The Foundation of an Inhuman Society.
Today is August 14, the day the Indian subcontinent mourns the price of colonialism and the tragedy of Partition. Officially today is Partition Horrors Remembrance Day (विभाजन विभीषिका स्मृति दिवस), marking the anniversary of Partition and the ongoing historical reckoning with the cost of colonial rule.
The hypothesis of these articles is that the British are failed humans. They did not fail as an Empire. They keep failing at every turn of events. They never think twice about cruelty. It is normal behavior for the British.
In English legal history, “Hanged, Drawn, and Quartered” was the statutory penalty under English law for men convicted of High Treason. The statutory ritual was executed in four distinct stages:
- Drawn: The convicted prisoner was bound to a wooden hurdle (a sled) and dragged by a horse to the place of execution.
- Hanged: He was hanged by the neck with a rope, but cut down while still conscious and alive (short drop hanging).
- Disemboweled & Emasculated: While still alive on a table or block, his genitals were cut off, his stomach was sliced open, and his entrails/organs were pulled out and burned before his eyes. Finally, his heart was cut out.
- Quartered: The corpse was then beheaded, and the torso was chopped into four pieces (quartered).
The five severed pieces (head and four quarters) were parboiled in salt and cumin to prevent rapid decay, and then publicly displayed on spikes across city landmarks (such as London Bridge) as a warning to the public.
It was formally codified into English law under the Treason Act 1351 during the reign of King Edward III. Variations of dragging and disemboweling treason suspects occurred earlier in English history (notably William Wallace in 1305 and Dafydd ap Gruffydd in 1283).
Under the Treason Act 1814, Parliament amended the sentence so the convict was hanged until dead before being beheaded and quartered. The last time the sentence was officially pronounced by a court was in 1867 against Irish Fenian revolutionaries (such as Thomas Burke), though it was commuted to penal servitude. The penalty of drawing and quartering was completely abolished from British statutory law by the Forfeiture Act 1870.
In 1649, there was a Civil War between the Royalists (supporting the monarchy) and Parliamentarians (supporting Parliament). Royal supporters lost that war. The military general who led the Parliamentarian victory, Oliver Cromwell, emerged as the absolute ruler of England.
Parliament tried King Charles I for high treason against his own people. On January 30, 1649, King Charles I was beheaded outside the Banqueting House in Whitehall, London. If you think that was cruel, wait, and read on.
In 1653, Cromwell dissolved Parliament by force using his soldiers and established The Protectorate. He took the title of Lord Protector of England, Scotland, and Ireland (ruling from 1653 to 1658). Cromwell was a commoner and refused the crown of “King.” Instead, he ruled as a military dictator under strict Puritan religious laws (banning Christmas celebrations, theater, sports, and makeup). Thus, for a decade or so, the monarchy and the House of Lords were officially abolished, and England was declared a republic (The Commonwealth of England).
Oliver Cromwell died of malaria and kidney complications on September 3, 1658. His son, Richard Cromwell, succeeded him as Lord Protector, but Richard lacked military authority and political skill. He was nicknamed “Tumbledown Dick” and resigned after just nine months in May 1659.
The Restoration (1660): Without strong leadership, the regime collapsed into political instability. Parliament invited Charles I’s exiled son back to the throne. On May 29, 1660, he was crowned King Charles II, restoring the British monarchy. He took no time in reverting to his sub-animal instinct to demonstrate how cruel he was.
In 1661, after the monarchy was restored, Oliver Cromwell’s corpse was exhumed from Westminster Abbey. The royal government subjected his dead body to the legal punishment of posthumous execution. He was hanged in chains, beheaded, and his head was displayed on a 20-foot spike outside Westminster Hall for over two decades.
British People
When it was written that the “British are failed humans,” it must have immediately struck one how common people can be termed as “failed humans” for the conduct of the State or Kings. Here is the story that completes the picture.
Sometime in 1685 (roughly 24 years after it was spiked), a massive gale broke the wooden spike holding Cromwell’s mummified head on top of Westminster Hall. The head tumbled to the ground below.
A guard on night duty found the head, hid it under his cloak, and took it home. He hid it inside his chimney. Only on his deathbed did he confess to his daughter, revealing the hidden head.
In the 1700s, the guard’s daughter sold the head. It started a strange 200-year history where Cromwell’s head became a prized private collector’s item. Remember Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (Act 2, Scene 1). The conspirators meet at night to plan the assassination of Caesar. When Cassius suggests they all take a formal oath, Brutus forcefully rejects it, arguing that noble men fighting for a righteous cause do not need oaths. He said:
“No, not an oath. If not the face of men,
The sufferance of our souls, the time’s abuse—
If these be motives weak, break off betimes,
And every man hence to his idle bed;
So let high-sighted tyranny range on
Till each man drop by lottery. But if these,
As I am sure they do, bear fire enough
To kindle cowards and to steel the very melting spirits of women,
Then, countrymen,
What need we any spur but our own cause
To prick us to redress? …
Swear priests and cowards and men cautelous,
Old feeble carrions and such suffering souls
That welcome wrongs; unto bad causes swear
Such creatures as men doubt…”
In the mid-1700s, Cromwell’s carrion was bought by a museum owner named Claudius Du Puy, who displayed it to tourists in London. In 1799, it was sold to a comic actor named Samuel Russell, who exhibited the head in a museum near Covent Garden. Russell eventually pawned it to pay his drinking debts. A group of businessmen bought it for £230 and took it on tour as a freak-show exhibit.
When Brutus speaks of “men cautelous, old feeble carrions… that welcome wrongs,” he is talking about people who conform to tyranny. People afraid of the consequences and afraid of being exposed, ridiculed, stripped of status, or brought low.
And ironically, Oliver Cromwell’s head ending up as a carnival sideshow exhibited for pennies in Victorian London is the ultimate historical satire: the proud “Lord Protector” reduced to an “old feeble carrion” displayed for public ridicule.
British Rule
The British army was so great that in India it was provided sex slaves for entertainment. The British Government had no hesitation in pimping this service to them. This was a historical low by any human standard. This prostitution operation was uncovered by British parliamentarians.
The British ridicule the people of India for their height which used to average around 5 feet. But they do not tell that they contributed to it. Their exploitative rule resulted in such gross malnutrition, generation after generation.
Grandfathers and grand-uncles of the current generation were “slightly over 5 feet,” reflecting centuries of malnutrition. The middle generation shows intermediate heights. Today’s young generation routinely reaches 6 feet, with 5.5 feet becoming average rather than tall. This creates the poignant irony of an entire generation literally looking down at their elders in a culture built on bowing down to elders. Read about the exploitation here.
The atrocities committed during the colonial era were rarely the result of a few individually “evil” or insane people; rather, they were driven by a deeply ingrained system that engineered brutal behavior.
Imperial ideology was built on the doctrine of racial superiority (often framed as the “Civilizing Mission” or “White Man’s Burden”). Indigenous populations were routinely viewed not as individual human beings with rights, but as “natives,” subjects, or sub-humans. Once you convince a bureaucracy that a group of people is inherently inferior or uncivilized, inflicting pain on them no longer triggers normal empathetic or moral checks.
A society that turned the mummified head of its own former ruler into a penny-freakshow will naturally feel zero moral hesitation in running military brothels or starving millions abroad.
Climate Caveat
Some historians attempt to explain this cold utilitarianism through geography. They will argue that cold, damp, northern environments historically forced a culture of harsh survival, resource hoarding, and emotional detachment. But climate is an explanation, not an excuse. While a harsh northern island might condition a society for survival at home, taking that cold insensitivity and exporting it across the globe as an industrial system of plunder is a conscious moral choice. Instead of evolving past environmental hardness through immense wealth and education, British society institutionalized that coldness, exporting their harsh winter to warm, self-sufficient civilizations built on Dharma and empathy. Failure to adapt is a human failure.
A society that turned the mummified head of its own former ruler into a penny-freakshow will naturally feel zero moral hesitation in running military brothels or starving millions abroad.
British society as a whole is responsible for this behavior. It was not just that a few hundred years ago they behaved in a cruel fashion with the head of Cromwell. They still do not protest in the face of cruelty or inhuman behavior of their politicians or media. The only conclusion is that they are what they are: Failed humans.
In this series, we shall study these traits of the British which tell us that they have failed as humans.
In the next article, we shall discuss the Cellular Jail or Kala Pani.
References:
Tharoor, Shashi. An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India (published internationally as Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India). Publisher: Aleph Book Company, 2016 (India); Hurst & Company / Penguin Random House, 2017 (International). ISBN (Aleph Hardcover): 978-9384067960. ISBN (Hurst Hardcover): 978-1849048088. A comprehensive historical catalog of how British colonial rule systematically de-industrialized India, looted its economy (reducing its share of world GDP from 27% to under 4%), destroyed local governance, and enforced institutionalized racism.
Patnaik, Utsa. “Revisiting the ‘Drain’, or Transfer from India to Britain in the Context of Global Economic History,” in A Theory of Imperialism (Columbia University Press, 2016) and expanded in Capital and Imperialism: Theory, History, and the Present (co-authored with Prabhat Patnaik, Monthly Review Press, 2021). ISBN (Monthly Review Press): 978-1583678931. Economist Utsa Patnaik’s landmark calculation documenting that between 1765 and 1938, the British Crown and East India Company drained approximately $45 trillion (at current prices and interest rates) out of India through tax-siphoning and trade manipulation mechanisms.