HOW TO WRITE ABOUT THE BRITISH EMPIRE
All history is contemporary history, of course, but no rival subfield in our age can match imperial history’s claim to ur-contemporaneity. Accordingly, these days one finds middle- and lowbrows in search of a quick buck flocking to it like vultures to offal. Earlier last year, we had Nigel Biggar sounding the bugle for the British Empire in Colonialism, which gave us a benevolent NGO staffed by saints spreading enlightened manna to benighted natives. On the strength of its testimony, one could be mistaken for thinking Cecil Rhodes was the best thing that happened to Africa between Augustine and Mandela.
Now we have the journalist Sathnam Sanghera, Biggar’s foil but no better historian, who inverts the conceit in Empireland, a meandering, whingeing, selective litany of empire’s defaults that, understandably, finds room for the Amritsar massacre but not, also understandably, the massacre presided over by the princely ruler of Alwar six years later, a far more brutal episode but unworthy of mention here due to the inconvenient fact that its moving spirit was brown, so an awkward fit with his facile dichotomy between metropole and colony, white and nonwhite, oppressor and victim.
Likewise, his lurid narrative elides such needless complexities as the fact that peasants incontrovertibly had it better under the Raj than under the Mughals; that most colonial apparatchiks from c. 1850 on were High Tory types who had little time for such niceties as empire’s ‘civilising mission’, preferring to preserve native tradition instead; that, as Gandhi and Naoroji understood well, excepting a few skull-measuring cranks, Brits were by and large a tolerant people; they would turn racist only after empire in the sixties. Evidently, Gladstone’s Britain was a world away from Enoch Powell’s. Sanghera’s beef really ought to have been with post-imperial English nationalism rather than empire itself.
Empire, it seems, explains everything, which is to say nothing at all. ‘Sex
(shh, don’t tell Sanghera about the sozzled Safavids, alcoholic Arabs, and tippling Turks). Worse, Brexity Brits betrayed an ‘imperial distrust of cleverness’ in electing Boris. For colonial officials, Sanghera explains, tended to be ‘reliable rather than bright’. Presumably he has in mind such dunces as James Mill and John Maynard Keynes, both India Office employees, or that ICS alumnus B.N. Rau, draftsman of our Constitution.
Historian David Veevers’ The Great Defiance, on the other hand, is a serious work of history that chronicles the barbarity of colonial conquest. The chapters of the New World, especially those on the decimation of the Kalinago and Ossomocomuck natives, will no doubt come as eye-openers to many readers. However, his puerile prose style, honed by binge-watching RRR surely, will prove grating. More disturbingly, his ‘celebration’ of all manner of resistance takes him to some rather dark places. The Dahomians of West Africa, for instance, are lauded for maintaining a monopoly on the local slave trade. An equally crippling defect is the rather dim view Veevers takes of native agency. Even the slaughter of West Africans by other West Africans is blamed on the beastly Brits. For who was it who sold firearms to those unsuspecting childlike natives?
Skip both volumes and read Empire Building instead. Not for Rosie LlewellynJones the de rigueur finger-wagging reflex of ‘decolonial’ historians. Her brilliantly concise and suggestive book is a social and architectural history of the East India Company that begins in 1690, with Job Charnock laying the foundation for what became Calcutta, and concludes with the railways on the eve of the Revolt. Along the way she takes in the construction of not only hill stations, purpose-built to prevent Brits from succumbing to malaria, but also museums, hospitals, and libraries, thrown up to exude state power. It was a tricky business because architects kept dropping like flies. The Company’s joyless accountants proved a nuisance, too, blocking every ambitious proposal on some miserly pretext. Here, then, is a convincing portrait of the Raj, in all its mingy glory. ■
`1,299; 240 pages
A chapter of general observations is followed by one section each on stories, on colour reproductions of paintings, on poems and finally proverbs. The India-specific focus is what makes the collection unique. Despite copious anecdotes in Indian folk tales, the author tells us that cats have never been the subject of any traditional or historical texts.
Apicking up the robe, leaving her sleeping rather than disturb her”.
The section on paintings is especially interesting. Each painting or sketch on the right-hand page is accompanied on the left by an excellent descriptive text as well as a fragment showing an enlarged view of the cat or cats featured in the painting. The author tells us that artists of the Mughal and later periods, while copying a scene from western paintings, frequently inserted a cat into their interpretations. This is, in my view, a fascinating detail. It is impossible to know now, at this distance in time, whether these inclusions were a form of sly commentary from the local artists! Equally interesting is the fact that most of the depictions are stylised rather than naturalistic, so that the cats look like very tiny lions rather than domestic animals.
While greatly admiring this slender volume, I have one quibble: the printed reproductions on these pages make it very difficult to appreciate the intricacy and precision of the original paintings. ■ nother of my favourite reads this year was
Tree & Serpent: Early Buddhist Art in India
(Mapin). Edited by John Guy, the curator of the show at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, this 368page catalogue is a delight for the senses. It is not your typical flip-through with rushed glances at the images; it is almost encyclopaedic in its range. Each page is a treasure trove of information, and every image is worth a thousand words. What captivated me is the vast range of interpretations, from the anthropomorphic to the more pictorial portrayals of the Buddha. One intriguing revelation was that of a found in Pompeii. Apart from that, the essays by several scholars provide diverse perspectives. The cover image itself—of a stupa panel with Nagaraja Mucalinda protecting the Buddha—is compelling, layered with an abundance of metaphors.
Penguin Random House/ Non-fiction his is a book that one wishes never had to be written. Rushdie’s brave new memoir is a gripping account of surviving an attempt on his life 30 years after the fatwa was ordered against him. Speaking out for the first time and in unforgettable detail about the traumatic events of August 12, 2022, KNIFE is a powerful, deeply personal and ultimately uplifting meditation on life, loss, love, the power of art, finding the strength to keep going, and to stand up again. It releases on April 16, 2024.
TTHE GREAT FLAP OF 1942: How the British Raj Panicked Over a Japanese Non-Invasion
Penguin Random House/ Non-fiction
‘The Great Flap’
was an expression used by British bureaucrats to describe the state of panic between December 1941 and mid-1942, when India mistakenly believed that Japan was going to invade its borders. The book takes in its arc the attack on Malaya, the conquest of Singapore, the bombing and eventual occupation of Burma, and the entry into the Indian Ocean.
HarperCollins/Nonfiction
The story of a boy who would become one of the greatest conservationists of his generation. When his mother married and moved to Mumbai, Whitaker was transplanted from a conventional childhood in the US to what was for him the exciting world of India. At boarding school