Of medals, titles and aristocrats
Carl Muller
EMPIRE BUILDERS: In the 1980s, Palestinian writer, Edward
Said, argued that Western perceptions of the Orient was hopelessly
distorted by racial prejudice.
However, a new book by David Cannadine: "Ornamentalism: How the
British Saw Their Empire" (Allen Lane, UK), insists that this was not
so. In a riposte to Said's influential work that was titled "Orientalism",
Cannadine declares that it was class and not race that mattered.
To quote: "The men who built the British Empire were not concerned
with promulgating the values of the master race; they just wanted to run
orderly hierarchical societies based on the British model."
This tells us a thing or two, doesn't it? How many in this island,
when under the British, were encouraged to further their education in
England; go to Oxford or Cambridge? How many of our people were knighted
during the British occupation? How much of England, its history and
culture, its literature, its sports, were given us? How much of British
manners and mores did we take to heart?
While Cannadine does not touch on Sri Lanka much, (or Ceylon, as the
Brits knew it), he illustrates his thesis by examining the elaborate
class systems in the outposts of the Empire.
And yet, in India and Ceylon, honours were given to "deserving
natives" if only as a way of keeping them in their place, while loyal
civil servants could look forward to an OBE.
Later, (and could I be a little mischievous?) schoolboys found
excellent words for the OBE, with O being 'One' and B being anything
from 'Button' to 'Belly' and other objects that come to mind that began
with the letter B; and E was for Enlarged (which I thought, in my
innocence, must be an E for England but I was soon put right).
In fact, as Cannadine points out: "This whole apparatus of medals and
titles became so convoluted that, by the 1890s, Burke's Colonial Gentry
ran to two volumes!"
The other trick was to strengthen the position of the social
aristocracies in the colonies. Here, there were lots of Hamus and so
many who claimed royal descent, who kowtowed to the Brits and were given
the authority to impose order according to British standards.
In our villages, such a person would be regarded as a suddage miniha,
affectionately or otherwise. In India, which was far too large,
Cannadine tells of huge swathes of territory that were run by local
princes, nizams, rajahs and the like, all with British approval.
In like manner, the author says, African chieftains were also
courted, and in telling of Fiji, we are given quite a revealing story:
"The wife of the British Governor of Fiji was Mrs. Arthur Hamilton
Gordon. She had the highest regard for the local chiefs and regarded
them as her equals, but looked down on her British-born nurse!"
This is a clever, interesting and irresistible book that runs counter
to the politically correct assumptions about the Empire that is being
preached today. The real British attitudes to Empire have been presented
by Cannadine with much insight and wit.
The book is also a repository of revealing facts, quotations and
anecdotes and is very informative. As Cannadine puts it, "The British
successfully exported an honours system that kept those they lorded
over, lapping at their hands. It was a system of near-Byzantine
complexity."
Not only has the author thrown new light on the way the British ran
their Empire, but also gives us a brilliant grasp of social gradation in
the far-flung colonies, by finally unlocking the significance of medals,
titles and aristocrats! |
