Dreaming of a better nation
(and perhaps one day it will be Scotland)
“Work as if in the early days of a better nation”, said that nice Mr. Gray,
And what excellent advice it was.
I used to believe that Scotland could become that better nation; and that my work as a theatre artist could help bring it about.
But right now the failures of the Scottish government are overshadowing their successes;
And their catastrophic neglect of our culture caps everything.
It’s hard to write about…
…and hard not to write about.
WHAT IS TO BE DONE?
Wrote a 31 years old exiled activist confronting personal and political failure in 1901.
He went under the name of Lenin and he was arguing that we need to do more than organise the working class to strike for better wages and conditions
That it is necessary to educate people into the workings and failures of capitalism in order to reach a better understanding of how to bring about its collapse.
He must have been onto something, that clever Mr Lenin, because only 16 years later he was leading a successful revolution in his home country.
He didn’t turn out that well in the end, of course; and in any case the solutions that worked for him then, and the ideas of what a revolution entailed, are not a great deal of help any more.
But he was certainly asking the right question, and there’s maybe a germ of truth in his answer.
And I know I do do need to educate myself.
Again and again…
Educate myself in the workings of the capitalist economic and political systems in the outer world:
But reach an understanding of how they operate in myself.
And so I find myself remembering the view of the world I was given as a child.
The view of the world I absolutely believed to be true: and that still lives on deep in me somewhere.
When I was a child, I find myself remembering, I was taught that the British Empire was the greatest empire the world had ever known.
That it was just and benevolent.
And later I discovered that I had been schooled to become one of its administrators -
Which was a strange kind of schooling to receive given that by then the empire was something that no longer existed.
But maybe that didn’t matter so much, given that I was also taught that in this world we are all individuals competing to gain power over and make profits out of each other
And that men were men and women were women
And men were more important than women, and cleverer too
And what that meant that, empire or not, my destiny was still to rule the world.
Looking back I am astonished at how useless and untrue this all was.
Needless to say, culture was not in the slightest bit important in this view of the world
And so in ending up a writer and performer who is also living as a woman is really a very thorough repudiation of everything my upbringing taught me.
And maybe that is the secret of the happiness in this photo.
I was taught to be racist too. My dad thought that the inhabitants of the colonies were utterly incapable of governing themselves well. He deplored the independence movements of the fifties and often said that these people should be grateful for the benefits of British rule.
What he never said was that British policy was to grab as much wealth from India as we could; and maintain our rule by exploiting and deepening the religious divisions within its populations.
It was my grandfather’s profession to do this, as a Political Agent for the empire; and he did it all over India and what is now Pakistan.
He then went on to do the same work in what was then called Persia.
He was involved in the aerial bombardment of rebellious Kurdish villages; and then was shot by Kurdish rebels in 1919.
All this has come to mind after this beautiful encounter with Saptarshi Mallick over a pot of tea in the National Library of Scotland.
In 2014 he commissioned me to write an article about script writing in an anthology called IMAGES OF LIFE published in Calcutta; and it was a real joy to finally meet him in the flesh.
He’s a distinguished scholar, whose work encompasses women’s literature, the British Empire, botanical collections and so much more besides:
and here
A man having to contend with deep prejudice in India and vile racism here; someone dedicated to understanding the world better and supporting young women in their struggle to attain education in a hideously oppressive patriarchal society.
Years ago I travelled to Bengal to research my play LIGHT IN THE VILLAGE, and was profoundly moved by the women I encountered there.
And then again when I went to Karachi in 2023 to see the play performed in Urdu.
So moved by the courage of the theatre workers I encountered there.
I wrote about it all here
I’ve a feeling that Saptarshi is another such light. A light in the global village.
And that maybe the light in him inspired the light in me that shines through in this picture, and has helped me get through the darkness of the last few days.
“We all have a light inside us”, says Queen Jesus, “And sometimes it’s the very thing we’ve been taught to be most ashamed of”.
“And our job is to bring it out and let it shine…”
And one light illumines another.
And together we can overcome the darkness.