Yet during the entire year history of British rule in India, there was almost no increase in per capita income. In fact, during the last half of the 19th century — the heyday of British intervention — income in India collapsed by half. The average life expectancy of Indians dropped by a fifth from to Tens of millions died needlessly of policy-induced famine. What does this require of Britain today? An apology? Perhaps — although there is not enough money in all of Britain to cover the sums that Patnaik identifies.
In the meantime, we can start by setting the story straight. The correct year is Jason Hickel. Published On 19 Dec How did this come about? More from Author. As my own forthcoming book details, some shut themselves off from the day-to-day lives of Indians, unless forced to engage for work purposes.
Others escaped through drowning themselves in alcohol, opium or other drugs. Several came to see their role as being a peacekeeper between various ethnic and religious groups, despite the irony of the British having encouraged and exploited the categorisation of colonial subjects on these grounds in the first place.
Underneath all of this sits a trauma that the coloniser had to either deal with — or resign their post and go home. One serviceman of the late Raj who I have focused on in my research is an example of the coping mechanisms that British officials deployed. Andrew Clow entered the Indian Civil Service in at the age of 22 and would remain a civil servant until when he reached the mandatory retirement ceiling of 35 years. His most notable portfolios were as secretary of the Indian Labour Bureau in the late s, followed by minister for communications and then governor of Assam from to Clow, and his one thousand or so colleagues at any one time, effectively ruled India during the late Raj.
In their entire year rule, they made up no more than 0. And, yet, for most of that period, no Indian was allowed to join the Indian Civil Service, in part because the British could not bear to take orders from a brown man.
When they were finally admitted, more direct racism was in store. High scorers in the civil service examinations were accused of cheating, for how else could brown men do so well. Under the British, Tharoor shows that, the Hindu caste system became more rigid, and communal lines, particularly those between Hindus and Muslims, deepened. Nowhere was the application of that singular ethos clearer than when, on their way out, the colonialists partitioned the subcontinent into India and Pakistan.
A democracy cannot function without a free press and just law. Neither truly existed under the Raj. The British were the first to establish newspapers in India, catering to a small English-educated elite first, and large audiences in the vernacular languages later. However, alarmed by their proliferation, the East Indian Company passed the Censorship of the Press Act in , subjecting all newspapers to scrutiny before publication.
In , all other kinds of publication, too, were brought under this rule. Once bitten by the bug and with strict adherence to the law not being insisted on over time, Indians continued with the enterprise. By , there were some newspapers in the subcontinent, mostly owned and edited by Indians. Alarm bells rang again, bringing another round of censorship in the form of the Vernacular Press Act of and the revised Press Act of Under the latter, publishers were required to provide a hefty security deposit, which they would forfeit if the publication carried inflammatory or abusive articles.
The racism of the British-owned press was not subject to the same restrictions. No greater indictment of the failures of British rule in India can be found than the tragic manner of its ending. Nor did Britain work to promote democratic institutions under imperial rule, as it liked to pretend.
Instead of building self-government from the village level up, the East India Company destroyed what existed. The British ran government, tax collection, and administered what passed for justice. Indians were excluded from all of these functions. Democracy, in other words, had to be prised from the reluctant grasp of the British by Indian nationalists.
It is a bit rich to oppress, torture, imprison, enslave, deport and proscribe a people for years, and then take credit for the fact that they are democratic at the end of it. A corollary of the argument that Britain gave India political unity and democracy is that it established the rule of law in the country. This was, in many ways, central to the British self-conception of imperial purpose; Kipling, that flatulent voice of Victorian imperialism, would wax eloquent on the noble duty to bring law to those without it.
But British law had to be imposed upon an older and more complex civilisation with its own legal culture, and the British used coercion and cruelty to get their way. And in the colonial era, the rule of law was not exactly impartial. In the entire two centuries of British rule, only three cases can be found of Englishmen executed for murdering Indians, while the murders of thousands more at British hands went unpunished.
Punch wrote an entire ode to The Stout British Boot as the favoured instrument of keeping the natives in order. Political dissidence was legally repressed through various acts, including a sedition law far more rigorous than its British equivalent.
The penal code contained 49 articles on crimes relating to dissent against the state and only 11 on crimes involving death. Of course the British did give India the English language, the benefits of which persist to this day.
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