An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India

by Shashi Tharoor

Nor were Indians employed in the railways. The discriminatory hiring practices of the Indian Railways meant that key industrial skills were not effectively transferred to Indian personnel, which might have proved a benefit. The prevailing view was that the railways would have to be staffed almost exclusively by Europeans to ‘protect investments’. This was especially true of signalmen, and those who operated and repaired the steam trains, but the policy was extended to the absurd level that even in the early twentieth century all the key employees, from directors of the Railway Board to ticket-collectors, were white men—whose salaries and benefits were also paid at European, not Indian, levels and largely repatriated back to England. Moreover, when the policy was relaxed and expensive European labour reduced, there was a continuing search for the most ‘British-like’ workers. Thus came the long-lasting identification of the Anglo-Indian community with railway employment, since at first it was these Eurasians from military orphanages, the product of liaisons between British ‘other ranks’ and local Indian women, who were trained to do the jobs that only Europeans had been assumed to be capable of doing previously.

Of course the British did give India the English language, the benefits of which persist to this day. Or did they? The English language was not a deliberate gift to India, but again an instrument of colonialism, imparted to Indians only to facilitate the tasks of the English. In his notorious 1835 Minute on Education, Lord Macaulay articulated the classic reason for teaching English, but only to a small minority of Indians: ‘We must do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indians in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals and in intellect.’ The language was taught to a few to serve as intermediaries between the rulers and the ruled. That Indians seized the English language and turned it into an instrument for our own liberation—using it to express nationalist sentiments against the British, as R. C. Dutt, Dinshaw Wacha and Dadabhai Naoroji did in the late nineteenth century and Jawaharlal Nehru in the twentieth—was to their credit, not by British design.

Gauri Vishwanathan has done pioneering work on the role of the study of English literature in colonial India as a means of socializing and co-opting Indian elites during the early nineteenth century. Indeed, she argues that the very idea of English literature as a subject of study was first devised by the British in India to advance their colonial interests. It was not only that the English felt their literature would be a way of striking awe and respect for British civilization into the minds and hearts of the colonized Indians; it was also that the British colonists considered many of the great works of Indian literature to be ‘marked with the greatest immorality and impurity’—and that included Kalidas’s Shakuntala, described by Horace Wilson, the major nineteenth-century Sanskrit scholar, as the jewel of Indian literature, but disapproved of as a suitable text for study in Indian schools and colleges in British India.

(The sun never set on the British empire, an Indian nationalist later sardonically commented, because even God couldn’t trust the Englishman in the dark.)

A bill for universal compulsory primary education was indeed tabled by the ‘moderate’ Congress leader Gopal Krishna Gokhale in the legislative council of the Governor General in 1911 and another by Vithalbhai Patel in the same body in 1916, but both were defeated by the votes of the British and government-appointed members. What is less known, however, is that the bills were also opposed by the likes of Mahatma Gandhi and Surendra Nath Banerjea, staunch nationalists both. Gandhiji wrote in Hind Swaraj : ‘The ordinary meaning of education is knowledge of letters. To teach boys reading, writing and arithmetic is called primary education. A peasant earns his bread honestly. He has ordinary knowledge of the world. But he cannot write his own name. What do you propose to do by giving him a knowledge of letters? Will you add an inch to his happiness? It is not necessary to make this education compulsory. Our ancient school system is enough. We consider your modern school to be useless’. Fortunately, on this issue, Gandhiji’s somewhat eccentric views did not prevail. But perhaps his real objection was not to literacy and education as such, but to British education in particular. In 1937, when Congress ministries were elected in eight provinces and for the first time enjoyed control over education, Gandhi put forward a plan called the Wardha Scheme for Education, which envisaged seven years of basic education for rural children, including vocational training in village handicrafts...

Full credit, then, to the British. And this time it is difficult to argue that one could have had extensive tea cultivation and a vast market for the product without colonization: certainly Indians hadn’t ever done it before the British. Even the name is a colonial legacy.

The word ‘tea’, common to most European languages, is from the dialect of Amoy, from where much of Britain’s tea was shipped; but those who got their tea from Canton, like the Portuguese, and overland, like the Indians and the Arabs, call it by the Cantonese word ‘cha’. Almost every Indian language uses a variant of ‘cha’, including ‘chai’ and ‘chaya’; it is only the Anglophone Indians who speak of ‘tea’. But before I end this section on tea, a small digression. Even as they gave us tea, the British were destroying something else. The British ruthlessly exploited the land for profit, while ruining it and decimating the wildlife it sheltered. The destruction of Indian forests and wildlife occurred at a galloping pace under colonialism. The forests were destroyed for three main reasons: to convert the land into commercial plantations, especially to grow tea; to make railway sleepers; and to export timber to England for the construction of English houses and furniture.

except in the one corner of the country, in Gujarat, where an Indian prince, the Nawab of Junagadh, maintained a private lion sanctuary where hunting was permitted for his invitees only. This saved the Asiatic Lion to some extent—but this majestic animal, of whom several thousand flourished before the British came to India, was down to fewer than a hundred when the Empire ended.

The most expensive Indian tea, Castleton, was sold for over 6,000 rupees a kilo in 1991 ($231 at the then-prevailing exchange rate); the buyers were Japanese. The new record was set in 2012, when the price hit 7,200 rupees a kilo (but that meant it was down to $120 as the rupee had weakened). Castleton is the champagne of teas: other Indian teas do not fare a fraction as well.

Internationally, Indian tea is competing for export markets with inferior teas from such unlikely sources as Argentina, Kenya and Malawi. But then again—if Argentina could grow tea without the British having colonized them first, couldn’t India have done so as well?

Cricket is, of course, the only sport in the world that breaks for tea (and for many amateurs, tea is the highlight of the experience). I have often thought that cricket is really, in the sociologist Ashis Nandy’s phrase, an Indian game accidentally discovered by the British. Everything about the sport seems suited to the Indian national character: its rich complexity, the infinite possibilities and variations possible with each delivery, the dozen different ways of getting out, are all rather like Indian classical music, in which the basic laws are laid down but the performer then improvises gloriously, unshackled by anything so mundane as a written score. The glorious uncertainties of the game echo ancient Indian thought: Indian fatalists instinctively understand that it is precisely when you are seeing the ball well and timing your fours off the sweet of the bat that the unplayable shooter can come along and bowl you. It is almost, as has also been observed, a pastime in which the Bhagavad Gita is performed in the guise of a Victorian English morality play. A country where a majority of the population still consults astrologers and believes in the capricious influence of the planets can well appreciate a sport in which an ill-timed cloudburst, a badly-prepared pitch, a lost toss of a coin or the sun in the eyes of a fielder can transform the outcome of a game. Even the possibility that five tense, exciting, hotly-contested and occasionally meandering days of cricket can...

The sociologist Richard Cashman notes that Indian nationalism was less radical, in a cultural sense, than Irish nationalism. In Ireland, the nationalists and Home Rule agitators attacked cricket and other English sports as objectionable elements of colonial culture, and patronized ‘Gaelic sports’ instead. Indian nationalist leaders, on the other hand, ‘attacked the political and economic aspects of British imperialism but retained an affection for some aspects of English culture’. While traditional Indian sports like kabaddi languished in the colonial era, and polo was revived as a sport mainly for the British and a very narrow segment of the Indian aristocracy, cricket was seen as a sport where Indians could hold their own against the English. (This may explain why Ireland still has a very modest cricket team that is yet to earn ‘Test’ status, whereas India in the twenty-first century is one of the giants of the world game.)

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.

It must not be forgotten, after all, that the India the British entered was a wealthy, thriving and commercializing society: that was why the East India Company was interested in it in the first place. The Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama, who found his way around the Cape of Good Hope to Calicut (Kozhikode), rather breathlessly spoke to King Manuel I of Portugal of large cities, large buildings and rivers, and great and prosperous populations. He talked admiringly of spices and jewels, precious stones and ‘mines of gold’. The trinkets he offered were deemed unworthy gifts for the Indian monarch he offered them to, the Zamorin of Calicut; da Gama’s goods were openly mocked and scorned by merchants and courtiers accustomed to far higher quality items. Far from being backward or underdeveloped, as we have seen, precolonial India exported high quality manufactured goods much sought after by Britain’s fashionable society. The British elite wore Indian linen and silks, decorated their homes with Indian chintz and decorative textiles, and craved Indian spices and seasonings. (Indeed, there are tales of British manufacturers in the seventeenth century trying to pass off their wares as ‘Indian’ to entice customers into buying their poorer quality British-made imitations.) The annual revenues of the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb (1618-1707) were vast. Indeed, tax revenues aside, which I have mentioned earlier in the book, his total income at the time is said to have amounted to $450,00...

If there were positive by-products for Indians from the institutions the British established and ran in India in their own interests, I am happy to acknowledge them, but only as by-products, and not because they were intended to benefit Indians.

For, as I have pointed out repeatedly, behind everything lay one inescapable fact: unlike every previous conqueror of India (not counting transient raiders like Mahmud of Ghazni, Timur and Nadir Shah), unlike every other foreign overlord who stayed on to rule, the British had no intention of becoming one with the land. The French ruled foreign territories and made them French, assimilating them in a narrative of Frenchness; the Portuguese settled in their colonies and intermarried with the locals; but the British always stayed apart and aloof, a foreign presence, with foreign interests and foreign loyalties.

The Delhi Sultans and the Mughals may have arrived from abroad, and their progenitors might initially have harked back to distant cities in the Ferghana Valley as their idea of ‘home’, but they settled in India and retained no extraterritorial allegiance. They married women from India and diluted their foreign blood to the point that in a few generations no trace remained of their foreign ethnicity. Akbar’s son Jehangir was half-Rajput; Jehangir’s son Shah Jehan also came from an Indian bride; Aurangzeb was only one-eighth non-Indian. Of course, the Mughal emperors were all deeply aware of their connections to Ferghana; they would ask emissaries from there about the conditions of their ancestors’ Chingisid tombs and donate money for their upkeep. The past was part of the Mughal identity, but their conceptions of themselves in the present and for the future became more rooted and embedded in India. The British, in contrast, maintained racial exclusivity, practised discrimination against Indians and sneered at miscegenation.

The question never honestly confronted by the apologists of Empire is the classic ‘cui bono?’—who benefited from British imperial rule? The answer is evidently Britain itself.* Let’s look at the numbers one last time, widening the lens a little. A fascinating comparative chart of countries’ share of global GDP throughout history is instructive. In 1 CE, as Christianity lay literally in swaddling clothes, India accounted for 33 per cent of global GDP, while the UK, France and Germany combined scored barely 3 per cent. By 1700, the equivalent figures were 25 per cent and 11 per cent; by 1870, at Empire’s peak, 12.5 per cent for India and 22 per cent for the three European countries; in 1913, with India’s further impoverishment, 9 per cent versus 22.5 per cent. In 1950, just after the British left, India stood at 4 per cent; in 2008, this figure was above 7 per cent and climbing. The UK, France and Germany, having dropped to 16 per cent in 1950, are hovering at 9 per cent today. As of 2014 Britain accounted for 2.4 per cent of global GDP, down from 6 per cent twenty-five years ago. History administers its own correctives.

The fact that, despite all these wrongs and injustices, Indians readily forgave the British when they left, retaining with them a ‘special connection’ that often manifests itself in warmth and affection, says more about India than it does about any supposed benefits of the British Raj.

The Kohinoor was once the world’s largest diamond, weighing 793 carats or 158.6 grams, when it was first mined near Guntur in India’s present-day southern state of Andhra Pradesh by the Kakatiya dynasty in the thirteenth century. (It has been whittled down to a little over 100 carats over the centuries.) The Kakatiya kings installed it in a temple, which was raided by the Delhi Sultan Alauddin Khilji, who took it back to his capital along with other plundered treasures. It passed into the possession of the Mughal empire that established itself in Delhi in the sixteenth century, and in 1739 fell into the hands of the Persian invader Nadir Shah, whose loot from his conquest of Delhi (and decimation of its inhabitants) included the priceless Peacock Throne and the Kohinoor itself. It was Nadir Shah himself, or so legend has it, who baptized the diamond the Kohinoor, or ‘Mountain of Light’. An eighteenth-century Afghan queen memorably and colourfully stated, ‘if a strong man were to throw four stones, one north, one south, one east, one west and a fifth stone up into the air, and if the space between them were to be filled with gold, it would not equal the value of the Kohinoor’. Upon Nadir Shah’s death, the diamond fell into the hands of one of his generals, Ahmed Shah Durrani, who became the Emir of Afghanistan. One of Durrani’s descendants was then obliged to cede the Kohinoor in tribute to the powerful Sikh Maharaja of Punjab, Ranjit Singh, in 1809. But Ranjit Singh’s succ...

India’s independence marked the dawn of the era of decolonization, but many nations still came to freedom only after bloody and violent struggles. Other peoples have fallen under the boots of invading armies, been dispossessed of their lands or forced to flee in terror from their homes. Non-violence has offered no solutions to them. It could only work against opponents vulnerable to a loss of moral authority, governments responsive to domestic and international public opinion, governments capable of being shamed into conceding defeat. The British, representing a democracy with a free press and conscious of their international image, were susceptible to such shaming. But in Mahatma Gandhi’s own day non-violence could have done nothing for the Jews of Hitler’s Germany, who disappeared unprotestingly into gas chambers far from the flashbulbs of a war-obsessed press. It is ironically to the credit of the British Raj that it faced an opponent like Mahatma Gandhi and allowed him to succeed.

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.

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.

But it’s not just the direct results of colonialism that remain relevant: there are the indirect ones as well. The intellectual history of colonialism is littered with many a wilful cause of more recent conflict. One is, quite simply, careless anthropology: the Belgian classification of Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda and Burundi, which solidified a distinction that had not existed before, continues to haunt the region of the African Great Lakes. A related problem is that of motivated sociology: how much bloodshed do we owe, for instance, to the British invention of ‘martial races’ in India, which skewed recruitment into the armed forces and saddled some communities with the onerous burden of militarism? And one can never overlook the old colonial administrative habit of ‘divide and rule’, exemplified, again, by British policy in the subcontinent after 1857, systematically promoting political divisions between Hindus and Muslims, which led almost inexorably to the tragedy of Partition.

Boundaries drawn in colonial times, even if unchanged after independence, still create enormous problems of national unity. We have been reminded of this in Iraq, whose creation from the ruins of the Ottoman empire welded various incompatibilities into a single state. But the issue is much more evident in Africa, where civil conflict along ethnic or regional lines can arise when the challenge of nation building within colonially drawn boundaries becomes insurmountable.