Article by History Reclaimed with thanks to Mark Stocker and Rohan Fernando
Zareer Masani was well-known to readers of History Reclaimed as a contributor and reviewer on Indian history who took an unfashionable view of the history of his country, one based on his extensive experience of India and his deep knowledge of its culture and traditions.
He was born in Bombay at the end of 1947, the year of Indian independence, into a wealthy and distinguished family that had both supported the Raj and opposed it. His father, Minoo Masani, a Parsi, was a leading figure in the movement for independence and later in the Swatantra Party, a liberal faction opposed to Nehru’s socialism, though Minoo was, in fact, a close personal friend of India’s first prime minister. Minoo’s father, Sir Rustom Masani, had been Vice-Chancellor of the University of Bombay and the first Municipal Commissioner of that city to be born an Indian.
Zareer’s mother, Shakuntala, was the daughter of Sir Jwala Prasad Srivastava, a Kanpur businessman who, in the 1940s, was a member of the Viceroy’s Executive Council. While her father was close to leading British officials, Shakuntala was involved in the Quit India Movement. Minoo was much older than Shakuntala and twice divorced. Both families apparently opposed the match. Zareer Masani’s upbringing was strongly influenced by Indian high politics and by echoes of the Raj, therefore, and he wrote about these themes in his family memoir And All is Said: Memoir of a Home Divided, published in 2012.
Zareer enjoyed a privileged childhood and youth. He was educated at the private Cathedral and John Connon school in Bombay, which was founded in 1860 and is considered one of the best schools in modern India, and proceeded to Elphinstone College, affiliated with the University of Bombay, for his undergraduate studies. Named after the Governor of the Bombay Presidency, Mountstuart Elphinstone, who raised funds for the new college, Elphinstone dates from the mid-1830s, an example of the liberal empire that Masani wrote about and admired.
He then studied in Oxford, completing a doctorate there in 1976 entitled ‘Radical Nationalism in India 1930-42: The role of the All India Congress Socialist Party’, the study of a socialist caucus within the wider Congress movement. As this subject suggests, as Zareer aged his politics – and his view of the Raj – mellowed and changed. After Oxford he embarked on a career as a journalist, commentator and broadcaster, including two decades as a BBC producer. He also served as a member of Policy Exchange’s History Matters advisory board.
He published four works of history. The first, in 1976, was a biography of Indira Ghandi. That was followed in 1987 by Indian Tales of the Raj, notable for the way Masani emphasised the complex, shared and interconnected histories of India and Britain. Next year, 1988, he published a history of India co-written with the BBC’s former Indian correspondent, Mark Tully, entitled India: Forty Years of Independence.
His major work, which appeared in 2013 was a biography, Macaulay. Britain’s Liberal Imperialist, whom he presented as a great progressive force in India’s modern history, notable for his design of a western education system and for instruction in it in English, the key to India’s successful modernisation. Zareer also emphasised that by so doing, Macaulay helped liberate the class of untouchables from the tyranny of the caste system, a service for which he is still remembered and revered. In the short time – four years only – that Macaulay was in India in the 1830s, he defined and also exemplified a reforming empire. Zareer dedicated the book to his ‘History teachers in Bombay, who were proud to be Macaulay’s children’.
Zareer was always critical of crude anti-imperialism, especially anti-imperialism dressed up as history. He used his Indian identity and deep knowledge of the country to present a subtle, nuanced and reflective history of British involvement in the sub-continent and the history of empire more generally. As he told the Cambridge Union in 2022 in a debate on the British empire,
Looking back over the last several millennia, Empire has been the default mode of governance for all aspiring peoples, tribes, nations. And some empires have been more benevolent, more inclusive than others…The British Empire has been probably the most benign and most inclusive.
In lectures, talks and discussions, Zareer would always emphasise Britain’s many contributions to the sub-continent, from women’s rights to the discovery and preservation of Indian archaeology. He did not neglect the errors and disasters either, presenting a BBC Radio 4 documentary on the centenary of the Amritsar Massacre of 1919: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0003ztt
Masani’s balanced approach did not endear him to a new generation of anti-colonial historians in the west, though they found it difficult to argue with someone so rooted in India, its culture and history and languages.
In 2017, when these anti-colonialists tried to undermine and close down Professor Nigel Biggar’s ‘Ethics and Empire’ project in Oxford, Zareer Masani volunteered his services. In 2022 History Reclaimed published one of his academic essays for the project, entitled ‘The British Raj: An Assessment’ https://historyreclaimed.co.uk/the-british-raj-an-assessment/
As he wrote there,
India exemplified a model of indirect governance that the British Empire perfected and which lingers on in UK multiculturalism today. The key was the collaboration of local elites, who ran most of the administration and graduated to its uppermost circles. Their support was crucial to the survival of empire, despite serious challenges like the 1857 Mutiny, and was based on the self-interest inspired by stable governance, the rule of law, efficient, uncorrupt administration, protection for property rights, economic modernity and representative institutions.
Zareer Masani was tall, distinguished in his bearing, and always impeccably well-dressed. In later life he carried a cane which, though necessary for purposes of balance, added greatly to his gravitas and style.
He was active and working up to the end. He participated in a seminar at the Institute of Economic Affairs in London in May of this year on the subject of empire, slavery and industrialisation. His articles for History Reclaimed include a study of the British conservation of India’s classical heritage, https://historyreclaimed.co.uk/how-the-british-saved-indias-classical-history/; his defence of the royal retention of the Koh-i-Noor diamond; and critical reviews of William Dalrymple’s history of the East India Company https://historyreclaimed.co.uk/the-anarchy-the-relentless-rise-of-the-east-india-company/ and Walter Reid’s account of Churchill’s relationship to India https://historyreclaimed.co.uk/the-churchill-paradox/.
Zareer Masani died with dignity in Switzerland on 9 August 2024.
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