With the #AmritsarMassacre centenary looming, is it time we teach students the reality of Empire?
April 2019 will mark the centenary of an act of alarming butchery and colonial superciliousness as British troops (including Gurkhas and Sikhs) carefully and with deliberate precision mowed down thousands of Indians (Muslim, Hindu and Sikh) within the walls of the Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar, Punjab, India. They were apparently there to quell a rebellion, even though the space was packed full of families, merchants, traders, women, children and a collection of protestors armed with nothing more than slogans, poetry and speeches.
It was the nadir of the Raj, of the ostensible virtuosity of Empire and it, along with the critical mass of pervasive violence that underpinned lessons about cricket, double entry book keeping and the railways and trains marked a turning point in Indian nationalism. Unfortunately, the history of Britain’s ascension and decline and the global implications of Empire that are still very relevant today, are not really taught at all in schools in the way they arguably should be.
At the present time-and echoed through past decades- there is not much differentiation between the facts that are actually considered, the events, and the happenings are almost same. The difference comes in when some of the perceptions of the events enter the topic; most of the Indian texts are designed to produce the nationalist feel, support for Gandhian movements and highlight the leaderships that got India through the process. The British version is a more formal in the sense that the facts are presented straight without additional language to foster any sorts of emotion. But Empire is a uniquely emotional matter.
Teachers do need to generally engage with the moral dimension of the British Empire — it would be an obvious part of lessons for teachers to ask whether the British Empire was a good or bad thing, and who benefited and who didn’t, and to allow their students to explore this topic through debate.
A real accounting of the Indian nationalist movement is vital but if you asked specifically about the Indian independence movement, clearly there’s not a great deal of room for this in the current school system in Britain. Indeed, the story from a British perspective is often overshadowed by World War II, and Indian independence is usually almost a footnote to this, part of the narrative of Britain rebuilding after the war and giving up the Empire. My impression is that it’s seen by many British people almost as a moral choice, that the post-war government decided that making India an independent country was seen as the time as the right thing to do, rather like establishing the NHS and the welfare state. The involvement of Indians in the process of independence is virtually ignored.
A proper accounting of history that does not cheat students should arguably deal with the entire 190 years, especially the 100 years before the mutiny of 1857. That was the period when India was being de-industrialized, pauperized and colonialized, all while keeping up the rhetoric of free trade (courtesy of Adam Smith and other liberals) and proper governance (courtesy of Burke). That is the real crime the colonialists committed in India. India’s sociological issues with illiteracy and overall backwardness are a direct result of that.
British history books and lessons that make up the current curriculum certainly don’t go into the Raj, or the real context of Jallianwala Bagh. They also don’t talk about how through the period of the Irish famine, grain produced in Ireland was being sold in England for higher prices while the local population of Ireland starved. This was being justified at that time by saying the market forces dictated it. Meanwhile, it was all right to stall the British market from better quality Indian goods with high import tariffs — that was no violation of laissez faire economics. In China, in fact, the British had no way of entering because the Chinese goods were of better quality and the Chinese did not even want British goods. Therefore, the East India Company had to traffic opium in the country to get hold of their market. These things cannot be talked about, precisely because they go to the core of economic exploitation of the third world that goes on to this day. They expose the inherent hypocrisy of the ‘great powers’.
Most students have probably heard of Gandhi and consider him to be the leader of the resistance movement against Empire, yet they’re probably entirely baffled as to why any Indian might want to kill him. And some people, probably not as many, will know about the partition of India and Pakistan. That’s pretty much the extent of it. Most students have never heard of General Dyer, or Jallianwala Bagh, and many would hear the name Nehru and think of a Roman Emperor, and most will probably think that Indira Gandhi was the Mahatma’s daughter. I’m certain that most people in Britain will never have heard of Subhas Chandra Bose or Ambedkar.
Should more British Colonial history be taught? Probably. Wouldn’t students be interested in the causes of the Irish famine, the expansion of empire in Asia and Africa, the emigration of Europeans around the world (current European diaspora is almost half a billion people)? Of course they would as long as it is not at the cost of knowing the foundation of local and national history. Wouldn’t they want to really understand why Empire is seen with a certain degree of shame in the UK; and to critique the argument that it brought nothing but freedom and democracy and is without reproach?
Instead, much more time is spent discussing the Roman invasion, the Norman invasion and any other time the UK was on the back foot or the underdog. It is still surprising that an institution that lasted half a millennium, involved millions upon millions of people, that was responsible for some of the biggest population shifts and technology transfers in history and influencing nearly every corner of the globe should be largely ignored by the British political and educational establishments.
Many of the world’s current borders were drawn by imperialists and many of today’s problems have roots to the imperial age in one form or another. The Empire does not need to be taught in an overly hagiographic or overly critical way, but it should be taught, debated and discussed nonetheless. If the increasingly multi-cultural population of Britain is to understand what it means to be British in the modern World then they need to understand what role the Empire played in that story. The Empire was such a vast institution that touched so many peoples’ lives positively and negatively.
Imperial history should not be ignored, it should not even be an optional extra, it should play a fundamental role in the educational experience of every child in Britain, especially its regrettable aspects.
Author Saurav Dutt is an author and syndicated political columnist. He is the writer of “Garden of Bullets: Massacre at Jallianwala Bagh” a book marking the centenary of the 1919 Amritsar Massacre, which will be released next month.
