Were the British colonial influences on India good or bad?

[LordShiva]

Originally posted by aneeshm
Because I've left.

Why?

[aneeshm]

Originally posted by LordShiva


Why?

In brief, because of real life commitments.

[Caligastia]

Was there a common language in India before colonisation? If not, then it could be argued that the introduction of the English language has been and will be hugely beneficial to the average Indian.

[LordShiva]

The average Indian doesn't speak the English language. There was, and is, no common language in India.

[aneeshm]

Originally posted by LordShiva

The average Indian doesn't speak the English language.

But is realising that he must learn it, in order to not be treated as an outcast, and to have any chance at any advancement whatsoever.

Sad, really, that the majority of the people are cut off from all the new opportunities, and only a small elite can access them. It's the result of a job improperly and half-assedly done.

[Caligastia]

Originally posted by LordShiva
The average Indian doesn't speak the English language. There was, and is, no common language in India.

What are the percentages on that?

[LordShiva]

Hindi 337 million
Telugu 86
Tamil 72
Marathi 71
Bengali 60
Kannada 44
Gujarati 40.7
Urdu 43.4
Maithili 35.4
Malayalam 35.3
Oriya 28.1
Punjabi 23.4
Assamese 13.1
Sindhi 2.12
Dogri 2.0
Tulu 2.0
Nepali 2.08
Konkani 1.76
Meitei (Manipuri) 1.27
Kashmiri 0.0567
Sanskrit 0.0497

English 100
Kokborok 1.3
Bhojpuri 29
Gondi 2.1
Bishnupriya Manipuri .45
Marwari 12
Chhattisgarhi 11
Magahi 11
Awadhi 25 to 40
Tulu <2
Kodava (Dravidian) 0.6
Sankethi (Dravidian) <.001
Persian 0.06
Pashto 0.776
French 0.015
Portuguese 0.08

[PLATO]

Where would Call Centers be today if the British had never been there?

[molly bloom]

Originally posted by Lazarus and the Gimp


From my own point of view, I think the British performance in the late 19th century can only be described as vile. There was a callous disregard for human life that resulted in millions of unnecessary death. It's something that should be regarded as shameful.

Unfortunately not an attitude that was confined to the British in India, as the caste system shows.

The hinge is the Mutiny- if you look at early paintings and examine written records, there was a lot of miscegenation and mutual admiration between the British and groups of Indians- Parsees, Muslims, Maharajahs, et cetera.


After the savagery (on both sides) of the Mutiny and the hypocrisy of muscular evangelizing Christianity the respect for Indians and Indian culture was largely lost except for the 'renegade' Brits who tempted to go native.


I recommend Dalrymple's 'White Mughals' as a great introduction to the contradictions and complications of the life of the white elite in colonial India.

[aneeshm]

Originally posted by molly bloom

Unfortunately not an attitude that was confined to the British in India, as the caste system shows.

Slightly disagree. It's indicative of a lack of consciousness of human aspiration and equality, not of the value of a human life.

Originally posted by molly bloom

The hinge is the Mutiny- if you look at early paintings and examine written records, there was a lot of miscegenation and mutual admiration between the British and groups of Indians- Parsees, Muslims, Maharajahs, et cetera.

The atrocity at Kanpur became a reason for all the subsequent British atrocities that followed. For instance, to instil fear in the populace against further resistance, the bodies of slain Indian soldiers were strung up on trees along all major roads, and in villages.

Originally posted by molly bloom

After the savagery (on both sides) of the Mutiny and the hypocrisy of muscular evangelizing Christianity the respect for Indians and Indian culture was largely lost except for the 'renegade' Brits who tempted to go native.

Since that time, the Indians also lost all respect for the British as a civilisation.

Originally posted by molly bloom

I recommend Dalrymple's 'White Mughals' as a great introduction to the contradictions and complications of the life of the white elite in colonial India.

I won't. He's far too taken in by the romanticism of that time. For instance, in his "The Last Mughal", there is absolutely no indication of the extent of the general decadence that had set in into the Mughal dynasty at that time. Bahadur Shah was so completely lost to reality that he used to order his female servants and slaves to perform his ablutions for him. But facts of this sort will rarely, if ever, be found in his books.

[Bugs ****ing Bunny]

What about the famines of the late 19th century (and 1943)? To what extent should the British be held responsible.

[aneeshm]

Originally posted by Lazarus and the Gimp
What about the famines of the late 19th century (and 1943)? To what extent should the British be held responsible.

To a great extent. Famine was much more uncommon under the traditional Indian tax rates of a sixth of produce, with an optional provision that it could be waived in times of crop failure. Of course, individual kings had their caprices, but in general, most of them at least tried.

It's quite ironic and heartbreaking that the Indian policy of having a full treasury precisely in order to tide over things like famines or war was the thing which led to an accumulation of the same wealth which attracted looters and colonialists and imperialists of all sorts, who subsequently became the causes of famines of unthinkable proportions.

[LordShiva]

The Economist reviewed these two books:

India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy.
By Ramachandra Guha.
Macmillan; 900 pages; £25.
To be published in America by Ecco in August

The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence, and India's Future.
By Martha C. Nussbaum.
Belknap Press; 432 pages; $29.95 and £19.95


“YOU British believe in fair play,” said a Punjabi official to a young British social worker in 1947. “You have left India in the same condition of chaos as you found it.” He had a point. Disbanding, at two months' notice, a system of rule that had taken two centuries to construct, the British left a subcontinent famished and divided. Thanks to modern medicine, the population had steepled to 400m. But with no corresponding effort to improve agricultural productivity, food production per head had plummeted: hunger was general. In sectarian rioting over the partition of British India—the necessity of which history has yet to decide—1m people, maybe 2m, perished.

Delineated by caste, a society less fit for democracy was almost unimaginable. In southern Kerala, an “untouchable” paraiya (hence: pariah) would cry out a warning as he went, ensuring that no high-caste brahmin need be sullied by a glimpse of him. Consisting of a dozen main linguistic blocks, which had never previously been united, and with over 500 independent principalities speckled across it, India was not a nation at all. Many departing Britons predicted it never would be.

That it has survived as the world's biggest democracy and is now emerging, with over a billion people, as an economic giant, is one of the remarkable tales of modern times. Ramachandra Guha, an Indian himself, has rendered it in rare detail.

He describes the country's first rulers, the nation-builders of the Congress party, in shimmering terms: as saints and heroes, no less. And indeed they included several brilliant men. Thus, B.R. Ambedkar, an untouchable legal scholar, who drafted a liberal constitution in the teeth of the most illiberal opposition. Also, Vallabhbhai Patel, who duped and threatened most of the princes into merging with India in less than two years.

Above all, Jawaharlal Nehru, who led India for its first 17 years. He made appalling mistakes, for example in his arrogant, autocratic handling of the contested region of Kashmir. On this, the admiring Mr Guha judges him too kindly. Yet the principles of secularism and democracy upon which India was founded were his own. A weaker leader would probably have failed to implant them.

By giving Nehru such a smooth ride, Mr Guha stores up opprobrium for his daughter, Indira Gandhi. On Nehru's death, in 1964, she inherited a party and a state sickening with corruption. Conveniently for Mr Guha's thesis, she accelerated their demise, proving dreadful in most ways. The economy needed urgently to be liberalised; she tightened control over it. Congress was aching for internal democracy; she let it splinter. She suspended the country's democracy, imposing a two-year emergency. When democracy was restored, in 1977, Congress was swept from power by an alliance of its opponents. Only two governments since, both of them Congress, have been formed by a single party.

Political fragmentation was inevitable. India is too diverse to be represented by a single party. Yet Martha Nussbaum, an American polymath, blames Nehru for it nonetheless. Remarkable as were his achievements, his stern generalship of Congress alienated many in the provinces. Encouraged by affirmative action written into the constitution on behalf of untouchables and low-caste groups, caste-based alternative parties emerged, often hugely corrupt and linked to gangsters.

Worse, in Ms Nussbaum's view, was Nehru's rationalist disdain for “the cultivation of liberal religion and the emotional bases of a respectful pluralistic society”. If such bases are understood to be liberal arts schools—of the sort created in the first half of the last century by Ms Nussbaum's hero, Rabindranath Tagore, a Nobel laureate poet, in Bengal—a good point lurks within an esoteric sentence. Difficulty in disentangling language is quite a common experience in reading Ms Nussbaum, rewarding as her book is in other ways. It is also a bit harsh on Nehru to attribute the rise of the Hindu right in part to his suspicion of religion; the right's flagship Bharatiya Janata Party espouses pro-business policies and extreme nationalism.

Ms Nussbaum considers the Hindu extremists, nourished by the communal violence that they stir, a terrible threat to India's improbable democracy. And there are others, with a Maoist insurgency inflaming the impoverished east of the country. Continued fast growth is critical. Millions of poor Indians need a reason to believe in their way of government.

But growth will not, on its own, heal their divisions. Indeed, the extreme unevenness of India's current enrichment is creating new splits. Amartya Sen, an economist and a more recent Nobel-prize winner, has given warning that the country's west and south may come to look like California while the north and east is more like sub-Saharan Africa. To develop a unity that is not based on race or religion, Ms Nussbaum argues for the “public poetry” advocated by Tagore. That would be lovely but, as an ugly consumerism lays hold in India, almost unimaginable.

[aneeshm]

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

[aneeshm]

An interesting article.

But why did Asia stand in place? The rote answer is because it was weighed down with the chains of tradition and Malthusian demography, although this had not prevented Qing China, whose rate of population increase was about the same as Europe's, from experiencing extraordinary economic growth throughout the 18th century.

The relevant question, however, is not so much why the Industrial Revolution occurred first in England, Scotland and Belgium, but why other advanced regions of the 18th century world economy did not adapt their handicraft manufactures to the new conditions of production and competition in the 19th century.

The looms of India and China were defeated not so much by market competition as they were forcibly dismantled by war, invasion, opium and a Lancashire-imposed system of one-way tariffs. From about 1780 or 1800 onward, every serious attempt by a non-Western society to move into a fast lane of development or to regulate its terms of trade was met by a military as well as an economic response from Britain or a competing imperial country.

The use of force to configure a "liberal" world economy is what Pax Britannica was really about. The Victorians resorted to gunboats on at least 75 different occasions. The simultaneous British triumphs in the 1857 Indian Mutiny and the 1858 Second Opium War in China were the epochal victories over Asian economic autonomy that made a world of free trade possible in the second half of the 19th century.