The Enlightenment ideals of toleration, independence, democracy, and intellectual freedom were no longer simply noble aspirations but had become practical necessities. Mass production required a mass market, so the common people could no longer be kept at subsistence level but had to be able to afford manufactured goods. More and more people were drawn into the productive process—as factory workers, printers, or office clerks—and needed at least a modicum of education. Inevitably they would begin to demand representation in government, and modern communications would make it easier for workers to organize politically. Because no single group could either dominate or even effectively oppose the government, different parties had to compete for power.89 Intellectual liberty was now essential to the economy, as people could achieve the innovation that was crucial to progress only by thinking freely, unconstrained by their class, guild, or church. Governments had to exploit all their human resources, so outsiders, such as the Jews in Europe and Catholics in England and America, were brought into the mainstream.
Industrialized countries were soon compelled to seek new markets and resources abroad and would therefore, as the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Hegel (1770–1831) had predicted, be pushed toward colonialism.90 In these new empires, the economic relationship between the imperial power and the subject peoples became just as one-sided as it had been in the agrarian empires. The new colonial power did not help its colonies to industrialize but simply appropriated an “undeveloped” country to extract raw materials that could feed the European industrial process.91 In return the colony received cheap manufactured goods from the West that ruined local businesses. Not surprisingly, colonialism was experienced as intrusive and coercive. The colonialists built modern transport and communications but chiefly for their own convenience.92 In India, British traders ransacked the assets of Bengal so ruthlessly during the late eighteenth century that this period is regularly described as “the plundering of Bengal.” The region was pushed into a chronically dependent role, and instead of growing their own food, villagers were forced to cultivate jute and indigo for the world market. The British did help keep disease and famine at bay, but the consequent population growth led to poverty and overcrowding.93
This combination of industrialized technology and empire was creating a global form of systemic violence, driven not by religion but by the wholly secular values of the market. The West was so far ahead that it was virtually impossible for the subject peoples to catch up. Increasingly the world would be divided between the West and the Rest, and this systemic political and economic inequality was sustained by military force. By the mid-nineteenth century, Britain controlled most of the Indian subcontinent, and after the Indian Mutiny (1857), in which atrocities were committed on both sides and some seventy thousand Indians were killed in a final desperate protest against foreign rule, the British formally deposed the last Moghul emperor.94 Because the colony had to fit into the global market, a degree of modernization was essential: policing, the army, and the local economy had to be completely reorganized, and some of the “natives” introduced to modern ideas. Only very rarely had agrarian empires attempted to change the religious traditions of the common people, but in India British innovations had a drastic effect on the religious and political life of the subcontinent.
The ease with which they had been so thoroughly subjugated was profoundly disturbing to the people of India since it implied that something was radically amiss with their social systems.95 Traditional Indian aristocracies now had to cope not only with a foreign ruling class but with a wholly different socioeconomic order and with the new native cadres of clerks and bureaucrats, created by the British, who often earned more than the old elites. These Westernized Indians had become in effect a new caste, separated by a gulf of incomprehension from the unmodernized majority. The increasing democratization of their British rulers was alien to the social arrangements of India, which had always been strongly hierarchical and had encouraged synergy among disparate groups rather than organized unity. Moreover, confronted with the bewildering social variety of the subcontinent, the British latched on to the groups they mistakenly thought they understood and divided the population into “Hindu,” “Muslim,” “Sikh,” and “Christian” communities.
The “Hindu” majority, however, consisted of multifarious castes, cults, and groups that did not see themselves as forming an organized religion, as Western people now understood this term. They had no unifying hierarchy and no standard set of rituals, practices, and beliefs. They worshipped numerous unrelated gods and engaged in devotions that had no logical connection with one another. Yet now they all found themselves lumped together into something the British called “Hinduism.”96 The term hindu had been used first by the Muslim conquerors to describe the indigenous people; it had no specifically religious connotation but simply meant “native” or “local,” and the indigenous peoples, including Buddhists, Jains, and Sikhs, came to use it of themselves. Under the British, however, “Hindus” had to become a close-knit group and cultivate a broad, casteless communal identity that was alien to their age-old traditions.
It was ironic that the British, who had banished “religion” from the public sphere at home, should classify the subcontinent in such tightly religious terms. They based the Indian electoral system on religious affiliation and in 1871 conducted a census that made these religious communities acutely aware of their numbers and areas of strength in relation to one another. By bringing religion to the fore in this way, the British inadvertently bequeathed a history of communal conflict to South Asia. In the Moghul Empire, there had certainly been tension between the Muslim ruling class and its hindu subjects, but this had not always had a religious coloration. While Western Christians had become more sectarian during their Reformation, India had been going in the opposite direction. During the thirteenth century, Vedic orthodoxy had begun to be transformed by bhakti, a “devotion” to a personal deity that refused to acknowledge differences of caste or creed. Bhakti drew much inspiration from Sufism, which had become the dominant mode of Islam in the subcontinent and had long insisted that because the omniscient and omnipresent God could not be confined to a single creed, belligerent assertion of orthodoxy was a form of idolatry (shirk).
Sikhism had been born in this climate of open-hearted tolerance. The word sikh derived from the Sanskrit shishya (“disciple”), for Sikhs followed the teachings of Guru Nanak (1469–1539), founder of their tradition, and his nine inspired successors. Born in a village near Lahore in the Punjab, Nanak had insisted that interior apprehension of God was far more important than a strict adherence to doctrines and customs that could divide people from one another—though he scrupulously avoided deriding anybody’s faith. Like the Sufis, he believed that human beings must be weaned from the fanaticism that made them attack the beliefs of others. “Religion lives not in empty words,” he once said. “He who regards all men as equals is religious.”97 One of his earliest maxims stated categorically: “There is no hindu; there is no Muslim; who shall I follow? I shall follow the way of God.”98
Another leading proponent of this openness to other faiths was Akbar, the third Moghul emperor (r. 1556–1605). Out of respect for hindu sensitivity, he gave up hunting, forbade the sacrifice of animals on his birthday, and became a vegetarian. In 1575 he founded a House of Worship, where scholars from all religious traditions met freely to discuss spiritual matters, and a Sufi order, dedicated to “divine monotheism” (tawhid-e-ilahi) based on the conviction that the one God could reveal himself in any rightly guided religion. But not all Muslims shared this vision, and this policy could be sustained only while the Moghuls were in a position of strength. When their power began to decline and various groups began to revolt against imperial rule, religious conflict escalated. Akbar’s son Jahangir (r. 1605–27) had to put down one rebellion after another, and Aurangzeb (r. 1658–1707) seems to have believed that political unity could be restored only by greater discipline within the Muslim ruling class.
He therefore outlawed laxities such as wine drinking, made Muslim cooperation with their hindu subjects impossible, and engaged in the widespread destruction of their temples. These violent policies, the result of political insecurity as much as religious zeal, were reversed immediately after Aurangzeb’s death but were never forgotten.
Sikhs had suffered from this imperial violence. By this time Sikhs, who had once eschewed all external symbols, had developed some of their own. The fifth guru, Arjan Dev, had made the Golden Temple at Amritsar in the Punjab a place of pilgrimage and had enshrined the Sikh scriptures there in 1604. Sikhism had always abstained from violence. Guru Nanak had said: “Take up arms that hurt no one; let your coat of mail be understanding; convert your enemies to friends.”99 The first four gurus had had no need to bear arms. But Jahangir had tortured the fifth guru to death in 1606, and in 1675 Aurangzeb beheaded Tegh Bahadur, the ninth guru. His successor, Gobind Singh, therefore faced an entirely different world. Henceforth, the tenth guru declared, there would be no more human leaders: in the future the Sikhs’ only guru would be their scripture. In 1699 he instituted the Sikh Order of Khalsa (the “purified” or “chosen”). Like Kshatriya warriors, its members would call themselves Singh (“Lion”), carry swords, and distinguish themselves from the rest of the population by wearing soldiers’ garb and keeping their hair unshorn. Yet again, imperial violence had radicalized an originally irenic tradition and had also introduced a particularism that was entirely alien to the original Sikh vision. Gobind is believed to have written to Aurangzeb that when all else failed, it was only right to lift the sword and fight. Militancy might be necessary to defend the community—but only as a last resort.100
The Hindu, Sikh, and Muslim communities were now in competition for British favor, resources, and political influence. Their leaders discovered that the British were more receptive to their ideas if they believed that they represented a larger group and realized that in order to prosper under colonial rule, they would have to adapt to the Western understanding of religion. So new reform movements tended to adopt contemporaneous Protestant norms in a way that distorted these traditions. Luther had tried to return to the practice of the early church, so the Arya Samaj (“Society of Aryans”), which was founded in the Punjab in 1875 by Swami Dayananda, attempted a return to Vedic orthodoxy. He also tried to create an authoritative scriptural canon, which had no precedent in India. The Arya was, therefore, an extremely reductive form of “Hinduism,” since the Vedic tradition had long been the faith of only a small elite, and very few people were able to understand ancient Sanskrit. It thus tended to appeal only to the educated classes. But by 1947, when British rule ended, the Arya had 1.5 million members. In other parts of the world too, wherever secular modernity was imposed, there would be similar attempts to return to “fundamentals.” The Arya illustrated the aggression inherent in such fundamentalism. In his book Satyarth Prakash (“The Light of Truth”), Dayananda dismissed Buddhists and Jains as mere offshoots of “Hinduism,” derided Christian theology, claimed that Sikhism was merely a Hindu sect, dismissing Guru Nanak as a well-meaning ignoramus who had no understanding of the Vedic traditions, and was vitriolic in his abuse of the Prophet Muhammad. In 1943 the book inspired violent protests among Muslims in Sind and became a rallying point for those Hindus who were campaigning for an India free of both the British and Islam.101
After Devananda’s death, the Arya became even more insulting and disrespectful in their denunciation of the Sikh gurus and, perhaps inevitably, inspired an aggressive assertion of Sikh identity. When Arya pamphlets argued that Sikh Hindu hain (“The Sikhs are Hindus”), the prominent Sikh scholar Kahim Singh retaliated with his highly influential tract Ham Hindu nahin (“We are not Hindus”).102 The irony was, of course, that until the British had arrived, nobody had thought of themselves as “Hindu” in this sectarian way. The British tendency to see the different faith communities in stereotypical ways also helped to radicalize the Sikh tradition; they promoted the idea that Sikhs were an essentially warlike and heroic people.103 In recognition of Sikh support during the 1857 mutiny, the British had overcome their initial reluctance to admit members of the Khalsa into the army; moreover, once they were recruited, they were allowed to wear their traditional uniforms. This special treatment meant that gradually the idea that Sikhs were a separate and distinctive race gained ground.
Hitherto Sikhs and Hindus had lived together peacefully in the Punjab, sharing the same cultural traditions. There had been no central Sikh authority, so variant forms of Sikhism flourished. This had always been the norm in India, where religious identities had been multiple and defined regionally.104 But during the 1870s Sikhs began to develop their own reform movement in an attempt to adapt to these new realities. By the end of the nineteenth century, there were about a hundred Sikh Sabha groups all over the Punjab, dedicated to an assertion of Sikh distinctiveness, building Sikh schools and colleges, and producing a flood of polemical literature.105 On the surface these groups seemed in tune with Sikh tradition, but this separation entirely subverted Nanak’s original vision. Sikhs were now expected to adopt a single identity. Over the years a Sikh fundamentalism would emerge that interpreted the tradition selectively, claiming to return to the martial teachings of the tenth guru but ignoring the peaceful ethos of the early gurus. This new Sikhism was passionately opposed to secularism: Sikhs must have political power in order to enforce this conformity. A tradition that once had been open to all had been invaded by fear of the “other,” represented by a host of enemies—Hindus, heretics, modernizers, secularists, and any form of political dominance.106
There was a similar distortion of the Muslim tradition. The British abolition of the Moghul Empire had been a traumatic watershed, summarily demoting a people who hitherto had seemed virtual masters of the globe. For the first time, they were being ruled by hostile infidels in one of the core cultures of the civilized world. Given the symbolic importance of the ummah’s well-being, this was not simply a political anxiety but one that touched the spiritual recesses of their being. Some Muslims would therefore cultivate a history of grievance. We have previously seen that the experience of humiliation can damage a tradition and become a catalyst for violence. Segments of the Hindu population, who had been subjected to Muslim rule for seven hundred years, had their own smoldering resentment of Moghul imperialism, so Muslims suddenly felt extremely vulnerable, especially since the British blamed them for the Mutiny of 1857.107
Many were afraid that Islam would disappear from the subcontinent and that Muslims would entirely lose their identity. Their first impulse was to withdraw from the mainstream and cling to the glories of the distant past. In 1867 in Deoband, near Delhi, a cadre of ulema began to issue detailed fatwas that governed every single aspect of life to help Muslims live authentically under foreign rule. Over time the Deobandis established a network of madrassas throughout the subcontinent that promoted a form of Islam that was as reductive in its own way as the Arya Samaj. They too attempted a return to “fundamentals”—the pristine Islam of the Prophet and the rashidun—and vehemently decried such later developments as the Shiah. Islam had for centuries displayed a remarkable ability to assimilate other cultural traditions, but their colonial humiliation caused the Deobandis to retreat from the West in rather the same way as Ibn Taymiyyah had recoiled from Mongol civilization. Deobandi Islam refused to countenance itjihad (“independent reasoning”) and argued for an overly strict and literal interpretation of the Shariah. The Deobandis were socially progressive in their rejection of the caste system and their determination to educate the poorest Muslims, but they were virulently opposed to any innovation—adamant, for instance, in their condemnation of the compulsory education of women. In the early days, Deobandis were not violent, but they would later become more militant. They would have a drastic effect on subcontinental Islam, which had traditionally leaned toward the more inclusive spiritualities of Sufism and Falsafah, both of which the Deobandis now utterly condemned
. During the twentieth century they would gain considerable influence in the Muslim world and would rank in importance with the prestigious al-Azha Madrassa in Cairo. The British subjugation of India had driven some Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims into a defensive posture that could easily segue into violence.
With the transformation of manufacturing came one particularly portentous technological development: the creation of modern weaponry. The new guns and shells developed by William Armstrong, Claude Minié, and Henry Shrapnel made it easy for Europeans to keep their colonial subjects in line. They were initially unwilling to use these new machine guns against their fellow Europeans, but by 1851 Minié ball—firing rifles had been issued to British troops overseas. When they were used the following year against Bantu tribesmen, marksmen found that they could pick off the Bantu at a distance of thirteen hundred yards without having to see the devastating consequences of their action. This distance led to a dulling of the innate reluctance to kill at close quarters. In the early 1890s, during an encounter between the German East Africa Company and the Hehe tribesmen, an officer and a soldier killed around a thousand natives with two machine guns.108 In 1898 at the Battle of Omdurman in the Sudan, a mere six Maxim guns firing at six hundred shots a minute mowed down thousands of the Mahdi’s followers. “It was not a battle, but an execution,” an onlooker reported. “The bodies were not in heaps … but … spread evenly over acres and acres.”109
The new secular ethos was quickly able to adapt to this horrific violence. It certainly did not share the universalist outlook promoted by some religious traditions that had helped people cultivate a reverence for the sanctity of all human beings. At a conference in The Hague that debated the legality of these weapons the following year, Sir John Armagh explained that “civilized man is much more susceptible to injury than savages.… The savage, like the tiger, is not so impressionable, and will go on fighting even when desperately wounded.”110 As late as 1927, U.S. Army Captain Elbridge Colby could argue that “the real essence of the matter is that devastation and annihilation is the principal method of warfare that savage tribes know.” It was a mistake to allow “excessive humanitarian ideas” to inhibit the use of superior firepower. A commander who gives in to this misplaced compassion “is simply being unkind to his own people.” If a few “non-combatants” were killed, “the loss of life is probably far less than might have been sustained in prolonged operations of a more polite character. The inhuman act thus becomes actually humane.”111 The pervasive view that ethnic difference rendered other groups not quite human had resulted in a casual acceptance of the mass slaughter that mechanized arms had made possible. An age of unimagined violence was dawning.
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