Caroline Elkins

“For nearly a thousand years, communities on the Indian subcontinent had coexisted in a cultural melting where religious identity was less salient than ethnic or linguistic identity. “A hybrid Indo-Islamic civilization emerged,” according to the historian of India William Dalrymple. “In the nineteenth century, India was still a place where traditions, languages, and cultures cut across religious groupings, and where people did not define themselves primarily through their religious faith.”51 Much as communities had negotiated means of coexistence in pre-Mandate Palestine only to see them unravel during British rule, the subcontinent’s communal arrangements corroded when the full weight of Britain’s colonial state bore down on them. The Raj’s divide and rule policies produced a chemical-like reaction, shattering long-standing traditions of coexistence and interacting with local personalities who had their own ambitions, passions, and allegiances. It was another liberal experiment in empire gone horribly wrong, and on a scale so epic that once history’s chain of contingent events combusted, no one could contain it.”
― Caroline Elkins, Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire

“In 1943 Bengal suffered one of the world’s worst famines: some 3 million people died due to British wartime requisitioning policies, diverting resources away from Bengal’s crisis and laying bare the hollowness of Britain’s claim to be running an efficient and benevolent empire. As commentators on all sides of the political divide suggested, events in Southeast Asia suggested Britain’s political and moral weaknesses.”
― Caroline Elkins, Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire