Graphic by Sunny Wei ’23.
By Kaveri Pillai ’23
Opinion Editor
Sept. 8, 2022, was supposed to be a day like any other. At Mount Holyoke, many of us spent the afternoon celebrating the end of the first week of classes. I myself was raising a silent toast to the beginning of my senior year as I sat in the Dining Commons, when hushed gasps and phone notifications brought me back to reality. After a number of scattered updates from Buckingham Palace on Thursday regarding Queen Elizabeth II’s deteriorating health, her death was finally shared with billions of people around the world.
As reported by the BBC, Queen Elizabeth died at the age of 96 in her Scottish holiday home, Balmoral Castle, handing over a 1,200-year-old monarchy to her eldest son Charles III. My emotions on Thursday ranged from shock and grief to a more pronounced sense of reflection. As pictures of the departed queen and devastated Londoners made the rounds on social media, so did posts about the history of the British Empire.
As an Indian woman who lives to see a religiously-divided India today, it would be impossible for me to ignore that the origins of the religious strife can be traced back to the horrific British colonization and their heinous “divide and rule” land-conquering strategy. The list of harms done by the British Empire cannot possibly end at pitting religious communities against each other. The question for many of the once-colonized nations is not the scale of the offenses committed by the imperial power but what the monarchy can do next in mending the relationship between the United Kingdom and the rest of the Commonwealth.
With the British monarchy in the limelight in the 21st century — an era committed to asking questions about social justice and challenging power structure — it is crucial to question if the monarchy wishes to move toward reparations for its colonial past and clearly admit guilt for its plundering legacy.
Additionally, with Charles III as the new face of the British monarchy, it is natural to ask if the once-colonized world will move away from the looming cloud of imperialism that hovers over any chance of true advancement, and whether countries that are still tightly connected to the Crown will give in to rising anti-monarchist sentiments and establish themselves as republics of the free world.
Acknowledging the severity of the harms done by the British Empire and urgently questioning the future of the monarchy is even more so justified during the mourning of Queen Elizabeth II.
A large part of the 20th century saw Queen Elizabeth as the face of the British monarchy following her 1953 coronation at age 27. As mentioned by the BBC, Queen Elizabeth led the British monarchy through the tumultuous post-war decades, the transition from the empire to the Commonwealth and the recent withdrawal of the UK from the European Union. Yet, one can argue that while the world was on the path of rapid democratization and social liberty, the monarchy remained stagnant in the face of societal progress.
In a BBC article about the queen’s death triggering South African colonial memories, Mamphela Ramphele, a distinguished anti-apartheid activist and politician, shared insight on what the queen’s response to the treacherous period of Apartheid in South Africa was like. With racial segregation and the ill-treatment of Black South Africans engulfing the nation, the monarchy as an institution remained apolitical.
Ramphele said, “The queen as an individual probably cared. But the fact is that [she was] a symbol, and the head of the British [state], and there weren’t really any steps taken to acknowledge, let alone to … undo the structural inequalities that were built into a racist, exploitative South Africa, both during the colonial period, under apartheid and even post-apartheid.” The monarchy’s inability to enact proactive measures in preventing these atrocities in their own Commonwealth state highlights the pressing issue of what the true purpose of the institution is.
Echoing the monarchy’s sheer lack of mirroring the reignited sense of global activism and desire for change is also its inability to truly address the dark colonial past of the institution. While the later half of the 20th century saw countries gaining independence from their colonizers, it didn’t witness visible remorse or regret from the British.
A Guardian article on India’s sentiments on the late Queen Elizabeth II and its history as a British colony helps shed light on how countries across the globe struggle with a lack of closure and still live with traces of British colonialism. The queen’s visit to Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar, India, a place that witnessed a massacre of grotesque scale of peaceful protestors, is one of the few times that the queen even dared to mention British colonial rule.
The queen said, “Jallianwala Bagh, which I shall visit tomorrow, is a distressing example. But history cannot be rewritten, however much we might sometimes wish otherwise.” What makes this quote truly disturbing is the fact that it is the first of many attempts to skirt away from apologizing for the harms done by the British Empire. While the colonial histories of South Africa and India predate Queen Elizabeth II, it is the institution that was in her name that justified these attacks on countries and it is the responsibility of the institution to confront the ghosts of its past and move constructively toward reparations.
When discussing the responsibility of the monarchy as a whole in addressing and working towards change, it is necessary to look at the new monarch King Charles III for any hints as to what the monarchy could do next. Noted in a TIME magazine article, while the Crown is still recognized to head over a dozen states such as Australia, Canada, New Zealand and Belize, anti-monarchist sentiments are simmering too close to the ground. Echoing the habit of the monarchy to shy away from confronting and admitting their mistakes, this March the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, Prince William and Catherine Princess of Wales, experienced the frustration of a former colony as they visited Belize.
With clear demands for apologies for the enslavement of the native people going unnoticed by the Duke and Duchess and a rise in protests in the areas, the monarchy can’t look the other way for too long. As mentioned in a New York Times article on the matter, much like Barbados breaking off from the queen as their head of state to become a republic other states will follow — pushing the monarchy, and more specifically King Charles III — to reconsider the trajectory for the British monarchy.
Although the former British colonies have come a long way from being under complete monarch rule, the wounds of imperial power run deep within our bodies today. While I see the world celebrating the life of a woman who dedicated her life to service, I see an institution that upholds tenets of territorial control, discrimination and hegemonic authroity.
The idea of the monarchy coexisting with modernity seems to be paradoxical in nature, with history showing the monarchy’s hesitation to embrace change that could disrupt its conservative foundation. With the world being pushed to engage with unequal power dynamics and gender and racial bias, if an institution can’t keep up in this race to be progressive, it will fall behind. The question of whether the monarchy will adapt or perish is one that needs to be examined immediately. It is time for the monarchy to address its systemic issues of oppression and denial in order for it to be truly accepted in our modern world.