BRITAIN & INDIA
Part I
Mahatma Gandhi was one of a hundred Heroes and Icons TIME magazine celebrated in a special issue marking the end of the 20th century. An article by India-born British novelist Salman Rushdie explained his place in history. Rushdie began his piece with a riff on the Apple Corporation’s “Think Different” advertising campaign. “A thin Indian man with not much hair sits alone on a bare floor, wearing nothing but a loincloth and a pair of cheap spectacles, studying the clutch of handwritten notes in his hand. The black-and-white photograph takes up a full page in the newspaper. In the top left-hand corner of the page, in full colour, is a small rainbow-striped apple. Below this, there's a slangily American injunction to Think Different. Once, a half-century ago, this bony man shaped a nation's struggle for freedom. But that, as they say, is history. Now Gandhi is modeling for Apple.” Gandhi today is “up for grabs” Rushdie declared. “He has become abstract, ahistorical, postmodern, no longer a man in and of his time but a freeloading concept, a part of the available stock of cultural symbols, an image that can be borrowed, used, distorted, reinvented to fit many different purposes, and to the devil with historicity or truth.“ As if to validate that last phrase he then served up the following reprise of colonial era British propaganda:

• Gandhi was “afraid of the dark, and always slept with a light burning by his bedside.” 

• The literal translation of his name was "Action-Slave Fascination-Moon Grocer," and “he was as rich and devious a figure as that glorious name suggests.”

• It was Gandhi’s “failure to keep the Muslim leader Mohammed Ali Jinnah within the Indian National Congress's fold” that “led to the partition of the country.”

• “He was determined to live his life as an ascetic, but, as the poet Sarojini Naidu joked, it cost the nation a fortune to keep Gandhi living in poverty.”

• “His hunger strikes could stop riots and massacres, but he also once went on a hunger strike to force one of his capitalist patrons' employees to break their strike against the harsh conditions of employment.”

• “Gandhian techniques were not the key determinants of India's arrival at freedom. They gave independence its outward character and were its apparent cause, but darker and deeper historical forces produced the desired effect.”

• Gandhi “was a passionate opponent of modernity and technology, preferring the pencil to the typewriter, the loincloth to the business suit, the plowed field to the belching manufactory. Had the word processor been invented in his lifetime, he would almost certainly have found it abhorrent.  ... [He] made a conscious decision to go back to the Middle Ages." 

• “The creator of the political philosophies of passive resistance and constructive nonviolence, he spent much of his life far from the political arena, refining his more eccentric theories of vegetarianism, bowel movements and the beneficial properties of human excrement.”

None of the other Heroes and Icons was accorded such negative treatment; in fact, all other articles in the issue were uniformly uncritical. Why was Gandhi the exception? TIME is the most ideological of mainstream American magazines and such a gratuitous attack on a revered figure could not be anything but political. Going just by the contents of the article, the editors of TIME, who continue to maintain a defensive Cold War attitude towards an encroaching world, probably felt the need to counter Apple’s suggestion that Gandhi, the antithesis to American consumerism, should be a role model. Rushdie’s published record of contempt for the land of his birth made him a natural choice to do a hatchet job, and he had to lie and distort – every quote above is one or the other – because the truth would only have reinforced Apple’s view. Rushdie’s own motivation is not so easy to explain. He is the loose end of a very tangled skein, leading into multiple layers of history and politics; we must follow the story patiently through knot and twist to see its thread run clear.

Rushdie was born in Mumbai of Muslim parents who sent him away as a boy to be educated in one of Britain’s famously oppressive private schools. He emerged from it a Brown Sahib disdainful of his own country and traditions, a species of Indian the British deliberately created to collaborate in colonial rule. That self-hate did not find voice in his weak and little noticed first novel, Grimus, but it was the effulgent core of his second effort, Midnight’s Children, written in a strikingly more energetic “magical-realist” style. The novel shot to instant fame because it won the £50,000 Booker Prize, often described as “Britain’s most prestigious literary award.” However, the Booker Corporation, a right-wing outfit with a decidedly unsavoury colonial-era reputation, had neither literary antecedents nor associations before it endowed the award – at the suggestion of Ian Fleming, an MI-6 specialist in psychological operations who authored the James Bond novels. (MI stands for Military Intelligence; its Section 6 deals with foreign dirty tricks.) Booker juries change every year and individuals rarely participate in more than one, ensuring that the modalities of selecting winners remain firmly in the hands of faceless sherpas. The four “Indian” novels Booker juries have chosen to reward over the last four decades have an interesting sameness: all depict the country in the divisive terms the British invented in their effort to subvert and demoralize the nationalist movement; all are filled with characters caught in webs of caste, religion or ethnicity, aimless and ultimately despairing. Two were first novels: Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (which she originally claimed to have written without the knowledge of her husband), and Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger. The other two were second novels markedly different from weak first efforts –Rushdie’s, as already noted, and Kiran Desai’s Inheritance of Loss. None of the four is rooted in Indian culture or values; Rushdie, Desai and Adiga have spent most of their lives outside India and are comprehensively deracinated; Arundhati Roy came from a broken Christian-Hindu home and led a vagabond existence till David Davidar, the founding head of Penguin India, “discovered” her. Penguin India also publishes Rushdie and Desai; Adiga might also have appeared under that imprint if Harper Collins had not hired away two of its senior staffers to begin its India operations.

Rushdie’s work is by far the most accomplished presentation of the British view of India as a gigantic freak-show of dissipation, hysteria and comic mangling of their language. The novel’s central conceit is that all babies born at the moment when India became independent were magically gifted in some way. Its main character has two such gifts, a powerful sense of smell and the capacity to serve as the telepathic medium for all the other 1001 magical children who are, says the hero, either “the last throw of everything antiquated and retrogressive in our myth ridden nation” or “the true hope of freedom.” By the sour end of the story that freedom is seen to be “forever extinguished;” all communication among the children has ended, and the hero is using his nose to track and kill intellectuals in East Pakistan during its struggle to become Bangladesh. The shelf-life of Rushdie’s 1981 work has been twice extended by being judged “Best of the Bookers” at the 25th and 40th anniversaries of the award; it is now being made into a Hollywood movie. In two subsequent novels, Shame! and The Satanic Verses, Rushdie lavished his raw contempt on Pakistan and Islam. These tragicomic pictures of his putative homelands and ancestral faith have in common one pronounced characteristic: they ignore the long British role as the puppet-master of South Asian and Islamic politics. In ridiculing Pakistan Rushdie avoided mentioning that Britain created the country – at the cost of a million lives – to be its violent proxy in South Asia. In casting scorn on the dreams and stories that surround the long-dead Prophet of Arabia Rushdie took no note of the prolonged British effort that manipulated the politically primitive and quiescent world of early 20th century Islam into its current suicidal blaze of extremism. [The manipulation involved three main elements: supporting Ibn Saud to become the ruler of Arabia, creating the Arab-Israeli conflict in Palestine, and sponsoring the Muslim Brotherhood, a violent secret society the Nazis had used in anti-Jewish campaigns during World War II. Saudi control of Islam’s holy places gave global influence to the family’s extremist Wahhabi creed; the dispossession of Palestinian Arabs outraged and radicalized Muslims all over the world; and the Muslim Brotherhood under transatlantic tutelage during the Cold War provided the leadership of every major “Islamic” terrorist organization.]

Arundhati Roy is not in the same literary league as Rushdie but she has reprised more clearly the stock British theme of India as a land of irredeemably oppressive caste and gender discrimination. She set her story in Kerala, celebrated in development studies for its liberated women and the revolutionary advances of its lower castes, the province with the highest literacy rates in the country, life expectancy comparable to Europe, and the only Indian state where, within a few decades of independence, land reform devolved ownership massively into the hands of the poor. Caste discrimination is murderous in The God Small Things. The low caste lover of a high caste (Christian) woman is kicked to death by the police, pictured as wearing boots for the job, an upgrade from the sensible chappals that are standard issue for Kerala police. The local Communist Party Chief is a Brahmin who had it in his power to prevent the murder but gave it the green light in the hope of currying favour with the woman’s brother. The bereaved woman dies of asthma in a railway waiting room. Her children survive, but the boy, who is molested as a child at a cinema hall, is emotionally dysfunctional; there is also a suggestion of sibling incest. The novel presents a dankly corrupt and despairing picture of India, and since getting the Booker Roy has given shrill voice to that perspective. She seldom offers constructive suggestions to deal with the objects of her vitriol; the prescriptions she does make tend to be hare-brained, extremist, or both: in 2008 she called for Indian withdrawal from Kashmir, a move that would shatter the country’s secular polity and fulfil British predictions that Hindus and Muslims can never coexist peacefully. Her latest book of essays declares Indian democracy a fake. Like Rushdie, she has avoided looking at the British authorship of many Indian miseries, especially its deliberate poisoning of caste and inter-faith relations.

Desai is the weakest of the Booker propagandists. Her plotless Inheritance of Loss strings together a succession of tragicomic stories about the humiliations and frustrations of people who are all orphans of British rule. The central character is a retired judge, once part of the elite Indian Civil Service, the reputed “steel frame” of British India. He leads a forlorn existence in a cold, mist-shrouded bungalow outside Darjeeling, beset with vague regrets at the long and hollow pretence of his life: in trying to blend in with the British culture of the ICS he rejected his father and ended his marriage after beating his pregnant wife black and blue because she innocently joined a public reception for Jawaharlal Nehru. Gun-toting young supporters of “Gorkhaland” terrorize the Judge, his recently arrived orphaned granddaughter, and their cook. The Judge’s only companion, his beloved dog Mutt, disappears, and he is driven to tears, to entreaties for divine intervention by a God he does not believe in, and to beating the cook. The cook’s son gets a tourist visa to go to the United States with lies and a forged bank statement; his jubilation at getting the visa is expressed by chasing pigs in a lush green public park watered “with raw sewage.” In America he is grossly exploited by the owner of the Gandhi Cafe. On his return to Darjeeling Gorkhas steal everything he brought back; the book ends with him at the Judge’s gate, dressed in a woman’s nightgown, defeated, penniless and humiliated. The only time the novel looks disparagingly at the British is when an old ICS colleague of the Judge comes for dinner and talks bitterly of not being given the same pension as White officers. What the British did to India in leaving is recorded without passion, without blame, as if it were a turn in the weather: “the news of the country disintegrating filled the newspapers; almost a million were dead in riots, three to four million in the Bengal famine, thirteen million were evicted from their homes; the birth of the nation was all in shadow. It seemed appropriate.”

Adiga’s tale, The White Tiger, is much more virulently and directly anti-Indian. Where the previous three Booker novels presented miserable situations and characters but left readers to connect the dots and come to their own conclusions about the country, Adiga indicts India venomously. His Australian-educated eyes focus on the spit, shit and disease of India, its corrupt politicians and its uncaring rich. He is entirely oblivious to all that is positive and admirable about India, its heroic endurance against staggering odds, its brave and humble people, its vibrant faith and enriching culture. The White Tiger has as hero a Delhi chauffer who murders his boss to get the money to start his own business in Bangalore, the central node of new, high-tech India. The book is written in the form of a letter from the murderer-entrepreneur to the Chinese Prime Minister who is visiting Bangalore; it begins by warning him not to be taken in by talk of Gandhi or Indian business acumen. Holding out his own experience as the national model, Adiga’s semi-literate hero declares India’s current economic rise to be entirely criminal. This crude assault on the country should be seen as an attempt to reassert the crippling prejudices the British had long cultivated. Adiga’s story is also at many points a call for caution by international investors in India. “Keep your ears open in Bangalore” he writes; as “in any city or town in India – you will hear stirrings, rumours, threats of insurrection. Men sit under lampposts at night and read. Men huddle together and discuss and point fingers to the heavens.” Revolution is brewing, but people are distracted by television, by cricket, by shampoo advertisements. He shifts his target audience in mid-letter to address potential insurrectionists: “The book of your revolution sits in the pit of your belly, young Indian. Crap it out and read.”

Is it far-fetched to look on the Booker awards as part of an elaborate British propaganda effort to project their negative view of India? Those inclined to be sceptical need to look at British history. The people of Britain represent successive waves of tribal invasions from Europe over thousands of years, each wave violently dispossessing its immediate predecessor. Though there has been much mixing of bloodlines, the lower classes and historically less-privileged parts of the country still represent conquered groups. Presiding over this layered social order is an elite minority that arrived in the 11th century. Once raw violence was no longer necessary to keep control, that group maintained itself in power by blocking the economic and social potential of the lower classes with impenetrably nuanced discrimination, keeping them in a perennial state of insecurity about everything from their accents, to their mannerisms, clothes, education, and way of life. The Welsh, Scots and Irish were the first victims of this method of governance, and it came into use across the Empire on which the sun never set. Such manipulation was set aside only where indigenous populations were useless as labour and incapable of organized resistance; in North America, Australia and New Zealand settler colonists committed genocide. Everywhere else, mind games were part of the standard operating procedure, and nowhere did they assume the same scale and intricacy as in India.

It began in Bengal with the East India Company’s first bid for power in 1756, some 150 years after its ships first weighed anchor off Surat, the main Mughal port on the Arabian Sea. In that time the agents of the Company had become confident at reading and manipulating local vulnerabilities, and as the Mughal Empire went from its zenith to quick disarray in the 18th century they were sure-footed in taking advantage. In Bengal, the richest Mughal province, they waited till the office of Nawab passed to a raw youth, 19-year old Suraj ud-Dowlah. They withheld taxes due to his treasury, provoking him to attack Calcutta. After he had taken and held Fort William briefly, they had the excuse to counter-attack, which they did in due time, in 1757. To justify it all they accused the Nawab of having perpetrated a harrowing atrocity on British prisoners at Fort William: 146 men and women had reportedly been thrust into a dungeon 14 feet by 18 feet, causing 123 to die of suffocation and thirst in one stifling summer night. The story of the “Black Hole of Calcutta” was patently absurd, for 146 Europeans could not possibly have fit into the dungeon. It was cooked up by the head of the East India Company in Calcutta six months after the alleged incident, as he sailed back to Britain to report to the Company Directors. None of those worthies nor their government overseers were interested in questioning the compressibility of human bodies in a story that justified a quick and profitable war. The war itself was largely fiction. It consisted of the “Battle of Plassey” (Pilashi), an engagement in which a force of 2000 under Robert Clive reportedly routed an army of 40,000; it was a feat made possible by bribing the Nawab’s general not to fight. These tales of Indian infamy and British valour became the founding legends of colonial rule in India, featured in history books and taught to generations of school children around the world.

During the century that followed, as the Company slowly extended its territories across India, every step was accompanied by a separate mendacious justification – this ruler had conspired against the British, another was vicious to his own people, yet another had interfered with trade – and they all slipped easily into the self-righteous narratives of colonial history and literature. This process created an official record of British imperialism in India that was so far removed from reality that Winston Churchill could claim (in his 1956-1957 History of the English Speaking Peoples) that it was all unintended: “Modern generations should not mistake the character of the British expansion in India. The government was never involved as a principal in the Indian conflict. The East India Company was a trading organization. Its directors were men of business. They wanted dividends, not wars, and grudged every penny spent on troops and annexations. But the turmoil of the great subcontinent compelled them against their will and their judgment to take control of more and more territory, till in the end, and almost by accident, they established an empire no less solid and certainly more peaceful than that of their Mughal predecessors. To call this process ‘Imperialist expansion’ is nonsense, if by that is meant the deliberate acquisition of political power. Of India, it has been well said that the British Empire was acquired in a fit of absence of mind.”

That argument was false at many levels. The British government acted through a private corporation in India because its misadventure in America had left a huge burden of official debt. The Company was chartered by the Crown, which came to own a third of its stock; its Directors included parliamentary appointees, and overseeing them was a cabinet minister. The Company charter was revised several times after 1661, always to extend its powers: to coin money, create armies, arm ships, summon Courts of Admiralty and enforce martial law; the Directors could initiate wars and negotiate treaties “with any people that are not Christians.” The main reason the East India Company took to expanding its territories was not to defend trade but to replace it as a source of income. The Company discovered early in its foray into India that there was no demand in the country for anything British; all Indians would accept in payment for their goods were gold and silver. To stem the drain of bullion the Company took to local trade at Madras, Calcutta and Bombay, the profits from which paid for the cargoes sent home. When thriving towns developed around its trading posts and the various fees imposed on their inhabitants outweighed profits from trade, territorial expansion became a primary aim of the Company; except for the peak period of opium exports to China its main revenues came thereafter from the loot (itself a Hindi word that entered English at that time) of Indian territories. By 1833 only a quarter of its stock was exposed to the vagaries of trade; and in 1848, as its forces brought down the Sikh kingdom and took the Kohinoor diamond as a “gift” from Ranjit Singh’s 9-year old grandson, the Directors in London abandoned all pretence of being a trading company. As a life-long student of history Churchill certainly knew that what he wrote was untrue, but was evidently confident that he could say anything about India and not be challenged. It was an assurance born of imperial experience, and it has endured into the 21st century in the work of many British writers.

The myths of the “Black Hole of Calcutta” and the “Battle” of Plassey were followed a few decades later by a far more complex effort to distort Indian realities. To understand why and how that happened, we have to step back and look at what the British did in Bengal in the first few decades after taking over the job of Mughal tax collector from the murdered boy-Nawab. In their first decade the British raised levies on agriculture to extortionate levels and imposed ruinous duties on Indian merchants. Edmund Burke speaking in the British parliament to impeach Warren Hastings of high crimes in India noted how his tax collectors operated: “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. … It did not end there. 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.” Such fierce extractions destroyed the 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 their rule some 7 million people starved to death, fully a third of the population of Bengal. (By the time British rule ended, the all-India toll would stand, at a conservative estimate, near two hundred million.) When even the most draconian measures could not squeeze any more out of Bengal’s private holdings, the East India Company turned its attentions to the wealth locked up in temple and mosque endowments, the revenues from which supported village schools and vaids (healers), and maintained roads, tanks and dams. Unable to decipher the Sanskrit and Persian documents in which the endowment records were kept, and not trusting local interpreters, the Company assembled in Calcutta during the last quarter of the 18th century a small group of linguists. They uncovered much wealth for the Company, the taxing of which soon undermined the entire structure of traditional civic arrangements in Bengal. But the “Orientalists” as they came to be known, also found an entirely unexpected treasure: the Vedas and the Upanishads, the Ramayana and Mahabharatha, the Bhagavad Gita and the teachings of the Buddha. They translated much poetry and the play Sakuntala, sparking the Romantic Period of European literature. They uncovered a tradition of mathematics and astronomy that predated Newton and Copernicus by a thousand years (and could have influenced both men). They discovered the fables that fathered those of Aesop; treatises on love, architecture, horses, elephants; books of fortune-telling and prophecy, chants and magic. The most eminent of the Orientalists, William Jones, a Welsh polymath proficient in scores of languages, also arrived at a startling conclusion: Sanskrit belonged to the same family of languages as Latin and Greek. In 1786 he delivered a lecture in Calcutta declaring the existence of an ancient Indo-European language family in which Sanskrit held pride of place: “The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer (sic) could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists.”

As the intelligentsia of Europe marvelled at these discoveries and flowered under their influence in a new “Oriental Renaissance,” Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet, 1694–1778), the most influential of the French philosophes, declared India the foremost of civilizations. “Is it not probable that the Brahmins were the first legislators of the earth, the first philosophers, the first theologians?” he wrote. “Do not the few monuments of ancient history which remain to us form a great presumption in their favour, since the first Greek philosophers went to them to learn mathematics, and since the most ancient curiosities collected by the emperors of China are all Indian?” Such views were gall and wormwood for the East India Company, for if Europeans looked on India as a land of high civilization it could not be looted under the easy pretext (invented by the Conquistadores in the Americas) that Christian conquest and guidance were necessary to help the primitive natives. To create the image of India it wanted the Company paid for and published two books of propaganda. One was a History of British India by James Mill (1773-1836), a journeyman journalist in London who had never been out of Europe and knew no Indian language. The other was a tome on Hindu Manners and Customs by the Abbe Jean-Antoine Dubois (1765-1848), the Chief of Foreign Missions in Paris who had fled the French Revolution to Pondicherry; he sent in his manuscript after seeing a notice circulated by the Company in India asking for material Mill could use.

Mill wrote that it was “incredible and ridiculous” to think of India as having “a high state of civilization.” To an audience largely ignorant of the long Indian traditions in the arts and architecture he depicted Indians as primitive: “Of the Hindus, it may, first of all, be observed, that they little courted the pleasures derived from the arts, whatever skill they had attained in them. The houses, even of the great, were mean, and almost destitute of furniture; their food was simple and common; and their dress had no distinction (which concerns the present purpose) beyond certain degrees of fineness in the texture.” He admitted to “the exquisite degree of perfection to which the Hindus have carried the productions of the loom ... as there are few objects with which the inhabitants of Europe are better acquainted.” However, he had an explanation for that aberration into excellence: “intelligent travellers” had observed “that this is the only art which the original inhabitants of that country have carried to any considerable degree of perfection” and that was because the “circumstances of the Hindu were in a singular manner adapted” to it. “His climate and soil conspired to furnish him with the most exquisite material for his art, the finest cotton which the earth produces. It is a sedentary occupation, and thus in harmony with his predominant inclination. It requires patience, of which he has an inexhaustible fund; it requires little bodily exertion, of which he is always exceedingly sparing; and the finer the production, the more slender the force which he is called upon to apply. But this is not all. The weak and delicate frame of the Hindu is accompanied with an acuteness of external sense, particularly of touch, which is altogether unrivalled, and the flexibility of his fingers is equally remarkable. The hand of the Hindu, therefore, constitutes an organ, adapted to the finer operations of the loom in a degree, which is almost, or altogether, peculiar to himself.” The book was a great success, and had the impact the East India Company desired: Europe never again looked on India as having a worthy and high civilization.

Dubois also had a major part in that change. His outrageously dishonest book began by declaring that British rule had “filled the people of India with admiration” and “fully convinced the Powers of Asia of the great superiority of Europeans in every way.” He described Hinduism as “a religion that encourages the most unlicensed depravity of morals,” illustrating that assertion with a plethora of repulsive detail, mostly drawn from his own sordid imagination. All the examples were from South India, where he had wandered dressed as a Brahmin for two decades. The Namboodiri caste in Kerala, he wrote, would not cremate an unmarried girl after puberty unless the corpse was ceremoniously wed and deflowered on the funeral pyre. He found people in the “hills of the Carnatic” who never washed their clothes, but wore them till they rotted off their bodies. In the “interior of Mysore” women were “obliged to accompany the male inmates of the house whenever the latter retire for the calls of nature and to cleanse them with water afterwards;” that practice was “regarded as a sign of good breeding” and was “most carefully observed.” The Abbe was admiring only of two things about the Hindus, their tolerance and their caste system; to the latter he ascribed the “hereditary continuation of families and that purity of descent which is a peculiarity of the Hindus.” A Hindu of high caste, he wrote “can, without citing his title or producing his genealogical tree, trace his descent back for more than two thousand years without fear of contradiction.” In an attempt to fit Indians into a Biblical framework (which then envisaged a 6000-year life-span for the human race, with Creation set at 9 A.M. on Sunday, 23 October, 4004 B.C.), the Abbe speculated that they were kin to Noah. India must have been “inhabited very soon after the Deluge,” for it was “close to the plains of Sennaar, where Noah’s descendants remained stationary for so long.” The seven rishis (sages) of Indian antiquity, from which the Indian Brahmins claimed descent “must be the seven sons of Japeth who with their father at their head, led one-third the human race towards the West, when men began to disperse after the Flood. They did not all reach Europe. Some of them on their way there turned northwards under the guidance of Magog, second son of Japeth, and penetrated into Tartary as far as the Caucasian range.” As evidence that the Brahmins had originated in the Caucasus, the Abbe pointed to the similarity between the names Magog and Gautama, one of the seven rishis. “Anyone believing in the connection between names and facts will be struck with the similarity existing between Magog’s name and Gautama’s, commonly called Gotama. Ma, or maha, signifies great, so that Gotama must mean the Great God, or Ma gog.”

The Abbe’s confused speculations about the prehistoric spread of Noah’s progeny and pure Hindu blood-lines took energy from the far more scientific concept of the Indo-European family of languages that William Jones had set out two decades earlier. From that conflation was born the idea of an ancient master race that had fathered the peoples of Europe and brought to India its ancient Vedic civilization. The concept offered what Europeans had been seeking for decades, a “scientific” reason for their easy dominance over people of all other regions. The German Sanskritist Max Müller (1823-1900) tried vainly to separate the linguistic from the racial. “The genealogies of the Old Testament refer to blood, not to language” he wrote; “it is clearly impossible that the genealogies of the Old Testament should coincide with the genealogical classification of languages. In order to avoid a confusion of ideas, it would be preferable to abstain altogether from using the same names to express relationships of language which in the Bible are used to express relationships of blood. It was usual formerly to speak of Japhetic, Hamitic, and Semitic languages. The first name has now been replaced by Aryan, the second by African; and though the third is still retained, it has received a scientific definition quite different from the meaning which it would have in the Bible.” The clarification had no impact, for a phantom “Aryan race” had come alive in the European imagination and would not be exorcised. The first full blown theory of race came from a French diplomat, Arthur de Gobineau (1816-1882), who argued in a four-volume Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races (1853), that superior White European “Aryans” had been weakened by breeding with inferior black and yellow races. Charles Darwin (1809-1882) contributed quite unintentionally to this new racism, for his concept of the “survival of the fittest” made European domination of other races seem natural and necessary. As late as 1937 Winston Churchill was comfortable in telling the Royal Commission on Palestine that he did “not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly-wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.” The “dog” of immediate reference in his testimony was, of course, the Arab people of Palestine. Indians were tarred with the same contempt: the people from whom Europe got the idea of pure blood-lines were bundled in with the world’s “lesser breeds.” The first political result of the new racial arrogance of the British was the great Indian uprising of 1857 which nearly ended colonial rule. The actual end of British rule 90 years later was also due in no small part to the “Aryan” myth, which inspired German militarists and sparked the rise of Hitler’s Nazi Party. Britain’s capacity to hold onto India was destroyed by armies that carried into battle the swastika, the Hindu symbol of good luck they fondly imagined to be that of their ancient forefathers.

To sustain the idea of European superiority all of history was skewed; ancient Greece became the only acknowledged source of Western civilization; the rest of the world was faded out of European consciousness. American science historian Dick Teresi, one of the rare Westerners to acknowledge that redaction, made fun of it in his 2002 book Lost Discoveries: “science was born in ancient Greece around 600 B.C. and flourished for a few hundred years, until about 146 B.C, when the Greeks gave way to the Romans. At this time science stopped dead in its tracks, and it remained dormant until resurrected during the Renaissance in Europe around 1500. This is what’s known as the ‘Greek miracle.’ The hypothesis assumes that the people who occupied India, Egypt, Mesopotamia, sub-Saharan Africa, China, the Americas and elsewhere prior to 600 B.C. conducted no science. They discovered fire, then called it quits, waiting for Thales of Miletus, Pythagoras, Democritus, and Aristotle to invent Science in the Agean.” Teresi documented a legion of non-Western pioneers in mathematics, science, astronomy, cosmology, physics, geology, chemistry and technology, with India a leading contributor in many fields. He did not address the issue of why all the information in his book, easily available in the historical record, has been routinely excluded from textbooks and other popular histories of science; he did, however, have a paragraph noting that in 1915, about the time when “Germans were rewriting their encyclopaedias to edit out the Phoenicians from Greek history, the English science historian G.R. Kaye admonished ‘Western investigators in the history of knowledge’ to look for ‘traces of Greek influence’ because the ‘achievements of the Greeks’ form ‘the most wonderful chapters in the history of civilization’.” Pop historians like Jacob Bronowski (The Ascent of Man), and Carl Sagan (Cosmos: A Personal Voyage), had “certainly been faithful to that directive” he observed. Later documentary series produced by the BBC, especially one on the history of mathematics (which FOX History was broadcasting in India in January 2010), actively distorted the factual record to give precedence to the Greeks; it gave credit to the invention of the zero to the Babylonians because they had a dot as “place holder” after the numeral nine.

The selective shaping of Europe’s historical memory dates back to the 19th century and followed analyses by pioneering European researchers who documented the striking similarities between ancient Indian beliefs and those of major Greek philosophers. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (1888-1975), one of the foremost of modern Indian philosophers, noted those similarities in a 1937 lecture at Oxford, where he held the chair of Comparative Religion: “The divine origin of the soul, its pre-existence, its fall into corporeality, its judgement after death, its expiatory wanderings through the bodies of animals or men according to its character, its final redemption from the cycle of rebirth and its return to God, are common to the mystery cults and Plato and Empedocles. This tradition is something which Hellenic thought, untouched by alien speculation, was perhaps not very likely to have developed, and we have it in a striking form in Indian religion. To the student of cultural development it is indifferent whether similarities are due to borrowing or are the result of parallel intellectual evolution; the important thing is that the ideas are similar. They were firmly established in India before the sixth century B.C., and they arise in Greece after that period. History does not repeat itself except with variations. It is idle to look for exact parallels, but we can trace a resemblance between the two systems, the Indian and the Greek. There are some who regard it as derogatory to the Greeks to send them to school to older cultures and assume them to have taken thence some of the sources of their knowledge and belief. But people of their acute intellectual vigor, inquisitiveness, and flexible mind could not help being influenced by foreigners with whom they come into frequent and intimate contact as soldiers and merchants, as adventurers, seamen, and warlike settlers. To be a Greek is not to be impervious to every other form of thought.”

British authors surveying the sudden appearance of ancient Indian beliefs in Greece have studiously avoided coming to Radhakrishnan’s obvious conclusions. Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) in A History of Western Philosophy (1945), noted that in “all history nothing is so surprising or so difficult to account for as the sudden rise of civilization in Greece.” He contrasted the mystery cult of Bacchus that appeared in Greece at that time with the Olympian religion of ancient Greece, which had gods with super powers and immortality but were in all other respects human. The followers of Bacchus “believed in the transmigration of souls [and] aimed at becoming ‘pure,’ partly by ceremonies of purification, partly by avoiding certain kinds of contamination. The most orthodox among them abstained from animal food.” Man, they held, is “partly of earth, partly of heaven; by a pure life the heavenly part is increased and the earthly part diminished. In the end, a man may become one with Bacchus” who is referred to as the “twice-born.” Orpheus, a reformer of the Bacchanalian religion after its rites of divine union had degenerated into drunken orgies, founded a sect that believed “life in this world is pain and weariness,” with human beings bound to a wheel which turns through endless cycles of birth and death. Only by “purification and renunciation and an ascetic life can we escape from the wheel and attain at last to the ecstasy of union with God.” Russell noted also that Pythagoras, a seminal figure in Greek philosophy and mathematics, was an Orphean, a vegetarian who believed in the transmigration of souls and the “wheel of birth.” After noting this remarkable appearance of Indian beliefs in ancient Greece Russell dismissed the possibility of linkage between the two countries in one sentence, without explanation.

Donald F. Lach (1917-2000) in his multi-volume work on Asia in the Making of Europe (1971) devoted a brief and cursory section to “the evolution of Europe’s knowledge of Asia from the time of the ancient Greeks to the opening of the route around the Cape of Good Hope.” The short shrift given to that large stretch of time reflected his belief that “knowledge of Asia before 1500 effected no fundamental alterations in Europe’s own artistic, technological, or religious premises.” While admitting that “points of resemblance have been noted between Pythagorean and Indian thought,” and that the Greeks “knew parts of Indian literature such as the Sanskrit epic Mahabharatha,” Lach asserted that “no reliable evidence of borrowing has so far been produced.” Without going into specifics, he said the question whether “certain literary motifs were borrowed from India remains highly debateable.” The section ended with the rather strange declaration that if the Greek “populace at large” bothered to think of Asia at all, it was “as a hazy, hot place beyond the eastern horizon, peopled by monstrous barbarians living in the kind of simple and just society ordinarily postulated for primitive tribes,” and that even the “elite among Greek thinkers” failed “to evince great interest in the realistic delineations of India presented by Megasthenes and Erastothenes.” People “of all classes continued to be primarily absorbed with matters closer to home.” Such overt lack of interest might well have reflected the religious intolerance pervasive in Greece, with each city-State possessed of a reigning deity with a jealous following – after all, Pythagoras was lynched by an angry mob because of his strange beliefs, and Socrates was sentenced to death for “corrupting the youth of Athens” by introducing them to “strange gods.”

Early European researchers who looked into the history of the concept of God traced its origins to the universal and immanent “Self” of the Upanishads. That concept entered the European tradition first through the secular philosophy of Plato, who wrote of a Universal Spirit, and then through religion in the 3rd century B.C. when the Torah was translated into Greek by a council of scholars assembled by Ptolemy II in Alexandria. It is in that translation that Yahweh was transformed from a tribal war god to the God of Genesis in the Old Testament, and passed thereafter into Christianity and Islam. The European legend of the Christian kingdom of “Prester John” in India probably reflected that ancient linkage, as did Vasco da Gama’s belief, when he landed in Kerala in 1498 that the locals were Christians. Since the onset of modern European racism, however, the shared concept of God in Hinduism and the “Abrahamic religions” has been quite deliberately obscured by descriptions of the former as idolatrous and having “millions of gods.” (Idol worship in Hinduism appeared during the period of intense competition to win hearts and minds from Buddhism, whose followers, under Greek influence, had taken to venerating statues of the Buddha.) The grossly misguided efforts of “Hindutva” ideologues to respond to such charges by asserting a unitary Hinduism have intensified the attacks in the last decade, with British claims that there was no such thing as “Hinduism” before they invented it. 

All this is vitally relevant to our story, for the concept of God transmitted to Europe through the Semitic world became the cause of unending conflict. In the Judaic tradition “God” did little damage because it was circumscribed by the concept of Jews as the “Chosen People;” in Christianity and Islam that tribal exclusivity was transformed into the kinship of belief, and those who were not Christian or Muslim became the tribal “Other.” Thus, when the Church became the official religion of the Roman Empire three hundred years after Jesus, his gentle message was soon lost as “Christians” took revenge on the Pagans who had for so long been their persecutors. The spread of Christianity to the northern European tribes was uniformly violent, and once everyone was converted, efforts at preserving theological integrity took the form of wars and Inquisitions. Towards the end of the 17th century, when many decades of Catholic-Protestant wars had dramatically reduced the influence of the Church, the gathering strength of the industrial and technological revolutions added a profoundly dangerous dimension to European racism. British historian Arnold Toynbee noted this in a 1952 lecture at Edinburgh: “Christianity had taken the traditional divinity out of Non-Human Nature in its zeal for the faith that there was no god but God and that Nature was nothing but God’s creature. In consequence, when this almighty transcendent creator God was deposed in Western Christendom towards the close of the 17th century, Nature was no longer a competitor with Man for the occupation of God’s vacant seat.” Increasingly, Europeans saw themselves as masters of the universe, without moral accountability.

The German philosopher Friedriech Nietzsche (1844-1900) captured the raw ethos of the new European spirit in his concept of the “Will to Power.” He saw it incarnate in all forms of life, striving “to grow, spread, seize, become predominant — not from any morality or immorality but because it is living and because life simply is will to power.” Exploitation of others, Nietzsche believed, belonged “to the essence of what lives, as a basic organic function; it is a consequence of the will to power, which is after all, the will to life.” In dominating the weak the powerful were but fulfilling their nature, reverting “to the innocence of wild animals.” He dismissed the gentling message of Jesus as Semitic weakness, and glorified Teutonic supermen, “blond, beautiful beasts” whose orgies “of murder, arson, rape and torture” left them “jubilant and at peace with themselves.” Nietzsche’s declaration that “God is dead” was shocking not because it was radical but because it confronted Europeans with their own inner reality. Out of that spiritual desert emerged the soulless philosophy of Karl Marx, and the three monstrously destructive figures who determined the course of world affairs in the 20th century: Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin and Winston Churchill.

Europe’s global political and economic dominance, its racial arrogance, scientific and technological prowess, and lack of respect for either God or Nature, shaped the world we now have. It did so with terrifying rapidity. Just 90 years after the American Civil War was fought with muskets and horse-drawn cannon the mushroom clouds over Hiroshima and Nagasaki ushered in the nuclear age. In that blip of time Europe extended its colonial reach across all of Africa except Ethiopia, and German challenges to the power of Britain and France precipitated two world wars. Some 15 million were killed in World War I, the last conflict in which the fighting was confined mainly to combatant armies. Over 60 million were killed in World War II as strategists focused on destroying the enemy’s industrial infrastructure and scientists developed ever more horrendous weapons to do that. Even that toll was dwarfed by the 100 million killed in the proxy conflicts of the “Cold War” (1946-1989), as strategy turned to the control of resources – or its denial to the enemy; deadly land mines spread like a plague across the vast areas under dispute and entire countries became killing fields. Europe’s new virulence negated the advances in human rights heralded by the American and French Revolutions. In Africa, slavery reappeared wherever Europeans needed a work force to acquire and process precious or industrial raw materials. In the Congo a regime run by Belgium’s King Leopold II tasked entire villages with tapping rubber from forest trees, and decreed that those who failed to meet production targets should have the hands of workers cut off; it was accepted practice for overseers to produce baskets of dismembered limbs to prove their own zeal; under such ministrations the population of the Congo dropped by some 10 million between 1877 and 1908. Indentured labourers from India and China – slaves by contract – were taken around the world to build railways, dig canals and work on plantations. As already noted, where indigenous populations could not contribute labour, there was genocide; in Tasmania British settlers used the local people for target practice, wiping them out entirely. Britain put down the 1857 uprising in India with historically unprecedented brutality, wiping out whole villages in areas of partisan involvement, down to the last woman and child; in 2007 Ameresh Misra’s voluminously documented reassessment of the death toll of that campaign – based on British reports of labour shortages in the affected areas – put it at 10 million. In China, the British went to war twice to override a ban on the import of opium. With Europeans pushing opium wholesale and retail (through lucrative “opium dens”), the level of drug use rose to a staggering 25 per cent of the Chinese population.

It was against that background that Gandhi in South Africa in the first decade of the 20th century initiated nonviolent Satyagraha, beginning the moral revolution that broadened into the modern movements for decolonization, development, human rights and peace. Unfortunately, this did not lead Europeans to consider their own moral accountability; instead, as their empires dwindled, memories of great atrocities disappeared from public consciousness in what Adam Hoschild in his1999 book King Leopold’s Ghost termed “the Great Forgetting.” The British did more than forget: they manipulated what was unarguably the bloodiest and most oppressive of colonial records into self-congratulatory history. Britain’s leading role in the transatlantic slave trade – it accounted for more than half of all the slaves taken out of Africa – was neatly excised from school text books, which focused instead on the British role in eradicating the evil. The great famines in India under British rule were either ignored or presented as routine in a country of “ageless poverty.” The Opium Wars in China were presented, when they were mentioned at all, as a worthy struggle to open up the country to foreign trade; the burning of the ancient and rich treasure of the Summer Palace in Peking, an act of barbarity with few parallels in history, slipped into oblivion. Genocide was denied or repackaged as pacification and social progress – in Australia the government continued into the 1970s a policy of forcibly taking Aboriginal children away from their parents and placing them in White families. British historians emphasized the “progress” spread by Empire. P. J. Marshall noted with irony in the 1996 Cambridge Illustrated History of the British Empire how Britain had invested a “great deal of national self-esteem” in the view that its colonial record had been enlightened. “Other European countries oppressed their fellow citizens overseas and drove them to revolt; the British, after the American misadventure, learned to nurture links of freedom, which evolved into that unique institution, the British Commonwealth of Nations. In the tropics, while the Spanish and Portuguese imperial regimes were sleazy and corrupt, the Dutch nakedly mercenary, the Germans and Russians brutally militaristic, and the French overbearingly chauvinistic in imposing their own cultural values, the British ruled with a high-minded concern for the good of the ruled. Others tried to resist the pressures of nationalism, only to go down to defeat — for example, the Dutch in Indonesia and the French in Algeria; the British entered into partnership with their nationalists and extricated themselves from empire with grace and goodwill.”

Marshall’s irony did not extend to his own assessment of the British imperial record. While acknowledging that imperialism was inherently perverse because it involved one group of people dominating another, he thought it had commendable aspects. One was that the British created around the world a similarity of ambition among very dissimilar peoples: everywhere they wished “to be citizens of nation states and members of ‘modern’ societies, marked by liberal secular values and democratic government and with economies based on industrialization and technological innovation.” The “distinctive features” of British colonialism included the introduction of common law, “with at least a theoretical respect for the accountability of government and the rights of the individual.” The role of Protestant missionaries overseas and the role of the church as a “kind of conscience for British imperial rule” had no European parallel. There were the “economic gifts” of “investment, markets, technology, and financial services such as banking or insurance.” And finally, the British were “proud custodians of a culture and set of values that many other people found very attractive indeed.” None of these claims bears close examination. The “similarity of ambition” belonged to the tiny political elites the British created to collaborate in colonial rule; talk of “common law,” “accountability of government,” the “rights of the individual” and “economic gifts” was absurd under White supremacist colonial rule that impoverished and/or exterminated people on a continental scale. To claim unique credit for the Church of England as a “conscience” is to grossly distort historical truth; it did next to nothing compared to the very active role of the Catholic Church to protect Native Americans from the worst oppressions. 

Marshall’s claims were not original; they echoed justifications advanced by a long line of predecessors, and younger historians have taken up and expanded the same arguments. Niall Ferguson is the most eminent of contemporary apologists of empire, described by The Times of London as the “most brilliant British historian of his generation,” possessed of “debonair wit” and “splendid panache,” a veritable “Errol Flynn of British historians” (all encomiums recorded on the jacket of his 2002 book, Empire: The rise and demise of the British world order and the lessons for global power). In that book Ferguson claimed not only that British imperialism benefited the world by disseminating a number of “distinctive features of their own society,” he even attempted to explain away the genocide of the Australian Aborigine. “The case of the Aborigines was a striking example of the way attitudes diverged over distance” he wrote. “The British in London regarded the problem quite differently from the British in Sydney. Here was the very essence of the imperial dilemma. How could an empire that claimed to be founded on liberty justify overruling the wishes of colonists when they clashed with those of a very distant legislature?” The more fundamental anomaly of how a brutally oppressive empire could claim to be “founded on liberty” escaped his attention. Fergusson also put in specific terms the argument that India had been lucky to have the British as rulers, citing no less an authority than Adolf Hitler. The fascist leader had evidently told Britain’s Foreign Secretary Halifax in 1939 that “the way to deal with Indian nationalism was simple: ‘Shoot Gandhi, and if that does not suffice to reduce them to submission, shoot a dozen leading members of Congress; and if that does not suffice, shoot 200, and so on until order is established’.” Hitler was “disarmingly frank in admitting that his version of imperialism would be a great deal nastier than the British version.” If Germany took India, Ferguson quoted Hitler as saying, “the Indians would certainly not be enthusiastic and they’d not be slow to regret the good old days of English rule.”

Among the most recent crop of British historians to take up the pro-imperial theme, Alex Von Tunzelmann has received the most publicity. Her almost comically dishonest first book, Indian Summer, the secret history of the end of an empire (2007), is set to become a Hollywood movie. Billed as an “extraordinary saga of romance, history, religion and political intrigue,” the book begins with a passage of pure fiction: “On a warm summer night in 1947, the largest empire the world has ever seen did something no empire had ever done before. It gave up. The British Empire did not decline. It simply fell; and it fell proudly and majestically onto its own sword. It was not forced out by the revolution, nor defeated by a greater rival in battle. Its leaders did not tire or weaken. Its culture was strong and vibrant. Recently it had been victorious in the century’s definitive war.” Then came the piece de resistance: “As the chimes sounded and the unexpected blast from a conch shell startled the delegates in the chamber of the Constituent Assembly, a nation that had struggled for so many years, and sacrificed so much, was freed at last from the shackles of empire. Yes, Britain was finally free.” Inexplicably, that 21st century rendition of Kipling’s “White Man’s Burden” went unnoticed in the uniformly good reviews the book got in the elite Indian Press, a phenomenon that suggests either that none of the reviewers actually read the book, or that its publisher took advantage of the most scandalous development in modern Indian journalism, the sale of favourable editorial opinion.

This brings up the question of how the British have managed to maintain a propagandistic line in varied works of history written over a period of nearly two centuries. Part of the answer lies in the demonstrated capacity of Britain’s governing elite to mount campaigns of psychological manipulation. Partly, it lies in the structure of the book publishing industry, which concentrates in very few people the power to decide what is put before readers. Once dominant in a particular field, publishing firms also have a huge influence on what gets to be widely read. For instance, Penguin and Penguin India have disproportionate power to make any book on India successful, and their backlist is far richer in British propaganda than that of any other publisher in the world. Another part of the answer lies in the fact that since Gandhi there has been no Indian leader conscious of the need to counter British image control. Gandhi did so by such unorthodox and unexpected means that by the time the British realized what he was doing it was too late. Even he did not fully escape, for the British succeeded in branding him a “Hindu leader” in the eyes of the world. As a result, when they manipulated the country into a communal holocaust at the time of independence the British could put some of the blame on him (see relevant Rushdie quote cited earlier), while themselves pretending to be vainly trying to stop the irrational slaughter. It is not just at the political level that there is lack of awareness of British manipulation of the country’s image; the gatekeepers of elite Indian media, who should be acutely aware and responsive, are instead routinely supportive of those efforts.

An excellent example of this can be seen in the fond treatment Indian newspapers accorded to BBC correspondent Mark Tully’s No Full Stops in India (Penguin 1991). Tully’s book, still available in Indian bookstores nearly two decades after publication, is filled with familiar colonial stereotypes, beginning with its title, which reflects his “insight” that “India’s Westernized elite, cut off from local traditions, ‘want to write a full stop in a land where there are no full stops’.” That long-standing imperial theme – that the British understand India better than its own elite – led easily into the book’s contents which, as another blurb on the cover said, threw “more light on this vast tragicomic country than anything since V.S. Naipaul’s Area of Darkness.” Tully was nowhere as acerbic as Naipaul, but the book chugged along in a familiar colonial rut; its ten essays dealt with caste, the “new colonialism” of the English-speaking Indian elite, Hindu religious infighting, Hindu religiosity, the police handling of Sikh unrest, communism in Calcutta, sati, Hindu-Muslim street riots in Ahmedabad, tribal life, and the pervasive corruption of politics in Bihar. Visiting the Kali temple in Calcutta Tully was reminded of “Abbe Dubois the great French scholar” who had “found old men who told him that human sacrifice to placate the gods was still being practised when they were young.” At the Kumbh Mela he found the Sankaracharya of Puri proclaiming that Sati is sanctioned by Hindu scriptures, the Sankaracharya of Kanchipuram denouncing family planning and the Sankaracharya of Dwaraka “performing complicated and esoteric rituals.” He recorded the view of a government official that “the British introduced a sense of justice in India” and that they had a “habit of supporting the underdog.” The last essay of the book dealt with a Bihar politician whose political life ended when his friend Indira Gandhi was assassinated; he told Tully of being “very depressed” because “the whole system is collapsing;” asked if it can be fixed, he replied: “Only by bloodshed.” A brief epilogue noted Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination. The book was favourably reviewed and Tully himself became something of a star. The Hindu hailed him as “a media legend in India” who had “often ruffled establishment feathers” with “his subaltern view of things.” The year after the book appeared the Indian government awarded Tully a Padma Shree.

Penguin India has also created Indian media stars, most prominently Shobhaa De, who morphed into media punditry from bodice-ripper romances. Her Superstar India, a book supposedly celebrating the 60th anniversary of Indian independence, is actually an ignorant diatribe against the country and its people; it was commissioned by David Davidar of Penguin India (who, it will be remembered, “discovered” Arundhati Roy). At many places the book is an incoherent rant, near gibberish at times. Indian culture to De is a “blanket” that “covers up our ugliest flaws and wounds... like dowry, casteism, sati.” She dismisses “traditional Indian values” as “bogus;” “what exactly are these mysterious ‘values’?” she asks, and “how different are they from the world’s?” Indians have feelings of “superiority” that come “from some ancient notion about our great and good civilization.” Watching The Last King of Scotland the Hollywood film about Idi Amin’s murderous tryranny in Uganda, she “felt numb just connecting with the mirror images. It could’ve been a portrait of any politician in India.” At one point in the film “I forced myself to keep watching, telling myself, ‘it’s about Idi Amin and Uganda – don’t take it so personally.” It is not till page 427 of the 456 page book that she thinks to mention India’s democracy as a “triumph;” and that, without any effort to square it with her moaning about the country being the mirror image of Amin’s Uganda. De’s various observations on Gandhi are stupefying in their vacuity. “If you can cleverly combine a ‘Gandhi’ (to rhyme with ‘randy’) story, that’s India in a nutshell. By the way, Paris has four Indian restaurants with names ranging from Gandhi to Gandhiji” When a taxi driver in Yemen tells her she is lucky to live in a country that had Gandhi as leader her response is “How bizarre ... everything was strange. The setting, the context, the man behind the wheel.” She thinks “Gandhi is being positioned as ‘Daddy Cool’ and being transformed into a Youth Icon” because in India “we are seriously short of heroes” and “try and create them artificially in order to fill the empty slot. Gandhi is perfect for that. Besides he is a caricaturist’s delight.” She advises Indians not to take umbrage at the commercial use of Gandhi’s image: “What’s the point of achieving an iconic position if it can’t be flogged?” Indian reviewers were generally tepid about the book but seemed not to notice that it is an unmitigated assault on the country.

The abdication of gate-keeping functions by elite Indian media was fully on display in the unstinting celebration of the 2007 movie Slumdog Millionaire. In all the reams of purple prose Indian journalists expended on the Oscar-winning movie there was not a single attempt to look beyond the glitz, to question why a British company had acquired the rights to Indian diplomat Vikas Swarup’s uplifting tale of a poor boy achieving spectacular success and turned it into a sordid tale of child abuse, police torture, gang violence and unrelenting corruption. In contrast to the book, there is not a single sympathetic character in the movie. Everyone is corrupt. The main roles belong to gangsters, the heroine is a whore, the police are sadists, and even the hero is shown cheating foreign tourists and stealing from them. All the subplots and most of the characters in the movie were created from scratch by British film director Danny Boyle, including the child's Muslim mother who is murdered by a Hindu mob. In the book the mother’s religion is unknown; she abandons her newborn son at a church, and the kid grows up in a Delhi orphanage run by a Catholic priest. Torturing Ram Mohammad Thomas (the name of the hero in the book), is not the idea of the Indian talk-show host. The suggestion that the boy cheated comes first from an American representative of the game show, and that mainly because the Russian owner of the franchise does not have the prize money. In real life the franchise owner is British, and he bankrolled the movie. As with Adiga’s The White Tiger, Slumdog Millionaire was an undisguised attempt to blacken India’s newfound image as an economic success. "This is the heart of the new India" says the gangster Salim surveying the high-rises that have replaced the slum of his boyhood; "and I am at its heart." 

Our review of aspects of Britain’s manipulative record in India has barely scratched the surface. It is a sad comment on the quality of our political class that although most of the foregoing is a matter of record, none of it is common knowledge. Judging from the quality of our current national political discourse and the flow of content in the media and publishing industries, we seem to have learned little from the agonizing experience of colonialism or six decades of independence during which Britain has actively, repeatedly and violently tried to subvert India. (That will be dealt with in Part II of this essay.) With very few exceptions our writers, academics, journalists and political leaders seem to be blissfully unaware of what happened to us under British rule and what we have experienced since independence. This is not just a failure of political awareness but of character and commitment. Corruption in India has not been merely a matter of bribes to politicians and bureaucrats but of intellectual sloth and lack of effort to understand and express the imperatives of our unique civilization. There have been too many Rushdies, Roys and Adigas willing to barter away their Indian eyes, too many ideologues of the “Left” willing to impose shallow foreign paradigms on Indian realities, too many ignorant proponents of “Hindutva” who mistake and harm the essence of our broad and tolerant tradition. Because of these failures we exist as a nation in an entirely reactive mode, without a common cultural-political frame of reference for strategic action. It is a shortcoming that needs urgent remedy.