I need scarcely point out,
Hinduism professes no false certitudes. Its capacity to express wonder at Creation and simultaneously scepticism about the omniscience of the Creator are unique to Hinduism. Both are captured beautifu...
Basic truth about the colonies, Heaslop. Any time there’s trouble, you can put it down to books. Too many of the wrong ideas getting into the heads of the wrong sorts of people. If ever the Empire com...
At the beginning of the eighteenth century, as 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 togethe...
It is striking that when slavery was abolished, the British government paid compensation, not to the men and women so inhumanely pressed into bondage, but to their former owners, for their ‘loss of pr...
The cricketer-prince Ranjitsinhji obliged his peasantry, in the midst of a crippling drought, to contribute to the British coffers during World War I; and as his state choked in the grip of famine, he...
History is neither for excuses nor for revenge 1.
But it does not want
Alienated
A highly developed country of the past, in an advanced state of decay).
We carry with us the weight of the past, and because we do not have a finely developed sense of history and historicism, it is a past that is still alive in our present. We wear the dust of history on...
There were other well-known Indian supporters of Empire, most notably the Bengali intellectual and unabashed Anglophile, Nirad C. Chaudhuri, who in a series of books extolled the virtues of the Britis...
The racism of the colonial state was also reflected in its penal code. The Criminal Tribes Legislation, 1911, gave authority to the British to restrict movement, search and even detain people from spe...
The manipulation of currency, throughout a feature of the colonial enterprise, reached its worst during the Great Depression of 1929–30, when Indian farmers (like those in the North American prairies)...
The assumption on the part of most Indian political parties that overt friendship with Israel would cost its advocates dearly at the Indian ballot box remains a strong factor, especially when election...
The British ruled nineteenth-century India with unshakeable self-confidence, buttressed by protocol, alcohol and a lot of gall.
Rabindranath Tagore put it gently to a Western audience in New York in 1930: ‘A great portion of the world suffers from your civilisation.’ Mahatma Gandhi was blunter: asked what he thought of Western...
Pakistan was created by Jinnah’s will and Britain’s willingness’—not by Nehru’s wilfulness.
It is a bit rich for the Brits to suppress, exploit, imprison, torture and maim a people for 200 years and then celebrate the fact that they are democratic at the end of it. We weren't given democracy...
History belongs to the past, but understanding it is the duty of the present