Those who fail to learn from history...

By William Dalrymple - New Statesman - London,England,UK

Monday, October 16, 2006

East and west face each other across a divide that some call a religious war. Suicide jihadis take what they see as defensive action and innocent people are killed. But this is 1857. William Dalrymple on lessons from the Raj for the neo-cons.

The bier of the State Prisoner - as the deceased was referred to - was accompanied by his two sons and an elderly mullah. The ceremony was brief. The British authorities had made sure not only that the grave was already dug, but that quantities of lime were on hand to guarantee the rapid decay of both bier and body. When the shortened funeral prayers had been recited, the earth was thrown over the lime, and the turf carefully replaced to disguise the place of burial.

The state prisoner was Bahadur Shah II, known from his pen-name as Zafar (meaning, paradoxically, "victory"). Zafar was the last Mughal emperor, and a direct descendant of Genghis Khan. He was born in 1775, when the British were still a modest coastal power in India, and in his lifetime his dynasty had been reduced to insignificance, while the British transformed themselves from vulnerable traders into an aggressively expansionist military force.

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The Last Mughal, published this month, continues the story I began in White Mughals - the story of the fast-changing relationship between the British and the Indians, and especially Muslim Indians - in the late 18th and the mid-19th century.
During the 18th century it was almost as common for westerners to take on the customs, and even the religions, of India, as the reverse. These white Mughals had responded to their travels in India by shedding their Britishness like an unwanted skin, adopting Indian dress, studying Indian philosophy, taking harems and copying the ways of the Mughal governing class they came to replace - what Salman Rushdie, talking of modern multiculturalism, has called "chutnification". By the end of the 18th century one-third of the British men in India were leaving their possessions to Indian wives.

In Delhi, the period was symbolised by Sir David Ochterlony, the British Resident, who arrived in the city in 1803: every evening, all 13 of his Indian wives went around Delhi in a procession behind their husband, each on the back of her own elephant. For all the humour of this image, in such mixed households, Islamic customs and sensitivities were clearly understood and respected. One letter, for example, recorded that "Lady Ochterlony has applied for leave to make the Hadge to Mecca". Indeed, Ochterlony strongly considered bringing up his children as Muslims, and when his children by his chief wife, Mubarak Begum, had grown up, he adopted a child from one of the leading Delhi Muslim families.

This was not an era when notions of clashing civilisations would have made sense. The world that Ochterlony inhabited was more hybrid, and had far less clearly defined ethnic, national and religious borders, than we have been conditioned to expect. It is certainly unfamiliar to anyone who accepts the usual caricature of the Englishman in India, presented repeatedly in films and television dramas, of the narrow-minded sahib dressing for dinner in the jungle.

Some 200 years before Zadie Smith, Monica Ali and Hari Kunzru all made it into the bestseller lists, and multiculturalism became a buzzword capable of waking Norman Tebbit and the Tory undead from their coffins at party conferences, the India of the East India Company was an infinitely more culturally, racially and religiously chutnified place than the most mixed areas of London today.

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There is a direct link between the jihadis of 1857 and those we face today. The reaction of the educated Delhi Muslims after 1857 was to reject both the west and the gentle Sufi traditions of the late Mughal emperors, whom they tended to regard as semi-apostate puppets of the British; instead, they attempted to return to what they regarded as pure Islamic roots.

With this in mind, disillusioned refugees from Delhi founded a madrasa in the Wahhabi style at Deoband, in Delhi, that went back to Koranic basics and rigorously stripped out anything European from the curriculum. One hundred and forty years later, it was out of Deobandi madrasas in Pakistan that the Taliban emerged to create the most retrograde Islamic regime in modern history, a regime that in turn provided the crucible from which emerged al-Qaeda, and the most radical Islamist counter-attack the modern west has yet had to face.

Today, west and east again face each other uneasily across a divide that many see as a religious war. Suicide jihadis fight what they see as a defensive action against their Christian enemies, and again innocent civilians are slaughtered. As before, western evangelical Christian politicians are apt to cast their opponents and enemies in the role of "incarnate fiends" and simplistically conflate any armed resistance to invasion and occupation with "pure evil". Again, western countries, blind to the effect their foreign policies have on the wider world, feel aggrieved and surprised to be attacked, as they see it, by mindless fanatics.

And yet, as we have seen in our own time, nothing so easily radicalises a people against us, or undermines the moderate aspect of Islam, as aggressive western intrusion in the east: the histories of Islamic fundamentalism and western imperialism have often been closely, and dangerously, intertwined. In a curious but very concrete way, the extremists and fundamentalists of both faiths have needed each other to reinforce each other's prejudices and hatreds. The venom of one provides the lifeblood of the other.

There are clear lessons here. For, in the celebrated words of Edmund Burke - himself a fierce critic of British aggression in India - those who fail to learn from history are destined for ever to repeat it.

William Dalrymple is the India correspondent of the New Statesman. His book "The Last Mughal: the fall of a dynasty (Delhi 1857)" is published by Bloomsbury (£25)