Indian History
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Indian History’
In 1327, Mohammad bin Tughluq gave every man, woman and child in Delhi just three days’ notice to quit.
The Delhi Sultanate ruled wide realms in India between 1206 and 1555, but the aspiration of Sultan Mohammad bin Tughluq (r. 1325-1351, a contemporary of England’s Edward III) to be Alexander and Solomon rolled into one brought only bankruptcy and revolt. Especially disastrous was his snap decision in 1327 to walk the entire population of Delhi to a new capital over six hundred miles away.
In 1840, Secretary at War Thomas Macaulay treated the Union Jack like a bully’s visiting card, but backbencher William Gladstone believed it deserved better.
In 1840, the British Government, outraged at Peking’s crackdown on the smuggling of opium by British merchants from Bengal, declared war on the Chinese Empire. On April 8th, William Gladstone rose in the Commons to denounce the Government’s belligerent attitude, deploring the execrable drug traffic and taking exception to the way Secretary-at-War Thomas Macaulay wrapped it in the Union Jack.
In 1840, the British Government declared war on the Chinese Empire over their harsh treatment of drug smugglers from Bengal.
The Opium Wars of 1839-42 and 1856-60 were a miserably low point in British history, as Jawaharlal Nehru makes painfully clear in this passage. Opium grown in India was smuggled into China by British merchants to feed the addiction of millions of Chinese, until the problem became so bad that the Chinese imperial government was obliged to step up efforts against the smugglers.
The fort at Budge Budge near Calcutta proved stubborn against the massed artillery of the East India Company, but a tipsy seaman took it all by himself.
In 1756, colonial rivalry between France and Britain sparked the Seven Years’ War. In India, France’s ally Siraj ud-Daulah, Nawab of Bengal, drove the British from Calcutta; they in turn, smarting from the infamous ‘Black Hole’ incident, sailed gunships up to the Nawab’s fort at Budge Budge, which guarded the River Hooghly. The small hours of December 30th found them snatching a little sleep prior to a dawn assault.
When the young Aga Khan visited London in 1898 he was presented to Queen Victoria, and found her cultural sensitivity deeply touching.
In February 1898 the Aga Khan, then twenty, left Bombay for Europe. After some days enjoying life on the French Riviera he travelled on to Paris and London, and there in the glorious and bewitching Imperial capital he was presented at Windsor Castle to Queen Victoria herself. It was an intimate affair: only himself, his friend the Duke of Connaught and the Empress, now approaching her eightieth birthday.
As Governor of Bengal, Robert Clive hoped to use his powers and his formidable reputation to make the East India Company mend its ways.
As Governor of Bengal in 1757-60 and 1765-66, Robert Clive strove to reform the East India Company’s wasteful, mercenary and supercilious bureaucracy. The Company responded in 1773 with a Parliamentary smear campaign so masterly that to this day, many regard Clive as a microcosm of all that was wrong with British colonialism, but it is hard to see that Clive in Sir John Malcolm’s account of him.