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prithviatreides 's review for:
Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India
by Shashi Tharoor
Like many others, I read this book after watching Shashi Tharoor's iconic Oxford speech, 'Britain Does Owe Reparations.'
And invigorating as that speech was, this book was more so. It's a hard read for anyone who cares about the atrocities committed by the East India Company and the British crown in their modern crusades, in their search for money to be made, nations to be destroyed, people to be enslaved.
And of course, though the notion does not need the input, the validation, of a random twenty-one-year-old kid, I wanna say that Shashi Tharoor has a brilliant mind. There's a lot to be learned from him, beyond the facts and figures of British cruelty.
It is important to note that he does not intend to incite rage against the British, but only to engender an understanding of the history of a land colonized by them. Because, let's be honest, Colonial India is something most Indian kids know of, like many other important things (thanks to our education system), only at a surface level. We know it was bad, we know shit went down. But how bad was it?
Spoiler: Very.
I was horrified and disturbed, but I also understood. I think the last one is the key thing to take away from this book. We must understand the atrocities of the past, to be prepared when parasites like greed and the hunger for power, in different forms, with different hosts, raise their ugly heads from the dark pits again.
Because of course, they do not rest for long, and never in their entirety.
And invigorating as that speech was, this book was more so. It's a hard read for anyone who cares about the atrocities committed by the East India Company and the British crown in their modern crusades, in their search for money to be made, nations to be destroyed, people to be enslaved.
And of course, though the notion does not need the input, the validation, of a random twenty-one-year-old kid, I wanna say that Shashi Tharoor has a brilliant mind. There's a lot to be learned from him, beyond the facts and figures of British cruelty.
It is important to note that he does not intend to incite rage against the British, but only to engender an understanding of the history of a land colonized by them. Because, let's be honest, Colonial India is something most Indian kids know of, like many other important things (thanks to our education system), only at a surface level. We know it was bad, we know shit went down. But how bad was it?
Spoiler: Very.
I was horrified and disturbed, but I also understood. I think the last one is the key thing to take away from this book. We must understand the atrocities of the past, to be prepared when parasites like greed and the hunger for power, in different forms, with different hosts, raise their ugly heads from the dark pits again.
Because of course, they do not rest for long, and never in their entirety.