#Corporate Raiders Redux: A Review of Excerpts

Portraits of Nabobs, or representatives of the East India Company. Photograph: Alamy

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

William Dalrymple has been spending a lot of time reading and of course, writing about India.Serious historians no longer think him to be a lot of pop and are sitting up to hear what is he talking about. In fact in his latest book awaiting to be published The Anarchy: How a Corporation Replaced the Mughal Empire, 1756-1803, by Bloomsbury & Knopf he tries to redraw and throw new light on our understanding of how India got subjugated.Not by armies or invasions,mostly.Instead through simple businessmen and their accessories: parchments,trade agreements, land deeds,  financial documents,contracts, and the path breaking concept of Joint-stock Companies and Corporations so made, howsoever rudimentary .In that,Sir Thomas Roe may or may not have been an honest trader but,it was through his supplicating ways in the court of Jehangir, the hitherto, Lord and Master of all things surveyed where it got started .In their wily,obsequious ways like most businessmen the English were suitably bent(not enough as we are told) and grovelling to con the naive and insular Mughals.Convulsed and blinded as the latter might have been (not without a lot of hubris) ,we are told ,with tact and sly negotiating skills and financial foresight of the Company Bahadurs was the beginning of a forward march on the high seas. Following on were War ships, technology and armaments,East India Company, treachery and devious and cowardly acts the booby traps and quicksands for the Mughals to sink into the most unsuspecting deaths and thereafter a total surrender of country,flag and its people.

But why in hell would I be talking of all that? An elaborate ruse of a different kind?Another dark hole unseen? A repeat of history?Maybe all of this and much more. This time another Englishman called John Elliot who writes in Implosion: India’s Tryst with Reality, HarperCollins India  prognosticates by looking at the crystal ball. Uses the pen, if you please, laced in sugar and the gypsy's beauty to entice and for succor. Finally, for the master the inevitable - succumb.He is also into business albeit not the usual one..It is only he and he alone who through his interviews and one fateful TV show had seen it all.Others cataracted by hubris or sheer organic ailments have failed to envision what Sir John so easily saw.Modi has that quality to be clear and firm on complex ideas like religion, Islam and terrorism and is never shy to speak in English.And that which is much his own, accented, yes !In fact,the Congress Party was suicidally inclined in not cutting this fledgling enemy-to-be to size early and the great English world foolishly found him a mass-murderer and outcasted him.(that he unabashedly congratulates his own prescience in recognising in the early new millennium the potential and rise of a great leader called Narendra Modi is another matter and needs some more of our indulgence).And surely this is written once again in the style of a fawning courtier in the Mughal interiors which the new Nawab Of Bharat ,Modi would be only so delighted to hear It is for us to wait and see how many books get to be sold and how a certain Mr John Elliot suddenly becomes anointed as the new Court historian.But that would in the end be historical trivia. What say you ?And there are I am told many such in the fields of environment, neo-economics, religious politics,constitutional freedoms, digital liberation and development. electoral and managerial strategies who are swarming the corridors of Shastri Bhavan,North and South Blocks to be heard, peddle books and ideas.

Are there then any parallels, convergences and continuities of a strange kind in the excerpts of the two books quoted ?One that looks back not only in wonder or amazement but also to reconstruct the tragedy and to be seen as it was and be warned of the British, West and Business?And the second, paradoxically, simulating a repeat of history :only stooping and waiting to conquer with a laced pen and honeyed mouth ! Dalrymple is honest and surgical while he sees the ugliness of their Lordships, governors, the British Parliament as against the gullibility of the Indian laity and the kings.He sees tell tale signposts in the past which if not recognised might cause the India that he inhibits to once again be sold out to cheap tricksters.John Elliot instead is sitting in the present and paints false pictures of important event , political parties and personalities.He plays the proverbial Pied Piper,sings a tune of flattery and deceit, lulls the uninitiated with a condescending tale of hidden talent and the modern Cinderalla rechristened Narendra Modi in modern times.He would have us believe that the chosen one has come and so has the moment for India.He deceptively looks the honest English while ingratiating himself with the powers- that-be, particularly the ones who are likely to be around for a while.These are the new traders then.In disguise both the authors look similar.It is for us then to recognise the imposters.

A corporate Raider Redux ?Are we not seeing the beginnings of new penetrations and therefore 'condemned' to suffer the rehearsed end, yet again, sometime in the future?

If you are interested in more and getting curiouser or plain bemused then soak your dried thinks in :

http://scroll.in/article/713145

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/04/east-india-company-original-corporate-raiders

Book Review :The Past As Present: Forging Contemporary Identities Through History by Romila Thapar

The Past As Present: Forging Contemporary Identities Through History by Romila Thapar

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Hardcover: 344 pages
Publisher: Aleph Book Company; First edition (23 April 2014)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 9383064013
ISBN-13: 978-9383064014
Product Dimensions: 22.6 x 14.4 x 3 cm


India had no history or historians. So the English said and went about creating their little history book on India which was only about three centuries since they shipped themselves into India that is..There was no science, empirical techniques, proveable records, archaeology developed enough amongst other things, to claim, otherwise, the British complained. Sadly. a large part of books and history on India parroted this colonial thesis. India became independent and a brand/type of nationalist historians were born the Mukherjees,Raychauchaudris,Majumdars, Vincent Smith et all..And the contrarian viewpoint was from a brand of 'subalterns',Ranajit Guha, Irfan Habib, Sarkar, Partha Chatterjee, RS Sharma,Bipin Chandra Ms Thapar included. The latter, a motley group supported a materialistic historical interpretation and hence this kind of research bore a certain stamp and style.Ms Thapar, notably, is against a 'communal interpretation' of history, for they are invariably 'partisan'or 'selective' and do not go by modern tools or methodologies of seeking and investigating 'multiple, prioritised causes'.Arun Shourie a prominent critic and practicing politician, though would have us believe the central issues of understanding history and its interpretation are caught up in the cross-hairs of nationalist historians vs Marxist hagiography.


Like all victors the so-called left-leaning historians seemed to receive a certain patronage from the Congress Party for a long while and their history writing style was encouraged officially. Politics being dynamic was undergoing a change gradually in Independent India and this or such a viewpoint started to getting challenged.There were numerous views and opinions and all felt had justification enough to be heard.The season of alternative histories had been spawned from the fertile eggs of a new found democracy. The Right or BJP and its kind which also sees the sense of history as a cultural and political desideratum wants to a be part of this process, too. It is into this competitive dialectics, quite legitimately,thus, that the contestations are underlined in.


One does read increasingly,regrettably though, of a new kind of intolerance. Very physical and coercive it is. Very violent. The banning of Ramanujam’s articles on Ramayana, the forcible exile of arguably the best known artist M F Hussain,non-publishing of Donigers books on Hinduism and the rise of a Batra Brigade bringing to the fore- a kind of thought control which is non-scientific,non-emiprical, a-historical and mythology based historical revival of Hinduism as an argument of force and power. Exactly the kind the British masters of yore had bemoaned, perhaps.


Notwithstanding, whether Left or Right, it has to be seen though that the 'identified' linkages of political power and historical research do they in the end, (if there is one) help in nation building and the continuity of its core values(whatever they are as it is in the debate) in the future. It can never be denied that the success of the arguments made in the reviewed book is also interestingly linked to the fear that a new age of non-ideology and digital overdrive, thoroughly technology driven would quite wipe out a nuanced and rigorous understanding of our past, history and politics. The alternative rewriting of history,the dressing up of right wing icons like Shyma Prasd Mukherjee, talk of return to 'linguistic nationalism', "civilisational consciousness"(read homogenised Hindu -dominated history of India) as proposed for in the BJP Manifesto or as is one already witness to is bad augury and appears to be a suspicious onslaught on the memory and recall of generations now and in years to come.For secularism is deemed to be intellectual snobbery and religion is unfairly seen as superstition,“a hypocrisy … a staged unfairness which treated minority violations as superior to majoritarian prejudices”:Modi and his kind drum this kind of historical apathy and anti-nationalism to be the bane of these government-funded researches of history..It is here that we begin to read wily and mischievous new interpretations on the process of nation building . How then secularism gets back to its true meaning of 'religion' being separate from the 'state', is a moot question for all in terms of contemporary identities:Hindu, including all castes and Dalits,Muslims i.e. Shias, Sunnis and other minorities ?

A word about Ms Romila Thapar and her impeccable integrity would be in order, here.In January 2005, she declined the Padma Bhushan awarded by the Indian Government. In a letter to President A P J Abdul Kalam, she said she was "astonished to see her name in the list of awardees because three months ago when I was contacted by the HRD ministry and asked if I would accept an award, I made my position very clear and explained my reason for declining it". Thapar had declined the Padma Bhushan on an earlier occasion, in 1992. To the President, she explained the reason for turning down the award thus: "I only accept awards from academic institutions or those associated with my professional work, and not state awards". That Ms Thapar has been a pioneer of sorts in pursuing a certain scientific and anti-essentialist interpretation of history is beyond doubt.It focuses more about what happens below and among the masses rather than the elites. As to how much of it survives or spurs others in continuing and furthering in part or whole,as not a mere academic debate but a living, objective history of the people will in the ultimate analysis be the judge and jury.It would be particularly gainful to remember that Ms Romila Thapar has always agreed to the right of the Hindus for a 'culturally sensitive and fair' representation as against an "unscientific and religious based material that distorts the truth and pushes a political agenda'.


For the moment we are sanguine ,however,only victors do not write histories. Heroes do not determine the consequence of wars and we learn from history to correct our mistakes. Early India is no longer about the Hindus; neither is the middle period of the Mughals and Muslims. Nor the last three hundred years about the English.

Hear this accomplished and much respected activist-historian speak:

http://youtu.be/J8HhLJzpx3