An Era of Darkness

Title: An Era of Darkness – The British Empire in India

Author: Shashi Tharoor

Publisher: Aleph, 2016 (First)

ISBN: 9789383064656

Pages: 333

As the world slept, India awoke to light and freedom on a summer night in 1947 after reeling under two centuries of British rule and seven centuries of Islamic hegemony. Undoubtedly, some beneficial aspects had been bestowed on the country from the alien rule, but there is universal consensus that on the whole, the experience had been deleterious. Shashi Tharoor, former UN bureaucrat, politician, former minister in Manmohan Singh’s cabinet and writer, presents a postmortem examination of the colonial rule. His conclusion after the exercise is evident in the title of the book – ‘An Era of Darkness’. The British period in India is usually characterized by the appearance of viable political institutions, a democratic spirit, an efficient bureaucracy and the rule of law. Tharoor attacks each and every postulate with fatuous arguments that produce much light and sound, but hardly any substance. This book is written as a sequel to his speech at Oxford where he demanded reparations for the colonial misrule. However, Tharoor is content with a symbolic one pound a year as the rate at which Britain must compensate India. The author’s deft writing style is displayed in impressive detail in this book. In fact, that is the only saving grace.

Tharoor argues that India’s GDP in 1700 CE was 27% of the world’s, which nosedived to 3% in 1947 and claims that it was as a result of British rule. It is true that the British de-industrialized India, forcing the textile industry to collapse and flooded the country with machine-made cloths. Raw materials were freely exported to Britain, at the same time imposing protective tariff against Indian exports of finished cloth. However, by the late-nineteenth century, the situation had started to reverse. Mechanized mills had somewhat recovered the position. In 1896, Indian mills produced only 8% of Indian demand, which grew to 20% by 1913, 62% by 1936 and 76% in 1945. These figures take the wind out of Tharoor’s sails. His fantastical stories of the British cutting off good weavers’ thumbs and smashing machinery are simply regurgitation of local legends and hearsay. It is felt that the author does not follow the dictum that the conduct of states, as of individuals, can only be assessed by the standards of their age, not by today’s litigious criteria.

I have to stress here a point before proceeding further. My stand is that the colonial period is a blot on the nation’s history. We’d have been better off if the foreign yoke hadn’t been bolted on to our shoulders. That said, presuming it to be worse than the preceding Islamic period is sheer hypocrisy and intellectual deceit, which Tharoor seeks to establish. He posits that even without the political unity imposed by the British, a constitutional monarchy would’ve developed in the country and political institutions built upon the Mughal administration system, as modified by the Marathas. But the Mughal system also reeked of grave discrimination against the Hindus is not mentioned by the author. He falsely claims that the monarchs the British supplanted were benign. An example cited is that of the Nawab of Oudh. And the reason for saying so? Because he played chess! Such is the incongruity of the arguments raised in this book! His criticism is only intended for criticism’s sake. The British policy of systematization of administration by framing rules and written procedures is derided because it spawned red-tapism. But a corrupt bureaucracy was a legacy of the Mughal period as well, as attested by foreign travelers who visited the country in that age. Written rules in fact made the malpractices less onerous. The chapter on political unity is simply beating around the bush, covering such wide range of topics as constitutional reforms and participation in world wars. No worthwhile discussion is seen here.

Startling it may seem, but Tharoor attacks the enforcement of Rule of Law as well, accusing it to be discriminatory and citing a few cases where justice was plainly miscarried. Then again, law was not uniform in pre-colonial India too. The Muslim law treated the majority Hindus as dhimmis, or second-class citizens denuded of much civil rights automatically granted to Muslims. The Hindu law that was in force prior to that period condemned people of lower castes to the bottom rung of society, stripping even basic human rights such as the privilege to draw water from wells or use public thoroughfares. What is really shocking is the author’s growl against the British injunction on women of some parts of the South to cover their breasts in public. Tharoor blurts out that ‘Southern Indian women, whose breasts were traditionally uncovered found themselves obliged to undergo the indignity of conforming to Victorian standards of morality’ (p.111). The author’s ignorance of south Indian history is manifest in these words. Many lower castes in Kerala had waged rebellions in the nineteenth century for the right of their women to cover their breasts and the British law was in acknowledgement of these struggles. His tirade against the British-imposed Indian Penal Code (IPC) is laughable, as a few sections of it makes homosexuality a crime and follows preferential treatment to men in the case of adultery. This is, of course, against the zeitgeist of the twenty-first century. But why then did Tharoor, himself a member of parliament, and his party which had ruled the country for six decades after the British left, didn’t amend it?

British rule boded ill for India, but heaping all blame at their door is not justified, which is what this book purports to do. Many of Tharoor’s arguments are illogical. Another broadside is that colonialism made caste what it is today. He alleges that the British used their colonial power to affirm caste as the measure of all social things. Indians in pre-colonial times were said to have lived in imprecisely defined ‘fuzzy’ communities. It was the census which started counting the people from 1872 onwards that categorized them. Tharoor goes on to add that caste competition had been largely unknown in India. Devadasi system is claimed to be an honourable one, but the British clubbed it with prostitution. Of all the postulates in this book, none is more ridiculous as those on caste. Tharoor confuses caste with Vedic varnas and clearly exposes his lack of knowledge of India’s social fabric. His unawareness of India’s caste system is masked by superfluous trumpeting of irrational ideas that assign responsibility on others. There can be no denial of the fact that the backward castes of India found their voice through education mostly in British-run schools and then demanded the fair share they deserved. Another fallacious claim is that the Shia-Sunni conflict in India began only in the British period.

The author is hard put to justify the destruction of thousands of Hindu temples in the Islamic period. It is surprising that he doesn’t condemn it, but defends it as ‘simply a phenomenon of the advancing frontier, occasioned by warfare and occurring mainly in the intense frenzy of armed conflict across changing territorial lines. A royal temple symbolized the king’s power, and so destroying it signified that king’s utter humiliation’ (p.135-6). By Tharoor’s facile logic, Nadir Shah and Ahmed Shah Abdali, who had conquered the Mughal emperors at Delhi, should’ve destroyed its grand Juma Masjid, but strangely, they didn’t!

Tharoor’s wholesale blame game reaches its comic peak when he declares that advances in space and missile technology owes nothing to the colonial period, but is a product of independent India’s own efforts (p.235). This may sound serious until you remember that the space race began only in the 1950s. His blind assault on everything the British had installed extends to railway too in the assertion that railway embankments disrupted local ecology by blocking water channels and caused flood in some areas. Famines are said to have occurred only during the British period, which is outright false. There was no famine in independent India, but the pre-colonial period was replete with them. We have specific information of a great famine when the construction of Taj Mahal started in the 1630s. This is just one among many in that period. The narration falls to the level of storytelling at some points.

This book’s source of reference material is a questionable one. Little known authors are referred as authoritative faculty and Nehru’s remarks against the British are treated as clinching evidence in favour of the author’s argument. Tharoor punctures the validity of his own contentions with an immediately following vacuous disclaimer that ‘this does not mean that pre-colonial India was…’. You can argue anything with that kind of an escape route behind you. The book makes Gandhiji out to be a stupid figure, having no fixed or valid point of view on anything. Tharoor ridicules the father of the nation on his opinion on how children should be educated. The greatest slur, however, is reserved in the chronology section of the book where Gandhiji is described as ‘Indian nationalist and Hindu political activist who developed the strategy of nonviolent disobedience that forced Christian Great Britain to grant independence to India’.

The book, taken altogether, is a sheer waste of time and hence is not recommended.

Rating: 2 Star