Inglorious Empire -What the British Did to India
By Shashi Tharoor, Penguin 2017
Excerpts, part 3 of 3
"The historian Andrew Roberts rather breathtakingly claimed, given this background, that British rule 'the modernisation, development, protection, agrarian advance, linguistic unification and ultimately the democratisation of the subcontinent'." p. 175
"The construction of the Indian railways is often pointed to by apologists for Empire as one of the ways in which British colonialism benefited the subcontinent, ignoring the obvious fact that many countries also built railways without having to go to the trouble and expense of being colonised to do so...
"In its very conception and construction, the Indian railway system was a big colonial scam. British shareholders made absurd amounts of money by investing in the railways, where the government guaranteed returns on capital for 5 per cent net per year, unavailable in any other safe investment." p. 177
Nor was there any significant residual benefit to the Indians. The railways were intended principally to transport extracted resources, coal, iron ore, cotton and so on, to ports for the British to ship home to use in their factories. The movement of people was incidental, except when it served colonial interests; and the third class compartments, with their wooden benches and total absence of amenities, into which Indians were herded, attracted horrified commment even even at the time." p. 178
"As [Will] Durant pointed out, the railways were built, after all, for 'the purpose of the British army and British trade ... Their greatest revenue comes ... from third-class passengers—the Hindus ..."
"Nor were the Indians employed in the railways. The discriminatory hiring practices of the Indian Railways meant that key industrial skills were not effectively transferred to Indian personnel, which might have proved a benefit." p. 179
"In 1912 .. the British passed an act of Parliament, explicitly making it impossible for Indian workshops to design and manufacture locomotives." p. 181
"The British left India with literacy rate of 16 per cent, and a female literacy rate of 8 per cent—only one of every Indian women could read and write in 1947 ... As Will Durant points out, 'When the British came, there was throughout India, a system of communal schools, managed by the village communities. The agents of the East India Company destroyed these village communities, and took no steps to replace the schools; even today [1930] ... they stand at only 66 per cent of their number a hundred years ago." p. 183
"The English language was not a deliberate gift to India,but again an instrument of colonialism, imparted to Indians only to facilitate the tasks of the English. In his notorious 1835 Minute on Education, Lord Macaulay articulated the classic reason for teaching English, but only to a small minority of Indians: 'We must do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indians in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect'.
The East India Company's interest in Indian education began after the publication of a report by the company evangelist, Charles Grant, in 1792, which 'believed that the introduction of Western education and Christianity would transform a morally decadent society'." p. 186
Macaulay did not allow his ignorance of the East to undermine his self-confidence. 'A single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia,' he notoriously declared, while admitting that he had not read a single work from the literatures he was dismissing." 188
"Most Indians educated in English used that language for their own career self-advancement, not to serve as academic translators or instructors for the masses; and vernacular teaching remained an orphaned profession, reserved for those unfortunate whose own English was not good enough for professions that required the language of the colonials." p. 189
"The British saw precolonial Mughal history as consisting of a linear narration of events devoid of context or analysis; as for pre-Mughal texts, John Stuart Mill dismissed them as 'mythological histories ... where fable stands in the face of facts'. To replace these versions, the British reconstructed 'factual' accounts of Indian historiography adding more contextual analysis in a structured 'European' style—but with the teleological purpose of serving to legitimise British rule in India.
By Shashi Tharoor, Penguin 2017
Excerpts, part 3 of 3
"The historian Andrew Roberts rather breathtakingly claimed, given this background, that British rule 'the modernisation, development, protection, agrarian advance, linguistic unification and ultimately the democratisation of the subcontinent'." p. 175
"The construction of the Indian railways is often pointed to by apologists for Empire as one of the ways in which British colonialism benefited the subcontinent, ignoring the obvious fact that many countries also built railways without having to go to the trouble and expense of being colonised to do so...
"In its very conception and construction, the Indian railway system was a big colonial scam. British shareholders made absurd amounts of money by investing in the railways, where the government guaranteed returns on capital for 5 per cent net per year, unavailable in any other safe investment." p. 177
Nor was there any significant residual benefit to the Indians. The railways were intended principally to transport extracted resources, coal, iron ore, cotton and so on, to ports for the British to ship home to use in their factories. The movement of people was incidental, except when it served colonial interests; and the third class compartments, with their wooden benches and total absence of amenities, into which Indians were herded, attracted horrified commment even even at the time." p. 178
"As [Will] Durant pointed out, the railways were built, after all, for 'the purpose of the British army and British trade ... Their greatest revenue comes ... from third-class passengers—the Hindus ..."
"Nor were the Indians employed in the railways. The discriminatory hiring practices of the Indian Railways meant that key industrial skills were not effectively transferred to Indian personnel, which might have proved a benefit." p. 179
"In 1912 .. the British passed an act of Parliament, explicitly making it impossible for Indian workshops to design and manufacture locomotives." p. 181
"The British left India with literacy rate of 16 per cent, and a female literacy rate of 8 per cent—only one of every Indian women could read and write in 1947 ... As Will Durant points out, 'When the British came, there was throughout India, a system of communal schools, managed by the village communities. The agents of the East India Company destroyed these village communities, and took no steps to replace the schools; even today [1930] ... they stand at only 66 per cent of their number a hundred years ago." p. 183
"The English language was not a deliberate gift to India,but again an instrument of colonialism, imparted to Indians only to facilitate the tasks of the English. In his notorious 1835 Minute on Education, Lord Macaulay articulated the classic reason for teaching English, but only to a small minority of Indians: 'We must do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indians in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect'.
The East India Company's interest in Indian education began after the publication of a report by the company evangelist, Charles Grant, in 1792, which 'believed that the introduction of Western education and Christianity would transform a morally decadent society'." p. 186
Macaulay did not allow his ignorance of the East to undermine his self-confidence. 'A single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia,' he notoriously declared, while admitting that he had not read a single work from the literatures he was dismissing." 188
"Most Indians educated in English used that language for their own career self-advancement, not to serve as academic translators or instructors for the masses; and vernacular teaching remained an orphaned profession, reserved for those unfortunate whose own English was not good enough for professions that required the language of the colonials." p. 189
"The British saw precolonial Mughal history as consisting of a linear narration of events devoid of context or analysis; as for pre-Mughal texts, John Stuart Mill dismissed them as 'mythological histories ... where fable stands in the face of facts'. To replace these versions, the British reconstructed 'factual' accounts of Indian historiography adding more contextual analysis in a structured 'European' style—but with the teleological purpose of serving to legitimise British rule in India.
By arguing that history texts should 'rely upon facts and serve a secular curriculum, they also moved away from the teaching of religious and mythological texts, including India's timeless epics, the Mahabharata and Ramayana, which at the very least could have occupied the place in .indian schoolrooms that the Iliad and Odyssey did in British ones." p. 193
"(The sun never set on the British empire, an Indian nationalist later sardonically commented, because even God couldn't trust the Englishman in the dark.") p. 195
"Salman Rushdi has written if the creation of a 'false Orient of cruel-lipped princes and dusky slim-hipped maidens, of ungodliness, fire and the sword', endorsing Edward Said's conclusion in his pathbreaking Orientalism, ' 'that the purpose of such false portraits was to provide moral, cultural and artistic justification of imperialism and for understanding ideology, that of racial superiority of the Caucasian over the Asiatic'. To Rushdi, such portrayals did not belong only to the imperial past: 'the rise of Raj revisionism, exemplified by the huge success of these fictions, is the artistic counterpart to the rise of conservative ideologies in modern Britain'." p. 196
"A bill for universal compulsory primary education was indeed tabled by the 'moderate' Congress leader Gopal Krishna Gokhale in the legislative council of the governor-general in 1911 and another by Vithalbhai Patel in the same body in 1916, but both were defeated by votes of the British and government-appointed members. What is less known, however, is that the bills were also opposed by the likes of Mahatma Gandhi and Surendra Nath Banerjea, staunch nationalists both." p. 198
"The British ruled India but not China: rather than spending money on the Chinese, they reasoned, why nit grow tea in India? Their desire to end their dependence on Chinese tea led the British to invent agricultural espionage, as a secret agent, improbably enough named Robert Fortune, slipped into China in the early 1840s, during the chaos and confusion of the Opium War years, to procure tea plants for transplantation in the Indian Himalayas." p. 203 (See also the documentary Tea War, the Adventures of Robert Fortune)
"Early in the twentieth century, the remarkable anti-imperialist Sir Walter Strickland wrote bitterly in the preface of his now-out-of-print volume The Black Spot in the East: 'Let the English who read this at hime reflect that, when they sip their deleterious decoctions of tanin ... they too are, in their degree, devourers of human flesh and blood. It is not the tea alone, but the impoverished blood of the slaves, devoid of its red seeds of life and vigour, that they are drinking'." p. 204
"The forests were destroyed for three main reasons: to convert the land into commercial plantations, especially to grow tea; to make railway sleepers; and to export timber to England for the construction of English houses and furniture.
The same phenomenon occurred when the British forced Indian farmers to grow poppy in order to extract opium, which involved cutting down vast areas of forests in some parts of north India... The British ... put a bounty on the head of each predator, successfully erasing tigers, cheetahs,leopards and lions from vast parts of India." p. 205
"Sport played an important in British imperialism, since it combined Victorian ideas of muscular Christianity, a cult of youthful vigour and derring-do in far-off lands, and the implicit mission of bringing order and civilisation to the unruly East through the imposition of riles learned on the playing fields of Eton." p. 208
"In a somewhat different way, Parsi cricketers in Bombay undertook the sport for the purpose of social mobility within the colonial framework. The maharajas, the affluent classes and Anglicised Indians, Ashis Nandy points out, 'saw cricket as an identifier of social status and as a means of access to the power elite of the Raj. Even the fact that cricket was an expensive game by Indian standards strengthened these connections'." p. 209
"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'." p. 210
Recent years have seen the rise of what the scholar Paul Gilroy called 'postcolonial melancholia', the i 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'." p. 214
Niall Ferguson's claim that the British empire 'was a 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... The British proclaimed the virtues of free trade while destroying the free Indians had carried on for centuries,if not millennia, by both land and sea.
Feeguson 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 globalised 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 Indian meant economic exploitation and ruin to millions ..." 215
"Indians can never afford to forget the conditions in which we found our country after two centuries of colonialism. We have seen how we had once been one of the richest and most industrialised 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... 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 ..." 217
"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." p. 218
"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." pp. 218-9
"In 1930, [William] Durant found 7,000 opium shops in India, every single one of them British-government owned, and conducting their business over the protests of every Indian nationalist organisation and social service group. Some 400,000 acres of fertile land were given over to opium cultivation; these could have produced food for malnourished Indians... When Mahatma Gandhi, no less, mounted a campaign against opium in Assam and succeeded in halving its consumption, the British responded by jailing him and forty-four of his satyagrahis." p. 227
"The call for the abolition of sati (widow immolation) was initiated by Raja Rammohan and enacted by Bentinck, knowing he had the support of right-thinking Indians, rather than being the product of the British conscience imposing its will on the barbarous native. The modest increase in the age of marriage (to fourteen for women and eighteen for men) that took place under the British Raj was voted by the Indians in the legislature against the opposition, but later acquiescence, of the British authorities." pp. 228-9
"As one reviewer of Ferguson's pro-imperialist screed put it: 'Ferguson's "history" is a fairy tale for our times which puts the white man and his burden back at the centre of heroic action. Colonialism—a tale of slavery, plunder, war, corruption, land-grabbing, famines, exploitation, indentured labour, impoverishment, massacres, genocide and forced resettlement—is rewritten into a benign developmental mission marred by a few unfortunate accidents and excesses." p. 231
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