An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India

by Shashi Tharoor

For, as I have pointed out repeatedly, behind everything lay one inescapable fact: unlike every previous conqueror of India (not counting transient raiders like Mahmud of Ghazni, Timur and Nadir Shah), unlike every other foreign overlord who stayed on to rule, the British had no intention of becoming one with the land. The French ruled foreign territories and made them French, assimilating them in a narrative of Frenchness; the Portuguese settled in their colonies and intermarried with the locals; but the British always stayed apart and aloof, a foreign presence, with foreign interests and foreign loyalties. The Delhi Sultans and the Mughals may have arrived from abroad, and their progenitors might initially have harked back to distant cities in the Ferghana Valley as their idea of ‘home’, but they settled in India and retained no extraterritorial allegiance. They married women from India and diluted their foreign blood to the point that in a few generations no trace remained of their foreign ethnicity. Akbar’s son Jehangir was half-Rajput; Jehangir’s son Shah Jehan also came from an Indian bride; Aurangzeb was only one-eighth non-Indian. Of course, the Mughal emperors were all deeply aware of their connections to Ferghana; they would ask emissaries from there about the conditions of their ancestors’ Chingisid tombs and donate money for their upkeep. The past was part of the Mughal identity, but their conceptions of themselves in the present and for the future became more ...