Though I've belted you and flayed you,
By the livin' Gawd that made you'
You're a better man than I am, Gunga Din!
Rudyard Kipling, Gunga Din
We have no right to seize Sind (sic) but we shall do so, and a very advantageous, useful, humane piece of rascality it will be."
General Napier, 1843
It is expected that a strict and severe enquiry will immediately be made into the means by which gentlemen returning from India have acquired such monstrous and outgrown fortunes... It must end in bringing the plunderers of the East to that condign punishment which, to the disgrace of the national character, has so long been withheld from them.....-The Public Advertiser fulminates against 'nabobs' on 3 December 1774.
As before, the genius of India has taken from her aggressors the most spiritually significant principle of their culture and fashioned of it a new message of hope for mankind. There is in Christianity the great doctrine that God became man in order to save humanity by taking the burden of its sin and suffering on Himself, here in this very world, not the next. That the starving must be fed, the ragged clad, has been emphasized by Christianity as no other religion has done. Charity, benevolence, and the like, no doubt have an important place in the religions of our country as well, but there they are are in practice circumscribed within much narrower limits, and are only partially inspired by love of man. --Rabindranath Tagore, _A Tagore Reader_
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