Former Minister of State Shashi Tharoor put across a very powerful question in an interview in the UK. “If you don’t know where you come from, how will you appreciate where you are going?” He questioned that history students in the UK are not taught Colonial History, he pointed out the fact that young people in England do not know of the atrocities the British committed during their occupation of India.
“Children doing A-levels in history don’t know a single line of colonial history.”
He called this ‘historical amnesia’. This phenomenon seems to be a reason why most of the English feel that they ‘did us a favour’ by colonising us. He went on and said that British children today don’t even know what their forefathers did and the fact that Britain fueled its Industrial revolution by plundering India.
But he later clarified that this issue does not affect the relationship between both the countries. He did maintain that the history has to be taught to the young people so that they appreciate where they are going in the future. It is surprising that Britain does not teach its young, colonial history. Maybe that is why the English still believe that colonising India was a good thing.
Watch the full video here: