It is said that man is by nature; vile and this historically might never have been seen so much
in its true manifestation as it was in the history of colonialism. The European countries; filled
with unbridled ambition and the will and resources to explore the world and its riches started
a race for colonization.
In the nineteenth century, the tension between liberal thought and colonial practice became
particularly acute, as dominion of Europe over the rest of the world reached its zenith.
Ironically, in the same period when most political philosophers began to defend the principles
of universalism and equality, the same individuals still defended the legitimacy of
colonialism and imperialism. One way of reconciling those apparently opposed principles
was the argument known as the “civilizing mission,” which suggested that a temporary
period of political dependence or tutelage was necessary in order for “uncivilized” societies
to advance to the point where they were capable of sustaining liberal institutions and selfgovernment.
The idea of a “civilizing mission” was by no means the invention of the British in the
nineteenth century. The Spanish conquistadores and colonists explicitly justified their
activities in the Americas in terms of a religious mission to bring Christianity to the native
peoples. The Crusades provided the initial impetus for developing a legal doctrine that
rationalized the conquest and possession of ‘infidel’ lands. Whereas the Crusades were
initially framed as defensive wars to reclaim Christian lands that had been conquered by nonChristians, the resulting theoretical innovations played an important role in subsequent
attempts to justify the conquest of the colonies. The core claim was that the “Petrine
mandate” to care for the souls of Christ’s human flock required Papal jurisdiction over
temporal as well as spiritual matters, and this control extended to non-believers as well as
believers.
The colonization, however, did not have just one unproblematic justification for the project of
overseas conquest. Another one was the Theory of Guardianship. According to John Stuart
Mill, a life-long employee of the British East India Company-
‘Savages do not have the capacity for self-government because of their excessive love of
freedom. Serfs, slaves, and peasants in barbarous societies, on the other hand, may be so
schooled in obedience that their capacity for rationality is stifled. Only commercial society produces the material and cultural conditions that enable individuals to realize their
potential for freedom and self-government.’
According to this logic, civilized societies like Great Britain were supposedly acting in the
interest of less-developed peoples by governing them. Imperialism, from this perspective,
was not primarily a form of political domination and economic exploitation but rather a
paternalistic practice of government that exports “civilization” (e.g. modernization) in order
to foster the improvement of native peoples. ‘Despotic government’ and Mill doesn’t hesitate
to use this term, is a means to the end of improvement and ultimately self-government.
ORIENTAL DESPOTISMAnother way of justifying the colonization process was the idea of ‘Oriental despotism’,
whereby the Asian societies were seen to be a society of savages operation without any
reasonable form of government structure and where no principles of natural justice were
followed at all.
Karl Marx used the concept of “Oriental despotism” to describe a specific type of class
domination that used the state’s power of taxation in order to extract resources from the
peasantry. According to Marx, oriental despotism emerged in Bharata because agricultural
productivity depended on large-scale public works such as irrigation that could only be
financed by the state. This meant that the state could not be easily replaced by a more
decentralized system of authority. In Western Europe, feudal property could be transformed
gradually into privately owned, alienable property in land. In Bharata, communal land
ownership made this impossible, thereby blocking the development of commercial
agriculture and free markets. Since “Oriental despotism” inhibited the indigenous
development of economic modernization, British domination became the agent of economic
modernization.
White Man’s burden-
“Take up the White Man's burden--
Send forth the best ye breed--
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need;
To wait in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild-- Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half-devil and half-child
Take up the White Man's burden--
The savage wars of peace--
Fill full the mouth of Famine And bid the sickness cease;
And when your goal is nearest
The end for others sought, Watch sloth and heathen Folly
Bring all your hopes to nought”
The above lines have been taken from a famous poem, written by Britain's imperial poet
Rudyard Kipling as a response to the American takeover of the Philippines after the SpanishAmerican War. Despite being born in Bharata, a colony of the British government
themselves, he could not understand the pain and agony the country was in. British Empire
apparently was the Englishman's "Divine Burden to rein God's Empire on Earth"; British
colonialism was a mission of civilisation that eventually would benefit the colonised natives.
ASSYMETRICAL CULTURAL EXCHANGEWhenever there are conquests or formation of colonies, it was inevitable for there to be a cultural exchange between the two groups it would be an exchange of knowledge, food, cultures and traditions. But this was different in the case of the British who refused to accept anything from Bharata; the cultural exchange remained asymmetrical in nature. They came to demean the Indic culture and practices, Macaulay who has been an important part of the colonial history and responsible for the education and the law system that we have once completely personified the British denial for cultural exchange. With regard to the Indic Literature, he proclaimed “a single shelf of British library is enough to replace entire oriental learning”. Indic music, for instance, Macaulay considered as “deplorably bad"—the only unresolved question was whether it was vocal or instrumental music that was worse. All the Hindu gods were “hideous, and grotesque, and ignoble"—Ganapati was “a fat man with a paunch". Even the better variety of the Indic society lacked sophistication—a glance at the furniture in the Mysore maharaja’s drawing room horrified Macaulay into comparing His Highness to “a rich, vulgar Cockney cheesemonger". But most preposterous of all was his hatred of tropical fruits—the mango, for instance, was as palatable as “honey and turpentine".
Local interests were always subservient to the interest of the colonial authorities. Poor
representation of the local populace added to the problem. The colonies were not at all interested in the local problems at all; they were only interested in profits and whatever
resources they could extract from the colonies.
The indigenous population was heavily used often in conditions worse than hell itself, they
were forced to grow crops that ultimately made their lands barren; forcing them to die of
starvation just so that the investors of these colonies could have a plate full of all the profit
that came from the sale of such crops at the international market. Bharata faced 31 famines in 120 years of British Raj; the last one killed around 4 million people in 1943.
The Indic population toiled hard night and day working as labourers in factories and doing
slave work in mines or at railway tracks just so that the colonies could achieve the distinction
of being the most industrially advanced and sophisticated in the world. The locals were also
forced to fight in wars that were never theirs to fight often losing their lives in foreign lands
just so that the colonizers could sleep peacefully at night in the comfort of their own homes.
The valour of Bharatiya soldiers in the World War ⅠⅠ was only recently recognized by the
International community.
The British often created new boundaries depending upon what suited them and later on left
the problems to be faced by the colonies later on. The McMohan line that designates the
border between Bharata and China has for decades been a bone of contention between the
two neighbours. The line was allegedly agreed upon during the Shimla Conference organised
by Sir Henry McMahon, the then Foreign Secretary of British India.
At the conference, called by McMahon to settle the border dispute between Bharata and
China, only the China-Tibet border was discussed. The Tibetan and British Indian
representatives signed the agreement. China, who considers Tibet its territory, did not.
In 1929, the 14th volume of the Aitchison’s Treaties – which compiled all the treaties and
agreements executed in imperial India – showed that the Shimla Conference had only been
about China and Tibet and not any McMahon line.
Olaf Caroe, the then deputy secretary, went ahead and ordered the destruction of the 1929
volume. Instead, he released a forged volume with the same date that said Britain recognised Chinese suzerainty over Tibet and the border between Tibet and Bharata was fixed along the McMahon Line.
Seventy years ago the British decided to divide Bharata into the new independent nations of
Bharata and Pakistan. They did that with no preparation or concern for the well being of the
very nation that they had previously sought to ‘civilize’. The lines that were drawn that day
sparked several tragedies that still haunt the people of Bharata.
IMPOSITION OF A SATELLITE-METROPOLITON STATE RELATIONSHIP
The concept of satellite state here referred to the colonies that were under heavy political,
economic and military influence or control from their colonial masters. The term was coined
by creating an analogy to planetary objects orbiting a larger object, such as smaller moons
revolving around larger planets, and is used mainly to refer to Central and Eastern European
countries that were referred to as metropolitan in nature.
These ‘satellite states’, existed to serve the interest of the ‘metropolitan states’. There was an
unequal transfer of resources from the satellite states to the metropolitan states. All the
benefits, rights, profits and interests of the metropolitan state were taken care of at expense of detriment, loss and responsibility undertaken and suffered by the Satellite states.
For example the raw materials required for production of clothes such as cotton were grown
in satellite states and then they were sent off to Britain where in the mills they were converted into finished goods which were then sent back to India for sale. Similarly during wartime all the raw resources including basic cattle as well as the food grains and even the soldiers of the colonial state were used and then at the end of the war all the expenses incurred by the metropolitan country were paid by the colonies. The colonies even paid all the salaries of the servants employed in the colony by the colonizers. So here the problem was that the colony faced double exploitation and therefore paid heavily in sweat, tears and blood.
The colonial Mission of British was devastating for Bharata; Millions were impoverished as
an existential crisis overwhelmed large segments of the economy and catastrophically
disrupted the social fabric. Eventually, families disintegrated; men sold their small farms and
left home to look for work or to join the British Indian Army, and women and children
became homeless migrants.
A country that was famed for its riches had now after constantly being attacked by the
colonial powers from the outside on one hand and the internal disparity and impoverishment
on the other hand was pushed to the brink of collapse under the weight of the horrors of war, partition, famines, communal disharmony, economic and social disparity. The ‘civilizing
mission’ of the so called ‘enlightened west’ spelled doom for Bharata.
One gets reminded of the statement by Anthony Burgess-“Colonialism; the enforced spread
of the rule of reason. But who is going to spread it among the colonizers?”
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