The day Britain was discovered

New Zealand knows how to poco — that is, to engage in ‘postcolonial’ conduct that’s neither anachronistically grating nor teeth-grindingly woke. From this year on, the former British colony marks April 27 as Moehanga Day, the day Aotearoa (Long White Cloud) — what the country’s original inhabitants call New Zealand in the Maori language — ‘discovered’ Britain.

It was on that day in 1806 that Moehanga, a Maori travelling on an English whaling ship, landed in London, making him the first New Zealander to find the other island country. It’s a good twist to the standard notion of White folks ‘discovering’ countries as if the latter were not there, or were uninhabited, before they arrived. New Zealand doesn’t have an ‘Independence Day’.

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Despite gaining full statutory independence from Britain the same year we did, there is no ‘stroke of the midnight hour’, no singular ‘tryst with destiny’. But Moehanga Day does throw up an idea. Even as we don’t know when the first Indian landed in Britain — it must have been a lascar (sailor) hired by the East India Company in the 1600s — we could rustle up something.

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Historian Sanjay Subrahmanyam, specialising in India’s early modern period, could be consulted to find a day India ‘discovered’ Britain. His brother, Indian external affairs minister, could then facilitate matters.