An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India

by Shashi Tharoor

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’.

In contrast, after many months of fighting for justice, the families of the victims of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre were given 500 rupees each in compensation by the government—at the prevailing exchange rate, approximately £37 (or some £1,450 in today’s money) for each human life.

Famine, forced migration and brutality: three examples of why British rule over India was despotic and anything but enlightened.

‘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.’

In its very conception and construction, the Indian Railways was a big British colonial scam. British shareholders made absurd amounts of money by investing in the railways, where the government guaranteed returns on capital of 5 per cent net per year, unavailable in any other safe investment.

Britons made the money, controlled the technology and supplied all the equipment, which meant once again that the profits were repatriated. It was a scheme described at the time as ‘private enterprise at public risk’. All the losses were borne by the Indian people, all the gains pocketed by the British trader—even as he penetrated by rail deep into the Indian economy.

And, of course, racism reigned; though whites-only compartments were soon done away with on grounds of economic viability, Indians found the available affordable space grossly inadequate for their numbers.

British racial theories were in full flow on railway matters: it was believed that Indians did not have the ‘judgement and presence of mind’ to deal with emergencies and that they ‘seldom have character enough to enforce strict obedience’ to railway rules.

Double standards prevailed in other ways: whereas in Britain it was common practice to ensure the merit-based promotion of firemen to drivers, or of station-masters of small rural stations to large stations, this did not happen in India because these junior positions were occupied by Indians, whose promotion would be to posts otherwise occupied by Europeans. By

These rules had the desired effect: In 1886, out of 1,015 engineers in the Public Works Department (PWD), only 86 were Indians.

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 them by RITES, a subsidiary of the Indian Railways.

The Bengali newspaper Samachar wrote on 30 April 1884 that ‘iron roads mean iron chains’ for India—foreign goods could flow more easily, it argued, killing native Indian industry and increasing Indian poverty.

There were other critiques. Gandhi argued in Swaraj that the railways spread bubonic plague.

And there are other examples to show how the interests of Indians were never a factor in railway operations: during World War I, several Indian rail lines were dismantled and shipped out of the country to aid the Allied war effort in Mesopotamia!

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.

It supplanted and undermined an extensive Indian tradition: traditional methods of guru-shishya parampara (in which students lived with their teachers and imbibed an entire way of thinking) had thrived in India, as did the many monasteries which went on to become important centres of education, receiving students from distant lands, notably as far from our shores as China and Turkey.

Nalanda University, which enjoyed international renown when Oxford and Cambridge were not even gleams in their founders’ eyes, employed 2,000 teachers and housed 10,000 students in a remarkable campus that featured a library nine storeys tall.

Many maktabs closed in the mid-nineteenth century as their elite students gravitated to colonial schools in the hope of greater opportunities for advancement after their schooling.

In addition to monasteries and formal establishments of learning, informal institutions and methods of education also flourished in India. Oral education has always enjoyed an honoured place in Indian culture.

But while such traditions give Indian education its moorings in our culture, there is no escaping the stark fact that modern India lost much of it under British rule, achieved independence with only 16 per cent literacy, and is still struggling to educate the broad mass of its population to seize the opportunities afforded by the globalized world of the twenty-first century.

The English language was not a deliberate gift to India, but again an instrument of colonialism, imparted to Indians only to facilitate the tasks of the English.

Lord Macaulay articulated the classic reason for teaching English, but only to a small minority of Indians: ‘We must do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indians in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals and in intellect.’

Teaching Sanskrit or Arabic to Indians was not going to be of much practical use to the business of the Company, but Indians who could read and write English, however badly they spoke it, could indeed be of value to the British.

Some argue that Macaulay’s contribution to the system of education in India is overstated, and that the forces which he represented would probably have been successful anyway.

‘A single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia’, he notoriously declared, while admitting he had not read a single work from the literatures he was dismissing.

Mass English education was never British policy, therefore, nor was it necessary to dispense ‘European’ scientific knowledge to Indians; the educated Indians would do so in their own languages.

It is difficult to argue, however, that such education acquired as much reach or influence as English education in India, which to this day is considered the passport to success and influence in Indian society. Most Indians educated in English used that language for their own career self-advancement, not to serve as academic translators or instructors for the masses;

The colleges, like the British schools in India, heavily emphasized rote learning, the regurgitation of which was what the examinations tested. Failing the exams was so common that many Indians proudly sported ‘BA (F)’ after the names as a credential, to indicate that they had got that far (the ‘F’ stood for ‘failed’).

Worse, though, it left the individual graduate—every one of them—Westernized enough to be alienated from his own Indian cultural roots.

European subordination of Asia was not merely economic and political and military. It was also intellectual and moral and spiritual: a completely different kind of conquest than had been witnessed before, which left its victims resentful but also envious of their conquerors and, ultimately, eager to be initiated into the mysteries of their seemingly near-magical power.

This unedifying spectacle of a brown man with his nose up the colonial fundament made Chaudhuri a poster child for scholarly studies of how Empire creates ‘native informants’, alienated from and even abhorring their own cultures and societies.

The funding of education continued to be a low priority for the British throughout their rule.

Durant observed that the total expenditure for education in India (in 1930) was less than half that in New York state alone.

‘The responsibility of the British for India’s illiteracy,’ Durant concluded, ‘seems to be beyond question.’

Since educating Indians was not a major British priority, it did not attract eminent Britons, and from early in the twentieth century, academia became the one available avenue for Indian advancement.

The British saw precolonial Mughal history as consisting of a linear narration of events devoid of context or analysis; as for pre-Mughal texts, John Stuart Mill dismissed them as ‘mythological histories…where fable stands in the face of facts’. To

By arguing that history texts should ‘rely upon facts and serve a secular curriculum’, they also moved away from the teaching of religious and mythological texts, including India’s timeless epics, the Mahabharata and Ramayana, which at the very least could have occupied the place in Indian schoolrooms that the Iliad and Odyssey did in British ones.

Indeed, she argues that the very idea of English literature as a subject of study was first devised by the British in India to advance their colonial interests. It

Charles Trevelyan in his 1838 book On the Education of the People of India admitted that the arguments made for propagating English literature through the English language were not based on any scientific notion but on the simple Macaulayan prejudice that European knowledge was axiomatically ‘superior’ to oriental knowledge. Nonetheless,