British India Quotes

1. "I've even come to a conclusion that would get me blackballed from ever setting foot in liberal education circles again. That is this: colonialism wasn't 100 percent evil. More like 96 percent evil. Sometimes the colonizing culture actually made moral improvements in the native culture. I came to this conclusion while reading about the abolition of the Indian custom of widow burning. In pre-British India, a man's widow was burned alongside his corpse. The British colonialists put a stop to that. So yes, they criminally oppressed an entire people. But like a robber who fills up the ice trays while he steals the TV, they did a smidgeon of good."
Author: A.J. Jacobs

2. "There seemed never to be a moment when he was not haunted by the fear of being thought lacking by his British colleagues. And yet it seemed to be universally agreed that he was one of the most successful Indians of his generation, a model for his countrymen. Did this mean that one day all of India would become a shadow of what he had been? Millions of people trying to live their lives in conformity with incomprehensible rules? Better to be what Dolly had been: a woman who had no illusions about the nature of her condition; a prisoner who knew the exact dimensions of her cage and could look for contentment within those confines."
Author: Amitav Ghosh

3. "She had talked of this at length with Kadambari—Mrs. Dutt: Why should it not be possible for these freedoms to be universally available for women everywhere? And Mrs. Dutt had said that of course, this was one of the great benefits of British rule in India; that it had given women rights and protections that they'd never had before. At this, Uma had felt herself, for the first time, falling utterly out of sympathy with her new friend. She had known instinctively that this was a false argument, unfounded and illogical. How was it possible to imagine that one could grant freedom by imposing subjugation? that one could open a cage by pushing it inside a bigger cage? How could any section of a people hope to achieve freedom where the entirety of a populace was held in subjection?"
Author: Amitav Ghosh

4. "I guess the most surprising discovery was how long Gandhi remained loyal to the ideal of the British Empire, even in India."
Author: Arthur L. Herman

5. "His bedroom was a reflection of Bryant's mind, its untidy shelves filled with games and puzzles stacked in ancient boxes, statues and mementoes competing for space with books on every subject imaginable, from Sensation and Perception in the History of Experimental Psychology to Illustrated British Ballads and A History of Indian Philosophy. "What are you reading at the moment?' asked May. "Batman," said Bryant. "The drawings are terribly good."
Author: Christopher Fowler

6. "This historic general election, which showed that the British are well able to distinguish between patriotism and Toryism, brought Clement Attlee to the prime ministership. In the succeeding five years, Labor inaugurated the National Health Service, the first and boldest experiment in socialized medicine. It took into public ownership all the vital (and bankrupted) utilities of the coal, gas, electricity and railway industries. It even nibbled at the fiefdoms and baronies of private steel, air transport and trucking. It negotiated the long overdue independence of India. It did all this, in a country bled white by the World War and subject to all manner of unpopular rationing and controls, without losing a single midterm by-election (a standard not equaled by any government of any party since). And it was returned to office at the end of a crowded term."
Author: Christopher Hitchens

7. "All nationalists have the power of not seeing resemblances between similar sets of facts. A British Tory will defend self-determination in Europe and oppose it in India with no feeling of inconsistency. Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage — torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians — which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by 'our' side . . . The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them"
Author: George Orwell

8. "The British could leave and half India wouldn't notice us leaving just as they didn't notice us arriving. All our reforms of administration might be reforms on the moon for all it has to do with them.."
Author: J.G. Farrell

9. "For a day or two Fleury became quite active. He had his book about the advance of civilization in India to consider and this was one reason why he had taken an interest in the behaviour of the Collector. He asked a great number of questions and even bought a notebook to record pertinent information."Why, if the Indian people are happier under our rule," he asked a Treasury official, "do they not emigrate from those native states like Hyderabad which are so dreadfully misgoverned and come and live in British India?""The apathy of the native is well known," replied the official stiffly. "He is not enterprising."Fleury wrote down "apathy" in a flowery hand and then, after a moment's hesitation, added "not enterprising"."
Author: J.G. Farrell

10. ". . . I still hold two truths with equal and fundamental certainty. One: the British did terrible things to the Irish. Two: the Irish, had they the power, would have done equally terrible things to the British. And so also for any other paired adversaries I can imagine. The difficulty is to hold on to both truths with equal intensity, not let either one negate the other, and know when to emphasize one without forgetting the other. Our humanity is probably lost and gained in the necessary tension between them both. I hope, by the way, that I do not sound anti-British. It is impossible not to admire a people who gave up India and held on to Northern Ireland. That shows a truly Celtic sense of humor."
Author: John Dominic Crossan

11. "I have a dialect myself; it's more pronounced, because I have studied theatre and been in England. It's half-British, half-Indian."
Author: Kunal Nayyar

12. "Among the many misdeeds of British rule in India, history will look upon the Act which deprived a whole nation of arms as the blackest."
Author: Mahatma Gandhi

13. "One of the effects of indoctrination, of passing into the anglo-centrism of British West Indian culture, is that you believe absolutely in the hegemony of the King's English and in the proper forms of expression. Or else your writing is not literature; it is folklore, or worse. And folklore can never be art. Read some poetry by West Indian writers--some, not all--and you will see what I mean. The reader has to dissect anglican stanza after anglican stanza for Caribbean truth, and may never find it. The anglican ideal -- Milton, Wordsworth, Keats -- was held before us with an assurance that we were unable, and would never be able, to achieve such excellence. We crouched outside the cave."
Author: Michelle Cliff

14. "Over the years, the British had strategically pitted the Muslims against the Hindus, supporting the All India Muslim League and encouraging the notion that the Muslims were a distinct political community. Throughout British India, separate electorates had been offered to Muslims, underscoring their separateness from Hindus and sowing the seeds of communalism. Teh Morley-Minto reforms in 1908 had allowed direct election for seats and separate or communal representation for Muslims. This was the harbinger for the formation of the Muslim League in 1906. In 1940, the Muslim League, representing one-fifth of the total population of India, became a unifying force. They were resentful that they were not sufficiently represented in Congress and feared for the safety of Islam."
Author: Prem Kishore

15. "When the British left, India was a multireligious, multiregional, multiethnic country, exploited, backward, and poor from colonialism."
Author: Prem Kishore

16. "Winston Churchill was not entirely British. His mother was American, making Sir Winston part Iroquois Indian."
Author: Rachel Blanchard

17. "My mother's family came from the British West Indies. And my father's family came from, well, my father's father came from the Montana/South Dakota area. They were Blackfoot Indian."
Author: Richie Havens

18. "The British seizure of Hongkong was an aspect of one of the most ugly crimes of the British Empire: the takeover and destruction of India, and the use of India to flood China with opium."
Author: Robert Trout

19. "Gandhi has asked that the British Government should walk out of India and leave the Indian people to settle differences among themselves, even if it means chaos and confusion."
Author: Stafford Cripps

20. "No one will expect the British Government or the Government of India to give way to threats of violence, disorder and chaos; and, indeed, representatives of large sections of Indian opinion have expressly warned us that we must not do so."
Author: Stafford Cripps

21. "Gandhi has more recently recognized the need for continuance of British, American and Chinese efforts in India and has suggested that these troops might remain by agreement with some new Indian Government."
Author: Stafford Cripps

22. "[Taken from a BBC documentary]Tariq was born in Lahore, now in Pakistan, then part of British-ruled India, in 1943. A Catholic school education did nothing to shake his life-long atheism, which he shared with his communist parents."
Author: Tariq Ali

23. "Tariq was born in Lahore, now in Pakistan, then part of British-ruled India, in 1943. A Catholic school education did nothing to shake his life-long atheism.(BBC Documentary)"
Author: Tariq Ali

24. "We cannot, with good conscience, expect the British to set up an orderly schedule for the liberation of India before we have decided for ourselves to make all who live in America free."
Author: Wendell Willkie

25. "James Joyce, in his novel Finnegans Wake, in 1939, punned on the word "Hindoo" (as the British used to spell it), joking that it came from the names of two Irishmen, Hin-nessy and Doo-ley: "This is the hindoo Shimar Shin between the dooley boy and the hinnessy."30 Even Joyce knew that the word was not native to India."
Author: Wendy Doniger

British India Quotes Pictures