Inglorious Empire, a new book by Indian diplomat and Congress MP Shashi Tharoor, has renewed debate on the legacy of the British Empire in India. In a powerful refutation of apologists of Britain’s ‘benevolent’ imperialism, the book lays out evidence of the colonially-imposed plunder, violence and conflict that impoverished, starved and killed millions in the subcontinent and continues to color its society and politics to this day.
Tharoor has called for Britain to overcome its rose-tinted nostalgia for empire and acknowledge the horrors it visited upon the Indian population, atrocities largely missing from British history textbooks. As he put it in one of his interviews on British television, ‘If you don’t know where you’ve come from, how will you appreciate where you’re going?’ In today’s Brexit Britain dominated by an anti-immigrant politics of nationalistic greivances, a reminder about the colonial past that shaped Britain’s relationship to the world is indeed relevant and timely.
Perhaps for different reasons, Tharoor’s calls to reckon honestly with imperial history are also acutely relevant to Pakistan, another country that pays very little attention to its colonial past. While it is relatively easy to understand why Britain ignores the excesses of colonialism, Pakistan’s indifferent treatment of its own colonial subjugation in state textbooks and narratives is somewhat more peculiar. Unlike India, where the history of resistance to colonial rule is a more central component of state nationalism, the Pakistani state has instead long centered its definition of national identity primarily in antagonistic opposition to ‘Hindu India’, a narrative that relegates colonialism to a position of diminished historical importance.
As chronicled by critics of official history, the bulk of state historiography in Pakistan focuses on Muslim conquerers from centuries past, in an effort to establish the Islamic foundations of national identity. In the retelling of such glorious tales of conquest, colonialism tends to be treated as a temporary hiccup in the otherwise long history of Muslim dominion in the subcontinent, as an event only of significance insofar as it resulted in the weakening of Muslim power. With the exception of the War of Independence and the Khilafat movement, reluctantly acknowledged as important instances of united Hindu-Muslim anti-colonial resistance, much of the focus in the telling of colonial history — particularly of its last century — tends to be on the unproblematized anti-Muslim scheming of ‘The Hindus’, in an attempt to build an airtight historical rationale for Partition. If the historical legacy of the colonizers is discussed at all, it is usually in a strictly cultural sense; such as the attempts of Lord Macaulay to undermine ‘Islamic’ culture through ‘Western’ education.
This indifference to the economic, social and political legacies of colonial rule that irrevocably transformed Pakistani society, has had profound consequences. In the first instance, this has led to an under-appreciation of the single most important factor behind the country’s historical impoverishment — the centuries long extraction of its agrarian surplus to enrich colonial capitalists — resulting in decades of neocolonial economic and trade policies continuing long after 1947 in partnership with the capitalist bloc. It has also led to many social contradictions — of religion, caste, class and ethnicity — being popularly misunderstood and internalized as natural and primordial, rather than the contingent consequences of colonial social engineering.
There is for instance, little acknowledgement of how social differences in India were fomented and institutionalized by the British. The most prominent consequence of this oversight is of course the idea of static and irreconcilable difference between Hindus and Muslims, as encapsulated in the Two Nation Theory, the ahistorical cornerstone of Pakistani state ideology that ignores the conscious creation and perpetuation of this antagonistic religious binary as explicit colonial policy — policy that included the blasphemy law, an instrument created to regulate inter-religious violence, which today has bizarrely become a marker of Islamist identity, with few knowing about its colonial origins.
Even less acknowledged and understood is how the British codified caste, clan, ethnic and occupational categories into law in order to better organize Indian society for the purposes of economic extraction, political control and patronage distribution; in the process creating differentiated groups where there were once relatively integrated communities and entrenching social and economic hierarchies that remain the basis for political competition and conflict to this day.
Many of Pakistan’s economic and political inequalities can be traced to the colonial period. The persistence of feudal structures and mass landlessness is rooted in colonial land administration, including legislation like the Punjab Land Alienation Act of 1900 that restricted the transfer of land from agricultural to non-agricultural classes, perpetuating the economic power of the landed elite while strengthening its political role as the principal intermediary between the state and the disenfranchised peasantry. Only in recent years has local research been undertaken (such as that by Ali Cheema and Shandana Mohmand in 2009) that explains how the political dominance of landed elites over non-propertied classes established in the colonial period persists today in spite of the abolition of the colonial institutions that embedded it. Moral discourse about corrupt political dynasties is extremely popular today — yet a lack of knowledge on the colonial origins of their propertied power prevents any calls for necessary structural solutions like rural and urban land reform.
Perhaps most significantly, one of the enduring realities of Pakistani political life, the dominance of its military over political power is also directly traceable to the nature of the colonial state, whose need to ensure security for its economic extraction and political control necessitated the development of an administrative and security apparatus far more developed and powerful in comparison to the agrarian society it was imposed upon. This was particularly true in the case of Punjab and KP (then NWFP), which the British relied on for military recruitment, resulting in an authoritarian and unwieldy civil-military bureaucracy in Pakistan that continued after independence to perceive its interests as separate and superior to those of a primitive population in need of disciplining. Whether it is the violent repression of socialists and nationalists to the present-day fear-mongering about anti-Islam ‘foreign conspiracies’, the Pakistani military-bureaucratic oligarchy has continued to mirror the hegemonic tactics of its colonial predecessor.
The full list of unaddressed colonial legacies — from the continued imposition of colonial laws like the FCR in FATA to the persistence of concepts of traditional authority and colonial subjecthood over full constitutional citizenship — is far too long to be considered with any depth within the scope of an opinion piece. What is clear though is that Pakistan has paid insufficient attention to the legacy of its colonial past for far too long. While this has suited political, military and religious elites who have managed to protect the illegitimate bases of their social power from historical interrogation, it has left the bulk of society unequipped with the intellectual means to trace the foundations of our present-day contradictions and find structural solutions that draw on facts rather than than conspiracy theories & discourses of moral corruption. Any present-day attempts to build a progressive future must undertake this critical task — of critically reevaluating our colonial past and building a fuller understanding where we have come from.
The writer is a researcher in gender, development and public policy and a political worker for the Awami Workers Party. He tweets @ammarrashidt