[Reader-list] Guardian Unlimited: Daring to dream

[Keith Hart]

Sanjay,

Passing over the ethics and politics of personal publishing on the net, 
there are important matters of judgment about the composition and future 
of world society at stake in the piece you posted. Now you have revealed 
that you admire aspects of the European experiment and would like to 
counter Europhobia in Britain. And you don't think India is a superpower 
or is likely to be one soon. I doubt if you are in a minority in that 
respect.

Indian history is the sea you swim in, so it is hard for you to see the 
ancient roots of your society all around you. I understand why the West 
and especially the British had to locate the origin of ancient 
civilisation in the region of their holy land, but I find it astonishing 
that India's independent intelligentsia have not done more to restore a 
perspective on the ancient world where India assumes its rightful place 
as the earliest and dominant civilization and the Indian Ocean is seen 
for what it was, the matrix of early long-distance commerce until really 
quite recently. Why was India the source of many of the world's 
principal religion's and is still home to most of them? Gandhi drew 
heavily on the cultural residue of this history in forging his own 
synthesis of Western and Eastern thought and offended the narrower 
Hindus in the process. The Commonwealth, relic of the British empire, is 
the largest voluntary association of states in the world and it is 
obvious that Indians could be its active leaders, if they wanted. The 
question is what will become of the Anglo-Indian superstate that 
dominated the 19th century world, especially now that English is the 
common language of the network of networks? Information services are not 
secondary -- they are by far the largest sector of the world economy, 
including finance, education, media, entertainment, b2b commerce etc and 
the market share of material production is dwindling.

My novel is a thought experiment in which our world is transposed to the 
24th century with one important change, the superpowers are Asian not 
Western, based on a switch in the location of global production that is 
already evident in manufactures and may become so for services. The 
world revolution of 2017 comes about when India, reconciled with 
Pakistan and thus with the Islamic world, moves with China into a more 
assertive role in the Middle East. The last American helicopter leaves 
the roof of the embassy in Baghdad and a new state of Palestine is 
established. The Islamic world subsequently enjoys a renaissance, but 
global hegemony reinforces the territorial integrity and size of the two 
new superpowers. Although the overthrow of rule by the white men in 
suits was hailed at the time as a liberation for the young, poor, darker 
people of the world, it soon shakes down into another round of 
capitalist imperialism, with China and India uneasily sharing dominance 
of global governing institutions. The South remains excluded. The 
Americans and the Europeans fulfil the network prophecy for political 
disintegration and end up having to turn to religion in compensation for 
their fragmented impotence. A religious movement loosely based on 
Christianity arises to resist the Indo-Chinese empire in self-conscious 
imitation of Gibbon's scenario for Rome's decline. My narrator, a 
time-travelling (this is after all the century of Star Trek) historian 
at Mumbai Cosmopolitan University called Muni Subrahmanya, would not be 
out of place in a right-wing American think tank today -- the 
intellectuals having long ago exchanged subaltern for boss status.

The question is not whether this is an accurate prediction of the 
future, but whether it allows us to look at the class structure and 
movement of world society today through different spectacles than those 
provided by the current global establishment. So, no Sanjay, I .don't 
suppose that an Asian superpower would behave much differently from 
those we already have, since capitalism has not finished its task of 
bringing cheap commodities to every corner of the world. But there are 
definite cultural possibilities in such a shift and I aim to explore 
them in my novel.

Keith