History as Karma

During the colonial era Europeans considered themselves unique in having a sense of history. All the rest of us, including the Chinese with their exact millennial court records, were deemed to have a sense of passing Time but not of history.

That assessment had two elements. One was a sense of racial superiority born of easy dominance over all other regions.

The other lay in the European belief that history was a fluid intellectual construct amenable to countless Orwellian revisions: those who control the present control the past; those who control the past control the future.

In that perspective the Indian view of the past as an unalterable karmic progression seemed “fatalistic,” and it led the British to imagine that by creating their own narrative of Indian history they could control the country’s future.

The first effort at such rewriting, paid for and published by the East India Company, was by James Mill (1773-1836), a London journalist who wrote a six-volume history of India without ever visiting the country or knowing any of its languages. Mill trashed Indian history as a “monstrous and absurd” concoction of legends and myths. He thought Indian society “presented a very uniform appearance during the long interval from the visit of the Greeks [under Alexander] to that of the English,” and that their “annals … from that era until the period of the Mohomedan conquests, are a blank.”

Since that early 19th Century work, there has been a huge outpouring of British writing reinforcing those themes, almost all of it racist, much of it intellectually disreputable in terms of motive, and some blatantly dishonest.

An author who bundles all those elements is John Keay, whose books can be found in most bookshops and libraries in India. The following is my review of one of his books (done for the Amazon web site).

Propaganda as History

“Two hundred years ago India was seen as a place with little history and less culture,” says a blurb on the back cover of John Keay’s “India Discovered,” originally published in 1984. The book credits the British for transforming India into a country now “revered for a notable prehistory, a magnificent classical age and a cultural tradition unique in both character and continuity.”

Keay makes his case with a massive amount of distortion.

For instance: “It is hard to appreciate now that as late as the end of the eighteenth Century nothing whatsoever was known of Indian history prior to the Mohammedan invasions.”

That is utter nonsense. India has never lost sight of its literary tradition dating back many thousands of years to the ordering of the Vedas. That tradition includes the philosophy of the Upanishads, the great epics Ramayana and Mahabharata, and the teachings of the Buddha. All of them constitute an understanding of the past that is incontrovertibly “history,” and much of it has remained common knowledge down to the village level.

The Buddhist tradition in particular is specifically historical, yet Keay asserts that the British were responsible for the “realization” that the Buddha was “not a god but a historical figure.” A Buddhist scholar is likely to laugh out loud at that.

Another laugh-out-loud assertion is that Warren Hastings promoted the study of Sanskrit because he “loved the people of India and respected them to a degree no other British ruler has ever equaled.”

If Hasting loved Indians, Hitler loved Jews.

Edmund Burke’s blistering indictment in the British parliament when it moved to impeach Hastings for a variety of high crimes and corruptions made clear just how much the former East India Company honcho in Calcutta cared for Indians.

Of the tortures the Company’s tax collectors used in Bengal under Hastings, Burke said, “Virgins whose fathers kept them from the sight of the sun were dragged into the public Court [and there] vainly invoking its justice, while their shrieks were mingled with the cries and groans of an indignant people, those virgins were cruelly violated. …. The wives of the people of the country only differed in this; that they lost their honour in the bottom of the most cruel dungeons … they were dragged out naked and exposed to the public view, and scourged before all the people … they put the nipples of the women in the sharp edges of split bamboos and tore them from their bodies.”

Hastings assembled the first group of “Orientalists” to study Sanskrit for only one reason: to comprehend the financial records of temples so he could tax their vast hidden wealth. In a few years his taxes drained the resources that had always before supported a great variety of social services, from village school teachers and vaids (doctors) to maintenance of roads, upkeep of water works and famine relief.

The East India Company’s fierce exactions destroyed not only that system but the entire agricultural economy of Bengal and pushed it into the first of the great “man-made famines” the British brought to India. In the first decade of its rule some 7 million people starved to death, fully a third of the population of what had been the richest province of the Mughal Empire. By the time colonial rule ended in 1947, the death toll from British “man-made famines” would be estimated at several hundred million.

Keay also engages in a great number of subtler distortions that are hardly unimportant.

For instance, in referring to Hastings as the “first Governor General of India” and adding parenthetically that “Clive had been Governor of Bengal only,” he creates the impression that British rule was far more extensive than it was. In fact, it remained virtually unchanged under Clive and Hastings; the main difference was that the latter had the title of “Governor General of India.”

Under both, the East India Company continued to collect taxes on behalf of the Mughal Emperor in Bengal and to extort revenues in lieu of debt repayment from the indigent Nawab of Arcot in Madras.

Over the next century the Company would continue to collect taxes in the name of the Mughal as it slowly added to its territories. The British Crown would assert sovereignty only after the national uprising of 1857. After that, it would rule some 3/5ths of undivided India for just 90 years, a third of that in steady retreat before the strengthening nationalist movement under Mahatma Gandhi.

Given that reality, how do we explain the undeniable zeal that fired so many Englishmen, most of them with other day jobs, to search out the Indian past?

The explanation is rich in karmic ironies.

Warren Hastings initiated the work of the “Orientalists” to get more taxes. They brought to light not only a great mass of public wealth but the riches of the Indian past. That had the effect of reconnecting modernizing Indians to their national roots: Gandhi, for instance, first read the Gita in London, in Edwin Arnold’s English translation.

What sustained the zeal for discovery into the 19th Century?

It was the theory of an Indo-Aryan language family proposed by William Jones, the most brilliant of the first Orientalists. It was misinterpreted to mean there was an actual flesh and blood “Aryan race,” a possibility the British seized on eagerly because they could be the “original Aryans” and thus legitimate rulers of India. Thereafter, everything they did to uncover Indian history was driven by the hope of finding concrete evidence of that link.

Meanwhile, the karmic current of the “Aryan race” gained enormous energy in Germany and France, where it was seen as justifying White supremacist racism. Hitler epitomized that view, and his reach for Aryan supremacy precipitated World War II.

As if to underline this whole string of karmic ironies, the armies that devastated Britain’s capacity to hold on to India marched under the ancient Indian symbol of good luck, the Swastika.

Keay’s flat self-serving presentation of the British Indian relationship is typical of almost everything that has been written on the matter since colonial times. It reflects at one level a basic incomprehension of the multi-layered subtleties that have been in play, and at another, a determined refusal to see India for what it is.

What can break that pattern as accelerating changes in international relations force once powerful countries to turn in small corners will be a pressing issue in the years ahead.

************ end of review ************

The British seem to have learned nothing about karmic consequences from their experience of ruling India. They are undoubtedly behind such initiatives as the EPIC Channel and the attempt by the Hindu Mahasabha to glorify Mahatma Gandhi’s assassin, Nathuram Godse. They will inevitably spur Indians to a reawakening of their spiritual and political history that would have taken much longer otherwise.

The Nehruvian-Hindutva Tussle Over History

Subramanian Swamy’s call for the burning of “Nehruvian” history books and the riposte from Congress leader Digvijay Singh reminded me of the nursery rhyme battle between Tweedledum and Tweedledee.

Their combat is over the rattle of history not its substance. 

The truth lies neither in the vilification of Nehru and his acolytes nor in their celebration.

Much as it will stick in BJP throats to say it, Nehru was a patriot who spent almost his entire life in the service of India. And though it will be wormwood and gall for the Congress to admit it, he was an intellectually shallow snob who betrayed Mahatma Gandhi in the final run up to the transfer of power, and all of us in the course he set for independent India.

As young people today will understand little of all this, I give below a short summary of what actually happened, with some notes on its current relevance.

Jawaharlal Nehru was the treasured son of a rich lawyer in Lucknow who, one urban legend had it, sent his shirts to be laundered in Britain. Born to luxury, spoiled rotten as a child, Nehru himself was sent to Britain early, first to school at Harrow and then to Cambridge. He was the quintessential “Brown Sahib,” with an intellect shaped by a fey upper class socialism that had little to do with  working class realities.

For all his elite education, Nehru had little understanding of his own country or the world: while dismissive of the religion that has been India's saving grace over the millennia, he saw the corrupt and violent communist revolution in Russia as the door to a brave new world.

He returned to India at a time when Mahatma Gandhi was revolutionizing the Congress and became, with some energetic pushing by his father, one of the Party’s bright young leaders. His primary rivals in the party, Mohammad Ali Jinnah and Subhas Chandra Bose, earned their own limelight and either could have given Nehru a run for his money if they had stayed with the Congress; but neither did.

Nehru thus became the only leader of his generation with national appeal, his stature enhanced by the perception that he was Gandhi’s political heir.

That status was not based on ability. Vallabhai Patel, the hard-eyed Gujarati lawyer whose unmatched organizational skills had made him the “Iron man” of the Congress, was unquestionably a far more effective leader.

But Gandhi had made the shrewd calculation that Nehru's cultural commonalities with the British were an essential bridge during the transition of power. In that he was entirely correct, but the expectation that the younger man would eventually follow his path proved disastrously wrong.

Weeks before independence Nehru stumbled into a British honey trap baited with Edwina Mountbatten (whose extramarital affairs were notorious), and was thereafter a British stooge. He asked Louis Mountbatten to stay on as independent India’s first Governor-General, appointed him chair of the cabinet committee dealing with the “tribal invasion” of Kashmir, and after Indian forces routed the Pakistanis and had them on the run, froze their advance and referred the matter to the United Nations.

After independence, Nehru set India on a course towards a "socialist pattern of society." Ironically, that involved committing enormous flows of public money to large projects that profited a small business elite; it would be four decades before the Panchayat Raj provisions of the Constitution would be minimally funded.

It was a comprehensive betrayal of Gandhi's legacy.

Hindutva betrayals have been even more profound, for they involved the assassination of the Mahatma and the undermining of Indian democracy.

The man mainly responsible was Vinayak Damodar Sarvakar, an erstwhile votary of violent revolution who the British tortured into collaboration at the Andamans “Cellular Jail.”

They released him early from a 50-year sentence after he wrote the tract Hindutva, arguing that Muslims were second-class citizens in India, entitled to exist only as a submissive minority. 

After release in 1924 he lived in a pleasant bungalow the British provided in Ratnagiri, and three years later, took over as president of the Hindu Mahasabha, a proxy British organization formed at about the same time as the Muslim League.

As the head of the Mahasabha Savarkar assembled a gang in Pune that included Naturam Godse and Narayan Apte, the men who killed Gandhi in 1948. Beginning in 1934, Godse made several unsuccessful attempts to kill the Mahatma but revealingly, he was never taken into police custody or put under any kind of watch. Even after a bomb went off at Gandhi’s prayer meeting a few days before the assassination the police acted as if they had no knowledge of him.

(It should be noted that this history of assassination attempts demolishes the claim that Godse killed the Mahatma in flaming anger at the atrocities suffered by Hindus during Partition. It makes clear that his gallows speech was pure humbug.) 

Another indication of a British hand in the plot was Apte’s refusal, at the height of the Great Depression, of a full-time job in the Royal Indian Air Force. The most likely explanation is that he was already fully occupied -- as a British agent.

All this is of more than historical interest because the extremist Hindu elements brought to life by the British continue to thrive with murky support from unidentified sources.

Maharashtra ATS Chief Hemant Karkare’s investigation into that nexus was cut short when he was killed in the September 2008 attack on Mumbai, giving rise to a widespread belief that the attack was primarily aimed at eliminating him. It is alarming that Mrs Karkare, who had been vocal about a conspiracy to kill her husband, has just suffered a brain hemorrhage and is now in a coma.[I understand she has died.]

Also fueling dark speculation is the strange matter of the Home Ministry files the Modi government destroyed within weeks of taking power. Corridor talk has it that the files related to the Mahatma’s assassination. The government assured parliament that was not the case, but it is necessary to ask if that denial covered mention of Narayan Apte in personnel records. Did the destroyed files show government financing for B. S. Moonje, the medical doctor from Nagpur who served with the British Army in the Boer War and in 1925 established the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS)? Does the denial cover records of payments to thugs engaged in the “communal riots” that led to Partition?

These uncomfortable questions indicate that the increasing challenges to Indian democracy are not all contemporary: they also emerge from our cloak and dagger history.

Britain and Hinduism 2: Murder as Policy

Over the centuries religion has been a standard tool of the British imperial elite. In manipulating victim populations ranging from Northern Ireland to the Middle East and India, their modus operandi has been simple: create a sense of grievance or entitlement in a religious group and use the resulting conflicts to serve British interests.

This worked well with Christian and Muslim populations with their well-established collective sense of their faith, but in India the technique came up short because our group identities compound religion with culture, caste, language and province. The extremist proxies the British promoted – the Muslim League under Mohammad Ali Jinnah and the Hindu Mahasabha under Vinayak Damodar Savarkar – had very limited impact until the colonial regime introduced a historically unprecedented element: communal violence.

They did so first with the “Maplah (Muslim) Rebellion” in Kerala immediately in the wake of Gandhi’s first nation-wide Satyagraha in 1920. It succeeded in destroying the Hindu-Muslim amity created by the Khilafat Movement but there was no permanent communal split nationally.

The next stage came in the run-up to the 1937 elections, when “Hindus” suddenly began to make a series of unprovoked and inexplicable attacks on Muslims. The Muslim League blamed the Congress for the attacks in a series of written reports that made no mention of the Hindu Mahasabha (newly under Savarkar). The reports described the assaults with Dickensian bathos: the victims were invariably pious people at prayer or celebrating some happy holiday; the attackers came to their bloody business shouting “Gandhi ki jai!” Suspicion that it was all a British command performance was widespread, and the Viceroy (Linlithgow) only reinforced that with a series of unctuous speeches expressing his “deep conviction that upon [Hindu-Muslim] unity depend the position and prestige of India before the nations, and her capacity to take her due place in the world.”

The violence was meant to scare Muslims into supporting the League but it did not work. Within their reserved vote banks and in the general electorate, Muslims voted overwhelmingly for other parties. The North-West Frontier Province, with a population over 90 per cent Muslim, voted solidly for a close ally of the Congress, the Redshirt Party led by the great Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan. The Punjab, with a Muslim majority of about 53 per cent, elected the Unionist Party led by Sikander Hyat Khan who had broad Hindu and Sikh support. In Bengal, which also had a thin Muslim majority, a regional party won a plurality with support from all communities. Jinnah could not gain control even of his own native province, Muslim-majority Sind; the local leader, Khan Bahadur Allah Bux, opted to ally himself with the Congress.

Both Hyat Khan and Allah Bux rejected the notion that Hindus and Muslims were different “nations” and they would have been formidable obstacles to Partition. But neither lived to oppose it: Hyat Khan died suddenly of an alleged “heart attack” at the age of 50 and Allah Bux was assassinated. 

Mahatma Gandhi, the most effective foe of British rule, had become the target of deadly assault much earlier. The first attempt on his life was on 25 June 1934, when an unknown assailant threw a bomb at a car in which he was supposed to be travelling. As Tushar Gandhi (the Mahatma’s great-grandson), noted in his 2007 book Let’s Kill Gandhi! the bomb injured several policemen but “surprisingly, there [was] no record of any investigations or arrests.” As he also underlined, the attack took place in Pune, the base of operations for the gang that tried repeatedly to kill Gandhi and finally succeeded on 30 January 1948.

A second attempt on Gandhi’s life was in July 1944 at the small resort of Panchgani near Pune where he was recuperating from the near death experience of his final imprisonment. The assailant, Nathuram Godse, rushed at him with a dagger but was stopped and disarmed. Gandhi invited him to stay and talk but Godse stalked off; no police action followed. In September the same year, Godse tried again, joining a group at the entrance to Sevagram Ashram armed with a dagger; the police confiscated the weapon but once again, failed to take any action.

These incidents occurred well before the massive atrocities at the time of Partition that supposedly enraged Godse into killing Gandhi in 1948. They make clear that Godse's statement prior to his execution expressing outrage at the afflictions of of the Hindu community was pure propaganda. The available facts, especially the scandalous police inaction that extended from 1934 to 1948, point firmly to a long-standing conspiracy supported by the British and centred on Savarkar, Godse and Narayan Apte.

Apte has been generally viewed as little more than Godse's sidekick but he was in fact a key figure. A womanizing part-time recruiter for the Royal Indian Air Force (RIAF), he declined a coveted permanent commission at the height of the Great Depression to continue his marginal existence as Savarkar’s henchman. The only believable explanation for that decision is that he was already employed full-time as an operative of British Intelligence.

A third plotter, Madanlal Pahwa, was a former radio operator in the Navy and probably kept Savarkar in touch with his British controllers. Another factor indicating a wider conspiracy to murder Gandhi is the mystery surrounding the provenance of the murder weapon. It was initially reported stolen from the armory at Nasik; later accounts said it was an almost brand new Beretta automatic brought to India from Italy by a former Army officer.

The 1944 attempts on Gandhi’s life followed his providential escape from death in custody, at a time when British leaders wanted him dead. Winston Churchill responded to news of his 21-day fast in 1943  by sending a “most secret encrypted message” to the Viceroy (Linlithgow) urging him against “any show of leniency.” Linlithgow assured the Prime Minister he would “feel no compunction” in letting Gandhi die. A later cable contained Churchill’s cold query why Gandhi was not dead yet. His survival probably had something to do with the interest Franklin Roosevelt took in the matter; at one point he had the State Department summon the British Ambassador in Washington and tell him flatly “Gandhi must not die in prison.”  

Gandhi fasted in prison to protest the "man-made famine" in Bengal with which the colonial regime responded to the Quit India movement. That punitive intent is clear in the fact that as some 3 million people starved to death, Churchill turned down requests to divert any of the numerous supply ships passing within hours of Calcutta carrying food from New Zealand to Britain. British diplomats also declined a Canadian offer of free grain.

Another object of Gandhi's protest was the brutal repression of the leaderless Quit India Movement. The colonial police and Army routinely beat, machine-gunned and bombed nonviolent demonstrators; torture and custodial death were common. Sushila Nayar's diary recorded that Indian sources within the government estimated the civilian death toll at some 50,000; she noted that the actual toll was higher.

Not all murders the regime committed were open and violent. There were also many quiet deaths  supposedly from natural causes. Three of Gandhi’s closest aides were eliminated in that manner. His nephew Maganlal, who founded and ran Sabarmati Ashram, the person the Mahatma considered his political “heir,” died inexplicably in 1928; that was when consultations were beginning for the declaration of Purna Swaraj the next year.

The next to go was the formidable business magnate Jamanlal Bajaj, who founded Sevagram Ashram in Wardha, where Gandhi moved in 1930. He dropped dead of a supposed brain haemorrhage in February 1942, as Congress was gearing up for what became the Quit India movement. It was reported to be a "staggering loss" to Gandhi, the most serious blow he had suffered since Maganlal's death.

Less than six months later, Mahadev Desai, Gandhi’s private secretary, the only person who knew all of the Mahatma’s vast network of contacts and correspondents, dropped dead in prison. The three deaths not only affected Gandhi’s capacity for action at crucial times, they eliminated those most capable of carrying on his legacy.

Gandhi did not consider the deaths of his primary aides to be natural. On 2 March 1944 Sushila Nayar’s diary noted that he told her: “One after the other, you may all be taken away and I may be left alone. That will be a pathetic state.”

The death of his wife in prison also weighed heavily on Gandhi. In a rare personal complaint, he wrote to Viceroy (Wavell) disputing the regime’s public claim that Kasturba had been provided the best medical care and pointing out the many “pinpricks” the old couple had endured in prison. British “historians” have continued to repeat the canard that Kasturba’s death resulted from Gandhi’s refusal to permit the use of penicillin. Nayar’s diary makes clear that she (as the doctor in attendance), had asked the prison authorities for penicillin but was told it was unavailable.

All the foregoing pales in the light of the mass murders the British engineered in the final two years of their control of India. To understand why they did that we have to appreciate the global context.

World War II had pauperized Britain. Its main creditor, the United States, was pressing hard for an end to its Empire. Churchill’s hopes that Britain would have room to manoeuver by using the Soviet Union to counterbalance American power came to an abrupt end in 1945 when the United States became the world’s only nuclear Power. Without hope of holding India in the face of its massive nationalist mobilization and increasingly mutinous army. British strategists headed by Churchill decided that India had to be split.

David Monteath, the Permanent Under-Secretary at the British Foreign Office, summed up their rationale in a note for the file. “If India falls apart we may, I suppose, expect the Muslims to try and enlist British support by offering us all sorts of military and political facilities, to commit ourselves to what would be in effect the defence of one Indian state against another.”

To make India “fall apart” became the British objective from mid-1946, and the first step towards that goal was the "Great Calcutta Killing" initiated by the Muslim League on its “Direct Action Day,” 16 August. Jinnah was then secretly getting political advice from Churchill, who had arranged for letters to be routed through his private secretary, Miss E.A. Gilliat, at 6 Westminster Gardens in London.
The idea of using mass murder for political gain probably originated in that correspondence, for Jinnah was too fastidiously lawyerly to have come up with such an egregiously criminal plan on his own.

Whatever the origin of the plan, there is no doubt that the British actively facilitated the killings. The police did nothing as a crowd of Muslim League "hooligans" (as The Statesman described them), dispersed after Friday prayers on the Maidan and went on a spree of murder and arson, targeting Hindus and Sikhs. The Army, which had withdrawn all its outposts in the city the previous day, remained firmly ensconced in Fort William as thousands of people were beaten, hacked and burned to death over the next 72 hours. Retaliatory killings of Muslims did not get under way in the city until, on the third day of murder and arson, a group of Marwari businessmen assembled a band of hardened criminals and announced a bounty. Whether they did so under instructions from the British is a question that needs to be asked because without retaliation their whole project would have stalled.

The events in Calcutta set off a murderous rampage in the Muslim-majority area of Noakhali now in Bangladesh, and that led to mayhem in Bihar, and across North India. Descriptions of this process have commonly used the phrase “communal madness,” as if it were a natural contagion; but that distorts what actually happened. Those who witnessed the 1946-1947 riots up close have invariably reported that the killings were organized, and that goondas, criminals without any tint of faith, were always in the forefront of action.

Peace activist Muriel Smith who ran a relief centre at Noakhali made an additional important point when she wrote: “Perhaps the only thing that can be quite positively asserted about this orgy of arson and violence is that it was not a spontaneous uprising of the villagers. However many goondas may live in Bengal, they are incapable of organizing this campaign on their own initiative. Houses have been sprayed with petrol and burnt. Who supplied this rationed fuel? … Who supplied the weapons? The goondas seem to think that they really are the rulers of this beautiful area of Bengal. One sees no sign of fear [or] anxiety as to future punishment ….” Only the colonial authorities could have offered them impunity.

The tale of Partition has been told many times, but no historian has tried as yet to identify the Indians who helped organize the events that led to the murder of a million of their compatriots and rendered 14 million homeless in their own ancient lands. It is important to do that if only to see what role they have continued to play in the post-colonial evolution of Indian politics.

It is also necessary to bring into post-colonial perspective the evolution of the poisonous concept of "Hindutva" the British injected into Indian politics to dismember the country. That will be the focus of Part 3 of this essay.