The Right to Examine the Conquerors

Hindus have no theological dispute with the Semitic world. Their quarrel is not with belief in one God or many gods, but with the civilizations that arrived bearing swords in one hand and salvation in the other. Christianity and Islam did not come to debate India. They came to dismantle it — temple by temple, city by city, century by century.

The Hindu civilization never marched into Arabia, Palestine, or Europe to destroy their shrines or enslave their people. Yet both Christianity and Islam marched into India, Asia Minor, Persia, and beyond, turning flourishing polytheistic civilizations into ruins and memories. Their history is not one of dialogue but domination. Their success was built on two engines — faith and fear — and both were driven with absolute certainty.

The first to invade came with cavalry and crescent; the second came with cross and canon. Between them, they managed to mutilate one of the most continuous civilizations on Earth. The result is a broken cultural body: Pakistan and Bangladesh are its amputated limbs. They were once Hindu lands, speaking Sanskritic tongues, worshipping local deities, celebrating life in plural forms. Today they stand as reminders of what happens when tolerance meets monotheistic militancy.

Hindus were not conquered in a single war; they were conquered in a long civilizational poker game played with deceit and dogma. The theological trick was simple: to first redefine the Hindu as “heathen,” then redefine conquest as “conversion.” When violence was not enough, missionaries arrived with sympathy — the most dangerous form of aggression. Their weapon was not the sword but the sermon. They played theology like a zero-sum game, where the conversion of one Hindu was a point for God and a loss for Satan.

No civilization that has been invaded for thirteen centuries can be expected to remain neutral. Every generation of Hindus has lived under some form of ideological colonization — Islamic, Christian, or British secular. Their temples were destroyed by invaders; their gods were mocked by missionaries; their texts were mistranslated by scholars who measured India through Biblical categories. Even when the guns fell silent, the language of conquest continued — now in universities, NGOs, and global media.

It is therefore not fanaticism but self-defense to examine these religions critically. If a civilization has been dissected by theology, it must respond with reason. Hindus do not owe reverence to the very ideologies that enslaved them. They owe them analysis. Objective, empirical, dialectical analysis. The same scrutiny the West applies to capitalism, communism, or colonialism must also apply to Christianity and Islam — for these are not just religions, but world-historical systems of power.

The Christian world rarely allows such examination. Its theologians guard revelation as property. Its institutions react to rational criticism with moral outrage. Islam reacts with threats or violence. Both claim immunity from reason by declaring themselves divinely revealed. But a truth that cannot bear questioning is already a lie that has lost its armor. Revelation demands obedience; realization demands understanding. The former silences, the latter liberates.

Hindu civilization, by contrast, has never feared argument. From the Rig Veda to the Upaniṣads, from the Buddha to Śaṅkara, debate was the highest worship. To ask questions was not blasphemy but duty. That is why India produced both gods and philosophers — because truth here was not an order to obey but a mystery to be explored. Every Indian school — Vedānta, Sāṃkhya, Nyāya, Jain, Bauddha, Cārvāka — argued furiously, yet never massacred each other for disbelief. The Hindu mind created the marketplace of ideas long before Europe discovered its agora.

By contrast, the Semitic mind divided humanity into believers and infidels. Their history reads like a long excommunication of the planet. They burned libraries, demolished temples, and baptized rivers with blood — all in the name of peace. The tragedy is not that they conquered, but that they moralized conquest. The sword was forgiven because it carried a scripture. Colonization was sanctified as salvation. The Hindu, Buddhist, and Greek worlds were not merely defeated — they were theologically erased.

Even in modern times, the missionary instinct continues. Conversion today wears the costume of compassion — “education,” “healthcare,” “relief work.” But its purpose remains identical: to replace pluralism with monopoly. Every baptized Hindu is a statistical victory in an old war disguised as charity. The same logic drives Islamic daʿwah: the more souls converted, the more God’s dominion expands. The marketplace of the soul remains a conquest economy.

Hindus must not confuse tolerance with submission. To be tolerant of the intolerant is to commit civilizational suicide. True secularism does not mean neutrality toward aggressors; it means the courage to judge all creeds by the same rational standard. If Hindus are asked to introspect, so must Christians and Muslims. If Hindu gods can be caricatured, so must Biblical and Qur’ānic narratives be open to analysis. Intellectual equality demands reciprocal vulnerability.

Modern India still carries the scars of its spiritual colonization. The English-educated elite often quotes Voltaire but kneels like Luther. They speak of reason but worship Western approval. Their minds are colonized by the very ideologies that once chained their ancestors. They call self-defense “communalism” and surrender “secularism.” They think examining Christianity or Islam is hate, but deriding Hinduism is progress. This is not liberalism; it is learned helplessness.

The path to Hindu revival is not revenge but reason. To study the Abrahamic faiths is not to hate them, but to liberate humanity from their monopolies of truth. Every civilization that has been colonized by the cross or the crescent has the moral right to deconstruct the machinery of its own conquest. To analyze dogma is the first step toward recovering dignity.

Hindus must reclaim that right — publicly, unapologetically, and philosophically. Not to mirror the intolerance of their conquerors, but to expose the theological engines that fueled empire. To study these religions empirically is not an act of aggression; it is an act of self-preservation. No civilization survives long if it forgets how it was broken.

History has been generous to the conquerors and cruel to the conquered. The West remembers the fall of Jerusalem but not the fall of Nālandā. It memorializes the Crusades as courage, not as carnage. It canonizes the missionary as a saint, never as a cultural assassin. But civilizations do not die when they lose wars. They die when they lose the courage to remember who wounded them.

Hindu civilization has endured precisely because it remembers. Its memory is long, its patience infinite, its philosophy forgiving — but not forgetful. To forgive is a sign of strength; to forget is an invitation to repetition. And repetition is what the Hindu world must prevent, by the only weapon left that the conquerors never understood: reason.

The future of Hindu civilization depends not on resurrecting the past but on confronting the myths of its conquerors. The gods of the desert once conquered the gods of the Ganges. The time has come for the children of the Ganges to conquer the desert — not with swords or sermons, but with light, logic, and compassion.

Citations

1. R.C. Majumdar, The History and Culture of the Indian People, Vol. VII: The Mughul Empire (Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, 1974).
2. Sita Ram Goel, Hindu Temples: What Happened to Them, Vols. I–II (Voice of India, 1990).
3. Arun Shourie, Missionaries in India: Continuities, Changes, Dilemmas (ASA Publications, 1994).
4. Will Durant, The Story of Civilization, Vol. I: Our Oriental Heritage (Simon & Schuster, 1935).
5. S. Radhakrishnan, The Hindu View of Life (HarperCollins, 1995).
6. A.L. Basham, The Wonder That Was India (Grove Press, 1954).
7. Richard Eaton, Temple Desecration and Muslim States in Medieval India (Oxford University Press, 2000).
8. Koenraad Elst, Negationism in India: Concealing the Record of Islam (Voice of India, 1992).
9. D.N. Jha, The Myth of the Holy Cow (Verso, 2002).
10. Amartya Sen, The Argumentative Indian (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2005).