An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India

by Shashi Tharoor

  9British exports of textiles to India, of course, soared: Jon Wilson, India Conquered: Britain’s Raj and the Chaos of Empire, London: Simon & Schuster, 2016, p. 321.

  9India’s weavers were, thus, merely the victims of technological obsolescence: This argument is made by B. R. Tomlinson in The Economy of Modern India, 1870–1970, The New Cambridge History of India, Vol 3, 3, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, p. 15.

  10In 1936, 62 per cent of the cloth sold in India: Gurcharan Das, India Unbound: From Independence to the Global Information Age, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001.

  11at the end of British rule, modern industry employed only 2.5 million people: Ibid, p. 63.

  11‘the redemption of a nation… a kind of gift from heaven’: Owen Jones, ‘William Hague is wrong…we must own up to our brutal colonial past’, The Independent, 3 September 2012.

  11‘There are few kings in Europe’: Letter to the Duke of Choiseul, dt. London, 27 Feb. 1768. A.E./C.P., Angleterre, Vol. 477, 1768; quoted in Sudipta Das, ‘British Reactions to the French Bugbear in India, 1763–83’, European History Quarterly, 22 (1), 1992, pp. 39–65.

  11‘[tax] defaulters were confined’: Durant, The Case for India.

  13Nabobs, [Macaulay] wrote: Historical Essays of Macaulay: William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, Lord Clive, Warren Hastings, Samuel Thurber (ed.), Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1894. The five paragraphs that follow draw extensively from Tillman W. Nechtman, ‘A Jewel in the Crown? Indian Wealth in Domestic Britain in the Late Eighteenth Century’, Eighteenth- Century Studies, 2007, Vol. 41 (1), pp. 71–86.

  13‘India is a sure path to [prosperity]’: James Holzman, The Nabobs in England: A Study of the Returned Anglo-Indian, 1760–1785, New York: Columbia University Press, 1926, pp. 27–28, quoted in Nechtman, 2007.

  14‘As your conduct and bravery is become the publick’: Richard Clive to Robert Clive, 15 December 1752; OIOC Mss Eur G37/3 quoted in Nechtman, 2007.

  14‘Here was Lord Clive’s diamond house’: Walpole to Mann, 9 April 1772, quoted in Henry B. Wheatley, London Past and Present: Its History, Associations, and Traditions, London: John Murray, 1891, p. 2.

  14The Cockerell brothers, John and Charles: www.sezincote.co.uk.

  16‘the Company providentially brings us home’: The Gentleman’s Magazine, Vol. 56, Part 2, London: A. Dodd and A. Smith, 1786, p 750.

  16‘Today the Commons of Great Britain’: Dalrymple, ‘East India Company’.

  17‘combined the meanness of a pedlar with the profligacy of a pirate’: R. B. Sheridan, ‘Speech on the Begums of Oude, February 7, 1787’, quoted in British Rule in India: Condemned by the British Themselves, issued by the Indian National Party, London, 1915, p. 15.

  17‘in the former capacity, they engross its trade’: Minute of 18 June 1789, quoted in ‘British Rule in India: Condemned by the British Themselves’, issued by the Indian National Party, London, 1915, p. 17.

  18Hastings duly informed the Council that he had received a ‘gift’: See the vivid accounts of the trial in Nicholas B. Dirks, The Scandal of Empire: India and the Creation of Imperial Britain, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press/ Harvard University Press, 2006; and Peter J. Marshall, The Impeachment of Warren Hastings, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965.

  18He described in colourfully painful detail the violation of Bengali women: Ibid.

  18‘the scene of exaction, rapacity, and plunder’: William Howitt, The English in India, London: Longman, Orme, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1839, pp. 42–43.

  19‘the misgovernment of the English was carried’: Thomas Babington Macaulay, Essays: Critical and Miscellaneous, London: Carey and Hart, 1844.

  19It is instructive to see both the extent to which House of Commons debates: See, for instance, substance of Sir Arthur Wellesley’s speech delivered in the Committee of the House of Commons on the India Budget on Thursday, 10 July 1806 in Bristol Selected Pamphlets, 1806, University of Bristol Library.

  19The prelate Bishop Heber…wrote in 1826: Bishop Heber, writing to Rt. Hon. Charles W. Wynne from the Karnatik, March 1826, quoted in British Rule Condemned by the British, p. 24.

  19In an extraordinary confession, a British administrator in Bengal, F. J. Shore: Hon. F. J. Shore’s Notes on Indian Affairs, Vol. ii, London, 1837, p. 516, quoted in Romesh Chunder Dutt, The Economic History India Under Early British Rule: From the Rise of the British Power in 1757 to the Accession of Queen Victoria in 1837, London: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co. Ltd, 1920.

  20rueful voices had coined the catchphrase, ‘Poor Nizzy pays for all’: See John Zubrzycki, The Last Nizam, New Delhi: Picador India, 2007, p. 34.

  21the revenue had to be paid to the colonial state everywhere in cash: See Sugata Bose, Peasant Labour and Colonial Capital, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

  22‘the ryots in the Districts outside the permanent settlement’: H. M. Hyndman, The Ruin of India by British Rule: Being the Report of the Social Democratic Federation to the Internationalist Congress at Stuttgart, London: Twentieth Century Press, 1907, cited in Histoire de la Ile Internationale, Vol. 16, Geneva: Minkoff Reprint, 1978, pp. 513–33.

  22‘the difference was this, that what the Mahomedan rulers claimed’: Chunder Dutt, The Economic History, pp. xi–xii.

  22A committee of the House of Commons declared: Quoted in Howitt, English in India, p. 103.

  23thereby abolishing century-old traditions and ties: Ibid, p 149.

  23‘As India is to be bled, the lancet should be directed’: British Rule Condemned, pp. 6–7.

  24Cecil Rhodes openly avowed that imperialism: Quoted in Zohreh T. Sullivan, Narratives of Empire: The Fictions of Rudyard Kipling, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, p. 7.

  24Bengali novelist Bankim Chandra Chatterjee wrote of the English: Tapan Raychaudhuri, Europe Reconsidered: Perceptions of the West in 19th Century Bengal, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988, p. 185.

  25Paul Baran calculated that 8 per cent of India’s GNP: Paul Baran, The Political Economy of Growth, New York, 1957, p. 148.

  25India was ‘depleted’, ‘exhausted’ and ‘bled’ by this drain of resources: Dadabhai Naoriji, Poverty and Un-British Rule in India, London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1901.

  25The extensive and detailed calculations of William Digby: William Digby, ‘Prosperous’ British India: A Revelation from Official Records, London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1901.

  26‘There can be no denial that there was a substantial outflow’: Angus Maddison, Class Structure and Economic Growth: India and Pakistan Since the Moghuls, New York: Routledge, 2013, p. 63.

  26In 1901, William Digby calculated the net amount: See William Digby, Indian Problems for English Consideration, London: National Liberal Federation, 1881 and ‘Prosperous’ British India, 1901.

  27A list of Indian Army deployments overseas by the British: H. S. Bhatia (ed.), Military History of British India, 1607-1947, New Delhi: Deep & Deep Publications, 1977.

  27Sikh who named his Hurricane fighter ‘Amritsar’: Ibid, p. 101.

  28Every British soldier posted to India: Bill Nasson, Britannia’s Empire: Making a British World, Stroud, Gloucestershire: Tempus, 2004.

  28Biscuits, rice…authorized to the European soldier, came from Indian production: Bhatia, Military History, p. 152.

  28‘how little human life and human welfare’: Howitt, English in India, pp. 40–41.

  29in the oft-quoted words of the Cambridge imperial historian John Seeley: John R. Seeley, The Expansion of England: Two Courses of Lectures, London: Macmillan, 1883, p. 243.

  30‘The mode by which the East India Company’: Howitt, English in India, p. 9.

  30‘The British empire in India was the creation of merchants’: Ferdinand Mount, The Tears of the Rajas: Mutiny, Money and Marriage in India 1805–1905, London: Simon & Schuster, 2015, p. 773.

  30Mr. Montgomery Martin, after examining: Dadabhai Naoroji, Poverty and Un-British Rule in India, London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1901.

  33Indian shipbuilding…offers
a more complex but equally instructive story: This section relies heavily on Indrajit Ray, 1995, ‘Shipbuilding in Bengal under Colonial Rule: A Case of ‘De-Industrialisation’, The Journal of Transport History, 16 (1), pp. 776–77.

  35India’s once-thriving shipbuilding industry collapsed: Ibid

  37The total amount of cash in circulation in the Indian economy fell: Wilson, India Conquered, p. 433.

  37Even Miss Prism…could not fail to take note: Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest, Act II, London: Leonard Smithers and Company, 1899.

  38English troopers in battle would often dismount and swap their own swords: Philip Mason, A Matter of Honour: An Account of the Indian Army, its Officers and Men, London: Penguin, 1974, p. 39.

  39India ‘missed the bus’ for industrialization, failing to catch up on the technological innovations: See, for instance , Akhilesh Pillalmarri, ‘Sorry, the United Kingdom Does Not Owe India Reparations’, The Diplomat, 24 July 2015; Raheen Kasam, ‘Reparations for Colonial India? How about railways, roads, irrigation, and the space programme we still pay for’, 22 July 2015, www.breitbart.com; and Foreman, ‘Reparations for the Raj?.

  41The humming factories of Dundee, the thriving shipyards, and the remittances home: See Scotland and the British Empire, John M. MacKenzie and T. M. Devine (eds.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Also see Martha MacLaren, British India and British Scotland 1780–1830, Akron, Ohio: Akron University Press, 2012.

  CHAPTER 2: DID THE BRITISH GIVE INDIA POLITICAL UNITY?

  45‘considering its long history, India has had but a few hours’: Diana Eck, India: A Sacred Geography, New York: Harmony Books. See also William Dalrymple’s review of the book for The Guardian, 27 July 2012.

  47having once been a British colony is the variable most highly correlated with democracy: Taken from Seymour Martin Lipset, Kyoung-Ryung Seong and John Charles Torres, ‘A Comparative Analysis of the Social Requisites of Democracy’, International Social Science Journal, 1993, 45, pp. 155–75.

  47‘every country with a population of at least 1 million’: Myron Weiner, ‘Empirical Democratic Theory’, in E. Ozbudun and M. Weiner (ed.), Competitive Elections in Developing Countries, Durham, NC: Duke University, 1987, pp. 3–34.

  49‘In India,’ wrote an eminent English civil servant: H. Fielding-Hall, Passing of the Empire, London: Hurst & Blackett, 1913, p. 134.

  50‘a society of little societies’: Wilson, India Conquered, p. 14.

  51‘Areas in which proprietary rights in land’: See, for instance, Abhijit Banerjee and Lakshmi Iyer, ‘History, Institutions, and Economic Performance: The Legacy of Colonial Land Tenure Systems in India’, The American Economic Review, Vol. 95, No. 4, 2005, pp. 1190–1213.

  51‘We may be regarded as the spring which’: Forrest, 1918, p. 296.

  52William Bolts, a Dutch trader…wrote in 1772: Bolts, 1772, p. vi.

  52Of all human conditions, perhaps the most brilliant’: Dalrymple, ‘The East India Company’.

  54The British charges against the rulers they overthrew: Hyndman: Report on India, 1907, Ruin of India by British, pp. 513–533.

  56‘partly to amaze the indigenes, partly to fortify’: Jan Morris, Farewell the Trumpets: An Imperial Retreat, London: Faber & Faber, 1978.

  56years later, the management theorist C. Northcote Parkinson: C. Northcote Parkinson, Parkinson’s Law: The Pursuit of Progress, London: John Murray, 1958.

  57reflected what the British writer David Cannadine dubbed ‘Ornamentalism’: David Cannadine, Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire, London: Allen Lane, 2001.

  59‘frivolous and sometimes vicious spendthrifts and idlers’: David Gilmour, Curzon: Imperial Statesman, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003.

  60‘neither Indian, nor civil, nor a service’: Jawaharlal Nehru, Glimpses of World History: Being Further Letters to his Daughter, London: Lindsay Drummond Ltd., 1949, p. 94.

  60‘a few hundred Englishmen should dominate India’: For sympathetic accounts of the lives, careers and points of view of the British in India, see Philip Mason, The Men Who Ruled India, New York: W. W. Norton, 1985 and Charles Allen, Plain Tales from the Raj, London: Abacus, 1988.

  61The British in India were never more than 0.05 per cent: Figures from Maddison, ‘The Economic and Social Impact of Colonial Rule in India’, in Class Structure.

  61‘so easily won, so narrowly based, so absurdly easily ruled’: Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire, Hachette, 2010, p. 82.

  62In David Gilmour’s telling, they had no illusions: From David Gilmour, The Ruling Caste: Imperial Lives in the Victorian Raj, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2006, pp. 5, 33, 19, 244.

  63‘The whole attitude of Government to the people it governs’: Fielding- Hall, Passing of the Empire, p. 54.

  64‘constructed a world of letters, ledgers and account books’: Wilson, India Conquered, p. 128.

  64he paid a Bengali clerk in the Collector’s office to tell him: Ibid, p. 140.

  64‘The new system was not designed’: Ibid, pp. 128–129.

  64‘allowed British officials to imagine’: Ibid, p. 225.

  65‘Collector of the Land Revenue. Registrar of the landed property’: Hyndman, Ruin of India by British.

  66In the summer capital of Simla: Gilmour, The Ruling Caste, p. 271.

  66‘ugly pallid bilious men’: Gilmour, The Ruling caste, p. 104.

  67‘A handful of people from a distant country’: Henry W. Nevinson, The New Spirit in India, London: Harper & Brothers, 1908, p. 329.

  67‘India is...administered by successive relays of English carpet-baggers’: H. M. Hyndman, Ruin of India by British, pp. 513–33.

  68Insulated from India by their upbringing and new social circumstances: See a detailed account in Anne de Courcy, The Fishing-Fleet: Husband-Hunting in the Raj, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2012.

  68the places named for the British have mostly been renamed: Gilmour, The Ruling Caste.

  69‘the Government of India is not Indian, it is English’: Fielding- Hall, Passing of Empire, p. 182.

  69Government must do its work: Ibid, p. 194.

  69‘it would be impossible to place Indian civilians’: Ibid, p. 188.

  69‘Socially he belongs to no world’: Ibid, p. 193.

  70‘educated Indians whose development the Government encourages’: British Rule Condemned, p. 13.

  72On the verge of being dismissed, Mahmud…resigned in 1892: Jon Wilson, ‘The Temperament of Empire. Law and Conquest in Late Nineteenth Century India’, from Gunnel Cederlof and Sanjukta Das Gupta, Subjects, Citizens and Law: Colonial and Postcolonial India, Routledge, 2016.

  72‘if an Indian in such a position tries to preserve his self-respect’: Ibid.

  73In the first decades of the twentieth century, J. T. Sunderland observed: Sunderland, 1929.

  73‘With the material wealth go also’: Dadabhai Naoroji, ‘The Moral Poverty of India and Native Thoughts on the Present British Indian Policy (Memorandum No. 2, 16th Nov, 1880)’, 1880, reproduced in Naoroji, Poverty and Un-British Rule in India, London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1901.

  74It is instructive to note the initial attitudes of whites in India: Two books that cover this theme especially well are Jonathan Gil Harris, The First Firangis, New Delhi: Aleph Book Company, 2015 and William Dalrymple, White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century India, London: Harper Perennial, 2002.

  74‘it was almost as common for Westerners to take on the customs’: Dalrymple, White Mughals.

  74‘the wills of company officials show that one in three’: Ibid.

  75‘our Eastern empire...has been acquired’: Quoted by Wilson, India Conquered, p. 163.

  75‘a passive allegiance,’ Malcolm added: Dalrymple, White Mughals.

  75‘Hundreds, if not thousands, on their way from Burma perished’: Quoted by Wilson, India Conquered, pp. 449–450.

  76This very metaphor pops up in the quarrel: E. M. Forster, A Passage to India, London: Allen Lane, 1924, pp. 50–
51.

  76‘Naboth is gone now, and his hut is ploughed into its native mud’: Rudyard Kipling, ‘Naboth’, in Life’s Handicap (1891), republished by Echo Books, London, 2007, p. 289.

  76‘sometimes with a rare understanding, sometimes with crusty, stereotyped contempt’: Philip Mason, Kipling: The Glass, The Shadow and The Fire, New York: Holt, Rinehart & Wilson, 1975, p. 27.

  77‘part of the defining discourse of colonialism’: Zohreh T. Sullivan, Narratives of Empire: The Fictions of Rudyard Kipling, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, p. 25.

  77‘brave island-fortress/of the storm-vexed sea’: Sir Lewis Morris, ‘Ode’, The Times, London, 22 June 1897.

  77‘be the father and the oppressor of the people’: Zohreh T. Sullivan, Narratives of Empire, p. 4.

  77‘Who hold Zam-Zammah, that “fire-breathing dragon”’: Rudyard Kipling, Kim, New York: Oxford University Press, 2008, p. 1.

  78the imperial enterprise required men of courage: See the detailed discussion in M. Daphne Kurtzer, Empire’s Children: Empire and Imperialism in Classic British Children’s Books, London: Routledge, 2002, pp. 13–44.

  78‘There is something noble in putting the hand of civilization’: Quoted in C. J. Wan-ling Wee, Culture, Empire, and the Question of Being Modern, New York: Lexington Books, 2003, p. 80.

  78‘the ennobling and invigorating stimulus’: Ibid, pp. 80–81.

  80‘Imperialism,’ Robert Kaplan suggests: Robert Kaplan, ‘In Defense of Empire’ The Atlantic, April 2014.

  81‘[if] this chapter of reform led directly or necessarily’: Morley, Indian Speeches London, 1910, 91, in Ishtiaq Husain Qureshi, The Struggle for Pakistan, University of Karachi, 1969, p. 28.

  81C. A. Bayly makes an impressive case: Christopher A. Bayly, Recovering Liberties: Indian Thought in the Age of Liberalism and Empire, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

  81it [the Congress] was a model of order’: Nevinson, The New Spirit in India, p. 327.

  82The chairman...summarized the history of the last year: Ibid, pp. 129–30, 132.