Painful reading.

One of the indisputable merits of Newsinger’s book is that the author is relentlessly candid in advancing the argument that the British empire was not merely gained at the point of bayonets but was down to its last days a very bloody affair…. What Newsinger offers instead is an annotated catalogue of British crimes, some more familiar than others. The story of the brutal suppression of the Indian Rebellion of 1857-58, for instance, has been the staple of nationalist Indian narratives and is gen erally encountered in most histories of the British empire. The chapter on the 1940s which covers the Quit India ‘disturbances’ INA trials, and the Royal Indian Navy mutiny, is more intellectually rewarding since the historiographical focus has been largely on the Hindu-Muslim communal conflict. At the same time that Churchill was waging a valiant struggle against the Nazis and Japanese, he complained to Leo Amery, Secretary of State for India, ‘I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.’ The Hindus, Churchill observed, are a ‘foul people’, and the Royal Air Force’s surplus bombers could, in his opinion, be suitably deployed ‘to destroy them’ Amery privately noted, ‘I didn’t see much difference between his outlook and Hitler’s.

Look around us today, we’ve never really shaken colonialism off. Culturally and psychologically, the British rule was infinitesimally more devastating. Evidence: Sonia Gandhi.