Supriya Guha has the last word on Jeremy Paxman’s Empire: What Ruling The World Did To The British.

I had to check my shoulder as I began this book, for the chip I might be carrying on it. I had, after all, studied my history in independent India, where imperialism was definitely, with no ambivalence, a Bad Thing. Could it really be true, as has been rumoured, that the Empire is once again to become a source of pride for the British public?

Some thirty years ago, there was a phase of “Raj” nostalgia fed by vapid recall of the days of Burra Sahibs and Chota Pegs. It spawned some literature and TV dramas, filmed in India and much mocked by Salman Rushdie in an essay in which he compared The Jewel in the Crown to mulligatawny soup, declaring it tried to taste Indian but ended up being ultra-parochially English, only with too much pepper.

More recently, the Tory education minister, Michael Gove, said he wanted every British schoolchild to learn about the Empire with pride. Having watched Jeremy Paxman fix his baleful interrogative gaze on his victims on Newsnight, I wondered if he too would be susceptible to this hubris that he is so intolerant of in others.

The role of the Empire in shaping Britain’s national consciousness is hard to assess, though that’s what Paxman’s book (in its sub-title, at least) promises to do. He does describe what an important part it played in providing both careers and new homelands for the British population, and not merely the ne’er do wells and younger sons from the shires. This was especially true for Scotland, which had a large surplus of literate young men in search of a fortune. Mary Lutyens (the daughter of a Viceroy and wife of the English landscape gardener who became principal architect of New Delhi) said, India was the last place in the world where “little nobodies [could] come and play at being kings and queens”.

I found myself fairly steeped in the book because its canvas is so wide and the story covers so many different parts of the world. Paxman’s narrative is compelling, if episodic, with little pretension to being original scholarship, and it covers ground that includes the slave trade, the opium trade, the siege of Khartoum, the siege of Mafeking, the Balfour Declaration, the Suez crisis and much more. The book indulges in a fair amount of myth-busting, but not, as far as I could make out, myths of great prevalence. The Indian part of the story I did have a fair idea of and so was less impressed by.

In his introduction, Paxman describes change in fashions that knocked imperial idols from their pedestals.  Not without irony, he describes some of the individuals who played pivotal parts in the story and recognises the role of personal ambition, fanaticism and occasional monomania. His particular skill lies in his ability to sketch characters with all their foibles, flaws and flashes of heroism. It speaks of a remarkable even-handedness that he can draw a certain parallel between the delusional religious fanaticism of General Gordon and his enemy, the Mahdi, and also describe the brutality of the concentration camps set up during the Boer War.

This was the High Noon of Empire, and the displays of nationalist swagger on the streets of Britain led to the creation of a verb: “to maffick” meant to join in “uproarious celebration”, with waving of Union Jacks and pictures of Baden-Powell, as employed in a couplet by the Edwardian writer Saki,

Mother, may I go and maffick,
Tear around and hinder traffic?

This is one of the wittier pieces of verse Paxman quotes, but he also makes apposite use of poetry by Kipling and (the dreadful) Henry Newbolt.

Paxman’s achievement is to present a diverse patchwork of scholarship in a readable and entertaining form. The book fails, though, in an inability to live up to the promise of its subtitle. I looked hard for what Paxman could tell us about what the having been a great imperial power did to Britain; I couldn’t find very much, apart from the obvious effects of a large immigrant population (which is not unique to former colonial powers) and the consequent preponderance of curry restaurants and the invention of Balti cuisine in Birmingham. Perhaps, then, the more appropriate subtitle would have “From Blighty to Baltistan” and here I have one of my minor quibbles – “vilayat” does not mean “foreign” in Urdu. It is derived from an Arabic word that means kingdom and in India it came to mean Britain or, perhaps, Europe.

Some other factual inaccuracies caught my eye. There was no king of Bangalore (then a quiet cantonment town), only a Maharaja of Mysore and of course he’d be loyal to the British – he’d been placed on the throne by them. The first British Indian MP was elected not in 1892 but in 1841 – David Ochterlony Dyce Sombre was the Eurasian heir to the estate of Sardana near Meerut.  Babur’s empire was not as enormous as suggested, though it spread under his descendants.

The book has come out in advance of the BBC series that will be on television next year, probably intended to coincide with sixty years of the reign of Queen Elizabeth II. The celebrations are likely to be muted in comparison with the Diamond Jamboree of the last regnant queen and, in 2012, it would be absurd to expect the certainties of 1897. It is, to quote Jan Morris, “too late for arrogance, too soon for regrets”.

Perhaps that is the true consequence of having once had an empire and then lost it – a national ability for self-doubt and scepticism rather than flag-waving and jingoistic idolatry. It is a spirit of dissent and interrogation that voiced itself over the years of imperialism, and has to be recognised in any nuanced rendering of the tale. To my mind, this is far more admirable and a sign of maturity in a national narrative, and I look forward to watching the television series.

Supriya Guha lives in Basel. She was educated in Delhi and Calcutta. She has worked as a publishers’ editor and at centres for Women’s Studies in Calcutta and Mumbai. Her area of special interest is the history of reproductive health in South Asia, and she was a David Bell Fellow at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies.

Share this article

Your Email* :

Friends Email* :

Your Name* :

Message

Close

Tweet