 Mae'n gweithio i gael ymddangos. Mae'n gweithio i gael yma. Mae'n gweithio i gael yma. Mae'n gweithio i Gweithio. Mae'n gweithio i India oedd 30 gynhyrch ar y mid-60. Mae'n gweithio i Gweithio i Gweithio. Mae'n gweithio i India oedd y Llegarau Brithys. Mae'n yn rhan o gyf 혼. It seems to be a huge amount of television about the Raj in India and, of course, Queen Victoria. He spent his career in broadcasting, television and radio and was managing editor of the BBC documentary department before running a company of his own, teaching documentary film abroad including in India. Mae'r hyn o'r cyffredin iawn i'r cyffredin iawn i'r hyn yn ystod yma, sy'n deud yn ymgyrch chi'n ddod yma, a'r cyflawn i'r cyffredin iawn. Felly, y bydd y bydd yn ymgyrch i'r cyffredin iawn, a'r cyffredin iawn i'r cyffredin iawn. Ymarfer y Llywodraeth, y Prifysgol yng Nghymru yn yng nghymru, y ffordd o'r ddod yn ymgyrch, mae'n ddod yn ymgyrch yn ymgyrch. ac mae'n i'n gwybod i ddim yn gwybod ar yr ysgol yw'r ddweud ymlaen i'r llunio. Huw, ddweud i'n gwybod i'r ddweud. Ddweud i'r ddweud. Ddweud i'n gwybod i'r ddweud yma, a'r gwaith yn gweithio. Mae'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ddweud, ychydig, mae'n gweithio arall o'r parodau o'r boll yn India o'r Pockastar. Mae'n gweithio arall o'r ddweud. Mae'n gweithio arall o'r ddweud. Mae'n gweithio arall o'r ddweud mae'n gweithio arall o'r panfforddol ddim yn debyg wneud. Chyswch. Ddim yn gweithio yn lactowel. Rwy'n gobeithio yn ddweud a'n gweithio yw ei chlynyddu. Gofyn. Felly y cwestiynau dim. Mae'n gweithio arall o'r ddweud o fath o'r ddweud. Mae'n debyg i'r Ddweud i'r Ddweud felly mae'n dda'r bobl ddaeth. Yr dismygu? Mae'r ddechrau yn gweithio, ac mae'r ddechrau yn gweithio'r ffordd. Mae'r ddechrau yn gweithio'r ffordd. Mae'r ddechrau yn gweithio'r ffordd. Felly, yna'r rhag Bryddoedd? Felly, mae'n gwneud i'r rhag, dwi'n fyddechrau'r rhaid o'r rhaid o'r llyfrnau sy'n cymdeithasio'r Rhagd Bryddoedd yn y Rhagd Bryddoedd. Dwi'n fyddechrau'r Rhagd Bryddoedd, rwy'n methu hynag Might Mind ac yn gweithio'r Rhagd Bryddoedd, yr gallwch i Thrall Bunsel, ac yn cael diganio'r Rhagd Bryddoedd' Anglo-Indian now means if you are of a family going back three generations with a male member of the family from Europe, not just the UK, who married an Indian lady. But at the time, during the empire, Anglo-Indians were known as Eurasians basically, and an Anglo-Indian was a Brit who had been working out in India for a lot of his life and had come back to the UK. I just thought that might interest you. So my own connections with India, I went out there first in 1964 when I was your age when I was 21. But even or not, it was easy to travel to India by public transport over land, which I did with two friends. It took 16 days and cost £40. One student rail, student travel passport. So one train from Amsterdam to Istanbul, three days. One train to Erzurum, which is right up in the northeast part of Turkey. Buses across Iran, this was the time of the Shah, local buses. Then, this was the exciting thing, this was the legacy of the Raj. There was a once weekly train that you caught in a hellhole called Zaidan, and it took you round the bottom of the Hindu Kush through Baluchistan to Quetta. You wouldn't do it now because it's bandit country. You wouldn't even go to Zaidan now, and I know because we've just come back from Iran and Zaidan is a no-go area. Then you're in Quetta, and then you can imagine my wonderful relief and excitement when we hitched up from Lahore to Kashmir. Kashmir then was open to tourists, and it was a wonderful Shangri-La, oh my God, it was fantastic. We stayed on a houseboat, and there were the peacocks, and there was the lush fruit, and everything. In those days, that was 17 years after the British had left India, and it was still a talking point. Was Churchill, Winston Churchill, a good or a bad thing? Well, he was undoubtedly a bad thing for India. In fact, he said that the Hindus were a beastly people with a beastly religion, and in 1940 he said he thought British rule over India would last for a thousand years. Churchill was a terrible old imperialist, really. I remember looking at a quotation on the government buildings in Delhi built by, designed by Luchans, a British architect. The quotation was, liberty will not descend to a people, a people must raise themselves to liberty. It is a blessing that must be earned before it can be enjoyed. How patronising. Really, what a offensive thing to have written on a government building. The British were the occupiers of India. Now, at this stage I certainly wasn't anti-empire, I was rather pro, but I thought that was an awful thing to write. Anyway, I've been going back ever since, and now of course a few Indians know anything about the British Raj. I remember getting a taxi in Delhi, talking to the taxi driver. He said, oh, I know so. You want to go to buildings of British Raj. I'll take you to one. Great, and he took me to Humayun's tomb, which was of course part of the Moghul empire dating from the case of Humayun, I think the early 16th century. So empires come and go, and the Moghul empire, the British empire, one has succeeded the other and gone. There are still graveyards, gothic graveyards with tombs of millions of Brits who were hundreds of thousands. The figures in my book actually who died and were buried in India. Calcutta is still quite a British town because it was the old British capital of India and the centre of British commerce, which I'll come back to later. And then of course there are the wonderful buildings like the Luchans New Delhi and the railway station in Mumbai, which is an extraordinary bit of what they call Sarasinic, which is gothic Indian architecture. Anyway, so I thought I'd write a book called After the Raj, and I found 10 or 12 Brits. This was in about 2003, who had been born in India when it belonged to the Raj, and had never left. Most of the Brits went back home in 1947, but these had grown up with the new India. And there was a tea planter, a missionary, an awful old big game hunter who'd become a tiger preservationist in his last years. There was an Anglo-Indian girl who was on the cover, and there was a guy called Nigel Hankin who'd written a book called Hanklin Janklin, which is about the kind of British Indian language which has emerged during the British time. And what did I think then? I mean I was still, and I am still in a way proud of the British achievements in India. The railways, for example, to return to that later, but many of you have been to India, you go on the railways. This was the network that held and holds India together. It's incredibly efficient, though slow. You can buy your tickets in North Wembley if you feel like it. It's much easier to get your tickets in North Wembley than to queue up at an Indian station. Though if you do queue up at an Indian station and you are with a girl, get her to go to the women-only ticket office, because the queue is always a lot shorter, right? So the trains, the whole of the railways was staffed by Anglo-Indians, as it happened. They were called the nuts and bolts of empire. And I remember going to a community outside Calcutta, which was entirely lived in now by elderly Anglo-Indians, who were so proud of driving the trains and so on. And then of course the graveyards, which do tell stories or rather you can imagine the stories of many, many, many, many, many Brits who toil their lives in irrigating the land or building the railways or bringing justice or teaching in the schools or being missionaries. Whatever the end result and whatever the motive of all that, their lives actually were dedicated to India. And they were worn out by the hot sun and the monsoons and the very uncomfortable life. Now that I do believe. I also read, it's defunct now, there's a magazine called the Indo-British Review, which were articles, it lasted until the 1990s, and there are articles about, particularly about old army guys. The hundreds went out every year from independence to revisit their old regiments. And if you go to regiment of the Indian army, it is so like the British army. I mean, there are bagpipers, there's the regiment of silver going back to the days of the Raj, the ranks, the same structure, the same kind of uniforms. It's a very British institution really. So here we are, 2003, a lot of pride in the British in India. But I do believe that the British, particularly after the mutiny in 1857, never tried to understand India and never did understand India. If you read a book called The Raj Quartet, which is four volumes by a guy called Paul Scott, which is a seminal work in literature, you'll know what I mean. But here are a couple of quotes which I picked up when I was writing my book. This one was by a British guy. Like all the British of the Raj, adult or child, I was part of two worlds. I might kind lived on India, but not in India. This other world, the Shadowland, was a place where our averted eyes, a slightly disreputable place, hardly mentioned in decent company. And here's an Indian officer. There was almost no social contact between British and Indian officers in the army. I don't know of a single case in which a British and Indian were very friendly. There was no contact, although we fought the same enemy. There you lived their lives in Cantonments, little Englanders all over. The British did live in Cantonments in their own lines. And up until certainly the 1950s, Indians couldn't go in these Cantonments. They were British only unless you had a pass. Actually, the British officers were very attached to their men, but this didn't actually include the officers too much. Perhaps they saw them as rivals, as social equals. I don't know. But I do believe the British never really tried to understand India. It's a huge generalisation, but I mean I stick to it. And this is sort of from the mutiny onwards. Anyway, basically, the Rajgut or bad, I've kind of changed my mind anyway by reading this fantastic book by Shashi Turur called Inchlorious Empire What the British Did to India. Hands off, those of you who've read it. Good, good, it's a good read, isn't it? It's a fantastic read. He was a Deputy Director General of the UN. He's now a writer, a very clear writer. And it's about time this argument was put forward because there are far too many books by old British guys who lived in India talking about the smell of wood fire at the early morning as they went for a ride or the chink of gin glasses and the mess in the evening and all that. This is sort of the other side. And his basic point, which I don't think actually is, I think it's irrefutable, was that Britain was a colonial power and everything it did in India was first and foremost in the best interests of Britain, including the leaving of it. And he has a good quote, which is a bit mischievous. It's not his, somebody else's. In the beginning there were two nations. One was a vast, mighty and magnificent empire which dominated a massive swath of the earth. The other was an undeveloped semi-feudal realm driven by religious factualism and barely able to feed its illiterate, diseased and stinking masses. The first nation was India and the second was England. However, this was talking about the early 17th century when the company began and the first Brits went out. So let's have a look at the balance sheet, bearing in mind in a way we should look at it through this colonial perspective as I will give you an indication. What was obviously good in a way was the English language. It's an official language of India. It's Pan-Indian. It's the language of global trade. It unites the Indian middle classes and so on through television. If you go to India, you turn on the television and there are the English-speaking Indian or imported programmes on television uniting social cohesion, English-speaking middle classes. Of course it enables some of you, only a very small number, to be here because Indians, Pakistanis, whatever, you can go to England and America without any language difficulties at all. So it's obviously quite a good thing. But you've got to look at its origin and back in the 1830s, a guy called Lord Macaulay worked for the East India Company and he was responsible for the English rather than Persian being the official language of India. He founded the education system in India for the ruling classes once again. This is a classroom in times. He said, we must form a class of persons Indian in colour and blood but English in taste, in opinions, in morals and in intellect. He wanted a kind of carder of Indians who are more British than the British to teach Indians about the British, the British rule and the British culture. And the education was quite unashamedly Anglo-centric. He had two more quotes from Macaulay. The introduction of western education and Christianity will transform a morally decadent society. A single shelf of a good European library is worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia. This is Macaulay in 18, speaking in 1830. Interestingly enough, Shashi Tharoe went to St Stephen's College in Delhi, his favourite author is a PG Woodhouse and of course Shakespeare and he's the legacy of that which he's the first one to admit. But the British were not actually interested in educating the vast mass of Indians and here's a statistic which, again, I haven't checked, but it's one of Shashi Tharoe's, but when the British left India in 1947, only 16% of males and 8% of females were literate. This was in 1947. Only one in 12 Indian women could read or write. So it was a language, undoubtedly a blessing, to get through a colonial perspective. Here's two other blessings which got so important and really, I don't think they're so controversial. One is tea. The British discovered tea in Assam in the 1830s because they didn't want to buy it from China and when I went to India last, or no, to write my book in the 1990s, most of the tea plantations up in Assam and places had only recently been run by Indians. Way up until the 60s and early 70s there were predominantly Scottish firms like Jardin and Madison who run the tea plantations. The tea, by the way, until the 1930s was not grown for Indians. It was grown for the British. It was during the depression in the 1930s that the market was expanded to India. Now I believe that when you go to India and you drink chai, which is a fantastically good drink as you know with milk and cinnamon, that's not what the British meant by tea. Their tea, which is now my favourite tea here, is Darjeeling tea, which you drink black and it's one of wonderful pure tastes. Interestingly enough, did you know that Narendra Modi, he began as a chai walla? You go to Indian stations, I've always waited for the call of the chai walla. He says chai, chai, and he comes along to your compartment with wonderful chai tea. Well, that's how Narendra Modi began on a railway station in Gujarat. Chai, by the way, we talk about chai, but in fact chai doesn't come from the Indian word. It comes from a Chinese word, chai, which was how the Chinese called their tea when it came from Canton and probably still do years ago. Now we get on to cricket. There's a lot of kind of reverse colonialism now because the British run our steel industry, the Indians run our steel industry, the Indians run a lot of our car industry, and round Heathrow, it's like where I live quite near, it's like living in Mumbai in a way, and it's the same with cricket. I ran, I started a cricket team of the BBC, which is now almost totally composed of Indians who've taken it over and quite right too because they are the best cricket players in the world. Cricket came from England. Initially, it was kind of the attitude, let's teach the Indians the rules of a complicated game that started on the playing fields of Eaton. But now, of course, the Indians take them to cricket wherever you go in India, it always amazes me, even if it's a mud pitch and there's not a proper wicket or even a proper bat, Indian boys, they're really good at cricket. Fantastic. So now let's look at the railways. The railways, as I say, I think are one of the prides of India, which you can tell because there are so many programmes on British television about railways. The Viceroy Harding said in 1843, railways will be beneficial to the commerce, government and military control of India. That's why the railways were built. Now, of course, they transport masses of Indians all over India. How's most of you been to India? Been to India. Been on the railways. Good. Well, it's a fantastic experience. But their origin, they were built by the British, who insisted, by the way, that the railways were built in the trains, were built in Britain. And between 1854 and 1947, about 15,000 trains were exported to India. The Indians weren't allowed to build their own, although they had an incipient steel industry. Nor were the Indians allowed to invest. It was a British company, and the British who invested were guaranteed 5% interest per year, which is a big colossal increase over the years. But if that 5% had not been earned by the railways, it was paid for by the Indian taxpayer. Right? And the staff were British or Anglo-Indian. The Indians were not allowed to have any senior role on the railways. And that is why, where the British left, well, even when the British were there, the Anglo-Indians were the train drivers, the mechanics, so on and so on and so on. So the railways, one could be proud of all these things, and I am, but you've got to look at them through perspective of the colonial past. Now let's look at what we all say, oh well, like I say, the British brought India democracy. Democracy you could define as probably a free press, a parliamentary democracy, and the rule of law. And a free press, it is true. The British did allow Indians to, they encouraged a free press in the 19th century. They did in fact impose a levy of 5,000 pounds per year from every paper, Indian paper, which is a lot of money in those days. So if the paper ran an article or so, which was very anti-British, they could confiscate its levy, right? And indeed it was certainly also true that anything considered revolutionary or subversive, you would be sacked or end up in the Andaman Islands. But nevertheless, the India's free press today, most of the big papers, the Times of India, the Times of Calcutta, the Hindustan Times, were all from the 19th, early 20th century, mostly from Calcutta and encouraged by the British. If you now look at democracy, well, the Indians, I mean, before 1947, there wasn't much democracy. I mean, it was the Nehru and his socialist government who decided to adopt the British model, rightly or wrongly. In fact, if you're interested in this, on pages 86 to 88, Shashi Taurua argues that a parliamentary system of democracy on the western model is not right for India. It would be much better to have a more presidential system, which you could argue Narendra Modi is moving over too. But I mean, that's not for this talk, but I'll recommend it. Before 47, there was a gradual movement towards war democracy, but it was at the provincial and local level, and, for example, the earlier reforms, they were known as the Montague-Chelmysen reforms of 1919, we set up provincial assemblies, the Brits could veto the legislation, control the taxation, keep charge of security, and it was a very limited property franchise to vote. And that didn't alter very much until independence. So, in fact, the British really ruled through a system of enlightened despotism. However, rightly or wrongly, the British system, the Indian system now is based roughly on the British model. Here's a very interesting quote from the Amarche Sen. Amarche Sen, the Indian Nobel Prize winner, economist, right? This is fascinating. There's never been a famine in a country with a free press and a parliamentary democracy. There's never been a famine in a country with a free press and parliamentary democracy. Now, in possibly the 100 years, 1857, 1947, 30 or 40 million Indians lost their lives in famines, which is analogous to those who lost their lives in the Gulag or much more than in the Second World War. There have not been famines since. Under nourishment, yes, famines no. So, his argument is that if you have a freedom to elect your officials and to rise up in a peaceful way, then you can stop famines. I just commend that to you. We now look at the rule of law, which I think this will interest you. The rule of law in India, the criminal code, was laid down by Macaulay again. It became law after he died, actually, in 1861. The President of India said in 2016, only last year, our criminal law largely enacted by the British to meet colonial needs and Victorian attitudes. Now, it's a very good thing to me that this code of law means a jurisprudence, courts, have a serial system that's more debatable, but, anyway, the whole structure of law that we have in this country is in India. But, by God, it is now ripe for change. I was looking the other day. It's my interest you of the laws on sex in India. The India's rape law enshrined in the colonial era of 1861 requires the victim to establish her good character and she has to prove that rape has occurred. Section 2, I mean number 2, section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, there is still a law which criminalises carnal intercourse against the order of nature. That means between gays. That's now in front of the Supreme Court, but in 2014 and 2015, there were 58 arrests in India under that law. Further, a wife cannot sue her husband for adultery unless the mistress is underage or married to somebody else. I just thought you might like to know that. This is the English Penal Law of 1861, which is still in law in India, another legacy of the British. So far, I see a lot of good things only through the perspective of colonialism. A lot of things today which are good and bad. I think what was bad, indisputably bad, was the looting of India. In 1800, 25% of the world trade came from India. In 1947, only 3% of world trade came from India. Now, you might say, why does it matter today? By God, India is so dynamic. What is the growth rate? 6%, 8%? You've taken over our steel industry. You've taken over our car industry. You're knocking your spots off us. But what would it be like if the baseline had been a lot higher in 1947? I'll just take, for example, cotton. In 1800, the Indian cotton, Indian textiles, this is the point, were a thriving industry. About 25%, the same figure again, 25% of the global trade in exiles in the global trade in textiles. The British didn't want this because they wanted textiles to be put together, the pyjamas, the shirts, the trousers and so on, in the mills of Lancashire. They wanted raw cotton from India. So the irony was, and in a way the insult was, that the East India Company would destroy the handlooms in India and put a whopping great tariff on exporting textiles into Britain. Meanwhile, they had to buy back their own cotton, now turned into shirts and pyjamas and all the rest of it, coming back from the UK. That changed, by the way, in 1920s and 30s. I go to Cornpawr, now Canpur quite a bit, and it is known as the Manchester of the North and you can still see the ruined textile mills. But for a long time, that was the case. Then there were the management agencies. If you go to Calcutta, you find the old management agencies, which looked after the export of all India's raw materials, jute, textiles, tea, silk and so on, into... They were known as sterling companies, which meant they were owned by the British, only the British could run them. That was because the British wanted raw materials from India. They didn't want made-up products they wanted raw materials. I happen to read a book when I was writing my book about an Indian accountant. The big managing agency of Jardin Madison wanted him on the board. This is now 1955, 1956, nearly 10 years after independence, because he was a very clever accountant. How to appoint him? They wanted to take him to the Bengal Club, which is where these nice dinners were held, where you invited someone to join the board of a big company. But this accountant wasn't allowed in, because even nearly 10 years after independence, the Indians were banned from the Bengal Club. So they had to have a little dinner in Annanix. But he said, I'll give the British one thing. They realised how stupid they are and they get us Indians actually to get the sums right. And he ended up running this biggest managing agency. It's an interesting story. The supply of manufactured exports to the world markets fell to 2% by 1947. I could talk about the steel company just in a sentence when the Tartars tried to set up the steel company earlier in the 20th century. They had great difficulties, because the British didn't want them to do it. So they insisted that steel produced was to the British standard, BSSS, rather than the world standard, which India had a healthy export to. When Tartar made the steel according to the British standard, there was a quota imposed on the amount of steel that could be exported to Britain. So the British were having their cake and eating it. So I don't believe the British looted India over 100 years. Finally, and I think this is controversial possibly, let's look at partition, right? Which have all been no doubt seen films about, reading about, this was in 1947 where the British left India and it caused such, because of the lack of agreement between Muslims and Hindus, actually the subcontinent was subdivided between Pakistan, East and West and India in the middle and millions fled either East or West with tremendous suffering. Now, one thing you cannot say, and I mean it is said a lot, is that actually the British did not want to give up India. By the time partition happened in 1947, the British had had India. They wanted to get out. They'd been ruined by the Second World War. It was a socialist government. Churchill was not in power then. I'm just correcting a recent film on the subject, which got it all wrong. Attlee was in power. He was a socialist. He had tried different ways to leave India with a peaceful solution. There would be the federal solution, the Balkan solution, the principally state solution. All these ways, but in the end, Jinnah wanted Pakistan. He didn't want an Islamic state there. He wanted a state for Muslims to live in, not quite the same thing, but he wanted Pakistan and he was going to have it. Gandhi said, let Jinnah be Prime Minister of the whole of the subcontinent if that's what he wants, but let us not be divided. But Neru said, no, we must have partition. So was it wrong to do it so quickly? Yes. Is the deadline incorrectly drawn? Probably yes. On the other hand, the fact that there was partition like that was not, in my view, in the short term the result of the British. So now we'll go along to the longer term view and I would say the British had a lot to answer for because the British all along had the policy of divide and rule, i.e. let Muslims be Muslims and Hindus be Hindus and Sikhs be Sikhs and so on, and Tamils be Tamils and so on. And a highly esteemed historian called Ramala Tapa of Indian history would talk, she writes really quite eloquently about the formal integration between the Muslims and the Hindus before the British came along and one of the British notions, for example, was the real India, the Hindu India, which was thousands of years old and had Sanskrit writing and its own wonderful legends. That is the real India. The Muslims came along in the late 15th century and set up the Mughal Empire in North India with Akbar and Charjahar and all the rest of it. In a way that's true, but that was always the interpretation. The Hindus were there first and then the Muslims by conquest. This was always constantly hearted on. To be more specific, anyway, so that was the British narrative. When the Congress Party began in the 19th century, the early founders of the Congress Party who were partly British wanted it to be for both Hindus and Muslims, but the British said, no, no, no, it has to be for Hindus. We'll have a Muslim League for Muslims and so there you started the political division. Then in 1906, Lord Cersen actually divided Bengal into east and west. Of course tremendous controversy. One of our main objects is to split up and thereby weaken a solid body of opponents to our rule. That was undone in 1911, but the foundation, if you like, of what is now a Bangladesh and so on on the one side and Bengal on the other was the division in 1906. In all the statistical events like censuses and the political arrangements like composition of assemblies, it was always done on a kind of religious basis. All this aggravated the tension between Hindus and Muslims which we still live with today. Finally, Shashi Turua said, the creation and perpetuation of Hindu-Muslim antagonism was the most significant accomplishment of British imperial policy. The project of Divide Et Imperial culminated the horrors of partition. That I believe, though the actual events of 46, 47, I think the British on the whole have been, have been, have been hold responsible unfairly. So, there you go. I'm very keen to ask any questions that there might be.