ROMANCING THE EMPIRE - THE BEST EXOTIC MARIGOLD HOTEL AND THE SLEEPING DICTIONARY

Hugh Dancy in The Sleeping Dictionary (2001)

The British Empire has its own complex history dating back to its beginning in the 16th century and with its apex and maximum expansion during the Victorian Era. I often work on colonialism, the good that it brought and the bad that it inflicted,  and the British Imperial Myth with my students reading Kipling, Conrad, Orwell, E.M. Forster among others. 

The  outcomes of the British dominance on a quarter of the world for a long period of time are still evident in nowadays world, from the widespread use of English as a second language or as a foreign language turned into a lingua franca - well, that's something due to the more recent American cultural influence too, especially after WWII -  to Britain's having a multi-ethnic population. 

What I want to discuss here though is not the real history of the Empire but 

1. the tendency to romanticize, minimizing, neutralizing the faults of that reality
2. the die-hard prejudices /cliches related to the once-subjected populations
which I recognized  in these two movies I've recently watched: The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2011) and The Sleeping Dictionary (2001).