Burden of Proof

 First, I gasped.   The image I came across in my routine internet wanderings a while back is shocking.  An apparent relic of a shameful past, it shows a good-sized officious looking European decked out in the costume of the colonizer - boots, the formal suit of a functionary, pith helmet- seated in a basket strapped to the forehead of a small woman dressed in what appears to be the traditional costume of some subjugated dark skinned people.  The woman is stooped over to bear on her back the weight of the man, who rests, arms relaxed in his lap, comfortably settled in for the ride.  The man gazes at the camera imperiously.  It's hard not to read entitlement in his expression.

In retrospect I can't be certain whether the picture was understood first or if the impression was aided along by the caption: "Bengali woman carrying her British master on her back, circa 1900."  Accompanying the shock is an almost aesthetic satisfaction at the sheer perfection of this photographic encapsulation of all that European colonialism has ever stood for.  The utter contempt for the back-- let alone the dignity-- of his colonized subject.  First, the gasp, then the smile of recognition at having your worst notions of Western imperialism incontrovertibly confirmed.  

And then the doubt... Does using a petite woman as transport serve any sort of purpose other than reprehensibility for the sake of reprehensibility?  Was this transportation; was it a punishment of some kind; or was something else going on?  Could this sort of thing have somehow been customary to the region before the coming of the Europeans?  How would something like this have developed?  The more thought I gave to it, the less certain I was that I had a proper understanding of what I was seeing.  After a quick google search turned up plenty of hits featuring the photograph but no more information about it, I scanned through the comments of the post looking for some sort of pushback.  Buried deep within, I found it: a link to a debunking of it by John Kelly on medium.com.  By Kelly's admission, the debunking did not come easy, but after sticking with it for months of work that involved a bit of internet sleuthing, communication with  scholars across the globe and some primary source translation, he solved it.  He was the right person for the job.   His account of the ordeal makes for instructive, enlightening reading.

The thumbnail: It was a stunt, performed amicably and voluntarily by all participants.  The woman is Burmese, not Bengali (or Indian or African as some captionings on the web have it).  The man is French, not British (the pith helmet gives him away).  He's a visitor, not a colonizer.  The basket was commonly used in the area, traditionally for transporting both frail elderly and the young as well as for carrying goods.  The man was invited to ride by the woman's husband, who was serving as translator to the Frenchman, and it was offered with his wife's un-coerced consent as a demonstration of her strength which the Frenchman had remarked upon admiringly.  The photograph commemorates the feat as a memento; it does not document an atrocity.

The truth does not erase the crime that it is mistaken for.  But it is freeing.