BACKLASH
I am not an academic, I am certainly not a scholar, my response to India is almost entirely a sensual one, not an academic one. But one thing that I stumbled on in reading about India was the reasons given for Sepoy Mutiny, when elements of the Indian army rose up against their English officers and tried to wipe them off the map, but instead were brutally crushed themselves. Somehow the Sepoy Mutiny of about 1860, about the same time as the American Civil War, now seems relevant to me. In fact, both wars seem to have had something in common. Both were fought over traditional rural values and the transition to new technologies and ways of life that threatened these values. I am over my head here so I won’t pontificate too much. But at least the Sepoy mutiny seems to me relevant to what is happening in the United States today.
Britain’s interest in India was trade. The East India Company brought goods from India including spices which brought high prices in Europe and traded factory goods with India which also brought profits. The East India’s competitors were the Portuguese and the Dutch who were interested in the same trade each trying to keep the other European trading companies out of their territories. At first this trade was only from harbors on the coast such as Calcutta and Bombay, but soon the British found that the Mogul Empire was near collapse and the hundreds of maharajahs of princely states could be played off against each other. In order to control trade the British invaded and ruled by proxy in state after Indian state. But when the British took over the large middle state of Oudh and displace the Maharajah’s huge assemblage of his ineffective army and a large supported group of sadhus (holy men) and a huge court that depended on the patronage of the Maharajah of Oudh, there was finally a backlash. All of these out of work supporters of the Maharajah were resentful and furious. The holy men spread all kinds of stories about the British including that the rounds the Indian Sepoys (soldiers) had to bite off before firing were greased with the fat of pigs (anathema to Moslems) and the fat of cows (anathema to Hindus). Everything about the traditional way of life was threatened including their religion and this led to an overnight backlash of the Indian soldiers turning against their English officers and their families, murdering as many of them as they could. The English officers and English soldiers were disciplined and had control of the firepower, the Indians were undisciplined and outgunned and were finally brutally defeated by the British.
The result was that the British immediately stopped invading any more Indian states while at the same time controlling the policies of the Maharajahs whom the British kept in power. But the process of modernization of India continued under this new system. The British brought a new concept of universal laws, bound the country up with a large railway system, even used educated Indians (often educated in England as Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru were) to govern, instituted a system of higher education, and united India from a group of principalities to a cohesive nation bound together by Indian English.
The British exploited India but they also modernized India and India’s IT prowess and its growing strength today came from this modernization caused by the British. The Sepoy Mutiny was a tipping point from the old traditional values and ways to doing things in a new way.
I have been reading a book called Backlash by two men who are academics and through scholars. Every chapter of the book is followed by pages and pages of footnotes. These are the experts whom MAGA reject.
The populist movements they have studied carefully using the great body of work of other scholars is one that they find around the world. Trump and his MAGA followers are just one example. Common to all populist movements is that the common man knows best what is good for him and what is keeping him down. The cause of the common man not doing well in country after country are felt to be the out of touch elites, the corrupted politicians, the media which pretends to be unbiased and secularism and the corrupting of traditional cultural values. Defending traditional cultural values and fundamentalist religious values are central to Putin’s powers and Modi in India and MAGA in the United States. All populist movements have in common what they are defending against and not what they are going to build, they are more interested in tearing down than building up, more driven by resentment than by policies the want to implement.
They more interested in going back than going forward. So this is why I compare the Sepoy Mutiny to populist politics.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 