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

Doom – The Politics of Catastrophe

Title: Doom – The Politics of Catastrophe
Author: Niall Ferguson
Publisher: Allen Lane, 2021 (First)
ISBN: 9780241501764
Pages: 472

In their evolutionary history, mankind has had many brushes with disaster in which a portion of the society perished; the surviving others recovered from the shock and the damages to technology and culture were repaired. Earthquakes, pandemics, volcanic eruptions, storms and wars are the disasters that confront human societies every now and then. Covid 19 was the latest in the list of disasters that afflicted us. This book is a general history of catastrophe from the geological (earthquakes) to the geopolitical (wars), from the biological (pandemics) to the technological (nuclear accidents). This book was written in late-2020 when Covid was raging across the world. Niall Ferguson is a prominent British-American historian who needs no introduction. Several of his books were reviewed earlier here. The seeds of this work were probably sown during the lockdowns enforced to contain the spread of the Covid virus which restrained most people to a virtual house-arrest that was unaccustomed and uncomfortable. Many people used this time of compulsory leisure to good advantage and this book is a testament to it.

The first part of the book provides a primer on the mechanics of a disaster and how human groups cope with it. All societies live under uncertainty and disasters have profound economic, cultural and political consequences. What we have to fear about is not the end of the world, but big disasters that most of us survive. The resilience of societies to pull back from a catastrophe and regain its earlier technological level is not actually tested yet in an interconnected world, but this is a graver threat than outright annihilation of the species. Even then, people does not seem to be too much concerned with living near places where disaster has struck previously and where there is a greater chance to repeat it. A map of the world with the locations of the biggest earthquakes since 1500 CE plotted reveals that the biggest cities were built on or close to fault lines. This illustrates the fatal interplay between the infrequency of disasters and the shortness of human memory. Humans nearly always return to the scene of a disaster, no matter how vast it may be. In spite of occasional eruptions of Vesuvius, Naples grew to be one of Italy’s largest cities.

Most often, what affects men more is not how a disaster occurred but rather how its effects were percolated across networks – both human and natural. The most important feature of a disaster is whether there is some way of propagating the initial shock through the biological networks of life or the social networks of humanity. This book includes a useful primer on network science. A disaster consists of multiple smaller versions of itself which is a microcosm of the larger unit. This is called the fractal geometry of disaster. Unfortunately, the author does not elaborate on or give examples for this claim. Most disasters occur when a complex system goes critical, usually as a result of some small perturbation. The extent to which the exogenous shock causes a disaster is generally a function of the social network structure that comes under stress. The point of failure is more likely to be in the middle layer of the hierarchy of people than at the top of the organisation chart. Ferguson introduces ‘groupthink’ also to be a reason for causing errors that lead to disaster. It’s a mode of thinking that people engage in when they are deeply involved in a cohesive in-group, when the members’ striving for unanimity override their motivation to realistically apprise alternative courses of action. The author also points to the gradual improvement of public health even before the scientific principles behind them became apparent. Scientists took much credit for the general improvement of public health which had produced an unprecedented increase in life expectancy in the space of a century into the early-twentieth. Beginning in the Renaissance period, men worked out the efficacy of quarantines, social distancing and other measures now referred to as non-pharmaceutical interventions, long before they properly understood the true nature of the diseases they sought to conquer. It was enough to disrupt the social networks of the time to slow down the spread of the still unknown and unguessed-at microbes.

Ferguson being a British and I being an Indian, some narratives in the book that describe events in the colonial era rattle my nerves. The author presents a sense of inevitability for some colonial mishandlings that led to the death of a considerable number of Indians. Nationalists accuse the British of insensitivity to native suffering which has some substance in it, but this book argues that there was nothing more they could have done at that time. The 1918 influenza killed 18 million Indians which was 240 times the fatality figure of the British. It shattered the myth that Britain led the world in public health. In fact, a ministry of health was constituted in India only a year later. This book is professed to have been written with the aim of enabling the reader to compare the different forms doom take, rather than treating all disasters as the same. It then plays down Indian deaths and argues that ‘what was a catastrophic famine for some parts of Bengal in 1943 is altogether smaller if the death toll is expressed as a percentage of the entire population’ (p.41) which is another way of saying that ‘you should be grateful that the death toll was not higher’! He further concludes that ‘those who call the nineteenth century famines in India ‘Victorian holocausts’ are debasing historical terminology’ (p.37). Ferguson also notes the improvement in Indian health but ascribes the wrong reasons to it. The Indian mortality rate declined steeply between the 1920s and 1940s, as did the death toll attributable to famines (p.186). This is only partially true. Indian life expectancy began to surge after 1947 and there were no famines post-independence even though the monsoon had failed in many years. The author’s attempt to deny British culpability is in vain.

Ferguson analyses several pandemics and disasters occurred since World War II and suggests lessons to be learned from them. He also hints at the disproportionately harsh response measures towards Covid 19 in some countries such as the US which actually performed much worse than some other countries that responded to the disease with much milder plans. The 1957-58 Asian flu pandemic was similar in threat to Covid, but the US played it down, by not imposing lockdowns, social distancing or forcing people to wear masks. Soon herd immunity developed, along with vaccines. The reason for this subdued response may also have been due to the cold war which was at its peak. It posed such an unprecedented threat of disaster that the traditional threats posed by microbes somewhat receded in popular consciousness. Between 1957 and 2020, the world faced only one historically significant pandemic: AIDS. The policy response to it was dismal at first because the disease was mostly sexually transmitted. If polio-stricken children in leg-braces had gripped the American imagination in the 1950s, gay men with a sexually transmitted disease had the opposite effect in the 1980s. It took fifteen years to find a therapy that could prevent HIV-infected people from developing AIDS, which had killed 32 million people worldwide. The other recent disasters that are handled in the book are the Challenger space shuttle explosion and Chernobyl nuclear reactor disaster that occurred within a span of three months in 1986. In both the events, the middle management is arraigned as the culprit. However, the US society accused its president of incompetence while the Soviets blamed the Chernobyl workers.

The lockdown and social distancing measures enforced by an unimaginative bureaucracy and overzealous policemen caused more harm than good during Covid. The author notes that instead of economic lockdowns, a more rational strategy would have been to keep that share of the working population employed that could not work from home while mandating social distancing, enforcing mask-wearing and isolating older and vulnerable people. Ferguson rightly prophesies that the economic consequences of lockdowns were historically unprecedented and may have exceeded the public health benefits. The monetary and fiscal measures would decouple asset prices from economic reality and would lead to financial instability and inflation. This was written in Sep 2020 and came true soon. We have not yet become free from the effects of that Covid-induced inflation. Had the Chinese authorities acted with speed and candour, the disaster might have been averted and millions of human lives could have been saved. The book also exposes the hypocrisy of American liberal media which accused President Donald Trump of not doing enough to curtail the spread of Covid. However, even the limited measures he initiated in Jan 2020 to close down American airspace to incoming traffic from China were condemned by much of the media as racist. At the same time, the author points out with concern the countries such as Taiwan and South Korea which excelled in containing the disease. This feat was achieved using surveillance of smart phones used by the public which infringed on civil rights and privacy. These nations could pull this off under the Asian dictum that an individual’s rights are subservient to the welfare of the society. This runs counter to western ideals which put the individual before anything else. The leeway such technologies afford to autocratic regimes is another serious issue.

Ferguson’s writing is profound and well-researched. This book is not a page-turner, but it will reward you for the time spent in assimilating the several nuances to every proposition presented diligently by the author. There is indeed a palpable link between the text to cultural icons such as paintings, literature and music, indicating the author’s intimate familiarity to these areas. This book includes a scathing criticism of China in the epilogue accusing it of being autocratic and illiberal. This is a welcome change from the behaviour of international organisations such as WHO which faithfully toed the Chinese narrative on Covid. The WHO’s spineless incompetence was exposed even in innocuous issues like naming the variants of virus mutations which was done according to the Greek alphabet. After variant ‘mu’ was named, the next in line were the letters ‘nu’ and ‘xi’. WHO was worried that the name ‘xi’ would upset the Chinese dictator Xi Jinping. So they dropped it as well as the earlier letter ‘nu’ and selected ‘omicron’, which succeeds ‘xi’. Considering this in mind, Ferguson’s tirade against China is well directed. There is a long chapter on the economic consequences of Covid. Having been written in Aug-Sep 2020 when the progress of the disease was still uncertain, this chapter lacks depth and meaningful analysis. This appears too much US-centric. The arguments look premature and do not raise above discussing American politics and how its bureaucracy bungled the response measures. The whole chapter looks pointless when viewed in light of the book’s grand title.

The book is recommended.

Rating: 3 Star