The Myth of the British-Made India

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.

Civilizational Memory vs. Imperial Amnesia

There has always been a deep, unbroken sense of India as a civilizational unit; from the Indus Valley Civilization to the Mauryan Empire, the Gupta age, the Chola naval dominions, and the Mughal synthesis.

Religiously, philosophically, and culturally, Bharat has been an interconnected civilizational space for over three millennia, a शाक्त पीठ of enduring memory. The British did not “invent” India. They exploited the political disunity of the 18th century, much like every other empire before them. If anything, the British benefited from India’s pre-existing cultural and trading networks, they didn’t create them.

The “Statelets” Lie

Pike’s language, “a patchwork quilt of 562 principalities”, is deliberately misleading. Yes, there were hundreds of princely states at Partition. But many of these were massive — Hyderabad alone was larger than France.

Even smaller states like Travancore and Mysore had rich, ancient political traditions that far outstripped the newly formed nation-states of Europe. To compare the sophisticated kingdoms of India circa 1700 CE to the tribal polities of ancient Germania circa 100 BCE — as the previous British writer did in 2019 — is simply a bald-faced lie.

The Real Irony

Pike’s piece sneers at Nehru’s vision of a unified India while openly mourning the loss of Muslim supremacy in the Subcontinent:

“The West’s courting of Modi is seen as the continuation of the subjugation of Muslims, symbolized by Britain’s ousting of the Mughal Indian empire.”

Ah, so now British colonialists are concerned about Mughal loss? The Mughal Empire collapsed well before the British seized control — and it collapsed under its own contradictions. The deeper truth: India’s unity is a civilizational fact, not a colonial invention. It’s Britain that is an artificial union — one that barely holds together Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland.

Final Thoughts

These tired colonial narratives reveal more about the fragility of our island’s self-image than about India itself. When your conquerors cannot even narrate your history without inserting themselves at the center, it tells you everything about the shallowness of their victory — and the depth of your endurance. A Britain struggling to remain relevant in a post-imperial world must tell itself that India is a British artifact — because to admit otherwise would be to acknowledge that history has passed by. What I wrote five years ago seems sadly to remain true now.