Reading notes : An Era of Darkness - The British Empire in India By Dr Shashi Tharoor

First and the foremost, I like several of my friends (with whom I had the chance to discuss this topic), always learned history at school with the sole purpose of scoring and getting a higher GPA. Having pursued an engineering degree,  subjects like History and Social sciences remained a mere collection of evanescing  reminiscences which were never solid enough to truly realize my home country’s history. When this author asked a British media news anchor this question, it came down as a slap on my face honestly “How will you appreciate where you are going, if you don’t know where you’ve come from?” Reading works like “Sapiens” by Prof. Yuval Noah Harari and this book are my efforts to fathom the evolution of my home land which is the most promising countries of 21^st century, India. Out of 1.3 billion Indians, still about 6 million older adults have memories of the colonial Raj, the author claims.

I would suggest all those who are interested in truly realizing and knowing the history, to read this book. I think there is still value in reading this book for those of you who had special interest in history and learned it as part of school curriculum not just for the sake of scoring in history tests. The reason is extensive research based facts presented in this book and the vast area of topics covered in this book like Agriculture, arts, press, literature, education, industrialization, shipping etc etc.

What struck me the most from author's stirring oration at Oxford(which and the interest it elicited makes him write this book and made me read this one) and also enlisted in the book is the following. A retrospective vs current fact sheet in terms of Share of global GDP is the most revealing and irrefutable argument of the depredations of the British Raj and India's ability to recover and regain like the mythological Greek bird Phoenix.

• 1 CE - 33% (India) vs UK, France and Germany(3%)
• 1700 - 25% (India) vs UK, France and Germany(11%)

At colonial empire's hay days

• 1870 - 12.5% (India) vs UK, France and Germany(22%)
• 1913 - 9% (India) vs UK, France and Germany(22.5%)
• 1950 - 4% (almost after British left India)

Per Statisticstimes.com, the latest figures are

• 2016 - 2.99% (India) vs UK (3.52%)

In terms of GDP growth, this Economist article is more than an indication of what India means to the world in terms of development now and Britain is nowhere in this discussion.

https://www.economist.com/news/economic-and-financial-indicators/21654018-world-gdp

Each and every incident and the associated facts presented in the book were revealing to me and below are a short list only

• -          India’s shipping capabilities
• -          Colonial Raj’s role in allowing and encouraging Pakistan – India partition
• -          Devastating famines that India suffered esp. the Bengal famine
• -          Winston Churchill’s attitude and atrocities towards India (I have been a great admirer of Churchill and used to savor his speeches and been a regular subscriber to https://www.winstonchurchill.org/, now what remains is severe disrespect)
• -          Fact that Travancore government first introduced free primary education (perhaps is this why Kerala one of the widely educated state and our Kanyakumari district is held high on literacy rates?)
• -          “loot” is a Hindi word and here’s the Oxford Dictionary anglicized version
• https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/loot

Being a Candian-Indian and being in Canada for the last decade, I shamefully failed to notice Canadian governments apology to Indians after 102 years of the Komagata Maru incident where Canada refused entry to the 300 wish-to-be immigrants. Followed by an informal apology in the year 2008 by the then PM Stephen Harper, in May 2016 Prime Minister Justin Trudeau rose in the House of commons to announce ““Mr. Speaker, today I rise in this House to offer an apology on behalf of the government of Canada, for our role in the Komagata Maru incident,” Trudeau said.  “But Canada’s government was, without question, responsible for the laws that prevented these passengers from immigrating peacefully and securely. For that, and for every regrettable consequence that followed, we are sorry.”

I can’t agree more, we need more than an apology from the current beneficiaries of the “the Great Colonial Loot”. I have now added this to my bucket list as exhibit of the mindset of reprisal “Owning a Jaguar” – a currently glowing symbol of how an Indian business conglomerate can salvage a British enterprise as an act of Salvage but not as an act of depredation.