Angela Davis, a citizen-heroine, of the United States, who has fought intensely over many decades for her ideals of what the US is capable of becoming. An inspiration.

***

I am a citizen, in a sense, of two Empires. 

I was born in 1961, in the village of Enangudi in southern India, fourteen years after the British Empire left. India was, though, still part of the Commonwealth, a post-empire category. I was a post-colonial child and yet the ghosts of the British past were never too far away.

My teenage years were filled with the stories of my father running away at the age of ten in 1942 to join the Quit India protests, a critical moment in the independence movement during WWII, and his participation in student protests and marches in Bangalore against the princely state of Mysore. This royal kingdom did not want to join the Indian Union and wanted to keep enjoying their royal privileges. A third of the British Indian empire was still held by Indian royalty at independence. They had to be persuaded by massive protests to give up their privileges.

My mother remembers that same year, 1942, elders in her village of Kunnam gathering saris made of mill cloth from England to burn in a huge bonfire. She was six years old and she remembers the bonfire burning the beautiful saris and the angry controversies that action ensued. The village was divided as to what to do.Many did not want to give up their British cloth made saris, as they were not far from being poor themselves and rankled against the wastefulness of this political exercise.

I became a citizen of the United States in the fall of 2008, inspired by the possibility of voting for Obama. I had been a permanent alien resident from the age of eleven in 1972 when I immigrated to this country. I became a citizen at the age of forty-seven in 2008. I had been a permanent alien resident for thirty-six years, the majority of my life and an Indian citizen for forty seven years, nearly all of my life. Being a citizen is still a new, exciting experience for me. I still love to go to the polls and give my ballot to a real person. It is only my fourth time that I have ever done it. This time because of the extreme circumstances, I will walk and mail it tomorrow in the right kind of mailbox.

Perhaps the British Empire, or the memory of it, may help us understand how and why this election is so critical to our future. These words are inspired by an upcoming NYT book review of Priya Satya’s new book, Time’s Monster: How History Makes History (Harvard University Press). [https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/11/02/misremembering-the-british-empire]

The British Empire has willingly brought into its own myth­­–––that what the British represented in the 18th-20th century when it ruled a huge portion of the world, through its military and technological prowess, and its concomitant cultural exports and other so called “soft” powers­–––was benign, necessary, and “progressive” in its very roots.

That the British slavery business which founded many business empires and their descendants (still prominent in British life such as Rhodes, Booker, etc.), that the British colonial machine which extracted massive amounts of capital from India to England, through the transformation of commons lands into a spurious category such as “wastelands” in order to make it ripe for land-grabbing, that the British shipped off “indentured servants” throughout the British Empire at its convenience–––are all forgotten truths. And we must remember the constant, exorbitant British taxation throughout the British Empire. The British Empire: “Civilization evolves in stages, the logic ran; Britain had reached a higher stage than its colonies; therefore Britain had a moral duty to lift them up”.

For two dramatizations of this widespread phenomenon, see the two historical films Lagaan, set in the late 19th century and Attenborough’s Gandhi film, which in spite of some of its drawbacks, has a moving section on Gandhi, before he became world-famous, sensitively responding to the requests of indigo farmers, impoverished into famine. They asked for his help to end the British taxation on their crops, marking a turning point in Gandhi’s political fame.

India was, after all, the “jewel” in the British Crown. It was a jewel for the British empire precisely because the British transformed the Indian commons by naming them as “wastelands”, and therefore “available” legally, according to British law for British economic occupation, and made the “commons” into saleable commodities, out of reach of most Indian peasants.

Now, the American Empire, begun during the last years of the nineteenth century, when America acquired Puerto Rico and other “territories” and began to see itself as the leader of the Americas, and subsequently the world, has also willingly brought into its own imperial myths. This election, as well as the last one, makes it abundantly clear that it is not willing to own up to its responsibilities to the larger communities, whether inside of the United States or in the world at large. In its pride in its “greatness”, the US has forgotten its obligations to a basic defense of democracy, of democratic institutions, of having a broad canopy of protection over all its citizens, not just its top 1% or 2%.

We citizens must be willing to let some of the myth of the “greatness” of America go. We must, though, live up to its myths of democratic inclusion. As Angela Davis says, “We must not allow Trump to remain in power. The damage he has done to the federal court system with his appointments will take several generations to correct.” [https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/10/19/t-magazine/angela-davis.html]
We must begin the task to bring our democracy back to order; and tackle some of the biggest issues ever in humankind.

We need the best minds, the best hearts, the best souls to come forward to take up the mantle of the recovery of the commons–––the local, the regional, the national, and the global; the forests, the air, and so much more.

So, everyone! Now go to the polls. Mail in your ballots. Keep on keep on the texting!

TO THE GREEN NEW DEAL!!!