Indian History
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Indian History’
After two punishing years rising to the top of the East India Company’s armed forces in India, Robert Clive could not spare the time to go courting.
By the end of March 1752, Robert Clive was lonely and exhausted. He had almost single-handedly relieved the fortress at Arcot from a French siege, and then captured two French forts at the head of a band of five hundred raw recruits no other officer would agree to command. As he listened to his friend Edmund Maskelyne reading snatches of his letters from home, a resolution formed in his breast.
Sir Henry Craik had heard such glowing reports of Agra’s Taj Mahal, that he was afraid it might prove to be an anticlimax.
In 1907, Sir Henry Craik MP went on a tour of India. That December, he made his way south from New Delhi to Agra, where he marvelled at the sixteenth-century fort and the Pearl Mosque of Shah Jahan (r. 1628-58) before following the River Yamuna for a mile or so towards Shah Jahan’s legendary monument to his favourite wife, Mumtaz Mahal. Would it be all that report had made it?
Cricketing legend W. G. Grace tells a story illustrating how fellow-batsman K. S. Ranjitsinhji set about winning the hearts of English cricketers.
“Among cricketers” wrote that great cricketing legend Dr W. G. Grace, “‘Ranji’ is exceedingly popular, his open-hearted generosity and geniality having captured all their hearts.” But when K. S. Ranjitsinhji (1872-1933) first came up to Cambridge in 1888, he had yet to win his popularity — even as he had yet to win his crown as Prince of Nawanagar. From this story, it is easy to see how Ranji wore down the barriers.
In all his years of soldiering at home and abroad, Major-General George Younghusband had never heard British soldiers talk like those in Kipling’s tales.
‘Tommy Atkins’ is the name given to the average British foot-soldier in the Great War. He is affectionately pictured as chirpy and a trifle insubordinate, always up to some lark, but brave as a lion when required. Major General Sir George Younghusband was in no doubt that Tommy was a literary fiction, but one that had become a living fact, and also that Rudyard Kipling had created him.
After one of the worst outrages in modern British history, Winston Churchill stood up in the House of Commons to label the Amritsar Massacre an act of terrorism.
On 13th April 1919, thousands of Sikhs crowded into the Jallianwala Bagh at Amritsar in the Punjab for a religious festival. Led by intelligence reports to believe that Bolshevik (communist) agitators were among them, General Reginald Dyer quietly shut the gates and gave the order to fire on the crowd. A year later, Secretary of State for War Winston Churchill rose in the Commons to deliver his verdict.
Following a historic embassy in 1792-93, Chien Lung, the Emperor of China, despatched a haughty letter rebuffing King George III’s offer of trade.
Glimpses of World History (1934) was written for his daughter by Jawaharlal Nehru while he was in gaol for protesting against a tax on salt. In this passage, the man who later became India’s first Prime Minister reflects on the fading of empires, recalling the groundbreaking Macartney embassy to China in 1792-93 and the haughty response by the Emperor, Chien Lung.