[Reviews] Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India and The Anarchy: The Relentless
Rise of the East India Company
Author[s]: Saronik Bosu
Source: Moveable Type, Vol.12, ‘Nostalgia’ (2020)
DOI: 10.14324/111.1755-4527.113
Moveable Type is a Graduate, Peer-Reviewed Journal based in the Department of English at UCL.
© 2020 Saronik Bosu. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative
Commons Attribution License (CC-BY) 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which
permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author
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Nostalgias of empire and Economics
Saronik Bosu
Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India.
By Shashi Tharoor. 2018. xxix +295p. $14.75. Scribe US. ISBN 978-1947534308
The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company
By William Dalrymple. 2019. Xxii+525p. £30.00. Bloomsbury
Publishing. ISBN 978-1635573954
Shashi Tharoor’s and William Dalrymple’s books continue a debate which was at the
heart of several anti-colonial movements in India between the 1890s and 1920s. A
generation of thinkers, led by Dadabhai Naoroji, positioned India’s net
impoverishment under British rule as an adaptable case study which could then be
applied across several instances of colonialism. If the tenets of this study were the fact
of the impoverishment and ways to better the nature of colonial rule, the premise was
a kind of economic nostalgia. When employed as a deliberate strategy, economic
nostalgia can repair and sublimate diverse elements of the past into a whole that is
markedly different from the literal sum of its parts. Tharoor’s book originates in an
Oxford Union speech that called for British reparations to nations that were once its
colonies: ‘If India’s GDP went down because it “missed the bus of industrialization,”’
he writes, ‘it was because the British threw Indians under the wheels.’1 In layering the
arithmetic of impoverishment (important to Naoroji’s and Tharoor’s work) with
metaphors like this, nostalgia does political work. Economist Tirthankar Roy has
argued that in this instance, the situation which Tharoor reads as total devastation
was, in fact, a paradox: ‘The migration of millions of Indians from servile labour back
in their villages to mines, factories and plantations all over the empire created the
possibility of real freedom […] such freedom came packaged with the brutality of
colonial rule and (the fact) that the British needed to leave for India to thrive.”2
1 Shashi Tharoor, Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India (New York: Scribe US, 2018), p.
34.
2 Tirthankar Roy, ‘The British Raj according to Tharoor: Some of the Truth, Part of the Time’, The
Churchill Project, Hillsdale College, 7 Aug. 2020 <https://winstonchurchill.hillsdale.edu/tharoor-
inglorious-empire/> [ accessed 22 September 2020]
Dalrymple in The Anarchy sets the precursory scene for this paradox, the
establishment of the rule of the East India Company by the beginning of the nineteenth
century. The word “anarchy” superimposes the political horror unleashed in the
subcontinent due to the expansionist aggression of the Company, onto the gradual
transformation of the Company itself into what is essentially a prototype of the modern
multinational. ‘No contemporary corporation,’ Dalrymple writes, ‘could get away with
duplicating the violence and sheer military might of the East India Company, but many
have attempted to match its success at bending state power to their own ends’.3 The
distancing of British exceptionalism from the unsavoury practices of the Company
took several forms, including Edmund Burke’s famous indictment of Warren
Hastings, governor-general of British possessions in India between 1773 and 1785: ‘He
is a robber. He steals, he filches, he plunders, he oppresses, he extorts’.4 Naoroji would
use British criticism of the Company’s rule to characterize the colonial administration
of India as un-British, meaning contrary to values that liberal traditions proclaimed.5
In The Anarchy, and elsewhere, Dalrymple cuts through empire nostalgia that, since
decolonization in the fifties and sixties, has seen British nationalism as antithetical to
a proper understanding of the miseries wrought by colonial rule. Prime Ministers
Margaret Thatcher and more recently Boris Johnson have characterized such
understanding as symptomatic of ‘wetness’, a sensibility that includes the replacement
of the spirit of nuanced historical curiosity, with a hard, streamlined nationalism
immune to ambiguity.
Normative iterations of Indian nationalism at present do not have much truck
with the critique of British rule of India. The cultural effects of Mughal rule, real and
imagined, are a much more widely disseminated bugbear. The political aspect of
Tharoor’s project has to do with a function of memory, in Britain but also globally, that
is somewhat related to nostalgia in that it, too, involves a process of selection. He talks
about imperial amnesia, which has been in the news recently in public conversations
following the worldwide Black Lives Matter protests and the toppling of Confederate
and colonial statues in the US and the UK. Tharoor’s suggestions of reparation are less
concerned with money than with education on colonialism, ‘to teach British
3 William Dalrymple, The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company (London:
Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019), p. 395.
4 Ibid., p. 308.
5 Dadabhai Naoroji, Poverty and the Un-British Rule of India, (London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co.,
Ltd., 1901).
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schoolchildren what built their homeland, just as German children are shepherded to
concentration camps to see the awful reality of what their forefathers did’.6 Besides
education, other symbolic and gestural reparations fall short of the granular material
reality of what Ann Stoler has termed the process of imperial ruination, a continuous
and multiform worsening of lives and futures that began with the effects of historical
colonialism.7 Damage and potential redress, on a local level, are often made invisible
by the geopolitical scale that sustains competitive moralities in the liberal world order.
Tharoor uses the phrase “advancing underdevelopment,” in which the opposing
vectors point to the nature of postcolonial development negotiating with not only
remnants of colonial political, economic, and cultural infrastructure, but also active
processes of ruination.
In describing the inauguration of these processes with the beginning of colonial
rule, the historical moment where Dalrymple’s book ends, he notes the unique
combination of economic and political interests that characterized the East India
Company becoming an “empire within an empire”.8 The aggressive economic policies
of despotic governor-generals like Hastings and later Richard Wellesley were chastised
by the Parliament. ‘By the end of 1803,’ Dalrymple writes, ‘[…] Wellesley, the Empire-
building government cuckoo in the Company’s corporate nest, was […] recalled.’9 After
the Mutiny in 1857, the rule of India transferred from the Company to the Crown, and
in 1858 the Queen’s Proclamation read, ‘We hold Ourselves bound to the Natives of
Our Indian Territories by the same obligation of Duty which bind Us to all our other
Subjects’.10 Dadabhai Naoroji would later base his book on the argument that this
putative political homogenization and creation of a unified grateful subjecthood across
the empire, were severely betrayed by unfair and exploitative economic practices.
Relatedly, imperial nostalgia smooths the transition from a grateful empire to a
celebratory commonwealth, the latter a ready market for cultural products. The
sombre note struck at the end of Dalrymple’s book is a response to the jubilant
nostalgia that is a political cultural force evident in everything from recent debates
6 Inglorious Empire, p. 239.
7 Ann Laura Stoler, ‘Introduction’, Imperial Debris: On Ruins and Ruination, ed. by Ann Laura Stoler,
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013, pp. 1-38.
8 Joseph Sramek, Gender, Morality, and Race in Company India, 1765-1858, qtd. in William
Dalrymple, The Anarchy, p. 388.
9 Ibid. p. 389.
10 Queen Victoria, ‘Proclamation, by the Queen in Council, to the Princes, Chiefs and People of India’,
The British Library, <https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/proclamation-by-the-queen-in-council-to-
the-princes-chiefs-and-people-of-india>, [accessed 22 September 2020]
84
over The BBC Proms to immensely popular films and TV shows like The Crown. His
and Tharoor’s books, in respective ways, engage in battling its enervating effects.
Saronik Bosu
New York University
sb5749@nyu.edu
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