Shashi Tharoor and The Dark Era of Ingolrious Empire

This activity is a part of our academic writing.

 ⚫ Write on key arguments in shashi Tharoor's book "An Era of Darkness ".

 

Shashi Tharoor's , An Era of Darkness, is one breathless read. In it, he aggregates all the arguments required to establish that British colonial rule was an  awful experience for Indians and he does so with a consummate debater’s skill. His book is, in fact, an expanded take on British exploitation of India that famously carried the day for Tharoor in an Oxford debate not too long ago.

According to Tharoor, there was nothing redeeming in British rule of our country. What India had to endure under them was outrageous humiliation on a humongous scale and sustained violence of a kind it had never experienced before. In short, British rule was, according to Tharoor, an era of darkness for India, throughout which it suffered several manmade famines, wars, racism, maladministration, deportation of its people to distant lands and economic exploitation on an unprecedented scale. An indignant Tharoor even demands a token restitution and public apology from the British for all the harm they had caused India. This is something, as his debate established, wildly popular in India.impunity. Tharoor is right, of course. There are few Indians who would not have heard of the treachery that enabled Clive to triumph at Plassey or of the incredible amounts of ill-begotten wealth the East India Company officials hauled back with them to England. “One official,” Cyril Radcliff informs us, “was said to have pocketed 1,200,000 sterling in bribes from the Nawab of Carnatic: another pocketed 200,000 pounds.” Given the opportunities he had to enrich himself in India, Clive was “amazed at his own moderation”.

There was scant appreciation, Tharoor tells us, of India’s contributions in men, material and money, to the wars that the British fought within India and overseas, especially the two World Wars. The well-known historian and Nehru’s biographer, Judith Brown, acknowledges that “British taxpayers contributed not a penny to the Raj”. Even Niall Ferguson, not one of Tharoor’s favourites, accepts that Indians paid for the “privilege of being ruled by the British”.

That British rule in India was bad in parts has never been denied by anyone, least of all by the British. Their archives are full of accounts of British depredations, covering the entire period of their rule in India. Several of their historians have brought out the suffering the British inflicted on India and Indians throughout their rule of our country. What Tharoor, however, seeks to establish through his book, is that British rule was unremittingly rotten and indefensible by the standards of its time and ours. Tharoor admirably fills the gap by holding a mirror to the British, and the West, that they have a case to answer. And answer they must, as old imperialisms, with renewed vigour and with the same specious ‘civilising’ arguments, have never really ceased devastating the world, from faraway places like now well-forgotten Grenada and present-day West Asia and the Middle East.

⚫ Write critique on both the films with reference to postcolonial insights.

1.The Black Prince :

With the context of post colonial indight ,Maharaja Duleep Singh was a very complex and troubled man. In today's world, he would have a flock of psychiatrists and psychologists trying to help him overcome his troubles, and understand him. Maharaja Duleep Singh's battles were not fought on the battlefield. He didn't win any duels with the sword like his father, and the mighty warrior Hari Singh Nalwa, who helped shape the Sikh Kingdom of Punjab. His fight was more in terms of an internal battle to overcome his own demons and the manipulated reasoning imposed upon him by the British. He had to find himself first and reconnect to who he really was.Then [he could] raise his voice to denounce the English authority over him and demand freedom not only for the people of Punjab, but the entire sub-continent of India. He fought a lonely war amidst an atmosphere full of spies, traitors and manipulators. This was a story that needed to be told.

2.Victoria and Abdul :

Abdul Karim was 24 years old when he was dispatched from Agra to serve 68-year-old Queen Victoria as an attendant. The tall and handsome Indian Muslim didn't speak a word of English, nor the Empress of India any Urdu. What followed was a relationship of such intimacy and tenderness that the British establishment tried their hardest to destroy all evidence of it. In Victoria and Abdul: The True Story of the Queen's Closest Confidant historian Shrabani Basu unearths a story that shows a new side to Victoria and places a young Indian at the heart of the Empire as her greatest influence.

⚫ Summarise Ngugi Wa Thiongo's views in 'Introduction: Towards the Universal Language of Struggle' - from 'Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature'.  

Language and culture inDecolonising the Mind, Ngũgĩ sees language, rather than history orculture, as the enabling condition of human consciousness: "The choice of language and the use of language is central to a people's definition of themselves inrelation to the entire universe.Decolonising the Mind is a meld of autobiography, post-colonial theory, pedagogy, African history, and literary criticism. Ngũgĩ dedicated Decolonising the Mind "to all those who write in African languages, and to all those who over the years have maintained the dignity of the literature, culture, philosophy, and other treasures carried by African languages."

Thank you...