The day that marked the end of empires

You probably don’t have Monday, Aug. 15 circled on your calendar. Perhaps you should. It’s the 75th anniversary of the collapse of colonialism.

On Aug. 15, 1947, India declared Independence.

Actually, Pakistan beat India by one day — an omen of the animosity that has persisted ever since — but my ties are to India, so that’s what I’ll write about.

I spent my first 10 years in India. Most of it during the Second World War, where my mother received a Kaiser-i-Hind medal — India’s highest civilian honour — for, among other things, refusing to flee from the Himalayas when Japanese forces were just one Himalayan pass away.

But even as some two million Indian soldiers fought for Britain, millions of ordinary people rallied against British rule.

I remember standing on our hillside the summer before Independence, listening to waves of sound drifting across the forested slopes from the nearest town, as thousands chanted “Jai Hind! Jai Hind! Jai Hind!”

Loosely translated, “Victory to India!” “What are they shouting for?” I asked my father. At 10, I was politically clueless.

“They want independence from `Britain,” `he explained.

“Why?” I wondered. “Don’t they realize how good they’ve got it now?”

My father, wisely, said nothing. But I learned later that he had chosen not to return to India for a third term as college professor, because he knew he would be appointed principal, and he believed it was time an Indian held that post.

In some ways, India did derive benefits from British rule. The British brought education — in English, of course. They built a railroad system that should have qualified as a wonder of the world. They brought a uniform system of laws to over 500 autonomous princely states.

On the other hand, to put this bluntly, Britain raped India.

When the East India Company first sank its claws into the Indian sub-continent in 1611, India was the world’s richest country, an economic superpower that surpassed the whole of Europe.

By 1947, though, India had sunk to one of the poorer nations. From being the world’s biggest textile exporter, it had become a major market for English cotton mills.

India was the victim of England’s industrial revolution.

We left India in January 1947, so I wasn’t there for the first Independence Day.

It was, in many ways, a triumph. After 200 years of external rule, first by a trading corporation and then by the British crown, India had set itself free.

It was, in other ways, a massive tragedy. A mini-continent — conventional mapping makes it look much smaller than it really is — was split into three. Along religious lines. Muslims were banished to Pakistan, or to what is now Bangla Desh. Hindus flocked into India. Over 15 million people migrated.

Wikipedia estimates that 500,000 people were killed.

Fifty years later, an older schoolmate told me of riding a train back to his home in Karachi, Pakistan’s major port. Each time the train crossed and recrossed the new border between India and Pakistan, gangs of young men surged through the carriages, dragging anyone who might belong to the other religion off the train, and killing them.

My schoolmate estimated that he saw more than 100 people murdered outside his window. He’s dead now; I hope I’ve recalled his story accurately.

But aside from atrocities, Indian Independence was the beginning of the end of colonialism.

Colonialism reached its zenith following the Industrial Revolution. European powers carved up the rest of the world. Africa, for example, now has 54 countries. Only one escaped being a European colony.

The British Empire was the biggest. Maps of the time marked British colonies in red. They looked as if someone had sloshed a gallon of paint across the globe.

And India was, as Paul Scott’s novels called it, the “Jewel in the Crown” of the British Empire.

George VI was King of England, but Emperor of India.

India’s Independence was the tipping point. Like dominoes, the rest of Britain’s colonies followed, eventually becoming today’s Commonwealth of Nations. More than 50 new sovereign states emerged from European empires.

Colonialism is dead, today. No nation — except Russia, still stuck in a Czarist mindset — would dare annex another nation by force.

Here in Canada, we decry the colonial attitudes of our ancestors, who believed they had a divine right to take over territories inhabited for 14,000 years by “savages.”

We forget that the first major rejection of the colonial mentality happened in India, 75 years ago this coming Monday.