Eastern watchers of Western ruin
Indian writer Pankaj Mishra is among the most incisive critics of the Western neoimpressionist mindset which has manifested itself to such baleful effect in recent years and which the other day found fresh inflammatory expression in the assertion of US Republican Presidential candidate, Mitt Romney, that Israel has prevailed over Palestinian people by virtue of possessing a superior culture.
A rebuke to Western arrogance, Mishra’s new book, From the Ruins of Empire, is also an indictment of the willful ignorance that has accompanied that arrogance.
Even among educated Westerners, there is little awareness of how rich a critique of hegemonic Western values was developed by Chinese, Indian, Japanese, Persian and Arab intellectuals during the colonial era. Mishra throws light on late nineteenth and early twentieth century writers who are barely known in the West yet whose denunciations of the West’s overweening self-importance were as penetrating as they were prescient.
The writers in question would not be surprised by the disastrous outcomes of the Anglo-American interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, or by the financial crisis that has engulfed Western societies. None of them ever doubted that the imperialism was an engine of destruction.
Mishra evokes the fugitive Persian-born intellectual Jamal Al-Din Afghani (1838-1897), who first defined Islam as anti-Western and who urged Muslims to abandon their passivity and resignation in the face of Western power. Convinced that there was nothing to stop Muslims from acquiring the science, education and military prowess that underlay the West’s supremacy, Afghani was an advocate of Islamic self-empowerment who liked to intone the Qur’anic verse, ‘God does not change the condition of a people until they change their own condition’.
Pankaj Mishra believes that if Muslim peoples switched within a century from being subjects of history to its makers, it was in no small degree because of the efforts of Al-Afghani and his followers. Indeed, he wonders if the Arab uprisings of the 21st century would have been possible but for the ideological foundations Al-Afghani built.
Much about Afghani’s itinerant career is obscure. Yet the reason why many of the thinkers Mishra discusses have not impinged on Western consciousness has little to do with paucity of information. It resides rather in the West’s cultural narcissism and self-deceiving belief that it had bestowed on ‘lesser breeds’ the priceless gift of Western ‘civilization’. One of the critics of the West portrayed by Mishra, Al-Afghani’s Egyptian disciple Mohammed Abduh (1849-1905), noted the disconnect between British words and deeds with respect to his country. ‘Your liberalness, we see plainly, is only for yourselves and your sympathy with us is that of the wolf for the lamb which he deigns to eat’, he scornfully commented.
Another figure quoted by Mishra, Indian nationalist Aurobindo Ghose (1872-1950), pointed out how British Christian empire-builders covered their depredations in India with a ‘cloak of virtue, benevolence and unselfish altruism’.
Not that Mishra’s book is a mere catalogue of Western malfeasance. It also underlines the conviction of his chosen critics that nothing could be more dangerous for the post-colonial world than for it to adopt the Western model of the unitary nation-state wedded to global capitalism. Mishra writes about Liang Qichao (1861-1929), who reviled Western materialism while upholding the spiritual ideals of Confucianism, and about Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), who chided Asian leaders for emulating Western models of development to the detriment of their own traditions.
The somber conclusion of his book is that the global diffusion of the West’s cult of growth is liable to generate nihilistic rage among the world’s poor and disenfranchised, even as it wreaks environmental havoc. Mishra’s message is that mankind must bid goodbye to divisive racist claims of cultural superiority and strive for a world where peoples of all cultures can meet on terms of equality and mutual respect.
Mishra is right to say that the cosmopolitan future dreamed of by his thinkers has drawn closer. Certainly, London, where he partly lives, has successfully absorbed all manner of nationalities and ethnicities.
Yet British society as a whole is far from eager to embrace such cosmopolitanism. With an ageing population typical of Western society at large, Britain appears handicapped by an inability to transcend a conception of itself rooted in its imperial past. Many Britons have a siege-mentality even in relation to their European neighbors. From the Ruins of Empire appears at a moment when Britain’s Channel 4 television station is broadcasting a series in which the historian David Starkey revisits the career of Winston Churchill, stressing Britain’s good fortune in having had an unyielding leader during the Second World who harbored no illusions about the threat posed by Hitler’s Germany.
This British mania for reliving past glories would be merely pathetic if it had not become plain how calamitously it can impact the present. In the aftermath of 9/11, Prime Minister Tony Blair struck a defiant Churchillian posture as he recalled how the US had stood by Britain during the ‘Blitz,’ the period in 1940/41 when British cities were bombed by the German Luftwaffe, with the implication that Britain was now honor-bound to stand by the US. In truth, the US had not even entered the Second World War when the ‘Blitz’ was at its height. Nevertheless, it was testimony to the tenacity of the folk memory that Britain and the US rescued Western civilization from fascism that Blair could credibly convey that renewed British support for the US was a necessary continuation of Churchill’s noble work.
Winston Churchill may have saved Britain from Nazi domination. Yet at the same time he was the very personification of Western arrogance, a British statesman who believed his country enjoyed a divine right to retain India as the jewel in its imperial crown. We need to hear much less about him and much more about the far-sighted thinkers showcased in Pankaj Mishra’s ground-breaking book.
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