No More Honor for Monsters
If only the pen were actually mightier than the sword, and we could have sent Shashi Tharoor back in time to confront the British Raj. I imagine him deploying his words as a scythe and slashing through the tall grasses of their professed noblesse oblige. Laying bare their craven greed, inexcusable racism, their rampant disregard for brown lives, and putting paid to the notion that the British Raj was actually ‘good’ for India, and that their depredations were outweighed by their munificence in bestowing the wonders of their civilization on poor, ragged Indians. All while reducing an economy that was a quarter of the world’s GDP when they arrived, to 3% when they left.
In Era of Darkness, Tharoor does a superb job of researching and then systemically shredding the veneer of respectability that defenders of the Raj have cloaked its worst atrocities in, to the point where even most Indians of today barely realize or understand just how pernicious this empire was and the massively ruinous effect it had on the subcontinent. However, this is not a book review, though I do highly recommend that any Indophile or Anglophile read it, to unearth what really happened, so we don’t forget, even if we forgive.
This piece is prompted more by the recent events in the US, with statues of confederate generals being brought down by protestors in support of the Black Lives Matter movement. Which made me think of an analogy in the Indian context, where so many of our streets and places of interest are named by the British or after Britishers. Truth be told, I’m one of the anglophones (and one-time semi-anglophile) who protested when names that we’d grown up with were being changed (such as Bombay to Mumbai). We thought it was too reactionary, too nationalistic, too much an effort to change the familiar for ‘political’ reasons alone, partly because we eschewed what we perceived as a parochial movement.
In hindsight, I was wrong and I’m hoping I can convince others with similar sentiment to also change their stance. Anything with even a passing reference to Robert Clive (initiated the rape of Bengal), Macaulay (denigrated Indian languages and culture), Kipling (racist at best), Curzon (split Bengal apart), Dalhousie (promulgated doctrine of lapse), Mountbatten (mostly incompetent) and so many others, should be shunned in any context that even remotely exalts them. Yes, all of them need to be remembered — appropriately in history books, in museums, in folklore perhaps — but clearly as the monsters they were, and not by any means with any goodness or greatness attributed to them.
Those of my ilk (anglophones, some who treated Indianness with a touch of disdain) just need to get over it. Embrace our past (and to be clear, it’s a pretty glorious one), not rest on the laurels of our ancestors, but certainly not give genocidal monsters a place of honor. Either physically, or in our minds. We’ve adopted and co-opted the English language (as has much of the world) but this need not be at the expense of our Indianness. To put in the American context, our complicity in perpetuating the halo around these names in the Indian context would be akin to Black protestors today defending the right to keep statues of Robert E Lee, Stonewall Jackson or similar confederate leaders in the public sphere to be revered. Yeah, it really is that weird. While confederate generals may be glorified by white supremacists under the guise of preserving their heritage and legacy, Indians not actively seeking to rename British leftovers is unthinking at best, and quite likely, plain reprehensible.
Yes, I’m suggesting we rewrite our present, not because we are trying to brown-wash anything. Rather, to tell the truth that thus far has been whitewashed, even in our brown minds.
Coming back to Tharoor — while reading Era of Darkness, it’s a wicked pleasure to wonder what Macaulay would have thought of a brown man excoriating the Raj, while sending the English scurrying to find a dictionary to even understand his use of the language as he exposes the Raj’s duplicity.
Would he rejoice in the glory of his mother tongue or would he be mortified to see an Indian do one better than most native speakers.
