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.

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.

Everybody and everything, as the 1923 edition of the Oxford History of India noted, was on sale.

The onset of British colonialism interrupted this natural evolution and did not allow it to flower. But to suggest that Indian political unity would not have happened without the British is absurd and unsupported by the evidence.

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

One viceroy, Lord Mayo, declared, ‘we are all British gentlemen engaged in the magnificent work of governing an inferior race’.