Satnam Sangla’s Land of the Empire is a work about the history of the British Empire. The book has been a best seller since it was published last month, and has been praised by critics as “heartless” … moving and exciting (Guardian), “excellent” and “balanced” (Sunday Times). However, the British public sent handwritten hate mail to the author and published thousands of abusive tweets of “imperialist nostalgic racists”. The author said that some speeches were close to death threats.
“If you are Brown and want to talk about race in Britain, you will get a lot of nonsense replies, which is always the case,” Sangla said. He is a reporter for The Times, and the author of the memoir A Bun Boy and the novel Marriage Materials. In 2019, he produced a documentary about the empire for Channel 4, focusing on the Amritsar massacre, and received “hundreds or even thousands of messages, letters and complaints. So I had a little understanding at that time. I know some people will go crazy. But now the situation has escalated, and some threats are too vicious. “
Sangla shared some news and letters he received on his Twitter account and described the abuse as “evidence that we need to have this conversation”. He said that compared with the attack on David Olusega, the abuse he suffered was only a small part. Olusega is a historian and host. His last book, Blacks and Britons, examines the relationship between the British Isles and people in Africa and the Caribbean.
“From the’ black life is life’, the empire was armed by the right. The idea now is that you must be proud of the history of the empire to be proud of Britain, and vice versa. “Empire has become synonymous with patriotism and race,” Sangla said. When discussing empire, we are actually talking about race. The empire is that white people conquer brown people. So, when brown people like David or me talk about empire, they will anger the public in a very profound way. David challenged the imperial hierarchy, but he also challenged the traditional way of telling the story of the empire, that is, a 50-year-old white man boasted on TV and sometimes boarded a train in India. There is a nostalgic perspective. All of a sudden, the ownership of this story is held by the Browns, which will really anger many people.
In sharp contrast, the historian William dalrymple also wrote similar topics to Sangla and Olusega, and severely criticized Britain for “being ignorant of all the most uncomfortable things in our empire”, but he said that he had not received any hate mail from the British. However, he was mercilessly ridiculed by the revived Hindu right because he wrote articles about the Mughal dynasty.
“There is a whole generation who are very willing to believe that the German Empire is terrible and the Belgians are terrible. They cut off everyone’s hands. But somehow, the British Empire was completely different to them. “William Dallimp Image source: Murdo Macleod/Guardian
“Although my writing is similar to Satnam’s, I have never received such news. This is a direct result of his race and color, “said dalrymple, whose new book Anarchy focuses on the” ruthless “rise of the East India Company. “What Satnam wrote is no different from what I wrote, but my book got a free pass. What he experienced and wrote about the empire is very different from what I wrote as a Caucasian.
Sangla said that as a columnist of colored minorities, he had been insulted by racism in different degrees before. “In the press, everyone will be treated like this? But this experience made me realize that I may be an easier target than most people, “he said. This time, his publisher Viking “endlessly” checked whether he adapted to it. “It made me realize that this was the first time in my life that I was not accepted. Some of his readers and Twitter fans expressed their support for him online, and some even said that they would send some Empire to those who abused him.
“These abuses just prove his point in the book: we urgently need to look at the history of our empire correctly to understand the current situation of this country,” added Mary Monte, editor of Viking publishing house Sangla, adding that so many abuses are disturbing.
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In most cases, Sangla was reviled and “invigorated”, but occasionally “inhuman” attacks made him feel uneasy, but he was not intimidated. “To some extent, this proves the necessity of this dialogue. No dialogue or theme I have written has received such an unbalanced response, as if the power of public opinion seems to be completely inversely proportional to the amount of knowledge, “he said.”
Dallimp agrees with this. “There is a whole generation who are very willing to believe that the German Empire is terrible and the Belgians are terrible. They cut off everyone’s hands. But somehow, the British empire is completely different to them, only tea parties, smiling Indian lords and ladies in petticoats on the lawn, not all other empires, and they only know exploitation, “he said.”
He believes that people want to believe that their ancestors are kind, but other countries have reflected on their past, while Britain has not. This is a “universal phenomenon”.
“Germans were taught to discuss the evils of the Third Reich when they were young, and this kind of thing must never happen again,” Dallinpu said. “There has never been such a content in the British education system. By the 21st century, most things in the empire have been abandoned for 70 years, but we still haven’t liquidated them.
Sangla added that this situation was also “instigated” by politicians “playing with the cultural war between empires”. For example, Robert Genrick said that legislation should be made to protect the statue, and Boris Johnson said that Churchill’s statue should be protected with his last breath, even if it would not be demolished at all. He said: “They are catering to these people. “These people know little about the empire. It sounds ridiculous to equate pride in 500 years of history with pride in being British. “