The Weight of History
From: Turning the Mirror: A View From The East
Sometime shortly before my eighth birthday, I had my first personal taste of the legacy of history. I was visiting Mont Ste. Anne just outside of Quebec City and found myself sitting beside someone on a chairlift who went out of his way to make me feel inadequate because I was unable to successfully communicate with him in French. To him, clearly, I was yet another in a constant line of imperialist anglophones cavalierly encroaching upon his land.
Of course I was nothing of the sort: I was just a middle-class kid from Toronto on a family ski holiday. But the whole experience made me feel both ashamed at my linguistic inadequacy and indignant that I was somehow being held responsible for historical events that I wasn’t even loosely associated with. What, I can remember thinking defensively, had any of this history business to do with me?”
It all seemed monstrously unfair. After all, it wasn’t as if I was even indirectly responsible, a proud descendant of British military veterans who had served on the Plains of Abraham. As it happened, when the Battle of Quebec was going on, my ancestors weren’t speaking English or French. And yet, irritatingly, none of that seemed to matter. To my tormentor that day I might have been General Wolfe himself.
Mind you, there is oppression and there is oppression. If the Québecois are justified in putting Je me souviens on their license plates, it does rather make one wonder what sort of appropriate response the Chinese might be entitled to after having suffered the unrelenting series of imperialistic subjugations from the Opium Wars to the Rape of Nanking.
There are no hard and fast rules here, no well-established scale of history’s burdens. But one thing is abundantly clear: it is not enough to protest, “I wasn’t there!” or “This had nothing to do with me!”
Because not having been there isn’t the point. What matters is to both remember and actively seek some understanding of what has occurred: a careful, studied reflection of what has gone before is the primary way we can elevate our present circumstances beyond that of a seemingly random series of disconnected events. It is not just “context” — although of course it is that too. It is an opportunity to experience a real sense of perspective, real empathy, real understanding.
In From the Ruins of Empire, The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia, celebrated writer Pankaj Mishra, provides us with just such an opportunity. By closely examining the work and impact of a small number of highly influential Asian thinkers of the mid to late 19th and early 20th century, Mishra does more than simply shatter trite stereotypes of “East vs. West”, he gives us a real sense of empathy of what it was like to be living at that place and time.
“One of the impulses behind the creation of the book was to excavate certain ideas, certain ways of life, certain worldviews that we have tended to neglect if not suppress or ignore altogether: to look at what, say, a Chinese intellectual in the late 19th century or early 20th century, was thinking when confronting this enormous challenge of Western imperialism or Western capitalism. That kind of challenge was really existential; and my book is really about individuals at particular stages in history, looking at the world around them, seeing existential challenges everywhere.
“How can we hold on to the society we’ve had and its traditions — particularly literary traditions, cultural traditions — that have been around for a very long time? How can we hold on to those, while also living with dignity in the wider world?
“So imperialism becomes a very important factor for all of these people, because what it is asking them to do — whether you’re in India which is physically occupied by British imperials, or in China or the Ottoman Empire which is not physically occupied but nevertheless feels this enormous pressure from the West — is to radically transform their societies, completely overhaul them in order to become strong enough to survive in the wider world. Otherwise your lands, your territories, your cultures, will be even more dominated by the West than they already are.
“That, really, is a challenge that I wanted to describe in this book: how did people respond to it?”
Developing a heightened sense of empathy for those who face urgent existential challenges to their long-held way of life is one thing, but the first reaction I had at picking up From the Ruins of Empire was a rather more personal one: a profound sense of embarrassment that I knew virtually nothing about any of the people being written about.
That, too, of course, is a sign of the problem, an indication of just how long overdue a deliberately Asia-centric account is. For when I told Pankaj of my distinct sense of discomfort at being so bluntly confronted with my profound ignorance of these Asian thinkers, he assured me that I was hardly alone.
“Actually a lot of people said that; this was a very common reaction. And the important thing here is that I was no different. If you’d asked me six or seven years ago who Liang Qichao was — China’s foremost modern intellectual — I would have said “no idea”. I wouldn’t have had any name recognition.
“So this is a measure of the ignorance that even someone who grew up in India has about the culture and history of China, an immediate neighbour and one of the most important countries today.
“But this is a manifestation of how our knowledge systems are structured — the way we think of ourselves and the world, the way we look at the world — which is a way almost entirely framed by Western social sciences and the way history has been taught in academia for the last 150 years or so. So that whether you are in India, or whether you are in Toronto or in France or in London, there is a certain kind of history you grow up reading. And that history excludes so many, many different aspects of our common experience of the last 150 years or so, because they’re all kinds of nationalist histories. If they’re not nationalist histories then they tend to be imperial histories, and imperial histories exclude even more than nationalist histories.”
But just because you might receive the same type of education as your average Westerner, that hardly means that your personal experiences will be similar.
“If you grew up in a world like Allabahad, you’re really surrounded by crisis, by breakdown, continuous breakdown. And that’s really been the experience for me growing up in India: being surrounded by crisis and a kind of modernity that is unachievable, unattainable — a sense of having arrived late in history.
“This is something that haunts us all: missing the boat, and then being forced to adopt certain ways, certain methods. And even if you succeed in your own life, you find that other people around you are failing. Really, what you see around you is evidence of massive overwhelming failure — even if you grow up in a relatively large city like Delhi or Mumbai, that sense of crisis never really leaves you.“I think that is one difference I feel increasingly between people who grew up in places like Turkey or Egypt or India and people who have grown up in the West at a time of prosperity, at a time of great power for the West, where their assumptions are informed by national power, their sense of national strength, and the fact that their model of modernity is being imitated.”
I am, of course, one of those very people whose fundamental sense of modernity has been framed so differently from that of Pankaj, to likely permanent effect. But having had the chance to read From the Ruins of Empire and then talk with him about it afterwards has nonetheless gone a considerable way towards giving me a much deeper sense of understanding of a very different world that was created in the shadow of a very different type of history.
Which is, at least, a beginning.
This is the introduction written by Howard Burton of the book, Turning the Mirror: A View from the East, which is based on an in-depth, filmed conversation between Howard and Pankaj Mishra. The book is broken into chapters and includes questions for discussion at the end of each chapter. The book is also available as part of the 5-part Ideas Roadshow Collection called Conversations About The History Of Ideas.
Visit the dedicated page for Pankaj Mishra on Ideas On Film: https://ideas-on-film.com/pankaj-mishra/.
