An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India

by Shashi Tharoor

as if incompetence after Independence justified the famines before it.

‘The conduct of states, as of individuals, can only be assessed by the standards of their age, not by today’s litigious criteria.

Not every British official in India was as rapacious as Clive, as ignorantly contemptuous as Macaulay, as arrogantly divisive as Curzon, as cruel as Dyer, or as racist as Churchill.

reflected in such delights as a burger called the Old Colonial, a London bar named The Plantation, and an Oxford cocktail (issued during the debate on reparations in which I spoke) named Colonial Comeback.

YouGov poll revealed that 59 per cent of respondents thought the British empire was ‘something to be proud of’, and only 19 per cent were ‘ashamed’ of its misdeeds;

Free trade, of course, suited the British as a slogan, since they were the best equipped to profit from it in the nineteenth century,

and the obliteration of the most precious possessions of the colonized, their identities

India had been reduced to a poor ‘third-world’ country, destitute and starving, a global poster child of poverty and famine.

gross domestic product increased in real terms by 347 per cent, Indian by a mere 14 per cent’.

the British colonial rulers had no interest in the well-being of the Indian people.

Instead of investing in the development of the countries they ruled, the British survived by doing deals with indigenous elites to sustain their rule at knockdown prices…

questions the perceptions of Indian ‘backwardness’ advanced by those who see modernity as a gift of the West.

da Gama’s goods were openly mocked and scorned by merchants and courtiers accustomed to far higher quality items.

‘In 1750, Indians had a similar standard of living to people in Britain. Now, average Indian incomes are barely a tenth of the British level in terms of real purchasing power. It is no coincidence that 200 years of British rule occurred in the intervening time.’

finally, a colonial mindset pervaded the Indian middle class—even the hardiest potential entrepreneur lacks confidence when he is politically enslaved.’

the fact that the East India Company had come to trade and stayed on to rule made our nationalist leaders suspicious of every foreigner with a briefcase, seeing him as the thin end of a neo-imperial wedge.

but it only goes to prove that one of the lessons you learn from history is that history sometimes teaches the wrong lessons.

The poignant tale is told of Hindu and Muslim officers singing ‘Auld Lang Syne’ together at the army mess in Delhi at a farewell dinner for those who were leaving for the new country of Pakistan.

‘Our force does not operate so much by its actual strength as by the impression which it produces’.

the self-respect that comes from the knowledge that you are the master of your own fate, that your problems are your own fault and that their resolution depends principally on you and not some distant person living in a faraway land.

and strict precedence was observed among them. But between the upper and lower regions of the house there was, socially and politically, an impassable barrier.’

mothers gave opium to their children to keep them quiet when they trudged off to construction sites to labour for their daily pittance.

the persistence of child marriage and untouchability, and a host of other social evils within India which the British preferred to keep at arm’s length rather than risk disturbing.

The call for the abolition of sati was initiated by Raja Rammohan Roy and enacted by Bentinck, knowing he had the support of right-thinking Indians, rather than being the product of the British conscience imposing its will on the barbarous native.

Three impressive women presided over the Indian National Congress during an era in which not a single governor, secretary or other British high official was female and the very notion of a female authority figure, let alone a female viceroy, would have been a fantasy.