"“Ronald Ross, “ writes Mr. Brailford, “has drawn a mordant picture of a class of children, all with enlarged spleens, struggling to learn by rote a table of the Plantagenet Kings.”
Culturally the net effect of the British occupation has been aptly summed up by Graham Wallas in Human Society:
It is neither our aim nor desire to substitute the English language for the vernacular dialects of the country. We have always been the most sensible of the importance of the use of the languages which alone are understood by the great mass of the population. These languages, and not English, have been put by us in the place of Persian in the administration of justice, and in the intercourse between the officers of Government and the people. It is indispensible, therefore, that in any general system of education the study of them should be assiduously attended to........"History of Education in the Madras Presidency" says that the Despatch of 1854 was "called the Magna Carta of English education in India". (I think here English means British rather than the language.) Quite a different tone from Macaulay; though historians note that the Company's purpose, just as in 1835, was still to reduce the Company's labor costs by being able to substitute cheaper Indians for more expensive Englishmen, if only Indians had the qualifications.
In any general system of education, the English language should be taught where there is a demand for it; but such instruction should always be combined with a careful attention to the study of the vernacular language of the district, and with such general instruction as can be conveyed through that language.....We look therefore, to the English language and to the vernacular languages of India, together as the media for the diffusion of European knowledge.....
"Calcutta had, by 1830, an influential group of rationalists who were notorious for their total rejection of the indigenous society and who accepted in its place everything Western, including Christianity. It is only apt that they symbolized their acceptance of the West with a meal which included beef. Raja Ram Mohan Roy was too deeply committed to his religion, culture and country to have any sympathy with the Occidentalists and he founded in 1828 the Brahmo Samaj....."The cited authority for the existence of the group of rationalists mentioned above is the historian Percival Spear.
Macaulay's unique imperial discourse found in his "Minute" can be better understood by exploring Macaulay as an historian. His most famous historical writing was his History of England published in 1848. Even though this came after the "Minute on Education," the History was a process and a goal of Macaulay during his time in India. His knowledge and opinions of England combined with his experiences of empire in India influenced Macaulay's overall view of history and the role it should play in every nation as well as answering why England was so exceptional compared to every nation. By understanding Macaulay's opinions on England and its history, it becomes clear why he so fiercely advocated for Anglicist reform in the "Minute".
At that "first," even "originary" moment of contact between "modern" India and Europe, Rammohun Roy, in his address to Lord Amherst, pleaded for "a more liberal and enlightened system of instruction, embracing mathematics, natural philosophy, chemistry and anatomy, with other useful sciences," (Tradition Modernity & Svaraj 98). But in the process, Rammohun also denigrated "Byakjurun," "Vedant," "Meemangsa," and "Nyaya Shastra." Whether such self-ridicule was tactical or serious is not clear. To all appearances, Indians wished to welcome modernity, even as they wished not to give up their traditions entirely. The earliest case of this attempted synthesis is Rammohun himself, with his Brahmo Samaj, a sort of modernized version of Vedanta.
Yet, when Thomas Babington Macaulay wrote his Minute of 2 February 1835 in favour of English education, he made ample use of Rammohun's address to Lord Amherst: "I am quite ready to take the Oriental learning at the valuation of the Orientalists themselves. I have never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia" (ibid 101). In places, his text echoes the very words of Rammohun, as when he cites the procedures laid down for expiating the sin of killing a goat (106), as an example of the uselessness of traditional Indian knowledge.However, perusing "The Life and Letters of Raja Rammohun Roy" (edited by Sophia Dobson Collet, Calcutta, 1914", one finds otherwise.
By 1931 the total capital expenditure by the State on railways stood at nearly £600,000,000. According to Sir John Strachye's Finance and Public Works of India the railways built by State enterprise between 1869 and 1881 involved a total outlay of £26,689,000. The rest of the railways were, in the great majority of cases, built by Guaranteed Companies, most of them having since been purchased by the Government.
The nature of the contracts by which these Guaranteed Companies built Indian railways is probably unique in the history of financial operations. The Company would be guaranteed an interest on its capital by the Indian Government at a rate which was itself excessive when compared with the prevailing market rates. Free land would be granted by the Government thus obviating the principal difficulty with which the railway speculator usually has to contend. If and when the railway showed a profit, that profit was the property of the Company; but when there was a loss the Company's dividends would be paid from the Indian taxes. Thus with the minimum of cost to themselves, a group of financiers could, without any of the normal risks of speculation, invest their capital with the certainty of a minimum dividend and the hope of a surplus. The people of India, who were their sleeping partners in this astonishing arrangement were compelled to balance the shareholder's losses and to produce, in addition, substantial dividends for them out of their taxes.The result, as per British government committees' own reports, is that the government in India found that it itself could construct railway lines at £4000 per mile in identical terrain that the private parties spent £18,000 per mile.
"Macaulay was in the long line of British statesmen who found in the administration of India a cure for their financial difficulties. "No doubt prudential motives", wrote H. H. Milman, " and those of no ungenerous prudence, influenced his determination. By a few years of economy, careful but not illiberal, he might make a provision for his future life." (Milman's biographical note to Macaulay's History of England.) He had formerly earned only £200 a year and went to India on account of his father's failure in business.
Now, with reference to education, so far as could be gathered from the Returns before the House—he had sought to obtain Returns of a more specific character, but to no purpose, having received the usual answer in these matters, that there was no time for preparing them—but from the Returns they had before them he found that while the Government had overthrown almost entirely the native education that had subsisted throughout the country so universally that a schoolmaster was as regular a feature in every village as the "potail" or head man, it had done next to nothing to supply the deficiency which had been created, or to substitute a better system.No doubt Macaulay and Niall Ferguson and the like would think that the 66,000£ was adequate, and that displacing the universal native education system in favor of a vacuum was greatly civilizing for India. Of course, to balance this imposed universal illiteracy they abolished Sati, and that justifies it all for the benighted latter day disciples of such Apostles of Empire.
Out of a population of 100,000,000 natives we instructed but 25,000 children; out of a gross revenue of 29,000,000 £ sterling, extracted from that population, we spent but 66,000£ in their education. In India, let it be borne in mind, the people were not in the position with regard to providing for their own education which the people of this country enjoyed, and the education which they had provided themselves with, the Government had taken from them, supplying no adequate system in its place. The people of India were in a state of poverty, and of decay, unexampled in the annals of the country under their native rulers. From their poverty the Government wrung a gross revenue of more than 29,000,000£ sterling, and out of that 29,000,000£, returned to them 66,000£ per annum for the purposes of education!
....Mr. Marshman was a gentleman who was well known as possessing a considerable amount of information on Indian affairs, and had, he presumed, come over on purpose to give his evidence on the subject. He was editor of a newspaper which was generally considered throughout India to be the organ of the Government; and in that newspaper, the Friend of India, bearing date 1st April, 1852, the following statement appeared:—
No one has over attempted to contradict the fact that the condition of the Bengal peasantry is almost as wretched and degraded as it is possible to conceive—living in the most miserable hovels, scarcely fit for a dog-kennel, covered with tattered rags, and unable, in too many instances, to procure more than a single meal a day for himself and family. The Bengal ryot knows nothing of the most ordinary comforts of life. We speak without exaggeration when we affirm, that if the real condition of those who raise the harvest, which yields between 3,000,000£ and 4,000,000£ a year, was fully known, it would make the ears of one who heard thereof tingle.
It had been said that in the Bengal Presidency the natives were in a better condition than in the other Presidencies; and he recollected that when he served on the Cotton Committee, the evidence taken before it was confined to the Bombay and Madras Presidencies, and it was then said that if evidence had been taken about the Bengal Presidency it would have appeared that the condition of the natives was better; but he believed that it was very much the same in all the Presidencies. He must say that it was his belief that if a country were found possessing a most fertile soil, and capable of bearing every variety of production, and that, notwithstanding, the people were in a
state of extreme destitution and suffering, the chances were that there was some fundamental error in the government of that country.
"Miss Mayo tells us that Hindu mothers feed opium to their children....She does not tell us (though she must have known) that women drug their children because the mothers must abandon them every day to go to work in the factories. She does not tell us that the opium is grown only by the Government; and is sold exclusively by the Government; that its sale, like the sale of drink through saloons, is carried on despite the protest of the Nationalist Congress.... She does not tell us that Burma excluded opium by law until the British came, and is now overrun with it;[74] that the British distributed it free in Burma to create a demand for it; that whereas the traffic has been stopped in the Philippines, England has refused at one World Opium Conference after another to abandon it in India; that the Report of the Government Retrenchment Commission of 1925 emphasized 'the importance of safeguarding opium sales as an important source of revenue', and recommended 'no further reduction'; that when Gandhi, by a peaceful anti-opium campaign in Assam had reduced the consumption of the drug there by one-half, the Government put a stop to his labours and gaoled fourty-four of his aides."
For Macaulay also, education was only a prelude to proselytization, and in 1836, soon after the acceptance of the Minute, he wrote:PS: My mother's kitchen, January 2013:
No Hindu, who has received an English education, ever remains sincerely attached to his religion. Some continue to profess it as a matter of policy, but many profess themselves pure Deists and some embrace Christianity. It is my firm belief that if our plans of education are followed up, there will not be a single idolater among the respectable classes in Bengal thirty years hence. And this will be affected without any effort to proselytize; without the smallest interference in their religious liberty; merely by the operation of knowledge and reflection.
[On 29 March 1945, Viceroy Wavell met Prime Minister Churchill in London]. A record of this meeting is unavailable. But one can get some idea of what was discussed from a cryptic entry made by the viceroy in his diary that night: The PM then launched into a long jeremiad about India which lasted for about forty minutes. He seems to favour partition of India into Pakistan, Hindustan and Princestan.The British imperialists definitely played a role in the partition of India, and we know of the support, e.g., Churchill gave Hyderabad; and the more successful support he gave to Jinnah. Were it up to them, India would not even have had the unity it now has. Indian unity was thus not a consequence desired by the imperialists, and any claim of it as a benefit of the Empire is ludicrous. Let us be clear - the unity of India owes to the English who were dissolving the Empire, not those who would have maintained it.
....The Hindoo appears a being nearly limited to mere animal functions, and even in them indifferent. Their proficiency and skill in the several lines of occupation to which they are restricted, are little more than the dexterity which any animal with similar conformation, but with no higher intellect than a dog, an elephant or a monkey, might be supposed capable of attaining.
What we’re seeing now is the result of the political class’ double failure; not only did they fail to indoctrinate the rest of India with appropriately English values, they also failed to find an alternate, more inclusive paradigm for discussing politics.
I agree with Dhume’s sentiment here. What I find surprising, however, is its unparalleled laziness. There are certainly instances in which looking at American history can help illuminate current events in India. Take America’s treatment of Native American in the 19th century and the Adivasis’ current plight in India, for example. Or maybe we use the Teapot Dome scandal in order to come to a better understanding of the 2g spectrum scandal. What we can’t and SHOULD NOT do is rely on the evolution of democratic institutions in America to find and prescribe solutions for India’s own political woes.
The term “middle class” itself cannot be bandied about in such a manner, for it implies not only a position within a particular society, but an ethos endemic to that class. For what its worth, applying the label to the tea party is itself a tenuous claim; evidence indicates that, on the contrary, tea party voters are richer and indeed better educated than your average American. And in regards to the “tea party effect,” as Dhume would puts it, well, it’s not much of an effect at all. Its band of crazies are tolerated by the GOP only insofar as they bring more voters into the fold and the Democrats, despite their insistence to the contrary, rely the tea party for it makes their own party more palatable to disgruntled progressives. But that’s beside the point, for Dhume has opted for shallow supposition in lieu of an honest attempt at understanding India’s current political situation.
I try not to have opinions on books I haven't read at least a little of.Excellent point. Macaulay had an opinion of an entire literature. Actually, more than one literature, because he commented on both Sanskrit and Arabic in his infamous minute of 1835.
I have no knowledge of either Sanscrit or Arabic. But I have done what I could to form a correct estimate of their value. I have read translations of the most celebrated Arabic and Sanscrit works. I have conversed, both here and at home, with men distinguished by their proficiency in the Eastern tongues. I am quite ready to take the oriental learning at the valuation of the orientalists themselves. I have never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.Fine, Macaulay claims to have read translations of the most celebrated Arabic and Sanskrit works, and all seems well. The question arises, which translations of which works?
"The earliest public institution for the teaching of English in India was perhaps the Hindu College of Calcutta, established in 1819. It owed its origin to a discussion at the Atmiya Sabha of Rammohun Roy in 1815." - The Life and Letters of Raja Rammohun Roy, edited by Sophia Dobson Collet, (1914)The college was founded by David Hare (a watchmaker in Calcutta, described by Dr. Alexander Duff to the British House of Commons in 1853 as "an ordinary illiterate man,....but...a man of great energy and strong practical sense") and Rammohun Roy.
Matters are quite different when it comes to the third kind of wrongness: making or insinuating false claims about readily checkable facts. The case in point, of course, is Ferguson’s attempt to mislead readers into believing that the CBO had concluded that Obamacare increases the deficit. This was unethical on his part – but Newsweek is also at fault, because this is the sort of thing it could and should have refused to publish.The first two types of wrongness Krugman lists are (1) wrong opinions, and (2) conceptual errors.
40. DISCUSSION WITH A CAPITALIST
[Before December 20, 1928]
God forbid that India should ever take to industrialism after the manner of the West. The economic imperialism of a single tiny island kingdom (England) is today keeping the world in chains. If an entire nation of 300 millions took to similar economic exploitation, it would strip the world bare like locusts. Unless the capitalists of India help to avert that tragedy by becoming trustees of the welfare of the masses and by devoting their talents not to amassing wealth for themselves but to the service of the masses in an altruistic spirit, they will end either by destroying the masses or being destroyed by them.
Young India, 20-12-1928So Gandhi is "anti-modern". He associated imperialism with industrialism (given that the Industrial Revolution might have been greatly delayed but for the subjugation of India, that may not be so off the mark.) Today, industrialism is no longer associated with imperialism, but is nonetheless implicated in a heavy burden on the environment.
The state Senate is split 20-20 between Republicans and Democrats. On Monday, while state Sen. Henry Marsh (D) — a 79-year-old civil rights veteran— was reportedly in Washington to attend President Obama’s second inaugural, GOP senators forced through a mid-term redistricting plan that Democrats say will make it easier for Republicans to gain a majority.
Arguing that intellectual movements, such as deconstruction, postsecular theory, and political theology, have different implications for cultures and societies that live with the debilitating effects of past imperialisms, Arvind Mandair unsettles the politics of knowledge construction in which the category of "religion" continues to be central. Through a case study of Sikhism, he launches an extended critique of religion as a cultural universal. At the same time, he presents a portrait of how certain aspects of Sikh tradition were reinvented as "religion" during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
India's imperial elite subtly recast Sikh tradition as a sui generis religion, which robbed its teachings of their political force. In turn, Sikhs began to define themselves as a "nation" and a "world religion" that was separate from, but parallel to, the rise of the Indian state and global Hinduism. Rather than investigate these processes in isolation from Europe, Mandair shifts the focus closer to the political history of ideas, thereby recovering part of Europe's repressed colonial memory.
Mandair rethinks the intersection of religion and the secular in discourses such as history of religions, postcolonial theory, and recent continental philosophy. Though seemingly unconnected, these discourses are shown to be linked to a philosophy of "generalized translation" that emerged as a key conceptual matrix in the colonial encounter between India and the West. In this riveting study, Mandair demonstrates how this philosophy of translation continues to influence the repetitions of religion and identity politics in the lives of South Asians, and the way the academy, state, and media have analyzed such phenomena.
All these causes rendered the Muhammadans more uneasy than the Hindus. The reason of this, I take to be that Hindu faith consists rather in the practice of long-established rites and forms, than in the study of doctrine. The Hindus recognise no canons and laws, or appeals to the heart and conscience. Their creed does not admit of such things. Hence it is that they are exceedingly indifferent about speculative doctrine. They insist upon nothing excepting the strict observance of their old rites, and of their modes of eating and drinking. It does not annoy or grieve them to see such rites and observances as they consider necessary, disregarded by other men.Syed Ahmed Khan notes the indifference of Hindus to doctrine, canons and laws, and he mentions that Muslims consider their religion to be true; by absence of mention, he perhaps thinks Hindus are indifferent to the truth of their "religion" (my scare quotes). These remarks are interesting in the context of the Balu's theory of religion.
Muhammadans, on the contrary, looking upon the tenets of their creed as necessary to Salvation and upon the neglect of them as damnation, are thoroughly well-grounded in them. They regard their religious precepts as the ordinances of God. Hence it was that the Muhammadans were more uneasy than the Hindus, and that, as might have been expected, they formed the majority of the rebels. It is wrong and impolitic on the part of a government to interfere in any way with the faith of its subjects. But of all courses, the most unjust is to hinder the study of the tenets of their religion: and especially of such an one as is heartily believed by its votaries to be true. But be this as it may, all I wish to prove is that, whatever the intentions of Government might be, matters were so managed that the people were left to stumble on in error, suspicion, and ill-will.
Born into Muslim nobility, Sir Syed earned a reputation as a distinguished scholar while working as a jurist for the British East India Company. During the Indian Rebellion of 1857, he remained loyal to the British and was noted for his actions in saving European lives. After the rebellion, he penned the booklet Asbab-e-Baghawat-e-Hind (The Causes of the Indian Mutiny) – a daring critique, at the time, of British policies that he blamed for causing the revolt.
Even the Governor-General, William Bentinck, was forced to report that “...the misery hardly finds parallel in the history of commerce. The bones of the cotton weavers are bleaching the plains of India.”Thereby improving the share of the villages in the Indian economy, and promoting equality.
In 1929, the people of India were taxed more than twice as heavily as the people of England. The percentage of taxes in India as related to the gross product, was more than double that of any other country. While most of the taxes extracted by the British went out of the country, much of the revenues extracted by Indian rulers went back to the people, with only about 5% being retained by the ruler in 1750. The actual producers got 70% back, 10% went to religious, cultural and educational projects, 7.5% to economic services and the police, another 7.5% to the army and the political aristocracy.
In addition, the government tax demand was inflexible and the British East India Company's collectors refused to make allowances for times of drought, flood or other natural disaster. The tax demand was higher than that in England at the time.Apart from beggaring the country, the class of landlords that the British created was to have a significant impact on India. The Indian National Congress was promising land reform, and that would hurt this class. The Hindu landlords had no where to go, but the Muslim landlords became supporters of the separatism of the Muslim League.
The Court of Directors on the duty of the Government to undertake works of public utility, 15 January 1812.93. In a highly improved state of society, and for a people wealthy, prosperous and far advanced in useful science, to provide the means of defence and protection is almost the sole duty of the Government. The grandest and most expensive undertakings may then with safety be left to individual enterprize or the excitement of public spirit; and the wisest policy of the sovereign is to allow his subjects to pursue their own interests in their own way, and according to their own judgment.94. A different, and in some respects an opposite duty, belongs to the sovereign of a people, poor, indolent, and ignorant. Besides providing for their external and internal security, by arms, negociation, and salutary laws, it is necessary that his government, for the purpose of producing a happy change in the character and fortunes of the nation, shall occasionally aid individuals with advances of capital, and take upon itself the construction and maintenance of works of great public utility.95. We find that the sovereigns of India have long been in the practice, not only of advancing money to the cultivators and weavers, with the view of promoting the agriculture and manufacture of the country, but of fencing the country against sudden and destructive inundations, and of supplying the land in the dry season with the means of artificial irrigation. The task of banking the rivers, of constructing and upholding tanks and reservoirs, has thus, by established usage, become a duty of the Government.96. The advantages which must result to agriculture from such constructions are too obvious to require development, and as long as the revenue of Government consisted in a fixed proportion of the produce of the soil, it was clearly in its interest to continue and extend the system of active vigilance and precaution, by which the productive powers of the land could be best protected and secured.97. Under the permanent settlement, we have fixed to perpetuity our demand on the land, without renouncing the obligation of continuing our care of what in Bengal is called the poolbundy, and in the southern parts of India, of the tanks and watercourses. The consequence of this arrangement is, either that the whole advantage of these mounds, reservoirs and canals, is ceded to the Zamindars, while all the trouble and expense of upholding them and keeping them in repair is defrayed by the Government, or that Government is exposed to the temptation of relaxing its zeal, and moderating its disbursements on account of works of great public utility, but in the preservation and extension of which it has no direct nor immediate interest.98. If, as has been shewn, a duty of this nature be imposed upon the Government of India, by ancient usage as well as by the total inability of the people to perform it with their own scanty means, it will, we think, be difficult to reject the conclusion, that the sovereign has a right to indemnity for the expense incurred in the undertaking, that the certainty of obtaining such indemnity can alone furnish security for the duty being performed as it ought to be; and therefore that a settlement of the land, under which this indemnity would always be within the reach of Government, is preferable to one under which all prospect of compensation is excluded.99. To a Government taking an interest in the improvement of the country, with a view to the increase of its own revenue, it might be a further subject of consideration, whether more could not be done than has hitherto been attempted towards bettering the system of Indian agriculture.
Under British rule, the village economy’s share of total after-tax income actually rose from 45 per cent to 54 per cent. Since that sector represented around three-quarters of the entire population, there can therefore be little doubt that British rule reduced inequality in India.The collapse of urban centers had nothing to do with the increased share of the villages in the economy? And were the villagers really better off?
(Wiki) By 1780 Warren Hastings, the Company's Governor-General of India, had brought all salt manufacture in the Bengal Presidency under Company control. This allowed him to increase the ancient salt tax in Bengal from 0.3 rupees per maund (37 kg) to 3.25 rupees per maund by 1788, a rate that it remained at until 1879. This brought in a huge amount of revenue for the company, amounting to 6,257,470 rupees for the 1784–85 financial year, at the cost of the Indian consumer, who would have to expend around 2 rupees per year (2 months' income for a labourer) to provide salt for his family.Of course, it is a great British benefit to Indian laborers to make them pay 2 months of income just for salt. Niall Ferguson seems to have forgotten how much the issue resonated, when Gandhi conducted his Dandi Salt March in 1930, to protest the British tax on salt. Certainly it was a major highlight of Attenborough's movie, so Niall Ferguson must have missed that.
Just five years after the Company secured control over Bengal in 1765, revenues from the land tax had already tripled, beggaring the people. These conditions helped to turn one of Bengal's periodic droughts in 1769 into a full-blown famine. Today, the scale of the disaster inflicted on the people of Bengal is difficult to comprehend. An estimated 10 million people – or one-third of the population – died, transforming India's granary into a 'jungle inhabited only by wild beasts'. But rather than organise relief efforts to meet the needs of the starving, the Company actually increased tax collection during the famine [similar policies were applied again more than a hundred years later by the government of British India - see Present Hunger, Past Ghosts]and
Oxford tells us: (see this also)Henry and Eleanor Sidgwick set up Newnham College, Cambridge, in 1880. Mary Hamilton wrote about her experience at Newnham College in the early 1900s in her book, Remembering Good Friends.
Eleanor Sidgwick and Henry Sidgwick had, throughout their life together, chosen to give their time to college. She had renounced mathematical research of a very high order in order to come and assist Miss Clough in the early days. Early in their married life, which was a perfect partnership, they gave up their own home to come and live in Newnham… They enjoyed the triumph of 1881 in the passing of the Senate of the Graces admitting women to the right of sitting for Tripos examinations and being placed on the lists, the struggle for full recognition - the granting of degrees, and admission to membership of the University was entering on a long, slow phase, with no end in sight. (It was in fact to take forty years and a world war to persuade the authorities to grant degrees to women.)
Women were not admitted to membership of the University until 1920, although they had been allowed to sit some University examinations and attend lectures for over forty years by that date. It was thanks to individual initiatives, and the pioneering work of the Association for Promoting the Higher Education of Women (AEW) that women's colleges came to be established in Oxford. Lady Margaret Hall and Somerville opened in 1879, followed by St Hugh's in 1886 and St Hilda's in 1893. St Anne's, which in 1952 was the last of the women's colleges to be incorporated by Royal Charter, originated as the Society of Oxford Home Students, catering for women students who lived with private families in Oxford while attending courses organised by the AEW. The five women's societies were granted full collegiate status in 1959.
On 9 February 1883, the Law Member of the Government of India, C.P. Ilbert, introduced a bill in the Legislative Council to amend the Code of Criminal Procedure of the Indian Penal Code. The Bill, popularly called the Ilbert Bill, proposed to give various classes of native officials in the colonial administrative service limited criminal jurisdiction over European British subjects living in the mofussil, or country towns in India. The Ilbert Bill, which was widely interpreted as a challenge to the control European capitalists exercised over sources of raw material and labour in the interiors of India, provoked a 'white mutiny' from Anglo-Indian officials and non-officials alike. The opposition secured a victory when Viceroy Lord Ripon was forced into an agreement or 'concordat' to get a modified bill passed on 25 January 1884, which undermined the original principle of the Ilbert Bill. Although the new Act accorded native magistrates criminal jurisdiction over European British subjects in the mofussils, the special legal status of European British subjects was preserved. The European British subjects in the mofussils won the right to demand trial by jury of whom at least half were European British subjects or Americans.Mrinalini Sinha (in the pages visible in Google books) gives extensive quotes about how opponents to the Bill "raised the cry of danger to European women" and how they expressed their disdain of native civil servants, describing them as effeminate. She tells us that "The celebrated Anglo-Indian writer Rudyard Kipling, who was in India during the Ilbert Bill controversy, considered the Bill even years later as a measure that made white women more vulnerable to the dangers posed by native men."
English women who opposed the bill further argued that Bengali women, who they stereotyped as "ignorant", are neglected by their men, and that Bengali babu should therefore not be given the right to judge cases involving English women. Bengali women who supported the bill responded by claiming that they were more educated than the English women opposed to the bill, and pointed out that more Indian women had academic degrees than British women did at the time, alluding to the fact that the University of Calcutta became one of the first universities to admit female graduates to its degree programmes in 1878, before any of the British universities had later done the same.These aside, I should mention with regard to the timeline: Bankin Chandra Chatterjee (Wiki) published his highly influential Anandmath in 1882. Modern India's national song is from that novel. The Ilbert Bill is only one of several tributaries flowing into the river of the independence movement.
He had not been averse to my atheism nor did his god scare me away. He appreciated a principle far more for its efficacy than for its mere academic or intellectual considerations. His primary concern was humanity. On account of this deep concern, he could proclaim boldly: "I can neither say my theism is right, nor your atheism is wrong." He was not a fanatic to quarrel about method, nor was he a poet to praise the ideal; but he was a prophet who perceived the direction. He never denounced anything that contributed the commonweal; on the other hand, he helped it, in spite of the wide divergence between its method and his. His conception of god, as well as his estimation of atheism appear to me to be based on this essentially humanitarian consideration.
Besides, he was pre-eminently a practical man. As a practical man, he took any situation as it obtained with all its paradoxes. He never sat down to scan and to sift its contradictions intellectually; but he moved the whole situation towards the ideal of happiness for all mankind. He condemned nothing beforehand lest a good cause should be lost by bad judgement. He only let things drop when they could not bear the strain of progress. Practice was his test of fitness. He subordinated intellectual and sentimental considerations to practical purposes. He tested a system of medicine by the cure it effected; he tested the advocate of a cause by the work he turned out; he allowed me to dissect a frog when it served a practical purpose.
Eventually, the colonial inferiority complex of the nineteenth-century Hindu reformers inspired a massive attempt to transform the native traditions into a Hindu theism–Protestant theology dressed up in Hindu garb. In my analysis, what happens today is a replay of those events....The Hindus will accept the terms of description as fixed by the western culture, just like the nineteenth-century Hindu reformers succumbed to the colonial image of the Indian culture.
Central to Webster's worldview was the work of Sir Albert Howard, the father of the organic farming movement. Howard, Britain's imperial economic botanist in India in the early 1900s, studied the farming practices of India's peasants and wrote two books based on his observations: An Agricultural Testament and The Soil and Health. He was knighted for his work in 1935.
For Howard, successful farming and food production - healthy plants, animals and people - required balance. Any agricultural enterprise must achieve a state of equilibrium that mimics nature if it is to survive and prosper.....
Nehru was shocked to learn that his Mahatma was quite ready to replace him as premier with the Quaid-i-Azam......But Nehru had tasted the cup of power too long to offer its nectar to anyone else - last of all to that "mediocre lawyer", the "reactionary-Muslim Baron of Malabar Hill" as so many good Congress leaders thought of Jinnah.Or for instance, the supposed snub Gandhi delivered to Jinnah in 1915. Taking Wolpert seriously at that point would obscure the real Gandhi-Jinnah difference. Gandhi was for mass participation in politics. Jinnah was republican in the sense of many of the American founding fathers, namely the affairs of the nation and politics were to be run by a wealthy, educated class only.
Bob received excellent performance reviews of his "clean, well written" coding. He had even been noted as "the best developer in the building."Bob was fired. Bob should instead be commended. His outsourcing overhead is lower than the usual outsourcing, and without the long chain of managers in between; and he got good code out it, which is just as rare.
As Pinto explicates, "The principal theme of Hind Swaraj is the moral inadequacy of western civilization, especially its industrialism, as the model for free India."Gandhi could not have known about global warming, but it is true, as we know today: if Indians seek and achieve living like the West, it means ecological catastrophe, not just of India, but for the world. Industrialism has to reform its basis or else people have to reform their ideas of what it means to live well.
India could have won freedom about ten years earlier than it did through some violence against the British. But we were not only fighting the British, but also our own causes of poverty, unemployment, and untouchability. A nation becoming free after a violent struggle is bound to capture power in few hands and the suffering of India's large masses would not have changed if we became free by violent means. I wanted people of India to partner with the English people after independence, so a peaceful transfer of power was necessary.PS: This appears to be a composite statement, rather than a direct quote.
On 19 June 2006, a lengthy commentary by Johann Hari appeared in Britain's Independent, headlined "The Truth? Our Empire Killed Millions. A Reply to Niall Ferguson." Ferguson was at the time a Cambridge University educated professor teaching at (simultaneously) Harvard, Oxford, and Stanford, and the world's leading apologist for both the British and the American empires. Columnist Hari ripped his work to shreds, specifically citing Ferguson's benign portrayal of Britain's treatment of India during the 1800's. "When I criticised Ferguson for dedicating almost as much space in his revisionist history of Empire to the slaughter of 29 million people as he gives to a description of a statue of the Prince of Wales, ... he responded primarily with personal abuse."
