India Conquered: British Raj and the chaos of empire: Review

India Conquered: British Raj and the chaos of empire: Review

FPJ BureauUpdated: Thursday, May 30, 2019, 10:54 AM IST
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Title: India Conquered: British Raj and the chaos of empire

Author: Jon Wilson

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2016

Price: Rs 799/-

Pages: 564

Unmasking the Raj

The Great Nations of Europe

Had gathered on the shore

They’d conquered what was behind them

And now they wanted more

So they looked to the mighty ocean

And took to the western sea

The great nations of Europe, in the sixteenth century

Great Nations of Europe by Randy Newman, the American singer-songwriter, arranger, composer, and pianist

In March 1906, Haji Abdulla Haji Kasim – a wealthy merchant from Udupi, the first to buy a car in the town and the first to drink coffee at breakfast time – started south-west India’s maiden modern bank, the Canara Banking Corporation. To him, the bank would help ‘not only to cultivate habits of thrift among all classes of people, without distinction of caste or creed, but also cooperation among all classes’. The bank, which occupied one room, had a single member of staff and took thirty-eight rupees in deposits on its inaugural day, is today the renamed Corporation Bank with 8,000 India-wide functional units including 2,500 branches.

Earlier in 1890s and half-the-country away, Lala Lajpat Rai had echoed similar sentiments in Punjab, namely that the money earned from the province’s expanding agricultural society ‘was being used to run English banks’. So he sent a memorandum to group of “leading men in Punjab – lawyers, educationists and government officials, Sikhs, Parsis and members of… Brahmo Samaj and Arya Samaj, – urging them to deposit capital with a new financial institution”. The Punjab National Bank, which started business on 19 May 1894 with Lajpat Rai’s brother as its first manager, is today among the five largest banks in India.

These institutions, and many others, owe their origins to the spirit of self-reliance, or Swadeshi movement, rather than being bestowed upon by the British Raj as is commonly – and hugely mistakenly – understood. Those who think and propagate this line of thinking also cite the hackneyed laundry list of railways, civil services, rule of law, irrigation projects and canals, universities and modern school system, and so forth.

But Prof Jon Wilson, a specialist in Indian history at King’s College London, disagrees. In India Conquered, tracing the trajectory of British presence in India from 1600 to 1947, he argues that British rule was far from prosperous; rather, it was problematic and chaotic. “…the idea of strong, consistent, effective British power in India was indeed a delusion,” he writes. “Pax Britannica only existed in the safe havens of British India’s small number of European administrators created for themselves. Otherwise, the idea of British rule as the source of peace, order and secure property rights was a fantasy, projected by anxious administrators to persuade themselves and their British public that they were in the right. In practice, British actions prolonged and fostered chaos far more than they cultivated security and prosperity.”

Prof Wilson is bent upon busting the myths. Consider, for instance, the railway network in India. British never considered its development aspect and “thought that blasting dry metal lines onto the Indian landscape was a wasteful enterprise.” The breakthrough came when the British companies who had won contracts began to contend that these lines were a military necessity. “These arguments portrayed the railway as a tool of conquest not an instrument of economic expansion,” explains Wilson.

No wonder, the First World War saw large sections of Indian railway network being dismantled and shipped to Iraq to be rebuilt to transport troops. “In 1917-18 alone, 1,800 miles of track, 13,000 feet of bridging, 200 engines and 6,000 other rail vehicles left India,” informs the author.

Similarly, though British India’s zeal for public works, especially irrigation projects, seemingly began with the succession of famines in 1830s, it was motivated more by the collapse of East India Company’s revenues, than by human sufferings. “British irrigation in mid-nineteenth-century India began with an ecological crisis and ended in only very limited success,” reveals Wilson.

If public works were used as propaganda, especially after the 1857 uprising, enacting laws became the ideological prop. “It was a system of rules imposed without consulting the people to which it applied. But the law also reflected the chaotic and limited capacity of British Empire” the author says. No wonder, the country still suffers from the legal overhang.

In totality, when British left India after 200 years of uninterrupted rule, the country’s share of world income collapsed from 22.6 per cent in 1700 – almost equal to Europe’s share of 23.3 per cent at that time – to a low of 3.8 per cent in 1952; only 0.2 per cent or 1,500 out of five lakh villages had electricity; average life expectancy was a mere 32 years; and only a sixth of the population could read and write.

Brilliantly-written and intensely-researched, this 500-plus page tome makes an interesting use of stories and anecdotes. For instance, we are told that over 2,50,000 Europeans are buried in the countries that once were part of British ruled India – India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Burma, and that there are 1,349 recorded British graveyards in South Asia. Or, the early twentieth century story recorded by a British lawyer of an elderly Marwari man who used the Stamp Paper to certify the chastity of his wife; And the saga of Rana Kamath, a wealthy Indian merchant from Goa who funded the reconstruction of Walkeshwar Temple in Mumbai and supported the construction of city’s first British church, now St Thomas’s Cathedral, next to Horniman Circle, completed in 1718. That’s what makes the book an interesting read equally for the students of history and the general readers.

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