E S H A
Educators' Society for Heritage of IndiA ईशा
A Non-Profit Organization offering authentic educational resources
on culture and heritage of India www.ESHAusa.org
History of India
The East India Company: The original corporate raiders By William Dalrymple, The Guardian UK March 4, 2015
For a century, the East India Company conquered, subjugated and plundered India and vast tracts of south Asia.
It tried to destroy the culture and heritage of India. The lessons of its brutal reign have never been more relevant
The Mughal emperor Shah Alam hands a scroll to Robert Clive, the governor of Bengal, which transferred tax collecting rights in Bengal, Bihar and Orissa to the East India Company. Illustration: Benjamin West (1738–1820)/British Library
The painting shows a scene from August 1765, when the young Mughal emperor Shah Alam, exiled from Delhi and defeated by East India Company troops, was forced into what we would now call an act of involuntary privatisation. The scroll is an order to dismiss his own Mughal revenue officials in Bengal, Bihar and Orissa, and replace them with a set of English traders appointed by Robert Clive – the new governor of Bengal – and the directors of the EIC, who the document describes as “the high and mighty, the noblest of exalted nobles, the chief of illustrious warriors, our faithful servants and sincere well-wishers, worthy of our royal favours, the English Company”. The collecting of Mughal taxes was henceforth subcontracted to a powerful multinational corporation – whose revenue-collecting operations were protected by its own private army.
It was at this moment that the East India Company (EIC) ceased to be a conventional corporation, trading and silks and spices, and became something much more unusual. Within a few years, 250 company clerks backed by the military force of 20,000 locally recruited Indian soldiers had become the effective rulers of Bengal. An international corporation was transforming itself into an aggressive colonial power.
Using its rapidly growing security force – its army had grown to 260,000 men by 1803 – it swiftly subdued and seized an entire subcontinent. Astonishingly, this took less than half a century. The first serious territorial conquests began in Bengal in 1756; 47 years later, the company’s reach extended as far north as the Mughal capital of Delhi, and almost all of India south of that city was by then effectively ruled from a boardroom in the City of London. Read full article here
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Did the British Raj modernise India, ushering in an era of industrialism?
Many cite the railways, roads, a global worldview,
western education and political ideologies to have been a leftover
from the 200 years of colonialism. The truth, however, could not
be farther. 'Sone ki chidiya', 'a golden bird' was Bharat's moniker
before it became India only to be looted and plundered by the
British for two centuries. The ruthlessness of the colonial rulers
cost India its economy, autonomy and its very essence of freedom.
Dr. Shashi Tharoor, certainly a man who can hold an audience,
couldn't have made it any clearer than on the occasion when he
spoke at the Oxford Union Society, that the British owe us one.
Addressing other speakers, Tharoor said reparations needn't be
doled out as a tool of empowerment but as a means of atonement
for the British Empire.
Tharoor, while concluding says the question of reparations owed,
how much must be paid and to whom, are not the pressing ones.
It is rather accepting that a debt is owed, wrong has been done,
and to "simply say sorry" would go far longer way than any monetary aid. Watch the video above - hear his brilliant speech.
New research at Harvard reveals the ancestral populations of India and their relationships to modern groups
Hyderabad, India; Cambridge and Boston, USA–In a study published in the September 24th issue of Nature, an international team describes how they harnessed modern genomic technology to explore the ancient history of India, the world’s second most populous nation...The study, which has medical implications for people of Indian descent, was led by scientists at the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) in Hyderabad, India together with US researchers at Harvard Medical School, the Harvard School of Public Health and the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT.
Aryan-Dravidian divide a myth: Harvard Study A pathbreaking study by Harvard and indigenous researchers on ancestral Indian populations says there is a genetic relationship between all Indians and more importantly, the hitherto believed 'fact' that Aryans and Dravidians signify the ancestry of north and south Indians might after all, be a myth. "This paper rewrites history... there is no north-south divide,'' Lalji Singh, former director of the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) and a co-author of the study, said at a press conference here on Thursday. Senior CCMB scientist Kumarasamy Thangarajan said there was no truth to the Aryan-Dravidian theory as they (Aryans) came hundreds or thousands of years after the ancestral north and south Indians had settled in India.
Distortion of Indian History
Some prominent Indian and “overseas” historians have been part of a
politico-ideological apparatus which, from the 1970s onward,
has come to dominate most historical bodies in the country, including
the Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR), and imposed its
blinkered view of Indian historiography on the whole academic discipline.
Anchored mainly in Marxist historiography and leftist ideology,
with a few borrowings from postmodernism, the Annales School,
Subaltern and other studies, this new School, which may be called “Leftist”
for want of a better term, has become synonymous with a number of
abusive and unscholarly practises; among them:
1. A reductionist approach viewing the evolution of Indian society pic. Ruins of Nalanda University (5th century)
almost entirely through the prism of the caste system, emphasizing its To Read the full article. click here
mechanisms of “exclusion” while neglecting those of integration
without which Indian society would have disintegrated long ago.
2. A near-complete erasure of India’s knowledge systems in every field
—philosophical, linguistic, literary, scientific, medical, technological or artistic
— and a general underemphasis of India’s important contributions to other
cultures and civilizations. In this, the Leftist School has been a faithful inheritor
of colonial historiography, except that it no longer has the excuse of ignorance.
Yet it claims to provide an accurate and “scientific” portrayal of India!
Ancient History of India
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Origin of Indian Civilization-edited by Dr. Balram Singh
Proceedings of the Symposium on the Oriogin of Indian Civilization attended by world renowned scholars
and published by Center for Indic Studies, University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, MA.
It is the most authoritative document. click here to see Table of Contect and list of contributors
By Dr Shiva Bajpai and Editors of Hinduism Today
Magazine, Published by Himalayan Academy
Excellent Video; Highly recommended for students
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Cultural History of India (in Hindi)
by Haridutt Vedālankār
Ātmārām and Sons, Delhi, India
Third Edition- 2013
ISBN: 81-7043-617-6
One of the Best documented, detailed
historical account of every aspect of cultural
development including all Indian traditions
(Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism) in ancient and
medieval periods in the Indian sub-continent
and extending in to Southeast Asia.
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A History of Ancient and Early Medieval India,
by Upinder Singh, Pearson Education, 2009,
Delhi,India.
Britain Owes Reparations to India
