I grew up in the Cold War. The East India Company was only mentioned in passing and nothing else was spoken of India, save two or three paragraphs on Ghandi. With that said, in my thirties I developed a friendship with an Indian family. Not long after I stupidly said "You sure speak English rather well." That person replied "The British have been in India for hundreds of years." I wanted to crawl into a hole in the floor.
Spanish has been spoken in what is now the USA and Philippines for over 500 years, but it is no surprise to find people who don't speak the language. the vast majority of Indians have little to no skill with English, regardless of colonial history.
This is still in the living memory of older generations. We Calcuttans grew up in the city with grandparents re-telling the horrors they saw and faced with this famine and the partition and riots that followed.
My father-in-law just moved to India, and I’ve heard so many stories on how the British took advantage of the Indians so many times. But this story truly takes the cake. Things happen, such as famines and diseases, but to continue to exploit the people dispute the problems….
The 'scramble for Africa' of the 19th Century is also another dark chapter in History. Leopold II of Belgium was particularly cruel in the Congo during the 1880s 1900s. Joseph Conrad's 'Heart Of Darkness' (1899) describes this period with chilling accuracy.
I’m Odia and Bengali. The trauma of the repeated famines and the manufactured mass murder is still evident in oral history, folk songs and folk stories. It’s worth noting that while there were famines in pre-colonial India (broadly referring to subcontinent and not just the modern state of India), the devastation they wrought was far below the horrors of the 18th-20th centuries. Various Indian rulers (from the Mughals to the Guptas to the Mauryas) are recorded to have mitigated the worst effects of drought and famine through direct grain distribution for free or for labour, reduction or exemption of taxes, importing grain, public waterworks construction, and price controls. One of the earliest records of famine policy is found in Kautilya’s ‘Arthashastra’ (literally, “statecraft”) dated to the 3rd century BC-3rd century CE. A royal advisor and the key architect of the Maurya Empire, Kautilya detailed the duties that a king had to his kingdom/subjects. He goes as far as to write that a king who fails in constructing waterworks/public facilities and sharing his provisions/providing for his subjects has a responsibility to relinquish his kingdom another king. He also noted that in addition to providing food from his stores during a famine, a king should impose higher taxes or seize resources from the wealthy to provide for all his subjects. On the other hand, the colonial period saw an increase in famines and an unprecedented loss of life that severely impacted population growth for the first time in centuries. Colonial masters then, and colonial apologists now, often deflect blame to El Niño events or other natural causes. But the indisputable fact is that crop losses caused by drought/lack of monsoon, pests or floods have occurred since millennia and the exceedingly high mortality during colonial rule was a result of racist, genocidal rhetoric that underpinned policy decisions. Under colonial rule, India suffered more famines in the late 18th to 20th century period than at any other time in history or since independence. Forcible conversion of arable food crop-growing lands into cash crop cultivation to support British industries, punishingly high taxes, exporting grains out of the country, and deeply racist apathy towards us meant that droughts were manufactured into multi-year deadly famines. What’s worse is that while the East India Company’s morally bankrupt officers were condemned in Britain (while still having the explicit support of the sovereign and parliament who were happy to gain wealth from this loot), the British crown was equally cruel, destructive and deadly after they took control in 1858. In my state, the Odisha famine of 1866-68 resulted in a third of the population dying of starvation in 1866 alone. Over the two years of the famine, *conservative* estimates place the death toll at 4-5 million. Famine relief efforts were made too late and were hindered by the lack of necessary infrastructure to reach people, because the “famous” British Indian railways had only been constructed for trade and not as a public service. Worse still, during the famine the British rulers exported over 200 million pounds of rice (about 91,000 tonnes) to Great Britain, and punished relief efforts organised by Indians. This led Dadabhoi Naoroji (an Indian MP in the British House of Commons) to note in 1867 that Britain was gaining its wealth with the lifeblood of Indians. The subsequent Bihar famine of 1873-74 caused very, very low mortality because of the policy decisions and relief efforts made by Sir Richard Temple as the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal Presidency (which included the present-day states of Bihar, Odisha and West Bengal), making it abundantly clear that the excessive deaths of previous famines was indeed avoidable. But Temple was criticised for the “unnecessary” and “excessive” costs of the relief efforts by the British government, leading to a change in the British Indian administration’s attitude to famine relief. As a direct result, very little resources were put towards famine relief during the Great Famine of 1876-78 and 8-10 million people died of starvation. Additionally, thousands were shipped off in indentured servitude to continue to replace slave labour in British colonies in the Caribbean after the abolition of slavery. The British consider Churchill to be one of their greatest heroes, as the man who defeated Hitler and successfully led them through the horrors of World War 2, but for many Indians of the time there was little difference between the Nazi leader and him. In the Bengal Famine of 1943-44, he repeatedly refused relief requests made by Secretary of State for India, Leo Amery, ordered the destruction of private grain reserves and boats in a “scorched earth” anticipation of a Japanese invasion (thereby severely limiting not only the ability of people to feed themselves but also their ability to travel elsewhere to obtain food), redirected grain supplies to Afghanistan from India, and refused the local administrators to permission to import food. Amery noted in his diary at the time that when Churchill was informed that Indians were refusing to support Britain’s war effort as a result of the policies, he expressed his hatred of Indians (they are “a beastly people with a beastly religion… [famine is] is their own fault for breeding like rabbits”). Churchill and his war cabinet also repeatedly refused offers of aid from other countries. Suffering through starvation already, 1944 saw huge numbers of malaria, cholera and dysentery, with minimal interventions by the British and further drove the death toll up. British records show that supplies of Quinine and the anti-malarial drug mepacrine were distributed solely to the British military and a small number of upper class Indians in their network. All this to say that the British government, the Crown, and even British society had and continue to have much criticism for the East India Company’s actions, but to me, as an Indian, it rings hollow in the absence of reflection, acknowledgement and reparations with regards to the brutalities of their actions.
Thank You for this expose upon The East India Company. My ancestors for hundreds of years (though no more) were part of the British Noble House of Hong Kong (Jardines). The story you have portrayed this day pretty much vindicates the beautiful people of the Far East and the East (as would have been described by my past family members.) Government does no longer work; Nor does any of the “isms’.” Monopoly or Duopolies neither. What a debate could be had upon what is the new way forward. Utopia will be no where near us for thousands of years whilst we thrive upon the dystopian ways of our past/current. Bravo/Brava/Bravi, Mr. Brady!
What amazed me the most when i first visited india in 1990 is how welcoming generous & kind indians were to me a brit, some of the older ones even said they wish the british still ran india as there was less corruption then....! I wish I had stayed there, they are far more tolerant & a lot less racist than the uk now.....
churchill was no better than hitler but he was glorified becuase he won a war and hitler is hitler because he lost the war. significant of the history is very baised and glorifies the victors and so war is not a crime but losing a war is, sad but true .
There's no way to know but quite possibly. The British introduced some useful forms of government but India already had a different but sophisticated system & it would have evolved further.
