Quotes About British India

#1. Unless nonviolence of the strong is really developed among us, there should be no thought of civil disobedience for Swaraj, whether within the states or in British India.

Mahatma Gandhi

#2. The British could leave and half India wouldn't notice us leaving just as they didn't notice us arriving. All our reforms of administration might be reforms on the moon for all it has to do with them..

J.G. Farrell

#3. I guess the most surprising discovery was how long Gandhi remained loyal to the ideal of the British Empire, even in India.

Arthur L. Herman

#4. the following paragraph from an article of his on British rule in India, written in 1853:

Anonymous

#5. By adopting the 'free trade,' or British, system, we place ourselves side by side with the men who have ruined Ireland and India, and are now poisoning and enslaving the Chinese people.

Henry Charles Carey

#6. Author reports that a group of tortoises was given to the British by India's natives during the Seven Years War which ended in 1763. The last of those tortoises died in 2004 at the age of 255.

Patrick N. Allitt

#7. When the British left, India was a multireligious, multiregional, multiethnic country, exploited, backward, and poor from colonialism.

Prem Kishore

#8. Famines occur under a colonial administration, like the British Raj in India or for that matter in Ireland, or under military dictators in one country after another, like Somalia and Ethiopia, or in one-party states like the Soviet Union and China.

Amartya Sen

#9. No one will expect the British Government or the Government of India to give way to threats of violence, disorder and chaos; and, indeed, representatives of large sections of Indian opinion have expressly warned us that we must not do so.

Stafford Cripps

#10. Abdul knew this Gandhi as the one who cared for poor people, who liked Muslims as well as Hindus, who took on the British and made India free.

Katherine Boo

#11. In India, as we saw, the Sepoy Mutiny led to a vast reorganization of British colonialism in the area, sending out a viceroy from London and before too long, Queen Victoria was proclaimed "Empress of India," with this great empire, ruling over maharajahs and other local potentates.

Webster Tarpley

#12. My dad's family is part British and Austrian, and my mother's family is from Goa, which is in the south of India. I looked different from everyone else, which now is such a blessing. It was harder at the beginning of my career.

Meaghan Rath

#13. It would be a blunder of the first magnitude for the British to be a party, in any way whatsoever, to the division of India.

Mahatma Gandhi

#14. The British Government in India constitutes a struggle between modern civilization, which is the Kingdom of Satan, and the ancient civilization, which is the Kingdom of God.

Mahatma Gandhi

#15. Gandhi has more recently recognized the need for continuance of British, American and Chinese efforts in India and has suggested that these troops might remain by agreement with some new Indian Government.

Stafford Cripps

#16. India was formed on the idea 'Let's get the British out.'

Shekhar Kapur

#17. Eventually, the British came to overrule India because there was too much diversity in our unity. They were great expotents and impotents. They started by expoting salt from India and then impoting cloth.' One of the more difficult questions related to Chanakya,

Ashwin Sanghi

#18. Though blessed with many able administrators, the British found India just too large and diverse to handle. Many of their decisions stoked Hindu-Muslim tensions, imposing sharp new religious-political identities on Indians.

Pankaj Mishra

#19. Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon the act depriving a whole nation of arms as the blackest.

Mahatma Gandhi

#20. Some experts even say the idea of India is wrong; it is not more than a leftover patchwork of disparate kingdoms created by the British.

Chetan Bhagat

#21. Dogmatic toleration is nonsense: I would no more tolerate the teaching of Calvinism to children if I had power to persecute it than the British Raj tolerated suttee in India. Every civilized authority must draw a line between the tolerable and the intolerable.

George Bernard Shaw

#22. The loss of India would mark and consummate the downfall of the British Empire. That great organism would pass at a stroke out of life into history.From such a catastrophe there could be no recovery.

Lord Randolph Churchill

#23. Praise to our Indian brothers, and the dark face have his due!
Thanks to the kindly dark faces who fought with us, faithful and few,
Fought with the bravest among us, and drove them, and smote them, and slew.
That ever upon the topment roof our banner in India blew.

Alfred Tennyson

#24. The British Empire passed quickly and with less humiliation than its French and Dutch counterparts, but decades later, the vicious politics of partition still seems to define India and Pakistan.

Pankaj Mishra

#25. The Government which attacks its own innocent subjects has no claim to be called a civilised government. Bear in mind, such a government does not survive long. I declare that the blows struck at me will be the last nails in the coffin of the British rule in India.

Lala Lajpat Rai

#26. India is less manly under the British rule than she ever was before.

Mahatma Gandhi

#27. Ineptitude and negligence directed British policies in India more than any cynical desire to divide and rule, but the British were not above exploiting rivalries.

Pankaj Mishra

#28. If the deaf are to hear, the sound has to be very loud. When we dropped the bomb, it was not our intention to kill anybody. We have bombed the British Government. The British must quit India and make her free.

Bhagat Singh

#29. The devadasis have a multilayered story, a story in which poverty, deprivation and injustice against women is central - but what has happened to them is absolutely an outcome of imperialism and the impact of British rule in India.

Beeban Kidron

#30. How could Britain operate in India for 300 years and take so little back from it in terms of understanding?

Jane Wilson-Howarth

#31. Gandhi has asked that the British Government should walk out of India and leave the Indian people to settle differences among themselves, even if it means chaos and confusion.

Stafford Cripps

#32. In a country like India, the British were only able to rule the country because it had completely co-opted the elite of the country, who did their work for them.

Arundhati Roy

#33. It is not yet too late for the Indian people to decide on rapid, ordered progress. I can assure them that the British people are as determined upon self-government for India as they are themselves.

Stafford Cripps

#34. 'Viceroy' is the first British film about the Raj and the transfer of power from Britain to India made by a British Indian director. It is a British film made from an Indian perspective.

Gurinder Chadha

#35. When the communists won the Chinese civil war in 1949, they accepted neither the semi-independence of Tibet nor the boundary lines drawn by British imperialism between Tibet and India.

Bruce Riedel

#36. I must fight unto the death the unholy attempt to impose British methods and British institutions on India.

Mahatma Gandhi

#37. The British seizure of Hongkong was an aspect of one of the most ugly crimes of the British Empire: the takeover and destruction of India, and the use of India to flood China with opium.

Robert Trout

#38. I would be happy to accept asylum, political asylum, in India a nation I love. In return, I will bring Mayawati a range of the finest British footwear.

Julian Assange

#39. Julie Andrews has a wonderful British strength that makes you wonder why they lost India.

Moss Hart

#40. Ever since the destruction of Baghdad by the Mongols in 1258, the Muslim world has been in slow decline relative to the west. With Napoleon's invasion of Egypt and the creeping British annexation of Muslim India, that decline took on a malign aspect.

James Buchan

#41. 'The Moonstone' was all I could have hoped for. A mysterious, cursed jewel, wrested from India, only to be stolen later from a great British mansion. Enigmatic, dangerous priests who follow it across the ocean in hopes of wresting it back.

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

#42. A dull, decent people, cherishing and fortifying their dullness behind a quarter of a million bayonets.

George Orwell

#43. I shall endeavor to marshal British opinion against a course of action which would bring in my opinion the greatest evils upon the people of India, upon the people of Great Britain and upon the British Empire itself.

Winston Churchill

#44. The collectors of revenue and the policeman are the only symbols by which millions in India's villages know British rule.

Mahatma Gandhi

#45. Christianity in India is inextricably mixed up for the last hundred and fifty years with the British rule.

Mahatma Gandhi

#46. He was flying over India now, still making notes. He remembered hearing an Indian politician on TV talking about the British prime minister and being unable to pronounce her name properly. "Mrs. Torture," he kept saying. "Mrs. Margaret Torture." This was unaccountably funny.

Salman Rushdie

#47. We cannot, with good conscience, expect the British to set up an orderly schedule for the liberation of India before we have decided for ourselves to make all who live in America free.

Wendell Willkie

#48. The British Government very naturally would like to see in India the form of democratic constitutions it knows best and thinks best, under which the Government of the country is entrusted to one or other political party in accordance with the turn of elections.

Muhammad Ali Jinnah

#49. [Taken from a BBC documentary]
Tariq was born in Lahore, now in Pakistan, then part of British-ruled India, in 1943. A Catholic school education did nothing to shake his life-long atheism, which he shared with his communist parents.

Tariq Ali

#50. In which local hero Colonel Arthur Pettigrew, of the British army in India, held off a train full of murderous thugs to rescue a local Maharajah's youngest wife. For his heroism, the Colonel was awarded a British Order of Merit and personally presented with a pair

Helen Simonson

#51. The shots that hit me are the last nails to the coffin of british rule in India.

Lala Lajpat Rai

#52. I'm an Asian guy growing up in London so I see myself as British, but India is part of my culture.

Dev Patel