Colonial History Of India-2

[acharya]

surinder wrote:
While there were a *few* Europeans (& Americans) in Indian Armies (especially of Sikhs), that hardly justifies the saying that the entire officer class was European


The officer class were foreigners, and where such foreigners were unavailable, ordinary soldiers deserting from European armies were welcomed by Indian Kingdoms and commissioned to raise modern infantry formations. Matthew Heaney, a common soldier who deserted from the 8th Dragoons, became "Colonel O'Brien" by raising a small force for the faraway hill-state of Kangra.

Even civilians with some European blood or just Indian Christians who dressed up in military uniforms could dupe their way to becoming officers; such was the state of ignorance among our indigenous warrior class. Jadunath Sarkar writes, "Every French or Portuguese half-breed, or even a pure native Christian of Goa, when dressed in a cast-off European military costume, was believed to be a master of the new war, and was commissioned to raise a sepoy battalion for the local Hindu prince..."

There is a short list in European Military Adventurers and many more in various other books covering that period.

[acharya]

the role of europeans in India changed over time. There are atleast the following phases:

1. Mughals in power phase (europeans begging for trade and awed by the riches of a 'new realm')
2. Mughals in decline phase (european adventurers making it big - as per Airavat description)
3. East India company phase (exploitative, brutal, aggressive, genocidal, greedy...)
4. Victorian Imperial phase (seemingly to undo the company's evils, but... powerful, dominant, domineering, indirectly destructive, partially unintentionally genocidal)
5. between the world wars phase (struggling with bringing liberalism to the colonies and avoiding it if possible through repressive means)
6. WW2 and independence phase (in desperate trouble, need to get out without getting lynched and making concessions)

In each of these the overall mentality and roles of the europeans were quite different. interestingly, american pressure in the final stages closed down british dreams of hanging on to empire -even though many in britain itself no longer wanted to - in the same way that the british at home were critical of the East india company's excesses in the 1840's. Some authors suggest that americans behaved just as imperiously with china during the same period without any sense of hypocracy

[ramana]

X-posted...
Book Review from The Telegraph, 8 May 2009

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->FOUNDER OF A NEW VISION 


Fearless speaker 
Robert Knight: Reforming editor in Victorian India By Edwin Hirschmann,
Oxford, Rs 795

Very often, the grand narrative of history is notoriously punctuated with blind spots that cause collective amnesia. <b>Robert Knight, the founder-editor of The Times of India, Mumbai, and The Statesman, Calcutta,</b> is a tragic victim of this amnesia. This book is undoubtedly a commendable effort to salvage this illustrious figure in the history of Indian journalism from oblivion. Besides being a rather belated tribute to a great champion of liberalism, the book is also a tribute to liberalism itself.

For one thing, this biography by Edwin Hirschmann clearly shows the extent to which <b>Knight was a product of his age: an age that was extremely significant not only in the history of colonial India but also in the history of British imperialism and Western liberalism.</b> Hirschmann cites classical economics and James Stuart Mill’s grossly misleading History of British India as the background for understanding Knight’s reforming spirit. However, the background does not quite come through, and Hirschmann fails to provide an elaborate contextualization of his subject. He does not examine Knight’s reading habit or provide a sociological account of Knight’s reformist zeal. Similarly, he does not attempt to explain the glaring inconsistencies in Knight’s ideology — those represented by his assumed role of a liberal-minded imperialist — and his ambiguous advocacy of the Tories as the more capable administrators for India, despite being a liberal himself. Thus, Hirschmann’s “biography as history” remains only partially constructed.

<b>What it chronicles in reasonable detail is the political history of British India, rather than a history of 19th-century Western ideas.</b> Hirschmann’s approach unaccountably refuses to acknowledge the fact that the philosophy behind <b>Knight’s editorial policy looked back on the triumph of reason heralded by the Enlightenment, which, according to historians like Hippolyte Taine and Alexis de Tocqueville, traced its roots to the French Revolution. While Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) articulated the premonition that the “abstract” revolutionary ideals, however magnanimous and purportedly rational, may actually turn out to be tyrannical, Enlightenment discourses glorified them, feeding into the Utilitarianism propounded by Jeremy Bentham and J.S. Mill. Utilitarianism professed freedom of expression, equal rights for women and an end to slavery, among other things. Utilitarian liberalism was trying to evolve a complete “ethology” for post-industrial Europe which would inform its politics and combine the apparently incompatible notions of public governance and individual liberty.</b>

<b>This perception of public governance as a process of authoritative decision-making by a select and knowledgeable few, which is conditionally exposed to rigorous, external verification, is integral to the understanding of Knight’s piquant chastisement of biased and ham-handed British policies.</b> His criticism of British economic policies also needs to be put in the perspective of the 19th-century debates on laissez-faire economy.

The hard facts of Knight’s editorial career have been well-documented by Hirschmann. The author also divides Knight’s career into five segments
‘reformer’, ‘editor’, ‘dissident’, ‘imperial critic’ and ‘Statesman elder’. His narrative becomes an efficient documentation of the emergence of journalism as the ‘fourth estate’. Moreover, the narrative also offers valuable insights into the debates on Orientalism.

Hirschmann does not dwell on Knight’s family life for too long, but he refers to the crises in his life caused by litigation and libel. The book invites readers to judge whether it can be called the saga of a fearless speaker, bearing in mind Michel Foucault’s definition of parrhesia or ‘fearless speech’ in his last book that was produced from his tape-recorded lectures.

ARNAB BHATTACHARYA
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

I think these traits or guidelines are followed by the Indian elite.

[acharya]

X-posted

<!--QuoteBegin-"A_Gupta"+-->QUOTE("A_Gupta")<!--QuoteEBegin-->
By contrast, to the planned communal terrorism of the Muslim League the British adopted a policy of: look the other way, take no effective action. NPA Smith, director of the Intelligence Bureau, wrote in a memorandum to the Viceroy Wavell who forwarded the same to London:

Grave communal disorder must not disturb us into action which would reintroduce anti-British agitation. The latter may produce an inordinately dangerous situation and lead us nowhere. <i>The former is a natural, if ghastly, process tending in its own way to the solution of the Indian problem</i>

This is why the original sources are important. Sorry, long post here, but I'm putting in the whole thing to put the N.P.A. Smith quote in its correct context.

This quote is from a letter from Mr Abell {George Edmund Brackenbury, Pvt Secy to the Viceroy} to Mr Harris {Randolph Montague Joseph, Pvt Secy to Secy of State for India} and is item 304, in the volume IX of the Transfer of Power papers.

<!--QuoteBegin--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->My dear Ronald,
H.E. thinks the Secretary of State may be interested in the enclosed note on the situation in India by Smith, the Director of the Intelligence Bureau.
Yours sincerely,
George Abell.

Enclosure:

British Angle

1. The game so far has been well played in that (a) both Congress and the League have been brought into the Central Government; (b) the Indian problem has been thereby thrust into its appropriate plane of communalism; © some kind of an opportunity for orderly evacuation now presents itself through the existence at the Centre of a government to which power can be transferred.

2. I fear, there is a tendency, now that we are temporarily in relatively untroubled waters -- from the purely British angle --, to forget that a storm will sooner or later again arise, and to move much too slowly in shedding our responsibilities.  The fullest advantage should be taken of our present breathing space. In my view, the Secretary of State's control over civil officers should be abrogated at the earliest possible moment.  This is only fair to the officers and has the political advantage that a decisive gesture of this kind will help to keep the problem on its correct communal plane.

3. The Quit India policy has now the general acceptance of almost all British officers.  In the Congress Provinces, this acceptance is accompanied by a realisation of its complete inevitability and a general support of the line so far taken by H.M.G.  In the non-Congress Provinces, and particularly  in the Punjab, civil officers are apt to criticise bitterly H.M.G.'s policy and the moves made by H.E.  This difference of outlook arises from difference of political circumstances.  The Punjab is inclined to regard the rest of official India as defeatist and much of the rest of India regards the Punjab as living in a dead or dying past.

4. Grave communal disorder must not disturb us into action which would reintroduce anti-British agitation.  The latter may produce an inordinately dangerous situation and leads us nowhere.  The former is a natural, if ghastly, process tending in its own way to the solution of the Indian problem***

The Indian Angle

What is likely to eventuate? Very difficult to answer. My own views are --
(a) Whatever the position a few years ago, communal antagonism has now reached such a point of bitterness that it is difficult to see how Hindu and Muslim can jointly work the future. This antagonism may lessen, but the cleavage and difference of culture is so marked as to make healthy cooperation unlikely.

(b)It is clear that India, with its strongly fissiparous tendencies, can only continue to exist through a strong Centre.

© It is equally clear that this strong Centre will not be conceded by the Muslims, and is probably unattainable.

(d) The weak Centre of the present target carries within itself the seeds of disruption.  It is difficult to foresee a joint policy in foreign affairs, and consequently in defence and finance.

(e)Indian leadership is so inept that there is little prospect of these inherent difficulties being overcome.

(f)I have little faith therefore in a successful outcome, in the long view, of the attempt to maintain a unified India.  As I have said for some months, Pakistan is likely to flow from Congresstan (the acceptance of office by Congress).

(g)I do not think Pakistan will advantage the Indian Muslim, who is likely to be squeezed and embarrassed by stronger forces East and West of him; but if he is determined to have it, he will get it.

(h)If Congress were wise, they would either attempt to dissolve by a psychological approach the psychological mistrust which exists or they would establish a strong Centre for areas of Hindu preponderance and to the exclusion of the N-West.  But I doubt if Congress is wise enough to do either of these things.

(i)Even if a strong Hindu Centre were established it is doubtful whether it could maintain itself for long in the face of a left-wing attack based on conditions rife for trouble, in labour, the peasantry, linguisitic and provincial jealousies, etc.  Jai Prakash Narain and his ill-assorted horde threaten the future. Congress might conceivably handle them and the Communists with sufficient firmness, but they have not much time to spare, and with Nehru in the Cabinet, I doubt their capacity or even willingness.

(j)In brief, I am pessimistic and fear, first, Hindu-Muslim separation, and, secondly, some measure of Balkanisation. The threat of the extreme Left-Wing may serve to bring present Hindu-Muslim leadership closer together, but this remains to be seen.

(k)If pessimistic, I am also philosophical about all this. If we cannot control natural forces, we must accept them, keeping our eyes steadily on reasonable British interest.

(l) The psychological approach which I would commend to Congress would have to be one of great generosity -- an offer, if necessary, of one over parity.  I suggested this to Sardar Patel and told him, moreover, that any attempt to force the Muslims would result, through the disintegration of the police and Army, in the loss of N.W. India. His reply was that, if I thought that generosity would placate the Muslim Oliver Twist, I did not understand either the Muslim mind or the situation.  With which sentiment I am tempted to agree.

N.P.A Smith.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

***In a letter from Wavell to Pethick-Lawrence, September 24, 1946, N.P.A. Smith's assessment of "possible moves in the Muslim League field and the consequences that might flow from them" is included. {#360 in Volume VIII of the Transfer of Power}. I read this while looking for the quote that prompted this post. Strictly, to be fair, I should produce the whole letter, but it is now 2:00 AM.
NPA Smith wrote:<b>
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->5. In brief, Mr Jinnah may be tempted by the knowledge of his possession of a very strong weapon which, though double-edged, can inflict deep wounds on his opponent.  If he feels that the threat of its use is unavailing, he may well employ its reality.  It is strange to think that, in the present century, the settlement of a dispute can be contemplated through the arbitrament, not merely of civil war, but of an insane butchery which spares neither women nor children.  Nevertheless, the ghastly reality is there and it is beyond doubt that "jehad" is still an emotion of the Muslim mind and that relatively few Muslims will be found to resist its call, or to resist the pressure which sustains it.  If, therefore, Mr. Jinnah does decide to plunge, the consequences will be of the gravest.  The League has proclaimed its intention to keep "direct action" on the non-violent plane of non-cooperation and, until it announces its plan, it would perhaps be unwise to exclude absolutely its ability to do so; but, in the ordinary run of things, violence must result and must probably take on at least something of the character of a jehad.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
</b>
BTW, we are told later {#410, October 8} in a letter from Pethick-Lawrence to Wavell that "I hope, as you do, that this {NPA Smith's assessment of Direct Action, of which a para is above} will make an impression on Patel". So presumably Sardar Patel was shown this assessment.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->

[acharya]

<b>Britain’s Faustian pact
</b>
Premen Addy

At the time of India’s independence, the standard-bearers of the British Raj scoffed at the idea of ‘Hindu India’ surviving as a nation. Instead, they put their faith in ‘Muslim Pakistan’ which they predicted would be stable and prosperous. Along with Jinnah’s dream, that prediction lies in tatters

Swine flu hypochondria dominates the airwaves in London; after the financial meltdown nothing has so concentrated the mind on either side of the Atlantic and beyond. An irate caller from Kolkata told of a Communist CITU-led strike at the city’s airport, but one didn’t have the heart to ask if it was the virus or the swine that was to blame.

More immediate and infinitely more troubling are the continuing Taliban and Al Qaeda irruptions along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border and the greater frequency of their depredations in the former’s Punjabi heartland. The Obama Administration is at its wit’s end mixing dollars with admonitions to its client in Islamabad, the British are witless, with an economy that sinks ever deeper into an abyss and a Prime Minister floundering from one PR disaster to another. Labour MPs and the party hoi-polloi fear a rout in next year’s general election.

Against such depressing news came Mihir Bose’s New Statesman meditation on the closing years of the British Raj in India. Mr Bose, the BBC sport’s editor, has had two stabs at a biography of Subhas Chandra Bose (no relation), so his knowledge and understanding of the region’s history and politics demand respect.

“It may be hard to credit now,” he writes, “as 700 million (Indian) voters go to the polls in the world’s biggtest elections, but back in the 1940s the wise men of the British Raj predicted that while Pakistan would prosper, India would soon be Balkanised. Pakistan, it was thought, would become a vibrant Muslim state, a bulwark against Soviet Communism. India’s predominantly Hindu population, however, was presumed to be a source of weakness and instability.”

Nobody expressed these dark sentiments more forcefully than Lt Gen Sir Francis Tucker who had seen service with the Indian Army in North Africa in the Second World War. His memoirs, While Memory Serves, was published in 1950, the year India became a republic. Mr Bose quotes from Tucker’s text: “Hindu India was entering the most difficult period of its whole existence. Its religion, which is to a great extent superstition and formalism, is breaking down. If the precedents of history mean anything... then we may well expect in the material world of today, that a material philosophy such as Communism will fill the void left by the Hindu religion.”

The departing good and great of the Raj were fixated by what they saw as the sly malevolence of the Brahmins and their Indian National Congress. Mahatma Gandhi’s remarkable success with Abdul Ghaffar Khan and his Red Shirts in the Pashtun NWFP was quite irrational, pronounced Sir Olaf Caroe, scholar-governor of the province and a Russophobe reactionary. This unnatural liaison would end as Pashtun martial ardour came to the fore, he predicted.

I recall a photograph of Mohammed Ali Jinnah addressing a Pashtun crowd near Peshawar in English, with a translator at hand to make his words intelligible. The chord of hatred struck by the sainted Quaid-e-Azam — “Islam in danger from the Hindu infidel” — transcended the barrier of language. Contemporary Pakistan is surely his truest monument.

We would, however, do well to broaden the historical canvas to include the first half century of the British presence in the subcontinent. It was age of the enlightenment in Europe, when scepticism leavened belief and social Darwinism was still a distant fantasy. So William Jones presented his path-breaking linguistic studies on the common origins of Indo-European speech to scholarly acclaim, and Charles Wilkins published the first English translation of the Gita, with a foreword by his patron Warren Hastings, the first Governor-General of British India and a notable Orientalist himself.

“I hesitate not to pronounce the Gita a performance of great originality,” wrote Hastings, “of a sublimity of conception reasoning and diction almost unequalled; and a single exception, amongst all the known religions of mankind, of a theology accurately corresponding with that of the Christian disposition, and most powerfully illustrating its fundamental doctrines…”

The Governor-General observed that “Not so long ago, the inhabitants of India were considered by many as creatures scarce elevated above the degree of savage life.” Of the body of Sanskrit works that were being revealed to the European world, he ended on a high note of prophecy: “These will survive when the British dominion in India shall have long ceased to exist, and when the sources which it once yielded of wealth and power are lost to remembrance.”

This early Indo-British encounter became a period of seed-time and remedy. The New Learning in India, particularly in Bengal and Bombay, led to a second modern revelation of India’s classical past, the researches of British (and European) scholars being of seminal importance. When, deeper into the 19th century, the Oxford-based German academic Max Müller published his first edited volumes of the Veda, the Bengali Sanskritist Radha Kanta Deb wrote thus to him from Calcutta: “Accept therefore my most grateful and sincere thanks, which, in common with my countrymen, I owe to you.” Swami Vivekananda was equally fulsome in his praise.

The Indo-British interaction of these years seeded Hindu social reform, cultural renewal and eventually gave rise to the movement for political emancipation, with the foundation of the Indian National Congress in Bombay on December 28, 1885, thanks principally to the endeavours of the Briton Allan Octavian Hume. Britons of the previous generations were loath to accept that the British Raj was cast in stone. It was only with the expansion and consolidation of the empire and its supremacist culture that suspicion of and aversion to Hindus gained currency. For Sir Lepel Griffin, the blimpish Governor of Punjab, the prospect of Indian self-determination (which he attributed to the machinations of ‘Bengali Baboo’ agitators) was as distasteful as the suffragette call back home in Britain.

India’s democratic and pluralist culture took shape in the 19th century. Rammohun Roy, Iswar Chandra Vidyasagar, the Tagores, Keshub Sen and Vivekananda in Bengal and such kindred spirits in the west of the country as MG Ranade, Gopal Krishna Gokhale and many others established the Servants of India Society. Mahatma Gandhi was a social reformer even as he became his country’s foremost liberator from British colonial rule, and Jawaharal Nehru took this forward after independence.

British Imperialism, fearful of the loss of power through an anathemised partnership, made its Faustian pact with the All-India Muslim League. Theirs was a poisoned chalice, of which Pakistan today is the emblem.

[Hauma Hamiddha]

Is this fellow Johann from that notorious forum? I think like in the past he might be representing his country and obfuscating matters so that the heathens do not get the drift. The idea of the mlechCha-s in the guise of impartiality and education is to confuse the heathens.

[Guest]

<b>Colonial loot, impoverished India, Industrial revolution</b>

1. British rule in India condemned by the British themselves by Indian National Party (1915).

Source: http://ia311307.us.archive.org/1/items/bri...inind00indi.pdf

2. "Prosperous" British India by William Digby (1901)

Source: https://www.yousendit.com/download/ZW9CT...SHcwTVE9PQ

Poverty and UnBritish rule in India by Dadabhai Naoroji (1901)



Source: http://www.yousendit.com/download/ZW9CTX...RmJ2Wmc9PQ

These three well-evidenced reports document the crime by a colonial regime impoverishing India and financing an industrial revolution using the loot of India's wealth.

It is time to claim reparations from the legatees of the colonial regime and institute an International Crimes Tribunal -- on the lines of a War Crimes Tribunal -- to enforce the international law to compensate India.

From a book overview of Angus Madison’s The world economy: a millennial perspective (2001):

“Angus Maddison provides a comprehensive view of the growth and levels of world population since the year 1000. In this period, world population rose 22-fold, while per capita gross domestic product increased 13-fold and world GDP nearly 300-fold. The biggest gains occurred in the wealthy regions of today (Western Europe, North America, Australasia and Japan). The gap between the world leader, the United States and the poorest region, Africa, is now 20 to 1. In the year 1000, today's wealthiest countries were poorer than Asia and Africa.The book has several objectives. The first is a pioneering effort to quantify the economic performance of nations over the very long term. The second is to identify the forces which explain the success of the wealthy countries and explore the obstacles, which hindered advance in regions which lagged behind. The third is to scrutinize the interaction between the rich and the rest to assess the degree to which this relationship was exploitative.”

Maddison presents the British ‘drain’ on India, 1868-1930 as follows:

British colonial ‘drain’ of India’s wealth


Indian export surrplus as% of Indian Net domestic product
Indian export surplus as% of British Net domestic product

1868-72
1.0
1.3

1911-15
1.3
1.2

1926-30
0.9
0.9


Source: Table 2-21b Maddison (1989, pp. 647-8 with revision of Indian/British income ratio. The ‘drain (i.e. the colonial burden as measured by the trade surplus of the colony) figures prominently in the literature of Indian nationalism, beginning with Naoroji in the 1870s (see Naoroji- 1901).

India’s % share of World GDP, 0-1998

Year

1500
1700
1913
1998

United Kingdom

1.1
2.9
8.3
3.3

Total Western Europe

17.9
22.5
33.5
20.6

USA

0.3
0.1
19.1
21.9

India
32.9 in 0 CE
28.9
24.4
7.6
5.0


Source: Table B-20 (Maddison, 2001, p.263)

The impoverishment of India is dramatic between 1700 and 1913. More than a century after its demise, the legacy of the East India Company continues to haunt both Europe and Asia. India's triple anniversaries in 2007 (1. anniversary of Plassey, 2. anniversary of the ‘war of independence’ (mutiny as the British called it) and 3. anniversary of independence) should be the occasion for a reckoning with this pioneering corporate giant, argues Nick Robins in his book, ‘The Corporation that changed the world: how the East India company shaped the modern multinational’ (Pluto Books, 2006).

A ‘corporate giant’ with the connivance and direct involvement of United Kingdom impoverished India in less than 300 years.

“…a corporation that has been defunct for more than a century, Britain's East India Company is undergoing something of a comeback. The onset of globalisation has prompted a resurgence of interest in what the Victorian historian Thomas Babington Macaulay once described as "the greatest corporation in the world". Founded in 1600 by a marginal island state in northwest Europe to gain seaborne access to Asia's luxury trade, the London-based company evolved to become the dominant commercial power in the east. The turning point came in 1757, when one of its more unscrupulous executives, Robert Clive, deployed the company's private army, a healthy dose of bribes and ingenious fraud to defeat the nawab (prince) of Bengal at the battle of Plassey.”

http://www.opendemocracy.net/globalization...ompany_3899.jsp

kalyanaraman

[Guest]

William Digby, 1901, Prosperous British India: a revelation from official records, London, T. Fisher Unwin
http://tinyurl.com/m2othh (Google book for full download 646 pages).

[acharya]

http://www.opendemocracy.net/theme_7-corpo...article_904.jsp

Loot: in search of the East India Company
Nick Robins, 22 - 01 - 2003
Concerns about corporate power and responsibility are as old as the corporation itself. In this account of the East India Company, the world's first transnational corporation, Nick Robins argues that an unholy alliance between British government, military and commerce held India in slavery, reversed the flow of trade and cultural influence forever between the East and West and then sunk almost without trace under the weight of colonial guilt.
22 - 01 - 2003


Mid nineteenth century view of Lahore, home to one of the Emperor's courts during the Mughal period. Panoramic scroll by an Indian artist. Or.11186
© British Library

Ours is a corporate age. Yet, amid the fertile arguments on how to tame and transform today's corporations, there is a curious absence, a sense that the current era of business dominance is somehow unique. For there was a time when corporations really ruled the world, and among the commercial dinosaurs that once straddled the globe, Britain's East India Company looms large. At its height, the Company ruled over a fifth of the world's people, generated a revenue greater than the whole of Britain and commanded a private army a quarter of a million strong.

Although it started out as a speculative vehicle to import precious spices from the East Indies – modern-day Indonesia – the Company grew to fame and fortune by trading with and then conquering India. And for many Indians, it was the Company's plunder that first de-industrialised their country and then provided the finance that fuelled Britain's own industrial revolution. In essence, the Honourable East India Company found India rich and left it poor.