An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India

by Shashi Tharoor

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.