Book Review: An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India by Sashi Tharoor

An Era of Darkness is about the atrocities against women, ship building in India, role of Scots in India, three big darbars in India, Indian Civil Service, racism. exploitation, Indian parliament and justice in India. It also covers the Criminal Tribes legislation of 1911, colonialism, caste, British, Shi-Sunni divide in Lucknow, Nehru and Edwina, transporting Indian convicts from India, studying English literature in India, English language and its legacy, cricket and coloniality,7000 opium shops in India and the Kohinoor Diamond.

Shashi Tharoor presents interesting facts and arguments in this book. I mention some of them in this review. The author says that the Pitt family produced two Prime Minsters (p. 16). In the late 1920s, 7500 Englishmen were receiving 20 million pounds in pension from India annually(p. 24). Tharoor also agues that 'ironically, Lord Lytton's only qualification for the job of viceroy was that, as Robert Bulwer-Lytton, he was Queen Victoria's favorite poet (p. 182). Allan Octavian Hume was a Scotsman who founded the Indian National Congress (p. 81).

The atrocity and brutality of the British has clearly been exposed by Tharoor. 3289 Indian soldiers went missing in World War I, when 700,000 Indian soldiers fought against the Ottoman Empire (p. 87-88). Jamsetji Tata built Taj Mahal Hotel because he was expelled from Watson's Hotel in Bombay (p. 110). During the Orissa Famine of 1866 while a million and a half million people starved to death, the British exported 200 million pounds of rice to Britain (p. 179). Tharoor believes that Sir Syed Ahmed Khan's son was a judge, who died at 53, because he was not treated well by the British (p.72). 

The 'unfree migrants' of India were carried on British ships. which was an estimated 5300, 000 people (p. 193). Sixteen sons of Bahadur Shah Zafar were tried and hanged by the British (p. 196). Shashi Tharoor argues that the British rule in India was despotic because of the famine, forced migration and brutality (p. 204). Timber was exported to Britain for the construction of houses (p. 240). In 1886, only 86 Indians out of 1015 Engineers in PWD (p. 212). The arrival of the first electricity supplies started in India in the 1890s (p. 255). 

Tharoor says that 'Indians themselves did not drink the tea they produced. It was only during the Great Depression of the 1930s- when demand in Britain dropped and British traders had to unload their stocks- that they thought of selling their produce to the Indians the had ignored for a century' (p. 240). 

This book is a must read for the people of India and Pakistan as the author raises many interesting questions. Anyone interested in reading about the colonial rule of the brutal British rule in India, should definitely read this book.