A new biography argues that the British commander who ordered the Jallianwala Bagh massacre on Vaisakhi day, 1919, was every bit as sadistic as reputed. Nigel Colletts’ damning take on General Reginald Dyer is rightly called The Butcher of Amritsar (via Amardeep Singh):
… Indians… were also incensed by the General’s notorious “crawling order.” In the street where a female missionary had been left for dead, Dyer decreed that between 6am and 8pm Indians could only proceed on their bellies and elbows and were to be beaten if they raised a buttock… a series of outrages… ensured that the indigenous elite would seek fulfilment in a government of their own race… [the book] helps retire the notion that the end of the Raj was anything but a good thing.
Surprisingly, Dyer’s instruments of butchery were desi soldiers from remote areas, not Brits. (The U.S. has pursued a similar strategy by using Kurdish soldiers in Sunni areas in Iraq). You’ve got to wonder what the hell Dyer’s soldiers were thinking as they methodically murdered their countrymen with manual rifles:
He chose from the troops at his disposal those he thought would harbour the least compunctions in shooting unarmed Punjabi civilians: the Nepalese Gurkhas and the Baluch from the fringes of far-off Sind… His “horrible, bloody duty”, as he called it, consisted of ordering his soldiers to open fire without warning on a peaceful crowd in an enclosed public square. The General directed proceedings from the front, pointing out targets his troops had missed, and they kept shooting until they had only enough ammunition left to defend themselves on their way back to base. While Dyer made his escape, a curfew ensured that the wounded were left to linger until the following morning without treatment… nearly 400 had been killed, including 41 children and a six-week-old baby, and around 1,000 injured.
Dyer, who was born in what is now Pakistan, was a stim-seeker and risk-taker with a strangely bipolar moral makeup:
… [Dyer] resigned from his officers’ club when it refused to end racial segregation. However… the Inspector of Infantry in India, described him as “an excitable lunatic” who did little during his time as a garrison commander except that “he used to drive about the mountain roads around Abbottabad with a car full of ladies of the station, his great delight being to frighten them by dangerous driving at which he was an expert. The man was insane.”
He was also prone to sociopathic callousness:
Of the fate of the injured, who had lain 10 deep in places, he remarked “the hospitals were open… The wounded only had to apply for help.” Dyer – and many of his contemporaries – believed that he had nipped a second Indian Mutiny in the bud…
Although Winston Churchill denounced Dyer’s murderousness, the British Parliament at the time anointed him a hero. Twenty-one years later, Udham Singh assassinated the former Punjab governor in London with two rounds from a Smith & Wesson .45. He claimed revenge for the Amritsar massacre and was hanged within four months.
Check out the Asian Dub Foundation song “Assassin” (on the ‘Rafi’s Revenge’ album). This was inspired by the 1919 Amritsar/ Jallianwala Bagh Massacre.
The first words spoken in the song are “Mohammed Singh Azad*, Zindabad!”
Oh damn. I always thought it was Dyer who got assasinated, not the Governor Michael O’Dwyer. That’s. . .less .. .something.Okay, fine, I hate to say it, but dammit, that’s less grimly satisfying.
It’s also a little weird given the iconic scene of that massacre in the Ben Kingsley “Gandhi” movie from the 1980s.
That scene — where all the guys with guns are white — has pretty much been imprinted on my mind as the ‘correct’ version of events. And I don’t think I’m alone: I seem to remember a scene in a recent, terrible Punjabi movie called Shaheed Udham Singh that copied Gandhi‘s Jallianwalla Bagh scene frame for frame.
It’s weird to visualize the scene with desi soldiers.
Disgusting. What a pig this man was. What an utter pig. Hopefully, he is reborn as a South Indian female feminist.
On a side note – for all there is to admire in Winston Churchill and his stand against Nazism and fascism, there are his actions toward India which are less than stellar. But great men are still only men, alas ( I get the same feeling when I read Gandhi’s writings toward prominent Jewish intellectuals – you know the famous essay where he told them they should be glad to submit? Well, glad isn’t quite the right word, and pacifism is what it is).
*The US using Kurdish soldiers in Sunni areas is the best analogy you could come up with? A bit of a different situation….or were 8 million Iraqi’s lining up just a bit of nothing (to get all Hinglishy)?
MD, come on now, you can make better statements than wishing that the “pig” is reborn a “South Indian female feminist.” Being a South Indian female Feminist, I am utterly insulted by your ‘wish!’and I am sure some of the others who read this and are “those” people feel the same too.
As a South Indian female feminist, I amd not insulted by MD’s comment and completely agree with her (I presume MD is a woman).
Let the scoundrel karmically feel the struggle that our women go through all across India, much less the south, and think, “I must have been an evil commander of the British Raj in my past life.”
Swati, I think what MD meant was that Dyer being the complete opposite of a ‘South Indian female feminist’, this would be some sort of karmic retribution..its not that this would be a punishment for anyone else, but for Dyer, he would obviously hate the thought of being reborn as such. Sheesh, don’t be so quick to play the victim. Or, I may be completely wrong and MD may have meant to insult all SI feminists…I’ll let MD talk on his behalf from now on..sorry 🙂
now i’ve been called many horrid things on this blog…but a “reincarnated Dyer” has to be the worst. 😉 i keeed. i keeed.
Swati, i’ve been reading her for quite a while, and MD-didi is a doll. as a wheatish malayalee feminist, i’ll totally vouch for her. here’s my theory: i’ll bet she didn’t have her ek cup of chai and thus wrote that in a decaffeinated hurry. 🙂 i know she didn’t mean it the way it sounded. trust me.
Yikes, swati – maybe I shouldn’t have posted in such a hurry – making jokes with such serious fare. What he did was an abomination, and I’m sorry if my comment offended you.
I guess what I was trying to say is that imagine you come back to a new life and you are aware – you are enlightened – and then you have some knowledge of what you were in another life. Can you imagine any greater punishment? The knowledge that you committed evil? I can’t. Maybe that is what ‘hell’ is.
*Thanks for the defense, sm’ers 🙂 Oh, and I am, indeed, a she. Darn glad of it, too.
Ahem, I would also like to say that I am a malayalee feminist— anyone interested? Seriously though, didnt the Gandhi movie have loads of other errors?
That many of the soldiers who helped passify punjab came from other parts of desi-stan was one reason Punjabi soldiers mostly sided with the Brits in the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857. I don’t think it was a case of “divide and conquer” so much as, I don’t think nationalism was a part of desi-stan at that time. A Baloch from Sind and a Jatt from Haryana would not have thought they had too much common cause, I think.
I think the whole idea of “race” was not so calicified until recently. The Romans had emperors from Africa I think. Even my own relatives thought of the brits in a similiar fashion to any other group that had some kind of influence on Punjab. Before the brits it was Mughals, who were also different colored. I think color is only recently the dividing point of groups….the Meditarian and Eurasia were once the pivot of the world, and these areas are poly-colored
end.
ps i love malayalee feminists. i understand both MD as not being insulting and Swati’s taking offence
Not less than stellar .. but downright evil. Churchill was a racist who has said on record that “Hindus are beastly people with beastly religion” Churchill presided over a devastating famine in part of Bengal which killed millions. If I am not mistaken he is the first person to use something similar to chemical weapon in the fight against the ottoman empire in Mesopotamia. (WW I) So Churchill should have same respect in an ethnic Indian’s mind as a ethnic Jew has for Hitler.
Darn, I wish he was assasinated.
Churchill was da man. Some gems from the great leader:
“I do not admit…that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the black people of Australia…by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race…has come in and taken its place” – Churchill to Palestine Royal Commission, 1937.
“I do not understand the squeamishness about the use of gas. I am strongly in favour of using poisonous gas against uncivilised tribes” – Writing as president of the Air Council. The gas attacks were in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Wow, Im stunned. I had no idea that desi soldiers were involved in the massacre. What were they thinking? I guess it goes to prove that old addage “That its every man for himself”
I wonder if these soldiers ever faced any retribution?
The East India Company rarely used “white” soldiers. They were, after all, a trading company. They always used “native” soldiers for their battles – whether it was Plassey, Mysore or the Sepoy Mutiny. The generals were all British, of course.
The Official Raj continued this wildly successful tradition.
MD,
i went back and read your blog. very sorry for jumping the gun, pardon the baaad pun:) i have just been subjected to so many “you idli vada – me pav bhaji” inanities that i felt i had to voice my two paisas. this forum btw, is fantastic, may your lives be full of idlis, vadas, sambhars and pav bhajis.
The British merely continued a practice used by empires past and present, utilizing soldiers from one part of their empire to hold another. Many of the white soldiers stationed in India were Irish Catholics and Indian soldiers were used in Burma, Afghanistan, the Crimea, Iraq and East Africa to further imperial interests.
Churchill was undoubtedly racist but there is no comparison to Hitler.
hm. i’m surprised people are surprised that brown soldiers killed brown civilians at the behest of the british…after all, who do you think conquered “india”, but brown sepoys (mostly bengalis and madrasis in the early days, with a later switch over to other groups as they got conquered). i suggest that we leave our modern sensibilities at the door, for if, as some believe, race is a social construction, culture certainly is, and nationality most definitely is. for history buffs, you will know that some of the greatest mughal generals were hindu (jai singh), and that many of the soldiers in the army of explicitly hindu kingdom of vijayanagar were muslim (that kingdom btw had european officers and advisors!).
when i went to the bangladesh in 1990 it was clear that many rural villagers did not understand conceptually that someone from across the meghna river was qualitatively a different kind of foreigness than someone from america (i experienced this personally, as i was slotted in with a woman who hailed from a city in north bengal as a “foreigner”).
now, on this issue: I guess it goes to prove that old addage “That its every man for himself”
well, certainly the way the soldiers behaved was atrocious, as soldiers have often behaved throughout history. but, i wonder, is it a more evil act because they were killing people ethnically similar to themselves? (though one can dispute this in the case of the balouch, who speak an iranian language, not an indo-aryan one) i think one can make that argument, but in general, history has not been characterized by neat and tidy conflicts that correspond to racial, ethnic and religious divides perfectly. in fact, the most common enemies were your neighbors. one reason many punjabi sikh soldiers supposedly fought for the british in suppressing the 1857 mutiny is that it had as its figurehead the mughal emperor (or at least an individual of that line), and the sikhs had negative memories of mughal oppression.
in the last planet of the apes film it was a common refrain that “ape must not kill ape,” but that doesn’t work with humans (ie; brown/white/black/muslim/christian/hindu must not kill brown/white/black/muslim/christian/hindu).
Salman Rushdie claimed that the only inadvertent factual error he made in Midnight’S Children was to say that the soldiers who shot at the Amritsar Crowd were white Britons.
(As opposed to the book’s deliberate factual errors due to the unreliable narrator)
If even Rushdie can make the error, I think the rest of us can be forgiven.
Thats not the only mistake Rushdie ever made!
Looks like you had your “Sepia Mutiny”, eh? Sepoy butchering Sepia… what joy. Besides, Dyer is a good loking guy; so, I guess, it’s ok. Anyways, its nice to kill a few people here and there occasionally.
“Is it a more evil act because they were killing people ethnically similar to themselves?”
NO definitely not. The ethnic identity of the soldiers in no way makes the act worse or better or more understandable. It was a heinous act pure and simple.
However, theories on ethnocentricity and reciprocal altruism posed by some sociobiologists may suggest that those from the same background or from the same “tribal group” maybe less likely to inflict harm on each other. However, in a country as diverse as India its hard to define one’s “tribal group” Is it based on language, geographical location, religion, etc. ? As razib mentioned I guess it is very much a social construct. And these soldiers may not have perceived Punjabis to be their kin or members of the same “tribal group”
I guess the difference is that usually the people who invaded India settled there and thus the wealth stayed in India as well. Eventually a certain degree of respect and understanding was established between all parties. With the British however it soon became apparent that they werent going to respect the natives and more importantly had no plan to keep the wealth of India in India. No their takeover of India was for monetary reasons and to gain markets that could exploit to make the British Isles rich and powerful.
However, theories on ethnocentricity and reciprocal altruism posed by some sociobiologists may suggest that those from the same background or from the same “tribal group” maybe less likely to inflict harm on each other.
yes, we’ve talked a lot about this over at my blog. you can find a series of posts on the topic of inclusive fitness as applied to ethnicities (scroll down to see all the posts linked at the bottom). in sum, i find ethnic nepotism implausible on a wide geographic scale simply because your main competitors were those closest to you. there are other issues of course….
and reciprocal altruism is probably a way to explain the behavior of the solders. after all, the british were offering them steady pay and some status (in some parts of india british recruited dalits specifically because they were loyal against locals, for obvious reasons). the attachment they might have had to the people they killed would not have been on material/selfish grounds (unless very broadly interpreted), but their relations with their brit officers were advantageous to each.
Making Churchill into somkind of hero of people (and that too those whom he oppressed ruthlessly) is what gets my blood boiling. Fighting one type of racism (as practised by the Nazis) and carrying out similar things at other places is a sign of a opportunistic imperialist.
” in sum, i find ethnic nepotism implausible on a wide geographic scale simply because your main competitors were those closest to you.”
As you stated before your closest neighbors may often be your worst enemy. Therefore it might behoove you to show a little altruism, as it may enhance your survival.
Hmmm … something about not learning from history and, thus, being condemned to repeat it comes to mind.
Therefore it might behoove you to show a little altruism, as it may enhance your survival.
well, i’m going to insert some pedantic precision here: on a genetic level your own survival is irrelevant if you don’t reproduce. as you know, the way inclusive fitness works is that your own reproductive fitness hit is more than compensated by those who carry your genes. so, your sibling is 1/2 related to you, your children 1/2, your half-sibling 1/4, etc. so, for “selfish altruism” to work you need to gain genetic benefits in inverse proportion to the relationship, your brother’s fitness needs to be more than twice your own fitness hit, your half-brother more than four times your own hit (because the common genes will then increase, or at least not decline, in frequency). naively interpreted this causes problems when you start being related to someone on the order of 1/32 or something (distant cousin). it is complicated by inbreeding and population substructure.
in sum, scientifically, human concepts of genetically hard-wired inclusive fitness might not project much further than your near family. there is a lot of complexity to this, but that’s the gist of it. others try to rework the relationship to show how you are related to ethnicity A as opposed to ethnicity B as your are related to your brother vs. your cousin (browns are more related to each other than they are to whites for example). the problem with this logic is two fold:
1) the proximate evolutionary adaptations likely don’t exist, because transracial contact was minimal (all the evolutionary inputs are probably being shaped by competition with people that look, and perhaps act, similar to yourself).
2) the further away you get from familial genetic relationships, the further from common sense genetic ideas of “kinship” nmatch “reality.” there are genetic loci where you are more closely related to a chimp than you are to your own sibling (MHC loci), for example.
so we get back to culture. i think that is where ethnocentrism probably emerges. and culture is malleable (within limits). physically a pashtun may look more like his dark welsh officer than he does like a punjabi from the lowlands, but to the welsh officer both are “pandey niggers” (there is some genetic evidence to suggest that indians might be the outgroup if you compared persians, western europeans and indians, for example-though the evidence is mixed).
in any case, i simply wanted to respond to the common response that people have when they found out that group A oppressed/ruled/whatever group B with the help of group C though B and C seem to have much in common. this isn’t something that occurs just in south asia, the aztecs fell because of the help of rivals like the mixtecs, celtic britain fell in part because of the ruling classes use of mercenaries against each other (eventually one group of mercenaries, the anglo-saxons, decided to settle down), and muslims and christians regular stabbed their co-religionists in the back when their own selfish interests were dominant.
i think people have a tendency to fixate on macro-categories as the most salient aspects of our identification…but, i suspect that individual/familial selfishness is just masked by the reality that it doesn’t normally have a chance to operate and betray one’s own “people/religion/tribe/nation.” ethnic/religious/racial loyalties do exist, but i think we have a false sense of how important they are on a concrete level….
(to give an example, in 1960 most white americans were rather racist, and offered they wouldn’t sit next to a black person on a bus. today, in 2005, there is a common anti-racist consensus that about 3/4 of white americans, and almost all the elites [g.w. bush himself is part of a mixed-race family], hold to. they simply changed with the times)
Here is your comparison. The Famine of Bengal killed 3 million people. It was actually and proximally caused by the British. People were not even allowed to live their lives and eat on a subsistence basis.
Hitler killed 6 million Jews and about 11 million people overall.
Apologizing for Churchill by calling him merely “undoubtedly racist” and “no comparison” to Hitler spits in the face of those millions of Bengalis who wanted nothing more than to live and eat free of colonial domination.
One thing is clear, if Indians had somehow adopted a secular identity based on a shared history and loose cultural, linguistic, culinary and familial connections as they have today, the British would not have stood a chance….and India would be a lot more prosperous than it is today. Central governance is what led the British to dominate (remember, the British were actually made up of disparate groups too, Scots, Irish, Normans, Anglicans, Protestants, blah blah).
On another note, one would think that the Nepali Gurkhas (who by the way, have remained in the British army and today serve in Iraq) would have an affinity to the men, women and children they so callously butchered. Yes there might have been some ambivalence to the desi cause under the theory that the British were yet another conqueror, but to shoot at a crowd featuring women in saris holding babies, men in kurta pajamas, etc….how could the troops not feel that to some extent they were shooting at themselves? Its not like they were shooting at other soldiers who were shooting back. In that case, the soldier might think “OK this is my job”….but when he shoots at unarmed men, women and children, one would think “These are my people” would win out over “This is my job.”
(Sorry to dumb down my analysis, not feeling particularly intellectual today….more like sick to the stomach over imagining this event).
This point is disputed, old theory was so. There is evidence that linguistically the Baluchi language is actually Dravidian based. It makes sense because they are ethnically and genetically different from their mixed Aryan-Dravidian neighbors…The more likely theory is that they were holdovers from the Indus Valley Civiliation….so next time you go to Baluchis, ask for some idli vada…(granted they might look at you funny).
More on the Gurkhas from the above-mentioned link:
Hahah…a couple of Hispanic relatives who married in doesn’t count. One things for damn sure, GW is not mixed-race himself.
Bush is to gora as fried is to pakora.
You mention the fact that central governance allowed the Brits to dominate. I agree with this conclusion but keep in mind it was the English that did the dominating and the others did as they were told.
The problem in India was that after the Mughals fell and the Marathas, Sikhs, Nawabs etc began to fight it out the Brits appeared. The battle for one to dominate was never allowed to take place and was halted. The Nawab of Oudh stood by while the Nawab of Bengal was beaten by the British just like the Marathas stood by while South India was being taken over by the Brits. And then the Sikhs didnt do much while the Marathas were being taken care of and finally there was no one left to help the Sikhs.
If the Brits never showed up it is possible that either the groups would have come to some sort of peaceful solution or one would have battered the others out. In one of my War Studies class we were told that sometimes it is better to let a war conclude so that at least there is a permanant solution. This happened in Europe, centuries ago Europe had so many small kingdoms eventually it was reduced to a few major powers. In India the process was halted and the Brits did divide and conquer to take over. It is currently continuing as you see India & Pak sort of confronting one another to see who will dominate South Asia. While it was pretty much settled in 1971 it is still there. Eventually for any sort of peace or stability to truly occur one side has to come out on top. Why do you think some of the states fund and support insurgencies within India? They dont want a single state to control any region and would like to see India again fall apart into smaller bits based on ethnicity or religion b/c that will be easier to manipulate. The “whites” did this in Europe, the Americas and in Australia really well. They took and got what they wanted, now they preach human rights etc to everyone else while they go about their balance of power games.
You are correct, but hindsight is 20/20. The only reason why present day India looks the way it does, was a result of the common threat posed to all in the subcontinent by the British.
If the western imperialists had failed in gaining a foothold on the Indian subcontinent, the area would look significantly different. Most likely a sprinkling of small and large princely states that would have ruled either by outright monarchy or some form of republic with the monarch as the figure head (like current day Great Britain). Also, old grievences between Maratha, Rajput, Mughal, and other Sultante kingdoms would still be lingering around in some fashion or the other.
These princely states despised each other more than the outsider British and that was the very reason “Divide and Conquer/Rule” worked.
Bureaucracies and the Miltary in colonial India were primarily staffed with Indians. This trend became accelerated after world war I when many foreigners had to go fight the great war. This left Indians to run the business at home.
In many ways, this also resulted in a relatively smooth transition to an independent republic since the Government and Military were already run by the natives.
How can you be so sure that the old grievances (which do exist even today) could not be superseded by some sort of secular republic, independent of British “assistance”? The Japanese were able to becoming a global power in about 20-30 years, without any colonial domination, there is no reason why the Indians couldnt do the same.
Therefore, if the western imperialists had failed in gaining a foothold on the Indian subcontinent, the area may have looked the same or even more powerful.
While I have no desire to spit in the face of Bengalis, I find it strange that you state that the great famine was ” actually and proximally caused by the British” and yet the link you provided stated it was actually caused by a fungus and lack of rice imports from Japanese occupied Burma. I never recall offering an apology for Churchill but stand by the thought that Hitler’s purposeful genocide of at least 11 million in death camps and the deaths of tens of millions more finds no comparison in with anything Churchill ever did. Perhaps the best testimony is the fact that India continued productive relations with the UK after independence, including during Churchill’s second stint as PM in the 1950’s.
vurdlife you are correct. In fact both the Marathas and Sikhs were multiethnic and multireligious states where the communal situation was acctually better than today in many cases. Things began to settle down during that period since I think everyone had had enough of Aurangzeb and his kind of true believers. The British did create some sort of unity in the sense that everyone wanted them out, and when they left India was left partioned which acctually reopened a lot of old wounds that still fester to this day.
If the Brits had never shown up then it is entirely possible that would have 3-4 major states that would compete and cooperate and possibly form some sort of subcontinental union once the Age of Imperialism and the plans of the Europeans powers becomes clear for everyone to see by the late 1800s. In fact one could say that the reason that 1857 happened was precisely because the Indians realized what was going to happen to them. It wasnt till the mid 1800s that the Indians came to know what the Europeans are capable of and what their plans are with regards to all of Asia and Africa.
After reading the comment about the portrayal of the massacre in Attenborough’s “Gandhi” I went back and looked at the scene on DVD. The movie actually shows non-British soldiers firing on the crowd and the only whites clearly shown are the officers. I vaguely remembered this being the case but I guess it goes to show how easily we can conflate what we think should be the case and what actually is shown.
I agree, there is no way of saying what would have happened if the British were absent. While there were political differences, we shouldn’t discount the huge cultural and religious commonality that existed across most parts of present-day India.
Bravo, MF, bravo! I was thinking the same thing but didn’t have access to the DVD. Way to go for fact checking.
As for all the rest of this: I have read that Nepal is basically an independant state (a very screwed up one up one, but an independant one) because, among other things, the Ghurkas fought with the British, and they fought so well, the British decided they’d rather have them as mercenaries than subjects. Basically, in exchange for a tribute of troops, the King of Nepal didn’t have to do anything else for the UK, and got to keep running his own state. So, those Ghurkas, at least might well have been thinking–“better we shoot here than we reneg on our King’s pledge by starting a mutiny, and risk bringing the British wrath down on Kathmandu.”
Still not very nice, but a plausible explanation at least.
I linked to wikipedia for convenience’s sake…that article does state that the conscious British policy of creating artifical price inflation led to the famine.
But for more visit this article entitled The Unknown Famine Holocaust: About the Causes of Mass Starvation in Britain’s Colony of India 1942-1945. Here’s a snippet:
As for actual/proximate causation…if not for the artifical British price inflation (which Economics Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen has said led to a rare “boom famine”), 2-3 million people would NOT have died…in a free and undominated market, there would be enough to eat. So there was “actual” causation. And it was proximately caused by them because it is foreseeable that creating price inflation during mass starvation will lead to famine. Anyway the prox/act causation is a legal analogy…for our purposes its enough to say the British did it.
What makes this British action even more represensible is that they were AWARE of what their policies were doing to the people (remember famines arent like tsunamis, they happen over time).
I can just imagine the Bengali overlords sitting around saying “Hmm…seems to me hundreds of thousands of people are dying of starvation. What to do?” I wish I could have teleported back and said, “Heres a hint assholes…Don’t institute a ‘Rice Denial Scheme'”
swati – thanks for being so reasonable. And now I finally get why it read so poorly! I didn’t even think about the idli vada-pav bhaji angle. I just seemed to remember reading about some really prominent feminists who were South Indian, and it just stuck in my mind. Oh. Do not post before you’ve had morning tea, that’s for sure.
Also, re: the many comments on Churchill. I have very ambivalent feelings because he was a racist, and the government policies at the time did contribute to the famine in Bengal. But in order for the analogy to stick, Hitler would have had to conduct a war to liberate millions, while locking up others. So if you want to compare the Bengali famine with the Holocaust, then you still have the fact that Churchill was the reason Hitler was stopped. Which dictator did Hitler try and stop? Sorry, it’s just a wierd analogy. My point was that history is complicated and men are more so. How could he be both a racist and also the man who held the fort and kept Britain free during those long dark days when it was not clear the the Allies would win? (and how could Gandhi tell the Jews they should submit to the Nazis as almost a purification, and then say he understood why the Palestinians could take up arms? I’m sorry, that’s just inconceivable. Why the advice that violence is understandable for the Palestinians, but not for the Jews to resist? I never get that essay.) Churchill may not have been a hero, but he did heroic things.
I mean, if I was someone liberated from Dachau, I might find the Americans and Churchill heroic. How can you compare Churchill with Hitler? Hitler was an aggressor, invading other countries and rounding up not only Jews, but gays, socialists, communists, gypsies, anyone felt to be deviant. They rounded up children in death camps and performed human experimentation on death camp inmates. The Bengal famine happened because of a complex set of factors: food being diverted to wartime Europe, the Japanese cutting off food supplies and poor British governance (which shouldn’t have been there to begin with – freedom is for everyone, right?)
Ok, per vurdlife’s last post from the Revisionist (interesting source, that) it is deliberately poor governance, not simply poor governance. Despicable? But where does that leave us? Was it good that he was instrumental in stopping Hitler or not?
*Did anyone else hear about kids named Hitler in India during world war II because he was fighting the British, and some Indians looked up to him? I heard those stories as a kid, but never looked up any references.
Arrrgh, despicable! not despicable? Yes, the deliberate nature of what happened is truly awful.
No one can be sure. Obviously, this is all subjective. However, I lean towards a more fragmented view. The subcontinent has far more people, is much more diverse, and area wise larger than Japan (language and religion). Therefore, I don’t think it would have followed a Japanese model.
British “assistance” is also a bad term to use. Rather than assistance, it was more of a reaction to their colonization and opression. Whatever the British did in India was designed to keep it in power longer, not assist the local people. It inadvertantly may have helped people, but that was never the goal.
If anything, modern India without colonial rule may have resembled today’s EU. As mentioned in the comments above, the larger kingdoms could have eaten up their smaller neighbors until it reached an equilibrium where the big boys can live together in some peace.
Here is the difference betweem Hitler and Churchill.
Hitler hated people he considered inferior and wanted to wipe them out.
Churchill hated people he considered inferior and often killed them when it suited him. Yet he kept them alive in a state of subjugation and oppression when it suited him. He wanted to use the inferior populations to create armies and spread British control. He wanted to use the inferior people as a market and exploit them to increase British revenues as long as they didnt create a fuss. The minute they began to create fuss he would not hesitate to wipe them out. Keep in mind that the Quit India movement started in 1942 and Churchill saw the Bengal famine as a way to implement a scorhed earth policy and block Japanese advances and to finish off the Quit India movement.
Hitler’s hate was so deep that he resorted to genocide. Churchill’s hate was more sublime and exploitative. He wanted to use the supressed people to reach his goals. If they refused to further his goals then they had to go.
Churchill hated Hitler b/c Hitler dared to end British independence, but Churhchill didnt want the independence of any of the people that he ruled over. He didnt want the UK to become a German colony but he wanted the UK to keep its own colonies. If he could have he would have made sure the UK didnt have to decolonise at all so as to still remain powerful and relevant in the world. To keep the UK as a superpower and prime pole of power in the world; a role that the UK had to give up and hand over to the US.
Amardeep, The soldiers in “Gandhi” were not all white. The officers were, but not the rest.
I see ASR, so it was just a happy by product that Hitler was stopped (because of British nationalism) and that the Jews were saved? He is to get no credit for that? And why is fighting for your independence (if you are Gandhi) admirable and not if you are Churchill? (I’m only talking about the British people here, not the others ruled under Britain’s empire, which, yes, was ruled oppressively).
So most of you think that Churchill and Hitler are equal, really? Is that what most of the Sepia Mutineer commenters are saying? Because that astounds me. It really does. Is the world better off because Churchill won? I find it astounding that some don’t want to give him credit for helping to defeat Nazism and Fascism. It wasn’t just that he was threatened by Hitler: he hated the system Hitler stood for. He hated communism and fascism. He hated the systems themselves, because he felt they were a form of tyranny. And yet, another sort of tyranny in India.
I find this whole thread depressing: the right glorifies Churchill, the left abhores him, and somewhere inbetween is the truth. Or Truth, as I prefer it, ’cause I think you will work harder for it if you think it’s Truth.
How is it that a man can be so courageous and morally strong in one instance, be such a vile coward/xenophobe in another? I think he can be both. That was my original point.
i think this speculation about the possible trajectory of the indian subcontinent, and analogies to say japan, trip up over the fact that we are talking about a geocultural region on the order of the size of europe, rather than a nation-state. japan was relatively homogenous (the ainu were almost gone as a distinct people by the 19th century) after 200 years of tokugawa control when it was jarred into the modern world.
V,
Crap, my memory is playing tricks on me.