The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Ritu:

I am not so sure that an invasion by Russia would have been on the cards. Around the time Aurangzeb died, the Marathas were rather active as were the Afghans and the Pathans, and the Jats and the Sikhs. Most of the north-western territory could as easily have been divided between these three groups.

The idea - debateable, I think - that "the landmass from the Himalyas to Kanyakumari has been (always) considered one nation" has usually not hindered the division of India into many political entities.

Of course not. It has been quite troublesome to forge a united entity, and I am not too sure how far we have succeeded. The results of a poll were published this week and even today some 41% of the Indians identify themselves first with their region/state, 29% with India the country, and 19% indentify themselves on the basis of their religion. And it is not too hard to understand if one considers the regional differences in culture, language and lifestyle. As Jinnah pointed out to Mountbatten, 'A Bengali is a Bengali first and a Muslim second'. When Mountbatten pointed out that surely an Indian must be an Indian first and a Bengali second, he was met with a blank stare. :)

The current polity is the only one that has approached being a nation-state, as opposed to a series of conquests by one ruler or another, amounting to an Empire with subject peoples and suzerainity rather than unified government.

Yep. And for this I give credit first to Patel, then to Menon. The British were quite willing to leave us fragmented. If the Cabinet mission plan envisioned a very weak federation, even Mountbatten's plan was to allow any of the 565 princely states to declare independence if they so wanted. It was Patel's insistence on at least 560 accessions that created today's India.

Re Hitler's advice: 1938 was too late in the game to kill Gandhi - there would have been a mass rebellion and only the British armymen would have helped suppress it. :)

But as far as ridiculous comments go, I thought Gandhi's advice on how Britain should face the Nazi invasion was even sillier than Hitler's advice. Gandhi thought that the British should lay down their arms and not offer any resistance or violence. This was apparently going to appeal to the humanity of the Nazi soldiers...

To get back to the initial point though, I don't know how much credit one is supposed to give to the British for refusing to kill these 60 odd people. Far more had been killed before 1938 [like the Jalianwallah Bagh massacre], many more would be killed in the nine years left till Independence [especially in 1942]. Just because the British were circumspect and relatively polite in the 20th century, especially after WWII started and they donned the mantle of supporters of freedom, doesn't mean that brutality hadn't been a feature of the Raj.

Bellantrys, I know what my ancestors did and I probably know it in greater detail than you. For example, I know that we didn't indulge in vilification of the British even during the struggle for our independence. It was a non-violent movement, based on satyagraha, our insistence on our right to govern ourselves, and the criticism was limited to specific policies and people. There were a few exceptions, of course, but the mainstream, from Gandhi down, merely pointed out the specific problems and insisted that the British leave. And I don't think that indicates any kind of a subservience but, rather, illustrates confidence and assurance. Gandhi was probably the politest rebel ever, and I'd sure be interested in someone making a case that he was subservient and considered himself to inferior to any white man.

You sound, with all due respect, like some Irish-American praising the British govt during the Famine, because it resulted in Irish diaspora and present state of wealth and prosperity and increased numbers for Irish people since 1840,

And you sound, with all due respect, amazingly anxious to foist your favourite misconceptions on me. Can you point out a single sentence in which I *praised* the atrocities committed by the Raj or even a supposed effect of these atrocities, like maybe a statement of mine in which I spout idiocies like 'Oh goody! The deaths caused by famines brought down the population', or 'Wow! Dyer sure showed those stupid protestors!'? Surely an enumeration of what was good along with an enumeration of what was bad cannot be counted as praise.

without any thought as to what *better* might have been, without such interference, the foolish assumption that your own people couldn't have, building on what they had already accomplished in their own Renaissance, without the downpresser men of the Raj grifting and ruining native arts and industry, attained the same as Europe on their own. Which is a kind of sad self-hating acceptance of the Anglosphere assessment of "wog" inferority.

Eh? We were talking about what *did* happen, not about what might have happened. And I am not sure why you assume you know my views on the latter. As far as I know, I have never thought or said anything even half as remotely ridiculous as the views you ascribe to me. I'd like you to either back these statements by quoting my lines, or, failing that, I'd like you to admit that you don't have faintest idea of what you are talking about. Namely, my views on what India would have been like if the Brits never arrived. And please don't point to the stuff I said about engineers and decent civil servants: if you can't see the difference between an acknowledgement of what was done and the wail that we couldn't possibly have done it ourselves, then that is your problem, not mine.

--You won't *ever* find an Irish-American praising the actions of the British empire during the Famine - nor even exonerating them with historicism, by-the-by. They'd be run out of town on a rail.

How the Irish conduct their affairs is their business, I am not the keeper of their conscience. I am, however, the keeper of my conscience and I refuse to lie or exagerrate to prove my credentials. Least of all to impress a random stranger who seems a bit too willing to accuse me of weird notions. I respond well to questions, I don't respond too well to being told what I think and then being berated on the basis of somebody else's fantasies.

...although you do find the same uncritical acceptance of white, "Western Culture" superiority among a very few African-Americans, who know what side they expect to have their bread buttered on.

*shrug*

Again, that is their problem. What *I* am interested in is your compulsion to believe that I suffer from an inferiority complex. The very notion that we needed the Brits to 'civilise' us is laughable - not only are we one of the oldest civilisations in the world, taking over somebody else's lands and wealth for personal gain is hardly my notion of being civilised. However that doesn't mean that I can't appreciate the good folk who came over here and fell in love with the country, or its people, or built dams and canals which *did* help my people. But then again, I have never subcribed to the notion that giving credit where it's due reduces a person.

But most black citizens don't think their ancestors were dupes and dopes for resisting the "blessings" of "civilization" by any means available to them

And pray where did I call my ancestors 'dupes and dopes'? Do you ever think before you type, or do you just get caught up in your fantasies and impose them on anyone unlucky enough to be in your vicinity?

David:

Cricket is a very good point, almost enough to make me start thinking of the Raj as an excellent thing to have happened. ;)

But since it also a source of anxiety today, I'll refrain from adding it to the equation and just stick to my original view, which is that the Raj had its good points and its bad points. And I tend to find that the sides balance out.

For every Dyer, there were dozens of dedicated officers who tried to maintain order and help the people. For every famine, there were engineers who worked hard at irrigation projects. Although I rarely came across genuine altruism on the part of the Company or the Crown, I also rarely came across deliberate malice. It was a different age, with different compulsions, and the Brits didn't acquit themselves too badly when they were here.

And then there is English. Perhaps my favourite legacy of the Raj. :)
The existence of India as a nation, however, is not a legacy of the British. For thousands of years, even before Clive set foot on Indian soil, the landmass from the Himalyas to Kanyakumari has been considered one nation. And at least two other empires, preceding the Raj, successfully brought most of that area under their control.

Zoe:

My great great great grandfather's mare could jump over that hedge while carrying a few sacks of jaggery. When the district collector found that out, he first refused to believe it and then, after a demonstration, insisted on treating the mare to jaggery from the British stores. :)

And if the Harappan civilisation interests you, you'll find a lot of material online under that name and the 'Saraswati Valley Civilisation'. Over the last few decades, enough evidence has been uncovered to debunk Wheeler's theory of the Aryan invasion. Oh, and excavations of some of the sites, Hothal and Mahendragarh, apparently revealed skeletons from different races. Multiuculturalism still remains - I just wish our drainage system was as good as of the Harappans [covered drains ~ 2500 BC].

Keep in mind that policy in the case of the second Bush administration is very nearly reducible to 'bring hither the money'.

The Company, of course, waited more than a century before it started denying that that was its basic motive. They were refreshingly honest to begin with. :)

Nevertheless, consider what the Indian troops mutinied for: a system that made it moral and right for a man to refuse another water on the grounds that it would break the former's caste.

That is a bit of an over-reach. It was a system which condoned such a refusal of water. It never declared it was moral and right [the way it did with Sati]. And that statement would only explain the mutiny of the Hindu sepoys - the Muslims were not caste-bound and they rebelled too.

The cartridges were the spark that set off the rebellion, the unrest had been fomenting for years. Government missives proclaiming the desire to Christianise the subcontinent helped, as did the famines and the lack of pay, as did the dissolution of the Zamindari and Talukdari system, the heavy taxes, and the Doctrine of Lapse, as did the refusal to let an Indian rise to the higher levels of administration. The Indians who rebelled, sepoys and kings, did so for many different reasons. Jhansi, fr'ex, rebelled directly as a result of the Doctrine of Lapse.

If one were to give a one sentence reason for the mutiny, it would be that they were fighting for their way of life. So they fought for their right to keep their castes, for the right to adopt a child and pass on their property to their adopted heir rather than to have it lapse into the Company's ownership, they fought to keep their religion [Muslims], so on and so forth.

A couple of coincidences here:

I first heard about Fraser's book last night when a friend said much the same thing that you have said - that it is the sole source of what he knows about the Mutiny. The topic came up when I talked on my lj about some online resources on the Mutiny. I had been going through the contemporary Merkin newspapers to see what they had to say about the same. As I remarked, with definite amusement, some of them read much the same as a leftist British columnist's condemnation of the Iraqi adventure. There were concerns about imperialistic hubris, looting of Indian wealth and the complete lack of accountability, stuff like that. :)

So I assume we will imminently see war declared on the weather and Castro given 48 hours to either prove he's not stockpiling winds or to get out of Cuba.

Billmon thinks that Bush wold end up fighting the war against hurricanes in the Indian Ocean and anyone who points out that Katrina never went/originated there would be called 'unpatriotic'. :)

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