JOIN USIt’s a strange and disconcerting coincidence. I’m planning to visit the UK. On my itinerary are, of course, London and its myriad attractions. The staples of Big Ben, the Thames waterfront, Hyde Park, Madame Tussauds, the Royal Albert Hall, Kew Gardens among many more. 10, Downing Street is also on my list. Who knows, PM Theresa May may deign to spare a few minutes for me to discuss post Brexit issues!
After visiting London, how can I return without an audience with Her Majesty in the Lucullan interiors of the Buckingham Palace? After returning, I can boast “I’d been to London to see the Queen!” Sure, Oxford and Cambridge, too. I haven’t been lucky (and brainy) enough to enter the portals of these hallowed institutions. So, at least, let me content myself with a wishful look at their exteriors! But more importantly, on my must-see list are Shakespeare’s birthplace Stratford-on Avon, the Globe for an evening rendezvous with probably Hamlet or the wily, usurious Shylock.
Then there is the famed English countryside with the rolling meadows, the picture postcard pastoral serenity with the cows grazing away in all their bovine calmness, the cosy cottages tucked away into ‘leafy bowers’ where William Wordsworth, Lord Tennyson, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Charles Dickens, the Bronte sisters and many other men and women of words wrote their immortal works of exquisite pulchritude. I’d love to sit on the heather with Enid Blyton and go back in time with scones and muffins by my side. And laugh in abandon with Wodehouse in my hands, Baxter and his stiff countenance be damned!
After this long and rather frivolous preamble, now for the disconcerting part. I have just read an article on the horrific brutalities inflicted by the British – in no way lesser in sadism than the Nazi atrocities in Auschwitz – on the people of a nondescript town in Uttar Prad-esh called Ballia for having dared to raise the banner of revolt. Everyone knows about Jallianwala Bagh. The bullet holes on the walls and the well into which the escapees jumped are still there!
Closer home, the huge banyan near Gauribidanur in Karnataka is a stark reminder of the Vidurashwata firing. How many poor Indians were transported to British colonies like Malaya to work as indentured labourers in their plantations? Am I going to the land of these barbaric marauders?
After nearly 70 years, I know it sounds supposititious, naïve and puerile. For those of us born much after independence, such things are just a part of history. We can never ever imagine the trauma that our countrymen faced under colonial tyranny and oppression.
But the benefits cannot be ignored too. Would we have progressed without the ‘British gifts’ of English education, a constitutional framework, infrastructure like the railways, postal system and more?
Yes, we have to move on with life. There is no ‘undo’ button to erase the bitter past. Still, Winston Churchill’s words, “I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion” and “...that half naked fakir” rankle. If the Bard asked “to be or not to be is the question,” I ask myself, “to go or not to go?”