Thiong'o, Tharoor and films on colonial history

 

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Thiong'o, Tharoor and films on colonial history 

Shashi Tharoor  is an Indian politician, writer and a former career international diplomat  who is currently serving as Member of Parliament, Lok Sabha from Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, since 2009. 

Book: An Era of Darkness 

The full title of the book is An Era of Darkness: The British Empire In India. If we talk about how the idea of the book and book itself come to existence  it has its own story. Actually Tharoor went to Oxford Union in 2015 and took part in debate. The topic on which he gave a speech is

"Does Britain owe reparations to it's on former colonies?"

The speech went viral. Subsequently his publisher. Flores the idea to transform speech into a book. So, in this way the book An Era of Darkness comes. 

The book is the result of a speech which was given in Oxford Union. So let me first identify some of the key points from speech. The very first thing he talks about the economic condition of colonies was actually variant by the existence of British Colonialism. He takes the example of India and says that India shares the world economy of 23 present when Britain arrived. But by the time they left it was below 4 present.

The next he talks about that during their stay in India between 15 to 29 million Indian died because of starvation.  A great example of it is the great Bengal famine during the 2nd world war. Because the food is given to European as stoke by Winston Churchill. He further said that violence and racism was the reality of colonialism. Then he made a satire on the quote

“The sun never set on British Empire. "

He says that even god cannot trust English in the dark.

Key points from book: 

 The points we see in speech are incl The first point in book and in speech is common. He talked about the economic condition of India. But in the book we found examples from Indian textile market. According to hum three inderstree in India were doing good ; textile, still, and ship building all these three systematically, debratly, targeted and destroyed by British. In this book he also talks about the rules which are regressive. Some of which are still continuing today. He says that there are Darrin lows which are misused by the state government for tribal offence. 

Further he talk about the low on Homosexuality in section 377. According to him India was very liberal about self expression of sexuality. He says that this is Victorian morality which is imposed over India.

Thank you...