After Tamerlane (62 page)

Perhaps it was not surprising that geopolitical and economic cleavages should have found a loud cultural echo. Even before 1914 the Western liberals' programme for building a modern culture had not passed
without challenge. Religious thinkers (in every part of the world) as well as educated elites (in some) treated its claims as a challenge to mobilize. While Western ideas about technological change, individual choice and the public sphere were drawn upon freely, new types of media and newforms of association were enrolled in the struggle to fashion distinctively national ‘high cultures' out of older traditions. The First World War was a watershed. Its explosive impact on the mind and imagination gave a savage twist to the loss of liberal certainty. The extreme case was Russia. The survival of Bolshevism as the newruling order demanded cultural no less than political revolution. The newSoviet culture was meant to reach technical modernity through collective proletarian effort, not bourgeois self-help. It was part of the vast campaign of ‘de-peasantization'.
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The new‘Soviet man' would embrace science and socialism in the certain belief that capitalist societies were on course to self-destruct. In Germany too the culture of liberalism came under heavier fire after 1918. This was no coincidence. There was long-standing antipathy on both Left and Right to the corrosive effect of laissez-faire capitalism on social cohesion. Part of the appeal of a German-led Mitteleuropa had been its offer of a middle way between the backward East and an over-commercialized West. The trauma of defeat, the ‘loss' of millions of Germans permanently separated from the newGerman state, and the devastating impact of economic shocks from outside created a powerful sense of social and cultural crisis. Only a strong state could save the German
Volk
from being broken on the wheel of international capitalism, with its ruthless disregard for authenticity and belonging. These views, already widespread before 1929, acquired added authority with Hitler's accession to power in January 1933.
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Soviet and Nazi culture were agreed in offering alternative versions of modernity. Both insisted on their technological dynamism. Each claimed that technology was being made to serve a common social purpose. Both urged the need for cultural autarky to exclude foreign influence. Each denounced the West as corrupt and decadent and in steep decline. The failure of the leading capitalist states – the United States, Britain and France – even to agree upon a plan to save the international trading system, let alone act on it, seemed to vindicate these criticisms from the Left and the Right. Nor, of course, was the
cultural attack on the West confined to Europe. In Japan, where industrialization accelerated sharply in the 1920s and '30s (with a heavy dependence upon female labour), the rush to the towns, the stresses on rural life, the impact of newmedia (especially American films) and fear of the break-up of old social disciplines produced symptoms of deep cultural anxiety.
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Events after 1930 seemed to confirm the alienness and bankruptcy of the international order imposed by the West on a reluctant East Asia. In Kuomintang China, where hopes of Western support were dealt a heavy blow by the League's timid response to Japan's attack in Manchuria, and where the struggle with Communism was a vital concern, nationalist ideology stressed social discipline through the ‘NewCulture' movement and revived Confucian notions of communal duty. In British-ruled India, the Congress Party was the main nationalist vehicle. By the 1930s the intellectual loyalties of its ‘high command' were divided between loyalty to the autarkic utopia of Gandhianism and loyalty to the Soviet-inspired socialism favoured by Gandhi's cerebral protégé Jawaharlal Nehru. Religious revivalism (among both Hindus and Muslims) and popular Gandhianism, which promoted the idea of a pristine, rural and godly India, formed a combined assault upon the cultural values of imperial rule, condemned as the alien violation of India's moral order. The same kind of objection was voiced in colonial Africa by Kikuyu notables who feared that the settler occupation in the Kenya colony would smash their social and ethical system.
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In
Facing Mount Kenya
(1938), Jomo Kenyatta (who had trained in London as an anthropologist under the great Bronislaw Malinowski) denounced colonial rule as a vandal that had wrecked the material foundations of Kikuyu culture, destroying in the process a sense of freedom and responsibility of which the ignorant Europeans had no understanding.
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Against this lowering background, it is little wonder that the fate of Europe's overseas empires seemed at best uncertain. From their different angles, Marxists, imperialist diehards and even anxious liberals predicted the early demise of European imperialism.
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Without drastic measures, it would soon be politically, economically and culturally bankrupt. Between these signs of glee on the Left and gloom on the Right, imperial rulers displayed periodically a crisis of confidence. Meanwhile, prophecies of downfall sharpened the anger of those who
felt vulnerable to its immediate impact – like the white minorities in South and Central Africa, or the resident expatriates in treaty-port Shanghai.
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But, like Tom Sawyer's obituary, earnest prognoses of a ‘lost dominion' or ‘the world revolt against Europe' were to be premature. The imperial systems of Europe's main colonial powers – Britain, France, the Netherlands, Portugal and Belgium – proved surprisingly resilient. On the eve of the Second World War they remained territorially intact. Even where nationalism had won the widest support, the breakthrough to freedom was tantalizingly elusive. In 1938, after two decades of struggle, Jawaharlal Nehru all but despaired of India's political prospects.
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Real independence still seemed far in the future.

Imperial survival was partly the result of imperial pragmatism. Colonial policy rejected reliance on coercion as costly, clumsy and counterproductive. The post-war upheaval had hammered home that lesson. Finding local allies meant yielding more local power. The British practised this doctrine in earnest after 1920. In Iraq and Egypt they renounced direct supervision of internal affairs, preferring instead to base their claim to pre-eminence on the terms of a treaty.
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This should not be mistaken for a tacit acceptance that imperial power was over. In India, especially, the British combined a gradual enlargement of Indians' political rights with constitutional changes that were carefully designed to make the province, not the nation, the focus of political life. As province-based leaders assumed full responsibility for provincial affairs, their electorates would expect them to concentrate on ‘knife and fork' matters of development and welfare, not chase the wild goose of ‘independence now'. Not only that. Provinces varied greatly in their religious and linguistic make-up. Their newleaders were unlikely to give all-out support to the Indian National Congress, the main antagonist of the British Raj, and dominated politically by North Indian Hindus. In two of the most important provinces, Bengal and the Punjab, provincial self-government had brought Muslims to office. In 1935 the British carried their Machiavellian liberalism to an even higher level. They promised India self-government as a federal dominion. But the constitutional rules, which assured a large quota of seats for Muslims and princes (the federation would unite ‘British' and ‘princely' India), seemed almost certain to keep Congress from power and might even ensure its eventual break-up.
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It would be wrong to exaggerate the cunning behind these imperial manoeuvres. What is striking, however, is the cool expectation that colonial politics could be ‘managed' in ways that would leave the key imperial interests safe: strategic use of local resources and exclusive control over external relations. This was not irrational. Until the late 1930s the British, French and Dutch could assume that the risk of another great power daring to interfere in their empires' internal politics was practically nil. While that remained true, local nationalist leaders had no hope of playing off their imperial masters against another great patron. Nor could they hope to raise the price of their loyalty. Worse still, the virtual absence of an external threat left colonial rulers free to use coercive tactics against local oppositions they defined as ‘extremist'. Armed with much better intelligence than before 1914, colonial regimes could nowstrike hard at ‘subversive' movements: Communist rebellions in French Indochina and the Dutch East Indies were quite easily broken in the 1930s.
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The other great lever that the rulers could wield was the divided nature of most colonial societies.

It was a crucial paradox in colonial politics that social and cultural change worked both for and against the cause of nationalism. In most parts of the world, colonial boundaries were essentially artificial. Colonial states Sellotaped together districts and regions that had little in common. Imperial frontiers and divisions were determined by administrative convenience, the pattern of conquest, or partition diplomacy, not a wish to preserve ethno-linguistic unity or old ties of trade and exchange. Of course, once the colonial state began to take shape and to assert its authority across the whole of its territory, it tended to stimulate a parallel growth among its colonial subjects. When even remote districts began to feel the demands of a faraway government and to sense the effects of ‘policy' made in the colonial capital, their leaders and notables had a powerful motive to build supra-local alliances. Only a colony-wide movement could apply adequate pressure on the colonial officials and exert local influence at the point of decision – at the colonial centre. This kind of nationalism was given added impetus by two important trends. The first was the bonding together of different parts of the colony by speedier travel, the circulation of knowledge (often by newspapers) and new types of
education (in European-style colleges and schools). The second was the adoption by the emergent native ‘Western-educated elite' of the political ideology not of the colonial rulers but of their distant motherlands faraway in Europe. Legal equality, freedom of speech and the right to self-government became the battle cry of one of the first and greatest of these nationalist movements (and the model for many others), the Indian National Congress. In principle, the junction between a skilful, sophisticated and well-connected elite in the colonial capital, well versed in the rule books of colonial governance, and local district notables, anxious to influence the decisions of government – in finance, education, transport or agriculture – meant the moment of take-off for mass nationalism. All that was needed was to keep local resentments simmering at just the right heat while the nationalist elite squeezed successive instalments of political power from their baffled rulers.

That was the theory. The practice was usually different. Colonial rulers made it their business to deflate the claims of nationalist leaders, whose motives and authenticity were contrasted unfavourably with those of traditional authorities: princes, landlords, sheikhs and chiefs. In much of British-ruled Africa, the inter-war years saw the remorseless spread of ‘indirect rule', which devolved local affairs not to elected bodies but to chiefs and their followers (‘tribes').
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By granting limited taxing powers and promoting the use of customary law (codified versions of local practice), indirect rule turned the colonial state into a loose confederacy of different ethnic units whose links and connections, whether horizontal or vertical, could be easily patrolled by the colonial officials.
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That was one challenge to the advance of nationalist politics, but not the most dangerous. Far more serious was the rise of ‘sub-nationalisms' – newsolidarities based on language, religion, ethnicity or status that denied the reality of the colonial state as a cultural or political unit. It was easy to see how these had come about. The uneven spread of literacy and print, the differential impact of economic change, and the sharpening lines between religious faiths and creeds mobilized a succession of ‘new' communities often antagonistic to the original nationalists. Here the classic case was India. ‘Self-government within… or without the British Empire, the formation of a consolidated North-West Indian Muslim State appears to me the final destiny of the Muslims, at least of North-West India,' declared
the poet-philosopher Muhammad Iqbal in his presidential address to the Muslim League in December 1930.
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‘We Hindus are bound together not only by the tie of love… to a common fatherland… but… by the tie of the common homage we pay to our great civilization – our Hindu culture,' claimed V. D. Savarkar in his tract Hindutva:
Who is a Hindu?
,
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dismissing the notion of a secular Indian nationalism. ‘The British have an Empire,' exclaimed B. R. Ambedkar, the leader of the untouchables. ‘So have the Hindus. For is not Hinduism a form of imperialism and are not the Untouchables a subject race, owing their allegiance and servitude to their Hindu Master?'
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Gandhi's claim that the Congress was the sole representative of all Indian opinion had lost credibility by the 1930s. In other colonial regions, political or cultural awakening was the signal to demand separation from, or protection against, other indigenous groups whose past exploitation was resented or whose future dominance was feared. For Hill State peoples in Burma, or the Lao and Khmer in French Indochina, colonial rulers were far less threatening than ethnic Burmans or Vietnamese. There was no reason to think that, as time went on, the original nationalist movements would maintain their lead over the newer sub-nationalisms or survive the attempt to quash or contain them. It was fear that the Congress would succumb to the magnetic force of provincial, sectional, class or religious interests that so depressed Nehru in the late 1930s. If the chance of independence was missed, it might never recur, except in a form too limited to be real.