When Gary Oldman won the Oscar for playing Winston Churchill in Darkest Hour , it was no big surprise. He was heavily favoured to win. What was surprising though was that the win meant Darkest Hour returned to movie theatres in some parts of India for a second innings. In a country where we are happy to take offence at the drop of a hat, Darkest Hour has escaped unscathed. Yet here was a real-life villain far more deserving of umbrage than fictional characters in a novel, a character whose misdeeds are still in living memory unlike a 21st century film based on a 16th century poem about a 13th century princess who may or may not have existed.
Yet there was hardly a peep out of those always itching for a fight to protect our national honour. Winston Churchill should have been a man we could all rally around, united in our distaste.
Shashi Tharoor has listed Churchill’s sins in a scathing piece for Washington Post . He was a man who was in favour of “terror bombing”, who wanted to use “poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes” and decreed that all who resisted the superiority of the British race would be “killed without quarter”.
The statesman
Churchill reserved particular bile for Indians — “beastly people with a beastly religion” and as Madhusree Mukerjee has documented in her book Churchill’s Secret War , while millions starved during the Bengal famine, he diverted food supplies to replenish European stockpiles and complained about Indians “breeding like rabbits”. Infamously, when Delhi sent a telegram to Churchill about the famine, he wondered peevishly why Gandhi had not died yet. There have been quibbles about whether Mukerjee was too single-minded in her focus on Churchill, but none deny Churchill’s odious racism. Yet he remains the “greatest Briton of all time” according to a 2002 BBC poll, a leader whose state funeral was attended by representatives from 112 nations.
The embarrassing fact is that too many of us in India also swallowed that war hero hype hook, line, and sinker perhaps because we are such suckers for that grandiose “we shall never surrender” oratory. I think it’s some hangover from elocution contests in school. I remember as a boy choosing one of Churchill’s books as a prize for something at school. It was probably his memoir, My Early Life, and I remember nothing of it. That I chose that book feels embarrassing now, but what feels even more cringeworthy is that I went through my entire education in India without learning the truth about Churchill.
Post-Independent India was ready to knock many burra sahibs off their pedestals, but Churchill seemed unassailable. Otherwise why in this day and age, in independent India, would there be a gastropub called Churchill’s Restobar in Bengaluru which describes itself as “very British. Very cool. Very you”? Or the Churchill Bar, a “perfect place for your pubbing while you rendezvous with modern art” in an upscale Moradabad hotel? Or a Café Churchill in Colaba serving up grilled sandwiches, peach iced tea and nostalgia? Would anyone have dared name a gastropub after General Dyer, the man who ordered troops to fire in Jallianwala Bagh?
But Churchill is A-OK as a brand. India is not the only place with a Churchill bar. Churchill has had bars named after him in Guangzhou, Marrakesh and Dubai. The U.S. named a naval destroyer after him. As soon as Donald Trump moved into the White House, he returned a bust of Churchill to the Oval Office, telling British prime minister Theresa May “It’s a great honour to have Winston Churchill back.” Barack Obama, whose Kenyan grandfather had been imprisoned for two years without trial and tortured under Churchill’s watch, had quietly removed the bust.
Never surrender?
One can understand Churchill’s appeal, especially in a time of strongmen. His cigar-smoking, blunt-spoken ways personify a kind of gruff no-nonsense ““victory at all costs” leadership, the kind that could come with a 56-inch chest.
Instead of films like Darkest Hour about Churchill the hero, it’s surely time for films about that other Winston Churchill, the man who was as much an English bully as some beloved English bulldog. It is possible that some day someone in London or Los Angeles might make that film. Such a film should have a great box office showing in India if the success of Madhusree Mukerjee’s book or Shashi Tharoor’s An Era of Darkness is any indication.
Of course, it does not mean Indians have any appetite for a dispassionate warts and all look at their own heroes. Imagine anyone daring to show the darkest hour of an Indian icon, especially one currently in vogue, living or dead. Their bhakts will fight in the fields and in the streets, they will fight in the hills and they will never surrender.
