Inglorious Empire
Penguin, 336 pages, £9.99
Erudite and beautifully written, this book is, selfconfessedly, an attempt to right what Shashi Tharoor – an Indian politician and ex-UN diplomat – sees as the wrongs inflicted by historians such as Niall Ferguson, Andrew Roberts and co in their painting of the British imperial project as a ‘good thing’. In page after page of biting critique, we are reminded about “the looting of India”, reducing “one of the richest and most industrialised economies of the world… into one of the poorest, most backward, illiterate and diseased societies on Earth”. There is also a distinct undercurrent of blaming the colonial past for much of what is fundamentally wrong with India today.
It is impossible to disagree with the general thesis that the British profited immeasurably by their economic exploitation of India, and that racism, violence and inequality were significant attributes of imperial rule. However, history and the past are not necessarily equivalent. And one need not be an apologist for empire to posit that the Raj was not a black-and-white story but contained infinite shades of grey.
Tharoor’s approach suggests a coherence and consistency to British policy that didn’t really exist. British power was to a considerable extent fleeting, fragmented or illusory. His portrayal also affords relatively little agency to Indians – princes, peasants and everyone in-between – other than to the nationalists, who are portrayed with insufficient nuance. While political and societal fissures based on religion and caste were undoubtedly exploited by the British, their origins and appeal also lay firmly in India’s past. As Gandhi once remarked: “We divide, you conquer.” Yet, Tharoor appears to give pre-western empires such as the Mughals an almost clean bill of health, but judges the Raj by the standards of Utopia and, unsurprisingly, finds it wanting. At the end, one is left wondering if perhaps the legacy of the British imperial encounter deserves to be examined in a less polarised fashion.
Chandrika Kaul is senior lecturer in modern history at the University of St Andrews