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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 6f75799 | If India's GDP went down because it 'missed the bus' of industrialization, it was because the British threw Indians under the wheels. | Shashi Tharoor | ||
| 79a2ac8 | This British practice, previously unknown in India, caused long-lasting damage. The historian Jon Wilson has argued that India had a dynamic economic and political order--'a society of little societies'--where constant negotiation between the rulers and the ruled was the norm. 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 th.. | Shashi Tharoor | ||
| cfacac1 | The Empire, in Hobsbawm's evocative words, was 'so easily won, so narrowly based, so absurdly easily ruled thanks to the devotion of a few and the passivity of the many. | Shashi Tharoor | ||
| d06517e | India's share of the world economy was 23 per cent, as large as all of Europe put together. (It had been 27 per cent in 1700, when the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb's treasury raked in PS100 million in tax revenues alone.) By the time the British departed India, it had dropped to just over 3 per cent. The reason was simple: India was governed for the benefit of Britain. Britain's rise for 200 years was financed by its depredations in India. | Shashi Tharoor | ||
| 6146e30 | Bengalis say when offered cod, we still have other fish to fry. | Shashi Tharoor | ||
| 8ce82d4 | But less than a century and a half later, this Mughal empire was in a state of collapse after the spectacular sacking of Delhi by the Persian Nadir Shah in 1739 and the loot of all its treasures. The Mughal capital was pillaged and burned over eight long weeks; gold, silver, jewels and finery, worth over 500 million rupees, were seized, along with the entire contents of the imperial treasury and the emperor's fabled Peacock Throne; elephant.. | Shashi Tharoor | ||
| 43eba82 | The British ruled nineteenth-century India with unshakeable self-confidence, buttressed by protocol, alcohol and a lot of gall. | Shashi Tharoor | ||
| 2707fd2 | And the British had the gall to call him 'Clive of India', as if he belonged to the country, when all he really did was to ensure that a good portion of the country belonged to him. | Shashi Tharoor | ||
| 0c1b0c5 | If the Muslims of the 1520s acted out of ignorance and fanaticism, should Hindus act the same way in the 1980s? By doing what you propose to do, you will hurt the feelings of the Muslims of today, who did not perpetrate the injustices of the past and who are in no position to inflict injustice upon you today; you will provoke violence and rage against your own kind; you will tarnish the name of the Hindu people across the world; and you wil.. | Shashi Tharoor | ||
| 9b7c85b | The highest officers in the government had the strongest motives to corruption, and therefore could by no possibility attempt to check the same corruption in those below them... | Shashi Tharoor | ||
| 215446f | The Indian vessels, a contemporary British observer wrote, 'united elegance and utility and are models of patience [sic] and fine workmanship.' Indian workers were considered expert in all shipbuilding materials--wood, iron and brass | Shashi Tharoor | ||
| 73382b6 | By the end of the nineteenth century, India was Britain's biggest source of revenue, the world's biggest purchaser of British exports and the source of highly paid employment for British civil servants and soldiers all at India's own expense. We literally paid for our own oppression. | Shashi Tharoor | ||
| 1421875 | We tend to reduce everyone else to the limits of our own mental universe and begin privileging our own ethics, morality, sense of duty and even our sense of utility. All religious conflicts arose from this propensity to judge others. If we indeed must judge at all, then it must be "according to his own ideal, and not by that of anyone else"." | Shashi Tharoor | ||
| 253cf33 | it is striking that when slavery was abolished, the British government paid compensation, not to the men and women so inhumanely pressed into bondage, but to their former owners, for their 'loss of property'!) | Shashi Tharoor | ||
| 2c27434 | Hinduism' is thus the name that foreigners first applied to what they saw as the indigenous religion of India. It embraces an eclectic range of doctrines and practices, from pantheism to agnosticism and from faith in reincarnation to belief in the caste system. But none of these constitutes an obligatory credo for a Hindu: there are none. We have no compulsory dogmas. This is, of course, rather unusual. A Catholic is a Catholic because he b.. | Shashi Tharoor | ||
| 377c007 | Jinnah proved obdurate: he was determined to obtain Pakistan. The Muslim League leader declared 16 August 1946 as 'Direct Action Day' to drive home this demand. Thousands of Muslim Leaguers took to the streets in an orgy of violence, looting and mayhem, and 16,000 innocents were killed in the resulting clashes, particularly in Calcutta. | Shashi Tharoor | ||
| 61635f6 | She said my problem was that I saw things in people that they didn't see in themselves. | Shashi Tharoor | ||
| 39c6c19 | history is neither for excuses nor for revenge | Shashi Tharoor | ||
| 96f461f | So Britain would fight Germany for doing to Poland what Britain had been doing to India for nearly two hundred years. | Shashi Tharoor | ||
| 3e36fe3 | Tolerance, after all, implies that you have the truth, but will generously indulge another who does not; you will, in an act of tolerance, allow him the right to be wrong. Acceptance, on the other hand, implies that you have a truth but the other person may also have a truth; that you accept his truth and respect it, while expecting him to respect (and accept) your truth in turn. This practice of acceptance of difference--the idea that othe.. | Shashi Tharoor | ||
| 754abf4 | In August 1765, the young and weakened Mughal emperor, Shah Alam II, was browbeaten into issuing a diwani that replaced his own revenue officials in the provinces of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa with the Company's. An international corporation with its own private army and princes paying deference to it had now officially become a revenue-collecting enterprise. India would never be the same again. | Shashi Tharoor | ||
| 84022bb | historian William Dalrymple quotes a Mughal official named Narayan Singh as asking after 1765, 'when we have to take orders from a handful of traders who have not yet learned to wash their bottoms? | Shashi Tharoor | ||
| 2e0373a | The soldiers of the East India Company obliged, systematically smashing the looms of some Bengali weavers and, according to at least one contemporary account (as well as widespread, if unverifiable, belief), breaking their thumbs so they could not ply their craft. | Shashi Tharoor | ||
| eb454e9 | Islam came to Kerala not by the sword, as it did in northern India, but through traders, travellers and missionaries, who brought its message of equality and brotherhood to the coastal people. | Shashi Tharoor | ||
| 39d0f25 | India, under Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb, accounts for 27 per cent of the world economy. | Shashi Tharoor | ||
| 2c19659 | the British economic historian Angus Maddison has demonstrated, India's share of the world economy was 23 per cent, as large as all of Europe put together. (It had been 27 per cent in 1700, when the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb's treasury raked in PS100 million in tax revenues alone.) By the time the British departed India, it had dropped to just over 3 per cent. | Shashi Tharoor | ||
| db48a2a | At Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam, his own favorite, Lance would pray for our connecting flights to be delayed so that he could have even longer in the arcade, shooting down monsters and dragons with no regard for jet lag. How wonderful it is to have your monsters and dragons on a screen in front of you, to be destroyed by the press of a button, and not inside your heart as mine are, hammering away at your soul. | Shashi Tharoor | ||
| 10cf01f | The manipulation of currency, throughout a feature of the colonial enterprise, reached its worst during the Great Depression of 1929-30, when Indian farmers (like those in the North American prairies) grew their grain but discovered no one could afford to buy it. Agricultural prices collapsed, but British tax demands did not; and cruelly, the British decided to restrict India's money supply, fearing that the devaluation of Indian currency w.. | Shashi Tharoor | ||
| 003d21f | When Jamsetji Tata tried to set up India's first modern steel mill in the face of implacable British hostility at the turn of the century (he began petitioning the British for permission in 1883, and raised money from Indian investors; after repeated denials and delays it finally began production in 1912 under his son Dorabji), a senior imperial official sneered that he would personally eat every ounce of steel an Indian was capable of prod.. | Shashi Tharoor | ||
| 9c26e8a | the cricketer-prince Ranjitsinhji obliged his peasantry, in the midst of a crippling drought, to contribute to the British coffers during World War I; and as his state choked in the grip of famine, he literally burned up a month's revenues in a fireworks display for a visiting viceroy. | Shashi Tharoor | ||
| 2ea762d | Babington | Shashi Tharoor | ||
| cd2f00c | Few women, Ganapathi, fail to be excited by the thought of producing children from different men; it is the ultimate assertion of their creative power. Fortunately for mankind, however, or perhaps unfortunately, fewer still have the courage to put their fantasy into practice.) | Shashi Tharoor | ||
| bc21e38 | British cartography defined spaces the better to rule them; the map became an instrument of colonial control. Even the valuable British legacy, the museum, was devised in furtherance of the imperial project because here objects, artefacts and symbols could be appropriated, named, labelled, arranged, ordered, classified and thus controlled, exactly as the people could be. | Shashi Tharoor | ||
| 6fc0cc5 | Great discoveries, Ganapathi, are often the result of making the wrong mistake at the right time. Ask Columbus. | Shashi Tharoor | ||
| 9934103 | In this Ferguson is at least living up to the ethos of the colonial project, which primarily benefited the European imperialists in material, moral and intellectual terms. Imperialism elevated European notions of humanity to predominance in the world, posited the white male as the apotheosis of the ideal of the Enlightenment, and did so by fiat and military power. In the process imperial historians wrote the 'history' of their subject peopl.. | Shashi Tharoor | ||
| 8fbbfa1 | The British, representing a democracy with a free press and conscious of their international image, were susceptible to such shaming. But in Mahatma Gandhi's own day non-violence could have done nothing for the Jews of Hitler's Germany, who disappeared into gas chambers far from the flashbulbs of a war-obsessed press. It is ironically to the credit of the British Raj that it faced an opponent like Mahatma Gandhi and allowed him to succeed. .. | Shashi Tharoor | ||
| c8bd2fd | Holocaust. | Shashi Tharoor | ||
| f794bfa | simple logic of colonialism, under which the rules of humanity applied only to the rulers, for the rulers were people and the people were objects. Objects to be controlled, disciplined, kept in their place and taught lessons like so many animals: | Shashi Tharoor | ||
| 1509af7 | Agood part of the British case for having created India's political unity and democracy lies in the evolution of three of democracy's building-blocks during the colonial era: a free press, an incipient parliamentary system and the rule of law. This trifecta, which India retains and has continued to develop in its own ways, existed in the colonial era, but with significant distortions, and is therefore worth examining. | Shashi Tharoor | ||
| 66dc0c7 | Those who have no sons rarely attach any importance to the priorities of those who do, but they resent them deeply.) | Shashi Tharoor | ||
| 8624907 | British under Clive defeat Nawab Siraj-ud-Daula to become rulers of Bengal, the richest province of India. | Shashi Tharoor | ||
| ce90541 | Between opponents who will not physically fight, a punch line is equivalent to a punch. | Shashi Tharoor | ||
| 526e7cd | We brought up our sons to 'eat everything', but their mixed genetic inheritance prevailed: one twin took to meat-eating with relish, while the other, at age seven, with no persuasion whatsoever from his father, turned staunchly vegetarian. | Shashi Tharoor | ||
| 22bcb07 | lack of preference is itself a preference. To put the true leaders of the people on the same level as princes and pretenders and pimps is not virtuous but vicious. | Shashi Tharoor |