Contrarian history

From the Ruins of Empire by Pankaj Mishra; Penguin; Price: Rs.699; 356 pp This is truly an extraordinary book of scholarship and history. It prompts reflections on several unanswered questions which have haunted the minds of all right thinking people of India, indeed Asia. Foremost among them is how and why did the British and other imperial powers have such an easy passage of entry, loot and conquest in Asia — especially in the huge landmasses of India and China — during the 19th and 20th centuries? The general impression within middle class India, raised on texts written by historians steeped in the western tradition is that the ancient civilisations of the oriental world were so enfeebled by sloth, greed, cruelty and exploitation of their native rulers, that their people welcomed foreign rule. British historians claimed that imperial rule imposed modern law, order and justice systems, introduced western science and technologies, and injected egalitarian concepts such as secularism and equality before the law into hierarchical oriental societies riddled with patently unjust social orders. Certainly, the vast majority of pre-independence and free India’s children are not aware that this unbalanced view of history which glossed over the excesses of exploiting imperialists, was vigorously contested by several unsung intellectuals including preachers, writers and journalists in India, China, Japan and other Asian countries. For instance how much — if anything at all — do Indian scholars and students know about Jamal al-Din-Afghani, a highly revered scholar-journalist who travelled across the Islamic world in the 19th century warning the effete rulers of Delhi, Afghanistan, Persia, Egypt and the Ottoman empire in Istanbul, that the texts of British historians were “marked by the hands of English self-love, with the pens of conceit and pencils of deception, and inescapably they do not relate the truth and report reality”? Al-Afghani ploughed a lonely furrow because in the latter half of the 19th century when he began advocating the cause of pan-Islamic unity, Western, particularly British imperialism was at its zenith, and the elites of the oriental world were dazzled by European science, technology, learning and organisational ability. It impressed Indian Muslims such as Sir Sayyid Ahmed Khan, founder of Aligarh University, who exhorted the Muslim community to profit from the “style and art of Englishmen”, and in 1876 described British rule in India as “the most wonderful phenomenon the world has seen”. Other Indian intellectuals were not as gullible and were able to see through the sanctimonious humbug of British imperialism driven by sustained greed, and little real regard for the welfare of the native population. Swami Vivekananda, regarded by Mishra as India’s most famous thinker of the 19th century, described British rulers and troops as demons “fearsome-like wild animals who see no difference between good and evil… dependent on material things, grabbing other people’s land and wealth by hook or crook”. In this excellent and fluid volume beyond trodden paths, Mishra forays into the suppressed history of pillage of Asia and the humiliations heaped upon its people,…