PATENT PLACES...

applied to the British, the Dutch, the Spanish, the French etc.

Now, you may not have this impression TrOI the BBC British Empire series. produced by Michael Weigali entitled "Remember Cawnpore' and purporting to deal with the history India and more especially_ with the Great Indian Mutiny. You may have had the impression that after two and a half centuries of the relatively calm, benevolent presence of the British East India Company, who asked nothing of the natives but the right to trade, those uncouth, pagan Indians suddenly began to run around the entire country with chapittis in their hands, bent on exterminating every Englishman (and good God, the women and children too!) in the most horrific manner possible.

The method of Weigall and his writer, René Cutforth, was rather like that of a Cecil B. de Mille epic based on blood, gore and breath-taking courage, except that instead of de Mille's habitual cast of some thousand extras, the BBC was limited to a few dozen valiant English actors changing uniforms at lightning speed appear as someone else in the next sequence.

There was much poetic camera work and symbols pregnant With significance like a lone vulture sitting on a tree, zero degree of political and historical understanding and a deep identification with the perennial White Man's Burden.

The Black Hole of Calcutta in which a few British men and women died atrociously cannot be condoned, but it did stem from native grievances and not out of the blue. And even then, did it justify British retribution Bengal shade be theminizure of dominance the whole of India?

The programme was clearly not too interested in the cause of the native, but what blind arrogance led Weigall to insinuate that suddenly on New Year's Day, 1857, the Indian Mutiny broke out, again out of the blue? It may have been unexpected for the British; they may indeed have felt in the words of the programme 'that the unbelievable was now happening' and that this was (note the understatement) 'a period of intense gloom'. But for the Indians it was the necessary explosion which followed years of exploitation and humiliation.

Nor was this the first outburst. There are many confrontations from which to choose. Some years prior to this there had occurred the incident. which the English ruling class chose to call the Barrackpur Mutiny and which Indians rightly insist on calling the Barrackpur Massacre. High-caste Bengali troops had refused to be sent by sea to fight the Burmese on behalf of the British — the recalcitrants were ordered on parade and shot by two British regiments.

The humiliation and dominance of native peoples knew no bounds, and even liberal historians now contend that the East India Company and British governors of India, such as Lord Dalhousie, deliberately set out to instigate wars in order to annex further territory. An instance of this was cited by Richard Cobden in the House of Commons in 1852, when he said:

'Lord Dalhousie begins with the possibilities of an honest, liberal investigation, albeit confined within the time limitations from which all the programmes in a vehicle in charge of a coloured man. suffer. He managed to convey not only atmosphere but information on the social, political and historical forces at work in the colonization of the 4 West Indies. Tonight's Part Canada is also produced by him, and on the basis of his last contribution should be well worth watching.

What emerged from the 'Sugar Slaves' was precisely that rivalry for gain which characterized the expansion overseas of the European trading companies and the man, especially on a dark night.' extent to which natives were merely the cattle from whom a certain amount of labour could g extracted after which they were entirely expendable. One