It has hardly rained in Pune since June 2014. They say El Niño. There is nothing new about El Niño...
Munshi Premchand's story 'Shatranj ke khiladi' is full of condemnation for Lucknow’s degeneracy.
from Satyajit Ray's 'Shatranj Ke Khilari', 1977
courtesy: the current holder of the copyright of the feature
Satyajit Ray's attitude is more ambivalent: "I was portraying two negative forces, feudalism and colonialism. You had to condemn both Wajid (1822-1887) and Dalhousie."
What all did colonialism bring to India?
Mike Davis has some answers in his "Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World", 2001.
Munshi Premchand's story 'Shatranj ke khiladi' is full of condemnation for Lucknow’s degeneracy.
courtesy: the current holder of the copyright of the feature
Satyajit Ray's attitude is more ambivalent: "I was portraying two negative forces, feudalism and colonialism. You had to condemn both Wajid (1822-1887) and Dalhousie."
What all did colonialism bring to India?
Mike Davis has some answers in his "Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World", 2001.
"...The central government under the leadership of Queen
Victoria’s favorite poet, Lord Lytton ( Viceroy of India between 1876 and 1880), vehemently opposed efforts by Buckingham
and some of his district officers to stockpile grain or otherwise interfere
with market forces. All through the autumn of 1876, while the vital kharif crop
was withering in the fields of southern India, Lytton had been absorbed in
organizing the immense Imperial Assemblage in Delhi to proclaim Victoria
Empress of India (Kaiser-i-Hind). As The Times’s special correspondent described
it, “The Viceroy seemed to have made the tales of Arabian fiction true …
nothing was too rich, nothing too costly.” “Lytton put on a spectacle,” adds a
biographer of Lord Salisbury (the secretary of state for India), “which
achieved the two criteria Salisbury had set him six months earlier, of being
‘gaudy enough to impress the orientals’ … and furthermore a pageant which hid
‘the nakedness of the sword on which we really rely.’ ” Its “climacteric
ceremonial” included a week-long feast for 68,000 officials, satraps and
maharajas: the most colossal and expensive meal in world history. An English
journalist later estimated that 100,000 of the Queen-Empress’s subjects starved
to death in Madras and Mysore in the course of Lytton’s spectacular durbar. Indians
in future generations justifiably would remember him as their Nero..."
Remember, Maharashtra lost 8.2 million (India 12.2–29.3 million) people during the famine of 1876-1879. (disclaimer: death toll estimates vary but are mind numbing in any case)
p.s Where can I read Mahatma Phule's (महात्मा फुले) condemnation of the British Raj for its handling of the "The Great Famine of 1876–78"? I am sure he criticized it? Didn't he?
....And how I wish Japan stuck to 'such' wars instead of the real wars they waged in 20th century.p.s Where can I read Mahatma Phule's (महात्मा फुले) condemnation of the British Raj for its handling of the "The Great Famine of 1876–78"? I am sure he criticized it? Didn't he?
Japanese 'fart battle' scrolls date from the Edo period (1603–1868)
Artist: Unknown to me
courtesy: Dangerous Minds