An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India

by Shashi Tharoor

Never in the history of the world was such a hoax perpetrated upon a great people as England perpetrated upon India, when in return for India’s invaluable service during the War, we gave to the Indian nation such a discreditable, disgraceful, undemocratic, tyrannical constitution.

Cited in Durant, The Case of India. By British MP Dr Rutherford. 1918

every Indian schoolchild must lament the influence of the British dress code on Indians—especially the tie as a permanent noose around the necks of millions of schoolchildren, in India’s sweltering heat, even today.

M. J. Akbar put it, ‘Pakistan was created by Jinnah’s will and Britain’s willingness’—not by Nehru’s wilfulness.

Divide et Impera

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.

Speech by Jawaharlal Nehru

If Britain’s greatest accomplishment was the creation of a single political unit called India, fulfilling the aspirations of visionary emperors from Ashoka to Akbar, then its greatest failure must be the shambles of that original Brexit—cutting and running from the land they had claimed to rule for its betterment, leaving behind a million dead, thirteen million displaced, billions of rupees of property destroyed, and the flames of communal hatred blazing hotly across the ravaged land. No greater indictment of the failures of British rule in India can be found than the tragic manner of its ending.

One first-hand witness, Lieutenant Colonel Ronald Osborne, has written movingly of the horror in 1877: ‘Scores of corpses were tumbled into old wells, because the deaths were too numerous for the miserable relatives to perform the usual funeral rites. Mothers sold their children for a single scanty meal. Husbands flung their wives into ponds, to escape the torment of seeing them perish by the lingering agonies of hunger. Amid these scenes of death, the government of India kept its serenity and cheerfulness unimpaired. The [newspapers] were persuaded into silence. Strict orders were given to civilians under no circumstances to countenance the pretence that civilians were dying of hunger.’

Famines

nearly 4 million Bengalis starved to death in the 1943 famine. Nothing can excuse the odious behaviour of Winston Churchill, who deliberately ordered the diversion of food from starving Indian civilians to well-supplied British soldiers and even to top up European stockpiles in Greece and elsewhere. ‘The starvation of anyway underfed Bengalis is less serious’ than that of ‘sturdy Greeks’, he argued. Grain for the Tommies, bread for home consumption in Britain (27 million tonnes of imported grains, a wildly excessive amount), and generous buffer stocks in Europe (for yet-to-be-liberated Greeks and Yugoslavs) were Churchill’s priorities, not the life or death of his Indian subjects. When reminded of the suffering of his victims his response was typically Churchillian: The famine was their own fault, he said, for ‘breeding like rabbits’. When officers of conscience pointed out in a telegram to the prime minister the scale of the tragedy caused by his decisions, Churchill’s only reaction was to ask peevishly: ‘why hasn’t Gandhi died yet?’

Winston Churchill should also be considered as genocidal maniac. Same in the categories of Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Mao Zedong.

Famine, forced migration and brutality: three examples of why British rule over India was despotic and anything but enlightened. But why should one be surprised? Sir William Hicks, home minister in the Conservative government of Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, had stated the matter bluntly in 1928: ‘I know it is said in missionary meetings that we conquered India to raise the level of the Indians. That is cant. We conquered India as an outlet for the goods of Britain. We conquered India by the sword, and by the sword we shall hold it. I am not such a hypocrite as to say we hold India for the Indians. We went with a yardstick in one hand and a sword in the other, and with the latter we continue to hold them helpless while we force the former down their throats.’

On the whole, therefore, the verdict of the eminent historian Bipan Chandra stands. British motives in building railways in India, he wrote, were ‘sordid and selfish…the promotion of the interests of British merchants, manufacturers and investors…at the risk and expense of Indian revenues’; their ‘essential purpose’ being to ‘assist British enterprise in the exploitation of the natural resources of India.’ Quod erat demonstrandum.

Truth of Railways

The funding of education continued to be a low priority for the British throughout their rule. Will Durant noted in 1930 that the British government in India preferred to devote the limited resources it allocated to education to ‘universities where the language used was English, the history, literature, customs and morals taught were English, and young [Indians]…found that they had merely let themselves in for a ruthless process that aimed to de-nationalize and de-Indianize them, and turn them into imitative Englishmen’.

Education

Hunting in the British period became a monster sport; countless numbers of animals were killed, irretrievably transforming the ecology of many areas. For example, Madras was once called Puliyur, which means the town of tigers and leopards (the Tamil word ‘puli’ is used for both tiger and leopard). The British killed every tiger and leopard in this area, so that not even one was left in Madras or any of the plains of Tamil Nadu. The term Puliyur has lost its meaning, and is now largely forgotten.

what had once been one of the richest and most industrialized economies of the world, which together with China accounted for almost 75 per cent of world industrial output in 1750, was transformed by the process of imperial rule into one of the poorest, most backward, illiterate and diseased societies on earth by the time of our independence in 1947. In 1600, when the East India Company was established, Britain was producing just 1.8 per cent of the world’s GDP, while India was generating some 23 per cent. By 1940, after nearly two centuries of the Raj, Britain accounted for nearly 10 per cent of world GDP, while India had been reduced to a poor ‘third-world’ country, destitute and starving, a global poster child of poverty and famine.

Economy

Pile on the brown man’s burden, compel him to be free; Let all your manifestoes Reek with philanthropy. And if with heathen folly He dares your will dispute, Then, in the name of freedom, Don’t hesitate to shoot.

My favorite stanza from The Brown man's burden a poem by Henry Laboucheres. An answer to infamous The White man's burden by Rudyard Kipling.

The sad truth is that the staying-power of organized violence is almost always greater than that of non-violence. It is increasingly argued that Gandhi could embarrass the British but not overthrow them. It was when soldiers who had sworn their loyalty to the British Crown rebelled during World War II, and when sailors of the Royal Indian Navy mutinied in 1945 and fired their own cannons at British port installations, that the British realized the game was up. They could jail an old man and allow him to fast, but they could not indefinitely suppress an armed rebellion that had 320 million people behind it. Gandhi won the moral case, the ‘soft power’ battle, in today’s parlance; but even without a military victory, the rebels and mutineers in uniform won the ‘hard-power’ war.

Gandhism and it's effectiveness