Britain should not be nervous of India

For a disconcertingly large constituency in Britain, Indian history ends in 1947.The two centuries leading up to that bloody year – when British rule formally ended, India gained independence and Pakistan was conjured into existence – were replete with books, articles, pamphlets, lectures and debates on India. What unites this body of work, apart from colonial condescension, is an effort to comprehend India. That impulse faded once India attained freedom.

Britain’s sins in India – racism, carnage, plunder – are a matter for British consciences. But a more confident India will also one day acknowledge that its modern state would have been improbable in the absence of the encounter with Britain. It was the British who, reacquainting Indians with their past glory, reminded them of their great and tragically squandered history. The Indian sociologist André Beteille, no apologist for empire, has written about the intellectual currents provoked by the public universities raised by the British in Kolkata, Chennai and Mumbai.