This past week, we learned about Britain’s imperial rule in South Asia, specifically Pakistan and India. In the reading, India at 70, the author discusses the promises and the failure to meet them 70 years after India gained independence from Britain. They talk about W.E.B. DuBois and how he believed India could become a “superior alternative” to the other world powers in the West. But that hope never came to fruition according to this author, specifically noting the rise of hate crimes against Africans in India. This article dealt mainly with the hopes for a better India, better than the world powers of the time. But India did not reach that level, instead perpetrating violence against Africans in India, to the extent of 40 African nations calling out India and the United Nations beginning an investigation.
In Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge, the author discusses British rule in India in modalities: historiographic, observational, survey, enumerative, museological, and surveillance. These different modalities were used by Britain to collect extensive data and use that data to administer the region and push the population towards hatred; pinning religious groups against each other. Dividing the population and pinning religious groups against each other aided Britain in maintaining the populations focus away from them and their taking of resources in India, as well as their oppressive rule. The tension that the British started in India created a lot of violence within the nation.