Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India

by Shashi Tharoor

Indeed, the best form of atonement by the British might be, as Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has suggested, to start teaching unromanticized colonial history in British schools. The British public is woefully ignorant of the realities of the British empire, and what it meant to its subject peoples.

‘[W]hen we kill people,’ a British sea-captain says in the Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies, ‘we feel compelled to pretend that it is for some higher cause. It is this pretence of virtue, I promise you, that will never be forgiven by history.’

At the beginning of the eighteenth century, as the British economic historian Angus Maddison has demonstrated, India’s share of the world economy was 23 per cent, as large as all of Europe put together. (It had been 27 per cent in 1700, when the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb’s treasury raked in £100 million in tax revenues alone.) By the time the British departed India, it had dropped to just over 3 per cent. The reason was simple: India was governed for the benefit of Britain. Britain’s rise for 200 years was financed by its depredations in India.

Britain’s Industrial Revolution was built on the destruction of India’s thriving manufacturing industries.

As British manufacturing grew, they went further. Indian textiles were remarkably cheap—so much so that Britain’s cloth manufacturers, unable to compete, wanted them eliminated. The soldiers of the East India Company obliged, systematically smashing the looms of some Bengali weavers and, according to at least one contemporary account (as well as widespread, if unverifiable, belief), breaking their thumbs so they could not ply their craft.

India’s share of world manufacturing exports fell from 27 per cent to 2 per cent under British rule. Exports from Britain to India, of course, soared, as India’s balance of trade reversed and a major exporting nation became an importer of British goods forced upon the Indian market duty-free while British laws and regulations strangled Indian products they could not have fairly competed against for quality or price.

The British extracted from India approximately £18,000,000 each year between 1765 and 1815. ‘There are few kings in Europe’, wrote the Comte de Châtelet, French ambassador to London, ‘richer than the Directors of the English East India Company.’

Taxation by the Company—usually at a minimum of 50 per cent of income—was so onerous that two-thirds of the population ruled by the British in the late eighteenth century fled their lands. Durant writes that ‘[tax] defaulters were confined in cages, and exposed to the burning sun; fathers sold their children to meet the rising rates’. Unpaid taxes meant being tortured to pay up, and the wretched victim’s land being confiscated by the British. The East India Company created, for the first time in Indian history, the landless peasant, deprived of his traditional source of sustenance.

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.

The extensive and detailed calculations of William Digby, the British writer, pointed to the diminishing prosperity of the Indian people and the systematic expropriation of India’s wealth by Britain—including the telling fact that the salary of the Secretary of State for India in 1901, paid for by Indian taxes, was equivalent to the average annual income of 90,000 Indians.

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

If India’s GDP went down because it ‘missed the bus’ of industrialization, it was because the British threw Indians under the wheels.

It is also pertinent to nail the canard that whatever the deficiencies of the Company, its rule was no worse than the supposedly rapacious princes whom the British supplanted. This is simply false.

Jawaharlal Nehru put it sharply: the Indian Civil Service, he said, was ‘neither Indian, nor civil, nor a service

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.’

It was only when World War I drove thousands of young British men to officer duty in the trenches rather than service in the Empire that the British grudgingly realized the need to recruit more Indians, and the numbers of Indians in the ICS slowly inched upwards in the last three decades of the Raj.

William Makepeace Thackeray spoke of the need to suppress ‘haughtiness’, ‘deep thought’ and ‘independence’ of spirit in India: ‘they are directly adverse to our powers and interest. We do not want generals, statesmen and legislators. We want industrious husbandmen’. The result, of course, was racist discrimination in every sphere.

Contrary to stereotype, a surprising number of company men responded to India by slowly shedding their Britishness like an unwanted skin and adopting Indian dress and taking on the ways of the Mughal governing class they came to replace’. Salman Rushdie has called this ‘chutnification’; Dalrymple dubs the practitioners of this approach ‘White Mughals’.

As many as 74,187 Indian soldiers died during World War I and a far higher number were wounded. Their stories, and their heroism, were largely omitted from British popular histories of the war, or relegated to the footnotes.

Never in the history of the world was such a hoax perpetrated upon a great people as England perpetrated upon India, when in return for India’s invaluable service during the War, we gave to the Indian nation such a discreditable, disgraceful, undemocratic, tyrannical constitution.

When an Indian boy was shot dead by Lieutenants Thompson and Neave in Bangalore and Indian villagers forcibly confiscated Neave’s gun, it was two of the villagers who were sentenced to six months’ imprisonment for the crime of misappropriating the white man’s weapon, whereas the murderers went unpunished. Indeed the case was filed as an incident of ‘Natives Against Europeans’.

Racial discrimination was legal: as we have seen, in addition to private clubs that were open only to whites, many British hotels and other establishments sported signs saying ‘Indians and dogs not allowed’. (It was the experience of being expelled from one of them, Watson’s Hotel in Bombay, that led Jamsetji Tata to build one of the world’s finest and most opulent hotels of its time, the Taj Mahal, which was open to Indians.)

Similarly, Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, enacted in 1860, criminalizes ‘carnal intercourse against the order of nature’—a term so archaic that it would invite derision in most modern societies. There had never been a taboo against homosexuality in Indian culture and social practice—until the British Victorians introduced one.

One of the worst legacies of colonialism is that its ill effects outlasted the Empire.

The creation and perpetuation of Hindu–Muslim antagonism was the most significant accomplishment of British imperial policy: the project of divide et impera would reach its culmination in the horrors of Partition that eventually accompanied the collapse of British authority in 1947.

But when Germany’s invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939 led Britain to declare war upon it, Indians noted the irony of the English fighting to defend the sovereignty of a weak country resisting the brute force of foreign conquest—precisely what Indian nationalists were doing against British imperialism. So Britain would fight Germany for doing to Poland what Britain had been doing to India for nearly two hundred years.

Nehru hoped in vain for some policy declaration by the British that would enable him to commit India to the Allied cause, but the reactionary Churchill and his blinkered representatives in New Delhi went the other way, with Churchill (whose subsequent beatification as an apostle of freedom seems all the more preposterous) explicitly declaring that the principles of the Atlantic Charter would not apply to India.

In such matters Churchill was the most reactionary of Englishmen, with views so extreme they cannot be excused as being reflective of their times: in fact Churchill’s statements appalled most of his contemporaries.

It is a bit rich, as I pointed out in Oxford, for the British to suppress, exploit, imprison, torture and maim a people for 200 years and then celebrate the fact that they are a democracy at the end of it.

what political unity can we celebrate when the horrors of Partition were the direct result of the deliberate British policy of communal division that fomented religious antagonisms to facilitate continued imperial rule?

If Britain’s greatest accomplishment was the creation of a single political unit called India, fulfilling the aspirations of visionary emperors from Ashoka to Akbar, then its greatest failure must be the shambles of that original Brexit—cutting and running from the land they had claimed to rule for its betterment, leaving behind a million dead, thirteen million displaced, billions of rupees of property destroyed, and the flames of communal hatred blazing hotly across the rav...

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.

During the very 1866 Orissa Famine that would so disturb Salisbury’s sleep, while a million and a half people starved to death, the British insouciantly exported 200 million pounds of rice to Britain.

‘London was eating India’s bread’ while Indians were dying in a famine. To add insult to injury, the British increased taxes on the peasantry, and railed against those too hungry to be productive as ‘indolent’ and ‘unused to work’. When some Englishmen of conscience objected and mounted relief operations of their own, the British government threatened them with imprisonment.

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 brutal force used to repress the Quit India movement in 1942 involved tactics that, in the words of a British governor, if ‘dragged out in the cold light of [day], nobody could defend’. Gang rape by the police was not uncommon: 73 women were violated by police in a bid to terrorize the satyagrahis, prisoners were forced to lie naked on blocks of ice till they lost consciousness, and thousands were beaten in jail.

The Jallianwala Bagh massacre was no act of insane frenzy but a conscious, deliberate imposition of colonial will. Dyer was an efficient killer rather than a crazed maniac; his was merely the evil of the unimaginative, the brutality of the military bureaucrat.

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.

As Durant pointed out, the railways were built, after all, for ‘the purposes of the British army and British trade … Their greatest revenue comes, not, as in America, from the transport of goods (for the British trader controls the rates), but from third-class passengers—the Hindus; but these passengers are herded into almost barren coaches like animals bound for the slaughter, twenty or more to one compartment …’

‘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.

Since educating Indians was not a major British priority, it did not attract eminent Britons, and from early in the twentieth century, academia became the one available avenue for Indian advancement. With very few exceptions, the vice-chancellors of the main public universities after the 1890s were Indians, though inevitably most were staunch defenders of British imperial rule.

The study of history was not only Anglo-centric, it was deliberately designed to impress upon the student the superiority of all things British, and the privilege of being the subject of a vast Empire, whose red stain spread across a map of the world on which the sun never set. (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.)

By the late nineteenth century, English education had indeed created a class of Anglophone Indians well-versed in the literature, philosophy and political ideas of the British; but, as we have seen, when they began to clamour for rights, and access to positions that they believed their education had qualified them for, they met with stubborn resistance.

I am grateful, in other words, for the joys the English language has imparted to me, but not for the exploitation, distortion and deracination that accompanied its acquisition by my countrymen.

The British grew tea in India for themselves, not for the locals: the light, fragrant Darjeeling, the robust Assam, the heady Nilgiris tea, all reflected the soil, climate and geography of the respective parts of India for which they were named, but they were grown by Scottish planters (and picked by woefully underpaid Indian labourers) to be shipped to the mother country, where demand was strong.

It was only during the Great Depression of the 1930s—when demand in Britain dropped and British traders had to unload their stocks—that they thought of selling their produce to the Indians they’d ignored for a century. The Indian masses turned to tea with delight, and the taste for it spread throughout the Depression and the War years. Today, tea can be found in the remotest Indian village, and Indians drink more black tea than the rest of the world combined.

This practice of slashing trees to protect the poppy indirectly almost wiped out some of India’s most magnificent predators. The British wanted more land to be used for commercial crops, which would bring them revenue, so they put a bounty on the head of each predator, successfully erasing tigers, cheetahs, leopards and lions from vast parts of India.

By destroying the forests, the British also broke the spirit of the aboriginal people or ‘tribals’ who lived in and utilized the natural resources of the forests. Unfortunately, their ownership of forest lands was traditional rather than documented; since they could not claim ownership in a form the British recognized, they were dispossessed and displaced, and attempts to maintain their hunter-gatherer lifestyle resulted in them being treated as poachers and therefore criminals.

Tata, the Indian business conglomerate, now owns Tetley, the venerable British tea firm. So perhaps, in the ubiquitous references to ‘chai’ everywhere in the country, and in the milky, sweetened cups of tea that Indians thrust on every visitor, it is we who have appropriated this colonial legacy and made it our own.

Cricket reflects and transcends India’s diversity: the Indian team has been led by captains from each of its major faiths, Hindus, Muslims, Parsis, Christians and a colourful Sikh. A land divided by caste, creed, colour, culture, cuisine, custom and costume is united by a great conviction: cricket.