Book: An Era Of Darkness
Author: Shashi Tharoor
Price: 442 (Hardback)
Pages: 333
ISBN: 978-93-83064-65-6
Publisher: Aleph Book Company
Pile on the brown man’s burden
And’ if ye rouse his hate,
Meet his old fashioned reasons
With maxims up to date
With shells and dumdum bullets
A hundred times made plain
The brown man’s loss must ever
Imply the white man’s gain. – Brown Man’s burden
India, at the beginning of the 18th century, as the British economic historian Angus Maddison demonstrated, had a share of 23 percent in the World economy. But when the British left India, that share had dropped to a little over 3 percent. What were the events in the twenty decades of British rule that lead to such a drastic drop? A country which was sprawling with richness in culture, material wealth, education and diversity was left with nothing but fragments, a fragmented and divided geography, an insecure peoples and a story of agony. Shashi Tharoor recounts this story with painstaking detail, with statistical backing, and with a mirror in hand, one which he calls a rear view mirror, to take the British to the time of their atrocities and to the Indians, to remind them what is the price of their freedom.
The Indians of today haven’t lived in the colonial rule. They have lived in the free air of Independence and have been privileged with rights, which once were dreams. ‘The Era of Darkness’ is that account of history where Indians were trampled upon by the Brutish boot of colonial rule, and what added fuel to the fire was that they had to pay for it, in cash, in kind, and in blood. The book initiates with ‘The Case for India’, a work by Will Durant that “tore apart the self-serving justifications of the British for their long and shameless record of rapacity in India.”
The British conquest of India was the invasion and destruction of a high civilization by a trading company (The British East India Company) utterly without scruple and or principle, careless of art and greedy of gain, over-running with fire and sword a country temporarily disordered and helpless, bribing and murdering, annexing and stealing, and beginning that career of illegal and ‘legal’ plunder which has now (1930) gone on for one hundred and seventy-three years- Will Durant
Tharoor’s ‘An Era of Darkness’ in eight chapters initiated as a debate held in Oxford where the distinguished Indian speaker made a case for why Britain owed a reparation to India. The amount that Tharoor asked for was not in the form of a percentage of Britain’s GDP, or a large chunk of pounds, but what he asked for was one pound a year for the next two hundred years and a simple apology. He said that the apology would go a long way. The video went viral, because it was by an Indian, on British soil, in one of the most renowned institutions in the world, reminding the British of what they had done and why they shouldn’t be proud about it.
The book, in every chapter, brings forward the British agenda, which in all cases was to fill their coffers and send them shipping back to Britain. It takes the reader through the details of the vandalism of Indian economy and its self-respect. Tharoor desecrates the likes of Colonialist Robert Clive, Prime Minister Winston Churchill, Author Rudyard Kipling and philosopher John Stuart Mill by bringing forth their racism, elitism, and their policies of ‘Divide Et Impera’. He explains that what the British gave the Indians was not built for the benefit of her peoples; this included the railways, which was a necessity for transporting goods for the benefit of British trade. He also showcases the lack of public policy from the governing bodies during the worst famines. In ten years alone the deaths in famines were to the tune of 19 million. Did the British help? No they just didn’t believe in ‘indiscriminate indigenous almsgiving’. On being quizzed why Prime Minister Winston Churchill had deliberately ordered the diversion of food from starving Indians to well supplied British soldiers, Churchill asked “Hasn’t Gandhi died yet?”
The curtailed press, the gift of laws like sedition and article 377, the Indian penal code were some of the supposed gifts from the Empire, many of them are still plaguing our country even today. Tharoor gives the example of the recent JNU incident where students were arrested for sedition owing to their protests against the ruling government and how fifty eight Indians have been arrested in just two years (2014 and 2015) for being homosexual.
Tharoor acknowledges the criticism that has been made to his famous oxford speech too. The primary one being that Tharoor himself, is from the Indian National Congress, “a party that itself misruled India for six decades, all the time becoming increasingly arrogant and corrupt and seemingly almost as insulated as their British counterparts had been.” as quoted by commentator Jonathan Foreman. Tharoor, acknowledges the criticism as legitimate, but says “History, cannot be reduced to some sort of game of comparing misdeeds in different eras, each period must be judged in itself for its own successes and transgressions.”
The book refers to an era, an era of people who have lived on our soil, eaten the food we eat and breathed the air that fills our lungs today. But their eyes were devoid of the light we live in, their era is reminiscent of Plato’s cave where prisoners are chained so that their legs and necks are fixed and they can’t see anything but shadows on the wall near them. For them the shadows were reality. Today when we, free people of India, stand outside that cave and see the sun and take in its warmth, perhaps it is a good time to return to that cave and see what that era was, and learn from it.
