Amartya Sen: India, Britain, and the wrong lessons
[Amartya Kumar is an Indian economist, philosopher, and a winner of the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences (Nobel Prize for Economics) in 1998.]
As I entered secondary school in the mid-1940s in what was still British India, I remember thinking that, despite our irritation with the British, it was rather agreeable that the favorite military music of the British Army was "Beating the Retreat." There was little sign in 1944 that the British were about to evacuate the country, despite the swelling torrent of the Indian national movement led by Gandhi and other political leaders; but the decisive moment was not far off. It came rather abruptly in 1947, sixty years ago, ushering in the beginning of the end of "the biggest empire ever, bar none," as Niall Ferguson describes it in his book Empire, a guarded but enthusiastic celebration of British imperialism. While this year the Indian newspapers have been full of festivity for what has been achieved in six decades of independence, it is worth remembering more soberly that this is also the anniversary of the end of a very long imperial relationship.
As the year 2007 trails away, it is a good time to take a general look back at the history of the domination of a hot, sunny, and vast subcontinent in the Orient by rulers from a small kingdom in rainy, windy, cool--and very far away--islands on the western coast of Europe. In India, indeed, this is a year of anniversaries. Not only did that imperial rule of the subcontinent end sixty years ago, it also began 250 years ago, with a small but hugely repercussive event in 1757. On June 23 of that year, Robert Clive led the forces of the East India Company to defeat the Nawab of Bengal in the battle of Plassey, thereby initiating British control of state power in India. The battle lasted all of a day, but it is still seen as a memorable event both in Britain and in the subcontinent; and when I gave a commemorative lecture last June in the London City Hall, the mixed nature of the large audience made it vividly clear to me that the recollection of that one-day war a quarter of a millennium ago still interests people of diverse ancestry and origin, living now in post-imperial Britain.
And there is another momentous anniversary that broaches the question of what imperialism did for, and to, India. It is now exactly one hundred fifty years since the first armed battle for the end of the British domination that engulfed the subcontinent. The uprising, which united very different rebellious groups under one banner of revolt, started in March 1857 in Barrackpore, on the outskirts of Calcutta, not far from Plassey, and spread across India. It was ultimately crushed by the British, with the help of Gurkha, Pathan, and Sikh troops, who were not involved in the revolt. The squashed rebellion, which has variously been called "the Sepoy Mutiny" (the official term used by the British) and "the first war of independence" (favored by many Indian nationalists), was in fact responsible for the British decision to make India directly a part of the empire, rather than continuing to rule it indirectly through the East India Company....
The leading British administrator of India in the mid-nineteenth century, T. B. Macaulay, who wrote the famous "Minute" on "Indian Education" in 1835 that would govern the structure of what Indians would be taught over a century, thought that Mill's thoroughly prejudiced book was "on the whole the greatest historical work which has appeared in our language since that of Gibbon." Macaulay's own approach and inclinations fitted well with Mill's: "I have no knowledge of either Sanskrit or Arabic.... I am quite ready to take the Oriental learning at the valuation of the Orientalists themselves. I have never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia."
If the lessons to be taught to Americans about how best to run their de facto empire are to be based on the character and balance of British administration and the actual beliefs that influenced it, a certain amount of make-believe history would be needed. When the British left India in 1947, after nearly two hundred years of imperial rule, the proportion of adult literacy was around 13 percent. This abysmal figure reflects a certain view of the needs of the subject nation as seen by the dominant administrators from the ruling country--a country that had done so much to make its own population completely literate. The only regions in India with comparatively high literacy in India were the "native kingdoms" of Travancore and Cochin, which since Indian independence have constituted the bulk of the state of Kerala. These kingdoms, though dependent on the British administration for foreign policy and defense, had remained formally outside the British empire and had enjoyed a great deal of freedom in domestic matters, including educational policy.
The gap between theory and practice remained strong throughout the history of imperial relations between Britain and India. Rudyard Kipling issued his own invitation to the United States to follow Britain's alleged imperial success, in his famous poem "The White Man's Burden," published in McClure's in 1899 under the subtitle "The United States and the Philippine Islands." He may have caught the self-perception of the British administrator well when he explained, "Take up the White Man's burden/The savage wars of peace/Fill full the mouth of Famine,/And bid the sickness cease." And yet British governance of India had little success in its self-congratulatory role to "fill full the mouth of Famine." Indeed, British rule began with a gigantic famine in Bengal in 1769-1770; there had been none in that century before British conquest. And there were famines in India throughout the period of British rule, ending with another large famine in Bengal, the famine of 1943, in which close to three million people died, just before independence in 1947. There has been no such famine in India since British rule ended sixty years ago....
Read entire article at New Republic
As I entered secondary school in the mid-1940s in what was still British India, I remember thinking that, despite our irritation with the British, it was rather agreeable that the favorite military music of the British Army was "Beating the Retreat." There was little sign in 1944 that the British were about to evacuate the country, despite the swelling torrent of the Indian national movement led by Gandhi and other political leaders; but the decisive moment was not far off. It came rather abruptly in 1947, sixty years ago, ushering in the beginning of the end of "the biggest empire ever, bar none," as Niall Ferguson describes it in his book Empire, a guarded but enthusiastic celebration of British imperialism. While this year the Indian newspapers have been full of festivity for what has been achieved in six decades of independence, it is worth remembering more soberly that this is also the anniversary of the end of a very long imperial relationship.
As the year 2007 trails away, it is a good time to take a general look back at the history of the domination of a hot, sunny, and vast subcontinent in the Orient by rulers from a small kingdom in rainy, windy, cool--and very far away--islands on the western coast of Europe. In India, indeed, this is a year of anniversaries. Not only did that imperial rule of the subcontinent end sixty years ago, it also began 250 years ago, with a small but hugely repercussive event in 1757. On June 23 of that year, Robert Clive led the forces of the East India Company to defeat the Nawab of Bengal in the battle of Plassey, thereby initiating British control of state power in India. The battle lasted all of a day, but it is still seen as a memorable event both in Britain and in the subcontinent; and when I gave a commemorative lecture last June in the London City Hall, the mixed nature of the large audience made it vividly clear to me that the recollection of that one-day war a quarter of a millennium ago still interests people of diverse ancestry and origin, living now in post-imperial Britain.
And there is another momentous anniversary that broaches the question of what imperialism did for, and to, India. It is now exactly one hundred fifty years since the first armed battle for the end of the British domination that engulfed the subcontinent. The uprising, which united very different rebellious groups under one banner of revolt, started in March 1857 in Barrackpore, on the outskirts of Calcutta, not far from Plassey, and spread across India. It was ultimately crushed by the British, with the help of Gurkha, Pathan, and Sikh troops, who were not involved in the revolt. The squashed rebellion, which has variously been called "the Sepoy Mutiny" (the official term used by the British) and "the first war of independence" (favored by many Indian nationalists), was in fact responsible for the British decision to make India directly a part of the empire, rather than continuing to rule it indirectly through the East India Company....
The leading British administrator of India in the mid-nineteenth century, T. B. Macaulay, who wrote the famous "Minute" on "Indian Education" in 1835 that would govern the structure of what Indians would be taught over a century, thought that Mill's thoroughly prejudiced book was "on the whole the greatest historical work which has appeared in our language since that of Gibbon." Macaulay's own approach and inclinations fitted well with Mill's: "I have no knowledge of either Sanskrit or Arabic.... I am quite ready to take the Oriental learning at the valuation of the Orientalists themselves. I have never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia."
If the lessons to be taught to Americans about how best to run their de facto empire are to be based on the character and balance of British administration and the actual beliefs that influenced it, a certain amount of make-believe history would be needed. When the British left India in 1947, after nearly two hundred years of imperial rule, the proportion of adult literacy was around 13 percent. This abysmal figure reflects a certain view of the needs of the subject nation as seen by the dominant administrators from the ruling country--a country that had done so much to make its own population completely literate. The only regions in India with comparatively high literacy in India were the "native kingdoms" of Travancore and Cochin, which since Indian independence have constituted the bulk of the state of Kerala. These kingdoms, though dependent on the British administration for foreign policy and defense, had remained formally outside the British empire and had enjoyed a great deal of freedom in domestic matters, including educational policy.
The gap between theory and practice remained strong throughout the history of imperial relations between Britain and India. Rudyard Kipling issued his own invitation to the United States to follow Britain's alleged imperial success, in his famous poem "The White Man's Burden," published in McClure's in 1899 under the subtitle "The United States and the Philippine Islands." He may have caught the self-perception of the British administrator well when he explained, "Take up the White Man's burden/The savage wars of peace/Fill full the mouth of Famine,/And bid the sickness cease." And yet British governance of India had little success in its self-congratulatory role to "fill full the mouth of Famine." Indeed, British rule began with a gigantic famine in Bengal in 1769-1770; there had been none in that century before British conquest. And there were famines in India throughout the period of British rule, ending with another large famine in Bengal, the famine of 1943, in which close to three million people died, just before independence in 1947. There has been no such famine in India since British rule ended sixty years ago....