English: History's greatest gift
Tuesday, 11 September 2007
William Dalrymple
TRAVEL a few miles north of Old Delhi, and you soon find yourself in a plain so empty and flat that a single bullock cart inching its way across the land appears as tall as a towering temple chariot. As the eye sweeps over the green and monsoon-marshy flatlands, there rises on one side of the horizon a vast marble image of a ruler, an Indian Ozymandias, more than 60 feet tall.
As you draw closer, you see that the image shows a king enthroned with orb and sceptre; around him stand a crescent of stone acolytes, an ossified court marooned in an Arthurian wasteland of monsoon swamp, mud and cattle-thorn. Creepers tangle through the folds in the robes; grass greens the Crown Imperial.
At first it is possible to mistake this vain and forgotten idol of worldly power for a displaced Egyptian pharaoh or a lost Roman Emperor. Only on closer examination does it become clear that it is none other than George V, the King Emperor, surrounded by his viceroys.
The statue used to stand at the Central roundabout of New Delhi, the climax of Lutyens' great ceremonial avenue once known as Kingsway, and now called Rajpath. Along with its attendant viceroys, it was hauled into retirement soon after independence and now stands forgotten and unloved, an unwanted reminder of a period few Indians look back at with any nostalgia.
Although the statue is only 70 years old, the world it came from now seems as distant as that of Rameses II. It is a perfect symbol of how far India, now widely regarded as a future superpower, has moved on from a period when it was patronised as a conquered imperial possession.
In 1984 when I first went to India to teach in a school in the Himalayan foothills on my gap year, Britain was in the grip of one of its periodic bouts of imperial nostalgia. The Raj was everywhere being repackaged as some sort of extended colonial soap opera - Upstairs, Downstairs writ large over the plains of India. The Jewel in the Crown was being shown on television, and the correspondence columns of the papers were full of complaints from old India hands about the alleged inaccuracies in Richard Attenborough's Gandhi. Publishers were churning out books on the buildings of empire and a biography of Mountbatten was topping the bestseller list. The Booker shortlist could be counted on to include at least two books whose plot revolved around the Raj: The Seige of Krishnapur, Heat and Dust, Staying On and Midnight's Children had all been winners in recent years.
Such was the enthusiasm at home for things imperial Indian, that I had naively assumed that India would be similarly obsessed with things imperial British. Nothing, of course, could be further from the truth. Instead Indira Gandhi could regularly be seen hectoring audiences on India's one state-controlled TV channel -- Doordashan -- about how exploitative and brutal the British had been; there was no hint at all that her father had had such an intimate relationship with the Raj that he had had an affair with the last viceroy's wife. Instead, the British were talked of rather as my schoolteachers had talked of the Nazis: as vicious, racist, bloodthirsty and ruthlessly ambitious and efficient empire builders. It was my first encounter with post-colonial rhetoric, and I remember being astonished by it all: were we really thought of like that? Surely not?
As I backpacked around India, I found that there was a special window in many train stations which offered cut price tickets to registered freedom fighters. For all that you could still find the old Indian colonel who moaned how the trains had never run on time since the British left, by and large it was clear that we British were more or less universally regarded as the old colonial enemy, the foe bravely vanquished by Mahatma Gandhi's non-violent guerrillas. People might have vaguely forgiven us, and I rarely encountered any direct hostility on my travels, but they had not forgotten. A casual remark about the Raj - especially one that might be perceived as nostalgic or uncritical about our rule in India - could easily lead to uncomfortable disagreements. I soon learned to steer the conversation away from the subject of the colonial period.
A few years later I returned to India in the early 1990s to work as a journalist and to begin work on a book on Delhi called City of Djinns. Living in a flat near the Sufi shrine of Nizamuddin, it seemed to me that attitudes had changed and relaxed somewhat from the days of Mrs G's fiery rhetoric. Among the Indians of my own generation who I befriended, the Raj was regarded as ancient history, an impossibly distant memory that never really impinged on their lives. Indeed they referred to it as I would refer to the Roman empire: the Romans were brutal, yes, but they had brought the odd benefit to our ancestors such as straight roads and villas with pretty mosaics. In the same way my friends were happy to acknowledge that the British had brought cricket and democracy and the rule of law, but they had no doubt that we came with the open intention of plundering the country and lining our pockets.
But it was not something that they thought much about - it was frankly too distant and irrelevant. Things had moved on. Moreover, it was no longer to the UK that the bright ones had their eyes and ambitions trained: it was the US. Margaret Thatcher had just put up the tuition fees for foreign students at British universities, and this settled the matter for most of my friends: though many of their fathers might have had gone to Oxbridge, now it was to Harvard and Yale that they were applying.
In 2004 I moved back to Delhi for a third stint in India. This time I came to write a history book, The Last Mughal, about the great anti-colonial uprising of 1857 and how this brought the Mughal dynasty to an end. With this perspective I became aware of another small shift in perceptions of the Raj. India, as everyone knows, is undergoing a big economic transformation. Economic futurologists all agree that China and India will at some stage in the 21st century come to dominate the global economy. India will overtake the US by roughly 2050, as measured in dollar terms. Measured by purchasing power parity, India is already on the verge of overtaking Japan to become the third-largest economy in the world. This has all had a revolutionary effect on Indian self-confidence.
In modern Delhi, an increasingly wealthy Punjabi middle class now live in an aspirational bubble of fast-rising shopping malls, espresso bars and multiplexes. On every side, rings of suburbs are springing up, full of call centres, software companies and fancy apartment blocks, all rapidly rising on land that only two years ago was billowing winter wheat. These new neighbourhoods, most of them still half-built and ringed with scaffolding, are invariably given unrealistically enticing names - Beverly Hills, Windsor Court, West End Heights - an indication, perhaps, of where their owners would prefer to be, and where, in time, they may eventually migrate.
This fast-emerging middle-class India is a country with its eyes firmly fixed on the coming century. Everywhere there is a profound hope that the country's rapidly rising international status will somehow compensate for a past often perceived - rightly or wrongly - as a long succession of invasions and defeats at the hands of foreign powers, of which the British were only the most recent.
At the same time as India is rising, those parts of the Islamic world without oil remain sunk in the economic third division. For many people in India, as in the west, Islam has come to be associated not with high civilisation, fine buildings and subtle mystical poetry but instead with a brutal and uncompromising form of terrorism. Judging from the blog responses to articles I write on Mughal and colonial history, a younger generation of Indians still looks on Britain as colonial exploiter, but it also believes that the Raj -- albeit accidentally and unwittingly -- brought one great gift: the English language.
This is perceived as having pulled India out of the orbit of Islamo-Persianate world of central Asia and the Middle East -- a world which would go into ever greater cultural and economic decline as the 19th century gave way to the 20th -- and propelled it instead into a western cultural universe. "If it wasn't for the British getting rid of the Mughals," wrote one blogger, in response to something I had written on the last Mughal, "India would now be a patchwork of third rate emirates like Abu Dhabi".
And 150 years ago, in the period that followed the final fall of the Mughals, this forcible turning away from the old cultural moorings and the reorientation of India towards the west caused heartbreak to the old north Indian Urdu and Persian-speaking elites. As Azad, the poet and critic, wrote: "The glory of the winners' ascendant fortune gives everything of theirs -- even their dress, their gait, their conversation -- a radiance that makes them desirable. And people do not merely adopt them, but they are proud to adopt them." Yet it was the depth of that reorientation and adoption, and the ease with which Indians can now cross the globe and work in either Britain or the US, that today has given the country's Anglicised elite such easy access to the jobs and opportunities of the western economy, and gives them such an advantage in so many fields over their only real rivals, the Chinese.
When I first arrived in India on that gap year trip 23 years ago, amid much that was very strange, I was constantly surprised to find in India much that was familiar. My Indian friends and contemporaries spoke English and had read the same books; they even shared quite a lot of British TV. Indeed to my amazement, I found in many ways I had more in common with my Indian contemporaries than those I met from France or Italy.
The same is all the more true today, but in reverse: Indians can travel halfway across the world and come to the very different world of London, and yet find much that is immediately familiar to them. As far as millions of young Indians are concerned, this is certainly the most important legacy of the colonial period: far more important than the railways, maybe even more important than the introduction of cricket. They do not look at the Raj with the slightest nostalgia; but they are well aware of the useful legacy it has left them, and know the advantages to which they can put it.
(William Dalrymple's latest book, The Last Mughal: the Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi 1857, recently won the Duff Cooper Prize for History)
Under syndication arrangement with FE
TRAVEL a few miles north of Old Delhi, and you soon find yourself in a plain so empty and flat that a single bullock cart inching its way across the land appears as tall as a towering temple chariot. As the eye sweeps over the green and monsoon-marshy flatlands, there rises on one side of the horizon a vast marble image of a ruler, an Indian Ozymandias, more than 60 feet tall.
As you draw closer, you see that the image shows a king enthroned with orb and sceptre; around him stand a crescent of stone acolytes, an ossified court marooned in an Arthurian wasteland of monsoon swamp, mud and cattle-thorn. Creepers tangle through the folds in the robes; grass greens the Crown Imperial.
At first it is possible to mistake this vain and forgotten idol of worldly power for a displaced Egyptian pharaoh or a lost Roman Emperor. Only on closer examination does it become clear that it is none other than George V, the King Emperor, surrounded by his viceroys.
The statue used to stand at the Central roundabout of New Delhi, the climax of Lutyens' great ceremonial avenue once known as Kingsway, and now called Rajpath. Along with its attendant viceroys, it was hauled into retirement soon after independence and now stands forgotten and unloved, an unwanted reminder of a period few Indians look back at with any nostalgia.
Although the statue is only 70 years old, the world it came from now seems as distant as that of Rameses II. It is a perfect symbol of how far India, now widely regarded as a future superpower, has moved on from a period when it was patronised as a conquered imperial possession.
In 1984 when I first went to India to teach in a school in the Himalayan foothills on my gap year, Britain was in the grip of one of its periodic bouts of imperial nostalgia. The Raj was everywhere being repackaged as some sort of extended colonial soap opera - Upstairs, Downstairs writ large over the plains of India. The Jewel in the Crown was being shown on television, and the correspondence columns of the papers were full of complaints from old India hands about the alleged inaccuracies in Richard Attenborough's Gandhi. Publishers were churning out books on the buildings of empire and a biography of Mountbatten was topping the bestseller list. The Booker shortlist could be counted on to include at least two books whose plot revolved around the Raj: The Seige of Krishnapur, Heat and Dust, Staying On and Midnight's Children had all been winners in recent years.
Such was the enthusiasm at home for things imperial Indian, that I had naively assumed that India would be similarly obsessed with things imperial British. Nothing, of course, could be further from the truth. Instead Indira Gandhi could regularly be seen hectoring audiences on India's one state-controlled TV channel -- Doordashan -- about how exploitative and brutal the British had been; there was no hint at all that her father had had such an intimate relationship with the Raj that he had had an affair with the last viceroy's wife. Instead, the British were talked of rather as my schoolteachers had talked of the Nazis: as vicious, racist, bloodthirsty and ruthlessly ambitious and efficient empire builders. It was my first encounter with post-colonial rhetoric, and I remember being astonished by it all: were we really thought of like that? Surely not?
As I backpacked around India, I found that there was a special window in many train stations which offered cut price tickets to registered freedom fighters. For all that you could still find the old Indian colonel who moaned how the trains had never run on time since the British left, by and large it was clear that we British were more or less universally regarded as the old colonial enemy, the foe bravely vanquished by Mahatma Gandhi's non-violent guerrillas. People might have vaguely forgiven us, and I rarely encountered any direct hostility on my travels, but they had not forgotten. A casual remark about the Raj - especially one that might be perceived as nostalgic or uncritical about our rule in India - could easily lead to uncomfortable disagreements. I soon learned to steer the conversation away from the subject of the colonial period.
A few years later I returned to India in the early 1990s to work as a journalist and to begin work on a book on Delhi called City of Djinns. Living in a flat near the Sufi shrine of Nizamuddin, it seemed to me that attitudes had changed and relaxed somewhat from the days of Mrs G's fiery rhetoric. Among the Indians of my own generation who I befriended, the Raj was regarded as ancient history, an impossibly distant memory that never really impinged on their lives. Indeed they referred to it as I would refer to the Roman empire: the Romans were brutal, yes, but they had brought the odd benefit to our ancestors such as straight roads and villas with pretty mosaics. In the same way my friends were happy to acknowledge that the British had brought cricket and democracy and the rule of law, but they had no doubt that we came with the open intention of plundering the country and lining our pockets.
But it was not something that they thought much about - it was frankly too distant and irrelevant. Things had moved on. Moreover, it was no longer to the UK that the bright ones had their eyes and ambitions trained: it was the US. Margaret Thatcher had just put up the tuition fees for foreign students at British universities, and this settled the matter for most of my friends: though many of their fathers might have had gone to Oxbridge, now it was to Harvard and Yale that they were applying.
In 2004 I moved back to Delhi for a third stint in India. This time I came to write a history book, The Last Mughal, about the great anti-colonial uprising of 1857 and how this brought the Mughal dynasty to an end. With this perspective I became aware of another small shift in perceptions of the Raj. India, as everyone knows, is undergoing a big economic transformation. Economic futurologists all agree that China and India will at some stage in the 21st century come to dominate the global economy. India will overtake the US by roughly 2050, as measured in dollar terms. Measured by purchasing power parity, India is already on the verge of overtaking Japan to become the third-largest economy in the world. This has all had a revolutionary effect on Indian self-confidence.
In modern Delhi, an increasingly wealthy Punjabi middle class now live in an aspirational bubble of fast-rising shopping malls, espresso bars and multiplexes. On every side, rings of suburbs are springing up, full of call centres, software companies and fancy apartment blocks, all rapidly rising on land that only two years ago was billowing winter wheat. These new neighbourhoods, most of them still half-built and ringed with scaffolding, are invariably given unrealistically enticing names - Beverly Hills, Windsor Court, West End Heights - an indication, perhaps, of where their owners would prefer to be, and where, in time, they may eventually migrate.
This fast-emerging middle-class India is a country with its eyes firmly fixed on the coming century. Everywhere there is a profound hope that the country's rapidly rising international status will somehow compensate for a past often perceived - rightly or wrongly - as a long succession of invasions and defeats at the hands of foreign powers, of which the British were only the most recent.
At the same time as India is rising, those parts of the Islamic world without oil remain sunk in the economic third division. For many people in India, as in the west, Islam has come to be associated not with high civilisation, fine buildings and subtle mystical poetry but instead with a brutal and uncompromising form of terrorism. Judging from the blog responses to articles I write on Mughal and colonial history, a younger generation of Indians still looks on Britain as colonial exploiter, but it also believes that the Raj -- albeit accidentally and unwittingly -- brought one great gift: the English language.
This is perceived as having pulled India out of the orbit of Islamo-Persianate world of central Asia and the Middle East -- a world which would go into ever greater cultural and economic decline as the 19th century gave way to the 20th -- and propelled it instead into a western cultural universe. "If it wasn't for the British getting rid of the Mughals," wrote one blogger, in response to something I had written on the last Mughal, "India would now be a patchwork of third rate emirates like Abu Dhabi".
And 150 years ago, in the period that followed the final fall of the Mughals, this forcible turning away from the old cultural moorings and the reorientation of India towards the west caused heartbreak to the old north Indian Urdu and Persian-speaking elites. As Azad, the poet and critic, wrote: "The glory of the winners' ascendant fortune gives everything of theirs -- even their dress, their gait, their conversation -- a radiance that makes them desirable. And people do not merely adopt them, but they are proud to adopt them." Yet it was the depth of that reorientation and adoption, and the ease with which Indians can now cross the globe and work in either Britain or the US, that today has given the country's Anglicised elite such easy access to the jobs and opportunities of the western economy, and gives them such an advantage in so many fields over their only real rivals, the Chinese.
When I first arrived in India on that gap year trip 23 years ago, amid much that was very strange, I was constantly surprised to find in India much that was familiar. My Indian friends and contemporaries spoke English and had read the same books; they even shared quite a lot of British TV. Indeed to my amazement, I found in many ways I had more in common with my Indian contemporaries than those I met from France or Italy.
The same is all the more true today, but in reverse: Indians can travel halfway across the world and come to the very different world of London, and yet find much that is immediately familiar to them. As far as millions of young Indians are concerned, this is certainly the most important legacy of the colonial period: far more important than the railways, maybe even more important than the introduction of cricket. They do not look at the Raj with the slightest nostalgia; but they are well aware of the useful legacy it has left them, and know the advantages to which they can put it.
(William Dalrymple's latest book, The Last Mughal: the Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi 1857, recently won the Duff Cooper Prize for History)
Under syndication arrangement with FE