Rick Harsch’s Reviews > Selected Works Of M.N. Roy Volume I: 1917-1922 > Status Update

Why no colonial reparations?

I picked a history of 'modern' India--Clive to Partition--off my shelf and checked the index for Roy, who was not there.

I'm reading his first Marxist Indian Manifesto. One clear understanding is the nonsense of nationalism. Of course, in his case he would like the British laborer to look beyond the gains possible in conditions in England and connect with the laborer of India. All mechanisms in place prevent it.

the numbers if fully calculable would very likely be greater than those attributed to the Mao and Stalin regimes combines.

There has been no reparations of note. (The Brits still keep Indian items in their museums, deaf to all calls for their return).

Roy set out a clear outline of the process of the British takeover of India from Clive to his present (1918, in Mexico, when he was about 20). It's an excellent brief on the state of India before the Brits, and the devastation of the colonial system, and its near annihilaton of the subcontinent. Far more people dies of diseases and hunger and bullets than is commonly understood, but

Reading about the salt tax (an old Venezian torment to these home shores of mine) is horrific. The economic assault on the Indian must be considered as modern and horrific as what is called THE Holocaust, but the deaths were more numerous, for one thing, and for another the torment was drawn out for nearly 200 yeas, if you don't include the inevitability of the continuation of that torment after British fucked off.

103rd page of 4 5-600 page volumes and if you didn't already retch on the British, you needn't read further

After the letter to Wilson there's a short overview of Indian history, intending to get across that the country was managing just fine--for millenia--before the Brits came to enrich them by upgrading their opium and modernizing their mode of dress.
One particularly nice line: India has never possessed the insane idea of wanting to be master of the world.

Letter to Wilson subheadings
1. The national movement of India is not sedition (US called it thus during WWI
2. Indian unrest is not of German Origin (can you believe he had to say that?)
3. India has fought for freedom since beginning of British presence.
4. English oppression/Indian nationalism began before WWI
5....that England has brought higher civ. to India is bullshit
6. England, not India, has benefitted

Yet another third world letter by a reasonable anti-colonial colonized to a distant US president, this one to Wilson. A brilliant recapitulation of the process of being colonized. To any avail? Of course not. At the time Roy was in Mexico.

who th fuck is jean-claude roy? This is about Manabendra Nath Roy, born Narendra Nath Bhattacharya.