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Book Review: The Theft of India by Roy Moxham

Of tax collectors, colonial trappings

“To use for our exclusive benefit what is not ours is theft.” This simple definition of theft by Jose Marti quite suitably fits the narrative of organised robbery that spanned four centuries, and that reduced India to a wretched site of exploitation.

Of tax collectors, colonial trappings

from the days of the Raj: This scholarly book offers little new in terms of facts but extensive and unbiased research gives an air of novelty to the known information



Shiva

“To use for our exclusive benefit what is not ours is theft.” This simple definition of theft by Jose Marti quite suitably fits the narrative of organised robbery that spanned four centuries, and that reduced India to a wretched site of exploitation. It is the story of colonial rule in India. It is the story of riches to rags.

History of colonialism has been ruthless, self-serving, and unapologetically barbaric. However, glimpse through a Euro-centric prism offers a different narrative: colonialism has been used as a fig leaf to justify acts of grotesque magnitude, in both scale and number. No wonder, we still deal with major colonial hangover despite the experience of a brutal past. Flipping the coin, Roy Moxham reports from the crime scene and provides analysis that is both discreet and disinterested. Tracing the history from the arrival of the first Portuguese ship on Indian shore, he details the coming of other barbarians – The Dutch, the British, and the French — and their rivalry as they made their way from the coast to the heart of India.

Although the first encounter with the Europeans seemed innocuously innocent, the veneer of exploration readily made way for blatant exploitation. Religion was to be their first tool of control. Hindus were forced to convert to Christianity by smearing their lips with beef. Also, it became an offence to retain non-Christian customs: “To cook rice with salt, to refuse to eat pork, to arrange feasts at funerals, or to strew flowers at weddings.” Portuguese, the writer notes, were more savage in pursuit of establishing their religious hegemony. “Furthermore, the lake temple and its idols were demolished. Not content even with that, the Jesuits had a cow killed and its blood sprinkled over the sacred lake.”

Interestingly, Mughal India was more tolerant than most of the countries of Europe at that time. Artfully gauging the situation, the British began more innocently than their violent predecessors. Accomplished in diplomatic manoeuvres, they established trade relations with Gujarati bankers and eventually set the stage for the East India Company. The accounts of the Great Bengal Famine during the Company rule are not only agonising but also appalling. The writer concludes that mortality would have been much lower if not for the British atrocities of tax collection. “It seems likely that in the first 13 years of the British rule, more harm was done to the people of India than by all the other European invaders of the centuries before.”

Quite ironically, the 17th and the 18th centuries in Europe were the Age of Reason and Enlightenment. And Europeans were unleashing such horrors on the Indian soil to which it would be almost impossible to find a parallel in any reasonable and enlightened society. Apart from war and resulting devastation, exploitative agricultural practices and slave trade made the matters worse. Women slaves in Goa and Travancore kingdom were “sold semi-naked at auctions and fetched more if they were virgins.” Moreover, slaves were forced to speak in an inferior manner — “not referring to themselves as ‘I’, but as ‘your slave’; not to refer to their food as rice, but as ‘dirty gruel’”. Value of Indian life in those harrowing times can be estimated by an account about a slave boy who was sold for price of a parcel of stockings.

It is the absolute and incredible lack of culture on the part of the ‘civilised’ that strikes the reader. This scholarly book offers little new in terms of facts but extensive and unbiased research gives an air of novelty to the known. Using riveting memoirs, travelogues, and eye-witness accounts, the writer transforms a mere chronology of events into an intriguing interplay between ambition/greed of coloniser and defiance/oppression of the colonised.

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