Sunday Posts

Are we witnessing the end of an imperial era? Usually, these periods are fraught with violence and uncertainty. Empires are power structures, which crumbles from inside, and everything that stood on its edifice, values, ideas and systems, go down with them. Empires are stable - that's their raison d'etre! Even those who are disadvantaged by the empire support its existence because people would rather tolerate tyranny than anarchy. The end of any empire is therefore accompanied by instability. I know it is odd for me to think this is the end of an empire. The second Trump Presidency is as imperial as it gets. The United States, the world's overlord, is throwing its power around, threatening other countries with tariff and even invasion. It has approached major world issues unilaterally, pulling out of multilateral institutions or conventions, sitting down with Russia without other parties around and proposed to turn Gaza, in defiance of the all norms and wishes of everyone...

  The scenes from Kabul Airport are sad and shocking, but they are not extraordinary. If anything, it seems that the Biden administration, even if they did not know what this would look like, was fully aware what they were doing - and what its consequences will be. Their allies were in it too, and they also knew what was going to happen: They were hoping, after Louis XVth, that the inevitable catastrophy would come after they have safely left. Most of the world already knew, ever since the 'Nam, that America is much better at bombing territories than holding them. That George W still misadventured shows the perils of not knowing one's history - or for that matter, any history! There was, of course, a good dose of over-confidence from the end of history moment of the nineties: After all, as Marx said, Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please. It's not just about history, but also about the present. In more ways than one, what's happening in Kabu...

73 years ago, on this day, India was divided.  Of course, this is a well-known fact. But it's worth repeating. We must remember that the division of India and creation of Pakistan was an imperial act, driven by self-serving motives.  Indeed, it's an easy thing to forget. In the intervening years, the political class in both countries, which owed its existence to this new configuration, took the existence of the two (and later, three) nations as a given. It was deemed as a historical, cultural and geographical fact, on the basis of which all later thinking sprouted. Each year, the countries drifted apart, obsessed as they were with one another. However, we must remind ourselves - periodically if we must - that this division is an artificial, imperialist one. I am sure there are plenty of people who will disagree to this. They will, because their political power, status and affluence depend on not agreeing with the artificiality of this division. They do their best to keep alive...

It only came to me slowly, through a confusing mist of ideas: That I really never escaped the empire. I live in history. My mind is trained to see things with its submerged past, with its layered stories. The blue plaques of London - like the one on the flat near St Pancras where Shelley lived with Mary when she ran away with him - take me back in time often. But I missed the most obvious place where I should have looked for history - my mind in itself. It's hard to explain why I came to London. I did not exactly come looking for money: I left a great job and prospects of a career rather. I had no job offers in hand. I came to learn but didn't enrol in a university until several years later. I dearly loved my life in India and never gave up the plan to return. And, yet, I came. It may seem unsound but I came to see, not as a modern tourist who moves sight to sight and takes a country as a package, but rather as an ancient one who comes to wonder, to observe and to ret...

I write this post mainly as a record and a response to a debate that I participated in last week. The question we were concerned with is the well-known one, why did Western Europe, and particularly England, took the lead in the industrial age. The debate was drawn along the lines of the arguments of David Landes, who argued about the primacy of culture (positing Max Weber's 'Protestant Ethic' at the core of his argument), and that of people like Andre Gunder Frank and Kenneth Pomeranz, who argues that the the 'Western' hegemony is contingent (that it has come about following a number of chance advantages, geographical and historical) and perhaps cyclical.  To me, the 'contingency' argument has more appeal. This is not just because of my general view of life - that contingency plays a huge role - or because that would be more consistent with a Darwinian world view. For that matter, such an argument would also be consistent with the idea of 'conjun...

I am finally onto a project I always wanted to do: Write a history of the Colonial Universities. Indeed, I start with a very modest work - an essay on the establishment of metropolitan universities (Calcutta, Madras and Bombay first, and then Allahabad and Punjab Universities) in India - which I intend to finish over the next few months. But I hope to make this a prelude to the bigger project, because I see the Colonial University as a distinct form of institution, whose purpose was to educate for the economic purposes of imperialism, and even if the empire is long gone and dead, this institutional form and modes of thinking lives on.   That way, I shall claim, this is not just a freak exercise in academic pretencion for me, but an essential part of my overall work.  While I work on it, I already find it fascinating to study the rhetoric and ideas around the establishment of the Indian universities. The conventional narrative runs along the lines of Orient...

There are two reasons why I am writing this post, which is really a retake of an earlier post - Should Britain Apologise? - which I recently shared on Social Media.  The first is that there is a renewal of this debate. The recent political twists and turns - Brexit and emergence of Hindu Nationalist India most importantly - have brought the question of British imperial folly to the forefront, engaged in animated debates and denials ( see here ). The second is a renewal of interest in history itself, made possible by the deliberate wrecking of the Post-War world system by Conservatives in America and Britain. After being presumed dead, history has been regularly invoked in claims, particularly by British and American politicians who are good at pointing follies of other nations. Hollywood made a film about Holocaust denial, though the question of American imperialism in the Pacific was never deemed worthy of retelling. The British Secretary of International Trade, Dr Liam...

Shashi Tharoor, Author and Indian Politician, has touched a number of raw nerves when he compared Churchill and Hitler, maintaining “Churchill has as much blood on his hands as Hitler does” ( See story ) in an interview with UK-Asian, an Asian community interest website in Britain, launching his new book, Inglorious Empire   (a catchy title with a whiff of Quentin Tarantino). While this has now drawn several angry responses (for example, see this one from Zareer Masani ), there is little new here. Churchill did preside over a genocide, intentionally diverting food from India and causing a famine to punish insolent Bengalis in 1943, a forgotten affair in Britain (like all other atrocities of the empire), but subject to detailed exploration in Madhusree Mukherjee's Churchill's Secret War , and even more famously and dispassionately, in Amartya Sen's Poverty and Famine . Churchill, the arch-colonialist, had actively participated in various colonial atrocities, starting w...

One of my key interests is to study 'global education' and what impact it has on developing societies. Like my other projects, this is a conversation in progress, and therefore, much better covered, at least at this stage, as blog posts rather than in any other form. This interest also sits in the intersection of my work, which is about using the possibilities of technology to broaden access to education and to connect it to the needs of a modern service economy, and my political beliefs, which, being Indian, is of mixed feelings about modernity itself.  The claim that globalising education, among other things, brings a greater capacity to think critically is of immense interest to me. The components of this claim itself are worth studying: That the Indian education is traditionally based on rote learning, and the Western scientific education is based on critical questioning of the world, is presented as an absolute starting point of this discussion - and by definition ev...

English is fast becoming the world's language. While some Frenchmen are perturbed, and call the language penetrating even their universities 'American' rather than English, the Tower of Babel seems to be reaching a final solution.  Why does this matter? The apologists of English do not see this as an imperial project but a triumph of pragmatism, a natural corollary of globalisation and rise of an uniform consumer ethics. And, indeed, there is one view that it is the 'democratic' nature of English - the language can be molded and adapted to its host cultures infinitesimally - that makes it so popular. They claim this is not about English or American, but the story of many Englishes. So, you can speak any language as long as it is called English, which means an expansion of what some observers will call an Anglosphere. This is a sphere of influence of a certain kind of rhetoric, enabled by the unity of media and thinking. In one way, this is a function of te...

I learnt something new about India when I travelled around the country in April/ May. I was accompanied by two colleagues: One, my Co-founder, a Briton who has never been to India before; Another, a senior colleague who is the Chair of our Academic Board (and previously been a member of the executive in an UK university), who was born in Mauritius but settled down in England three decades ago, and have become as English as anyone (in contrast, though settled in England, I preserved my Indian, arguably Bengali, identity in day to day life, and even in work). I learnt a lot seeing India through the eyes of these two close colleagues,who were visitors to a country I consider my own. What I learnt went beyond the usual staff one expects: One gets embarrassed by the lack of basic facilities in India when accompanying a 'guest', but at the same time, on reflection, feels proud about how little we have to go by, yet how aspirational we are. Coming back-to-back to a visit to China...

I have been following an interesting debate on the Amazon site on the legacy of British imperialism . The discussion was dominated by the arguments of 'benign empire', the deeply nationalist feeling that the British stood for freedom and fought Hitler, and that it liberated many societies which have gone a step backward since the British left. As an Indian living in Britain and conducting most of my work and life in the English language, this debate is deeply relevant to me: Hence, I comment. The starting point here is that history is inevitable because it happened. One can indulge in what-if fantasies but they have no practical relevance. So, British empire is a fact one can't deny, and there is no point mulling over whether India, the country I come from, would have been better or worse off without the empire. At the same time, it is worth mentioning that history is usually a complex and discreet process. While 'creating history' is a popular expression, it is usu...

A western power finds itself in a ‘situation’. Their forces and administrators are running a country which is increasingly rebellious, and the rule, unpopular. The rulers' first response was to resort to the ancient rule of the Roman empire – divide and rule – and set the communities against one another. It did work for some time, too. But then it stopped working! Rather, there is now the added hassle of keeping peace within communities to have things going. Costs of occupation now outweighs the benefits. Everyday, the poor, dangerous country looks less and less appetising to its civilised administrators. Besides, there is a resource crunch too. The ruling country has been involved in too many wars - not many fine young men of the 'expendable' variety are available to man the front lines. It is becoming difficult to use the natives, and the local army is increasingly against the occupation. The public opinion at home is also turning nasty. First, the belligerent leader...