December 12, 2011, 6:23 am

New Delhi’s Controversial Birth

By DINYAR PATEL

Alkazi Foundation for The Arts via Associated PressThe Delhi Coronation Durbar of 1911 with Emperor King George V and Empress Queen Mary seated on the dais, in this file photo.

¶Few cities of recent vintage have a history as complicated and contested as New Delhi, which turned 100 on Monday. Now the seat of the world’s largest democracy, New Delhi began in 1911 as a grand imperial showpiece meant to stand for eternal British rule over the Indian subcontinent. But during its two decades of construction New Delhi became the stage upon which Indians gained increasing political advantage over a crumbling Raj.

Alkazi Foundation For The Arts via Associated PressCrowds gathered during The Delhi Coronation Durbar of 1911, in this file photo.

¶ New Delhi literally began as an imperial edict. In December 1911, King George V traveled to Delhi in order to be crowned emperor of India at an elaborate durbar, or gathering: he was the first reigning British monarch to step foot on Indian soil. After several days of ceremonies at a temporary city consisting of some 40,000 tents and featuring its own railway system, King George V offered two boons to his subjects: First, he revoked the partition of Bengal, an act that had unleashed violent anti-British agitation. Second, he announced the creation of a new city in the vicinity of Delhi to replace Calcutta as the imperial capital. The city, George hoped, would be a fusion of Indian and European architecture, according to a letter from his viceroy to one of his colleagues.

¶Herbert Baker and Edwin Lutyens, the two architects appointed to design much of the city, seemed to be curious choices for such a venture. Baker worked in South Africa, where he had become a disciple of the arch-imperialist Cecil Rhodes. Lutyens, who previously had mostly designed English country houses, was known for his occasional prejudiced outbursts against India. In a letter to his wife, for example, Lutyens described Indian architecture as “essentially the building style of children.” Even the Taj Mahal, he complained, was “small but very costly beer.” Both men reveled in their assignment to create a monument to imperialism. “Hurrah for despotism!” Baker wrote to Lutyens. “On the day you sail [to India] you should feel like Alexander when he crossed the Hellespont to conquer Asia.”

Arthur Gill/British Architectural LibraryViceroy’s House in Delhi, in this undated file photo.

¶In spite of their prejudices, Lutyens and Baker managed to create a remarkable assemblage at New Delhi that melded European and Indian architecture into an innovative whole. Lutyens’ Viceroy’s House had a dome modeled after the Buddhist stupa at Sanchi, commissioned in the third century B.C. by Ashoka. In order to battle Delhi’s blazing summer heat, Lutyens adapted Mughal techniques for indoor cooling by installing rooftop fountains that cascaded into the interior of buildings. Baker laced his classical Secretariat blocks with Mughal-style domes, cupolas and cornices. For other elements of their city plan, they took cues from Washington, Paris and Canberra in addition to Fatehpur Sikri and Jaipur.

¶New Delhi inspired a lively architectural debate amongst the uppermost echelons of British Indian society. But for Indians themselves, it became the object of resentment. Parts of the new city seemed completely antithetical to the Raj’s promises to Indian nationalists of gradual political reform. Above the entrances to his Secretariats, for example, Baker engraved a rather patronizing phrase: “Liberty will not descend to a people, A people must raise themselves to liberty, It is a blessing that must be earned before it can be enjoyed.” The engraving remains there today. Lutyens’ Viceroy’s House covered a greater area than Versailles and had an army of attendants, including several whose job was to shoo away pigeons. New Delhi emerged as a rigidly ordered and segregated city, with spacious bungalows for British officers in the south and poorly ventilated tenements for Indian peons in the north.

¶Indians protested the cost and extravagance of the new capital in the legislative assembly, the feeble predecessor to the Indian Parliament. Contrasting New Delhi’s opulence with the grinding poverty of the rest of the country, one legislator in 1921 complained that, “we have no right to feed our aesthetic sentiments at the expense of the poor tax-payers of India. And I cannot find any justification whatsoever why we should think that we should be better housed … when we really know that the country is actually starving and suffering.” In 1927, the chamber erupted in a chorus of “Shame, Shame” when British officials increased the budget for furnishing the Viceroy’s House.

¶Armed with limited budgetary powers, the assembly began chipping away at New Delhi’s construction budget and helped organize two committees to investigate ways for further reductions. As a result, many elements of New Delhi’s plan, such as extending the city’s processional boulevard, now Rajpath, to the Yamuna River, were discarded and remain unfinished even today. Leading Indian nationalists took a harder line against the city. Jawaharlal Nehru mocked the Viceroy’s House as the “chief temple where the High Priest officiated” and Mahatma Gandhi is rumored to have wanted to turn it into a hospital.

¶When New Delhi was officially inaugurated in 1931, it was a fundamentally incomplete city, littered with vacant plots and unfinished palaces. Due to the outrage over the cost of construction, British officials kept inaugural ceremonies to a bare minimum, something that was in marked contrast to the 1911 durbar. The power dynamics in the new city were starting to shift. At its center was a new Council House built for India’s expanded legislative assembly. As the Raj was forced to make further political concessions to the nationalists, the Council House, today home to India’s Parliament, became a hub of the city’s political life at the expense of the Viceroy’s House.

¶Ultimately, New Delhi served as the capital of the Raj for only 16 years before India became independent in 1947. Lutyens’ Viceroy’s House — decorated with stone bells that were meant never to ring and thereby never to herald the end of empire — became Rashtrapati Bhavan, the home of India’s ceremonial president. Colonial-era statues were dumped at the neglected durbar site. Reminders of the Raj still abound at every turn in modern New Delhi, but the Indian republic has managed to put its own stamp on the capital. At the eastern end of Rajpath lies an empty pavilion that once housed the marble statue of George V. It serves as a fitting symbol for an ancient civilization very much still in the process of refashioning itself as a democratic, egalitarian nation-state.

¶

Source: http://india.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/12/new-delhis-controversial-birth/?src=un&feedurl=http%3A%2F%2Fjson8.nytimes.com%2Fpages%2Fworld%2Fasia%2Findex.jsonp

From: Vinay Joshi <murdikar@gmail.com>

Indian Holocaust

Dear Friends,

This is to bring to your attention the horrid chapters of Indian history that were  never openly discussed.

RIGOROUS OVER TAXATION resulted in FAMINES

“All through the stifling summer of 1770 the people went on dying. The husbandmen sold their cattle;they sold their implements of agriculture; they devoured their seed grain; they sold their sons & daughters, till at length no buyer of children could be found; they ate leaves of trees and the grass of the field ; and in June 1770 the Resident at (Murshidabad) affirmed that the living were feeding on the dead. A third of the people of Bengal, numbering about 10 million,perished”

The Cambridge Economic History of India. Vol II,229

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DARK CHAPTERS OF BRITISH IMPERIALISM IN INDIA

or on our blog http://darkchaps.wordpress.com/

Regards,

Amitabh Soni

How Britain plundered colonial India – George Monbiot

Outsourcing Unrest
June 17, 2009

The 300 year colonial adventure is over at last, which is why Britain is in political crisis.

By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 9th June 2009

Why now? It’s not as if this is the first time our representatives have been caught out. The history of governments in all countries is the history of scandal, as those who rise to the top are generally the most ambitious, ruthless and unscrupulous people politics can produce. Pushing their own interests to the limit, they teeter perennially on the brink of disgrace, except when they fly clean over the edge. So why does the current ballyhoo threaten to destroy not only the government but also our antediluvian political system?

The past 15 years have produced the cash-for-questions racket, the Hinduja and Ecclestone affairs, the lies and fabrications which led to the invasion of Iraq, the forced abandonment of the BAE corruption probe, the cash-for-honours caper and the cash-for-amendments scandal. By comparison to the outright subversion of the functions of government in some of these cases, the expenses scandal is small beer. Any one of them should have prompted the sweeping political reforms we are now debating. But they didn’t.

The expenses scandal, by contrast, could kill the Labour party. It might also force politicians of all parties to address our injust voting system, the unelected House of Lords, the excessive power of the executive, the legalised blackmail used by the whips and a score of further anachronisms and injustices. Why is it different?

I believe that the current political crisis has little to do with the expenses scandal, still less to do with Gordon Brown’s leadership. It arises because our economic system can no longer extract wealth from other nations. For the past 300 years, the revolutions and reforms experienced by almost all other developed countries have been averted in Britain by foreign remittances.

The social unrest which might have transformed our politics was instead outsourced to our colonies and unwilling trading partners. The rebellions in Ireland, India, China, the Caribbean, Egypt, South Africa, Malaya, Kenya, Iran and other places we subjugated were the price of political peace in Britain. Following decolonisation, our plunder of other nations was sustained by the banks. Now, for the first time in three centuries, they can no longer deliver, and we must at last confront our problems.

There will probably never be a full account of the robbery this country organised, but there are a few snapshots. In his book Capitalism and Colonial Production, Hamza Alavi estimates that the resource flow from India to Britain between 1793 and 1803 was in the order of £2m a year, the equivalent of many billions today. The economic drain from India, he notes, “has not only been a major factor in India’s impoverishment … it has also been a very significant factor in the Industrial Revolution in Britain.”(1) As Ralph Davis observes in The Industrial Revolution and British Overseas Trade, from the 1760s onwards India’s wealth “bought the national debt back from the Dutch and others … leaving Britain nearly free from overseas indebtedness when it came to face the great French wars from 1793.”(2)

In France, by contrast, as Eric Hobsbawn notes in The Age of Revolution, “the financial troubles of the monarchy brought matters to a head.” In 1788, half of France’s national expenditure was used to service its debt: “the American War and its debt broke the back of the monarchy”(3).

Even as the French were overthrowing the ancien regime, Britain’s landed classes were able to strengthen their economic power, seizing common property from the country’s poor by means of enclosure. Partly as a result of remittances from India and the Caribbean, the economy was booming and the state had the funds to ride out political crises. Later, after smashing India’s own industrial capacity, Britain forced that country to become a major export market for our manufactured goods, sustaining industrial employment here (and avoiding social unrest) long after our products and processes became uncompetitive.

Colonial plunder permitted the British state to balance its resource deficits as well. For some 200 years a river of food flowed into this country from places like Ireland, India and the Caribbean. In The Blood Never Dried, John Newsinger reveals that in 1748 Jamaica alone sent 17,400 tons of sugar to Britain; by 1815 this had risen to 73,800 tons(4). It was all produced by stolen labour.

Just as grain was sucked out of Ireland at the height of its great famine, so Britain continued to drain India of food during its catastrophic hungers. In Late Victorian Holocausts, Mike Davis shows that Indian wheat exports to the UK doubled between 1876 and 1877 as subsistence there collapsed(5). Several million Indians died of starvation. In the North Western provinces the famine was wholly engineered by British policy, as their surplus production was exported to offset poor English harvests in 1876 and 1877(6).

Britain, in other words, outsourced famine as well as social unrest. There was terrible poverty in this country in the second half of the 19th Century, but not mass starvation. The bad harvest of 1788 helped precipitate the French Revolution, but the British state avoided such hazards. Others died on our behalf.

In the late 19th Century, Davis shows, Britain’s vast deficits with the United States, Germany and its white Dominions were balanced by huge annual surpluses with India and (as a result of the opium trade) China. For a generation “the starving Indian and Chinese peasantries … braced the entire system of international settlements, allowing England’s continued financial supremacy to temporarily co-exist with its relative industrial decline.”(7) Britain’s trade surpluses with India allowed the City to become the world’s financial capital.

Its role in British colonisation was not a passive one. The bankruptcy and subsequent British takeover of Egypt in 1882 was hastened by a loan from Rothschild’s bank whose execution, Newsinger records, amounted to “fraud on a massive scale”(8). Jardine Matheson, once the biggest narco-trafficking outfit in world history (it dominated the Chinese opium trade), later formed a major investment bank, Jardine Fleming. It was taken over by JP Morgan Chase in 2000.

We lost our colonies, but the plunder has continued by other means. As Joseph Stiglitz shows in Globalisation and its Discontents, the capital liberalisation forced on Asian economies by the IMF permitted northern traders to loot hundreds of billions of dollars, precipitating the Asian financial crisis of 1997-98(9). Poorer nations have also been strong-armed into a series of amazingly one-sided treaties and commitments, such as Trade Related Investment Measures, bilateral investment agreements and the EU’s Economic Partnership Agreements(10). If you have ever wondered how a small, densely-populated country which produces very little supports itself, I would urge you to study these asymmetric arrangements.

But now, as John Lanchester demonstrates in his fascinating essay in the London Review of Books, the City could be fatally wounded(11). The nation which relied on financial services may take generations to recover from their collapse. The great British adventure – three centuries spent pillaging the labour, wealth and resources of other countries – is over. We cannot accept this, and seek gleeful revenge on a government which can no longer insulate us from reality.

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. Hamza Alavi, 1982. Capitalism and Colonial Production, pp 62-63. Croom Helm, London.

2. Ralph Davis, 1979. The Industrial Revolution and British Overseas Trade, pp55-56. Leicester University Press.

3. Eric Hobsbawm, 1962. The Age of Revolution, p78. Abacus, London.

4. John Newsinger, 2006. The Blood Never Dried, p14. Bookmarks, London.

5. Mike Davis, 2001. Late Victorian Holocausts, p27. Verso, London.

6. ibid, p51.

7. ibid, p297

8. John Newsinger, ibid, p86.

9. Joseph Stiglitz, 2002. Globalization and its Discontents. Allen Lane, London. First published in 2002 by W.W. Norton, New York.

10. See for example Myriam Vander Stichele, 24th October 2008. The facilitating framework for free investment and capital. Draft Briefing Paper. The Corner House.http://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk/pdf/document/facilitate.pdf

11. John Lanchester, 28th May 2009. It’s Finished. London Review of Books.http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n10/lanc01_.html

http://www.monbiot.com/2009/06/17/outsourcing-unrest/

Read more on colonial impoverishment of India in Rastram (Kalyanaraman, 2011)

Guru Tegh Bahadur’s martyrdom

By Koenraad Elst

Guru Tegh Bahadur’s martyrdom is usually interpreted as an act of self-sacrifice for the sake of the Kashmiri Pandits threatened with forced conversion.  As such, it is a classic Hindutva proof of the Hinduness of Sikhism, though it is also a classic neo-Sikh proof of the “secularism” of Sikhism (“showing concern even for people of a different religion, viz.  Hinduism”). However, this whole debate may well rest upon a simple misunderstanding.

In most indo-Aryan languages, the oft-used honorific mode of the singular is expressed by the same pronoun as the plural (e.g. Hindi unkâ, “his” or “their”, as opposed to the non-honorific singular uskâ), and vice-versa; by contrast, the singular form only indicates a singular subject.  The phrase commonly translated as “the Lord preserved their tilak and sacred thread” (tilak-janjû râkhâ Prabh tâ-kâ), referring to unnamed outsiders assumed to be the Kashmiri Pandits, literally means that He “preserved b is tilak and sacred thread”, meaning Tegh Bahadur’s; it is already unusual poetic liberty to render “their tilak and sacred thread” this way, and even if that were intended, there is still no mention of the Kashmiri Pandits in the story.

This is confirmed by one of the following lines in Govind’s poem about his father’s martyrdom: “He suffered martyrdom for the sake of his faith.” in any case, the story of forced massed conversions in Kashmir by the Moghul emperor Aurangzeb is not supported by the detailed record of his reign by Muslim chronicles who narrate many accounts of his biogorty.

Tegh Bahadur’s martyrdom in 1675 was of course in the service of Hinduism, in that it was an act of opposing Aurangzeb’s policy of forcible conversion.  An arrest warrant against him had been issued on non-religious and nonpolitical charges, and he was found out after having gone into hiding; Aurangzeb gave him a chance to escape his punishment by converting to Islam.  Being a devout Muslim, Aurangzeb calculated that the conversion of this Hindu sect leader would encourage his followers to convert along with him.  The Guru was tortured and beheaded when he refused the offer to accept Islam, and one of his companions was sawed in two for having said that Islam should be destroyed.

At any rate, he stood firm as a Hindu, telling Aurangzeb that he loved his Hindu Dharma and that Hindu Dharma would never die,-a statement conveniently overlooked in most neo-Sikh accounts. He was not a Sikh defending Hinduism, but a Hindu of the Nanakpanth defending his own Hindu religion.  However, even Tegh Bahadur never was a warrior against the Moghul empire; indeed, the birth of his son Govind in the eastern city of Patna was a souvenir of his own enlistment in the party of a Moghul general on a military expedition to Assam.

Though Govind Singh is considered as the founder of the Khalsa order (1699) who “gave his Sikhs an outward form distinct from the Hindus”  he too did things which Sikh separatists would dismiss as “brahminical”.  As Khushwant Singh notes, “Gobind selected five of the most scholarly of his disciples and sent them to Benares to learn Sanskrit and the Hindu religious texts, to be better able to interpret the writings of the gurus, which were full of allusions to Hindu mythology and philosophy.  Arun Shourie quotes Govind Singh as declaring: “Let the path of the pure [khâlsâ panth] prevail all over the world, let the Hindu dharma dawn and all delusion disappear. (…) May I spread dharma and prestige of the Veda in the world and erase from it the sin of cow-slaughter.”

Ram Swarup adds a psychological reason for the recent Sikh attempt to sever the ties with Hindu society and the Indian state: “‘You have been our defenders’, Hindus tell the Sikhs.  But in the present psychology, the compliment wins only contempt-and I believe rightly.  For self-despisement is the surest way of losing a friend or even a brother.  It also gives the Sikhs an exaggerated self-assessment.

Ram Swarup hints at the question of the historicity of the belief that “Sikhism is the sword-arm of Hinduism”, widespread among Hindus.  It is well-known that the Sikhs were the most combative in fighting Muslims during the Partition massacres, and that they were also singled out by Muslims for slaughter. The image of Sikhs as the most fearsome among the Infidels still lingers in the Muslim mind; it is apparently for this reason that Saudi Arabia excludes Sikhs (like Jews) from employment within its borders.  Yet, the story for the earlier period is not that clear-cut.  Given the centrality of the image of Sikhism as the “sword-arm of Hinduism”, it is well worth our while to verify the record of Sikh struggles against Islam.

In the Guru lineage, we don’t see much physical fighting for Hinduism.  Guru Nanak was a poet and a genuine saint, but not a warrior.  His successors were poets, not all of them saintly, and made a living with regular occupations such as horse-trading.  Guru Arjun’s martyrdom was not due to any anti-Muslim rebellion but to the suspicion by Moghul Emperor Jahangir that he had supported a failed rebellion by Jahangir’s son Khusrau, i.e. a Muslim palace revolution aimed at continuing the Moghul Empire but with someone else sitting on the throne. Arjun refused to pay the fine which Jahangir imposed on him, not as an act of defiance against Moghul sovereignty but because he denied the charges (which amounted to pleading his loyalty to Jahangir); it was then that Jahangir ordered a tougher punishment.  At any rate, Arjun was never accused of raising the sword against Jahangir, merely of giving temporary shelter to Khusrau.

Tegh Bahadur’s son and successor, Govind Singh, only fought the Moghul army when he was forced to, and it was hardly to protect Hinduism.  His men had been plundering the domains of the semi-independent Hindu Rajas in the hills of northeastern Panjab, who had given him asylum after his father’s execution. Pro-Govind accounts in the Hindutva camp equate Govind’s plundering with the Chauth tax which Shivaji imposed to finance his fight against the Moghuls; they allege that the Rajas were selfishly attached to their wealth while Govind was risking his life for the Hindu cause.

The Rajas, after failed attempts to restore law and order, appealed to their Moghul suzerain for help, or at least to the nearest Moghul governor.  So, a confrontation ensued, not because Govind Singh had defied the mighty Moghul Empire, but because the Moghul Empire discharged its feudal duties toward its vassals, i.c. to punish what to them was an ungrateful guest turned robber.

Govind was defeated and his two eldest sons killed in battle; many Sikhs left him in anger at his foolhardy tactics.  During Govind Singh’s flight, a Brahmin family concealed Govind’s two remaining sons (Hindus protecting Sikhs, not the other way around), but they were found out and the boys were killed.

The death of Govind’s sons provides yet another demythologizing insight about Govind Singh through its obvious connection with his abolition of the Guru lineage.  A believer may, of course, assume that it was because of some divine instruction that Govind replaced the living Guru lineage with the Granth, a mere book (a replacement of the Hindu institution of gurudom with the Book-centred model of Islam).  However, a more down-to-earth hypothesis which takes care of all the facts is that after the death of all his sons, Govind Singh simply could not conceive of the Guru lineage as not continuing within his own family.

After his defeat and escape (made possible by the self-sacrifice of a disciple who impersonated the Guru), Govind Singh in his turn became a loyal subject of the Moghul Empire.  He felt he had been treated unfairly by the local governor, Wazir Khan, so he did what aggrieved vassals do: he wrote a letter of complaint to his suzerain, not through the hierarchical channels but straight to the Padeshah.  In spite of its title and its sometimes defiant wording, this “victory letter” (Zafar Nâma) to Aurangzeb is fundamentally submissive.  Among other things, Govind assures Aurangzeb that he is just as much an idol-breaker as the Padeshah himself: “I am the destroyer of turbulent hillmen, since they are idolators and I am the breaker of idols.”Aurangzeb was sufficiently pleased with the correspondence (possibly several letters) he received from the Guru, for he ordered Wazir Khan not to trouble Govind any longer.

After Aurangzeb’s death in 1707, Govind tried to curry favour with the heir-apparent and effective successor, Bahadur Shah, and supported him militarily in the war of succession: his fight was for one of the Moghul factions and against the rival Moghul faction, not for Hinduism and against the Moghul Empire as such.  In fact, one of the battles he fought on Bahadur Shah’s side was against rebellious Rajputs.  As a reward for his services, the new Padeshah gave Govind a fief in Nanded on the Godavari river in the south, far from his natural constituency in Panjab.  To acquaint himself with his new property, he followed Bahadur Shah on an expedition to the south (leaving his wives in Delhi under Moghul protection), but there he himself was stabbed by two Pathan assassins (possibly sent by Wazir Khan, who feared Govind Singh’s influence on Bahadur Shah) in 1708.  His death had nothing to do with any fight against the Moghuls or for Hinduism.

So far, it is hard to see where the Sikhs have acted as the sword-arm of Hinduism against Islam.  If secularism means staying on reasonable terms with both Hindus and Muslims, we could concede that the Gurus generally did steer a “secular” course.  Not that this is shameful: in the circumstances, taking on the Moghul Empire would have been suicidal.

In his last months, Govind Singh had become friends with the Hindu renunciate Banda Bairagi.  This Banda went to Panjab and rallied the Sikhs around himself.  At long last, it was he as a non-Sikh who took the initiative to wage an all-out offensive against the Moghul Empire.  It was a long-drawn-out and no-holds-barred confrontation which ended in general defeat and the execution of Banda and his lieutenants (1716). Once more, the Sikhs became vassals of the Moghuls for several decades until the -Marathas broke the back of the Moghul empire in the mid-18th century.  Only then, in the wake of the Maratha expansion, did the Sikhs score some lasting victories against Moghul and Pathan power.

We may conclude that Ram Swarup has a point when he questions the Hindu attitude of self-depreciation and gratefulness towards the Sikh “sword-arm”.  Sikh history has its moments of heroism, but not particularly more than that of the Marathas or Rajputs.  And like the Rajputs and Marathas, Sikhism also has a history of collaboration with the Moghul throne.

By Koenraad Elst

Source: Arjun arjunshakti@yahoo.co.uk