MAY 13, FRIDAY

“GREAT” BRITAIN AND LONDON

Anyone who is trying to find Paris in London is going to be disappointed. But in looking for Paris I found many beautiful parks in London and walkways along the Thames and marvelous museums. So I was not disappointed.

But my relationship to London turned out to be more complicated than simply finding beautiful places. I don’t speak French and have never spent a long time in France and most of all don’t have any personal connections to France. In Paris I am simply a dazzled outsider.

But my relationship to London and to England is more complicated. When I was born in the Landour Community Hospital in Landour, Mussoorie, United Provinces, India my parents were apparently given three choices. I could be an American citizen, a British citizen or an Indian citizen. Whether this is true or not, and they had me certified a United States citizen in Calcutta, this is when my complicated relationship to England and Great Britain began. India was by this time a reluctant British colony, the largest colony in the British Empire. Gandhi was leading an independence movement that led to India becoming an independent country in 1947 when I was ten.

But I remember the British monarch, George the VI, I think, on every coin and every banknote and every postage stamp. He was King of India as well as Great Britain, almost king of the world. And even though I was only a boy I was aware of the power and the prestige of the British and without realizing it my missionary family was also a part of the colonial impulse to transform and civilize India. I grew up white and privileged in the British empire and felt part of that pride even though I was American.

In high school I studied and then in college majored in English, as it was called, the literature of Great Britain. Because the United States was also an early colony of Great Britain our language and laws and religion and heritage came primarily from Great Britain. I know more about Britain than any other country besides the United States. So in spite of the revolution of 1776 I felt very close to the English.

So when I stayed two weeks in London I was coming to the center of the Great Britain of my colonial youth and my American education. But at this point Great Britain didn’t seem like Great Britain at all to me, it just seemed like little England, a medium sized island off the coast of a united and thriving Europe.

This is what I faced in my two weeks there. Brexit had changed my view of England completely. Again Boris Johnson’s breakaway from Europe to restore England’s greatness was echoed by Donald Trump’s MAGA promise to make America great again. In my mind half the population in a populist movement in each country were trying to return to the myth of a glorious past of pomp and power, to a past that we couldn’t go back to, to the past of white, male, nationalism, and were in danger instead of disintegrating and destroying themselves. In England Johnson used the fear of immigration to persuade the British to send the Poles and other European immigrants home, but was forced to admit from the Commonwealth, from India and other places the workers Britain needs. That is what Lili told us. Great Britain was turning away from globalization and multiculturalism to England first and in the process was likely to split up with Northern Ireland leaving first and then Scotland leaving so that Great Britain would become little England chasing dreams of glory but becoming less and less relevant.

That certainly isn’t everyone’s view of what is happening in the United Kingdom, but it is mine. The tourist places that American tourists crowd into—Buckingham Palace, House of Parliament, Westminster Abbey, London Bridge, Trafalgar Square and on and on are remnants of that past pomp and glory. They felt like Disneyworld to me dwarfed by the glass skyscraper canyons of the new London financial center which wanted to stay in Europe but now is threatened as financial institutions move offices to the continent.

But outside the financial center of London I saw two Londons, one of the privileged with their private parks and Sri Lankan or Nigerian nannies and the other of the huge parts of London that have been taken over by Indians and others. Half of London has come from Asia or Africa. The old white, elite, male, aristocracy is being drowned out by this new wave from around the world, or so it seems to me. It is too late to go back to white supremacy and the colonial empire that I grew up in. I hadn’t seen England this way on previous tourist trips when all I saw was Liberty’s and the Victoria and Albert museum. Now I feasted four times at Saravanaa Bhavan on Indian thalis and saw thriving Indian businesses everywhere.

So this is my new view of London. It is based on my own biased experience and my politics but from my perspective with my fondness still for all things English, with English relatives on Kathe’s side whom I love, Great Britain seems to me to be a country in decline and not willing to admit it just as the United States, which had come to think of itself as replacing Great Britain as the number one most powerful nation on earth is having to realize that it is just one power among many.

So that is my private take and my response to spending two weeks in London. Others, I’m sure, feel differently about both countries and their futures. We’ll see what happens, or you will, because I’ll be gone so it won’t affect me either way, glory or decline.