Daily Times

The British Museum this week learned a harsh, yet long overdue, lesson. Namely, that just because as an institution it is dedicated to documenting evolutionary and cultural history of a world it long ago plundered — doesn’t mean there it should remain.

Britain has long prided itself on a multicultural tradition that subscribes to the progressive principles of integration in both the public and private spheres. Indeed, this was the unequivocal reason, a certain Mr Blair opportunistically pronounced, that the London bombers had struck. An assault on British values and freedoms. And it was this same multiculturalism that allowed him to taunt ‘Old Europe’ over what he saw as its retrogressive social contract based on the principles of immersion; a full embrace of a secular identity that straddles both the public and private spheres.

All of which makes it all the more unfortunate the Museum’s recent ‘misspeak’ on social media. Briefly put, the Keeper of Asia answered a question on Twitter about the process of designing exhibition labels accessible to a diverse visiting body. “We aim to be understandable by 16-year-olds. Sometimes Asian names can be confusing, so we have to be careful about using too many.” One has to wonder how so many of Britain’s pre-teens got to grips with all the intricately named spells, rituals and whatnot that Harry Potter and his friends had to contend with at a far much more tender age. Realising her mistake, the curator went on to explain that limited space was also a factor: “the Buddhist bodhisattva of mercy is known as Avalokitesvara in India, Guanyin in China, Kwanum in Korea and Kannon in Japan.” Prompting one Twitter wag to note that all the above fit neatly into a single tweet. So there.

The Daily Mail’s Richard Littlejohn, a man who can always be relied upon to dumb down opinion come rain or shine, was quick to use his national column to engage in a bit of non-interactive trolling. Totally bamboozled was he at the ensuing Twitter storm that dared talk about racism, imperialism and perpetuating colonialist heritage. Indeed, his poor heart sank as he read these ‘offensive’ words. Then his incredulity at how the Museum was forced to issue what he terms a grovelling apology some 90 minutes later.

Gosh! It took the British Museum, a publicly-funded institution of learning, a full hour-and-half to get there.

Yet it’s not really his fault. Men of his generation were not taught the true history about those heady days when Britannia ruled the waves. And today not much has changed.

This is why India’s Shashi Tharoor has been so spectacularly relentless in his campaign to educate the British establishment about the very damaging impact of its own prolonged and systematic crusade to silence the voices of those whom it subjugated; to erase their narrative experience from the story.

“There’s no real awareness of the fact that Britain financed its Industrial Revolution and its prosperity from the depredations of Empire, the fact that Britain came to one of the richest countries in the world in the 18th century and reduced it, after two centuries of plunder, to one of the poorest”

Dr Tharoor, earlier this year, gave a spectacularly punchy interview to British terrestrial broadcaster, Channel 4. Answering the crudely put question as to whether colonialism was a British or Indian problem, he said it was the former, given that there is so much historical amnesia about what the Empire really entailed. “There’s no real awareness of the atrocities, of the fact that Britain financed its Industrial Revolution and its prosperity from the depredations of Empire, the fact that Britain came to one of the richest countries in the world in the 18th century and reduced it, after two centuries of plunder, to one of the poorest.”

The British Museum raked in during the last financial year £39.2m in revenue and received £2.6m from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. Meaning that not content with its past plundering – it has now turned its attention to looting the British taxpayer. Which is, of course, not cricket.

The writer is the Deputy Managing Editor, Daily Times. She can be reached at mirandahusain@me.com and tweets @humeiwei

Published in Daily Times, September 16^th 2017.