Mihir Bose is an old hand in documenting Anglais perfidy. In his book "THE MAGIC OF INDIAN CRICKET -- Cricket and society in India" posted here in full for the interested reader,
http://depositfiles.com/files/fbyo9du0x
he chronicles Anglais perfidy on the cricket field and beyond:
Read it along withThis early sign of arrogance was transformed into the much more pernicious belief that the British were the master race destined to rule India after 1857 when India came under direct Crown rule. It was the high tide of the new western imperialism when everything non-western was suspect and Britons, presenting themselves as Europeans, imposed their superior civilisation. This meant, as George Orwell put it, ‘You turn a Gatling gun on a mob of unarmed natives and then you establish “The law” which includes roads, railways and court-house.’ It was, of course, during the period of ‘a sort of forcible evangelising’ that cricket took root in India.
However, despite this, the British, starting with Hastings and Oriental Jones, were the catalysts of change in India. They brought new ideas, new ways of looking and reconnected India to the world. Its effect on the Indian, particularly the Hindu mind, was immense. The most significant reforms of Hinduism, removing some of its barbaric customs, for instance, were not carried out by the British but by Indians who looked at their own society with the help of British ideas and, finding it wanting, sought to change it.
But having helped open the Indian mind the British also chained it, put a ceiling on what Indians could aspire to. The classic illustration of this is the way Everest was named. It was named after George Everest, a British colonel who, along with William Lambton, helped map India, something that had not been done before. It was an awesome achievement and it also resulted in the first accurate measurements of the Himalayas, including the world’s highest peak which bears Everest’s name.
But who actually calculated that the mountain we call Everest was the highest in the world? It was certainly not Everest. In the early stages of the mapping it was denoted as Peak XV as efforts were made to measure it. In Calcutta worked a Bengali called Radhanath Sikdar, a young mathematical genius whose skills had been much admired by Everest. He was the Chief Computer and he was asked by Andrew Waugh, Everest’ successor as Surveyor-General of India, to provide the mathematical formula. This he did working out that Peak XV was 29,002 feet above sea level, making it the highest in the world. However, when it came to the name Waugh insisted it should be named Everest. He had already dismissed the names the Nepalis had for the mountain, saying Everest was a ‘household word among civilised, nations’, so for him to consider an Indian subordinate’s name for the peak was impossible. This incident illustrates British rule rather well. It allowed someone like Sikdar to rise, even become the Chief Computer, but his Indian name could not possibly be given to the highest peak in the world.
The other great feature of the British connection with India was that from the very beginning the British behaved as if they always occupied the moral high ground. You can get some idea of how deeply the British held to this notion during the Raj if you visit the third floor of the British Library in Euston. This is where the India Office Library is now located and a truly magnificent library it is, essential to anyone researching into the India of the last two hundred years. Here the British have not only carefully preserved the records of their rule but much of value relating to India. There is nothing like this available anywhere else. However, among the many wonderful things here, one set of publications is not much in demand, although in many ways it is the most revealing.
These are the annual reports presented to the British Parliament by the Secretary of State for India, summarising the activities of the government in India during the preceding year. The report underlined that the ultimate ruler of India was the British House of Commons and through this report the representatives of the British people, who owned India, could judge what had been done in their name. Such government reports are not uncommon and the red-bound books are full of the sort of dry government facts and figures you would expect. But what is really remarkable is the title the British gave these reports. They were not called the Annual Report on British India or anything like that. Their title was: Moral and Material Progress in India. The message was clear. The British in India were not only improving the economic condition of the Indians – a claim some British historians still maintain is valid – but they were also improving the morals of this barbaric, decadent, people.
Such a view became the orthodoxy in the middle of the nineteenth century. But even when the British were mere traders in India, and had no expectations of ruling the country, they projected themselves as people who were always in the right and considered all those who opposed them as usurpers.
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Once the British converted themselves from traders to rulers in India then this desire to portray all their actions as being on a higher moral plane to that of the Indians became an almost obsessive British concern. The British were the conquerors, yet it was British heroes who always sought to occupy the moral high ground. This started right from the moment when Clive fought Siraj-ud-daulah at Plassey in June 1757 to launch the British Empire in India.
That victory on that rainy Thursday was more like the sort of one-day cricket international that the South African Hanje Cronje might have organised with the result fixed by judicious bribing before the match (battle) begun. It rained, which affected Siraj’s powder, there was some dare-devilry from Clive’s cavalry but the outcome was not in doubt because Clive had bribed Mir Jaffar, Siraj’s ambitious Commander-in-Chief, promising him the kingship of Bengal in exchange for remaining neutral. The result of the battle was Mir Jaffar replacing Siraj on the throne of Bengal and Clive and his men earning fortunes they could never have dreamt of. When Clive and his men entered Murshidabad, Siraj’s capital, he described it as ‘as extensive, populous and rich as the city of London, with the difference that there are individuals in the first possessing infinitely greater property than in the last’.
As it happens, the crucial battle of Plassey was preceded by not one deception but two, one of which involved a banker called Omichand who was the middle man between Clive and Mir Jaffar. At one stage he threatened to blow the whistle on the whole enterprise and tell Siraj unless he was paid very large sums of money. Clive and the English in Calcutta were convinced that Omichand was a crook. However, for their plan to work they knew they had to associate with him and, since everybody else was crooked, perhaps more so, they decided that the only way to deal with Omichand was to be as deceitful. They produced two versions of the treaty with Mir Jaffar. The true one, coloured blue, had no clause about any payment to Omichand, the false one, coloured red, with forged signatures had. Clive justified it on the grounds that Omichand was the ‘greatest villain upon earth’ and that it was necessary to deceive him in order to achieve the greater prize of securing these possessions for England. Many years later Clive’s action was the subject of a censure motion in the British House of Commons. The proposer, Colonel Burgoyne (who was later to suffer defeat at the hands of the Americans during their war of independence), denounced Clive for his looting of Bengal and his deception of Omichand. Clive defended himself in much the same style as Napolean justifying the shooting of Duc d’Enghein. The debate showed the English at their sanctimonious worst. Part of Burgoyne’s resolution was accepted, that Clive had made money, but he was also praised for ‘great and meritorious service to the country’. As Nirad Chaudhuri, Clive’s biographer, says, the Commons had ducked the question: how could they condemn Clive without condemning the very establishment of British power in India? ‘England could not retain the stolen goods if they called Clive a thief.’
It is very interesting to see how popular British histories deal with this seminal period. Little or no mention is made of the bribery of Mir Jaffar or Clive’s deception of Omichand, but much emphasis is laid on an event that preceded Plassey.
http://depositfiles.com/files/fa967xvrt
Boria Majumdar
LOST HISTORIES OF INDIAN CRICKET -- Battles off the Pitch
PS: Admittedly, cricket and sports are not the flavor of this thread, but the books by Mihir bose and Boria majumdar are far from sporting documentaries, they are a chronicle of the perfidious albion as seen from a sporting eye.
Why isn't philip g@ndu's and queen maadar's arrant arrogance on that occasion better known amongst ordinary yindians? Heck, I'm hearing about it only now!
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