Inglorious Empire - What the British Did to India
by Shashi Tharoor, Penguin 2017
Excerpts, part 1, with my comments
The criminal Tony Blair has refused to personally apologise to the Libyan dissident Abdel Hakim Belhaj, who was tortured in a jail in Libya following a rendition operation mounted with the help of MI6 ...
Compare that with this:
"When Willy Brandt was chancellor of Germany, he sank to his knees at the Warsaw Ghetto in 1970 to apologize to Polish Jews for the Holocaust. There were hardly any Jews left in Poland, and Brandt, who as a socialist* [sic] was persecuted by the Nazis, was completely innocent of the crimes for which he was apologizing. But in doing so—with his historic kniefall von Warschau (Warsaw Genuflection), he was recongnizing the moral responsibility of the German people, whom he led as chancellor...
Of course not everyone agrees that even atonement is due. Historian John Keay put it best: 'The conduct of states, as of individuals, can only assessed by the standards of their age, not by today's litigious criteria. Otherwise, we'd all be down on the government of Italy for feedings Christains to the lions.' Amusing, but indefensible. The British Raj is scarcely ancient history. It is part of the memories of people still alive. According to a recent UN Population Division report, the number of Indians over the age of eighty is six million. British rile was an inescapable part of their childhoods. If you add to their number, their first-generation descendants, Indians their fifties and sixties, whose parents would have told them stories about their experience of the Raj, the numbers with an intimate knowledge of the period would swell to over 100 million Indians.
It is getting late for atonement, but not too late: I, for one, dearly hope that a British prime minister will find the heart, and the spirit, to get on his or her knees at Jallianwala Bagh in 2019 and beg forgiveness from Indians in the name of his or her people for the unforgivable massacre that was perpetrated at the site a century earlier. David Cameron's rather meatly-mouthed description of the massacre in 2013 as a 'deeply shameful event does not, in my view constitute an apology. Nor does the ceremonial visit to the site in 1997 by Queen Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh, who merely left their signatures in the visitors' book, without even a redeeming comment."
Two words summarize the above: imperialist arrogance.
"Indeed, the best form of atonement by the British might be, as Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has suggested, to start teaching unromanticized colonial history in British schools. The British public is woefully ignorant of the realities of the British empire, and what it meant to the subject peoples. These days there appears to be a return in England to yearning for the Raj: the success of the telivision series Indian Summers, building upon earlier Anglo-nostalgia productions like The Far Pavilions and The Jewel in the Crown, epitomize what the British domiciled Dutch writer Ian Buruma saw as an attempt to remind the English 'of their collective dreams of Englishness, so glorious, so poignant, so bittersweet in the resentful seediness of contemporary little England.' If British school children can learn how those dreams of the English turned out to be nightmares for their subject people, true atonement—of the purely moral kind, involving a serious consideration of historical responsibility rather than mere admission of guilt—might be achieved."
— Shashi Tharoor, Inglorious Empire, 2017, Preface, xxiv-xxv.
Blair once said that Britain was "the greatest nation on earth." The arrogance of such a ruling class prevents her from issuing an apology to one victim of rendition. What about the destruction of Iraq and what it unleashed?
Given the highly filtered school curriculum of the history of the British Empire, this must resonate well in public ears. It must even play a signifant role in today's support or passivity of imperialist adventures and the type of friends the British [read English] ruling class has. It must enforce the belief that "we" are a force of good among "the international community": foreign aid and loans mechanisms, for instance.
Inglorious Empire should be an essetial reading in British schools. It should be produced as series and read out on the radio.
* Brandt in fact was a social democrat with contradictory positions, including his support of the US in its war in Vietnam.
But as Ferdinand Mount—a descendant of a famous Company general himself—recently explained, it was all the simple logic of capitalism: 'The British empire in India was the creation of merchants and it was still at heart a commercial enterprise, which had to operate at profit and respond to the ups and downs of the market. Behind the epaulette and the jingle of harness, the levees and the balls at Government House, lay the hard calculus of the City of London.' p. 26
"So attractive was it for British entrepreneurs to build ships in India that by the second decade of the nineteenth century, there was rising unemployment in the shipbuilding industry at home—shipwrights, caulkers, sawyers and joiners in their hundreds were reported to be unemployed in London." p. 29
"As William Digby was to observe, the Mistress of the Seas of the Western world had killed the Mistress of the Seas of the East." p. 30
"One form of colonial discrimination that was almost ubiquitous and extremely effective was the use of currency to separate British businesses from Indian ones, and regulate the opportunities available to each." p. 30
"The British used the fixed exchange rate regimes as it suited them, basically to accommodate British current-account deficits and other domestic exigencies, with scant regard for their Indian subjects. Such policies exacerbated India's financial instability, adding adding to the miseries endured by Indians under the Raj... A currency [the rupee] which had once been among the strongest in the world in the seventeenth century was reduced to a fraction of its value by the end of the nineteenth." p. 31
"The British were unalterably opposed to India developing its own steel industry." As early as the sixth century "steel was made in the country, and Indian steel acquired global renown as the world's finest. (The establishment by Arabs of a steel industry based on Indian practices in the twelfth century gave the world the famous Damascus steel.) p. 32
Deindustrialization "was a deliberate British policy, not an accident. British industry flourished and Indian industry did not because of systematic destruction abetted by tariffs and regulatory measures that stacked the decks in favour of British industry conquering the Indian market, rather than the other way around. The economic exploitation of India was integral to the colonial enterprise. And the vast sums of Indian revenues and loot flowing to England, even if they were somewhat less than the billions of pounds Digby estimated, provided the capital for British industry and made possible the financing of the Industrial Revolution." p. 34
The British failed to create educational and scientific institutions where technological research and innovation would have taken place. The "foremost Indian research institution under the British empire, the Indian Institute of Science, was endowed by the legendary Jamsetji Tata, not by any British philanthropist, let alone by colonial government." p. 34
"In the years after 1757, the British astutely fomented cleavages among the Indian princes, and steadily consolidated their dominion through a policy of 'divide and rule' that came to be dubbed, after 1858, 'divide et impera'." p. 40
A country conquered by a corporation
"Reports written by observers of the [British East India] Company described the village communities as self-governing republics and functioning economic units, linked to the wider precolonial global market, that had governed themselves even as powers at the centre came and went. Under the British rule this ceased to be true." p. 41
Instead of "building self-government from the village level up, as the British could have done had they been sincere, the Company destroyed what existed, and the Crown, when it eventually took charge of the country, devolved smidgens of government authority, from the top, to unelected provincial and central 'legislative' councils whose members represented a tiny educated elite, had no accountability to the masses, passed no meaningful legislation, exercised no real power and satisfied themselves they had been consulted by the government even if they took no actual decisions." pp. 41-2
"The socio-political constructs that the British made in their Empire were primarily reflections of the traditional, individualistic, unequal and still class-ridden society that existed in England." p. 42
"The English tried to find similar structures in the traditional societies of their colonies, and when they could not, they invented an approximation of them." Many were "given British-invented titles like 'Rai Rahadur' or even knighted ... This was both less expensive for the Empire and, as with the English system at home, it was run by complicit amateurs, so there was no need to create a professional class of Indians who would wield, and then seek to exercise, political authority." p. 42
"Extensive scholarship has shown how the British created the phenomenon of landlessness, turned self-reliant cultivators into tenants, employees and bondsmen, transformed social relations and as a result undermined agrarian growth and development." p. 43
"Underlying the British imperial expansion in India was a congeries of motivations and assumptions—crass commercial cupidity ... and the need to consolidate political power in order to safeguard profits, but also the racist European notion, expressed most bluntly during the Iberian conquest of the New World, that 'heathen' Indian nations were unworthy of the status of sovereign legal entities." p. 43
"The Company paid soldiers in exchange for their service and others for essential procurements, offering various benefits to ensure their support. Violence, to use today's language, was contracted to non-state actors. Such methods accentuated the informal, non-institutionalized nature of the British conquest of India, stunning the prospect of the normal development of political institutions in the country ... The freelance warriors and mercenaries associated with the Company enjoyed the licence to loot everything they could lay their hands on: hardly a British contribution to good governance in India." p. 45
The canard that whatever "the deficiencies of the Company, its rule was no worse than the supposedly rapacious princes whom the British supplanted" is simply false. "Much of the British conquest and expansion before 1857 took place against either benign, or not particularly oppressive, native rulers. The Maratha Peshwas the Mysore rulers and the chess-playing Nawab of Oudh, to name three, were not accused of misgovernance: they were merely too powerful for colonial comfort or too rich to avoid attracting British avarice ... Where British charges of misrule had any validity, they were principally against rulers the Company had installed in the first place or, in the twentieth century, princes they had removed from their cultural context and educated at Eton and Harrow, leaving them aliens in their own land." p. 46
It was remarkable that the British Raj was run by so few people. [A] of 1890, 6,000 British officials ruled 250 million Indians, with some 70,000 European soldiers and a large number of Indians in uniform." In 1931 there was just "168,000 [Britons] (including 60,000 in the army and police and still only 4,000 in civil government) to run a country approaching 300 million people. It was a combination of racial self-assurance, superior military technology, the mystique of modernity and the trappings of enlightenment progressivism—as well as,it must be said clearly, the cravenness, cupidity, opportunism and lack of organized resistance on the part of the vanquished—that sustained the Empire, along with the judicious application of brute force when necessary. The British in India were never more than 0.05 per cent of the population. The Empire in Hobsbawm's evocative words, was 'so easily won, so narrowly based, so absurdly easily ruled thanks to the devotion of a few and the passivity of the many." p. 52
"One viceroy, Lord Mayo, declared, 'we are all British gentlemen engaged in the magnificent work of governing an inferior race'. Few shared Victoria's 'romantic feelings for brown skins'. p. 53
"'Collector of the Land Revenue. Registrar of the landed property in the District. Judge between landlord and tenant. Ministerial officer of the Courts of Justice. Treasurer and Accountant of the District. Administrator of the District Excise. Ex offico President of the Local Rates Committee. Referee in local public works. Manager of estates of minors. Magistrate, Police Magistrate and Criminal Judge. Head of Police. Ex officio President of Municipalities...' All these tasks were performed by a young man, in a foreign country ..., convinced of his innate superiority over those he had been assigned to rule and his God-given right to dispense authority in all these functions. Authority, but not welfare; there was no 'development work' listed for any British official in a district." p. 57
"J. T. Sunderland observed that the difference in salaries and emoluments was so great that 8,000 British officers earned £13,930,554, while 130,000 Indians in government service were collectively paid a total of £3,284,163." p. 62
"As a tract put out by the 'Indian National Party' in London in 1915 argued: 'It is not the Roman System of thoroughly latinizing and assimilating the subject races that is tried by England, but the system of exploitation and degradation of a race by another for the material benefits of the latter." p. 63
"Not only was there no pretence of ruling with the consent of the governed ('a passive allegiance [Sir John] Malcolm added, 'is all [Indians] will ever give to their foreign masters'); there was, in essence, almost complete apartheid, a profound belief in racial differences, 'and little friendship or marriage across strictly policed racial and religious boundaries.'" p. 64
"Thoug he turned down several invitations to become Britain's Poet Laureate, Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) was for much if his adult life the unofficial Poet Laureate of Empire. His roots as the quintessential writer of imperialism ran deep... Scholars have come to see Kipling's writings as 'part of the defining discourse of colonialism' which both 'reinscribe cultural hegemony and the cultural schizophrenia that constructed the division between the Englishman as a demi-God and as human failure, as colonizer and semi-native'. p. 65
The imperial enterprise "required men of courage, capable of violence, prepared for action and ready at all times to prevail against the unwashed hordes, qualities reaffirmed in the works of Kipling (such as Stalky & Co., where British schoolboys triumph through savagery) and other 'masculinist' writers if Empire. This literary reaffirmation is all the more ironic, since it celebrates qualities that are proudly deployed in pursuit of a civilizing mission. The Empire's heroes were, in other words, men who used barbarity to pacify the supposedly barbarous." p. 66
Every 'reform' that "the British government brought into India's governance, up to the Government of India Act of 1935, protected the absolute authority of the governor-general and the Parliament of Britain. The Indian councils at the centre and provincial levels were always bodies with no real authority on any significant matter, and budgets, defence and law and order remained firmly in British hands. The objective was a gradual increase in representative government, not the establishment of full-fledged democracy." p. 69
"The Indian National Congress was established in 1885 as a voice of moderate, constitutionalist Indian opinion by a Scotsman, Allan Octavian Hume, and a group of well-educated, establishmentarian Indians. Far from welcoming such a development, as a truly regime seeking to instil democracy in its charges ought to have done, the British reached to it with varying degrees of hostility and contempt." pp. 69-70
"British attempts to suppress political activities that merely involved the exercise of free speech showed up the insincerity, or at least the poverty, of any claims of liberalism." p. 70
Throughout the book, it seems that Tharoor does not see the contradictory features of "liberalism". Slavery, colonialism, racism, etc. were defended by "liberal" thinkers and "liberal" politicians" since "the Enlightenment".
"Instead of embracing the bourgeois comforts that his status in the Indian community of South Africa might have entitled him to, Ghandi retreated to a communal farm he established outside Durban, read Henry David Thoreau, and corresponded with the likes of John Ruskin and Leo Tolstoy, all the while seeking to arrive at an understanding of 'truth' in both personal life and public affairs." pp.71-2
"Ghandi's ascent, enabled by the Raj's failure to live up to the principles and values it professed, proved a repudiation of British liberalism, and not, as Bayly suggests, its vindication." p. 72
"As many as 74,187 Indian soldiers died during World War I and a far higher number were wounded. Their stories, and their heroism, were largely omitted from British popular histories of the war, or relegated to the footnotes." p. 74
I would use "killed" instead of "died" and I would put "heroism" in inverted commas or use another word. What was heroic in fighting in a colonizer's war, killing other fellow soldiers in an imperialist war? See what the author himself wrote a few lines below.
"The number of soldiers and support staff sent overseas service from India during the World War I was huge", a total of 1,215,318 went to Mesopotamia, Egypt, France, East Africa, Gallipoli, Salonica, Aden, and the Persian Gulf. p. 75
"Nearly 700,000 Indian sepoys fought in Mesopotamia against the Ottoman empire, Germany's ally, many of them Indian Muslims taking up arms against their co-religionists in defence of the British empire." p. 75
These men were " neglected by the British, for whom they fought, and ignored by their own country, from which they came. Part of the reason is that they were not fighting for India. None of the soldiers was a conscript: soldiering was their profession. They served the very British empire that was oppressing their own people back home." p. 76
Mahatma Ghandi, "who returned to his homeland for good from South Africa in January 1915, supported the war, as he had supported the British in the Boer War. He hoped, he wrote, 'that Indian, by this very act, would become the most favourite partner [of the British], and racial distinctions would become a thing of the past'. Sir Rabindranah Tagore was somewhat more sardonic about nationalism: 'We, the famished, ragged ragamuffins of the East are to win freedom for all humanity!,' he wrote during the War. 'We have no word for "Nation" in our language.' p. 76
"The fact that Brigadier General Reginald Dyer, who showed exceptional brutality and racism in Amritsar, was hailed as a hero by the British, who raised a handsome purse to reward him for his deed, marked the final rupture between British imperialism and its Indian subjects. Sir Rabindranah Tagore returned his knighthood to the British in protest against 'the helplessness of our position as British subjects in India'. [better late than never!]. Tagore's early ambivalence about the costs and benefits of British rule was replaced after Amritsar by what he termed a 'graceless disillusionment' at the 'misfortune of being governed by a foreign race'. He did not want a 'badge of honour' in 'the incongruous context of humiliation'. p. 77
"It must be acknowledged ... that it was the British who first established newspapers in India, which had been unknown before colonial rule, and it is to their credit that they allowed Indians to emulate them in doing so both in English, catering to the tiny English-educated elite (and its aspirational imitators) and in Indian vernacular languages." p. 82
"There is no doubt that the press contributed significantly to the development and growth of nationalist feelings in India, inculcated the idea of a broader public consciousness, exposed many of the failings of the colonial l administration and played an influential part in fomenting opposition to many aspects of the British rule." p. 83
Indeed. That was thanks to what Benedict Anderson called "print-capitalism" that had emerged three centuries earlier (see Anderson's "Imagined Communities"). From South America to the Philippines, newspapers played a significant role in the growth of nationalist consciousness. I don't think even if the British did not establish newspapers in India, they could have prevented it from being established by the Indians." p. 83
The argument that "Britain left us with self-governing institutions and e trappings of democracy fails to hold water in the face of the reality of colonial repression. Let me cite one individual who actually lived through the colonial experience, Jawaharlal Nehru, who wrote in a 1936 letter to an Englishman, Lord Lothian, that British rule is 'based on an extreme form of widespread violence and the only sanction is fear. It suppresses the usual liberties which are supposed to be essential to the growth of a people...'" p. 89-90
"In three rare cases, Britons were executed for killing Indians: John Rudd in Bengal (1861), four sailors named Wilson, Apostle, Nicholas, and Peters in Bombay (1867), and George Nairns in Bengal (1880). But in two hundred years of British rule, and thousands of cases in which Indians died at the hands of their colonial masters, these three cases were the only exceptions." p. 93
"(Southern Indian women, whose breasts were traditionally uncovered, found themselves obliged to undergo the indignity of conforming to Victorian standards of morality; soon the right to cover one's breasts became a marker of upper-cast respectability and efforts were made to deny this privilege to lower-caste women, leading to such missionary-inspired colonial curiosities as the Breast Cloth Agitation from 1813 to 1859 in Travancore and Madras Presidency.)" p. 94
"It is true enough that British racism was accentuated by convictions of Christian superiority: as William Wilberforce, Britain's most famous evangelical Christian, put it: 'Our religion is sublime, pure, and beneficent. Theirs is mean, licentious, and cruel.' p. 96
"'The first, and often the only, purpose of British power in India,' writes Jon Wilson, 'was to defend the fact of Britain's presence on Indian ground.' For most of the imperialists, India was a career, not a crusade. Changing India was not object; making money out of India was. As Angus Maddison observes, 'there were no major changes in village society, in the caste system, the position of untouchables, the joint family system, or in production techniques in agriculture.' He was not entirely right: in fact ... the caste system became more rigid under the British than it had been under precolonial India." p. 96
The Indian Penal Code, "drafted by the British imperial rulers in the mid-nineteenth century criminalizes homosexuality under Section 377; creates a crime of 'sedition' under which students shouting slogans have been arrested; and applies a double standard to the commission of adultery." p. 97
"The irony is that in India there has always been place for people of different gender identities [sic] and sexual orientations. Indian history and mythology reveal no example of Prejudice against sexual difference. On the contrary, in the great epic of Mahabharata, the gender-changing Shihkhandi killed Bhishma. The concept of the Ardhanareeshwara imagined God as half man and half woman, prompting the movie-star chief minister of Andhra Pradesh in the 1980s, N. T. Rama Rao to dress up as Ardhanareeshwara and surprise his followers ... Transgender people were recognized as a napunsakh gender in Vedic and Puranic literature and were given due importance in India throughout history (and even in the Islamic courts during the Mughal era)." p. 99
by Shashi Tharoor, Penguin 2017
Excerpts, part 1, with my comments
The criminal Tony Blair has refused to personally apologise to the Libyan dissident Abdel Hakim Belhaj, who was tortured in a jail in Libya following a rendition operation mounted with the help of MI6 ...
Compare that with this:
"When Willy Brandt was chancellor of Germany, he sank to his knees at the Warsaw Ghetto in 1970 to apologize to Polish Jews for the Holocaust. There were hardly any Jews left in Poland, and Brandt, who as a socialist* [sic] was persecuted by the Nazis, was completely innocent of the crimes for which he was apologizing. But in doing so—with his historic kniefall von Warschau (Warsaw Genuflection), he was recongnizing the moral responsibility of the German people, whom he led as chancellor...
Of course not everyone agrees that even atonement is due. Historian John Keay put it best: 'The conduct of states, as of individuals, can only assessed by the standards of their age, not by today's litigious criteria. Otherwise, we'd all be down on the government of Italy for feedings Christains to the lions.' Amusing, but indefensible. The British Raj is scarcely ancient history. It is part of the memories of people still alive. According to a recent UN Population Division report, the number of Indians over the age of eighty is six million. British rile was an inescapable part of their childhoods. If you add to their number, their first-generation descendants, Indians their fifties and sixties, whose parents would have told them stories about their experience of the Raj, the numbers with an intimate knowledge of the period would swell to over 100 million Indians.
It is getting late for atonement, but not too late: I, for one, dearly hope that a British prime minister will find the heart, and the spirit, to get on his or her knees at Jallianwala Bagh in 2019 and beg forgiveness from Indians in the name of his or her people for the unforgivable massacre that was perpetrated at the site a century earlier. David Cameron's rather meatly-mouthed description of the massacre in 2013 as a 'deeply shameful event does not, in my view constitute an apology. Nor does the ceremonial visit to the site in 1997 by Queen Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh, who merely left their signatures in the visitors' book, without even a redeeming comment."
Two words summarize the above: imperialist arrogance.
"Indeed, the best form of atonement by the British might be, as Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has suggested, to start teaching unromanticized colonial history in British schools. The British public is woefully ignorant of the realities of the British empire, and what it meant to the subject peoples. These days there appears to be a return in England to yearning for the Raj: the success of the telivision series Indian Summers, building upon earlier Anglo-nostalgia productions like The Far Pavilions and The Jewel in the Crown, epitomize what the British domiciled Dutch writer Ian Buruma saw as an attempt to remind the English 'of their collective dreams of Englishness, so glorious, so poignant, so bittersweet in the resentful seediness of contemporary little England.' If British school children can learn how those dreams of the English turned out to be nightmares for their subject people, true atonement—of the purely moral kind, involving a serious consideration of historical responsibility rather than mere admission of guilt—might be achieved."
— Shashi Tharoor, Inglorious Empire, 2017, Preface, xxiv-xxv.
Blair once said that Britain was "the greatest nation on earth." The arrogance of such a ruling class prevents her from issuing an apology to one victim of rendition. What about the destruction of Iraq and what it unleashed?
Given the highly filtered school curriculum of the history of the British Empire, this must resonate well in public ears. It must even play a signifant role in today's support or passivity of imperialist adventures and the type of friends the British [read English] ruling class has. It must enforce the belief that "we" are a force of good among "the international community": foreign aid and loans mechanisms, for instance.
Inglorious Empire should be an essetial reading in British schools. It should be produced as series and read out on the radio.
* Brandt in fact was a social democrat with contradictory positions, including his support of the US in its war in Vietnam.
But as Ferdinand Mount—a descendant of a famous Company general himself—recently explained, it was all the simple logic of capitalism: 'The British empire in India was the creation of merchants and it was still at heart a commercial enterprise, which had to operate at profit and respond to the ups and downs of the market. Behind the epaulette and the jingle of harness, the levees and the balls at Government House, lay the hard calculus of the City of London.' p. 26
"So attractive was it for British entrepreneurs to build ships in India that by the second decade of the nineteenth century, there was rising unemployment in the shipbuilding industry at home—shipwrights, caulkers, sawyers and joiners in their hundreds were reported to be unemployed in London." p. 29
"As William Digby was to observe, the Mistress of the Seas of the Western world had killed the Mistress of the Seas of the East." p. 30
"One form of colonial discrimination that was almost ubiquitous and extremely effective was the use of currency to separate British businesses from Indian ones, and regulate the opportunities available to each." p. 30
"The British used the fixed exchange rate regimes as it suited them, basically to accommodate British current-account deficits and other domestic exigencies, with scant regard for their Indian subjects. Such policies exacerbated India's financial instability, adding adding to the miseries endured by Indians under the Raj... A currency [the rupee] which had once been among the strongest in the world in the seventeenth century was reduced to a fraction of its value by the end of the nineteenth." p. 31
"The British were unalterably opposed to India developing its own steel industry." As early as the sixth century "steel was made in the country, and Indian steel acquired global renown as the world's finest. (The establishment by Arabs of a steel industry based on Indian practices in the twelfth century gave the world the famous Damascus steel.) p. 32
Deindustrialization "was a deliberate British policy, not an accident. British industry flourished and Indian industry did not because of systematic destruction abetted by tariffs and regulatory measures that stacked the decks in favour of British industry conquering the Indian market, rather than the other way around. The economic exploitation of India was integral to the colonial enterprise. And the vast sums of Indian revenues and loot flowing to England, even if they were somewhat less than the billions of pounds Digby estimated, provided the capital for British industry and made possible the financing of the Industrial Revolution." p. 34
The British failed to create educational and scientific institutions where technological research and innovation would have taken place. The "foremost Indian research institution under the British empire, the Indian Institute of Science, was endowed by the legendary Jamsetji Tata, not by any British philanthropist, let alone by colonial government." p. 34
"In the years after 1757, the British astutely fomented cleavages among the Indian princes, and steadily consolidated their dominion through a policy of 'divide and rule' that came to be dubbed, after 1858, 'divide et impera'." p. 40
A country conquered by a corporation
"Reports written by observers of the [British East India] Company described the village communities as self-governing republics and functioning economic units, linked to the wider precolonial global market, that had governed themselves even as powers at the centre came and went. Under the British rule this ceased to be true." p. 41
Instead of "building self-government from the village level up, as the British could have done had they been sincere, the Company destroyed what existed, and the Crown, when it eventually took charge of the country, devolved smidgens of government authority, from the top, to unelected provincial and central 'legislative' councils whose members represented a tiny educated elite, had no accountability to the masses, passed no meaningful legislation, exercised no real power and satisfied themselves they had been consulted by the government even if they took no actual decisions." pp. 41-2
"The socio-political constructs that the British made in their Empire were primarily reflections of the traditional, individualistic, unequal and still class-ridden society that existed in England." p. 42
"The English tried to find similar structures in the traditional societies of their colonies, and when they could not, they invented an approximation of them." Many were "given British-invented titles like 'Rai Rahadur' or even knighted ... This was both less expensive for the Empire and, as with the English system at home, it was run by complicit amateurs, so there was no need to create a professional class of Indians who would wield, and then seek to exercise, political authority." p. 42
"Extensive scholarship has shown how the British created the phenomenon of landlessness, turned self-reliant cultivators into tenants, employees and bondsmen, transformed social relations and as a result undermined agrarian growth and development." p. 43
"Underlying the British imperial expansion in India was a congeries of motivations and assumptions—crass commercial cupidity ... and the need to consolidate political power in order to safeguard profits, but also the racist European notion, expressed most bluntly during the Iberian conquest of the New World, that 'heathen' Indian nations were unworthy of the status of sovereign legal entities." p. 43
"The Company paid soldiers in exchange for their service and others for essential procurements, offering various benefits to ensure their support. Violence, to use today's language, was contracted to non-state actors. Such methods accentuated the informal, non-institutionalized nature of the British conquest of India, stunning the prospect of the normal development of political institutions in the country ... The freelance warriors and mercenaries associated with the Company enjoyed the licence to loot everything they could lay their hands on: hardly a British contribution to good governance in India." p. 45
The canard that whatever "the deficiencies of the Company, its rule was no worse than the supposedly rapacious princes whom the British supplanted" is simply false. "Much of the British conquest and expansion before 1857 took place against either benign, or not particularly oppressive, native rulers. The Maratha Peshwas the Mysore rulers and the chess-playing Nawab of Oudh, to name three, were not accused of misgovernance: they were merely too powerful for colonial comfort or too rich to avoid attracting British avarice ... Where British charges of misrule had any validity, they were principally against rulers the Company had installed in the first place or, in the twentieth century, princes they had removed from their cultural context and educated at Eton and Harrow, leaving them aliens in their own land." p. 46
It was remarkable that the British Raj was run by so few people. [A] of 1890, 6,000 British officials ruled 250 million Indians, with some 70,000 European soldiers and a large number of Indians in uniform." In 1931 there was just "168,000 [Britons] (including 60,000 in the army and police and still only 4,000 in civil government) to run a country approaching 300 million people. It was a combination of racial self-assurance, superior military technology, the mystique of modernity and the trappings of enlightenment progressivism—as well as,it must be said clearly, the cravenness, cupidity, opportunism and lack of organized resistance on the part of the vanquished—that sustained the Empire, along with the judicious application of brute force when necessary. The British in India were never more than 0.05 per cent of the population. The Empire in Hobsbawm's evocative words, was 'so easily won, so narrowly based, so absurdly easily ruled thanks to the devotion of a few and the passivity of the many." p. 52
"One viceroy, Lord Mayo, declared, 'we are all British gentlemen engaged in the magnificent work of governing an inferior race'. Few shared Victoria's 'romantic feelings for brown skins'. p. 53
"'Collector of the Land Revenue. Registrar of the landed property in the District. Judge between landlord and tenant. Ministerial officer of the Courts of Justice. Treasurer and Accountant of the District. Administrator of the District Excise. Ex offico President of the Local Rates Committee. Referee in local public works. Manager of estates of minors. Magistrate, Police Magistrate and Criminal Judge. Head of Police. Ex officio President of Municipalities...' All these tasks were performed by a young man, in a foreign country ..., convinced of his innate superiority over those he had been assigned to rule and his God-given right to dispense authority in all these functions. Authority, but not welfare; there was no 'development work' listed for any British official in a district." p. 57
"J. T. Sunderland observed that the difference in salaries and emoluments was so great that 8,000 British officers earned £13,930,554, while 130,000 Indians in government service were collectively paid a total of £3,284,163." p. 62
"As a tract put out by the 'Indian National Party' in London in 1915 argued: 'It is not the Roman System of thoroughly latinizing and assimilating the subject races that is tried by England, but the system of exploitation and degradation of a race by another for the material benefits of the latter." p. 63
"Not only was there no pretence of ruling with the consent of the governed ('a passive allegiance [Sir John] Malcolm added, 'is all [Indians] will ever give to their foreign masters'); there was, in essence, almost complete apartheid, a profound belief in racial differences, 'and little friendship or marriage across strictly policed racial and religious boundaries.'" p. 64
"Thoug he turned down several invitations to become Britain's Poet Laureate, Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) was for much if his adult life the unofficial Poet Laureate of Empire. His roots as the quintessential writer of imperialism ran deep... Scholars have come to see Kipling's writings as 'part of the defining discourse of colonialism' which both 'reinscribe cultural hegemony and the cultural schizophrenia that constructed the division between the Englishman as a demi-God and as human failure, as colonizer and semi-native'. p. 65
The imperial enterprise "required men of courage, capable of violence, prepared for action and ready at all times to prevail against the unwashed hordes, qualities reaffirmed in the works of Kipling (such as Stalky & Co., where British schoolboys triumph through savagery) and other 'masculinist' writers if Empire. This literary reaffirmation is all the more ironic, since it celebrates qualities that are proudly deployed in pursuit of a civilizing mission. The Empire's heroes were, in other words, men who used barbarity to pacify the supposedly barbarous." p. 66
Every 'reform' that "the British government brought into India's governance, up to the Government of India Act of 1935, protected the absolute authority of the governor-general and the Parliament of Britain. The Indian councils at the centre and provincial levels were always bodies with no real authority on any significant matter, and budgets, defence and law and order remained firmly in British hands. The objective was a gradual increase in representative government, not the establishment of full-fledged democracy." p. 69
"The Indian National Congress was established in 1885 as a voice of moderate, constitutionalist Indian opinion by a Scotsman, Allan Octavian Hume, and a group of well-educated, establishmentarian Indians. Far from welcoming such a development, as a truly regime seeking to instil democracy in its charges ought to have done, the British reached to it with varying degrees of hostility and contempt." pp. 69-70
"British attempts to suppress political activities that merely involved the exercise of free speech showed up the insincerity, or at least the poverty, of any claims of liberalism." p. 70
Throughout the book, it seems that Tharoor does not see the contradictory features of "liberalism". Slavery, colonialism, racism, etc. were defended by "liberal" thinkers and "liberal" politicians" since "the Enlightenment".
"Instead of embracing the bourgeois comforts that his status in the Indian community of South Africa might have entitled him to, Ghandi retreated to a communal farm he established outside Durban, read Henry David Thoreau, and corresponded with the likes of John Ruskin and Leo Tolstoy, all the while seeking to arrive at an understanding of 'truth' in both personal life and public affairs." pp.71-2
"Ghandi's ascent, enabled by the Raj's failure to live up to the principles and values it professed, proved a repudiation of British liberalism, and not, as Bayly suggests, its vindication." p. 72
"As many as 74,187 Indian soldiers died during World War I and a far higher number were wounded. Their stories, and their heroism, were largely omitted from British popular histories of the war, or relegated to the footnotes." p. 74
I would use "killed" instead of "died" and I would put "heroism" in inverted commas or use another word. What was heroic in fighting in a colonizer's war, killing other fellow soldiers in an imperialist war? See what the author himself wrote a few lines below.
"The number of soldiers and support staff sent overseas service from India during the World War I was huge", a total of 1,215,318 went to Mesopotamia, Egypt, France, East Africa, Gallipoli, Salonica, Aden, and the Persian Gulf. p. 75
"Nearly 700,000 Indian sepoys fought in Mesopotamia against the Ottoman empire, Germany's ally, many of them Indian Muslims taking up arms against their co-religionists in defence of the British empire." p. 75
These men were " neglected by the British, for whom they fought, and ignored by their own country, from which they came. Part of the reason is that they were not fighting for India. None of the soldiers was a conscript: soldiering was their profession. They served the very British empire that was oppressing their own people back home." p. 76
Mahatma Ghandi, "who returned to his homeland for good from South Africa in January 1915, supported the war, as he had supported the British in the Boer War. He hoped, he wrote, 'that Indian, by this very act, would become the most favourite partner [of the British], and racial distinctions would become a thing of the past'. Sir Rabindranah Tagore was somewhat more sardonic about nationalism: 'We, the famished, ragged ragamuffins of the East are to win freedom for all humanity!,' he wrote during the War. 'We have no word for "Nation" in our language.' p. 76
"The fact that Brigadier General Reginald Dyer, who showed exceptional brutality and racism in Amritsar, was hailed as a hero by the British, who raised a handsome purse to reward him for his deed, marked the final rupture between British imperialism and its Indian subjects. Sir Rabindranah Tagore returned his knighthood to the British in protest against 'the helplessness of our position as British subjects in India'. [better late than never!]. Tagore's early ambivalence about the costs and benefits of British rule was replaced after Amritsar by what he termed a 'graceless disillusionment' at the 'misfortune of being governed by a foreign race'. He did not want a 'badge of honour' in 'the incongruous context of humiliation'. p. 77
"It must be acknowledged ... that it was the British who first established newspapers in India, which had been unknown before colonial rule, and it is to their credit that they allowed Indians to emulate them in doing so both in English, catering to the tiny English-educated elite (and its aspirational imitators) and in Indian vernacular languages." p. 82
"There is no doubt that the press contributed significantly to the development and growth of nationalist feelings in India, inculcated the idea of a broader public consciousness, exposed many of the failings of the colonial l administration and played an influential part in fomenting opposition to many aspects of the British rule." p. 83
Indeed. That was thanks to what Benedict Anderson called "print-capitalism" that had emerged three centuries earlier (see Anderson's "Imagined Communities"). From South America to the Philippines, newspapers played a significant role in the growth of nationalist consciousness. I don't think even if the British did not establish newspapers in India, they could have prevented it from being established by the Indians." p. 83
The argument that "Britain left us with self-governing institutions and e trappings of democracy fails to hold water in the face of the reality of colonial repression. Let me cite one individual who actually lived through the colonial experience, Jawaharlal Nehru, who wrote in a 1936 letter to an Englishman, Lord Lothian, that British rule is 'based on an extreme form of widespread violence and the only sanction is fear. It suppresses the usual liberties which are supposed to be essential to the growth of a people...'" p. 89-90
"In three rare cases, Britons were executed for killing Indians: John Rudd in Bengal (1861), four sailors named Wilson, Apostle, Nicholas, and Peters in Bombay (1867), and George Nairns in Bengal (1880). But in two hundred years of British rule, and thousands of cases in which Indians died at the hands of their colonial masters, these three cases were the only exceptions." p. 93
"(Southern Indian women, whose breasts were traditionally uncovered, found themselves obliged to undergo the indignity of conforming to Victorian standards of morality; soon the right to cover one's breasts became a marker of upper-cast respectability and efforts were made to deny this privilege to lower-caste women, leading to such missionary-inspired colonial curiosities as the Breast Cloth Agitation from 1813 to 1859 in Travancore and Madras Presidency.)" p. 94
"It is true enough that British racism was accentuated by convictions of Christian superiority: as William Wilberforce, Britain's most famous evangelical Christian, put it: 'Our religion is sublime, pure, and beneficent. Theirs is mean, licentious, and cruel.' p. 96
"'The first, and often the only, purpose of British power in India,' writes Jon Wilson, 'was to defend the fact of Britain's presence on Indian ground.' For most of the imperialists, India was a career, not a crusade. Changing India was not object; making money out of India was. As Angus Maddison observes, 'there were no major changes in village society, in the caste system, the position of untouchables, the joint family system, or in production techniques in agriculture.' He was not entirely right: in fact ... the caste system became more rigid under the British than it had been under precolonial India." p. 96
The Indian Penal Code, "drafted by the British imperial rulers in the mid-nineteenth century criminalizes homosexuality under Section 377; creates a crime of 'sedition' under which students shouting slogans have been arrested; and applies a double standard to the commission of adultery." p. 97
"The irony is that in India there has always been place for people of different gender identities [sic] and sexual orientations. Indian history and mythology reveal no example of Prejudice against sexual difference. On the contrary, in the great epic of Mahabharata, the gender-changing Shihkhandi killed Bhishma. The concept of the Ardhanareeshwara imagined God as half man and half woman, prompting the movie-star chief minister of Andhra Pradesh in the 1980s, N. T. Rama Rao to dress up as Ardhanareeshwara and surprise his followers ... Transgender people were recognized as a napunsakh gender in Vedic and Puranic literature and were given due importance in India throughout history (and even in the Islamic courts during the Mughal era)." p. 99
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