India’s rise on the global stage stems from choices made nearly 200 years ago Rahul Sagar Jun 04, 2022 https://www.hindustantimes.com/opinion/chinas-aggression-will-fail-to-thwart-india-s-ambition-101654261018715.html China’s aggression will fail to thwart India’s ambition https://www.hindustantimes.com/opinion/chinas-aggression-will-fail-to-thwart-india-s-ambition-101654261018715.html
If we reflect on modern India’s trajectory, which began not in 2014 or 1991, but in the recesses of the 19th century, we will see that its ambitions are a product of choices made long ago.
Consider India’s position in the early 19th century. Decades of war, initially among the remnants of an earlier era, and then between the battered survivors and the East India Company, had reduced the country to ruin.
The earliest English language schools in India were established in Tanjore and Travancore — decades before they appeared in British India. The missionaries that operated these schools soon learnt who was using whom. The natives, they despondently wrote home, were only interested in their “temporal welfare”. ... “before Macaulay set foot in India native opinion had declared so strongly for English teaching... Dress and diets were supplemented, irrational social and religious diktats were challenged, and then Indians, who for centuries had refused to leave their locales, flooded out in every direction—to England and the United States, to Germany and Japan — seeking new skills and expertise. From there they returned as doctors, lawyers, engineers, and scientists, leading Bholanath Chandra, one of the great observers of the age, to proclaim, “a widely diffused enterprising spirit is always the antecedent to that widely diffused national prosperity, by means of which alone can our nation ever hope to occupy a conspicuous position in the eyes of mankind. Such was the state of India once, such ought to be the state of India again”.