In this 50th anniversary year of India's independence, we carry a summary of a lecture on E.M. Forster's A Passage to India given at Eton College in September.
If history could be re-ordered, how many Indians would want the British Raj to be omitted from it? No one who still has the courage to affirm the old-fashioned value of 'intellectual integrity' and to put truth above nationalism.
In spite of many evils, the colonial rule turned out to be a blessing for the Indian sub-continent. It transformed thousands of petty kingdoms, ruled by thugs, at war against each other, into one modern, civil and free nation, ruled by law, with the potential of becoming an economic super-power.
