The pandits…cited doctrinal justifications: See, for instance, Madhu Kishwar, Zealous Reformers, Deadly Laws, New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2008.
‘enumerate, categorize and assess’: Christopher Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914: Global Connections and Comparisons, London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2004, p. 275.
The American scholar Thomas Metcalfe has shown how race ideology: Thomas Metcalfe, Ideologies of the Raj, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, p. 89.
the census in India was led by British: This discussion relies heavily on K. W. Jones, ‘Religious Identity and Indian Census’ in The Census in British India: New Perspectives, N. G. Barrier (ed.), New Delhi: Manohar Publishers, 1981, pp. 73–102.
This is underscored by the scholar Sudipta Kaviraj: Sudipta Kaviraj, ‘The Imaginary Institution of India’, Subaltern Studies VII, Partha Chatterjee and Gyanendra Pandey (eds), New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992, p. 26.
Risley’s work helped the British use such classification both to affirm their own convictions: See E. M. Collingham, Imperial Bodies: The Physical Experience of the Raj, 1800–1947, Oxford: Polity Press, 2001; Christopher Pinney, ‘Classification and Fantasy in the Photographic Construction of Caste and Tribe’, Visual Anthropology 3, (1990), pp. 259–284, p. 267; and Peter Gottschalk, Religion, Science and Empire: Classifying Hinduism and Islam in British India, London: Oxford University Press, 2012, p. 213.
Such caste competition had been largely unknown in pre-British days: See M. N. Srinivas, Social Change in Modern India, Hyderabad: Orient Longman India, 1972, which describes how social change and caste mobility were practiced before the advent of the British.
‘Nothing embraces the whole of India, nothing, nothing’: Forster, A Passage to India, p. 160.
Both David Washbrook and David Lelyveld believe that: David Washbrook, ‘To Each a Language of His Own: Language, Culture, and Society in Colonial India’, in Language, History and Class, Penelope J. Corfield (ed.), London: Blackwell, 1991, pp. 179–203; David Lelyveld, ‘The Fate of Hindustani: Colonial Knowledge and the Project of a National Language’, in Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament, Carol A. Breckenridge and Peter van der Veer (eds), Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993, pp. 189–214.
the British even subsumed ancient, and not dishonourable, professions: Ratnabali Chatterjee, ‘The Queen’s Daughters: Prostitutes as an Outcast Group in Colonial India’, Chr. Michelsen Institute Report 1992: 8.
the Hindu-Muslim divide was, as the American scholar of religion: Peter Gottschalk, Religion, Science, and Empire, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
Gyanendra Pandey suggests that religious communalism: Gyanendra Pandey, The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990.
the colonialists’ efforts to catalogue, classify and categorize the Indians: Ibid, 204.
a temple in South Arcot, Tamil Nadu, hosts a deity: Muttaal Ravuttan can be found in Virapatti, Tirukoyilur Taluk, South Arcot, Tamil Nadu. See Alf Hiltebeitel, ‘Draupadi’s Two Guardians: Buffalo King & Muslim Devotee’ in Criminal Gods and Demon Devotees: Essays on the Guardians of Popular Hinduism, Binghamton, NY: SUNY Press, 1989, p. 338 et seq.
The Mughal court, she points out: Romila Thapar, On Nationalism, New Delhi: Aleph Book Company, 2016, pp. 14–15.
Hindu generals in Mughal courts, or of Hindu and Muslim ministers in the Sikh ruler Ranjit Singh’s entourage: Gyanendra Pandey, Construction of Communalism.
the colonial state loosened the bonds that had held them together: Romila Thapar, On Nationalism.
large-scale conflicts between Hindus and Muslims…only began under colonial rule: See Sandria Freitag, Collective Action and Community: Public Arenas and the Emergence of Communalism in North India, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989.
Hindu or Muslim identity existed in any meaningful sense: C. A. Bayly, ‘The Pre-History of ‘Communalism’? Religious Conflict in India, 1700–1860’, Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 19(2), 1985, p. 202.
The portrayal of Muslims as Islamist idol-breakers…is far from the truth: Richard M. Eaton, ‘Temple Desecration and the Image of the Holy Warrior in Indo-Muslim Historiography’, (paper presented at the annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies, Boston, April 1994), cited by Cynthia Talbot, ‘Inscribing the Other, Inscribing the Self: Hindu-Muslim Identities in Pre-Colonial India’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 37 (4), 1995, p. 718.
Cynthia Talbot observed that since a majority of medieval South India’s: Talbot, ‘Inscribing the Other’, pp. 692–722. Also see H. K. Sherwani, ‘Cultural Synthesis in Medieval India,’ Journal of Indian History, 41, 1963, pp. 239–59; W. H. Siddiqi, ‘Religious Tolerance as Gleaned from Medieval Inscriptions’, in Proceedings of Seminar on Medieval Inscriptions, Aligarh: Centre of Advanced Study, Dept. of History, Aligarh Muslim University, 1974, pp. 50–58.
‘a new religious feud was established’: Nevinson, The New Spirit in India, p. 192–193.
I have almost invariably found: Ibid, p. 202.
it is striking that…the Aga Khan articulated a vision of India: The Aga Khan, India in Transition: A Study in Political Evolution, (Philip Lee Warner for the Medici Society, London, 1918); see particularly Chapter I, pp. 1–15, for his civilizational theories; Chapter XIII, ‘India’s Claim to East Africa’; pp. 123–132, and Chapter XV on Islam, pp. 156–161.
‘to counteract the forces of Hindu agitation’: Dr B. R. Ambedkar, Thoughts on Pakistan, Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1941, p. 89.
‘predominant bias in British officialdom’: Durant, The Case for India, pp. 137–138.
‘By 1905, religious rhetoric between Shias and Sunnis’: Keith Hjortshoj, ‘Shi’i Identity and the Significance of Muharram in Lucknow, India’, in Martin Kramer (ed.), Shi’ism, Resistance and Revolution, Boulder: Westview Press, 1987, p. 234.
Muslims have been together with the Hindus since they moved: Maulana Husain Ahmad Madani, quoted in Venkat Dhulipala, Creating a New Medina, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016, pp. 449–450.
‘The British are not a spiritual people’: Lala Lajpat Rai, ‘The Swadeshi Movement’, 1905, quoted in Nevinson, p. 301.
‘We are different beings,’ he declared: Cited in Nisid Hajari, Midnight’s Furies: The Deadly Legacy of India’s Partition, New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015, p. 9.
Clement Attlee persuaded his colleagues: The entire section on the events leading to Partition (including the pages that follow) is based on the following books: Phillips Talbot, An American Witness to India’s Partition, New Delhi: Sage Books, 2007; Leonard Gordon, Brothers Against the Raj, New York: Columbia University Press, 1990; Penderel Moon, Mark Tully and Tapan Raychaudhuri, Divide and Quit, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998; Sugata Bose, His Majesty’s Opponent: Subhas Chandra Bose and India’s Struggle Against Empire, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011; Maulana Abul Azad Khan, India Wins Freedom, New Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2004; Durga Das, India: From Curzon to Nehru and After, New Delhi: Rupa Publications, 1967; Bipan Chandra, India’s Struggle for Independence, New Delhi: Viking, 1988; Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India, New Delhi: Viking, 2013; Sarvepalli Gopal, Jawaharlal Nehru, Vols. I & II, New Delhi: Vintage, 2005; Nisid Hajari, Midnight’s Furies; Tunzelmann, Indian Summer; Alan Campbell-Johnson, Mission with Mountbatten, London: Macmillan, 1985; Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre, Mountbatten and the Partition of India, New Delhi: Vikas, 1975; Michael Brecher, Nehru: A Political Biography, London: Beacon Press, 1962; Stanley Wolpert, Nehru: A Tryst with Destiny, New York: Oxford University Press, 1995; M. J. Akbar, Nehru, New Delhi: Viking, 1988; H. V. Hodson, The Great Divide, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997; Yasmin Khan, The Great Partition, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008; Louis Fischer, The Life of Mahatma Gandhi, New York: Harper Collins, 1997; Nicholas Mansergh, The Transfer of Power 194
2–47, London: HM Stationery Office, 1983; and Lord Archibald Wavell, Viceroy’s Journal (ed.), Penderel Moon, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973. For a short account, see also my own Nehru: The Invention of India, New York: Arcade Books, 2003.
‘It is alarming and nauseating to see Mr Gandhi’: Ramachandra Guha, ‘Statues in a Square’, The Telegraph, 21 March 2015.
‘He put himself at the head of a movement’: Boris Johnson, The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History, New York: Riverhead Books, 2014, p. 178.
‘bound hand and foot at the gates of Delhi’: Alex Von Tunzelmann, Indian Summer: The Secret History Of The End Of An Empire, New York: Henry Holt & Company, 2007.
‘he represents a minority’: Hajari, Midnight’s Furies, p. 41.
its membership swelled from 112,000 in 1941 to over 2 million: Ibid, p. 42.
‘are only technically a minority’: For the opposite view, marshalling various sources of evidence for the idea that Muslim separatist consciousness had deep roots in society and religion, see Venkat Dhulipala, Creating a New Medina: State Power, Islam and the Quest for Pakistan in Colonial North India, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.
The latter was serious, affecting seventy-eight ships and twenty shore establishments: Srinath Raghavan, India’s War: The Making of Modern South Asia 1939–1945, London: Penguin, 2016.
Wavell’s astonishingly candid diaries reveal his distaste for: Lord Archibald Wavell, Viceroy’s Journal (ed.), Penderel Moon, p. 283.
‘I’ve never met anyone more in need of front-wheel brakes’: Hajari, Midnight’s Furies, p. 102.
‘The British Empire did not decline, it simply fell’: Tunzelmann, Indian Summer, 2007.
‘stands testament to the follies of empire’: Yasmin Khan, The Great Partition, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007.
Far from introducing democracy to a country mired in despotism: This argument is laid out in convincing detail in Amartya Sen, The Argumentative Indian, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2005.
CHAPTER 5: THE MYTH OF ENLIGHTENED DESPOTISM
there has never been a famine in a democracy with a free press: Amartya Sen, Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlements and Deprivation, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982.
The fatality figures are horrifying: Durant, The Case for India.
‘it was common economic wisdom that government intervention’: Dinyar Patel, ‘How Britain Let One Million Indians Die in Famine,’ BBC News, 11 June 2016. www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-36339524.
‘If I were to attempt to do this, I should consider myself no better’: Ibid.
‘complex economic crises induced by the market’: Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World, London; New York: Verso Books, 2001, p. 19.
‘We have criticized the Government of Bengal for their failure to control the famine’: Famine Inquiry Commission Final Report, Famine Inquiry Commission, (John Woodhead, Chairman), India, 1945, pp. 105–106.
‘Behind all these as the fundamental source of the terrible famines’: Durant, The Case for India, pp. 36–37.
‘There is to be no interference of any kind’: Davis, 2001, pp. 31, 52.
Lytton’s pronouncements were noteworthy: Ibid.
‘it is the duty of the Government’: Johann Hari, ‘The Truth? Our Empire Killed Millions’, The Independent, 19 June 2006.
‘severely reprimanded, threatened with degradation’: Ibid.
‘Scores of corpses were tumbled into old wells’: Ibid.
‘When in August 1877 the leading citizens of Madras’: Georgina Brewis, ‘Fill full the Mouth of Famine: Voluntary action in famine relief in India 1877–1900’, in Robbins, D. et al. (eds), Yearbook II PhD research in progress, London: University of East London, 2007, pp. 32–50.
‘were humane men and, although hampered by inadequate’: Ibid.
‘[i]n its influence on agriculture, [cattle mortality]: J. C. Geddes, Administrative Experience Recorded Former Famines, Calcutta, 1874, p. 350. Another official noted that ‘a loss that is likely to fall more heavily on the farmers than even the temporary loss of manual labour, is the loss by death of their plough and well bullocks’. Report of Colonel Baird Smith to Indian Government on Commercial Condition of North West Province of India and recent Famine, Parliamentary Papers, 8 May 1861, p. 29; and Report of the Same Officer to the Indian Government on the Recent Famine in the Same Province, House of Commons, 1862, p. 39.
‘it falls to us to defend our Empire from the spectral armies: Cited in Chandrika Kaul, Reporting the Raj: The British Press and India 1880–1922, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1922, p. 75.
‘In the past 12 years the population of India’: Sydney Morning Herald, 6 November 1943.
richly-documented account of the Bengal Famine: Madhusree Mukerjee, Churchill’s Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India During World War II, New York: Basic Books, 2010, p. 332.
The way in which Britain’s wartime financial arrangements: Durant, p. 36. For famines in general and the Bengal Famine of 1943–44 in particular, see also Cormac Ó Gráda, Eating People is Wrong, and Other Essays on Famine, its Past, and its Future, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1950.
‘a providential remedy for overpopulation’: William Jennings Bryan, British Rule in India, reprinted by the British Committee of the Indian National Congress, London, 1906, p. 11.
which rests largely on the introduction of quinine as an anti-malarial drug: These claims are made in Ferguson, Empire, p. 215.
From 1787, Indian convicts were transported, initially to the penal colonies: These details are cited in G. S. V. Prasad and N. Kanakarathnam, ‘Colonial India and Transportation: Indian Convicts in South East Asia and Elsewhere’, International Journal of Applied Research, Vol. 1 (13), 2015, pp. 5–8.
Between 1825 to 1872, Indian convicts made up the bulk of the labour force: Ibid.
‘Whether labour were predominantly enslaved, apprenticed or indentured’: Clare Anderson, Convicts in the Indian Ocean, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000, pp. 104–106.
The ‘Brotherhood of the Boat’ became the subject of poetry: See this song from the 1970s in the Carribean called ‘Jahaji Bhai, Brotherhood of the Boat’: www.youtu.be/DOh4fsIaTH8.
In the period 1519–1939, an estimated 5,300,000 people whom scholars delicately dub ‘unfree migrants’: G. S. V. Prasad and Dr N Kanakarathnam, ‘Colonial India and transportation: Indian convicts in South East Asia and elsewhere’, International Journal of Applied Research, 1(13), 2015.
‘was as if fate had thrust its fist’: Ghosh, Sea of Poppies, p. 367.
‘Most of the time,’ says historian Jon Wilson, ‘the actions of British imperial administrators’: Wilson, India Conquered, p. 5.
‘their sense of vulnerability and inability’: Ibid, pp 75–77.
‘I can only [subdue resistance] by reprisals’: Howitt, p. 21.
Delhi…was left a desolate ruin: Ferdinand Mount, Tears of the Rajas.
‘I knowed what that meant’: Denis Judd, The Lion and the Tiger: The Rise and Fall of the British Raj, 1600–1947, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, p. 132.
‘every mutiny, every danger, every terror, and every crime’: John Ruskin, The Pleasures of England: Lectures Given in Oxford, London: G. Allen, 1884, p. 111.
‘Peterloo massacre had claimed about eleven lives’: Helen Fein, Imperial Crime and Punishment, Honolulu: The University Press of Hawaii, 1977, p. xii.
‘the calumny…that frail English roses: Salman Rushdie, ‘Outside the Whale’.
General Dyer issued an order that Hindus using the street: Durant, The Case for India, pp. 134–135.
‘I know it is said in missionary meetings that we conquered India’: Quoted in British Rule Condemned, p. 36.
CHAPTER 6: THE REMAINING CASE FOR EMPIRE
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‘In the beginning, there were two nations’: Tunzelmann, Indian Summer, p. 6.
‘led to the modernisation, development, protection, agrarian advance’: Amit Singh, ‘Think India should be grateful for colonialism? Here are five reasons why you’re unbelievably ignorant’, The Independent, 10 November 2015.
‘Wherever they are allowed a free outlet’: H. M. Hyndman, Ruin of India by British, pp. 513–33.
there were fourteen questions on this issue: Breakdown of questions figures based on Amba Prasad, Indian Railways: A Study in Public Utility Administration, Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1960.
Indians also pointed out at the time that the argument that the railways: See, for instance, Horace Bell, Railway Policy in India, Rivington, Percival & Company, 1894 and Edward Davidson, The Railways of India: With an Account of Their Rise, Progress, and Construction, E. & F. N. Spon, 1868.
‘sordid and selfish…’: Bipan Chandra, The Rise and Growth of Economic Nationalism in India: Economic Policies of Indian National Leadership, 1880–1905, New Delhi: Har-Anand Publications, 2010.
‘Britain provided India with the necessary tools’: Jonathan Old, ‘Why I think Shashi Tharoor’s Speech is Populist, Oversimplified and Ignores the Problems’, www.youthkiawaaz.com, 28 July 2015.
The British left India with a literacy rate of 16 per cent: The Census of India, 1951, New Delhi: Publications Division, 1952.
‘When the British came, there was, throughout India, a system of communal schools: Durant, The Case for India, pp. 31–35.
‘in pursuing a system, the tendency of which’: Sir Thomas Munro, ‘His Life’, Vol. III, quoted in British Rule Condemned by British Themselves, p. 16.
philosopher James Mill and his followers urged the promotion of western science: James Mill, History of British India, London: Baldwin, Cradock and Joy, 1817, p. 156.
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