Brahmanical Intolerance in Early India

The construct of tolerant Hinduism seems to have been of relatively recent origin and seems to have first acquired visibility in Western writings on India. In the seventeenth century, Francois Bernier (1620–1688), the French doctor who travelled widely in India, was one of the early Europeans to speak of Hindus as a tolerant people. In the eighteenth century, the German philosopher Johann Gotfried Von Herder (1744–1803), the forerunner of the Romantic glorification of India, referred to Hindus as ‘mild’ and ‘tolerant’, and as ‘the gentlest branch of humanity’; and Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) said that they ‘do not hate the other religions but they believe they are also right’. Such views find a more prominent place in the writingsof Orientalists like William Jones, according to whom ‘the Hindus . . . would readily admit the truth of the Gospel but they contend that it is perfectly consistent with their Sastras’.