Dr. Shashi Tharoor

One of the more insidious challenges of colonialism is the extent to which our minds are colonized as well. And that colonization of a mind takes some growing out of. For us, for, for some of us, one never really grows out of it.

I mean, I do know that there are, there are many who can't help, as it were, their identification with things Anglophone and Anglophile because that's really what they were schooled to appreciate. I have argued in the book, for example, that my fondness for Wodehouse and Mm. Which you mentioned, actually, is despite, in many ways, the fact that they have English origins.

Of course, I'm even more fond of cricket now that we regularly beat the English at it. But famously, an Indian game accidentally discovered by the British, I think Yeah, that's a great line by a sociologist called Ashis Nandy, that it's actually an Indian game accidentally discovered by the British. I mean, clearly, you know, our climate is far more suitable for cricket than theirs, for one thing.

But anyway, where were we? I've lost my train of thought. No, that's okay.

We we Oh, yes. P.G. Wodehouse, for example. You know, obviously the delights of Wodehouse are the delights that are imparted to you by your appreciation of the English language, what he does with stylistic humor, plotting, and so on and so forth.

But the interesting thing is precisely because of that, you don't actually have to have any allegiance to Britain, as long as. In other words, you don't need a, you don't need a, The passport is the English Mm.

But you don't need a British visa to get there. Okay. You can sit in India surrounded by, a very different world from that which he describes and enjoy the escapism that his writing represents. And so it goes.

But I realize that this is self-interested pleading because obviously, I am a product of the system, as you rightly point out. And I suppose one of the great problems with history is you can't establish the counterfactual. It's impossible to know what India might look like had the British not been there.

Can I take you to those more structural things? The fact that India speaks the world's language, the fact that India has a centralized unitary government, that it is a democracy, how much has India's way in the world been made easier by those legacies? I think highly contested.

Now there's no question that some of this has been useful to us in the English language, certainly, but I want to stress, and I think you alluded to this in your introduction, that all the things that apologists for empire like to claim credit for, the English language, parliamentary democracy, the rule of law, the railways, you know, the, all the classic clichés, and for that matter, even tea.

Every single one of these things was brought in by the British to advance their control of India, to enhance their profits, and serve their interests. Not one was intended principally to benefit Indians.

And the fact that when they left, they couldn't take this with them, and we were able then to turn them around to purposes the original, people who introduced them would never have intended, is something that I think is more to the credit of the Indian nationalists than to the Englishmen. I'm happy to go through the examples you mentioned. You take language, for example.

Mm. The British had no intention of imparting education to the masses of Indians and made it very clear they weren't going to spend the money doing that. And indeed, as late as 1930, the American historian Will Durant observed that the entire budget of the British for education in India from the nursery level to the highest university levels amounted to less than half the high school budget of the state of New York.

And that was for the entire country of India with, at that point, 10 times as many people as the state of New York. The fact is that the British were not interested in investing in education, and even the English language was brought in just to educate a narrow class of sort of interpreters between the governors and the governed. People who would help the British by constituting a Mm.

Between them and the dirty masses whom they ruled. I mean, that was very much the attitude. Macaulay actually said this in his notorious Minute on Education India, where he said that we need to create a class of Indians, Indian in skin and color, but English in opinions and tastes and morals and in intellect.

That was his exact, those were his exact words. And it was to serve their purposes. Now of course, Indians then used English to open up another world of ideas, often very radical and critical ideas, and ideas that eventually made English a language of Indian nationalism.

Our first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, wrote his classic, The Discovery of India, in English. So an Indian nationalist discovered India in English, as it were. But that was our, if you like, change of what the British had intended to do.

Democracy, and you mentioned political unity. Mm. Well, political unity, is the one that the British point to with pride, that they came into a bunch of warring principalities- That's right. And they made a country out of it.

Not so. For 2,000 years before the British ever set foot on India, there had been a very clear sense of a common civilizational unity and an aspiration on the part of monarchs to consolidate that territorially. Now obviously they couldn't. I mean, we had two, people who came very close.

There was the Mauryan Empire, Ashoka and Chandragupta, who, controlled about 90% of the subcontinent, including Afghanistan. And then the Mughals, particularly between Akbar and Aurangzeb, they controlled about 95% of the subcontinent. And that was, that was the extent.

But the fact that everyone tried to do it, aspired to do it, and failed in trying, shows that if the British hadn't succeeded, somebody else around the same time with the advantages of modern communications and so on would have. So political unity was not a British gift. Democracy had to be prised from the reluctant grasp of the British.

In fact, the history of the advent of democracy in India, as I demonstrate in the book, is actually littered with the broken promises of English rulers who Promising responsible self-government and then sort of yanking it away, just when the time came for them to redeem their pledge. And the example after example of this until finally, a sort of more or less, democratic system.

I say more or less because the franchise was still limited by literacy and population, so it was not a majority of the people. But still, a franchise, a vote was offered to Indians properly for the first time in 1937. Before that, there'd been elections, but for example, in the 1920s, only one out of every 250 Indians had the vote.

Mm. So hardly a training ground for democracy. And and even then they did not allow people to vote for a national government. The national government was still the British headed by the Viceroy.

It was only provincial governments that Indians were allowed to form up to the Second World War. So given all of that, it's very difficult to point, and as I say, the British did a great deal to undermine Indian unity. When the Indian National Congress was established in 1885 by a well-meaning Scotsman with various Indian supporters, it was truly, a body the British could have easily co-opted.

It was a bunch of largely Anglophile lawyers who wrote decorous petitions and held very civilized meetings in which they asked the English to give them the rights of Englishmen. But the British saw even this as a threat.

So far from welcoming it as a first step towards responsible self-government for Indians, what the British did instead was try and undermine the Congress to the extent of helping encourage the setting up of a rival body 20 years later, the Muslim Mm. Which was set up explicitly on sectarian lines, with the British prodding them to say, "Look, these people will only represent the interests of the Hindu majority."

Now, you look at their first 20 presidents, and they're Christians, Muslims, Parsis, as well as Hindus, and there's even an Irish woman, an Irish Catholic. Annie Besant, the, of the Theosophist movement. So it was a very open, very inclusive, body, but the British had no intention of cooperating with it, had no intention of taking it serious.

And these are not retrospective judgments. I've quoted, for example, a Sunday Times journalist from London who traveled in India in 1907, 1908, Henry Nevinson, who attended meetings of the Congress, met British official, officialdom, and recorded his horror at the way in which the British were denying, fair, due process and and fair rights to Indians.

So, all this was apparent at the time, and yet the British dragged it out as long as they could. So it's a bit rich, as I've said at Oxford, to, you know, arrest, maim, imprison, torture, deny rights to a people for 200 years, and then celebrate the fact that they're democratic at the end of it.

Let's talk food. You one of the, one of the great lines of the book is, "There's never been a famine in a democracy with a free press." one of the striking things that comes out of this book is the, is the widespread starvation that occurs in India during the first half of the 20th century. Can you talk about the famines and and what they did?

Absolutely. No, it really was a, was a horror show what the British did. And if there are any Irish people in the audience, this will resonate with them because they did the same thing in Ireland. The British had a compound of attitudes, at the time that they were ruling India.

The first was that one must not give charity because it encourages idleness. The second was the rather callous notion, but they justified it in Adam Smithian terms, that the free market must prevail.

So if there is a famine and the British government buys the only grain available to ship it off to London for the bread baskets of the East End, but the poor people left in India who are starving for food can't afford to buy it because the Brits have driven the price up, well, those are the rules of the free market. It's tough, but that's the way it's going to be.

Third was the Malthusian principle, that if the land cannot sustain the population that's trying to live off it, well, people must die. So they did. And the final thing, of course, was Victorian fiscal prudence.

Thou shall not spend money thou has not budgeted for. So with all of this put together, they refused to help people in famines, which was exactly the opposite of the Indian experience in the past, where whenever there was a drought, whenever there was a failure of a harvest, the rich people, the aristocracy, the local kings and princes and so on, all came in to help people.

And there are no recorded instances of people just dying of famines until the British came along. In fact, there are actually accounts by British observers in the late 18th century during the first devastating British-made famine in Bengal, which wiped out a third of the entire population, saying that in the nearby states still ruled by Indians, because Britain hadn't conquered all of India yet, people were being helped.

And here in British India, they were not being helped as a matter of policy. Now, in Ireland, they did the same thing, which led to the great potato blight of 1841 and the, and the deaths of people. But the Irish at least had the option of jumping onto boats and sailing off to America.

We didn't have that option. So we stayed in India and died. And the worst example that one can come to is Winston Churchill and the Second World War.

Winston Churchill personally took decisions to allow people to die while his government acquired all the grain in Bengal that they could get, not to feed the war effort as was, as was wrongly suggested, but to enhance buffer stocks, reserve stocks, in the event of a likely future invasion of Greece and Yugoslavia.

And Australian ships were docking at the Port of Calcutta laden with wheat, and Churchill was personally deciding, either he or his odious Paymaster General, Lord Cherwell, acting on his instructions, to not allow those ships to, disembark their cargo, but to continue to sail on to Europe. When officials in India wrote to him saying, "People are dying. They're literally dying on the streets," he said, "Well, I hate Indians.

They're a beastly people with a beastly religion. It's all their fault anyway for breeding like rabbits." These are all exact quotes verbatim.

And when one particular memo reached the prime minister's desk about the unconscionable number of deaths, it ended up being 4.3 million, all Churchill could bring himself to do was to write in the margin somewhat peevishly, "Why hasn't Gandhi died yet?" Now, this is the man whom the British expect us to hail as an apostle of freedom and democracy. He has as much blood on his hands as the worst genocidal dictators of the 20th century.

So then remedy. We're here at the Antidote Festival. What is the antidote to a, to a historical wrong as you've laid out here? The Oxford Union debate was on the subject of reparations.

Is it, is it fiscal? Is it political? Is it, is it an apology? Where do, where do we go from here?

Well, you know, I got saddled with this reparations thing 'cause that was the topic the Oxford Union students chose, Ben. And the fact is that, even in that debate I said that you can't really quantify, the value, of the damage done by the British. How do you put a price on these 35 million Indians who died totally unnecessary deaths in those famines?

How do you measure the lives and livelihoods of the weavers whose thumbs were chopped off so they couldn't weave again when their looms were smashed? In case the looms were rebuilt, they no longer could ply their craft. How could you measure all of this?

I mean, the financial drainage has been calculated. In fact, an Englishman called William Digby in 1901 published a 900-page book, which I have on my laptop, in which he worked out down to the last penny and and shilling, how much the British had each year repatriated to England from India.

But I mean, it was after that that India spent the equivalent of £80 billion sterling in supporting the First World War, and so on. So those numbers have long since been overtaken. So I don't want to go the financial route.

In that debate I said even a symbolic £1 a year for the next 200 years will do it, because the larger point is not finance, but reparations. But atonement, I beg your pardon. Is not reparations, but atonement.

Why do I say that? Because, reparations, any sum of money that would be payable would not be credible, and any sum that would be credible, that would take into account all this Would not be payable. Would not be payable.

So why go that down, go down that route? Atonement, however, is necessary. I think all sinners need to atone.

And Mahatma Gandhi, in fact, is the one who wrote to a viceroy that he considers British rule in India to be a sin. And for him that was a very strong word because a sin was. But at the same time, he had the very Hindu notion that you must hate the sin and not the sinner.

So once the sin was over, once the Union Jack had come down, there was no more any rancor towards the sinner because he was no longer a sinner. However, what about the past sins? And and my answer is, first of all, well, there are three things I'd like to suggest to the British, and indeed have been suggesting to the British.

The first is I think they should teach unvarnished colonial history in their schools. There's this very convenient historical amnesia in Britain today, as a result of which what's happening is that you can do an A level in history in Britain today without learning a line of colonial history.

Most people don't know what the British did to the extent that YouGov, which is a poll that often looks at young people's views in Britain, every year for the last few years. I've quoted one, but there's been another poll which is even worse, showing that a significant proportion of young English people actually are proud of the empire and would love to have it back.

They have no idea what they're proud of, so they've got to be taught. That's one thing. A link to that, I would say, is there needs to be more by way of memorials and museums. London is just absolutely covered with museums of various sorts, many of which are full of the products of theft from colonies.

They're sort of Chor Bazaar for the Indians in the Yeah. Masquerading as museums. But having said that, you know, you can, you can even find an Imperial War Museum in Mm.

But you can't find an imperial museum, a colonialism museum. There's no place for children, tourists, visitors to go to and see for themselves the whole picture of what was done by the British and their foreign rule. And the third thing.

Oh, by the way, there's even a statue to the animals that aided the war effort in Britain. Right in the heart of London, I've driven past it, and there is no statue to the 1.3 million Indians who gave of their own and won, an improbable number of Victoria Mm.

And so on in the First World War, and the 1.7 million Indians who fought in the Second World War, no statue to them. The animals, however, are commemorated. The British really have to recognize, the debt that they owe.

Finally, you mentioned an apology. To me that is important, and I've got the perfect opportunity for it looming right now. On the 13th of April, 2019 will be the centenary of what I consider the single worst Mm.

Of the British Empire, the Jallianwala Bagh massacre. The Amritsar massacre, some people call it. Not because of the numbers of people killed, the British actually killed 100,000 people in Delhi alone in putting down the revolts of 1857, but rather because of everything that accompanied it.

If you'll give me two minutes to explain.

It came at the end of the First World War, which even Mahatma Gandhi had supported the Indian war effort, and Indians had sent money, treasure, taxes which they could not afford, pack animals, rations, clothing, uniforms, carts, even rail lines ripped out of the ground to aid the war effort, in the hope that at the end of all of this there would be the grant of what the British had promised to the white Commonwealth, responsible self-government.

It never came. They betrayed the promise. And not only did they betray it, but they actually re-imposed wartime era prohibitions on freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of the press, and so on. Immediately protests broke out saying, "This is simply not what we were promised."

And the British, in effect, declared martial law. They didn't use the phrase, but they sent generals out to the various provinces to put down the unrest. In Amritsar, the second-largest town in Punjab, we had the arrival of Brigadier General Reginald Dyer.

And he got there and he proclaimed that people couldn't gather in groups of more than five and so on and so forth. But he'd completely failed to notice that this was the Punjabi spring festival of Baisakhi. And in a walled garden called Jallianwala Bagh, a large number of men, women, and children had gathered to commemorate the festival, completely unarmed.

He arrives there with a bunch of soldiers. He doesn't ask them what they're doing there and why they're there. He doesn't even take a look at who they are.

He doesn't fire a warning shot. He just orders his soldiers to shoot into the bodies of the unarmed, wailing, soon stampeding men, women, and children. And as they try to flee this garden, this walled garden, there's only one gate, one exit.

And he stations his soldiers right there, as he himself explains later, because that makes these people easier targets. 1,650 rounds were fired, and he boasted proudly not one bullet was wasted. The British admitted to 379 killed and the rest injured.

The Indians claim the figures are much higher. Whatever the truth was, it was a horrendous massacre. At the end of it, he bars the gate shut and doesn't allow even the relatives of the dead, the dying, and the wounded to tend to their dear ones.

They are forced to lie for 24 hours in the hot April sun. Many of whom die because of that. On top of that, he forces Indians to crawl on their bellies on a narrow lane nearby.

And if they so much as lift their heads, their heads are bashed in by British staves. At the end of all of this, of course, there is outrage. The House of Commons condemns him.

The House of Lords promptly passes a resolution praising him for what he had done. And the British take out a collection to reward him. And they raise the equivalent of a quarter of a million pound sterling in today's money, which is presented to him with a bejeweled sword.

And that flatulent voice of Victorian imperialism, Rudyard Kipling, hails him as the man who saved India. Now this, that entire package, the betrayal at the beginning, the cruelty of the massacre, the racism and indifference to Indian suffering that followed, the justification and reward, you take the whole thing together, and to me it makes it the single most fitting act that is worthy of an apology.

And if somebody on the centenary of that event, somebody from the royal family, because everything was done in the name of the crown, were to come to Amritsar and go down on their knees at Jallianwala Bagh and beg forgiveness or express remorse, apologize for this sin, I think it would have a remarkably cleansing effect and perhaps wash away much of the wrongs that were done in the preceding 200 years.