The colonial impulse

<i>The Theft of India:</i> The European Conquests of India, 1498-1765

The Theft of India 

The European Conquests of India, 1498-1765

Roy Moxham

Harper Collins

264 pages; Rs 399

The impact of colonialism on India has been a fertile area of research, investigation and analysis by professional historians and commentators. A British citizen who has lived for many years in Africa and visited India has added his mite to this public discourse, starting from the arrival of Portuguese sailor Vasco da Gama on May 20, 1498. 

This is a relatively lightweight history, with little new in terms of facts and analysis but Roy Moxham’s motives for writing it are to present an unequivocal riposte to historians who have expended scholarly energy focusing attention on the “positive” side of colonialism. He writes: “It soon became apparent to me that the impressions I had formed of a benevolent British rule bore, as they had in Africa, little resemblance to the reality. The British had indeed improved education, irrigation and transport, but there was much darker side too”. He duly notes the unintended positive consequences of colonialism but focuses on the “robbery and plunder” of India’s economic resources.

No less significant is his unconscious contradiction of the Sangh Parivar historiography, which describes India’s many Muslim rulers and the Mughal dynasty as “foreign” rulers. Mr Moxham, a foreigner, makes a more correct and even-handed judgement. He writes: “For most historians, life under the Mughals was considerably worse than is generally portrayed but at least the Mughal spoils were generally retained in India. The Europeans, however, exported not only vast amount of India’s wealth but thousands of Indian slaves too.” In other words, he has squarely identified colonial rulers as foreigners who fought their battles in India for the sole purpose of plundering Indian wealth. 

How they did so is captured in nine chapters — three for the Portuguese, four for the British, and one chapter each for the Dutch and the French. Each of these powers fought local rulers and each other for control of large tracts of India until the British managed to defeat them and establish their hegemony. 

Some common facts about colonial policies and practices towards India deserve mention to understand the reality of colonialism. 

First, all these competitors – the Portuguese, Dutch or British – were involved not just in the trade of goods and commodities, but in the business of exporting slaves from India to their homeland.

Second, and concomitantly, these powers openly practiced racial discrimination against local populations. British practices are well-known and documented, but they were by no means the worst. As Mr Moxham writes, “Although probably most of the Europeans in India thought themselves superior to the Indians, the Dutch colonialists were the most extreme. They habitually described themselves as the ‘Elect of God’, and the Indians as ‘Black Dogs’.”

Third, debauchery was rife since most Europeans were single and male, and so, therefore, were sexually transmitted diseases (euphemistically known as the “social disease”).

Fourth, local kings were not defeated only by the colonisers’ superior military strength and technology. Every colonial success in India was achieved by manipulations of the “locals” by the colonisers. “The Portuguese, the Dutch, the English and the Danes were finally followed into India by the French. It was the French who would precipitate the European conquest of India,” Mr Moxham writes.

With the death of Aurangzeb in 1707, the Mughal empire disintegrated into smaller competing polities, “ideal conditions for the Europeans to play one side off against the other”. The French were particularly adept at diplomatic manoeuvres and the author describes the role of Joseph Francois Dupleix, who came to India in 1741 and expanded trade and political influence after defeating the Mughal army near Madras (now Chennai). The inter-colonial wars for the occupation of India were the “norm”, the final scene being enacted in Madras and also in Bengal in clashes between Dupleix and Robert Clive, that soldier of fortune and officer of the East India Company who later became commander-in-chief of British India. 

Clive’s rise to power came, of course, via the bribery of and betrayal by Mir Jaffer, commander of the Nawab of Bengal Siraj ud-Daula’s army, at the Battle of Plassey in 1757. The conquest of the wealthy and fertile province of Bengal marked the beginning of formal rule of the British in India and the marginalisation of the French and the Portuguese. 

Traders, thus, “became warriors and conquerors” because India was a great profitable market for the successful coloniser. It wasn’t just the East India Company that made huge gains, its local employees did too. Clive’s fabled riches (and equally famous ruination of Bengal) has long been emblematic of the basic exploitative nature of colonialism, whether in Asia, Africa or Latin America.  

Colonialism, as Mr Moxham’s account underlines, was a profitable enterprise and driven by pure self-interest. It is non-historical to search for any “beneficial” results of the colonial project; even if the colonisers did a few modern things in colonies, such actions of the colonisers at best were “incidental” to the larger enterprise. The Theft of India in that sense is a good title, though “The Plunder of India” would also have been appropriate.