Anti-Indian sentiment

Anti-Indian sentiment (historically known as Hinduphobia; also referred to as anti-Indianism, Indophobia) refers to prejudice, collective hatred, and discrimination which is directed at Indian people for any variety of reasons. According to Kenyan-American academic Ali Mazrui, Indophobia is "a tendency to react negatively towards people of Indian extraction, against aspects of Indian culture and normative habits." As such, it is the opposite of Indomania, which refers to a pronounced affinity for Indians and their culture, history, and country. Anti-Indian sentiment is frequently a manifestation of racism, particularly in cases in which Indians are targeted alongside other South Asians. Regardless of their motivation, Indophobic individuals often invoke stereotypes of Indians to justify their feelings or attitudes towards them.

History

British India

The relationship between Indomania and Indophobia in the British Indology during the Victoria era was discussed by American academic Thomas Trautmann who found that Indophobia had become a norm in the early-19th century British discourse on India as the result of a conscious agenda of evangelicalism and utilitarianism, especially by Charles Grant and James Mill. Historians noted that during British rule in India, "evangelical influence drove British policy down a path that tended to minimize and denigrate the accomplishments of Indian civilization and to position itself as the negation of the earlier British Indomania that was nourished by belief in Indian wisdom."

In Grant's highly controversial 1796 work Observations on the ... Asiatic subjects of Great Britain, he criticised the Orientalists for being too respectful to Indian culture and religion. His work tried to determine the Hindus' "true place in the moral scale" and he alleged that the Hindus are "a people exceedingly depraved". Grant believed that Great Britain's duty was to civilise and Christianize the natives. This paper has often been cited as one of the foremost examples of Eurocentrism and the ideological foundation upon which colonialism was built, that is, the notion that the Western world had a duty to "civilize" indigenous populations.