BOOK REVIEWS
T
THREE BOOKS ON BRITISH INDIA
he first Mackinlay to set foot in India arrived in 1852 on his own sailing ship, the King Alfred, which according to the log was less stylish than it sounds. Since then our family have had a continuous presence on the sub-continent, mainly in Calcutta and I was born on the North West Frontier in the BMH Quetta. Many readers will have similar connections. Most of us grew up speaking a cod version of Urdu with sunlit memories of lush gardens, big verandas and the comfortable security of living in the nicer part of town. I still love India. My Urdu is somewhat eroded and the blank spaces are filled with Nepali words. In the last five years these bright memories have become darkened along with the whole story of our colonial past in India. Although a recent YouGov poll found that 59% of the population still felt that the British Empire was something to be proud of, 19% – mostly young people, were actively ashamed of it. At present the young are winning the argument; our past is under attack, statues are being defaced, in Parliament Square Winston Churchill has been graffitied as a racist, university lecturers who equivocate on the subject are going down like ninepins and the media is searching hard for yet more evidence of British misdeeds in India.
days. Tharoor’s message is absolute; throughout their presence in India the British acted cynically and rapaciously at all times. There was no white man’s burden, it was an entirely exploitative relationship which left India in a far worse condition in every sense than when the British first anchored off the Gujarat coast in 1608. The British, he maintains, held India solely for their own benefit and during the centuries that followed funded their overseas footprint from their depredation of India. Far from uniting India they left it more divided than ever and India’s political problems today are a direct consequence of British rule. Although British and Indian critics have dismantled many of Tharoor’s arguments, as a polemic attack it succeeded, the mud has stuck, the Inglorious Empire version of our history is now widely cited by academics and BBC commentators. Sashi has made us think there is indeed more to say about the conduct of the British Raj than the Jewel in the Crown version of our relationship. East India Company officials did behave in a rapacious fashion, especially in the 1700s when there was a very limited sense of their having a civil responsibility for the population. Much of Tharoor’s book however is argued in absolute terms and the personalities he uses to typify the British are familiar demons: Clive, Curzon, Dyer and so on. They are presented as Bollywood villains and there is no attempt to understand the British in India as cognitive beings or to explain their actions in the context of the 18th Century – as opposed to the 21st Century.
The shrillest of these attacks have been led by Sashi Tharoor who, when I knew him, was a civil servant in the UN Secretariat wearing sharp suits and speaking with a posh English accent. Now that he is the Lok Sabha member for Thiruvanathapuran, Tharoor has taken on a home spun look and has a pretty confrontational line of nationalist rhetoric, mostly aimed at the British. In 2015 his attack on the colonial In a contemporary door stopper of a book (700 British at the Oxford Union went viral which prompted pages) Ferdinand Mount provides another version him to rush out his book, apparently written in 12 of British India. Mount is not afraid to engage with
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