Kudos to the conversation I'd like to dedicate this piece to. And, thank you to the person whom I had it with. It's difficult to frame the tone of a particular conversation, which took place at a particular time; but the air felt a little colder, and the topic flowed with relative ease. One question I was asked made me ponder, and continues to; long after the conversation has ended. "Are you British-Indian?". I responded, "No, I am just British". The one phrase sits bitterly at the tip of my tongue. I don't do that latter line justice; it never fails to remind me of the perfect way Nabokov used it in Lolita - "the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth". Instead though, it sits at the tip of my tongue with a slight hesitation, not falling down comfortably to the depths of my palate, and if it absolutely had to, as aforementioned, it'd probably leave a bitter trail following it. It's not the kind which washes away with ease either; I've contemplated far longer and harder than I intended to, particularly when I realised that it's not quite confusion, but the fact that I seemed to lack the ability to articulate it within the scope of a fleeting conversation. So here I shall provide my rationale; if it can even be called that. Nonetheless, I digress; it was an oversimplification. I am not simply just British. It's about as simple as more than two centuries of the unlawful British occupation of India, as simple as the liquidation of the British East India Company; as simple as The Crown very conveniently assuming the role of the Government of India. As simple as Indians never uniting to remove the British from Bharat; as simple as the British lawyer who carelessly drew up the line for the partition.
Growing up, I was always Indian first. I vividly remember reading Amarchitrakatha's "Great Freedom Fighters" and "Stories of Freedom Fighters" again and again; about the lives of the likes of Rabindranath Tagore, Veer Sarvarkar, Bhagat Singh, Jawaharlal Nehru, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, and Babasaheb Ambedkar, to name a few. These reimagined biographies would have me poring over them for hours, and after devouring them, I would always ask my father why we were living in England of all places? Why were we living in the same country which tried to erase our ancestors and their livelihoods? The same country which shed their blood because of their own heartless imperialistic greed? The same country which still proudly boasts that the sun of its Empire never set? The same country which still adorns its monarchs with our Kohinoor? The same country whose museums are filled with artefacts which aren't, and never shall be, theirs?
How can I call myself British when my own maternal grandmother was forced to flee her ancestral home because of the partition? How can I align myself with the so-called British identity when my ancestors were historically noted for fighting the British rule so vehemently? Mulraj Chopra, most notably was the Diwan of Multan, and leader of a Sikh rebellion, which subsequently led to the Second Anglo-Sikh War. Because he opposed the tax raises proposed and imposed by resident minister of Lahore, Sir Frederick Currie, the British sought to replace Mulraj with a yes-man. He was supposed to present the keys of the city to two British officers; Patrick Vans Agnew of the Bengal Civil Service, and Lieutenant William Anderson of the Bombal Fusilier Regiment. Instead, Mulraj's own regiment hacked the two officers to death - it's likely that he didn't organise the rebellion, but was instead forced into it because of them. He evidently supported it nonetheless, because it became an act of disobedience against the British Raj, since Multan was not willingly surrendered to them. The heads of both officers were sent back to Currie as a form of protest; and the event provided justification for the British to retaliate, and ultimately sparked the Second Anglo-Sikh War, in which Mulraj was depicted as a bloodthirsty despot intent to see the overthrow of the last Maharaja of the Sikh Empire, Duleep Singh. Essentially, the British hoped that by showing Mulraj in this light, other Sikh groups would not want to align themselves with him; which failed miserably, fortunately.
Unfortunately, the siege of Multan was followed by the fall of Multan; post-conflict pillaging "followed a series of atrocities perpetrated during the siege, including physical mutilation and rape", according to Jarat Chopra, the great-great-great-grandson of the Diwan. Prior to the fall of Multan, Mulraj was ready to surrender himself and his troops in exchange for the safety of the city's women and children. The British rejected this, and instead pillaged the city completely. The fallen Diwan gave a British general his talwar as a symbol of surrender after the fall of Multan. Mulraj's more closely related descendant; the formerly mentioned great-great-great-grandson, formally requested the sword be returned, or that he be permitted to purchase it. Unsurprisingly, he received a letter back from Major Begbie, the assistant regimental secretary, stating that "it is not the regiment's policy to return captured "battle trophies" to families or governments of erstwhile foes". He further conveyed that "[they] would, for example, never consider returning German or Japanese trophies from the two world wars. We would not consider returning Crimean War trophies to the Russians, not Napoleonic ones to the French. Nor, I must record, do we ever seek the return of trophies captured from us in past conflicts." Begbie went on to write, "as a final observation, you infer that returning the sword would 'bring an honour to the regiment and institution, more in keeping with the times'. I respectfully point out that you express the view of a civilian, who misunderstands one of the main purposes of a military trophy, and that is to maintain the memory of past conflicts and of our forebears who fought and died in them."
Learning of this makes me all the more enraged. Major Begbie should know of the distinction between "captured" in the context of war, and "plundered", "stolen", and "looted", with regard to familial heirlooms and artefacts. It is preposterous to even attempt to compare Crimean "trophies", and those "won" in the First and Second World Wars to returning an heirloom, which was stolen by colonisers. Especially considering the fact that India suffered centuries of looting; the Empire did not gracefully win skirmishes and wars; it tore apart communities, families, people - limb from limb, ensured their blood soaked the holy soil upon which they worshipped and walked, and showed not even an ounce of mercy, to anyone. Begbie wrote that the British never sought the trophies they lost, and that is because more than half of what they "won" was stolen, not won rightfully and honourably within warfare, but plundered, like common, cowardly thieves. Though even ideals of honour and dishonour within the realm of warfare are very much debatable; perchance a discussion for another article. The British were not great noblemen, they were common muck, and only seek to fortify this perspective when they refuse to return military honours which were, once again, looted, like the word itself, from the hands of Indians, who for years, fought their unlawful subjugation.
I suppose what makes me most angry is his tone. A British regiment which oversaw, ensured, and justified the destruction of a city and its people, because the Diwan opposed unjust tax hikes, can never rightfully stake a claim on his sword. Is Begbie blind to his own hypocrisy here? The great Empire was certainly not the constitutional monarchy Britain claims to be today; it wasn't even an effective one at that. It would be more pertinent to refer to it as an organised movement of usurpers, common criminals, bandits, goons; vandals, thieves, and cowards. Keeping the Diwan's sword is not a military trophy being used to maintain the memory of "forebears who fought and died in them [conflicts]"; the British didn't die in these conflicts - they instead annihilated any Indian who questioned the legality of their Raj, their presence, and by extension, engaged in a most dangerous activity; freedom of thought, and protest. That is what the sword represents, till date; their triumph in never allowing various factions in Bharat to unite. Ultimately, it was not the ideals and various movements of freedom fighters which drove England out of India, after centuries, but the threat of bankruptcy, due to the amount required to maintain their occupation post-WW2, which was simply unsustainable alongside plans for Attlee's "New Jerusalem". Retaining the sword is a bitter reminder of this, and will always remain such; no British forebears are being honoured, it is instead the dishonourable death(s) and improper rites of passage given to so many of our revolutionaries, which are being signified by the reticence of such artefacts and heirlooms. For example, Mulraj was cremated on the banks of the Ganga by a handful of loyal servants en route to a prison at Buxar. Bhagat Singh, Shivaram Hari Rajguru, and Sukhdev Thapar, were all hanged at a Lahore prison, and were subsequently secretly cremated, and their ashes disposed of in the nearby Sutlej river. It was not enough for the imperialists to subvert justice entirely; they wanted to disrupt ceremonial rites entirely, an entire culture for them to uproot, consider their own, to torment, terrorise.
And yet, they still refuse to apologise for it. Britain has categorically refused to recognise that it engaged in multiple human rights violations which spanned the entirety of its Raj over Bharat. In fact, Churchill engaged in crimes against humanity by diverting much-needed supplies from civilians to European front-lines (to be stored as excess), which caused the Bengal Famine. A crime against humanity was the British fleeing in a manner which allowed them to wash their hands of the blood of the millions who died crossing the Indian/Pakistani borders. Jews will never let the world forget the Holocaust, how it happened, and who perpetrated it. But we, Indians across the world, and those of us in Britain especially, don't speak about this nearly as much as we should. Partition stories are seldom spoken about, and we are far from memorialising them; making them immortal, accessible for generations to come. Why? Are we still partaking in the "great silence"? It may not be the present, and yes, one can understand that it does involve dredging up the past, of which the majority, is painful, and often, anger-inducing. But we cannot let this become an excuse for letting the world remain ignorant, for letting the very country which imposed its Raj unto our grandparents, their parents, and their grandparents, forget that it ever did. How can we let history remain unwritten? I still remember the migration chapter of my GCSE history course; the topic was entitled "Migration circa 790 - present day". We covered the Huguenots in splendid detail, alongside the movement of various Jewish peoples across Europe and the Americas due to hateful pogroms, the hope of the Quakers and other minorities that they'd be able to practise their religion freely as they migrated to the new thirteen colonies. But we skimmed over the making of the British Empire; the genocides it perpetuated, and the names of those who orchestrated them. A meagre half-page of a 200-page textbook was dedicated to the discussion of Commonwealth migration and the reasons for it. The British side of my A-level history course spanned the "Making of Modern Britain"; 1945-2010, filled with British cultural, economic, societal, and legal history. We spent a single lesson covering decolonisation; that too, it was only the financial considerations of Britain, and the "liberalism" of Labour which granted this. We did not once look at the contentious historical memorialisation of Churchill; a war hero to the Brits, but perhaps the most well-known, and hated racist, to formerly colonised nations. I instead studied his electoral policies, how his electoral loss in 1945 came as a shock to everyone, the King himself included; how his death was dearly mourned by millions across Britain. How can I call myself British when he did too? Especially knowing he said we were "beastly people with a beastly religion"? How can I call myself British when we are all expected to laud him as a Great War hero? When we are all supposed to know "Rule Britannia"? (Cruel Britannia, as it should be, rather). How can I call myself British when so many before me who did were the same "forebears" Begbie writes of; who probably celebrated the death of the "bloodthirsty" Diwan?
Note how in my last few paragraphs I depersonalised the term "British"? It became synonymous with British imperialism, which at one point, was not distinguishable from the nationality - the Empire was not borne in a day, and spanned the Commonwealth; the citizens of it who travelled to Britain and now make up a large part of its diaspora. Since immigration from Commonwealth countries was popularised within the late 1950s and 1960s, as the making of modern Britain forged ahead, despite the contentions pertaining to the Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1968, which conflicted with the Race Relations Act(s). But even then, Commonwealth citizens bore the badge of British nationality with pride, despite blatant mistreatment and often, racism.
My questions about identifying as intrinsically "British", are inescapable, because whether I like it or not, it's a part of my identity; I am a British national. British colonialism was a large part of the national identity, and for many, remains to be an extension of pride within their own. And this is precisely where the problem resides; it is our responsibility to ensure the history books contain evidence of the mistreatment of our ancestors, and of the chaos, and blood spilled during the partition. Gone are the days when we mutely listen to former prime ministers of this country praise the Empire and we laugh at their ignorance; for if we don't ensure the books reflect an accurate record now, when we have a "British-Indian" prime minister, then when else?
For myself, the extent of my Britishness ends at my love for the English countryside, literature, fish and chips, and the Beatles - not to mention the RP accent (I am also endlessly fascinated by certain historical eras within British history; i.e. the Tudor, the Victorian, the "swinging sixties", to name a few). It does makes me wonder what the great revolutionaries of India would think, of so many Indians settling in the same country which occupied our own. It could be a cruel kind of irony, unless we've distanced ourselves from the culture, ideals, religion, entirely. I'd like to think we haven't. I suppose only time will tell, which is such a cliche. But it is still ironic, nonetheless.
I may have just reached a conclusion, then. I am not "simply" just British. But I am not entirely Indian either. I don't particularly like the terms "British-Indian" or "British-Asian", because it implies that my identity is perfectly halved, without any debate, between my Englishness and Indian-ness. But that shall never be the case. In some aspects, I am far more British than I am Indian, and vice versa, in others. But I suppose that term, "British-Indian", is the only way to denote the imbalanced identity which I shall continue to attempt to identify. Though, it does make me wonder why not Indian-British? A question to address next, perhaps.
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