The death of Queen Elizabeth II mostly evoked fond memories in South Asia, where we still think of the English as jolly good fellows who taught us the pleasures of cucumber sandwiches and buttered scones, the crack of willow on leather and the romance of the rails. Of course, there is an uneasy understanding that the railways were developed to open up hinterlands and speed up troop movements—the need was keenly felt after 1857—rather than to help the natives holiday. But never mind, the English and their royals were all right, even if they did pinch the Kohinoor and now charge exorbitant sums to let you see it in the Tower of London.
But times are changing rapidly, and the old admonition against speaking ill of the dead is out of date—that, too, was a British import, derived via the Enlightenment from Chilon of Sparta (6th century BC). Bashing Nehru is a profitable industry, and other worthies of the period are not immune. Earlier, UK dignitaries visiting India only feared demands for an apology for the Jallianwala Bagh massacre. Now that it’s been Indianised into an entertainment venue with a laser show, attention has shifted to the Kohinoor, which is of more material value. The Shri Jagannath Sena of Odisha wants the hot rock returned to the Lord of the World and has asked the President, who will attend the Queen’s funeral, to do the needful.
Queen Elizabeth II assumed the throne in 1952, in another period of rapid change. Ten days before she became Queen, Black Saturday rioters burned down the business district of Cairo, particularly targeting British businesses. Nine months later, the Crown declared martial law in Kenya and viciously suppressed the Mau Mau rising, in which at least 11,000 were killed. Ironically, that was precisely where the Queen was honeymooning in a treehouse—amidst a large company including Jim Corbett―when she received news of her father’s death, and the princess who climbed a tree famously came back down a queen. In Asia, the Jewel in the Crown went native, with Jawaharlal Nehru heading the first elected government in May. When Elizabeth took the throne, it was sunset in the empire on which the sun had never set. Its shrinkage has continued, and today, the UK is neither united nor a real kingdom. She kept up appearances in an institution that has been irrelevant for 75 years but memories of occasional brutality and systematic extraction, especially in Africa, remain.
Some African interests have reacted sharply to the Queen’s death. The South African party, Economic Freedom Fighters, said it does not mourn the Queen because she never acknowledged or apologised for the empire’s atrocities. Indeed, the argument that the Queen was restricted to a ceremonial role by the institutional protocol is a poor excuse. Institutions are made up of people who have agency and choice. The voice of Elizabeth would have drowned out that of the establishment had she chosen to settle historical accounts. But out of respect, most of the former colonies let it pass.
Over a century ago, the Irish trade unionist James Connolly pointed out that deference to royalty interferes with mental hygiene: “The mind accustomed to political kings can easily be reconciled to social kings—capitalist kings of the workshop, the mill, the railway, the ships and the docks. Thus, coronation and king’s visits [George V was swimming into Connolly’s ken at the time] are by our astute never sleeping masters made into huge Imperialist propagandist campaigns in favour of political and social schemes against democracy.”
Black Lives Matter has made the UK itself aware of its historical lack of democratic values. In 2020, protesters in Bristol dumped the statue of slave trader Edward Colston in the drink. There is uneasiness about the dirty money from slavery and conquest in the very foundations of Britain’s institutions. The East India Company was the world’s first transnational narcotics cartel, forcing peasants in Bihar and UP to grow poppy and attacking China to create a market for opium. The Doctrine of Lapse used against Indian states like Awadh and Jhansi was blatant trespass. And the Queen’s prime minister Winston Churchill is understood to have precipitated the Bengal Famine of 1943. By modern conceptions of rights, these were criminal projects, and the Queen’s death brought them up again.
But it also resurrected a delightful tradition: telling the bees. The day after she died, John Chapple, 79, the beekeeper of Buckingham Palace, bound the beehives with black ribbons and told their inhabitants that their mistress was dead, that King Charles III was their new master. They should be nice to him and not buzz off because you can’t live life king-size without a spot of honey on your breakfast toast.
Telling the bees is an ancient Celtic tradition, from when bees were believed to flit between worlds. But maybe it’s only because until colonialism began in earnest, Megasthenes, the Greek ambassador to the Mauryan court, was perhaps the only European to have encountered sugarcane. Until the slave-powered Caribbean cane plantations were set up in Britain, sweetness meant honey. No wonder Melissa (‘honeybee’ in Greek) remains a popular name.
The UK press dismissed telling the bees as superstition. They had earlier ridiculed Prince Charles for conversing with plants and trees, which kept him “somewhat sane”. But when it was discovered that plants could communicate, they declared that he was ahead of his time.
Bees also have a language—an aerial dance which workers perform to point their colleagues to a good patch of flowers by describing the angle at which the sun strikes the eye. Maybe the Queen’s bees understood what the beekeeper told them. Maybe they danced in reply. If not, perhaps King Charles III would be happy to talk to them about it.