Great discoveries, Ganapathi, are often the result of making the wrong mistake at the right time.
But less than a century and a half later, this Mughal empire was in a state of collapse after the spectacular sacking of Delhi by the Persian Nadir Shah in 1739 and the loot of all its treasures. The...
British under Clive defeat Nawab Siraj-ud-Daula to become rulers of Bengal, the richest province of India.
Indeed there were outstanding examples of good governance in India at the time, notably the Travancore kingdom, which in 1819 became the
The British economic historian Angus Maddison has demonstrated, India’s share of the world economy was 23 per cent, as large as all of Europe put together. (It had been 27 per cent in 1700, when the M...
The Bengali intellectual and author of the bestselling Autobiography of an Unknown Indian (1951), with its cringe-worthy dedication to the British empire in India: To
National television broadcast a fifty-two-episode serialization of the Mahabharata, the script was written by a Muslim poet, Dr. Rahi Masoom Raza.
Had exported an average of £13,000,000 worth of goods to Britain each year from 1835 to 1872 with no corresponding return of money; in fact, payments to people residing in Britain, whether profits to...
Crushes the adventurous, the brave, the sensitive, and encourages the timid, the opportunist and time-serving, the sneak and the bully. It surrounds itself with
Whereas an Akbar might have used such technologies to fuse his diverse people together, the British used them to separate, classify and divide.
Twilight never lasts long in India, but its advent was like opening time at the pubs our rulers had left behind. The shadows fell and spirits rose; the sharp odour of quinine tonic, invented by lonely...
Trudeau’s Willy Brandt moment needs to find its British echo.
Then there was neither non-existence nor existence,Then there was neither space, nor the sky beyond.What covered it? Where was it? What sheltered it?Was there water, in depths unfathomed? Then there w...
Personally, I am far from convinced that the British system is suited to India. The parliamentary democracy we have adopted involves the British perversity of electing a legislature to form an executi...
Indians were always subjects, never citizens; throughout the days of Empire, no Indian could have presumed to say ‘I am British’ the way a French African was encouraged to say ‘Je suis français’.
India . . . was like an ancient palimpsest on which layer upon layer of thought and reverie had been inscribed, and yet no succeeding layer had completely hidden or erased what had been written previo...
Holocaust.
History, in any case, cannot be reduced to some sort of game of comparing misdeeds in different eras; each period must be judged in itself and for its own successes and transgressions.
Gangaji’s truth required activism, not passivity.
Bombs and bullets alone cannot destroy India, because Indians will pick their way through the rubble and carry on as they have done throughout history.