This is coolbert:
All thanks to the Internet web site of Archbishop Cranmer. His
Grace is most beneficent and I am strongly appreciative.
Yet one more venture into the land of woke, critical race theory, anti-colonialism as is now so vogue. A venture with a definite military dimension.
"David Lammy and the anti-Empire racism of religious illiteracy"
"When it transpired recently that thousands of black and Asian soldiers who died fighting for the British Empire had been ‘unequally’ commemorated in death, the absence of headstones and other memorials to their service was swiftly attributed to 'pervasive racism' and the evils of the British Empire"
AS IS ALLEGED THE LACK OF TOMBSTONES FOR THOSE IMPERIAL TROOPS HAVING FALLEN DURING THE GREAT WAR [WW1] ATTRIBUTED TO RACISM OF THE WORST POSSIBLE SORT!
Now for the rest of the story:
Sir: "The storm over Commonwealth war graves misses the point that contribution of colonial troops is deliberately ignored by post-colonial regimes in their home countries. It has been forgotten that those colonial troops were not conscripts, as in Britain, but professional soldiers who volunteered to serve the British Empire."
"The focus on headstones wrongly labels as institutional racism what were often reasonable assumptions about diverse funerary customs. Individual headstones were a Christian practice, completely alien to the Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims who made up the huge British Indian Army, which accounted for the vast majority of colonial war dead. Hindus and Sikhs insist on cremation, with ashes scattered, while Muslims only give tombstone to grandees. You would be hard pressed to find individual headstones to the dead of those communities anywhere in Indian or Pakistan today. What you would find is collective amnesia about their defense of empire in two world wars" Dr. Zareer Masani.
"Graves 'apartheid'"
Sir: "David Olusoga's description of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission as guilty of 'apartheid' is simplistic and unhistorical. Had their been an established custom of commemorating war dead from which non-white soldiers were deliberately excluded, then he might have had a point. But there was not. Before the First World War it was normal for regimental memorials only to list offices by name, the number of other ranks killed was simply tacked on at the end. When the idea of individual graves for the dead of the First World War was proposed it was denounced as a cruel state takeover of the primate process of mourning, many families objected to their loved ones being abroad under a uniform design of headstone. Given the controversy it aroused in Britain, where burial was at least the normal, it is not surprising that there was little enthusiasm for enforcing it on soldiers from cultures with very different funerary traditions."
"It is certainly true that the enormous contribution made by Empire and Commonwealth troops to the Great War has been over looked, and Professor Olusoga has played an important part in rectifying that, but to throw such wild accusations does the cause of historical objectivity and harmonious community relations no service." Dr. Sean Lang.
There you have it. Headstones for troops killed in the Great War a Christian custom alien to the cultures of the Indian sub-continent. British Indian Army soldiers their burial rituals different, tombstones not lacking because of some overwhelming and pervasive racism.
coolbert.
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