Dr Zareer Masani is a historian and the author of Macaulay: Britain's Liberal Imperialist. He is on the advisory panel of Policy Exchange’s History Matters Project
It’s a little-remembered fact that the Indian subcontinent once had the world’s largest Muslim population. Numbering 95 million, they were almost a quarter of India’s total population. Partition in 1947 still left them as the world’s largest Muslim minority, at 15 per cent of Hindu-majority India. More than 70 years later, no single study has
The conviction of Rahul Gandhi – an opposition politician and dynastic heir to three of India’s past prime ministers – has raised questions in India about both a colonial-era defamation law and Gandhi’s own political judgement. Rahul is currently an MP in the Indian parliament, but has taken on the role of crown-prince-in-waiting for the
In India, a generation has been brought up on the academic Edward Said’s unhistorical prejudices towards the British and what he called the ‘colonial gaze’. In his eyes, British Orientalists were guilty of what is now termed ‘cultural appropriation’. To his followers it therefore may come as a surprise to learn that it was British
The proposed return to Greece, in the guise of loans, of some of the British Museum’s most iconic objects, the Elgin marbles, is a measure of how far the ‘decolonisation’ campaign has gone in brainwashing the guardians of our cultural heritage. There’s little doubt that the Greek government, which still claims rightful ownership, will never
‘Long years ago, we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially.’ Imagine if those famous words had not been spoken by Jawaharlal Nehru 75 years ago today, as Pakistan and India announced their independence, but instead by
Robert Jenrick’s pledge to protect monuments and statues from mob iconoclasm with new laws and powers is very welcome. It’s an issue on which the Government has been quiet in terms of legislation, even if the Prime Minister made clear last summer that ‘we cannot try to edit or censor our past’. Now that the
