How Western media’s contemporary narrative about India was seeded
The history of the Western media’s reportage on India is concomitant with the history of the British colonisation of India. Before the advent and growth of newspapers as a separate industry and journalism as an independent profession, Europe’s knowledge about India emanated from travelogues, missionary accounts, trading reports, and bureaucratic and military writings. The common theme that stands out in all this gigantic body of literature spread roughly over five hundred years is the sheer amount of detail covering even the size and colours of say, leaves, flowers, barks, shrubs and trees. This observatory detail naturally extended even to Indians as a people, and the common theme in this zone was a uniform contempt for the manners, customs, and religion of the Hindoos. The contempt had its roots in the innate Christian bigotry against the heathens. This element becomes clearer when we observe their writings about Indian Muslims who then formed the ruling class in large parts of nort...