[Marxism] Sepoy revolt

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070430/prakesh

Inevitable Revolutions
by GYAN PRAKASH

[from the April 30, 2007 issue]

E.M. Forster's A Passage to India ends with a poignant exchange 
between Aziz, a young Muslim doctor, and Fielding, a Briton 
sympathetic to Indians. Though Aziz is acquitted of the false charge 
of molesting a British woman, he is deeply wounded by the experience 
and wants nothing to do with the colonial race. Fielding, an old 
friend, seeks him out and asks why they cannot be friends again.

But the horses didn't want it--they swerved apart; the earth didn't 
want it, sending up rocks through which riders must pass single file; 
the temples, the tank, the jail, the palace, the birds, the carrion, 
the Guest House, that came into view as they issued from the gap and 
saw Mau beneath: they didn't want it, they said in their hundred 
voices. "No, not yet," and the sky said, "No, not there."

This is how the novel ended, written in 1924 against the backdrop of 
the first mass nationalist upsurge against British rule. Gandhi, who 
led the movement, was a product of the Indian encounter with Western 
culture. He trained as a barrister in London and spent more than two 
decades in South Africa, developing his doctrine of nonviolent 
struggle in campaigning for Indian rights. Western ideas deeply 
influenced his political philosophy, and he maintained lifelong 
friendships with a number of Europeans. But anticolonialism formed 
the bedrock of his relationship with the West. Despite good 
intentions, there could be no friendship in the abstract. You could 
not simply wish away empire when it formed the setting in which the 
members of colonizing and colonized cultures met.

Historians of empire have always understood this chasm in human 
relationships created by the fact of one culture ruling over another. 
But a reappraisal of this truth has been under way for some time now 
at the hands of revisionist historians of the British Empire. These 
historians dislike Edward Said and the postcolonial critics who cite 
French theory and argue that the British Empire established lasting 
Orient/Occident and East/West oppositions in politics and knowledge. 
Uncomfortable with the political passion and theoretical language of 
these critics, the revisionists counsel us (in mainly British 
accents, with some American intonations) to lower the anti-imperial 
temperature and write old-fashioned narrative history. They contend 
that empire is the oldest and one of the most widely practiced forms 
of governance.

The Romans did it, the Spaniards did it, the Russians did it, the 
Chinese did it, even the newly independent nations have done it. 
Everybody oppressed everyone else. Pax Britannica may have ruled over 
one-fifth of humanity, but the conquerors, soldiers, administrators 
and scholars were also human. Why bring in such abstractions as 
Orientalism and colonialism? Underneath it all, the story of the 
British Empire is a narrative of individuals caught up in human 
encounters between cultures.

True, the revisionist argument continues, Britons went to distant 
lands to profit and conquer. But vastly outnumbered by the local 
population and pitted against powerful adversaries, they were deeply 
conscious of their vulnerability. This was particularly true in the 
eighteenth century, when the British were all too aware of the power 
and grandeur of the Ottomans and the Mughals. The Barbary corsairs 
and Algerian slave owners harassed them in the Mediterranean, the 
Indian tribes challenged them in North America and the French engaged 
them in imperial wars. Then, their American territories fell. On the 
Indian subcontinent, the Mughal Empire was reduced to a shell, but 
successor states posed a serious challenge to the East India 
Company's military position. Embattled, the British were forced to 
depend on indigenous allies and could not afford to treat native 
populations and cultures as inferior. Forcibly or willingly, many 
crossed cultural borders. They shed European trousers for native 
pajamas, grew Hindu mustaches and Muslim beards, married local women 
and kept concubines, and collected indigenous texts and artifacts. A 
human story of interest and immersion in other cultures, languages 
and artifacts--not mastery--underpinned British imperial expansion.

Stroke by stroke, this revisionist historiography seeks to redraw the 
portrait of the British Empire. This picture has received prominent 
attention in British publications, including leftist ones, eager to 
mark distance from their imperial past while trying to rescue some 
cultural value from it for the present. In this version of the story, 
set against the current spectacle of an arrogant and dangerous 
American imperialism, we are told the British Empire developed 
willy-nilly as a collection of territories and cultures; it was never 
the project that nineteenth-century imperialists claimed and that 
present-day postcolonial critics allege. The conquerors, particularly 
in the eighteenth century, are seen not as agents of colonial 
oppression and exploitation but as hapless imperialists caught in a 
hostile environment; weak and embattled, they eagerly embraced 
indigenous allies and cultures.

This revisionist view of the British Empire underpins William 
Dalrymple's deeply researched and beautifully written The Last 
Mughal. The subject of his study is the 1857 Uprising against British 
rule in India. It was an event that, according to Dalrymple, marked 
the end of the eighteenth century's "relatively easy relationship of 
Indian and Briton" and the onset of "hatreds and racism" that became 
so characteristic of the nineteenth-century Raj. "The Uprising, it is 
clear, was the result of that change, not its cause."

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