In my early teens, I was not a rebel without a cause. I had solid reasons to rebel against a lot. But, it was all suppressed rage as I went about life as a good student and an obedient son. As they say, it is the quiet ones that you should always worry about ;)
One of the targets for my anger was the goddamn British empire. My childhood hero was Vanchinathan (Vanchi,) who was from grandmother's village, Sengottai. The 25-year old Vanchi shot dead the regional British administrator, Robert Ashe, in a carefully planned assassination when Ashe was traveling. This happened almost fifty years before India's independence from the colonizer. At the main crossroad in Sengottai, there is a statue for Vanchi, who killed himself after the shooting.
Even now, as I blog about it, I can feel the anger within. Colonization forever changed the lives and histories. One of the ways we take revenge: By winning the Spelling Bee!
(Such anger within is also why I am always impressed, with deep respect, that African-Americans have not exploded with anger. While I have the utmost respect for MLK's nonviolent approach, I am confident that had I been a black teenager during the Civil Rights movement, I would have been drawn only to Malcolm X and the Black Panthers.)
The UK and the world fawning over the queen reminds me of the old stories all over again. Four decades of life since the early teenage anger against the murderous thugs who (mis)ruled the old country has dampened my anger and disgust only a tad. If I believed in hell, I could at least curse those white supremacists to the darkest chambers of hell!
I reviewed my blog and read up a few posts in which I have been highly critical of the empire, which I almost always referred to as the bastard empire. Bad idea!
“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. The British were masters at this. 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 during the last gasps of the empire.
"The British Empire was much worse than you realize," wrote 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.
They plundered and raped, and then the rapists and plunderers wanted to be remembered with fondness and respect. I think I am going to puke!
Of course, it is not as if life in the old country was all wonderful before the White Supremacist Raj was established. Far from that. For starters, the caste system as it was practiced then--including by my ancestors--along with horrific customs like sati, made sure that life for an overwhelming majority was nasty and hellish. But, that does not make the White Supremacist Raj any nobler.
We often also use humor to channel the anger. Trevor Noah did that well in his stand-up routines on the British colonization. There are also plenty of simple jokes like this: A demon took a monkey to wife – the result by the Grace of God was the English.
Thinking about Britain along these lines reminded me of the tshirt I bought a few years ago when I was in Chennai.
who failed to think beyond the next meal;
who find pleasure, in the faults of the rest;
whose souls toil in constant despair - mind
tangled in desperation and agony;
who wish ills to their neighbour;
who subject themselves to luck's mischief;
who live burdened with miseries,
and passed life as a burden
Born human,
did you wonder, if like those men,
I would also fall for fate's follies?
Consider India. At the beginning of eighteenth century, India’s share of the world economy was 23 percent, as large as all of Europe put together. By the time Britain left India, it had dropped to less than 4 percent. “The reason was simple,” argues Shashi Tharoor in his book Inglorious Empire. “India was governed for the benefit of Britain. Britain’s rise for two hundred years was financed by its depredations in India.” Britain, Tharoor argues, deliberately deindustrialized India, both through the physical destruction of workshops and machinery and the use of tariffs to promote British manufacture and strangle Indian industries.
I don't expect white supremacists to disappear anytime soon, given how much they have become emboldened in the US, and across Europe. Which is all the more the reason why we cannot forget the past and let white supremacists rewrite history. 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