An Era of Darkness Quotes

“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”
― Shashi Tharoor, An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India

“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, semifeudal 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.”
― Shashi Tharoor, An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India

“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”
― Shashi Tharoor, An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India

“India is my country, and in that sense my outrage is personal.”
― Shashi Tharoor, An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India

“I do not look to history to absolve my country of the need to do things right today. Rather I seek to understand the wrongs of yesterday, both to grasp what has brought us to our present reality and to understand the past for itself. The past is not necessarily a guide to the future, but it does partly help explain the present. One cannot, as I have written elsewhere, take revenge upon history; history is its own revenge. One”
― Shashi Tharoor, An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India

“Indians paid, in other words, for the privilege of being conquered by the British.”
― Shashi Tharoor, An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India

“When we kill people, 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.”
― Shashi Tharoor, An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India

“It was not just the maharajas who had to suffer: every Indian schoolchild must lament the influence of the British dress code on Indians—especially the tie as a permanent noose around the necks of millions of schoolchildren, in India’s sweltering heat, even today.”
― Shashi Tharoor, An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India

“When an Englishman wants something, George Bernard Shaw observed, he never publicly admits to his wanting it; instead, his want is expressed as ‘a burning conviction that it is his moral and religious duty to conquer those who possess the thing he wants’. Durant is scathing about this pretence: ‘Hypocrisy was added to brutality, while the robbery went on.’ And”
― Shashi Tharoor, An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India

“History, in any case, cannot be reduced to some sort of game of comparing misdeeds in different eras; each period must be judged in itself and for its own successes and transgressions. The”
― Shashi Tharoor, An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India

“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.”
― Shashi Tharoor, An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India

“History belongs in the past; but understanding it is the duty of the present.”
― Shashi Tharoor, An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India

“India’s rape law, enshrined in the colonial-era Indian Penal Code, placed the burden of the victim to establish her ‘good character’ and prove that a rape had occurred, which left her open to discredit by opposing counsel. Many rapes were never reported as a result of the humiliation to which this system subjected the victims.”
― Shashi Tharoor, An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India

“but as an Indian, I find it far easier to forgive than to forget.”
― Shashi Tharoor, An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India

“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.”
― Shashi Tharoor, Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India

“We literally paid for our own oppression.”
― Shashi Tharoor, An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India

“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.”
― Shashi Tharoor, Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India

“When a marauder destroys your house and takes away your cash and jewellery , his responsibility for his actions far exceeds that of the servant who opened door to him, whether out of fear, cupidity or because he simply he didn't know any better.”
― Shashi Tharoor, An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India

“As I was typing this last sentence, somewhat hastily, my computer’s spellcheck offered ‘Brutish’ as an acceptable substitute for ‘British’ rule in India!”
― Shashi Tharoor, An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India

“Pakistan was created by Jinnah’s will and Britain’s willingness’—not by Nehru’s wilfulness.”
― Shashi Tharoor, An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India

“Colonialism was made possible, and then sustained and strengthened, as much by cultural technologies of rule as it was by the more obvious and brutal modes of conquest that first established power on foreign shores… Colonialism was itself a cultural project of control.”
― Shashi Tharoor, An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India

“The British conquest of India was the invasion and destruction of a high civilization by a trading company [the British East India Company] utterly without scruple or principle, careless of art and greedy of gain, over-running with fire and sword a country temporarily disordered and helpless, bribing and murdering, annexing and stealing, and beginning that career of illegal and ‘legal’ plunder which has now [1930] gone on ruthlessly for one hundred and seventy-three years.”
― Shashi Tharoor, Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India

“With the absorption of each native state, the (East India) company official John Sullivan observed in 1840s: "The little court disappears--the capital decays--trade languishes--the capital decays--the people are impoverished--the Englishman flourishes, and acts like a sponge, drawing up riches from the banks of the Ganges, and squeezing them down upon the banks of the Thames.”
― Shashi Tharoor, An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India

“I do not look to history to absolve my country of the need to do things right today. I seek to understand the wrongs of yesterday, both to grasp what has brought us to our present reality and to understand the past for itself.”
― Shashi Tharoor, An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India

“History belongs to the past, but understanding it is the duty of the present”
― Shashi Tharoor, An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India

“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 supplied by Indian taxpayers. The”
― Shashi Tharoor, An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India

“Half of India’s revenues went out of India, mainly to England. Indian taxes paid not only for the British Indian Army in India, which was ostensibly maintaining India’s security, but also for a wide variety of foreign colonial expeditions in furtherance of the greater glory of the British empire, from Burma to Mesopotamia. In 1922, for instance, 64 per cent of the total revenue of the Government of India was devoted to paying for British Indian troops despatched abroad. No other army in the world, as Durant observed at the time, consumed so large a proportion of public revenues.”
― Shashi Tharoor, An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India

“In looking to understand the forces that have made us and nearly unmade us, and in hoping to recognize possible future sources of conflict in the new millennium, we have to realize that sometimes the best crystal ball is a rearview mirror.”
― Shashi Tharoor, Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India

“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.”
― Shashi Tharoor, Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India

“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.”
― Shashi Tharoor, Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India