Yours, Obediently

Acceptance speeches are notoriously unmemorable. But when Prime Minister Manmohan Singh rose to thank his alma mater, OxfordUniversity, for giving him an honorary doctorate on July 8, it was a speech that was unlikely to be forgotten in a hurry. With a startling—some would say suicidal—lack of political correctness, the PM openly declared an affinity for the British empire's "beneficial consequences" to modern India: rule of law, free press, civil service, modern universities and research laboratories, judiciary, legal system, bureaucracy, police, and above all, the English language which is now enabling us to be world players. Did he get carried away by the occasion and was he "just being nice", as industrialist Bharat Ram puts it? Or was it a deliberate message to the world that India had finally come of age and could afford to generously acknowledge its former oppressor's contributions?

Niceness had little to do with it, according to PMO sources. Nor political innocence. "The prime minister has always felt that India is big enough and strong enough to look the ghosts of our past in the eye," according to them. What is more, Manmohan had put his speech through academic scrutiny, getting it vetted by several historians. But the ghosts, it appears, are not so easily exorcised, with historians clearly divided on the "benefits" of the British Raj.

Popular feeling can seem to side with Manmohan. "Ask any common man over 50, and if he is honest, he will say we were better off under the English than Indian rulers," says Khushwant Singh. "Look at anything—railways, telegraph, civil service—and it's British-built. We had no democratic institutions until the British gave them to us. Rule of law and justice were their concepts. Even our Constitution is based on a model laid down by the British government in 1935. They gave us the English language which has given us a huge advantage over other parts of the world. There are now more English-speaking Indians than even in Great Britain." Adds Singh unequivocally: "It's not a sign of kow-towing to the British, it just shows self-confidence to say what the British did for us."

But for Marxist historians like Irfan Habib, "it's all idle talk". "Governance?" asks Habib acidly, "The PM is the first person I've heard praising the British empire for its governance. How many schools and universities did they build? Our English education was at Indian cost —it was organised and funded by Indians, the British did nothing.As for the railways, we paid for it through huge taxation—the Indian taxpayer was actually milked; the British made a five per cent net profit on the railways they built here. Whatever they built—roads, canals—it came from our revenue. All the material was imported from Britain, at double the cost of indigenous material. And during the famine of 1899, the British exported their wheat to us, three million tonnes of it, for which we paid an enormous cost."

Nor does Habib agree with the other "benefits" of the Raj: "What laboratories is the PM talking about—I haven't heard of any. And if Manmohan is satisfied with our administrative system, the majority of people aren't. Every country has an administrative system, what's so specially wonderful about ours? And as for the Indian Penal Code—has he ever looked at the Evidence Act which draws a distinction between respectable persons and ordinary ones? Of course, nationalism was of western origins, but it was not particularly British. The Japanese and Chinese had their nationalism as well and they were never ruled by the British. Post-1947, we were in such a stricken state... what industries did we have?"

But Bharat Ram of the Shriram group doesn't agree that the British obstructed the growth of Indianindustry."They certainly did not want our textile industry to grow because of their own domestic interests, but I don't think they came in the way of Indianindustry. I personally feel that we would not be where we are today if the British hadn't ruled here. They made India more modern. We were such a fragmented society and because of them we became one nation."

But Marxist historians insist that it wasn't British imperialism that made us one, any imperial rule would have led to the same results. As D.N. Jha points out: "When they drained our wealth out and unleashed a repressive rule with so many atrocities, how can we say that the British gave us a model of good governance? Whatever country had ruled over us, we would have adopted their system of governance with the same results. It's just a matter of chance that all our democratic institutions are based on the British model. They did everything to further their own interests, whether it was governance, railways, post and telegraph. As Marx said, British rule is an unconscious tool of history. It has both good and bad results. If we turned these tools to our own advantage, why give credit to British rule? Especially because when they left here we were in such a crippled condition that we still haven't recovered from it. It's the same as them calling us the white man's burden, exploiting us under the garb of a civilising mission."

Jawaharlal Nehru University historian Basudev Chatterjee though argues that it's time to grow up and stop the blame game. "Why we were crippled post-1947 is because of our own internal conditions, even the British could do nothing about it. Why do we forget that their interests were not necessarily inimical to ours?" he points out. "There was a new breed of Indians who grew in collaboration with the British." According to Chatterjee, India would have been worse off if we were colonised by other powers like the French or Portuguese. "We couldn't have guilt-tripped them into granting us freedom because the French imperial system did not grant the same rights to their colonies." Instead of "getting stuck in the same stupid arguments", Chatterjee suggests that we move on and stop blaming foreigners for all our ills. "Gandhi, Nehru, Tagore, all of them drew a distinction between British imperialism and the British. Why can't we?"

Modern India historian Sumit Sarkar agrees: "The tendency to demonise anything that comes from outside the country is an ideology that Vir Savarkar typifies. " All imperialists, he points out, work in their own interests. And whatever the British did, whether it was the railways or anything else, they did out of the basest motives.But if the prime minister begins by acknowledging the economic drain, transforming us, as he says, from "the brightest jewel in the British Crown (to) the poorest country in the world", then why not give them their due credit? Did any of the Indian-born imperialists do as much?

Sarkar admits many of the benefits of the Raj era are arguable, like the civil service or even the English language. "English education created elites and had an alienating effect from Indian culture, but in a multi-lingual country like ours with a need for a link language, English was the most practicable and helped enormously, besides giving us one of our few global advantages."

What we have to watch out for, according to Sarkar, is a tendency "to convert nationhood into a simple conflict of good and bad". Every historian would agree with that. As Jha says, "It was a bitter divorce. But now it's time to shake hands and say, let's be friends."