Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How did British officers live in the scorching heat of India?

archive.ph

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 96 posts

Re: How did British officers live in the scorching heat of India?

#71

Post by uwuhn »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #70
dspillett wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plenty of melanin, and habits that didn't involve being out in the direct sun at its hottest probably helped. As for the British officers of the time, I assume a key factor was having people (slaves and/or other subordinates) to order to do work while they stayed out of the direct sun as much as possible, in their relatively luxuriant accommodations.

Does melanin help with the heat, though? I thought it just protected from skin cancer.

It does if you spend time in the sun.

Re: How did British officers live in the scorching heat of India?

#72

Post by onyva »

What a euro centric oblivious type of pseudo academic indulgence. I guess what we need to take from that is that colonialists we’re really busy people, entrepreneurs doing really important things, so this is the kind of perspective into their legacy that we’re missing. You do tend to deal with the heat rather well when someone else is doing the hard work and producing the staff you’re stealing from them.

I wonder if there’s a follow-up article on how the nazis kept their uniforms so tidy considering how many ditches and mass graves they stood around.

Re: How did British officers live in the scorching heat of India?

#73

Post by bsanr2 »

bsanr2 wrote: post #13
9nGQluzmnq3M wrote: post #9

Earlier 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...

Genocide by convenient happenstance, as a side-effect of deliberate action, is still genocide.

The first modern genocide (if you don't count the Congolese, which most don't but should) was a death march. The Turks didn't try to eliminate the Armenians by shooting or poisoning or slashing them; they simply made them walk, en masse and in horrible conditions, until they died.

If you've supplanted an ethnic group's government and redirected resources such that people start dying in horrifically large numbers, that is also a case in which you're committing genocide. Even if you're the Brits.

Re: How did British officers live in the scorching heat of India?

#74

Post by bsanr2 »

jahewson wrote: post #57
macewindu wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

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 inflammat…

>What’s the deal recently with new accounts on HN peddling anti-western conspiracy theories?

That's a gross mischaracterization of what was posted.

Re: How did British officers live in the scorching heat of India?

#75

Post by wink »

onyva wrote: post #72

What a euro centric oblivious type of pseudo academic indulgence. I guess what we need to take from that is that colonialists we’re really busy people, entrepreneurs doing really important things, so this is the kind of perspective into their legacy that we’re missing. You do tend to deal with the heat rather well when someone else is doing the hard work and producing the staff you’re stealing from them. I wonder if…

I wonder why you sound so snarky regarding this article.

It's not that the author defended them or said anything positive about them (except maybe "I've been there and can relate"). Nothing I read here surprised me, really. And it's not that he didn't mention that the burden was basically shouldered by the people there.

Re: How did British officers live in the scorching heat of India?

#76

Post by graeme »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #42

Uh... but how had the Indians been doing it for thousands of years?

I think an implied part of the question is how did the british do it despite having customs and building habits designed for a colder climate. E.g. british troops had stuff uniforms, and british building styles weren’t designed for india.

Hence was much of the answer focusses on “going native” with “mughal dress”, local building styles, etc.

So, how did they adapt the face of apparent resistance to abandoning all of their normal customs kept up elsewhere.

Re: How did British officers live in the scorching heat of India?

#77

Post by graeme »

golover721 wrote: post #61

For every officer living the privileged life described in this article there were dozens of rank and file British troops, who certainly had no servants, or any of the other described comforts and luxuries. No mention of them?

A dead comment mentions even rank and file troops had servants. In previous centuries it was much more common for middle status people to have hired help.

Re: How did British officers live in the scorching heat of India?

#78

Post by NeedMoreTea »

macewindu wrote: post #16
sbmthakur wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Famines were mainly a result of British mismanagement of resources. This mismanagement peaked when World War 2 was the top priority (read: Bengal famine). The British were indeed sloppy when it came to the welfare of Indians and did enact some evil policies. They were imperialists after all. But there's no evidence that the British wanted to "wipe out" the native population.

> there's no evidence that the British wanted to "wipe out" the native population. No one accused all "the British". If you read my sentence, I used the word, some Brits such as Churchill. There's ample evidence of Churchill's desire to genocide, and even actions taken to genocide non-white people and subsequent whitewashing of the matters. I am sorry if some readers are upset to discover this about their hero, as I…

Of course if you had quoted the full context of your supposedly damning gas quote:

"It is sheer affectation to lacerate a man with the poisonous fragment of a bursting shell and to boggle at making his eyes water by means of lachrymatory gas. I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes. The moral effect should be so good that the loss of life should be reduced to a minimum. It is not necessary to use only the most deadly gasses: gasses can be used which cause great inconvenience and would spread a lively terror and yet would leave no serious permanent effects on most of those affected."

lachrymatory gas: That's tear gas. To cause a great inconvenience yet leave no serious permanent effects. To reduce loss of life to a minimum. That's clearly not a memo calling for genocide.

Re: How did British officers live in the scorching heat of India?

#79

Post by quindecagon »

nemo wrote: post #47
TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For one thing, there are accounts of Europeans deliberately exposing the natives to diseases. It wasn't just a natural unfortunate occurance.

There are plural accounts, but there is only a single documented case historians have evidence for of the British at Fort Pitt deliberately using infected items from their infirmary.

I wonder how they thought of it. I don't think germ theory was common knowledge at the time.

Re: How did British officers live in the scorching heat of India?

#80

Post by macewindu »

jahewson wrote: post #57
macewindu wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

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 inflammat…

> accounts on HN peddling anti-western conspiracy theories? There’s a kernel of truth here

It is a sad day when providing facts is described as "anti-western".

> we just get inflammatory rhetoric

We? Inflammatory? The facts speak for themselves. If the truth hurts, then perhaps the problem is the reader's attachment to invalid notions.

Post reply on HN