Author: Premen Addy
Publication: IntelliBriefs
Date: October 7, 2007
URL: http://intellibriefs.blogspot.com/2007/10/india-historys-lessons-not-learned.html
Michael Wood's six-part documentary, recently
telecast by BBC to mark the 60th anniversary of India's independence, is a
triumph of television. Camera and narrative, themes and events, have been
woven into a seamless robe of the story-teller' s art. The colossal canvas
of the sub-continent with its blend of beguiling colours and its larger-than-
life characters is a challenge alike to intellect and imagination.
Wood is clearly in love with his subject and
it shows in every scenic detail and comment. The rise and fall of dynasties
and peoples, their achievements and failures, are related with integrity and
wonder. They would enchant any audience for whom history and culture are intellectual
and moral imperatives.
Yet any scrutiny of a subject of such compelling
scale in time and space must involve angles of vision and judgements peculiar
to the individual. It is what gives the confection its savour. A corporate
construct with its necessary accommodations and compromises would be less
stimulating by far.
Revisiting the Wood script, I decided to inject,
in certain areas, an amended view of history, the challenge being to do so
without disturbing the flow of the original, without distorting its unique
coherence.
The Mughal dominion in India (1526), for a
start, was one of three great empires in the Islamic world, the others were
the Ottoman empire in Turkey and beyond (1453), and the Safavid empire in
Persia (1506). They arrived when Islam had passed its intellectual zenith.
This decline was marked by the ascending influence of the Muslim theologian
al-Ghazzali in the late 12th century, and was quickened by the destruction
of Baghdad in 1258 by the Mongols. Islam's earlier spirit of inquiry, its
capacity and willingness to borrow and rework the discoveries and attainments
of major non-Islamic civilisations and cultures were much diminished. Into
this vacated space came theological certainties and an exclusivist weltanschauung.
The Muslim empires were thus receptacles of
orthodoxy, military bureaucracies devoted principally to the business of war.
Without the sort of education that promoted science and technology, and an
innovative economy responsive to the mores of a changing world, Ottomans,
Safavids and Mughals atrophied in turn, losing the skills they had brought
with them from their Central Asian fastnesses.
The Mughals, like their peers in Turkey and
Persia, were great builders given to construct magnificent architectural wonders
such as the Taj Mahal, Jama Masjid, Fatehpur Sikri and much else besides.
This, however, did not extend to the expanding universe of science, where
Newton and Galileo and Copernicus reigned supreme, or to the evolving philosophy
of government and the law. These were changing the face of Europe and would
reorder the world.
Autocratic power, the absence of primogeniture
and endemic wars of succession, seeded a culture of caprice and excess which
sapped the vitality of state and society. Eighteenth century India refracted
these debilitating features: The Mughals could neither uphold their authority
against domestic contenders nor defend and protect their subjects from the
depredations of foreign marauders. The Persian Nadir Shah sacked Delhi in
1739 and put its population to the sword; his monstrous loot included Shah
Jahan's Peacock Throne. Any Indian rash enough to lodge a claim for its return
is likely to provoke an explosion in Tehran.
Maratha predators and Afghan invaders in the
north, the despotic rule of Imad-ul-mulk in Delhi and petty tyrants of every
stripe in all corners of the land became a sub-continental theme. Imad personified
the paradoxical traits of his type: Linguist, poet and warrior he assured
was. "But all these splendid gifts were vitiated by an utter lack of
the moral sense, a boundless ambition, a shameless greed of money, and a ferocious
cruelty of disposition that makes him one of the monsters of Delhi history,"
wrote Jadunath Sarkar.
Anarchy, arbitrary government and the lack
of enlightenment inspired Rammohun Roy, social reformer and cultural polymath
and the first great Indian of the modern age, to offer "up thanks to
the Supreme Disposer of the events of the universe, for having unexpectedly
delivered this country from the long-continued tyranny of its former rulers,
and placed it under the government of the English..."
In a separate conversation with the French
traveller, Victor Jacquemont, Rammohun explained that Pax Britannica was necessary
for the next hundred years if India was ever to recover its strength. With
the rise of a middle class the British would be asked to leave, he observed
with god-like prescience. He was a mere 17 years off his predicted time-frame.
My story would have included the evolution
of the Indian middle class, its social and political programmes, its changing
aspirations, its achievements and the reasons behind its failures, in particular
its inability to preserve the unity of India against Muslim separatism.
Why did Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, author
of Vande Mataram, the Tagores, Ranade, Tilak, Gokhale, Surendranath Banerjee
or Dadabhai Naoroji not espouse the cause of the mutineers of 1857? Where
would the British have been without the critical intervention of the Sikhs?
The First War of Independence, did you say?
The tribute to the work of the early British
Indologists would have gained with this embellishment of Warren Hastings,
apropos of the corpus of Sanskrit writings: "These will survive when
the British dominion in India shall have long ceased to exist, and when the
sources which it once yielded of wealth and power are lost to remembrance.
"
For variety, I would have also quoted Karl
Marx, who wrote: "The political unity of India, more consolidated, and
farther than it ever did under the Great Moghuls, was the first condition
of its (India's) regeneration. That unity, imposed by the British sword, will
now be strengthened and perpetuated by the electric telegraph. The native
army, organised and trained by the British drill-sergeant, was the sine qua
non of Indian self-emancipation, and of India ceasing to be the prey of the
first foreign intruder. The free Press, introduced for the first time into
Asiatic society, and managed by the common offspring of Hindus and Europeans,
is a new and powerful agent of reconstruction. "
Finally, as an afterword, the peoples of Pakistan
and Bangladesh, now resident in Britain, are at the bottom of the social,
economic and educational pile as were their forebears when they created a
Muslim homeland in the sub-continent through blood and iron on the specious
plea that their community would otherwise be disabled under Hindu raj.
There is indeed much room for meditation.
