In 1901, shortly before the death of Queen Victoria, the radical writer William Digby looked back to the 1876 Madras famine and confidently asserted: "When the part played by the British Empire in the 19th century is regarded by the historian 50 years hence, the unnecessary deaths of millions of Indians would be its principal and most notorious monument." Who now remembers the Madrasis? In the 19th century, however, drought was treated, particularly by the English in India, as an opportunity for reasserting sovereignty.
During 1876 Lord Lytton, widely suspected to be insane, ignored all efforts to alleviate the suffering of millions of peasants in the Madras region and concentrated on preparing for Queen Victoria's investiture as Empress of India. The highlight of the celebrations was a week-long feast of lucullan excess at which 68,000 dignitaries heard her promise the nation "happiness, prosperity and welfare".
(For more on Lord Lytton: India's Nero - Please refer to chapter on Glimpses).
Traditional Indian polities like the Moguls and the Marathas had zealously policed the grain trade in the public interest, distributing free food, fixing prices and embargoing exports. As one horrified British writer discovered, these 'oriental despots' sometimes punished traders who short-changed peasants during famines by amputating equivalent weights of merchant flesh.
The British worshipped a savage god known as the 'Invisible Hand' that forbade state interference in the grain trade. Like previous viceroys (Lytton in 1877 and Elgin in 1897), Lord Curzon allowed food surpluses to be exported to England or hoarded by speculators in heavily guarded depots. Curzon, whose appetite for viceregal pomp and circumstance was legendary, lectured starving villagers that 'any government which imperiled the financial position of India in the interests of prodigal philanthropy would be open to serious criticism; but any government which by indiscriminate alms-giving weakened the fibre and demoralised the self-reliance of the population, would be guilty of a public crime'.
Lord Curzon as a celebration of imperialist ideals, even forbade the singing of a particular hymn because it contained an inappropriate reminder of that kingdoms "may rise and wane."
(source: Colonial Overlords: Time Frame Ad 1850-1900 - Time-Life Books. The Scramble for Africa p. 33).
Vaughan Nash of the Manchester Guardian and Louis Klopsch of the New York Christian Herald were appalled by Curzon's 'penal minimum' ration (15 ounces of rice for a day's hard labour) as well as the shocking conditions tolerated in the squalid relief camps, where tens of thousands perished from cholera.
'Millions of flies,' wrote Klopsch, 'were permitted undisturbed to pester the unhappy victims. One young woman who had lost every one dear to her, and had turned stark mad, sat at the door vacantly staring at the awful scenes around her.'
Despite Kiplingesque myths of heroic benevolence, official attitudes were nonchalant. British officials rated Indian ethnicities like cattle, and vented contempt against them even when they were dying in their multitudes.
Asked to explain why mortality in Gujarat was so high, a district officer told the famine commission: 'The Gujarati is a soft man... accustomed to earn his good food easily. In the hot weather, he seldom worked at all and at no time did he form the habit of continuous labour. Very many even among the poorest had never taken a tool in hand in their lives. They lived by watching cattle and crops, by sitting in the fields to weed, by picking cotton, grain and fruit, and by... pilfering.'
Lytton believed in free trade. He did nothing to check the huge hikes in grain prices, Economic "modernization" led household and village reserves to be transferred to central depots using recently built railroads. Much was exported to England, where there had been poor harvests. Telegraph technology allowed prices to be centrally co-ordinated and, inevitably, raised in thousands of small towns. Relief funds were scanty because Lytton was eager to finance military campaigns in Afghanistan. Conditions in emergency camps were so terrible that some peasants preferred to go to jail. A few, starved and senseless, resorted to cannibalism. This was all of little consequence to many English administrators who, as believers in Malthusianism, thought that famine was nature's response to Indian over-breeding
It used to be that the
late 19th century was celebrated in every school as the golden period of
imperialism. While few of us today would defend empire in moral terms, we've
long been encouraged to acknowledge its economic benefits. Yet, as Davis points
out, "there was no increase in India's per capita income from 1757 to
1947".
As the great Indian political economist Romesh Chunder Dutt pointed out in one
of his Open Letters to Lord Curzon British
Progress was India's Ruin. The railroads, ports and canals which enthused Karl Marx in the 1850s were
for resource extraction, not indigenous development. The taxes that
financed the railroads and the Indian army pauperised the peasantry. Not
surprisingly, there was no increase in India's per capita income during the
whole period of British overlordship from 1757 to 1947. Celebrated cash-crop
booms went hand in hand with declining agrarian productivity and food security.
Moreover, two decades of demographic growth (in the 1870s and 1890s) were
entirely wiped out in avoidable famines, while throughout that 'glorious
imperial half century' from 1871 to 1921 immortalised by Kipling, the life
expectancy of ordinary Indians fell by a staggering 20 per cent. Author and political activist Mike Davis poses the question in his book, Late Victorian Holocausts:
“How do we weigh smug claims about the life-saving benefits of steam transportation and modern grain markets when so many millions, especially in British India, died along railroad tracks or on the steps of grain depots?”
(source: The Observer - 'Late Victorian Holocausts' By Mike Davis
http://www.observer.co.uk/comment/story/0,6903,436495,00.html
http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/history/0,6121,424896,00.html).
A Glowing
account: How an American
Christian Missionary wrote about British India
What has England done for India ?
What has England done for India ?
India is no longer the prey of Western ambitious powers.
It is a solid part of the British possessions. It knows, because it is a solid
part of the British possession. It knows, because it sends its troops that England
cannot fight in a battle in Europe without its help. The expansion of education
among all classes of people, the physical care of the helpless classes, the
subtle bond of the English language, the development of the soil, the utilizing
of the mineral wealth, the opening of the country for the incoming of Western
ideas, and greater than all combined, the breaking down of all doors for the
free spread of the Gospel. England has never achieved grander victories over
Waterloo or Quebec than those which belong to her quiet and peaceful
administration of India . The day has not yet dawned when it is possible to
measure the whole magnitude of England ’s service to the millions of India .
Generations must elapse before this can be done. When the hour does come, it
will be seen that the Englishman has never been wiser or more humane on the
Thames or that St. Lawrence than on the Ganges, the Indus, and the Godavari .
The real fact is, not that he has conquered the country, but that he has
discovered it, and now governs it by as generous laws, and as even justice as
he rules over the millions within sight of his parliament at Westminster.
A French scholar Barthelemy
St. Hilaire, (1805 - 1895) in his book, “L’Inde Anglaise; son Etat
Actuel son Avenir, has written:
“Neither in the Vedic times, nor under the great Ashoka,
nor under the Mohammedan conquest, nor under the Moguls, all powerful as they
were for a while, has India ever obeyed
an authority so sweet, so intelligent and so liberal.”
England has been a blessing to the helpless continent.
England has conquered India . But it has been less a conquest by steel and
gunpowder than by all the great forces which constitutes a Christian civilization.
(source: Indika:
The Country and the people of India and Ceylon - By Rev. John F Hurst p. 755 - 766).
(source: India And Her People - By Swami Abhedananda p.144).
Amitav Ghosh author of several books, The Circle of Reason (1986), won France's top literary award, Prix Medici Estranger, and The Glass Palace also makes fun of the claim that the British gave India the railways.
"Thailand has railways and the British never colonized the country," he says. "In 1885, when the British invaded Burma, the Burmese king was already building railways and telegraphs. These are things Indians could have done themselves."
(source: Travelling through time - interview with Amitav Ghosh).
Nick Robins in his article titled "Loot" has said: "The East India Company found India rich and left it poor."
And for many Indians, it was the Company's plunder that first de-industrialized that country and then provided the finance that fuelled Britain's own industrial revolution." There was no increase in India per capita income between 1757 and 1947" In the beginning, Britain was buying cloth made in India. In the end, India was buying cloth made in Britain, paying for it not only with money but with the blood of its people. History teaches us that history must never be forgotten.
(source: East India Company - By Omar Kureishi )
According to Francois Gautier: " The British did impoverish India: according to British records, one million Indians died of famine between 1800 and 1825, 4 million between 1825 and 1850, 5 million between 1850 and 1875 and 15 million between 1875 and 1900. Thus 25 million Indians died in 100 years! (Since Independence, there has been no such famines, a record of which India should be proud.)" (source: rediff.com).
Mrs Aruna Asaf Ali " How can a civilized and enlightened people like the British have kept us so backward and divided? They tried to educate a certain middle-class and allowed it all the facilities; but the basic reforms they did not carry out. Our literacy rates were so poor, and our technology has taken years to catch up with modern developments."
(source: Indian Tales of the Raj - By Zareer Masani p. 130).
An English friend of India said, "England, through her missionaries, offered the people of India thrones of gold in another world, but refused them a simple chair in this world."
(source: India And Her People - By Swami Abhedananda p.169).
William Samuel Lilly, in his India and Its Problems writes as follows:
"During the first eighty years of the nineteenth century, 18,000,000 of people perished of famine. In one year alone -- the year when her late Majesty assumed the title of Empress -- 5,000,000 of the people in Southern India were starved to death. In the District of Bellary, with which I am personally acquainted, -- a region twice the size of Wales, -- one-fourth of the population perished in the famine of 1816-77. I shall never forget my own famine experiences: how, as I rode out on horseback, morning after morning, I passed crowds of wandering skeletons, and saw human corpses by the roadside, unburied, uncared for, and half devoured by dogs and vultures; how, sadder sight still, children, 'the joy of the world,' as the old Greeks deemed, had become its ineffable sorrow, and were forsaken by the very women who had borne them, wolfish hunger killing even the maternal instinct. Those children, their bright eyes shining from hollow sockets, their nesh utterly wasted away, and only gristle and sinew and cold shivering skin remaining, their heads mere skulls, their puny frames full of loathsome diseases, engendered by the starvation in which they had been conceived and born and nurtured -- they haunt me still." Every one who has gone much about India in famine times knows how true to life is this picture.
"During the first eighty years of the nineteenth century, 18,000,000 of people perished of famine. In one year alone -- the year when her late Majesty assumed the title of Empress -- 5,000,000 of the people in Southern India were starved to death. In the District of Bellary, with which I am personally acquainted, -- a region twice the size of Wales, -- one-fourth of the population perished in the famine of 1816-77. I shall never forget my own famine experiences: how, as I rode out on horseback, morning after morning, I passed crowds of wandering skeletons, and saw human corpses by the roadside, unburied, uncared for, and half devoured by dogs and vultures; how, sadder sight still, children, 'the joy of the world,' as the old Greeks deemed, had become its ineffable sorrow, and were forsaken by the very women who had borne them, wolfish hunger killing even the maternal instinct. Those children, their bright eyes shining from hollow sockets, their nesh utterly wasted away, and only gristle and sinew and cold shivering skin remaining, their heads mere skulls, their puny frames full of loathsome diseases, engendered by the starvation in which they had been conceived and born and nurtured -- they haunt me still." Every one who has gone much about India in famine times knows how true to life is this picture.
Says Sir Charles
Elliott long the Chief Commissioner of Assam, "Half the
agricultural population do not know from one half year's end to another what it
is to have a full meal." Says the Honorable
G. K. Gokhale, of the Viceroy's Council, "From 60,000,000 to
70,000,000 of the people of India do not know what it is to have their hunger
satisfied even once in a year."
(source: India in Bondage: Her Right to Freedom - By Jabez T.
Sunderland p. 11-12).
Suhash Chakravarty has brilliantly
observed in his book, The Raj Syndrome: "The vision of the Roman
Empire did not merely inspire the Raj. It was universally claimed that the Raj
was the inheritor of the political and cultural legacy of Rome. This was characterized by snobbery,
ruthlessness, and intolerance which were given the nomenclature of patriotism,
loyalty and fortitude. Economic benefits were dressed in idealist garb,
mercenary motives in a moral crusade and romance and adventure camouflaged
political and military aggression.
As a substitute to Greek and Roman theatre, the American
films arrived – early Christian films complete with gladiators and lions, those
of Tarzan and the Apes, the ‘westerns’ with trigger-happy cowboys chasing the
feathered Indian, followed by the urbanized ‘westerns’ where cars replaced
horses and ‘cops’ replaced cowboys. The impact was remarkable because the
attempt had been to reduce the quantum of wisdom and wit to the minimum. Superimposed on this was the idea of the
‘chosen people’ operating on the doctrine of Christianity. God was supposed to
back only the Christians. Christianity was offered as synonymous with science
which was called service and service was the other name for sharp shooting
guns."
(source: The Raj Syndrome: A Study in Imperial Perceptions - By Suhash
Chakravarty. Penguin Books. 1991 193).
The Bengal Famine 1943
- 44: The final judgment on British Rule in India
Author John
Newsinger is Senior Lecturer: History. School of Historical and Cultural
Studies at the Bath Spa University, UK. He has written in his book, The Blood Never Dried: A People's History of the British Empire:
"India still had to face the greatest disaster to
befall the country in the 20th century: the Bengal Famine of
1943-44. This was the product of food shortages brought about by the war.
Imports of food grains from Burma were cut off by the Japanese occupation and
the system of distribution for domestic supplies broke down. For the peasantry,
a large number of whom lived at or below subsistence level at the best of
times, the consequences were catastrophic. The poor could not feed themselves
and began to starve. Tens of thousands trekked to Calcutta , only to die on the
city streets. The British administration in the words of one historian
responded with “a callous disregard of its duties in handling the famine.” Not
only were no steps taken to provide against famine, but India continued
exporting food grains to Iran at the rate of 3,000 tons a month throughout
1942. The result was a terrible death toll from starvation and disease in
1943-44 that totaled more than 3.5 million men and women.
This was, as Jawaharlal Nehru put it, “the final judgment on British rule in India.”
This was, as Jawaharlal Nehru put it, “the final judgment on British rule in India.”
When Lord Wavell
succeeded Lord Linlithgow as
Viceroy, he was appalled at how little had been done to provide famine relief.
Part of the problem was Churchill, “who seemed to regard famine relief as
‘appeasement’ of the Congress”. On one occasion when presented with details of
the crisis in Bengal , Churchill commented, “on Indians breeding like rabbits”.
As far as he was concerned “the
starvation of anyhow underfed Bengalis is less serious than sturdy Greeks”,
a sentiment with which Amery concurred. Wavell himself informed London that the
famine “was one of the greatest disasters that has befallen any people under
British rule”. The government was unmoved. Wavell said when Holland needs food,
“ships will of course be available,
quite a different answer to the one we get whenever we ask for ships to bring
food to India.”
Winston Churchill’s (1874 - 1965) attitude
was quite explicitly racist.
He told Amery: “I
hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.” On
another occasion, he insisted that they were “the beastliest people in the
world next to the Germans”.
Leopold Charles Maurice Stennett Amery (1873-1955) born in Gorakhpur, India
of an English father and a Hungarian Jewish mother, he was a British Conservative
Party politician and journalist.
Amery was bemused by Churchill's “curious hatred of India ” and concluded that he was “really not
quite normal on the subject”. Indeed Amery was not sure “whether on this
subject of India he is really quite sane.” Provoked beyond endurance by
Churchill’s bigotry, Amery, on one occasion, said: “I didn’t see much difference between his outlook and Hitler’s”. Amery
was not a liberal or progressive, but a hardnosed right wing imperialist. And
it was not just to Amery that Churchill made his feelings clear.
In February 1945 Churchill told his private secretary, Sir John Colville (1915-1987) that:
“the Hindus
were a foul race…and he wished Bert Harris (Air Marshall Bert "Bomber" Harris
(1892 - 1984) could send some of his
surplus bombers to destroy them.”
Somewhat predictably, Churchill’s part in the failure of famine
relief in Bengal , one of the great crimes of the war, is not something that
his innumerable biographers have been concerned to explore. This is really
quite disgraceful. To quote N B
Bonarjee, author of Under Two Masters, and the district magistrate who had
loyally helped suppress the Quit India revolt.
In his memoirs he writes bitterly of how the Viceroy
broadcast of 13 May 1945 Churchill had thanked Australia, Canada and New
Zealand for their contribution to the war effort, but could not bring himself
to mention India “although she provided
more in men and material than the rest put together.”
(source: The Blood Never Dried: A People's History of the British Empire
- By John Newsinger p. 157 - 159).
Viceroy Richard Southwell Bourke Mayo,
6th earl of Mayo (1822 – 1872) also called Lord
Naas Irish politician and civil servant best known for his service
as viceroy of India, where he improved relations with Afghanistan wrote,
'We are determined as long as sun shines in
heaven to hold India. Our national character, our commerce, demand it; and we
have, one way or another, £250 millions of English capital fixed in the
country'.
Benjamin Disraeli (1840 - 1881) famously dubbed India a 'jewel in the crown of
England'.
In
the 1880s India took nearly one fifth of British exports and overseas
investment. In the mid-19th century all tea had come from China. By 1900 most
of it came from India.
Winston Churchill (1874 - 1965) once
remarked, The possession of India, made
all the difference between Britain being a first and a third rate world power.
***
American Rev. Jabez T. Sunderland (1842-1936) former President of the
India Information Bureau of America and Editor of Young India (New York).
Author of India, America and World Brotherhood, and Causes of Famine in India. He has
written glowingly about India's culture:
"When the British first appeared on the scene, India was one of the richest countries of the
world; indeed, it was her great riches that attracted the British to her
shores. For 2,500 years before the British came on the scene and robbed
her of her freedom, India was self-ruling and one of the most influential and
illustrious nations of the world."
“This wealth,” says was created by the Hindus’ vast
and varied industries. Nearly every kind of manufacture or product known to the
civilized world – nearly every kind of creation of Man’s brain and hand,
existing anywhere, and prized either for its utility or beauty – had long, long
been produced in India. India was a far greater industrial and manufacturing
nation than any in Europe or than any other in Asia. Her textile goods – the
fine products of her loom, in cotton, wool, linen, and silk – were famous over
the civilized world; so were her exquisite jewelry and her precious stones, cut
in every lovely form; so were her pottery, porcelains, ceramics of every kind,
quality, color and beautiful shape; so were her fine works in metal – iron,
steel, silver and gold. She had great architecture – equal in beauty to any in
the world. She had great engineering works. She had great merchants, great
business men, great bankers and financiers. Not only was she the greatest
ship-building nation, but she had great commerce and trade by land and sea
which extended to all known civilized countries. Such was the India which the
British found when they came.
Rev. C. F. Andrews, missionary, professor and publicist, says:
"Our whole
British talk about being ' trustees of India' and coming out to ' serve' her,
about bearing the 'white man's burden' about ruling India 'for her good,' and
all the rest, is the biggest hypocrisy on God's earth."
Many will remember the poem written by Bertrand Shadwell:
"If you see an island shore
Which has not been grabbed before
Lying in the track of trade, as islands should
With the simple native quite
Unprepared to make a fight
Oh, you just drop in and take it for his good
Not for love of money, be it understood
But you row yourself to the land,
With a Bible in your hand,
And you pray for him and rob him, for his good:
If he hollers, then you shoot him for his good.
Or this lesson I can shape
To campaigning at the Cape,
He would welcome British rule
If he weren't a blooming fool;
Thus, you see it's only for his good,
So they're burning houses for his good
Making helpless women homeless for their good,
Leaving little children orphans for their good
In India there are bloody sights
Blotting out the Hindu's rights
Where we've slaughtered many millions for their good
And, with bullet and with brand,
Desolated all the land
But you know we did it for their good,
Yes, and still more far away
Down in China, let us say
Where the "Christian" robs the "heathen" for his good,
You may burn and you may shoot
You may fill your sack with loot
But be sure you do it for his good."
(source: India in Bondage: Her Right to Freedom - By Rev. Jabez T. Sunderland p.1-61). This book, published in India and promptly suppressed by the British Government, is the history of the British Rule in India from the Indian side. The central theme of the book was that the British rule in India was unjust, that the Indians were abundantly competent to rule themselves and that America should support the cause of Indian nationalism. The book appeared to be so seditious to the British authorities in India that it was not only proscribed, its publisher was arrested and proceeded against under the Indian Penal Code).
Which has not been grabbed before
Lying in the track of trade, as islands should
With the simple native quite
Unprepared to make a fight
Oh, you just drop in and take it for his good
Not for love of money, be it understood
But you row yourself to the land,
With a Bible in your hand,
And you pray for him and rob him, for his good:
If he hollers, then you shoot him for his good.
Or this lesson I can shape
To campaigning at the Cape,
He would welcome British rule
If he weren't a blooming fool;
Thus, you see it's only for his good,
So they're burning houses for his good
Making helpless women homeless for their good,
Leaving little children orphans for their good
In India there are bloody sights
Blotting out the Hindu's rights
Where we've slaughtered many millions for their good
And, with bullet and with brand,
Desolated all the land
But you know we did it for their good,
Yes, and still more far away
Down in China, let us say
Where the "Christian" robs the "heathen" for his good,
You may burn and you may shoot
You may fill your sack with loot
But be sure you do it for his good."
(source: India in Bondage: Her Right to Freedom - By Rev. Jabez T. Sunderland p.1-61). This book, published in India and promptly suppressed by the British Government, is the history of the British Rule in India from the Indian side. The central theme of the book was that the British rule in India was unjust, that the Indians were abundantly competent to rule themselves and that America should support the cause of Indian nationalism. The book appeared to be so seditious to the British authorities in India that it was not only proscribed, its publisher was arrested and proceeded against under the Indian Penal Code).
It was this wealth that the East India Company proposed to
appropriate. Already in 1686 its Directors declared their intention to “establish …a large, well-grounded, sure
English dominion in India for all time to come.” The company rented from
the Hindu authorities trading posts at Madras, Calcutta and Bombay, and fortified
them, without permission of the
authorities, with troops and canon.
Robert Clive said: “When I
think, of the marvelous riches of that country, and the comparatively small
part which I took away, I am astonished at my own moderation.” Such were the
morals of the men who proposed to bring civilization to India."
His successors in the management of the Company now began
a century of unmitigated rape on the resources of India. They profiteered
without hindrance: goods which they sold in England for $10,000,000 they bought
for $2,000,000 in India. The forged documents as circumstances required, and
hanged Hindus for forging documents.
“Every effort, lawful and unlawful,” says a Bombay
Administration report, written by Englishmen, “was made to get the utmost out
of the wretched peasantry, who were subjected to torture, in some instances
cruel and revolting beyond all description, if they would not or could not
yield what was demanded.”
“Everything and everybody was on sale” says the Oxford
History of India. “Under their old masters they (Indians) had at least one
resource: when the evil became insupportable, the people rose and pulled down
the government. But the English Government was not to be shaken off. That
Government, oppressive as the most oppressive form of barbarian despotism, was
strong with all the strength of civilization.
By 1858 the crimes of the Company so smelled to heaven
that the British Government took over the captured and plundered territories as
a colony of the Crown; a little island took over half a continent. All the
debts on the Company’s books, together with the accrued interest on these
debts, were added to the public obligations of India, to be redeemed out of the
taxes put upon the Hindu people. Exploitation
was dressed now in all the forms of Law – ie. The rules laid down by the victor
for the vanquished. Hypocrisy was added to brutality, while the robbery went
on.
John Morley estimated that during the nineteenth century
alone England carried on one hundred and eleven wars in India, using for the
most part Indian troops; million of Hindus shed their blood that India might be
slave. The cost of these wars for the conquest of India was met to the last
penny out of Indian taxes; the English congratulated themselves on conquering
India without spending a cent. Certainly it was a remarkable, if not a
magnanimous, achievement, to steal in forty years a quarter of million square
miles, and make the victims pay every penny of the expense. When at last in
1857 the exhausted Hindus resisted, they were suppressed with “medieval ferocity”; a favorite way of
dealing with captured rebels was to blow them to bits from the mouth of canons.
“We took,” said the London Spectator, “at least 100,000 Indian lives in the
mutiny.” This is what the English call
the Sepoy Mutiny, and what the Hindus call the War of Independence. There is
much in a name.
James Mill, historian of India, wrote: "Under their dependence
upon the British Government...the people of Oudh and Karnatic, two of the noblest
provinces of India, were, by misgovernment, plunged into a state of
wretchedness with which ..hardly any part of the earth has anything to
compare."
F. J. Shore, British
administrator in Bengal, testified as follows to the House of Commons in
1857:
“The fundamental
principle of the English has been to make the whole Indian nation subservient,
in every possible way, to the interests and benefits of themselves. They have been taxed to the utmost limit; every
successive province, as it has fallen into our possession, has been made a
field for higher exaction; and it has always been our boast how greatly we have
raised the revenue above that which the native rulers were able to extort. The Indians have been excluded from every
honor, dignity or office which the lowest Englishman could be prevailed upon to
accept.”
In the midst of heart breaking poverty engendered partly
by heavy taxation, the Government treats itself, at staggering costs, to
gigantic official buildings at Delhi, needlessly alien in style to the
architecture of India; for seven months of every year it transfers the Capital,
with all its machinery and personnel, to vacation resorts in the mountains, at
an expense of millions of dollars; and from time to time it holds gorgeous
Durbars, to impress the people who provide tens of millions for the ceremony.
It pays to be free.
The result is that the national debt of India which was
$35,000,000 in 1792 rose to $3,500,000,000 in 1929.
The actual policy of the British in India has been one of
political exclusion and social scorn. Every year the Indian colleges graduates
12,000 students; every year hundreds of Hindu graduate from universities in
Europe or America, and return to their native land. But only the lowest places
in the civil service are open to them.
Liberals like Elphinstone, and Munro, protested in vain
against this refusal of function to the educated intelligence of India, this “decapitation of an entire people,” as Lajpat
Rai called it. It is the commonest thing,” says an American missionary,
“to see Indian scholars and officials, of confessedly high ability, of very
fine training, and of long experience, serving
under young Englishmen who in England would not be thought fit to fill a
government or a business position above the second or third class.
“Eminent Hindu physicians and surgeons,” says Ramachandra Chaterjee, “are
compelled to spend the best years of their lives in subordinate positions as
‘assistant’ surgeons, while raw and callow youths lord it over them and draw
four to five times their pay.”
The English in India act as if they felt that their
superior position can be best maintained by asserting it at every step, by
avoiding participation in the life of the people, by setting up against them
every aristocratic social distinction, by treating them in every way as an
inferior race.
Sunderland reports that the British treat the Hindus as strangers and foreigners in India, in a
manner “quite as unsympathetic, harsh and abusive as was ever seen among the
Georgia and Louisiana planters in the old days of American slavery; and
he tells of several cases in which British
soldiers forcibly ejected from railway compartments educated Brahmins and
courtly rajahs who had tickets for this space.
Savel Zimand author of Living India, corroborates him: “Many of those
distinctions drawn against Indians are like those made against the Negroes in
our south – minus lynching. I could fill volumes with such instances.”
The result is a
pitiful crushing of the Hindu spirit, a stifling of its pride and growth, a
stunting of genius that once flourished in every city of the land. “Subjection to a foreign yoke ,” says Professor Ross, “is
one of the most potent cause of the decay of nations.”
“The foreign system under which India is governed today,”
says Gandhi, “has reduced India to pauperism and emasculation. We have lost
self-confidence.”
Such was the method of
British acquisition of India…..and with all its modest improvements, is
destroying Hindu civilization and Hindu people.
(source: The Case
for India - By Will Durant Simon and Schuster, New York. 1930 p. This
book was banned by the British Government. Durant held the view that no part of
the world suffered so much poverty and oppression as India did and that this
was largely due to British imperialism).
During 1903-5 in the wake of the partition of Bengal, William Jennings Bryan, one of the
topmost figures on the American political scene and twice the Presidential
candidate for the Democratic Party, visited India and obtained first hand
knowledge of the '"jewel" of the British empire. The somber verdict
was:
"Let no one cite India as an argument in defense of
colonialism. On the Ganges and the Indus the Briton, in spite of his many
notable qualities and his large contribution to the world's advancement, has
demonstrated, as many have before, man's inability to exercise, with wisdom and
justice, irresponsible power over the helpless people. He has conferred some
benefits upon India, but he has extorted a tremendous price for them. While he
has boasted of bringing peace to the living, he has led millions to the peace of the grave; while he has dwelt
upon order...he has impoverished the country by legalized pillage."
(source: Katherine
Mayo and India - By Manorangan Jha People's Publishing House New Delhi
1971.p.2).
The Triumph of Death
The emaciation of the
Hindus sickens the traveler; closed fingers can be
run up around their bare legs from the ankles to the knees. In the cities 34 %
of them are absent from work, on any day, from illness to injury. They are too
poor to afford foods rich in mineral salts; they are too poor to buy fresh
vegetables, much less to buy meat. The water-supply, which is usually the first
obligation of a government, is in primitive condition, after a century or more
of British rule; dysentery and malaria have been eliminated from Panama and
Cuba, but they flourish in British India. Once the Hindu was known to be the among the cleanest of the clean; and
even today he bathes every morning, and washes every morning the simple garment
that he wears; but the increase of poverty has made social sanitation
impossible. Until 1918 the total expenditure on public health, of both the
central and provincial governments combined, was only $5,000,000 a year, for
240,000,000 people - an appropriation of two cents per capita.
Sir William Hunter, estimated that 40,000,000 of the people of India were
seldom or never able to satisfy their hunger. In 1901, 272,000 died of plague
introduced from abroad, in 1902, 500,000 died of plague; in 1903, 800,000; in
1904, 1,000,000. We can now understand why there are famines in India. Their
cause, in plain terms, is not the absence of food, but the inability of the
people to pay for it. It was hoped the railways would solve the problem...the
fact that the worst famines have come since the building of the
railways...behind all these, as the fundamental source of the terrible famines
in India, lies such merciless
exploitation, such unbalanced exploitation of goods, and such brutal
collection of high taxes in the very midst of famine....
(source: The Case for India - By Will Durant Simon and Schuster, New York.
1930 p.50-53). Refer to Jesus Christ:
Artifice for Aggression - By Sita Ram Goel Christian rule in India was perhaps the most brutal and inhuman ever, possibly even more so than the most tyrannical Muslim kingdoms.
Do you know that the rations approved by one Sir Richard Temple for those undergoing hard labour during an 1890s famine was less than the starvation diet given to Jewish prisoners at Buchenwald? (In passing, Temple was also infamous for his Christian evangelism activities.) Yes, the Buchenwald ration for the toiling masses.
Here is a damning table from Late Victorian Holocausts (Mike Davis, Verso, pp 33). Look at the state-sanctioned ration for the famine-ridden Madras Presidency in 1877, under the leadership of the aforementioned Temple. Less than half the approved caloric intake for a modern Indian. Less than the caloric intake at the most notorious concentration camp run by the Nazis.
|
|
Caloric Value
|
Activity Level
|
|
Basal
metabolism
|
1,500
|
No activity
|
|
Ration in
Madras, 1877
|
1,627
|
Heavy labour
|
|
Buchenwald
ration, 1944
|
1,750
|
Heavy labour
|
|
7-year-old
child, approved diet, 1981
|
2,050
|
Normal
activity
|
|
Minimum war
ration, Japan, 1945
|
2,165
|
Moderate
activity
|
|
Indian adult,
subsistence, 1985
|
2,400
|
Moderate
activity
|
|
Ration in
Bengal, 1874
|
2,500
|
Heavy labour
|
|
Survey of
Bengali labourers, 1862
|
2,790
|
Heavy labour
|
|
Indian male,
approved diet, 1981
|
3,900
|
Heavy labour
|
|
Voit-Atwater
standard, 1895
|
4,200
|
Heavy labour
|
Refer to Loot: in search of the East India Company - By Nick Robins and How India became poor - indiarealist.com
Mark Twain in India
Mark Twain (1835-1910) author of Following the Equator, blamed the white man who, in the name of civilization and "the white man's burden," impoverished many peoples in the world. The poverty of India suffocated Mark Twain. In his book Mark Twain in India, Keshav Mustalkik noted of Twain's observation:
"The white man's tools were whiskey and wine and tobacco offered with the fetters and hanging pole and noose; the white man's world was death and murder coupled with the commandment Thou Shall not kill. Mark Twain angrily said, "We are obliged to believe that a nation that could look on, unmoved, and see starving or freezing women hanged for stealing twenty-six cents' worth of food or rags, and boys snatched from their mothers and men from their families and sent to the other side of the world for long terms of years for similar trifling offenses, was nation to whom the term 'civilized" could not in any large way be applied." The result of 'civilization' was the extermination of the savages. These are the humorous things in the world - among them the white man's notion that he is less savage than the savage."
(source: Hinduism Today July/August/September 2002 p. 54-55). Refer to Jesus Christ: Artifice for Aggression - By Sita Ram Goel
From Jewel in the
Crown to Third World
Sir Charles Trevelyan,
Finance Minister of India in the 1860s, was anxious to see the disappearance of the
Indian weaver as a class, a development he thought best for both Britain
and India: India would benefit because the weaver, faced with competition from
machine-made goods, would be forced to give up his craft and turn to
agriculture; the increased labor supply would then raise output and England
would benefit since makers of cloth would be converted into consumers of
Lancashire goods."
(source: Decolonizing History: Technology and Culture in India, China and the West
1492 to the Present Day - By Claude Alvares p. 152).
"British historian William Digby ('Prosperous'
British India) and the Indian historian Rajni Palme Dutt (India
Today) would agree, the
Industrial Revolution would not have taken place had it not been for the
'venture capital' provided by loot from Bengal. Note the amazing
coincidence: the Battle of Plassey, 1757. The spinning jenny, 1764; the water
frame, 1769; the steam engine, 1785. Money chased innovations -- and the
innovations appeared."
(source: The predatory
State - Rajeev Srinivasan rediff.com).
The people flock to the factories because the land cannot
support them; because it is overtaxed, because it is overpopulated, and because
the domestic industries with which the peasants formerly eked out in winter
their gleanings from the summer fields, have been destroyed by British control
of Indian tariffs and trade. For of old the handicrafts of India were known
throughout the world; it was manufactured
- i.e hand-made – goods which
European merchants brought from India to sell to the West. In 1680, says the
British historian Nicholas Orme,
the manufacture of cotton was almost universal in India, and the busy spinning
wheels enabled the women to round out the earnings of their men. But the
English in India objected to this competition of domestic industry with their
mills at home; they resolved that India should be reduced to a purely
agricultural country, and be forced in consequence to become a vast market for
British machine-made goods.
As a British historian put it: “It is a melancholy
instance of the wrong done to India by the country on which she had become
dependent….Had India been independent, she would have retaliated, would have
imposed prohibitive duties upon British goods, and would thus have preserved
her own productive industry from annihilation. This act of self-defense was not
permitted her; she was at the mercy of the stranger.”
And another Englishman wrote: “We have done
everything possible to impoverish still further the miserable beings subject to
the cruel selfishness of English commerce…..Under the pretense of free trade, England has compelled the Hindus to
receive the products of the steam-looms of Lancashire, Yorkshire, Glasgow etc…while
the hand-wrought manufactures of Bengal and Bihar, beautiful in fabric and
durable in wear, have heavy and almost prohibitive duties imposed on their
importation into England.”
The result was that
Manchester and Paisley flourished, and Indian industries declined; a country well on the way to prosperity was forcibly
arrested in development, and compelled to be only a rural hinterland for
industrial England. The mineral wealth
abounding in India was not explored, for no competition with England was
allowed.
“India, “ says Hans
Kohn author of A History of Nationalism in the East “was
transformed into a purely agricultural country, and her people lived
perpetually on the verge of starvation.”
Commerce on the sea is monopolized by the British even
more than transport on land. The Hindus are not permitted to organize a
merchant marine of their own. All Indian goods must be carried in British
bottoms, an additional strain on the starving nation’s purse, and the building
of ships, which once gave employment to thousands of Hindus is prohibited.
As early as 1783
Edmund Burke predicted that the annual drain of Indian resources to
England without equivalent return would eventually
destroy India.
From Plassey to Waterloo, fifty seven years, the drain of
India’s wealth to England is computed by Brooks Adams at two-and-a-half to five
billion dollars. He adds, what Macaulay
suggested long ago, that it was this stolen wealth from India which supplied
England with free capital for the development of mechanical inventions, and so
made possible the Industrial Revolution.
"Two of the stark statistics that reveal the colonial plunder
and neglect are: At the end of British colonial rule, life expectancy in India
was 27 years and literacy 8 percent; after fifty years of independence, life
expectancy is 62 years, and literacy 52 percent."
Anglophilic
apologists, take note: British colonial
rule in India was the organized banditry that financed England's Industrial
Revolution."
Britain not only took money from India but also technology. According to American Historian Will Durant, India had flourishing ship building industry besides expertise in steel making and textiles. All these came to ruin once Britain took over.
Britain not only took money from India but also technology. According to American Historian Will Durant, India had flourishing ship building industry besides expertise in steel making and textiles. All these came to ruin once Britain took over.
Not only India financed England's industrial
revolution but also that of American growth and economic prosperity. For about hundred years in 19th century US levied stiff
tariffs on any goods imported from Britain. Usually this calls for reciprocal
measures. But Britain did not care since it had the empire to absorb the
iniquity. And Americans thus enjoyed advantage in trade with Britain. India thus financed American economy as well.
In 1901 Dutt estimated that one-half of the net revenues
of India flowed annually out of the country, never to return. “So great an
economic drain out of the resources of the land,” says Dutt, “would impoverish
the most prosperous countries on earth; it has reduced India to a land of
famines more frequent, more widespread,
and more fatal, than any known before in the history of India or of the
world.”
(source: IndiaStar.com).
Social
Destruction:
From such poverty come ignorance, superstition, disease
and death. A people reduced to these straits cannot afford education, they
cannot afford the taxes required to
maintain adequate schools.
When the British came there was, throughout India, a
system of communal schools, managed by the village communities. The agents of the East India Company
destroyed these village communities, and took steps to replace the schools;
even today, after a century of effort to restore them, they stand at only 66%
of their number a hundred years ago. Hence, the 93 % illiteracy of India.
Instead of encouraging education, the Government
encourages drink. When the British came India was a sober nation. “The
temperance of the people,” said Warren Hastings, “is demonstrated in the
simplicity of food and their total abstinence from spirituous liquors and other
substances of intoxication.” With the first trading posts established by the
British, saloons were opened for the sale of rum, and the East India Company
made handsome profits from the trade.
Seven thousand opium shops were operated in India, by the British Government in the most
conspicuous places in every town. Thus the health, courage, and character of
the Hindu people have been undermined through this ruthless drugging of a
nation by men pretending to be Christians.
(source: The Case
for India - By Will Durant Simon and Schuster, New York. 1930
V S Naipaul said in 1967: "Indians are proud of their ancient, surviving civilization. They
are, in fact, its victims."
Neera K Sohoni writes:
"Earlier books in my own or my children’s
student days echoed the British, therefore the ruler’s, take on events. Here is
an effort to interpret British rule in terms of how it benefited the British
but harmed India and the people England ruled. The book offers some harsh facts
about the negative impact of British
rule on Indian economy, agriculture, crafts, and development. In my time, one had to wait to read Economic History of India at the graduate level before getting an inkling of the exploitative impact of British policies. The textbook speaks bluntly of the racialism practised by the British, rather than the one-sided ‘fair and enlightened rule’ gibberish we were fed with. "
(source: Reclaiming our story - by Neera K Sohoni -
indianexpress.com).
***
The Raj
and the ReichMichael Portillo, a Conservative Minister for Kensington and Chelsea in the British government, in early 1995 compared one-time British government in India - the so-called 'Raj' - with the Nazi regime.
The fact remains that British rule in India was largely rule with an iron fist, even though it may most often have been in a velvet glove. As an conquering and occupying power, the British East India Company were largely free from legal control from Britain and could virtually make their own laws to subdue, divide and rule these states and their peoples. These laws were made just as draconian as the demand for control of India's resources, draining its economy for huge profits and ensuring the ascendancy of the British white man demanded.
After the so-called 'Mutiny' the British lived more and more as an isolated ruling caste, with all too widespread disdain and hardened attitudes towards most peoples in the sub-continent. The British thought and behaved as a 'master race' towards their subordinates. Among the many sins of the British was the recruitment under false pretences and promises of Indian workers to labor in their other colonies in Africa and the West Indies. Their exile was permanent as they could not get the means to return to India and were exploited thoroughly - bonded laborers under virtual slavery in all but name, often held in their places by systems of unjust debts.
In Place of Slavery - Indentured laborers
Slavery was abolished in Suriname in 1863. Between 1873 and 1940 more than 34,000 British Indians entered Suriname and effectively replaced the former slaves. Deplorable condition of Indian labor:
"Under the colour of a Bill for protecting the Indian labourers, it is proposed to legalize the importation of them into the colonies." "Hundreds of thousands of poor helpless women and children are now to be abandoned to want, that the growth of sugar in the West Indies may not languish." Indentureship recruitment, the Indo-Trinidadian scholar Kenneth Permasad reminds us, "took place in an India reeling under the yoke of colonial oppression." Colonialism induced massive transformations in Indian economy and society, and the increase in famines under colonial rule, the destruction of indigenous industries, and the proliferation of the unemployed all attest to the heartlessness of colonial rule. From Calcutta and Madras Indian men, and a much smaller number of women, especially in the first few decades of indentured migration, were herded into "coolie" ships, confined to the lower deck, the women subject to the lustful advances of the European crew. Sometimes condemned to eat, sleep, and sit amidst their own waste, the indentureds were just as often without anything but the most elementary form of medical care. Many did not survive the long and brutal "middle passage"; the bodies of the dead were, quite unceremoniously, thrown overboard.
Discipline was enforced with an iron hand, and the whip cracked generously: as a number of Indian laborers in Surinam were to state in a complaint in 1883, "if any coolie fails to work for a single day of the week, he is sent to jail for two or four days, where he is forced to work while day and night kept under chains. We are tortured very much. For this reason two to three persons died by swallowing opium and drowning themselves." Indians are apt, like many other people, to associate the phenomenon of slavery solely with Africans, but it is not realized that indentured labor was only, in the words of Hugh Tinker, "a new form of slavery".
(source: Manas - Indentured Labor). For more information refer to chapter on Glimpses III).
***
Feeling of inferiority in Indians
Jim Corbett, the renowned tiger hunter even commented that the Indians were so obedient that otherwise it was impossible for 30,000 to rule 300 million.***
The abject feeling of inferiority in India was the result
of a different set of circumstances, brought
about principally by total subjection to British rule. Unlike the
Chinese, Indians adapted at first to the roles that Empire required. The
psychological and moral effects of British conquests and Indian subjection
gradually spread and deepened. The disappearance of the warrior element in Indian society (the Kshatriyas) marked the
disappearance too of basic components such as courage and encouraged more
superficial doubts among Indians about their technical ability to do anything
about the overthrow of British rule.
British rule succeeded in making clear to the Indians
themselves that they lacked power, and it strengthened the imperial opinion
that qualities of passivity, weakness, and cowardice were in fact norms of
Indian culture and character. The process no doubt aided when the British
concentrated on providing educational and related service opportunities that
required the tamer skills and temperament of the office rather than the scepter
and sword. On the other hand, Britons were led to think that the superiority of English power and culture was
an inherent rather than a historical phenomenon. What is even more surprising, the devaluation of Indian culture led to a
contempt for the Indian physique.
“The physical organization of the Bengali is feeble even
to effeminacy. He lives in a constant vapor bath. His pursuits are sedentary,
his limbs delicate, his movements languid. ….” Wrote John Strachey in his book, India, its administration & progess which was
written at the turn of the century and a standard training assignment text at
the time for Englishmen undergoing probation in the Indian Civil Service.
(source: Decolonizing History: Technology and Culture in India, China and the West
1492 to the Present Day - By Claude Alvares p. 186-187).
British administrators, missionaries, and
European Indologists -- Arun Shourie cites extensively from historical
documents to establish that these three groups colluded in essential agreement
that "India is a den of ignorance, inequity and falsehood; the principal
cause of this state of affairs is Hinduism; Hinduism is kept going by the
Brahmins; as the people are in such suffering, and also because Jesus in his
parting words has bound us to do so, it is a duty to deliver them to
Christianity; for this, it is Hinduism which has to be vanquished." Macaulay's notorious minute instituting English as the medium of instruction in India, says Shourie, "was laced with utter contempt for India, in particular for Hinduism, for our languages and literature: of course, Macaulay did not know any of those languages... his ideas about Hinduism had been formed from the calumny of missionaries .... But the breezy, sweeping damnation-- even a century and a half later, the imperialist swagger takes one's breath away."
(source: Missionaries in India - By Arun Shourie).
The
Christian Conquest of India Bishop James M. Thoburn (1836-1922) wrote in his book, The Christian Conquest of India in 1906, about the Millions Waiting to be converted in the British Empire:
“In her most palmy days Rome ruled over only one hundred
and twenty million people, while in India today nearly three hundred million
souls are subject, more or less directly, to the rule of the King-Emperor.
China alone among the great kingdoms and empires of the world can compare with
India in population at the beginning of this new century, and this splendid
realm has opened all her gates and doors to the Christian missionary. Instead
of the wretched little vessels in which Paul coasted around the Mediterranean
ports, the Indian missionary has floating palaces to convey him at sea, while
palatial cars await him when he wished to travel by land. God has opened his
pathway to even the most remote tribes, while a sympathetic and enlightened
government protects him from hostile persecution, or even the menace of danger.
The original commission to evangelize the nations still stands, while God, who
rules over all nations, sets an open door before his servants who are willing
to enter and evangelize the waiting millions.”
“The time is auspicious, and the missionaries of India
should not lose a day or an hour in sounding the trumpet for a great forward
movement. As Paul, the ideal missionary for all lands and all times, aimed
first at Greece and next for Rome, so should the missionaries of our modern day
aim for all the great centers of population, commerce, and political rule in
the empire. This does not mean that outlying and distant places are to be
negated, but only that the great centers of power and influence should be
quickly seized and strongly held. A wide and firm grasp is needed. The word should be passed all along the line
that India is to be won for Christ, and that the greatest movement ever
attempted in the history of Christianity is now at hand. Nothing in all modern
history, nothing since the day of Pentecost, has been equal to the present
opportunity.
The old may rejoice that they have lived to see this day,
but the young may rejoice still more in the hope of seeing a day when a million
souls will be found inquiring the way to Zion in North India, a million in West India, a million more in
Burma, and still a million more in South India. A million? Why not ten million?
Why not the Christian Conquest of
India?
(source: The Christian Conquest of India - By Bishop James M. Thoburn p.
244-245). Refer to Jesus Christ:
Artifice for Aggression - By Sita Ram Goel
India ’s North-east
All Roads Lead to the British Empire
All Roads Lead to the British Empire
The British Empire survived, and then thrived, through
identification, within the subcontinent, of various ethnic and sub-ethnic
groups and their conflict points; and then, exploited those conflict points to
keep the groups divided and hostile to each other. India and the other South
Asian nations failed to comprehend that it was suicidal to allow a degenerate colonial
power to pursue such policies against their nations.
The die was cast in the subversion of the sovereignty of
an independent India by the British Raj in 1862, when it laid down the law of
apartheid, to isolate “the tribal groups.” The British came into the area in
the 1820s, following the Burmese conquest of Manipur and parts of Assam . The
area had become unstable in the latter part of the 18th Century, following the
over-extension of the Burmese-based Ahom kingdom, which reached into Assam . The
instability caused by the weakening of the Ahom kingdom prompted the Burmese to
move to secure their western flank. But the Burmese action also helped to bring
in the British. The British East India Company was lying in wait for the Ahom
kingdom to disintegrate.
Lord Palmerston’s Zoo
The British plan to cordon off the north-east tribal areas was part of its policy of setting up a multicultural human zoo, during the 1850s, under the premiership of Henry Temple, the third Viscount Palmerston. Lord Palmerston, as Henry Temple was called, had three “friends” - the British Foreign Office, the Home Office, and Whitehall .
The apartheid programme eliminated the North-east Frontier Agency from the political map of India , and segregated the tribal population from Assam , as the British had done in southern Africa and would later do in Sudan . By 1875, British intentions became clear, even to those Englishmen who believed that the purpose of Mother England’s intervention in India , and the North-east in particular, was to improve the conditions of the heathens.
The British plan to cordon off the north-east tribal areas was part of its policy of setting up a multicultural human zoo, during the 1850s, under the premiership of Henry Temple, the third Viscount Palmerston. Lord Palmerston, as Henry Temple was called, had three “friends” - the British Foreign Office, the Home Office, and Whitehall .
The apartheid programme eliminated the North-east Frontier Agency from the political map of India , and segregated the tribal population from Assam , as the British had done in southern Africa and would later do in Sudan . By 1875, British intentions became clear, even to those Englishmen who believed that the purpose of Mother England’s intervention in India , and the North-east in particular, was to improve the conditions of the heathens.
Apartheid also helped the British to function freely in
this closed environment. Soon enough, the British Crown introduced another
feature: It allowed Christian
missionaries to proselytize among the tribal population and units of the
Frontier Constabulary. The Land of the
Nagas was identified as “virgin soil” for planting Christianity.
“Among a people so thoroughly primitive, and so independent of religious profession, we might reasonably expect missionary zeal would be most successful,” stated the 1875 document, as quoted in the “Descriptive Account of Assam,” by William Robinson and Angus Hamilton.
“Among a people so thoroughly primitive, and so independent of religious profession, we might reasonably expect missionary zeal would be most successful,” stated the 1875 document, as quoted in the “Descriptive Account of Assam,” by William Robinson and Angus Hamilton.
Missionaries were also
encouraged to open government-aided schools in the Naga Hills . Between 1891
and 1901, the number of native Christians increased 128%. The chief
proselytizers were the Welsh Presbyterians, headquartered in Khasi and the
Jaintia Hills. British Baptists were given the franchise of the Mizo (Lushai)
and Naga Hills , and the Baptist mission was set up in 1836.
(source: South Asian Terrorism: All Roads Lead to the British Empire - By Ramtanu Maitra -
vijayvaani.com).
***
Gorham D.
Sanderson has written:"The British army in India expressed most of the crude realities of militarism. The bayonet was within striking distance of every man, woman, and child in India. British militarism in India was founded upon a principle which tolerated swift and ruthless destruction of civilian life and property. The purpose of militarism in India was to compel obedience by terror. Massacres, bombings, and other atrocities occurred frequently enough to spread fear and submissiveness. Protected by British bayonets, tax gatherers, plantation owners, police, judges, prison keepers, and British citizens were able to carry their purpose with impunity. The use of force to extract profits and satisfy privileged appetites is no pretty picture anywhere.
(source: India and British Imperialism - By Gorham D. Sanderson p. 249).
Winston Churchill on Colonial bondage and Terrorism
Winston Churchill (1874 - 1965) served as a soldier and journalist in India. He had opposed limited self-government for India because he cherished, Britain's imperial history. A Labour MP asked in the British House of Commons whether the principles of the Atlantic charter would apply to India and elicited the celebrated reply from Winston Churchill that he had not become the first minister of His Majesty’s government to preside over the liquidation of the British empire.
As Secretary of State at the War Office (1919), W
Churchill authorized the RAF Middle East Command to use chemical weapons
"against recalcitrant Arabs as an experiment", dismissing objections
by the India Office as
"unreasonable".
"I do not understand this squeamishness about the use
of gas. I am strongly in favour of
using poisoned gas against uncivilized tribes. (to) spread a lively
terror." (The tribes were the Kurds of Iraq and the Afghans.) "We cannot acquiesce in the
non-utilisation of any available weapons to procure a speedy termination of the
disorder which prevails on the frontier", adding that chemical weapons are
merely "the application of Western science to modern warfare".
Lesser breeds?
"I do not agree
that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger even though he may
have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit for instance, that a
great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of
Australia. I do not admit that a wrong
has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade
race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their
place."
Basing itself on lessons learnt in its Indian colonial possession as well as
its wartime experience in Iranian Kurdistan, Britain cast around for pliable
Kurdish figures whom it could appoint to positions of authority, focusing
especially on tribal leaders - even going to the extent of 're-tribalising':
For all its talk of its 'civilising
mission' to non-Christian and non-white peoples, therefore, Britain was
deliberately attempting to turn back the clock of social development, in the
naked pursuit of its own capitalist interests. The British imperial General Stanley Maude, who, after marching his military forces into Baghdad in 1917 in order to establish British Empire rule, declared, “Our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators.”
(source: Winston Churchill on Terrorism and www.internationalism.org and Churchill - Drunk With Thrill Of Genocide - By Chris Floyd and http://www.rense.com/general47/thil.htm and timesofindia.com). Refer to Jesus Christ: Artifice for Aggression - By Sita Ram Goel
(Note: Churchill is named Time’ magazine’s man of the year for 1940. and U.S. News and World Report have dubbed Winston Churchill "The Last Hero" in a 2000 cover story).
Winston Churchill and Mahatma Gandhi
"It is alarming and also nauseating to see Mr. Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well-known in the East, striding half-naked up the steps of the Viceregal palace, while he is still organizing and conducting a defiant campaign of civil disobedience, to parley on equal terms with the representative of the King Emperor."
(source: India Britannica - By Geoffrey Moorhouse p. 240). For more refer to Mahatma Gandhi.
Winston Churchill
favoured letting Gandhi die if he went on hunger strike, newly published
Cabinet papers show. The UK's WWII prime
minister thought India's spiritual leader should be treated like anyone else if
he stopped eating while being held by the British. But his ministers persuaded
him against the tactic, fearing Gandhi would become a martyr if he died in
British hands. The Viceroy of then British-run India, Lord Linlithgow, said he
was "strongly in favour of letting Gandhi starve to death". "He
is such a semi-religious figure that his death in our hands would be a great
blow and embarrassment to us," said Sir Stafford Cripps, then Minister for
Aircraft Production.
(source: Churchill may have
let Gandhi die - BBC)."The British mentality is the same as Hitler's. In their own estimation they are the master race born to govern. Only those who successfully show fight get what they want from Britian. She always interferes on the side of reaction, and the League of Nations itself is just another link in the chain of bondage, for the status quo clause would fetter India for ever as Britain's subject."
(source: India Reveals Herself - By Basil Matthew p. 90).
The British are accustomed to bestow high praise upon
their Government in India and to urge its continuance on the ground of its
great efficiency.
The Indian people, contend that it is efficient only in
serving British interests, only in carrying on the affairs of India for
Britain’s benefit, and that it is not efficient, but woefully inefficient, in
promoting the interests of India.
Said the Hon. G.
K. Gokhale, “One result is that the true well-being of the people is
systematically subordinated to militarism, and to the service and the interests
of the English mercantile classes.”
In his recent book, “Modern India: Its Problems and their Solution” (p. 161
and 77), Dr. V. H. Rutherford,
M. P. examines the character and results of British efficiency, and pronounces
it “one of the chief causes of India’s poverty.” He declares that the British
Government in India is efficient only on behalf of British interests, only in
carrying on the government and managing the affairs of the country for the
benefit of Great Britain. He cites the Government’s neglect of education of
masses; neglect of sanitation and medical services in the villages; neglect to
keep order; neglect of housing of the poor; neglect to provide agricultural
banks; comparative neglect to improve and develop agriculture; neglect to
foster Indian industries; neglect to protect British profiteers from capturing the
tramways, electric lighting and other public services; and neglect to prevent
the manipulation of Indian currency in the interests of London.” “British rule
as it is carried on in India is the lowest and most immoral system of
government in the world – the exploitation of one nation by another.”
Some years ago, at the time of the Congo atrocities, an
Irish author wrote: “The English people love liberty – for themselves. They
hate all acts of injustices, except those which they themselves commit. They
are such liberty-loving people, that they interfere in the Congo and cry,
‘Shame! To the Belgians. But they forget that their heels are on the neck of
India.”
In his book, “Secret History of the English Occupation of Egypt” (p.
47), Wilfrid Scawen Blunt gives
some strong and important testimony regarding British rule in India as seen
close at hand and under the most favorable light. He was an intimate personal
friend of Lord Lytton, who at that time was the Viceroy of India. Mr. Blunt
went there to make a study of the condition of things there. He found that
British rule in India, instead of being a blessing, was working India’s
ruin. Of the British Imperial system in
general he writes:
“It is one of the evils of the English Imperial system
that it cannot meddle anywhere among free people, even with quite innocent
intentions, without in the end doing evil. Of India he writes: “I am
disappointed with India, which seems just as ill governed as the rest of Asia,
only with good intentions instead of bad ones or none at all. There is just the
same heavy taxation, government by foreign officials, and waste of money, that
one sees in Turkey. The result is the same, and I don’t see much difference between making the starving Hindoo pay for a
cathedral at Calcutta and taxing Bulgarians for a palace on the
Bosphorus….In India the ‘natives’ as they call them, are a race of slaves,
frightened, unhappy, terribly thin. Though myself a good Conservative and
member of the London Carlton Club, I own to being shocked at the bondage in
which they are held, and my faith in British institutions and blessings of
English rule has received a severe blow……if we go on developing the country at the present rate, the inhabitants
will have, sooner or later, to resort to cannibalism, for there will be nothing
but each other left to eat.”
Rev. C. F. Andrews in his recent book, “India’s Claim for Independence,” says: “The British Empire today,
with its Indian appendage – with India held in subjection by force – is also a
monstrosity. It can produce only bitterness, ever-increasing bitterness, and
estrangement, between India and England, tow people that ought to be
friends.”
To conclude: There
is not a myth on the earth more baseless or more cruel than the claim put forth
to the world that England is ruling great distant India well, or that
she can by any possibility rule it well, or without constant blunders and
injustices of the most serious and tragic nature.
(source: India in Bondage: Her Right to Freedom - By Rev. Jabez T. Sunderland p. 313-318).
(source: India in Bondage: Her Right to Freedom - By Rev. Jabez T. Sunderland p. 313-318).
“English rule,” wrote Sri Aurobindo, “. . .
undermined and deprived of living strength all the pre-existing centres and
instruments of Indian social life and by a sort of unperceived rodent process left
it only a rotting shell without expansive power or any better defensive force
than the force of inertia."
(source: The Foundations of Indian Culture - By Sri Aurobindo, 1972,
vol. 14, p. 4).
Gandhi, the idealist, did not realize that the subjection
of India was one root of the War; that this had for a century determined the
British policy, and the size of the British navy, as well as the size of all
the navies in the world. Instead, Gandhi saw the War as an opportunity for
securing Home Rule by proving the absolute loyalty of India to England. From
the beginning to the end the Great Madness he supported the Allies, and India
followed him. She contributed at once $500,000,000 to the fund for prosecuting
the War; she contributed $7,000,000,000 later in subscriptions to war loans;
and she sent to the Allies various products to the value of $ 1,250,000,000.
The total number of Hindus who were persuaded, often by means amounting to
compulsion, to fight for England in the war, was 1,338,620, being 178,000 more
than all the troops contributed by the combined Dominions of Canada, South
Africa, Australia and New Zealand.
None of the Hindu
soldiers were granted a commission, however, brave he might have proved himself
to be. Yet they gave a good account of
themselves in France, in Palestine, in Syria and Mesopotamia; a British
historian speaks of "the brilliant performances of the Indian contingent
sent to France in 1914 at a critical time in the Great War"; and some say
that it was the Hindu troops who first turned back the Germans at the Marne. It
has been one of the many misfortunes of the Hindus, who are called unfit for
self-defense, that they have been considered admirable military material to
fight for any others except themselves.
Never had a colony or a possession made so a great
sacrifice for the master country. Every Hindu
conscious of India looked forward hopefully now, as a reward for this bloody
loyalty, to the admission of his country into the fellowship of free dominions
under the English flag. After the war, Lloyd George, then Premier, declared
with unstatesmanlike, clarity that Britain intended always to rule India, that
there must always, remain in India "a steel frame" of British power
and British dominance. This was the best traditions of imperialistic hypocrisy.
The Montagu-Chelmsform reform fell short of promises. Dr. Rutherford, a Member
of Parliament, wrote: "Never in the history of the world was such a hoax
perpetrated upon a great people as England perpetrated upon India, when in
return for India's invaluable service during the War, we gave to the Indian
nation such a discreditable, disgraceful, undemocratic, tyrannical
constitution.
(source: The Case
for India - By Will Durant Simon and Schuster, New York. 1930 p.
123-128).
'British military tested poison
gas on Indian soldiers'
Are British War Criminals like Saddam Hussein?
British military
scientists sent hundreds of Indian soldiers into gas chambers to test mustard gas during more than a decade of experiments
that began before World War II, a media report said. British military did not
check up on the Indian soldiers after the experiments to see if they developed
any illnesses. It is now recognised that mustard gas can cause cancer and other
diseases. The experiments began in the early 1930s and lasted more than 10
years at a military site. The experiments in Rawalpindi were part of a much
larger programme intended to test the effects of chemical weapons on humans,
the paper reported. Are British War Criminals like Saddam Hussein?
(source: 'British military tested poison gas on Indian soldiers' - rediff.com and The Guardi
The parting shot on the Indian Subcontinent by
the British Empire in 1947 was to break it up into two countries - India and
Pakistan . The division, which followed rivers of blood unleashed by the ruling
British to prevent the birth of a single nation, was carried out on the basis
of religious divisions.
Alain Danielou (1907-1994), son of French aristocracy, author of numerous
books on philosophy, religion, history and arts of India, has said that the
division of India was on the human level as well as on the political one, a great mistake. It added, he says, to
the Middle East an unstable state (Pakistan) and burdened India which already
had serious problems."
He further says:
"India whose
ancient borders stretched until Afghanistan, lost with the country of seven
rivers (the Indus Valley), the historical center of her civilization. At a time
when the Muslim invaders seemed to have lost some of their extremism and were
ready to assimilate themselves to other populations of India, the European
(British) conquerors, before returning home, surrendered once more to Muslim fanaticism
the cradle of Hindu civilization.
(source: Histoire
de l'Inde - Alain Danielou p. 355).
Horrors of Partition
Horrors of Partition
Dramatic new footage from India's partition in 1947 --
much of it in color (a three-part report by ITV to be called The British Empire in Color) and never been seen
publicly before -- will be shown on British TV this month. The new footage
gives the most vivid visuals yet of the violence and atrocities that occurred
during the partition when the sub-continent was broke up into Pakistan and
India.
The frames shot at the time of partition have stunned
audiences at early screenings and already provoked an argument among
historians. The partition is being compared with the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and Rwanda. "The British, and in
particular Lord Louis Mountbatten, Prince Charles's great uncle and adored
mentor, come across as vainglorious interlopers who left the continent when
trouble loomed," The Observer reports.
"Terrible
scenes, not seen before, of thousands of dispossessed refugees trailing across
the newly created border with Pakistan will make it hard to defend the memory
of colonial India as a caring,
orderly place, which was run in increasing collaboration with Indians." Historian
Andrew Roberts and Prof Judith Brown, the Oxford academic who advised the
program-makers on India, say these distressing
pictures will be a welcome jolt
to Britain's complacent self-image. "At the time of transition the
British establishment admitted that around 100,000 had died," says
Roberts. "But from my own researches the figure is more like three
quarters of a million. A figure not un-adjacent to what happened in Rwanda and
worse, I think, than in Bosnia.
"The footage shows terrible trails of people and much
of this is not known about in Britain where it was described at the time as 'a peaceful transfer of power.'"
(source: British TV to air horrors of India's partition - Times of India).
"...It has rare images and comments that expose the
British Raj as exploitative and
in many ways a shambles. The documentary unravels much of the grim reality beneath the grand spectacle of
the Raj. The pomp and show is also there to be seen, as never before.
The spectacle of 20,000 men who came to honour Kind George V in Delhi in 1911.
Lord Linlithgow is shown as hunting down 38 rhinos, 120 tigers and 27 leopards
over a three-month shoot in the company of several Indian princes. The film brings out the dire poverty in which
most Indians lived, away from the glamour in Delhi.
It quotes Gandhi as describing this as a "crime against humanity".
The partition of India in 1947 was the most tragic legacy of the empire, the documentary shows, giving horrific accounts of atrocities. Of 10 million people who crossed over in Punjab, a million died.
(source: Documentary on British Empire stirs new controversy - newindpress.com).
It quotes Gandhi as describing this as a "crime against humanity".
The partition of India in 1947 was the most tragic legacy of the empire, the documentary shows, giving horrific accounts of atrocities. Of 10 million people who crossed over in Punjab, a million died.
(source: Documentary on British Empire stirs new controversy - newindpress.com).
Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950) most original philosopher of modern India said,
"India is free, but she has not achieved unity, only a fissured and broken
freedom."
"A fundamental mistake”. That was how Maulana Abdul Kalam Azad, the greatest of India’s Muslim leaders, described the Partition of India on October 23, 1947. Many in both countries today agree that Partition was a historical blunder.
(source: Fundamental mistake, historical blunder - By V. S. Dharma Kumar). The country was partitioned on the basis of religion and undivided Bengal lost its two-third area to Pakistan in 1947.
Partition triggered one of the most terrible and bloodied exodus in the history of humanity. Partition, which the British willfully and consciously left behind as a parting gift. Winston Churchill's (who had called Gandhi a naked fakir), words on learning about the chaos following Partition: "At last we had the last word."
(source: Arise O India - By Francois Gautier p. 85-92).
"A fundamental mistake”. That was how Maulana Abdul Kalam Azad, the greatest of India’s Muslim leaders, described the Partition of India on October 23, 1947. Many in both countries today agree that Partition was a historical blunder.
(source: Fundamental mistake, historical blunder - By V. S. Dharma Kumar). The country was partitioned on the basis of religion and undivided Bengal lost its two-third area to Pakistan in 1947.
Partition triggered one of the most terrible and bloodied exodus in the history of humanity. Partition, which the British willfully and consciously left behind as a parting gift. Winston Churchill's (who had called Gandhi a naked fakir), words on learning about the chaos following Partition: "At last we had the last word."
(source: Arise O India - By Francois Gautier p. 85-92).
Prince Charles much-publicized British Golden Jubilee
Banquet held in London, recently thanked India for "its civilizing influence over Britain", then proposed a
toast for "real India, the
enduring and everlasting India", an India that had preserved its identity
through its experience of colonization.....What a volte face for a nation that systematically during its 300 years
of rule, denigrated every aspect of the 'native' culture, including its
philosophy and spirituality, and supplanted it with its own imperial values,
attitude and approaches.
(source: The empire strikes
back - By Suma Varghese Publication: The Free
Press Journal Date: December 5, 1997)
In conclusion, it can be said that, from 1600, when the East India Company received its charter from Queen Elizabeth, to 1947, when Lord Mountbatten packed up the Union Jack, the history of the British in India has been one of treachery, exploitation and untold savagery.
The Great Farce - The benign British?
The Colonial Legacy - Myths and Popular Beliefs - Fashionable theories of benign Imperial rule ?
"They emphasize the improvements in administration, construction of railroad, universities, abolition of ‘Sati’ and ‘Thugis’ from India and ultimate peaceful transfer of power to Gandhi-Nehru. According to British history, there was no freedom movement in India, no man made famines, no transfer of huge resources from India to Britain, no destruction of Indian industries and agriculture by the British rule, but only a very benign and benevolent British rule in India."
- writes Dr. Dipak Basu of Nagasaki University in Japan
***
The Colonial Legacy - Myths of The British Raj
1. Railways
Romancing the Raj?
Oozing with the milk
of human kindness, aren’t we?
Modern Indians carry
this rather ignorant impression that Indians railways was a departing gift by
the British to independent India.
This impression is aided and abetted by Western media too. Recently, Robert Kaplan
writing in The Atlantic gushed
how the “British, by contrast, brought tangible development, ports and railways,
that created the basis for a modern state” of India.
The end of extraction
Dharmpal is a noted Gandhian and historian of Indian science. He is well known for his "rediscovery" of Indian science. His work has often been path breaking and instilled a whole generation of Indians with a new-found faith in the country's indigenous scientific traditions and cultures.He has recently said:
"The great myth of British railways and administration misses the point of the kind of exploitative institutions and ruthless efficiency which culminated in large-scale famines during and preceding the Second World War, killing millions. "
(source: Indic Science - Interview with Dharmpal - timesofindia - January 3 2004).
Sardar Kavalam
Madhava Panikkar (1895-1963) Indian
scholar, journalist, historian from Kerala, administrator, diplomat, Minister
in Patiala Bikaner and Ambassador to China, Egypt and France. Author of several
books, including Asia and Western Dominance, India Through the ages and India and the Indian Ocean.
Panikkar wrote:
"The 19th century witnessed the apogee of
capitalism in Europe. That this was in a large measure due to Europe ’s
exploitation of Asian resources is now accepted by historians.
"It is the riches of Asian trade flowing to Europe
that enabled the great industrial revolution to take place in England. In the
18th century, conquest was
for the purpose of trade. In the area you conquered, you excluded other
nations, bought at the cheapest price, organized production by forced labor to
suit your requirements, and transferred the profits to mother country. In the
19th century conquest was not for trade but investment. Tea plantations and railway construction
became major interests in Britain ’s connection with India. Vast sums were
invested in India for building railways. "
As J A (John Atkins) Hobson (1858 -
1940) the historian of Imperialism, (1902) observes:
“The exploitation of
other portion of the world, through military plunder, unequal trade and forced
labor, has been the one great indispensable condition in the growth of European
capitalism.”
(source: Asia and Western Dominance - By K M Panikkar p. 316).
When the
British decided to lay a network of rail line in India they gave an impression
that it was being done to improve communication and economic well being of
India. But some enlightened Indians recognized it as an investment in Empire. (source: Asia and Western Dominance - By K M Panikkar p. 316).
The rail line was not built for the benefit of the natives. It was built with sheer selfish interest to lay down the foundation for colonialism and promotion of the British supreme and economic expansionism. At that time, no British mind could have dared imagine that one day the railway line would be lost only to benefit the natives.
It is easy to see why British industry felt very kindly towards the building of railways in India. Railways were needed by British industry in order that Indian seaports and the interior districts of the country be interconnected, so that manufactured goods might be distributed throughout India and the raw products be collected for export to England.
The introduction of Railways for example, as everyone knew, was for the twin purpose of taking away all the agricultural raw materials for their industrial needs and, for the dumping of the British manufacturers in the hinterland markets.
Indian Railways initially was never meant for the sake of Indians and their interests. Similarly the way Indian agriculture was made to go in the commercial way under the colonial rule, was to benefit the British Industry by feeding their hungry mills at the cost of Indian people and peasants.
The severity of the frequent famines is another scourge of the same place. But to say that on account of the British rule, there was transport revolution, there was the linking of the village market to that of the outside markets, that foreign trade got accelerated, foreign capital multiplied, capital oriented industries proliferated — is to overlook the fact that all these were peripheral and unintended to the natives while the major drawback was the huge drain of wealth that all these economic innovations have brought in their trial. What answer the history teacher could provide if a student in the classroom asks for justification for our struggle for independence if the British rule was so positive.
(source: Distortions in History - By K S S Seshan - The Hindu November 26, 02).
The infrasructure that
the British created (roads, ports, cities, railway transportation and power
grids) were designed exclusively for the removal of rich resources in as quick
and efficient manner as possible.
Rev.
Jabez T. Sunderland author of India in Bondage: Her Right to Freedom writes: "The impression is widespread in America that British rule in India has been a great and almost unqualified good. The British themselves never tire of "pointing with pride" to what they claim to have done and to be doing for the benefit of the Indian people. What knowledge we have in America regarding the matter, comes almost wholly from British source, and hence the majority of us do not suspect that there is another side to the story."
There have been persistent attempts of Western scholars to argue that "India was not a country but a congeries of smaller states, and the Indians were not a nation but a conglomeration of peoples of diverse creeds and sects. Anybody familiar with the relevant situation will know that this attitude still forms the major undercurrent of Western scholarship on India. (refer to article: Hindu Nationalism Clouds the Face of India - H. D. S. Greenway. Even today the same attitude is alive and well, Mr. Greenway says in his article: "Secularists realize that a united India was a product of the British Empire. Before the British, Indians owed their allegiances to family, clan, religion, or princely state. We are constantly told that it was the British who established a centralized administration, a common educational system, and countrywide transportation that gave the subcontinent a sense of belonging to one country).
1. Regarding countrywide transportation: Railways
American Historian Will Durant has written in his book - A Case For India:
"It might have been supposed that the building of 30,000 miles of railways would have brought a measure of prosperity to India. But these railways were built not for India but for England; not for the benefit of the Hindu, but for the purpose of the British army and British Trade. If this seems doubtful, observe their operation. Their greatest revenues come, not as in America, from the transport of goods (for the British trader controls the rates), but from the third-class passengers – the Hindus; but these passengers are herded into almost barren coaches like animals bound for the slaughter, twenty or more in one compartment. The railroads are entirely in European hands, and the Government refuse to appoint even one Hindu to the Railway Board. The railways lose money year after year, and are helped by the Government out of the revenues of the people. All the loses are borne by the people, all the gains are gathered by the trader. So much for the railways.
Amitav Ghosh author of several books, The Circle of Reason (1986), won France's top literary award, Prix Medici Estranger, and The Glass Palace also makes fun of the claim that the British gave India the railways.
"Thailand has railways and the British never colonized the country," he says. "In 1885, when the British invaded Burma, the Burmese king was already building railways and telegraphs. These are things Indians could have done themselves."
(source: Travelling through time - interview with Amitav Ghosh).
China and Japan acquired railways without British colonial rule. Same holds for other Western technology.
The Railways were a win-win situation for Britain -- Indians took the risk and the British got trains that brought cheap cotton to the ports to be exported to the mills of Manchester and then distributed the cloth they manufactured to outlets throughout India. Historians have said the railways were the mightiest symbol of the Raj, and grand stations like Bombay's Victoria terminus, a Saracenic-Gothic cathedral of the railway age, and Calcutta's Howrah, cited as the largest station in Asia, were built to impress Indians with the might of their rulers.
Mahatma Gandhi blamed them for carrying "the pest of westernization" around India.
(source: India's railways - By Mark Tully).
Note: The Konkan
Railway, the first major railway project in India since Independence, has been
a major success despite the difficult terrain and the logistics nightmares. As
for the story about the Konkan Railway, it is an inspiration. In the face of
obstacles, including extremely difficult terrain (many tunnels, bridges, etc)
as well as the task of raising large amounts of money through a public bond
issue, the railway was constructed on schedule and within budget. It used to be said that Indians could never
match the feats of the British engineers who built much of India's network;
isn't it amazing that E. Sreedharan, the man who ran this Herculean effort, is
a virtual unknown?
(source: Historicide:
Censoring the past... and the present).Commerce on the sea is monopolized by the British even more than transport on land. The Hindus are not permitted to organize a merchant marine of their own. All Indian goods must be carried in British bottoms, an additional strain on the starving nation’s purse, and the building of ships, which once gave employment to thousands of Hindus is prohibited.
Dadabhai Naoroji has commented on the building railways in India by the British:
"The misfortune of India is that she does not derive the benefits of the railways, as every other country does."
(source: Poverty and Un-British Rule in India - By Dadabhai Naoroji - p. 103).
***
2. Education:
The English rulers have boasted that they have introduced education in India but this boast is pure moonshine.
Literacy in British India in 1911 was only 6%, in 1931 it was 8%, and by 1947 it had crawled to 11%! In higher education in 1935, only 4 in 10,000 were enrolled in universities or higher educational institutes. In a nation of then over 350 million people only 16,000 books (no circulation figures) were published in that year (i.e. 1 per 20,000).
Lord Macaulay who created the modern Indian education system, explicitly stated that he wanted Indians to turn against their own history and tradition and take pride in being loyal subjects of their British masters. In effect, what he envisaged was a form of conversion— almost like religious conversion. It was entirely natural that Christian missionaries should have jumped at the opportunity of converting the people of India in the guise of educating the natives. So education was a principal tool of missionary activity also. This produced a breed of ‘secular converts’ who are proving to be as fanatical as any religious fundamentalist. We call them secularists. Macaulay, and British authorities in general, did not stop at this. They recognized that a conquered people are not fully defeated unless their history is destroyed.
(source: Tortured souls create twisted history - N S Rajaram - bharatvani.org and The Colonial Legacy - Myths and Popular Beliefs).
"Every village had its schoolmaster, supported out of the public funds; in Bengal alone, before the coming of the British, there were some 80,000 native schools - one to every four hundred population. Instruction was given to him in the "Five Shastras" or sciences: grammar, arts and crafts, medicine, logic and philosophy. Finally the child was sent out into the world with the wise admonition that education came only one-fourth from the teacher, one-fourth from private study, one-fourth from one's fellows, and one-fourth from life."
(source: Story of Civilization: Our Oriental Heritage - By Will Durant MJF Books.1935 p.556-557).
Christian missionaries and the British are also proud that they brought education to India, "but," counters Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, Founder of the Bangalore based Art of Living, an International Foundation. He recently addressed the UN Peace Summit on Aug 28. He is the only non-westerner to serve on the advisory board of Yale University's School of Divinity and is author of the book - Hinduism and Christianity:
"it is not true: there were for instance 125,000 medical institutions in Madras before the British came. Indians never lacked education, the Christians only brought British education to India, which in fact caused more damage to India by westernizing many of us."
Sir John Woodroffe, (1865-1936) the well known scholar, Advocate-General of Bengal and sometime Legal Member of the Government of India. Referring to the Macaulay's Educational Minute of 1834 (for education refer to chapter on Hindu Culture Education in Ancient India and First Indologists) he wrote:
"To an Indian, self-conscious of the greatness of his country's civilization, it must be gall and wormwood to hear others speaking of the "education" and "civilization" of India. India who has taught some of the deepest truths which our race has known is to be 'educated.' She whose ancient civilization ranks with the greatest the world has known is to be civilized."
(source: Is India Civilized: Essays on Indian Culture - By Sir John Woodroffe p.290).
European travelers and administrators bear testimony to the great veneration in which Hindus held learning and instruction. One of the earliest observation was made on the subject of indigenous education was by Fra Paolino Da Bartolomeo. Born in Austria, he spent 14 years in India (1776-1789). He wrote: "No people, perhaps, on earth have adhered as much to their ancient usage and customs as the Indians." and "temperance and education contribute, in an uncommon degree, to the bodily confirmation, and to the increase of these people."
Brigadier-General Alexander Walker who served in India between 1780-1810, says, that "no people probably appreciate more justly the importance of instruction that the Hindus."
The fact of wide-spread education - a school in every village - was uniformly noticed by most early observers. Even writing as late as 1820, Abbe J. A. Dubois says that "there are very few villages in which one or many public schools are not to be found...that the students learn in them all that is necessary to their ranks and wants...namely, reading, writing and accounts."
(source: On Hinduism Reviews and Reflections - By Ram Swarup p. 179-180 - refer to chapter on Hindu Culture for more information on Education in Ancient India)
In October 1931 Mahatma Gandhi made a statement at Chatham House, London, that created a furore in the English press. He said, "Today India is more illiterate than it was fifty or a hundred years ago, and so is Burma, because the British administrators, when they came to India, instead of taking hold of things as they were, began to root them out. They scratched the soil and left the root exposed and the beautiful tree perished". Mahatma Gandhi said, "The beautiful tree of education was cut down by you British. Therefore today India is far more illiterate than it was 100 years ago." We now learn, with almost a sense of disbelief, that a large part of the country did have a sustainable education system, as late as even the early years of the 19th century, and that this was systematically demolished over the next 50 years or so. The present education system is, in effect, a legacy of the colonial rule. This system has perpetuated the notion that traditional societies were seeped in ignorance, superstition and rituals for thousands of years and lived a life of abject poverty, which was caused by an extreme form of social discrimination and exploitative socio-political systems. So deep has this notion seeped into our collective consciousness that, it colors the belief of both, providers of education as well as of recipients and aspiring recipients in our society.
(source: http://www.indiatogether.org/education/opinions/btree.htm). (For more please refer to noted Gandhian, Dharampal's book. The Beautiful Tree, (Biblia Impex, Delhi, 1983}.
When the British came there was, throughout India, a system of communal schools, managed by the village communities. The agents of the East India Company destroyed these village communities, and took steps to replace the schools; even today, after a century of effort to restore them, they stand at only 66% of their number a hundred years ago. Hence, the 93 % illiteracy of India.
(source: The Case for India - By Will Durant Simon and Schuster, New York. 1930 p.44).
Mr. Ermest Havell (formerly Principal of the Calcutta school of Art) has
rightly said, the fault of the Anglo-Indian Educational System is that, instead
of harmonizing with, and supplementing, national culture, it is antagonist to,
and destructive, of it.
Sir George Birdwood says of the system that it “has destroyed in Indians the
love of their own literature, the quickening soul of a people, and their
delight in their own arts, and worst of all their repose in their own
traditional and national religion, has disgusted them with their own homes,
their parents, and their sisters, their very wives, and brought discontent into
every family so far as its baneful influences have reached.
(source: Bharata Shakti: Collection of Addresses on Indian Culture - By Sir John
Woodroffe p. 75-77).The missionaries and the government cooperated for mutual benefit in the spread of Western education. The government made use of the linguistic expertise of the missionaries and their knowledge of local customs and tradition for the extension and consolidation of the empire. By the middle of the 19th century a new type of English rulers was emerging. The evangelical influence had grown and the new officials both in London and in India made no secret of their sincere profession of Christianity. Some of the British officials including Governors like Bartle Frere of Bombay (1862-1868) openly supported the missionary work. Voicing a similar sentiment, Lord Lawrence, Viceroy and Governor-General of India (1864-1869) stated, "I believe not withstanding all that the English people have done to benefit the country, the Missionaries have done more than all other agencies combined." After 1860 there was not only an increase in the number of missionaries who came to India but the number of Indian Christians also went up.
(source: Western Colonialism in Asia and Christianity - edited by Dr. M.D. David p. 88-89).
The new rulers were understandably hostile to the indigenous education system. As soon as the British took over the Punjab, the Education Report of 1858 says: " A village school left to itself is not an institution which we have any great interest in maintaining."
This hostility arose partly from a lack of imagination. To the new rulers, brought up so differently, a school was no school if it did not teach English.
(source: On Hinduism Reviews and Reflections - By Ram Swarup p. 191-192). For more on education please refer below to article - Education in India Under the East India Company - Major B. D. Basu).
Another design which the British evolved to promote Christianization of India was T.B. Macaulay’s educational system introduced in 1835. “It was the devout hope of Macaulay… and of many others, that the diffusion of new learning among the higher classes would see the dissolution of Hinduism and the widespread acceptance of Christianity. The missionaries were of the same view, and they entered the education field with enthusiasm, providing schools and colleges in many parts of India where education in the Christian Bible was compulsory for Hindu students. The Grand Design on which “they had spent so much money and energy had failed”. The rise of Indian nationalism also had an adverse effect on missionary fortunes. The great leaders of the national movement such as Lokmanya Tilak, Sri Aurobindo and Lala Lajpat Rai were champions of resurgent Hinduism.
(source: Vindicated by Time: The Niyogi Committee Report On Christian Missionary Activities - By Sita Ram Goel).
Dr. Ananda K Coomaraswamy (1877-1947) the late curator of Indian art at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and author of The Dance of Shiva: Essays on Indian Art and Culture, wrote:
"One of the most remarkable features of British rule in India has been the fact that the greatest injuries done to the people of India have taken the outward form of blessings. Of this, Education is a striking example; for no more crushing blows have ever been struck at the roots of Indian evolution than those which have been struck..." It is sometimes said by friends of India that the National movement is the natural result by English education, and one of which England should in truth be proud, as showing that, under 'civilization' and the Pax Britannica, Indians are becoming, at last, capable of self-government. The facts are all the anti-national tendencies of a system of education that has ignored or despised almost every ideal informing the national culture."
"Yes, English educators of India, you do well to scorn the Babu graduate; he is your own special production, made in your own image; he might be one of your very selves. Do you not recognize the likeness? Probably you do not; for you are still hidebound in that impervious skin of self-satisfaction that enabled your most pompous and self-important philistine, Lord Macaulay, to believe that a single shelf of a good European library was worth all the literature of India, Arabia, and Persia. Beware lest in a hundred years the judgment be reversed, in the sense that Oriental culture will occupy a place even in European estimation, ranking at least equally with Classic. Meanwhile you have done well nigh all that could be done to eradicate it in the land of the birth."
"A single generation of English education suffices to break the threads of tradition and to create a nondescript and superficial being deprived of all roots - a sort of intellectual pariah who does not belong to the East or West, the past or the future."
(source: The Wisdom of Ananda Coomaraswamy - presented by S. Durai Raja Singam 1979 p. 38-40). For more on education, refer to chapter on Education in Ancient India and Hindu Culture II).
"British-educated Indians grew up learning about Pythagoras, Archimedes, Galileo and Newton without ever learning about Panini, Aryabhatta, Bhaskar or Bhaskaracharya. The logic and epistemology of the Nyaya Sutras, the rationality of the early Buddhists or the intriguing philosophical systems of the Jains were generally unknown to the them. Neither was there any awareness of the numerous examples of dialectics in nature that are to be found in Indian texts. They may have read Homer or Dickens but not the Panchatantra, the Jataka tales or anything from the Indian epics. Schooled in the aesthetic and literary theories of the West, many felt embarrassed in acknowledging Indian contributions in the arts and literature. What was important to Western civilization was deemed universal, but everything Indian was dismissed as either backward and anachronistic, or at best tolerated as idiosyncratic oddity. Little did the Westernized Indian know what debt "Western Science and Civilization" owed (directly or indirectly) to Indian scientific discoveries and scholarly texts.
Dilip K. Chakrabarti (Colonial Indology) thus summarized the situation: "The model of the Indian past...was foisted on Indians by the hegemonic books written by Western Indologists concerned with language, literature and philosophy who were and perhaps have always been paternalistic at their best and racists at their worst.."
Elaborating on the phenomenon of cultural colonization, Priya Joshi (Culture and Consumption: Fiction, the Reading Public, and the British Novel in Colonial India) writes: "Often, the implementation of a new education system leaves those who are colonized with a lack of identity and a limited sense of their past. The indigenous history and customs once practiced and observed slowly slip away. The colonized become hybrids of two vastly different cultural systems. Colonial education creates a blurring that makes it difficult to differentiate between the new, enforced ideas of the colonizers and the formerly accepted native practices."
Ngugi Wa Thiong'o, (Kenya, Decolonising the Mind), displaying anger toward the isolationist feelings colonial education causes, asserted that the process "...annihilates a peoples belief in their names, in their languages, in their environment, in their heritage of struggle, in their unity, in their capacities and ultimately in themselves. It makes them see their past as one wasteland of non-achievement and it makes them want to distance themselves from that wasteland. It makes them want to identify with that which is furthest removed from themselves".
Strong traces of such thinking continue to infect young Indians, especially those that migrate to the West. Elements of such mental insecurity and alienation also had an impact on the consciousness of the British-educated Indians who participated in the freedom struggle. In contemporary academic circles, various false theories continue to percolate. While some write as if Indian civilization has made no substantial progress since the Vedic period, for others the clock stopped with Ashoka, or with the "classical age" of the Guptas.
Mahatma Gandhi wrote in the "Harijan:
"That Indian education made Indian students foreigners in their own country. The Radhakrishnan Commission said in their Report (1950); "one of the serious complaints against the system of education which has prevailed in this country for over a century is that it neglected India's past, that it did not provide the Indian students with a knowledge of their own culture. It had produced in some cases the feeling that we are without roots, and what is worse, that our roots bind us to a world very different from that which surrounds us".
(source: British Education
in India - By Dr David Grey).
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