2022 was the 70th year of Queen Elizabeth II’s reign. Her Jubilee was celebrated with great fanfare in England and across the Commonwealth. It also marks the 75th anniversary of my people’s independence from Britain, a celebration which is always shadowed with the pain of Partition, the largest and bloodiest single migration of people in human history. The division was made almost arbitrarily, tasked to a British judge who knew little about the land he was hastily vivisecting on a map. The impact of that decision on Indians, already devastated by famines orchestrated largely by that hero of the Western imagination, Winston Churchill, would reverberate across multiple generations.
In August of 1947, my maternal grandfather, whom I call Na’abu, was a ten-year-old boy. He was one of ten children of an agricultural family that had cultivated its vast fields for generations in Ludhiana, in the state of Punjab. He tells stories of riding water buffalo at age seven, herding them to graze and drink; of learning how to work the land and grow green things so easily it seemed like magic, a talent he never lost. His mother was a great lady, known in the area for her hospitality to travelers. She was illiterate but a fount of wise sayings: one of my favorites translates roughly to “The tree that bears fruit lowers its branches,” meaning that those who have much should be both generous and humble. On the eve of Partition, the peanut harvest had just come in, and their storeroom was so full that Na’abu and his brothers had to climb up to the roshandan, the narrow window near the ceiling, to throw in their sacks of peanuts.
The first warning sign was the fire visible from the neighboring village — my grandmother’s home village, although she wouldn’t meet and marry Na’abu for almost a decade, and she and her family lived in Kenya. Word spread of the violence sparked by Britain’s sudden exit, and the hastily drawn new borders between India and East and West Pakistan. (In 1971, East Pakistan became Bangladesh.) Na’abu and his family left everything behind, believing the promise that they would get property of equal value once they reached Pakistan. So they abandoned their home with nothing but a large sack of grain and a grindstone to turn it to flour.
Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs suddenly found themselves displaced on their ancestral lands, fleeing for their lives and often from neighbors they had trusted only a few years before. The grisly stories are endless: trains reaching their final destinations full of bloody bodies, including women with their breasts cut off; babies cut out of their pregnant mothers, or impaled and burned on swords; women jumping into wells to escape rape. Before they made the long march to the new border, Na’abu’s family would live for three months in a refugee camp that was soon flooded by monsoons. The stench of rotting livestock would become so putrid that they’d burn green wood and breathe the smoke for relief, blankets over their heads.
After more than 200 years, the British Raj was finally over — and its last act was, characteristically, both violent beyond words and camouflaged as benevolence.
It can be argued that the Queen herself is a victim of circumstance, thrust into a constricted and challenging position at a young age. That’s certainly the perspective of many of her portrayals in pop culture, which show her to be a slightly awkward, well-meaning, and painfully reserved woman who feels things deeply and carries herself with great dignity. She did not choose to be born a royal, and she did carry her 70-year reign with grace and a kind of wry restraint and subtle humor that for many personifies the ideal of the British "stiff upper lip." But we must be clear-eyed about the choices she did make, as the brand ambassador of the world’s most successful PR campaign to date.
What the long-winded panegyrics of the last ten days obscure are the very real structures of genocide, slavery and colonial extraction that sourced the Queen’s massive wealth — a grotesquely large collection of assets on which her heir Charles will pay no inheritance tax, amassed by England’s pillaging of the world’s nations (and its own people). When Elizabeth became Queen, she was in Kenya. Nani, my mother’s mother, 15 years old at the time, remembers the pomp and circumstance of that visit vividly. Upon the news of her father’s death, Elizabeth pledged to serve the Empire and the Commonwealth — and so she did. As the British army ruthlessly suppressed the Mau Mau independence movement in Kenya over the next eight years, imprisoning 1.5 million people in concentration camps, she toured the world and provided an endearingly young, beneficent face to soften the Empire’s image.
The Queen has never apologized for her family’s actions over the generations, despite repeated demands to do so from descendants of those harmed by the Crown and its colonial representatives. On her visit to India in 1997, for example, she visited the site of one of the bloodiest massacres of the Raj — Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar, where a British general ordered thousands of peace protestors shot. Hemmed in on all sides in the walled garden, they had no escape from the bullets. But the Queen, as always the embodiment of restraint, described it as one of the “difficult episodes in our past” that cannot be changed, "however much we might sometimes wish otherwise.” Indians have not forgotten that non-apology. In Canada, where they have recently unearthed multiple mass graves of Indigenous children, the Church of England ran 36 residential schools and over 150 Indian day schools between 1820 and 1969. The Queen was both Canada’s head of state and the leader of the Anglican Church; when she visited in May, residential school survivors were still calling for apologies and reparations.
Queen Elizabeth II was quite likable. She had friends in high and low places, and could be funny and down-to-earth. The princes we’ve watched grow up clearly loved their granny just like us regular folks, and her corgis are extremely cute. These details have been uplifted in the last week as reasons to mourn her as a human being, as we also reflect on the many grand moments of near history she was part of. It's a supercharging of the same impulse many feel upon the death of a famous person: let’s not speak ill of the dead, let us embrace the good they left behind.
But this kindly, distantly gracious persona is the scaffolding that upholds the crumbling relevance of the British royal family — and make no mistake, it is a persona, carefully manufactured and manipulated by an institution interested only in maintaining its power. That very fairy tale narrative, far from the harmless diversion it often appears to be, is precisely what fuels the Crown. The monarchy runs not only on its massive stores of expropriated wealth, but on its hundreds of years of self-sustaining propaganda. The first stage of the Empire’s colonial campaigns was never military conquest, but knowledge production.
As a trained historian, I would never want anyone to learn history from TV, but one thing Netflix’s The Crown did bring home to me was the absolute excess of material wealth these people are cocooned in from conception to burial. The opulent trappings of the greatest protection racket in history serve a vital purpose: they legitimize an institution that disguises its idleness as service — and elevate the royal family to a status so unreachable that onlookers cannot help but see them as superior beings.
Witness the slow progress of the Queen’s coffin, crown daintily perched atop, as it made its way from Balmoral to London, throngs of people coming to pay their respects to the motorcade as it passed. Al Jazeera English, a network that is often less Eurocentric in its coverage than many of its English language counterparts, followed the Queen’s body as its “main news” in a week when a third of the people in Pakistan continued to suffer death, disease and displacement from apocalyptic flooding. (Don’t get me started on how little coverage that catastrophe has received in American media.) I live in a household that constantly listens to NPR and I work for my beloved member station, but I had to turn off the radio in the days following her death because the constant fawning coverage — both domestic and ported over from the BBC — began to turn my stomach.
On one hand, I’m unsurprised that the Queen’s death is getting so much airtime. She was an icon. American presidents have long belabored our “special relationship” with the U.K. On the surface that seems like a strange way to describe the connection between a former settler colony and the country it fought a war to be free of. After all, England has left us with a pathology of racial casteism that still endures 250 years later. But from the beginning, our love-hate relationship with the founding kingdom has included a fascination with the paraphernalia of Britishness. The saga of Harry and Megan, echoing the tragedy of Diana, has only deepened our inability to look away from this twisted real-life fairy tale.
Besides, the structures of power reproduce themselves. It’s no surprise that the elite in many former British colonies still revere her, while other citizens have more mixed feelings. (Or some do, at least. Then there is this Yemeni man, who got arrested for trying to do a voluntary pilgrimage to Mecca on the Queen’s behalf.) In the great push to decolonize during the twentieth century, resources and power often stayed in the hands of those who curried favor with their imperial masters, reproducing much of that brutal injustice in the postcolonial era.
When Kenya gained independence in 1963, my grandparents moved to England with my mother and oldest uncle, who were both toddlers, during the short window when British subjects from the Indian subcontinent and the Caribbean were eligible to do so. England in the 50s and 60s was rocked by race riots, the white populace enraged by Black and Asian immigrants from former colonies daring to make the seat of the Empire their home. My mom lived in the sleepy town of Cradley Heath, but she remembers visiting her cousins in Birmingham, and encountering skinheads when the kids were roaming the neighborhood alone.
“There were these really scary looking guys with the high boots and thick soles, and the straight jeans that were rolled up at the bottom, and the shaved heads…and they started calling us names.” It was the first time she realized, she says, that they were not perceived as British.
The family emigrated to Canada in 1973, once again just under the wire before immigration closed for a few years, and my mom says that although Canada was still very racist, she thanks God that they left England. Canada is still part of the Commonwealth; my parents met and married in Toronto, and when we moved to the United States in the late 90s, for the first time I lived in a land with no Queen. We were now in the belly of the American neo-empire.
Throughout my life, as I’ve traced my family’s journey through the carnage left by British imperialism, I’ve learned that this history creates in us something like the double consciousness described by W.E.B. Du Bois. In our Western diasporic communities, we have slowly unearthed the traumas of the past — which for so long our elders found too painful to speak of — and are challenged with the task of reconciling those truths with the triumphant white supremacy underpinning the foundational myths of the countries we call home. Despite a recent move toward performative support for antiracism in many mainstream spaces, at their core, our institutions are still fueled by and designed to reproduce these myths.
Once you begin the journey to decolonize your mind, you are confronted with the daunting collective task of decolonizing our media, our schools, our governments and our cultural narratives. And in moments such as this, when the entire world mourns the death of Queen Elizabeth II, it feels like a fool’s errand.
“That summer that Lady Diana was getting married, I didn’t really have that much background knowledge about colonialism and empire and what the British did,” says my mother.
She recalls sitting up all night as a teenager, watching Charles and Diana’s wedding on TV with her friends. But the more she learned about the history of the British in the Indian subcontinent and around the world, she says, “At this point I’m just so disgusted by the royal family. And I can’t unlearn or unsee that history… and then I see all the ways that they have kept brown people and Black people down, stolen from them and taken advantage of them, including both my grandfathers and my father — Partition is just the cherry on top.”
I don’t begrudge people’s sadness at the loss of a woman who has been a constant figure in their lives for seven decades. Nor do I support the kind of vitriol that some are throwing at her children and grandchildren, who deserve to have their time to grieve, though I doubt it will be granted to them in the midst of this spectacle. It is, undoubtedly, the end of an era.
But my hope is that it will be the end of an era in which we explicitly and implicitly glorify the symbols of white supremacy, and of a colonial power that reshaped civilizations across the world. My hope is that laying Queen Elizabeth II to rest will also mean laying to rest the myth of the glorious Empire which trails millions of unacknowledged dead in its wake. My wish is for the thrall of a near-century of propaganda around this one woman to finally loosen, so that the British people can throw off the parasitic institution of the monarchy and redirect some of that stolen wealth to their own public programs. As one of my best friends, Khadija, who is British, says, “If the money that was spent on royals was spent on feeding people who can’t afford to eat, on subsidizing unaffordable energy bills, on giving pay rises to NHS [National Health Service] staff… you’d still probably have money left over.”
My father’s family has lived in Lahore for many generations. In pre-independence India, my paternal great-grandfather Shujauddin Khalifa, who would later be the Speaker of the House for Punjab State in Pakistan, was a young lawyer. He was well-known for having both an encyclopedic knowledge of the law and a willingness to challenge British judges to their faces in court — successfully.
In a well-documented incident in the early forties, two workers from the Muslim League came to his home at the time of the dawn prayer, reporting that the police had beaten some of their members on the orders of the British governor of Punjab. Shujauddin was so angry that he put a robe over his pajamas and rushed to the governor’s house in his slippers, taking the two members of the Muslim League with him.
He showed up at the walled, gated estate and insisted that the governor meet him at once, rousing him from his bed. When he met the governor, as my uncle Zaki tells it, “Shujauddin aggressively admonished him that the minimum responsibility of the police should be to protect the people, and under no circumstances should they beat them.” He became so angry that he was about to slap the governor, but his two friends grabbed the back of his robe. “If they did not succeed in physically pushing him back to the chair, the governor would have been slapped that day,” Uncle Zaki told me with quiet relish.
There are many such stories of Shujauddin’s fearlessness; when he was studying law at Cambridge, his classmates held him down and tried to force him to drink alcohol, but he threw them off. He never gave in. He never bought the story about British superiority and might that had become engrained in colonial society after 200 years. And that’s the kind of clear-eyed courage I aspire to.
