Abstract
The annual Orwell Prize was established in 1994 by the late Professor Bernard Crick to reward accessible writing ‘in good English’ on politics or public policy, ‘whether political, economic, social or cultural’. Pankaj Mishra’s From the Ruins of Empire was on the short-list for the 2013 prize and, although it did not win, it is clear that in Britain and the US at least, Mishra has now become an influential public commentator on the long, messy and continuing life of Euro-American imperialism.
This, surely, is no bad thing. From the outside, Mishra, who divides his time between London and Simla and writes for impeccably liberal publications such as the Guardian, New York Times and the London Review of Books, may superficially resemble those cosmopolitan postcolonial citizens whose vocal criticism of empires past and present turns out to be a condition for their access to some of the privileges possessed by today’s global ruling classes. Yet a closer look at Mishra’s writing reveals that after some initial moments of flirtation with what Graham Huggan has called the ‘postcolonial exotic’ (I am thinking especially of his 1995 ‘breakthrough’ book Butter Chicken in Ludhiana here), he has turned his attention to producing serious analyses of some of the most urgent questions that we face today – how can we imagine a way of life that is decisively different from the ‘there is no alternative’ triumphalism of neoliberalism? More to the point, how can we live it? Why did those nations that achieved liberty from the European imperial powers in the mid-twentieth century fail to fulfil their declared aims of sovereignty, equality, fraternity? What accounts for the resurgence of religious fundamentalism across wide swathes of the world? What, in fact, do we mean today when we use the terms ‘modernity’ or ‘modernisation’?
These are hardly new questions and there is an abundance of specialist and non-specialist literature that has been wrestling with them, as Mishra himself shows here, for nearly a century now. But this does not reduce their current urgency, especially since over the past few decades the corporatisation of media and the state in Britain and the US has tended to neuter any serious public conversation about imperialism and capitalism. This is, of course, in stark contrast to the lived experience of people everywhere, even or especially so in the British, European and North American heartlands of ‘globalisation’, where mass anguish can be seen every day in Zuccotti Park, Manhattan, St. Paul’s, London, or the Acropolis, Athens. Pankaj Mishra’s achievement in recent years, in a sequence starting with An End to Suffering (2004), Temptations of the West (2006) and now From the Ruins of Empire, has been to present an intellectual lineage of today’s global rage in clear prose that is likely to get his readers thinking about the long unfolding of the history of modernity, albeit in a manner unlikely to win the approval of the current British neoconservative Secretary of State for Education, Michael Gove.
Mishra’s primary aim in the book is to reanimate a long-running debate in the scholarship on anti-colonial nationalism – namely, to what extent is it, in Partha Chatterjee’s words, a ‘derivative discourse’ that relies on the fundamental assumptions of European post-Enlightenment thought about the twinned process of modernisation and modernity? Another way of posing this problem is to ask whether anti-colonial nationalism is doomed to failure because it employs the master’s weapons to fight the master. The all too easy co-option of post-colonial societies into a neo-colonial dispensation after the global conflicts of the twentieth century surely underlines the relevance of these questions.
Mishra’s answer is to decisively reject the analysis (or accusation) of the derivative nature of anti-colonial thought. He structures his book around Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, who, despite his name was almost certainly born in Iran and not in Afghanistan around 1838; and Liang Qichao, the Chinese thinker and activist who was born thirty-five years after al-Afghani, in 1873. Around these two men, Mishra gathers a host of other Asian thinkers, poets and activists such as the Indian Rabindranath Tagore, the Egyptian Sayyid Qutb and the Chinese Sun Yat-Sen. A few important connecting threads between these men are immediately obvious – they were all born during the mid- to late-nineteenth century at the height of European imperial expansion and most of them lived into the first half of the twentieth century when the political reach of that imperialism, at least, slowed down and started to contract; most of these men were well-travelled, often in Europe, but most frequently throughout the length and breadth of Asia; they were educated and were able to make good use of ‘print capitalism’ and information technology of their times; they were all interested in, and to various degrees committed to, what they saw as their ‘traditional’ religious heritage – be it Hinduism, Islam or Confucianism; they all offered theories of modernity and modernisation that sought to uncouple these from any reflexive association with Europe and build instead a vision of a common Asian future; and finally, most of them were variously persecuted by the ruling classes of their occupied countries.
By tracking how the thinking of the individual members of this diverse group was cross-fertilised by their meetings, exchanges and awareness of each other, Mishra gives us an intellectual counterpart of what some development economists call ‘south-south co-operation’. In Mishra’s account, anti-colonial nationalist thought (in Asia at least) is largely formed out of the rich interaction of this group of itinerant, restless, curious, brave and accomplished thinkers who tried to resist the universalising claims of Europe. What we have here is the outline of a cosmopolitanism whose axis does not run through London, Paris and Berlin (although it might include some or all of these spaces), but Istanbul, Tokyo, Calcutta and Shanghai. Islam, Hindusim and Buddhism emerge not as anti-modern, but as an integral part of modernity itself.
This is fine so far as it goes, but, to my mind, this book has two major points of weakness. First, as Mishra himself claims, al-Afghani was ‘the first major Islamic thinker to use the concepts of “Islam” and “the West” as violently opposed binaries’. It is curious then that instead of subjecting this false binary that misrepresents the actual structure of the modern world-system to any meaningful interrogation, Mishra retains it as an analytical category in his discussion. If there is anything derivative about anti-colonial thought, it is this notion of the world parcelled out in ‘civilisational’ blocs where ‘west’ is synonymous with some parts of Euro-America (London but not Belgrade, Rome but not Istanbul, New York but not Mexico City) and material, technological and scientific progress; and ‘east’ is synonymous with Asia, material, social and political poverty, and spiritual and cultural richness. From Thomas Macaulay to Samuel Huntington via the ‘civilising mission’ and the ‘white man’s burden’, this is the ideological formula par excellence of modern imperialism and its adoption by al-Afghani and other Asian thinkers and activists is, in the final analysis, a sign of their conservative world-view. There is an important question to be asked here – namely, by what process did this neo-traditional evocation of religion come to dominate anti-colonial nationalism? But Mishra does not ask this question rigorously or consistently enough, and as a result analytically meaningless terms such as ‘western modernism’ and ‘western imperialism’ are liberally strewn across the text to the general detriment of Mishra’s overall argument.
Second, and relatedly, nowhere does Mishra clarify in his book the relationship between modernity, modernisation, imperialism and historical capitalism. Did Asia become modern only with the advent of European imperialism? Did capitalism exist in Asia before the arrival of the Dutch, the Portuguese, the French and the British? If so, in what form? These are, or should be, important questions in a book that proposes to deal with the revolt and ‘remaking’ of Asia. In fact, in the New York Review of Books last year (11 October 2012), David Shulman had precisely focused on this missing link in Mishra’s argument by showing how large parts of Asia – the coastal parts of South India for example – were displaying social, cultural and economic features of modernity well before the European ascendancy. If al-Afghani, Liang Qichao or Tagore conflated modernity with imperialism, surely an investigation into their intellectual formations should analyse this position in the light of evidence rather than take it as being normative?
Let me end by offering one small example of how these weaknesses damage Mishra’s thesis in the book. Writing about Wahhabi jihads in South Asia, Mishra writes: Claiming that India was Dar al-Harb, Muslim theologians and activists declared jihads in 1803 and again in 1826 against the British and their Indian collaborators. Overrunning parts of north-west India, the jihadists were finally suppressed in 1831 at the Battle of Balakot, which was to assume a tragic aura in South Asian Islamic lore comparable to the martyrdom of Imam Hussein at Karbala in AD 680.
The battle here encapsulates the recurring pattern in Mishra’s book – a religious ‘East’ in doomed revolt against a materialist ‘West’. But where do the Indian collaborators who Mishra touches on in the second line of the passage fit into this? Which civilisational bloc do they belong to? Are they modern, pre-modern or anti-modern? In fact, as Ayesha Jalal has shown in Partisans of Allah (2008), the clash at Balakot was between the jihadists led by two charismatic leaders called Sayyid Ahmed and Shah Ismail, and a large Sikh army under the command of one of Ranjit Singh’s generals. It had multiple causes including local and regional class dynamics, systems of political alliances between emergent and established powers, and cultural and religious conflicts. No doubt an author as well-informed as Mishra is aware of the existing scholarship on Balakot. But what does he gain by compressing all the complexities expressed by the event into a ‘west vs east’ paradigm?
In fact, such a compression negates a much more interesting and productive line of investigation. What were the interests that connected the Sikhs of Ranjit Singh to the British administration (especially given that within fifteen years of Balakot, they would be fighting a series of deadly wars that would see the end of the Sikh kingdom)? Which social groups were mobilised by the jihadists and how? Nor are these questions of mere historical accuracy. Rather, by choosing not to integrate class as an analytical tool, Mishra does not attend to the radically uneven way in which capitalism and modernity unfolds in space and time. As a result, he deals with jarring generalisations such as ‘Muslims had been the biggest losers as the British East India Company became the major military power in the subcontinent’ or ‘Hindus – seemed to be favoured by the new rulers, and were quick to educate themselves in Western-style institutions and assume the lowly administrative positions assigned to them’. Surely not all Muslims or all Hindus lost or won in the game of Victoria’s throne? Some members of the Indian ruling classes, both Hindu and Muslim, came to a comfortable understanding with the new regime. Most Indian peasants, both Hindu and Muslim, lost out.
It is one of the many ironies of post-cold war Britain that George Orwell’s name has been appropriated by a cosy liberal consensus where all meaningful structural analysis of the relationship between capitalism and imperialism are dismissed as irrelevant Marxist dogma (whatever that might be). Pankaj Mishra has written an elegant, readable book that brings some interesting and perhaps unfamiliar material to a general readership, and his effort has been recognised by the judges of the prize bearing Orwell’s name. But whether George Orwell would have been satisfied with Mishra’s language of ‘east’ and ‘west’ and superficial attention to imperial class dynamics, is an open question.