Growing up in Kabul, my first encounter with monarchy was through Iranian magazines featuring large and colourful photographs of the Iranian royal family. But by the time these magazines had found their way into my childhood hands, Iran was no longer a monarchy and neither was Afghanistan. In Afghanistan the monarchy had been overthrown in 1973 through a peaceful revolution inside the royal family itself, while in Iran its abolition occurred in a much more bloody way six years later.
For these reasons, even though I grew up in the east I never experienced the famous despotism of its kings. Rather, political power was in the less glittering hands of the communist party members who sported thick black moustaches and wore ill-fitting suits. As an ugly kind of social realism, it was a great aesthetic contrast to the photographs of the Iranian royals who were always dressed immaculately with their crowns and swords.
I later asked my parents about our own exiled king and my mother told me that when the communists took power they opened the royal palace for ordinary Afghans to see what pompous lives their 'oppressors' had led while the people ate their onions and bread. But when I asked my mother how the palace was, she answered to my surprise, 'Well, they didn't have much really. I think we had better porcelain then they had.' Perhaps it was this lack of glamour which made the Afghan monarchy so easily forgetable even where the romantic printed images of the Iranian royals lingered on.
My later schooling in Germany taught me to look differently at political power, whether it be displayed through the symbolism of crowns or military uniforms. I began to look differently at the Iranian rulers who had captured my childhood imagination and monarchy began to seem archaic and dangerous. But later, as an exchange student in England, the monarchy was suddenly back in my life though this time it also had its fun side. I would buy postcards of the royal family for my politically aware friends in Germany who in return sent me postcards of soap and pop stars. It was a competition about who was more chic, more famous, more kitsch. But in each of these qualities, no-one could compete with the British royals.
However, matters changed when I became more involved with English people. I found out that for many of them the monarchy was more meaningful and this confrontation with the reality of English life forced me to think more seriously about monarchy. However, it was not easy, for the British monarchy was nothing like the kind of monarchy I knew from the east where kings had real political power and often abused it. The Queen, by contrast, resembled a sober and rather glamorous grandmother. She didn't order the execution of her political enemies, but instead gave speeches in her standard-setting pronounciation and manners.
That the British monarchy uses symbols of power - the crowns, gowns, horses and ceremonies - but lacks actual political power may seem difficult to understand. What is the monarchy's use if it is merely symbolic and ceremonial? It seems that a sense of social continuity is the most important factor. In contrast to the many changes of contemporary British life, the monarchy is always there, unchanging and predictible. This lends it a transcendental quality. While in England one cannot rely upon public transport or the NHS, one can always rely upon the Queen. With her displays of perfection she thus compensates for the modern-day shortcomings of her country by allowing the imagination of her subjects to partake in this haven of flawlessness.
