An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India

by Shashi Tharoor

The past is not necessarily a guide to the future, but it does partly help explain the present.

loot’ being a Hindustani word they took into their dictionaries as well as their habits),

‘where every prospect pleases / And only Man is vile’)

Had this exposé not taken place, Kashmir would not have remained a ‘princely state’, free to choose the country, and the terms, of its accession upon Independence in 1947; it would have been a province of British India, subject to being carved up by a careless British pen during Partition. The contours of the ‘Kashmir problem’ would have looked very different today.

‘It is clear that a sedition law which is adequate for a people ruled by a government of its own nationality and faith may be inadequate, or in some respects unsuited, for a country under foreign rule.’

The Jain texts recognized a broader concept of gender identity by speaking about the idea of a psychological sex being different from that of a physical one.

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. In keeping with Muslim practice, there is no idol therein, merely a symbolic stone slab, a sword (Vavar was a warrior) and a green cloth, the colour of Islam.

was central to the Indian experience throughout its long civilizational history.

Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially. At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom. A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation long suppressed finds utterance.

(The sun never set on the British empire, an Indian nationalist later sardonically commented, because even God couldn’t trust the Englishman in the dark.)

‘Glory or death, for true hearts and brave / Honour in life, or rest in a grave.’

one of the lessons you learn from history is that history sometimes teaches the wrong lessons.