05-11-2009, 04:07 AM
<b>Britainâs Faustian pact
</b>
Premen Addy
At the time of Indiaâs independence, the standard-bearers of the British Raj scoffed at the idea of âHindu Indiaâ surviving as a nation. Instead, they put their faith in âMuslim Pakistanâ which they predicted would be stable and prosperous. Along with Jinnahâs dream, that prediction lies in tatters
Swine flu hypochondria dominates the airwaves in London; after the financial meltdown nothing has so concentrated the mind on either side of the Atlantic and beyond. An irate caller from Kolkata told of a Communist CITU-led strike at the cityâs airport, but one didnât have the heart to ask if it was the virus or the swine that was to blame.
More immediate and infinitely more troubling are the continuing Taliban and Al Qaeda irruptions along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border and the greater frequency of their depredations in the formerâs Punjabi heartland. The Obama Administration is at its witâs end mixing dollars with admonitions to its client in Islamabad, the British are witless, with an economy that sinks ever deeper into an abyss and a Prime Minister floundering from one PR disaster to another. Labour MPs and the party hoi-polloi fear a rout in next yearâs general election.
Against such depressing news came Mihir Boseâs New Statesman meditation on the closing years of the British Raj in India. Mr Bose, the BBC sportâs editor, has had two stabs at a biography of Subhas Chandra Bose (no relation), so his knowledge and understanding of the regionâs history and politics demand respect.
âIt may be hard to credit now,â he writes, âas 700 million (Indian) voters go to the polls in the worldâs biggtest elections, but back in the 1940s the wise men of the British Raj predicted that while Pakistan would prosper, India would soon be Balkanised. Pakistan, it was thought, would become a vibrant Muslim state, a bulwark against Soviet Communism. Indiaâs predominantly Hindu population, however, was presumed to be a source of weakness and instability.â
Nobody expressed these dark sentiments more forcefully than Lt Gen Sir Francis Tucker who had seen service with the Indian Army in North Africa in the Second World War. His memoirs, While Memory Serves, was published in 1950, the year India became a republic. Mr Bose quotes from Tuckerâs text: âHindu India was entering the most difficult period of its whole existence. Its religion, which is to a great extent superstition and formalism, is breaking down. If the precedents of history mean anything... then we may well expect in the material world of today, that a material philosophy such as Communism will fill the void left by the Hindu religion.â
The departing good and great of the Raj were fixated by what they saw as the sly malevolence of the Brahmins and their Indian National Congress. Mahatma Gandhiâs remarkable success with Abdul Ghaffar Khan and his Red Shirts in the Pashtun NWFP was quite irrational, pronounced Sir Olaf Caroe, scholar-governor of the province and a Russophobe reactionary. This unnatural liaison would end as Pashtun martial ardour came to the fore, he predicted.
I recall a photograph of Mohammed Ali Jinnah addressing a Pashtun crowd near Peshawar in English, with a translator at hand to make his words intelligible. The chord of hatred struck by the sainted Quaid-e-Azam â âIslam in danger from the Hindu infidelâ â transcended the barrier of language. Contemporary Pakistan is surely his truest monument.
We would, however, do well to broaden the historical canvas to include the first half century of the British presence in the subcontinent. It was age of the enlightenment in Europe, when scepticism leavened belief and social Darwinism was still a distant fantasy. So William Jones presented his path-breaking linguistic studies on the common origins of Indo-European speech to scholarly acclaim, and Charles Wilkins published the first English translation of the Gita, with a foreword by his patron Warren Hastings, the first Governor-General of British India and a notable Orientalist himself.
âI hesitate not to pronounce the Gita a performance of great originality,â wrote Hastings, âof a sublimity of conception reasoning and diction almost unequalled; and a single exception, amongst all the known religions of mankind, of a theology accurately corresponding with that of the Christian disposition, and most powerfully illustrating its fundamental doctrinesâ¦â
The Governor-General observed that âNot so long ago, the inhabitants of India were considered by many as creatures scarce elevated above the degree of savage life.â Of the body of Sanskrit works that were being revealed to the European world, he ended on a high note of prophecy: âThese 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.â
This early Indo-British encounter became a period of seed-time and remedy. The New Learning in India, particularly in Bengal and Bombay, led to a second modern revelation of Indiaâs classical past, the researches of British (and European) scholars being of seminal importance. When, deeper into the 19th century, the Oxford-based German academic Max Müller published his first edited volumes of the Veda, the Bengali Sanskritist Radha Kanta Deb wrote thus to him from Calcutta: âAccept therefore my most grateful and sincere thanks, which, in common with my countrymen, I owe to you.â Swami Vivekananda was equally fulsome in his praise.
The Indo-British interaction of these years seeded Hindu social reform, cultural renewal and eventually gave rise to the movement for political emancipation, with the foundation of the Indian National Congress in Bombay on December 28, 1885, thanks principally to the endeavours of the Briton Allan Octavian Hume. Britons of the previous generations were loath to accept that the British Raj was cast in stone. It was only with the expansion and consolidation of the empire and its supremacist culture that suspicion of and aversion to Hindus gained currency. For Sir Lepel Griffin, the blimpish Governor of Punjab, the prospect of Indian self-determination (which he attributed to the machinations of âBengali Babooâ agitators) was as distasteful as the suffragette call back home in Britain.
Indiaâs democratic and pluralist culture took shape in the 19th century. Rammohun Roy, Iswar Chandra Vidyasagar, the Tagores, Keshub Sen and Vivekananda in Bengal and such kindred spirits in the west of the country as MG Ranade, Gopal Krishna Gokhale and many others established the Servants of India Society. Mahatma Gandhi was a social reformer even as he became his countryâs foremost liberator from British colonial rule, and Jawaharal Nehru took this forward after independence.
British Imperialism, fearful of the loss of power through an anathemised partnership, made its Faustian pact with the All-India Muslim League. Theirs was a poisoned chalice, of which Pakistan today is the emblem.
</b>
Premen Addy
At the time of Indiaâs independence, the standard-bearers of the British Raj scoffed at the idea of âHindu Indiaâ surviving as a nation. Instead, they put their faith in âMuslim Pakistanâ which they predicted would be stable and prosperous. Along with Jinnahâs dream, that prediction lies in tatters
Swine flu hypochondria dominates the airwaves in London; after the financial meltdown nothing has so concentrated the mind on either side of the Atlantic and beyond. An irate caller from Kolkata told of a Communist CITU-led strike at the cityâs airport, but one didnât have the heart to ask if it was the virus or the swine that was to blame.
More immediate and infinitely more troubling are the continuing Taliban and Al Qaeda irruptions along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border and the greater frequency of their depredations in the formerâs Punjabi heartland. The Obama Administration is at its witâs end mixing dollars with admonitions to its client in Islamabad, the British are witless, with an economy that sinks ever deeper into an abyss and a Prime Minister floundering from one PR disaster to another. Labour MPs and the party hoi-polloi fear a rout in next yearâs general election.
Against such depressing news came Mihir Boseâs New Statesman meditation on the closing years of the British Raj in India. Mr Bose, the BBC sportâs editor, has had two stabs at a biography of Subhas Chandra Bose (no relation), so his knowledge and understanding of the regionâs history and politics demand respect.
âIt may be hard to credit now,â he writes, âas 700 million (Indian) voters go to the polls in the worldâs biggtest elections, but back in the 1940s the wise men of the British Raj predicted that while Pakistan would prosper, India would soon be Balkanised. Pakistan, it was thought, would become a vibrant Muslim state, a bulwark against Soviet Communism. Indiaâs predominantly Hindu population, however, was presumed to be a source of weakness and instability.â
Nobody expressed these dark sentiments more forcefully than Lt Gen Sir Francis Tucker who had seen service with the Indian Army in North Africa in the Second World War. His memoirs, While Memory Serves, was published in 1950, the year India became a republic. Mr Bose quotes from Tuckerâs text: âHindu India was entering the most difficult period of its whole existence. Its religion, which is to a great extent superstition and formalism, is breaking down. If the precedents of history mean anything... then we may well expect in the material world of today, that a material philosophy such as Communism will fill the void left by the Hindu religion.â
The departing good and great of the Raj were fixated by what they saw as the sly malevolence of the Brahmins and their Indian National Congress. Mahatma Gandhiâs remarkable success with Abdul Ghaffar Khan and his Red Shirts in the Pashtun NWFP was quite irrational, pronounced Sir Olaf Caroe, scholar-governor of the province and a Russophobe reactionary. This unnatural liaison would end as Pashtun martial ardour came to the fore, he predicted.
I recall a photograph of Mohammed Ali Jinnah addressing a Pashtun crowd near Peshawar in English, with a translator at hand to make his words intelligible. The chord of hatred struck by the sainted Quaid-e-Azam â âIslam in danger from the Hindu infidelâ â transcended the barrier of language. Contemporary Pakistan is surely his truest monument.
We would, however, do well to broaden the historical canvas to include the first half century of the British presence in the subcontinent. It was age of the enlightenment in Europe, when scepticism leavened belief and social Darwinism was still a distant fantasy. So William Jones presented his path-breaking linguistic studies on the common origins of Indo-European speech to scholarly acclaim, and Charles Wilkins published the first English translation of the Gita, with a foreword by his patron Warren Hastings, the first Governor-General of British India and a notable Orientalist himself.
âI hesitate not to pronounce the Gita a performance of great originality,â wrote Hastings, âof a sublimity of conception reasoning and diction almost unequalled; and a single exception, amongst all the known religions of mankind, of a theology accurately corresponding with that of the Christian disposition, and most powerfully illustrating its fundamental doctrinesâ¦â
The Governor-General observed that âNot so long ago, the inhabitants of India were considered by many as creatures scarce elevated above the degree of savage life.â Of the body of Sanskrit works that were being revealed to the European world, he ended on a high note of prophecy: âThese 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.â
This early Indo-British encounter became a period of seed-time and remedy. The New Learning in India, particularly in Bengal and Bombay, led to a second modern revelation of Indiaâs classical past, the researches of British (and European) scholars being of seminal importance. When, deeper into the 19th century, the Oxford-based German academic Max Müller published his first edited volumes of the Veda, the Bengali Sanskritist Radha Kanta Deb wrote thus to him from Calcutta: âAccept therefore my most grateful and sincere thanks, which, in common with my countrymen, I owe to you.â Swami Vivekananda was equally fulsome in his praise.
The Indo-British interaction of these years seeded Hindu social reform, cultural renewal and eventually gave rise to the movement for political emancipation, with the foundation of the Indian National Congress in Bombay on December 28, 1885, thanks principally to the endeavours of the Briton Allan Octavian Hume. Britons of the previous generations were loath to accept that the British Raj was cast in stone. It was only with the expansion and consolidation of the empire and its supremacist culture that suspicion of and aversion to Hindus gained currency. For Sir Lepel Griffin, the blimpish Governor of Punjab, the prospect of Indian self-determination (which he attributed to the machinations of âBengali Babooâ agitators) was as distasteful as the suffragette call back home in Britain.
Indiaâs democratic and pluralist culture took shape in the 19th century. Rammohun Roy, Iswar Chandra Vidyasagar, the Tagores, Keshub Sen and Vivekananda in Bengal and such kindred spirits in the west of the country as MG Ranade, Gopal Krishna Gokhale and many others established the Servants of India Society. Mahatma Gandhi was a social reformer even as he became his countryâs foremost liberator from British colonial rule, and Jawaharal Nehru took this forward after independence.
British Imperialism, fearful of the loss of power through an anathemised partnership, made its Faustian pact with the All-India Muslim League. Theirs was a poisoned chalice, of which Pakistan today is the emblem.