Looking back to the era of darkness
“At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom. A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance…”
This is the speech given by Jawaharlal Nehru, a man who spent almost 9 years of his life in jail for a free India. He later became the first Prime Minister of India.
This speech captures the moment when, on August 15th, 1947, Indians felt free again. It was the moment when we became the writers of our own destiny. The dark old ages had ended, and a new beginning was awaiting India.
The departing British had left 70% of Indians below the poverty line and 84% completely illiterate. Although erasing these injustices has been difficult, India has managed to lift hundreds of millions out of poverty and has a literacy rate of 77%.
While it is important to discuss modern India, I’m going to focus on what India went through for nearly 2 centuries, with the help of some historical records and the book “An era of darkness” by Shashi Tharoor.
There are several people who strongly believe that British rule empowered India, and is the only reason why India is what it is today. They argue that the modern governments of India has done nothing better and have failed in providing the Indian citizens.
However, even if the current government may have fallen short, it cannot be compared to the British Raj. Thanks to democracy and India's own leaders, most of the horrors of the British Raj are not seen in modern India.
This does not mean that the British did nothing good in India. They built railways, banned Sati (an inhumane practice where a widow was burned alive with her dead husband), promoted widow remarriage, tried to remove child marriages and untouchability, and initiated several other beneficial things for India.
“But one set of failings do not invalidate another….History, in any case, cannot be reduced to some sort of game of comparing misdeeds in different eras; each period must be judged in itself and for its own successes and transgressions.”
— An excerpt from An era of darkness.
Industrialization or deindustrialization?
“Britain’s Industrial Revolution was built on the destruction of India’s thriving manufacturing industries. Textiles were an emblematic case in point: the British systematically set about destroying India’s textile manufacturing and exports, substituting Indian textiles by British ones manufactured in England. Ironically, the British used Indian raw material and exported the finished products back to India and the rest of the world, the industrial equivalent of adding insult to injury.”
— An excerpt from the book.
The Indian textiles industry was a thriving market, and one of the reasons why India's GDP accounted for 24.4 percent of the world's GDP, while the entire Europe combined was at 23.3 percent.
One of the most popular Indian textiles was chintz, mostly recognized for its floral prints. It was considered the most desirable design for the European elites in the 17th and 18th centuries.
The destruction of these artisanal industries caused millions to move to agriculture, which resulted in them becoming landless serfs.
A combination of these anti-Indian industries made India a poor country, with only 4 percent of the global GDP in 1947, the year India gained independence.
The liberators of Indian women?
As mentioned before, Britain criminalized Sati, took steps to erase child marriages, increased the age of consent, and promoted widow remarriage. They also focused on decreasing the rate of female infanticide, to the point where India had the highest sex ratio of 972 in 1901 during British rule!
However, the British were both the emancipators and oppressors of Indian women.
In 1864, a cantonment act was passed which enabled and regulated prostitution in Cantonments. For 1000 soldiers in a cantonment, only 10-15 women were assigned. These women were subjected to inhumane forms of STD testing, not for their own well-being, but for the soldiers who were not supposed to get these tests because they were considered "too much" for them.
Rape laws were enacted in a way that the British were not charged with rape. British judges created requirements that were harsh on the victim. The entire burden of proving the rape was placed on the victim while the accused had to prove nothing. As a result, victims of rape were unable to obtain justice and some did not even file charges out of fear of this "second-rape."
The British also attempted to erase India’s third gender (transgender).
What the British did not understand, they tried to destroy.
“Indian history and mythology reveal no example of prejudice against sexual difference. On the contrary, in the great epic the Mahabharata, the gender-changing Shikhandi killed Bhishma. The concept of the Ardhanareeshwara imagined God as half man and half woman,….Transgender people were recognized as a napunsakh gender in Vedic and Puranic literature and were given due importance in India throughout history (and even in the Islamic courts during the period of Mughal rule). The Jain texts recognized a broader concept of gender identity by speaking about the idea of a psychological sex being different from that of a ppsychological
— Another excerpt from the book.
They introduced several acts which attacked and criminalized Transgender and homosexual communities for even existing.
The bengal famines
Through a series of bad policies by the British government, Bengal, once the wealthiest part of India experienced one of the worst famines known to history.
While, the rice production had been stagnant for a few years in Bengal, the production with the help of some government plans could have been enough to feed the bengal population, but it wasn't seen as priority by the British.
Will Durant, an American historian states:
“Behind all these as the fundamental source of the terrible famines in India, lies such merciless exploitation, such unbalanced exportation of goods, and such brutal collection of high taxes in the very midst of famine, that the starving peasants cannot pay what was asked for…American charity has often paid for the relief of famine in India while the government was collecting taxes from the dying.”
Will Durant also quotes an American theoligan, Dr. Charles Hall:
“The Indian starves [so] that India’s annual revenue may not be diminished by a dollar. 80 per cent of the whole population has been thrown back upon the soil because England’s discriminating duties have ruined practically every branch of native manufacture. We send shiploads of grain to India, but there is plenty of grain in India. The trouble is that the people have been ground down till they are too poor to buy it.”
An estimated 800,000 to 4 million Bengalis died due do the ill-effects of the famine.
Reportedly, when Churchill was asked to do something about the famine, he asked, "Why hasn't Gandhi died yet?" He also allegedly commented on the famine, saying, "The famine is their own fault for breeding like rabbits." These remarks are extremely disappointing, but not surprising given Churchill's prior statement about Indians: "I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.”
From Jallianwala Bagh massacre to the partitioning of India, India has gone through a dark past, a past that should be remembered.
