1. RAJ AND RUIN :An Author and Two Books -1

1. RAJ AND RUIN :An Author And Two Books-1
       
                    

We learn about an author or book from many sources. The commonest used to be book reviews in newspapers and magazines.But immersed in silly politics, vulgar show biz and cheap sports, our newspapers have no space for  books  . The few books covered and the reviews appearing in our mainstream newspapers are dyed  red.
 It used to be a pleasure visiting old time bookshops, picking  books and browsing , but such places were few and now such bookshops are closing down. I fondly remember Strand Book Stall in Bombay. But technology  is challenging and terminating the old ways.

Books on line: benefits

 I am not referring to kindle or such stuff, but to online book stores.With the coming of   Amazon,  we have an incredible window to the whole world of books and reviews! Infibeam is also good, indeed great for used books from the United States- books we could never afford or acquire otherwise in India. We get to see the book online, learn about the contents, and read great reviews. The reviewers are  usually well-informed, and we  learn a lot!Some take time and pains to inform us about the merits (and demerits) of the particular edition,  and educate us on the subject.Reading the reviews is by itself an experience. 

We have to mind the reviewer. Academics can be incomprehensible at times or  boring. Reviewers  can also be prejudiced, or ideologically committed. But we get to read both sides, and can form a view. However, in the end, we have to read the book ourselves and decide. Books are quite expensive these days and we feel bad if we buy a book  based on some review and  it doesn't meet our expectation.

Good author- again and again?

Another problem is when we like a book by an author, so buy his other books but find they are not as good. Many authors fall in this category. One good book, and they try to repeat the formula! [ I am not talking of fiction.Truth verily is stranger than fiction.Indian politics is more entertaining than Erewhon or Pickwick papers.Of course one can say so only after reading these!] Many of the so called self-improvement  books or new age books are like this. Read  Norman Vincent Peale on positive thinking, you have read all!

Shashi Tharoor

Over a year ago, Shashi Tharoor was in the news for a speech he gave in Oxford about British rule in India, and he famously demanded a token reparation of a rupee for the damage they did! This was a surprise, coming from a Congress MP, for we have long stopped expecting any sensible speech or writing from a Congressman. But Tharoor is well educated, and not a traditional politician.( I suspect he is not even a 'full' Congressman, in the sense of blindly following its leadership.)He speaks his mind, his language flies above the head of  most Indian  politicians, and lands him in trouble with his own party. [Remember "cattle class"?] Thus he lost his junior ministerial positions and ceased being a  spokesman of his party.

So when I came to know that Tharoor had developed his Oxford talk into a full book, I bought it eagerly.
 Titled "An Era of Darkness ", it is rewarding reading.





Published by Aleph Book Company New Delhi, 2016. Cover shown here  only for educational purpose.





ICS to IAS : Indian Atrocities Service


Most educated [ really, only "schooled " or "colleged" ] Indians are taught that English rule was benevolent, and India would not have become modern without the English rule. This attitude and belief are so pervasive that though India officially became independent of British rule 70 years ago, we are still governed by the laws and systems set up by the British for their benefit! [Is it a surprise then that most youngsters with technical education find it easier to work in the US ? ] 
Nehru, the long-serving first PM did nothing to change them!  Nehru noted that ICS had been called "neither Indian, nor civil, nor a service ", but he let it morph into  IAS, the  Indian Administrative Service, which now is plainly Indian Atrocities Service- a group of self-serving goons.[ Goon in British English means a silly or stupid person; in American, it means a thug or bully. The average IAS fellow fits both senses.]

Apology for the Raj

There are still many among us who are fond of the British era. Some are apologetic about the Raj, some clearly pro-British, even among the so called, self-styled liberal intellectuals.They argue that:

• India became a nation under the British: the British gave political unity 
• They introduced us to democracy, the Press,the parliamentary system, rule of law.
• They were the agents of modernisation and progress: giving us education system, railways, telegraphs,etc.

This notion has been perpetuated through the govt controlled school system which millions of our children go through each year. 

During the freedom struggle , nationalists gave us a different picture of England as the exploiter: Dadabhai Naoroji., Romesh Chander Dutt, Mahatma Gandhi, etc. But their views did not get into the main curriculum. Or even enter mainstream discussions. Later, the Marxist historians took over our academies, and today it is their view which prevails by /as default . The colonial power is shown as the agent of progress. [ The Marxists have added their own class struggle to which it is essential to paint the Hindu , pre-Muslim period in dark colours, to project the Muslims too as agents of progress and benevolence! ]

There are nationalists today who challenge these ideas, but they get dismissed as right-wing fanatics and their view does not get public space.

Tharoor examines such claims with factual thoroughness and demolishes them one by one, citing on the way unquestionable authorities.

 He quotes the American Scholar-Historian Will Durant who wrote in 1930:

Image from will-durant.com/bio.

The British conquest of India was an invasion and destruction of a high civilization by a trading company utterly without scruple or principle, careless of art and greedy of gain, over-running with fire and sword a country temporarily disordered and helpless, bribing and murdering,  annexing and stealing, and beginning that career of illegal and 'legal' plunder which has now gone on ruthlessly for one hundred and seventy- three years.

John Sullivan, founder of Ooty, noted in 1840s:

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 squeezing them down upon the banks of the Thames.

India was not a barren or poor land,but the very centre of wealth of the medieval world with which every country wished to trade. India contributed over 23% of the world GDP at the beginning of the 18th century. 

American Unitarian Minister J.T.Sunderland  noted in 1929:

Nearly every kind of manufacture or product known to the civilized world  - nearly every kind of creation of man's brain and hand, existing anywhere, and prized either for its utility or beauty - had long been produced in India. India was a far greater industrial and manufacturing nation than any in Europe or any other in Asia.

The lie of Indian Poverty 

Those who hold up before us the image of impoverished and backward  Indians and paint the British as the modernisers and benefactors - those lickers of Macaulay's shoes - do not point out these facts. Tharoor sums it up beautifully:

Britain's rise for 200 years was financed by its depradations in India.

Tharoor goes into each argument and tears it apart with a great array of historical facts and authentic figures. We cannot reproduce them all here but may note some key features.

• Britain's Industrial Revolution was built on the destruction of India's thriving manufacturing industries. The British destruction of Indian textile industry was the " first great deindustrialisation of the modern world. "
• Rural poverty was a direct result of British actions.
• The British learned as much of the technology as possible and then shut down India's metallurgical industries.
• India has had a sense of unity from time immemorial. Tharoor cites Diana Eck in this connection who writes:

"Considering its long history, India has had few hours of political and administrative unity. Its unity as a nation, however, has been firmly constituted by the sacred geography it has held in common and revered ". 

In other words, India has had a different basis for constituting or reckoning unity.Even in Europe, the rise of the nation state  is a recent development.

• Reports written by the observers of the Company described the village communities as self-governing republics and functioning economic units, linked to the wider pre-colonial global market, that had governed themselves even as powers at the centre came and went. This was destroyed by the British who introduced a centralised system for their benefit.
• 
  
• The British ran government, tax collection,and administered what passed for justice. Indians were excluded from all these.  Dadabhai Naoroji argued in 1880: "While in India they acquire India's money, experience, and wisdom; and when they go they carry  both away with them, leaving India so much poorer in material and moral wealth."
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• They divided Indian society in many ways, on  all conceivable grounds."India was anthropologized in the colonial interest...they reduced vastly  complex codes and their associated meanings to a few metonyms." They introduced motivated sociology.
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• "Ethnic, social, caste and racial classifications were conducted as part of an imperial strategy more effectively to impose and maintain British control."
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• "The trio of Mill, Macaulay and Mueller...had effectively established a colonial construction of Indian past which even Indians were taught to internalise. "  

[To which our leftist historians have added two more Ms : Muslims and Marx.]

• "Large-scale conflicts between Hindus and Muslims (religiously defined) , only began under colonial rule; many other kinds of social strife were labelled as religious. " The Muslim League was started under the instigation of the British in 1906.

[  The same British started the  Aryan-Dravidian split and encouraged the pro-Dravidian elements in Madras. ]

• Famines became a recurring feature under the colonial rule. claiming millions of lives, not because there was no food, but because there was no money to buy it with. 80% of the people were "thrown back upon the soil because England's discriminating duties have ruined practically every branch of native manufacture". Land alone could not support all of them.
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• Indians were forced to migrate and work as indentured labour in many countries, where their descendants still suffer when the British left without caring for them.
• British rule was created and maintained by brutal force. As  historian Jon Wilson says in a recent book: "The assertion of violent power usually exceeded the demands of any particular commercial or political interest." British Raj was at base Brutish Raj.
• Jallianwala confirmed how little the British valued Indian lives.

Sir William Hicks, home minister under Stanley Baldwin in 1929 openly admitted:

"We conquered India as an outlet for the goods of Britain. We conquered India by the sword, and by the sword we shall hold it. I am not such a hypocrite as to say we hold India for the Indians."

Tharoor shreds to pieces every argument apologists  offer in support of the British Raj. And brilliantly sums up:

"the British state in India was indeed...a totally amoral, rapacious imperialist machine bent on the subjugation of Indians for the purpose of profit, ...And its subjugation resulted in the expropriation of Indian wealth to Britain, draining the society of resources."

We are still to fully emerge from the long shadow of British imperialism. Many of those features have left their after-effects which still affect us.

In a lighter vein one may say that the real British legacies were Tea, Cricket and English language. But even these come with a sad twist.

Tea without Sympathy

The British grew tea in India for themselves, not for locals.In the process, the British ruthlessly exploited the land for profit, while ruining it and decimating the wild life and destroying the forests.

Indianised Cricket

Yes, Cricket is an English game, but Tharoor cites Ashis Nandy to say that it is an Indian game accidentally discovered by the British.Indians have taken to it with a touch of philosophy, the glorious uncertainties of the game echoing ancient Indian thought... it is as if " Bhagavad Gita is performed in the guise of a Victorian English morality play." It seems to be derived ultimately from Indian philosophy, " which accepts profoundly that in life the journey is as important as the destination."

But even here, the British genius for divide and rule was evident: they divided the teams on communal lines: Hindus, Muslims, Parsis and 'the Rest'!

English language and Colonisation of Indian mind

English language by itself is good, and could not have done harm but in India it was introduced as a tool of colonialism, "to de-nationalize and de-Indianize them, and turn them into imitative Englishmen." as Will Durant said. Other subjects, notably our own History. was taught in English as written by them- with "the teleological purpose of serving to legitimize British rule in India." The introduction of English literature  as a subject of study was not based on any scientific notion but on the simple Macaulayan prejudice, as noted by Charles Trevelyan in 1838.

Unfortunately, little in our educational system has changed since Independence. We are turning our children into Anglophones and Anglophiles (Yankeephiles ?) by the lakh every year!

Tharoor quotes with approval Alex von Tunzelmann's revealing beginning to her book Indian Summer:

"In the beginning there were two nations.One was a vast, mighty and magnificent empire, brilliantly organized and culturally unified, which dominated a massive swath of the earth. The other was an undeveloped, semi-feudal realm, riven by religious factionalism and barely able to feed its illiterate, diseased and stinking masses.The first nation was India.The second was England."

An Era of Darkness by Shashi Tharoor is a brilliant and engaging book. It marshals facts and figures scattered in diverse fields and links them together in brilliant narrative and splendid argument. Tharoor does it without hatred, malice or rancour- purely as an academic. There are a few places where he shows himself as a  politician, but on the whole he is independent and bases himself on solid facts and analysis.

George Santayana said that those who do not read history are condemned to repeat it. This is a  book  every nationalistic Indian should read.

Note :

1. Adam Smith, father of modern economics and champion of free trade, noted as early as 1776 in his Wealth of Nations that Bengal exported more manufactures than grain, and that the British merchants would destroy it.

Bengal..which commonly exports the greatest quantity of rice has always been more remarkable for the exportation of a great variety of manufactures  than for that of its grain. (Book IV)

Comparing the British company to the destructiveness of the Dutch, Smith wrote:

The English company have not yet had time to establish in Bengal so perfectly destructive a system.The plan of their government, however, has had exactly the same tendency......

In the course of a century or two, the policy of the English company would in this manner have probably proved as completely destructive as that of the Dutch. (Book IV)

This is exactly what happened in  under two centuries, with the Crown carrying on the loot from where the company left since 1858!  Adam Smith was first  a moral philosopher and he could identify moral depravity in the English so early in their adventure in India. It is not for nothing that we salute Adam Smith!

2.Friends who are interested may read the following :

1.Will Durant : a).The Story of Civilization, vol.1. Our Oriental                                      Heritage.
                         b) The Case For India (1930)

2. Alex von Tunzelmann :  Indian Summer
3. Madhusree Mukerjee : Churchill's Secret War
4. Roy Moxham :The Theft of India
5.Jon Wilson : India Conquered
6.Walter Reid : Keeping The Jewel In The Crown
[2 -6 are recent books]