This book is an outcome of a debate at Oxford where Tharoor took
part in May 2015 on the proposition 'Britain owes reparations to her former
colonies'.
The power of social media ensured that the snippets of the
debate went viral with gushing support and appreciation galore for Tharoor.
and thus the idea of the book was born.
One wishes Tharoor had just stuck to the debate and not made a
book out of it. Sound bytes in a glamorous clipped accent makes for better
feeling of simplistic vacuous nationalistic pride than somber reading of 300
odd pages of how the Empire lorded over us filthy natives for over 200 odd
years.
The book is a depressing read. It depresses me no end as to how
India had been subjugated so easily and so thoroughly by the British with
seemingly little effort. Just a paltry 70000 Brits is all it took
keep a country of 250 million natives in check in the late nineteenth century,
a number which increased to 1.7 Lacs versus 300 million at the time of
independence.
As Tharoor writes eloquently:
"It was an extraordinary 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.’
Tharoor essentially lays bare the argument that there was anything
altruistic in the British rule of India and 200 years of Colonial rule
simply devastated the country economically and morally. The British ruled over
us for their own self-interest - much
like any other country- and there was nothing special about them, and there is
simply no grain of truth in the least in that notorious verse by Kipling of the
‘White man’s burden’ eulogizing the Englishman and his travails:
‘Take up the White Man’s Burden, Send forth the best ye breed
Go bind your sons to exile, to serve your captives’ need’,
despite the ingratitude of the heathens they were ruling;
the White Man had to bear his Burden despite ‘his old
reward:
the blame of those ye better, / The hate of those ye guard’
All for the needs, as Kipling wrote, for the resentful ‘sullen
peoples, half-devil and half-child’.
But I felt the thrust of the books argument was a no-brainer. I
mean, the Brits ruled for their own self-interest, who would want to contest
that? They ravaged the economy, broke the back of pre-industrial India, wreaked
havoc on the thriving textile, ship building industry etc, forced huge swathes
of fertile land to be used for cultivation of opium, ensured that there was a
ready market for British goods while devastating centuries old Indian export
market with high tariffs laid on goods…the list is endless. And of course the
so called benefits of railways, english language, establishment of Schools and
Universities etc were simply to enable them to subdue and lord over their
subjects in a more effective fashion.
Isn’t this a no-brainer?
But Tharoor delves at length to thwart the notion of any redeeming
benefits of the Empire on the Indian Sub-continent, and he crams loads and
loads of data to make his point.
To be fair, there are a section of Indians and not just a few
Englishmen who believe in the myth that the British rule was actually good for
India. Tharoor especially goes to great lengths to demolish the arguments for
the empire raised by Niall Fergusson in his book ‘Empire: how Britain made the
world’.
So I guess the arguments set forth in the book forcefully by
Tharoor deserves to be told. And it’s a fair book.
Having said that, I think there were two points that Tharoor could
have dwelt on while discussing the Empire, which are slightly thorny issues, and maybe the reason why Tharoor the
politician, has avoided them.
Firstly, would modern India have the boundaries we see today if it
were not for the British rule? Would there have been a nationalistic movement
and leaders of such mettle as a Gandhi to forge a united polity in the absence
of an external enemy?
It is no one’s argument that India existed as a Civilizational
entity for more than 3000 years. But were we ever a political entity, (apart
from brief interludes of the Maurya, Gupta and Mughal Empires) in the sense
that China was? Even during the century long subjugation of China starting in
the 1850s, the European imperial powers dealt with the Qing dynasty, the unquestioned rulers of the Middle kingdom. Not so in India’s case.
So a closer look at whether the Indian polity that we see today
would have remained the same without the ravages on its soil by the Imperial
rule for over 200 years would have been an interesting debate.
Secondly, given that huge swathes of the globe were under Colonial
rule beginning the nineteenth century, and India happened to be a ripe fruit
waiting to be plucked, (given the lack of unity amongst warring princely
states) how would the Country have fared if it was any other Colonial power in
place instead of the Brits? What if it were the Japanese or the Nazi Germans?
The moot question being, given that India would have been
colonized in any case, and if we had any choice in the matter, which Colonial
power would have been better for the Indians?
The above points raised are contentious and I don’t blame Tharoor
for not touching them.
Do read the book only if you are one of those who really believe,
that the colonial rule had been good for the country in any manner whatsoever..
Else, avoid. Just stick to the sound bytes of the debate and feel good about it.
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