Britons rush to India for the boom

capt_mahajan

Graeme,

Winston Churchill was one such individual. Would he, and all of them down the line, have taken the Nuremberg defence?

4 million died. (though one link below says 1 million, but look around.)

And, btw, this didn't happen 200 years ago, it happened at the same time Hitler's holocaust was in full swing


To put it in perspective, and off the top of my head
6 million died in concentration camps, Jews, Gypsies, etc ncluded
3 million died under Pol Pot.


But few know about the Bengal famine and the wanton starvation of 4 million; maybe the victims were the wrong skin colour, like in Ruanda.


A quick google by me

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/ock...ies/s19040.htm
http://www.samarthbharat.com/bengalholocaust.htm
http://www.open2.net/thingsweforgot/...galfamine.html

Or, Google Bengal Famine and take your pick



PS from one of the links, bold mine


Cricket, anybody?

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iwanttogoback

them there's fightin' words cap'n!

capt_mahajan

And losing words too, I stink at cricket.

iwanttogoback

there are just so many things i could say in reply cap'n, but none of them are polite.

capt_mahajan

No 4 is the only one I agree with. We say India got independent in 1947, but the fact is that it did not exist in it's present form before that, though some kings in history ruled over a vast area controlling most of present day India, including some lands which are now foreign.

The rail network would have been built anyway, and much of it has been built after 1947, and not by the British.

Roads, well, some of the great roads predate the British. And many of them postdate them.

And some, like 6 and 8, are post 1947 negatives.

crvlvr

And let's not forget the million people (and 15M displaced) due to the Indian pakistan partition

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partition_of_India

edwardseco

Much as I might appreciate the emotion and not having a stand one way or the other on the matter I would just comment that a smattering of internet sites is not even close to scholarship. Its a fail for a student to rest an argument on such a flimsy basis..

Nick-H

I find it completely absurd to suggest that the economic colonization of India had any altruistic motives!

Show me a start-up company today setting out to do good things, oh, and maybe make a bit of cash along the way. Tobacco companies? Oil companies? Even the drug companies who do happen to manufacture life-saving medicines are often major targets of crtiticism. Fertiliser/seed/GM companies?

Commerce wasn't different then; why should it have been?

I also find it absurd to attribute major advances such as railways, education, etc to the British. Blighty Saves The Savages, eh? Good Old Blighty!


India was a wealthy country. I wonder how much more advanced it might be today if the Europeans had stayed away?

Even the departure from India was commercial: Anybody think the Brits of the day would have given up so easily if vast profits were still to be made?

There may have been altruists. That doesn't merit the re-writing of history into a cosy,cosy colonialism model.

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capt_mahajan

Since we are online, internet sites are a given. And just because they are internet sites does not make them incorrect.

Which is why I said, google and take your pick. My googling was admittedly quick. But the Bengal Famine story was not news to me.

But, as with other historical matters, it is best to choose your own references.

It is my strong belief that any unbiased ones will agree with what I have said.

I could quote you some books too, but that too, can be subject to suspicion.


PS

The British, the Congress and the Muslim League have to jointly bear the blame for that.
Particularly Mountbatten and his masters, Nehru and Jinnah. Indians like me may tend to blame the British more, because of timetable issues plus the fact that they were in control... but that is neither here nor there.

Mickey S

And thus, by extension, any sites that disagree with you are simply biased?

The greatest gift that the British gave to India was the English language, which has given the country a priceless advantage economically and politically. Closely followed by the gift of a home for the millions of Indians who left the country - and continue to do so - looking for a better life.

And it is a better life; no doubt about it. Returning once again to the original theme, almost twice as many Indians emigrate to the UK each year than the entire number of Britons living in India. So to use that latter figure as evidence of India's economic success is self-defeating.

capt_mahajan

I see a tendency here of disputing the facts since otherwise history gets disturbing.

So, for the last time, I will say this: Find your sources, do your research. Nobody is here to convert or be converted.

Btw, agree with MickeyS on English being the greatest "gift".

Which does not mean that it makes a few centuries of oppression worth learning it. We have schools for that.

Nick-H

Britain 'gave' no 'gifts' to India.

The introduction of the English language has, indeed, proved commercially fortuitous and a long-term blessing. Do not give credit to the Brits for this, it was entirely to their own advantage. Just see what they did with local names and pronunciation.

There is no credit either due for allowing immigration of Indians or other commonwealth countries into UK. Perhaps there was, thirty-plus years ago, some sort of recognition of the Commonwealth as a unit, where its citizens had some rights in the UK --- but immigration is otherwise strictly controlled according to economic and social requirements. UK needs nurses? Immigration is encouraged? Doctors? Bus drivers? Immigration is encouraged.

The door is swiftly slammed when the economy shifts, or the output of British medical schools, for instance, becomes more than enough to fulfil the market for British doctors.

Furthermore, none of this has any relevance to the original years of colonisation. Otherwise: where were the Indian trading companies setting up in UK?

Some unforeseen long-term good fortune, for which a very high price was paid, perhaps. Gifts? No.

Prashant.M

Nick has put it far better than I could have. English language was not a gift; it has just turned out to be good that we knew it.

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machadinha

How would the English language be a gift if it wasn't a major former colonial language that today, with a few others, dominates the world?

The argument is absurd and, indeed, self-defeating (and neo-colonial to boot. As is the idea that one should be "happy" to have any rights in the country of one's former colonizer, and meagre as those rights may be in themselves, indeed. Yippee!) We might as well all have spoken Samoan if history had taken a different turn.

It's like saying, here, we taught you the foxtrot, which just happens to get you by in international high society today (and which carried the foxtrot to begin with, but never mind), so there you go. White man's burden, anyone? And damn your silly native dances, of course, relegated to the realm of the "folkloric" (or "world" music today?) at best.

As for those railways and highways and stuff, those were and still get built to facilitate military and commercial movements of course (or did you really think your "right" to commute in your very own private car serves something other than economic motives?) I've yet to hear the British hail the Japanese trans-SE Asian railway that many of them, and of other nationalities, died in forced labor to build during WWII. From a Japanese perspective however, I'm sure the project made every bit of sense, and in fact it's historically known to have done so, to them at that time. Why else would they have bothered, just to pester those forced laborers?

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brownboy66

Nicely said nick. I think by definition the term used for organisations with altruistic goals is charity, whereas the east indian company strangely enough, was a company! So yes - lets not beat about the bush is was in it for the profit as much as it could possible get. It may have done more or other things, but it was certainly not going to do any less.

doesn't it! Thank you for your posts capt. Having grown up in another far flung colonial outpost the Bengal Famine was strangely absent from any history book I read.

I've learnt a lot so far this morning.