British India Quotes



The chance was the fact that war—the War of 1812—had been declared between Britain and America. Tecumseh allied himself with General Isaac Brock, the British Commander of the Western Forces. Tecumseh himself was put in charge of all Indian forces and given the rank of a British Brigadier General. However, Brock was killed shortly thereafter, and his replacement, General Procter, was not as skilled at working with Indian Allies and the British-Indian alliance was defeated bringing to an end the notion of “one great Indian nation.”


As early as 1933, 14 years before Indian independence, there was a movement for a separate Muslim nation within India. Ironically, Hindu India was never a nation in any sense of the word, but was a series of independent principalities much like Italy before its unification. However, with the Muslim conquest of the various Indian states, there was a central authority, ruler, and nation for the first time. Later the Muslims had to argue that India was not a country when it was they who had made it such. When the Muslim Emperors were in power, they argued that India was one country under their authority. But when they lost power, the Muslims argued the other side of the issue.


Richard Southwell Bourke. Victoria was then Queen. The role of the Islamic religion in terms of violence, terrorism & rebellion is not uniquely a question of the 21st century. The 19th Century saw much Islamic fundamentalist violence in India and other Islamic Colonies—much more than from other religious groups in similar colonial status. Opinion was divided between those who saw Islam—especially the Wahabi sect—as inciting violence per se. Mayo assigned one of his administrators to do a study of the issue. See {616924} for the study of William Wilson Hunter. Ironically, Lord Mayo was stabbed to death in a terrorist attack on him personally in 1872.


The Sepoys were Indian natives serving as enlisted men in the British Army in India. Napier had been the Commander of the British Forces in India and resigned over a dispute with the government. This quotation came from his negative report. Not long after he wrote this, the “Sepoy Rebellion” in 1857 almost destroyed English rule in India.