How the bastards, er, British looted India. And how that model to loot continues

Three mornings ago, I read William Dalrymple's essay and tweeted about it.  Thanks to the author re-tweeting it, my original note reached thousands more, as this screenshot of the analytics shows:

Dalrymple's essay has a catchy, wonderful beginning:

One of the very first Indian words to enter the English language was the Hindustani slang for plunder: “loot”. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, this word was rarely heard outside the plains of north India until the late 18th century, when it suddenly became a common term across Britain. 

Who can resist reading the essay after such a sampler, right?  Plus, of course, to somebody like me who continues to hold a huge grudge against the colonizers, especially those who resisted granting freedom even to the point of killing millions, Dalrymple's essay was awesome.

Dalrymple makes an important point:

We still talk about the British conquering India, but that phrase disguises a more sinister reality. It was not the British government that seized India at the end of the 18th century, but a dangerously unregulated private company headquartered in one small office, five windows wide, in London, and managed in India by an unstable sociopath – [Robert] Clive.

Unregulated private corporation + an unstable sociopath = utter destruction of a rich culture thousands of miles away!

Caption at the source:
The Mughal emperor Shah Alam hands a scroll to Robert Clive, the governor of Bengal,
which transferred tax collecting rights in Bengal, Bihar and Orissa to the East India Company

A powerful moment in history--until then, the route to plundering a country, killing people, was via any royal madness.  The king decided to wage wars and conquer lands.  With the East India Company, a corporation led the way!

Through the essay, Dalrymple not only provides rich details of how India was looted (not that this is news; graduate schooling was where I learnt a lot about this) and also reminds us why studying history is important:

In many ways the EIC [East India Company] was a model of corporate efficiency: 100 years into its history, it had only 35 permanent employees in its head office. Nevertheless, that skeleton staff executed a corporate coup unparalleled in history: the military conquest, subjugation and plunder of vast tracts of southern Asia. It almost certainly remains the supreme act of corporate violence in world history. For all the power wielded today by the world’s largest corporations – whether ExxonMobil, Walmart or Google – they are tame beasts compared with the ravaging territorial appetites of the militarised East India Company. Yet if history shows anything, it is that in the intimate dance between the power of the state and that of the corporation, while the latter can be regulated, it will use all the resources in its power to resist.

My only problem with that formulation: notice that he, too, lists Walmart, the oil corporations, and the "usual suspects," but not Apple.  Why does everybody give Apple a free pass?  Am I the one who is messed up then?

Bengal’s wealth rapidly drained into Britain, while its prosperous weavers and artisans were coerced “like so many slaves” by their new masters, and its markets flooded with British products. A proportion of the loot of Bengal went directly into Clive’s pocket. He returned to Britain with a personal fortune – then valued at £234,000 – that made him the richest self-made man in Europe.

History is full of assholes like Robert Clive.  BTW, until I read this essay, I had no idea about how Clive's life ended, which Dalrymple writes about:

Clive, hounded by envious parliamentary colleagues and widely reviled for corruption, committed suicide in 1774 by slitting his own throat with a paperknife some months before the canvas was completed. He was buried in secret, on a frosty November night, in an unmarked vault in the Shropshire village of Morton Say. Many years ago, workmen digging up the parquet floor came across Clive’s bones, and after some discussion it was decided to quietly put them to rest again where they lay. Here they remain, marked today by a small, discreet wall plaque inscribed: “PRIMUS IN INDIS.”

A fitting end, indeed!

Dalrymple reminds us about the shady and atrocious relationship between this first multinational corporation and the state:

It seemed impossible that a single London corporation, however ruthless and aggressive, could have conquered an empire that was so magnificently strong, so confident in its own strength and brilliance and effortless sense of beauty.
Historians propose many reasons: the fracturing of Mughal India into tiny, competing states; the military edge that the industrial revolution had given the European powers. But perhaps most crucial was the support that the East India Company enjoyed from the British parliament. The relationship between them grew steadily more symbiotic throughout the 18th century. Returned nabobs like Clive used their wealth to buy both MPs and parliamentary seats – the famous Rotten Boroughs. In turn, parliament backed the company with state power: the ships and soldiers that were needed when the French and British East India Companies trained their guns on each other.

If you thought those days, years, have ended, well, think again:

In September, the governor of India’s central bank, Raghuram Rajan, made a speech in Mumbai expressing his anxieties about corporate money eroding the integrity of parliament: “Even as our democracy and our economy have become more vibrant,” he said, “an important issue in the recent election was whether we had substituted the crony socialism of the past with crony capitalism, where the rich and the influential are alleged to have received land, natural resources and spectrum in return for payoffs to venal politicians. By killing transparency and competition, crony capitalism is harmful to free enterprise, and economic growth. And by substituting special interests for the public interest, it is harmful to democratic expression.”

So, the closing lines, Dalrymple?

[The] East India Company – the first great multinational corporation, and the first to run amok – was the ultimate model for many of today’s joint-stock corporations. The most powerful among them do not need their own armies: they can rely on governments to protect their interests and bail them out. The East India Company remains history’s most terrifying warning about the potential for the abuse of corporate power – and the insidious means by which the interests of shareholders become those of the state. Three hundred and fifteen years after its founding, its story has never been more current.

Screwed we are! :(

The lotus and the downward dog

A few years ago, when the luxury of a dual-income household afforded me a gym membership, which I rarely used anyway, I went to one of the yoga classes there. It felt strange that I had never cared for yoga back when I was growing up in the very country that was the homeland for yoga, but I was at a yoga class in a land halfway around the world that was now home to me.

The teacher was a white woman. Of course. And before the class began, she had us do some breathing exercises with the sound of "om" in the background. And ended the class with a "namaste." I could not understand why she could not conduct a yoga class that was focused on the exercises without all the om and the namaste.  I never went back!

Yoga is big business here in the US, despite all the om and namaste:

Across America, students, stressed-out young professionals, CEOs and retirees are among those who have embraced yoga, fueling a $27 billion industry with more than 20 million practitioners -- 83 percent of them women.

As Ramesh humorously noted a few months ago, the industry is not merely about the teachers and asanas, but also about the yoga gear:

What foxes me is this. Who on earth wants to pay $ 92 for a "Om pant".  Do yoga by all means, but concentrate on , well, the yoga. Does it matter an iota whether your pant is "om" or "not om" ?? 

So, how did this yoga craze begin?  In a review essay, William Dalrymple writes about a whole bunch of stuff that is simply way above my head--damn these smart people!  He notes there:

The Sanskrit word yoga means “union” and is etymologically linked to the English word “yoke.” Its earliest occurrence in the Rig Veda, which dates from the second millennium BCE when both the Pyramids and Stonehenge were still in use, links the word to the rig with which war chariots were yoked to horses; by the early centuries AD the same word is being used to convey the idea of the body and the senses being yoked and reined in so as to move toward the Absolute.
It is possible that the oldest image in Indian art shows a yogi in meditation: one of the Indus Valley seals dug up at Mohenjo Daro by Sir John Marshall in 1931, dating from between 2600 and 1900 BC, shows a cross-legged figure that Marshall interpreted to be Shiva as Mahayogi and Lord of the Beasts. This interpretation has been questioned by some scholars, but the Vedas, which date from maybe five hundred years after the Indus Valley seal, already contain references to flying long-haired sages that indicate even then the presence of a mystical tradition related to the world of the yogis.

I had no idea that yoga and yoke would be examples of the Indo-Latin family tree for languages. Something new every single day!

there has always been a clear duality visible in the objectives of the yogis. Some were focused entirely on the interior: on breathing exercises and mastery of the body as a route to self-understanding and spiritual liberation. Others, however, were clearly searching for the magical tantric powers that they believed yoga could unleash. There are hints of this tension already in the Yoga Sutras where Patanjali outlines the route to union with the Absolute, while making it clear that an accomplished yogi can perform all sorts of useful tricks in this life: flying, transmigrating, reading other people’s minds, and even defying death itself.

One interpretation of the Buddha's life that I recall is that he went through years of living the life of a yogi from that physical, body route.  The extreme rigor he put the body through as the route to self-realization didn't work though.

Even now there are yogis in plenty in India who practice that extreme-yoga, which always makes me wonder if an atheist will willingly engage in twisting self into a pretzel and denying oneself of food and water for days.

I am far more comfortable with the wisdom from my favorite yogi of all, Yogi Berra, who said you can observe a lot by watching. I will watch those doing yoga, especially when 83 percent of the yoga students are women ;)