India
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘India’
The Rivers Son and Narmada rise together in the hills of Amarkantak, but because of Johilla they never meet again.
William Sleeman, after whom the little village of Sleemanabad in Madhya Pradesh is named, retold a classic Indian fable in an open letter to his sister. It is a love story of three rivers, the Narmada (Nerbudda), the Son and the Johila, and explains why the Narmada and the Son rise in the same place in central India, but flow in opposite directions.
John Bright MP urged a critic of the British Raj to offer India more than fine words.
In 1883, Major Thomas Evans Bell, a former employee of the East India Company and a severe critic of the British Raj, was preparing for a lecturing tour in the United States. John Bright MP (who was not uncritical himself) wrote to remind him that what India needed most from Britain and America was not colonial guilt or blame, but free trade.
As Viceroy of India, Lord Ripon was rather more popular with the people of India than he was with some of his own civil servants.
When Lord Ripon took over as Viceroy of India in 1880, he at once set about including more Indians in Government, and allowing the local press to hold lawmakers to account. Many opposed him and it took a long time for his policy to bear fruit, but Ram Chandra Palit believed that it was Ripon, and not his critics, who was truly British.
The first setbacks for the German Empire in the Great War came courtesy of ANZAC troops.
ANZAC (Australian and New Zealand Army Corps) troops were involved from the very beginning of the Great War on August 4th, 1914, not because they were summoned to Europe to protect Britain but because Germany’s growing colonial presence in the South Pacific was a direct threat to their independence.
Kim O’Hara starts his apprenticeship as a British spy with a little competition.
In the city of Shimla, summer capital of the British Raj, a jeweller named Lurgan is schooling young orphan Kim O’Hara for intelligence work in Afghanistan. A Hindu boy already in his care has become so jealous of this ‘stranger’ that he has tried to poison Lurgan, and is now sobbing with remorse, which the canny Lurgan turns to advantage.
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.