There is a kind of half-assed liberal idea that while colonialism wasn’t great, at least Britain gave India the trains. And maybe that’s something they should be thankful for. After all, trains are pretty useful, especially in the seventh largest country on Earth.
So colonialism, maybe not all that bad? Unfortunately, Britain also stole trillion of dollars from India,all the while exploiting religious divisions between the Hindu and Muslim communities, and further turning them against each other. And those beloved railways?
They became the sites of mass slaughter, while Britain sat back and watched. Britain first got involved in India through the East India Company, which had its headquarters on Leadenhall Street. A private company owned by London stockholders,the East India Company grew over the next 300 years to become a quasi-governmental body with its own army and laws,responsible for trading spices, cotton, silk, and tea all over the world.
By 1858, ownership of the East India Company had been transferred to Queen Victoria after the failed Indian rebellion.
Trains were the brainchild of British engineers.The East India Company would use railways to transport exploited resources like cotton and coal more efficiently around India.And it worked.
Between 1853 and 1924, a railway network was created to help Britain extract from India relentlessly. And it’s not like we gave India the railways either, by the way.India was made to pay for them,and ripped them off in the process.Despite Indian mechanics having their own efficient, cheap designs,
Britain made India buy trains from them.Between 1854 and 1947,over 14,000 locomotives were imported from the UK to India.
Initially, Indians weren't even allowed to work on the trains.They were staffed entirely by white people,from the board directors to the ticket collectors.
The railways made little profit,but British shareholders who invested in its construction made vast returns, guaranteed at the expense of Indian taxpayers, who had to pay for it.
Now that the railways were built, Britain could get down to the task at hand: squeezing India for every last ounce of profit,for its own uses.
After it was no longer profitable to remain in India,and after receiving huge pressure from the Indian Independence Movement, the British finally left in 1947.
Before they went, they split the country into two:
in an act that became known as Partition.
But in their haste to get out of the country, British diplomats arranged a shoddy Partition agreement that ignored the fact there would be inter-religious conflict.
After Partition, millions of Muslims trekked to Pakistan and what is now known as Bangladesh,while Indians and Sikhs headed the other way.
Violence between Pakistan and India ensued.
Within a year of the British leaving,
15 million people were displaced,and between one and two million people were dead.
Trains became the sites for mass murder during the migration.
Trains filled with refugees crossing the border on each side were stopped, and everyone on board was murdered.
Carriages were set on fire with petrol, with people still inside.The only ones spared were the drivers,so they could transport their trains full of dead bodies to the final destination.The British knew about the train massacres, but they’d already washed their hands clean of India.Prime Minister Clement Atlee, writing to Lord Mountbatten, the last Viceroy of India in 1947, said, “Keep India united if you can. If not, save something from the wreck.In any case, get Britain out.”
Despite all this—the four million starved to death, the careless Partition, the trillion dollars they stole from the Indian people—many don’t think that the British did anything wrong in India.They thought that the British Empire was “something to be proud of.”
