[Reader-list] William Dalrymple: Lessons from the British Raj (1857-2007)
Patrice Riemens
patrice at xs4all.nl
Fri Aug 10 19:13:20 IST 2007
At the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the Indian Insurgency (sept
1857)
NB
Le Monde Diplomatique has an (actually several) english editions, and is
worth following. Check the website. This month, for instance, there is a
path-breaking article by Jean Bricmont, where he argues that the disaster
of the Left in Europe, cq the 'Global North', is that it is unable to
accept that political progress now is in the Global South (e.g. South
America), and that the economic model it defends - unsuccesfully - is an
outworn Keynesian one based on (neo-)colonialist exploitation.
with permission from:
From: Le Monde diplomatique <english at mondediplo.net>
Date: 7 ao?t 2007 10:47
Subject: Lessons from the British Raj
To: Le Monde diplomatique <english at mondediplo.net>
Le Monde diplomatique
-----------------------------------------------------
August 2007
`THOSE WHO FAIL TO LEARN FROM HISTORY ARE DESTINED TO REPEAT IT'
Lessons from the British Raj
___________________________________________________________
Today West and East face each other uneasily across a divide
that many see as religious war. Lessons can be learned from the
mistakes of British imperial arrogance in India 150 years ago,
and its misplaced idealism.
by William Dalrymple
___________________________________________________________
In early May 1857 - almost exactly 150 years ago - the
British Empire found itself threatened by the largest and
bloodiest anti-colonial revolt against any European empire
anywhere in the world in the entire course of the
19th century. There is much about the history of British
imperial adventures in the East at this time, and the massive
insurgency this provoked, which is strikingly and uneasily
familiar to us today. There are also many lessons that can be
learned from the mistakes that the imperial arrogance, as
well as the misplaced idealism, of the British led them to
make.
The British had been trading in India, in the form of the
East India Company, since the early 17th century. But this
commercial relationship changed during the 18th century as
the power of the Mughal Empire began to fade. To protect its
trade, its rights to extract minerals, and its wider
geopolitical interests, the company began to recruit local
troops and conquer territory.
Then at the end of the 18th century a new group of
conservatives came into power, determined radically to expand
British power: the Governor General, Lord Wellesely, the
elder brother of the Duke of Wellington, called his new
aggressive approach the Forward Policy. It was in effect a
Project for the New British Century, as Wellesley made it
clear he was determined to establish British dominance over
all its European rivals - especially the French. He also
firmly believed it was better pre-emptively to remove hostile
Muslim regimes that presumed to resist the West's growing
power. There were, as ever, many voices in the more rightwing
sections of the press who supported this view. The puppet
Muslim allies who effectively allowed the Empire to run their
affairs could stay for the time being, but those governments
that were intent on resisting the advance of the West were
simply not to be tolerated any longer.
Against a `furious fanatic'
Nor was there any doubt who would be the first to be
targeted: a dictator whose family had usurped power in a
military coup. According to British sources close to
government he was "a cruel and relentless enemy", an
"intolerant bigot", a "furious fanatic" who had "perpetually
on his tongue the projects of Jihad". This dictator was also
deemed to be an "oppressive and unjust ruler... [and a]
perfidious negotiator".
Wellesley had arrived in India in 1798 with specific
instructions to effect regime change and replace Tipu Sultan
of Mysore with a western-backed puppet. First, however,
Wellesley had to justify a policy whose outcome had already
been decided. Wellesley began to mobilise his forces:
military, logistical but most importantly rhetorical, for to
get agreement for an expensive and divisive war is never
easy, and it is only by marshalling a body of apparently
convincing evidence against your opponent that the
belly-aching anti-imperialists at home - in this case the
coterie that had gathered around Edmund Burke - could be shut
up.
It was with this in mind that Wellesley and his allies began
a comprehensive campaign of vilification against Tipu,
portraying him as a vicious and aggressive Muslim monster who
planned to wipe the British off the map of India. This essay
in imperial villain-making duly opened the way for a
lucrative conquest and the installation of a more pliable
regime which allowed the conquerors to give the impression
they were handing the country back to its rightful owners
while in reality maintaining firm western control.
The British progressed from removing threatening Muslim
rulers to annexing even the most pliant Islamic states. In
February 1856 they marched into Avadh on the lame excuse that
the Nawab was "excessively debauched".
To support the annexation, a "dodgy dossier" was produced
before parliament, so full of distortions and exaggerations
that one British official who had been involved in the
operation described the Parliamentary Blue Book on Oudh as "a
fiction of official penmanship, [an] Oriental romance" that
was refuted "by one simple and obstinate fact": that the
conquered people of Avadh clearly "preferred the slandered
regime" of the Nawab "to the grasping but rose-coloured
government of the Company". In this way, by early 1857, the
East India Company was directly ruling about two-thirds of
the subcontinent.
Ruled and redeemed
Many British officials who believed in the "forward" policy
were also nursing plans to impose not just British laws and
technology on India, but also British values. India would be
not only ruled, but redeemed. Local laws which offended
Christian sensibilities were abrogated: the burning of
widows, for example, was banned. One of the Company
directors, Charles Grant, spoke for many when he wrote of how
he believed Providence had brought the British to India for a
higher purpose: "Is it not necessary to conclude that our
Asiatic territories were given to us, not merely that we draw
a profit from them, but that we might diffuse among their
inhabitants, long sunk in darkness, the light of Truth?"
If the tracts of the missionaries reinforced Muslim fears,
increasing opposition to British rule and creating a
constituency for the rapidly multiplying jihadists determined
to stop the rule of the kafir infidels, so the existence of
"Wahhabi conspiracies" to resist the Christians strengthened
the conviction of the evangelicals that a "strong attack" was
needed to take on such "Muslim fanatics".
The reaction to this steady crescendo of insensitivity came
in 1857 with the Great Mutiny. Soon after dawn on 11 May
1857, the Mughal Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar was saying his
morning prayers in his oratory overlooking the river Jumna,
when he saw a cloud of dust rising from the far side of the
river. Minutes later, he was able to see its cause: 300 East
India Company cavalrymen charging wildly towards his palace.
The troops had ridden overnight from Meerut, where they had
turned their guns on their British officers, and had come to
Delhi to ask the Emperor to bestow his blessing on their
mutiny. Shortly afterwards, the sepoys entered Delhi,
massacred every Christian man, woman and child they could
find, and declared the 82-year-old emperor to be their
leader. Later they stood in the Chandni Chowk, the main
street of Delhi, and asked people: "Brothers: are you with
those of the faith?" British men and women who had converted
to Islam - and there were a surprising number of those in
Delhi - were not hurt; but Indians who had converted to
Christianity were cut down immediately. As a letter sent out
by the rebels' leaders subsequently put it: "The English are
people who overthrow all religions... As the English are the
common enemy of both [Hindus and Muslims, we] should unite in
their slaughter... By this alone will the lives and faiths of
both be saved."
Before long the insurgency had snowballed into the largest
anti-colonial revolt against any European empire in the 19th
century. Of the 139,000 sepoys of the Bengal army all but
7,796 turned against their British masters. In many places
the sepoys were supported by a widespread civilian rebellion.
Atrocities abounded on both sides.
Though it had many causes and reflected many deeply held
political and economic grievances - particularly the feeling
that the heathen foreigners were interfering with a part of
the world to which they were entirely alien - the uprising
was nevertheless articulated as a war of religion, and
especially as a defensive action against the rapid inroads
missionaries and Christian ideas were making in India,
combined with a more generalised fight for freedom from
western occupation.
`Suicide ghazis'
Although the great majority of the sepoys were Hindus, there
were many echoes of the Islamic insurgencies the US fights
today in Iraq and Afghanistan: in Delhi a flag of jihad was
raised in the principal mosque, and many of the resistance
fighters described themselves as mujahideen or jihadists.
Indeed, by the end of the siege, after a significant
proportion of the sepoys had melted away, the proportion of
jihadists in the rebellion's storm centre of Delhi grew to be
about half of the total rebel force, and included a regiment
of "suicide ghazis" who had vowed never to eat again and to
fight until they met death at the hands of the kafirs, "for
those who have come to die have no need for food".
The siege came to its climax on 14 September 1857, when
British forces attacked the city. They proceeded to massacre
not just the rebel sepoys and the jihadists, but also the
ordinary citizens of the Mughal capital. In one neighbourhood
alone, Kucha Chelan, some 1,400 unarmed citizens were cut
down. "The orders went out to shoot every soul," recorded one
young officer, Edward Vibart.
"It was literally murder ... I have seen many bloody and
awful sights lately but such a one as I witnessed yesterday I
pray I never see again. The women were all spared but their
screams, on seeing their husbands and sons butchered, were
most painful... Heaven knows I feel no pity, but when some
old grey bearded man is brought and shot before your very
eyes, hard must be that man's heart I think who can look on
with indifference..."
Those city dwellers who survived the killing were driven out
into the countryside to fend for themselves. Delhi, a
bustling and sophisticated city of half a million souls, was
left an empty ruin. Though the Mughal imperial family had
surrendered peacefully, most of the emperor's 16 sons were
tried and hung, while three were shot in cold blood, having
first freely given up their arms, then been told to strip
naked: "In 24 hours I disposed of the principal members of
the house of Timur the Tartar," Captain William Hodson wrote
to his sister the following day. "I am not cruel, but I
confess I did enjoy the opportunity of ridding the earth of
these wretches."
The captured emperor was put on trial and charged - quite
inaccurately - with being behind an international Muslim
conspiracy to subvert the British Empire, stretching from
Mecca and Iran to the walls of the Red Fort. Contrary to the
evidence that the uprising broke out first among the
overwhelmingly Hindu sepoys, the British prosecutor argued
that, "toMusalman intrigues and Mahommedan conspiracy we may
mainly attribute the dreadful calamities of 1857". Like some
of the ideas propelling more recent adventures in the East,
this was a ridiculous and bigoted over-simplification of a
far more complex reality. As today, politicians found it
easier to blame mindless "Muslim fanaticism" for the
bloodshed they had unleashed than to examine the effects of
their own foreign policies.
Reinforcing hatreds
Yet the lessons of the bloody uprising of 1857 are very
clear. No one likes people of a different faith conquering
them, taking their land, or force-feeding them improving
ideas at the point of a bayonet. The British in 1857
discovered what Israel and the US are learning now: that
nothing so easily radicalises a people against them, or so
undermines the moderate aspect of Islam, as aggressive
western intrusion in the East. The histories of Islamic
fundamentalism and western imperialism have after all, long
been closely and dangerously intertwined. In a curious but
very concrete way, the fundamentalists of all three Abrahamic
faiths have always needed each other to reinforce each
other's prejudices and hatreds. The venom of one provides the
lifeblood of the others.
The violent suppression of the great uprising of 1857 was a
pivotal moment in the history of British imperialism in
India. It marked the end both of the East India Company and
the Mughal dynasty, the two principal forces that had shaped
Indian history over the previous 300 years, and replaced both
with undisguised imperial rule by the British government.
Shortly after Zafar's corpse had been tipped into its
anonymous Burmese grave, Queen Victoria accepted the title
"Empress of India" from Disraeli, initiating a very different
period of direct imperial rule.
Yet in many ways the legacy of the period is still with us,
and there is a direct link between the jihadists of 1857 and
those we face today. For the reaction of some of the Muslim
ulema after 1857 was to reject the West and the gentle Sufi
traditions of the Mughal emperors, who they tended to regard
as western puppets; instead they attempted to return to pure
Islamic roots. So was founded a Wahhabi-like madrasa at
Deoband which went back to Koranic basics. One hundred and
forty years later, it was out of Deobandi madrasas in
Pakistan that the Taliban emerged to create the most
retrograde Islamic regime in modern history, a regime that in
turn provided the crucible from which emerged al-Qaida, the
most radical Islamic counterattack the West has yet had to
face.
So does history repeat itself: not only are westerners again
playing their old game of installing puppet regimes, propped
up by western garrisons, for their own political ends, but
more alarmingly the intellectual attitudes sustained by such
adventures remain intact. Despite over 25 years of assault by
Edward Said and his followers, old style Orientalism is still
alive and kicking, its prejudices quite intact, with Samuel
Huntingdon, Bernard Lewis and Charles Krauthammer in the
roles of the new Mills and Macauleys. Through the pens of
neo-con writers, the old colonial idea of the Muslim ruler as
the decadent Oriental despot lives on; and as before it is
effortlessly projected on to a credulous public by warmongers
in order to justify their imperial projects.
Today, West and East again face each other uneasily across a
divide that many see as religious war. Suicide jihadists
fight what they see as a defensive action against their
Christian enemies, and again innocent civilians are
slaughtered. As before, western evangelical politicians are
apt to cast their opponents and enemies in the role of
"incarnate fiends" and simplistically conflate armed
resistance to invasion and occupation with "pure evil." Again
western countries, blind to the effects of their foreign
policies, feel aggrieved and surprised to be attacked - as
they see it - by mindless fanatics. There are clear lessons
here. For, in the celebrated words of Edmund Burke, those who
fail to learn from history are always destined to repeat it.
________________________________________________________
William Dalrymple is a writer and author, most recently, of
The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi, 1857
(Bloomsbury, London, 2006) which has been awarded the Duff
Cooper Prize for History and Biography
Original text in English
________________________________________________________
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED (c) 1997-2007 Le Monde diplomatique
<http://MondeDiplo.com/2007/08/15raj>
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