an era of darkness quotes

Nalanda University, which enjoyed international renown when Oxford and Cambridge were not even gleams in their founders’ eyes, employed 2,000 teachers and housed 10,000 students in a remarkable campus that featured a library nine storeys tall. “The Empire, in Hobsbawm’s evocative words, was ‘so easily won, so narrowly based, so absurdly easily ruled thanks to the devotion of a few and the passivity of the many.” When reminded of the suffering of his victims his response was typically Churchillian: The famine was their own fault, he said, for ‘breeding like rabbits’. Nor does the ceremonial visit to the site in 1997 by Queen Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh, who left their signatures in the visitors’ book, without even a redeeming comment.Yet another way of demanding reparation, the author demands is teaching unromanticized colonial history in British School as he believes that the British public is woefully ignorant of the realities of British empire, and what it meant to its subject peoples. The colleges, like the British schools in India, heavily emphasized rote learning, the regurgitation of which was what the examinations tested.” “Mahatma Gandhi was as devout a Rambhakt as you can get — he died from a Hindu assassin’s bullet with the words “Hé Ram” on his lips — but he always said that for him, Ram and Rahim were the same deity, and that if Hinduism ever taught hatred of Islam or of non-Hindus, “it is doomed to destruction.” “Agood part of the British case for having created India’s political unity and democracy lies in the evolution of three of democracy’s building-blocks during the colonial era: a free press, an incipient parliamentary system and the rule of law.

The few unarguable benefits the English language, tea, and cricket were never actually intended for the benefit of the colonized but introduced to serve the interests of the colonizers.

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?” Over the next several decades, the East India Company, backed by the British government, extended its control over most of India, ruling with a combination of extortion, double-dealing, and outright corruption backed by violence and superior force.

“Bengalis say when offered cod, we still have other fish to fry.” Other readers will always be interested in your opinion of the books you've read.

Everyday low prices and free delivery on eligible orders. It is said that when Nadir Shah and his forces returned home, they had stolen so much from India that all taxes were eliminated in Persia for the next three years.” His short book, The Case for India, remains a classic, a profoundly empathetic work.“The British conquest of India was the invasion and destruction of a high civilization by a trading company (The British East India Company) utterly without scruple or principle, careless of art and greedy of gain, over-running with fire and sword a country temporarily disordered and helpless, bribing and murdering, annexing and stealing, and beginning that career of illegal and legal plunder which has now (1930) gone on ruthlessly for one hundred and seventy three years.”The conquest of India, author maintains was not of a barren land by East India Company but of a glittering jewel of the medieval world. You can write a book review and share your experiences. When the British left it was just above 3 per cent. “India’s share of the world economy was 23 per cent, as large as all of Europe put together. Post was not sent - check your email addresses! “One of the lessons you learn from history is that history sometimes teaches the wrong lessons.” “India’s villages were not self-reliant republics that lived in blissful isolation. It may takes up to 1-5 minutes before you received it. Brilliantly narrated and passionately argued, An Era of Darkness will serve to correct many misconceptions about one of the most contested periods of Indian history. In 1930, the American historian and philosopher Will Durant wrote that Britain s conscious and deliberate bleeding of India... [was the] greatest crime in all history . He wrote this book following one of his speeches at Oxford, debating a case for reparations to India from Britain for its imperial rule of 200 years over India. To take just the first four years of the twentieth century, as Durant did: 272,000 died of plague in 1901, 500,000 in 1902, 800,000 in 1903, and 1 million in 1904 the death toll rising every year.

Buy An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India by Shashi Tharoor (ISBN: 9789383064656) from Amazon's Book Store. By the time the British departed India, it had dropped to just over 3 per cent. Britain’s rise for 200 years was financed by its depredations in India.” In 1757, under the command of Robert Clive, Company forces defeated the ruling Nawab Siraj-ud-Daula of Bengal at Plassey, through a combination of superior artillery and even more superior chicanery. It was ironic, said Bryan, that British rule was sought to be justified on the grounds that ‘it keeps the people from killing each other, and the plague praised because it removes those whom the Government has saved from slaughter!’.”

An extra ordinary reviewFill in your details below or click an icon to log in:Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email. “historian William Dalrymple quotes a Mughal official named Narayan Singh as asking after 1765, ‘when we have to take orders from a handful of traders who have not yet learned to wash their bottoms?” ― Shashi Tharoor, An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India

He demands a moral reparation from British and acknowledgement of the wrongdoings that it meted out to the Indians over two centuries. Author claims India was a far greater industrial and manufacturing nation than any in Europe or any other in Asia. It has distorted the voting preferences of an electorate that knows which individuals it wants but not necessarily which policies. This state of affairs continued until 1857, when large numbers of the Company s Indian soldiers spearheaded the first major rebellion against colonial rule.