Many Indians are apt to dismiss the Raj as an aberration that brought little good to the country. They opine that the British milked India dry for their benefit and left only by compulsion. To an extant this may be true but there were benefits from British Raj that just cannot be dismissed out of hand.
Firstly when the British came to India the Hindus were an oppressed lot and paid obeisance to the Islamic rulers. The jizzia tax was imposed on Hindus and to profess their religion they had to pay this tax in their own land. Despite all talks by some Historians who really are pseudo secularists the Muslim rulers were aliens who came from Central Asia and they ruled with an Iron hand. They did adopt local customs but mass scale conversions were the order of the day coupled with destruction of Hindu temples.
One great advantage of the British raj was that the Hindus became equals of the Muslims and the tag of a second class citizen was gone. The Hindus could now live and breathe with ease. They could worship their Gods and the Jizzia tax became a foot note in history. The Hindus took full advantage of this and developed far more than the Muslims who steeped in iconoclast ideas just lost their moorings and fell way behind Hindus in the fields of education and commerce.
There is also no doubt that the Hindus had fallen prey to obscure and abhorrent practices. The Hindu religion over a period of time had become rigid and practices like child marriage, sati-burning of the wife on the husband's pyre, caste system and thuggery crept in. It took an enlightened British rule to take on these abhorrent practices head on and cleanse India as never before.
The Raj was a period when law and order were restored in India and for once in a thousand years the people could live and work freely. For the English rule was not a terror and a lot many Englishmen came to India with zeal, mission, and love with the task of preserving the ancient Indian heritage. Thus the famous temples of Khujaraho and creation of the infrastructure for development like roads and railway cannot be wished away.
The Raj gave to India a framework of a civil administration to govern this vast country. They set up all India services and brought in the railways and postal services that benefitted the common man. India slowly started moving forward under the British raj.
The British were the rulers and the 'bada sahibs' and lived a royal life. But from the tea gardens of Assam to the cotton mills of Ahmadabad the British mark of development cannot be minimized.
Lastly, the Raj gave something that can never be forgotten. They brought in the concept of India as a nation. In two thousand years of Indian history, it was only the English who united India under one rule from the Khyber to the tribal areas in the northeast. It had never happened before as even the empires of Asoka and Aurangzeb never encompassed the entire subcontinent.
With the advent of the twenty-first century, we can look back to the period of British rule as a romantic period and sigh of relief that the British colonized Indian and not the French or Germans or Belgians. They created India and for this, the British rule has to be appreciated as something good for India.
Rajinikanth is almost a legend and I am afraid the Mumbai stars and that includes the 3 khans is not a patch on him. here is a man who has given 6 hits in a row and all have grossed over 100 crores. That will require some effort to match.
