india notes

[keshavonline-deactivated2020101]

Varaha, reclaiming the earth from the ocean. Watercolour.

[indianskeptic]

India's Misfortune

India’s misfortune was to have brilliant economists: an affliction that the Far Eastern super-performers were spared.

Jagdish Bhagwati in India In Transition (1992)

[indianskeptic]

Nirad Chaudhuri on Santiniketan

“This place with its counterfeit cosmopolitanism became the center of all that was false, affected and weak in contemporary Bengali culture”

Nirad Chaudhuri on Tagore’s Santiniketan

[indianskeptic]

Mountbatten and Nehru

On learning that Mountbatten was to be the new Viceroy: ‘Ah, he will be a toy for Jawaharlalji to play with - while we arrange the revolution’.

Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel quoted in Patrick French’s book “Liberty or Death”

[indianskeptic]

Too Few Exploiters

The trouble with India is that there are too many exploited and too few exploiters.

Michael Kalecki

[indianskeptic]

Nehru on "Scientific Socialism"

“We have accepted the socialist and cooperative approach… We have adopted also the planned and scientific approach to economic development in preference to the old laissez-faire school. We are therefore proceeding scientifically and methodically without leaving things to chance or fate… But subject to these factors, planning and development have become a sort of mathematical problem which may be worked out scientifically.”

The Mind Of Mr. Nehru. By R.K.Karanjia. 1960

[indianskeptic]

In the many histories of Britain's involvement with India the Moghul War of 1688-90 receives little attention. Ill advised and worse prosecuted, it spawned no heroes yet fell short of sublime tragedy. Indecision induced adversity; adversity ended in ignominy. Its only saving grace, it would seem, was its irrelevance. Such inglorious and eminently forgettable incidents doubtless account for that typically dismissive attitude towards the Company which presents its history as opening in a blaze of exploratory endeavor in the early 1600s after wgich nothing happens until Clive's exploits in the 1750s.

"The Honourable East India Company" by John Keay

[indianskeptic]

Disraeli cultivated a keen interest in Indian affairs; he had been a member of the select committee which had preceded the new Act. He was a firm opponent of the Whig westernization policy of Bentinck and Macaulay, now being carried out so energetically by the Peelite Dalhousie. He later denounced bitterly the doctrine of lapse and the annexation of Oudh.

Brian Gardner in "The East India Company"

[indianskeptic]

In 1640 Francis Day, one of the company's representatives in southern India, in the lands independent of the Mughal, obtained from a local sovereign a grant of land on the East Coast. Upon this, the company built the trading post of Fort St. George - around the walls of which grew an increasing settlement - to become one day the great city of Madras. It was the first land to be held by the British in India. By 1670 the post had developed to about 300 English, with some three thousand Portuguese living under their protection. It was mostly famous for its laxity of morals.

The East India Company, By Brian Gardner

[indianskeptic]

The French Revolution is a landmark in all countries. Its repercussions rather than those of the American revolution, occasioned the risings which led to the liberation if Latin America after 1808. Its direct influence radiated as far as Bengal, where Ram Mohan Roy was inspired by it to found the first Hindu reform movement and the ancestor of modern Indian nationalism. (When he visited England in 1830, he insisted on traveling in a French ship to demonstrate his enthusiasm for its principles.)

Eric Hobsbawm in "The Age of Revolution"

[indianskeptic]

John Kenneth Galbraith, former American ambassador to India, contented that 'the centre of Nehru's thinking was Laski' and 'India the country most influenced by Laski's ideas'. So widespread was Laki's reputation in India because of his work for independence and his influence on the political elite through Nehru, Menon and the legions of LSE students in the government and civil service that it was often said that 'there was a vacant chair at every Cabinet meeting in India, reserved for the ghost of Professor Harold Laski'.

Harold Laski, A Life on the Left by Isaac Kramnick and Barry Sheerman

[indianskeptic]

Originally an imprint of the publishing firm Bodley Head, Penguin Books was established by Allen Lane in 1935 and pioneered the paperback book, bringing affordable fiction and non-fiction to the British public. V. K. Krishna Menon worked as general editor on the Pelican list from its inception in 1936 until 1938. Accounts of the extent and nature of his involvement in this non-fiction imprint vary, but it is generally acknowledged that he played a significant part in its establishment. In a 1967 history of the company, Victor Weybright describes Menon visiting Lane in the crypt (Penguin’s first premises) with written permission from Bernard Shaw for Penguin to publish a paperback edition of his Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism. Lane, who had, by coincidence, just overheard a customer in a shop mistakenly referring to a Penguin as a ‘Pelican’ and been struck by the appeal of this as an additional brand name, immediately decided to publish Shaw’s work as the first title of the brand-new Pelican list. Appointing Menon as general editor, Lane also asked the economist H. L. Beales and W. E. Williams, Secretary of the British Institute for Adult Education, to join the team as editorial advisors. The list, which consisted of paperback editions of existing titles as well as original titles, crossed disciplinary boundaries, extending from art to history to politics to science, and included work by eminent writers and scholars such as H. G. Wells, Harold Laski, Roger Fry, Leonard Woolf, Clive Bell and Sigmund Freud. Correspondence between Menon and Lane throughout 1938 documents the gradual deterioration of the relationship between the two men and the eventual ejection of Menon from the company in December 1938. Penguin published K. S. Shelvankar’s controversial The Problem of India in 1941. Fiercely critical of the colonial government in India and considered to be dangerously polemical, the book was banned in India. Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable and Coolie were published in paperback by Penguin in 1940 and 1945, respectively, and in 1944 a second edition of US-based Indian author Dham Gopal Mukerji’s award-winning Gay-Neck was published by Puffin Story Books.

Penguin Books |

[indianskeptic]

1954 Interview with V.K.Krishna Menon (by PublicResourceOrg)

[indianskeptic]

Rajaji at the age of 81 took up the challenge and formed the Swatantra Party in 1959. Rajaji coined Permit-License-Quota-Raj, the ubiquitous phrase since used to describe Indian central planning. He understood the unintended consequences of economic restrictions. During 1938-1942, in the wake of the War, severe controls were put on the movement of food grains, and the rice was rationed at about 30 grams per person per day. It was typical for wedding invitations to carry an insertion, "Please bring your ration card with you." These controls were in place in 1952, when Rajaji became the Chief Minister of the Madras State. Without any notice or discussion, he announced at night over the All India Radio that food rationing and restrictions were abolished with immediate effect. Dire predictions of scarcity and starvation were made, but Rajaji stood by his decision. He understood the laws of supply and demand. The supply of food grains actually increased and the prices fell! If the current ministers were as clever, they would abolish all restraints on the movement of agricultural goods and create a common market in India.

Profiles in Courage: Dissent on Indian Socialism - Introduction

[indianskeptic]

He sounds wistful when talks about China's authoritarian economy.

[indianskeptic]

Again, the brahman’s adherence to his faith was amazing and so was his silent but stubborn resistance. It is meaningful to note Shaikh Nizam-ud-Din Auliya’s observations in this connection. Fawaid-ul-Fuad, the famous collection of the Shaikh’s conversations (malfuz), recounts a story about a brahman in a certain town who possessed untold wealth. the wali (governor/administrator) of that town forcibly took all his wealth from him, reducing him to a pauper. The brahman, however, expressed no grief, let alone protest, over the loss. He would instead appear to be happy. To the query of a friend of his as to how he managed to be so unconcerned even after he had lost all his belongings and effects, the brahman replied that his brahmanical thread was still with him. The anecdote certainly has a bearing on the existing situation, even if the Shaikh related it to console his disciple, Amir Hasan, who was distresses and rightly so for having not received his overdue emoluments. On another occasion, the Shaikh observed reportedly with tears in his eyes that “the heart of these people [Hindus] is not changed through one’s sermons. However, if some of them are persuaded to join the company of pious man, they may become Muslims”

Competition and Co-existence: Indo-Islamic Interaction in Medieval North India by Muzaffar Alam

[indianskeptic]

Yet at the same time, Mahalanobis was also representative of a specifically Indian rationalist tradition. Sankhya meant not only ‘number’ but something like a rational understanding of the universe. Mahalanobis’s family, from the famous small Brahmin gentry of Bikrampur in East Bengal, had converted to the rationalistic strain of the reforming Brahmo Samaj. His father was an activist in the widow re-marriage campaigns of the mid-nineteenth century. Mahalanobis himself was connected with the Samaj throughout his life, opposing the reintroduction of rituals and paying homage to the memory of the founder of the Samaj, Rammohan Roy. In fact it is striking how many of the Bengali intellectuals of the Independence generation, including Satyajit Ray, the film-maker and Nirad Chaudhuri, the self-declared ‘Unknown Indian’, were Brahmos or were influenced by the Samaj. For his part Mahalanobis declared that he was not a Hindu, but added paradoxically, a ‘Brahmo by religion.’ He also revered the great Bengali sage, Rabindranath Tagore, himself a covert Brahmo. So Mahalanobis’s cultural and religious stance stood on that intriguing Indian cusp between pantheism and what might be called ‘pan-atheism.’ As he once said, the human race would be improved by ‘thinking about him who cannot be known, by trying to know.’

C.A.Bayly, Development and Sentiment: The Political Thought of Nehru’s India The Brahmos have always had an unconcealed hostility to traditional Hindus.