M.J. Akbar > Quotes

“Lord Charles Canning, the last Governor-General and first viceroy of India (the transition from East India Company rule to the British Crown took place during his turbulent tenure, 1856–62) wrote candidly to Vernon Smith, president of the Board of Control, on 21 November 1857, at the height of the ‘mutiny’: ‘As we must rule 150 million of people by a handful [of] Englishmen, let us do it in a manner best calculated to leave them divided (as in religion and national feeling they already are) and to inspire them with the greatest possible awe of our power and with the least possible suspicion of our motives’.”
― M.J. Akbar, Tinderbox: The Past and Future of Pakistan – An Essential History of Muslim-Hindu Cultures and the Taliban Context in South Asia

“An economically devastated Bengal became too weak to fight back the famine of 1769–70; it is estimated that 10 million, out of a population of 30 million, died. ‘In fact, British control of India started with a famine in Bengal in 1770 and ended in a famine – again in Bengal – in 1943. Working in the midst of the terrible 1877 famine that he estimated had cost another 10 million lives, Cornelius Walford calculated that in the 120 years of British rule there had been thirty-four famines in India, compared with only seventeen recorded famines in the entire previous two millennia,’ writes Robins. The Mughal response to famine had been good governance: embargo on food export, anti-speculation regulation, tax relief and free kitchens. If any merchant short-changed a peasant during a famine, the punishment was an equivalent weight in flesh from his body. That kept hoarding down.”
― M.J. Akbar, Tinderbox: The Past and Future of Pakistan – An Essential History of Muslim-Hindu Cultures and the Taliban Context in South Asia

“Beijing has organised for itself the best of all three worlds: First World armed power, Second World economic strength and Third World handouts.”
― M.J. Akbar, Have Pen, Will Travel

“You have to conquer nations in the West to become an empire. In India all you have to do is to conquer yourself to become and emperor.”
― M J Akbar

“Jinnah said, as early as in the first decade of the twentieth century, that separate electorates would lead to the destruction of Indian unity; and so they did.”
― M.J. Akbar, Tinderbox: The Past and Future of Pakistan – An Essential History of Muslim-Hindu Cultures and the Taliban Context in South Asia

“Muslims of British India had opted for a separate homeland in 1947, destroying the possibility of a secular India in which Hindus and Muslims would coexist, because they believed that they would be physically safe, and their religion secure, in a new nation called Pakistan. Instead, within six decades, Pakistan had become one of the most violent nations on earth, not because Hindus were killing Muslims but because Muslims were killing Muslims.”
― M.J. Akbar, Tinderbox: The Past and Future of Pakistan – An Essential History of Muslim-Hindu Cultures and the Taliban Context in South Asia

“John Steinbeck. The Grapes of Wrath, a huge indictment of materialism published in the thirties, is the sleeper success of publishing. In 1959 Steinbeck wrote to his friend Adlai Stevenson, the great icon of liberals, ‘If I wanted to destroy a nation, I would give it too much and I would have it on its knees, miserable, greedy and sick.”
― M.J. Akbar, Have Pen, Will Travel

“Travel continues to broaden the mind and slim the wallet.”
― M.J. Akbar, Have Pen, Will Travel: Observations of a Globetrotter

“The People’s Republic of China loses its republican sheen when it comes to territory and turns imperial even if it cannot always get imperious.”
― M.J. Akbar, Have Pen, Will Travel

“London is often confused with England. The English also live in London but they are only one of the communities which inhabit a true world city.”
― M.J. Akbar, Have Pen, Will Travel: Observations of a Globetrotter