By Aneeta Prem MBE
The file is thin, the paper brittle with age. In the quiet, climate-controlled reading room of the National Archives at Kew, the past does not feel distant. It feels like an indictment written in ink.
A researcher unfolds a document from the 1930s and reads a line that should shatter the nostalgic fog around the British Empire:
“Subject experienced intense erythema and large blisters after 10 minutes’ exposure in chamber.”
The “subject” is a soldier of the British Indian Army. The “chamber” is a gas-testing facility at a military station near Rawalpindi, now in Pakistan. The scientists are British, reporting to the chemical warfare establishment at Porton Down. The chemical is sulphur mustard (mustard gas).
Most people in Britain know about the railways. They know about cricket, tea and perhaps the architecture of Lutyens’ Delhi. They are seldom told that British scientists tested chemical weapons on Indian skin to see how it burned, that economic policy helped turn droughts into mass death, or that entire communities were designated “criminal by birth” by British statute.
None of this is conspiracy theory. It is history, preserved in Britain’s own handwriting.
As a magistrate and human rights campaigner, I deal in evidence. My work often involves confronting uncomfortable truths, whether about forced marriage or dishonour based abuse, to protect the vulnerable. We cannot safeguard the future if we lie about the past. This is not an exercise in guilt. It is an exercise in accuracy.
I did not learn this history at school in east London. Like many British Indians, I first heard fragments from my parents, then went looking for the documents that proved what they already knew.
What follows is not every crime of empire. It is simply what Britain’s own files reveal when we take them seriously.
In the early 1930s, chemical warfare experts at Porton Down faced a practical problem. They knew how mustard gas affected white skin in temperate Europe. They wanted to know how it behaved on darker skin, in tropical heat.
The solution was a series of trials that would later be known as the Rawalpindi experiments.
According to War Office files and Porton Down reports uncovered in 2007, hundreds of Indian soldiers were sent into gas chambers at a military installation near Rawalpindi. They wore respirators in some tests, but often only cotton shorts and shirts. The aim was to find the “casualty dose” required to incapacitate a man and to observe whether Indian skin responded differently to white skin.
Medical reports note “intense erythema”, “large blisters”, burns to the scrotum and armpits and subjects described as “very miserable and depressed”. Some were hospitalised for days or weeks. There is no evidence of anything that would meet modern standards of informed consent. These men were not treated as comrades in arms. They were treated as data.
Rawalpindi was part of a wider Porton Down programme. More than 20,000 British servicemen were exposed to chemical agents between the First World War and the late twentieth century. The Indian trials added a colonial layer to an already troubling story: an empire using its own subjects as test material in the name of military science.
In British classrooms, when we hear about gas chambers we think of Nazi Germany. The fact that British scientists used gas chambers on Indian troops under their own command is almost never mentioned.
Famine in India is often explained away as an act of nature: failed monsoons and crop disease. The archives tell a harder story, one in which drought and disease were real, but imperial policy decided who lived and who died.
In 1765, the East India Company secured the right to collect land revenue in Bengal. A few years later, drought and disease struck. Between 1769 and 1770, Bengal and Bihar suffered a famine that killed perhaps ten million people, roughly a third of the local population according to contemporary and later estimates.
Company records and parliamentary inquiries show that revenue demands were only lightly reduced, grain continued to move through the market, and no large-scale relief comparable to later welfare states was organised. Profit and fiscal stability took precedence over bodies in the streets.
The pattern was set: climate could trigger crisis, but policy would decide its scale.
In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, severe El Niño events disrupted rainfall across Asia, Africa and Latin America. In India, this coincided with an imperial ideology that treated free markets and balanced budgets as more sacred than human life.
Historian Mike Davis, in Late Victorian Holocausts, argues that between 1876 and 1902, famines linked to these events killed between 30 and 60 million people worldwide. India bore a vast share of those deaths.
While peasants starved, grain exports continued. Davis notes that Indian grain exports rose from around 3 million tons a year to 10 million tons by the turn of the century, much of it going to Britain. He shows that, in some famine years, Indian provinces exported hundreds of thousands of tons of grain even as local people queued at relief works.
Relief camps did exist. Their rations were deliberately austere. Davis argues that in at least one case, official famine rations fell below those provided to inmates in some European concentration camps half a century later. The logic was stark: just enough food to keep people barely alive while they worked, but not enough to encourage what officials called “dependency”.
The precise death toll will never be known. What matters is that market dogma and imperial caution turned environmental shocks into man-made catastrophes.
By 1943, India was under direct Crown rule. The East India Company was long gone. The world was at war. In Bengal, a combination of crop disease, earlier “boat denial” measures, rice procurement schemes and market failure drove up prices and emptied granaries.
From late 1942, the Viceroy and provincial officials sent increasingly desperate telegrams to London, warning of impending famine and requesting large grain imports. Churchill’s War Cabinet repeatedly refused or cut those requests, arguing that shipping was needed for other theatres. Only a fraction of the grain asked for ever arrived, and much of it came too late. At the same time, rice and wheat continued to leave India for other parts of the British war effort.
Estimates of the death toll range from around one and a half to three million people; some Indian scholars argue for even higher figures. There is academic debate over the relative weight of crop failure, hoarding, Japanese occupation in Burma and War Cabinet decisions. What is not seriously disputed is that policy choices in London and Delhi made the famine far worse than it needed to be, and that desperate appeals for relief from within the colonial administration were brushed aside.
Churchill is recorded by his own secretary of state for India, Leo Amery, as responding to pleas for grain with remarks about Indians “breeding like rabbits”. Whether every word is verbatim or paraphrase, the attitude is clear: millions of Indian lives ranked below shipping priorities and political prejudices in the imperial hierarchy.
In Britain, 1943 is folded into the story of the “finest hour”. In Bengal, 1943 is remembered as the year people died in the fields while grain ships passed them by.
Empire did not only control bodies. It classified them.
The Criminal Tribes Act of 1871 allowed colonial governments to “notify” entire communities as “addicted to the systematic commission of non-bailable offences”. Once notified, every man, woman and child born into those communities was legally treated as a potential criminal.
People labelled in this way had to register with the police, report their movements, give fingerprints and often live in special settlements that functioned like forced labour colonies. They could be punished for leaving their prescribed area without permission.
By the time of independence in 1947, an estimated thirteen million people across 127 communities were under the shadow of the Act.
Independent India repealed the legislation in 1949 and formally “de-notified” these groups in 1952. The stigma has not vanished. Today there are hundreds of denotified and nomadic tribes who still face police profiling and marginalisation, a direct legacy of a British statute that declared entire peoples suspect from birth.
When Britain boasts that it brought the rule of law to India, this is part of the record.
One of the most persistent defences of empire is that Britain “developed” India. Long-run economic data offers a different perspective.
According to the work of British economist Angus Maddison, India’s share of the world economy was about 24.4 per cent in 1700. By 1950, after nearly two centuries of British dominance, that share had fallen to about 4.2 per cent. India’s share of global industrial output dropped from around a quarter in the mid-eighteenth century to roughly 2 per cent by 1900.
There is debate among historians about precisely how much of that collapse should be blamed on empire rather than on wider global shifts. There is less dispute about the mechanisms Britain used.
Economist Utsa Patnaik has argued, using two centuries of tax and trade data, that between 1765 and 1938 Britain extracted the equivalent of roughly 45 trillion US dollars (in today’s money) from India through what she terms “unrequited exports”: goods exported from India whose foreign exchange earnings were used by Britain rather than returned to India. More recent work for Oxfam has suggested an even higher cumulative figure if a different timeframe is used. Critics dispute the methodology and the exact totals, but few deny that wealth flowed out of India to Britain on a massive scale.
Railways, legal codes and administrative buildings were built in this context: funded disproportionately by Indian taxpayers and structured to serve extraction and control.
When control slipped, imperial power was often reasserted in ways designed to be seen.
After the 1857 uprising, British reprisals were public and exemplary. Contemporary accounts and parliamentary evidence describe rebels tied to cannon mouths and blown apart in places such as Kanpur, a method that destroyed the body so completely that it was believed to threaten the soul’s passage in the afterlife. Prisoners were forced to eat beef or pork in violation of their religious beliefs before execution. Torture in revenue collection, including beatings, suspension and burning, had already been documented by House of Commons committees before the rebellion.
On 13 April 1919, thousands of people gathered in Jallianwala Bagh, a walled garden in Amritsar. Some came to protest against new repressive laws. Others were there simply to mark the festival of Baisakhi. Brigadier General Reginald Dyer marched his troops in, blocked the main exit and ordered them to open fire without warning. They fired until their ammunition was nearly exhausted.
Official British figures recorded 379 dead and about 1,200 wounded. Indian estimates and later research suggest that more than 1,000 people were killed. No medical aid was organised. Dyer later told the Hunter Commission that his aim had been to produce a “moral effect”. He was forced to retire, but not tried. A public fund in Britain raised money for him as a hero of the empire.
In May 1930, at the Dharasana Salt Works in Gujarat, about 2,500 non-violent volunteers advanced on a British-controlled salt depot as part of Gandhi’s civil disobedience movement. They were met by Indian police and soldiers under British command, armed with steel-tipped lathis. American journalist Webb Miller watched as line after line of satyagrahis walked forward, were clubbed to the ground with fractured skulls and broken limbs, and were carried away while the next line stepped up without raising a hand. His dispatch, describing bodies “lying in every direction”, was cabled round the world. Wikipedia+2bmartin.cc+2
These scenes are not aberrations. They are windows into how an empire maintained order.
The end of slavery in the British Empire did not end coerced labour.
From the 1830s to the early twentieth century, more than one and a half million Indians were transported as indentured workers to plantations in the Caribbean, Africa, Mauritius and Fiji. Contracts promised wages and sometimes return passages. In practice, many labourers encountered harsh regimes, high mortality and practical barriers to ever going home.
In the First World War, about 1.3 million Indian soldiers and labourers served overseas for Britain; roughly 70,000 died. In the Second World War, around 2.5 million Indians wore British uniform; about 87,000 were killed. All of this was financed largely from Indian revenues.
In 1918, as troops and workers moved across the globe, influenza moved with them. In India, weakened by poverty and limited public health infrastructure, the virus killed between 12 and 18 million people according to demographic estimates. The 1911–1921 census is the only decade in which the population of British India actually declined. Wikipedia+1
The lives of Indian labourers, soldiers and pandemic victims rarely feature in British war memorials or school syllabuses, but they are part of the imperial balance sheet.
The formal end of British rule came in 1947. The task of drawing the boundary between the new states of India and Pakistan fell to a British lawyer, Cyril Radcliffe, who had never visited India before. He was given a few weeks, incomplete data and an impossible brief.
The Radcliffe Line cut through districts, irrigation systems and railway lines. Within months, 12 to 15 million people had fled or been driven across the new borders. Hindus and Sikhs moved towards India, Muslims towards Pakistan. Estimates of those killed in the ensuing violence range from about 200,000 to two million. The Washington Post
Survivors talk of trains arriving at stations with every passenger dead, of canals clogged with bodies, of caravans of refugees attacked on the road, of women and girls abducted, raped and murdered in the name of honour on all sides. The Times of India+1
British officials were not solely responsible for these crimes. Indian and Pakistani leaders and local militias bear their own share of guilt. But the violence unfolded in a political landscape shaped by decades of communal electorates, divide-and-rule tactics and a hurried exit in which security planning was fatally inadequate.
The most striking fact about all of this is not that it happened. It is that Britain recorded it.
In other colonies, such as Kenya and Malaya, research has uncovered a deliberate policy in the 1950s known as Operation Legacy. Officials were instructed to burn or secretly ship out documents that might “embarrass Her Majesty’s Government”. Decades later, court cases forced the admission that about 20,000 such “migrated archives” from dozens of territories had been sitting in secret British collections rather than in the countries they concerned.
India’s archival story is more complex, but the impulse behind Operation Legacy matters. The British state knew that the true record of empire could be politically dangerous.
The deeper silence today, however, is not only in burned files. It is in British classrooms and public memory.
A child in Britain can finish school knowing little or nothing about Rawalpindi, Bengal 1943, the Criminal Tribes Act, indenture, the influenza death toll or the detail of Partition. Empire appears as a map with red shading or a footnote to the Second World War, not as the system that shaped the lives of hundreds of millions of people and the wealth of both India and Britain.
I write this not as an academic, but as a British Indian magistrate and human rights campaigner whose work has already helped change UK law on forced marriage and the way we talk about dishonour based abuse. My professional life has been spent listening to people whose experiences were denied or minimised, and insisting that institutions face what they would rather ignore. Wikipedia+1
The same principle applies here. This is not about hating Britain. I am proud to be British. I sit in judgement in British courts. I believe in the values of fairness and justice that Britain claims for itself.
But those values mean nothing if we cannot look honestly at the national ledger.
We cannot celebrate the defeat of fascism in Europe while refusing to discuss a preventable famine in Bengal. We cannot praise the rule of law while forgetting the laws that branded babies as criminals. We cannot tell children that Britain “brought civilisation” to India without acknowledging the gas chamber at Rawalpindi and the files that record the burns.
The ink on those files is dry. The facts are there, in Britain’s own words. The question is not whether the evidence exists. It is whether we are prepared to teach it.
Aneeta Prem MBE JP is a British Indian human rights campaigner, magistrate and author. She founded Freedom Charity, which works to eradicate forced marriage and female genital mutilation and to challenge dishonour based abuse in all its forms. Her campaigning contributed to the creation of a specific criminal offence of forced marriage in the United Kingdom. She is joint chair of trustees of Learn About Britain and has addressed national and international audiences, including at the Oxford Union, on safeguarding and human rights. Her books But It’s Not Fair and Cut Flowers are used in schools and professional training across the UK.
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