Over the past year, but particularly in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States of America, there has been disquiet over what a British writer recently described as the “grievance industrial complex”. The phenomenon, which started off innocuously as ‘political correctness’ that established a language code among a few, has evolved into a ‘cancel’ culture that aims at suppressing all that is deemed offensive and unacceptable by self-appointed boards of intellectual standards. Coinciding with a curious left turn in US politics whose efficacy will be partly tested in November’s presidential election, cancel culture has crossed the Atlantic and is gradually permeating the rest of the English-speaking world.
The manifestations of cancel culture range from the sublime to the ridiculous. It is understandable that the culture of Dixie worship that was till recently a feature of states that once formed a part of the defeated Confederacy in the American Civil War of the 1860s was deemed offensive by many Black Americans. The underlying romanticism behind the celebration of a way of life that, alas, was inextricably linked to slavery and the Jim Crow laws inevitably concealed the brutal underside of a deeply iniquitous society. It was inevitable that sooner or later there would be a reaction against the statues of Confederate heroes that dotted cities of the Deep South in America. Equally, while flaunting the Confederate flag may well have been an innocent way for some to assert their southern regional identity, it is undeniable that it meant something more sinister than Joan Baez’s moving rendition of “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”. Without doubt the flag of the defeated had also come to be equated with assertions of white supremacy.
It is indeed remarkable that the worship of the Confederacy persisted as long as it did. Politically it may have been eclipsed after the fading out of George Wallace who won as many as 45 electoral votes and 13.5 per cent of the national popular vote, but it maintained a fringe presence that was seen as embarrassing by all mainstream politicians. All it took was a gentle push for many of the visible symbols of the old Confederacy to be relegated to museums and specialist shops trading in memorabilia.
An earlier version of Black Lives Matter was witnessed in Oxford two years ago when some students — inspired by a movement in the universities of South Africa — took exception to the statue of Cecil Rhodes in Oriel College. The problem was that while Rhodes is rightly seen as a venal exploiter in southern Africa, his extraordinarily large bequests to Oxford University had a different meaning. The Rhodes scholarships, for example, had acquired a formidable reputation throughout the Anglophone world, including India, and it was problematic to separate the benefactor from his money. Indeed, this is not uniquely a problem limited to Oxford. A large number of the major universities on both sides of the pond have funded their road to excellence through bequests whose provenance may not pass the test of exacting ethical scrutiny.
This is particularly true of the United Kingdom. Today’s spirited decolonizing activists may not like the presence of Lord Clive in the forecourt of the old India Office (now the Foreign and Commonwealth Office) and they may balk at statues of erstwhile heroes such as Lord Roberts of Kandahar and others who put down the 1857 uprising in India quite mercilessly. Yet there is no denying the fact that earlier generations fed on a diet of G.A. Henty — a largely forgotten writer whose books were obligatory for schoolboys of yore — thought these men to be heroes. In many cases, the statues were put up with public subscriptions. Britain may have successfully divested itself of its Empire, but the symbols of past glory are omnipresent. What is equally interesting is that while there are chapters of its history that appear shameful — and in some cases worthy of public apologies —the Empire, taken in totality, is something that doesn’t offend by its mere mention. Efforts to link the so-called absence of a decolonized curriculum in the liberal arts to imaginary racism in the classroom and the campus are largely contrived. If there aren’t more expressions of disgust at the attempted imposition of ‘white shame’ on an entire people, it is because of a strange political squeamishness that deems voices of colour to be automatically worthy of patient consideration.
Yet, it is not knowing where to draw a line that could generate a backlash. Last month, for example, in a move that provoked legitimate outrage all over Middle England, the BBC allowed some overzealous music conductors to ensure that the words of “Land of Hope and Glory” and “Rule Britannia” were not sung — as is the custom — in the Last Night of the Proms. This was because they were deemed to be celebrations of a past that the politically correct have decided must be cancelled — airbrushed from popular memory and history. Earlier, there have been persistent reports of the iconic song, “Jerusalem”, being similarly bowdlerized. The epidemic has touched such ridiculous levels that a respected professor of theology in Oxford was the target of denunciatory petitions by fellow academics for having the temerity to suggest a research project on the ethics of the British Empire.
Nigel Biggar, Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology at Oxford and the target of this outpouring of silliness, wasn’t attempting anything revolutionary. It is undeniable that there was an ideology of Empire that went beyond economic exploitation of the natives. The sense of paternalism or ‘civilizing mission’ — a term coined, incidentally, in America — may well have been misplaced or even evidence of what old-style Marxists like to call ‘false consciousness’ but these ideas were nevertheless real.
I have before me a book, A Judge in Madras: Sir Sidney Wadsworth and the Indian Civil Service, 1913-1947, by Caroline Keen, published earlier this year by Hurst and Company, a reputed publishing company in London. It is entirely possible that most Indians have never heard of Sir Sidney or believe him to be significant. Yet it is worth reading the small appreciation of the book by David Washbrook, a Cambridge historian who has studied South India: “While colonialism these days stand rightly condemned, it is easy to forget that many of those caught up in its history were human too — and, in the case of Sidney Wadsworth, remarkably humane.”
Washbrook is stating the obvious but it is also blasphemous in the context of the cancel culture that would rather the old judge was consigned to either silent oblivion or noisy disgrace — if, indeed, he was a known figure. However, it is reassuring, in the context of the Biggar controversy, that a reputed publisher still believes that a good book is worth publishing regardless of its underlying bias. This innate belief in pluralism may be terribly old-fashioned but is a virtue that is under threat in this age of certitudes. Revisionism certainly has an important place in the larger scheme of intellectual evolution, but that goal will become elusive if it is subsumed by a wave of iconoclasm — of the type that was witnessed by the indiscriminate destruction of the library at Nalanda by the army of Bakhtiar Khilji in the 13th century.
These are dangerous trends and more dangerous if some Indians decide they are worth emulating. Some of the controversies over the management of social media and the pulping of a book on the Delhi riots because it suggested there was no one truth are disturbing. The cancel culture, like the barbarians, must be kept outside the gates.
