Sunday August 7, 2022
You probably don’t have Monday August 15 circled on your calendar. Perhaps you should. It’s the 75th anniversary of the collapse of colonialism.
On August 15, 1947, India declared Independence.
Actually, Pakistan beat India by one day – an omen of the animosity that has persisted ever since – but my ties are to India, so that’s what I’ll write about.
I spent my first ten years in India. Most of it during World War II, where my mother received a Kaiser-i-Hind medal – India’s highest civilian honour -- for, among other things, refusing to flee from the region when Japanese forces were just one Himalayan pass away.
But even as some 2 million Indian soldiers fought for Britain, millions of ordinary people rallied against British rule.
I remember standing on our hillside the summer before Independence, listening to waves of sound drifting across the forested slopes from the nearest town, as thousands chanted “Jai Hind! Jai Hind! Jai Hind!”
Loosely translated, “Victory to India!”
“What are they shouting for?” I asked my father. At ten, I was politically clueless.
“They want independence from Britain,” `he explained.
“Why?” I wondered. “Don’t they realize how good they’ve got it now?”
My father, wisely, said nothing. But I learned later that he had chosen not to return to India for a third term as college professor, because he knew he would be appointed principal, and he believed it was time an Indian held that post.
Winners and losers
In some ways, India did derive benefits from British rule. The British brought education – in English, of course. They built a railroad system that should have qualified as a wonder of the world. They brought a uniform system of laws to over 500 autonomous princely states.
On the other hand, to put this bluntly, Britain raped India.
When the East India Company first sank its claws into the Indian sub-continent in 1611, India was the world’s richest country, an economic superpower. Its economy surpassed the whole of Europe.
By 1947, though, India had sunk to one of the poorer nations. From being the world’s biggest textile exporter, it had become a major market for English cotton mills.
India was the victim of England’s industrial revolution.
Triumph and tragedy
We left India in January 1947, so I wasn’t there for the first Indian Independence Day.
It was, in many ways, a triumph. After 200 years of external rule, first by a trading corporation and then by the British crown, India had set itself free.
It was, in other ways, a massive tragedy. A mini-continent – conventional mapping makes it look much smaller than it really is – was split into three. Along religious lines. Muslims were banished to Pakistan, or to what is now Bangla Desh. Hindus flocked into India. Over 15 million people migrated.
Wikipedia estimates that 500,000 people were killed.
Fifty years later, an older schoolmate told me of riding a train back to his home in Karachi, Pakistan’s major port. Each time the train crossed and recrossed the new border between India and Pakistan, gangs of young men surged through the carriages, dragging anyone who might belong to the other religion off the train, and killing them.
My schoolmate estimated that he saw over 100 people murdered outside his window. He’s dead now; I hope I’ve recalled his story accurately.
The end of colonialism
But aside from atrocities, Indian Independence was the beginning of the end of colonialism.
Colonialism reached its zenith following the Industrial Revolution. European powers carved up the rest of the world. Africa, for example, now has 54 countries. Only one escaped being a European colony.
The British Empire was the biggest. Maps of the time marked British colonies in red. They looked as if someone had sloshed a gallon of paint across the globe.
And India was, as Paul Scott’s novels called it, the “Jewel in the Crown” of the British Empire.
George VI was King of England, but Emperor of India.
India’s Independence was the tipping point. Like dominoes, the rest of Britain’s colonies followed, eventually becoming today’s Commonwealth of Nations. More than 50 new sovereign states emerged from European empires.
Colonialism is dead, today. No nation – except Russia, still stuck in a Czarist mindset – would dare annex another nation by force.
Here in Canada, we decry the colonial attitudes of our ancestors, who believed they had a divine right to take over territories inhabited for 14,000 years by “savages.”
We forget that the first major rejection of the colonial mentality happened in India, 75 years ago this coming Monday.
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Copyright © 2022 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups encouraged; links from other blogs welcomed; all other rights reserved.
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Your turn
Last week’s column grew out of a frustration with TV news. As I wrote, the screen shows a face contorted with painful memories, accusing someone of something. The “someone” declines to be interviewed, but issues a “statement” which, in fact, says nothing. To me, watching, the “statement’s” blandness, its “Father-knows-best” generalities, almost confirms the accuser’s claims.
In that context, Jan White’s theories about the use of illustrations made a lot of sense to me. I must have attended his workshop 30 years ago. He was able to reduce the complicated business of graphic design to a few simple principles.I used them for years.
But until recently, it hadn’t occurred to me to apply them to text as well as visuals.
That’s the background for last week’s column.
I write as a freelancer. Isabel Gibson also works with words. But she writes mainly in a corporate world. She saw some weaknesses in applying Jan White’s principles: “I like White's categories and accompanying advice, but the accuser often has the upper hand on the communications front. An accusation must be specific: ‘They did this to me’. An emotional delivery is seen as understandable and even as adding to credibility.
“What's the most specific thing an innocent accused person can say in rebuttal? "I did not do that."
“An emotional delivery [defence? JT] can be discounted or even ridiculed.
“Although I understand why organizations do these pro forma denials, they're not worth much, if anything.”
Frank Martens launched a generic blast at moral rigidity: “There is something wrong with the majority of Christians, Muslims, etc., who, in this scientific age, cannot figure out what is wrong (or what few things are right) with their beliefs.
“I was not even 10 years of age while attending a very evangelical, Baptist, elementary school, that I could see the hypocrisy of my teachers and their teachings. I was taught and learned the differences between right and wrong -- for the average mind that is not a difficult concept to learn. That, plus the Golden Rule, is all that everyone needs. You don’t need to rely on Jesus or Mohammad, or the Grand Mufti, or Abraham or Moses, to be a ‘good’ person. Common sense and a little learning can tell you how to act and react with your fellow human beings.”
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TECHNICAL STUFF
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PROMOTION STUFF…
To use the links in this section, you’ll have to insert the necessary symbols. (This is to circumvent filters that think some of these links are spam.)
Wayne Irwin's “Churchweb Canada,” is an inexpensive service for any congregation wanting to develop a web presence, with free consultation. http://wwwDOTchurchwebcanadaDOTca. He set up my webpage, and he doesn’t charge enough.
I recommend Isabel Gibson’s thoughtful and well-written blog, wwwDOTtraditionaliconoclastDOTcom. She also runs beautiful pictures. Her Thanksgiving presentation on the old hymn, For the Beauty of the Earth, Is, well, beautiful -- https://www.traditionaliconoclast.com/2019/10/13/for/
Tom Watson writes a weekly blog called “The View from Grandpa Tom’s Balcony” -- ruminations on various subjects, and feedback from Tom’s readers. Write him at tomwatsoATgmailDOTcom (NB that’s “watso” not “watson”)
ALVA WOOD ARCHIVE
The late Alva Wood’s collection of satiric and sometimes wildly funny columns about a mythical village’s misadventures now have an archive (don’t ask how this happened) on my website: http://quixotic.ca/Alva-Wood-Archive. Feel free to browse all 550 columns