The Empire fallacy

[1]

By Pankaj Mishra [2]

Rs 699

Pankaj Mishra’s book From the Ruins of Empire is perhaps the most important book in a long time, for India in particular, and Asia in general, as we choose our foreign and economic/industrialisation policies for a new era.

Whether this new era will be defined by a genuine rise of Asia and “Asian-ness” or merely of Asian copies of the West — and what the consequences of either would be — is Mishra’s chief concern.
Of course, there are many who ask whether there indeed is an Asian identity, Asian mind, “Asian-ness”. Mishra, who has read a lot and travelled far and wide to bring together many strands of Asian thought in the 19th and 20th centuries — on the encounters between the West and the East, from the peak of the colonial era to its decline — answers in the affirmative and reveals an Asian mind.
To many following the Western narrative, the rise of Asia is a recent and merely economic phenomenon. From the Ruins of Empire traces it back to the naval Battle of Tsushima in 1905 that saw an Asian country, Japan, defeat a European power, Russia, for the first time since the Middle Ages. That Japanese victory awakened Asia, and a widespread feeling of “Asian-ness” and gave hope and confidence to the “subordinate” peoples of the continent — Arab, Turkish, Persian, Vietnamese, Indonesian and, of course, Indian and Chinese. Whether it was the rich, Anglophile, Brahman Nehru or the poor Chinese farmer’s son Sun Yat Sen, the pan-Islamic intellectual Abdul-Rashid Ibrahim or Turkey’s Mustafa Kemal Ataturk of Albanian-Macedonian origin, the Burmese nationalist U. Ottama, or the then unknown Bania lawyer in South Africa Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, or Rabindranath Tagore, “who took out an impromptu victory march… in rural Bengal”, they all rejoiced in it, and dreamt of their own liberation from the West.
Indeed, almost all of the Asian intellectuals that Mishra follows started off as Western-style liberals and turned — as Tagore, Gandhi, Liang Shuming, Yan Fu and even the Japanese poet Yonejiro Noguchi did — into critics of the “special modern enthusiasm for Western progress and force”. They all recognised a common enemy and its common source — the West and its modernity, defined by “machine” and mass murder. While Liang Shuming despised the “machine”, to Gandhi the industrial revolution had made economic prosperity the central goal of politics, placing machine over man and relegating religion and ethics to irrelevance.
Having established a common “Asian-ness”, Mishra then proceeds to warn that we may be forgetting it and setting ourselves up to become mere copycats of the West. He accomplishes that by quoting some of the most powerful, but largely forgotten, thoughts about what industrialisation — the dream that India and China are chasing relentlessly today — does to the human soul and how the modern Western economic juggernaut creates the conditions for war, subjugation and injustice, which become inescapable tools in the pursuit of greater economic glory. He warns that following that path would constitute not a genuine “revenge of the East”, but the universal triumph of Western modernity.
The book ends with how the dream of a regenerated Asian spiritual civilisation, one that arose out of the Japanese victory over Russia, ended by Japan’s own imitation of the West — in the name of uniting and creating a greater Asia. Tagore’s friend Yonejiro Noguchi pleaded with him to endorse Japan’s war in China as a means for “establishing a new great world in the Asiatic continent”, a war of “Asia for Asia”. Tagore replied by wishing Japan “not success, but remorse”.
Today, China, too, says it wants “Asia for Asians”, and leaves the rest of Asia shuddering. India, Japan, Vietnam etc. are caught not just in the race to match the West, but also in a bond of mistrust towards China, such that even if they wanted “Asia for Asians”, none would still feel confident to let go of their Western ally/partner and the game of global balance of power, to the advantage of America rather than to themselves. That may well be the inescapable tragedy of great power politics.

Excerpts from the interview:

Lots of praise and lots of criticism for From the Ruins of Empire
Mostly praise. The criticism is all from expected quarters. Mostly Right-wing. There will be more in America, no doubt.

What prompted you to look at Empire and the East-West categorisation?
I am looking at the way in which the idea of Empire becomes the dominant paradigm of our times. Europe starts out having these far-flung empires in the modern era, then the Americans follow. And now, we are looking at China following that particular model where it needs resources for its economy from everywhere.
So, even though it is not colonising Latin America as the Europeans did, it is very present there. It is very present in Africa. So is India, for that matter. I am interested in looking at this particular political model that we seem to have adopted from the West, which breaks down the East-West binary altogether. What I am saying is, we ended up embracing a lot of the West’s ideas and ended up resembling them a great deal, which is a big irony.

You chose lesser known anti-colonial thinkers to write about, not the usual heroes.
I wanted to focus on the more obscure ones because sometimes they tell you more about a culture, a society, a situation than the more famous, celebrated ones; and to bring people who have been excluded from history back into it. It was also to show how cosmopolitan our histories are. Someone like Tagore could travel to Japan and
China and meet with their intellectuals, Chinese artists and intellectuals could travel to India and participate in the intellectual and cultural life of this country. We have forgotten all that because nationalist histories have no place for that. Our nationalist history tells us about how we led this heroic, grand battle for Independence. It suppresses a lot of things, it ignores a lot of things.
It is important to focus on these characters and what they said when they first encountered Western power, the way they diagnosed it, the way they critiqued it because today, post-colonial regimes have been around for 50-60 years, and most of the post-colonial world is politically and economically a disaster. There is obviously some sign of economic dynamism here and there, but in large parts of Africa, large parts of Asia, large parts of India, for that matter, people still don’t enjoy full rights, people are still horribly poor; the regimes — the police, the administration — are extremely corrupt. So we have to then ask ourselves the question, why did the post-colonial regimes become mirror images of the colonial regimes?

Many in India have actually swung from the view that Empire was unalloyed evil to now saying, no, actually, much good came of it…
It’s completely false. Just look at the record to see how India was systematically deindustrialised, how millions of people were forced into destitution, traditional industries, artisans, crafts were destroyed, how India became a supplier of raw materials to the British economy, cash crops were introduced all over, subsistence economies were destroyed, millions were exposed to famines across India and died. Everything that’s supposedly good happened incidentally: the railways, for instance, were built to expedite the exploitation of India...

There are some in India who take inspiration from Lord Curzon and lay store by the idea of joining hands with Anglophone countries or a Western alliance…
India should not forget its geographical location. To offer ourselves up as a large aircraft carrier for a Western power is neither desirable nor possible, because there will be enough opposition to that within this country. Politically, these are completely unfeasible ideas and notions. India is too independent-minded a country to allow these small elites to dictate its foreign policy.
There have been moments in the last 15-20 years when there have been certain figures, certain characters who have brought us very close to the US. But the momentum has been against them. So, even with Manmohan Singh signing the nuclear agreement, we know what the fate of that is. It hasn’t worked out the way Americans thought it would. I think politically, there are many more pressures at work here for us to become a little satellite or ally of some big power. And our relationship with China is becoming very important. So the idea of teaming up with the US against China is becoming more and more impractical.

In the West itself, there is a lot of debate whether something called the West exists.
It’s a legitimate interrogation of the idea of the West. When one uses it in a particular context, you are describing an entity as it was perceived. If you were a person in China in the 1890s, the West was an entity signified by the shared oppressive nature of practically every European power that was present in Shanghai or Beijing at the time. The way they were forcing or dictating economic policy, for them the West was a very coherent entity in that the European powers were acting in concert. The Boxer Rebellion was suppressed jointly by the British, the French and the Russians.
But if you are looking at the “West” as an English person in England in 2012, he or she would rightly say, “Look, we have very little in common with this strange country across the Atlantic, the US, where they have complete nutters like Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan running for President, you have a completely crazy Christian fundamentalist component. We don’t have any of that. What actually binds us together apart from a common language (English), which, too, we speak very differently?” So, it depends on where you are looking at the “West” from.