An enduring scholarly discourse in recent years has revolved around the “manufactured” secessionist propensities in Southern India. Utilizing a term like “manufactured” is imperative, given that these secessionist inclinations are not indigenous to the region, having emerged only after the arrival of Christian missionaries. Every time parties such as the BJP, which are ascribed to be Hindu-nationalist parties, win in a Northern state and lose in a Southern one, various varieties of jibes are used to degrade Hindus and our culture. There is debate over migration and the rise of Hindutva politics, and more often than not, Hinduism comes under fire rather than the specific political parties whose ideals some may not conform to.
The North, often seen as the Hindu bastion, becomes an object of enmity for many who conform to these secessionist ideals. The problem with this mindset is that it has been ingrained into the minds of many living in Southern Bharat over centuries.
For several centuries, the Southern region of Bharat has encountered a distinct form of invasion compared to its Northern counterpart. Seldom have large armies walked into the South and waged wars, by virtue of which, most temples in the South still bask in ancient glory, as compared with the estimated 42,000 temples demolished in the North by foreign invaders.
The invasion that the southern part of Bharat faced was predominantly ideological: a battle of consciousnesses. Since even before the British colonial rule in Bharat, Christian missionaries have been operating in the region, sometimes openly, other times not, to spread the gospel and earn converts. (Read Mother Teresa: The Untold Story by Aroup Chatterjee)
The Christian missionary work in Southern Bharat has been significantly more concentrated than in the North for three reasons.
It is undeniable that there is an emotional connection to the South of Bharat with the history of Saint Thomas spreading the gospel there.
The other, more obscure, reason is that after the Mid-Eastern invasions in Bharat, the North was already in tatters in many areas: sacred temples had been destroyed, forceful Islamic conversions were already happening at the pointed ends of swords, and Christian missionaries were already working on, what they understood from their colonial-lens, backward castes. The Southern part of Bharat, however, was still concentrated with Hindus (relatively having many more Brahmins in particular) and still followed Hindu practices and rituals.
Additionally, after breaking away from the Vatican and with the rise of Protestantism in the British Empire, missionary activity in India saw Brahminism as another form of control over religion as it had once seen the Vatican. With this view, and with the knowledge that the Brahmins stood as the strongholds for the preservation of Hindu rituals and that it was difficult to convert Hindus as long as a wedge was not driven between Brahmins and the other varnas, the missionary activity was conducted in the South with full force.
For these reasons, the South became a hotbed for Christian missionary activity.
In fact, other than this takeaway, one would realize two more aspects of the Christian missionary work: (i) that the Western coloniality had begun to seep in, in its proper form, with an object to change the consciousness of the land, even before the establishment of the British Raj, and
(ii) that the application of colonial lens over the jati and varna concepts led to the solidification of castes and tribes in the form that Bharat suffers from today.
With the establishment of the Raj in India with the view of fulfilling the white man’s burden, this work only intensified. The first list of castes was officially published under the British, and using this, the work of making certain varnas feel inferior and discriminated against began to drive the anti-Brahminism agenda.
Inherent inferiority is not intrinsic to Hindu Dharma. The Shudras, often perceived as victims of caste hierarchy, assumed this role primarily due to the heightened missionary activities, as previously discussed.
India, Bharat and Pakistan by J Sai Deepak
With such intense diatribe against the Brahmins and such intense missionary work, India saw the rise of Dravidianism, which believes that the South is racially different from the North as a result of the Aryan Invasion theory and sought to disassociate with the North that had remained Hindu even after Mid-Eastern and Western invasions. Even after scientific proof to the contrary, new “evidence” was manufactured to keep up the falsities propagated by the theory.
Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru described one of its main propagators, E.V. Ramaswami, in the following manner in his letter to K. Kamaraj on November 5, 1957:
‘I find that Ramaswami Naicker is going on saying the same thing again and calling upon people at the right time to start stabbing and killing. What he says can only be said by a criminal or a lunatic… Let him be put in a lunatic asylum and his perverted mind treated there.’ [Emphasis added]
A D.K. party meeting organised under Ramaswami’s leadership adopted a resolution that mandated a 15-day ultimatum to the government to remove provisions in the Constitution of India pertaining to religious freedom. Failure to comply would result in the burning of copies of the Constitution and the removal and destruction of portraits and statues of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. If it produced no results, the Dravida Kazhagam members would be asked to kill Brahmins and burn their residential localities.
The Dravidian movement furthered the caste solidification and discrimination theory that had been propagated by Christian missionaries up till then. Ramaswami organised a padayatra to carry naked idols of Ram and Sita and garlanded them with slippers to protest against the same. This outrage, however, was limited to only Hindus, as if castes and divisions did not exist elsewhere. History was largely rewritten by the Justice Party to propagate this theory of discrimination. It was said that the Brahmins did not let non-Brahmins study in schools they attended and took up most of the jobs.
The truth in the matter is as follows:
Source: https://twitter.com/Arya_Anviksha_
With this rise in anti-Brahminism and the theory that the people of Southern Bharat were different from the North, the view that saw the North as the Hindu bastion was strengthened and furthered extensively.
From then until now, not much has changed in this situation, unfortunately. Dravidianist parties still hold all the power in Southern states and actively further this theory.
Temples that were some of the most important strongholds for the preservation of the Hindu culture now stand controlled by these Divasom boards that comprise Dravidianists and leftists who see religion as the opium of the masses. They actively dictate terms on how the temple is to function and, many a time, appoint non-Hindus on the board of temples.
These Divasom boards feel comfortable in actively withdrawing temple money not only for development projects of the state but also for furthering other religions.
Even after this, they feel comfortable instructing the police to perform a lathi-charge if the crowd of devotees is too large. The recent incident of devotees being beaten up in the inner sanctum of a temple to the point of death and children being separated and herded into vans while they cry their parents’ names as if to be taken to ghettos only form part of this shameful long history.
Hinduism is seen as a disease associated with the North and forms an active part of the conversation against the North, which, as mentioned earlier, is seen as a conformist to the religion, in the negative connotation of the word. Thus, anti-Hindu became anti-North itself.
Media channels are owned by a few parties directly that shape the truth. Remarks calling for the eradication of Sanatana Dharma, diatribes against movies like the ‘The Kerala Story’ that bring the problem of extremism and indoctrination in the South to light, and stories of people of Northern Bharat migrating to the South for menial jobs are actively propagated to further the Dravidianist agenda. As mentioned earlier, tirades against the ideologies of particular parties or against the Sanskrit and Hindi languages that are associated with Sanatana culture are used to consolidate vote-banks and to further the anti-North agenda.
It should, thus, not come as a surprise that the rise of Dravidianism, after the work of the Christian missionaries, complements, or rather actively pushes, the secessionist agenda between the northern and the southern parts of India and seeks to carve out Bharatiya land for its purposes.
This agenda is spreading at an alarming rate and should concern every Bharatiya. What was conducted initially in the papers and then spilled over to news channels now reverberates in the halls of our very parliament with a DMK MP calling the northern states ‘gaumutra states’.
M. Gandhi said a nation’s culture resides in its people’s hearts and souls. One can hide history and muddle facts, but years of tyranny have not been able to wipe out Bharatiya culture and divide its followers. It would be akin to bowing down to the colonisers were we to succumb to their agenda, systematically buried within our consciousness now.
The reader must be disillusioned as to the actual purposes of this North-South secessionist agenda and, while reading its history, wonder whether Bharat is to part with more than it already has. Lastly, ‘bhaichara’ must not be a fancy term uttered every now and then but something brought into actual practice to combat this nefarious colonial agenda.
Cover Image Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Map_of_Akhand_Bharat.jpg
Acknowledgements: Dr. Anand Ranganathan for reading this and giving his valuable advice and Aryan Dubrov for his help in constructing and editing this (Aryan: https://thehindunarrative.blogspot.com/)
Source Acknowledgements: J. Sai Deepak's second book-India, Bharat and Pakistan; and Arya Anviksha's diligent fact checks over X
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