A little ignorance of history may be a good thing
Sathnam Sanghera's documentary on empire is a compelling personal portrait, but an unconvincing polemic
Waiting for a book to be made into the movie turns out to be a viable strategy even for non-fiction. So much time has passed since the release of Sathnam Sanghera’s acclaimed Empireland that Channel 4 has turned it into a documentary – and a good one too.
Sanghera has been arguing that Britain should reconcile itself to its imperial past for some years as a journalist. Adding a personal touch to this theme, the documentary describes his progress from a British Punjabi upbringing in Wolverhampton to being a columnist for the Times, via stints in grammar school and Cambridge university.
That trajectory has made him feel estranged both from the largely white elite he joined and the relatives he somewhat left behind. Interviews with academics about stolen relics, with peers about colonist statues and with shrinks about brittle patriotism are therefore spliced between him recounting his exposure to racial abuse during his childhood and through recent backlash to Empireland.
The film is an attempt to reconcile those strands. Many of the best parts of the film are its subject’s personal connection to the history, for instance when he is brought to tears at a rare war memorial to Sikh soldiers near Brighton.
What’s less convincing is Sanghera’s overall thesis. First, he contends the white British are largely unaware of the negatives of our old empire. Second, he thinks that if we accepted the negatives as well as the positives we would become a happier nation with less racial and nationalistic strife.
There are doubtless people reluctant to admit that British conduct over the years has been a tad saucy in places. A YouGov poll from 2019 claims that a third of Brits feel that the empire is more something to be proud of than not, against a fifth that say the opposite.
Sanghera still easily finds people who acknowledge the shameful stuff, including Clive of India’s own descendent. One only has to recall outrage over Nigel Biggar’s colonial apologism a few years back to be unsurprised by this finding.
He is on firmer ground when he raises the trope that schoolkids rarely get taught much beyond the Second World War, Henry VIII and the Battle of Hastings. Just over a decade ago it was my experience that the empire didn’t feature that much in history lessons either.
And yet, how plausible is it that historical ignorance, wilful or otherwise, causes racism? In this case the broad correlation surely points the other way. The average Briton in the 1950s probably knew more about the empire than the average Briton today, but the latter is far less racist.
As others have pointed out, if anything knowledge of history is often what causes ethnic groups to kill each other with such enthusiasm. And other times, as with our facile relationship to German history, the result is offensive football chants, not hate crime.
I nonetheless suspect as the children of immigrants rise through society such calls to draw attention to the ugliness of the British Empire will grow louder. In the meantime, Sanghera’s documentary is a compelling portrait of one man’s relationship to the history of his own country and that of his ancestors.
As we were paying for dinner the other night a friend used the word ‘delta’ for the difference between two amounts. We had fun ribbing him about it for a few minutes, until in mock anguish he cried out: “Do you not say that? I say it every day!”
Doubtless this was an example of somebody who pushes words round for a living picking on the more useful chap who deals with the finances. Groups’ tendency to spin off their own language is clearly a natural one, even if it produces barbaric corporate speak that should be a shooting offence.
Experts may argue that such jargon is technically precise. My experience is that most of it can be swapped with plain English without any loss of meaning, while being more easily understood. As an exasperated classmate of mine said many years ago on discovering another lumpen synonym, “Why didn’t you just use the normal word?”