This year, the weeks preceding the historic month of August have resurrected many ghosts – conjured up by our PM’s rosy tribute to India ’s colonial rulers, and by the deep fault lines which Advani’s remark on Jinnah exposed in the Sangh Parivar. This month, let us take the risks of defending memory against forgetting, and revisit our history to assess and learn from it. Below, we carry articles that review the legacy of colonialism and Partition – and the shadows they cast on our present. – Ed.
To turn infamies into feats, the memory of the North is divorced from the memory of the South, accumulation is detached from despoliation, opulence has nothing to do with plunder. Broken memory leads us to believe that wealth is innocent of poverty . – Eduardo Galeano
Manmohan Singh didn’t get carried away with emotion in his speech at his alma mater –his views on the legacy of British Rule were not for the benefit of the British audience alone. Addressing the District Collector’s Conference in Delhi in May this year, he was even more glowing in his praise; he declared that the British Empire was ‘an act of enterprise, adventure, creativity’. What makes it possible for an Indian Prime Minister to turn the infamy of two centuries of colonial exploitation and brutal domination into a feat of ‘adventure and enterprise’?
If one believes the celebratory stories written in defence of Manmohan Singh’s speech at Oxford , we are witnessing India coming of age, being invited to dine at the table of adult nations. A mature India can, now that colonialism and Cold War are both past, appreciate the benefits of Empire, they imply. These writers chide the critics of Manmohan’s speech, observing that it is only the “ultra-Left” (CPIML) and the “ultra-Right” (BJP) who have criticised that speech. They allege that such criticism is the product of ‘stale’ ideas and the characteristic blindness of ‘programmed thought systems’ (Communism and Hindutva).
Hardly anyone has pointed out that the founding fathers of the Sangh had expressed approval of British Rule even at the height of the freedom struggle; Golwalkar had chastised the freedom fighters for being ‘reactionary’ (reacting blindly against the British)! Back then, the RSS had recommended that nationalism should not be anti-colonial or anti-British in content, but in fact should come from the inherent impulse of Hindus for a Hindu Rashtra, a nation of their own.
Is criticising Singh’s praise of the British Raj really tantamount to an obscurantist rejection of modernity? Is it time we dropped the ‘one-sided view of history’ and adopted Manmohan Singh’s ‘balanced’ and ‘nuanced’ view of Empire and imperialism?
What, according to Manmohan Singh, is the basis for giving British colonialism a certificate of ‘good governance’? ‘Fair play’ and the ‘Rule of Law’? Really, Mr. Singh? Were the British and Indians equal in the eyes of this law? How can the institutionalised racism embedded in the colonial structures of ‘governance’ be called ‘fair play’?! Recall that even in the ICS about which Mr. Singh waxes lyrical, the demand for exams to be held in India was denied for half a century and Indians were barred from holding the topmost posts. As for the fairytale of a ‘Free Press’ and freedom of expression – has Mr. Singh forgotten the draconian Rowlatt Act, introduced to muzzle dissent? Has he forgotten the horrific Jallianwala Bagh massacre unleashed in cold blood on people who resisted the Rowlatt Act? Recall that the immediate context in which Bhagat Singh flung his bomb in the Assembly was the Industrial Disputes Bill, brought in to ban workers’ strikes. And the Universities and laboratories? It is incredible that Manmohan Singh should thank the British for these – when the fact is that most Universities of the time were set up through nationalist initiative and funding!
True, Mr. Singh has quoted Angus Maddison to justify Indian ‘grievance’ against colonialism, pointing out that India’s share of world income fell sharply in the colonial period; also that India’s per capita income at the beginning of the 20 th century was among the lowest in the world. What Mr. Singh doesn’t mention is that this poverty was no dry, inevitable economic fact. This was a result of what Marx in 1881 described as a “bleeding process with a vengeance” – plunder, ruthless repression, bloodshed. To use Galeano’s phrase, Manmohan Singh’s words imply that Britain ’s wealth, its status as a developed nation today is innocent of India ’s poverty!
But there are many gifts for which Mr. Singh forgot to thank the British. Foremost among them are the deep communal wounds on our polity. True, there were communal clashes in pre-colonial times – but there was unity too – as was shown in the resistance to the British in 1857. But it was the colonial policy of Divide and Rule that was largely responsible for the deliberate creation of Hindus and Muslims as political entities. Mr. Singh may thank the British for English: will he also thank them for the calculated and painful amputation of Urdu from Hindi, which distorted our precious linguistic legacy?
Underlying the praise for Mr. Singh’s speech is the notion that but for colonial rule, India would have been deprived of modernity. But historians of medieval India have pointed out the elements of modernity incipient in pre-colonial India . As it was – the modernity we gained by the colonial route was a stunted, distorted version, a bonsai ruthlessly pruned by the British. The British introduced the barest minimum elements of modernity as were required to rule and to plunder effectively. Existing industry was destroyed with equal ruthlessness. And most pre-modern forms of feudal domination were retained and consolidated on a new basis. Some commentators have said that colonialism had benefits for the dalits-bahujans – insofar as modern industry and the development of a modern working class eroded the caste system. But these benefits are far outweighed by the fact that in agrarian India , the British did nothing to destroy structures of feudal caste domination. Concerned only with extracting backbreaking revenue, they were least interested in encouraging productive investment in agriculture. So, they gave institutions like the zamindari a new lease of life, brutally crushed anti-feudal uprisings of the peasantry – the result is that the mass of dalit agrarian poor remained shackled by structures of feudal oppression.
It is amusing to find Marx being quoted in Manmohan’s defence. Marx did indeed anticipate that British colonialism would act as an ‘unconscious tool of history’ – that among the unintended effects of its rapacious rule would be to create the ground for the national liberation and democratic revolution in India : much as capitalism itself would have the unintended effect of creating the proletariat which would be the instrument of its destruction. To interpret this as appreciation for colonialism’s ‘good governance’ is laughable and perverse. Recall that Marx wrote, in the same series of despatches on India , that “The profound hypocrisy and inherent barbarism of bourgeois civilisation lies unveiled before our eyes, turning from its home, where it assumes respectable forms, to the colonies, where it goes naked.” Marx firmly identified the British as the worst of all rulers in India – “the misery inflicted by the British on Hindustan is of an essentially different and infinitely more intensive kind than all Hindustan had to suffer before.” He also declared: “All the English bourgeoisie may be forced to do will neither emancipate nor materially mend the social conditions of the masses of the people.”
And, did not Bhagat Singh later actually warn of the danger of perpetuation of the colonial structures of exploitation if Indian nationalism and Freedom failed to have a revolutionary basis? In saying that the freedom struggle “did not deny the British claim to good governance”, but was merely a “natural” bid for “self-governance”, Manmohan Singh is proving Bhagat Singh’s contention that the Indian ruling class was a class of ‘Black Sahibs’, who did not want to ‘overthrow the yoke’ of the ‘White Sahibs’; rather they wanted to keep that yoke in their hands instead.
There are those who say that the violence by British colonialists was not ‘one-sided’ – the Indians too responded with ‘barbaric’ violence, for instance during the 1857 war, or at Chauri Chaura (much as Iraqis are reviled for bombing US soldiers and officials). In answer to such accusations, Engels’ defence of the Chinese who systematically poisoned the bread of Europeans during their national liberation struggle, sounds as fresh as if it were written today: “Civilisation mongers who throw hot shell on a defenceless city and add rape to murder, may call the system cowardly, barbarous, atrocious; but what matter to the Chinese if it be but successful?” [ Engels , Persia and China (1857)]
Actually, Manmohan Singh’s ideas are not so new – lately, historians like Niall Ferguson (also a product of Oxford ) have been extolling the virtues of the British Empire and advising the US to unabashedly don its mantle. Galeano remarks, “Some have suggested the mistaken idea that to remember is dangerous, because by remembering, history will repeat itself as a nightmare. Yet…it is amnesia that makes history repeat itself, repeat itself as nightmare. Amnesia implies impunity, and impunity encourages crime”. Mr. Singh’s myth of the benefits which followed when Indian civilisation ‘met’ the ‘Dominant Empire of the day’ is an act of amnesia which the Indian ruling class needs as it ‘meets’ the Dominant Empire of today!
- Kavita Krishnan