A reflective point of view on Shashi Tharoor’s ‘Britain Does Owe Reparations’

In a debate, arguments are delivered and as a matter of fact, they are raised to persuade the opponent.
Language plays a key role while building arguments and further it is the effective use of language which
creates persuasion. Through the lens of a layman, rhetoric is defined as that effective use of language to
persuade. However, there is more into it where the likes of Aristotle have explored rhetoric in depth.

The part of the debate which I’m going to discuss here is related to the overarching discussion on whether
Britain does owe reparations to her colonized countries? The speaker is Dr. Shashi Tharoor, Member of
the Indian Parliament who is quite an established political orator and his oratory skills have been much
discussed and talked in academia and as well as in media. The debate was conducted by Oxford Union
Society, one of the world’s oldest and prestigious debating society, where thrust has always been given
to promote debates and discussions not only confined within the premises of Oxford University but across
the globe.

Dr. Tharoor initiates his speech by acknowledging the great venerable institute where he got the
opportunity to stand in front of an audience with high intellect and reasoning capabilities. As an esteemed
orator, the very fact of expressing humbleness at the first-hand sets the tone of the motion where the
audience is put into a certain frame of mind from wherein they are persuaded to think in a way the speaker
wants. There are a couple of methods which Dr. Tharoor has used in this speech and those have kept the
audience engaged by not losing even a whisker of a moment. It pertains to the fact that those methods
are quite compulsive to follow and much persuasive to stir enough emotions which may either make you
pleased or hostile to the speaker. Those two methods he has used relatively are humor and sarcasm. As
he was the seventh speaker in the house out of eight, it’s an inevitable fact that the minds of the audience
were saturated with an abundance of information shared by the respective speakers. However, to take
that mundaneness away, he starts his note by stating that he belongs to Henry VIII School of Speaking. I
searched online about the relevance of that context, to my astonishment I find, that school stands for
promoting extracurricular activities and public speaking is an integral part of it. However, still there is one
more reason of his utterance of Henry VIII which is quite understandable in his next lines when Dr. Tharoor
further says that as Henry VIII said to his wives, “I shall not keep you long”, “but now finding myself the
seventh speaker out of eight, in what must already seem a rather long evening to you, I rather feel like
Henry the eight’s last wife. I more or less know, what expected of me, but I am not sure how to do it any
differently. Perhaps what I should do is really try and pay attention to the arguments that would have
advanced by the opposition today.” It is to be noted King Henry VIII had six wives and Dr. Tharoor’s witty
and humoristic remark comparing his situation with one of Henry’s last wife left the audience burst into
laughter. This sigh of comic relief was a breather for the audience and diplomatically it was a good move
by the orator to bring back the concentration of the audience.

Before I move to discuss the other method – sarcasm, used extensively by him to challenge the
opposition’s points, it also becomes imperative to understand the credibility of the speech as well as of
the speaker. To find out how credible his speech is, it needs to be noted that he has spent almost 30 years
of his life working in the United Nations and in that due course of time he has made other great strides
which had helped him to publish bestselling fiction and nonfiction books which revolved around India’s
history, culture, politics, films, foreign policy, and whatnot. He has also published innumerable articles in
many dailies with the likes of The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Times of India. Keeping

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all these under considerations, it will be quite a futile attempt to question further the plethora of
knowledge he holds.

Dr. Tharoor followed by his humoristic remark on King Henry he counter argues to a point made by one
of his opponents where he says the lives of the people and the economic condition of the colonies were
rather quite worsened by the experience of British colonialism. He takes the example of India, where he
points out with numbers that when Britain arrived in India, world economy shared by India was 23% but
when the colonizers left after ruling more than 2 centuries, it was down to below 4%. The reasons he puts
forward in steady degradation of economic wealth of India, he says that India had been mostly governed
to benefit the markets in Britain. Most of the economy and market was served in Britain through the
depredation made by the colonizers in India. Further, he stresses on the point the industrialization which
Britain had experienced was due to the growing de-industrialization in India. In fact, it reminds us of Ernest
Gellner’s concept of modernity which he ties along with industrialization. Dr. Tharoor reminds the
audience the suffering the colonizers had incurred where the colonizers imposed heavy taxes in the form
of duties and tariffs on the fine handloom weavers who were making fine muslins. This atrocious move
literally made the weavers crippled as they were not left with any choice. The strong command and
emotions Dr. Tharoor generate through his language leave the audience spellbound and one can imagine
oneself to be going back to the lived experiences of those handloom weavers. Taking the raw materials
from India and flooding the world market with the finished product and getting the best profit out of it is
one the outrageous acts the colonizers had done and Dr. Tharoor was quite strong with his point that
Britain does owe reparation for this heinous crime!

When I talk about sarcasm which Dr. Tharoor has used as an effective method to persuade through his
rhetorical speech, he reminds us of the word ‘loot’. According to him, it is the legacy of one of the
colonialists Robert Clive, who bought the rotten burrows in England and kept those burrows filled with
the looted goods from India. He further makes it quite laughable when he says that Clive doesn’t stop only
looting the goods, but also takes the Hindi word ‘loot’ in the dictionary and as well as their habits. He also
brings facts from the great Bengal famine where many lives were lost and as a matter of fact, Winston
Churchill was not at all moved. In fact, when there was a protest from the other corners of India, Churchill
mocked the endeavors of those protesters by saying, “Why Gandhi has not died?” Dr. Tharoor had again
a very sarcastic comment on that remark of Churchill’s but with quite an abundance of wittiness where
he says, “And no wonder the sun never set on the British empire because even God couldn’t trust the
English in the dark”.

It is seen throughout the speech he brings facts and figures and demands reparations from the British as
it the act of the colonizers which had made the then Indian milieu lost all its stability, economy and natural
resources. He reminds us of the lived experiences of the Indian soldiers also, who have actively taken part
in World War I and World War II thus leaving a huge void in the society when many lost their lives fighting
in the war-stricken zones of the world.