As the bride stepped out of the antique Rolls Royce, her royal veil, five metres long, trailed behind. Hand embroidered blossoms and flowers represented fifty-three Commonwealth countries. They were from nations that Britain had colonised. There was a time when the sun did not set on the British Empire. A tiny nation had captured the world, literally.
But the wedding’s fairytale credentials are debatable. Harry, 6th in line to the British throne, grandson of the reigning monarch, is a popular figure the world over. And especially in the US, from where the bride hails. Prince Harry is also popular in the former British colonies – where people, deep down in their hearts, are still enslaved by the glamour and pomp of royalty.
Meghan Markle is biracial. On her paternal side, according to Boston-based New England Historic Genealogical Society, Meghan could be Prince Harry’s 17th cousin, as she is a descendant of King Edward III. On her maternal side Meghan could be a descendant of an African slave on a plantation in 19th-century America. According to Massachusetts-based genealogist Elizabeth Banas, Meghan’s ancestry four generations ago on her maternal side is mostly people living difficult lives in rapidly growing cities.
The diaphanous fabric of the veil reminded us of the muslin and chintz cloth producers of 19th century India, of the plight of textile weavers who were forced by their British masters not to produce the fabric that they had been weaving and printing for thousands of years
Meghan, however, has come a long way from her ancestral past. Her mother raised her in relative comfort. Her life has been very different from the ancestors who most likely sweated long hours on farms in Georgia. Mehgan received superior education in private schools in a country where an average, upper middle class, white American kid goes to a public school. For higher education, Meghan had the option of private universities and attended the prestigious Northwestern University in Illinois. She received more than moderate success as a TV star in North America. In 2017, Meghan’s net worth was an estimated $5 million. This before she married into British royalty.
On her wedding day, people the world over adored and fawned over her plain looks and applauded her for a subdued gown that she selected for her special day, forgetting in the euphoria of the moment that the gown was designed by a renowned British designer at the upscale fashion house Givenchy. The gown was made from specially developed double bonded silk cady, a kind of silk that is used for high end attire and which Givenchy’s Waight Keller retrieved after an extensive search of textile factories all over Europe. She and the Princess-to-be spent hours deciding every detail of this special dress – the gown with its estimated cost of $400,000 certainly did not come off the Walmart rack!
To reinstate her superior status in society, the bride wore Queen Mary’s diamond tiara holding her long veil in place. Certainly not an ordinary woman, this is a lady conscious of her newly acquired status in her new country. The British monarchy is entrenched in tradition and the ceremony saw glimpses of heritage at every step. Meghan also wore diamond earrings and a diamond bracelet by French jeweler Cartier.
Queen Mary’s tiara was holding the veil which was decorated with 53 flowers that harked back to Britain’s colonial past. A past, the bride with her prestigious degree in International Studies, still wanted to flaunt to the world and one that the world mistakenly thought modern Britain was ashamed of. A past the people from those 53 countries had all but forgotten on Meghan’s wedding day. The suppression, the inhumane oppression, now all lost in oblivion in the ecstasy of a fairytale wedding. Aparna Kapadia’s excellent take on the fifty-three flowers was an eye-opener The diaphanous fabric of the veil reminded us of the muslin and chintz cloth producers of 19th century India, of the plight of textile weavers who were forced by their British masters not to produce the fabric that they had been weaving and printing for thousands of years, because the colonisers wanted them to stagnate so that Britain could sell its own textiles. This oppression brought unprecedented hardships to textile-weaving communities in India.
The flowers from the colonised countries in the Subcontinent also reminded us of the massacres of the innocent, the injustices of the colonisers to the common people in India and the enforced famines on a population which was ironically financing the British Industrial Revolution. New writing by Indians has opened up flood gates of accusations on the colonisers of the Indian subcontinent.
Britain’s colonial past is murky at best. However, in a YouGov poll, 44% of Britons still feel that colonising the 53 countries was the right thing to do and that they are proud of it.
This proud country is not only proud of its colonial past, but also of its monarchy and the royal family.
In 19th century India, as the British gained control, they ran an effective campaign to malign and ridicule India’s royalty. They killed the princes of the Mughal dynasty. Their barbarity continued as they hung the severed heads of Mughals at the Khooni Darwaza in Delhi. They snatched the kingdoms of other Indian kings and prevented them from passing their properties to their heirs. Their very effective campaign to make common Indians hate their royal families stands in direct contrast to Britain’s own unwavering adulation for their royals in the 21st century.
Generations of Indians reading their own history through a British prism ridiculed Mughal Emperor Muhammad Shah and the Nawab of Awadh Wajid Ali Shah as effeminate and ineffective rulers. Generations still believe in exaggerated accounts of temple smashing by Mughal emperor Aurangzeb. Audrey Truschke’s balanced study of Aurangzeb negates that accusation. Generations still believe that Bahadur Shah could not have ruled as he was debauched, incompetent and as ineffective as his predecessors. William Dalrymple’s excellent book The Last Mughal exonerated him in history.
The artisans who meticulously embroidered the Jasmine, the Indian Lotus and the White Water Lily on Meghan’s royal veil, would wash their hands every half hour to keep the silk tulle and the silk thread in pristine condition. These delicate flowers from the Subcontinent on the new British royal’s veil, are also a reminder of the last monarchy that the Subcontinent had and its Mughal king, the tormented Bahadur Shah Zafar, exiled from his motherland, who died longing for a small piece of it to be buried in. Ironically that very land is still represented as part of an empire on a new bride’s veil, 70 years after the Subcontinent freed itself from the British yoke.
Modernity in British royalty has many sides. Accepting a woman of colour as a prince’s wife, who is 6th in line to the throne, does not become a representation of modern thought. The new princess’s deceptive minimal look on her wedding day does not become a signal for modernity in an archaic system. The new princess’s eagerness to still revel in the unethical, unjust colonial empire’s lost glory shows that there are still questions of redemption and soul-searching staring hard on British society’s face.
A lone Mughal King, depleted in health and status, exiled in poverty to a foreign land, was brilliantly captured in a watercolour painting by one of his British captors. The painting from the 19th century now stands in dark contrast to the pomp of the British monarchy in the 21st century.