Comment by sieve
1 day ago
I wonder what is it with this denial of the existence of India prior to 1947. If people were specific and said that they were referring to the Republic of India as the successor state to British-controlled India, then it would at least make some sense. Otherwise it sounds completely insane.
If India was invented 79 years ago, then you need to explain the various East India companies established in the 1600s, and all the references to India and the Indians by the Romans and the Greeks and the Persians and the Chinese before the Abrahamization of Europe. Europeans were literally looking for ways to India and ran into the West Indies and North America by accident.
There was no unified political entity prior to 1947---technically, 26 January 1950---because it took that long for Sardal Patel's program of political unification of sovereign princely states to conclude, so that the now-unified political entity would govern itself under common constitutional, and common law, with democratic universal franchise.
The East India Company, and then the British Raj, held power because they were able to broker deals with opposing (and warring) princely states and kingdoms. They used contractual leverage to make those sub-sub-regions keep each other in check.
The British Raj was a kingdom of kingdoms, in addition to being a protectorate. These are literal legal facts [0].
The word Hindu is literally an exonym. A name given to a people by foreigners. Our very collective identity was conferred upon us by outsiders.
[0] Obligatory Wikipedia... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Raj#British_India_and_...
In its Interpretation Act 1889, the British Parliament adopted the following definitions in Section 18:
Who agreed to the legal terms? The rulers of the sovereign princely states and kingdoms.
> There was no unified political entity prior to 1947
There have been many (empires, not modern, Westphalian nation-states), but the British managed to create the largest yet. Pakistan was carved out of British India on Muslim and non-Muslim lines.
> Who agreed to the legal terms? The rulers of the sovereign princely states and kingdoms.
Sovereign in name, but vassals nonetheless.
> Our very collective identity was conferred upon us by outsiders.
It is a name, not an identity. This is like saying the Indians conferred upon the Chinese their identity because the word cīna is of Sanskrit origin and the world calls the Chinese ... Chinese ... due to that.
I'm sorry what, Hindu is not an identity?
3 replies →
The idea of a Westphalian nation state is foreign to South Asia until 1947. Before that there was your local patil and whatever clan you belonged to. Even Indian princely states had no clean separation before the British insisted on clean borders.
You're applying modern standards to a time and place where they would have been incomprehensible