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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.
The animals in the jungle agree that amidst the drought, the sport of hunter and hunted has to be suspended.
In Rudyard Kipling’s story The Jungle Book, a prolonged drought has left Mowgli and the animals with no food and little water. The waterhole has sunk so low that the Peace Rock is showing, and Hathi, the elephant, has called the Water Truce so hunter and hunted alike can drink. As dusk falls, the truce is holding — though Bagheera, the black panther, isn’t much help.
Frances Colenso admired the gallantry of the men who defended the fort at Rorke’s Drift, and the restraint of the men who attacked it.
On January 22nd, 1879, some 150 British soldiers repelled an attack by several thousand Zulu warriors on a tiny garrison at Rorke’s Drift. It was a gallant action in an otherwise dubious war: the British colony of Natal had picked a quarrel with King Cetshwayo of the Zulus as an excuse to annex his realm. Frances Colenso, daughter of the Bishop of Natal, appreciated the Zulus’ restraint.
Frances Colenso warned that if the British did not learn to treat the Africans with respect, a higher Power would soon teach them some manners.
In the 1880s, competition for Africa’s resources drove European powers to a frenzy of colonial exploitation. Frances Colenso, daughter of the Bishop of Natal, acknowledged that Britain had brought technology and education to Africa; but if the average African was still a child in some matters, that did not mean that we should treat Africans as if they were children. If we continued to do so, she warned, there would soon be a reckoning.
According to Kipling, the British Empire was the last resort of Englishmen who could not stand conditions at home.
In a speech to the Royal Society of St George in April 1920, Rudyard Kipling took issue with Sir John Seeley’s by then famous dictum that ‘we seem to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind’. After rehearsing a catalogue of meddlers and oppressors, foreign and domestic, from the Romans to Cromwell, Kipling declared that the men who made the Empire had a very clear purpose: to get away from England.
The Indian Mutiny began with a revolt among disgruntled soldiers, and ended with the making of the British Raj.
By 1857, the East India Company, a British government agency, had been running India for a hundred years. The Company’s ruthless acquisition of territory, and its high-handed treatment of respected figures and institutions, alienated Indians of all classes; and that May, soldiers in the Company’s militia rose up against their officers. Jawaharlal Nehru explains what happened next.
Incompetence, arrogance and some mischievous propaganda all conspired to throw India into chaos.
In 1757, the British East India Company took control of most of India on behalf of the British Government. The Company employed a large number of Indian-born soldiers in their private army, including Muslims and Sikhs, and in 1857 some of these ‘sepoys’ rose up in rebellion. The reasons were complex, but clearly explained here by two Indian schoolmasters, writing in 1944.