An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India

by Shashi Tharoor

  Internationally, the Mahatma expressed ideals few can reject: he could virtually have written the United Nations Charter, except of course for the provisions of Chapter 7 authorizing the use of force. But the decades after his death have confirmed that there is no escape from the conflicting sovereignties of states. Some thirty million more lives have been lost in wars and insurrections since his passing. In a dismaying number of countries, including his own, governments spend more for military purposes than for education and healthcare combined. The current stockpile of nuclear weapons represents over a million times the explosive power of the atom bomb whose destruction of Hiroshima so grieved him. Universal peace, which the Mahatma considered so central to Truth, seems as illusionary as ever.

  As governments compete, so religions contend. The ecumenist Mahatma Gandhi who declared, ‘I am a Hindu, a Muslim, a Christian, a Zoroastrian, a Jew’ would find it difficult to stomach the exclusivist revivalism of so many religions and cults the world over. But perhaps his approach was always inappropriate for the rest of the world. As his Muslim rival Muhammad Ali Jinnah retorted to his claim of eclectic belief—‘only a Hindu could say that’.

  And finally, the world of the spinning-wheel, of self-reliant families in contented village republics, is even more remote today than when the Mahatma first espoused it in Hind Swaraj. Despite the brief popularity of intermediate technology and ‘small is beautiful’, there does not appear to be much room for such ideas in an interdependent world. Self-reliance is too often a cover for protectionism and a shelter for inefficiency in developing countries. The successful and prosperous countries are those who are able to look beyond spinning charkhas to silicon chips—and who give their people the benefits of technological developments which free them from menial and repetitive chores and broaden the horizons of their lives. But today’s urbanizing India is far removed from the idealized, self-sufficient village republics he envisaged, and its enthusiastic embrace of technology would have struck the Mahatma as selling its soul.

  But if Gandhism has had its limitations exposed in the years after his assassination, there is no denying the Mahatma’s greatness. While the world was disintegrating into fascism, violence and war, he taught the virtues of truth, non-violence and peace. He destroyed the credibility of colonialism by opposing principle to force. And he set and attained personal standards of conviction and courage which few will ever match. He was that rare kind of leader who was not confined by the inadequacies of his followers.

  So Mahatma Gandhi stands as an icon of anti-colonialism, a figure of his times who transcended them. The ultimate tribute to the British Raj might lie in the quality of the ‘Great Soul’ who opposed it.

  CAST A LONG SHADOW: RESIDUAL PROBLEMS OF COLONIALISM

  The colonial era is over. And yet, residual problems from the end of the earlier era of colonization, usually the result of untidy departures by the colonial power, still remain dangerously stalemated. The prolonged state of chronic hostility between India and Pakistan, punctuated by four bloody wars and the repeated infliction of cross-border terrorism as a Pakistani tactic against India, is the most obvious example. But there are others. The dramatic events in East Timor in 1999 led to the last major transfer of power to an independence movement. Yet at least closure has occurred there, unlike in Western Sahara or in those old standbys of Cyprus and Palestine, all messy legacies of European colonialism. Fuses lit in the colonial era could ignite again, as they have done, much to everyone’s surprise, in the Horn of Africa, between Ethiopia and Eritrea, where war broke out over a colonial border that the Italians of an earlier era of occupation had failed to define with enough precision and where peace simmers today amidst much uncertainty. The Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916, by which the British and the French agreed to carve up the former Ottoman territories between themselves and which set the boundaries between independent Syria and Iraq, is another relic of colonial history that haunts us today. For when ISIS (‘Daesh’) advanced ruthlessly in those countries, it railed against the iniquities of that Anglo-French agreement and avowed its determination to reverse the Sykes-Picot legacy—making the imperial era compellingly current once more.

  But it’s not just the direct results of colonialism that remain relevant: there are the indirect ones as well. The intellectual history of colonialism is littered with many a wilful cause of more recent conflict. One is, quite simply, careless anthropology: the Belgian classification of Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda and Burundi, which solidified a distinction that had not existed before, continues to haunt the region of the African Great Lakes. A related problem is that of motivated sociology: how much bloodshed do we owe, for instance, to the British invention of ‘martial races’ in India, which skewed recruitment into the armed forces and saddled some communities with the onerous burden of militarism? And one can never overlook the old colonial administrative habit of ‘divide and rule’, exemplified, again, by British policy in the subcontinent after 1857, systematically promoting political divisions between Hindus and Muslims, which led almost inexorably to the tragedy of Partition.

  Such colonial-era distinctions were not just pernicious; they were often accompanied by an unequal distribution of the resources of the state within the colonial society. Belgian colonialists favoured Tutsis, leading to Hutu rejection of them as alien interlopers; Sinhalese resentment of privileges enjoyed by the Tamils in the colonial era in Sri Lanka prompted the discriminatory policies after Independence that in turn fuelled the Tamil revolt. India still lives with the domestic legacy of divide and rule, with a Muslim population almost as large as Pakistan’s, conscious of itself as a minority striving to find its place in the Indian sun.

  A ‘mixed’ colonial history within one modern state is also a potential source of danger. When a state has more than one colonial past, its future is vulnerable. Secessionism, after all, can be prompted by a variety of factors, historical, geographical and cultural as well as ‘ethnic’. Ethnicity or language hardly seem to be a factor in the secessions (one recognized, the other not) of Eritrea from Ethiopia and the ‘Republic of Somaliland’ from Somalia. Rather, it was different colonial experiences (Italian rule in Eritrea and British rule in Somaliland) that set them off, at least in their own self-perceptions, from the rest of their ethnic compatriots. A similar case can be made in respect of the former Yugoslavia, where parts of the country that had been under Austro-Hungarian rule for 800 years had been joined to parts that spent almost as long under Ottoman suzerainty. The war that erupted in 1991 was in no small measure a war that pitted those parts of Yugoslavia that had been ruled by German-speaking empires against those that had not (or had resisted such colonization).

  Boundaries drawn in colonial times, even if unchanged after independence, still create enormous problems of national unity. We have been reminded of this in Iraq, whose creation from the ruins of the Ottoman empire welded various incompatibilities into a single state. But the issue is much more evident in Africa, where civil conflict along ethnic or regional lines can arise when the challenge of nation building within colonially drawn boundaries becomes insurmountable. Where colonial constructions force disparate peoples together by the arbitrariness of a colonial mapmaker’s pen, nationhood becomes an elusive notion. Older tribal and clan loyalties in Africa were mangled by the boundaries drawn, in such distant cities as Berlin, for colonially created states whose post-independence leaders had to invent new traditions and national identities out of whole cloth. The result was the manufacture of unconvincing political myths, as artificial as the countries they mythologize, which all too often cannot command genuine patriotic allegiance from the citizenry they aim to unite. Civil war is made that much easier for local leaders challenging a ‘national’ leader whose nationalism fails to resonate across his country. Rebellion against such a leader is, after all, merely the reassertion of history over ‘his’ story.

  State failure in the wake of colonialism is another evident source of conflict, as the by-product of an unp
repared newly independent state’s inability to govern. The crisis of governance in many African countries is a real and abiding cause for concern in world affairs today. The collapse of effective central governments—as manifest in Darfur, South Sudan and eastern Congo today, and in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Somalia yesterday (and who knows where tomorrow?)—could unleash a torrent of alarming possibilities: a number of ‘weak states’, particularly in Africa, seem vulnerable to collapsing in a welter of conflict.

  Underdevelopment in postcolonial societies is itself a cause of conflict. The uneven development of infrastructure in a poor country, as a result of priorities skewed for the benefit of the colonialists, can lead to resources being distributed unevenly, which in turn leads to increasing fissures in a society between those from ‘neglected regions’ and those who are better served by roads, railways, power stations, telecommunications, bridges and canals. Advancing underdevelopment in many countries of the South, which are faring poorly in their desperate struggle to remain players in the game of global capitalism, has created conditions of desperate poverty, ecological collapse and rootless, unemployed populations beyond the control of atrophying state systems—a portrait vividly painted by Robert Kaplan in his book The Coming Anarchy, which suggests the real danger of perpetual violence on the peripheries of our global village.

  As we embark upon the twenty-first century, it seems ironically clear that tomorrow’s anarchy might still be due, in no small part, to yesterday’s colonial attempts at order. I have no wish to give those politicians in postcolonial countries whose leadership has been found wanting in the present, any reason to find excuses for their failures in the past. But 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 rear-view mirror.

  *There were some who asserted intellectual independence from this dominant imperial trope: thinkers who devised a view of life that was neither modern nor anti-modern, Marxist nor revolutionary, colonialist nor, strictly speaking, anti-colonialist. Some of these under-appreciated intellectual responses to Western dominance in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are traced by Pankaj Mishra in From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt against the West and the Remaking of Asia, London: Allen Lane, 2012. Mishra ruefully admits the East was ‘subjugated by the people of the West that they had long considered upstarts, if not barbarians’. (Page 3.)

  ——————————————

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  There are many wonderful people I would like to thank for helping me with this book. First of all, my friend and publisher David Davidar, who talked me into undertaking this project—a decision I made rashly without fully realizing how much work it would involve—and guided the manuscript to the form in which it is before you now. His colleague Simar Puneet, for her diligent and painstaking assistance throughout the editing process, deserves a special word of appreciation.

  An Era of Darkness required an extraordinary amount of research and reading (in many cases, re-reading) of source material on the British Raj in India. In this endeavour Professor Sheeba Thattil was invaluable, digging up digitized versions of original documents, texts and books from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as finding academic material of more recent provenance in the form of books and journal articles relating to my subjects of enquiry. My two tireless researchers, Abhimanyu Dadu, who bore the brunt of the load, and Ben Langley, unearthed valuable insights and substantiated them meticulously. Abhimanyu stayed involved with the preparation of the manuscript, including crosschecking its many references and citations, for which I am most grateful.

  A handful of close friends read the manuscript and offered useful comments: my son Kanishk Tharoor, a better historian and writer than his father; my close aide Manu Pillai, author of a superb history of the period himself; my friend, and sometime collaborator, the writer and polymath Keerthik Sasidharan; and my ‘sister from another womb’, the historian Dr Nanditha Krishna. My schoolmate and now parliamentary colleague Professor Sugata Bose, the eminent Harvard historian, read a late draft of the manuscript and gave me the benefit of his wisdom. While their thoughts and ideas were most valuable, I remain solely responsible for the substance and the conclusions in this book.

  Above all, my profound gratitude to His Majesty Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck, King of Bhutan, without whose generous hospitality and support I would have been unable to write this book or finish it within deadline. Thanks to his kindness and help I was able to escape into the mountains of his beautiful country and write undisturbed, without interruptions, calls or visitors, at considerable speed. My thanks, too, to Dasho Zimpon Ugyen Namgyel, Chamberlain to His Majesty, Captain Jattu Tshering and Tsedon Dorji for their unfailing courtesy and assistance in my endeavour.

  My staff has backed me up in a hundred vital ways throughout the writing of this book, no one more so than Narayan Singh to whom I remain eternally grateful.

  And for the special friend who left me alone to write, but supported and encouraged me daily, no words are necessary, nor will suffice.

  Shashi Tharoor

  Paro, Bhutan

  August 2016

  ——————————————

  NOTES AND REFERENCES

  PREFACE

  xixthe attempt by one Indian commentator…to compute what a fair sum of reparations would amount to: Minhaz Merchant, ‘Why Shashi Tharoor is right on Britain’s colonial debt to India’, www.dailyo.in, 23 July 2015. www.dailyo.in/politics/minhaz-merchant-shashi-tharoor-oxford-union-address-congress-britain-colonialism-monsoon-session-parliament/story/1/5168.html.

  xx‘Tharoor might have won the debate—but moral victory: Shikha Dalmia,‘Perhaps India Shouldn’t Get Too Excited About Reparations’, Time, 3 August 2015.

  xxOne blogger added, for good measure: Sifar AKS, ‘Dear Shashi, Your Accent Could Not Mask the Holes in Your Speech’, www.akkarbakkar.com. www.akkarbakkar.com/dear-shashi-tharoor-your-accent-could-not-mask-the-holes-in-your-speech.

  xxiCommentator Jonathan Foreman put it most bluntly: Jonathan Foreman, ‘Reparations for the Raj? You must be joking!’, www.politico.eu, 3 August 2015. www.politico.eu/article/british-reparations-for-india-for-the-raj-oxford.

  xxiOne Indian commentator argued that the claim for reparation: Gouri Dange, ‘For a few claps more…’, Pune Mirror, 29 July 2015.

  xxiiiHistorian John Keay put it best: John Keay, ‘Tell it to the Dreaming Spires’, Outlook, 15 August 2015.

  xxiiiAccording to a recent UN Population Division report: ‘World Population Ageing 1950–2050’ report, United Nations, www.un.org/esa/population/publications/worldageing19502050/pdf/90chapteriv.pdf.

  xxivto start teaching unromanticized colonial history: Steven Swinford and Christopher Hope, ‘Children should be taught about suffering under the British Empire, Jeremy Corbyn says’, The Telegraph, 27 July 2015.

  xxivwhat the British-domiciled Dutch writer Ian Buruma saw as an attempt to remind the English: Ian Buruma, Playing The Game, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1991, p. 258.

  xxivBuruma was, of course, echoing: Salman Rushdie, ‘Outside the Whale’, Granta, 1984, reproduced in Imaginary Homelands, New Delhi: Viking, 1993.

  xxivThe Indian columnist Aakar Patel suggested: Aakar Patel, ‘Dear Shashi, the fault was not in the Raj, but in ourselves’, Times of India, 26 July 2015.

  xxvi‘[W]hen we kill people,’ a British sea-captain says: Amitav Ghosh, Sea of Poppies, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2011, p. 242.

  CHAPTER 1: THE LOOTING OF INDIA

  2The British conquest of India: Will Durant, The Case for India, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1930, p. 7.

  3‘The little court disappears’: John Sullivan, A Plea for the Princes of India, London: E. Wilson, 1853, p. 67.

  3‘Nearly every kind of manufacture or product’: Jabez T. Sunderland, India in Bondage: Her Rig
ht to Freedom and a Place Among the Great Nations, New York: Lewis Copeland, 1929, p. 367.

  4At the beginning of the eighteenth century, as the British economic historian Angus Maddison: Angus Maddison, The World Economy, Development Centre of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2006.

  6‘What honour is left to us?’: William Dalrymple, ‘The East India Company: The Original Corporate Raiders’, The Guardian, 4 March 2015.

  7Bengal’s textiles were still being exported: Most of these details are from K. N. Chaudhuri, The Trading World of Asia and the English East India Company: 1660–1760, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006 and Sushil Chaudhury, The Prelude to Empire: Plassey Revolution of 1757, New Delhi: Manohar Publishers, 2000.

  8The soldiers of the East India Company obliged, systematically smashing the looms: William Bolts, Considerations on Indian Affairs: Particularly Respecting the Present State of Bengal and its Dependencies, London: J. Almon, P. Elmsly, and Brotherton and Sewell, 1772, p. vi.

  8India had enjoyed a 25 per cent share of the global trade in textiles: P. Bairoch and M. Levy-Leboyer, (eds), from ‘The Main Trends in National Economic Disparities since the Industrial Revolution’ in Disparities in Economic Development since the Industrial Revolution, New York: Macmillan, 1981.