Shackles of History
by S. P. Chakravarty
I will tell a story to illustrate how we can become prisoners of history, unable to move
forward and become the worse for this paralysis. The story is about imperialism and
the lessons to be drawn from that experience.
Eric Blair, better known now under his assumed name as the author George Orwell,
set sail from Liverpool in October 1922 at the age of 19 to start a career in British
India in the footsteps of his father who had spent his working life in the Bengali Opium
Service reaching the rank of Sub-Opium Agent Class 1, an euphemism for being
engaged in the profitable trade of drug peddling to China, before retiring in England
on a pension. Although Eric was born in India, his mother came to England to settle
permanently shortly after his birth. His first proper introduction to the empire came
when the ship docked in Colombo on its way to Rangoon. He saw a policeman kicking
a coolie, without even the slightest show of disapproval from any of his fellow
passengers, otherwise "decent middling people". They were white, and the policeman
was white, but the coolie was black, one of the "coal-black men with lips stained redder
than blood by betel juice" that he had observed as the ship pulled into harbour. What
he saw of the empire was unsettling but it took him five years to begin to understand
why and then to chuck in the prospect of a lucrative career in the Imperial Police
Service in disgust to return to an uncertain financial future in England, much to the
dismay of his parents.
It would be right to conclude, based on stories such as those told by Orwell in his
novel Burmese Days, that the values of the rulers in British India as observed by
Orwell were not the values of those who cherish the ideals of a pluralist democracy
where racial prejudice should have no place. It would be wrong to conclude that their
failings were due to the fact, per se, that they were more recent arrivals than those
already living in the place. A more robust explanation is suggested here.
Who came when, in itself, is not the issue. After all, the more recent arrivals from
Europe who were to conquer much of India and beyond left the feudal regime of the
Kingdom of Nepal largely undisturbed. Nepal remains one of the poorest regions in
Asia, ruled by a monarchy exercising arbitrary medieval powers. It would be difficult to
maintain that the Nepalese people are better off than their Indian counterparts for
having escaped direct colonial rule. Some may wish to go even farther along this line
of reasoning and lament the fact that the colonial administrators in British India had
not deposed the corrupt rulers in the princely states and had, instead, come to a
mutually agreeable formula for sharing ill-gotten gains and shoring up the system of
governance without accountability.
The lesson from the experience of racism in the empire under colonial rule is lost if the
focus remains exclusively on the behaviour of the colonial rulers. Racism is wrong not
simply because it confers privilege on one visibly identifiable group at the expense of
another visibly identifiable group but because it is a system of belief that judges an
individual not for what he is but for who he is associated with by skin colour, caste,
geographical origin or other irrelevant factors. If this broad definition is accepted,
visible identification by skin colour to confer privilege is not the only form of racism that
is bad. All forms of group-specific discrimination are to be condemned. In that sense, a
great deal of the social hierarchy that characterised life in British India must be
considered to be an evil on par with racism. Mulk Raj Anand, a writer just a couple of
years younger than George Orwell, depicts the demeaning nature of the Hindu caste
system in his novel Untouchable published around the same time, in the mid-1930s,
that Orwell spilled the beans on the horrors of another form of racism in his novel
Burmese Days. More than half a century after the end of colonial rule, it is time to take
stock to see how much the countries that now comprise what used to be British India
have progressed in eliminating racism.
The caste system which Jawahar Lal Nehru so movingly described in The Discovery of
India, reflecting on Indian history during one of his many sabbaticals in British jail, is to
this date "a burden and a curse". We still hear of lower caste villagers being lynched,
yes lynched!, in north India. We hear of upper caste thugs under the banner of Ranvir
Sena rampaging through Bihar with little restraint placed in their way by law
enforcement agencies killing villagers belonging to lower castes to show who is the
boss. We hear of Pandits from Kashmir hounded out of their homes by marauding
Muslims. We hear of conspiracy at the highest level of government in Gujarat to kill
and maim Muslims because they are not Hindus. We hear of Christian services being
disrupted by Islamic fundamentalists in Karachi who explode bombs to kill worshippers.
We hear of Ahmadi Muslims being harassed by laws that were enacted decades after
independence to ensure religious purity in Pakistan. Nationalist politics on the sub-
continent is in danger of becoming a prisoner of history, blaming all ills on colonial rule
and refusing to recognise that there is also much in the national culture that is
disagreeable, if not despicable, on par with the worst forms of racism.
The post colonial societies cannot tackle their internal problems and move forward if
people there continue to believe that all ills would be wiped away if society could be
restored to some pristine state unsullied by colonial rule. No one knows how that
pristine state might look like, but nationalist doctrine insists on this unknown to be
defined as the desirable dream. How can that be? Suppose the British never came.
Perhaps the failing governments under the control of kings and warlords would have
been overthrown by an internal revolution such as that which occurred in France.
Perhaps a period of civil war might have ensued as it did in England. Perhaps nothing
much would have happened and much of British India would have settled down to a
state of medieval poverty and ruled by autocratic dynasties a la Nepal. We do not
know.
Yet Sri Lankan society is in danger of being torn apart by quarrels over how to restore
that pristine state of affairs that no one can really know enough to describe. If society
is plunged into conflict over the primacy of claim to Sri Lankan identity, political
discourse will continue to remain imprisoned in the past and the economy would
suffer. The poor will continue to remain poor. It is the abject poverty of the
dispossessed that 19 year old Eric Blair first observed in Colombo that remains a
great indictment against British rule.
As he came ashore in Colombo, young Eric saw men pulling other men seated in a
carriage, a rickshaw. He was appalled at the "vile sight of men running between shafts
like horses". If society is to move out of this phase, where men use other men as
animals, economic prosperity and technological progress are needed. Mulk Raj
Anand’s protagonist Bahka looked forward to liberation through the introduction of
the flush toilet. His caste would be redefined if the job of shovelling night soil
disappeared with the advent of technology, a necessary though alas not a sufficient
condition for the elimination of the system of untouchability.
If politics remains imprisoned in a discourse entailing impossible calculations of what
the demographic pattern of society might have been instead of breaking free to define
a just society and articulating how it might be created, the poor will continue to remain
poor. For the purposes of economic growth, it does not matter where administrative
boundaries are drawn if there is peaceful and unfettered movement of products,
capital and labour across frontiers. If economic prosperity is to come, the colonial
legacy of the English language must not become a bar to its acceptance and English
must not be consigned to the margins as an alien influence to be shunned. Otherwise,
the potential economic advantage of embracing the language which is the language of
modern international commerce will be thrown away. If the descendants of those who
came earlier and the children of those who came later cannot engage in a common
project for the prosperity of all, then the synergy of economic cooperation amongst
regions and amongst people within Sri Lanka will never be realised. The people in Sri
Lanka have a choice. They can look forward to articulating a just and prosperous
society or they can look back in anger at real and imagined injustices of the past,
remaining imprisoned by history.
The author is a professor of economics at the School of Business and Regional
Development, University of Wales