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Wrote: “ It was an astounding discovery
that Hindustan possessed, in spite of the changes of the realms and
changes of time, a language of unrivalled richness and variety; a
language, the parent of all those dialects that Europe has fondly called
classical- the source alike of Greek flexibility and Roman strength.”
Count Louis Hamon Cheiro (1866-1936) wrote:
“ Long before Rome or Greece or Israel was even heard of , the mountains
of India point back to an age, of learning, beyond , and still beyond.
From the astronomical calculations that the figures in their temples
represent, it has been estimated that the Hindu understood the precession
of the equinoxes centuries before the Christian Era.”
Lord Curzon (1859-1925) viceroy of India
from 1899-1905 and Chancellor of Oxford University wrote: “ Powerful
empires existed and flourished here (in India) while Englishmen were still
wandering, painted in the woods and while the English colonies were a
wilderness and a jungle.”
The German philologist and archaeologist,
Friedrich Creuzer (1771-1858) wrote in “The Mother of Us All”: “If
there is country on earth which can justly claim the honor of having been
the cradle of the human race or at least the scene of primitive
civilization, the successive developments of which carried into all parts
of the ancient world….that country assuredly is India.”
Ali bin Abi Talib, the Fourth Caliph
(656-661) wrote in Hindu Muslim Cultural Accord, “The land where
books, were first written and from where wisdom and knowledge sprang is
India.”
Will Durant, the American Pullitzer-prize
winning author wrote in The Case for India: "That India was
the motherland of our race, and Sanskrit the mother of Europe's languages,
that she was the mother of our philosophy, mother, through the Arabs, of
much of our mathematics, mother, through the Buddha, of the ideals
embodied in Christianity, mother, through the village communities, of
self-government and democracy. Mother India is in many ways the
mother of us all."
The German philosopher and author wrote:
“India is not only at the origin of everything, she is superior in
everything, intellectually, religiously or politically and even the Greek
heritage seems pale in comparison. Here
is the actual source of all languages, all the thoughts and poems of the
human spirit; everything, everything without exception comes from India.”
The following is an article written
by a Scottish Historian, William Dalrymple:
India Empire Strikes Back - A Western Perspective
By William
Dalrymple
From
Raj to riches: As India celebrates 60 years of independence, = acclaimed
historian William Dalrymple salutes a country returning to its
pre-colonial wealth. When I moved back to India with my family four years
ago, I took a lease on a farmhouse five kilometers from the boom town of
Gurgaon on the south-western edge of Delhi. From my road I could see in
the distance the rings of new housing estates, full of call centers,
software companies and fancy apartment blocks, all rapidly rising on land
that only two years earlier was billowing winter wheat. One of India's
most historic sites: the Taj Mahal
The
first time I lived in Delhi, in the late 1980s, Gurgaon was a semi-rural
Haryana market town, with a single large Maruti car plant to one side; it
was home to no more than 100,000 people, Now it had become a city of
several million; some said three million, some said more - the speed of
growth was so enormous that it was difficult to obtain accurate figures.
Either way, Gurgaon was now home to a population almost equal to that of
my native Scotland.
Here an increasingly wealthy middle class had suddenly taken root in an
inspirational bubble of fast-rising shopping malls, espresso bars,
restaurants and multiplexes. These new neighborhoods, most of them still
half-built and ringed with scaffolding, were invariably given such
unrealistically enticing names as Beverly Hills, Windsor Court, West End
Heights - an indication, perhaps, of where their owners would prefer to be
and where, in time, they might eventually migrate.
Four years later, Gurgaon has galloped towards us at such a speed that it
now abuts the edge of our farm and the proudly-touted "largest mall
in Asia" is arising a quarter of a mile from my house. What was
farmland and a pool for water buffaloes when I moved in is now a mass of
cranes, flanked by billboards advertising the latest laptops and iPods.
There are still no accurate figures but the population has probably topped
five million.
The speed of the development of Gurgaon is
breathtaking to anyone used to the plodding growth rates of western
Europe: the sort of construction that would take 25 years in Britain comes
up here in five months, even if, at the end of it, the "luxury"
flats will probably only have electricity for a couple of hours a day and
the water supply will be intermittent at best.
The speed of change in Gurgaon reflects that of the growth of the Indian
economy in general: economic futurologists all agree that China and India
will at some stage in the 21st century come to dominate the global
economy. The various intelligence agencies estimate that China will
overtake America between 2030 and 2040, while India will overtake the US
by roughly 2050, as measured in dollar terms. Measured by purchasing-power
parity, India is already on the verge of overtaking Japan to become the
third largest economy in the world.
Incredibly, India now trains a million engineering graduates a year
(against 100,000 each in America and Europe) and stands third in technical
and scientific capacity - behind the US and Japan, but well ahead of
China.
Today India's IT sector alone annually earns the vast sum of almost $25
billion, mostly in export earnings. With an average growth rate over the
last decade of 6 per cent and current growth of 9 percent, it is little
wonder that average incomes are doubling every 15 years: the number of
mobile-phone users has jumped from 3 million in 2000 to 100 million in
2005; the number of television channels from one in 1991 to more than 150
last year.
It is a similar picture on India's roads: in the early 1990s, as India was
starting to relax import and investment restrictions on foreign
manufacturers, there were only six or seven makes of car. More than 90 per
cent of them were Hindustan Ambassadors, the Indian- made version of the
1950s Morris Oxford - effectively clumpy vintage cars. Now the new
six-lane highways are full of sleek and speedy Fiats, Fords, Mercedes-Benz
and even the odd Porsche and Bentley.
The 17th century Mughal emperor Shah Jahan who created the Taj Mahal
monument So extraordinary is all this to us today, particularly to those
who knew the sluggish India of 20 years ago, that it is easy to forget how
little of it would have surprised our ancestors who sailed there with the
East India Company. The idea of India as a poor country is relatively
recent: historically, South Asia was always famous as the richest region
of the globe, whose fertile soils gave two harvests a year, and whose
mines groaned with minerals.
Ever since Alexander the Great first penetrated the Hindu Kush, Europeans
fantasized about the wealth of these lands, where the Greek geographers
said that gold was dug up by gigantic ants and guarded by griffins, and
where precious jewels lay scattered on the ground like dust. In Roman
times, there was a dramatic drain of Western gold to India. This is
something the Greek historian Strabo comments on with great anxiety in his
writings - an image graphically confirmed by the recent finds of huge
Roman coin hoards around Madurai in Tamil Nadu and a large Roman coastal
trading post near Pondicherry.
At the peak of the trade, during the reign of Nero, the south Indian
Pandyan Kings even sent an embassy to Rome to discuss the latter's balance
of payments problems. Even today, the English "pepper" and
"ginger" are loan words from Tamil - respectively, pippali and
singabera, testaments to the spice trade that was once a staple of this
lucrative Indian export traffic.
It was similar legends of India's extraordinary wealth that drew the
merchant adventurers of the Company eastwards. They came not as part of
some Tudor aid project, or on behalf of a charitable Elizabethan NGO, but
as part of a desperate effort to cash in on the vast riches of the fabled
Mughal Empire, then one of the two wealthiest polities in the world.
What the Poles are to modern Britain - economic migrants in search of
better lives - the Jacobeans were to Mughal India.
At their heights, the Mughal Emperors were really
rivaled only by their Ming counterparts in China. The Great Mughals ruled
over most of India, all of Pakistan and Bangladesh and great chunks of
Afghanistan. Their armies were all but invincible, their palaces
unparalleled and the domes of their many mosques glittered with gold. For
their contemporaries in distant Europe, they were potent symbols of power
and wealth. The word Mughal (or Mogul) is still loaded today with
connotations of this, even when it is divorced from its original Indian
context.
In Milton's Paradise Lost, for example, the great Mughal cities of Agra
and Lahore are revealed to Adam after the Fall as future wonders of God's
creation. This was hardly an understatement: by the 17th century, Lahore
had grown larger and richer even than Constantinople and, with its two
million inhabitants, dwarfed both London and Paris.
"The city is second to none either in Asia or in Europe," said
Portuguese Jesuit Father Antonio Monserrate, "with regards either to
size, population, or wealth. It is crowded with merchants, who foregather
there from all over Asia. There is no art or craft useful to human life
which is not practiced there. The citadel alone has a circumference of
three miles."
It was, in terms of rapid growth, instant prosperity and unlimited
opportunities, the Gurgaon of its day.
What changed all this was quite simply the advent of European colonialism.
Following Vasco da Gama's discovery of the sea route to the East in 1498,
bypassing the Middle East and conquering the centers of spice production
in South Asia, European colonial traders - first the Portuguese, then the
Dutch and finally the British - slowly wrecked the old trading network and
imposed with their cannons and caravels a western imperial system of
command economics.
It was only at the very end of the 18th century that Europe, for the first
time in history, had a favorable balance of trade with Asia. At the same
time, the era of Indian economic decline had begun and was most
precipitous in the region around the British headquarters in Calcutta.
As the 18th century historian Alexander Dow put it: "Bengal was one
of the richest, most populous and best cultivated kingdoms in the world
85. We may date the commencement of decline from the day on which Bengal
fell under the dominion of foreigners."
This was certainly the view of Edmund Burke, who impeached Warren
Hastings, India's first Governor General, charging him with oppression,
corruption, gross abuse of power and ruthlessly plundering India.
On February 13, 1788, huge crowds gathered outside Parliament to witness
the members of the House of Lords troop into Westminster Hall to sit in
judgment on Hastings. Tickets for the few seats reserved for spectators
were said to have changed hands for as much as A350. In the audience was
Sarah Siddons, the great society actress (and courtesan), as well as
Edward Gibbon, Joshua Reynolds, the novelist Fanny Burney, the Queen, two
of her daughters and most of the ambassadors in London.
For all the theatre of the occasion - and, indeed, one of the prosecutors
was the playwright Richard Sheridan - this was not just the greatest
political spectacle in the age of George III. It was the nearest the
British ever got to putting the Empire on trial and they did so with
Edmund Burke, one of their greatest orators, at the helm, supported by the
similarly eloquent Charles James Fox.
Hastings stood accused of nothing less than the rape of India - or as
Burke put it in his opening speech: "Cruelties unheard of and
devastations almost without name crimes which have their rise in the
wicked dispositions of men, in avarice, rapacity, pride, cruelty,
malignity, haughtiness, insolence - in short everything that manifests a
heart blackened to the very blackest; a heart dyed in blackness; a heart
gangrened to the core We have brought before you the head, the = captain
general of iniquity - one in whom all the fraud, all the tyranny of India
are embodied."
When Burke began to describe the violation of Bengali virgins and their
mothers by the rapacious tax collectors the British employed - "They
were dragged out, naked and exposed to the public view, and scourged
before all the people they put the nipples of the women into the sharp
edges of split bamboos and tore them from their bodies" - Mrs. =
Sheridan "was so overpowered that she fainted and to be carried from
the hall"
Hastings was in many ways the wrong target for Burke's Parliamentary
offensive and, after a trial lasting nearly 10 years, he was eventually
acquitted on all charges. But it is worth recalling the damage that the
Company undoubtedly did to the flourishing economy of India as the 60th
anniversary of Indian Independence dawns amid unprecedented excitement at
India's rapid rise towards its projected superpower status.
Today, academics, historians and economists are fiercely divided between
those who believe European colonial rule brought great benefits to India
and those who believe Britain put India into irreversible political and
economic decline. Given the complex and emotive issues involved, it is
hardly surprising that there is little neutral territory in this
politically super-charged debate: did Western mercantile-imperialism bring
high capitalism and free trade to India, as supporters such as historian
Niall Ferguson would have us believe; or did it irrevocably destroy
millennia-old trading networks?
Did it bring democracy to a part of the world inured to despotism and
tyranny; or did it remove political freedom of expression from lands with
long traditions of debate and public expression of dissent, as argued by
the Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen?
Did the British Empire bring in constitutional guarantees of the freedom
of the individual; or promote slavery, exploitation, indentured labor and
forced migration? Did the British bring just governance and irrigate the
deserts, or did they plunder natural resources, drive a number of species
to extinction and preside over a succession of famines that left many
million dead while surplus grain was being shipped to Britain?
Most important of all, did the British promote religious tolerance, or did
they instead sow the seeds of religious conflict with cynical policies of
sectarian divide and rule - thus laying the scene for the
politico-religious divisions we see around us and what Bernard Lewis and
Samuel Huntingdon would have us believe are today's civilization clashes?
There are no easy answers to any of these questions. Looking back at the
role the Europeans have played in South Asia until their departure in
August 1947, there is certainly much that the West can unambiguously be
said to have contributed to Indian life: the Portuguese, for example,
brought that central staple of Indian life, the chili pepper; while the
British brought that other essential staple, tea, as well as the far more
important innovations of democracy and the rule of law, along with the
railways, all of which have helped India = rise again to greatness.
In the light of so much post-colonial disapproval, it is also worth
remembering the impeccable reputation Victorian rule in India (if = not
that of the Company) once enjoyed, even from Britain's fiercest critics.
Bismarck thought Britain's work in India would be "one of its lasting
monuments". Theodore Roosevelt agreed that Britain had done”such
marvelous things in India" that they might "transform the Indian
population in government and culture, and thus leave [their] impress as
Rome did hers on Europe"
The French traveler Abb Dubois extolled the "uprightness of
character, education and ability" of British officials in India,
while the Austrian Baron HFCbner ascribed the "miracles" of
British rule to its administrators' "devotion, intelligence, courage,
and skill combined = with an integrity proof against all temptation".
It is also true that factors such as cricket and
the English language have been crucial to India's modern success, cultural
indicators that in their different ways set Indian eyes looking westwards
to the rising power of Britain, and later the US, and away from the
declining Islamo-Persianate culture of Central Asia and the Middle East, a
world that would go into ever greater cultural and economic decline as the
19th century gave way to the 20th.
In the days that followed the fall of the Mughals after the great Indian
Mutiny of 1857, this turning away from the old cultural moorings and the
reorientation of India towards the West caused heartbreak to the old Urdu-
and Persian-speaking elites.
As the poet and critic Azad wrote: "The glory of the winners'
ascendant fortune gives everything of theirs - even their dress, their
gait, their conversation - a radiance that makes them desirable. And
people do not merely adopt them, but they are proud to adopt them."
Yet it was the depth of that reorientation and adoption, and the ease
which Indians can now cross the globe and work in either Britain or the
US, that today has given the country's anglicized elite such easy access
to the jobs and opportunities of the Western economy. Nevertheless, for
all this we British should keep nostalgia and self-congratulation over the
Raj within strict limits. For all the irrigation projects, the great
engineering achievements and the famous imperviousness to bribes of the
officers of the Indian Civil Service, the Raj nevertheless presided over
the destruction of Indian political, cultural and artistic
self-confidence, while the economic figures speak for themselves.
In 1600, when the East India Company was founded, Britain was generating
1.8 per cent of the world's GDP, while India was producing 22.5 per cent.
By 1870, at the peak of the Raj, Britain was generating 9.1 per cent,
while India had been reduced for the first time to the = epitome of a
Third World nation, a symbol across the globe of famine, poverty and
deprivation.
Today in India, the dramatic increase in wealth that we see on all sides
is less some sort of economic miracle - the strange rise of a once
impoverished wasteland, as it is usually depicted in the Western press -
so much as things slowly returning to the traditional pattern of global
trade in the pre-colonial world. Last year, the richest man in the UK was
for the first time an ethnic Indian, Lakshmi Mittal, and our largest steel
manufacturer, Corus, has been bought by an Indian company, Tata.
Extraordinary as it is, seen from the wider perspective the rise of India
and China is merely nothing more than a return to the ancient equilibrium
of world trade. Today, we Europeans are no longer the gun-toting,
gunboat-riding colonial masters we once were, but instead are reverting to
our more traditional role: that of eager consumers of the much celebrated
luxuries and services of the East.
William Dalrymple's new book, the Last Mughal: the Fall of a Dynasty,
Delhi 1857, published by Bloomsbury, has just been awarded the Duff Cooper
Prize for History.
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