Alex von Tunzelmann: Indian Summer

Alex von Tunzelmann's book on the partition of India and Pakistan, Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire (2007, Henry Holt), looks to be an interesting read, both for its coverage of a critical moment in world history and for whatever light it spreads on the decay and demise of British and European (or Euroamerican) imperialism. I hope to get to it before too long. Meanwhile, Pankaj Mishra's review in The New Yorker has some interesting things to say.

Von Tunzelmann goes on a bit too much about the Mountbattens' open marriage and their connections to various British royals, toffs, and fops, but her account, unlike those of some of her fellow British historians, isn't filtered by nostalgia. She summarizes gbluntly the economic record of the British overlords, who, though never as rapacious and destructive as the Belgians in the Congo, damaged agriculture and retarded industrial growth in India through a blind faith in the "invisible hand" that supposedly regulated markets. [ . . . ] she reminds readers that, in 1877, the year that Queen Victoria officially became Empress of India, a famine in the south killed five million people even as the Queen's viceroy remained adamant that famine relief was a misguided policy. [ . . . ]

Though blessed with many able administrators, the British found India just too large and diverse to handle. Many of their decisions stoked Hindu-Muslim tensions, imposing sharp new religious-political identities on Indians. As the recent experience of Iraq proves, elections in a country where the rights and responsibilities of secular and democratic citizenship are largely unknown do little more than crudely assert the majority's right to rule. The British-supervised elections in 1937 and 1946, which the Hindu-dominated Congress won easily, only hardened Muslim identity,and made partition inevitable. [ . . . ] The British policy of defining communities based on religious identity radically altered Indian self-perceptions, as von Tunzelmann points out: "Many Indians stopped accepting the diversity of their own thoughts and began to ask themselves in which of the boxes they belonged."

Ineptitude and negligence directed British policies in India more than any cynical desire to divide and rule, but the British were not above exploiting rivalries. As late as 1940, Winston Churchill hoped that Hindu-Muslim antagonism would remain "a bulwark of British rule in India." [ . . . ] In the nineteen-twenties and thirties, Churchill had been loudest among the reactionaries who were determined not to lose India, "the jewel int eh crown," and, as Prime Minister during the Second World War, he tried every tactic to thwart Indian independence. "I hate Indians," he declared. "They are a beastly people with a beastly religion." [ . . . ] According to his own Secretary of State for India, Leopold Amery, Churchill knew "as much of the Indian problem as George III did of the American colonies." [ . . . ]

Von Tunzelmann judges that Churchill, hoping to forestall independence by opportunistically supporting Muslim separatism, instead became "instrumental in creating the world's first modern Islamic state." [ . . . ]

What Leopold Amery denounced as Churchill's "Hitler-like attitude" to India manifested itself most starkly during a famine, caused by a combination of war and mismanagement, that claimed between one and two million lives in Bengal in 1943. Urgently beseeched by Amery and the Indian viceroy to release food stocks for India, Churchill responded with a telegram asking why Gandhi hadn't died yet. [ . . . ]

As von Tunzelmann writes, "By 1946 the subcontinent was a mess, with British civil and military officers desperate to leave, and a growing hostility to their presence among Indians." In an authoritative recent two-volume account of the end of the British Empire in Asia -- Forgotten Armies and Forgotten Wars -- the Cambridge University historians Tim Harper and Christopher Bayly describe how quickly the Japanese had humiliated the British in Malaya and Burma, threatening their hold over India. With their mystique of power gone, Asia's British masters depended on what Bayly and Harper term the "temporary sufferance of Asians." Although Churchill had rejected the Congress Party's offer of military support in exchange for independence, Bayley and Harper write that, ultimately, "it was Indian soldiers, civilian laborers and businessmen who made possible the victory of 1945. Their price was the rapid independence of India."

The British could not now rely on brute force without imperilling their own sense of legitimacy. Besides, however much they "preferred the illusion of imperial might to the admission fo imperial failure," as von Tunzelmann puts it, the country, deep in wartime debt, simply couldn't afford to hold on to its increasingly unstable empire. Imperial disengagement appeared not just inevitable but urgent.

But Churchill's divisive policies had already produced a disastrous effect on the Indian political scene. Congress Party leaders had refused to share power with Jinnah, confident that they did not need Muslim support in order to win a majority vote in elections. These attitudes stoked Muslim fears that the secular nationalism of Gandhi and Nehru was a cover for Hindu dominance. While the Congress leaders were in prison, Jinnah, with Churchill's encouragement, steadily consolidated Muslim opinion behind him. By 1946, this secularist politician had managed to present himself as the best defender of Muslim interests in a Hindu-dominated India. Religion was never so deeply and enduringly politicized in India as it was in the last years of imperial rule. [ . . . ]

Meeting Mountbatten a few months after partition, Churchill assailed him for helping Britain's "enemies," "Hindustan," against "Britain's friends," the Muslims. Little did Churchill know wht his expedient boosting of political Islam would eventually unleash a global jihad engulfing even distant New York and London. The rival nationalisms and politicized religions the British Empir ebrought into being nwo clash in an enlarged geopolitical arena; and the human costs of imperial overreaching seem unlikely to attain a final tally for many more decades.

The relevance of these quotes to what Britain did in Palestine, and to what first Britain and now the US has and is still doing in Iraq and Afghanistan, should be obvious.

As for Churchill, it's possible that one can see his hand in every war in a century of war, from the British assault on the Sudan, which he witnessed, and the Boer War, where he first made his political mark, up to the present War on Terror. Churchill has at least this much in common with Bush: he never recognized making a fundamental error, and realize that there was anything in the world beyond his competency. Paul Woodward made a note recently where he suggested that Bush reflect on the following quote from the Tao Te Ching:

A great nation is like a great man:
When he makes a mistake, he realizes it.
Having realized it, he admits it.
Having admitted it, he corrects it.
He considers those who point out his faults
as his most benevolent teachers.
He thinks of his enemy
as the shadow that he himself casts.

If a nation is centered in the Tao,
if it nourishes its own people
and doesn't meddle in the affairs of others,
it will be a light to all nations in the world.

Of course, it's not just Churchill, nor just Bush. The British, to the extent one can generalize, still cling to the notion that their empire was good for all concerned, and they reiterate this by trying to help the Americans follow in their footsteps. That those footsteps lead to ruin is something they all will deny as long as possible. Only by recognizing Churchill as one of the true monsters of the 20th century will we start to become "centered in the Tao."

posted 2006-08-16