Author Dalrymple urges Britain to set up ‘museum of colonialism’

AUTHOR Willian Dalrymple has urged the UK to acknowledge the “really terrible things that happened in our past” and set up a “museum of colonialism”.

Monuments of “war criminals” from Britain’s colonial past should be taken down and displayed at a public venue, like the National Museum of African American History and Culture in the US, the writer added.

Dalrymple said the British education system had, for long, been hiding gory chapters of imperial history.

“At the moment children in schools go from Henry VIII to Wilberforce and the impression they get is that the British Empire was always about liberating slaves and always about anti-racism,” he said. His comments came during a discussion at the recently concluded Jaipur Lit Fest held virtually, in association with the British Museum.

“The things the British did in India and elsewhere are simply not taught in the syllabus and that is a problem. When the British go out into the world, they don’t know what Indians know about the Raj or what the Irish know about the potato famine, they don’t know what the Australians know about the mass extinction of the Indigenous Tasmanians.…”

Referring to the pulling down of slave trader Edward Colston’s statue in Bristol, Dalrymple said he “certainly wouldn’t want to see most of the nation’s statues torn down”, but insisted that imperial heroes who were modern-day villains deserved to be in a museum.

“When we go to Germany, we do not expect to see Hitler or any of the Nazi war criminals or SS officers standing on plinths, and in the same way we have to weed out war criminals from our country,” Dalrymple pointed out.

“It’s not a matter of being woke or a matter of being fashionable or trendy but it’s being realistic about some of the really terrible things that happened in our past and teaching them to our children. If we put them in a museum of colonialism, this is an opportunity to teach, because we can set up a museum, which will do at the moment what the curriculum fails to do.”

The writer, who is mostly based in Delhi, said the UK should “face up as the Germans have done to the sins of the past and apologise for the things that need apologising for and then move on”.