The shoddy legacy of colonialism unfortunately still lives on. It thrives as neocolonialism. All colonies have obtained freedom technically but many decades later, the subjects of these former colonies spend their hard-earned money to go and study at “prestigious” universities located in countries like the US, UK, etc. Ironically enough, students from former colonies spend their folks’ hard-earned money to enroll themselves at universities, the founders of many of which were brutal colonizers and those who continue to celebrate that colonial legacy, or if not celebrate, stay mum on the topic.
With students from all over the world enrolling at these “prestigious” universities and the movement of solidarity amongst the countries of the global south going strong, things seem to be changing for good now. Due to constant media scrutiny and voices of resistance within, many of the top elite western universities feel pressured to apologize for their colonial past.
The Yale University of US, which belongs to the elite Ivy League group of universities recently issued an apology for its connection to slavery. “Today, on behalf of Yale University, we recognize our university’s historical role in and associations with slavery as well as the labor, the experiences, and the contributions of enslaved people to our university’s history, and we apologize for the ways that Yale’s leaders, over the course of our early history, participated in slavery”, Yale University said in a statement as per various media reports.
The apology issued by Yale University regarding its involvement in the slave trade and colonialism is based on the findings of a book under the Yale Slavery and Research Project. The book titled Yale and Slavery: A History delves into the involvement of the founders of Yale University in the slave trade. Most importantly, the book tells the reader about the shoddy colonial legacy of Elihu Yale (1649-1721) after whom the university is named. The book highlights the fortunes earned by Elihu Yale through his involvement in the slave trade. Yale, born to a rich merchant family in 1649 in Boston, became a clerk for the East India company in 1670 when he was merely 21 years old. He subsequently rose through the ranks to become the Governor-President of Madras from 1684-85, and again from 1687-92.
The main reason Yale University apologized for its historical role in perpetuating slavery was its founder Elihu’s involvement with the East India Company in the sale and purchase of human beings, as per various media reports. Elihu Yale was also reportedly involved in the enslavement of many people in Madras for carrying out the routine operations of the East India Company when he was stationed there as the Governor-President.
A news report by Deccan Herald provides detailed insight into the shoddy dealings of Elihu Yale, the founder of Yale University. “Elihu was removed from the position of the governor in 1692, and is said to have returned back to England in 1699, after amassing wealth from India, being involved in myriad corrupt practices. He left India with a “record of arrogance, cruelty, sensuality, and greed”. Blight also records certain events in his book where in one instance Elihu “ordered the hanging of an Indian stable boy who had absconded with a company horse”, says the article.
However, Elihu Yale’s involvement in the slave trade is not the only reason for Yale university’s apology. The university also acknowledged that prominent members of the Yale community joined calls to stop a proposal to build a college for Black Youth in 1831. The university reportedly acknowledged through a statement that prominent members of the Yale community joined hands with New Haven leaders and citizens to stop a proposal to build a college in New Haven for black youth in 1831, which would have been America’s first black college.
Yale University is not the first prominent higher educational institution to apologize for its involvement in the horrors of slavery though. Before Yale, Loyola University Maryland reportedly acknowledged that it had ties to the 19th-century sale of enslaved people. In September 2023, Georegetown University and the Jesuits reportedly gifted 27 million USD to benefit a foundation that helps descendants of enslaved people who were sold to pay off debt at the school in the 19th century. The desire to confront disturbing racist legacies in the US picked up pace in 2020 after the death of George Floyd, a Black Man who was killed by a Minneapolis officer.
But the important question remains: is apology enough to get away from the horrors of slavery and colonialism that these universities not just indulged in during the distant past but continue to demonize and stereotype the “natives” through their biased academic research in the humanities and social sciences? The emphasis of all these apologies seems to be the Blacks to whom the former colonizers rightfully owe an apology to. But none of these “prestigious” universities, especially the ones in the UK have apologized for the horrors of British colonialism inflicted on hapless Bharatiyas. On the contrary, these universities continue to perpetuate those colonial stereotypes by sponsoring motivated Hinduphobic research in their Indology and Post-Colonial Studies departments. The top authority figures who dominate studies of Hindu Dharma in the west are shockingly Hinduphobic professors and scholars who propagate dangerous anti-Hindu stereotypes through their so-called academic works and demonize Hindus and Hindu Dharma.
The book “Ten Heads of Ravana: A Critique of Hinduphobic Scholars” edited by Rajiv Malhotra and Divya Reddy exposes the cabal of Hinduphobic scholars dominating much of the academic discourse on Hinduism.
The book consists of academic essays written by different scholars. Each essay is devoted to exposing a Hinduphobic academic through purely academic methods, by delving deep into the motivations of their work, highlighting the flaws in their main arguments by quoting directly from their own works or paraphrasing these. Wendy Doniger, Sheldon Pollock, Michael Witzel, and Audrey Truschke are some of the prominent anti-Hindu voices from the international academia that have been critically interrogated in this book.
The study of Hindu Dharma and Bharat in top-notch western universities unfortunately, reproduces the age-old colonial stereotypes of the “natives”, portraying Hindus as “dirty heathens” and Hindu Dharma as an irrational religion seeped in superstition. Both British colonialism and Islamic colonization are glorified in the context of Bharat while ancient Bharatiya culture is abused and demonized by cooking up conspiracy theories of the supposed caste discrimination in Hindu Dharma, even though the term caste in the Bharatiya context was cooked up by colonizers anyways.
The western academia is obsessed with the topic of “caste” when it comes to conducting social science and humanities research on subjects related to Bharat. No wonder then that even as the universities in the US are apologizing for the horrors of slavery, Hindus in the US are getting vilified as some kind of colonizers inflicting tortures on Hindus belonging to “lower castes” even as many Hindus in America barely have an idea of what caste they belong to. Thus, in the case of Bharat, the western academia is trying to subvert the narrative of colonialism by portraying the colonized people of Bharat as colonizers. As per this new conspiracy theory of western academia, the upper-caste Hindus are the real colonizers and thus, it’s not the British or the Islamic invaders that the Bharat has much to blame but the upper-caste Hindus are the real bad guys, the main villain as it were. As simplistic and crude it sounds, this is actually what’s happening in western academia.
Thus, issuing formal apologies is all good. But it’s perhaps high time the western academia did a solid soul-searching and stopped promoting Hinduphobic and Bharatphobic research in its Humanities and Social Sciences Departments perpetuating colonial stereotypes.
Perhaps it would be apt to end the piece with an X post by the Coalition of Hindus of North America ( CoHNA) which says that even though Yale University has taken a good initiative by apologizing for the horrors of slavery, a lot more needs to be done.
