Inglorious Empire

by Shashi Tharoor

  The sociologist Richard Cashman notes that Indian nationalism was less radical, in a cultural sense, than Irish nationalism. In Ireland, the nationalists and Home Rule agitators attacked cricket and other English sports as objectionable elements of colonial culture, and patronized ‘Gaelic sports’ instead. Indian nationalist leaders, on the other hand, ‘attacked the political and economic aspects of British imperialism but retained an affection for some aspects of English culture’. While traditional Indian sports like kabaddi languished in the colonial era, and polo was revived as a sport mainly for the British and a very narrow segment of the Indian aristocracy, cricket was seen as a sport where Indians could hold their own against the English. (This may explain why Ireland still has a very modest cricket team that is yet to earn ‘Test’ status, whereas India in the twenty-first century is one of the giants of the world game.)

  That cricket was connected with the nationalist movement in Bengal of the 1910s is evident from the sporting history of Presidency College, the principal English-language institution of higher learning for Indians in Calcutta, where sports such as gymnastics and cricket were made compulsory to develop (as we have noted a little earlier) Bengali boys physically in reaction to British colonial stereotypes of ‘manly’ Britons and effeminate Bengalis. When the nationalist resistance in Bengal was gathering momentum, Presidency College lost a cricket match in 1914 to an all-European team of La Martinière College, an unabashedly colonial institution whose students were divided into ‘Houses’ named for the likes of Charnock and Macaulay. This caused much breast-beating and self-flagellation. The players of the team were publicly criticized: ‘the big defeat of the college team by La Martinière College cannot be forgiven’, declared the Presidency College magazine.13

  [13 Of course, my football-crazy son Kanishk assures me that the single greatest moment of Indian sporting triumph against the British in the colonial period is to be found in football, not cricket: the Mohun Bagan team that defeated the East Yorkshire Regiment to win the IFA shield in 1911, barefoot!]

  ‘The contention that emulation of the colonizers is the key to explaining the origins of Indian cricket,’ writes a scholar, ‘fails to successfully account for the flowering of the game in Bengal.’ So cricket too had nationalist overtones, and while one must concede that the British imparted it to us, today we can more than hold our own with them, and anyone else playing that sport.

  7

  THE (IM) BALANCE SHEET

  A CODA

  As I prepare to wind up my arguments, I’d like to touch on aspects of them, in brief, in this chapter. Before I do so I’d like to make it clear that it is not my intention to discredit every single thing the British did in India. As with all human enterprises, colonialism too brought positives as well as negatives. Not every British official in India was as rapacious as Clive, as ignorantly contemptuous as Macaulay, as arrogantly divisive as Curzon, as cruel as Dyer, or as racist as Churchill. There were good men who rose above the prejudices of their age to treat Indians with compassion, curiosity and respect; humane judges, conscientious officials, visionary viceroys and governors, Britons who genuinely befriended Indians across the colour barrier; and throughout the Raj there were men who devoted their lives to serve in India—to serve their country and its colonial institutions, it must be said, but also to help ordinary people lead better lives in the process. Their good works are still remembered by the Indians whose lives they changed. Sir Arthur Cotton, for instance, built a dam across the Godavari that irrigated over 1.5 million acres of previously arid land in south India, and is celebrated to this day with some three thousand statues installed by grateful farming communities in those two Andhra Pradesh districts, with even chief ministers participating in his birthday memorials. All these figures did exist; but they alleviated, rather than justified, the monstrous crime that allowed them to exist, the crime of subjugating a people under the oppressive heel of the ‘stout British boot’.

  Few still claim, as Lord Curzon did, that ‘the British empire is under Providence the greatest instrument for good that the world has seen’; having written (or so he declared, without the slightest suggestion of irony) ‘the most unselfish page in history… We found strife and we have created order.’ He added that Britain had ruled India ‘for the lasting benefit of millions of the human race’.

  Few claim, I said, but some do. There are still Empire apologists like Ferguson and the lesser-known but surprisingly successful Lawrence James, who portrays the imperial undertaking as (to quote his literary agency) ‘an exercise in benign autocracy and an experiment in altruism’. It seems preposterous that anyone today could possibly believe the twaddle that by spreading the benign blessings of free trade like so much confetti, introducing Western notions of governance by gunboat and sowing altruistic seeds of technological progress, the British empire genuinely ruled the benighted heathen in his own interest, but there are still nostalgics willing to make such an argument to the gullible, and they must be refuted, as I have tried to do throughout the book.

  Imperial Pretensions, Colonial Consquences

  Recent years have seen the rise of what the scholar Paul Gilroy called ‘postcolonial melancholia’, the yearning for the glories of Empire, reflected in such delights as a burger called the Old Colonial, a London bar named The Plantation, and an Oxford cocktail (issued during the debate on reparations in which I spoke) named Colonial Comeback. A 2014 YouGov poll revealed that 59 per cent of respondents thought the British empire was ‘something to be proud of’, and only 19 per cent were ‘ashamed’ of its misdeeds; almost half the respondents also felt that the countries ‘were better off’ for having been colonized. An astonishing 34 per cent opined that ‘they would like it if Britain still had an empire’.

  Niall Ferguson, for instance, argues that Britain’s empire promoted ‘the optimal allocation of labour, capital and goods in the world…no organisation in history has done more to promote the free movement of goods, capital and labour than the British empire in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. And no organization has done more to impose Western norms of law, order and governance around the world. For much (though certainly not all) of its history, the British Empire acted as an agency for relatively incorrupt government. Prima facie, there therefore seems a plausible case that Empire enhanced global welfare—in other words, [that it] was a Good Thing.’

  This ‘Good Thing’ was so proclaimed at the height of globalization at the dawn of the twenty-first century, when it suited Ferguson to portray the British empire as the pioneer of this much-vaunted global economic phenomenon, its conquests dressed up as overseas investment and its rapacity as free trade—the very elements that contemporary globalizers were claiming would raise everyone’s levels of prosperity. Such an argument is, of course, highly contestable, since the ‘optimal allocation’ of resources that Ferguson celebrates meant, to its colonial victims, landlessness, unemployment, illiteracy, poverty, disease, transportation and servitude. The British proclaimed the virtues of free trade while destroying the free trade Indians had carried on for centuries, if not millennia, by both land and sea. Free trade, of course, suited the British as a slogan, since they were the best equipped to profit from it in the nineteenth century, and their guns and laws could always stifle what little competition the indigenes could attempt to mount. A globalization of equals could well have been worth celebrating, but the globalization of Empire was conducted by and above all for the colonizers, and not in the interests of the colonized.

  Ferguson also suggests that, in the long run, the victims of British imperialism will prove to have been its beneficiaries, since the Empire laid the foundations for their eventual success in tomorrow’s globalized world. But human beings do not live in the long run; they live, and suffer, in the here and now, and the process of colonial rule in India meant economic exploitation and ruin to millions, the destruction of thriving industries, the systematic denial of opportuni
ties to compete, the elimination of indigenous institutions of governance, the transformation of lifestyles and patterns of living that had flourished since time immemorial, and the obliteration of the most precious possessions of the colonized, their identities and their self-respect.

  In this the likes of Ferguson are, ironically, following no less a predecessor than Karl Marx:

  Indian society has no history at all, at least no known history. What we call its history is but the history of the successive intruders who founded their empires on the passive basis of that unresisting and unchanging society. The question, therefore, is not whether the English had a right to conquer India, but whether we are to prefer India conquered by the backward Turk, by the backward Persian, by the Russian, to India conquered by the Briton… England has to fulfil a double mission in India: one destructive, the other one regenerating the annihilation of old Asiatic society, and the laying of the foundations of Western society in Asia.

  A more balanced account of imperial rule, broadly sympathetic to the British Raj but without glossing over its exploitative nature—while concluding that ‘whether all this has been for better or worse, is almost impossible to say’—may be found in Denis Judd’s short The Lion and the Tiger. Jon Wilson, in his recent India Conquered, is dismissive of most pretensions to grand imperial purpose, one way or the other. ‘Its operation was driven instead by narrow interests and visceral passions,’ he argues, ‘most importantly the desire to maintain British sovereign institutions in India for its own sake.’ In other words, Empire had no larger purpose than its own perpetuation. No wonder, then, that it did India little good.

  Indians can never afford to forget the condition in which we found our country after two centuries of colonialism. We have seen how what had once been one of the richest and most industrialized economies of the world, which together with China accounted for almost 75 per cent of world industrial output in 1750, was transformed by the process of imperial rule into one of the poorest, most backward, illiterate and diseased societies on earth by the time of our independence in 1947. In 1600, when the East India Company was established, Britain was producing just 1.8 per cent of the world’s GDP, while India was generating some 23 per cent. By 1940, after nearly two centuries of the Raj, Britain accounted for nearly 10 per cent of world GDP, while India had been reduced to a poor ‘third-world’ country, destitute and starving, a global poster child of poverty and famine. Ferguson admits that ‘between 1757 and 1900 British per capita gross domestic product increased in real terms by 347 per cent, Indian by a mere 14 per cent’. Even that figure masks a steadily worsening performance by the Raj: from 1900 to 1947 the rate of growth of the Indian economy was below 1 per cent, while population grew steadily at well over 3.5 per cent, leavened only by high levels of infant and child mortality that shrank the net rate of population growth to the equivalent of economic growth, leaving a net growth rate near zero.

  Freedom from Britain turned these numbers around for India. Net per capita income growth between 1900 and 1950 was nil (economic growth of 0.8 per cent minus net population growth at the same level,) but it rose to 1.3 per cent from 1950 to 1980 (growth rate of 3.5 per cent minus population growth of 2.2 per cent), to 3.5 per cent from 1981–90 and 4.4 per cent from 1991–2000, before attaining even higher levels in the following decade, twice crossing 9 per cent and averaging 7.8 per cent from 2001–10. Besides these, other key indices were also extraordinarily good after just under seven (at the time of writing) decades of independence, compared to the twenty decades of British rule that had gone before.

  The British left a society with 16 per cent literacy, a life expectancy of 27, practically no domestic industry and over 90 per cent living below what today we would call the poverty line. Today, the literacy rate is up at 72 per cent, average life expectancy is nearing the Biblical three score and ten, and 280 million people have been pulled out of poverty in the twenty-first century.

  To take the simple example of electricity, one of the supposed blessings of imperial rule in India: Britain governed India for five decades after the arrival of the first electricity supplies in the 1890s. In those fifty years to independence in 1947, while all of Britain, along with the rest of Europe and America, was electrified, the Raj connected merely 1,500 of India’s 640,000 villages to the electrical grid. After Independence, however, from 1947 to 1991, the Indian government brought electricity to roughly 320 times as many villages as British colonialism managed in a similar time span.

  The reasons were obvious: the British colonial rulers had no interest in the well-being of the Indian people. India was what the scholars Acemoglu and Robinson call, in their path-breaking Why Nations Fail, an ‘extractive colony’. Thanks to British imperialism, the organic development of the Indian state and its scientific, technological, industrial and civic institutions could not take place, as it did between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe. Colonial exploitation happened instead.

  The world was aware of this disgraceful imperial record for decades before the British ended their rule after an ignominious half-century in which India’s per capita income showed no growth at all. The US statesman William Jennings Bryan quotes the editor of a Calcutta magazine, Indian World, as writing in 1906: ‘When the English came to India, this country was the leader of Asiatic civilization and the undisputed centre of light in the Asiatic world. Japan was nowhere. Now, in fifty years, Japan has revolutionized her history with the aid of modern arts of progress, and India, with 150 years of English rule, is still condemned to tutelage.’ Japan had achieved 90 per cent literacy in forty years after the Meiji Restoration, whereas India languished at 10 per cent after 150 years of British rule. Every other significant socio-economic indicator worked to India’s detriment.

  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 élite 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.’