PIQUE OVER A PEAK

Press, Volume LXXXVII, Issue 26396, 14 April 1951, Page 3

PIQUE OVER A PEAK

(A Fourth Leader tn "The Times.") In this country the term “cultural aggression" is not yet widely used, and its meaning is only dimly apprehended. To some people it suggests the embodiment in Kiss Me, Kate of. dialogue from “The Taming of the Shrew,’’ to others attempts to convert the cricket ’ pavilion into a dressing room for petformers in their local pageant. We suspect people who write “How true!” against heavily underlined passages in the books that they borgow from us to be guilty of cultural aggression, along with those who recite poetry in saloon bars and the acquaintances who ask for a frank opinion on a festival ode written by their daughter during a prolonged convalescence from the effects of athlete’s foot These peocadilloes are not the real thing. Everything about them is on too small a •rale; to describe them as cultural aggression would betray a gross lack of proportion, like calling a mouse a dangerous carnivore just because it had cantered off with the week’s meat ration.

It is only the ideologists who understand the nature of this offence and are qualified to pass judgment on it; and it is disquieting to learn, from an incensed article in the Chinese periodical “Enlightened Youth." that the British are, and have for a century been, committing cultural aggression by calling Mount Everest Mount Everest “Cultural aggression by the Imperialists” is how Mr Chiu (who wrote the article) characterises the tong-standing adoption of this misnomer. He maintains that the celebrated eminence ought to be known ® Chu-mu-lang-ma, or Peak of “acred Mother’s Spring, and that it first discovered in 1717, “fully 1® years before Mr Everest laid his e Xes on the peak,” by surveyors sent yt by the Manchu Emperor of the “•y-. It would be an undignified waste W tone to take Mr Chiu up on points detail, Two blacks do not make a *mte and it is no good reminding mm that the Manchu Empire was, ana made no bones about being, an imperialist institution, or that by 1852 meutenant-Colonel Sir George Everest, me surveyor-general in India, after wnom the mountain was named, had been living in retirement in England nearly a decade. These are minor in no way modifying the graY™ten of Mr Chiu’s charge, which is ”“e of cultural aggression against the mgnest mountain in the world. Though it is true that this charge “33 yet to be proved, most Englishwill feel instinctively that there g Wobably something in it. Soviet r®*®? has more inventions and diswvencs to her credit than any other Z?? o ’*’ but they are mostly of things wmeh had been invented or discovered r?°5 e ’ and China—what with gungjwjtor and print, ng and all the rest SA; to rea “y more of an originator m me old-fashioned sense of the word. *ould not be at all surprising to t ’ la ®at she had been the first country Jffibme aware of the existence of *be eminence in question; z"?, “ *, ouic * almost certainly be extraF®nanly difficult to prove that she not if she said that she had. The ah ls - what is to be done about tlMir s? The British may feel that tn 113,136 tor the mountain deserves suh?Lt?S r ?F tua ted because they have r'*V 66 ted themselves to much danger, zTjtomp, and expense m their efforts " cU ®b to 016 top of it; but the Chincertoinly contend that their r*mn*d abstention from such ludiantics is the firmest of all E™ na s on which to base their claims. J* whole question is one which it rul. to* 6 a considerable time to deSt' and meanwhile the individual in ug, country, faced with the choice of r*mg about Chu-mu-lang-ma and as an appeaser or call--2? it Everest and being reviled emli5 rov< ? ca^ve war-monger with no. for Asiatic susceptibili- ' rr’Jtod better shun the Himalayas as wPto for general conversation.