Long-Lived the Queen!

By Tamanna Mohanty

When the news of the Queen’s death made headlines, it was nearly midnight in India. Immediately, it spread like wildfire and the news was shared by everyone on social media with “RIP” messages flooding my feed. This got me thinking, “Should we say that it certainly is the end of an era?”

Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor was born in the year 1926 as the first child of the Duke and Duchess of York who later became King George VI and Queen Elizabeth after his brother’s abdication, thereby ensuring Elizabeth’s path of becoming heir to the throne. She did not know that she would be crowned at a young age because of her father’s sudden demise. She was in Kenya, then a British colony, and the first stop on her tour of the Commonwealth she had embarked upon with her husband, Prince Philip, in place of her ill father. The royal couple had taken a night out of their official engagements to stay at a one-of-a-kind game-watching lodge perched in a tree in the Aberdares. She climbed up the treetop lodge amid the wilderness as a princess and got down as a queen.

She was not going to be an empress as the India-Pakistan partition stripped her of that title, she kept the title of Head of the Commonwealth and years later, she still was head of 14 Commonwealth realms. While the traditionalist front of the Commonwealth existed even after the dissolution of the British Empire, Queen Elizabeth II surely modified and carried the monarchy towards modernization.

She telecasted her coronation and millions watched, with an average of 17 people in front of a small television across Britain. Before Keeping Up with the Kardashians became a hit in the early 2000s, Elizabeth allowed cameras to follow her and the Royal Family to commission a documentary in 1969. The documentary was of course a calculated move to get the common man’s attention and respect for the Royal Family during the Swinging Sixties when everyone thought of the monarchy to be irrelevant. The documentary showed the more human side of the Royal Family, eating breakfast, telling stories, and even barbequing sausages in the Palace’s backyard.

While the British population was in awe of how normal the Royal Family’s life would be, the people of the British colonies surely were not buying it. The Commonwealth had its origins in a racist and paternalistic conception of British rule as a form of the empire’s sequel to retain Britain’s international influence. Though Elizabeth championed anti-racism, pictures of hers with the Commonwealth ministers show a different reality – standing in front like a righteous ruler with a mix of colours behind her.

Behind all the diplomatic tours and meetings with leaders of the colonies, there was violence. And we might never officially know about all the crimes to her name, we are not indifferent to it either. The colonial officers might destroy all records to save the Queen’s reputation, but history is not blind, showing the atrocities committed in Kenya, Yemen and Ireland. (Ireland got personal about it led to the assassination of Lord Mountbatten in 1979.)

Nor former colonies are ever going to forget the damage and loss caused by her previous generations. There was blood on their hands, and will always be.

Speaking of the Royal Family, ex-members like Diana and Meghan Markle left the boundary walls of Buckingham Palace and voiced out unfair treatment towards them. Conspiracy theories around Diana’s death continue, and her death anniversary was not so long ago. And Meghan Markle will have to wait for her royal apology now.

In recent years, the British state and institutions were pressurised to acknowledge and make amends for the legacies of empire, slavery and colonial violence. But are pay-outs any good after decades of destruction and loss? Or are efforts to pull down monuments and statues that glorify colonial rule going to redeem respect? Of course not.

The entire world mourns for a Queen, an icon, and the last of the monarchs in the true sense. But for former colonies, it seems like honouring a war criminal who idolised her ancestors’ sentiments of genocidal violence, invasion, theft and white supremacy. Hopefully, the imperial monarchy changes itself or rather end itself. The 14 Commonwealth nations should follow suit and leave their colonial past behind. And only for myth’s sake should princes and princesses, kings and queens exist in the modern world.

By Tamanna Mohanty