Six years ago, I wrote an outraged post on BP when a British historian casually claimed that “the British created India” (we had a very thriving commentariat then); a breathtaking erasure of one of the world’s oldest civilizations.
Today, reading Francis Pike’s piece in The Spectator, I feel the same cold disdain. Pike repeats the same old colonial fantasy: that India was a “patchwork of principalities,” and that Nehru and Gandhi “invented” the myth of Indian unity. Let’s be clear: this is not history. It’s imperial nostalgia dressed up as analysis.
“India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Mahatma Gandhi both propagated the myth that India had always been a unified country.”
“More reflective commentators knew that this was hogwash.”
“It was the British who… for the first time introduced the rule of law and a democratic form of government.”
This is colonial gaslighting at its most refined. Continue reading The Myth of the British-Made India