JUST LIKE THAT | From subjugation to revolt: India’s response to imperial arrogance

Power, if you have it, means little if it is not projected in a manner that those over whom it is exercised are left in no doubt of its existence. Around a hundred and fifty years later, on 12th August 1765, another meeting took place, between another Mughal emperor, Shah Alam II and another British representative, Lord Clive. Macaulay, who in 1833 was appointed as a member of the Supreme Council to govern India, and who laid down the policy to create a ‘class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and intellect’, lived in a princely mansion in Kolkata receiving a salary of Pounds 10,000 a month, while Ghalib, his contemporary survived on a monthly pension of ₹66. When Francis Hawkins, the acting British Resident in Delhi, did not receive Ghalib with courtesy, he complained to the Chief Secretary in Kolkata that he ‘was received in a manner totally unsuited to my Rank and Standing in the Scale of Asiatic Society and extremely ungratifying to my Feelings’. In 1922, when tried for stoking ‘disaffection’ against the British Empire, Gandhi told the bewildered British judge: ‘I am, therefore, here to submit not to a light penalty, but to the highest penalty.