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. One cannot, as I have written elsewhere, take revenge upon history; history is its own revenge.

Nearly every kind of manufacture or product known to the civilized world—nearly every kind of creation of man’s brain and hand, existing anywhere, and prized either for its utility or beauty—had long been produced in India.

Not only was she the greatest shipbuilding nation, but she had great commerce and trade by land and sea which extended to all known civilized countries. Such was the India which the British found when they came.

The Bengali novelist Bankim Chandra Chatterjee wrote of the English ‘who could not control their greed’ and from whose vocabulary ‘the word morality had disappeared’.

By the end of the nineteenth century, India was Britain’s biggest source of revenue, the world’s biggest purchaser of British exports and the source of highly paid employment for British civil servants and soldiers all at India’s own expense. We literally paid for our own oppression.

Indians paid, in other words, for the privilege of being conquered by the British.

British-based businesses simply could not compete, and so they petitioned Parliament for a ban on Indian shipbuilding. The first legislative act in their favour came in 1813 with a law that prohibited ships below 350 tonnes from plying between the Indian colonies and the United Kingdom. That took some 40 per cent of Bengal-built ships out of the lucrative India-England trade. A further Act in 1814 denied Indian-built ships the privilege of being deemed ‘British-registered vessels’ to trade with the United States and the European continent.

Thus, of 385 joint stock companies in the tea industry in India as late as 1914, 376 were based in Calcutta; and all were owned by the British. Scholars have established that in 1915, 100 per cent of the jute mills in India were in British hands; by 1929 this was down to 78 per cent, still enshrining British dominance.

It is important to remember that these villages did not exist in some kind of rustic agrarian isolation but were active and functioning political and economic units as well. ‘In India,’ wrote an eminent English civil servant, ‘the village system was the one organism that survived the long years of anarchy and invasion, and it was in full vigour when we conquered India.

Part of the problem was that the Indian social structures were unfamiliar to the British, whose own villages survived in a largely feudalistic relationship to their landlords. Empire was in many ways the vehicle for the extension of British social structures to the colonies they conquered.

India’s villages were not self-reliant republics that lived in blissful isolation. They were networked and connected, and it was the destruction of Indian industry that forced people to retreat and focus on farming, creating both a more agrarian society and the problem of peasant dispossession. By the early 1800s, India had been reduced from a land of artisans, traders, warriors and merchants, functioning in thriving and complex commercial networks, into an agrarian society of peasants and moneylenders.

Years later, the management theorist C. Northcote Parkinson would cite the building of New Delhi among many examples in formulating his ‘second law’, that institutions build their grandest monuments just before they crumble into irrelevance.

By 1931, this had gone up to just 168,000 (including 60,000 in the army and police and still only 4,000 in civil government) to run a country approaching 300 million people. It was an extraordinary combination of racial self-assurance, superior military technology, the mystique of modernity and the trappings of enlightenment progressivism—as well as, it must be said clearly, the cravenness, cupidity, opportunism and lack of organized resistance on the part of the vanquished—that sustained the Empire, along with the judicious application of brute force when necessary. 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.’

By 1930, the Indian National Congress had decided to go beyond its modest goals of 1918. It issued a Declaration of Independence on 26 January 1930: The British government in India has not only deprived the Indian people of their freedom but has based itself on the exploitation of the masses, and has ruined India economically, politically, culturally and spiritually… Therefore…India must sever the British connection and attain Purna Swaraj or complete independence.

Instead of offering more democracy, Britain went farther in the opposite direction. It passed the repressive Rowlatt Act in 1919, reimposing upon India all the wartime restrictions on freedom of speech and assembly that had been lifted with the Armistice. The Act vested the viceroy’s government with extraordinary powers to quell ‘sedition’ against the Empire by silencing and censoring the press, detaining political activists without trial, and arresting without a warrant any individuals suspected of treason against the Empire. The Act granted the authorities the power to arrest Indians on mere suspicion, and to try them in secrecy without a right to counsel or a right of appeal. It was a return to the practices of the Spanish Inquisition animated by the presumption of guilt and with no rights for the accused against a people who thought they had just earned the right to control their own political destiny.

While many of the early newspapers faded away—sometimes with the death or departure of their publishers, sometimes because they were not commercially viable given their small readership base, and sometimes because the editors and staff simply ran out of enthusiasm for their task and adequate replacements could not be found—others not only survived but established a considerable following. The Times of India, established in Bombay in 1838, and the Calcutta Statesman (which began life in 1875, but incorporated the Friend of India which was founded in 1818) soon established themselves as reliable pillars of the establishment, solidly committed to British imperial interests but able to criticize the policies and actions of the government in a responsible manner. As the British expanded across northern India, The Pioneer established itself in Lucknow as the third in a colonial triumvirate of newspapers whose views could be taken as broadly representative of the British community in

The Bombay Samachar, in Gujarati, was founded in 1822 (it is still running, and proudly calls itself the oldest newspaper in Asia still in print) and a few decades later, two Bengali-owned newspapers followed suit in Calcutta, The Bengalee in 1879 (later purchased, and edited for thirty-seven years, by Surendra Nath Banerjea after he left the ICS) and the formidable Amrita Bazar Patrika in 1868 (which, after being founded as a Bengali-language publication, then became a bilingual weekly for a time, before turning into an English-language newspaper in 1878 to advocate nationalist interests. The Amrita Bazar Patrika became a formidable pro-Congress voice and survived till the late twentieth century, before closing in 1986). Other English-language, Indian-owned newspapers addressed themselves to Indian readers but in the awareness that their views would be paid attention to by the colonial authorities; this made them increasingly influential in the freedom movement. Arguably the most notable of these was The Hindu in Madras, established as a weekly in 1878 and converted into a daily from 1889, which the British came to regard for a long time as the voice of responsible Indian opinion. (The Hindu’s first issue counted a grand total of eighty copies, printed with ‘one rupee and eight annas’ of borrowed money by a group of four law students and two teachers). In the early twentieth century, Indian nationalists began to establish newspapers explicitly to advocate their cause: the...

Some critics point out that the British can scarcely be blamed for the pre-existing divisions in Indian society, notably caste, which divided (and still divides) the majority Hindu population into mutually exclusive and often incompatible social stratifications. Fair enough, but it is also true that the British, knowingly or unknowingly, helped solidify and perpetuate the iniquities of the caste system. Since the British came from a hierarchical society with an entrenched class system, they instinctively tended to look for a similar system in India. They began by anatomizing Indian society into ‘classes’ that they referenced as being ‘primarily religious’ in nature. They then seized upon caste. But caste had not been a particularly stable social structure in the pre-British days; though there were, of course, variants across time and place, caste had broadly been a mobile form of social organization constantly shaped and reinvented by the beliefs, the politics and quite often the economic interests of the dominant men of the times. The British, however, promulgated the theory that caste hierarchy and discrimination influenced the workings of Indian society. This is arguably a very narrow definition of how Indian society actually functioned in the pre-British era, and it is thanks to colonial rule that it has now become conventional wisdom.

The resulting output was an ‘Anglo-Brahminical’ text that arguably violated in both letter and spirit the actual practice: in letter, because it was imprecise in regard to the originals, and in spirit, because the pandits proceeded to take advantage of the assignment to favour their own caste, by interpreting and even creating sacrosanct ‘customs’ that in fact had no shastric authority. This served to magnify the problem of caste hierarchy in the country. Prior to this, scholars argue, disputes in Indian civil society were settled by jati or biradri, i.e. a person’s fate was decided within a community or clan by his own peers in accordance with their local traditions and values and without needing approval from any higher caste authority. The pandits, instead of reflecting this widespread practice, cited doctrinal justifications from long-neglected texts to enshrine their status as the only authority figures, and most of the British took them at their word. (Some had their doubts. The most learned of British Orientalists, William Jones, who in 1797 founded the Asiatic Society in Calcutta and served in the Supreme Court of Judicature, remarked, ‘I can no longer bear to be at the Mercy of our pandits who deal out Hindu Law as they please, and make it at reasonable rates, when they cannot find it ready made’. But Jones died tragically young and his wisdom was not replicated in his successors.)

Just as ‘Brahmin’ became a sought-after designation enshrining social standing, the census definition of an individual’s caste tended to seal the fate of any ‘Shudra’, by fixing his identity across the entire country. Whereas prior to British rule the Shudra had only to leave his village and try his fortunes in a different princely state in India where his caste would not have followed him, colonialism made him a Shudra for life, wherever he was.

In the old days, any individual with the height and musculature required could make a livelihood as a warrior, whatever his caste background. In British India, this was far more difficult, if not impossible, since entire regiments were constructed on the basis of caste identities.

Indians questioned by Risley’s team predictably asserted both their caste identities and their entitlement to special privileges over other castes, accentuating the very differences the British wanted to see and had brought to the fore. By so doing they sought benefits for their group—admission to certain military regiments, for instance, or scholarships to some educational institutions—at the expense of, or equal to, others. Such caste competition had been largely unknown in pre-British days;

Indeed, for all the British encouragement, the Muslims of India as a whole did not think of their futures as anything but entwined with their Hindu compatriots. It is striking that, as late as 1918, in his most substantial book on ‘the Indian question’, the Aga Khan articulated a vision of India as a confluence of four civilizations —‘Western’, ‘Far Eastern’, ‘Brahmanical’ and ‘Mohamedan’—and expressed an ‘Indian patriotism’ that assumed close understanding between Hindus and Muslims (including a common desire for India, rather than Britain, to colonize East Africa!) Similarly, he is dismissive of ‘political Pan-Islamism’, speaking of Islam as a social, cultural and spiritual force that unites believers morally around the world, but stressing that ‘religion has more and more become a spiritual force in the modern world, and less and less a temporal one.

Thus the British can be largely blamed for the creation of previously non-existent Shia-Sunni tensions within the Muslim population of Lucknow. Prior to the British annexation of Oude (Avadh), the two sects had lived in harmony under a Shia nawab, whose celebrations of the Shia festival of Muharram had included Sunnis and Hindus as well in a public affirmation of his people’s fraternity. Once the British had deposed the nawab in 1856, the unifying symbol of the throne was lost, and the relationship between the ruling Shia nobility and the non-Shia subjects of the kingdom (Sunnis and Hindus) irrevocably transformed.

The British-sponsored Shia-Sunni divide in Lucknow is one of the clearest examples of how the British encouraged differences, and how Indians sought to create communities that the Raj would recognize and to which it would give political weight.

defying Salt March, the British felt obliged to grant improved measures of self-governance through the Government of India Act, 1935. Even then, however, the franchise was extended to less than 10 per cent of the population and, as before, Indians voted not as citizens of a single country but as members of different religious groups, with Muslim voters choosing Muslim members from a reserved list—a further confirmation of divide et impera. Separate electorates were part of the British attempt to thwart Mahatma Gandhi’s mass politics, which for the first time had created a common national consciousness not just among the educated elite who had formerly dominated the Congress but amongst the general public he had successfully mobilized. The British decision to declare the community then known as ‘Untouchables’ (today as Dalits, or more bureaucratically as ‘Scheduled Castes’) to be a minority community entitled to separate representation, distinct from other Hindus, in a new category called the ‘Depressed Classes’, was seen by Indian nationalists as a ploy to divide the majority community in furtherance of imperial interests. Dalits, in turn, saw the nationalist movement as dominated by the same ‘upper’ castes that had long discriminated against them, and Dalit leaders like Ambedkar, a brilliant constitutional scholar who had risen from hard-scrabble poverty by sheer dint of merit, embraced separate electorates as a means of asserting their right to choose their own represent...

Disdaining the populism and the mass appeal of Gandhi, Jinnah had retreated to his law practice in England, only to return, after a long political sulk, as the leader determined to take the Muslim League towards separatism. Jinnah began to claim that India’s Muslims represented a nation unto themselves: ‘We are different beings,’ he declared in barefaced denial of his entire upbringing, career, social relations and personal life. ‘There is nothing in life which links us together. Our names, our clothes, our foods—they are all different; our economic life, our educational idea, our treatment of women, our attitude to animals… We challenge each other at every point of the compass.’ For the Savile Row-suit-wearing, sausage-eating, whisky-swilling Jinnah to go on about clothes and food was a bit rich, as was the reference to women’s habits coming from the lips of a man who had been famously indulgent of his young wife’s scandalously ‘bold’ attire.

The 1937 elections saw the Indian National Congress being elected to rule eight provinces; the party won an astonishing 617 of the 739 ‘general’ seats it contested, and even 25 of the 59 seats reserved exclusively for Muslims. Several other parties, and 385 Independents, also won seats. Trailing a distant second to the Congress was the Muslim League, which failed to win even a plurality of the seats reserved for Muslims, winning just 106 of the 1,585 seats at stake and failing to take control of any province. The domestic political contest, it seemed, had been decisively settled in favour of the inclusive, pluralist, multi-ethnic party, the Congress. But those who saw it that way had spoken too soon. The Congress’s victory was far from determinant. Though the elections involved some 15.5 million voters and marked a significant step forward in the creation of representative governance, most key powers were still retained by the viceroy, and no elections were held to the central government, which continued to be run by him.

The decision was taken on a point of principle, but politically it proved a monumental blunder. It deprived the Congress of their only leverage with the British government, cast aside the fruits of their electoral success, and presented Jinnah with a golden opportunity. He broke off talks with the Congress—declaring the day of the Congress resignations a ‘day of deliverance’—and turned to the viceroy instead. Two years in the political wilderness after the electoral setbacks of 1937 had already transformed the League. Congress rule in many provinces had unwittingly increased Muslim concern, even alarm, about the implications of democratic majoritarian rule in a country so overwhelmingly Hindu.

Many Muslims began to see themselves as a political and economic minority, and the League spoke to their insecurities. Jinnah had begun to come to the conclusion that the only effective answer to the Congress’s political strength would be separation—the partition of the country to create an independent state in the Muslim-majority areas of the northwest and east. This demand would be enshrined in the League’s Lahore Resolution of 23 March 1940 calling for the creation of Pakistan.

it is the British empire itself that is on trial before the bar of the world’),

American sympathy was matched by that of the Labour Party in the War Cabinet. Clement Attlee persuaded his colleagues to send the socialist Sir Stafford Cripps to India in early 1942 with an offer of Dominion status after the war, with the possibility of partition. Cripps

Churchill had strong views on Gandhi. Commenting on the Mahatma’s meeting with the Viceroy of India, 1931, he had notoriously declared: ‘It is alarming and nauseating to see Mr Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well known in the east, striding half naked up the steps of the viceregal palace, while he is still organising and conducting a campaign of civil disobedience, to parlay on equal terms with the representative of the Emperor-King.’

On 7 August 1942 in Bombay, the All-India Congress Committee, at Gandhi’s urging, adopted a resolution moved by Nehru, and seconded by Patel, calling upon Britain to—in a journalistic paraphrase that became more famous than the actual words of the resolution—‘Quit India’. (Gandhi’s own preferred phrase was ‘Do or Die’.) Within thirty-six hours the Congress leaders were arrested.

Gandhi ‘should not be released on the account of a mere threat of fasting’, Churchill told the Cabinet. ‘We should be rid of a bad man and an enemy of the Empire if he died.’ He was quite prepared to facilitate the process, suggesting that the Mahatma should be ‘bound hand and foot at the gates of Delhi, and let the viceroy sit on the back of a giant elephant and trample [the Mahatma] into the dirt.’

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. They paved the way for the triumph of the Muslim League.

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 reality that Jinnah and the Muslim League could now legitimately claim a popular mandate to speak for the majority of India’s Muslims.

Nonetheless, when the Cabinet Mission proposed a three-tier plan for India’s governance, with a weak centre (limited to defence, external affairs and communications), autonomous provinces (with the right of secession after five years) and groups of provinces (at least one of which would be predominantly Muslim), the League accepted the proposal, even though it meant giving up the idea of a sovereign Pakistan.

Meanwhile, the problem of the Cabinet Mission’s proposed government remained to be addressed. Both Congress and the League had accepted the plan in principle; the details were yet to be agreed upon. Nehru, newly restored to the presidency of the Congress, chaired a meeting of the (AICC in Bombay at which he rashly interpreted Congress’s acceptance of the plan as meaning that ‘we are not bound by a single thing except that we have decided to go into the Constituent Assembly’. The implications of his statement were still being parsed when he repeated it at a press conference immediately afterwards, adding that ‘we are absolutely free to act’. Nehru stated specifically that he did not think the grouping of provinces, so important to the League, would necessarily survive a free vote. An incensed Jinnah reacted by withdrawing the League’s acceptance of the Cabinet Mission Plan.

but Jinnah proved obdurate: he was determined to obtain Pakistan. The Muslim League leader declared 16 August 1946 as ‘Direct Action Day’ to drive home this demand. Thousands of Muslim Leaguers took to the streets in an orgy of violence, looting and mayhem, and 16,000 innocents were killed in the resulting clashes, particularly in Calcutta.

Nonetheless, on 29 January 1947, the Muslim League Working Committee passed a resolution asking the British government to declare that the Cabinet Mission Plan had failed, and to dissolve the assembly. The Congress members of the interim government in turn demanded that the League members, having rejected the Plan, resign. Amid the shambles of their policy, the British government announced that they would withdraw from India, come what may, no later than June 1948, and that to execute the transfer of power, Wavell would be replaced.

As the impasse in the interim government continued, Mountbatten and his advisers drew up a ‘Plan Balkan’ that would have transferred power to the provinces rather than to a central government, leaving them free to join a larger union (or not). The British kept Nehru in the dark while Plan Balkan was reviewed (and revised) in London—all the more ironic for an empire that liked to claim it had unified India.

The only exception was Mahatma Gandhi: 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.

There is no doubt that Mountbatten seemed to proceed with unseemly haste, picking a much earlier date than planned—15 August, a date he chose on a whim because it was the date he had accepted the Japanese surrender as Supreme Allied Commander in Southeast Asia—and that in so doing he swept the Indian leaders along. Nehru was convinced that Jinnah was capable of setting the country ablaze and destroying all that the nationalist movement had worked for: a division of India was preferable to its destruction. ‘It is with no joy in my heart that I commend these proposals,’ Nehru told his party, ‘though I have no doubt in my mind that it is the right course.’ The distinction between heart and head was poignant, and telling.

On 3 June, Nehru, Jinnah, and the Sikh leader Baldev Singh broadcast news of their acceptance of partition to the country. The occasion again brought out the best in Nehru: ‘We are little men serving a great cause,’ he said. ‘Mighty forces are at work in the world today and in India… [It is my hope] that in this way we shall reach that united India sooner than otherwise and that she will have a stronger and more secure fo...

The British tended to base their refusal to intervene in famines with adequate governmental measures on a combination of three sets of considerations: free trade principles (do not interfere with market forces), Malthusian doctrine (growth in population beyond the ability of the land to sustain it would inevitably lead to deaths, thereby restoring the ‘correct’ level of population) and financial prudence (don’t spend money we haven’t budgeted for). On these grounds, Britain had not intervened to save lives in Ireland, or prevent emigration to America, during the famine there. In the mid-nineteenth century, as Dinyar Patel points out, ‘it was common economic wisdom that government intervention in famines was unnecessary and even harmful. The market would restore a proper balance. Any excess deaths, according to Malthusian principles, were nature’s way of responding to overpopulation’.

Recent work by Professor Clare Anderson has established the extent of the horrors: in just one year, 1856-57, and on one route, Kolkata to Trinidad, the percentage of deaths of indentured labour on the transportee ships reached appalling levels: 12.3 per cent of all males, 18.5 per cent of the females, 28 per cent of the boys and 36 per cent of the girls perished, as did a tragic 55 per cent of all infants. To make an admittedly invidious comparison, the deaths of slaves on the notorious ‘Middle Passage’ was estimated at around 12.5 per cent.

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.’

The construction of the Indian Railways is often pointed to by apologists for Empire as one of the ways in which British colonialism benefited the subcontinent, ignoring the obvious fact that many countries also built railways without having to go to the trouble and expense of being colonized to do so. But the facts are even more damning.

It was a splendid racket for everyone, apart from the Indian taxpayer. In terms of a secure return, Indian railway shares offered twice as much as the British government’s own stock. Guaranteed Indian railway shares absorbed up to a fifth of British portfolio investment in the twenty years to 1870—the first line opened in 1853—but only 1 per cent of it originated in India. Britons made the money, controlled the technology and supplied all the equipment, which meant once again that the profits were repatriated. It was a scheme described at the time as ‘private enterprise at public risk’. All the losses were borne by the Indian people, all the gains pocketed by the British trader—even as he penetrated by rail deep into the Indian economy.