bummed out on bengal

The stereotype of the Indian from India in American culture has been an enduring one, in part inherited from British colonialism and shoehorned into the mass media tropes that frame our present perceptions. If all the oppressed and colonized peoples were to rise up and clean out the lackeys and puppets doing the bidding in the radically antaonistic, violent riposte as the only interlocution possible with the colonial power in the framework of Fanon or Edward Said, the world would be ablaze in a conflagration of nihilistic global proportions; the apotheosis of Walter Benjamin’s messianic violence, anarchist heaven and the apocalypse in one short fuse of glory before the big kaboom.

At root is a certain narrative, essentially on the alleged laziness and shiftlessness of the native that is not seen through the optic of a form of resistance but as a genetic inferiority that can’t adapt to the Western system of consumption, instead of the more likely ingenious evasions of work seen by the oppressor as tangible and bonafide evidence of native inferiority and absence of backbone and character. As 2012 winds down, the knifes are being sharpened for Romney and his allusions to Churchill. Its Leftist prop since Obama may be worse, the archetypal “nigger king” who can pacify the natives….

( see link at end)…If Obama is to be castigated as an anti-colonial radical, it is seemingly acceptable among US conservatives to embrace an “Anglo-Saxon heritage” and Churchill. Those who know anything of India’s anti-colonial fight recognize that the villain of the piece was Churchill. His words from May 1943 should be embroidered into a tapestry to hang near the mirrors of every Indian household, to remind us of his perfidy, “I hate Indians,” he said, “They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.”

…The context for this outburst was straightforward. A famine stalked the land in Bengal. This had been produced by the removal of vast quantities of foodstuff to feed the British population and the troops in West Asia and North Africa as well as to build up a stockpile in case of the imminent collapse of Nazi Germany. Even at the height of the famine, Churchill blocked the diversion of ships of grain from Australia to Calcutta. As Madhusree Mukherjee writes in her important study of the famine, Churchill’s Secret War (2010), “The sole sacrifice that ordinary Britons were asked to make in response to the shipping crisis of 1943 was to eat multigrain bread.” Meanwhile, in Bengal, between 1 and 5.4 million people died. At the War Cabinet meetings if anyone raised the question of the Bengal famine, Churchill would fulminate about “British workmen in rags struggling to pay rich Indian mill-owners.” As Field Marshall Wavell put it, Churchill “hates India and everything to do with it.”

Dismayed by the lack of dialogue with the British, Gandhi and the Congress had begun the Quit India movement in 1942 and then gone to jail. There, Gandhi began one of his many fasts. Churchill revealed in the Mahatma’s near death, “we should be rid of a bad man and an enemy of the Empire,” he thundered. When asked to make some compromise with the nationalists, Churchill said that this “was not the time to crawl before a miserable little old man who had always been our enemy.” Two years later, in 1945, Churchill told his private secretary that “the Hindus are a foul race,” and that he wished Air Chief Marshall Arthur “Bomber” Harris could “send some of his surplus bombers to destroy them.” Read More:http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/09/26/romney-and-churchills-bust/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=romney-and-churchills-bust