I know Priyamvada Gopal slightly from Cornell, and I’m always happy to read something she’s written. A recent editorial she published on neoconservative imperial historians in the Guardian provides lots of food for thought. I think she makes some important points about the current conservative fad for praising British imperialism, but I wanted to supply some quotes from Niall Ferguson’s book Empire that might challenge some of Gopal’s assertions. My own goal is to use this discussion as a learning opportunity, rather than a chance to throw around more polemical language; there’s been quite enough of that as it is.
(Incidentally, there are quite a number of intelligent comments in respone to Gopal’s essay at the Guardian site linked to above [check out especially the the comments by “Sikanderji”], as well as a lively discussion at Pickled Politics.)Let’s start with Gopal’s substantive, factual claims:
More famines were recorded in the first century of the British Raj than in the previous 2,000 years, including 17-20 million deaths from 1896 to 1900 alone. While a million Indians a year died from avoidable famines, taxation subsidising colonial wars, and relief often deliberately denied as surplus grain was shipped to England.
Tolerance? The British empire reinforced strict ethnic/religious identities and governed through these divisions. As with the partition of India when 10 million were displaced, arbitrarily drawn boundaries between “tribes” in Africa resulted in massive displacement and bloodshed. Freedom and fair play? In Kenya, a handful of white settlers appropriated 12,000 square miles and pushed 1.25 million native Kikuyus to 2,000 restricted square miles. Resistance was brutally crushed through internment in detention camps, torture and massacres. Some 50,000 Kikuyus were massacred and 300,000 interned to put down the Mau Mau rebellion by peasants who wanted to farm their own land. A thousand peaceful protesters were killed in the Amritsar massacre of 1919. (link)
One thought I have in response to this is to point out that Empire operated differently from place to place, and any discussion of its possible benefits ought to take that into account. I beleive the British Raj in India did have some benefits along with its many negatives, but it’s hard to say that the British presence in Africa, from the Slave trade up through formal colonization in the 1870s, had very many positive effects at all. India entered independence in relatively good shape, and largely adopted the British industrial and legal infrastructure when it established a new state; the African states, by contrast, had far less to work with. Also, it’s worth noting that most of the bloodier incidents in the history of the British empire actually took place outside of India (the massacre at Amritsar, while bad, is not of the same order as the suppression of the Mau Mau that Gopal mentions).
Secondly, I have my doubts about blaming the British for the Partition of India, though I concede I am not an expert on the nitty-gritties of that process. Third, “Sikanderji” has some interesting comments on the question of famines and the Indian textile industry:
A few other points: 1) The British regime was the first to make some comprehensive attempt at famine prevention in India, by vastly extending irrigation networks and building railways lines to famine-prone areas, as well as introducing famine codes in most provinces (though not, tragically, in Bengal). The historical record is insufficiently complete for any historian to be able to compare the levels of famine under the British with those under preceding regimes, but it is extremely unlikely to have been higher, given that by the latter half of the 19th century it had at least become possible to move grain and rice to areas stricken by shortage from areas of surplus using the railways. 2) India’s textile industry would have been destroyed with or without British rule, as it was largely export driven, and could not compete with industrial production in Lancashire, which would have taken over its exports anyway. India did eventually industrialise from the 1880s onwards, and the nationalist grievance is that protection of the industry through tariffs did not happen until the 1890s. (link)
I do not know whether all this is correct, and I’m willing to be educated by readers who know the details about the famines and the Indian textile industry (especially ones who come armed with links to actual facts!).
But since this debate concerns Niall Ferguson, I would encourage people participating in this debate to actually go read his book Empire. It’s true that he tells the history of Empire from the British side, but there is really an impressive amount of knowledge on display in the book. Here is a passage from Ferguson’s book specifically on the question of the effect of the British presence on India’s economy. It addresses some of Gopal’s points:
[E]ven Curzon once admitted that British rule ‘may be good for us; but it is neither equally, nor altogether, good for them.’ Indian nationalist agreed wholeheartedly, complaining that the wealth of India was being drained into the pockets of foreigners. In fact, we now know that this drain — the colonial burden as measured by the trade surplus of the colony — amounted to little more than 1 per cent of Indian net domestic product a year between 1868 and 1930. That was a lot less than the Dutch ‘drained’ from their Indonesian empire, which amounted to between 7 and 10 per cent of Indonesian net domestic produce in the same period.
And on the other side of the balance sheet were the immense British investments in Indian infrastructure, irrigation and industry. By the 1880s the British had invested &270 million in India, not much less than one-fifth of their entire investment overseas. By 1914 the figure had reached &400 million. The British increased the area of irrigated land by a factor of eight, so that by the end of the Raj a quarter of all land was irrigated, compared with just 5 per cent of it under the Mughals. They created an Indian coal industry from scratch which by 1914 produced nearly 16 million tons a year. They increased the number of jute spindles by a factor of ten. There were also marked improvements in public health, which increased the Indian average life expectancy by eleven years. It was the British who introduced quinine as an anti-malarial prophylactic, carried out public programmes of vaccination against smallpox — often in the face of local resistance — and laboured to improve the urban water supplies that were so often the bearers of cholera and other diseases. . . .
True, the average Indian had not got much richer under British rule. Between 1757 British per capita gross domestic product increased in real terms by 347 per cent, Indian by a mere 14 per cent. (from Ferguson’s Empire, 215-216)
After enumerating these economic benefits of Empire in India, Ferguson does go on acknowledge the role of the indentured laborers, as well as the bad British economic policies that exacerbated the famines of 1876-8 and 1899-1900. All in all, a fairly balanced picture. It’s not exactly the story Marxists want to hear, and it’s certainly not quite as bad as what Gopal describes Ferguson doing (“Colonialism–a tale of slavery, plunder, war, corruption, land-grabbing, famines, exploitation, indentured labour, impoverishment, massacres, genocide and forced resettlement–is rewritten into a benign developmental mission marred by a few unfortunate accidents and excesses.”).
I quote Ferguson here not to exonerate him for the kinds of things he said on the radio during the recent BBC interview (which I haven’t heard), nor for other comments he’s made along the way. In fact, I agree with many of Gopal’s criticisms of the smug, celebratory version of Imperial history that is currently in vogue in some circles. But Ferguson’s actual book on the subject of Empire is generally more learned than smug; it’s also well-written and decently documented. I’d rather discuss historical facts and maybe learn a thing or two than simply re-declare that Imperialism was bad, or continue on in the endless bloggy “bartering of positions” that the blogger Rage recently lamented. Once we get past blanket generalizations, the history of the British Empire is both fascinating and thoroughly complex.
Funny, our posts go together.
I met her at a conference at Trinity College a while back. Very sharp mind and witty!
Amardeep as to where the responsibility for the violence surrounding parition goes, I find a pretty strong resonance with Iraq today. A great deal of the violence directed at colonial subjects in India was not through direct action from the British authorities (although that too did happen, especially in the early days) but rather throuh decisions at a higher administrative/strategic level which then snowballed at a societal level. For example, the forced growing of jute in the place of cash crops which resulted in a lack of adequate food, which resulted in sporadic and desperate acts of (subaltern) violence. Drawing a parallel with today, the lack of adequate strategic planning for a post-war Iraq is largely responsible for the security situation there now. True, the gangsters who commit the violence are directly responsible, but the government is also culpable when it not only planned poorly but even turned a blind eye towards the security concerns of a subject people.
I disagree! India was a source for dirt cheap raw materials (and also a market for finished goods). The early industrialization of the Indian textiles was also greatly hindered by the protections offered to the industry in England.
Mmmm, Dietmar Rothermund’s volume has a different take on this.
It’s amazing how far these circles actually extend. During my entire grad year in the UK, there was never once a mention of the fact of colonial brutality in departmental seminars, although that of Hindu nationalists or the Mughal state was all abuzz!
Amardeep wrote: FergusonÂ’s actual book on the subject of Empire is generally more learned than smug; itÂ’s also well-written and decently documented
Actually, I thought Ferguson’S polemic on Empire (because it was more a political argument than a history) was extremely one-sided. Look up his description of the Younghusband expedition to Tibet — even Winston Churchill condemned it, but Ferguson makes it sound anodyne. I wouldn’t recommend Ferguson’s book to anyone as an introduction to the British Empire.
Relative to your examples only. Certainly not relative to what it was before the Brits got their money-grubbing hands on the country. Prior to the British, India had 25% of the share of world trade. This was decimated by the British. As for the legal system, I think it’s a great pity we adopted it. If it wasn’t for the redeeming features of the indigenous panchayat system that India has had for centuries, the inherited system would be the grossest form of injustice to a nation as diverse as India.
And as noted in the comment above, the textile industry was destroyed by the British. It is no wonder that they called India the jewel in their crown. Not only did they loot a lot of its wealth, they also found a readymade industrial infrastruce which was greatly beneficial in helping kick start their own industrial revolution.
Partition was the fault of the Muslim League/Jinnah et. al. AND of course the British. The accompanying violence was the result of two notoriously militant communities (Punjabi Muslims and Punjabi Sikhs) trying to destroy each other. Punjabi Hindus by and large simply fled (and committed violence only when in a very comfortable majority).
Could someone please be kind enough to explain in layman’s terms what the sentence
“In fact, we now know that this drain — the colonial burden as measured by the trade surplus of the colony — amounted to little more than 1 per cent of Indian net domestic product a year between 1868 and 1930”
means?
Thanks.
I meant notoriously militant in a good way…both communities largely made up of soldiers and farmers. They were the backbone of the British Army in India in its later days.
What about Congress??? Ok, let’s not start this discussion again 😉
And Amitabh how does your theory explain the violence in Bengal during the partition?
Regards,
Ikram, I looked it up (on p. 316 of Ferguson’s book). It looks like he mentions it more as an example of Imperial administrators “quietly cracking” than as a case of Imperialism At Its Benevolent Finest. It’s a section called “Doubts,” which is all about Brits who criticized Imperialism after witnessing it firsthand.
Ferguson begins the paragraph with Leonard Woolf, who worked in Ceylon:
In other words, these are imperialists who dropped out of the game (later in the section he goes on to talk about E.M. Forster, George Orwell, and T.E. Lawrence). Here he’s not trying to tell the story of the British invasion of Tibet so much as develop a pattern of what happened with imperial administrators who “burnt out.”
I did read a bit more about Younhusband’s Tibet mission here, and it’s definitely an interesting story. (The really sickening part is what happened in 1904 — the Maxim gun as a Weapon of Mass Destruction.) Ferguson may be remiss in not telling that part of the story, but he is thorough on some other British military misadventures.
I’m not saying that Ferguson’s book is the greatest thing ever, but it’s more than mere neocon polemic.
A brave and noble effort, my friend 🙂 A few points:
History is built on records and access to it and, most of all, their existence. Therefore, any claims that compare the number of famines in the last three hundred years or so to the number in the 1700 years before should, imo, be dismissed outright–unless there’s some treasure trove of evidence or a way that the person found another method (the way carbon dating is analogously used to date biological material).
The framework for comparison is as important as the actual substance of debate. The commenter you’re quoting above who defends the British Empire makes his/her points without really considering the broader context of the world–e.g. Britain was financially, organizationally, and militarily in a better position (i.e. more technologically advanced) to both exploit its empire and to engage in famine prevention regimes (if those actually occurred) than previous realms that enjoyed less technology. This as much a function of the fact that Britain and South Asia both operated within a Eurasian sphere where technologies like gunpowder and the printing press and numbering systems went back and forth to different loci of technological advancement at different times. Similarly, to argue that the textile industry would have collapsed anyway is ridiculous, because there was a world economy which existed prior to European colonization and one that existed afterwards–ignoring that transition is foolhardy.
On a factual level, the idea that Britain was the “first” to engage in famine prevention regimes, as with Gopal’s point about how there were more famines, strikes me as a gross overgeneralization built more on what the author wants to see than what’s actually arguable from the evidence. If Britain instituted such a great famine prevention regime, then why did the famine of Bengal happen in 1943, almost at the end of British rule, and due to political reasons as much as natural (Amartya Sen’s argument, not mine). Similarly, to argue that the Indian export trade would have died out anyway is to ignore the nationalist historians’ arguments–which need to be dealt with–that the British actually structured the economics to protect their own trade while undermining the export industry in India. This circumstantially makes a lot of sense and is hardly implausible, though you’d have to look at several decades worth of primary sources (or works that have in a fair way) to actually figure out what the British policy towards textiles was.
The argument that the British were not responsible for Partition misses the boat, imo. The British constructed their empire in South Asia on the principle of Divide and Rule–this is documented. If you use this idea for at least 90 years, the politics of the resistance and the society is going to developin particular ways, and one of those ways is institutionalized identity politics to which notions of sovereignty are tied–i.e. competing nationalist movements based on identities that are pitted against one another. In the broadest and most important, imo, sense of the term, the British laid all the groundwork for partition–to argue otherwise is analogous to arguing that the American slave system had no impact on the development of American sharecropping after the Civil War. The British also did their fair share in making these divisions rigid in other ways–e.g. imposing the Census, which eliminates a lot of social fluidity. You could, I suppose, argue that these are features of mass society, but the two terms are largely equivalent here, as the only mass society colonial india knew was the British Raj.
Also, let’s remember there were three partitions–the partition of India/Pakistan, Punjab into two, and Bengal into two. These had different dynamics. A book by Joya Chatterjee makes the argument that the Partition in Bengal was, in the short term, (as opposed ot the broader dynamics I talked about above), primarily driven by the Hindu aristrocracy, not the Muslim League. The argument is that the former would rather have had a province to rule of their own than to be second tier elites in a majority Muslim Bengal. Again, I can’t vouch for the veracity, but it’s certainly a tenable argument.
I think more interesting than the accuracies/ inaccuracies of Niall Ferguson’s account of the colonial encounter – (which can be endlessly debated) is Gopal’s characterisation of him as a ‘neocon ideologue’. It seems to me what she is pointing to are the recent writings in the field of International Relations (Ppl like Max boot,Robert Kagan, Dinesh D’souza, Michael Ignatieff etc) by US writers which specifically characterise US as an empire and justify US occupation of Iraq on grounds similar to the colonial justification of empires(either self regarding- that is national security, continuance of US as a state- or human rights and rescue of the ‘other’ ie a civilizing mission). What I think she is saying Fergusson is doing (and I don’t disagree with her) is rewriting history to exonerate British Empire of it’s violence and racist foundations, much as these writers are doing in the field of contemporary International relations. This move makes it difficult for critics of US foreign policy to make the (morally loaded) acussation that US is behaving like an Imperialist, colonial power ( a favourite form of Left wing critique)- because according to Fergusson “What’s wrong with empires anyway? look at the fine things they gave us – like capitalism , and the English language etc”!
Oh, for a reasonably decent introductory book, you could try Wolpert’s history of india (or maybe it was modern india or south asia or something). One of the best histories I’ve read of India was Sumit Sarkar’s History of Modern India, but that’s very fact specific and might be boring to someone without a deep interest in history. Chapati Mystery has a post on good books, but I can’t find it.
Hear hear!!! A brilliant piece of work, thoroughly researched and balanced.
Priyamvada Gopal’s rather angry open letter to Andrew Marr (the presenter of the show in question) is available here. The blog also has a link to a recording of the actual show. The transcript of the phone in that Priyamvada is more incensed about in the open letter is also being circulated on email , and I have it – in case ppl are interested let me know and i’ll mail it to you.
Saurav, lots of points, and I only have time to respond to a couple of things right now:
I don’t see why that should be so. The beneficiaries of the sharecropping system were, by and large, former slaveholders and their descendents. The “beneficiaries” of partition were the formerly colonized. I think agency has to mainly go to the Indians — Jinnah (and co.), Gandhi/Nehru (and co.), and Savarkar (and co.).
I think the case for the importance of the census as an means of fomenting division has been somewhat overstated. I’ve never seen anyone cite the census in support of two nations theory. The hardening of religious identity in the Indian subcontinent was an inevitable consequence of the introduction of European ideas about the definition of “religion.”
I have some comments on your points #2 and #3, but it will have to wait until after various real world errands have been accomplished…
This is what Lawrence James — a recent defender of Ferguson — says about the Younghusband expedition:
The .. invasion of Tibetan has been very well chronicled. … the men on the spot bulldozed the British government into a frontier war which it had tried to avoid … [a newspaper writer] was astonished by how the primitively armed Tibetans faced up to machine gun and artillery fire. Trusting in their own talismans and faith, they were ‘unterrified by the resources of modern science and war….’ The result was a number of massacres and the campaign was denounced in the Indian native press and in the Commons, where Winston Churchill … spoke for the right of Tibetans to defend their homeland
I would say Ferguson seriously misrepresents this invasion.
Here’s what I wrote about Ferguson when I first read his book:
As history, it’s a well written and engaging story that decidedly one-sided in its presentation of the facts … [but] the book is not primarily a work of history; it is a political polemic. The parts of British Imperial history that do not bolster Ferguson’s case are simply left out.
Ferguson shows … selective presentation in telling the story of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre. And he leaves the 1943 Bengal famine out of his book entirely
Ferguson’S book is not a balanced picture. Not one bit.
(As for partition, everyone — meaning all my old uncles with too much ear hair — know that it was Nehru’s fault.)
Anindo:
The violence in Bengal was several orders of magnitude less than what took place in Punjab. In Bengal, there was some heavy Muslim violence against Hindus in certain districts of eastern Bengal (Naokhali, etc). By and large western Bengal did not see very heavy Hindu-on-Muslim violence and the best testimony to that is there was no MASSIVE migration of populations…western Bengal retained a large Muslim minority and eastern Bengal retained a significant Hindu minority (which has dwindled in the ensuing decades). In the case of Punjab, western Punjab was almost entirely cleansed of Hindus/Sikhs, and eastern Punjab almost entirely cleansed of Muslims. 10-12 million people migrated to the other side and started new lives. An estimated 1 million died. I think the culture and martial character of Punjab played a big role in that.
Sorry, that last post (#18) was from me not Anindo.
Shame. Shame. By narrowing down the discussion of empire to just the two items of famine and partition, you are doing a great disservice to everyone. The central theme of any discussion of empire should be FREEDOM. It is every human’s right and all the specious arguments you can put forth to justify imperialism cannot take that away.
I suspect neither Niall Ferguson nor you, Amardeep have lived as an adult in conditions where your life was controlled/dictated by another. Where you chafed under the absolutist rules imposed by a master for his own benefit. Where your life and the lives of your children and all their descendants were, as a foregone conclusion, dedicated in the service of this master and his children and all their descendants. Where you coud not aspire to anything other than servitude. I am NOT talking about slavery. I am talking about imperialism.
What slavery does to an individual, imperialism does to an entire society.
It is the enemy of freedom.
In the words of Arundhati Roy, “debating the pros and cons of imperialism is a bit like debating the pros and cons of rape.”
In my words, “exploring the beneficial effects of imperialism” is a bit like expecting her to be grateful that you wore a condom.
Duh, no one here is arguing that imperialism was in and of itself a good thing — so let’s leave your cheap/polemical rape metaphor out of it, shall we?
Historical events are rarely moral. They happen as they do, and we can condemn them (as I would condemn imperialism) or rejoice in them (independence). But if you have a certain intellectual mentality you want to at some point move beyond that, and actually understand the details of what transpired. How did the empire work? How did a few thousand ICS officers run a country with several hundred million people? How did the economics of it work? What are its lasting consequences?
That’s why I posed this post as an attempt to talk about facts and share knowledge, not as yet another chapter in “save the world through blogging.” For saving the world or putting the British in their place, blogging is pretty damn useless.
Amardeep, nice blog..
I wonder what people think about monarchy / whatever system that existed before the Brit imperialism.. Do they seriously think those monarchs/kings/sultans cared about human rights of an ordinary citizen more or less than a Brit imperialist??..
LOL.. yeah right..
What slavery does to an individual, imperialism does to an entire society.
societies have inalienable rights?
i predict this argument will devolve into the russian dolls. man has never been truly free.
Consider the Mughals. Their original native place was Turkmenistan. But they emigrated to India, and did not think of going back to Turkmenistan.
In contrast, the British went back to Britain after serving for a certain number of years in India.
Why is this important? Because it determines where the money is rotated. The Mughals rotated the money they made in India, not Turkmenistan. The British rotated the money they made in England.
“I wonder what people think about monarchy / whatever system that existed before the Brit imperialism.. Do they seriously think those monarchs/kings/sultans cared about human rights of an ordinary citizen more or less than a Brit imperialist??..”
that reminds me of this line from the movie “gandhi.”:
“Mr. Kinnoch, I beg you to accept that there is no people on Earth who would not prefer their own bad government to the good government of an alien power. “
i always wondered if he actually said that, or was that just a line created for the movie?
My own (anecdotal) impression, based on conversations with my father and uncles of his generation–who actually remember colonialization and often talk of Independence Day as “the greatest day of my life;” is that they have both tremendous respect for the British yet remain staunchly proud of India.
Sometimes they’ll say things that’ll completely baffle me (like; “The Queen was the most beautiful woman I ever saw”) and my mind will turn to very modern concepts like “the internalization of colonial values;” only to then hear them wax poetic about the greatness of Indian civilization.
I guess itÂ’s a product of Gandhi’s methodology and in many ways mirrors Nehru’s own complicated relationship with the British.
But never have I heard a person of this generation say something like Arundhati Roy’s, “debating the pros and cons of imperialism is a bit like debating the pros and cons of rape.” I daresay, you’d have to be extremely “westernized” to say something like that.
How did the empire work? As long as it is an academic exercise, sure, nothing wrong in that. It’s like forensic science. But should we hand over this forensics expertise to organized crime? When imperialists like Donald Rumsfeld sponsors a study of how empires work, and people like Niall Ferguson eagerly sell their expertise, should they be considered intellectuals? Or imperialists? How do you treat a forensic scientist who helps organized crime fool the police?
The rape metaphor was A Roy’s, not mine. That should have been crystal clear from the first line. And yes, it is not only an apt metaphor, it is bang on the dot. Why should we leave it out? If anything that needs to be left out, it is your pretense of “a certain intellectual mentality”.
Yeah, because they did not have efficient and quick transport in those days.. 🙂
I don’t believe in the BS about Mughals being natives.. No one of those rulers ever thought high of the native cultures/languages/people.. What is the court language of the Mughals??.. Check Babar’s Babarnama on what he thinks about India.. 🙂
The people don’t need their ruler’s respect. They need the ruler to rotate the money.
here is Niall Ferguson’s presentation at UC Berkley
and did not think of going back to Turkmenistan.
i believe this is false. the mughals tried to conquer, and did, afghanistan multiple times. they came to india for plunder, but they were also driven out by the uzbek warlords.
The problem with trying to answer questions like “was the british empire good?” — apart from the fact that “good” is ill-defined — is that one can’t do controlled experiments in social sciences. Scientifically, the proper way to answer such a question is to take two copies of the Indian sub-continent at the beginning of the 18th century; put one copy under British rule for 200 years (or however long the empire lasted) and then compare the outcome against the “control.”
This inability to do controlled experiments makes the question “was the british empire good?” much more complicated to answer. Let me give two examples. First, some people say that things like Railways were some of the good consequences of British rule. This assumes that Railways would not have developed had the British not come to the subcontinent. How does one know this? Here’s where the importance of experimental control is important. The point is that if the Railways would have come to India in the absence of British rule, then Railways cannot be counted as a contribution of British rule. Only, if it can be demonstrated that the Railways would not have come to India without British rule can it be counted as a contribution. Since there are examples of countries adopting Railways without the benefit of British rule, it is possible that Railways could have come to India even without colonialism. True, it is likely that the Railway system that developed would be different but it then means that comparing having a railway system to a situation without one is not the right comparision.
Second, some have argued that famines etc. as a negative consequence of British rule. Again, this is too facile. Is one sure that there would have been lesser famines in the absence of British rule? On what basis does one make such conclusions? If famines of equal or greater magnitude would have been there anyway, why must this be added to the deficit column of the British raj?
Not very surprisingly, most attempts to answer such questions fall back on the trivial: “It had its good and bad points, etc. etc. Anyway, to conclude this overly long comment, I personally don’t find the question “was the british empire good?” very interesting. There are, to be sure, interesting questions about British rule and its legacy (we in India are still facing the consequences of the choices made by the British raj) but this particular question is not one of them. I think this question is more important for some — not all — British people.
Suresh.
This is what Abraham Eraly – a very readable historian, and certainly not a ‘nationalist’ – had to say about India before the advent of the British:
I would say a question such as, “Was the British Raj good or bad?” must be pondered in light of what the subcontinent was like before their arrival.
At the height of Mughal splendour under Shah Jahan, over a quarter of the gross national product of the empire was appropriated by just 655 individuals
yes, but they were brown. sort of (i recall mughals referred to indian muslims as ‘black’ so i don’t know how brown turco-persians really are 🙂 the key for some is clearly cultural freedom. all “complex” cultures have elites, but what is especially onerous is when an alien elite rules. as long as the foot is the same color (even if a lighter shade) and the insult is intelligible in your native language (even if with an aristocratic accent & diction), the pain of the indigenously crafted boot being driven into your back is not deemed imperialism.
I seriously doubt this. The influence of the Mughal empire was largely urban. Perhaps the above quote was true of the town folk. The villages of India were prosperous at the time. There was nearly 100% literarcy both among men and women. All of this has been recorded in the British archives themselves. As we know the British loved recordkeeping. Historians on the other hand are less reliable and often have dubious motives.
Unlike the Mughals who were content with their riches and did not venture deep into the heartland, the Brits scoured the length and breadth of India in order to squeeze it of every last drop they could. With their taxation policies they completely destroyed the support structure that maintained the education and culture within a few decades of coming to power. The country has never recovered from this.
There was nearly 100% literarcy both among men and women.
LOL. fuck, ROFL.
still ROFL.
man, divya needz a spoorlam.
nevermind, i just realized, divya is her own spoorlam 🙂
sorry if i’m being mean guyz, i’m checking out thread at this point so you can keep the tone elevated.
have a good wkd & peace.
What about the above nugget from the Guardian article ??
Wow Amardeep, I’m still waiting for your assertion that colonialism was good. I’ve been reading your stuff for over a year, and you inch closer and closer with your defense of colonialist tradition and the idiotic tendency aong educated NRI’s to worship the British. Perhaps your support for Dalrymple and his ilk and your repeated assertions that “scholarly” written works by western academia are somehow superior to the homegrown testimonials by Indian writers are a byproduct of your position in academia. At any rate, the argument you have used before about how studying a culture makes you qualified to comment on it could be extended to neo-con historians who think the British Empire was a great benefit to both Africa and India. I’m sure these men have all the requisite degrees, must we therefore accept their conclusions as true? Or must we acknowledge that they are still biased and bigoted in their views, regardless of how many years of grad school they’ve attended. You could learn something from Gopal; she has obviously not lost her perspective due to her education.
Also Amardeep,
So does that logic apply to the Holocaust? Khmer Rouge? Andrew Jackson’s program of genocide? Does your “intellectual mentality” extend you to being able to better understand the brilliant economics behind the mass murder of thousands? We must admit, they were tremendous accomplishments, each of those three examples. Each lead to significant advancements in the art of subjugation. Much like the British Empire. You’re quote is basically you saying that you are smarter than us, because some of us choose to blame the British for their actions, while academics like you can somehow “understand” them despite being born far after any of the action took place. You should tell my grandmother about this; she hates the British. She was also arrested for three years and sat in their jails, simply for trying to assist in village uplift. I’m sure you could make her see the good in colonialism.
Whatever. You’ll simply have to go to London to check the British archives. Unless you’re content to believe the historians. Literacy isn’t exactly an education and nothing to be incredulous about. The fact is that there were schools of all sorts which were supported by local patrons and people in the villages in no way experienced the crushing poverty that they do now.
There’s a book called The Beautiful Tree by Dharampal which is based on the data gathered from these archives and it talks in depth about this.
That’s not at all what I’m saying. I’m only saying it’s a subject worth knowing in detail. If you’re only ever going to evaluate something at a moral level, your need to continue learning stops. I only claim to be a curious person, not one who is smarter than anyone else. Many of the comments on this thread have suggested that Indians of that generation themselves manage to respect the British Raj even though they would never, ever trade their freedom.
In my post I was clear that there are certain elements of this I don’t know perfectly well, and I invited readers to share what they know. Some of the comments have already taught me things — but they were generally the ones that brought up specifics (like Younghusband in Tibet).
In fact, something like the Holocaust would be an appropriate point of comparison. There is a whole subdiscipline of history known as “Holocaust Studies,” composed of people who exclusively study the forces that led to the Holocaust, how it literally happened, and how it was tolerated. They are all obviously unanimous in their condemnation of it morally (which isn’t true of the British empire), but the questions it raises nevertheless need to be addressed in detail. The field is, I should note, dominated by people who are themselves of Jewish descent.
Dark Knight, “So does that logic apply to the Holocaust?” I think it does, I took two classes in college on the Holocaust. I don’t think we ever needed to state the fact that the Holocaust was morally reprehensible, it was assumed. Our purpose was to learn the facts about it because they were horrific enough that they couldn’t be blamed on one person and left at that. That would be simplifying it too much and I believe that the Holocaust shouldn’t be reduced to a mere slogan.
Another personal example :), I did my senior thesis on women in the Indian Nationalist movement. I started out with a very starry eyed opinion of how accepted women were within this movement etc. I ended up with a much more complicated idea of how Feminism and Nationalist don’t always mesh. Did this make me less proud of how much people contributed and gave up for Independence? Of course not, I started out admiring them and I ended up admiring them. It was just that they weren’t a faceless mass of greatness anymore, they had faces and they had real issues with the ideologies driving independence. That in no way means that the British empire was not based on racist ideologies and exploitative economics, it just means that our predecessors that fought for Indepedence were independent people with diverse opinions. We can only respect that diversity if we study it. My two cents.
Sorry Amardeep, I didn’t realize you had already posted on Holocaust Studies. I took a while commenting and I guess you posted before I refreshed. Sorry Sorry.
I’m sure that many Indians of the generation do respect the British Raj. As I have continuously stated, I believe that this tendency among Indians is probably our greatest failing and is most a result of the British-based education system that most of them were indoctrinated within. Rest assured, there are also just as many who believe the opposite.
Also, your point about Holocaust studies is fair and I don’t dispute the interest of Jewish peoples in the discipline. The key element is this:
This the great challange, and you dismiss it like it’s a given. There was a long time when the Holocaust wasn’t “universally morally condemned” or even recognized as happening. If it hadn’t been for the Jewish scholars that had pushed forward the truth, our contemporary understanding could have been much different or more tempered, much like our current view of colonialism. If we want further generations to understand the horror of the British occupation, then that must be pressed forward by our scholars, an option you personally have but choose not to exercise. that’s fine, everyone should act as they believe, but why brown people take the apologist slant, when there are so many white people pressing that view already? At this rate, British colonialism will be viewed as the same old kind of aw-shucks “accident” that gets one paragraph in a history book, much like the decimation of the indigenous peoples of the Americas. At least they have almost no one to speak for them; what will our excuse be?
And yes, I don’t think there is any gray area here. I think one major goal of South Asian historians should be to get British imperialism to be universally condemned as morally wrong. I explain why
This the great challange, and you dismiss it like it’s a given. There was a long time when the Holocaust wasn’t “universally morally condemned” or even recognized as happening. … At this rate, British colonialism will be viewed as the same old kind of aw-shucks “accident” that gets one paragraph in a history book, much like the decimation of the indigenous peoples of the Americas. At least they have almost no one to speak for them; what will our excuse be?
both these assertions seem off to me. the recent emphases of both the native american die off and the holocaust are new, it it seems much to contend that the holocaust wasn’t condemned (nuremberg trials?) or that the history books now neglect the native americans.
of course, that’s the problem with history. anyone can say anything (e.g., “indians were 100% literate”).
anyway, white people suck!
What Razib said. Also:
I don’t know what you’re talking about — the book in contention in this post is like 500 densely printed pages long, and it raises lots of interesting issues.