How imperial story has shaped Britain
Empireland: How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain
by Sathnam Sanghera.
Penguin Random House.
Pages 320.
Rs 999
Sandeep Dikshit
The old adage of never judging the book by its cover holds true as a British Sikh embarks on a personal and public journey to unravel how the past of an empire — held by brutality, guile, plain loot and partial accommodation of the natives — has shaped modern day Britain’s impulses and wealth.
The 12 delectable chapters call for focused reading since Sathnam Sanghera liberally quotes his primary sources in telling both sides of the imperial story. From Charles Dickens to Tony Blair, there is a long line-up of eminent Britishers who weighed in on this side of the empire or that.
Leavened in an all-angle examination of the after-effects of the empire is the author’s coming of age as a Sikh boy, living under the shadow of brown bashing by skinheads, and Olaudah Equiano of Benin and the Indian Deen Mohammed, who followed their masters to Britain, married white women, wrote evocatively of the slave trade and racism before being forgotten.
Sanghera declares in the fine-print that the “moral right of the author has been asserted”. Yet, it is a complex story. There is always a yin and yang in his chapters. Nearly 100 pages of bibliography, notes and index – almost one-third of the book — prove the maxim that all events exist as inseparable and contradictory opposites.
Take the railways. There is a general consensus that it today serves the ex-colonised nations though it was originally meant to supply the empire’s garrisons and suck out the target country’s raw materials. Sanghera finds out that there was no charity involved. There was no effort to ensure the health and safety of workers. Over 25,000 Indians died in constructing just two railway sections crossing the Thal and Bhor Ghats, which possibly made it the deadliest railway project ever undertaken in the world. Whites enjoyed first class luxury funded by the taxpayer even as Bengal reeled under a famine triggered by the British prioritising the transfer of resources for the Second World War. If charity was the underlying principle, the British would not have uprooted railway lines to fuel the First World War.
In recalling previous and similar-sounding rationalisations for the unwelcome ramming of imperial Britain into alien civilisations, Sanghera punctures the moral justification for Britain’s modern day crusaders. He nevertheless brings out two worthy aspects that usually go missing on a controversial subject as the empire. One is to give voice to those who backed the entire enterprise. He also brings in broad relief the array of men and women from Britain itself who had opposed many of the excesses wrought on the colonised.
The intense research throws up surprises on almost every page. History also gets corrected along the way: the first acquisition of East India Company was an island full of nutmegs in the South Pacific. Or that slavery didn’t die just because enlightened Britons turned against it. And once that phase ended, another inhuman one of transporting Indians, Chinese and the Africans to sugar plantations began. Or that the British, who rail so much against China laying claim to islands in its backyard, hold at least 20 islands of which half a dozen are money-laundering hubs also called tax havens.
But this book is also due to the inculcation of values of fair play, courage and resilience taught in British public schools. The system was to breed personnel to amass wealth for the British Isles. It also gave birth to a long line of contrarians who helped temper and apologise for some of the excesses.
A similar, self-critical book is unlikely to see the light of the day in other ex-empires of Russia, China and Iran. Now that statues of men believed to have made their fortunes from slave trade are being torn down in the UK, this uniquely western outlook of uncritically examining their own warts compels Sanghera to suggest that such actions also invite counter-campaigns. More would be achieved by creating and building perhaps a 40-foot fountain that explores the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
More than being brilliant, it confirms one truism. The more you read from as many original sources as is possible, the image that emerges is grey, although the abandoning of morality remains a constant thread.
