Forsyth on Biafra

Wed Jan 22 11:18:39 UTC 2020

Makes me think of Tagore ...

+ In 1919, Sir Rabindranath Tagore wrote to Lord Chelmsford, the viceroy of India, to return the knighthood that the British Crown had bestowed upon him four years earlier. Tagore’s attempt to renounce his knighthood came in response to the Amritsar massacre, in which British imperial forces killed hundreds of peacefully demonstrating Indians. Tagore was especially protesting the way in which the British Indian press first suppressed news about the event, and then praised the actions of General Dyer, the commanding officer. ‘The time has come,’ Tagore wrote to Chelmsford, ‘when badges of honour make our shame glaring in the incongruous context of humiliation, and I for my part wish to stand, shorn of all special distinctions, by the side of those of my countrymen, who, for their so-called insignificance, are liable to suffer a degradation not fit for human beings.’

Chelmsford and officials in London refused to accept Tagore’s resignation of his title. They said that, as it was bestowed for services to literature, Tagore’s knighthood had nothing to do with politics, so he could not use it to make a political statement. Like it or not, he was stuck with it. Until his death in 1941, British officials continued to call him ‘Sir Rabindranath’. According to them, when it came to the politics of the Indian empire, a man known worldwide for his poetry was not even allowed to decide how he was to be addressed.

Though it didn’t rid him of his title, Tagore’s gesture caught the world’s notice. Officials refused his request in part because they feared its subversive political message, its undermining of British authority. But it was too late. Tagore’s letter to Chelmsford was public and reprinted in many Indian newspapers. In the letter, Tagore paired ‘badges of honour’ with shame, and elevated humility above special distinction. British-Indian honours and titles, Tagore implied, were worse than worthless because they highlighted the shame of India by patronising and coopting individual heroes. The fact that he remained ‘Sir Rabindranath’ in the eyes of the imperial state was an embarrassment. Indian nationalists later used the knighthood against Tagore, for they too agreed that British honour could not be separated from Indian shame ...

... The British Crown used honours in the empire as a way of ranking and appealing to the local elites. The Crown particularly bestowed them in South Asia to the puppet rulers of the Indian princely states. The expansion of honours began to include more members of middle-class elites from the mid-19th century. In the first half of the 20th century, though, more and more Indian nationalists opted out of the honours system. It was a statement rejecting the British Indian government’s system of Indian titles, and the world of deference and loyalty to the empire that it represented.

In 1919, the same year in which Tagore tried to return his knighthood, M K Gandhi wrote that the first stage in instituting ‘non-cooperation’ with the British empire was the ‘giving up of titles and resignation of honorary posts’. The British government ‘bribes you into consenting to its will by awarding titles, medals and ribbons’, buying the loyalty of Indians with the offer of status, alongside the promise of commercial advantage if they accepted the British system. Gandhi was one of the 20th-century’s great masters of political symbolism. He understood that the dismantling of the British system of social distinction amounted to a step toward disengagement with imperial rule. The symbolism of British imperial honours mattered. It reinforced a deferential, hierarchical relationship that bought consent from Indians to the ‘will’ of the empire with a shallow currency that lacked true value ...

... What Britain saw instead of Gandhian revolution were individual moments of rebellion and scandal. One such scandal happened in 1965 when Harold Wilson’s Labour government made the four Beatles Members of the Order of the British Empire (MBEs). A dozen or so current holders of the Order returned their medals in protest. George Read, a coastguard decorated for bravery, wrote that he was ‘disgusted’ by the Beatles’ appointment, and was considering returning his medal. C V Hearn, a policeman who had got his MBE fighting bandits in Italy, told The Daily Telegraph that the Queen ‘was wrongly advised. I was told my award was for bravery, but there is nothing brave in yarping at a howling mob of teenagers while you have a million pounds in the bank.’

Four years later, the Beatles’ John Lennon also returned his medal to protest ‘Britain’s involvement in the Nigeria-Biafra thing, against our support of America in Vietnam and against “Cold Turkey” slipping down the charts’. His renunciation was widely reported, but once again the government did not formally rescind the honour. When Lennon was killed in 1980, he was still officially an MBE, just as the other Beatles remained on the rolls of the Order, and Tagore remained Sir Rabindranath in the eyes of the state until his death.

Because of the British Crown’s refusal to accept returned medals as a renunciation of honours, ‘the gesture is meaningless’, wrote the honours expert Ivan de la Bere in response to the anti-Beatles protests in 1965. This echoed the British officials who, a few decades earlier, ignored Tagore’s request to return his knighthood, and then were puzzled by the new Indian government’s insistence that the British system be dropped. Tagore, Lennon and other anticolonial (and anti-Beatles) protestors understood state honours in a very different way. To them, these gestures were full of meaning. In fact, they were what gave the honours system an increasingly large part of its enduring significance in decolonising societies. This was true of India, where British titles retained a stigma. But it was also true in a different way in former settler colonies that continued to use aspects of the British system, such as Canada, Australia and New Zealand. In all of these nations, the legacy of the British system became entangled in debates about national identity, settler colonialism and their relationship to Britain. These publics were divided over the meaning and value of British honours and titles ... +

https://aeon.co/essays/the-shame-of-sir-british-honours-and-decolonisation

In case you don't know the poetry of Tagore (who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913), you should at least read GITANJALI!

"The time that my journey takes is long and the way
   of it long.
I came out on the chariot of the first gleam of light,
   and pursued my voyage through the wildernesses
   of worlds leaving my track on many a star and
   planet.
It is the most distant course that comes nearest to
   thyself, and that training is the most intricate
   which leads to the utter simplicity of a tune.
The traveller has to knock at every alien door to come
   to his own, and one has to wander through all the
   outer worlds to reach the innermost shrine at the
   end.
My eyes strayed far and wide before I shut them and
   said 'Here art thou!'
The question and the cry 'Oh, where?' melt into
   tears of a thousand streams and deluge the world
   with the flood of the assurance 'I am!'"

http://www.spiritualbee.com/media/gitanjali-by-tagore.pdf
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Am 21.01.20 um 17:15 schrieb Jochen Stremmel:
Thanks, Kai, and Rich, it was the MBE. My friend Freddy, wonderful.

Am Di., 21. Jan. 2020 um 16:30 Uhr schrieb rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com<mailto:richard.romeo at gmail.com>>:
i think John Lennon returned his OBE because of the war in Biafra

On Tue, Jan 21, 2020 at 7:25 AM Kai Frederik Lorentzen <lorentzen at hotmail.de<mailto:lorentzen at hotmail.de>>
wrote:

>
>
> https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jan/21/buried-50-years-britain-shamesful-role-biafran-war-frederick-forsyth
>
> + ... "DEAR TOM GUINZBURG WHEREVER YOU ARE, I THOUGHT YOU WOULD LIKE TO
> KNOW I'M NUMBER EIGHT AND MY FRIEND FREDDIE IS NUMBER TWO."/ Pynchon was
> referring to the fact that Frederick Forsyth's second thriller, THE
> ODESSA FILE, was No. 2 on the NEW YORK TIMES bestseller list and
> GRAVITY'S RAINBOW was No. 8 ... +
>
>
> https://books.google.de/books?id=btgXCwAAQBAJ&pg=PT127&lpg=PT127&dq=frederick+forsyth+pynchon&source=bl&ots=XzztUaCr-x&sig=ACfU3U2w-d_zdetjCnDUBZyOPsvwhe1IvA&hl=de&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiB9fPp0ZTnAhVS4aQKHZaLBZQQ6AEwAnoECAkQAQ#v=onepage&q=frederick%20forsyth%20pynchon&f=false
>
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>
--
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