Quotes About British Raj

Are Indians cowards? No, but they are bad starters and occasionally jib. Fear is everywhere; the British Raj rests on it.

Villagers still worship at shrines dedicated to gods and goddesses with roots in the Stone Age.12 Compared to this unequaled staying power, the British Raj seemed very transitory—like every other ruler or conqueror in Indian history. Gandhi made his own view plain in 1909, in his Hind Swaraj. "History is really a record of every interruption of the even working of love or of the soul," he wrote, "a record of the interruption of the course of nature.

I first read the 'Raj Quartet' in the early 1970s, when Paul Scott's decision to set his novels in the dying days of the British Raj in India seemed an eccentric choice, almost as though he did not want readers. The British were tired of their imperial past.

I was more interested in the older generation as they seemed to be the last remaining remnants of the British Raj - people who remembered the railway cantonments, the Marilyn Monroe look-a-like contest, the Central Provinces,' and so on, a world long gone.

There's much about the British Raj which I think is disreputable. It was rapacious; it was a sort of kleptocracy, and it was also racist. Indians were not treated as equals.

'Viceroy' is the first British film about the Raj and the transfer of power from Britain to India made by a British Indian director. It is a British film made from an Indian perspective.

Pakistanis must figure out why India, which inherited similar institutions from the British Raj, maintained democracy consistently after Independence while Pakistan could not. They should also examine how Bangladesh has been able to expand its economy while reducing its population after breaking off from Pakistan.

The military is Pakistan's only institution inherited from the British Raj that has proved resilient and effective. 'As the history of law, democracy, administration and education in Pakistan demonstrates, other British institutions in what is now Pakistan (and to a lesser extent India as well) failed to take root, failed to work, or have been transformed in ways that their authors would scarcely have recognized.

My main aim in 'Gandhi' was to project him as the vanguard of non-violence. Nowhere in the world has a movement of non-cooperation sans violence received so much support from masses as Gandhi's movement in India did. He was, to a great extent, responsible for freeing his nation from the British Raj.