Reckoning with colonialism is on the minds of third-generation diaspora kids. Projects such as the Crimes of Britain website are monitoring Britain’s imperial legacy for today’s youth and interrogating Britain’s claim to greatness. Now, the Indian standup Anuvab Pal anatomises the same subject matter in his touring comedy show, The Empire, which he performs at Soho theatre in London this week.
A Bengali native, Pal offers an Indian perspective on the armies who turned up uninvited on India’s shores. But he also uses his routines to inform audiences of a subset of Indians who yearn for the return of the Raj.
“A certain sort of middleman got very rich both in Britain and India by exploiting poor Indian people, who have pretty much always been exploited,” he tells me over the phone. “And it wasn’t just the British doing horrible things directly – it was through a class they created.”
And what does this class look like? Pal’s interpretation dons a Beefeater jacket and judge’s wig, and adopts the personality of an Indian suffering from such a fervent colonial hangover that Ukip’s nationalism seems tame. This is a character who has no desire to be Indian. He sports jodhpurs, refers to his friends as “old chap” with the staccato slur of a bygone radio announcer, takes his wife ballroom dancing and attends Gymkhana and croquet clubs.
It’s a cartoonish image but one that resonated with Pal for an uncomfortable reason: “As I did more research [into these people], I realised, ‘Oh shit, I’m part of that class.’”
Pal’s absurd onstage persona navigates India’s recent colonial history, taking us on a journey from the Mughals to the Portuguese and finally the British. In a convivial manner he explains India’s battle to define its identity after being subjected to outside interference, juxtaposing its history with the rightwing nationalism of the country’s current prime minister, Narendra Modi.
“The Modi narrative is essentially: ‘We started a long time ago, and the Mughals were invaders, and the British were invaders, and everything before that, we were who we were,’ whatever that means,” Pal explains. “In new India, no one’s really interested in going back and looking at our history. Shah Jahan built an entire city. They just ignore the amount that the Mughals did for religious tolerance, culture and architecture.”
Modi’s nationalistic narrative labels the Mughals as colonisers and delegitimises everything they brought with them. Such a stance has been used to perpetrate Islamophobia. Pal hopes to point out the hypocrisy in dismissing the significance of invasions. “Which country would not like to be told that invaders were horrible? With that same logic you can say: ‘Oh, Taj Mahal, terrible, just a rubbish monument built by invaders. Biryani, nonsense, rubbish food.’ You could keep going back in history and say anything.”
Pal is by no means endorsing colonialism. “It’s true that the British were invaders, but I just thought there has got to be more nuance, there’s got to be more deception on both sides,” he says. “I was struck by how similar wealthy Indians’ homes were at the turn of the century, based on copying British homes because they were contractors and serving as middlemen for British people.”
It’s this dichotomy of thought that made Pal’s Britain-loving Indian such a striking caricature. “These people are kind of outdated in new India but their generation, in many ways, built India by being very English and following the same exploitative things that the English did.”
Due to increasing animosity towards those who don’t fit in with India’s image of unified hindutva, this class is being erased from Indian culture. “These people belong nowhere – they’re foreigners in their own country,” Pal says.
But his show does not set out to make audiences feel sorry for them. “I wanted to understand this bizarre generation of anglicised Indians,” says Pal. In doing so he has delved into what makes India India. Perhaps it acts as an antidote to the current regime’s exclusionary populism, but Pal laughs: “There is no ‘we’ – everybody’s fighting.”
- Anuvab Pal: The Empire is at Soho theatre, London, until 5 May.
