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| Subject: The fables of nationalism | |
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] Date Posted: 02:24:21 10/30/04 Sat THE FABLES OF NATIONALISM Words sometimes contain interpretations. The events of 1857 in India have been described by some writers as a Sepoy Mutiny, and by other writers as a War of Independence. The first description suggests a revolt confined to the army, while the second suggests a much larger mass uprising. The first description diminishes the events; the second magnifies them. Such a contest, over words and interpretations, carries over into the labels we use about the twentieth century. But when events are nearer to us, both emotionally and in time, our assumptions take longer to clarify. The usual attempts to make sense of 1947 hinge on key words and phrases like ‘Independence and Partition’ and ‘The Transfer of Power’. These key words fit into key concepts: on the one hand, the ‘Freedom Struggle’ or ‘National Movement’, and on the other hand, ‘Decolonization’. Often, though not always, the word decolonization suggests a voluntary relinquishing of authority, while the words ‘freedom struggle’ unmistakably suggest a hard fought, bitterly resisted victory. Here again, now closer to our times, in the desire to magnify or to diminish events, we hear interpretations in combat. Intertwined with these interpretations, are the ideologies of imperialism and Indian or Pakistani nationalism. They portray the dramatic events of the 1940s as the inevitable result of deliberate policies. The correct calculation of outcomes, and a sense of their necessity, can confer legitimacy on different actors - whether these actors are Indian, British, or Pakistani. So, in different locations and at different times, 15 August 1947 has been presented differently. It has been portrayed as the outcome of Britain's policy of training Indians in modern government; or as the result of India's energetic fight for freedom; or as the vindication of the two-nation theory on which the Pakistan movement was based. Reflections on 1947 have had followed three trenchant national trajectories. Beginning from the recognition that the story of 1947 has been a contested story, this article traces how the story has been moulded in the discourse of modern India. It asks, in which direction the story has moved, which emphases and elisions this has entailed, and which factors have encouraged this movement. In other words, it discusses the manufacture of opinions - indeed of a tradition - central to the autobiography of modern India. EMPHASES AND EVASIONS Check this for yourself. Almost no student, despite high marks in Indian history at school and university, will be able to tell you, even very approximately, how many Britishers were actually to be found in India in the colonial period. He or she would have devoted a considerable amount of time to the study of British rule, would possess a store of other factual information, and may well be able to debate, quite intelligently, the character of colonial conquest. But ask this particular question, and you are likely to draw a blank. The fault is not that of the student, because these statistics are omitted rather than highlighted in recent textbooks. What, then, are the figures? In 1939, the secretary of the European Group in the Indian Central Legislature referred to his constituency as `a small handful'. At the outbreak of the second world war, when the total Indian population was about 350 million, the number of adult white males in India was just over 90,000: the total number of white men, women and children was about 160,000. The British were classified as soldiers, non-officials, and officials. British soldiers, numbering about 60,000, constituted the single largest group. The non-official class, numbering about 20,000, consisted mainly of businessmen in Calcutta, Bombay, Madras and Kanpur, or men in tea estates and coffee plantations, as well as some individuals in professions like law and journalism. Officials numbered about 12,000 only. These included all the British members of the Indian Civil Service, the Indian Police, the railways, and the irrigation and engineering services. The most important group was thus numerically the smallest. On the basis of these figures, there were more than two thousand Indians to each Britisher in India. These figures are seldom, if ever, mentioned in nationalist historiography. They are probably kept out of sight with good reason, for the numbers are embarrassingly small. The remarkable thing about the British in India was that there were so few of them. Even the Indian Civil Service, of which so much was heard, had only a thousand officers in all, half of whom were Indian. An analysis based on such figures can make imperialism look more like a midget than a monster. But in the nationalist view, the forces of justice and of good triumphed in India, despite the superior might of the foreign forces of evil. An Indian David killed a British Goliath. A fearsome adversary was overcome. Conveying this impression requires exaggerating the might of the foreign forces of evil. The story of 1947 has, in the last half century in India, moved towards precisely this exaggeration. Concomitantly, history in modern India has preferred to forget another inference from the same set of figures. Reconciliations have occurred, and we are all nationalists now. But if we do not exaggerate British numbers, we must contend with Indian complicity. And it can be awkward to stress that British rule was made possible only by Indian collaboration. Writing about how British rule was fought produces sublime, heroic stories; describing how it was supported reveals rather more sordid ones. Yet those who supported the Raj included government personnel, princes, businessmen, landlords, and politicians of various hues. After 1947, members of these groups sometimes concocted nationalist pedigrees for themselves, to ensconce themselves more comfortably in independent India. Research and teaching in history connived in this, by describing the Raj in terms which stressed British repression rather than Indian collaboration. Another trend has been to depict the story of the Congress and the Raj predominantly as one of all-out conflict. After 1947, nationalists projected themselves as clear-sighted, strong-willed, and consistent opponents of imperialism. In their version of events, their tactics and strategies varied, but their ends did not. They knew that British rule was their enemy, and worked gloriously, ceaselessy and implacably to defeat it. This view glosses over some inconvenient facts. For example, the early sessions of the Congress were vocal in their professions of loyalty to Queen Victoria. Moderate nationalism did not question the British connection. Dadabhai Naoroji, one of its grand old men, called his book `Poverty and Un-British Rule in India'. For him - despite the criticisms he levelled - the word `British' still had some positive connotations. But after independence, as Indian history has been retold, the positive contemporary assessments of British rule in India have been underplayed. Similarly, the times when the nationalist leaders and the British officials held hands and worked together - as in the Provincial Congress Ministries functioning for two years between 1937 and 1939 - get little mention, or are sought to be explained away. It is difficult to accept that, for a while, the nationalist leaders functioned successfully within, and as a part of, and worse still as the junior partner in, a British-controlled colonial state apparatus. Therefore, as it is retold, history in India emphasizes the confrontation of nationalism with imperialism. It shies away from nationalism's negotiations (and even occasional coalitions) with the enemy. Before 1947, textbooks discussed in detail the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms and the 1935 Government of India Act; now they discuss in detail Non-Cooperation, Civil Disobedience, and Quit India. Before 1947, the focus was on government initiatives; afterwards it has been on Congress mass movements. There has also been an attempt to minimize the alien input into Indian nationalism. Nationalism is seen as if it sprang more from conditions within India than from ideas imported from Europe. Never mind that while Indian reality was formative for Indian politicians, so was British ideology. After all, Gandhi, Nehru and Patel were all partly the products of the study of law in London. When Congress leaders are represented in modern India, it is as if their Indian dress is emphasized, and their English education minimized. Of course they themselves spoke less of their attachment to their school or university in England, and more of their attachment to the soil of India - Nehru provides a good example of this. As if following his lead, the clothing of Congress leaders is given more importance their than education. The "foreign hand", repeatedly invoked in public speeches in independent India, is meant to be detested and feared. Traces of its touch are best remembered privately. There is another striking element in the portrayal of 1947 in modern India. This is to make it look as if the British were kicked out of the country. A full-page government advertisment in the Times of India on 9 August 1999 reads: `Fifty-seven years ago people from all over India woke up this day to hear two electrifying words. Quit India. On this day, Mahatma Gandhi the father of the nation asked a foreign ruler to quit our motherland. People lived for his words. People died for his words. And the foreign ruler was forced to leave.' Imperialism sought to depict the British departure as voluntary; nationalism sought to depict it as an eviction. As an actual eviction was impossible to demonstrate, the trend became to make it appear as if the British were virtually evicted from the country. In history text-books, children were told that the Congress Party, under the leadership of Gandhi, mobilized the people of India and thereby pushed the British out. But could the national movement actually evict the British from India? The only all-out attempt to do so was made in August 1942. For it was with the `Quit India' Movement, that the Indian National Congress made its most determined effort to throw the British out. The Quit India Movement, with the slogan `Do or Die', was declared to be Indian nationalism's last battle. But the most strenuous effort of the Congress ended in abject failure. The British did not flee: instead they crushed the main force of the movement in about three weeks, and reasserted imperial authority. Although glorified later with much fanfare, the 1942 Quit India movement was a failure in terms of its own stated objective, and left the Congress leaders locked up in jail for the next three years. The timing of independence - 1947, not 1942 - requires and repays scrutiny. Indeed, if only independence had come in 1942 instead of 1947, the task of nationalist history would have been simpler, and its fables more convincing. In 1947, in fact, the situation seemed much more complicated. This is starkly evident in crucial texts from that year. On 26 November 1947, introducing the first budget of independent India, the Finance Minister, Shanmukham Chetty, said: `...we have secured freedom from foreign yoke, mainly through the operation of world events, and partly through a unique act of enlightened self-abnegation on behalf of the erstwhile rulers of the country...' His tone was totally different from that of later generations of politicians. Another direction in which the story of 1947 has been moved is to make the year look like a completely fresh start. In the fables of nationalism, 1947 marks a totally new beginning. The nature of state power before that year is held to be completely different from the nature of state power after it. Formulations of this vary. For example: an alien state became indigenous; an exploitative state became a welfare state; a regulatory state became a developmental one; a static state became dynamic; an unjust state was replaced by a just one. It is as if in 1947 a magic wand had been vigorously waved. This exercise requires overlooking the obvious continuity in the personnel of the state. With the departure of British officials, the Indian members of the Indian Civil Service, the Indian Police, the railways and other civilian services - as well as the Indian officers of the armed forces - did extremely well. Next to the Congress leaders, government officers were, ironically enough, the group for whom the benefits of independence were quickest to materialize. Officials who had been trained to control Congress influence under British rule, now savoured plum postings - the fruits of Congress victory. Thus the erstwhile bureaucratic opponents of the Congress did better out of independence than its peasant supporters. The majority of higher posts, hitherto occupied by Europeans, suddenly became vacant; so did the posts occupied by those Muslim officials who left for Pakistan. As vacancies had to be filled, "premature promotions" became the order of the day, according to a police officer in Madras who found himself "included in the general advancement". P.C. Lal, who eventually became the Chief of the Air Force, recalled that "When India became independent many of us found ourselves transformed from lowly workers in the field to staff officers interpreting policies, formulating plans and implementing and enforcing programmes". All over the country, Indian officials stepped into the shoes of their departing British seniors, and pronounced that their new boots were not too big, but fitted very well. It was a time of windfall promotions. The schoolboy dream of a double promotion, on which so many of these creatures of the competitive examination had been brought up, came true for them in adult life. With delightful finesse, the very same personnel of the state, while continuing their old careers, now projected the state they continued to serve as a completely different enterprise. In addition to their other aptitudes, they displayed a skill in serving two masters. They revealed that they had been sympathizers of the Congress all along. They insisted that they had never switched sides: they had merely chosen another route to serve the nation. The Indian Civil Service self-image remained robust. Superficially, a new world was called into being. Myriad efforts were made to give this impression. In 1950, India was declared a sovereign democratic republic with a new constitution. In the years after 1947, reports with titles like `India in the Eighth Year of Freedom' were published annually, as if a new calendar had been established. Roads in many cities were renamed: the road in Delhi named after Lord Curzon was thoughtfully turned into Kasturba Gandhi Marg. On all sides, one could see the state's attempt to distance itself from the past. The national state was guilty of its colonial origins. Consequently, the government of independent India tried to show that it was built on the wreckage of colonialism, rather than on the foundations provided by the colonial state. In retrospect one of the most obvious (though unstated), projects of nationalism, and of the state, in independent India was the concealment of continuity. There were varieties of things to conceal or forget. Among them was the fact that that loyalty to British rule was valued in independent India. The officers of the Indian Civil Service, having served British rule, were retained in their posts, and promoted; the members of the Indian National Army were not even reinstated in their old jobs - most of them gained a few moments of glory, and lost their livelihood. It was not the Indian National Army, but the British Indian Army, which provided the armed forces of independent India. And while the constitution was hailed as the founding, original document of a new nation, much of that constitution borrowed heavily from the Government of India Act of 1935. So also, most of the legal structure of British India was retained in place. There is yet another of the ironies of history here. The British had long maintained that they would hand over power to India once Indians were trained and fit for self-government. This was a claim the Indian leaders vociferously condemned, as patronizing and disingenuous. But after India became self-governing its leaders themselves sent young Indian probationers in the civil services to England for training, presumably to learn what they could not in India. British personnel were retained in key positions within India: in the decade after independence, the Indian Air Force and the Indian Navy were commanded by Britishers. CONTEXT AND CONTENT As we have seen, the content of the story of 1947 changed in subsequent years. In India, the story moved in a definite direction. The might of the British enemy was magnified; Indian collaboration with British rule was minimized; an all-out struggle was postulated between uncompromising British and Indian opponents; the British were deemed to be evicted as a result of Indian nationalist strength; and the continuities between the colonial state and the government of independent India were sought to be concealed. What allowed and encouraged the story to move in this direction? In a sense, the answer is that a change in context permitted the change in content. The outcome of the 1940s allowed the leaders of independent India to don the mantle of state power, to preen themselves, to ask the familiar question of the mirror on their wall, and to supply a delightfully satisfying answer themselves. There was no doubt in their minds that they were the fairest leaders of them all. Historians were instructed and encouraged to write accordingly. Few disobeyed this mandate. Most historians in India obediently exalted nationalism, praised its beauty, and often exaggerated its strength. The complicity of knowledge and power is well known. In the third quarter of the twentieth century in India, the portrayal of Indian history reflected the change in dominant ideology, its shift from imperialism to nationalism. As the ideology of the state in India changed from imperialism to nationalism, the representation of 1947 moved accordingly. Inexorably, the propaganda of imperialism gave way to the propaganda of the nation state. For the present to look better, it helps if the past looks worse. The mythology of nationalism walks hand in hand with the demonology of its other. In the case of India, the fables of nationalism replaced the fables of a defunct imperialism. An eminent anthropologist and historian, Bernard Cohn, has written a book titled Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge. Comparable studies are needed for nationalism and its forms of knowledge. Another aspect of the change in context was generational. Over time, the status of 1947 altered, from an event within memory to an episode in text-book history. In India, the events of 1947 left a common imprint, easier to recognize than to define, on the lives of a generation. There was an outpouring of popular enthusiasm on the streets on 15 August 1947, which exceeded the euphoria of many religious festivals. To witness this was to be marked by it. But while the story of 1947 had greater emotional meaning for the people who had vivid memories of events, it was, for the very same reason, as far as they were concerned, a less malleable story. Members of an older generation had too many moorings in the reality of the times, to let their representation slide too far away into fantasy. They might have found it a more moving story: but their memories would not allow the story to move too far. A standard textbook of Indian history, An Advanced History of India, by R.C. Majumdar, H.C. Raychudhuri, and Kalikinkar Datta, concluded by declaring: `15th August, 1947, which saw the end of the long-drawn National Struggle against British rule is a red-letter day in the history of India, and the date will ever remain engraved in the hearts of millions of her people'. The authors forgot that times and audiences change. As time passed, a population of eyewitnesses began to give way to younger people who had to be told what had happened. Once a festival of the people, the 15th of August eventually became a ritual of the state. In due course, a date engraved in older hearts had to be imprinted on younger minds. Emotion had to be replaced by education. As memories faded, and messages about 1947 were addressed more to children and less to adults, the story became more pliable. Versions of the past became more tractable with time, when the past was more distant, because they were addressed to a constituency without any dissonant memories to challenge them. The data needed to dispute an official version were less readily available. Imagination was less fettered by fact. As the official version of 1947 travelled through the firm channel of formal education, its current gained speed and strength. Hitherto carried mainly through conversation, the 1947 story found its new medium in the more structured hectoring of the classroom. The most vivid anecdote must fail before the most vapid syllabus. Moreover, the school teacher's cane is an effective weapon in the armoury of nationalism. IDEOLOGY AND BIAS The imperial sunsets over Delhi's Red Fort, and the Viceregal Palace on Raisina Hill, provide an instructive contrast. The Mughals slowly lost their hold over their territories: and the British later established themselves by their victories over their various enemies, battle by battle, and region by region. But when the British left, the entire territory and state apparatus was handed over at one stroke, in a single negotiated transaction, to the leaders of the Congress and the Muslim League. Even as the British seized power in reality, they held its Mughal umbrella aloft till 1857. Foreigners in a distant country, the British initially projected their rule as an essentially Indian enterprise. But the Congress regime after 1947, with its pre-eminent leaders educated in London, even while employing the same Indian personnel as the British had, projected itself as totally different and distanced from British rule. This was because the awe and aura of Mughal rule had persisted even after it was dead, whereas British rule was discredited, and its myths eroded, before it died. But though different in complexion, both distortions were similar in purpose. Frequently taking liberties with facts, the autobiographies of states tell us only what they would have us believe about their origins. Ancestry is a messy matter. Close scrutiny of origins - whether of families or nations - is a notoriously sensitive issue, often fascinating, but seldom conclusively reassuring. The pasts of states, like those of individuals, seldom correspond exactly to later presentations of them. The autobiographies of states represent, not the quest for truth, but a search for legitimacy. On 14/15 August 1947 Jawaharlal Nehru, making his `Tryst with Destiny' speech, declared: `At the stroke of the midnight hour, as the world sleeps, India awakes to life and freedom.' The fable of 1947 is rather like Prime Minister Nehru's statement, stirring, beautiful, and yet not quite accurate (for of course, at the stroke of the midnight hour in India, the world does not sleep). Over the years, the story of 1947 has been pasteurized to rid it of germs, and homogenized as well. Individuals speak with many voices; the state seeks to speak in a single, authoritative voice. The Indian nation has, officially, only one past. For some decades, this past has been enshrined in the history textbooks published by the National Council of Educational Research and Training. A national viewpoint has, as we are repeatedly reminded, much to commend it. But there is in this process of standardization, I suggest, also an arrogance to deprecate, and a loss to mourn. For the people who lived through the events of the 1940s, the meaning of the events depended on their experiences. Experiences are notoriously varied and contradictory. They varied in the 1940s with - among other things - region, social class, gender, ideology and political affiliation. For the villages of Bengal, the great famine dwarfed most other events of the 1940s. In north India, 1947 is still referred to as the year of `partition' rather than independence; in South India, the reverse is the case. For businessmen in India, the 1940s were a time of unprecedented war profits; for agricultural labourers, they were years of frightening starvation. For women abducted during the partition riots, and then claimed by the governments of India and Pakistan even when their families rejected them, the period was exceptionally traumatic, with little or nothing to celebrate. If the elation of many Congress politicians in 1947 was visible at one extreme, the grief of the victims of famine, rape and murder was discernible at the other. The past bequeaths to us a rich diversity of memory. A single, exclusive national rendition smothers this diversity of memory. The message from the new Indian nation state to its people has been unambiguous. What is most important to the government of independent India must be most important to them. An event which altered the trajectory of the state, must, they have been told, have done the same to their lives, in which one chapter closed in 1947, and another began. Each year, 15 August is supposed to be a time to banish thoughts other than those evoked by the national anthem. Foregrounding the 15th of August means, in a sense, telling the people that the history of the state is their personal history. It means telling them what to know, and commanding them what to feel. Speaking for others, and telling them what to know, is an attribute of power. The story of 1947 is, in both senses of the word, a moving one. The realities of 1947 were many and varied, and they have not been discussed here except tangentially, for our subject is not the contemporary character of these events, but their subsequent representation. Independent India has viewed 1947 through nationalist spectacles. The purpose of this article has been, by pointing out some of the ways in which the story has been seen, to draw our attention to the power of the lenses used. For in the study of history, an awareness of bias is a condition of truth. **** NOTE ON THE AUTHOR: Indivar Kamtekar teaches modern Indian history at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi. He has been on the faculty of the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta, and has been a fellow of the Indian Institute of Advanced Study at Shimla. His doctoral dissertation, at the University of Cambridge, dealt with the independence and partition of India. [ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ] |