Enoch Powell on The Post-Imperialism Of Britain And India | The Dick Cavett Show

uh this is the last show that i taped from london although i should explain you that monday's show will also be coming from london because i have taped a special show uh the other day with six british school children and uh if you want to see uh some of the most attractive children you've ever seen don't miss bundy's show um i'm talking with uh i almost said adam clayton powell i beg your pardon that's libelous there is really it is you are not i've heard that through the lawyers it is liable they did it by accident once in the new zealand newspaper i i have had him on as a guest and uh i must have just made the jump i also i also have not had him on as a guest by this i mean that he one night uh did not show up uh either on my show or anywhere else for about two weeks so it's a little risky to have mr powell that mr powell is a guest thank you for being call me call you enoch all right enoch uh it's not easy it does that's all right everybody does it it doesn't come easy there's been so many jokes about england losing britain i mean losing india and were you sad when india was lost yes very what does that mean why uh because it seemed to me that india was a sort of joint entity with britain you see what people talk about as the british empire was really the indo-british empire india was the center of it and so much of british policy and british defense depended upon this link with india and the maintenance of that link with india indeed even australia and new zealand and the far east they were to britain the things the other side of india and it was from india that both the middle east and the far east were seen it's difficult nowadays but important to recover what was the imp the central significance of india to hold generations of englishmen now it happened in my generation that we had to unlearn and i suppose a good either my political life since 1947 has been learning that there was a pre-imperial britain and that therefore there would be a post-imperial britain and that the self-respect and the greatness of britain didn't depend as we had allowed them to tell us as we had told ourselves for so many years on having those great possessions and those great stretches of a man and if i had to summarize in one sentence what i think i'm trying to do in politics i'm trying to tell the people of britain that they don't have to be big to be great yes if they wanted to be big now what good would it do then i don't mean exactly so yeah and i think that uh you know in the um attempt to join the common market and i'm opposed to that yes there's a great deal of this instinctive post-imperial wish to be big if we've lost the empire the crude idea runs let's join something else big what is it oh yes europe and you hear people going about saying britain would regain a voice in the councils of the world by being part of europe well that's really nonsense you know we should simply be merged in something very different or ten right be all the time refusing to be merged in it there's not much future in that after all britain was britain long before there was an empire and she had what was afterwards recognized as the empire long before the imperialists came along right at the end of the 19th century and told the british you know you're great because you've got a great empire it was a very late development it was almost a decadent development it was all crammed into that last 10 or 15 years before world war one but the time and the ideas that are most difficult to escape from are those of the world that you were born into and being born just before world war world war one it was all these ideas the ideas of imperialism which were the air that one breathed uh as a child and a young man i suppose every generation has to recover from what it was taught in its youth one thing i find rather surprising about the way in which you describe the imperial experience is that it is entirely described from our point of view as if in fact india was a very large uh uh indian ocean convenience for enlarging the moral vision of the english and for enlarging the commercial life of the english and for giving us a sense of the pacific possibilities of the world um but at no point uh do i hear in in your rhetoric any feeling of what in fact uh might have been the experience of the indians in servicing us in this way no if i've given that impression then i've given one which is very incomplete indeed the remarkable thing about the british empire in india is that it was not an empire of domination still less of assimilation now contrast for instance the french colonies and there's a great deal to be said for the french colonial period and the french empire but the french for example insisted that french was the language we insisted in india that urdu was the language if you were if you were going to serve not merely in the indian army but in the british army in india you had to learn the language and there was tremendous emphasis upon the fact that the british were not attempting to assimilate india on the contrary right from the beginning you find the notion not of trusteeship i think that's a horrid idea but there was from the very beginning the conviction that this extraordinary connection unique in the history of a world mysterious was bound to be broken was bound to disappear but how it would be broken neither the indians nor the british could see and the indians had just the same sense of this belonging from the other end uh as we had well aren't there many um occasions in which it is possible to impose the sense of belonging and to elicit the sense of consent and to elicit consent from people who in fact are dominated by all sorts of very subtle methods which don't in fact necessarily consist of the knowlet and the uh and it's possible to elicit even in fact uh opinions of love yes i'm sure that's so and i believe that uh until the last generation until the 20s and 30s this was very much the case that it was through britain that many indians gained access to europe and to the outer world an experience which they afterwards interpreted and reinterpreted in their own way so that both sides were were often mistaken uh and unconsciously uh were playing a different part from that which they thought they were certainly [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: The Dick Cavett Show

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Keywords: The Dick Cavett Show, Talk Show, Musician, Celebrities, Dick Cavett, United States, Chat Show, Interview, Enoch Powell, #enochpowell, Roger Moore, Jonathan Miller, #jonathanmiller, British politician, classical scholar, #politics, Minister of health, conservative member, India independence, Post-imperialist Britain and India, post-imperialism, John Enoch Powell MBE, Rivers of Blood Speech, Britain commonwealth, immigration, UK immigration, #thedickcavettshow

Id: VsC6GBw9zew

Length: 8min 1sec (481 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 18 2020