India
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘India’
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.
The lord of Benares is so partial to venison that fields lie fallow and marketplaces stand empty while his people catch deer for him.
The following tale comes from the collection known as the Jataka, a series of fables setting out the wisdom of Siddhartha Gautama, the fifth- or fourth-century BC teacher of enlightenment. This particular story is set in the deer park near Varanasi (Benares) in Uttar Pradesh where tradition says that Gautama Buddha first taught.
If officials in the Raj ever forgot who their boss was, they would bring the whole government down about their ears.
In Kipling’s short story, Aurelian McGoggin, a British bureaucrat, has been boring everyone in Shimla with his conviction that there is neither God nor Hereafter, so we can only worry along somehow for the good of Humanity. In a tongue-in-cheek aside, Kipling gave a Raj-shaped twist to an argument that had been made by political thinkers from Moses to Alexis de Tocqueville.
Sir William Hunter looks back over a Government committee’s plan to introduce tea cultivation to India in 1834.
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.