The terrible truths the colonialist must hide from his own people

Intellectual honesty is a crime in any totalitarian country: George Orwell

- RAJESH TALWAR

It appears that colonial history has never been part of the school curriculum in the United Kingdom. In England they learn about their kings and queens, European history and the world wars, but not about empire and its excesses. Why is this the case? Is this accidental or deliberate? Is it similar to the ostrich burying its head in the sand? The ostrich does not wish to see approaching danger; the British do not wish for their young, school-going population to be confronted with the misdeeds of their ancestors.

A few years ago, Shashi Tharoor was on a show with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation to discuss his new book. In ‘An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India,’ a title possibly inspired by V S Naipaul’s ‘An Area of Darkness,’ Mr Tharoor had written, inter-alia, about the loot and plunder carried out in India by the British over the course of two centuries. A nation that once commanded a lion’s share of the global economy, had, in the writer’s words ‘been reduced to being a poster-child for third-world poverty and destitution.’

During the course of the interesting discussion that ensued, an Englishwoman on the panel with Tharoor wondered aloud why she had not been taught any of this in school. It appears that colonial history has never been part of the school curriculum in the United Kingdom. In England they learn about their kings and queens, European history and the world wars, but not about empire and its excesses. Why is this the case? Is this accidental or deliberate? Is it similar to the ostrich burying its head in the sand? The ostrich does not wish to see approaching danger; the British do not wish for their young, school-going population to be confronted with the misdeeds of their ancestors.