imperialism

The Good, Bad and the Ugly of Trapping ‘Pranayama’ Within Scientific Speak

Scientific American’s article and the reaction it has prompted offer more than an opportunity to outrage.

A recent article in Scientific American on the benefits of “proper breathing” for overall health has ignited anger across social media, with many in India accusing the magazine of rebranding or even appropriating the ancient Indian breathing technique of ‘pranayama’.

Detailed description of the benefits of the 2500-year-old Indian technique of pranayama, dressed up in 21st c. scientific language as "cardiac coherence breathing"! It's taking the West a few millennia to learn what our ancients taught us millennia ago, but hey, you're welcome… https://t.co/LLltRZ3pP5

— Shashi Tharoor (@ShashiTharoor) January 29, 2019

The outrage on display seems prompted by Scientific American‘s tweet, rather than the article itself, which makes multiple flattering references to pranayama, yoga and the knowledge of the East.

Of course, given the track record of the West, the outrage is perfectly understandable. Western scientists have frequently been guilty of (re)discovering something that’s been around for many centuries, attempting to package it as something new, and in the process depriving it of its cultural heritage in the name of sanitising it for scientific examination. There was a similar incident with banana leaves last year and with turmeric latte before that.

Also read: Why You Shouldn’t Measure Scientific Progress With Award-Winning Discoveries

However, Scientific American‘s article and the reaction it has prompted offer more than an opportunity to just outrage; they offer a chance to reflect on and unpack a lot of things going on here. One example that comes immediately to mind is the role of science in society, as opposed to science’s relation to society, as if it were a separate entity somehow.

‘Cardiac coherence breathing’, as the article characterises pranayama, is the language of a specialist within science. That doesn’t make it wrong, even though claiming it is something novel would be misguided, but that does remove the technique from the commons and away from the people, using language that isn’t very accessible, and making it sound more alien than it actually is. On the other hand, calling it ‘pranayama’ – by way of its storied relationship with yoga – keeps it within the commons.

This is simply a reflection of the scientist’s isolation from society’s broader goals, in the West as much as in the modern East. It’s also a reflection of the kind of language scientists have been trained to, and are encouraged to, use. For example, you no longer read scientific papers today that are easy to understand. The writing is predominantly in the passive voice, very dense and is typified by the overuse of ‘science-ese’ like “‘moreover,’ ‘therefore,’ ‘distinct’ and ‘underlying’”. The following is what some scientists have said about the scientific literature:

Typically, it is bloated, dense and so dry that no amount of chewing can make it tasty. (source)

That science has become more difficult for nonspecialists to understand is a truth universally acknowledged. (source)

Modern scientific texts are more impenetrable than they were over a century ago, suggests a team of researchers in Sweden. It’s easy to believe that. (source)

Fans of the TV sitcom Big Bang Theory will have seen this tendency mocked in the title of each episode: ‘The Allowance Evaporation’, ‘The Romance Recalibration’, ‘The Collaboration Contamination’, etc. So ‘cardiac coherence breathing’ sounds about right for pranayama.

Another issue at play here is the seeming incompatibility of knowledge and the tests used to verify knowledge. India has had the former for a very, very long time, as have numerous other non-modern civilisations around the world.

On the other hand, the tests used to verify knowledge have evolved continuously, and the set of tests used today are of Western origin. Further, because of the West’s colonial mindset, knowledge that isn’t verifiable by their methods is treated as non-knowledge or pseudoscience.

Where we have come up short is in breaching this past/present divide – as Youyou Tu did – instead of dismissing one in favour of the other. But even here, it’s still only the regrettable global struggle for primacy at play, motivated by the incentives capitalism offers for it. As the philosopher Samir Chopra wrote:

Legal protections appropriate for tangible objects … are a disaster in the realm of culture, which relies on a richly populated, open-for-borrowing-and-reuse public domain. It is here, where our culture is born and grows and is reproduced, that the term ‘intellectual property’ holds sway and does considerable mischief.

Then again, one can’t just wish this complication away, and the (re)discovery of ‘cardiac coherence breathing’ might just be a good thing. It’s useful that scientists – anywhere, not just in India – are examining pranayama through the scientific method, with the potential to unlock some detail that an Indian, by virtue of her traditional knowledge alone, doesn’t already have.

As the Scientific American article goes on to note:

The method was developed based on the understanding that slow, deep breathing increases the activity of the vagus nerve, a part of parasympathetic nervous system; the vagus nerve controls and also measures the activity of many internal organs. When the vagus nerve is stimulated, calmness pervades the body: the heart rate slows and becomes regular; blood pressure decreases; muscles relax. When the vagus nerve informs the brain of these changes, it, too, relaxes, increasing feelings of peacefulness. Thus, the technique works through both neurobiological and psychological mechanisms.

This is certainly good to know. Where the ‘discovery’ errs is in passing it off as something new, where it runs the risk of being translocated from the commons to the specialists. Terms like ‘vagus nerve’, ‘parasympathetic’ and ‘neurobiological mechanisms’ aren’t exactly part of casual conversation.

Also read: The Conversation on Eastern Traditions of Science That Needs to Happen But Won’t

An attendant issue is that of cultural misappropriation. Many readers will remember the hoopla over Coldplay’s music video for ‘Hymn for the Weekend’ in 2016. In 2018, we discovered how the British author J.K. Rowling had shoehorned an Indonesian character, played by a Korean actress, into the script for the second Fantastic Beasts film in a bid to have diversity where none existed in her books. The only problem: the mythology she chose to draw from was of Indian origin.

The result, in the writer Achala Upendran’s words:

[Rowling] refuses to accept that her position as creator does not entitle her to rewrite cultural histories and rebrand different mythologies according to her own convenience, especially when this rebranding is so fraught with political implications.

In much the same way, many Western commentators and thinkers – if not scientists and policymakers – refuse to acknowledge that their cultural hegemony doesn’t give them the license to recast existing knowledge according to their convenience. Instead of slicing off one portion for scientific study and another to promote pseudoscience, we need scientists to work together with pranayama and yoga practitioners to marry technical inputs with cultural and spiritual rituals, and enhance their benefits for everyone’s sake.

What Mandela and Fanon Learned From Algeria’s Revolution

The Algerian revolution had a profound effect on both Mandela and Fanon’s thinking about colonisation, oppression and freedom.

On the fifth anniversary of South African statesman Nelson Mandela’s death, it’s worthwhile to remember how his thinking moved from violence to reconciliation as the solution to undoing apartheid.

On his journey to a different approach, Mandela visited Algeria – a place where the revolutionary thinker Frantz Fanon also developed his ideas on armed struggle.

A grim revolutionary war started in Algeria in 1954 between the indigenous Arab population, mainly represented by the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN), and the French on behalf of the white settlers. The casualties numbered around 300 000 with two million Algerians displaced and one million settlers returning to France.

The conflict came to an end in 1962 when French President Charles de Gaulle called out a referendum on whether Algeria should remain as part of France. The vote was overwhelmingly in favour of independence.

This revolution had a profound effect on both Mandela and Fanon’s thinking. It shaped a great deal of their respective understanding about colonisation, oppression and freedom.

Mandela in Algeria

Mandela was an ardent freedom fighter in the early days of South Africa’s liberation struggle – he co-founded the ANC’s military wing Umkhonto weSizwe in December 1961. He believed that violence was necessary in resisting the repressive and brutal apartheid regime. He was eventually imprisoned for attempting to overthrow South Africa’s apartheid regime. Mandela and seven of his comrades were convicted of sabotage in 1964.

Also Read: The ‘Mandela Effect’ and How Your Mind Is Playing Tricks on You

Mandela visited troops of the FLN in Morocco earlier in 1961 during a tour of Africa designed to establish Umkhonto we Sizwe as the armed wing of the African National Congress (ANC). Later that year he travelled to Algeria to participate in joint exercises between the ANC and the FLN.

Algeria also came to be the first country Mandela visited after he was released from prison in 1990. This was a symbolic gesture to acknowledge the inspiration he drew from the North African nation’s revolution and support for the struggle against apartheid.

The Algerian Revolution inspired Mandela. In his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, he compares their situation as the closest to that of the ANC in South Africa. The rebels in Algeria also had to face a government representing a sizeable white community controlling most of the indigenous population who were not white.

Fanon in Algeria

The Algerian Revolution made a profound imprint on Fanon’s work, too. He hailed from the island of Martinique in the Caribbean, then studied psychiatry in France and ultimately ended up working in an Algerian hospital in the 1950s.

It was there that he became acutely aware of the damage oppression wages both on the colonised and the colonist. Fanon became a member of the FLN and was involved in the resistance against the French.

Fanon is considered by some as an advocate of violence because of the prominent role it plays in his work, which can be read from a certain angle as a kind of manifesto. But he did not glamorise violence. The point for him was rather that violence becomes a necessary response to oppression where the oppressor does not recognise the humanity of the oppressed.

There are only a few references to apartheid in Fanon’s famous work, The Wretched of the Earth, but he saw the situation in South Africa as an exemplification of the struggle for decolonisation. Fanon’s ideas played an important role in South African political thinker Steve Biko’s work on the ideology of Black Consciousness.

In conversation

Mandela and Fanon never met. By the time that Mandela visited Algeria, Fanon was on his deathbed in Washington DC; he had leukaemia, and would die at the age of just 36. Fanon’s ideas didn’t feature in Mandela’s thinking, but one could imagine a conversation between them. There would be some points of agreement, and some areas in which they’d differ.

There would be agreement between Mandela and Fanon on the role of violence as a necessary foil to oppressive regimes. This was Mandela’s train of thought during his visit to Algeria when he emphasised armed struggle.

Also Read: The British Council ‘Mandela and Me’ Exhibition: History or Corporate Washout?

Mandela’s thinking about the role of violence changed during his 27 years in jail. He realised that violence was necessary to counter and undo the institutions of apartheid. Violence has its place in purifying society of institutional oppression, racism and hate but it cannot continue indefinitely. Once apartheid was undone, Mandela reasoned, violence would only become a destructive force.

Mandela opted for reconciliation with the old oppressors, which had mixed results in retrospect.

What might Fanon say about Mandela’s eventual change of mind? He would probably praise the South African’s acknowledgement of the damage which oppression does to both the oppressor and the oppressed. Reconciliation – or what Fanon called mutual recognition – becomes a remedy, absolving both sides of culpability for the violence which they exercised.

Fanon might criticise Mandela regarding the decision to embrace neo-liberal capitalism, which has led economic injustice to persist on a massive scale.

There is one major achievement in Mandela’s compromise which Fanon would acknowledge: his decision to include oppressor and oppressed as part of the post-apartheid dispensation has brought about the promise of something like the new humanity that Fanon envisioned beyond decolonisation.

Charles Villet is an Independent Researcher (PhD, Monash) at Monash University.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Nehru – the Professor and the Revolutionary

The Comintern’s chosen name for Nehru was ‘The Professor’, an apt description given the breadth of his historical awareness.

Note: This article is being republished on November 14, 2018, Jawaharlal Nehru’s birth anniversary.

The fortnight gone by marks both the centenary of the Russian Revolution of 1917 as well as Jawaharlal Nehru’s 128th birth anniversary. Revolutionary Russia and Nehru’s India both seem worlds away in present time. But what do we know of the influence this event of enormous gravity had on Nehru, both around the time it happened and in the following half of the twentieth century?

From his letters in Glimpses of World History, it is clear that Nehru saw the October Revolution of 1917 as part of a continuum including the revolutions of 1825, 1905 and, indeed, the earlier revolution of March 1917. He saw them as moments in which the nationalist urges of a people had culminated, and so these experiences collectively spoke to his own anti-colonial impulses. In the letter titled ‘The Passing Away of Tsardom in Russia’, Nehru talks of the cries for freedom in the Russian and French Revolutions as having inspired India’s own cry for freedom from British rule, Inquilab Zindabad! (‘Long live the revolution!’). These are long essays, longer than most in the book, and are clearly written by a man who was deeply aware of the momentousness of this revolution. They serve to remind Indira (his daughter, to whom these letters were written) of her own serendipitous connection to the revolution (she was born in the same month of the same year).

It was Nehru’s view of Marxism that informed his view of Russia – not the other way around. In his autobiography, he writes,

But Soviet Russia’s success or failure, vastly important as it was as a practical experiment in establishing a communist state, did not affect the soundness of the theory of communism. The Bolsheviks may blunder or even fail because of national or international reasons, and yet the communist theory may be correct.

In the early years, he was rather certain of the value of Marxist theory. Although he had not yet made up his mind about the success of a communist society, he was optimistic for the future of international Marxism per se: “Russia apart, the theory and philosophy of Marxism lightened up many a dark corner of my mind. History came to have a new meaning for me,” he wrote. Although Nehru is often indicted for his fidelity to the Marxist cause, either for having too much or too little of it, it is more useful to note that the revolution offered to him a spectacle, a picture of what the triumph of anti-imperialism might look like, a beacon to hold up in the midst of the darkness of the great war.

This is not unlike what it meant for other Indian leaders – most crucially for, as sources of Nehru’s political philosophy, Tagore and Gandhi, who celebrated the revolution. They contested its meaning and it conflicted them internally and pitted them against each other, but it influenced them, even if in Gandhi’s case it was more of an agitation against the means the revolution sought to defend and promote.

The heart of the matter here really is that it was for them an intellectual provocation, not an ideological creed. Tagore saw the revolution as a war cry against imperialism, and in the preface to his treatise Nationalism, said that Russia had “raised the seat of power for the dispossessed”.

Tagore travelled to Russia, of course, and on one occasion, his letters were collected in a pamphlet called Russiar Chithi (‘Letters from Russia’). Tagore ends one of his first letters pithily, saying, “The people whom in other countries we would call the masses, are here the only class of person.” Yet, he was deeply critical of the Russian method in later years. In an interview with Izvestia in 1930, he particularly criticised the use of terror and ended his final trip to the Soviet Union in 1930 saying that he was “doubtful about Communism as a political ideal.”

Also read: ‘We Need More Youthful Dreamers Like You’: A Letter to Jawaharlal Nehru

For Gandhi, the difference in the communist method from his own was too stark, and his anti-statist views were in direct contradiction to the communist model. He was deeply and wholly critical of the economic thrust of Soviet communism, as he saw it as the imprisonment of man’s spirit. Gandhi also found the relation between Soviet Russia and communists in other states problematic, saying of Indian communists that their taking instructions from Russia “whom they regard as their spiritual home” was difficult, and that he could not “countenance this dependence on an outside power”.

In the end, it was the question of means in politics that drove him to disassociate with any sort of socialist enterprise as he came to believe that communists “do not make any distinction between fair and foul, truth and falsehood” and were morally not sovereign, for a “free man would not engage in a secret movement”.

Although he had followed these debates quite keenly, as is evidenced by his earlier writings, Nehru’s first concrete interface with Soviet Russia stemmed from his participation in the International Congress against Colonial Oppression and Imperialism of February 1927, which is ironic as Soviet Russia did not participate in it. Yet as an invisible force, it had a strong presence, and Nehru was exposed both to the workings of international organised labour and the anti-imperialist leanings of the communists. Together with his father, Motilal Nehru, he accepted an invitation to attend the decennial celebrations to be held in Moscow later that year, travelled to Russia in November 1927 and wrote a series of articles, later published as a pamphlet titled Soviet Russia: Some Random Sketches and Impressions.

Jawaharlal Nehru. Credit: Nehru Memorial Library

In this work, Nehru quotes from William Wordsworth’s ode to the French Revolution to say of the Russian Revolution, “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive; But to be young was very heaven.” In Nehru’s mind, the French and the Russian Revolutions were very closely linked and, given his deeply anti-imperial feelings towards Britain, he was awake to the radically distinct upheaval underway in Russia.

In later years, he commemorated the revolution more cautiously, as if he did not want it to matter too much or for it to be read as the tradition in which Indian communists were acting – which was at odds with India’s own mostly non-violent freedom movement. In conversations with the journalist Tibor Mende, Nehru laid emphasis on Gandhi as a tremendous revolutionary force in India and spoke of Gandhi’s, and indeed India’s revolution, as conceived “in terms of continuity and not in terms of a break”.

The internal divisions within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, particularly in light of the Congress of 1956, led Nehru to believe that Soviet Communism had somewhat imploded. As head of the Indian state, he was concerned the effects that might have on India’s stability, particularly in light of the Communist Party of India’s activities. In talks with Mikoyan, the deputy premier of the USSR on the latter’s visit to New Delhi, he brought up his concern that “communist parties in noncommunist countries rather lived in the past”, which he saw as compromising a futurist vision for a newly independent India.

Thus, it is discernible in Nehru’s writings how the Russian Revolution served an intellectual purpose in its time, but when it became foregrounded by communist activity during the Cold War, it lost some of its sheen for him. In particular, Nehru’s main gripe with Cold War communism seems to have been its hubris towards history, and he often derogatorily told communists that for them, history began with 1917. His own history of the socialist movement extended well into the longer durée – those who think he was unable to distinguish between the ideals of communism and the methods of communists ought to read his thoughts on the socialist international in one long stretch from his histories of the Russo-Japanese War of 1905 to the Peace Offensive of Khrushchev’s time. The prevailing sentiment in his later writings is that of a skeptic – the unmistakable sense that it is certainly possible to stay too long at the Marxist fair. This is not to say that in hindsight he disowned the revolution but that he viewed it as an act of its time.

There is a longer story to be told of Nehru’s estranged friendship with Soviet Russia, but it is not a simple narrative in which he is either too much of a socialist or not socialist enough. He wrote then, and believed to the end, that the real significance of the Russian Revolution would manifest within democratic parties, in the way they adopted socialist principles, in the way they opposed revolutionary approaches, and how new radical forms of political methods would thus emerge.

Swapna Kona Nayudu is presently a non-residential Fellow at LSE IDEAS, London. Her research interests are in International Relations theory, the Cold War in the Third World, security studies, peacekeeping and India’s external affairs.

Remembering Samir Amin, Who Dedicated Himself to Overcoming Capitalism

The anti-imperialist scholar was very critical of the models of development and of the institutional structures of nation-states in developing countries that slavishly imitated the West, which he felt enabled colonialism to easily transmogrify into neo-colonialism.

Samir Amin (September 3, 1931-August 12, 2018) was a visionary: someone with his own very strong ideas of what the future should be like, and consumed by the need to mobilise people to work for bringing about such a future. The desirable (though not inevitable) future for him was that of socialism, which required the defeat of imperialism and the overcoming of capitalism. The intense enthusiasm with which he sought to pursue that vision, to the very end of his immensely productive life, was at once obsessive, beguiling and infectious.

Amin was born in 1931 of Egyptian and French parentage, and was brought up in Port Said in Egypt, but his subsequent education and his own inclinations made him much more cosmopolitan, truly a citizen of the world – or rather of the Third World. Indeed, he self-identified as an African scholar of political economy and was hugely devoted to encouraging and developing rigorous intellectual life in that continent.

His early professional experiences were clearly crucial in developing that orientation. Already in secondary school he considered himself a communist, and he was a member of the French Communist Party as a student in Paris in the 1950s. His PhD thesis in Paris in 1957 was on the origins of underdevelopment, presenting the germ of ideas that subsequently were elaborated in his magnum opus Accumulation on a World Scale that was first published in 1970. He returned to Cairo to work as a research officer in the Office of Economic Management of the Egyptian government, but the anti-communism that marked the Nasser regime at that time drove him to exile, followed by a stint in Mali working for that country’s government.

Thereafter, he was mostly based in Dakar, Senegal – first in the UN’s Institut Africain de Développement Economique et de Planification, of which he became the director in 1970, and then as the director of the Forum du Tiers Monde (Third World Forum) that he set up in 1980. He was instrumental in setting up the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (Codesria), which has become the main vehicle of social science research and analysis in the continent and currently has more than 4,000 active members.

Such activity reflected his pan-Africanism, which was an essential and abiding part of his personality and his intellectual leanings. But he did not see this as a simplistic celebration of one homogenised “African culture”, which in any case he recognised as a false construct. In a moving tribute, the young Tanzanian social scientist Natasha Issa Shivji has pointed out that Amin argued for pan-Africanism as “a project of the oppressed of Africa against imperialism and its compradors… as a political project from below, as a class project in defence of the peasantry and the working people and an anti-imperialist project birthed from the nationalist movements.”

Samir Amin
Accumulation on a World Scale

Amin had a sharp intellect and little patience for academic dissemblers, whom he saw through easily. He had an appropriately cynical attitude to mainstream economics, which he saw as little more than a discourse “to legitimise the unrestricted predations of capital,” and dismissed the claims of economics to being a pure science as little more than “magic and witchcraft”. His own analytical framework was that of Marxian political economy, of which he developed his own specifically anti-imperialist variant that presumed the existence of unequal exchange between North and South, that systematically impoverishes the South in various ways.

So for Amin, capitalism, which was always a global system, was critically dependent on the polarisation between centre and periphery, and the logic of capital accumulation was such that the periphery could never catch up with the centre. Thus Amin became one of the most celebrated proponents of “dependency theory”, which he developed in several books such as Accumulation on a World Scale; Eurocentrism; and Imperialism and Unequal Development. According to him (as elaborated in his book Capitalism in the Age of Globalization, London: Zed Books, 1997), the fundamentally unequal relationship between centre and periphery is characterised by the five monopolies which reproduce global capitalism.

These are: the monopoly of technology generated by the military expenditures of the imperialist centres; the monopoly of access to natural resources; the monopoly over finance; the monopoly over international communication and the media and the monopoly over the means of mass destruction.

The way to combat this is through “delinking” – an idea he developed in a book of the same title in 1990. He did not view this as a simple reversion to autarky in trade or isolationism. Rather, he saw “delinking” as “the refusal to subject the national development strategy to the imperatives of worldwide expansion”, based on rejecting the dictates of the centre with regard to economic policies that ultimately benefit the centre rather than the periphery in which they are deployed. The requirement of delinking extended from specific policies to institutional structures that formed the very basis of social and political existence in the countries of the periphery. Thus, Amin was very critical of the models of development and of the institutional structures of nation-states in developing countries that slavishly imitated the West, which he felt enabled colonialism to easily transmogrify into neo-colonialism.

Delinking requires politically bold governments with sufficient mass support, which would have the confidence to reject strategies based on static comparative advantage and break the stranglehold of comprador interests over state policy. In addition to domestic political economy forces in support of this, it also requires much greater South-South co-operation, which should be based on economic relations that avoided reproducing relations of exploitation that characterised interactions between the capitalist core and periphery. It also requires strengthening the co-operation between progressive forces across North and South.

An offshoot of this is the urge to a multipolar world – so Amin very much welcomed the emergence of new powers and the waning of US global power. He was optimistic enough to believe that as the world system fragments and comes apart, there would be greater possibilities for his much-anticipated revolt of the working classes of the North against capitalism itself.

However, he was also shrewd enough to realise that multipolarity does not necessarily represent a decline in imperialist tendencies or in traditional centre-periphery relations of hierarchy and domination. In a fairly complex but nonetheless sweeping analysis (The Law of Worldwide Value, New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010), he identified six global classes of significance: (1) the imperialist bourgeoisie at the centre or core, to which accrues most of the global economic surplus value; (2) the proletariat at the centre, which earlier benefited from being a labour aristocracy that could enjoy real wage increases broadly in line with labour productivity, but which was now more threatened and experiencing falling wage shares and more insecure employment conditions; (3) the dependent bourgeoisie of the periphery, which exists in what he saw as an essentially comprador relationship with multinational capital based in the core; (4) the proletariat of the periphery, which is subject to super-exploitation, and for whom there is a huge disconnect between wages and actual productivity because of unequal exchange; (5) the peasantries of the periphery, who also suffer similarly, and are oppressed in dual manner by pre-capitalist and capitalist forms of production; and (6) the oppressive classes of the non-capitalist modes (such as traditional oligarchs, warlords and power brokers).

This obviously creates an extremely complex set of struggles and alliances. And it means that even relations between economies in the peripheries would not always necessarily display the characteristics of working class and peasant solidarity that he hoped for.

Indeed, the possibilities of such complexity were increasingly recognised by Amir when it came to the role of religious fundamentalism as a supposedly anti-imperialist expression. While anti-imperialism was his deepest and most abiding characteristic, he was also ruthless in his critique of religious fundamentalist movements. He was a vehement opponent of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, criticising them sharply not only for their revanchist religious dogma with its socially regressive implications, but also because he believed that in economic terms they would apply the same neoliberal policies that the centre typically wanted to impose on peripheral countries. He even supported the military coup in Egypt – to the dismay of many of his friends and fellow-travellers – because of his deep opposition to both the politics and economics represented by such groups, and he felt strongly that they could never be part of a truly emancipatory movement.

These are strong views, and Amir always expressed them forcefully. But he was also a man of great personal charm, able to connect to people across the world of different backgrounds and ages, with little recognition of conventional hierarchies of age, achievement or experience. And his tenacity and untiring commitment were unbelievable. Even a few weeks before his death, I and many others among his friends and comrades across the world received emails from him reiterating the need for a new International and insisting on enlisting us for this cause, with demands for clear commitments with regard to time and output. He brought his formidable intellect and persuasive powers to this with so much energy that we were shamed into compliance, promising to take this forward. So we cannot even begin to say farewell, Amir, until we have done at least some of what we promised you.

Jayati Ghosh is a professor of economics at Jawaharlal Nehru University.

It’s Time for a New Approach to Travel

Globalism has made it easier than ever to visit faraway places – and easier to never really leave home while you’re there.

When I overcame a flying phobia, I resolved to make up for lost time by visiting as much of the world as I could.

So in the course of a decade, I logged over 300,000 miles, flying everywhere from Buenos Aires to Dubai.

I knew intuitively that my travels would “make me a better person” and “broaden my horizon,” as the clichés have it. But I’ve come to believe that travel can, and should, be more than a hobby, luxury or form of leisure. It is a fundamental component of being a humanist.

At its core, humanism is about exploring and debating the vital ideas that make us who we are. We study music, film, art and literature to do just that. And while it’s important to explore these ideas in our own communities, people and places that are not like us have a role to play that’s just as crucial.

This is where travel comes in. It’s what sent me packing to see some of the places I have spent so long reading about. And it’s what compelled me to write “The Importance of Elsewhere: The Globalist Humanist Tourist,” in which I wanted to make a case for a new approach to travel.

The imperialist tourist

In academia, travel studies have long looked at the intersection between imperialism and tourism, describing how they flourish in tandem.

From the 16th to 19th centuries, European empires gobbled up territories around the world, planting their flags and building embassies, banks, hotels and roads. Imperialists traveled to collect cinnamon, silk, rubber and ivory, using them, upon returning home, for pleasure and profit.

The golden age of travel roughly coincided with that period. Not long after the military and commercial incursions began, tourists followed imperialists to these far-flung locales.

Both tourism and imperialism involved voyages of discovery, and both tended to leave the people who were “discovered” worse off than they had been before the encounters.

Globalism’s impact on the way we travel

Over the last century, globalism – a vast and daunting concept of transnational corporate and bureaucratic systems – has replaced imperialism as the dominant network of international relations.

Globalism can be overwhelming: It involves billions of people, trillions of dollars, innumerable inventories of goods, all ensconced in a technocratic vocabulary of geopolitics and multinationalism that’s anathema to those of us who approach the world on a more human scale.

It has also made travel much easier. There are more airplane routes, more ATMs on every corner and international cellphone service. You can travel elsewhere without ever leaving the comforting familiarities of home, with McDonald’s, Dunkin Donuts and Holiday Inns now dotting the globe.

But why bother traveling if you want familiar comforts?

I would argue that we need a new travel guide that acknowledges the sweeping interconnectedness of globalism, but balances this with a humanist mindset.

Because beneath the innocuous activities of visiting cathedrals, lounging on the beach and collecting souvenirs, travelers can still harbor selfish, exploitative desires and exhibit a sense of entitlement that resembles imperial incursions of yesteryear.

In a way, globalism has also made it easier to slip into the old imperialist impulse to come with power and leave with booty; to set up outposts of our own culture; and to take pictures denoting the strangeness of the places we visit, an enterprise that, for some, confirms the superiority of home.

The right way to be a tourist

Humanism, however, is proximate, intimate, local. Traveling as a humanist restores our identity and independence, and helps us resist the overwhelming forces of globalism.

There’s nothing wrong with going to see the Colosseum or the Taj Mahal. Sure, you can take all the same photos that have already been taken at all the usual tourist traps, or stand in long lines to see Shakespeare’s and Dante’s birthplaces (which are of dubious authenticity).

But don’t just do that. Sit around and watch people. Get lost. Give yourself over to the mood, the pace, the spirit of elsewhere. Obviously you will eat new and interesting foods, but think of other ways, too, of tasting and “ingesting” the culture of elsewhere, of adapting to different habits and styles. These are the things that will change you more than the view from the top of the Eiffel Tower.

Psychologists have found that the more countries you visit, the more trusting you’ll be – and that “those who visited places less similar to their homeland became more trusting than those who visited places more similar to their homeland.” Immersion in foreign places boosts creativity, and having more diverse experiences makes people’s minds more flexible.

With the products and conveniences of globalism touching most parts of the world, it simply takes more of a conscious effort to truly immerse yourself in something foreign.

My own empathy, creativity and flexibility have been immeasurably enhanced by such strange and fascinating destinations as a Monty Python conference in Lodz, Poland; a remoteness seminar near the North Pole; a boredom conference in Warsaw; Copenhagen’s queer film festival; Berlin’s deconstructed Nazi airport; a workshop in Baghdad on getting academics up to speed after Iraq’s destruction; and an encounter as an ecotourist with Tierra del Fuego’s penguins.

There’s an especially vital argument to make for travel in these fractious times of far-right ideologies and crumbling international alliances, burgeoning racism and xenophobia. The world seems as if it’s becoming less open.

A trip is the greatest chance you’ll ever have to learn about things you don’t experience at home, to meet people you wouldn’t otherwise encounter. You’ll probably find that, in many important ways, they are the same as you – which, in the end, is the point of doing all this.

Humanists know that our copious insights and deliberations – about identity, emotions, ethics, conflict and existence – flourish best when the world is our oyster. They dissipate in the echo chamber of isolationism.

Randy Malamud, Regents’ Professor of English, Georgia State University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Railways and the Raj: Travelling Through ‘Bad Imperialism’ and ‘Good Nationalism’

Does the story of the Indian railways really stop at presenting a fact file of imperial patronage?

There is a lot that can be said about the blatant colonialist underpinnings of the Indian railways without resorting to intentional oversimplification or even factual errors. Credit: Bhavishya Goel/Flickr CC BY 2.0

In the late 1910s, a satirical sketchbook, The Koochpurwanaypore Swadeshi Railway, was published anonymously. Produced in the context of the First World War and swadeshi-influenced anti-colonial thinking, the unknown author claimed the book “may serve to amuse the Railwaymen of India and the general public”. A quick perusal leaves no doubt that the sole purpose was to mock the technological and organisational skills of Indians of all ranks and classes. Those who would soon be running the country were thought unfit to run the world’s third largest railways.

KPR (Koochpurwanay Railway) was not only a line but also an imaginary railway town. The very title contained three Hindi words in their typical Anglicised spelling: Kooch purwa nay (kuch parwāh nahīn), meaning ‘it doesn’t matter at all’ or ‘no one cares’. So Koochpurwanaypore was a town where nothing mattered. The chief engineer was depicted enjoying nautch in his office and the general manager was asleep under the cool breeze of a paṅkhā (fan). The subalterns of the railway workforce, on the other hand, formed the K.P.R. Pioneer Corps with tools ranging from a simple drill machine to the traditional broom and basket.

‘Railway Men at Work’. Source: The Koochpurwanaypore Swadeshi Railway, by Jo. Hookm

The title page gives the author’s name as ‘Jo hookm’. At any rate, this is the pseudonym. Some library websites have identified the author as William Henry Deakin. Each of the engravings is also signed with ‘Jo hookm’. In the absence of reason and intellect, the best natives/Indians could do was to follow command. For running steam engines, steel-like nerves and the unfailing alacrity of the mann, or mind, was required. This mann was obviously European as for long, the Raj thought Indians possessed none. The satirical message made clear that once the British were gone and the Anglo-Indians had retrenched from the railways, the whole country would turn into Mutwalabad (in an inebriated state). It would remain connected through tracks but obstructed by elephants.

‘Obstruction on the Line’. Source: The Koochpurwanaypore Swadeshi Railway, by Jo. Hookm

Railway imperialism

The railways is one of three recurrent themes in the tug of war between the apologists of empire and English-educated nationalists; the other two being the Kohinoor and the English language itself.

For long, the colonialists and their apologists insisted that in spite of the exploitation, the British brought the railways to India that gave political unity to the subcontinent. While lauding the railways as a monument of ‘British wealth, power and skill’, it was often forgotten that British private wealth succeeded only under the public guarantee of returned interest offered by the Indian government. The KPR sketchbook is a specimen of that belief. The counter argument to the British enterprise presented by authors like Shashi Tharoor, therefore, goes: “In their very conception and construction, the Indian railways were a colonial scam.”

There is a lot that can be said about the blatant colonialist underpinnings of the Indian railways without resorting to intentional oversimplification or even factual errors. Tharoor may or may not be right in noting that the idea of India is as old as the Vedas, but he is definitely wrong in locating one of India’s oldest railway workshop towns, Jamalpur, in Bengal. It is close to the historical town of Monghyr in the state of Bihar. This mix-up is perhaps itself reflective of the deep-seated influence of how the British divided the subcontinent. After all, Bihar was part of the Bengal presidency and hence Tharoor should not be blamed for reproducing the colonial administrative logic of territorial divisions in spite of his visible attempt to criticise it.

The racialised privilege given to whites and Anglo-Indians both in employment and travel facilities is undeniable. It would be grossly erroneous, however, to club white Europeans and Anglo-Indians together just because they both were superior to Indians in the ‘railway caste’ hierarchy. There was deep-seated hierarchy and antagonism between those two groups.

Equally undeniable is the preferential treatment meted out to British firms as against global competition from Germans and Americans in providing engines to India. Between 1850 and 1910, 94% of Indian broad gauge locomotives were built in Britain and only 2.5 in India. During the Second World War, preconditions for purchases from outside of Britain were relaxed but still the overall balance remained disproportionately tilted in favour of Britain. Thus, prior to independence in 1947, India imported 14,420 locomotives from Britain, built 707 itself and purchased 3,000 from other countries.

‘But what about historical complexity…?’

But does the story of the Indian railways stop at presenting a fact file of imperial patronage? Tempting though it is to rally behind the engines to score points over the apologists’ arguments, this can be done only by engaging in historical distortion and ignoring the manifold stories and practices that constitute India’s railway modernity.

Contrary to Tharoor’s claim that “the railways were first conceived of by the East India Company”, the fact is that it was first conceived by private British capitalists and railway engineers. In fact, when R.M. Stephenson first approached the East India Company, his plan to build railways in India was dismissed as a “wild concept”. In his visit to Calcutta in 1843, he collected opinions from a wide array of officials and merchants including notable Indians who supported the plan.

Tharoor is equally and quite surprisingly wrong in claiming, “Nor were Indians employed in the railways”. In particular, he argues that to “protect investments”, signalmen and “those who operated and repaired the steam trains” were all white.

This is simply wrong. Belief in racial superiority at times gave way to the pure logic of economics. Precisely because Indian labour was hired cheap, as early as the 1860s Indian drivers were deemed fit to run engines in certain parts of the country, for instance, in the Madras presidency. An 1863 report made a categorical call to address the absence of natives in higher grades in the traffic department. In Madras, Indians were also employed as train guards in common with Europeans and Anglo-Indians on lesser salary. “Nothing can contribute,” the report stated, “in a greater degree to sound and economical management than security of office tenure and a fair system of promotion without distinction of race, and with strict regard to efficiency alone.”

Ironically on the same Great Indian Peninsular Railways in whose magazines the KPR sketches first appeared, by the end of 1882 no fewer than 60 native engine drivers were in employment. By the beginning of the 20th century, the same Jamalpur workshop in which Tharoor claims no Indians were employed to repair engines, had almost 10,000 people, almost all of them natives, working there. The first locomotive engine at Jamalpur was manufactured in 1899 at a cost of Rs 33,000 as compared to the imported cost of Rs 47,897.

The native skill that made this possible was highly praised right from the beginning. The ability to handle imported heavy machinery such as steam hammers, rolling mills and cranes was applauded in particular. In fact, on a visit to the workshop in 1868, over the topic of repair of one particular locomotive, a traveller was told by the shop manager: “No English fitter in the world could do that. That job takes a native to do it.”

The workshop relied on the generational transfer of skill from fathers to their sons – so much so that the railway company initially resisted the idea of standardised technical education. They were happy to get their labour pool filled from villages dotted around the workshop.

Train tales of modernity

These stories can again be twisted into arguing that precisely despite the availability of skill, imperial favours to the British stunted the chances of indigenous growth. And the blame game can go on forever. Understanding the complexity of the Raj and the railways does not necessarily mean becoming an imperial apologist. If race was prioritised in the colony, class mattered more in England. As late as 1910, it was claimed that drivers ought to be hired from ‘higher classes’ particularly when the existing ones were found ‘deficient in brains’.

Notwithstanding the colonial specificity of Indian railways, there was something shared between the colonial and the metropolitan world. The ‘ladies only’ compartment is one such example. The popular representation as well as public mediations such as one by Tharoor would have us believe that these worlds were poles apart. Even in their apparent dissimilarity we can see seams that bind them together.

One popular way of casting the difference between Western modernity and Indian traditionalism was to pitch the encounter in terms of engines vs elephants. Allegedly, they represented two civilisations, two epochs that came face to face.

Soon after its introduction in India, the director of Indian Railways Juland Danvers assured the British parliament, “now even a Rajah […] in his own territory must submit to the ‘imperative call’ of the railway bell.” The old had to make the way for new.

The black beauty represented calm, concentrated power. When the wheels of the Falkland moved on the opening of the first railways in Bombay, the Illustrated London News reported that the ageless superstitions of natives had melted away. Engine was the new divinity to which natives salaamed as it passed. One eyewitness report claimed that the moving iron horse put natives in awe and wonder. The “hissing monster” which was called āg-gāṙī (āg meaning fire and gāṙī carriage) in native parlance was not only to be seen from a distance but to be touched, stood upon and ran along with.

The enchantment with engines was not unique to the colonial world. Both amidst the general public and the railway workforce, engines were a subject of fascination in metropolis as well as colony. In Britain, railway enthusiasts drew pleasure by spotting engines and using their cameras to take eye-catching shots.

The early railway enthusiasts in India might not have used their cameras but the element of charm and surprise — the bewilderment that the moving engine caused — was equally pronounced. In both metropolis and colony, the engine was feminine. She was a black beauty who could either make an apprentice her slave or would happily belong to her efficient master.

In India, perhaps the added element was of divinity. Myriad stories circulated in the print bazaar of the British Empire that used steam technology to claim that the religious superstition of Indians would soon change, in fact, disappear. One such story was of a Brahmin exclaiming the following when the ‘fire horse’ Lawrence reached the Punjab, “All the incarnations of all the gods in India never produced such a thing as that.” The same was the case on the other side of the country. The power of steam enraptured the imagination of Bengalis who flocked to see how the new “car of Indra” looked.

Expressions and proclamations like these can easily be fitted into the formulaic narrative of ‘clash of civilisations’, but these stories show the social engagement with a new technology. They also show how railways with all their novelty still came to be understood through the language of providential creation. Next to the traditional forms, the pantheon of godly vehicles now got a new member. When railways became the new vehicle of Indra, the modern sensibility of speed and mechanical robustness was acknowledged as novel and yet co-opted into the existing structures of tradition. The engine did not displace the belief in Indra. It rather became his vehicle. The tracks of modernity often did not erase the site of tradition, as is clear from the image below.

‘A Sutie Relic at an Indian Railway Station’. Source: The Railway Magazine, LIII, July to December 1923

‘Bad imperialism and good nationalism’

A set of representations based upon claims of the colony’s cultural and intellectual deficiency was one way of depicting the introduction of modernity. In this version, the western technological advancement brought modernity to India often through the painful but necessary exercise of conflict, confrontation and displacement. Howsoever exploitative, the argument ran that colonialism brought science, education, hospitals and railways into India.

The train tales of India’s modernity are, however, more complex than the above framework would have us believe. Beyond the formulaic tussle between ‘bad imperialism’ and ‘good nationalism’ lies mundane stories, fantasies and imaginations, satire and rhetoric, and more importantly their retellings that are no less powerful than factsheets of institutions and nation states to understand the complex encounters between cultures, technology and people.

These everyday practices related to peoples, technologies and places make up India’s railway modernity. And they are not narrowly limited to imperialism and nationalism alone. In the KPR sketch of Mutwalabad, the lines of modernity, at least momentarily, were disrupted by the weight of the mighty oriental beast but in Burdwan the same traditional beast carried people to witness the charm and surprise of railway modernity. It also frequently ushered in the very vehicle of Indra into towns.

Often, in settling our contemporary scores of ‘arrested development’ or underdevelopment due to imperial rule and in the quintessential follow-up mention of compensation and reparations, historical prudence is sacrificed. The railways have unfortunately become a whipping boy of reductionist arguments, a punch bag between imperialist apologists and suave nationalists. Lost in these debates are the words of unknown millions whose lives the railways touched. Beyond Mahatma Gandhi and Tharoor, some of them, as a local poet expressed in the 19th century, did like what they saw.

चलल रेलगाड़ी रंगरेज तेजधारी,
बोझाए खूब भारी हाहाकार कईले जात बा।
बईसे सब सूबा जहाँ बात हो अजूबा,
रंगरेज मंसूबा सब लोग के सुहात बा ।

Off goes the train, with fierceness and rush,
Mighty it looks, creates thunderous sound on its way.
Reaches all corners (subahs), where it is marvelled as a wonder,
This piece of work is admired by all.

Nitin Sinha is a senior research fellow at ZMO (Centre for Modern Oriental Studies), Berlin.

Sare Jahan Se Acha: The Idea of India in Early 20th Century Urdu Poetry

In the diverse iterations of Iqbal’s iconic ‘Sare jahan se achha’ in Urdu poetry, varied understandings of ‘Hindustan’ manifest – but none are narrowly chauvinist.

In the numerous iterations of Iqbal’s iconic ‘Sare jahan se achha‘ in Urdu poetry, varied understandings of ‘Hindustan’ manifest – but none are narrowly chauvinist.

Iqbal’s iconic ‘Sare jahan se achha’ is rife with geographical references, including to the formidable Himalayas. Representational image. Credit: Wikipedia

For many Indians, an enduring childhood memory is standing in an assembly line at school and singing Sare jahan se achha, Hindustan hamara.

But what was this idea of ‘Hindustan’, really, and did it always imply a sense of superiority to other nations?

The iconic nationalist poem, written by Muhammad Iqbal (1877 –1938), better known as “Allama” Iqbal, in 1904, at the age of 27, is rife with geographical references, from the Himalayas to the multiple rivers that flow across the country:

Parbat woh sabse uncha, hamsaya asman ka,

Woh santari hamara, woh pasban hamara.

(That highest mountain, the companion of the skies,

which is our sentry and our watchman)

Godi mein khelti hain, uski hazaron nadiyan

Gulshan hai jinke dam se rashk i jinan hamara

(In its lap play thousands of streams,

because of them, heavens envy our gardens)

Ae ab e rood e Ganga, woh din hain yad tujhko,

utra tere kinare jab karwan hamara

(Oh the water of Ganges! Do you remember those days,

when our caravan halted on your banks?)

Muhammad Iqbal. Credit: Wikipedia

The third couplet reminds us that numerous caravans have halted on the banks of Ganges through the ages and that the Indian nation is defined by these continuous migrations, not by ‘original’ inhabitants of any kind or an ‘original’ culture. What Indians share, according to Iqbal, is a common geography, not a common language, culture or religion. Hence, in the next couplet, Iqbal reminds us that:

mazhab nahi sikhata apas mein bair rakhna,

hindi hain hum, watan hai hindostan hamara.

(Religion does not teach us to hate each other,

We are Hindustanis, Hindustan is our homeland)

Iqbal wrote another poem, ‘Hindustani bachhon ka qaumi geet’ (‘The national song of Hindustani children’), before 1904, which refers to the same idea of India being constituted by continuous migration and diverse cultures:

Chishti ne jis zameen par paigham e haq sunaya,

Nanak ne jis chaman mein wahdat ka geet gaya

(The land where Chishti delivered the true message,

the land where Nanak sang the song of unity)

Tatariyon ne jisko apna watan banaya,

jis ne hijaziyon se dasht e arab chhudaya

(the land the Tartars made their home,

for which the Arabs forgot their desert)

Mera watan wohi hai, mera watan wohi hai

(that land is my homeland, that land is my homeland)

Akbar Allahabadi

Akbar Allahabadi (1846-1921) was already an established poet when Iqbal wrote his ode to Hindustan. With typical wit, of which he was a pioneer in Urdu poetry, he responded to Iqbal in the same metre and rhyme the latter had used in sare jahan se achha:

College mein ho chuka jab imtehan hamara,

seekha zaban ne kahna Hindustan hamara

(After we finished our exams in college,

we learnt to say ‘our Hindustan’)

Raqbe ko kam samajh kar Akbar ye bol utthe,

Hindustan kaisa, sara jahan hamara

(Akbar thought the area too small, so he exclaimed,

what is Hindustan, the whole world is ours)

Lekin ye sab ghalat hai, kahna yehi hai lazim

Jo kuchh hai sab khuda ka, wahm o guman hamara

(But all this is nonsense, one should say just this much,

everything belongs to God, only illusions and doubts are ours)

Akbar Allahabadi. Credit: Youtube

In a strikingly logical reply to Iqbal’s enthusiastic ode to the nation, Allahabadi points to the parochial nationalism induced by university education. He then moves from the idea of universal human ownership of the world to the even safer grounds of mysticism, reminding his readers that words like ‘hamara’ (‘ours’) are meaningless. The only thing that humans truly own is their doubts and illusions. While Akbar did take up the challenge of defining India, he used it to question British imperialism:

Ye bat ghalat hai ke mulk e islam hai hind

ye jhooth hai ke mulk e lakshman o ram hai hind

(it is wrong to say that Hind is a Muslim nation

it is wrong to say that Hind is Ram’s or Lakshman’s nation)

Hum sab hain mutee o khair-khwah e English

Europe ke liye bas ek godam hai hind

(All of us are servants and well-wishers of the English.

Hind is but a godown for Europe)

Akbar did not hide his contempt for the advocates of religious nationalism and reduced their new-found identity to a byproduct of European economic machinations. As important protagonists of Urdu poetry in North India, these verses by Iqbal and Akbar indicate the diverse reactions to the new idea of India which was being floated in the last decades of nineteenth century.

In 1908, Iqbal returned to Punjab after a three-year stay in Europe. This led to a reconfiguration of his ideas on the nation and religion, and his poetry borrows increasingly from the repository of Islamic symbolism. This transformation is evident in ‘Tarana e Milli‘, written in 1909:

Cheen o arab hamara, Hindustan hamara

Muslim hain hum watan se, sara jahan hamara

(Central Asia/China is ours, Arabia is ours, Hindustan is ours,

We are Muslims by nation, the whole world is ours)

Dunya ke butkadon mein woh pehla ghar khuda ka

hum uske pasban hain, woh pasban hamara

(Among the idolhouses of the world,

this is the first abode of God,

This is our sentry, and we are its watchmen)

How striking is the change in Iqbal’s ideas about the nation! From the Himalayas as the sentry of a geographical nation, we jump to a nation of faith being guarded by that ‘first idol-less house of God’. It is also striking that Iqbal ends the first sher with the same words that Akbar uses: ‘sara jahan hamara’. However, what is common to both those phases is an obsession with geography. In ‘Tarana e Milli’, he refers to markers of a shared Islamic geography, such as Andalusia in Spain and the river Tigris. Later in Iqbal’s life and career, many of his couplets refer to the territorial idea of the nation as a dangerous political concept, as reflected in the poem ‘Wataniyat‘:

Is daur mein mai aur hai, jam aur hain, jam aur

saqi ne bina ki ravish e lutf o sitam aur

(In this age, the wine is new, the cup is new and the emperor is new,

The cup-bearer has invented new ways of reward and punishment)

tahzeeb ke azar ne tarashwaye sanam aur

muslim ne bhi tameer kiya apna haram aur

(The idol-maker of this age has created new idols,

even the Muslims have declared a new sacred direction]

in taza khudaon mein bada sabse watan hai

jo pairahan iska hai wo mazhab ka kafan hai

(of all these recent deities, the nation is the greatest,

and the cloth that makes its clothes is the shroud of religion)

Iqbal saw territorial nationalism as something that divided humanity and co-religionists, something that ought to be destroyed, and through this poem he urged Muslims to bury the false idol of nationalism.

This most acclaimed poet of the Urdu language, who imagined an India at one point, gave up his vision eventually, making way first for an imagined Muslim nation and then a complete rejection of territorial identity altogether. Akbar, on the other hand, was in complete disagreement with Iqbal from the start, reminding us that colonialism had an important role to play in the formation of Indian identities. It would be a worthwhile exercise to analyse the idea of India as Urdu poetry expressed it during the colonial era, and compare it with similar or parallel expressions in other vernacular literatures.

Sahir Ludhianvi

Finally, we come to the progressive Urdu poet Sahir Ludhianvi (1921-1980) and his take on this string of poems on the idea of India. In a 1958 movie Phir Subah Hogi, he gives us a new version of ‘Hindustan hamara’:

Cheen o Arab hamara, Hindustan hamara,

rahne ko ghar nahi hai, sara jahan hamara

(China is ours, Arabia is ours, India is ours,

we don’t have a place to live, the whole world is ours)

jebein hain apni khali, kyon deta warna gali,

wo santari hamara, wo pasban hamara

(Our pockets are empty, otherwise why would

our sentry and our watchmen scold us)

jitni bhi buildingein theen, sethon ne bant lee hain

footpath Bambai ke hain aashyan hamara

(All the buildings have been divided among the rich,

the footpath of Bombay are our homes)

Sahir Ludhianvi. Credit: Wikipedia

Although the first couplet is attributed to Majeed Lahori by the online repository Rekhta.org, the rest of the poem has been written by Sahir for the movie. In this poem, the message is strongly socialist: since the majority does not own any land, there is no question of ownership of this or that piece of land, and the whole world belongs to the downtrodden. Sahir also turns the watchman metaphor upside down: the abusive watchman who exploits the poor is far from Iqbal’s watchful and caring sentry. This third version adds to the set of diverse reactions of the Urdu poets to the idea of India, which ranges from Iqbal’s emphasis on global migration patterns, to Akbar’s and Sahir’s attention to the nuanced meaning of ownership and the economic conditions of colonial and post-colonial India.

The debates about the concept of Indianness and the Indian nation among these Urdu poets is far removed from the imagined nation of the Hindu right-wing Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, which has gained immense popularity in recent times and which postulates an inherent and timeless ‘Indian’ culture and civilisation.

Sharjeel Imam is a graduate from Computer Science, IIT Bombay and is currently doing his MPhil in Modern History from JNU. His research topic is “Partition and Pogroms in Bihar in 1946”. Besides his academic and professional involvements, he is interested in Urdu poetry and literature.

A Beleaguered Britain Takes Comfort in Nostalgia for Empire

Early this year, a poll showed that a full 44% of Britons were proud of colonialism.

Credit: Royal Museum Greenwich.

The British empire never lacked contradictions. A global juggernaut standing with its military boot on millions of necks, practising commercial coercion and diplomatic cynicism, it nonetheless routinely thought of itself as a plucky underdog. Its heroes were the handful of redcoats at Rorke’s Drift fighting off the Zulu masses, or General Charles Gordon of Khartoum, going down against the odds in a last stand against religious zealots in the Sudan.

British soldiers, diplomats and traders pictured themselves as almost accidental conquerors, vanquishing a quarter of the planet’s landmass in between tea, tiffin and cricket matches. They maintained a detached stiff upper lip and publicly ignored the unpleasant reality of the Maxim gun – a luxury not afforded to the locals on its business end.

Britain preferred to see its dominance of a fifth of the world’s population as some sort of benevolent, God-given mission to bring law, order and free trade to benighted corners of the world. As George Bernard Shaw complained: ‘The ordinary Britisher imagines that God is an Englishman.’

It was a powerful notion and it has not gone away. Even though the empire is reduced to a scattering of tiny islands with names few Britons would recognise, the imperial past remains implausibly popular. Early this year, a poll showed that a full 44% of Britons were proud of colonialism, far outnumbering the mere 21% who regretted their country’s imperial past. The survey was not an outlier. A 2014 report showed a mere 15% of Britons thought the colonised might just have been left worse off by the experience.

For the rest of the article, click here.

This article was originally published in Aeon Magazine.

Imperialism: The Spectre That Never Waned

Imperialism Past and Present challenges several existing notions about empires, colonists and imperialists, making it an interesting read.

Imperialism Past and Present challenges several existing notions about empires, colonists and imperialists, making it an interesting read.

King Leopold described Africa as “the magnificent cake” to be devoured by his ilk and the impact of his brutal savagery continues to play out in the Congo and its surrounding countries even today. Image: Congolese soldiers being trained by American contractors wait for instructions during training at Camp Base, Kisangani. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

King Leopold described Africa as “the magnificent cake” to be devoured by his ilk. The impact of his brutal savagery continues to play out in the Congo and its surrounding countries even today. Image: Congolese soldiers being trained by American contractors wait for instructions during training at Camp Base, Kisangani. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

In the introduction to the first volume of his famous The Third Reich trilogy, the British historian Richard J. Evans says, “Contemporaries could not see things as clearly as we can, with the gift of hindsight: they could not know in 1930 what was to come in 1933, they could not know in 1933 what was to come in 1939 or 1942 or 1945. If they had known, doubtless the choices they made would have been different”. This wisdom is perhaps essential before embarking to review a book like Imperialism Past and Present by Emanuele Saccarelli and Latha Varadarajan.

The authors, both professors of political science at San Diego State University, examine (largely successfully) the origins, development and contemporary manifestations of imperialism. In doing so, they define imperialism as a theoretical concept, dispel common problems in the understanding of the concept and help the reader understand what imperialism is not. In a world beset with conflicts and associated uncertainty, this work makes a provocative argument that Western imperialism did not end with the end of colonialism.

Emanuele Saccarelli and Latha Varadarajan
Imperialism: Past and Present
Oxford University Press, 2015

The book, divided into six chapters, starts with a grim introduction where Joseph Conrad’s masterpiece Heart of Darkness is used to introduce the idea of imperialism as a historical epoch. This is followed by the longest chapter of the book that lays down the conceptual foundations for the arguments that the authors make. The remaining chapters provide an overview and the various manifestations of imperialism from the 19th century down to the present day.

What is imperialism?

The primary argument that the authors make is that imperialism emerged as a result of specific economic developments that fomented political transformations in the late 19th century. They also contend that imperialism is a definite epoch that continues to define the current global political scenario.

For a layperson, the difference between an empire and imperialism or for that matter between colonialism and imperialism is confusing. The book successfully differentiates between the three controversial ideas. While empire refers to political domination in all historical periods and colonialism refers to acquisition and rule of territories outside the mother country, according to the authors, “imperialism” refers exclusively to capitalism – beyond the economic system – and all of its political reverberations.

The origins of imperialism are presented through disparate views on the subject by liberal economist John Hobson and the leader of the Russian revolution, Vladimir Lenin. While the former viewed the idea as a set of misguided policies that could be reversed (and indeed rejected), the latter argued that imperialism is a systemic feature of capitalism.

The features of imperialism are explained through two important economic transformations. One, the rise of monopoly capital and the death of free competition as envisaged in the early days of capitalism leading to the creation of monopolies. Two, the financialisation of capitalism, which is the disproportionate importance and power of the finance industry. It is in this section that the ideological biases of the authors seem to take precedence over empirical evidence. While the authors make valid arguments about the nature and harm that monopolies can do, when it comes to finance they go on to denounce the entire industry with little in the way of finesse. Finance capital is referred to as parasitic and examples that fit the narrative are presented. This criticism, though, is a little hard to take seriously when the authors state, “the parasitic operation of finance capital assumes textbook quality – although in fairness to mushrooms and bacteria it should be noted that many of them are actually not pathogenic”. While this may be a tongue-in-cheek remark, comparing global systems of (mis)rule with mushrooms makes you wonder how much of their argument the authors want to be taken seriously.

From the standpoint of politics, a convincing case is made for the international character of imperialism. It is contended that the capital class “owns” the state in imperialist nations and the post-2008 crisis bailout example, in addition to projecting the inability of advanced capitalist economies to translate democratic will into actionable policy, is a strong argument. The volume demonstrates the erosion of democracy in the imperialist epoch rather successfully by way of relevant examples.

That said, the authors work within their definition throughout the volume and highlight the importance of studying imperialism as a theoretical concept and a political reality – a position that is not mainstream in today’s academia. In what is probably the best section of the book, the authors credibly distinguish their argument from the arguments posited by Edward Said in Orientalism, and by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in Empire.

Continuities throughout history

The book tests the theoretical validity of the authors’ definition of imperialism on events from 1885 to the present day. The three chapters covering this timespan shed light on the daisy chain nature of world events and hold a mirror to the excesses exhibited by imperialist powers. For instance, the Berlin conference of 1885 displays the depraved moral compass of imperial powers. The conference, called for at the instigation of Portugal by Otto von Bismarck, averted war among imperial powers but peace was bought at the expense of the colonised – through unprecedented land grabs, political subordination and economic exploitation. If these three characteristics formed the flesh, the twin layers of racism and greed formed the rind.

The writers largely succeed in their endeavour. However, they exclude the Soviet Union from the ambit of an imperialist system, making their case far less convincing. Saccarelli and Varadarajan insist that the identification of an imperialist power is in the existence of a particular economic configuration and an internal political engine that the Soviet Union fails to meet (unless the term imperialism “is reduced to a mere epithet”). They also mention that the Soviet expansionist project was not motivated by the search for markets/resources but was, instead, a defensive move driven merely by the desire to create ‘buffer’ states in eastern Europe. Although this completely fits within the definition that is presented earlier, it fails to explain the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Additionally, the claim creates considerable cognitive dissonance in the mind of the reader and evokes a sense of semantic jugglery. If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it usually is a duck, no matter what you call it. The people in various countries on the receiving end of Soviet expansionism are unlikely to believe that the USSR was not imperial, especially as the USSR did extract huge amounts of economic resources from the states it extended its hegemony over.

Importance of history

Imperialism Past and Present is a scholarly work that traces the long historical roots of the conflicts and tensions that we witness today (not to mention the excellent further reading list that it provides at the end). At a time when the term imperialism itself is shunned in academia and popular discourse, the writers makes a thorough case for a systematic study of the imperialist epoch right from its origins.

Apart from challenging several existing notions about empires, colonists and imperialists, the book successfully convinces the reader to be cognisant about history while engaging with the present. As is pointed out in the conclusion, “It is history that reveals the laws and regularities of the epoch out of otherwise overwhelming stream of seemingly arbitrary and unpredictable events”.

Nevertheless, theory should hold some space for the peculiarities of particular individuals. It is hard to believe any theory or hindsight could explain the odious behaviour of the likes of King Leopold who described Africa as “the magnificent cake” to be devoured by his ilk, the impact of whose brutal savagery continues to play out in the Congo and its surrounding countries even today.

Imperialism Past and Present is authored by Emanuele Saccarelli and Latha Varadarajan, and published by Oxford University Press.

Varun Ramachandra is a researcher at The Takshashila Institution. He tweets @_quale