An Era of Darkness by Shashi Tharoor , published in 2016 by Aleph Book company , is an eye-opener for
all those who think that the British Empire in India was a mixture of good and
the bad. Shashi Tharoor has done remarkable research and very convincingly tells us in 333
pages that nearly two centuries of British rule in India was out and out a period of oppression and
loot of India .
Tharoor rolls out
relevant data to prove the above .When East India Company took control of India , India’s share of the
world GDP was 23 per cent. When the British left India in 1947, it wasjust
above 3 per cent. The British left India
as a society with 16 per cent literacy , a life expectancy
of 27, practically no domestic industry
and over 90 per cent living below what
today we would call below poverty line. They systematically destroyed Indian textile ,
steel-making and shipping industry .They
substituted Indian textiles by British
ones manufactured in England. This deindustrialization of India was a
deliberate British policy and not an accident.
In 1922,
64 per cent of the total revenue of the
Government of India was devoted to
paying for British Indian troops dispatched abroad. As many as 74,187 Indian
soldiers died during world war one.
The
racialism and exploitative attitude of the British rulers was reflected time and again in unforgivable
massacre of Indians in Jallianwala Bagh in 1919, in the writings of Rudyard
Kipling and in the statements of
Curchill. Churchill suggested in 1942 that Mahatma Gandhi should be “bound hand
and foot at the gates of Delhi, and let
the viceroy sit on the back of a giant elephant
and trample(the Mahatma) into the dirt”. Rudyard Kipling hailed General
Dyer as “The Man Who Saved India”. And Macaulay said:”A single shelf of a good
European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia”.
The British policy of divide and rule reached
its culmination in the horrors of Partition
that eventually accompanied the
collapse of British authority in
1947.Over a million people died and about 17 million were displaced during
Partition.
Tharoor says that there were only three
benefits to India due to the British
rule:
1. English Language.
2. Tea.
3. Cricket.
An Era of Darkness is
an outstanding book on the history of
British Empire in India. Every
Indian , and every student of India and the
UK, must read this book. Shashi Tharoor has an excellent control over English language . I
strongly recommend this book
.
