Colonialism

By Aashna Sinha

In the beginning, there were two nations. One was a vast, mighty and magnificent empire, brilliantly organized and culturally unified, which dominated a massive swath of the earth. The other was an undeveloped, semifeudal realm, riven by religious factionalism and barely able to feed its illiterate, diseased and stinking masses. The first nation was India. The second was England.” The above lines are the opening of the book, ‘Indian Summer’, by Alex von Tunzelmann, which rightly describe the condition of the two countries before their fates and histories became intertwined with each other in a knot called colonialism.

Colonialism is known in its primitive form, that is to say, by the permanent settling of repressive foreign powers, with an army, services, policies. India, a country referred to as ‘the golden bird’ since the ancient times, was reduced to being an underdeveloped and economically unstable country in 1947, when the British finally left it.

“When two brothers are busy fighting, an evil man can easily attack and rob their poor mother. Mankind should always stay united, standing shoulder to shoulder so evil can never cheat and divide them.” This first happened to India when Mahmud of Ghazni invaded India to conduct raids and loot its wealth in the eleventh century till the British left it in the twentieth century.

The Turks, though foreign powers who invaded India, settled here and kept India’s riches within its boundaries. Their reign brought about a fusion of different cultures, a composite culture. It gave rise to new forms of art, architecture, design, music and literature. The British, however, ruled from across the globe, and their imperial policies drained our wealth bringing nothing but misery to the Indians.

On December 31, 1600, Queen Elizabeth I granted the British East India Company exclusive rights to trade in the East Indies. From that day till the Great Uprising of 1857, the Company exploited Indians for their gain and to bankroll the Industrial Revolution back in England. Not much changed after 1857, just the ruling authority and titles. India’s situation remained as piteous as it was. British monarchs didn’t care for a land across the sea that neither spoke their language, nor shared their cuisine. Mistreatment carried on with no one to question it (those who dared to raise their voice where swiftly silenced), and the land once renowned for its abundant natural vegetation and mineral wealth, was diminished to being the land of famines and snake charmers.

Fanon, in his book ‘The Wretched of the Earth’, stated that, “Colonialism hardly ever exploits the whole of a country. It contents itself with bringing to light the natural resources, which it extracts, and exports to meet the needs of the mother country's industries, thereby allowing certain sectors of the colony to become relatively rich. But the rest of the colony follows its path of under-development and poverty, or at all events sinks into it more deeply.” The British too, in the name of innovation and improvement, brought new inventions to India, like the telegraph and railway, but under that guise, they exploited the poor and the rich alike. They first came to India as traders during Mughal Emperor Jahangir’s reign, setting up a factory in Surat. Slowly, they began militarizing. With the Battles of Buxar and Plassey, and Treaty of Allahabad, the Company gained administrative power which it used for their profit. 

The East India Company, economically ill-equipped to run a country as gigantic as India, forced heavy and unjust taxes on the poor peasants. New revenue collection laws caused farmers to barter food grains like wheat, millets and rice to cash crops: cotton, jute etc. which led to devastating famines. Courtiers to native princes lost their employment and artists lost their patronage, after the British conquered those kingdoms. 

India, like every other colony, was turned into a source for cheap raw material and a market for finished goods. Indian handloom, though of better quality, was expensive than the machine-made British textiles. Not only that, Indians had to pay heavy import duties on Indian textile in England. Artisans lost their customers and many artforms went extinct. Spices, jewels and precious metals was taken with no proportionate economic return for the natives. 

Centuries-old teachings and traditions were replaced with Western learning. Languages like Sanskrit, Arabic and Persian, a key part of our history and crucial to understand our past were superseded by English. Autochthonous books of philosophy and reason were swapped for what the British deemed appropriate. We were labelled as backward, superstitious and ignorant even though their new discoveries were known to us for centuries now.

A lot of Indian practices also seemed vulgar to their rigid Victorian sensibilities. Traditional Indian clothing and sculpture, which left the chest bare was deemed to be too inappropriate to minds that appreciated classical Greek and Roman statues. British officials and Christian missionaries launched the ‘Anti-Nautch’ movement, suppressing dance forms like Bharatanatyam, Kathak and Odissi, because of “overtly sensual” nature. ‘Tamasha’, a form of folk theatre from Maharashtra, was considered too bawdy by them.

Our greatest loss, however, has to be that of human capital. Numerous men were made to join the British army and fight unnecessary wars. The two World Wars, Britain’s wars with the Afghans, and Crimea, all caused needless Indian casualty. There were rebellions supressed by killing the rebels, innocent men wrongfully condemned to death sentences and of course, the frequent famines that we have the colonial policies to thank for.

Their policy of Divide and Rule brought the hard-earned unity between different communities tumbling down. Centuries of effort put in by Bhakti and Sufi saints, kings and philosophers, all went in vain. By the late 1800s, there was religious intolerance and the time of 1947, the hatred had escalated to such a level that people demanded partition. Communal riots and protests caused the untimely demise of thousands of individuals.

“The worst thing that colonialism did was to cloud our view of our past.” These words of Obama hold true in every country that has been subjugated by an imperial power. The British made us deter from our rich heritage and shun what made our civilisation so great in the bygone times. Instead of blindly following the fallacy fed to us by our imperial overlords, we should rely on our own judgement and question history. Was the British rule truly beneficial? Or was it just two hundred years of glorified slavery? It isn’t until we disillusion ourselves that the past will truly be understood and the injustice against us, rectified.

By Aashna Sinha