Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India

by Shashi Tharoor

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. Indians literally paid for their own oppression.

This pageantry involved the British not merely exalting the principle of hierarchy in ensuring reverence for their own queen, but extending it to India, honouring ‘native princes’, ennobling others and promoting the invention of ersatz aristocratic tradition so as to legitimize their rule. Thus the British created a court culture that the princes had to follow, and a hierarchy that sought to show the Crown as successors of the Mughal emperor. The elaborately-graded gun salutes, from nine guns to nineteen (and in only five cases, twenty-one)6, depending on the importance, and cooperativeness, of the ruler in question; the regulation of who was and was not a ‘Highness’, and of what kind (the Nizam of Hyderabad went from being His Highness to His Exalted Highness during World War I, mainly because of his vast donation of money to the war effort); the careful lexicon whereby the ‘native chiefs’ (not ‘kings’), came from ‘ruling’, not ‘royal’, families, and their territories were ‘princely states’ not ‘kingdoms’—all these were part of an elaborate system of monarchical illusion-building.

The British in India were never more than 0.05 per cent of the population.

A list of major famines during British rule makes for grim reading: the Great Bengal Famine (1770), Madras (1782–83), Chalisa Famine (1783–84) in Delhi and the adjoining areas, Doji bara Famine (1791–92) around Hyderabad, Agra Famine (1837–38), Orissa Famine (1866), Bihar Famine (1873–74), Southern India Famine (1876–77), the Indian Famine (1896–1900 approx.), Bombay Famine (1905–06) and the most notorious of the lot, the Bengal Famine (1943–44).10 The fatality figures are horrifying: from 1770 to 1900, 25 million Indians are estimated to have died in famines, including 15 million in the five famines in the second half of the nineteenth century. The famines of the twentieth century probably took the total well over 35 million. William Digby pointed out that in the entire 107 years from 1793 to 1900, only an estimated 5 million people had died in all the wars around the world combined, whereas in just ten years 1891–1900, 19 million had died in India in famines alone. While comparisons of human deaths are always invidious, the 35 million who died of famine and epidemics during the Raj does remind one of the 25 million who died in Stalin’s collectivization drive and political purges, the 45 million who died during Mao’s cultural revolution, and the 55 million who died worldwide during World War II. The death toll from the colonial holocausts is right up there with some of the most harrowing examples of man’s inhumanity to man in modern times.

As we have seen, by the time it ended, 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?’

I have dwelt at length on famines because they offer such an outstanding example of British colonial malfeasance. One could have cited epidemic disease as well, which constantly laid Indians low under British rule while the authorities stood helplessly by. To take just the first four years of the twentieth century, as Durant did: 272,000 died of plague in 1901, 500,000 in 1902, 800,000 in 1903, and 1 million in 1904 the death toll rising every year. During the Spanish Influenza epidemic of 1918, 125 million cases of ‘flu were recorded (more than a third of the population), and India’s fatality rate was higher than any Western country’s: 12.5 million people died. As the American statesman (and three-time Democratic presidential candidate) William Jennings Bryan pointed out, many Britons were referring to the deaths caused by plague as ‘a providential remedy for overpopulation’. It was ironic, said Bryan, that British rule was sought to be justified on the grounds that ‘it keeps the people from killing each other, and the plague praised because it removes those whom the Government has saved from slaughter!’.

In the period 1519–1939, an estimated 5,300,000 people, whom scholars delicately dub ‘unfree migrants’, were carried on British ships, of whom approximately 58 per cent were slaves, mainly from Africa, 36 per cent were indentured labour, mainly from India, and 6 per cent were transported convicts, both from India and other colonies. If nothing else, this British endeavour, motivated as always by the simple exigencies of the colonial project, transformed the demography of dozens of countries, with consequences that can still be seen today.

At the beginning of the century, Ruskin declared that ‘every mutiny, every danger, every terror, and every crime, occurring under, or paralyzing, our Indian legislation, arises directly out of our national desire to live on the loot of India’.

the Jallianwala Bagh massacre.

Famine, forced migration and brutality: three examples of why British rule over India was despotic and anything but enlightened.

Alex von Tunzelmann’s clever start to her book Indian Summer made my point most tellingly: In the beginning, there were two nations. One was a vast, mighty and magnificent empire, brilliantly organized and culturally unified, which dominated a massive swath of the earth. The other was an undeveloped, semi-feudal realm, riven by religious factionalism and barely able to feed its illiterate, diseased and stinking masses. The first nation was India. The second was England.

The Pala period [between the eighth and the twelfth century CE], in particular, saw several monasteries emerge in what is now modern Bengal and Bihar, five of which—Vikramashila, Nalanda, Somapura Mahavihara, Odantapuri, and Jaggadala—were premier educational institutions which created a coordinated network amongst themselves under Indian rulers. Nalanda University, which enjoyed international renown when Oxford and Cambridge were not even gleams in their founders’ eyes, employed 2,000 teachers and housed 10,000 students in a remarkable campus that featured a library nine storeys tall. It is said that monks would hand-copy documents and books which would then become part of private collections of individual scholars. The university opened its doors to students from countries ranging from Korea, Japan, China, Tibet, and Indonesia in the east to Persia and Turkey in the west, studying subjects which included the fine arts, medicine, mathematics, astronomy, politics and the art of war.

Under the British, the universities remained largely examination-conducting bodies, while actual higher education was carried out in affiliated colleges, which offered a two-year BA course (following a year of intermediate studies after high school). The colleges, like the British schools in India, heavily emphasized rote learning, the regurgitation of which was what the examinations tested.

Still, the British higher education system did little to promote analytic capacity or creative thinking and certainly no independence of mind.

This was the country impoverished by British conquest. The India that succumbed to British rule enjoyed an enormous financial surplus, deployed a skilled artisan class, exported high-quality goods in great global demand, disposed of plenty of arable land, had a thriving agricultural base, and supported some 100 to 150 million without either poverty or landlessness. All of this was destroyed by British rule. As Wilson points out: ‘In 1750, Indians had a similar standard of living to people in Britain. Now, average Indian incomes are barely a tenth of the British level in terms of real purchasing power. It is no coincidence that 200 years of British rule occurred in the intervening time.’

Joseph Conrad, no radical himself, described colonialism as ‘a flabby, pretending, weak-eyed devil of a rapacious and pitiless folly’. As he wrote in 1902, ‘The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.’ Rabindranath Tagore put it gently to a Western audience in New York in 1930: ‘A great portion of the world suffers from your civilisation.’ Mahatma Gandhi was blunter: asked what he thought of Western civilization, he replied, ‘It would be a good idea’.

The East India Company ensured that both growing opium and selling it were to be British government monopolies. The facts were laid out in an 1838 account: Throughout all the territories within the Company’s jurisdiction, the cultivation of the poppy, the preparation of the drug, and the traffic in it, […] are under a strict monopoly…the growing of opium is compulsory on the part of the ryot. Advances are made by Government through its native servants, and if a ryot refuses the advance, ‘the simple plan of throwing the rupees into his house is adopted; should he attempt to abscond, the peons seize him, tie the advance up in his clothes, and push him into his house. The business being now settled, and there being no remedy, he applies himself, as he may, to the fulfilment of his contract…’14 The evils which the cultivation of opium entails upon our fellow-subjects in India, arise partly from the ryots in the opium districts of Patna and Benares being compelled to give up fixed portions of their lands for the production of the poppy.

Some 400,000 acres of fertile land were given over to opium cultivation; these could have produced food for malnourished Indians. When the elected Indian members of the impotent Central Legislature got their colleagues to pass a bill in 1921 prohibiting the growth or sale of opium in India, the government vetoed it by the simple expedient of refusing to act upon it, mindful, no doubt, of the fact that one-ninth of the government’s annual revenues came from drugs. When Mahatma Gandhi, no less, mounted a campaign against opium in Assam and succeeded in halving its consumption, the British responded by jailing him and forty-four of his satyagrahis.