by MURALI KAMMA
Few Indians writing nonfiction today are as prominent as Pankaj Mishra. Known widely for his incisive articles and analyses, which often appear in respected periodicals, he is the author of five books, including the recently published From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia. Mishra spoke to Khabar.
Now in his early 40s, writer Pankaj Mishra is married to Mary Mount, a U.K.-based book editor and Prime Minister David Cameron’s cousin. Her father, a notable British literary figure, was an advisor to Margaret Thatcher. That should lead to interesting discussions at family gatherings, for Mishra is hardly a Tory sympathizer or a friend to powerful politicians. He can be fiercely anti-establishment, in fact, and is a champion of activist writers like Arundhati Roy, whom he “discovered” as a young editor when the manuscript of her Booker Prize-winning The God of Small Things landed on his desk.
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You note how European colonialism was unlike other conquests, in that it wasn’t just about political, economic, and military domination. But others have said that there was nothing unique about it. There were earlier invaders like the Mughals who wreaked much havoc. Even within Indian society we had the cruelties of the caste system, which inflicted so much damage. So what makes British colonialism and racism so different?
The simple answer to that is we’re not living in a world made by Mughal imperialism. We’re not living in a world made by Persian or Ottoman imperialism. We’re living in a world made by Western imperialism. So that is my primary concern. That’s what I’m dealing with here, the kind of imperialism that has really left no part of the world unaffected. Wherever you go you see emblems of Western modernity. The West was not just politically and militarily dominant, but also intellectually and morally dominant. Countries all around the world have adopted some form of Western political system, ideologies, forms of Western popular culture, ways of Western dress. If you can name a single imperialism in the past that achieved this kind of success—or this kind of tragic success—I’d be very impressed. There’s no imperialism that comes close to establishing this kind of global presence and global hierarchy where entire nations in Europe are on top. No other imperialism, however strong and powerful, was able to establish that kind of presence.
Not only in terms of range, but also in the length of time …
Absolutely. People were cruel, brutal, ruthless…any number of examples spring to mind from Alexander the Great to Genghis Khan. But their brutality was constrained by the limited number of resources they had. Alexander the Great swept across a lot of territory and killed a lot of people, but then he went back. That was it. Then he left this loosely administered territory behind. But this business of getting farmers in Bihar to grow opium for sale to China, and forcing the Chinese to buy the opium, and using Indian soldiers to beat up the Chinese, importing Chinese labor into the Caribbean, importing Indian labor into the Fiji islands—this kind of global movement of capital, of products, of human labor—this was totally unprecedented.
This brings me to your [highly critical] review of Niall Ferguson’s Civilization: The West and the Rest. It provoked such a furious reaction from him. He claims that there were six killer apps that helped the West beat the rest and dominate the world for 500 years or whatever. But you say that he missed one important killer app. How important was that missing killer app?
The most important of these so-called killer apps was imperialism. The fact is that the West had such a huge advantage over everyone else when it set out to expand its economy. Britain had the entire world at its disposal back in the early 19th century and could conquer with its superior power just about any part of the world it wanted to. Same with America when it became an industrial power in the late 19th century. I think to discount the role of conquest and imperial exploitation and to simply credit the West with certain indigenous advantages that the West apparently accumulated without any help from anyone else is nonsense. We know that Western science was a collaborative project—discoveries by Arab scientists, Indian mathematicians, Chinese scientists had led up to what happened in the West. And they obviously used science and technology in ways that had not been used before, such as the way in which they developed superior military firepower. Gunpowder had been invented before, but hadn’t been used in quite the same way.
The Chinese and Indians and any number of others weren’t interested in global conquest the same way. They had the resources and were traveling but they weren’t interested in conquering. The Chinese emperors, for instance, did send out any number of navies and merchant ships into the big wide world. One should acknowledge the many advantages that the West subsequently accumulated since the late 18th century, [but] this talk of 500 years is all rubbish. Most people even in the late 18th century were being extremely reverential to the Chinese emperor and to some of the Indian kings and chieftains. It was only after the late 18th and in the early 19th centuries that the West took the lead over the Asian countries.
Our readers would be more interested in Tagore than the other intellectuals you profile. He became an influential and inspiring figure after winning the Nobel Prize. But then, even as he was being lionized in the West, Asians became disenchanted with him. Why did that happen?
Tagore plays a very important role because he enters the book when [the others] are being pushed aside. Particularly in Japan, which is already modernized but finding that there are limits to its attempt to become a respectable international power, there are certain hurdles being put in its way. So it has to become more militaristic and go all the way in its imitation of Western imperialism. Tagore is a very strong critic of that from the beginning, and he can see that the whole quest for modernization can lead nations and peoples down these blind alleys. Japan is the first example of that in Asia, where it becomes a clone of Western imperialism. Tagore offers a very strong and persuasive moral critique of nationalism and of the nation state and also implicitly of the kind of hard-line ideologies emerging in Asia at that time. He’s a very important thinker in that way.
Do we see echoes of what you wrote in the Arab Spring? It looks like “the democratization of mass resentment” that you talk about is happening today.
The Arab Spring is basically delayed decolonization. We in India and elsewhere in Asia went through this process about 50-60 years ago and finally emerged from under the yoke of Western empires and became relatively sovereign nations with little Western interference. But that hasn’t been the case with the Arab world. They enjoyed some degree of sovereignty but they were all under great pressure most of the time. And then they were reabsorbed into the Western imperium. Countries like Egypt under Hosni Mubarak were basically client states of the United States. And finally now, with the younger, politicized population, they have broken through to this ideal of sovereignty and self-determination that many other countries in Asia have been already enjoying. I think it’s completing a historical process that started in the mid-20th century. It’s by no means a complete process. There will be many, many more. There are hurdles to come and there will be a lot of chaos and violence in various parts of post-colonial Asia and Africa. The important thing that has happened is that they’ve broken free of the spell of Western power. It’s part of the historical logic of the 20th century.
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