An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India

by Shashi Tharoor

I am not suggesting that India’s traditional forms of education, in Indian languages, could have met the challenge of making India literate and competitive with the rest of the world. It could, of course, have given India a basic competence and self-confidence that cultures like Japan which educate themselves in their national languages have, and the foundation to set up great schools and colleges in the Nalanda mode; and an India that had grown and flourished without the ordeal of colonialism, could always have imported the best educationists, technological systems and English teachers from wherever they were, to create our own links with the globalized world. At least, without the British having expropriated our national wealth for two centuries, we would have had the resources to do so.