Inglorious Empire

by Shashi Tharoor

  Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially. At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom. A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation long suppressed finds utterance.

  There were no harsh words for the British, whose Raj was ending at midnight. ‘This is no time…for ill-will or blaming others,’ he added. ‘We have to build the noble mansion of free India where all her children may dwell.’

  Quitting India, Creating Pakistan

  In that last mad headlong rush to freedom and partition, the British emerge with little credit. Before the war they had no intention of devolving power so rapidly, or at all. The experience of the elected governments in the last years of the Raj confirmed that the British had never been serious about their proclaimed project of promoting the responsible governance of India by Indians. When the Congress ministries quit, the British thought little of appointing unelected Muslim Leaguers in their place and in many cases assuming direct control of functions that had supposedly been devolved to Indians. The British, who had been dismayed by the League’s inability to win a majority of Muslim seats anywhere, thereby undermining the strength of divide and rule, welcomed the opportunity to assume the power they had partly ceded, and to shore up the League as the principal alternative to the Indian National Congress in the process. They openly helped the Muslim League take advantage of this unexpected opportunity to exercise influence and patronage that their electoral support had not earned them, and to build up support while their principal opponents languished in jail.

  This was all part of official policy: no one in any responsible position in London or New Delhi as late as 1940 had any serious intention whatsoever of relinquishing the Empire or surrendering India to a rabble of nationalists clad in homespun. But the devastation of World War II meant that only one half of the phrase could survive: bled, bombed and battered for six years, Britain could divide but it could no longer rule.

  The British—terrorized by German bombing, demoralized by various defeats and large numbers of their soldiers taken prisoner, shaken by the desertion of Indian soldiers and the mutiny of Indian sailors, shivering in the record cold of the winter of 1945–46, crippled by power cuts and factory closures resulting from a post-War coal shortage—were exhausted and in no mood to focus on a distant empire when their own needs at home were so pressing. They were also more or less broke: American loans had kept the economy afloat and needed to be repaid, and even India was owed a sizable debt. Overseas commitments were no longer sustainable or particularly popular. Exit was the only viable option: the question was what they would leave behind—one India, two or several fragments?

  Britain’s own tactics before and during the war—compounded, as we have seen, by the Congress’s folly in relinquishing all its leverage and going to jail—ensured that by the time departure came, the prospects of a united India surviving a British exit had essentially faded. Divide et impera had worked too well: two Indias is what it would be.

  The task of dividing the two nations was assigned to Sir Cyril Radcliffe, a lawyer who had never been to India before and knew nothing of its history, society or traditions. Radcliffe drew up his maps in forty days, dividing provinces, districts, villages, homes and hearts—and promptly scuttled home to Britain, never to return to India. ‘The British Empire did not decline, it simply fell’, as Alex von Tunzelmann put it. The British were heedless of the lives that would be lost in their headlong rush to the exits.

  So much has already been written about the tragic disruption of Partition that it seems otiose to add new words to describe what has already been so devastatingly depicted by so many. It may suffice for now to quote the British Muslim scholar Yasmin Khan, in her well-regarded history The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan. Khan writes that Partition ‘stands testament to the follies of empire, which ruptures community evolution, distorts historical trajectories and forces violent state formation from societies that would otherwise have taken different and unknowable paths’.

  It is difficult, therefore, to buy the self-serving imperial argument that Britain bequeathed to India its political unity and democracy.

  Yes, it allied a variety of states under a system of common law and administration, but with a number of distortions (outlined in the previous chapters) occasioned by the fitful and hypocritical nature of British conquest and rule, and by the British determination to deny Indians the opportunity to exercise genuine political authority in representative institutions.

  Yes, it brought in a supposedly free press, but ensured it operated under severe constraints, and planted the seeds of representative parliamentary institutions while withholding the substance of power from Indians.

  Far from introducing democracy to a country mired in despotism and tyranny, as many Britons liked to pretend, it denied political freedom to a land that had long enjoyed it even under various monarchs, thanks to a cultural tradition of debate and dissent even on vital issues of spirituality and governance.

  Yes, India has emerged as a thriving pluralist democracy, though both Pakistan and Bangladesh have encountered difficulties in doing so, and Pakistan officially and undemocratically discriminates against its non-Muslim citizens even under civilian rule. But India’s flourishing democracy of seven decades is no tribute to British rule. It is a bit rich, as I pointed out in Oxford, for the British to suppress, exploit, imprison, torture and maim a people for 200 years and then celebrate the fact that they are a democracy at the end of it.

  Finally, the most painful question of all: what political unity can we celebrate when the horrors of Partition were the direct result of the deliberate British policy of communal division that fomented religious antagonisms to facilitate continued imperial rule? If Britain’s greatest accomplishment was the creation of a single political unit called India, fulfilling the aspirations of visionary emperors from Ashoka to Akbar, then its greatest failure must be the shambles of that original Brexit—cutting and running from the land they had claimed to rule for its betterment, leaving behind a million dead, thirteen million displaced, billions of rupees of property destroyed, and the flames of communal hatred blazing hotly across the ravaged land. No greater indictment of the failures of British rule in India can be found than the tragic manner of its ending.

  5

  THE MYTH OF ENLIGHTENED DESPOTISM

  There has been a tendency on the part of many, including several Anglophile Indians, to see British colonial rule as essentially benign, a version of the ‘enlightened despotism’ that characterized the Enlightenment of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In this view, the British may have been imperialists who denied Indians democracy, but they ruled generously and wisely, for the greater good of their subjects. To paraphrase Emperor Joseph II of Austria, who famously said: ‘Everything for the people, nothing by the people’, the British, in this reading, may not have let the Indians do anything, but they did everything for them.

  This view is either naïve or self-serving, it is difficult to decide which. A few examples of how the British actually ruled in India are therefore worth examining, for they give the lie to this narrative. The most obvious example relates to the famines the British caused and mismanaged; to the system of forced emigration of Indians by transportation and indentured labour; and to the brutality with which dissent was suppressed. We shall examine each of these briefly.

  Feast and Famine: The British and ‘Starving India’

  As India became increasingly crucial to British prosperity, millions of Indians died completely unnecessary deaths in famines. As a result of what one can only call the British Colonial Holocaust, thanks to economic policies ruthlessly enforced by Britain, between 30 and 35 million Indians needlessly died of sta
rvation during the Raj. Millions of tonnes of wheat were exported from India to Britain even as famine raged. When relief camps were set up, the inhabitants were barely fed and nearly all died.

  It is striking that the last large-scale famine to take place in India was under British rule; none has taken place since, because Indian democracy has been more responsive to the needs of drought-affected and poverty-stricken Indians than the British rulers ever were. As the scholar and Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen has explained, there has never been a famine in a democracy with a free press, because public accountability ensures effective response. Sen’s work, informed by compassion as well as solid quantitative research, has established the now widely-accepted doctrine that famines are nearly always avoidable; that they result not from lack of food but lack of access to food; that distribution is therefore the key, and that democracy is the one system of government that enables food to be distributed widely and fairly. Lack of democracy and public accountability, however, is what characterized British rule in India.

  A list of major famines during British rule makes for grim reading: the Great Bengal Famine (1770), Madras (1782–83), Chalisa Famine (1783–84) in Delhi and the adjoining areas, Doji bara Famine (1791–92) around Hyderabad, Agra Famine (1837–38), Orissa Famine (1866), Bihar Famine (1873–74), Southern India Famine (1876–77), the Indian Famine (1896–1900 approx.), Bombay Famine (1905–06) and the most notorious of the lot, the Bengal Famine (1943–44).10 The fatality figures are horrifying: from 1770 to 1900, 25 million Indians are estimated to have died in famines, including 15 million in the five famines in the second half of the nineteenth century. The famines of the twentieth century probably took the total well over 35 million. William Digby pointed out that in the entire 107 years from 1793 to 1900, only an estimated 5 million people had died in all the wars around the world combined, whereas in just ten years 1891–1900, 19 million had died in India in famines alone. While comparisons of human deaths are always invidious, the 35 million who died of famine and epidemics during the Raj does remind one of the 25 million who died in Stalin’s collectivization drive and political purges, the 45 million who died during Mao’s cultural revolution, and the 55 million who died worldwide during World War II. The death toll from the colonial holocausts is right up there with some of the most harrowing examples of man’s inhumanity to man in modern times.

  [10 Lists vary. The Oriental Herald in February 1838 reported on fifteen famines in British India in the course of seven decades: ‘Famines prevailed in India, in 1766, 1770 (when half the inhabitants perished in Bengal), 1782, 1792, 1803, 1804, 1819, 1820, 1824, 1829, 1832, 1833, 1836, 1837, and now in 1838.’]

  In late colonial India, famines became an important area of political contestation. Their repeated occurrence, the failures of the British to fulfil their promises of good governance, and the resultant mass starvations, provided a strong rallying point for Indian nationalist leaders: Dadabhai Naoroji began his research into the famous ‘economic drain’ theory and ‘un-British rule in India’ after being moved by the horror of the Orissa deaths. He had hitherto been seen as an Anglophile and an admirer of British liberalism, but now he could no longer hide his disillusionment. ‘Security of life and property we have better in these times, no doubt,’ Naoroji wrote. ‘But the destruction of a million and a half lives in one famine [the toll in Orissa in 1866] is a strange illustration of the worth of the life and property thus secured.’

  The British tended to base their refusal to intervene in famines with adequate governmental measures on a combination of three sets of considerations: free trade principles (do not interfere with market forces), Malthusian doctrine (growth in population beyond the ability of the land to sustain it would inevitably lead to deaths, thereby restoring the ‘correct’ level of population) and financial prudence (don’t spend money we haven’t budgeted for). On these grounds, Britain had not intervened to save lives in Ireland, or prevent emigration to America, during the famine there. In the mid-nineteenth century, as Dinyar Patel points out, ‘it was common economic wisdom that government intervention in famines was unnecessary and even harmful. The market would restore a proper balance. Any excess deaths, according to Malthusian principles, were nature’s way of responding to overpopulation’.

  Thus the Governor of Bengal, Sir Cecil Beadon (who on a visit to the area had declared, ‘Such visitations of providence as these no government can do much either to prevent or alleviate’), when criticized for doing nothing to reduce food prices during the Orissa Famine of 1866, declared that ‘If I were to attempt to do this, I should consider myself no better than a dacoit or a thief.’ The governor was more concerned with fealty to the free-market principles of Adam Smith, and the damage to his political reputation, were he seen to be intervening in the ‘natural laws’ of economics, than the tragedy of the deaths of people in Orissa.

  This did, it must be said, trouble some Englishmen of conscience: the Marquess of Salisbury, Secretary of State for India during the Orissa Famine of 1866, is said to have reproached himself daily for his failure to act for two months after he had been informed of the onset of the crisis; his inaction was blamed for one million famine-related deaths. British administrators largely acknowledged, from at least the 1860s, that the frequent famines were not the result of food shortages per se, but the inability of people to purchase food or, in a scholar’s words, ‘complex economic crises induced by the market impacts of drought and crop failure.’ The reasons for that inability, however, went well beyond those the British liked to cite, and inculpated the colonial rulers themselves. During the very 1866 Orissa Famine that would so disturb Salisbury’s sleep, while a million and a half people starved to death, the British insouciantly exported 200 million pounds of rice to Britain.

  On the one hand, the persistence of famines contributed to the British narrative too, since they could be cited to make the argument that Indians needed British oversight and supervision that, indeed, the Indians would all be dying of starvation were it not for the benevolence of British rule. On the other, the British, in their official reports and reviews of famine, took care to blame everything but themselves—the burgeoning population, declining rice production, the role of climate and other uncontrollable factors, lack of transportation, even indigenous culture. All these elements were emphasized as causes that thwarted the noble attempts by good British administrators to prevent food shortages, with very little consideration given to the role that colonial policies and practices played in shaping the events that led to those shortages, destroying the purchasing power of the Indian peasantry and failing to mitigate the ravages of the climate.

  This was not merely a nineteenth-century phenomenon, but characterized British colonial policy throughout. As late as 1943, the last paragraph of the official report into the Bengal Famine provides an interesting example of this:

  We have criticized the Government of Bengal for their failure to control the famine. It is the responsibility of the Government to lead the people and take effective steps to prevent avoidable catastrophe. But the public in Bengal, or at least certain sections of it, have also their share of blame. We have referred to the atmosphere of fear and greed which, in the absence of control, was one of the causes of the rapid rise in the price level. Enormous profits were made out of the calamity, and in the circumstances, profits for some meant death for others. A large part of the community lived in plenty while others starved, and there was much indifference in face of suffering. Corruption was widespread throughout the province and in many classes of society… Society, together with its organs, failed to protect its weaker members. Indeed there was a moral and social breakdown, as well as an administrative breakdown.

  As against this self-exculpation—when you blame a tragedy on everybody, you blame it on nobody—there lies the uncompromising denunciation of a Will Durant: ‘Behind all these as the fundamental source of the terrible famines in India, lies such merciless exploitation, such unbala
nced exportation of goods, and such brutal collection of high taxes in the very midst of famine, that the starving peasants cannot pay what is asked for… American charity has often paid for the relief of famine in India while the Government was collecting taxes from the dying.’ Romesh Chunder Dutt argued accurately that ‘there has never been a single year when the food-supply of the country was insufficient for the people’. Durant quotes an American theologian, Dr Charles Hall, as echoing this view and adding: ‘The Indian starves [so] that India’s annual revenue may not be diminished by a dollar. 80 per cent of the whole population has been thrown back upon the soil because England’s discriminating duties have ruined practically every branch of native manufacture. We send shiploads of grain to India, but there is plenty of grain in India. The trouble is that the people have been ground down till they are too poor to buy it.’

  Before the British came, Indian rulers had supported the people in times of food scarcity by policies of tax relief, fixing grain prices and banning food exports from famine-affected regions. There was also a strong tradition of personal charity, especially during periods of scarcity. In tough times, wealthier Indians, including landowners and merchants, often took on the responsibility of helping the poor by offering them work, giving them food or even subsidizing the cost of grain by selling it below market prices. The East India Company took a dim view of this kind of Indian almsgiving, dismissing it as undiscerning charity which irresponsibly attracted the wandering poor; one writer called it ‘indiscriminate indigenous almsgiving motivated by superstition and ostentation’. The British therefore declared that they would ‘provide employment for the able-bodied’ but not ‘gratuitous relief’ to the general public.