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February 9 - March 10, 2019
failures. History, in any case, cannot be reduced to some sort of game of comparing misdeeds in different eras; each period must be judged in itself and for its own successes and transgressions.
ancestors. Compensation should be paid to the victims, not to their grandchildren, and by the wrongdoers, not by their grandchildren.
When Willy Brandt was chancellor of Germany, he sank to his knees at the Warsaw Ghetto in 1970 to apologize to Polish Jews for the Holocaust. There were hardly any Jews left in Poland, and Brandt, who as a socialist was persecuted by the Nazis, was completely innocent of the crimes for which he was apologizing. But in doing so—with his historic ‘Kniefall von Warschau’ (Warsaw Genuflection), he was recognizing the moral responsibility of the German people, whom he led as chancellor.
If British schoolchildren can learn how those dreams of the English turned out to be nightmares for their subject peoples, true atonement—of the purely moral kind, involving a serious consideration of historical responsibility rather than mere admission of guilt—might be achieved.
especially true of Indian princes who, once British rule was well established, accepted a Faustian bargain to protect their wealth and their comforts in exchange for mortgaging their integrity to the British.
itself. The past is not necessarily a guide to the future, but it does partly help explain the present. One cannot, as I have written elsewhere, take revenge upon history; history is its own revenge.
Even Miss Prism in Oscar Wilde’s 1895 play The Importance of Being Earnest could not fail to take note, instructing her impressionable ward Cecily to ‘read your Political Economy in my absence. The chapter on the Fall of the Rupee you may omit. It is somewhat too sensational. Even these metallic problems have their melodramatic side.’
soupçon of schadenfreude in some Indians.)
The Brexit is another instance. This time the British are tearing themselves up, without any external help!
and industrial progress in other eras suddenly lost its ability to innovate in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Somehow, the cultural stagnation and degradation also contributed to the downfall of Indian industries. Stupid caste rules, customs and rituals often hindered the people from taking up risky enterprises. Shadow of this still exists today; states like West Bengal, Jharkhand and Odisha have "missed the bus" to development owing to lack (or more likely discouraging) mentality of people towards entrepreneurship. People here would rather work for others, than start enterprises of their own. The risk taking has a hard landing. Even in family support.
institutions; the foremost Indian research institution under the British empire, the Indian Institute of Science, was endowed by the legendary Jamsetji Tata, not by any British philanthropist, let alone by the colonial government.
Yet, almost all Nobel Prize in sciences to Indian scientists belong to British times. Racism and European bias may have crept in, but major brealthrough research is confined only to a few top tier institutes in the country.
its imperialism brought in law and order amid what looked perilously like anarchy,
It was anarchy. Frankly, it woud have been surprising had an outsider not taken advantage of it.
‘Imperialism,’ Robert Kaplan suggests, ‘confers a loose and accepted form of sovereignty, occupying a middle ground between anarchy and full state control’.
The Indian councils at the centre and provincial levels were always bodies with no real authority on any significant matter, and budgets, defence and law and order remained firmly in British hands. The objective was a gradual increase in representative government, not the establishment of full-fledged democracy.
Hogwash and filth. Mere pittance for the beetles
The problem is that this liberalism was practised within severe limits.
Secondly, the British, till the bitter end hoped to hold on to the "Jewel in the Crown". Who would want to let go of a cash cow?
Nicholas B. Dirks explains it lucidly: ‘Colonialism was made possible, and then sustained and strengthened, as much by cultural technologies of rule as it was by the more obvious and brutal modes of conquest that first established power on foreign shores… Colonialism was itself a cultural project of control. Colonial knowledge both enabled conquest and was produced by it; in certain important ways, knowledge was what colonialism was all about. Cultural forms in societies newly classified as “traditional” were reconstructed and transformed by this knowledge, which created new categories and
...more
But Jones died tragically young and his wisdom was not replicated in his successors.)
Misinterpretation and ignorance + misappropriation = gross undermining of culture and misrepresention with stereotyping
the map became an instrument of colonial control.
Somehow, towards the 17th and 18th century, the Asians, most notably Indians and Chinese, no longer developed this science. Once the most advanced of the civilisations, the complacency and inward-looking attitude of Indians and Chinese led to the erosion of culture of exploration. Nature abhors a vacuum; this was filled by the imperialists of Europe.
