Inglorious Empire -What the British Did to India
By Shashi Tharoor (Penguin 2017)
Excerpts, part 2
"The sight if Muslim and Hindu soldiers rebelling together in 1857 and fighting side by side, willing to rally under the command of each other and pledge joint allegiance to the enfeebled Mughal monarch, had alarmed the British, who did not take long to conclude that dividing the two groups and pitting them against one another was the most effective way to ensure the unchallenging continuance of Empire.", p. 101
The tendency to separate was apparent in British attitudes from the start. Indeed, it had been evidenced in the only already-white country the British colonized, Ireland; instead of assimilating the Irish into the British race, they were subjugated by their new overlords, intermarriage was forbidden (as was even learning the Irish language or adopting Irish modes of dress) and most Irish people were segregated 'beyond the pale'." p. 102
"Laws had to be translated into terms the British could understand and apply. A complicated, often chaotic and always fluid society like India was 'redefined by the British to be a place of rules and orders; once the British had defined to their satisfaction what they construed as Indian rules and customs, then the Indians has to conform to these constructions'." p. 103
"The pathbreaking writer and thinker, Benedict Anderson, has convincingly pointed out that identities uniting large numbers of people could arise only after a certain technological level had been attained. It is not seriously disputed that the sharper articulation of identities encompassing broad communities is relatively a recent phenomenon, nor that such identities have been 'imagined' and 'invented' to a great extent, as Anderson famously postulated. The British ruled just as this kind of identity-creation was becoming possible, thanks to modern developments in transport and communication. Whereas the Great Mughal Akbar might have used such technologies to fuse his diverse people together, the British used them to separate, classify and divide." p. 104
It is also true that "the British, knowingly or unknowingly, helped solidify and perpetuate the iniquities of the caste system. Since the British came from a hierarchical society with an entrenched class system, they instinctively tended to look for a similar one in India. They began by anatomizing Indian society into 'classes' that they referenced as being 'primarily religious' in nature." p. 104
as a result of "a concrete encounter with colonial modernity during two hundred years of British domination ... colonialism made caste what is today'." p. 104, quoting from the American anthropologist Nicholas Dirks' book "Castes of Mind"
"In fact, caste, he [Dirks] says, 'was just one category among many others, one way of organising and representing identity. Moreover, caste was not a single category or even a single logic of categorisation, even for Brahmins, who were the primary beneficiaries of the caste idea... Under colonialism, caste was thus made out to be far more pervasive, far more totalizing, and far more uniform than it had been before'..." p. 105
"[A]lternative identities, sub-castes, clans and other formulations also existed and flourished in different ways at different places. The idea of the four-fold caste order stretching across all of India and embracing its complex civilisational expanse was only developed, modern scholars assert with considerable evidence, under the peculiar circumstances of British colonial rule." p. 105
"The Brahmins enjoyed British patronage over other groups and began considering themselves above all other castes, whim the British, internalizing Brahmin prejudice, thought of as lower castes.
The result was a remarkable preponderance of Brahmins in positions of importance in the British Raj. Brahmins, who were no more than a tenth of the population, occupied over 90 per cent of the positions available to Indians in government services, except the most menial ones..." p. 107
"The census joined the map and the museum as tools of British imperial dominance in the nineteenth century... The census reconfirmed the process of defining castes, allocating them certain attributes and inventing extraordinary labels for entire communities, such as 'martial races' and 'criminal tribes'.
"The British could find no one to tell them authoritatively where or in what number any particular community was; the census commissioners discovered that boundary lines among Hindus, Sikhs and Jains barely existed, and that several Hindu and Muslim groups in different parts of the country shared similar social and cultural practices with regard to marriage, festivals, food, and worship. This went against the colonial assumption that communities must be mutually exclusive and that a person had to belong to one community or another..." p. 109
"[C]aste competition had been largely unknown in British days; caste consciousness had never been made so explicit as in the late nineteenth century." p. 110
"Religion became a useful means of divide and rule: the Hindu Muslim divide was, as the American scholar of religion Peter Gottschalk documents, defined, highlighted and fomented by the British as a deliberate strategy..." p. 111
The Americans in Iraq learnt something from the British!
"By excluding Muslims from the essential national narrative, the nineteenth century colonial interpretation of Indian history helped give birth in the twentieth to the two-nation theory that eventually divided the country." p. 112 (See also the BBC's Partition: Roots and Legacy)
"The facts are clear: large-scale conflicts between Hindus and Muslims (religiously defined), only began under colonial rule. Many other kinds of social strife were labelled religious due ti the colonists' Orientalist assumption that religion was the fundamental division in Indian society." p. 114
"Islam came to Kerala not by the sword, as it did in northern India, but through traders, travellers and missionaries, who brought its message of equality and brotherhood to the coastal people." p. 116
"Looking at peninsular south India at the time of the Muslim invasions (from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries), Cynthia Talbot observed that since a majority of medieval South India's population continued to be non-Muslim, even within the regions where Muslims were politically dominant, the two societies always overlapped...
When Allan Octavian Hume founded the Indian National Congress he actively welcomed Indians of all faiths to the organisation; its first few presidents included Hindus, Christians, Parsis and Muslims. The British did not approve of Hume's liberal attitude... Instead, the British watched the rise to prominence of Congress, a secular body transcending religion, with growing disapproval, and pronounced it a Hindu-dominated organization. They instigated a Muslim nobleman, Nawab Khwaja Salimullah of Dacca, to start a rival organization in 1906 for his co-religionists alone, the Muslim League.
The British deliberately 'sold' the partition of Bengal to Muslims as promoting their interests...
The British made no effort to hide their partiality. Herbert Risley ,the architect of the scheme, admitted frankly that 'one of our main objects is to split up and thereby weaken a solid body if opponents to our rule." pp. 116-17
"In 1916, Motila Nehru was chosen by the Congress to draft, together with a brilliant young Muslim lawyer called Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the principles that would govern cooperation with the Muslim League." p. 118
"The British-conducted censuses had overt political significance, since the census numbers were crucial to the political debates at the beginning of the twentieth century. They were ignored in constituting the British Indian Army, in which Muslims accounted for 50 per cent of the Indians serving in uniform despite being only 20 per cent of the population" p. 119
"... Englishmen who would have shuddered at the idea of allowing the Jews of Golders Green to vote separately in London elections enthusiastically arranged separate electorates for the Muslims of India, where Muslim voters could only vote for Muslim candidates, Sikhs for Sikhs, and Christians for Christians. The practice prompted Will Durant to observe that the British approach 'intensifies and encourages the racial and religious divisions which statemanship would seek to heal'." p. 120
"As Alex von Tunzelmann noted in her history, Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire, when 'the British started to define "communities" based on religious identity and attach political representation to them, many Indians stopped accepting the diversity of their own thoughts and began to ask themselves in which of the boxes they belonged... Thus the British can be largely blamed for the creation of previously -non-existent Shia-Sunni tensions within the Muslim population of Lucknow... As the scholar Keith Hjortshoj recounts: 'By 1905, religious rhetoric between Shias and Sunnis had reached such heights that Sunnis in Lucknow did not join in the Marsiyah elegies during Muharram, but instead recited a praise of the first three Caliphs called Madhe-Sahaba." The British "enacted laws against practices by Sunnis that could be offensive to Shias..." p. 121-22
"'The British are not a spiritual people. They are either a fighting race or a commercial nation. It would be throwing pearls before swine to appeal to them in the name of higher morality or justice or on ethical grounds. They are a self-relaint people, who can appreciate self-respect and self-reliance even in their opponents'." said the nationalist Lala Lajpat Raj. p. 124
"[A]larmed by the growing popularity of the Congress, the British counted upon what the viceroy, Lord Linlithgow, called 'the potency of provincial autonomy to destroy the effectiveness of Congress as an all-Indian instrument of revolution... The electoral system was also stacked in favour of rural representation in order to get more landlords elected whose interests would diverge from the socialist programmes of Congress's national leaders." p. 127
However, "[t]o the surprise of their supporters and their critics, the Congress ministries in the nine provinces had conducted themselves as able stewards of the governmental system of the British Raj. For the most part they did little to dismantle oppressive British laws, and in some cases proved as zealous in arresting radicals as the British themselves had been." p. 127
"Nehru's abhorrence of fascism was so great that he would gladly have led a free India into war on the side of the democracies, provided that choice was made by Indians and nit imposed upon them by the British." p. 128
Note the narrow definition of "democracy" by Thahroor. He calls the coloniser whose list of crimes speaks volumes in the book a "democracy". What he calls "democracies" of the time were imperial powers subjugating hundred of millions of people, plundering their wealth and starving and murdering them.
[W]hen Germany's invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939 led Britain to declare war upon it, Indians noted the irony of the English fighting to defend sovereignty of a weak country resisting the Brute force of foreign conquest—precisely what Indian nationalists were doing against British imperialism. So Britain would fight Germany for doing to Poland what Britain had been doing to India for nearly two hundred years.
Nehru blamed British appeasement for the fall of Spain to the fascists, the betrayal of Ethiopia to the Italians, and the selling out of Czechoslovakia to the Nazis: he wanted India to have no part of the responsibility for British policy, which he saw as designed to protect the narrow class-interests of a few imperialists." p. 128
1940 "was the year in which Churchill confidently expressed the belief that the British empire would last a thousand years." p. 130
"In December 1941 ... despite the opposition of Winston Churchill, the War Cabinet in London authorized the release of all the imprisoned Congressmen. Nehru hoped in vain for some policy declaration by the British that would enable him to commit India to the Allied cause, but the reactionary Churchill and his blinkered representatives in New Delhi went the other way, with Churchill ...explicitly declaring that the principles of the Atlantic Charter would not apply to India." p. 131
"I hate the Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion."
"Churchill had strong views on Gandhi ... [H]e had notoriously declared: 'It alarming and nauseating to see Mr Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well known in the east, striding half naked up the steps of the viceregal palace, while he is till organising and conducting a campaign if civil disobedience, to parlay on equal terms with the representative of the Emperor-King'. (Ghandi had nothing in common with fakirs, Muslim spiritual mendicants, but Churchill was rarely accurate about India.) 'Gandhi-ism and all it stands for,' declared Churchill, 'will, sooner or later, have to be grappled with and finally crushed.' In such matters Churchill was the most reactionary of Englishmen, with views so extreme they cannot be excused as being reflective of their times: in fact Churchill's statements appalled most of his contemporaries. Even the positive gloss placed on him today seems inexcusable: 'He put himself at the head of a movement of irreconcilable imperialist romantics,' wrote Boris Johnson in his recent admiring biography of Churchill. 'Die-hard defenders of the Raj and the God-given right of every pink-jowled Englishmen to sit in his veranda and ... glory in the possession of India." p. 132
"Ghandi 'should not be released on the account of the mere threat of fasting,' Churchill told the Cabinet. 'We should be rid of a bad man and an enemy of the Empire if he died.' He was quite prepared to facilitate the process, suggesting that the Mahatma should be 'bound hand and foot at the gates of Delhi, and let the viceroy sit on the back of a giant elephant and trample [the Mahatma] into the dirt.'" p. 133
"The British had not covered themselves with glory during the war [World War II]. They had run a military dictatorship in a country that they had claimed to be preparing for democracy. They had presided over one of the worst famines in human history, the Bengal Famine of 1943, while diverting food (on Churchill's personal orders)from starving civilians to well-supplied Tommies." p. 134
"London, under the Labour Party, exhausted by war, was determined to rid itself of its Indian empire. In February1946, Prime Minister Attlee announced the dispatch of a Cabinet Mission to India 'to discuss with leaders of Indian opinion the framing of an Indian Constitution'. The endgame had begun." pp. 136-37
The American journalist Philip Talbot "felt that Nehru had simply not realised that Britain was exhausted, near bankrupt, unwilling and unable to despatch the 60,000 British troops the government in London estimated would be required to reassert its control in India. London wanted to cut and run, and if the British could not leave behind a united India, they were prepared to 'cut' the country quite literally before running." p. 138
As Nehru's biographer M. J. Akbar, "put it, 'Pakistan was created by Jinnah's will and Britain's willingness'— not by Nehru's wilfulness." p. 139
Jinnah "was determined to obtain Pakistan. The Muslim League leader declared 16 August 1946 as 'Direct Action Day' to drive home this demand. Thousands of Muslims Leaguers took to the streets in an orgy of violence, looting and mayhem, and 16,000 innocents were killed in the resulting clashes, particularly in Calcutta. The police and army stood idly by: it seemed the British had decided to leave their former imperial capital to the mob." p. 140
"Nehru .. was at his most conciliatory, but Jinnah saw in the British position confirmation that his party's fortunes were in the ascendent, and escalated his demands. To Nehru it seemed the British learnt nothing from the failure of the policy of appeasement in Europe in the 1930s."
My comment: It was not about learning history; it was about deliberate calculated policies. In the case of appeasement in Europe, Nazim and Fascism were seen as a bulwark against "communism". In India, the British too the policy of divide et impera to its extreme end for longer strategical objectives. The division of the "Arab world" into nation states was another example.
Viscount Mountbatten of Burma, the outgoing Supreme Allied Commander in Southeast Asia, and his advisors drew up a 'Plan Balkan' that would have transferred power to the provinces rather than to a central government, leaving them free to join a larger union (or not). The British kept Nehru in the dark while Balkan Plan was reviewed (and revised) in London—all the more ironic for an empire that liked to claim it had unified India...
A long, passionate and occasionally incoherent note of protest from Nehru to Mountbatten killed the plan. But the only alternative was partition." p. 143
"Gandhi went to Mountbatten and suggested that India could be kept unified if Jinnah were offered the leadership of the whole country. Nehru and Patel both gave that idea a short shrift, and Mountbatten did not seem to take it seriously." p. 144
"Nehru imagined that the rioting and violence that had racked the country over the League's demand for Pakistan would die down once that demand had been granted, but he was wrong. The killing and mass displacement worsened as people sought frantically to be on the 'right' side of the lines the British were to draw across their homeland." pp. 144-45
"The task of dividing the two nations was assigned to Sir Cyril Radcliffe, a lawyer who had never been to India before and knew nothing of its history, society or traditions. Radcliffe drew up his maps in forty days, dividing provinces, districts, villages, homes and hearts—and promptly scuttled home to Britain, never to return to India." p. 147 (See also BBC online India Partition: Roots and Legacy)
"If Britain's greatest accomplishment was the creation of a single unit called India, fulfilling the aspirations of visionary emperors from Ashoka to Akbar, then its greatest failure must be the shambles of that original Brexit—cutting and running from the land they had claimed to rule for its betterment, leaving behind a million dead, thirteen million displaced, billions of rupees of property destroyed, and the flames of communal blazing hatred hotly across the ravaged land. No greater indictment of the failures of the British rule in India can be found than e tragic manner of the ending." p. 148
The Myth of Enlightened Despotism
"There has been a tendency on the part of many, including several Anglophile Indians, to see British rule as essentially benign, a version of 'enlightened despotism' ..."
"This view is either naïve or self-serving ... The most obvious example relates to the famines the British caused and mismanaged,; to the system of forced emigration of Indians by transportation and indentured labour; and to the brutality with which dissent was suppressed." p. 149
"As a result of what one can only call the British Colonial Holocaust, thanks to economic policies ruthlessly enforced by Britain, between 30 and 35 million Indians needlessly died of starvation during the Raj. Millions of tonnes of wheat were exported from India to Britain even as famine raged. When relief camps were set up, the inhabitants were barely fed and nearly all died.
"It is striking that the last large-scale famine to take place in India was under British rule; none has taken place since, because Indian democracy has been more responsive to the needs of drought-affected and poverty-stricken Indian than the British rulers ever were." p. 150
"The fatality figures are horrifying: from 1770 to 1900, 25 million Indians are estimated to have died in famines, including 15 million in the five famines in the second half of the nineteenth century. The famines of the twentieth century probably took the tatal of over 35 million. William Digby pointed out that in the entire 107 years from 1793 to 1900, only an estimated 5 million people died in all the wars around the world combined, whereas in just ten years 1891-1900, 19 million had died in India in famines alone. While comparisons of human deaths are always invidious, the 35 million who died of famine and epidemics during the Raj does remind one of the 25 million who died in Stalin's collectivization drive and political purges, the 45 million who died during Mao's cultural revolution, and the 55 million who died world-wide during World War II." pp. 150-51
"The British tended to base their refusal to intervene in famines with adequate government measures on a combination of three sets of considerations: free trade principles (do not interfere with market forces), Malthusian doctrine (growth in population beyond the ability of the land to sustain it would inevitably lead to deaths) and financial prudence (don't spend money we haven't budgeted for). On these grounds, Britain had not intervened to save lives in Ireland, or prevented emigration to America, during the famine there." 151
Thus the Governor for Bengal, Sir Cecil Beadon "was more concerned with fealty to the free-market principles of Adam Smith, and the damage to his political reputation, were he seen to be intervening in the 'natural laws' of economics, than the tragedy of the deaths of people in Orissa." p. 152
"During the very 1866 Orissa Famine that would so disturb [the Marquess of ] Salisbury's sleep, while a million and a half people starved to death, the British insouciantly exported 200 million pounds of rice to Britain." p. 152
Typical of many who today blame climate change and its consequences on everybody, an official report into the Bengal Famine blamed the public and the government of Bengal. "[W]hen you blame a tragedy on everybody, you blame it on nobody, " writes Shashi Thahroor. p. 53
"Before the British came, Indians rulers had supported the people in times of food scarcity by policies of tax relief, fixing grain prices and banning food exports from famine affected regions. There was also a strong tradition of personal charity, especially during periods of scarcity." p. 153
"In keeping with established British policy, Viceroy Lord Lytton notoriously issued orders prohibiting any reduction in the price of food during a famine. 'There is to be no interference of any kind on the part of Government with the object of reducing the price of food,' he declared, instructing district officers to 'discourage relief works in every possible way ... More distress is not a sufficient reason for opening a relief work'." p. 154
When an official named Sir Richard Temple "had, in the earlier Orissa Famine of 1866, imported rice from Burma for starving Oriyas, The Economist [magazine] bitterly attacked him for allowing Indians to think 'it is the duty of the Government to keep them alive'... Though the British created 'work camps' as a form of famine relief (so the starving could use their labour to earn their bread), the most significant legacy this official [Temple] left behind was the 'Temple wage' which, in Mike Davis's words [in Late Victorian Holocausts], 'provided less sustenance for hard labour' in British labour camps during the famine than the infamous Buchenwald concentration camp's inmates would receive eighty years later.
In other words, the British cannot be accused of 'doing nothing' during the 1876-77 famine, but rather of doing much to worsen its impact. India's grain continued to be exported to global markets, just as Stalin was to do during the 'collectivisation famines' that beset Russia and Ukraine in the 1930s: in effect, as Professor Mike Davis has written, 'London was eating India's bread' while Indians were dying in a famine. To add insult to injury, the British increased taxes on the peasantry, and railed against those too hungry to be productive as 'indolent' and railed against those too hungry to be productive as 'indolent' and unused to work'." 155
"[T]he lack of adequate infrastructure and transportation to get food from areas where it was plentiful to areas of scarcity, which was cited by Florence Nightingale as a major reason for famine ... was irrelevant to British India after the advent of the railways. And yet the worst famines of the nineteenth century occurred after thousands of miles of railway lines had been built...
"The Daily Mail declared in 1897 that 'it falls to us to defend our Empire from the spectral armies of hunger ... our weapon is good honest British money'." p. 158
By the time it ended, "nearly four million Bengalis starved to death in the 1943 famine. Nothing can excuse the odious behaviour of Winston Churchill, who deliberately ordered the diversion of food from starving Indian civilians to well-supplied British soldiers and even to top up European stockpiles in Greece and elsewhere. 'The starvation of anyway underfed Bengalis is less serious' than that of 'sturdy Greeks', he argued. Grain for the Tommies, bread for home consumption in Britain (27 million tonnes of imported grains, a wildly excessive amount), and generous buffer stocks in Europe (for yet-to-be-liberated Greeks and Yugoslavs) were Churchill's priorities, not the life or death of his Indian subjects. When reminded of the suffering of his victims his response was typically Churchillian: the famine was their own fault, he said, 'breeding like rabbits'. When officers of conscience pointed out in a telegram to the prime minister the scale of the tragedy caused by his decisions, Churchill's only reaction was to ask peevishly: 'why hasn't Gandhi died yet?'" p. 160
"It is also telling that there were no great hospitals established by the Raj anywhere in the country: strikingly, everyone of the major modern medical establishments of British India was established by the generosity of Indian benefactors, even if, for understandable reasons, these Indian donors often named their hospitals after British colonial grandees." pp. 161-62
"Some 1.9 to 3.5 million Indians (the numbers vary in different sources, depending on who is counted), moved halfway across the globe, most involuntarily, under the colonial project. They played their roles as cogs in the wheels of the imperial machinery, toiling on sugar plantations, building roads and buildings, clearing jungle. Many suffered horribly on harrowing journeys and some perished en route; others endured terrible privations." p. 163
"[I]n just one year, 1856-57, and one one route, Kolkata to Trinidad, the percentage of deaths of indentured labour on the transportee ships reached appalling levels: 12.3 per cent of all males, 18.5 per cent of the females, 28 per cent of the boys and 36 per cent of the girls perished, as did a tragic 55 per cent of all infants. To make an admittedly invidious comparison, the deaths of slaves on the notorious 'Middle Passage' was estimated at around 12.5 per cent. To be an indentured Indian labourer transported to the Caribbean on British ships was to enter a life-and-death lottery in which your chances of survival were significantly worse than those of a shackled African slave." pp. 163-64
The British historian Niall Ferguson "dismisses this immensely painful and disruptive displacement as 'this mobilisation of cheap and probably underemployed Asian labour to grow rubber and dig gold'." p. 165
"Surely they [the British] could not have behaved in India like the murderous Belgians in the Congo?
They did. Not all the time, and not with sustained and inhuman brutality consistently deployed by King Leopold's amoral killers, but they were no exception to the basic rule that imperialism extends itself through brutal force. 'Most of the time,' says the historian Jon Wilson, 'the actions of British imperial administrators were driven by irrational passions rather than calculated plans. Force was rarely efficient. The assertion of violent power usually exceeded the demands of any particular commercial or political interest'." p. 166
"Though the family of the Mughal Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar surrendered peacefully to the British forces that captured Delhi, they were treated abominably. Most of his sixteen sons were tried and hanged, while several were shot in cold blood, after first being stripped of their arms and, of course, their jewels. Atrocities also took place under civilian rule, on official orders and against civilian victims." p. 167
In the Jallianwala Bagh massacre British troops used "1,650 rounds, killed at least 379 people (the number the British were prepared to admit to) and wounded 1,137. Barely a bullet was wasted...
Brigadier General Reginald Dyer "did not order his men to fire in the air, or at the feet of their targets. They fired, at his orders, into the chests, the faces, and the wombs of the unarmed and defenceless crowd... Dyer was an efficient killer rather than a crazed maniac..." The massacre "represented the worst that colonialism could become, and by letting it occur, the British crossed that point of no return that exists only in the minds of men—that point which, in any unequal relationship, both master and subject must instinctively respect if their relationship is to survive." p. 169-170
"The historian A. J. P Taylor calls the massacre 'the decisive moment when Indians were alienated from British rule'. No other 'punishment' in the name of law and order has similar casualties: 'The Peterloo Massacre [in England] had claimed about eleven lives. Across the Atlantic, British soldiers provoked into firing on Boston Common had killed five men and were accused of deliberate massacre. In response to the self-proclaimed Easter Rebellion of 1916 in Dublin, the British had executed sixteen Irishmen.' Jallianwala confirmed how little the British valued Indian lives." p. 171
"It was only only when a thoroughly documented report was prepared by the investigative team of the Indian National Congress that the British admitted what had happened. Dyer was relived of his command and censured by the House of Commons, but promptly exonerated by the House of Lords and allowed to retire on a handsome pension. Rudyard Kipling, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature and the poetic voice of British imperialism, hailed him as 'The Man Who Saved Indian'. p. 173
Jawaharlal Nehru later wrote, "I realized then, more vividly than I had ever done before, how brutal and immoral imperialism was and how it had eaten into the souls of the British upper classes'." p. 173
"Sir William Hicks, home minister in the Conservative government of Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, had stated the matter bluntly in 1928: 'I know it is said in missionary meetings that we conquered India to raise the level of the Indians. That is cant. We conquered India as an outlet for the goods of Britain. We conquered Indian by the sword, and by the sword we shall hold it. I am not such a hypocrite as to say we hold India for the Indians. We went with a yardstick in one hand and a sword in the other, and with the latter we continue to hold them helpless while we force the former down their throats.' p. 174.
By Shashi Tharoor (Penguin 2017)
Excerpts, part 2
"The sight if Muslim and Hindu soldiers rebelling together in 1857 and fighting side by side, willing to rally under the command of each other and pledge joint allegiance to the enfeebled Mughal monarch, had alarmed the British, who did not take long to conclude that dividing the two groups and pitting them against one another was the most effective way to ensure the unchallenging continuance of Empire.", p. 101
The tendency to separate was apparent in British attitudes from the start. Indeed, it had been evidenced in the only already-white country the British colonized, Ireland; instead of assimilating the Irish into the British race, they were subjugated by their new overlords, intermarriage was forbidden (as was even learning the Irish language or adopting Irish modes of dress) and most Irish people were segregated 'beyond the pale'." p. 102
"Laws had to be translated into terms the British could understand and apply. A complicated, often chaotic and always fluid society like India was 'redefined by the British to be a place of rules and orders; once the British had defined to their satisfaction what they construed as Indian rules and customs, then the Indians has to conform to these constructions'." p. 103
"The pathbreaking writer and thinker, Benedict Anderson, has convincingly pointed out that identities uniting large numbers of people could arise only after a certain technological level had been attained. It is not seriously disputed that the sharper articulation of identities encompassing broad communities is relatively a recent phenomenon, nor that such identities have been 'imagined' and 'invented' to a great extent, as Anderson famously postulated. The British ruled just as this kind of identity-creation was becoming possible, thanks to modern developments in transport and communication. Whereas the Great Mughal Akbar might have used such technologies to fuse his diverse people together, the British used them to separate, classify and divide." p. 104
It is also true that "the British, knowingly or unknowingly, helped solidify and perpetuate the iniquities of the caste system. Since the British came from a hierarchical society with an entrenched class system, they instinctively tended to look for a similar one in India. They began by anatomizing Indian society into 'classes' that they referenced as being 'primarily religious' in nature." p. 104
as a result of "a concrete encounter with colonial modernity during two hundred years of British domination ... colonialism made caste what is today'." p. 104, quoting from the American anthropologist Nicholas Dirks' book "Castes of Mind"
"In fact, caste, he [Dirks] says, 'was just one category among many others, one way of organising and representing identity. Moreover, caste was not a single category or even a single logic of categorisation, even for Brahmins, who were the primary beneficiaries of the caste idea... Under colonialism, caste was thus made out to be far more pervasive, far more totalizing, and far more uniform than it had been before'..." p. 105
"[A]lternative identities, sub-castes, clans and other formulations also existed and flourished in different ways at different places. The idea of the four-fold caste order stretching across all of India and embracing its complex civilisational expanse was only developed, modern scholars assert with considerable evidence, under the peculiar circumstances of British colonial rule." p. 105
"The Brahmins enjoyed British patronage over other groups and began considering themselves above all other castes, whim the British, internalizing Brahmin prejudice, thought of as lower castes.
The result was a remarkable preponderance of Brahmins in positions of importance in the British Raj. Brahmins, who were no more than a tenth of the population, occupied over 90 per cent of the positions available to Indians in government services, except the most menial ones..." p. 107
"The census joined the map and the museum as tools of British imperial dominance in the nineteenth century... The census reconfirmed the process of defining castes, allocating them certain attributes and inventing extraordinary labels for entire communities, such as 'martial races' and 'criminal tribes'.
"The British could find no one to tell them authoritatively where or in what number any particular community was; the census commissioners discovered that boundary lines among Hindus, Sikhs and Jains barely existed, and that several Hindu and Muslim groups in different parts of the country shared similar social and cultural practices with regard to marriage, festivals, food, and worship. This went against the colonial assumption that communities must be mutually exclusive and that a person had to belong to one community or another..." p. 109
"[C]aste competition had been largely unknown in British days; caste consciousness had never been made so explicit as in the late nineteenth century." p. 110
"Religion became a useful means of divide and rule: the Hindu Muslim divide was, as the American scholar of religion Peter Gottschalk documents, defined, highlighted and fomented by the British as a deliberate strategy..." p. 111
The Americans in Iraq learnt something from the British!
"By excluding Muslims from the essential national narrative, the nineteenth century colonial interpretation of Indian history helped give birth in the twentieth to the two-nation theory that eventually divided the country." p. 112 (See also the BBC's Partition: Roots and Legacy)
"The facts are clear: large-scale conflicts between Hindus and Muslims (religiously defined), only began under colonial rule. Many other kinds of social strife were labelled religious due ti the colonists' Orientalist assumption that religion was the fundamental division in Indian society." p. 114
"Islam came to Kerala not by the sword, as it did in northern India, but through traders, travellers and missionaries, who brought its message of equality and brotherhood to the coastal people." p. 116
"Looking at peninsular south India at the time of the Muslim invasions (from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries), Cynthia Talbot observed that since a majority of medieval South India's population continued to be non-Muslim, even within the regions where Muslims were politically dominant, the two societies always overlapped...
When Allan Octavian Hume founded the Indian National Congress he actively welcomed Indians of all faiths to the organisation; its first few presidents included Hindus, Christians, Parsis and Muslims. The British did not approve of Hume's liberal attitude... Instead, the British watched the rise to prominence of Congress, a secular body transcending religion, with growing disapproval, and pronounced it a Hindu-dominated organization. They instigated a Muslim nobleman, Nawab Khwaja Salimullah of Dacca, to start a rival organization in 1906 for his co-religionists alone, the Muslim League.
The British deliberately 'sold' the partition of Bengal to Muslims as promoting their interests...
The British made no effort to hide their partiality. Herbert Risley ,the architect of the scheme, admitted frankly that 'one of our main objects is to split up and thereby weaken a solid body if opponents to our rule." pp. 116-17
"In 1916, Motila Nehru was chosen by the Congress to draft, together with a brilliant young Muslim lawyer called Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the principles that would govern cooperation with the Muslim League." p. 118
"The British-conducted censuses had overt political significance, since the census numbers were crucial to the political debates at the beginning of the twentieth century. They were ignored in constituting the British Indian Army, in which Muslims accounted for 50 per cent of the Indians serving in uniform despite being only 20 per cent of the population" p. 119
"... Englishmen who would have shuddered at the idea of allowing the Jews of Golders Green to vote separately in London elections enthusiastically arranged separate electorates for the Muslims of India, where Muslim voters could only vote for Muslim candidates, Sikhs for Sikhs, and Christians for Christians. The practice prompted Will Durant to observe that the British approach 'intensifies and encourages the racial and religious divisions which statemanship would seek to heal'." p. 120
"As Alex von Tunzelmann noted in her history, Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire, when 'the British started to define "communities" based on religious identity and attach political representation to them, many Indians stopped accepting the diversity of their own thoughts and began to ask themselves in which of the boxes they belonged... Thus the British can be largely blamed for the creation of previously -non-existent Shia-Sunni tensions within the Muslim population of Lucknow... As the scholar Keith Hjortshoj recounts: 'By 1905, religious rhetoric between Shias and Sunnis had reached such heights that Sunnis in Lucknow did not join in the Marsiyah elegies during Muharram, but instead recited a praise of the first three Caliphs called Madhe-Sahaba." The British "enacted laws against practices by Sunnis that could be offensive to Shias..." p. 121-22
"'The British are not a spiritual people. They are either a fighting race or a commercial nation. It would be throwing pearls before swine to appeal to them in the name of higher morality or justice or on ethical grounds. They are a self-relaint people, who can appreciate self-respect and self-reliance even in their opponents'." said the nationalist Lala Lajpat Raj. p. 124
"[A]larmed by the growing popularity of the Congress, the British counted upon what the viceroy, Lord Linlithgow, called 'the potency of provincial autonomy to destroy the effectiveness of Congress as an all-Indian instrument of revolution... The electoral system was also stacked in favour of rural representation in order to get more landlords elected whose interests would diverge from the socialist programmes of Congress's national leaders." p. 127
However, "[t]o the surprise of their supporters and their critics, the Congress ministries in the nine provinces had conducted themselves as able stewards of the governmental system of the British Raj. For the most part they did little to dismantle oppressive British laws, and in some cases proved as zealous in arresting radicals as the British themselves had been." p. 127
"Nehru's abhorrence of fascism was so great that he would gladly have led a free India into war on the side of the democracies, provided that choice was made by Indians and nit imposed upon them by the British." p. 128
Note the narrow definition of "democracy" by Thahroor. He calls the coloniser whose list of crimes speaks volumes in the book a "democracy". What he calls "democracies" of the time were imperial powers subjugating hundred of millions of people, plundering their wealth and starving and murdering them.
[W]hen Germany's invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939 led Britain to declare war upon it, Indians noted the irony of the English fighting to defend sovereignty of a weak country resisting the Brute force of foreign conquest—precisely what Indian nationalists were doing against British imperialism. So Britain would fight Germany for doing to Poland what Britain had been doing to India for nearly two hundred years.
Nehru blamed British appeasement for the fall of Spain to the fascists, the betrayal of Ethiopia to the Italians, and the selling out of Czechoslovakia to the Nazis: he wanted India to have no part of the responsibility for British policy, which he saw as designed to protect the narrow class-interests of a few imperialists." p. 128
1940 "was the year in which Churchill confidently expressed the belief that the British empire would last a thousand years." p. 130
"In December 1941 ... despite the opposition of Winston Churchill, the War Cabinet in London authorized the release of all the imprisoned Congressmen. Nehru hoped in vain for some policy declaration by the British that would enable him to commit India to the Allied cause, but the reactionary Churchill and his blinkered representatives in New Delhi went the other way, with Churchill ...explicitly declaring that the principles of the Atlantic Charter would not apply to India." p. 131
"I hate the Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion."
"Churchill had strong views on Gandhi ... [H]e had notoriously declared: 'It alarming and nauseating to see Mr Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well known in the east, striding half naked up the steps of the viceregal palace, while he is till organising and conducting a campaign if civil disobedience, to parlay on equal terms with the representative of the Emperor-King'. (Ghandi had nothing in common with fakirs, Muslim spiritual mendicants, but Churchill was rarely accurate about India.) 'Gandhi-ism and all it stands for,' declared Churchill, 'will, sooner or later, have to be grappled with and finally crushed.' In such matters Churchill was the most reactionary of Englishmen, with views so extreme they cannot be excused as being reflective of their times: in fact Churchill's statements appalled most of his contemporaries. Even the positive gloss placed on him today seems inexcusable: 'He put himself at the head of a movement of irreconcilable imperialist romantics,' wrote Boris Johnson in his recent admiring biography of Churchill. 'Die-hard defenders of the Raj and the God-given right of every pink-jowled Englishmen to sit in his veranda and ... glory in the possession of India." p. 132
"Ghandi 'should not be released on the account of the mere threat of fasting,' Churchill told the Cabinet. 'We should be rid of a bad man and an enemy of the Empire if he died.' He was quite prepared to facilitate the process, suggesting that the Mahatma should be 'bound hand and foot at the gates of Delhi, and let the viceroy sit on the back of a giant elephant and trample [the Mahatma] into the dirt.'" p. 133
"The British had not covered themselves with glory during the war [World War II]. They had run a military dictatorship in a country that they had claimed to be preparing for democracy. They had presided over one of the worst famines in human history, the Bengal Famine of 1943, while diverting food (on Churchill's personal orders)from starving civilians to well-supplied Tommies." p. 134
"London, under the Labour Party, exhausted by war, was determined to rid itself of its Indian empire. In February1946, Prime Minister Attlee announced the dispatch of a Cabinet Mission to India 'to discuss with leaders of Indian opinion the framing of an Indian Constitution'. The endgame had begun." pp. 136-37
The American journalist Philip Talbot "felt that Nehru had simply not realised that Britain was exhausted, near bankrupt, unwilling and unable to despatch the 60,000 British troops the government in London estimated would be required to reassert its control in India. London wanted to cut and run, and if the British could not leave behind a united India, they were prepared to 'cut' the country quite literally before running." p. 138
As Nehru's biographer M. J. Akbar, "put it, 'Pakistan was created by Jinnah's will and Britain's willingness'— not by Nehru's wilfulness." p. 139
Jinnah "was determined to obtain Pakistan. The Muslim League leader declared 16 August 1946 as 'Direct Action Day' to drive home this demand. Thousands of Muslims Leaguers took to the streets in an orgy of violence, looting and mayhem, and 16,000 innocents were killed in the resulting clashes, particularly in Calcutta. The police and army stood idly by: it seemed the British had decided to leave their former imperial capital to the mob." p. 140
"Nehru .. was at his most conciliatory, but Jinnah saw in the British position confirmation that his party's fortunes were in the ascendent, and escalated his demands. To Nehru it seemed the British learnt nothing from the failure of the policy of appeasement in Europe in the 1930s."
My comment: It was not about learning history; it was about deliberate calculated policies. In the case of appeasement in Europe, Nazim and Fascism were seen as a bulwark against "communism". In India, the British too the policy of divide et impera to its extreme end for longer strategical objectives. The division of the "Arab world" into nation states was another example.
Viscount Mountbatten of Burma, the outgoing Supreme Allied Commander in Southeast Asia, and his advisors drew up a 'Plan Balkan' that would have transferred power to the provinces rather than to a central government, leaving them free to join a larger union (or not). The British kept Nehru in the dark while Balkan Plan was reviewed (and revised) in London—all the more ironic for an empire that liked to claim it had unified India...
A long, passionate and occasionally incoherent note of protest from Nehru to Mountbatten killed the plan. But the only alternative was partition." p. 143
"Gandhi went to Mountbatten and suggested that India could be kept unified if Jinnah were offered the leadership of the whole country. Nehru and Patel both gave that idea a short shrift, and Mountbatten did not seem to take it seriously." p. 144
"Nehru imagined that the rioting and violence that had racked the country over the League's demand for Pakistan would die down once that demand had been granted, but he was wrong. The killing and mass displacement worsened as people sought frantically to be on the 'right' side of the lines the British were to draw across their homeland." pp. 144-45
"The task of dividing the two nations was assigned to Sir Cyril Radcliffe, a lawyer who had never been to India before and knew nothing of its history, society or traditions. Radcliffe drew up his maps in forty days, dividing provinces, districts, villages, homes and hearts—and promptly scuttled home to Britain, never to return to India." p. 147 (See also BBC online India Partition: Roots and Legacy)
"If Britain's greatest accomplishment was the creation of a single unit called India, fulfilling the aspirations of visionary emperors from Ashoka to Akbar, then its greatest failure must be the shambles of that original Brexit—cutting and running from the land they had claimed to rule for its betterment, leaving behind a million dead, thirteen million displaced, billions of rupees of property destroyed, and the flames of communal blazing hatred hotly across the ravaged land. No greater indictment of the failures of the British rule in India can be found than e tragic manner of the ending." p. 148
The Myth of Enlightened Despotism
"There has been a tendency on the part of many, including several Anglophile Indians, to see British rule as essentially benign, a version of 'enlightened despotism' ..."
"This view is either naïve or self-serving ... The most obvious example relates to the famines the British caused and mismanaged,; to the system of forced emigration of Indians by transportation and indentured labour; and to the brutality with which dissent was suppressed." p. 149
"As a result of what one can only call the British Colonial Holocaust, thanks to economic policies ruthlessly enforced by Britain, between 30 and 35 million Indians needlessly died of starvation during the Raj. Millions of tonnes of wheat were exported from India to Britain even as famine raged. When relief camps were set up, the inhabitants were barely fed and nearly all died.
"It is striking that the last large-scale famine to take place in India was under British rule; none has taken place since, because Indian democracy has been more responsive to the needs of drought-affected and poverty-stricken Indian than the British rulers ever were." p. 150
"The fatality figures are horrifying: from 1770 to 1900, 25 million Indians are estimated to have died in famines, including 15 million in the five famines in the second half of the nineteenth century. The famines of the twentieth century probably took the tatal of over 35 million. William Digby pointed out that in the entire 107 years from 1793 to 1900, only an estimated 5 million people died in all the wars around the world combined, whereas in just ten years 1891-1900, 19 million had died in India in famines alone. While comparisons of human deaths are always invidious, the 35 million who died of famine and epidemics during the Raj does remind one of the 25 million who died in Stalin's collectivization drive and political purges, the 45 million who died during Mao's cultural revolution, and the 55 million who died world-wide during World War II." pp. 150-51
"The British tended to base their refusal to intervene in famines with adequate government measures on a combination of three sets of considerations: free trade principles (do not interfere with market forces), Malthusian doctrine (growth in population beyond the ability of the land to sustain it would inevitably lead to deaths) and financial prudence (don't spend money we haven't budgeted for). On these grounds, Britain had not intervened to save lives in Ireland, or prevented emigration to America, during the famine there." 151
Thus the Governor for Bengal, Sir Cecil Beadon "was more concerned with fealty to the free-market principles of Adam Smith, and the damage to his political reputation, were he seen to be intervening in the 'natural laws' of economics, than the tragedy of the deaths of people in Orissa." p. 152
"During the very 1866 Orissa Famine that would so disturb [the Marquess of ] Salisbury's sleep, while a million and a half people starved to death, the British insouciantly exported 200 million pounds of rice to Britain." p. 152
Typical of many who today blame climate change and its consequences on everybody, an official report into the Bengal Famine blamed the public and the government of Bengal. "[W]hen you blame a tragedy on everybody, you blame it on nobody, " writes Shashi Thahroor. p. 53
"Before the British came, Indians rulers had supported the people in times of food scarcity by policies of tax relief, fixing grain prices and banning food exports from famine affected regions. There was also a strong tradition of personal charity, especially during periods of scarcity." p. 153
"In keeping with established British policy, Viceroy Lord Lytton notoriously issued orders prohibiting any reduction in the price of food during a famine. 'There is to be no interference of any kind on the part of Government with the object of reducing the price of food,' he declared, instructing district officers to 'discourage relief works in every possible way ... More distress is not a sufficient reason for opening a relief work'." p. 154
When an official named Sir Richard Temple "had, in the earlier Orissa Famine of 1866, imported rice from Burma for starving Oriyas, The Economist [magazine] bitterly attacked him for allowing Indians to think 'it is the duty of the Government to keep them alive'... Though the British created 'work camps' as a form of famine relief (so the starving could use their labour to earn their bread), the most significant legacy this official [Temple] left behind was the 'Temple wage' which, in Mike Davis's words [in Late Victorian Holocausts], 'provided less sustenance for hard labour' in British labour camps during the famine than the infamous Buchenwald concentration camp's inmates would receive eighty years later.
In other words, the British cannot be accused of 'doing nothing' during the 1876-77 famine, but rather of doing much to worsen its impact. India's grain continued to be exported to global markets, just as Stalin was to do during the 'collectivisation famines' that beset Russia and Ukraine in the 1930s: in effect, as Professor Mike Davis has written, 'London was eating India's bread' while Indians were dying in a famine. To add insult to injury, the British increased taxes on the peasantry, and railed against those too hungry to be productive as 'indolent' and railed against those too hungry to be productive as 'indolent' and unused to work'." 155
"[T]he lack of adequate infrastructure and transportation to get food from areas where it was plentiful to areas of scarcity, which was cited by Florence Nightingale as a major reason for famine ... was irrelevant to British India after the advent of the railways. And yet the worst famines of the nineteenth century occurred after thousands of miles of railway lines had been built...
"The Daily Mail declared in 1897 that 'it falls to us to defend our Empire from the spectral armies of hunger ... our weapon is good honest British money'." p. 158
By the time it ended, "nearly four million Bengalis starved to death in the 1943 famine. Nothing can excuse the odious behaviour of Winston Churchill, who deliberately ordered the diversion of food from starving Indian civilians to well-supplied British soldiers and even to top up European stockpiles in Greece and elsewhere. 'The starvation of anyway underfed Bengalis is less serious' than that of 'sturdy Greeks', he argued. Grain for the Tommies, bread for home consumption in Britain (27 million tonnes of imported grains, a wildly excessive amount), and generous buffer stocks in Europe (for yet-to-be-liberated Greeks and Yugoslavs) were Churchill's priorities, not the life or death of his Indian subjects. When reminded of the suffering of his victims his response was typically Churchillian: the famine was their own fault, he said, 'breeding like rabbits'. When officers of conscience pointed out in a telegram to the prime minister the scale of the tragedy caused by his decisions, Churchill's only reaction was to ask peevishly: 'why hasn't Gandhi died yet?'" p. 160
"It is also telling that there were no great hospitals established by the Raj anywhere in the country: strikingly, everyone of the major modern medical establishments of British India was established by the generosity of Indian benefactors, even if, for understandable reasons, these Indian donors often named their hospitals after British colonial grandees." pp. 161-62
"Some 1.9 to 3.5 million Indians (the numbers vary in different sources, depending on who is counted), moved halfway across the globe, most involuntarily, under the colonial project. They played their roles as cogs in the wheels of the imperial machinery, toiling on sugar plantations, building roads and buildings, clearing jungle. Many suffered horribly on harrowing journeys and some perished en route; others endured terrible privations." p. 163
"[I]n just one year, 1856-57, and one one route, Kolkata to Trinidad, the percentage of deaths of indentured labour on the transportee ships reached appalling levels: 12.3 per cent of all males, 18.5 per cent of the females, 28 per cent of the boys and 36 per cent of the girls perished, as did a tragic 55 per cent of all infants. To make an admittedly invidious comparison, the deaths of slaves on the notorious 'Middle Passage' was estimated at around 12.5 per cent. To be an indentured Indian labourer transported to the Caribbean on British ships was to enter a life-and-death lottery in which your chances of survival were significantly worse than those of a shackled African slave." pp. 163-64
The British historian Niall Ferguson "dismisses this immensely painful and disruptive displacement as 'this mobilisation of cheap and probably underemployed Asian labour to grow rubber and dig gold'." p. 165
"Surely they [the British] could not have behaved in India like the murderous Belgians in the Congo?
They did. Not all the time, and not with sustained and inhuman brutality consistently deployed by King Leopold's amoral killers, but they were no exception to the basic rule that imperialism extends itself through brutal force. 'Most of the time,' says the historian Jon Wilson, 'the actions of British imperial administrators were driven by irrational passions rather than calculated plans. Force was rarely efficient. The assertion of violent power usually exceeded the demands of any particular commercial or political interest'." p. 166
"Though the family of the Mughal Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar surrendered peacefully to the British forces that captured Delhi, they were treated abominably. Most of his sixteen sons were tried and hanged, while several were shot in cold blood, after first being stripped of their arms and, of course, their jewels. Atrocities also took place under civilian rule, on official orders and against civilian victims." p. 167
In the Jallianwala Bagh massacre British troops used "1,650 rounds, killed at least 379 people (the number the British were prepared to admit to) and wounded 1,137. Barely a bullet was wasted...
Brigadier General Reginald Dyer "did not order his men to fire in the air, or at the feet of their targets. They fired, at his orders, into the chests, the faces, and the wombs of the unarmed and defenceless crowd... Dyer was an efficient killer rather than a crazed maniac..." The massacre "represented the worst that colonialism could become, and by letting it occur, the British crossed that point of no return that exists only in the minds of men—that point which, in any unequal relationship, both master and subject must instinctively respect if their relationship is to survive." p. 169-170
"The historian A. J. P Taylor calls the massacre 'the decisive moment when Indians were alienated from British rule'. No other 'punishment' in the name of law and order has similar casualties: 'The Peterloo Massacre [in England] had claimed about eleven lives. Across the Atlantic, British soldiers provoked into firing on Boston Common had killed five men and were accused of deliberate massacre. In response to the self-proclaimed Easter Rebellion of 1916 in Dublin, the British had executed sixteen Irishmen.' Jallianwala confirmed how little the British valued Indian lives." p. 171
"It was only only when a thoroughly documented report was prepared by the investigative team of the Indian National Congress that the British admitted what had happened. Dyer was relived of his command and censured by the House of Commons, but promptly exonerated by the House of Lords and allowed to retire on a handsome pension. Rudyard Kipling, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature and the poetic voice of British imperialism, hailed him as 'The Man Who Saved Indian'. p. 173
Jawaharlal Nehru later wrote, "I realized then, more vividly than I had ever done before, how brutal and immoral imperialism was and how it had eaten into the souls of the British upper classes'." p. 173
"Sir William Hicks, home minister in the Conservative government of Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, had stated the matter bluntly in 1928: 'I know it is said in missionary meetings that we conquered India to raise the level of the Indians. That is cant. We conquered India as an outlet for the goods of Britain. We conquered Indian by the sword, and by the sword we shall hold it. I am not such a hypocrite as to say we hold India for the Indians. We went with a yardstick in one hand and a sword in the other, and with the latter we continue to hold them helpless while we force the former down their throats.' p. 174.
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