“He came in a carriage. We had to stand in a straight line and we couldn’t look away,” said Cook, who played at St Paul’s Cathedral in then Kolkata, the one-time capital of British India. “I don’t remember much else, but he read from the Bible.” The 70-year-old retiree spent Monday in front of a television in the New Delhi nursing home where she now lives, watching with a touch of sadness as the queen was carried for the last time during a tradition-filled funeral and procession. In Mumbai, Sarvar Irani watched the ceremony secretly on her smartphone during her working day as an administrative clerk at a shopping mall. In her home she has dozens of rare books, stamps and other memorabilia, collected over decades, highlighting Elizabeth and Princess Diana. “Something about [the queen’s] Her eyes and smile told me she must be a kind and good person,” Irani, 61, said. “That glow is gone forever now.” But most Indians, especially the youth, felt a little homesick. The queen’s death sparked a complicated debate here about colonial heritage, so even as world leaders and heads of state gathered in London for the service, there was no strong expression of grief in the country that was once a crucial corner of the British realm. . Unlike many of his counterparts, Prime Minister Narendra Modi stayed home. Mumbai activist Yash Marwah, 27, called the funeral no “big deal” and did not attend. His first thought on hearing of the Queen’s death on September 8 was that it would overshadow more important events. “I thought about all the news that won’t make the news,” he said. In former British colonies, ghosts of the past haunt the mourning for the queen Although India gained independence before Queen Elizabeth was crowned, many people believe she could have at least apologized for the violence and looting that marked British rule in the subcontinent and led to the partition of India and Pakistan. “There is a need and demand for an apology,” said historian Jyoti Atwal, who teaches at Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University. The closest the Queen came was on her third and final trip to India in 1997. Before a visit to Jallianwala Bagh, a site in the north where British troops in 1919 had fired on a gathering of unarmed Indian protesters, killing hundreds, the queen obliquely acknowledged the bloody past. “It’s no secret that there have been some difficult episodes in our past,” he said. “Jallianwala Bagh, which I will visit tomorrow, is a painful example.” However, he did not go further, saying “history cannot be rewritten, no matter how much we sometimes wish otherwise. It has its moments of sadness as well as its moments of joy. We must learn from sorrow and build on joy.” In Britain’s oldest overseas territory, a farewell toast to Her Majesty Atwal said the queen played an important role in reaching out to the former colonies and that the new king must decide what to do next. “It laid the foundation for this kind of renegotiation and reshaping of the role between the crown and the colonies,” he said. “This is the changed script in which Charles has to operate.” On social media, memes and posts are calling for the return of the Kohinoor, a 105.6-carat diamond originally from India that adorns the Queen’s crown. “A reminder that Queen Elizabeth is not a relic of colonial times,” noted one tweet. “He was an active participant in colonialism.” And just last week, Modi renamed a stretch of road in the heart of Delhi that had been called Kingsway or Rajpath. He described it as a “symbol of slavery”. “Today, we fill the picture of tomorrow with new colors, leaving the past behind,” he said.
