An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India

by Shashi Tharoor

  Instead of enriching the world, Jon Wilson argues, the British empire impoverished it. ‘The empire was run on the cheap. Instead of investing in the development of the countries they ruled, the British survived by doing deals with indigenous elites to sustain their rule at knockdown prices… The feudal lords now massacring villagers in the Indian state of Bihar were created by British land policy.’

  It is hard not to bristle at Lawrence James’s celebration of this abject performance by the British Raj: ‘In return for its moment of greatness on the world stage, the Raj had offered India regeneration on British terms. It had been the most perfect expression of what Britain took to be its duty to humanity as a whole. Its guiding ideals had sprung from the late-18th and early-19th-century Evangelical Enlightenment, which had dreamed of a world transformed for the better by Christianity and reason. The former made little headway in India, but the latter, in the form of Western education and the application of science, did.’

  Did India, the land of the Vedas and the Upanishads, the country of the learned theological debates at Akbar’s court, the home of the ‘argumentative Indian’, really need British colonialism in order to be ‘regenerated’ by ‘reason’? The claim is breathtaking in its presumption. Taken together with Ferguson’s argument that economic benefits flowed from imperial rule, these Raj apologists are guilty of what might be described as an intellectual Indian rope-trick: they have climbed up their own premises. As Professor Richard Porter asks: ‘Why, for example, should one assume that eighteenth-century India could not have evolved its own economic path, with distributions of capital, labour and goods “optimal” in the eyes of its own elites, however different from the criteria of liberal western political economists?’ Porter, citing the detailed work of historians and scholars, questions the perceptions of Indian ‘backwardness’ advanced by those who see modernity as a gift of the West.

  It must not be forgotten, after all, that the India the British entered was a wealthy, thriving and commercializing society: that was why the East India Company was interested in it in the first place. The Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama, who found his way around the Cape of Good Hope to Calicut (Kozhikode), rather breathlessly spoke to King Manuel I of Portugal of large cities, large buildings and rivers, and great and prosperous populations. He talked admiringly of spices and jewels, precious stones and ‘mines of gold’. The trinkets he offered were deemed unworthy gifts for the Indian monarch he offered them to, the Zamorin of Calicut; da Gama’s goods were openly mocked and scorned by merchants and courtiers accustomed to far higher quality items.

  Far from being backward or underdeveloped, as we have seen, precolonial India exported high quality manufactured goods much sought after by Britain’s fashionable society. The British elite wore Indian linen and silks, decorated their homes with Indian chintz and decorative textiles, and craved Indian spices and seasonings. (Indeed, there are tales of British manufacturers in the seventeenth century trying to pass off their wares as ‘Indian’ to entice customers into buying their poorer quality British-made imitations.) The annual revenues of the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb (1618-1707) were vast. Indeed, tax revenues aside, which I have mentioned earlier in the book, his total income at the time is said to have amounted to $450,000,000, more than ten times that of (his contemporary) Louis XIV.

  India’s highly developed banking system and vigorous merchant capital, with its well-established network of agents, brokers and middlemen and a talent for financing exports and commercial credit, featured such sophisticated financial networks as that of the Jagat Seths, the Chettiars in the south and the Gujarati Banias in the west. This banking system was as large and extensive and dealt with as much money as the Bank of England.

  This was the country impoverished by British conquest. The India that succumbed to British rule enjoyed an enormous financial surplus, deployed a skilled artisan class, exported high-quality goods in great global demand, disposed of plenty of arable land, had a thriving agricultural base, and supported some 100 to 150 million without either poverty or landlessness. All of this was destroyed by British rule. As Wilson points out: ‘In 1750, Indians had a similar standard of living to people in Britain. Now, average Indian incomes are barely a tenth of the British level in terms of real purchasing power. It is no coincidence that 200 years of British rule occurred in the intervening time.’

  As I have said more than once in the course of the book, there is no reason to believe that, left to itself, India could not have evolved into a more prosperous, united and modernizing power in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Many economists blame technological backwardness rather than British malice for India’s economic failure under the Raj. But even if lack of technology was the Indian economy’s single biggest failing, an independent India could always have imported the technology it needed, as Japan, for instance, was to do. This the British refused to allow Indians to do till well into the twentieth century. A country that was quite willing, over the centuries, to import artists and historians from Persia, sculptors and architects from Central Asia and soldiers from East Africa, would have seen no reason not to import the trappings of modernity from Europe, from railways to industrial technology (just as China is doing today).

  India’s civilizational impulse throughout history was towards greatness, punctuated undoubtedly by setbacks and conflicts, but which country has been exempt from those? Trade, not conquest, could also have changed India. Something like the Meiji Restoration could have easily taken place in India without the incubus of British rule. It is at least as plausible to argue that India would have modernized, using best practices borrowed (and paid for) from everywhere and adapted to its needs, as to claim that it needed the subjection and humiliation of Empire to reach where it has now begun to.

  The novelist Joseph Conrad, no radical himself, described colonialism as ‘a flabby, pretending, weak-eyed devil of a rapacious and pitiless folly’. As Conrad wrote in 1902, ‘The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.’ 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 question,’ Niall Ferguson writes in his defence of Empire, ‘is not whether British imperialism was without blemish. It was not. The question is whether there could have been a less bloody path to modernity’. As we have seen from the sanguinary record of massacres and brutality by the Raj laid out in the previous chapters, the answer to his question could only be yes. Gurcharan Das, who is inclined to give the British the benefit of the doubt, also does not see deliberate malice in their policy, but his review of the reasons for the industrial failure of British India amount in fact to a devastating summary of what British colonial rule had done to the economy: ‘The industrial revolution did not occur because [first], Indian agriculture remained stagnant, and you cannot have an industrial revolution without an agricultural surplus or the means to feed a rapidly growing urban population; second, the international trading environment turned hostile with protectionism after World War I, followed by the Depression; third, the colonial government did not educate the masses, unlike the Japanese state; finally, a colonial mindset pervaded the Indian middle class—even the hardiest potential entrepreneur lacks confidence when he is politically enslaved.’ In other words, British colonial agrarian policy, its education policy in India and its racist subjugation of Indians contribute three of Das’s four major reasons for India’s backwardness in the period in question; and the fourth, the Great War and its consequences, only affected India as much it did because India was a British possession.

  It could be argued that the great crime of the British can be understood in a more neutral way. Critics, this argument runs, muddle the idea of the West in the c
olonial period, because we conflate two very separate strands that are constitutive of this idea: the first consists of modern state machinery (armies, censuses, bureaucracies, railroads, hospitals, telegraph lines, educational and scientific institutions and so on) and the second is of liberal norms (individual rights; freedom of thought, speech, artistic and political expression; equality under the law; and political democracy). One does not axiomatically go with the other. (Look, after all, at China today, where the former flourishes without the latter.) What separates the British from precolonial Indian rulers, then, is not that they were more rapacious or more amoral, but simply that they were more efficient in making a state, while remaining indifferent, or insincere, about imparting their liberal values. But Britain was also the embodiment of the Enlightenment tradition of liberalism, and we judge the ‘state’ they created harshly on this basis. Is this a valid argument, then, since it obviously cannot be applied on its own terms to the Marathas, the Indian principalities or even the collapsing late Mughal state the British encountered? Who was holding the Maratha Peshwas to the standards of Mill and Pitt?

  This is an interesting argument, but not, ultimately, a persuasive one. For the British state in India was indeed, as I have demonstrated, a totally amoral, rapacious imperialist machine bent on the subjugation of Indians for the purpose of profit, not merely a neutrally efficient system indifferent to human rights. And its subjugation resulted in the expropriation of Indian wealth to Britain, draining the society of the resources that would normally have propelled its natural growth and economic development. Yes, there may have been famines and epidemics in precolonial India, but Indians were acquiring the means to cope with them better, which they were unable to do under British rule, because the British had reduced them to poverty and destroyed their sources of sustenance other than living unsustainably on the land—in addition to which Victorian Britain’s ideological opposition to ‘indiscriminate’ charity denied many millions of Indians the relief that would have saved their lives.

  It may seem frivolous to confine my appreciation of British rule to cricket, tea and the English language. I do not mean to discount other accomplishments. In outlining the exploitation and loot of India by British commercial interests, for example, I should acknowledge that in the process the British gave India the joint stock company, long experience of commercial processes and international trade, and Asia’s oldest stock exchange, established in Bombay in 1875. Indians’ familiarity with international commerce and the stock market has proved a distinct advantage in the globalized world; India’s entrepreneurial capital and management skills are well able to control and manage assets in the sophisticated financial markets of the developed West today, as Tatas have demonstrated in Britain by making Jaguar profitable for the first time in years, and India’s businessmen and managers are familiar with the systems needed to operate a twenty-first-century economy in an open and globalizing world.

  And yet one must qualify this rosy notion—that it is thanks to British colonization that India is busy overrunning the planet with skilled, experienced and English-speaking businessmen straining at the leash to take over the world economy. The fact is that the initial Indian reaction to colonial commercial exploitation was, understandably, the opposite—not imitation but rejection. The fight for freedom from colonial rule involved the overthrow of both foreign rulers and foreign capitalists (though few nationalists could tell the difference). Thanks to colonialism, the great leaders of Indian nationalism associated capitalism with slavery: the fact that the East India Company had come to trade and stayed on to rule made our nationalist leaders suspicious of every foreigner with a briefcase, seeing him as the thin end of a neo-imperial wedge.

  So instead of integrating India into the global capitalist system, as a few postcolonial countries like Singapore so effectively were to do, India’s leaders were convinced that the political independence they had fought for could only be guaranteed through economic independence. That is why self-reliance became the default slogan, the protectionist barriers went up, and India spent forty-five years with bureaucrats rather than businessmen on the ‘commanding heights’ of the economy, spending a good part of the first four and a half decades after Independence in subsidizing unproductivity, regulating stagnation and trying to distribute poverty. One cannot blame the British for the choices Indians themselves made in reaction to British rule, but it only goes to prove that one of the lessons you learn from history is that history sometimes teaches the wrong lessons. Our current economic growth and global visibility is a result of new choices made after the initial visceral rejection of British colonialism and its methods.

  If there were positive by-products for Indians from the institutions the British established and ran in India in their own interests, I am happy to acknowledge them, but only as by-products, and not because they were intended to benefit Indians. The railways were set up entirely for British gain, from construction to execution, but today Indians cannot live without them; the Indian authorities have reversed British policies and the railways are used principally to transport people, with freight bearing ever higher charges in order to subsidize the passengers (exactly the opposite of British practice). Similarly the irrigation works conducted by the British were criticized for their inadequacy by Indian nationalists—since expenditure on them was barely one-ninth that on the railways—and William Jennings Bryan, the American statesman, pointed out that, ‘Ten per cent of the army expenditure applied to irrigation would complete the system within five years, but instead of military expenses being reduced, the army appropriation was increased.’ However, irrigation still added some twenty million acres, an area the size of France, to the country’s cultivable land (almost all of it, alas, in Pakistan today). It would be idle to pretend that no good came of any of this. But when the balance sheet is drawn up, at the end, the balance weighs heavily against the colonialists.

  The Indian Army is sometimes cited as a valuable British legacy, a professional fighting force held together by strong traditions of camaraderie and courage, which has remained a meritocracy and stayed out of politics. How much of the credit for this last accomplishment should go to the British is debatable: after all, the Pakistan Army is as much an inheritor of the same colonial legacy, but it has conducted three coups, as well holding the reins firmly even when elected governments are in the saddle. The essential point is, of course, that the Indian Army was not created in India’s interests, but in those of Britain, both here and abroad. The Indian soldier was merely an obedient instrument: the Indian sepoy was described by a contemporary as ‘temperate, respectful, patient, subordinate, and faithful’. This quiescence ended with the 1857 revolt, but the British managed to restore discipline and the British Indian Army rebuilt itself on notions of fidelity and honour for the next ninety years.

  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.

  A largely uncritical, indeed romanticized, account of the British Indian Army, and how a few thousand British troops held down a subcontinent of 200 million people, comes from Philip Mason, who quotes a Victorian administrator: ‘Our force does not operate so much by its actual strength as by the impression which it produces’.

  That today’s Indian Army, a million strong, has held on to the best of British military traditions while eschewing the temptations to which its Pakistani and Bangladeshi counterparts have fallen prey, is surely more to the credit of its own officers and men, as well as of the inclusive and pluralist nature of Indian democracy.

  Some point to physical evidence of the British presence—buildings, ports, trains and institutions—as evidence of a lasting contribution. The fact is the British p
ut in the minimum amount of investment to optimize their exploitation of Indian wealth, while keeping the indigenous population from rebelling. Some of these things were basic to any society; most were created to benefit the British, whether in India or in the UK. Niall Ferguson argues that the British built ‘useful’ things—opulent palaces for themselves and ships to transport indentured labour, no doubt, are good examples of these—while Indians wasted their resources on ‘conspicuous consumption’. Making exportable muslin? Setting global metallurgical standards with its wootz steel? Building magnificent cities and temples? Or perhaps Ferguson thinks the Taj Mahal was a colossal and conspicuous waste?

  The story is told—I cannot pinpoint the source—that when the Prince of Wales, the future Edward VIII, visited India in 1921, he pointed to a few magnificent buildings, cars and electrical installations and remarked to an Indian accompanying him, ‘We have given you everything here in India! What is it you don’t have?’ And the lowly Indian replied, gently: ‘Self-respect, sir.’

  That too was snatched away by colonialism: the self-respect that comes from the knowledge that you are the master of your own fate, that your problems are your own fault and that their resolution depends principally on you and not some distant person living in a faraway land. The biggest difference that freedom has made lies in this, in the establishment of democratic rights and a shared idea of empowered citizenship, in which every citizen or sub-national group can promote their own rights and ensure their voices are heard. This was always withheld from Indians by the colonial subjecthood that was all the British were willing to confer upon them.