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BOOKS
Dressing Up The Raj
Redeeming the idea of Empire from postcolonial revisionism
By Swapan Dasgupta
The problem with
collective memory is its built-in obsolescence. Today's generation, accustomed
to observing August 15 and January 26 as moments of national resolve,
will scarcely remember that for some five decades before 1947, the important
day in the calendar was May 24. It was the birthday of Queen Victoria,
the last Empress of India, a day celebrated in Bombay, Brisbane and Bula-wayo-and
large chunks of the world map that were marked red-as Empire Day.
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ORNAMENT-ALISM: HOW THE BRITISH SAW THEIR EMPIRE
By David Cannadine
Allen Lane/ Penguin
Price: £16.99
Pages: 264
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Unlike the Mughal empire which is at the centre
of contemporary political symbolism, it is thoroughly unfashionable to
speak about the British Empire with fondness. Although there is a vibrant
global industry that has emerged from Raj nostalgia, the Empire itself
has become the subject of a new demonology, not least in Britain itself.
It is painted as exploitative, rapacious, racist and offensive to all
civilised mores.
Like many things in history, this cruel evaluation
is on hindsight. Contemporary British accounts speak of the Empire with
touching fondness, as the personification of grandeur, style and gracious
living. Till the mid-1920s at least, that view was echoed by the colonial
elite and middle classes who faithfully replicated an Empire style. It
is these facets of imperial existence that David Cannadine has rescued
from the clutches of post-colonial revisionism.
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Kumar Shri Ranjitsinhji, 1897
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Taking off from former Australian prime minister
Sir Robert Menezies' candid confession, "Perhaps we are snobs and
love a hierarchical society", Cannadine paints the British Empire
as a bewildering exercise in stra-tification that gave a sense of contrived
homogeneity to the far-flung possessions. Its power structure, he claims,
was dictated, not merely on the strength of race, but on class and splendour.
The Empire builders sought to recreate a rural arcadia in the colonies
to compensate for the gradual loss of this world at home. They complimented
it with a bewildering-and amusing-array of honours and titles. "Dressing
up," Cannadine has said in a recent interview, "is what the
Empire was all about."
Implicit in the portrayal of "imperialism
as ornamentalism" is an attack on writers like Edward Said who project
the romanticised "Orientalism" of the old colonial hands as
the creation and perpetuation of racial stereotypes. Not so, says Cannadine.
"In social terms, the British colonies of settlement were about the
export of hierarchy; India, by contrast, was much more about the analogues
of hierarchy."
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EXCERPT
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In the hands of such prestige-conscious viceroys as Lords Willingdon
and Linlithgow, New Delhi was the setting for the grandest living
on earth, with more bowing and curtsying, more precedence and protocol,
than anywhere else in the empire, London included. At its peak in
the 1930s Viceroy's House employed a staff of six thousand servants,
and they were as carefully graded and ranked below stairs as the
officialdom and the princes of the Raj were above ... The future
King Edward VIII once remarked that he had never known what authentic
regal pomp really meant until he had stayed with Lord Lloyd. And
Lloyd was not the Viceroy but merely the Governor of Bombay.
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This was particularly so after the 1857 uprising
when the reformist and missionary impulses of imperialism were discarded
in favour of collaboration and preservation of indigenous institutions.
Thus, the British upper classes saw the native princes and big landowners
as their own counterparts. Like Ranjitsinhji (the "Jam Sahib")
they were people-like-us with free access to the country houses and gentleman's
clubs.
What Cannadine doesn't elaborate is that class
solidarity was limited in scope. Whereas a Gujarati prince or a Nigerian
chief may have added a cosmopolitan touch to Victorian and Edwardian social
life in London, racial segregation was the unflinching norm in the colonies.
The Pegu Club in Rangoon and the Bengal Club in Calcutta followed a strict
"Europeans only" policy. Lower down the social ladder, apartheid
was accompanied with a crass racism that manifested itself during the
Ilbert Bill agitation.
There was an idea of Empire that a tiny handful
like Lord Curzon and T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia) were wedded to. That envisaged
a confederation of aristocrats bound by spectacle and allegiance to the
British monarch. Ornamentalism fitted into that scheme. It was a good
idea but not all of those who ran the Empire shared it.
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