India which marked its sixtieth year of independence just a few weeks ago, has much to teach us. Though to most of us Filipinos, I daresay our attitudes toward Indians are usually racist: We equate them with usury, or 5-6, while never asking ourselves why Indians — to be precise, often Sikhs, who wear those turbans — are the entrepreneurs who provide credit, which our own banks won’t do. The more enlightened among us, perhaps, are looking at microfinance as a valuable weapon against poverty.
We all know the romantic story of the Taj Mahal, the mausoleum complex, including a mosque, built by the Mogul Emperor Shah Jahan in memory of his wife. But here’s the thing that struck me about that story.
We’re used to hearing that there are many words in English — bungalow, pajamas, pundit, nabob, to name just a few — that originated in India. So many interesting, at time beautiful, even basic, words — look at copra, sugar, karma, and shampoo for example — but none of these words hit as close to home — and connect India so intimately to Filipinos — as the word mahal.
Beginning with our word for beloved, mahal, there are many words, and the ideas they represent, that have come down to Filipinos from India. Marvelous words. Words of whimsy — muni-muni for example — and of great significance — take wika, dukha — and even mysticism — puri, diwa, tadhana and Bathala.
The late Octavio Paz, Nobel Laureate, once served as Mexico’s ambassador to India. He wrote a little jewel of a book, titled “In Light of India.” As a Mexican, he was, of course, also conscious of another country, our country, with whom Mexico has had a centuries-old relationship.
Through his book, he introduces the tantalizing possibility the Philippines served as an intermediary between Mexico and India.
Here’s an example. He points out that the chili came from the Americas; when he was Mexico’s ambassador, he found out the ancient cuisine of India didn’t include chilis, now an important ingredient in Indian food. Paz suggests one of the ways the chili reached India may have been through the Philippines!
He also wrote that the chico fruit may have reached India through the Philippines, while of course the chico came to us from Mexico — just as Paz says, the mango reached Mexico from India, through the Philippines, though the finest mangoes in Mexico, to this day, are known as Mangoes of Manila.
If Octavio Paz is right, perhaps it was through the British invasion and occupation of Luzon that the chili reached India and the mango reached Mexico. India was ruled by the British East India Company, and it launched an expedition to seize Manila in 1762. In 1764, the British returned Manila to Spain, after the Treaty of Paris — another Treaty of Paris, of course, two hundred years later had the Spanish handing us over to the Americans — but the British stayed in Sulu until 1773.
The loot from Manila was so massive, that three centuries later, precious items were being put up in auction in London, by the descendants of Gen. Draper, the commander who’d supervised the plundering of Manila.
But an altogether different kind of permanent mark was left by the British occupation. It was in the town of Cainta, where some Indian troops, known as sepoys, decided to stay rather than return to their native land. And it is by means of the sepoys, that we can establish what should be an enduring basis for a sense of affinity with India.
From the sepoys that settled in Cainta, we go to the sepoys who launched a revolt against the British.
In 1857 Indians revolted against British rule, and just like our revolt against Spain in 1896 and then our war against the Americans, they, like we, were defeated, with great bloodshed. The last Mogul emperor was exiled, and the process began by which the Queen of Great Britain became Empress of India by 1877.
The British, as the victors, called the revolt the Indian Mutiny; just as the Americans until quite recently, called the Filipino-American War the Philippine Insurrection.
The end result, for Indians and us, seems the same: Another way had to be found. The costs of revolt were too great, whether in India in 1857, here at home in 1870, for which the elite was persecuted, and in 1896, for which the new middle class and the masses too up arms, and then, again, for us, from 1899-1903 in our war against the Americans.
So the 20th century would see, for both India and the Philippines, a remarkable, unprecedented development in the history of colonized nations: A generally peaceful, political, struggle for independence.
Like the British in India, the Americans set out to create a class of professionals in addition to the established rulers, through whom they ruled; and who would, because they were educated in the ways of the British, instinctively pursue reform by means of the law and not the gun.
Just as our peaceful campaign to restore our independence was led by lawyers, so, too was India’s. All three of it’s greatest independence campaigners, Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Mohammed Ali Jinnah, wanted independence, but through peaceful means.
Indeed Nehru and Jinnah, left alone, might have pursued matters as Filipinos did, through independence missions. But Gandhi developed something he called Satyagraha — the resistance of tyranny through mass civil disobedience, which firmly founded upon “ahimsa” or total nonviolence.
Stanley Wolpert’s “Nehru: A Tryst With Destiny,” a fascinating account of that statesman’s life and times, tell us of the unease some of Gandhi’s closest associates, like Nehru, felt with the idea of civil disobedience. The Muslim leader Jinnah simply hated it.
The story told in Wolpert’s book reads like Philippine political history from the 1920s to the 1940s.
Their independence struggle, like ours, is a tale of leaders generally from the upper and professional classes that led the independence movement. Their vehicle was a single party, the Congress Party, which dominated politics for generations, just as here at home, the Nacionalista Party dominated the independence movement. Even now, the instinct of our political class is to form a superparty, just as much of India’s modern history has been dominated by the Congress Party.
And independence for India, as for us, came, some felt, too soon, but not a moment too soon, because the Americans and the British were finally prepared to recognize independence, after decades of insistence on the part of Filipinos and Indians.
America had thought it could use the Philippines, as an entry point to the China market. Britain thought it could reap riches from India. For a time, both nations did well from their colonies’ resources, but eventually, the Philippines proved too much a threat to American sugar and vegetable oils interests, and independence was finally promised by 1935.
A Russian scholar, Victor Somsky, told me not so long ago, that Carlos P. Romulo once interviewed Mahatma Gandhi in the 1930s. Gandhi told Romulo, if he’d been able to secure an independence law from the British the way Filipinos did from the Americans, he would have accepted it with delight.
