An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India

by Shashi Tharoor

  183‘it is the duty of the Government’: Johann Hari, ‘The Truth? Our Empire Killed Millions’, The Independent, 19 June 2006.

  183‘severely reprimanded, threatened with degradation’: Ibid.

  183‘Scores of corpses were tumbled into old wells’: Ibid.

  184‘When in August 1877 the leading citizens of Madras’: Georgina Brewis, ‘Fill full the Mouth of Famine: Voluntary action in famine relief in India 1877–1900’, in Robbins, D. et al. (eds), Yearbook II PhD research in progress, London: University of East London, 2007, pp. 32–50.

  185‘were humane men and, although hampered by inadequate’: Ibid.

  186‘[i]n its influence on agriculture, [cattle mortality]: J. C. Geddes, Administrative Experience Recorded Former Famines, Calcutta, 1874, p. 350. Another official noted that ‘a loss that is likely to fall more heavily on the farmers than even the temporary loss of manual labour, is the loss by death of their plough and well bullocks’. Report of Colonel Baird Smith to Indian Government on Commercial Condition of North West Province of India and recent Famine, Parliamentary Papers, 8 May 1861, p. 29; and Report of the Same Officer to the Indian Government on the Recent Famine in the Same Province, House of Commons, 1862, p. 39.

  187‘it falls to us to defend our Empire from the spectral armies: Cited in Chandrika Kaul, Reporting the Raj: The British Press and India 1880–1922, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1922, p. 75.

  188‘in the past 12 years the population of India’: Sydney Morning Herald, 6 November 1943.

  188richly-documented account of the Bengal Famine: Madhusree Mukerjee, Churchill’s Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India During World War II, New York: Basic Books, 2010, p. 332.

  189The way in which Britain’s wartime financial arrangements: Durant, p. 36. For famines in general and the Bengal Famine of 1943-44 in particular, see also Cormac Ó Gráda, Eating People is Wrong, and Other Essays on Famine, its Past, and its Future, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1950.

  189‘a providential remedy for overpopulation’: William Jennings Bryan, British Rule in India, reprinted by the British Committee of the Indian National Congress, London, 1906, p. 11.

  190which rests largely on the introduction of quinine as an anti-malarial drug: These claims are made in Ferguson, Empire, p. 215.

  191From 1787, Indian convicts were transported, initially to the penal colonies: These details are cited in G. S. V. Prasad and N. Kanakarathnam, ‘Colonial India and Transportation: Indian Convicts in South East Asia and Elsewhere’, International Journal of Applied Research, Vol. 1 (13), 2015, pp. 5–8.

  191Between 1825 to 1872, Indian convicts made up the bulk of the labour force: Ibid.

  192‘Whether labour were predominantly enslaved, apprenticed or indentured’: Clare Anderson, Convicts in the Indian Ocean, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000, p. 104-106.

  193The ‘Brotherhood of the Boat’ became the subject of poetry: See this song from the 1970s in the Carribean called ‘Jahaji Bhai, Brotherhood of the Boat’: www.youtu.be/DOh4fsIaTH8.

  193In the period 1519-1939, an estimated 5,300,000 people whom scholars delicately dub ‘unfree migrants’: G. S. V. Prasad and Dr N Kanakarathnam, ‘Colonial India and transportation: Indian convicts in South East Asia and elsewhere’, International Journal of Applied Research, 1(13), 2015.

  194‘was as if fate had thrust its fist’: Ghosh, Sea of Poppies, p. 367.

  195‘Most of the time, the actions of British imperial administrators’: Wilson, India Conquered, p. 5.

  195‘their sense of vulnerability and inability’: Ibid, pp 75–77.

  195‘I can only [subdue resistance] by reprisals’: Howitt, English in India, p. 21.

  196Delhi…was left a desolate ruin: Ferdinand Mount, Tears of the Rajas.

  196‘I knowed what that meant’: Denis Judd, The Lion and the Tiger: The Rise and Fall of the British Raj, 1600–1947, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, p. 132.

  197‘every mutiny, every danger, every terror, and every crime’: John Ruskin, The Pleasures of England: Lectures Given in Oxford, London: G. Allen, 1884, p. 111.

  201‘Peterloo massacre had claimed about 11 lives’: Helen Fein, Imperial Crime and Punishment, Honolulu: The University Press of Hawaii, 1977, p. xii.

  201‘the calumny...that frail English roses: Salman Rushdie, ‘Outside the Whale’.

  202General Dyer issued an order that Hindus using the street: Durant, The Case for India, pp. 134–135.

  204‘I know it is said in missionary meetings that we conquered India’: Quoted in British Rule Condemned, p. 36.

  CHAPTER 6: THE REMAINING CASE FOR EMPIRE

  206‘In the beginning, there were two nations’: Tunzelmann, Indian Summer, p. 6.

  206‘led to the modernisation, development, protection, agrarian advance’: Amit Singh, ‘Think India should be grateful for colonialism? Here are five reasons why you’re unbelievably ignorant’, The Independent, 10 November 2015.

  207‘Wherever they are allowed a free outlet’: H. M. Hyndman, Ruin of India by British, pp. 513–33.

  210there were fourteen questions on this issue: Breakdown of questions figures based on Amba Prasad, Indian Railways: A Study in Public Utility Administration, Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1960.

  214Indians also pointed out at the time that the argument that the railways: See, for instance, Horace Bell, Railway Policy in India, Rivington, Percival & Company, 1894 and Edward Davidson, The Railways of India: With an Account of Their Rise, Progress, and Construction, E. & F. N. Spon, 1868.

  215‘sordid and selfish...’: Bipan Chandra, The Rise and Growth of Economic Nationalism in India: Economic Policies of Indian National Leadership, 1880–1905, New Delhi: Har-Anand Publications, 2010.

  215‘Britain provided India with the necessary tools’: Jonathan Old, ‘Why I think Shashi Tharoor’s Speech is Populist, Oversimplified and Ignores the Problems’, www.youthkiawaaz.com, 28 July 2015.

  215The British left India with a literacy rate of 16 per cent: The Census of India, 1951, New Delhi: Publications Division, 1952.

  216‘When the British came, there was, throughout India, a system of communal schools: Durant, The Case for India, pp. 31–35.

  218‘in pursuing a system, the tendency of which’: Sir Thomas Munro, ‘His Life’, Vol. III, quoted in British Rule Condemned by British Themselves, p. 16.

  219philosopher James Mill and his followers urged the promotion of western science: James Mill, History of British India, London: Baldwin, Cradock and Joy, 1817, p. 156.

  221‘The fact that the Hindoo law is to be learned chiefly’: Macaulay’s Minute on Education, 2 Feb 1835, is published in Henry Sharp, Selections from the Educational Records, Bureau of Education, India, I, Calcutta, 1920.

  222‘most fully admitted that the great body of the people’: Quoted in Zastoupil and Moir, (1999), p 140–141.

  222It is difficult to argue…that such education acquired as much reach: From Margrit Pernau (ed.), Delhi College: Traditional Elites, the Colonial State and Education before 1857, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006.

  223‘become a sort of hybrid’: Fielding-Hall, Passing of the Empire, p. 298.

  224All Indian aspirations and development of strong character: British Rule Condemned, p 9.

  224European subordination of Asia was not merely economic: Pankaj Mishra, From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia, London: Allen Lane, 2012.

  224To the memory of the British Empire in India: Nirad C. Chaudhuri, Autobiography of an Unknown Indian, London: Macmillan, 1951.

  224made Chaudhuri a poster child for scholarly studies of how Empire creates: Ian Almond, The Thought of Nirad C. Chaudhuri: Islam, Empire and Loss, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.

  225‘these two processes of self- othering’: Ibid, p. 115.

  225moved to Oxford, there to live out his centenarian life: Ibid, p. 120.

  225seeing even in Clive’s rapacity…
the ‘counterbalancing grandeur’ of the grand imperialist: Chaudhuri, Autobiography, p. 3; Chaudhuri, Clive of India, p. 11.

  225‘Nirad Chaudhuri is a fiction created by the Indian writer: David Lelyveld, ‘The Notorious Unknown Indian’, New York Times, 13 November, 1988.

  226‘all the squalid history of Indo-British personal relations’: Chaudhuri, Autobiography, p. 15.

  227‘mythological histories...where fable stands in the face of facts’: Javed Majeed, Ungoverned Imaginings: James Mill’s The History of British India and Orientalism, Clarendon Press, 1992.

  228Gauri Vishwanathan has done pioneering work on the role of: Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India, New York: Columbia University Press, 1989.

  228arguments made for propagating English literature through the English language: Charles E. Trevelyan, On the Education of the People of India, London: Longman, Orme, Brown, Green & Longmans, 1838.

  230‘the rise of Raj revisionism’: Rushdie, ‘Outside the Whale’; see also Kathleen Wilson (ed.), A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity and Modernity in Britain and the Empire 1660–1840 (2004); Antoinette Burton, Empire in Question: Reading, Writing, and Teaching British Imperialism, Durham: Duke University Press, 2011.

  230‘it is impossible to make the English language the vernacular tongue’: Howitt, English in India, p. 88.

  230‘in our schools pupils imbibe sedition’: J. D. Rees, The Real India, London: Methuen, 1908, pp. 162–163.

  231the study of which, even in Oxford, induces a regrettable tendency towards vain: Ibid, p. 343.

  236‘That was the age when the English loved and treasured’: Richard West, ‘Wodehouse Sahib’, Harpers and Queen, 1988, pp. 114–115.

  239‘let the English who read this at home reflect’: Quoted in British Rule Condemned, p. 19.

  241large numbers of trees were chopped down since the opium poppy: Arupjyoti Saikia, ‘State, peasants and land reclamation: The predicament of forest conservation in Assam, 1850s-1980s’, Indian Economic & Social History Review, 2008, pp. 81–82.

  242The term Puliyur has lost its meaning: For details of India’s environmental destruction under the British, see Mahesh Rangarajan, India’s Wildlife History, New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001; Madhav Gadgil and Ramachandra Guha, Ecology and Equity: The Use and Abuse of Nature in Contemporary India, New Delhi: Routledge, 1995.

  243cricket is really, in the sociologist Ashis Nandy’s phrase: Ashis Nandy, The Tao of Cricket: On Games of Destiny and the Destiny of Games, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000, p. 1.

  245why cricket acquired such a hold in Bengal society between 1880 and 1947: Anonymous, ‘Cricket in Colonial Bengal (1880–1947): A lost history of nationalism’, The International Journal of the History of Sport, Vol. 23 (6), 2006.

  245‘saw cricket as an identifier of social status’: Nandy, p. 53.

  246‘an English cricketer and an Indian prince’: Buruma, p. 234.

  246‘attacked the political and economic aspects of British imperialism’: Richard Cashman, Patrons, Players, and the Crowd: The Phenomenon of Indian Cricket, London: Orient Longman, 1980, p. 22–3.

  247sports such as gymnastics and cricket were made compulsory to develop: Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The ‘Manly Englishman’ and the ‘Effeminate Bengali’ in the Late Nineteenth Century, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995.

  CHAPTER 7: THE (IM)BALANCE SHEET: A CODA

  251‘an exercise in benign autocracy and an experiment in altruism’: See www.andrewlownie.co.uk/authors/lawrence-james/books/raj-the-making-and-unmaking-of-british-empire.

  251Recent years have seen the rise of what the academic Paul Gilroy: Paul Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia, New York: Columbia University Press, 2005.

  251A 2014 YouGov poll revealed that 59 per cent of respondents: www.yougov.co.uk/news/2014/07/26/britain-proud-its-empire/

  251‘the optimal allocation of labour, capital and goods’: Ferguson, Empire, p. xx.

  252human beings do not live in the long run; they live, and suffer, in the here and now: These arguments are cogently substantiated by Linda Colley, ‘Into the Belly of the Beast’, The Guardian, 18 January 2003, and Philip Pomper , ‘The History and Theory of Empires’, History and Theory, Vol. 44 (4), December 2005, Wiley for Wesleyan University, pp. 1–27.

  253Indian society has no history at all, at least no known history: Karl Marx, ‘The Future Results of British Rule in India’, in David McLellan, ed., Karl Marx: Selected Writings, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982, p. 362.

  253‘whether all this has been for better or worse, is almost impossible to say’: Denis Judd, The Lion and the Tiger: The Rise and Fall of the British Raj, 1600–1947, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, p. 200.

  253‘its operation was driven instead by narrow interests and visceral passions’: Wilson, India Conquered, p. 500.

  254‘between 1757 and 1900 British per capita gross domestic product’: Ferguson, Empire, p. 216.

  255the Indian government brought electricity to roughly 320 times as many villages: Paul Cotterrill, ‘Niall Ferguson’s Ignorant Defence of British Rule in India’, New Statesman, 16 August 2012.

  255India was… an ‘extractive colony’: Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, Why Nations Fail, New York: Crown Business, 2012.

  255Colonial exploitation happened instead: See Cotterrill, ‘Ferguson’s Ignorant Defence’ and ‘The Incomplete State: Charles Tilly and the Defence of Aid to India’, www.thoughcowardsflinch.com/2012/02/07/the-incomplete-state-charles-tilly-and-the-defence-of-aid-to-india/, 7 Feb 2012.

  255‘When the English came to India’: William Jennings Bryan, British Rule in India, Westminster: British Committee of the Indian National Congress, 1906, p. 19.

  255‘The empire was run on the cheap’: Jon Wilson, ‘False and dangerous’, The Guardian, 8 February 2003.

  256‘in return for its moment of greatness on the world stage’: Lawrence James, Raj: The Making and Unmaking of British India, New York: St Martin’s Griffin, 1997.

  256‘Why, for example, should one assume that eighteenth-century India’: Professor Andrew Porter’s review of Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World, (History review no. 325) www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/325.

  257He talked admiringly of spices and jewels, precious stones: Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The Career and Legend of Vasco da Gama, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

  257The annual revenues of the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb: John Kautsky, The Politics of Aristocratic Empires, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982, p. 188.

  257The India that succumbed to British rule enjoyed an enormous financial surplus: Chunder Dutt, Economic History of India, p. xxv.

  257‘In 1750, Indians had a similar standard of living to people in Britain’: Wilson, ‘False and Dangerous’.

  258‘a flabby, pretending, weak-eyed devil of a rapacious and pitiless folly’: Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, London: Dover Thrift Editions, 1990, originally published in the volume Youth: A Narrative, and Two Other Stories, Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood & Sons, 1902.

  259‘The question...’: Ferguson, Empire, p. xxix.

  259‘The industrial revolution did not occur because’: Das, ‘India: How a rich nation’; see also Das, India Unbound, pp. 228–243.

  262‘Ten per cent of the army expenditure applied to irrigation’: William Jennings Bryan, p. 12.

  263‘temperate, respectful, patient, subordinate, and faithful’: Ibid, p. 187.

  263‘Our force does not operate so much by its actual strength’: Mason, A Matter of Honour.

  267[It was] the practice of the miserable tyrants whom we found in India: Thomas Babington Macaulay, Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches—Volume 4, Project Gutenberg, 2008. www.gutenberg. org/files/2170/2170-h/2170-h.htm.

  267British interfered with social customs only when it suited them: See, for example, the impassioned appeals by anti-slavery campaigners for the British gover
nment to put an end to certain traditional practices of servitude, which were of course completely ignored by Company officialdom: Wilson Anti-Slavery Collection, A Brief View of Slavery in British India, 1841, Manchester: The University of Manchester, John Rylands University Library. URL: www.jstor.org/stable/60228274.

  268‘Unlike Stalin’s Russia, the British empire’: Lawrence James, The Making and Unmaking of British India, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000; also published as Raj: The Making and Unmaking of British India, London: Little, Brown &Co., 1997.

  268For whom was the British empire an open society?: See the essays in Philippa Levine, ed., Gender and Empire, Oxford History of the British Empire Companion Series, Oxford University Press, 2004.

  270Let’s look at the numbers one last time, widening the lens a little: See https://infogr.am/Share-of-world-GDP-throughout-history.

  270As of 2014 Britain accounted for 2.4 per cent of global GDP: www.quandl.com/collections/economics/gdp-as-share-of-world-gdp-at-pp-by-country.

  270‘Ferguson’s "history" is a fairy tale for our times’: Priyamvada Gopal, ‘The story peddled by imperial apologists is a poisonous fairytale’, The Guardian, 28 June 2006.

  271Henry Labouchère, published an immediate rejoinder: Henry Labouchère, ‘The Brown Man’s Burden’ was first published in the London magazine, Truth, edited by Labouchère, in February 1899.

  CHAPTER 8: THE MESSY AFTERLIFE OF COLONIALISM

  276A 1997 Gallup Poll in Britain revealed: Stuart Ward, ed., British Culture and the End of Empire (Manchester, 2001), 28, 128, cited in Richard Price , ‘One Big Thing: Britain, Its Empire, and Their Imperial Culture’, Journal of British Studies, Vol. 45, No. 3, July 2006, pp. 602–627. Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of The North American Conference on British Studies www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/503593.

  277‘wholly unprecedented in creating a global hierarchy’: Pankaj Mishra, From the Ruins of Empire. The Revolt against the West and the Remaking of Asia, London: Allen Lane, 2012, p. 42.

  277‘the memory of European imperialism remains a live political factor’: Mark Mazower, ‘From the Ruins of Empire’, Financial Times, 27 July 2012.