History, in any case, cannot be reduced to some sort of game of comparing misdeeds in different eras; each period must be judged in itself and for it… - Shashi Tharoor

By the end of the nineteenth century, India was Britain’s biggest source of revenue, the world’s biggest purchaser of British exports and the source of highly paid employment for British civil servants and soldiers all at India’s own expense. Indians literally paid for their own oppression.

The instinctive Indian sense that nothing begins and nothing ends. We are all living in an eternal present in which what was and what will be is contained in what is, or to put it in a more contemporary idiom, that life is a series of sequel to history.

Indians paid, in other words, for the privilege of being conquered by the British.