I feel I must begin by paying my tribute to Prof.Amiya Bagchi to whom I owe more than what I can express here.A renowned economist with radical political views,a generous and warm-hearted man who could bear calmly the quirks and crochets of his numerous friends and acquaintances,erudite scholar and a voracious and sensitive reader of literature in particular I happened to attract his interest and affection almost by chance.For in those days I was so shy and diffident that with strangers I almost lost my confidence and became tongue-tied.
Some illustrious scholars showed some interest in me,but in stead of eagerly seeking their company I avoided them by miles.At Cambridge I found myself at first at odds with practically everything in British society,particularly the food, and I shamelessly found or seized occasions to visit the Bagchis as some sort of an haven from insecurity and inedible food.Bagchi did not say a word and treated my intrusions as perfectly natural.There were many other debts of gratitude I owe to him and I fervently dedicate this essay to him.For empire was one topic I had discussed most with him.And strange to say,it was in Britain that I became most aware of the vampire-like quality of imperial rule for our country.I am sorry to say this though I met many good people in Britain and found their company both enjoyable and profitable in many ways.Like many of my compatriots back home they were quite innocent of its evil role.
The British empire seems to have been quite different from its contemporary and rival,the Russian empire.While the Russians were content to impose their rule and openly and guiltlessly plunder the booty the British went about it as though it was a scientifically planned and systematically organized treasure-hunt lasting centuries.The regime saw a huge and ever-increasing accumulation of massive tomes and official surveys of the natural resources and society and culture of the conquered country.They wrote the history of the country with painstaking industry and thoroughness.It was both knowledge and power that lured them,though they chose to veil the thirst for loot and power in bland and grand verbiage.
It required grit,intelligence and passion apart from sheer greed for lucre.For many it was a source of adventure.They set up plantations, immense timber industries thriving on huge stretches of virgin forests and then the mines and factories exploiting native labour at a fraction of the cost and built an enormous network of railways and arterial roads all over the country.While they boasted that these had civilized the wretched natives it actually filled the coffers far away across the seas.
The experience was set down in numerous official reports,personal memoirs and books about travel and adventure,not to speak of thousands of scientific surveys and reports.The whole corpus,enormous and varied as it was,had as its base(‘episteme’ in Foucoult’s theory) what has now become known as Orientalism.
Though it has acquired an overtone of evil thanks to its association with domination and exploitation I have a notion.that for the most part it had been unconscious and unpremeditated.It was a case of registering and understanding something exotic,unfamiliar and yet unavoidable.So the informants and scholars tried to make sense of it to the best of their ability.Thanks to their sense of superiority this knowledge system got infected with negative bias.When we recall that most classical ancient systems suffered from similar cognitive bias about their internal human relations it is not something abnormal,although the victims have been naturally scornful of their strident moral claims.
Against such a background it is natural too that a considerable body of creative writing had also emerged out of it.Most of it peddled pedestrian accounts of adventure and exoticism as the authors hade been mediocrities. Some were well-meaning but smug paeans to Empire and reading them today would make both Indians and Britishers squirm.But a few do survive despite obvious faults.
Throughout the three centuries of its existence British attitude to India and Indians went through a continuous process of change,especially among the ruling elite.It reflected change in British social and political structure,particularly the long decay of conservative Tory power and the equally protracted rise of labour and social democracy,and all sorts of marriage of convenience between them.
The most enduring yet most Colonial Blimpish work of fiction to emerge out of the empire is undoubtedly Kipling’s KIM.While its author betrayed the most obnoxious kinds of imperialist prejudice and snobbery he was undoubtedly a great story-teller. Even the JUNGLE BOOK,stories of the empire of wild life for children packed with fun and suspense and intense moments of heart-stopping terror and beauty filled with the odour of green shoots,swollen rivers after summer rains and the sound of animal cries from soft whispering tones to the roar of the tiger and the great trumpet blare of angry elephant,actually mimic the imperial Law that the British had maintained all over the country.
Also the solid hierarchies from the knighthoods down to the proud village headman with his little crown of a turban.A story of adventure set in the never-never land of fairy tales,but still impressed with the authority of empire.The triumphalism shining through these stories and KIM can hardly be missed as it had emerged in the heyday of the empire.
And the dim nostalgic pathos and the sense of irreversible decay that enthrall readers in the story of the old white cobra guarding the buried treasure of a long dead king,so old that his skin was a faded white in colour, and whose dreaded venom had run dry ages ago, was a mournful but slightly superior elegy about India’s feudal rulers now reduced to showpieces of the empire’s might.The rising resistance to arbitrary British power and its assertion of dignity,especially based among educated elite of Calcutta,
is crudely and snugly mocked in the lawless and vainglorious Bandar Log jumping about on branches of trees.
KIM also celebrates the Empire.Again the dominant sentiment is romance,in the colour and sheer variety of the travellers and wayfarer on the Grand Trunk Road,in the mystical aspirations and quest of the Tibetan Lama,alien but held with respect,in the erotic overtures of the polyandrous queen from the hills and a lot of other things.This heaving,pulsating sea of humanity, bounded and kept in some order by the imperial power display to the world imperial wisdom and majesty.
Like any old fabled or historic empire the British too had its dangerous rival and secret enemy,the Russians who had by then swallowed up several central Asian kingdoms of Turks and were on the edge of the empire itself.The two powers were furiously spying on each other using a miscellaneous troop of secret agents busy getting past each other with the usual traps and tricks of espionage.In a nod to loyal Indians who Kipling thought deserved kudos,he created the character of Hurrie Babu part dedicated scientific surveyor,part wily secret agent.The co-option of natives to prop up the empire had evidently been held as yet another achievement of imperial wisdom.
The book was published in 1901, at the time of the zenith of unrivalled British dominion. Nineteen years later,with the growing threat of terrorism striking at the highest seat of imperial power and Gandhi arriving from South Africa with ideas of a mass uprising that eschewed violence the British were on the edge,nervous, uncertain and at their wit’s end.
The anxiety and panic resulted in the savage massacre of Jalianwalabag which in turn united the country against the stigma and humiliation of colonial rule as never before during the last fifty years. Jalianwalabag also revolted the liberal British elite.They reacted with horror and outrage against the blind Tory project of saving the empire by mowing down the Indians.There were talks of friendship and co-operation,meetings and rallies on rights of subjects and the heartlessness of boorish and brash officialdom.It was the initiative of a major section of the liberal British elite that believed a more civilized approach would assuage hurt Indian feelings and bring about a more humane rapprochement.But none of them even dreamt of freedom from the colonial yoke.
E.M.Forster’s A PASSAGE TO INDIA is a novel that tries to bring together the charm of Indian ‘shairi’ and old world courtesy,the everyday mysticism of all-encompassing tolerance with British values of individual liberty and dignity as well as respect for law.Majo Fielding and Aziz become friends(uncharitably characterized by the wry Naipaul as an homosexual relationship,though the story does not provide even a wisp of evidence!) and explore ways of reaching a serene mutual respect and understanding.But a mysterious event in a cave where a touring British woman has a hallucination of being molested by the courteous Aziz to his mortification creates a commotion that drives the two apart.The matter ends with the two souls yearning for peace and friendship but are inexorably driven asunder by the two divergent cultures marked by their icons.The mystery of the separation remains an insoluble enigma,like the mysterious booming sound inside the cave,uncannily reminiscent of the holy syllable for Hindus—–‘OUM”!
But the tragedy of the broken friendship is actually explained by something that is all too boringly familiar: Empire.It is the stubborn weight of exploitative and oppressive the empire that formed the basis of security of liberal British values, the value of individual and his rights,of mutual respect and tolerance,of friendship and civilized exchange,of courtesy and grace of gesture.Neither Forster nor any of his compatriots sharing those values ever recognized the crass but indisputable reality of that.And that provided the unacknowledged mainspring of the tragic drama at the heart of this powerful novel.
What Forster thought was driving the two friends apart was the insurmountable incompatibility of the two cultures was actually the gulf that kept the them inexorably apart,which was in effect the weight of the empire that triggered a permanent division of point of view and interest between them.
Hiren Gohain is a political commentator
