An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India

by Shashi Tharoor

Indians were active collaborators in many, if not most, of the misdeeds that I will spell out in this book. This was especially true of Indian princes who, once British rule was well established, accepted a Faustian bargain to protect their wealth and their comforts in exchange for mortgaging their integrity to the British. These nominal ‘rulers’ went out of their way to demonstrate their loyalty to the Crown—thus the cricketer-prince Ranjitsinhji obliged his peasantry, in the midst of a crippling drought, to contribute to the British coffers during World War I; and as his state choked in the grip of famine, he literally burned up a month’s revenues in a fireworks display for a visiting viceroy. Such episodes were by no means untypical of the complicity shown by the compromised Indian aristocracy with the colonial project.