An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India

by Shashi Tharoor

Theirs was a curious marriage, marked by her frequent infidelities, which he condoned, and it has been suggested that her affection for Nehru played a part in some of his (and Mountbatten’s) decisions relating to Indian independence.

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.

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.

Reluctantly, he agreed to Mountbatten’s proposal for a referendum in the North-West Frontier Province and in the Muslim-majority district of Sylhet, gave in on a Congress counter-proposal for a similar approach in regard to Hindu-majority districts of Sindh, and most surprisingly, agreed to Dominion status for India within the British Commonwealth, rather than the full independence the Congress had long stood for.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

Divide et impera had worked too well: two Indias is what it would be.

Radcliffe drew up his maps in forty days, dividing provinces, districts, villages, homes and hearts—and promptly scuttled home to Britain, never to return to India.

It is difficult, therefore, to buy the self-serving imperial argument that Britain bequeathed to India its political unity and democracy.

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.

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.

a result of what one can only call the British Colonial Holocaust, thanks to economic policies ruthlessly enforced by Britain, between 30 and 35 million Indians needlessly died of starvation during the Raj.

It is striking that the last large-scale famine to take place in India was under British rule; none has taken place since, because Indian democracy has been more responsive to the needs of drought-affected and poverty-stricken Indians than the British rulers ever were.

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.

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.

Dadabhai Naoroji began his research into the famous ‘economic drain’ theory and ‘un-British rule in India’ after being moved by the horror of the Orissa deaths.

In the mid-nineteenth century, as Dinyar Patel points out, ‘it was common economic wisdom that government intervention in famines was unnecessary and even harmful.

British administrators largely acknowledged, from at least the 1860s, that the frequent famines were not the result of food shortages per se, but the inability of people to purchase food or, in a scholar’s words, ‘complex economic crises induced by the market impacts of drought and crop failure.’

On the other, the British, in their official reports and reviews of famine, took care to blame everything but themselves—the burgeoning population, declining rice production, the role of climate and other uncontrollable factors, lack of transportation, even indigenous culture.

Before the British came, Indian rulers had supported the people in times of food scarcity by policies of tax relief, fixing grain prices and banning food exports from famine-affected regions.

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.

‘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.

It was only when public opinion in England could no longer be ignored that an international appeal was finally issued in January 1897, four months after the famine began and many lives had been lost.

By James’s logic the increase in China’s population under Mao and the Soviet Union’s under Stalin should equally give the lie to the gory tales of mass starvation in those countries.

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.

Fiscal prudence consistently trumped ‘humanitarian humbug’. Indians proved more generous whenever they were not themselves laid low by famine, and ‘native charity’ was often available to rescue cattle, including often aid from the village zamindar, who felt a social obligation to provide whatever relief he could to save his people and their cows.

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.

Aside from indifference to the human victims of suffering, famine relief in India brought out another negative feature of the colonial regime—its unwillingness to acknowledge its own limitations and its ability to disguise mismanagement as wise policy.

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.

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?’

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.

Between 1852 and 1854, when labour costs in the region rose by an estimated 30 per cent, the Company’s government in the Straits Settlements relied almost entirely on Indian convict labour for the construction of public works.

By 1868, regulations had increased the share of female migrants to a minimum of forty women for every hundred men.

Some 1.9 to 3.5 million Indians (the numbers vary in different sources, depending on who is counted) moved halfway across the globe, most involuntarily, under the colonial project.

Recent work by Professor Clare Anderson has established the extent of the horrors: in just one year, 1856-57, and on one route, Kolkata to Trinidad, the percentage of deaths of indentured labour on the transportee ships reached appalling levels: 12.3 per cent of all males, 18.5 per cent of the females, 28 per cent of the boys and 36 per cent of the girls perished, as did a tragic 55 per cent of all infants.

To be an indentured Indian labourer transported to the Caribbean on British ships was to enter a life-and-death lottery in which your chances of survival were significantly worse than those of a shackled African slave.

The wrenching of people from their homes amid scenes of desolation and despair was a crime that would haunt the history of British rule in India for generations to come.

British imperialism had triumphed not just by conquest and deception on a grand scale but, as I have mentioned, by ruthlessly suppressing dissent, executing rebels and deserters and chopping off the thumbs of skilled weavers so they could not produce the fine cloth that made Britain’s manufactures look tawdry.

‘Most of the time,’ says the historian Jon Wilson, ‘the actions of British imperial administrators were driven by irrational passions rather than calculated plans. Force was rarely efficient.

Delhi, the Mughal capital, a rich and bustling city of half a million inhabitants, was left a desolate ruin.

The brutal force used to repress the Quit India movement in 1942 involved tactics that, in the words of a British governor, if ‘dragged out in the cold light of [day], nobody could defend’. Gang rape by the police was not uncommon: 73 women were violated by police in a bid to terrorize the satyagrahis, prisoners were forced to lie naked on blocks of ice till they lost consciousness, and thousands were beaten in jail.

When the troops had finished firing, they had used 1,650 rounds, killed at least 379 people (the number the British were prepared to admit to) and wounded 1,137.* Barely a bullet was wasted, Dyer noted with satisfaction.

But his action that Baisakhi day came to symbolize the evil of the system on whose behalf, and in whose defence, he was acting. In the horrified realization of this truth by Indians of all walks of life lay the true importance of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre.

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.

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 massacre lasted for ten minutes, and the toll amounted to an extraordinary kill-rate, akin to a turkey-shoot.