From the Ruins of Empire
Page 26
Later in this dreamlike sequence, Shibiao sees a yellow-skinned man in a red Sikh-style turban; he turns out to be Chinese. The dream then quickly turns into a nightmare as Shibiao notices that everyone on the streets is wearing red turbans and that English is being taught in schools from textbooks designed by Christian missionaries. The story ends with Shibiao feeling profoundly disturbed by this vision of China subjected to India’s fate.
India, conquered and then mentally colonized, was also a cautionary tale for al-Afghani. But from the perspective of China, where despite its weaknesses a political-moral order based on Confucianism had endured, India seemed dangerously out of touch with its own cultural heritage. Indian philosophy and literature – which only Brahmans in possession of Sanskrit could read – had been a closed book to a majority of Indians; it was the European discovery, and translation into English and German, of Indian texts that introduced a new Western-educated generation of Indian intellectuals to their cultural heritage.
As the Chinese saw it, foreigners had ruled the country continuously since the Mughals established their empire in the sixteenth century; there was no native ruling class capable of unifying the country. The most progressive elements seemed to be members of the Hindu castes that had faithfully served the imperial Muslim court and then turned into officials of the British as the latter expanded their administrative structures across the subcontinent.
Rabindranath Tagore’s family, connected to the British East India Company right from the settling of Calcutta in 1690, was a prominent beneficiary of the British economic and cultural reshaping of India. His grandfather was the first big local businessman of British India, and socialized with Queen Victoria and other notables on his trips to Europe; his elder brother was the first Indian to be admitted by the British into the Indian Civil Service (ICS).
Born in 1861, four years after the Indian Mutiny and the establishment of new Western-style universities in Calcutta, Madras and Bombay, Tagore was part of a new Indian intelligentsia – one that was exposed to a range of Western thought and was also influenced by the ‘social reform’ movements initiated by such men as Ram Mohun Roy (1774 – 1833), often called the ‘father of modern India’. Roy founded the Brahmo Sabha, a reformist society aimed at purging Hinduism of such evils as widow-burning and bringing it closer to a monotheistic religion like Christianity. Tagore’s father, Debendranath, adopted and then elaborated Roy’s syncretism in the organization Brahmo Samaj.
Just as many of China’s modern thinkers emerged from the regions near Canton and Shanghai, the parts of the country most exposed to the West, so the Bengalis of India’s eastern coast came to be natural leaders of what was later called the ‘Indian Renaissance’. Tagore himself grew up in a culturally confident and creative family, and was exposed early to European society and culture. This meant that he never partook of the strident anti-Westernism that began to overwhelm many of his Bengali compatriots in the latter half of the nineteenth century.
Writing as late as 1921, when the tide of Indian nationalism was rising fast, he protested that ‘if, in the spirit of national vainglory, we shout from our house-tops that the West has produced nothing that has an infinite value for man, then we only create a serious cause of doubt about the worth of any product in the Eastern mind.’2 He would later develop serious differences with Gandhi over what he saw as the xenophobic aspect of the anti-colonial movement. At the same time, Tagore could never be part of ‘Young Bengal’, a group of Western-educated Bengalis who sought to escape Asia and join Europe just as fervently as the Ottoman Tanzimatists and the Meiji intellectuals in Japan had. Committed to a larger vision of the divine in man, and the essential unity of mankind, Tagore became in fact one of the clearest observers and strongest critics of India’s Europeanization.
In nineteenth-century India, movements dedicated to reforming Hinduism and restoring its lost glory had grown very rapidly, part of the same larger trend mentioned previously of religious-political assertion in Muslim, Buddhist and Confucian societies. The inspiration and rhetoric of these neo-Hindu movements might have seemed archaic but, though often born out of a sense of racial humiliation, they were largely inspired by the ideas of progress and development that British Utilitarians and Christian missionaries aggressively promoted in India. The social reformer Dayananda Saraswati (1824 – 83), for instance, exhorted Indians to return to the Vedas, which contained, according to him, all of modern science; and echoed British missionary denunciations of such ‘Hindu superstitions’ as idol-worship and the caste system.
This ‘modernization’ of Indian religion under semi-European auspices was to release new political and social movements across India, many of them militantly opposed to British rule and dedicated to recovering national dignity. One emblematic figure of this ambiguous Europeanization of Indian culture was Bankim Chandra Chatterji (1838 – 94), an official in the British government in Bengal, who moved in his lifetime from Young Bengal-style uncritical adoration of the West to being the first icon of Hindu nationalism.
Bengalis were ‘drunk with the wine of European civilization’, Aurobindo Ghose complained in 1908, no doubt thinking of his own upbringing in a fanatically Anglophile Bengali family.3 Saddled with the middle name ‘Ackroyd’, and banished to English public schools in the 1880s, Aurobindo acquired his knowledge of Indian languages and literature from European Orientalist scholars, and returned home in the early 1890s a bitter critic of the British and their Bengali imitators. As he saw it, ‘the movements of the nineteenth century in India were European movements’ which
adopted the machinery and motives of Europe, the appeal to the rights of humanity or the equality of social status and an impossible dead level which Nature has always refused to allow. Mingled with these false gospels was a strain of hatred and bitterness, which showed itself in the condemnation of Brahminical priestcraft, the hostility to Hinduism and the ignorant breaking away from the hallowed traditions of the past.4
Such was the Bengali infatuation with Europe, Aurobindo claimed, that India as a whole ‘was in danger of losing its soul by an insensate surrender to the aberrations of European materialism’. But it was also Bengalis who in the second half of the nineteenth century articulated an overwhelmingly negative view of the materialistic West, even as they grudgingly admired and sought to emulate some of its practical skills. For Swami Vivekananda (1863 – 1902), the earliest and most famous of Indian spiritual leaders, Europeans were the children of Virochana, the great demon of Indian mythology, who believed that the human self was nothing but the material body and its grosser cravings. ‘For this civilization,’ Vivekananda wrote of the West, ‘the sword was the means [for the attainment of given ends], heroism the aid, and enjoyment of life in this world and the next the only end.’5
Vivekananda, who visited Europe and America often in his short life, saw Western societies and politics as controlled by the rich and powerful, and quite akin in their class stratifications to the Indian caste system: ‘Your rich people are Brahmans,’ he told his English friends on his last visit to Britain, ‘and your poor people are Sudras.’6 For Bhudev Mukhopadhyay, perhaps the most comprehensive nineteenth-century Bengali critic of the West, the innate human capacity for love had stopped, in Europe, at the door of the nation-state – it was the end-point of Europe’s history and its endless conflicts. This faculty of love had latched on to such strange objects as money and an excessive concern for property rights – an extreme individualism that relieved human beings of their usual obligations to society and combined with machinery and the quest for markets and monopolies to lead to endless wars and conquests and violence. What was most galling for Mukhopadhyay was that the European never seemed to experience any contradiction between his selfish needs and the demands of morality. ‘Whatever is to their interest,’ Mukhopadhyay wrote about Europeans, ‘they find consistent with their sense of what is right at all times, failing to understand how their happiness cannot be the source of universal bliss.’7
The idea that despotism of any kind was an offence against humanity, had crystallised into an instinctive feeling, and modern morality and sentiment revolted against the enslavement of nation by nation, of class by class or of man by man. Imperialism had to justify itself to this modern sentiment and could only do so by pretending to be a trustee of liberty, commissioned from on high to civilise the uncivilised and train the untrained until the time had come when the benevolent conqueror had done his work and could unselfishly retire. Such were the professions with which England justified her usurpation of the heritage of the Moghul and dazzled us into acquiescence in servitude by the splendour of her uprightness and generosity. Such was the pretence with which she veiled her annexation of Egypt. These Pharisaic pretensions were especially necessary to British Imperialism because in England the Puritanic middle class had risen to power and imparted to the English temperament a sanctimonious self-righteousness which refused to indulge in injustice and selfish spoliation except under a cloak of virtue, benevolence and unselfish altruism.8
For Aurobindo, Indians who believed European claims to such superior values as democracy and liberalism were deluding themselves. For the British themselves considered such ideals ‘unsuitable to a subject nation where the despotic supremacy of the white man has to be maintained, as it was gained, at the cost of all principles and all morality’. Infused with a fierce new pride in India by his Oriental education, Aurobindo steadily turned into a militant nationalist, convinced that ‘there can be no European respect for Asiatics, no sympathy between them except the “sympathy” of the master for the slave, no peace except that which is won and maintained by the Asiatic sword’.9
Like Aurobindo, Tagore was greatly influenced by the Orientalist scholarship that endowed India with a classical past. And he absorbed some of the Bengali suspicion of the modern West. In 1881, early in his career, he proclaimed his political distance from his businessman grandfather, a crucial intermediary in the opium trade. But his own intellectual and spiritual journey from a conservative aristocratic background and Western-style education took him to a very different place from that of his Bengali compatriots.
His long sojourn in the Bengali countryside between 1891 and 1901 was crucial in this regard. Proximity to lives in Indian villages helped distinguish his worldview from that of the middle-class intellectuals in Calcutta. It unleashed a love of natural landscapes, a regard for the everyday, the domestic and the fragmentary, as well as an insight into the plight of the rural poor. He remained convinced for the rest of his life of the moral superiority of pre-industrial civilization over the mechanized modern one; he became certain, too, that India’s self-regeneration had to begin in its villages.
In 1901, he founded an experimental school in rural south-western Bengal. Santiniketan, as it was called, would expand into an international university, and train some of India’s leading artists and thinkers (including the filmmaker Satyajit Ray and the economist Amartya Sen). That same year, in an essay titled ‘Eastern and Western Civilization’, Tagore first developed his thesis of a dichotomy between rural harmony and urban aggressiveness, village-centred society and the nation-state. The East prescribed modes of social harmony and spiritual liberation. On the other hand, the West, he argued, was dedicated to strengthening national sovereignty and political freedom. ‘Scientific rather than human’, it was
overrunning the whole world, like some prolific weed … It is carnivorous and cannibalistic in its tendencies, it feeds upon the resources of other peoples and tries to swallow their whole future … It is powerful because it concentrates all its forces upon one purpose, like a millionaire acquiring money at the cost of his soul.10
The imperialist wars in South Africa and the suppression of the Boxer Rising, both involving Indian soldiers, had confirmed Tagore’s scepticism. On 31 December 1900, he completed a poem titled ‘Sunset of the Century’: ‘The century’s sun has set in blooded clouds. / There rings in the carnival of violence / from weapon to weapon, the mad music of death.’11 Tagore concluded the poem by scorning such imperialist poets as Rudyard Kipling, who had exhorted America to take up the white man’s burden in the Philippines: ‘Awakening fear, the poet-mobs howl round / A chant of quarrelling curs on the burning-ground.’
From 1905 to 1908 Tagore was very attracted to the Swadeshi Movement, led by young Bengali firebrands who boycotted British goods and aimed at economic self-sufficiency. It was after the widespread protests against Lord Curzon’s partition of Bengal in 1905 that he composed the two songs that subsequently became the national anthems of India and Bangladesh. Like most Asian intellectuals, Tagore rejoiced in Japan’s victory over Russia in 1905, taking his pupils at Santiniketan on an impromptu victory parade. But already in 1902, three years before that landmark event in the political awakening of Asia, he was hoping it would steer clear of mindless imitation of the West:
The harder turns our conflict with the foreigner, the greater grows our eagerness to understand and attain ourselves. We can see that this is not our case alone. The conflict with Europe is waking up all civilized Asia. Asia today is set to realizing herself consciously, and thence with vigour. She has understood, know thyself – that is the road to freedom. In imitating others is destruction.12
Tagore saw no reason for Asians to believe that the ‘building up of a nation on the European pattern is the only type of civilization and the only goal of man’.13 After a brief fascination with the Swadeshi militants, he recoiled from the militant Indian nationalism inspired by thinkers like Chatterji, especially the series of assassinations and terrorist attacks by young Bengali nationalists in the first decade of the twentieth century. He explored the middle-class fascination with violent politics in such novels as Gora (1910) and Ghare Baire (‘Home and the World’, 1916). But from 1917 he conducted a systematic critique of nationalism in his essays and speeches. The nation-state, he told audiences in America that year, ‘is a machinery of commerce and politics turn[ing] out neatly compressed bales of humanity’.14 ‘When this idea of the Nation, which has met with universal acceptance in the present day, tries to pass off the cult of selfishness as a moral duty … it not only commits depredations but attacks the very vitals of humanity.’15 Like Kang Youwei, he formulated a non-nationalist ideal of Asian cosmopolitanism early in his life, and never departed from it. ‘India has never had a real sense of nationalism … it is my conviction that my countrymen will truly gain their India by fighting against the education which teaches that a country is greater than the ideals of humanity.’16
Tagore wasn’t the only Indian with serious apprehensions about the trajectory of modern European civilization and its over-eager followers in the East. Travelling from London to South Africa in November 1909, the forty-year-old Gandhi feverishly wrote, in nine days, a stirring anti-modern manifesto titled Hind Swaraj that summed up many prevailing intellectual arguments against the West, and also anticipated many others still to come. Like Tagore, with whom he had a long and mutually enriching friendship, Gandhi in 1909 was engaged in a polemical battle with his radical and revolutionary peers who saw salvation in the wholesale imitation of Western-style state and society. Many of these were Hindu nationalists, the ideological children of Bankim Chandra Chatterji and later part of a religious-cultural movement that derived inspiration from the Fascist parties of Italy and Germany, and which aimed to unite India through a monolithic Hindu nationalism derived from the joint British-Indian reinvention of Hinduism in the nineteenth century. Gandhi saw that these nationalists would merely replace one set of deluded rulers in India with another: ‘Engli
sh rule’, he wrote in Hind Swaraj, ‘without the Englishman.’
Gandhi’s own ideas were rooted in a wide experience of a freshly globalized world. Born in 1869 in a backwater Indian town, he came of age on a continent pathetically subject to the West, intellectually as well as materially. Dignity, even survival, for many uprooted Asians seemed to lie in careful imitation of their Western conquerors. Gandhi, brought out of his semi-rural setting and given a Western-style education, initially attempted to become more English than the English. He studied law in London and, on his return to India in 1891, tried to set up first as a lawyer, then as a schoolteacher. But a series of racial humiliations during the following decade awakened him to his real position in the world.
Moving to South Africa in 1893 to work for an Indian trading firm, he was exposed to the dramatic transformation wrought by the tools of Western modernity: printing presses, steamships, railways and machine guns. In Africa and Asia, a large part of the world’s population was being incorporated into, and made subject to the demands of, the international capitalist economy. Gandhi keenly registered the moral and psychological effects of this worldwide destruction of old ways and lives and the ascendancy of Western cultural, political and economic norms.
As Gandhi wrote later in Satyagraha in South Africa, ‘the nations which do not increase their material wants are doomed to destruction. It is in pursuance of these principles that western nations have settled in South Africa and subdued the numerically overwhelmingly superior races of Africa.’17 Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg implicated capitalism in imperialism; and Gandhi, too, believed that colonial economic policies, enabled by native Indians, were meant to benefit foreign investors, and actually impoverished the mass of India’s population. But he went further, implicating the whole of modern civilization and its obsession with economic growth and political sovereignty (the latter inevitably achieved through violence).