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John Anderson in conversation with Vishal Mangalwadi.

On 3 February 2023, John Anderson had a conversation with Vishal Mangalwadi, an Indian philosopher and social reformer who has written several popular books on the Bible’s seismic influence on us all.

John and Vishal Mangalwadi take a deep dive into how the Bible has shaped the world today, through the lens of the British Empire in India. Vishal explains how key ideas we now take for granted, such as democracy and human rights, explicitly derive from the Bible. Vishal draws out the political implications of the Bible, from God’s commands to Israel to Jesus’s teaching to love our neighbour as ourselves, which had such an impact on the formation of modern, democratic India.

I am pretty sure that if you are reading this piece, you will know that the ‘political correctness’ brigade has been systematically seeking to silence God and any belief in His sacred text, the Bible, for a long time now. I would argue that they have seen great success in many communities around the world.

As a result, we have been left with the narrative that the only legacy of white settlement of North America, for example, has been the brutal, discriminatory, racism toward the black slaves by the white European conquerors. Consequently, the vilification, destruction, and cancellation of anything which can be traced back to white colonialism.

However, this narrative ignores the white British colonialist William Wilberforce’s role in bringing about the abolition of slavery at a huge personal cost. It also conveniently ignores William Carey, the father of modern India’s role in the abolition of sati or suttee (widow burning).

Terrible Deaths

When William Carey arrived in India from England in 1793, he was horrified to witness the Hindu practice of ‘widow burning’ on the same funeral pyre as their deceased husbands. Vishal recounts a modern-day example, purportedly the last, of this practice still surviving:

On September 4, 1987, Roop Kanwar, an eighteen-year old teen, had taken the decision to jump into the funeral pyre of her husband in an act of self-immolation that came to establish a legacy that would live on for years to come. The mass audience who were spectators to this act described it as a voluntary action.
~ Gayatri Mishra, 2020

My cursory research found references to ‘voluntary’, ‘coercive’ and ‘forced’ immolation. The underlying principle here is the notion that the women, ‘left behind after the death of their husband, have no earthly value’. I would argue that any practice of widow burning is ‘murder’ on the part of the culture or community advocating or condoning it.

It is into this culture that William Carey arrived in India, and he made it one of his life goals to abolish the practice of widow burning. He actually set about finding new husbands for Hindu widows. Then, 36 years later, in the province of Bengal, Sati Regulation (Regulation XVII) was passed by the then Governor-General of India Lord William Bentinck, making the practice of sati illegal in all of British India from 4 December 1829.

This is surely one of the great legacies of the British in India. Did the British commit atrocities in India? Undoubtedly. But surely, they should also be remembered for their fight against sati. Vishal goes on to argue that the Bible, in the hands of Carey’s evangelical missionaries, saw the creation of modern India, not British colonialism.

The Canberra Declaration brought Vishal Mangalwadi from the USA for an Australian tour in 2012.

Human Dignity

John and Vishal talked at length about the role and place of the British East India Company. Popular culture would regard their presence as an example of ‘exploitation’ of the ‘weaker’ by the ‘stronger’. This could be described as ‘bullying’ at a national scale, and thus to be abhorred.

But what if we are to view the British East India Company as coming to India to facilitate trade rather than to conquer? And that the British leadership there was to defend the traders, not to loot. Consistent with this philosophy came the notion that governments exist to defend the rights of their citizenry, rather than to lord it over them.

The core of John and Vishal’s conversation focussed on the principle that ‘love is a political force, enshrined in the Ten Commandments’, and one that grows all the stronger the more that it is given away.  Vishal argued that the notion of ‘nationhood’ is a Biblical one. Before the arrival of the British in India, the people groups were a disparate collection of warring fiefdoms with no concept of becoming a nation. British rule brought about peace and order; in fact, they fulfilled the Biblical promise given to Abraham, that God would make his descendants ‘a blessing to all the nations of the world’, thus enshrining the concept of nations and nationhood as opposed to one-world globalism.

In all the rhetoric of anti-colonialism we hear every day, we don’t hear this story, do we? In fact, listening to Vishal, I felt proud to be British and to be a descendant of a people and a nation that brought human dignity, peace, and nationhood to so many parts of the world, including Australia.

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Photo by Thirdman.