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Sir William Hunter looks back over a Government committee’s plan to introduce tea cultivation to India in 1834.
… In January 1834, under the Governor-Generalship of Lord William Bentinck, a committee was appointed ‘for the purpose of submitting a plan for the introduction of tea-culture into India … The success of these undertakings engendered a wild spirit of speculation in tea companies, both in India and at home … and we may look forward to the day when India shall not only rival …
The British drink almost 36 billion cups of tea each year, a trend set by King Charles II’s Portuguese wife, Queen Catherine. The tea itself came exclusively from China, which by the early Nineteenth Century had become a cause for concern. What if China were to close her ports to Europe, as neighbouring Japan had done? So the Government set up a Tea Committee.
Posted May 13 2020
26
A dozy rabbit gets an idea into his head and soon all the animals of India are running for their lives.
The following tale from the fourth-century BC Jataka Tales was told to illustrate how Hindu ascetics blindly copied one another’s eye-catching but useless mortifications; but it might just as well be applied to stock-market rumours or ‘project fear’ politics.
Posted December 27 2018
27
In this fable from India, a sly little insect teaches a jackdaw that all that glisters is not necessarily edible.
William Cowper’s ‘The Nightingale and the Glow-Worm’ told how a glow-worm persuaded a hungry bird to spare his life because light and song complement each other so beautifully. In the following Indian fable by Ramaswami Raju (playwright, London barrister and Oxford professor of Telugu), the hard-pressed glow-worm does not have such dainty material to work with.
Posted May 13 2022
28
The British Empire’s hostile breakup with India should have taught everyone two things: money cannot buy love, and power does not command respect.
In his Memoirs (1954) the Aga Khan Sir Sultan Mahomed Shah (1877-1957) regretted the breakdown of esteem between Englishmen and Indians in the early twentieth century. Novelist W. Somerset Maugham found in this a lesson for the emerging Power of the 1950s, the United States of America: a lesson not to make the same mistake the British Empire made.
Posted May 15 2021
29
Contemporary historian Ramanath Aiyar catalogued the ways in which Maharajah Moolam Thurunal led the way in modernising British India.
In 1885, His Highness Sir Rama Varma Moolam Thurunal became Maharajah of Travancore. A close confidant was historian Ramanath Aiyar, who some eighteen years later catalogued the various ways in which the Maharajah had moved Travancore forward in terms of society and industry.
Posted March 29 2018
30
Canadian sailor William Hall was summoned over to India to help face down the Indian Mutiny.
William Nelson Hall (1827-1904) had every reason to love the Royal Navy. Under instructions from the Admiralty in London, the Navy had helped his parents and thousands of others to escape slavery in Maryland. The Halls were resettled as free citizens in Nova Scotia, where William was born, and he repaid the Navy handsomely during the Indian Mutiny thirty years later.
Posted December 17 2017