Our past should teach us how to resist new colonial designs framed by a pandemic
Irrespective of what evil the British did, the one thing the East India Company showed consistently was great sensitivity to its surroundings, an ability to learn from competitors and, above all, the ability to test beliefs against reality. These are qualities that we would do well to learn
Graffiti to aware people on coronavirus in New Delhi (Express photo/Praveen Khanna) I once met a researcher from JNU at a social event. In the course of our conversation, I found out that she was pursuing a doctorate and I made the mistake of asking her what the doctorate was about. She looked at me with some pity and told me kindly that the subject was a difficult one; only an initiate could understand it. I looked at the clock and saw that we had another two hours to kill. So I asked her to tell me nevertheless — perhaps I might understand. It turned out that she was studying the culture and politics of a little-known tribal group in central India as part of a larger study of oppression. She seemed to have known the dimensions of oppression before she began the study. I wondered why she did the study in that case but decided that such a question could be a conversation stopper.
Later, while reading the marvellous The History of India, as Told by Its Own Historians (1867), edited by Elliott and Dowson, I came across an episode that demonstrates that such overweening conceit is, and has been, a besetting sin of Indians, for a few hundred years at any rate. Khafi Khan, the historian of Mughal times, was railing against the English East India Company and its depredations on Indian shipping. He says, “the total revenue of Bombay, which is chiefly derived from betel-nuts and cocoa-nuts, does not reach to two or three lacs of rupees. The profits of the commerce of these misbelievers, according to report, does not exceed twenty lacs of rupees. The balance of the money required for the maintenance of the English settlement is obtained by plundering the ships voyaging to the House of God, of which they take one or two every year.” Evidently, to Khan, the company was a set of puny peddlers who, in their ignorance and foolishness, had dared to challenge the Mughals. Within three decades of his fulminations, the Mughal empire had crumbled and the puny peddlers were on the way to becoming the new masters of India.
Share
