Description
The Road to Delhi
In 1857, Great Britain was the greatest power in the world. India, a superpower and economic grant of the sixteenth, seventeenth and a large part of the eighteenth century functioned as Britain's supreme colony. Indian glory had faded, British land revenue and trade policies drained its wealth, her princely states were being annexed, her aristocracy and martial class was suppressed, her merchants, landlords and artisans were impoverished, her industries, markets, Industrial Revolution, and Asiatic capitalism, had collapsed; her peasants were rack-rented.
British intent was to take Imperialism to its logical conclusion. Under the Great Mughals, Islam and Sanatan Dharma, the religions respectively, of Muslims and Hindus, had built up a model of religious harmony and secular cultural synthesis, which was envied the world over. But European hegemony demanded India's Christianisation.
This is the first of the two-volume work, which details, for the first time the shaping up of a titanic, and the most, bitter conflict of the nineteenth century. The world still bears the scars, and victory marks, of the India versus the West, War of Civilisations that ensued in AD 1857, and went on for over a decade. More than 10 million Indians 7% of the country's population-lost their lives, most of them massacred in cold blood by marauding British t troops. This was the world's first holocaust, bigger than that perpetrated by Hitler on Jews. The British also killed their own women and children, and blamed the Indians, to justify their 'excesses".
But the war ensured the rejection of alien, despotic, colonial-secular-western-Christian modernity-and the victory of indigenous, freedom loving, Mughal-Asian- Indian, political, cultural and religious, secular-modernity. The West's overall defeat in 1857 prepared the world for decolonisation, making it ultimately, safer for democracy. In the twentieth century, the dominance of the West therefore was never complete. Due to 1857's persistence of presenting an alternative, non-western form of Asian democracy and progress, the West was unable to dictate completely the course and agenda of its self created bugbears: Political Islam and Al Qaida.
The 1857 struggle resonates today, in several, complex ways, in the cultural-religious-economic wars, political- identity fights, and military battlefields of Middle-East, South Asia, Africa and Latin America, as well as the cities of Europe and North America. It is also evident in India's rise in the twenty-first century-and how the latter is now termed as Asia's century.
But this is how it all began.The Long Revolution
This is, the second of the two volume work, which details, for the first time, the shaping up of a titanic, and the most, bitter conflict of the nineteenth century. The world still bears the scars, victory marks, and results of the India versus the West War of Civilisations that ensued in AD 1857, and went on for over a decade. More than 10 million Indians-7% of the country's population-lost their lives, most of them massacred in cold blood by marauding British troops.
The West's overall defeat in 1857 prepared the world for decolonisation, making it ultimately, safer for democracy. In the twentieth century, the dominance of the West therefore was never complete. Due to 1857's persistence of presenting an alternative, non-western form of Asian democracy and progress, the West was unable to dictate completely the course and agenda of its self created bugbears: Political Islam and Al Qaida. The 1857 struggle resonates in several, complex ways today in the cultural- religious-economic wars, political-identity fights, and military battlefields of Middle-East, South Asia, Africa and Latin America, as well as the cities of Europe and North America. It is also evident in India's rise in the twenty-first century- and how the latter is often termed Asia's century. But this is how the story reached its climactic turning point.
ISBN:9788129112828
