By Swapan Dasgupta
The accomplished British cartoonist Martin Rowson
is—as befitting his profession—naturally attracted by the absurdities of public
life. Last week, he directed his fire at the Think Tanks. “Let’s form a Think
Tank”, he suggested to his Twitter followers, “Call it… ‘Policy Carousel’…Front
it up with a couple of nerdy teenagers in suits…and start issuing press
releases…arguing the dumbest things that comes into our heads. Insist that
children reared in trees are better at French; nurses who eat nothing but jam
have better mortality outcomes; if the moon was painted mauve reading standards
would improve among ‘White British’ mice living in buckets…Then see how long it
is before lazy news editors at the BBC makes our latest batshit…the third story
on their main morning news…”
As a response to my endorsement of the whacky
scheme, Martin suggested I open a Delhi chapter of Policy Carousel. Ever
helpful with identifying the bizarre, he suggested an opening initiative—an ‘Apology
Exchange: Amritsar for Black Hole.”
Since the authenticity of the Black Hole of Calcutta
remains in some doubt—there are grave suspicions that an imaginative account by
a survivor written many years after the event was responsible for the infamy
that was bestowed on the area around the majestic General Post Office—there are
other possible initiatives that Apology Exchange can mentor. How about
restoring the beautifully crafted Angel of Cawnpore to the original site of the
Bibighar massacre where an estimated 120 people, including large numbers of
women and children, were massacred by the troops of the ‘perfidious’ Nana Sahib
on July 15, 1857? After Independence, the memorial was relocated to a corner of
the All Souls Church in Kanpur.
And, just to demonstrate that it is not merely the
loathsome Lt-General Dyer who is being pilloried by history, how about an
appropriate memorial in Delhi’s Chandni Chowk to commemorate one of the worst
massacres of civilians in India? I am, of course, referring to the massacre of
Delhi by Nadir Shah on March 9, 1739 in retaliation for the mob fury the night
before that led to the killings of some 3,000 Kazalbash troopers. According to
a contemporary account, the Iranian troops began the carnage at 9 am “and
forced their way into shops and houses killing the occupants and laying violent
hands on anything of value… No distinction was made between the innocent and
the guilty, male and female, old and young.” By the time Nadir Shah called off
the pogrom after six hours, the roads of Delhi were blocked by heaps of bodies.
The death toll was said to be anything between 8,000 and 40,000—a darn shade
more than the highest estimates of those killed in the Jallianwala Bagh
massacre of 1919.
Nadir Shah, who continues to be celebrated in modern
Iran as a great national hero, also made off with the Peacock Throne and the
Kohinoor diamond (which subsequently found its way into the Tower of London).
Indeed, to this day, the term ‘Nadirshahi’ is used is northern India as a
synonym for brutality and oppression. How come, therefore, the frequent visits
of Shah Reza Pehlavi in the past and more infrequent visits of the stalwarts of
the post-1979 theocratic regime these days isn’t peppered with calls for either
the return of the Peacock Throne to Delhi or at least a heartfelt but
grovelling apology? Instead, the representatives of Independent India lose
absolutely no opportunity to emphasise the “deep civilizational ties” that bind
the peoples of Persia and Hindustan.
Going back a little further in time, there was also
the invasion of the Moghul Tamerlane in 1398, a mere 615 years ago. That
invasion was marked by an equal show of blood-thirstiness by the Moghul army.
Having taken nearly a lakh prisoners during the course of his advance from the
Indus, Timur was apprehensive that they would “join their countrymen against
him” when he attacked Delhi. To forestall that possibility, he massacred the
lot of them in cold blood. Having taken Delhi, Timur allowed his soldiers to go
berserk. According to a contemporary account Firishta, “the Hindoos, according
to their custom, seeing their females disgraced, set fire to their houses,
murdered their wives and children , and rushed out on their enemies.” A
massacre followed and, like in 1739, the streets were clogged with corpses.
“The desperate courage of the Delhiyans was at length cooled in their own
blood, and throwing down their weapons, they at last submitted themselves like
sheep to slaughter…”
The irony is that 228 years later, a scion of the
Timurid dynasty established the Moghul empire in India, an empire that is
celebrated as an authentic encapsulation of the Indo-Islamic encounter. In
1857, when the sepoys and dispossessed chiefs rose against the firinghees of
the East India Company, they did so in the name of the bewildered and
bedgraggled Mughal who was perceived as the alternative pole of sovereignty. In
the 459 years between Timur being loathed as the barbaric invader and Bahadur
Shah Zafar’s emergence as the symbol of what some historians regard as
patriotic resistance to the British, the Moghuls had been recast. Their
legitimacy was no longer a contested issue, a reason why street names in the
showcase Capital of the Republic bear the names of Babur, Humayun, Akbar, Shah
Jehan and even Aurangzeb.
There are many reasons why the absorptive powers of
India which Rabindranath Tagore wrote about—and, incidentally, included the
English, along with the Huns and the Moghuls, as communities of ‘them’ who
became ‘us’—has escaped the British Raj. One of the possible reasons could be
expedient erraticism that accompanies the already feeble Hindu grasp of
chronology. In contemporary discourse, for example, the Great Calcutta Killings
and the accompanying bloody Partition of India is ‘history’, as is, say, the
Emergency of 1975-77. At the same time, the Jallianwala Bagh butchery that
happened 94 years ago still warrants a limited debate over whether visiting
British Prime Minister David Cameron should have opted for an unequivocal apology—akin
to his predecessor Tony Blair’s ‘sorry’ for the Irish famine or former West
German Chancellor Willy Brandt’s famous genuflection in Poland in 1970—rather
than mere ‘regret’.
Without underplaying the importance of the Amritsar
killing which effectively broke the moral backbone of an Empire that had cast
itself in a paternalist garb, today’s debate is rather silly. For a start, the
pressure to distance an economically beleaguered United Kingdom from its Empire
inheritance hasn’t originated from the Dominions and the former colonies. Its
origins are strictly rooted in the post-colonial angst that has gripped the
younger and more cosmopolitan generation of Britons. In India, the Raj is well
and truly history and a toy wheeled out by the tourism industry for hard
currency. Apart from politicians and xenophobes who peddle pop history as
political slogans, the mass of young India crave for proficiency in the English
language, western culture and global opportunities. M.K. Gandhi and Tagore
would have squirmed in despair.
Ironically, that doesn’t make them any less
nationalist. Perhaps the greatest satisfaction Indians drew from Cameron’s
visit was not the ‘regret’ in Amritsar but the caricature in a British
publication depicting Cameron as the supplicant before the throne of Manmohan
Singh and Sonia Gandhi. The perverse like me would say that this wasn’t a parody of Sir
Thomas Roe in the court of Jehangir; it corresponded more to Lord Clive
extracting his due from a cowering Shah Alam whose realm, as we all know,
extended from Delhi to Palam.
The Telegraph, February 28, 2013
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