Hello Monks,
Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India, first published in India as An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India, is a work of non-fiction by Shashi Tharoor, an Indian politician and diplomat, on the effects of British colonial rule on India. The book has won widespread acclaim and won Tharoor the 2019 Sahitya Akademi Award and the 2017 Ramnath Goenka Excellence in Journalism Award. So let’s know more about Shashi Tharoor and his book.
Shashi Tharoor :
Here we are talking about An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India. And points to ponder out.
- His speeches videos are
Speech at Oxford Union
Looking back at the British Raj in India: The University of Edinburgh
1. Write on key arguments in Shashi Tharoor's book - " An Era of Darkness".
Shashi Tharoor’s An Era of Darkness, is one breathless read. In it, he aggregates all the arguments required to establish that British colonial rule was an awful experience for Indians and he does so with a consummate debater’s skill. His book is, in fact, an expanded take on British exploitation of India that famously carried the day for Tharoor in an Oxford debate not too long ago.
According to Tharoor, there was nothing redeeming in British rule of our country. What India had to endure under them was outrageous humiliation on a humongous scale and sustained violence of a kind it had never experienced before. In short, British rule was, according to Tharoor, an era of darkness for India, throughout which it suffered several man made famines, wars, racism, maladministration, deportation of its people to distant lands and economic exploitation on an unprecedented scale. An indignant Tharoor even demands a token restitution and public apology from the British for all the harm they had caused India. This is something, as his debate established, wildly popular in India.
- The makers of India
Kartar Lalwani’s very well researched book, The Making of India — The Untold Story of British Enterprise, is a compelling account of the great infrastructure the British created in India — the railways being one of the most important ones.
In writing this book, it is obvious that instead of being even-handed, Tharoor has chosen to present the arguments against British rule in India with strength and force, and he is right in doing so. Until An Era of Darkness came along, there was no single work that clearly and unambiguously catalogued all the harm done to India under British rule.
Tharoor admirably fills the gap by holding a mirror to the British, and the West, that they have a case to answer. And answer they must, as old imperialisms, with renewed vigour and with the same specious ‘civilising’ arguments, have never really ceased devastating the world, from faraway places like now well-forgotten Grenada and present-day West Asia and the Middle East.
- Looted with impunity
Everything the British did in India, Tharoor asserts, was for their own benefit and never for that of the Indians. They also had, Tharoor tells us, perfected a policy of divide and rule, breaking treaties at will and making war and looting with impunity. Tharoor is right, of course. There are few Indians who would not have heard of the treachery that enabled Clive to triumph at Plassey or of the incredible amounts of ill-begotten wealth the East India Company officials hauled back with them to England.
There was scant appreciation, Tharoor tells us, of India’s contributions in men, material and money, to the wars that the British fought within India and overseas, especially the two World Wars.That British rule in India was bad in parts has never been denied by anyone, least of all by the British. Their archives are full of accounts of British depredations, covering the entire period of their rule in India. Several of their historians have brought out the suffering the British inflicted on India and Indians throughout their rule of our country. What Tharoor, however, seeks to establish through his book, is that British rule was unremittingly rotten and indefensible by the standards of its time and ours. He makes his points with bare-knuckle indignation and irresistible passion.
Tharoor mourns the annihilation of a gentle social order across the country which he believed was sustained through dialogue and held together by consensus. He also condemns the introduction of harsh and formal legal systems by the British, replacing much kinder, more accessible and personalised traditional ones. In his book, Tharoor is particularly derisive of parliamentary democracy, asserting that what was fine for a small number of people of a much smaller country, is wholly unsuited for a large and raucous one like our own.
“No wonder that the sun
never set on the British empire
because even god couldn’t trust the English in the dark.”
He also talk in First speech that “To speak lightly og sacrifice on both sides as analogy was used here ‘A burglar comes into a house ransacked the place stubs his toe.’ and you say well he there was a sacrifice on both side that is not acceptable” He also questioned the issue of a moral debt that British need to pay for 200 years of ruling India. He write about Nationalism and difference between nationalism and patriotism then and now also.
Tharoor says that in Nationalism in that day is an inclusive Nationalism. It embrassesed in everybody's country in any background, religion, language, cast...Today's Nationalism is narrow minded one.
2. Write critique on both the films with reference to Postcolonial insights.
✅The Black Prince :
"What you seek is all gone now, my black Prince"
'The Black Prince' is a story of Queen Victoria and the Last King of Punjab, Maharajah Duleep Singh. His character as it evolves, torn between two cultures and facing constant dilemmas as a result. His relationship with Queen Victoria will be the most impactful relationship in the film, the Queen representing the English culture he was drawn into. The Black Prince begins a lifelong struggle to regain his Kingdom. It takes him on an extraordinary journey across the world.
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