An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India

by Shashi Tharoor

Mughal empire was in a state of collapse after the spectacular sacking of Delhi by the Persian Nadir Shah in 1739 and the loot of all its treasures.

From the great manufacturing nation described by Sunderland, India became a mere exporter of raw materials and foodstuffs, raw cotton, as well as jute, silk, coal, opium, rice, spices and tea. With the collapse of its manufacturing and the elimination of manufactured goods from its export rosters, India’s share of world manufacturing exports fell from 27 per cent to 2 per cent under British rule.

The British in India were never more than 0.05 per cent of the population. The Empire, in Hobsbawm’s evocative words, was ‘so easily won, so narrowly based, so absurdly easily ruled thanks to the devotion of a few and the passivity of the many.’

Since the British were not motivated by either the crusading Christianity of the Spanish or the cultural zeal of the French, but merely by pecuniary greed, they were not unduly anxious to transform Indian society or shape it in their image.

the caste system became more rigid under the British than it had been in precolonial India.

The futility of the Quit India movement, which accomplished little but the Congress’s own exclusion from national affairs, compounded the original blunder of the Congress in resigning its ministries. It had left the field free for the Muslim League, which emerged from the war immeasurably enhanced in power and prestige. Both the resignations of the Congress ministries in 1939 and the Quit India movement in 1942 turned out to be futile gestures of demonstrative rather than far-sighted politics.

The Labour victory in the British general elections meant that the egregious Churchill was soon to be replaced as prime minister by Attlee, but this did not bring about any change in the anti-Congressism of the British authorities in India. Wavell convened a conference in Simla from late June 1945, which the viceroy allowed Jinnah to wreck. In this atmosphere of frustration and despair, the British called elections in India at the end of 1945, for seats in the central and provincial assemblies.

The Congress was woefully unequipped to contest them. Its blunder in surrendering the reins of power in 1939 and then losing its leadership and cadres to prison from 1942 meant that it went into the campaign tired, dispirited and ill-organized. The League, on the other hand, had flourished during the war; its political machinery was well oiled with patronage and pelf, while the Congress’s was rusty from disuse.

The electoral fortunes of 1937 were now significantly reversed. The Congress still carried a majority of the provinces. But except for the North-West Frontier Province, where the Congress won nineteen Muslim seats to the League’s seventeen, the League swept the reserved seats for Muslims across the board, even in provinces like Bombay and Madras which had seemed immune to the communal contagion. Whatever the explanation—and Nehru could have offered a few—there was no longer any escaping the reali...

London, under the Labour Party, exhausted by war, was determined to rid itself of the burdens of its Indian empire. In February 1946, Prime Minister Attlee announced the dispatch of a Cabinet Mission to India ‘to discuss with leaders of Indian opinion the framing of an Indian Constitution’. The endgame had begun.

Part of the problem at the time may well have lain in a profound miscalculation on Nehru’s part about the true intentions of the British.

Nehru, still imagining an all-powerful adversary seeking to perpetuate its hegemony, and unaware of the extent to which the League had become a popular party amongst Indian Muslims, dealt with both on erroneous premises.

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.

This was all part of the policy of divide and rule: no one in any responsible position in Britain as late as 1940 had any serious intention whatsoever of relinquishing the Empire or surrendering the jewel in His Majesty’s Crown to a rabble of nationalist Indians clad in homespun. 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.

The British—terrorized by German bombing, demoralized by various defeats and large numbers of their soldiers taken prisoner, shaken by the desertion of Indian soldiers and the mutiny of Indian sailors, shivering in the record cold of the winter of 1945-46, crippled by power cuts and factory closures resulting from a post-War coal shortage—were exhausted and in no mood to focus on a distant empire when their own needs at home were so pressing. They were also more or less broke: American loans had kept the economy afloat and needed to be repaid, and even India was owed a sizable debt. Overseas commitments were no longer sustainable or particularly popular. Exit was the only viable option: the question was what they would leave behind—one India, two or several fragments?

The British left India with a literacy rate of 16 per cent, and a female literacy rate of 8 per cent—only