If you would like to see a seriously good film, gently poke some fun at the Christians, and watch Graham Chapman expose himself to a huge crowd who think he is the Messiah then your mission for the week is to go and watch Monty Python’s Life of Brian.
I also sheds some light on today’s title, and even answers it in some ways.
They were of course talking about what the Romans did for the Jews, but what the British did for Indians, aside from a lot of cheerful slaughter and theft of natural resources, is in some ways similar, although there are many differences too and it took the poor old Jews 1,946 to get their own country, and we all know how that turned out…
While I’m here, I have to offer an apology. I cannot research my facts because this computer can only run one internet window at a time: that one window is uploading pictures & video to Photobucket.com, and keeping a word file open concurrently is making the poor beast sweat pure liquid silicone from its sockets, so dates and possibly some of the longer words might not be all that accurate this morning 
Now, it has to be said that Britain, Portugal, Spain, France, Holland and a few other countries were very naughty boys when they came to India. As John Simpson put it, the simply treated the country as their own personal goldmine, and they fought down the indigenous people and each other in their attempts to secure it for Queen/King, country, national glory and a second mansion with en suite ornamental gardens.
It also has to be said, though, that before Johnny European turned up then India, like most strategically placed and/or mineral-rich countries, had been invaded over and over by the neighbours, and had got pretty used to it all, perhaps even accepting with stoic grace the occasional need to replace family members as various foreigners trundled up the garden path and lopped their heads off.
It also has to be said, most importantly, that before all the white bastards turned up then India didn’t actually exist. It was never even a country, not a nation state but what you get before you get countries; ruled by warring kingdoms and fiefdoms, mostly the Hindu Vijayanagara empire in the South, and the Muslim Mughal Empire in the North. There were several others, too, and none of them could claim more than about quarter of the present country’s land as its own – there are still tribes in Eastern India that bow to no-one, and until about the 1970s (from memory of reading the date somewhere) they were called the criminal tribes, and were eligible for arrest simply for existing despite being in their thousand-year-occupied native homelands. Nasty old business, as my Brother would say.
What united India was in fact the East India Company, as after 150 years of battling other patriotic entrepreneurs (read: Mercenary buggers) they effectively ruled the country from the 1760s until the middle of 1850s, and while they were exploiting the diamonds, spices, wood, minerals, people and culture as only a pre-20th century empire could do, they also made such an impression on the Indian peoples that they became the Indian people, and banded together against the universal aggressor.
Although it wasn’t always that aggressive, after the initial and `necessary` old “move in and slaughter enough to keep ‘em quiet” routine, so treasured by the redcoat Army. The East India Company was in it for money, and obviously employed `local labour` (i.e. slaves or at least slave-wages workers) to get most of the work done. However, once it was established that the British were better equipped, organized and trained then it was largely over until the First War of Indian Independence, or the Sepoy Mutiny in 1857 (I think) when the E.I.C. was finally defeated and the British government stepped in and, calling themselves the British Raj, did the vaguely decent thing and governed the place and established all the glorious modern frills and twiddles that make life so much easier and faster.
India before the British had no proper roadways (not much has changed, then…) and no railway system, meaning all transport was manual, either on foot or by a drawn carriage or cart. This fact alone limited India to a low-technology, low communications, low-progress state of being.
Technology was also largely antiquated by the standards of the Western world and having no means of mass production meant that everything had to be made by hand, so it was costly, often unreliable, and cripplingly slow to replace.
There were no telephones, no telegraph, not much in the way of public health treatment (that worked) and the country could not stand up to any coherent and determined aggressor, as was seen when at least 4 different European countries all managed to establish strong holds on the place while still fighting three countries with the other hand!
In short, we shared our cultures and the Indians came off the better, in the short term. Now, India stands for an awful lot more than a vunerable treasure trove, available for sacking and looting to anyone with enough silly men in shiny red coats carrying a flag. One in every six people who walk the Earth are Indian, and that is a lot more than we British, or even the Americans can lay claim to – in fact there are more citizens of India than there are subjects and citizens in all the countries of Europe combined; there are only around 800 million Europeans in this world, and, yes, that includes all those pesky asylum seekers, too :
It is one of only nine Nuclear Powers in the world - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_states_with_nuclear_weapons -
and has produced and propagated their armed forces, political capabilities and industrial worth to sufficient extent that they are regarded as only being just outside the G8, being one of the 5 Outreach Countries that attend the recently created `G8 + 5` meetings that will hopefully not be attacked by loonies with paint and eggs in quite the same way as the original ones are 
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Of course, if it hadn’t been the British it would have been the Portuguese or the French of the Dutch, but as someone who sees an awful lot of anti-Empire thought and feeling, and as someone who respects the facts of the matter; that England handed virtual control of a country to a commercial company (who it later had to reign in and regulate into oblivion) for an easy profit and an expanding empire; I also think it highly unfair to think that we came along and raped and murdered and stole for 200+ years without actually leaving a lot of good behind, and in bringing a whole new world to a whole world, as it were: and vice versa.
There are many instances of British reverence and love for this country, and many, too, of love and respect for the British among Indians. Thousands of our lot lived and died over here too, and although the beginnings were, ahem, ignominious to say the least, the endings seem to be far from it. Young Indians love and absorb Western culture with more fervour than we do in the west, economic fantasies being a largely responsible I imagine, but there is a lasting and meaningful exchange of ideas, and more material things, that is to be commended and loved.
There are also, of course, the old stories of Indian soldiers in the British army who love and respect the regiments and the King/Queen/Whelp as much as any stiff-lipped Bedfordshire Colonel. And this is hardly limited to Armies, although of course in the more militarized world of the 19th Century these things were more everyday affairs.
I am warmly welcomed by most people who ask where I’m from, which is everyone. It is know as a `good country` even among those who have never visited and have no intention of ever going there. We wouldn’t have the massive Indian populations in the UK without an acceptance of the Commonwealth, and overall, I think that the British occupation of India was actually a good thing; think what would have happened if it had been Kaiser-led Germany, or Fascist Spain that had taken control. What if it had been a country less disciplined, more bloodthirsty, and less obsessed with social grace and politeness.
Of course taking over any country should never happen, it is wrong and motivated purely by greed. This is deplorable, and it would be best, of course, if India had been left alone.
To leave a country alone as it was does leave it vunerable however, and a warring group of small empires with no coherent or countrywide structure, surrounded by China and the Muslim world and with virtually undefended ports on a planet world with 4 massively successful naval empires is open to a lot of negative influence. Imagine if was left alone until 1939 and old Adolf set his sights on it…
Which isn’t a valid excuse for all the misdeeds, of course, it is just a recognition that it wasn't as bad as it could have been, and of course we ended up leaving so much behind that we advanced the country more quickly and more stably than I can otherwise imagine, and in 1947 when Independence was established then it was right and it was proper.
And with all the culture, peaceful spirit and calming `mysticism` that we have absorbed from the subcontinent, the practices and beliefs of a tranquil, simple life and the wisdom of a few simple rules of life that have powered a large part of estern thinking and success for the past 150 years, it seems to me it turned out that that we Europeans fared at least as well from sharing the culture of, too 
PS: today’s post was going to be about Mangalore, but I thought of the title and it all just flowed from that! I’m leaving the city tomorrow for a small town in the forests called Madikeri, hopefully lots of trekking and wildlife shenanigans, and maybe I’ll finally catch up on the pictures for this here page. Maybe.
