6

THE REMAINING CASE FOR EMPIRE

What, then, remains of the case for the British empire in India?

Alex von Tunzelmann’s clever start to her book Indian Summer made my point most tellingly:

In the beginning, there were two nations. One was a vast, mighty and magnificent empire, brilliantly organized and culturally unified, which dominated a massive swath of the earth. The other was an undeveloped, semi-feudal realm, riven by religious factionalism and barely able to feed its illiterate, diseased and stinking masses. The first nation was India. The second was England.

The historian Andrew Roberts rather breathtakingly claimed, given this background, that British rule ‘led to the modernisation, development, protection, agrarian advance, linguistic unification and ultimately the democratisation of the sub-continent.’ We have dealt with the suggestion that it is to Britain that India owes its political unity and democracy; we have shown the severe limitations in the British application of rule of law in the country; we have laid bare the economic exploitation of India and the despoliation of its lands which give the lie to Roberts’s claims of ‘modernisation, development [and] agrarian advance’; and we have dispensed with the notion that there was something benign and enlightened about British despotism in India.

But the idea that such modernization could not have taken place without British imperial rule is particularly galling. Why would India, which throughout its history had created some of the greatest (and most modern for their time) civilizations the world has ever known, not have acquired all the trappings of developed or advanced nations today, had it been left to itself to do so? As I have pointed out earlier in the book, the story of India, at different phases of its several-thousand-year-old civilizational history, is replete with great educational institutions, magnificent cities ahead of any conurbations of their time anywhere in the world, pioneering inventions, world-class manufacturing and industry, a high overall standard of living, economic policies that imparted prosperity, and abundant prosperity—in short, all the markers of successful ‘modernity’ today—and there is no earthly reason why this could not again have been the case, if it had had the resources to do so which were instead drained away by the British. An Englishman writing for European social democratic readers in 1907 put it clearly: ‘Wherever they are allowed a free outlet they [the Indians] display the highest faculties; and it is absurd to contend that great States which managed their own business capably for thousands of years, which outlived and recovered from invasions and disasters that might have crushed less vigorous countries, would be unable to control their own affairs successfully if a handful of unsympathetic foreigners were withdrawn, or driven out, from their midst.’

The clinching proof of this argument, after all, lies in the fact that despite having had to climb out of the deep socio-economic trough that colonialism had plunged the country into, and despite having made its own mistakes in the years after Independence, India has become the world’s third-largest economy in less than seven decades since the British left, and is currently its fastest-growing one; it has also piled up an impressive list of ‘modern’ distinctions including that of being the first country in the world to have successfully sent a spacecraft into Mars orbit at the first attempt (a feat even the US could not accomplish and one which China and Japan have failed trying to do). How much better would India have done if it hadn’t had the succubus that was the British empire fastened to it for twenty decades?

Apologists for Empire point to a number of other benefits they say the British left India with: the railways, above all; the English language; the education system and even organized sport, especially cricket, the one sport at which, in recent years, Indians have twice been world champions. Let us examine these in turn.

The Great Indian Railway Bizarre

The construction of the Indian railways is often pointed to by apologists for Empire as one of the ways in which British colonialism benefited the subcontinent, ignoring the obvious fact that many countries also built railways without having to go to the trouble and expense of being colonized to do so. But the facts are even more damning.

The railways were first conceived of by the East India Company, like everything else in that firm’s calculations, for its own benefit. Governor-General Lord Hardinge argued in 1843 that the railways would be beneficial ‘to the commerce, government and military control of the country’. Ten years later, his successor Lord Dalhousie underscored ‘the important role that India could play as a market for British manufacturers and as a supplier of agricultural raw materials’. Indeed, the vast interior of India could be opened up as a market only by the railways, labourers could be transported to and from where they were needed by the new enterprises, and its fields and mines could be tapped to send material to feed the ‘satanic mills’ of England.

In its very conception and construction, the Indian railway system was a big colonial scam. British shareholders made absurd amounts of money by investing in the railways, where the government guaranteed returns on capital of 5  per  cent net per year, unavailable in any other safe investment. That was an extravagantly high rate of return those days, possible only because the government made up the shortfall from its revenues, payments that of course came from Indian, and not British, taxes. These excessive guarantees removed any incentive for the private companies constructing the railways to economize—the higher their capital expenditure, the higher would be their guaranteed return at a high and secure rate of interest. As a result each mile of Indian railway construction in the 1850s and 1860s cost an average of £18,000, as against the dollar equivalent of £2,000 at the same time in the United States. In the event, it was twenty years or more before the first lines earned more than 5  per  cent of their capital outlay, but even after the government had taken over railway construction in the 1880s, thanks to the rapacity of private British firms contracted for the task, a mile of Indian railway cost more than double the same distance in the equally difficult and less populated terrain of Canada and Australia.

It was a splendid racket for everyone, apart from the Indian taxpayer. In terms of a secure return, Indian railway shares offered twice as much as the British government’s own stock. Guaranteed Indian railway shares absorbed up to a fifth of British portfolio investment in the twenty years to 1870—the first line opened in 1853—but only 1  per  cent of it originated in India. Britons made the money, controlled the technology and supplied all the equipment, which meant once again that the profits were repatriated. It was a scheme described at the time as ‘private enterprise at public risk’. All the losses were borne by the Indian people, all the gains pocketed by the British trader—even as he penetrated by rail deep into the Indian economy. The steel industry in England found a much-needed outlet for its overpriced products in India, since almost everything required by the railways came from England: steel rails, engines, rail wagons, machinery and plants. Far from supporting the proposition that the British did good to India, the railways are actually evidence for the idea that Britain took much more out of its most magnificent colony than it put in.

Nor was there any significant residual benefit to the Indians. The railways were intended principally to transport extracted resources, coal, iron ore, cotton and so on, to ports for the British to ship home to use in their factories. The movement of people was incidental, except when it served colonial interests; and the third-class compartments, with their wooden benches and total absence of amenities, into which Indians were herded, attracted horrified comment even at the time. (And also questions in the toothless legislatures: there were fourteen questions on this issue in the legislative assembly every year between 1921 and 1941, and eighteen more annually in the Council of State. The concern kept mounting as conditions worsened: the yearly averages for 1937–1941 were sixteen and twenty-five respectively. Mahatma Gandhi’s first crusade on his return to India was on behalf of the third-class traveller.) Yet the third-class passengers became a source of profit for the railways, since British merchants in India ensured that freight tariffs were kept low (the lowest in the world, in fact) while third-class passengers’ fares were made the railway companies’ principal source of profit. No effort was made, in building the railway lines, to ensure that supply matched the demand for popular transport.

And, of course, racism reigned; though whites-only compartments were soon done away with on grounds of economic viability, Indians found the available affordable space grossly inadequate for their numbers. (A marvellous post-Independence cartoon captured the situation perfectly: it showed an overcrowded train, with people hanging off it, clinging to the windows, squatting perilously on the roof, and spilling out of their third-class compartments, while two Britons in sola topis sit in an empty first-class compartment saying to each other, ‘My dear chap, there’s nobody on this train!’)

As Durant pointed out, the railways were built, after all, for ‘the purposes of the British army and British trade…Their greatest revenue comes, not, as in America, from the transport of goods (for the British trader controls the rates), but from third-class passengers—the Hindus; but these passengers are herded into almost barren coaches like animals bound for the slaughter, twenty or more to one compartment…’

Nor were Indians employed in the railways. The discriminatory hiring practices of the Indian Railways meant that key industrial skills were not effectively transferred to Indian personnel, which might have proved a benefit. The prevailing view was that the railways would have to be staffed almost exclusively by Europeans to ‘protect investments’. This was especially true of signalmen, and those who operated and repaired the steam trains, but the policy was extended to the absurd level that even in the early twentieth century all the key employees, from directors of the Railway Board to ticket-collectors, were white men—whose salaries and benefits were also paid at European, not Indian, levels and largely repatriated back to England. Moreover, when the policy was relaxed and expensive European labour reduced, there was a continuing search for the most ‘British-like’ workers. Thus came the long-lasting identification of the Anglo-Indian community with railway employment, since at first it was these Eurasians from military orphanages, the product of liaisons between British ‘other ranks’ and local Indian women, who were trained to do the jobs that only Europeans had been assumed to be capable of doing previously. (In keeping with British notions of eugenics, and since the Anglo-Indians were not a very large community, ‘martial’ Sikhs and pale-skinned Parsis were then employed as well, although they were only put in charge of driving engines within station yards and employed in stations with infrequent traffic.)

British racial theories were in full flow on railway matters: it was believed that Indians did not have the ‘judgement and presence of mind’ to deal with emergencies and that they ‘seldom have character enough to enforce strict obedience’ to railway rules. When Indianization was attempted for economic reasons in the 1870s, railway officials argued that it would take three Indians to do the job of a single European. So great was the racist resistance to Indian employees that the project of training drivers was discontinued after a three-year trial, and the drivers who had been trained were once again restricted to yard work.

Here, too, the double standards of British colonial justice described previously were much in evidence, as with the 1861 collision of a mail train and a goods train between Connagar and Bally in Bengal. The European driver and guard of the goods train were both drunk and went to sleep, leaving the fireman in charge of the train while they slept. The poor man kept doing his job—stoking coal—and his train duly crashed into a mail train. When the accident was investigated, blame was placed on the absence of the Bengali stationmaster, rather than the behaviour of the comatose Europeans.

Double standards prevailed in other ways: whereas in Britain it was common practice to ensure the merit-based promotion of firemen to drivers, or of station-masters of small rural stations to large stations, this did not happen in India because these junior positions were occupied by Indians, whose promotion would be to posts otherwise occupied by Europeans. By 1900, in the regulations for pay, promotion, and suitability for jobs, or what we would today describe as the human resource management rules, employees were subdivided into ‘European, Eurasian, West Indian of Negro descent pure or mixed, Non-Indian Asiatic, or Indian’. On employment the local medical officer would certify the race and caste identity of a candidate and write it on his history sheet—thus determining his future pay, leave, allowances, and possible promotions as well as place in the railway hierarchy for the rest of his career.

The Royal Indian Engineering College at Cooper’s Hill near London, established in 1872 to produce engineers for India, allowed as candidates only those capable of passing examinations in mathematics, sciences, Latin, Greek, German, English literature and history—stipulations designed to exclude the majority of Indian candidates. These rules had the desired effect: In 1886, out of 1,015 engineers in the Public Works Department (PWD), only 86 were Indians.

Racism combined with British economic interests to undermine efficiency. The railway workshops in Jamalpur in Bengal and Ajmer in Rajputana were established in 1862 to maintain the trains, but their Indian mechanics became so adept that in 1878 they started designing and building their own locomotives. Their success increasingly alarmed the British, since the Indian locomotives were just as good, and a great deal cheaper, than the British-made ones. In 1912, therefore, the British passed an Act of Parliament, explicitly making it impossible for Indian workshops to design and manufacture locomotives. The Act prohibited Indian factories from doing the work they had successfully done for three decades; instead, they were only allowed to maintain locomotives imported from Britain and the industrialized world. Between 1854 and 1947, India imported around 14,400 locomotives from England (some 10  per  cent of all British locomotive production), and another 3,000 from Canada, the US and Germany, but made none in India after 1912. After Independence, thirty-five years later, the old technical knowledge was so completely lost to India that the Indian Railways had to go cap-in-hand to the British to guide them on setting up a locomotive factory in India again.

There was, however, a fitting postscript to this saga. The principal technology consultants for British Railways, the London-based Rendel Palmer & Tritton, today rely almost entirely on Indian technical expertise, provided to them by RITES, a subsidiary of the Indian Railways.

This is far from being a retrospective critique from the comfortable perspective of a twenty-first-century commentator. On the contrary, nineteenth-century Indians were quite conscious at the time of the abominable role of the railways in the crass exploitation of their country. The Bengali newspaper Samachar wrote on 30  April 1884 that ‘iron roads mean iron chains’ for India—foreign goods could flow more easily, it argued, killing native Indian industry and increasing Indian poverty. Nationalist voices like those of G.  V.  Joshi, G.  S.  Iyer, Gopal Krishna Gokhale and Dadabhai Naoroji were raised publicly in the 1890s, pointing out how limited were the benefits of the railways to India, how the profits all went to foreigners abroad, and how great was the burden on the Indian exchequer. The money that was being sent to England every year as interest, they pointed out unfailingly, could have been used for productive investments in Indian industry, in infrastructure work like irrigation (especially irrigation, which would help the Indian farmer, and which received only one-ninth of the government funding the railways did), or simply just spent in India to stimulate the local economy. Gokhale declared that ‘the Indian people feel that [railway] construction is undertaken principally in the interests of the English commercial and moneyed classes, and that it assists in the further exploitation of our resources’. Indians also pointed out at the time that the argument that the railways would be an instrument against famine, and improve the general economic condition of the people, was fraudulent: in fact, famines persisted despite the railways, which only facilitated the export of grain and other agricultural products, effectively removing the very food surpluses that might have served as a buffer against famine.

There were other critiques. Gandhi argued in Swaraj that the railways spread bubonic plague. The ecological impact of railway construction aroused concern even at the time. In building the Sara-Sirajganj line in the Bengal delta, massive earthworks were put in place to block waterways, in order to reduce the outlay on bridges and the effect of damp. In doing so, very large arable areas to the northwest were waterlogged, ruining their agricultural potential. During the 1918 floods, railway embankments blocked natural water channels resulting in catastrophic flooding.

Market distortions also occurred with railway development. The railways were responsible, for instance, for sharply raising the price of rice. Before the railways came, slow water-based transport spread surpluses around the districts, keeping prices in any given areas low. But railways allowed surpluses to be cleanly extracted, essentially making peasants in the rice growing areas (and participating in an informal economy) compete directly with urban Indians and exporters for rice. The same was true of the fish markets.

And there are other examples to show how the interests of Indians were never a factor in railway operations: during World War I, several Indian rail lines were dismantled and shipped out of the country to aid the Allied war effort in Mesopotamia!

On the whole, therefore, the verdict of the eminent historian Bipan Chandra stands. British motives in building railways in India, he wrote, were ‘sordid and selfish…the promotion of the interests of British merchants, manufacturers and investors…at the risk and expense of Indian revenues’; their ‘essential purpose’ being to ‘assist British enterprise in the exploitation of the natural resources of India.’ Quod erat demonstrandum.

Education and the English Language

‘Britain provided India with the necessary tools for independence,’ wrote a British blogger on an Indian youth website in response to my Oxford speech. ‘The idea of a modern democracy, of a self-governed country with a constitution and the guarantee of civil rights, was brought to India by Indians educated abroad, with the most famous example being barrister Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, whose contribution to independence is, well, not insignificant. Not to forget the English language, without which pan-Indian protest and, later, communication and culture, is simply unimaginable.’

This case is often made by well-meaning individuals, and perhaps it should not be necessary to point out that Mahatma Gandhi’s ideas of democracy and civil rights were developed in resistance to British rule, not in support of it. Still, the gift of the English language cannot be denied—I am, after all, using it as I write—and nor can the education system, of which again I am a beneficiary. So let us look at both closely.

The British left India with a literacy rate of 16  per  cent, and a female literacy rate of 8  per  cent—only one of every twelve Indian women could read and write in 1947. This is not exactly a stellar record, but educating the masses was not a British priority. As Will Durant points out, ‘When the British came, there was, throughout India, a system of communal schools, managed by the village communities. The agents of the East India Company destroyed these village communities, and took no steps to replace the schools; even today [1930]… they stand at only 66  per  cent of their number a hundred years ago. There are now in India 730,000 villages, and only 162,015 primary schools. Only 7  per  cent of the boys and 1  per  cent of the girls receive schooling, i.e. 4  per  cent of the whole. Such schools as the Government has established are not free, but exact a tuition fee which…looms large to a family always hovering on the edge of starvation.’

Britain’s education policy, in other words, had very little to commend itself. It supplanted and undermined an extensive Indian tradition: traditional methods of guru-shishya parampara (in which students lived with their teachers and imbibed an entire way of thinking) had thrived in India, as did the many monasteries which went on to become important centres of education, receiving students from distant lands, notably as far from our shores as China and Turkey. The Pala period [between the eighth and the twelfth century CE], in particular, saw several monasteries emerge in what is now modern Bengal and Bihar, five of which—Vikramashila, Nalanda, Somapura Mahavihara, Odantapuri, and Jaggadala—were premier educational institutions which created a coordinated network amongst themselves under Indian rulers.

Nalanda University, which enjoyed international renown when Oxford and Cambridge were not even gleams in their founders’ eyes, employed 2,000 teachers and housed 10,000 students in a remarkable campus that featured a library nine storeys tall. It is said that monks would hand-copy documents and books which would then become part of private collections of individual scholars. The university opened its doors to students from countries ranging from Korea, Japan, China, Tibet, and Indonesia in the east to Persia and Turkey in the west, studying subjects which included the fine arts, medicine, mathematics, astronomy, politics and the art of war. Amongst them were several famous Chinese scholars who studied and taught at Nalanda University in the seventh century. Hsuan Tsang (Xuanzang from the Tang dynasty) studied in the university and then taught there for five years, while leaving detailed accounts of his time in Nalanda.

In the period of Muslim rule, in addition to madrasas, schools of religious instruction essentially open to Muslims, there were also maktabs (schools), which imparted Persian-Islamic education to Indian students, usually in Urdu (though Arabic and/or Persian were also taught). Before the British took over, the court language of the Mughals was Persian and the Muslim section of the population used Urdu—a mixture of Persian, Arabic and Hindi. Many Hindus in northern India also studied in Urdu or Persian. (In the south, various regional languages prevailed.) A maktab was an elementary (and secondary for some) educational institution before the 1850s that was used for secular education: the subjects taught included public administration, trade and intellectual and cultural pursuits, such as poetry. Maktabs were open to members of the elite class and included both Hindus and Muslims (in some places, many more of the former than the latter). Many maktabs closed in the mid-nineteenth century as their elite students gravitated to colonial schools in the hope of greater opportunities for advancement after their schooling.

As late as the late eighteenth/early nineteenth century, Raja Rammohan Roy, who would be hailed by the British as a progressive and modern-minded reformer, started his formal education in a village school or pathshala, where he learned Bengali, some Sanskrit and Persian; later, at age nine, he studied Persian and Arabic in a madrasa in Patna, and two years later went to Benares (Kashi) to learn Sanskrit and Hindu especially the scriptures, Vedas and Upanishads. Only then did he learn English and adapt to the British system of education in India, at which he excelled. But this kind of extensive grounding in traditional Indian learning, followed by English education, was already becoming quite rare.

In addition to monasteries and formal establishments of learning, informal institutions and methods of education also flourished in India. Oral education has always enjoyed an honoured place in Indian culture. Gandhi memorably advocated oral education in place of the prevailing emphasis on textbooks: ‘Of textbooks…’ he said, ‘I never felt the want. The true textbook for the pupil is his teacher.’ And so, in the little ashram that he created in South Africa, named Tolstoy Farm, he adopted oral forms of communicating his ideas, disregarding the need for formal written work. Gandhi found inspiration in the ways that knowledge of the Vedas and other foundational Hindu texts like the Ramayana and Mahabharata were passed orally from one generation to another. The oral tradition, sustained through the generations, had allowed this ancient knowledge to live.

But while such traditions give Indian education its moorings in our culture, there is no escaping the stark fact that modern India lost much of it under British rule, achieved independence with only 16  per  cent literacy, and is still struggling to educate the broad mass of its population to seize the opportunities afforded by the globalized world of the twenty-first century. At least some of the blame for this surely lies in the system of education implemented by the British. The eminent Major General Sir Thomas Munro, hero of the Mysore and Maratha wars, no less, pointed out that ‘in pursuing a system, the tendency of which is to lower the character of the whole people, we profess to be extremely anxious to improve that character by education’. The use of the word ‘profess’ pointed to the eminent soldier’s own doubts about the sincerity of the Company’s intentions.

Of course the British did give India the English language, the benefits of which persist to this day. Or did they? The English language was not a deliberate gift to India, but again an instrument of colonialism, imparted to Indians only to facilitate the tasks of the English. In his notorious 1835 Minute on Education, Lord Macaulay articulated the classic reason for teaching English, but only to a small minority of Indians: ‘We must do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indians in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals and in intellect.’ The language was taught to a few to serve as intermediaries between the rulers and the ruled. That Indians seized the English language and turned it into an instrument for our own liberation—using it to express nationalist sentiments against the British, as R.  C.  Dutt, Dinshaw Wacha and Dadabhai Naoroji did in the late nineteenth century and Jawaharlal Nehru in the twentieth—was to their credit, not by British design.

The East India Company’s interest in Indian education began after the publication of a report by the company evangelist, Charles Grant, in 1792, which ‘believed that the introduction of Western education and Christianity would transform a morally decadent society’. After the setting up of missionary schools was legitimized in the revised Charter Act of 1813, the Company’s Court of Directors, in a dispatch to the Bengal government offering guidance on the implementation of the act, also noted that English would ‘improve the communication between Europeans and natives’ and ‘produce those reciprocal feelings of regard and respect which are essential to the permanent interests of the British empire in India’. In other words, this was not only about Christian missionary zeal; it was also to be seen from the point of view of the Company’s interests. The preferences of the natives were to be taken into account only ‘whenever it can be done with safety to our dominions’.

While the evangelicals saw English education as a means of supplanting the pernicious influences of both ‘Hindoo and Mohemedan learning’, the philosopher James Mill and his followers urged the promotion of Western science and learning in India from a utilitarian point of view. However, Mill was not of the opinion that English was the language to do it in; rather, he preferred that texts be translated to the vernacular. In this he could also find support in the Charter of 1813, which also provided for the ‘revival and improvement of literature, and the encouragement of the learned natives of India’.

These seemingly contradictory objectives could not be reconciled, however, and it was rapidly apparent to those entrusted with Indian affairs that it had to be one or the other. A debate ensued between the two schools of thought, but there seemed to be little doubt where the Company’s bias lay. Teaching Sanskrit or Arabic to Indians was not going to be of much practical use to the business of the Company, but Indians who could read and write English, however badly they spoke it, could indeed be of value to the British.

In this debate between ‘Orientalists’ and ‘Anglicists’, the Anglicists prevailed—thanks, it is commonly believed, to the championing of their cause by Lord Macaulay, who had been appointed chair of the Committee on Public Instruction. Some argue that Macaulay’s contribution to the system of education in India is overstated, and that the forces he represented would probably have been successful anyway. Governor-General William Bentinck was an open supporter of the Anglicist cause and had begun to implement a policy of English education through Company-ruled India, and Macaulay’s task, they suggest, was merely to justify the prevalent policy rather than concoct a new one. But there is no doubt that his articulation of the Anglicist cause remains the clearest and most far-reaching statement of colonial purpose in the field of education, the most notorious in India for its flagrantly contemptuous dismissal of Oriental learning, and the most liable to quotation and misquotation by critics of the entire enterprise. (To this day English-speaking Indians are denounced as ‘Macaulayputras’, or ‘sons of Macaulay’, by their non-Anglophile critics—usually, of course, in English.)

In his Minute on Education12 Macaulay took an uncompromisingly, and many would say arrogantly, ethnocentric stand on the issue. His view, which prevailed with the reformist governor-general, was that ‘the intellectual improvement of those classes of the people who have the means of pursuing higher studies can at present be affected only by means of some language not vernacular amongst them’. He did not allow his ignorance of the East to undermine his self-confidence. ‘A single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia’, he notoriously declared, while admitting he had not read a single work from the literatures he was dismissing. ‘We have to educate a people who cannot at present be educated by means of their mother-tongue. We must teach them some foreign language. The claims of our own language it is hardly necessary to recapitulate. It stands pre-eminent even among the languages of the West. In India, English is the language spoken by the ruling class. It is spoken by the higher class of natives at the seats of Government…of all foreign tongues, the English tongue is that which would be the most useful to our native subjects… What the Greek and Latin were to the contemporaries of More and Ascham, our tongue is to the people of India… The languages of western Europe civilised Russia. I cannot doubt that they will do for the Hindoo what they have done for the Tartar…’

[12 Dubbed by an Indian wag, with a penchant for alliteration, as ‘Macaulay’s Moronic Minute’.]

What about the practical legal aspects of governing a foreign population, many following their own customs and laws?

‘The fact that the Hindoo law is to be learned chiefly from Sanscrit books, and the Mahometan law from Arabic books, has been much insisted on, but seems not to bear at all on the question. We are commanded by Parliament to ascertain and digest the laws of India. The assistance of a Law Commission has been given to us for that purpose. As soon as the [new, British-drafted legal] Code is promulgated, the Shasters and the Hedaya will be useless to a moonsiff or a Sudder Ameen. I hope and trust that, before the boys who are now entering at the Mudrassa and the Sanscrit College have completed their studies, this great work will be finished. It would be manifestly absurd to educate the rising generation with a view to a state of things which we mean to alter before they reach manhood.’

(There is irony in this justification of the dismantling of traditional education: the penal code Macaulay drafted in the 1830s would only be enacted by the British a generation later, in 1861.)

To their credit, the Anglicists did not altogether dismiss the vernacular languages. They sought that European scientific and literary knowledge should percolate down to the masses through an intermediary élite class of English-speaking Indians. Macaulay had pointed out that ‘it is impossible for us, with our limited means, to attempt to educate the body of the people’. To this élite, interpretative class, therefore, ‘we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population.’ Another Anglicist ‘most fully admitted that the great body of the people must be enlightened through the medium of their own languages, and that to enrich and improve these, so as to render them the efficient depositories of all thoughts and knowledge, is an object of the first importance’. Mass English education was never British policy, therefore, nor was it necessary to dispense ‘European’ scientific knowledge to Indians; the educated Indians would do so in their own languages.

This did happen, to some extent. The Delhi College was founded in 1825 partly with such an object in view: a Vernacular Translation Society was formed there in the 1840s, which attempted to translate English textbooks on history, law, science and medicine into Urdu, with the help of Western-educated Indians and other college officials. These were some of the earliest textbooks on ‘modern’ subjects that were written to propagate an updated Western curriculum, and served as vernacular education textbooks in the northwestern provinces and Punjab in the 1840s and 1850s. It is difficult to argue, however, that such education acquired as much reach or influence as English education in India, which to this day is considered the passport to success and influence in Indian society. Most Indians educated in English used that language for their own career self-advancement, not to serve as academic translators or instructors for the masses; and vernacular teaching remained an orphaned profession, reserved for those unfortunates whose own English was not good enough for professions that required the language of the colonials. The Anglicists’ purpose was not served, but one wonders whether, in these circumstances, it ever could have been.

Under the British, the universities remained largely examination-conducting bodies, while actual higher education was carried out in affiliated colleges, which offered a two-year BA course (following a year of intermediate studies after high school). The colleges, like the British schools in India, heavily emphasized rote learning, the regurgitation of which was what the examinations tested. Failing the exams was so common that many Indians proudly sported ‘BA (F)’ after the names as a credential, to indicate that they had got that far (the ‘F’ stood for ‘failed’). Dropout rates were always very high, and successfully completing a bachelor’s degree was widely hailed as a rare and considerable achievement.

Still, the British higher education system did little to promote analytic capacity or creative thinking and certainly no independence of mind. It produced a group of graduates with a better-than-basic knowledge of English, inadequate in ninety  per  cent of the cases to hold one’s own with an Englishman, but adequate to get a clerical position in the lower rungs of government service or a teaching position in a government school. (The other ten  per  cent shone despite the limitations of the system and either excelled in various private capacities or went abroad to England for higher education.) Worse, though, it left the individual graduate—every one of them—Westernized enough to be alienated from his own Indian cultural roots. Indians educated under this system, observed a senior civil servant in 1913, ‘become a sort of hybrid. This is due to their English masters, who are obsessed with the idea that the only way to “educate” anyone is to turn him into a plaster Englishman.’

The problem persisted throughout British rule. An Indian nationalist group declared, in a book published in London in 1915:

All Indian aspirations and development of strong character have been suppressed. The Indian mind has been made barren of any originality, and deliberately kept in ignorance… The people are kept under an illusion in order to make them more amenable to British control. The people’s character is deliberately debased, their mind is denationalized and perpetually kept in ignorance and fed with stories of England’s greatness and ‘mission’ in the world…

As Pankaj Mishra has observed:

European subordination of Asia was not merely economic and political and military. It was also intellectual and moral and spiritual: a completely different kind of conquest than had been witnessed before, which left its victims resentful but also envious of their conquerors and, ultimately, eager to be initiated into the mysteries of their seemingly near-magical power.

An intriguing example of the successful colonization of the Indian mind is that of the notorious Anglophile Nirad C.  Chaudhuri, the Bengali intellectual and author of the bestselling Autobiography of an Unknown Indian (1951), with its cringe-worthy dedication to the British Empire in India:

To the memory of the British Empire in India,

Which conferred subjecthood on us,

but withheld citizenship.

To which yet every one of us threw out the challenge:

‘Civis Britannicus sum’

Because all that was good and living within us

was made, shaped and quickened

by the same British rule.

This unedifying spectacle of a brown man with his nose up the colonial fundament made Chaudhuri a poster child for scholarly studies of how Empire creates ‘native informants’, alienated from and even abhorring their own cultures and societies. Chaudhuri’s admiration for the British empire extended to his appreciation of it for restraining Indians from defecating in public—an activity which assuredly the British did not, in fact, succeed in controlling, let alone stopping, except in the public areas of major towns. This suggests a curious correlation between dislike for one’s own body and a yearning for foreign rule: ‘these two processes of self-othering’, the scholar Ian Almond observes, ‘work in tandem to replicate a crucial distance between colonized and colonizer, Babu and native, mind and body’. One of the consequences of a colonial education was Chaudhuri’s xenolatry, rooted in the conviction that he was ‘a displaced European/Aryan suffering the present-day and (millennia-old) consequences of an ancestor’s unwise decision to wander in the wrong direction and settle in an unsuitable climate’. Chaudhuri, at the age of seventy-three, upped sticks and moved to Oxford, there to live out his centenarian life. In his mind, of course, he had always lived there.

Chaudhuri wore his erudition anything but lightly, quoting Greek and Latin and dropping classical allusions in a style that went out with the sola topi. (No doubt woggishness loses something in translation.) It was typical that his take-no-prisoners assault on all the citadels of Indian culture and civilization was titled The Continent of Circe: he had to turn to Western mythology even for his principal metaphor. Though Chaudhuri dismissed most British histories of India as little more than ‘imperialistic bragging’, he remained seduced by the Raj, seeing even in Clive’s rapacity and theft the ‘counterbalancing grandeur’ of the grand imperialist project. The scholar David Lelyveld wrote in an indulgent review that ‘Nirad Chaudhuri is a fiction created by the Indian writer of the same name—a bizarre, outrageous and magical transformation of that stock character of imperialist literature, the Bengali babu’. But while the British in India laughed at the typical babu for his half-successful attempts to emulate his colonial masters, Nirad babu sought to demonstrate to post-imperial Britain that he was impossible to laugh at. That there might be something faintly comical about the sight of this wizened figure, in his immaculate Bengali dhoti, strutting about Oxford lamenting the decline of British civilization, does not appear to have occurred to him.

But there was still one fatal fly in the Anglophile’s ointment. Even Nirad Chaudhuri had to admit that British racism, snobbery and exclusiveness (‘all the squalid history of Indo-British personal relations’) had a great deal to do with the downfall of the Empire. He wrote bitterly of ‘intolerable humiliation’ and ‘national and personal degradation’ from British behaviour towards Indians. In repeated personal instances of racism, Ian Almond points out, ‘the comprador intellectual discovers the precise limits of his contract’—the supposed benevolence of the Empire which he celebrates in his writings encountering the more prosaic reality of the British baton and the white man’s sneer.

Textual Harassment

In 1859–60, education in Bengal received 1,032,021 rupees from the British government, which was about the same amount spent on rebuilding army barracks that year. The funding of education continued to be a low priority for the British throughout their rule. Durant noted in 1930 that the British government in India preferred to devote the limited resources it allocated to education to ‘universities where the language used was English, the history, literature, customs and morals taught were English, and young [Indians]… found that they had merely let themselves in for a ruthless process that aimed to de-nationalize and de-Indianize them, and turn them into imitative Englishmen’. This was done with minimal resources: Durant observed that the total expenditure for education in India (in 1930) was less than half that in New York state alone. Between 1882 and 1897, a fifteen-year period marked by a significant expansion of public education worldwide, the appropriation for the army in India increased by twenty-one-and-a-half times the increase for education. ‘The responsibility of the British for India’s illiteracy,’ Durant concluded, ‘seems to be beyond question.’

Still, there was one unintended benefit of the British approach to Indian education. Since educating Indians was not a major British priority, it did not attract eminent Britons, and from early in the twentieth century, academia became the one available avenue for Indian advancement. With very few exceptions, the vice-chancellors of the main public universities after the 1890s were Indians, though inevitably most were staunch defenders of British imperial rule.

While English instruction acquired a position of dominance in British India, albeit for a small if well-placed elite, a British perspective also infused the study of other subjects taught to Indians through English—notably history. The British saw precolonial Mughal history as consisting of a linear narration of events devoid of context or analysis; as for pre-Mughal texts, John Stuart Mill dismissed them as ‘mythological histories…where fable stands in the face of facts’. To replace these versions, the British reconstructed ‘factual’ accounts of Indian historiography, adding more contextual analysis in a structured ‘European’ style—but with the teleological purpose of serving to legitimize British rule in India. As we have seen, English histories and theoretical constructs of India not only promoted divide et impera by inventing the religious ‘periodization’ of the Indian past, but portrayed a nation waiting for the civilizing advent of British rule. By arguing that history texts should ‘rely upon facts and serve a secular curriculum’, they also moved away from the teaching of religious and mythological texts, including India’s timeless epics, the Mahabharata and Ramayana, which at the very least could have occupied the place in Indian schoolrooms that the Iliad and Odyssey did in British ones. Independent India carried on this tradition of secular neglect of the classics, for which it is now reproached by a new, Hindu-chauvinist government that accuses the British and their Indian Macaulayputras of promoting the intellectual and cultural deracination of Indian children.

If the teaching of history served an evident purpose, literature served the same ends in a more tangential way. Professor Gauri Vishwanathan has done pioneering work on the role of the study of English literature in colonial India as a means of socializing and co-opting Indian elites during the early nineteenth century. Indeed, she argues that the very idea of English literature as a subject of study was first devised by the British in India to advance their colonial interests. It was not only that the English felt their literature would be a way of striking awe and respect for British civilization into the minds and hearts of the colonized Indians; it was also that the British colonists considered many of the great works of Indian literature to be ‘marked with the greatest immorality and impurity’—and that included Kalidas’s Shakuntala, described by Horace Wilson, the major nineteenth-century Sanskrit scholar, as the jewel of Indian literature, but disapproved of as a suitable text for study in Indian schools and colleges in British India.

In this, the British educationists were only echoing the biases of Macaulay and his ilk, who made no bones about their convictions regarding the superiority of English literature. Macaulay had, after all, argued in his Minute that ‘the literature now extant in [English] is of greater value than all the literature which three hundred years ago was extant in all the languages of the world together… The literature of England is now more valuable than that of classical antiquity.’ Charles Trevelyan in his 1838 book On the Education of the People of India admitted that the arguments made for propagating English literature through the English language were not based on any scientific notion but on the simple Macaulayan prejudice that European knowledge was axiomatically ‘superior’ to oriental knowledge. Nonetheless, it worked, since Indians socialized through the study of English literature were bound to be more admiringly Anglophone and therefore more willing to be complicit in British dominance.

The study of history was not only Anglo-centric, it was deliberately designed to impress upon the student the superiority of all things British, and the privilege of being the subject of a vast Empire, whose red stain spread across a map of the world on which the sun never set. (The sun never set on the British empire, an Indian nationalist later sardonically commented, because even God couldn’t trust the Englishman in the dark.)

The study of English literature served a similar purpose. Amongst the required texts was Arthur Stanley’s collection of English patriotic poetry, with an introduction by the Lord Bishop of Calcutta extolling the virtue of verse (‘for an Empire lives not by bread alone’, he intones sagely), and commencing with Tennyson’s famous lines ‘The song that nerves a nation’s heart / Is itself a deed.’ The poems are all, of course, intended to exalt the greater glory of the British empire. The poet G.  Flavell Hayward wrote in praise of ‘Glory or death, for true hearts and brave / Honour in life, or rest in a grave.’ The spirit of English ‘fair play’ was instilled in Newbolt’s ‘Play up! Play up! And play the game’ and Kipling’s odes to the White Man’s Burden no doubt made the heathen feel suitably grateful for the stamp of the colonial jackboot. (‘East is East and West is West / And never the twain shall meet/’, I wrote bitterly after discovering the poem in college, ‘Except of course when you lie crushed / Under the Briton’s feet!’)

In those pre-televisual days, popular fiction, too, helped the anxious English-educated reader imbibe the virtues of colonialism. Those redoubtable bestsellers by G.  A.  Henty, H.  Rider Haggard, and Kipling himself told tales of imperial derring-do in which the intrepid Englishman always triumphed over the dark, untrustworthy savages. Kipling’s notorious verse told the English (and the Americans who were conquering the Philippines) to ‘Take up the White Man’s Burden, Send forth the best ye breed / Go bind your sons to exile, to serve your captives’ need’, despite the ingratitude of the heathens they were ruling; the White Man had to bear his Burden despite ‘his old reward: / the blame of those ye better, / The hate of those ye guard’. And he was to do this, in lines reeking of hypocritical paternalism, for the needs of resentful ‘sullen peoples, Half-devil [sic] and half-child’. (A brilliant contemporary riposte, in verse, ‘The Brown Man’s Burden’, came from the Liberal MP and theatre impresario Henry Labouchère, which deserves to be better known. I have therefore reproduced it in extenso later in this chapter.)

The inclusion of an Indian character in the hugely popular children’s stories featuring Billy Bunter, a staple of boys’ pulp-magazine fiction in the first quarter of the twentieth century, creatively sought to inveigle the colonials into a narrative of complicity. The boy was, of course, an aristocrat, improbably named Hurree Jamset Ram Singh, his royal provenance compounded (like his illustrious compatriot Ranji) by his talent at cricket. Still, his English classmates knew him as ‘Inky’, and the illustrations always showed him several shades darker than them; and he was usually relegated to the margins of the Bunter stories, whose real heroes remained the English boys.

Salman Rushdie has written of the creation of a ‘false Orient of cruel-lipped princes and dusky slim-hipped maidens, of ungodliness, fire and the sword’, endorsing Edward Said’s conclusion in his path-breaking Orientalism, ‘that the purpose of such false portraits was to provide moral, cultural and artistic justification for imperialism and for its underpinning ideology, that of the racial superiority of the Caucasian over the Asiatic’. To Rushdie, such portrayals did not belong only to the imperial past; ‘the rise of Raj revisionism, exemplified by the huge success of these fictions, is the artistic counterpart to the rise of conservative ideologies in modern Britain’.

Despite the efforts of the Orientalists and their glamorous exoticizing of British imperalism, however, there was one problem: once an Indian was taught to read, study and understand, it was impossible to restrict where his mind might take him. William Howitt presciently observed in 1839 that ‘it is impossible to make the English language the vernacular tongue, without at the same time producing the most astonishing moral revolution which ever yet was witnessed on the earth. English ideas, English tastes, English literature and religion, must follow as a matter of course…’ And, of course, though he did not mention it, English political ideas too. By 1908, the notorious Empire apologist J.  D.  Rees was complaining that ‘in our schools pupils imbibe sedition with their daily lessons: they are fed with Rousseau, Macaulay, and the works of philosophers, which even in Oxford tend to pervert the minds of students to socialistic and impractical dreams, and in India work with far greater force upon the naturally metaphysical minds of youths, generally quick to learn by rote, for the most part penniless, and thus rendered incapable of earning their living, except by taking service of a clerical character under rulers, whom they denounce as oppressors unless they receive a salary at their hands. The malcontents created by this system have neither respect for, nor fear of, the Indian Government. Nor is this surprising, for the literature upon which they are brought up in our schools is fulfilled with destructive criticism of any system of Government founded upon authority…’ Rees urged the British government in India to ‘follow Lord Curzon’s courageous lead in refusing to subsidise the manufacture of half-baked Bachelors of Arts and full-fledged agitators. It is too late, I suppose, to go back upon the decision in favour of the Anglicists, but is there any particular reason why Herbert Spencer, for instance, should be given in the Indian system so prominent a place? Is there any need to fill Indian students with philosophy, the study of which, even in Oxford, induces a regrettable tendency towards vain speculative dreams and socialistic sophistries?’

By the late nineteenth century, English education had indeed created a class of Anglophone Indians well-versed in the literature, philosophy and political ideas of the British; but, as we have seen, when they began to clamour for rights, and access to positions that they believed their education had qualified them for, they met with stubborn resistance.

There were always, of course, those who argued that the real obstacle was Indian attitudes, especially those relating to caste, since the prospect of students from various castes mingling in classrooms filled Indian traditionalists with horror. On this argument—that castes would not mingle in schools—Durant points out that they already did mingle indiscriminately ‘in railway coaches, tramcars and factories’ and that ‘the best way to conquer caste would have been through schools’. But the British chose to shelter behind imagined objections from the traditionalists, because it suited them not to have to spend more on education.

Still, there were memorable exceptions. The pioneering Dalit reformer Jyotiba Phule, born in a ‘lower’ caste of gardeners and florists, became an inspiring example of how a student could study in an English school with Brahmin and other high-caste friends, energize and invigorate his intellect with literature from around the world, and build on that to transform his society. Mahatma Phule, as many called him, not only became a pioneer of Dalit empowerment and women’s education but also a voice for global movements and ideas of equality. He dedicated his book Gulamgiri (‘Slavery’, 1873) to the ‘good people of the United States’ for having abolished slavery. A few decades later, Dr  B.  R.  Ambedkar followed in his footsteps, though after an Indian schooling he did all his higher education abroad, in both Britain and America.

It has been argued that the British were not selective, and at least theoretically favoured the education of all castes and not just the upper castes, whereas India’s own leaders were divided on whether modern education should be extended to all. A bill for universal compulsory primary education was indeed tabled by the ‘moderate’ Congress leader Gopal Krishna Gokhale in the legislative council of the governor-general in 1911 and another by Vithalbhai Patel in the same body in 1916, but both were defeated by the votes of the British and government-appointed members. What is less known, however, is that the bills were also opposed by the likes of Mahatma Gandhi and Surendra Nath Banerjea, staunch nationalists both. Gandhiji wrote in Hind Swaraj: ‘The ordinary meaning of education is knowledge of letters. To teach boys reading, writing and arithmetic is called primary education. A peasant earns his bread honestly. He has ordinary knowledge of the world. But he cannot write his own name. What do you propose to do by giving him a knowledge of letters? Will you add an inch to his happiness? It is not necessary to make this education compulsory. Our ancient school system is enough. We consider your modern school to be useless’.

Fortunately, on this issue, Gandhiji’s somewhat eccentric views did not prevail. But perhaps his real objection was not to literacy and education as such, but to British education in particular. In 1937, when Congress ministries were elected in eight provinces and for the first time enjoyed control over education, Gandhi put forward a plan called the Wardha Scheme for Education, which envisaged seven years of basic education for rural children, including vocational training in village handicrafts. It was never fully implemented, but it would certainly have imparted the basics, including literacy in the mother tongue, mathematics, science, history, and physical culture and hygiene, in addition to crafts. It is difficult to argue against the proposition that the Wardha scheme would have been a vast improvement on what little colonial education was available in rural India.

One of the consequences of a colonial education was, as we have seen with Nirad Chaudhuri, the colonization of the minds of Indians by the languages, models and intellectual systems brought into our lives by the West. In many ways Indians judged their societies according to Western intellectual or aesthetic standards (Ashis Nandy has written pointedly of how Third Worlders construct a ‘non-West which is itself a construction of the West’). Colonialism misappropriated and reshaped the ways in which a subject people saw its history and even its cultural self-definition. Nationalists sought, in reaction, to contribute towards, and to help articulate and give expression to, the cultural identity of their society, but they did so coloured, inevitably, by the influence of their own colonial education. It was only after India had emerged into Independence, awaking from the incubus of colonialism, that Indians realized how much imperial rule had also, in many ways, fractured and distorted their cultural self-perceptions. This is changing gradually over the decades, as Indians understand that development will not occur without a reassertion of identity: that this is who they are, this is what they are proud of, this is what they want to be. The task of the Indian nationalist is to find new ways (and revive old ones) of expressing his culture, just as his society strives, with the end of colonialism, to find new ways of being and becoming.

By virtue not so much of British colonization, as of American twentieth-century dominance, English has become the language of globalization, the benefits of which are also accruing to India. But though the worldwide adoption of English has ‘certainly facilitated more global exchanges and business transactions among English speakers everywhere’, including India, as Adrian Lester observes, ‘it [has] only served to heighten the exclusion of most non-English speaking subjects and women from access to the credit and political capital that flowed through Anglophone global networks’.

I am not suggesting that India’s traditional forms of education, in Indian languages, could have met the challenge of making India literate and competitive with the rest of the world. It could, of course, have given India a basic competence and self-confidence that cultures like Japan which educate themselves in their national languages have, and the foundation to set up great schools and colleges in the Nalanda mode; and an India that had grown and flourished without the ordeal of colonialism, could always have imported the best educationists, technological systems and English teachers from wherever they were, to create our own links with the globalized world. At least, without the British having expropriated our national wealth for two centuries, we would have had the resources to do so.

One of the regrettable consequences of British rule was how colonialism suffocated any prospect of a revival of India’s traditional spirit of scientific enquiry, whether by neglect or design. The destruction of the textile and steel industries has already been discussed, but it is striking that a civilization that had invented the zero, that spawned Aryabhata (who anticipated Galileo, Copernicus and Kepler by several centuries, and with greater precision) and Susruta (the father of modern surgery) had so little to show by way of Indian scientific or technological innovation even under the supposedly benign and stable conditions of Pax Britannica. The mathematical genius Ramanujan had to travel to Cambridge to have his genius recognized, and though C.  V.  Raman won a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1930 and S.  N.  Bose should have (instead, the discovery of the particle named for him, the boson, won two others the 2013 Prize), and Bose’s namesake and mentor, Jagadish Chandra Bose, blazed an astonishing path as physicist, biologist, biophysicist, botanist and archaeologist (as well as an early writer of science fiction), there was little else to celebrate by way of scientific accomplishment in the two centuries of British colonial rule. Strikingly, the British themselves flourished in these fields in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, while funding no great institutions in India, and neglecting the enormous potential of Indian minds to excel in science and technology. It would take a while for India to make any headway in science and technology given the ground the country had to make up in these areas. The lack of facilities at home led to an exodus of sorts; several Indians went on to excel in foreign institutions, three winning science Nobels under foreign flags, while the stunted or fledgling research institutions in India were still seeking to establish themselves as worthy homes for brilliant Indian minds. (There are signs, though, that scientific studies are improving, as the remarkable innovations in space and missile technology have shown; this owes nothing to the colonial period but is a product of independent India’s own efforts.)

Still, I am conscious that there is something ironic about English-speaking Indians like myself attacking the British in English for having imparted their English education to Indians. Ironic, yes, but only up to a point. I had my English schooling in India, and I learned it without the shadow of the Englishman judging my prose. I delighted in the language on its own terms, as a pan-Indian language today, and not as a symbol of colonial oppression. In any case, most English-educated Indians, including myself, will not repudiate Shakespeare and P.  G.  Wodehouse: we must concede we couldn’t have enjoyed their masterworks without the English language.

I am told by a British-Indian friend that in a passionate public debate in London in 2015 on the merits or otherwise of my Oxford views, more than one speaker sought to discredit me in my absence (I was in India) on the grounds that I was a known aficionado of Wodehouse and the English language, who had even revived St Stephen’s College’s Wodehouse Society, the first of its kind in the world, and still served as patron of the London-headquartered (global) Wodehouse Society. The implication was that one cannot denounce British colonialism and celebrate the doyen of English humorists at the same time.

My critics could not have been more wrong. Yes, some have seen in Wodehouse’s popularity a lingering nostalgia for the Raj. Writing in 1988, the journalist Richard West thought India’s Wodehouse devotees were those who hankered after the England of fifty years before (i.e. the 1930s): ‘That was the age when the English loved and treasured their own language, when schoolchildren learned Shakespeare, Wordsworth and even Rudyard Kipling… It was Malcolm Muggeridge who remarked that the Indians are now the last Englishmen. That may be why they love such a quintessentially English writer.’

Those lines are, of course, somewhat more fatuous than anything Wodehouse himself could ever write. Wodehouse is loved by Indians who loathe Kipling and detest the Raj and all its works. Indeed, despite a brief stint in a Hong Kong bank, Wodehouse had no colonial connection himself, and the Raj is largely absent from his books. (There is only one notable exception I can recall, in a 1935 short story, ‘The Juice of an Orange’: ‘Why is there unrest in India? Because its inhabitants eat only an occasional handful of rice. The day when Mahatma Gandhi sits down to a good juicy steak and follows it up with roly-poly pudding and a spot of Stilton, you will see the end of all this nonsense of Civil Disobedience.’) But Indians saw that the comment was meant to elicit laughter, not agreement.

(Mahatma Gandhi himself was up to some humorous mischief when, in 1947, far from sitting down to steak, he dined with the king’s cousin and the last viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, and offered him a bowl of home-made goat’s curd—perhaps from the same goat he took to England when he went to see the king in a loincloth! I reinvented the moment in my satirical The Great Indian Novel, only substituting a mango for the curd.)

If anything, Wodehouse was one British writer whom Indian nationalists could admire without fear of political incorrectness. Saroj Mukherji, née Katju, the daughter of a prominent Indian nationalist politician, remembers introducing Lord Mountbatten to the works of Wodehouse in 1948; it was typical that the symbol of the British empire had not read the ‘quintessentially English’ Wodehouse but that the Indian freedom fighter had.

Indeed, it is precisely the lack of politics in Wodehouse’s writing, or indeed of any other social or philosophic content, that made what Waugh called his ‘idyllic world’ so free of the trappings of Englishness, quintessential or otherwise. Whereas other English novelists burdened their readers with the specificities of their characters’ lives and circumstances, Wodehouse’s existed in a never-never land that was almost as unreal to his English readers as to his Indian ones. Indian readers were able to enjoy Wodehouse free of the anxiety of allegiance; for all its droll particularities, the world he created, from London’s Drones Club to the village of Matcham Scratchings, was a world of the imagination, to which Indians required no visa.

But they did need a passport, and that was the English language. English was undoubtedly Britain’s most valuable and abiding legacy to India, and educated Indians, a famously polyglot people, rapidly learned and delighted in it—both for itself, and as a means to various ends. These ends were both political (for Indians turned the language of the imperialists into the language of nationalism) and pleasurable (for the language granted access to a wider world of ideas and entertainments). It was only natural that Indians would enjoy a writer who used language as Wodehouse did—playing with its rich storehouse of classical precedents, mockingly subverting the very canons colonialism had taught Indians they were supposed to venerate (in a country ruled for the better part of two centuries by the dispensable siblings of the British nobility, one could savour lines like these: ‘Unlike the male codfish which, suddenly finding itself the parent of three million five hundred thousand little codfish, cheerfully resolves to love them all, the British aristocracy is apt to look with a somewhat jaundiced eye on its younger sons.’)

I am grateful, in other words, for the joys the English language has imparted to me, but not for the exploitation, distortion and deracination that accompanied its acquisition by my countrymen.

Tea Without Sympathy

Something similar can probably be said about those two great British colonial legacies (now that we have discredited democracy, the ‘rule of law’ and the railways as credible British claims): tea and cricket. Both, I freely confess, are addictions of mine, a personal tribute to the legacy of colonialism.

In an address to a joint session of the US Congress in 1985, the late Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi recalled, with a twinkle in his eye, the great affinities between the American Revolution and the Indian colonial experience. Cornwallis, after surrendering at Yorktown, triumphed in Bengal. And then, Gandhi added mischievously, ‘Indian tea stimulated your revolutionary zeal’.

He got a good laugh for the allusion to the Boston Tea Party. But he was wrong. In 1773, there was no Indian tea, at least none that was properly cultivated and traded. Tea was a Chinese monopoly, and the taxed tea the colonists tossed into Boston Bay came from Amoy, not Assam. Perhaps if it had been Indian tea, the American revolutionaries might have thought of a less wasteful method of protest.

It was the British who established Indian tea as a cultivated commodity. The story is interesting, and once again commercial motives came into play. The British ruled India but not China: rather than spending good money on the Chinese, they reasoned, why not grow tea in India? Their desire to end their dependence on Chinese tea led the British to invent agricultural espionage, as a secret agent, improbably enough named Robert Fortune, slipped into China in the early 1840s, during the chaos and confusion of the Opium War years, to procure tea plants for transplantation in the Indian Himalayas. But most of the thousands of specimens he sent to British India died, and the East India Company directors were left scratching their collective heads. The solution came by accident—when a wandering Briton discovered an Indian strain of tea growing wild in Assam, tested it in boiling water, tasted the results and realized he had struck gold: he had made tea.

That gave the British their own tea industry in India. Assam tea proved superior to the Chinese imports and more palatable to the British housewife. In the 1830s, the East India Company traded about 31.5 million lbs. (14 million kilos) of Chinese tea a year; today India alone produces nearly 300 million kilos. But even tea was not exempt from colonial exploitation: the workers laboured in appalling conditions for a pittance, while all the profits, of course, went to British firms. Early in the twentieth century, the remarkable anti-imperialist Sir Walter Strickland wrote bitterly in the preface to his now-out-of-print volume The Black Spot in the East: ‘Let the English who read this at home reflect that, when they sip their deleterious decoctions of tannin…they too are, in their degree, devourers of human flesh and blood. It is not the tea alone, but the impoverished blood of the slaves, devoid of its red seeds of life and vigour, that they are drinking.’

The British grew tea in India for themselves, not for the locals: the light, fragrant Darjeeling, the robust Assam, the heady Nilgiris tea, all reflected the soil, climate and geography of the respective parts of India for which they were named, but they were grown by Scottish planters (and picked by woefully underpaid Indian labourers) to be shipped to the mother country, where demand was strong. A modest quantity was retained for sale to the British in India; Indians themselves did not drink the tea they produced. It was only during the Great Depression of the 1930s—when demand in Britain dropped and British traders had to unload their stocks—that they thought of selling their produce  to the Indians they’d ignored for a century. The Indian masses turned to tea with delight, and the taste for it spread throughout the Depression and the War years. Today, tea can be found in the remotest Indian village, and Indians drink more black tea than the rest of the world combined.

Full credit, then, to the British. And this time it is difficult to argue that one could have had extensive tea cultivation and a vast market for the product without colonization: certainly Indians hadn’t ever done it before the British. Even the name is a colonial legacy. The word ‘tea’, common to most European languages, is from the dialect of Amoy, from where much of Britain’s tea was shipped; but those who got their tea from Canton, like the Portuguese, and overland, like the Indians and the Arabs, call it by the Cantonese word ‘cha’. Almost every Indian language uses a variant of ‘cha’, including ‘chai’ and ‘chaya’; it is only the Anglophone Indians who speak of ‘tea’.

But before I end this section on tea, a small digression. Even as they gave us tea, the British were destroying something else. The British ruthlessly exploited the land for profit, while ruining it and decimating the wildlife it sheltered. The destruction of Indian forests and wildlife occurred at a galloping pace under colonialism. The forests were destroyed for three main reasons: to convert the land into commercial plantations, especially to grow tea; to make railway sleepers; and to export timber to England for the construction of English houses and furniture.

The British cut down the forests of the Nilgiris and Assam to grow tea, and ravaged the forests of Coorg to grow coffee. Tea was not the only villain in the ecological devastation of the Nilgiris; the British also brought in several exotic species like eucalyptus, pine and wattle to produce viscose, which was sent to the UK to be made into fabric. Unfortunately, plants like eucalyptus thirstily drink up the ground water; thanks to their plantations, the British converted the once lush tropical rainforests of the Nilgiris into a water-shortage area.

The same phenomenon occurred when the British forced Indian farmers to grow poppy in order to extract opium, which involved cutting down vast areas of forests in some parts of north India. In Assam, for instance, by the mid-nineteenth century, large numbers of trees were chopped down since the opium poppy could not ripen and flower in their shade. This practice of slashing trees to protect the poppy indirectly almost wiped out some of India’s most magnificent predators. The British wanted more land to be used for commercial crops, which would bring them revenue, so they put a bounty on the head of each predator, successfully erasing tigers, cheetahs, leopards and lions from vast parts of India. The tiger and leopard survived, albeit in reduced numbers, because they hid in the jungle. But the lion needed vast open spaces and could not survive—except in the one corner of the country, in Gujarat, where an Indian prince, the Nawab of Junagadh, maintained a private lion sanctuary where hunting was permitted for his invitees only. This saved the Asiatic Lion to some extent—but this  majestic animal, of whom several thousand flourished before the  British came to India, was down to fewer than a hundred when the Empire ended.

By destroying the forests, the British also broke the spirit of the aboriginal people or ‘tribals’ who lived in and utilized the natural resources of the forests. Unfortunately, their ownership of forest lands was traditional rather than documented; since they could not claim ownership in a form the British recognized, they were dispossessed and displaced, and attempts to maintain their hunter-gatherer lifestyle resulted in them being treated as poachers and therefore criminals.

Meanwhile, the British elevated the killing of wild animals into a high-status sport, one for the whites and the privileged Indian elite, and an activity whose glamour was enhanced by the access it provided the latter into British ruling circles (rather like polo might do today). Hunting in the British period became a monster sport; countless numbers of animals were killed, irretrievably transforming the ecology of many areas. For example, Madras was once called Puliyur, which means the town of tigers and leopards (the Tamil word ‘puli’ is used for both tiger and leopard). The British killed every tiger and leopard in this area, so that not even one was left in Madras or any of the plains of Tamil Nadu. The term Puliyur has lost its meaning, and is now largely forgotten.

Puliyur may no longer have tigers, which are hanging on precariously elsewhere in the subcontinent, but the British still drink Indian tea. In more ways than one: Tata, the Indian business conglomerate, now owns Tetley, the venerable British tea firm. So perhaps, in the ubiquitous references to ‘chai’ everywhere in the country, and in the milky, sweetened cups of tea that Indians thrust on every visitor, it is we who have appropriated this colonial legacy and made it our own.

The story gets a little more complicated. Tea, like other commodities, has been suffering a decline in prices, and exports are dwindling; many tea plantations, faced with rising wages and collapsing profits, are threatening to close down. The most expensive Indian tea, Castleton, was sold for over 6,000 rupees a kilo in 1991 ($231 at the then-prevailing exchange rate); the buyers were Japanese. The new record was set in 2012, when the price hit 7,200 rupees a kilo (but that meant it was down to $120 as the rupee had weakened) Castleton is the champagne of teas: other Indian teas do not fare a fraction as well. Internationally, Indian tea is competing for export markets with inferior teas from such unlikely sources as Argentina, Kenya and Malawi. But then again—if Argentina could grow tea without the British having colonized them first, couldn’t India have done so as well?

So when the first Indian prime minister who had served as a chaiwallah (helping his father sell tea at a railway station platform), Narendra Modi, addressed the US Congress in 2016, he sprinkled his speech with humour, but unlike his predecessor thirty-one years earlier, did not breathe a word about tea. At a time when the world commodity markets are down and Indian tea producers are clamouring for relief, the Indian prime minister must have realized that tea is no longer a joking matter.

The Indian Game of Cricket

Cricket is, of course, the only sport in the world that breaks for tea (and for many amateurs, tea is the highlight of the experience). I have often thought that cricket is really, in the sociologist Ashis Nandy’s phrase, an Indian game accidentally discovered by the British. Everything about the sport seems suited to the Indian national character: its rich complexity, the infinite possibilities and variations possible with each delivery, the dozen different ways of getting out, are all rather like Indian classical music, in which the basic laws are laid down but the performer then improvises gloriously, unshackled by anything so mundane as a written score. The glorious uncertainties of the game echo ancient Indian thought: Indian fatalists instinctively understand that it is precisely when you are seeing the ball well and timing your fours off the sweet of the bat that the unplayable shooter can come along and bowl you. It is almost, as has also been observed, a pastime in which the Bhagavad Gita is performed in the guise of a Victorian English morality play.

A country where a majority of the population still consults astrologers and believes in the capricious influence of the planets can well appreciate a sport in which an ill-timed cloudburst, a badly-prepared pitch, a lost toss of a coin or the sun in the eyes of a fielder can transform the outcome of a game. Even the possibility that five tense, exciting, hotly-contested and occasionally meandering days of cricket can still end in a draw seems derived from Indian philosophy, which accepts profoundly that in life the journey is as important as the destination.

Cricket first came to India with decorous English gentlemen idly pursuing their leisure; it took nearly a century for the ‘natives’ to learn the sport, and then they played it in most un-English ways. I remember being taken by my father to my first ever Test match, in Bombay in late 1963, when a weak English side was touring. I shall never forget the exhilaration of watching India’s opening batsman and wicketkeeper, Budhi Kunderan, smite a huge six over midwicket, follow it soon after with another blow that just failed to carry across the rope, and then sky a big shot in a gigantic loop over mid-on. As it spiralled upwards Kunderan began running; when the ball was caught by an English fielder, he hurled his bat in the air, continued running, caught it as it came down, and ran into the pavilion. I was hooked for life.

India has always had its Kunderans, but it has also had its meticulous grafters, its plodders, its anarchists and its stoics: a society which recognizes that all sorts of people have their place recognizes the value of variety in its cricket team as well. Cricket reflects and transcends India’s diversity: the Indian team has been led by captains from each of its major faiths, Hindus, Muslims, Parsis, Christians and a colourful Sikh. A land divided by caste, creed, colour, culture, cuisine, custom and costume is united by a great conviction: cricket.

Yes, the British brought it to us. But they did not do so in the expectation that we would defeat them one day at their own game, or that our film-makers would win an Oscar nomination for an improbable tale about a motley bunch of illiterate villagers besting their colonial overlords at a fictional nineteenth-century match (Lagaan, 2003). Sport played an important role in British imperialism, since it combined Victorian ideas of muscular Christianity, a cult of youthful vigour and derring-do in far-off lands, and the implicit mission of bringing order and civilization to the unruly East through the imposition of rules learned on the playing fields of Eton. If Empire was a field of play, then to the colonized learning the rules and trying to defeat the masters at their own game became an inevitable expression of national feeling. Scholars have demonstrated that one of the reasons why cricket acquired such a hold in Bengal society between 1880 and 1947 was as a way to discharge the allegation of effeminacy against the Bengali male by beating the English at their own game. The educated middle class of Bengal, the bhadralok, joined the maharajas of Natore, Cooch Behar, Mymensingh and other native states to make cricket a part of Bengali social life as a means of attaining recognition from their colonial masters. At the same time, the British, who saw cricket as a useful tool of the Raj’s civilizing mission, promoted the sport in educational institutions of the province. In a somewhat different way, Parsi cricketers in Bombay undertook the sport for the purpose of social mobility within the colonial framework. The maharajas, the affluent classes and Anglicized Indians, Ashis Nandy points out, ‘saw cricket as an identifier of social status and as a means of access to the power elite of the Raj. Even the fact that cricket was an expensive game by Indian standards strengthened these connections’.

Curiously, this pattern was replicated across the country, not just in the British presidencies but also in the princely states, many of which produced not inconsiderable teams, well financed by the native rulers. Some of these gentlemen played the sport themselves at a significant level of accomplishment; one, K.  S.  Ranjitsinhji (universally known as ‘Ranji’, and enviously as ‘Run-get-sin-ji’), was selected to play for England against Australia in 1895, and scored a century on debut, which made him the hero of the Indian public. It is fascinating how Ranji, like Oscar Wilde and Benjamin Disraeli, became an English hero without being quite English enough himself. (‘He never played a Christian stroke in his life,’ as one English admirer disbelievingly put it.) Ranji described himself as ‘an English cricketer and an Indian prince,’ but as Buruma observes: ‘As an English cricketer he behaved like an Indian prince, and as an Indian prince like an English cricketer.’

Ranji—cricketing genius, reckless spendthrift, shameless Anglophile—was an extraordinary amalgam of the virtues and defects of both gentleman and prince. His nephew, K.  S.  Duleepsinhji, and another prince, the Nawab of Pataudi, both emulated Ranji in 1930 and 1933 respectively, though by then Indians were beginning to ask why they had taken their talents to the other side instead of playing for the fledgling Indian Test team. (Pataudi did, in 1946, but by then he was past his prime.)

When Indians became good enough at cricket to win the occasional game, the British took care to divide them, organizing a ‘Quadrangular Tournament’ that pitted teams of Hindus, Muslims, Parsis and ‘the Rest’ against each other, so that even on the field of play, Indians would be reminded of the differences among them so assiduously promoted by colonial rule.

The sociologist Richard Cashman notes that Indian nationalism was less radical, in a cultural sense, than Irish nationalism. In Ireland, the nationalists and Home Rule agitators attacked cricket and other English sports as objectionable elements of colonial culture, and patronized ‘Gaelic sports’ instead. Indian nationalist leaders, on the other hand, ‘attacked the political and economic aspects of British imperialism but retained an affection for some aspects of English culture’. While traditional Indian sports like kabaddi languished in the colonial era, and polo was revived as a sport mainly for the British and a very narrow segment of the Indian aristocracy, cricket was seen as a sport where Indians could hold their own against the English. (This may explain why Ireland still has a very modest cricket team that is yet to earn ‘Test’ status, whereas India in the twenty-first century is one of the giants of the world game.)

That cricket was connected with the nationalist movement in Bengal of the 1910s is evident from the sporting history of Presidency College, the principal English-language institution of higher learning for Indians in Calcutta, where sports such as gymnastics and cricket were made compulsory to develop (as we have noted a little earlier) Bengali boys physically in reaction to British colonial stereotypes of ‘manly’ Britons and effeminate Bengalis. When the nationalist resistance in Bengal was gathering momentum, Presidency College lost a cricket match in 1914 to an all-European team of La Martinière College, an unabashedly colonial institution whose students were divided into ‘Houses’ named for the likes of Charnock and Macaulay. This caused much breast-beating and self-flagellation. The players of the team were publicly criticized: ‘the big defeat of the college team by La Martinière College cannot be forgiven’, declared the Presidency College magazine.13

[13 Of course, my football-crazy son Kanishk assures me that the single greatest moment of Indian sporting triumph against the British in the colonial period is to be found in football, not cricket: the Mohun Bagan team that defeated the East Yorkshire Regiment to win the IFA shield in 1911, barefoot!]

‘The contention that emulation of the colonizers is the key to explaining the origins of Indian cricket,’ writes a scholar, ‘fails to successfully account for the flowering of the game in Bengal.’ So cricket too had nationalist overtones, and while one must concede that the British imparted it to us, today we can more than hold our own with them, and anyone else playing that sport.