1
2
3
5
8
12
20
33
52
83
133
213
340
543
867
1384
2208
3346
3522
5443
5619
6757
7374
7375
7376
7377
7378
7581
8098
8422
8625
8752
8832
8882
8913
8932
8945
8953
8957
8960
8962
8963
8964
8965
▲
▼
| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 71d93b4 | Brutish' as an acceptable substitute for 'British' rule in India! | Shashi Tharoor | ||
| d547258 | Britain is no longer 'Thatcherite', though in the aftermath of 'Brexit', it may even be worse. The need to temper British imperial nostalgia with postcolonial responsibility has never been greater. | Shashi Tharoor | ||
| b50cd68 | The little court disappears--trade languishes--the capital decays--the people are impoverished--the Englishman flourishes, and acts like a sponge, drawing up riches from the banks of the Ganges, and squeezing them down upon the banks of the Thames. | Shashi Tharoor | ||
| 597969f | The India that the British East India Company conquered was no primitive or barren land, but the glittering jewel of the medieval world. | Shashi Tharoor | ||
| 41068b4 | Above all, as a Hindu I belong to the only major religion in the world that does not claim to be the only true religion. I find it immensely congenial to be able to face my fellow human beings of other faiths without being burdened by the conviction that I am embarked upon a "true path" that they have missed." | india religion | Shashi Tharoor | |
| bd40e74 | The parliamentary democracy we have adopted involves the British perversity of electing a legislature to form an executive: this has created a unique breed of legislator, largely unqualified to legislate, who has sought election only in order to wield (or influence) executive power. It has produced governments obliged to focus more on politics than on policy or performance. It has distorted the voting preferences of an electorate that knows.. | Shashi Tharoor | ||
| 4c54112 | Mahatma Gandhi was as devout a Rambhakt as you can get -- he died from a Hindu assassin's bullet with the words "He Ram" on his lips -- but he always said that for him, Ram and Rahim were the same deity, and that if Hinduism ever taught hatred of Islam or of non-Hindus, "it is doomed to destruction." | india islam religion | Shashi Tharoor | |
| 2599c4c | India's villages were not self-reliant republics that lived in blissful isolation. They were networked and connected, and it was the destruction of Indian industry that forced people to retreat and focus on farming, | Shashi Tharoor | ||
| 96475e4 | The destruction of artisanal industries by colonial trade policies did not just impact the artisans themselves. The British monopoly of industrial production drove Indians to agriculture beyond levels the land could sustain. This in turn had a knock-on effect on the peasants who worked the land, by causing an influx of newly disenfranchised people, formerly artisans, who drove down rural wages. In many rural families, women had spun and wov.. | Shashi Tharoor | ||
| 2662e6f | When an Englishman wants something, he never publicly admits to his wanting it; instead, his want is expressed as a 'burning conviction that it is his moral and religious duty to conquer those who possess the thing he wants | Shashi Tharoor | ||
| 9b211e0 | It is a bit rich for the Brits to suppress, exploit, imprison, torture and maim a people for 200 years and then celebrate the fact that they are democratic at the end of it. We weren't given democracy, we had to snatch it from your hands | Shashi Tharoor | ||
| b0eea20 | History belongs to the past, but understanding it is the duty of the present | Shashi Tharoor | ||
| 66b9054 | but it does not want | Shashi Tharoor | ||
| d17f4eb | As Henry Nevinson also pointed out, the rule of law, such as it was, functioned in a system in which Indians were 'compelled to live permanently under a system of official surveillance which reads their private letters, detains their telegrams, and hires men to watch their actions'. This, then, was the rule of law the British taught us. We have much to unlearn. | Shashi Tharoor | ||
| 8e65680 | The racism of the colonial state was also reflected in its penal code. The Criminal Tribes Legislation, 1911, gave authority to the British to restrict movement, search and even detain people from specific groups, because their members were deemed to be chronically engaging in 'criminal' activity. This was bad sociology and worse law, but it stayed on the books till after Independence. Worse, its effects were inhumane. | Shashi Tharoor | ||
| a93f5ec | The Hindu's first issue counted a grand total of eighty copies, printed with 'one rupee and eight annas' of borrowed money by a group of four law students and two teachers). In | Shashi Tharoor | ||
| add135e | The Mahatma's singular insight was that self-government would never be achieved by the resolutions passed by a self-regarding and unelected elite pursuing the politics of the drawing room. To him, self-government had to involve the empowerment of the masses, the toiling multitudes of India in whose name the upper classes were clamouring for Home Rule. This position did not go over well with India's political class, which consisted in those .. | Shashi Tharoor | ||
| 0a9afdf | He put himself at the head of a movement of irreconcilable imperialist romantics,' wrote Boris Johnson in his recent admiring biography of Churchill. 'Die-hard defenders of the Raj and of the God-given right of every pink-jowled Englishman to sit on his veranda and...glory in the possession of India'. Mahatma | Shashi Tharoor | ||
| ea15d33 | Indeed there were outstanding examples of good governance in India at the time, notably the Travancore kingdom, which in 1819 became the first government in the world to decree universal, compulsory and free primary education for both boys and girls.) | Shashi Tharoor | ||
| 68334ca | Wartime hardened British attitudes to the prisoners as well. Gandhi 'should not be released on the account of a mere threat of fasting', Churchill told the Cabinet. 'We should be rid of a bad man and an enemy of the Empire if he died.' He was quite prepared to facilitate the process, suggesting that the Mahatma should be 'bound hand and foot at the gates of Delhi, and let the viceroy sit on the back of a giant elephant and trample [the Maha.. | Shashi Tharoor | ||
| d3ea13d | India . . . was like an ancient palimpsest on which layer upon layer of thought and reverie had been inscribed, and yet no succeeding layer had completely hidden or erased what had been written previously. . . . Though outwardly there was diversity and infinite variety among our people, everywhere there was that tremendous impress of oneness, which had held all of us together for ages . . . [India] was a world in itself, a culture and a civ.. | Shashi Tharoor | ||
| d023722 | Sedition was therefore explicitly intended as an instrument to terrorize Indian nationalists: Mahatma Gandhi was amongst its prominent victims. Seeing it applied in democratic India shocked many Indians. The arrest in February 2016 of students at New Delhi's Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) on charges of sedition, for raising 'anti-Indian' slogans in the course of protests against the execution of the accomplice of a convicted terrorist, a.. | Shashi Tharoor | ||
| 492f4fa | The press, in other words, was free, but some newspapers (the British-owned ones) were freer than others. | Shashi Tharoor | ||
| 512fd1f | Jawaharlal Nehru put it sharply: the Indian Civil Service, he said, was 'neither Indian, nor civil, nor a service'. | Shashi Tharoor | ||
| 5ab90cb | Shashi Tharoor says, every truism about India and its opposite are both true! | Rama Bijapurkar | ||
| d2ddc77 | Kerala's Christians belong to the oldest Christian community in the world outside Palestine. And when St Thomas, one of Jesus's twelve apostles, brought Christianity to Kerala, it is said he was welcomed on shore by a flute-playing Jewish girl. St Thomas made converts among the high-born elite, the Namboodiri Brahmins, which meant there were Indians whose families had practised Christianity for far longer than the ancestors of any Briton co.. | Shashi Tharoor | ||
| 7a7130e | On election days, the burdens of poverty and corruption and of a creaky economic system are put aside, and India celebrates. Many voters dress especially for the occasion... None quite voice the thought, but those who came in a steady stream to vote seemed to be saying that India may have fallen far behind its neighbors in the struggle for prosperity, but as long as it can choose its governments, it can hope for better in the future. | sociology | Shashi Tharoor | |
| 3f0163e | six decades of Independence have wrought significant change, as exposure to British practices has faded and India's natural boisterousness has reasserted itself. Some of the state assemblies in our federal system have already witnessed scenes of furniture overthrown, microphones ripped out and slippers flung by unruly legislators, not to mention fisticuffs and garments torn in scuffles among politicians. Pepper spray has been unleashed by a.. | Shashi Tharoor | ||
| fed4175 | Jawaharlal Nehru, who wrote in a 1936 letter to an Englishman, Lord Lothian, that British rule is 'based on an extreme form of widespread violence and the only sanction is fear. It suppresses the usual liberties which are supposed to be essential to the growth of a people; it crushes the adventurous, the brave, the sensitive, and encourages the timid, the opportunist and time-serving, the sneak and the bully. It surrounds itself with a vast.. | Shashi Tharoor | ||
| 3b83b66 | Justice, in British India, was far from blind: it was highly attentive to the skin colour of the defendant. | Shashi Tharoor | ||
| e1a953a | ruled Pakistan directly for a majority of the years of its existence, | Shashi Tharoor | ||
| 85ffeb0 | The combination of internal controls and international protectionism gave India a distorted economy, underproductive and grossly inefficient, making too few goods, of too low a quality, at too high a price. The resultant stagnation led to snide comments about what Indian economist Raj Krishna called the "Hindu rate of growth," which averaged some 3.5 percent in the first three decades after independence (or, to be more exact, between 1950 a.. | Shashi Tharoor | ||
| 2e8561b | The British used the term 'Anglo-Indian' to refer to British people living and working in India, and 'Eurasian' to refer to those of mixed parentage, usually the children of lower-ranking Europeans and 'other ranks' who could not afford to snare one of the women from the 'fishing fleet' and ended up cohabiting with, and in a few cases marrying, Indian women. Today, the descendants of these Eurasians are known as 'Anglo-Indians', a term that.. | Shashi Tharoor | ||
| e134573 | Indians were always subjects, never citizens; throughout the days of Empire, no Indian could have presumed to say 'I am British' the way a French African was encouraged to say 'Je suis francais'. | Shashi Tharoor | ||
| a39aa31 | It also meant that decisions were increasingly made in offices, behind closed doors, by foreigners with no connection to those whose fates they were deciding. The public display of the rulers' authority was replaced by the private circulation of incomprehensible paper. | Shashi Tharoor | ||
| 3be3d43 | In the conceptual scheme which the British created to understand and to act in India, they constantly followed the same logic; they reduced vastly complex codes and their associated meanings to a few metonyms.' Laws had to be translated into terms the British could understand and apply. A complicated, often chaotic and always fluid society like India was 'redefined by the British to be a place of rules and orders; once the British had defin.. | Shashi Tharoor | ||
| d37cdc3 | we cannot blame the British for saddling us with this system, though it is their 'Mother of Parliaments' our forefathers sought to emulate. First of all, the British had no intention of imparting democracy to Indians; second, Indians freely chose the parliamentary system themselves in a Constituent Assembly. | Shashi Tharoor | ||
| 2b8fd47 | But six decades of Independence have wrought significant change, as exposure to British practices has faded and India's natural boisterousness has reasserted itself. Some of the state assemblies in our federal system have already witnessed scenes of furniture overthrown, microphones ripped out and slippers flung by unruly legislators, not to mention fisticuffs and garments torn in scuffles among politicians. Pepper spray has been unleashed .. | Shashi Tharoor | ||
| 0ac1461 | The playwright Richard Sheridan was scathing in his denunciation of the Company, whose operations 'combined the meanness of a pedlar with the profligacy of a pirate... | Shashi Tharoor | ||
| 780764c | The creation and perpetuation of Hindu-Muslim antagonism was the most significant accomplishment of British imperial policy: the project of divide et impera would reach its culmination in the horrors of Partition that eventually accompanied the collapse of British authority in 1947. | Shashi Tharoor | ||
| bd5a232 | The task of dividing the two nations was assigned to Sir Cyril Radcliffe, a lawyer who had never been to India before and knew nothing of its history, society or traditions. Radcliffe drew up his maps in forty days, dividing provinces, districts, villages, homes and hearts--and promptly scuttled home to Britain, never to return to India. 'The British Empire did not decline, it simply fell', as Alex von Tunzelmann put it. The British were he.. | Shashi Tharoor | ||
| 781342d | Sir Rabindranath Tagore returned his knighthood to the British in protest against 'the helplessness of our position as British subjects in India'. Tagore's early ambivalence about the costs and benefits of British rule was replaced after Amritsar by what he termed a 'graceless disillusionment' at the 'misfortune of being governed by a foreign race'. He did not want a 'badge of honour' in 'the incongruous context of humiliation'. | Shashi Tharoor | ||
| f50ea5c | As late as World War II, among the 'few of the few' who bravely defended England against German invasion in the Battle of Britain were Indian fighter pilots, including a doughty Sikh who named his Hurricane fighter 'Amritsar'. | Shashi Tharoor | ||
| 0d4c91b | Hinduism, with its openness, its respect for variety, its acceptance of all other faiths, is one religion that should be able to assert itself without threatening others. But this cannot be the Hinduism that destroyed a mosque, or the Hindutva spewed in hate-filled speeches by communal politicians. It has to be the Hinduism of Swami Vivekananda, who, a century ago, at Chicago's World Parliament of Religions in 1893, articulated best the lib.. | Shashi Tharoor |