Prologue continues .....

“India with all her poverty and degradation had enough nobilityand greatness about her, and though she was overburdened withancient tradition and present misery, she had ‘a beauty wroughtout from within upon the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell, ofstrange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions’.Behind and within her battered body one could still glimpse amajesty of soul.

Through long ages she had travelled and gatheredmuch wisdom on the way, and trafficked with strangers and addedthem to her own big family, and witnessed days of glory and of decay, and suffered humiliation and terrible sorrow. But throughout her long journey she had clung to her immemorial culture, drawn strength and vitality from it and shared it with other lands... Despitethe woeful accumulations of superstition and degrading customthat had clung to her and borne her down, she had never whollyforgotten the inspiration that some of the wisest of her children,at the dawn of history, had given her in the Upanishads.”British colonialism came riding on the shoulders of the East IndiaCompany.

The Mughal power had virtually collapsed after the death of Aurangzeb and India did not have any central political authority to holdit together. The East India Company walked into that power vacuum. It certainly fought its way into it. The Battle of Plassey in Bengal in 1757was the beginning of the British Empire in India. They of course had tofight many battles to dominate India. They fought the Marathas, a powerful empire of the Hindus who held against the British in the initial stages. But in 1818 they were finally crushed and British supremacy was finally and decisively established.

To be continued...