The little court disappears—trade languishes—the capital decays—the people are impoverished—the Englishman flourishes, and acts like a sponge, drawing up riches from the banks of the Ganges, and squee...
Justice, in British India, was far from blind: it was highly attentive to the skin colour of the defendant.
Colonialism was made possible, and then sustained and strengthened, as much by cultural technologies of rule as it was by the more obvious and brutal modes of conquest that first established power on...
British cartography defined spaces the better to rule them; the map became an instrument of colonial control. Even the valuable British legacy, the museum, was devised in furtherance of the imperial p...
The Mahatma’s singular insight was that self-government would never be achieved by the resolutions passed by a self-regarding and unelected elite pursuing the politics of the drawing room. To him, sel...
The British public is woefully ignorant of the realities of the British empire, and what it meant to its subject peoples.
Indians paid, in other words, for the privilege of being conquered by the British.
Great discoveries, Ganapathi, are often the result of making the wrong mistake at the right time. Ask Columbus.
Forget heaven and hell, yaar, he says as he leaves. It’s purgatory I’m concerned about. We call it Earth.
Above all, as a Hindu I belong to the only major religion in the world that does not claim to be the only true religion. I find it immensely congenial to be able to face my fellow human beings of othe...
The U.N. guards the vital principles entrenched in its charter, notably the sovereign equality of states and the inadmissibility of interference in their internal affairs. It is precisely because the...
Six decades of Independence have wrought significant change, as exposure to British practices has faded and India’s natural boisterousness has reasserted itself. Some of the state assemblies in our fe...
When Jamsetji Tata tried to set up India’s first modern steel mill in the face of implacable British hostility at the turn of the century (he began petitioning the British for permission in 1883, and...
What the hell does this say about India? Appearances are more important than truths. Gossip is more potent than facts. Loyalty is all one way, from the woman to the man. And when society stacks up all...
The sun never set on the British empire, an Indian nationalist later sardonically commented, because even God couldn’t trust the Englishman in the dark
The Indian tricolour was raised just before sunset, and as it fluttered up the flagpole a late-monsoon rainbow emerged behind it, a glittering tribute from the heavens.
The Empire, in Hobsbawm’s evocative words, was ‘so easily won, so narrowly based, so absurdly easily ruled thanks to the devotion of a few and the passivity of the many.
My China Diary and Walking With Lions, were memoirs of his diplomatic and political experiences. The
Hinduism is great for encouraging social peace, because everyone basically believes their suffering in this life is the result of misdeeds in a past one... So Hinduism is the best antidote to Marxism.
Hinduism as a faith might espouse tolerance, this does not necessarily mean that all Hindus behave tolerantly.