An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India

by Shashi Tharoor

Since the British came from a hierarchical society with an entrenched class system, they instinctively tended to look for a similar system in India. They began by anatomizing Indian society into ‘classes’ that they referenced as being ‘primarily religious’ in nature. They then seized upon caste. But caste had not been a particularly stable social structure in the pre-British days;

In his seminal book Castes of Mind, Dirks has explained in detail how it was, under the British, that ‘caste’ became a single term ‘capable of expressing, organizing, and above all “systematizing” India’s diverse forms of social identity, community, and organization.

Under colonialism, caste was thus made out to be far more pervasive, far more totalizing, and far more uniform than it had ever been before.’

Scholars who have studied precolonial caste relations dismiss the idea that varna—the classification of all castes into four hierarchical groups, with the Brahmins on top and even kings and warriors a notch beneath them—could conceivably represent a complete picture of reality (Kshatriya kings, for example, were never in practical terms subordinate to Brahmins, whom they employed, paid, patronized, heeded or dismissed as they found appropriate at different times).

The British either did not understand, or preferred to ignore, the basic fact that the system need not have worked as described in theory.

The pandits, instead of reflecting this widespread practice, cited doctrinal justifications from long-neglected texts to enshrine their status as the only authority figures, and most of the British took them at their word.

Ethnic, social, caste and racial classifications were conducted as part of an imperial strategy more effectively to impose and maintain British control over the colonized Indian population.

Brahmins, who were no more than a tenth of the population, occupied over 90 per cent of the positions available to Indians in government service, except the most menial ones;

The British fondness for taxonomy and social classification continued to be in evidence throughout their rule, and was formalized by means of the census they undertook first in 1872 and then every ten years from 1881, converting it into an ‘ethnographic census’ in 1901.

Whereas prior to British rule the Shudra had only to leave his village and try his fortunes in a different princely state in India where his caste would not have followed him, colonialism made him a Shudra for life, wherever he was.

Census-taking in British India differed significantly from the conduct of the census in Britain, since unlike in the home country, the census in India was led by British anthropologists seeking to anatomize Indian society, the better to control and govern it.

In the precolonial era, community boundaries were far more blurred, and as a result these communities were not self-conscious in the way they became under colonial rule.

This went against the colonial assumption that communities must be mutually exclusive and that a person had to belong to one community or another.

Indians questioned by Risley’s team predictably asserted both their caste identities and their entitlement to special privileges over other castes, accentuating the very differences the British wanted to see and had brought to the fore. By so doing they sought benefits for their group—admission to certain military regiments, for instance, or scholarships to some educational institutions—at the expense of, or equal to, others. Such caste competition had been largely unknown in pre-British days;

All these classifications in turn served the interests of the colonizers by providing them with a tool to create perceptions of difference between groups to prevent unity amongst them, and justifying British overlordship—which

A troubling side effect of this changed pattern of social dominance was political: ideas of democracy were not extended to all strata of Indian society under British rule.

Religion became a useful means of divide and rule: the Hindu–Muslim divide was, as the American scholar of religion Peter Gottschalk documents, defined, highlighted and fomented by the British as a deliberate strategy.

Olcott was the first, though, to argue that the Aryans were indigenous to India and took civilization from India to the West, an idea that is today promoted by Hindutva ideologues.

By excluding Muslims from the essential national narrative, the nineteenth-century colonial interpretation of Indian history helped give birth in the twentieth to the two-nation theory that eventually divided the country.

In Kerala’s famous pilgrimage site of Sabarimala, after an arduous climb to the hilltop shrine of Lord Ayyappa, the devotee first encounters a shrine to his Muslim disciple, Vavar Swami.

The Mughal court, she points out, became the most impressive patron of the translation of many Sanskrit religious texts into Persian, including the epic Mahabharata (translated as the Razmnamah) and the Bhagavad Gita, with Brahmin priests collaborating on the translations with Persian scholars.

Acceptance of difference, as Swami Vivekananda famously declared at the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago, was central to the Indian experience throughout its long civilizational history.

But by encroaching on the terrain of the various communities, thereby invalidating indigenous social relations, the colonial state loosened the bonds that had held them together for generations across these divides.

The facts are clear: large-scale conflicts between Hindus and Muslims (religiously defined), only began under colonial rule; many other kinds of social strife were labelled as religious due to the colonists’ Orientalist assumption that religion was the fundamental division in Indian society.

Eaton believes that temple destruction by Turkic and other Muslim rulers throughout India occurred mainly in kingdoms in the process of being conquered; a royal temple symbolized the king’s power in Hindu political thought, and so destroying it signified that king’s utter humiliation.

In other words, invaders’ attacks on temples were politically, rather than religiously, motivated.

Jews fleeing Roman persecution found refuge here; there is evidence of their settlement in Cranganore as far back as 68 CE.

the Zamorin of Calicut was so impressed by the seafaring skills of this community that he issued a decree in the sixteenth century obliging each fisherman’s family in his kingdom to bring up one son as a Muslim to man his all-Muslim navy, commanded by sailors of Arab descent, the Kunjali Maraicars.

The political consequences of this British denial of the precolonial past and the deliberate imperial construction of a ‘Hindu–Muslim divide’ after 1857 became vividly apparent in the late nineteenth century.

Instead, the British watched the rise to prominence of Congress, a secular body transcending religion, with growing disapproval, and pronounced it a Hindu-dominated organization.

The British deliberately ‘sold’ the partition of Bengal to the Muslims as promoting their interests, so that the Nawab of Dacca, who had initially condemned the division of his province as ‘beastly’, was persuaded to change his mind under the influence of Lord Curzon’s visit to him.

Herbert Risley, the architect of the scheme, admitted frankly that ‘one of our main objects is to split up and thereby weaken a solid body of opponents to our rule.’

(Hakim Ajmal Khan, Maulana Mohammed Ali and Dr M. A. Ansari enjoy the remarkable distinction of having been presidents of both the Congress and the League without having to give up either.)

1916, Motilal Nehru was chosen by the Congress to draft, together with a brilliant young Muslim lawyer called Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the principles that would govern cooperation with the Muslim League.

The Congress’s leading literary light, the poetess Sarojini Naidu, hailed Jinnah as the ‘ambassador of Hindu–Muslim unity’ and set about editing a compilation of his speeches and writings.

In this [era] national and material interests have predominated over religious ties’. These were views widely held by other educated Indian Muslims, and had been expressed in almost identical terms by Justice Syed Mahmud four decades previously.

They were ignored in constituting the British Indian Army, in which Muslims accounted for 50 per cent of the Indians serving in uniform despite being only 20 per cent of the population. (The Dalit leader Dr B. R. Ambedkar suggested this disproportionate representation in the army was deliberately designed ‘to counteract the forces of Hindu agitation’ against the British Raj.)

This resulted in the aggravation of communal identities, since what little politics was permitted could quickly devolve into a communal competition for limited resources.

Lord Olivier, Secretary of State for India in the 1920s, openly admitted to a ‘predominant bias in British officialdom in favour of the Moslem community…

This kind of conventional political contention could have kept India united, with Jinnah and Nehru becoming the Disraeli and Gladstone of their era in an emerging Indian Dominion.

‘the British started to define “communities” based on religious identity and attach political representation to them, many Indians stopped accepting the diversity of their own thoughts and began to ask themselves in which of the boxes they belonged’. Such divisions were heightened not just between religious communities, but even within them.

The British-sponsored Shia-Sunni divide in Lucknow is one of the clearest examples of how the British encouraged differences, and how Indians sought to create communities that the Raj would recognize and to which it would give political weight.

One can lay not only a Hindu–Muslim divide at their door, but also credit them for giving legal definition to a new political division between the Sunni and Shia communities.

The creation and perpetuation of Hindu–Muslim antagonism was the most significant accomplishment of British imperial policy:

Truth could not be obtained by ‘untruthful’ or unjust means, which included inflicting violence upon one’s opponent. The means had to be worthy of the ends; if they were not, the ends would fail too.

Non-violence was the way to vindicate the truth not by the infliction of suffering on the opponent, but on one’s self. It was essential to willingly accept punishment in order to demonstrate the strength of one’s convictions.

By accepting the punishments imposed on him he confronted his captors with their own brutalization.

It would be throwing pearls before swine to appeal to them in the name of the higher morality or justice or on ethical grounds.

Even then, however, the franchise was extended to less than 10 per cent of the population and, as before, Indians voted not as citizens of a single country but as members of different religious groups, with Muslim voters choosing Muslim members from a reserved list—a further confirmation of divide et impera.

The British decision to declare the community then known as ‘Untouchables’ (today as Dalits, or more bureaucratically as ‘Scheduled Castes’) to be a minority community entitled to separate representation, distinct from other Hindus, in a new category called the ‘Depressed Classes’, was seen by Indian nationalists as a ploy to divide the majority community in furtherance of imperial interests.