The need to tell the WHOLE story of Empire.
The reason our country looks the way it does is because of Empire and it’s not taught enough in schools or universities. We can’t properly understand this country without knowing about the British Empire. The whole story is rarely told. Its usually the genocides, torture and massacres that are omitted. The Age of Imperialism is returning so we must not forget what that means. India was the richest country in the world in the C17th but the British Raj drained it of its wealth. Despite that, when talking about Empire, some nuance is required. The institution should be criticised as a lesson in what not to do but many of the people who worked for the Empire were good hardworking people who genuinely wanted to improve the world. That is what I tried to do in my novel Sculpting the Elephant.
The first part is located in Oxford where I live, especially in the former industrial and working class areas of Jericho and St Thomas’s but is set when Jericho was gentrifying and the Oxford Rock scene had started to transform the district. I devised a Sculpting the Elephant walk of interesting landmarks.Sculpting the Elephant Walk leaflet
The other half is in India.
I can write about it with authenticity because of my Indian (Hindu) born husband, Atam, was born near Lahore in what is now Pakistan, so was a refugee thanks to the world’s biggest ethnic cleansing engineered by the imperial power that was the UK. It’s possible to read Sculpting the Elephant as a moving love story and ignore the historical subplot but I hope the latter grips readers. I invented a Victorian polymath, Bartholmew Carew who leaves for India believing in the colonial myths. As an open minded and curious man, he soon becomes disillusioned with the Raj. I asked Dr. Jim Bennett, the former director of the Museum of the History of Science, if he could suggest a scientific project that Batholomew could be involved in.
Jim suggested the Great Trigonometrical Survey – the nineteenth century equivalent of the endeavour to get into space in the C20th! The inspirational thing about this 70 year long project to map the whole of India including the Himalayas is that the Indians and Brits worked together and respected each other. Put simply the mapping of India was one of the greatest scientific achievements of the C19. Measuring the Himalayas with heavy C19 equipment meant it was an achievement of human endurance too. The story of this survey is a great and often forgotten achievement and also defined the country we know as India.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-C5CQz-PKg&feature=youtu.be
In my memoir,
I explain immigration from the Commonwealth – we are here because you were there.
You will gather that I don’t believe in sweeping away the horrors of empire, the Transatlantic Slave Trade, the Opium Wars, the massacres and the hasty departure from India using the army to protect the leaving British but not to police partition. Neither do I believe in stereotyped narratives because life isn’t like that – its messy.
Even after recounting the terrible consequences of our former imperial rule, the predominant tone in India is of sadness. They talk of the English language, the cities of Mumbai (Bombay), Chennai (Madras) and Kolkata (Calcutta) founded by the Raj, the railways, the law and cricket as positive legacies but criticise our hypocrisy that we ignore the massacres, the racism, famines and economic exploitation.
I want my books to reflect how each human being is unique. In my opinion, we need to connect and judge each other on our individual behaviour and not on stereotypes! I don’t want to be labelled by association with the British government. I’ve done everything I can think of to say NOT IN MY NAME, for example , disagreeing with my government’s arming and giving intelligence to Israel’s destruction of Gaza, its instituitions and its people. Our politicians need to distinguish between PATRIOTISM and NATIONALISM. The former is love of one’s country but the latter is my country right or wrong and is dangerous.
The Hollywood actor, Kundan Khan, made a fabulous audiobook of Sculpting the Elephant. Unfortunately Essential Audiobooks went out of business before it could be put on audible. I’m hoping to remedy that in 2026.
He was present at the launch of my memoir at the Nehru Centre in Mayfair.
