Review: From the Ruins of Empire; The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia

A minor sidelight in the Islam section:

Akbar Ilahabadi was an Indian Islamist poet who is often (and most approvingly) quoted in this section. In reality, he was a traditionalist, shocked by most “innovations” in Islamic thought or practice (e.g. the appearance of women outside of purdah was a pet peeve) but not so shocked at being in British service (he spent his entire working life in government service, retiring as a session judge and being given a minor imperial honor as a reward for his services). His position of honor in PMs book is dependent on carefully excluding aspects of his life that do not fit the anti-colonial guerrilla war Pankaj is waging a hundred years after the fact.

Meanwhile, Pankaj has this to say about the Mahdi in Sudan:

“in the Sudan in the 1870s, a charismatic leader calling himself the Mahdi emerged at the head of a millenarian movement to beat back not only the Egyptian Khedive but also his British allies. Scoring one brilliant victory after another, he promised to Islamize the entire world”.  Afghani, Pankaj reports, becomes an eager follower of the Mahdi. “he had clearly and vehemently turned against the kind of accommodation to Western power and tutelage that many Muslim elites had previously advocated.”

We know by now that even the craziest and most fanatical scheme against the British empire or its puppets is going to get PM’s approval. But if you know more about Akbar Ilahabadi, you could be forgiven for thinking that “accommodationist” or “puppet of the British Empire” is a list in which Akbar Ilahabadi would surely be included by Pankaj if he was not already in use as poster boy of anti-colonial heroism (Akbar being far more “accommodationist” in how he lived his life than even the Sudanese who tried to resist the Mahdist revolution).

The Chinese and Indian/Hindu Section.
Pankaj is a great fan of Islam as the virile tradition that is “challenging empire” but other Asians should not relax. There is a Tagore section after a
detour through China (its Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist revolution and
hyper-capitalist industrialization forgiven as it prepares to do battle
against “empire”).

In many ways, the Chinese and Tagore sections are even weaker than the
Afghani section. The same confusion remains paramount. Thinkers in China and India are said to be responding to Western dominance but Pankaj does not want to say they were dominated.  Every time he shows how weak China or India were in the face of Western invaders, he also wants to say that they were never as weak as portrayed in his favorite straw-man, “the dominant narrative”. He also consistently underplays all examples of sectarian or religious violence in Asian countries (unless it can be blamed on Europeans), but pounces on every example of violence or duplicity in the Europeans. It is all perfectly calibrated to suit the tastes of his eager (and forgiving) audience. As long as their buttons are pressed, Pankaj (and they) seem to have no problem with button A being contradictory to button B.

Modern China was built on traditional China and big influences include Sun Yat Sen’s nationalism (explicitly described as an opponent of Liang by Pankaj himself),  Mao’s revolution (its debt to Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism acknowledged by his followers and his detractors, his debt to Liang, mostly imaginary) and Deng’s counter-revolution (his debt to America to be found in the 100,000 Chinese he sent there to study, his debt to Liang?). If and when modern capitalism and nationalism fails in China and if and when some sort new synthesis  (whatever that is, Pankaj has
not enlightened us about the new faith that will replace “the dominant
narrative”)  replaces it, maybe we will be forced to say something else.
But for now, how is modern China in any way the creation of Liang Qichao more than it is the creation of Sun Yat Sen, Mao or Deng (and through them, of several Western thinkers, including Marx, Lenin and Adam Smith)?
Pankaj fails to make that case and yet labels him one of his “intellectuals who remade Asia”. How so?

Modern India meanwhile is the product of British empire building, an
earlier Mughal empire, a Turkic colonial empire (the Delhi Sultanate) and an earlier Gupta empire that may be described as the charter state of Hindu-ist India.  More recently, its shape and form owe much to the successes and failures  of people like Gandhi and Nehru, and  the modern political party (the Congress Party) that they led (albeit with skilful use of Indian cultural memes by Gandhi).  Yet the person Pankaj has chosen as one of his three “intellectuals who remade Asia” is Tagore. How exactly can the last 100 years of Indian history be described as the fruit of Tagore’s intellectual labors? if Tagore had not even existed,would India look that different?

I am sure Tagore was a good man (and in his own naive way, not critical of Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism, not to speak of gentler Western models) but how exactly did he “remake Asia”?

Pankaj himself describes the failure of Liang and Tagore to do much (and their disappointment at the end of their lives). Maybe he
sees their main achievement as the fact that they had their doubts about Western notions of progress (more so than Nehru or Mao) and warned that these notions may include hidden disasters. And indeed, some of these dangers have become more manifest today, so in retrospect they may seem somewhat prophetic on this score, but the crucial fact is that any rethinking that is taking place today owes little or nothing to these particular individuals.  Their influence in their own time was limited, their detailed programs were either missing or included as many errors as prescient predictions (Tagore and Stalinism, for example). The responsea offered by all three thinkers to the Western “dominant narrative” is different and only partly accurate. It needs a lot of selective reading to make them part of the same trend in anything more substantial than “somewhat skeptical of Western civilization”, but maybe PM’s audience knows even less than he does, so he gets away with it?

PM clearly feels that the demise of “Western” notions like the secular nation state is now imminent, so insofar as they were skeptical about this notion, those intellectuals are about to be vindicated. But real vindication
would involve being right in more detail than just some vague notion that “materialistic Western civilization” is doomed. It would also involve being at least partially right about what happens if it fails.  And in any case, with nation states and capitalism still very much alive how can these brave intellectuals be said to have “created modern Asia” (as the title claims)?

What follows amplifies (and sometimes just repeats) some of these points and includes excerpts from an interview with Pankaj. You can stop here if you wish 🙂

To get some idea of Pankaj Mishra’s thought process, take a look at these excerpts from a recent interview with fellow prophet of doom, Hamid Dabashi of Columbia University:

Hamid: “Postcolonialism is a mode of knowledge production. Colonialism happened, then postcolonial nation states emerged, and they become conducive to the production of ideologies – nationalism, third world socialism, Islamism, etc. These ideologies have exhausted themselves and postcolonialism has ceased to produce knowledge. This is what I call the end of postcolonialism and the result is postcolonial leaders running for their lives across North Africa and the Arab world.”

Now the world is rather large. Which parts exactly have moved beyond
the ideologies of socialism, nationalism, Islamism etc? (interestingly, capitalism is not mentioned in that list; perhaps sensibly enough).
China is no longer nationalist? India has dissolved the nation
state? Japan has moved beyond Nationalism? What does this statement really mean? A few (very few) dictators in the Arab world, long since past their sell-by date, have been deposed (3 at last count, out of 30 or so Arab countries, one in the rest of the world if you count that exemplar of post-post-colonialism, Zimbabwe). In most cases they have been replaced by new regimes trying to stabilize their nation-states in ways completely predictable in the modern paradigm, or by anarchy. What does Hamid’s question even mean?

Here is PM’s humble response:
“I would date my political awakening in many ways to that particular visit (to
Kashmir), where I was confronted with the debris of the postcolonial ideology. I saw how a postcolonial ideology of secular nationalism had turned malign and had become extremely oppressive for the four million Muslims of Kashmir, who had embodied at some point – and they still do – a cosmopolitan idea of culture, a cosmopolitan idea of society. Here they were being asked to conform to a certain form of postcolonial polity which claimed to be secular but that
actually concealed a very strong Hindu majoritarian element.”

I invite Indian friends to have a go at this one. Start with “postcolonial ideology of secular nationalism” versus the Kashmiri Muslim idea of  ” a cosmopolitan idea of culture, a cosmopolitan idea of society.”

In any case, if Kashmir had already thrown off the Indian yoke and become some sort of cosmopolitan post-state  alternative to the malignant nation-state then we would have had to sit up and take notice. As it is,even if this Muslim revolt had succeeded, (it shows no signs of doing so, I am just saying even if it did) it would almost certainly lead to a modest enlargement in the size of nationalist Islamist Pakistan at the expense of nationalist putatively secular India. In a more ambitious scenario, it could even trigger the collapse of modern India (the one Pankaj doesnt like too much), but what would follow that? I submit that what would like follow is a violent free for all that would probably entail Pankaj spending much more time in London than in Mashobra. But it would still not negate whatever it is that Pankaj thinks it has already negated about the modern world. Yes, the straw-man of peaceful, perfectly secular, perfectly just, perfectly-formed nation states would go down in flames. But the actually existing world of nation-states indulging in violence, territorial grabs, religious violence and so on would remain unsurprised even if parts of it in the Indian subcontinent are violently rearranged. Whatever revelation Pankaj had in Kashmir, it does not seem on the verge of fulfillment to me.

Keep in mind that I am NOT saying that secular nationalism etc cannot
be malign. But actually existing A needs to be described accurately, then
perhaps replaced by actually possible B. PM’s description of actually existing A seems to be all too frequently overpowered by his intense desire to see a modern Western “materialist” civilizational catastrophe. As he himself put it in this interview:

“The old paradigm of “The West” having reached the summit of human achievement – modernity – with everyone else catching up, lies exploded due to various crises not just within “The West” but also the sheer scale of environmental crises that are about to overwhelm large parts of India and China who have elected to follow that particular path of development and globalisation”

Since this apocalyptic vision is already mainstream in the Western Left (currently waiting for global warming to finally do what years of revolutionary intellectual effort have failed to accomplish), it is accepted without question by his audience. But out there in the real world, modern civilization, even in its vicious aspect, is closer to what Marx predicted it would be:

“The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising
the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and
with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of
production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of
existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of
production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting
uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier
ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable
prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is
profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real
conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”

This is not necessarily a happy state. Maybe “we” were better off without it. (that is a big maybe though, since it has to take into account that most of “us” were peasants living uncomfortably close to the edge of famine in the good old days). And maybe new ways of social and communal life will arise from the smoking ruins of the old (or, perhaps in a few luckier cases, will evolve relatively peacefully from the old). One can certainly make a case against bourgeouise triumphalism. It can even be an Islamist case or a Hindutvadi case or one of a thousand other cases that have been made in the past (within Western civilization and outside it) and continue to be made today but what exactly is special or especially influential about these three intellectuals? And where has their vision (such as it was) successfully replaced the “dominant paradigm”?

Incidentally, in the same interview PM also says about the Indian emperor Akbar:

“Someone like Mughal emperor Jalal-ud-Din Muhammad Akbar, nominally a Muslim emperor and yet incredibly syncretic. Someone who knew he was presiding over a multi-ethnic, multi-racial, multi-religious reality. These are examples of suppressed histories that we don’t really talk about much or that don’t form part of the dominant narrative.”

WTF?
First of all, this view of Akbar the Great as a great syncretic ruler (correct or not is a separate issue) has been around since the 19th century! British historians described him in exactly those terms, as did Nehru and many many Indian nationalists. What dominant narrative? what suppressed history?

Another interesting thing about Pankaj: his heroes OUTSIDE India tend to be the same kind of people he cannot stand INSIDE India. Afghani, with his pan-islamist dreams (with a reformed and modernized Islam in place in a Muslim empire that can match the West in scientific and military terms, not just in some airy-fairy spiritual realm) is good in Pankaj-land (the same goes for Chinese and Japanese nationalists), but Savarkar, with similar nationalist-revivalist dreams about Hindu India is not?  It is something to think about.

In summary, the core claim of this book is that these were the intellectual who remade Asia. How so? Jamaluddin Afghani was a serial impostor who tried to sell his services to every empire of the day (British, Russian, Turkish, Persian, Egyptian) and failed in every one of his harebrained schemes. His efforts had no detectable impact on the rise or fall of the British empire. His attempts at creating some sort of modern Islam, neither Shia nor Sunni and able to meet the Western challenge, have not become the dominant form of resistance in the Islamic world.

It is a tremendous stretch to say that Afghani was somehow the prime mover of the Islamic revivalist trend. That trend existed (and still exists) because the Islamicate world retained a self-image of ideal unity and worldly power and reacted from day one to “objective conditions” that
did not conform to their self-image. There is a long history of Ottoman
attempts at “catching up” with the West by revitalizing their ideology and practice. Mishra himself makes tangential mention of those attempts (though he tends to empathize mostly with those who completely rejected Western knowledge and insisted on an “authentic” response). Similarly there were multiple Persian attempts at reform and re-invigoration. Afghani would approve of some of them. All of them came and went how so far they did without him. Allama Iqbal’s attempt at a modern yet authentic Islamic revival owed little or nothing to Afghani. He admired Afghan, but his ideology, such as it was, was his own, not derived from Afghanin. In any case that vision has now petered out after Saudi money pumped up the
more “authentic” return-to-purity version.

I can see that some people love Mishra because they think colonialism and imperialism were bad and he is anti-colonial and anti-imperialist, so he must be good. Now I can imagine a Leninist willing to use him (while laughing at him behind his back), and if you are that kind of Leninist, carry on. But other than that kind of instrumental usefulness, he is not a good guide to what actually happened and what is happening now. You would learn more about the past from reading Wikipedia.  I am not saying colonialism was good (or bad, for that matter). I am just saying things were rather different in too many details and his framework is a very 21st century liberal Westoxicated framework, mixed (sometimes awkwardly) with some specifically Indian Left-Liberal talking points. It is not a good enough guide to what actually happened.