Reclaiming Alternate History: How Speculative Fiction Can Resist Toxic Historical Revisionism
Author Vaishnavi Patel discusses the power of speculative fiction to help authors tackle complex questions from often politicized pasts.
Alternate history, though fictional, isn’t limited to fiction. Just ask British Empire apologists. Cambridge Professor Robert Tombs once decried “portray[ing] British officials and soldiers roaming [India] casually committing crimes” as “a sign of absolute ignorance or of deliberate dishonesty.”[1] Perhaps he was unaware of Captain Stanley de Vere Julius’s 1903 Notes on Striking Natives, which explained that casually kicking Indian servants was perfectly acceptable.[2] Or perhaps he meant that British officials and soldiers carefully committed their crimes—after all, engineering multiple mass famines by removing food from a country[3] does take a lot of planning.
Enough ink has been spilled explaining why the British Empire was an oppressive, tyrannical regime that I will not repeat all the evidence here. Though history is vast, complex, and sprawling, in this case it can be boiled down to a fairly simple representative statistic: that when the British arrived in 1600s, India produced over 20% of the world’s economic output; by the time the British departed India in 1947, it had dropped to 3%.[4] The UK experienced a nearly exact opposite trajectory in growth. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to determine what happened, and yet British academics and politicians appear to disagree:
- Andrew Roberts, Professor at King’s College London, 2021: “I don’t agree with the automatic assumption that the British Empire was evil. . . . In fact, I think it was very helpful for the development of the native peoples of the Empire.”
- Michael Gove, soon to be UK Education Secretary, 2009: “There is no better way of building a modern, inclusive, patriotism than by teaching all British citizens to take pride in this country’s historic achievements. Which is why the next Conservative Government will ensure the curriculum teaches the proper narrative of British History – so that every Briton can take pride in this nation.”
- Niall Ferguson, Senior Fellow at Harvard University, 2004: “Without the British empire, there would be no Calcutta, no Bombay, no Madras. Indians may rename them as many times as they like, but they remain cities founded and built by the British.”
- UK Foreign Minister Mark Fields on the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, 2019: “I feel a little reluctant to make apologies for things that have happened in the past. There are also concerns that any government department has to make about any apology, given that there may well be financial implications to making an apology. I feel we debase the currency of apologies if we are seen to make them for many, many events.”
It doesn’t matter how much one rebuts every detail: India had strong industrial sectors before the British arrival,[5] India had its own education system before “Western” education,[6] Indian taxpayers funded the railroads while British shareholders received guaranteed dividends covering any investment and a hefty bonus.[7] Nearly a third of the British populace still thinks the empire was a good thing to be proud of, while half thinks it did no harm to colonized countries,[8] and many Americans think the worst of British colonialism was taxation of the thirteen colonies. Historical revisionism presents an easy, engaging narrative: Britain saved India, Britain deserves its bounty, Britain has no reason to make amends. The problem is not the facts. It is the story. And stories are best fought by stories.
Ten Incarnations of Rebellion flips this script, using alternate history to showcase the horrors of colonialism in a world parallel to ours. If history has been bogged down by a mainstream whitewashing of colonialism, alternate history cuts through those narratives by tweaking key details, showing the moral rot at the empire’s core. The story was inspired by a simple what-if. After their failures on the Indian subcontinent, the British Empire innovated new methods of oppression. They used these “improved” tactics to fight anti-colonial movements in their other colonies around the globe, from cutting off entire cities to imposing long-term curfews to placing dissenters in punitive prison camps. So, what if the British had used those tactics to prevent Indian independence?
Check out Vaishnavi Patel's Ten Incarnations of Rebellion here:
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The book’s timeline branches from real history in the 1910s, with increased violent crackdowns on political parties, freedom of speech, and protest movements. By the 1930s in this world, the major figureheads of independence and their followers have been killed. Over the coming decades, this alternate history India is subjected to militarized rule, constant surveillance, language erasure, and cultural suppression. The main events of the novel take place in a fundamentally altered version of the 1960s, in a city robbed of its young men, where a group of young women take up the torch of rebellion. This is not alternate history done in the apologist way—that is, without tether to reality. While the events of the book are fictional, inventing subjugation does a disservice to the billions who have suffered under colonialism. In Ten Incarnations of Rebellion, every act of brutality, every tactic of oppression, every traitor and martyr, is inspired by real-life events that took place either in India or elsewhere.
The same is true not just of the sins of Empire, but of the struggle for freedom. India’s freedom movement is credited with being a nonviolent, inclusive movement. But there were also many freedom fighters who undertook violent operations, and their successes in terrorizing the British helped pave the way for the nonviolent movement’s victories. And while Indians of all creeds took part in the struggle, there were great rifts and injustices within the movement, on religious, caste, and geographic lines. In the West, where this history is often sanitized to the point that one must struggle just to show that colonialism is bad at all, it is nearly impossible to examine these nuances. How can you discuss fair criticisms of freedom fighters when the need for the fight itself is being attacked? By moving into an alternate history space, the protagonists of this story can face the same questions as their real-life predecessors—How do they reconcile the caste and religious divides within their people? Can they work with the British to improve their condition? When is violence justified?—without delegitimizing the struggle for freedom.
From India to Ireland and everywhere in between, the British left a trail of genocide, famine, engineered sectarian violence, cultural repression, and theft. And through programs like Operation Legacy, they have put records of their crimes into literal bonfires, hiding the truth from the light of day. It is this erasure that allowed them to build a new narrative for themselves. But this erasure also provides an opportunity: rewriting history to highlight and honor freedom movements. The fights of freedom movements and the legacies of colonialism are not confined to history. Even today, millions live under physical and economic colonialism—as but one example, the United States has “territories” that pay taxes but are unable to meaningfully participate in the election of the government taxing them. And billions continue to be affected by the laws and actions of their former colonial masters, suffering from centuries of deindustrialization, looting, divide-and-rule, and more.
There is no easy answer to healing the ills of colonialism. But until those of us living in the west can grapple with the true cost of our wealth and status, we will be the ones living in an alternate history.
[1] Tombs, Robert. “In Defense of the British Empire,” The Spectator, May 8, 2020. https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/In-defence-of-the-British-Empire/
[2] Jordanna Bailkin. “The Boot and the Spleen: When Was Murder Possible in British India?” Comparative Studies in Society and History 48.2 (2006): 463-494.
[3] Elkins, Caroline. Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya. New York: Henry Holt, 2005: 39, 359.
[4] See Tharoor, Shashi. Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India. London: Hurst, 2017; Broadberry, Stephen, Johann Custodis, and Bishnupriya Gupta, “India and the great divergence: An Anglo-Indian comparison of GDP per capita, 1600–1871,” Explorations in Economic History 55 (2015): 58-75.
[5] Clingingsmith, David, and Jeffrey G. Williamson, “Deindustrialization in 18th and 19th century India: Mughal decline, climate shocks and British industrial ascent,” Explorations in Economic History 45, no. 3(2008): 209-234.
[6] Dharampal (2000). “Introduction,” The Beautiful Tree: Indigenous Indian Education in the Eighteenth Century. Goa, India: Other India Press. The availability of such pre-colonial education was extremely divided along lines of caste and class, but the British were not particularly active in fixing these—or indeed, any—forms of discrimination.
[7] Bogart, Dan, and Latika Chaudhary. “Regulation, Ownership, and Costs: A Historical Perspective from Indian Railways,” American Economic Journal: Economic Policy 4, no. 1 (2012): 28–57.
[8] Matthew Smith, “British Attitudes to the British Empire,” YouGov Jan. 29, 2025. https://yougov.co.uk/society/articles/51483-british-attitudes-to-the-british-empire.
