An Era Of Darkness: The British Empire In India Quotes
"History is neither for excuses nor for revenge."
"India was governed for the benefit of Britain."
"Every kind of manufacture or product known to the civilized world had long been produced in India."
"The bones of the cotton weavers were bleaching the plains of India."
"India had enjoyed a 25 per cent share of the global trade in textiles in the early eighteenth century."
"The British systematically set about destroying India’s textile manufacturing and exports."
"India still grew cotton, but mainly to send to Britain."
"The British conquest of India was the invasion and destruction of a high civilization by a trading company utterly without scruple or principle."
"The whole revenue system resolved itself, on the part of the public officers, into habitual extortion and injustice."
"The British had subjugated a vast land through the power of their artillery and the cynicism of their amorality."
"The sacrifice that Indian troops made for the advancement of British interests was acknowledged neither in compensation to them nor the families they left behind."
"India was treated as a cash cow; the revenues that flowed into London’s treasury were described as ‘the redemption of a nation…a kind of gift from heaven’."
"The British liked to joke that they had acquired their empire in India ‘in a fit of absence of mind’."
"The British destruction of textile competition from India led to the first great deindustrialization of the modern world."
"In their prosperity will be our strength, in their contentment our security, and in their gratitude our best reward."
"Who hold Zam-Zammah, that "fire-breathing dragon", hold the Punjab, for the great green-bronze piece is always first of the conqueror’s loot."
"‘No, not yet,’ and the sky said ‘No, not there.’"
"The whole attitude of Government to the people it governs is vitiated."
"It would be impossible to place Indian civilians in places where co-operation with military or military police-officers would be essential."
"India is, in fact, now administered by successive relays of English carpet-baggers, men who go out with carpet-bags and return with chests."
"The British had very little respect for the Indian aristocracy they were indulging."
"‘My name is George Nathaniel Curzon / I am a most superior person / My hair is black, my face is sleek / I dine at Blenheim every week’."
"The Government of India is not Indian, it is English."
"Hundreds, if not thousands, on their way from Burma perished without food or drink."
"It is not the Roman System of thoroughly Latinizing and assimilating the subject races that is tried by England, but the system of exploitation and degradation of a race by another for the material benefits of the latter."
"Divide et impera was the old Roman maxim, and it should be ours."
"The British had a particular talent for creating and exaggerating particularist identities."
"Caste had broadly been a mobile form of social organization."
"The British approach inevitably suffered from the prejudices and limitations of the age."
"Nothing embraces the whole of India, nothing, nothing."
"It is time for twenty-first-century India to get the government out of the bedroom."
"Our religion is sublime, pure, and beneficent. Theirs is mean, licentious, and cruel."
"India had arguably been a far more meritocratic society before the British Raj."
"The British made these divisions such an article of faith."
"The very notion of linguistic identities emerged from the British colonial project."
"Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially."
"At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom."
"A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation long suppressed finds utterance."
"This is no time for petty and destructive criticism, no time for ill-will or blaming others."
"We have to build the noble mansion of free India where all her children may dwell."
"A single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia."
"It stands pre-eminent even among the languages of the West."
"The languages of western Europe civilised Russia."
"We have to educate a people who cannot at present be educated by means of their mother-tongue."
"The intellectual improvement of those classes of the people who have the means of pursuing higher studies can at present be affected only by means of some language not vernacular amongst them."
"I cannot doubt that they will do for the Hindoo what they have done for the Tartar."
"The fact that the Hindoo law is to be learned chiefly from Sanscrit books, and the Mahometan law from Arabic books, has been much insisted on, but seems not to bear at all on the question."
"It would be manifestly absurd to educate the rising generation with a view to a state of things which we mean to alter before they reach manhood."
"As soon as the Code is promulgated, the Shasters and the Hedaya will be useless to a moonsiff or a Sudder Ameen."
"The true textbook for the pupil is his teacher."
"European subordination of Asia was not merely economic and political and military. It was also intellectual and moral and spiritual."
"These passengers are herded into almost barren coaches like animals bound for the slaughter, twenty or more to one compartment."
"The Indian mind has been made barren of any originality, and deliberately kept in ignorance."
"All Indian aspirations and development of strong character have been suppressed."
"The people are kept under an illusion in order to make them more amenable to British control."
"The people’s character is deliberately debased, their mind is denationalized and perpetually kept in ignorance and fed with stories of England’s greatness and ‘mission’ in the world."
"There was a moral and social breakdown, as well as an administrative breakdown."
"A large part of the community lived in plenty while others starved, and there was much indifference in face of suffering."
"Corruption was widespread throughout the province and in many classes of society."
"Society, together with its organs, failed to protect its weaker members."
"This cold-blooded approval of that deed shocked me greatly."
"I realized then, more vividly than I had ever done before, how brutal and immoral imperialism was."
"The Indian people feel that construction is undertaken principally in the interests of the English commercial and moneyed classes."
"It assists in the further exploitation of our resources."
"The British government in India preferred to devote the limited resources it allocated to education to ‘universities where the language used was English, the history, literature, customs and morals taught were English."
"The total expenditure for education in India (in 1930) was less than half that in New York state alone."
"The appropriation for the army in India increased by twenty-one-and-a-half times the increase for education."
"Academia became the one available avenue for Indian advancement."
"The British saw precolonial Mughal history as consisting of a linear narration of events devoid of context or analysis."
"The British reconstructed ‘factual’ accounts of Indian historiography, adding more contextual analysis in a structured ‘European’ style."
"English literature as a subject of study was first devised by the British in India to advance their colonial interests."
"The study of history was deliberately designed to impress upon the student the superiority of all things British."
"The Indian Army was not created in India’s interests, but in those of Britain."
"The British had no intention of becoming one with the land."
"The British put in the minimum amount of investment to optimize their exploitation of Indian wealth."
"India could not have evolved into a more prosperous, united and modernizing power without the incubus of British rule."
"Despite all these wrongs and injustices, Indians readily forgave the British when they left."
"Indians cannot live without the railways set up entirely for British gain."
"The British left a society with 16 percent literacy, a life expectancy of 27."
"The British themselves flourished in these fields in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, while funding no great institutions in India."
"The British always stayed apart and aloof, a foreign presence, with foreign interests and foreign loyalties."
"The British were roundly condemned during their execution of their opium policy by every contemporary Indian nationalist grouping."
"History belongs in the past; but understanding it is the duty of the present."
"The British empire was always an open society for the British, not for non-whites or Indians."
"A nation's culture resides in the hearts and in the soul of its people."
"The only real prison is fear, and the only real freedom is freedom from fear."
"A small body of determined spirits fired by an unquenchable faith in their mission can alter the course of history."
"Peace is not merely a distant goal that we seek, but a means by which we arrive at that goal."
"To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment."