Thread by @cbkwgl

Mosaic Distinction: Faith is more important than common sense 😇

https://twitter.com/IndoChristian_H/status/1343118623011819521

Now some serious stuff. Three of the most impactful crops these missionary backed imperialists grew in India -
1. Opium to destroy China. British India in 1906 produced more drugs than Columbia and Afghanistan combined at their respective peaks.

https://twitter.com/IndoChristian_H/status/1343118623011819521

2. Indigo leading to widespread famines in Bengal
3. Groundnut for which vast swathes of forests were chopped down because groundnut doesn't grow in shade. Anantapur still sees the devastating effects of that.

Cotton. This is how Europeans thought about cotton. And cotton existed from the time there ancestors were covering themselves with hides and leaves. They called it Vegetable Lamb of Tartary.

This one I like it. You chop the fingers of the weavers who make the finest cotton and then reintroduce Indian cotton to the world? This is called Ehiteman's Burden - you create a mess and call cleaning up that mess a burden.

https://twitter.com/IndoChristian_H/status/1343120664706732032

Another example of Mosaic Distinction here.

https://twitter.com/IndoChristian_H/status/1343120947423821827

So, these colonizers went back in time before the Tocharians arrived in 1500 BC and taught them about ginger? Even today it is debated whether the word Ginger came from Sanskrit or Tocharian - and that was even before the mythical Moses is created.

https://twitter.com/IndoChristian_H/status/1343121349888262145

This makes absolute sense. They introduced food Indians were eating for millenia to Indians and they introduced potatoes for the missionaries.

https://twitter.com/IndoChristian_H/status/1343121349888262145

May be, that's why we don't have the words like Potato Christians unlike Rice Christian - either no one ate potatoes or stopping supply didn't cause massive food shortages.

They forgot to tell one thing about cocoa - permissible levels of cockroach body parts per 100 grams of chocolate.

https://twitter.com/IndoChristian_H/status/1343127181182947330

See. Inspite of all this, they weren't able to reproduce the Vegetarian Lamb of Tartary in England!!

https://twitter.com/IndoChristian_H/status/1343127273780563968

What exactly did they achieve by doing that?

https://twitter.com/IndoChristian_H/status/1343127378252337152

But there is one important thing which Indians taught the missionaries and which became a part and parcel of their lives. How to clean one's own bottom.

Reminds me...do you know which is the largest rodent? It's not capybara and that's because according to missionaries, capybara is a fish. To convert Venezuelans who loved capybara flesh, they allowed them to eat this fish during Lent.

https://twitter.com/cbkwgl/status/1346736989593161728