Rebalancing the historical narrative: British Empire in India (part 1)
Documenting my work-in-progress journey as I learn about the incontrovertible changes that British Empire caused to the social, economic and political fabric of India, Britain and the world at large.
I grew up in the UK, and it will come as no shock to anyone else who lives here, that we didn’t really cover the British Empire in history lessons. So when I moved to India, aged 12, it wasn’t really something I knew much about, nor something I spent a lot of my time thinking about.
This changed very quickly. Whenever the British Empire cropped up in conversations, I felt deeply uncomfortable, feeling as though I had to speak up for the country I had grown up in - rebutting criticism with the much used (and lacking in nuance, I would later find out) argument of ‘Oh but the British set up the railways and the postal service in India.’ More and more, my shock and horror at not knowing the very basics and fundamentals of what the British Empire had wrought on India plagued me. Yet ironically, it wasn’t until I came back to the UK in 2018 that I took a very active interest in learning about this period of time and taking a keener and more critical eye of venerated public figures who while contributing to Britain and fuelling its progress, created more than their fair share of crises on other shores.
Books have been, and will continue to be, a key source of learning in this space. It has been heartening to see so many books crop up and gain popularity on this very topic. And even more so to see this happen in children’s books like ‘Lands of Belonging: A History of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Britain’, Sathnam Sanghera’s ‘Stolen History: The truth about the British Empire and how it shaped us’ as well as fictional tales like ‘City of Stolen Magic’ by Nazneen Ahmed Pathak.
The first book that I picked up on this topic was Shashi Tharoor’s ‘Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India.’ This was borne out of a debate that Tharoor, an MP who sits in the Congress Party of the Indian government, had at the Oxford Union about what the British owe to India. The statistics really do speak for themselves.
“At the beginning of the eighteenth century, as the British economic historian Angus Maddison has demonstrated, India’s share of the world economy was 23 per cent, as large as all of Europe put together…By the time the British departed India, it had dropped to just over 3 per cent. The reason was simple: India was governed for the benefit of Britain. Britain’s rise for 200 years was financed by its depredations in India.”
My main takeaway from the book is that when arguments are made in favour of the British empire for introducing democracy, political unity, the railway system and the press, that it is important to remember that it was done more in the interests of Britain than out of any kind of magnanimity or desire to improve the circumstances of the indigenous population. Tharoor argues that the British therefore looted India on multiple levels:
Economically - The systematic and precise destruction and obsolescence of India’s cottage industries such as textiles which pushed more and more of India’s population into being landless farmers.
Politically - From Britain’s motto of ‘Divide et Impera’ which led to line being drawn at random to carve out three countries from one, the effects of which continue to reverberate until this day to what Tharoor believes is the incorrect model of democracy.
Socially - Tharoor disputes any claims of how India should be grateful to the British for spreading the English language owing to the fact that India’s literacy rate when the British left was only 16%. Furthermore, the British’s new system of education only served to undermine pre-existing structures and systems of education, instead of improve them. Thomas Macaulay who was given the responsibility of creating an education system and curriculum had the opinion that “A single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia” which should tell you all you need to know.
Tharoor makes the important point that the British Empire in India had different motives to other empires of the time:
“Since the British were not motivated by either the crusading Christianity of the Spanish or the cultural zeal of the French, but merely by pecuniary greed, they were not unduly anxious to transform Indian society or shape it in their image…For most of the imperialists, India was a career, not a crusade.”
Tharoor’s disgust and anger with Empire is palpable throughout the text, to the point where I would find it difficult to read the book in public, sitting in a train, whose infrastructure was likely laid during the Industrial Revolution that would have been significantly funded by the profits of colonial and imperial activities.
Ultimately, from my reading it was clear that the effects of unbalanced historical narrative that misrepresent the past greatly impact our present and future. It is possible to draw a line linking the lack of knowledge around Britain and Empire, and the anti-immigrant rhetoric that grows in popularity, and the nostalgia for a time when “Britannia ruled the waves”.
What would it be like to be part of a Britain and United Kingdom that acknowledged its progress and many of its achievements in that time period came from the labour and resources of countries they systematically hegemonised and looted?
It would be more difficult for governments to blame bad decision-making and flagrant disinvestment in public resources on “migrants.” And certainly harder to find a public who believed them.
It is unfair to leave individuals to challenge the knowledge they are getting from the education system. It is alarming that some British politicians have refused to take a constructively critical lens on their own heroes, admitting their mistakes.
Reclaiming and rewriting the historical narrative is an uncomfortable and time-intensive project. It involves confronting harsh truths, asking difficult questions and excavating what has been brushed under multiple carpets for centuries. It behoves us as global citizens who have more access to information than ever before to use it well, and as more people begin to raise these questions, the imperial past (and in some cases the present) can no longer avoid scrutiny. History requires this scrutiny so we do not condone, intentionally or unintentionally, the same harmful beliefs and behaviours.
If you have stayed with me and read until the end, thank you so much. I hope to continue to document my learnings and un-learnings, and hope you will join me again.
I will end with one of my favourite quotes from Shashi Tharoor’s book:
“The past is not necessarily a guide to the future, but it does partly help explain the present. One cannot, as I have written elsewhere, take revenge upon history; history is its own revenge.”
To be continued…