British Rule in India and Nazi rule. What is the difference?
Indian History books teach the pros and cons of British rule
The subject of British rule in India is an emotional one for most Indians but even those Indians who are aware that Britain plundered India and treated locals as sub-humans and killed the indigenous industry, reluctantly admit that Britain did build infrastructure and made English popular in India. Guess if it wasn’t for British rule all those years ago I wouldn’t be writing this very piece in English, would I? And well, Britain did unite all those little kingdoms and gave all of us a pan Indian identity.
But if most Indians believe that British rule did some good (not everyone agrees about the high price paid) I think the credit is due to the way we were taught history. The advantages of British rule were clearly brought out.
Britain apparently teaches a biased view of the British Raj
What surprised me was a front page report in today’s Times of India (Mumbai). It said that British school children are not taught the evil aspects of British rule – in fact there is a controversy going on in Britain right now about teaching school-children about Jallianwala Bagh, where hundreds of peacefully protesting Indians were massacred (including women and children). It’s difficult to understand why Britain wants to brush this under the carpet..after all if German school children can be taught about the evils of Nazi rule, why can’t British school-children be taught about the evils of British rule in India? Sure, the Nazis did more damage in a short period of time and killed millions of Jews.
But who has calculated the damage that Britain did? Are there any records of the number of Indians killed and enslaved by the British during the British Raj? Are there any records of ill-treatment meted out on a regular basis to the Indians? Has anyone calculated the economic damage caused to India because of the East India Company and British rule? Ofcourse not.
Britain does not want to know
The truth is that the truth is too painful. And neither the Brits nor the Indians in Britain are trying very hard to do anything about it. On the other hand, it is because of the power of the Jewish community that Germany said sorry…and meant it. It is because of the Jewish people that today German school children know the truth. Surely, history is important?
Britain’s attempt to change the curriculum is being opposed
Britain is trying to change the curriculum to give British school-children a ‘valuable insight into shared, if painful and often controversial aspects of the relationship between Indian and Britain’ but there are groups opposing this because this kind of teaching is considered anti-British. How can the dissemination of truth be anti anything?
The root of racism
But then, this is the very root of racism. Children in developed countries are taught in school itself that they come from a ‘superior’ stock. They are taught to take on the ‘White Man’s Burden’. A burden which makes it mandatory for the ‘superior’ race to ‘civilize’ the ‘inferior’ races. This was the attitude of the British when they came to India. They came, they saw and they plundered. They believed it was their right as ‘rulers’. At the same time they came down heavily on some of the barbaric practices they saw in India.
Yes, some barbaric things went on in Indian society (and we are not completely rid of them) but what the British failed to see that what they were doing was equally barbaric. They robbed and enslaved not just a few people, but a whole country.
What Britishers did not realise was that India had a far longer history of ‘civilization’ than war-like Britain. The problem was that India’s civilization was cloaked in dhotis, saris and turbans and some ancient practices (not too far removed from equally medieval practices that took place in Britain). These differences convinced the shirts, skirts and trousers who came to India that India was uncivilized. Every culture and every country has it’s dark side…but the developed world can only see the evils of other countries…not their own.
What chance does truth stand?
What’s amazing is that the developed world today prides itself on freedom and democracy…so why not own up to the bad things of the past? True, Britishers were probably not as bad as the Nazis, but they did far greater harm than the Nazis by the very virtue of their being around for more than a hundred years. The British East India Company arrived in India as far back as 1757 (proxy rule by the British) and then direct British rule started in 1858, lasting until 1947. The Nazis under Adolph Hitler ruled only from 1933 to 1945 – which is just a dozen years! One does not need much of an imagination to realise the damage the British must have done to India.
The sad part is is that millions of young Britishers are growing up thinking that Britain did India a big favour by ruling her. Why, the Queen herself wears a diamond stolen from India in her crown. The Wikipedia calls this diamond the ‘spoils of war.’ Funny.
Related Reading: Is India’s language divide the biggest divide of all?
New immigration laws in Britain tell Indians to get out and that’s not such a bad thing.
It’s not surprising at all that the Germans would emulate the English given that the House of Coburg-Sax-Gotha, a.k.a. Windsor provides a German head for the British Crown.
Regarding American arrogance: what better can be expected from an English-minded society? The English have always looked down their noses at other cultures whose surnames and place names English pudding-filled mouths can not pronounce and relegate to the realm of “Whatever…” because, of course, “things English are the best and English gentlemen are the most intelligent.”
Yawn….. sorry Chrobry, you don’t score any points for generalisation or out right racism.
So why don’t you take your Onion Baji filled mouth elsewhere…… (couldn’t resist)
Ben… Here is a generalization.
Firstly please understand my use of the terms ‘wogs’ and ‘pakies’. I am a wog myself and feel the right to use it as I have been called this thousands of times in Britain. I use these terms to also show the contempt the Brits have for coloured people. The Brits use these terms abundantly in private and sometimes accidentally in the public. The Queen’s mother in her palaces used to openly call us blackies, wogs, coons etc. Prince Charles still refers to his Asian acquaintant as ‘Sooty’, and Prince Harry was recently recorded on tape referring to us as ‘Pakies and Ragheads’. The royal palace then said these terms were not racist but terms of ‘Endearment’ for his fellow Pakistani recruit in the British Army.
Because the British history of atrocities is never taught, the Brits still think they are wonderful, and that they educated and civilized the ‘wogs’ and the ‘pakies’. No wonder they have absolutely no respect for the wogs.
Furthermore most of the ‘wogs’ in Britain are too busy either licking white ass to get ahead, or are trying to become like them as they believe the whites are superior. The rest are just wussies.
Not one ‘wog’ has stood up and said a word to challenge the British b.s. revision of history, or the contempt the Brits have for the ‘wogs’ and ‘pakies’ in Britain.
Shame on the Brtis and shame on us ‘wogs’. Consequently the next generation of Asians will now have to think like slaves and being treated as such, or have to take on the fight we should have started and finished fifty s***y years ago.
@Ben:
Ben it was only when I read your comment that I realised that Chrobry’s comment was offensive, but I don’t know why you wanted to add to the offence! Anyway because I published his, I have to publish yours but no more.
Sorry Nita……. I meant no harm. Just being ironic.
I simply can’t believe that so many Brits on here would try to deny or minimize the extent of British brutality and mass murder in India in particular, after the 1857 rebellion. This is well-documented– even before it, the East India Company was evicting Indians off farms providing subsistence crops and replacing them with cash crops, working Indians to exhaustion in the camps, blocking trade, flooding Bengal with ridiculous imports to kill India’s industries. After 1857, the Raj generalized this to India in general– at least, to the 1/2 of India that they controlled. Thank goodness the other half stayed independent, can you imagine how much damage Britain would have done with control over all of India?
The logical result of what the East India Company and the Raj did was, of course, the 50 million or so Indians who were killed by these wars and famines in British hands, which the British still fail to recognize. Along with who knows how many Irish, S. Africans, Australian native peoples….
Seamus Milne summarized it well in an article he wrote a couple years ago, basically pointing out that when it comes to Holocaust denial, the British are in a league of their own with regard to the Holocausts they committed in many countries. And this is also despite the fact that, as many others have written here, the British were militarily incompetent, suffering defeat at the hands of Afghans, Egyptians, S. American Creoles, Boers, Haitians, South Arabs and lots of other peoples that the British considered “inferior.”
Maybe mass genocide was one of the few ways that the British could take on hegemony in a place, since militarily they repeatedly got humiliated by the “coloured peoples” whom they looked down upon and felt they had a natural right to rule.
Your derogotory terms.. “The British” and “Britishers” applies in this present time, to a population that includes many of Indian origin who live here now. The ‘British’ who ruled India, have long gone. I’m definately not trying to justify the atrocities committed during the heyday of the ‘British Empire’, and I would guess that every ‘country’ or powerful nation that has ever existed, used their power in ways which we can rightly condemn. But, human history is like that. Power over others – of any kind – allows those with the power to exploit those they have power over. In this sense, I understand that its right to point out such atrocities, but the excercise of power in this way, and the reaction to it, can lead to a better world. Can have a life enhancing influence. Not that ‘The British’ gave India a new identity, but that India itself, rose from the ashes of that traumatic time, to rediscover itself?
I believe, we are entering a ‘time’ in human history, where the oppression of any people by another people, is coming to an end. We still have a way to go, but eventually, ‘self determination’ or individual ‘self-expression’ will become a recognized right, of all humans. Hopefully, we will learn, that the freedom and security to be onself, which exists in the family unit, is a template fot global relations between us all!.
Michael you say ‘I would guess that every ‘country’ or powerful nation that has ever existed, used their power in ways which we can rightly condemn.’ This is ludicrous.
Not all countries have the same violent foreign policies of international rape, whether they have the power or not, or go around the world robbing and raping others who just want to live in peace. Not all countries have behaved like the Brits in India.
Your thinking is also wrong. you imply a justification that nations who have power over others are likely to misuse it and do what the Brits did in India, implication being that it is natural. No.
War mongers (like the Brits were) went out of their way and spent fortunes, even above feeding their own people and enslaving them in work houses, to become militarily powerful, so that they could invade, rob and rape others.
Michael – you said ‘powerful countries/nations’ have used their power to exploit etc.,’ ….It is not so… not everyone did it… even if they have done, no one did it like the west…
the western is still struggling to evolve into a humane civilization…
exploitation, wars, violence and atrocities are not the qualities of a saner society… yesterday almost the whole of europe exercised their ‘powers’ on their colonies, today usa does it on the third world… free trade and globalization are the new terms for the same imperialism…
do not ascribe it to being a part of the entire human history… but it is only a part of the western history… the east was busy with their introspection without invading/plundering the rest of the world before the west set their foot here… infact, many western civilizations failed repeatedly in the past with this kind of ‘exercise of power’….
The Brits are in denial because they would have to apologize, and return all the stolen treasures, or if not be seen by the world, every time the Queen wears her crown etc. for the thieving, racist, war mongering, rapists they were in India and around the world.
I think we should get both from the Brits, a massive apology and all our stolen things back, together with interest and postage paid.
We will only get anything back if we speak up,fight for it and shame the Brits. Unfortunately we Indians have been cowards. The Brits raped India, our wives and our daughters, and we are still not angry, let alone outraged.
I was in Russia a while ago, and spoke with many men who fought the Nazi invaders. My girlfriend’s grandfather was one of them. The Russians showed me the stroy of Stalingrad. They showed me how hard we should have fought those who dared to invade and rob our country, and rape and enslave our people. The Russians couldn’t understand why we took being raped, beaten, robbed, starved, enslaved and murdered, and did not fight or kill as many Brits as possible! We didn’t kill any, when the Brits were raping millions and killing tens of millions, in 190 years!
I’m starting to think, ‘Scratch an Indian and you’ll find a coward’.
I felt ashamed in Russia. I felt ashamed that my ancestors put up a resistance which was laughable if any. I am even more ashamed that we are still cowards, sucking up, and putting up with the present situation of the Brits keeping our treasures, and even refusing to apologize for a single killing or theft.
As my American friends put it, we Indians need to grow some balls and fight. Being ‘Peaceful and nice’ hasn’t worked in three hundred years, we need to wake up to reality in this world. For those of you who will now shout that we are a people of Ahimsa and of Peace, this is pure bull manure to disguise our cowardice. We had no problems throwing widowed women on their husbands funeral pyres, which is hardly peaceful, but we would not take on the Brits who were robbing and raping our people. It looks like Indian men are tough when it comes to killing helpless women, but wonderful peaceful people when it came to taking on the Brits.
There are many smart people around the world, and they see us for what we Indians are, cowards. Lets not kid ourselves, we’re not kidding the smart observers, and government and military analysts around the world.
So cowardly are the Indians in Britain, they even try to shut me up when I mention Indian history, scared it might offend the Brits who are present.
We Indians are cowards plain and simple.
The Seamus Milne article, BTW:
http://tinyurl.com/y7vxef
Worth reading.
Thanks for the link. – Nita
We need far more articles and books like those of Milne and Mike Davis, detailing the atrocities and genocides of the British Empire. Not as a way of “sticking it to the Brits” of today, with whom I get along pretty well, actually– but, rather, of finally shedding light on those dark and extremely brutal chapters of British history that are far too neglected.
The problem is that the British, still largely unaware and ignorant of their country’s own brutal history in so many countries, persist in the fantasy of a benevolent (or at least not too bloodthirsty) imperial regime, which in turn makes it impossible for them to understand the lingering anger and resentment among so many of their colonized peoples, who are aware of this history quite well yet find their history scorned and neglected by British historians. It also leads the British (and the Americans now emulating them) to blunder into stupid imperial send-ups of prior British imperial regimes in places like the Middle East, while failing to realize just how brutal and murderous the original British Empire actually was in the 1800′s.
Anyone with a bent for historical writing here, you’ll make a fortune by helping to research and address this neglected history. It’s very much something that needs better coverage in the popular historical literature!
Dear Kannadan
You say ‘Brits” of today, with whom I get along pretty well, actually’,
Try talking about the British atrocities in India and around half the world with your Brit friends, and then you’ll see how well you get along with them!
lol… yes…
Great posts and great link, Kannadan. I spent much of my childhood in Lancashire in England and got much of my education there, and almost never was the subject of British imperial brutality broached. Even in the late 1990′s, there was just a lot of self-congratulatory pap about the Brits and their “civilising mission,” how they brought railroads and schools and law to those erstwhile cave- and hut-dwelling brown-skinned primitives on the Subcontinent. Whilst in Belgium for example, there is no shying away in their own historical treatments from discussing the unspeakable brutality of the Leopoldian colonial regime that killed almost 10 million Africans in the Congo region while the Belgian nobility was salivating over the copper to be gotten.
The Milne article is great. The key quote there IMHO: ‘”Britain’s empire was in reality built on genocide, vast ethnic cleansing, slavery, rigorously enforced racial hierarchy and merciless exploitation. As the Cambridge historian Richard Drayton puts it: “We hear a lot about the rule of law, incorruptible government and economic progress – the reality was tyranny, oppression, poverty and the unnecessary deaths of countless millions of human beings” ‘
Ouch.
The only place Milne errs is in repeating the classic mistaken claim that the British Empire in the 1800′s “ruled a quarter of the world’s people” along with 1/5 of the land. As you and others have been calling attention to here, the British actually ruled only 50% of India, they were never able to colonise China despite many attempts b/c as someone noted China was still too strong and never colonised by the West, the British had minimal presence in S. America and Central Asia after being slaughtered by the Afghans, and in fact had only partial control in many African colonies, with other powers in hegemony in West and southern Africa. It was more like 1/10th-1/15th of humanity and perhaps about 1/15th or so of the land surface, which if anything makes for an even more serious indictment of British war crimes and imperial brutality since they wreaked such havoc against so many people within the still significant, but less-than-often-appreciated domains where they actually ruled. (And remember, most of the land they held was just scrubland– almost all of Canada and Australia as example.)
Thus it irks me all the more, how many people even in India today still slavishly try to think of themselves as “culturally Britons but with Indian blood,” even now try to admire themselves as vessels of British urbane sophistication and the British Raj as a benign factor in India’s history, despite the tens of millions of people in India killed there and the reduction of India to a weak, servile, economically ruined nation due to the Britons’ drawing out of Indian wealth and wrecking of our industries since the East India company began its looting in the 1760′s. As others write, the word “loot” is of Hindi origin for a reason! This foolish historical amnesia is bad enough in the UK, it is inexcusable in India– we are not Britons and our culture is not British culture, it predates the British by thousands of years and in our long history, the British were a blip on the screen.
3 things must be done IMHO to address this historical swooning that leads to such ignorance among young Britons and even some young Indians alike:
(1) As you say Kannadan, there must be a more systematic effort by popular historians in particular writing for a popular audience, to expose and detail the murderous and bloody behaviour of the British in India and their other colonies, which as has been convincingly demonstrated here, was on a much greater and more damaging scale than anything the Nazis achieved. I agree with you, this is not in any way designed to attack the Britons of today, I also have quite a few British chums from my school days in the UK and I quite like the country as it is, fish and chips and it’s other quirks that can be quite charming. But history must be addressed forthrightly, as most other modern Western countries have done.
This is even more the case for the United Kingdom, since the British are constantly seizing an opportunity to compare themselves, supposedly favourably, to the (in their words) ghastly Nazis and Russian Bolsheviks. The Britons who do this are indulging in nothing but rank hypocrisy considering their even worse record, and since these falsehoods have a large impact on the thinking on the disastrous foreign policy decisions of the US and UK today, there must be a more detailed and honest reckoning with the bloody trail left by the British in India and other places. Note this includes Iraq, which was a British colony created after WWI in a bid to divide and rule the locals but which of course, failed, resulting in British expulsion.
As you say, historians who write about this underexplored topic, of British imperial mass brutality and killing, stand to gain financially as well as gaining respect for their unique contributions to the historical record, since there is so little good popular literature on this so far. Similarly, authors of books, film scriptwriters and other purveyors of popular culture, should explore this with the same zeal they use in exploring e.g. Nazi atrocities and the story of Anne Frank– focusing on the stories of Indians brutalised by the British military after 1857, Jamaicans in the horrid British regime in the Caribbean, Bantu tribesmen in British concentration camps, Iraqis terror-bombed by the RAF in 1921, Kenyans who rebelled in the 1960′s, also the Irish, the Yemen fighters, Cypriots, Egyptians, Uruguayans and Afghans who successfully fought the British either to throw off the colonial yoke or fend it off in the first place.
(2) Proper perspective on supposed British “contributions” to India, which in any case could never even slightly compare to the millions of murdered Indians and systematic ruin of Indian agriculture and industry. Even those railroads people like to tout as others have said here, merely expedited the mass plunder of India’s goods. India had advanced civil law systems well before the British.
And the English language in India as a British “gift”? It wasn’t a gift, it was merely a way to help the British gain further economic advantages at the expense of Indians by trying to rupture us from our own glorious past and our own indigenous languages and culture, turning us into a cultural and economic satellite of the UK at the direct expense of our own cultural development and internal economic advancement.
The extent to which English actually helps us in India is grossly exaggerated. As others have been stating here, the vast majority of the strong countries today are not Anglophone English-speaking countries, they are places like Japan, China, Germany, France, Taiwan and Korea that in every single case, have developed their own indigenous languages to be used at sophisticated levels for science, technology and business. Whereas many English-speaking countries and/or former British colonies are among the world’s worst basketcases– Uganda, Burma, Pakistan, Somalia, Zimbabwe and of course, Iraq. English hasn’t done much for them, has it?
Nor is English in any way a neutral or “link” language in India. After all, some Indians (a very tiny elite) are first-language English-speakers themselves and they, of course, would be advantaged by downplaying and weakening India’s indigenous tongues, essentially carrying on the British imperial legacy of profiting at the expense of the Indian masses themselves. So they pretend that English is a “neutral” language to unite India when, in reality, this tiny minority of a few million English-speaking Indians stands to profit by advancing English at the expense of both Hindi and Tamil, and other Indian languages used by the masses. To the extent that link language(s) are needed in Bharat, probably a combination of the major Indo-European language (Hindi) along with the major Dravidian tongue (Tamil) can be used in tandem for official government purposes, as the language of business and science, and the courts. This is what many countries throughout the world do and quite harmoniously, such as Switzerland, which in fact has 4 official languages yet whose people get along quite well, with both German and French in particular (and Italian in the south) being used for official purposes. Or also Italy itself, where Italian (in most of Italy) and German (in the Italian Alpine north) are both official and used harmoniously.
If India truly wants to become great, then we have to be assertive about the importance of our own languages in general, especially of Hindi and Tamil, which have a great literary tradition (stretching back to Sanskrit in the case of Hindi) and a long period of use as vehicles for popular expression. Hindi is the national language but in practice, a kind of popular “Bollywood Hindi” with lots of Tamil vocabulary, and also some Bengali and Malayalam, has currency as a more on-the-ground popular national tongue, and should be used proudly and without hesitation by Indian political leaders for speeches in Parliament and for international delegations. (I myself am of chiefly Tamil extraction.) What this tells the world is, “We, the nation of India, are proudly independent and no longer a British colony, and we are confident enough about our own indigenous languages and cultures to assert ourselves using them.” People in other countries will learn and use Hindi themselves when we are ourselves more confidently use it. This is the only way that the rest of the world will actually take India seriously and respect us– we’ll be respected only when we respect ourselves. No country has ever become strong by trying to slavishly ape the culture of a hegemonic power, as has been written many times, we can only become strong by respecting our heritage as a nation.
I’m not at all saying that India should get rid of English or any such thing, it’s just that– we’re not a British colony anymore, and we should not give English any more special treatment as a foreign language than we give, say, French or Portuguese (who were also colonial powers in India, after all). To the extent that our citizens learn English in India, it should be for basic economic and cultural calculations that we make for the foreign language of any other country outside India, not because we owe some “special status” to English or the Anglophone countries. That is, we need to weigh the value of English-learning with respect to the actual advantages it accrues us, not because we are a “product of the British nation,” which we aren’t.
In practice, this means we need to do a much better job of diversifying, learning other important world languages in India besides English. Our monolithic focus on English as a language for business and science is doing India grievous harm by effectively cutting us off from other critical world languages where there is an enormous amount of business potential (and not just for outsourcing business), not to mention cultural enrichment, even as the Anglosphere declines economically and in other ways compared to the rest of the world. Other countries such as China, Korea and Russia– which are much better at diversifying the languages they learn compared to India– are netting those economic gains at our expense. Since we have such a large and well-educated population, we can easily foster a system in which millions of Indians diversify to specialise in different big European and non-Indian Asian languages, while continuing to speak and use Hindi and/or other Indian tongues at home. If many millions of educated Indians don’t know English, but instead know something like Japanese, French, German or Spanish for example, fine. That diversity of language mastery is much better for the nation.
We should definitely be much better at mastering Mandarin Chinese, which may become the most important world business language in a few decades and, at the very least, will be critical for India since China will soon be India’s single largest trading partner. Indians who go into science and engineering, as well as business, should have higher fluency levels in professional German, even writing some of our professional documents in it, since it’s such a critical language in tech fields and some business fields in particular, and also since Germany is the economic leader of the European Union which will likely soon become the world’s biggest economic bloc, exceeding even China. And of course, Spanish can be useful for the millions of Indians who emigrate to or work in South America, and even Indians who work in the USA, where Spanish is co-official in many Western states. Obviously, English will also be extremely important as a foreign language choice among the languages in this “basket,” but no more compulsory than the others– just studied in proportion to its actual importance. (Considering economic doldrums in USA and UK, may not be much longer, it will certainly be at least on a par or even somewhat less important than other big world languages such as Chinese and German.)
(3) Finally, Indian historians should do a much better job emphasising the oft-neglected fact as others have here, that the 50% of India that Britain controlled tends to be the poorest and least-developed (and bitterly divided) portion of India, while the 50% of India which stayed semi-independent, under mostly local rajas, also tend to be the wealthiest and most culturally and politically advanced. The British did grave damage to India and to the extent that India is in recovery today, it is in spite of, not because of, the British. The semi-independent regions of India are mainly charting the future for the Indian nation, and effectively repairing the damage that the British did to their regions.
wELL WRITTEN ARIDAM YOU HAVE EVEYTHING SPOT ON, ONLY IF ALL PEOPLE OF INDIAN SUB-CONTINENT KNEW THIS, THEN HOW DIFFERENT WOULD THE MENTALLITY OF THE PEOPLE WOULD BE!
KEEP POSTING
@ Nita:
What do we know? This topic comes up again – on Urban Semiotic and I have directed Katha – and others – to read the debate here.
http://urbansemiotic.com/2007/07/17/pro-british-and-amateurish-hitler-in-denial-of-mass-killing/
@Shefaly:
Thanks for letting me know about that discussion. the only reason I am not commenting there is not just because this subject has been much discussed on my blog but because I feel too emotional about it.
p.s. And ofcourse thanks for telling them about mine!
I guess Hitler does seem to be some sort of benchmark of evil!
@ Nita:
Thanks. I understand.
BTW your post predates that post by many months.
David Boles of Urban Semiotic has put me into moderation for citing your link. He says he considers it spamming by an irregular (which is interesting considering my recent regular readership of that blog and a lot of detailed commentary on that blog). Anyway this is what I said on that link and it is not likely to appear and I think it is a fair point about your blog and your writings and the relevance of promoting discussion in the blogosphere on similar topics:
QUOTE:
David: Thanks for your note.
I do read your blog regularly and comment often too. But of course, it is your blog and you set the ground rules, so if you wish to remove the URL, that is fine by me.
I had cited the link as it is a similar piece of writing by Nita, who is a widely read commentator on issues relating to India. The post also predated Katha’s post. It was not intended as “spam”. However since it is your blog, you are free to ascribe intent to my comment.
Thanks for making me feel very welcome!
UNQUOTE
@Shefaly:
I am very surprised by the David Boles reaction. I wonder if he thought that commentators might think that Katha got the idea from here, whether that’s true or not. I doubt it, but people can be judgmental.
I allow all such links on my blog as you know. People give all sorts of links on almost every post of mine and it adds to the discussion and the value of my post. The more links the merrier! That is why Boles reaction was a little odd. and I too think it’s unfair. It wasn’t even your own link!
But anyway your reply was very mature and as you said each to his own!
It’s true most young Britons know nothing of incidents such as Jallianwala Bagh massacre or Bengal Famine (which was a direct fall-out of British imperial war policies). Even fewer know anything of India’s immense military contribution to Britain during both World Wars (while they do remember Australia and Canada’s contribution!). And to add insult to injury, they don’t fail to mention that Indians were “civilized” only by their benign policies during the Raj. Winston Churchill, the most ardent British imperialist (he’s a hero in that country), once said,
“India is a geographical entity: it is as much of a country as the equator.”
Despite these sensitive concerns, Britain is a very fair society for immigrants and it is true that in 2007, their country needs India much more than we need them. British companies need access to emerging Indian markets; many Indians in the UK provide valuable services in institutions such as the NHS and research institutions. Each year British universities queue up in even the remotest of Indian towns to attract students because Indian students are necessary to maintain good “quality” for their own academic benefits. India is currently the third largest trading partner of the UK. Indian food is the number one cuisine over there (25,000 Indian restaurants in the UK). Even the richest man in Britain, and in Europe today, is an Indian passport-holder.
As they say, Sun cannot be hidden from clouds for too long. India is going to rise soon…and people who were used to ruling over us till today, are not getting used to this transformation of India’s image – it’s too much for them to bear and can only incite jealousy and resentment. This may be one of the biggest reasons why they don’t like Indians anymore!
@ Sahil:
I think there is some insecurity about Indians taking away their jobs, I don’t think many even believe that India is going to rise, this is assuming that there is a dislike of Indians. I cannot say whether the British dislike Indians or not, as I live in India.
But yes, I think India is going to rise soon, and the economy will overtake Britain’s although it might take 50 years! And once we are up there, we shall re-write history, which is really all I want. The truth of the past to be out.
Dear o dear o dear it never ends does it
Just one question since the afghans pillaged a lot lot more than us and their rule was practically all negative why is it that Indians never demand an ‘official apology’ for all the wrong at the hands of the Afghans or the persians (Nadir Shah etc) why only us?
Quote:
cannot say whether the British dislike Indians or not
well some do some don’t most couldn’t care less.I’m pretty sure its the same on the other side isn’t it?
Cheers
Krenim. The central tact of the criticisms of Britain here, is quite basic: Britain sanctimoniously claims that it #1 was a “more civilized colonizer” than other European countries, #2 that the UK “brought civilization” to India which had been a relative backwater beforehand, #3 Britain’s decolonization was more civilized and constructive than those of France, the Netherlands and other Euro powers, #4 Britain’s legacy (as it is claimed, from the railroads to the English language) is superior to the legacy of France, the Netherlands and other colonial contemporaries, and #5 that Britain’s history as a more “mature colonizer” gives Britain the privilege of intervening as a quasi-colonial power in places like Iraq and Afghanistan today, even as a mere second fiddle to the USA which took Britain’s place when the British Empire collapsed.
That’s the heart of this thread, Krenim, and defensive, insecure Britons just don’t get it: Those of us of Indian background are very furious that the British, almost unique among modern European countries, have such ridiculous amnesia and whitewashing about the tremendous atrocities in their own colonial history, and they even try to falsely portray India and other countries as “uncivilized heathens” that the British civilized and modernized, when the opposite is true.
In addressing points #1 and #2, India was in fact, the world’s second-wealthiest place on earth before the British came along, economically productive, enterprising and culturally advanced, with China having the top spot all the way into 1820. China itself was never colonized, although the depredations of many Western powers caused severe grief in the country.
However, half of India *was* colonized by the British, and far from “bringing civilization” to a backward India, the British looted India so severely that a once wealthy, advanced and ancient nation was reduced to a backwater. This is the primary thesis of Mike Davis in Late Victorian Holocausts, and while pro-British imperialists like to slander Davis as a “Socialist,” in fact Davis writes basic plain-vanilla, backed-and-referenced factual history to demonstrate how the British effectively *made* India into a poor, ruined 3rd-world nation, from the prosperous, culturally advanced place that Bharat had been before.
In fact, when you look at India today, you’ll notice that the wealthiest and most advanced regions of the country correspond *almost precisely* with the 50% of India which remained independent of British rule, under local princes, while the 50% under British control is by far the poorest and most economically distressed. As others have said better than I, the British “infrastructure” (whose extent is vastly overestimated) was built expressly to remove massive amounts of raw materials, minerals and especially, foodstuffs from India– without any compensation or fair trade given to India (so much for “British capitalism” as has been noted here)– and take them to the UK.
Which is a nice segue, since all those foodstuffs removed from India were directly responsible for the tens of millions of Indians killed by British misadministration and direct, murderous, genocidal policies later in the 1800′s. I won’t repeat the litany of other murderous British policies here– looks like others have done a pretty good job of that, from Ireland to the Transvaal British concentration camps and the terror-bombing of Iraq in 1922– but there’s really no doubt, when this record is examined with cold and objective eyes, that the British record was a good deal worse than the Nazis, the Stalinists, the other Communist regimes or other 20th-century monsters. India alone makes the case.
JNS on the other thread has some good citations to check out:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/india/story/0,,2155324,00.html
Amaresh Misra notes the genocidal British slaughter of millions of Indians following the 1857 First War of Indian Independence (little surprise– this has long been known from Indian sources while grossly underreported in British ones). Also, the film “Rabbit-Proof Fence”, about British genocide against the aborigines in Australia: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0252444/
Looks like False British Claims #3, 4 and 5 have already been taken down here. British decolonization was incredibly bloody and awful– Kenya in particular was horrendous, full of torture and concentration camps in which the British murdered tens of thousands of Kenyans. I’ll repeat the books cited above:
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v27/n05/port01_.html
Caroline Elkins Britain’s Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya
and David Anderson Histories of the Hanged: Britain’s Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire
This was at least as awful as the French fiasco in Algeria. Then when you consider the humiliating British defeat in Suez, the mess in Palestine (with the British being bombed out of the region by 1948), the brutal Cyrpus insurrection and the British defeat in Aden, it’s clear that the British didn’t just politely stand aside and turn power over to the locals, even as they themselves were nearly bankrupt from the World Wars– the British refused to give up their cherished empire and had to be violently expelled by the locals.
In fact, in 1954– two years before the Suez disaster and its kiss of death against the British Empire– the British, under that racist arch-imperialist Winston Churchill, were a major instigator of the coup that removed Muhammed Mossadegh, the democratically-elected leader of Iran, from power and replaced him with the shah. Why? Because Mossadegh had the temerity to claim Iran’s oil as belonging to the Iranian people, for the benefit of Iran. This would have resulted in less money for the British oil companies.
So it was plain, naked greed which led the British and Churchill, despite all their platitudes about “spreading democracy” and the joys of Constitutionalism, to overthrow a democratically-elected government in Iran and replace it with a pliable dictatorship. When you consider the way the British slapped Iraq together after WWI, with 3 rival people at each other’s throats to get the oil, you can see how British decolonization in the 20th century was not at all neatly-accomplished, and in fact today has led to the world’s worst trouble spots. The US and Britain are both embroiled in Iraq today thanks to British blundering before.
As for “British gifts” and this truly idiotic belief that former British colonies and English-speaking regions are better poised than nations colonized by other countries (or not colonized at all)– then why are so many former British colonies like Pakistan, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Sierra Leone, not to mention Malaysia or Burma, such messed-up places today? They speak pretty good English in Rawalpindi and other cities in Pakistan, and English is an essential language of Zimbabwe, Sierra Leone and Kenya. Yet these Anglophone former British colonies are by and large either dictatorial failed states, or economically ruined wastelands– or often both. English and the so-called “gifts of British civilization” haven’t exactly done a lot there, have they?
Meanwhile, the world’s most dynamic nations today never had the, uh, “joys” of British colonization. Taiwan and Korea were Japanese colonies, yet these two very non-Anglosphere countries are among the world’s most vigorous. Japan itself, never colonized at all and non-Anglophone, is both an economic and a cultural leader. China will likely soon be *the* world’s superpower. Germany is the de facto leader of the EU, soon the world’s main economic bloc. Vietnam– a French colony– is now among the world’s most rapidly changing and growing economies. All of these are non-Anglophone countries that, as a lot of other people have been pointing out, have adapted their own languages and cultures for science, technology and the modern world.
Indeed, France and especially Germany were if anything *the* scientific bellwethers in the 18th thru much of the 20th centuries and created this modern technological world, much more so than the British did. German was the main scientific language, in fact in my own courses, I had to be quite proficient at German to get the highest-quality material. (I’d highly recommend Indians to become fluent in German, or French if you’re so inclined.)
To the extent that India is doing better today than other former British colonies, this is largely because half of India escaped British colonization and looting, and is now leading the way for the rest of India. And as other Asian countries such as Korea, Taiwan, Japan, China and Vietnam have done, we need to build up and adapt Hindi and other Indian languages to tackle the modern world, not use a Western language imposed from the outside– as other people have written here. We have the intellectual depth to translate the fruits of the Western world, whether written in French, German, English, Italian, Spanish, Dutch or other languages, into our own tongues, and that’s what we should be doing.
As for point #5– Britain was never a “mature colonizer” in any form, so any claim that they should be given credence as proto-colonizers today, in Iraq or elsewhere, are rather ridiculous. Only when the Britons frankly acknowledge their own trail of blood, will they start inhabiting the modern world as a mature nation, rather than the angry, frustrated, “why-are-we-has-beens” people they have become. This isn’t a matter of self-flagellation or abject apologizing– people in India, Ireland and other former British colonies become understandably furious when British apologists deny their own brutality here, something that we remember well. We will respect Britain when Britain starts respecting us, and the first step is to stop whitewashing Britain’s colonial history in those places.
the only objective account of the British Empire I have seen is the TV series by Nail Ferguson. Noteworthy is that Ferguson is a scot so he can understand being a victim of English imperialism and at the same time being the coloniser with the British Empire.
The problem I note from these comments is we Indian are unable to grasp or
accept the damage caused by the muslim invasion. Around 600 AD Afganistan and Pakistan was part of India. Indian civillisation has shrunk to its present borders. We can see the rapid islamisation of India; perhaps if the Britrish never came then India would be as Islamic as Indonesia or Iran.
You can call me a communalism but its India hindu majority that allows it to be a democracy.
The British didnt permanently annex a slice of India by forcibly converting whole populations to christianity. Think about it.
Hello friends, i need to know some information. During the British period is there any mass murder or any kind of devastated killing has been done in MUMBAI (specifically). And is or are there any place/places still exits in mumbai which is known as genocide or mass killing occurred. Any horrifying area which is now part of history. I really need to know information of such place in Mumbai. I am writing a story for film, so if anyone can provide any valuable & authenticate information about mentioned matter please mail me or send me web reference to dreamers.space@gmail.com
I will be much obliged.
Thanks
Areful Eeslam.
Nita,
Thanks for linking this post to the other one !
I did not know that this post existed !
This is some debate !
I would say that this is even better than the North-South post !
After reading just a few comments,I realised the seriousness of this one !
This one requires a LOT of time to go through,before I can join the party !
I tend to agree with V.Narayan.
The Spanish too plundered their colonies,which of the South American countries have their original religion,language
Hi, I have not read all the posts but post of krenim ( on May 9th, 2007 at 12:31 pm) makes perfect sense to me.
India had lost its glory by the time british came in political scenerio becuase of hundreds of years of muslim rule. Just economically perhaps she was still doing good but culturally and overall it had become pathetic. Britishers happened to trigger the revival which still continues.
Also we must agree that the the lower caste people have been treated inhumanly in hindu society in almost all the times in our history and is actually rooted in out religion – although the most sacred of hindu texts generally do not talk about castes/discrimination.
While in ancient Rome it was even worse, Europens now realise hat that was barbaric. We hindus still do not open heartedly realise that that was uncivilised.
Whites (people of Europeans decent only and not muslim whites) have given the world a lot. They have made the world the way it is today.
Today, We indians boast and can boast of only sprituality in terms of contribution to the world. But there is something there. We see scores of exmples of whites coming to india in serch of ‘peace’ or ‘self realization’. We see not a single example of any indian or any chinese going to west for the same reason.
But a long way to go before the world AGAIN start respecting indians for spiritual reason, cultural reason or for some other reasons.
The British enslaved India for years and it’s people.
Because I’m young I did not know about that the Nazi were there beforehand.
I think it is a disgrace that everyone is blaming India for everything.
It’s about respect too
Being Indian I was raised to respect everyone.
In return everyone disrespects me.
Is that how american parents raised their children.
To spit on someone who has dark skin.
And they insult our hindu religion.
I love our religion.
I love everything about me.
And my people.
Tibet is still not free from china.
While I am new on this blog, I have had such discussions with Brits on other forums and from what I can see the Brits are one stubborn lot. Just based on this, I can’t even imagine how hard it must have been to kick their ancestors out of the country in the first place.
I look forward to the day when we kick out the English language as well. That time has come as well. Persian was the official language in India under the Mughal rule, when the Brits came, they replaced Persian with English. Now its time for us to to get rid of English.
Off course, I will leave it up to the Brits whether they want to continue using our number system or not
The colonial brutality has been conveniently forgotten and should be classified on the same scale as other international crime
I think my generation (the people who were born after independence) are at a unique point in history as we WILL see, in our lifetimes, the country emerge from almost 1000 years of continuous cultural and economic plunder at the hands of Islamic invaders and rulers (800 years) and then the British invaders (200 years).
The good part being , we emerged out of this darkness with much of our ancient and well tested culture and value system alive. So looking on the positive side, we had a great past and if we can match even 50% of that in future, we have a great future in front of us.
As for UK, it will either continue in its current form as the 51st state of USA or merge and disappear into the European union.
On the flip side, we need to fully analyze our history in the minutest of minute detail over the last one thousand years to see what we did to allow 1000 years of foreign occupation. Just so that we will be prepared the next time some evil tendencies appear in some small island of the globe
The worst things happen slowly in an invisible manner rather than suddenly.
thanks for your comments desi, and welcome to my blog.
I think however we were dominated easily because we were not one country. I don’t blame us for that as we are as diverse as those who live in the europeon union and it’s naturaly that we would not be united. ofcourse the fact that culturally we were not warlike also counts for a great deal. In fact somewhere in the comments I think this has been analysed. Culturally and economically rich societies are generally satisfied within themselves and do not plunder, loot and attack other countries. But that is a weakness, or it was a weakness in that age.
Yes, I too believe that India will one day overtake the UK but I have no feelings of resentment towards the Brits. I mean, it wasn’t the present Brits who plundered India.
About English, that is the only treasure we have have got from the Brits, so lets hang on to it! It’s given us a global advantage, and we will become a top nation today by using this tool. In any case, it’s too late to go back now…far too late.
Nita,
Although a comparison of India’s diversity with Europe is well justified, I think there are many cultural, historical, and religious factors that unite us. So in my opinion, the notion (that some educated Indians hold) that the usage of English as a common language unites Indians is a complete fallacy.
I recently went on a tour around Bangalore (my first visit to south India) and the guy who drove us around considered himself to be uneducated, yet he could converse easily in five Indian languages except English. And most educated Indians can speak/write 2 to 3 languages. Most of us don’t even need to translate from one language to another as we can think in different languages.
Keep in mind that Persian was India’s only official language for 200 years and before the 1857 First war of independence, it was completely unimaginable that anything would ever threaten the British presence in India. The point being we have replaced languages in past and can do so in present. The only difference being it will be done voluntary in the form of a consensus.
The only reason to hold on the English language is for better communication with the west because west is economically more dominant right now. However, if one considers history in its entirety, it comes as no surprise that out of 5000 years of human history, the west has been dominant for only say 400 years or so. Given that China is already the worlds second largest economy and India is moving up the scale every couple of years, the fact that we need to retain English’s current status in India is a complete fallacy.
Also only a small fraction of Indian’s know English and many in this small fraction of Indians have developed a complete false “notion” that people who do not know English are somehow not educated or up to speed when the fact that is that most of our great works through 5000 years of history have been written in Sanskrit.
Most of us learn the Vedas, Mahabharat, and Ramayan from childhood and all of these are written in Sanskrit. So why not give Sanskrit the status of pre-eminent language in India like the way it was 1000 years ago before the entry of Islamic/British invaders. Surely Sanskrit would be well accepted to all religional sentiments (am I right in stating this?). If not, I don’t see any reason in learning one or two other languages.
But English? There is no logical reason not to replace English. Sanskrit was replaced by Persian in past, and Persian was replaced by English. If we are ever going to stand united and get back into our own culture, English would need to be replaced with Sanskrit again. And from what I know Sanskrit is probably one of the most precise languages ever known to mankind. So its never too late to be able to change languages.
Also, English is not the dominant language in the west. English is just the dominant language in US (where more and more people are conversing in Spanish) and in UK (which is a small and I am sorry to say an insignificant country). As the economic balance of the world shifts towards Asia (which it definitely is), I don’t see any reason why we should be retaining English the way we do now. Each state in India is an economic superpower in the making (if we or someone else does not screw things up).
- Nita.
Desi, you have made some good points but I don’t agree that we will be successful in the world without English, like china. I wonder if you know what’s happening in China? Development is entirely in the hands of the govt, the govt is extremely strict, to the point of fear. no strikes or anything like are allowed. no people are allowed to live on the pavements. they can go back to their villages and die!! You will be shocked to know how labour is exploited there!
India being a democratic country can never imitate China. Without English we may as well go back to the middle ages. The British destroyed us once, and now we will destroy ourselves all over again. The world will laugh at us because they will realise that we want to get rid of English because we have a colonial hang up. It’s important to forget the past, and not take revenge on a tool the British gave us to get us out of the ditch they put us into!
I agree that the majority of Indians do not speak English and any kind of snobbishness associated with english must go. it will go when english is taught to everybody. I know you won’t agree with me, but you see, I believe english will help us develop and right now I just want to see India up there on the global charts. However, I think learning chinese would be a good idea too as the extremely hardworking and disciplined chinese are going to be number one very soon.
Nita,
France, Germany, China, South Korea, and Japan, Brazil, and Russia all seem to be quite successful or getting more successful in the world and that too without a shred of English being used in their education or official systems. There is not a single so called “developed” country which is not using its own language for education and official work.
We (Indians) are the exception rather than a rule when we give so much importance to English because no one else really does so. So I really find it difficult to believe that we will go back to the middle ages if we get rid of English. Plus most of the world doesn’t even know that much of our education and official work is based on English until they meet an Indian and start wondering how the Indians can speak English so well.
And I can understand that the “entire world is a village” (again a Sanskrit quote), but if we seek approval from rest of the world before we take some domestic policy decisions then I am sure that our days as a free country are numbered. China, France, Germany, USA, etc certainly don’t.
As an example, consider how many students will start learning Sanskrit if the entrance exams in the country introduced just one “small essay” question in Sanskrit. If not anything else that would be a good start.
Thanks for maintaining an excellent blog. Your blog is obviously popular and I hope someday you will write something about replacing English language with Sanskrit
the idea of Sanskrit, it sounds a very beautiful and romantic idea to me. 
Somehow I see too many hurdles in it’s implementation. I see the advent of english in India almost like the Tsunami… 
But the damage has been done my friend and it’s too late to turn back. We got to now make the best of it, well, I guess that’s just a point of view! 
Nita
Thanks desi
Umm nita english is the only treasure we gave you?
Indians learning sanskrit is the equivalent of Italians replacing italian with latin.not very easy.
Besides most of the south indian languages are derived from tamil not sanskrit and actually predates sanskrit.Looks like you might want to create your own united india language
perhaps you guys(indians like desi) could have a grand assembly, a loya jirga maybe where you could debate the pros and cons of all major languages ~30 now we wouldn’t want any hurt feelings so you could add the minor dialects and debate the pros and cons of tribal languages ~500 ,are we getting there? no? well each of these in turn have at least 10 variants depending on which region you come for so again..I know!
perhaps the ICS could set up an inter departmental comittee with fairly broad references which in the fullness of time,when the moment is ripe could come up with an indian language which seems strangely familiar to every indian but no indian understands.
Well said Krenim!
– Nita.
Krenim,
With “ideas” like that, its no surprise that the British Empire collapsed so quickly
In any case it will still be better than forcing people to learn a completely unknown and relatively underdeveloped language like “English.”
Desi, I don’t think you are being very objective here. English is more ‘known’ than Sanskrit in India? Also a greater percentage of people in India know English today than the percentage of Indians who knew Sanskrit. Sanskrit was forbidden to the lower castes. Another thing, I think English is a very rich language. But in any case languages are never chosen on the basis of their richness. They are chosen because of how usable they are and how popular they are. Anyway, I don’t want to get into an argument about this.
Everyone is certainly entitled to their point of view and we can argue forever! 
You prefer Sanskrit and I am totally against the concept of one national language and you are welcome to join in the debate on the language post as this subject is more relevant there. – Nita.
English is the world’s language because:
1.Rule(d) britannia britannia rule(d) the waves….
2.Its a very simple language to learn compared to most others.
3.Even someone with a vocabulary of maybe 500 odd words can get his view across unlike oriental languages with weepingly difficult grammer and syntax where the same word means 10 different things in different contexts and the way it is pronounced is as important as the word itself.
Some reasons why you probably should stick with it:
)
1.70% of scientific research is published in english.
2.It is understood by practically everyone(even the french
3.It is the language of business.
4.everyone’s trying to learn it anyway.
5.most importantly so that people like me won’t have to learn others
It seems foolish for me to wade in at the end of such a long debate, but I just want to corroborate what Nita said in her piece at the very beginning. I am British myself, and a graduate, and I have to admit that until recently I knew little of the horrors imposed on India and rest of the Empire by the British. I was taught at school about the mutiny, and the ostensible cause of it (gun cartridges etc) but was not taught about any of the atrocities that were committed but ‘us’. Things may be different now. My son has a book in the ‘Horrible Histories’ cartoon series, about the Empire, and I have to admit I was horrified at the things I read there. I had never compared the British to the Nazis before.
More recently I have added to my knowledge, but from a different source. Some British people like myself have started watching Hindi films, and Rang de Basanti taught me much. But I have still much to learn.
One of the things I am currently learning about India, is the Hindi language. Your debate ranged to the subject of English and one commentator said these days people in Europe are rushing to learn Japanese and Chinese, but not Hindi. Well, this person IS! I couldn’t tell you why exactI am doing this, but I think originally it was so I could watch your wonderful films without having to take my eyes off the actors! I am taking it fairly seriously, and am following courses from both Teach Yourself Hindi and Rosetta Stone. I don’t know if I can make up for the cultural and linguistic dominance of English over India, but I am trying. (I realise not everyone in India speaks Hindi anyway.)
Joss, it’s always wonderful to get a point of view of a Britisher on this post. Thanks.
It is indeed sad that British school textbooks don’t give a complete picture, and I hope this will be rectified one day.
And what you said about Hindi is true, about 70 percent of India speaks different languages. Hindi is primarily a North Indian language and because of Bollywood and because is compulsory in govt. schools and in fact most school level boards all over India, many Indians can communicate in it. Not very well ofcourse, but I for example know enough broken and pidgin Hindi to get by in the North. I am from the West, and there is more acceptance of Hindi here. The southern states do not accept it all. If you speak Hindi there you are likely to get a very cold reception! All major languages of India have their own film industry and if you get a chance do see some good classic films in Tamil, Marathi, Telugu and Bengali.
I mentioned this as you love Indian movies and well, Indian movies are not just Hindi movies.
Thanks again Joss.
“True, Britishers were probably not as bad as the Nazi’s” is a very general statement. If you take away the element of killing of Jews, I am not sure if there would be any major world-impacting mistakes made by Nazis or Germans. War and War Crimes were commited as much by Russia and Britan as Germany. The sheer number of Russian’s killed by Stalin for just staying in Power and indirectly because of his policies far outnumbers the Jews killed in Germany and elsewhere. The case of Britan I need not even take – as it is evident from all these comments.
Great Britan need not have entered either WWI or WWII. Hitler never wanted to attack England, initially. But England was not able to tolerate such a growing power in Europe and hence got involved in the affairs of Central and Eastern Europe.
Comparing Britishers to Nazis is certainly an insult. Insult to Nazis and Germans.
Destination Infinity.
I see this thread is still going….
Firstly – “If you take away the element of killing of Jews“you would still be left with all the other ethnic minorities they slaughtered. Ok I’ll spell it out – the Nazi’s did not just kill Jews!
Secondly – as I’ve stated elsewhere, War Crimes have been committed by most countries not just Russia, Britain & Germany – Even you guys have committed a few. This has already been done to death on this thread already, so what was the point of your statement?
Thirdly – Great Britain had to enter the war, not because they wanted to medal in other peoples affairs!! The very idea of this is just preposterous! Hitler would never have stopped with EU (don’t forget Africa). There was a treaty in place to stop countries from committing such acts and yet they were doing what they wanted. Someone had to stop them!
oh here’s a new gem apparently a few of these guys now want to commemorate the ‘first war of independence’,and the cause?To put bahadur shah zafar on the throne of India again.Of course educated indians and the sikhs whose religion was created pretty much in opposition to the mughals would have nothing to do with it and valiantly fought on our side and saved their country from almost certain ruin.
After which we went out of our way to create modern institutions of government,education with colleges that produced nobel prize winners no less,rid them of god know how much troubles prior to our coming these proud Indians were almost regularly humiliated by Afghans,we taught them how to organize a modern military machine one in which their somewhat superior intellect could overwhelm the superior physical strength of their tormentors and created the country out a rolly polly bunch of 1500+ kingdoms with systems robust enough to last till this day……
We also discovered a good part of their pre islamic past IVC,the mauryan empire for pete’s sake!(These people had forgotten the brahmi script till we figured it out and told them who Ashoka was by collating and cross linking chinese and greek sources).
I give up dear Indians yes we British are evil!We did such terrible terrible things.Very sorry we deeply regret winning the first war of independence yup kabbadi , jizya tax , education in madrsas and temple schools and mughal rule that’s the way!
Happy??
Nita it is my belief that there is nothing more to be gained from keeping this thread open.
We seem to be going in circles here.
Most of us agree that the British caused you a lot of pain, but it’s clear the general consensus is that we cannot be compared to Nazi’s.
I have learnt a lot from this thread, it’s been a real eye opener, but re-inventing the wheel ever couple of months is pointless – wouldn’t you agree?
Ben I agree completely and I wish to close this thread (and another one on this blog about the language issue) but the wordpress theme I have chosen doesn’t allow it. I have tried to do it, but if I do all comments disappear! Pretty sad! And being technologically not too savvy I don’t want to mess around with CSS and things like that. Anyway, hardly anyone comes here now, so chill.
– Nita.
Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World (Hardcover) by Mike Davis
Hard to over rate the importance of this book, August 29, 2002 Reviewer: Ken McCarthy (New York)
‘There have been droughts and other major agricultural failures in China, India, and Africa for millennium, but the accompanying mass starvations and ecological catastrophes that we tend to associate with these regions did not start occurring in earnest until the British Empire imposed its ‘free’ market discipline on these societies using the end of the barrel of a gun as their means of persuasion.
Who shaped the glass through which most of us unconsciously consider India, China, and Africa? 19th century Brits. Their strategy was simple: paint the citizens of these places as ignorant, progress-resisting savages, then rob them blind and, when they starve by the millions, as they also did in conquered Ireland, tell the world it can’t be helped.
The episodes Davis writes about are in many ways still ongoing because the pattern of ecological mismanagement and social disintegration set off by the British in these regions has become the ‘modern’ norm. We’re just one shift in the weather from even larger catastrophes.’Quoted from Amazon.com
Dowry Murder: The Imperial Origins of a Cultural Crime
By Veena Talwar Oldenburg, Oxford University Press USA. Dr Oldenburg is Associate Professor of History of India at the City University of New York.
‘The Hindu custom of dowry has long been blamed for the murder of wives and female infants in India. Dr. Oldenburg argues that these killings are neither about dowry nor reflective of an Indian culture or caste system that encourages violence against women. Rather, such killings can be traced directly to the influences of the British colonial era. In the precolonial period, dowry was an institution managed by women, for women, to enable them to establish their status and have recourse in an emergency. As a consequence of the massive economic and societal upheaval brought on by British rule, women’s entitlements to the precious resources obtained from land were erased and their control of the system diminished, ultimately resulting in a devaluing of their very lives. Taking us on a journey into the colonial Punjab, Veena Oldenburg skillfully follows the paper trail left by British bureaucrats to indict them for interpreting these crimes against women as the inherent defects of Hindu caste culture. The British, Oldenburg claims, publicized their “civilizing mission” and blamed the caste system in order to cover up the devastation their own agrarian policies had wrought on the Indian countryside….’ Quoted from Amazon.com
—-
We were so poor and devastated after colonial rule that our very textbooks were written by the British. Hence some think they did some good. They did nothing that was good, alas! Colonization took away our very language and til today there is this divide between those who had an expensive education with English and those who did not. Hindi or Sanskrit and Tamil could easily have been our main languages.
—————————————————————————————–
Swapna,
I am not sure about the other points that you mentioned but let’s take the following quote:
// Colonization took away our very language and til today there is this divide between those who had an expensive education with English and those who did not //
Colonisation did not take away our language. It is still there and thriving. On the other hand, colonisation did equip us with English and let us be glad that our English skills have helped us greatly in a rapidly globalising and technologically advancing world. If there is a divide between those who are educated in English and those who are not, it is not the fault of English language! It is the fault of those Indians who claim to be “educated” in English!
I am not a fan of the British for what they did in different parts of the world. But at the same time it is not good only to look at the disadvantages. They did help us in modernising ourselves despite all that they took from us. Let us make the best use of whatever we have to prove to the world that we can be a great civilisation in the future, too.
I don’t like to compare the Brits with the Nazis. Let us face the truth. The Nazis were notorious killers without a conscience! That was not the case with the Brits. Not all of them atleast. That was the reason why Gandhi chose the peaceful path to achieve independence. He knew that some of the Brits had a conscience and if we morally shame those who did not, those who did have a conscience would triumph over those who did not and they did!
The topic of this post is very interesing
In my view English really brought new things to india and we gained a lot but not financially or economically but socially; they brought the governance,bureaucracy, and judiciary to india……but made us weak economically, curbed our industry, stopped the growth and used our country for their purpose
India was a source of income for them, they took raw materials from here, manufactured things in england and sold the products to us indians…….Indians were treated as second class citizens, India could never flourish under them, the longer they would have ruled the poorer we would have been today
I am not sure what would have been the scene today , had the English not invaded India……….yesterday i was watching an excellent show on Discovery channel “story of India”…….they told that in sixteenth centure India was the biggest economy in the world, and the quality of life of an average indian was very decent…..but the progress of india was stalled in next couple of century…………Now my opinion is that it was partly due to weakening of Mughal empire and largly due to invasion of the English, as they curbed our industries and made us handicapped and dependant on them economically
It sounds stupid to me when someone say railways would not come to india had the English not been there……The trade between india, Europe and middle east had always been very significant, lots of tehnologies had been exchanged…..If the indian emperors could built a thing like “Taj Mahal” while involving people and material from Europe, China and middle east…..they could well have imported the technology of the Railways or the benefits of the industrial revolution in Europe………..
The bottom line is that in my opinion we did not gain economically by the british rule, in fact they curbed our industries and made us dependent on them………………………
BUT we gained significantly in governance and judiciary by the british rule and this can not be ignored, as these are not the things which coud just be imported from the europe….but a practice of the governance, bureaucracy, and judiciary was required to make it inherent in the society and the English did it
Seeing as this thread is still going strong…..
I was doing some surfing and came across this individual.
http://falseptriotism.sulekha.com/blog/post/2006/01/i-invite-britishers-to-rule-india-again.htm
Some of you may have already seen this…
He has a lot to say on current problems in India and how some of them can be blamed on the British, BUT not all of them. Some of you may find what he has to say a bit close to the cuff and I do not intend to cause any grief by posting this here. I just think some of the things he has said are relevant to what is being discussed here.
Indians here are interesting chaps in general in front of their bretheren they are more british than the british.In front us us they are more indian than indians.:)
I found this discussion quite interesting and would like to share my views on it. The kind of thinking that permeates the west about colonial rule and dominance over other countries in general is indeed strange(not to them, but to us). I did some reseach on the british empire in India. The conclusions are startling as they show a social Darwinianism (or a laissez-fare model of thinking , which is itself extrapolated from atheism). In a world where morality is decided not by a external supernatural force but by the judgement of one’s own intellect and laws of physics, there are no fixed rules.
Let’s say that the British administration in India was governing us by two rules, Rule I and Rule II.
Rule I:
In this context, any country or race(species in Darwin’s terminology) that has intellectual, technological, military or strategic vantage over any other, due to whatsoever reasons, is justified to rule (or even eliminate) over members of the weaker race.
Rule II:
Also justified is weakening a race emotionally , psychologically or intellectually to rule over it or exploit it economically. Weakening emotionally means to show a human front and talk of pity, compassion and humanity. Sometimes sacrifice and even martyrdom is required on part of the protagonist to keep the show alive (like missionary aberrations and evangelicalism). It is also necessary to maintain an atmosphere of fair play, sanctity and imperviousness. Intellectual and psychological weakening can consist of showing superior traits (and hiding weaker traits) of the ruler as well as highlighting and ridiculing the weaknesses of the ruled. The British, like most of the west thinks now, thought of themselves as a single, superior race, a force that was moral in itself and everything outside it was immoral and inferior. Rule I and Rule II were played alternatively over and over. There has not been an apology for economic exploitation and there will never be in future because of the governance of rule I. Talk of spread of English, modernization, civilization is actually a variation of rule II (though we are not being ruled today), because the British were not there for that purpose in the first place. It was just a side-effect which happened just due to the fluctuations of events. No doubt the prime mover was economics. Economics is always the driving force behind such undertakings.
The attempt was always to show the best of the British empire, whether it be the extensively maintained bungalows whose extravaganza was sometimes barely affordable, repatriation of English lunatics to England or exclusive ‘English only’ spaces beyond the reaches of the natives. In a journal paper that I read the British justified their rule over the natives(Indians) saying they were not ‘honorable’ enough, or else they would have kicked off the British longtime before they set to rule. For no Englishman would allow himself to be ruled by another people. It’s ironical how we still look to the west for guidance and moral assurance.
very interesting insight. Thanks.- Nita.
Hi Nita,
You are expecting an apology from the British,
I don’t think that is going to happen, Its You can teach a person who want to know the truth but you cant teach person who is ignorant to leaning, new things,
I have noticed few things about Britain, The British think them selves that they are the centre of universe, Watch BBC any time, That covers even the news of a CAT got killed in accident in any part of Britain, but not any bomb blast in India( actually it became too common in India so one bothers ) News from other Europe comes up only when there is any sport event, (95 percent of the new is centered about UK and then US or about the UK soldiers fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan or crying innocent looking UK girls showing their concerns about the Dharavi slum in India, Very less about Europe and nothing about any other country.
So forgot about they would be any knowledge or even concerned that any thing happening or happened about any third world country and not even in dreams they would be concerned about the history of India, they would be knowing only what they are taught or listened on TV and I don’t believe they are such broad minded to accept that they had done any thing wrong to India, They play and enjoy Calcutta cup but won’t be know the history of Calcutta.
You can’t expect UK authorities to tell their people that the prosperity UK is having there were people there who had price for that. The finest cotton their fore fathers were wearing that was made by someone whose land was abolished by him and was forced to work for them to produce the cotton or the sugar they are using were at the cost of hundreds of thousand of Indians who where taken by British authorities to some alien country and working in as slaves for them.
Indians in African countries, Malaysia still suffering Britishers had uprooted them form their own country and forced them to work and die in other countries for the sake of producing sweet sugar. These people are still suffering from what Britishers had done to them,
BBC is also doing good job http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwZNJbTs7BQ
You could go to any Historical Museum in LONDON having Indian arti facts There will be a lable down that “THIS SWORD else was presented by INDIA KING to Voicrow /general on mm-dd- yyyy something like that. They believe that every one will buy this story If I am having some thing which is a part of my family legacy incredibly precious I am not going to gift any damn person
Neeta how could you expect an government to teach there people something like that. Honestly could you?
We Indians himself lost a lot information about our past, thanks to education system, then could you really expect the British to know about them when they are not having any particular need of knowing it? But Britishers do love to talk about moral values, just India before independence is not on their list
For India it would definitely hurts, The problem is not that they captured looted and taken all steps to destroy and loot and take every possible thing out of India, They were defintely better than us in war tactics and at that time there was lack of a central defence power in India at that time, the britishers have certainly noticed this, Mughals succeeded in 1st war but lost after that. Every winner country treats same to the slave country. The problem is that after all this 200 years of torture they tell us they made us human,
I have seen this movie Braveheart if any bit of that true then you can get some idea of their attitude, Scotish are the people who looks like them, when they treat them such like that then forgot it how they behave to other people who doesn’t look like them,
I remember here In England there was lot of controversy happened when Jaliawalah bagh was tried to introduce in school books.
Don’t forgot that the DYER is treated an British hero
The interesting revelation in Collett’s book is what a sorry hero Dyer made for imperial enthusiasts. Pugnacious, stupid and dishonest, he told the commission of inquiry into the massacre that he had intended to shoot the crowd at Jallianwala Bagh even before he got there: “I thought I would be doing a jolly lot of good and they would realise that they were not to be wickedack
The Roman Catholic Archbishop of Simla wrote that Dyer’s conduct “saved the Punjab, and, in the opinion of many other British authorities at that time, saved India”. It is a claim for which there is, in retrospect, scant evidence. When he died in 1927, Dyer was given something close to a full although unofficial military funeral in London.
There was an Indecent after the Amritsar massacre was Dyer’s insistence a few days later that Indians using a street where an Englishwoman had been assaulted would have to crawl down it..
You can easily realise the kind of attitude the empire was having about INDIA.
India got independence 60 years and surely this time is not enough when they was in India they never considered Indians as humans at least humans like them created by the same God, how could you expect they would be interested that what was happened in India was bad, on the contrary they were taught that they were ruled India and changed India lives, The present generation is much friendly but what they was taught was desided by the same people ruled on India. You cant expect such kind of broad mindness,
More over UK is a way more concerned of its sophisticated Image, Image of humanity, pride, secular image and all,
You would be remembering the Bollywood actresses Shilpa Shetty episode, after the racial episodes, Prime minister Tony Blayer and other MPS are came to save UK image,
There were photos in all the News papers TV of meeting Shilpa with the PM, UK is there country and they are having every right to protect it,
But could you expect that in this kind of culture you can even expect something like that,
To British Could I ask one question whether your economy grow If you get free petrol for 50 years, You could easily expect how much,
Britain have got free Cotton SILK COAL SUGAR IRON GOLD etc etc for 200 years.
From the above blogs many Britisheres are that they brought railway to India
Just I want to say Britain was not in love with india so that they bought Railway to India, They bought that for Mass transportation of troops and the Fast crops to that they can be delivered fast to Britain,
Do you thing that India could afford to have Railways if britishers were not there, Country like India who managed to be on top of the world for more than 5000 years must be having capability to at least purchase it, isn’t it? But that was sure you couldn’t be affording Railway if India was not there.
And more over about the self praising about the system, well system was always there no country would be prosperous if there is no system, at lease for continuous 5000 years,
British bought education and all everything to create a group of people so that that can support them in their noble work to rob India effectively and efficiently. You had changed the name of the country which was not having any link to any culture in past 5000 years of history and sadly we are still carrying that burdon. Nice education system really?
To britishers find some time to read this book “Life of Lord Macaulay”, I won’t expect that you will belive that.
The following you could found interesting
For their Tax propaganda
In India 35% to 50% of village lands were revenue free and that revenue was utilised for running schools, conducting temple festivals, producing medicines, feeding pilgrims, improving irrigation etc. The British in their greed brought down the revenue free lands down to 5%. When there was a protest they assured Indians that the government would create an irrigation department to take care of irrigation, an educational board to take care of education. etc. The initiative of the people was destroyed. But the rulers found to their chagrin, that though they had conquered this nation, it was still strongly rooted in its own culture. They found that as long as the nation was aware and even proud of its traditions, their ‘white man’s burden’ remained as ‘heavy and cumbersome as ever’! India had, at that time, a very well spread system of education and that system had to be made ineffective for their purposes. Now, most of us are taught to believe that the education was in the hands of the Brahmins and in Sanskrit medium and that the other castes had no education. But here are the facts about how the British destroyed the Indian educational system and made one of the most literate nations illiterate.
In the Round- table conference in 1931, Mahatma Gandhi in one of his speeches 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.” Immediately, Philip Hartog, who was a parliamentarian stood up and said, “Mr.Gandhi, it is we who have educated the masses of India. And therefore you must take back your statement and apologise or prove it.” Gandhiji said he would prove it. But the debate did not continue for lack of time. Later one of his followers, Shri Dharampal, went to the British museum and examined the reports and archives. He published a book “The Beautiful Tree” where this matter has been discussed in great detail. By 1820, the British had already destroyed the financial resources that supported our educational system- a destruction that they had been carrying out for nearly twenty years. But still the Indians persisted in continuing with their system of education. So, the British decided to find out the intricacies of this system. Therefore a survey was ordered in 1822 and was conducted by the British district collectors. In the survey it was found that the Bengal presidency had 1 lakh village schools, in Madras there was not a single village without a school, in Bombay, if the village population was near 100, the village had a school. Teachers as well as students of all castes were in these schools. The Brahmins accounted 7% to 48% of the teachers, and the rest of the teachers in any district, came from other castes.
The equivalent of the present day primary education lasted 4 to 5 yrs. We all know that it is universal primary education that is important for taking the nation ahead, not just a few getting higher education. The British administrators admired the dedication and capacity of the Indian teachers. By the time the students came out of the schools they had acquired the capacity to be competitive, and to understand and have proper insight into their own culture. One Mr.Bell, a Christian missionary in Madras took the Indian system of education back to England, and introduced it there. Until then, only the children of the nobles were given education there and he started education for the masses in England. So, we gather that it is from India that the British adopted the system for educating the masses
What Clive had done is called He adopted the “downward filtration method” for educating the Indians.
Please also read this
The story goes that once when he was in Ooty, in his residence, he saw an Indian officer coming and touching the feet of a peon sitting outside his office (which was near his residence.) and was obviously surprised. Why was an officer touching the feet of a peon? He was told, “You don’t know, this Indian society is a peculiar one. Here the Brahmins are respected and the peon belongs to that caste.” The changes that Macaulay brought after this are well documented and authenticated in books. The downward filtration method was formulated according to which the forward caste (even this was much later) was given preference in schools. To put it in his own words,” But it is impossible for us with our limited means to educate all in English. We must at present do our best to form a class of persons Indian in blood and colour but English in tastes, in opinion, in morals, and in intellect.’ To gauge how much he succeeded in his mission, we only need to look into the history of the Indian educated classes since that time onwards. The fact is that we have not tackled the Macaulayian issue even after Independence, and graver still, few realise that the problem exists at all. The system of giving preference to Brahmins in the govt. and missionary run schools went on for nearly hundred yrs. In the meantime other castes practicing any trade had lost their business due to the flooding of Indian markets with British goods and also due to the deliberate strangulation of their business by the British. Due to the land policy of the British, born out of their greed, the farmers had become landless labourers in their own lands, and the landlords the cruel stooges of the British. The systematic destruction of the Indian system of education deprived certain castes of education. Thus over a hundred years these castes had become impoverished and ignorant and the Brahmins who were supposed to lead the society became distorted in their understanding of things, due to foreign education.
In Macaulay’s letter dated 12th Oct., 1836, he wrote to his father:
“Our English schools are flourishing wonderfully; we find it difficult to provide instruction to all. The effect of this education on Hindus is prodigious. No Hindu who has received an English education ever remains sincerely attached to his religion. It is my firm belief that if our plans of education are followed up, there will not be a single idolater among the respected classes 30 years hence. And this will be effected without our efforts to proselytize; I heartily rejoice in the prospect’
One thing I admire about Britishers that they were loyal to there country and they have done every thing to make there country prosperous, It was Indian week ness that they was allowed to rule without any resistance and this week ness had destroyed a lot.
I just appreciate our freedom fighters their effort their courage, Gandhi, Bhagat sing and to every one who contributed to Indian Independence had how were they able to make our country free form such an crudus empire.
You see Britishers I am neither complaining nor crying and also trying to grow up.
In my school I heard this story that there are 2 lines 1 is smaller than other, how would you make the smaller line bigger one approach is to cut short the bigger line and second is to make the smaller line bigger, Britain had adopted the first approach and India had adopted the second. The growth is slow but not on the expense of slaughtering any other nation
India’s GDP was 3% in 1947, it is 6% now and I wish to see in my life India in world top nations then there won’t be any thing called apology,
Cheers
Shashank
Thanks Shashank, well I expected an apology because times have changed. And yes I am aware that whatever good the British did during the Raj was for their own good. Otherwise would they leave a rich country gasping in poverty? They (Britain) steadily became richer during British Rule in India and India steadily became poorer. But after I wrote this post I realised that in a way you are right. We shouldn’t expect an apology from Britain. We should educate our own people first. You will be surprised to know how few Indians have any idea of what the truth is. – Nita
Hi Nita
This is the first time I am writing something for a blog and somethin like that I am not offending you in any way but I believe this way the British could be able to face the truth. Perhaps??
huh people talking about past!!!
If at all they understand that the present differences in Indian society (religious, caste etc) are all consequences of british raj’s divide and rule policy. There were divisions, but they were just made a little more serious and dangerously higher
Well we are talking about our past and that is truth a bitter truth,
There were devisions in the Indian society and i am sorry had british done somthing to for that?
I thought Gandhi and B R ambedkar was working to remove them. What britishers actually done to take advantage of every difference, Devide the people based on their differences so that they wont unite.The Downward filteration metod of education, Devide and Rule policy,Aryan Invation theory etc etc, What ever happened to overcome those differences happened after Independence, I believe.
Still there are people and politics in India who try to exploit these differences, But don’t worry this is our problem and we will deal with that somehow, Don’t say that you came to remove those differences.
well done Sashank!!! You gave a complete insight of our country.
Hey,
What the Britishers did is past but not forgivable, they plundered, looted and diversified our ppl, but what they couldnot break is our will to survive and be indepedent, yes they ruled but we tolerated , the day our endurance power reached its saturation, Our freedom fighters and ancestors wearing mere sarees and dhotis drove them out of our country and lives for ever .
Agreed that till date there are religious as well as political issues going on in the country but inspite of all these and the past invasions as shashank said we are still one among the developing nations isnt this really a great thing about India.
The Britishers made English popular coz they couldnot speak any other language ,unlike us Indians who atleast speak two to three languages even the uneducated ppl in our country can speak more than one language.
The Jalianwala episode shall never be taught in the schools of britain coz i am sure a polished country like britain would never like its offsprings to know about its acts of cruelty and inhumanity but dont you think that certain facts can never be hidden even if they are not taught.
Talking about apologies, Can one apology suffice for the sufferings, pain and humiliation caused to our country during the span of british rule.
Well, i did go thru quite a lot of posts. I had only heard the stories of British Nazism from my grandmother and few elders apart from what i learnt at school.
I remember, a horrible story which our house painter told me. It was that his grandfather used to work as a labourer under the British. Apart from the fact they were huntered when labour din work properly, the women of the labourers’ families were also raped by British officers on many occasions or humiliated by undressing them in villages.
He told the impact was so much that the entire village population just hated the white British men.
Anyways, i feel very happy to have gained a lot of knowledge, which perhaps i could never have come across.
I have high regard for lot of ppl i read esp. guqin (he’s a blessed person), gordon, nita (for putting up this topic n more) n others.
Proud of our Indian matrys n salute ppl n matrys of all nations who succumbed to similar nazism.
So who would do the apologising then?
Shall I?
Will that do?
Then again… I had nothing to do with what went on all those years ago.
In fact…. no one alive today (maybe the odd geriatric soldier) country had any part to play.
Perhaps the relatives of these savage British invaders could say “sorry” ?…. would that do?
Maybe I’m just being a little too flippant?
I would suggest that what you really want is some kind of recognition from the British government, that yes we did indeed behave rather poorly all those years ago….and I would agree!
but please do not claim to know how we British feel about all the pain and suffering in this world. We are one of the larger providers of aid on this planet. Yes a little boy dies in a road side bomb and we don’t get to hear about it…. Do you know why? Because it happens so regularly, there simply isn’t enough space to tell all the horrible stories. Yes a large percentage of our news is national… I would wager that this is the case in EVERY country that is allowed to broadcast!! To say we don’t care is a bit harsh…. I think you need to see past your dislike of us British and make a more informed analysis instead of the one sided kind!
Oh and by the way Sashank ??….. the film Braveheart was set 700 odd years ago! You really cant judge a culture on events that transpired in the 1300s…
The film was supposed to be based on facts, but, sadly it was directed by an English hating mad man so ….not an accurate portrayal… I’m from Scotland and hold the entire film in contempt!
Basically what I’m trying to say is – that you claim to know so much about how we think about the rest of the world and you use examples from our news and from a terribly inaccurate film to solidify your case and to be honest it’s fairly laughable! I commend you on your knowledge of your own country, but please do not even pretend to know mine, because you clearly don’t!!
Go this link from wikipedia and inform urself how Britain turned the richest civilisation into a poor one.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_past_GDP_%28PPP%29#1st_century
I’m so glad you have this blog. I/we don’t need apologies.
Just return everything that belongs to us/india.
we have to remember that the british infrastructure was not for us indians. and if m.gandhi didn’t revolt we’d still be a colony.
nazis and brits are very different, you just can’t compare them. brits would love any indian if they would follow them (euphemistically put).
anyways , when is india going to get what belongs to them.
the jews got an apology and total remorse from the german population and they (germans) are really sorry about what happened.
.
I don’t want an apology, that doesn’t mean anything. you brits can keep that.
like you stole from egypt, you stole from India and all i ask is that you give us what you stole from us..
-mathew
Thanks to Siby for bringing this post to my notice.
Nita, I dont think that we (a minority of Indians) know English solely due to British occupation. That we were under British control obviously had a role, but dont forget that there are many former colonies where the language of the former imperialists is not spoken as widely as it is in India. Nigeria, Indonesia, Algeria and even in Pakistan, the colonial language isnt as widespread as it is in India.
A big part of why English is widespread in India is the work of the Christian schools (such as the one I was schooled at), which have flourished in India since independence but were probably stifled in Pakistan and elsewhere.
Also, in India the language of a lot of the government business is in English, mainly due to the linguistic struggles in South India.
In recent years liberalisation of the media especially has made English even more pervasive.
So maybe you are giving the British more credit than they deserve.
Namaste Vikram, I’m a Desi raised in western Canada, so I grew up speaking an interesting gemisch of French, English, Hindi and Telugu. Then went back and spent some years in India…
Anyway, I agree with the consensus here and Desi’s comments, that the value of English is vastly overrated in India– even in my own international business work, the value of English is overstated. It’s just a language, nothing particularly special about it– French, Latin, Greek, German (for science) and others have been global languages before, and the English-speaking countries especially the USA, are so riddled with debt and military overstretch, that they won’t be on top much longer. China’s going to have that role, no question about it, so Indian schools should start devoting more effort into Mandarin Chinese training. (My old company has now started requiring basic Chinese courses for anyone doing the highest paid international jobs. If anyone refuses to take the course, or doesn’t make sufficient progress– they’re fired immediately! So Chinese is already being taken very seriously!)
German is also very valuable for technical fields– I simply can’t believe that India has been so poor at teaching a big technical, Western scientific language like German. Lots of outsourcing opportunities plus a big, wealthy European market for German-speakers, and India’s totally missed the boat on German-language opportunities with this misplaced focus on English, which is costing us billions. As for other non-Indian languages, Portuguese, Spanish, French, Japanese, Arabic and Russian can also have some utility in some international circumstances, but German is where the action is.
A very good article on this, “Myths About English,” by Prashant Agrawal: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/2547029.cms
I’m not saying we should get rid of English– I’m just saying, we should teach it as an elective foreign language, just like any other foreign language outside of the Indian Subcontinent. (If anything, the main focus should be shifting to Chinese.) That way, Indians will have a greater diversity of languages in which we’re proficient.
We have to ditch the fantasy that English is some kind of “link language” for us– it isn’t, in fact if anything it was introduced by the British colonizers specifically to divide us, to divide an “Anglicized” Indian elite from the Indian people themselves.
And all education should be mother-tongue– local languages and Hindi. They’ve done studies on this, and education especially in creative fields like the arts, math and sciences is ALWAYS better when conducted in local mother tongue/national language (Hindi in this case). In fact, India is probably holding itself back significantly by our failures to provide adequate, high-level education in Hindi and local languages.
This is not a trivial matter– some educational experts were called into the Philippines 3 years ago, where Filipinos also have struggled to provide decent education in the indigenous national language (Tagalog) and too often rely on English-medium teaching. The findings were actually scary– the Philippines is LITERALLY KILLING ITSELF economically by using English medium, and by failing miserably to provide adequate education in indigenous language medium.
It’s a bit subtle until the studies are done, but kids need teaching in the indigenous language to learn advanced, abstract concepts efficiently, and to think creatively. In fact, if kids aren’t taught in the local/national tongue of a country, they fail to develop the skills necessary for creative and abstract thinking, and THEY CAN NEVER REGAIN THEM!!! IOW, better education in Indian languages is necessary for the very survival of our country! Note, this is one big reason for the success of countries like Japan and South Korea– their education is in Japanese and Korean medium, not in English, so when the kids finish school, they’re much better at problem-solving. (They often take English as an elective, as well as other foreign languages like Chinese and German, but they don’t learn *in* these languages.) For India to survive, we need to devote a lot of effort to high-level math, science, business and other subjects, provided in Hindi and the other indigenous languages of the Subcontinent. No nation has ever thrived by trying to educate its people in a language imposed from the outside– like Korea and Japan, they flourish only when they educate their people in the native language!
As far as government, I don’t see a problem in having courts, Parliament sessions and so forth, conduct business jointly in Hindi and, say, Tamil. That’s the formula that’s used in other multilingual countries like Switzerland, and they get along pretty well. Using English gives us the worst of both worlds– distancing ourselves from our own languages, and preventing us from better developing our national language, Hindi, into a language able to tackle legal and scientific complexity, the way French, German and Chinese are able to do. This, in turn, holds India back as a country.
Also, I’m not sure I agree that media liberalisation has made English even more pervasive. If anything, I’ve found the opposite while working in India– Indian language media, especially in Hindi but also in Malayalam and Telugu, are flourishing as never before. After independence, basically the media was ruled by English. But now, films, TV, radio, even magazines and newspapers, all dominated by Hindi and regional languages. English isn’t even anywhere on the list of top languages!
If anything, what I’ve found most surprising is that Hindi really is starting to catch on among the youth in South India, something I never expected before. It’s probably because of Bollywood, and also it’s a colloquial Hindi with a mix of Dravidian vocabulary, so it’s not the stodgy Hindi that’s annoyed people in TN in the past. IOW, Hindi’s going national in a real way. My Telugu side has some second thoughts about this, but it’s the reality I guess, and so India needs to do a better job ensuring that Hindi is not just a language of entertainment and media, but also of science, government and law.
Without providing this support (to India’s regional languages as well as to Hindi), India will always remain a second-rate power. Successful countries always, ALWAYS develop their indigenous languages first to make them good vehicles for expressing complex thoughts and concepts, and this is an absolute prerequisite for advancement. There has never been an exception, and there is no other way to greatness for India than to give better respect to our national language and regional languages, and to nurture them much better than we’ve been doing.
Girish, I am afraid Hindi is not the national language and if you want to see the kind of trouble that will ever happen if Hindi is made the national language, please read this post and this one. Perhaps by removing English we will be a divided India. That is what I get after reading more han a thousand comments on the first post and about 160 on the other. In fact your comment is rather more relevant to those two posts, rather this one. In fact I fidn it surprising that you call a Hindi the national language and relegate the other languages to a “regional” status. This is not there even in our constitution. – Nita.
Raj: “The Nazis were notorious killers without a conscience! That was not the case with the Brits. Not all of them atleast. That was the reason why Gandhi chose the peaceful path to achieve independence. He knew that some of the Brits had a conscience and if we morally shame those who did not, those who did have a conscience would triumph over those who did not and they did!”
Raj, please, not this again. There are multiple posts above by multiple authors who totally debunk this claim– you are simply falling for British Imperial propaganda that claims they were somehow “more moral than the Nazis”. How could you?? It’s pathetic that India, even today, is still colonised by British propaganda in the Indian mind…
Raj, read the posts above by Sandeep, Seth, Arindam and others. They tackle British genocide, imperial atrocities and British military defeats in excellent detail. In fact, the British were much worse than the Nazis, it’s just that too many British (and even many Indians) are unaware of this because we get the “propaganda version of British history” rather than the real version. Look at the examples everyone cites above: British genocides, deliberate attacks, on the aboriginal peoples of the South Pacific and North America, concentration camps in South Africa against Blacks and Boers there, multiple genocides and mass murder of Irish people, deliberate manmade famines in India that killed up to 45 million of us, terror-bombing Iraqi civilians, ethnic cleansing the island of Diego Garcia… the list goes on and on!
When you tally it up, the British committed genocide against perhaps a half-dozen different groups, and killed 60 million– much worse than the Nazis and even the Soviets! Yes, the British were indeed the worst of the European imperial powers, by far. They weren’t capitalistic by any stretch (they suppressed free trade in their colonies), they weren’t democratic (harshly suppressing self-rule in their colonies, including in India, outside of the princely states which were independent), they mass-murdered brown people in India whom they considered racially inferior (after 1857). The Brits were the worst of the worst. As someone else gave examples for here, they were militarily incompetent, losing the vast majority of the wars they fought from the 18th-century on (Afghanistan, Haiti, American Revolution, South America, Ireland, Egypt). So to keep their empire under control, they made up this stupidity about their racial superiority over brown people, and they committed mass genocide that made it more difficult for us to unite politically and militarily against them.
And as for Gandhi? Well, in fact, Gandhi did have many predecessors before him, who tried the peaceful route. Know why they were unsuccessful? Because the British killed them, that’s why! Gandhi simply came along at the right place at the right time. The British were bankrupt from the World Wars, an exhausted defeated power– they had been humiliated by Japan at Singapore in 1942, which destroyed the British racial myth, had been bloodied to a pulp at Gallipoli and the Somme, had seen their homeland bombed to smithereens, lost in Afghanistan and Ireland after WWI and then in Egypt, Palestine, Aden and elsewhere after WWII. IOW, the British were too weak, too bloodied and damaged to maintain an empire after the World Wars, so Gandhi had the benefit of good timing in addition to his remarkable skills at damaging British imperial finances. (Also, Bose was leading a second military front against the British, which provided its own contribution.)
So no, I have no respect for the British as colonisers, they were the worst of the lot.
As for the English language– read my post above. We should have no loyalty to it whatsoever. It’s fine to teach it so long as it’s useful, but as I wrote above, it’s not nearly as useful as many think. Native language education, and especially the development of Hindi and other languages with big literary and scientific tradition (such as Tamil) is essential for India to become stronger– no nation has ever become powerful without strengthening its indigenous languages. There has never been an exception, ever. Since China, Japan, Korea, Thailand, Taiwan were never colonised by the West, they have an advantage over India, since they have confidence in their native language and use it for education. We in India need to do the same.
Besides, Mandarin Chinese is already becoming, quite rapidly, the new global language, and many companies even in Canada and the USA will not hire you without Chinese skills. (In the Southwest USA and Florida for that matter, you have to speak Spanish, for legal and historical reasons– or you will not be hired.)
Also, German-language education needs to be a much bigger priority in India, both for outsourcing and for sci-tech work, and engineering. It’s now the big language of the European Union. Indians should even practice writing some scientific and academic papers in German– all the top science publications of past 2 centuries are in German, and there’s a big community for it, so this would develop our skills. (Same for Chinese also, for example.) But still, most of our scientific, technical and academic work should be published in India’s home-grown languages, especially in Hindi publications.
I notice various Hindutva materials employing the term of Enslavement in relation to British India when in fact Slavery was abolished with much resistance in the 19th century, and towards new forms. If you believe British India resembled Nazi Germany, you have failed to examine the latter. Then again, contemporary Indians tend to forget more than 2 million Indians who fought against the German and Japanese aggressions — those who genuinely fought for a decent cause, as compared to much applause for the Nazi/Japanese collaborator Netaji. At this rate, the Republic of India may yet see a fascist state. First, ostracise, demonise & persecute minorities; chat it up about a ‘communist’ bogey man, support rightwing authoritarian ideas of security; dispense with constitutional aims and guarantees; teach students in more than one state that Hitler did much for his country; ignore more than 30 million deaths including several millions Jews along with every kind of disabled person, and political or other dissident; convert occupied areas to similar methods of social control and the elimination of unwanted sectors; preach a doctrine of racial purity to prop up an essentially criminal elite.
Sorry Ben I was not able to post the response earlier, You are correct I am not very much aware of the history of Scotland this is not the chapter we read very often in terms of Indian context, thats why i said if any bit is true (I should have given the better example ). But definetley I know about the british history, Undoubtly India was the part of that time.
It been 60 years of Indian independence and still the same propaganda is going on an on and on no change from the date it was created by the British rule. I couldn’t understand what is the use of propagating all the false information still now, I believe the lot of people of Britain is still not ready to accept that empire days are over and they are not ruling any country any more.
Your forefathers have done a very good job for your country to make your country richer and my country poor, but that time its over now , over 60 years back, I can’t find a single reason why British still want every one to believe that they came to India or any other country to make that country prosperous happy or whatever, As if there was no culture, no education and no knowledge was in India.
Economic stability is directly dependent on social, economic and cultural stability and it was fairly stable and rich when British started using their forces to capture India,
Don’t forget that Brits and other Europeans were here form 16th century but they got the knowledge that Indian culture is bad, worst, pathetic and there is no education system no even system virtually nothing in India after they established their rule here and after that they started propagating this to the people.
They have done every possible thing to justify their rule in India, Morally, economically, culturally, spiritually and still can’t see any changes.
What is the attitude of the British Empire are having towards the people of India Try to find out.
Every one knows why they came to India. What is their sole purpose of doing all the things their language, their education system (sorry their customized education system), trains and all.
I repeat the problem is more with their propaganda which is going on not what they did and what they haven’t done. That is past now. That is over. Actually propaganda is very nice technique of every country like Talk about moral values human rights but earn revenue by exporting weapons.
From being the world’s major exporting economy (along with China), India was reduced to an importer of goods; from being the source of much of the economic capital that funded Britain’s Industrial Revolution, it became one of the biggest debtor nations; from its envied status as one of the wealthiest nations, it became a land synonymous with poverty; and from a nation with a large number of prestigious centers of higher education that attracted the cream of foreign students from Asia, it became the land with the highest number of illiterate persons
And Brits are asking credits
Every evader does some damage to the nation and British rule was also not different. But Britain is a exception that this would be the only country who expects the world, to forget all the atrocities, plundering, deaths and every thing and to recite with them because they brought civilization, Train and English particularly to India.
If you feel proud of what empire has done good to other then you are also understand that there are lot other things not good to feel proud of.
This is true British brought trains to India, but you are missing something that you not only brought trains you brought Bicycle, Cars, Trucks, buses, Aeroplanes, Radio and every damn thing that invented in all those 200 years, Because you were ruling the country, Individuals can’t posses trains, I don’t think you would have left any one that wealthy that he can have trains isn’t it??
British brought these things because they thought they are going to rule this country forever. If you argue that British had spend from their pocket to bring trains to India and for Indians then it would be difficult for you to convince others, because British were running the trains on the cost of Indian tax payers money and utilizing the trains for fast movement of troops and to move the wealth out of country for their own benefit. This is called business; Trains were contributing primarily to British economy not to Indians.
China got the rail way in 1876, Japan in 1872, Russia 1837, NY in 1831, Iran got in 1887, Iraq in 1896. Germany in 1831, Japan in 1872, What these nations have done to hired some one who have knowledge of trains and thus trains come to their country, You must brought railways to US also, but In don’t think you are having guts to ask the credit from them, Rules are different for India isn’t it. Every country has got the railways but are you trying to say that if British were not there it won’t be possible for Indian to have the trains?
According to British perspective railways can be given to India either by God or by British otherwise India can’t have railways, Do you honestly believe in this logic.? Is this the logic british people is trying to convey, Are the rules is different for India, I haven’t heard that any country is asking the for the credit from these above mentioned countries for train, except British, That’s why I told Britain is an exception,
How much credit British want for trains.
When the world was developing in 18th century India was just Still only feeding Britain, one example of feeding check the growth of British steel industry, check the Biggest clients of Bank of England in 17th-18 century.
India can have its successful space program, cryogenic engine, nuclear program, Param (Super computer), Kaveri (Aircraft and naval ship engine) these technologies developed in India or either came to India by some mutual agreement,)*”, but Railways…. hmmm… India can’t have without British. Even US or Russia is not asking for the contribution the way British are expecting from us.
How British were active to bring some thing good like technology to India can be understood from the fact that it has taken 70 years to Cloth mill to come to India. Even the swing needle or Match box every thing was made in Britain, nothing was in India, because it could seriously hamper the wealth drain to Britain.
And how much they were interested in India’s Industrial growth can be analysed from the points below. If some one interested some examples.
“The people of Bengal had been used to tyranny, but had never lived under an oppression so far reaching in its effects, extending to every village market and every manufacturer’s loom. They had been used to arbitrary acts from men in power, but had never suffered from a system which touched their trades, their occupations, their lives so closely.
The springs of their industry were stopped, the sources of their wealth dried up”.
The British Parliamentary Select Committee of 1812 was appointed to discover how they (Indian manufactures) could be replaced by British manufactures, and how British industries could be promoted at the expense of Indian industries.
– R. C. Dutt
So I am also trying to understand when this magical transformation happened that britishers are started promoting the Indian Industries? If they promoted what was he reason for that, Was it to bring prosperity to Indians???? I think the reason was world war.
This is the link how Indian Industries grown
http://www.ccsindia.org/ccsindia/policy/hist/studies/wp0025.pdf
One example of deindustrialization
Muslin was the softest fabric ever produced in human history. 20 meter length of Muslin fabric could be folded into a matchbox… today it survives in museums only. Muslin production began 3000 years ago or maybe has its roots in the Indus Civilization which is 5000 years old and survived various foreign invaders in Bangla, However, it did not survive the vengeful British colonial period. In Bangla a new fabric is now called Muslin, but is not the Muslin of history.
Neither Native nor European agriculturist, I think, can thrive at the present rate of taxation. Half of the gross produce of the soil is demanded by Government. … In Hindustan (Northern India) I found a general feeling among the King’s officers … that the peasantry in the Company’s Provinces are on the whole worse off, poorer and more dispirited than the subjects of the Native Provinces; and here in Madras, where the soil is, generally speaking, poor, the difference is said to be still more marked. The fact is, no Native Prince demands the rent which we do. — Bishop Heber
In the British time economy as just went down, If some one have some time read the following book. (This is not written by any indian) (In Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino famines and the making of the Third World by M. Davis, London, Verso Books, 2001)If the history of British rule in India were to be condensed to a single fact, it is this: there was no increase in India’s per-capita income from 1757 to 1947.” In fact, incomes may have declined by 50 percent in the last half of the 19th century
The Britishers are talk very often that they had given lot of things to Indian But no one had even uttered how much they taken from India, If some one is interested they have to look beyond the school books of Great Britain. This chapter is not in history books there.
So I am also trying to understand when this transformation happened that britishers are started promoting the Indian Industries? If they promoted what was he reason for that, Was it to bring prosperity to Indians???? I think the reason was world war.
This is the link how Indian Industries grown during British rule.
http://www.ccsindia.org/ccsindia/policy/hist/studies/wp0025.pdf
One example of deindustrialization
Muslin was the softest fabric ever produced in human history. 20 meter length of Muslin fabric could be folded into a matchbox… today it survives in museums only. Muslin production began 3000 years ago or maybe has its roots in the Indus Civilization which is 5000 years old and survived various foreign invaders in Bangla, However, it did not survive the vengeful British colonial period. In Bangla a new fabric is now called Muslin, but is not the Muslin of history.
Neither Native nor European agriculturist, I think, can thrive at the present rate of taxation. Half of the gross produce of the soil is demanded by Government. … In Hindustan (Northern India) I found a general feeling among the King’s officers … that the peasantry in the Company’s Provinces are on the whole worse off, poorer and more dispirited than the subjects of the Native Provinces; and here in Madras, where the soil is, generally speaking, poor, the difference is said to be still more marked. The fact is, no Native Prince demands the rent which we do. — Bishop Heber
In the British time economy as just went down, If some one have some time read the following book. (This is not written by any indian) (In Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino famines and the making of the Third World by M. Davis, London, Verso Books, 2001)If the history of British rule in India were to be condensed to a single fact, it is this: there was no increase in India’s per-capita income from 1757 to 1947.” In fact, incomes may have declined by 50 percent in the last half of the 19th century
The Britishers are talk very often that they had given lot of things to India But no one had even uttered how much they taken from India, If some one is interested they have to look beyond the school books of Great Britain. This chapter is not in history books there.
For last 260 years they are shouting very loud that our culture our religion is of 3rd class, Hideous, Lets go into British times
Henry VIII and his Statute which had prevented the reading of the English version of the Bible in Churches in preference to Latin version and even restricting its listening in English only to nobility and higher echelons of the society. The Statute (1542-43) ordained violation with serious consequences:
Read another one
…. The Bible shall not be read in English in any Church. No women or artificers, prentices, journeymen, serving men of the degree of yeomen or under husbandsmen, nor labourers, shall read the New Testament in English. Nothing shall be taught or maintained contrary to the King’s instructions. And if any spiritual preach, teach, or maintain any thing contrary to the King’s instructions or determinations, made of ‘to be made, and shall be thereof convict, he shall for his first offence recant, `for his second abjure and bear a fagot, and for his third shall be adjudged an heretick, and be burned and lose all his goods and chattels.” . A.E. Dobbs, Education & Social Movement, 1700-1850, London, 1919, p. 105, quoting 34 and 35 Henry VIII.C.I.
During the same period, the expectations about education for a common man England was -.
“….. a ploughman’s son will go to the plough, artificer’s son to apply the trade of his parents’ vocation; and the gentlemen’s children are meet to have the knowledge of Government and rule in the commonwealth.
For we have as much need of ploughman as any other state; and all sorts of men may not go to school. ” (Emphasis ours)
- A.E.Dobbs, op.cit, p.. 104, p. 104, £n. 3 quoting Strype, Cramer, i.127.
It was Britain culture who was opposing the science, Galileo said Sun is centre of Universe, then Pop told come Son, I want to talk some thing very serious as it was against god will, Don’t know who many got burned who tried to do new discoveries.
I haven’t started digging about the drawbacks of Christianity and that is not my intension either.
Hindu culture were having some drawbacks so do Christianity or British culture or any damn religion/culture, But Britishers were pointing every draw back in Indian culture but never taught Refusal of the use of English against Latin in Church to the common man and burning of women by branding them as witches was never a part of information made available to Indians. The Biblical exhortation “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live” or the l6th, the l7th and the l8th, nearly three to twenty lacs of women were executed branding them as witches as reported by , Vol. 29 (1984), p. 84.
or neither Copernicus, Galileo and Bruno had to suffer because they did not accept the `Doctrine of Papacy’
The whole British education was meant to kick the native culture. Even the nurses were using the techniques for less painful delivery were branded as witches and burned alive. They widely propagated Sati as Indian House hold custom which was in some pockets of Bengal but not even uttered anything about burning women in their own country. Even not about the inhuman atrocities committed by Christian missionaries in Goa and Kerala in the name of Inquisition, Neither the slave trade in which they were involved in North America, Caribbean such as Trinidad and Tobago, the Bahamas, the Leeward Islands, Barbados, and Jamaica. Not the effects of Forced Opium trade to china.
Their phenomenal modern educational system was carefully designed to produce clerks and just clerks to put the stamps on official documents nothing else neither scientist nor scholars’ just clerks, and those who are not interested to become clerks were moving to London or other countries for scientific or technical education. Can any one deny this?
This was the reality of the Modern British education system and even Macaulay hadn’t that, But in present Britain, people are denying that.
The famous Minute which Macaulay wrote in 1835, remained unpublished till 1864. His nephew Sir George Otto Trevelyan first published them in Macmillan’s Magazine of May, 1864. Macaulay proudly records :
“We are at present a Board for Printing Books which are of less value than the paper on which they are printed was when it was blank, and for giving artificial encouragement’s to absurd history, absurd metaphysics, absurd physics, and absurd theology.”
Converted the whole generation to be clerks. Either be Illiterate or be a clerk.
I think Romans would have done some thing similar like every outsider Ruler does, but are the Romans also asking for CREDIT?
But they still claim it was the modern education, if I will say that it was too much racially biased to be even termed as education, what do you think about that? I think we have to redefine the meaning of modern.
Their plan was to super impose their superiority from the medium of education and then gradually bring the British pro Indians to the administration so that their won’t be any agitation of alien rule so that they can rule on this country forever.
Regarding the Famines, Trade mark of British Rule, I don’t want to go into how many people were died in the Famines because of British Policies Ingnoranty or deliberately. Or how much plundering was done. There is enough details avilable on the previous posts,
What I would ask you to do is to find out that how many people were died In the Famines caused because of British administration and their refusal to provide help to them, Acttually why to provide help to them, they were not British and the money British Raj had acquired form indians with lot of difficulties must not meant to spent on them. I had given some refences in the end to help you, It would be unfare if we will keep on telling you about atrocities and not let you give time to find out and decide by your self,
Find out how many lives India and world has lost because of the Impearlism and try to do a rough count of total human Lives lost, then compare it to the lives lost because of hitler. Please also think what is more bad killing people in GAS Chambers or killing them slowly by starvation or by other means (check the history of African countries) and leave them to die,
I am asking this because what have I found that there was no apparently no difference between the mindset of Hitler and of British imperialism.
See the following examples:
1) Mr churchil : He told this when the Indian forces was fighting for him. Approximate 2.4 million Indians served in British units during the Second World War. Isn’t it discusting, Call him British Hitler or Nadir Shah, doesn’t matter
” The chapter on the 1940s which covers the Quit India ‘disturbances’ INA trials, and the Royal Indian Navy mutiny, is more intellectually
rewarding since the historiographical focus has been largely on the Hindu-Muslim communal conflict.
At the same time that Churchill was waging a valiant struggle against the Nazis and Japanese, he complained to Leo Amery, Secretary of State for India, ‘I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.’ The Hindus, Churchill ob served, are a ‘foul people’, and the Royal Air Force’s surplus bombers could, in his opin ion, be suitably deployed ‘to destroy them’ Amery privately noted, ‘I didn’t see much difference between his outlook and Hitler’s. ” http://epaper.timesofindia.com/Repository/ml.asp?Ref=VE9JS00vMjAwNy8wMS8xNCNBcjAwODAw&Mode=HTML&Locale=english-skin-custom
“I am asking this because what have I found that there was no apparently no difference between the mindset of Hitler and of British imperialism.”
Shashank, this is an excellent point! Quite a few historians have done detailed studies on the literature and pamphleteering that the British used to invite soldiers out to India, and when you examine what was written, *the racist diatribes used by the British were as bad as, or worse than, those of Hitler!*
In fact, as is becoming increasingly clear even in Western textbooks, Hitler’s ideology was inspired chiefly by the racist ideology spouted by the British imperialists in South Asia, Oceania (where massacres and genocide attempts were repeatedly launched against the aboriginal peoples) and in the Transvaal in South Africa, where the British established the world’s first concentration camps. The British attempted to justify all these atrocities on the basis of their supposed racial superiority, the same kinds of claims used by the fascists in later decades in Europe.
In Mein Kampf, Hitler repeatedly mentions how much he admires the British Empire in India, especially the racist basis for British Imperialism and the way the “British placed the boot on the neck” of the brown peoples there. The British Empire, and the Victorians’ open bigotry and hatred (spouted by officials such as Lytton, Kipling, Trolloppe and others) were the most formative contributors to Hitler’s own ideology.
The irony, when one considers the circumstances, is that if anything the British people were far more culpable than the Germans ever were. The German people never gave the Nazi party a majority in Parliament even during the depths of the economic crisis there (Hitler wended his way in), and despite Hitler’s dictatorship– with the attendant suppression of a free press, and the Gestapo– millions of Germans rose up against Hitler in bitter resistance. The German resistance even continued into WWII itself, and Hitler send hundreds of thousands of his German opponents to the concentration camps. (Konrad Adenauer, the first postwar West German prime minister, was one example of such an opponent.)
OTOH, Britain always claimed democracy and a free press, and the British people knew full and well of the atrocities that the British officials were committing in India after 1857. As said above, there were thousands of potential Gandhis whom the British gunned down before Mohandas Gandhi came along, with the British too weak and bankrupt to confront him. Yet the British people acquiesced in the genocide in India, as well as the attempts in Australia, in South Africa and elsewhere. And even today, there are fools who try to defend the British Empire, whereas the German people are much more sensible (and refreshingly cynical, for that matter) about the arrogance of Western European imperialism in the 19th and 20th centuries.
The British seriously need to come to terms with this past.
A good first step, would be for the British to return the Kohinoor Diamond to India, and to start paying some reparations, as many other countries have done. India was among the world’s wealthiest nations, until the British came to India to loot the Subcontinent blind. Steps like those above would be the least they could do.
Regarding the Famines, Trade mark of British Rule, I don’t want to go into how many people were died in the Famines because of British Policies Ingnoranty or deliberately. Or how much plundering was done. There is enough details avilable on the previous posts,
What I would ask you to do is to find out that how many people were died In the Famines caused because of British administration and their refusal to provide help to them, Acttually why to provide help to them, they were not British and the money British Raj had acquired form indians with lot of difficulties must not meant to spent on them. I had given some refences in the end to help you, It would be unfare if we will keep on telling you about atrocities and not let you give time to find out and decide by your self,
Find out how many lives India and world has lost because of the Impearlism and try to do a rough count of total human Lives lost, then compare it to the lives lost because of hitler. Please also think what is more bad killing people in GAS Chambers or killing them slowly by starvation or by other means (check the history of African countries) and leave them to die,
I am asking this because what have I found that there was no apparently no difference between the mindset of Hitler and of British imperialism.
See the following examples:
1) Mr churchil : He told this when the Indian forces was fighting for him. Approximate 2.4 million Indians served in British units during the Second World War. Isn’t it discusting, Call him British Hitler or Nadir Shah, doesn’t matter
” The chapter on the 1940s which covers the Quit India ‘disturbances’ INA trials, and the Royal Indian Navy mutiny, is more intellectually
rewarding since the historiographical focus has been largely on the Hindu-Muslim communal conflict.
At the same time that Churchill was waging a valiant struggle against the Nazis and Japanese, he complained to Leo Amery, Secretary of State for India, ‘I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.’ The Hindus, Churchill ob served, are a ‘foul people’, and the Royal Air Force’s surplus bombers could, in his opin ion, be suitably deployed ‘to destroy them’ Amery privately noted, ‘I didn’t see much difference between his outlook and Hitler’s. ” http://epaper.timesofindia.com/Repository/ml.asp?Ref=VE9JS00vMjAwNy8wMS8xNCNBcjAwODAw&Mode=HTML&Locale=english-skin-custom
Lucy, an excellent post and a nice addition to the outstanding posts above by Girish, Shashank, Sandeep and others– pointing out facts and historical details showing how the British were worse than the Nazis as genocidal imperialists, and how British myths about racial superiority in fact inspired the Nazi practices of the 20th century.
I can’t add much more in this respect to what people have already written here, so I just wanted to emphasize a crucial step in *taking action* to overcome this historical whitewashing on the part of Anglophile historians:
Take tough, if necessary even harsh, action against historians and authors of world history texts who neglect the brutal British imperial history in India after the uprising in 1857.
I and others in my South Asian group had to deal with this recently, with a textbook company that pushes world history textbooks into schools in the USA and Canada. It’s outrageously Anglophile– it all but blames the Indian people themselves for the rebellion of 1857, and entirely ignores the horrid British atrocities after the rebellion, well-documented ones, in which entire Indian villages were wiped out, and British officers blew Indian leaders apart with cannon. It’s blatantly hypocritical, since this textbook goes into detail about Nazi and Soviet atrocities, but it doesn’t call the British on their brutalities in India after 1857.
There’s not even a mention of the famines in late 19th-century India, which killed well over 30 million Indians, nothing on the Bengal Famine, only one tiny line about the Jallianwala Bagh massacre! Nothing whatsoever on Churchill’s genocide with the Bengal Famine.
Also, when the text covered the Boer Wars, there was no mention of the British concentration camps there. There was little discussion at all about the attempted genocides of Australian and Tasmanian peoples by British settlers and officials. Nothing about the terror-bombing of Iraq in 1920 by the British RAF. Only a cursory treatment of the Opium Wars that largely blamed the Chinese– for a war that the British started to flood China with opium! Nothing about British brutality in Kenya after WWII during the Mau Mau Uprising.
There was also very little discussion about British military defeats, another sure indication of outrageous Anglophilia by textbook-writers. Only the American Revolution was mentioned, and just a brief mention about the British defeat in Afghanistan in 1842 (which in fact, was the most lopsided defeat that any of the European colonial powers suffered). Nothing about the British defeats in South America in 1806-7, or against Toussaint L’Ouverture in Haiti at the same time he was fighting Spanish and French forces. Nothing about Muhammad Ali’s defeat of the British in Egypt in early 1800′s. Nothing about the Irish victory over Britain in 1921– the textbook basically treats the Irish War for independence as a little skirmish, with the British generously handing over independence! Nothing about British defeat against the Russians in the civil war campaigns in 1919-1920. The British catastrophe at Singapore against the Japanese in 1942 is glossed over– when even Churchill himself lamented the disaster– and British military debacles against Israel (1948), Vietnam (1945), and Yemen (1960) aren’t even mentioned. The victory of China (defeated the British and Americans in 1950, what we call the “Korean War” but was in fact a related but separate conflict) is also glossed over, as is Egypt’s victory in the Suez Crisis in 1956. (The textbook makes it seems like Eisenhower in the USA was entirely responsible for the British debacle, rather than the Egyptians defending themselves against the British invaders!) The hypocrisy is an outrage, since this same textbook delights in devoting many pages to the Italian humiliation against Ethiopia in the late 1800′s, French failures against the Algerians and Vietnamese after WWII– even though the British suffered far more and much more severe defeats against the native peoples than the other colonialists did!
The South Asian community was furious, and we organized a boycott of this textbook company unless they changed the textbook and acknowledged the British injustices against Indians (even though Britain ruled just half the country) and against other peoples, and became more balanced in its treatment of military and other colonial history, rather than just painting the British as “better” than, say, the Dutch and French.
The textbook company refused, so we got tough– important members of the Indian-American community put pressure on school boards and teachers to refuse to buy this textbook, lest they suffer consequences.
Ultimately, the pressure was successful. Schools stopped using this textbook, and this textbook company recently went out of business.
The lesson for us: Textbook companies and outrageously Anglophile historians understand economic pressure first and foremost, and they’ll change their ridiculous pro-British, anti-Indian slants– utterly ignoring a large swath of history– only when we in the Indian communities worldwide put tremendous, and overpowering, pressure on the textbook companies to change and be even-handed. When it comes to taking action, this should be one of our priorities, because it brings success!
Hi,
I am Indian but lived the past decade of my life outside India.
I have this to say about the topic:
If Britain is rich to day because it ‘looted’ other countries then why aren’t Mongolia (periodic raids into China) and Afghanistan (many raids into India) just as rich?
I guess the British are rich because of some values that exist in their socio-economic system.
I dont think just looting another country will make any country rich.
I personally think that India is better off because of the British empire.
My two cents!!
When you say Britishers plundered India you need not say India. Since when the Britishers came to “so called India”, there was nothing called India. There were these princely states , princes and anarchists who ruled India and wrote the stories of their greatness which we read today. I agree with you that initially the Britishers exploited India but latter did much more looking at India’s plight. Their first attempt to interfere in caste system was overthrown in 1857 by so called rebels but who in fact were mutineers who wanted to re establish the Muslim rule in India. After this period Britishers had to stop their noble work of destroying the caste but instead gave praise to it and appreciated it which gave rise to new sects and movements. The Indian Army which defends your country consisting of gorkha mountaineers, sikh heavy infantry, maratha light infantry guriellas, rajput infantry and so on was formed by britishers. Britishers are the ones who united and formed something called India, If they weren’t there could you tell me why a sikh or a gorkha fighter would fight for someone outside their community ? and the most important thing they got with them is called democracy.
Naveen, with all due respect, your argument is rather foolish. In fact, Mongolia was very, very rich for a while after they plundered China and Central Asian lands (beginning in the 1200′s, that’s 8 centuries ago)– their capital, Karakoram, was one of the richest in the world at the time. But it declined afterward when the Mongols were militarily defeated, and Mongolia couldn’t plunder anymore.
The same is now happening in Britain. It was, after all, only about 60 years ago that the British were kicked out of the Indian Subcontinent, and they, like the Mongols, had a good deal of wealth left over from their plundering. Now, the UK is is rapid decline and, as you can see with this financial crisis, in a state of economic disaster– the British pound sterling is in freefall. Britain had a lot of wealth to sustain it before, but is now in a state of collapse, and I wouldn’t at all be surprised if Britain in 50 years does indeed decline even more severely, just as Mongolia did.
Besides, nobody said that Britain’s imperial plunder of India was the only reason for its eventual wealth (which, as noted, is now rapidly declining). Places like Korea, Taiwan and Norway are quite wealthy today without plundering other nations in the process. Germany was a divided, broken nation in 1945 that is now among the world’s wealthiest and most successful, after rebuilding itself with the Wirtschaftswunder. Finland has the world’s most competitive economy. There are many possible routes to wealth.
But the fact remains that whatever its eventual contribution to Britain’s economic state, the United Kingdom did indeed loot India on a grand scale. Priceless Indian artifacts and valuables remain in British hands– and if indeed this loot were not considered “valuable” by the British, then why not return the Kohinoor Diamond as a goodwill gesture, among other things?
Besides, whatever their motivations, the British did a lot of damage in India, as other posters have pointed out in far more detail than I. They destroyed entire Indian villages en masse after the 1857 rebellion, took over Indian farms and restricted trading, even exported out scarce food, which killed over 40 million Indians in the late 1800′s through the famines, while drafting Indians into British armies to fight British wars in Afghanistan (which the British lost and were humiliated in, of course). The British mass murder in India, all their atrocities remain poorly detailed in most popular histories, yet they are much worse than the 20th-century Holocaust– that’s what people are pointing out here, and rightly so.
If you yourself are Indian, Naveen, I would strongly suggest you read the works by R. Dutt, Mike Davis and Amartya Sen, which detail the British Holocaust that was perpetrated in India, a mass genocide far worse in scale than almost any other in the past 3 centuries. Independence means little for India, if modern Indians today remain colonised in our minds to the point of licking British boots, and too feeble-minded to stare the bitter truth in the eye, and realise how badly India was raped by British rule. It’s not pleasant, but it’s necessary for understanding our country’s painful travails over the past 2 centuries.
And Wellwisher, I’m going to be very blunt with you– your ignorant, condescending comments toward India and the Indian people are more than a little racist, the mark of an insecure Briton who simply cannot deal with his country’s decline into weakness and humiliation in the past 3 decades.
The 1857 rebellion was a grass-roots uprising for freedom by the Indian people, from all castes and social classes, against a foreign occupying power, and your assertion that it was with the aim of “establishing Muslim rule” is incredibly laugh-inducing — most of the rebel leaders (not to mention the fighters themselves) were Hindu, not Muslim. For example, look up the Rani of Jhansi, one of our national heroines and a leader in battling the British, whom the cowardly British soldiers killed in cold blood.
In fact, the 1857 rebellion was one of the few occasions when Hindus and Muslims really fought side-by-side to overthrow the foreign yoke, rather than succumbing to British divide-and-rule tactics– something that I, as a Hindu, take great pride in. Also perhaps the reason why it upsets you so much as a racist defender of British imperialism, Wellwisher.
Your assertion that “there was no India” prior to the British is equally preposterous. First of all, India had been united before, across a much larger geographical scope and a more united state, under historically renowned empires such as the Gupta. Look at our flag for once– on it is the Wheel of Asoka, our greatest leader and the man who presided over our country when it was truly united. Second, the British themselves only ruled less than 50% of India, with the rest under independent control of the rajas or ruled by French or other European powers. (And despite this, the British mass-murdered over 40 million Indians in the portion that they did rule.) It was only after independence that India proceeded toward unification, including with the raja-ruled provinces and French and other ruled portions of India.
Finally, your assertion about the British bringing democracy to India is equally laughable. If this is the case, then why did the British– from Clive in the 1760′s, well into the 1900′s– deprive India of even basic representation or the ability to assert our rights? Why, even as 40 million Indians were being starved to death by the British, worked to death on the Andaman work camps (worse than Auschwitz in terms of the deprivation, as M. Davis has indicated), and our industries being stripped bare– why were Indians deprived of even basic rights to redress our grievances?
Why, furthermore, did that genocidal racist Winston Churchill, call us a “beastly race” whom he hated, and do his best to push the denial of rice scheme that killed 4 million Indian people in the Bengal Famine?
It’s because Britain had no intention of granting democracy to the “inferior brown peoples,” which their racist orthodoxy considered to be beneath contempt of the British themselves. It’s also why Britain denied democracy to their other colonies as well.
In fact, as we can see today, some former British colonies are democracies, while others are not– and this has everything to do with the decisions of the people themselves, not the British. For example, Burma, Uganda and Iraq were also British colonies, but none of them became democratic at independence.
Moreover, in most places the British did not leave peacefully– they had to be violently evicted in military operations. The Irish had to militarily defeat the British in the 1920′s, the Kenyans had to rise up in the 1960′s, the Aden fighters and Cypriots, the Iraqis, all rose up and defeated the British in war. (The Afghans and South Americans defeated the British before they could even establish colonies there.)
On the other side, there are countless other countries– such as Thailand and South Korea– which were never under British control, but became democracies themselves. So this arrogant British support of imperialism continues to push the desperate British line (as the British continue in their downward spiral) that somehow British imperialism was a good thing and brought democracy, when the opposite is the case– it brought nothing but genocide and looting to the countries it affected. (The aborigines in Australia, the Pequots, the Africans and Boers in South Africa who were thrown into British concentration camps– had it even worse than we did.)
It’s ironic, Wellwisher, because until recently– while we Indians have been insisting that the British acknowledge their history– we have had no ill will toward modern Britons themselves, provided that they forthrightly acknowledge this history. But now that it’s become clear that the British continue to indulge in their racism and ignorance about their own imperial past– in contrast to most other European nations– we are changing this view.
You see, Wellwisher, we believe in something called karma in India, and you British have some terrible, incredibly painful karma coming your way very soon, since you continue refusing to acknowledge your murderous and genocidal history, in stark contrast to your Western counterparts– while still trying to claim that your mass genocide and plunder of India and other places was somehow good for them.
In fact, while we would ordinarily feel sad for you as your country collapses in the midst of the current economic crisis, and your failed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, now we relish it instead. Why should we feel any sympathy for you, when you clearly show not even a trace of sympathy or remorse for the tens of millions of Indians you killed during your rule of India? Your country continues its rapid and inexorable decline — while India, in contrast to your decline, moves to even greater strength and importance.
And I agree fully with the posters above– boycott and force into bankruptcy, any textbook publishers who refuse to delve into Indian history to provide this detail about the British atrocities there. They are negligent in their job as historians, and so long as they continue to propagandise for the British rather than write history accurately, we will ensure that only the publishers who are more even-handed about this, are able to stay in business. There can be no exceptions on this.
Hi Gopal,
what would your thoughts be about India and Indians if you were not an Indian (I am making some assumptions here)?
Can you thing like a person who is above nationality, race, gender, color, etc?
If you think (about India) the way you think just because you are an Indian then you can never be a good judge of these things. I guess we need to detach ourselves from our identities and start to think like a ‘global’ being.
Then you will realise whats wrong with India. Then you will (hopefully) see my point.
Any ways, you seem well read. I myself find it difficult to find some time to read these days.
Bye
I find it fascinating how America Civil War was connected with Mumbai’s Backbay Reclamation and how it also provided wealth to Premchand Roychand to fund Rajabai Tower as a tower to allow his blind mother keep time. Here’s a picture of Rajabai Tower during construction. There is no Azad Maidan because the reclamation project was still a few years away.
All of this happened during the British rule of India.
Lord Macaulay’s Address to the British Parliament in 1835:
” I have travelled across the length and breadth of India and I have not seen one person, who is a beggar, who is a thief. Such wealth I have seen in this Country,Such High Moral Values, People of such Caliber, that I do not think, we would ever conquer this Country “
Good point, Bharath. India was among the world’s wealthiest and culturally richest nations before the British– the second-largest economy and most advanced nation after China, just as Macaulay himself was forced to admit.
After 1857, and all the British massacres that took place in its wake, India was reduced to peasantry, millions and millions of us slaughtered, our industries ruined so the greedy Brits could loot us dry.
And I’m glad to see people finally outing Winston Churchill for the bloodthirsty, genocidal racist failure that he was. The only difference between Churchill, Hitler and Stalin is that Churchill killed millions of dark-skinned people, so his mass murders don’t “matter” as much as those of the other two, at least according to the racist fools who still write many history textbooks. (Which as someone else drew attention to, are going out of business, and quite deservedly so.)
contiued from my previous posts comparing the attitued of Hital to British Empairilsim
2) Charles Dickens regarding independence struggle 1857 : “I wish I were commander-in-chief in India … I should proclaim to them that I considered my
holding that appointment by the leave of God, to mean that I should do my utmost to exterminate the race.”
Something also BBC http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/4573152.stm
3) Mr Dyer : No need of telling any thing, Here is an another interesting story, When your Queen came to India during I K Gujral’s governmennt,
The people of Punjab and members of the families of the Killed were expecting the apology from the queen, Forget about apology at that time the British officers were quarrelling with the Indian officials that they had put the wrong figure on the Jaliawalah Bagh Memorial, memorial, I think the difference was around 25,sorry couldn’t remember exactly,
4) Not having much knowledge of African countries please search for Uganda, Nigeria and Uganda
But this is worth reading
Mau Mau Movement http://www.wsws.org/articles/1999/may1999/mau-m26.shtml
1955, British Labour Party Member of Parliament Barbara Castle, who later became a cabinet minister, visited Kenya to investigate charges that white
policemen had tortured and killed innocent Kikuyu with government approval. She concluded that the entire system of justice in Kenya had a “Nazi”
attitude toward Africans. (http://www.wsws.org/articles/1999/may1999/mau-m26.shtml)
4) I believe You Know much better about Ireland, Tasmanian and Native Australians and Americans,
There are few links for your reference
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23206187-12377,00.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-HsxTqKZJY&feature=related
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1578552/'Britain-should-apologise-to-Aborigines‘.html
http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2008/07/18/pope-apology.html
http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/asiapcf/07/16/australia.pope.ap/
5) Also search for the No of Indians died of Slave trade and search for how brits reinvented slavery. Its your wish you want to include African natives into this. (sarch bbc coolies ) http://web.uknet.com/blog/michael/2007/03/
Slavery was part of human history but only British want every one to believe they were lucky because they were slaves of British. I think its been 70 years after abolition of Slave trade, I found this comment on a British newspaper that a person was sued by a immigrant from Kenya I believe That Brit person was saying this his father was slave to us, he is lucky that he is working with us. WOW what a attitude directly inherited from British empire.
That empire seems biggest threat to human civilization, you should himself decide you want to give first place to the Brit empire or want it to stand beside the Hitler.
This is all because of what?? Now some British can ask why don’t the Vikings apologise for invading us 900 years ago? You want the apology for 900 years back from the people of that time when probably they won’t be knowing to cook food don’t know the importance of taking bath daily but not even accepting your brutality with in 200 years when you claim your self to be so noble wise full of human qualities and also talk so much about human rights, ask credit for lot of things all and If some discussion happens and for any question of brutality done,just hiding behind Hitler.
There is a difference in Hitler and British cruelty, In case of Hitler there was a person behind all the genocides and in British case there was a system. British were just killing every one who doesn’t look like them and by excriminating them so that they can make money. Unlike for Hitler, for British it was day to day affair, there were policies laid for that, there were laws made for that.
Actually Hitler was more than impressed of British, in many ways British and set lot of bench mark for him, Watch his uniform, His favourite movie (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0026643/trivia),he himself wrote in Mein Kampf that UKRAINE SHOULD BE THE GERMANY INDIA
(http://uncpress.unc.edu/browse/page/514), actually he was friend of Britain before war During a meeting with Lord Halifax in 1938, Hitler had pledged his support to the preservation of the British empire and offered his formula for dealing with
the Indian National Congress: kill Gandhi, if that isn’t enough then kill the other leaders too, if that isn’t enough then two hundred more activists,
(http://koenraadelst.bharatvani.org/articles/fascism/gandhihitler.html)
The Britain was initially was in very good relations with Hitler, even when the WW stars,
The Britain only attacked Germany when it started crossing the British interest, he want to have a empire with the collaboration of British.
I don’t know how much this is true that British having an agreement with Hitler that he will be his ally if Germany will defeat Moscow.
If you are not criticizing the atrocities your empire then you certainly loses any moral right to Criticize Hitler or former Sudanese president
Omar Hassan al-Bashir(charged to kill 2.5 million people) or Bosnian Serb president Radovan Karadzic. Every one was involved in killing the innocents.
Brits haven’t felt the pain of famine starvation or death, Just type in google image saerch Bengal femine and watch some photos, or click on the link below
repeated link ( http://urbansemiotic.com/2007/07/17/pro-british-and-amateurish-hitler-in-denial-of-mass-killing/ )
Both have done wrong ways are different but they did wrong.
Someone said in the previous post that the 70% of the world literature is in English then it would be much easier for you to do the analysis.
There is a reason that you expect could expect the Indian writers to be biased, I am not asking you to blindly believe on anything, Just compare the facts from different sources and use your conscious to reach the truth.
Cumulate all the information and then compare to the Hitler bad vs Bad and then decide yourself.
The villages of villages were hanged to make sure that the British Raj will survive in India, and Wairth please you should read this on your comment That we given Independence to you. British was able to rule India because their armed forces was better.
In India the people generally are not aggressive and don’t take arms in their hands,
But when some one does tyranny crosses its limits.
Since the beginning of 19th Century the nationalist movement never came to stop.
In this duration it had seen many high and lows, probably you won’t be interested to know the last details
According to the British Prime Minister Clement Attlee, during whose regime India became free, it was the INA and the RIN Mutiny of February 18-23 1946 that made the British realize that their time was up in India. An extract from a letter written by P.V. Chuckraborty, former Chief Justice of Calcutta High Court, on March 30 1976, reads thus: “When I was acting as Governor of West Bengal in 1956, Lord Clement Attlee, who as the British Prime Minister in post war years was responsible for India’s freedom, visited India and stayed in Raj Bhavan Calcutta for two days`85 I put it straight to him like this: ‘The Quit India Movement of Gandhi practically died out long before 1947 and there was nothing in the Indian situation at that time, which made it necessary for the British to leave India in a hurry. Why then did they do so?’ In reply Attlee cited several reasons, the most important of which were the INA activities of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, which weakened the very foundation of the British Empire in India, and the RIN Mutiny which made the British realise that the Indian armed forces could no longer be trusted to prop up the British. When asked about the extent to which the British decision to quit India was influenced by Mahatma Gandhi’s 1942 movement, Attlee’s lips widened in smile of disdain and he uttered, slowly, ‘Minimal’.”
Even your Prime Minister accepted that there were reasons that India got freedom not because their they realised that are doing unfair to Indians and they decided to leave respectfully. Indian paid a hell of a price for this Independence, After World War II, the British were definitely all time weak seemed keen to just wash their hands off India. If you try you can found the pictures how much this land was messed up, when you decided to leave.
http://www.hindustantimes.com/news/specials/Netaji/images/nov_2_45.gif
http://www.tribuneindia.com/2006/20060212/spectrum/main2.htm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/3684288.stm
I read some where that British given Independence to India because it was difficult for them to maintain over extended empire.., then why African countries got independence? After Indian Independence the empire was no more OVEREXTENDED?
Britain who was sucking all the wealth and prosperity in 200 years, there was nothing left for them to squeeze further.
“Churchill very much wanted the option of squeezing the brown man at least a little more. Whatever little there was left of the brown man after the Great Bengal Famine of 1943. Clement Attlee pointed out that there was nothing left to squeeze. Attlee thought that the cost of squeezing was greater than the value of the extract. “
This was real character of British empire, Today people are expecting us to give credit. They talk lot about railway I think it would be too heavy for them to take other wise ????
Some one was telling Brits brought UNITY to INDIA lets check,
Another example Councils Act of 1909 : Indian representation in government at provincial level, created by separate Hindu and Muslim electorates.
(The vital reason of partition this land.)
Another example: The Biggest ethnic cleansing of the world, the partition lines between India and Pakistan was decided much before the partition but not disclosed and on 17th Aug 1947, 15 million Hindus and Muslims got the instruction to MOVE.
More than a million died in the riots this could be much less if it was handled properly. No protection was provided to the Hindus and Muslims and they were leaving form both sides
Charles Wood, Secretary of State for India, writes to the Viceroy Canning, “I never wish to see again a great Army, very much the some in its feelings and prejudices and connections, confident in its strength, and so disposed to rise in rebellion together. If one regiment mutinies, I should like to have the next regiment so alien that it would be ready to fire into it.”
The policy of Divide and Rule received great impetus since the British realized that if the Hindus and Muslims combined like they had in 1857, India may prove to be very difficult to be ruled. — Maj (Retd) AGHA HUMAYUN AMIN (Military Political Analyst of 1857 Rebellion)
Hi Wellwisher, you are correct its not about People, its about empire and those who control empire, And regarding 1857 this happened because Brits became vary abusive to the local culture and relegions, and traynny was crossing the limits Hindus,muslims, Brits faveriote Dalits(untouchables- actually this generaligation is wrong) everyone fought against Brits forces, In 1855-56, another most daring revolution occured in Bengal/Bihar. The Shantals in Bengal and Bihar rose in revolt against the tyranical British rulers. They did not have guns or artillery but they fought valiantly. They fought armed only with axes, bows and arrows. They were crushed
Yes you said democracy but I tried but not able to found how many public electorate happend under british rule.
Hi Wellwisher regarding your comment.
The Indian Army which defends your country consisting of gorkha mountaineers, sikh heavy infantry, maratha light infantry guriellas, rajput infantry and so on was formed by britishers
No I think British empire got these from the kings they defeated and after that they came under one rule.
If they weren’t there could you tell me why a sikh or a gorkha fighter would fight for someone outside their community ? and the most important thing they got with them is called democracy.
The Regional armies constituet of people of various groups/cast/relegion/
Ex : In Queen of Jhansi army, The Head Topchi( person who commands the cannons team) was a muslim and the lady who has taken disguise of Queen and faught with british was a DALIT.
and this was not different for other rulars also.
Yeah thats true British bought the whole land under one rule(unified the whole region) , but after endependence every region became free again, it has again taken few years of effort to bring all the parts under one rule.
I dont know where to fit this quete but since i got it so it is for you to read.
Lord Mayo, the Governor General, said in 1870, “I do not know what is precisely meant by ammoniac manure. If it means guano, superphosphate or any other artificial product of that kind, we might as well ask the people of India to manure their ground with champagne” (Pg 11).
Some one claimed British protector of indian Legecy
Lord William Bentinck, (governor general of Bengal 1828-33, and later first governor general of all India), went so far as to announce plans to demolish the best Mogul monuments in Agra and Delhi and remove their marble facades. These were to be shipped to London, where they would be broken up and sold to members of the British aristocracy. Several of Shahjahan’s pavilions in the Red Fort at Delhi were indeed stripped to the brick, and the marble was shipped off to England (part of this shipment included pieces for King George IV himself). Plans to dismantle the Taj Mahal were in place, and wrecking machinery was moved into the garden grounds.
Just as the demolition work was to begin, news from London indicated that the first auction had not been a success, and that all further sales were cancelled — it would not be worth the money to tear down the Taj Mahal.
Thus the Taj Mahal was spared, and so too, was the reputation of the British as “Protectors of India’s Historic Legacy” !
That innumerable other monuments were destroyed, or left to rack and ruin is a story that has yet to get beyond the specialists in the field.
The western way of life was imposed on Indians in the name of trade and English during the occupation.
If you read our struggle for freedom, first thing Mahatma Gandhi did was to shun the western way of life (clothes). If one thinks, not following Western way of life is primitive, then he should not follow any of his religious and cultural rites.
We have been one of the victims of Buckingham atrocities like many nations and innocents.
just stumbled across this blog… I haven’t read all the responses,
I am a humanities teacher from England although I have been living in India for some time. I have found that in India many misconceptions of what Britain is now like exist amongst Indians, and in the India media (the same can be said about India in the UK)
I thought i would comment that, in Britain school children are taught very very little about the former British Empire, the curriculum content varies between different places and is not centrally dictated or issued.
So the notion you convey; that children are infiltrated with the “virtue” of Britiains colonial activity in India, is untrue because the topic is seldom studied.
If anything the prevailing attitude of political correctness means that whenever “empire” is studied, the supposed “positives” don’t feature.
J
I see this thread is still going strong…
I will point out again that; Hitler set out to annihilate entire races. Britain did not!
I will also point out that at that particular time in history, the horrible things enacted upon India by imperial Britain, were I am afraid, accepted policy for many of the flawed countries of the world.
By the time the Nazi’s came on the scene, Britain and most of the civilized world had abandoned such ways – Half way through the 20th century, such acts were unimaginable.
On that basis, I will not endorse any comparisons with Britain and Nazi Germany.
You can not compare the mindset of a pompous, bumbling Victorian nation to one of the ruthless killing machine that was Nazi Germany (both from completely different eras!)
@ J
I couldn’t agree more!
I recall my teachings as a child and British imperialism never came up…
I believe our own history and the history of other countries to be very important – Britain should be doing more to enlighten these kids.
As an Indian whos parents were activley sort for the cheap labour required by Britain after the war, I have to say the Modus Operandi of the Britts is still contemptable. When my parents came to this country in the 70′s they called us all sorts of names and far worse resported to physical violence against “darkies”. They ridiculled our food, our women, our customs and told us to go home. A home they basically raped, pillaged and looted. The rest of my family live in New Zealand and the Moaris tell us of the same attrocities they Brittish committed. The Nazis may have killed 6million Jews, but the British have almost wiped out the Moari, Aborigani, American Indians and god knows who else. Jews by contrast are a thriving communitty. Now after riddiculling Indians in all manners and customs, the national dish is curry, most English men harp on about Indian women and their fashions and culture are based on Indian themes. Yet the number of Indian male chefs is very low. As are the number of Indian t.v presenters. The female of the species is welcomed in line with the lion pride principal. There is no such thing as multicultural integration. You get pockets of “black” communitties and white. The two dont mix. They get mad when work is outsourced to India, yet like a lover scorned the whole of thier being is permeated by Inidan valeues. Like a scorned lover they are obssessed by India and its virutes, even the only times they win oscars is when India is brought into the equation. Gandhi, and now slumdog millionaire. Again how they portray India is corrupt backward and the White as the virteuous the caring the empathetic. How the powerful right history. The British Empire was the worst ailment on mankind, second though after my rant is how we treat our “untouchables” for same on India when we treat our own brtohers as lower than low. No wonder India faces the problems it does I mean the rise of Islam has been because it pffered these people a way out of of sub human behviour.
Hi Gopal,
Wow!! You do have some thing very personal against the British I believe.
I would like to say a few simple, logical statements.
Check up Indians average IQ and check out its variance. this will give you some very deep insights into why, when the British went away, they said ‘The Indians cant rule themselves’.
My point was simple: Over time, looting doesnt matter at all. Both for the looter and the looted.
What matter, ultimately, are the fundamentals of the peoples. Their culture, values, logic, etc.
Think about it.
“The Nazis may have killed 6million Jews, but the British have almost wiped out the Maori, Aborigine, American Indians and god knows who else.”
What figures are you basing this on? Please show where it says that Britain was responsible for nearly wiping out the Maori (still thriving to this very day), the Aborigine (treated poorly, but yet remain in massive numbers throughout Australia) and the American Indians (if you scroll up a bit you will see from my previous posts: its widely supported that US were largely to blame for their decline not Britain).
If you are going to lay blame at Britain’s door then at least get your facts straight. Britain’s actions in India, Australia and South Africa were certainly questionable and contemptible! All of this across a period of time long before the Nazi’s showed their faces and terrorized the entire world!
To generalise Britain by saying we are ignorant and blind to the troubles the Indian people have had to endure as a result of British Rule is for want of a better word…arrogant!
You are coming at this from one angle and the record is stuck on replay! I have done my best here to understand both sides and I think I have succeeded, but you keep referring to Britain being worse than Nazism! There was no British Holocaust against the Indians.
Yes India was treated in the worst fashion and a lot of Indians died under British rule, but there are inconsistencies with your claims. One prime example would be the miss-labeling of the Bengali Famine as “British genocide against the Indians”. Where is it said that Britain caused this terrible famine? Evidence stating Mr Churchill’s poorly chosen words in public and his initial refusal to spare aid in a time of war leads you to this train of thought, but evidence also shows that he did not cause the Famine and eventually he did spare aid, unfortunately it wasn’t enough.
Here is an excerpt from winstonchurchill.org:
[i]“The idea that Churchill was in any way ‘responsible’ or ‘caused’ the Bengal famine is of course absurd. The real cause was the fall of Burma to the Japanese, which cut off India’s main supply of rice imports when domestic sources fell short, which they did in Eastern Bengal after a devastating cyclone in mid-October 1942. It is true that Churchill opposed diverting food supplies and transports from other theaters to India to cover the shortfall: this was wartime. Some of his angry remarks to Amery don’t read very nicely in retrospect. However, anyone who has been through the relevant documents reprinted in The [India] Transfer of Power volumes knows the facts:
[b]“Churchill was concerned about the humanitarian catastrophe taking place there, and he pushed for whatever famine relief efforts India itself could provide; they simply weren’t adequate. Something like three million people died in Bengal and other parts of southern India as a result. We might even say that Churchill indirectly broke the Bengal famine by appointing as Viceroy Field Marshal Wavell, who mobilized the military to transport food and aid to the stricken regions (something that hadn’t occurred to anyone, apparently).”[/b]
The salient facts are that despite his initial expressions about Gandhi, Churchill did attempt to alleviate the famine. As William Manchester wrote, Churchill “always had second and third thoughts, and they usually improved as he went along. It was part of his pattern of response to any political issue that while his early reactions were often emotional, and even unworthy of him, they were usually succeeded by reason and generosity.”
[/i]
clearly i dont know how to add italic/bold text….
In 1896 there were only 42,113 people of predominantly Maori descent Post European Invasion.
http://www.maorilanguage.info/mao_pop_faq.html
200,000 Aboriginis in Austrailia about 1% of the population.
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_many_Aboriginal_people_are_there_in_Australia
American Indian or Alaska Native alone: 0.68% or 2.0 million
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_States
I dont see a Moari Prime Minister, nor Aborigoni, nor a American Indian in their own country and are cast to reservations. I think it safe to assume than from a population of 10million pre European invasion that far more people were killed in America alone, never mind anywhere else under the Empire! And in all the native are now the minority.
The population of England according to https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/print/uk.html is. 60,943,912. People of the Indian sub continent making up 3.1%. People say, especially all those leaving for Oz, Nz and Canada, that England isnt for the English anymore and they are overrun with immigrants thats why they are leaving the shinking ship HMS Brittania, and those who cant and dont leave for some reason resent the levels of immigrants, (But hey they do a nice curry and there women are a bit of alright), Well if you think with a population over 60million in UK where, 83.6% are English, Scottish 8.6%, Welsh 4.9% that your way of life and country are under siege and Britishness is dissapearing; That its all over for Rover! Than what would you say if your numbers fell to those of the Moari, Aborigoni, Native American Indian?
Thriving? Massive? Umm, get your dictionary terminology right! In fairness you at least acknowledge the “questionable and contemptible” behaviour of the Raj.
Facts are facts and will not disappear by argument. Ironically a quote by an Indian, Jawaheralal Nehru.
Ben wrote: “I will point out again that; Hitler set out to annihilate entire races. Britain did not!”
Bzzzt, try again! Looks like other posters have already called you out on this Ben, yet you just repeat the same cant about “not doing as Hitler did,” refusing to address a single point of evidence showing unequivocally how the British Holocausts in many places were quite deliberate and if anything even worse than Hitler’s in scale and impact (the citations by Jared Diamond, the views of Trolloppe who wanted to eliminate the aboriginal peoples in Australia, the genocidal Indian and Irish policies enacted by Lytton and Palmerston themselves).
I’ll add to this mountain of evidence– Niall Ferguson, a stridently pro-imperialist historian, nonetheless was forced to admit in his book Empire (in which he otherwise extols the British Empire itself) that the British sought to wipe out the Pequots, expressly eliminate them from North America and take their place. And the Tasmanians and aborigines. And attempt the same against the Maoris.
And kill off the Irish as much as possible. I checked up on some of the references above, and they all check out– go and read up on England’s bloody policies toward Ireland since Mountjoy’s days, all the way through to the Black and Tans who killed and tortured the Irish who dared to oppose those oh-so-civilized Brits. The English troops set acres of Irish crops ablaze to starve out the population and kill them en masse after that pesky Irish Lord Tyrone kept on defeating Elizabethan era English soldiers in battle, reasoning that killing off half the Irish population would “get rid of the Irish problem.” (Even then, the Irish didn’t surrender, with King James practically grovelling to them.) When you deliberately set out to mass-murder close to half of a population you regard as “inferior,” like the Irish, that’s a genocide, by definition. And it continued all the way through to the Black and Tans, and the British humiliating defeat against the Irish in the war of freedom that began in 1916. (All at the same time British were losing to Afghans *a third time* in 1919, to Russians at Arkhangelsk in 1919-1920– who weren’t the British losing to?)
And even Ferguson is forced to admit the genocidal character of British actions in India after the events of 1857. It wasn’t just Indian leaders blown apart by cannon– as a way to cow the population and *reduce resistance*, Palmerston authorized British Raj officials to raze entire villages to the ground and gun down men, women and children alike, across large swathes of the Subcontinent. Mostly in the east of India which the British controlled, since the British never got control of the west (which, incidentally, is the wealthiest and most productive part of India today– funny that). India isn’t just one group of people, it’s hundreds, and as the British cut through the villages, they eliminated many ethnic groups wholesale, while sending others to the British concentration camps on the islands to the south of India.
And this doesn’t begin to describe the genocides that swept through India when close to 38 million were killed in the mass famines start in the late 1860′s, caused by British officials replacing Indian cropland with farms to produce cash crops and opium, preventing farmers in e.g. Tamil Nadu and Bengal from selling to each other, even shipping the produce out to British military units. The points raised above have some validity– the British were repeatedly losing wars to the dark-hued people they scorned, and just as they’d done against the Irish, they attempted genocide as an “alternative” measure. The British couldn’t even beat a motley collection of South American freed Blacks and Creoles under Liniers, a French officer-for-hire, who defeated the British in two separate wars in 1805-1808. So genocide was very much a political and military tool for British military forces who were incompetent on the battlefield.
And speaking of resorting to “other measures” after the British were beaten in the field– what of the Cape Colonies of Africa? With those “kinder, gentler concentration camps” that the British try to defend? Hundreds of thousands of Africans and farmer’s wives/kids were tossed into those camps, and the conditions were so awful that the kids died of hunger, literally wasted away, or were cut down by massive epidemics that swept through the camps, with the British deliberately starving the people. The poor, starved souls in the British concentration camps looked just like the survivors of the WWII concentration camps, and in fact many studies have shown the conditions of the British camps in India and the cape settlements to be even worse than those prevailing at Bergen-Belsen.
These are genocides Ben, flat-out. And no amount of ignoring or sugarcoating them will make them go away. Britain’s comeuppance right now, its descent into catastrophe, is a direct result of the imperial arrogance that England still carries– the addiction to debt and foolish foreign adventures is a hallmark of unreformed imperial countries, which is fatal to Britain when it doesn’t even have an empire anymore!
I have no particular malice for the English people of today, but there has to be an honest reckoning with the truly genocidal nature of the British past. Otherwise, this wound in the British psyche will continue to fester, soon devouring England in particular, itself.
Naveen– I actually agree with you here that it’s the fundamentals of the people that matter, and I am confident of India’s future overall. Problem is, the British pillage and rape of India set us back for centuries and we are only now just beginning to recover.
As Mike Davis and Tirthankar Roy in particular have convincingly demonstrated, India was a wealthy first-world country that was *turned into a Third World nation* by Britain in particular. British propaganda even today has a residue of portraying the Indian people as restless, untamed savages before they came to “civilize” us, which has always been a pack of lies.
India had an advanced civilization, sophisticated industries and among the world’s largest economies before the British came in and looted India to our foundations– still retaining loot from India (and I’m not just talking about the Kohinoor Diamond, which everyone is rightfully citing here) today. This continues to set us back, and a lot of the classically “Third World” problems besetting India today, are a direct result of the British rampaging through India.
Again– look at the wealthiest and most innovative parts of India today, at Karnataka, Hyderabad, Kerala and elsewhere. What do they all have in common? ***They were never under British rule!*** The most modern, advanced parts of India stayed independent (under our princes), while the British-ruled parts were the most damaged and are today the poorest. More evidence that the British did nothing for us, and damaged us in more ways than we can cite. China was similarly threatened, and they suffered the scourge of opium just as we Indians did, but China was at least spared colonization itself, thanks to a more centralized government and British defeats in Central Asia and against the Boers that drew away their troops. We weren’t so fortunate in Bharat.
India is finally waking up today, regaining what we lost from the British colonization. We are improving our skills. We are finally (and long overdue) diversifying our language skills to master Chinese, Spanish, German, Arabic, Japanese and other major languages besides and instead of English (a prerequisite to national survival today, since the English-speaking countries are mired in disastrous debt while economic power moves to the non-Anglophone world).
In other words, in short, India is finally again becoming a modern, mature nation. But we still have a long way to go, and we’ll continue to suffer from the damage to our economy and industries that the British wrought upon us during their imperial rampages, which even today, as some posters show, they still refuse to acknowledge.
Hi Nita, I am not an expert on history, so I will not venture much with my thoughts on this. I think that India would have become an Islamic country if the Europeans had not come, do you think that would have been a possibility?
well wishtobeanon if u saying the european invasion and loot stopped india from becoming islamic country then ur wrong.If u read history u will realise the hindus established a hindu empire called maratha empire,they defeated the mughals and other muslim kingdoms and in 1760 Marathas ruled a territory of over 250 million acres (1 million km²) or one-third of the Indian sub-continent.
They had in possession the area which we today call has Maharashtra, Karnataka, Vidarbha, Gujrat, Malwa, Madhya Pradesh, Chhatisgarh, Tamilnadu upto Tanjawar, Orissa, Zarkhand, Bihar( where he has Chauthai rights ), West Bengal alongwith East Bengal upto Chitgaon.
For more information read this site and look at the map showing the territory the hindu maratha empire controlled http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maratha_empire
So the answer is no we stopped india from becoming muslim country while europeans turned india into a poor counrty by looting its wealth,commiting mass murder for ur greed,just like u turned africans into slaves to work in ur fields for free.
You also forget that the last power stopping the British from taking India was the Sikh Empire, and they would never have let India become Islamic.
Does it matter now anyway, India MP’s bend over backwards to appease Muslims, even in the UK, Islam is spreading and is the dominant power.
There is some sort of irony there, that a small minority (Muslims make up around 3% of the UK population) can control the majority, there is nothing like a taste of your own medicine!
http://urbansemiotic.com/2007/07/17/pro-british-and-amateurish-hitler-in-denial-of-mass-killing/
goes well with the theme of the topic…. enjoy!
I thought this article was very interesting. Here in Canada similar events happened, colonization and the item of culture genocide that took place. What is taught in schools today is very similar, very little is taught in schools today about the true history about aboriginal people and how we were colonized. Today people do not know much about aboriginal people here in Canada and there are a lot of misinformation about us and hate towards us from this misinformation. To know the true history would open a lot of eyes and also understand us more and their selves.
Yes the article is absolutely right when it says the british were nazis. Why just the british even the portugese rule in goa,india they did the same plunder the wealth of goa,burnt books written in konkani so natives can be forced to learn portugese,built big churches and forced natives to convert.
Whether british,spanish,americans,portuguese,dutch infact all white people did same went to asia,south america,africa to loot ,destroy there cities and culture ,colonise them and make them slaves(we all know about africans turned into salves) so they can have free labour. If the white people’s land today is developed and they are rich its only because of the loot ,murder of the people in asia,africa and south america. Whats so great if they are now rich. History shows they looted the aztec and mayans in south america ,people of india,china,middle east and even the africans. The spanish went to to the land of aztec and mayans killed them in thousands and looted there gold,silver,raw materials back to spain to build there own churches , houses and industries. Aztec and mayans were more advanced than europeans when it came to culture,money,science,honesty.The white people were adavanced in looting, lying and murdering.
I say the biggest terrorists,thiefs,goons,bandits,murders,the biggest nazis in the world were white people i.e, the europeans and americans ,every place they went they looted that country,colonized them and used the natives as slaves for free labour and now these white people lecture the non-white on decency, culture,how to be rich,development,literacy and so on. I say instead of them lecturing us,they should give back the asians,africans,south americans and red indians in north america there money and land which they looted and occupied.
British Rule was identical to Nazi rule.
The only reason Nazi Rule appears more brutal is because of the short time capsule in which it lasted
and that it was restricted only to Europe and that it industrialized human slaughter by using Gas Chambers.
Nazi Atrocities DO NOT diminish British atrocities one bit.
In fact British atrocities dwarf Nazi atrocities.
British atrocities were launched on world wide scale during the building of the British Empire and affected Asians, Africans, Indigenous Americans and Australians. It decimated their populations and enslaved them in as ghastly and brutal a manner as the Nazis did to Europe using the same racial arguments as the Nazis used.
I can firmly say that Britain fought Nazi Germany out of spite rather than with a genuine intention of liberating Europe. The Brits were seriously threatened by their German cousins since 1871 and resented this since that time.
Churchill was Jealous that Hitler was stealing his thunder. It is typical of Brits to be jealous of any people who are better than them.
Churchill was as bad a racist and as much as a homicidal maniac as Hitler. He gloated with satisfaction at having brought about the partition of India and at having precipitated riots between Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims in India which resulted in 2 million dead.
I have NO DOUBTS at all that he is giving Hitler good company in Hell at this moment.
Just a shame that we Indians don’t believe in Heaven or Hell. So I’d prefer to think that Churchill got reincarnated as one of those Pigs he loves so much, and ended up as a Sunday lunch for a UK based Indian family.
>British Rule was identical to Nazi rule.
Identical, except that the British abolished
slavery, introduced democracy, built, roads,
canals, bridges, railways (with stations and platforms and ticket offices for Indian people
to use), penny post, telegraph system, schools and colleges, and introduced enlightened liberal legislation, etc., while
the Nazis – supported by Subass Chandra Bose – introduced
mobile gas vans and extermination camps.
>I can firmly say that Britain fought Nazi Germany out
>of spite rather than with a genuine intention of
>liberating Europe.
Say it as firmly as you like; it is still wrong.
>Churchill was Jealous that Hitler was stealing his thunder.
Churchill didn’t declare war on Naziism; Chamberlain did,
and very reluctantly at that. He went to war over the
invasion of Poland, because of the Anglo-Polish Guarantee.
When Churchill was warning about Naziism, he didn’t have any
thunder – he was the most hated man in Britain, condemned
by socialists, liberals and Tories alike as a ‘war-monger’.
>[Churchill] gloated with satisfaction at having brought
>about the partition of India
Claptrap.
“THE GREAT DIVIDE
The existence of three conflicting desires became apparent
during the final set of negotiations. Congress, led by
Nehru, wanted a strong central government; the Muslim
League wanted more power for the provinces; the last
Viceroy, wanted a stable state with which Britain could
maintain close ties. In the end, none of these aims
could be realized, and each party had to settle for
second best. Congress had to accept partition; the
League got a “moth-eaten Pakistan” and the British were
landed with two mutually antagonistic states, close
cooperation on defence with either, therefore, being
made impossible.”
–page 198 ATLAS of the British Empire, General editor,
Dr. Chris Bayly.
Doesn’t even mention Churchill.
>I have NO DOUBTS at all that he is giving Hitler good
>company in Hell at this moment.
That is childish and spiteful nonsense.
>And speaking of resorting to “other measures” after
>the British were beaten in the field– what of the
>Cape Colonies of Africa?
I know the ones you mean – the Dutch colonies
whose constitution allowed every Boer to keep and beat
his own ni**er. What a beacon of civilisation – how
we all mourn their demise.
>With those “kinder, gentler concentration camps”
>that the British try to defend?
So, which camps would you rather live in:
1. British camp
“the Boers in the camps were certainly given enough to eat. The
problem was that their diet was deficient in essential vitamins. This
was an age that knew little about community resistance to disease, still
less about nutrition and virtually nothing about vitamins.”
Byron Farwell, The Second Anglo-Boer War.
The Boer women threw meat on the ground in front of the
Committee as a sign of rebellion.
“Women threw large portions, which had been newly served out, of
good though thin meat, into the wide roadway of the camp. It
would have made very good broth or stew.”
“They lived in a way that used to make the brutal soldier’s mouth water
when he came into town after trekking. Our food in the Mounted Infantry
was generally good enough, but we never had shelter…. These persecuted
people, however, were living in cool, roomy marquees and were paid for
doing things for themselves. Thus if they wanted an oven to bake their
bread in the men made one and got paid for it.”
ISBN 0-393-30659-3
2. Soviet camp
RUSSIA: THE GREAT TERROR by Robert Conquest ISBN 0-19-507132-8
Standard NKVD methodology included urination on
the victim’s head, sleep deprivation, the deliberate provision of a
deficient diet to promote scurvy, cold, bright lights, crushing of the
genitals, wrapping the prisoners in wet canvas which on drying shrank
to cause unbearable pain, systematic beating of every part of the body,
mock executions, the threat of reprisals against the family of the
prisoner, reprisals against the family of the prisoner (including
execution) for example the rape of Kossior’s 16 year old daughter.
3. Nazi camp
“Hundreds of children were incarcerated in
Ravensbrueck. The cruelty and the sadism of
the Nazis against the children had no limits.
“Newborn babies
were immediately separated from their mother and drowned or thrown into
a sealed room until they died. Most of the time, this was done in front
of the mother. There are dozen of testimonies about children thrown
alive into the crematory, buried alive, poisoned, strangled, or drowned
in Ravensbrueck. Several children were also used for sadistic “medical”
experiments. Hundreds of little girls, sometimes only 8, were sterilized
by direct exposure of genitals to X-rays. In the early months of
Ravensbrueck, children were immediately killed. The SS doctor Rosenthal
and his girlfriend Gerda Quernheim aborted by force pregnant women,
and this was often done using bestial methods.
4. CHINA: GULAGS AND SWEATSHOPS
“The gulag system has become an increasingly important part of the
country’s developing economy…the multi-million-dollar rush to invest in
mainland China by companies across the world has marginalized concern for
the abuses of human rights in China’s ‘laogai’ system. As trade increases,
so does a demand for products made with a ‘stable supply of labour’,
better still, at ‘zero labour cost’.”
- Kate Saunders ‘Beneath The Iron Crust’
Since the foundation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, an
estimated 30 – 50 million prisoner have died from exhaustion, disease or
torture in these camps, while an estimated ten to sixteen million
prisoners
still work on the grim production lines of farms, factories, and prison
camps, or are held for years without trial in detention or shelter
centres.
5. Spain’s reconcentrados (100,000 – 300,000 dead of disease and starvation)
http://www.latinamericanstudies.org/reconcentrado.htm
6. America’s concentration campos in the Phillipines
(600,000 dead of disease, torture, terrorism, and war).
http://www.loompanics.com/Articles/DestroyAllGooGoos.htm
>Hundreds of thousands of Africans and farmer’s
>wives/kids were tossed into those camps,
The camps started when peaceful burghers
turned up at the British lines looking for
refuge from the Boer Commandoes.
Later on, the Boer guerillas were preying on the
same women and children whose fate their descendents
lament today.
“At one farm, the housewife welcomed the men of the
Johannesburg Commando warmly, but they stole her pigs
and turkeys anyway, causing her to break into tears:
“If only she had cursed us,” said Schikkerling,
“we could have stood it; but she merely wept; and this
drew from me all I had to leave her–a tear of pity.”
The Boer commandoes cleverly raided the British
concentration camps, stealing food from the women
and children you accuse us of deliberately starving.
“Young Commandant Willem Fouche, operating in Cape Colony,
heard that administrators of the camp at Aliwal North
were traitors from the Orange Free State. On July 17 1901
he led an attack on the camp, killed two Bantu, and carried
off four of the alleged traitors; he also tried there to
drum up some recruits, but out of 689 men in the camp only
five elected to follow him. On Sept 15 1901 the Belfast
camp was raided, apparently only to get supplies, but
the attack was repulsed; one woman and two children were
wounded. In December about 800 Boers captured the
Pietersburgh camp, and J. E. Tucker, the superintendent,
and his staff were made prisoners. After a gay, all
night party with wives, sweethearts, friends, and relations
the burghers released their prisoners unharmed and rode off
into the sunrise.”
(ibid).
>and the conditions were so awful that the kids
>died of hunger, literally wasted away,
THE GREAT ANGLO-BOER WAR Byron Farwell ISBN 0-393-30659-3, page 400:
“The army treated the inmates as thought they were so many soldiers. The
rations issued were those served out to regular soldiers in garrison”
“In the concentration camps the food was neither good nor plentiful,
and certainly did not make for a balanced diet. Still, no-one died of
starvation.”
>or were cut down by massive epidemics that
>swept through the camps,
Yes, disease cut a swathe through the British too.
“In spite of all the champagne, brandy, whiskey, and tinned milk,
the children continued to die. Typhoid killed one in five inmates who
came down with it; pneumonia one in three. Between 1st Sept 1901
and the end of the year, one person out of every ten died.”
>with the British deliberately starving the people.
Sheer fantasy, borne of your incontinent anti-British racism.
If the British deliberately starved the Boers why did
they throw beef on the ground in protest?
If the British deliberately starved the Boers why did
the Boer commandoes raid the British camps for food?
Now wave your picture of poor little Lizzie van Zyl at
me.
Let’s be honest here people, what the British did was far worse than Hitler & the Nazis.
At least Hitler killed his victims even if he starved them at the Nazi concentration camps before doing so.
The British invaded the richest country in the world and turned it into the poorest overnight by getting a 13 year old Prince to sign over the wealth.
This is where the saying ‘like taking candy from a child..’ comes from….
I am an Indian born in Britain, and after 30 years of cultural imperialism and racism, I now understand the nature of SOME of the British people.
Instead of complaining about it, I am now in the process of returning back to India as I have no desire to co-operate with evil, as Gandhi had once said that is evil to to co-operate with evil.
With the BNP (British National Party) getting into power, whose beliefs are very similar to Hitlers, then there is nothing left to be said.
British nationalism and racism co-exist symbiotically, it’s in their history, and it is reflected today in the way their country is run.
A couple of years ago, the Metro paper did a survey as to whether another holocaust could take place here in the UK, and over 50% yes, whilst another 30+ % said that no one will do anything about it.
It says it all.
With another holocaust just on the horizon, racism growing even more, there is nothing left for coloured people here.
Racism or Nazism does not define what the British did with justice, there is only one word that does.
EVIL.
Only EVIL people would be proud of a history that has labelled them as cheats, cowards & charlatans, promoting hate,war & lies.
No wonder they hate the Indians so much, the Vedic culture revolved around love,peace & TRUTH, the exact opposite of the realm the British desire to see succeed, which is why we live in a world full of hate,war & lies.
It would not surprise me if a major exodus of coloured people took place here in the UK.
Love,peace & TRUTH
Kal-k
The 3rd Side of a Coin…
The Beginning & The End…
I originally come from the Netherlands, before I moved to Spain. This has allowed me to get an objective view on many points in history. Both in the Netherlands, and in Spain, you get taught about the great attrocities committed by them. The Netherlands stand proudly claiming they treated most of their colonies with respect. Most. They do not claim to have treated all just. The Dutch children of today do get taught all the attrocities committed by their ancestors. The same goes on in Spain. So how is it, that when I went into a discussion with a British person just yesterday, she was claiming that everything the British have done in India was “good”? Because of the way the British people have decided to try keep their own attrocities a secret. Because of fear, mainly, in my opinion. The second they admit it, they can no longer see themselves as having had the most just/powerful/etc Empire, something they often prize themselves with.
But why can it not stop there?
A similar discussion with a British person about WW2 ended with him going of in a rage when I mentioned some of the “mistakes” the British had committed in WW2, such as the Englandspiel. Why can they not admit, nor accept, that their country is not perfect?
“Instead of complaining about it, I am now in the process of returning back to India as I have no desire to co-operate with evil, as Gandhi had once said that is evil to to co-operate with evil. ”
So by that logic how the hell are you going to a nation that practises the caste system. Millions upon millions of people denied rights, social mobility and essentially slaves in some parts of the country due to caste.
I agree that much of British rule was brutal and often murderous, it was without a doubt. And Britain has never really seen its empire as it was. Too much of the we did them so much good. They neglect to see the cruelty, misery, mass murder, etc. But lets not pretend that India was, or is, some fairy tale land where everyone lived in perfect harmony.
“British nationalism and racism co-exist symbiotically, it’s in their history, and it is reflected today in the way their country is run. ”
And hypocrisy and a blindness to the evils of the country you prefer is a trait of all cultures. Good luck in India – try to pause occasionally and reflect on the misery caused by poverty and caste.
It was only because of India’s tropical climate that we escaped the same fate as the natives of North America, Australia and New Zealand (majority exterminated and replaced with White settlers).
Charles Wentworth Dilke (1843-1911), a Liberal politician and apologist for colonialism who presented Britons as a benevolent master race, described Indians in Volume 2 of his book Greater Britain: A Record of Travel in English-speaking Countries During 1866 and 1867 as: “naked barbarians, plunged in the densest ignorance and superstition, and safe only from extermination because the European cannot dwell permanently in the climate of their land”.
http://www.archive.org/details/greaterbritainre00dilkuoft
http://www.archive.org/download/greaterbritainre00dilkuoft/greaterbritainre00dilkuoft.pdf
In Volume 1 he boasted about the genocide of large indigenous populations:
“The Saxon is the only extirpating race on earth. Up to the commencement of the now inevitable destruction of the Red Indians of Central North America, of the Maories, and of the Australians by the English colonists, no numerous race had ever been blotted out by an invader”.
Addressing the question of whether England could bear the drain of people if emigration to India was allowed, English politician Philip Francis (1740-1818) said in April, 1793, that: “The climate of India was of itself a sufficient security against emigration of any consequence from England, for the real purpose of colonization”.
William Bentinck (1774-1839), the Governor-General of India from 1828 to 1835, said: “India may be described as a tropical country, in which the European cannot safely labour in the field, excepting at particular times, and in which the Northern races appear, after a few generations, to lose much of their physical hardihood”.
You can find the Greater Britain books and the above quotes in a few books if you search Google Books.
Hello everyone,
I have read these comments with interest, but no-one has explained the essential question:
If British rule in India was so bad, why did it last so long (200 years)?
The continuence of British rule over two hundred years was only possible through the acceptance and active co-operation of the majority.
I am also puzzled by the tone of this conversation.
All the comments speak of Britain as if it was a big, powerful and aggressive country, easily able to overcome poor tiny defenceless India.
Actually it is the United Kingdom that is a small nation and India that is a vast territory. You also need to factor in the huge logistical disadvantages that the British were under – how could they have maintained imperial control over such vast distances without the acquiesence of the local population?
I put it to you that the anti-British aggression exhibited in these comments is not motivated by outrage at British imperial cruelty and excess. Rather it is motivated by shame (yes, shame) that such a big territory should have so meekly submitted to control by a tiny country on the other side of the world.
You should accept that historically you played a silly trick on yourselves, get over the anger you feel and move on.
I am also tempted to laugh at those who say “one day the Indian economy will be bigger than Britain’s”.
Please tell me when that day will occur? You have had sixty years of independence and you still have not got your economic act together. I would remind you that the United Kingdom is a tiny group of islands, with a relatively small population and almost no natural resources. Why are you judging your economic performance against ours? Should you not be picking on someone your own size?
I also think that you need to address the issue of anachronism. You cannot judge a 19th century society by 21st century standards. You need to judge a 19th century society by 19th century standards.
One error – India was never a British “colony” and it is wrong to talk of colonialism in this context – the correct term is imperialism.
But please do not think I am an apologist for British rule in India – it was a disaster from the British perspective. However having become entangled in the Indian subcontinent it proved to be almost impossible to get unentangled – until Atlee literally dumped the responsibility and brought forward the independence date because he wanted the money to set up the National Health Service.
Andrew
//You have had sixty years of independence and you still have not got your economic act together. I would remind you that the United Kingdom is a tiny group of islands, with a relatively small population and almost no natural resources. Why are you judging your economic performance against ours? Should you not be picking on someone your own size?//
You really think that UK and its big brother are economic power houses because of the intellectual capacities, innovation capabilities and all that good stuff, Don’t you? You watch too much of BBC, CNN, FOX crap, I guess. Try Alzajeera for a change and for the truth.
If not for making the pound and dollar the reserve currencies (by the ‘BULL CRAP’ Bretton Woods system), do you know what your currencies would be worth today? And with these twisted economics, your countries rigged the world financial system feeding on the world’s resources for cheap. And you come and comment on India’s economic incapabilities without looking at the trash your tiny island country and its big brother threw on the rest of the world recently.
//Please tell me when that day will occur?//
Pretty soon. I’d say -within 5 years. Set your calender/clock for it.
My goodness you are angry Naveen, but your anger should be directed against your ancestors who failed your nation, not against Britain’s ancestors who took advantage of the situation.
And in five years time your economy will overtake the British economy – is that not a pathetic achievement for a nation of one billion people inhabiting an entire subcontinent that after sixty years of running their affairs they are at last catching up with a small island of only sixty million? I should keep quiet about it if I were you or you may risk making your nation look ridiculous (but of course, as you must know, all nationalist boastings are ridiculous, British as well as Indian).
And do please get your facts right – the Bretton Woods settlement entirely benefitted the dollar at the expense of the pound sterling.
But thank you for your comments.
Andrew
Well, Why should I be angry at my ancestors?
Is it because they did not go hunt for natives in Australia, the Americas, Asia and Africa? And spread our own population at the expense of the native populations elsewhere? Well if thats what you mean -no I am not. I am angry for one reason -for learning socialist crap at london universities and experimenting it in my country.
One billion population being self-reliant without depending on other country’s resources is in itself an acheivement. To realize it – you’ll have to put back the entire English population from Australia, US and elsewhere into UK and make them live on their own (without parasiting on Africa and the developing world for resources). And remember -absolutely no dependence on the savings of the developing world. You will then realize the ‘strength’ of a huge population on limited resources.
Bretton Woods certainly helped dollar but don’t forget that the pound had been a reserve currency for two centuries and is currently the third largest reserve currency in the world (Thank the Euro). And I am sure you know its not a fair game.
andrew..indians have time and again proved and they continue to prove that collectively they like slavery and they have a strong inclination to be ruled by the outsiders. look at our history and see how many came and conquered us, made us slaves, looted and raped us and yet we do not hold our heads in shame for all that which happened but take pride in our ability to bounce back. i would anyday say that the aboriginal, shattered, scattered, internally strife torn india was integrated by the british and all that we own today (including self-respect) we owe to the britishers who in their short rule of 200 yrs not only integrated this vast country but also gave it so many other gifts. one may argue at the separation of pakistan but i am not crying at the amputation of a putrifyed (or putrifying) arm. good riddance of later day internal thorn. it is time we stopped pointing fingers and started looking at our own internal disunity and strife. once more we are looking towards a white master..this time it is america, perhaps or the vatican? who knows?
Hi
You know one thing i like germans much more than Britts. Because the germans asked the apology to the jews for what they have done to the jews. But you are not ready for even to deliver the messege to your people what you have done in india on past. Its not Great Britain its “Great Brutain”
Naveen, you should not be angry with anyone, certainly not over interpretations of history.
There seesm to be an unthinking racist assumption in your lumping British, American and Australian people together – they are quite different societies and have their own national outlooks and interests. They are certainly not the “English population”. For the record, I have no time for the American government and I regard Australia as an unsustainable society.
You raise the issue of socialism. One aspect of democracy that India is going to need to get to grips with, is that the “have nots” in India can vote to tax the better off sections of society so that everyone has a reasonably equitable share of the nation’s wealth. Only when all families and individuals have a reasonable standard of housing, education, welfare payments and access to healthcare can a nation feel proud of itself. Everything else is bogus boasting and you should be very wary of politicians who encourage you to think you are poor because other nations are rich.
You raise the issue of “the savings of the developing world” – do you not have banks in India where the Indian people can put their savings? They do not need to deposit their hard-won money in New York, London or Tokyo. In fact you would be very foolish to continue to hold dollar deposits since the American government is quietly devaluing the dollar. This is not a darstardly plot against the developing world (as no doubt your politicians will encourage you to see it) but an easy way for American politicians to solve their economic problems without too much internal hardship. The result is that China and India and other dollar holding countries are going to end up paying for the West’s recession. As historians we must see this for what it is, and not complain that “the West” is trying to enslave “India” again. Such political mudslinging gets us nowhere. The issue I fear is that Indian politicians have got themselves into a position of dependence upon dollar reserves which are fast declining in value. Rather than say to the Indian population “look how stupid we have been, you deserve to vote us out of office” they will appeal to nationalist vanity and portray it as yet another example of “enslavement”.
As for “fairness” in international affairs, I know such a thing is not possible. The United Kingdom took the main role in defeating Nazi Germany and yet ended the world war almost bankrupt. America, which came in very late, emerged fabulously wealthy. The Soviet Union, which had started the war as an ally of the Germans, finished with their territory vastly expanded. I do not complain of this, and it would have been a disaster for Britain to have continued as an imperial nation. But it is an example of how unfair the world can be.
Regards, Andrew
You seem to hijack the whole discussion even accusing me of racism -not giving thought to the facts I give you. Whether you like it or not, the damage done by the london-based Fabian socialist school to India is unprecedented, stiffling its growth for 50 years of the 60 years that you mentioned in the previous comment.
You tend to overlook the important points that I consistently show you as to what made UK rich and India not -and for this long. But you tend to go back showing me the ills of Indian ancestors and politicians without giving thought to the facts that I write. Anyway, our politicians don’t try too hard to show us the unfair practices of the West. If they did, there wouldn’t be so much love left for the west. I reemphasize what I’ve been telling all along.
1) Britain shed off a huge population in the then new worlds, which came to Britain’s advantage. There is nothing racist about this fact.
2) There is an incredibly huge and unfair advantage for the pound sterling in the present-day ‘RIGGED’ world trade system. This is another fact.
3) This unfair advantage made the west eat up the resources of the developing world – for cheap- making the trade go oneway -for centuries -building up an ever ending pile of trade deficits.
You can’t have too many variables in a single equation- if we both are trying to find what made Britain rich and India not, we can’t leave ‘fairness’ as a variable and believe that we can find the real reasons. Bottom line is that I don’t consider this as ‘not being fair in International Affairs’ but as outright ‘cheating’ the developing world with economic trickery -as done for centuries.
Vasudev, I rather exaggerated my point over the shame because I wanted to make the point that if anyone was to blame for the takeover of India (not initially by the British state but by a multinational company that was later nationalised) then it must be the Indian rulers of the time. There is of course no shame in inheriting that history – we are all what history has made us. As for Pakistan, you must surely realize that the individuals in that country are not much different from the rest of us. They are just ordinary people trying to get on with their lives. If you and your fellow Indians made friends with individual Pakistanis (which you can do on an individual basis) how would conflict between the two countries be possible?
Naveen, you are very unfair in your accusations and emotive in your language. However I will ignore the provocations and answer your points:
Regarding Fabian socialism, Britain did not force this ideology on the Indian politicians – indeed after 15th August 1947 there was no way we could have done this even had we wanted to. Your politicians chose this for themselves, and they are responsible for the decades of stagnation. However I would point out that the unbridled capitalism your country has currently adopted is also a British model, defined by Adam Smith in Wealth of Nations. Surely you are not going to blame us for when things subsequently go wrong (as they inevitably will I’m afraid).
As for you three numerated points:
1) Britain shed off a huge population in the then new worlds, which came to Britain’s advantage. There is nothing racist about this fact.
Why do you think a colonial and imperial empire was of any benefit to the United Kingdom? A few individuals enriched themselves (as they will in any social system) but generally the British population gained no advantage. Benjamin Disraeli, Prime Minister in the 1880s, described Britain’s colonies as “millstones round our necks”. Possession of an empire does not enrich the imperial power, which is why I say imperialism was a disaster for Britain. Imperial possessions have to be administered and protected, this huge cost falling generally upon the British taxpayer. Emigration to colonies drained the British isles of manpower, which was a serious concern when faced with the large land armies being built up by Germany, France and Russia.
The American colonies rebelled in 1776 and Britain gained no “advantage” from their existence thereafter. Australia was independent in 1901, South Africa in 1910, Canada in er 1860ish, New Zealand in about 1920. These became independent nations. The “British” people who occupied these areas ceased to be British in any meaningful way, and they must take responsibility for what subsequently happened in those areas. From my own viewpoint, if the aboriginal inhabitants of Australia want that territory back they can have it (except of course I have no power to give it to anyone). It is (forgive me for saying so) rather racist of you to lump all these peoples together and say they are all the same and the current British population is responsible for all of them. In 1902 imperial federation was specifically rejected by the British government because the higher taxes needed to pay for it were unacceptable.
You also conveniently overlook the many millions of Indians who moved to Africa to improve their lives, and who were accused by the Africans (even to this day) as exploitative parasites, the Africans speaking of the Indians in the same emotive language you use about the British in India.
2) There is an incredibly huge and unfair advantage for the pound sterling in the present-day ‘RIGGED’ world trade system. This is another fact.
You are confusing the pound with the dollar. The pound is a floating currency and its exchange value is fixed by the money markets. On the whole the strength of the pound has been reinforced by possession of North Sea oil, which has defined sterling as a “safe” petro currency. But if the Indian economy (in its widest sense) does not want to hold foreign currencies no-one is forcing you to do so.
3) This unfair advantage made the west eat up the resources of the developing world – for cheap- making the trade go oneway -for centuries -building up an ever ending pile of trade deficits.
“Protective” imperial trade tariffs obstructed free trade and made British industries uncompetitive, which is why they were done away with. Possession of a strong currency is not the advantage you make it out to be. A strong pound makes imports cheap, but cheap imports destroy domestic jobs. The problem for India (if you will permit me to define your problems for you) is that your domestic economy is so weak and your current wealth is dependent upon selling cheap goods and services to the West. This is a silly situation for you to get yourselves into as the West thereby assumes considerable power over you (via the holdings of foreign currencies that can be devalued at will). Why I accept that the British in India may have been insufferably patronizing, they did not plunder the country in the way you describe (I am talking post 1877). However the Americans are not so foolishly sentimental and you may well find your economy becomes the fall-guy for the Western recession.
However you must also look at WHY India (and other countries) are holding such large reserves of foreign currency. This is because your government has neglected the welfare of the ordinary people. There are no universal pensions, universal health care free at the point of delivery, unemployment benefits, disability benefits etc. Therefore the ordinary working population has to save large percentages of their income in case disaster should befall them. Thus there is not an adequate amount of consumer capital circulating in your internal economy sufficient to maintain current growth rates. Thus your economy is dependent on what you can sell to the West. Not a good situation to be in, but you cannot blame “us” for this. The fault lies with your own leaders.
Regards,
Andrew
Andrew,
Sure, I will bust each one of your myths. I will take you on a ride with not just your interested subject -History but more till the reasons for the recent Iraq war. I am busy right now and am not in a position to type in the long response. But for the time being, I recomend you to read William Digby’s “The Famine Campaign in Southern India”. You can download the book for free from this website -books.google.com. Just type in the title of the book. There are two volumes of the book. Thanks.
This is another piece that you should read and let me know what you think.
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3821/is_200610/ai_n17195857/
Andrew,
Another bitter medicine for you
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2005/dec/27/eu.turkey
I have been brought up learning history from the British perspective at school and it is only recently that I have delved into my Indian ancestorial history. I am ashamed how my adoptive country treated my ancestors– the Salt Tax that was repealed barely before Indian Independance was inhumane.
Mygrandmother (on visits to India) would often tell tales of how weavers had their thumbs amputated because they refused to stop weaving — the British not wanting to have competition for the Lancashire mills.
I often wonder that the so-called grand estates that one visits through the National trust / English Heritage has the blood of the “primitives /savages” that the English brutally suppressed and plundered. India’s GDP was the highest in the world when the British arrived in India yet when they finally left they had reduced that nation to one of the poorest in the world. Britain should apologise for its inhumanity.
Andrew I think you need to reflect on what Britain did –eg Sir Francis Drake is an English hero yet he was really a common pirate who struck lucky—that is how Britain conducted its trade/empire.
Naveen, although I am happy to argue points that you make yourself, it is ridiculous for you to produce an arbitrary reading list, as if the authors of these books will somehow endorse the points you are making. I have a degree in History from the University of London, and therefore I trust you will accept that I have read widely on the subject already.
PS I do not deny that terrible things were done in past centuries. However you are being anachronistic if you judge those actions by modern standards. You need to look at them through the standards of the time, when terrible things were being done EVERYWHERE and by EVERY elite. I would put it to you that the rule of the British, by the standards of the time, was relatively benign (not that I am defending British imperialism – it was a disaster for Britain). If you examine British history of the period you refer to you will find equally unacceptable behaviour that was gradually reduced through social campaigns. It is ironic of you to raise this issue, since working conditions in India are now inferior to those in the United Kingdom.
The comment you make about Indian GDP in the 18th century is one I have often seen made by commentators (not usually serious historiuans however) – I would be grateful if you would explain how this figure has been arrived at since there were no official statistics at the time.
Your point on Sir Francis Drake exactly reinforces my argument – there was no official British policy to acquire colonies and overseas territories, and the expansion was often done by individuals who created a problem the British government later had to sort out, at considerable cost to the British taxpayer. Far from being beneficiaries of imperialism, the British population were among the chief victims.
Regards,
Andrew
Andrew,
In your first response on November 6th, you said India is going for unbridled capitalism and in the last para, you continue to give suggestions for the Indian economy. Without much analysis, I could understand your ignorance about Indian economy and its budget allocations. Let you not pretend you know something that you are absolutely not familiar with.
You are concerned that Britain did not plunder enough from India as expressed by Benjamin Disraeli. Before the British came to India, the GDP of India accounted for 24.4% of the world economy. These facts are not from a fact-fudging British historian but by Angus Maddison, a renowned expert in comparative economics. You have to read his books to understand the advanced statistical models used to unearth these facts. And for the next two hundred years, India’s percapita income did not increase but went down. Britain put India 200 years back but you are sarcastic about India’s past 60 years.
You want to put the responsibility of the atrocities of Colonial british forces into the baskets of the settlers and show me the ‘benevolent’ british empire in the next para. Since I tried to show you this was not the case, you reiterate that I am a racist(asking me for your forgiveness). Fair enough. And you consistently argue that my ancestors are responsible for letting this happen to them not certainly the British empire. Do you dare say the same thing about Hitler’s persecutions?
Now Indians in Africa. If you pull aside an African anywhere in the world and ask him about Indians, he’d say most of his teachers are Indians. And he’ll tell you all good things you want to hear. If you don’t believe me, try it out yourself. You tried to push forth a demented dictator’s opinion of Indians as the average African’s opinion. That is a blatant lie. Do you know Uganda is begging Indians to return back to their country? Now how did Indians end up in Africa? Isn’t it to make money for the British empire, as laborers in their sugarcane crops? That is after the livelihood in their own country is entirely destroyed? Anyway, thats another story.
Don’t make the pound sacred by trying to seperate it from the dollar politics. Don’t you know the real reasons for the Iraq war? Isn’t it because Saddam Hussein wanted to sell his oil directly -not through the London and New York exchanges? There is a lot of sin to go around here. If the big brother preys on the innocent, Britain is the Coyote lurking around for the flesh.
You think that the strong currency is not an advantage. This argument is like “Don’t show me the starving African, Look we are also suffering also……with Obesity”. Unfortunately there is no way out for the developing world to take our money out. What do they convert it into? This is all the cunning strategy of the west -all designed at the Bretton Woods. Keynes is one of the evil brains in the design of this system. And you should teach the welfare economics to the evil sisters -IMF/World Bank (also designed at BW by US/UK), who force governments of the developing world -not to spend on welfare at all.
You have said nothing new Naveen, merely drawn up a synopsis of our discussion.
Therefore I must assume you are admitting the validity of my arguments.
Andrew
Western trickery again, eh?
Have a good night sleep now.
“Don’t show me the starving African, Look we are also suffering also……with Obesity”.
Lol! That was funny. Good arguments Naveen.
Reading up a bit on dependency theory might help those who still think that the West has not artificially propped up an unsustainable economic system for their own greed.
Thanks rags.
You have a good point. If Globalization is really the way forward, what might otherwise work is a ‘TRUE’ reserve currency managed by a central agency and not like the present one, which is cooked up in the kitchens of some privileged countries and thrown on the world. I am sure that day will come- all countries brought on a level playing field.
Globalisation is not the way forward Naveen.
I can assure you from the greedy and obese West that materialism will corrupt and destroy your country and its culture and bring mostly unhappiness.
However, on the issue of currency, it is not “fixed” in the way you describe (which, I have to say, sounds rather paranoid). There is a significant advantage to the dollar in being the reserve currency, but it also brings disadvantages. You talk of another currency emerging but probably this will be a basket of currencies – as I have said, being top currency brings problems.
In any case, the dollar cannot long remain in primary position (they are fast devaluing and this realisation is going to hit the world before much longer, not least in inflation), and it is interesting that the advantage financially to the USA of being the reserve currency is almost exactly equal to the American military budget. If they lose the top position they will have to make significant cuts in their national expenditure – will this make the world safer or more dangerous?.
Anyway, if you don’t like dollars then gold is an acceptable international Currency. Always has been and always will be. If any government is holding big tranches of dollars then they have been very foolish. With India this is not such a problem (Indians have seldom made trouble in the world) but what is to happen when the Chinese realise that all their hard-won savings are worth half or a quarter what they were worth two or three years ago?
Andrew
Andrew,
Trade between countries always existed and Globalization is not a new concept (although the word is). But what changed is the intensity of trade and in becoming unidirectional. With fair reforms to today’s trade/financial systems, the intensity of trade will limit itself. And each country will grow its own domestic markets and limit their exports.
I have every reason to believe that the world financial system is ‘fixed’(even if you think its paranoia). It all started with Bretton Woods and then the Nixon Shock. In a ‘real’ economy, production of goods and services should be the basis to decide the richness of a country (not consumption). But in today’s world, speculation is what decides the strength of a currency and subsequently the richness of the country. An estimated 1.8 trillion dollars are moved everyday between countries by currency speculators. Reserve currencies get a very strong and unfair advantage here, and it is widely believed that US/UK governments have control over these cartels. In other words, today’s currency is all worthless paper supported by nothing and the only prop is speculator’s confidence(or their anger). Its for sure that eventually such a system should fall. But if the system falls, the third world will be the one terribly affected. The hard earned money of Malaysia was vanished overnight in 1997 by manipulative tactics of currency speculators in the west. Same was true with the Four Asian Tiger’s currencies.
Joseph Stiglitz (a former World Bank Chief Economist and Noble Laureate), undoubtedly the leading expert in world trade system wrote many times how the developing world is getting the short end of the stick with this broken system. He is the one who proposed to change the reserve currency to SDRs. There are many other economists who showed that the present system is unsustainable and is serving the purpose of only the West. It is not that there are no ideas left to bring in a just system. But whenever the world leaders came together(Once 120 country heads signed a petition to President Clinton) requesting to overhaul (not just tweak the Bretton Woods system) there are two countries that vehemently opposed such change. And it never happened.
India is trying hard to prop up its gold reserves. Gold is no more an option as a reserve currency -especially at the present price. It is inadequate for the expansion of world trade and financial development. Moreover gold gives advantage to a few select countries, who already have huge reserves. But Gold helps if there is a total collapse of the present system. SDRs and heavy Tobin tax, I think, will eventually be the future to bring a sustainable reserve currency system. Regarding China/US, We’ll know only later as to who fooled whom with currency manipulation.
this is a great article. And it is just full of many facts. Truthfully when reading this article i felt inspired. Keep up the good work.
Yours trully Janam Dalal
hi everyone.
from the beginning to the end of this topics i spent more than 3 hours to go thru all the discussions.i m originally from bangladesh(i believe i m the only bangladeshi person reading nd writing here) currently living london.
some ppl here wana change english language to persian/sankscrit again in india.some ppl focusing on chinese,french language because its better than english,some ppl blaming english rule constantly in india,some ppl even discussed about mughal rule in india.
well i m asking to all indians/pakistanis/bangladeshis whoever were part of india that time–how cum only few thousands of english ruled the whole empire of millions of educated,cultural and second welthiest nation on earth.is it because what british got inside their ball we indians havent got ?ask urself once?what they got inside their head but we havent ?
is it only british treated indians as slave–how about our own king/nawab/zamindar–did they treat us well.didnt they consider subjects as slaves?come on guys u know how their life style was?
britain took these chances nd used them as a technique.
how come our own ppl fought against us?is it only because of money our soldiers obeyed their command nd were ready to die?they definitely brainwashed us.didnt they?
how long we indian or subcontinents ppl been living here or anywhr else in the world?how cum we cudnt invade or rule a single country?
how cum we indian fought for england nd died in world wars 1 nd 2?
only for money and respect?isnt it?
have u ever asked urself whyyyyyy?
is it bcz they got better management nd controlling power than us?or its only colour.i blv lots of indian/pakistani/canadian/australian ppl much fairer than english
if british were so bad why did we do all good things to them in return of slavery,massmurder?
is there any country in the world where in the name of religion,culture,language ppl still fight nd die?qyt hard to find bruvs.if anyone wnna find the racist ppl,easiest thing is before u go far luk at ur own society/culture/religion or own face in the mirror.
Its true britain needed more resources that time bcz it was the tym of industrial revolution and they transferred resources including kohinoor,raw materials, from india,diamonds from africa and plenty of useful books,articles from egypt nd other countries.they also did some good things definitely english ,cricket,schools,hospitals,roads,rail line nd other infrastuctures but there is a dark story behind it.which is to complete their mission nicely,gainning trust nd easily trasfer resources to their own country which means better transport facilities.thats y everyone call them great.isnt it?master piece?
but guys there is no pointing of arguing these untill u make the history and reach upto that level.there is no room for being emotional untill u gain trust.its a cycle.roman rulled britain for long tym,french ruled them fr few yrs,then britain ruled us nd they still got problems wd almost every countries in the world including n ireland,scotland,EU nd other muslim countries.in the name of democracy,chemical weapon,terrorism its fair to invade countries nd killing innocent ppl bcz myt is ryt nd there is a tym nd situation for everything.thats y history always changes.
recently britain sed sorry to black ppl(after long tym tho) bcz of slavery nd laid nelson mendelas statue gently in london which attracts lots of visitors evey yr.
i believe one day britain will take this step to say sorry abt what they did in india (in the name of business nd charity) and they will also tell their future generation true stories in school books,newspapers and we will tell them how they converted a rich nation into the most corrupted nd poorest nation.
sorry guys no offence to any 1 nd pls dnt take personally.
by any chance if any one missed that links frm shefaly————-
worse than holocaust which british were never ready to accept
thnk u shefali fr sharing.
http://urbansemiotic.com/2007/07/17/pro-british-and-amateurish-hitler-in-denial-of-mass-killing/
I read in someone saying India was made a poor country ever since they colonized India.
Not only they made us Poor but they are the ones created the slums as well.
Now they are making movies to expose us world since there are people in this world who do not know the history. Today, we are facing many socio-economic challenges is due to the Anglo European colonization because the bottom line is they want to enjoy the cream on others cost. Today, many parts pf the world is facing the same challenges because the White man interest comes first. If we follow Mahatma Ghandhi’s way, then we can put a full stop.
“Throw his way of living live your way, don’t copy the Ango European follow your ancestral methods of living it’s good for you and for the planet as well. Say no to capitalism save the planet and nature live with the nature, don’t change your cell phone every 6 months and make the land fill with plastic, Follow Ghandiji how he threw him just in 10 years where as we could not do in 200 yeras.
Thanks
One word is needed when talking of the actions of individuals and nations in history: Perspective. I’m afraid many of the posters here are failing on this front. Many of the acts committed during East India Company and Empiral India were atrocious but are similar to many other acts committed at that time and in the past by many different peoples including *gasp* Indians. Looking back with modern morality on a topic as subjective as history is just plain stupid.
It is true the UK children are only educated on the mutiny in regards to India. But this is no cover-up. The only topics that are taught on the Empire is this and the slave trade from West Africa to the Americas. That is two negative subjects out of two. They aren’t even taught Britain’s zealous attempts to end the slave trade. And please don’t talk to me about education when multiple posters have exposed there ignorance on the political and sovereign status of the UK with regards to Scotland and Ireland. Especially funny when people are saying Britain conquered Scotland. Thats like saying the Finnish conquered Finland.
A true comparison of the economic demise of India shouldn’t be Europe, but China. Both large Asian countries. One with large European colonisation, the other with minimal. A link someone pointed to earlier: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_past_GDP_(PPP)#1700 . You see India loses its economical supremacy in the 1820 list to China. In the 1870 list it is catching up. 1913 it has made a small increase on China. 1950 they are both very similar. And by 1998 India lags very far behind China.
And does anyone find it funny when people are lambasting Brits for believing they were superior when that exact same poster then states the moral superiority of Indians over Brits?
If the British didn’t conquered the scotland, then how millions and millions scotland people are died
Haven’t heard that comparison to the Nazis since Ghandi tried to get the Indian Army to fight for Hitler.
if my grandfather would be 30 years younger he will surely initiate a war against the british, because of them my grandfather had to leave sindh, the land of sindhis, which thanks to the british and to the muslims we dont have!!!
I dont think fluency in English is a gift the British have given us. Average people in fast developing and prosperous countries like China, Japan, S Korea, Russia middle east etc struggle with english, but it hasn’t stopped them from progressing. This whole idea of English being a “gift” or “advantage” is servile and this is the attitude that led to Indians being conquored and ruled in the first place.
Also, history is written by the victorious, the british won in the war and so the nazis were made out to be murderous maniacs. However, bear in mind, if Germany and japan did not inflict the heavy losses that they did not Britain, the british would have remained strong enough to rule India,
English is not a superior language. Its just a Language thats it.
Your artical ignores one glaring fact ,that the idea of the common man did not exist in the 17 centry,his evoled over 300 years, their was no red cross, their was no idea of not using children to clean flues, pregent women were sent down mines, even as late as the 1920 , titanic, ect, the lower classes were, kept from the upp-er classes, the armys of Wellington, stabed the french to death , at waterloo, so much for surrendering, the idea 0f womens liberation was belyond their minds, same with animal rights,as far as their consern for Indians, their logic would have been that they lost in a war against us ,thus they were tribune( it means the enslavment of a race, tribe)see Rome, indians ect ect, over the last 10,000 years,we now live in 2010, not the past, stop fighting dead mens wars.
Its a nice article. Umm… How about weighing the pros and cons of British raj… I am sure the pros are going to win. How long are we going to whine about what British did to us. There would certainly be their point of view for jalianwala bagh and the so called ‘ Racism”, which we are not taking into consideration. We have had independence for last 60 years…. What progress have we made during these years ? why not compare ourselves with Israel who got independence at the same time as we got. The whole Library was burnt because of some comments by James Laine in his book , why did not we try to actually read what he had to say ?. We teach lessons on Lalu prasad yadav, mayavati and Sharad Pawar in our school books. Have you ever bothered to read those, are they totally true/ legit ? They surely have right to teach their children what they feel is / was right . I am sorry if I sound rude. Now coming to the so called Gem ….which was never ours… some one or other always got / conquered it from us. You don’t owe it if you can’t protect it or have the ability to protect it and keep it. I know I am going to sound rude to all the Indians who read my comment . But trust me I was a proud Indian. It was only until I went abroad for studies that i felt Indians are greatest….when I saw the polite , honest people out there I came to know what we lack . We surely are intelligent, but need to focus a little on what is right.
damage has been done by britishers and you are absolutely right .Can you write on mughal empire as i think they did greater damage than britishers and still doing
when d mughals were ruling den our country was democratic but then d upcoming of nazim n british destroed the unity n democracy but now also i thick d country is democratic by name only
What a bunch of sh*t. The propaganda about National Socialist Germany is ridiculous to this day. The British Empire was THE vilest and murderous EVER.
Great post, Sumit. I agree, and I hope more Indians realize what you have– that the single biggest factor holding back India’s modern greatness, is that too many Indians are still too servile in their minds about the British Raj, actually buying into the propaganda of Macaulay and others, even that of British Lord Palmerston and Havelock who mass-murdered millions of Indians because we were considered “inferior” and he despised the idea that brown-skinned people would dare to push for our own independence. (Palmerston BTW, killed far more people than Hitler in Britain’s scattered domains during the 1850′s, despite world population being much less then than it was a century later. Palmerston almost as bad as Stalin in fact.) Britain was many times worse than the Nazis could ever reach esp. when you add up other British genocides against native peoples in the Anzac countries, North American indigenous, Irish, various African peoples (in addition to enslaving tens of millions from Africa), Mesopotamia and the civilian bombings by Churchill. And like other people write here, this is despite the fact that England and British were again and again being humiliated on the battlefield in Ireland, Egypt, Colombia, Afghanistan, Somalia, much of South Asia (Nepal and what’s now Pak Frontier), beaten by the Turks, by Haiti, Russians recently. So the British were either killing civilian women and children who weren’t armed (usually brown-skinned civilians), or they were being beaten by an enemy who was armed– British were murderers, cowards, losers all the same.
You’re also right to shoot down this stupid myth about the “gift” of English, another example of too many Indians being suckered by slick Anglo propaganda. Chinese, Koreans, Germans, French, Dutch, Italians, Finland, Russia, Chile, Argentina, Taiwan, Belgium– they’ve all built very successful and durable societies despite not having the “gift” of English, and all using their native indigenous languages to teach science, business and other subjects. I work in statistical field, and every single education study, every single one, shows that students learn tough subjects like science and math better in their native tongue like Hindi, Telugu, Kannada, Tamil, Marathi than a foreign one however stupidly “prestigious” some may call English these days. That’s why Philippines is switching to Filipino to teach most subjects, Malaysians are using Malay and Chinese, Indonesians use Bahassa rather than English or Dutch– students just learn better. India is getting better, but still too much English faddishness makes us a weak nation unable to use our resources and compete internationally.
And besides, English isn’t prestigious anymore. The international economic crisis that’s causing so much pain for India and other countries, was a direct result of stupid policy and arrogance by lazy but powerful Brits and Americans, who let the most corrupt businesses in finance or insuring sectors take over economy at expense of science or producing things, and deregulated so the rich criminals could rob the banks and the overall economy. So India hurt itself by being so mindlessly attracted to Anglo-American economic policy, and we’re still suffering for it. Not even much BPO work for us anymore, US and British economies are terrible shape.
India should focus more on other languages from countries that have better economic systems and where we can be trade partners. I also agree, Spanish is obviously more and more useful and incredibly widespread (plus very easy to learn, I picked it up in 2 years), but probably German grows most rapid in importance because they have the best econ model. Also the Swiss and the Germans have the best science, industry, Enlightenment philosophy, social system, culture and business models, so we can probably best run India by better learning how Germany and Switzerland are so successful, and German language is key to it. So maybe Spanish, German should be the top choices as main non-Indian languages for us to study in schools, then a second group of other very important (but not quite as important) languages like French and English to be taught as popular electives. Probably Chinese, Russian and Portuguese should be second-group too, since we have to trade so much with them (esp. China) to help our own economy.
Mera, there were very few “pros” of British Raj and very, very many cons. The only reason that some Indians (thankfully smaller and smaller number every year) still fantasize that British rule was good, is they’ve been deceived by British propaganda of 1800′s and today. I was a supervisor for data-compiling involving a UK firm selling books (including texts), and Britain chauvinist historians always try to hide the fact that India had an advanced culture, with lots of industry and science, in the centuries before Clive came in 1750′s. The British want Europeans and Indians to believe that India was a backward country before Brits came, and that Britain then “civilized” India. They didn’t– we had industries in India that Britain almost completely brought to ruin. It was Britain that made India into a poor, backward 3rd-world country by 1947 by killing millions of our best people and crushing our home industries, or shipping them back to England, compared to the first-world great power we were in 1600′s and 1700′s.
India’s cloths and fabrics, not to mention spices and efficient agriculture production, were actually among best in world before Britain came. We had basic industry that was growing rapidly and a middle class, we even had some stirrings of individual rights and representation among the common people with rule of law. But the British didn’t want India’s cotton, rice and other production to hurt British profits, so they made sure that India was kept poor and weak. They then burned down fields in India to grow opium (which they then forced on China), forcing our people to starve to death. Countless millions of people of India died in the starvations when Britain refused to allow us to sell our own food at market, and then stole our produce and shipped it off to British soldiers, especially in and around Chennai and throughout Bihar. Amartya Sen suggests perhaps 60 million Indians died from British behaviors, and his estimates do make sense. And those railroads Britain likes to talk about in India? It was the RR that were used to ship out so much of India’s food and the opium to China, or to ship in British soldiers to mass-murder Indians in 1857 or at Jallian Wala Bagh.
When I was working in London, half the time I wanted to take a pick-axe to the statues of Havelock and Napier there in Trafalgar Square, Britain likes to celebrate its historical mass murderers in India. (The Bomber Arthur Harris is another one, killed hundreds of thousands of Mesopotamian villagers with RAF attacks– nobody likes him even within Britain itself, they constantly throw paint on his statue to deservedly insult him.)
We in India do not owe Britain any respect, we owe them no support, we should spit on their culture and symbols in India and abroad at every opportunity, teach English in schools only to the point it provides economic benefit (and it’s not even providing much of that anymore) and replace it with Spanish and German more and more. We should not show respect to the United Kingdom, until Great Britain finally acknowledges their historical crimes rather than trying to paper over them. That means Britain acknowledges people like Palmerston as being on the same level as Stalin, Hitler or Idi Amin– genocidal mass murderers who deserve revulsion for what they did. Also that Britain acknowledges the acts of its other murderers in India like Dyer and Napier, acknowledges the genocidal hatred of Winston Churchill against India and his role in the deadly famine of Bengal, openly discusses the mass murders of Lord Lytton who was a Stalin-level murderer like Palmerston.
Also that England makes even tiny steps toward restitution. Restoring the Diamond of Kohinoor would be a start, not to mention other national treasures that the British looted from India. The British authorities complain when thieves try to steal the Kohinoor from crown jewels, but the British were the thieves in the first place. If they don’t act, then others have the right idea– take them to the World Court at the Hague, just embarrassing those pompous Brits about the Kohinoor and making them miserable would be reward enough.
Really appreciated the way Nita written the article and comments by influential people. My point is very simple. Today India is rising with strong economy. It’s time to develop allies (many countries hate them too) and need to craft India’s foreign policy. Ultimately, Britain is a small island somewhere in Europe. Action speaks loader than words…isn’t it???
your right… Britain needed India Before and Still needs it. Britain is on the verge of bank rupcy. the british have taken wealth out of India but what has happened more has been produced. India is the most patriotic country in the world. BRITAIN DO NOT WORRY INDIA WILL GIVE YOU MONEY
I was looking for a blog like this and finally found it cause i share the exact same belief. The Nazis are characterised as the most evil being on earth. The only difference between the nazis and british was that Hitler openly expressed anti-semitic opinions and the British did it subtly.The Nazis murdered jews the British murdered Indians, Africans , Native races etc.This is not to mention economic damage done and more importantly the pshychological damage done.
One day you will give the prise for what you have done on the past in India. I hate Britain
Dhinesh(The Black)
The british pioneered genocide. They built the first modern concentration camps during the Boer wars(a war they won through the mass killing of women and children), they stole India’s grain to feed London cheap bread. The list goes on and on for HUNDREDS of years.
They messed up Africa and Asia and some how managed to shift the blame to America(and the clean up cost). The English are just a very evil people. Look what the Brit’s conned America into doing? WW1(which lead to WW2) and the Shah fiasco in Iran.
Growing up I always noticed some types of “other whites” hated me/disliked me for no reason. As I grew up and began to recognize myself as German-American(If the SHTF I could always flee to Germany and pass of as native stock easily) I noticed one thing those “other whites” had in common, they where all anglo(English) Americans.
P.S as for the American economy, the main thing killing us is the fact that the bankers control the energy sectors of our economy and are jacking up prices(it was high energy prices, not the financial bubble that brought us to our knees) and China.
Why we trade with a communist country is beyond me when there are so many semi-free to free nations in the world. I don’t know but if you look up all the messed up anti-American(politicians who do stuff not in America’s interest’s) they all tend to be Anglo-Americans.
Just keep it up and the truth will win in the end.
brothers and sisters
1)british helped us in one way they ruled whole country but they werre a trouble for everyone so they became common enemy unifying us but to say that indians did not have the idea of unity is false remember asoka, shivaji ,etc also indians were uunified earlier but split themselves (mahajanapadas) for better governance but soon it caused internal rivalry
2) british were racist but some people but all britsh cant be blamed it would be foolish to do so
3) science was introduced by them which helped us to overcome blind beliefs,untouchabilityetc this was their greatest gift
4)but we cannot say that they were the only one who responded to untouchability blind belifs etc many indians also strived for it before british and one of the greatest person in the list is gautama budda an indian ,annamaya(untouchability),kanakadas,kabir, shankara,purandara dasa , lingayats,ramadas, tukaram, eknath,jnanadeva,namadeva, chaitanya mahaprabhu, veerabrahmendra swamy, mahaveera,charvaka,vyasa,valmiki,suta maharishi,and many many more
5) and refer bagavathgeeta an ultimate scripture which says each and every object is god and wise man sees and treats everyone equally
6)and the utimate gautama buddha taught the world non violence forgiveness ,equality,truth ,way of living,fearlessness more details read buddist teachings and also these teachings influenced teachings of other religions of the world
7)also read patanjali yoga sutras and upanishads see please i wnt to teel indians are also great their way of living is great
8)it also taught and influenced thinkers of west greek, rome etc
9) we were fine inarts music ,science(not as great as the west),architecture builidings etc see harappan civilization wen world was asleep still(excpt egypt andother civilizations)
10)many great things are there more and more
11)equality of women ,and many more refer ardhanareeswari concept and other hymns
13) even many greta things are there
14) but one thing every nation or region will have dark ages similarly we too remember withcraft,geocentric controversy, and beliefs like ghosts evil spirits and many more evenin 114or15 th centuary but these came to end after birth of science but in india it didnt hapen and british came and uknow the rest
15) and also charity indians believe that one must do charity every day in life
16) the concept of spirit ghost etc were opposed and in bc itself refer to gatama budas
teachings and also vitoout his teching there will be no self development in this world it influnced many westerners
17) finally i intend to say were r not barbaric, uncultured,arrogant ,selfish and pagan belivers but the opposite refer distinctons between demonica nd divine atribtes to be foolwed to reach perfection in gita
18)but not to forget british conribution they also helped us alot
19) they could have done without ruling us and troubling us
20) other thing they looted our wealth they were atracted to wealth and spices and this is also bad ………and equal to their contributions
21)they made us slaves in our own country and took many lives
22) tehy ruled us with guns and utilized our fear and helpless ness
23) but we must see good and bad
24) finally there is no comparision in injustice see if u hurt others also it is bad and even if u kill …………………………….an indian thought
25) but brish were not the worst but cant comapre and i pray dont compare
26) actually i wrote these to tell about my motherland and its greatness but i accept others conribution but please forget history i also want to forget but cant but life becomes worst wen u r in past be in future but i want to clarify misconceotions about my motherland
27) finally at the end isay “e jati charitra choosina emiunadi garva karanam antha para peedana parayanam” meanining dont worry(being egoistic about nationa identityetc) ab of history it is just a riverof blood
and scripture of violence brutality and slavery
28) bye best of luck dont watste much time but ponder over these bye and remember always accept the truth this was also my motherlands tmessage
sorry present
I must raise the point that while many here speak of the atrocities of “The British”, that it’s not actually the British people who are guilty, it’s the establishment, with the royal family at the top of the festering pile, for little more than financial gain. The ‘British people’ are no more than victims of the propaganda machine that is the British education system and the nationalist press, thus producing the largely ignorant and racist society that exists today which supports the ongoing and well disguised tyranny that has taken a more global form. Yesterday it was ‘wogs, chinks and commies’, today it’s ‘Muslems and rag-heads’; who knows who/what next?
I used to believe I was a ‘British citizen’ till I saw the reality of the farce and got the hell out of there. Unfortunately I still have to carry that label as I must apply to that regime for a new passport every ten years, but there’s little I can do about that but be thankful that I don’t actually have to go there to get it.
I would love to visit India but Indian immigration law says the I have to apply for a visa in my country of birth, which definitely rules that out.
So, please try and view things in perspective and put the blame with the guilty and not it’s less aware victims and tools of tyranny.
britain must accept and pay for its mistakes
Er, Germans are aware of their Nazi past because they themselves have questioned the role of their forefathers during the time. It’s debate that is still alive in Germany.
Growing up in the 80ties in Delhi, I recall, our history lessons were pretty neutral. Perhaps because they were written by leftwing historians?
It is not well documented (or publisized) the attrocities committed by the british. They have explolited the world to the maximum. Some of the names (Dyer etc) need to be put in the same level as Hitler. Countries like India should demand full compensation for the losess. next 150 years UK should pay India whatever they took. The nice and gentleman behaviour of these people need to exposed agaan and again.
I encountered this whilst researching a reply on a Usenet group, to a dimwit who wants me to believe that the British were all sweetness and light towards Boer POWs during the second Boer War, though he admits the deaths of 26000 women and children. Dodging the 18,000 repatriated soldiers who died in camps after the war was over.
Anyhow I have not read the many comments above but read the original article.
All I can say is that as a British person (As many generations back as I can go) I for one am painfully aware that Britain has a huge distance to travel before we can legitimately claim to have acknowledged the awful aspects of our past.
Britain abused and stole half the world, and stamped on anyone who got in the way.
I for one would offer apology, and contrition.
And say that in reparation I can only argue with those who hanker for Imperial glory to recognise the folly that it was.
The original poster is right what was the difference.
Very well written Nita.
I am from Pakistan and I totally agree with you over what you have written. Yes all the desi people written in the BLOG are correct that we should raise the voice for our ancestors that faced the atrocities of the RAJ for hundreds of years. Nothing can be done for them and may their souls rest in peace, but we can at least raise our voice to show the world the dark and brutal phase of our country’s history. It is correct that the British gave loads of revolutions but this would have been adopted any ways because the world was changing when the British took control of India. We Indians were no less than the rest of the world and we would have contributed a lot to the history, though unfortunately as my Physics Professor used to say that when Newton and others were thinking of the Science and making discoveries our drunk and corrupt rulers were busy in their Debauchment and watching prostitutes dance for them and making buildings and palaces for them.
Anyways I just read your article and it is an excellent one and may you have courage to write many more like these and may Almighty gives us courage to raise voice agaisnt it.
Britain should be punished for its crimes done in india dolonization period.
I have not had an extended education in History or Economics, however I would like to offer the following observations. To declare oneself masters in someone else’s home is patently wrong & inexcusable. Britain fought 2 World Wars, the latter, ostensibly to rid the World from tyranny. This whilst declaring itself masters in a strangers land! Can no one see this? We are fed a diet of “British fair play” & “lest we forget”. We can lay wreaths in November & wear poppies to remind ourselves of the Nazi threat of some 60 odd years ago but conveniently overlook the many that were under British rule AT THE SAME TIME! No mention of this! All those saying get over it to, perhaps you could ask your Grandparents to get over the threat of Nazi Germany which “only” lasted 6 years as opposed to 200 years.
We say why hasn’t India risen after 60 years of home rule, whilst forgetting the centuries prior where they were made to feel worthless. We see third generation benefit claimants in the UK but cannot equate the two!
My then, 5 year old son, whilst looking at a photographic display, pointed out that various African countries, depicted, must be close by as they must have been named by the same people seeing that the place names ended in “dougou”. We have resource books available that will tell you that many African states have a majority ethnic group of less than 50%, yet when atrocites occur, the dictator is killing “his own people”. In Britain where the natives account for close to 90%, not a day goes by where one of my son’s is not racially abused in a well to do suburb just outside London, where the local rag is happy to report that the average income in town is in excess of £40k.
Whilst, both Rwanda & Zimbabwe were making regular news a few years back, (the latter more so), by way of demonstration, can anyone who has posted here tell me the name of a single Rwandan from either side (or name either side!) without reference. Similarly, can anyone not tell me who the President of Zimbabwe might be? The same would have been true years ago when these Nation’s were making the news.
Not one documentary about Rwanda, but several about Zimbabwe. BBC news suggesting that 7 (seven) million people faced death through starvation, one million more than a figure oft mentioned by various contributors on this forum, lest we forget. Hidden camera documentaries smuggled out from an occupied white farm, about how people were going to starve as the farmer could not grow crops. However, if you listened intently, you would have heard, just the once mind, that he grew tobacco. Can you cook with that?
I pointed out to a friend that, even today, India has 41.6% of people living on less than 78p a day, as reported in the papers, which made her one of the poorest places on planet earth. His reply was, in dollars yes, but where are they morally & in spirit on this league table.
they all done for their own good, they are cruel, unreligious. They ruined our temples,mosque only for money they treat every person like a slave . These cruel Britishers raped million of girls and women and take away our gold to their land. But in response we respect every British girl, women and their child. And you are saying that because of them English came in India.We Indian are more civilized then they are more cultural then they are , we Indian gave respect to all the girls and women whether they are Indian or not. And if they had done any good they had done only for their own good. They did not respect our language, religion. If you know that after hanging BHAGAT SINGH, RAJ GURU and SUKHDEV they cut their bodies into pieces. We Indians gave a response attack to all the persons who came for attacking India whether they Nazi, Britishers. But Britishers are cruel because they attack in a shadow , they came India for business but after sometime they rule India. But before these Britishers, all the attacking armies who came to India for ruling came here not with cruel mind of business, they came with armies whether they are Muhammad Ghori, Nazi, The Mughals, Alexander all of them attack India with their armies not with the idea of business and then rule over India. But Britishers have no culture they enter temples, mosque ,with their guns. In small contrary they the cruel, un cultured, they are not religious to any religion except their own religion.
@Nita: You wrote “Britain did build infrastructure and made English popular in India. Guess if it wasn’t for British rule all those years ago I wouldn’t be writing this very piece in English, would I? And well, Britain did unite all those little kingdoms and gave all of us a pan Indian identity.”
Britain had to build infrastructure in order to rule and loot us. If you want to get the drainage system of your house repaired then would like the plumber to kill your family members and rape you??
So what if we are more likely to know English, would we not have learnt it otherwise? Is English is too great a language to sacrifice you culture, respect, wealth and freedom for?
Are non-English speaking countries not progressing? For e.g. European countries, China and Japan?
This is a propaganda that they were little kingdom. Read history to know the kingdom of Shivaji and Maharaja Ranjit Singh.
I have deleted a line where you made a personal comment about me. Everyone can voice their opinion here, but personal comments are not permitted. Usually I delete the whole comment if there is any personal remark, but in this I had some time on my hands to edit it out. – Nita.
There were very few British in India. At the peak of British power 1 in 400 people in India were British, and even the majority of those were not military. The bulk of the police, admin and military work carried on in India, was carried out by Indian volunteers. Unfortunately Indians point the finger at the “evil British”, when most of the time British rule and law was enforced by Indians upon Indians. The lack of British in India was quite stunning, in the 1901 census, Calcutta (the capital of the Raj) recorded over a million citizens, of which 10,000 were British – that’s 1% !! In many areas there would be a few hundred Brits to a few million Indians. These are all facts. When considering such numbers, you must consider the MASSIVE cooperation and colaboration of vast sections of the Indian population. The police and army in India were never drafted or conscripted. For example, in WWII, at the height of the independence struggle Indians created the biggest volunteer army in human history, to fight for the Empire. The article asks, British Rule and nazi Rule, what was the difference? Well, in occupied Norway, 25% of the population was German military, and in western Europe the occupation army numbered in their millions, and their local supporters were comparatively small in number, in British India it was the complete opposite, the occupation forces were small, and the local supporters numbered in their millions.
India used to be the wealthiest nation before the British took over, true, about 60 years before! It was the Persians that destroyed the Mogul Empire in the 1720′s (at that time there were only a few hundred English in India, and they had no power). after they looted Delhi, historians agree that the Indian economy shrank massively, and civil war wrecked the country. The Persians took the Peacock Throne away, which was the most priceless item in the world – worth ten times more than all the Indian jewels in the Crown jewels. But of course, because the Persians are dark skinned Asian Muslims, they are let off the hook, and nobody cares – it doesn’t fit into your racist anti-white agenda. The British started taking over in the 1750′s, which was easy as India had split up into a hundred kingdoms and principalities due to the Persian invasion. It is true that India had once been united, more than once in fact, but its also true that the British put it all together again afterwards – for their own purposes maybe, but they still did it. Had they not have intervened, India would probably look like a map of Europe today, with about 20 or 30 nations. They also built the world’s third ;largest railway network, for their own purposes maybe, but they still did it. Building one of the world’s biggest railways is hardly “destruction” is it? They also built New Delhi, a fantastic capital city, maybe this was for their own glory and purposes yes, but they still built a huge and useful city – was this “destruction”? As for social institutions, India got its first modern police force, Suttee was banned, widows were given rights, India’s first ever newspaper was published in Calcutta, Asia’s first museum was also built in Calcutta. did you know that India’s government caste quota system was also introduced by the British? All these are HISTORICAL FACTS. Unfortunately your opinions are just a racist rant against whitey – what about the Muslim invasions into India in the 11th century? They wiped out entire cities. So you IGNORE all that, and pretend that India was a peaceful utopia before the British? What a lie! Your views are just fanatically anti-western, to the point of dishonesty. You also say that the British arrived about 1757 – well in fact they arrived in the 1620′s ! The East India Company was created in 1599, so really you know very little anyway, other than to blame white people for all the ills of India. Spectacularly wealthy areas of the world were ruled by the British, Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaysia, USA, Canada, New Zealand, Australia etc., — so what’s India’s excuse? but of course you will reply to this that the English are the root of all evil, against the supreme genius and moral majesty of the Indians, who outnumbered the British a thousand to one in most districts. Accept your guilt and responsibility for what the Indians did to themselves, and stop blaming other races for everything. India has not given the world any useful discovery or invention for over a thousand years, despite being 20% of the world. Corruption is massive, the country’s population rises unchecked, by that of Australia’s every year, 40% of the population can’t read or write, China invaded you and kicked your arses in 1962, the British took vast areas of your land with armies so small, that they can not even be described as armies by military historians, — even winning a few gold medals at any given Olympic games is completely beyond the capabilty of India. wake up to yourselves! The Indians are Nazis unto themselves – always have been. Go to Calcutta, the best bridge over the river Hooghly is still the British bridge, the sewer system is still British, all the best buildings were left behind by the British, no good building having been built in the last 60 years. The overland railway system has not been expanded since 1947 there, it’s still the British lines and stations. The museum, the main library, the government house, even the main military camp – all formerly British buildings – the population has increased 8-fold, and the British have been gone 60 years, but the city is still totally reliant upon what they left behind. Oh but I forgot, the british “destroyed” everything didn’t they? When the British arrived in Calcutta in 1690 it was a muddy fishing village. In the last 60 years the Bengali government has done almost nothing apart from ride in their British trains, sit in their grand British buildings, cross their river back and forth on the British bridge, use the old British infrastructure to breaking point and blame their total failure decade after decade on who,,, themselves? No never, the British! The white devils. It’s so dishonest and racist too. Indians should not be grateful to the British for anything,, but how about a little honesty??? Why don’t you take responsibilty? Do you know how many British troops massacred Indians in Amritsar in 1919?? Answer = none. It was completely carried out by Indian troops. HISTORICAL FACT! Are the British to blame? Yes – are Indians blameless?? Of course not!!!!!!!!
Throughout the postings above, the theme is generally that the British ruined India. Well, the British have always been about 5% of the population of India, and as an island the other side of the world it faced massive logistical problems. Moreover, for the most part (apart from during the world wars) Britain had a small volunteer army, which was mainly used for fighting other European powers, not in India. So if the British really did what you say, that has to make the British massively superior OR it means that the Indian people were weak and foolish and substantialy cooperated in their own exploitation. Really, these are the ONLY explanations. Discounting the racist conclusion of British superiority, we must then agree that the Indians were “weak and foolish and substantially cooperated in their own exploitation” – in which case, why are you complaining? Who do you want sympathy from? Take responsibility! Sir Robert Clive conquered a third of India with an army that numbered less than two thousand men – if Indians defended their country so badly, carried arms for the British, and allowed themselves to be bribed with their own money, then the Indians were very very stupid and weak. In the 18th and 19th centuries, stupid and weak countries did not survive – it was the way the world was. If the British had not stepped in to exploit this weakness and stupidity, it would have been the French, the Russians, the Spanish, the Chinese, the Turks, the Persians, the Portuguese – it was going to happen! The Indians should stop pointing the finger, and be honest about the vast role they had in their own downfall. Shame on the British for doing it, and shame on the vastly more numerous Indians for letting it happen. As for India being the source of British wealth and power, that’s rubbish too. By the 1750′s Britain was already the most powerful country in Europe, and the richest (it won the 7 years war against all the major European powers), and at that time IT DIDN”T HAVE AN INDIAN EMPIRE !!!!! The Industrial revolution in England started in 1750, at that time the British had a few trading posts in India, nothing more ———– Also, you speak of the British destruction of Native Americans, well, in truth up until the British lost what is now the USA, they only ruled about 20% of that country. Only 13 of the 50 modern states were British, and some of those 13 states are the smallest in the USA now. Even if the British had wanted to wipe them out (which they didn’t) they would have only had access to 20% of the tribes anyway! As it was, during the American Revolution (despite having about 1% of the Indian population, the Americans still managed to expel the British) most Indian tribes under British rule actually took up arms for the British against the revolution. So explain to me how the British wiped out the Native Americans???? During the British era they were quite numerous in their lands. It’s just rubbish – just rabid anti-British comments, with zero historical basis, just like most of the comments about the Raj.
If you keep an open mind perhaps another explanation exists. Speaking to an Indian friend, who after marriage decided to travel across India. He started in the South, travelled across & upwards. He said to me that although he had never left India, he became a stranger in his own country. A language barrier existed, the clothes were different as were physical features.How many languages are spoken in India today?
Going off on a tangent, I was on a train a few years back when the practice of “steaming” was prevalent. 8 (eight) youths went through car by car & robbed commuters. I was in the fairly populated second car. I was travelling alone, but refused to comply. I was set upon & dealt with very swiftly by the gang. Needless to say, the rest of the commuters gave up their loot freely & without any resistance. I would say “we” outnumbered them at least 5 to 1, & that was in my car alone!
Perhaps unity is more important than numbers? You want to deal in facts? Whether you are a person of faith or not, you will no doubt concede that religion & it’s abiding prinicples have formulated morality across the globe for Centuries. I am sure “thou shall not steal” is crystal clear & does not need clarification to even the most rudimentary human being.
It was wrong THEN, let alone today, to declare yourself master in someone else’s home. It was wrong then to cart off 75 (seventy five) barges full of loot as Clive did.If you disagree with this, please take it up with Jeremy Paxman & the BBC.
Linton Kwesi Johnson met an elderly Sikh gentleman in Punjab. He was there as a toddler during THE massacre. He lost his mother & father. He still had a deep set hatred for the British. His main reason? Dyer was hailed as a hero by the press & received wide support from the British public.
Let us look at Britain today. If we look at Medicine, Law, Dentistry, etc, we will see a staggeringly high proportion relative to respective populations, of 2nd or 3rd generation Indian immigrants. What would you say if I deduced that onyl TWO possibilities existed; Indians are far more intelligent (we’ll rule that out so as not to be racist) or the natives are thick. That’s right, Indians can’t be superior so the natives are brutally stupid. Do you begin to see the flaws in your argument?
When India united under Gandhi they CHOSE not to use force. Does that make them weak for NOT shedding the blood of thousands? Clive stole from India. Is it beyond your own moral compass to show some humility & NOT refer to him as Sir? Do you really need to hide behind the fact that he was granted a knighthood by the then monarch?
.
@BaKUL: I don’t quite get the connection between the first paragraph of your comment and the rest that follows. Are you suggesting that a diversity of languages, clothing and physical features (and, although you do not mention it, cuisine) is responsible for India’s misfortunes, past and present? Are you, thereby, making a case for a culturally homogeneous, monotonous India?
Hello Vivek. The suggestion made was that the British were either superior or Indians weak & stupid. I was merely attempting to highlight that perhaps an alternative existed. I make no comments on India’s plight today.
Isnt it sad that we as Indians are not taugh to hate the britishes .. when they killed our forefathers.. the poverty and misery that we hv here is because of the britishers.. why is indian on coordial relationship with a country that raped her of her wealth and more importantly dignity…
Why doesnt our blood boil up hearing/ watching these stories..? Why is it wrong to seek revenge…?
Decency.
british cheated us than be brutal. they came to india begging for trade. they had no name or credit to start business. slowly with help of mother india they earned money. 1600 to 1947. they climber in peak by 1850. by this time they managed to distroy mugals and maratha and sikhs. however it was not a cake walk for briton. they have managed to team up with some anti indian kings and that helped them to conquer india. once they had it then every thing went their way. what do you expect from a brutal and cunning invader. who meditate for 300 years.
Denial of your history is a big mistake that any society will do if it rigs with it and tries to run away from the truth. Oh my God…The Britishers are forgetting something, way before coming to India in the 13th century and the 14th – 15th – 16th or should i say – also in the 17th and 18th century the Britishers were on a WITCH HUNT RAMPAGE. They killed poor and helpless old ladies accusing them for witch-craft and sorcery. Even they had legislations on ANTI-SORCERY and witches.
So in what possible way they claim that they were more civilized than INDIA and how they did a favour coming to India.
If you go back to 1 lac years of history of humankind (impartial) ,you will find that India was never an aggressor in an act of conflict. When Britishers were living in caves, busy in cannibalism and witch hunting , India was glowing with the great civilization contributing to the fields of Art,literature,mathematics,astronomy,physics . Our Bhagavat Gita was written when your people were living naked in the jungle. We developed the number system and the Iranians borrowed it from us and you people learned it from them. Our great scientist and mathematician The Great Aryabhat invented the number ZERO( sunya in sanskrit).
Do you know why we Indians worship all these animals and trees and rivers, because we respect mother nature, we thank them for their help to make our lives easier. Your legacy is to divide a society and rule, may be you’ll do it again like you are doing it right now by doctoring the history books for removing the dark past of your country. Learning from the past mistakes makes a society a more civilized one. Just own up what your forefathers did and try to ameliorate the relationship by making up all these missing years.
Hello Sujit. The most respected radio news station in the UK is Radio 4 ( listerners, less than 0.5m per day). One of the lead stories a few days ago was the opening of files, more than 30 years old, now, no longer constrained by the official secrets act. This alluded to the British lying to the UN about Chagos Islanders & brutal oppression (Middle East today style) of uprising in some of it’s colonies. No mention on the main TV news of the day on BBC, nor any mention in the papers.
Hi BaKUL, Rightly said.
Adding to your point,
if we see the history of the past 2000 years ,we can verify that The BRITS are the most oppressive and cunning society, even today they are the most racist society. The BRITS invaded the France, unlawfully created colonies, the story of Joan of Arc is well known, the BRITS oppressed the Americans ,unlawfully imposed taxes on them only to be kicked out by the Brave Americans, even today George Washington is enemy number one for the BRITS. Now come to Africa,slavery of African people is the gift of BRITS.
Yes all of these happened in the past, so they say let’s forget it and start afresh with a new approach towards everyone.
My question is if you doctor the history and claim to be a BETTER SOCIETY then I am sorry we have to change the meaning of “BETTER SOCIETY”.
All i can say is just own up your history and remove the mask you are wearing.
i am english and i know about the pro and con of british empire, all empires are the same over all romans,ottoman,mongol etc…the romans conquered most of britian and the normans and vikings as well these groups were brutal wiped out whole villages etc… but they arent really looked upon that way in britian i guess we look at the positive side they left
of course indians suffered under british rule but u cant blame the brits entirely many indians joined happily if it would further their position half the country was still under indian control so what happened in those regions.
colonization will always happen today and in the future its always been apart of human history going back to caveman days whether we like it or not currently we are under the influence of america in decades to come maybe the chinese, or india. indians should never lose their good nature and respect for others look at some parts of western culture(especially from the states deeply depressing, as a famous english general said DO NOT MISTAKE KINDNESS FOR WEAKNESS just ask the pakistanis who took on india twice in 1970s and got butslapped by the indians.
@Every Reader Of this blog,
The whole idea of my protest to the falsification of the History(particularly The British-India history) is nothing to do with any particular person but to the persons who are trying to tamper with the history. To be honest if you are a britisher and/or Indian and you are silent about this deplorable act of falsifying the historical facts then my protest is against you too. “Mauna sammati ra kaarana”, that means if you are silent about a crime then you are giving your nod to the criminal that you agree with him.
Lastly i wanna say i like pudding as well as onion bhaji, and the combination of both of them is just out of this world. Dont take it as sarcasm, i am just a foodie.