Thoughts And Trivia

My job has taken me to every part of India. I am fascinated by British cemeteries. The epitaphs on the graves,
are sometimes terse/ sometimes in verse,
but have solemnity/ and enough gravity,
I bow my head/ to the silent dead!

These show a pathetic side of the story. How many British mothers/wives lost their sons/husbands, in a land thousands of miles over oceans - in inhospitable weather, hated and unloved by locals - among whom they died. More white-men died due to disease - dysentery, cholera, malaria and heat-stroke than fighting. How many men wasted their lives away from families. In terms of human price paid, it was colossus. If employed in Industry - these very men would have given Britain well - earned honest wealth - much more than the illgotten wealth through plunder and undisguised Robbery of a defenceless people. And imagine the full life these men would have lived among their families.
My school was in an erstwhile castle (Ludlow Castle)of the British, in Delhi. It bore the brunt of attack from the natives, during the first independence war of 1857. My favourite perch, for eating my lunch, was a memorial over a solitary grave in our football field. Whenever they dug grounds in school for construction, human bones still turnedup in 1950s.
Oppressions is a double edged sword. It cuts both the oppressors and the oppressed. In terms of human lives the oppressors suffers as much as those they oppress. Britain's colonisation of India and other nations also was a similar story.
India was kept enslaved as a colony for over two hundred years - really a long time. From a Modern point of view, it appears uncivilised and downright barbaric, to treat another nation and its people like this. It was purely for commercial reasons - howsoever disguised, behind high-sounding cliches of whiteman's burden.
But if I keep aside my negative feelings, and look with compassion, at the British people who ruled in India. They unwittingly suffered a lot.
Who suffered more the oppressor, or the oppressed? Clearly the oppressed suffered much more. But Britishers didn't go Scot-free.
Do I fulfill a psychological need by wandering through these cemeteries? Is it a purging of congealed disgust against the British Rule - a sort of gotcha?

Posted by Girish Bhatnagar at Tuesday, April 19, 2005