Primitivizing the Hindus: Hindus as Oppressive and Hierarchical

The contentions of the Francophone postcolonial thinkers are proven fair and square when critically examining Mill’s chapters on the Hindu people in the History. This chapter thoroughly exposes the various parameters on which Mill characterized the Hindu people, Hinduism, and Ancient India as savage and barbaric. One of his chief refrains in describing the Hindu people as savage was that they have been hierarchical and oppressive since the beginning of the times. Their social order, governance laws, and taxation structure, among others, have been hierarchical and oppressive since antiquity. He uses the worst of human vices to represent the Hindu people, which reveals that his discourse is racist. We have undertaken a thorough expose of Mill’s contentions to demonstrate how the grade-school discourse on India and Hinduism carries his distinct stamp in a later chapter.