标题: 2022.08.15英国学生应该了解英国对印度的统治 [打印本页] 作者: shiyi18 时间: 2022-8-23 08:50 标题: 2022.08.15英国学生应该了解英国对印度的统治 By Invitation | The 75th anniversary of India’s independence
What British pupils should know about Britain’s rule of India: a history teacher’s view
Tom Allen says that teachers need to offer more than a list of its positive and negative effects
Aug 15th 2022
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“The things the British did in India are simply not taught in the syllabus and this is a problem,” said William Dalrymple at the Jaipur Literary Festival in September 2020. “When the British go out into the world,” the Delhi-based historian continued, “they don’t know what Indians know about the Raj or what the Irish know about the potato famine, they don’t know what the Australians know about the mass extinction of the Indigenous Tasmanians, so we need to teach this in our schools.”
For history teachers like me, the first reaction to pronouncements like Mr Dalrymple’s is often one of irritation, as it reveals how little wider society understands about how “the curriculum” in Britain actually functions. A national history curriculum exists, but aside from the Holocaust, which must be taught, it consists of a very broad set of guidelines. What is more, there is technically no requirement for academies—state-funded schools which are not accountable to local-authority control—to follow them (and they comprise four-fifths of all secondary schools in England). This means that in most schools it is up to the teachers themselves to decide whether or not they are going to educate their pupils about the Raj, the Irish famine or the Black war in Tasmania.
Mr Dalrymple does have a point, however. Many history departments have traditionally elected to romanticise the British Empire. But this is changing, and the Black Lives Matter protests across the world in June 2020 were a turning point. The toppling of Edward Colston’s statue in Bristol at that time brought the continuing legacy of British colonialism into sharp focus. (Locals no longer wanted the statue of a slaver in their city.) Colonial history was already on the curriculum at my school, but my colleagues and I realised that we needed to reconsider not just what we were teaching, but how we were teaching it. When millions of people died of famine in India under British rule, is it appropriate to ask our pupils to weigh this statistic up against the fact that the British built railways?
At the academy in Bath where I worked for eight years, I taught a series of lessons on the British Empire in India to pupils aged 12 to 13. After learning about the East India Company and critical people such as Robert Clive, Tipu Sultan and Rammohan Roy, we made a whistle-stop tour of more than three centuries of Indian history. Then pupils evaluated two historical interpretations of British rule: one highly critical, as argued by Shashi Tharoor, an Indian politician; and one sympathetic, from Lawrence James, a British historian. Then they would explain which of the two they found more convincing.
The idea behind this sequence of lessons was that the pupils could make up their own minds about the impact of colonialism on India—to tot up a list of “positives” and “negatives” and use these to decide which view they favoured. One of the textbooks we made use of encourages exactly this approach: it suggests that pupils pick pieces of information off its pages to place into the “positives” column (“the British built railways”) or the “negatives” (“criticising the British could land you in prison for sedition”).
More recently, however, such analysis of British rule in India has come under fire. A growing number of academic voices, both in Britain and overseas, have pointed out that this “balance-sheet” approach to the empire is deeply flawed. In her 2020 book “Time’s Monster: History, Conscience and Britain’s Empire”, Priya Satia, an American historian, argues that we would never compile a list of “positives” and “negatives” about fascist regimes in Europe, out of respect to their victims. Professor Satia also points out that a “balance-sheet” suggests that the impact of colonialism in India is over, and that a final account can be settled, suggesting to pupils that the empire is firmly in the past.
Now instead of asking pupils to look for “positives” and “negatives”, we should ask some simple questions: what did the British do in India? Why did they do it? Who benefited? And how does it still affect communities today? This reframing will lead to richer discussions. Instead of glibly placing railways or factories into the “positives” column and moving on, pupils need to think about why the British constructed them. It is more enlightening to try to reconstruct the worldview of British policymakers, such as those who refused relief to starving Indians in the famine of 1899-1900, than it is to place their actions into a chart. Understanding colonialism gives pupils the ability to think about the most fundamental questions of all: how did we get here, and does it have to be like this? History teachers in Britain have a responsibility to allow pupils to explore the full extent of the country’s colonial legacy. At a time when Britain’s national identity and global role is being recast, future generations should attempt to understand the empire from the perspective of the people it was imposed upon. ■
Tom Allen is a history teacher. He now works at a school in Germany.
