10-25-2007, 04:39 PM
Book Reveiw; Pioneer, 25 Oct., 2007
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->From Raj to Swaraj
<b>More than Gandhi and Nehru, it is the imposing figure of Churchill that dominates Peter Clarke's book, writes MV Kamath </b>
The Last Thousand Days of the British Empire, Peter Clarke, Allen Lane, £25
<b>It would be unfair to compare Peter Clarke's book, The Last Thousand Days of the British Empire, with Stanley Wolpert's Shameful Flight: The Last Years of the British Empire in India and Alex Von Tunzelmann's Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire.</b> Wolpert focusses specifically on Britain and India, whereas <b>Clarke deals with Britain in its last days as an imperial power, with special reference to its relationship with the US, which was keeping it alive during the final years of World War II. It is doubtful whether Britain would have survived without the financial as well as other assistance given to it by America under 'Lend Lease'. Or, for that matter, without India's massive contribution both in men and money. The Army that Britain raised in India was larger than all the forces raised by all other Commonwealth countries put together. And the money that Britain owed to India at the end of the war was a massive £1,300 million!</b>
<b>Winston Churchill,</b> that mean and mealy mouthed character who hated India and was to say that he had not become "the King's First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire", was to comment cheekily on Britain's debt to India. <b>He is quoted as saying, "We are now in their (India's) debt -- is £1,200 million the figure? -- which we owe to them for the privilege of having saved them from conquest by the Japanese." He forgot -- though Clarke in his text doesn't -- that apart from raising a huge Army to protect British interests everywhere, India also sent foodgrain to Britain at the cost of its own people, of whom three million died in the Great Bengal Famine. </b>
<b>Churchill happens to be the central figure in this book, which deals with a whole range of events pertaining to World War II -- the talks at Potsdam and Yalta and Churchill's discussions with US Presidents FD Roosevelt and Harry S Truman. Also figuring prominently is Palestine. Clarke merely puts India's demand for independence in the context of Anglo-American relations and what Britain owed to America.</b> As he put it: "The British Empire was a central issue in the financial negotiations (between the US and the UK) because of the sterling balances. That meant above all India, because Britain owed more to India than to the rest of its sterling creditors."
<b>In the circumstances, Britain was doing no particular favour to India by conceding independence to it.</b> And even while granting freedom, it took care to see that India became part of the Commonwealth, an event which took places in 1949.
Britain's decrepitude had been foreseen in India by MN Roy, who used to argue in the 1940s that no debtor nation can rule over a country it owed money to. That was Roy's argument against the Quit India Movement. Roy was emphatic that India should support the war effort precisely on these grounds. It is strange that Clarke does not even mention Roy.
Clarke gives credit to Sir Stafford Cripps for hastening India's Independence and not Labour Prime Minister Clement Attlee, who succeeded Churchill at the end of the war. <b>According to Leopold Amery, then Secretary of State for India, Attlee's attitude hardly differed from that taken by Churchill, namely that Britain cannot hand India over to Indian capitalists and exploiters!</b>
Attlee was later to change his mind because he realised that Britain just could not hold on to India. <b>Britain had become a bankrupt state and by the beginning of February 1946, prospects were so bad that electricity was not available for industrial production in England for most of the time, coal stocks could hardly meet the requirements of 10 days and two million workers had been laid off.</b>
<b>Britain could not, at that time, concede freedom to a unified India because the Muslim League under Mohammed Ali Jinnah's guidance had terrorised it into submission to its will. </b>As Clarke says, "The British Government for all its sympathies with the Congress was simply unprepared to impose a military settlement in the absence of consent from the Muslim League, which was now bent on achieving Pakistan at all cost."
Clarke notes that Jawaharlal Nehru and Vallabhbhai Patel had come to "tacitly accept'' the inevitability of Partition "breaking from Gandhi's tutelage". <b>Gandhi was opposed to Partition.</b> Clarke thinks that this was wrong on the part of the Mahatma to do so. According to him, Gandhi's "failure to rise to the political challenge in 1946 emerges as the most significant missed opportunity in the whole story". And then again he writes: "Even if Partition had eventually come in India, it surely need not have come in the way it did in 1947. In the final months Gandhi's response was heroic on a personal level, but that need not blind us to the degree of his own responsibility for engendering the situation." Still further he goes on to say, "Gandhi's incapacity to abide any imperfect solution was fatal in the final attempt to reach a negotiated settlement."
That is being very unfair to Gandhi. It was Britain that encouraged Jinnah to ask for Partition. When Jinnah called for "Direct Action Day", which led to large-scale killings in Calcutta, the British Government should have had him arrested and placed behind bars. The responsibility for Partition rests heavily on Britain.
As for the book, it is not India-specific but deals in great detail with Palestine during the last 1,000 days of the British Empire. <b>With King George having to drop the "I" in his title "RI", Britain's imperial role had come to an end rather unremarkably.</b>
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Acharya, I was right in thinking that an unknown factor of Indian independence was a bargain between US and UK with the understanding that the US would take over the role of the UK in India. I got that from the vast number of books written since 1865 by the US elite and their deep interest in studying India as revealed by teh contents of the large number of books in Google. It just doesnt make sense why would US elite study India that early on?
Also your thinking of UK complicity in Direct Action is also being remarked by the reviewer.
Also my admiration of Gandhi has shot up more after this review. He knew the importance of a united India better than the others. A divided India unless we solve the Pakistan problem will always hinder the rise of India.
Need to think about this.
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->From Raj to Swaraj
<b>More than Gandhi and Nehru, it is the imposing figure of Churchill that dominates Peter Clarke's book, writes MV Kamath </b>
The Last Thousand Days of the British Empire, Peter Clarke, Allen Lane, £25
<b>It would be unfair to compare Peter Clarke's book, The Last Thousand Days of the British Empire, with Stanley Wolpert's Shameful Flight: The Last Years of the British Empire in India and Alex Von Tunzelmann's Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire.</b> Wolpert focusses specifically on Britain and India, whereas <b>Clarke deals with Britain in its last days as an imperial power, with special reference to its relationship with the US, which was keeping it alive during the final years of World War II. It is doubtful whether Britain would have survived without the financial as well as other assistance given to it by America under 'Lend Lease'. Or, for that matter, without India's massive contribution both in men and money. The Army that Britain raised in India was larger than all the forces raised by all other Commonwealth countries put together. And the money that Britain owed to India at the end of the war was a massive £1,300 million!</b>
<b>Winston Churchill,</b> that mean and mealy mouthed character who hated India and was to say that he had not become "the King's First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire", was to comment cheekily on Britain's debt to India. <b>He is quoted as saying, "We are now in their (India's) debt -- is £1,200 million the figure? -- which we owe to them for the privilege of having saved them from conquest by the Japanese." He forgot -- though Clarke in his text doesn't -- that apart from raising a huge Army to protect British interests everywhere, India also sent foodgrain to Britain at the cost of its own people, of whom three million died in the Great Bengal Famine. </b>
<b>Churchill happens to be the central figure in this book, which deals with a whole range of events pertaining to World War II -- the talks at Potsdam and Yalta and Churchill's discussions with US Presidents FD Roosevelt and Harry S Truman. Also figuring prominently is Palestine. Clarke merely puts India's demand for independence in the context of Anglo-American relations and what Britain owed to America.</b> As he put it: "The British Empire was a central issue in the financial negotiations (between the US and the UK) because of the sterling balances. That meant above all India, because Britain owed more to India than to the rest of its sterling creditors."
<b>In the circumstances, Britain was doing no particular favour to India by conceding independence to it.</b> And even while granting freedom, it took care to see that India became part of the Commonwealth, an event which took places in 1949.
Britain's decrepitude had been foreseen in India by MN Roy, who used to argue in the 1940s that no debtor nation can rule over a country it owed money to. That was Roy's argument against the Quit India Movement. Roy was emphatic that India should support the war effort precisely on these grounds. It is strange that Clarke does not even mention Roy.
Clarke gives credit to Sir Stafford Cripps for hastening India's Independence and not Labour Prime Minister Clement Attlee, who succeeded Churchill at the end of the war. <b>According to Leopold Amery, then Secretary of State for India, Attlee's attitude hardly differed from that taken by Churchill, namely that Britain cannot hand India over to Indian capitalists and exploiters!</b>
Attlee was later to change his mind because he realised that Britain just could not hold on to India. <b>Britain had become a bankrupt state and by the beginning of February 1946, prospects were so bad that electricity was not available for industrial production in England for most of the time, coal stocks could hardly meet the requirements of 10 days and two million workers had been laid off.</b>
<b>Britain could not, at that time, concede freedom to a unified India because the Muslim League under Mohammed Ali Jinnah's guidance had terrorised it into submission to its will. </b>As Clarke says, "The British Government for all its sympathies with the Congress was simply unprepared to impose a military settlement in the absence of consent from the Muslim League, which was now bent on achieving Pakistan at all cost."
Clarke notes that Jawaharlal Nehru and Vallabhbhai Patel had come to "tacitly accept'' the inevitability of Partition "breaking from Gandhi's tutelage". <b>Gandhi was opposed to Partition.</b> Clarke thinks that this was wrong on the part of the Mahatma to do so. According to him, Gandhi's "failure to rise to the political challenge in 1946 emerges as the most significant missed opportunity in the whole story". And then again he writes: "Even if Partition had eventually come in India, it surely need not have come in the way it did in 1947. In the final months Gandhi's response was heroic on a personal level, but that need not blind us to the degree of his own responsibility for engendering the situation." Still further he goes on to say, "Gandhi's incapacity to abide any imperfect solution was fatal in the final attempt to reach a negotiated settlement."
That is being very unfair to Gandhi. It was Britain that encouraged Jinnah to ask for Partition. When Jinnah called for "Direct Action Day", which led to large-scale killings in Calcutta, the British Government should have had him arrested and placed behind bars. The responsibility for Partition rests heavily on Britain.
As for the book, it is not India-specific but deals in great detail with Palestine during the last 1,000 days of the British Empire. <b>With King George having to drop the "I" in his title "RI", Britain's imperial role had come to an end rather unremarkably.</b>
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Acharya, I was right in thinking that an unknown factor of Indian independence was a bargain between US and UK with the understanding that the US would take over the role of the UK in India. I got that from the vast number of books written since 1865 by the US elite and their deep interest in studying India as revealed by teh contents of the large number of books in Google. It just doesnt make sense why would US elite study India that early on?
Also your thinking of UK complicity in Direct Action is also being remarked by the reviewer.
Also my admiration of Gandhi has shot up more after this review. He knew the importance of a united India better than the others. A divided India unless we solve the Pakistan problem will always hinder the rise of India.
Need to think about this.