An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India

by Shashi Tharoor

  In its very conception and construction, the Indian Railways was a big British colonial scam. British shareholders made absurd amounts of money by investing in the railways, where the government guaranteed returns on capital of 5 per cent net per year, unavailable in any other safe investment. That was an extravagantly high rate of return those days, possible only because the government made up the shortfall from its revenues, payments which of course came from Indian, and not British, taxes. These excessive guarantees removed any incentive for the private companies constructing the railways to economize—the higher their capital expenditure, the higher would be their guaranteed return at a high and secure rate of interest. As a result each mile of Indian railway construction in the 1850s and 1860s cost an average of £18,000, as against the dollar equivalent of £2,000 at the same time in the US. In the event, it was twenty years or more before the first lines earned more than 5 per cent of their capital outlay, but even after the government had taken over railway construction in the 1880s, thanks to the rapacity of private British firms contracted for the task, a mile of Indian railway cost more than double the same distance in the equally difficult and less populated terrain of Canada and Australia.

  It was a splendid racket for everyone, apart from the Indian taxpayer. In terms of a secure return, Indian railway shares offered twice as much as the British government’s own stock. Guaranteed Indian railway shares absorbed up to a fifth of British portfolio investment in the twenty years to 1870—the first line opened in 1853—but only 1 per cent of it originated in India. Britons made the money, controlled the technology and supplied all the equipment, which meant once again that the profits were repatriated. It was a scheme described at the time as ‘private enterprise at public risk’. All the losses were borne by the Indian people, all the gains pocketed by the British trader—even as he penetrated by rail deep into the Indian economy. The steel industry in England found a much-needed outlet for its overpriced products in India, since almost everything required by the railways came from England: steel rails, engines, rail wagons, machinery and plants. Far from supporting the proposition that the British did good to India, the railways are actually evidence for the idea that Britain took much more out of its most magnificent colony than it put in.

  Nor was there any significant residual benefit to the Indians. The railways were intended principally to transport extracted resources, coal, iron ore, cotton and so on, to ports for the British to ship home to use in their factories. The movement of people was incidental, except when it served colonial interests; and the third-class compartments, with their wooden benches and total absence of amenities, into which Indians were herded, attracted horrified comment even at the time. (And also questions in the toothless legislatures: there were fourteen questions on this issue in the legislative assembly every year between 1921 and 1941, and eighteen more annually in the Council of State. The concern kept mounting as conditions worsened: the yearly averages for 1937-1941 were sixteen and twenty-five respectively. Mahatma Gandhi’s first crusade on his return to India was on behalf of the third-class traveller.) Yet the third-class passengers became a source of profit for the railways, since British merchants in India ensured that freight tariffs were kept low (the lowest in the world, in fact) while third-class passengers’ fares were made the railway companies’ principal source of profit. No effort was made, in building the railway lines, to ensure that supply matched the demand for popular transport.

  And, of course, racism reigned; though whites-only compartments were soon done away with on grounds of economic viability, Indians found the available affordable space grossly inadequate for their numbers. (A marvellous post-Independence cartoon captured the situation perfectly: it showed an overcrowded train, with people hanging off it, clinging to the windows, squatting perilously on the roof, and spilling out of their third-class compartments, while two Britons in sola topis sit in an empty first-class compartment saying to each other, ‘My dear chap, there’s nobody on this train!’)

  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…’

  Nor were Indians employed in the railways. The discriminatory hiring practices of the Indian Railways meant that key industrial skills were not effectively transferred to Indian personnel, which might have proved a benefit. The prevailing view was that the railways would have to be staffed almost exclusively by Europeans to ‘protect investments’. This was especially true of signalmen, and those who operated and repaired the steam trains, but the policy was extended to the absurd level that even in the early twentieth century all the key employees, from directors of the Railway Board to ticket-collectors, were white men—whose salaries and benefits were also paid at European, not Indian, levels and largely repatriated back to England. Moreover, when the policy was relaxed and expensive European labour reduced, there was a continuing search for the most ‘British-like’ workers. Thus came the long-lasting identification of the Anglo-Indian community with railway employment, since at first it was these Eurasians from military orphanages, the product of liaisons between British ‘other ranks’ and local Indian women, who were trained to do the jobs that only Europeans had been assumed to be capable of doing previously. (In keeping with British notions of eugenics, and since the Anglo-Indians were not a very large community, ‘martial’ Sikhs and pale-skinned Parsis were then employed as well, although they were only put in charge of driving engines within station yards and employed in stations with infrequent traffic.)

  British racial theories were in full flow on railway matters: it was believed that Indians did not have the ‘judgement and presence of mind’ to deal with emergencies and that they ‘seldom have character enough to enforce strict obedience’ to railway rules. When Indianization was attempted for economic reasons in the 1870s, railway officials argued that it would take three Indians to do the job of a single European. So great was the racist resistance to Indian employees that the project of training drivers was discontinued after a three-year trial, and the drivers who had been trained were once again restricted to yard work.

  Here, too, the double standards of British colonial justice described previously were much in evidence, as with the 1861 collision of a mail train and a goods train between Connagar and Bally. The European driver and guard of the goods train were both drunk and went to sleep, leaving the fireman (coal stoker) in charge of the train while they slept. The poor man kept doing his job—stoking the coal—and his train duly crashed into a mail train. When the accident was investigated, blame was placed on the absence of the Bengali stationmaster, rather than the behaviour of the comatose Europeans.

  Double standards prevailed in other ways: whereas in Britain it was common practice to ensure the merit-based promotion of firemen to drivers, or of station-masters of small rural stations to large stations, this did not happen in India because these junior positions were occupied by Indians, whose promotion would be to posts otherwise occupied by Europeans. By 1900, in the regulations for pay, promotion, and suitability for jobs, or what we would today describe as the human resource management rules, employees were subdivided into ‘European, Eurasian, West Indian of Negro descent pure or mixed, Non-Indian Asiatic, or Indian’. On employment the local medical officer would certify the race and caste identity of a candidate and write it on his history sheet—thus determining his future pay, leave, allowances, and possible promotions as well as place in the railway hierarchy for the rest of his career.

  The Royal Indian Engineering College at Cooper’s Hill near London, established in 1872 to produce engineers for India, allowed as candidates only those capable of passing examinations in mathematics, sciences, Latin, Greek, German, English lite
rature and history—stipulations designed to exclude the majority of Indian candidates. These rules had the desired effect: In 1886, out of 1,015 engineers in the Public Works Department (PWD), only 86 were Indians.

  Racism combined with British economic interests to undermine efficiency. The railway workshops in Jamalpur in Bengal and Ajmer in Rajputana were established in 1862 to maintain the trains, but their Indian mechanics became so adept that in 1878 they started designing and building their own locomotives. Their success increasingly alarmed the British, since the Indian locomotives were just as good, and a great deal cheaper, than the British-made ones. In 1912, therefore, the British passed an Act of Parliament, explicitly making it impossible for Indian workshops to design and manufacture locomotives. The Act prohibited Indian factories from doing the work they had successfully done for three decades; instead, they were only allowed to maintain locomotives imported from Britain and the industrialized world. Between 1854 and 1947, India imported around 14,400 locomotives from England (some 10 per cent of all British locomotive production), and another 3,000 from Canada, the US and Germany, but made none in India after 1912. After Independence, thirty-five years later, the old technical knowledge was so completely lost to India that the Indian Railways had to go cap-in-hand to the British to guide them on setting up a locomotive factory in India again.

  There was, however, a fitting postscript to this saga. The principal technology consultants for British Railways, the London-based Rendel Palmer & Tritton, today rely almost entirely on Indian technical expertise, provided to them by RITES, a subsidiary of the Indian Railways.

  This is far from being a retrospective critique from the comfortable perspective of a twenty-first-century commentator. On the contrary, nineteenth-century Indians were quite conscious at the time of the abominable role of the railways in the crass exploitation of their country. The Bengali newspaper Samachar wrote on 30 April 1884 that ‘iron roads mean iron chains’ for India—foreign goods could flow more easily, it argued, killing native Indian industry and increasing Indian poverty. Nationalist voices like those of G. V. Joshi, G. S. Iyer, Gopal Krishna Gokhale and Dadabhai Naoroji were raised publicly in the 1890s, pointing out how limited were the benefits of the railways to India, how the profits all went to foreigners abroad, and how great was the burden on the Indian exchequer. The money that was being sent to England every year as interest, they pointed out unfailingly, could have been used for productive investments in Indian industry, in infrastructure work like irrigation (especially irrigation, which would help the Indian farmer, and which received only one-ninth of the government funding the railways did), or simply just spent in India to stimulate the local economy. Gokhale declared that ‘the Indian people feel that [railway] construction is undertaken principally in the interests of the English commercial and moneyed classes, and that it assists in the further exploitation of our resources’. Indians also pointed out at the time that the argument that the railways would be an instrument against famine, and improve the general economic condition of the people, was fraudulent: in fact, famines persisted despite the railways, which only facilitated the export of grain and other agricultural products, effectively removing the very food surpluses that might have served as a buffer against famine.

  There were other critiques. Gandhi argued in Swaraj that the railways spread bubonic plague. The ecological impact of railway construction aroused concern even at the time. In building the Sara-Sirajganj line in the Bengal delta, massive earthworks were put in place to block waterways, in order to reduce the outlay on bridges and the effect of damp. In doing so, very large arable areas to the northwest were waterlogged, ruining their agricultural potential. During the 1918 floods, railway embankments blocked natural water channels resulting in catastrophic flooding.

  Market distortions also occurred with railway development. The railways were responsible, for instance, for sharply raising the price of rice. Before the railways came, slow water-based transport spread surpluses around the districts, keeping prices in any given areas low. But railways allowed surpluses to be cleanly extracted, essentially making peasants in the rice growing areas (and participating in an informal economy) compete directly with urban Indians and exporters for rice. The same was true of the fish markets.

  And there are other examples to show how the interests of Indians were never a factor in railway operations: during World War I, several Indian rail lines were dismantled and shipped out of the country to aid the Allied war effort in Mesopotamia!

  On the whole, therefore, the verdict of the eminent historian Bipan Chandra stands. British motives in building railways in India, he wrote, were ‘sordid and selfish…the promotion of the interests of British merchants, manufacturers and investors…at the risk and expense of Indian revenues’; their ‘essential purpose’ being to ‘assist British enterprise in the exploitation of the natural resources of India.’

  Quod erat demonstrandum.

  EDUCATION AND THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

  ‘Britain provided India with the necessary tools for independence,’ wrote a British blogger on an Indian youth website in response to my Oxford speech. ‘The idea of a modern democracy, of a self-governed country with a constitution and the guarantee of civil rights, was brought to India by Indians educated abroad, with the most famous example being barrister Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, whose contribution to independence is, well, not insignificant. Not to forget the English language, without which pan-Indian protest and, later, communication and culture, is simply unimaginable.’

  This case is often made by well-meaning individuals, and perhaps it should not be necessary to point out that Mahatma Gandhi’s ideas of democracy and civil rights were developed in resistance to British rule, not in support of it. Still, the gift of the English language cannot be denied—I am, after all, using it as I write—and nor can the education system, of which again I am a beneficiary. So let us look at both closely.

  The British left India with a literacy rate of 16 per cent, and a female literacy rate of 8 per cent—only one of every twelve Indian women could read and write in 1947. This is not exactly a stellar record, but educating the masses was not a British priority. As Will Durant points out, ‘When the British came, there was, throughout India, a system of communal schools, managed by the village communities. The agents of the East India Company destroyed these village communities, and took no steps to replace the schools; even today [1930]… they stand at only 66 per cent of their number a hundred years ago. There are now in India 730,000 villages, and only 162,015 primary schools. Only 7 per cent of the boys and 1 per cent of the girls receive schooling, i.e. 4 per cent of the whole. Such schools as the Government has established are not free, but exact a tuition fee which…looms large to a family always hovering on the edge of starvation.’

  Britain’s education policy, in other words, had very little to commend itself. It supplanted and undermined an extensive Indian tradition: traditional methods of guru-shishya parampara (in which students lived with their teachers and imbibed an entire way of thinking) had thrived in India, as did the many monasteries which went on to become important centres of education, receiving students from distant lands, notably as far from our shores as China and Turkey. The Pala period [between the eighth and the twelfth century ce], in particular, saw a number of 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, a
nd 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. Amongst them were several famous Chinese scholars who studied and taught at Nalanda University in the seventh century. Hsuan Tsang (Xuanzang from the Tang dynasty) studied in the university and then taught there for five years, while leaving detailed accounts of his time in Nalanda.

  In the period of Muslim rule, in addition to madrasas, schools of religious instruction essentially open to Muslims, there were also maktabs, which imparted Persian-Islamic education to Indian students, usually in the Urdu language (though Arabic and/or Persian were also taught). Before the British took over, the court language of the Mughals was Persian and the Muslim section of the population used Urdu—a mixture of Persian, Arabic and Sanskrit. Many Hindus in northern India also studied in Urdu or Persian. (In the south, various regional languages prevailed.) A maktab was an elementary (and secondary for some) educational institution before the 1850s that was used for secular education: the subjects taught included public administration, trade and intellectual and cultural pursuits, such as poetry. Maktabs were open to members of the elite class and included both Hindus and Muslims (in some places, many more of the former than the latter). Many maktabs closed in the mid-nineteenth century as their elite students gravitated to colonial schools in the hope of greater opportunities for advancement after their schooling.

  As late as the late eighteenth/early nineteenth century, Raja Rammohan Roy, who would be hailed by the British as a progressive and modern-minded reformer, started his formal education in a village school or pathshala, where he learned Bengali, some Sanskrit and Persian; later, at age nine, he studied Persian and Arabic in a madrasa in Patna, and two years later went to Benares (Kashi) to learn Sanskrit and Hindu scripture, especially the Vedas and Upanishads. Only then did he learn English and adapt to the British system of education in India, at which he excelled. But this kind of extensive grounding in traditional Indian learning, followed by English education, was already becoming quite rare.