Author: Tarun Vijay
Publication: The Times of India
Date: July 31, 2010
URL: http://blogs.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/indus-calling/entry/the-empire-continues-i
David Cameron was candid during his recent
India visit when he said he was not ashamed to admit that the visit was an
investment hunt. And he did get what he wanted - investment and jobs for Britons.
As a report said, Prime Minister Cameron toured the Hawk facility at Hindustan
Aeronautics Limited (HAL) and welcomed the finalization of a £700 million
agreement between BAE Systems, Rolls-Royce and HAL, which is expected to support
more than 200 jobs in the UK.
Like his predecessors in East India Company, he looked at India as a market
and an opportunity to get more from it. His remarks on the 26/11 attack were
casual and superficial. He said, "In November 2008, we watched in horror
as terrorists went on the rampage in Mumbai, killing scores of Indians and
three British nationals."
While he was definitive on the number of Britons
killed in Mumbai, he simply used the word "scores" for Indians killed,
showing a lack of interest. He ignored any reference to the atrocities the
British inflicted on us just a hundred years before and neither expressed
a sense of regret nor apologized for the brutalization of India at the hands
of his ancestors that made India weak, emasculated and grappling with hunger,
poverty and corruption. All these three ailments India is facing today are
a British "gift" to us.
Recently a book authored by the world renowned
historian Will Durant has seen the light of the day thanks to the painstaking
efforts of TN Shanbagh, a respected name among book lovers and the intellectual
community of Mumbai, who ran the famous Strand book shop at Fort till he breathed
his last a year ago. This book, titled "The Case for India" must
be prescribed in every school of our nation, which is still reeling under
the neo-colonialists in corrupt politicians and babus. And we are a people
who seem to have given up hopes on them. This book, which lay lost for years
till it was "rediscovered" and republished had made Rabindranath
Tagore to write these lines, "Will Durant treated us with the respect
due to human beings. I noticed in his book a poignant note of pain at the
suffering and indignity of the people who are not his kindred, an indignant
desire to be just to the defeated race."
The British empire in India proved that the British were the most savage and
inhuman colonial rulers. Unlike what many of the Anglicised writers and historians,
who still use the word Raj for the Britsh rule in India giving it the legitimacy
of a just and respectful era of rule, would like us to believe. Will Durant
writes, "Those who have seen the unspeakable poverty and physiological
weakness of the Hindus to-day will hardly believe that it was the wealth of
eighteenth century India which attracted the commercial pirates of England
and France. "This wealth", says Sunderland, "was created by
the Hindus' vast and varied industries. Nearly every kind of manufacture or
product known to the civilized world - nearly every kind of creation of Man's
brain and hand, existing anywhere, and prized either for its utility or beauty
- had long, long been produced in India……. She had great architecture
- equal in beauty to any in the work. She had great engineering works. She
had great merchants, great businessmen, great bankers and financiers. Not
only was she the greatest ship-building nation, but she had great commerce
and trade by land and sea which extended to all known civilized countries.
Such was the India which the British found when they came."
AND WHAT DID THEY DO TO US? "Until 1918 the total expenditure on public
health, of both the central and the provincial governments combined, was only
$5,000,000 a year, for 240,000,000 people - an appropriation of two cents
per capita.
"Sir William Hunter, once Director-General
of Indian Statistics, estimated that 40,000,000 of the people of India were
seldom or never able to satisfy their hunger. Weakened with malnutrition,
they offer low resistance to infections; epidemics periodically destroy millions
of them. In 1901, 2,72,000 died of plague introduced from abroad; in 1902,
5000,000 died of plague; in 1903, 800,000; in 1904, 1,000,000. In 1918 there
were 125,000,000 cases of influenza, and 12,500,000 recorded deaths... We
can now understand why there are famines in India. Their cause, in plain terms,
is not the absence of sufficient food, but the inability of the people to
pay for it. Famines have increased in frequency and severity under British
rule. From 1770 to 1900, 25,000,000 Hindus died of starvation; 15,000,000
of these died in the last quarter of the century, in the famines of 1877,
1889, 1897, and 1900."
We wanted to get education, but the British didn't encourage it, having destroyed
all indigenous institutions of education that have made India a superpower
in trade, arts, architecture, ship building and science and technology. Writes
Durant, "At no time in history has India been without civilization: from
the days of Buddha, in the fifth century, who is to the East what Christ is
to the West; through the time when Asoka, the most humane of emperors, preached
the gentle creed of Buddha from pillars and monuments everywhere; down to
the sixteenth century, when culture, wealth and art flourished at Vijayanagar
in the south, and a still higher culture, and still greater wealth and art,
flourished under Akbar in the north. It was to reach this India of fabulous
riches that Columbus sailed the seas. The civilization that was destroyed
by British guns had lasted for fifteen centuries, producing saints from Buddha
to Ramakrishna and Gandhi; philosophy from the Vedas to Schopenhauer and Bergson,
Thopea and Keyserling, who take their lead and acknowledge their derivation
from India (India, say Keyserling, "has produced the profoundest metaphysics
that we know of."; and he speaks of "the absolute superiority of
India over the West in philosophy"; poetry from the Mahabharata containing
the Bhagavad-Gita, "perhaps the most beautiful work of the literature
of the world... And how shall we rank a civilization that created the unique
and gigantic temples of Ellora, Madura and Angkor and the perfect artistry
of Delhi, Agra and the Taj Mahal - that indescribable lyric in stone?"
But we were subjected to live in darkness. Says he, "In 1911 a Hindu
representative, Gokhale, introduced a bill for universal compulsory primary
education in India; it was defeated by the British and Government-appointed
members. In 1916 Patel introduced a similar bill, which was defeated by the
British and Government-appointed members; (115) the Government could not afford
to give the people schools. Instead, it spent most of its eight cents for
education on secondary schools and universities, where the language used was
English, the history, literature, customs and morals taught were English,
and young Hindus, after striving amid poverty to prepare themselves for college,
found that they had merely let themselves in for a ruthless process that aimed
to de-nationalize and de-Indianize them, and turn them into imitative Englishmen.
The first charge on a modern state, after the maintenance of public health,
is the establishment of education, universal, compulsory and free. But the
total expenditure for education in India is less than one-half the educational
expenditure in New York State (116). In the quarter of a century between 1882
and 1907, while public schools were growing all over the world, the appropriation
for education in British India increased by $2,000,000; in the same period
appropriations for the fratricide army increased by $43,000,000.117."
Impoverished, humiliated and tyrannically pushed to become emasculated slaves,
Indians tried hard to live a life of subhuman beings. Durant writes, "Everybody
and everything," says the Oxford History of India, was on sale. (22).
And Macaulay writes: During the five years which followed the departure of
Clive from Bengal, the misgovernment of the English was carried to such a
point as seemed incompatible with the existence of society… The servants
of the Company … forced the natives to buy dear and to sell cheap …
Enormous fortunes were thus rapidly accumulated at Calcutta, while thirty
millions of human beings were reduced to the extremity of wretchedness. They
had been accustomed to live under tyranny, but never under tyranny like this
… Under their old masters had they had at least one resource: when the
evil became insupportable, the people rose and pulled down the government.
But the English Government was not be so shaken off. That Government, oppressive
as the most oppressive form of barbarian despotism was strong with all the
strength of civilization (23).
Death stared at Indians so starkly that it
was difficult to breath. Durant writes, "Let the late President of Union
Theological Seminary, Dr. Charles C. Hall, speak: The obvious fact stares
us in the face that there is at no time, in no year, any shortage of food-stuffs
in India. The trouble is that the taxes imposed by the British Government
being 50% of the produce, the Indian starves that India's annual revenue may
not be diminished by a dollar. 80% of the whole population has been thrown
back upon the soil because England's discriminating duties have ruined practically
every branch of native manufacture. The final item is the death-rate. In England
the death-rate is 13 per 1000 per year; in the United States it is 12; in
India it is 32 (140). Half the children born in Bengal die before reaching
the age of eight (141). In a recent year (1921) the infant mortality in Bombay
was 666 per 1000."(142)
