197. White Man's Burden

Rudyard Kipling’s poem, The White Man’s Burden, is a song of praise to the selflessness of the white man who goes out to the lands of benighted savages and gives them the benefits of his wisdom and kind, if stern, governance to protect them from their own savagery.

Sadly, when we take a closer look at imperialism, we find a rather different picture. That’s anyone’s imperialism and not just the British version. This episode looks at the impact of the Spanish and Portuguese in what would become Latin America, as well as the US in the Philippines (powerfully denounced by Mark Twain). But it concludes in India, and the incident that became the turning point for Indian political leaders, previously loyal to the Empire, but convinced by that innocent that British rule had to be ended.

One of the key aspects of that incident, an obscene massacre followed by further severe oppression, was that the perpetrator faced little sanction in Britain, while the victims in India received little help. It’s no surprise that the stark contrast caused faith in British fair play to crumble. The growing resistance to British power wasn’t the reaction the perpetrators had hoped for, but it’s the reaction they should have expected.

Illustration: Jawaharlal Nehru and Mohandas Ghandi. Public domain.

Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License.