The Two Indias: How Monotheism Conquered Both Continents

They called them both Indians. The first in Asia, cradle of gods and philosophies; the second in America, cradle of maize, pyramids, and calendars. Two worlds, each with its own sacred multiplicity. And both crushed by the same theological hammer—the god who allows no other. What Europe and Arabia shared, despite their differences, was the psychology of monopoly: one God, one Book, one Truth. Everything else became a lie to be erased.

The history of India and the Americas is the same story written in different alphabets. One faced the sword of Islam and the Bible of Britain; the other the cross and musket of Spain. Both were invaded not just for land but for metaphysical conquest. Their gods were outlawed. Their temples became ruins. Their civilizations were rewritten in the language of sin.

When Abrahamic monotheists arrived in India, they saw not a civilization but a blasphemy. The Quran called idolaters najis—unclean (Qur’an 9:28). The Bible commanded, “You shall destroy their altars, break their pillars, and cut down their Asherim” (Deuteronomy 7:5). That was the founding charter of religious genocide. A god who admits no rival turns theology into totalitarianism. Conquest is sanctified as obedience. Loot becomes salvation. Every civilization that believed in many gods became guilty by design.

India, the most plural land on Earth, became the laboratory for that holy hatred. For centuries, waves of invaders declared the same verdict: the temples must burn, the gods must fall. Mahmud of Ghazni, Muhammad Ghori, Aurangzeb—all claimed divine sanction. The destruction of Somnath, the razing of Kashi Vishwanath, the slaughter of monks in Nalanda—these were not crimes of greed alone. They were performances of faith. Each hammer blow on a lingam was an act of monotheistic triumphalism, the celebration of the One over the many.

When the British arrived, they baptized the same impulse in civility. They no longer burned temples; they simply mocked them. Macaulay sneered that a single shelf of a good European library was worth all the literature of India. The same theology now wore a suit. The East India Company was less an empire than a church disguised as a corporation. The missionary replaced the invader. Conversion replaced crucifixion. “Civilization” replaced conquest as the chosen euphemism.

Across the ocean, the same logic wore armor. The Spaniards who arrived in the Caribbean did not see humans; they saw heathens. Bartolomé de las Casas recorded how entire islands were emptied by holy steel. The Inca were told their gods were demons. The Aztecs were offered baptism or death. When Atahualpa refused to bow to the Bible, the priest Valverde declared him damned, and Pizarro’s men strangled him with a garrote. The theology of mercy produced the machinery of massacre.

The word Indian became an accusation. In Europe’s vocabulary, Indian meant savage, pagan, idolatrous—someone outside salvation. Columbus had set out to find India, but what he found was the mirror of his own delusion: another plural civilization ripe for erasure. The name stuck because the purpose was identical. To conquer “the Indies” meant to destroy worlds where gods multiplied instead of ruled.

Both conquests—the Indian and the American—shared a peculiar arrogance: the belief that violence could redeem. Monotheism teaches that sin must be purged, not understood. So it turns soldiers into priests and priests into executioners. The genocide of the Americas and the colonization of India were not secular acts of empire; they were rituals of purification. Europe did not simply kill; it baptized its killing in theology.

What was lost in the process was not just territory but metaphysics. The Hindu saw divinity in rivers, trees, animals, planets. The Aztec saw the same in rain, maize, and sun. Both believed that the divine was woven through the material, not above it. To the monotheist, that was blasphemy. God must be transcendent, jealous, separate. The sacred cannot reside in stone or sunlight. Thus, the very sensibility of reverence toward nature became a sin.

The contrast is civilizational. In the Dharmic and indigenous worlds, difference was sacred. The Rig Veda declared: “Truth is one; the wise call it by many names.” The Popol Vuh of the Maya said: “There were many dawnings, many beginnings.” Polytheism, in all its forms, is the metaphysics of coexistence. Monotheism is the metaphysics of domination. Once you declare one truth, every other truth becomes treason.

That is why monotheistic societies could enslave and exterminate without remorse. Their victims were not human beings in the same moral universe; they were souls infected with false worship. The Quran permitted the enslavement of unbelievers. The Bible condoned conquest of “Canaanites” as divine duty. The Spanish conquerors and Muslim sultans shared the same psychological immunity: they could not commit sin against those who were already condemned.

The irony is cruel. The civilizations accused of idolatry were the ones that treated divinity as infinite. The ones who accused them of superstition were those who reduced the universe to one angry father. The pluralists created the Upanishads and the pyramids; the monotheists produced crusades and inquisitions. The former built civilizations of synthesis; the latter built cemeteries of righteousness.

When the Enlightenment came, it tried to rescue reason from revelation. But even secular Europe carried the same colonial arrogance in a new form: the white man’s burden. Missionary monotheism evolved into missionary modernity. Science replaced Scripture, but the contempt for other cultures survived. The pagan was now “primitive.” The infidel was now “underdeveloped.” The old theological hierarchy became economic.

In both Indias, the psychological damage persists. In America, the descendants of the native nations live on reservations, ghosts in their own land. In India, centuries of theological humiliation left behind a class of deracinated elites who learned to be ashamed of their own gods. The colonial mind internalized the conqueror’s judgment. It learned to see its own multiplicity as weakness.

And yet, something refuses to die. Despite all the slaughter, the sacred plural survives. In India, millions still chant a thousand names of God. In the Andes, people still greet the mountains as living beings. The monotheists conquered their bodies, not their souls. The conquered have outlived the conquerors. That is history’s quiet revenge.

But philosophy demands more than revenge—it demands understanding. What made monotheism so destructive? Its root is in its grammar: the singular noun. The One God of Abraham is not a being among beings but Being itself. Everything else is derivative, disposable. Once reality itself is monopolized by one deity, all difference becomes error. That is why the theology of love breeds hatred—it abolishes otherness.

The pluralist civilizations began with a different intuition: that reality is manifold. The Vedas, the Tao Te Ching, the Shinto kami, the Greek pantheon—all perceive divinity as multiplicity in motion. This worldview produces tolerance not as moral virtue but as metaphysical necessity. To see the divine in everything is to be incapable of demonizing difference. That is why polytheism never needed crusades; it already had conversation.

The two Indias—geographical and metaphorical—represent the two destinies of humanity. One path leads to the One God and endless war; the other to many gods and endless dialogue. The conquest of both continents was not just historical but philosophical: a war between singularity and plurality. The West called it evangelization. The victims called it apocalypse.

Even within the Abrahamic sphere, the logic of exclusion never stops. Jews are the chosen people, Christians the redeemed, Muslims the final believers. Each new prophet cancels the previous revelation. The monotheistic God devours even his own followers. The Catholic burned the Protestant; the Sunni slaughters the Shia. The One God cannot even tolerate Himself in another form.

If history teaches anything, it is that monopoly is the natural enemy of morality. Economic monopolies exploit; theological monopolies annihilate. India and the Americas were not conquered by superior arms but by a superior arrogance—the belief in exclusive access to truth. The Bible, the Cross, the Crescent: all instruments of metaphysical theft.

And yet, from the ruins of these conquered worlds, the future may be reborn. The secular humanism of today—its insistence on equality, reason, and freedom—owes more to the pagan than to the prophet. It is the ethical resurrection of polytheism’s plural spirit. The Enlightenment’s “natural rights” echo the ancient intuition that divinity pervades all life. The true revolution is not against religion but against monopoly—of truth, of power, of God.

The two Indias stand as twin witnesses. One survived to remember; the other perished to warn. The Indian of Asia preserved its civilization by absorbing the invader, turning even its conquerors into ghosts of empire. The Indian of America was annihilated before it could absorb anything. One endured through philosophy; the other died through faith. Together they prove that the greatest sin of monotheism was not violence but blindness—the inability to see the sacred in the other.

We live now in the aftershock of that blindness. The same theology that erased the pagans justifies modern imperialism, economic or ideological. The corporations of today preach the same monopoly under secular slogans. The “One True God” has become the “One True Market.” The monotheistic virus has changed names but not nature. It still demands uniformity, still calls diversity chaos, still divides the world into saved and damned—only now as “developed” and “backward.”

But the cure is already known. It was known to the sages of India and the shamans of America long before the Bible or the Qur’an were written. The cure is to see the divine as plural, the world as dialogue, truth as asymptotic. No civilization that believes in many gods will ever need to destroy another. No mind that honors diversity in heaven will suppress it on earth.

The two Indias, then, are not just continents—they are metaphors for two moral destinies. One celebrates diversity; the other exterminates it. One builds temples to debate; the other burns libraries. One sees God in everything; the other sees everything as an enemy of God. The future of humanity depends on which India we choose to inhabit.

Civilization began when humanity started seeing the world as sacred. It will end when humanity starts seeing the sacred as its property. The monotheists conquered the world but lost their souls; the polytheists lost the world but kept the soul of the world alive. The time has come to finish that unfinished war—not with weapons, but with reason. The resurrection of pluralism is not nostalgia; it is survival.

Every idol smashed by monotheism was a mirror of human imagination. Every god erased was a possible voice of truth. What the two Indias remind us is that to destroy the many is to impoverish the One. The universe itself is polytheistic: a billion galaxies, each with its own order, none ruling the others. The divine cannot be jealous; only tyrants can. To worship one God at the cost of all others is to declare war on reality.

The first India still chants Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam—the world is one family. The second India has no temples left to chant it. The conquerors renamed their lands, erased their languages, baptized their children into silence. Yet both Indias whisper across time to each other: the same story, the same theft, the same hope—that one day, the world will learn that the divine never needed to be one to be true.

Citations

1. The Holy Bible, Deuteronomy 7:1–5; Exodus 34:13; Joshua 6:17–21.
2. The Qur’an, 9:5, 9:28, 8:39; Sahih al-Bukhari 4:52:196 (on idolaters).
3. Will Durant, The Story of Civilization: Our Oriental Heritage (Simon & Schuster, 1935).
4. Bartolomé de las Casas, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies (1542).
5. Romila Thapar, Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300 (University of California Press, 2002).
6. Richard Eaton, Temple Desecration and Muslim States in Medieval India (Delhi, 2000).
7. J. Nehru, The Discovery of India (1946), on the plural foundations of Hindu civilization.
8. Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus (Vintage, 2006).
9. Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other (Harper & Row, 1984).
10. D.D. Kosambi, An Introduction to the Study of Indian History (1956).
11. Max Müller, The Six Systems of Indian Philosophy (1899).
12. R. Panikkar, The Vedic Experience: Mantramañjarī (University of California Press, 1977).
13. Rig Veda 1.164.46; Popol Vuh (trans. Dennis Tedlock, 1985).
14. Edward Said, Orientalism (Vintage, 1979).
15. Vivekananda, Addresses at the Parliament of Religions, Chicago (1893).