History 'outside' the 'West'

Scholars from the Third World may have taken charge of their history, but 'world history', which is generally represented as the playing field of more ecumenical minds, remains firmly within the provenance of the Western scholar, says Vinay Lal.

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IN his early 19th century History of British India, a voluminous work that not only remained until the end of the century the standard narrative of the Indian past but also exercised an incalculable influence on the 'heavenly born' British civil servants for whom James Mill's history was required reading, the father of John Stuart Mill set out to periodise Indian history. By his time the distinction between ancient, medieval, and modern was commonplace, not even tempered by such phrases as 'early modern', and to an innocent reader Mill may not have appeared as effecting any kind of departure from the established template. He characterised ancient India as 'Hindu' and rendered medieval India as 'Muhammadan'. 

In English, of course, the word 'medieval' had long had overwhelmingly pejorative overtones:  the medieval represents not merely a chronological stage of history, but even more so a state of mind - a state characterised by the lack of reason, disregard for progress, and primitivism in thought, belief, and conduct.  Mill would not at all have hesitated in associating the medieval period, apparently corresponding to Europe's 'dark ages', predominantly with Islam.  Mill knew that north India had, in the second millennium CE, come firmly under Muslim rule, commencing at least with the Delhi Sultanate; and he may even have had some awareness of Muslim sultanates in the Deccan, though like most colonial historians and commentators of India, he had fallen into the habit of supposing that the history of north India could effortlessly be passed off as the history of the entirety of India. 

There are, as would be obvious to any student of Indian history, numerous grounds on which Mill's characterisation of ancient India as 'Hindu' and especially medieval India as 'Muhammadan' might have been cogently contested. Though Islam gained many converts, Saivism, Vaishnavism, Shaktoism, and other strands absorbed into what later became known as Hinduism continued to maintain a formidable presence.   Medieval India was far from being congruent with Islamic India. Groups in certain strata of Indian society embraced Islam much more readily than other social groups. Though some contemporaries, and later historians, were inclined to think that north India had fallen under the iron grip of Muslim rule, many contemporary Islamic theologians doubted that India could be characterised as a land governed under the Sharia. Mill's periodisation cannot account for the unique Indo-Islamic synthesis forged in the supposedly dark period of Indian history.  With that characteristic, seamless arrogance that marks and mars colonial (and some neo-colonial) narratives of Indian history, Mill and hundreds of his contemporaries assumed that 'the dark ages' of Europe were 'dark' everywhere. 

Mill was thus among those who contributed to the communalisation of Indian history.  His prejudices were by no means exclusive: if he displayed an unremitting hostility to Islam, common to his ancestors and successors, he was even more vituperative in his condemnation of Hinduism as a barbarous religion of monkey gods and goddesses adorned with necklaces of human skulls. 

Though, as I have suggested, there are many justifiable grounds for critiquing him, there is yet a more profound reason for viewing his writings with deep suspicion.  One can reasonably expect that Mill, having designated the ancient and medieval periods of Indian history as Hindu and Muhammadan, respectively, should have designated the modern period as Christian.  By the time that the first edition of Mill's history was published in 1818, substantial portions of India had fallen under British rule. The charter of the East India Company had initially put a brake on Christian missionary activities in India, but there is no doubt that the Englishmen ruling India thought of themselves as representatives of a Christian power.

When Charles Grant presented his tract, 'Observations on the State of Society among the Asiatic Subjects of Great Britain', to the Company's directors in 1797, it was a signal that the evangelicals had decided to join battle in turning British India into a fertile ground for Christian proselytisation.  Grant was candid in the declaration of his faith that nothing was more calculated to lift the superstitious and ignorant Hindu from his adherence to hideous customs than persistent exposure to Christianity.  It was 'repugnant to the past experience of Europeans', Grant wrote, to believe that the 'obstinate attachment' of Hindus to their faith would prevent 'their conversion to Christianity'.1 

If Britain was a Christian power, and Englishmen in India saw themselves upholding the ideals of Christianity, Mill should have in all honesty characterised the modern period in India as 'Christian', much as he rendered the ancient period as 'Hindu' and the medieval period as 'Muhammadan'. He, however, termed the modern phase of Indian history as 'British'.  There is cunning of reason here that speaks volumes, even today, about the exercise of power in the Christian West.  For Mill, as for the greater bulk of his intellectual contemporaries, Protestant Christianity furnished the template for a proper, rational faith.  Quite predictably, all other religions, and even Catholicism, were judged against Protestantism and found terribly wanting. Yet the pretence that inspires Mill, and permits him the sleight of hand, is one where modern Britain is seen as having transcended religion.

Mill was guided by several assumptions, beginning with the consideration that religion was the predominant and inextricable element in the constitution of Indian society; whatever else might be said about India, religion and the battles over it had shaped its history. Secondly, the European Enlightenment had succeeded in establishing a division between church and state, and to be modern one had to embrace secularism.  Thirdly, cognizant of the fact that in Britain itself the evangelicals had come to occupy a significant space in the public sphere, Mill implicitly advocated a realist position that transformed religion into 'the invisible hand'. In principle, it was all well and good to argue that religion, a private affair, was to be banished from the public sphere; but fidelity to realpolitik demanded that religion would function somewhat as the uncrowned king.

With this one example, I have sought to establish a number of fundamental principles. First, Europe's history invariably serves as the template for all history, even when we are least aware of it or writing history in opposition to Eurocentric history.  What is true of Indian history is true of nearly every national history:  the categories - ancient, medieval, and modern, to take only one example - that have informed the study of the European past are assumed to be the 'natural' categories through which one might interpret any history. 

Secondly, an order of temporal linearity is explicitly or tacitly the informing principle of all contemporary history:  as we move from the ancient age to the modern age, it is assumed that we also gravitate from slavery to liberty, from the religious life to secularism, and from a life embedded in community to individualism. In this narrative, the most bitter contemporary conflicts readily become relics of the medieval age:  thus the 'fanaticism' of the Serbian nationalist, the Hindu fundamentalist, or the Islamic terrorist is something that the perpetrator of atrocities has been unable to leave behind in his halting and existentially troubled journey towards modern freedom.

Thirdly, the enterprise of history perforce condemns the people outside Europe to live someone else's history, with consequences that have been seen across all domains of life.  Europe's past is the present of those living in India or Africa; when, at long last, the native arrives at the destination, it is only to discover that the European has moved on to another station, leaving only his baggage to be collected by natives. 

Fourthly, as a corollary of the above points, it becomes imperative to understand that all history is in fact European history:  the histories of Latin America, Africa, or India are thus not merely ancillary histories, the limbs to the body of European history, they are illustrative of certain strands of European culture, thought, and sensibility that are invisible or only partially visible to Europe itself.

Fifthly, the problem of Eurocentrism afflicts not only the study of non-European cultures, but also the understanding of the contours of the history of Europe and the entire West.  It is a remarkable fact that most British histories of Britain still remain largely oblivious to the history of colonialism: it is recognised, of course, that Britain had an empire, but the bulk of British historians labour under the impression that Britain's overseas history had little bearing on British history, culture, and politics.  To take another example:  American exceptionalism, whatever its precise features, is not merely a problem for those seeking to unravel the nature of American history and destiny; it is at least as pressing a problem for everyone else in the world.  I had once put forth a public proposal that every adult around the world ought to be permitted to vote in the elections for the American presidency:  since the fate of much of the world, and certainly of its most vulnerable, smaller, or (in the language of the Americans and their camp followers) 'rogue' nations, rests so much on who is elected to the most powerful office of the world, surely the victims of the American war machine must be permitted to choose the agent of their destruction?  In a similar vein, we ought perhaps to insist that national histories, insofar as such histories are at all attempted, should never be left entirely in the hands of the citizens of the nation-state in question.  In the matter of national histories, nearly everyone is a nationalist.

The Eurocentric wolf in sheep's clothing:  The new malaise of world history

The perils of what is termed 'Eurocentric history', and some prospects for our emancipation from such problems, are curiously best gleaned by a rather more exhaustive account of the latest malaise in historiographic writing, namely the recent renaissance, particularly in the United States, of world history.  The conference circuit in world history has witnessed rapid growth since the mid-1990s, job openings in this area have multiplied, and ambitious works in world history, such as Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (1997), David Landes's The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor (1998), and Niall Ferguson's Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (2004), have garnered numerous accolades as well as an unusually wide readership.  

At the University of California, a multi-campus initiative in world history was launched nearly a decade ago, and among its first products is a series, published by the university's press, called 'The California World History Library'.  The second volume in this series, Maps of Time (2004), is described as a work in 'big history'; and its author, David Christian, characterises his enterprise as having originated from his feeling that scholarship has been enervated by the fragmented accounts of reality which have been in fashion over the last two decades, and that historians can learn from scientists (p. 3). If scientists no longer find the idea of a 'grand unified theory' absurd or preposterously vain, why should historians shun grand narratives? Christian argues that 'large stories' can provide a 'sense of meaning', and that intellectuals who disavow 'grand narratives' do so at the risk of rendering themselves insignificant (pp. 9-10).  He does not reflect on the most obvious rejoinder, namely that the emulation of scientists has long been one of the principal problems in the social science; nor is there any degree of self-reflexivity on his part, or else he might have had to think about just how precisely an American trait it is to think big, all so that one might not be rendered 'insignificant'.

California is a 'big' state in an equally big nation-state, and it is perfectly apposite that 'big history' should be grounded in a place that often imagines itself as the centre of the world.  One of the numerous, unthinking clich‚s that proliferate about Los Angeles, that very big 'metropolis' of California, is that a hundred or more languages can be heard in its schools, though what is never mentioned in the same breath is that speakers of English, Spanish, Vietnamese, Hindi, Gujarati, Korean, Japanese, and Swahili alike shop at Wal-Mart and consume the burgers at McDonald's. Multiculturalism has a ravenous appetite; it is America's way, from the late 20th century onwards, of eating up the world.

But to return to the schools:  if the world has come to Los Angeles, why bother at all with the world?  That California cannot much be bothered with the world is nowhere better indicated than in the fact that it is self-obsessed by its own earthquakes, fires, mudslides - and highway chases.  Indeed, one suspects that for all the difficulties that occasionally intrude upon the lives of Californians, these are also welcomed as signs of the Biblical scale of life in God's own land.  Lest one should forget just how 'big' California is, it is useful to recall that it is often spoken of as the world's seventh or eighth largest economy.  Doubtless, purchasing power parity has not been factored into such calculations about the size of the economy, but one can nonetheless understand why California is accustomed to thinking of itself in lofty terms, both drawing the world to itself and having the world radiate outward from the 'Golden State'.

Big history and world history thus have, in myriad ways, their own political economy.  In big places one's pretensions are likely to be big as well, and it is inconceivable that world history would emanate from Khartoum, Tripoli, Dhaka, Kuala Lumpur, or Lima.  From Spengler onwards, world history has been a conversation in which colonised and now underdeveloped subjects have had no place, except, of course, as the objects of the wise discourse of knowing subjects. Indians may have taken charge of their history, as have (to howsoever lesser an extent) Africans of African history, but 'world history', which is generally represented as the playing field of more ecumenical minds, remains firmly within the provenance of the Western scholar.  The paraphernalia of almost any kind of modern scholarship is vast, but much vaster still are the array of texts, in diverse languages, that a world historian might require and that seldom are available to those outside the Western academy; besides, historians in those capitals to which I have referred are almost certainly preoccupied enough in the endeavour of decolonising the received histories. 

Though Dipesh Chakrabarty argued, not so long ago, that the subject of history is always Europe, even when the histories in question are transparently those of Latin America, Africa, or India,2 we might say that world history has not merely restored Europe as the hegemon of history - a restoration occurring in the midst of much anxiety about the loss of faith in grand narratives, the nefarious influence of those French diseases of the mind that go under the name of poststructuralism and Lacanian psychoanalysis, the demotion of scientific history, and the infusion of interpretive frameworks that steadfastly probe the nexus of knowledge and power - but rather returned history to its 'proper' home.                                   

Vinay Lal is Professor of History at the University of Delhi and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). The above is extracted from his presentation at the International Conference on 'Decolonising Our Universities' held in Penang, Malaysia, in June 2011.

      

Endnotes

1   Charles Grant, Observations on the State of Society among the Asiatic Subjects of Great Britain, particularly with respect to Morals . . . Written chiefly in the year 1792 (Ordered, to be Printed, by the House of Commons, 1813), p. 88.

2   Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe:  Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 27-46.

*Third World Resurgence No. 266/267, October/November 2012, pp 39-41