An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India

by Shashi Tharoor

An 1895 Royal Commission set up in response to public outrage glossed over the horrors of opium and claimed the public’s fears and concerns were exaggerated. (Sir Richard Temple of famine fame, now retired, defended the opium policy before the Commission.) In 1930, Durant found 7,000 opium shops in India, every single one of them British-government owned, and conducting their business over the protests of every Indian nationalist organization and social service group. Some 400,000 acres of fertile land were given over to opium cultivation, these could have produced food for malnourished Indians. When the elected Indian members of the impotent Central Legislature got their colleagues to pass a bill in 1921 prohibiting the growth or sale of opium in India, the government vetoed it by the simple expedient of refusing to act upon it, mindful, no doubt, of the fact that one-ninth of the government’s annual revenues came from drugs. When Mahatma Gandhi, no less, mounted a campaign against opium in Assam and succeeded in halving its consumption, the British responded by jailing him and forty-four of his satyagrahis. Various World Opium Conferences were held to demand the abolition of this pernicious drug, but Britain refused to accede to their exhortations; in order to appease global outrage, it agreed to reduce its export of opium by 10 per cent a year, but not to restrict or dilute its production and sale in India. (Indeed, a Government Retrenchment Commission, examining econom...