An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India by Shashi Tharoor
I am told by a British-Indian friend that in a passionate public debate in London in 2015 on the merits or otherwise of my Oxford views, more than one speaker sought to discredit me in my absence (I was in India) on the grounds that I was a known aficionado of Wodehouse and the English language, who had even revived St Stephen’s College’s Wodehouse Society, the first of its kind in the world, and still served as patron of the London-headquartered (global) Wodehouse Society. The implication was that one cannot denounce British colonialism and celebrate the doyen of English humorists at the same time.
My critics could not have been more wrong. Yes, some have seen in Wodehouse’s popularity a lingering nostalgia for the Raj, the British empire in India. Writing in 1988, the journalist Richard West thought India’s Wodehouse devotees were those who hankered after the England of fifty years before (i.e. the 1930s): ‘That was the age when the English loved and treasured their own language, when schoolchildren learned Shakespeare, Wordsworth and even Rudyard Kipling… It was Malcolm Muggeridge who remarked that the Indians are now the last Englishmen. That may be why they love such a quintessentially English writer.’
Those lines are, of course, somewhat more fatuous than anything Wodehouse himself could ever write. Wodehouse is loved by Indians who loathe Kipling and detest the Raj and all its works. Indeed, despite a brief stint in a Hong Kong bank, Wodehouse had no colonial connection himself, and the Raj is largely absent from his books. (There is only one notable exception I can recall, in a 1935 short story, ‘The Juice of an Orange’: ‘Why is there unrest in India? Because its inhabitants eat only an occasional handful of rice. The day when Mahatma Gandhi sits down to a good juicy steak and follows it up with roly-poly pudding and a spot of Stilton, you will see the end of all this nonsense of Civil Disobedience.’) But Indians saw that the comment was meant to elicit laughter, not agreement.
(Mahatma Gandhi himself was up to some humorous mischief when, in 1947, far from sitting down to steak, he dined with the king’s cousin and the last viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, and offered him a bowl of home-made goat’s curd—perhaps from the same goat he took to England when he went to see the king in a loincloth! I reinvented the moment in my satirical The Great Indian Novel, only substituting a mango for the curd.)
If anything, Wodehouse was one British writer whom Indian nationalists could admire without fear of political incorrectness. Saroj Mukherji, née Katju, the daughter of a prominent Indian nationalist politician, remembers introducing Lord Mountbatten to the works of Wodehouse in 1948; it was typical that the symbol of the British empire had not read the ‘quintessentially English’ Wodehouse but that the Indian freedom fighter had.
Indeed, it is precisely the lack of politics in Wodehouse’s writing, or indeed of any other social or philosophic content, that made what Waugh called his ‘idyllic world’ so free of the trappings of Englishness, quintessential or otherwise. Whereas other English novelists burdened their readers with the specificities of their characters’ lives and circumstances, Wodehouse’s existed in a never-never land that was almost as unreal to his English readers as to his Indian ones. Indian readers were able to enjoy Wodehouse free of the anxiety of allegiance; for all its droll particularities, the world he created, from London’s Drones Club to the village of Matcham Scratchings, was a world of the imagination, to which Indians required no visa.
But they did need a passport, and that was the English language. English was undoubtedly Britain’s most valuable and abiding legacy to India, and educated Indians, a famously polyglot people, rapidly learned and delighted in it—both for itself, and as a means to various ends. These ends were both political (for Indians turned the language of the imperialists into the language of nationalism) and pleasurable (for the language granted access to a wider world of ideas and entertainments). It was only natural that Indians would enjoy a writer who used language as Wodehouse did—playing with its rich storehouse of classical precedents, mockingly subverting the very canons colonialism had taught Indians they were supposed to venerate (in a country ruled for the better part of two centuries by the dispensable siblings of the British nobility, one could savour lines like these: ‘Unlike the male codfish which, suddenly finding itself the parent of three million five hundred thousand little codfish, cheerfully resolves to love them all, the British aristocracy is apt to look with a somewhat jaundiced eye on its younger sons.’)
I am grateful, in other words, for the joys the English language has imparted to me, but not for the exploitation, distortion and deracination that accompanied its acquisition by my countrymen.
TEA WITHOUT SYMPATHY
Something similar can probably be said about those two great British colonial legacies (now that we have discredited democracy, the ‘rule of law’ and the railways as credible British claims): tea and cricket. Both, I freely confess, are addictions of mine, a personal tribute to the legacy of colonialism.
In an address to a joint session of the US Congress in 1985, the late Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi recalled, with a twinkle in his eye, the great affinities between the American Revolution and the Indian colonial experience. Cornwallis, after surrendering at Yorktown, triumphed in Bengal. And then, Gandhi added mischievously, ‘Indian tea stimulated your revolutionary zeal’.
He got a good laugh for the allusion to the Boston Tea Party. But he was wrong. In 1773, there was no Indian tea, at least none that was properly cultivated and traded. Tea was a Chinese monopoly, and the taxed tea the colonists tossed into Boston Bay came from Amoy, not Assam. Perhaps if it had been Indian tea, the American revolutionaries might have thought of a less wasteful method of protest.
It was the British who established Indian tea as a cultivated commodity. The story is interesting, and once again commercial motives came into play. The British ruled India but not China: rather than spending good money on the Chinese, they reasoned, why not grow tea in India? Their desire to end their dependence on Chinese tea led the British to invent agricultural espionage, as a secret agent, improbably enough named Robert Fortune, slipped into China in the early 1840s, during the chaos and confusion of the Opium War years, to procure tea plants for transplantation in the Indian Himalayas. But most of the thousands of specimens he sent to British India died, and the East India Company directors were left scratching their collective heads. The solution came by accident—when a wandering Briton discovered an Indian strain of tea growing wild in Assam, tested it in boiling water, tasted the results and realized he had struck gold: he had made tea.
That gave the British their own tea industry in India. Assam tea proved superior to the Chinese imports and more palatable to the British housewife. In the 1830s, the East India Company traded about 31.5 million lbs. (14 million kilograms) of Chinese tea a year; today India alone produces nearly 300 million kilograms. But even tea was not exempt from colonial exploitation: the workers laboured in appalling conditions for a pittance, while all the profits, of course, went to British firms. Early in the twentieth century, the remarkable anti-imperialist Sir Walter Strickland wrote bitterly in the preface to his now-out-of-print volume The Black Spot in the East: ‘Let the English who read this at home reflect that, when they sip their deleterious decoctions of tannin…they too are, in their degree, devourers of human flesh and blood. It is not the tea alone, but the impoverished blood of the slaves, devoid of its red seeds of life and vigour, that they are drinking.’
The British grew tea in India for themselves, not for the locals: the light, fragrant Darjeeling, the robust Assam, the heady Nilgiris tea, all reflected the soil, climate and geography of the respective parts of India for which they were named, but they were grown by Scottish planters (and picked by woefully underpaid Indian labourers) to be shipped to the mother country, where demand was strong. A modest quantity was retained for sale to the British in India; Indians themselves did not drink the tea they produced. It was only during the Great Depression of the 1930s—when demand in Britain dropped and British traders had to unload the
Full credit, then, to the British. And this time it is difficult to argue that one could have had extensive tea cultivation and a vast market for the product without colonization: certainly Indians hadn’t ever done it before the British. Even the name is a colonial legacy. The word ‘tea’, common to most European languages, is from the dialect of Amoy, from where much of Britain’s tea was shipped; but those who got their tea from Canton, like the Portuguese, and overland, like the Indians and the Arabs, call it by the Cantonese word ‘cha’. Almost every Indian language uses a variant of ‘cha’, including ‘chai’ and ‘chaya’; it is only the Anglophone Indians who speak of ‘tea’.
But before I end this section on tea, a small digression. Even as they gave us tea, the British were destroying something else. The British ruthlessly exploited the land for profit, while ruining it and decimating the wildlife it sheltered. The destruction of Indian forests and wildlife occurred at a galloping pace under colonialism. The forests were destroyed for three main reasons: to convert the land into commercial plantations, especially to grow tea; to make railway sleepers; and to export timber to England for the construction of English houses and furniture.
The British cut down the forests of the Nilgiris and Assam to grow tea, and ravaged the forests of Coorg to grow coffee. Tea was not the only villain in the ecological devastation of the Nilgiris; the British also brought in several exotic species like eucalyptus, pine and wattle to produce viscose, which was sent to the UK to be made into fabric. Unfortunately, plants like eucalyptus thirstily drink up the ground water; thanks to their plantations, the British converted the once lush tropical rainforests of the Nilgiris into a water-shortage area.
The same phenomenon occurred when the British forced Indian farmers to grow poppy in order to extract opium, which involved cutting down vast areas of forests in some parts of north India. In Assam, for instance, by the mid-nineteenth century, large numbers of trees were chopped down since the opium poppy could not ripen and flower in their shade. This practice of slashing trees to protect the poppy indirectly almost wiped out some of India’s most magnificent predators. The British wanted more land to be used for commercial crops, which would bring them revenue, so they put a bounty on the head of each predator, successfully erasing tigers, cheetahs, leopards and lions from vast parts of India. The tiger and leopard survived, albeit in reduced numbers, because they hid in the jungle. But the lion needed vast open spaces and could not survive—except in the one corner of the country, in Gujarat, where an Indian prince, the Nawab of Junagadh, maintained a private lion sanctuary where hunting was permitted for his invitees only. This saved the Asiatic Lion to some extent—but this majestic animal, of whom several thousand flourished before the British came to India, was down to fewer than a hundred when the Empire ended.
By destroying the forests, the British also broke the spirit of the aboriginal people or ‘tribals’ who lived in and utilized the natural resources of the forests. Unfortunately, their ownership of forest lands was traditional rather than documented; since they could not claim ownership in a form the British recognized, they were dispossessed and displaced, and attempts to maintain their hunter-gatherer lifestyle resulted in them being treated as poachers and therefore criminals.
At the same time, the British were able to elevate the killing of wild animals into a high-status sport, one for the whites and the privileged Indian elite, and an activity whose glamour was enhanced by the access it provided the latter into British ruling circles (rather like golf might do today). Hunting in the British period became a monster sport; countless numbers of animals were killed, irretrievably transforming the ecology of many areas. For example, Madras was once called Puliyur, which means the town of tigers and leopards (the Tamil word ‘puli’ is used for both tiger and leopard). The British killed every tiger and leopard in this area, so that not even one was left in Madras or any of the plains of Tamil Nadu. The term Puliyur has lost its meaning, and is now largely forgotten.
Puliyur may no longer have tigers, which are hanging on precariously elsewhere in the subcontinent, but the British still drink Indian tea. In more ways than one: Tata, the Indian business conglomerate, now owns Tetley, the venerable British tea firm. So perhaps, in the ubiquitous references to ‘chai’ everywhere in the country, and in the milky, sweetened cups of tea that Indians thrust on every visitor, it is we who have appropriated this colonial legacy and made it our own.
The story gets a little more complicated. Tea, like other commodities, has been suffering a decline in prices, and exports are dwindling; many tea plantations, faced with rising wages and collapsing profits, are threatening to close down. The most expensive Indian tea, Castleton, was sold for over 6,000 rupees a kilo in 1991 ($231 at the then-prevailing exchange rate); the buyers were Japanese. The new record was set in 2012, when the price hit 7,200 rupees a kilo (but that meant it was down to $120 as the rupee had weakened). Castleton is the champagne of teas: other Indian teas do not fare a fraction as well. Internationally, Indian tea is competing for export markets with inferior teas from such unlikely sources as Argentina, Kenya and Malawi. But then again—if Argentina could grow tea without the British having colonized them first, couldn’t India have done so as well?
So when the first Indian prime minister who had served as a chaiwallah (helping his father sell tea at a railway station platform), Narendra Modi, addressed the US Congress in 2016, he sprinkled his speech with humour, but unlike his predecessor thirty-one years earlier, did not breathe a word about tea. At a time when the world commodity markets are down and Indian tea producers are clamouring for relief, the Indian prime minister must have realized that tea is no longer a joking matter.
THE INDIAN GAME OF CRICKET
Cricket is, of course, the only sport in the world that breaks for tea (and for many amateurs, tea is the highlight of the experience). I have often thought that cricket is really, in the sociologist Ashis Nandy’s phrase, an Indian game accidentally discovered by the British. Everything about the sport seems suited to the Indian national character: its rich complexity, the infinite possibilities and variations possible with each delivery, the dozen different ways of getting out, are all rather like Indian classical music, in which the basic laws are laid down but the performer then improvises gloriously, unshackled by anything so mundane as a written score. The glorious uncertainties of the game echo ancient Indian thought: Indian fatalists instinctively understand that it is precisely when you are seeing the ball well and timing your fours off the sweet of the bat that the unplayable shooter can come along and bowl you. It is almost, as has also been observed, a pastime in which the Bhagavad Gita is performed in the guise of a Victorian English morality play.
A country where a majority of the population still consults astrologers and believes in the capricious influence of the planets can well appreciate a sport in which an ill-timed cloudburst, a badly-prepared pitch, a lost toss of a coin or the sun in the eyes of a fielder can transform the outcome of a game. Even the possibility that five tense, exciting, hotly-contested and occasionally meandering days of cricket can still end in a draw seems derived from Indian philosophy, which accepts profoundly that in life the journey is as important as the destination.
No wonder cricket has seized the national imagination of India as no other sport has. Our cricketers occupy a place in the pantheon rivalled only by gods and Bollywood stars. The performances of our heroes are analysed with far more passion than any political crisis; selectoral sins of commission and omission, especially the latter, can bring teeming cities to a grinding halt. In no other country, I dare say, does a sport so often command the front pages of the leading newspapers. And why
Cricket first came to India with decorous English gentlemen idly pursuing their leisure; it took nearly a century for the ‘natives’ to learn the sport, and then they played it in most un-English ways. I remember being taken by my father to my first ever Test match, in Bombay in late 1963, when a much weaker English side than the present one was touring. I shall never forget the exhilaration of watching India’s opening batsman and wicketkeeper, Budhi Kunderan, smite a huge six over midwicket, follow it soon after with another blow that just failed to carry across the rope, and then sky a big shot in a gigantic loop over mid-on. As it spiralled upwards Kunderan began running; when the ball was caught by an English fielder, he hurled his bat in the air, continued running, caught it as it came down, and ran into the pavilion. I was hooked for life.
India has always had its Kunderans, but it has also had its meticulous grafters, its plodders, its anarchists and its stoics: a society which recognizes that all sorts of people have their place recognizes the value of variety in its cricket team as well. Cricket reflects and transcends India’s diversity: the Indian team has been led by captains from each of its major faiths, Hindus, Muslims, Parsis, Christians and a colourful Sikh. A land divided by caste, creed, colour, culture, cuisine, custom and costume is united by a great conviction: cricket.