Colonial notion of South
Asia Sanjay Joshi
South Asia did not exist in colonial
times--at least not in the sense we understand
that regional label today. For the British,
their empire in India defined the entire region.
Since the end of that empire, a number of
reasons have made South Asia a preferred label
when discussing the region. Topping that list of
reasons was the partition of British India into
India (a.k.a. Bharat) and Pakistan in 1947, and
later, the creation of Bangladesh. Of course,
the parcelling out of Asia (and other parts of
the world) into regional blocks we are familiar
with today--e.g., South-East Asia or Central
Asia--are to a large extent, also products of
the cold- war era. Strategic interests of the
United States dictated the study of regions
after the end of the Second World War.
The emergence of the United States,
first as the major Anglophone power, and now as
a unique global superpower, has ensured that the
labels they originally deployed have come to be
used virtually universally across the
globe.‘South Asia’ as the description of a
particular region is a product of that
historical process, even though the category
‘South Asia’ came into common circulation only
after the end of British colonialism. In this
essay I seek to argue that the notion of South
Asia as we know it today has a critically
important historical legacy reaching back to the
colonial era. Only by understanding that
historical background can we understand the
intellectual, political and emotional baggage
this label carries from that past. Only by
taking into account that history, can we
comprehend the range of problems with which we
are confronted when we deploy this category
today.
What is South Asia? Who is a part of
South Asia and who is not? Bodies such as the
South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation
(SAARC) dictate that the label South Asia be
used to refer to a region comprising of the
sovereign states of Bangladesh, Bhutan, India,
Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. Yet
SAARC simply assumes the existence of an entity
called South Asia instead of defining it. If
South Asia is simply an expression of
geographical proximity, then why, for instance,
is Myanmar (Burma) not a part of South Asia,
while the Maldives are? Why do some descriptions
include Afghanistan in South Asia, while others,
including those of SAARC, do not? These
questions don’t have answers we can simply
deduce from ‘objective’ geographic realities. If
fact, these questions themselves reveal that
there is nothing natural or objective about
South Asia. Most attempts to define the region
are fairly arbitrary, and the boundaries this
region encompasses, somewhat uncertain. The
notion of South Asia today is a product not of
proximity, nor is it based on a shared
world-view. Rather, South Asia is the product of
a variety of global, regional, and local
political processes, which in turn, reflect
different configurations of power relations and
history.
And history does not easily give up its
hold. In most conversations not constrained by
strict diplomatic protocol, South Asia continues
to be used as a synonym for what was British
India. A recent textbook, widely used in the
region and in the west, is titled Modern South
Asia: History, Culture, Political Economy.
Despite the title, however, this work focuses
entirely on the history of British India and the
post-colonial states which emerged from it. Some
SAARC members would no doubt object to the fact
that there is no history of Nepal and Sri Lanka
in that book, and Bhutan and the Maldives hardly
merit a footnote. The contrast between the title
and contents of the book, however, do reveal the
ways in which history shapes most notions of
South Asia we use today, and why that category
remains, despite many relevant objections,
impossible to separate from notions of British
India.
Britain acquired an empire in India, not
in a ‘fit of absent-mindedness’ as a prominent
British historian suggested, but certainly in a
piecemeal fashion. A mix of opportunism, greed,
and national rivalries drove the acquisition of
this empire over a period of a hundred years
from the middle of the eighteenth century. The
acquisition was facilitated by outright military
conquest, diplomatic manoeuvres, and the use of
dubious quasi-legal doctrines. Much of the
actual work of territorial expansion was carried
out by individuals nominally working for the
East India Company (hereafter referred to as the
EIC or simply the Company), but who, over time,
began to function much more as representatives
of the Crown and then the British Parliament. A
major revolt in 1857 put an end to most of the
territorial expansion and certainly ended the
role of the EIC in governance. The Company
territories now came under the direct control of
the Crown and Parliament, and the reigning
monarch, Queen Victoria, was formally invested
with the title of Empress of India in
1877.
It was easier to declare Victoria the
Empress of India than it was to actually create
a unified British India out of the tremendous
regional diversity the Company, and then the
Crown, succeeded to in the subcontinent. The
presence of a large number of states nominally
under the control of native princes visibly
demonstrated the limits of such an endeavour.
This was the result of Victoria’s own
proclamation in 1858, which guaranteed the
integrity of India’s remaining princes. But even
within the areas under their control, the
British were not as successful as they would
have liked, in transforming zamindars
of the north, merchants of the west, plantation
workers of the east, or priests of the south
into homogenised Indian subjects of the empire.
It is important to keep in mind that the EIC and
then the Crown did not replace a single,
centralised empire in India. Rather, the EIC
displaced a number of vibrant regional states,
which in turn had overthrown or ignored their
former overlords of the Mughal dynasty.
Moreover, British power was acquired over a long
period of time. The new rulers of the region had
to try and cobble together a British India from
a welter of different regional entities. Through
common laws, a common currency, lines of
communication cutting across the subcontinent,
and with the help of institutions such as the
civil service (not for nothing was it called the
steel frame of the Raj), the British attempted
to create out of regional diversities, a
centralised empire in India. This was not an
easy task, and to a large extent, this was a
project which remained incomplete.
Yet, incomplete does not mean
insignificant. Economically, culturally and for
strategic reasons, ‘India’ became central to the
British imperial mission, and in turn the empire
had profound transformative impacts on the
people it sought to incorporate. It has become a
fashion, of late, for revisionists of imperial
history to argue that British imperialism was
merely a blip in the long history of
continuities in the subcontinent. It is
suggested that the British Raj was in fact
completely undermined by local interests, and
that what appeared to be new in this
era--whether imperial governance strategies or
nationalist responses to these--were no more
than a continuation of older forms of politics
with new labels. The artisans who were deprived
of a living with the competition from
machine-made yarn and fabrics, the peasants who
were made subject to vagaries of an
international market at terms unfavourable to
them, the soldiers who fought to expand or
defend imperial interests across the world, or
the indentured workers who were herded into
plantations in India and overseas, would, no
doubt, disagree with this revisionist assessment
of the Raj. Equally, India was important not
only to ensure the economic prosperity of the
British Empire, but was central to the very
self-imagination of Britain and British
nationalism. To defend these imperial interests,
initially the Company, and then the Crown sought
to extend their domain from India to include
modern day Sri Lanka, they annexed territories
from the Nepali kingdom, incorporated for a
while what was then known as Burma into British
India, and suffered serious setbacks in their
attempts to seek control over Afghanistan. If
today these territories are, in some eyes, seen
as part of South Asia, then it is certainly due
to this attempt by the British to expand or
defend their empire in India. Equally, when
other lexicons regard South Asia to be
synonymous with India, then that too is part of
the same colonial legacy.
The notion of India and its product, the
notion of South Asia, are also the products of
nationalisms directed against the colonial
rulers. Yet most of these nationalisms too were
a ‘derivative discourse’--to use a phrase coined
by Partha Chatterjee. Drawing their arguments
from a vocabulary and world-view, in a large
part borrowed from that of the rulers, educated
middle-class nationalists used imperial
categories to mount what became challenges to
the British empire. Early nationalists though,
took pride in their loyalty towards the British
empire. Their demands for greater representation
in the institutions of colonial
governance--whether on councils or in the civil
service--were couched in the rhetoric that as
natives they were better placed to represent the
needs of the loyal subjects of that
empire. That their identification with the
empire soon turned to a project of emphasising
the cultural differences between British rulers
and their native subjects, was in large measure
a product of colonial racism which delighted in
ridiculing the aspirations of ‘brown sahibs’ to
positions of equality with that of the rulers.
However, whether they reacted, resisted,
responded, opposed or accommodated with the
structures of empire, for most part,
organisations such as the Indian National
Congress, and the All India Muslim League, as
their very names indicate, worked within and
were limited by, the territorial framework
established by the colonial presence in the
region. Thus the All India Muslim League, though
concerned with a wider, global, Islamic
community, never sought to represent Muslims
outside of the area circumscribed by British
paramountcy. The Indian National Congress too,
did not seek to extend its scope of operations
to, say, Sri Lanka or Burma, which were deemed
to be outside of ‘India’ proper by the British
authorities. Administrative boundaries of
British India clearly limited and curtailed the
geographic extent of nationalisms within
colonial India.
More significant perhaps than the
territorial limits imposed by colonialism, was
the extent to which colonialism circumscribed
the very imagination of nationalists. Nothing
illustrates the devastating legacy of these
frameworks better than the partition of the
sub-continent. Ultra-nationalist historians
aside, most analysts today would agree with the
proposition that it was the inability or the
unwillingness of the major participants to break
with colonially constructed categories of
thought and politics which resulted in the
partition of 1947. The political division of
British India into two nation-states was
certainly not the product of religious plurality
alone. Rather it was the product, ultimately, of
a colonial imagination, which translated
religious diversity into political distinctions
and created political institutions, which
furthered those distinctions. There is always
the danger in analysis of this sort, however, of
attributing all agency for historical change to
British colonialism. In fact, the structures and
imaginations of colonialism would have been of
little significance in this context, had they
not also served the interests of middle-class
nationalist who inhabited these structures and
furthered the devastating reach of the colonial
imagination. Religious nationalism, or what is
called communalism in South Asia, was a product
of colonialism taken to new and devastating
heights by self-serving nationalist
leaderships.
In all fairness though, it must be said
that not all nationalisms were self-serving,
though even many of these alternative visions
did come to be co-opted or marginalised by
colonial political processes and institutions. A
variety of radical visions of the nation, not
necessarily tied to the structures of colonial
rule flourished among a population where a
majority had reasons for disaffection from not
only the colonial rulers, but also their
immediate, native, superiors. Mohandas (Mahatma)
Gandhi’s vision and rhetoric addressed much of
this disaffection. The towering presence of
Gandhi in the nationalist arena need not,
however, blind us to the popularity of more
revolutionary and socially transformative
imaginations of the nation which co-existed with
and at times were as popular as the world
envisioned by the Mahatma. However, there is no
doubt that Gandhi’s critique of modernity, and
his call for total non-cooperation with colonial
institutions in the 1920s, became the starting
point of mass nationalist politics in British
India. Yet even in the 1920s middle class
leaders of Gandhi’s own party, the Indian
National Congress (INC), participated, and
indeed revelled in the power and patronage they
could access through participating in the
elections and institutions sponsored by the
colonial state. The leadership of the Muslim
League, was, if anything, even more elitist and
self-serving than that of the INC at that time.
By the middle of the fourth decade of the
twentieth century, different sections of the
middle-class nationalist leadership (as well as
the colonial authorities, of course) were
concerned by the potential threat to their own
interest posed by Gandhian ideas and the
revolutionary potential of popular nationalisms.
They eventually succeeded in marginalising these
all together, so as to define a ‘mainstream’ of
politics primarily concerned with elections,
councils, and control over institutions of the
state.
The partition of 1947 was a
product of the inability of the participants in
the new mainstream of politics to come to an
agreement about how to share power between them.
The elections of 1937 were a watershed event in
this history. The INC did spectacularly well in
these elections, while the Muslim League fared
disastrously. Envisioning themselves as the new
rulers of India, the INC leadership adopted the
high moral ground and rhetoric very similar to
that deployed by the British colonial
administrators. Claiming that they were the sole
representatives of Indian nationalism, the INC
now began to relegate the Muslim League to the
status of a party which represented sub-national
or ‘communal’ interests. The League, in turn,
replied by insisting that there were not one,
but two nations in British India, a Hindu nation
represented by the INC and a Muslim one, of
which they were the ‘sole spokesmen’.
The coming of the Second World War did
not interrupt this conflict. Moreover, the
massive outbreak of popular anti-colonial
violence during the Quit India movement of 1942,
outside the control of the major nationalist
parties, worried the British leadership
considerably. The end of the war saw Britain
economically impoverished, militarily exhausted,
and under mounting pressure from the Indians,
the international community, and even large
sections of their own population, to relinquish
control over India. After a few failed attempts
at brokering a compromise between the League and
the INC, the British decided to divide British
India between the two and quit with as much
speed as possible. Meanwhile some nationalist
leaders, for their own limited political
purposes, were escalating popular anger against
other religious communities. The real tragedy of
the partition--the death of over a million
people and the forcible displacement of around
10 million--was a result both of the actions of
a short-sighted nationalist leadership and the
hasty transfer of power, which left little time
to prepare people for the momentous changes with
which they were to be confronted.
There is a lot to be said for names. A
rose by any other name is not a rose. The new
Pakistani leadership protested the appropriation
of the label ‘India’ by the INC leadership for
their section of the country. Even today, most
official Pakistani communication uses ‘Bharat’
rather than ‘India’ to refer to its eastern
neighbour. The INC, on the other hand truly
believed that it succeeded to the British legacy
of being the paramount power in the region.
Thus, when thinking about South Asia, the Indian
state has often sought the same role as a
regional hegemon as the one enjoyed by the
empire in its heyday. One could argue that the
totally avoidable war with China in 1962 was a
product of remnants of this misguided belief. Of
course Pakistan was a visible and vocal obstacle
to this ‘imperial’ imagination of South Asia.
But in the Indian imagination, Pakistan was, and
to a large extent continues to be, regarded as
an artificial creation, brought into being from
naturally-existing India by the machinations of
the British and some self-serving Muslim
politicians. The description of partition as a
‘tragedy’ in this context, refers not to the
millions of dead and displaced, but to the very
existence of Pakistan. The Indian state helped
their argument regarding Pakistan’s
artificiality somewhat by supporting Bengali
separatism in eastern Pakistan, and even going
to war for the ‘liberation’ of Bangladesh. The
colonial legacy continues to haunt the Indian
imagination of South Asia, particularly in the
way it seeks to represent its role in the region
as a benevolent though vastly superior lord of
the manor. There is no doubt that this is an
imagination which the Indian leadership needs to
transcend, if it is to avoid the sort of
disasters it has perpetrated in the past-whether
it be the China debacle of 1962 or sending an
Indian peace keeping force to deal with ethnic
conflict in Sri Lanka. We cannot, however,
transcend what we don’t first recognise.
That the notion of South Asia today is
rife with problems is not hidden from any one.
To begin to discuss these problems and their
possible resolutions, we need to realise that
this regional label itself has a history. The
region continues to be configured through a
geographic and cultural imagination created
during colonial times. South Asia today is
India-centric, but only in part due to it being
the largest and most powerful state in the
region. This India centricness is equally the
product of a history where the region itself was
defined in terms of British interests and
objectives, to which India was central. If the
Indian state acts as the big brother of the
region, then that too is the product of the same
history. Claiming that the situation today is
the product of history does not, of course, mean
we accept the status quo or do not try to change
it. But in order to solve a problem we need
first to understand it, and in understanding
South Asia today, we ignore the historical
baggage this category carries with it only at
our own peril.
(Sanjay Joshi is an associate
professor at the Department of History, Northern
Arizona University,
USA) |