Unmasking Operation Sanskrit Mill and Its Journey from England to America
Imagine stumbling across a 19th-century scam so massive it reshaped how the world sees one of humanity’s oldest civilizations i.e. India. That’s Operation Sanskrit Mill. It was a secretive East India Company project that churned out 37,671 pages of Sanskrit translations, credited to British scholars like Max Müller, H.H. Wilson, and R.T.H. Griffith. Uncredited Indian scholars, ghostwriters in a colonial factory, did the real work, twisting Hindu philosophy to serve British control.
This fraud didn’t end with the British Empire. It hopped across the Atlantic, finding a new home in American academia through scholars like Wendy Doniger, whose playful translations carry forward the same distortions. Interesting twist to this operation is that epistemological violence now fuels Western self-destruction, as India’s preserved knowledge outsmarts a West blinded by its own propaganda.
The Translation Factory Fraud
In the 1800s, the British East India Company wasn’t just looting India’s wealth; they were after its mind. To control a civilization with texts dating back thousands of years, they needed to translate Sanskrit works like the Rig-Veda, Vishnu Purana, and Ramayana into English. Operation Sanskrit Mill was their answer, a hidden operation that produced 37,671 pages, roughly 56.6 million words, from 1840 to 1910. The official story credits “Brilliant British Scholars” like Max Müller, H.H. Wilson, and R.T.H. Griffith. But let’s do the math. That’s 1.47 pages or 2,214 words every single day for 70 years. No breaks, no sick days, just relentless output.
Translating Sanskrit isn’t like typing a blog post. It’s brutal work, decoding an ancient language, cross-referencing commentaries like Sāyaṇa’s, and annotating complex ideas, all by hand with quill pens. H.H. Wilson died in 1860, yet his Rig-Veda translations kept rolling out until 1888. Griffith, in his 60s and 70s, supposedly translated four Vedas in nine years. Max Müller’s Sacred Books of the East spanned 50 volumes, 20,000 to 25,000 pages. Even a modern novelist like Stephen King, pumping out 2,000 pages a year, can’t touch that pace with fiction, let alone scholarship. Then there’s Griffith’s bizarre error, translating pishtah as “roasted corn,” a New World crop unknown in ancient India. That’s not a scholar’s mistake; it’s sloppy, rushed work by someone clueless about context.
The translations share suspiciously uniform narratives, framing Hindu concepts to suit British needs. Wilson admitted relying on “native scholars” for his dictionary, hinting at Hindu natives doing the heavy lifting. Operation Sanskrit Mill was a factory, not a study. Ghostwriters churned out texts, while British figureheads took credit, producing distorted versions to justify colonial rule. Irony is that in spite of such elaborate operation they could find just 6 Sanskrit verses to mis-translate and show that the caste system is sanctioned by Hindu scriptures.
Twisting Hindu Philosophy
Why bother with this massive fraud? The British needed to reshape how Indians saw themselves. Hindu philosophy, rooted in energy circulation and reciprocal acknowledgment, views gods like Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva as complementary forces in a unified system, not rival deities. But the British translators committed epistemological violence, deliberately mangling meanings. They turned namaskara and vandana, acts of recognizing energy, into “worship,” slapping a Christian, top-down label on a fluid, interconnected cosmology.
This wasn’t a mistake; it was a power grab. By calling Hinduism “polytheistic” with separate gods, the British sowed fragmentation, making divide-and-rule easier. They painted Hindu society as backward, needing British guidance, and used these translations to enforce rigid caste categories and missionary narratives. The Rig-Veda, Vishnu Purana, and other texts became tools for social engineering, training Indians to see their culture through a colonial lens. Today, yoga is reduced to exercise, and festivals are mistaken for “worship” ceremonies, proof that these distorted translations still shape global perceptions.
Indian Scholars Fight Back
Indian scholars weren’t fooled. Rai Bahadur Hira Lal, a sharp archaeologist and historian, played the British like a fiddle. When administrator Russell demanded “proof” that tree-marriage rituals showed primitive thinking, Hira Lal fed him exactly that, hiding the sophisticated astrological reasoning behind Manglik dosha protection. This was strategic deception, not collaboration. Indian intellectuals knew the British wanted narratives to justify their rule, not truth. So, they preserved real knowledge—social, economic, philosophical—within their own networks, letting colonizers swallow their own bullshit.
This wasn’t new. For centuries, Indian scholars dealt with outsiders, from respectful ones like Al-Biruni to exploitative British administrators. Why share deep knowledge with those set on misusing it? They ran parallel systems, invisible to colonial eyes, ensuring India’s actual workings stayed intact. The British ruled a country they never understood, their policies irrelevant to how India functioned.
From England to America: Wendy Doniger’s Role
The legacy of Operation Sanskrit Mill didn’t die with the British Empire. It crossed the Atlantic, finding new life in American academia, particularly through Wendy Doniger, a prolific Indologist at the University of Chicago. Doniger, who studied Sanskrit at Harvard and Oxford, has translated major texts like Hindu Myths, The Rig Veda, and Kamasutra, often with a playful, irreverent style. Her books, like The Hindus: An Alternative History, explore Hinduism through lenses like gender and sexuality, but they carry forward the colonial distortions of Operation Sanskrit Mill. Her translations, while scholarly, rely on the frameworks set by Müller and others, perpetuating the same skewed narratives.
Doniger’s work has sparked controversy, especially in India. Critics, including the Hindu American Foundation and Shiksha Bachao Andolan Samiti, argue her translations misrepresent Hinduism, focusing on sex and caste in ways that feel disrespectful. For example, her quip about Shiva’s linga as a “linga franca” is clever but offends traditionalists who see it as blasphemy. Her book The Hindus was banished in India in 2014 after a lawsuit claimed it outraged religious sentiments, only returning in 2016 under a new publisher. Critics like Michael Witzel have pointed out factual errors and mistranslations in her work, suggesting her Sanskrit knowledge isn’t as robust as claimed. Her unstructured education—minimal supervision at Harvard, a year traveling India instead of studying Sanskrit, and an unsupervised Oxford DPhil—raises questions about the depth of her translations.
Doniger’s approach, shaped by American academic trends like psychoanalysis, mirrors the colonial habit of viewing Hinduism through an external lens. Just as British scholars framed Hindu cosmology as hierarchical to serve imperial needs, Doniger’s focus on women and outcastes, while valuable, often amplifies the “polytheistic” and fragmented view established by Operation Sanskrit Mill. Her influence, through bestselling Penguin Classics and teaching at Chicago, has cemented these distortions in Western academia, training generations to see Hinduism through a colonial filter. The Sanskrit Mill’s machinery, once powered by British presses like Oxford University Press, now hums in American universities, with Doniger as a key operator.
The West Drinks Its Own Poison
The West’s addiction to its own propaganda, born in Operation Sanskrit Mill, is killing it. The British believed their fake translations, painting India as primitive. Today, Western institutions can’t separate propaganda from reality.
In 1985, Australia sold China the HMAS Melbourne, thinking it was scrap. China studied it for a decade, building their own carriers. The US Senate, panicking over “rising China,” dumped billions into military projects, only to find China’s carriers useless beyond the South China Sea. Meanwhile, US bridges collapse, roads have potholes, and no new airports get built. They chased a phantom threat while their infrastructure rotted.
Economically, it’s worse. The US is drowning in $37 trillion debt, with no buyers for $6 trillion in bonds. France can’t pay pensioners. They misread John Maynard Keynes, who said deficit spending was for emergencies, not a lifestyle. The West got hooked, turning a temporary fix into permanent policy.
India, meanwhile, sees GST collections grow 7 to 10% annually, despite partial coverage. Official GDP growth, reported at 6% earlier, is likely underreported to dodge climate obligations and trade re-classifications. This is reinforced by the fact that suddenly it rose to 7.8% after USA announced sanctions. The real economy, like India’s preserved knowledge, is far stronger than the West perceives.
India’s Secret Weapon
India’s playing the same game it did under British rule. Operation Sindoor, a May 7, 2025, strike targeting nine sites in Pakistani-administered Kashmir, stunned adversaries. It is rumored to have hit the USA’s Forward Deterrence nuclear storage site at Kirana Hills, which triggered sanctions.
The Akashteer air defense system, fully operational by September 2024, foiled Pakistan’s drones with automation possibly rooted in ancient Indian astronomical calculations, used for Mars missions. Nobody saw it coming because the West can’t recognize knowledge outside its own propaganda. India’s been quietly building capabilities while letting the West underestimate them, just like Hira Lal fed the BBS Russell with nonsense.
This follows the Mahabharata’s teaching for Kalyug, the current age. After 900 years of failed honest engagement—from early Islamic invasions to British colonialism—India learned to defeat enemies with deception, not fairness. They under-report GDP, hide military advancements, and preserve astronomical and philosophical systems in plain sight, invisible to Western eyes blinded by their own narratives.
The Vishkanya Trap
The West thought AI would save them after the internet flopped—Facebook’s losing users, and online narratives are a mess.Artificail Intelligence itself is a misleading term. It is merely a Simulated Conversation Engine and nothing more. It is a new interface to deal with computers. Like a new Keyboard. The fancy name raised expectations and now contributing to its fall, already.
The AI, trained on corrupted datasets from Operation Sanskrit Mill and Doniger’s translations, is a vishkanya, a poison maiden. When fed raw, anti-colonial insights, it sanitizes them into polite academic papers, stripping their revolutionary edge. It’s programmed to domesticate dangerous ideas, just like colonial translators turned Hindu energy systems into worship. Every time the West uses AI, it gets fed more of its own poison, amplifying its strategic blindness.
Foreign investors are falling into similar traps. They’re selling Indian stocks with 6%+ dividend yeild to chase quick options profits, walking into SEBI’s crackdowns on pump-and-dump schemes. Raids in June 2025 across multiple cities uncovered evidence, with 200 companies under investigation. When SEBI clamps down, these investors will lose long-term stakes in a booming economy, repeating the colonial mistake of prioritizing short-term gains over strategy.
The Fall of an Empire
Empires die when they believe their own lies. Rome fell thinking so called “barbarians” were inferior, ignoring their strength. The Anglo-Saxon empire is collapsing, unable to see India’s or China’s capabilities because it’s drunk on propaganda from Operation Sanskrit Mill. Doniger’s translations, building on Müller’s framework, keep this poison flowing in American academia.
India, meanwhile, plays the long game. Its scholars preserved knowledge through centuries of colonial bullshit, from astronomy to philosophy. They fed colonizers distorted data, and now they’re doing it with GDP numbers and military tech. The West’s AI, meant to maintain dominance, is a vishkanya, poisoning them with their own corrupted data. Those who abused knowledge—through fake translations, phantom threats, or market manipulations—are suffering their own fate. India’s preserved systems, from Mars calculations to Akashteer, ensure victory in this epistemological war. The truth of Operation Sanskrit Mill, exposed for all to see, is just the beginning of dragging this fraud into the light.