-remove- (Mhoulsby) wrote in message ...
From: (Nick)
Date: 14/07/03 02:55 GMT Daylight Time
Message-id:
(snipped)
"For many years, British books on India formed a small but precise genre of
their own, involving the use of phrases like 'the heady smell of spices and
woodsmoke', and descriptive invocations of cruel maharajahs, sly holymen,
rebellious tribesmen and the heat of the Deccan, together with occasional
appearances by tigers, missionaries, memsahibs, gymkhanas, Kipling and
tiffin. This extended into histories of the edifice lately termed 'the Raj',
and although it is now rare to find imperial dogma articulated so openly, a
nostalgic subtext still hovers beneath the pages of many books, like a loyal
native bearer lurking discreetly under the verandah of one of M.M. Kaye's
bungalows."
--Patrick French (1997, Liberty or Death, xxiv)

Dear Mr. Houlsby,

I did not intend to imply that you were ignorant about the
historical record of British imperialism in India. Yet books
are still being published that tend to present a highly idealised
narrative of British imperialism, such as 'Empire' by Niall
Ferguson (2002), a companion book to a British television series.

"'Right-wing' critics of liberalism in the Raj looked with satisfaction to
the journalism of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, who in 1883 famously said
that the Raj was 'founded not on consent but on conquest'....Once Indian
nationalism became an even half-serious proposition, the Raj could not long
endure. Racist, by any standards, it undoubtedly was; economically
exploitative too, as nearly all modern historians wish to point out; but
the British will to govern by force had its limits when consent was absent.
The massacre of protestors at Amritsar by General Dyer--379 killed and
1200 wounded--on 13 April 1919, followed by a proclamation of martial law,
was a disgrace from which the British Raj never recovered its
semi-legitimate self-estimation for decency and justice.
Thirty years before independence it sealed the Raj's fate..."
--A.N. Wilson (The Victorians, pp. 500-1)

'Whatever happens, we have got
The Maxim gun, and they have not.'
--Hilaire Belloc

On 8 July 1920, Winston Churchill spoke in the House of Commons
to denounce General Dyer. Notwithstanding a vote of support in
the House of Lords, General Dyer was forced into early retirement,
though he would be consoled by a fund of more than 26000 pounds
(a fortune in 1920), which had been donated on his behalf by
Britons who approved of what he had done at Amritsar.

On 13 March 1940, the Amritsar Massacre was partially 'avenged'.
Sir Michael O'Dwyer, who, as the Governor of the Punjab, had
fully supported General Dyer's bloody actions, was assassinated
in London by Udham Singh, a Sikh who reportedly had been among
those Indians who were fired upon in 1919. (Udham Singh might
have been intimately connected with one of those killed.)
After being convicted for murder, Udham Singh was hanged on
31 July 1940. In 1975, Udham Singh's exhumed remains were
returned to his homeland. In 1996, a college of Punjab
Technical University was named in Udham Singh's honour.

Some Irish nationalists approved of Udham Singh's deed.

"The same article (in a British newspaper) refers to the
Indian hero Udham Singh who was executed in London in 1940
for the shooting of Sir Michael O'Dwyer who had been governor
of the Punjab at the time of the Amritsar Massacre. We are
proud to have the name of this Indian hero linked with those
of Dunne and O'Sullivan (two Irishman who had been executed
for killing a British Field Marshal), even though the intention
in linking them was to defame them. Our only regret in the
incident is that it should have been an Irishman who had sold
himself to our national enemy, who had by his part in the
butchery and oppression of the Indian people so richly deserved
the punishment meted out to him by Udham Singh."
--Ant Eireannach Aontaithe (United Irishman) (July-August 1949)

During the Second World War, there was a great famine in Bengal, which
caused a few million deaths, toward which any British relief was much too
little and too late.

"Jinnah stated in the Legislative Assembly in New Delhi that the British
were 'irresponsible' and 'incompetent' to have allowed the famine to develop,
and pointed out that Churchill's administration would not have remained in
office for twenty-four hours if people had been dying of starvation in their
thousands every week on the streets of Britain....Wavell wrote that he
considered the Cabinet's stand over food imports to Bengal to be nothing
short of 'scandalous', and threatened resignation if nothing was done to
halt the deaths from starvation....Under pressure from Wavell and Amery,
Churchill asked Roosevelt if he could borrow US ships to bring wheat from
Australia....The Americans refused to assist, for fear of damaging their
own war effort....
--Patrick French (Liberty or Death, pp. 182-3)

As a child in Bengal, Amartya Sen witnessed the wartime famine.
Today, Amartya Sen is the Master of Trinity College, Cambridge
University.

'There are Englishmen who reproach themselves with having
governed the country badly. Why? Because the Indians show
no enthusiasm for their rule. I claim that the English have
governed India very well, but their error is to expect
enthusiasm from the people they administer.'
--Adolf Hitler

'I have never left room for any doubt of my belief that the
existence of this (British) empire is an inestimable factor of
value for the whole of human cultural and economic life. By
whatever means Great Britain has acquired her colonial
territories--and I know that they were those of force and often
brutality--nevertheless, I know full well that no other empire
has ever come into being in any other way, and that in the final
resort it is not so much the methods that are taken into account
in history as success, and not the success of the methods as such,
but rather the general good which the methods yield. Now there
is no doubt that the Anglo-Saxon people have accomplished
immeasurable colonizing work in the world. For this work I have
a sincere admiration....'
--Adolf Hitler (28 April 1939, speech to the Reichstag)

'Heart of Smugness' by Maria Misra (23 July 2002, The Guardian):
'Unlike Belgium, Britain is still complacently ignoring the gory cruelties
of its empire.'

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/st...761626,00.html

"If the history of British rule in India were to be condensed
into a single fact, it is this: there was no increase in India's
per capita income from 1757 to 1947. Indeed, in the last half
of the nineteenth century, income probably declined by more than
50 percent....Moreover in the age of Kipling, that 'glorious
imperial half century' from 1872 to 1921, the life expectancy of
ordinary Indians fell by a staggering 20 percent, a deterioration
in human health probably without precedent in the subcontinent's
long history of war and invasion."
--Mike Davis (Late Victorian Holocausts, pp. 311-2)

"Davis has given us a book of substantial contemporary relevance
as well as great historical interest."
--Amartya Sen (winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Economics)

Here are some reviews of 'Late Victorian Holocausts':

http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/...424896,00.html

http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/...436292,00.html

"He seemed to appeal for protection in the insult that had
befallen him, and they, in instinctive homage, rose to their feet.
But every human act in the East is tainted with officialism, and
while honouring him they condemned Aziz and India. Fielding
realised this, and he remained seated. It was an ungracious, a
caddish thing to do, perhaps an unsound thing to do, but he felt
he had been passive long enough, and that he might be drawn into
the wrong current if he did not make a stand."
--E.M. Forster (A Passage to India)

--Nick