By: Shelbin MS
By S Neeraj Krishna
HISTORIAN Willian Dalrymple has urged the UK to acknowledge the “really terrible things that happened in our past” and set up a “museum of colonialism”.
He said the monuments of “war criminals” from Britain’s colonial past should be taken down and displayed at a public venue, like the National Museum of African American History and Culture in the US.
Dalrymple emphasised that the British education system had, for long, been hiding gory chapters of imperial history.
“At the moment children in schools go from Henry VIII to Wilberforce and the impression they get is that the British Empire was always about liberating slaves and always about anti-racism,” he said during the the recent Jaipur Lit Fest’s concluding debate titled ‘The Age of Iconoclasm’.
“The things the British did in India and elsewhere are simply not taught in the syllabus and that is a problem. When the British go out into the world, they don’t know what Indians know about the Raj or what the Irish know about the potato famine, they don’t know what the Australians know about the mass extinction of the Indigenous Tasmanians.…”
Referring to the pulling down of slave trader Edward Colston’s statue in Bristol, Dalrymple said he “certainly wouldn’t want to see most of the nation’s statues torn down”, but insisted that imperial heroes who were modern-day villains deserved to be in a museum.