Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India

by Shashi Tharoor

Scholars have demonstrated that one of the reasons why cricket acquired such a hold in Bengal society between 1880 and 1947 was as a way to discharge the allegation of effeminacy against the Bengali male by beating the English at their own game.

When Indians became good enough at cricket to win the occasional game, the British took care to divide them, organizing a ‘Quadrangular Tournament’ that pitted teams of Hindus, Muslims, Parsis and ‘the Rest’ against each other, so that even on the field of play, Indians would be reminded of the differences among them so assiduously promoted by colonial rule.

But human beings do not live in the long run; they live, and suffer, in the here and now, and the process of colonial rule in India meant economic exploitation and ruin to millions, the destruction of thriving industries, the systematic denial of opportunities to compete, the elimination of indigenous institutions of governance, the transformation of lifestyles and patterns of living that had flourished since time immemorial, and the obliteration of the most precious possessions of the colonized, their identities and their self-respect.

Rabindranath Tagore put it gently to a Western audience in New York in 1930: ‘A great portion of the world suffers from your civilisation.’

Then the British tore it apart through Partition. The poignant tale is told of Hindu and Muslim officers singing ‘Auld Lang Syne’ together at the army mess in Delhi at a farewell dinner for those who were leaving for the new country of Pakistan. For many of those officers, years of comradeship were irretrievably lost in the name of a faith they had been born into and a political cause they had not chosen.

The British did little, very little, of such things. They basked in the Indian sun and yearned for their cold and fog-ridden homeland; they sent the money they had taken off the perspiring brow of the Indian worker to England; and whatever little they did for India, they ensured India paid for it in excess. And at the end of it all, they went home to enjoy their retirements in damp little cottages with Indian names, their alien rest cushioned by generous pensions provided by Indian taxpayers.

[T]he British empire was essentially a Hitlerian project on a grand scale, involving military conquest and dictatorship, extermination and genocide, martial law and “special courts”, slavery and forced labour, and, of course, concentration camps and the transoceanic migration of peoples.’

The money exacted in taxes and exploitation has already been spent, and cannot realistically be reclaimed. But individual pieces of statuary sitting in British museums could be, if for nothing else than their symbolic value. After all, if looted Nazi-era art can be (and now is being) returned to their rightful owners in various Western countries, why is the principle any different for looted colonial treasures? Which brings me, inevitably, to the vexed issue of the Kohinoor in the Queen’s crown.

From the Parthenon Marbles to the Kohinoor, the British expropriation of the jewels of other countries’ heritage is a particular point of contention. Giving in on any one item could, the British fear, open Pandora’s box.

Still, flaunting the Kohinoor on the Queen Mother’s crown in the Tower of London is a powerful reminder of the injustices perpetrated by the former imperial power. Until it is returned—at least as a symbolic gesture of expiation—it will remain evidence of the loot, plunder and misappropriation that colonialism was really all about. Perhaps that is the best argument for leaving the Kohinoor where it emphatically does not belong—in British hands.

The major example is of Martin Luther King Jr., who attended a lecture on Gandhi, bought half a dozen books on him and adopted satyagraha as both precept and method. King,