When I was a child in Lahore my parents employed a driver called Sultan. A retired soldier, Sultan was from a village near Jehlum. Slightly hard of hearing (he’d been a gunner), Sultan was a cheerful man in his 60s who readily joined in our games of badminton. But to me the most interesting fact about Sultan was that he could speak Italian. A rudimentary, broken Italian, but Italian nonetheless, picked up as a prisoner of war in Italy. He called me signorina and taught me three Italian words: si, grazie and gelati. Decades later, when I told my children about Sultan, they were gobsmacked. What was a Pakistani villager doing fighting in Italy? He wasn’t Pakistani then, I explained, he was Indian. Sultan was one of two million Indian soldiers who fought for the Allies in World War II. ‘No! Really?’ they breathed.
My children (daughter 17, son 14) were born and raised in London and have had the good fortune to attend fantastic schools where they’ve been offered, alongside the usual array of subjects, a rich diet of music, drama, art, sport and languages (not just European languages but Arabic, Mandarin and Russian). Their extracurricular clubs include art history and astronomy, feminism and book binding, mindfulness (yes, mindfulness!) and carpentry. In my Convent School in Lahore I was told to sit quietly and listen. In London they are encouraged to question and argue.
Statue of Cecil Rhodes at Oxford
What was a Pakistani villager doing fighting in Italy?
Yet, for all the range and candour of their education, they haven’t once encountered Britain’s colonial past in school. It does not appear in their history syllabus. My daughter is now in her first year of A’levels. She has studied history from the age of nine but she’s never learnt about Britain’s empire. Last year her GCSE syllabus included the two World Wars. Though she read about the horrors of the Somme and Ypres and also about Hiroshima as well as the brutal battles in the Pacific and North Africa, no mention was made of the 1.3 million Indian soldiers who fought in the First World War and the 87,000 jawans (privates) killed in Tobruk, Kohima and Imphal. She had no notion of the massive contribution India - and Britain’s other colonies - made to the war effort. Hence the astonishment at Sultan’s Italian connection.
Of course my kids know that their grandparents, along with the citizens of almost half the globe, were once British subjects. But they’ve learnt this at home, not at school. When my daughter was eleven she had to write about an eminent Victorian from a list chosen by her teacher. Though the list included literary luminaries like Dickens and Robert Louis Stevens, Kipling - that great chronicler of the British Raj and Nobel Prize winner for literature - was conspicuous by his absence. Aged twelve, my son learnt in a Geography class that one of the many reasons Ghana (known as the Gold Coast in the nineteenth century) was economically less developed was because of its colonial past. It had been stripped of its wealth by the British. Just one bland sentence.
Colonised brothers - Nigerian and Indian soldiers during the Burma campaign of World War II
I don’t know whether this amnesia is due to embarrassment or small mindedness or fear of reparations. Admittedly, efforts have been made recently to set the historical record straight. BBC has aired searing documentaries about soldiers from the colonies in the World Wars. Indian historians and commentators have done solid research on the subject and their books have been published in the UK. The Booker winner of 2014, Narrow Road to the Deep North, chronicled Australian soldiers’ horrific experiences as Japanese prisoners of war.
British Indian Army soldiers examine a captured German tank during World War II
My daughter studied history in Britain from the age of nine but she's never learnt about Britain's empire
Currently some students are agitating in Oxford University to remove the statue of Cecil Rhodes from outside Oriel College. They say it offends them to see a white-supremacist glorified. Chris Patten, the Chancellor of the university, argues that Rhodes was a man of his time. Of course his views are abhorrent today but we can’t pretend he didn’t exist. And if we remove the statue, do we also knock down the college buildings he paid for? And what about the prize he endowed with his fortune from which thousands of students - many of them from the Commonwealth - have benefited? Patten’s point is that, however painful or shameful, we must debate these issues - after all that’s what a university is for - but we can’t re-write history or censor the past.
British school textbooks must also acknowledge the less savoury aspects of their history. Without it, they are distorted and dishonest. And so when we in the Subcontinent rush to change the names of roads or cities built by the British, or for political expediency airbrush our textbooks of our shared Hindu-Muslim past, we too should remember that merely pretending it didn’t happen doesn’t make it true.
Moni Mohsin is the creator of the bestselling Diary of a Social Butterfly
