Britain remains an exhilarating place for students of empire. One kind of Empire began to crumble in 1947, another kind continues to enjoy a ghostly existence in the culture of the present time.
A few months ago, the British branch of the "Rhodes Must Fall" movement was responsible for a noisy, prolonged, and enlightening debate over the legacy of empire. Just over a week ago, the series
Indian Summers returned to television, complete with heaving
memsahibs, illegitimate offspring, seditious freedom-fighters, and suited-and-booted ICS administrators. What a soapy
tamasha! Also rolling on for another few weeks is "Artist and Empire", an exhibition which opened at Tate Britain, in London, last November. Not much of a
tamasha there, I'm afraid, it's all very earnest.
The last serious outbreak of Empire mania occurred in the 1980s. That was the era of
The Far Pavilions (the television version came out in 1984),
A Passage to India (film version, 1984),
The Jewel in the Crown (television, 1984), and, of course,
Gandhi (1982). Critics, among them Salman Rushdie, connected the Raj revival to Thatcherism, the Falklands conflict, and the national mood at the time.
Rule, Britannia! Britannia rule the waves. Postcolonial studies was yet to catch fire, and the nation was ripe for a colonial fantasy. The chattering classes justified the revival by talking about critical balance and independence movements:
Gandhi was the prime exhibit in this line of reasoning, of course, and the
Jewel in the Crown and
Passage were also said to have their dark moments, their Hari Kumar and Aziz. But once you paid lip-service to dissent and anti-colonial forces, to figures such as Gandhi and Mandela, you could then proceed to indulge your inner Raj with as much fervour as you wished. Viceroys on the television, the Empress of India on your mantelpiece.
One of the interesting features of the current revival is that it leaves a larger space for criticism than in the 1980s, but nonetheless also then accommodates and tames it. The criticism is given an airing, but then appears to make no difference whatsoever to how people think and act. In a
poll conducted in Britain in January, 43% of those surveyed said that the British Empire was "a good thing" and 44% said that Britain's history of colonialism was a "part of our history that we should be proud happened".
Not so long ago, in July 2014, some 39% of those surveyed
in another poll expressed the startling view that they would "like Britain to still have an empire". Thoughtful analysis about empire is unlikely to gain a foothold among those parts of the population that are even now yearning for the glory days of the Raj.
I went to see the
exhibition entitled "Artist and Empire" at Tate Britain in December, around the time that Oriel College, Oxford, was deliberating over the Rhodes statue. The gallery was busy, but not as popular as it might have been for the time of year. Perhaps if the history of the Empire was taught in British schools, the exhibition would have attracted a larger audience than it has. As it is, the public isn't very interested in learning about the Empire. Some of the works on display are stunning, moving even. The catalogue is perceptive, serious, and sober, and contains some finely observed essays on the art and its contexts. The publicity material acknowledges the complexity of Empire and its legacies.
One
painting that reminded me of the Rhodes statue was "The Death of General Gordon, Khartoum, 26th January, 1885" from 1893, by George William Joy.
It's a familiar sight: Gordon of Khartoum, standing above the world and gazing down at the dark and menacing mob. This is also an image of heroic calm in the face of imminent death. One of the Sudanese fighters is about to cast his spear at Gordon, but the latter holds his ground unflinching, the prototypical symbol of the empire's last stand. This conception of the last stand fuses notions of heroic endurance, Christian martyrdom, and Spartan bravery associated with Thermopylae, and the figure at the centre of the last stand is, of course, the Victoria hero. Men such as Gordon were prepared to lay down their lives for Queen and Empire - and were accordingly worshipped and memorialized as heroes in the art of the imperial age.
For me, the weakest part of the exhibition comes at the end. There are many superb responses to imperial art, but they are not well represented in this selection of post-imperial works. The idea seems to be driven by political correctness, as if to ward off criticism that the show might not be inclusive enough, or might be unmindful of postcolonial sensitivities. What is needed is a forceful critical engagement with colonial art through art that is itself of high quality, and not this small concession in the last room of the exhibition. It's not surprising that public attitudes to Empire don't change when criticism is offered as an afterthought.
Empire and "art" come together in a very different form in the statue of Rhodes that stands in Oxford. It is not a first-rate work of art - and was perhaps never intended to be such. Here is
another Victorian colonialist looking down on the masses below. But this is no hero making a last stand: the word that comes to mind is "condescension". The wall bears an inscription in Latin that manages to be clever, learned, and vulgar, all at the same time: E LARGA MVNIFICENTIA CAECILII RHODES, "By the generous munificence of Cecil Rhodes". The dreamer, who was both eulogized and vilified in his own lifetime, left £100,000 to the college in his will. Some of the letters in the inscription are larger than the others, and if you take these to be Roman numerals and add them up (L M V . . .), you arrive at 1911, the date on which the building was completed, the apogee of Empire.
One almost feels sorry for the statue, though not for Rhodes. One hundred years of solitude, marred only by the occasional pigeon, and then to be hit by the full force of student activism, charges of racism, removal, and possibly even obliteration. To think that it should come to this.
The unremarkable statute is very different from the Cecil Rhodes that once reposed in a wonderful spot at the University of Cape Town, the scene of another and more successful Rhodes Must Fall movement. There, in Cape Town, Rhodes sat looking into the distance; leaning forward, confident, ambitious. The colonialist as visionary. I remember the view from the place as breath-taking. The base of the statue had a few lines from Kipling's
Song of the English, which first appeared in May 1893: "I dream my dream | By rock and heath and pine, | Of Empire to the northward . . ." But that statue was removed in April 2015, after the Senate and Council at the university agreed on its removal. The claims about the statue were heard, deliberated, and then translated into action in Cape Town. In Oxford, the decision was kicked into the long grass, and the statue remains in Oriel, still on its high perch, protected simultaneously by a wire mesh, a governing body, and, if newspaper reports are to be believed, alumni in a fury.
How much nostalgia does a nation need? The Rhodes Must Fall movement has renewed discussions about colonial history and racism within the university world and in Britain. Sections of the British public may not be ready yet to give up their deep-rooted affection for the Empire, but at least RMF has got people thinking about the subject. In coming to terms with Empire, one small step forward at a time may be all that we can hope for.
Phiroze Vasunia is Professor of Greek at University College London and the author, most recently, of 'The Classics and Colonial India' (Oxford, 2013)Disclaimer: The opinions expressed within this article are the personal opinions of the author. The facts and opinions appearing in the article do not reflect the views of NDTV and NDTV does not assume any responsibility or liability for the same.