An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India

by Shashi Tharoor

Did India, the land of the Vedas and the Upanishads, the country of the learned theological debates at Akbar’s court, the home of the ‘argumentative Indian’, really need British colonialism in order to be ‘regenerated’ by ‘reason’? The claim is breathtaking in its presumption. Taken together with Ferguson’s argument that economic benefits flowed from imperial rule, these Raj apologists are guilty of what might be described as an intellectual Indian rope-trick: they have climbed up their own premises. As Professor Richard Porter asks: ‘Why, for example, should one assume that eighteenth-century India could not have evolved its own economic path, with distributions of capital, labour and goods “optimal” in the eyes of its own elites, however different from the criteria of liberal western political economists?’ Porter, citing the detailed work of historians and scholars, questions the perceptions of Indian ‘backwardness’ advanced by those who see modernity as a gift of the West.