Imperialism and the Writing of History

There is a specter haunting the history of colonial India: the myth of benevolent empire. That specter haunts our times in other inescapable ways. The myth of benevolent empire is playing out in narratives about Iraq, flooding our airwaves and gobbling up newsprint, the stuff of national elections and international relations, the fodder of late nights shows and water-cooler conversations alike. Curiously (or, perhaps, not so curiously), the apparitions that stalk the realms of realpolitik are not that dissimilar from those that inhabit the arcane worlds of colonial history writing or historiography. A form of historical reasoning about empire that always already contains its own justification refuses to relinquish its presence in both domains, a demon that cannot or will not be exorcised.

Let us move from present to past, from the US and Iraq in the present to the context of colonial India. The US congressional hearings on Iraq held in early September kept media channels, political analysts, journalists, and the motley crew world of bloggers busy. The proceedings indicated that US lawmakers remain deeply skeptical about claims of progress and the possibility of success in Iraq. Support for the war also happens to be at an all-time low among Americans. It is possible that some kind of blueprint for the future role of the US in the region will emerge shortly. That will have consequences for Iraq, the wider region, and for domestic politics in the US.

As such, the hearings mark an important point in the history of the war. Mirroring the focus of the hearings, media analyses of the event in the US centered on the merits and demerits of ending or prolonging the US occupation and the specifics of the various possible scenarios. Whether a complete withdrawal by US troops without some kind of alternative security arrangement in place is a good idea remains a matter of debate. The structure of a viable Iraqi state that would possess popular legitimacy among the population is also subject to discussion. America's role in the region, power-sharing arrangements between different groups in Iraq, Iran's nuclear ambitions and aspirations of establishing a Shia bloc-- all of these, and related, issues kept, and continue to keep, liberal, conservative, and libertarian commentators of every hue busy on the radio and television, in print, and on the internet.

But these matters, critically important as they are, mask some deep assumptions about the very presence of the US occupation of Iraq, which remain singularly unquestioned in mainstream public and political discourse in the country.

No one is raising the question of whether the US has a right to be in Iraq as an occupying power, despite the obvious fact-- now known for a while-- that no weapons of mass destruction were found in the country. No one is drawing attention to the fact that the US occupation is a continuing violation of international law: a profound paradox since the US is trying-- with all good intention-- to establish the rule of law in Iraq. In the mainstream media coverage of events in Iraq, it is taken as a settled matter that the US presence in Iraq is in the best interests of the Iraqis, even when some ordinary Iraqis are skeptical about the benefits of the occupation. The narrative is one that sees developments in Iraq as a fundamentally domestic American matter. In his criticism of Democrats who questioned his leadership, the Iraqi Prime Minister recently made this very point, stating "There are American officials who consider Iraq as if it were one of their villages, for example Hillary Clinton and Carl Levin." The US media coverage echoes this sentiment.

There are also two contradictory messages about Iraqis that are identifiable in the political, public, and media narratives about the US occupation. On the one hand, the Iraqis are deemed inherently incapable of governing themselves. They are, variously, too faction-ridden, sectarian, distrusting of each other, or simply defined as lacking initiative or administrative ability. On the other hand, the Iraqis are also being chided for not doing enough, for not getting a grip on the situation, and for not exercising their agency. But what the US media does not address-- or refuses to address-- is the fact that the mess in Iraq is significantly an outcome of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq.

To be sure, there are divides among Iraq's many communities. Institutions of civil society were non-existent under Saddam's dictatorship, and the people of Iraq were victims of his brutal and repressive rule. All the local, regional, and international actors (or non-actors) in Iraq have their own agenda. Terrorist groups are invested in preventing Iraqi society from achieving any semblance of normalcy, peace, or stability. The actions of the European nations, for all their moral posturing, are motivated by their own narrow interests rather than any overwhelming commitment to international law. It also needs to be recognized that the Americans cannot be blamed for acts of violence committed by Iraqis as individuals or groups. Indeed, the perpetrators of any and every act of violence against innocent people need to be held accountable for their actions.

The point I want to emphasize here, though, is simply that the current situation in Iraq is primarily a result of the decision of the American neoconservative brigade to invade the country. It is a tragic consequence of an arrogant belief that a society's history can be made and remade like putty, and, equally, of a deeply flawed misunderstanding about the meaning and nature of history. (Whether it was genuinely motivated by the best interest of the Iraqis, some belief in a brave new world, or driven by baser motives such as global domination and control of oil is almost beside the point. Marxist explanations about a transnational capitalist machine driving the war are also off the mark.)

I am not suggesting that it is obligatory for the US media to take a contrarian political stance on all matters. I am simply pointing out that the US media seems unable to approach Iraq from a viewpoint that is distinct from that of US state and political actors. Indeed, for all their internal differences, and notwithstanding the hand-wringing and self-flagellation that followed in the wake of the non-existent WMDs, mainstream media organizations in the US do not bother to examine their presumptions about the right of America to occupy a sovereign nation-state.

In a different domain of activity, we find resonances of these same assumptions.

In the field of colonial Indian history, we are witnessing the resurgence of a revisionist historiography of the British empire that perversely denies the fact of colonialism in the name of respecting the 'agency' of Indians. (And precisely for that reason it symbolically reenacts the violence of colonialism.) An accompanying theme that rears its head again is the notion of the reluctant and haphazard empire. As historian Gyan Prakash notes
...we are told the British Empire developed willy-nilly as a collection of territories and cultures; it was never the project that nineteenth-century imperialists claimed and that present-day postcolonial critics allege. The conquerors, particularly in the eighteenth century, are seen not as agents of colonial oppression and exploitation but as hapless imperialists caught in a hostile environment; weak and embattled, they eagerly embraced indigenous allies and cultures.

The revisionist argument about empire may be summed up as follows. Domination, literal and symbolic, was but one aspect of the complex and contradictory phenomenon of the Indo-British encounter. There were many other aspects to the colonial encounter. Many of these aspects of the Indo-British encounter were positive, reflecting happy and fruitful collaborations between Indian subjects and British rulers. Indians also solicited the help of the British against other Indians. In fact, there were no Indians in the modern sense of the term at the time. In these ways, the people we call Indians made their own history under British rule. Therefore, focusing on colonial violence does a disservice to the contributions of Indians during British rule. Yes, it may be true, the revisionist argument tells us, that British rule was often violent and the colonial state became increasingly tyrannical with the passage of time. But that too was a consequence of local circumstances and infighting among Indians. And the British had no choice but to crack down on savage practices like sati. And to do so they sometimes needed to govern with a very firm hand.

The argument is seductive. On the face of it, who would disagree with the claim that Indians made their own history under colonial rule. It is also tempting to believe that British rule in India was largely ineffectual, an ornamental gilding over structures that were essentially and abidingly Indian. Such an argument taps directly into the rich vein of nationalist sentiment, promising to lessen the humiliation of the stigma of colonial subjugation. And no student of colonial history would disagree that the phenomenon we label colonialism was uneven, contradictory, and complex.

But the revisionist argument is premised on a fallacy -- that the colonial encounter was propelled by benign, even noble, imperatives, such as the thirst for knowledge, curiosity about cultures, and so on. It was, in fact, the other way around; as Prakash observes, "It was because of empire, not despite it, that Europeans took an interest in non-European cultures." The basic premise of colonial rule was the inherent inability of Indians to rule themselves and the right of the British to occupy and rule Indian territories. Colonialism thus had to constantly produce accounts of the lack of agency of Indians in order to justify its own existence. In this sense, violence was not just one aspect, or unfortunate side-effect, of the colonial encounter. Colonialism itself was the violence. To analyze these operations of colonial power in the realm of representation, culture, policy, education, governance, and so on is not to deny Indians agency. Rather, it is to examine and describe the profoundly unequal conditions in which Indians sought to exercise their agency.

The problematic invocation of agency by the revisionist historians of empire is also easily answered by Marx's incisive argument in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon that men make their history but they do not always make it under circumstances of their own choosing. Disenfranchised communities in India, such as Dalits, have always made their own history. But they have not made it in circumstances of equal opportunity. The fact that all members of the community did not always (and do not always today) consciously identify with the category of 'Dalit' does not make the oppression they have suffered any less real. The fact that Dalits are historical agents does not mean that they have not suffered oppression at the hands of other Indians. Conversely, the fact that they have suffered oppression does not deprive them of their agency. The same argument can be made in different contexts, whether with respect to the oppression of Jews by the Nazis, of black South Africans under the apartheid regime, or of 'natives' under colonialism.

Twenty, fifty, one hundred years later, how will the history of this present moment and the story of Iraq and America be written? As an article by Gary Younge in The Nation noted, with reference to a speech by Churchill in the House of Commons in March 1947,

arguments for maintaining colonial rule in India are almost identical to the justifications offered for the continuing presence of US troops in Iraq and escalation of the war(10).
Younge suggests that in such arguments the agency of Indians or Iraqis is paradoxically invoked as a voluntary abdication and negation of their agency and a demand that they be governed by the occupying power: "they need and want us though they have yet to find a way to show it. For deep down they understand that before they can be freed, they must first be subjugated" (ibid.) This logical inversion transforms the act of occupation into a fundamentally charitable action (ibid.).

As is often the case with histories of the British empire, one wonders whether the history of Iraq will be described in terms of the deeply unfair choice between: (a) the benevolence of an occupying power; and (b) the ‘agency’ of Iraqis, that is, the complicity of a people in the invasion of their sovereign territory? In either narrative, the fundamentally unjust nature of the occupation and invasion would be denied. Watching the US media, one cannot help get the feeling that the ground is already being prepared for this story.