CapitalistImperialistPig

The origins of the peoples of India has long been a contentious issue.  India has a population that looks, and is, racially diverse.  Several major language groups are represented in the hundreds of languages and dialects of India.  Notably, several of them are closely related the languages of Europe and Iran - the Indo-European languages, which are not only global in extent but probably spoken by more people than any other, with the possible exception of Chinese. These IE languages in India are clearly descended from Sanskrit, the language of the founding documents of Hinduism and Indian culture.  So a central question is who were these people who spoke something like Sanskrit, called themselves Aryans, and occupy a central role in all of Indian culture since.  German linguists appropriated the name and claimed that the Aryans were in fact Germans who had invaded India. Anthropology and especially modern genomics tells a different story.  The IE langua...

Gardiner Harris, writing in The New York Times Sunday Review, tells the story of the horrors of air pollution in New Delhi, India. Beijing is infamous for its murderous killer smog, but it seems that New Delhi is a great deal worse. Harris's article is entitled "Holding Your Breath in India" but a more descriptive title might be "How I inflicted Child Abuse Resulting in Severe Permanent Damage in Pursuit of the Story." New Delhi FOR weeks the breathing of my 8-year-old son, Bram, had become more labored, his medicinal inhaler increasingly vital. And then, one terrifying night nine months after we moved to this megacity, Bram’s inhaler stopped working and his gasping became panicked. My wife called a friend, who recommended a private hospital miles away. I carried Bram to the car while my wife brought his older brother. India’s traffic is among the world’s most chaotic, and New Delhi’s streets are crammed with trucks at night, when road signs become large...

My experience with the book was a bit conflicted. On the one hand, I thought that I learned a lot, and certainly finished with more respect for and, I like to think, understanding of Hindu thought. Despite the heavy presence of scholarly apparatus (thousands of citations and hundreds of endnotes), there are some curious inexactitudes ( India lies mostly in the Northern Hemisphere - so far as I can tell India and its islands lie entirely in the Northern Hemisphere). The author is addicted to a chatty, discursive, and frequently frivolous tone which I sometimes found annoying. It's important to note that the author hasn't written a history of India, but a history of its main religion. There are bits of the history of the country included, but mainly just as background. Because it's a history, the focus is on evolution and change. Moreover, as the author declares at the outset, her focus is not on the central figures of the religion, it's priestly and other high cas...

Once upon a time, a few mistakes ago ... (with apologies to Taylor Swift) I stumbled into an argument with Arun, some of his readers and a certain Guru. I say "stumbled into" because I never had any sense that I was contesting a point - rather I thought that I misunderstood something obvious, and merely was confused about a definition. The statement in question: "Hinduism is not a religion." My problem was that I thought that this failed the obvious "quacks like a duck" test. Arun's latest post has clarified matters in my mind, though he likely won't agree with my interpretation. It seems that in India, as in the US, there is an income tax advantage for charitable contributions, but differently than here, this deduction does not apply to religious contributions. Thus, it is very interesting what a certain tax commission has ruled. Arun quotes from an article in the Economic Times of India: Hinduism: Tax Tribunal says donations to Nagpur temp...

Englishmen can look back on their work in India, if not with unalloyed satisfaction, at least with some legitimate pride. They have conferred on the people of India what is the greatest human blessing — Peace. They have introduced Western Education, bringing an ancient and civilised nation in touch with modern thought, modern sciences, modern institutions and life. They have built up an Administration which, though it requires reform with the progress of the times, is yet strong and efficacious. They have framed wise laws, and have established Courts of Justice, the purity of which is as absolute as in any country on the face of the earth. These are results which no honest critic of British work in India regards without high admiration...Romesh Chunder Dutt On the other hand, he adds, they robbed the place blind, with terrible consequences. He published this 105 years ago, in his The Economic History of India , still a valuable resource for the years from 1757 to 1857. A companion v...

I've already written a plethora of posts on the subject Zameer Masani's book on Macaulay( Macaulay: Pioneer of India's Modernization [Kindle Edition] ), but I have now finished and should sum up. I found the portrait of Macaulay and his times fascinating. Clever Tom, as he was known to his family and many others, was a prodigy. Much of his life was devoted to politics, and in an ages of speeches, he was a dominant force. Most of what he accomplished in life was by virtue of his speech or writing. He was an imperialist and a cultural chauvinist, but he saw himself as an agent of virtue. Born in modest circumstances, he died a wealthy baron. Some of his wealth was acquired as a result of very well paid service in India, but the bulk came from his writings, which were wildly popular in England, America, and Europe. Masani clearly approves of many Macaulay's actions in India, the most important of which were the establishment of open schools taught in English, the wri...

Perhaps no aspect of Macaulay's character is more surprising to the modern mind or more obnoxious to his enemies in India than his overt hostility to Indian religion and culture. It's also hard to imagine why this frank admirer of pagan Rome and Greece found superficially similar practices in India so offensive. Masani provides a clue: Though far from puritanical by Victorian standards, Macaulay was particularly outraged by what he considered the sexual immorality of Hindu iconography. His revulsion may well have been exaggerated by his own long suppressed sexuality. ‘Emblems of vice,’ he railed, ‘are objects of public worship. Acts of vice are acts of public worship. The courtesans are as much a part of the establishment of the temple, as much ministers of the god, as the priests.’ His greatest rage was reserved for the worship of Shiva, whose temple at Somnath Ellenborough was proposing to honour. Referring to the phallic cult of shivalingams, Macaulay declared: ‘I am asha...

It is a testimony to the far vaster scale of our planet in Macaulay's time that his voyage home from India took nearly six months. He chose his passage for comfort rather than speed, but in those days at the dawn of steam power, such long journeys still depended on the wind. When he traveled about in India, roads did not yet exist that could accommodate a carriage in the countryside.

Macaulay was a hypercritical person by temperament, a trait that combined with his talent for invective to be really useful in producing enemies, but it also carried many an argument for him. His chauvinistic attitudes were another obnoxious trait. He hated Versailles and considered it a vast waste of money. Italy didn't live up to his expectations, and the exteriors of its great cathedrals couldn't match Saint Paul's in London. When he got back to London he found the interior of Saint Paul's wanting by comparison with the Italians. It's very easy to see why the man would be resented in India. His bad tempered rhetoric was often turned on its literature, social organization, music, the character of the Bengalis - though the architecture did make an impression. Of course he was even more critical of most of his fellow Britons abroad. Even more obnoxious was the fact that he didn't bother to try to understand the literature and art that he dismissed so caval...

Macaulay's legal efforts were perhaps as significant as his educational. When he arrived, he found that Indian law was a jumble of older Islamic laws and fragments of British law. Different laws applied in different cities and different laws applied to different persons. Indians were effectively prevented from pursuing legal action against Europeans by a legal system that afforded the Europeans special privileges. The death penalty applied to many crimes including breaking a tea cup in another persons house, apparently even accidentally. A couple of his more controversial laws removed press censorship and established legal equality in civil law. The latter especially outraged his compatriots. He also designed an extremely progressive set of laws for the nation which were long considered a model of concision and simplicity. They were not enacted in his lifetime - mostly due to opposition from his countrymen - but according to Masani, still form the core of Indian law. Despit...

Other things being equal, it would seem highly desirable not to be conquered, and if conquered and ruled by foreigners, to be rid of them. The ratio of Englishmen/Indians in India was rarely much above 1/1000. Unlike the native Americans encountered by Cortez and Pizarro, the natives of India were if anything less vulnerable to disease than vice-versa. Moreover, the technological advantage of the English was slight or non-existent until well into the nineteenth century. So why did India suffer itself to be and remain conquered?

The British East India Company (EIC) began as traders, became free-booting mercenaries, and finally conquerors. Their ambition was to suck as much money as possible out of the territory. The company's bad behavior, and in particular it's role in exacerbating the catastrophic famine of 1770 attracted a lot of negative press in Britain. Mostly as a consequence, parliament took some tentative steps to reining in it's reckless rapacity. In particular, it set up a government "Board of Control" to oversee the EIC in India and required that the Company set aside some funds for "improving" the lives of Indians, including 100,000/yr rupees for educational work. These were the funds that were potentially available to the governor and his board, including Macaulay. It's worth noting that in England at the time, the government funds allocated for education were zero - it was a purely private enterprise. The powers of the board of control in Indian civil ...

If our ancestors of some time ago had been a bit more forward thinking and had set up suitable time-lapse photography, we could have had a nice record of a spectacular event. I'm talking about the collision of India with the Eurasian land mass, of course. 300,000 years worth should have been enough to capture the land mass looming out of the distance, the seabeds buckling upward, and the wild explosion of earthquake and volcanic activity. I suppose we can't really blame them much though, since they were all squirrel sized pro-simian insectivores with little knowledge of digital photography or long term archival storage.

Pre-British India had a system of village schools that impressed the English enough that they imported at least one feature back to their own schools in England - instruction of the younger pupils by the more advanced students. A good deal of English rhetoric was expended on what to do about these schools, but in fact, they were mostly left to their own devices. They were very economical, because teachers usually had no training beyond the village school themselves, and the money they made came in small fees and presents from the villagers they educated. There were no teacher's colleges and no books. These virtues also made them hard to reform and update. They did not admit students from the scheduled castes and many or most did not educate girls Such efforts and expenditures the British made were on the colleges or their own educational ventures. The best source I have found on them is D. D. Aggarawal's History and Development of Elementary Education in India. He reports ...

Unfortunately, The Story of English in India (Krishaswami & Krishnaswami) )does not appear to be available in ebook form.

Swapan Dasgupta, writing in India Today , also takes on Masani. Excerpt: In view of the demonology over Macaulay, Zareer Masani's lucid and uncluttered biography of Macaulay-the first since Arthur Bryant's study in 1932-must fall into the category of revisionist history on two counts. First, Masani does not proceed on the assumption that the imperial system was a blot on the history of mankind and that its functionaries were little better than precursors of Hitler's SS. He treats Macaulay as a noble example of a gifted, if somewhat precocious, English Whig who, like many of his contemporaries, saw British rule in India as a mission. Masani has tried to evaluate Macaulay in the context of the value system of the early and mid-19th century, and not through the prism of the early 21st century's political correctness. Secondly, Masani has resisted the macabre temptation of hunting for an economic rationale to every policy initiative of the British Empire. Instead, he has st...

A not particularly friendly (or unfriendly) review here. Excerpt: Whereas Britain remembers Macaulay as the entertaining but misguided father of the Whig interpretation of history, which charted his country’s progress towards parliamentary democracy, Indian nationalists curse his legacy. During his four years as a colonial politician, they argue, he fastened the yoke of the English language onto India. Even today “Macaulay’s children” is a pejorative term for those he Westernised. In this brisk, well-written biography Zareer Masani comes forcefully to his defence.

Thomas Babington Macaulay, the British historian, poet and politician also played a key part in the British rule of India. He was, according to a new biography, a racist with no use for Hindu culture, but he was also a far seeing liberal who had a vision of the future of India that was remarkably prescient. Zareer Masani, a historian who is himself the son of prominent Indian political figures, is the author of Macaulay: Pioneer of India's Modernization. Macaulay is controversial in India, but it turns out that he has a big fan club, mostly among the Dalits (scheduled castes = former untouchables). The reason for the fans, says Masani, is that he introduced teaching English, and they consider that to have been crucial in their social and political advancement.

Discuss: It might seem self-evident that they [Indians] would have been better off under Indian rulers. That was certainly true from the point of view of the ruling elites the British had overthrown and whose share of national income, something like 5 per cent, they then appropriated for their own consumption. But for the majority of Indians it was far less clear that their lot would improve under independence. Under British rule, the village economy’s share of total after-tax income actually rose from 45 per cent to 54 per cent. Since that sector represented around three-quarters of the entire population, there can therefore be little doubt that British rule reduced inequality in India. And even if the British did not greatly increase Indian incomes, things might conceivably have been worse under a restored Mughal regime had the Mutiny succeeded. China did not prosper under Chinese rulers. The reality, then, was that Indian nationalism was fuelled not by the impoverishment of the man...

Correctly or not, Niall Ferguson sees the origins of the Indian independence movement in an event called The White Mutiny. After the rebellion of 1857 and the dissolution of the East India Company, India was ruled by a tiny cadre of civil servants, about 900 to rule a country of 250 million. This highly competitive civil service was entered by passing very demanding exams in history, politics, morality, Indian languages and much else. As Queen Victoria had promised, this civil service was open in theory to Indians as well as Britons. Indians created their own schools to study for the exams and eventually Indians were in fact admitted. The rules, however, had an important racist clause. Although both were members of the covenanted civil service, the Indians were not entitled to conduct trials of white defendants in criminal cases. In the eyes of the new Viceroy, this was an indefensible anomaly; so he requested a bill to do away with it. Ferguson, Niall (2008-03-17). Empire: The ...