An Era of Darkness (The British Empire in India) by Shashi Tharoor

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  .