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Christian Missionaries in India

Missionaries in India were never innocent wanderers in saffron fields, never neutral teachers of love. They were soldiers of the Cross, the ideological infantry of empire, whose weapon was not the sword but the story—the story that Hindus were damned heathens, their gods mere idols, their culture an abyss awaiting salvation. Armies conquer land, missionaries conquer minds; together they dismantle civilizations. The British understood this perfectly well. They knew that the colonization of India would be incomplete without the colonization of Hindu consciousness.

From the beginning, the missionary project in India was not about dialogue but demolition. When Francis Xavier arrived in Goa in the sixteenth century, he did not come to admire the Vedas; he came to burn temples, outlaw rituals, and enforce baptism under the shadow of the Inquisition. Hindu gods were mocked as demons, and entire communities were told that their centuries-old traditions were illegitimate. Jesuits did not stop at the claim that Christianity was true; they made it their business to prove Hinduism false. The Gospel advanced not by inspiration but by humiliation.

By the nineteenth century, the strategy shifted from overt persecution to subtle indoctrination. Mission schools became the laboratories of psychological war. Thomas Macaulay’s infamous “Minute on Indian Education” declared that the goal was to create a class of Indians “English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.” That was the civilizational coup: train young Hindus to despise their own traditions and to measure worth by Western yardsticks. Charity, medicine, and education were Trojan horses. A free meal or scholarship came tied with the demand to abandon Krishna and Rama. Poverty was exploited, vulnerability weaponized, all in the name of Christ.

The language of the missionary was carefully chosen. Hindus were not merely different; they were “idol worshippers,” “pagans,” “superstitious.” Their gods were “false,” their rituals “darkness.” This rhetoric delegitimized Hinduism not only to Western audiences but also to Hindus themselves, who were encouraged to see their civilization as broken, in need of foreign repair. Missionaries may not have carried guns, but they carried the arsenal of propaganda, and propaganda can devastate a culture as effectively as artillery.

The tragedy is that the wounds inflicted by this psychological war still bleed. Many educated Indians internalized the missionary’s contempt, repeating the same colonial clichés about caste, ritual, and superstition, while ignoring the philosophical sophistication of the Upanishads or the ethical universalism of the Gita. The missionary succeeded not only in converting some bodies but in confusing many minds. Conversion was the tip of the spear; the larger target was Hindu self-confidence.

Even in contemporary India, missionary activity retains the same logic. NGOs with Western funding cloak themselves in humanitarian language while their underlying mission is unchanged: to convince Hindus that their gods are powerless, their civilization worthless, and their salvation lies in foreign faith. The methods are subtler, the marketing slicker, but the goal is the same: to destabilize, delegitimize, and divide.

This is why missionaries must be seen as soldiers of Christian faith. Their battlefield is not the open plain but the human heart; their victory is not political power but cultural surrender. The war they wage is not violent in appearance but insidious in effect, a war whose casualties are pride, memory, and continuity. When a Hindu child is taught that his gods are demons, when a community is persuaded that its traditions are inferior, when a civilization is shamed into doubt, then the missionary has won the battle without firing a shot.