Fields of Blood (53 page)

To many it seemed that the French Revolution had failed. The systemic violence of Napoleon’s empire betrayed revolutionary principles, and Napoleon also reinstated the Catholic Church. For decades the hopes of 1789 were dashed by one disillusioning event after another. The glory days of the fall of the
Bastille were followed by the
September Massacres, the
Reign of Terror, the Vendée
genocide, and a military dictatorship. After Napoleon’s fall from power in 1814, Louis XVIII (the brother of Louis XVI) was returned to the throne. But the republican dream refused to die. The republic was revived for two brief periods, during the Hundred Days before Napoleon’s final defeat at Waterloo in 1815 and for a brief period between 1848 and 1852. In 1870 it was restored yet again, this time lasting until it was destroyed by the Nazis in 1940. Instead of seeing the French Revolution as a failure, therefore, we should perhaps see it as the explosive start of a lengthy process. Such massive social and political change overturning millennia of
autocracy cannot be achieved overnight. Revolutions take a long time. But unlike several other European countries, where aristocratic regimes were so deeply entrenched that they managed to hang on, albeit in limited form,
France eventually achieved its secular republic. We should bear this long-drawn-out and painful process in mind before dismissing as failures revolutions that have taken place in our own time in Iran, Egypt, and Tunisia, for example.

The French Revolution may have changed the politics of Europe, but it did not affect the agrarian economy.
Modernity came of age in
Britain’s
Industrial Revolution, which began in the later eighteenth century, though its social effects would not be truly felt until the early nineteenth.
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It started with the invention of the steam engine, which provided more energy than the country’s entire workforce put together, so the economy grew at an unprecedented rate. It was not long before
Germany,
France, Japan, and the
United States followed Britain’s lead, and all these
industrialized countries were forever transformed. To man the new machines, the population had to be mobilized for industry instead of agriculture; economic self-sufficiency now became a thing of the past. The government also began to control the lives of ordinary folk in ways that had been impossible in agrarian society.
⁸⁸
In
Hard Times
(1864)
Charles Dickens portrayed the industrial city as an inferno: workers—referred to contemptuously as “the Hands”—live in abject poverty and have only instrumental value. The oppression of the agrarian state had been replaced by the structural violence of
industrialization. More benign state ideologies would develop, and more people than ever before would enjoy comforts previously available only to the nobility, but despite the best efforts of some politicians, a seemingly unbridgeable gap would always separate rich and poor.

The
Enlightenment ideals of toleration, independence, democracy, and intellectual freedom were no longer simply noble aspirations but had become practical necessities. Mass production required a mass market, so the common people could no longer be kept at subsistence level but had to be able to afford manufactured goods. More and more people were drawn into the productive process—as factory workers, printers, or office clerks—and needed at least a modicum of education. Inevitably they would begin to demand representation in government, and modern communications would make it easier for workers to organize politically. Because no single group could either dominate or even effectively oppose the government, different parties had to compete for power.
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Intellectual liberty was now essential to the economy, as people could achieve the innovation that was crucial to progress only by thinking freely, unconstrained by their class, guild, or church. Governments had to exploit all their human resources, so outsiders, such as the
Jews in Europe and Catholics in England and America, were brought into the mainstream.

Industrialized countries were soon compelled to seek new markets and resources abroad and would therefore, as the German philosopher
Georg Wilhelm
Hegel (1770–1831) had predicted, be pushed toward
colonialism.
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In these new empires, the economic relationship between the imperial power and the subject peoples became just as one-sided as it had been in the agrarian empires. The new colonial power did not help its colonies to industrialize but simply appropriated an “undeveloped” country to extract raw materials that could feed the European industrial process.
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In return the colony received cheap manufactured goods from the West that ruined local businesses. Not surprisingly, colonialism was experienced as intrusive and coercive. The colonialists built modern transport and communications but chiefly for their own convenience.
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In
India, British traders ransacked the assets of
Bengal so ruthlessly during the late eighteenth century that this period is regularly described as “the plundering of Bengal.” The region was pushed into a chronically dependent role, and instead of growing their own food, villagers were forced to cultivate jute and indigo for the world market. The British did help keep disease and
famine at bay, but the consequent population growth led to poverty and overcrowding.
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This combination of industrialized technology and empire was creating a global form of systemic violence, driven not by religion but by the wholly secular values of the market. The West was so far ahead that it was virtually impossible for the subject peoples to catch up. Increasingly the world would be divided between the West and the Rest, and this systemic political and economic inequality was sustained by military force. By the mid-nineteenth century,
Britain controlled most of the Indian subcontinent, and after the Indian Mutiny (1857), in which
atrocities were committed on both sides and some seventy thousand Indians were killed in a final desperate protest against foreign rule, the British formally deposed the last
Moghul emperor.
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Because the colony had to fit into the global market, a degree of modernization was essential: policing, the army, and the local economy had to be completely reorganized, and some of the “natives” introduced to modern ideas. Only very rarely had agrarian empires attempted to change the religious traditions of the common people, but in India British innovations had a drastic effect on the religious and political life of the subcontinent.

The ease with which they had been so thoroughly subjugated was profoundly disturbing to the people of India since it implied that something was radically amiss with their social systems.
⁹⁵
Traditional Indian aristocracies now had to cope not only with a foreign ruling class but
with a wholly different socioeconomic order and with the new native cadres of clerks and bureaucrats, created by the British, who often earned more than the old
elites. These Westernized Indians had become in effect a new caste, separated by a gulf of incomprehension from the unmodernized majority. The increasing democratization of their British rulers was alien to the social arrangements of India, which had always been strongly hierarchical and had encouraged synergy among disparate groups rather than organized unity. Moreover, confronted with the bewildering social variety of the subcontinent, the British latched on to the groups they mistakenly thought they understood and divided the population into “Hindu,” “
Muslim,” “Sikh,” and “Christian” communities.

The “Hindu” majority, however, consisted of multifarious castes, cults, and groups that did not see themselves as forming an organized religion, as Western people now understood this term. They had no unifying hierarchy and no standard set of rituals, practices, and beliefs. They worshipped numerous unrelated gods and engaged in devotions that had no logical connection with one another. Yet now they all found themselves lumped together into something the British called “Hinduism.”
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The term
hindu
had been used first by the Muslim conquerors to describe the indigenous people; it had no specifically religious connotation but simply meant “native” or “local,” and the indigenous peoples, including
Buddhists,
Jains, and Sikhs, came to use it of themselves. Under the British, however, “
Hindus” had to become a close-knit group and cultivate a broad, casteless communal identity that was alien to their age-old traditions.

It was ironic that the British, who had banished “religion” from the public sphere at home, should classify the subcontinent in such tightly religious terms. They based the Indian electoral system on religious affiliation and in 1871 conducted a census that made these religious communities acutely aware of their numbers and areas of strength in relation to one another. By bringing religion to the fore in this way, the British inadvertently bequeathed a history of communal conflict to South Asia. In the Moghul Empire, there had certainly been tension between the Muslim ruling class and its
hindu
subjects, but this had not always had a religious coloration. While Western Christians had become more sectarian during their
Reformation, India had been going in the opposite direction. During the thirteenth century, Vedic orthodoxy had begun to be transformed by
bhakti,
a “devotion” to a personal deity that refused to
acknowledge differences of caste or creed. Bhakti drew much inspiration from
Sufism, which had become the dominant mode of Islam in the subcontinent and had long insisted that because the omniscient and omnipresent God could not be confined to a single creed, belligerent assertion of orthodoxy was a form of idolatry (
shirk
).

Sikhism had been born in this climate of open-hearted tolerance. The word
sikh
derived from the
Sanskrit
shishya
(“disciple”), for Sikhs followed the teachings of
Guru Nanak (1469–1539), founder of their tradition, and his nine inspired successors. Born in a village near Lahore in the Punjab, Nanak had insisted that interior apprehension of God was far more important than a strict adherence to doctrines and customs that could divide people from one another—though he scrupulously avoided deriding anybody’s faith. Like the Sufis, he believed that human beings must be weaned from the fanaticism that made them attack the beliefs of others. “Religion lives not in empty words,” he once said. “He who regards all men as equals is religious.”
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One of his earliest maxims stated categorically: “There is no
hindu;
there is no Muslim; who shall I follow? I shall follow the way of God.”
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Another leading proponent of this openness to other faiths was
Akbar, the third Moghul emperor (r. 1556–1605). Out of respect for
hindu
sensitivity, he gave up hunting, forbade the sacrifice of animals on his birthday, and became a vegetarian. In 1575 he founded a House of Worship, where scholars from all religious traditions met freely to discuss spiritual matters, and a Sufi order, dedicated to “divine
monotheism” (
tawhid-e-ilahi
) based on the conviction that the one God could reveal himself in any rightly guided religion. But not all Muslims shared this vision, and this policy could be sustained only while the Moghuls were in a position of strength. When their power began to decline and various groups began to revolt against imperial rule, religious conflict escalated. Akbar’s son
Jahangir (r. 1605–27) had to put down one rebellion after another, and
Aurangzeb (r. 1658–1707) seems to have believed that political unity could be restored only by greater discipline within the Muslim ruling class. He therefore outlawed laxities such as wine drinking, made Muslim cooperation with their
hindu
subjects impossible, and engaged in the widespread destruction of their temples. These violent policies, the result of political insecurity as much as religious zeal, were reversed immediately after Aurangzeb’s death but were never forgotten.

Sikhs had suffered from this imperial violence. By this time Sikhs,
who had once eschewed all external symbols, had developed some of their own. The fifth guru,
Arjan Dev, had made the
Golden Temple at Amritsar in the
Punjab a place of pilgrimage and had enshrined the Sikh scriptures there in 1604. Sikhism had always abstained from violence. Guru Nanak had said: “Take up arms that hurt no one; let your coat of mail be understanding; convert your enemies to friends.”
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The first four gurus had had no need to bear arms. But
Jahangir had tortured the fifth guru to death in 1606, and in 1675
Aurangzeb beheaded
Tegh Bahadur, the ninth guru. His successor, Gobind Singh, therefore faced an entirely different world. Henceforth, the tenth guru declared, there would be no more human leaders: in the future the Sikhs’ only guru would be their scripture. In 1699 he instituted the Sikh Order of Khalsa (the “purified” or “chosen”). Like
Kshatriya warriors, its members would call themselves Singh (“Lion”), carry swords, and distinguish themselves from the rest of the population by wearing soldiers’ garb and keeping their hair unshorn. Yet again, imperial violence had radicalized an originally irenic tradition and had also introduced a particularism that was entirely alien to the original Sikh vision. Gobind is believed to have written to Aurangzeb that when all else failed, it was only right to lift the sword and fight. Militancy might be necessary to defend the community—but only as a last resort.
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