Future British monarchs must right the wrongs of colonialism

Last Thursday, the world learned of a historic moment. Queen Elizabeth II — who reigned over the United Kingdom for 70 years, longer than any previous monarch — passed. Most people alive today have only ever known her rule. It’s only natural that her death would cause an outpouring of grief. As she lies in state before her funeral on Monday, the country has entered a period of mourning and people are feeling the weight of “the end of an era.”

But for people who have suffered the consequences of the royal family’s colonial atrocities and longstanding history of racism and violence, that grief takes on different connotations.

In India, where I’m from, people might choose to grieve the history that the country never got to live, as a result of Britain’s oppressive colonial rule and subsequent partitioning of the Indian subcontinent, which altered the course of India’s destiny. People in Jamaica and Barbados might choose to remember the legacy of trauma imposed by the British colonial system, and people in Africa or of African descent might choose to mourn the unimaginable wound marked by the transatlantic slave trade, which enriched Britain and the British royal family beyond imagination while submitting a population to some of the worst humanity has ever seen.

Jemele Hill, a contributing writer for the Atlantic, tweeted, “journalists are tasked with putting legacies into full context, so it is entirely appropriate to examine the queen and her role in the devastating impact of continued colonialism.” I would argue that the same is true for artists.

Art is meant to reflect the world back at us in all its glory, in all its ugliness, with all of the complexities of real life —otherwise, it’s simply pretty objects. The 75th anniversary of the Partition of British India is another historic moment we’re experiencing (and highlighted in my current exhibit, Unbearable Memories, Unspeakable Histories). I know the weight of the past is sometimes unbearable, but its difficult histories can be unspeakable. That is the very legacy we are tasked with dismantling — the notion that when history serves us with atrocious events, as it will inevitably continue to do as long as humanity survives, we are better off sweeping reality under the rug and presenting a sanitized version of the truth for posterity.

But what if we rebuked this view entirely? What would the world look like if we confronted our past head on, and demanded that unbearable truths be reflected all around us? Perhaps only then we could ensure the past doesn’t repeat itself.

There’s no way — or perhaps no easy way — to right the wrongs of a colonial rule so brutal, so vicious and so entrenched in our society’s makeup as the one we can trace back to England’s century-long world domination efforts.

But there are always ways to do better than our ancestors, because that is the whole purpose of history. Should King Charles III choose to take action in new and decisive ways, should he choose to apologize for the horrors of British oppression — for the Partition of India, and for the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, which Queen Elizabeth never did — or even address the injustice of colonialism with reparations? Well, that would be a truly regal move.

Breaking the cycles of violence and injustice, freeing ourselves from the ramifications of colonialism is not an easy task, but it is one that the royal family is unquestionably forced to reckon with. The world will be waiting to see what they choose to do with that unbearable truth, and their unspeakable role in it.

Pritika Chowdhry is a socio-political and activist artist currently exhibiting her Partition Anti-Memorial Project artwork “Unbearable Memories, Unspeakable Histories” at the South Asia Institute in Chicago.