Contrary to the rose-tinted view of decolonisation, the end of British rule in India was marked by blunder and duplicity, writes Sean Ledwith The two dominant nation-states of South Asia will celebrate 70 years of independence on 14/15 August. The peoples of India and Pakistan will rightfully recall a vast movement of insurgency that climaxed in 1947 to throw off the yoke of two centuries of imperialist plunder by the British Empire.
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The celebration will be tempered by bitterness, however, at the price of their respective freedoms. The hitherto single state of India, as ruled by the British Raj, was torn in two amid ferocious communal violence that caused up to a million deaths and The dominant view for the apologists of empire is that partition was inevitable as the Hindu majority and the Muslim minority had proved themselves incapable of living together in an independent state without British supervision. The historical reality is that the sectarian divide that mutilated the fight for Indian independence had been consciously encouraged by the British for decades; and that the struggle to overthrow the Raj had witnessed numerous examples of multi-faith unity that could have averted the disaster of 1947. Thanks to the lasting influence of Richard Attenborough 1982 film Gandhimost in the West perceive the movement for independence as being led primarily by the Mahatma and his largely rural-based protest movement. Less well-known is the crucial impact of urban strikes by the Indian working class, alongside mutinies by soldiers and sailors that dealt the death blow to the Raj. Noxious nostalgia Alongside these misconceptions stands the prevalent notion that British rule in India was generally benevolent and somehow a nicer version of imperialism than that practised by other European powers. This rose-tinted nostalgia is still evident in the perception of the British ruling class regarding the former ‘Jewel in the Crown’of their lost global empire.
British Raj Queen Victoria
Joanna Lumley’s recent TV travelogue through India characteristically lamented the grinding poverty of millions in the country without acknowledging the direct. Likewise, Christopher Nolan’s recent film Dunkirk noticeably failed to recognise the. Most British people remain completely unaware of the appalling famines and massacres that took place throughout the two centuries of colonial rule.
The Raj India And The British
The imperialist airbrushing of history means the atrocities of British occupation, such as blowing rebels out of the mouths of cannon or Churchill allowing three million to starve in the middle of WWII, are virtually unknown outside India. Indian holocausts Britain’ssupposedly nicer version of imperialism was, in reality, founded on rapacious degradation and exploitation of the sub-continent. When the British, in competition with the French, started to make incursions into India in the eighteenth century, the country actually had a higher level of manufacturing development under the Mughal Empire than any European state. At the start of that century India was the world’s biggest economy, about ten times the size of Britain’s, and accounted for about a third of global GDP. The Mughal dynasty, however, was on a downward trajectory and ultimately fell prey to the machinations of British traders, most significantly in the notoriously corrupt form of the East India Company. Password: su: sorry. From the mid-1700s, the EIC initiated an asymmetric economic relationship that enriched the British and caused regression on the sub-continent. India’s thriving handloom industry of the pre-Raj era was systematically destroyed and the country was converted into a captive market for textiles from Britain’s own accelerating industrial revolution.
The generals and shareholders of the EIC forcibly took over the tax-raising powers of the Mughal princes and used them to accumulate vast profits for themselves and to plunge the countryside into extreme poverty. The British insistence in Bengal that the countryside be re-aligned to the production of cash crops caused a famine in 1770 that killed 10 million. Marxist historian Mike Davis has termed this and later similar events, the Late VictorianHolocausts,that have been Mutiny The Indian Mutiny of 1857 necessitated the winding up and the EIC and its replacement by direct rule by the British government, symbolised by the absurd declaration of Victoria as Empress of India in 1877 (a country she never set foot in).