Peter Ward Fay > Quotes

“Of India he (Sir John Strachey) had pronounced (and in reissues of "India: Its Administration and Progress" continually repeated) that nothing by that name existed. "This is the first and most essential fact about India that can be learned.”
― Peter Ward Fay, The Forgotten Army: India's Armed Struggle for Independence 1942-1945

“Gandhi did not ask when India would be ready for independence. Gandhi asked when will the British be? Just as he looked for Indians to direct their gaze inward and discover their true selves, so he looked for a transformation, a change of heart, in India's occupiers. They were to recognise that they had no business being in India. They were to recognise that they had never had any business being in India. When that realisation came, they would be allowed to depart with dignity, perhaps even with honour. They would ( Francis Hutchins, India's Revolution) "be permitted to withdraw to compose their memoirs.”
― Peter Ward Fay, The Forgotten Army: India's Armed Struggle for Independence 1942-1945

“Section144 (of the Criminal Procedure Code) slowed, confused, sometimes deflected the independence initiative. But the cat never closed in for the kill.That was never the intention. Besides there were, if you will, too many mice.”
― Peter Ward Fay, The Forgotten Army: India's Armed Struggle for Independence 1942-1945

“For it was the Englishmen of that day who felt race, thought race, and used the word often and publicly. It was the Englishman who, encountering an Indian or an Egyptian or a Zulu, and observing that he differed, attributed the difference not to circumstance but to blood, not to community or culture but to race.”
― Peter Ward Fay, The Forgotten Army: India's Armed Struggle for Independence 1942-1945

“From this humiliating self-estimate (of cowardice) Gandhi escaped by substituting for the Englishman's courage, which begins in self-assertion and proceeds to physical mastery, the courage which begins with self-control and proceeds to the nonviolent affirmation of truth.”
― Peter Ward Fay, The Forgotten Army: India's Armed Struggle for Independence 1942-1945

“Much later, (S.A.Ayer) credited (Subhas Chandra) Bose with combining in his person "the qualities of Akbar, Shivaji and Vivekananda," which is a little like saying that Charles de Gaulle was Joan of Arc, Louis XIV and Victor Hugo all rolled into one.”
― Peter Ward Fay, The Forgotten Army: India's Armed Struggle for Independence 1942-1945