By KC Bhatt
That the Ministry of Truth works always to erase history and rewrite it in a way that becomes more comfortable for the power that be is an argument George Orwell put forward painstakingly in his work.
This book by Patrick French ironically betrays how it actually works. That the Jalainwala Bagh massacre in 1919 April on Baisakhi day in Punjab, the author argues, turned the tide against the British rulers, who were hitherto viewed moderately by the people like Jawahar Lal Nehru, the British cultivated and educated Indian aristocrats, who were in the leadership of Indian Independence movement.
In the recent aftermath of the first world war, in which Indian independence leaders cooperated with the British and nearly sixty-two thousand Indian soldiers lost their lives, this massacre of predominantly Sikh unarmed civilians on a Hindu New years’ day came as a rude awakener and Independent movement of India gathered an increased momentum since, which culminated in Independence on Aug 15, 1947.
The Bolshevik revolution in Russia just before the first world war has created panic among the ruling class of the whole world. The attack on British rulers became more frequent after this massacre and they occurred at times even in England by someone like Udham Singh. The likes of Subhash Chandra Bose emerged strongly and threatened the leadership of Mahatma Gandhi, who was only for using peaceful means of protest to win Independence from ‘benign’ British colonialism. The Left also started to finally take a shape in India.
That the massacre was ordered by General Dyre, whose fifty white soldiers along with other soldiers of Indian nativity opened fire on the unarmed civilians, is a point Salman Rushdie tried to make in his novel Midnights Children. But only in the first edition of it. Because by the second edition, they no longer remained the White soldiers and changed into the soldiers of Gurkha nativity and other Indian mercenaries, as per Patrick French.
It is one example of how the history which becomes uncomfortable to the imperial powers of yore is continuously contested and changed by the institutions of if in the world where colonialism is said to have been done away with. The best way to do it is to always scrutinize the work of a native writer from a colony like Salman Rushdie, for such writers are too good to be silenced always, and make them write or rewrite a fact, or a motif indicating a fact so that the history remains salutary and celebratory towards the colonials.
Besides the death toll in official records is only one-fifth of the actual as per some records on that Baisakhi day. Not to mention the Indian soldiers who lost their lives in the first world war. So Petrick French tries to argue if the British responsibility for that Baisakhi day massacre was not as much as people thought. In that vein, he will not possibly give credit to Gurkha and other Indian ‘mercenary’ soldiers who defeated the Japanese army in Burma and the Far East in the second world war.
The writer also tries to argue that the British did not create the Hindu-Muslim divide, which prolonged their rule in India and finally resulted in the creation of Pakistan. He writes that if that was so these two communities might have reconciled after the Indian independence. One cannot forget that the bloody division of India was overlooked by the British as their last enterprise as colonials. To this day the prying interest of former colonials in their former colonials tries to make them unsuccessful so that the colonialism they did away with looked better.
The writer is an aspiring Right wing politician of England. He finds and meets the people in Punjab who were around when the Jalinwala Bagh massacre happened, who blame the people for being there to be massacred on their religiously auspicious day. The prohibitory orders have already been issued by the authorities expecting unrest.
But in the kind of writing he does, he found solid competition from writers like V S Naipaul, who was from the migrant bonded labourers of Indian nativity in the West Indies. Naipaul unfailingly criticized the colonized people like the Indians and celebrated the imperialists. The failure of the 1857 Sepoy mutiny he described as a victory of the British Resistance without uttering a word about the massacre of Muslims in Delhi in its aftermath and their banishment from the city for many years.
Naipaul, who mentioned once that his grandfather was from Nepal and migrated to Gorakhpur after his marriage to a woman from there, to live with her family, won his Nobel award for his work, but Patrick French can not hope to win one, because the celebration of colonialism from among its subjects is more sonorous to a colonial ear. So Patrick French knew his competition and did his best to tear apart Naipaul the writer, in the biography he wrote on him; thanks to the unlimited access Naipaul gave him to his private papers. Naipaul was wrong to assume that the British institutions will be thankful to him for doing the dirty job of placing British colonialism in a favourable light and not bringing to the fore many of the topics about him which were too personal and non-literary but were quite damaging.
Like, for example, his literary agent went in search of a quarter of a million British pounds as an advance from a publisher for a journey and sojourn Naipaul will take of a former colony, out of which he will write a book to publish–left the publishers hiding one behind another. His books had limited appeal and sales. There are many more such revelations in the biography of Naipaul by Patrick French, which are far too personal and embarrassing to be published.
So this is how the books are published and their writers become known. Think about the readers who are their audience and who feel knowledgeable on the basis of such books they read. Naipaul never forgave Patrick French for his biography on him and till he could move in his old age was visiting the witch doctors in Africa along with his wife, trying to put some kind of evil spell or curse on Patrick French, who almost destroyed him by writing his biography on him.
Now, in the aftermath of Covid, when the politicians have done their best to destroy a world which was already on the verge of a recession, no one is going to have a last laugh. For many of the institutions of the yore, no more have the credibility they hitherto enjoyed. In fact, everything around is sinking into a deep hole it was digging for others. The publishing industry too is one of them. It possibly has no financers left to produce the likes of work that Petrick French or Naipaul created, for people are now too worried about their food and shelter even in the world hitherto called developed. The recession is gripping the world more threateningly than before.
We cannot hope to have more Naipauls or non-English writers who try to describe a city like London being a migrant there and winning accolades for it. So the loss of the world economy might be a gain for literature.
Besides, one way of coming to terms with the bleak and gloomy history of colonialism is as Dutch have shown recently. Offer an unconditional apology and move ahead.
It no longer can be allowed to blight the days of humanity ahead, no matter how many writers of the ilk of Patrick French are created.
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