Amartya Sen on British Imperialism in India

         

This is yet another excellent article by Sen who, among other qualities, is one of our most knowledgeable and incisive public intellectuals on democratic theory and praxis, which I hope to write about in a future post.

“Illusions of empire: Amartya Sen on what British rule really did for India”

By Amartya Sen for The Guardian

29 June 2021

It is true that before British rule, India was starting to fall behind other parts of the world – but many of the arguments defending the Raj are based on serious misconceptions about India’s past, imperialism, and history itself.

“The British empire in India was in effect established at the Battle of Plassey on 23 June 1757. The battle was swift, beginning at dawn and ending close to sunset. It was a normal monsoon day, with occasional rain in the mango groves at the town of Plassey, which is between Calcutta, where the British were based, and Murshidabad, the capital of the kingdom of Bengal. It was in those mango groves that the British forces faced the Nawab Siraj-ud-Doula’s army and convincingly defeated it. British rule ended nearly 200 years later with Jawaharlal Nehru’s famous speech on India’s ‘tryst with destiny’ at midnight on 14 August 1947. Two hundred years is a long time. What did the British achieve in India, and what did they fail to accomplish?

During my days as a student at a progressive school in West Bengal in the 1940s, these questions came into our discussion constantly. They remain important even today, not least because the British empire is often invoked in discussions about successful global governance. It has also been invoked to try to persuade the US to acknowledge its role as the pre-eminent imperial power in the world today: ‘Should the United States seek to shed – or to shoulder – the imperial load it has inherited?’ the historian Niall Ferguson has asked. It is certainly an interesting question, and Ferguson is right to argue that it cannot be answered without an understanding of how the British empire rose and fell – and what it managed to do.

Arguing about all this at Santiniketan school, which had been established by Rabindranath Tagore some decades earlier, we were bothered by a difficult methodological question. How could we think about what India would have been like in the 1940s had British rule not occurred at all? The frequent temptation to compare India in 1757 (when British rule was beginning) with India in 1947 (when the British were leaving) would tell us very little, because in the absence of British rule, India would of course not have remained the same as it was at the time of Plassey. The country would not have stood still had the British conquest not occurred. But how do we answer the question about what difference was made by British rule?

To illustrate the relevance of such an ‘alternative history,’ we may consider another case – one with a potential imperial conquest that did not in fact occur. Let’s think about Commodore Matthew Perry of the US navy, who steamed into the bay of Edo in Japan in 1853 with four warships. Now consider the possibility that Perry was not merely making a show of American strength (as was in fact the case), but was instead the advance guard of an American conquest of Japan, establishing a new American empire in the land of the rising sun, rather as Robert Clive did in India. If we were to assess the achievements of the supposed American rule of Japan through the simple device of comparing Japan before that imperial conquest in 1853 with Japan after the American domination ended, whenever that might be, and attribute all the differences to the effects of the American empire, we would miss all the contributions of the Meiji restoration from 1868 onwards, and of other globalising changes that were going on. Japan did not stand still; nor would India have done so.

While we can see what actually happened in Japan under Meiji rule, it is extremely hard to guess with any confidence what course the history of the Indian subcontinent would have taken had the British conquest not occurred. Would India have moved, like Japan, towards modernisation in an increasingly globalising world, or would it have remained resistant to change, like Afghanistan, or would it have hastened slowly, like Thailand?

These are impossibly difficult questions to answer. And yet, even without real alternative historical scenarios, there are some limited questions that can be answered, which may contribute to an intelligent understanding of the role that British rule played in India. We can ask: what were the challenges that India faced at the time of the British conquest, and what happened in those critical areas during the British rule?

There was surely a need for major changes in a rather chaotic and institutionally backward India. To recognise the need for change in India in the mid-18th century does not require us to ignore – as many Indian super-nationalists fear – the great achievements in India’s past, with its extraordinary history of accomplishments in philosophy, mathematics, literature, arts, architecture, music, medicine, linguistics and astronomy. India had also achieved considerable success in building a thriving economy with flourishing trade and commerce well before the colonial period – the economic wealth of India was amply acknowledged by British observers such as Adam Smith. The fact is, nevertheless, that even with those achievements, in the mid-18th century India had in many ways fallen well behind what was being achieved in Europe. The exact nature and significance of this backwardness were frequent subjects of lively debates in the evenings at my school.

An insightful essay on India by Karl Marx particularly engaged the attention of some of us. Writing in 1853, Marx pointed to the constructive role of British rule in India, on the grounds that India needed some radical re-examination and self-scrutiny. And Britain did indeed serve as India’s primary western contact, particularly in the course of the 19th century. The importance of this influence would be hard to neglect. The indigenous globalised culture that was slowly emerging in India was deeply indebted not only to British writing, but also to books and articles in other – that is non-English – European languages that became known in India through the British.

Figures such as the Calcutta philosopher Ram Mohan Roy, born in 1772, were influenced not only by traditional knowledge of Sanskrit, Arabic and Persian texts, but also by the growing familiarity with English writings. After Roy, in Bengal itself there were also Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, Madhusudan Dutta and several generations of Tagores and their followers who were re-examining the India they had inherited in the light of what they saw happening in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries. Their main – often their only – source of information were the books (usually in English) circulating in India, thanks to British rule. That intellectual influence, covering a wide range of European cultures, survives strongly today, even as the military, political and economic power of the British has declined dramatically.

I was persuaded that Marx was basically right in his diagnosis of the need for some radical change in India, as its old order was crumbling as a result of not having been a part of the intellectual and economic globalisation that the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution had initiated across the world (along with, alas, colonialism).

There was arguably, however, a serious flaw in Marx’s thesis, in particular in his implicit presumption that the British conquest was the only window on the modern world that could have opened for India. What India needed at the time was more constructive globalisation, but that is not the same thing as imperialism. The distinction is important. Throughout India’s long history, it persistently enjoyed exchanges of ideas as well as of commodities with the outside world. Traders, settlers and scholars moved between India and further east – China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand and elsewhere – for a great many centuries, beginning more than 2,000 years ago. The far-reaching influence of this movement – especially on language, literature and architecture – can be seen plentifully even today. There were also huge global influences by means of India’s open-frontier attitude in welcoming fugitives from its early days. [….]

One of the achievements to which British imperial theorists tended to give a good deal of emphasis was the role of the British in producing a united India. In this analysis, India was a collection of fragmented kingdoms until British rule made a country out of these diverse regimes. It was argued that India was previously not one country at all, but a thoroughly divided land mass. It was the British empire, so the claim goes, that welded India into a nation. Winston Churchill even remarked that before the British came, there was no Indian nation. ‘India is a geographical term. It is no more a united nation than the equator,’ he once said.

If this is true, the empire clearly made an indirect contribution to the modernisation of India through its unifying role. However, is the grand claim about the big role of the Raj in bringing about a united India correct? Certainly, when Clive’s East India Company defeated the nawab of Bengal in 1757, there was no single power ruling over all of India. Yet it is a great leap from the proximate story of Britain imposing a single united regime on India (as did actually occur) to the huge claim that only the British could have created a united India out of a set of disparate states.

That way of looking at Indian history would go firmly against the reality of the large domestic empires that had characterised India throughout the millennia. The ambitious and energetic emperors from the third century BC did not accept that their regimes were complete until the bulk of what they took to be one country was united under their rule. There were major roles here for Ashoka Maurya, the Gupta emperors, Alauddin Khalji, the Mughals and others. Indian history shows a sequential alternation of large domestic empires with clusters of fragmented kingdoms. We should therefore not make the mistake of assuming that the fragmented governance of mid-18th century India was the state in which the country typically found itself throughout history, until the British helpfully came along to unite it.

Even though in history textbooks the British were often assumed to be the successors of the Mughals in India, it is important to note that the British did not in fact take on the Mughals when they were a force to be reckoned with. British rule began when the Mughals’ power had declined, though formally even the nawab of Bengal, whom the British defeated, was their subject. The nawab still swore allegiance to the Mughal emperor, without paying very much attention to his dictates. The imperial status of the Mughal authority over India continued to be widely acknowledged even though the powerful empire itself was missing.

When the so-called sepoy mutiny threatened the foundations of British India in 1857, the diverse anti-British forces participating in the joint rebellion could be aligned through their shared acceptance of the formal legitimacy of the Mughal emperor as the ruler of India. The emperor was, in fact, reluctant to lead the rebels, but this did not stop the rebels from declaring him the emperor of all India. The 82-year-old Mughal monarch, Bahadur Shah II, known as Zafar, was far more interested in reading and writing poetry than in fighting wars or ruling India. He could do little to help the 1,400 unarmed civilians of Delhi whom the British killed as the mutiny was brutally crushed and the city largely destroyed. The poet-emperor was banished to Burma, where he died.

The British … were not satisfied until they were the dominant power across the bulk of the subcontinent, and in this they were not so much bringing a new vision of a united India from abroad as acting as the successor of previous domestic empires. British rule spread to the rest of the country from its imperial foundations in Calcutta, beginning almost immediately after Plassey. As the company’s power expanded across India, Calcutta became the capital of the newly emerging empire, a position it occupied from the mid-18th century until 1911 (when the capital was moved to Delhi). It was from Calcutta that the conquest of other parts of India was planned and directed. The profits made by the East India Company from its economic operations in Bengal financed, to a great extent, the wars that the British waged across India in the period of their colonial expansion.

What has been called ‘the financial bleeding of Bengal’ began very soon after Plassey. With the nawabs under their control, the company made big money not only from territorial revenues, but also from the unique privilege of duty-free trade in the rich Bengal economy – even without counting the so-called gifts that the Company regularly extracted from local merchants. Those who wish to be inspired by the glory of the British empire would do well to avoid reading Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, including his discussion of the abuse of state power by a ‘mercantile company which oppresses and domineers in the East Indies.’ As the historian William Dalrymple has observed: ‘The economic figures speak for themselves. In 1600, when the East India Company was founded, Britain was generating 1.8% of the world’s GDP, while India was producing 22.5%. By the peak of the Raj, those figures had more or less been reversed: India was reduced from the world’s leading manufacturing nation to a symbol of famine and deprivation.’

While most of the loot from the financial bleeding accrued to British company officials in Bengal, there was widespread participation by the political and business leadership in Britain: nearly a quarter of the members of parliament in London owned stocks in the East India Company after Plassey. The commercial benefits from Britain’s Indian empire thus reached far into the British establishment.

The robber-ruler synthesis did eventually give way to what would eventually become classical colonialism, with the recognition of the need for law and order and a modicum of reasonable governance. But the early misuse of state power by the East India Company put the economy of Bengal under huge stress. What the cartographer John Thornton, in his famous chart of the region in 1703, had described as ‘the Rich Kingdom of Bengal’ experienced a gigantic famine during 1769–70. Contemporary estimates suggested that about a third of the Bengal population died. This is almost certainly an overestimate. There was no doubt, however, that it was a huge catastrophe, with massive starvation and mortality – in a region that had seen no famine for a very long time.

This disaster had at least two significant effects. First, the inequity of early British rule in India became the subject of considerable political criticism in Britain itself. By the time Adam Smith roundly declared in The Wealth of Nations that the East India Company was ‘altogether unfit to govern its territorial possessions,’ there were many British figures, such as Edmund Burke, making similar critiques. Second, the economic decline of Bengal did eventually ruin the company’s business as well, hurting British investors themselves, and giving the powers in London reason to change their business in India into more of a regular state-run operation.

By the late 18th century, the period of so-called ‘post-Plassey plunder,’ with which British rule in India began, was giving way to the sort of colonial subjugation that would soon become the imperial standard, and with which the subcontinent would become more and more familiar in the following century and a half. How successful was this long phase of classical imperialism in British India, which lasted from the late 18th century until independence in 1947? The British claimed a huge set of achievements, including democracy, the rule of law, railways, the joint stock company and cricket, but the gap between theory and practice – with the exception of cricket – remained wide throughout the history of imperial relations between the two countries. Putting the tally together in the years of pre-independence assessment, it was easy to see how far short the achievements were compared with the rhetoric of accomplishment. [….]

Alas, neither the stopping of famines nor the remedying of ill health was part of the high-performance achievements of British rule in India. Nothing could lead us away from the fact that life expectancy at birth in India as the empire ended was abysmally low: 32 years, at most.

The abstemiousness of colonial rule in neglecting basic education reflects the view taken by the dominant administrators of the needs of the subject nation. There was a huge asymmetry between the ruler and the ruled. The British government became increasingly determined in the 19th century to achieve universal literacy for the native British population. In contrast, the literacy rates in India under the Raj were very low. When the empire ended, the adult literacy rate in India was barely 15%. The only regions in India with comparatively high literacy were the ‘native kingdoms’ of Travancore and Cochin (formally outside the British empire), which, since independence, have constituted the bulk of the state of Kerala. These kingdoms, though dependent on the British administration for foreign policy and defence, had remained technically outside the empire and had considerable freedom in domestic policy, which they exercised in favour of more school education and public health care.

The 200 years of colonial rule were also a period of massive economic stagnation, with hardly any advance at all in real GNP per capita. These grim facts were much aired after independence in the newly liberated media, whose rich culture was in part – it must be acknowledged – an inheritance from British civil society. Even though the Indian media was very often muzzled during the Raj – mostly to prohibit criticism of imperial rule, for example at the time of the Bengal famine of 1943 – the tradition of a free press, carefully cultivated in Britain, provided a good model for India to follow as the country achieved independence. [….]

Nothing is perhaps as important in this respect as the functioning of a multiparty democracy and a free press. But often enough these were not gifts that could be exercised under the British administration during imperial days. They became realisable only when the British left – they were the fruits of learning from Britain’s own experience, which India could use freely only after the period of empire had ended. Imperial rule tends to require some degree of tyranny: asymmetrical power is not usually associated with a free press or with a vote-counting democracy, since neither of them is compatible with the need to keep colonial subjects in check.

A similar scepticism is appropriate about the British claim that they had eliminated famine in dependent territories such as India. British governance of India began with the famine of 1769-70, and there were regular famines in India throughout the duration of British rule. The Raj also ended with the terrible famine of 1943. In contrast, there has been no famine in India since independence in 1947.

The irony again is that the institutions that ended famines in independent India – democracy and an independent media – came directly from Britain. The connection between these institutions and famine prevention is simple to understand. Famines are easy to prevent, since the distribution of a comparatively small amount of free food, or the offering of some public employment at comparatively modest wages (which gives the beneficiaries the ability to buy food), allows those threatened by famine the ability to escape extreme hunger. So any government should be able stop a threatening famine – large or small – and it is very much in the interest of a government in a functioning democracy, facing a free press, to do so. A free press makes the facts of a developing famine known to all, and a democratic vote makes it hard to win elections during – or after – a famine, hence giving a government the additional incentive to tackle the issue without delay. India did not have this freedom from famine for as long as its people were without their democratic rights, even though it was being ruled by the foremost democracy in the world, with a famously free press in the metropolis – but not in the colonies. These freedom-oriented institutions were for the rulers but not for the imperial subjects.

In the powerful indictment of British rule in India that Tagore presented in 1941, he argued that India had gained a great deal from its association with Britain, for example, from ‘discussions centred upon Shakespeare’s drama and Byron’s poetry and above all … the large-hearted liberalism of 19th-century English politics.” The tragedy, he said, came from the fact that what ‘was truly best in their own civilisation, the upholding of dignity of human relationships, has no place in the British administration of this country.’ Indeed, the British could not have allowed Indian subjects to avail themselves of these freedoms without threatening the empire itself.

The distinction between the role of Britain and that of British imperialism could not have been clearer. As the union jack was being lowered across India, it was a distinction of which we were profoundly aware.”

Adapted from Home in the World: A Memoir by Amartya Sen (Allen Lane, 2021).

For a handful of titles on the ideology and political theory of the East India Company and British Imperialism generally, please see:

• Dalrymple, William. The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence and the Pillage of an Empire (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019).
• Iyer, Raghavan. Utilitarianism and All That: The Political Theory of British Imperialism (Chatto & Windus, 1960/Concord Grove Press, 1983).
• Kohli, Atul. Imperialism and the Developing World: How Britain and the United States Shaped the Global Periphery (Oxford University Press, 2020).
• Lal, Vinay. “John Stuart Mill and India,” a review-article, New Quest, no. 54 (January-February 1998): 54-64.
• Metcalf, Thomas R. Ideologies of the Raj (Cambridge University Press, 1995).
• Robins, Nick. The Corporation that Changed the World: How the East India Company Shaped the Modern Multinational (Pluto Press, 2nd ed., 2012).
• Ryan, Alan. “Liberal Imperialism” and Utilitarian and Bureaucracy: The Views of J.S. Mill,” republished in his book, The Making of Modern Liberalism (Princeton University Press, 2012).

To learn more about some of the topics broached by Sen in this piece, and in addition to his works (some co-written) on India and a wide range of other subjects (e.g. justice, political economy, human development, public health, poverty and hunger, famines), I have bibliographies on facets of Indian history and civilization at my Academia page. Please see, for example, the compilations for (i) B.R. Ambedkar; (ii) Communism in India; (iii) Constitutionalism in India; (iv) The Life, Work, and Legacy of Mohandas K. Gandhi; (v) Hinduism; (vi) Indian/Indic Philosophies; (vii) Jainism; (viii) and the Varna and Caste system in India. I also have a (ix) Study Guide for Hinduism. There is much that is not covered, for example, material on Islam in India is found in my Islamic Studies bibliography as well as several specific compilations for Islam (e.g., on theology and philosophy, jurisprudence, Sufism, arts, etc.), and the history, economics and politics of famines in India is found in the compilation on famines. I have yet to compose a bibliography for Sikkhism.

And here is a short list of readings on Indian history and politics more generally (much of which is not found in the above compilations):

• Abraham, Itty. The Making of the Indian Atomic Bomb: Science, Secrecy and the Postcolonial State. London: Zed Books, 1998.
• Abraham, Itty, ed. South Asian Cultures of the Bomb: Atomic Publics and the State in India and Pakistan. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2009.
• Alam, Fakrul and Radha Chakravarty, eds. The Essential Tagore. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011.
• Anderson, Perry. The Indian Ideology. London: Verso, 2013.
• Arora, Namit. Indians: A Brief History of a Civilization. Gurgaon, Haryana, India: Penguin Viking, 2021.
• Bardhan, Pranab. Awakening Giants, Feet of Clay: Assessing the Economic Rise of China and India. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013.
• Bass, Gary J. The Blood Telegram: India’s Secret War in East Pakistan. New York: Vintage Books, 2013.
• Berenschot, Ward. Riot Politics: Hindu-Muslim Violence and the Indian State. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011.
• Bidwai, Praful and Achin Vanaik. New Nukes: India, Pakistan and Global Nuclear Disarmament. New York: Olive Branch Press, 2000.
• Bilgrami, Akeel. Secularism, Identity, and Enchantment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014.
• Bose, Sugata and Ayesha Jalal, eds. Nationalism, Democracy and Development: State and Politics in India. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1997.
• Chibber, Vivek. Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital. London: Verso, 2013.
• Choudhry, Sujit, Madhav Khosla, and Pratap Bhanu Mehta, eds. The Oxford Handbook of the Indian Constitution. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2016.
• Cullather, Nick. The Hungry World: America’s Cold War Battle Against Poverty in Asia. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010.
• Dalrymple, William. The Last Mughal—The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi, 1857. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007.
• Desai, Meghnad. The Rediscovery of India. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2011 (Allen Lane, 2009).
• Desai, Radhika. Slouching Towards Ayodhya: From Congress to Hindutva in Indian Politics. New Delhi: Three Essays Press, 2004.
• Dhar, P.N. Indira Gandhi, the ‘Emergency,’ and Indian Democracy. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000.
• Drèze Jean and Amartya Sen. An Uncertain Glory: India and Its Contradictions. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013.
• Dutta, Krishna and Andrew Robinson. Rabindranath Tagore: The Myriad-Minded Man. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995.
• Frankel, Francine R. India’s Green Revolution: Economic Gains and Political Costs. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971.
• Frankel, Francine, et al., eds. Transforming India: Social and Political Dynamics of Democracy. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2002.
• Ganguly, Šumit and Devin T. Hagerty. Fearful Symmetry: India-Pakistan Crises in the Shadow of Nuclear Weapons. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2006.
• Ganguly, Šumit and S. Paul Kapur. Nuclear Proliferation in South Asia: Crisis Behaviour and the Bomb. New York: Routledge, 2009.
• Ganguly, Šumit and S. Paul Kapur. India, Pakistan, and the Bomb: Debating Nuclear Stability in South Asia. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010.
• Ganguly, Šumit and Rahul Mukherji. India since 1980. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
• Gidla, Sujatha. Ants among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017.
• Glaeser, Bernhard, ed. The Green Revolution Revisited: critique and alternatives. New York: Routledge, 2011 (1987).
• Griffin, Keith. The Political Economy of Agrarian Change: An Essay on the Green Revolution. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974.
• Guha, Ramchandra. India after Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy. New York: Ecco, 2007.
• Guha, Ramchandra, ed. Makers of Modern India. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011.
• Habib, Irfan, ed. Akbar and His India. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997.
• Hansen, Thomas Blom. The Saffron Wave: Democracy and Hindu Nationalism in Modern India. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999.
• Jaffrelot, Christophe. The Hindu Nationalist Movement in India. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996.
• Jaffrelot, Christophe. Religion, Caste and Politics in India. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011.
• Jaffrelot, Christophe, ed. Hindu Nationalism: A Reader. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007.
• Jayal, Niraja Gopal and Pratap Bhanu Mehta, eds. The Oxford Companion to Politics in India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2010.
• Jenkins, Rob. Democratic Politics and Economic Reform in India. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
• Kakar, Sudhir. The Colors of Violence: Cultural Identities, Religion, and Conflict. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996.
• Kihlnani, Sunil. The Idea of India. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999.
• Kohli, Atul, ed. The Success of India’s Democracy. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
• Larson, Gerald James. India’s Agony Over Religion. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1995.
• McLeod, Hew. Sikkhism. London: Penguin Books, 1997.
• Metcalf, Barbara D. and Thomas R. Metcalf. A Concise History of Modern India. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2nd ed., 2006.
• Moosvi, Shireen. Episodes in the Life of Akbar: Contemporary Records and Reminiscences. New Delhi: National Book Trust, 1994.
• Nikam, N.A. and Richard P. McKeon, ed. and trans. The Edicts of Aśoka. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1959.
• Nussbaum, Martha C. The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence, and India’s Future. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007.
• Perkins, John H. Geopolitics and the Green Revolution: Wheat, Genes, and the Cold War. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.
• Robinson, Francis. The Mughal Emperors and the Islamic Dynasties of India, Iran, and Central Asia. London: Thames & Hudson, 2007.
• Ruparelia, Sanjay, Sanjay Reddy, John Harris, and Stuart Corbridge, eds. Understanding India’s New Political Economy: A Great Transformation? London: Routledge, 2011.
• Sen, Amartya. The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005.
• Sharma, Jyotirmaya. Terrifying Vision: M.S. Golwalkar, the RSS and India. Penguin, 2007.
• Sharma, Jyotirmaya. Hindutva: Exploring the Idea of Hindu Nationalism. New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2003.
• Sharma, Jyotirmaya. A Restatement of Religion: Swami Vivekananda and the Making of Hindu Nationalism. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013.
• Shiva, Vandana. The Violence of the Green Revolution: Third World Agriculture, Ecology and Politics. London: Zed Books, 1991.
• Strong, John S. The Legend of King Aśoka: A Study and Translation of the Aśokāvadāna. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983.
• Thapar, Romila. Aśoka and the Decline of the Mauryas. New York: Oxford University Press, revised ed., 1998.
• Thomas, Raju G.C. and Amit Gupta, eds. India’s Nuclear Security. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2000.
• Vanaik, Achin. The Painful Transition: Bourgeois Democracy in India. London: Verso, 1996.
• Varshney, Ashutosh. Democracy, Development, and the Countryside: Urban-Rural Struggles in India. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
• Warder, A.K. Indian Buddhism. Delhi: Motilal Barnarsidass, 3rd ed., 2000.
• Wolpert, Stanley. A New History of India. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.