It was really hot there!!!
How did British officers live in the scorching heat of India?
51–60 of 96 posts
Re: How did British officers live in the scorching heat of India?
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
Citation needed. The British certainly viewed Indians as expendable , and many decisions during (say) the Bengal Famine made squarely favored military wartime supply at the expense of the local population, but I don't think anybody has seriously proposed that the British intentionally created the famine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943#Historio...
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Citation of a blog not even mentioning what you describe doesn't count as a fact. War is harsh, colonization was a crime against humanity IMHO, but the ain't no proof about planned genocide of Indian population. Rather the locals were 'deprioritized' when supplies were considered during war, with horrible consequences.
Re: How did British officers live in the scorching heat of India?
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
Native Americans had no exposure or resistance to smallpox, cholera, diphtheria, influenza, malaria, measles, scarlet fever, typhoid, tuberculosis, etc etc. There are a lot of accounts of cities and towns being completely depopulated very rapidly during the early colonial period just from disease before there was large scale immigration to the Americas from the old world.
Follow-up question: why did the disease exchange only affect native Americans. Why didn't the colonists perish due to contact with deadly American diseases they had no exposure or resistance to? Why were the European diseases so deadly to Americans, but not vice versa?
Lung cancer.
Re: How did British officers live in the scorching heat of India?
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not "tactless drivel" to accurately state what actually happened . The British in colonial India were a highly privileged class, and they did a lot worse than just making their punkahwallahs sweat.
Is punkahwallahs an actual term? Asking as an ABCD.
As someone in Pakistan, I can tell you that it is a term but doesn't necessarily need to have been documented. If someone does something as a trade, you append -waala to their trade and call them by that.
So, if you see someone driving a tuk-tuk, or rickshaw as they're known in Pakistan, you refer to the driver as a rickshaw-waala. A chai seller becomes a chai-waala, a fruit seller becomes a fruit-waala, and so on.
Re: How did British officers live in the scorching heat of India?
#55Why so much concern of British officers in India, Better question would be how did common Indian population survived British Raj, when American Native populations did not.
Fundamentally because they're on the same contiental plate, and had exposure to the same germs, having been infected by the same or similar animals.
The decimation of the Americas was largely due to the fact that the ships that arrived brought with them germs to which the natives had no defences at all.
This topic is covered extensively in Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel.
Re: How did British officers live in the scorching heat of India?
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
Native Americans had no exposure or resistance to smallpox, cholera, diphtheria, influenza, malaria, measles, scarlet fever, typhoid, tuberculosis, etc etc. There are a lot of accounts of cities and towns being completely depopulated very rapidly during the early colonial period just from disease before there was large scale immigration to the Americas from the old world.
Follow-up question: why did the disease exchange only affect native Americans. Why didn't the colonists perish due to contact with deadly American diseases they had no exposure or resistance to? Why were the European diseases so deadly to Americans, but not vice versa?
My uneducated guess is that the Europeans lived in much larger communities (in Europe), which is a much better breeding ground for disease. This meant they were much more full of disease than the native Americans.
Another uneducated guess is that this is why your pet doesn't often get sick - they have much less contact with other s than you do with other humans, contributing to less and slower spread of disease.
Please could a pathologist jump in and enlighten me?
Re: How did British officers live in the scorching heat of India?
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
Citation needed. The British certainly viewed Indians as expendable , and many decisions during (say) the Bengal Famine made squarely favored military wartime supply at the expense of the local population, but I don't think anybody has seriously proposed that the British intentionally created the famine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943#Historio...
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What’s the deal recently with new accounts on HN peddling anti-western conspiracy theories? There’s a kernel of truth here but the conclusions and narrative are simplistic and false.
There’s no shortage of good historical resources on the Bengal famine which demanded at its peak 3x as much food as was sailing past to war-torn Europe, and with which Churchill asked FDR for assistance, but instead we just get inflammatory rhetoric.
Re: How did British officers live in the scorching heat of India?
#58When he says temperatures were 5-10 degrees lower, he means fahrenheit, correct?
The author is a history professor from the US, I would say, yes you are correct, Fahrenheit.
It's also what was used for much of the colonial period in India because of the British, so it's not exactly off-base. Fahrenheit is still often used among older populations in many ex-British colonies.
Re: How did British officers live in the scorching heat of India?
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
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Citation of a blog not even mentioning what you describe doesn't count as a fact. War is harsh, colonization was a crime against humanity IMHO, but the ain't no proof about planned genocide of Indian population. Rather the locals were 'deprioritized' when supplies were considered during war, with horrible consequences.
Did you not read the linked articles?
"The study, published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, provided scientific backing for arguments that Churchill's policies played a significant role in contributing to the 1943 catastrophe."
Re: How did British officers live in the scorching heat of India?
#60Why so much concern of British officers in India, Better question would be how did common Indian population survived British Raj, when American Native populations did not.
I think it is a valid question to ask how newcomers survived as well.