Western opinion shapers often have a mistaken sense of world history since they tend to look at it from the coloniser’s prism. They labour under the belief that the colonial and imperialist rule greatly benefitted the colonised subjects by offering them the fruits of the industrial revolution and bringing them to “civilisation”. Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson is one such individual who believes India’s civilisation is not millennia old, but just over three centuries old and a gift that Britain bequeathed India when it left in 1947.
In his bid to rant against the current US government and emphasise its numerous failures, most notably the bungled pullout from Afghanistan, Carlson sang paeans to the former English monarch, Queen Elizabeth II, who breathed her last on Thursday, at 96. Lavishing praises on Elizabeth II, Carlson slammed her critics highlighting how England left behind a “civilisation” in India when they quit in 1947 while rubbing it in the spectacular US failure while abandoning Afghanistan.
“When the U.S. government withdrew from Afghanistan after 20 years, we left behind airstrips, shipping containers and guns. When the British pulled out of India, they left behind an entire civilization, a language, a legal system, schools, churches and public buildings, all of which are still in use today. Here’s the train station the English built in Bombay, for example. There’s nothing like that in Washington, DC right now, much less in Kabul or Baghdad,” said Carlson, enthusing about the British rule in India that authentic and unbiased historians say was among the darkest periods endured by the country.
He further continued, “Today, India is far more powerful than the UK, the nation that once ruled it and yet, after 75 years of independence, has that country produced a single building as beautiful as the Bombay train station that the British colonialists built? No, sadly, it has not. Not one.”
Now, that’s pretty presumptuous of Carlson to say India has not built a single building as beautiful as the Mumbai Train station. As author Margaret Wolfe Hungerford rightly noted, “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”. A colonial slave will always drool over buildings and other establishments built by the British, overlooking what the natives built after attaining independence. And to Carlson’s chagrin, India has built many magnificent structures post-independence. The Lotus Temple in Delhi, the Vidhana Soudha in Bengaluru, Auroville Dome in Puducherry, and many more. The recently built ‘Statute of Unity’ speaks volumes of infrastructural strides made by India in the years since its independence.
While it is Carlson’s personal choice to slaver over buildings made by the British before India’s independence, what needs to be contested and opposed is his mistaken belief that the British were on an altruist expedition in India, with “civilising” the indigenous masses being their primary object of imperialist ambitions.
Racism, economic exploitation, and unabashed loot define the “civilisation” that the British imparted to India
Contrary to what Carlson would have his watchers believe, Britishers in India were guided by the sole aim of squeezing the country dry. In fact, they left India in 1947 not as an act of benevolence as people like Carlson and other perennial sycophants of the British continue to perpetuate, but because remaining in India had become untenable for them, especially in the wake of the losses borne in World War II and Britain’s growing reluctance to grapple with Indian independence movement that was beginning to assume dangerous proportions.
As per conservative estimates, the Britishers looted over 45 trillion dollars during 190 years of their imperial rule in India. In the 18th century, when Britain began seizing Indian territories by fuelling inter-religious feuds and exploiting societal fault lines, India contributed approximately a quarter of the world’s GDP. When they left in 1947, India’s GDP share was less than 1 per cent of the world’s GDP. As Indian politician and author Shashi Tharoor poignantly notes in his seminal book “An Era of Darkness”, Britain’s Industrial revolution was built on the destruction of India’s thriving manufacturing industries.
If one considers the amount of wealth that was repatriated to England during those gloomy years of slavery, the value comes out to be close to 14 million pounds every year for 190 years, besides the attendant British inequities & racial transgressions endured by Indians for those woeful years. It is pretty rich of Carlson and apologists of colonialism to clthat the democracy was the positive outcome for the Indians, and that the British rule imparted “civilisation” to what they considered as a nation of unwashed and perpetually squabbling masses. Britishers created deep fissures in the society, some of which exist even today, in their bid to wrench as much wealth as possible from Indians.
Britishers ruled India & Indians, but most positions in the government were reserved only for Britishers. When eminent Indians like Dadabhai Naroji pointed out the treachery and demanded greater autonomy, the British Raj conceded initially but the decision to grant Indians a say in their self-government was merely an eyewash meant to contain then simmering outrage against their inequities and atrocious rule. After the outrage died down, the British, through subterfuge, accumulated all the decision-making power with themselves.
The roles extended to Indians were at best frivolous and at worse spineless. It is one thing, to empower the masses with providing opportunities of ruling themselves and another thing, to duplicitously stof them off their power by passing a legislation superseding their roles & responsibilities by bestowing their heads with supreme powers to annul any legislation passed by the lower rung Indians.
Apologists of the British empire like to claim that the British brought the Railways in India. What they conveniently hide is the fact that the railways was introduced in India for the transportation of goods and personnel across the hinterland and to aide the mercantilist goals of the East India Company. As historians point out, the perception that Indians should be grateful to the British for starting Railways is deeply flawed as the English had their own selfish reasons to bring the Railways in India. The purpose of the Railways was to serve the British to extract raw materials, goods, and minerals from the rural India that were hitherto inaccessible.
In his book, Tharoor mentioned about how Indian passengers and employees working for the Railways had to face racism from their British counterparts. Indians, he wrote, were never offered the posts of ticket collectors or station masters, which were reserved only for the Europeans. While the Europeans travelled in relative luxury, Indians were consigned to the horrendous third class with wooden benches but were charged the highest passenger rates anywhere in the world at that time. By contrast, the British companies who were shipping freight on the railways, paid the lowest freight rates anywhere in the world.
The Britishers also stole the much-vaunted Kohinoor diamond from India and spirited it away to England, where it was set in the platinum Crown created for the British monarch. The story of its thievery with laced with subterfuge, immorality, and cruelty. The diamond was taken away from the treasury of the Sikh Empire by Lord Dalhousie, the Governor General of India in 1849, when Duleep Singh, son of Maharaja Ranjit Singh, was 11 years old. The British took the diamond by force and peddled a false narrative that it was gifted by the king to the Queen.
In addition to this, Great Britain is also responsible for engineering the Bengal famine in 1943, when three million people died due to starvation or malnutrition. The Bengal famine of 1943 was not a result of a severe drought but it was caused by a complete failure of the policy of the then-British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who diverted essential food rations to Greece and other European countries even when they did not need it while people in Bengal continued to die of starvation.
The resilience of Indian civilisation and its millennia-old ethos helped power India’s rise, not British benevolence of “civilising” the colonised
If that’s the definition of “civilisation”, Carlson must enrol himself in a school rather than using his bully’s pulpit and propagating a deeply skewed and bastardised version of history.
Despite being economically exploited for over two centuries, suffering social and religious feuds spawned by the British, enduring racist atrocities, and oppression of the poor with crippling taxes, inducing famines and expropriating indigenous resources and precious jewels, India did not harbour any ill feelings toward its former coloniser after it attained independence. Neither has she demanded any reparation or compensation from Great Britain for two centuries of atrocities meted out on her. Instead, it continues to treat England as a partner nation in an increasingly intertwined world.
It is India’s millennia-old civilisational ethos that prizes forgiveness over vengeance, collective growth over bitter resentment, and the sanctity of life over materialistic growth, which lifted it out of the abyss that Britain had left it and subsequently propelled the country to being the 5th largest economy in the world, in just over 75 years after its independence. England did not leave behind any “civilisation” to India, it was India’s civilisational resilience that powered her growth despite suffering two centuries of cruelly oppressive British rule.
