I've been reading The Ruling Caste by David Gilmour. Gilmour describes the lives and times of the Civil Servants who ran India in the 19th century. The book is dry, very dry, but there are many interesting tidbits in it. In the discussion on famine, for example, Gilmour writes "Whatever shortcomings the Government may have had, famine duty brought out the best in the ICS." The impression being that the Civil Servants did a great job during the famine. The reality is that the civil service was the government and they did a singularly bad job in dealing with famines, each one being worse in its effects than the previous ones. Famines in India were largely a phenomenon confined to the British era, few before and few since.
Elsewhere, he gives revenue figures (p.109).
"At the end of the 19th century it [Land Revenue] produced some 210 million rupees, while Customs, Excise, and Stamps brought in 140 million, the Salt Tax yielded 75 million, and the sale of opium 40 million."
Interesting. Let's see:
1. Of the Rs. 465 million in revenue, 16% came from taxing one essential item, salt. That explains the salt march!
2. 45% came from property taxes. Given that the zaminari system was in full flourish, the brunt of this must have been passed on to the share-croppers and ryots. No wonder there were so many famines, these guys were broke!
3. The less said about the 40 million (8.6%) from opium the better.
It gets more interesting, let's see how the money was spent:
"The chief items of expenditure were the Army, which accounted for nearly half the total (244 million rupees), followed by the administration (140 million) and public works (68 million)."
O.K. So, the Raj collected Rs. 465 million in revenue and spent Rs. 244 million on the army. 52.5% of the money collected taxing the Indian people was spent on subjugating them. A mere 14% was spent on public works.
Now, I know that the Raj was in the business of enriching the Brits, but this is ridiculous. How can anyone pretend that the Raj was a good thing when half the revenue from taxes was spent on what was essentially a police force, and a disproportionate chunk of the revenue was from the impoverished people!
(Note: The salt tax reminds me of a very interesting book I read a few years ago. The Great Hedge of India by Roy Moxham. A must read if you can find a copy.)
Wednesday, January 31, 2007
Tuesday, January 30, 2007
The Trouser People
The quintessential colonial book on Burma is The Burman: His Life and Notions by Shwe Yoe a nom-de-plume of Sir George Scott a British colonialist in Burma. That book was written in 1894 and remains a standard source for understanding the Burmese people of the late 19th century (you can read it for free here). Of course, since Scott was British, albeit one who could speak several languages of Burma, we'll never really know what life in Burma was like, but you get what you get ...
The Trouser People: A Story of Burma In the Shadow of the Empire by Andrew Marshall follows the travels of George Scott in Burma. The book is interesting partly because his writing is interesting and full of humor, partly because he goes where no one else goes (the Wa State), but mostly because it is shocking that opium is being grown and drugs manufactured in the Shan and Wa States with impunity. The junta is known to be cynical (and more than a little crazy) but such large scale abdication of their responsibility is horrendous. The casual visitor to Burma, me on more than one occasion, sees a poor country with a despotic government, hears a few stories of the Karen being "cleansed," mostly from journalists who cannot visit Burma, sees evidence of forced labor in road-building projects, but the scale of the criminal enterprise that passes for government in that country is well hidden.
The Trouser People: A Story of Burma In the Shadow of the Empire by Andrew Marshall follows the travels of George Scott in Burma. The book is interesting partly because his writing is interesting and full of humor, partly because he goes where no one else goes (the Wa State), but mostly because it is shocking that opium is being grown and drugs manufactured in the Shan and Wa States with impunity. The junta is known to be cynical (and more than a little crazy) but such large scale abdication of their responsibility is horrendous. The casual visitor to Burma, me on more than one occasion, sees a poor country with a despotic government, hears a few stories of the Karen being "cleansed," mostly from journalists who cannot visit Burma, sees evidence of forced labor in road-building projects, but the scale of the criminal enterprise that passes for government in that country is well hidden.
Burma
Burma is not a country that most people think about every day, or even every year. Rarely in the news, off the radar screens, one never hears about it, except perhaps as a passing mention in the odd State of the Union Address (was that bizarre or what!). What most people know about it can be summarized by the words backward and dictatorship. If probed, they may add that it is a small country somewhere in South East Asia occupied by the monolithic "Burmese" people. The reality is, of course, that the country is quite large and far from monolithic. It is populated by a diverse range of ethnic groups with distinct cultures that speak languages that don't even share the same root (some are Indo-European, some share Southern China origins, some, like the Wa are unclassifiable). Sort of like a problematic version of India.
My fascination with Burma began about 35 years ago. I was visiting my father at his Air Force base in North Eastern India for the summer holidays. I already knew something about Burma, my (maternal) grandfather had been stationed in Rangoon during the end of the Second World War and was full of stories about that country, about the Stilwell Road, about the epic battle to re-take Burma from the Japanese. The battle in Europe was a cakewalk in comparison. One day, while I was visiting him, announced that we should go for a drive along the Stilwell Road. We drove in an Air Force jeep up to the Ledo border and there I could see Burma. There was a well paved road and a border checkpost on the Indian side but, on the Burmese side, there was no checkpost, no guard, nobody. And, the "man a mile," Stilwell Road had been swallowed up by the jungle. I don't know what it was about the contrast but my little boy heart wanted to know more about what was going on across that border.
Of course, it is not easy to know what is actually going on across that border. Books on Burma are few and far between and that has always been the case. A colonial backwater, few British civilians and soldiers wrote about Burma, and most books are out of print. After the 1962 coup, the whole country disappeared into a black hole from which it is only now returning. Still, I read everything I could find. For a long time it was next to impossible to get a visa to visit. But, visit I did. On my first visit, I was interviewed on three separate occasions by head of the mission, suspicious, I suppose, of my motives in visiting. On a more recent visit, I walked into the London embassy and walked out with a visa, no questions asked, thanks to the desperate need that the junta has for hard currency. What I found was a complicated country, in some ways stuck in a time warp but in other ways as savvy as the savviest Silicon Valley entreprenuer. It is hard to get a read on Burma by visiting Burma because one sees so little of the country and only what the junta wants you to see.
So, books about Burma. More to come ....
My fascination with Burma began about 35 years ago. I was visiting my father at his Air Force base in North Eastern India for the summer holidays. I already knew something about Burma, my (maternal) grandfather had been stationed in Rangoon during the end of the Second World War and was full of stories about that country, about the Stilwell Road, about the epic battle to re-take Burma from the Japanese. The battle in Europe was a cakewalk in comparison. One day, while I was visiting him, announced that we should go for a drive along the Stilwell Road. We drove in an Air Force jeep up to the Ledo border and there I could see Burma. There was a well paved road and a border checkpost on the Indian side but, on the Burmese side, there was no checkpost, no guard, nobody. And, the "man a mile," Stilwell Road had been swallowed up by the jungle. I don't know what it was about the contrast but my little boy heart wanted to know more about what was going on across that border.
Of course, it is not easy to know what is actually going on across that border. Books on Burma are few and far between and that has always been the case. A colonial backwater, few British civilians and soldiers wrote about Burma, and most books are out of print. After the 1962 coup, the whole country disappeared into a black hole from which it is only now returning. Still, I read everything I could find. For a long time it was next to impossible to get a visa to visit. But, visit I did. On my first visit, I was interviewed on three separate occasions by head of the mission, suspicious, I suppose, of my motives in visiting. On a more recent visit, I walked into the London embassy and walked out with a visa, no questions asked, thanks to the desperate need that the junta has for hard currency. What I found was a complicated country, in some ways stuck in a time warp but in other ways as savvy as the savviest Silicon Valley entreprenuer. It is hard to get a read on Burma by visiting Burma because one sees so little of the country and only what the junta wants you to see.
So, books about Burma. More to come ....
Monday, January 29, 2007
The Last Mughal and Indian Muslims
The thing that is the most striking about The Last Mughal, for me anyway, is that for the first time I got some perspective on why the Indian Muslim disappeared from public life. After a thousand years of being the ruling class in Northern India, they were, at best a marginal force in pre-independence India. What happened to them is a subtext of The Last Mughal. At the time of the Mutiny, Delhi was still a Mughal city, marginal to the British led power structure of the Raj, but still an important center of Mughal, and thus, Muslim power and culture. For six months during the Mutiny, the Mughal empire returned, but this was a Mughal empire that depended as much on Hindus as it did on Muslims. In a sense, it was the first sign of a nationalist India. Once the Mutiny was over, the British took a series of steps that left the Muslim population of India out in the cold.
1. For almost two years Delhi's muslims were excluded from the city! By the time they returned, they had lost control of business and property and, even in Delhi, the punjabi hindus were in ascendance. The economic and cultural impact on the muslim community was enormous.
2. They excluded muslims from the army. Read anything about the Mutiny in 19th century histories and you realize the extent to which the pre-mutiny Company army was drawn from the muslim population. It seems to me that at least 40 to 50% of the army was muslim. Post-mutiny, the army was drawn from the "martial races," the Sikhs and the Gurkhas, who also happened to be the main sources for the British army that fought the mutineers. The Sikhs were a part of British India by then, but the Gurkhas were the offering of an opportunistic Nepali king who joined the British when he had figured out who would win.
3. The creation of a Babu class that was mostly drawn from loyal Hindus and actively excluded muslims. The large recruitment of Sikhs, Gurkhas, and "Madrasis" in the army, and the creation of a loyal english speaking educated babu class, largely left muslims out of the two avenues of government service open to Indians, the army and the civil service.
1. For almost two years Delhi's muslims were excluded from the city! By the time they returned, they had lost control of business and property and, even in Delhi, the punjabi hindus were in ascendance. The economic and cultural impact on the muslim community was enormous.
2. They excluded muslims from the army. Read anything about the Mutiny in 19th century histories and you realize the extent to which the pre-mutiny Company army was drawn from the muslim population. It seems to me that at least 40 to 50% of the army was muslim. Post-mutiny, the army was drawn from the "martial races," the Sikhs and the Gurkhas, who also happened to be the main sources for the British army that fought the mutineers. The Sikhs were a part of British India by then, but the Gurkhas were the offering of an opportunistic Nepali king who joined the British when he had figured out who would win.
3. The creation of a Babu class that was mostly drawn from loyal Hindus and actively excluded muslims. The large recruitment of Sikhs, Gurkhas, and "Madrasis" in the army, and the creation of a loyal english speaking educated babu class, largely left muslims out of the two avenues of government service open to Indians, the army and the civil service.
Thursday, January 25, 2007
The Indian Mutiny
So, how long and how important was the Indian Mutiny or the War of Independence anyway? I always thought it started and ended in 1857. Asked around and almost everyone thought the same thing. No one came even close to the actual length of the mutiny, two years and two months from the first incident in Berhampore near Calcutta in February 1857 (the 19th Regiment Indian Infantry refused to take their bullets on parade and was subsequently disbanded), to the capture of Tantia Tope, or rather the opportunistic betrayal of Tantia Tope by Man Singh, in April 1959. From the history I read at school I always got the impression that the First War of Independence was fought by a few kings (Nana Saheb, Tantia Tope, Rani Laxmibai) and that it was a brief affair that resulted in the crown taking over India from The Company. I'll give a timeline of the mutiny in a later post.
I am reading "History of the Indian Mutiny," by G. W. Forrest. Three volumes, two published in 1904 and one in 1912. A fascinating book. The entire mutiny is discussed from the point of the view of the British and gives absolutely no mention of the strategies, troop movements, etc. of the mutineers. Much more of a victors view than a real history. (Yes, I have read William Dalrymple's The Last Mughal.) With a lot of stuff about the brave English soldiers fighting to save the empire. Don't get me wrong, they were brave. One only has to read the history of the siege of the Residency at Lucknow to see that. But surely the Indians fought with equal bravery on both sides.
The other striking thing is the degree to which the English were hated by their own men. They, the English i.e., thought that they had loyal soldiers who would follow them anywhere. Many of these soldiers were veterans of other battles fought under British command. But, almost to a man, entire regiments not only deserted but also hacked/shot their commanders to death whenever they got the opportunity. Here is an extract from Forrest (writing about the evacuation of the British from Kanpur at the start of the mutiny):
“A litter containing Colonel Ewart, commanding the First Native Infantry, who had been severely wounded, fell into the rear, and when passing St. John’s Church was stopped by seven or eight men of his own regiment. ... The sepoys then mockingly asked their wounded commander [Colonel Ewart], “Is this not a fine parade, and is it not all well dressed up?” Two of them then cut him to pieces.” (Vol.1 462). They then killed his wife as well. One boat that managed to cut loose was chased for days and almost everyone killed.
Colonel Ewart's men were clearly passionate about killing their masters. Time after time, as one regiment after another mutineed, their officers were caught off-guard. "My men will remain loyal," they said.
I am reading "History of the Indian Mutiny," by G. W. Forrest. Three volumes, two published in 1904 and one in 1912. A fascinating book. The entire mutiny is discussed from the point of the view of the British and gives absolutely no mention of the strategies, troop movements, etc. of the mutineers. Much more of a victors view than a real history. (Yes, I have read William Dalrymple's The Last Mughal.) With a lot of stuff about the brave English soldiers fighting to save the empire. Don't get me wrong, they were brave. One only has to read the history of the siege of the Residency at Lucknow to see that. But surely the Indians fought with equal bravery on both sides.
The other striking thing is the degree to which the English were hated by their own men. They, the English i.e., thought that they had loyal soldiers who would follow them anywhere. Many of these soldiers were veterans of other battles fought under British command. But, almost to a man, entire regiments not only deserted but also hacked/shot their commanders to death whenever they got the opportunity. Here is an extract from Forrest (writing about the evacuation of the British from Kanpur at the start of the mutiny):
“A litter containing Colonel Ewart, commanding the First Native Infantry, who had been severely wounded, fell into the rear, and when passing St. John’s Church was stopped by seven or eight men of his own regiment. ... The sepoys then mockingly asked their wounded commander [Colonel Ewart], “Is this not a fine parade, and is it not all well dressed up?” Two of them then cut him to pieces.” (Vol.1 462). They then killed his wife as well. One boat that managed to cut loose was chased for days and almost everyone killed.
Colonel Ewart's men were clearly passionate about killing their masters. Time after time, as one regiment after another mutineed, their officers were caught off-guard. "My men will remain loyal," they said.
This Blog!
I read. I read a lot. Almost everything I read is connected with South Asia in some way or the other. Because Burmese history is so tied up with Indian history, think British Raj, I include Burma in South Asia. This blog is all about my meandering thoughts about the books I am reading, with thoughts on film and art thrown in for good measure.
Saouq is the Burmese word for book.
Saouq is the Burmese word for book.
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