Absence of mind

A few years ago I got into a flamewar over at Ace's place, which I'd started by praising the British influence (overall) in India. In those days I did not know about the British part in the famines, especially the one in Bengal 1943. During that altercation my counterparty put me some knowledge, as Paul Anka would say, about the Maratha.

I'd read my Flashman and thought I was pretty good at India over the AD 1800s; back when I had Indian-origin colleagues, in the 1990s, they agreed I was pretty darn good at nineteenth-century trivia. It turns out the Maratha were a century prior, so I had not heard of them. Why should I have heard of them? Europe is my subcontinent; India is not. But by that token - I should have shut up about matters concerning which I had no 'ilm. I took the L, as we say now, and moved on.

So, here is Razib Khan, who does know the Marathas, given that he is of the (Chittagong / Rohingya) Bengalis. Khan is here to put ALL of us ALL the knowledge.

Khan reviews Peace, Poverty and Betrayal: A New History of British India by one Roderick Matthews. Matthews - endorsed by Khan - has a revisionism perhaps less violent than McMeekin's. He figures that the Brits in India should not be associated with the Brits back home; because the Brits in India were stationary-bandits who kept disobeying Westminster. But although they were pretty-much just pirates, in the fine old Francis Drake and Henry Morgan tradition, the East India Company did at least try to work within the system.

At first in the 1680s The System meant - Aurangzeb. Say what you will about 'Zeb, he weren't no pussy. The Brits bent the knee to him - full prostration, in fact. Owww. But later, Delhi raised up sultans who weren't nearly as strong as ol 'Zeb. And the Brits got sick of the kowtow.

The Marathas, a mostly-Hindu coalition, are today the toast of Bollywood. These guys fended off the Brits too, as they took over a swathe of Mughal territory. But they were also piratical when they wanted to be, for instance in the AD 1750s launching a murderous crusade against Bengal; which adventure Razib Khan, Bengali as he is, will not spot them. Around that time Robert Clive also invaded Bengal but in this case, made an effort to rule it, not (just) to loot it. Which meant Clive was protecting it. Credit to Clive.

Credit to Razib, and to Matthews, for informing us of all this. Mind you, Clive was doing a Cortes; not exactly having permission to carve out this little empire.

Clive's approach would be vindicated during the sepoy mutiny to which Bengal - like the Sikhs - did not participate.

Overall it looks like the British approach was to uplift whom they could, creating an educated class in hopes that class might educate the next generation. The British didn't ever want to annex India which would have brought its various constituencies into the London Parliament. This was about the best approach the British could have mounted.

There were failures along the way, but (1943 aside) many of those failures were due to the Brits not wanting to uplift the local forms of land-ownership and cultivation. Again: India is not our subcontinent. They got different crops and different seasons over there. Chesterton left the fence up. Unfortunately that meant India didn't get the technologic advances that England got, or that Canada got for that matter. Mind you... that's why it was so important to teach the locals how to science.