RE: Controlling Narratives: Deciding Who Gets to Speak
The modern "objections" to history would be worth considering, if those who are most vocal can move beyond parroting the racial victim mentality so fashionable in modern academia. Our societies are not divided according to "racial" or "ethnic" divisions, as much as class and caste divisions. Modern Indians may like to imagine all their social woes on the British colonization, but dominance of relatively small number of British over such a vast people as the Indians would not have been possible without the enthusiastic cooperation of the Indian upper castes in the form of the Raj system.
The upper/ruling elites have much more in common with elites of foreign cultural background than with peasants of similar cultural or ethnic background. Focusing on racial or ethnic divisions, while helpful, can distract from the real social events that are always ignored in the remaking of common human experience.
I generally agree- through most of history, class differences have been a lot more important than race differences. Not always, but usually.
To be sure, Britain left a shit ton of problems in India- including Partition, which is easily their single greatest colonial mistake. It is entirely legitimate for an Indian to blame Britain for the shape of international relations on the subcontinent. Partition was a moronic move that was heavily warned against at the time.
You have a very dim view of British competence when regarding her imperial policies. I tend to perceive the Partition of India as one of the masterpieces in political power transition; if fact, the British seems to have been unnaturally generous to their Indian counterparts.
Without an external bogieman in the form of foreign colonial power, i.e. Britain, the Indians would have degenerated into feuding provinces and principalities, as they had been prior to British colonial government via the Raj. Furthermore, the semi-independent Raj states were not all-encompassing, resulting in a severe power-vacuum where the British bureaucracy no longer functioned.
The convenient presence of two major religions allowed for the division of India into two (and later three) major political entities, rather than the hundreds that would have resulted in the ensuing British withdrawal. Rather than Rajputs killing Punjabs, Gujarati killing Sindhs, Kashmiri killing Bhojipuri, etc. the Indian subcontinent was stabilized with Pakistans killing Indians and vise versa. It is eminently better to have two major stable polities hostile to each other rather than disparate ethnic groups causing chaos. A socio-political policy perspective that the upstart 'Muricans would well to do to emulate.
Uhhh... or they could have left it as a single polity, since, you know, India had extrordinarily little ethnic or religious violence in pre-colonial times compared to how ridiculously diverse India is. (Which is to say still a lot, of course, just not proportionally.) And since Partition has resulted in literally millions of civilian deaths in a quite direct fashion. The whole reason two was divided into three? Yeah, not a fun one. I feel pretty comfortable dismissing Partition as a terrible idea based on its real world consequences rather than worrying about an entirely hypothetical eventuality which never occurred.
India had literally centuries of experience being a single polity- splitting it into two out of nowhere? Such a weird move.
It seems that while you have a dim view of British colonial policies, I have a very dim view of humanity in general. :-)
Was not India as a single political unit, a gift, or remnant, of British colonial administration? Prior to British imperial policies, India was divided into separate principalities and kingdoms. Mughal invasion did create a northen empire, but through the will of force, not with assent of the populace.
The modern era of post-French Revolution seems to engender the delusion of national, ethnic, popular "self-determination" (whatever thart means). The fracturing of the Ottoman European holdings, the dissolution of Habsburg holdings, the Irish revolt, the tribal anarchy of the sub-Saharan African "republics," the fragmentaion of former Yugoslavia, etc. seem to indicate an inherent human tendency towards anarchy in the absence of a strong, ruthless central power coupled with modernist political drivel. The only other force that unites disparate human creatures into some type of cohesive polity seems to be xenophobic paranoia.
Maybe India would have remained united without the need to partition a significant group into a hostile, "foreign" entity. But I don't share such optimism within the human spirit.