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In this book, we analyze the psycho-social consequences faced by Indian American children after exposure to the school textbook discourse on Hinduism and ancient India. We demonstrate that there is an intimate connection—an almost exact correspondence—between James Mill’s colonial-racist discourse (Mill was the head of the British East India Company) and the current school textbook discourse. This racist discourse, camouflaged under the cover of political correctness, produces the same psychological impacts on Indian American children that racism typically causes: shame, inferiority, embarrassment, identity confusion, assimilation, and a phenomenon akin to racelessness, where children dissociate from the traditions and culture of their ancestors.


This book is the result of four years of rigorous research and academic peer-review, reflecting our ongoing commitment at Hindupedia to challenge the representation of Hindu Dharma within academia.

Brahmacharya

From Hindupedia, the Hindu Encyclopedia

By Jit Majumdar


  1. residing in Brahman; following the mode of Brahman; living and acting in concordance with the creative aspects of Brahman
  2. following the mode of (self) expansion; one who strives for excellence in all domains and spheres of life and human activity; one who pursues virtue, excellence, and divinity; one who aims at expanding one’s consciousness to embrace the totality of Reality in all its facets and spheres; one who strives to centre one’s spiritual development in sustainable, consistent and tested values; immersing in higher awareness or cosmic awareness
  3. in the age-based social system of Brahminical Hinduism, the first of the four āśrama, or stages/ phases in an individual’s life, covering the period from pre-pubescence to youth, where one’s main occupation is the practicing of religious, spiritual and intellectual disciplines, acquiring of knowledge and moral codes of conduct, development of individual skills and talents, studying under a preceptor, and maintaining bachelorhood and celibacy. Traditionally, this phase is marked by strictly disciplined or rather restricted lifestyles, wherein frugality, shunning of material pleasures or luxury or sensory indulgences, with an excessive and overt stress on sexual abstinence both by the laymen as well as by religious figures and interpreters of religion and spirituality (so much so as to render the term practically synonymous with sexual abstinence in common definition, mass culture and popular imagination), though that is nor the literal, technically or contextually correct meaning, neither at all an essential prerequisite for being a brahmachārī and performing the roles that define this phase.

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