Shashi Tharoor Quotes

Justice, in British India, was far from blind: it was highly attentive to the skin colour of the defendant.

When an Englishman wants something, he never publicly admits to his wanting it; instead, his want is expressed as a 'burning conviction that it is his moral and religious duty to conquer those who pos...

Forget heaven and hell, yaar, he says as he leaves. It’s purgatory I’m concerned about. We call it Earth.

Six decades of Independence have wrought significant change, as exposure to British practices has faded and India’s natural boisterousness has reasserted itself. Some of the state assemblies in our fe...

My China Diary and Walking With Lions, were memoirs of his diplomatic and political experiences. The

The sun never set on the British empire, an Indian nationalist later sardonically commented, because even God couldn’t trust the Englishman in the dark

The Empire, in Hobsbawm’s evocative words, was ‘so easily won, so narrowly based, so absurdly easily ruled thanks to the devotion of a few and the passivity of the many.

When Jamsetji Tata tried to set up India’s first modern steel mill in the face of implacable British hostility at the turn of the century (he began petitioning the British for permission in 1883, and...

India . . . was like an ancient palimpsest on which layer upon layer of thought and reverie had been inscribed, and yet no succeeding layer had completely hidden or erased what had been written previo...

Great discoveries, Ganapathi, are often the result of making the wrong mistake at the right time. Ask Columbus.

But less than a century and a half later, this Mughal empire was in a state of collapse after the spectacular sacking of Delhi by the Persian Nadir Shah in 1739 and the loot of all its treasures. The...

The British economic historian Angus Maddison has demonstrated, India’s share of the world economy was 23 per cent, as large as all of Europe put together. (It had been 27 per cent in 1700, when the M...

Gangaji’s truth required activism, not passivity.

Indeed there were outstanding examples of good governance in India at the time, notably the Travancore kingdom, which in 1819 became the

The Indian tricolour was raised just before sunset, and as it fluttered up the flagpole a late-monsoon rainbow emerged behind it, a glittering tribute from the heavens.

Indians were always subjects, never citizens; throughout the days of Empire, no Indian could have presumed to say ‘I am British’ the way a French African was encouraged to say ‘Je suis français’.

British under Clive defeat Nawab Siraj-ud-Daula to become rulers of Bengal, the richest province of India.

British cartography defined spaces the better to rule them; the map became an instrument of colonial control. Even the valuable British legacy, the museum, was devised in furtherance of the imperial p...

Had exported an average of £13,000,000 worth of goods to Britain each year from 1835 to 1872 with no corresponding return of money; in fact, payments to people residing in Britain, whether profits to...

Personally, I am far from convinced that the British system is suited to India. The parliamentary democracy we have adopted involves the British perversity of electing a legislature to form an executi...