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Education
January 14, 2026
India was the crown jewel of the British Empire, its largest constituent part. Like many other colonies, India gained its independence from the British but retained much of the infrastructure and bureaucratic political structures that the British had established. Compared to her neighbors, India has fared much better in sustaining the social order that was bequeathed to her by the British. Pakistan, Myanmar, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and the Maldives all have had political revolutions, and while India has had her share of struggles, India has remained a unity despite our huge size and the fact that we have over 22 languages scheduled in our constitution and a multitude of cultures. Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s first prime minister, once said that India is 28 countries united by the British railways.
Despite the fact that the British Empire is responsible for India's national existence, the country has increasingly tried to distance herself from Britain and the West in general. Positively put, independent India increasingly boasts proudly of her ancient culture and tradition, to the downplaying of Western culture. India resists Christian missionary work with violence, accusing them (among other things) of eroding the culture and traditions of India. Yoga and Ayurvedic medicine have been in the West since the early twentieth century. There has been a call for the Sanskritization of India as a way to purge India of anything that reminds us of our rulers (both British and Muslim). But this is easier said than done. The Islamic and European Colonial parts of our history are as much a part of us as the ancient Gupta or Vijaynagara empires. It is impossible to turn back the clock. The end result of this vain attempt is a fusion of cherry-picked ancient Indian symbols with secular modernism. One example of this is the move of the federal legislature buildings from the ones built by the British in the 1920s to a modern “state of the art” complex, which carries historic Indian symbols like the peacock and the banyan tree. It is supposed to be a “net-zero carbon footprint” project with “modern waste management and water recycling.”
What this kind of historical revisionism amounts to is the imitation of modern and postmodern Western standards, rather than the Western standards of 100 or 200 years ago. India has been becoming increasingly westernized since Vasco de Gama set foot in Calicut at the end of the fifteenth century. The question is not whether India will be westernized, but what kind of westernization will India undergo. The Magna Carta, Westphalian democracy, and the Westminster Confession of Faith are Western. But so is the anti-trinitarianism of Hegel. The former are heights of Christian civilization; the latter was a safe haven for the British-educated Indians who were confronted by William Carey with the Gospel. Anti-Christian philosophies of the West facilitated a thoroughgoing Unitarian revolt among the intelligentsia of nineteenth-century India, which eventually devolved back into pantheism. This is the philosophical basis on which modern Hinduism exists today.
Only Christianity redeems and preserves that which is worth preserving in a culture.
India has accepted the anti-God West as far as it made her rich and gave her a platform to preach her own doctrines of reincarnation and karma. The nineteenth-century Scottish missionary Alexander Duff warned the British about the ill effects that a merely secular Western education might have on India. He said that while it may, in all its rationalism, strike a blow to old paganism in all its superstition, it will not be able to give another animating principle to the people in exchange for the old one. Mere secularism will not be able to provide a system of morals and a vision for organizing society, but instead will lead to ‘excesses of incredulity and indiscriminate outrage.’ The old spirit being cast out and not supplied with a robust Christianity, will gather seven worse ones, and the last state will be worse than the first.
The national mind of a people like that of India — among whom the religious sentiment or propensity has ever been manifested with peculiar power, — might, with greater fervor than ever, rally round the standards of a faith which, though fiercely proscribed, had still lingered and survived behind the entrenchment of customs, manners and usages, rendered inveterate by the practice of ages; — and might, with greater tenacity than ever, cling to forms and observances, the abrogation of which had entailed nought but devastation and ruin; and the absence of which had left a vacuum not to be supplied by the dim abstractions of science or the frigid speculations of philosophy. In a word, the temples might be repaired; the idols reseated; the offerings and sacrifices renewed; the rites and ceremonies reinstituted; and the festivals celebrated with greater pomp and magnificence than ever.
In other words, the economic, cultural, and political benefits of being tied to the West will only reinforce the ancient paganism if Christianity is not at the heart and soul of it. And that is precisely where India is today. Modern Hinduism in India exists in the shadow of the anti-Christian movement that has been at home in the West since the Enlightenment.
So, the choice before the church in India today is not whether she will be Western in her outlook, but what kind of elements of the West she will adopt. The choice is not even between whether she will be Indian, but what kind of Indian she will be. For the vast body of Indian antiquity that even anti-Christian elements in India rely on was discovered and preserved by the British (cf. The Asiatic Society, founded by Sir William Jones). Indian Christians, such as Krishna Mohan Banerjee and Ramchandra Yeshudas, continued the exploration of India’s glorious ancient past from a biblical perspective. It is impossible to study Indian history without acknowledging the influence of Western civilization, which has been shaped by the redemptive grace of God. Indian Christians have a great inheritance in the West, with all the treasures of Western civilization being theirs to inherit as children of Abraham. The task for the Indian Christian today is to pick up that task that was left off at the end of the nineteenth century, when secularism hijacked the missionary institutions in India and co-opted them to be reduced to factories of English-speaking worker bees. A reactionary antagonism towards the West will never yield the kind of cultural capital needed to transform India in the image of our Creator. It is impossible to undo the effects of westernization in India; indeed, it is futile to try. A grateful application of the true and good resources inherited from the West is a necessary prerequisite to long-lasting, multigenerational culture building in India.
So, contrary to the fears of Christ’s enemies in India, Christianity does not come to destroy culture but to fulfill it.
I am convinced that the posited antithesis between the East and the West that is spoken of today is a proxy for the true antithesis that exists between the Christian and the non-Christian. The only way to truly preserve the East is to make it Christian. I am certain that the primary reason we are aware of Greek and Roman culture today is that Christianity conquered Greece and Rome. Every other culture razes its geographic predecessors to the ground. Only Christianity redeems and preserves that which is worth preserving in a culture. Is Western culture to be rejected in India because it was the culture of our conquerors? Were Greek and Latin rejected in England and France because they were the languages of their conquerors? No colonial angst forbade the appropriation of Latin and Greek to the larger European cultural milieu. Was this merely because time heals all wounds? Not quite. It was the binding loyalties and affinities that resulted from an underlying (and sometimes overarching) Christendom.
So, contrary to the fears of Christ’s enemies in India, Christianity does not come to destroy culture but to fulfill it. If the world is a unity (it is), if objective truth exists (it does), and if God is working His way in the world to form it into the image of His Son (He is), then we should expect Christian nations across the world to come to be united by ties impossible in the ancient pagan world. We have seen that happen among the warring nations of Europe so that now we collectively call them ‘the West.’ We should now expect that to happen with all the other nations where Christ’s empire has arrived. We are in a transition phase in history. God is shaking all things so that that which is unshakable will remain. A new Christendom is underway, and it will not be brought about apart from the faithful labors of individual Christians across the globe.
