Pankaj Mishra: history lessons
The map of the colonially constructed middle east is definitely being being redrawn. Not by the oft touted "Arab Srpring" alone but by the wars pushed by former colonial powers as they seek to assert a neo colonial control over resources and the routes to extract them. .
Pankaj Mishra: history lessons must not become empire triumphalism.
Pankaj Mishra, author of From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia, argues that decolonisation is an ongoing process that the Arab spring can be seen as part of. It would be a mistake to revise history curriculums in such a way that the Asian and African response to British colonialism is overlooked, he says
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/video/2012/aug/13/pankaj-mishra-history-lessons-video
“this discussion of East-West with the obvious implication of Western superiority is historically inaccurate and is mostly a symptom of the great cultural prestige and power of Western cultural institutions.” Mishra’s book is doing something altogether more sophisticated, acknowledging that there is much to be learned from the West but, as he tells me, that its “political, social and economic model exported through coercion and later voluntarily embraced has profound flaws. This is not the language of East versus West. We’re all stuck with this.”
Travelling in Japan, Tagore, discomfited by the evidence of Japan’s modernisation, lectures his hosts: “The New Japan is only an imitation of the West.” “This,” Mishra notes, “did not go down well with his audience for whom Japan was a powerful nation and budding empire, and India a pitiable European colony.” In China too, Tagore was shouted down by militarists convinced that imitation of European power was the only way to progress, to escape European domination. Tagore’s appeal to Chinese tradition, to “centuries of wisdom nourished by your faith in goodness, not in mere strength” was, Mishra reports, “greeted with the slogans, ‘Go back, slave from a lost country!
“The Americanisation of India has happened swifter than anyone could have imagined. The ruthlessness of hire-fire, the rough justice of the marketplace, the dismissal of social welfare — how quickly we’ve abandoned justice, morality, decency, for god’s sake! This kind of craven surrender to ideas that are not even suitable and to adopt them in a largely poor and destitute nation is unconscionable but we’ve gone and done it. Our elites and media are happy to regurgitate the consumer ideal.” From the Ruins of Empire is not so much polemic as cri de coeur, motivated by Mishra’s keen sense of the world, East and West, hurtling towards its own destruction.
http://www.tehelka.com/story_main53.asp?filename=hub250812HOW.asp
He accepts that he is not a trained historian but delights in the freedom that comes with that, because he can travel across disciplinary boundaries and discover and make available to a larger audience the stories of these men. And these stories need to be told, he says, especially today when neo-imperialists and Islamophobes hog all the popular narrative platforms in the West.
http://www.thehindu.com/arts/books/article3815973.ece?homepage=true
“this discussion of East-West with the obvious implication of Western superiority is historically inaccurate and is mostly a symptom of the great cultural prestige and power of Western cultural institutions.” Mishra’s book is doing something altogether more sophisticated, acknowledging that there is much to be learned from the West but, as he tells me, that its “political, social and economic model exported through coercion and later voluntarily embraced has profound flaws. This is not the language of East versus West. We’re all stuck with this.”
Travelling in Japan, Tagore, discomfited by the evidence of Japan’s modernisation, lectures his hosts: “The New Japan is only an imitation of the West.” “This,” Mishra notes, “did not go down well with his audience for whom Japan was a powerful nation and budding empire, and India a pitiable European colony.” In China too, Tagore was shouted down by militarists convinced that imitation of European power was the only way to progress, to escape European domination. Tagore’s appeal to Chinese tradition, to “centuries of wisdom nourished by your faith in goodness, not in mere strength” was, Mishra reports, “greeted with the slogans, ‘Go back, slave from a lost country!
“The Americanisation of India has happened swifter than anyone could have imagined. The ruthlessness of hire-fire, the rough justice of the marketplace, the dismissal of social welfare — how quickly we’ve abandoned justice, morality, decency, for god’s sake! This kind of craven surrender to ideas that are not even suitable and to adopt them in a largely poor and destitute nation is unconscionable but we’ve gone and done it. Our elites and media are happy to regurgitate the consumer ideal.” From the Ruins of Empire is not so much polemic as cri de coeur, motivated by Mishra’s keen sense of the world, East and West, hurtling towards its own destruction.
http://www.tehelka.com/story_main53.asp?filename=hub250812HOW.asp
He accepts that he is not a trained historian but delights in the freedom that comes with that, because he can travel across disciplinary boundaries and discover and make available to a larger audience the stories of these men. And these stories need to be told, he says, especially today when neo-imperialists and Islamophobes hog all the popular narrative platforms in the West.
http://www.thehindu.com/arts/books/article3815973.ece?homepage=true
posted by Satish Sharma at
15:34
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