Why england colonized india

Under the British, Tharoor shows that, the Hindu caste system became more rigid, and communal lines, particularly those between Hindus and Muslims, deepened. Nowhere was the application of that singular ethos clearer than when, on their way out, the colonialists partitioned the subcontinent into India and Pakistan.

A democracy cannot function without a free press and just law. Neither truly existed under the Raj. The British were the first to establish newspapers in India, catering to a small English-educated elite first, and large audiences in the vernacular languages later.

However, alarmed by their proliferation, the East Indian Company passed the Censorship of the Press Act in , subjecting all newspapers to scrutiny before publication. In , all other kinds of publication, too, were brought under this rule. Once bitten by the bug and with strict adherence to the law not being insisted on over time, Indians continued with the enterprise.

By , there were some newspapers in the subcontinent, mostly owned and edited by Indians. Alarm bells rang again, bringing another round of censorship in the form of the Vernacular Press Act of and the revised Press Act of Under the latter, publishers were required to provide a hefty security deposit, which they would forfeit if the publication carried inflammatory or abusive articles.

The racism of the British-owned press was not subject to the same restrictions. The justice system in India was even more discriminatory. For instance, an Englishman who shot dead his Indian servant got six months in jail and a modest fine. But an Indian convicted of the attempted rape of an Englishwoman was sentenced to 20 years. Worse still, the legacy of the British legal system has left India with an unenviable judicial backlog.

India and Pakistan are nuclear adversaries. Hundreds of millions of people still live in abject poverty. The intergenerational trauma suffered by the colonized and their descendants is not likely to disappear any time soon; nor, it seems, will the West recover from its amnesia about the true nature of colonialism.

Curiously, the recent revival of this imperial nostalgia comes not at a time of Western confidence and security, but rather at a time of great anxiety, of looking inward and backward, of nursing old grievances, and of scapegoating immigrants.

The publics for which Gilley and Biggar write, along with the great bulk of the citizenry, do not know the colonial story from the perspective of the colonized. Fifty-nine percent of Britons are proud of British colonialism. Textbooks and television shows routinely suggest that the darker-skinned masses benefited from their civilizing rulers.

But this narrative of colonialism, which hinges on the gifts that the master left the colonized, and in this case, that Great Britain bestowed on India, has provoked an intellectual refutation that was long overdue.

When Will Durant, who co-authored, with his wife, Ariel, The Story of Civilization , witnessed what was happening in India in the s, he set aside his work of history to write a short pamphlet called The Case for India. In this pamphlet, the ordinarily measured historian does not mince words, lambasting the British for their ongoing actions. The book originated from a speech Tharoor made at the Oxford Union, in which he argued that Britain owed India and other colonies reparations for the centuries of looting, violence, and depredation inflicted upon them.

In this speech, Tharoor even attempted to circumvent the insoluble question of dollars and cents by arguing that if Britain paid India one pound a year for the next years — a form of moral atonement for two centuries of subjugation — he would be satisfied.

When Tharoor finished speaking, his opponents — all but one of them white — seemed at once amazed and repulsed. Soon after, a video of the speech went viral online, making both it and Tharoor the subject of intense discussion. A sitting member of the Indian National Congress party in the Indian parliament, he has authored 13 previous books on India, literature, and foreign affairs. He was formerly the Under-Secretary General of the United Nations, where it was widely presumed he would succeed Kofi Annan in , but the United States vetoed his candidacy.

The neoconservative faction of the Bush White House thought Tharoor would use his considerable platform and oratorical abilities to infuse the UN with a new activist spirit, and so he was promptly blocked. Tharoor subsequently withdrew his candidacy and returned to India to enter national politics. In the 10 years since Tharoor left New York for New Delhi, the rise of historical revisionism and the touting of empire, as well as the pervasive ignorance of the past, have only increased.

Western intellectuals have constructed a fantastical balance sheet where the benefits of colonialism outweigh the costs, where some imaginary moral good ultimately exculpates theft and murder. Western publics have hypnotized themselves with historical untruths about their darkest chapters, or else reinterpreted the story as a parable of Western benevolence. That goes for both sides of the Atlantic, and both sides of the English Channel. Accordingly, Inglorious Empire is neither an academic book, nor a comprehensive one; rather, it is a point-by-point refutation of the idea that colonialism in India was a Good Thing.

Tharoor writes with the studious zeal of a prosecutor who knows that the preponderance of evidence is on his side, and he makes his case not by referencing Indian nationalists — that would be too easy — but by quoting the words of the colonizers themselves.

India lost its independence not even to a government but to a private company: the notorious British East India Company, which extended its control over a sizable share of the country through both manipulation and brutality — and conducted its theft by taxing the natives and forcibly extracting their resources.

In , the Amritsar Massacre of unarmed protesters by British and Gurka troops received much public criticism. From letters Clow wrote to a friend, we know he considered resigning on several occasions during the early s.

This period of reflection led him to fundamentally question his role within the colonial system, but he ultimately decided to continue his career.

Clow was a devout Christian and his life in India would develop into a religious cocoon of sorts where he used his relationship with God to suppress his trauma at being a colonial usurper. As he became more senior within the administration he increasingly distanced himself from Indians, Indian culture and expressed little sympathy for the plight of people who suffered from British exploitation. He spent the vast majority of his time with other Europeans and his holidays at his house at the British hill station of Simla.

His diaries throughout the s and s became almost entirely written prayers requesting salvation punctuated by private comments of self-loathing, written in confidence between himself and God. His private time was spent largely in the pursuit of the preservation of the legacy of British India. As well as these massive famines, there were many other smaller, more localised famines.

This was much less than the French, Dutch and Germans took from their lands. They brought in an irrigation programme, which increased the amount of land available for farming by 8 times. They developed a coal industry, which had not existed before. Public health and life expectancy increased under British rule, mainly due to improved water supplies and the introduction of quinine treatment against malaria. Big landowners, Indian princes, the Indian middle classes all gained in terms of job opportunities, business opportunities and careers in areas like the law.

Ordinary Indians gained little, but the argument still continues about whether British rule made much difference to their lives. Many historians think that the majority of Indians would have remained poor even if they had been ruled by Indians.

The debate about British rule in India. The largest rebellion against British rule took place in It was known in Britain as the Indian Mutiny. This was because it began with a rebellion by Indian troops sepoys serving in the army of the British East India Company. British rule in India was handled by the East India Company. Indian historians dislike the term 'mutiny' because it suggests that only Indian troops were involved. In fact, once some of the Indian troops did revolt, the rebellion against British rule spread rapidly and involved many local Indian leaders who had a wide range of complaints against British rule.

The British preferred to think of the rebellion as a mutiny because this word disguised the huge scale of the rebellion. The word mutiny also covered up the involvement of ordinary Indians. The British preferred to keep this quiet as it suggested that British rule was not widely accepted in India. Telegram alerting the British government to the outbreak of rebellion in India in By permission of the British Library.