From the Ruins of Empire

by Pankaj Mishra

  Yet this success conceals an immense intellectual failure, one that has profound ramifications for the world today and the near future.

  It is simply this: no convincingly universalist response exists today to Western ideas of politics and economy, even though these seem increasingly febrile and dangerously unsuitable in large parts of the world. Gandhi, their most rigorous critic, is a forgotten figure within India today. Marxism-Leninism lies discredited and, though China’s rulers increasingly make gestures towards Confucian notions of harmony, China’s own legacy of ethical politics and socio-economic theory remains largely unexplored. And even if it is exportable to other Muslim countries, Turkey’s Islamic modernity doesn’t point to any alternative socio-economic order.

  The ‘Washington Consensus’ may lie in tatters, and Beijing’s Communist regime mocks – simply by persisting as long as it has – Western claims of victory in the Cold War and the inevitability of liberal democracy. But the ‘Beijing Consensus’ has even less universal application than its Washington counterpart; it sounds suspiciously like merely a cynical economic argument for the lack of political freedom.

  The earliest Asian modern intellectuals were beholden to European ideas. Working in a world shaped by European actions, or ‘blinded by the dust-storm of modern history’, as Tagore put it, they naturally embraced the nation-state as the prerequisite for modernity. And though these ‘derivative’ and synthetic varieties of nationalism had some uses in a geopolitical situation fraught with perils for newly sovereign countries, their limitations and problems are now more clearly visible.

  It was never going to be easy for internally diverse societies like India and Indonesia to find a social, political and cultural identity without violence and disorder. Europe itself took hundreds of years to develop and implement the concept of a sovereign nation-state, only to then plunge into two world wars that exacted a terrible toll from ethnic and religious minorities. The European model of the ethnically homogenous nation-state was a poor fit in Europe itself. That it was particularly so for multi-ethnic Asian societies has been amply proved by the plight of Kashmiri Muslims, Tibetans, Uighurs, the Chinese in Malaysia, Sunni Muslims in Iraq, Kurds in Turkey and Tamils in Sri Lanka.

  The countries with restive minorities may seem to hold together. But they do so at great human cost which future generations will find too steep. Furthermore, the nation-state is fundamentally unable to deal on its own with such problems as climate change, environmental degradation and water scarcity, which spill across national borders. China’s damming and proposed diversion of the rivers that originate in the Tibetan plateau threaten catastrophe in South and South-east Asia.

  Much of the ‘emerging’ world now stands to repeat, on an ominously larger scale, the West’s own tortured and often tragic experience of modern ‘development’. In India and China, the pursuit of economic growth at all costs has created a gaudy elite, but it has also widened already alarming social and economic disparities. It has become clear that development, whether undertaken by colonial masters or sovereign nation-states, doesn’t benefit people evenly within a single territory, not to mention across larger regions.

  Certainly China’s and India’s new middle classes have done very well out of two decades of capitalism, and their ruling elites can strut across the world stage like never before. But this apparently wildly successful culmination to the anti-colonial revolution has coincided with a veritable counter-revolution presided over by political and business elites across the world: the privatization and truncation of public services, de-unionization, the fragmentation and lumpenization of urban working classes, and the ruthless suppression of the rural poor. As instructed by the Chinese premier, Mao’s son may well rest in peace in North Korea since his father’s great dream of national regeneration has been fulfilled. But there is no doubt that not just Mao but all the leaders of the Chinese Revolution would have rejected this strange denouement to their great venture, in which some Chinese people stand up while most others are forced to stand down, and the privileged Chinese minority aspire to nothing higher than the conveniences and gadgets of their Western consumer counterparts.

  Sixty years after independence, India, with its stable and formally democratic institutions and processes, seems to have come closer to fulfilling the nationalist project of the first postcolonial elites. The Indian nation-state has grown stronger, with a voice in the international arena. It is an increasingly attractive place for Western corporate and speculative capital. Indian elites, like their Asian counterparts in Japan, are still content to make themselves a junior partner to the United States, implicitly affirming that the post-war international order will survive.

  These Asian beneficiaries of globalization project an image of a confident and self-aware people moving as one towards material fulfilment and international prominence. But India displays even more garishly than China the odd discontinuities induced by economic globalization: how by fostering rapid growth in some sectors of the economy it raises expectations everywhere, but by distributing its benefits narrowly, it expands the numbers of the disenchanted and the frustrated, often making them vulnerable to populist and ethnocratic politicians. At the same time the biggest beneficiaries of globalization find shelter in such aggressive ideologies as Hindu nationalism.

  The feeling of hopelessness and despair, especially among landless peasants, has led to militant communist movements of unprecedented vigour and scale – the Indian prime minister describes them as the greatest internal security threat faced by India since independence. These Mao-inspired communists, who have their own systems of tax collection and justice, now dominate large parts of central and northern India, particularly in the states of Andhra Pradesh, Jharkhand, Bihar, Chhattisgarh and Orissa. Their informal secessionism has its counterpart among the Indian rich. Gated communities grow in Indian cities and suburbs. The elite itself seems to have mutinied, its members retreating into exclusive enclaves where they can withdraw from the social and political complications of the country they live in. This is deeply troubling as up to a third of Indians live in conditions of extreme poverty and deprivation. More than half the children under the age of five in India are malnourished; failed crops and spiralling debt drove more than a hundred thousand farmers to suicide in the past decade.

  The disasters occasionally described in the Western media – the violence in Kashmir that has claimed more than 80,000 lives in the last decade and a half; the destruction of the environment and the uprooting of nearly 200 million people from their rural homes in China – can no longer be explained away with reference to the logic of development as manifested in Europe’s history. The West itself has begun to feel the pain of the emerging world’s transition to modernity, as China’s hunger for energy and resources raises the price of commodities and its cheap exports undermine the once-strong economies of Europe and put workers out of jobs in America.

  Of course, as some of Asia’s intellectuals pointed out, Europe’s own transition to its present state of stability and affluence was more than just painful. It involved imperial conquests, ethnic cleansing and many minor and two major wars involving the murder and displacement of countless millions. As India and China rise with their consumerist middle classes in a world of finite energy resources, it is easy to imagine that this century will be ravaged by the kind of economic rivalries and military conflicts that made the last century so violent.

  The war on terror has already blighted the first decade. In retrospect, however, it may seem a mere prelude to greater and bloodier conflicts over precious resources and commodities that modernizing as well as already modern economies need. The hope that fuels the pursuit of endless economic growth – that billions of consumers in India and China will one day enjoy the lifestyles of Europeans and Americans – is as absurd and dangerous a fantasy as anything dreamt up by al-Qaeda. It condemns the global environment to early destruction, and looks set to create reservoirs of nihilistic rage and disappointment among hun
dreds of millions of have-nots – the bitter outcome of the universal triumph of Western modernity, which turns the revenge of the East into something darkly ambiguous, and all its victories truly Pyrrhic.

  A Note on Names and Places

  A book that ranges as widely as this over time and space throws up innumerable dilemmas about names of people and places – questions that are actually deeply political in nature, as anyone who uses the old colonial name Bombay instead of Mumbai in the British-built port city will very quickly find out. Romanizing Islamic names necessitates a hard choice between at least three major demotic traditions: Arabic, Turkish and Persian. In the end I decided to use names I thought would be most familiar to readers who read predominantly in English. Hence, I opted for Sun Yat-sen, using the older Wade-Giles system of Romanizing Chinese names, rather than the Pinyin version Sun Yixian. This still leaves some room for debate about whether Zhou Enlai, which I use, is better known than Chou En-lai. And I use Beijing as well as Peking. Consistency in these matters, I discovered, was hard to achieve. I hope that readers will forgive my more eccentric choices.

  The History of China has shown no development, so that we cannot concern ourselves with it any further … China and India as it were lie outside the course of world history.

  G. W. F. Hegel, 1820

  Europeans would like to escape from their history, a ‘great’ history written in letters of blood. But others, by the hundreds of millions, are taking it up for the first time, or coming back to it.

  Raymond Aron, 1969

  ALSO BY PANKAJ MISHRA

  NONFICTION

  Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet, and Beyond

  An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World

  Butter Chicken in Ludhiana: Travels in Small Town India

  FICTION

  The Romantics

  Bibliographic Essay

  The idea for this book came to me in 2005, while reading a book by William Pfaff and Edward Stilman called The Politics of Hysteria. Written in 1962, as the United States worked hard to export the ideologies of the ‘free world’ and beat back communism, Pfaff and Stilman invoked the tormented history of European imperialism in Asia, warning that ‘the radical and disruptive remaking of [Asia’s] life and society – the challenge to Asians’ understanding of existence itself, made by the West’s four century-long intrusion – is ignored or simply not understood by Western policymakers and observers.’ This ignorance, Pfaff and Stilman could have added, was also widespread among Asians themselves, especially those brought up, like myself, on histories of nation-building – triumphalism in a local key. I grew up with the stirring story of India’s emergence as a free nation-state from Western rule, but I knew next to nothing about what had happened in other Asian countries, about the writers, leaders and activists who had expressed similar ideas and aspirations.

  The previous pages are a result of serendipitous reading. I went from book to book, appalled by my growing knowledge of how little I knew, and anxious to alleviate my ignorance by reading more. There were lucky discoveries along the way, books that opened up large vistas. Among these are two exceptional books: Cemil Aydin’s The Politics of Anti-Westernism: Visions of World Order in Pan-Islamic and Pan-Asian Thought, and Erez Manela’s The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism.

  This book’s building blocks are not only such authoritative overviews and, indeed, many national histories, but also much more tightly focused scholarship. To name all of them would take up too many pages, and leave the reader no less uncertain where to begin his own journey into these still obscure realms of modern history. Rather than list all the books I consulted, I decided to mention those that a general reader might find useful.

  PROLOGUE

  Given its world-historical significance, the Russo-Japanese War has had relatively few books in English devoted to it. The diplomatic wrangles leading up to it are covered in Ian Hill Nish’s The Origins of the Russo-Japanese War (London, 1986). A short account of its major battles can be found in Geoffrey Jukes’ The Russo-Japanese War 1904 – 1905 (Oxford, 2002). Constantine Pleshakov provides a gripping narrative of the doomed Russian effort at the Battle of Tsushima in The Tsar’s Last Armada: The Epic Voyage to the Battle of Tsushima (New York, 2003). Vladimir Nabokov registers the impact of the war in the opening pages of his memoir, Speak, Memory (New York, 1966), and the biographies and memoirs of Gandhi, Nehru, Atatiirk, Sun Yat-sen and Mao Zedong rarely fail to do likewise. On the battle’s international ramifications, see Rotem Kowner’s The Impact of the Russo-Japanese War (London, 2009) and Cemil Aydin’s The Politics of Anti-Westernism (New York, 2007).

  1. ASIA SUBORDINATED

  Juan Cole’s Napoleon’s Egypt: Invading the Middle East (New York, 2007) is the best recent account of the French megalomaniac’s misadventures in Egypt. Edited by Irene Bierman, Napoleon in Egypt (Reading, 2003) has scholarly essays on specific aspects of the French invasion and occupation, while Napoleon in Egypt: Al-Jabarti’s Chronicle of the French Occupation, 1798 (Princeton, 1993) cannot be beaten as a record of the Muslim response to the French intrusion.

  Post 9/11, the literature on Islam and Islamic history has proliferated. There is much rich material to choose from, but the three volumes of Marshall Hodgson’s The Venture of Islam (Chicago, 1974) remain the most stimulating panoptic account. His Rethinking World History: Essays on Europe, Islam and World History (Cambridge, 1993) offers an equally bracing way to think about a less West-centric history. An account of travels in the fourteenth century, the Travels of Ibn Battutah (London, 2003) gives the clearest sense of the geographical extent and cultural influence of the Muslim world. An interesting companion piece might be Westward Bound: Travels of Mirza Abu Taleb (Delhi, 2005), a description of travels undertaken at the turn of the nineteenth century by a Muslim witnessing Europe’s assumption of superior power. K. M. Panikkar’s Asia and Western Dominance: A Survey of the Vasco da Gama Epoch of Asian History, 1498 – 1945 (London, 1953) is a somewhat dated but still entertaining broad history of the West’s slow penetration of Asia. Some notable though under-regarded contributions to this field are by Sanjay Subrahmanyam, whose The Portuguese Empire in Asia, 1500 – 1700: A Political and Economic History (Oxford, 2012) and Three Ways to Be Alien: Travails and Encounters in the Early Modern World (Brandeis, 2011) are essential reading.

  The Opium Wars (London, 2011) by Julia Lovell ably replaces the classic studies of the subject by Maurice Collis and Arthur Waley; it is especially good on the uses of the opium wars by Chinese nationalists over the decades. Jonathan Spence, in his masterpiece The Search for Modern China (New York, 1999), gives a characteristically elegant account of the opium tangles in addition to much else, while John K. Fairbank’s early contribution to Sinology – Trade and Diplomacy on the China Coast (Palo Alto, Calif., 1953) – retains the capacity to surprise. The nascent Chinese sense of the outside world is captured in Rebecca Karl’s Staging the World: Chinese Nationalism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (Durham, N.C., 2002) and Theodore Huters’ Bringing the World Home: Appropriating the West in Late Qing and Early Republican China (Hawaii, 2005).

  The military aspects of the Indian Mutiny are described in Saul David’s The Indian Mutiny (London, 2003) and Christopher Hibbert’s The Great Mutiny: India 1857 (London, 1982.). For it ideological, social and political reasons, see Eric Stokes’s English Utilitarians and India (London, 1959) and The Peasant Armed: The Indian Rebellion of 1857 (New York, 1986), and Rudrangshu Mukherjee’s Awadh in Revolt, 1857 – 1858: A Study in Popular Resistance (Delhi, 1984). A broader account of rural revolts against British rule is provided by Ranajit Guha’s seminal book, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (Durham, N.C., 1999). Ayesha Jalal’s Partisans of Allah: Jihad in South Asia (Cambridge, Mass., 2008) offers an important ideological backdrop to the Mutiny as well as antidotes to crude prejudices about jihad, especially in the chapter tit
led ‘The Martyrs of Balakot’. For Indian perspectives of the Mutiny, see Amaresh Misra’s Lucknow: Pire Of Grace – The Story of its Renaissance, Revolution and the Aftermath (Delhi, 1998) and the edited volume by Mahmood Farooqui, Besieged: Voices from Delhi 1857 (Delhi, 2010). Abdul Halim Sharar’s Lucknow: The Last Phase of an Oriental Culture (Delhi, 1975) is an outstanding evocation of a city in decline. Satyajit Ray’s script and film of The Chess Players, the short story by Premchand, gives a vivid sense of the culture of Awadh in the 1850s. On nineteenth-century Delhi, see Mushirul Hasan’s A Moral Reckoning: Muslim Intellectuals in Nineteenth-Century Delhi (Delhi, 2007), William Dalrymple’s The Last Mughal (New York, 2007), Pavan K. Varma’s biography of the city’s greatest poet Ghalib: The Man, The Times (Delhi, 1989) and the edited volume by Ralph Russell and Khurshidul Islam, Ghalib 1797 – 1869: Life and Letters (Delhi, 1997). The Indian Muslim predicament is sensitively described by M. Mujeeb, Indian Muslims (Delhi, 1962) and Rajmohan Gandhi’s Understanding the Muslim Mind (Delhi, 1988).

  The literature rebutting triumphalist accounts of the West’s ‘superiority’ over Asia grows all the time. Christopher Bayly’s The Birth of the Modern World 1780 – 1914. Global Connections and Comparisons (Oxford, 2003) is a magisterial account of recent scholarship on the subject. Andre Gunder Frank’s Reorient: Global Economy in an Asian Age (Berkeley, 1998), Janet L. Abu-Lughod’s Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250 – 1350 (New York, 1989) and Kenneth Pomeranz’s The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, 2001) are now acknowledged classics in their field. Prasannan Parthasarthi’s Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not: Global Economic Divergence, 1600 – 1850 (Cambridge, 2011) complicates the story further. Hamashita Takeshi’s China, East Asia and the Global Economy: Regional and Historical Perspectives (New York, 2008) places China in the centre of a vast Eurasian network of trade and tributary relations. The general reader may find Stewart Gordon’s When Asia was the World: Traveling Merchants, Scholars, Warriors, and Monks Who Created the ‘Riches of the East’ (Philadelphia, 2009), Jerry Brotton’s The Renaissance Bazaar: From the Silk Road to Michelangelo (New York, 2003) and Jack Goody’s The East in the West (Cambridge, 1996) more accessible. John Darwin’s After Tamarlene: The Global History of Empire elegantly performs the necessary task of reorientating world history. V. G. Kiernan’s The Lords of Human Kind: European Attitudes Towards the Outside World in the Imperial Age (London, 1969) is a more informative account of its subject than Edward Said’s complex polemic Orientalism (New York, 1978). On how ‘whiteness’ became an ideology and a form of political solidarity against the ‘rest’, see Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds’s book Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality (Cambridge, 2008) and Bill Schwarz’s first volume of what promises to be a remarkable trilogy, The White Man’s World (New York, 2012).