We paid for our own oppression: Tharoor

Shashi Tharoor’s latest offering‘An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India’ provides valuable insight into the British Raj and the East India Company. Tharoor’s book was launched last week by the Vice President of India Hamid Ansari at the Taj Mahal Hotel, Delhi.

While most of the other books focus on just one or two aspects of this particular period: history, culture or what the society was like, An Era of Darkness provides a comprehensive account on the British era, covering all the aspects of that period- history, economics, politics, cricket, policies, literature, tea, English language, torture, extra-judicial killings and much more from an Indian point of view.

The book provides an alternative view to those by British writers who sought to portray the empire as a jolly good thing. At the launch, Tharoor said, “I was inspired to write this book after the overwhelming response to my speech at the Oxford Union Debate of 2015 about the British era.

I realised that the speech went viral only because maybe it’s not being told the same way as before in our classrooms or simply because ours is a forgiving society and we have put behind the bad stuff quickly to move on to face our current realities and future prospects. Therefore what happened for 200 years till 1947 is no longer of much importance to today’s Indians.” No sum of reparations by the British, who reduced India to one of the poorest countries in the world, can compensate for the “horrendous” crimes the Raj committed against the Indian people, Tharoor pointed out.

Tharoor, who makes a strong case against the British Empire in his new book, said the European country became prosperous primarily by impoverishing India.“the rise of Britain for 200 years was financed by its depredations in India. And certainly, we were a principal cash cow for Britain throughout the nineteenth century. We paid for our own oppression,” Tharoor said.

The book critically examines the 200-year long British legacy in India and provides damning evidence and incisive arguments against its supposed boons.