Indians in the empire overseas : a survey

This book is both a survey of the position of Indians in the Empire overseas and a challenge to the circumstances which make that position so humiliating. The problems concerning Indian immi gration and colonization have always agitated public opinion in India.
The book may touch the reader's sentiments, it has a significant topical interest. It gives the full background needed for an understanding of the Indian delegation's grand remon strance at the United Nations General Assembly in New York in December, 1946-a remonstrance directed primarily to the racial oppression of both Indians and Africans at the hands of the European oligarchy in South Africa. The Assembly upheld the Indian plea by a majority of 32 votes to 15. World opin ion has thus dismissed alike as inconsistent with the United Nations Charter and as untenable in itself General Smuts' un worthy claim that the racial discrimination of the ghetto is "essential to the maintenance of Western and Christian civilisa tion."

Humanists in every country, including South Afinca,, rejoice that a shallow and offensive pride of race should have suffere rebuke from such unchallengeable authority. For the DELF Briton, however, there is nothing but humiliation in the stance that the British delegates should have led the reproved minority, and rallied to the support of the least defensible features in the social life and politics of South Africa. No one who reads Dr. Gangulee's pages will remain in doubt why those delegates adopted a line which could serve only to discredit their country. still further in the eyes of coloured people the world over, or why they proved so reckless of that consequence. The reason is that the British record in matters of racial discrimination is hardly better fitted to stand investigation than that of Smuts' South Africa. In effect, if not formally, the British Government were alongside Smuts in the dock. They shared, and, as this book shows, they have long deserved to share, the ignominy of the verdict against him. TNG.

Beyond its topical interest, Dr. Gangulee's work has a pro found philosophic, and even tragic, meaning. The tragedy of power, we are often told, is that it corrupts. Lord Acton's famous phrase, now by repetition become a platitude, has sel dom found a fuller illustration than in the British Empire of our times, with its all-pervasive colour bar, its bitter whirlpools of racial hate and violence. But Lord Acton was viewing only one side of the medal; Dr. Gangulee sees both. He deepens our perception of the corroding influence of power by the vivid stress he lays on the correlative corruptions of impotence. In his picture the villain of the piece is inevitably, and rightly, the white man, the tyrant and tormentor. But he does not por tray the Indian victim as a mere sacrificial lamb, without blot or stain.