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 Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb’s treasury raked in £100 million in tax...
India’s rape law, enshrined in the colonial-era Indian Penal Code, placed the burden of the victim to establish her ‘good character’ and prove that a rape had occurred, which left her open to discredi...
In this Ferguson is at least living up to the ethos of the colonial project, which primarily benefited the European imperialists in material, moral and intellectual terms. Imperialism elevated Europea...
Hinduism, with its openness, its respect for variety, its acceptance of all other faiths, is one religion that should be able to assert itself without threatening others.
Few women, Ganapathi, fail to be excited by the thought of producing children from different men; it is the ultimate assertion of their creative power. Fortunately for mankind, however, or perhaps unf...
Ruled Pakistan directly for a majority of the years of its existence,
Equal
Am proud to belong to a religion which has taught the world both tolerance and universal acceptance. We believe not only in universal toleration, but we accept all religions as true. I am proud to bel...
While he was alive, he was impossible to ignore; once he had gone, he was impossible to imitate.
We brought up our sons to ‘eat everything’, but their mixed genetic inheritance prevailed: one twin took to meat-eating with relish, while the other, at age seven, with no persuasion whatsoever from h...
Throughout the decades after Independence, the political culture of the country reflected these ‘secular’ assumptions and attitudes. Though the Indian population was 80 per cent Hindu and the country...
The soldiers of the East India Company obliged, systematically smashing the looms of some Bengali weavers and, according to at least one contemporary account (as well as widespread, if unverifiable, b...
The principles he stood for and the way in which he asserted them were always easier to admire than to follow.
The playwright Richard Sheridan was scathing in his denunciation of the Company, whose operations ‘combined the meanness of a pedlar with the profligacy of a pirate…
The path-breaking writer and thinker on nationalism, Benedict Anderson, has convincingly pointed out that identities uniting large numbers of people could arise only after a certain technological leve...
The historian A. J. P. Taylor calls the massacre ‘the decisive moment when Indians were alienated from British rule’. No other ‘punishment’ in the name of law and order had similar casualties: ‘The...
The British did little, very little, of such things. They basked in the Indian sun and yearned for their cold and fog-ridden homeland; they sent the money they had taken off the perspiring brow of the...
Opening lines of The Great Indian Novel narrated as a modern day MahaBharata. They tell me India is an underdeveloped country. They attend seminars, appear on television, even come to see me, creasing...
Jawaharlal Nehru’s first Cabinet list set a standard that would never again be matched, while establishing a precedent for diversity that all his successors would strive to emulate. A
If India’s GDP went down because it ‘missed the bus’ of industrialization, it was because the British threw Indians under the wheels.