India’s independence from British rule set off the process of ‘decolonisation’ — the gradual dismantling of European imperialism in the Afro-Asian world. It’s a point to keep in mind as India moves beyond the euphoria of celebrating the 75th anniversary of Independence. So, as we move beyond Covid-19 and India@75, where exactly does our ‘truth and reconciliation’ agenda with the legacy of Empire stand? As I write, a decolonisation-flavoured meme is going around on social media, with the jubilant faces of Rohit Sharma’s boys in blue superimposed on a Lagaan poster. But on a more serious note, what would be the meaningful questions to ask in this respect, other than periodic wishful reiterations of the demand for the return of the Koh-i-Noor to India, or a grumpy half-anger at the consistent British refusal to formally apologise for Jallianwala Bagh?
Decolonisation has undeniably become even more of a buzzword in recent times, growing especially around the Black Lives Matter movement and, then, in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis in July 2020, when significant parts of the world burst into angry protests against the legacies of Empire, including the enslavement, brutalisation, and exploitation of colonised peoples. Statues of slave traders (like Edward Colston in Bristol) were pulled down and imperialist figures — among them, Sir Cecil Rhodes in Cape Town (#RhodesMustFall), King Leopold of Belgium in Ostend, and Robert Clive in London (#RemoveClive) — got vandalised, shifted, or confronted with raucous demands for obliteration.
How do such symbols of Empire matter in our public history, especially in relation to our museums? Calcutta’s Victoria Memorial Hall, which took off in 1921 as a museum to showcase the achievements of the British Empire in India, might be a good case to look at. As an Empire Museum, its initial choice of worthies to commemorate included mostly ‘good Indians’, mainly the loyalist rajahs of princely India. While ‘heroic’ Indian adversaries like Tipu Sultan and Ranjit Singh were co-opted into the display, ‘villainous’ Indian foes like Nana Sahib were completely obliterated for committing the diabolical atrocity of massacring captive British women and children at Kanpur during the Revolt of 1857. The VMH was thus primed for hosting an imperialist game of cultural politics in which the Indian nation was present in a cosmetic, non-threatening way.
In the late-1960s, as part of a postcolonial mandate of making it into a ‘people’s museum’, space was carved out right in front of the VMH’s imperialist statuary for a ‘National Gallery’ of leaders primarily from the ranks of the Indian National Congress. In a curious switch of priorities, in 2022, the portraits of this Congress pantheon of leaders were taken down to instal a new permanent exhibition on India’s biplabis or revolutionary nationalists — with a mandatory segment on V.D. Savarkar — to fulfil a mandate given by the Indian prime minister himself. The substitution of one narrative of Indian nationalism by another indicated something more at play than a straightforward tussle between imperialism and nationalism — an internal tussle shaped by adversarial partisan positions within the Indian nation-state, both deeply invested in their public histories.
In recent times, one of the strongest critiques of the atrocities of the British Empire in India has appeared in Shashi Tharoor’s An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India. But notably, it hasn’t mobilised public opinion in India against imperial legacies to any significant extent. Interestingly, Tharoor’s strong exhortations in 2017 to the Government of India to turn the VMH into a museum showcasing the dark side of the Empire failed to incorporate such a defining project of ‘decolonisation’ into the museum’s centenary plans for 2021.
In that year, the VMH put on display a large exhibition on Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, inaugurated by the prime minister. In a curatorial decision percolating from the bureaucratic corridors of power above, all colonial statues inside the VMH building, including a portrait statue of Queen Victoria (picture, left), were ‘masked’ (picture, right) to avoid a conflict with the exhibition theme of anticolonial nationalism. Robert Clive, for instance, like some of his staunchest fellow imperialists such as the Earl of Ellenborough and Lord Dalhousie, was not removed or re-curated, but bottled inside a reflective glass cage, erased and wiped away from sight and, thus, forgotten, at least for the two years of the exhibition. This masking became the high point of decolonisation in a city that has continued to nurture India’s longest historical connection with the culture of the Anglophone world.
What explains this ‘low tide’ of decolonisation in a country whose independence set it off? One conjecture is that the fault lines of postcolonial India’s social and political conflicts — between Hindus and Muslims, between caste Hindus and Dalits — have been so pervasive and often violent that they have deflected debates about structural racism or other kinds of internalised iniquities from focusing on colonial symbolisms. One needs to look no further than the consistent attacks launched by upper-caste Hindu supremacists on the statues of B.R. Ambedkar to get this point. The VMH case foregrounded an absence of engagement with the legacy of Empire and a failure to recontextualise the museum — indeed the failure of the memory of colonial subjection to mobilise anything like the anger and the iconoclasm that the BLM had brought forth in other parts of the world. Perhaps this non-curatorial intervention showed the limits of what could be done in a historical-political setting where the discourses of anti-imperialism and decolonisation have been increasingly pushed to the sidelines by the rise of a Hindu majoritarianism bent upon a unitary redefinition of India’s Indo-Islamic past.
Given this, is it possible to create a museum that provides nuanced, textured, multipolar accounts of some of the darkest elements that signpost the Indo-British imperial encounter, like the so-called ‘Black Hole tragedy’, Nana Sahib’s infamous ‘Kanpur massacre,’ the blowing off of captured 1857 rebels from the mouths of English cannons, the cold-blooded massacre at Jallianwala Bagh, the cynically manufactured scourge of the Bengal Famine of 1943 (indeed, all famines in colonial India), and scores of others? And, in addition to these deadly elements in this checkered relationship, also its gentler aspects, like the worldview spawned by the English language, or the railways — that great Indian democratic institution, despite being originally tethered to British colonial commercial interests?
This is a daunting task, for sure. For one thing, ascendant ‘de-Mughalisation’, evident in rampant nomenclature changes, most recently the mutation of Agra’s upcoming Mughal Museum into the ‘Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Museum’, will keep pushing a serious engagement with decolonisation to the margins. And, more importantly, such a museum will be impossible to build without the documents and the artefacts confined in repositories in the United Kingdom. The matchless displays of Smithsonian’s National Museum of African-American History and Culture or the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. became possible only by pooling together material belonging to the perpetrators as well as victims of slavery and the Holocaust. Whether UK will share material for such a museum is anybody’s guess but the fact that English history curriculum does not prioritise colonialism doesn’t instil much confidence.
So, is our moment of reckoning with Empire’s legacy, indeed our ‘truth and reconciliation’ moment, destined to languish as we as a majoritarian nation-state get consumed with weaning ourselves away from our Indo-Islamic past? Only time will tell. In the meantime, I keep gazing, awestruck, at a grand marble edifice, still called the ‘Victoria Memorial Hall’, the only address on a road still called ‘Queens Way’. And I keep wondering: whose queen is it anyway?
Jayanta Sengupta is Director, Alipore Museum; jsengupt@gmail.com
