An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India

by Shashi Tharoor

as if incompetence after Independence justified the famines before it.

History, in any case, cannot be reduced to some sort of game of comparing misdeeds in different eras; each period must be judged in itself and for its own successes and transgressions.

When Willy Brandt was chancellor of Germany, he sank to his knees at the Warsaw Ghetto in 1970 to apologize to Polish Jews for the Holocaust.

Also Japan's apology for its actions in the Philippines during WW2

But when a marauder destroys your house and takes away your cash and jewellery, his responsibility for his actions far exceeds that of the servant who opened the door to him, whether out of fear, cupidity or because he simply didn’t know any better.

(one wonders whether to deplore his avarice or admire him for the fact that despite being ‘paid for’, he refused to be ‘bought’).

When the British eventually left in 1947, they left India as a functioning democracy, and many Britons would take credit for having instilled in their Indian subjects the spirit of democracy and the rule of law, even if Indians were denied its substance by the British.

The British ruled nineteenth-century India with unshakeable self-confidence, buttressed by protocol, alcohol and a lot of gall.

Scottish historian Niall Ferguson published Empire: How Britain Made the World, which saw in the past all the virtues he wished to celebrate in the present.

For most of the imperialists, India was a career, not a crusade.

The arrest in February 2016 of students at New Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) on charges of sedition, for raising ‘anti-Indian’ slogans in the course of protests against the execution of the accomplice of a convicted terrorist, and the filing of an FIR against Amnesty International in August 2016 on the same charges, would not have been possible without the loose, colonially-motivated wording of the law.

Agree with the point, but the responsibility for this sits squarely on India's shoulders

Unfortunately, the British-drafted Indian Penal Code criminalized aspects of human behaviour and human reality that in India had not previously been regarded as criminal or requiring legal sanction.

While this may be true, alternative sexual or gender identities were still subject to social discrimination - much like the caste system

The facts are clear: large-scale conflicts between Hindus and Muslims (religiously defined), only began under colonial rule;

Is that really so?

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.

Doesn't necessarily imply this though, does it

The massacre made Indians out of millions of people who had not thought consciously of their political identity before that grim Sunday.

This unedifying spectacle of a brown man with his nose up the colonial fundament

Fortunately, on this issue, Gandhiji’s somewhat eccentric views did not prevail.

"Eccentric" is an understatement - this sentence barely scratches the surface of just how problematic ths approach really was

One cannot blame the British for the choices Indians themselves made in reaction to British rule, but it only goes to prove that one of the lessons you learn from history is that history sometimes teaches the wrong lessons.

But in looking to understand the forces that have made us and nearly unmade us, and in hoping to recognize possible future sources of conflict in the new millennium, we have to realize that sometimes the best crystal ball is a rear-view mirror.