The British gave us a sense of our past. Without William Jones, Edwin Arnold, the Reverend Pope and even the much-read, much-abused Vincent Smith and Lane-Poole Indian history would not just be poorer — it might not have existed. The British gave us our feel for the land in real material terms, not just with metaphorical allusions to Bharata Varsha, where seven rivers flow and black bucks roam. Between the Survey of India, the Botanical Survey of India, the Archaeological Survey of India, the Geological Survey of India, the Census of India and numerous District Gazetteers they mapped our country, studied, categorised, catalogued, analysed and described it in memorable prose (even if the content does not meet current fashions of political correctness). The British gave us our future. Macaulay (and the less-recognised Bentinck), thank heavens, forced English on us and created generations of Shakespeare-lovers — at one time a member of the Bengali Bhadralok could quote Shakespeare better than anyone in Warwickshire — not to mention lovers of Agatha Christie and P.G. Wodehouse. The English language defines our weltanschauung. It gives our writers fabulous royalties and our call-centre workers their extravagant livelihoods. It enables our judiciary to remain faithful to Magna Carta traditions even as they expand the vocabulary of jurisprudence with expressions like “basic features” and “creamy layers”.

The Gibbon who will write the definitive history of the Decline of the British Empire is still a few hundred years into the future. But with his inimitable brilliance, Nirad Chaudhuri may have hit upon the reason why the Raj lasted two hundred years (if you count from the siege of Arcot) or ninety years (if you count from Queen Victoria’s proclamation) and not four hundred years like the Roman Imperium. Based on a now-discredited ideology of racism, the empire conferred ‘subjecthood’ on us and denied us ‘citizenship’. Gandhi was an Inner Temple barrister, who defended the laws of England. To throw him out of a train is the stupidest kind of gesture that converts a friend into a foe. Contrast this with the fact that the Roman Empire gave the full rights of a citizen to a Syrian Jew (St Paul) who probably spoke no word of Latin. If the Raj deserved to pass on it was because of this single fault of racial arrogance (a fault exhibited particularly by many British residents in India who derived a peculiar sadistic sense of self-importance by kicking the natives around). The only excuse is that the prevailing pseudo-scientific theories of the time gave legitimacy to the doctrines of racial superiority and inferiority.

... contd.