‘History isn’t over’: Historians, authors debate colonial legacy

SINGAPORE – To moderator Meihan Boey’s prompt about how to make writing about colonialism “palatable” to the public, British journalist-historian Sathnam Sanghera’s response immediately got the Victoria Theatre crowd chuckling: “That’s a very Singaporean question.”

A scholarly panel on Nov 15 at the Singapore Writers Festival, titled Through Colonial Lenses: Reclaiming Power And Voice, saw three writers who tackle historical oppression in their works discuss public backlash to their books – including, in Sanghera’s case, death threats.

There were winking references to the Sir Stamford Raffles statue just outside the venue and the complicated legacies of democracy in Singapore.

A recurrent joke was whether one would get “demerit points” for making these jibes.

Sanghera, author of the deeply researched Empireland (2021) and Empireworld (2024), eschewed simplistic conclusions. “To say that you should be proud or ashamed of the British Empire, it’s a bit like saying I want to study the climate over the last 500 years, but I only want to focus on the sunshine or the rain.”

Boey moderated Sanghera as well as Chola empire historian Anirudh Kanisetti and Singapore mystery writer Ovidia Yu on a Saturday with multiple panels reckoning with the lasting reach of the past.

Yu’s solution to giving such writing a wider audience is to insert a murder. She said: “As long as there’s a body, you can smuggle in a lot of other information – about history, about events and about geographical location.”

Yu, author of

the Crown Colony series that started in 2017,

also provided a Singaporean perspective that has been the partial cause of the Republic’s relatively benign view of British rule today.

In terms of violence, especially visceral for those who have lived through it, the Japanese Occupation during World War II was far more traumatising.

“The British make you use separate toilets and you can’t be promoted, but they don’t shoot you on the street because you didn’t bow low enough,” she said. “They did build hospitals.”

At which point Sanghera interrupted to offer a more transnational corrective.

The author, who has been invited by the British government and the royal family to advise them on alternative ways to talk about empire, has observed a similar pattern in places like Hong Kong, where the British are frequently compared favourably with the Chinese for having introduced democracy.

He set the record straight. “There was only one governor in the history of Hong Kong who ever tried to introduce democracy, and his reforms were undone. Just because someone has had a worse experience, it makes everyone feel great about the other oppression, but it’s still oppression.”

Both Sanghera and Kanisetti proved adept at tracing colonial reverberations through the centuries. Kanisetti, citing the 9th- to 13th-century South Indian Chola empire – often characterised as Hindu – said the notion that a political entity must have one religion, one language and one ethnic group was a recent colonial invention.

So, too, the enmity between Muslims and Hindus. The Chola empire is today sometimes romanticised by Hindutva advocates, just as how the 16th- to 19th-century Mughal Empire has been reduced to its Muslim-ness and condemned as worse than British rule.

“It’s ironic to me to see the champions of decolonising India actually imposing a very colonial way of looking at the world on a very diverse country.”

Sanghera reached further, drawing parallels between imperial commercial entities like the British East India Company and technology firms today. In his view, the British East India Company set the precedent for such ills as capitalist lobbying and the establishment of monopolies that is the modus operandi of tech firms. Both are involved in “some bad sh**”, he said.

It was left to Kanisetti to offer a young audience member some hope when she asked how someone using the internet today can avoid being complicit with exploitation and the dissemination of toxic views which heads of technology platforms have unabashedly endorsed.

Exhorting the audience to put out sensible information and not despair of changing minds online, he said: “History isn’t over. The fascists haven’t won. They just want you to think they won. That’s something I find tremendously empowering. History is constantly being rewritten and shaped by small actions.”