Amartya Sen writes the above article in THE GUARDIAN, UK seeking mainly to ask the question and set off a debate on it: “what would India have been, and eventually become too, if the British had not occupied and ruled the country for 200+ years.”
Much of his article instead of actually suggesting interesting possible scenarios and hypotheses, which an eager reader would have expected from a scholar-historian of his erudition and status, is instead full of jejune rehash of William Dalrymple’s history of the British East Indian Company in the book “THE ANARCHY”.
A friend of mine with whom I shared Sen’s article wrote to me after reading it, “at best it’s specualtive and at worst hypothetical as it was quite possible that in the alternative, it could have been French or the Portugese spreading their wings here (in India)”.
It was a valid question indeed … but for which no clues are to be found in Prof. Sen’s article. (He does offer us though, by way of historical comparison, a dry, pedantic nugget about the Meiji dynasty before and after the American occupation of Japan in 1854 that Commodore Mathew Perry, with a just a small naval fleet, then heralded).
However, I ventured to oblige my friend with my own humble attempt in using my own relatively limited knowledge of history of my country (in comparison to Sen’s own) in providing what I thought might have most likely panned out as historical events in India between the period 1600 and 1947 when the British EIC, at first, and then the British Crown thereafter turned India comprehensively into the kind of nation that it became after 1947.
Below is reproduced what I wrote back to my friend:
It certainly is all just idle speculation… even if it does happen to be that of the Nobel Laureate, the great Prof. Amartya Sen.
My own idle speculation is that if the British EIC had not been able to aggressively expand in Bengal and the Awadh provinces, the tottering Mughal Empire would have collapsed and disappeared at least 50-60 years before we know it finally did with the death of the last Mughal Emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar in 1862-3.
The Marathas would’ve then been able to certainly rule much of North India by unifying all other smaller princely states. And given then their collective might, the Portuguese and French would’ve been effectively stymied and prevented from allying with either the Nizam in Hyderabad or Tipu Sultan in the Carnatic and creating political mischief across the country as we know they did throughout our colonial history.
The British, French and Portuguese would’ve all been welcomed and allowed to do trade and commerce of course in India …. But the Marathas would never have given the foreigners political latitude the kind of which the fading Mughal Empire in its last days unfortunately did and perished because it did so.
I think the Marathas would’ve easily ruled all Deccan , all Central Provinces as well as large parts of the Northwest Frontier after seeking an alliance or power-share agreement in Punjab with the powerful Sikhs.
In the Deep South , where the Marathas were already present in Arcot, Tanjore and Tiruchirappalli , the Marathas would’ve turned those into vassal states with local regents.
India then would’ve become a largely Hindu nation. … not the nation with the severely broken or identity-disordered societies that it is made up of today, thanks mainly to the post-British colonial Westminster-style Nehruvianism that was adopted by the founding fathers of the new State that was born midnight 15 August 1947.
Amartya Sen instead of focusing on such possible or even imaginative “what-if” scenarios, and giving us far more authentic historian perspectives and deeply considered constructions than any that an ordinary person like me ever could, instead disappoints us all in his article which is filled with no more than boring, dreary stuff from history that we already know.
Sudarshan Madabushi