Indian History
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Indian History’
During the Indian Mutiny, over a thousand men, women and children were trapped in the Commissioner’s residence at Lucknow.
The Indian Mutiny in 1857 saw many of the East India Company’s sepoys (Indian soldiers) join with angry princes to protest at the Company’s disrespectful and corrupt administration. The revolt turned nasty, and in June that year things looked bleak for the Company’s staff at Lucknow, in the former Kingdom of Oudh.
The East India Company installed Mir Kasim as Nawab of Bengal, only to find that he had a mind of his own.
Robert Clive’s victory against the Nawab of Bengal at Plassey in 1757 made him and his employers, the East India Company, quite literally kingmakers. But Clive now retired to London, leaving Bengal to the new Nawab, Mir Jafar, and Company policy to Henry Vansittart, Clive’s successor in Calcutta.
A tribute to the postal workers of British India, and to the kind of empire they helped to build.
‘The Overland Mail’ is a tribute to the runners who carried letters across India during the Raj, and in particular the personal and business letters of the Indian Civil Service to which young Englishmen were posted. Among other things, Kipling’s poem is a welcome reminder that by Victoria’s day, the British Empire was increasingly united by trade, services and communications rather than by armies or centralised political will.
The British encountered no stouter resistance in India than Mysore’s gifted commmander Hyder Ali and his son, Tipu.
The Princely State of Mysore was for many years one of the most prosperous and pro-British kingdoms of the Raj, but in the late eighteenth century it was briefly dominated by two of Britain’s most bitter and successful opponents, Hyder Ali (?1722-1782) and his son Tipu (1750-1799).
The Princely State of Mysore (today in Karnataka) was hailed as an example of good governance to all the world.
The Indian Kingdom of Mysore is associated with two remarkable figures, Tipu Sultan (1750-1799), ‘the Tiger of Mysore’, and Maharaja Krishnaraja Wodeyar IV (1884-1940). Tipu fought the British and anyone else for nearly twenty years of unrelenting bloodshed; Krishnaraja made Mysore a world leader in industrial, artistic and social advancement.
Samuel Smiles reminds us that until we brought the railways to India, we had little to boast about as an imperial power.
Samuel Smiles’s biography of George and Robert Stephenson opens with a heartfelt appreciation of the social and economic progress brought by the railways. He describes how this peculiarly British invention had by the 1870s already reached most European countries and beyond, and of course he could not fail to mention the railways of India.