An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India

by Shashi Tharoor

In this, Gandhi was embodying what the doughty nationalist Lala Lajpat Rai had propounded in 1905: ‘The British are not a spiritual people,’ the Lala had said. ‘They are either a fighting race or a commercial nation. It would be throwing pearls before swine to appeal to them in the name of the higher morality or justice or on ethical grounds. They are a self-reliant, haughty people, who can appreciate self-respect and self-reliance even in their opponents.’ (Despite this insight, Lajpat Rai was himself killed, aged sixty-three, by repeated blows to the head by the stave of a British superintendent of police, James A. Scott, while leading a peaceful, non-violent protest against the British in 1928.)

The 1937 elections saw the Indian National Congress being elected to rule eight provinces; the party won an astonishing 617 of the 739 ‘general’ seats it contested, and even 25 of the 59 seats reserved exclusively for Muslims. Several other parties, and 385 Independents, also won seats. Trailing a distant second to the Congress was the Muslim League, which failed to win even a plurality of the seats reserved for Muslims, winning just 106 of the 1,585 seats at stake and failing to take control of any province. The domestic political contest, it seemed, had been decisively settled in favour of the inclusive, pluralist, multi-ethnic party, the Congress.

Ironically, when war came, the viceroy would have found ready support from the Congress, whose leader, Jawaharlal Nehru, had declared that in any conflict between democracy and fascism, ‘our sympathies must inevitably be on the side of democracy… I should like India to play its full part and throw all her resources into the struggle for a new order’. Nehru’s abhorrence of fascism was so great that he would gladly have led a free India into war on the side of the democracies, provided that choice was made by Indians and not imposed upon them by the British. But when Germany’s invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939 led Britain to declare war upon it, Indians noted the irony of the English fighting to defend the sovereignty of a weak country resisting the brute force of foreign conquest—precisely what Indian nationalists were doing against British imperialism. So Britain would fight Germany for doing to Poland what Britain had been doing to India for nearly two hundred years.

The futility of the Quit India movement, which accomplished little but the Congress’s own exclusion from national affairs, compounded the original blunder of the Congress in resigning its ministries. It had left the field free for the Muslim League, which emerged from the war immeasurably enhanced in power and prestige. Both the resignations of the Congress ministries in 1939 and the Quit India movement in 1942 turned out to be futile gestures of demonstrative rather than far-sighted politics. They paved the way for the triumph of the Muslim League.

In speeches, interviews and articles throughout late 1945 and early 1946, he expressed the belief that, free of foreign rule, the Muslims of India would relinquish any thought of secession. The Muslims of India, he wrote, ‘are only technically a minority. They are vast in numbers and powerful in other ways, and it is patent that they cannot be coerced against their will… This communal question is essentially one of protection of vested interests, and religion has always been a useful stalking horse for this purpose’. He even argued that Congress should grant the right of secession just to allay any Muslim fears, not in the expectation that the Muslim League-ruled provinces would actually exercise it. But whether, as many Indian analysts have suggested, Jinnah had really meant to establish a separate state or was merely advocating Pakistan to obtain leverage over the Congress, his followers had taken him at his word. A state of their own was what they were determined to have, and by the spring of 1946 Nehru’s idealism appeared naïve, even dangerously so. Tragically, divide et impera had worked too well. A device to maintain the integrity of British India had made it impossible for that integrity to be maintained without the British.

Even the idea of Pakistan seemed to take many forms in the minds of its own advocates, with several seeing it as a Muslim state within a united India, and others advocating assorted forms of decentralized confederation rather than outright secession. (The American journalist Phillips Talbot told me of Sir Abdullah Haroon of the League showing him, in 1940, eight separate plans for Pakistan then being debated by the League’s high command.) Jinnah was steadfast in his demand for a separate state in the northwest and east of the country, but avoided giving specific answers as to how the creation of such a state could serve its declared purpose of protecting Muslims in the Hindu-majority provinces.

Part of the problem at the time may well have lain in a profound miscalculation on Nehru’s part about the true intentions of the British. Cut off by imprisonment from the political realities of world affairs, Nehru came to Simla believing (as he asserted to Phillips Talbot) that perfidious Albion was still trying to hold on to the jewel in her imperial crown by encouraging division amongst the Indian parties. Talbot felt that Nehru had simply not realized that Britain was exhausted, near bankrupt, unwilling and unable to despatch the 60,000 British troops the government in London estimated would be required to reassert its control in India. London wanted to cut and run, and if the British could not leave behind a united India, they were prepared to ‘cut’ the country quite literally before running. Nehru, still imagining an all-powerful adversary seeking to perpetuate its hegemony, and unaware of the extent to which the League had become a popular party amongst Indian Muslims, dealt with both on erroneous premises. ‘How differently would Nehru and his colleagues have negotiated,’ Talbot wondered, ‘had they understood Britain’s weakness rather than continuing to be obsessed with its presumed strength?’ The question haunts our hindsight.

As his biographer M. J. Akbar put it, ‘Pakistan was created by Jinnah’s will and Britain’s willingness’—not by Nehru’s wilfulness.

Even before its nominees were sworn in on the 26th, they had made speeches declaring their real intention to be to work for the creation of Pakistan. The League’s members met by themselves separately prior to each Cabinet meeting and functioned in Cabinet as an opposition group rather than as part of a governing coalition. On every issue, from the most trivial to the most important, the League members sought to obstruct the government’s functioning, opposing every Congress initiative or proposal. Meanwhile, the party continued to instigate violence across the country; as riots broke out in Bihar in early November (with Gandhi walking through the strife-torn province single-handedly restoring calm), Jinnah declared on 14 November that the killing would not stop unless Pakistan was created. The British convened talks in London in December to press the Congress to make further concessions to the League in order to persuade it to attend the Constituent Assembly. Nehru, still burned by the reaction to his Bombay press conference, was at his most conciliatory, but Jinnah saw in the British position confirmation that his party’s fortunes were in the ascendant, and escalated his demands. To Nehru it seemed the British had learned nothing from the failure of the policy of appeasement in Europe in the 1930s.

As the impasse in the interim government continued, Mountbatten and his advisers drew up a ‘Plan Balkan’ that would have transferred power to the provinces rather than to a central government, leaving them free to join a larger union (or not). The British kept Nehru in the dark while Plan Balkan was reviewed (and revised) in London—all the more ironic for an empire that liked to claim it had unified India. When he was finally shown the text by Mountbatten at Simla on the night of 10 May, Nehru erupted in indignation, storming into his friend Krishna Menon’s room at 2 a.m. to sputter his outrage. Had the plan been implemented, the idea of India that Nehru had so brilliantly evoked in his writings would have been sundered even more comprehensively than Jinnah was proposing. Balkanization would have unleashed civil war and disorder on an unimaginable scale, as provinces, princely states and motley political forces contended for power upon the departure of the Raj.

As long as the British gave Jinnah a veto over every proposal he found uncongenial, and as long as they were about to give up the ghost, there was little else Nehru could do but give in to partition. Nor is there evidence in the writings and reflections of the other leading Indian nationalists of the time that any of them had any better ideas. The only exception was Mahatma Gandhi: Gandhi went to Mountbatten and suggested that India could be kept united if Jinnah were offered the leadership of the whole country. Nehru and Patel both gave that idea short shrift, and Mountbatten did not seem to take it seriously.

There is no doubt that Mountbatten seemed to proceed with unseemly haste, picking a much earlier date than planned—15 August, a date he chose on a whim because it was the date he had accepted the Japanese surrender as Supreme Allied Commander in Southeast Asia—and that in so doing he swept the Indian leaders along. Nehru was convinced that Jinnah was capable of setting the country ablaze and destroying all that the nationalist movement had worked for: a division of India was preferable to its destruction. ‘It is with no joy in my heart that I commend these proposals,’ Nehru told his party, ‘though I have no doubt in my mind that it is the right course.’ The distinction between heart and head was poignant, and telling.

Nehru imagined that the rioting and violence that had racked the country over the League’s demand for Pakistan would die down once that demand had been granted, but he was wrong. The killing and mass displacement worsened as people sought frantically to be on the ‘right’ side of the lines the British were to draw across their homeland. Over a million people died in the savagery that bookended the freedom of India and Pakistan; some 17 million were displaced, and countless properties destroyed and looted. Lines meant lives. What Nehru had thought of as a temporary secession of certain parts of India hardened into the creation of two separate and hostile states that would fight four wars with each other and be embroiled in a nuclear-armed, terrorism-torn standoff decades later.

QUITTING INDIA, CREATING PAKISTAN In that last mad headlong rush to freedom and partition, the British emerge with little credit. Before the war they had no intention of devolving power so rapidly, or at all. The experience of the elected governments in the last years of the British Raj confirmed that the British had never been serious about their proclaimed project of promoting the responsible governance of India by Indians. When the Congress ministries quit, the British thought little of appointing unelected Muslim Leaguers in their place and in many cases assuming direct control of functions that had supposedly been devolved to Indians. The British, who had been dismayed by the League’s inability to win a majority of Muslim seats anywhere, thereby undermining the strength of divide et impera, welcomed the opportunity to assume the power they had partly ceded, and to shore up the League as the principal alternative to the Indian National Congress in the process. They openly helped the Muslim League take advantage of this unexpected opportunity to exercise influence and patronage that their electoral support had not earned them, and to build up support while their principal opponents languished in jail.

But the devastation of World War II meant that only one half of the phrase could survive: bled, bombed and battered for six years, Britain could divide but it could no longer rule.

Britain’s own tactics before and during the war—compounded, as we have seen, by the Congress’s folly in relinquishing all its leverage and going to jail—ensured that by the time departure came, the prospects of a united India surviving a British exit had essentially faded. Divide et impera had worked too well: two Indias is what it would be.

Far from introducing democracy to a country mired in despotism and tyranny, as many Britons liked to pretend, it denied political freedom to a land that had long enjoyed it even under various monarchs, thanks to a cultural tradition of debate and dissent even on vital issues of spirituality and governance. Yes, India has emerged as a thriving pluralist democracy, though both Pakistan and Bangladesh have encountered difficulties in doing so, and Pakistan officially and undemocratically discriminates against its non-Muslim citizens even under civilian rule. But India’s flourishing democracy of seven decades is no tribute to British rule. It is a bit rich, as I pointed out in Oxford, for the British to suppress, exploit, imprison, torture and maim a people for 200 years and then celebrate the fact that they are a democracy at the end of it.

If Britain’s greatest accomplishment was the creation of a single political unit called India, fulfilling the aspirations of visionary emperors from Ashoka to Akbar, then its greatest failure must be the shambles of that original Brexit—cutting and running from the land they had claimed to rule for its betterment, leaving behind a million dead, thirteen million displaced, billions of rupees of property destroyed, and the flames of communal hatred blazing hotly across the ravaged land. No greater indictment of the failures of British rule in India can be found than the tragic manner of its ending.

A list of major famines during British rule makes for grim reading: the Great Bengal Famine (1770), Madras (1782–83), Chalisa Famine (1783–84) in Delhi and the adjoining areas, Doji bara Famine (1791–92) around Hyderabad, Agra Famine (1837–38), Orissa Famine (1866), Bihar Famine (1873–74), Southern India Famine (1876–77), the Indian Famine (1896–1900 approx.), Bombay Famine (1905–06) and the most notorious of the lot, the Bengal Famine (1943-44).* The fatality figures are horrifying: from 1770 to 1900, 25 million Indians are estimated to have died in famines, including 15 million in the five famines in the second half of the nineteenth century. The famines of the twentieth century probably took the total well over 35 million.

William Digby pointed out that in the entire 107 years from 1793 to 1900, only an estimated 5 million people had died in all the wars around the world combined, whereas in just ten years 1891–1900, 19 million had died in India in famines alone. While comparisons of human deaths are always invidious, the 35 million who died of famine and epidemics during the Raj does remind one of the 25 million who died in Stalin’s collectivization drive and political purges, the 45 million who died during Mao’s cultural revolution, and the 55 million who died worldwide during World War II. The death toll from the colonial holocausts is right up there with some of the most harrowing examples of man’s inhumanity to man in modern times.

Affluent Indians were meant to help the general public in ways that did not come naturally to the British in India. Indeed some Indians in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were critical of the British for returning home with their vast Company fortunes without having done a thing for the people they had exploited and left behind digging wells, making reservoirs, building bridges or planting trees, in the long-established Indian tradition.

In keeping with established British policy, Viceroy Lord Lytton notoriously issued orders prohibiting any reduction in the price of food during a famine. ‘There is to be no interference of any kind on the part of Government with the object of reducing the price of food’, he declared, instructing district officers to ‘discourage relief works in every possible way… Mere distress is not a sufficient reason for opening a relief work’. The historian Professor Mike Davis notes that Lytton’s pronouncements were noteworthy for combining non-intervention with a unique aversion to ‘cheap sentiment’ the prerogative of the unaccountable appointee to high office who is immune to public needs. (Ironically, Lord Lytton’s only qualification for the job of viceroy was that, as Robert Bulwer-Lytton, he was Queen Victoria’s favourite poet.)

In other words, the British cannot be accused of ‘doing nothing’ during the 1876-77 famine, but rather of doing much to worsen its impact. India’s grain continued to be exported to global markets, just as Stalin was to do during the ‘collectivization famines’ that beset Russia and Ukraine in the 1930s: in effect, as Professor Mike Davis has written, ‘London was eating India’s bread’ while Indians were dying in a famine. To add insult to injury, the British increased taxes on the peasantry, and railed against those too hungry to be productive as ‘indolent’ and ‘unused to work’. When some Englishmen of conscience objected and mounted relief operations of their own, the British government threatened them with imprisonment. A Mr MacMinn, who out of his own money distributed grain to the starving, was ‘severely reprimanded, threatened with degradation, and ordered to close the work immediately’.

One first-hand witness, Lieutenant Colonel Ronald Osborne, has written movingly of the horror in 1877: ‘Scores of corpses were tumbled into old wells, because the deaths were too numerous for the miserable relatives to perform the usual funeral rites. Mothers sold their children for a single scanty meal. Husbands flung their wives into ponds, to escape the torment of seeing them perish by the lingering agonies of hunger. Amid these scenes of death, the government of India kept its serenity and cheerfulness unimpaired. The [newspapers] were persuaded into silence. Strict orders were given to civilians under no circumstances to countenance the pretence that civilians were dying of hunger.’

Human beings were not the only victims of British-induced famines; cattle died too. It is striking that the export trade in hides and skins rose from 5 million rupees in 1859 to nearly 115 million rupees in 1901, an astonishing increase especially in a culture where the death of a cow was devastating, not only for religious reasons but because cows were crucial to farming, and also served as a means of transportation and as status symbols in rural society. The deaths of quite so many cows suggest severe rural distress; farmers know few setbacks worse than the death of their cattle, which would be a major blow to their present prospects and darken their future hopes. Indeed, some officials seemed to consider the deaths of cows worse than those of people: one report on famines noted that ‘[i]n its influence on agriculture, [cattle mortality] is perhaps a more serious and lasting evil than the loss of population. As a rule, those who die of hunger must be old or helpless, whereas the able-bodied and useful escape. But if the cattle perish, cultivation is almost impossible.’ The loss of cattle directly impacted agricultural productivity, which would take years, if not decades, to be restored to pre-famine levels.

It is instructive, too, that one of the challenges faced in pre-British India—the lack of adequate infrastructure and transportation to get food from areas where it was plentiful to areas of scarcity, which was cited by Florence Nightingale as a major reason for famines—was irrelevant to British India after the advent of the railways. And yet the worst famines of the nineteenth century occurred after thousands of miles of railway lines had been built. There could be no more searing proof that the responsibility for famines lay with the authorities and their policies.

Nothing can excuse the odious behaviour of Winston Churchill, who deliberately ordered the diversion of food from starving Indian civilians to well-supplied British soldiers and even to top up European stockpiles in Greece and elsewhere. ‘The starvation of anyway underfed Bengalis is less serious’ than that of ‘sturdy Greeks’, he argued. Grain for the Tommies, bread for home consumption in Britain (27 million tonnes of imported grains, a wildly excessive amount), and generous buffer stocks in Europe (for yet-to-be-liberated Greeks and Yugoslavs) were Churchill’s priorities, not the life or death of his Indian subjects. When reminded of the suffering of his victims his response was typically Churchillian: The famine was their own fault, he said, for ‘breeding like rabbits’. When officers of conscience pointed out in a telegram to the prime minister the scale of the tragedy caused by his decisions, Churchill’s only reaction was to ask peevishly: ‘why hasn’t Gandhi died yet?’ As Madhusree Mukerjee’s richly-documented account of the Bengal Famine demonstrates, India’s own surplus foodgrains were exported to Ceylon; Australian wheat was sent sailing past Indian cities (where the bodies of those who had died of starvation littered the streets) to storage depots in the Mediterranean and the Balkans, to create stockpiles that could ease the pressure on post-War Britain, and offers of American and Canadian food aid were turned down.

The only difference is that the evidence for British callousness and racism in 1943 is far better documented than for the dozen grotesque famines that preceded it.

I have dwelt at length on famines because they offer such an outstanding example of British colonial malfeasance. One could have cited epidemic disease as well, which constantly laid Indians low under British rule while the authorities stood helplessly by. To take just the first four years of the twentieth century, as Durant did: 272,000 died of plague in 1901, 500,000 in 1902, 800,000 in 1903, and 1 million in 1904 the death toll rising every year. During the Spanish Influenza epidemic of 1918, 125 million cases of ‘flu were recorded (more than a third of the population), and India’s fatality rate was higher than any Western country’s: 12.5 million people died. As the American statesman (and three-time Democratic presidential candidate) William Jennings Bryan pointed out, many Britons were referring to the deaths caused by plague as ‘a providential remedy for overpopulation’. It was ironic, said Bryan, that British rule was sought to be justified on the grounds that ‘it keeps the people from killing each other, and the plague praised because it removes those whom the Government has saved from slaughter!’.

In the period 1519-1939, an estimated 5,300,000 people, whom scholars delicately dub ‘unfree migrants’, were carried on British ships, of whom approximately 58 per cent were slaves, mainly from Africa, 36 per cent were indentured labour, mainly from India, and 6 per cent were transported convicts, both from India and other colonies. If nothing else, this British endeavour, motivated as always by the simple exigencies of the colonial project, transformed the demography of dozens of countries, with consequences that can still be seen today.

One instance of British colonial conduct from the twentieth century deserves detailed description to illustrate the larger point I am making. The incident took place just after the end of World War I (the war to ‘make the world safe for democracy’, in that ringing phrase of Woodrow Wilson’s). I refer, of course, to Jallianwala Bagh. It was 1919. The Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires had collapsed; new nations were springing up from their ruins; talk of self-determination was in the air. India had just emerged from World War I having made enormous sacrifices, and a huge contribution in men and materiel, blood and treasure, to the British war effort, in the expectation that it would be rewarded with some measure of self-government. Those hopes were belied, as explained in Chapter 2; the dishonest Montagu–Chelmsford ‘reforms’ and the punitive Rowlatt Acts were India’s only reward. This is what happened next. In March and April 1919, Indians rallied across the Punjab to protest the Rowlatt Acts; they shut down normal commerce in many cities, including Amritsar, through hartals on 30 March and 6 April that demonstrated, through empty streets and shuttered shops, the dissatisfaction of the people at the British betrayal. This was a form of Gandhian non-violent non-cooperation; no violence or disorder was reported during the hartals. But on 9 April, with no provocation, the British government in the Punjab arrested two nationalist leaders, Dr Saifuddin Kitchlew and Dr Satyapal...

The massacre made Indians out of millions of people who had not thought consciously of their political identity before that grim Sunday. It turned loyalists into nationalists and constitutionalists into agitators, led the Nobel Prize-winning poet Rabindranath Tagore to return his knighthood to the king and a host of Indian appointees to British offices to turn in their commissions. And above all it entrenched in Mahatma Gandhi a firm and unshakable faith in the moral righteousness of the cause of Indian independence. He now saw freedom as indivisible from Truth, and he never wavered in his commitment to ridding India of an empire he saw as irremediably evil, even satanic. The historian A. J. P. Taylor calls the massacre ‘the decisive moment when Indians were alienated from British rule’. No other ‘punishment’ in the name of law and order had similar casualties: ‘The Peterloo massacre had claimed about 11 lives. Across the Atlantic, British soldiers provoked into firing on Boston Commons had killed five men and were accused of deliberate massacre. In response to the self-proclaimed Easter Rebellion of 1916 in Dublin, the British had executed sixteen Irishmen.’ Jallianwala confirmed how little the British valued Indian lives.

The massacre lasted for ten minutes, and the toll amounted to an extraordinary kill-rate, akin to a turkey-shoot. When it was over and the dead and wounded lay in pools of blood, moaning on the ground, Dyer forbade his soldiers to give any aid to the injured. He ordered all Indians to stay off the streets of Amritsar for twenty-four hours, preventing relatives or friends from bringing even a cup of water to the wounded, who were writhing in agony on the ground calling for help.

General Dyer issued an order that Hindus using the street in which the woman missionary had been beaten should crawl on their bellies; if they tried to rise to all fours, they were struck by the butts of soldiers’ guns. He arrested 500 professors and students and compelled all students to present themselves daily for roll-calls, though this required that many of them should walk sixteen miles a day. He had hundreds of citizens, and some schoolboys, quite innocent of any crime, flogged in the public square. He built an open cage, unprotected from the sun, for the confinement of arrested persons; other prisoners he bound together with ropes, and kept in open trucks for fifteen hours. He had lime poured upon the naked bodies of Sadhus (saints), and then exposed them to the sun’s rays that the lime might harden and crack their skin. He cut off the electric and water supplies from Indian houses and ordered all electric fans possessed by [Indians] to be surrendered, and given gratis to the British. Finally he sent airplanes to drop bombs upon men and women working in the fields.

No doubt some good Englishmen will say that Brigadier General Reginald Dyer was an aberration, one of those military sadists that every army throws up from time to time, and not typical of the enlightened men in uniform who normally served the Raj. The excuse will not wash. Not only was Dyer given a free hand to do as he pleased, but news of his barbarism was suppressed by the British for six months, and when outrage at reports of his excesses mounted, an attempt was made to whitewash his sins by the official commission of enquiry, Hunter Commission, which only found him guilty of ‘grave error’. It was only when a thoroughly documented report was prepared by the investigative team of the Indian National Congress that the British admitted what had happened. Dyer was relieved of his command and censured by the House of Commons, but promptly exonerated by the House of Lords and allowed to retire on a handsome pension. Rudyard Kipling, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature and the poetic voice of British imperialism, hailed him as ‘The Man Who Saved India’.

For Jawaharlal Nehru, the English reaction to the massacre—and Dyer being publicly feted—was almost as bad as the massacre itself. ‘This cold-blooded approval of that deed shocked me greatly,’ he later wrote. ‘It seemed absolutely immoral, indecent; to use public school language, it was the height of bad form. I realized then, more vividly than I had ever done before, how brutal and immoral imperialism was and how it had eaten into the souls of the British upper classes.’ It was no longer possible to claim that Dyer did not represent the British in India: they had claimed him as one of their own—their saviour.

Famine, forced migration and brutality: three examples of why British rule over India was despotic and anything but enlightened. But why should one be surprised? Sir William Hicks, home minister in the Conservative government of Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, had stated the matter bluntly in 1928: ‘I know it is said in missionary meetings that we conquered India to raise the level of the Indians. That is cant. We conquered India as an outlet for the goods of Britain. We conquered India by the sword, and by the sword we shall hold it. I am not such a hypocrite as to say we hold India for the Indians. We went with a yardstick in one hand and a sword in the other, and with the latter we continue to hold them helpless while we force the former down their throats.’ In Dyer’s case, the sword was a bejewelled one; the yardstick measured the account books in the British treasury. One should never reproach a government for the candour of its high representatives.

Alex von Tunzelmann’s clever start to her book Indian Summer made my point most tellingly: ‘In the beginning, there were two nations. One was a vast, mighty and magnificent empire, brilliantly organized and culturally unified, which dominated a massive swath of the earth. The other was an undeveloped, semifeudal realm, riven by religious factionalism and barely able to feed its illiterate, diseased and stinking masses. The first nation was India. The second was England.’

Racism combined with British economic interests to undermine efficiency. The railway workshops in Jamalpur in Bengal and Ajmer in Rajputana were established in 1862 to maintain the trains, but their Indian mechanics became so adept that in 1878 they started designing and building their own locomotives. Their success increasingly alarmed the British, since the Indian locomotives were just as good, and a great deal cheaper, than the British-made ones. In 1912, therefore, the British passed an Act of Parliament, explicitly making it impossible for Indian workshops to design and manufacture locomotives. The Act prohibited Indian factories from doing the work they had successfully done for three decades; instead, they were only allowed to maintain locomotives imported from Britain and the industrialized world. Between 1854 and 1947, India imported around 14,400 locomotives from England (some 10 per cent of all British locomotive production), and another 3,000 from Canada, the US and Germany, but made none in India after 1912. After Independence, thirty-five years later, the old technical knowledge was so completely lost to India that the Indian Railways had to go cap-in-hand to the British to guide them on setting up a locomotive factory in India again. There was, however, a fitting postscript to this saga. The principal technology consultants for British Railways, the London-based Rendel Palmer & Tritton, today rely almost entirely on Indian technical expertise, provided to th...

The British left India with a literacy rate of 16 per cent, and a female literacy rate of 8 per cent—only one of every twelve Indian women could read and write in 1947. This is not exactly a stellar record, but educating the masses was not a British priority. As Will Durant points out, ‘When the British came, there was, throughout India, a system of communal schools, managed by the village communities. The agents of the East India Company destroyed these village communities, and took no steps to replace the schools; even today [1930]… they stand at only 66 per cent of their number a hundred years ago. There are now in India 730,000 villages, and only 162,015 primary schools. Only 7 per cent of the boys and 1 per cent of the girls receive schooling, i.e. 4 per cent of the whole. Such schools as the Government has established are not free, but exact a tuition fee which…looms large to a family always hovering on the edge of starvation.’

Orientalism, ‘that the purpose of such false portraits was to provide moral, cultural and artistic justification for imperialism and for its underpinning ideology, that of the racial superiority of the Caucasian over the Asiatic’. To Rushdie, such portrayals did not belong only to the imperial past; ‘the rise of Raj revisionism, exemplified by the huge success of these fictions, is the artistic counterpart to the rise of conservative ideologies in modern Britain’. Despite the efforts of the Orientalists and their glamorous exoticizing of British imperalism, however, there was one problem: once an Indian was taught to read, study and understand, it was impossible to restrict where his mind might take him.

A bill for universal compulsory primary education was indeed tabled by the ‘moderate’ Congress leader Gopal Krishna Gokhale in the legislative council of the Governor General in 1911 and another by Vithalbhai Patel in the same body in 1916, but both were defeated by the votes of the British and government-appointed members. What is less known, however, is that the bills were also opposed by the likes of Mahatma Gandhi and Surendra Nath Banerjea, staunch nationalists both. Gandhiji wrote in Hind Swaraj : ‘The ordinary meaning of education is knowledge of letters. To teach boys reading, writing and arithmetic is called primary education. A peasant earns his bread honestly. He has ordinary knowledge of the world. But he cannot write his own name. What do you propose to do by giving him a knowledge of letters? Will you add an inch to his happiness? It is not necessary to make this education compulsory. Our ancient school system is enough. We consider your modern school to be useless’.

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.

It was the British who established Indian tea as a cultivated commodity. The story is interesting, and once again commercial motives came into play. The British ruled India but not China: rather than spending good money on the Chinese, they reasoned, why not grow tea in India? Their desire to end their dependence on Chinese tea led the British to invent agricultural espionage, as a secret agent, improbably enough named Robert Fortune, slipped into China in the early 1840s, during the chaos and confusion of the Opium War years, to procure tea plants for transplantation in the Indian Himalayas. But most of the thousands of specimens he sent to British India died, and the East India Company directors were left scratching their collective heads. The solution came by accident—when a wandering Briton discovered an Indian strain of tea growing wild in Assam, tested it in boiling water, tasted the results and realized he had struck gold: he had made tea. That gave the British their own tea industry in India. Assam tea proved superior to the Chinese imports and more palatable to the British housewife. In the 1830s, the East India Company traded about 31.5 million lbs. (14 million kilograms) of Chinese tea a year; today India alone produces nearly 300 million kilograms. But even tea was not exempt from colonial exploitation: the workers laboured in appalling conditions for a pittance, while all the profits, of course, went to British firms.

The British grew tea in India for themselves, not for the locals: the light, fragrant Darjeeling, the robust Assam, the heady Nilgiris tea, all reflected the soil, climate and geography of the respective parts of India for which they were named, but they were grown by Scottish planters (and picked by woefully underpaid Indian labourers) to be shipped to the mother country, where demand was strong. A modest quantity was retained for sale to the British in India; Indians themselves did not drink the tea they produced. It was only during the Great Depression of the 1930s—when demand in Britain dropped and British traders had to unload their stocks—that they thought of selling their produce to the Indians they’d ignored for a century. The Indian masses turned to tea with delight, and the taste for it spread throughout the Depression and the War years. Today, tea can be found in the remotest Indian village, and Indians drink more black tea than the rest of the world combined.

The British cut down the forests of the Nilgiris and Assam to grow tea, and ravaged the forests of Coorg to grow coffee. Tea was not the only villain in the ecological devastation of the Nilgiris; the British also brought in several exotic species like eucalyptus, pine and wattle to produce viscose, which was sent to the UK to be made into fabric. Unfortunately, plants like eucalyptus thirstily drink up the ground water; thanks to their plantations, the British converted the once lush tropical rainforests of the Nilgiris into a water-shortage area. The same phenomenon occurred when the British forced Indian farmers to grow poppy in order to extract opium, which involved cutting down vast areas of forests in some parts of north India. In Assam, for instance, by the mid-nineteenth century, large numbers of trees were chopped down since the opium poppy could not ripen and flower in their shade. This practice of slashing trees to protect the poppy indirectly almost wiped out some of India’s most magnificent predators. The British wanted more land to be used for commercial crops, which would bring them revenue, so they put a bounty on the head of each predator, successfully erasing tigers, cheetahs, leopards and lions from vast parts of India. The tiger and leopard survived, albeit in reduced numbers, because they hid in the jungle. But the lion needed vast open spaces and could not survive—except in the one corner of the country, in Gujarat, where an Indian prince, the Nawab o...

Internationally, Indian tea is competing for export markets with inferior teas from such unlikely sources as Argentina, Kenya and Malawi. But then again—if Argentina could grow tea without the British having colonized them first, couldn’t India have done so as well?

Sir Arthur Cotton, for instance, built a dam across the Godavari that irrigated over 1.5 million acres of previously arid land in south India, and is celebrated to this day with some three thousand statues installed by grateful farming communities in those two Andhra Pradesh districts, with even chief ministers participating in his birthday memorials.

India’s highly developed banking system and vigorous merchant capital, with its well-established network of agents, brokers and middlemen and a talent for financing exports and commercial credit, featured such sophisticated financial networks as that of the Jagat Seths, the Chettiars in the south and the Gujarati Banias in the west. This banking system was as large and extensive and dealt with as much money as the Bank of England.

The story is told—I cannot pinpoint the source—that when the Prince of Wales, the future Edward VIII, visited India in 1921, he pointed to a few magnificent buildings, cars and electrical installations and remarked to an Indian accompanying him, ‘We have given you everything here in India! What is it you don’t have?’ And the lowly Indian replied, gently: ‘Self-respect, sir.’ That too was snatched away by colonialism: the self-respect that comes from the knowledge that you are the master of your own fate, that your problems are your own fault and that their resolution depends principally on you and not some distant person living in a faraway land. The biggest difference that freedom has made lies in this, in the establishment of democratic rights and a shared idea of empowered citizenship, in which every citizen or sub-national group can promote their own rights and ensure their voices are heard. This was always withheld from Indians by the colonial subjecthood that was all the British were willing to confer upon them.