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Coming From

The last couple of years, I have been trying to read more history. The way history was taught when I was in high school made it hard to understand the value of the subject. 

Fast forward a couple of decades, and meaning of the quote “If you do not know where you come from, then you don't know where you are, and if you don't know where you are, then you don't know where you're going. And if you don't know where you're going, you're probably going wrong.” started to become alarmingly clear. 

In my own life I was at a place that I believed was right for me based on that fact I really did not know where I was coming from in a broad historical context. The place may or may not have been right. I made peace with that. But being able to move forward was even harder - nothing felt right so status quo was the only way. 

Reading these lines from The Anarchy, made me think about the hazards of not knowing where one comes from:

Mir Jafar, in his position as paymaster of the Bengal army, was prepared to offer the Company the vast sum of 2.5 crore* rupees if they would help him remove the Nawab. Further investigation revealed that the scheme had wide backing among the nobility but that Mir Jafar, an uneducated general with no talent in politics, was simply a front for the real force behind the coup – the Jagat Seth bankers. ‘They are, I can confirm, the originators of the revolution,’ wrote Jean Law many months later. ‘Without them the English would never have carried out what they have. The cause of the English had become that of the Seths.

When we studied the rise and fall of the British Raj in school, Mir Jafar was the depicted as the villain and his treachery was made responsible for all our woes. There was no mention of the Seths whatsoever. That is a significant rewrite of history. And I am sure there were hundreds of such oversimplifications and misrepresentations leading to us growing up with a fully distorted view of where we came from. Contrary to what we were taught, the fate of India as it turns was shaped by bankers from Bengal:

..This was something quite new in Indian history: a group of Indian financiers plotting with an international trading corporation to use its own private security force to overthrow a regime they saw threatening the income they earned from trade.60 This was not part of any imperial masterplan. In fact, the EIC men on the ground were ignoring their strict instructions from London, which were only to repulse French attacks and avoid potentially ruinous wars with their Mughal hosts.
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