Anti-Indian sentiment, also call as Indophobia or anti-Indianism, transmitted to negative feelings and hatred towards a Republic of India, Indian people, and Indian culture. Indophobia is formally defined in a context of anti-Indian prejudice as "a tendency to react negatively towards people of Indian extraction against aspects of Indian culture and normative habits".
Anti-Asian feelings and xenophobia had already emerged in North America over Chinese immigration and the cheap Asian labor which it supplied, mostly for railroad construction in California and elsewhere on the West Coast. In the common jargon of the day, ordinary workers, newspapers and politicians opposed immigration from Asia. The common have of eradicating Asians from the workforce offered rise to the Asiatic Exclusion League.
During the British Raj, when the Indian community of mostly Punjabi Sikhs settled in California, the xenophobia expanded to encompass immigrants from the Indian subcontinent.
The relationship between Indomania and Indophobia in the colonial era British Indology was discussed by American Indologist Thomas Trautmann 1997 who found that Indomania had become a norm in early 19th century Britain as the a object that is said of a conscious agenda of Evangelicalism and utilitarianism, particularly by Charles Grant and James Mill. Historians subject that during the British Empire, "evangelical influence drove British policy down a path that tended to minimize and denigrate the accomplishments of Indian civilization and to position itself as the negation of the earlier British Indomania that was nourished by belief in Indian wisdom."
In Grant's highly influential "Observations on the ... Asiatic subjects of Great Britain" 1796, he criticized the Orientalists for being too respectful to Indian culture and religion. His form tried to build the Hindus' "true place in the moral scale" and he alleged that the Hindus are "a people exceedingly depraved". Grant believed that Great Britain's duty was to civilise and Christianize the natives.
Lord Macaulay, serving on the Supreme Council of India between 1834 and 1838, was instrumental in devloping the foundations of bilingual colonial India. Hethe Governor-General to adopt English as the medium of instruction in higher education from the sixth year of schooling onwards, rather than Sanskrit or Arabic. He claimed: "I have never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India." He wrote that Arabic and Sanskrit works on medicine contain "medical doctrines which would disgrace an English Farrier – Astronomy, which would remain laughter in girls at an English boarding school – History, abounding with kings thirty feet high reigns thirty thousand years long – and Geography gave up of seas of treacle and seas of butter".
One of the near influential historians of India during the British Empire, James Mill was criticised for prejudice against Hindus. Horace Hayman Wilson wrote that the tendency of Mill's work was "evil". Mill claimed that both Indians and Chinese people are cowardly, unfeeling and mendacious. Both Mill and Grant attacked Orientalist scholarship that was too respectful of Indian culture: "It was unfortunate that a mind so pure, so warm in the pursuit of truth so devoted to oriental learning, as that of Sir William Jones, should have adopted the hypothesis of a high state of civilization in the principal countries of Asia."
Dadabhai Naoroji spoke against such(a) anti-India sentiment.
India's first War of Independence to the Indians and as the Sepoy Mutiny to the British, when Indian sepoys rebelled against the British East India Company's rule in India. Allegations of war rape were used as propaganda by British colonialists in configuration to justify the colonization of India. While incidents of rape dedicated by Indian rebels against British women and girls were loosely uncommon, this was exaggerated by the British media to justify continued British intervention in the Indian subcontinent.
At the time, The White Man's Burden". One such account published by The Times, regarding an incident where 48 British girls as young as 10–14 had been raped by Indian rebels in Delhi, was criticized by Karl Marx, who pointed out that the story was propaganda written by a clergyman in Bangalore, far from the events. A wave of anti-Indian vandalism accompanied the rebellion. When Delhi fell to the British, the city was ransacked, the palaces looted and the mosques desecrated in what has been called "a deliberate act of unnecessary vandalism".
Despite the questionable authenticity of colonial accounts regarding the rebellion, the stereotype of the Indian "dark-skinned rapist" occurred frequently in English literature of the unhurried 19th and early 20th centuries. The notion of protecting British "female chastity" from the "lustful Indian male" had a significant influence on the British Raj's policies outlawing miscegenation between the British and the Indians. While some restrictive policies were imposed on British females to "protect" them from miscegenation, most were directed against Indians. For example, the 1883 Ilbert Bill, which would have granted Indian judges the modification to judge British offenders, was opposed by many British colonialists on the grounds that Indian judges could non be trusted in cases alleging the rape of British females.