The premise of this book was born after a speech the author delivered at the Oxford Union on the proposition ‘Britain Owes Reparations to Her Former Colonies” in which he informed the audience of the iniquities of British Colonialism, and along with his fellow speakers, went on to win the debate with a two thirds majority. The speech garnered traction which surprised Shashi, as he thought he wasn’t saying anything new, everyone, he assumed, knew about the ills of empire. A few months later though he had a book deal and begun work on Inglorious Empire. Although the book isn’t abut reparations, it is about “the moral urgency of explaining to today’s Indians – and Britons – why colonialism was the horror it turned out to be {and} could not be put aside”. With such noble intentions, the author begins his dive into Indian history with the looting of a once prosperous nation. India’s share of the worlds economy, under the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb in the 1700, was 27 per cent, larger than the whole of Europe combined. When the Brits departed, it was less then 3 per cent. Clearly the notion that India needed or benefited from colonialism is absurd, and the author details why in the following chapters dismissing the presumptions that the British gave India political unity, democracy, a free press, the rule of law and of course the beloved railway system. Whilst this book is full of interesting facts, it is also littered with the authors prejudices, which makes it, unfortunately, an unpleasant and taxing read, especially for a Muslim and/or Pakistani reader, of which I am both. Clearly this book wasn’t written for the 14.2% or approximately 172.2 million people in India today who identify as Muslim. The first chapter is quite possibly the only one in the book where the author manages to tame his own inner demons, it was certainly the only one I managed to read without rolling my eyes deep into their sockets. I’ll confess by the final two chapters I was skim reading (and scoffing). I had so desperately wanted to enjoy this book, but it turns out that one of the remaining legacies of colonialism that the British left in India was a deep bias against Muslims, that unfortunately the editors of this book didn’t think was worth tempering down.

It is important for readers to understand that when the author speaks about India under the British Raj, he is referring to present day India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Although he frequently makes quips about Pakistan and its current state of disarray, which of course is valid, he doesn’t once mention anything about the rot of nationalism that is currently overtaking India. He rightfully mentions the appalling treatment of religious minorities within Pakistan, although in no specific detail. He simply states Pakistan was mean to its Sikh inhabitants (I’m paraphrasing). As a Pakistani (although more accurately Kashmiri, but more about that later) I’ll be the first to say that Pakistan has huge issues with how it treats its religious minorities. I take objection to them applying Islamic rules to people who don’t practise the religion, which is absolutely unacceptable. I also object to the treatment of women in Pakistan, of corruption and of the military coups the country suffers from every few years #FreeImranKhan. All that being said, minorities make up less than 4 per cent of the population. Members of the Sikh community continue to make pilgrimage to Pakistan, primarily to the Punjab region, which hosts a number of sites including the birth and death places of Guru Nanak, the founder of Sikhism. This is a visa free connection from India. The largest Sikh population in Pakistan can be found in Peshawar. Mr Tharoor does not mention a word about the anti Sikh violence in India however. Not a peep about Operation Blue Star in 1984, the anti Sikh pogroms that lead to the death of around 3,000 people (although some quotes are as high as 17,000). Nor does he mention a word about the Gujarat Riots of 2002, which many genocide scholars contended met the definition of a genocide. According to a report: “By the afternoon of February 27, retaliatory attacks had already begun. Donning the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) uniform of khaki shorts and a saffron headband, the mobs carried out attacks in a highly coordinated manner. Armed with a list of Muslim homes and businesses, they arrived in Muslim neighbourhoods by truckloads carrying swords, metal pipes, and Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG) cylinders. The rampaging mob stormed into the housing complex of Ehsan Jafri, a former highly regarded Muslim member of the Indian parliament. The mob murdered Ehsan Jafri and 68 other Muslims who had sought refuge in his house. During the massacres, at least 250 women and girls were gang-raped before being burned to death. A mob of 5,000 people set fire to houses of Muslims in Ahmedabad’s Naroda Patia neighbourhood, resulting in the death of at least 65 people. Before being burned and hacked to death, women and girls were gang-raped in public. Their male family members were forced to watch the rapes and then were killed.” This happened in 2002, Tharoor’s book was published in 2016. It is an interesting omission from the recent history on India.

Another glaringly obvious bias of the author is his admiration for Gandhi and Nehru and his disapproval of Jinnah. One might expect this as he currently sits as a member of Parliament for the Indian National Congress, the party that led India, in its present day iteration, into independence and that was rivalled by the Muslim League, led by Jinnah, who would go on to lead Pakistan. However his criticism is far from academic and usually very pedestrian, with even Jinnah’s wife being attacked for her husbands politics. Shashi Tharoor exhibits one of colonialisms worst impacts upon its one oppressed subjects, divide and rule. He accepts that Mughal rule was prosperous for India but never once mentions the religion of those rulers, yet throughout the text the only collaborators with the British he mentions are Muslim. He accuses Jinnah of this as well, as well as referring to him as “Savile Row-suit-wearing, sausage-eating, whisky swirling Jinnah” Again, I think all political leaders should be up for criticism where valid, but this just felt like an attack on his Islamic credentials. The author avoids any moralistic judgements against Nehru and only briefly mentions his affair with Mountbatten’s wife, which of course he masks as “There is no question that Nehru and Edwina indeed became close, but it does not seem likely that this had any political impact“. He spends the next few chapters alleging that the British favoured Jinnah, which is possible, after all, he wasn’t sleeping with the Viceroys wife!

And then there is Gandhi. There are numerous accounts, including Gandhi’s own writing that reveal him to be pro-caste, misogynist and racist. Although he did campaign against having an “untouchable” caste, he still believed in a social hierarchy which was a fundamental part of his Hindu belief. The good author does not mention this. Nor does he elaborate on some of Gandhi’s abhorrent views on women, including his belief that Indian women who were raped lost their value as human beings and he argued that fathers could be justified in killing daughters who had been sexually assaulted for the sake of family and community honour.  Author Rita Banerji, in her book Sex and Power outlines his warped view of menstruation: “he believed menstruation was a manifestation of the distortion of a woman’s soul by her sexuality”. In 1904, whilst still in South Africa, he wrote to a health officer in Johannesburg, “About the mixing of the Kaffirs with the Indians, I must confess I feel most strongly.” (Kaffir is an offensive term for Africans).  When Durban was hit by a plague in 1905, Gandhi wrote that the problem would persist as long as Indians and Africans were being “herded together indiscriminately at the hospital”. Ashwin Desai, co-author of The South African Gandhi, challenges the popular narrative of Mahatma Gandhi by presenting him as a figure who held colonialist and racist views during his time in South Africa, arguing he was a supporter of the British Empire rather than a challenger to it. Arundhati Roy has also questioned the prominent narrative around Gandhi and spoken about his racist views on caste and race. He also mentions nothing about the assassination of Gandhi by and extremist Hindu.

It would be unfair to suggest that the entirety of this book is awful, far from it. It just needed the author to sit with someone to discuss his views towards Muslims, and ask if they were the lingering consequence of colonialism or more recently developed ideas from the racist BJP party, currently governing India. He does highlight that large scale conflicts between Hindu’s and Muslim’s only began under colonial rule. He also emphasises that Muslims made up 50 per cent of the British Indian Army during the first world war, even though they accounted for 20 percent of the population. “Dr B.R. Ambedkar suggested that this disproportionate representation in the army was deliberately designed to counteract the forces of Hindu agitation against the British Raj“. It was also interesting to learn that the Sunni/ Shia divide that we see today play out across the Indian Subcontinent was in fact incubated and nurtured in India as early as 1856 by the British. Tharoor thoroughly debunks any notion of Britain being a virtuous Empire by concisely listing its various acts of despotism and its cruel, craven yet conscious acts of violence against the indigenous population. From manufactured famines, forced migrations, to vicious massacres, the Indian population, of all religions, suffered from Britain’s greed. For all their championing of democracy, no Indian subject was allowed to experience it. The “free” press was tightly controlled and violently managed. Papers in native languages were abruptly and aggressively shut down at the slightest whiff of dissent. The claim that the English language is a lingering gift of colonialism is often branded about and again Tharoor debunks it methodically and completely. My favourite passage in this section of the book is the hypocrisy and obnoxious nature of the British, but also how familiar it feels even in todays educational institutions. The British dismissed Mughal history as linear narrations and devoid of context and analysis. Pre-Mughal texts such as the Mahabharata and Ramayana (ancient Indian epic poems which are considered foundational Hindu texts) were dismissed as fables and mythological histories, and replaced by the teaching of the Iliad and the Odyssey! Of course they went on to reconstruct ‘factual’ accounts of Indian history in their desired European style.

Even the Indian railway, that Empire apologists love to hark on about was primarily constructed for the benefit of the Empire. The railway opened up the whole of India for exploitation, from raw materials and labourers, now readily available wherever the colonial powers needed them. The Indian subcontinent was a magnificent trading power long before the British stepped foot on its soil. They had ships far superior to the British and sailed across the seas to have successful businesses with neighbouring lands. There is nothing to suggest that the continent would not have grown from strength to strength had the British not stolen that opportunity from them. The sad truth is that colonialism robbed India of its natural potential for almost 200 years. It didn’t leave India with anything other than division, suspicion and poverty.

It is true that the British did bring tea to the Indian subcontinent from neighbouring China. Unable to colonise China and unwilling to pay a fair price for the export themselves they decided to grow tea in India. Tharoor tells of a British secret agent, Robert Fortune, who sneaked into China in the early 1840s, in an attempt to steal thousands of specimens which he was to transport via the Himalayas back to India. (Un)fortunately none of the specimens survived. Coincidently another Britain happened upon the wild Assam, tested it in boiling water, and hey-presto, he had made tea. Of course this tea was never meant for the Indians, they only carried out the back breaking work, in appalling conditions, to grow and harvest it. It was only during the Great Depression of 1930, according to the author, that tea was finally sold in India to the Indians, who delighted in it, and it has become a staple across all three nations (although of course he only mentions India). It wasn’t only tea that the British tried to steal of course, they also attempted to grow poppy in order to extract opium. In order to do this they deforested large parts of India’s forests, not only destroying trees but also damaging the ecosystem. The forests of India were home to large predators, and the clearing of trees effectively erased tigers, cheetahs, leopards, and lions from vast parts of India. The introduction of non-native trees also resulted in the once lush tropical rainforests of the Nilgiris becoming water-shortage areas. Cricket is the only other thing the author mentions the British brought over to India.

The tragedy of this text is how much like the British coloniser the author sounds in his obvious frustrations at the Empire. The one lingering legacy he forgets to mention is an anti-Muslim sentiment which runs throughout the text. As the book draws to a close Shashi Tharoor throws in a shout-out to the current racist Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi, or as he is colloquially called “The butcher of Gujarat“. Instead of telling us how he was responsible for the Gujarat pogroms in 2002 he tells of how in 2016 ( the year this book was published) Modi also addressed the US Congress. He initiates him to the reader as a Chaiwalah (someone who serves tea) rather than someone who was banned from travelling to both the UK and US for “severe violations of religious freedom”. The audacity continues in the next chapter when the author states: “That today’s Indian Army, a million strong has held on to the best of British military traditions while eschewing the temptations to which its Pakistani and Bangladeshi counterparts have fallen prey, is surly more to the credit of its own officers and men, as well as of the inclusive and pluralist nature of Indian democracy”. Has anyone told the Right Honourable gentleman of India’s ongoing military occupation of Kashmir, which incidentally is very much a colonial legacy of India and a topic Mr Tharoor completely ignores.

I’ve written about the evils of India’s occupation in my review of Arundhati Roy’s book Azadi. It is hard to take Shashi Tharoor seriously, not as he presents his case against the British Empire, but as he wants the reader to believe that the modern state of India is a progressive democracy and has succeeded where its (Muslim) neighbours have not. Whilst its true that India has done well economically and given its humongous constraints, which include its population and its vastly diverse needs, it is also true that India is the only one of the three nations now repeating the crimes of Empire with its occupation of Kashmir. To expect serious readers to simply overlook India’s slide into becoming a religious, authoritarian, extremist state, where once it was hailed the world’s largest democracy is absurd. Inglorious Empire has the potential to be a great book, unfortunately it falls into the trap of the British by reinventing its own version of history to present to the world as its more palatable than the truth. Unfortunately for Tharoor, we live in the age of information and India’s colonial ambitions have been well documented, even as it imposed 500 days of internet blackout on Kashmir, which it, like the British said was about maintaining peace, but rather resulted in the devastation of businesses and increase in military presence in the region. It seems India’s true true legacy from the British Empire is its desire to mimic it.