The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire
by William Dalrymple
On 28 August 1608, Captain William Hawkins . . . became the first commander of an
EIC [East India Company] vessel to set foot on Indian soil.
India then had a population of 150 million - about a fifth of the world's total - and was
producing about a quarter of global
manufacturing: indeed in many ways it was the world's industrial powerhouse and the
world's leader in manufactured textiles. [p. 14 -- Mughal authorities allowed the
English East India Company to establish a small trading settlement at Surat] . . .
Tipu went out of his way to woo and protect the Hindus of his own dominions. From the
beginnings of his reign he had loaded the temples of his realm with presents, honours
and land. . . . But it was the great temple of Sringeri that always received his most
generous patronage, . . . Tipu put on record his horror at damage done to the temple by
a Maratha raiding party during a Maratha invasion of Mysore (pp. 319-320 ) . . .
The Company's conquest of India almost certainly remains the supreme act of
corporate violence in world history. (p. 394)
The Anarchy: A New Book by William Dalrymple, Asia Society, October 4, 2019
William Dalrymple has written several books on India, has lived in India on and off
since 1989, and spends most of the year at his Mehrauli farmhouse in the outskirts of
Delhi. He has received numerous awards and prizes, including the Duff Cooper Memorial
Prize, the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award, the Sunday Times Young British Writer of the
Year Award, the Hemingway, the Kapuscinski and the Wolfson Prizes.
"'The greatest and noblest ruler India has known . . . indeed one of the great kings of
the world' . . . tolerance to men of other religions were as important to Ashoka as to
Mahatma Gandhi," John Keay, " India
Discovered, First published in Great Britain in 1981, p63, MORE
[The policemen who supervised and sometimes even assisted the rampaging Hindu mobs in
Gujarat have been rewarded and promoted. The RSS has 45,000
branches, its own range of charities and 7 million volunteers preaching its doctrine of
hate across India. They include Narendra Modi--Arundhati Roy,
"The
monster in the mirror," theguardian.com, December 13, 2008]
The actual term 'hindu' first occurs, . . .
as "a Persian geographical term for the people who lived beyond the river Indus"
Visweswaran, Kamala, Michael Witzel, Nandini Manjrenkar, Dipta Bhog, and Uma
Chakravarti, "The Hindutva view of
history: rewriting textbooks in India and the United States," Georgetown Journal of
International Affairs 10(1):101-112.
India's BJP is determined to complete what the British began:
Divide et Impera (Divide and Rule)
The 'idea of India' was essentially a European, not a local invention
, as the name
itself makes clear. No such term, or equivalent, as India existed in any indigenous
language. . . . as late as the 16th century, Europeans could define Indians simply as
'all natives of an unknown country', and so call the inhabitants of the Americas.--Perry
Anderson, "The Indian
Ideology," Verso (November 5, 2013)
Ram Puniyani, "Why Did Muslim Rulers Destroy Hindu Temples? Facts and Myths," YouTube, June 18, 2014
[Through most of the 20th century, Hindu nationalism was not a mainstream view.
Especially after a Hindu nationalist assassinated Mahatma Gandhi, . . . For most of its
past, India was neither Hindu nor a nation, . . .
Hindu kings had begun the Indian tradition of desecrating one another's temples
by the seventh century, long before the dawn of Indo-Muslim rule. . . .
For a century, Hindus had constituted roughly 20 per cent of all Mughal nobles. In the
second half of his reign, Aurangzeb enlarged by 50 per cent the proportion of Hindus in
the Mughal nobility, hardly a course of action that indicated he was bent on destroying
Hindus or Hinduism.--Audrey Truschke, "A
much-maligned Mughal," aeon.co, April 7, 2015]
"The changing share of world GDP 1600-1870" (in million 1990 international $),
Angus Maddison, The World Economy, Paris: OECD, 2001, p. 261, Table B-18
Romila Thapar, "They
Peddle Myths and Call It History: India's governing party rewrites the country's
history to justify its Hindu nationalist ideology," nytimes.com, May 17, 2019
"Article 370: India Strips Disputed Kashmir
of Special Status," BBC.com, August 5, 2019
[The Company makes its first territorial seizure with the support of the Jagath
Seths [the country's wealthiest bankers]. It was they who asked the British to
overthrow Siraj-ud-Daulah of Bengal and they offered Clive £2 million to do this.
This was the moment the Company realised it could defeat the vast Mughal armies with a
very small amount of its newly-trained sepoys. And particularly from the 1780s onwards,
the Marwari and Jain bankers of Bengal, and later the Hindu bankers of Benares and
Patna, consistently backed the Company against other Indian forces. . . .
If only the Triple Alliance created by Nana Phadnavis between Hyderabad, the Marathas
and Tipu Sultan had held together. Had these three pushed at the same time, there was
absolutely no question that the Company would have been defeated. . . . The Triple
Alliance broke down and the next [one] was with the British against Tipu. The Marathas
collaborated with the Company, idiotically from an Indian perspective, to destroy
Tipu.--Mukund Padmanabhan, "William Dalrymple on 'The Anarchy' and
the cunning of the East India Company," thehindu.com, October 3, 2019]
[But the essential truth is that the people of India started to think themselves to be
"Hindus" slowly over several centuries, after 12th century. . . . And the Imperial
British added "ism" to Hindu in the early 19th century in order to execute its divide
and rule strategy. . . .
The three words - Hindu, Hindustan and Hinduism - were coined and popularised by
Muslims and Christians - whom the Hindutva ideology identifies as "invaders". . . .
Many of the Turks and Afghans who are now seen as "invaders into India" came from
regions which were once part of the ancient empires of India.--Devdan Chaudhuri, "How
did Hindus become Hindu and why Hindutva is not Hinduism," dailyo.in, October 17, 2017]
[My generation grew up in an India where our sense of nationhood lay in the slogan,
'unity in diversity.' We were brought up to take pluralism for granted, and to reject
the communalism that had partitioned the nation when the British left. In rejecting the
case for Pakistan, Indian nationalism also rejected the very idea that religion should
be a determinant of nationhood.--Sashi Tharoor, "Why I Am A Hindu,"
The Wisdom Fund, October 10, 2019]
Dexter Filkins, "Blood and Soil in Narendra Modi's India: The Prime Minister's
Hindu-nationalist government has cast two hundred million Muslims as internal enemies,"
newyorker, December 2, 2019
VIDEO: Uttar Pradesh, Chief Minster Yogi Adityanath said that he will take badla or revenge on
protesters--"Muzaffarnagar: Yogi Adityanath's 'Revenge'?," ndtv.com, December 24, 2019
[The anti-CAA
protests began in the state of Assam, where the BJP had supported the implementation
of a National Registry of Citizens under orders from the Supreme Court in 2015. The NRC,
which grew out of a decadeslong ethno-linguistic dispute between Indigenous Assamese
people and Muslim and Hindu immigrants from neighboring Bangladesh, was billed as a way
to identify unauthorized immigrants, forcing residents of Assam to establish their
Indian lineage or be stripped of their citizenship. But the BJP turned the registry into
a predominantly anti-Muslim exercise: Ultimately, a major portion of the 2 million
residents of Assam who were excluded from the list were Muslim.--Soumya Shankar, "INDIA'S CITIZENSHIP
LAW, IN TANDEM WITH NATIONAL REGISTRY, COULD MAKE BJP'S DISCRIMINATORY TARGETING OF
MUSLIMS EASIER," theintercept.com, January 30, 2020]
[In a stump speech in 2014, Modi told an audience in Assam that while Hindu migrants
would be accommodated, other "infiltrators" would be sent back to Bangladesh. In April
2019, Amit Shah, now Modi's home minister, said that Bangladeshi immigrants were "eating
the grain that should go to the poor". They were "termites", Shah added. The BJP would
pick them up, one by one, and "throw them into the Bay of Bengal".--Samanth Subramanian,
"How Hindu supremacists are tearing India
apart," theguardian.com, February 20, 2020]
Karan Deep Singh and Suhasini Raj, "'Muslims Are Foreigners': Inside India's Campaign to Decide Who Is a
Citizen," nytimes.com, April 4, 2020
VIDEO: "India: When Hindu nationalism meets
Covid-19," TRT World, April 11, 2020
[The Bhagavad Gita enumerated the traits of the righteous . . .
The traits of the righteous were, "Fearless and pure in heart; steadfast in the exercise
of wisdom; restrained and open-handed; none-hurting, truthful, from anger free;
compassionate to all existent beings; free from nagging greed; gentle, modest, never
fickle; ardent, patient, enduring, pure, not treacherous nor arrogant." . . .
The National Flag is a tricolour of saffron, white and green; with the Ashoka Chakra, a
24-spoke wheel, in navy blue, at its centre. . . .
"Bhagwa or the saffron colour denotes renunciation or disinterestedness. Our leaders
must be indifferent to material gains and dedicate themselves to their work. The white
in the centre is light, the path of truth to guide our conduct. The green shows our
relation to (the) soil, our relation to the plant life here, on which all other life
depends. The Ashoka Chakra in the centre of the white is the wheel of the law of dharma.
Truth or satya, dharma or virtue ought to be the controlling principle of those who work
under this flag." . . .
Hindutva ideologues were inspired simultaneously by the nationalist, racial, supremacist
and cultural values of both Nazism and Zionism.--Devdan Chaudhuri,
"About Values: Why
Hinduism-loving citizens tolerate the unrighteous or the devilish?," thepunchmagazine.com,
April 18, 2020]
Siddharth Varadarajan, "Demolition Men Do Not Build Nations, They Destroy Them," The Wire, August 7, 2020
Hinduism, too, it turns out, is an 'invader' religion, arriving with the
Aryans from Central Asia. (p.38) --
Namit Arora, "Indians:
A Brief History of a Civilization," India Viking (May 15,
2021)
Mr Modi's avowed GDP target - a $5 trillion (£3.6 trillion) economy by 2025, or roughly
$3 trillion after adjusting for inflation - is a pipe dream now.--Nikhil Inamdar and
Aparna Alluri, "India economy: Seven
years of Modi in seven charts," BBC News, June 21, 2021
Pavan Varma, BJP-RSS have Talibanized Hinduism, Eroded India's Pluralism, Harmony and
Rule of Law, The Wire, August 18, 2021
The Hindu Extremists at War With Interfaith Love, VICE News, October 21, 2021
How Haidar Ali and Tipu Sultan led India's first united front against the East India Company, History of Islam, March 18, 2022
Prophet Muhammad Row: Presenting Bhartiya Fringe Party Feat. Nupur Sharma, PM Modi, Amit Shah & Yogi, The Wire, June 15, 2022
BJP Continues to Fool India on the CAA, The Wire, June 30, 2022
"Azad Remained Steadfast Against Partition:
On the 75th anniversary of India's independence, imagine if Gandhi,
Nehru, Patel . . . had not agreed to partition India, where would India be today?,"
The Wisdom Fund, August 15, 2022
Can India be the Next China? Not With Modi's Present Policies Which Are Obstacles, The Wire, December 14, 2022
