A Critique From The Left

Shashi Tharoor’s “Inglorious Empire” is an account of “What the British did to India”. The book is composed in eight chapters through which Tharoor deals with the implications of two centuries of British colonialism. The author assembles a thematic record of deliberate policies pursued by the British aristocracy and he examines how those strategies in action, led to the depredation and looting of the Indian resources, starvation of its people, fragmentation of its social identity and destruction of its cultural and economic base in the course of two centuries. Tharoor’s book is not a chronology of the British colonial machinery and it should not be treated so. The narrative is shaped to converge in certain historical events – such as partition of India – in a flowing arrangement of themes that are the over-arching characteristic of the record the author is providing.