A British argument for Indian Unity

This is from the Times of London, November 16, 1855:

...A dominion of this sort, in which so many squares of the chessboard were British possessions, so many under British protection and so many others nominally independent, never yet preserved long its checkered character, and the influences tending to political unity are certainly not fewer or less powerful in India than elsewhere.   A community of religions, of commerce, and of arms, pervades and continually assimilates all India.  The sacred shrines of either faith are visited by pilgrims from all parts; the population follows trade wherever it goes, and our armies are recruited indifferently from all the three classes of States we have enumerated.   When this is the case it is quite impossible that any disorder should continue to be local.  There are no "party walls" between the States, and a conflagration, once lit, is sure to spread from one to another.   Hence there must be a unity either of order or of disorder.

{Subsequently, the case for the annexation of Oude is made.}

Oude, 1855

Long ago, at one of the peak times of controversy over the Ramjanmabhoomi/Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, I discovered one of the joys of the full-fledged American university libraries, and found there news-reports from a previous flare-up.

This battle was over the Hanumangarhi site. The news reports are from the Times of London, and are in the order of publication (remember, news and correspondence traveled much slower in those days.)

One should note that the British were eyeing the province Awadh or Oude as they spelled it,  which included Ayodhya and its sister town Faizabad for annexation, and they did annex it in 1856. 

About Dunkirk

Sunny Singh writes in the Guardian:

What a surprise that Nigel Farage has endorsed the new fantasy-disguised-as-historical war film, Dunkirk. Christopher Nolan’s movie is an inadvertently timely, thinly veiled Brexiteer fantasy in which plucky Britons heroically retreat from the dangerous shores of Europe. Most importantly, it pushes the narrative that it was Britain as it exists today – and not the one with a global empire – that stood alone against the “European peril”.

To do so, it erases the Royal Indian Army Services Corp companies, which were not only on the beach, but tasked with transporting supplies over terrain that was inaccessible for the British Expeditionary Force’s motorised transport companies. It also ignores the fact that by 1938, lascars – mostly from South Asia and East Africa – counted for one of four crewmen on British merchant vessels, and thus participated in large numbers in the evacuation.

 .....

Perhaps Nolan chose to follow the example of the original allies in the second world war who staged a white-only liberation of Paris even though 65% of the Free French Army troops were from West Africa. 

......

All storytellers – and novelists, poets, journalists, and filmmakers are, ultimately, just that – know the power we hold. Stories can dehumanise, demonise and erase. Such stories are essential to pave the way for physical and material violence against those we learn to hate. But stories are also the only means of humanising those deemed inhuman; to create pity, compassion, sympathy, even love for those who are strange and strangers. Stories decide the difference between life and death. And that is why Dunkirk – and indeed any story – is never just a story.

The Invariant British Parliament

The House of Lords, today.

The White Man’s burden weighs so heavily in the House of Lords.

 The House of Commons, 1813.  (the burden hadn't yet been invented by Kipling).

Pretty much the same stuff, just now some Sepoys have been added to the mix that weren't there in 1813.

Will Durant: "...I had come upon the greatest crime in all history"

Previously mentioned on these pages was William Jennings Bryan's assessment of the British rule of India, written around 1905-06:

While he has boasted of bring peace to the living he has led millions to the peace of the grave;  while he has dwelt upon order established between warring troops he has impoverished the country by legalized pillage.   Pillage is a strong word, but no refinement of language can purge the present system of its iniquity.

About twenty-five years later, Will Durant,  the American writer, historian and philosopher, winner of a Pulitzer Prize, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, made his assessment of the British Raj, and wrote a book - The Case for India, published in 1930.   The foreword to his book is reproduced below.

Reliable sources tell me that per honorable men like Brutus, the reproduction of such sentiments today amounts to hate speech.  Well, I am glad to be spewing hate speech in the company of Bryan and Durant.   

 

I repeat myself - Britain should be shorn of its "Great", and the United Kingdom should dissolve and  vanish into the pages of history -- they do not deserve to continue any more than the German National Socialists.   At best they perpetrated the second greatest crime in history (Will Durant wrote his words before Hitler ascended to power).   If this is hate speech, then "Hate Speech Zindabad!".

Will Durant – The Case for India (1930)

A Note To The Reader

I went to India to help myself visualize a people whose cultural history I had been studying for The Story of Civilization. I did not expect to be attracted by the Hindus, or that Ishould be swept into a passionate interest in Indian politics. I merely hoped to add a little to my material, to look with my own eyes upon certain works of art, and then to return to my historical studies, forgetting this contemporary world.

But I saw such things in India as made me feel that study and writing were frivolous things in the presence of a people– one-fifth of the human race – suffering poverty and oppression bitterer than any to be found elsewhere on the earth. I was horrified. I had not thought it possible that any government could allow its subjects to sink to such misery.

I came away resolved to study living India as well as the India with the brilliant past; to learn more of this unique Revolution that fought with suffering accepted but never returned; to read the Gandhi of today as well as the Buddha of long ago.

And the more I read the more I was filled with astonishment and indignation at the apparently conscious and deliberate bleeding of India by England throughout a hundred and fifty years. I began to feel that I had come upon the greatest crime in all history.

And so I ask the reader's permission to abandon for a while my researches into the past, so that I may stand up and say my word for India. I know how weak words are in the face of guns and blood; how irrelevant mere truth and decency appear beside the might of empires and gold. But if even one Hindu, fighting for freedom far off there on the other side of the globe, shall hear this call of mine and be a trifle comforted, then these months of work on this little book will seem sweet to me. For I know of nothing in the world that I would rather do today than to be of help to India.

WILL DURANT

October 1, 1930

Note: This book has been written without the knowledge or co-operation, in any form, of any Hindu, or of any person acting for India.

More on the Bengal famine of 1770

The East India Company took over the taxation of Bengal in 1765.  There ensued the great famine of 1770.  10 million people -- one-third of the population -- is estimated to have perished.

Here is what Wiki says about the contributing factors:

• the widespread forced cultivation of opium (forced upon local farmers by the British East India Company as part of its strategy to export it to China) in place of local food crops

• as lands came under company control, the land tax was typically raised fivefold what it had been – from 10% to up to 50% of the value of the agricultural produce

• ordering the farmers to plant indigo instead of rice, as well as forbidding the "hoarding" of rice. {In Madhusree Mukherjee's talk she says that the custom at that time was for farmers to stock two years worth of their food consumption of grain.}

How were the British any different from Stalin or Mao, under whom enormous numbers of people starved to death?  Stalin's famine in the Ukraine killed 7 million people.  That was a quarter of the population.  Mao's great famine killed somewhere between 30 million and 45 million in China.

Ah, but Stalin forcibly collectivized the Ukrainian farms, you say.  But the East India Company extracted the Bengali farmers' entire surplus by raising taxes fivefold.   Is there a difference?  I can't really see one.

And let us remember, the era of Victorian holocausts was yet to come.  I mean, you could possibly argue that once is an accident.  But almost two hundred years of repeated such "accidents"? 

The kindest thing that can happen to the world is that Scotland breaks away from the United Kingdom, and the United Kingdom thereafter fades away into history just as the Soviet Union did.

After listening to Madhusree Mukherjee's talk, I tweeted to her (with no reply) about how could she know what she knows without becoming a revolutionary?

PS: as large portions of Bengal returned to the jungle and as labor productivity in Bengal plummeted, the British Parliament, to help alleviate the East India Company's troubles, raised the taxes on tea in America....

Madhusree Mukherjee: The Imperial Roots of Hunger

The demise of the United Kingdom is something that is to be devoutly hoped for; it was as genocidal as the Nazis. Only the fact that it won the World Wars and thus wrote our current history is the reason why it is "respectable". I predict that if India and China continue their ascent in the world and come to write the accepted version of world history, the United Kingdom will achieve its correct lowly place along with Nazi Germany, Genghis Khan's Mongols, Stalin's Soviet Union, Mao's China and so on.

The IMF and World Bank and the powers behind them will also be consigned to the same dung heap. The unthinking disciples of Adam Smith are, I hope, burning in hell.

Video has autoplay on, and so am putting it beneath the fold. [PS: Video seems to have gone kaput]

PS: sample exhibit - the East India Company took over the taxation of Bengal in 1765; in 1770 there was a famine in which 1/3rd of the population of Bengal perished - 10 million. Among the contributing factors was the forced cultivation of opium for the Chinese market.

Amitav Ghosh on the Opium Wars

From this review/interview:

Amitav Ghosh, the acclaimed 58-year-old Indian novelist, is describing his extraordinary Ibis trilogy which has just concluded with the publication of the equally stupendous Flood of Fire. A decade in the writing, this exciting, passionate and scathing account of the First Opium War deserves to stand as one of the outstanding achievements of 21st-century literature.

...
In Ghosh’s telling, English merchants’ expansionist policy of selling opium, grown in India by near-slave labour, and sold in China where there was a vast illegal market, did not simply mark the foundations of the British Empire. It signalled a new form of global trade and politics, laying the foundations of outsourcing, migrant populations and truly international foreign relations – all driven by advances in military technology and realpolitik.
...
“It’s strange that the world pays such little attention to the Opium Wars, but opium was perhaps the largest single trade of the 19th century. All the profits went to England. All the work was done by Indians. All the silver came from China which was consuming it. It was one of the most iniquitous things that has ever happened in the history of mankind.”

A quote from Claudius Buchanan on the Hindoos

Per Wiki,Claudius Buchanan (12 March 1766 – 9 February 1815) was a Scottish theologian, an ordained minister of the Church of England, and an extremely 'low church' missionary for the Church Missionary Society.

From his works, we collect this gem:

Macaulay's estimation of Ram Mohun Roy

This is from "A speech delivered at the opening of the Edinburgh Philosophical Institution on the 4th of November, 1846", by Macaulay.  This can be found in Volume 8 of The works of Lord Macaulay complete, 1897, page 380.  The speech is a toast to the literature of Great Britain which among other things, is "that literature before the light of which impious and cruel superstitions are fast taking flight on the banks of the Ganges" -  if only he had known, Macaulay could have composed an ode to the cruel fate that has dispelled the empire before dispelling those impious and cruel superstitions!  Maybe global warming will put paid to the glaciers of Tibet and thus to the Ganga, the "superstitions" live on, and Britannica turned to be an empire of tin.

Macaulay talks about men who "are haunted" "by an unreasonable fear of what they call superficial knowledge".  Knowledge, to be meaningful,  they think, must be profound.  But what little we know is very small compared to what remains to be known, and we are then always shallow.

"It is evident then that those who are afraid of superficial knowledge do not mean by superficial knowledge, knowledge which is superficial when compared with the whole quantity of truth capable of being known. For, in that sense, all human knowledge is, and always has been, and always must be, superficial.   What then is the standard?  Is it the same two years together in any country? Is it the same, at the same moment, in any two countries?  Is it not notorious that the profundity of one age is the shallowness of the next; that the profundity of one nation is the shallowness of a neighboring nation?  Ramohun Roy passed among Hindoos for a man of profound Western learning; but he would have been but a very superficial member of this institute.  Strabo was justly entitled to be called a profound geographer eighteen hundred years ago.  But a teacher of geography, who had never heard of America, would now be laughed at by the girls of a boarding-school.  What would now be thought of the greatest chemist of 1746, or of the greatest geologist of 1746? The truth is that, in all experimental science, mankind is, of necessity, constantly advancing.  Every generation, of course, has its front rank and its rear rank; but the rear rank of a later generation occupies the ground which was occupied by the front rank of a former generation."

It is evident to me that Einstein too, would be laughed at by the girls of a boarding-school, but perhaps because of his hair.  It is equally evident that what Rammohun Roy knew of Sanskrit and Arabic literature, was not considered to be knowledge of any kind.   Lastly, it does not appear to be available online, who was in the audience for this speech, except people mentioned in the footnotes to the speech itself (Lord Provost Mr. Adam Black, and Archbishop Whately) and so the above is superficial knowledge onlee.

The rebel bureaucrat: Frederick John Shore

Following once again the trail that begins in Reginald Reynolds' "The White Sahibs in India", arrive at Notes on Indian Affairs (1837) by Frederick John Shore, in two volumes, only the first of which is available in Google books.  If there is a Wiki page for Frederick John Shore,  I've missed it.  There is this out-of-print title on amazon.com, The rebel bureaucrat: Frederick John Shore (1799-1837) as critic of William Bentinck's India.  { His brother, John Shore, 1st Baron Teignmouth (1751-1834), was a governor-general of India; a friend of Sir William Jones, and a prominent member of the Clapham sect that included the Macaulays.   Per Wiki, "towards the close of 1768 he sailed for India as a writer in the East India's Company's service".   When Macaulay wrote that about his time, when a fortune such as Clive's was no longer possible, but a writer could expect to amass a fortune of £30,000, I wonder if he was thinking of Baron John Shore. }

One arrives then at the Eclectic Review, Vol VII, January-June 1840, page 304, where four works dealing with India are reviewed, the third one being Notes on Indian Affairs, by aforementioned Frederick John Shore.  It turns out to be quite a damning indictment of British rule in India.

The discretion of a critic

Once again, we draw on Reginald Reynolds, "The White Sahibs in India" — several of my posts owe to tracing sources from his footnotes— for the following: writing about what William Jennings Bryan termed as the legalized pillage of India, (and, in my opinion, that Romesh Chunder Dutt could not term so, whatever he might have believed)

Quote: (emphasis added)

There could be no more fitting conclusion to this chapter than the words of Bishop Heber, whose praise for the administration and general prosperity in one of the Indian native states has already been cited. Once more we are reading the words of a writer of the early part of the century; but it must be remembered that after 1858 criticism of the British administration became more difficult and more rare, for reasons which we shall consider later.  Bishop Heber's words refer to a system which continued in all its principal aspects to be the administrative system of India; and those who have followed the instances we have selected will recognize the symptoms which alarmed the Bishop and the results which he feared. [64]

Bishop Heber toured the country extensively during three years from 1824 to 1826.  He inquired carefully into social conditions and was gravely disturbed by the heavy land-tax which then, as in later years, was the main source of supply for the growing tribute to England.  In a letter written in 1826 Heber tells how "half the gross product of the soil is demanded by the Government," and comments that such a rate of taxation (which still obtains throughout the greater part of British India) "keeps the people, even in favourable years, in a state of abject penury." [65]  He finds such excessive taxation, employed for a tribute to a foreign country, with no return to the cultivator, "an effective bar to anything like improvement," and notes that the tardy remissions made in times of scarcity "do not prevent men, women and children dying in the streets in droves, and the roads being strewed with carcasses." [66]

[64] Memoirs and Correspondence, London, 1830, Vol II, p. 413.  Letter to the Rt. Hon. Charles Wyndham Wynn, dated Karnatic, March, 1826.  Quoted by Dutt, Vol I, pp. 369-370.  Dutt points out that the Bishop avoided expressing himself on this subject in his journal, which was written for publication: even greater discretion was to become even more common in later years.  Dutt says that there was a reduction in the land tax in Bombay and Madras after Heber's time, but that it was "still excessive".

[65] According to H.H. Wilson (Mill, Vol VII, pp. 299-300) the Hindu law enacted that the King should have a twelfth, an eighth or a sixth of the produce, but in time of war he might take one-fourth. Assessments varied according to the quality of the land, and were taken in kind, which made the peasant less concerned with price variations.  Moslem rulers demanded more, but Akbar limited the land-tax to one-third of the produce.

[66] Mr. W.S. Lilley in India and its Problems gives a similar and equally gruesome description of famine in the latter half of the century.

End quote.

An American assessment of the British Raj, 1906

William Jennings Bryan (1860-1925) is probably most remembered today by people like me for his attacks on Darwin's Theory of Evolution, and more specifically, the Scopes Trial in 1925.

Wiki tells us that Bryan

was a leading American politician from the 1890s until his death. He was a dominant force in the populist wing of the Democratic Party, standing three times as its candidate for President of the United States (1896, 1900 and 1908). He served in Congress briefly as a Representative from Nebraska and was the 41st United States Secretary of State under President Woodrow Wilson (1913–1915), taking a pacifist position on the World War. Bryan was a devout Christian, a supporter of popular democracy, and an enemy of the gold standard as well as banks and railroads. He was a leader of the silverite movement in the 1890s, a peace advocate, a prohibitionist, and an opponent of Darwinism on religious and humanitarian grounds. With his deep, commanding voice and wide travels, he was one of the best known orators and lecturers of the era. Because of his faith in the wisdom of the common people, he was called "The Great Commoner."

In 1906, Bryan wrote a pamphlet "British Rule in India", after a visit to India.  It is available online.
This pamphlet is contemporaneous with Romesh Chunder Dutt's Economic History of India, which contains some praise for British accomplishments that fools the unwary. I expect Bryan's clear-eyed condemnation of British rule in India will be dismissed because he was also an anti-Darwinist.

As per "Indian Proscribed Tracts, 1907-1947", from Center for Research Libraries, Chicago, William Jennings Bryan's pamphlet was banned in India by the British government.

Freedom of the Press, India, 1934

In 1934, Bihar suffered a huge earthquake.  Of this episode, Reginold Reynolds writes, in "The White Sahibs in India" (1937):

Writing from Muzaffarpur, Bihar, a Second Lieutenant of the East Yorks Regiment described with pride in an English paper how his regiment had cleared the roads

"by getting four men of the platoon to stop every native that comes along the road and making him work for ten minutes.  It has been most effective.  If they refuse to work a bayonet is stuck in them." [*]

For criticising such aspects of the Government's policy after the earthquake, fifteen newspapers were penalised and obliged to cease publication. [**] 

[*] Letter from 2nd Lieut. C.M.S. Marsden in the Farnham Herald, Feb. 17th, 1934.
[**] Official statement on the operation of the Press Ordinances, circulated in the Legislative Assembly in 1935.

It might be possible to get more context about the shutdown of the fifteen newspapers. The Farnham Herald still seems to exist, but of course, its archives cover only the Internet Era. Few newspapers can digitize their archives like the New York Times has done, I suppose.

Conversion corrupts?!

Back in 1993, I had posted this on soc.culture.indian, thinking it to be a joke.  Yet, there appears to be a recurring minor theme in 19th century literature about India that conversion to Christianity by Europeans resulted in a corruption of the natives.  

Title: In the spirit of the Maharaj :-)  {Jai Maharaj was a poster on s.c.i., considered by many to be a joker}
"The British census of 1881 gives the record of {criminal} convictions:
        Europeans                1 in 274
        Eurasians                1 in 509
        Native Christians        1 in 799
        Mahommedans                1 in 856
        Hindus                        1 in 1361
        Buddhists                1 in 3787 

These statistics were reprinted in the leading Catholic organ
in Britain, The Tablet, with the comments: 

"The last item is a magnificent tribute to the exalted purity
of Buddhism...It appears from these figures that while we effect
a very marked moral deterioration in the natives by converting
them to our creed, their natural standard of morality is so
high that however much we Christianize them, we cannot succeed
in making them altogether as bad as ourselves."" 

(From an introduction to "The Light of Asia", for original reference,
see Reincarnation: The Phoenix Fire Mystery, compiled and edited by
Joseph Head & S.L. Cranston, 1977, Warner Books).

English & Vernacular - 1835-1840

The following is mostly based on A Review of Public Instruction in the Bengal Presidency, from 1835 to 1851, by James Kerr (1852).

Macaulay's Minute on Education was dated February 2, 1835.  On March 7, 1835, Lord Bentinck issued the resolution that the funds that had been spent on oriental education cease, and those funds be devoted to English education only.  After that, the President of the Educational Committee, a Mr. Shakespeare, resigned his office, and Macaulay was appointed to succeed him.  Macaulay remained President from 1835 through 1837 till he left India in December 1837. From 1838 into 1842, the president was Macaulay's friend, Sir Edward Ryan.

Kerr tells us -

Vindicator of the Hindoos - Maj. Gen. Charles Stuart

Read about Maj. General Charles Stuart (1758-1828), whose work "Vindication of the Hindoos" attracted vitriolic replies by the missionaries of his day.  Unfortunately, I have not been able to obtain Part I of his work; only Part II, his reply to the attacks on his first work, seems to be available on the web.

PS: since I wrote the above, I have obtained a digitized version of part I, but I'm not sure all the pages are present.

The Long History of Air Power in the NWFP

Where the US is now using drones ---

(British India) Legislative Assembly Debates
August 31, 1927.
1927 Volume IV, pages 3694-95

MOHMAND DISTURBANCE ON THE FRONTIER

654. *Mr Gaya Prasad Singh : (a) Will Government kindly give the causes and an account of the Mohmand disturbances on the Frontier in June last, and the part played by the land force and the Royal Air Force in suppressing them?

(b) What was the number of casualties on both sides?

 Sir Denys Bray:  The origins of the Mohmand disturbance are obscure.  But they appear to be traceable to a concerted aggressive movement against the Maliks of certain loyal sections under the sustained agitation of a well-known Mullah.  Their unexpected resistance brought a rival Mullah upon the scene, whose fanatical preaching succeeded in assembling a tribal lashkar, twelve to fifteen hundred strong.  It crossed the administrative border on the night of June 5th and attacked the blockhouse line, despite clear warnings from us that any attack on the district would be at once met by bombing from air.

Orders were accordingly given to the Royal Air Force to disperse the lashkar; and within 36 hours they did so.  This striking success was achieved with surprisingly few casualties.   The lashkar lost, it is believed, 15 killed and 16 severely wounded.  The Royal Air Force had no casualties at all.  Ground troops were held in readiness at Shabkadar and Shankargarh, but owing to the rapid dispersal of the enemy it was not found necessary to bring them into action.

Diwan Chaman Lall: Is it the policy of the Government of India that they should use aeroplanes to bomb men who are not in a position to resist with equal force the forces of the British Government?

Sir Denys Bray: Certainly, Sir, if they attack the British Government.

Diwan Chaman Lall: May I ask whether it is a civilized method to employ against these unarmed people?

Sir Denys Bray: My Honourable friend is under a complete misapprehension if he thinks a tribal lashkar is unarmed.  And I would point out at any rate in this particular case that the operations were amazingly humane.  The casualties, as I said, were amazingly few.  I have never known myself a tribal lashkar of this size attacking British India and being dispersed with so few casualties on their part.

______