pmaitra
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How did you find this gem?
Anyway, here goes:
Close ties with India gave Europe better access to India's mineral resources. Close ties with India also gave Britain the knowledge of rocket artillery.Close ties with Britain give India better access to the rest of Europe.
Britain isn't gaining prominence in the modern world.Just as Empire opened the doors of modernity to India, a good relationship between Britain and India will be a mark of how prominent both countries are in the modern world.
This is not an autobiography, but carry on.It is a subject that particularly interests me as, although I was born and raised in Britain, my parents migrated here from India.
Yes, the British were so tolerant that they would have a sign board that read "Dogs and Indians not allowed." Read more here. As a matter of fact, they even tolerated, nay, ordered opening fire on a group of unarmed civilians. Read more here.All that is best about India - its tolerance, freedom and engagement with the world - has flourished due to the structures and ideas it inherited from British rule.
Perhaps, assuming another Chadragupta Maurya would not have ever been born.Despite the often callous profiteering of Empire, the modern Indian state simply would not exist without it.
Neither US, nor India were fostered into being by Britain. The American revolutionaries fought against the government and won. The Indian revolutionaries fought against the government and lost, twice.Like the U.S., India is a nation fostered into being by Britain, and one which derives its romantic national identity from its struggle for independence.
George Washington may have been an abysmal general, but when he dragged his artillery pieces and fellow soldiers across the mountains, laid a siege of Boston, and threatened to bomb the hell out of them if they did not surrender, Boston, and its British loyalists were in the figurative abyss, while Washington, and his men, were on the hills. Read more here. Say what you want, he won the US independence. Moreover, he was a humble man, and quite the opposite of Churchill, an arrogant prick, who is better defined as a mediocre participant in the Boer War, but overhyped, for whatsoever reason.And just as Americans don't publicly admit that George Washington was an abysmal general who lost almost every battle, Indians don't explicitly recognise Britain's contribution to their country's present success.
Vassals.But these bleak facts should not obscure the fact that British rule in India was a joint effort, impossible without the widespread co- operation of Indians themselves.
Utter nonsense. "Hindu Kush" is a modification of the Greek term "Indicus Caucasus," which means the Indian Caucasian Mountains, because, the Greeks thought the Caucasian Mountains extended up to India. Keep smoking that cool green stuff that grows at the foothills of the "Hindu Kush."The Afghan mountain range of the Hindu Khush (which translates as the 'Hindu Slaughter') is named after the huge numbers who died there while being marched to the markets of Arabia and Central Asia.
Don't know what the Punjabis were doing or were stopped from doing, but I know for a fact the British deliberately overlooked the practice of Sati by the Bengal Brahminical gentry, and even refused to cooperate with Ram Mohan Roy. Finally, he had to write directly to the Queen and the Empress.In 1846, the British commissioner, John Lawrence, told the local elite that Punjabis could no longer burn their widows, commit female infanticide, nor bury their lepers alive.
And then they took indentured Indian labourers to Africa to build railways in lion infested jungles. Cool story bro.In addition to combating these barbaric practices, the British also outlawed slavery in 1843 at a time when an estimated 10 million Indians were slaves - up to 15 per cent of the population in some regions.
Two million volunteers had little to do with gratitude, but you, dear author, would have my gratitude, if you start reading a bit more than writing.This gratitude expressed itself in 1939 when, at the height of the independence movement led by Jawaharlal Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi, two million Indians nonetheless enlisted in the fight against fascism - the largest volunteer army in history.
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