* Tripura CM mocks Lisa Hayden because she doesn’t conform to Indian beauty standards.
* CBI wins a victory against Vijay Mallya.. His barrister, Clare Montgomery, is interesting as she belongs to Matrix Chambers, whom Cherie (Blair) Booth used to belong. Her previous client includes Augustine Pinochet and she seems eminently capable (smacks of Oxbridge even though she didn’t seem to have gone there).
* Initially I really liked the new name Prince Louis but I’ve now realised they’ve named him after Lord Mountbatten. That’s in incredible poor taste to the British Asian population; as Lord Mountbottom was as bad as Churchill when it came to India. Partition is ultimately in his conscience, speeding the division of India was probably one of the greatest human disasters in history. A very poor showing by the Royal Family and a complete insensitivity to their Asian citizen-subjects.
I think the main thing was to honor Prince Charles by naming the baby after “the grandfather he never had”. But yeah, Britons of Indian and Pakistani descent don’t particularly care for Lord Mountbatten (or “Dickie” as they call him in “The Crown”).
I also read that the name is supposed to be pronounced the French way and not the English way. I don’t know what people are going to read into that (Louee like Louis XVI).
It’s only the American who don’t make the S silent, the Brits silence the S.
You Mountbottom was a travesty; as always the colonial hand is to blame for the travails of the modern world.
I don’t know about all the travails of the modern world, but certainly advancing the date of Partition by six months (?) was not a good idea.
Divide and rule is a colonial concept. Caste, Hindu-Muslim, Aryan Dravidian, martial races while they may have some basis in a South Asian cultural matrix were steroidised by the colonial authorities.
The Wahabis are a great example; imagine if the Hashemites controlled the Hijaz, how different would the Muslim world be?
Hindus and Muslims had their issues long before the British showed up. But yes, the colonial encounter largely “fixed” these into two binary identities. Divide and rule was definitely a British strategy.
“Hindus and Muslims had their issues long before the British showed up. But yes, the colonial encounter largely “fixed” these into two binary identities. Divide and rule was definitely a British strategy.”
Would you be open to a corollary that Pakistani Punjabi Sunnis and Bharatiya Hindustanis [or whatever phrase you prefer for South and Central Asians] share common values, common culture, common interests and should be natural allies and natural best friends forever (BFF)?
Zachary:
Yes Lord Mountbatten and the English (English more than Lord Mountbatten) are partly to blame for partition. But doesn’t part of the blame also belong to Nehru–who refused to endorse Jinnah as the first PM of a united India as Gandhiji begged him to do?
Partition was a foregone conclusion in British/Mountbatten mind. The rest is just frame work and blame game. British would not leave the subcontinent without breaking the country. If Muslims were not ready, perhaps Dravidians would be persuaded to secede. 🙂 Sorry for being direct and hurt any anglophiles.
hoipolloi, I love to blame the English for many, many things. The English deserve censor. But most of the readers of Brown Pundits are not English. Many leaders of British India also made terrible mistakes and they should be held accountable.
Others may mess with us. But no one can mess with us nearly as much as we mess with ourselves. We should worry primarily about how we mess with ourselves. Then even if the rest of the universe and Shaitan Lucifer himself messes with us . . . nothing can hold us back.
“May I submit that divide and rule is not invented by the British. That is what all imperial powers across the world and through out history did.”
“Divide and rule” is what post modernism does. Many imperialist powers do more good than harm. And many imperial powers are very harmful. Not all imperial powers are the same. Mostly good imperial powers include:
–Cyrus the Great
–Alexander the Great in some parts of the empire (if he had lived long enough, he believed in Asian empowerment and towards the end most of his army was Asian)
–Chandragupta Maurya
–Gupta dynasty
–Mongol empire in some parts of the empire
–NATO
–EU
–ASEAN
–African Union
–Organization of American States
–WTO
–IMF/World Bank
–UN
–the Mughal empire might have turned into one had Dara Shikoh become emperor.
Often locals greatly benefit from joining an imperialist federation and alliance.
The British were fine with the Cabinet Mission Plan. So was Jinnah. It was Nehru who said “well perhaps we can reopen the grouping issue in ten years”. That was the last straw for Jinnah who said “Nothing doing. I don’t trust you. Nothing short of Pakistan will do.” This is as late as 1946.
The British did not want to Partition the “Jewel in the Crown”. They felt (rightly or wrongly) that they had made “India” into one country. The Partition Plan only came into being when the British saw no other way to get out of there. Congress shares a large part of the blame for Partition. What the British can be blamed for is advancing the date from 1948 to 1947 and drawing the borders in a hasty manner which led to ethnic cleansing. This is based on a lot of reading I’ve done about Partition. “Freedom at Midnight” and Jaswant Singh’s book included (the latest book was “Midnight’ s Furies”). I used to be really interested in this question of why India was divided and was it inevitable. Now, I’ve emotionally moved on. Pakistan is here to stay and it is the job of Pakistanis to worry about making our own country better.
There is a definitely a common culture and a common history but Pakistan and India as nation-states have different national interests. Pakistan has always been defined as a Muslim state and India is increasingly being defined as a Hindu one. A lot of water has passed under the bridge in 70 years. The two countries are going in different directions. The time for being “best friends forever” has long past. At best, we can be normal neighbors, who mostly ignore each other’s existence and are neither super-fond of each other nor hate each other. Until the territorial dispute is solved, I don’t see anything changing.
This doesn’t mean individual Indians and Pakistanis can’t be friends, but when it comes to the level of the nation-state, I am cynical.
Kabir: “Divide and rule was definitely a British strategy.”
May I submit that divide and rule is not invented by the British. That is what all imperial powers across the world and through out history did.
Zach: “Initially I really liked the new name Prince Louis but I’ve now realised they’ve named him after Lord Mountbatten. That’s in incredible poor taste to the British Asian population; as Lord Mountbottom was as bad as Churchill when it came to India.”
Thank you Zach for those words of wisdom and sticking up for all south Asians. If nothing else the naming was in poor taste and on par with some actress showing her ignorance of Indian history by naming her kid Taimur.
It is a name that has some importance in their family. HRH Prince Charles loved Lord Mountbatten. That is what took priority for the family.
They are the Royal Family; they need to be sensitive about the whole nation..
Isn’t part of being “Royal” that you can do whatever you want? HRH Queen Elizabeth can’t be voted out. Teresa May can.
In the end, the choice of a child’s name is the prerogative of two people (the parents). The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge chose Prince Louis (and whether it is good or bad), they had the absolute right to do so.
Yes true!
“HRH Prince Charles loved Lord Mountbatten.”
Hope they don’t start calling him Dickie. Poor kid.
That would be pretty cruel. HRH Prince Louis of Cambridge will be just fine. His last name is “of Cambridge” by the way. That’s how royalty works.
A bit of a comfort that little Louis is not in direct succession to the throne.
Actually, he is. He is number 6 in the line of succession. Right after HRH Princess Charlotte but before his Uncle, HRH Prince Henry of Wales.
Granted, the likelihood of something taking out his grandfather, father, and two older siblings is extremely slim, so probably he will never get on the throne. But the probability is still greater than 0.
Prince Harry is really the lucky one. The more kids his older brother has, the more remote his chances of ever having to be king are. He is free to lead a “normal” life (whatever passes for normal among the super-rich). 🙂
As you can tell, I’m a little too emotionally invested in the British Royal Family (I was a devotee of “The Crown” and watched the series religiously. My favorite character was Princess Margaret). Ironically, I’m not even British. So I will stop here.
Kabir, I share a lot of your sentiments. I was pleased to see Prince Harry’s intended looks desi though from a different mix of DNA. Such is ones inner thoughts. By the way, many of us are invested emotionally in British royalty. God bless.
If Prince Harry were ever likely to be king, the Queen would never have approved his marriage. At the time that the marriage was announced (pre-Louis), Harry was 6th in line to the throne. I believe there is a rule that the Queen must approve all marriages of the top six. An African-American divorcee and an actress would have been quite unforgivable for Her Majesty. But since Harry is no longer here or there, the Queen said yes.
For me, British Royalty is like a soap-opera that never ends. I love long novels that chart a story through the generations. I could talk about the British Royals all day but since I actually have an agenda for today, I must stop now 🙂