An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India

by Shashi Tharoor

Rammohan Roy founds Adi Brahmo Samaj in Calcutta, first movement to initiate socio-religious reform. Influenced by Islam and Christianity, he denounces polytheism, idol worship and more.

When Willy Brandt was chancellor of Germany, he sank to his knees at the Warsaw Ghetto in 1970 to apologize to Polish Jews for the Holocaust. There were hardly any Jews left in Poland, and Brandt, who as a socialist was persecuted by the Nazis, was completely innocent of the crimes for which he was apologizing. But in doing so—with his historic ‘Kniefall von Warschau’ (Warsaw Genuflection), he was recognizing the moral responsibility of the German people, whom he led as chancellor.

But when a marauder destroys your house and takes away your cash and jewellery, his responsibility for his actions far exceeds that of the servant who opened the door to him, whether out of fear, cupidity or because he simply didn’t know any better.

The Company ran India, and like all companies, it had one principal concern, shared by its capitalist overlords in London: the bottom line.

The East India Company created, for the first time in Indian history, the landless peasant, deprived of his traditional source of sustenance.

True, there could only have been scientific and technological innovation if a forward-looking Indian ruler had endowed the country with educational and scientific institutions where such research would have taken place. The British, however, failed to create such institutions; the foremost Indian research institution under the British empire, the Indian Institute of Science, was endowed by the legendary Jamsetji Tata, not by any British philanthropist, let alone by the colonial government. And if competition with an industrializing Europe was a challenge, why wouldn’t a free India have used a level playing field to its own advantage, levying its own tariffs when protection was needed, giving its own subsidies and developing its own existing global markets?

Material assistance was also significant. One ironic detail, given Britain’s attempts to strangle India’s steel industry: India shipped 7,000 tonnes of steel sheet rolls to the UK after British steel shipments were lost at sea.

(Indeed there were outstanding examples of good governance in India at the time, notably the Travancore kingdom, which in 1819 became the first government in the world to decree universal, compulsory and free primary education for both boys and girls.)

Jawaharlal Nehru put it sharply: the Indian Civil Service, he said, was ‘neither Indian, nor civil, nor a service’.

In Clive’s time, the Company presided over a ‘dual’ system: the Company exercised power but propped up a puppet nawab. Warren Hastings ended the pretence and overthrew the nawab: direct administration was now under the control of the Company. Cornwallis, in 1785, created a professional cadre of Company servants who were to govern the country for the Company, reserving all high-level posts for the British, and placing Englishmen in charge of each district with the blunt title of ‘Collector’, since collecting revenue was their raison d’etre. The Collector usually exercised the dual function of magistrate in his district.* The British thus ran government, tax collection, and administered what passed for justice. Indians were excluded from all of these functions.

To a common type of Anglo-Indian mind, any criticism of the Government, any claim to further freedom, is sedition. But though this was avowedly a meeting of Extremists, the claim in the speeches was for the simple human rights that other peoples enjoy the right to a voice in their own affairs, and in the spending of their own money.

The British government in India has not only deprived the Indian people of their freedom but has based itself on the exploitation of the masses, and has ruined India economically, politically, culturally and spiritually… Therefore…India must sever the British connection and attain Purna Swaraj or complete independence.

Sir Rabindranath Tagore was somewhat more sardonic about nationalism: ‘We, the famished, ragged ragamuffins of the East are to win freedom for all humanity!’ he wrote, during the War. ‘We have no word for “Nation” in our language.’

the English language, English forms of land tenure, Scottish and English banking, the common law, Protestantism, team sports, the ‘night watchman’ state, representative assemblies, and the idea of liberty.

Bengal Gazette,

Bombay Chronicle, founded by former Congress president Sir Pherozeshah Mehta in 1910, Hindustan Times, which was started by the Congress-supporting Birla business family in 1924, and Jawaharlal Nehru’s own National Herald, which started publication in 1938. The Muslim League followed suit, when its political fortunes picked up during the war years, Muhammad Ali Jinnah establishing Dawn in Karachi and Delhi in 1941.

A digression here: Personally, I am far from convinced that the British system is suited to India. The parliamentary democracy we have adopted involves the British perversity of electing a legislature to form an executive: this has created a unique breed of legislator, largely unqualified to legislate, who has sought election only in order to wield (or influence) executive power. It has produced governments obliged to focus more on politics than on policy or performance. It has distorted the voting preferences of an electorate that knows which individuals it wants but not necessarily which policies. It has spawned parties that are shifting alliances of individual interests rather than the vehicles of coherent sets of ideas. It has forced governments to concentrate less on governing than on staying in office, and obliged them to cater to the lowest common denominator of their coalitions. It is time for a change.

requires the existence of clearly defined political parties, each with a coherent set of policies and preferences that distinguish it from the next, whereas in India a party is all too often a label of convenience which a politician adopts and discards as frequently as a Bollywood film star changes costume.

Women were treated with Victorian paternalism and not a little misogyny. Institutionally, for instance, women on the Malabar coast who benefited from matrilineal law and enjoyed vast property and social rights, not to speak of bodily autonomy, were pushed to accept patriarchal shackles as the ‘correct’ and ‘moral’ way of living and subject themselves to husbands and sons, physically, socially, and economically. (Southern Indian women, whose breasts were traditionally uncovered, found themselves obliged to undergo the indignity of conforming to Victorian standards of morality; soon the right to cover one’s breasts became a marker of upper-caste respectability and efforts were made to deny this privilege to lower-caste women, leading to such missionary-inspired colonial curiosities as the Breast Cloth Agitation from 1813 to 1859 in Travancore and the Madras Presidency.) India’s rape law, enshrined in the colonial-era Indian Penal Code, placed the burden of the victim to establish her ‘good character’ and prove that a rape had occurred, which left her open to discredit by opposing counsel. Many rapes were never reported as a result of the humiliation to which this system subjected the victims.

but as Rwanda has shown with its gacaca courts, traditional systems can be adapted to meet modern norms of justice without the excessive procedural

The path-breaking writer and thinker on nationalism, Benedict Anderson, has convincingly pointed out that identities uniting large numbers of people could arise only after a certain technological level had been attained. It is not seriously disputed that the sharper articulation of identities encompassing broad communities is a relatively recent phenomenon, nor that such identities have been ‘imagined’ and ‘invented’ to a great extent, as Anderson famously postulated.

The British, however, promulgated the theory that caste hierarchy and discrimination influenced the workings of Indian society. This is arguably a very narrow definition of how Indian society actually functioned in the pre-British era, and it is thanks to colonial rule that it has now become conventional wisdom.

Scholars who have studied precolonial caste relations dismiss the idea that varna—the classification of all castes into four hierarchical groups, with the Brahmins on top and even kings and warriors a notch beneath them—could conceivably represent a complete picture of reality (Kshatriya kings, for example, were never in practical terms subordinate to Brahmins, whom they employed, paid, patronized, heeded or dismissed as they found appropriate at different times). Nor could such a simplistic categorization reasonably organize the social identities and relations of all Indians across the vast subcontinent; alternative identities, sub-castes, clans and other formulations also existed and flourished in different ways at different places. The idea of the four-fold caste order stretching across all of India and embracing its complex civilizational expanse was only developed, modern scholars assert with considerable evidence, under the peculiar circumstances of British colonial rule. The British either did not understand, or preferred to ignore, the basic fact that the system need not have worked as described in theory.

The result was a remarkable preponderance of Brahmins in positions of importance in the British Raj. Brahmins, who were no more than a tenth of the population, occupied over 90 per cent of the positions available to Indians in government service, except the most menial ones; they dominated the professions open to Indians, especially lawyering and medicine; and they entered journalism and academia, so it was their voices that were heard loudest as the voices of Indian opinion. India had arguably been a far more meritocratic society before the British Raj settled down to enshrine the Brahmins in such a position of dominance.

The young prince, and later cricket star, Ranji, arriving in England as a student, was taken aback by ‘the sight of Britishers engaging in low-caste work’ (he was assured the stevedores were ‘only Irishmen’).

Whereas prior to British rule the Shudra had only to leave his village and try his fortunes in a different princely state in India where his caste would not have followed him, colonialism made him a Shudra for life, wherever he was. The British belief in the fighting qualities of the ‘martial races’ also restricted the career possibilities of those not so classified, since British army recruitment policies were usually based on caste classifications. In the old days, any individual with the height and musculature required could make a livelihood as a warrior, whatever his caste background. In British India, this was far more difficult, if not impossible, since entire regiments were constructed on the basis of caste identities.

Olcott was the first, though, to argue that the Aryans were indigenous to India and took civilization from India to the West, an idea that is today promoted by Hindutva ideologues.

At the village level, many historians argue that Hindus and Muslims shared a wide spectrum of customs and beliefs, at times even jointly worshipping the same saint or holy spot. In Kerala’s famous pilgrimage site of Sabarimala, after an arduous climb to the hilltop shrine of Lord Ayyappa, the devotee first encounters a shrine to his Muslim disciple, Vavar Swami. In keeping with Muslim practice, there is no idol therein, merely a symbolic stone slab, a sword (Vavar was a warrior) and a green cloth, the colour of Islam. Muslim divines manage the shrine. (In another astonishing example, astonishing since it is both anachronistic and syncretistic, a temple in South Arcot, Tamil Nadu, hosts a deity of Muttaal Raavuttan, a Muslim chieftain—complete with beard, kumkum and toddy pot—who protects Draupadi in the Mahabharata. Note, of course, that Islam did not exist when the Mahabharata was composed, but in post-Islamic retellings, a Muslim chieftain has entered the plot!)

The Mughal court, she points out, became the most impressive patron of the translation of many Sanskrit religious texts into Persian, including the epic Mahabharata (translated as the Razmnamah) and the Bhagavad Gita, with Brahmin priests collaborating on the translations with Persian scholars.

realize this assertion will rouse the sceptics, who will argue that Muslims and Hindus were slaughtering each other since at least 712 CE, when the teenaged Arab warrior Muhammad bin Qasim conquered the Hindu kingdom of Sindh. Indeed, the argument that tensions existed for 1,200 years, since the advent of Islam in north India, is often made both by Pakistanis (to justify separation) and by acolytes of the Hindutva cause, who routinely assert that as many as 60,000 Hindu temples were razed to the ground by Muslim rulers over the centuries, and mosques built on 3,000 of those temples’ foundations. That some of this happened is indisputable: one only has to visit Sultan Iltutmish’s celebrated mosque and its surrounding architecture at the Qutb Complex in Delhi to see the elaborate Hindu religious carvings that still adorn the pillars. But the work done separately by historians Cynthia Talbot and Richard M. Eaton in two different parts of India suggest that temple desecration was largely ‘a phenomenon of the advancing frontier’, occasioned by warfare and occurring mainly in the intense frenzy of armed conflict across changing territorial lines. Eaton believes that temple destruction by Turkic and other Muslim rulers throughout India occurred mainly in kingdoms in the process of being conquered; a royal temple symbolized the king’s power in Hindu political thought, and so destroying it signified that king’s utter humiliation. Talbot’s research in Andhra Pradesh at the time of M...

Hakim Ajmal Khan, Maulana Mohammed Ali and Dr M. A. Ansari enjoy the remarkable distinction of having been presidents of both the Congress and the League without having to give up either.)

‘religion has more and more become a spiritual force in the modern world, and less and less a temporal one. In this [era] national and material interests have predominated over religious ties’.

Ironically, had Indian politics been encouraged to develop as British politics had, along ideological lines, one could have seen the emergence of a conservative party and a socialist one, with some liberals in between; these tendencies were all present among Indian public men. This kind of conventional political contention could have kept India united, with Jinnah and Nehru becoming the Disraeli and Gladstone of their era in an emerging Indian Dominion. But colonial policies drove conservatives and socialists alike to define themselves primarily in relation to the communal question, leading ultimately to the tragic sundering of the country.

As Alex von Tunzelmann noted in her history Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire, when ‘the British started to define “communities” based on religious identity and attach political representation to them, many Indians stopped accepting the diversity of their own thoughts and began to ask themselves in which of the boxes they belonged’.

The British decision to declare the community then known as ‘Untouchables’ (today as Dalits, or more bureaucratically as ‘Scheduled Castes’) to be a minority community entitled to separate representation, distinct from other Hindus, in a new category called the ‘Depressed Classes’, was seen by Indian nationalists as a ploy to divide the majority community in furtherance of imperial interests. Dalits, in turn, saw the nationalist movement as dominated by the same ‘upper’ castes that had long discriminated against them, and Dalit leaders like Ambedkar, a brilliant constitutional scholar who had risen from hard-scrabble poverty by sheer dint of merit, embraced separate electorates as a means of asserting their right to choose their own representatives.

‘It is with no joy in my heart that I commend these proposals,’ Nehru told his party, ‘though I have no doubt in my mind that it is the right course.’ The distinction between heart and head was poignant, and telling. On 3 June, Nehru, Jinnah, and the Sikh leader Baldev Singh broadcast news of their acceptance of partition to the country. The occasion again brought out the best in Nehru: ‘We are little men serving a great cause,’ he said. ‘Mighty forces are at work in the world today and in India… [It is my hope] that in this way we shall reach that united India sooner than otherwise and that she will have a stronger and more secure foundation… The India of geography, of history and tradition, the India of our minds and hearts, cannot change.’ But of course it could change: geography was to be hacked, history misread, tradition denied, minds and hearts torn apart.

Perhaps a more humane view comes from the Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh, who has written that the migration of peasants from the Gangetic plains ‘was as if fate had thrust its fist through the living flesh of the land in order to tear away a piece of its stricken heart’.

(The sun never set on the British empire, an Indian nationalist later sardonically commented, because even God couldn’t trust the Englishman in the dark.)

Indian society has no history at all, at least no known history. What we call its history is but the history of the successive intruders who founded their empires on the passive basis of that unresisting and unchanging society. The question, therefore, is not whether the English had a right to conquer India, but whether we are to prefer India conquered by the backward Turk, by the backward Persian, by the Russian, to India conquered by the Briton… England has to fulfil a double mission in India: one destructive, the other one regenerating the annihilation of old Asiatic society, and the laying of the foundations of Western society in Asia.

The novelist Joseph Conrad, no radical himself, described colonialism as ‘a flabby, pretending, weak-eyed devil of a rapacious and pitiless folly’. As Conrad wrote in 1902, ‘The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.’ Rabindranath Tagore put it gently to a Western audience in New York in 1930: ‘A great portion of the world suffers from your civilisation.’ Mahatma Gandhi was blunter: asked what he thought of Western civilization, he replied, ‘It would be a good idea’.

So instead of integrating India into the global capitalist system, as a few postcolonial countries like Singapore so effectively were to do, India’s leaders were convinced that the political independence they had fought for could only be guaranteed through economic independence. That is why self-reliance became the default slogan, the protectionist barriers went up, and India spent forty-five years with bureaucrats rather than businessmen on the ‘commanding heights’ of the economy, spending a good part of the first four and a half decades after Independence in subsidizing unproductivity, regulating stagnation and trying to distribute poverty. One cannot blame the British for the choices Indians themselves made in reaction to British rule, but it only goes to prove that one of the lessons you learn from history is that history sometimes teaches the wrong lessons.

A 1997 Gallup Poll in Britain revealed the following: 65 per cent did not know which country Robert Clive or James Wolfe was associated with, 77 per cent did not know who Cecil Rhodes was, 79 per cent could not identify a famous poem Rudyard Kipling had written, and 47 per cent thought Australia was still a colony. Over 50 per cent did not know that the United States of America had once been part of the British empire.