And on and on and on – till his tunic clung to him, his head drummed and quaked, and the punkah’s steady squeak hurt like a rusty screw turning in his skull. Everyone was pale with nervous anger but far from speechless. They were worse than the women at the Club, and with less reason.
The conference at last ended, nothing settled. Rodney flung out of the room, mounted, and spurred Boomerang into a split gallop up the Pike. The road glared back into his eyes, and the dust grated between his teeth. Nothing settled – except that the sepoys would have to use the new cartridges. Most surely there were too many separate rooms and too few windows. ibid. p127
Rodney did not trust him because he never held his head up, never looked anyone straight in the eye, but whined and grovelled and crept round the sides of rooms and huts, hugging the walls. He was always bare above the waist; under a thin mat of grey hairs scars latticed the shiny dark skin of his chest. His ears were large and stuck out from his head, seeming by themselves to support his untidy turban; his eyes were dark, ruminant, rheumy, sunk deep under a bony and receding forehead; his Adam’s apple bobbed up and down in his sinewy throat. He sometimes wore a loincloth, and sometimes rolled-up green trousers cast off by a sepoy and two sizes too large for him. The corner of a clean black silk handkerchief always peeped out at his waist and seemed a useless and incongruous ornament, for he never used it but blew his nose with his fingers like any other Indian. ibid. pp127-128
‘There are not two standards for us, for the English – only one. We must keep our standards – or go home. We must not, as we do now, permit untouchability and forbid suttee, abolish tyranny in one state and leave it in another ... If we rule we must rule as Indians – or we must make the Indians English ... God will punish us for compromising. And He will punish me.’ ibid. p176
In June the air would day by day become more humid ... There would be electric storms for a few days beforehand – high winds, thunder and dust, a heavy drop or two of rain. Then, on the first day of the monsoon, a tremendous storm of rain, lasting for hours ... When it rained, large drops fell slowly, then faster and thicker until they were almost a waterfall. It fell too fast for the earth to swallow it; it laid the dust, filled the rivers, and spread a surface of slippery mud on the hard earth. ibid. pp177-178
The sun sank as a dark red disk from which ragged pennants of green, gold, blue and saffron trailed across the lower sky. The glow died out of the dusty heat haze, leaving the air dead. The dust storm passed by the south, but the threat of it made the twilight black and electric. Then the word passed. It was not even yet an exact word, but a curse and a warning: This is the night. ibid. p198
The wind backed sharply and hurled a torrent of sparks and whole burning splinters of wood across the Pike. The bright shower flew over the crowd to settle on the roofs of the quarter guard and of the magazines and store-houses behind it. Not for thirty seconds could Rodney hear under the other noises, the bang and rattle of rifle fire. (India & Fire & Riots) ibid. p213
The green strangers pressed closer. An inch from his ear a rifle exploded. The ball smashed into Torrance’s appalled face, blew off his nose, and ploughed up between his eyes, into his forehead, and out at the top of his head. The Byronic boy squirmed gobbling in the dust, and spouted blood and brains. ibid. p214
All India had exploded into smoke and fire, that all its millions would be his enemies and he would find no pity or shelter in all its miles of plain and jungle. To right and left the bungalows burned, and outside each one men moved in silhouette. Some of them were shouting excitedly and firing rifles; in others the first panic of fear had gone, so that they stood about in whispering knots. ibid. p220
His son Robin lay beside Rambir, face down in his nightshirt the back of his head a black and clotted blur. Rodney felt the skull gently and thought it was not broken. Blood still trickled under the fair hair and dripped on the earth. They must have held him by the ankles, dashed him once against a wall or a tree, and thought they’d killed him. Rodney gathered him up and pressed him, kissing the round face and purple eyelids. The boy breathed in quick shallow gasps. The sepoys still moved about the lawn. ibid. p221
The next few months would lay the new foundations, granite and rough and cold. They’d be British soldiers pouring in from overseas. They’d hear what had happened in Bhowani and Kishanpur, and they’d pay it back a thousandfold. Rodney would lead them. He’d find the words to tell them about Bhowani. He’d make them see the blood, and hear the screams, feel the chilling horror of the treachery. ibid. p265
There he arched back until the muzzle touched the centre of his spine ... The air split and clapped together, and the boards on the windows rattled. Girdhari Lall’s head flew up and spun like a black football against the orange glare of the sky. The vacuum of the blast sucked black pieces of flesh and spattered the gunners with blood and bowels. The body flew apart like a bursting water jar, and a shower of entrails and pieces of bone and flesh splashed the faces of the British Officers and Indian sepoys. ibid. p329
A gunner threw down his ramrod and ran down the bank and plunged into the river. The dripping, sweaty dead were dragged out of the way and piled round the caissons in a welter of splintered wood, twisted iron, and spilled powder. Direct hits overturned three of the eight guns so that their muzzles pointed at the sky or rammed at an angle into the dust. ibid. p337
India is a rich, productive country. Every year millions of pounds worth of wealth are produced by her people, only to be stolen from them by means of the Money Trick by the capitalist and official classes. Robert Tressell, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist
‘Two and a half million troops from India, Pakistan and the rest of the sub-continent formed the biggest volunteer army in the history of the world’. Saul David, World War II: A Timewatch Guide, BBC 2016
A dramatic announcement live on television that as of twelve midnight that evening the 500 and 1,000 Rupee notes would no longer be accepted as legal tender in the country. The Corbett Report, The Indian Demonetization Disaster Explained, Corbett Report online 2017
Death by Demonetization. ibid. Satya Sagar article
Buddhist monk Lobsang Phuntsok … felt called to leave his life as a spiritual leader in the United States, and returned to the region of his birth with a dream of rescuing unwanted children. Tashi and the Monk, caption, 2014
All of us are basically abandoned … This is a community of love and compassion. ibid. Lobsang
She wets the bed and tries to hide it with blankets. ibid. teacher
When we decide to take a child, I have to think about it very deeply. It’s not just for a few months, it’s for a whole life. When I take a kid into the school, I promise to them that I will be their parent. ibid.
Raju, remember, always try to be a good straightforward human being. ibid. Lobsang
A place of unparalleled fertility, life, vibrancy, prosperity, music, cheer – I’m talking about Punjab … This state is in jeopardy like it’s never been before … We’re talking about a hurricane of drugs … Today, 73.5% of the entire youth population of Punjab is addicted to drugs. Glut, The Untold Story of Punjab, 2010
The streets are infested with peddlers. ibid.
Which is smuggled into India through the 553 kilometre long international borders shared with Pakistan. ibid.
We will find villages with seemingly nobody ill, no hospitals in the vicinity, but plenty of pharmacy shops. ibid.
‘No-one’s left alive. This isn’t life.’ ibid. mother
That makes Punjab one of the highest per capita consumers of liquor in the world. ibid.
This is the meeting place of three great expanses of water … I’m on the southernmost tip of one of the most intriguing, bewildering and thrilling countries on Earth. Joanna Lumley’s India s1e1, BBC 2017
Hinduism is the world’s oldest religion … Hinduism and its thirty-three million gods can be bewildering. ibid.
On the streets of Calcutta it’s impossible not to be moved by seeing what people with very little money have to endure. ibid.
In 2014 they legally recognised the third gender. ibid.
Jute is in its ascendancy again. ibid.
Mumbai, formerly Bombay, the colossus that is India’s most populated and intense city … 22 million people are crammed into an area about one-third the size of Greater London, Mumbai is one of the world’s most captivating cities … the second most densely populated city on Earth. Joanna Lumley’s India s1e2
Throughout history India has been renowned as a land of spirituality. ibid.
I’m joggling across Rajasthan in a train and I’m sitting in a third-class compartment which actually is terrific, apart from the slightly shonky windows, it’s fabulous, it’s got three layers of seats, and you get two sheets and a pillow to lie down … What’s not to like. Joanna Lumley’s India s1e3
Today Delhi is clearly somewhere you can make it. Its population is exploding. And £280 million is being spent on a new monorail system. ibid.
The director of the East India company reported that ‘the misery hardly finds a parallel in the history of commerce’ … By the nineteenth century India was financing more than two-fifths of Britain’s trade deficit, providing a market for British manufacturers – for the destruction of its own industry – as well as the troops for its colonial conquests and of course the opium. Noam Chomsky, lecture London 1993, ‘500 Years of Western Imperialism’
This is the Wagah border crossing between India and Pakistan. Every evening the flags of these two great nations are lowered in a hugely popular display of national pride. But just seventy years ago this border didn’t even exist. In 1947, 200 years of British rule came to an abrupt end and this vast sub-continent was divided between an independent India and the new Muslim homeland of Pakistan. My Family, Partition and Me: India 1947, BBC 2017
The first outbreak of Partition violence occurred in the summer of 1946 in Calcutta. Reports of atrocities against Muslims spread throughout Bengal, and in Noakhali district roaming gangs … began a campaign of terror against Muslims. ibid.