A salutary reminder of the empire's pernicious legacy

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Even this brief display of handbills, tracts, advertisements, banners, cartoons, petitions, speeches and popular songs puts paid to the canard that "liberty" is a mainly western value. These texts refuse subjection and call on Indians to take freedom, not expect it to be given. Some make polemical use of criticism of empire by Englishmen themselves, citing W Digby - on "famine-stricken India being bled for the maintenance of England's world-wide empire" - and Charles Dilke, for whom imperialism was testimony less to so-called British values than "our descent from Scandinavian sea-king robbers".

The struggle reflected a diverse milieu. There were Swarajists, Gandhians, socialists, Hindu and Muslim religious nationalists, communists, militant revolutionaries (branded "terrorists") and the Indian National Army. Underpinning anti-colonialism was the sense that achieving freedom also necessitates self-criticism and transformation of one's own self and society - an insight some self-styled modern anti-imperialists seem to have forgotten.

Many of the materials on show at the British Library were banned at the time. Despite the fond notion that the empire spread liberty (a myth US neocons have reworked), protest was heavily policed through anti-sedition and press-control legislation. The scholar Gerald Barrier has shown how a vast range of materials (including plays, histories of revolution and political commentaries, especially Irish and Russian) were judged to be critical of western civilisation or Christianity and banned as "incitement to violence". Some Hollywood films were censored for showing the "seamier side" of western culture, unsuitable for natives.

Proscribed materials not included in this exhibition tell us even more. They are testimony to the suppression of dissent within communities, one of the most pernicious legacies of imperial rule. The British government of India zealously confiscated material that "by words, either spoken or written, or by visible representations, insults the religion or the religious beliefs" of a group. As with recent extensions to British law, the lengthening arm of colonial proscription reworked existing legislation against inciting "racial hatred" to cover "religious hatred". It is to this section of the Indian penal code - 295A - that religious chauvinists still appeal to have an "offensive" item prosecuted.

This wide-ranging censorship is why the British Library is one of the few places to hold a copy of Angarey, a 1932 anthology of short stories by four young Muslim writers, including a woman. It attempted a critique, from within the community, of certain patriarchal practices. Though the ostensible goal of this legislation was to preserve communal peace, in practice it marginalised debate and dissent within communities. Its legacy afflicts official multiculturalism in Britain today, where many know little about the history of debate and dissent within their own communities.

Though the British were obviously not the only rulers to suppress dissent, the colonial government frequently collaborated with authoritarian clerics and leaders. Colonial practice insistently defined communities in narrowly religious terms, legitimising religious leaders as political representatives. Though commentators frequently argue that the British tried nobly to unite an "uneducated and excitable" people, separatism was intrinsic to colonial rule and continues to inflect British politics.

As we commemorate six decades of independence, we need to reflect, in Britain and the subcontinent, on how historical legacies shape thinking today. We need to stop believing that culture, community, religion and nation are the same entities. Or that it behoves community pride to appeal to colonial-era legislation to censor offence. In doing so, Hindu, Sikh and Muslim chauvinists show themselves to be most thoroughly colonised. Or that the answer to extremism is "Britishness" through citizenship courses and English-speaking imams. As the exhibition shows, chauvinism speaks many languages, including English. Luckily, so do freedom and tolerance. It is these that we need to recover and strengthen from the margins to which history has tried to relegate them.

· Countdown to Freedom is at the British Library, London, to October 7; Priyamvada Gopal teaches in the English faculty at Cambridge University and is the author of Literary Radicalism in India

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