An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India

by Shashi Tharoor

History, in any case, cannot be reduced to some sort of game of comparing misdeeds in different eras; each period must be judged in itself and for its own successes and transgressions.

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 past is not necessarily a guide to the future, but it does partly help explain the present. One cannot, as I have written elsewhere, take revenge upon history; history is its own revenge.

It is said that when Nadir Shah and his forces returned home, they had stolen so much from India that all taxes were eliminated in Persia for the next three years.

‘What honour is left to us?’, the historian William Dalrymple quotes a Mughal official named Narayan Singh as asking after 1765, ‘when we have to take orders from a handful of traders who have not yet learned to wash their bottoms?’

He and his followers bought their ‘rotten boroughs’ in England with the proceeds of their loot in India (‘loot’ being a Hindustani word they took into their dictionaries as well as their habits),

the British had the gall to call him ‘Clive of India’, as if he belonged to the country, when all he really did was to ensure that a good portion of the country belonged to him.

As late as World War II, among the ‘few of the few’ who bravely defended England against German invasion in the Battle of Britain were Indian fighter pilots, including a doughty Sikh who named his Hurricane fighter ‘Amritsar’.

When war was waged, the costs were paid by taxes and tributes exacted from Indians. Indians paid, in other words, for the privilege of being conquered by the British.

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

(The Hindu’s first issue counted a grand total of eighty copies, printed with ‘one rupee and eight annas’ of borrowed money by a group of four law students and two teachers).

In the process, while codifying the legal system and instituting an Indian Penal Code, the British have saddled India with colonial-era prejudices which they have long abandoned at home but which remain entrenched in India, causing untold misery to millions.

It is ironic to see the self-appointed defenders of Bharatiya Sanskriti on the Treasury Benches now acting as the defenders of the worst prejudices of British Victorian morality.

One of the worst legacies of colonialism is that its ill effects outlasted the Empire.

Britain would fight Germany for doing to Poland what Britain had been doing to India for nearly two hundred years.

(it was only in 1939, for instance, that Jinnah began to learn Urdu and to don the ‘Muslim’ achkan for official photographs, actions reminiscent of that old saw from the French tumult of 1848: ‘I am their leader I must follow them’).

As his biographer M. J. Akbar put it, ‘Pakistan was created by Jinnah’s will and Britain’s willingness’—not by Nehru’s wilfulness.

It is a bit rich, as I pointed out in Oxford, for the British to suppress, exploit, imprison, torture and maim a people for 200 years and then celebrate the fact that they are a democracy at the end of it.

the most significant legacy this official left behind was the ‘Temple wage’ which, in Mike Davis’s words, ‘provided less sustenance for hard labour’ in British labour camps during the famine than the infamous Buchenwald concentration camp inmates would receive eighty years later.

Dyer was relieved of his command and censured by the House of Commons, but promptly exonerated by the House of Lords and allowed to retire on a handsome pension. Rudyard Kipling, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature and the poetic voice of British imperialism, hailed him as ‘The Man Who Saved India’.

Sir William Hicks, home minister in the Conservative government of Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, had stated the matter bluntly in 1928: ‘I know it is said in missionary meetings that we conquered India to raise the level of the Indians. That is cant. We conquered India as an outlet for the goods of Britain. We conquered India by the sword, and by the sword we shall hold it. I am not such a hypocrite as to say we hold India for the Indians. We went with a yardstick in one hand and a sword in the other, and with the latter we continue to hold them helpless while we force the former down their throats.’

‘In the beginning, there were two nations. One was a vast, mighty and magnificent empire, brilliantly organized and culturally unified, which dominated a massive swath of the earth. The other was an undeveloped, semifeudal realm, riven by religious factionalism and barely able to feed its illiterate, diseased and stinking masses. The first nation was India. The second was England.’

The principal technology consultants for British Railways, the London-based Rendel Palmer & Tritton, today rely almost entirely on Indian technical expertise, provided to them by RITES, a subsidiary of the Indian Railways.

Nalanda University, which enjoyed international renown when Oxford and Cambridge were not even gleams in their founders’ eyes, employed 2,000 teachers and housed 10,000 students in a remarkable campus that featured a library nine storeys tall.