Quotes About India

Indeed there were outstanding examples of good governance in India at the time, notably the Travancore kingdom, which in 1819 became the first government in the world to decree universal, compulsory and free primary education for both boys and girls.)

The British in India were never more than 0.05 per cent of the population. The Empire, in Hobsbawm's evocative words, was 'so easily won, so narrowly based, so absurdly easily ruled thanks to the devotion of a few and the passivity of the many.

What the hell does this say about India? Appearances are more important than truths. Gossip is more potent than facts. Loyalty is all one way, from the woman to the man. And when society stacks up all the odds against a woman, she'd better not count on the man's support. She has no way out other than to end her own life. And I'm in love with an Indian. I must be crazy.

Europe's history of trading relations with India is borne out in the writings of the ancient historians Herodotus, Pliny, Petronius and Ptolemy, and

Discussion is an 'art form' in India, an egocentric ritual of simulated conviction or, at best, a second-hand expression of conscience. Its vitality is attenuated by its own irrelevance.

as of 1890, 6,000 British officials ruled 250 million Indians, with some 70,000 European soldiers and a larger number of Indians in uniform. In 1911, there were 164,000 Britons living in India (of whom 66,000 were in the army and police and just 4,000 in civil government). By 1931, this had gone up to just 168,000 (including 60,000 in the army and police and still only 4,000 in civil government) to run a country approaching 300 million people.

The India that the British East India Company conquered was no primitive or barren land, but the glittering jewel of the medieval world.

At the beginning of the century, Ruskin declared that 'every mutiny, every danger, every terror, and every crime, occurring under, or paralyzing, our Indian legislation, arises directly out of our national desire to live on the loot of India'.

Famine, forced migration and brutality: three examples of why British rule over India was despotic and anything but enlightened

India's share of the world economy was 23 per cent, as large as all of Europe put together. (It had been 27 per cent in 1700, when the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb's treasury raked in £100 million in tax revenues alone.) By the time the British departed India, it had dropped to just over 3 per cent. The reason was simple: India was governed for the benefit of Britain. Britain's rise for 200 years was financed by its depredations in India.

In August 1765, the young and weakened Mughal emperor, Shah Alam II, was browbeaten into issuing a diwani that replaced his own revenue officials in the provinces of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa with the Company's. An international corporation with its own private army and princes paying deference to it had now officially become a revenue-collecting enterprise. India would never be the same again.

Under the British, the universities remained largely examination-conducting bodies, while actual higher education was carried out in affiliated colleges, which offered a two-year BA course (following a year of intermediate studies after high school). The colleges, like the British schools in India, heavily emphasized rote learning, the regurgitation of which was what the examinations tested.

The British in India were never more than 0.05  per  cent of the population.

Kerala's Christians belong to the oldest Christian community in the world outside Palestine. And when St Thomas, one of Jesus's twelve apostles, brought Christianity to Kerala, it is said he was welcomed on shore by a flute-playing Jewish girl. St Thomas made converts among the high-born elite, the Namboodiri Brahmins, which meant there were Indians whose families had practised Christianity for far longer than the ancestors of any Briton could lay claim to.

He argued that it is an insult to preach religion to a man with an empty stomach, and for many in India, he said, God will only appear as a loaf of bread.

British under Clive defeat Nawab Siraj-ud-Daula to become rulers of Bengal, the richest province of India.

India, under Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb, accounts for 27 per cent of the world economy.

the British economic historian Angus Maddison has demonstrated, India's share of the world economy was 23 per cent, as large as all of Europe put together. (It had been 27 per cent in 1700, when the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb's treasury raked in £100 million in tax revenues alone.) By the time the British departed India, it had dropped to just over 3 per cent.

The extensive and detailed calculations of William Digby, the British writer, pointed to the diminishing prosperity of the Indian people and the systematic expropriation of India's wealth by Britain—including the telling fact that the salary of the Secretary of State for India in 1901, paid for by Indian taxes, was equivalent to the average annual income of 90,000 Indians.

If I look at the definition of Hinduism, the Supreme Court of India has given a beautiful definition; it says that Hinduism is not a religion, it is actually a way of life.

If any Englishman dedicated his life to securing the freedom of India, resisting tyranny and serving the land, I should welcome that Englishman as an Indian.

Unity among the different races and the different religions of India is indispensable to the birth of national life.

It's soul force that removed the English from India. It's soul force that brought down the Berlin Wall. It's soul force that gave life to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s struggle for civil rights.

as Lord Reading, a viceroy of India.