The Real First World War

Europe's "Great War" of 1914-1918 does not deserve to be called the "First World War." That title should go to the first real global conflict, Europe's genocidal invasion of other regions that began in the final decade of the 15th Century.

European historians have sought to downplay the ferocity, extent and significance of that earlier conflict by treating it as a diffuse historical process, but if we who were victims accept that view it disables our understanding of everything that has happened since then.

As few Indians are likely to know much about what actually happened, let me recount some salient points.  

A decade after Columbus landed on Hispaniola in 1492, its indigenous people were extinct. They had done nothing to deserve that fate; Columbus in a letter to his royal sponsors in Spain said they were “loving, uncovetous people,” with “good features and beautiful eyes,” who “neither carried weapons nor understood the use of such things.” Yet many were tortured to death in a vain attempt to get them to reveal nonexistent hoards of gold and others worked to death or driven to suicide.

Such gratuitous violence continued as Europeans extended their domains in the "New World."

 Many of the smaller tribes followed the Arawak of Hispaniola into extinction while the populations of larger groups fell by as much as 85 percent, victims not only of indiscriminate violence but of induced famines and new diseases to which they had no immunity. The spread of smallpox through blankets distributed free to Native Americans and the wanton slaughter of the great herds of bison on which the "Plains Indians" depended for food, clothing and shelter were the most outrageous cases of genocide. Estimates of the numbers killed range up to 100 million.

In South America the Conquistadores engaged in a zestful mass murder that has no equivalent to this day. Bartolomeo de las Casas (1484-1566), a Spaniard who went to the New World for fortune but was driven by the atrocities he witnessed to enter the Church, left a vivid description in Brevissima Relacion de la Destruycion de la Indias (Short Report on the Destruction of the Indies):

“One time the Indians came to meet us, and to receive us with victuals and delicate cheer, and with all entertainment, ten leagues from a great city, and being come at the place they presented us with a great quantity of fish and of bread, and other meat, together with all they could do for us to the uttermost.” The Conquistadores put them all to the sword “without any cause whatsoever,” more than “three thousand souls, which were set before us, men, women and children,” committing “great cruelties that never any man living either have or shall see the like.”

“The Christians, with their horses and swords and lances, began to slaughter and practice strange cruelty among them. They penetrated into the country and spared neither children nor the aged, no pregnant women, nor those in child labor, all of whom they ran through the body and lacerated, as though they were assaulting so many lambs herded in their sheepfold. They made bets as to who would slit a man in two, or cut off his head at one blow: or they opened up his bowels. They tore babes from their mothers' breast by the feet, and dashed their heads against the rocks. Others they seized by the shoulders and threw into the rivers, laughing and joking … They spitted the bodies of other babes, together with their mothers and all who were before them, on their swords. They made a gallows just high enough for the feet to nearly touch the ground, and by thirteens, in honor and reverence of our Redeemer and the twelve Apostles, they put wood underneath and burned the Indians alive. They wrapped the bodies of others entirely in dry straw, binding them in it and setting fire to it; and so they burned them. They cut off the hands of all they wished to take alive. They generally killed the lords and nobles in the following way. They made wooden gridirons of stakes, bound them upon them, and made a slow fire beneath: thus the victims gave up the spirit by degrees, emitting cries of despair in their torture.”

Casas, writing as the Bishop of Chiapas, estimated that just in the Caribbean his compatriots had killed some 15 million Indians, leaving “destroyed and depopulated” the large islands of Cuba, San Juan [Puerto Rico], and Jamaica, and some 30 smaller islands.

In Australia and New Zealand, the killing was less zestful but it was more comprehensive, and there was no Casas to call attention to what happened. The Anglican Church and British authorities looked the other way as settlers in Australia hunted the Aborigines like animals, poisoned their food and water, raped their women and savaged their children, all in a deliberate campaign to reduce the indigenous population. The Aborigine numbered about 750,000 at the end of the 18th Century and about 30,000 a century later; both figures are estimates for they were not included in Australian censuses until 1971. Australian policies to “protect” and “assimilate” the Aborigines continued the oppression into the second half of the 20th Century. It inflicted prison terms on adults for “crimes” ranging from “cheeky behavior” to “not working” to “calling the Hygiene Officer a big-eyed bastard.” Government officials took Infants from their parents and placed them in White families or orphanages. That “adoption” policy openly aimed at eliminating the Aborigines as a cultural group, the legal definition of genocide. In the face of mounting international criticism the government discontinued the program grudgingly in 1970; it was not until 1997 that it noted the negative impact on the victims and their families.

In New Zealand, a country larger than Britain (103,738 sq mi to 94.526 sq miles), the first British settlers in the mid 1800s found a tribal population said to be around 100,000 – almost certainly an underestimate, for the newcomers were soon engaged in a series of “Maori wars” to expropriate tribal land. By 1896 the number of Maoris was down to 42,000.

 In Africa and Asia the death tolls were far higher.

The slave trade out of Africa began with the first Portuguese explorations down the African coast in the 14th century and continued into the 19th. By the time it ended, slavers had taken an estimated 25 to 35 million Africans across the Atlantic and killed an equal number during capture and conveyance.

Within Africa too, wherever Europeans settled, they displaced and often enslaved the local population. The “Congo Free State” established by Belgium’s King Leopold II reduced the native population from an estimated 20 million to 8 million. Under the pretext of "civilizing the natives," his regime established a reign of terror, mandating wild rubber collection quotas for each village and punishing unmet targets by lopping off the arms of workers. Supervisors were required to bring in baskets of limbs to show they were implementing policy rigorously.

 In Namibia, the Germans massacred the Herero. In Kenya, the British ran the Kikuyu off the best agricultural land in the country, pushing over a million people into lasting poverty. A movement to reclaim the land in the 1950s resulted in a second displacement as the colonial regime hunted down, tortured and killed over 100,000 “Mau Mau terrorists.”

In South Africa, the British slaughtered the Zulu to get at the diamonds and gold in their land and the Boers (descendents of Dutch settlers) imposed racial segregation on the whole country in 1948, as India’s independence heralded the end of the era of European world domination. The system stayed in place until 1994.

 Asia saw the highest death tolls of the colonial era, and as K.M. Panikkar noted in Asia and Western Dominance (1959), the violence began with Vasco da Gama. On his second voyage to India he came upon an unarmed Arab vessel and, “after making the ship empty of goods" he "prohibited anyone from taking out of it any Moor" and then ordered it to be set afire. A commentator in Portugal justified that as follows: “It is true that there does exist a common right to all to navigate the seas and in Europe we recognize the rights which others hold against us; but the right does not extend beyond Europe, and therefore the Portuguese, as Lords of the Sea, are justified in confiscating the goods of all those who navigate the seas without their permission.”

That “strange and comprehensive claim,” commented Panikkar, was “one which every European nation in its turn held firmly, almost to the end of Western supremacy in Asia. The principle that the doctrines of international law did not apply outside Europe, that what would be barbarism in London or Paris is civilized conduct in Peking, and that European nations had no moral obligations in dealing with Asian peoples, was part of the accepted creed of Europe’s relations with Asia.”

 In India, the first of the "man-made famines" under British rule occurred in the decade after the 1757 fall of Nawab Siraj ud Dowlah in Bengal; it killed seven million people, a third of the population. The last famine the British created, also in Bengal, occurred in 1942-1943; it killed between 3 and 4 million. In all, the total of such deaths has been estimated at several hundred million; the Gandhian Dharampal calculated the total number of Indian deaths from all causes under British rule at 500 million. (Dharampal who died at Sevagram in Wardha in 2006, did not use his last name, Banwari; his groundbreaking work on pre-colonial and colonial India has been largely ignored by Indian historians because he had no academic background or standing.)

 China was never under colonial rule, but Britain fought two "Opium Wars" in the 19th Century to force it to import the drug. By the first decade of the 20th Century a quarter of its population was estimated to be using the drug.   

This litany of European depredations in the global South is not a mere scratching at old scars. It is, in fact, essential to understanding the "Great War" of 1914-1918. German disaffection at not having enough colonial "lebensraum" (elbow-room) was perhaps the most important factor that drove its competition with Britain into war. In that sense, it was a direct karmic consequence of the Real First World War. 
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Why Britain Failed to Subvert the Hindu Narrative - Part 1

There are three main reasons why the British have not been able to co-opt and subvert the Hindu narrative as they did with that of Islam.

The most important is a long-running failure to understand the nature of the faith.

By the time Vasco da Gama landed in Kerala in 1498, Europeans had long forgotten what ancient Greece and Rome knew of India. Increasing contact over the next three centuries did not improve understanding because Europeans could make little sense of a faith that had no single founder, deity or catechism.

It was not until the “Orientalist” discoveries of ancient Sanskrit works in the late 18th Century that Europeans began to understand basic Hindu tenets. However, even as knowledge of ancient India set off an “Oriental Renaissance” in Europe, the East India Company took measures to bring back ignorance: it could not countenance admiration for a country the British were supposedly civilizing. The Company commissioned and published two books of racist calumny, John Mills’ “History of British India,” and “Hindu Manners and Customs” by the French missionary Abbe Jean-Antoine Dubois.

Mills was a journeyman journalist who had never been to India and knew none of its languages; the Abbe had fled the French Revolution to Pondicherry and, after a year in which he made not a single convert, took to going around dressed as a Brahmin to find out why.

Their comically ignorant books presented Indians as religious primitives with a chaos of gods, superstitions, repulsive practices and quaint philosophical beliefs. The impact of the books is evident in countless English books, articles and films that are a Rorschach test of British fears and fantasies about Hinduism. While that helped the East India Company justify its rule of India, it did not facilitate manipulation of Hindus.

A second reason the British never got a grip on the Hindu narrative was that Indian custodians of ancient tradition avoided contact with people they considered mad and mleccha. Those forced into intimacy by economic or political need were of little use in manipulating the community as a whole.

The third factor was the intellectual and moral quality of Indian leadership. From Rammohun Roy in the 18th Century to Vivekananda, Tilak, Gandhi and Ambedkar, there was a formidable and unwavering line of Hindu defense. The British managed to poison inter-caste relations but that did not affect a cultural unity forged over millennia; even at the height of his disgust with high caste bigotry Ambedkar never lost sight of that irreducible reality. When the British tried to create a separate electorate for the lowest castes, seeking to replicate their success in splitting a faction of Muslims from the nationalist mainstream, Gandhi went on a “fast unto death” to prevent it.

This is not to say that the British did not succeed in taking control of the overall Indian narrative by conceptualizing its history in communal terms and by outright fabrications such as the “Aryan invasion theory” postulating an imaginary proto-European parent of Indian civilization. But that was as much self-deception as it was manipulation. In fact, the invention of the “Aryan Race” proved disastrous for Britain: it became the basis for the racist ideology of Nazi Germany and, in one of history’s rich ironies, mobilized under the Swastika the armies that demolished its capacity to hold onto India. Another exercise in self-deception, the bombastic claim that the British had “invented Hinduism,” did not have the least effect on Indians but it blurred British understanding of Indian realities, especially Gandhi’s massive political power.

The only way the British could get a manipulative handle on Hindus was through communal violence, and it is instructive to look at how they managed it.

By the time the British took power in Bengal in 1757, Islam in India had undergone a long process of adaptation. Most notably, it had developed the indigenous Sufi tradition that moved it towards other Indian faiths and indeed, brought it a large Hindu following.

The ruling elites of the country helped that interfaith melding. Shivaji, now an icon for Hindu intolerance, had Muslims at every level in his army and endowed Sufi shrines; Aurangzeb, remembered for his imposition of the hated Jaziya (tax on non-Muslims) and persecution of the Sikhs, also employed people of all religions and extended support for temples.

Perhaps nothing exemplifies the easy coexistence of those times more than Netaji Palkar, one of Shivaji’s commanders who joined the Mughal army, converted to Islam, and fought for ten years against the Afghans under the name of Quli Mohammed Khan; after that he returned without fuss to Shivaji's service and Hinduism.

Against that background, it is easy to see why Hindu-Muslim differences were not a factor in the century-long expansion of British rule in India: the treacheries that helped them were within the communities, not between them. The British focus shifted only after the 1857 uprising made clear that their rule could not survive if Hindus and Muslims were to unite in more effective opposition.

To prevent that from happening became a primary aim of Britain's India policy. Initially, it involved no more than playing favorites with patronage to promote elite jealousies. The British were also deft at creating communal distrust. When an important section of the Muslim intelligentsia lost its livelihood because courts in north India stopped using Persian, the British blamed the change on “pressure” from Hindus. That was a laughable proposition in the prevailing circumstances, but it deflected blame and embittered Hindu-Muslim relations. By misrepresenting Hindu protests at the increasing slaughter of cows for British consumption as anti Muslim (at a time when the community, in the Arab-Persian tradition, ate mainly mutton), the regime created an enduring hot-button issue.

Divisive maneuvers became more overt after the Indian National Congress (founded in 1885) began to focus on Hindu-Muslim commonalities.

As the number of Muslim delegates to the annual sessions of the Congress rose from two to 22 percent and leaders like Mohammad Ali Jinnah assumed national prominence, the British split Bengal along communal lines and prompted the formation of the All India Muslim League. A few years later, the shadowy creation of the Hindu Mahasabha gave the British a Hindu proxy as well. Despite their grandiloquent names both were tiny organizations with little political appeal, especially at a time when Hindu-Muslim amity was at an all-time high because of Congress backing for the pan-Islamic Khilafat movement to safeguard the Caliph in the wake of Turkey’s defeat in World War I.

However, the atmosphere changed radically after the Khilafat movement dissolved in the wake of Kemal Ataturk’s abolition of the Turkish Caliphate and the eruption of the “Maplah (Muslim) Rebellion” in Kerala.

The British were clearly behind the Maplah violence in a province where Islam, Christianity and Hinduism had coexisted peacefully for many centuries. The poor and largely illiterate Maplahs were stirred by talk that they would be invulnerable to all weapons in a jihad for a new Caliphate. Although it was supposedly anti-British, their spree of murder and rapine turned against their Hindu neighbors. As I explain in 1001 Things Every Indian Should Know, these developments came in the wake of a major effort by Spymaster John Arnold-Wallinger to expand the assets of the Indian Political Intelligence Office, a coincidence historians have yet to explore.

In the wake of Gandhi’s first great non-cooperation movement in 1920 the British activated important new proxies to carry forward their new divisive agenda.

One was Mohammad Ali Jinnah, just a few years earlier the “Ambassador of Hindu Muslim unity.” He had self-destructed politically within the Congress by eloping, at the age of 42, with the 18-year old daughter of an influential Parsi leader of the party. Although he made not the least pretence of being an observant Muslim, Jinnah became the leader of the League.

On the Hindu side, the British got as proxy the fiery patriot Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, who they broke with brutal and degrading torture at the notorious "Cellular Jail" at Port Blair in the Andamans. Months into a 50-year sentence Savarkar wrote a letter pleading for mercy and promised in another to do whatever the British wanted. In 1923 he wrote the tract Hindutva, setting out a Hindu version of the League’s “two nation” theory; it argued that Muslims must submit to the dominance of the Hindu majority. After release in 1924 he lived in a pleasant bungalow the British provided in Ratnagiri and in 1927, despite being a professed atheist, he took over as the head of the Hindu Mahasabha.

Two years earlier, B. S. Moonje, a doctor from Nagpur who had served with the British Army in the Boer War, had established the Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh (National Self-Service Society). It inculcated strongly anti-Muslim views in idealistic Hindu youth and trained them to become a source of thuggish street muscle to counter the Muslim community's capacity for violence.

With the help of two Godless men at the helm of rival communal organizations, the British then set about ratcheting up the Hindu-Muslim "riots" that destroyed Indian unity. Writing about this period, the American journalist William Shirer noted that it was difficult to find out how many of India’s communal riots “were incited by the British in their effort to keep both communities at each other’s throats so that they could not unite in their drive for self-rule.” He quoted the British Chief of Police in Bombay saying “almost as a joke – that it was very easy to provoke a Hindu-Muslim riot. For a hundred dollars, he said, you could start something really savage. Pay some Muslims to throw the carcass of a cow into a Hindu temple, or some Hindus to toss a dead pig into a mosque, and you could have, he said, a bloody mess, in which a lot of people would be knifed, beaten and killed.”

In Part 2: Partition and Beyond