Superb. Did not know, this existed.

Historic...

mir jafar..the ultimate quintessentially infamous traitor!! so infamous is he for his treachery to his ruler, the nawab sirajudaullah, that in bengal, we are known to refer to a traitor and fraud as "mir jafar ya mir jafar ki aulaad"

ek mir zafar ki wajah se saara hindustan ghulam hua. why does history have this in store for us ;'(

But Siraj ud daulah was a psycopath. And Mir Jaffer was not alone, as the biographies of Clive et al reveal. A lot of businessmen from Calcutta (especially Marwaris) were quite distraught at the erratic behavior of Siraj-ud-daulah, who was an anti-Hindu tyrant and preferred an alternative.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jagat_Seth

http://business.illinois.edu/doogar/www/other/jain/murshid.html

Like James Mill who wrote his History of British India without ever setting foot on the land - a book that influenced every Governor General right up to the mid-nineteenth century-, Hayman never visited the country before painting this, by which NPG accounts for the poor rendering of the elephant. The first realistic and fully caprisoned Asiatic elephant on public display was at the Great Exhibition of 1851. Mir Jafar could be said to be the last of the Nawabs of Bengal to have any kind of significant duties towards the people. After him, both the Nizamath and the Deewani were in British hands.

I don't think Siraj ud Daulah was incompetent. He was only 21 when Plassey happened, and began negotiations with the British as soon as he became the Nawab, with a prominent Hindu Narayan Singh. The latter was unceremoniously dismissed by the British. Siraj ud Daulah also tried to reconcile with Mir Jafar even after his defection was suspected. He was defeated only because of high treason by his own men.

A wonderful painting by Hayman - if one that was created largely for the purposes of political propaganda (note how the Union flag is portrayed as the focal point of the entire scene).... The Battle of Plassey itself, as a military encounter was - in truth - little more than a cosmetic 'skirmish' ( Clive and his cohorts had bribed the opposition beforehand). In many ways, it was almost irrelevant; its real significance lay in the sophisticated intrigue and plotting that had led up to it - Which included : duplicity, forgery of contracts, licensing frauds, murder, double-crossing, arm-twisting and just about any other form of skulduggery that you might care to mention - willingly undertaken by Briton and Bengali alike - and in what followed after ... I.e. The engineering of a coup d'etat that resulted, effectively, in a 'corporate takeover' of the economy of Bengal ...

Plassey is a neglected place now. Bengal Tourism have absolutely forgot about it. In March, there is going to be a heritage fest in Murshidabad when people visiting the fest can also include Plassey in their itinerary.

i wondered what an composition

I think this is a repost by RBSI ?! Do recollect discussing this somewhere...

Re: "... like James Mill who wrote his History of British India without ever setting foot on the land ' (as mentioned above by Mr Kolar). Correct. Nor could James Mill (father of John Stuart, of course) speak any of the sub-continental languages. He looked at the various problems that faced India - as they presented themselves to his mind across his desk in London - very much in the abstract - almost in the hypothetical - as conundrums that needed to be resolved.... His attitudes towards Indian culture were patronising at best, and openly contemptuous at worst ... But - having said that : He was also one of the key advocates - in his role as a leading 'utilitarian' political theorist - of social and economic reform upon the sub-continent during the 1820s & 1830s. Mill, himself - quite preposterously to our eyes perhaps - did not consider his lack of first-hand experience of India to be in any way a handicap to his understanding of its requirements - going so far as to suggest, rather absurdly, that: "A duly qualified man can obtain more knowledge of [ India ] in one year in his closet than he could obtain during the course of his longest life, by the use of his eyes and ears in [ India] .”* *Marriot, 133.

[Continuing the discussion about the Mills]: Both James and John Mill worked in the East India Company for decades, rising to be Chief Examiners. It was their duty to examine official correspondence from India and help prepare a British response, not unlike being the Secretary of State for India before such a position was established in the years after the Mutiny. Said James Mill: "It is the very essence of the internal government of 60 millions of people with which I have to deal: and as you know that the government of India is carried on by Correspondence, and that I am the only man whose business it is, or who has the time, to make himself master of the facts scattered in a most voluminous correspondence, on which a just decision must rest, you will conceive to what an extent the real decision on matters belonging to my department rests with the man in my situation." The perception of India rested on their disposition towards the country, and it is a sad fact that despite long years of intimate connection with land, very little esteem was afforded to it. Even John Stuart, credited with defending the rights of the individual against the State, said that his ideas were only for those people who weren't subjects of barbaric states, inducing Indians among them: "...we may leave out of consideration those backward states of society in which the race itself may be considered as in its nonage. The early difficulties in the way of spontaneous progress are so great, that there is seldom any choice of means for overcoming them; and a ruler full of the spirit of improvement is warranted in the use of any expedients that will attain an end, perhaps otherwise unattainable. Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improvement, and the means justified by actually effecting that end. Liberty, as a principle, has no application to any state of things anterior to the time when mankind have become capable of being improved by free and equal discussion. Until then, there is nothing for them but implicit obedience to an Akbar or a Charlemagne, if they are so fortunate as to find one."

Mr Kolar ~ Clearly the English utilitarians of the early nineteenth century - those who concerned themselves with the sub-continent, I should say - Mill Snr & jnr, Bentinck et al - believed that what they were hoping to achieve in India (and by implication, within Britain itself) was in the best interests of the 'greatest number'. But they certainly did not believe - as your quote above illustrates - that " Indians " were, or would potentially ever be, capable of delivering these benefits for themselves - they would always need a ' paternalistic ' British hand for guidance. There is certainly a historical irony, a philosophical contradiction, within this scenario - for many of these men - who professed at their core a love of English civil liberty and personal freedoms, found themselves complicit in the establishment and consolidation of a form of absolute despotism in India ...if - however - a rather benevolent and largely benign form of despotism. "The English Utilitarians and India" by Professor Eric Stokes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959), is the still the most important work to have been written upon this theme - and is well worth reading if you can find a copy via the internet.

Thank you Mr. Craig. I'll look Mr. Stokes' book up. I hardly find mention of the extraordinary contradiction you have stated about the outlook of the most well known of Utilitarians, and I hope Mr. Stokes work fleshes it out a bit. But, whether the Raj was a benign one is still a matter of debate. While it did introduce the fruits of modern scientific labors into the country, the spiritual, cultural, economic and humanitarian losses are still not fully measured up. Like the Irish Potato Famine which is explained away in fewer pages than is done the Great Exhibition in various Victorian histories, Indian famines beginning from the 1770s and the artifical conditions that worsened them are seldom remembered. One can't help but agree with Coomaraswamy who said that “A single generation of English education succeeded in breaking the threads of tradition and created nondescript and superficial beings deprived of roots–a sort of intellectual pariahs belonging neither to the East nor to the west, neither the past nor the future.” This painful truth is only too apparent to any urban Indian, and as much as Niall Ferguson would like to claim that India could not have had a less bloody path to modernity, the question is far from settled.

The trouble is none of these writers or analysts ever mention the fact the British took on India at its weakest.They did not have the guts to take on Jehangir, Shah Jehan or Aurangzeb.If they had it would have been an entirely different story!

nice

Vidya Amirapu: History has always been replete with such instances. And the story is no different today. Guts alone does not win a war...it needs wisdom too. Take a look at what Chanakya says about the very situation you are referring to: "The strong ruler should attack on the weak (Enemy)": A battle should be fought with a weak enemy . Conquering the weak enemy, a clever politician should grow in power. It is always better to avoid fighting with a strong enemy. "One should not fight with a superior or equal": Always avoid fighting with those who are superior in power and valour. Otherwise defeat is must. More at: http://bit.ly/10LZhoj