White Mughals, by William Dalrymple, published by Harper Perennial 2004 – extracts from pp 46-54:
“Most powerful of the critics was one of the Company’s Directors, Charles Grant. Grant was amongst the first of a new breed of Evangelical Christians, and he brought his fundamentalist religious opinions directly to the East India Company boardroom. Writing ‘it is hardly possible to conceive any people more completely enchained than they [the Hindus] are by their superstitions’, he proposed in 1787 to launch missions to convert a people whom he characterised as ‘universally and wholly corrupt…depraved as they are blind, and wretched as they are depraved’. Within a few decades the missionaries – initially based at the Danish settlement of Serampore – were beginning fundamentally to change British perceptions of the Hindus. No longer were they inheritors of a body of sublime and ancient wisdom,…but instead merely ‘poor benighted heathen’, or even ‘licentious pagans’, some of whom, it was hoped, were eagerly awaiting conversion, and with it the path to Civilisation.
…It was to combat the intolerance of these Evangelicals that [the more enlightened British General] Stuart anonymously published a pamphlet called
A Vindication of the Hindoos. In this text he tried to discourage any attempt by European missionaries to convert the Hindus, arguing that, as he put it, ‘on the enlarged principles of moral reasoning, Hinduism little needs the meliorating hand of Christianity to render its votaries a sufficiently correct and moral people for all the useful purposes of a civilised society’…The reaction that Stuart generated by writing his defence of Hinduism is a measure of how attitudes were beginning to change at the close of the eighteenth and the opening years of the nineteenth century. A full-scale pamphlet war broke out, with furious attacks on the anonymous ‘Bengal Officer’ who produced the work, denouncing him as an ‘infidel’ and a ‘pagan’.
…[General] Stuart was not alone in facing criticism. All over India, as the eighteenth century gave way to the nineteenth, attitudes were changing among the British. Men who showed too great an enthusiasm for Hinduism, for Indian practices or even for their Indian wives and Anglo-Indian children, were finding that the climate was growing distinctly chilly.
David Hare, a Scottish watchmaker who founded the Hindu College in Calcutta, was actually denied a Christian burial when he died of cholera, on the grounds that he had become more Hindu than Christian. Many more found that their Indian ways led to a block on their promotion. When Francis Gillanders, a British tax-collector stationed in Bihar, was found to be involving himself too closely with the [Buddhist] temple at Bodh Gaya, to which he donated a bell in 1798, the Directors of the Company back in London wrote to the Governor General expressing their horror that a Christian should be, as they put it, administering ‘heathen’ rites. A little later Frederick Shore found that his adoption of native dress so enraged the increasingly self-righteous officials of Calcutta that a government order was issued explicitly forbidding Company servants from wearing anything other than European dress. The following year the army issued similar orders forbidding European officers from taking part in the [Hindu] festival of Holi…The shutters were beginning to come down.
…Two words were growing apart…If that gap widened into an abyss during the first years of the nineteenth century, it was largely due to the influence of one man…On 8 November 1797, Lord Wellesley, a minor Irish aristocrat, set out from England to take up his appointment as Governor General of Bengal and head of the Supreme Government of India. For nearly three hundred years Europeans coming out to the subcontinent had been assimilating themselves to India in a kaleidoscope of different ways. That process was now drawing to a close. Increasingly Europeans were feeling they had nothing to learn from India, and they had less and less inclination to discover anything to the contrary. India was perceived as a suitable venue for ruthless and profitable European expansion, where glory and fortunes could be acquired to the benefit of all concerned. It was a place to be changed and conquered, not a place to be changed or conquered by.
This new Imperial approach was one that Lord Wellesley was determined not only to make his own, but to embody. His Imperial policies would effectively bring into being the main superstructure of the Raj as it survived up to 1947; he also brought with him the arrogant and disdainful British racial attitudes that buttressed and sustained it.”
William Dalrymple discussing the economic impacts of the British Empire on India:
http://www.outlookindia.com/fullprint.asp?choice=1&fodname=20070424&fname=dalrymple&sid=1 :
"For all the irrigation projects, new railways, and imperviousness to bribes, the Raj presided over the destruction of Indian political institutions and cultural and artistic self-confidence, while the economic figures speak for themselves. In 1600, when the East India Company was founded, Britain was generating 1.8 percent of the world's GDP while India was producing 22.5 percent. By 1870, at the peak of the Raj, Britain was generating 9.1 percent, while India had been reduced to a poor third-world nation, a symbol across the globe of famine and deprivation."
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.... his death mask was put on display in one of our local museums as part of an exhibition and huge uproar was created over it.
