In August 1765, the young and weakened Mughal emperor, Shah Alam II, was browbeaten into issuing a diwani that replaced his own revenue officials in the provinces of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa with the...
If you believed in truth and cared enough to obtain it, Ganga affirmed, you had to be prepared actively to suffer for it. It was essential to accept punishment willingly in order to demonstrate the st...
Great discoveries, Ganapathi, are often the result of making the wrong mistake at the right time.
But 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 ou...
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...
Brutish’ as an acceptable substitute for ‘British’ rule in India!
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.
It is suggested that while the Vedic era saw only the worship of a formless and imageless God, the conduct of rituals and the propitiation of the river and mountain and tree gods of local tribes, all...
Indeed there were outstanding examples of good governance in India at the time, notably the Travancore kingdom, which in 1819 became the first government in the world to decree universal, compulsory a...
The word ‘Hindu’ did not exist in any Indian language till its use by foreigners gave Indians a term for self-definition. Hindus, in other words, call themselves by a label that they didn’t invent 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...
Simple logic of colonialism, under which the rules of humanity applied only to the rulers, for the rulers were people and the people were objects. Objects to be controlled, disciplined, kept in their...
Historian William Dalrymple quotes a Mughal official named Narayan Singh as asking after 1765, ‘when we have to take orders from a handful of traders who have not yet learned to wash their bottoms?
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
Control. The people’s character is deliberately debased, their mind is denationalized and perpetually kept in ignorance and fed with stories of England’s greatness and ‘mission’ in the world… As Panka...
A highly developed country of the past, in an advanced state of decay).
While he was alive, he was impossible to ignore; once he had gone, he was impossible to imitate. When
While God waits for his temple to be built of love, man brings stones.’ Or
When an Englishman wants something, George Bernard Shaw observed, he never publicly admits to his wanting it; instead, his want is expressed as ‘a burning conviction that it is his moral and religious...