<b>5. Christian theft of India's wealth and land </b>
All the excerpts from <i>Will Durant, The Case for India (1930), Chapter 1:</i>
<i><b>5.1 India before Britain's christian colonialism</b></i>
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Those who have seen the unspeakable poverty and physiological weakness of the Hindus to-day will hardly believe that it was the wealth of eighteenth century India which attracted the commercial pirates of England and France. "This wealth," says Sunderland,
"was created by the Hindus' vast and varied industries. Nearly every kind of manufacture or product known to the civilized worldnearly every kind of creation of Man's brain and hand, existing anywhere, and prized either for its utility or beauty-had long, long been produced in India. India was a far greater industrial and manufacturing nation than any in Europe or than any other in Asia. Her textile goods-the fine products of her looms, in cotton, wool, linen and silkwere famous over the civilized world; so were her exquisite jewelry and her precious stones cut in every lovely form; so were her pottery, porcelains, ceramics of every kind, quality, color and beautiful shape; so were her fine works in metal-iron, steel, silver and gold. She had great architecture-equal in beauty to any in the world. She had great engineering business men, great bankers and financiers. Not only was she the greatest ship-building nation, but she had great commerce and trade by land and sea which extended to all known civilized countries. Such was the India which the British found when they came."7<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
<i><b>5.2 How the christians from Britain stole India</b></i>
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->It was this wealth that the East India Company proposed to appropriate. Already in 1686 its Directors declared their intention to "establish . . . a large, well-grounded, sure English dominion in India for all time to come." The company rented from the Hindu authorities trading posts at Madras, Calcutta and Bombay, and fortified them, without permission of the authorities, with troops and cannon. In 1756 the Rajah of Bengal, resenting this invasion, attacked the English Fort William, captured it, and crowded one hundred and forty-six English prisoners into the "Black Hole" of Calcutta, from which only twenty-three emerged alive the next morning. A year later Robert Clive defeated the Bengal forces at Plassey with the loss of only twenty-two British killed, and thereupon declared his Company the owner of the richest province in India. He added further territory by forging and violating treaties, by playing one native prince against another, and by generous bribes given and received. Four million dollars were sent down the river to Calcutta in one shipment. He accepted "presents" amounting to $1,170,000 from Hindu rulers dependent upon his favor and his guns; pocketed from them, in addition, an annual tribute of $140,000; took to opium, was investigated and exonerated by Parliament, and killed himself. "When I think," he said, "of the marvelous riches of that country, and the comparatively small part which I took away, I am astonished at my own moderation."9 Such were the morals of the men who proposed to bring civilization to India.
His successors in the management of the Company now began a century of unmitigated rape on the resources of India. They profiteered without hindrance: goods which they sold in England for $10,000,000 they bought for $2,000,000 in India. 10 They engaged, corporately and individually, in inland trade, and by refusing to pay the tolls exacted of Hindu traders, acquired a lucrative monopoly, The Company paid such fabulous dividends that its stock rose to $32,000 a shareP Its agents deposed and set up Hindu rulers according to bribes refused or received; in ten years they took in, through such presents, $30,000,000.13 They forged documents as circumstances required, and hanged Hindus for forging documents.14 Clive had set up Mir Jafar as ruler of Bengal for $6,192,875; Clive's successors deposed him and set up Mir Kasim on payment of $1,001,345; three years later they restored Mir Jafar for $2,500,825; two years later they replaced him with Najim-ud-Daula for $1,151,780.15
They taxed the provinces under the Company so exorbitantly that two-thirds of the population fled;16 defaulters were confined in cages, and exposed to the burning sun; fathers sold their children to meet the rising rates. It was usual to demand 50% of the net produce of the land. "Every effort, lawful and unlawful," says a Bombay Administration. report, written by Englishmen, "was made to get the utmost out of the wretched peasantry, who were subjected to torture, in some instances cruel and revolting beyond all description, if they would not or could not yield what was demanded."
...
"Everybody and everything," says the Oxford History of India, "was on sale."22 And Macaulay writes:
"During the five years which followed the departure of Clive from Bengal, the misgovernment of the English was carried to such a point as seemed incompatible with the existence of society. . . . The servants of the Company. . . forced the natives to buy dear and to sell cheap. . . . Enormous fortunes were thus rapidly accumulated at Calcutta, while thirty millions of human beings were reduced to the extremity of wretchedness. They had been accustomed to live under tyranny, but never under tyranny like this. . . . Under their old masters they had at least one resource: when the evil became insupportable, the people rose and pulled down the government. But the English Government was not to be so shaken off. That Government, oppressive as the most oppressive form of barbarian despotism, was strong with all the strength of civilization."23<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
<i><b>5.3 The christian government of Britain takes the place of the plundering christian East India Company </b></i>
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->By 1858 the crimes of the Company so smelled to heaven that the British Government took over the captured and plundered territories as a colony of the Crown; a little island took over half a continent. England paid the Company handsomely, and added the purchase price to the public debt of India, to be redeemed, principal and interest (originally at 10.5%), out of the taxes put upon the Hindu people.24 All the debts on the Company's books, together with the accrued interest on these debts, were added to the public obligations of India, to be redeemed out of the taxes put upon the Hindu people. Exploitation was dressed now in all the forms of Law-i.e. the rules laid down by the victors for the vanquished. Hypocrisy was added to brutality, while the robbery went on.
... the expropriation of state after state from the native rulers by war or bribery, or the simple decree of Lord Dalhousie that whenever a Hindu prince died without leaving a direct heir, his territory should pass to the British; in Dalhousie's administration alone eight states were absorbed in this peaceful way. Province after province was taken over by offering its ruler a choice between a pension and war.26 In the seventh decade of the nineteenth century England added 4000 square miles to her Indian territory; in the eighth decade, 15,000 square miles; .in the ninth, 90,000; in the tenth, 133,000.27 John Morley estimated that during the nineteenth century alone England carried on one hundred and eleven wars in India, using for the most part Indian troops;28 millions of Hindus shed their blood that India might be slave. The cost of these wars for the conquest of India was met to the last penny out of Indian taxes; the English congratulated themselves on conquering India without spending a cent.29 Certainly it was a remarkable, if not a magnanimous, achievement, to steal in forty years a quarter of a million square miles, and make the victims pay every penny of the expense.30
When at last in 1857 the exhausted Hindus resisted, they were suppressed with "medieval ferocity";31 <b>a favorite way of dealing with captured rebels was to blow them to bits from the mouths of cannon.</b>32 "We took," said the London Spectator, "at least 100,000 Indian lives in the mutiny."33 This is what the English call the Sepoy Mutiny, and what the Hindus call the War of Independence. There is much in a name.
<img src='http://www.harappa.com/lith/gif/delhimas.jpg' border='0' alt='user posted image' />
<i>Image caption: "An Execution in British India", painting by Vassili Verestchagin, ca. 1888, on the page "Mutiny Independence Delhi 1858 Massacre".</i>
( http://www.harappa.com/lith/delhi2.html , http://www.harappa.com/lith/gif/delhimas.jpg )
Let Englishmen describe the result. A report to the House of Commons by one of its investigating committees in 1804 stated: "It must give pain to an Englishman to think that since the accession of the Company the condition of the people of India has been worse than before."34
...
F.J. Shore, British administrator in Bengal, testified as follows to the House of Commons in 1857:
"The fundamental principle of the English has been to make the whole Indian nation subservient, in every possible way, to the interests and benefits of themselves. They have been taxed to the utmost limit; every successive province, as it has fallen into our possession, has been made a field for higher exaction; and it has always been our boast how greatly we have raised the revenue above that which the native rulers were able to extort. The Indians have been excluded from every honor, dignity or office which the lowest Englishman could be prevailed upon to accept."38 Such was the method of the British acquisition of India; this is the origin of the British claim to rule India today. And now, leaving the past, we shall examine the present, and show, point after point, how English rule is at this very moment, with all its modest improvements, destroying Hindu civilization, and the Hindu people.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
<i><b>5.4 Christianism taxes Hindus to death in their own land </b></i>
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><i>IV. The Caste System in India</i>
The present caste system in India consists of four classes: the real Brahmans-i.e., the British bureaucracy; the real Kshatryas-i.e., the British army; the real Vaisyas-i.e., the British traders; and the real Sudras and Untouchables-i.e., the Hindu people.
...
With a government responsible to England, not to India, it is natural that the power of taxation should be freely used. Though before the coming of the English the land was private property, the Government made itself the sole owner of the soil and charged for it a land tax or rental now equal to one-fifth of the produce.44In many cases in the past this land tax has amounted to half the gross produce, in some cases to more than the entire gross produce; in general it is two to three times as high as under pre-English rule.45 The Government has the exclusive right to manufacture salt, and adds to its sale-price a tax amounting to onehalf a cent per pound. When we remember that the average annual income in India is only $33, and recall the judgment of a missionary paper, The Indian Witness, that "it is safe to assume that 100,000,000 of the population of India have an annual income of not more than $5.00 a head,"46 we begin to understand how oppressive even these taxes may be, and how much they share in responsibility for the ill-health and emaciation of the Hindus.
A member of parliament, Cathcart Wilson, says: "The percentage of taxes in India, as related to the gross produce, is more than that of any other country."47 Until recently the rate was twice as high as in England, three times'as high as in Scotland. Herbert Spencer protested against "the pitiless taxation which wrings from the poor Indian ryots nearly half the product of their soil."48 Another Englishman, the late H. Y. Hyndman, after detailing the proof that taxation in India was far heavier than in any other country, though its population is poorer, entitled his book The Bankruptcy of India. Sir William Hunter, former member of the Viceroy's Council; said in 1875: "The Government assessment does not leave enough food to the cultivator to support himself and his family throughout the year."49 Mr. Thorburn, one-time Financial Commissioner of the Punjab, said that "the whole revenue of the Punjab. . . is practically drawn from the producing masses."50 Since the enactment of the income tax this is no longer true.
I asked the guide at Trichinopoly how the people of India had found, three or four hundred years ago, the money to build the vast temples there and at Madura and Tanjore. He answered that the rajahs had been able to build these edifices despite the fact that they had taxed the people much less severely than the English were doing.
Against this terrible blood-letting the Hindus have no redress; their legislatures are impotent. And in the midst of the heart-breaking poverty engendered partly by this taxation, the Government treats itself, at staggering cost, to gigantic official buildings at Delhi, needlessly alien in style to the architecture of India; for seven months of every year it transfers the Capital, with all its machinery and personnel, to vacation resorts in the mountains, at an expense of millions of dollars; and from time to time it holds gorgeous Durbars, to impress the people who provide tens of millions for the ceremony." It pays to be free.
The result is that the national debt of India, which was $35,000,000 in 1792, rose to $105,000,000 in 1805; to $150,000,000 in 1829; to $215,000,000 in 1845; to $275,000,000 in 1850; to $350,000,000 in 1858; to $500,000,000 in 1860; to $1,000,000,000 in 1901; to $1,535,000,000 in 1913, and to $3,500,000,000 in 1929.52 Let these figures tell the tale.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
<i><b>5.5 Christianism's calculated economic destruction of Hindu India: destroying Hindu industry and wealth-generation</b></i>
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><i>V. Economic Destruction</i>
The economic condition of India is the inevitable corollary of its political exploitation. Even the casual traveler perceives the decay of agriculture (which absorbs 85% of the people), and the destitution of the peasant. He sees the Hindu ryot in the rice-fields, wading almost naked in the mud of a foreign tyrant's land; his loin-cloth is all the finery that he has. In 1915 the Statistical Department of Bengal, the most prosperous of India's provinces, calculated the average wage of the able-bodied agricultural laborer to be $3.60 per month.78 His hut is of branches often open at the sides, and loosely roofed with straw; or it is a square of dried mud adorned with a cot of dried mud, and covered with mud and sticks and leaves. The entire house and furnishings of a family of six, including all their clothing, are worth $10.79 The peasant cannot afford newspapers or books, entertainment, tobacco, or drink. Almost half~his earnings go to the Government; and if he cannot pay the tax, his holding, which may have been in his family for centuries, is confiscated by the State.
If he is fortunate he escapes from the overtaxed land and takes refuge in the cities. Provided there are not too many other applicants, he may get work in Delhi, the capital of India, carrying away the white master's excrement; sanitary facilities are unnecessary when slaves are cheap. Or he can go to the factory, and become, if he is very lucky, one of the 1,409,000 "hands" of India. He will find difficulty in getting a place, for 33% of the factory workers are women, and 8% are children.80
In the mines 34% of the employees are women, of whom one-half work underground; 16% of the miners are children. In the cotton mills of Bombay the heat is exhausting, and the lungs are soon destroyed by the fluff-laden air; men work there until they reach a subsistence wage, and then their health breaks down.
More than half the factories use their employees fifty-four hours a week. The average wage of the factory workers is sixty to seventy cents a day; though allowance must be made for the inferior skill and strength of the Hindu as compared with the European or American laborer long trained in the ways of machines. In Bombay, in 1922, despite the factory acts of that year, the average wage of the cotton workers was 33 cents. In that same year the profit of the owners of those mills was 125%. This was an "off-year";in better years, the owners said, the profits were 200%. The workman's home is like his wage; usually it consists of one room, shared by the family with various animals; Zimand found one room with thirty tenants.81
Such is the industrial revolution that a British government has allowed to develop under its control, despite the example of enlightened legislation in America and England. The people flock to the factories because the land cannot support them; and the land cannot support them because it is overtaxed, because it is overpopulated, and because the domestic industries with which the peasants formerly eked out in winter their gleanings from the summer fields, have been destroyed by British control of Indian tariffs and trade. For of old the handicrafts of India were known throughout the world; it was manufactured-- i.e., hand-made--goods which European merchants brought from India to sell to the Westn In 1680, says the British historian Orme, the manufacture of cotton was almost universal in India,82 and the busy spinning-wheels enabled the women to round out the earnings of their men.
But the English in India objected to this competition of domestic industry with their mills at home; they resolved that India should be reduced to a purely agricultural country, and be forced in consequence to become a vast market for British machine-made goods. The Directors of the East India. Company gave orders that the production of raw silk should be encouraged, and the manufacture of silk fabrics discouraged; that silkwinders should be compelled to work in the Company's factories, and be prohibited, under severe penalties, from working outside.83 Parliament discussed ways and means of replacing Hindu by British industries. A tariff of 70-80% was placed upon Hindu textiles imported into free-trade England, while India was compelled, by foreign control of her government, to admit English textiles almost duty free.
Lest Indian industries should nevertheless continue somehow to exist, an excise tax was placed on the manufacture of cotton goods in India.84 As a British historian puts it:
"It is a melancholy instance of the wrong done to India by the country on which she has become dependent. . . . Had India been independent, she would have retaliated, would have imposed prohibitive duties upon British goods, and would thus have preserved her own productive industry from annihilation. This act of self-defense was not permitted her; she was at the mercy of the stranger. British goods were forced upon her without paying any duty, and the foreign manufacturer employed the arm of political injustice to keep down and ultimately strangle a competitor with whom he could not have contended on equal terms."85
And another Englishman wrote:
"We have done everything possible to impoverish still further the miserable beings subject to the cruel selfishness of English commerce. . . . Under the pretense of free trade, England has compelled the Hindus to receive the products of the steam-looms of Lancashire, Yorkshire, Glasgow, etc., at merely nominal duties; while the handwrought manufactures of Bengal and Behar, beautiful in fabric and durable in wear, have heavy and almost prohibitive duties imposed on their importation into England."86
The result was that Manchester and Paisley flourished, and Indian industries declined; a country well on the way to prosperity was forcibly arrested in its development, and compelled to be only a rural hinterland for industrial England.
The mineral wealth abounding in India's soil was not explored, for no competition with England was to be allowed.87 The millions of skilled artisans whom Indian handicrafts had maintained were added to the hundreds of millions who sought support from the land. "India," says Kohn, "was transformed into a purely agricultural country, and her people lived perpetually on the verge of starvation."88 The vast population which might have been comfortably supported by a combination of tillage and industry, became too great for the arid soil; and India was reduced to such penury that to-day nothing is left of her men, her women and her children but empty stomachs and fleshless bones.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
<i><b>5.6 The railways: the means by which Britain's christianism carried away loot stolen from Hindu Bharatam</b></i>
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->It might have been supposed that the building of 30,000 miles of railways would have brought a measure of prosperity to India. But these railways were built not for India but for England; not for the benefit of the Hindu, but for the purposes of the British army and British trade. If this seems doubtful, observe their operation. Their greatest revenue comes, not, as in America, from the transport of goods (for the British trader controls the rates), but from the third-class passengers--the Hindus; but these passengers are herded into almost barren coaches like animals bound for the slaughter, twenty or more in one compartment. The railroads are entirely in European hands, and the Government has refused to appoint even one Hindu to the Railway Board. The railways lose money year after year, and are helped by the Government out of the revenues of the people; these loans to date total over $100,000,000. The Government guarantees a minimum rate of interest on railway investments; the British companies who built the roads ran no risk whatever. No play or encouragement is given to initiative, competition, or private enterprise; the worst evils of a state monopoly are in force. All the losses are borne by the people, all the gains are gathered by the trader.89 So much for the railways.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
<i><b>5.7 Estimating how much thieving christianism had stolen from wealthy Hindu India: reducing Hindus to abject poverty in order to fund the christian (illiterate, destitute, Dickensian) England</b></i>
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Commerce on the sea is monopolized by the British even more than transport on land. The Hindus are not permitted to organize a merchant marine of their own;90 all Indian goods must be carried in British bottoms, as an additional strain on the starving nation's purse; and the building of ships, which once gave employment to thousands of Hindus, is prohibited.91
To this ruining of the land with taxation, this ruining of industry with tariffs, and this ruining of commerce with foreign control, add the drainage of millions upon millions of dollars from India year after year-and <b>the attempt to explain India's poverty as the result of her superstitions becomes a dastardly deception practised upon a world too busy to be well informed.</b> This drain having been denied, it is only necessary to state the facts, and to introduce them with a quotation from a document privately addressed by the British government in India to the Parliament of England. "Great Britain, in addition to the tribute which she makes India pay her through the customs, derives benefits from the savings .0f the service of the three presidencies (the provinces of Calcutta, Madras and Bombay) being spent in England instead of in India; and in addition to these savings, which probably amount to $500,000,000, she derives benefit from the fortunes realized by the European mercantile community, which are all remitted to England."92
This is a general statement; let us fill it in. Consider first the drain on India through trade. Not merely is this carried in British ships; far worse than that, there is an astounding surplus of exports over imports. In the happy years of the Company there were such balances as $30,000,000 exports and $3,000,000 imports;93 latterly the indecency has been reduced, and the excess of goods taken from India over goods brought into India is now a moderate one-third. In 1927, e.g., imports were $651,600,000, exports were $892,- 800,000; the excess of exports, $241,200,000.94 Where goes the money that pays for this excess? We are asked to believe that it takes the form of silver or gold imported and hoarded by the Hindus; but no man that has seen their poverty can believe so shameless a myth. Doubtless there is some hoarding, above all by the native princes, for India cannot be expected to put full faith in a banking system controlled by foreign masters. But it is the officials, the merchants and the manufacturers (most of whom are British) who take the great bulk of this profit, and return it to their countries in one form or another. As an East Indian merchant said in a Parliamentary report in 1853, when this process of bleeding was on a comparatively modest scale: "Generally up to 1847, the imports were about $30,000,000 and the exports about $47,500,000. The difference is the tribute which the Company received from the country."95
Consider, second, the drain through fortunes, dividends and profits made in India and spent abroad. The British come as officials or soldiers or traders; they make their money and return to Great Britain. Let an Englishman, Edmund Burke, describe them--and intensify his description to-day in proportion to the growth of British positions, manufactures and commerce in India.
"They have no more social habits with the people than if they still resided in England; nor indeed any species of intercourse but that which is necessary to make a sudden fortune. . . . Animated with all the avarice of age, and all the impetuosity of youth, they roll in one after another; wave after wave, and there is nothing before the eyes of the natives but an endless, hopeless prospect ofnew flights of birds of prey and passage, with appetites continually renewing for a food that is continually wasting. Every rupee of profit made by an Englishman is lost forever to India."96
Consider, third, the drain through salaries and pensions derived from India and spent abroad. In 1927 Lord Winterton showed, in the House of Commons,that there were then some 7500 retired officialsin Great Britain drawing annually $17,500,000 in pensions from the Indian revenue;97 Ramsay MacDonald put the figure at $20,000,000 a year.98 When England, which is almost as overpopulated as Bengal, sends its sons to India, she requires of them twenty-four years of service, reduced by four years of furloughs; she then retires them for life on a generous pension, paid by the Hindu people. Even during their service these officials send their families or their children to live for the most part in England; and they support them there with funds derived from India.99 Almost everything bought by the British in India, except the more perishable foods, is purchased from abroad.100 A great proportion of the funds appropriated' for supplies by the Government of India is spent in England.
As early as 1783 Edmund Burke predicted that the annual drain of Indian resources to England without equivalent return would eventually destroy India.101 From Plassey to Waterloo, fiftyseven years, the drain of India's wealth to England is computed by Brooks Adams at two-and-a-half to five billion dollars.102 He adds, what Macaulay suggested long ago, that <b>it was this stolen wealth from India which supplied England with free capital for the development of mechanical inventions, and so made possible the Industrial Revolution.</b>103
In 1901 Dutt estimated that one-half of the net revenues of India flowed annually out of the country, never to return.104 In 1906 Mr. Hyndman reckoned the drain at $40,000,000 a year. A. J. Wilson valued it at one-tenth of the total annual production of India.105 Montgomery Martin, estimating the drain at $15,000,000 a year in 1838, calculated that these annual sums, retained and gathering interest in India, would amount in half a century to $40,000,000,000.106 Though it may seem merely spectacular to juggle such figures, it is highly probable that the total wealth drained from India since 1757, if it had all been left and invested in India, would now amount, at a low rate of interest, to $400,000,000,000.106
Allow for money reinvested in India, and a sum remains easily equivalent to the difference between the poorest and the richest nations in the world. The same high rate of taxation which has bled India to perhaps a mortal weakness, might have done her no permanent injury if the wealth so taken had all been returned into the economy and circulation of the country; but bodily withdrawn from her as so much of it was, it has acted like a long-continued transfusion of vital blood.
"So great an economic drain out of the resources of the land," says Dutt, "would impoverish the most prosperous countries on earth; it has reduced India to a land of famines more frequent, more widespread and more fatal, than any known before in the history of India, or of the world."107
Sir Wilfred Scawen Blunt sums it up from the point of view of a true Englishman:
"India's famines have been severer and more frequent, its agricultural poverty has deepened, its rural population has become more hopelessly in debt, their despair more desperate. The system of constantly enhancing the land values (i.e. raising the valuation and assessment) has not been altered. The salt tax. . . still robs the very poor. . . . What was bad twenty-five years ago is worse now. At any rate there is the same drain of India's food to alien mouths. Endemic famines and endemic plagues are facts no official statistics can explain away. . . . Though myself a good Conservative . . . I own to being shocked at the bondage in which the Indian people are held; . . . and I have come to the conclusion that if we go on developing the country at the present rate, the inhabitants, sooner or later, will have to resort to cannibalism, for there will be nothing left for them to eat."108<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
All the excerpts from <i>Will Durant, The Case for India (1930), Chapter 1:</i>
<i><b>5.1 India before Britain's christian colonialism</b></i>
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Those who have seen the unspeakable poverty and physiological weakness of the Hindus to-day will hardly believe that it was the wealth of eighteenth century India which attracted the commercial pirates of England and France. "This wealth," says Sunderland,
"was created by the Hindus' vast and varied industries. Nearly every kind of manufacture or product known to the civilized worldnearly every kind of creation of Man's brain and hand, existing anywhere, and prized either for its utility or beauty-had long, long been produced in India. India was a far greater industrial and manufacturing nation than any in Europe or than any other in Asia. Her textile goods-the fine products of her looms, in cotton, wool, linen and silkwere famous over the civilized world; so were her exquisite jewelry and her precious stones cut in every lovely form; so were her pottery, porcelains, ceramics of every kind, quality, color and beautiful shape; so were her fine works in metal-iron, steel, silver and gold. She had great architecture-equal in beauty to any in the world. She had great engineering business men, great bankers and financiers. Not only was she the greatest ship-building nation, but she had great commerce and trade by land and sea which extended to all known civilized countries. Such was the India which the British found when they came."7<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
<i><b>5.2 How the christians from Britain stole India</b></i>
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->It was this wealth that the East India Company proposed to appropriate. Already in 1686 its Directors declared their intention to "establish . . . a large, well-grounded, sure English dominion in India for all time to come." The company rented from the Hindu authorities trading posts at Madras, Calcutta and Bombay, and fortified them, without permission of the authorities, with troops and cannon. In 1756 the Rajah of Bengal, resenting this invasion, attacked the English Fort William, captured it, and crowded one hundred and forty-six English prisoners into the "Black Hole" of Calcutta, from which only twenty-three emerged alive the next morning. A year later Robert Clive defeated the Bengal forces at Plassey with the loss of only twenty-two British killed, and thereupon declared his Company the owner of the richest province in India. He added further territory by forging and violating treaties, by playing one native prince against another, and by generous bribes given and received. Four million dollars were sent down the river to Calcutta in one shipment. He accepted "presents" amounting to $1,170,000 from Hindu rulers dependent upon his favor and his guns; pocketed from them, in addition, an annual tribute of $140,000; took to opium, was investigated and exonerated by Parliament, and killed himself. "When I think," he said, "of the marvelous riches of that country, and the comparatively small part which I took away, I am astonished at my own moderation."9 Such were the morals of the men who proposed to bring civilization to India.
His successors in the management of the Company now began a century of unmitigated rape on the resources of India. They profiteered without hindrance: goods which they sold in England for $10,000,000 they bought for $2,000,000 in India. 10 They engaged, corporately and individually, in inland trade, and by refusing to pay the tolls exacted of Hindu traders, acquired a lucrative monopoly, The Company paid such fabulous dividends that its stock rose to $32,000 a shareP Its agents deposed and set up Hindu rulers according to bribes refused or received; in ten years they took in, through such presents, $30,000,000.13 They forged documents as circumstances required, and hanged Hindus for forging documents.14 Clive had set up Mir Jafar as ruler of Bengal for $6,192,875; Clive's successors deposed him and set up Mir Kasim on payment of $1,001,345; three years later they restored Mir Jafar for $2,500,825; two years later they replaced him with Najim-ud-Daula for $1,151,780.15
They taxed the provinces under the Company so exorbitantly that two-thirds of the population fled;16 defaulters were confined in cages, and exposed to the burning sun; fathers sold their children to meet the rising rates. It was usual to demand 50% of the net produce of the land. "Every effort, lawful and unlawful," says a Bombay Administration. report, written by Englishmen, "was made to get the utmost out of the wretched peasantry, who were subjected to torture, in some instances cruel and revolting beyond all description, if they would not or could not yield what was demanded."
...
"Everybody and everything," says the Oxford History of India, "was on sale."22 And Macaulay writes:
"During the five years which followed the departure of Clive from Bengal, the misgovernment of the English was carried to such a point as seemed incompatible with the existence of society. . . . The servants of the Company. . . forced the natives to buy dear and to sell cheap. . . . Enormous fortunes were thus rapidly accumulated at Calcutta, while thirty millions of human beings were reduced to the extremity of wretchedness. They had been accustomed to live under tyranny, but never under tyranny like this. . . . Under their old masters they had at least one resource: when the evil became insupportable, the people rose and pulled down the government. But the English Government was not to be so shaken off. That Government, oppressive as the most oppressive form of barbarian despotism, was strong with all the strength of civilization."23<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
<i><b>5.3 The christian government of Britain takes the place of the plundering christian East India Company </b></i>
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->By 1858 the crimes of the Company so smelled to heaven that the British Government took over the captured and plundered territories as a colony of the Crown; a little island took over half a continent. England paid the Company handsomely, and added the purchase price to the public debt of India, to be redeemed, principal and interest (originally at 10.5%), out of the taxes put upon the Hindu people.24 All the debts on the Company's books, together with the accrued interest on these debts, were added to the public obligations of India, to be redeemed out of the taxes put upon the Hindu people. Exploitation was dressed now in all the forms of Law-i.e. the rules laid down by the victors for the vanquished. Hypocrisy was added to brutality, while the robbery went on.
... the expropriation of state after state from the native rulers by war or bribery, or the simple decree of Lord Dalhousie that whenever a Hindu prince died without leaving a direct heir, his territory should pass to the British; in Dalhousie's administration alone eight states were absorbed in this peaceful way. Province after province was taken over by offering its ruler a choice between a pension and war.26 In the seventh decade of the nineteenth century England added 4000 square miles to her Indian territory; in the eighth decade, 15,000 square miles; .in the ninth, 90,000; in the tenth, 133,000.27 John Morley estimated that during the nineteenth century alone England carried on one hundred and eleven wars in India, using for the most part Indian troops;28 millions of Hindus shed their blood that India might be slave. The cost of these wars for the conquest of India was met to the last penny out of Indian taxes; the English congratulated themselves on conquering India without spending a cent.29 Certainly it was a remarkable, if not a magnanimous, achievement, to steal in forty years a quarter of a million square miles, and make the victims pay every penny of the expense.30
When at last in 1857 the exhausted Hindus resisted, they were suppressed with "medieval ferocity";31 <b>a favorite way of dealing with captured rebels was to blow them to bits from the mouths of cannon.</b>32 "We took," said the London Spectator, "at least 100,000 Indian lives in the mutiny."33 This is what the English call the Sepoy Mutiny, and what the Hindus call the War of Independence. There is much in a name.
<img src='http://www.harappa.com/lith/gif/delhimas.jpg' border='0' alt='user posted image' />
<i>Image caption: "An Execution in British India", painting by Vassili Verestchagin, ca. 1888, on the page "Mutiny Independence Delhi 1858 Massacre".</i>
( http://www.harappa.com/lith/delhi2.html , http://www.harappa.com/lith/gif/delhimas.jpg )
Let Englishmen describe the result. A report to the House of Commons by one of its investigating committees in 1804 stated: "It must give pain to an Englishman to think that since the accession of the Company the condition of the people of India has been worse than before."34
...
F.J. Shore, British administrator in Bengal, testified as follows to the House of Commons in 1857:
"The fundamental principle of the English has been to make the whole Indian nation subservient, in every possible way, to the interests and benefits of themselves. They have been taxed to the utmost limit; every successive province, as it has fallen into our possession, has been made a field for higher exaction; and it has always been our boast how greatly we have raised the revenue above that which the native rulers were able to extort. The Indians have been excluded from every honor, dignity or office which the lowest Englishman could be prevailed upon to accept."38 Such was the method of the British acquisition of India; this is the origin of the British claim to rule India today. And now, leaving the past, we shall examine the present, and show, point after point, how English rule is at this very moment, with all its modest improvements, destroying Hindu civilization, and the Hindu people.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
<i><b>5.4 Christianism taxes Hindus to death in their own land </b></i>
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><i>IV. The Caste System in India</i>
The present caste system in India consists of four classes: the real Brahmans-i.e., the British bureaucracy; the real Kshatryas-i.e., the British army; the real Vaisyas-i.e., the British traders; and the real Sudras and Untouchables-i.e., the Hindu people.
...
With a government responsible to England, not to India, it is natural that the power of taxation should be freely used. Though before the coming of the English the land was private property, the Government made itself the sole owner of the soil and charged for it a land tax or rental now equal to one-fifth of the produce.44In many cases in the past this land tax has amounted to half the gross produce, in some cases to more than the entire gross produce; in general it is two to three times as high as under pre-English rule.45 The Government has the exclusive right to manufacture salt, and adds to its sale-price a tax amounting to onehalf a cent per pound. When we remember that the average annual income in India is only $33, and recall the judgment of a missionary paper, The Indian Witness, that "it is safe to assume that 100,000,000 of the population of India have an annual income of not more than $5.00 a head,"46 we begin to understand how oppressive even these taxes may be, and how much they share in responsibility for the ill-health and emaciation of the Hindus.
A member of parliament, Cathcart Wilson, says: "The percentage of taxes in India, as related to the gross produce, is more than that of any other country."47 Until recently the rate was twice as high as in England, three times'as high as in Scotland. Herbert Spencer protested against "the pitiless taxation which wrings from the poor Indian ryots nearly half the product of their soil."48 Another Englishman, the late H. Y. Hyndman, after detailing the proof that taxation in India was far heavier than in any other country, though its population is poorer, entitled his book The Bankruptcy of India. Sir William Hunter, former member of the Viceroy's Council; said in 1875: "The Government assessment does not leave enough food to the cultivator to support himself and his family throughout the year."49 Mr. Thorburn, one-time Financial Commissioner of the Punjab, said that "the whole revenue of the Punjab. . . is practically drawn from the producing masses."50 Since the enactment of the income tax this is no longer true.
I asked the guide at Trichinopoly how the people of India had found, three or four hundred years ago, the money to build the vast temples there and at Madura and Tanjore. He answered that the rajahs had been able to build these edifices despite the fact that they had taxed the people much less severely than the English were doing.
Against this terrible blood-letting the Hindus have no redress; their legislatures are impotent. And in the midst of the heart-breaking poverty engendered partly by this taxation, the Government treats itself, at staggering cost, to gigantic official buildings at Delhi, needlessly alien in style to the architecture of India; for seven months of every year it transfers the Capital, with all its machinery and personnel, to vacation resorts in the mountains, at an expense of millions of dollars; and from time to time it holds gorgeous Durbars, to impress the people who provide tens of millions for the ceremony." It pays to be free.
The result is that the national debt of India, which was $35,000,000 in 1792, rose to $105,000,000 in 1805; to $150,000,000 in 1829; to $215,000,000 in 1845; to $275,000,000 in 1850; to $350,000,000 in 1858; to $500,000,000 in 1860; to $1,000,000,000 in 1901; to $1,535,000,000 in 1913, and to $3,500,000,000 in 1929.52 Let these figures tell the tale.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
<i><b>5.5 Christianism's calculated economic destruction of Hindu India: destroying Hindu industry and wealth-generation</b></i>
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><i>V. Economic Destruction</i>
The economic condition of India is the inevitable corollary of its political exploitation. Even the casual traveler perceives the decay of agriculture (which absorbs 85% of the people), and the destitution of the peasant. He sees the Hindu ryot in the rice-fields, wading almost naked in the mud of a foreign tyrant's land; his loin-cloth is all the finery that he has. In 1915 the Statistical Department of Bengal, the most prosperous of India's provinces, calculated the average wage of the able-bodied agricultural laborer to be $3.60 per month.78 His hut is of branches often open at the sides, and loosely roofed with straw; or it is a square of dried mud adorned with a cot of dried mud, and covered with mud and sticks and leaves. The entire house and furnishings of a family of six, including all their clothing, are worth $10.79 The peasant cannot afford newspapers or books, entertainment, tobacco, or drink. Almost half~his earnings go to the Government; and if he cannot pay the tax, his holding, which may have been in his family for centuries, is confiscated by the State.
If he is fortunate he escapes from the overtaxed land and takes refuge in the cities. Provided there are not too many other applicants, he may get work in Delhi, the capital of India, carrying away the white master's excrement; sanitary facilities are unnecessary when slaves are cheap. Or he can go to the factory, and become, if he is very lucky, one of the 1,409,000 "hands" of India. He will find difficulty in getting a place, for 33% of the factory workers are women, and 8% are children.80
In the mines 34% of the employees are women, of whom one-half work underground; 16% of the miners are children. In the cotton mills of Bombay the heat is exhausting, and the lungs are soon destroyed by the fluff-laden air; men work there until they reach a subsistence wage, and then their health breaks down.
More than half the factories use their employees fifty-four hours a week. The average wage of the factory workers is sixty to seventy cents a day; though allowance must be made for the inferior skill and strength of the Hindu as compared with the European or American laborer long trained in the ways of machines. In Bombay, in 1922, despite the factory acts of that year, the average wage of the cotton workers was 33 cents. In that same year the profit of the owners of those mills was 125%. This was an "off-year";in better years, the owners said, the profits were 200%. The workman's home is like his wage; usually it consists of one room, shared by the family with various animals; Zimand found one room with thirty tenants.81
Such is the industrial revolution that a British government has allowed to develop under its control, despite the example of enlightened legislation in America and England. The people flock to the factories because the land cannot support them; and the land cannot support them because it is overtaxed, because it is overpopulated, and because the domestic industries with which the peasants formerly eked out in winter their gleanings from the summer fields, have been destroyed by British control of Indian tariffs and trade. For of old the handicrafts of India were known throughout the world; it was manufactured-- i.e., hand-made--goods which European merchants brought from India to sell to the Westn In 1680, says the British historian Orme, the manufacture of cotton was almost universal in India,82 and the busy spinning-wheels enabled the women to round out the earnings of their men.
But the English in India objected to this competition of domestic industry with their mills at home; they resolved that India should be reduced to a purely agricultural country, and be forced in consequence to become a vast market for British machine-made goods. The Directors of the East India. Company gave orders that the production of raw silk should be encouraged, and the manufacture of silk fabrics discouraged; that silkwinders should be compelled to work in the Company's factories, and be prohibited, under severe penalties, from working outside.83 Parliament discussed ways and means of replacing Hindu by British industries. A tariff of 70-80% was placed upon Hindu textiles imported into free-trade England, while India was compelled, by foreign control of her government, to admit English textiles almost duty free.
Lest Indian industries should nevertheless continue somehow to exist, an excise tax was placed on the manufacture of cotton goods in India.84 As a British historian puts it:
"It is a melancholy instance of the wrong done to India by the country on which she has become dependent. . . . Had India been independent, she would have retaliated, would have imposed prohibitive duties upon British goods, and would thus have preserved her own productive industry from annihilation. This act of self-defense was not permitted her; she was at the mercy of the stranger. British goods were forced upon her without paying any duty, and the foreign manufacturer employed the arm of political injustice to keep down and ultimately strangle a competitor with whom he could not have contended on equal terms."85
And another Englishman wrote:
"We have done everything possible to impoverish still further the miserable beings subject to the cruel selfishness of English commerce. . . . Under the pretense of free trade, England has compelled the Hindus to receive the products of the steam-looms of Lancashire, Yorkshire, Glasgow, etc., at merely nominal duties; while the handwrought manufactures of Bengal and Behar, beautiful in fabric and durable in wear, have heavy and almost prohibitive duties imposed on their importation into England."86
The result was that Manchester and Paisley flourished, and Indian industries declined; a country well on the way to prosperity was forcibly arrested in its development, and compelled to be only a rural hinterland for industrial England.
The mineral wealth abounding in India's soil was not explored, for no competition with England was to be allowed.87 The millions of skilled artisans whom Indian handicrafts had maintained were added to the hundreds of millions who sought support from the land. "India," says Kohn, "was transformed into a purely agricultural country, and her people lived perpetually on the verge of starvation."88 The vast population which might have been comfortably supported by a combination of tillage and industry, became too great for the arid soil; and India was reduced to such penury that to-day nothing is left of her men, her women and her children but empty stomachs and fleshless bones.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
<i><b>5.6 The railways: the means by which Britain's christianism carried away loot stolen from Hindu Bharatam</b></i>
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->It might have been supposed that the building of 30,000 miles of railways would have brought a measure of prosperity to India. But these railways were built not for India but for England; not for the benefit of the Hindu, but for the purposes of the British army and British trade. If this seems doubtful, observe their operation. Their greatest revenue comes, not, as in America, from the transport of goods (for the British trader controls the rates), but from the third-class passengers--the Hindus; but these passengers are herded into almost barren coaches like animals bound for the slaughter, twenty or more in one compartment. The railroads are entirely in European hands, and the Government has refused to appoint even one Hindu to the Railway Board. The railways lose money year after year, and are helped by the Government out of the revenues of the people; these loans to date total over $100,000,000. The Government guarantees a minimum rate of interest on railway investments; the British companies who built the roads ran no risk whatever. No play or encouragement is given to initiative, competition, or private enterprise; the worst evils of a state monopoly are in force. All the losses are borne by the people, all the gains are gathered by the trader.89 So much for the railways.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
<i><b>5.7 Estimating how much thieving christianism had stolen from wealthy Hindu India: reducing Hindus to abject poverty in order to fund the christian (illiterate, destitute, Dickensian) England</b></i>
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Commerce on the sea is monopolized by the British even more than transport on land. The Hindus are not permitted to organize a merchant marine of their own;90 all Indian goods must be carried in British bottoms, as an additional strain on the starving nation's purse; and the building of ships, which once gave employment to thousands of Hindus, is prohibited.91
To this ruining of the land with taxation, this ruining of industry with tariffs, and this ruining of commerce with foreign control, add the drainage of millions upon millions of dollars from India year after year-and <b>the attempt to explain India's poverty as the result of her superstitions becomes a dastardly deception practised upon a world too busy to be well informed.</b> This drain having been denied, it is only necessary to state the facts, and to introduce them with a quotation from a document privately addressed by the British government in India to the Parliament of England. "Great Britain, in addition to the tribute which she makes India pay her through the customs, derives benefits from the savings .0f the service of the three presidencies (the provinces of Calcutta, Madras and Bombay) being spent in England instead of in India; and in addition to these savings, which probably amount to $500,000,000, she derives benefit from the fortunes realized by the European mercantile community, which are all remitted to England."92
This is a general statement; let us fill it in. Consider first the drain on India through trade. Not merely is this carried in British ships; far worse than that, there is an astounding surplus of exports over imports. In the happy years of the Company there were such balances as $30,000,000 exports and $3,000,000 imports;93 latterly the indecency has been reduced, and the excess of goods taken from India over goods brought into India is now a moderate one-third. In 1927, e.g., imports were $651,600,000, exports were $892,- 800,000; the excess of exports, $241,200,000.94 Where goes the money that pays for this excess? We are asked to believe that it takes the form of silver or gold imported and hoarded by the Hindus; but no man that has seen their poverty can believe so shameless a myth. Doubtless there is some hoarding, above all by the native princes, for India cannot be expected to put full faith in a banking system controlled by foreign masters. But it is the officials, the merchants and the manufacturers (most of whom are British) who take the great bulk of this profit, and return it to their countries in one form or another. As an East Indian merchant said in a Parliamentary report in 1853, when this process of bleeding was on a comparatively modest scale: "Generally up to 1847, the imports were about $30,000,000 and the exports about $47,500,000. The difference is the tribute which the Company received from the country."95
Consider, second, the drain through fortunes, dividends and profits made in India and spent abroad. The British come as officials or soldiers or traders; they make their money and return to Great Britain. Let an Englishman, Edmund Burke, describe them--and intensify his description to-day in proportion to the growth of British positions, manufactures and commerce in India.
"They have no more social habits with the people than if they still resided in England; nor indeed any species of intercourse but that which is necessary to make a sudden fortune. . . . Animated with all the avarice of age, and all the impetuosity of youth, they roll in one after another; wave after wave, and there is nothing before the eyes of the natives but an endless, hopeless prospect ofnew flights of birds of prey and passage, with appetites continually renewing for a food that is continually wasting. Every rupee of profit made by an Englishman is lost forever to India."96
Consider, third, the drain through salaries and pensions derived from India and spent abroad. In 1927 Lord Winterton showed, in the House of Commons,that there were then some 7500 retired officialsin Great Britain drawing annually $17,500,000 in pensions from the Indian revenue;97 Ramsay MacDonald put the figure at $20,000,000 a year.98 When England, which is almost as overpopulated as Bengal, sends its sons to India, she requires of them twenty-four years of service, reduced by four years of furloughs; she then retires them for life on a generous pension, paid by the Hindu people. Even during their service these officials send their families or their children to live for the most part in England; and they support them there with funds derived from India.99 Almost everything bought by the British in India, except the more perishable foods, is purchased from abroad.100 A great proportion of the funds appropriated' for supplies by the Government of India is spent in England.
As early as 1783 Edmund Burke predicted that the annual drain of Indian resources to England without equivalent return would eventually destroy India.101 From Plassey to Waterloo, fiftyseven years, the drain of India's wealth to England is computed by Brooks Adams at two-and-a-half to five billion dollars.102 He adds, what Macaulay suggested long ago, that <b>it was this stolen wealth from India which supplied England with free capital for the development of mechanical inventions, and so made possible the Industrial Revolution.</b>103
In 1901 Dutt estimated that one-half of the net revenues of India flowed annually out of the country, never to return.104 In 1906 Mr. Hyndman reckoned the drain at $40,000,000 a year. A. J. Wilson valued it at one-tenth of the total annual production of India.105 Montgomery Martin, estimating the drain at $15,000,000 a year in 1838, calculated that these annual sums, retained and gathering interest in India, would amount in half a century to $40,000,000,000.106 Though it may seem merely spectacular to juggle such figures, it is highly probable that the total wealth drained from India since 1757, if it had all been left and invested in India, would now amount, at a low rate of interest, to $400,000,000,000.106
Allow for money reinvested in India, and a sum remains easily equivalent to the difference between the poorest and the richest nations in the world. The same high rate of taxation which has bled India to perhaps a mortal weakness, might have done her no permanent injury if the wealth so taken had all been returned into the economy and circulation of the country; but bodily withdrawn from her as so much of it was, it has acted like a long-continued transfusion of vital blood.
"So great an economic drain out of the resources of the land," says Dutt, "would impoverish the most prosperous countries on earth; it has reduced India to a land of famines more frequent, more widespread and more fatal, than any known before in the history of India, or of the world."107
Sir Wilfred Scawen Blunt sums it up from the point of view of a true Englishman:
"India's famines have been severer and more frequent, its agricultural poverty has deepened, its rural population has become more hopelessly in debt, their despair more desperate. The system of constantly enhancing the land values (i.e. raising the valuation and assessment) has not been altered. The salt tax. . . still robs the very poor. . . . What was bad twenty-five years ago is worse now. At any rate there is the same drain of India's food to alien mouths. Endemic famines and endemic plagues are facts no official statistics can explain away. . . . Though myself a good Conservative . . . I own to being shocked at the bondage in which the Indian people are held; . . . and I have come to the conclusion that if we go on developing the country at the present rate, the inhabitants, sooner or later, will have to resort to cannibalism, for there will be nothing left for them to eat."108<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->