They also had, Tharoor tells us, perfected a policy of divide and rule, breaking treaties at will and making war and looting with impunity. Looted with impunityĮverything the British did in India, Tharoor asserts, was for their own benefit and never for that of the Indians. This is something, as his debate established, wildly popular in India. An indignant Tharoor even demands a token restitution and public apology from the British for all the harm they had caused India. In short, British rule was, according to Tharoor, an era of darkness for India, throughout which it suffered several manmade famines, wars, racism, maladministration, deportation of its people to distant lands and economic exploitation on an unprecedented scale. What India had to endure under them was outrageous humiliation on a humongous scale and sustained violence of a kind it had never experienced before. His book is, in fact, an expanded take on British exploitation of India that famously carried the day for Tharoor in an Oxford debate not too long ago.Īccording to Tharoor, there was nothing redeeming in British rule of our country. In it, he aggregates all the arguments required to establish that British colonial rule was an awful experience for Indians and he does so with a consummate debater’s skill.
An Era of Darkness, is one breathless read.
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