I do not look to history to absolve my country of the need to do things right today. I seek to understand the wrongs of yesterday, both to grasp what… - 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.

महान दार्शनिक और भारत के राष्ट्रपति डॉ. सर्वपल्ली राधाकृष्णन ने हिन्दुओं को परिभाषित करते हुए लिखा था — ‘एक साझे इतिहास, साझे साहित्य और साझी सभ्यता वाली विशिष्ट सांस्कृतिक इकाई’।

At the beginning of the eighteenth century, as 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 Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb’s treasury raked in £100 million in tax revenues alone.) By the time the British departed India, it had dropped to just over 3 per cent. The reason was simple: India was governed for the benefit of Britain. Britain’s rise for 200 years was financed by its depredations in India.