Summary of Alex Von Tunzelmann's Indian Summer

Everest Media

Description

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.
Sample Book Insights:
#1 In 1577, the Mughal Empire was in the process of uniting India. The English population was starving and miserable. The country was politically and religiously divided, and had spent much of the sixteenth century at war with itself.
#2 In the 1570s, the English began to feel confident and expansive. In 1577, the philosopher John Dee conjured up the first image of a Brytish Impire, a empire that would include India.
#3 The history of empire was not always so cosy between the British and the Indians. After the English republic fell and the monarchy was restored, King Charles II gave the East India Company a series of rights without responsibilities. This was pure capitalism, unleashed for the first time in history.
#4 The East India Company, a private corporation, ruled India from the mid-1700s until the 1850s, when regulation began to creep in. The British government eventually decided that an empire based on trade was in poor taste, and drew up a new charter that restricted the Company’s trade activities.

Sujets

• Religion
• Histoire
• General officer
• Great Britain
• General
• History
• Europe
• Politique

Informations

• Publié par: Everest Media LLC
• Date de parution: 30 avril 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781669394815
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Insights on Alex Von Tunzelmann's Indian Summer
Contents Insights from Chapter 1 Insights from Chapter 2 Insights from Chapter 3 Insights from Chapter 4 Insights from Chapter 5 Insights from Chapter 6 Insights from Chapter 7 Insights from Chapter 8 Insights from Chapter 9 Insights from Chapter 10 Insights from Chapter 11 Insights from Chapter 12 Insights from Chapter 13 Insights from Chapter 14 Insights from Chapter 15 Insights from Chapter 16 Insights from Chapter 17 Insights from Chapter 18 Insights from Chapter 19
Insights from Chapter 1

#1

In 1577, the Mughal Empire was in the process of uniting India. The English population was starving and miserable. The country was politically and religiously divided, and had spent much of the sixteenth century at war with itself.

#2

In the 1570s, the English began to feel confident and expansive. In 1577, the philosopher John Dee conjured up the first image of a Brytish Impire, a empire that would include India.

#3

The history of empire was not always so cosy between the British and the Indians. After the English republic fell and the monarchy was restored, King Charles II gave the East India Company a series of rights without responsibilities. This was pure capitalism, unleashed for the first time in history.

#4

The East India Company, a private corporation, ruled India from the mid-1700s until the 1850s, when regulation began to creep in. The British government eventually decided that an empire based on trade was in poor taste, and drew up a new charter that restricted the Company’s trade activities.

#5

The Indian Mutiny of 1857 was the result of a series of small-scale rebellions by Indian soldiers against the British East India Company. It exploded with full force at the town of Meerut, just north-east of Delhi, on 24 April 1857. The rebels took the Red Fort, home of the heir to the Mughal Empire, Bahadur Shah II.

#6

The British comeback in India was as brutal as it was predictable. Whole villages were burnt, men lynched and shot, and women raped. The streets of Delhi were stormed and filled with the bloated and stinking corpses of sepoys, provoking an outbreak of cholera.

#7

In 1858, the relationship between Britain and India moved into its most intense phase: the raj. The British government left the ruling of India in the hands of the maharajas, rajas, and nawabs, while only keeping a British Resident in their capitals to keep an eye on things.

#8

The British upper classes found it hard to reconcile their proud Anglophiliac upbringings with the reality of their exclusion. They identified with the gilded youth of a glorious empire, but they were relegated to the second rank.
Insights from Chapter 2

#1

The young Mohandas Gandhi had a rebellion against his family. He tried smoking, and stole gold from his family to finance it. But he stopped when he realized it was morally wrong. He then dreamed of a live goat trapped in his stomach, bleating, so he stopped that too.

#2

Mohan’s father died in 1885, and he had to take care of his mother and sister. His wife, Kasturbai, gave birth to a weak and ailing infant. Mohan began to look for salvation in self-denial and discomfort.

#3

In 1888, Mohandas Gandhi set sail for London. He was 19 years old, and he had a baby son with his wife. He was not impressed by London, and found it expensive and strange. He began to develop his personal philosophy, which was rooted in Hindu scripture but incorporated many anti-materialistic and abstinent values of early Christianity and Jainism.

#4

When Gandhi went to South Africa, he was met with extreme racism. He began a campaign that demanded equal rights for Indians in South Africa as citizens of the British Empire.

#5

In 1899, Gandhi began to implement rules inspired by the vision of society offered by Ruskin and Tolstoy, aimed at egalitarian, cooperative living and a pure devotion to God through asceticism. He was awarded the War Medal in spite of his family’s objections.

#6

Mohandas Gandhi was a great soul, but he needed a great lieutenant to link him to the temporal world. His student Jawaharlal Nehru was just the person for the job.

#7

Jawahar was a very spoiled child, and he only made it to the age of five or six before his father punished him for taking his pen without permission. He developed a fierce temper that set him apart from other politicians.

#8

In 1905, when Jawahar was fifteen, he went to school in Britain. He was bored with it after two years, but he learned to conform to the school’s eccentricities. He had deliberately not resisted the school’s traditions so as to be in harmony with the place.

#9

Jawahar’s father, Motilal, was trying to find him a wife. He wanted him to marry outside the Kashmiri Brahmin community, but Jawahar refused, noting that there was not an atom of romance in the way his father was searching out girls for him.

#10

Jawahar went to the Inner Temple in London to follow in his father’s footsteps and become a lawyer. He was interested in politics, but had a crippling fear of speaking in public. His life was filled with stupefying tedium, and he quickly fell into despair.

#11

The wedding of Jawaharlal Nehru and Kamala Kaul was one of the leading social events of the year in 1916. It was arranged for the first day of spring. The groom rode to the Kaul family mansion in Old Delhi on a white horse, followed by a procession of guests.

#12

Gandhi’s speech at the opening of Benares Hindu University in 1916 was widely misunderstood. It was thought that he was calling for Indian socialism, but he was actually calling for a change of heart among the Indian aristocracy.

#13

Gandhi’s condemnation of princely luxury was part of a much broader preoccupation with returning India to a prehistoric golden age of godliness, simplicity, and humility. He developed a distaste for synthesized drugs and surgery, which he associated with Western medicine.

#14

The Indians were a people belittled, starved, and fearful. But then Gandhi came, and with him, a new way of life. He changed everything, putting the upper classes in touch with the lowest and raising the lowest to a new status of nobility.
Insights from Chapter 3

#1

The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, Bosnia, on 28 June 1914, quickly triggered the Great War. Prince Louis of Battenberg was born in 1900. He was always known within the family as Dickie. He was cousin to almost every king, prince, and grand duke in the monkey-puzzle family tree of European royalty.

#2

The King, Winston Churchill, and H. H. Asquith, the Prime Minister, agreed to throw one of their most senior military experts on to the pyre at the beginning of the war, because his name was foreign. The in-laws were de-Germanized.

#3

Mountbatten’s challenge during the war years was to make his mark in the same Royal Navy from which his father had been so rudely ejected. He was intrepid, but usually slapdash with it. He had a strong streak of romanticism, and a great gift for storytelling.

#4

Mountbatten had a passion for formality, and he adored ceremony. He would amass an extraordinary collection of decorations: the octagonal collar of the Royal Victorian Order with its eight gold roses, the Maltese cross of the Order of St John, with two lions and