Truth, as they say, is the first casualty of war. The situation of the ruling classes of India and Pakistan is so disdainful that they cannot go to war nor they can sustain a genuine peace. What they contrive are virtual wars and hoaxes of peace. In the ongoing rhetoric of war and the hysteria (...)
There is a story that is commonly told in Britain that the colonisation of India - as horrible as it may have been - was not of any major economic benefit to Britain itself. If anything, the administration of India was a cost to Britain. So the fact that the empire was sustained for so long - (...)
Patnaik, in her essay published in Columbia University Press recently, said Britain drained out over $45 trillion from India, which to date has hampered the country’s ability to come out of poverty.
Britain ruled India for about 200 years, a period that was marred with extreme poverty and (...)
On the 300th anniversary of his martyrdom, Shah Inayat’s ideas on equality and collective economic endeavour remain completely relevant.
Sufi Shah Inayat Shaheed (1655-1718) – whose 300th anniversary of martyrdom falls today on October 25 – symbolised tolerance, social justice, civil liberties (...)
Many accounts ignore the fact that the Assamese territory saw massive geographical expansion under the British and that despite immigration, there was an increase in the Assamese speaking population in what was a multi-lingual society.
The issue of undocumented immigration of Bangladeshis into (...)
"The prime movers of these movements do not in their hearts desire that the agricultural labourers should get real relief. They seek only their own ends. Then how will the poor be benefited? They will be benefited in the long run because despite the determined efforts of dim false leaders to (...)
Iqbalunnisa Hussain was married at the age of 15. She received her higher education after her marriage when she traveled to England in 1933 with her infant daughter, leaving behind five other children in Bangalore with her husband. Once in England, she not only received her postgraduate degree (...)
How India’s dream of using her wartime loan to finance development went up in smoke.
A sea change, with many long term consequences, took place in the US view of India between 1944 and 1947.
By the 1940s, India had many friends in the US. Important members of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s (...)
Maulvi Barkatullah Bhopali believed the spirit of Marx’s thought and divine religions was the same. “The objective of both is to provide a dignified and peaceful life to the oppressed.”
Maulvi Barkatullah Bhopali, who was born 164 years ago this month, was a glorious standard-bearer of the Indian (...)
Is there anyone in the subcontinent who has remained untouched by the slogan he coined, ’Inquilab Zindabad’?
The problem with historical icons in the Indian subcontinent is that their fate is closely tied to the demands of present-day politics in both India and Pakistan. If the seven decade-long (...)
Notions of the ritual purity of the Brahmana go back to the Brahmana as the Vedic ritual specialist. As I have mentioned elsewhere, Vedic Brahmanism had been less prominent with the rise of Puranic Hinduism. But there was a revival of Vedic rituals, legitimizing rulers in the multiple kingdoms (...)
A new edition of Madhushree Mukerjee’s seminal book, to mark 75 years Bengal famine of 1943, details the role played by Britain’s most famous Prime Minister.
“I am glad to learn from the Minister of War Transport that a strict line is being taken in dealing with requests for cereals from the (...)
Highgate, where Marx is buried, is also where Savarkar ran the India House, an important centre of anticolonial operations, from 1907.
In a piece published in the Eastbourne Herald on November 21, 1953, a certain Mrs H.C. Bowker in her address to the Eastbourne Auxiliary of the British and (...)
The Alkazi Collection of Photography: The Uprising of 1857, edited by London-based historian Rosie Llewellyn Jones, examines the infamous revolt, which was among the first fully photographed wars in the history of India.
The East India Company arrived in India in the 17th century, and by the (...)
Contrary to the rose-tinted view of decolonisation, the end of British rule in India was marked by blunder and duplicity, writes Sean Ledwith.
Jinnah and Gandhi in Bombay, 1944. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
The two dominant nation-states of South Asia will celebrate 70 years of independence on (...)
It’s that time of the year when many countries remember the Allied victory in the Second World War and the fall of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich. But on Monday, I met military historian Professor Anirudh Deshpande of Delhi University to talk about the last secular, anti-imperialist uprising in (...)
About 250 years ago, Bengal suffered a debilitating famine under colonial rule, partially brought on by changes in the colonial currency system.
“The lack of money is the root of all evil” – Mark Twain
History, they say, repeats itself. I hope this isn’t true, because history tells us of a (...)
It is often said the victors always write history. This is nowhere more appropriate than in the case of the struggle for Indian independence from the British Raj and carving up of the Indian subcontinent resulting in the killings of over one million and enforced migration of over twenty (...)
“The Great Divide. The violent legacy of Indian Partition”. By William Dalrymple.
Partition displaced fifteen million people and killed more than a million.
In August, 1947, when, after three hundred years in India, the British finally left, the subcontinent was partitioned into two independent (...)
"I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion. The famine was their own fault for breeding like rabbits.”, Winston Churchill
The British had a ruthless economic agenda when it came to operating in India and that did not include empathy for native citizens. Under the British (...)
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