The king’s burden

The 70-year reign of Queen Elizabeth II culminated with her transition at her beloved abode, the Balmoral Castle in the Scottish Highlands. Queen Elizabeth’s death was mourned by many but also brought forth historical biases, bitterness and injustices associated with the British monarchy. It is an inviolable fact that British monarchs and royals actively participated, facilitated and profited from the slave trade and colonization for centuries.

In ‘Late Victorian Holocausts’, historian Mike Davis narrates how famines during the British rule find no place in the laudatory screeds of the British Empire. Davis asserts that taxes and changes in the Subcontinent’s revenue system impacted farmers adversely and was a major factor leading to famines. There were 31 famines in 120 years of British rule compared with 17 in the 2,000 years preceding it. According to Davis, over 29 million people perished due to Britain’s policies.

These policies were devised by the likes of British economist John Maynard Keynes, an avowed imperialist. In 1919, he authored ‘The Economic Consequences of Peace’; a scathing critique of the Versailles Peace Treaty. Keynes, along with Harry Dexter White, is also known as the intellectual father of the IMF and World Bank, the excruciating neo-colonial tools of today.

In 1943, the Keynesian policy had Churchill divert India’s food stocks to Europe. In what gained notoriety as the Bengal Famine, British estimates put the resulting deaths at three million, Indian estimates say seven million perished. The surviving millions faced severe malnutrition and impoverishment. It remains one of the most horrific atrocities of British rule.

Bards of the Empire eulogize the imparting of civility and bettering lives in the Subcontinent; a land that boasted sophisticated civilizations thousands of years ago. Renowned economist Utsa Patnaik’s research published by Columbia University Press draws on two centuries of detailed data. It reveals that from 1765 to 1938 the “bestowing and benevolent” colonists extracted a mind-boggling 45 trillion dollars from the Subcontinent. This was when the average annual salary in England was around 36 pounds.

In the 18th century, when Britain began its putsch in the Subcontinent, the latter contributed a quarter of the world’s GDP. When the British finally departed in 1947, this lay decimated to less than 1 per cent. Belgian economist Paul Bairoch’s detailed study of world economy in his book ‘Economics and World History: Myths and Paradoxes’ claims that the Subcontinent was the largest global economy for 1700 of the past 2000 years. The missing 300 years being those under British rule. This has also been substantiated by a study initiated by the Paris based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

In ‘Crimes against India’, Stephen Knapp writes that in 1832 the then governor general William Bentinck initiated a plan to totally dismantle the Taj Mahal and ship it to Britain. Word from London said that there had been scant response to the envisaged auction of the marble pieces. This is how the fabled monument survived its fragmented journey to the capital city of the rapacious empire. London’s Victoria and Albert Museum alone holds over 40,000 art items from the Subcontinent. This led to TV show host John Oliver saying that “all our greatest possessions are stolen” adding that “the entire British Museum is basically an active crime scene”.

As the British initiated their scramble back home, Queen Victoria’s great grandson Lord Mountbatten tasked Cyril Radcliffe to draw the partition line. The dice were totally loaded against Pakistan due to the known Mountbatten, Edwina, Nehru friendship. The mindset of the empire can be well gauged from the fact that Radcliffe, a lawyer who had never been to India and was absolutely clueless about its geography, was given five weeks to complete the onerous task.

In a famous 1976 interview with veteran Indian journalist Kuldip Nayar in London, Radcliffe called his effort a “shoddy affair” that could have been handled better had he been given “two to three years”. He told Nayar “I nearly gave you (India) Lahore but then I realized that Pakistan would not have any large city as I had already earmarked Calcutta for India”. Among others, he gave Muslim majority Gurdaspur, a direct conduit to Jammu and Kashmir, to India. In 1948, this enabled India to occupy Kashmir which it brutalizes to this day.

The partition of Punjab and Bengal too was criminally biased. In a Daily Telegraph article of February 24, 1992 Christopher Beaumont, secretary of the Radcliffe Commission, confirmed that the frontiers had been secretly redrawn to favor India. The “shoddy affair” proved to be a harrowing tragedy. Over 90,000 women were abducted, almost two million people perished and over 15 million were displaced. The scars are carried by generations; the resulting acrimony between Pakistan and India threatens the globe.

The year 1992 saw the end of the marriages of three of the late Queen’s four children, including that of the present king and Lady Diana. A fire at Windsor Castle also caused damage to the tune of 60 million pounds. Queen Elizabeth famously dubbed the year as her “annus horribilis”, Latin for ‘a horrible year’. If these setbacks made the late Queen’s year horrible, one can well imagine the sentiments of the generations left behind of the millions who suffered and perished at the hands of the British Empire.

Rudyard Kipling extolled the empire to civilize the half devil half child savages terming it the white man’s burden. As the crown is placed on King Charles’s head, the burden of history shall be far heavier and telling than the Kohinoor that adorns the royal crown; this shall be the King’s burden.

Known to have strong views on interfaith dialogue and other important issues, King Charles III can carve a name for himself in history by accepting and apologizing for the wrongs perpetrated on the colonized subjects of the British Crown. This cannot undo the past but shall surely be the closure many seek for the terrible fate suffered by millions. It shall also be the legacy that shall outlive, endure and outshine what are fallaciously termed the glories of the British Empire, once of the perpetual sunshine.

The writer is a freelance contributor. He can be reached at miradnanaziz@gmail.com