Archer

True, that avoided messy battles later on, but they were not the only ones who could have done it, any empire in India basically sought to expand its borders and seek dominance. At their peak, the Marathas effectively ran an Indian empire. What I am of course picking on, is not your statement per se but the notion, often peddled by a few British victorian era academics (and apparently still a popular one in some british circles, even on the net) that the British accomplished something which was hitherto never done ("The raj was not all that bad old boy, we made India").

Which of course is patently false, given the Maurya empire in BC,
http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~dee/GRAPHIC...SES/MAURYA.GIF

...to even the modern day ones. And once the British left, it was Sardar Vallabhai Patel who by dint of acumen and strength created modern India. Whether Bharat or Hindustan, Indias been around for ages.

I have to disagree here since during British era, despite the ICS, Indians could never rise beyond the stated ranks. It was not a democracy, it was a Monarchy with white admins and brown babus.

The Collector, Magistrate equivalents were always the White guys. Rules relaxed somewhat much later on, esp during WW2, but the "glass ceiling" remained rigidly enforced, with due attention paid to "caste", "ethnicity" and "religion"- good old divide and rule.

Indian democracy began with the INC founding fathers and Ambedkar and co, who used the British system as a template to model our own. In that, we "owe" them, as much as we'd owe the Zimbabweans if we had followed the Rhodes system of democracy, just coming up with an off the cuff analogy..

Disagree here- the educational institutions that existed in British time, fell into the pale in comparison with the utter destruction of the village/ taluk level educational system which iirc Macaulay and co, systematically uprooted. Gurcharan Das has excellent statistics on this, he points out that pre British times, even the smallest village often had access to functional literacy, including basic math, in its native tongue. The British banned this, and instituted an English centric system, which ensured that only a few handpicked babus were groomed for the ICS, admin posts etc. Their would have been little harm in this but for the fact they wiped out basic education from significant swathes of India; what had taken literally centuries to establish was driven into oblivion, and many of the dotard Rajah's were only too eager to follow Company Bahadurs diktat, tax their peasants, rather than concern themselves with such plebeian affairs.

Its an ironic state of affairs, that modern India, fifty years thence, is striving, at great cost, to implement what the British uprooted so fast, and thoroughly! Macaulays other (in)famous statement being of course: (paraphrasing) : A roomfull of western / latin literature is far better than all that Sanskrit is ever going to be worth.

Furthermore, most of India's educational system, including the much vaunted IITs etc are post Independence. There are but a handful of Pre Ind. Univs, some of which are still soldiering on, BHU, I think being one of them, which was set up by Pandit Madan Mohan Malviyas initiative.

Agreed, they established the rail network and expanded it (primarily some claim to move logistics and troops asap), but the bulk of the Indian network has been established post independence.

Its amazing for instance, if we see post independence Pak and India, the latters rail network -on an image, appears throughout, Paks is like a stunted branch, arguably pointing to each countries relative success or priority.


Definitely. Be as it may, the ICS were excellent bureaucrats, even if they were more often than not, more Brit than the Brits themselves.

On the negative side, the British template of the bureaucracy and the police force was of the ruler and the ruled, independent India followed it, and to its discredit, has not reformed the system despite many commissions pointing out the glaring disconnect. The Right to info. act is hopefully a harbinger of things to come, but the police reforms still need to be undertaken, perhaps better late than never.

In my opinion, the most overlooked byproduct of the Raj, afaik, in WW2 there were 20 Million Indians volunteers in the Military, the largest contingent from any nation (of course, this was united India, but the largest portion came from todays India).

India has always had superb soldiers by historical/ cultural choice- the Rajputs for eg, to those who made themselves into warriors, the Khalsa, the Marathas, but the British per se, introduced uniformity across the ranks and drilled them to perfection. The Marathas, and the Sikhs all iirc had a massive elite contingent, but were also dependent upon levies of varying levels of training, and consequently performance. This of course, referring to only the "famous types"- the common Indian jawan comes from so many diverse backgrounds that it is hard to state them one by one!

I have no qualms in accepting the Brit influence here, as well as paying homage to our doughty Indian jawans and officers, who have continued to soldier on, as their forefathers did, in a noble and highly challenging profession.

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My bow is stretched for its task