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.

Many pointed out that today’s Britons bore no responsibility for the transgressions of their forebears and should not be expected to bear the burden of reparations for sins in which they played no part. Nor, for that matter, were today’s Indians worthy of being compensated for the sufferings of their ancestors. Compensation should be paid to the victims, not to their grandchildren, and by the wrongdoers, not by their grandchildren.

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.

That is what Prime Minister Justin Trudeau did in 2016 when he apologized on behalf of Canada for the actions of his country’s authorities a century earlier in denying permission for the Indian immigrants on the Komagata Maru to land in Vancouver, thereby sending many of them to their deaths. Trudeau’s Willy Brandt moment needs to find its British echo.

Indians were active collaborators in many, if not most, of the misdeeds that I will spell out in this book. This was especially true of Indian princes who, once British rule was well established, accepted a Faustian bargain to protect their wealth and their comforts in exchange for mortgaging their integrity to the British. These nominal ‘rulers’ went out of their way to demonstrate their loyalty to the Crown—thus the cricketer-prince Ranjitsinhji obliged his peasantry, in the midst of a crippling drought, to contribute to the British coffers during World War I; and as his state choked in the grip of famine, he literally burned up a month’s revenues in a fireworks display for a visiting viceroy. Such episodes were by no means untypical of the complicity shown by the compromised Indian aristocracy with the colonial project.

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 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.

‘[W]hen we kill people,’ a British sea-captain says in the Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies, ‘we feel compelled to pretend that it is for some higher cause. It is this pretence of virtue, I promise you, that will never be forgiven by history.’ I cannot presume to write on behalf of history, but as an Indian, I find it far easier to forgive than to forget.

The Mughal capital was pillaged and burned over eight long weeks; gold, silver, jewels and finery, worth over 500 million rupees, were seized, along with the entire contents of the imperial treasury and the emperor’s fabled Peacock Throne; elephants and horses were commandeered; and 50,000 corpses littered the streets. 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.

Though the Mughal emperor’s firman referred to the directors of the East India Company as ‘the high and mighty, the noblest of exalted nobles, the chief of illustrious warriors, our faithful servants and sincere well-wishers, worthy of our royal favours, the English Company’, no royal favours were required, other than signing on the dotted line. Shah Alam II and his successors lived on the sufferance of the Company, prisoners and pensioners in all but name. ‘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?’ But honour was an irrelevant concern for his emperor’s ‘faithful servants and sincere well-wishers’. The Company ran India, and like all companies, it had one principal concern, shared by its capitalist overlords in London: the bottom line.

The destruction of artisanal industries by colonial trade policies did not just impact the artisans themselves. The British monopoly of industrial production drove Indians to agriculture beyond levels the land could sustain. This in turn had a knock-on effect on the peasants who worked the land, by causing an influx of newly disenfranchised people, formerly artisans, who drove down rural wages. In many rural families, women had spun and woven at home while their men tilled the fields; suddenly both were affected, and if weather or drought reduced their agricultural work, there was no back-up source of income from cloth. Rural poverty was a direct result of British actions.

The East India Company created, for the first time in Indian history, the landless peasant, deprived of his traditional source of sustenance. Ironically, Indian rulers in the past had largely funded their regimes not from taxing cultivators but from tapping into networks of trade, both regional and global. The Company’s rapacity was a striking departure from the prevailing norm.

The owners of these diamonds escaped the confinement of traditional sources of wealth for something that could be acquired by colonial enterprise rather than traditional inheritance. Fifteen years after he had brought the diamond from India, Thomas Pitt sold it to the Regent of France, the Duc d’Orléans, for the princely sum of £135,000, almost six times what he had paid for it. The astronomical amount (worth multiple millions in today’s money) bought the Pitt family a new place in English society. An Indian diamond thus gave a financial springboard to a British dynasty that would, in very short order, produce two prime ministers—his grandson William Pitt, 1st Earl of Chatham, and Chatham’s own son, William Pitt ‘the Younger’.

Burke, in his opening speech at the impeachment of Hastings, also accused the East India Company of ‘cruelties unheard of and devastations almost without name…crimes which have their rise in the wicked dispositions of men in avarice, rapacity, pride, cruelty, malignity, haughtiness, insolence’. He described in colourfully painful detail the violation of Bengali women by the British-assigned tax collectors—‘they were dragged out, naked and exposed to the public view, and scourged before all the people…they put the nipples of the women into the sharp edges of split bamboos and tore them from their bodies’—leading Sheridan’s wife to swoon in horror in Parliament, from where she had to be carried out in distress.

Taxation and the general conditions of life under the East India Company were so unpleasant and onerous that, as I have mentioned earlier, as many as could fled their traditional homes for refuge in domains beyond the Company’s remit, whereas the migration of Indian peasants from the ‘native states’ to British India was unheard of through most of the nineteenth century.

As long as the East India Company was in charge, its profits skyrocketed to the point that its dividend payouts were legendary, making its soaring stock the most sought-after by British investors. When its mismanagement and oppression culminated in the Revolt of 1857, called by many Indian historians the First War of Independence but trivialized by the British themselves as the ‘Sepoy Mutiny’, the Crown took over the administration of this ‘Jewel in the Crown’ of Her Britannic Majesty’s vast empire. But it paid the Company for the privilege, adding the handsome purchase price to the public debt of India, to be redeemed (both principal and generous rates of interest) by taxing the victims, the Indian people.

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 lancet 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.) Cecil Rhodes openly avowed that imperialism was an essential solution to the cries for bread among the unemployed working-class of England, since it was the responsibility of colonial statesmen to acquire lands to settle the surplus population and create markets for goods from British factories.

By the end of the nineteenth century, India was Britain’s biggest source of revenue, the world’s biggest purchaser of British exports and the source of highly paid employment for British civil servants and soldiers all at India’s own expense. We literally paid for our own oppression.

Taxation remained onerous. Agricultural taxes amounted at a minimum to half the gross produce and often more, leaving the cultivator less food than he needed to support himself and his family; British estimates conceded that taxation was two or three times higher than it had ever been under non-British rule, and unarguably higher than in any other country in the world. Each of the British ‘presidencies’ remitted vast sums of ‘savings’ to England, as of course did English civil servants, merchants and soldiers employed in India. (After a mere twenty-four years of service, punctuated by and including four years of ‘home leave’ furloughs, the British civil servant was entitled to retire at home on a generous pension paid for by Indian taxpayers: Ramsay MacDonald estimated in the late 1920s that some 7,500 Englishmen were receiving some twenty million pounds annually from India as pension.)

Indian-made swords were legendary. Indeed, in the early days of British colonial expansion into India, Indian swords were so far superior to European ones that English troopers in battle would often dismount and swap their own swords for the equipment of the vanquished foe. The British learned as much of the technology as possible and then shut down India’s metallurgical industries by the end of the eighteenth century. Attempts to revive it met with resistance and then with racist derision.

There is an ironic footnote to the issue of Britain’s economic exploitation of India, in these days of Scottish nationalism and feverish speculation about the future of the Union. It is often forgotten what cemented the Union in the first place: the loaves and fishes available to Scots from participation in the colonial exploits of the East India Company. Before Union with England, Scotland had attempted, but been singularly unsuccessful at, colonization, mainly in Central America and the Caribbean. Once Union came, India came with it, along with a myriad opportunities. A disproportionate number of Scots were employed in the colonial enterprise, as soldiers, sailors, merchants, agents and employees. Though Scots constituted barely 9 per cent of Britain’s people, they accounted for 25 per cent of those employed by the British in India. Their earnings in India pulled Scotland out of poverty and helped make it prosperous. The humming factories of Dundee, the thriving shipyards, and the remittances home from Scots working in India, all stood testimony to the profitable connection. Sir Walter Scott wrote of India as ‘the corn-chest for Scotland’. With India gone, no wonder the Scottish bonds with England are loosening…

Years later, the management theorist C. Northcote Parkinson would cite the building of New Delhi among many examples in formulating his ‘second law’, that institutions build their grandest monuments just before they crumble into irrelevance. Morris describes in lavish detail the imperial durbar conducted by Lord Curzon in Delhi, where, amid elephants and trumpets, bejewelled maharajas paying tribute and a public assembled from all four corners of the subcontinent to view the imperial panoply, ‘theatre became life’.

The British system of rule in India was, by any standards, remarkable. A 24-year-old district officer found himself in charge of 4,000 square miles and a million people. The duties which the district officer had to perform were enumerated in a contemporary account as follows: ‘Collector of the Land Revenue. Registrar of the landed property in the District. Judge between landlord and tenant. Ministerial officer of the Courts of Justice. Treasurer and Accountant of the District. Administrator of the District Excise. Ex officio President of the Local Rates Committee. Referee for all questions of compensation for lands taken up for public purposes. Agent for the Government in all local suits to which it is a party. Referee in local public works. Manager of estates of minors. Magistrate, Police Magistrate and Criminal Judge. Head of Police. Ex officio President of Municipalities…’ All these tasks were performed by a young man, in a foreign country, with little knowledge of the local language or conditions, following uniform rules of procedure laid down by the distant government, but convinced of his innate superiority over those he had been assigned to rule and his God-given right to dispense authority in all these functions. Authority, but not welfare; there was no ‘development work’ listed for any British official in a district.

The Indian Civil Service, peculiarly, insisted that all ICS men remain bachelors until after the age of thirty. This made them ripe for capture by the ‘fishing-fleet’, as the boatloads of Englishwomen who came over to India to trawl for husbands in the mid- and late-nineteenth century were known. These ladies were usually the rejects of the British upper and upper-middle classes, women who were too smart or too plain to find a ‘good husband’ and were in their late teens or early twenties. Once you were deemed too old for the English marriage-market, it was either the boat to India or a spinster’s life as governess at home—and tales of the comforts of British life in the colonies certainly made the boat a more attractive option.

The result was that there were more statues to Queen Victoria on Indian territory than Indians in the higher reaches of the civil service.

In substantiation of his case, Fielding-Hall recounted the experience of an early Indian in the ICS, a ‘Mr Chetty’, who after an English education at Wren’s and Oxford, ranked high in the civil services examination and was posted to a district in India. But there the club—the centre of all social life for officialdom and other English civilians—refused to admit him as a member. This was more than a personal privation: it was an absolute handicap in his career, since so much official work, and so many professional relationships, were dealt with and processed over a drink at the club. Fielding-Hall, who did not disapprove of the racial discrimination practised by his fellow Englishmen, blamed it on the unwise policy of recruiting Indians for jobs only the English should do. He muses about ICS officers like Chetty: ‘Socially he belongs to no world. He has left his own and cannot enter the other. And you cannot divorce social life from official life. They are not two things, but one.’ He adds: ‘In the end Chetty shot himself. It was a sad end for a man gifted and likeable. And although such an end was unusual, the causes which led to it are universal. I have known several civilians who were Indians, and… I think they were all unhappy.’

It was only when World War I drove thousands of young British men to officer duty in the trenches rather than service in the Empire that the British grudgingly realized the need to recruit more Indians, and the numbers of Indians in the ICS slowly inched upwards in the last three decades of the Raj. But till then, Indians may have had positions, but no real authority. A rare Cambridge-educated Indian judge appointed on the bench of the Allahabad High Court in 1887, Justice Syed Mahmud, suffered daily discrimination and prejudice, especially from Chief Justice Sir John Edge, who Mahmud felt treated him like a conquered subject rather than a judicial equal. As a young man freshly returned from England enthusiastic about Empire, Mahmud had dreamed of a day when ‘the English people are known to us more as friends and fellow subjects, than as rulers and foreign conquerors’. That was not to be. On the verge of being dismissed, Mahmud—the second son of the famous reformer Sir Syed Ahmed Khan, whose support was so crucial for the British among Indian Muslims—resigned in 1892, unable to reconcile his faith in British law with his exclusion from the high table at the institutions administering it, turned to drink and depression, and died a broken man at the age of just fifty-three.

William Dalrymple has described well how the rule of the East India Company, in the first two centuries from 1600 to 1800, was characterized by a remarkable level of interaction between the colonized and the colonizer. This included not just business ties and political and financial relations, but friendships, love affairs, and, quite frequently, marriage. During the eighteenth century, Dalrymple writes, ‘it was almost as common for Westerners to take on the customs and even the religions of India as the reverse. Contrary to stereotype, a surprising number of company men responded to India by slowly shedding their Britishness like an unwanted skin and adopting Indian dress and taking on the ways of the Mughal governing class they came to replace’. Salman Rushdie has called this ‘chutnification’; Dalrymple dubs the practitioners of this approach ‘White Mughals’. Between 1780 and 1785, Dalrymple says, ‘the wills of company officials show that one in three were leaving everything to Indian wives, often accompanied by moving declarations of love asking their close friends to care for their “well beloved” Indian partners, or as one put it, “the excellent and respectable Mother of my two children for whom I feel unbounded love and affection and esteem”. Family portraits from the period are remarkable for the ease with which two races and religions cohabit, with British men dressed in turbans and kurta pajamas, while their Indian wives sit in the European manner on European furni...

Since such approaches never worked, the national movement soon began to take a different approach, that of mass political agitation against Curzon’s 1905 Partition of Bengal, in order to make an effective impact upon the British. Outraged Bengali youths campaigned in towns and villages for the people to show their opposition to the colonial division of their homeland, preaching swadeshi (reliance on Indian-made goods) and urging a boycott of British goods. Shops that continued the sale of foreign goods were surrounded by youths who implored customers often by prostrating themselves in supplication before prospective purchasers, never by intimidation, for the sake of their country, to depart without purchasing. This form of picketing was never violent, but it was not what the British were used to. As British merchants in Bengal complained of a dramatic downturn in their sales and the conversion of regular profits into unaccustomed losses, the agitation triumphed: the British reversed the Partition.

The Mahatma’s singular insight was that self-government would never be achieved by the resolutions passed by a self-regarding and unelected elite pursuing the politics of the drawing room. To him, self-government had to involve the empowerment of the masses, the toiling multitudes of India in whose name the upper classes were clamouring for Home Rule. This position did not go over well with India’s political class, which consisted in those days largely of aristocrats and lawyers, men of means who discoursed in English and demanded the rights of Englishmen. Nor did Gandhi’s insistence that the masses be mobilized not by the methods of ‘princes and potentates’ (his phrase) but by moral values derived from ancient tradition and embodied in swadeshi and satyagraha. To put his principles into practice, the Mahatma lived a simple life of near-absolute poverty in an ashram and travelled across the land in third-class railway compartments, campaigning against untouchability, poor sanitation and child marriage, and preaching an eclectic set of virtues from sexual abstinence to the weaving of khadi and the beneficial effects of frequent enemas. That he was an eccentric seemed beyond doubt; that he had touched a chord amongst the masses was equally apparent; that he was a potent political force soon became clear.

Even in the twentieth century, when the British moved grudgingly and fitfully towards what Secretary of State for India Lord Montagu had termed ‘responsible self-government’, there was no serious intent to develop credible political institutions in India. There had been widespread expectations that, in response to India’s, and specifically Mahatma Gandhi’s, support for Britain in World War I, not to mention the sacrifices of Indian troops, India would, at the end of the conflict, be granted Dominion status (connoting autonomous self-government within the Empire, as enjoyed by Australia, Canada and the rest of the ‘White Commonwealth’). In 1917, Lord Montagu had placed before the British Cabinet a proposed declaration pledging ‘the gradual development of free institutions in India with a view to ultimate self-government’. The former viceroy and later foreign secretary, Lord Curzon, thought this went too far, and suggested an alternative phrasing straight out of Sir Humphrey Appleby in Yes, Minister—that the government would work towards ‘increasing association of Indians in every branch of the administration and the gradual development of self-governing institutions with a view to the progressive realization of responsible government in India as an integral part of the British empire’. The Cabinet approved this convoluted and insincere formula in place of Montagu’s original wording and promptly reneged on the intent it had signalled. Self-government under the ‘Montagu–Chelm...

To this was added the extraordinary Indian support for the war effort and its humiliating British recompense. As many as 74,187 Indian soldiers died during World War I and a comparable number were wounded. Their stories, and their heroism, were largely omitted from British popular histories of the war, or relegated to the footnotes.

India contributed a number of divisions and brigades to the European, Mediterranean, Mesopotamian, North African and East African theatres of war. India’s contribution in men, animals, rations, supplies and money given to Britain exceeded that of any other nation. In historical texts, it often appears formally that the Government of India ‘offered’ the assistance to the British and that His Majesty’s Government ‘graciously accepted’ the offer to pay unfairly large amounts of money, including a lump sum payment of £100 million as a special contribution to HMG’s expenses towards a European war. This elides the fact, of course, that the ‘Government of India’ consisted of Englishmen accountable to His Majesty’s Government in Britain. The number of soldiers and support staff sent on overseas service from India during World War I was huge: among them 588,717 went to Mesopotamia, 116,159 to Egypt, 131,496 to France, 46,936 to East Africa, 4,428 to Gallipoli, 4,938 to Salonica, 20,243 to Aden and 29,457 to the Persian Gulf. Of these Indians, 29,762 were killed, 59,296 were wounded, 3,289 went missing, presumed dead, and 3,289 were taken prisoner. Of the total of 1,215,318 soldiers sent abroad there were 101,439 casualties.

It was estimated at the time that the value of India’s contribution in cash and kind amounted to £146.2 million, worth some £50 billion in today’s money. (Some estimates place the value of India’s contribution much higher.)

In Europe, Indian soldiers were among the first victims who suffered the horrors of the trenches. They were killed in droves before the war was into its second year and bore the brunt of many a German offensive. Indian jawans stopped the German advance at Ypres in the autumn of 1914, soon after the war broke out, while the British were still recruiting and training their own forces. Hundreds were killed in a gallant but futile engagement at Neuve Chapelle. More than a thousand of them died at Gallipoli, thanks to Churchill’s folly in ordering an ill-conceived and badly-planned assault reminiscent of the Charge of the Light Brigade in the Crimean War. Nearly 700,000 Indian sepoys fought in Mesopotamia against the Ottoman empire, Germany’s ally, many of them Indian Muslims taking up arms against their co-religionists in defence of the British empire. Letters sent by Indian soldiers in France and Belgium to their family members in their villages back home speak an evocative language of cultural dislocation and tragedy. ‘The shells are pouring like rain in the monsoon’, declared one. ‘The corpses cover the country like sheaves of harvested corn’, wrote another. These men were undoubtedly heroes: pitchforked into battle in unfamiliar lands, in harsh and cold climatic conditions they were neither used to nor prepared for, fighting an enemy of whom they had no knowledge, risking their lives every day for little more than pride. Yet they were destined to remain largely unknown onc...

It was not to be. When the war ended in triumph for Britain, India was denied its promised reward. Instead of self-government, the British offered the fraudulent Montagu–Chelmsford Reforms in 1918 which left all power in British hands and attempted to fob off the Indians with minimal authority over inconsequential issues. If Indians were disappointed, so were Britons with a sense of fair play. British MP Dr Rutherford declared: Never in the history of the world was such a hoax perpetrated upon a great people as England perpetrated upon India, when in return for India’s invaluable service during the War, we gave to the Indian nation such a discreditable, disgraceful, undemocratic, tyrannical constitution. Instead of offering more democracy, Britain went farther in the opposite direction. It passed the repressive Rowlatt Act in 1919, reimposing upon India all the wartime restrictions on freedom of speech and assembly that had been lifted with the Armistice. The Act vested the viceroy’s government with extraordinary powers to quell ‘sedition’ against the Empire by silencing and censoring the press, detaining political activists without trial, and arresting without a warrant any individuals suspected of treason against the Empire. The Act granted the authorities the power to arrest Indians on mere suspicion, and to try them in secrecy without a right to counsel or a right of appeal. It was a return to the practices of the Spanish Inquisition animated by the presumption of guil...

It was not just the maharajas who had to suffer: every Indian schoolchild must lament the influence of the British dress code on Indians—especially the tie as a permanent noose around the necks of millions of schoolchildren, in India’s sweltering heat, even today.

Pride of place to the legacy of British imperialism in India is often given to the Empire giving India its penal code, drafted by Macaulay with the avowed purpose of ‘legislating for a conquered race, to whom the blessings of our constitution cannot as yet be safely extended’. Macaulay sat for three years behind high walls, completely disconnected from the people he was ostensibly working for, and created a code of criminal law that was ‘a body of jurisprudence written for everyone and no one, which had no relationship to previous Indians laws or any other form of government at all’. Even the British were uncertain about his effort, and Macaulay’s penal code sat un-enacted for twenty-four years after he finished it in 1837. Finally enacted in 1861, it is still largely in force in all its Victorian glory. In addition, the British introduced their ideas of trial by jury, freedom of expression and due process of law. These are incontestable legal values, except in their actual manner of working, for in its application during the colonial era, the rule of law was not exactly impartial. Justice, in British India, was far from blind: it was highly attentive to the skin colour of the defendant. Crimes committed by whites against Indians attracted minimal punishment; an Englishmen who shot dead his Indian servant got six months’ jail time and a modest fine (then about 100 rupees), while an Indian convicted of attempted rape against an Englishwoman was sentenced to twenty years rig...

A certain type of case popped up frequently in the British colonial courts. Many Indians suffered from enlarged spleens as a result of malaria (or other diseases); when a British master kicked a native servant in the stomach—a not uncommon form of conduct in those days—the Indian’s enlarged spleen would rupture, causing his death. The jurisprudential question was: did the fatal kick amount to murder or criminal misconduct? When Robert Augustus Fuller fatally assaulted his servant in these circumstances in 1875—Fuller claimed he struck him on the face, but three witnesses testified that he had kicked him in the stomach—he was found guilty only of ‘voluntarily causing hurt’, and was sentenced to fifteen days’ imprisonment or a fine of thirty rupees to be paid to the widow. (According to the coroner, the servant’s spleen was so enlarged that even ‘moderate’ violence would have ruptured it.)

The disinclination of British judges in India to find any Englishman guilty of murdering any Indian was curiously mirrored in a recorded decline in murder charges in Victorian London. Martin Wiener proposed an ‘export’ model: the murder rate had dropped in Britain, he suggested, because ‘the most aggressive citizens were busily wreaking havoc overseas’. It helped, of course, that fatal kicking in London was handled as ‘wilful murder,’ whereas in India it would only be charged as ‘causing hurt’ or ‘committing a rash and negligent act’—provided the victim was an Indian.

Sentences handed down by British judges were never equal for Indians and Europeans: in Calcutta, it was estimated that Indian prisoners’ sentences exceeded those for Europeans by a factor of ten for the same crimes. Indian defendants were more than twice as likely as European ones to face murder or attempted murder charges for violent crimes. Statistically, European assaults on Indians were far more frequent than those by Indians on Europeans, yet almost all of the latter were charged as murder whereas most European misdeeds were deemed to be either accidental or in self-defence, and were in any case downgraded from murder to assault. In one case in which a British judge found evidence that a crime was ‘clearly’ murder, the British killer was found insane and hence not responsible for his actions.

One scholar, Jordanna Bailkin, points out that there were a few (though very few) exceptions to this norm of race-conscious justice. In three rare cases, Britons were executed for killing Indians: John Rudd in Bengal (1861), four sailors named Wilson, Apostle, Nicholas, and Peters in Bombay (1867), and George Nairns in Bengal (1880). But in two hundred years of British rule, and thousands of cases in which Indians died at the hands of their colonial masters, these three cases were the only exceptions.

Since the rule of law was intended to perpetuate the British hold over India, it was designed as an instrument of imperial rule. Political dissidence was legally repressed through various acts. The penal code contained forty-nine articles on crimes relating to dissent against the state (and only eleven on crimes involving death).

The sight of Hindu and Muslim soldiers rebelling together in 1857 and fighting side by side, willing to rally under the command of each other and pledge joint allegiance to the enfeebled Mughal monarch, had alarmed the British, who did not take long to conclude that dividing the two groups and pitting them against one another was the most effective way to ensure the unchallenged continuance of Empire. As early as 1859, the then British governor of Bombay, Lord Elphinstone, advised London that ‘Divide et impera was the old Roman maxim, and it should be ours’. (He was not quite right: the term was coined not by the Romans, but by Philip II of Macedonia, though some Roman conquerors followed its precepts.) A few decades later, Sir John Strachey opined that ‘the existence of hostile creeds among the Indian people’ was essential for ‘our political position in India’.

Since the British came from a hierarchical society with an entrenched class system, they instinctively tended to look for a similar system in India. They began by anatomizing Indian society into ‘classes’ that they referenced as being ‘primarily religious’ in nature. They then seized upon caste. But caste had not been a particularly stable social structure in the pre-British days; though there were, of course, variants across time and place, caste had broadly been a mobile form of social organization constantly shaped and reinvented by the beliefs, the politics and quite often the economic interests of the dominant men of the times. The British, however, promulgated the theory that caste hierarchy and discrimination influenced the workings of Indian society.

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 Brahmins enjoyed British patronage over other groups and began considering themselves above all other castes, whom the British, internalizing Brahmin prejudice, thought of as lower castes. 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 census reconfirmed the process of defining castes, allocating them certain attributes and inventing extraordinary labels for entire communities, such as ‘martial races’ and ‘criminal tribes’. Just as ‘Brahmin’ became a sought-after designation enshrining social standing, the census definition of an individual’s caste tended to seal the fate of any ‘Shudra’, by fixing his identity across the entire country. 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.

By the mid-nineteenth century, the trio of Mill, Macaulay and [Friedrich Max] Müeller, the German Indologist working in Britain, had effectively established a colonial construction of the Indian past which even Indians were taught to internalize. In their reading, Indian civilization was seen as essentially Hindu, as defined by the upper castes, and descended from the Aryan race, which it was claimed invaded around 1500 bce from the Central Asian steppes in the north, displaced and merged with indigenous populations, evolved a settled agrarian civilization, spoke Sanskrit and composed the Vedas. The Muslims came as a first wave of invaders and conquerors, in turn supplanted by the British. This history in turn became the received wisdom for late-nineteenth century Indian nationalists, Hindu and Muslim revivalists, and even cosmopolitan movements rooted in ancient Indian spiritualism like the Theosophical Society, whose co-founder, Colonel H. S. Olcott, became a major propagator of the ‘Aryan origins’ theory in the nineteenth century. 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. By excluding Muslims from the essential national narrative, the nineteenth-century colonial interpretation of Indian history helped give birth in the twentieth to the two-nation theory that eventually divided the country. It also legitimized, with a veneer of schola...

Thus there were seats reserved for Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs and so on. This resulted in the aggravation of communal identities, since what little politics was permitted could quickly devolve into a communal competition for limited resources. Public sentiments could be aroused to exaggerate differences amongst Indians, which redounded to the benefit of the British, who, of course, were above it all. So Englishmen who would have shuddered at the idea of allowing the Jews of Golders Green to vote separately in London elections enthusiastically arranged separate electorates for the Muslims of India, where Muslim voters could only vote for Muslim candidates, Sikhs for Sikhs and Christians for Christians. The practice prompted Will Durant to observe that the British approach ‘intensifies and encourages the racial and religious divisions which statesmanship would seek to heal’.