A rose-tinted Raj?

The tribute Prime Minister Manmohan Singh paid to the benefits of the British Empire is yet more evidence that our leaders are being bitten by the bug of post-colonialism. This development is not entirely unhealthy. It is leading to an examination of some of the simplistic premises that have governed our attitudes towards the past. And it was a matter of time before the taboo of officially praising the British Empire was also lifted.

But we should wonder whether the PM did not go too far in extolling the benefits of Empire. Admittedly, he was being gracious to his hosts at Oxford University. Nevertheless, the Indian national movement had always found a way of being gracious to the British. It had acknowledged that the per capita contribution of the land of Shakespeare, Locke, Newton and Darwin, to world civilisation was probably unrivalled. But extolling the British did not entail extolling colonial rule. For all the elan with which the British ruled India, there is absolutely no denying the fact that India experienced virtually no economic growth for almost two hundred years under its rule. They bequeathed to us a crushing legacy of poverty and famine that has taken years to unravel. One does not have to be an admirer of pre-British India to recognise that this interregnum scarred India profoundly.

Much is made of the fact that the British bequeathed a series of remarkable institutions to India. It would be churlish to deny their inventiveness in institution building. But it would be equally distorting to conclude that these institutions were anything more than an unmixed blessing. The state that the British bequeathed to India was not designed either for development or for unleashing entrepreneurial energies. Reexamining our prejudices about the past is entirely desirable, but substituting a one-sided myth by another one-sided myth is not.