Anas’s Blog

This article demonstrates why it’s important we keep making the connections with what came before — and why divide and conquer is still the favourite tool of the coloniser.

From The Sunday Herald:

Brown needs to ’stop glorifying the Empire’
By Senay Boztas

LEADING HISTORIANS have criticised Gordon Brown for “glorification” of the British Empire, and claim the government repeated in Iraq mistakes made with India.

At a lecture in Edinburgh tonight, the award-winning Scottish author William Dalrymple will caution that exulting the old empire is a thin veil for justifying “contemporary imperial projects such as Iraq and Afghanistan”.

Meanwhile, Maria Misra, lecturer in modern history at Oxford University and a speaker at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, criticised Brown for refusing to apologise for the British Empire when empires “by definition often damage societies”.

…

Brown said, on a trip to Africa in 2005, that the “days of Britain having to apologise for its colonial history are over”. He explained: “We should celebrate much of our past rather than apologise for it. And we should talk, and rightly so, about British values that are enduring, because they stand for some of the greatest ideas in history: tolerance, liberty, civic duty, that grew in Britain and influenced the rest of the world. Our strong traditions of fair play, of openness, of internationalism, these are great British values.”

However, some historians believe that this celebratory attitude might gloss over particular ongoing problems of former colonies, when governments could learn from past mistakes.

Misra - whose modern history of India, Vishnu’s Crowded Temple, will be published in August - said she thought Brown’s rhetoric was worrying. “I am surprised to have a revival of imperial ideas coming from Brown as he is an intelligent person and a historian,” she said. “I think it is partly because Brown wants to unify Britain that he focuses on the empire. The problem with that is where it leaves people like me, the descendants of black immigrants. They are going to be left thinking: were we only civilized because these helpful Scots went out and took us in hand?”

She said that there might be other motives for praising empires. “Britain’s international reputation has been damaged by being involved in the Iraq imbroglio, so Britain might have a reason for some soft-pedalling on the imperial theme.”

Her book suggests that the British Empire increased division, religious tension and oppression rather than creating stable societies and democracies.

“Empires almost by definition - not because they are evil or badly intended - often damage societies quite badly. They team up with what they think of as the dominant groups when they take over, such as religious leaders and people with a lot of wealth. Rather than trying to spread the benefits of development and education, they concentrate on governing through these inter- mediaries - developing ideas of cultural and ethnic difference which justified the rule.”

Misra said the British Empire helped establish sharia law and the caste system. “An odd combination of British and Islamic scholarship developed a hardened idea of sharia law. There is no such thing as a single set of Muslim laws in 1808, but there sure is in 1930 because it has been propagated by a colonial estate desperate to understand a state over which it has quite thin powers.

“The same thing happens with the idea of the caste system - it doesn’t have anything like what we think of as the rigid system, from the brahmin to the untouchables. If it exists at all, it is in a small part of India and probably disappearing.”

The lessons were there to be learned for Iraq, she said. “The book is trying to get people to think about the complexity of colonial legacies and to be less susceptible to what seem like easy solutions.

“What has happened in Iraq is a kind of capsulised version and much worse, than what happened in India. One can see Iraq heading towards partition, just as India was in 1947, because the leading groups of Muslim and Hindu society had begun to feel they couldn’t live with each other. It wasn’t necessarily going to have to be that way, but empires work to exacerbate those feelings of difference.”

William Dalrymple, who this year published the award-winning The Last Mughal, said that the Tudors going to India were like Poles coming to Britain today - it was wealthy, rich, self-confident and in the midst of an artistic renaissance. But, he said, the Moghal empire was destroyed by the British, in a period that proves the negative effects of imperialism.

“I think from our contemporary perspective, it is clearly wrong for one country to impose its will on another,” he said. “The great danger when people glorify empire is that it provides legitimacy to contemporary imperial projects such as Iraq and Afghanistan.”

…

A spokeswoman for 10 Downing Street said that Brown’s position on the British Empire remains the same as the comments he made, in their proper context, in 2005, and in a subsequent interview with The Voice.

Writer Kurt Vonnegut dies at 84

Another great man passes on…I came to Vonnegut late on, but when I did discover Slaughterhouse 5 what a fucking revelation!

Yes, I’ve decided to write about it here, because I think it’s raised a number of extremely interesting issues and because it gives us some measure of where we’re at in terms of multiculturalism and race relations in this country: the signs are good, the public have shown they cannot tolerate this kind of racist bullying — at least when it is in full public view. For me the most interstesing aspect of the whole furore has been the level of hysteria and almost visceral anger within the Asian community.

The thing is that the seemingly inordinate response amongst many young Brits of Asian origin to the whole Shilpa Shetty/CBB racism row becomes far more understandable when you realise the extent to which the events in the program have brought back recollections of past insecurities and instances of racist bullying.

In contemporary Britain we seem to have reached a point where young Asians as a whole feel much more confident about identifying themselves as both Asian and British, without having to compromise on their Asian identities in order to better “fit in” – something that was undeniably not the case in the recent past. There’s been a sea change in the last few years: Asian music, fashion, cinema, and culture in general has started to become fashionable and therefore to gain more recognition within the wider mainstream — which I suppose might be perceived as a sort of belated vindication and cultural validation by many Asians given the intolerant attitudes of just a few years ago.

Indeed there was a time when a sizeable percentage of the wider British community resented the presence of Asians in this country, and weren’t afraid to manifest their hostility openly and overtly through racism, poisonous name calling and acts of discrimination. In that kind of antagonistic climate, at a time when the sense that many Asians now have of a shared-dual identity that encompasses two cultures was still in the process of being forged, it was obviously much harder to visibly assert those things that made you different within the wider cultural context — especially when that difference was constantly being used as the basis for racial abuse. The reaction of many first generation immigrants was just to keep their heads down and react passively to the abuse they received: they probably felt they had more to lose than the generations to come would. Understandably though this passivity fuelled a sense of resentment amongst the second and third generations, at what was often seen as a subservient and deferential attitude.

At the same time in playgrounds across the land, differences of skin colour, accent, general appearance and cultural background of young Asian kids were being incessantly exploited and set upon by schoolyard bullies — major visible differences were and probably still are perceived as points of vulnerability that bullies use as opportunities to humiliate their victims — something which obviously affected the Asian sense of identity in this country, especially when we were told to “go home”. In this context “Paki” also became a particularly vicious though common term of abuse. Used to signify backwardness and the supposedly uncivilised and primitive nature of life on the subcontinent, it was also often a prelude to threats or actual physical violence, which is why a lot of Asians wince when they hear it.

Predictably, many second and third generation kids themselves started to poke fun at some of the newly arrived immigrants from the sub-continent, at their accents, clothing, etc.

To put a personal slant on this, I remember being the only brown kid in my primary school in the 1980s, and, although I wasn’t physically bullied — though there was racist taunting — I was left out of every group of kids and purposefully not included because of the colour of my skin. I don’t have very happy memories of that time, and feel extremely ashamed at all the attempts I tried to make to ingratiate myself with others in the face of all their resistance. My mum told me later that many of the parents of the kids in the small town where I went to school resented the fact that my dad owned a shop in that town. God knows the kinds of things they were telling their children about our family.

At secondary school things were different, the school I went to was near the centre of Glasgow for a start — and not located in a godforsaken forlorn small town that had been rendered completely desolate by the loss of the Clyde shipping industry like my Primary school was — and so there were a lot of Pakistani/Indian kids attending. But I remember one instance that has stuck with me from those days. There had been a TV program on the night before called Karachi Cops, and I recall one of the white kids in my year expressing his amazement at the fact that people in Pakistan lived in cities with apartment blocks; whereas he’d thought they’d all be living in mud huts. (Of course I discovered about the Indus Valley civilisation and Harrapa a few years later, which would have meant that while all of Scotland was living in caves and wearing Ox-skins and possibly getting raped by marauding Vikings, there were actual cities with irrigation and many of the accoutrements that we associate with civilisation in what is now Pakistan).

So now here we are, it’s 2007, and this major Bollywood star Shilpa Shetty – who I’d never heard of but then I only know of Amitabh, Shah Rukh and Aishwarya to look at — arrives in Britain to take part in a reality TV show, moreover one that specialises in making capital out of its participants humiliating themselves and in using psychological manipulation as a catalyst to provoke ratings boosting conflict – now, that should have raised a flag right there. Shetty is impossibly glamorous, indeed possessed of an amazing beauty, has a black belt in karate, and is able to speak 6 languages, so by rights she shouldn’t be on this show alongside the usual array of no-talent, non-entities, wannabes and second cousins to wannabes, that populate these so called reality shows.

But she is on the show, and since it is (for the UK) fairly high profile, she becomes, potentially, a symbol of great pride for many young British Asians, representing as she does the prestige and glamour of Indian and South Asian culture and exemplifying an ideal of Indian beauty and grace. So what happens? This great Indian star is subject to a program of bullying by three of her fellow housemates — and to accentuate this great humiliation, these three happen to indeed be the customary reality TV shower. One of them, the ring leader, is incredibly ugly, porcine in her appearance, comes from a resolutely deprived background and a broken home (something which many commentators are fond of flagging up) and is almost absurdly thick. Like the other three she has no talent to speak of whatever and her fame seems to derive from her canny ability to win the public’s favour and sympathy.

Shetty, whose English is impeccable, has her accent made fun of by people whose command of the English language verges on the pitiful, she’s called a dog, and her “Indian” habits are constantly the subject of mockery as her tormentors huddle up into groups and whisper things about her and generally exclude her.

Now obviously the associations for a lot of young Asians watching that are going to be very painful: once again certain aspects of Asian culture are being used as points of vulnerability. It almost doesn’t matter if Shetty herself feels the abuse she’s receiving is racist or not, to many Asians who will be referencing their previous (and in some cases continuing) experiences when trying to relate to the situation it seems unmistakeably so.

I posted this little rant earlier this year on the excellent media-underground site’s forums, but as Allen is featuring rather heavily in all of the end of year Music polls I thought I’d repost it here (wiv some minor adjustments):

At the moment, in the UK, the latest and hottest young talent to be hyped up to high heaven is 20-year old chanteuse Lily Allen. Lauded by everyone from music journalists to middle-aged, middle class, cultural commentators writing for the broadsheets, the wayward (she’s especially forthcoming about her various cred-boosting drug exploits and likes to boast about having been expelled or suspended from school on several occasions), though not too wayward, sprog of loutish Welsh, England supporting, thespian and professional wanker, Keith Allen, is currently celebrating her second week at number one with a rather lovely little song called Smile. Having established her fan base through myspace (credit where it’s due she was one of the first to really exploit myspace in this way) Allen couldn’t be more sickeningly relevant, more contemporary, and so she’s found herself riding the crest of the zeitgeist just as The Streets and more recently the Arctic Monkeys have done.

In her publicity she likes to come across as smugly aloof, with the affected attitude of bemused detachment that’s so typical of self-absorbed teenagers nowadays. That is not entirely unsurprising: I mean it usually takes a few more years before the childhood conviction that the universe revolves around you and you alone begins to lose some of its grip and, of course for many people it never does. But amidst the predictable bombardment of Lily Allen hype and publicity from media sources eager to profit from Allen’s ascendancy, one thing that did genuinely shock and offend me was the promotional video she starred in for Smile.
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