SHASHI THAROOR AND DARK ERA OF INGLORIOUS EMPIRE
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In writing of Indian culture, I am highly conscious of my own subjectivity; arguably, there is more than one Indian culture, and certainly more than one view of Indian culture.” – Shashi Tharoor (HAPR)
As a diplomat and writer, Shashi Tharoor has explored the diversity of culture in his native India. By exploring the themes of India’s past and their relevance to its future, he has produced both works of fiction and nonfiction. In reaction to his works The Great Indian Novel and Show Business, Tharoor has been referred to as “one of the finest writers of satirical novels currently operating in English” (Shashi Tharoor). Though his works are pointedly satirical and comedic, Tharoor contends that his novels “… are to some degree, didactic works masquerading as entertainment” (HAPR). For instance, India: From Midnight to Millennium, is a nonfiction account of India’s past and projected future inspired by the 50th anniversary of India’s independence.
Shashi Tharoor was born in 1956 in London and educated in Mumbai, Calcutta, Delhi (BA in History, St. Stephen’s College), and the United States. He holds a Ph.D. from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University (Shashi Tharoor 2).
Since May 1978, Tharoor has worked for the United Nations. He served for over 11 years with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, whose Singapore office he headed during the “boat people” crisis (SAJA). In October 1989 he was transferred to the peace-keeping staff at the United Nations Headquarters in New York (Shashi Tharoor 2). In this position, he served as Special Assistant to the Under-Secretary-General for Peace-keeping Operations. Dealing with a range of issues in this capacity, Tharoor addressed a variety of peace-keeping issues around the world and led the team responsible for the United Nations peace-keeping operations in the former Yugoslavia (Shashi Tharoor 2). On January 1, 1997 Shashi Tharoor was appointed Executive Assistant to Secretary of the United Nations Kofi Annan (Shashi Tharoor 2).
As an author, Shashi Tharoor has written many editorials, commentaries, and short stories in Indian and Western publications (SAJA). In addition, he is the winner of several journalism and literary awards, including a Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (SAJA).
postcolonial epic rewritings such as Shashi Tharoor’s The Great Indian Novel and Derek Walcott’s Omeros. Such works are more attuned to what Glissant calls a “relation identity”, predicated not on the racial purity of mythic ancestral filiation, but on the conscious and contradictory experience of intercultural contact.
Tharoor treats colonialism as a moral phenomenon of the past, one that existed in a vacuum, while it is actually a phenomenon with an ongoing material impact on the lives of people. Over the last few years, Shashi Tharoor has become the hero of many people in India. Besides his pop-postcolonialism, Tharoor is famous for his charm, good looks and style of argument. His general appeal, I argue, can be understood by considering the specific demographic he is most appealing to – liberal elites. While some of his claims are important – the most famous (and obvious) one being that India would have been better off not being colonised by the British – I think the politics that Tharoor embodies and promotes are shallow and dangerous.
To be fair to Tharoor, however, I must begin my critique by acknowledging that he did more than simply point out that colonialism is bad; he went through the trouble of researching and writing a book on the many ways in which the British exploited India (An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India). Although Tharoor definitely isn’t the first to do it, he takes the time to dispel a more colonialist view of history, for which he is due some credit.
His book might be understood as a response to the work of scholars such as Nigel Biggar – whose controversial project on the ethics of empire has recently been a point of contention within Oxford University – and Niall Ferguson – who famously feuded with Pankaj Mishra in the London Review of Books over his book Civilization: The West and The Rest. It should be made clear, however, that there aren’t many historians who agree with Biggar and Ferguson – or even take their arguments seriously. As such, Tharoor’s basic historical premise about the nature of colonialism isn’t particularly controversial or unique.
What does it mean to understand the materiality of colonialism? Consider the families across India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, that have suffered since the British rule. For them, colonialism lives on in the many cycles of oppression that were either created, perpetuated, or intensified by British colonialism. Unemployment, famine, poor sanitary conditions, lack of access to education and healthcare, cast-based oppression, religious violence, gender-based violence and myriad other issues are all a part of the legacy of colonialism. The very framework of reparations denies this material legacy by assuming that colonialism existed (in the past) as a merely moral aberration – one that can be overcome through acknowledgement, remorse and punitive damages.
Tharoor affirms and enhances Indian cultural identity through his novel by reflecting on pluralism and openness in India’s kaleidoscopic culture. He also aims to broaden the understanding of Indian culture and historical heritage. Tharoor writes that “the task of altering and shaping such resonant characters and situations to tell a contemporary story offered a rare opportunity to strike familiar chords while playing an unfamiliar tune” (HAPR). Thus this novel, by interpreting reality through myth and history, concludes that India has a vast heritage from which much can be learned.
The appeal of Tharoor and his politics to liberal elites is clear. A politics of moral debt and individual action – as opposed to structural oppression and collective struggle – allows liberals to ignore their very real part in the perpetuation of the legacy of colonialism. All it takes is a click of the share button to feel like one is making a difference. Liberals aren’t just captured by Tharoor’s arguments, charm, and wit than, they are captured by the way in which all these things reaffirm their politics of elitism. While I’d like to believe that Tharoor himself would be open to these critiques, I maintain that his arguments and cult of personality in general obscure the material legacy of colonialism in India.
* Write on key arguments in shashi Tharoor's book "An Era of Darkness ".
In the " An Era of Darkness " Shashi Tharoor mostly doing arguments to established about British colonial rites whose violence experience for Indian society.Here I notify that most off the his work represented on British exploitation of India so that he carried the day for Tharoor in an Oxford debate not too long ago.
May be Tharoor's point is that there was nothing make some one in British rule of our country. What India had suffer something difficult or painful under them. According to Tharoor an era of darkness for India which suffered through wars, made man famines,racism,deportation..etc. So here Tharoor's debate became popular. We very well know that British government everything was doing for increased own wealth from India but they gave us new more things.
Shashi Tharoor's , 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.impunity. Tharoor is right, of course. There are few Indians who would not have heard of the treachery that enabled Clive to triumph at Plassey or of the incredible amounts of ill-begotten wealth the East India Company officials hauled back with them to England. “One official,” Cyril Radcliff informs us, “was said to have pocketed 1,200,000 sterling in bribes from the Nawab of Carnatic: another pocketed 200,000 pounds.” Given the opportunities he had to enrich himself in India, Clive was “amazed at his own moderation”.
* Write critique on both the films with reference to postcolonial insights.
1.The Black Prince :
With the context of post colonial indight ,Maharaja Duleep Singh was a very complex and troubled man. In today's world, he would have a flock of psychiatrists and psychologists trying to help him overcome his troubles, and understand him. Maharaja Duleep Singh's battles were not fought on the battlefield. He didn't win any duels with the sword like his father, and the mighty warrior Hari Singh Nalwa, who helped shape the Sikh Kingdom of Punjab. His fight was more in terms of an internal battle to overcome his own demons and the manipulated reasoning imposed upon him by the British. He had to find himself first and reconnect to who he really was.Then [he could] raise his voice to denounce the English authority over him and demand freedom not only for the people of Punjab, but the entire sub-continent of India. He fought a lonely war amidst an atmosphere full of spies, traitors and manipulators. This was a story that needed to be told.
2.Victoria and Abdul :
Abdul Karim was 24 years old when he was dispatched from Agra to serve 68-year-old Queen Victoria as an attendant. The tall and handsome Indian Muslim didn't speak a word of English, nor the Empress of India any Urdu. What followed was a relationship of such intimacy and tenderness that the British establishment tried their hardest to destroy all evidence of it. In Victoria and Abdul: The True Story of the Queen's Closest Confidant historian Shrabani Basu unearths a story that shows a new side to Victoria and places a young Indian at the heart of the Empire as her greatest influence.
Abdul Karim, a young prison clerk from India, travels to present Queen Victoria with a mohur on her Golden Jubilee and strikes an unlikely friendship with her.
* Summarise Ngugi Wa Thiongo's views in 'Introduction: Towards the Universal Language of Struggle' - from 'Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature'.
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o ((IPA: nɡʊɡi wá ðiɔŋɔ ); born James Ngugi; 5 January 1938) is a Kenyan writer and academic who writes primarily in Gikuyu. His work includes novels, plays, short stories, and essays, ranging from literary and social criticism to children's literature. He is the founder and editor of the Gikuyu-language journal Mũtĩiri. His short story The Upright Revolution: Or Why Humans Walk Upright, is translated into 98 languages from around the world.
Language and culture inDecolonising the Mind, Ngũgĩ sees language, rather than history orculture, as the enabling condition of human consciousness: "The choice of language and the use of language is central to a people's definition of themselves inrelation to the entire universe.Decolonising the Mind is a meld of autobiography, post-colonial theory, pedagogy, African history, and literary criticism. Ngũgĩ dedicated Decolonising the Mind "to all those who write in African languages, and to all those who over the years have maintained the dignity of the literature, culture, philosophy, and other treasures carried by African languages."
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