Quotes About India

India's transition to colonialism took place under a for-profit corporation, which existed entirely for the purpose of enriching its investors.

Ten years ago every second person at Delhi drinks parties seemed to be either an old schoolfriend of the Prime Minister or a member of his cabinet. Now, quite suddenly, no one in Delhi knows anyone in power. A major democratic revolution has taken place almost unnoticed, leaving the urban Anglicised élite on the margins of the Indian political landscape.

It is as if the Victorians succeeded in colonising not only India but also, more permanently, our imaginations, to the exclusion of all other images of the Indo – British encounter.

On his deathbed, Haidar had written to Tipu with advice to his son on the art of good government. He warned him that the Company would attempt to exploit any weakness in the succession: 'The greatest obstacle you have to conquer is the jealousy of the Europeans,' he wrote. 'The English are today all-powerful in India. It is necessary to weaken them by war.

Wealth is not the only, nor the most valuable commodity, which Britain might import from India.80

Whatever the accurate figures, the event generated howls of righteous indignation for several generations among the British in India and 150 years later was still being taught in British schools as demonstrative of the essential barbarity of Indians and illustrative of why British rule was supposedly both necessary and justified.

The barracks should of course have been torn down years ago, but the Fort's current proprietors, the Archaeological Survey of India, have lovingly continued the work of decay initiated by the British: white marble pavilions have been allowed to discolour; plasterwork has been left to collapse; the water channels have cracked and grassed over; the fountains are dry. Only the barracks look well maintained.

In many ways the East India Company was a model of commercial efficiency: one hundred years into its history, it had only thirty-five 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.

Lord Valentia famously observed that it was better that 'India be ruled from a palace than a counting house'; but it was this spendthrift use of Company funds that more than anything gradually eroded Wellesley's support among the Company Directors

Indian historian Romila Thapar has called the new 'syndicated Hinduism' of middle class urban India.

cartographical survey of India by James Rennell and built a series of public granaries, including the great Gola at Patna, to make sure the famine of 1770–71 was never repeated.

dominion in India shall long cease to exist, and when the sources which it once yielded of wealth and power are lost to remembrance … In truth I love India a little more than my own country.'87

India in the 1840s and 1850s was slowly filling with pious British Evangelicals who wanted not just to rule and administer India, but also to redeem and improve it.

the Afghans, were to a man executed on Durrani's orders. The Peshwa Ballaji Rao died broken-hearted soon after: 'his mind had become confused and he began to revile and curse his people'.95 But a decade later, Durrani was dead and the Marathas had begun to recover their strength. They were now back in control of much of central and western India, and ambitious to extend their influence from the Kaveri to the Indus.

Calcutta had quickly grown to become the jewel among the Company's overseas trading stations: it was by far the EIC's most important trading post in India and the major source of British textile imports. Indeed, 60 per cent of all EIC exports from Asia were now passing through Calcutta.23

Roe could on occasion be dismissively critical of Mughal rule – 'religions infinite, laws none' – but he was, despite himself, thoroughly dazzled. In a letter describing the Emperor's birthday celebrations in 1616, written from the beautiful, half-ruined hilltop fortress of Mandu in central India to the future King Charles I in Whitehall, Roe reported that he had entered a world of almost unimaginable splendour.

While it is true that Aurangzeb is a more complex and pragmatic figure than some of his critics allow, the religious wounds Aurangzeb opened in India have never entirely healed, and at the time they tore the country in two.

The three great armies of the Mughal world had come together to defeat the Company and expel it from India. When instead it was the Mughals that were defeated, the Company was left the dominant military force in north-east India. Buxar confirmed the Company's control of Bengal and the coast and opened the way for them to extend their influence far inland to the west.

Indeed, one of the principal fears of the American Patriots in the run-up to the war was that Parliament would unleash the East India Company in the Americas to loot there as it had done in India.

The Company's conquest of India 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.

Travels in the Mogul Empire and Manucci's Mogul India.

The same year that Ghalib died in Delhi, 1869, there was born in Porbandar in Gujarat a boy called Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. It would be with the political movements headed by Gandhi, rather than those represented by Zafar, or indeed by Lord Canning, that the future of India would lie.

A body of merchants had been transformed into the de facto sovereign rulers of much of northern India. As one contemporary observer put it: 'Through many unexpected contingencies, an incorporated society of private traders [has become] a cabinet of Asiatic princes.'65 The result was what Adam Smith would call 'a strange absurdity' – a Company State.66

Already, by the end of 1771, the mood was beginning to change in London. Word was spreading about the Company's inhumanity in Bengal: the number of dead and dying was simply too vast to hide. Horace Walpole's letters reflected a growing awareness that behind the EIC's vast profits there was something profoundly rotten at work in the Company's Indian operations. 'The groans of India have mounted to heaven