India, Europe & Biblical Revolution | Vishal Mangalwadi | EP 257

One of the things that I've really been struck by lately is this, um, this this post-modern and radical leftist insistence that exploitation is wrong. Think: well, why do you think exploitation is wrong? You have to buy the doctrine of the inalienable rights of the individual, the natural rights of the individual, and the divine worth of the individual before slavery is wrong. And you don't buy any of that. But if you do—if you do buy it—you end up like Wilbur, like Wilberforce, and you put yourself on the line to what? To cost England a tremendous fortune over multiple decades to eradicate slavery around the world because of its moral inappropriateness, because of the sacred nature of each individual.

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Hello everyone, I'm pleased to have with me today Dr. Michelle Mangovati. Born in 1949, Dr. Mangovati is founder president of the Book of the Millennium International slash Revelation Movement. He's an Indian philosopher and social reformer. Born and raised in India, Vishal studied philosophy at the University of Allahabad (1967-1969) and Indore (1971-73) in Hindu ashrams and at the Labri Fellowship in Switzerland in 1976. Along with his wife, Ruth, he founded a community to serve the rural poor in India. Michelle continued his direct involvement in community transformation until 1997, including service at the headquarters of two national political parties. There he worked toward the empowerment and liberation of Indian peasants and the lower castes.

In 1977, Asia's then-largest publisher, V. Cass Publishing House, published his first book, The World of Gurus. His next two books, When the New Age Gets Old (IVP 1992) and India: The Grand Experiment (Hippa Ran 1997), brought his work to the attention of American and European readers. At the turn of the millennium, Vishal and his wife Ruth were invited to the US to make a television series exploring the Bible's role in creating the modern world. Their research, prepared in the process of making a documentary film, has been presented in text form and on a variety of electronic and social media platforms. He's lectured in more than 40 countries and published 17 books.

He served as the honorary professor of applied theology in the Gospel and Plow Faculty of Theology at the Sam Higginbotham Institute of Agriculture Technology and Sciences in Allahabad, India, since 2013. I recently read two of his newer books: The Book That Made Your World (Thomas Nelson 2011) and in what is some ways a companion volume and an extension, This Book Changed Everything (Sought After Press Media 2019). It was very interesting to me to encounter the views of a non-westerner on the biblical corpus and its effects on, well, its broad effects on civilization. I was also extremely impressed and happy to have had the opportunity to read books that were so, uh, deeply researched and widely ranging. I learned all sorts of things about Western history and certainly a lot about Indian history—things I had no idea about, so ignorant when it comes to history that it's embarrassing.

So it was a pleasure to encounter these books and to get some sense of the depth and breadth of scholarship that went into their production. I thought we could have a pretty interesting conversation on, well, on the history of India, on the role the Bible played in shaping India as a modern country, on your views of the Bible and the West—all of that. So welcome to my discussion.

Thank you, sir. I'm honored.

Well, it's a pleasure to have you here. So, um, can you maybe start by telling everyone how you came across the Bible and why you've made it in, in some ways, I would say the centerpiece of your life study?

Yes. While I was studying philosophy in Allahabad University, I couldn't have any childish faith because my professors did not believe the Bible or Hindu scriptures. I had become a Christian as a teenager because I was going through a moral struggle. I was addicted to shoplifting and lying, and I hated myself for this habit of lying, when there was nothing to be gained from lying. I would meditate and try and control my tongue, but in the evening, when I looked back on the day, I had just deceived everybody. That was habit. I would try and have more willpower to control myself until someone explained to me that your problem is not a real lack of willpower—you're quite stubborn. You have a disease; it's called sin that rules you. But there's good news: there is a Savior who can save you from sin. So I asked Jesus to deliver me from my habit of lying, but He also went ahead and delivered me from my habit of stealing. I was able to go back to the shops from where I had stolen and offer restitution. Thankfully, nobody took the money; they were all pleased.

These were little things.

How old were you?

How old was I? I was about 14 or so. I was still a teenager, uh, struggling with this moral struggle.

Why do you think it was that turning to Christianity actually worked, when your own attempts hadn’t produced any positive results?

Well, that is actually a very good question because I had already realized that my attempt to control my tongue—I hadn't heard the word addiction; I didn't know what addiction was, what it meant. So I just thought that I had these terrible habits, and I knew they were wrong; I didn't know how to get out of them. So when I was told that there is a Savior who came to save sinners like me, as a child I believed, and I asked Jesus to forgive my sins and to change me. So the transformation was real. I got very excited. You know, it's not easy to go back to the shops and confess that you had stolen. So the transformation was real. But at the university, I found that I couldn't really believe the Bible to be true. Nobody was directly attacking the Bible in the university, but my professors were obviously a lot more learned than my pastors, and if the professors didn't believe the Bible, why should I follow the pastors?

So it was easy to doubt the Bible. The difficult question was: what then do you believe? And I decided that I'm going to believe what the best philosophers and scientists believe. So what do they think is the truth? I began reviewing my course, reviewing all the notes, all the books, and I began to realize that my professors knew—that the philosophers knew—that they didn't know the truth and that they could not know the truth. So by 1969, philosophy departments in India already knew that the Enlightenment had failed. Nobody in any university believed that I know the truth, and I can teach the truth. So I began to feel that perhaps the Buddha was right. I come from the same people group as the Buddha, and his parable of the five blind men trying to make sense of an elephant and fighting that elephant. It is like a pillar, like a wall, or like a rope. We all have some truth, but that is relative truth, relative to our experience of the elephant. None of us really know the truth; none of us really know the elephant. So I thought that perhaps the Buddha was right and we should be humble enough in knowing that none of us knows the truth, and we should listen to each other rather than fighting with each other.

But that raised the question that if the five blind men are there who do not know the elephant, could there be a sixth person who is not blind, who sees the elephant and can communicate to me what I'm experiencing of the elephant? So obviously, the concept of blindness exists because there is someone who is not blind. So sight must exist for the concept of blindness to exist. So I decided, is there someone who knows the truth? Has He spoken? This started my quest: a philosophical quest to see.

I first went to the Hindu, uh, the Gita Press guru that sells Hindu scriptures and asked them for a copy of the Vedas, the most ancient sacred Hindu scriptures, which are supposed to be revelation. I was amazed that my professors, of course, had been teaching us the philosophy of the Vedas, but they never brought a copy of the Vedas into the classroom, and I had never seen a copy of the Vedas. So I went to buy one, and I was told that, sorry, the Vedas are not printed; they cannot be translated. I was surprised to learn that actually Sanskrit never had a script because it was an oral language, so with sophisticated grammar, but no script.

So the Vedas were not supposed to be written down; they were to be memorized. But memorizing was not enough; you needed correct enunciation and pronunciation and intonation and when to offer the melted butter into the fire, etc.—the rituals—because that was the purpose. So Vedas were never written to know the truth. In fact, the Upanishad, which followed the Vedas, for example, which from which our national motto comes, which is "Satte Mev Jayati”—truth alone triumphs—uh, the Upanishad says that no amount of study of the Vedas will ever lead you to truth because the Vedas are not written to give you knowledge of wisdom of truth; they are magical sounds composed to give you power.

So I said, well, it'll be very nice to have some power, but right now I'm looking for truth. So I went to the Muslim books because I was in a city called Allahabad, which is a Persian name, a bird of Allah. This city was established by Muslims. Just two years ago, its name was changed to a Hindu name, but at that time, it was still seen as a Muslim city. And I was surprised that the Quran was not available, neither in my mother tongue, which is India's national language, Hindi, or Urdu, which was the language of my town, which is the national language of Pakistan right now.

So the Quran was not available. The shopkeepers explained to me that you have to study, um, Arabic to study the Quran. So I said, well, it'll be very nice to know a foreign language, but at this moment, I'm not interested in studying a language. If the Quran is God's word, why is it not available to me in my language? So it was my older sister who encouraged me to read the Bible, and I said to her that I've already read the Bible; I think these are childish stories. She said, no, no, you were a child when you read it. Now you think you are a philosopher, so read it as a critical philosopher.

And as I began rereading the Bible, I found Genesis very exciting because it was answering questions that the university had not answered about who am I, what is man?

Yeah, well, in your book, one of the things you do quite nicely—a couple of comments and what you've said—I mean, you make a quite remarkable and insightful case, I would say, for the particulars of the vision of man that's embedded in Genesis. And I found that interesting. Your ideas, in some sense, paralleled ideas I was developing in a course or a lecture series I did in the Bible, that God contends with chaos to make order, and that man and women are made—man and woman are made in the image, and there's a, um, imputed nobility to the human character that's part and parcel of the initial Genesis story.

You also make a case that—and you were beginning to develop that just now again—that the universal translation of the Bible has had a revolutionary worldwide effect on every culture, really, that it's touched, and that that effect of the book itself—not necessarily the people who transmitted the book, but sometimes them too—that effect was fundamentally positive, that it led to an increased appreciation for the dignity and worth and nobility of men and women alike, regardless of their economic status or background.

That's absolutely right, and we are on the same wavelength at that point. But later, as I kept reading up to, say, books like Leviticus, I found the Bible very poor, a very boring book. But when I came into the, uh, historical books of Kings and Chronicles, then I was really fed up. Here I am, an Indian young man; I do not know enough about Indian history. Why am I reading this Jewish book?

And as I was ready to close down the Bible once and for all, something amazing happened, which was that Indian history at school level is always telling us how great, glorious, wonderful our ancestors and our rulers were. This Jewish book in Kings and Chronicles was telling me how rotten the Jewish kings were. So I realized, of course, this is not court history. Kings didn't pay historians to write about their fathers, so this must be religious history of the Jews, which is critical of the politicians because in India, the religious leaders are Brahmanas; politicians are Kshatriyas. There's always rivalry between them.

So I said, this must be a religious book. So just to confirm my opinion of what the Bible is, I began rereading these historical books, and I was amazed that the book is condemning Jewish religious leaders to the point that God hated them. He destroyed His temple; He killed the priests; He sent them into slavery. So I said, okay, then the Bible must be subaltern history, written from the point of view of simple Jewish people—men and women and children—who are exploited both by religious and political leaders.

But then, uh, as I began rereading these books, I realized, no, this book is incredible. It is more anti-Semitic than anything Hitler could have written. It is saying that every Jew was an idolater, adulterer, liar, cheater, deceiver, etc. God hated the people; He destroyed His chosen people, sent them into slavery to Assyria and Babylon. So then I said, well, this must be the point of view of the prophets because prophets love to condemn everybody.

Uh, that's—people would accuse you and me of being that kind of voice. So here, I already know that these are very boring books, and within a period of two months, I'm looking through Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles for the fifth time to just confirm my point of view that this is the word of prophets. But then I was amazed that the book is saying most of the prophets were false prophets; the good ones were the losers. They were trying to save their nation; they couldn't save themselves—they were beaten, killed, thrown into cisterns, etc.

Right, so you're making the case that it's not easy to read those books as the expression of any given dominant group or power, or exploitative group—or even viewpoint other than an attempt to lay out some fundamental ethical truth.

Well, it was a video in the north of Israel, a Sidonian widow who opened my eyes. Elijah is running away from his own king. The king says, you are a troubler of Israel; because of you there is three years of famine. He was hiding in a brook, drinking water from there. The Bible says the crows were bringing his food. The brook dried out, so he was sent to this widow of Zarephath.

And Elijah says, please, can you bring me some water? And she goes—you know, he's been on a long journey—he shouts at her, please also bring me a loaf of bread. She says, now that's going too far. I have just a little bit of flour; I'm going to make the last meal, me and my son. We eat that, after that we die. He says, no, no, you won't die. Make the loaf for me beside yourself and your son.

She does so; she invites him to stay because she realizes that she actually had more flour than she thought. Next morning, she still has flour and oil, and next evening, and the third day, and the fourth day. And she begins to feel this guy is a magician; he is multiplying by a limited flour. And she's very pleased to have him as the houseguest.

But then her son becomes sick and dies, and she's really angry at Elijah that "I'm a sinner; did you, as a man of God, come here to judge me? I have nothing; I have no husband; I have no jewelry; I have no pots and pans; I have no savings; no insurance. This boy was my only hope, and now he is dead because of you."

So Elijah takes him—the boy up, prays for him. Elijah asks God that "my whole nation condemns me as a troubler of Israel. Now you have brought trouble upon this woman also." So the boy is resurrected. When he brings the son back, the woman says, now I know that you are a man of God, and the words of the Lord from your mouth are true.

Now, my professors have no concept of truth. Can the words communicate truth? The Buddha doesn't believe; Upanishads don't believe that human words can communicate truth, but a widow knows that you are a man of God, the word of the Lord from your mouth marks truth. So I began to look into these old historical books, and I realized that whatever my interpretation, the book itself is claiming to be God's word.

Yeah, well, one of the things that you do a nice job of, I would say in contrast to maybe—maybe post-modern perspectives in particular—is to make the case that the biblical narrative, um, is predicated on the idea that there is a truth that words can aspire to, and words can contain that truth, and that human beings can possess those words. So the words can refer to something that's real and absolute and fundamentally true, and we're graced in some sense by the ability to partake in that process and that words have a world engendering force as well.

And so I thought that defense of the biblical perspective was extremely—is extremely, what would you say—necessary and welcome in today's world because, as you point out, it isn't the conclusion of modern philosophers, especially the more radical type, that words refer to anything at all outside of themselves or that words can contain anything reasonably approximating some kind of transcendent truth.

Yes, that's what I learned studying Wittgenstein. Bertrand Russell said that Wittgenstein was the greatest British philosopher of the first part of the 20th century, and his philosophy of linguistic analysis begins with assuming that the words have something to do with truth. Some words can communicate truth. But by the time he's done, he has come to realize that words have nothing to do with truth. The words lead to words, and more words, and do more words.

So after that, the Western Enlightenment philosophy becomes anti-philosophy. It's not a pursuit of truth but it's a pursuit of, um, myth-making, story-making. But so you have existentialism, etc., taking off from the failure of the Enlightenment. Because that raises the question: where does language come from? So if you take an atheistic position that we were all primates in the jungles of Sudan and Ethiopia, and, uh, we were fighting with each other over mating and food, then the language evolved because this is my parable: that an eighth female ape has her child, and the whole gang is resting on the trees.

So in the morning she gets up, and there is one male—he gets up; he's leaving. So she asks him, "Where are you going?" Because they don't use words. And he says that, well, yesterday I saw some very pretty females going towards Ethiopia; that's where I'm going. She said, "You're not going anywhere. You stay here. Look after my baby; I'm hungry; my baby is hungry; I'm going to eat. Find some food for myself, and there are pythons here that will eat up my baby unless you sit and watch over my baby. If you don't, I'll break your head."

So in these fights of, uh, apes or primates fighting over food, mating rights, the length of sounds—animal sounds become words. Language develops. If that's the origin of language, then the postmodern philosophy is right that words can have nothing to do with truth.

This is where Upanishads and Buddhism had reached—that in order to know the truth, you have to empty your mind in meditation. They didn't go the way Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell went because the Buddha is already critiquing, like Socrates, that he's critiquing the myths that the religious myths that Hindus have created or the Greeks have created. These myths are meant not to find meaning of life and truth; these myths are meant by religious leaders to exploit the ordinary people.

So the Buddha and Socrates have very little use for the myths, unlike Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell, because they already know that people are enslaved by myths. So a lot of the New Testament is critical of stories, critical of myths. Although at the moment, the Western mind has been taken over by the idea that we cannot know truth, but we can invent stories that know truth.

So I began to realize that if there are five blind men, there could be a sixth man who is not blind. Can he speak? Is revelation possible? And as I'm reading the Old Testament—particularly the boring books of the Old Testament, I begin to realize that the book is claiming to be God's word, and there are umpteen prophecies within Kings and Chronicles that are fulfilled during the lifetime of the kings themselves.

So, I began to take the concept of revelation seriously because also it explained the origin of language much better than the evolutionists did—how language evolved.

Okay, so you view, in your book—particularly in, uh, let's see, in The Book That Made Your World—you present a viewpoint that's pretty positively predisposed to science and technology, and the Enlightenment, at least the early periods of the Enlightenment. But you see them as inextricably rooted in a biblical underlay and that, as they became more and more divorced from that biblical underlay, the more postmodern deviations from the Enlightenment pathway or from the productive Enlightenment pathway manifested themselves. And you also make the case that, while in India, for example—which I found very interesting—that the distribution of the Bible in the native languages of the land had a revolutionary effect, and that that effect was also manifested in a broad sense in the West against the Catholic Church and against, well, everything, and against arbitrary political power.

That's correct. The Scottish Enlightenment—there was no atheist in the American Enlightenment. There were no atheists in the British Enlightenment. Only Thomas Hobbes was the atheist. It was only when you come to the French Enlightenment that you have atheists. And the end result of the French Enlightenment was disaster. Our universities were telling us—the department of politics, etc.—were telling us that our freedoms come from Rousseau, from the French Revolution, but they were also telling us that within three years of the start of the French Revolution, the revolutionaries themselves described their rule as the reign of terror.

And within ten years, the whole revolution ended with the dictatorship of Napoleon Bonaparte. So I began to realize that our professors were not—either they didn't know the truth, or they had been deceived by American universities, like ancient philosophy. Political philosophy begins with Plato's Republic. Plato, the professors are saying that democracy came from Greek city-states, but they are also telling me that Plato says that democracy is the worst of all political systems. He hated democracy because it was Athenian democracy that killed Socrates in order to defend the myths.

So professors clearly don't know how we got democracy, etc. So yes, as I looked at the Enlightenment, and of course, later, David Gress's book, From Plato to NATO, helped me understand why American universities had deceived themselves and a whole century of young people believing that the freedoms came from Greece.

The only thing Greece ever explored—right? And from the Enlightenment for that matter. But if the Enlightenment's rooted in biblical ideas, I mean, another thing I found particularly interesting about your book is your insistence—and I believe this to be the case—that the idea of natural rights is embedded in a biblical conception of the sovereignty of the individual and divine worth of the individual. And I think that case is pretty clear historically in relationship to the American Declaration of Independence, but I also think it's clear, and you do a lovely job of developing this; it's clear that the roots of that idea were essentially biblical—the derived both from the Old Testament and from the New Testament, particularly Genesis and the Gospels.

That's correct. So going back to those very boring historical books in the Bible, uh, here is King Ahab married to Jezebel. Naboth, his neighbor, ordinary peasant, has a very good vineyard. The king wants that vineyard. He wants to pay for it. Naboth says no. I don't have the right to sell it because my forefathers built it up; it belongs to my children and grandchildren. The king says, I'll give you double the price, ten times the market price.

He says, sorry, I don't want to sell it; I can't sell it. This is not mine to sell. No, the king is sulking. Jezebel says to him, what's wrong? He says, well, I offered ten times the market price to this fellow, and halfway, he'll turn the vineyard to him; he won't sell it to me. So she says, what do you mean? Are you a king? My father is a king in Sidon? Do you know how to rule? I'll get you the land.

So she writes a letter to the village elders to have a feast, bring some scoundrels to make false allegations—false witnesses, stone that fellow—she takes the vineyard, gives it to Elijah; he gives it to Ahab, the king. Elijah the prophet is furious; he goes to Ahab and he confronts him that you have broken every one of God's commandments. You have coveted your neighbor's vineyard; you have lied about him; he has blasphemed God and king. You have killed him when God says you shall not kill. You may be the king, but there is a law above you which is God's law: you shall not kill.

That's the law that gives inalienable right to life. You have been given the authority to rule in order to defend the fundamental inalienable right to life and property and freedom, but you have violated everything. Therefore, Elijah judges the king and the queen, and his prophecies turn out to be true—that this is what is going to happen, that Jezebel's blood will be licked by the dogs as what has happened to Naboth's blood.

So it is, as I'm reading these books, I began to realize that this is the source of the idea of— in India we call it fundamental rights—to life, liberty, and of the rule of law.

Yeah, under the rule of law, which is right. Right because the rule of law is predicated on an idea that there's a moral order that's superordinate even to the king or the emperor, and that's a transcendent moral order that doesn't lie in the hands of any given individual. And it is definitely the case that in those old biblical texts, the prophetic voice—but not always the winners, as you pointed out—but the prophetic voice that carries the main narrative line continually insists that if those transcendent ethical rules are violated, even by the rulers, who you would think is their prerogative to set whatever rules they want, if there's no order outside of them, even the rulers are told by the prophets that they're necessarily subordinate to those rules, and that all hell will break loose if they break them.

Yeah, this, of course, became very personal for me when I started this research and writing because there had been a hailstorm in 1980, which had flattened the wheat crop in hundred villages. I began to organize relief, and the district magistrate sent me an order, a formal order, that "your work is illegal; stop it," because there is a law in our state that in the event of natural calamity, no private parties cannot collect donations. So I gave a formal response, and thank you for telling me about this law. We will obey it; we will not collect any donation; we will give.

I get a second order that if you're not collecting any donation, how can you give? So your work is illegal, so stop it. So I wrote formally that the scriptures command us to obey the magistrates, so we will obey your order; we will not give any relief, but we will ask the peasants who are hurting to pray for relief. Maybe the government itself will grant the relief. I got a third order that your prayer meeting is illegal. Now this was not a Christian meeting in a church; this was in Gandhi ashram. Gandhi's style of prayer was very theistic prayer. So Gandhi ashram would be watching us for several years of what we are doing with the poor; they invited me to hold a public prayer meeting in their premises, and the district magistrate says this will disturb the peace and tranquility, law and order of my district, so your prayer meeting is banned.

Now, am I now required by the Bible to obey the magistrate, or is there a right—do I have a right to civil disobedience?

And as we began to look at this responsibility for civil disobedience—

Right, yes, exactly—to be a shepherd. Do I have to stand up against the wolves? And I was finally thrown into jail, and that's where I began to take a fresh look at the New Testament—that Jesus is doing good; apostles are doing good, healing, preaching, teaching about the kingdom of God. Why is he crucified? Why are they being stoned? Why are they being killed? Why are the troublemakers turning the world upside down?

And that's exactly the point that you made, that the rulers, the government, have authority, as the Declaration of Independence and the American Constitution says, that governments are constituted to defend and promote the laws that are given by the Creator. Every person is made in God's image and endowed by his Creator with inalienable rights. You give up that biblical framework that the rights come from God; His command, "You shall not kill."

The superintendent of police, a highly educated officer, he called me to his home. I sat in his home, in his lawn, in the easy chair for one and a half hours. He spent an hour telling me that if you don't cancel that prayer meeting, I will personally kill you. I don't need to arrest you; I need no warrant; I will not produce you before a judge; I'll come to your home, take you from your home, take you into the jungle, shoot you, throw your body there. The hyenas will eat you. Are you going to cancel that prayer meeting?

So I said to him, of course, that I have to consult my wife if she's okay being a widow, and then I'll consider your request. You realize I wasn't taking him seriously, which I wasn't, because I didn't believe that a highly educated, gadgeted officer of the government of India, who has taken an oath to uphold the Constitution of India, will have such utter disregard for my inalienable right to life, to pray.

So when I was in jail, that's when I began to take a fresh look at why is an apostle Paul turning the Roman world upside down? That's what he's accused of: why is Jesus being crucified? And what does the cross have to do with the transformation of Europe from being a very intolerant, brutal society to a civilized, tolerant society?

Yeah, well, you know, I talk to my audiences across the United States and say, well, it seems obvious to me—which doesn't mean it's true—that societies, the societies that are desirable are free societies, and free societies are predicated on rule of law—the law independent of the—and transcendent in relationship to the rulers—and on a conception of man that gives every individual an intrinsic dignity that basically has a religious substructure. And that to the degree that we are citizens of those lands and we believe in the principles by which they operate, then we're bound to accept that view, because without accepting that view the whole system makes no sense.

Like the foundation stone is pulled out from underneath it. And that's a—that's quite the conundrum. You know, there is a biblical vision underpinning the states that are the most productive.

Now the radical types, the leftists in particular, say, well, the reason that the West is wealthy and free is because it was built on the backs of the poor, and in the West and also in the Third World. But one of the reasons I found your book so interesting is that you're not so fond of that viewpoint.

You look at India, for example, and as far as I could tell, you believe that the distribution of the biblical narrative in India has clearly been a net positive. And so maybe you could outline a little bit of Indian history because I think people would find that very interesting.

The British came in. India was fragmented into hundreds of cities or states—small states ruled over, in many cases, by Muslims. That was the scene when the British arrived, and the British had their problems. But the introduction of the biblical narrative into India, in your estimation, had a positively transformative effect, much like it had in Western Europe.

That's true. Thank you. But you're doing a wonderful job in arguing the case that you just outlined, and I hope that many people in the West and in the East will listen to you.

Because, well, we don't believe it anymore—that's the thing—but it's also partly because we're so damn ignorant, eh? I mean, I was struck by reading your book how much I didn't know. You know, for example, this is very embarrassing to relate: I didn't realize—I knew India was fragmented before it was unified into a modern nation-state, but I didn't know it was fragmented and fundamentally ruled in many cases by the Muslim Empire. That I just didn't know that, and that's pathetic that I didn't know that. And I also—your book also helped me understand, see, in the West now we tend to think of the entire Christian tradition as oppressive in the Catholic sense, and I'm not criticizing the Catholics, by the way. Sure, that it was a monopolistic belief system that was fundamentally oppressive.

Now your book helped me understand to what degree that oppression, if it existed, was a remnant of the Roman Empire and the imperial worldview and that it was the introduction of the Bible and its distribution in all the vernaculars that actually blew the remaining empire part of Christianity into fragments in a very positive way.

And that's an analogous, as I said, to the effect of the Christian or the biblical narrative on India, which—yep. So please, please go ahead.

That's the Indian story. That's true. In year 1000, when, from Afghanistan through Khyber Pass or Khyber Pass, an invader began to invade India, an attack. So between 1000 and 1031, he came about 16, 17 times, looting primarily temples—religious temples because that's where the wealth was. The kings will store the wealth in the temples, and he would loot the temple.

There was a very small—Khyber Pass—only one place from where invaders could come from Afghanistan and Parashat, etc. India could have built a small wall of India. We didn't need a great wall of India to keep the invaders out, but the Indian rulers never built this small wall. To the point that almost 200 years later, in 1191, Muhammad Gauri comes from Afghanistan all the way to Delhi—almost a thousand kilometers—and he fights with the Hindu king of Delhi; he loses, goes back. In 1192, he comes back, defeats Prithviraj, kills him, and Delhi is taken over by Muslims in 1192.

So what has weakened— and the Hindu kingdoms from 1000 to 1190—almost 200 years—is a religious ritual called the horse sacrifice. Hindu kings are sending a horse, and behind the horse are a few hundred young men. They're going into a village; either the village becomes their property and begins to pay tribute to their king or they have to fight a war. So at that time, Delhi's small—it's a bigger kingdom, and the two Hindu kings are sons of real sisters, so their first cousins. One of the kings, of Kannauj, starts this Asvamedha—the horse sacrifice—but his brother, who is a smaller kingdom but more competent ruler, refuses to accept the sovereignty of his cousin. So hatred develops between two cousins who are governing two important kingdoms in North India.

So after, in 1192, when the Muslim invader has been defeated by the king of Delhi, the king of Kannauj invites the Muslim invader to please come back, kill my brother. And that's how Delhi is taken over by Muslims. And then Muslims—different dynasties—different kinds of Muslims rule India until they ruled Delhi until 1858.

So how much—and how much to what degree were they ruling over the rest of what was India as well during that period of time?

It was expanding and contracting. The Mughal Empire for about 200 years or so was the most expansive, but the British had begun to come during the Mughal Empire, but only to trade with permission. The French in the desert—

And what was the consequence of the Mughal Empire?

Well, in relationship to the typical Indian's life and to the structure of the state. They built the Taj Mahal, but they didn't build wheelbarrows for the laborers who were carrying bricks and stones. So you build pyramids; you build Taj Mahal; you build palaces. This is the whole middle ages, but you don't care for the wheelbarrows. So even today, women are carrying bricks and stones and mud and cinnamon on their head as they're building four-story halls because you don't care for the poor.

So India was weakened by what? A religious ritual Ashvamedha, which was supposed to make a king very strong. So kings did become strong; the nation became weak and divided, which allowed Muslim rulers and then French and British and others to come and take over. So India for a thousand years, almost—eight, nine hundred years—was slave. Now, there were pockets of Hindu kingdoms, but some of those Hindu kingdoms were worse, even compared to the Muslim rulers, like South India, Travancore.

And these all these rulers—Hindu and Muslim alike—existed in a completely exploitative relationship in relationship to their subjects. There was no conception of individual worth, as you point out. There was no conception that the life of a slave, let alone a female slave, let's say, or even a female period for that matter, had any real intrinsic value.

That unfortunately is correct. Let me give you a very shameful example of what this means. So in South India, in what is now Trivandrum, Travancore, no lower caste woman was allowed to cover her top. If she covered her top, she had to prepare breast tax, which depends on the size of her breast. Now, even the upper-caste women in Travancore, this is Kerala, South India, they, when they go into the temple, they have to remove their upper cloth because you're honoring the priests; you have to be bare-chested.

On the street, if a noble—someone from a noble family, royalty—is passing through on the street, the upper-caste women have to take their cloth off and throw petals—flower petals. This is Hindu India while the British are ruling in India. So these parts of history are suppressed because they are shameful. And obviously, they are shameful that there is more slavery in the Hindu kingdom of Travancore in South India than in the Muslim kingdom in the north.

So this is partly because of the caste system. So the horse sacrifice was one thing that had weakened India; the caste system had weakened India because if the kings are exploiting my wealth and putting that wealth in gold and silver and diamonds in the temples, when an invader comes and attacks that king, why should I sacrifice my life? Why should I fight and defend my kingdom? Because I have no stake in this kingdom. You are treating me as untouchable.

And this is what is happening in India today: every day, the lower caste people who are trying to recover their dignity call that the Hindu religious system has made me lower than animals. Jesus Christ is making me a human being, a child of God. You won't allow me to enter your temple; Jesus is making me a priest of the Most High God. So if they want to convert, there's persecution happening every day in India, and the Supreme Court—

So now you also made the case that in the caste system, for example, that I thought this was very interesting and quite damning from a modern perspective—or maybe from a biblical perspective—not so much a modern—that there was no sense in the Hindu caste structure that the poor and downtrodden—and let's say the untouchables—were to be revered, or served, or regarded as intrinsically noble, partly because the doctrine of karma was predicated on the assumption, A, that they deserved their suffering, had earned it in some cosmic sense, and B, that if you did even attempt to alleviate their suffering, all you were doing, all you were doing cosmically, was prolonging it because the suffering that they had garnered as a consequence of karma was deserved, and was going to be played out no matter who interfered with it.

And so there wasn't just an absence of care, let's say, in some sense for the downtrodden and the outcast, but there was an insistence that they deserved their position, and that anything that might be done to help them would actually be counterproductive.

Now, have I got that right?

Yes, except I'll take it a little further. That is that inequality, self-evident truth—including in America, that men and women are equal—was never self-evident to Americans. Whites and black slaves are equal was never self-evident to Jefferson's and Washington's and the American founding fathers. Equality is not a self-evident truth. Inequality is something—

Yeah, quite the contrary, right? You could say that equality is so non-self-evident that it would take divine fiat to make it a reality.

Exactly. So, yeah, I know that's a powerful argument. And Jefferson knew that; therefore, in the Declaration of Independence, he wrote, "We hold these truths to be sacred that all men are created equal."

Well, it was Benjamin Franklin who put pressure on him, and he was trying to please Thomas Paine, the deist, to the rationalists. We can't say that this truth is revealed to us by sacred writings. So, right, say, we hold these truths to be self-evident.

Well, I think it was—it might be fair to say that those truths are self-evident in a culture that's absolutely saturated by Protestant biblical presumptions, but they're not self-evident otherwise.

Yeah, they were not self-evident 500 years ago when Martin Luther discovered priesthood and kingship of fallen believers because at that time, if a Christian went to the church in Germany, the average Christian only got the bread—the symbol of Christ's body—not the wine, the symbol of blood. The blood was only for the priests. So the division between priests and laity resulted in war, because if all men are created equal, if every child of God is supposed to serve God as his priest, manage his kingdom as a king, then this was a revolution—a theological revolution.

So yes, and it was resisted. That was part of the reason, I suppose, that the translation of the Bible was resisted by so many people in the hierarchical church because people knew—they knew full well that if the actual words were distributed widely, that that would create a bottom-up revolution as people realized their fundamental—not only their equality, but more than that, their equality before God and their fundamental worth and their capability of having a relationship with truth.

And there is maybe no more revolutionary doctrine than that. You know, it hit home for me how revolutionary the book is—and even in Western history—that’s absolutely true.

So that doctrine of human equality, the first thing it does in Germany, 1524-1525, is the Peasants' War. Uh, I'll come back to that, but yeah—if before that, before Luther translates the Bible into German, you have Wycliffe in Oxford who has translated the Bible into English along with his friends—this is before printing existed, before Gutenberg.

And wasn't Wycliffe killed for his trouble?

Was he? He was burned—fortunately not; after he had been putted, his bones were dug out and burned. Oh yes, his bones were burned, and the ashes were scattered, but he didn't die because part of his time there were two popes or three—for a while there were three popes fighting with each other; each of them wanted British support, and Wycliffe had become a hero in Britain because of over-taxation.

So the British, they were—so he escaped that doom, but they got Tyndale, I believe, if I remember correctly.

Yes, Tyndale was planned. But Tyndale is 150 or so years after Wycliffe. But so—that's even—that's interesting. Even that, the resistance to the translation lasted multiple centuries. It wasn't a flash in the pan. It was an extremely dangerous act to translate the Bible into a vernacular language, and you've got to ask yourself why.

You're absolutely right. Because it was Bishop Arundel, the Archbishop of Canterbury, who banned Wycliffe's Bible and prohibited that no one is allowed to translate the Bible into English without permission. So Tyndale spent a whole year knocking at the doors of three bishops, trying to get permission to translate the Bible into English—all three of them refused.

So he became a refugee, which was also illegal—to leave England without permission—he left England, went to Wittenberg under Luther, began to translate the Bible, the New Testament; then he came to Belgium; that's where he printed it to smuggle it into England. So anyone who was found 100 years earlier with a page of Wycliffe's Bible, hand-copied, he could be burnt at stake because the church has banned translation of the Bible.

So the Bible was an explosive revolutionary—

Okay, so let's go back to India, then. So now you have the Muslims ruling—Muslims ruling India, and you have the Hindu gods or the Hindu kings ruling India, and it's a caste-structured society—and there's no shortage of oppression, and there's no real development at the individual level—and the British start a mercantile relationship. And then the biblical corpus enters the Indian landscape through the operation, fundamentally, of the British, but of missionaries—not the mercantilists, per se.

Yes, although a fair number of Christian-influenced British politicians were already pushing favorably for India's independent development several hundred years ago, way before it actually happened.

Yes, now a few missionaries from Europe had come to South India before the British missionary movement got going, and they had begun to translate the Bible into some of the South Indian languages, etc., but this was a small private initiative. The missionary movement per se got started only in 1793 when William Carey, a cobbler in England, wrote a book. A small book inquiring whether the contemporary church is under an obligation to go and evangelize the world—disciple all nations—or was that a command given only for the first generation of apostles?

So his book, An Inquiry into the Obligation of the Christians to Disciple Our Nations—it's a very long title—that's what begins the modern missionary movement. But ironically, 1793, when his book is published, is the year when the British Parliament banned missionaries from going to India. So the East India—British East India Company is governing Bengal, which includes Bangladesh, Assam, etc. That's a large part of Eastern India, but missionaries are not allowed because the evangelical movement is already creating problems for Africa. A British rule in Africa because British companies are bringing African slaves in British ships, selling them in the Caribbean, and South America, North America. The evangelical conscience believes that all human beings are equal; therefore slavery is immoral. They are creating problems, and it is the members of the House of Lords in England who have stakes in these companies. They don't want missionaries to go; they're having a good time in Africa and India; we're making a lot of money; we don't want morality injected into business.

But it does get injected. Wilberforce manages it unbelievably well.

And you know, one of the things that I've really been struck by lately is this, um, this this post-modern and radical leftist insistence that exploitation is wrong think—well why do you think exploitation is wrong? You have to buy the doctrine of the inalienable rights of the individual and the natural rights of the individual and the divine worth of the individual before slavery is wrong. And you don't buy any of that. But if you do, but if you do buy it, you end up like Wilbur, like Wilberforce, and you put yourself on the line to what? To cost England a tremendous fortune over a multiple decades to eradicate slavery around the world because of its moral inappropriateness because of the sacred nature of each individual.

That's absolutely right—that if a woman is an animal and I can buy a cow, keep a cow in lock and chain and sell a cow, why can't I buy girls, keep them locked and sell them? Is a girl different than an animal? Does she have—

Yeah, and if power is the only force that is real and the only force that's credible, then obviously you can buy and sell if you have the power to do it. You can only not do that in some fundamental sense if there's a transcendent order, let's say that that interviews each individual with fundamental worth—the inalienable right to liberty—that a woman cannot be kept in a cage because she is made in God's image, who is free.

Yeah, so this—well, I've been thinking about that practically too, you know; so think, imagine it this way. So the reason that you have the right to liberty is so that you—let's say you have the right to conscience, and you have the right to conscience so that you can make appropriate ethical decisions, and states depend on ethical individuals to make appropriate ethical decisions—to keep the states from crumbling—which is basically the stories that go throughout the Old Testament—is that when all the individuals who make up a state become enslaved or become so corrupt that they no longer make appropriate decisions, the entire state is doomed, and everybody collapses into slavery.

And so you have your freedom; you have your liberty not so that you can do whatever you want, but so that you can exercise your conscience in relationship to your—well, let's say divine calling.

That's absolutely right. The idea of function is foundational to the whole of Western political philosophy—that the reality is that in the human body there is no organ called conscience. Conscience is an aspect of the human soul, the spiritual dimension of a human being, where my conscience judges me that you're lying, that you're shoplifting, you're a thief, you're a liar, you're a sinner.

So conscience is, um, the image of God in me, which can be corrupted but can be reformed. So this is of course the fundamental source of liberty.

When—uh, 1521, 1522, Martin Luther is standing in the Diet of Worms. The Emperor has called for Luther to be tried because the Roman Empire cannot be divided when the Turks are attacking it; he wants unity, so he wants Luther to explain himself, and he says, okay, these are your books. Yes, sir. And these are the books of the church fathers. Yes, sir. Your books contradict the books that the church fathers have written for a long time. Yes, sir, they do.

So will you repent? He's not given an opportunity to defend himself because you are contradicting what the church fathers have said. You should recant; otherwise, you are a heretic. That means that any Christian can kill you and will go to heaven. So Luther takes 24 hours, and that happened just a few weeks ago—the 500th anniversary of the Diet of Worms—when Luther spends a whole night in prayer that, do I—can I save my life, or do I remain true to my conscience? So he makes that classic statement that it's not safe; it's not right to go against one's conscience.

I will repent; I'm not being proud. Or not again—I will repent if you convince me from scriptures and plain reason. If not, I'm sorry; I can't repent. So help me God; that's right here I stand, so help me God.

No, that doctrine of conscience comes from Paul, uses the word repeatedly in his epistles, such as Timothy and Titus—that this is the true religion, not all the rituals, not all the sacraments, but to keep your heart clean, pure—right? It's the prophetic voice within, essentially, yes.

So then it is debated, and, um, Milton—John Milton, the Puritan poet—uses it in his argument for Areopagitica, and he argues for liberty to—even if I'm wrong, I should have the freedom to express my false ideas; you should counter my false ideas with, um, arguments and evidence, not by the sword.

Yeah, that's part of the refinement of conscience, you could say. That so then, at that time during Oliver Cromwell's reign, the Long Parliament appoints Westminster Assembly—assembly of 70 or so theologians who write Westminster Confession. Chapter 20 is the chapter on conscience. It was—so the Parliament accepts Westminster Confession as the summary of biblical Christianity, and it was true that the conscience enters the dark of the political philosophy of the West.

That the root of it goes back to 1528—lecture, sermon.

And how does that how does that parallel Wilberforce's emergence as an anti-slavery campaigner?

He comes—300 years later, uh, yeah, but the background of it is Martin Luther's sermon, which John Locke quotes in his Letter Concerning Toleration, which, uh, Madison—James Madison, when introducing the Bill of Rights in America, he quotes Martin Luther's sermon. It's called, "On Two Kingdoms," that there are two kingdoms: the kingdom of Christ, which has come into this world, and the kingdom of man; the emperor and the church—the pope have authority over me in some areas, but the church doesn't own my soul, emperor doesn't own my soul. If I have accepted Jesus as my Lord, it's God's kingdom has come into my heart; Christ is my Lord; He is the King of Kings; He's the ruler of the kings of the earth. Therefore, my heart belongs to Jesus, and the government has no business in interfering with my conscience.

With mine. Ok, so now—now these ideas come into India, and you talked about the missionary distribution in the vernacular, and one of the things you do quite nicely, I thought, in the book that made your world is detail out the effects on the language and the culture of the societies in which— to which the Bible was, uh, what would you say, where the—to the languages in the societies that were provided with or offered a translation of the Bible, because it meant a codification of the language, and often the transformation of what was only a spoken language into a written language.

To the demarcation of the language as a consequence to the possibility of a written civilization and then also to the possibility of that society now developing its own literature, literary vernacular, as an offshoot of the biblical corpus—a very interesting development of the word, as a consequence of the translation efforts, because they often get pilloried in the West, right? Because the missionaries are seen as part of this oppressive Western colonial movement that—the that the radical types who criticize it don't differentiate, right? They just assume it's a uni—a unipolar oppressive mechanism that's orchestrated from the top down and purely exploitive.

Absolutely. So Wilberforce is a central figure in this. Three things flow out of his 20-year battle on behalf of India. One is permitting missionaries to go as educators because all the education was in the Department of the Church; it didn't become a department of the state until much later. So at that time, every teacher is a reference; you know, university teachers, etc.—bishop is the chancellor of the universities.

So Wilberforce is—he fought for 20 years that it's not enough to send only soldiers and traders to India; we must—God could not have their belief in providence, that history is not a mindless series of accidents, that there is God or a repetitive cycle. Yes, there is providence guiding history; God called Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. You follow me, I will bless you; I will bless all the nations through you.

So blessing India was part of God's plan; He could not possibly have given India to the British to exploit but to be blessed; therefore, we must send missionaries to educate India so that they can govern themselves. So it takes 20 years, he loses—

Okay, so let—we should—let's not gloss over that too quickly. So what we have here is, in the midst of, um, a structure that could have turned into a permanent empire, we have a movement within that empire itself that draws on its own conscience to reveal to itself that any continued history of exploitation, regardless of how profitable, is immoral.

Now that happens with the slave trade, and it happens in the case of, well, much of the British Empire, but particularly in India. So they're working against their own financial, um, interests in many—in many ways.

It's certainly the case with the war against the slave trade, absolutely. And so that's very weird, right? We want to remark on just how strange that is. That's unheard of.

Well, let me illustrate that Africa point first. British ships are going to Africa; Britain is an industrial country; it is producing a lot of things, is taking them, selling them in Africa. Africa is not producing anything at that point, so the ships have to go empty to the Caribbean or the Americas. There's a limit to how many monkeys and zebras you can take.

So they begin to take slaves, which are needed in the Caribbean, in the tea plantations and other plantations. So you take the slaves and then they're making sugar, and you're bringing sugar back to Europe, so this triangle of trade—if the ships are going empty from Africa to the Americas, then the shipping business in slavery can get a—that can get a toehold because it's way outside on the fringes of the commercial activity and invisible, at least to begin with, in some sense.

And if your ships are not allowed to take slaves, the Spanish will; the Portuguese will. So you might as well.

So when Wilberforce is fighting against the slave trade, he is hurting the Britons' economic interests, and everybody knows that, and that's why it takes a whole lifetime. I've read calculations that the British spent more fighting the slave trade than they gained economically from supporting slavery to begin with, by quite a large margin. I don't know if that's true, you know, but—

No, that's true. That's—that's what Adam Smith had already argued in, uh, his book, The Wealth of Nations, which was published 1776, the same year as American Independence. And he argues that free workers are much more productive and profitable than a slave.

So right, so that was true, except that that was an academic theory. In reality, the shipping company needs to take something from Africa to the Americas to make the navigation work. So, uh, in the end, whether the slaves are more productive or harmful, right, right, right, isn't it—is an economic debate, but so this is why Wilberforce is a troublemaker. He never goes to India, but he's important for the abolition of sati—widow burning—as well.

But he has two main assistants. Zachary McCauley is his right-hand man again against his fight against slavery. Charles Grant is Wilberforce's right-hand man. The Charles Brown actually becomes a member of parliament and becomes the director of the East India Company. His will—before his right-hand man again about how to reform India, beginning with how to reform the British misrule in India, because he has personally seen that the East India Company in governing India is a gang of public robbers.

Lord McCauley, the son of Zachary McCauley, he's the one who called East India Company's rule for the first 50 years as a gang of public robbers—"rule of an evil genie" because the soldiers and traders who had come to India, they were basically riff-raff of British society, like the conquistadors—

In yes, in the new world, correct. So they were looting. Did God give India to us so that we might loot India? This was the conscience troubling Charles Brown, and he wrote the book in 1793 at the request of Wilberforce. It was not published in '93; it was hand-copied. They had copies in those days. This was for the members of Parliament because the charter of the East India Company—they had the monopoly, so the charter had to be renewed every 20 years.

And in this was written to influence the renewal of the charter and to insert a missionary clause. So from 1793 onwards, Grant begins to play a very important role, although Wilberforce is the face, the political face of that movement. So they—fight for education, and the Parliament finally, in 18—

Yeah, they granted a hundred thousand—

Is that—that was—they granted a hundred thousand pounds or they forced the distribution of a hundred thousand pounds?

A hundred thousand rupees, which was, sorry, equal to the pound, more or less, that from its profit, East India Company must spend a hundred thousand rupees for public education, so that we begin to train Indians to govern India.

Now, this right again is a revolutionary, an unbelievably revolutionary concept. It's unprecedented. It's an anti-empire in the extreme, and Lord Macaulay, who argued and finally won the debate in Parliament in 1833, he says exactly what you're saying: that this has never happened, but this would be our greatest glory—not that we are ruling over illiterate people, but that we found people living in darkness, incapable of governing themselves, and we so ruled over them that they became capable of ruling themselves.

Okay, now, so let's take that apart a bit because, you know, the radical types, again, are going to insist that England or that Britain imposed English as a language on India, and that the fundamental—again, the fundamental orientation was exploitative. But one of the things that you point out quite clearly is that the missionary types in particular, driven by their biblical presuppositions, did everything they could to translate the Bible itself into the local vernaculars—into every language that anybody else spoke.

And that's part of that general missionary evangelizing proclivity. I went to the Museum of the Bible in Washington. They have a really—it's a great museum, by the way. Um, they have a very interesting room there that contains virtually every one copy of a Bible translated into almost all the languages that the Bible has been translated into, and there's a variety of empty shelves, although a small proportion that are devoted to the next decades.

I think they figured the Bible will be translated into virtually every living language within 40 years from now—something like that. And so those biblical translators had tremendous respect for the local vernaculars. They translate—they transformed them into written languages, which was no small feat, and they enabled all of those people to start to learn to read and to think for themselves.

That's—oh, that's how it looks, right? So—and it's likewise the case that in Europe, the monasteries were the—the central focus of what became partly industrial production and also institutes of higher education. So this idea that the—the biblical world was—was opposed to education and to enlightenment in general—that's false; that's just false; it's backwards.

Absolutely true.

Um, everyone agreed, whether Christians or non-Christians, politicians—everyone agreed that if India had to be reformed, vernaculars had to be developed because that is what happened in Europe. Latin was the language of learning—language, of course, but with the Reformation, German and French and English and Spanish and Portuguese—every language began to be developed.

And so, because that's what the principle of human equality meant, that every child should be able to study in his own mother tongue—in his own heart language.

Right? Well, every soul had to be reached. Yes, but also not just reached to be taken to heaven but reached to become king, because the Lamb of God shed His blood so that slaves of Satan are transformed into sons of God serving their Father managing His affairs, doing His will in their life, and making sure that God's will is being done on earth.

So everyone becomes a king. And therefore, the truth of God—what is God's will? I can't do God's will if I don't know God; if I don't know His will. So everyone has to be educated in his own mother tongue. This is what begins. This is the thrust of the entire missionary enterprise—British and non-British—in India.

But the question is, what exactly will develop Indian vernaculars? No pundits, no imam had any interest in any of Indian languages at that time. India had three classical languages: Sanskrit was the language of Brahmanas, but only of males; Arabic was the language of the mosque of imams, and the only— and the only language that the Quran could be distributed in at that time—and Persian.

So Mughal Empire, Humayun, had made Persian the official court language of India in order to keep the non-Persian-speaking Muslims away from the throne. So Persian was a sophisticated language, but in India, it was used as a language of discrimination, just as Sanskrit was used as a language of discrimination against women, against lower castes.

So no Hindu Muslim scholar had any interest in any of Indian languages. The current national language, Hindi, didn't exist; Urdu didn't exist. There were dialects that these missionaries began to transform. First was Hindustani.

Well, right, that—we should concentrate on that too because people don't really understand this, you know. When I went to Switzerland in 1982, there were still places in the backwoods in Switzerland where the people at the top of the mountain spoke a language so different from the people at the bottom that they couldn't understand each other.

And so the rule of thumb for languages isn't, well, the language is basically comprehensible by everyone, but there are various accents. The rule is that there's an unbelievable multitude of dialects such that people in one village can't understand the people in the next village. And so then the European missionaries come in and start to codify and unite these languages, and also to give them their written expression—first of all, developing an alphabet, often.

Correct. So, um, this—the question that really occupied was that once you have these hundred thousand rupees, how is that money going to be used?

And there were processes who were saying that we should use this money to teach Sanskrit, Arabic, and Persian. So, there were already Sanskrit colleges in Benares funded by East India Company and Calcutta Madrasa teaching Arabic funded by East India Company, but others began to say that, look, if somebody masters all the Sanskrit literature, all the Arabic literature, he or she is not going to be able to give to in vernacular knowledge of science, knowledge of economics, knowledge of technology, of law, right?

These productive—these productive fields, which you also—whose development you also traced in large part to the monastic tradition.

Yes, so that's why it was the Anglicists argued that we can't educate everybody with the limited money that I have. We have—therefore, let's teach English, so there will be a group of Indians—a small group of Indians—who are able to read English literature and take the knowledge from England, give it into Bengali, give it into Gujarati and Hindi.

So the English language was brought to India to empower Indian vernaculars. Now we have many high caste Hindus—did you suppose that there's a single university in the West that actually teaches that fact?

Well, a friend of mine took these ideas, which you have read, and wrote a PhD thesis which was submitted to the University of Nagpur. Five Brahmins were appointed to study his thesis before giving him a PhD. They took five years to investigate his thesis because he was showing that every single modern Indian vernacular language is a creation of Bible translators.

After five years, they gave him a PhD, and they wrote in their recommendation later that when his book is published, it should be a required reading in all the departments of linguistics—that every single modern Indian language is a creation of Bible translators.

Uh, yes, that's—oh, that's absolutely unbelievable. And—and you—I just can't imagine that being accepted without a tremendous amount of resistance anywhere—that idea anywhere in the West—his book is called Let There Be India.

It's a big book. The shorter version is still in print; the bigger version we have to reprint.

Um, but you're absolutely right that right now there are about 100 dialects in India which are being transformed into literary languages by missionaries who are risking them. These are Indian missionaries who are going into remote areas, tribal areas, hills, uh, sacrificing everything in order to transform these people because a civilization can only grow as far as their language will take them.

A Stone Age tribe doesn't have—you can't teach science to them; you can't teach them business law because their dialect doesn't have the vocabulary, the grammar, the structure to make these books available.

So a Bible translation—what do you think? What do you think of arguments that might point out that—that the counter-argument might be, well, why should we, um, assume that the benefits of, say, Western civilization, or biblical civilization for that matter, should be imposed on these people? Why can't we let them just pursue their own development? Why should we assume that there's anything superior about biblical civilization in relationship to Stone Age life?

Yes, that's a valid question. My wife and I wrote a book on William Carey, the father of modern India, who was the main figure behind this Bible translation and publications for the first 40 years of modern India.

Now, he was also the man who fought against widow burning; he—yes, if he was important, you also have an interesting story in your book about a girl that was starved to death by her parents, actually.

Yes, but I actually—I also began a fight against the revival of widow burning in, uh, 1987; an 18-year-old widow was burnt alive. That's when I began to discover these builders of modern India, of a civilization, as part of an equally valid alternate cultural tradition.

Yes, but the point I was making was that a lady speaking in Harvard University showed our book on William Carey to her audience, and she said that here is a gentleman—a cobbler, a linguist, the father of modern India, who helped abolish widow burning—and an American, Caucasian, white woman doing PhD in Harvard. She got mad at the speaker: what right did this white English man have to say that burning widows alive is bad?

Well, that's a good—that's exactly the question we asked earlier about slavery. If you don't buy the doctrine that women have what permanent and, and, uh, divinely valuable souls and the kind of kingship in principle that you describe, then there's nothing stopping you from doing that except the arbitrary facts of chance in society.

You have to have a view of the individual as made in the image of God and equal before the law.

Yeah, in consequence, before you can say that that's self-evidently wrong. That's how it looks to me.

Exactly. So here is Harvard University teaching a PhD scholar that all cultures are equally valid. If a culture burns the widow alive, that's valid—should be respected. And what if they gas the Jews? How's that prevalent? Or what if they kill six million Ukrainians?

Not okay too, about the Jews. They have a very strong presence in Hollywood, so, uh, Harvard would be afraid of taking on Hollywood because there are some boundaries, arbitrary boundaries—but the Jews—

Right, but it isn't much of it—isn't much of a leap from widow burning to the Holocaust furnaces; it's just a matter of scale.

Exactly. So when we first discovered infanticide in India, you just alluded to it—this little girl, Sheila, 18 months old, being starved to death by—

Yeah, tell that story. Tell that story; that's a very interesting story.

Well, I was—we had—Ruth and I had—my wife, Ruth, and I had just moved into a village in the middle of nowhere in Chattarpur District, Madhya Pradesh, and I was writing my first book, The World of Gurus, which was later then published by the biggest publisher in Asia because—and it became a textbook in many universities, including Cambridge, so in the study of contemporary Hinduism was using my book.

So I was writing; we had no table and chair. We had put a small wood into the wall, and I was sitting on a stool and writing. My wife sat on the other side of the bed; my English was very poor but she had had an English education. She was editing and typing my manuscript. When I didn't have enough work for her, she would pick on her bicycle and go into the village door to door to find out how many kids were there, how many were going to school, what can we do for those who were not studying, etc.

So she ran into a 10-year-old girl, Lilta, and asked her how many brothers and sisters do you have? Lilta said, three, maybe four. So Ruth was curious: do you have four or do you have three? She said, well, three; the fourth is almost dead. Can I come and see the fourth?

So Lilta took Ruth in the middle—this is one bedroom hut with patched roof, no light—light is sunlight is just coming through the roof—and here's this 18-month-old girl in the middle of the room on a string cart with no mattress or anything under it, unable to cry—flies all over her because pus is oozing out of everywhere, including her head. Ruth began to cry; what's wrong with her? The mother's smug, "Oh, she doesn't eat anything. Whatever we give her, she won't eat."

So Ruth said, "Well, have you taken her to the hospital?"

"How can we take her to the hospital? We don't have any money."

"Really? I'll give you the money; you take her to the hospital."

"No, no, I can't go to the hospital. I can manage the city."

Well, take your husband—my husband? Who will look after the cows, the field? Ruth said, "Really? I'll give you the money to hire a laborer to look after your field for one day. You go with your husband."

"Okay, I'll come with you."

She said to get rid of Ruth, she said, "Okay, I'll talk to my husband when he comes in the evening."

So Ruth came back, started urging me that you go and talk to the husband. I've done my job; I went back. They decided they are not going to the hospital.

Why? We don't have any money.

But my wife told you she'll give the money.

Oh, we don't want to get into debt.

No, this is not a debt; this is a gift; I'll write, give it in writing.

But we don't have the time.

Well, my wife told you that she'll pay for a labor.
Then they got angry at me: "Why are you bothered?" And I couldn't understand—

That's a good question. That's a good question. I couldn't understand; the only rational explanation, as far as I'm concerned, was that they really wanted to kill the baby. Is that possible? I didn't believe that, but I decided to use that to mobilize public opinion that are you killing this girl? Why are you so heartless?

Why don't you take a knife, stab her? Why are you prolonging her misery? They were about more angry at me. I found no support in the village because I didn't know at that time that female infanticide was a common practice.

Everybody did it. If you had a second or third daughter, so I decided to— I pretended that I'm angry; I raised my voice that, look, if you don't take this child to the hospital tomorrow, I'm bringing the police here, that you are murdering this baby.

So one elderly man said to them that, look, you better listen to this guy; he's crazy; he might actually bring the police, and in that case, you will have to pay for the hospital expense. Right now, they are offering to pay; take it.

So the girl went—long story, which I discussed in the chapter—twice the process was repeated; she spent two to three weeks