An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India

by Shashi Tharoor

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.’