Scroll has an article by one Dipankar Das titled-
Was the British empire a benign, progressive force?
Das writes in English. If that's a good thing, then the British empire was a good thing.
My family story proves otherwise.
We will soon see that the reverse is the case.
Colonial subjects who refused to acquiesce to the asymmetry of power between the ruler and the ruled paid a heavy price.
Not if they emigrated or confined themselves to legal, or at least non-violent, avenues of resistance. Any refusal to acquiesce in asymmetry of power can get your head kicked in. That's how power works. But, people without formal power can kill you or chase you away if there is no asymmetric State power to protect you. That's what happened to Dipankar's people.
I would like to share my family’s experience of life under colonial rule and the deadly consequences of challenging the empire.
His family did well under colonial rule. Then, very stupidly, some youngsters thought they were super-cool revolutionaries. They tried to fuck with the State and got well and truly fucked. Later Hitler and Tojo made European Imperialism unviable. Dipankar's people had to flee from their 'ancestral home'. It turned out that Bengalis liked the Brits. They would protect them if they wanted to stay on in Calcutta or Dacca because Brits provided useful services. What they East Bengali Muslim didn't want was the East Bengali Hindu.
Sadly, Delhi too disliked the East Bengali Hindu who was painted as a parasite whereas the Punjabi or Sindhi refugee was considered a tremendous asset. The journalist, Ranajit Roy published a book titled 'The Agony of Bengal' in 1971. No one bothered to controvert its thesis- viz. that Bengal had been financially exploited by the center and Bengalis had been discriminated against- because thanks to the Commies, and then the Naxals, it was obvious that Bengalis were their own worst enemies. They bite only the hand that feeds them. They attack only the policemen who keep them safe. Yet, this had not always been so. The Hindu bhadralok- who soon became 'buddhijivis' (intellectuals)- of Bengal had been rising throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth century. Then they took up mass politics. They grew confused and bewildered by their own bluster. With remarkable perseverance, they undid all the advantages they had accumulated over other parts of the sub-continent. By 1971, they had succeeded in making of their golden country a place which could only be described as the arsehole of the Turd World.
The true Bengali didn't mind this description. After all, if everything had gone wrong for the Hindu Bengali since 1937- when Britain surrendered power over the Province- the fault must be that of the Brits.
In this vein, Dipankar writes-
My grandfather, Probodh Chandra Das, and his elder brother Nibaran Chandra, lived in a joint family in the Rajar Deori area of what is now called Old Dhaka in pre-Partition India.
They had probably emigrated there under British rule. Once it ended, they had to flee.
Nibaran Chandra, a senior government employee
who had obviously benefited greatly from 'colonial rule' and who hadn't spent his life trying to murder White peeps
died young, leaving behind his wife, Kironbala Devi and four children – Anil, Sunil, Parimal and daughter Latika.
The Brits had helped bring down child mortality
My grandfather, a well-to-do lawyer,
the Brits created the Courts practicing in which lawyers became well-to-do. On the other hand, if Bengalis ran amok, killing and looting- those Courts punished them.
took responsibility for them. All the children were bright. Anil and Sunil, both went on to do a Masters in Chemistry at Dhaka University
set up by the Brits on a British model. Why didn't they go to Shantiniketan or some other indigenous institution? The answer is obvious. British style education was better. European Science was better than Arab or Indian or Chinese Science.
and studied under the guidance of Professor Gyan Ghosh, who headed the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, in 1939.
Its first director had the typically Indian name of Morris Travers. It seems the Brits were encouraging Indians to become Scientists- like Sir C.V Raman who got the Nobel- or mathematicians- like Srinivas Ramanujan. So far, everything Dipankar has said confirms the notion that the Brits had lifted up, if not all Indians, then comprador communities like his own.
At 23, Anil even wrote a textbook on chemistry, which started selling well.
to people who wanted to rise in European Science.
In the 1920s and early 1930s, Bengal – like many parts of India – was in a state of revolt against British rule.
Against dyarchy. Indians participated in that rule. However, it must be said, in some years communal violence obtained whereas in others crazy young people killed policemen and were slaughtered by them.
Every year, more than 100 armed attacks were recorded against the colonial government between 1930 and 1933.
They achieved nothing. Those young folk were living in a dream world. In 1969, after the Communists returned to power and released Naxals from prison, there were plenty of students at Presidency College who were saying 'Chairman Mao is our Chairman'. These guys attacked the Bengali and the Indian State and then they were slaughtered. There were thousands of 'armed attacks' and bombs thrown by those cretins. Educated Bengalis, it seems, could be the biggest enemies of Bengal's safety and progress.
Dhaka, Midnapore, along with Kolkata, were the centres of this revolt in Bengal.
Dhaka doesn't have a lot of Hindus left- does it? Maybe that's why it is doing so much better, economically, than Kolkata.
It was difficult for courageous young men like Anil and Sunil, in their early 20s, to remain aloof at a time of nationalist upsurge. They eagerly joined the underground revolutionary movement in Bengal.
But it was utterly shit. It achieved nothing whatsoever.
Anil Das, by then a social worker who taught poor students,
So, the Chemistry thing was a flash in the pan.
joined one of the two organisations the British administration dreaded – Sri Sangha, founded by revolutionaries Anil Roy and Leela Roy. Later, Leela Roy became a part of the Constituent Assembly that framed the Indian Constitution.
To her credit, she resigned to devote herself to helping Hindu refugees fleeing her ancestral Dacca etc. It turned out that killing policemen didn't protect you from Muslims. Later, similar nutters tried to start a class war which would have lead directly to their own extermination.
The year 1930 was eventful. Inspector General of Bengal FI Lowman was assassinated by revolutionaries while Superintendent of Police E Hodson was injured.
What was the end result of this stupidity? The Brits- people like Tegart- as well as the Congress leadership decided that Young Bengal was a nuisance. Tegart believed the Bose brothers were behind the assassination attempt on him. He grew close to Birla and thus Gandhi. Young Bengal had defeated its own hero in advance. That 'Socialist' would end up recruiting for Hitler and Tojo. Bengalis would be excluded from the political leadership of India. The decline of Calcutta was assured. Dhaka now has a fifteen percent higher per capita Income. It seems getting rid of bhadralok buddhijivis can be good for the economy.
The British police
Nope. It was the Bengali police.
raided the homes of known party members.
known to Bengali informers and agent provocateurs
They came looking for Anil and our home in Dhaka was raided. Luckily for Anil, he had gone to see off a visitor. Tipped off about the raid at home, he disappeared underground. Since Bengal had become too hot for him, he took shelter in Benaras and then in Lower Assam.
Why did the police not kill his family and expropriate their property? The truth is the Brits had fallen behind the times. The future lay with Stalin and Mao- at least in the opinion of crazy Bengali chemistry students.
I suppose one could say that the Bengalis wanted to prove they were well hard. That's also why Bose allied with Hitler and Tojo. But all they succeeded in showing was that they could be courageous only in a cause which would lead to their own abject defeat and humiliation. Also, if a thing isn't stupid and very bad for India, don't do it. Such is the creed of the buddhijivi.
Constantly on the move, Anil remained underground for two years and surfaced on May 13, 1932. To secure funds for the Revolutionary Party, he and his associates stopped a moving train in broad daylight at the Nilkhet level crossing in Dhaka and seized the cash on board.
India needs more thieves and murderers. Brits provided railway trains. It is our duty to loot them.
Anil was arrested on June 7, 1932. My grandfather, Probodh Chandra Das, was his defence counsel.
Stalin would have given him his grandfather as his defense counsel- up his ass.
When Anil was produced in court on June 11, 1932, it was clear he had been subjected to such brutal torture that he could barely stand in the dock.
Cops don't tend to treat cop-killers very well. I wonder why.
Under the governorship of the “Right Honourable” Sir Stanley Jackson, the Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Act was in place.
Under the Managing Directorship of Ghanshyam Das Birla- Gandhi's financier- Bengal's top British cop, Tegart, gained a well paid sinecure in Birla's London holding company. All the British officials got their pensions punctually paid. The revolutionaries got shit- because they were useless. A few lefties stayed on in East Pakistan but even they had to flee later on. The Left Front, on taking power, did precious little for them. On the other hand, they did kill Naxalites with vim and vigor.
The law had annulled all basic human rights – including habeas corpus,
habeas corpus- is that a Bengali expression? It seems Dipankar is complaining that British rule wasn't British enough. But for British rule to succeed there has to be some degree of cooperation, or absence of craziness, among the ruled.
to release a person imprisoned unlawfully..
Which wasn't the case here.
The British judge agreed to the prosecution’s demand to extend Anil’s custodial remand despite clear evidence of torture.
As would an Indian judge. Indeed, after Naxals started killing Judges, there wasn't a peep from the Bench regarding extra-judicial killing on an industrial scale. Indira's 'Operation Steeplechase' showed she was equal to any British Viceroy. Ted Heath's Emergency failed ignominiously. Indira's Emergency worked just fine. After the fall of the second Left Government, Siddhartha Shankar Ray improved on British methods to crush the Naxals. It turned out, India can be ruled very effectively the way it has always been ruled. The question is can it also become stronger geopolitically and can it keep minorities safe? Under the Brits- yes. They understood economics. Under Nehru- no. But this was not an inevitable outcome.
Anil was kept in jail without food and tortured on the orders of Superintendent of Dhaka Police Cyril Grasby.
But the torturing was done, very lovingly, by Indians.
But he refused to talk and even threatened to bite off his tongue and spit it out rather than sign the confession the police wanted.
Why not just shoot him while he was 'trying to escape'?
The police then shifted him to the dreaded Lalbagh Prison on the outskirts of Dhaka.
I suppose they wanted to turn him.
According to Ganesh Ghosh, another prisoner of the Chittagong Armoury Raid fame who was lodged in the neighbouring cell, on the night of June 17, 1932, terrible cries of pain could be heard from Anil’s cell and then a deathly silence descended on the prison. That night, Anil died of cerebral haemorrhage. The next morning, a police van came to our house and left Anil’s body in the courtyard. He would have turned 26 that day.
I hope the family was properly grateful to those who led Anil down a futile path.
As his body was taken for the cremation, there were city wide demonstrations.
But Hindus didn't have to flee Dacca till later.
But in colonial India, there was no recourse, no reprieve.
Now, there is 'encounter killing' and bulldozer Raj. Democracy can certainly improve policing.
My grandfather, who had been very fond of his nephew, was unable to walk for a few weeks. But as a well-known lawyer, he would not let the administration go unchallenged. He reached out to the prominent legislator Shyama Prasad Mukherjee to raise a question in the Bengal Assembly on the death of Anil Das.
Lots of people with names like Anil or Das would soon be dying or having to run away from East Bengal. Mukherjee couldn't do shit about it.
Mukherjee did, but he was immediately threatened with expulsion from the assembly if he alleged that Anil Das had died in the custody of the British government. My grandfather pushed to have similar questions raised in the Central Legislative Assembly – today’s Indian Parliament – and even in the British Parliament. He wrote a series of editorials in the Ananda Bazar Patrika over the role of the British police in the custodial murder of Anil Das.
That was helpful. Parents and kids need to know that killing coppers would be severely punished.
One of Anil’s students decided to display his dissent differently. On August 22, 1932, while Superintendent of Dhaka Police Grasby’s car was at a railway crossing, Benoy Bhushan Roy shot at him. Grasby escaped with minor injuries and 18-year-old Benoy Bhushan Roy was sent to life imprisonment in the Cellular Jail in the Andamans.
The Brits had noticed, even back in the eighteenth century, that the Bengalis were very courageous in facing the executioner. The regime in the Andamans was very degrading and inhuman precisely because courage fails when you realize it was expended in a foolish and futile manner.
The afterlife of revolt
The British administration was deeply vengeful. Anil’s younger brother Sunil was arrested without formal charges and kept in one of the many specially constructed detention camps across India at Hijli Jail – part of the campus of the Indian Institute Technology, Kharagpur, today.
That was sensible. Sunil probably lived to tell the tale. He'd have been killed quickly enough if he had tried to avenge Anil.
At 23, Sunil’s research on the properties of light had been published in the American Journal of Physical Chemistry. But he was imprisoned for more than a decade. Anil’s youngest brother Parimal was too young to be arrested, but was followed around by police informers.
Tegart, the police chief who crushed Jugantar, probably was the Empire's top cop. But it must be said, Indians were excellent detectives and very good at collating information and penetrating networks.
One day in September 1933, tired of plainclothes policemen trailing him, Parimal, a budding writer and first-year student of English Honours at Dhaka University, tried to give the police a slip. He raced across a railway track, but his dhoti got stuck and while trying to extricate it, a speeding train ran over his legs. Sunil died.
I think, Parimal is meant. Anil is supposed to have died in 1932.
In 1937, Bengal got provincial autonomy. For Hindus, things turned to shit.
My father, the younger son of Probodh Chandra Das, and the rest of his family lived through the harrowing Bengal Famine of 1943.
If the alternative was a Muslim Premier, suddenly, British officials didn't look so bad
My father was forever changed by the unspeakable trauma he witnessed of residents writhing in hunger and starving children dying in the streets, too weak even to cry.
He'd soon have to learn to run away from his ancestral home and to keep running till he reached a place where they were few Muslims.
Madhushree Mukherjee’s pioneering study has shown that
she has shit for brains.
the 3.5 million deaths in the last big famine of British India could have been prevented, but the “defender of Democracy”, then Prime Minister Winston Churchill, chose to let
Muslim Premiers ran Bengal- but that was what the 1935 Act required.
the residents of Bengal perish.
In 1974, lots of 'residents of Bengal' perished of starvation as they had perished of Pakistani genocide three years previously. Was that Churchill's fault too?
Then came Partition in 1947 and overnight, my family became foreigners in their ancestral land.
But they had only been able to live there because the Brits kept them safe from the Muslims.
Anil Das’s youngest sibling, Latika, who founded the Mahila Atmaraksha Samiti
which means 'Women's Self-defense organization'. It didn't prevent lots of Hindu women getting raped or butchered.
of the Communist Party of India, died while leading a women’s demonstration which was fired upon by the Police.
She was killed before she could kill. Sad.
The shadow of the colonial master was a looming presence over the major events in my father’s life, be it the death of his cousins, the famine and then Partition. A family that had challenged the might of the empire had paid for it dearly.
They paid dearly for its departure. They became refugees.
The ruler and the ruled
The British rule over India was different from the Spanish and Portuguese colonisation, of South America for example.
There was no genocide against the natives.
There was less random violence. Instead, exploitation was systemised through excessive taxation and other modes of expropriation of Indian money, what freedom fighter Dadbhai Naoroji called the “drain of wealth”.
Which paid for Pax Brittanica from which Dipankar's people benefitted.
It was fine-tuned into a process that systematically killed millions in a succession of man-made famines, and according to a study by economist Utsa Patnaik, siphoned off approximately $45 trillion from India.
But India siphoned off 897 bazillion from Nepal. Anyone can write nonsense.
The brutalities of British administration
which featured 'senior government servants' like this dude's grandfather
were painted over by the rule of law and justice, supported by the global propaganda of essential British goodness aided by the Western media.
Whereas the proof of essential Indian shiteness is aided by the Indian media.
Freedom fighter Subhas Chandra Bose called the BBC the “Bluff and Bluster Corporation”.
Bose's 'Azad Hind Radio' was hosted by Hitler and later Tojo who bluffed Bose that the Axis would make him the Dictator of India. Ludicrously, his blustering broadcasts began with a supposed recording of the last Mughal Emperor saying- ' Ghazio mein bi rahegi jab talak iman ki, Tab toh London tak chalegi regh hindustan ki"'- which means 'so long as Islam's warriors remain firm in the Faith/ their swords will reach London'. It doesn't seem to have occurred to Bose that Hindus would be chased out of East Bengal by the swords of the ghazis. Since he didn't come from the East, he was least bothered. Still his brother tried to create a separate Bengal- where Hindus from the West too could be slaughtered- so as to help Suhrawardy become a ghazi.
But this was so only as long as the colonial subjects quietly acquiesced to the asymmetry of power between the ruler and the ruled.
No. It was only so long as a profit could be made or a geopolitical advantage retained by ruling over a shithole
Those who objected were dealt with a medieval fury not different from other autocracies in history.
Or, they were left alone to slaughter each other if no profit could be made by ruling over them. After the Brits transferred power over Food in 1937, Bengal had a big famine. Independence meant ethnic cleansing.
Be it the brutal suppression of rebellions such the Vellore Mutiny of 1806,
It lasted a day. Apparently the sons of Tipu Sultan were involved. But Hindus wanted nothing to do with such stupidity and it is they who were the vast majority.
the Santhal Rebellion of 1857,
the Santhal's enemy was the Bengali
or the uninhibited custodial torture in the 20th century.
which increased greatly after Independence
What differentiated British rule was its claim to being a force for good,
without everybody immediately dying of laughter. The fact is most of the territories Britain ruled retained its language and institutions- unless their countries became too shitty for this to be possible.
while being otherwise – it was the yawning gap between what it preached in Britain and what it practised in the colonies that lay in the heart of its darkness.
No. The Brits didn't give a shit about what was 'practiced in the colonies'. If it was possible to kill or enslave the natives and bring in Europeans- well and good. But then Raja Ram Mohan Roy and Dwarkanath Tagore had lobbied Westminster to lift restrictions on European settlement in Bengal. Why? This would keep the Hindu safe from the Muslim. Then the Brits left- because Bengal wasn't worth keeping- and Dipankar's family had to run away from Dacca. At the heart of the darkness that is buddhijivi's brain, is a failure to recognize that the Brits weren't angels in Heaven. They didn't even pretend to be any such thing. There is no point to saying things like 'Brits were totes evil because they said they'd come and wipe my granny's bum, but they didn't! Viceroy didn't even apologize for this glaring negligence. Winston Churchill is worse than Hitler because he didn't do my Hindi homework. This is clear case of RACISM! Also ten gazillion dollars were stolen from my grandfather's pocket one hundred years ago. Reparations must be made!'
On the other hand, crimes of the Iyengars directly led to ethnic cleansing of Iyers from Iyerland by all them fucking leprechauns with names like Varadkar. Mind it kindly! Aiyayo.
No comments:
Post a Comment