Inglorious Empire

Guest post by Shashi Tharoor

Hola Globaljigsaw community,

As an Indian based in Europe, I’m often struck by the region’s continued discombobulation when it comes to the inglorious history of colonialism. I lived in Brussels, the capital of Belgium, for three years from 2009. It was here that the willed politics of forgetting that encapsulates the European attitude towards colonialism and its effects, first began to exercise me.

I’d lived a short walk away from the city’s Cinquantenaire park, where on gently warm summer days crowds had thronged the generous green sprawl, as the smell of vanilla wafted up from waffle vans. But a brutal history underlay these bucolic scenes. The park was built in the late nineteenth century by King Leopold II, with the proceeds from a horrific slave state that he’d established in the Congo.

 For almost 25 years the Congo, an area that was almost 80 times the size of Belgium, was a private estate of the King, before being taken over by the Belgian government in 1908. During this time, and for several years afterwards, forced slave labour in the Congo was used to extract rubber to feed Leopold’s coffers. In his chilling book, King Leopold’s Ghost, American historian Adam Hochschild, estimated a death toll of up to 10 million people in the Congo for the period between 1880 and 1920.

The economics behind the atrocities in the Congo had to do with J. B. Dunlop’s 1887 invention of inflatable rubber bicycle tubes which, coupled with the growing popularity of the automobile, dramatically increased the global demand for rubber. To monopolize the resources of the entire Congo Free State, Leopold issued three decrees in 1891 and 1892 that effectively reduced the native population to serfs.

Collectively, these ordinances forced the natives to deliver all ivory and rubber, harvested or found, to state officers. Male rubber tappers and porters were literally worked to death. Leopold's agents held the wives and children of these men hostage until they returned with their rubber quota. Those who refused or failed to supply enough rubber often had their villages burned down, children murdered, and their hands cut off.

Hochschild is one of the few western historians who directly compares the devastation wrought by colonialism to that of fascism and communism, the two great obsessions of Europe. He says that while the deaths in the Congo might not have constituted a genocide, in that their primary aim was not to eliminate a group of people, they were certainly genocidal in proportion.

 Yet nowhere were even traces of this barbaric story to be found in Cinquantenaire. Instead, a recently renovated monument gleamed in the sun. This “monument to the Congo,” showed off images of a Belgian soldier sacrificing his life in the “defence of the Congo and for the greater glory of Belgium.” Elsewhere, another soldier was shown heroically staving off an Arab slave dealer. The scene was topped off by one of a graceful white lady, symbolizing Belgium, receiving innocent black children in her munificent embrace.

Me in front of the Monument to the Congo in Park Cinquantenaire. 2016. Photo credit: Ishaan Arias

At the centre of the monument, a message in Leopold II’s words were carved out:

     J’ai entrepris l’oeuvre du Congo dans l’interet de la civilisation et pour le bien de la Belgique.

  Or

I undertook the work of the Congo in the interest of civilization and for the good of Belgium.

Across Europe, on the rare occasion that colonialism is addressed in museums or other public spaces, invariably the gist of the message is that it was a product of its time and therefore cannot be judged by modern day standards.

Why is the same never said of Nazism, or Stalin’s Russia?  Hochschild argues powerfully that in Europe, colonialism has either been actively “forgotten” or remembered as a largely benign phenomenon whose unfortunate collateral damage is explained by mentalities that must be understood in their context.  The reason Communism and Fascism have been singled out as the only genocides worth writing about is because their victims were mostly European.

In Berlin, a city awash with memorials to the terrors of the Third Reich, there are no museums to the tens of thousands of Hereros that were slaughtered in Namibia from 1904 on, by the troops of Kaiser Wilhelm II. In Paris and Lisbon there are no reminders of the rubber terror, forced labour systems for extracting rubber similar to those in Leopold’s Congo, that slashed in half the populations of French and Portuguese Africa.

Today, I bring you a guest post by writer and politician Shashi Tharoor, whose book Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India, lays out in bald detail the enormous (and usually unacknowledged) harm done to the subcontinent by the colonial experience.

From the book’s blurb:

“British imperialism justified itself as enlightened despotism for the benefit of the governed, but Shashi Tharoor takes on and demolishes this position, demonstrating how every supposed imperial ‘gift’ – from the railways to the rule of law – was designed in Britain’s interests alone. He goes on to show how Britain’s Industrial Revolution was founded on India’s deindustrialisation, and the destruction of its textile industry.”

In today’s guest post, Tharoor argues for a museum to colonialism, something not just lacking in the U.K, but even in India – where this lacuna is particularly egregious. Colonial historical amnesia is insidious because it implicates the colonized in the “forgetting:” as much as the colonizer.

Let me know what you think.

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Remembering Colonialism

by Shashi Tharoor

A few years ago, I wrote to the Government of India to propose that one of India’s most renowned heritage buildings, the Victoria Memorial in Kolkata, be converted into a museum that displays the truth of the British Raj – a museum, in other words, to colonial atrocities.

This famous monument, built between 1906 and 1921, stands testimony to the glorification of the British Raj in India. It is time, I argued, that it be converted to serve as a reminder of what was done to India by the British, who conquered one of the richest countries in the world (27% of global GDP in 1700) and reduced it, over two centuries of loot and exploitation, to one of the poorest, most diseased and illiterate countries on earth, by the time they left in 1947.

It is curious that there is, neither in India nor in Britain, any museum to the colonial experience. London is dotted with museums that reflect its imperial conquests, from the Imperial War Museum to the India collections at the Victoria and Albert Museum and the British Museum itself. But none says anything about the colonial experience itself, the destruction of India’s textile industry and the depopulation of the great weaving centres of Bengal, the systematic collapse of shipbuilding, or the extinction of India’s fabled “wootz”steel.

Nor is there any memorial to the massacres of the Raj, from Delhi in 1858 to Amritsar in 1919, the deaths of 35 million Indians in totally unnecessary famines caused by British policy, or the “divide and rule” policy that culminated in the horrors of Partition in 1947 when the British made their shambolic and tragic Brexit from the subcontinent. The lack of such a museum is striking.

It is equally striking that the only museum to the British presence in India was one that was, in fact, built to commemorate and celebrate the British Empire. Its progenitor, the then Viceroy, Lord Curzon, had declared the need for, “a building, stately, spacious, monumental and grand, to which every newcomer in Calcutta will turn, to which all the resident population, European and Native, will flock, where all classes will learn the lessons of history, and see revived before their eyes the marvels of the past.”

And of course, as with everything else the British built in India, from the Railways to the Viceregal Palace (now, as Rashtrapati Bhavan, the residence of the President of India) the Indians paid for it. The “princes and people of India”, the official website of the Victoria Memorial explains, “responded generously to Curzon’s appeal for funds”, and the total cost of construction of the monument, amounting to one crore and five lakhs of rupees in 1906 (then about ten million pounds sterling), was entirely derived from their “voluntary” subscriptions. Indians paid for their own oppression too in those days, and even for the conquest of far-off peoples. (Indians even largely financed the British participation in the First World War.)

So, isn’t it time Indians finally got their money’s worth? I can think of no better use it can be put to than to take Curzon’s declared purpose and reverse its intent – to make the monument a place where “all classes will learn the lessons of history”, but rather than the, “marvels of the past”, it should depict the horrors of the past. The Victoria Memorial should be converted into a national museum to British colonialism – its exactions and cruelties, its loot and expropriation, its atrocities and racism.

Image: Victoria Memorial in Calcutta

In Moscow, there are two state-sponsored national memorials to Stalin’s millions of victims, including a Gulag Museum. There was none in Washington to the horrors of slavery, but that was finally remedied -- and none in London to the cruelties of colonialism, but that remains unaddressed.

The British basked in the Indian sun and yearned for their cold and fog-ridden homeland; they sent the money they had taken off the perspiring brow of the Indian worker to England; and whatever little they did for India, they ensured India paid for it in excess. And at the end of it all, they went home to enjoy their retirements in damp little cottages with Indian names, their alien rest cushioned by generous pensions supplied by Indian taxpayers.

This is all now forgotten, and it must be remembered. The need for a place to house permanent exhibits about what the British did to India is compelling. If it can’t be in London, it can’t not be in India. An enduring reminder is required, both for Indian schoolchildren to educate themselves and for British tourists to visit for their own enlightenment. Historical amnesia is convenient to the British – till five years ago, you could do your “A” levels in history in Britain and not learn a word about colonial history. It’s time this void was filled.

Not to memorialise your colonial past is to imply that your economy is more important than your history, your land more important than your people. As I say to young Indians: if you don’t know where you have come from, how will you appreciate where you are going?

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Ja mata ne,

Pallavi