Here is my take starting with some history:
(1) We should not blame the British for our woes. If you look at the total number of people the British killed in their 350 years of existence vs total number of people killed in riots and clashes post independence - you get the answer.
Horribly mis-educated views - this is a classic example of entire generations of population brainwashed by our secular education system with history re-written by leftist/marxist/secularist propaganda machine. The truth is very very different. You will recall another leftist intellectual who writes trash about Indian civilization - Amrtya Sen. Well at least he writes trash when he steps outside his domain which is economics. But when he talks about governance and economics, we can consider his expert opinion for its worth. In his assessment of famines and their cause he had outlined that famines are created by bad governance and economic mismanagement. Now consider this -
In reality about 30 million perished in the famines of India under British rule . The so called late Victorian holocaust second only to the holocaust of 70 million over the six centuries of Islamic domination of the Indian subcontinent. The great famine of 1877 was the seventeenth famine since the beginning of virtual British colonial rule in the 1750's.This not to say there were no famines before the British came, just that they occurred extremely rarely, perhaps in the order of 1 every 2 centuries
And
One message of Davis' book is the connectedness of things. It is no accident that these famines, probably the most terrible in recorded human history, took place at the end of the railway age, as the new industrial system spread across the world. Free trade and military adventures combined to bring the people of Africa and Asia to the brink of famine; between 1850 and 1900 the per capita income of the average Indian fell by 50 percent.
Famine
A review of the book with a more global perspective here:
Review: Late Victorian Holocausts by Mike Davis | Books | The Guardian
If you think Hitler was bad, Churchill and his predecessors were no less. You have to read some of the racist comments some of their great leaders have made to know the truth.
They being outsiders and occupiers had some reason to kills us - what reason do we have to kill ourselves?
Nothing can excuse the responsibility of a person here and NOW as he decides to kill. But do you know that many ideologies that result in intellectual/mental justification for mass movements and mobs that are violent are seeded in the western universities of high repute? I bet you never imagined that the Hutu/Tutsi genocide - one of the worst in history was the culmination of a political/social theorizing that was propagated down from think tanks that do academic theorizing and construct a flawed sociology of other cultures that influence foreign policy of their governments at the highest level?
Although the Western media portrayed the 1994 genocide as a product of "centuries old" intractable divisions between Hutu and Tutsi "tribes," in fact genocide in Rwanda was never inevitable. Genocide was the final product of a strategy used by close supporters of President Habyarimana to preserve their power by appealing to ethnic arguments.
...<snip>... The genocide ultimately had much more to do with the contemporary political concerns of an authoritarian regime under attack than with "ancient tribal hatreds," and as such it could have been averted.
See:
Rwanda&Genocide.html
or
and
Genocide in Rwanda (African Studies): Timothy Longman: 9780521191395: Amazon.com: Books
And do you know like the Rwandan problem, that the definition, theorizing and political posturing of the violent Naxal problem was born in an American university? Going by history of social conflicts that have turned violent worldwide, it is quiet possible that the fundamentally flawed Dravidian movement or the Dalit movement that appears to be a fight for human rights has the potential to transform itself into a violent movement that will divide India 100 or 200 years down the line? These mass movements attain political impetus because they are actively seeded by western universities and think tanks with an agenda decided and driven by the sponsors of academic funding that influence foreign policy of their Governments. It is not stupidity that leads American government to side with Pakistan despite all its nefarious deeds, it is the systematic mis-education of senators and top policy makers about Indian civilization its people and values as dangerous for a modern world that drives those decisions. And this mis-education begins in American schools.
(2) Please remember before the British, there was no such called INDIA - we had 1-2 big kingdoms and plenty of small ones organized by regions and languages - hence we need to be grateful to them to have created our country. And yeah - we may have lost pakistan and bangladesh - what about arunachal, andaman, lakshwadeep and few NE states? these were never part of India.
Utter Rubbish!! What creates a nation is not just a political+military union with a social compulsion to display allegiance in the form of patriotism. Imagine with a more gentler non-coercive subtle and refined approach with a perspective that it is the cultural links and a common set of core values that define a deeper unity and this has certainly existed for more than a thousand years. What you are parroting is the propaganda line used by India baiters and brown sepoys who are still controlled intellectually by their foreign masters.
Instead of admiring Indian civilization because it did not homogenize everybody on language, food, customs and philosophy in a totalitarian fashion, the pervert only sees in it the evidence of opposition and disharmony. Instead of an intellectually aesthetic appreciation of the common threads that have bound Indic people over centuries and millennia, the self-loathing modern Indian wallows in the sewage of western world views with their artificial constructs and flawed social theorizing about India driven by their political agendas. Tsk! Tsk!
And anybody who speaks for a common Indic civilization is dismissed as fanciful and jingoistic
hyeah: While the reality is that the world view and history commonly portrayed and popular is actually a lot of chest thumping and triumphalism accompanied by a subtle form of racism and a European brand of jingoism disguised as sophisticated academic discourse. There is a copious amount of leftist literature on google churned out by these factories that have a problem with India's claim to existence. Wonder why they don't have a problem with the nationalism of any of the modern European countries that were born in the last 50 years out of Czechoslovakia and elsewhere? Why only India and its notion about its past is a problem with so much invested in academic studies and publications to refute the notion?
hyeah: Peoples of other nations can have sentiments about their past and a grand narrative of their history but when Indians do, they are fools that need to be corrected and re-educated
Incidentally since 1705, all the mogul emperors of India were installed by the Marathas as a titular head because it was politically expedient to do so. After the battle of Malwa the Moguls were a spent force. And the Marathas had vast swathes of what is modern India under their suzerainty which perhaps eventually could have been the birth of a new Indian nation united under a single political leadership had history not changed its course - given that there were undercurrents of nationalism in subsections of the Marathas. When you read (wide-eyed) about the history of the movement of and birth of European nationalism, also remember with the same regard and respect the nationalism that motivated Shivaji and a section of the Marathas and countless other movements from centuries before without the denigration accompanied by all its surrounding excuses. Like for example "Indian nationalism does not deserve any quarter or toehold because ... <look at the filth here> ... <and there> ..." Don't be a mindless parrot
(3) And most importantly please remember prior to British we were ruled by descendants of barbaric mongolians - Timur and party anyone? compare the number of people converted to Christianity in their 350 years vs number of people converted to other religions since 11th century? And imagine the demographics of India if these rulers were to continue for another 200 years?
It didn't happen in 1000 years since 800AD, why would it in the last 200 years if the Brits weren't around? That too when the Moguls had more or less lost their hold on India with the Marathas beginning to dominate?
(4) British were occupiers and also one of their primary reasons for being here was trade and commerce and they at least helped India grow in all areas - we got railways much before other countries. I haven't done any research but am sure we got telecommunications and other modern inventions earlier that other countries
Sigh!! Absurd view based on sheer ignorance. This I attribute to the success of modern secular Macaulayite education in India. For Britan to re-invent itself as a benevolent colonial power out to civilize and uplift the natives. And for the loyal Indian subject to believe that his flavor of civilization and he himself was doomed until the Superior white flavor of civilization came along and salvaged his pride and human rights (and standards of living?).
India was an economic superpower next only to China for more than a 1000 years with more than 25% of world GDP. And together with China it was world domination of global trade with 60% lasting almost 1500 years. And this domination was not the result of idle life contemplating other worldliness and spirituality. It came with a strong material culture and excellence in manufacturing technologies. The whole of Europe put together was a piddle 25% until then. Why are there so many accounts of fabulous wealth and treasures of the east? Why were they desperate to reach India? To break into the global trade routes of course. And the gold you hear about in this poor little rich country all came from Rome Greece and Europe in exchange for the goods it manufactured that were superior to anything similar Europe manufactured. Just like you crave for "phoren" goods today, the world craved for Indian and Chinese goods for a 1000+ years. And then guess what happened? Between 1700 and 1800, less than a century in fact - India's GDP fell from 25% to 7%!! You heard of the great depression and saw many romanticized hollywood versions with suicides and families with little children destroyed. Perhaps you even remember the mini crisis that the dotcom bust created. Imagine how Indian social fabric would have been destroyed when its 1000 year run with 25% GDP crashed? Britain did not help India grow - it destroyed India's manufacturing capabilities very systematically and transplanted the two main industries of excellence - Textiles and Steel to its own shores. Yes the two sunrise industries of the Industrial revolution in Britain were Textiles and Steel that were India's pride for centuries before. And talking about standards of living the Indian laborer enjoyed more economic security than his European counterpart in the 17th century. And the per hectare cultivation of rice paddy was 5 times that of modern Japan. And education was free of caste prejudices if you look at the statistics of shudras going to school. There were more nursing colleges in Madras than in London and India has exported its doctors and nurses for centuries not just in the last few decades!!
Get used to the idea that there has been a cross pollination and ferment of ideas and technological innovations across worlds - largely from east to west for centuries before and now vice versa. Science and technology was not born in the west. There is no western science, Only one universal science. And the east excelled over the west for a really long period before the 18th century while Europe struggled and bowed under the might of of a powerful but narrow minded Church. Remember something like what happened to Galileo never happened to any Indian due to a similar conflict between state or dominant ideology and its peoples, even though the heliocentric model was proposed centuries before in India.
(5) They at least tried to get rid of many unwanted customs in our great country and promoted equality.
Again you are parroting. What makes you think Indians are inferior when it comes to humane values? Show me a superior track record for the west that goes back not just 20 years but 500 or 1000 years.
It is common to flog India and blame its original civilizational values for all the sh*t (even when the bad things are not due to its intrinsic values) , then justify why Indians need to be saved from their own cultural moorings to be re-humanized as a more civilized people (The civilizing mission? Salvation or be damned!
).
For example do you know that some of these unwanted customs were actually practiced by communities that lost their dharmic roots? Like for example jauhar which was originally an act of valor to save a womans dignity from becoming a whore in a harem during defeat in battle? It became a social epidemic in the form of Sati in the new Anglo-Indian community around the time of Raja Rammohan Roy which he tried to eradicate. And I suppose you want to blame Indian civilization for the despicable Bhangi caste where people carry sh*tloads of excrement on their hands ? They were originally POWs - fighting soldiers of vanquished armies that were made to clean the toilets of the large harems of Islamic forces, as women were not allowed to be seen outside in public forget going to an outdoor laterine.
Feeling a sense of triumph or modernity while you so casually denigrate Indian civilization, its past and its core values is not going to make you a broad minded progressive or more humane. Stepping out of the box and reading alternative perspectives just might, if you learn to find to find the right sources. You need to start educating yourself for how much India has contributed to world civilizations and start respecting its value my friend.
Shouting from the rooftops about its dark deeds is not going to solve the problems of the world.
Thats just mud slinging and stone throwing as a mental exercise. Not a sign of being well educated.
--G
