Colonial Discourse and the Suffering of Indian American Children is now freely available.
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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.

Caņdāla

From Hindupedia, the Hindu Encyclopedia

By Jit Majumdar


  1. pertaining to Canda; belonging to Canda
  2. savage; angry; wild; untamed; fierce; dangerous
  3. an ancient social group spread throughout the Indian subcontinent, belonging to many linguistic and ethnic identities, who were traditionally engaged in occupations like burning or burying the dead, collection and disposal of garbage and waste, and sometimes also hunting and selling meat. They normally lived on the fringes of human settlements, and were aggressively demonized, vilified and regarded as dehumanized, unclean, highly polluting and untouchable by the rest of society, specially in Brahminical Hinduism, causing the term to continue upto presaent times as a derogatory expletive to refer to a mean, wicked or lowly person, specially in northern India, but also as a swear word in southern India and Srilanka as “sandala” (fem: caņdālinī): a Tāntrika goddess; another name for the Mahāvidyā goddess Mātańgī, who was worshipped by the caņdāla people, and is seen as hailing from the caņdāla society.

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