The damage done to India by the imperial British rule

 

Gandhi Jayanti

The damage done to India by the imperial British rule 

 

In 1757, Robert Clive had defeated the Bengal nawab Siraj-ud-Daula at the battle of Plassey, due to the betrayal of Mir Jafar, Commander of the Army.  And with that a trading Company, the East India Company, and the Imperial British ruled India, as its colony for next 200 years.  Shashi Tharoor in his book An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India examines the legacy of British Raj.  He argues that the British had done irreparable damage to India. This article, based on his book, is an attempt to understand that.

 

There was Indian complicity in British rule. The British takeover was facilitated and encouraged by Indians. Indians were active collaborators in most of the misdeeds of the British. This was especially true of Indian princes who accepted the ‘Faustian bargain’ to protect their wealth and their comforts in exchange for mortgaging their integrity; went out of their way to pledge loyalty to the British Crown. There were other well-known Indians supporters of Empire, most notably the Bengali intellectual and ‘unabashed Anglophile’, Nirad Choudhuri, who extolled the virtues of the British empire and lamented its passing.  Many ordinary Indians too went along with the British, never felt they had a choice in the matter. 

 

The Looting of India

 

The first British ambassador, Sir Thomas Roe, presented his credential in 1615 at the Court of the Mughal Emperor Jehangir- the world’s mightiest and most opulent monarch. The Mughal empire stretched from Kabul to the eastern extremities of Bengal, and from Kashmir in the north to Karnataka in the South.  But less than a century and a half later, the Mughal empire was in a state of collapse after the spectacular sacking of Delhi by the Persian Nadir Shah in 1739 and the loot of all its treasures. After the battle of Plassey, Clive transferred the princely sum of 2.5. million pounds to the Company’s coffers in England as the spoils of conquest. The British extracted from India some 18,000,000 pounds every year between 1765 and 1815. 

 

By the end of the nineteenth century, India was Britain’s highest source of revenue, the world’s biggest purchaser of British exports and the source of highly paid employment for British civil servants and soldiers all at India’s own expense. ‘We literally plaid for our own oppression’. India was depleted, exhausted and bled by the drain of resources, which made it vulnerable to famine, poverty and suffering.  In 1901, the amount extracted by the economic drain in the nineteenth century amounted to staggering 4,187,922,732 pounds. The British had a standing army of 325,000 men by the late nineteenth century, two thirds of which was paid by Indian taxes. India’s labour and commercial skills were exploited to cement imperial rule in many of the British colonies abroad. But India was denied any of the rewards or benefits of imperialism. Presiding over all of this was the Governor General of India, an executive appointed by the East India Company but, in effect, the monarch of all he surveyed.   

And with the coronation of 1877, the British monarchy was reinvented by Benjamin Disraeli as an imperial power- the queen became an empress- with India the most glittering jewel in her crown, and her domains stretched across the world to an unprecedented extent. The British created a court culture that the princes had to follow, and a hierarchy that sought to show the Crown as successor of the Mughal empire, inventing the Indian royals as an imperial category.  In her 1858 Proclamation, Quen Victoria expressed her wish that ‘our subjects, of whatever race or creed, be freely and impartially admitted to office in our service, the duties of which they may be qualified by their education, ability and integrity duly to discharge’. But the reality was different. The Indian were excluded ‘from every honour, dignity or office which the lowest Englishman could be prevailed upon to accept’. The Governor General became the Viceroy, who administered India through provincial governors.

 

The Divide and Rule

 

The sight of Hindu and Muslim soldiers rebelling together in 1857 and fighting side by side and pledging allegiance to the enfeeble Mughal monarch-Bahadur Shah Zafar- had alarmed the British, who concluded that dividing the two groups and pitting them against one another was the most effective way to ensure the unchallenged continuance of their rule.  As early as 1859, the British governor of Bombay, Lord Elphinstone, advised London that ‘Divide et imperia was the old Roman maxim, and it should be ours’.

 

Religion became an instrument of divide and rule: the Hindu-Muslim divide was fomented by the British as a deliberate strategy. The British watched the rise to prominence of the Congress, as a secular Organisation transcending religion, with growing disapproval, and pronounced it a Hindu -dominated organization.  Lord Curzon’s decision in 1905 to partition Bengal to create a Musim majority province was an attempt to divide the country.  The British instigated a Muslim nobleman, Nawab Khwaja Salimullah of Dacca to start a rival organization- the Muslim League- in 1906. The League represented only the landed aristocracy and upper-class merchants and landlords among the Muslim population.

 

The British decision to declare the community then known as ‘Untouchables’ to be a minority community, distinct from other Hindus, entitled to separate representation in a new category called the ‘Depressed Classes’ was a ploy to divide the majority community in furtherance of imperial interests. It was the first time that a separate electorate was proposed within a religious community. It was a strategy to fragment Indian nationalism and break the unity of the Indian masses. Following Gandhi’s fast unto death in 1932, the proposal to create a separate electorate for the ‘Depressed Classes’ was dropped, as per the Poona Pact. Jinnah, whom Sarojini Naidu once called ‘the ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity,’ disdained by the populism and the mass appeal of Gandhi, retreated to his law practice in England, only to return, after a long political sulk as the leader determined to take the Muslim League towards separatism. 

 

The 1937 elections, under Nehru’s Presidentship, the Congress registered huge victory, forming governments in 8 of 11 British provinces, the Muslim League winning just 106 out of 1585 seats. However, the Congress governments resigned in protest against the arbitrary declaration of the Viceroy Lord Linlithgow of India being a party to the World War in 1939. Jinnah saw a godsend opportunity in this. He persuaded the Viceroy to enlist the League as a sole representative of India’s Muslims. Subsequently, Jinnah and the Muslim Lague extended support to the British in its war efforts. The League grew with the British patronage, its membership swelled from 112,000 in 1941 to over 2 million members in 1944. Following the Quit India movement, and with all the Congress leaders in jail, the field was left free for the Muslim Lague, emerging from the war immeasurably enhanced in power and prestige. The resignations of the Congress ministries and the Quit India movement paved the way for the triumph of the Muslim League. The British divide and rule policy ultimately resulted in the partition of India. 

 

The Damage

 

As Shashi Tharoor says, ‘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’. Throughout the Raj, there were men who devoted their lives to service in India, good men who rose above the prejudices of their age to treat Indians with compassion and respect. There were visionary viceroys and governors.

 

However, ‘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, Britain accounted for 10 per cent of world’s GDP, while India had been reduced to a poor ‘third world’ country, destitute and starving, a global poster child of poverty and famine. 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. And when the English came to India, it was the leader of Asiatic civilization and the undisputed center of light in the Asiatic world. 

 

Far from being backward or underdeveloped, precolonial India exported high-quality manufactured goods much sought after by Britan’s fashionable society. The British elite wore Indian linen and silks, decorate their homes with Indian chintz and decorative textiles, and craved Indian spices and seasonings. It is said the annual revenue of the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb was to the tune of 450,000,000 pounds, more than ten times that of his contemporary Loui XIV.

 

India was impoverished by the British conquest. The India that succumbed to British rule enjoyed enormous financial surplus, deployed skilled artisan class, exported high-quality goods in great global demand, disposed of plenty of arable land, and a thriving agricultural base, and supported some 100 to 150 million without poverty or landlessness. All this was destroyed by the British rule.  Above all, we lost self- respect. Nehru described British India as being like an enormous country house in which the English were the gentry living in the best parts, with the Indians in the servants’ hall.   

 

And unlike every previous conqueror of India (excluding transient raiders like Mahmud of Ghazni, Timur and Nadir Shah), unlike every other foreign overlord who stayed on to rule, the British had no intention of becoming one with the land. The French ruled foreign territories and made the French assimilating them in a narrative of Frenchness; the Portuguese settled in their colonies and intermarried with the locals; but the British always stayed apart and aloof, with foreign interests and foreign loyalties. ‘The Delhi Sultans and the Mughals may have arrived from abroad, but they settled in India and retained no extraterritorial allegiance. They married women from India and diluted their foreign blood to the point that in a few generations no trace remained of their foreign ethnicity’.  Jahangir was half Rajput; Shah Jehan was born to an Indian queen; and Aurangzeb was only one-eighth non-Indian.

 

No doubt, ‘the past was part of the Mughal identity, but their conceptions of themselves in the present and for the future became more rooted and embedded in India. The British in contrast, maintained racial exclusivity, practiced discrimination against Indians and sneered at miscegenation’. The Mughal emperors taxed the citizens of India.  And ‘they claimed tributes from subordinate princes, they plundered the treasuries of those they defeated in battle- all like the British-but they spent or saved what they had earned in India, instead of repatriating it to Samarkand or Bukhara as the British did by sending their Indian revenues to London’.

 

Rudyard Kipling wrote his racist poem, ‘The White Man’s Burdem’, to which his contemporary, Henry Labouchere, published a rejoinder, ‘The Brown Man’s Burden’. That aptly sums up much of what was wrong with the imperial British rule. The fact that, despite all the wrongs and injustices, Indians readily forgave the British when they left, retaining with them a ‘special connection’ that often manifests itself in warmth and affection, says more about India than it does about any supposed benefits of the British Raj.  Nehru, who spent some 10 years in British jails, when asked by the arch-imperialist Winston Churchill ‘how it was that he felt so little rancour for his jailers and tormentors’, he replied: ‘I was taught by a great man, never to hate- and never to fear’, in a reference to Mahatma Gandhi.