Spiritual superhero

When totting up the positives from the British Raj, people often put the railways first, followed by the Indian Civil Service or the Indian Army. The Empire was won by the sword and held by the sword. It was racially exclusive, its taxes were often predatory, and its punishments savage. But at least it left an institutional legacy that helped to make independent India a startling success against all the odds, after the bloody wound of Partition and despite the excruciating poverty of the second most populous nation on earth.

But what the British bequeathed to India was not only a usable future but a usable past. This may sound paradoxical. In the millennia of India’s more or less recorded history, the years of British dominance were an eyeblink. How could we come-lately fly-by-midnights pretend to write or rewrite their national story? Yet the contribution of British archaeologists, palaeographers and numismatists to the making of modern India is no less significant than that of British engineers, judges and civil servants. As a matter of fact, many of them were the same people. It is hard to think of a network of amateur scholars anywhere to match their achievements.

The tradition of intense attention to every aspect of the Indian past began with the Calcutta judge Sir William Jones (1747-1794), and it continued until the end of the Raj, fostered by enlightened governor-generals and viceroys, from Warren Hastings to Curzon. And these labours were to help shape the ideology of the new nation as they had illuminated her history.

When Jawaharlal Nehru was using his privilege as Father of the Nation to select her icons, he chose for the flag the wheel with 24 spokes, the Chakra or ‘wheel of the moral law’, which now flaps and spins in the middle of the Indian tricolour.