That anxieties about present-day Indian identities are linked to memories and narratives of the colonial past is obvious. Recent contestations over the memories of events of 1857 have made it clear just how deeply vested present-day British identities are in the Indian past. More broadly, the very notions of empire and colonialism can be seen as discursive sites where some anxieties about Western identities come into play. For a while I have been meaning to write about a trend in the historiography of empire, which I term the "politics of ungeneralizability," that betrays some of these anxieties and displaces colonialism through the ultimately elusive category of empire.
In a review of Nicholas Dirks' book The Scandal of Empire and David Gilmour's text, The Ruling Caste, in The Nation, the historian Linda Colley suggests that British imperialism cannot be compared to Fascism or slavery.
It follows that the tendency to approach empire as a peculiarly European psychosis, occurring only in particular centuries in the past, is misleading. Empire cannot be compared to Fascism (a mode of politics confined to some decades in the twentieth century) or to slavery (a practice that most, alas not all, people have disavowed). Far better analogies are war or religious zealotry. Exactly like them, empire--the direct or indirect invasion of another people's sovereignty--has often proved fearfully disruptive and violent. But like them, too, empire has been ubiquitous, multi-stranded and recurrent, and is far from being over.
The argument is deeply problematic for several reasons. It suggests that the violence of colonialism is of a lower order than the violence of Fascism or slavery. The key word here is "often": Colley argues that empire, like war and religious zealotry, have often been violent. They have not always been violent nor have they been unrelentingly violent, as is the case with Fascism or slavery. Colley's view may read as a counterpoint to Fanon's argument that Fascism was colonialism come home. But it is not clear at all why the violence of war or religious zealotry (and thus the violence of colonialism and empire) is of a lower order than the violence of Fascism or slavery.
I suspect Colley's argument relates to the fact that there is a consensus-- rightly, in my view--- among scholars that there is nothing redemptive about Fascism and slavery. To treat empire or colonialism as equivalent to Fascism and slavery is to admit, then, that there was nothing redemptive about empire or colonialism either. Yet this is a position that would squarely contradict Colley's other arguments, familiar to students of South Asian history, that the British were following in the footsteps of the Mughals in the actions in India and were drawn into the power struggles of the subcontinent duly abetted by local elites. In this view, the violence of the colonizers, up to a point at least, was quintessentially Indian in character and was the product of contingencies quite different from the imperatives at work in slavery or Fascism.
Relatedly, Colley's point that empire was multi-faceted and recurrent does not tell us why British colonialism in India or elsewhere should not be seen as violent, characterized by the same order of unique violence as slavery or Fascism. Its multi-facetedness, quite simply, does not negate the paradigmatic alienness of British rule in India (to loosely borrow a phrase from Ranajit Guha about the founding moment of violence of the colonial state in 1765).
Colley goes on to argue that the critique of British colonialism launched by postcolonial studies scholars serves the purpose of obscuring attention to American imperial ambitions.
One of the drawbacks of--indeed, one of the reasons for--the popularity in this country of postcolonial analysis, for all its undoubted achievements, is that it tends to encourage a kind of displacement activity. Consciously or not, interest in and anxiety and guilt about America's past overland expansion and current global pre-eminence are projected onto the imperial past of Europe, a continent that has traditionally served as the American "other. The Scandal of Empire illustrates this beautifully; Dirks makes clear that he decided to write about the Hastings impeachment partly in response to the attempted impeachment of President Clinton and the Iraq War. Instead of such an indirect way of going about things, might it not be useful if, as well as focusing on past European imperial exertions and iniquities, American academics began devoting rather more time to teaching, writing on and taking seriously US imperial history? "
But the assertion warrants unpacking. Scholars in postcolonial studies, such as Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak (two of the three scholars, with Homi Bhabha, most often blamed for the excesses of postcolonialism by its detractors), have been strong critics of US imperialism. And even if one takes seriously Colley's suggestion that scholars of colonial history should engage with American imperial history, the analysis of colonialism, in any case, is not a zero-sum game. The critique of American imperial ambition does not in any preclude the analysis of British colonialism (or empire) on its own terms. American excesses do not negate or lessen the violence or excesses or British colonialism. And the comparative method itself does not tell us why we should avoid looking at the specificity of British colonial rule and its strategies of dominance.
Interestingly, the word 'colonialism' is never used by Colley in her article. This is somewhat surprising since postcolonial perspectives on empire that Colley critiques use the term 'colonialism' as analytic category, discursive object, and historical event (with due attention to its multifacetedness and complexity).
A somewhat similar position is taken by C.A. Bayly in his article, "Moral Judgment, Empire, Nation and History" (European Review; Interdisciplinary Journal of the Academia Europeae, Vol. 13, No. 3, 385-391). Bayly argues that while historians should take a moral standpoint on particular issues associated with empire (such as slavery or deaths due to famine), it is neither advisable nor possible to arrive at such a judgment about empire per se. Simply put, in Bayly's view, methods of authentic historical scholarship and writing as well as the obligation of the responsible historian preclude her from taking such a view. Bayly sees the legacy of Edward Said and postcolonial theorists at work in such characterizations of empire; scholars who work in Marxist and Subaltern Studies alike are guilty of allowing politicized sentiment to color their work. The anticolonial perspective, in Bayly's view, loses legitimacy when historians do not take the independent Indian state to task in the same manner that they castigate the British empire. He argues that:
...anti-colonial historians, even those of the Subaltern Studies collective, have been noticeably reticent in analysing the operations of the post-colonial Indian state, whether in the Indian countryside or in Kashmir and the Punjab. It is almost as if the category of 'subaltern' and the 'oppressed of the earth' suddenly disappeared with Independence in 1947. Although they often claim to dislike the unitary nation state, these authors cannot rid themselves of an underlying sentiment that associates nationalism with virtue.(388)
Bayly's argument might be critiqued as susceptible to the same fallacy as Colley's claim discussed above. Even if one views it as an accurate description of the selective loyalties of the Subaltern Studies school, the absence of a critique of the postcolonial Indian state does not necessarily translate into an obligation to view the colonial state with sympathy. The continuity thesis might be at work here in a peculiarly inverted manner: if the postcolonial state is undeserving of criticism, so must be the colonial state.
But who are 'anti-colonial' historians and what does it mean to be an 'anti-colonial' historian? By using this designation, Bayly has already implicitly made his position clear that one should be 'neutral' on the question of empire, neither pro-empire nor anti-empire. Yet, Bayly does not engage seriously with the argument presented by Left, Subaltern, and Postcolonial studies scholars that to claim neutrality toward empire or colonialism is itself a political position in favor of empire. And that may be seen as no less nationalistic a position, albeit with another territorial entity as the object of that affiliation, than the stance of the Subaltern Studies scholars.
The claim that Indian historians let the Indian state off the hook may be questioned. A critique of the Indian state (and of the Indian Left) is central to Gyanendra Pandey's recent work, Routine Violence (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006). Partha Chatterjee, whether one views his work as anthropology, history, or political science, is the author of Wages of Freedom (New Delhi: OUP, 2006), a collection of critical essays on the Indian nation-state since independence.
Ironically, Colley's suggestion about postcolonialist guilt projecting American imperial action on to British imperial pasts might also apply to her views and Bayly's arguments.
The ungeneralizability of empire, its eel-like slipperiness from the trap of moral judgment, can also be read as a displacement of the dangers of present-day imperial ambition and action through a corresponding exculpation of the British empire. If we believe that the British empire was in part good, that its engines were run by men who were noble, and that colonialism was not fundamentally a violent project (like slavery or Fascism), that licenses us to see nobility in the imperial ambitions of powerful nation-states in the present. It also licenses us to make our peace with the violence that these states-- whether India, China, or the US-- commit and to ignore the perspective of their victims in chronicling the history of such events.
"It is not clear," Bayly tells us, "that the emergence of 'victimology' as a sub-category of historical writing does anything more than stir passions and discount the search for historical evidence" (388). It is a passionate statement. One may ask whether a method that denies the fundamental character of colonialism in the name of complexity of empire does not violate that search in even more egregious fashion.
See my earlier post, Denying Colonial Violence and Redeeming the British Empire. Also read Gyan Prakash's article, "Inevitable Revolutions" in The Nation.
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