What is a Crown to the Colonized?
All four of my grandparents were born in British India. All four uprooted their lives during the 1947 Partition to relocate to the newly formed Pakistan. All four saw death, destruction, and destitution along the way. Blood spilt on the path to freedom still flows in the veins of kin.
My Dada (paternal grandfather) gave me a printed out Word doc a few years ago. It was a simple sheet of paper, embellished only by black rectangles and lines structured into nine distinct segments, representative of nine generations. While he can boisterously tell stories of those who make up the bottom four sections, he struggles to convey anything from the five generations above. Without narratives, they are nothing more than names in rectangles on a flimsy sheet of printer paper. Still, they are a source of pride, a history of self that was kept close amidst an ongoing loss of autonomy. A stubborn resistance to oblivion. He considers himself lucky, he knows the names of his ancestors, not just their tribe. My other grandparents have no such document to reference.
Every section of names boxed on that piece of paper lived under the rule of the British Crown (the Raj) save two, my father’s and mine. It was the Raj that split India, both in spirit and on a map, and created a new nationality for the past three generations of my family. Nearly a century prior, the Raj prohibited my tribe from serving in the Bengal Army, claiming that our people were too treacherous on account of them leading a province-wide uprising during the Rebellion of 1857. The Raj labeled and sorted people, histories, and communities as if they were taxonomists. They looted artifacts and precious stones, by some calculations nearly $45 trillion worth of fortunes, while starving out and killing millions in the subcontinent. The jewels of the crown, mined in my India, are passed down generation to generation yet I suffice with a Word doc.
So the question must be asked: What is a Crown to the Colonized?
There is a discussion to be had here, of lives not chosen and destinies altered. Of greed, of power, of the destructive desire to protect one’s own interests and kin. Of loss. Incalculable, incomprehensible, unjustifiable loss. Of the sheer fact that these thoughts are written in English. Yet instead, my mind turns toward the words of my father after a particularly brutal game of chess.
“In the end, the king and the pawn must go into the same box.”
