History is rarely dispassionate
ness of the Orient.
Today, this has been replaced by an emerging culture of self-abnegation, verging on self-loathing.
The celebration of the Empire and all that it represented has yielded space to a profound sense of post-colonial guilt — what an Australian writer has described as the replacement of the “Three Cheers” view of history with the “Black Armband” perspective.
I saw an example of this at an exhibition on German Colonialism at the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin. The exhibition, documenting some of the brutalities and racist overtones of the short-lived German Empire, culminated in a felled bronze statue of Hermann von Wissmann, a former Reich Commissioner and Governor of German East Africa, that stood in Dar es Salaam until 1919. Relocated to Hamburg University in 1922, it was toppled in 1967 following student protests against imperial glorification. The exhibition in Berlin has the statue lying on its side, the face still smeared in the yellow spray paint with which it was vandalised by students.
As a symbol of inversion the imagery is powerful. The German desire to repudiate a troubled past is understandable. If, however, historical guilt becomes an overriding concern, it could be a prescription for national paralysis. Germany’s self-destructive opendoor policy towards ‘asylum seekers’ has owed entirely to this sense of guilt, as has the UK’s inability to curb the evolution of a ‘Londonistan’.
History is rarely dispassionate or objective. Winston Churchill can be remembered as the leader who saved Britain from Hitler or as the man whose strategic choices led to a million plus deaths in the Bengal famine. India recalls the latter but if Britain also starts perceiving Churchill as simply an imperialist monster, there are bound to be complications. What matters is not what is taught but how the subject is approached. And with what objective.
India too has experienced the systematic rewriting of its history to suit post-national tastes. More than an exercise in puerile iconoclasm, the reshaping of the national imagination is also aimed at eroding the national spirit.
There is undoubtedly a place for rarefied scholarship but at the popular level history must aim at bolstering the nation.