The white man's burden

As an adult, I was always at a loss understanding how people born in India could not be angry.  Did they not care that the Bastard Empire ruined everything?  Even the loss of a historical continuity, and the very fact that here I am thinking and blogging in English?  Why such a worship of the barbarians who decimated life all around the world?  (Not that the rest of the world, including the old country, was a paradise otherwise.)

Over the years, I have blogged in plenty ranting about the Bastard Empire, and even celebrating the mess when the Conservatives tumble.  I am mighty glad that it has once again become a small island that is irrelevant to the rest of the world, as it was for most of human history.

One bastard, however, successfully managed to paint himself as the savior of western democracies.  Yep, this post is about the cigar chomping racist bastard.  It is beyond time to rewrite his history, like how Priya Satia writes in this essay.

(You may also want to read this book-review essay in the NYRB on the imperial delusions of the bastards; one of the books reviewed there is Priya Satia's Time's Monster.)

Satia, who is an endowed chair professor at Stanford, writes that Churchill had a godawful "sense of historical birthright, of masculine, upper-class entitlement to make history without accountability for human costs."

In every time, including ours, multiple value systems are in contest. Churchill’s decisions were guided less by intellectual consistency than an unapologetic sense of entitlement to make decisions (often opportunistically) based on his romantic intuitions.

I thought I had by now known enough about the bastard; yet, this was a shocker to me:

He praised Mussolini through the 1930s and continued to flatter him during the war itself. He sided with the fascists in the Spanish Civil War and admired Hitler, who also garnered a chapter in “Great Contemporaries.” He didn’t object to fascism but to the threatening continental expansionism that it inspired in Germany. 

I am reminded of George Carlin's punchline that the Allies were upset with Hitler because he cut in on their action.  It was not Hitler's Aryan supremacy and hitlerism that bothered the likes of Churchill, but that the fact that he went on an expansionist rampage into their own territories!

As we move forward in time, even those like Churchill who tried to engineer their stories will be defeated by the unfolding of history.  That is the fate that also awaits the contemporary GOP and the Republican "leaders" who, too, view "dominance as a birthright."

As a historian I assure you that what the @GOP and @LeaderMcConnell did today is completely in keeping with disenfranchisement after Reconstruction and the Jim Crow South. And history will judge them accordingly. They belong in the dustbin of history and will live in infamy.

— Manisha Sinha (@ProfMSinha) June 22, 2021

To "Sir" with crap!

When I was a rebellious teenager, which did not always outwardly manifest itself because I was a quiet fellow, there were many aspects of life that I routinely criticized.  One of those was about those who served with distinction in the Bastard Empire.  I could not understand how eminently qualified people could have licked the bastards' boots and claimed that  the act was something superior.

Thus, when people in the extended family boasted about "he was an ICS," I snickered within.  Had I known the phrase that I later came to know, I would have yelled--only within me, of course--a huge "fuck you." ;)

I couldn't care about the Indian government's honors as well.  The "Padma" awards.  Who cares!

Even funnier and incongruous is the UK continuing to hand out its various titles that refer to the British Empire.  Talk about people in denial, who can't even accept that the sun set on the empire a long time ago!

Anyway, back to the Bastard Empire.  The rulers figured out that it might to be their advantage to bestow honors on some of the colonized as well.

The British Crown used honours in the empire as a way of ranking and appealing to the local elites. The Crown particularly bestowed them in South Asia to the puppet rulers of the Indian princely states. The expansion of honours began to include more members of middle-class elites from the mid-19th century.

And, hence, people like "Sir" Rabindranath Tagore.

Of course, as the independence movement gained strength, the browns started tossing back the honors.  Including Tagore.  But, the bastards refused to recognize this.

Tagore paired ‘badges of honour’ with shame, and elevated humility above special distinction. British-Indian honours and titles, Tagore implied, were worse than worthless because they highlighted the shame of India by patronising and coopting individual heroes. The fact that he remained ‘Sir Rabindranath’ in the eyes of the imperial state was an embarrassment. Indian nationalists later used the knighthood against Tagore, for they too agreed that British honour could not be separated from Indian shame.

MK Gandhi, who perfected the non-cooperation movement as a powerful political weapon, launched his own battle against these fake honors.

Gandhi was one of the 20th-century’s great masters of political symbolism. He understood that the dismantling of the British system of social distinction amounted to a step toward disengagement with imperial rule. The symbolism of British imperial honours mattered. It reinforced a deferential, hierarchical relationship that bought consent from Indians to the ‘will’ of the empire with a shallow currency that lacked true value.

Shallow currency, indeed!

The practice of handing out shallow currency continues in the old country.  The government bestowed the highest civilian honor of "Bharat Ratna" (Jewel of India) on unqualified people like MGR and Rajiv Gandhi!

I continue to snicker.  But no longer within--I blog about it ;)

Shitholes aren't natural. They were created

During my meeting with the dean, who too has personal connections to the old country, she remarked about how unknown the partition of India is to almost all the students on any American campus.  I wanted to add that the partition is unknown to most Americans of all ages--not only the students.

It is not a historical factoid that is at stake.  Nope. When they don't know about that important part of history, chances are overwhelming that they have no idea that three hundred years ago the Subcontinent was one of the richest places on the planet.  And, therefore, when the President refers to the shitholes of the world, there is a good chance that there is no understanding among most on how these shitholes came to be created by white supremacists.

Of course, there are plenty of modern day defenders of the old fashioned colonialism.  These apologists argue that the colonized browns "lacked the social and intellectual resources to transform themselves":

But the reality, at least in some of its colonies, was the opposite. Consider India. At the beginning of eighteenth century, India’s share of the world economy was 23 percent, as large as all of Europe put together. By the time Britain left India, it had dropped to less than 4 percent. “The reason was simple,” argues Shashi Tharoor in his book Inglorious Empire. “India was governed for the benefit of Britain. Britain’s rise for two hundred years was financed by its depredations in India.” Britain, Tharoor argues, deliberately deindustrialized India, both through the physical destruction of workshops and machinery and the use of tariffs to promote British manufacture and strangle Indian industries.

And that is how shitholes were created by white supremacists!

It was not just India from which resources flowed back to Britain, though in different countries it happened in different ways. Britain’s West Indian colonies were at the heart of the “triangular trade” by which goods from Britain were used to purchase slaves from West Africa who were taken to the Caribbean, and from whose labor great riches flowed back to British merchants in Bristol, Liverpool, and London.

So, when the white supremacists walk around with condescension towards the browns in the shitholes, well, ...

Without the slave plantations, it is unlikely that Britain would have been able to industrialize, or to forge an empire, as it did.

Slaves and almost-slaves created the wealthy European countries and the US.

In 1807, Britain passed a law banning the slave trade. But for three centuries, that trade had been dominated by Britain; three centuries of savage enslavement, pitiless brutality, and casual mass murder. Twelve million Africans are thought to have been transported to the Americas, half of them in the peak years of the Atlantic slave trade between 1690 and 1807. In those peak years, about half of these slaves were taken on British ships. Historians estimate that at least one in ten, and possibly one in five slaves, died on the Middle Passage, the journey from Africa to the New World. This suggests that half a million Africans may have lost their lives while being transported on British ships.

How horrible!  Just horrible!!!

Supporters of the British Empire argue that its rule was far more benign than the terror of the Belgian Congo. That is not to place the moral bar very high.

Indeed.  Whenever the apologists defend those bastards, I quickly refer them to the Bengal famine, which is one of the most well-documented mass atrocities that the white supremacists committed in the old country towards the end of their colonizing years.

I don't expect white supremacists to disappear anytime soon, given how much they have become emboldened in the US, and across Europe.  Which is all the more the reason why we cannot forget the past and let the white supremacists, including the one in the Oval Office, rewrite history.

This wasted land, Kashmir

For a while now, I have not blogged anything that is focused on India.  Of course, I refer to my experiences in the old country because of the autoethnographic approach in my way of understanding the world.  But, it has been a long, long, while since I commented on anything that is going on in India.

All because--and this will not agree well with Indians, and with Ramesh in particular--I have given up on India :(

Like how a family simply gives up after years of riding the roller coaster of emotions as the relative continues to go down a destructive path, I decided a few months ago that for my own sanity I needed to disengage from the internal happenings in the old country that is so dear to me.

But then, it is not as if we can completely shut ourselves off.  We might get updates about the relative through the grapevine.  An occasional sighting somewhere.  Or the news of something that happened.  It is an unfortunate development that compels me to blog about the old country.  The news reports from Kashmir.

One image, among many, brought me to tears.  Literally. I paused to clear my eyes before I continued to read on.  It was this photograph:

Source

That is an x-ray of a boy who was one of the many Kashmiris who were pummeled by India's military with pellet guns.  The sparkling rhinestones in the x-ray are the tiny iron balls, the ball bearings, that got lodged in him.  Count them! 

The tiny iron balls have also blinded--yes, blinded--so many that eye surgeons have been rushed to Kashmir to treat them, most of whom will not get their eyesight back. (The number of reports of people--including kids pelleted--is why I am convinced that the x-ray image is real.)  Those with the tiny iron balls in their eyes include this Kashmiri:

Source

When a democratic government uses such cruel violence against its own people, pacifists like me lose all hope.

I found it particularly awful to look at the following photograph of India's military shooting at Kashmiris, after aiming at the target--humans:

Source

It reminded me of a notably violent incident from the decades of the white supremacists' political control of the Subcontinent: The afternoon at Jallianwalla Bagh a hundred years ago, when civilians who had gathered at the park for a political rally were mercilessly gunned down, was one of the darkest of the darkest of the many dark moments of the British Raj, 

The Indian government behaves as if it is a nineteenth century European colonizer, controlling the natives.  The Indian government in New Delhi has merely replaced the Queen's Viceroy!  If the natives rebel, they shall be put down with brute force.

If only a referendum had been held decades ago, soon after the departure of the white supremacists.  Instead, we have witnessed India's occupation of Kashmir and the wars with Pakistan, we bear witness to the violence that continues on, and Kashmir is the most militarized region in the world.

The government violence in Kashmir, and the lone-wolf violence in Nice have crushed me inside.   I will return to blogging after a couple of days.

"What's in a name?" Try Denali and Aurangazeb!

"What's in a name?" wrote the Bard.  If he were around now, perhaps he will sue me for abusing it in this post about controversies over names--one in the old country and another here at home.

As always, the Indian story is complex.  Is anything ever simple back there? ;)  Therefore, the local story first:

President Obama will announce Monday that his administration is officially redesignating Alaska's Mt. McKinley as Denali, the original name for the 20,237-foot-high mountain given by the area's Alaskan native population.

As always, the feds are the last one to the party though.

The state of Alaska changed the mountain’s name to Denali, the native Koyukon Athabascan word for “The Great One” or “The High One,” in 1975. But the federal government retained McKinley’s moniker.

The mountain is in Alaska, and Alaskans had changed the name to Denali forty years ago.  So, did the word get to DC by Pony Express only yesterday?

Ohio's congressional delegation, among others, has opposed removing the name of McKinley, who had been an Ohio governor.

Excuse me, oh master storyteller, you ready to change your "what's in a name?" line? ;)

Giving a name for geographic feature, or renaming it, is always a political act.  Remember the controversy about the Persian Gulf/Arabian Gulf?  In this case, McKinley was the President from Ohio, which is why Ohioans protest the change:

Ohio Rep. Bob Gibbs, a fellow Republican who has introduced a House bill aimed at retaining McKinley’s name on the peak, could not immediately be reached for comment Sunday.
Gibbs’ measure would prevent the U.S. Board on Geographic Names from considering Alaska's attempts to change the mountain's name under a policy that says no landmark titles can be considered if related legislation is pending before Congress.
Ohio representatives file such a bill every two years to essentially stymie Alaska's efforts.

That is a simple story, compared to the one from India, where Aurangazeb Road in Delhi has been renamed after a former president, Abdul Kalam.

Source

That is one heck of a political complication.  Why?  Was Aurangazeb any beloved guy?

Aurangzeb was a despot.

Can we have some examples, please?

He not only imprisoned his ailing father, the Fifth Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan, but had all three of his brothers—the heir-apparent Dara Shukoh, Shah Shuja and Murad, murdered. ‘Murdered’ is to put it mildly.
Both confident and insecure, Aurangzeb then went on to ensure his hegemony as the Sixth Emperor by having Dara’s son Sulaiman, imprisoned and poisoned in a slow and tortuous procedure that made the future Crown Prince mad before death claimed him.
He also set an example to all dissenters by having the free-thinking mystic Sarmad beheaded at the Jama Masjid, Delhi, for blasphemy, the Sikh Guru Teg Bahadur executed for objecting to conversions and the leader of the Maratha Confederacy, Sambhaji, caught and killed for just being what he was.

By now, I have perhaps lost the couple of American readers who were struggling through the names! ;)

So, if he was a despot, then changing the road name to that of the beloved former president is a good thing, right?

Re-naming roads is about the most immature and least convincing sign of authority. It is invariably the accoutrement of new power.

Denali was the original name that is now being restored. Was Aurangazeb Road, similarly, the original name?  Of course not; it was from the time when the British Raj opted for Delhi as its capital and designed buildings and roads that would be imperial enough.  Does it mean that the political act is to erase that British Raj's evil designs?  Nope. It is a political act by the ever scheming Hindu nationalist party that figured out a way to delete Aurangazeb, put Muslims in a corner by naming it after the popular former president, and make the Hindu fanatics happy.  A political trifecta:

The Muslims cannot object. How can they ? If they do they would be both un-faithful and un-patriotic. The Hindus will never object. And after a while all will be using A P J Abdul Kalam Marg as if the road has always been named after that honest son of Rameshwaram. How utterly clever!

One final question: what is the urgency to delete Aurangazeb anyway?  It goes back to the populist one-thousand-year slavery rhetoric that Modi and his Hindu nationalist party spew.  Perhaps you are shocked about 1,000 years as a slave nation, right?

The conventional view is that it lasted 200 years—those of British raj. So where did the remaining 1,000 years come from? Clearly, Modi was propounding what Mridula Mukherjee, former professor of modern Indian history at JNU, described as the “standard Hindu communal view of history”, which regards the period of Muslim rule also as a period of slavery.

 So, we will kick the ball back to Shakespeare.  "What's in a name?"  ;)

Aurangazeb's tomb
I was there more than three years ago

Pecunia non olet? Not if it is from Yale. From Chennai?

The title of this post should not, by any means, mislead a reader into thinking that I am now a Latin student at Yale.  Far from that; they would not allow the likes of me at those Ivies!

A few years ago, when I was in Boston for a conference, I went to Harvard, and walked about.  When I was in the law school buildings I decided to use the restroom instead of hunting for one later on.  As I like to joke about it, I have contributed a lot to Harvard!

Boston's Charles River, 2008

While those kind of contributions stink, we stink, therefore we are human ;)  Money, however, apparently has no smell.  Remember that earlier post on Pecunia non olet?

It is most appropriate that I continue with that smelly topic from here in Chennai.  Not because of the stink in Chennai, about which one could write doorstoppers.  But because of Chennai's connection with Yale.  With the university's namesake, that is.

Elihu Yale was more a product of the East India Co. than of any place or political jurisdiction. Descended from a Welsh family, he was born in 1649 in Boston but spent most of his childhood in London, where his father, David, sought freedom from the puritanical strictures of New England and a friendly environment for trade. Young Yale enjoyed an education from William Dugard, headmaster of the storied Merchant Taylors' School, before obtaining a job with the East India Co. in 1670. He soon shipped out to Fort St. George, the company's lucrative outpost in southern India, around which had grown the town of Madras, now Chennai, India's sixth largest city. There he remained for the next quarter-century, eventually becoming governor of the settlement. In between, he and his wife, Catherine, would become the first couple married at St. Mary's Church—India's oldest Anglican church—and Elihu would amass a fortune dealing in textiles and precious stones on his own account. After retiring to a grand estate in London, he arranged for a burial at his ancestral home in Wrexham, Wales, beneath a tomb paying homage to his peripatetic life: "Born in America, in Europe bred / In Afric travell'd and in Asia wed / Where long he liv'd and thriv'd; at London dead."

From a common puritan to a governor.

Yale had come to India with the entry-level title of a company "writer" and an annual salary of £10—about half a shilling a day at a time when an English cloth suit cost around 15 shillings. Having demonstrated a knack for negotiations with local trade partners, by 1687 he had been named governor.

Sounds like there is no reason why his money should smell, right?

His position was precarious: Opportunities for graft were extraordinary, and governors were vulnerable to accusations of improprieties. It didn't help that Yale was widely regarded as a brusque and divisive manager. After the company replaced Yale in 1692, a wide array of allegations regarding his tenure as governor emerged, keeping him on the legal defensive in Madras. But he used the time off the company's payroll in India to focus on growing his vast estate. The precise size of his fortune by the time he left India is unclear, but his assets were numerous enough that their disposal at his death required seven separate auctions.

I suppose the formula is simple.
First, you plunder.
Then create universities or hospitals or scholarships and launder that money clean.
And get recorded in history as one of the greats.

Yale had ensured that his name would emerge in the centuries to come as a byword for learned privilege. Always a a shrewd trader, Yale found in his gift to the fledgling New Haven school the best deal he ever made.

Oh well ... I have other smelly problems to deal with rather urgently--like how no amount of deodorants can help me in Yale's old robbing grounds ;)

The British Raj and I: a love-hate relationship, part II

The duties of the rulers of the land are simpler and less arduous.  These duties are to protect the forests which regulate the supply, to keep the ancient irrigation works in thorough repair, and to utilize the surplus water escaping to the sea, by constructing supplementary works.  All these measures have been, or are being taken; and Tinnevelli, with its busy port of Tuticorin, is among the most flourishing districts of British India.

That is from an article, "Irrigation in Southern India," which is on the Tamraparani (Tamrabarani) river system.  It was published in The Geographical Magazine--December 1, 1874.

Yes, 1874!

First, a back-story on what led me to reading this old piece from a time long, long ago.  In a recent telephone chat, my father said he was writing a few things down about the village--Pattamadai--and some of the neighboring villages and towns.  To keep himself busy, while, perhaps, passing along something useful to later generations.

This village is hot and dry, thanks to its location on the leeward side of the mountain ranges.  Thus, the river, Tamrabarani, and an irrigation channel--the Kannadian Channel--play important roles.  Sociocultural stories are tightly interwoven with the river and the channel.

A couple of years ago, I had shared with my father a newspaper article that I had read about these water bodies.  He wanted me to send that to him.

But, now, I was no longer keen on that news item.  The curious guy that I am, well, I wanted to know more than a simple news item. 

Which is how I ended up reading that 1874 article on the Tamrabarani river system.

As I noted in this post on the anicut at Srivaikuntam, there is quite a bit of constructive British activities that I have to grudgingly acknowledge.  That anicut is also to help irrigate the farmlands with waters from the Tamrabarani.  Those foreign rulers did get a few things right.

Free India, on the other hand, seems to have squandered the opportunity to build on what the British left behind.

Independent India and the democratically elected governments at the federal and state levels did not carry out the closing remarks of the 1874 article.  Contrary to its call "to protect the forests which regulate the supply, to keep the ancient irrigation works in thorough repair, and to utilize the surplus water escaping to the sea, by constructing supplementary works" the post-1947 governments did nothing to augment the water systems and have practically done everything possible not to protects the forests.

As the article noted, "there can be no more short-sighted policy than to allow the villagers to waste and destroy forests on the preservation of which not only the prosperity but the very existence of the population of a whole district may be involved."

Alas, wasted and destroyed they have been.

The result: the dry and hot geography has become drier and hotter.  Last January, when I was there, it was insanely hot.  It was January, with the hottest periods a couple of months into the future!

I understand from my father that the Kannadian Channel is now nearly dry, when it ought to be full and plenty, and that a farm labor migration to nearby towns is well underway.

Stories like this make me wonder, sometimes, whether the dysfunctional democracy that "rules" India now was worth the struggle for independence.  Would the British have taken better care of the anicuts and forests and, thereby, the peoples?

The British Raj and I: a love-hate relationship, even at Srivaikuntam

Despite all the traveling I have done over the years, I have never been to the UK.  Not even a stopover at London.  The logistics of transport is one important reason, of course.  A major reason that was.

A minor reason is that I am yet to develop any passion to visit the UK. 

This level of neutrality is a long way from my teenage anger at the imperial masters who sucked India dry.  Those were the young and rebellious years, as opposed to the contemporary old and rebellious years:) 

In this middle-age of mine, I suppose if I had money to spare, I would not be opposed to the idea of visiting London and the UK for a few days.

Traveling around in India always reminds me of my old hate-relationship that has metamorphosed into "meh" feeling about the UK.  The railways, old university and administrative buildings, road names, ... the reminders are everywhere I look.

The strangest reminder was at Srivaikuntam.  Yes, at this sleepy small town way deep down, near the peninsular tip of India. 

A narrow bridge over the Tamrabarani River links to the town to the other side of the riverbank.  One evening, well before the sun set, I walked the mile from my aunt's home to the bridge.  A plaque at the end caught my attention. 

A remnant of the British Raj!

The anicut (river flow regulator) was designed way back in 1853, by a Royal Engineer.  And then a few years to implement the design and construct the anicut, which was completed in 1873.  Back in 1873!

This will yet another example for me to add to the list that I usually provide in classes when I remark that I am thankful it was the British who colonized India, and not the Dutch or the Germans or the French.  If one's fate was to be ruled by a colonial overlord, well, it was better to be under the British because they at least established universities, built anicuts, bridges, and the railways, ...

This anicut/bridge from 1873 serves as a reminder for yet another reason: how much an independent India has failed to build up the infrastructure. 

This narrow bridge has handled people, carts, motorized transport all these years.  As the transport volume grew, there was nothing done to support the much higher traffic. 

Finally, 65 years after independence, a second bridge has been constructed--well, it is nearly complete, and nobody has any idea on when it will be "fully complete" enough for buses and cars to be diverted there.

Perhaps all the more the reason why the hateful attitude towards the British Raj has vaporized over the years, and I am now far more critical of India's government and politics.

If I live long enough to settle into retirement, perhaps then I will even begin to love the UK, eh!

Empires strike back. Solution: stop empire-building!

The “Arab Spring” is the final unraveling of the Ottoman Empire.

It is now almost a year since the self-immolation of a Tunisian street merchant—a horrific act that captured the imaginations of millions and launched the widespread movement in the Middle East to remove authoritarian governments in favor of democracy.

Almost all the countries included in the ongoing Arab Spring were once part of the powerful and expansive Ottoman Empire, whose prominence was marked by the conquest of Constantinople in 1453.  The victorious Mehmed renamed the city Istanbul and made it the empire’s capital too and, thereby, made clear the intention to expand into Europe.  It was no surprise, therefore, that soon Suleiman and his forces were knocking on Vienna’s doors. 

As empires always do, the Ottoman Empire, also, started its decline after a successful run, and the descent accelerated in the 19^th century.  Again, as it happens with empires, the decline was marked by its territories being taken over by other powers.  Tunisia was one of those, as were the other Arab Spring countries of Algeria, Libya, Egypt, Syria, Morocco, and Yemen.  The Pasha was replaced by European colonial powers.  The First World War, whose conclusion we mark with Armistice Day and Veterans Day, had an additional effect of removing the remnants of the Ottoman Empire. 

But, the real and final untangling from the Ottoman ties began with the breakup of Yugoslavia in 1991.  The Balkans, too, were once a part of the Ottoman Empire, and Yugoslavia was held together by authoritarian governments, until the death of President Tito and, later, the collapse of the Soviet Bloc.  When the authoritarian structures were gone, for the first time people in Yugoslavia had an opportunity to establish their own political identities.  Unfortunately, it turned out to be violent and bloody and triggered external intervention from the US and its NATO allies.

The collapse of the Soviet Union created new countries that were also former Ottoman territories—Armenia and Azerbaijan.  These had been swallowed by the Russian Czars and, after the Bolshevik Revolution, became a part of the USSR. 

When all that dust settled, more or less, the decade that followed began with the events of September 11, 2001.  One of the grand plans that preoccupied Osama bin Laden’s maniacal approach was the creation of an Islamic state that would continue where the Ottoman Empire had ended.  His logic was that the US was propping up the governments in Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Libya, to name a few, and that weakening the US would make possible the supra-Islamic state. 

In this decade, fortunately, the Arab Spring is the exact opposite of what bin Laden had envisioned.  The peoples of the former territories of the Ottoman Empire are protesting against their rulers not because they want to re-create an Islamic empire.  When the Tunisian street merchant set himself on fire, it was because he was fed up with having to deal with the corrupt rulers—all the way down to the local police.  Egyptians similarly were tired of Hosni Mubarak and his cronies looting away the wealth, while the youth were jobless with highly insecure futures. 

Dictators and authoritarian governments have been the norm since the end of the Ottoman Empire, and even after the people in the Arab Spring countries had witnessed the departure of the European colonizers.  Tunisia, for instance, was a French colony until 1956, but independence did not usher in freedom and democracy. 

The correlation between the Arab Spring and the Ottoman Empire is also reflected in the case of Saudi Arabia, which has not experienced mass protests—Saudi Arabia was not a part of the Ottoman Empire.

The Arab Spring is a reminder, in a way, that our contemporary lives are intricately connected with events from the past—something that historians often remind us about but is easily forgotten by most of the rest of us. 

The continued linkage with the past means that even as we keep one eye on the Arab Spring, the other remains fixed on at least one byproduct of the end of the British Empire that the world worries about--Pakistan.  Empires strike back, even from their graves!

How Winston Churchill starved India. Literally :(

Soutik Biswas writes in reviewing Madhusree Mukherjee's Churchill's Secret War:

Some three million Indians died in the famine of 1943. The majority of the deaths were in Bengal. In a shocking new book, Churchill's Secret War, journalist Madhusree Mukherjee blames Mr Churchill's policies for being largely responsible for one of the worst famines in India's history.

Why is the war time prime minister, Churchill, to be blamed?  Well, the acute shortage of food

was caused by large-scale exports of food from India for use in the war theatres and consumption in Britain - India exported more than 70,000 tonnes of rice between January and July 1943, even as the famine set in. This would have kept nearly 400,000 people alive for a full year. Mr Churchill turned down fervent pleas to export food to India citing a shortage of ships - this when shiploads of Australian wheat, for example, would pass by India to be stored for future consumption in Europe. As imports dropped, prices shot up and hoarders made a killing. Mr Churchill also pushed a scorched earth policy - which went by the sinister name of Denial Policy - in coastal Bengal where the colonisers feared the Japanese would land. So authorities removed boats (the lifeline of the region) and the police destroyed and seized rice stocks.

And, what was Churchill's response when this was discussed at cabinet meetings?  The soon to be appointed Viceroy, Archibald Wavell, writes:

"Apparently it is more important to save the Greeks and liberated countries than the Indians and there is reluctance either to provide shipping or to reduce stocks in this country," writes Sir Wavell in his account of the meetings. Mr Amery is more direct. "Winston may be right in saying that the starvation of anyhow under-fed Bengalis is less serious than sturdy Greeks, but he makes no sufficient allowance for the sense of Empire responsibility in this country," he writes.

As Shakespeare wrote, "And Brutus is an honourable man" .... :(

On India's Commonwealth Games: the nasty sneers

I have blogged earlier about my opposition to the Games--the same reasons why I "boycotted" the Asian Games back when I had just about started my undergrad program; I don't recall watching even a single event on TV.  I did love the "swagatham" song of the games though.  And the reason is that such an expense ought to be a much lower priority than the more urgent ones. Like the hundreds of millions who are poor.  Or the reports of child labor in the construction activities.

But, it is a democratic government that is spending the money and will be punished or rewarded at the next elections. At the end of the day, these resource allocation decisions are India's internal matters.

It is strange that most of the governments and athletes from the richer and whiter countries did not worry about whether they ought to encourage India spending such large sums.  (though, investments like with the new airport or metro will payoff.)

They didn't worry either about the possible security issues that the event might trigger--for the athletes as well as for all in Delhi--Indians and otherwise.

They didn't even worry when reports were trickling in that the projects were well behind schedule.

But, now, they raise their voices about .... bathroom conditions?

Spiked says it much better than I can:

one does not need to be a supporter of the Indian government – and spiked is not – to see that the British critics want it all ways. They complain about the ‘obscenity’ of spending millions on shiny modern sports stadiums in the midst of the poverty of the city slums. Yet they scream like children with a spider in the bath when they discover that the facilities for ‘our’ athletes might not be up to luxury standards, ignoring the fact that the most ‘uninhabitable’ corner of the athletes’ village will have better facilities than the places that countless Indians inhabit every day.

I sympathize with my high school friend who has been pretty much on a "fuck you" mode in his Facebook postings in response to the hysterical yelling and screaming by the British and the Kiwis, and his fellow-Indians too ... I bet he will light up the cigarettes in the pack all at once if he reads what Spiked notes:

As Prince Philip famously remarked of a dodgy old fuse box during a visit to a factory in, er, Scotland: ‘It looks as if it was put in by an Indian!’

Ouch!  Does the Prince not know by now what is humor and what isn't?

The final words from Spiked:

Yet something else makes me want these games to be a success for India. There is a new orthodoxy abroad which preaches that staging major sporting events can benefit the peoples of developing nations and help to unite the world. This is pious nonsense, as the experience of the recent World Cup in South Africa has demonstrated once more. But the alternative sanctimonious prejudice of our age is, if anything, even worse. This one preaches that there is something ‘arrogant’ or ‘obscene’ about a developing nation such as India daring to attempt grand projects such as the Delhi games, rather than concentrating its efforts on the poorest. Thus the critics protest loudly about the ‘resettlement’ of thousands of shanty town-dwellers to make way for the stadium – the sort of slum clearance that always accompanies major urban redevelopment – and ignore the new airport, subway lines, roads and railway bridges that the bloated budget for the games has brought to the city. The message to India is: know your place. But the backlash in India against the international Delhi-bashing suggests there is as little chance of that happening as of Prince Charles winning a medal next week.

The Dalai Lama Dilemma

I can't figure out this Tibet stuff.

I mean, yes, the Chinese were awful and brutal in the 1950s that led to large-scale ethnic cleansing of sorts with the Dalai Lama and tens of thousands of his followers fleeing Lhasa and its vicinity.  And, yes, the suppression of a basic freedom to believe in whatever one wants to is a gross violation of human rights.  I written about these (like this one) and have blogged a lot as well.

But, on the other hand, I have always wondered whether we are idealizing Tibet, the Tibetan life, and overly glorifying the Dalai Lama.  After all, there is a long track record of Western countries celebrating the simple lifestyles of the poor, when many of that same poor would way prefer not to be poor and starving and ill and illiterate ....

The ever contrarian Spiked makes it all the more difficult to figure this out:

The first sounds that greet me as I arrive in Lhasa are the incandescent honking of horns as car-drivers and motorcyclists (some with three to a bike) negotiate the roads. My own Tibetan driver is wearing a Playboy jacket. Maybe he bought it in the Playboy shop that I later see in the centre of Lhasa. It’s near the Tibet Steak House (‘juicy meat for you!’) and the Lhasa casino, in which Tibetan men in leather jackets pile coins into slot machines. On the streets young men in Kappa and Nike sweatshirts (fakes, I’m guessing), with hair by Topman, flirt with casually dressed young women, one of whom is sporting hotpants that even Kylie would consider too risqué. How can they dress like this in the freezing kingdom of snow and Yetis, as made famous by Tintin in Tibet? Because that’s another myth of Tibet, at least in July, and at least here in Lhasa: I might be 3,650 metres above sea level, inside a mountain range and with the clouds so close by I almost feel I could touch them, but it’s so hot that I get sunburnt.

Of course, one could argue that the dreaded hotpants would not have been there, and the Shangri-La would have continued, had the Chinese government not interfered in Tibet the way it did and continues to do.  But, what if all that Shangri-La talk itself is a myth?

it is during that period of the self-serving Orientalism of British rule in Tibet that the popular modern image of Tibet as a mystical, cut-off entity takes shape - most notably in James Hilton’s Lost Horizon (1933), which invented the idea of ‘Shangri La’. As McKay points out, the writings of the British imperialists, and of their sympathisers, are still regularly cited in the propaganda produced by the Dalai Lama’s people, which is designed to prove that Tibet is a unique and special place that only they can and should govern. Some of those old Orientalist writings were available at that hippy-fest in Lambeth, too - British imperial paternalism recycled as anthropological New Age ‘at-oneness’. What connects the old imperialists with the new Tibetophiles is their desire to have Tibet as a ‘buffer state’ – only where the imperialists wanted to use Tibet to protect their material interests against China and Russia, the new lot want to use it to protect their emotional interests, to preserve an idea of innocent, childlike humanity so far uncorrupted by modernity.

Reminds me of that controversial book on Orientalism from my graduate school days.  Speaking of which, Rongsheng, who was a fellow graduate student, always argued that the Chinese government was trying to get rid of feudal traditions and ignorance in Tibet, and that the West was keen on maintaining those horrible systems that do not help the Tibetans themselves.

I suppose the only way I can figure this out for myself is to travel in and around Tibet.  Will you, the reader, please pay for this important educational trip? Please? :)

Meanwhile, the Economist dryly notes that:

China seems to calculate that the eventual death of the Dalai Lama, a charismatic and internationally popular figure, will make its job in Tibet easier. Each passing birthday brings that day closer. But it also offers supporters of the Dalai Lama and his cause a chance to sing his praises.

That is some realpolitik, eh.

The last emperor .... of India ...

From the BBC:

Madhu is the illiterate great-great-granddaughter of emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar and has been employed to run errands in Coal India's offices.

A letter of employment will be formally handed over to her by the coal minister at a function in Calcutta next month.

She and her mother currently run a tea stall in the slums of Calcutta.

Rehabilitation

"It will great to have Madhu working for us. Actually, it will be a great tribute to the last Mughal emperor who played a key role during the first war of independence in 1857," Coal India Chairman Partha Bhattacharyya said.