Will Heaven: The history of British India will serve David Cameron well – as long as he doesn't go on about it
[Will Heaven is the Telegraph's Deputy Blogs Editor, specialising in politics and the internet.]
The Prime Minister has been swotting up on his Eastern history. In Turkey yesterday, he spoke of William Harborne’s journey there on behalf of Elizabeth I. “As a nation we sought the opportunity for our merchants to trade. More than 400 years on, I follow him… at least in part for the same reason.”
Lovely. But I hope Mr Cameron knows that if he tries that rhetoric in India, he’ll bomb. Where would you start? With the philandering shag-hounds of the East India Company? And then onto the Jallianwallah Bagh massacre via the Great Bengal Famine of 1770?
No: Indians are fiercely proud of their independence. And they don’t regard the history of British India with much fondness. I remember climbing into a taxi at Delhi airport a couple of years ago to be met with a tirade of jabbered Panjabi from my Sikh driver. “Bloody hell,” I realised about ten minutes into the journey, “you’re talking about the Kohinoor diamond.”
There are exceptions, of course. An Anglo-Indian (his name was the almost preposterous Clifton Brown) once approached me in Delhi’s Connaught Place to – quite literally – shake my hand for being British. “Look around,” he said, gesturing grandly at the marble columns. “You built all this.” (I suppose he was right, in the same way that the Pharaohs built the pyramids.) Another encounter, this time outside a Catholic Church in Udaipur, was not dissimilar. I was told by an old man: “When the British were here, William, this place was Heaven. Now it is Hell.” Corruption, it transpired, was the source of his bitterness.
But as the Prime Minister knows, these nostalgic old men don’t represent India’s future...
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The Prime Minister has been swotting up on his Eastern history. In Turkey yesterday, he spoke of William Harborne’s journey there on behalf of Elizabeth I. “As a nation we sought the opportunity for our merchants to trade. More than 400 years on, I follow him… at least in part for the same reason.”
Lovely. But I hope Mr Cameron knows that if he tries that rhetoric in India, he’ll bomb. Where would you start? With the philandering shag-hounds of the East India Company? And then onto the Jallianwallah Bagh massacre via the Great Bengal Famine of 1770?
No: Indians are fiercely proud of their independence. And they don’t regard the history of British India with much fondness. I remember climbing into a taxi at Delhi airport a couple of years ago to be met with a tirade of jabbered Panjabi from my Sikh driver. “Bloody hell,” I realised about ten minutes into the journey, “you’re talking about the Kohinoor diamond.”
There are exceptions, of course. An Anglo-Indian (his name was the almost preposterous Clifton Brown) once approached me in Delhi’s Connaught Place to – quite literally – shake my hand for being British. “Look around,” he said, gesturing grandly at the marble columns. “You built all this.” (I suppose he was right, in the same way that the Pharaohs built the pyramids.) Another encounter, this time outside a Catholic Church in Udaipur, was not dissimilar. I was told by an old man: “When the British were here, William, this place was Heaven. Now it is Hell.” Corruption, it transpired, was the source of his bitterness.
But as the Prime Minister knows, these nostalgic old men don’t represent India’s future...