Book Review - Mother India by Katherine Mayo

 

Mother India by Katherine Mayo
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Her scurrilous writing displays her blatant antipathy towards all things Indian – the country, the religion, the culture, the natives. So why did she set out to write this misandrous and sanctimonious piece of garbage. I struggled through it in the hope of finding something redeeming in her ‘research’. Indians in her perception are a teeming mass of scrawny, malnourished, lascivious pedophiles.

In the courts and alleys and bazaars many little bookstalls, where narrow-chested, near-sighted, anaemic young Bengali students, in native dress, brood over piles of fly-blown Russian pamphlets.

How this seething mass of sweaty stunted skeletal scarecrows managed to overthrow the mighty British Empire, she cannot explain. One gets the impression that, but for the benevolent British, Indians would have still been in the Stone Age. Did Indians really justify suttee through this convoluted logic?

"We husbands so often make our wives unhappy," said this frank witness, "that we might well fear they would poison us. Therefore did our wise ancestors make the penalty of widowhood so frightful - in order that the woman may not be tempted."

Were famines so bad?

pounded bones of the dead were mixed with flour and sold...Destitution at length reached such a pitch that men began to devour each other and the flesh of a son was preferred to his love.

or again

Weomen were scene to rost their Children...A man or woman noe sooner dead but they were Cutt in pieces to be eaten.

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