Mircea Rainau has a good review article on Priya Satia's 'Time's Monsters' here.
The main argument is most succinctly stated on pages 3-5, where Satia asks how a linear understanding of time came to be deeply embedded in the rise of modern European (and specifically British) imperialism.
This is a very interesting question. When did Europeans realize that there is a linear order to the calendar? Was it in the Seventeenth Century when an apple fell on Newton's head and he shouted 'Eureka! I now get why the Sixteenth Century preceded our own era and also am able to predict that the next century will be the Eighteenth Century!' ?
On the other hand, Imperialism- which involves going out to places and conquering them and ensuring they stay conquered has always required a 'linear understanding of time'. This is because if you try to rule a colony before conquering it, you look a fool. There is a linear order of a temporal kind which must be observed.
Priya Satia may be of Hindu Indian origin. She probably thinks that Hindu Indians kept getting conquered because they didn't have a linear understanding of time. They would show up for battle in the wrong century. Also, they didn't have a spatial understanding of geography. Priya herself grew up in California. Perhaps her parents kept telling her she was actually in Calcutta and that once the Twentieth Century ended, the Nineteenth Century would start. She'd better study History in order to find out what would happen in the future.
Priya also thinks that guys who went off to India and returned with great wealth had a 'guilty conscience'. This simply isn't true. They thought they'd done extremely well. On the other hand, the 'Nabobs' were a target for envy or even impeachment. Furthermore, there were sound political reasons to attack them and, by extension, the activities that had enriched them. But, so long as the East India Company made Britain wealthier and more secure, it was able to prevail over its detractors.
Teleology served to absolve the guilty consciences of empire’s makers and defenders, who often genuinely believed in the promises of progress.
No. Teleology means explaining a thing by referring to the purpose it serves. Saying 'Brits are superior. Superiors dominate inferiors and squeeze money out of them. That is the purpose of superiority.' is a teleological explanation for British Imperialism.
Consequentialism is a different kettle of fish. To say, this bad deed is pardonable because it has a good result is an example of consequentialism not teleology.
Put simply: “How did such avowedly ‘good’ people live with doing bad things?”
They got rich and gave money to their favorite charities.
The answer lies in the mid-eighteenth century, when history as a “system of ethical accountability” became central to Enlightenment notions of the self .
Ethical accountability is central to the Christian, the Hindu, the Muslim, the Jewish and all other Religious traditions. Satia's own people had a concept of 'Itihasa' as History such that every time a good guy did a bad thing that bad thing had karmic consequences which in turn were affected by the karmic consequences of the good things which bad guys did. This view of History converged to the Occassionalism of Liebniz. Voltaire critiqued Liebniz and came to the conclusion that 'ethical accountability' could go hang. Just cultivate your own garden. But there were plenty of other 'Enlightenment notions of the self' of a very different stripe.
Satia has written ignorant nonsense.
Conscience, which was always situated in a temporal framework,
No. Conscience is similar to synderesis. It is natural, in-born, and atemporal. It does not change when the times change. Thus, two Catholics may at the same time do two very different things because their conscience demands it. Yet by a Holy mystery of the Faith, no contradiction or scandal arises.
structured the normative relationship between the individual and the institutions of state and market.
This is not the case. Conscience could rupture that relationship. Thus John F Kennedy, the first Catholic President, promised he would resign rather than let his Conscience get in the way of doing what was right for the country.
As Satia explains later in the book: “The Enlightenment goal of papering over internal splits in the interest of producing internally coherent individuated selves had the effect of outsourcing judgments of conscience to time, to history.
This simply isn't true. Hume wasn't 'papering over internal splits'. He said persons 'are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in perpetual flux and movement'.
It did not do so without struggle” (239).In Chapter 1, Satia develops this argument by revisiting the Galton family of Birmingham, the subjects of her previous book Empire of Guns
The Quakers disowned Galton at the end of the eighteenth century. So what? Nobody greatly cared.
Samuel Galton's riposte carried the mark of truth- 'Is the Farmer who sows Barley, – the Brewer who makes it into Beverage, – the Merchant who imports Rum, or the Distiller who makes Spirits; – are they responsible for the Intemperance, the Disease, the Vice, and Misery, which may ensue from their Abuse?’ Why should he be held more responsible than those who traded in tobacco, rum, sugar, rice and cotton?'. The fact is Quakers were involved in all these trades. They were merely virtue signaling while profiting as much as anybody else from Britain's increasing military and economic power.
For these “Quaker gun-makers,” commerce and warfare were inseparable and unavoidable, “necessary evils” rendering individual ethical action meaningless. Yet the Galtons were also troubled by the blatant contradiction of professing pacifism while profiteering from arms manufacture. By the end of the century, the abolitionist movement (in which Quakers played a prominent role) empowered individuals to take action through consumer boycotts of slave-grown sugar.
Elizabeth Heyrick's campaign in the Eighteen Twenties did not succeed. However, Sharpe's Revolt, or the 'Baptist War', in Jamaica did concentrate minds in Westminster.
But the system of “war capitalism” as a whole remained untouched
After the slave revolt in Haiti, Europe had to think twice about the transatlantic slave trade. Sharpe's Revolt forced the British to give up the thing itself.
Indeed, the arms trade as both the material foundation of British power
which it wasn't.
and an occasional focal point of public criticism
which it wasn't save among some small group of Quakers whom nobody bothered with
is an interesting and original thread running through the book . Also in the late eighteenth century, Member of Parliament Edmund Burke’s prosecution of the East India Company’s abuses spotlighted the individual crimes of Governor-General Warren Hastings while ultimately bolstering the legitimacy of the imperial enterprise .
That was just a question of elite politics. Everybody involved was getting paid by some faction or interested party.
In each instance, wrongs would be made right in the fullness of time.
No. Commerce would evolve in new directions.
If the answer to the injustice of slavery was free trade,
It wasn't. There was no connection between the two.
the answer to the brutality of conquest was liberal empire
there was never any fucking 'liberal empire'. Why pretend that the White Man's burden consisted of wiping brown bums and getting the heathen to read John Stuart Mill?
– a dynamic that played out repeatedly over the next two centuries.
Sheer fantasy! The fact is 'ideology' does not matter. If a thing is profitable, it is done. As it ceases to be profitable, the thing is given up.
Priya Satia seems to believe that not very long ago there was no property and no crime and no inequality and no racism or misogyny and so forth. Then Capitalism happened. People started buying and selling things. This caused them to become very wicked.
In an essay published by Nature, Priya explains 'what guns meant in eighteenth century England'.
Private property was an aberration in a long history of communal landholding in England and around the world, and guns were critical to its emergence in Britain—and its violent exportation abroad.
This is utterly mad. Private property in land has existed since the first agricultural revolution. England had a sophisticated legal system for dealing with land holdings long before the Fifteenth Century. Alan Macfarlane's 'The Origins of English Individualism' came out in 1978. It created a furore but, after some back and forth, it has been admitted that there was never a Merrie England where everybody knew their place. But this is not to say that idealized feudalism involved common ownership of land. Rather, land was owned in the same way that the people on the land were owned by the landlord. Serfdom is not the same thing as Communism.
With the revolution of 1689, the purpose of government was understood as guaranteeing property.
All governments have always protected property and levy taxes to do so. What happened in 1689 was that Catholics were excluded from the succession to the Throne.
Legal terror, in the shape of the infamous “Bloody Code” made property violations like petty theft, food riot, forgery, and resistance of enclosure capital offenses.
The Code was introduced in 1723, five years after the Transportation act was introduced. The death penalty was seldom carried out. Instead, those convicted were sent off to the Colonies.
King & Ward write- 'According to Philip Jenkins’s estimates, national hanging rates peaked at between 25 and 30 per 100,000 population per year in the crisis period around 1600.17 However, they then rapidly declined to about 10 per 100,000 in the 1630s, to under 5 by 1700, and to 1.3 by 1750, after which they remained very stable until the late 1770s.18 By 1750 capital punishment was playing a completely different role from the one it had performed in 1600. As David Garland has pointed out, the English state was rapidly moving on from its ‘early modern stage’, in which the state frequently used rituals of execution to assert its claims to authority and to impress the populace.19 By 1750 it had embraced instead a range of penal policy options within which the death penalty was no longer ‘an unquestionable expression of sovereign power but a policy tool like any other’.20 Following its introduction as a formal sentencing option in 1718, transportation had quickly come to dominate the courts’ sentencing practices, and for the first time those who felt hanging was too severe a punishment for property crime had access to a tough secondary punishment which could act as an effective alternative.'
Privately owned guns were integral to this cheap solution to preservation of property.
Nonsense! Beating or stabbing thieves worked just as well.
The state was not yet institutionally coherent enough to have a monopoly on violence; it depended on partnership with private power.
Owning property gives rise to power. Rich people hire guys to guard their property. That was true then and it is true now.
A regular police force was anathema to a Francophobic gentry traumatized by memories of the Stuarts;
But there was no police force under the Stuarts. Why mention 'Francophobia'? How is it relevant? The truth is, those who could afford to flocked to Paris.
legal terror and the gun at the property holder’s bedside were acceptable substitutes.
The gun would suffice. But so would a pair of loaded cross bows. Better still was the old custom of having the bedroom at one side of the great hall where all ones servants and retainers slept- their swords within easy reach.
Priya lives in a parallel world where markets are bad. They cause people to start owning property- which is very wicked. This causes them to buy guns and go running to the nearest kindergarten so as to kill all the cute little kiddies there.
What of Priya's view of the partition of India, which affected her grandparents?
Why did the 1947 partition of India unfold the way it did?
The answer is that Muslims voted overwhelmingly for the Muslim League- which advocated the creation of Pakistan. Hindus voted overwhelmingly for Congress which agreed to Partition when it saw that the alternative was a weak Center. However, it had been obvious since 1937 that Muslims would never agree to a strong center because the majority of the population of undivided India was Hindu.
The context of World War II and the transfer of power were critical in shaping the violence.
Nonsense! The War meant that the Army was more powerful than ever. The problem was that it was mutinous and divided on Religious lines. Thus it could not be used to preserve the old order.
During the war, the British jailed much of the Congress Party in India.
They had been doing this regularly without any ill effect whatsoever.
In the meantime, more violently inclined nationalist movements flourished, some bearing an imprint of fascism.
Govind Vallabh Pant had acclaimed Gandhi as the 'Il Duce and Furhrer of India'. The Congress Seva Dal was a paramilitary outfit. Bose had dressed up in a comic opera General's uniform while still part of Congress. The Khaksars might be said to be Fascist, but- initially- it was against Partition. The RSS was merely a copy of the Congress Seva Dal but claimed to be apolitical. There had been some violence during the Quit India movement. Some like Jayaprakash Narayan had gone underground. However, they tended to be Socialists.
Bose escaped from India and led an Indian National Army which might have looked Fascist. But Bose, Nambiar etc were Socialists.
Indians who fought in the war came home with violent experiences. They and their arms were recruited into new defense groups and paramilitary volunteer bodies attached to these violent movements, such as the RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh) and the Muslim League National Guard.
This is nonsense. Nationalists joined Congress. Communists held apart- they supported Partition. The Congress Seva Dal was briefly banned in Bengal because it was the muscular arm of the Hindus. Nehru got the ban reversed. However, as Gandhi himself said, it was Congress members, not the RSS, who were responsible for the worst killings of Muslims. Some Sikh princely states, however, adopted a forward policy and organized 'jatas' which did a lot of killing in the Punjab. It should be emphasized that most Muslim army officers and bureaucrats saw their future as being with Pakistan. This is what prevented a handover of power to a weak center. The Civil Service and the Army were already split.
Some Indian politicians in provincial governments began to use such groups for policing as they shifted from being the opposition to being the government.
Indian politicians in provincial governments could use the actual police for policing. They could also bring in gangsters for ethnic cleansing. Interestingly, some former INA soldiers tried to act as peace-makers. But most chose sides on confessional lines. Incidentally, M.Z Kiani, Bose's successor as head of the INA as well as Bose's close aide, Habibur Rehman took the Pakistani side in the first Kashmir war. By contrast, Shahnawaz Khan chose India and served as a Congress member of Parliament and Minister for may years. But his son chose Pakistan.
Meanwhile, having secured their aim of having both newly independent countries in the Commonwealth, British officials hurried events at every turn.
The Naval Ratings Mutiny had concentrated minds in Westminster. But Viceroy Wavell had already warned that the country was on the verge of becoming ungovernable. On the other hand, it was clear that officers and bureaucrats would obey orders from either Jinnah or Nehru. Thus, it was up to them to run things.
The hasty dismantling of the imperial state
There was no 'dismantling'. India asked Mountbatten to stay on. Pakistan did not. The transfer of power was orderly. What was not orderly was the exchange of populations.
not only made it harder to address the violence, it also made much of the violence possible in the first place.
No. What made the violence possible was religious differences which greatly predated the arrival of the British.
The imperial state shed its law and order capacity and sense of responsibility,
Nonsense! The elected leaders did not use the capacity they had in a proper way. Shurawardy, as Premier of Bengal, started the bloodletting. Gandhi said Hindu Congress leaders in Bihar had done the same thing.
offering little support to administrators trying to deal with routine local politics.
But these 'administrators' had been answering to elected officials since 1937!
The British Army began to depart just when India’s own army was being divided and could not be relied on to control violence.
Why not? If these guys could fight a war in Kashmir, why couldn't they prevent ethnic cleansing? As a matter of fact refugee caravans given military escorts did get through. One might say, that the scale of the problem was not properly anticipated by elected politicians. But if Indians, living in India did not anticipate it, how could Clement Atlee have done so? Democracy is only as good as the officials it elects.
In Punjab, confidential instructions insisted that British army units had no operational functions except in emergency to save British lives.
Quite right. British units were not under the command of the GoI or its successor states. The Brits didn't want brother officers to be fighting each other because one unit was under the command of Pakistan and the other of India. What happened with the Indian Army was a different matter.
Bureaucracies became dysfunctional as officers thought of migrating or tried to please new masters or gave into anxiety themselves.
British bureaucracies in Burma etc. had simply collapsed when the Japanese showed up. Nobody, in 1947, had any great faith in them. In any case, the 1935 Act had transferred power to the elected leaders in the Provinces.
Officials were openly partisan or not at their posts. The evident breakdown of law and order produced paranoia and fear in everyday life. Whatever religious justifications may have been at play in the violence, many actions emerged from a sense of desperate need for survival in a harrowing environment.
One party sponsored this terror. It was the Muslim League. Will Priya admit this? Of course not. Yet, the facts can't be gainsaid. Non-Muslims tend to get ethnically cleansed in Muslim countries- unless there is a strong King or Emir who ensures their safety for economic reasons.
All the ingredients for ethnic cleansing were there:
only one was needed- Islam.
a feeble, polarized police force, absence of troops and an armed and terrified population.
Why was there no ethnic cleansing on the basis of language or caste? Why was it only on the basis of religion? How is it that it was a case of Muslim vs non-Muslim with Sikhs and Christians being in the same boat as Hindus?
The violence marked the crumbling of an old order and abdication of responsibility for minorities by all those with any kind of power.
Muslim minorities in South India were wholly unaffected. Why?
You have studied the partition for many years. What are some key takeaways from your research?
First, high-level negotiations between political elites do not shed much light on why partition unfolded the way it did, involving the flight and death of millions.
Nor can low-level recollections. Suffice it to say that if Muslims are in the majority and non-Muslims own cool stuff then... urm ... how should I put this politely? Get the fuck out!
Stanford Libraries have partnered with the 1947 Partition Archive, an organization collecting oral histories that can finally help us understand that history.
Second, the idea of Pakistan emerged initially out of an imaginative effort to think outside the box of nationalism after World War I’s demonstration of the violence nationalism caused. It was a way of imagining a polity anchored by something other than nationality or ethnicity.
Nonsense! We know precisely what was going through the muddled heads of Iqbal and Rehmat Ali etc. Liaqat and Jinnah and Shurawardy etc. were seasoned politicians. Why play second fiddle in a Hindu majority country when you can have your own Islamic Republic? Also, non-Muslims owned cool stuff in Muslim majority areas. Why not help oneself to it?
Third, the idea of partition was on the table in the first place because
at the Treaty of Lausanne, Turkish speaking Christians went to Greece while Greek speaking Muslims went to Turkey.
the British had applied it already in the process of decolonizing Ireland
because Ulster was Protestant and would fight rather than join the Catholic South. This is still a problem for Britain's Brexit negotiations.
and were discussing using it in Palestine.
Coz we all know Arabs lurve Jews till those wicked Brits divided up Palestine so as to keep Israel in the Commonwealth.
They thought of it as an acceptable compromise for ensuring all territory wound up within the British Commonwealth after devolution, even if in fragments, so that they might maintain old imperial ties in some form after the granting of formal independence.
Burma left the Commonwealth in 1948 and Ireland did so in formal terms the next year though it had been a Republic in all but name for a dozen years. But there hadn't been a Royal visit to the South between 1911 and 2011. So much for 'old imperial ties'.
Fourth, the history of partition haunts the subcontinent,
No. The threat of terrorist strikes which might culminate in a nuclear war is what haunts the subcontinent. Only some Punjabis and Bengalis care about partition. But nobody cares about either.
just like in Ireland, where Brexit has made the separation between Ireland and Northern Ireland a live issue all over again. It did not solve any problem it purported to solve between different communities.
Yes it did. The Irish know this very well. They were once poorer than the Brits. Now they are richer.
Your research has focused on the personal stories of people living through the partition, and your own family was affected by the event. What was it like to live through that turbulent time?
The guys who got out did way better than those who stayed behind. True, many of them may have had no choice and some lost family members along the way.
It was deeply scarring and traumatic, changing their lives dramatically, uprooting them from places and communities where they had lived for generations.
Priya's parents uprooted themselves from India and moved to Amrika. How they must have suffered! Those they left behind weep tears of pure envy when they think of them.
They lost languages,
Aw! Did they not teach Priya Punjabi?
ways of life,
dancing bhangra all the time
property,
which they have reacquired
heirlooms, people. It shaped their attitudes toward government, minorities and the concept of home.
And wanting your home to be in Beverley Hills.
Trauma like this has lasting consequences – it affects what is shared with and what is concealed from future generations. Habits formed through trauma are also passed on – I was not there but still many of my habits have been shaped by my mother’s and grandmother’s experiences after 1947.
I'm a lot older than Priya. The women I knew who remembered Partition tended to blame Muslims. I vividly recall a sweet elderly lady- who thought I looked a bit Muslim- tell her grand-daughter that she would slice her up if she had anything to do with me. The girl explained I was a Madrasi Brahmin. Thankfully, the lady was an equal opportunity hater. However, the fact remains, a lot of patriarchs did behead their womenfolk to preserve the purity of the lineage back then.
Some of your research has also analyzed the work of poets who wrote about the partition. How did poetry help shape the meaning of what happened?
It didn't. The Commies, who had supported Partition, soon found they had to run away from Pakistan or end up in jail. But India too showed it could get tough on those cretins.
Poetry helped people express other ways of being that continued to resist the national identities of “Indian” and “Pakistani.”
Does she mean Khalistani? Hindus get short shrift from those guys. Perhaps she means 'American' as a nicer 'national identity'.
It helped express the still-open possibilities for the relationship between India and Pakistan – it was not clear that the border would be hard and impassable, and that relations would be wholly inimical until the 1965 war.
Which Pakistan started.
What could be learned from this history?
Partition is not a solution for allegedly intractable conflict between communities.
Yes it is. There is no other. Of course, if one side claims territory from the other side, then there can be conflict. But that is also the case where there was no Partition. Both China and Pakistan claim Indian territory so there is conflict with those countries. But Nepal and Bangladesh and Myanmar and Sri Lanka have no territorial claim against India and so there is no conflict with them.
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