Wanted: Loyal Natives to Discuss Empire on the BBC. posted by Richard Seymour

Please make yourself available to Mr Andrew Marr, remembering to make the appropriate genuflective noises and express sufficient gratitude:

Open Letter to Andrew Marr, Presenter, Start the Week on Radio 4, the BBC.

Dear Andrew,

This is an open letter that I am going to ask the people--many of whom are prominent academics-- I have copied in to circulate as widely as possible, to draw the attention of people to the egregious manner in which you dealt with the follow-up this morning's show on 'The Legacy of Empire'. I am appalled and shocked at your biased introduction to the evening phone-in. You use dismissive words like 'blarney', 'aggressive', and 'too much heat' to describe an impassioned discussion of a painful and traumatic legacy that didn't fit the genteel upper-class British converation over 'tea and cucumber sandwiches'model. This then set the tenor for the phone-in that followed.

But worst of all is the patent attempt to bring in a 'positively disposed to Empire' Indian woman to neutralise what you saw as the 'aggression' of the Indian woman you had invited to be on your morning programme. It is obvious what that is trying to accomplish and completely unworthy of someone in your position. It is, after all, an old colonial strategy: pick the good native to neutralise the bad one quickly 'The British empire was good on the whole,' she announces, to Andrew Marr's relief. What this
person's credentials are to opine on Empire and India other than 'being' of Indian descent and 'married to a white man' are completely unclear. Is everyone of British descent qualified to discuss the Norman Conquest, the Magna Carta or even the Normandy landing? She tells us that the Empire means a lot to Indians because her grandfather salutes her white husband(!). Empire is 'anachronistic' for young Indians, apparently. Each of her questions/comments to callers betrayed, I'm sorry to say, as a teacher, ignorance and little other than a desire to smooth over any rough edges from the morning. As though there were no connection between sectarian violence and the Partition! And as though a critique of Empire precludes a critique of the Indian state which often works with what it inherited from the colonial state: please see the work of most people copied in on this letter. We find it possible to do both self-criticism and a critique of colonialism, and what is more, to see the connections in a complex historical and political frame. Next time, at least find a scholar of/on India--rather than a young woman from the office next door- if you want some damage control done. That is, if you are bothered about being serious at all rather than getting an agenda through.

I realised from your mode of operating today and how you handled the programme (including the nervousness about real debate as opposed to some facile smorgasbord 'point of view' dance) that your own pro-colonial biases are pretty apparent. Nevertheless, I would have expected a more general *show* of fairness (and that favourite BBC buzzword 'balance') from someone in your position. Apparently not. Several have written to me condemning the shameless plugging of Ferguson's racist text and the way in which the whole programme was not about the legacy of empire, but that text and its release this week. People will be interested in the following nuggets from the text the BBC wishes to launch as a definitive account of Empire:

'Like attracted and continues to attract like; those who are drawn to 'the Other' may in fact be atypical in their sexual predilections'

'When a Chinese woman marries a European man, the chances are relatively high that their blood groups may be incompatible, so that only the first child they conceive will be viable'

'Human beings do seem predisposed to trust members of their own race as traditionally defined'

We are supposed to react to this kind of thing with a lack of forcefulness or passion, and just to the whole Oxbridge boys back-slapping tally-ho routine. And if we don't, a nice native will be found and then wheeled on to say 'No, no, guys, it was all great really!.

I regret coming on at the last minute. As an academic with serious interests in the matter, I thought I'd be participating in a real discussion, not a book plug, a sham and an apologia for the past. (Those of you who are simpy copied in to this letter should know that the original programme had three white scholars, two of whom are pretty openly pro-empire, and one token black man, until the BBC were told at the last minute that they should ferry in an Indian woman so they could look 'balanced' and 'fair'. Then they didn't like what they heard: the pliant Oriental woman they had hoped for didn't turn up, so they quickly ferried one in for the evening to recover lost ground.

Nevertheless, I shall take some heart from the scores of emails that have flooded in to me thanking me for challenging Ferguson's biases and egregious theory. You really think that we should take two centuries of exploitation, war, famines and immiseration and do some sort of clinical 'balance sheet'? Well, we did. And as Robert said, it came out negative. Doing another 20 pro-empire programmes with a gaggle of Indian women willing to echo what you want them to say aren't going to change that, but do go ahead and give it your best.

I told Victoria I would be happy to come on again. Allow me to withdraw that offer firmly and unconditionally. I'm an academic, not a paid monkey.

Shame on you!


Dr Priyamvada Gopal
University Senior Lecturer
Faculty of English
Cambridge

You can listen to the show here. I think, having listened to this, that the real sleaze ball in this show is Niall Ferguson, who manages to insinuate his white, male superiority in several oleaginous ways. It isn't easy to quantify, but there are some repellent moments wherein he simply finds himself incapable of listening - everything someone else says is 'silly', 'no one' takes it 'seriously'. His views are backed up by the immense authority of being the son of colonists in Kenya, of being the self-confident, swaggering white man sans jodphurs. One hears him sneeringly put down the uppity natives several times, each time with increasing arrogance. He plays fast and loose with his rhetoric: rejecting the 'label' of a defender of empire, before going on to apologise for it in the most crude fashion possible; pretending not to take a moral view on empire, but then valorising it; pretending not to engage in utopianism, but buttressing his support for empire with various dystopias; pretending not to be nostalgic for empire (he must assume that no one reads his books, with their reminiscences about his 'magical' childhood - would that it were so), then going on to enthuse about its achievements and bemoaning its fall; insisting that Britain acquired its empire in a fit of absent-mindedness, before going on to lay out the strategic, premeditated character of empire-building etc. There's a curious defense of empire raised - when they die, they go through their bloodiest, most violent periods. And therefore? And therefore, one assumes, they mustn't be terminated. Ferguson asserts that colonial nationalist movements played no part in the downfall of the British Empire, "heroic though they, er, well, some of them were". Well, this bears some thinking about. Ferguson's preferred explanation is that Hitler brought the British state to near bankruptcy. One assumes if that explanation wasn't available, the relative economic decline from the 1870s might have sufficed. If not that, then a failure of nerve, a lack of commitment, a liberal betrayal - what is absolutely clear is that he prefers whatever explanation denies the natives any proper agency, any real capacity to affect change. Indeed, his account of empire omits so much of the experience of those who were its subjects, and his enthusiasm for it pays no attention to any preference they might have - indeed is openly dismissive of the only two individuals in the debate who come from colonial backgrounds. He is simply incredulous that they might have a different take to he on their experience and those with whom they share a history. Niall Ferguson may once have been an historian, but he is not one now. He is an unabashed, paid apologist for the new American Empire, and the sheer duplicity, the smirking glibness, the cheap macho swagger, the torsions of rhetoric and the condescending sneer are all symptoms of this.