The Company Bahadar

An analysis of who did what to whom has to be based within a context of the time and other options available during that time. As well as on statististics.

As someone who opposes forceful occupation of one people by another, I cannot support the invastion of any King, be it Mughal or European, into any territory. Hence the existence of Mughals and Brits in South Asia is wrong to begin with. All conquerors come into an area, solely with one purpose: to exploit the local conditions to benefit themselves. During that time, they have to set up an illusion to make everyone think that they are doing it for the benefit of the occupied. This is as true for the US invasion of Iraq, Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, as it is of the Mughal and British invastions.

So the Mughals screwed South Asia (I use South Asia, since their was no India back then), for their own benefit. And the British screwed South Asia for their own benefit. To compare the, ``benefits`` of one over the other, is to compare the benefits of one rapist over another. Perhaps one was more gentle and the other more cultured. Doesn`t make much of a difference.

I read somewhere that 20,000 people worked for x number of years, at a cost of 32 million ruppees, to construct the Taj Mahal. Were they paid well and looked after? If not, then should the Taj Mahal be considered a monument of culture, or a monument of torture? The famines that occured during the British in South Asia, have never occured after 1947. Should the British be judged by their construction of the canal system or by the famines?

Having said that, South Asia was being screwed by the local Hindu Rajas and Maharajas before the Muslims started invading, or the Brits started coming in.

So the common people of South Asia have been screwed by everyone who has conquered them and ruled them - be they Hindu, Muslim, Christian (and Hindu and Muslim again). This infact, is the tragedy of the South Asian psyche. It has become a slavish mentality, devoid of a desire of independence. It easily accpets the concept of the, ``other`` being better than itself. To the extent that it even debates who was a, ``better`` conquerer. And who civilised and culturised it more.

This defeatist psyche is the reason that South Asians have been conquered by anyone and everyone, and has never in its history seen prosperity (not counting the Sonay ki Chariya theories). So, speaking as someone whose family history goes back, through various religions, hundreds of years into South Asia, I think anyone who invaded the place (including local Rajas, of which my ancestor may or may not have been one), put it back many years. If for no other reason, because they shattered the self-confidence of the locals......And it is self-confidence, more than canal systems and Taj Mahals that defines a successful future for a people.

As stated above, if someone wants to do a correct technical analysis of the affect of the British rule, they need to look at statistics. What was the GDP, literacy rate, crime rate HDI etc. of South Asia, at the time the British invaded, vis-a-vis the rest of the world (at that time, and not 200 hundred years later, by the time the British left)?

I don`t have the exact statistics, but I vaguely remember Fareed Zakaria stating that the GDP of South Asia and England was relatively proportional, when the British started their rule. Sotuh Asia was not at the bottom of the totem pole of the worlds nations, when the British came in. By the time the British left, South Asia was one of the least developed and ill-educated areas in the world. And the British left it in such a mess, that its inhabitants are still at each others throats, and it contiues to be one of the poorest areas in the world..........

So who knows what would have happened had South Asia been allowed to evolve, on its own, for two hundred years, without the British rule. Today, other than Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asian countries are the least developed in the world (barring the Chowk elite who are the only groups who have benefited from the, ``systems`` the Brisith set up). Could they have been any worse off today, had the British not come in? For some reason, I doubt it.

Societies that could produce the genuises of Mir Taqi Mirs, Mirza Ghalibs, Bulleh Shahs (and other figures in South Asian languages that I cannot understand) could not have been the uncivilized buffoons, that everyone tries to make them out to be.

P.S. The one good thing about the non-British rulers was that, at least, they became a part of the local society (albeit in an elitist manner), and left behind their next generations in the same society. Unlike they British, who considered themselves too elitist to mix in........

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Nazar Hayat Khan wrote

[(b) To what extent did the British presence/rule (350 years) benefit South Asia? The British came to India for commercial reasons. They left India when they could not afford to keep it. They discarded the Indian heritage and attempted to replace it with the European technology and sytems. Their effort for modernization (railways, telegraph, canals, cantonements etc) were more for commercial and security reasons rather than any love for India. Their failing is that they left India at the level of baboos, petty bureacracy, lawyers and engineers before the European culture of high learning (reseacrh etc) could be introduced. They also did not do much for a common man.]

While agreeing with most of what you said in this paragraph, I would have to disagree with the observation that ``...they left India at the level of baboos, petty bureacracy, lawyers and engineers before the European culture of high learning (reseacrh etc) could be introduced.`` Education has to be spread among the people befor a certain group decides on scientific research as a career. The British opened several educational institutions in India. While we could argue that they did it primarily to provide them with an educated workforce, there is no doubt that this planted a seed in the right minds. Otherwise we would not have had a CV Raman winning the Nobel Prize in Physics in the 1930s. Nor would we have had people like Jagdish Chandra Bose about whom it has been written that ``Just one hundred years ago, J.C. Bose described to the Royal Institution in London his research carried out in Calcutta at millimeter wavelengths. He used waveguides, horn antennas, dielectric lenses, various polarizers and even semiconductors at frequencies as high as 60 GHz; much of his original equipment is still in existence, now at the Bose Institute in Calcutta. Some concepts from his original 1897 papers have been incorporated into a new 1.3-mm multi-beam receiver now in use on the NRAO 12 Meter Telescope.`` (D.T. Emerson in http://www.tuc.nrao.edu/~demerson/bose/bose.html). Nor would we have had people like SN Bose whose name is forever linked with Einstein`s in the Bose-Einstein statistics.

It was also the British government that brought into being the premier science institution of India, the Indian Institute of Science at Bangalore. It was also the British government that laid the plans for the Indian Institutes of Technology. If Pakistan or Bangladesh did not benefit from these, it is more because of the Partition which was not foreseen by them and which was bitterly opposed by the senior administrators of British India.

As to the common man, for the first time he could obtain impartial justice against powerful and wealthy forces. The rule of law was supreme and judgements were not arbitrary for the first time in living memory.

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dost-mittar:15

All of us at chowk (and that includes you, echoboom!) are Macaulay`s children in some sense.

True! But nothing to gloat over. We became baboos for corporations and civil-service--our servility and earthwormness is legendary. Watch Harundi Bakshi in ``The Party``.

(The nations whose natives nurse the desire to be mistaken that they are from elsewhere)


Jehangir would be aghast to learn that today it is his progeny that is trying to ape the progeny of Roe in substituting water with paper.

Nay! We have advanced. We now lick their arses too.
Noooobody does it better!

re: Nazar Khan

I will have to agree, with you, that the Mughuls were stupid. The Mughal society was a facade covering up massive poverty and it was the sheer arrogance of the Mughals, which made them shun the modernization taking place in Europe. The only worthwhile contribution of the Mughals to the history of this region was that they left the stage to the British, who did more good in nearly 350 years of their rule, than the Mughals ever did during their rule over India.

Ciao

Stuka # 16

You are right. Only the Mughal Royals and their Mansabdars had a good time. A commoner Muslim did not gain much. In some oblique way, this also suggests that Mughals were equal oppurtunity Rulers - with some exceptions.

Dost-Mitter # 15

Welcome. Always welcome.

In their own way, some credit does go to both - the Mughals & the British.

Incidently, the Mughals did precious little for the areas that are now Pakistan. Their only contribution is some maqbaras and some Forts. Whereas, the British brought railways, canals and colleges. So in many ways, Pakistan owes more debt to the British rather than to the Mughals.

The worst thing the Mughals left behind was an illusion of power to the ordinary Muslims. Hardly 1% of Muslims were part of the Mughal royalty. The rest were poor and disfranchised like Hindus. But because the Hindu was treated worse, it made the Muslim feel superior and left him with a hankering for a bygone Golden Age that was largly mythical.

[warning! long post]

Nazar saheb:
After sanatan dharma, a crash course in British History..and a good one!
I especially liked the write-up about the John Company. The farangi who came with the John Company was a special breed. He was an adventurous and free spirited seeker of fortune. He did not look down upon the native, but instead learned his language, lived like one, ate like one, dressed like one and sometimes married one. Unlike the Saab Bahadur who succeeded him, he did not treat the native as his inferior and did not consider it his mission to civilise him. It is said that when Sir Thomas Roe gave Jehangir a gift of a painting, he immediately had one of his artists make a duplicate and Roe could not tell the difference. Jehangir was impressed with the British, but not completely. He asked Roe how the British considered themselves civilized if they didn`t even wash after relieving. Jehangir would be aghast to learn that today it is his progeny that is trying to ape the progeny of Roe in substituting water with paper.
Did you know that Queen Elizabeth gave simutaneous charter to two companies? The other was The Hudson Bay Company which was given a similar monopoly in North America. This company traded fur and other commodities with the natives (Red Indians) and also became a virtual ruler, especially in area which is now western Canada. Unlike the John Company, this company still survives, owns sizeable real estate and runs the Bay and Zeller stores all over Canada.
I do not agree that the British did not leave a positive legacy in India. Just as the Mughals before them left a legacy of architecture, Urdu language and poetry, cuisine, etc. the British too left a legacy of language, custom, Shakespeare, dress, etc. All of us at chowk (and that includes you, echoboom!) are Macaulay`s children in some sense. They also left us an infrastructure for modern development, including physical infrastructure like railways, roads, telegraph, telephone and post office as well as -and more importantly- institutional infrastructure of property rights, schools, universities, the concept of universal education, and the separation of executive and judiciary. The proudest achievement of modern India is its constitution, which is also a legacy of the British.
As for the mughals, they neglected navy probably because North India did not have a coastline. But Shivaji did pay considerable attention to navy, which was considered quite strong in those days (probably because the Portugese were a force to reckon with and had already captured Goa!). The Hindu caste system created an obstacle for creating a navy as the upper caste hindus thought that going to sea meant losing their caste status. Shivaji built his navy with dalits who were otherwise not supposed to take part in war. The brahmin peshwas who succeeded Sambaji disapproved of this and disbanded the dalit navy. These dalits refused to go back to their menial jobs and joined the British, fought against the Peshwas and laid the foundation of the Mahar regiment of the Indian army. The founder of the modern dalit movement, Dr. Ambedkar`s father was a British dalit soldier.
It is true that the British exploited the discord among the native rulers. But was this something new? Didn`t the Mughals exploit the discord among the Sultans and didn`t the sultans exploit the discord among the Rajputs.
I am not sure that things have changed a whole lot. Didn`t our rulers get summoned to Tashkant and Washington to sort out our mess? Musharraf is a smart guy who has turned Pakistan into a willing vassal of the white man. But if he had resisted and Bush had turned Pakistan into Iraq, dont you think Indians would be dancing, including here at chowk?

SameerJB # 11

I agree. The way the Mughals were having a roaring time with their elephants, wives & palaces; and were on a mutual killing spree and had a complete disinterest in getting updated with the rest of the world, The British may have been a blessing in disguise.

My only grouse against the British is that they completely discarded India`s heritage. And while they had yet not fully replaced it with a new system, they left.

But the main theme of this article is ``How the British succeeded in India?``

They succeeded because they were able to exploit the local discord.

Unfortunately, history is repeating itself and that is still happening. The local discord is a benefit to the OUTSIDERS.

NHK

I agree with SameerJB. If Mughals were still in power, the most I could dream of would be to have a chance to clean their shoes.

Very well written piece Nazar sahb.

I agree with SameerJB. If Mughals were still in power, the most I could dream of would be to have a chance to clean their shoes.

nazar Hayat:

Very good job of not only summing up history of 250 years in 2.5 pages but you stayed away from emotions of siding one side or other. I read the entire article twice with keen interest to notice any subjectivity particularly with Auragzeb, British, Tipu Sultan, Hindus, Muslims or Sikhs. I must add though that personally there was nothing new for me in this article because I have been reading history with interest for a long time.

Having changed my mind several times over the last 20+ years to appreciate one group or another in the history of sub-continent, I am now actually grateful to all those people who chose to side with British over others during mutiny that would have restored Mughals to the throne. India would have left much behind than current level if Mughal rule by the descendants of Bahadur Shah Zafar was to continue. At that time, it was a choice between two evils, one markedly smart and genius than the other. Unlike another interactor, I am now thankful to Sikhs for helping crush the mutiny of Bengalis, Marathas and Upites in the name of their over-lords, which has nothing to do with India, freedom, nationalism or patriotism.

India not having a standing navy in 1857 speaks volumes about the mindset and visions of the ruling class. They did not deserve to be rulers not at that time and definitely not in the future. It is more or less like enemy of our enemy is our friend. People of India and particularly in the area of current Pakistan has no reason to take part in the mutiny.

The letter of Jahangir to King George reads just like the ghazal translated by Asif Naqshbandi. I can see clearly where the tradition of bragging, exaggerating, extensive metaphorical and allegorical expressions in Urdu ghazal is originating from......

nazar #9:

As a Punjabi, aren`t you glad that these chieftons fell one after another quickly and we have 100 years of peace which has left more monuments and legacies behind than all the combined history of prior period , which left behind only faint memories except a new religion. If not for these chietons falling one after another quickly, we might still have one dirt road linking Lahore and Multan with one bearded persian speaking Afghan governor of Multan and one bearded persian speaking Turk governor of Lahore. allah allah khair sallah

The most fascinating aspect of this tale is how the Company (and the British) played one Raja against the other and kept nibbling and eating away this huge landmass bit by bit.

And the Indian Chieftons fell into their trap, never reconciled with each other and put up a joint defence.

Kaurasach # 1

I think that the British decided to leave India - and leave it in a hurry. Either they should not have come or should not have left India at the stage they left. It is just an opinion.