Salisbury Park is an upscale locality of Pune. One of the most expensive places to purchase residential accommodation in the city. Many leading lights of Pune’s society live there.
I wonder if the residents realise that their locality is named after a British Prime Minister.
I came to know about this while reading Shashi Tharoor‘s An Era Of Darkness, The British Empire In India. Let me quote what he has to say about Salisbury.
“The drain of resources from India remained explicitly part of British policy. The Marquess of Salisbury, using a colourful metaphor as Secretary Of State For India in the 1860s and 1870s, said: ‘As India is to be bled, the lancer should be directed to those parts where the blood is congested …(rather than) to those which are already feeble for the want of it.’ The ‘blood’, of course, was money, and its ‘congestion’ offered greater sources of revenue than the ‘feeble areas’. (Salisbury went on to become Prime Minister.)”
I wonder if other residents of the area, reading either the book or this blog post will have the urge to rename their locality to something else!
What a great quote! I knew Salisbury was a Prime Minister and that India had been exploited, but I hadn’t read anything that blatant. Since the residents of the area are high status I can’t imagine them trying to stir up trouble/change things.
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Shashi Tharoor is devastating as is Jeremy Paxman in his book Empire, What Ruling The World Did To The British. (https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/oct/05/empire-ruling-world-paxman-review)
funny. but i’ve always thought of it as Salisbury Plain where Stonehenge is!
not a tree in sight of course. and hopefully no politicians either. xo
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Yes, I have visited Salisbury Plain and the stonehenge, but we have our own little corner reminding us of our colonial past. Till I read the book however, I did not know the gory background of the person after whom the area is named. You must remember that Pune was the largest Command Head Quarters for the British before WWII. It still is for the Indian Army. Our Cantonment area is a small town by itself.
Has the policy changed? (I see a lot of resources flowing from India into my neighborhood!) 😉
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I thought it best to respond to you with a blog post, which I have now done. Thank you for the inspiration.
This is very interesting. I have wondering something similar about all the Trump locales.
If ever I come across any such startling information connecting to the name of Trump, I will let you know.
Colonialism was never a beautiful thing. So many areas of the world suffered because of it! Lucky for us, here in Canada, that the British were finally depleted, and tired of it all by the time we were ready to declare ourselves a sovereign nation. Britain is still connected to us, but only figuratively speaking.
We too are very connected to the UK. Like me, you will find many Anglophiles and more Anglophones in India. The post shows how much of economic traffic we have between the two countries.