An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India

by Shashi Tharoor

  When Jamsetji Tata tried to set up India’s first modern steel mill in the face of implacable British hostility at the turn of the century (he began petitioning the British for permission in 1883, and raised money from Indian investors; after repeated denials and delays it finally began production in 1912 under his son Dorabji), a senior imperial official sneered that he would personally eat every ounce of steel an Indian was capable of producing. It’s a pity he didn’t live to see the descendants of Jamsetji Tata taking over what remains of British Steel, through Tata’s acquisition of Corus in 2006: it might have given him a bad case of indigestion. (Tata Steel’s subsequent decision to pull out of Britain, and the British government’s frantic scurrying to salvage the detritus of its steel industry, might also prompt a soupçon of schadenfreude in some Indians.)

  When the Tatas went ahead anyway, inspiring other Indians, the British devised effective ways to curb their growth. The two biggest consumers of steel in India, the government and the railways (both controlled by the British) insisted on British Standard Specification Steel (BSSS), which was of much higher quality than the Non-British Standard Specification Steel (NBSSS) used by most of the rest of the world. The requirement for BSSS was originally designed to exclude cheaper continental steel from the colonial Indian market, but it also served to hamper Indian steelmakers. Domestic producers of steel in India, such as Tata, were forced to meet these higher standards or be excluded from contracts with the government and railways.

  By focusing on producing BSSS, as required by law, Indian firms could not simultaneously produce the cheaper NBSSS that was used throughout most of the non-British world. The high cost base of India’s domestic production as a result of BSSS production rendered Indian steel uncompetitive in the wider international market, both during the Great Depression and the late 1930s recovery. Other developing countries in a comparable situation to India in the 1930s developed their steel industries using NBSSS without major problems.

  They could, of course, export BSSS steel to Britain, which the British steel industry would not welcome. So restrictions were placed by Britain on Indian steel imports. The British demonstrated brilliantly that they could have their steel cake and eat it too.

  India was, in other words, forced to make and use steel that was surplus to its requirements, restricted in its ability to find overseas markets for it, and curbed in every attempt at expansion. Indian companies such as Tata Steel thus had few opportunities to grow within the British economic ecosystem.

  As we know, some apologists for British rule argue that the condemnation of Britain for its destruction of Indian industry and economic growth is unjustified. Britain, they claim, did not deindustrialize India; India’s share of world GDP merely went down because India ‘missed the bus’ for industrialization, failing to catch up on the technological innovations that transformed the West. India had a significant world share of GDP when the world was highly agrarian. As the world changed, they argue, other countries overtook India because of scientific and industrial progress that India was unable to make.

  That is a highly disputable proposition. As I have demonstrated, deindustrialization was a deliberate British policy, not an accident. British industry flourished and Indian industry did not because of systematic destruction abetted by tariffs and regulatory measures that stacked the decks in favour of British industry conquering the Indian market, rather than the other way around. The economic exploitation of India was integral to the colonial enterprise. And the vast sums of Indian revenues and loot flowing to England, even if they were somewhat less than the billions of pounds Digby estimated, provided the capital for British industry and made possible the financing of the Industrial Revolution.

  Left to itself, why wouldn’t existing Indian industry have modernized, as industry in other non-colonized countries did? None of those criticizing India’s lack of technological innovation can explain why a country that was at the forefront of innovation and industrial progress in other eras suddenly lost its ability to innovate in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I have touched upon the skills of Indian steelmakers and shipbuilders, but under other rulers and regimes that fostered innovation, Indians excelled at mathematics, physics, medicine, mining, metallurgy and even rocketry (under Tipu Sultan and Hyder Ali).

  True, there could only have been scientific and technological innovation if a forward-looking Indian ruler had endowed the country with educational and scientific institutions where such research would have taken place. The British, however, failed to create such institutions; the foremost Indian research institution under the British empire, the Indian Institute of Science, was endowed by the legendary Jamsetji Tata, not by any British philanthropist, let alone by the colonial government. And if competition with an industrializing Europe was a challenge, why wouldn’t a free India have used a level playing field to its own advantage, levying its own tariffs when protection was needed, giving its own subsidies and developing its own existing global markets?

  It is preposterous to suggest that India’s inability to industrialize while the Western world did so was an Indian failure, the result of some sort of native deficiency, rather than the deliberate result of systematically planned policies by those who ruled India, 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.

  There is an ironic footnote to the issue of Britain’s economic exploitation of India, in these days of Scottish nationalism and feverish speculation about the future of the Union. It is often forgotten what cemented the Union in the first place: the loaves and fishes available to Scots from participation in the colonial exploits of the East India Company. Before Union with England, Scotland had attempted, but been singularly unsuccessful at, colonization, mainly in Central America and the Caribbean. Once Union came, India came with it, along with a myriad opportunities. A disproportionate number of Scots were employed in the colonial enterprise, as soldiers, sailors, merchants, agents and employees. Though Scots constituted barely 9 per cent of Britain’s people, they accounted for 25 per cent of those employed by the British in India. Their earnings in India pulled Scotland out of poverty and helped make it prosperous. The humming factories of Dundee, the thriving shipyards, and the remittances home from Scots working in India, all stood testimony to the profitable connection. Sir Walter Scott wrote of India as ‘the corn-chest for Scotland’. With India gone, no wonder the Scottish bonds with England are loosening…

  *This dubious distinction has now been inherited by the Pakistan Army, which today consumes a greater proportion of national resources than any army in the world. Perhaps some Pakistanis can blame this on the British legacy!

  *India’s immense contributions to World War I are discussed in detail in Chapter 2. The figures for World War II are also instructive. At the beginning of the war (in 1939), the Indian Army stood at 194,373 men; it was raised to 2,065,554 men by 1945, serving both in India and overseas. The air force employed another 29,201 soldiers and the Royal Indian Navy had 30,478. (Bhatia, 1977, pp. 234–235.) Indian Army battle casualties were high, amounting to 149,225 between 1 Sept 1939 and 28 Feb 1945. Material assistance was also significant. One ironic detail, given Britain’s attempts to strangle India’s steel industry: India shipped 7,000 tonnes of steel sheet rolls to the UK after British steel shipments were lost at sea.

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  DID THE BRITISH GIVE INDIA POLITICAL UNITY?

  British claim to creating Indian unity – the ancient ‘idea of India’ and the centralizing impulse – counterfactuals of history – the destruction of political institutions – overthrow of ‘native princes’ – weakening of village self-governance – Indian social structures unfamiliar to the British – increasing British control – deinstitutionalization of governance – native rulers not worse than Company – the Crown takes over its jewel – imperial osten
tation and ‘ornamentalism’ – Curzon and British self-regard – the un-Indian Civil Service – lifestyles of the rich and infamous – Indians in imperial service – exclusion and suppression of Indian talent – Chetty, Tagore, Banerjea, Ghosh – imperial racism: only disconnect – British governance, the swadeshi movement and the advent of Mahatma Gandhi – the Montagu–Chelmsford ‘reforms’ – the Great War and the great betrayal

  The British like to point out, in moments of self-justifying exculpation, that they deserve credit for the political unity of India—that the very idea of ‘India’ as one entity (now three, but one during the British Raj) instead of multiple warring principalities and statelets, is the unchallengeable contribution of British imperial rule.

  It is difficult to refute that proposition except with a provable hypothesis: that throughout the history of the subcontinent, there has existed an impulsion for unity. This was manifest in the several kingdoms throughout Indian history that sought to extend their reach across all of the subcontinent: the Maurya (322 BCE–185 BCE), Gupta (at its peak, 320–550 CE), and Mughal (1526–1857 CE) empires, and to a lesser extent, the Vijayanagara kingdom in the Deccan (at its peak 1136–1565 CE) and the Maratha confederacy (1674-1818 CE). Every period of disorder throughout Indian history has been followed by a centralizing impulse, and had the British not been the first to take advantage of India’s disorder with superior weaponry, it is entirely possible that an Indian ruler would have accomplished what the British did, and consolidated his rule over most of the subcontinent.

  The same impulse is also manifest in Indians’ vision of their own nation, as in the ancient epics the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, which reflect an ‘idea of India’ that twentieth century nationalists would have recognized. The epics have acted as strong, yet sophisticated, threads of Indian culture that have woven together tribes, languages, and peoples across the subcontinent, uniting them in their celebration of the same larger-than-life heroes and heroines, whose stories were told in dozens of translations and variations, but always in the same spirit and meaning. The landscape the Pandavas saw in the Mahabharata (composed approximately in the period 400 BCE to 400 CE) was a pan-Indian landscape, for instance, as their travels throughout it demonstrated, and through their tale, Indians speaking hundreds of languages and thousands of dialects in all the places named in the epic, enjoyed a civilizational unity. Lord Rama’s journey through India and his epic battle against the demon-king of Lanka reflect the same national idea.

  After all, India has enjoyed cultural and geographical unity throughout the ages, going back at least to Emperor Ashoka in the third century BCE. The vision of Indian unity was physically embodied by the Hindu sage Adi Shankara, who travelled from Kerala in the extreme south to Kashmir in the extreme north and from Dwarka in the west to Puri in the east, as far back as the seventh century after Christ, establishing temples in each of these places that endure to this day. Diana Eck’s writings on India’s ‘sacred geography’ extensively delineate ancient ideas of a political unity mediated through ideas of sacredness. As Eck explains: ‘Considering its long history, India has had but a few hours of political and administrative unity. Its unity as a nation, however, has been firmly constituted by the sacred geography it has held in common and revered: its mountains, forests, rivers, hilltop shrines…linked with the tracks of pilgrimage.’

  Nor was this oneness a purely ‘Hindu’ idea. The rest of the world saw India as one: Arabs, for instance, regarded the entire subcontinent as ‘al-Hind’ and all Indians as ‘Hindi’, whether they hailed from Punjab, Bengal or Kerala. The great nationalist Maulana Azad once remarked upon how, at the Haj, all Indians were considered to be from one land, and regarded themselves as such. Surely such impulses, fulfilled in those distant times by emperors and sages, would with modern transport, communications and far-sighted leaders, have translated themselves into political unity?

  Starting from these incontrovertible facts, it is possible to construct an alternative scenario to British colonialism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, with the Marathas extending their conquests across the country, while finding it politically convenient to mask their power under a titular Mughal emperor, a process that had already begun. Though the Marathas would have ruled the country under the nominal overlordship of a weak Mughal monarch (as the British themselves were briefly to do), this would have led to an inevitable transition to constitutional rule, just as England transitioned (with the seventeenth-century Glorious Revolution and the subsequent strengthening of the House of Commons) from an absolute monarchy to a constitutional monarchy. This could have happened in India just as it did in several other countries in the non-colonized world, across Europe and in the handful of Asian countries that were not colonized, notably China, Japan and Thailand. The process would not have been painless; there may well have been revolutions and military struggles; there would have been disruption and conflict; but India’s resources would have stayed in India and its future would have been resolved by its own people. The onset of British colonialism interrupted this natural evolution and did not allow it to flower. But to suggest that Indian political unity would not have happened without the British is absurd and unsupported by the evidence.

  Counterfactuals are, of course, impossible to prove. One cannot assert, for instance, with any degree of certitude, events that did not in fact occur, nor name that centralizing figure who might have been India’s Bismarck, Mazzini, Atatürk or Garibaldi in the absence of the British. But historical events find their own dramatis personae, and it is unreasonable to suggest that what happened everywhere else would not have happened in India. From such an initially hybrid system could have emerged a modern constitutional monarchy and political institutions built upon the Mughal administrative system, as modified by the Marathas. But these are hypotheticals. The British came, and no such non-colonial India emerged.

  Counterfactuals are theoretical but facts are what they are. The facts point clearly to the dismantling of existing political institutions in India by the British, the fomenting of communal division and systematic political discrimination with a view to maintaining and extending British domination.

  When the British eventually left in 1947, they left India as a functioning democracy, and many Britons would take credit for having instilled in their Indian subjects the spirit of democracy and the rule of law, even if Indians were denied its substance by the British. This claim is worth examining closely.

  THE DESTRUCTION OF POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS

  It is arguable that the democratic values of the British imperialists were better than those of other colonists. Some scholars have recently demonstrated, with impressive quantification (based on statistical analyses of the aggregate correlates of political regimes), that a large number of former British colonies are democracies, and, indeed, that having once been a British colony is the variable most highly correlated with democracy. Myron Weiner has pointed out that, except for countries in the Americas and Australia, ‘every country with a population of at least 1 million (and almost all the smaller countries as well) that has emerged from colonial rule and has had a continuous democratic experience is a former British colony’. (There have also been former British colonies whose democratic experience has not been continuous, but featured bouts of military dictatorship, including both Pakistan and Bangladesh.) So it would seem that however much they failed to live up to their own ideas—however strongly they denied to Indians, as they had to Americans before 1776, ‘the rights of Englishmen’—the British did instil sufficient doses of the ethos of democracy into their former colonies that it outlived their tutelage.

  But the actual history of British rule does not suggest this was either policy or practice.

  In the years after 1757, the British astutely fomented cleavages among the Indian princes, and steadily consolidated their dominion through a policy of ‘divide and rule’ that came to be dubbed, after 1858, ‘divide et impera’. At this time it was a purel
y political ploy, and the divisions the Company sought to encourage were entirely based on greed and the desire for self-advancement rather than religion or social group. One aristocratic cousin was pitched against another for the Company’s support; often it was merely a question of who could pay more to the British. Loyalties were purchasable, sometimes more than once. Thus in 1757, as we have seen, Clive installed Mir Jafar on the throne of Bengal for a handsome sum, as a reward for having betrayed the previous nawab, Siraj-ud-Daula, at Plassey; Clive’s successors deposed Mir Jafar and put Mir Kasim in his place for somewhat less (for the money went to them, after all, and not to Clive); three years later, they restored Mir Jafar, since he now paid them two and a half times more than Mir Kasim did; and two years after that, they took money from Najim-ud-Daula to depose Mir Jafar yet again. That sort of ‘bribe, suborn and rule’ system was comprehensible in terms of the crass motives that animated the East India Company in India. But it would be a forerunner of a more insidious divide-and-rule policy from the late nineteenth century, which instigated Indian against Indian on the basis of divisions that would do far more lasting damage.