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Shashi Tharoor & Dark Era of Inglorious Empire

 Hello Friends, 

This blog is my response to the task assigned to us by our Prof. Dr. DilipSir in the thinking activity. So here are my interpretations based on the videos attached. Happy Learning!

R - Rule

U - Understand 

L - Learn

E - Enjoy 

Click here to view Teacher's blog



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.

He also serves as Chairman of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Information Technology and All India Professionals Congress.  He formerly served as Chairman of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on External Affairs (2014 to 2019). In 2019, Shashi Tharoor received the Sahitya Academy Award for his book An Era of Darkness in a non-fiction category in English language.

Born in London, UK, and raised in India, Tharoor graduated from St. Stephen's College, Delhi in 1975 and culminated his studies in 1978 with a doctorate in International Relations and Affairs from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University. At the age of 22, he was the youngest person at the time to receive such an honour from the Fletcher School. From 1978 to 2007, Tharoor was a career official at the United Nations, rising to the rank of Under-Secretary General for Communications and Public Information in 2001. He announced his retirement after finishing second in the 2006 selection for U.N. Secretary-General to Ban Ki-moon. In 2009, Tharoor began his political career by joining the Indian National Congress and successfully represented the party from Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala by winning in the Lok Sabha elections and becoming a member of parliament. During the Congress-led UPA Government rule (2004–2014), Tharoor served as Minister of State for External Affairs (2009–2010) and Minister of Human Resource Development (2012–2014).

Tharoor is an acclaimed writer, having authored 19 bestselling works of fiction and non-fiction since 1981, which are centred on India and its history, culture, film, politics, society, foreign policy, and more related themes. He is also the author of hundreds of columns and articles in publications such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, TIME, Newsweek, and The Times of India. He was a contributing editor for Newsweek International for two years. From 2010 to 2012, he wrote a column in The Asian Age, Deccan Chronicle and, for most of 2012, until his appointment as Minister, a column in Mail Today; he also writes an internationally syndicated monthly column for Project Syndicate. He also wrote regular columns for The Indian Express (1991–93 and 1996–2001), The Hindu (2001–2008), and The Times of India (2007–2009). (Wikipedia)


Video 1. Speech at Oxford Union:


Shashi Tharoor's Oxford Union speech on 28 May 2015 was in favour of the motion, "This house believes Britain owes reparations to her former colonies". Shashi Tharoor was the seventh speaker on his team and was allotted eight minutes to speak. In the end, Tharoor's side won the debate with 185 votes to 56. Once the debates were uploaded onto the official Union YouTube channel on 14 July 2015, Shashi Tharoor's speech went viral, especially in India, where it was widely shared, discussed and attributed. Narendra Modi, at an event in the Parliament of India in July 2015, responded to the debate by saying that "what he spoke there reflected the sentiments of the citizens of India" and that the debate "shows the importance of saying the right thing at the right time". The video has over 8.1 million views on YouTube (as of June 2021) and is Oxford Union's most watched debate speech.  Following the response to his speech, Shashi Tharoor wrote a book expanding upon the debate.


Shashi Tharoor's speech was called "witty" and "passionate" among other things.  The Time magazine wrote that apart from the insight, it was Tharoor's "rapier barbs" that got everyone's attention, such as the line "No wonder that the sun never set on the British Empire because even God couldn't trust the English in the dark". Shashi Tharoor opened up with an analogy to Henry VIII's last wife: 

[...] now finding myself the seventh speaker out of eight in what must already seem a rather long evening to you, I rather feel like Henry the VIII's last wife. I more or less know what's expected of me but I am not sure how to do it any differently.

— Shashi Tharoor

While Tharoor himself did not provide attribution to his speech, some columnists have tried to verify the facts he cited. Tharoor's speech discussed the impact of colonial rule on the Indian economy, the Indian participation in the First and Second World Wars, the history of famine in India, including Churchill's role in the Bengal famine of 1943. The speech also mentioned the activities of East India Company officer Robert Clive in India, and the Jallianwala Bagh massacre. Tharoor also claimed that the infrastructure built by the British in India (such as the railway system) was merely to economically exploit the country. Shashi Tharoor focused on the principle of owing reparation rather than how much was owed:

The proposition before this house is the principle of owing reparations, not the fine points of how much is owed, to whom it should be paid. The question is, is there a debt, does Britain owe reparations? As far as I am concerned, the ability to acknowledge your wrong that has been done, to simply say sorry will go a far far far longer way than some percentage of GDP in the form of aid. What is required it seems to me is accepting the principle that reparations are owed.

— Shashi Tharoor

In the end, Tharoor was on the winning side of the debate, by 185 votes to 56.

Impact and aftermath

Within a week of the speech, the video became Oxford Union's fifth most-watched YouTube video. The video has over 7.5 million views on YouTube (as of December 2019), and is Oxford Union's most watched debate.  It was a trending topic in India for a number of days, being shared on a number of platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, and Whatsapp. Rebuttals were being written and published by media houses. A review in India's Livemint commented, "Tharoor's speech at Oxford was neither great nor entirely original; however, it was an articulate, well-reasoned, witty and, at times, passionate criticism of the British Raj." An article in The Week backed up a number of statements that Tharoor had made with research from British economists Angus Maddison and Colin Clark, British writer William Digby and American historian Will Durant. The Wall Street Journal asked over 2000 of their India Real Times readers "whether Britain should pay reparations to India and its other former colonies" and a majority answered yes. Following Tharoor's speech, there were renewed calls for claims regarding Britain and India during the colonial era, including the return of the Kohinoor diamond by British Indian MP Keith Vaz.

Following the response to the speech, Shashi Tharoor transformed the speech into a book, titled An Era of Darkness: the British Empire in India, and later published in the United Kingdom and United States as "Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India". Tharoor went on to win a Ramnath Goenka Excellence in Journalism Award in 2017 for the book as well as a Sahitya Akademi Award in 2019. In 2016 Tharoor had written in an article that "the book is not intended to have any bearing on today's Indo-British relationship. That is now between two sovereign and equal nations, not between an imperial overlord and oppressed subjects".


Bibliography 

Fiction 

Non-fiction 

(Wikipedia)









The Black Prince 

is a 2017 international historical drama film directed by Kavi Raz and featuring the acting debut of Satinder Sartaaj. It tells the story of Duleep Singh, the last Maharajah of the Sikh Empire and the Punjab area, and his relationship with Queen Victoria.

The story revolves around the young prince as he attempts both to regain his throne and reconcile himself with the two cultures of his Indian birth and British education. (Wikipedia)

The postcolonial critique of the film


The arguments presented by Shashi Tharoor are based in real research and facts. They are not concocted from hearsay talks or tea-stall gossips.

Listen to Dr. Shidhanshu Trivedi. Even though he is doctorate degree holder in Mechanical Engineering, all his arguments are based on hearsay talks and not based on hard facts. This speech is one of the best example of misplaced postcolonial argument. One should be proud of one's cultural identity. However, our perception of our culture shall be based on real life lived experience. The difference in Shashi Tharoor's highly academic post colonial argument and that of Dr. Shidhanshu Trivedi's fake rhetorics is very clear.
The popular resistance of post colonial subject results in reply words, like tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing.
(https://blog.dilipbarad.com/2018/09/shashi-tharoor-and-dark-era-of.html?m=1)

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