An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India

by Shashi Tharoor

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’.