The Greek Revolution

Title: The Greek Revolution – 1821 and the Making of Modern Europe

Author: Mark Mazower

Publisher: Allen Lane, 2021 (First)

ISBN: 9780241004104

Pages: 574

 

The roots of Western Civilisation run deep into the form and content of the ancient Greek Civilisation. Every aspect of western thought derives its inspiration from the orators, politicians, historians and litterateurs of the Hellenic world. With a sense of this deep attachment in mind, tourists scour the modern Greek nation and marvel at the architectural remains and reeve the thread of association which they think to be unbroken over the vast length of time. Little do they realise that Greece, the country tourists visit today, was born out of the revolution which began in 1821.  And that the glorious city of Athens was a quiet Ottoman backwater that had been left in ruins. The Greek people underwent much tribulation after they ended up under the Ottoman yoke. Under a strict interpretation of the sharia law, Greek Christians lived a subhuman existence with all avenues of progress blocked and even basic human rights denied. They had no freedom of religion. In fact, churches were not even allowed to toll their bells for worship. Muslim slave traders raided the territories to capture slaves for sale in the slave markets of Turkey, Syria and Egypt. Ottoman grandees chose Greek women for their harems at will. After centuries of patient suffering, the Greeks rose up in revolt in 1821 against the barbaric Ottoman rule and claimed independence with generous European support. Coming close on the heels of Napoleonic Wars, the events led to solidification of principles that founded the idea of modern Europe such as public opinion, international aid and peace-keeping forces. This book tells the story of this great transformation of the Greeks from medieval savagery to modern enlightenment. Mark Mazower is a professor of history at Columbus University and specializes in subjects on Greece and the Balkans.

 

The Greeks had an affinity to Russia as it was the stronger partner sharing the Orthodox Christian faith. A group of Greek patriots in Russia formed the Filiki Etaireia (Friendly Society) under Alexander Ypsilantis to wage war against the Porte. But this was a motley crowd of volunteers who lacked unity and discipline. The rebellion was initiated by this committee in the Danubian Principalities but was soon crushed. The banner was then kept aloft in the Peloponnese and Rumeli under the guise of the rebel Ottoman governor Ali Pasha of Jannina who had turned himself against the sultan. Even though Ali Pasha was later killed, the Ottoman rule in Greece hung in the balance. But the Greeks possessed no strong leadership and were grouped under several chieftains who had only local priorities to keep. The Turks retaliated by killing prominent Greeks residing in Constantinople, the Ottoman capital. Their spiritual leader, the 84-year old patriarch Gregorios V was publicly hanged and his body kept dangling there for days as a humiliation and warning. Non-Muslims were nothing more than hostages in Ottoman lands. If the sultan’s troops were attacked elsewhere by their co-religionists, they suffered the full punishment as if they were the perpetrators of the act. Ottomans regained the territory by combining their forces with Mehmed Ali Pasha of Egypt and fighting under his son Ibrahim Pasha. Ibrahim’s reprisals were merciless and brutal in the extreme. Apart from the usual killings, rape, loot and enslavement, he cut down the orchards and fruit trees to make Greece a desert similar to his home province of Egypt. At this point, Europe’s patience ran out and England, France and Russia intervened militarily. Ottoman resistance was soon wiped out and Greece was made independent.

 

Mazower gives a brief report of the highhandedness with which the Ottomans ran their dictatorship over the Greeks. The Muslims were in a minority in the province, but the Greeks were unmistakably suppressed as inferior. Any Greek meeting a Muslim on the road had to dismount as a mark of respect. Christian violence against Muslims was taken very seriously, but the Porte did not bother with violence among Christians themselves, leaving their religious bodies to resolve the issue. Greeks were mistreated and scorned for centuries by their Ottoman masters. The desire for revenge brought out casual ferocity and vindictive rage when the rebels overran Muslim settlements. The return attacks were blood-curdling. When Turks subdued the island of Chios which rebelled, they killed 25,000 men and 45,000 women and children were taken as slaves out of a population of 100,000. Soldiers cut the heads and ears off the corpses for payment from the Pasha’s accountants.

 

The crusades were the desperate attempt of European Christianity to liberate the Holy Land from Muslims in the eleventh-thirteenth centuries CE. The author has not addressed the question of how deep the spirit of crusades or religious unity had percolated into the European mind in arriving at their decision to come to the aid of Greeks even at the cost of military encounter with the powerful Ottomans. He provides many hints however. A sense of Christian solidarity allowed monarchists and republicans in Europe to bury their differences and coalesce around a culturalist argument akin to the spirit of the crusades. The prospect of communal death at the hands of Ottomans was a fear shared by the Greeks in the Peloponnese, Rumeli and Asia Minor. It was unquestionably one of the ways in which an idea of the Greek nation emerged. The Greek constitution, which was drafted by politicians and thinkers trained in Europe in 1822 declared Orthodox Christianity to be the ruling faith of the Greek state. Only Christians could be Greek citizens. The document was prefaced with the words ‘in the name of the Holy and Indissoluble Trinity’. There was a report in 2018 that the ruling Greek party was trying to separate church from the state and so it seems that even after many revisions, the constitution is still not secular in the modern sense. Whichever way you look at it, Orthodox belief has been the starting point of modern Greek consciousness. The Ottoman past has been completely eradicated from Peloponnese.

 

Mazower displays a surprising lack of empathy to the Greek cause in the narrative. The bad aspects of all Greek national leaders find prominent mention in the biographical sketches. On the other hand, the Ottoman warlords who had killed and enslaved thousands of innocents do not get the censure they deserve. Every nation glorifies their national movement and iron over wrinkles and differences of opinion especially when non-homogeneous groups are involved. This author’s irreverent approach inflates the issues of contention and ignores the points of unanimity. Lack of unity and mutual distrust among the leaders and regions are blown out of proportion. The revolution itself is portrayed as a lucky accident rather than the result of a valiant fight. “Putting off decision until it was clear who’ll prevail”, ‘wanted to avoid conflict but forced into action” are some of the author’s choice phrases to mark the Greeks in a poor light. The Greeks were short of men, material, money and resources on all fronts. In spite of this, Mazower ridicules the fighters and reports their occasional depredations against their own flock due to severe shortage of resources. All these fallacious arguments try to reinforce the conception that the Greeks did not deserve to win self-determination and that the Ottomans were unfairly wronged. This is epitomized in his narrative on the rudimentary Greek navy which was initially nothing but retrofitted commercial fleet. There was no discipline in them as the sailors were volunteers who deserted as they pleased. Needs of national strategy took second place and they reverted to ferry cargo for profit at times. They even indulged in piracy (p.140). At the slightest prospect of defeat, the Greek contingents looted each other. This is how the book portrays the Greek effort. The author also exhibits an Ottoman bias. Even when the Greeks were being crushed as a subhuman race of infidels, he claims that Christian women sometimes turned to Ottoman judges to obtain satisfaction when their own communal law fell short (p.124).

 

The book vividly highlights the change in European perception of the conflict that finally triggered a military response that decimated the Ottomans. Without that crucial intervention, all Greeks would undoubtedly have been killed or forcibly converted. The support arose in the trickle of philhellenes from Europe who was motivated by the study of classical Greece and the incumbent desire to somehow restore its past glory. The real contribution of these philhellenic volunteers was that they marked Europe’s concern and alignment of public opinion to the Greek cause. However, many of them were disillusioned after arriving in Greece and fighting on their side. In the next stage, specially chartered consignments of supplies and material reached the insurgents from wealthy Europeans and sympathetic groups. Lord Byron was the most famous volunteer and his death from natural causes in 1824 was a sensation across Europe. The surge in Europe’s sympathy was rooted in a tradition of educated veneration for ancient Greece. Supporting the Greeks also meant signaling disapproval of the continent’s conservative masters and their intolerance of the rights of nations. This was significant after Waterloo when the restored European monarchy abhorred revolutionary movements anywhere. The monarchs maintained neutrality or resigned indifference to the continuation of Ottoman dominance in the first few years of the revolution.

 

As is common with many European and American writers, this author also tries his best to laud the Ottomans. Apart from vignettes of their rule mentioned above, Mazower goes one step further to eulogize the life of slaves under Ottomans because, as he says, sometimes staffing the highest levels of imperial governance was with slave recruits. For this author, getting caught and separated from their own families to become a slave is like clearing the civil service examination! But the victims never thought so as we see them often committing suicide to prevent capture. The life of a female slave was much more hellish as sexual violation was also involved. Not that the young male slaves were also not completely free from this threat. She would be extremely fortunate if she could end up as one among the hundreds of concubines in an Ottoman Pasha’s harem. The narrative is rather drab and uninspiring. After 1826, the pace quickens and in a few chapters Ottomans go down, a new king appears from Bavaria and a constitution comes into effect. With its mission of cutting Greek revolutionary leaders down to size, the book is designed to cast away the feeling of euphoria from modern Greeks and to nip off respect towards the nation’s founding fathers. The book tells of European military experts called to train Ottoman soldiers going over to their army and fighting against their fellows. This author is a successor to them in spirit.

 

The book is recommended.

 

Rating: 2 Star

 

Social Background of Indian Nationalism

Title: Social Background of Indian Nationalism

Author: A. R. Desai

Publisher: Popular Prakashan, 1990 (First published 1948)

ISBN: 0861320867

Pages:461

 

When the Muslims demanded partition of pre-independent India on the basis that Hindus and Muslims constituted two separate nations, the nationalists were completely taken aback. The very concept of nationhood in the modern sense was hardly a century old by then. Civilizational unity of the country stretching thousands of years was an undisputable fact but the political unity of the landmass was uncertain for most of the time. India arose as a modern nation after the British conquest that subjected her to the ignominy of being a colony to a European power. Nationalism germinated after the rebellion of 1857 and was spearheaded by various socio-economic groups in many phases. As the economy underwent a change from feudalism to full-fledged capitalism, the social groups also changed in texture and content. This book seeks to assess the social background of Indian nationalism from a Marxian perspective. What sets it apart from other books is that it was written very close to independence. Akshay Ramanlal Desai (1915-94) was an Indian sociologist, Marxist and a social activist. He was professor of sociology at the University of Mumbai. He is mainly remembered as the author of this book.

 

Desai presents a good picture of pre-British India that lived out a sordid existence under centuries of Islamic rule. The villages which accommodated the bulk of the population were in a time warp that blindly reproduced the socio-economic activities it had practiced for millennia. The village was self-sufficient and was based on agriculture carried out with the primitive plough and bullock power. A few people were employed in handicrafts by means of simple instruments. A curious thing to note in this basic economic unit was the absence of private ownership of land, which was managed by the community elders. The overlord got his tribute from the produce but had no right of eviction of individual peasants in case of no or short payment. In this crucial sense, Indian feudalism was different from the West. National consciousness did not grow in such an atmosphere of self-contained village societies as it presupposed common political and economic life. Besides, there was no significant economic exchange in the form of trade.

 

The towns performed somewhat better. Desai claims that the economic and cultural life of towns was rich and progressive. It had constant contact with the outside world. Artisans produced articles for the king or other aristocrats for conspicuous consumption. As long as the feudal system prevailed, there were takers for their products. When it collapsed, the workers were rendered jobless. The ruin of urban handicrafts helped to set up exchange relations grow through markets. The producers adapted to the change in demand and diversified into articles which are useful for ordinary and rich merchants. The slew of counterfeit production centres in towns like Agra or Aligarh is a relic of that distant era. Consequent to this, a weak native merchant capitalist class emerged in India at the disintegration of Mughal Empire. However, the exchange and distribution of commodities was only between urban centres.

 

The changes wrought by the British after they conquered India form an interesting part of the narrative. The British conquest was the first of India’s conquests by a modern nation which had abolished feudalism and created a modern bourgeois society in its place. But there were vast differences between the systems existing in India and which existed in Britain. The zamindars had no right of ownership on the land and performed the function of revenue collectors. The British swept away this system with Lord Cornwallis’ Permanent Land Settlement (1793). It converted the revenue-collecting nobles into landlords upon payment of a fixed amount to the government. In return, this new class of landlords supported the British thereafter. In the Deccan, it was the small landholders who proliferated. So they introduced the Ryotwari system in which the individual cultivator became the owner of the land. In this way, private property was introduced in India which is the basic requirement of a capitalist society. The village agricultural output was brought within the sphere of domestic and foreign markets by trade in grains and cash crops such as indigo, tea and coffee. This helped the villages to become an organic part of Indian economy. The author acclaims this as a positive aspect of the British conquest. The political unity which was enhanced by the exchange-based economic system set up a capitalist economy in India and nationalism was a byproduct of the unity of the land politically, socially and economically.

 

Once nationalism takes root, it needs to be nurtured. This task was taken up by English-educated intellectuals who advocated social reform measures such as the banning of suttee and encouraging widow remarriage. After the 1857 revolt, the government did not intervene in religious matters. Very soon movements taking sustenance from India’s perceived glorious past emerged. Mass participation came about in movements related to agriculture, trade and demands for representation in the bureaucracy. The plan for regeneration and restructuring of national agriculture presupposed a national government which reflected the will of the people. The colonial government viewed India only as a producer of raw material for British industry and as a market for their produce. As the nationalists discerned the true colours of the British administrators, there arose a strong desire among them to unseat the aliens and bring in a government elected and governed by Indians. Development of transport, communication and modern education cemented nationalist ideas.

 

The book is authored by a Marxist scholar and he goes on to examine the involvement of Indian industrialists in the national movement and how the movement was bankrolled by them. He accuses Gandhi of dancing to the tune of Indian industry. Indian capitalists began to enter the nationalist movement in the first decade of the twentieth century. They gravitated to the Congress and supported the program of Swadeshi and boycott of British goods since it also served its own class interest. Industrialists strongly supported Gandhi and his control over the Congress. Wealthy industrialists subsidized such anachronous schemes as revival of handspun clothing. Moreover, Gandhi opposed the revolutionary concept of class struggle and instead called for collaboration of all sections of people. This endeared him to the industrialists. Going a step further, Desai alleges that the bourgeois leadership of the Congress under Gandhi was closely aligned to the vested interests like the Zamindari (p.354). Gandhian mass movements had a pressure value which the capitalists appreciated. The movements became levers to secure from the British the satisfaction of their demands such as safeguards for Indian industry and commerce.

 

The author’s ideological commitment to Marxism clouds his judgement, colours the analysis and confounds the results. In his statement that ‘pre-British Indian education was controlled only by Brahmins and they imparted superstition and conformity in the pupils’, the entire corpus of Indian knowledge is blackened as superstition. But on the other hand, ‘Islamic schools were open to all because of the democratic character of Islam’ (p.138). Clearly, the Leftist-Islamist nexus is very old and solid. Desai fails to recognise the civilizational unity that integrated India from the very distant past but claims that the religio-ideological unity did not overlap into political unity. He then grudgingly admits that ‘it is true that a conception of unity of India existed and flourished in pre-British times’, but then qualifies this ‘to be conceived as the religio-cultural unity of the Hindus’ (p.167). In this metaphorical twisting of the knife, the entire edifice of Indian unity is trivialized as naturally occurring among the followers of a common religion! In addition to this biased rhetoric, the book abounds in a nauseating excess of communist lingo. The word capitalism/capitalist in its political sense is used 220 times in this book along with a liberal dose of quotes from Karl Marx, Lenin and even Stalin. The author claims that ‘capitalism is socially, politically and culturally stronger than feudalism because it employs a higher technique of production’. The sole reason behind this generalization is that Marx said so. This book was written when Indian independence was fast approaching and Desai’s estimation of the nation’s forward movement exposes the lack of his perceptive rigour. He prophesies that independence, self-determination of nationalities and socialist economic system are the prerequisites for a complete solution of the problem of nationalities and minorities. This is all very well until one recollects that the socialist economic system brought the country very near to the edge of bankruptcy in 1991 and had to be disbanded on a war footing.

 

One upside of the author is that he doesn’t attempt to hide his political orientation. Right at the start, he confirms that historical materialism is the methodology applied to his study. This book treats the various language groups in India such as Marathas, Kannadas, Telugus or Gujaratis as separate nationalities, but stops just short of advocating self-determination and sovereignty to them. But the depressed classes among Hindus are treated as a ‘national minority’ like Muslims. The author claims to follow a rational outlook and terms like ‘superstition’, ‘oppression’ and ‘discrimination’ are freely used in the discourse on early Indian belief systems. However, when it comes to Islam, he takes on kid gloves and is all praise! He even compares pan-Islamism to humanism (p.301) and argues that ‘Islam arose out of the democratic ferment of the common people of Arabia against the privileged state of society’ (p.301). Statements like ‘communalism of the Muslim masses in India is generated by the economic exploitation by capitalists, landlords, moneylenders and merchants who were all Hindus’ (p.372) provide a secular prop to the fanatical argument that divided India. With such a partisan view in mind, Desai considers the Moplah Rebellion in Malabar to be ‘economic in content’. At this point, he might have felt a pang of guilt and proceeds to admit that it was ‘religious in form’.

 

The book typifies the genre of leftist analysis of Indian history and society. It is recommended with a caveat that readers should first dehusk the political narrative to reach the kernel of truth inside.

 

Rating: 2 Star