, teacher, homeschooling parent or grandparent can be trained to serve as an AP if he/she is able and willing to help students study and blossom. In other words, an Academic Pastor (AP) is a Youth Pastor version 2.0, trained to assess students, oversee studies and organize face-to-face seminars and webinars with experts. APs will teach students to love their neighbors. They will devote at least six hours a week to serving the needy in their family and local community. An AP will organize internships for students to develop vocational and leadership skills. Recognizing that she is the body of the One in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge (Colossians 2:3), the worldwide Church will organize global networks of scholars and professionals. Together, they will create a knowledge bank and a truth-based educational ecosystem. Students will learn to critically examine ideologies, trends and fashions.  Education will cease to be indoctrination that corrupts truth and morals. It will stimulate students to discuss and discern what is true, beautiful, good and wise. Truthpedia will assist Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) to create, edit, adapt and translate online curricula for school and university students. Professionals who understand the strengths and weaknesses of online learning, assessment formation, lecture scripting, videography and contemporary worldviews will assist SMEs to create innovative and meaningful online curricula. Imagine Albert Einstein coming into a poor church to teach Relativity in Hindi or Arabic, or John Milton appearing in a mud hut to explain “Paradise Lost.” Educational microfinancing will make it possible for resource-deprived churches to become centers of education. Scholarship funds and grants will supplement educational banking. Incidentally, Truthpedia’s partners, such as Virtues Campus, are already enabling students to go to a local church to study college courses. Truthpedia will be designed to help students develop the art of research, critical thinking and effective communication. Students will learn languages and master classics. Local churches will partner with existing facilities to teach physical fitness. The curricula will cultivate a sportsman’s spirit and personal discipline. Students will learn how to organize teams that turn local needs into opportunities for service. Church networks will help students travel across continents to learn and serve in different cultures as they grasp international relations. Truthpedia will train thought leaders by offering courses in classic books, ideas and biographies that have impacted history for better or for worse. The details of this vision can be found in our book, ‘The Third Education Revolution.’ A New Dark Age A new dark age has descended upon the world of education. Secularization has robbed teachers of the respect that the Church had bestowed upon them. Teaching is no longer a sacred calling. Many teachers have become vendors in an educational shopping mall (the university) where they sell their department’s wares. Without divine revelation, universities no longer know what logic and language are, or the difference between right and wrong, male and female. Some of the best minds in the West no longer know what sex and love, marriage and family, nation and justice, or self and God are. An intellectual revolution is required to restore the soul of education. Once again, learning must earn public respect as a pursuit of truth and virtue. If students go to college mainly to pursue pleasure, power, and prestige or a license to get a job, then how can a college expect greater respect than a club or a workshop? This corruption has already made universities the matrix of our new dark age. Amoral universities are swamps breeding corrupt politicians, civil servants, businessmen, journalists and judges. They can teach students how to make a great robot, but not how to be a good spouse, parent, neighbor or citizen. This revolution is intended to make education a training in servant-leadership. It will do more than prepare students for job markets. It will guide them to find the meaning and purpose of life, to discern their personal calling, and to prepare to fulfill their vocation. Truthpedia will reform education to become a civilizing process—not a breeding ground for immorality and corruption. It will nurture the “habits of the heart,” enabling students to love God more deeply,

A Revolution in Education: Truthpedia Read More »

IDOLATRY, THE BIBLE & INDIA’S ECONOMIC FLOURISHING

Leave a Comment / History, India, Uncategorized, Vishal /

Shah Jahan, the Mughal Emperor, brought Persian architects to build the Taj Mahal in Agra, on the bank of the river Yamuna. A century later (1837-1838), the monsoon failed and a severe famine devastated the Agra region. Over 800,000 people starved to death. The Mughals still ruled on the bank of the Yamuna, 150 miles north in Delhi. The Yamuna continued to flow down another 300 miles before merging with the Ganga in Allahabad, now renamed Prayagraj. Both the Yamuna and the Ganga come gushing down from the snow-clad Himalayas. So should ‘Doab,’ the land between the two rivers, lack water? Proby Thomas Cautley (1802-1871), a British military engineer, said, “NO.” He decided to change the future. Between 1842 and 1854, Cautley built the Ganga Canal System which now irrigates about 9,000 square miles of agricultural land. The mission to build the world’s largest canal system of that day came with many challenges: religious, political, financial, technical and educational. The Hindu priests objected to his “Christian” conspiracy to “imprison” the spirit of goddess Ganga by building a barrage that would re-direct its flow. They worshipped the life-giving river and built temples and ashrams along its banks. There, our people learned the rites of river worship. They were also taught meditation and tantric (sexual) techniques to empty their minds in order to experience inner bliss. India had plenty of leaders as capable as Cautley, but they used their abilities to organize festivals on the banks of “holy” rivers. No one ever built an institution to train engineers to establish human dominion over them. Our wealthy men financed grand temples; a vision of the Ganga Canal did not interest them. Cautley was an employee of the British East India Company which was created to trade and make money for its directors and shareholders. Investing in canals was not its mission. Therefore, Cautley had to turn to the British Parliament. Thankfully, in 1833, Parliament had already accepted Lord Macaulay’s case that Britain must rule over India to bless and prepare her for freedom. Macaulay’s childhood friend, Sir Charles Grant Jr., was the Company’s head and a Member of Parliament. His father, Charles Grant (Senior), had witnessed the horrors of the Bengal famine of 1770 and called to reform East India Company’s rule. In 1790, Grant Sr. teamed up with William Wilberforce and Lord Macaulay’s father, Zachary Macaulay, to change colonialism. In Divine Providence, 1837 marked the beginning of the Victorian Era—an age in which the moral fervor of the Evangelical movement influenced public policy as much as Capitalism’s economic interests. The Parliament’s support made it possible to finance the Ganga Canal. Cautley’s personal credibility undergirded his optimism. As the son of an Evangelical priest, Rev. Thomas Cautley, Proby was nurtured in the Bible. He was unashamed of his belief that human beings were created to rule over creation, not to worship rivers or idols. He rejected India’s pessimistic “Noble Truth” that “Life is suffering,” which implied that the only way to escape suffering was to escape life itself. To Cautley, the famine confirmed that the land and all of humanity were under a curse, brought on by sin. He believed the Gospel that God desires to forgive our sins and make us His sons. Forgiveness delivers us from the curse. He believed that God sent the Savior to bear our sin and its curse on Calvary’s cross. Salvation makes a tangible difference. Biblical optimism was already revolutionizing India. However, he did not impose his faith upon the people he wanted to serve. He appeased his religious opponents by building bathing ghats on the Ganga. This enabled Hindu priests to continue their profession of giving ritual baths to devotees even during the monsoon. Cautley needed not just money but also engineers to build the Ganga Canal. No Indian had ever built an institution to train engineers. Cautley’s dream to build an engineering college was supported by Lieutenant Governor James Thomason (1804-1853). After Independence, the governments of India upgraded James Thomason Engineering College to the status of an Engineering University and finally to the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Roorkee. The college taught more than science and practical skills. It also imparted an optimistic worldview, ethical values, work ethic and a cooperative spirit that are necessary for building lasting projects and flourishing nations. Where would they find students qualified to enroll in an engineering college that fights hunger and famines? That challenge inspired James Thomason to do what no Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim or Sikh ruler had done in North India. He established 857 schools throughout that region. During the last few years, the militant Hindu government has closed down more than 20,000 public schools in UP. This educational movement was the fruit of a new worldview that the Bible brought to India. It believed that the true wealth of a nation lies buried in the hearts and minds of its people and that education brings out that inner wealth. Hunters/gatherers toil day and night, but whether their labor will produce wealth depends on many factors. The key question is: how much mind, skill, planning, as well as the community’s trust and cooperation, is invested in that work. Economic flourishing depends on the Intellectual and moral development of the people. Education enables them to harness God-given resources such as water, land, sunlight and petroleum. Colonialism had no need to invest in educating Indian masses. James Thomason, the governor, promoted education because he had studied the Bible under his father, Rev. Thomas Truebody Thomason (1774-1829). Rev. Thomason came to Bengal in 1808, set up the first Church Missionary Society schools in Bengal, founded a Schoolbook Society and a Female Orphan Society for the illegitimate children of Europeans. He helped establish Calcutta’s Bible Society and translated the Old Testament into Hindustani. Before coming to Bengal and serving as a Chaplain to the East India Company, Rev. Thomason had served as a “curate” or assistant, to Rev. Charles Simeon in Cambridge. Simeon is considered the Father of the

IDOLATRY, THE BIBLE & INDIA’S ECONOMIC FLOURISHING Read More »

History of Hindi by Vishal Mangalwadi

The Vedas, The Bible, and the History of Hindi

Leave a Comment / History, India /

Parts of the Bible began to be published in Hindustani in 1811. The complete Hindi Bible was printed in 1843. It was only after the Bible had been published the Hindi, that the first Hindu who ever wrote in Hindi, Bharatendu Harishchandra, was born – in 1850. He began his literary activities by founding the first Hindi literary magazine, Kavi-vachana-sudha, in 1867. His very first book, a translation from Bengali, was published in 1868.  No part of the Vedas had been translated and published in Hindi, before Dayananda Saraswati’s translations of excerpts began to appear from 1875. After his death in 1883, additional work by his followers resulted in the first-ever unorthodox translation of the Rig Veda being published – only in 1899.  However, that was rejected by traditional Hindus  because it made clear to anyone who read it  that the Vedas do not teach idol worship and other traditional Hindu practices. The first translation of one of the Vedas which was accepted by many traditional Hindus is by Ramgovind Trivedi. It was published only in 1954. The first society to publish religious literature in Hindi that supported traditional or orthodox Hindu thought and practice was Gobind Bhawan Karyalaya in Gorakhpur, operating through its unit, the Gita Press. That was established only in 1923. During the century and more of its existence, it has published some 418 million (41.8 crore) books in fourteen Indian languages. However, it has refused to publish the Vedas — the most sacred of Hindu scriptures. Many Hindus ask: If the Vedas are a source of wisdom and goodness, why not make them available to the whole world, at least to all Hindus? Well, that is best explaind by asking the related question: : why do orthodox Hindus prevent lower caste Hindus from worshiping in their sacred temples? The answer is that the Hindu gods are different from the Bible’s God. He invites sinners to repent and become His children,  beloved and holy. Orthodox Hinduism teaches that a soul is born into a lower caste or as a female because of bad karma in previous lives. Polluted souls cannot find salvation without first re-incarnating as a Brahmin male. Gods and goddesses cannot make a sinful soul “holy”. That is why Hindu scriptures prohibit the lower castes from hearing, let alone reading or teaching the sacred Vedas. Caste-based and gender-based discrimination is justified on the basis of the theories of karma and reincarnation. These theories have  had serious civilizational consequences: – The Brahmin refusal to share Sanskrit with fellow Hindus and non-Hindus made it necessary for the Mughals to make another language the normal  court language -Persian. – In order to educate the oppressed, Christian missionaries had to develop peoples’ dialects so that they could be used for education and literacy. Muslims ruled Delhi for close to seven centuries, from 1192 to 1857. But no ruler, whether Muslim, Sikh, Maratha or Hindu, saw any need to develop a vernacular such as Hindi. For it is easier to keep people enslaved if they are ignorant and divided by local dialects as well as castes. Inspired by the Bible thousands  of people devoted their lives, money and energy to develop and teach the heart languages of the people. We Indians did not pay them, nor did the British Raj. Missionaries served India because they were inspired by God’s love – because God, the Bible says, wants to liberate the downtrodden — dalits and shoshits. Missionaries developed Urdu before they developed Hindi because, before them, Muslims had been ruling most of north India for centuries. Missionaries published the first Urdu New Testament in 1805. It is worth remembering that, back then, the average Muslim did not read or write Urdu. Missionaries had to set up schools to teach Urdu. It was the education system set up by missionaries which made Urdu the main literary language of northern provinces, including Punjab and Pakistan. That is why Hindus such as Bhartendu Harishchand (1850-85) and Munshi Premchand (1880-1936) began their literary careers in Urdu. Most educated Indians do not know that missionaries such as Alexander Duff, Indian reformers such as Raja Rammohan Roy, and colonial rulers such as Lord Macaulay promoted English education primarily to enrich Indian vernaculars. They wanted Indian intelligentsia to access the intellectual wealth created in the West so that it can be transmitted to the common man in vernaculars. Bible translators standardized Urdu and Hindi by using the works of the following pre-British poets: — Surdas (1478–1583) who grew up around Mathura and expressed his poetic devotion to Sri Krishna in a dialect called Braj Bhasha. — Mirabai (1498–1547) who composed her devotional poems in Merta, Rajasthani and Braj Bhasha.  — Rahim (1556–1627) who grew up in Delhi/Agra region as a Mughal courtier and composed his couplets (dohas) in Braj Bhasha and Awadhi.  — Tulsidas (1532–1623) who composed his epic Ramcharitmanas in Awadhi (notably, he did that in spite of strong opposition by the Brahmin community in Benaras). None of these poets had used “Hindi” because it did not exist in their day. Hindi  was born only when Bible translators and missionary educators fused Awadhi with a dozen other north Indian dialects in order to create a language rich enough to communicate complex and wide-ranging ideas which could not be expressed in any of the pre-existing dialects  Following  the work of the Bible translators who created Hindi, here are examples of the people who became pioneers of Hindi literature. It is important to note that none of them was a Brahmin: Brahmin intellectuals decided to support Hindi only in the 1890s. They were alarmed that Urdu, written in Arabic script, was becoming north India’s literary language. This fear motivated them to team up with missionaries such as Rev. Edwin Greaves of Varanasi to establish the Devanagari Pracharini Sabha (1893). Fear of Urdu motivated them to toil and develop Hindi vocabulary in “Hindi Shabd Sagar.” This massive work was published between 1922-29. However, the standardized Hindi dictionary was developed by a Jesuit

The Vedas, The Bible, and the History of Hindi Read More »

Shopping Cart