Review By Harsimran Kaur
Rating: 4/5
The marvel of M.J.Akbar to state facts with eloquence and irresistible conviction shows his political and historical acumen. The book “Doolally Sahib and the Black Zamindar” is a creation of the same womb. Humorously planted in the book are the ubiquitous mosquitos and the peripatetic bees and flies that were too racially sneered by the British. I can boast if Gandhi had not intervened, the infuriated mosquitos would have made them run for their homeland. The British prejudice was a fact; ringing in to the deplorable conditions that existed in India from a cesspit of indigence.
M.J.Akbar copiously pulls the barrel creating a xenophobic fusillade of cultural spasms and an odiferous dissimilation of the repressed. The foible of British conquering India invidiously perpetuated the seeds of pestilential hypocrisy and perfidy. History is rampant with the invective trials and tribulations of Indians hijacked by the British condescension—an illicit affair between exalted idiosyncrasies and unwary subjugation.
They obliged, proffering their trade propaganda to the Rajas and Maharajas, slowly insinuating their dominion over states buccaneering ahead as a strategic colonial power. The caravan finally ended with a fissiparous division of the land—a division initiated in 1608 when the East India Company landed in Surat; a chasm of culture, dialect, etiquette and perceptions.
The book by M.J.Akbar traces the chiaroscuro of reflective and defensive tendencies of the British towards Indians. It’s like adding more spice to the food to make it more delicious, but the result could be abysmal—the borborygmus of food churning the wrong way. The British wanted to control and the innocuous Valéry of ingratiation and blandishments gave rise to prejudices and polarization.
The stark reality of racism and revenge during British Raj cuts the ground under the feet. Indians were an intolerant swarm of honey bees that were kept at a distance to avoid their inglorious sting. The pejorative attempts of the British disenfranchised the Indians to bouts of slavery and subservience. The color of the skin fomented an incessant prelude to the Machiavellian cobwebs biting the dust. Keeping concubines was a meretricious disposition of the desires and ennui of the Englishmen and not a racial privilege for the Indian women. The off-springs were like a fly shoved off to make it unwary of the cup of tea savored the English style.
The readers would have at their disposal the real testimonies of Colonel Thomas Broughton who abhorred certain tentacles of Indian faith. Parched by the senile penetration of Indian subtleties, Kipling gives an honest account of Indian fragility and laxity. The deleterious ravage caused by the famine brings forth the disparaging account of British imperialism; not to side-stock the enormous revenue earned by them through exploitation and coercion.
TAKE AWAY
A perfect chronicle of emperors and their wishful desires, and the magical jestering of the sadhus to conspicuously alter the fallacy of the mind is a legacy that left the British dumbfounded. They frequently mocked at the anachronistic views and beliefs of the Indians; the latter proud partakers of atavistic knowledge. It was an imperialism of class and bigotry, hand in glove with an invincible power to suppress.
An important book to bring forth the megalomania of British oppression!!