Were the British colonial influences on India good or bad?

[Dr Strangelove]

Had the British East India Company assumed control of the lion's share of India in the 18th century it is almost certain that France would have. The reason the British won India was because the British promised to not attempt to force their religion down the throats of the native populations. Really it was the French Jesuits who won India for the British. Native rulers so feared their influence that they deserted the French cause for the British.

How many of the listed official languages of India are closely related to Hindi? Are any of them so closely related that a Hindi speaker would have little trouble understanding them without a formal education in the other language? The reason I ask is that my ex-sister-in-law used to insist that most of the non-Hindi official languages were merely dialects of Hindi, more closely related for example than Spanish and Portugese. I've wondered whether this was true or merely Congress party propaganda. She was after all the daughter of two staunch Congress party members. Her parents both had been members since before Indian independence.

[Kuciwalker]

Had the British East India Company assumed control of the lion's share of India in the 18th century it is almost certain that France would have.

I suspect that sentence is missing a "not".

[LordShiva]

Originally posted by Dr Strangelove
The reason I ask is that my ex-sister-in-law used to insist that most of the non-Hindi official languages were merely dialects of Hindi, more closely related for example than Spanish and Portugese.

She must be North Indian. Hindi and Urdu are indeed very closely related (more so than Spanish or Portuguese), but as a Hindi-speaker, I can't understand any of the other major Aryan languages.

All the four South Indian languages belong to a completely different language family. They have some Sanskrit vocabulary, but are otherwise more distant from it than Latin or Greek. Kannada and Telugu are related reasonably closely, but the other two aren't.

I speak Bengali and Assamese, too, and those two are pretty closely related (I imagine the other North Eastern languages, being tribal in origin, aren't). They branched off the Aryan language tree earlier than the Western/Northern languages, though, and are quite removed.

[aneeshm]

Originally posted by LordShiva

She must be North Indian. Hindi and Urdu are indeed very closely related (more so than Spanish or Portuguese), but as a Hindi-speaker, I can't understand any of the other major Aryan languages.

Maybe I'm at an advantage here, because I know enough Urdu to get by, and am fluent in Marathi and Hindi, but if you put two people in a room who know only Punjabi and Hindi, then unless they are language scholars, they'll be able to understand each other, even if with difficulty.

And Bhojpuri is perfectly and effortlessly intelligible to a speaker of Khariboli Hindi (though it could be considered, strictly speaking, just a dialect).

Originally posted by LordShiva

All the four South Indian languages belong to a completely different language family. They have some Sanskrit vocabulary, but are otherwise more distant from it than Latin or Greek. Kannada and Telugu are related reasonably closely, but the other two aren't.

It's quite funny how Sanskrit has come to associated exclusively with the Aryan and Brahmic scripts. Earlier, it was the spoken form which was uniform, while the written form used the local script. So a Tamil scholar of Sanskrit would use the Tamil script to write the language. Thus, his work would be unreadable by a person who did not know the script even if he knew the language, but two scholars could converse effortlessly anyway.

Instead of making it necessary to learn the Devanagari script, I think it would be good if Sanskrit teaching could be returned to the local script. It would help enormously in cultural diffusion.

Originally posted by LordShiva

I speak Bengali and Assamese, too, and those two are pretty closely related (I imagine the other North Eastern languages, being tribal in origin, aren't). They branched off the Aryan language tree earlier than the Western/Northern languages, though, and are quite removed.

I wouldn't know about that. But I do know that as you move away from the Arya heartland, the languages tend to get more and more diverse. Marathi, for instance, came into being after the events chronicled in the Ramayana, because at that time, Maharashtra was the jungle referred to as Dandakaranya, and its Aryanisation was not really complete until the Sanskritisation of administration under the Marathas (a Sanskritisation which provided the template for a lot of administrative methodology in independent India).

[Bugs ****ing Bunny]

Originally posted by aneeshm
Maybe I'm at an advantage here, because I know enough Urdu to get by, and am fluent in Marathi and Hindi, but if you put two people in a room who know only Punjabi and Hindi, then unless they are language scholars, they'll be able to understand each other, even if with difficulty.

Very true. I have a number of Sikh friends, and they have all said that they can manage to communicate with Hindi-speakers.

[aneeshm]

Originally posted by Lazarus and the Gimp


Very true. I have a number of Sikh friends, and they have all said that they can manage to communicate with Hindi-speakers.

Punjabi is unique in this regard, though. It's much more difficult with Marathi or Gujarati or Bengali or the more diversified languages.

[Bugs ****ing Bunny]

One point that's puzzled me...

It strikes me that Britain has loads of Punjabi and Urdu speakers, and quite a lot of Gujarati speakers too. Yet there seems to be a relative shortfalo of Hindi speakers, as well as the other bigger Indian languages.

Any reason for that? This is all anecdotal stuff based on my own experience, so don't ask for figures.

[molly bloom]

Originally posted by aneeshm

not of the value of a human life.

The article I posted in the Off Topic Forum on the conflict in Bihar would seem to indicate that the value of the rat eating and rice farming Dalits' lives is not held to be very high by the landowners, their armed gangs or the moneylenders.

The practice of sati/suttee and the contempt shown for Hindu widows would also indicate a certain negative aspect with regard the lives of women...

[molly bloom]

Originally posted by aneeshm
120 years of British rule had 31 famines, many nationwide, while the past two millennia had only 17, most of them localised.

Again, in the article on the civil war in Bihar, the diet of the rice farming Dalits consisted almost exclusively of the rice they were farming for the rich landowners.

Similarly the rateaters were 'hired' to catch the rats which would otherwise spoil the rice crop and harvest, their payment being allowed to eat the rats they caught.


With such diets, what exactly is the difference between famine and a bare sufficiency ?

And why should upper caste Indians be at all bothered whether the lower castes starve or not ?


Admittedly Victorian economic theory may also have played a part in famines in India, but so may adverse weather conditions and plagues of pests.

Bear in mind too, that the British may have simply reported more famines and food shortages, and that there may also have been an increase in population.

[Bugs ****ing Bunny]

That's a point that's bothered me. I'd heard the "17 famines in 2000 years" claim before, but I always wondered how accurate the reporting was.

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by molly bloom


Again, in the article on the civil war in Bihar, the diet of the rice farming Dalits consisted almost exclusively of the rice they were farming for the rich landowners.

Similarly the rateaters were 'hired' to catch the rats which would otherwise spoil the rice crop and harvest, their payment being allowed to eat the rats they caught.


With such diets, what exactly is the difference between famine and a bare sufficiency ?

And why should upper caste Indians be at all bothered whether the lower castes starve or not ?

I cant answer the last question, but more relevant is why the Govt would be bothered. The answer, its been hypothesized, is that famines tend to be election losers. Thats why famines are rare in democratic countries, as compared with non-democratic ones, holding constant for income level. And that holds true for India as well, which had numerous famines during the Raj, and none (AFAIK) since independence.

Now of course that begs the question of whether the Raj contributed to India becoming a democracy on independence, and maintaining far better than almost any other ex-colonial state.

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by molly bloom


Again, in the article on the civil war in Bihar, the diet of the rice farming Dalits consisted almost exclusively of the rice they were farming for the rich landowners.

Similarly the rateaters were 'hired' to catch the rats which would otherwise spoil the rice crop and harvest, their payment being allowed to eat the rats they caught.


With such diets, what exactly is the difference between famine and a bare sufficiency ?

Public opinion accepts chronic malnourishment as something beyond the control of the state, more so than periodic famine, presumably. That would explain why democracies are better at eliminating the latter than the former.

[Ekmek]

Originally posted by aneeshm
120 years of British rule had 31 famines, many nationwide, while the past two millennia had only 17, most of them localised.

I'm wondering at this. Is it reasonable to compare the pre-British millenia to the period of British rule in terms of land-utilization to population.

Not absolving the British because they were in charge and so there is undoubted responsibility. But looking at the reason for the famines, it possible that agricultural technology did not keep pace with the population growth of India at the time resulting in a critical point which allowed for frequent famines. Not at this time you get the Malthus starvation theory as well as famines elsewhere. Not tomention climate patterns in the period.

I don't think it could squarely fall on British (at least not the inital ones, but by the third or fourth time they should of said 'hey this may be a recurring problem.')

[LordShiva]

Apart from population growth, one of the main causes of the famines were the rise of cash crops like indigo; they had never been grown on such a large scale before.

I doubt that "17 famines in 2 millenia" datapoint, though. Data like that would be very hard to find.

[Cyclotron]

LordShiva brings up an excellent point about cash crops.

In general, governments that have more informational access to their populous and which are more available to local input are better at dealing with famines; thus, Amartya Sen's insistence that more responsive governments are more successful at preventing famines. It thus doesn't strike me as particularly surprising that a colonial government, alienated from its subjects and lacking democratic measures that engender responsiveness, would respond poorly to famine cues despite its relative technological and administrative sophistication. That's less a judgment of the British themselves, however, than it is of colonial government in general.

On the other hand, it is just as possible for "native" monarchs and potentates to be equally distanced from and insensitive to the needs and capabilities of their subjects, which is why I have trouble accepting the astonishingly low estimate of famines given by aneeshm. Precolonial India was hardly a brilliant example of responsive government characterized by democratic traditions and a free press.