A good time to mourn?

Pramod K Nayar

The recent controversy over British descendants of Henry Lawrence and Henry Havelock coming to India to mourn them is at once unseemly and appropriate.

Unseemly because, for the Indians, the spectacle of the Bishop of Lucknow in independent India conducting a memorial service for Englishmen who massacred Indians is unpardonable.

Appropriate because the Englishmen and women have a right to mourn their dead –– whatever character the dead might have possessed. Does allowing the English descendants of Havelock and Lawrence to mourn amount to anti-nationalism?

The politics of mourning is fascinating. Should we allow the English to make a spectacle of honouring those who massacred our countrymen in order to preserve the Empire?

On the other hand, would we not want to mourn our own dead, no matter where and for whatever cause they died? Subhas Bose is a national hero because he fought for Indian independence, even if he did so on the side of Nazis.

But Bose’s German connection is something we have chosen to ignore when mourning him, isn’t it? It does not make him any less a hero.

The Indian government has not exactly been kind to the native heroes, except for the select upper-class ones, of 1857. Nobody has prevented us from conducting memorial services or eulogistic seminars for Ahmed Ahmedullah Shah or tribal-Dalit heroes like Makka Pasi and Jhalkar Bai.

The government has not yet brought back, with ceremonial honour and national pride, the grave of that icon of the ‘Mutiny’: Bahadur Shah Zafar. In the communally-fraught context of today, retrieving the glory of Zafar –– the Muslim king under whom both Hindus and Muslims fought the British empire — would have gone a long way in showing exactly how the ‘freedom struggle’ evolved from a ‘mutiny’.

If we are so concerned about the politics of English mourning, why is it we have let our ‘national heroes’ stay within the confines of unopened history books? Or is it that we protest against their act only because they have shamed us by showing their loyalty to those whom they consider heroes? Instead of asking why they are here to commemorate their heroes maybe we should ask why we are not commemorating ours.

Colonialism has no excuse, of course. Its unjust and cruel. But how does the mourning by a great-great-grandson of Havelock become iconic of colonialism? How do we cast Mark Havelock Allan —Havelock’s descendant — in the 21st century as Havelock himself, or the act of a family mourning as a reinforcement of colonial oppression?

Considering the fact that we still use the Indian Penal Code crafted by the colonials to control Indians as our postcolonial basis for justice, are we double-faced in our use of colonial pasts?

There are other contexts. Britain and France have publicly apologised for colonialism, and Japan for its war crimes. True, Trafalgar Square is unlikely to have a statue of Mangal Pandey (incidentally it has Havelock’s!). But London’s Parliament Square does now have Mandela’s —and Mandela was also, like Gandhi, instrumental in overthrowing an empire, of apartheid.

And Gandhi is the ‘man of the millennium’ even in the neo-colonial First World. Isn’t it time to move beyond this politics of recrimination and despair to more constructive ideas? Has India apologised to its own citizens for the caste system, patriarchy,  pogroms, tribal displacements, Dalit-killings and lynchings?

Admittedly, it is rather sordid of the English to transform what ought to be a private mourning into a touristy spectacle. However, this spectacularisation is not a new development. British and Indian tourist companies both make profits from their ‘Mutiny tours’. Maybe economics rather than sentiment drives such trips to India.

The English are entitled to their mourning. However, they are not entitled to making it a spectacle where, beyond all reason and personal sentiment, they glorify imperialists as heroes without acknowledging the latter’s misdeeds. Yet we need to look at ourselves too — why do we not mourn and honour our heroes and heroines of 1857?

Their mourning does not transform Havelock into a hero for us. Our amnesia does not lessen the 1857 exploits of Liaquat Ali or Matadin.

The writer is the author of The Great Uprising : India, 1857