Charline on the biennial meeting, the long road from the Company Raj to the Crown to the Commonwealth and why nineteenth-century India makes modern summits look polite
Saturday 10 October, 6.30pm, a reading room in a library off Russell Square, a heap of nineteenth-century pamphlets that smell of old rain and a pencil I have sharpened with a violence usually reserved for Parliament.
Dear Diary. This is the entry I promised in the first one, the one about my subject. I am a student of the Indian politics of the nineteenth century, a subject so large that I regularly lose my glasses inside it. Today I want to put it in conversation with a piece of current news: the Commonwealth leaders’ meeting that will take place in Antigua and Barbuda later this month, at which, according to ITV, Prime Minister Andy Burnham will attend his first Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting as Prime Minister.
The Summit
ITV’s report of 2 October says the King’s Caribbean tour coincides with the biennial meeting of Commonwealth leaders. The Jamaica Observer, citing AFP, says the King will give a speech at the meeting of Commonwealth heads of government in Antigua and Barbuda, after which he will attend a parade marking 45 years of independence. The tour runs from 27 October to 4 November. I do not have a programme for the summit itself, and I will not pretend to, so the rest of this entry is not about the agenda. It is about the history that makes the room possible.
A Short History, From The Library
I will rely here on the general history that any decent textbook will give you, and I ask you to treat it as background and not as breaking news. In 1857, a rebellion broke out in northern India that shook the East India Company’s rule to its foundations. In the aftermath, the Government of India Act of 1858 transferred the Company’s powers to the Crown. In 1877, Queen Victoria was proclaimed Empress of India. And in 1885 the Indian National Congress was founded, the beginning of an organised political movement that would take sixty-two years to achieve its aim.
That is my whole subject in four sentences, and it is, in a way, the entire argument. In the space of about three decades, the rule of a trading company became the rule of a Crown, the Crown acquired a grand new title, and the people it ruled began to organise. The Commonwealth is, in a manner of speaking, the long afterword to that story: a club of countries, most of which were once governed from London, now sitting in the same room as equals.
The Comedy Of Arrival
There is something gloriously odd about a head of government attending his first summit of that club. It has the feel of a new boy at a school whose old boys are very large. He will be introduced. He will shake hands. He will sit in a chair, and a delegation from a country with a longer memory than his will look at him with an expression of courteous patience. I wrote about the Victorian era’s swaggering confidence in a post on London in the 1800s, with its smog, empire and confidence, and I think the confidence has been replaced by something far more interesting: good manners.
The empire’s long retreat is the subject of my piece on 1965, when the empire was officially reduced to a queue, a kettle and vague superiority. It was meant as a joke, and it has the frightful accuracy of a good joke. It is remarkable how much of an imperial inheritance can be reduced to a kettle.
What Remains In London
If you want to see the nineteenth century in London, look at the buildings. The capital is full of evidence of the empire, much of it in unexpected places. I wrote about one of those places in the post on Woolwich, where London remembers it had an empire, and I would encourage anyone with a free afternoon to take a walk there. It is a good reminder that history is not only in books. It is also on streets, in street names and in the cracks of old stone.
I come away from the library every evening with a headache and a strange sense of gratitude. The pamphlets are full of men who were certain of things. Almost none of the certainties survived. The ones that did were the ones that people fought for, in India and elsewhere, over a very long time, and the people who fought for them are rarely in the pamphlets.
A Note On Sources
I mentioned that the Company-to-Crown story is background, and I want to stress that I have not tied it to a source in this entry. If you need dates or details for something serious, please consult a proper history, and ideally one written by an Indian historian. The perspective matters, and a diary is no substitute for the archive. I include it here because it is the lens through which I read the news, and honesty requires that I tell you.
The summit, for its part, is current affairs, and I rely on the two reports above. The question I would ask, if I were there, is how a body that grew out of an empire manages to remain useful. The answer, as far as I can tell, is that it has become a place where countries talk, which is the oldest and cheapest form of diplomacy.
Closing Entry
I file for prat.UK and for Bohiney Magazine, and my American readers sometimes ask me how a country manages to be both an empire’s heir and its critic. I tell them it is the national hobby. If you want the longer view on British humour, my page on the history of British satire has the details, and for a gentle end to a heavy evening, the Daily Squib is excellent. The pencil is blunt again. Goodnight, Diary. Read the other side.
SOURCE: bohiney.com