‘The misery of Partition is welldocumented’

On his new book, which charts the violence inflicted by the British Empire, and the resistance against it that culminated in India’s independence

You trace the violence of the colonial powers all the way back to its start...

The expedition of the fleet commanded by Vasco da Gama marked the beginning of regular voyages between Europe and Asia via the Cape of Good Hope for the purposes of trade and conquest. The vessels plying along this route were not just merchant ships, they were heavily armed ships and brought a new element to the vibrant trade of the Indian Ocean, namely violence, disrupting it in the process. The Portuguese were ousted by the Dutch East India Company (VOC).

Dutch intervention was more devastating since the VOC sought to bring sources of supply under its direct control, through the conquest of producing areas wherever this was possible, as in the case of the Indonesian islands. The most wellknown instance is that of the Banda islands, which had the misfortune of producing nutmeg. Almost the entire population of the islands was wiped out to ensure the VOC’s nutmeg monopoly.

This was the model that other trading companies such as the English East India Company adopted. EIC would go on to operate on a vastly larger scale than VOC, eventually ruling over the entire Indian subcontinent and Burma.

To be able to do this it had to first eliminate its main competitor, the French company. The main battleground of the so-called Carnatic Wars was Tamil Nadu.

The three wars, fought from the 1740s to the 1760s, cannot be regarded as an affair involving just the two companies. Regional polities were drawn into the conflict and the wars affected the lives of countless non-combatants, apart from large numbers of locally recruited soldiers. The march of armies caused destruction, displacement, death and the loss of livelihoods, as it always does. And the triumph of the EIC was ultimately the triumph of its shareholders.

You write that there was a callousness to the way the Indian subcontinent was abandoned to its fate in August 1947.

The callousness I refer to is the utter lack of concern about the consequences of arbitrarily dividing a substantial chunk of the territories of the empire. Even a person unfamiliar with the Indian empire could have figured out the implications of such a division, the tragedy that would unfold when vast, densely populated areas were divided in a context where communal violence had become fairly widespread.

Underlying the “masterly inactivity” of colonial officials and policy makers at the highest levels was the complete absence of a concrete plan, a manifestation of the callousness, to deal with the situation which might arise due to Partition, leading Cyril Radcliffe to remark tersely, upon his return to Britain, “Strange chaps. [They] just didn’t do their homework”. The misery caused by Partition is well-documented; there is now extensive historical scholarship on

the subject.