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Here on my blog. This task related to the Shashi Tharoor's book: " An Era of Darkness." I have already written a blog on Shashi Tharoor.
Introduction about Shashi Tharoor:
Shashi Tharoor (born 9 March 1956) is an Indian politician, writer and former international diplomat who has been serving as Member of Parliament, Lok Sabha from Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, since 2009. He was formerly Under-Secretary General of the United Nations and contested for the post of Secretary-General in 2006.
Tharoor has written nineteen books in English.
Tharoor has been a columnist in each of India's three best-known English-language newspapers, most recently for The Hindu (2001–2008) and in a weekly column, "Shashi on Sunday," in the Times of India (January 2007 – December 2008). Following his resignation as Minister of State for External Affairs, he began a fortnightly column on foreign policy issues in the Deccan Chronicle.
☆ Shahi Tharoor's book : "An Era of Darkness " :
Shashi Tharoor’s latest "An Era of Darkness" is one breathless read. In it, he aggregates all the arguments required to establish that British colonial rule was an awful experience for Indians and he does so with a consummate debater’s skill. His book is, in fact, an expanded take on British exploitation of India that famously carried the day for Tharoor in an Oxford debate not too long ago.
According to Tharoor, there was nothing redeeming in British rule of our country. What India had to endure under them was outrageous humiliation on a humongous scale and sustained violence of a kind it had never experienced before. In short, British rule was, according to Tharoor, an era of darkness for India, throughout which it suffered several manmade famines, wars, racism, maladministration, deportation of its people to distant lands and economic exploitation on an unprecedented scale. An indignant Tharoor even demands a token restitution and public apology from the British for all the harm they had caused India. This is something, as his debate established, wildly popular in India.
Tharoor said that India’s contributions in men, material and money, to the wars that the British fought within India and overseas, especially the two World Wars.The well-known historian and Nehru’s biographer, Judith Brown, acknowledges that “British taxpayers contributed not a penny to the Raj”. Even Niall Ferguson, not one of Tharoor’s favourites, accepts that Indians paid for the “privilege of being ruled by the British”.That British rule in India was bad in parts has never been denied by anyone, least of all by the British. Their archives are full of accounts of British depredations, covering the entire period of their rule in India.
☆Shashi Tharoor’s Preface to his masterly An Era of Darkness:
“The British Raj is scarcely ancient history. It is part of the memories of people still alive. According to a recent UN Population Division report, the number of Indians over the age of eighty is six million: British rule was an inescapable part of their childhoods. If you add to their number, their first-generation descendants, Indians in their fifties and sixties, whose parents would have told them stories about their experiences of the Raj, the numbers with an intimate knowledge of the period would swell to over 100 million Indians...Still, I write as an Indian of 2016 about the India of two centuries ago and less, animated by a sense of belonging morally and geographically to the land that was once so tragically oppressed by the Raj. India is my country, and in that sense my outrage is personal. But I seek nothing from history – only an account of itself.”
☆ Ngugi Wa Thiongo's view:
Ngugi wa Thiong’o, original name James Thiong’o Ngugi, (born January 5, 1938, Limuru, Kenya), Kenyan writer who was considered East Africa’s leading novelist. His popular Weep Not, Child (1964) was the first major novel in English by an East African. As he became sensitized to the effects of colonialism in Africa, Ngugi adopted his traditional name and wrote in the Bantu language of Kenya’s Kikuyu people.
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