In this era of republics and democracy or aspirations to democracy, it is quite appropriate that people whose interest in history has always been paramount walk back to things that have been and will not be again. Among the realities we will not anymore see in our times is the long queue of monarchs who once wielded authority that was considered next to that exercised by the heavenly powers.
Yes, a sense of history is important. And so is an understanding of it. In our era --- and we were born in the 1950s --- the stories of the fall of empires and kingdoms have shaped much of our worldview through inculcating in us the truth that with nations marching progressively toward popular rule, monarchies would gradually dwindle to irrelevance. Which is the way it should have been and indeed has been.
We recall the swift manner in which Egypt's King Farouk fell when General Naguib and Col Nasser staged a coup d'etat in 1952. Farouk led a life of sybaritic pleasure, one which was divorced from the people. In any case, royalty has historically remained at a distance from the masses. That is the lesson which has come down to us down the centuries.
In the twentieth century, there was the collapse of the Russian monarchy and the rise of Lenin and his fellow Bolsheviks. Though there were moves, desultory ones, by monarchists to have the old regime restored, nothing happened. That is again another truth about history: what goes or what falls cannot be brought back to life. But, of course there have been exceptions to this rule. Back in 1649, England's King Charles I was executed in the course of the Cromwellian revolution. And yet in 1660 his son restored the monarchy as Charles II.
Exceptions are, well, exceptions. Once a monarchy goes, as the Mughals went with the advent of British colonial rule in India, the cardinal lesson coming down to people is that it will not return. Bahadur Shah Zafar, the Mughal ruler who was also a poet and a patron of the arts, died in Rangoon and was buried there. Lest his body be retrieved from his grave by his loyalists, the British made sure that it was sprayed with acid so that nothing would remain of it. Once that was done, the emperor's grave was covered over with earth.
Coming back to the times in which we inhabit the globe, we cannot but recall the gruesome manner in which Ethiopia's Haile Selassie was overthrown and murdered by the military in 1974. Selassie, who had been the recipient of global admiration when he spoke passionately at the League of Nations against his country's occupation by Italy in 1936, suffocated to death when the soldiers pressed a pillow on his face. It was a tragic end to a ruler who was considered no less than a god by his people.
And then there was the Shah of Iran, an emperor with pretensions to dynasties of the past. He organised grand celebrations of his monarchy, dubbing them the 2,500th anniversary of Persian royalty, at Persepolis in 1971. Scores of dignitaries, among whom were royalty, presidents and prime ministers, turned up to celebrate faux history. The Shah himself placed a crown on his head before placing a similar headgear on his wife, the Empress Farah Diba.
History often being a tale of tragic irony, the Shah lost his throne to an Islamic revolution in 1979 and then was forced to look for a country that would give him refuge. Hounded by the spectre of all the repression he had exercised in his days in power in Tehran, he was finally given refuge in Cairo by Anwar Sadat. The fallen Shah succumbed to cancer a year later.
All glory is fleeting. Sometimes glory has a comical quality about it. Jean-Bedel Bokassa, a mediocre army officer who seized power in the Central African Republic in the 1960s, at a point thought he could do a Napoleon Bonaparte --- he was a diehard admirer of the French monarch --- by crowning himself emperor. He began to call himself Emperor Bokassa I and renamed the country the Central African Empire. A few years later a coup dislodged him from power, forcing him to flee the country.
The rise and fall of empires has underpinned much of history. In 1967, when a group of colonels carried out a coup in Greece, the future turned difficult for King Constantine, who soon made his way abroad. The king was never able to regain his throne since after the overthrow of the colonels' regime in 1974, Greece was transformed into a republic. In 1969, Col Muammar Gaddafi overthrew Libya's King Idris and inaugurated what would in time become an entrenched dictatorship until his own fall from power and death in 2011.
Prior to the end of the Second World War, Emperor Hirohito of Japan was looked upon as a god whose writ ran across every aspect of life in the country. Not until Japan's surrender in 1945 and American General Douglas MacArthur's thorough recasting of the Japanese political system was the emperor shorn of his divine qualities. Regarded as a war criminal, he was nevertheless permitted to continue on the throne but as a mere mortal. Today it is his grandson Naruhito who is Japan's constitutional monarch.
Royalty has borne the brunt of growing republicanism in such countries as Afghanistan, where King Zahir Shah was overthrown by his cousin Sardar Mohammad Daoud in 1973. With Afghanistan passing through a series of deadly upheavals, beginning with the assassination of President Daoud and his family in 1978 by the communists and leading all the way to the rise of the Mujahideen and then the Taliban, Zahir Shah at a point returned to Kabul as king. That period was not to last.
And in Cambodia, Prince Norodom Sihanouk played, in the course of his mercurial career, a number of roles --- as monarch, singer, movie actor. In the Khmer Rouge era, he was a nominal monarch confined to what was virtual house arrest. His career as prince was a chaotic series of events which kept the global focus on him. In the end, he was unable to make an impression on either his people or the world beyond Cambodia.
History is all. Studies of history are all. Look back at the French Revolution of 1789, a process which went on for a decade. It was the first sign of the winds of change that would blow against the palaces of kings, queens, emperors and empresses and in time would leave a world reshaped for all time.
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