How would you react to the view that your portrayal of the British in India ignores the fact they ruined the country?
My book is a social history, not a political one. Nor is it about the British Empire or whether it was good or bad; inevitably it was both. The book is about the hundreds of thousands of individuals who found themselves in India during the centuries of Britain’s involvement in the subcontinent. I do not think that a social historian should be making political judgments, so I would prefer not to enter the debate about whether the British “ruined the country”.
Why do you think the British seem to have lost interest in India — is it merely because they wish to forget the colonial experience? Or are there other reasons as well?
The British may have lost interest in India in the decades following Independence, but I think they have recovered much of it now. Many of them like to travel in India, and in Britain many more enjoy eating in Indian restaurants, following Indian cricket, and watching TV programmes on subjects such as Indian railways and Indian wildlife. It seems to me that British affection for modern India is very strong.
Did the three centuries you write about produce a crop of characters Britain no longer produces or was it something about the environment that made them such a hardy, determined and adventurous lot?
I think that successful empires since ancient Rome have always engendered a sense of self-assurance among its young men. In Britain in the 19th century such feelings were reinforced by the ethos of the public schools and by what was known as “muscular Christianity”, the belief that strong and able officials could be produced by a combination of sporting ability and Christian attitudes. Although the public schools do still exist, their Victorian ethos has of course been much diluted.
Do you think that India acknowledges the contributions the British made to India or is that something completely overshadowed by the negative effects of colonial rule?
Most of the Indians I know — and most of them are historians and academics — would acknowledge certain positive contributions that the British made to India, especially in the fields of law and administration. I think former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh put it well when he observed in a speech in 2005 that India’s “judiciary, our legal system, our bureaucracy and our police are all great institutions, derived from British-Indian administration, and they have served our country exceedingly well”.
Did any part of your research bring you to India or was it all done entirely in the extensive libraries in the UK?
Most of my documentary research was done in British archives because they are where nearly all the letters and diaries the British wrote in India are now stored. But I could not have written this book without regular visits to India, without talking to Indian historians and other friends and without seeing the places I planned to write about. On my last visit I stayed in Murshidabad and Cossimbazar because they were so important in the days of the East India Company. On all my visits I have gone to cemeteries, and many times to the wonderful Park Street Cemetery in Kolkata, because they contain so much of British Indian history.
How would you compare British colonialists with other European colonists of the period? Was there something remarkably different about them that accounted for their success?
I have not studied enough comparative history to be able to answer this question without diffidence. The principal difference between the colonial policies of France and Britain was that the French wanted effectively to make their colonial subjects French while the British favoured a multicultural approach. This division holds good today with the two country’s approaches to their immigrant populations from Africa and Asia, and in this case at least the British way is proving more successful.
