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By Root 1287 0

of the regal dimension of empire. The rest of the crowd – officials in old-fashioned costumes and feathered hats, representatives of the new ruling class in national dress – listened as a military band marched in and played the anthems of the old and new countries. Flags old and new were saluted, glasses raised and toasts made. And then, summoning the remnants of their dignity, the British scuttled off home, farewells said to a creature of another age. By the turn of the twenty-first century, the massive enterprise which at the start of the twentieth century had straddled the globe was long gone – the speed with which the British jettisoned their empire takes some grasping. They let things go pretty fast (in the case of Palestine and India many would say much too fast). True, in 1982 the British fought to maintain their rule in the Falklands – a scattering of desolate islands at the other side of the earth – but that was a costly, risky enterprise against a military dictatorship, not an attempt to deny self-determination. In 1997, they quit their hugely successful colony in Hong Kong with hardly a murmur: while a war 8,000 miles away in the south Atlantic was a gamble, a confrontation with the Chinese army was a foregone conclusion. The expiry of the lease on part of Hong Kong seemed an appropriate metaphor for world dominance exercised by a small island in the north Atlantic. The dissolution of empire was as much the product of what was militarily feasible as its acquisition had been.

Chapter Thirteen

‘We look on past ages with condescension, as a mere preparation for us … but what if we are a mere after-glow of them?’

J. G. Farrell, The Siege of Krishnapur, 1973

On a sunny afternoon in Kolkata (or Calcutta as it was to the British) hundreds of people – lovers, parents, children, shambling old folk and squawling babies – mill around the gardens of a vast, improbable pile of a building. At the gates, tuk-tuk drivers hustle for fares, hawkers try to sell strips of sun-faded postcards and horribly skinny, deformed beggars stick out their upturned palms. The building behind them is a startling, 200-foot-high confection of white marble, gleaming in the sunshine, part Renaissance Florence, part Fatehpur Sikri. Like India’s most famous building, the Taj Mahal, it marks an act of devotion to a woman: the Viceroy, Lord Curzon, had planned the Victoria Monument as the world’s grandest memorial to the queen whose reign saw the empire spread across the globe. He got his wish. But it was always a white elephant: in the twenty years between plans and completion, the British had transferred the imperial capital to New Delhi. Within a further thirty years, they would quit the country altogether. On the nearby expanse of the Maidan, the immense park created by the British after their victory at the battle of Plassey, where once British troops drilled in the dewy early morning, there is a much more lively memorial. Thirty or forty impromptu games of cricket are taking place, generally with home-made bats, sometimes with home-made balls. The remarkable thing about all these crowds, cricketers or sightseers, is how few of them have any idea what the marble monument commemorates. Many seem hardly to have heard of Victoria. In the context of thousands of years of Indian history it is understandable: the British Empire was an interlude, growing over a few centuries and gone within a few decades.

Many empire-builders were left behind in India, and across town, behind the high walls of what was once the Great Cemetery, moss-covered urns and obelisks, columns and cupolas record their presence, killed in shipwrecks, drowned while crossing the river and a surprising number dead from lightning strikes. Most deadly of all to early settlers was ‘Jack Morbus’ – cholera. It was said you could have lunch with someone one day and be invited to their funeral by suppertime the next – the burials took place at night, in the light of flaming torches. Europeans thought themselves doing well to live through two monsoon seasons, and, when at last