Sati

Title: Sati – Evangelicals, Baptist Missionaries and the Changing Colonial Discourse 

Author: Meenakshi Jain
Publisher: Aryan Books, 2016 (First)
ISBN: 9788173055522
Pages: 464

On Sep 3, 1987, a young man aged 24 died in a Rajasthan hospital due to illness. On the next day, his widow, 18-year old Roop Kanwar, sat on the funeral pyre and burnt herself along with her dead husband. This caused a huge uproar in India and overseas. This was clearly a suicide but the fact that it was committed under the full glare of a large throng of people made them culpable. No cases were registered against anybody. However, by the time of the incident’s first anniversary in 1988, a stringent law had been in place and it came down heavily on a few people who glorified Kanwar and the practice. 45 people were charged for the offense which carried a prison sentence of seven years. The trial proceedings went on interminably as usual. After 17 years of deliberations, 25 were acquitted in 2004 for insufficient evidence, eight people were set free in 2024 for the same reason (after 37 years), four are still absconding and the remaining eight died in the meanwhile. This was a classic instance of overzealous legislation ruining innocent lives. Instances of widows immolating themselves on the pyres of their husbands have occurred intermittently even after the notorious 1987 Deorala incident. Despite the ban on glorification of sati, temples dedicated to sati matas exist and continue to thrive. This book is not a work on sati as such, its origins or voluntary or mandatory nature of its performance. The primary focus is on the colonial debate on sati and the role of evangelicals and Baptist missionaries in it. Sati was an exceptional act performed by a miniscule number of Hindu widows but its occurrence was exaggerated by the missionaries in the nineteenth century who were eager to Christianize and anglicize India. Meenakshi Jain is an associate professor in history at Gargi College, University of Delhi and is a former Fellow of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library.

Jain looks at information from foreign sources regarding the practice of sati and also at the religious sanction for this weird custom. Sati is not sanctioned in ancient texts. In fact, Vedas specifically ask the widow to return to life. Even Manu Smriti, which is generally deemed to be mildly misogynist, recommends the widow to remain chaste after the death of her husband and promises a place for her in heaven for that. Sati came into being in the Puranic age, but still its occurrence was highly sporadic. The Greek historian Diadorus writes about a voluntary immolation in 316 BCE in Persia where a contingent of Indian soldiers was stationed. All observations indicated that the rite was not obligatory and ridiculed the men folk for not dissuading the women from committing it. By the early middle ages, it became more common but never universal. Up to 1000 CE, satis were rare in the Deccan and an exception in the extreme South also. However, it flourished under the Chola dynasty.

The book notices the shift in European perspective on sati after they obtained political power in India. By the late-eighteenth century, the earlier sentiments of approbation and awe in foreign accounts which mostly stressed the voluntary nature of the rite, were replaced with condemnation and demands for intervention and abolition of the custom. This may also have something to do with the work of Orientalists. By the late-eighteenth century, a long line of scholars whose work worthily assessed ancient India’s contributions which put the country a notch higher in the cultural ladder even though she was chained in political bondage. Christianity was reinventing itself in Britain at that time from the ideals of Enlightenment with bold assertions to abolish slavery and carry the religion to every corner of the world to convert the heathens. This necessitated India to be projected in a bad light which urgently required the civilizing effort of missionaries. As a consequence, the 1800s witnessed foreign accounts suddenly assuming monumental dimensions which were at odds with earlier narratives. With the advent of the Baptists, earlier sentiments of wonder and astonishment were replaced with condemnation. The sati rites were sporadic but the Baptists asserted that it was rampant.

Jain makes a diligent assessment of the social climate in Britain at the moment it donned the mantle of self-righteousness and looked down upon India. Whatever might have been their antecedents back home, English society in late-1700s India was noted for their low morality, high cost of living, gluttony and concubinage. It was as if the Europeans left their religion behind them at the Cape of Good Hope to be resumed when they returned from India. Evangelicalism in India derived much of its motive force from hostility to the French revolution. They believed that the root of the crisis in France lay in the rampant irreligion and endeavoured to prevent a similar outburst in England by a religious movement to make the lower classes religious and reverent. Cambridge University was the intellectual centre of the Evangelical Movement under Isaac Milner and Charles Simeon. Till 1813, the East India Company did not permit the missionaries to operate in India for fear of an adverse impact on its trading activities. Charles Grant, who was the commercial agent of the company in Malda, was the first British official to argue for the Christianization and Anglicization of India. Grant’s commentaries invented the reform agenda for the British and thereby provided a justification for British rule in India. He termed Indian religions – all of them – ‘false, corrupt, impure, extravagant and ridiculous’ (p.99). He also pleaded for the permanence of British rule in the country. Intellectual heavyweights in England were arrayed on the side of the missionaries. James Mill was instrumental in underpinning a theoretical background for the effort of dismantling Indian civilization. His six-volume work ‘History of British India’ made a decisive and transforming contribution to reverse the trend of admiration for the civilization of the East due to the work of Orientalists. Mill categorized the Hindu civilization the rudest and weakest state of the human mind.

The author notes that not all Orientalist writing was actuated by noble motives. Some of them translated Hindu texts to English with the intention to ‘expose those mysterious sacred nothings that had maintained their celebrity so long merely by being kept from the inspection of any’ (p.125). But old India hands and administrators refuted the missionary claim of women burning themselves on the pyres of their husbands as ‘not any more a religious rite than suicide was a part of Christianity’. The missionary effort in India was a concerted one and determined to show results. From 1793, missionaries started coming to Kolkata without valid licenses due to the encouragement Charles Grant in India and his Evangelical friends in England were providing them. Incidents of widow immolation in Bengal were embellished by Evangelicals and missionaries to gain the right of proselytization and to justify their presence and British rule in India. Missionaries falsely proclaimed that more than 10,000 widows were burnt a year in Bengal and 100,000 devotees committed ritual suicide under the wheels of Lord Jagannath’s rath at Puri. The Evangelical-missionary campaign against sati falls into two phases – the first, from 1803 to 1813 when the case was prepared and the second, from 1813 to 1829 when awesome figures were marshalled to demonstrate that it was a raging practice. The author points out that it was at this moment a pronounced anti-Brahmin sentiment became palpable in missionary writings because they were an obstacle to proselytization. The missionaries made all efforts to undermine the status of Brahmins.

This book also examines the demographic profile of women who performed sati and how could anyone voluntarily undergo immolation in public. The need to accompany her husband in death was carefully inculcated in girls’ minds so that it was not the result of a momentary impulse, but of a long-resolved determination. They conducted themselves not like mad enthusiasts but as martyrs expecting and getting respect from all assembled at the spot. However, in some cases use of psychedelic drugs is to be suspected. The British were at first agreeable to permit sati if neither coercion nor narcotics was involved and the voluntary nature of the act was convincingly established by interrogation of the widow by high officials. Brahmins constituted 34 per cent of the sati cases, Kshatriyas 14.8 per cent and Vaishyas 3.1 per cent. Almost half of the satis were in the age group of 50 or above and two-thirds 40 or above, but 5 per cent were between 11 and 20 years of age. State registration of cases of sati began in 1815. The appointment of William Bentinck as governor general in 1828 gave momentum to the campaign against sati. Bentinck had already decided on abolition even before his arrival in India. Hindu thinkers and social activists like Raja Rammohan Roy and Mrityunjaya Vidyalankar advocated for its abolition. They suggested an ascetic life for widows and remarriage was not there even in their horizon. They were also reluctant on an outright ban but in imposing harsher conditions so as to make its occurrence progressively more and more burdensome. Hindus who opposed abolition led by Radhakant Deb did not defend the legality of widow burning and opposed only the government intervention in Hindu affairs. They did not encourage sati in their own families. When the British finally decided to put down the practice, what worried them most was the backlash from Hindus as a response to British meddling in religion. Bentinck consulted 49 military officers on the effect abolition would have on their men. Most of them supported immediate action. Sati was abolished in December 1829. As it was never a commonly observed rite, there was little protest on its official prohibition.

This book does its job well. It has brought to light the ‘missionary position’ in effecting a ban on sati. It explains that what prompted them in this venture is a desire to demote Hinduism as barbarous and to get enough funding from England to gain maximum converts in India. It has also proved two points beyond doubt – that the act was voluntary in most cases and that the number of sati cases was statistically insignificant. This is an effective argument, but the fact remains that this was not ethically or morally acceptable. A huge crowd witnessing the immolation of a woman and facilitating it by pouring oil and other flammable articles on to the flame is impossible to accept as normal by any person. Sati would have had to go at any cost, but it would have been infinitely better if its demise was caused by the effort of Hindu reformers alone. This is the message sent out by this nice work which is well researched. Section B of the narrative, which is almost half of the book, is dedicated to foreign accounts of sati. It exposes the condemnation and attitude of racial superiority of the British towards their colonial subjects in India. One official remarks with scarcely hidden contempt that when he reached a place of sati, he found that the ‘coolies had dug a hole’. Here, the term ‘coolie’ refers not to the labourers but all Indians. Jain provides some references which show how the British estimated people of different provinces on their valour and sense of injustice. Bentinck notes that if sati was more prevalent in the upper provinces (present day Uttar Pradesh and parts of Bihar) from which most of the soldiers came, he would be more circumspect because the people are more bold and manly (p.409). An earlier review of the book ‘Immolating Women’ by Jorg Fisch can be read here as a related topic.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 4 Star

Dethroned

Title: Dethroned – Patel, Menon and the Integration of Princely India

Author: John Zubrzycki

Publisher: Juggernaut, 2023 (First)

ISBN: 9789353451691

Pages: 337

 

“My own personal wish is to abdicate and to serve Islam. I have not amassed a fortune but that does not matter as long as I can serve Islam and Pakistan. I am prepared to serve Pakistan in any capacity”. This excerpt is from a letter written by Hamidullah Khan, the Nawab (king) of Bhopal to Jinnah on Aug 2, 1947, hardly two weeks before freedom dawned on India. A cursory glance at the map would convince any political novice that the Bhopal ruler’s wish to join Pakistan was physically impossible, yet it contained a political dynamite that was sure to wreck the unity of India. There were around 565 native states in undivided India, of which only ten states came inside the geographical boundary of Pakistan which easily acceded to it with the exception of Kalat in Baluchistan. The situation in India was different. All the Muslim rulers and even some of the Hindu rulers did not want to join India for various reasons, most of them religious or selfish. The native states were too dispersed geographically and too interconnected economically with British India for having any chance ever to become truly autonomous. Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel and V P Menon achieved their integration with India in an astonishingly short time. This book tells the story of India’s native princes from the arrival of Lord Mountbatten as the viceroy in March 1947 until the abolition of the former rulers’ titles, privileges and privy purses in Dec 1971. John Zubrzycki is the author of several books on Indian royalty of the twentieth century. He majored in South Asian history and Hindi at the Australian National University and has a PhD in Indian history. He had worked in India as a diplomat and as foreign correspondent of The Australian newspaper. My review of his earlier book ‘The Last Nizam’ can be read here.

 

The author makes an analysis of how the native states were managed by the rulers. There were large states such as Hyderabad which equalled France in geographical area but most were very small and the titular rulers were practically nothing more than zamindars. Some states – such as Mysore, Travancore and Baroda – were administered better than British India, but most of the others were backward fiefs. Whatever laws existed in many princely states were a jumble of personal decrees, British Indian laws and local customs. Britain, being the paramount power, did not interfere in their administrative affairs in return for cooperation and support of the princes when they needed it. The India Office in London was the final authority on recognizing successions and determining when to hand over powers in the case of minors. The system of gun salutes tied the princes to a feudal hierarchy. Out of the 565-odd states, only 149 were privileged to have gun salutes ranging from 9 to 21. By comparison, the Viceroy was entitled to 31 gun salutes and the King Emperor 101. Personal misrule freely occurred in many states. The proclivity of the princes towards sexual perversions reached gross proportions in some cases. In the summer of 1947, four tons of paper containing correspondence between the local British resident and the political department in Delhi regarding the secret affairs of the princes were clandestinely confined to flames so as not to reach the hands of the leaders of independent India. Congress withdrew its earlier stand-offish stance in the 1938 Haripura AICC session. It declared that the Congress stood for the same political, social and economic freedom in the states as in the rest of India and considered the states as integral parts of India which cannot be separated.

 

The book includes the fabulous intrigues and machinations undertaken by the Congress, Muslim League and the British in the run up to and immediately after independence. Most white officials had no qualms to see India disintegrating into a multitude of small, independent nations. Some of them even cherished the idea, while some others came around to embrace a nationalist outlook later on. Conrad Corfield, the political secretary to the Viceroy, was of the former type and he gave the rulers the assurance that their states would become independent once the British left, as was promised earlier by the Cabinet Mission plan. Mountbatten also toyed with the concept of disintegration at first. He was having a Balkanizing plan for independent India. Eleven provinces of British India would become free along with most of the native states which would negotiate with the provinces regarding accession. Nehru was furious at this callous proposal which would forever put India’s political unification to doom. It was on May 10, 1947 that V P Menon articulated a plan to Mountbatten which eventually materialized. On May 18, Menon and Mountbatten flew to London with the plan and convinced the British cabinet. This established Menon as an irreplaceable factor in the States ministry. An interesting anecdote is told in the book that exemplifies Jinnah’s subterfuges to destabilise India after he got assurance of Pakistan. The Patiala kingdom was reluctant to join India while entertaining hopes for an independent existence. Jinnah quickly seized the opportunity and in May 1947 urged Yadavindra Singh, the ruler of Patiala, to join Pakistan and offered an array of carrots. Singh refused. Undeterred, Jinnah invited him to his residence in Delhi two days later for an informal chat where his sister Fatima ‘made excellent tea’ while Jinnah repeated his offers. Once more, the Maharaja remained unmoved, but Pakistan’s reputation for preparing excellent tea for ‘Indian guests’ (remember Abhinandan Varthaman) appears to be long established.

 

The author covers most of the contentious cases where the rulers had to be forced to see reason and fall in line. It is to be remembered that not a drop of royal blood was spilt in the process. That was why Khrushchev once remarked that ‘India liquidated the princely states without liquidating the princes’. Patel’s powerful personality, which mixed fury with charm and persuasion with coercion complemented Menon’s skills as a tactician. Most rulers held Patel in awe and esteem. Menon cleverly handled this to his advantage. Even a mere hint from him that a point of contention might have to be referred to Sardar was sufficient to bring the rulers around. Menon and Patel thus achieved their wonderful goal of creating a politically cohesive India and of extending responsible, democratically elected government to the people of the states. No longer could the ruling princes run their states like fiefdoms. Rulers surrendered all their governing powers in return for a guaranteed privy purse amounting to ten per cent of the revenue of their states in 1947. This money was tax-free and this was an important concession considering the exorbitant levels of taxation at that time. Princes were allowed to retain their palaces, personal privileges and titles. Integration yielded, in addition to territory and population, cash and investments worth almost Rs. 100 crores, half of which had come from the bonds of just one state – Gwalior. In return, the government of India committed itself to paying privy purses costing around Rs. 4.5 crores in the first year, which would shrink with each succeeding year.

 

This book is unique because of two reasons. One is that it describes how the native states acceded to Pakistan while the same process was going on in India. Fortunately for them, they had to handle only ten states out of the 565. Even then, the accession of Kalat in Baluchistan was a coercive one that totally alienated the sentiments of Baloch nationalists. Pakistan is still paying a bloody price for disregarding the wishes of Baloch people in the form of a thriving freedom movement and militancy. It is interesting to note that Pakistan too revoked the privy purses shortly after India did so. The second noteworthy feature of the book is the clear exposition of Indira Gandhi’s rationale in rescinding the privy purses. After their states were merged to the union and their powers conceded, many rulers had taken to electoral politics cashing in on their immense clout with the local populace. The former rulers had begun to unite on the political front and tried to influence electoral outcomes in many constituencies. Indira Gandhi was not someone who would acquiesce in to such encroachment on territory which she deemed sacrosanct for popular politicians. One thing led to another and with a showdown with judiciary, Indira achieved what she wanted in taking away the incomes of the former princes. Whatever may be the democratic justifications, readers feel that the abrupt cancellation of princely privileges was a breach of promise Nehru and Patel had vowed to them while merging their territories voluntarily with India.

 

While the book is an enjoyable read, it presents the most blatant one-sided and pro-Pakistan outlook coming from a Western author. The accounts of even Pakistani authors such as Ayesha Jalal are much more balanced than this one which has completely gone over the fence as far as neutral readers are concerned. Zubrzycki’s narration is a totally partisan account of atrocities as if the Muslims alone were at the receiving end. He justifies the Pakistani attack on Kashmir in 1947 that propelled its king Hari Singh into the arms of India as a justifiable outrage of Pashtun tribals at the ill-treatment of Muslims in Kashmir. He alleges that Patel sanctioned ethnic cleansing of Muslims in Alwar by the state forces. He again stoops so low as to mimic the Pakistani propaganda piece that the atrocities committed by Razakars in Hyderabad were fake and fabricated by K M Munshi, India’s agent in that state. It is as If this author was asked to prepare an account on the losses of World War II, he would come up with only German losses suffered subsequent to Allied bombings while claiming the Holocaust as ‘fake and fabricated’. This book’s handling of the situation in Jammu and Kashmir is terribly off-balance by propping up a biased overview of the alleged violence on Muslims of Kashmir by the Dogra ruler. Plain communal disturbances are portrayed as ‘anti-monarchical protests’. He accuses the minority Kashmiri Pandit community of having 78 per cent representation in state services as a valid justification of the jihadi violence on them. By the same token, we would expect that this author would mention that Muslims cornered 85 per cent of the state services in the Nizam-ruled Hyderabad, but he maintains a stoic silence on this issue. Moreover, atrocities on Hindus are just ‘sectarian violence’ for him (p.222). This book also attempts to whitewash the Bhopal Nawab’s bigoted overtures to join Pakistan with a dubious allegation that the preference of a handful of fellow princes to the Hindu Mahasabha had driven Nawab Hamidullah Khan into the folds of the Muslim League and Pakistan (p.55). This kind of an argument would come only from a hard-line Muslim League supporter and Zubrzycki’s parroting of this line only proves his incompetence and ignorance of Indian politics and society.

 

Since this book is just a Pakistani propaganda piece, it is not recommended for general readers.

 

Rating: 1 Star

Slave Empire

Title: Slave Empire – How Slavery Built Modern Britain
Author: Padraic X. Scanlan
Publisher: Robinson, 2020 (First)
ISBN: 9781472142337
Pages: 448

Britain’s raise to the pinnacle of political and economic power in the nineteenth century was marked by the two parallel streams of imperialism and slavery both of which we abhor today. Britain did not have any compunction at all in buying people from West Africa in exchange for cotton, selling opium in China and enforcing a war on them when the local government objected and displacing unsuspecting native rulers who were gullible enough to expect the British to stick to the spirit of signed treaties. Britain was the greatest beneficiary of the transatlantic slave trade. Slavery was used for labour in plantations of the western hemisphere that produced tobacco, coffee, cotton, rice and sugar. The island colonies of the Caribbean, which produced sugar in copious quantities, were among Britain’s most valuable imperial prizes. Then came Enlightenment and its ideals helped to push purely economic goals to the back and bring a moral perspective to the fore, possibly for the first time in human history. This change of atmosphere was first sensed by religious sects who lost no time in appropriating the refreshingly pristine outlook of a small, yet thriving antislavery movement. Their sustained propaganda slowly chipped away resistance and brought the regime around to share their perspective. In 1807, the parliament abolished slave trade in Britain and its colonies and in 1833, slavery itself was legislatively cast away. A staggering sum of 20 million GBP was paid to slaveholders as compensation for the loss of their ‘property’. The slaves were required to continue the same work for their previous masters for a further period of six years of apprenticeship, at the expiry of which they were free to get employed anywhere they liked as wage labourers. This book examines the closing chapter of a shameful episode in history. Padraic X. Scanlan is an associate professor in the Centre for Industrial Relations and Human Resources and the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies at the University of Toronto. He has also held appointments at the London School of Economics and Harvard University.

Scanlan makes a survey of the beginnings of slave trade in the early part of the book. It may come as a surprise to many to learn that from 1475 to 1540, Portuguese merchants sold more than 12,000 slaves to Gold Coast in W. Africa to work in their gold mines. With the opening of sugar plantations in the New World, the direction changed, especially from the year 1580. Apart from the loss of manpower due to selling of slaves, textiles comprised more than half of the total goods offered in exchange for enslaved people. These cheap imports destroyed West African industry. Slave trade in British colonies began in 1619 in Jamestown, Virginia with the purchase of twenty African slaves by white settlers. Slave labour caused lasting changes in the agricultural profile and food habits of Western societies. Originally, sugar was a luxury item coming from Asia. With the opening of large sugarcane plantations in the Caribbean manned by slave labour imported from Africa, the prices crumbled and sugar became a staple. The book explains how the slave trade contributed to British colonial economy and helped them establish a ‘slave empire’. When ships full of enslaved captives arrived in the US and Caribbean, slaveholders would borrow money to buy enslaved workers using credit extended by British banks. More than that, insurers in Britain underwrote policies protecting plantations, slaving voyages and the bodies of enslaved people.

The pitiable condition of the slaves is visible in the narrative. Their physical circumstances might have been better in some instances when compared to poor white workers in Britain during the Industrial Revolution. But the demeaning nature of slavery was enough for its victims to wish for freedom even at the cost of a large part of their resources, such as buying one’s own freedom. A slave was not a legal person – they could not own property, sue or be sued, hold public office or marry. Slaveholders had the right to punish enslaved labourers however cruelly they wished, such as whipping, starving or branding. The murder of a slave was punished with a fine of mere 25 GBP or 3000 pounds of sugar. Penalty for killing another person’s slave was higher, because the perpetrator was destroying another man’s property. To slaveholders, the primary importance of the enslaved family was to produce a new generation of enslaved labourers. Fathers were written out of the records and not considered part of the family unit. Even in 1820 when colonial laws prevented separation of family members caused by slave sales, it defined family as consisting of a mother and her minor children. This sorrowful state of affairs was something shielded from European eyes. Rich slaveholders purchased landed assets and resided in Britain as absentee planters of the Caribbean islands and spent their money in rich abundance, forcing one thinker to caustically remark that the ‘slave empire’s splendour is at our doors, while the miseries are across the Atlantic’.

The book provides a summary picture of how slavery affected British politics and the part antislavery movement played in it. The wealth generated in the slave plantations helped to unify the otherwise divisive nations of Britain – England, Wales and Scotland. The British vowed not to become slaves themselves, but the liberty they treasured was rooted in slavery nor did it forbade them from owning slaves elsewhere in the empire. Demands to end slave trade as a moral necessity arose with Enlightenment. The number of slaves getting killed on the passage through the Atlantic was staggering. About ten per cent of the human cargo perished at sea which was only slightly better than that of horses similarly transported in the middle ages. This amounted to sheer murder. The American Revolution shaped the growing British antislavery movement. The loss of American colonies broke off some of the most powerful slaveholders in the empire. British antislavery flowed in complicated ways from Evangelicalism, Enlightenment and the rise of sensibility. A general sense that slavery was morally wrong extended even to slaveholders. In late-1780s this sentiment was harnessed into a movement to abolish the British slave trade. Law courts established that any enslaved person with the means to sue their owner in a British court would be manumitted. It does not mean that slaves had resigned to their fate to fall into passive suffering. In 1781, slaves revolted in Saint Domingue (Haiti) which was under French occupation. The British sent troops to capture the island as mainland France was in the clutches of the revolutionary regime. France abolished slavery in all its colonies in 1794 and enlisted the freedmen to fight against Britain. The British were defeated. Napoleon revoked the order of emancipation and sent force to re-annex the island. The rebels fought and decimated the French army also. The independent black kingdom of Haiti came into being in 1804 as a result.

The political process of emancipation was long drawn-out and littered with obstacles. William Wilberforce was the voice and face of the abolitionist movement. The trade in slaves was abolished through an act in 1807. Legislation was timid at first. The Dolben’s Act of 1788 merely fixed the maximum number of enslaved people who could be held captive in a slave ship. The planters readily came out in support of slavery. The argument in support of it was that the Old Testament approved of slavery and that the material comfort of the enslaved people was better than that of free British poor. Gradual emancipation was attempted through incremental reforms like amelioration of the plight of the enslaved. In the colonies, rumours widely circulated that slavery was abolished and the local masters were not honouring the legislation. Riots broke out in many places as the slaves believed that the parliamentary resolutions have granted them freedom but the white colonist has refused to carry them out. The Emancipation Act was passed in 1833 which prohibited slavery from the next year onwards. The abolitionists expected that the enslaved would accept their superior judgment in committing the newly manumitted people to continue to serve their former masters for another six years through an apprenticeship at the end of which they would be set free. This experiment failed and the intake of the former slaves as free, wage labourers also failed. The breakdown of this experiment hardened the resolve of American planters in continuing with slavery. A civil war had to be fought before the recalcitrant South saw reason. In the British case which we were examining in this book, the electoral reforms had also helped to weed out ultraconservative slaveholders from the parliament floor. The Reform Act of 1832 extended the populace’s voice in government. It closed rotten boroughs and eroded the power of slaveholders in the house. People with no landed wealth had little patience for slaveholders’ claims.

The book also looks at how slavery was wound down by adopting various measures to check an abrupt changeover. The abolitionists feared that the ‘uncivilized blacks’ could not prosper in a civilized society. They planned to leave the freed people landless, poor and politically weak so as to force them to wage labour which was thought to be having a civilizing effect on its practitioners. This envisaged a temporary period of low-wage work and exploitation. The concern was that if the wages were high, workers would quickly purchase land with their savings and would sit idle by producing their essentials from the land and thus removing themselves from the economic mainstream. In effect, after emancipation, the law would replace the whip and the slaveholders would become landlords. A severe rider on emancipation was the disbursement of compensation for slaveholders for the loss of slaves. A huge figure of 20 million GBP (which corresponded to 1.9 billion GBP in today’s money) was identified for payment. The compensation fund was amassed by perpetual bonds which were finally redeemed only in 2015 by paying 200 million GBP by the David Cameron government. The end of slavery marked Britain’s focus shifting to imperialism. By virtue of having abolished slavery, Britain was projected to have earned the moral right to take new colonies in the name of a civilization that itself had been made in the crucible of a slave empire.

Even though Scanlan makes an overview of Caribbean slavery and how it came to an end through legislative measures, the book contains a lot of references of its impact on India which was not related by ethnicity or commerce to the slave trade. The author claims that slavery existed in India too where the enslaved labourers were claimed as property by local aristocrats and not by Europeans as in the Caribbean. Here, it seems the author is confusing the caste system with slavery. While it is true that the caste system was highly oppressive and intimidating to the lower ones, it is not at all comparable to the slave system where a person could be sold to another and the rights of fathers over their offspring were not recognised. British racism on the conceptual level was different in India than in the Caribbean where workers of African descent were considered physically formidable but lazy and in need of rigid discipline in order to be put to work. Asian workers were imagined to be weak and effeminate, incapable of meeting the challenges of sugarcane cultivation. After emancipation, the sugar plantations faced severe labour shortages as the former slaves left work which was a mark of bondage. The planters then opted for indentured labour from India and Southeast Asia. Between 1833 and 1917, more than 3.5 million Indian workers went mainly to British Caribbean. The thriving societies of Indian ethnicity existing presently in these islands are the descendants of these labourers. Cotton also played a large part in the development of Indian nationalism and slavery has a direct link to it. As noted earlier, slave labour was mainly involved in cotton production in the US which was the staple commodity of British industry. As antislavery efforts picked up momentum in Britain, it extended cotton cultivation to India using cheap wage labour. This established a native cotton industry in India but it had a terrible side-effect. In some provinces, up to 21 per cent of all arable land was devoted to cotton. This rapid expansion came at a harrowing human cost. From 1876 to 1878, ten million Indians died in famines in South India. Cotton was not the only cause, but great swathes of land that might have grown staples had been converted to cotton.

With a lucid presentation style and delightful vocabulary, this book offers a pleasurable experience to readers. Enlightenment values are claimed to be behind the gradual transformation of the abolitionist outlook. At the same time, it cannot be denied that the Evangelists wanted to convert the entire slave population to their religion and thereafter did not intend them to keep them in servility. This dichotomy between the two sources is not elaborated sufficiently in the text and stands as a distinct disadvantage.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 3 Star

Himalaya – Exploring the Roof of the World

Title: Himalaya – Exploring the Roof of the World

Author: John Keay

Publisher: Bloomsbury Circus, 2022 (First)

ISBN: 9781526660527

Pages: 377

 

The Himalayan mountain range is as prominent as a global geographical unit as the Pacific Ocean, Australian continent or the Sahara Desert. Science deduces that this mountain range was formed several billions of years ago when the Indian tectonic plate rammed into the Asian plate causing the impact edges to bend upward as the Himalayas. The compression on the line of contact is so huge that the earth’s crust thickened near the mountains and it became the Tibetan plateau. Whatever may be the nitty-gritty of its formation, Himalaya is sacred to Hindus, Buddhists and other tribal religions alike as the abode of gods. When India succumbed to colonial expansionism in the nineteenth century, the British officials were intrigued by the sheer presence of the Himalaya mainly because of its high peaks which are unparalleled in the world, the indigenous people who valued exclusionism and the prospects of trade. The notion of Himalaya as a halfway haven to the stars blessed with idyllic valleys and other-worldly values took root in Western minds as a result of early explorations. This book offers a mishmash of facts and legends, mainly about Tibet and the Pamirs. It talks about early explorations, invasions, arm-twisting of native Tibetans both by the British earlier and later by the Chinese, mountaineering and how the region became a point of contention in the Great Game of colonial expansion sought by the British and the Russians. John Keay is a noted British historian whose style is very elegant. Reviews of several of his works such as India – A History, The Honourable Company and The Spice Route can be found in this series and can be accessed by clicking on the titles.

 

Keay begins by establishing Himalaya’s immense significance to dictating geography in this part of the world. The fragility of this eco-zone needs hardly to be explained. Himalaya is here compared to continents like Australia or Antarctica, where the latter is demilitarised and apportioned into national study zones by universal agreement. Himalaya also is as fragile and globally significant and would benefit from such a consensus. Towards the end of the book, the author laments that Himalaya cannot be protected by treaties due to political causes, but the concerns of the indigenous people ‘should not be allowed to deter global anxieties’ (p.337). This is a serious assertion and implies a colonial mindset expressed variously as White Man’s Burden. This long-discarded racial theory implies that the coloured people does not know how to mind their affairs in modern societies and it was the white man’s duty to civilize them. This implied suggestion to override national boundaries and bring the region into a supra-national protectorate administered by international bureaucracy is an outrageous one. As part of the history of the origin of Himalaya, this book explains the development of the concepts of plate tectonics and the contributions of Alfred Wegener whose ideas were ridiculed, discredited at first and then grudgingly accommodated. However, plate tectonics conveys such profound knowledge and is comparable to what evolution was to natural sciences and what relativity and quantum mechanics were to physics. The Himalayan peaks were once ocean floor. The uplifting of all this rock was the result of tectonic collisions at extremely low speed.

 

Keay often exhibits an unnecessarily accommodative posture to local beliefs and myths which may sometimes run counter to established scientific wisdom or even common sense. The reasons which prompt him to do so are flimsy and unconvincing for general readers. Palaeontologists discovered fossils of an enormous tortoise called Colossochelys atlas in the nineteenth century from Sivalik mountains. This species is speculated to have gone extinct after humans colonized the region and is stretched as an explanation to a similar concept in Hindu myths which suppose a giant tortoise on whose carapace the earth rests. There is a similar tale in native American societies too. The author drives the point a little too far and makes the earlier claim vulnerable to critical scrutiny when he suggests that the ogres and ogresses referred in Tibetan myths may represent an ancestral memory of contact with Neanderthals or other hominins (p.73). To scientifically buttress this point, he postulates that the genes adapted to oxygen deficiency in the high altitudes were obtained by mixing with Denisovan Man – another hominid. Another curious piece of folk wisdom relates to Hunza whose people believe that the glaciers are gendered and if ice from a male and female glacier is mixed together and is covered in snow at a suitable place and if certain ceremonies are gone through, then a baby glacier will grow there. Though the author does not back it unhesitatingly, he gives a nuanced description which hints that it is likely to happen or that he has met at least a few people who had seen it happen.

 

Most of the narrative revolves around Tibet and its geographical and political landscapes. Explorations into Tibet’s prehistory are narrated and concludes that prehistoric archaeology of the region is still in its infancy. China forcefully annexed Tibet and reconfigured it in the 1960s and prevented any meaningful enquiries. The Tibetan autonomous region was renamed Xizang and roughly corresponded to Outer Tibet. Most of Inner Tibet is now not recognized as Tibetan at all and is incorporated into neighbouring Chinese provinces. Tibet was being dismantled just as its name was being erased. China is brutally exploiting its resources. The ores and aggregates of the plateau all flow east into China. Those benefitting from all this bounty are Han Chinese plus a few foreign investors. The machinery, the expertise and most of the labour come from China. Stories of several Western explorers who travelled in Tibet are given in the book. They got into different regions of the Himalaya after 1850 and exposed several aspects of the geography or culture. While acknowledging Chinese aggression in Tibet, the author is extremely reluctant to admit the cultural ties that exist between that country and India. He insinuates that Indian pilgrimage to Kailas Manasarovar originated only in the 1930s because there are no ashrams, dharmasalas or statuary nearby or at least the British patronage in the 1920s led to a dramatic increase in the number of Indian pilgrims to Kailas region (p.215). The object of this British ploy was to impress on the Chinese that India too had a legitimate interest in Tibet – a case of pilgrimage serving politics. When China invaded and occupied Tibet, Indian pilgrimage was abruptly terminated which was resumed only in the late-1970s. The book also harps on the inconclusive character of the border line separating India and Tibet and called the McMahon Line. The wriggling course taken by the McMahon Line through the eastern Himalayas match exactly with the explorations of Bailey and Morshead in 1913. The 1914 Simla conference between Britain, China and Tibet would formalise the line, but it remained a dead letter as the convention was never ratified because the World War I intervened before any progress could be marked.

 

The book provides many curious bits of information that may challenge the incredulity of readers. It talks about a welcome piece of news regarding climate change and global warming called the Karakoram Anomaly. When the basic postulate of the warming gang is that glaciers are melting away to extinction, the glaciers in Karakoram are said to be actually growing! Compare this with the ice caps of Antarctica and Greenland where it is shrinking. The travels of Swami 1108 Pranavananda Maharaj prove very interesting. The number 1108 in his honorific corresponds to a sacred numeral in Hindu and Buddhist thinking. He semi-resided in Kailas Manasarovar region for 23 years and made 25 circuits around both on foot. He compiled a record enveloping everything that could pertain to the region even including ornithology, mineralogy, cultivation and zoology. Keay also mentions about a historical event that defined Tibet’s cultural affinity towards India, at the cost of China. A religious conclave was held there in the eighth century CE, to decide and choose between Zen Buddhism of China and the orthodox Indian variety. The reigning Tibetan monarch made a clincher that only the doctrine maintained by Indians was to be recognized in Tibet. Thereafter, it was to India that Tibet looked for religious inspiration and direction. Even then, the author makes a crafty observation later that Ladakh is ethnically and culturally Tibetan and virtually regrets its annexation in the nineteenth century to Kashmir under the Dogra king Gulab Singh (p.272).

 

The author is a colonial apologist of the milder variety. A faint astonishment is clearly discernible in the narrative which confounds the author as to why today’s Indians are not properly ‘grateful’ for the services rendered by their British taskmasters in the nineteenth century by opening up the Himalayan hinterland. He conclusively disregards Indian efforts in this direction. To the British explorers and possibly to Keay also, those Indians hired for the explorative journeys counted little more than cattle they collected as pack animals for the trip. In some places, the book unfortunately smacks of colonial hangover. It is as if the Europeans had not come and ‘prised up’ the mountain fastness, the Chinese and Indians would not have known that Himalaya existed! Keay’s disdain about Indians is exceeded only by his near-contemptuous disregard for Nepal and its people whom he likens to a destitute, failed state. The author does not consider Kashmir to be a part of India in his wily observation that ‘Nanda Devi was the highest peak wholly within India because Kangchenjunga being half in Sikkim and Nanga Parbat in Kashmir’ (p.305). He also accuses India of stripping Kashmir of its autonomy, isolated it by all manner of restrictions and subjected to occupation by half-a-million troops (p.267). Through this blatantly hostile comment, he is referring to the abrogation of Article 370 in the Indian constitution.

 

The book seems to lack a structure or a solid timeline of narration. Sometimes the author opts for a flashback going a century or two in the past and then fast-forwards to late-twentieth century with equal gusto. A large part of the book is concentrated on Tibet but this occupied country does not elicit the much-needed sympathy and support. The author of course notes ruefully that China is exploiting Tibet by robbing it of precious minerals, but it is timid and does not heats up the argument to such a level that can lead to a refusal of a visa to China in the future. Author’s research for the work seems limited to the historical material compiled by colonial explorers. Even though the Himalaya is the subject matter of the book, it does not disclose how the mountain is known to local people in the Chinese, Tibetan or Burmese languages. Keay has simply not bothered to look. What shines through the entirety of the text is the unbreakable linkage of local religions to the sacred geography of the Himalayas, whether it is Buddhist, Hindu or the tribal Bon religion. But in the western regions of the mountain range which straddles Pakistan and Afghanistan, no such bondage is witnessed which may probably be due to the strict form of Islamic monotheism practised in these parts. The author has obviously not visited the Afghan part of Himalaya possibly due to security concerns, but limits his criticism to those regions which actually permitted him to visit them safely. The irony and ingratitude is glaring.

 

The book is recommended.

 

Rating: 2 Star