Nandini Das, a Professor of Literature, reviews Satnam Sanghera's stupid new book in the Guardian.
In the early 1730s, a new subscription craze transformed Georgian Britain.
The only craze which worried people back then was the Gin craze.
Every year, for five guineas, “Bartram’s box” would delight plant collectors and gardeners with seeds from among a hundred different North American species. The supply chain had a Pennsylvanian Quaker, John Bartram, at one end and another Quaker, English merchant Peter Collinson, at the other.
Bartram was also supplying seeds to France, Germany and even distant Russia. So what? How is it relevant if he was a Quaker?
The overpriced phlox and rudbeckia we now buy from garden centres in seasonal attempts to brighten up our outdoor spaces, the rhododendrons and magnolias that arrest our attention across the drabbest of streets, were all introduced to England thanks to their initiative.
Nonsense! There were a variety of routes by which such seeds were acquired. The rhododendron- the national flower of Nepal- was introduced through Gibraltar in 1763. The magnolia first appeared in England in 1687 though another strain was brought in by Mark Catesby in 1730.
Collinson and Bartram’s subscriber list included dukes and earls who vied with each other to beautify their estates, but the pair were equally well connected beyond the movers and shakers of high society.
Dukes and Earls spent a lot of time buying seeds and digging holes in the ground for their proper reception. It was not the case that their Estate managers procured such items and saw to their planting and watering by labourers.
Collinson was a member of the Royal Society and exchanged letters with the collector Hans Sloane and the botanist Carl Linnaeus.
How very strange! A botanist writes to another botanist! A still largely agricultural country has plenty of horticulturists some of whom are members of the Royal Society. This is extremely sinister!
Bartram would later become one of the founding members of the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, alongside Benjamin Franklin.
Which was bizarre because he lived in Calcutta- right?
When the combination of that impeccable social and intellectual network got Bartram an appointment as botanist to King George III in 1765,
Collinson and Franklin lobbied the King who appointed Bartram Royal Botanist for North America with a stipend of fifty pounds a year.
his plants would also find a home in the Royal Gardens at Kew.
he was also made a member of the Swedish Royal Society. His plants found homes all over Europe.
Sathnam Sanghera’s Empireworld tells the story of Bartram and Kew as part of a nuanced, complicated account of the British empire’s impact on the world as we know it,
Seeds would have been sent to Europe by botanical surveys or merchants employed for that task even if there had been no settler colonialism. Spain and Portugal had already enabled all sorts of new food and cash crops to spread across the globe.
and it is a story that is strikingly, remarkably alive to the contradictions inherent in its telling.
There are no contradictions or 'nuances' in a simple matter of merchants creating a demand for commodities which they then supply.
For example, the technologies that facilitated the transporting of the plants and seeds
sailing ships. But sailing ships had existed for thousands of years!
that changed the English landscape
which had been changed even more when England became a big exporter of wool
and accelerated modern plant science
which existed in countries without Empires. Linnaeus was Swedish.
also drove the large-scale cultivation of indigo, sugar cane, and rubber, and thereby determined the destinies of countless thousands of enslaved and indentured labourers in British-owned plantations across the world.
If they hadn't been British owned, they would have been French or Dutch or Spanish or indigenously owned. The Arabs employed plenty of slaves on clove plantations in Zanzibar. But then the Zanj rebellion of black slaves in Southern Iraq occurred in the Ninth Century!
And these enterprises, leading as they did to the kind of large-scale ecological destruction
there was none at that time. The use of fossil fuels is a different story but that occurred much later.
whose effects are still felt today, also created a need for conservation movements and environmental activism.
The environmental activism that was required back then involved killing beasts who wanted to eat you.
Neither global communication, nor global cuisines, would be the same without any of this.
Yes they would. All that was required was trade. Imperialism didn't matter in the slightest. The fact is our diet has continued to change in the seven decades since European Imperialism gave up the ghost. I've given up rice and am now eating quinoa. I want to kill myself.
And it’s not just the world of plants that was affected by Britain’s colonial ambition.
Many plants were mercilessly killed by Brigadier Dyer at Jallianwallah bagh. Sabzi Singh Aalu-Gobi has written a moving account of various non-violent satyagrahas against British tyranny carried out by a Babul tree near his Nannee's house in Jallandhar. Sadly, the said tree was not being given ticket for Assembly Election by those fucking cunts who are running Kangress. Thus, the tree got drunk and crashed into a car being driven by Sabzi Singh. Fucking cunts who are running the Courts were so cruel that they suspended Sabziji's driving licence and fined him Rs 50. Atrocities like this carried out by British Imperialists like Pratap Singh Kairon (real name Peter Smith-Callaghan) caused Sabzi Singh to migrate to Youkay. Sadly, Hindu bastid- Rish Sunak- is now ruling. Whole country has gone to the dogs what with the stink of curry everywhere! I tell you, before we start getting rid of foreign plants, we must first deport all those smelly Hindoooo bastids. They are legacy of Imperialism!
Writing in another chapter that investigates the extraordinary global prominence of British charities and non-governmental organisations,
which has to do with the fact that the Brits were rich and soft hearted
Sanghera identifies the same dynamics at work.
Oxfam is trying to colonize you! Wake up sheeple! RSPCA will turn you into a catamite for the Royal Pleasure of Charles Rex! All is fault of Rishi Sunak. Would a Sikh Prime Minister permit such atrocities?
Take hunting, for example. Its deep entanglement with ideas of English imperial masculinity
whereas in India only transvestites went for Shikar- right?
was directly responsible for driving various animal species to the brink of extinction around the world.
Very true. Woolly mammoth was roaming around peacefully fifty thousand years ago. Then English imperialists persuaded the Neandertals to kill and eat those mammoths.
But it was equally the catalyst for the various charities that emerged in response, and for the codification of countless environmental protections.
But that happened after the Raj ended. The WWF dates from 1961.
“It’s all true, but the opposite is also true”, as Sanghera puts it.
Nothing Sanghera says is true or even meaningful. He is a cretin.
History is not a balance sheet: sometimes it requires that we hold multiple truths in our mind simultaneously.
History is a Journal each of whose entries can give rise to a debit or a credit for any particular account. We may hold multiple incompossible beliefs in our minds simultaneously, but a belief is not a truth.
Nations – and individuals – can do great evil at the same time as doing good.
Only if those they are doing evil too are too stupid or cowardly to stop it happening.
And that’s where it gets complicated: sometimes doing what’s considered evil can lead to good, and vice versa.
No. Doing evil leads to evil being done. It is a different matter that a benefit received by a party may burgeon such that ultimately all survivors are better off. But that doesn't change the fact that evil was done.
The raking light that Sanghera throws across the contradictions at the heart of the story of empire doesn’t come without some trepidation for the author.
If the British Empire was bad, then people like me and Sanghera who are British only because that Empire existed, should be sent packing.
Empireworld is in some ways a sequel to his previous book, Empireland, where the discussion of imperialism’s role in the making of Britain’s past and present attracted a substantial backlash that included public and personal attacks.
From people like me who thought Sanghera was a whiny little shit. Don't study rubbish at Uni. Do an MBA like Rishi. Make something of yourself rather than continually play the race card.
Sanghera deals with this backlash at the beginning of his first chapter, and he returns to it a few times subsequently.
He is a very precious and special little flower. Sadly, it is an imported flower. Put him in a Bartram box and mail him to Narendra Modi.
But his larger response is to spell out the complexity of historical assessment with painstaking clarity, showing, repeatedly, the deep entwinement of the positive and negative contributions of empire.
He shows nothing at all. Britain needed a kick ass Navy to protect itself. But Navies cost money. So, to pay for the Navy, Britain engaged in oceanic trade which in turn meant it went in for both settler colonialism and, at a later point, diversified into tax-farming in India and providing Public Goods as the paramount power.
The propagation of British legal and political frameworks is a case in point.
No it isn't. Polities which were cohesive and economically viable could thrive regardless of their legal or political framework. Those which weren't cohesive or economically viable tended to fail.
In present-day Mauritius, Nigeria, and India, many of the most restrictive and divisive of state mechanisms, aimed at imposing and retaining the power of certain social groups at the cost of others, have deep colonial roots.
Only because they had deeper pre-colonial roots.
It is a credit to Empireworld that it does not turn away from that uncomfortable truth.
It eagerly devours that turd.
Consider the following extract from it.
Introduction: Spot the Colonial Inheritance
To do so would involve spotting the pre-Colonial inheritance.
There is nowhere on earth that crackles with the atmosphere of British empire like New Delhi.
Nonsense! It was only built after it had become clear that Britain would have to gradually transfer power. That's why its architectural style is 'Indo-Saracenic'. The VeeTee terminal is Victorian and triumphalist. Lutyen's wife, daughter of a Viceroy, was however a Theosophist who believed in a Tambram Universal Messiah.
The British may have fled the subcontinent many decades ago, but you can still feel the influence of the largest empire in human history in the city which was designated India’s capital by the British, in the place of Calcutta (now Kolkata), in 1931.
Government House in Kolkata is English. Rashtrapati Bhawan isn't.
You can sense it in the streets, the uptight diagonals and preternaturally tidy but scorched patches of lawn
No you can't. Coming to London from New Delhi, as I did, what struck me was the narrowness of the streets and the gemutlich cosiness of the place. But the Lutyen's Delhi I left was still rather empty. There was little motor traffic on the broad boulevards. After the Asian Games, the City really took off.
sitting in contrast to the chaos of Old Delhi,
or the chaos of Daryaganj.
with its winding, narrow roads, some accessible only on foot. You can divine it in Parliament House which, designed by the British architects Edwin Lutyens and Herbert Baker in the classical style, mostly ignores Indian architecture, except for the occasional nod to its context in its decoration.
India has a new Parliament building. It must be said, it was far from obvious back when the old building was being designed, that the Central Legislature would have much power. It seemed likely that the Princes would remain while the Provinces would be autonomous. Indeed, this was the upshot of the 1935 Act. Parliament was an alien idea and had an alien architecture because it would be a place where things just went round in a circle. It would not be sovereign like Westminster.
You can almost smell it around the bungalows that Indians invented as a form but the British embraced as a colonial ideal,
Nope. The PWD simply put up a lot of them because they were cheap to construct with local labour. Their occupants were saving up to buy a nice suburban villa back home.
scattering them on tree-lined roads in what is known as the Lutyens Bungalow Zone. It’s a 7,000-acre area originally established to house government officials, the colonnaded verandas offering imperial administrators somewhere to cool down, somewhere to take refreshments and somewhere to maintain, in the paranoid colonial way, surveillance.
This is misleading. The Princes were invited to build palaces for themselves. Leading lawyers and Legislators built their own mansions. Prosperous contractors and merchants too got in on the act and there was some speculative building.
The mood even seeps into Old Delhi, where the Maidens Hotel,
built for the Coronation Durbar
my home for half a week in the middle of a series of international research trips tracing the legacies of British imperialism, doesn’t seem to have got the memo that empire ended at all.
Nonsense! It is peddling itself as a 'heritage hotel'.
Established in 1903 by an Englishman, but now run by the Indian Oberoi chain of luxury properties, its website talks proudly about how it ‘offers a journey back in time’. The welcome letter in my room waxes lyrical about how the hotel retains its ‘original 19th century colonial charm and architecture’ (I’ve seen British colonialism described in all sorts of ways, but never ‘charming’).
This is because Grievance Studies insists that the British Raj involved Viceroy Sahib personally sodomizing every single coolie in the country. Such behaviour was not charming at all. It was brusque, it was rude. It was deeply undignified.
One of the hotel restaurants is called the Curzon Room, after one of the viceroys who exercised authority in India on behalf of the British sovereign.
I lived on a road everybody called Curzon Road even thought Gorinmint had renamed it Kasturba Gandhi ki Bakri ki marg. Connaught Place became Rajiv ki gandhi chaddi chowk.
And it all goes down curiously well with a clientele that consists of a mix of Indian and European guests, one of its many rave online reviews declaring that it is ‘one of the nicest hotels . . . Brings you back to the colonial British time.’
When Hindus and Sikhs flourished in Peshawar and Lahore.
It’s a surreal place
No. It was an expensive place
to base myself for my tour examining the international influence of British empire, not least because there are also few places on earth, in the twenty-first century, more committed to the task of decolonization than New and Old Delhi, or what, when combined, India calls its National Capital Territory.
There is nothing to decolonize in the twenty-first century. Why be committed to any such thing? Oh. This mad fucker means Tibet.
I’m not just thinking here of Coronation Park, the 52-acre plot which was once the site of the grandest imperial spectacles, including the Delhi Durbars but has in recent decades become the dumping ground for the unwanted statues of British imperialists, and now, having been cleaned up, is home to only a handful of viceroys and monarchs.
Why think of it at all? No Delhiwallah does.
I’m thinking of Hindu nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s claim in 2014 that India had been troubled by ‘1200 years of slave mentality’ (he combined British rule with preceding periods of Mughal/Muslim rule in his definition of colonialism),
this cretin doesn't get that Modi was referring to the Dynasty's rule.
and of his efforts to delete all things colonial since.
Fuck Colonial, it is 'Congress mukht Bharat' that he wants to see.
These decolonization efforts have included redeveloping the capital’s Parliament in a $1.8 billion initiative, replacing the building opened by the British in 1927 with one dreamed up by Indian architect Bimal Patel.
Modi isn't a fool. He knows India doesn't need any decolonizing. The new Parliament is his attempt to put his mark on Delhi. It now looks as though he will be re-elected with a bigger majority. His party is now the default National party.
The two Parliament buildings face each other, but on the day I visit the smog caused by Delhi’s intense pollution is such that you can barely make out the edges of one building when standing next to the other. New Parliament House is not quite complete, but there has already been an opening ceremony, when Modi unveiled a 28-foot-tall statue of the militant Indian independence figure Subhas Chandra Bose, near the India Gate memorial – where the statue of the British monarch George V once stood.
Nobody gives a shit about George V. Modi is glorifying Bose because he hopes to displace Mamta in West Bengal.
Bose, who was popularly known as Netaji, and whose defiance of British empire extended to seeking alliances with Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, is something of an obsession for Modi’s governing, Hindu nationalist party, the BJP.
Because they were foolish enough to think they could take on Mamta. What they didn't get is that to defeat the TMC, you have to be actually, physically, beat the fuck out of their goons. Since the BJP can't protect its people from being knifed or gangraped by Mamta's thugs, they will lose seats in West Bengal in the upcoming general election.
I’m in Delhi on the very holiday Modi created in tribute to Bose’s birthday: so-called Bravery Day, also known as Parakram Diwas,
there is no holiday on this date.
which is being marked by, among other things, a terrifying fly-past of fighter jets that makes this part of the world feel like it’s being invaded all over again.
Perhaps this nutter mistook Republic Day for Parakram Diwas.
As a tribute to Bose, Modi – who is reportedly keen to rename India ‘Bharat’ (the Hindi name for the country) on anti-colonial grounds
Bharat is an alternative name mentioned in the Constitution
– has also rebranded three islands of the Andaman and Nicobar archipelago, previously named after imperial figures and once serving as a colonial penal colony, and this impulse to relabel things in the name of decolonization is hardly new.in 2023, 21 of the largest unnamed islands of Andaman & Nicobar Islands were named after the 21 Param Vir Chakra awardees
Since independence, the cities of Bombay, Bangalore and Calcutta have been given more indigenous names – Mumbai, Bengaluru and Kolkata respectively. But efforts have intensified. The ceremonial avenue that links the two Secretariat buildings in central New Delhi
They are across the road from each other. The avenue in question links the President's mansion to the National Stadium.
was once called Kingsway (and, in translation, as Rajpath), but is now known as Kartavya Path (the Hindi word for ‘duty’), the Prime Minister’s website declaring that the renaming displays a ‘shift to public ownership and empowerment’.
And has nothing to do with decolonization. Modi was saying 'unlike the Dynasty, we in the BJP don't think of ourselves as Kings. We are dutiful servants of the public.'
Elsewhere, Modi has unveiled a new ensign for the Indian Navy in place of the St George’s Cross (described casually in news reports as ‘a sign of slavery’);
Australia and New Zealand got rid of the George Cross on their naval ensigns at the end of the Sixties. Atal's government did introduce a new ensign but it was difficult to distinguish from the sky and the sea and so it was retired. Modi's government got it right.
14 the hymn ‘Abide With Me’, traditionally played to conclude Republic Day celebrations, has been replaced with the patriotic song ‘Aye Mere Watan Ke Logon’; Indian musical instruments including the sitar and tabla have been introduced for Independence Day ceremonies; and the government launched the ‘Har Ghar Tiranga’ campaign in 2022, to mark seventy-five years of India’s independence, encouraging Indians to put up the national flag (the Tiranga, meaning ‘three-coloured’) in celebration. A campaign which means that, as I walk around in 2023, there appear to be more national flags per square foot of the capital than there are posters featuring Modi’s face.
Modi has done a lot to make his party synonymous with the patriotism. The Opposition sought to combat this by creating a coalition called INDIA. Sadly, it soon fell apart. Anyway, all this has nothing to do with the British Empire. The BJP is hinting that the Dynasty is European and pro-Muslim whereas the vast majority of Indian citizens are Hindus.
The government has also declared war on the English language, colonial use of English having, in the words of Robert Young, ‘alienated colonized people from themselves’ by devaluing their own languages.
If Sanghera started miaowing like a cat he would end up devaluing cat language.
In October 2022, officials in BJP-ruled Maharashtra
the BJP is in coalition with the Shinde wing of the Shiv Sena
were forbidden to say ‘hello’ when greeting the public – they were instructed to say ‘Vande Mataram’ instead or ‘I bow to thee, oh motherland’.
This was optional. Congress too said 'hello' should be done away with. I pointed out many years ago that 'Hello' is Christian term. The Lord's Prayer states 'Our Father who does Art in Heaven/ Hello be thy name'.
And, following a 2020 move to allow practitioners of ayurveda, the traditional Indian system of medicine, to perform surgery (to the dismay of many medics),
Postgrad Ayurvedic students were required to take two courses on certain types of surgery. But these were procedures not generally performed by allopathic surgeons.
the Madhya Pradesh state government has declared its intention to offer medical degrees in Hindi.
A good idea because it means students might actually grasp what they are learning rather than regurgitating it parrot fashion.
Speaking to the Guardian, Dr Rajan Sharma, former head of the Indian Medical Council, described the move as ‘regressive, backward-looking, pathetic, deplorable’. He continued: ‘Where are the Hindi speaking teachers to teach medicine?
They are Hindi mother tongue Doctors. Rajan Sharma himself speaks shuddh Hindi. I believe he is from Haryana. No doubt, his teachers explained things in Hindi while writing in English on the blackboard. He fears that the prestige of the Medical degree will fall if Doctors are perceived as not knowing English.
I am not even going to talk about how good the translations are going to be because that implies one accepts the policy which I don’t. The policy will be a failure.’
It will succeed if done properly.
But the ultimate point I’m making here is not that decolonization is futile.
It happened long ago. What Sanghera is commenting on is strategic actions of a partisan, political, type. The ruling party is trying to show that the opposition is retarded and reactionary or, as with Rahul, retarded and only one quarter Hindu by blood.
Some of these initiatives, and those elsewhere around the globe, are crucial steps in restoring the self-respect and agency of the formerly colonized.
Fuck off! Self-respect and agency are what you get when your income rises and you can buy more cool shiny stuff.
Sharma’s fury echoes through my mind as I continue to walk around India’s capital,
Sharma was representing the class interest of Indian Doctors. He naturally does not want all sorts of mickey mouse Medical Colleges giving licenses to rustic retards.
Googling information within the confines of my international roaming data allocation. I understand why he objects and can see why other people might also have problems with this aspect of India’s decolonization project.
Sharma was born after Independence. Decolonization happened long ago. What he objects to is politicians monkeying with the standards and practices of his profession.
After all, there are factors besides British colonialism which make English today the world’s most spoken language, with approximately 1.5 billion speaking it as a first or second language: the enduring popularity of Friends, the dominance of English on the internet, American English in general.
English became the language par excellence of global commerce and scientific research.
Also, what happens amid this decolonization to the many English words, not least ‘bungalow’ and ‘veranda’, which derive from Indian languages?
Many of these words may be subjected to sexual abuse at the hands of Hindutva fanatics. Just the other day I stepped onto my veranda and found nothing but grass under my feet. My Estate Agent informed me that my house has no veranda but, because I am an Indian living in Engyland, it must be the case that I have a veranda. What could have happened to it? The answer is that Rishi Sunak must have sexually molested it. That is why it is hiding somewhere and weeping piteously.
And what about the practical challenge of removing English from a society which sprinkles it in almost every advert, every TV/Bollywood script, every other conversation, and provides linguistic common ground for India’s speakers of at least 121 languages?
This practical challenge can only be met if millions of Hindoooos join the RSS and sexually molest any porches which are seeking to displace verandas in India.
To see it through, India would need to disown writers like Rohinton Mistry
who is Canadian.
and Arundhati Roy,
who declared that she was seceding from India decades ago
who happen to be among the best on the planet at writing in English.
Fuck off! They are shit.
It would need to take on the popularity of English-language books across India: walk or drive around long enough and someone will try to flog you a pirated copy of Harry Potter or Malcolm Gladwell.
They should concentrate on flogging Sanghera.
It would need to undo its intensely competitive English-language newspaper market, in which the Times of India enjoys a readership of some 15 million, and the Hindu has some 6 million readers.
India's population is 1.4 billion.
It would need somehow to erase the fondness across India for classic writers such as Dickens and Shakespeare,
both of whom can be read in vernacular translation
and then it would have to ban the intense study of English literature, which, as Gauri Viswanathan has pointed out, has a longer academic history in India than in Britain.
Viswanathan was lying. Chancery English was taught in Britain long before the first British schools were set up in India.
But Sharma, and other critics of the Indian decolonization mission, need to pace their anger.
Sharma is welcome to attack Hindi language instruction if it is sub-par. Let us see if Madhya Pradesh can produce text-books which gain his imprimatur.
For if Modi continues with or even accelerates his initiative, which seems to have proved popular so far, there will be bigger things to get exercised about.
Modi's aim is 'Congress mukht Bharat'. Incidentally, the INC was set up by a White ICS officer- albeit a vegetarian Vedantist.
Such was the depth and length of British imperial involvement in the Indian subcontinent that ongoing decolonization could reshape India in profound ways.
Someone should reshape this cretin in profound ways.
Not least, the nation’s built infrastructure would have to be rethought.
Why stop there? Why not suggest that India's geographical location would need to be rethought? Instead of being bordered by the Indian Ocean why should it not relocate to the Pacific or Atlantic?
Banning new Western-style apartments and office blocks might be relatively achievable
Don't be silly.
and even admirable; it turns out they’re not particularly suited to the climate, Time reporting recently that ‘many Indian architects [have] abandoned the vernacular traditions’ – such as ‘the earthen walls and shady verandas of the humid south, and the thick insulating walls and intricate window shades of the hot dry northwest’ – only to find that Western-style buildings struggle to cope so well ‘with the weather extremes of different regions’ in India.
India is overpopulated. It's a case of high-rise or homelessness.
But removing other colonial features of the built environment could be rather more disruptive. Take, for instance, the wide streets that would have to go
there is plenty of encroachment on those 'wide streets'.
because British colonialists introduced them
where? Only in the Cantonment and 'Civil Lines' both of which might be at some distance from the 'Native town'.
for reasons of public health (to ‘ventilate the towns and blow away smells and disease’), temperature regulation (though if anything they ‘proved to be environmentally unsuited to hot climates’) and security (to ‘preserve colonial power through surveillance’).
Does this cretin think that the vast majority of urban Indians lived in the fucking Cantonment? In India, surveillance was done by beggars or bhishtis. Those considered a threat had a spy planted among their domestic servants. Broad avenues were bad for surveillance because a beggar or a bhishti would stick out like a sore thumb.
Digging them up would be quite a task, as would be removing Delhi’s postboxes and the associated system of mail, the empire having introduced the imperial postal service to India in 1854.
Nonsense! All Indian rulers had a Postal service and the East India Company followed suit in the second half of the eighteenth century. They made letter carrying a monopoly in the 1837. The 1854 reforms were carried out under the EIC. God alone knows what this cretin is babbling about.
However, electronic communication has probably done for them anyway, and it was very much Indians who made it work, in a country where few towns even had street names and a dozen different languages might be spoken in one town.
This was irrelevant. The professional letter carrier knew who received letters and delivered them properly no matter what address had been written down. Ghalib frequently complained that his correspondents would ascribe bizarre or disreputable localities as his place of residence. Still the letter carrier knew that a missive addressed to 'Old drunkard who lives on Piss street at the junction of Shit avenue' was meant for the acclaimed poet.
In turn, even these challenges would be dwarfed by the task of curing India of its obsession with cricket, a palpably imperial spectacle
a rustic children's game from the Weald. It wasn't imperial at all. Polo- okay. The thing was associated with the Mongols and the Turks. There was an Imperial Cricket Conference but India was only admitted to it in 1926 by which time it was obvious that the Raj was on its last legs.
which, in India, is only marginally less popular than breathing. As Brian Stoddart explains, ‘cricket was considered the main vehicle for transferring the appropriate British moral code from the messengers of empire to the local populations.
Nonsense! Conversion to Christianity might do so as might training to be a barrister or attending a Public School or British University. But cricket could be played by savages.
Colonial governors were especially important in emphasising cricket as a ritual demonstration of British behaviour, standards, and moral codes both public and private.’
Sadly, Australians played it. Remember the Bodyline controversy? Face it. No Ozzie can be a gentleman. On the other hand Clive James could look quite fetching in a push-up bra.
Imperialists were so successful that the Bollywood film industry plans its releases around the cricketing calendar; gambling on cricket makes up the vast majority of sports betting in the country; India’s national cricket team has many of the world’s top players; and the Indian Premier League is the most lucrative domestic league on the planet.
India uses money. Guess who else uses money? British people! This means, if Indians want to decolonize themselves they must give up money. The same is true of farting.
And as if that wasn’t enough imperial heritage to face up to, Modi could, if he wanted, take on the popularity of other sports introduced by the British, from horse racing (‘the sport of kings, as it was known widely, was inevitably among the first of sporting activities to be introduced to new colonial situations, partly because of the availability of horses, partly because of its traditional association with the English landed gentry, and partly because of its established gambling tradition’)
This silly man doesn't get that horse racing began when horse riding began.
to croquet (‘genteel games like croquet were to be found in most outposts of empire along with indoor activities such as billiards, board games, and different forms of card playing’),
Guess what else was found in most outposts of empire? Masturbation! Indians must give up wanking to decolonize themselves
tennis (the Colonial Secretary Lord Milner once came to visit Palestine and, after taking tea with the Governor of Hebron and his guests, played tennis with them; the ball boys were two Arab convicts who had been excused from prison for the occasion, but had to fulfil their duties on court while in leg-irons)
When Lord Milner visited Cairo, he took a shit. Egyptians gave up defecation and thus successfully decolonized themselves.
and football (Sir Richard Turnbull, a governor of Aden, once remarked that ‘when the British empire finally sank beneath the waves of history, it would leave behind it only two monuments: one was the game of Association Football, the other was the expression “Fuck off ”’).
The Houthis are certainly telling the Royal Navy to fuck the fucking fuck off.
Let’s face it, Modi would have less on his hands if he attempted to delete dal, or honking in traffic, or religion, from Indian culture.
Sanghera would have less on his hands if he attempted to delete stupid shit from his brain. But then he couldn't write books.
But the ultimate point I’m making here is not that decolonization is futile.
The cunt is repeating himself.
Some of these initiatives, and those elsewhere around the globe, are crucial steps in restoring the self-respect and agency of the formerly colonized.
No they aren't. Getting rich is all that matters.
In India, they clearly mean a great deal to lots of people: outside New Parliament House, I’m approached by a homeless man who I assume is going to request money, but he instead enquires where I come from and then asks, with pride, ‘Do you have anything like this in your country?’, indicating the new Parliament.
Sanghera looks Indian. Perhaps the homeless dude, who clearly wanted to cornhole Sanghera, was asking what happened to the proposal to build a new building for the British Parliament. I'm kidding. He expected Sanghera to start talking about Big Ben at which point the homeless dude would whip out his pecker and say I've got a bigger ben for you bhaiyya. Kindly bend over.'
I have to admit that we probably don’t: while the Indians have rapidly put up this building, plans to refurbish the disintegrating Houses of Parliament in London are the subject of interminable argument. My ultimate point is that decolonization,
this is the third time he has mentioned his ultimate point. Perhaps the homeless dude was able to shove his point up Sanghera and thus the boy's brains have been buggered.
which is growing in popularity as an idea across India, across the former British empire and in Britain itself, can only ever be tokenistic.
It can't be anything at all because decolonization happened long ago.
Having spent years tracing the legacies of British imperialism in Britain, and having now spent several more years tracing the legacies of imperialism across the globe, I realize that
you should have learnt a bit of History before wasting your time so egregiously
the British empire’s influence upon the quarter of the planet it occupied, and its gravitational influence upon the world outside it, has been profound.
Why didn't you just ask your daddy or mummy? They would have explained to you that the British Raj profoundly affected the lives of your grand-parents and great grand-parents. One result was the fact that you were born in Britain.
British imperialism is baked into our world and, frankly, it would be easier to take the ghee out of the masala omelettes I’ve become addicted to eating for breakfast in India.
only because substituting dalda or olive oil for ghee is very very fucking easy. On the other hand, British imperialism disappeared long ago. It wasn't really 'baked in' to anything. It is a different matter that England once had considerable influence on the US and other places which subsequently became independent. But that was because, as happened in India, the Brits could adapt and innovate on the basis of what pre-existed their arrival. At one time, there was a small class of Anglophile Indians who did mimic their masters. But they now have other mimetic targets. But so do British people- even if they have names like Sunak or Sanghera.
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