From the Ruins of Empire

by Pankaj Mishra

  India’s most famous thinker of that century, Swami Vivekananda (1863 – 1902), articulated a widespread moral revulsion among Asians for their European masters:

  Intoxicated by the heady wine of newly acquired power, fearsome like wild animals who see no difference between good and evil, slaves to women, insane in their lust, drenched in alcohol from head to foot, without any norms of ritual conduct, unclean, materialistic, dependent on material things, grabbing other people’s land and wealth by hook or crook … the body their self, its appetites their only concern – such is the image of the western demon in Indian eyes.44

  Westerners in Asia were increasingly seen as engaging in a deliberate assault on indigenous ways of life. Native frustration and grievances were inevitably articulated through religion, which, as Marx shrewdly pointed out, was much more than a belief system: it was a ‘general theory of the world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in a popular form, its spiritualistic point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, its universal source of consolation and justification’.45 Native rage, quietly simmering, often erupted into violence: the Boxer Rising in China, the tribal disturbances in east-central India at the very end of the nineteenth century, the Mahdist revolt in Sudan, the Urabi revolt in Egypt in 1882 and the tobacco revolution in Iran in 1891 would signify the strength of unorganized anti-West xenophobia, often accompanied by a desperate desire to resurrect a fading or lost socio-cultural order.

  The Indian Mutiny of 1857 was one such eruption. In the early nineteenth century, marginalized and embittered Muslims had begun to be receptive to the puritanical and scripturalist reformers of Islam – now known as Wahhabis – then growing dominant in Arabia. Claiming that India was Dar al-Harb, Muslim theologians and activists declared jihads in 1803 and again in 1826 against the British and their Indian collaborators. Overrunning parts of north-west India, the jihadists were finally suppressed in 1831 at the Battle of Balakot, which was to assume a tragic aura in South Asian Islamic lore comparable to the martyrdom of Imam Hussein at Karbala in AD 680.

  The Mutiny was a bigger explosion than any of these scattered rebellions mounted by Indian Muslims against the British. It was sparked by rumours that new cartridges used by the British Indian army were greased with pork and beef. However, for many of India’s old elite, the Mutiny had been simmering for years as the British peremptorily redrew the social, political and economic map of India. A full measure of this was provided by the Delhi newspaper Delhi Urdu Akhbar, whose editor, Maulvi Baqar, a member of the city’s old elite, swiftly moved in 1857 from being an anodyne court-chronicler to a fiery anti-imperialist pamphleteer. ‘In truth’, he wrote, ‘the English have been afflicted with divine wrath … and their arrogance has brought them divine retribution.’46 Baqar recalled for his readers the many crimes of the British – the broken treaties with local rulers, the siphoning off of profits to Britain – and how now the tables were being turned on them by Hindus and Muslims: ‘They have taken countries and governments away from the owners on the charge of bad management and ostensibly to bring relief to their subjects. Today the same logic is reverted upon them to say that you could not administer the country.’47 One of Awadh’s dispossessed landlords offered the same vengeful logic to a British official, whom he had rescued from a furious mob:

  Sahib, your countrymen came into this country and drove out our King. You send your officers round the districts to examine the titles to the estates. At one blow you took from me lands which from time immemorial had been in my family. I submitted. Suddenly misfortune fell upon you. The people of the land rose against you. You came to me whom you had despoiled. I have saved you. But now – now I march at the head of my retainers in Lucknow to try and drive you from the country.48

  The mutineers did not spare British women and children. One of the many fiery proclamations for the general revolt set out a division of labour among Indians whose ‘bounden duty’ it was

  to come forward and put the English to death … some of them should kill them by firing guns … and with swords, arrows, daggers … some lift them up on spears … some should wrestle and break the enemy into pieces, some should strike them with cudgels, some slap them, some throw dust into their eyes, some should beat them with shoes … In short no one should spare any efforts, to destroy the enemy and reduce them to the greatest extremities.49

  Though Hindus often led the mutineers, Muslims, especially those degraded by British rule, participated in large numbers, and the confused revolution coalesced briefly around the figure of the Mughal emperor in Delhi before it was brutally suppressed. Exhorted by public opinion back home and such venerated figures as Charles Dickens, the British in India exacted terrible reprisals as they dispersed the mutineers. Vengeful soldiers lashed tens of thousands of mutineers to the muzzles of cannons, and blew them to pieces; they left a trail of destruction across north India, bayoneting and burning their way through villages and towns.

  Encamped outside Delhi, waiting for the city to fall, British soldiers dreamt of ‘a nice little diamond or two’ from the ‘rich old niggers’.50 They went on to indulge in an orgy of murder and looting of astonishing ferocity. ‘Can I do anything,’ Lord Elgin wondered as he read in China of the savage quelling of the Indian Mutiny, ‘to prevent England from calling down on herself God’s curse for brutalities committed on another feeble Oriental race? Or are all my exertions to result only in the extension of the area over which Englishmen are to exhibit how hollow and superficial are both their civilisation and Christianity?’51 Elgin answered his question by burning down the Chinese emperor’s Summer Palace. As it turned out, the Qing Empire limped on for another half-century. But British rage and vandalism after the Mutiny made even the symbols of the Mughal Empire untenable. The formal end of Muslim power in India finally came when an English soldier executed the sons of the rebellious, and – as it turned out – last Mughal emperor, and left their corpses to rot in the streets of Delhi.

  THE NEW GLOBAL HIERARCHY

  A lack of unity and effective leaders doomed the Mutiny even though it had a broad mass base and the rebels vastly outnumbered the British. Writing of the mutineers in 1921, Abdul Halim Sharar, one of the first novelists in Urdu and chronicler of the fading magnificence of Lucknow, grieved that

  There was not a single man of valour among them who knew anything of the principles of war or who could combine the disunited forces and make them into an organized striking force. The British, on the other hand, who were fighting for their lives, stood their ground. Facing the greatest danger they repelled their assailants and proved themselves skilled in the latest arts of war.52

  The gap between the British and their Indian opponents was more than just military. As Sharar wrote bitterly,

  It was impossible for the intelligence of these foreigners and their good planning and methodical ways not to prevail against the ignorance and self-effacement of India. At this time the world had assumed a new pattern of industrialized civilization, and this way was crying aloud to every nation. No one in India heard this proclamation and all were destroyed.53

  However melodramatic, this was not an unrealistic assessment of European power. Helped by new technologies, superior information-gathering and attractive trade terms, Europeans were by the mid-nineteenth century challenging the Chinese, pushing Persia out of its sphere of influence in the Caucasus, invading North Africa, forcing the Ottomans to open up their markets, promoting Christianity in Indochina and eyeing a long-secluded Japan. Eight decades after Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt, the British would successfully occupy that country.

  These rapid advances are not explained by hoary Western accounts of Asian ‘decline’, ‘stagnation’, or ‘Oriental Despotism’, which many self-pitying Asians also embraced. As early as 1918, the Indian sociologist Benoy Kumar Sarkar dismissed what he identified as a scholarly ‘Occidental’ superstition about an energetic Europe outpacing a somnolent Asia. Sarkar warned against the historical ‘do
gma that naturally accrues to domineering and triumphant races’.54 Contemporary scholarship validates his view by demonstrating that Asia remained economically and culturally dynamic in the eighteenth century. Europe’s competitive edge was a product of its own clearly superior skills for ‘industrialized civilization’ or, more simply, organization – something that Asians would soon envy and seek to imitate – and the several advantages it had accumulated throughout the 1700s.

  ‘The spirit of the military organization,’ Tokutomi Soh marvelled about Europe in 1887, ‘does not stop with just the military.’ Its influence was ‘extended to all corners of society’.55 As more than one Asian observer noted, European forms of political and military mobilization (conscript armies, efficient taxation, codified laws), financial innovations (capital-raising joint-stock companies) and information-rich public cultures of enquiry and debate fed upon each other to create a formidable and decisive advantage as Europe penetrated Asia. Individually, Europeans might be no more brave, innovative, sensitive or loyal than Asians, but as members of corporate groups, churches or governments, and as efficient users of scientific knowledge, they mustered more power than the wealthiest empires of Asia.

  As Sharar pointed out, a large part of Europe’s power consisted of its capacity to kill, which was enhanced by continuous and vicious wars among the region’s small nations in the seventeenth century, a time when Asian countries knew relative peace. ‘The only trouble with us,’ Fukuzawa Yukichi, author, educator and prolific commentator on Japan’s modernization, lamented in the 1870s, ‘is that we have had too long a period of peace and no intercourse with outside. In the meantime, other countries, stimulated by occasional wars, have invented many new things such as steam trains, steam ships, big guns and small hand guns etc.’56 Required to fight at sea as well as on land, and to protect their slave plantations in the Caribbean, the British, for instance, developed the world’s most sophisticated naval technologies. Mirza Abu Talib, an Indian Muslim traveller to Europe in 1800, was among the first Asians to articulate the degree to which the Royal Navy was the key to British prosperity. For much of the nineteenth century, British ships and commercial companies would retain their early edge in international trade over their European rivals, as well as over Asian producers and traders.

  There was also something else behind European dominance. Writing in 1855 to Arthur Gobineau (who first developed the theory of an ‘Aryan’ master race), Alexis de Tocqueville marvelled at how ‘a few million men, who a few centuries ago, lived nearly shelterless in the forests and in the marshes of Europe will, within a hundred years, have transformed the globe and dominated the other races’.57 Pondering the same phenomenon a year later, the Bengali writer Bhudev Mukhopadhyay reached some disquieting conclusions:

  The effort to conquer other people’s lands is on the increase and becomes more intense with time among Europeans: there is a sharp edge to their thirst for material pleasures and it keeps getting sharper; these do not indicate any enhancements of moral standards or any prospect thereof … It would be logical to conclude their descendants would also inherit their penchant for marauding … If thus Europe does not need external control, who does?58

  But there was to be no external control – at least not until the calamity of the First World War. It was as though the competitive energies unleashed by the American and French revolutions could not be contained within the West; they could only spread around the globe, propelling Europe’s small nation-states into Asia’s remotest regions – a standing reproach and unique threat to peoples who were neither modern nor had any means with which to achieve economic or diplomatic parity with Europe.

  There had been other imperialisms in the past. Indeed, many victims of European conquests themselves belonged to powerful empires – Ottoman Turkey, Qing China. But modern European imperialism would be wholly unprecedented in creating a global hierarchy of economic, physical and cultural power through either outright conquest or ‘informal’ empires of free trade and unequal treaties. As Fukuzawa Yukichi observed in the 1870s:

  In commerce, the foreigners are rich and clever; the Japanese are poor and unused to the business. In courts of law, it so often happens that the Japanese people are condemned while the foreigners get around the law. In learning, we are obliged to learn from them. In finances, we must borrow capital from them. We would prefer to open our society to foreigners in gradual stages and move toward civilization at our own pace, but they insist on the principle of free trade and urge us to let them come into our island at once. In all things, in all projects, they take the lead and we are on the defensive. There hardly ever is an equal give and take.59

  By 1900, a small white minority radiating out from Europe would come to control most of the world’s land surface, imposing the imperatives of a commercial economy and international trade on Asia’s mainly agrarian societies. Europeans backed by garrisons and gunboats could intervene in the affairs of any Asian country they wished to. They were free to transport millions of Asian labourers to far-off colonies (Indians to the Malay Peninsula, Chinese to Trinidad); exact the raw materials and commodities they needed for their industries from Asian economies; and flood local markets with their manufactured products. The peasant in his village and the market trader in his town were being forced to abandon a life defined by religion, family and tradition amid rumours of powerful white men with a strange god-on-a-cross who were reshaping the world – men who married moral aggressiveness with compact and coherent nation-states, the profit motive and superior weaponry, and made Asian societies seem lumberingly inept in every way, unable to match the power of Europe or unleash their own potential.

  As European countries went from one easy conquest to another, leaving manifold social, economic and cultural disruptions in their wake, many Asian intellectuals would grow profoundly anxious about the fate of their societies. Many Muslims interpreted the loss of their territories to Christian Europeans in India, Africa and Central Asia as God’s punishment for their religious laxity. The sense of great and permanent crisis was profound even in places such as Japan and Turkey, which were not occupied or ruled directly by European powers. As Japan’s great novelist Natsume Soseki (1867 – 1916) described it:

  The civilization of the West has its origins within itself, while that of modern Japan has its origin outside the country. The new waves come one after another from the West … It is as if, before we can enjoy one dish on the table, or even know what it is, another new dish is set before us … We cannot help it; there is nothing else we can do.60

  The great speed of change, and helplessness before it, was a common experience. The slightest Western contact with Asian lands inevitably sparked a drastic churning – usually for the worse. The Industrial Revolution and Europe’s demand for raw materials for its manufacturing industries not only thwarted industrialization in Asia; it also forced traditionally self-sufficient peasants across Asia to become rubber-tappers, tin-miners, coffee-growers and tea-pickers. In Islamic societies, the imperative to match Western power and build a European-style centralized state created new classes of bureaucrats, technocrats, bankers, urban workers and intellectuals which threatened to undermine the old Islamic world of the guilds, the bazaars, caravanserai, the ulema and Sufi peers. Even the unalloyed boon of modern medicine in the rising West turned into something darkly ambiguous in Asia when it helped increase populations in the absence of corresponding economic growth, compounding the problem of poverty.

  The cultural effects of Europe’s primacy were no less dramatic. Civilization came to be represented by European forms of scientific and historical knowledge and ideas of morality, public order, crime and punishment, even styles of dress. Asians everywhere came up against Europe’s new self-understanding in which it was everything Asia was not: non-despotic, increasingly urban and commercial, innovative and dynamic. Rabindranath Tagore wrote exasperatedly of

  Asia’s being ever a defendant in Europe’s court and ever taking her verdict as the last w
ord, admitting that our only good is in rooting out the three-fourths of our society along with their very foundation, and in replacing them with the English brick and mortar as planned out by English engineers.61

  And Liang Qichao was not alone in worrying that such a dramatic change in his society’s external circumstances fatally damaged inner lives and older notions of morality: ‘I fear,’ he confessed in 1901 during his most pro-Western phase, ‘that mental training will gradually become more important, while moral training decays, that the materialist civilization of the West will invade China, the 400,000,000 people be led away and become as the birds and beasts.’62

  For thinkers like Liang, Sseki and Tagore, the challenges of the West were as much existential as geopolitical. What was good and bad about the old ways and the new ones proposed by the West? And was Europe’s modern civilization truly ‘universal’ and ‘liberal’, as its defenders claimed, or did it discriminate against non-white races? Could one stay loyal to one’s nation while importing ideas from the same Western countries that threatened that nation’s existence and survival? And how was one to define the new concept of the nation?

  Varying geopolitical conditions and religious and political traditions would determine Asian responses and their timings. Long sequestered, the Japanese were able to borrow the tool-kit of modernity earlier and more comprehensively than any other Asian country. Emulating Russia and their Muslim peers in Egypt, the Ottoman Turks tried to embrace European military and administrative techniques in an attempt to make themselves invulnerable to European power. The Chinese went on lamenting their ‘backwardness’ vis-à-vis Europe late into the twentieth century.