The British Museum and a Meditation on Colonial Trauma
“Get the Kohinoor on your way back.”
Standing in the British Museum’s Great Court, with a mini sponge cake in hand and the tendrils of jet lag slowly but surely encroaching on my consciousness, I barely registered my dad’s text — my focus in that moment was the grandiose spectacle of the Great Court, from its sweeping grass ceilings to the totem poles that loomed over the courtyard.
My dad’s offhand text, sent with equal parts jest and resentment, was referencing the well-known Kohinoor Diamond. Standing in the Great Court, I knew very little about the diamond beyond the fact that it was stolen during the Raj (the British occupation of the Indian subcontinent) and represented a part of Indian history that I was both intimately familiar with and completely estranged from. The Kohinoor Diamond was seized by the British after the First Anglo-Sikh War, fought between the British East India Company (the instrument of British colonialism in the subcontinent) and the Sikh Empire. The diamond, which was recut from its original form to appease the British public, now sits in the Tower of London as part of the British crown jewels, an enduring symbol of British colonial conquest and India’s corresponding historical trauma.
Whereas my grandparents and their parents before them lived through the Raj, my understanding of it is derived from limited historical study of postcolonial authors like Jhumpa Lahiri and V.S. Naipaul, whose works often succumb to the diasporic literature’s leitmotif of exaggeration (Som-Mai Nguyen offers an analysis of this effort to assert ethnic credibility in the context of Vietnamese diasporic literature, but it is every bit as applicable to works by Indian diasporic writers.) Being two generations removed from the Raj, I often question the claim I have to the trauma my ancestors endured — if I don’t make an effort to engage with Indian history, is it my place to grieve the losses it endured decades ago? If I select “American” in drop down boxes, will I ever truly understand the impact colonialism had on India’s collective consciousness?
If the Kohinoor were in the British Museum, the placard below the glass case (that all passersby would probably ignore anyway) would read very differently than the history described earlier. The museum, presumably to preserve the constructed image of London as an intercultural mecca, uses distinctly passive language to describe the origins of its many stolen artifacts. The Kohinoor Diamond, acquired from the Sikh Empire in 1846, is one of the largest cut gemstones in the world. The value of this presentation comes from its pithiness. For the occasional keen tourist who engages with the museum as a museum rather than a glorified photo-op, this description is a way of informing them that they’ve had a cultural experience. It also ameliorates any concerns they might have about where the artifact came from, if those concerns existed in the first place.
I’d like to say I’m an exception to this, that I analyzed every aspect of the museum through a critical lens, but that is simply not the case—for the most part, I walked mindlessly through the museum, oohing and aahing at exhibits likely stolen from Britain’s many other previous colonies. But even through this, I was deeply unsettled. Although the extent of the British colonial project has never been fully taught in school—and the small portion that has usually focuses on the experiences of the Britishers and less on the experiences of the colonized nation—colonialism is an inherently disturbing act. This knowledge, coupled with the notion that the Raj is an important part of my ancestral history even if I didn’t necessarily experience it, made the museum feel more like a cemetery. Walking through the museum’s South Asian section, with its numerous busts of Hindu deities and display cases of various artifacts of Indian origin, was an experience that I still consider with ambivalence. On the one hand, knowing the nature in which most if not all of the artifacts were acquired made me very uncomfortable; on the other, I had never been in such close proximity to so many relics and tokens of Indian history and culture.
As a first-generation Indian-American, having a multi-hyphenated national and cultural identity means I don’t truly belong in either category; that isn’t a particularly striking thought, but it does describe my experience, at least rudimentarily. After struggling with various phraseologies and the panoply of mixed thoughts in my head, I now realize that articulating my relationship with India’s fraught colonial past will be a much more extended project. Although I hoped to be able to say that my time in London fostered an epiphany or reconnected me in any significant way with my past, that would only feed into the pattern of exaggeration that so many discourses on (post)colonialism devolve into. That would not do justice to the subject, nor would it offer me any peace of mind. In some ways, my inability to resolve this personal inquiry reflects how colonialism’s violence manifests in a persistent and ubiquitous way, appearing in the most mundane objects, like a moth, in the case of Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, to the seemingly most trivial internal conflicts.