“No man ever went to the East Indies with good intentions.” Wrote Horace Walpole. As in no European man went to the East Indies with good intentions. They went to plunder and colonize. And they largely succeeded.
They stole everything that they could, and left their imprints on the lands. They loved plundering so much that they even adopted "loot" into the English language:
One of the very first Indian words to enter the English language was the Hindustani slang for plunder: “loot”. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, this word was rarely heard outside the plains of north India until the late 18th century, when it suddenly became a common term across Britain.
The colonizers succeeded in so many ways including how their languages spread around the world. Instead of English, French, and Spanish being provincial languages, they are now global. A rich language like Tamil, with its long history, struggles to maintain its life against English. Here I am, a Tamil by birth, blogging in the English language, while living in what was once a colony of Britain, after having immigrated from a country that was also a British colony!
Back in the old country, we used to say that at least it was the British that colonized us, and not the large-scale killers and torturers like Belgium or even the Netherlands. France's unwillingness to let go of Algeria reminded us about the hollowness of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity.
Further, the British built up the railways and dams and canals and ... of course, we conveniently overlooked the fact that the British did that to make the plundering that much easier for them!
Britain gets off rather easily compared to its continental counterparts who went around colonizing lands and people in the other inhabited continents. It is not that the British were saintly; recall Jallianwala Bagh? They had a good public relations system, and they also knew how to cover their tracks, like how they did in Kenya: "Operation Legacy was intended to ensure that “the British way of doing things” would be remembered with “fondness and respect” – that the conduct of its imperial retreat would be seen as exemplary."
"The British Empire was much worse than you realize," writes Sunil Khinani in The New Yorker.
[The] British Empire’s baneful legacy may well have been deeper and more diffuse than that of any other modern state. Was British liberal imperialism, given the extent of the damage it inflicted over generations, a more malevolent influence on world history than even Nazi Fascism?
The empire retracting back to the cold islands in the northern seas did not clear the slate, so to speak, in the former colonies. The multi-generational legal system that was in place in the colonies became a part of the legal system in the newly independent countries, and often this had disastrous results for people:
Ghanaian leaders, shortly after their country became independent, in 1957, cribbed from British preventive-detention laws the right to detain citizens for five years without trial. In the nineteen-sixties, Malaysian officials, building on British models, enacted laws permitting suspects to be detained indefinitely. In the seventies, Indian leaders used colonial emergency powers embedded into their constitution to censor the press, jail political opposition, clear urban slums and even sterilize their residents.
I used to think that the "emergency" years in the seventies were India's darkest as an independent democracy. But, the virulent anti-minority politics and policies of contemporary India make a saint of Indira Gandhi and her power-hungry "emergency" rule.
Why is such a discussion important? We need to get the inaccuracies out of our past stories, and accurately present the colonizers for what they did; else, going forward will not be easy. As Pankaj Mishra wrote in a different context: "The old question—what is a country, and what is its basis?—has become menacingly relevant long after it appeared to have been settled."
No comments:
Post a Comment