Are All Postcolonial Nations Brahmanical Constructs?

Note: Emotional comments are for the Open Season Thread. 

Every postcolonial elite preserves the borders it inherited. That is the reason we live in the world we live in: every succeeding elite has been very keen to preserve the boundaries of its state, and it is never the case, under a postcolonial elite, that nations go back to their original topographies. The map, once drawn, becomes sacred. The question in this title is whether the post-colonials are Brahmanical gatekeepers (I’m aware the Commentariat don’t like the nomenclature but it is particularly apt for an Apex Elite).

I. A Brahmanical construct

Maybe India is also a Brahmanical construct. I am not talking Pakistani propaganda here. Politically sovereignty in India was always more socially permeable than a static reading of caste would imply, and again and again the great empires were seized by men from the middle of the order who then rapidly Sanskritised. The Nandas, who raised the first empire out of Magadha, are sneered at in the Puranas as shudras. Two millennia later Shivaji, a Maratha of cultivator-warrior stock, had to import Gagabhatta from Banaras to certify a Rajput Sisodia genealogy before his coronation could proceed. He took power first and purchased pedigree afterwards.

The higher castes, for their part, rarely had political autonomy. Their dominance was over whatever served as the proto-civil service, the elite registers and the rituals of certification. An enterprising mid-caste individual would burst into the ranks, a phenomenon found throughout the world; Napoleon, a minor Corsican noble, ended by marrying a Habsburg, and would rapidly acquire the patina of elite dominance, one way or the other. And because caste markers are patrilineal, one never inherited caste from one’s mother (Kerala’s matrilineal Nairs, as ever, excepted).

The two famous Brahmin dynasties, Pushyamitra Shunga after the Mauryas and the Peshwas after Shivaji’s heirs, both reached the throne through service’ a general in the one case, hereditary ministers in the other. When Brahmins ruled, the road ran through the secretariat.

So let “Brahmin,” is a short-hand for the record-keeping class, which certifies the winners.

II. The Dravidian other

The Aryan-Dravidian divide would be the most salient cleft of them all, and I have been thinking a lot about the Dravidian other (shielded by the Deccan from the vagaries of conquest). The only Aryans who seemed to have settled south of the Deccan were Brahmins who were invited to Sanskritised the region?

The emergence of the “Open season thread” phenomenon means there is a psychosis in the Aryan civil war.

What is the psychosis that consumes the entire subcontinent? Look at the elevation map. It is, ultimately, the Indo-Gangetic plain; that is what has been cleft, and that is also what does the cleaving with the inexorable Hindu-Muslim. The plain presses outward on everything around it and cannot quite accept that anything around it is its equal.

The geography resists the psychosis. The plain’s power has always projected poorly past its own edges; every northern empire ran aground on the Deccan, and Aurangzeb spent his last quarter-century failing to digest it, dying there in 1707. And beyond the plateau stands the counterweight itself: Dravidian India, with its own classicism and its own kingships, the one civilisational pole the plain could neither absorb nor ignore.

III. Watersheds

In a weird way, partition made no sense whatsoever but also made a lot of geographic sense. Consider what it actually did: Punjab means five waters, and a lawyer who had never before set foot in India took a few weeks to draw a line through all five. It then required the Indus Waters Treaty of 1960 to re-partition the rivers, because the boundary had refused to follow them.

The sub-partitions made some sense at all, since East Bengal, of course, always had a very strong identity of its own and Majha Punjab (Lahore-Amristar is the line that runs between river-fed and rain fed Punjab).

One could have really created an Indus-watershed state and a Brahmaputra-watershed state, and these would have been very strong geopolitical constructs in whatever Confederation emerged. That is not what I am here to litigate, because ordinarily, more than language and more than ethnicity, geography is the best definition of state power. The point about a watershed is that a state can expand all the way to the very edges of its ridges, to its own side of the mountains. Mountains, like oceans, make some of the best barriers and boundaries there are, for culture and for politics both. That is why Kerala, in a way, is a very distinct identity from its “parent” Tamil Nadu, except for the Palakkad Gap; the one true breach in the Western Ghats, through which the railway and half the loan-words pass. However Kerala looks to the Arabian Sea while Tamil Nadu hugs the Bay of Bengal, which accounts for very different historical realities (one sees South East Asia, the other receives from the Middle East)

The Grand Cholas ignored watershed logic altogether and took to the sea, Rajendra sending his fleet against Srivijaya in 1025. The Oceanic barrier, it turns out, was also a road towards Hindufication and Tamilicisation of “Indo-China”.

IV. Does the Raj live on?

Q made an interesting point: Indians being upset that “their” empire being lost to them. In a strange way, both India and Pakistan are upper-caste constructs, imperial constructs that wanted to keep as much of the empire as possible.

The caste facts are real: the Congress high command was overwhelmingly twice-born, and the Muslim League was an ashraf project. But the mechanism, as in section one, is the proto-civil service. Hamza Alavi called Pakistan’s makers the salariat, the Muslim salaried and secretarial class conjuring a state in which it would be the elite; the Congress lawyers, for their part, inherited the Raj’s steel frame and never dreamed of melting it down. The Brahmanical construct scales.

Bangladesh in 1971 is the great stress test. It was a subaltern revolt against the inherited imperial structure; it was proof that language can defeat territorial preservation, a movement that began with students dying for Bengali in 1952; and it broke the border precisely because the centre had turned extractive, treating the east as revenue and garrison. It was also intellectually led, and the occupying army knew it; in its final week it hunted down Dhaka’s intellectuals. Armies do not waste their last days on irrelevant men. Sri Lanka, meanwhile, ran the same course as the rest: the English-speaking Ceylonese elite inherited the unitary colonial state intact in 1948 and kept it. Everybody wanted to preserve the postcolonial.

V. The Uncolonised

There are very few nations in the world, with the exception of Iran, Thailand, Japan, China, Turkey, and Ethiopia, which were not colonised by the great powers, and their borders are therefore, for better or for worse, very natural constructs. Test even this list and it sharpens rather than blunts. The pure cases are Japan behind its ocean, Iran behind the Zagros and the Elburz. Thailand survived partly as a diplomatic buffer, shaving off provinces to stay whole; China was carved into concessions without ever being swallowed; Ethiopia’s highlands bought it everything except five years under Italy; Turkey’s present borders were drawn at Lausanne in 1923, an empire cut back to its Anatolian redoubt. Geography gave them better terms than history.

The colonised, by contrast, have been very keen to maintain colonial borders; so keen that they wrote the instinct into law. When the newly free African states met at Cairo in 1964, they pledged to respect the frontiers inherited from their colonisers; uti possidetis, as you possess, so may you continue to possess. The coloniser’s map was received the way a shastra is received, as the text that settles the question.

So: are all postcolonial nations Brahmanical constructs? In function, yes. In every one of them a successor class took an empire it could not have built, kept the mythos and certified its own genealogy (Indonesia and the Majapahit Empire), and deemed themselves a nation.

The borders survived because the elites survived. India and Pakistan are only the clearest case, because there the Elite is old enough to have a name (Sayyid and Brahmin are two sides of the same coin). And beneath every inherited line the older map waits, the ridges and the watersheds, indifferent to the postcolonial Elite that administer the borders above them. Partition cut joint peoples; but it also exposed the shared geography underneath.