It is always odd to visit England as an Indian. So much of our history is tied to this small country, and yet so little of our current reality overlaps. I spent a year in London a decade ago — supposedly researching a book that I am no closer to writing even now — and this is the first time I have returned since. I end up spending the Sunday afternoon with a friend in Guildford, just an hour from London by train. In the conversation about books and politics over a lovely lunch and then tramping around the countryside, the distance that our history evokes dissolved in the ease that friendship brings. It was only in the evening, when I returned to London, walking back through the streets that the old mood came back.
India is hard to miss in London, especially at its heart, Trafalgar Square. The central column holds the statue of Admiral Nelson, and in four directions radiating from it are four plinths. One is ‘empty’, or used to be until the Royal Society of Arts came up with the brilliant idea of using it to put up interesting new sculptures, such as the ‘Gift Horse’ . This was designed by the German artist Hans Haacke, whose work is a commentary on political and social systems.
The sculpture is a bronze skeleton of a horse, and has an electronic ribbon tied to one of its forelegs that displays live readings from the London Stock Exchange. It is a criticism of the ravages of the market, as well as the austerity measures of the British government; but in a sense, if you really want to see it, you must see it as an Indian.
Ignore, of course, the statue of George IV: we have little time for kings. Of more importance are the statues of General Charles Napier and General Henry Havelock. Napier, of course, is remembered as the general who annexed Sindh to the territories swallowed up by the East India Company in the mid-1800s. This was the time the British were involved in supplying opium to the Chinese, in contravention to requests made by the Chinese government. At least one historian has linked the voracious appetite of the East India Company in swallowing up Indian states to the losses they bore in the Opium Wars when Chinese authorities seized and burned the drugs.
We all know that the policy led to greater and greater resentment in India, leading to the 1857 Uprising.
The other general on a plinth in Trafalgar Square is Havelock, who served in India for decades and led the British troops in recapturing Kanpur and Lucknow. He died a few days after the recapture of Lucknow, due to dysentery.
The statues of Napier and Havelock, in a way, are a far more biting critique of the murderous drive to accumulate wealth at all cost, with no reflection on the lives ruined, than the sculpture of Hans Haacke.
The lesson does not end there. If you hike from Trafalgar Square, you will move towards the heart of the British government — Whitehall and Westminster — and take a left past Downing Street, ignoring the Prime Minister’s residence, you will find yourself on Horse Guards Road. Take a left, and you will find another sculpture. It is new, a globe carved with doves. This is the memorial for the Bali bombing in 2002, in which 202 people — of many nationalities — died, but many among them British. Each person killed is represented by a dove. Apparently this site was chosen for its proximity to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and is a reminder that the tourists were not given adequate warning by the Foreign Office.
The doves, symbolising peace and the innocent lives lost, make a strong impression. The memorial, though, is a little overshadowed by the fact that it is situated on Clive Steps, named after Robert Clive, who established the military and political supremacy of the British East Indian Company in the Indian subcontinent.
His statue, with a hand on a sword, stands in the backdrop of the Bali Bombings Memorial and is a dampener. The images it evokes are of the horrors that imperialism brought to India, not least the famines that were often the result of deliberate if misguided policies. These images diminish the tragedy of the 202 lives lost in a calculated and brutal act of mass murder. There is, of course, no monument to the three million or so people who died in the Bengal famine of 1943, at a time when 2.3 million men were part of the British-led Indian Army.
Thus our histories divide us as much as both the rulers and the ruled are equal parts of them, and I wonder when, if ever, we will share a common understanding. Maybe never, except that shared as friends.
Omair Ahmad is the South Asia Editor for The Third Pole, reporting on water issues in the Himalayas