The History of British Violence

The Last Stand of the 44th at Gundamuck, by William Barnes Wollen (1842)

When my daughter was little I used to get up early with her every other morning to 'play'. The playing often revolved around the Playmobile people she had. She had millions of them and they all had names, so we'd invent these elaborate stories and play them out as the sun rose in the back window over the scenic Avon Valley Countryside. 

But it was early, so sometimes I'd lose track of the stories, and then I'd get asked to repeat old stories which would melt my brain and leave me in a state of existential crisis. So instead I started playing out the plots of films (Dracula, Frankenstein, the Invisible Man, the Shining and the like). The best one to play out was the Exorcist because Playmobil People's heads really do go round. 

The other thing I did was play out scenes from history - the rise of Hitler, the rise of Mao, Soviet history, slightly biased British history and so on. It got to be quite global in its scope. 

So she loved history from an early age and then she went to school. And it kind of got stuck on the first and second world wars with a bit of Egypt, Romans and Henry VIII thrown in. It was rubbish. There is nothing like a bad history teacher for taking the interest out of a subject that is manifestly fascinating. 

And that is what struck me first in this article by William Dalrymple from September. He talks about the censoring of British history (and censorship makes everything uninteresting) and the reason why we don't understand our own history. And the importance of understanding the dark side of what we did and what we do and who we support and where we support them. 

'Yet much of the story of the empire is still absent from our history curriculum. My children learned the Tudors and the Nazis over and over again in history class but never came across a whiff of Indian or Caribbean history. This means that they, like most people who go through the British education system, are wholly ill equipped to judge either the good or the bad in what we did to the rest of the world.

...

Yet if the British remain largely ignorant of the blackest side of the imperial experience, and are still taught in their schools that it was only our German enemies who turned racism into an ideology that sought to justify mass murder, then we also remain largely unaware of some of the more positive, and perhaps surprising, moments of our imperial experience.'

And then In this article from the weekend, Dalrymple talks about the artistic legacy of the empire, in particular that which connects to the brutalities of British rule.

'Paul Gilroy rightly puts it in the excellent accompanying catalogue, Britain’s “inability to come to terms with the disputed legacies of empire has been corrosive. Locally, it has contributed to a deep and abiding ignorance. Knowledge of the empire’s actual history is unevenly distributed across the globe. Descendants of the victims of past injustice are often more familiar with the bloody annals of colonial government than British subjects, safely insulated at home from any exposure to the violent details of conquest and expropriation.” That was certainly the case with The Last Stand of the 44th: in 2000, soldiers of the Royal Anglian Regiment – the lineal successors of the 44th – reported that coloured postcards of the image were selling well in Afghan markets, as if in celebration of a recent rather than a distant British defeat.

When I was researching my book on the 1857 Great Uprising – still anachronistically known in the UK as “the Indian Mutiny” – I was horrified to discover the scale of the war crimes our ancestors committed while supressing the rebellion: tens if not hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians were slaughtered in British reprisals; in one mohalla (neighbourhood) of Delhi alone, Kucha Chelan, some 1,400 unarmed citizens were cut down. “The orders went out to shoot every soul,” recorded a young officer, Edward Vibart.

It was literally murder … I have seen many bloody and awful sights lately but such as I witnessed yesterday I pray I never see again. The women were all spared but their screams, on seeing their husbands and sons butchered, were most painful … Heaven knows I feel no pity, but when some old grey bearded man is brought and shot before your very eyes, hard must be that heart that can look on with indifference.

By 1858, Delhi, a sophisticated city of half a million people, was left an empty ruin, as were Kanpur (“Cawnpore”) and Lucknow. Similar excesses were inflicted on many other cities from Kandahar and Kabul –both laid waste by the British “Army of Retribution” in 1842 – to Mandalay and Rangoon, burned down a few years later. Yet most people in the UK remain completely unaware of these aspects of their imperial history, and many leave school without touching upon it at any point in their formal education. In our school textbooks, it is only the Germans who imagine racial hierarchies and commit racially inspired genocides.'

Dalrymple's talking about British history because it is something which is rarely addressed. But the same applies to any nation which wields or has wielded political, economic, ideological or religious power over others. 

Which means just about everybody. Rather than always pointing the fingers at others and wallowing in blame and victimhood, we should all look at the cruel side of our history, our ideologies and the consequencs of our actions. And if we think our country doesn't have a cruel side, then we should think again.

Life Advice from Sam Harris: It's Raining! It's Cold! It's London! Let's Go to India!

The Middle of Somewhere is a lovely book about growing up, about being a child, about experiencing the world, about being part of nature.

The world of the Middle of Somewhere is ostensibly India and Australia, but really in an ideal world it could be anywhere where there are open spaces, clear skies and a family where freedom, adventure and discovery are the norm. And the children are Uma and Yali, daughters of  Sam Harris. He photographed their lives, their joys, their tears and their traumas as they grew up in the most idyllic surroundings. But again, in an ideal world, it could be any child.

It's a joyful book then, one that starts with a picture of a line of green clad girls, their feet pushing through the grass of a forest clearing, their arms pushing against the barriers of our imagination. Flick forward a page and we see  Uma (I think) lying in a meadow, her eyes closed as she falls into the ground upon which she lies.

There's a pagan element to the book, a sense that we are, or should be, one with nature, and that is emphasised through repeated pictures of birds, animals, flowers and fruit. A double-page spread shows a dead red-beaked finch held in the palm of a hand that is adorned with bangles and bead, together with Yali (I think) holding a mashed up bunch of blackberries, her lips stained red, her eyes gazing directly into the camera from hair that is reminiscent of the well-dwelling Sadako of The Ring.

So we have coming of age and we have mortality and there is half a nod to Sanguinetti's Sixth Day and the lyricism of the Immediate Family landscape, but the symbolism is never heavy handed and the book can be read as a straightforward journal, especially because it is made like a journal.

The journal inserts help in this. We hear from Yael, Harris's partner, as she sits with a young Uma in a one-bedroom flat in London. It's raining and she needs a change, they all need a change. The next entry comes from Goa. The change has come and life becomes a romantic tale of travelling in India, on the road in places where hungry cows, blue seas and freak storms create memories that have a value beyond value. Then Yael is suddenly pregnant, one month from term and ready to give birth, 'just like millions of other women..' in an Indian village.

And on life goes.



There's a great picture of gleaming eucalypti (I think?) shot from the inside of a car. It's a familiar shot with the dashboard in the foreground but is evocative all the same, a sign of the move to Australia, and the beginning of a new kind of life.

Here, the open spaces and the big skies open up before Harris and Yael. We see them standing beneath the stars, looking at a gleaming mood, a moment of peace as a quiet domesticity (toys, make-up, washing, chickens - the quieter pictures that punctuate the stronger double page spreads) makes a home in the smallholding that the family now calls home.



Amidst all this there are tears and conflict. Uma and Yali fight, then make up. We see this in little kiss-and-make-up notes stuck into the pages of the book.

The girls grow and so does the family's Australian home. Uma and Yael reach up with brooms to dislodge water trapped in an awning. But now Uma is almost Yael's height, more nimble and stronger. The generational 'surpasso' beckons.



And that is almost how the book ends. It's a gorgeous book with a gorgeous cover that is a pointillist rendition of the bush surrounding the Australian home. It's romantic, populist and beautifully produced; as well as the post-it notes and journal inserts, it comes with rounded corners to edge off that travelogue feel.

Buy the book here. 

Death is all around

I reviewed Christopher Bangert's War Porn for Emaho over the summer. It's a great book with one of those uncut pages designs - I didn't cut the pages open because I've got too many books with badly-cut pages and it's starting to annoy me.

The basic premise of War Porn is why do we not show pictures of dead people. The problem with this is that I'd spent the previous week looking at pictures of dead people - a lot were historical pictures, but they were still pictures of dead people (and here is another really interesting perspective on War Porn from Paul Fox).

And this year, there seem to be more dead people all over the place; dead girls who were raped and lynched in India, dead Palestinian children who were killed out of spite it seems, and dead passengers on the plane tht was shot down over Ukraine.

There's more death around and there seems to be a concerted effort to show death more, especially on Time's Lightbox (now edited by Olivier Laurent, formally of the BJP).

As if to confirm this effort, Fred Ritchin wrote a piece about the showing of death on yesterday's Lightbox and the hidden contracts that are contained within it.

But still, I wonder. I'm not sure anything has changed. These things go in circles. I've seen a dead Gaddafi (see above) on television, and Saddam Hussein being hung and we can see murdered Palestinian children or Indian girls, or watch journalists being beheaded in Syria, but in mainstream circles there are still the same taboos. Will we see dead American children or soldiers on Time Lightbox or in the New York Times, will we see dead British soldiers in the Guardian or Daily Mail? And if it's not OK to show American journalists getting beheaded, why was it OK to show Gaddafi's body being dragged around?

So death is all around when it is people who are deemed fit to be seen dead, but we are sheltered from seeing our own dead. When their time comes, we're not going to see Obama or Cameron's dead faces smeared across the TV. And when it comes to sparing our feelings, then blurring and blobbing will still be applied to the faces of those deemed innocent  (and if you have ever wondered why television producers putting a grey blob over a dead person's face show's respect, read Robert Fisk here).

So what exactly are the rules about showing the poor and distant dead versus showing our rich and Western dead. And are those rules changing? And if they are, why are they? And if they aren't, why aren't they?

Oh, and what's it like in countries outside Europe and North America, and on mainstream social media? Completely different rules apply, but that's a post for another day.

Reconciled through Photography: A Happy Ending from India, Sort Of

pictures by Arko Datta and Sebastian D'Souza

Here is an uplifting story of redemption, salvation and photography, this time from India and focussing on what many believe to be the provincial state-sanctioned killings of Muslims in Gujarat 2002. The man who allegedly sanctioned the killings is set to be become India's prime-minister, though money and political power may tone down his nationalist edge. 

The story focussed on two men, one Hindu, one Muslim, '...whose images came to define some of India’s deadliest communal violence.'

'One of the photographs - which capture different incidents during more than a week of violence - is of Qutubuddin Ansari, a Muslim man whose home had been torched by a Hindu mob and who was pleading with the police to save him. His face is filled with terror.

The other is of Ashok Parmar, a Hindu, whose head was wrapped in a saffron scarf and who wielded an iron bar against a backdrop of flames and mayhem. His face was twisted with anger.'

12 years later and '...the two men in the photographs have been reaching out to each other in a way that is little short of staggering. Last month, Mr Ansari, 40, and Mr Parmar, 39, shared a platform at an event in Kerala where the latter apologised for the horrors inflicted on the Muslim community.

"I shook his hand and said 'I am happy to meet you'," Mr Parmar recalled this week, sitting at his roadside cobbler's stand. "I said I regretted what happened in 2002. I am very sorry." Mr Ansari, a father-of-three who works as a garment stitcher, said of the meeting: "He said he had seen my photograph in the paper and that it should not have happened. It was a public apology. I think my photograph was instrumental in changing the attitude of Ashok."'

Ansari was photographed as a mob gathered to burn down his house and it is probably the photographer Arko Datta and other photographers who saved his life. '"I thought we would be dead in ten minutes," said Mr Ansari, wiping his eyes as he flicked through a photo album of his blackened, destroyed neighbourhood and remembered friends who were killed..."Arko Datta was like a gift from God."'

It's a great story and one with many undercurrents that connect to contemporary politics, memory and the 'trauma created by the photograph.' I get the feeling there's a whole bunch of stories but let's stick with the happy one today.

Read all about it here. 

Sarnath

Another old picture.

Kalpesh Lathigra

Just two of the pictures from Kalpesh Lathigra's splendid and very original  Transmission series.

Consortium of Pub-going, Loose and Forward Women

The Sri Ram Sena have defended Indian and Hindu honour this year by attacking women doing various un-Indian things, such as drinking or wearing un-Indian clothes. Sri want to uphold Indian culture, which in Sri Ram Sena's case means beating up women. Here is the video of one of their early actions, the Mangalore pub attack.

In response, a group of Indian women called the "Consortium of Pub-going, Loose and Forward Women" have created the Pink Chaddi Campaign (Pink nickers = pink chaddi), and started the Pink Chaddi Campaign Blogspot.

Good luck to the pink chaddis and God Bless India. You can hear about the campaign on this Radio Four interview here.

Exotic India and Harvey Milk

White Tiger by Aravind Adiga shares some of the themes of Danny Boyle's Oscar-nominated Slumdog Millionaire; it gets beyond the surface exoticism (as pictured above) and spirituality of India to show the culturally-embedded corruption that infests the country's beating heart. Adiga's hero likens it to a Rooster-Coop, a place into which you are trapped for life by the ties of religion, village and family.

What marks Slumdog Millionaire as special for a big-ticket movie is the main characters are all of Indian-descent, there is real-life Hindi language in there and things aren't made too easy for western audiences (despite what the Guardian called the complaints of Amitabh Bachan ( see his blog here where he says he didn't complain).

This is quite a change. I remember seeing Gandhi and Cry Freedom, films where the lives of Gandhi and Steve Biko need Candice Bergen and Kevin Kline to make sense of the less-Angloid people's lives.

How we've moved on. Or have we. Near the top of my list of films to see at the cinema (that-I-won't-see-until-they-come-out-on-DVD ) is Milk, starring Sean Penn as the gay San Francisco councillor, Harvey Milk. There are no gay actors in Hollywood, so it's obviously unfair to suggest that gay actors should play gay characters. But as Philip Hensher says in today's Independent.


"Clearly, there are people out there who can only see the world through the apertures licensed by the film industry. In the case of the lives of homosexuals and lesbians, those apertures are unusually tiny – I've never seen anything in the cinema remotely resembling my life, or the lives of people I spend most of my time with, which seems, on the face of it, distinctly peculiar. Films like Milk enlarge the Hollywood repertoire. We shouldn't kid ourselves, however, that the movie industry is starting to think of us as human, or anything."

Read the whole article here.

How Dare you, Mr Nehru

picture: Henri Cartier-Bresson


Another Magnum blast from the past, Cartier-Bresson's one insightful image from India, of the outrageous Mr Nehru propositioning Lady Mountbatten in the presence of the good lord himself.

Fazal Sheikh

The Deutsche Borse Prize is upon us again. Last week I spoke to the four shortlisted photographersfor an upcoming feature in the BJP and a rare pleasure it was. The winner is always good, but sometimes the shortlist can be patchy. This year it's incredibly consistent - an anti-art list of committed/committable photographers who really don't care about the art world.

Fazal Sheikh has been nominated for Ladli, a book in which Sheikh gets behind the illusion of India's economic development to examine a country where, as he says in the book's introduction, a girl's "...very gender, from conception, makes many women the potential victim's of a patriarchal system which tacitly condones their exploitation, mistreatment, even death."

The photography is simple and direct and so is the text, deep photography dealing with deep political and cultural issues. You can see the whole book online here.

One of the organisations Sheikh worked with was Shakti Shalini, which is run by two women (one muslim, one hindu) whose daughters were murdered for dowry payments. You can read about Shakti Shalini and other issues that are the flip side of India's economic miracle here.

And as Sheikh points out, the horrors of forced labour, forced prostitution and domestic abuse aren't confined to India - you can also find them closer to home, right on our doorsteps.