SINGAPORE: Nearly half a century ago, I was born at noon in the Queen Elizabeth 2nd Hospital in Kota Kinabalu, Sabah. The general hospital had been opened by the visiting British monarch two years earlier, and was thus named in her honor. Sabah was by then a component part of Malaysia for nearly a decade, but it was formerly a British colony, and before that essentially a company state run by the British North Borneo Chartered Company, much like India was for a period administered by the British East India Company.

By the time the British left Sabah, or North Borneo as it was then called, Queen Elizabeth had reigned for more than a decade, and her name and iconic image adorned many edifices and even stationery, both public and private. There was, of course, some semblance of decolonization efforts, but at least at that time they remained half-hearted at best, as Sabah, and indeed the whole of

Malaysia, inherited its political and socioeconomic framework from the British. Malaysia has a constitutional monarch, albeit a rotational and not inherited one, and Sabah has a constitutional governor, both as more symbolic rather than absolute rulers, patterned after — unsurprisingly — the British monarchy.

Indeed, Queen Elizabeth may be said to have defined and embodied the very notion of modern constitutional monarchy. Although born a princess, she was initially not destined to inherit the British crown. But her maverick uncle, King Edward 8th, had to abdicate the throne so he could marry his beloved, who was a divorcee — an unprecedented act that shocked the expanse of the then world-sprawling British Empire. Elizabeth’s father, King George 6th, succeeded his brother, and suddenly she became heir to the throne. Like many of her generation, she grew up having witnessed the scourge of a world war, and even served as a truck driver and mechanic as part of the World War 2 efforts in defending Britain from the Nazis.

Elizabeth learned of her becoming queen while on a working trip in East Africa after her father’s untimely death. When she rushed back to England, she was welcomed by none other than the legendary British prime minister, Winston Churchill, who was by then serving his second, perhaps less luminary premiership. The war, which had by then been over for some time, had depleted the British economic might, and anti-colonial sentiments were on the rise the world over. Britain, which used to boast that the sun never set on its empire, found it increasingly cumbersome to suppress the universal yearning of its colonies to achieve independence. The winds of change started blowing, and Britain essentially enabled one after another of its many colonies to go on their own. For example, in 1957, barely five years after Elizabeth assumed the throne, Ghana became the first British African colony to go, and Malaya peacefully gained its independence too. More on these later.

But the main point here is that Elizabeth may be said to have presided over the bulk of Britain’s decolonization efforts. And most of these former colonies remained on good terms with their former British colonial masters. Some even continue to welcome the queen as their constitutional monarch to these days. Most of these former colonies grouped together and formed the British Commonwealth, with the queen as its head. There was essentially no hard and fast rule as to how the Commonwealth should function, and the queen left her enormous imprint by having visited most, if not all of the Commonwealth nations, and fostered goodwill among them for the common goal of indeed enhancing developmental common wealth for all. Many of these long journeys were undertaken aboard the royal yacht Britannia, which usually berthed at the visiting ports. In the late 1980s, when Malaysia was hosting the Commonwealth heads of government meeting, Queen Elizabeth visited the country as was the norm, and Britannia dropped anchor some distance away from the Kota Kinabalu shore. One evening deck reception was held for the local dignitaries, and as a plebeian teenager, I could only catch from the shore glimpses of Britannia’s brilliant chains of lights. But even that was enough to impress upon the then impressionable me the glorious remnant of the British Empire.

Undoubtedly, colorful pageantry was part of the magic formula which mesmerized the global public over the enduring legacy of the British monarchy, and Elizabeth was never shy about laying out the full panoply of England’s royal glory. There was the so-called Trooping of the Colors, her annual official birthday troop inspection in a splendid military parade. But what imprinted deeply in my mind as a young boy as to the splendor of the British monarchy was the 1981 wedding of Prince Charles, the then heir to the throne, to Lady Diana Spencer. I recalled a little me taking an afternoon nap, and being awakened by my mother to watch the live telecast of the phantasmagoric wedding. It looked and sounded exactly like a fairy tale being acted out in full, complete with horse-drawn golden carriages. Granted, the queen was not the main character in this larger-thanlife wedding show, but she enabled it to cheer up sagging British spirits brought low by the economic slowdown in the late 1970s.