[Editor’s note: This article is the first of a two-part series on the exploitation, economic drain, and cultural suppression of India by the British Raj. In this part, we focus on the litany of crimes against humanity committed by Britain in India, detailing the severe atrocities and injustices inflicted during colonial rule. The second part will discuss the case for reparations, examining the legal and moral grounds for Britain to compensate India for the immense damages caused. Stay tuned for a comprehensive exploration of why reparations are not only justified but necessary for addressing these historical wrongs.]
- British colonial rule in India was marked by severe exploitation, economic drain, and oppression, contradicting the narrative of colonial benevolence.
- The introduction of railways and modern institutions primarily served British interests, facilitating resource extraction and leading to widespread poverty and famines.
- English education and legal systems were tools for entrenching colonial authority, creating a loyal intermediary class, and suppressing indigenous culture and dissent.
- Atrocities committed under British rule, including massacres and manufactured famines, need acknowledgment, and justice for the millions who suffered must be pursued.
- The glorified view of British colonialism obscures its brutal realities, which must be confronted to understand the true impact on India’s history and society.
Most Westerners, and even some Indians, consider British colonial rule in India as “having been good for the natives.” The railways, English education, laws, institutions, and democracy are often cited as evidence of colonial benevolence that “made India what it is today.” However, this narrative is a carefully crafted falsehood that obscures the brutal realities of the British exploitation and oppression of India.
Far from being the paragon of benevolence, the British Raj was responsible for unspeakable atrocities that devastated the Indian subcontinent. It orchestrated a systematic drain of India’s wealth, leading to widespread poverty and famine. The introduction of railways and modern institutions primarily served British economic interests, facilitating the extraction of resources and the consolidation of colonial control. While often praised, the introduction of English education was designed to create a class of intermediaries loyal to the British Crown. The legal and administrative systems established were tools of oppression, serving to entrench colonial authority and suppress dissent.
This false narrative needs to be vociferously countered. The atrocities committed under British rule, including massacres, manufactured famines, and cultural suppression, must be acknowledged and those responsible held accountable. Justice needs to be served for the millions of Indians who were treated as less than human, impoverished, humiliated, and killed or left to die without a pang of conscience.
While this article focuses on the damage inflicted by British colonial rule, it is important to recognize that other European colonizers, especially the French and Portuguese, were equally inhuman in their treatment of India. Additionally, the invasions and rule by Muslim conquerors were just as devastating, if not more so. Only by acknowledging the full extent of these historical atrocities can the true impact on India be understood and the false narrative of colonial benevolence dismantled.
Exposing Colonial Cruelty
To illustrate the dire situation in India, we will rely heavily on the well-known American historian Will Durant’s eyewitness account. Durant visited India in 1930 after extensively studying civilizations, eager to experience its ancient culture. What he saw shocked him so deeply that he paused his writing project to expose the suffering in India. After returning to America, he wrote a small book: “A Case for India.” [1]. Here is part of the introduction:
“I was filled with astonishment and indignation at the conscious and deliberate bleeding by England throughout 150 years. I began to feel that I came upon the greatest crime in all history…
I know how weak words are in the face of guns and blood, how irrelevant mere truth and decency appear beside the might of empires and gold. But if even one Hindu, fighting for freedom far off the other side of the globe, shall hear this call of mine and be a trifle comforted, then these months of work on this little book will seem sweet to me.
For I know of nothing in the world that I would rather do today than be of help to India.” (Oct.1, 1930)
Shashi Tharoor, in his book ‘Inglorious Empire.”[2] gives a similar account:
“Burke, in his opening speech at the impeachment of Hastings, also accused the East India Company of ‘cruelties unheard of and devastations almost without name…crimes which have their rise in the wicked dispositions of men in avarice, rapacity, pride, cruelty, malignity, haughtiness, insolence’. He described in colorfully painful detail the violation of Bengali women by the British-assigned tax collectors”.
I was filled with astonishment and indignation at the conscious and deliberate bleeding by England throughout 150 years. I began to feel that I came upon the greatest crime in all history…[Will Durant, American historian]
Tharoor writes further:
“In an extraordinary confession, a British administrator in Bengal, F. J. Shore, testified before the House of Commons in 1857: ‘The fundamental principle of the English has been to make the whole Indian nation subservient, in every possible way, to the interests and benefits of themselves. They have been taxed to the utmost limit; every successive province, as it has fallen into our possession, has been made a field for higher exaction; and it has always been our boast how greatly we have raised the revenue above that which the native rulers were able to extort.”
India’s Fabulous Wealth and How Britain Drained It
Before the British colonizers set foot on Indian soil, India was celebrated for its riches. Arnold Hermann Ludwig Heeran, a German historian (1760-1842), had this to say about India’s fabulous wealth[3]:
“India has been celebrated even in the earliest times for her riches. The wealth, splendor, and prosperity of India had made a strong impression on the mind of Alexander the Great, and when he left Persia for India, he told his army that they were starting for that “Golden India” where there was endless wealth and that what they had seen in Persia was as nothing compared to the riches of India.”
The Encyclopaedia Britannica also remarks that India “was naturally reputed to be the seat of immense riches.”[4]
Despite the colossal devastation caused by Muslim invaders, the 17th-century Moghul ruler Aurangzeb (1618-1707) was reputed to be as wealthy as all the European kings combined. John Coleman, in his book “Hierarchy of Power – The Committee of 300,”[5] lists Aurangzeb’s descendants among the 300 wealthiest families in the world.
However, the arrival of the British East India Company in 1765 marked the beginning of a brutal period of exploitation. The British imposed exorbitant taxes and used Indian revenues to fund their imports. Utsa Patnaik, a professor at JNU, conducted an extensive study of the British pillage of India[6] and calculated that the colonial extortion amounted to a staggering $45 trillion[7], resulting in severe famines and the deaths of millions. India’s agricultural land was repurposed for export crops, leading to a drastic decline in food grain consumption and widespread malnutrition. This systematic plunder transformed India from a land of abundance into the impoverished nation the world sees today.
However, the arrival of the British East India Company in 1765 marked the beginning of a brutal period of exploitation. The British imposed exorbitant taxes and used Indian revenues to fund their imports.
What the East India Company and Crown did to India was nothing short of criminal extortion, she explained in an op-ed article.[8]
India was a major producer and exporter of goods, accumulating substantial wealth and gold. However, this inflow halted in 1765 when the British East India Company received the right to collect taxes in the regions it controlled from the Mughal emperor. The British imposed extremely high taxes, extracting 80 to 90 percent, and used these Indian tax revenues to pay for goods imported into Britain.
Patnaik writes that the East India Company, from 1765 onwards, allocated every year up to one-third of Indian budgetary revenues to buy a large volume of goods for direct import into Britain, far in excess of this country’s own needs. However, for Britain, they were free, paid for by Indian taxes. Further, Britain re-exported to Europe and America what they did not need and received in return food, grain, iron, and other items for free.
When the administration of British India passed from East India Company to the British Crown in 1858, the situation got even worse. In the new regime, essentially all exports from India were paid for by Indian taxes, not only exports to Britain. The government in London asked those who wanted to import from India to deposit gold or sterling with the Bank of England and instead issued ‘Council Bills’ with the equivalent rupee value, which were sent to India. The Indian export houses and producers got paid from the Indian tax collection, which was budgeted as “expenditures abroad.” The gold and forex payments disappeared in the Bank of England, founded and owned by Nathan M Rothschild.
According to Patnaik, even as late as 1928, India was, after America, the second largest exporter nation in the world. She further notes:
‘Indians were deprived of every bit of the enormous purchasing power they had earned over 175 years. Not even the colonial government in India was credited with any part of India’s huge gold and forex earnings against which it could have issued rupees. This sleight of hand, namely, paying producers out of their own taxes, made India’s export surplus unrequited and constituted a tax-financed drain to London.’
Agricultural land in India was repurposed to produce export products, such as opium and indigo, leading to severe famines. Millions died slowly from starvation. In 1904, the average annual food grain consumption was 210 kg per person; by 1946, it had dropped to 137 kg. “Indian masses suffered a severe nutritional decline, and India inherited a festering problem of unemployment and poverty,” says Patnaik.
No wonder that the world came to see India only as “a very, very poor country.”
Colonizers’ Inhumanity
To illustrate the inhuman mindset of the colonizers, here are excerpts from a Dutch merchant, Jacob Haafner’s eyewitness account of the 1781 Madras famine, translated by Jacob de Roover of the University of Ghent, Belgium.[9]
“….One saw thousands of such human beings walk around, young and old, man and woman. With their last strength, they had come to the square for alms from the rich, but the doors remained shut so that one after the other collapsed. Dead bodies and those dying lay on top of each other as on a battlefield; from all sides, one could hear the crying of the suffering; begging, they raised their hands to the inhumane Englishmen on their balconies, who stood there reveling with their whores, and who made the hunger on the square even more unbearable because of the food they held in their hands.
Dying is nothing. But to see your wife, your children, and your parents waste away from starvation and see them die in terrible convulsions, that is more than dying. Oh! If only I think of the ghastly images that I saw in Madras, chills run down my spine. Never will I be able to forget them…
But, one may ask, was it completely impossible for support these poor, innocent Indians? Were there no provisions in the city?
Dying is nothing. But to see your wife, your children, and your parents waste away from starvation and see them die in terrible convulsions, that is more than dying – Jacob Haafner on 1781 Madras famine
Oh yes! For those who had the money to pay the extortionate prices of the English and their agents there was food enough! The warehouses of the English Company and some English merchants were amply provided with all kinds of grains, sufficient to feed double the number of people who were then in the city and this for a longer period of time. The rich bought what they needed, but for the penniless Indians, who had left everything they possessed behind when they fled to Madras, there was no other fate but dying from hunger. No one cared. Their disastrous condition did not in the least impress the petrified hearts of the English, who made no attempt whatsoever to prevent the dying of these masses of people and showed no compassion at all.
These Christians, who pride themselves on their humanitarian religion … alas, talking, singing, or whistling, they walked through the dead and the dying with that rude and hurtful arrogance so characteristic of them. From their carriages and palanquins, they looked down on the perishing natives with a look of contempt while the latter were lying in the dust, struggling with death or convulsively breathing their last.
I paid close attention; sometimes, I stood still for half an hour to observe the English passing by, and I cannot but declare openly that I saw no trace of compassion on the face of any of them, for the innumerable wailing beings lying on the ground before them. Even worse, I saw their ladies, those sentimental, tender-hearted creatures, sit in their palanquins with the same cool indifference when they were carried right through this battlefield. Perhaps there were some among them who would faint at the sight of a spider or a mouse! Yes, I saw these European ladies strolling dauntlessly through this field of death, laughing, talking, and frolicking with their company or lovers – shocking!”
Plunder of Indian Knowledge
The British depredation of India was not only material but also intellectual. They cut Indians off from their traditional language, Sanskrit, so they couldn’t read their ancient texts, then claimed that a small collection of English literature was worth more than all Indian texts combined.[10] This was a vicious lie, but Indian students were in no position to counter them because they were busy learning English to qualify for the government job that only the ‘White Sahibs’ had the power to dole out. Meanwhile, the British and missionaries shipped loads of ancient texts out of India. Here’s a relevant excerpt from Oxford University’s ‘Digital Bodleian’ website:
The plundering of India’s manuscripts by European colonizers and proselytizers was extensive and devastating. Apart from the British, many nations like Germany, Russia, and France participated in this intellectual loot.
“Consisting of approximately 9,000 manuscripts, the Bodleian Libraries house the largest known collection of Sanskrit and Prakrit manuscripts outside of the Indian subcontinent. This collection has been developing since the 17th century when the first South Asian books were donated to the Library by Archbishop William Laud in 1635-40.”
The plundering of India’s manuscripts by European colonizers and proselytizers was extensive and devastating. Apart from the British, many nations like Germany, Russia, and France participated in this intellectual loot. Ancient Indian texts, rich in science, philosophy, and arts, were taken at will and are now spread across various European institutions. As the European colonizers and missionaries carted away vast quantities of manuscripts, the libraries in Europe’s prestigious universities amassed collections of over 9,000 Sanskrit and Prakrit manuscripts, highlighting the scale of the cultural theft. This massive dislocation of India’s civilizational knowledge severed Indians from their heritage, creating an epistemological discontinuity and alienation from India’s valuable knowledge systems, the after-effects of which linger on to this day.
List of Britain’s Crimes Against India is Endless
Because of the enormity of the British Raj’s high crimes in India, it is nearly impossible to compile a comprehensive list of them. Here we share just a few of the big ones:
- Famines: During the British era, famine had been a recurrent feature of life in the Indian subcontinent, resulting in millions of deaths over the course of the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries. Economic historian Mike Davis records 31 major famines in the 190 years of British colonial rule – a famine every six years. In comparison, there were only 17 famines in India over the previous 2,000 years.[11] Based on official British data, Davis puts the death toll during the Victorian Era alone at 29 million. Economic anthropologist Jason Hickel says between 1880 and 1920, British colonial policies in India killed 100 million people – more lives than all famines worldwide.[12] Famines in British India were severe enough to substantially impact the country’s long-term population growth in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
- Opium and Indigo Farming: The British Empire and its forerunner, the East India Company, were deeply involved in the global opium trade. This state-run enterprise was enforced through two wars, which compelled China to open its doors to British Indian opium. Indian farmers were the unwitting victims of this nefarious enterprise. By the end of the 19th century, this cash crop engulfed nearly 1.3 million peasant households in North India, affected nearly 10 million people in the region known as Uttar Pradesh and Bihar[13], and accounted for 15% of the British annual revenue. [14]
The indigo plantation was another cash crop that the East India Company forced upon the Indian farmers, particularly in Bengal, through an exploitive sharecropping system. Indigo was highly valued as the key dye source until synthetic indigo’s advent in the 20th century. Indigo farming resulted in the depletion of soil fertility, preventing subsequent crop growth.[15]
- Indian Soldiers in British Wars: It is a little-known fact that over one million Indian troops fought on Britain’s behalf during World War I, with more than 60,000 losing their lives. In World War II, the number of Indian soldiers fighting on behalf of their colonial masters soared to an astounding 2.5 million, with nearly 90,000 perishing on foreign soil. Britain used these soldiers as cannon fodder, placing them on the front lines ahead of White soldiers, yet never acknowledged their crucial role in the outcomes of both wars. And, naturally, the financial burden of India’s involvement in wars in which India had no direct interest fell on Indian taxpayers, not the British!
- Indentured Labor: Following the abolition of the slave trade in 1833, the British colonizers introduced the Indian indenture system, a form of bonded servitude through which over 1.6 million workers from British India were transported to labor in European colonies as a substitute for slave labor. The system of Indian indentureship continued until the 1920s. As a result, a large segment of the Indian population was scattered worldwide, including the Caribbean, South Africa, East Africa, Mauritius, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Myanmar, and Fiji.
The Verdict
British colonial rule in India, often misrepresented as benevolent, was a period marked by severe exploitation, economic drain, and cultural suppression. The so-called advancements, such as railways and English education, primarily served British interests, facilitating resource extraction and control rather than benefiting the Indian populace. Atrocities like massacres, engineered famines, and widespread cultural destruction defined this era, resulting in unimaginable suffering for millions of Indians. This narrative, which glorifies colonial contributions, must be debunked to reveal the true impact of British rule on India. Acknowledging these historical realities is essential for justice and a comprehensive understanding of India’s colonial experience. The atrocities and economic plunder carried out by the British Raj are not just historical grievances but ongoing issues that have left deep scars on India’s social and economic fabric.
In Part 2 of this article, we will explore the compelling case for reparations by Britain to India, seeking justice for the immense suffering and losses endured.
Citations
[1] The case for India: Durant, Will; https://archive.org/details/dli.ministry.10950
[2] Tharoor, Shashi; An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India; (99+) Shashi Tharoor An Era of Darkness The British Empire in India Aleph Book Co 201620200125 64671 1r78due | Robin Singh – Academia.edu
[3] The Lost & Forgotten Wealth of India; https://www.sanskritimagazine.com/the-lost-forgotten-wealth-of-india/
[4] ibid
[5] CONSPIRATORS’ HIERARCHY: THE STORY OF THE COMMITTEE OF 300 (cia.gov); https://www.cia.gov/library/abbottabad-compound/4A/4A92FD2FB4DAE3F773DB0B7742CF0F65_Coleman.-.CONSPIRATORS.HIERARCHY.-.THE.STORY.OF.THE.COMMITTEE.OF.300.R.pdf
[6] Monthly Review | The Drain of Wealth; https://monthlyreview.org/2021/02/01/the-drain-of-wealth/
[7] The deadly impact of British rule in India – a comparative analysis; https://www.historytools.org/stories/the-deadly-impact-of-british-rule-in-india-a-comparative-analysis#:~:text=The%20extent%20of%20the%20economic%20drain%20was%20staggering.,the%20exploitation%20of%20India%E2%80%98s%20natural%20resources%20%28Patnaik%2C%202018%29.
[8] How the British impoverished India; https://www.hindustantimes.com/analysis/how-the-british-impoverished-india/story-zidAo8pKyIrmO7UnBkcjfJ.html
[9] The British and the Nazis: The experience of the colonized | WITNESS TO OUR TIMES (witness-to-our-times.org); https://witness-to-our-times.org/2022/01/26/the-british-and-the-nazis-denying-the-experience-of-the-colonized/
[10] Macaulay: An India-Hater Whose Shadow Still Looms Large on Indian Society – Hindu Dvesha (stophindudvesha.org); https://stophindudvesha.org/macaulay-an-india-hater-whose-shadow-still-looms-large-on-indian-society/
[11] The Susceptibility of South Asians to Cardiometabolic Disease as a Result of Starvation Adaptation Exacerbated During the Colonial Famines; https://www.researchgate.net/publication/366596806_The_Susceptibility_of_South_Asians_to_Cardiometabolic_Disease_as_a_Result_of_Starvation_Adaptation_Exacerbated_During_the_Colonial_Famines
[12] How British colonialism killed 100 million Indians in 40 years | History | Al Jazeera; https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2022/12/2/how-british-colonial-policy-killed-100-million-indians
[13] How Britain’s opium trade impoverished Indians (bbc.com); https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-49404024
[14] An opium curse? The long-run economic consequences of narcotics cultivation in British India (cornell.edu); https://barrett.dyson.cornell.edu/NEUDC/paper_364.pdf
[15] Indigo Cultivation: History, Significance And Disadvantages (krishijagran.com); https://krishijagran.com/agripedia/indigo-cultivation-history-significance-and-disadvantages/
