The lustre of globalization is ebbing, nationalism and patriotism are scorchingly fashionable. Patriotism was once described as the last refuge of scoundrels and nationalism was once seen as a violent ideology that fuelled two world wars. But today after Brexit and the triumph of Narendra Modi and Donald Trump, it is evident that a resounding espousal of nationhood delivers big political rewards. Benedict Anderson’s argument in his seminal work `Imagined Communities’, about a nationalism that is politically powerful and philosophically poor was never more relevant. In the era of virtual identities, as expatriate communities yearn for an idyllic homeland and give vent to nationalist rage in cyberspace (even as they benefit from open borders and free trade), the imagined nation is a potent force.
The Indian non-resident patriot’s email nationalism or virtual nationalism spills forth on social media, expressing itself often as Hindu rage against the rule of the UPA posited as colonial dominance by the `foreign’ Sonia Gandhi. The rise of Modi as the Hindu nationalist hero is seen as the triumph of an authentic bharat against foreign educated Macaulayputras, or English-speaking, foreign oriented Indians who are cut off from the grit of the Indian soil, yet have ruled because of colonial privileges, the mythical “Lutyens Elite”. Amidst this heightened nationalist fever, spiking on social media after Modi’s win in 2014 came Shashi Tharoor’s energetic debate speech last year at the Oxford Union. Tharoor was speaking for the motion, “Britain Owes Reparations To Her Former Colonies,” and launched into a brilliantly argued, no-holds barred nationalist roar against former colonial masters.
The video of the speech coursed through the cyber community like fast moving volcanic lava, shared, as Tharoor tells us in his book, over 3 million times. Cyber nationalists, Hindutva patriots, Modi bhakts who had mercilessly trolled Tharoor for his secular views, now hailed him as a hero for giving voice to their aggressive nationalism. A speech that echoed the views of the nationalist school of history writing begun as far back as the late 19th century had found a new millennial constituency.
Tharoor has now converted that ‘viral’ Oxford union speech into a new book, `An Era of Darkness’ (Aleph) in which he expands his theme of the evil, heartless, greedy and racist British mercilessly exploiting India, impoverishing its people, stealing its riches, destroying its social fabric and leaving it with a ruined economy, dysfunctional democracy and confused modernity, with even the so-called gains of colonialism like the English language and the railway network being only very mixed blessings. But while Tharoor’s speech was fluent drama, the book at times reads like a politicians’ rant. While the speech was punchy and riveting, the book does at times feel like a re-run of nationalist historiography of the 19th and early twentieth century.
`An Era of Darkness’ ranges through an impressive body of works and presents itself as an informed polemic on the ravages of colonial rule. But in the process it reinvents the wheel of nationalist history writing, sounding like an updated version of Rajni Palme Dutt’s `India Today’ written in the 1930s which provides an authoritative account of 3 phases of the Raj in India, from plunder to capitalist exploitation to finance imperialism. Dadabhai Naoroji, one of the founders of the Indian National Congress, as far back as the mid 19th century put forward the drain of wealth theory in his book `Poverty and Unbritish Rule in India.’ Nationalist history has since been overtaken by historians of the Marxist, Cambridge and Subaltern schools, who have interpreted colonial history in different ways. Marxists have argued that the oppressions within Indian society were sometimes as great as those inflicted by the Raj and the Subaltern school argues that nationalist struggles were not just carried on by elites but by diverse local and tribal movements, some of whose war cries were not just kill the Europeans but also kill other oppressive castes like zamindars and moneylenders. The contradictions within Indian society were too great for the Raj encounter to be just a binary conflict between two monoliths of Brown Indians vs White Britons.
`An Era of Darkness’ is thus not a book of new historical research but a racily written essay cum argument which takes up the hoary nationalist baton and races around spiritedly over well trodden ground. Yet Tharoor is a well regarded author, whose work India: From Midnight to Millenium was studied by none other than then US President Bill Clinton when preparing to visit India in 2000. So notwithstanding its familiar theme, Tharoor’s evocative prose makes known facts refreshingly relevant and interesting for the 21st century reader.
The book opens with a quote from the American historian Will Durant saying how the British conquest of India was `the invasion and destruction of a high civilization by a trading company utterly without scruple or principle.’ The destruction of Indian manufacturing , deindustrialisation of India, the wiping out of Indian textiles by the machines of the British industrial revolution, coupled with rapacious taxes and plunder by British ‘nabobs”, shows that as Tharoor writes, the “economic exploitation of India was integral to the colonial enterprise.” Tharoor argues that far from colonial rule creating political unity for “India”, as has been argued, “British imperial expansion was about crass commercial cupidity, the need to consolidate political power to safeguard profit.” It was also about the racist European notion that “heathen Indian nations were unworthy of the status of sovereign legal entities.”
The British created a royal hierarchy of Indian “native princes’ which only legitimized their own rule and created an administrative civil service based on exclusion and social scorn. The Raj is are credited with bringing democracy to India, but Tharoor believes that the “parliamentary system has not merely outlived any good it could do, it was from the start unsuited to Indian conditions and is primarily responsible for our principal political ills.” The British lumbered India with a draconian penal code. Repeated censuses divided Indian society into competitive religious groups and froze caste hierarchy in immobility when castes had in pre-colonial times been free to move up the social ladder. Also, “large scale conflicts between Hindus and Muslims only began under colonial rule.” Blunders by the early Congress and short-sightedness of the departing British led to a surrender to Jinnah and the Muslim League and the subsequent horror of Partition. Divide and rule worked only too well as the British split India into two as their parting gift.
Writes Tharoor, “India’s flourishing democracy of seven decades is no tribute to British rule. It is a bit rich for the British to suppress, exploit, imprison, torture and maim people for 200 years and then celebrate the fact that they are a democracy at the end of it.” Tharoor vociferously refutes historians like Niall Ferguson who argue that colonialism across the world brought modernity and free trade, and dubs the British raj as Brutish raj, characterized by brutalities both physical and psychological. Towards the end of the book Tharoor doesn’t quite make a case for the return of the Kohinoor diamond, instead he says the best argument to leave the Kohinoor where it does not belong, would be so that it serves as a reminder of the loot and plunder of colonialism. Arguments that are lustily nationalist enough to thrill 21st century virtual patriots.
Tharoor’s criticism of the pre-Independence Congress, evocations of an idyllic Indian past such as village communities, references to the glories of Nalanda University and guru shiksha parampara would delight the present Narendra Modi-led ruling dispensation. But history is greater than politics. Yes exploitation and racism were integral to British rule but should the history of those 200 years be interpreted only through a political prism? Dalitbahujan activists for example hail the Raj educationist Thomas Babington Macaulay, as the liberator of Dalits. Communities which in pre-colonial era labored under the laws of Manu and were forbidden to learn Sanskrit, were set free by the new language of power: English. Without access to the English language would generations of Indians from Amartya Sen to Satya Nadella have been able to make their mark overseas? The Empire has written back in the erstwhile master’s tongue and Salman Rushdie and Arundhati Roy have become jewels in our post colonial crown.
The Bengal renaissance of the 19th century, a social cultural “re-birth” only emerged because of a creative confrontation of western thought and eastern traditions. Those who campaigned against sati and Untouchability were surely inspired by western notions of individual liberty. Wasn’t the early Congress made up of westernized Indian gentlemen, turning to western liberal ideas imbibed from the British to mount their anti -Raj critique? Isn’t the Constitution of India itself a modern westernized assault on age old traditions?
Of course as Tharoor points out, citing a Gallup poll from 1997, many Britons are unware of the Raj’s depradations and need reminding. Plus a heightened nationalist consciousness need not always lead to crass jingoism but can also lead to a constructive understanding of the past and a resolve to undo its damage. History’s not about taking revenge but learning from it to craft a different future. `An Era of Darkness’ is a highly readable robustly argued book which while it demolishes all positive claims about colonialism is written in perfect English by a confident post-colonial, himself as much at home in Oxford as in Kochi. So even as the reader is once again taken through two centuries of colonial darkness, the cricket-playing Wodehouse- reading Tharoor himself shines forth as a reminder of some of the Raj’s better outcomes.
This article was first published in Biblio.
