[world-vedic] Associated Press: British Impact on India

[Guest guest]

Some have mixed feelings about legacy of colonialism

 

"In 1750, India produced 25 percent of the world's cotton textiles,

said Prasenjit Basu, a Calcutta-born economist at Credit Suisse First

Boston in Singapore. Then the British banned the exports to protect its

own textile industry, and production fell to 1.7 percent of the world

market by 1900.

 

India's economy grew at an average of just 0.7 percent a year from 1900

to 1950, Basu said. In the first decade after independence, it was 4

percent and reached 6.5 percent during the 1990s. Famines increased

during colonial times, he said, and stopped after independence."

 

by Laurinda Keys

The Associated Press

BOMBAY, India - Historian Sharada Dwivedi, born just before British

colonialism ended on the subcontinent, sometimes surprises herself with

her thoughts about the English.

 

"When I see something absolutely corrupt or mismanaged, I find myself

thinking, 'The British wouldn't have done it that way,' " she said.

 

But Dwivedi also remembers that Mohandas Gandhi, the English-educated

lawyer and future Indian independence leader, was thrown out of a

first-class train compartment in British-ruled South Africa because of

his skin color.

 

"The substance of colonial rule is the degradation of human values,"

said Dwivedi, in her book-crammed apartment in a city that exists

because the British built it.

 

Many Indians share her conflicted feelings.

 

"Certainly the British robbed India of its natural resources and some

of its most beautiful artifacts" during almost 200 years of

exploitation, she said. "But doesn't every colonial power do that?"

 

The Babylonians, Greeks and Romans did it more than 2,000 years ago.

The languages, technology, arts, ideas and racial mixtures disseminated

by those ancient and brutal colonialists are woven into the fabric of

today's nations and cultures.

 

Modern colonialism from the 15th century was the outgrowth of economic

rivalry among European powers and the search for new sources of raw

materials.

 

The Spanish, Portuguese, French, Germans, Belgians and Dutch all

competed with the British for new colonies, sometimes superimposing

their European wars on other races.

 

The end of colonialism, one of the significant historical developments

of the 20th century, passed another milestone this month when Portugal

returned the enclave of Macau to China.

 

So many countries have gained independence in the past 50 years that

millions of people - in Hong Kong, Namibia, the West Indies,

Mozambique, Algeria, the Philippines, India - have fresh memories of

life under colonial rule.

 

The harm, the benefits, the legacies and appropriate responses are

still being sifted.

 

In Bombay, 52 years after independence, a nationalist party has changed

the city's name to Mumbai and is trying to eliminate all

English-sounding street names.

 

There is a similar movement in Calcutta, on India's east coast, where

British influence began in the 18th century when traders made alliances

with maharajahs and nawabs - the local princes - to ensure steady

product supplies at low prices. British troops were sent to protect

them, and administrators to facilitate commerce.

 

With force, threats and money, Britain brought more territory under its

control. After "The Mutiny" - an 1857 uprising of Indian soldiers that

is considered India's first war of independence - crown rule, or "the

Raj," was established. It lasted until 1947.

 

"You can't wipe out history," says historian Dwivedi, who opposes name

changes and removal of statues. "You can't have Bombay without the

British."

 

She said 2.5 million people travel into Bombay each day on

British-built train lines. Boats still approach the colossal Gateway to

India that the British built at the harbor.

 

A Marathi-speaking Indian from Bombay will talk to a Bengali-speaking

one from Calcutta in English, since neither may know the most common

language of northern India, Hindi.

 

Parliamentary government, cricket, tea time, the judiciary, a

civilian-controlled military, a document-loving bureaucracy, laws that

allow detention without trial - for better and for worse, they are part

of India's legacy from colonialism.

 

"It's not simply good and it's not simply bad," said Sumit Sarkar,

professor of modern history at Delhi University.

 

The idea that Britain bequeathed India democracy, education and better

lifestyles has changed over the decades since British poet Rudyard

Kipling wrote "The White Man's Burden."

 

Sarkar argues that the colonial system strengthened casteism, because

the British were used to a class-based system and found the Hindu

hierarchy efficient.

 

When the British left India, 90 percent of the population was

illiterate. A small elite, overwhelmingly Brahmins, had received

educations that made them useful in the colonial administration.

 

"The British colonialists were a handful of people ruling over a huge

country with a much bigger populace," said Sarkar. "They never exceeded

300. They couldn't have succeeded without complicated and ever-shifting

alliances."

 

In his autobiography, recently retired South African President Nelson

Mandela wrote about his British-based education "in which British

ideas, British culture and British institutions were automatically

assumed to be superior."

 

He was given an English name on his first day of school. "At the time,

I looked on the white man not as an oppressor, but as a benefactor,"

Mandela said.

 

Under colonialism, India became poorer, as could be expected in a

system meant to benefit the home country at the expense of the colony.

 

In 1750, India produced 25 percent of the world's cotton textiles, said

Prasenjit Basu, a Calcutta-born economist at Credit Suisse First Boston

in Singapore. Then the British banned the exports to protect its own

textile industry, and production fell to 1.7 percent of the world

market by 1900.

 

India's economy grew at an average of just 0.7 percent a year from 1900

to 1950, Basu said. In the first decade after independence, it was 4

percent and reached 6.5 percent during the 1990s. Famines increased

during colonial times, he said, and stopped after independence.

 

"Another myth is that the British gave India democracy," said Basu.

"The British had democracy - for themselves - and the Indian

independence movement copied it." There was no universal suffrage until

India's first election after independence.

 

When the British left South Africa, racial separation was entrenched.

Military dictatorships, one-party rule and tribal conflicts followed

the British departure from other colonies.

 

"These new countries, without the economic, educational and social

preconditions, were expected to work upon independence when, during all

those years of colonial tutelage, there were no elections and no

democratic government," Singapore's powerful senior minister, Lee Kuan

Yew, said in a 1992 speech.

 

In setting up a post-colonial state where only one party has governed

since independence, Lee found no use for the British jury system or

one-man, one-vote elections.

 

But in his autobiography, he expresses fondness for his British-style

education in Singapore, and gratitude for the universality of English:

 

"Many years later, whenever I met Commonwealth leaders from far-flung

islands in the Caribbean or the Pacific, I discovered that they also

had gone through the same drill with the same textbooks and could quote

the same passages from Shakespeare."