Fields of Blood (54 page)

The
Hindu, Sikh, and Muslim communities were now in competition for British favor, resources, and political influence. Their leaders discovered that the British were more receptive to their ideas if they believed that they represented a larger group and realized that in order to prosper under colonial rule, they would have to adapt to the Western understanding of religion. So new reform movements tended to adopt contemporaneous
Protestant norms in a way that distorted these traditions.
Luther had tried to return to the practice of the early church, so the
Arya Samaj (“Society of Aryans”), which was founded in the Punjab in 1875 by
Swami Dayananda, attempted a return to Vedic orthodoxy. He also tried to create an authoritative scriptural canon, which had no precedent in
India. The Arya was, therefore, an extremely reductive form of “Hinduism,” since the Vedic tradition had long been the faith of only a small
elite, and very few people were able to understand ancient
Sanskrit. It thus tended to appeal only to the educated classes. But by 1947, when British rule ended,
the Arya had 1.5 million members. In other parts of the world too, wherever secular
modernity was imposed, there would be similar attempts to return to “fundamentals.” The Arya illustrated the aggression inherent in such
fundamentalism. In his book
Satyarth Prakash
(“The Light of Truth”), Dayananda dismissed Buddhists and
Jains as mere offshoots of “Hinduism,” derided Christian theology, claimed that Sikhism was merely a Hindu sect, dismissing Guru Nanak as a well-meaning ignoramus who had no understanding of the Vedic traditions, and was vitriolic in his abuse of the
Prophet Muhammad. In 1943 the book inspired violent protests among Muslims in
Sind and became a rallying point for those Hindus who were campaigning for an India free of both the British and Islam.
¹⁰¹

After Devananda’s death, the Arya became even more insulting and disrespectful in their denunciation of the Sikh gurus and, perhaps inevitably, inspired an aggressive assertion of Sikh identity. When Arya pamphlets argued that
Sikh Hindu hain
(“The Sikhs are Hindus”), the prominent Sikh scholar
Kahim Singh retaliated with his highly influential tract
Ham Hindu nahin
(“We are not Hindus”).
¹⁰²
The irony was, of course, that until the British had arrived, nobody had thought of themselves as “Hindu” in this sectarian way. The British tendency to see the different faith communities in stereotypical ways also helped to radicalize the Sikh tradition; they promoted the idea that Sikhs were an essentially warlike and heroic people.
¹⁰³
In recognition of Sikh support during the 1857 mutiny, the British had overcome their initial reluctance to admit members of the Khalsa into the army; moreover, once they were recruited, they were allowed to wear their traditional uniforms. This special treatment meant that gradually the idea that Sikhs were a separate and distinctive race gained ground.

Hitherto Sikhs and Hindus had lived together peacefully in the
Punjab, sharing the same cultural traditions. There had been no central Sikh authority, so variant forms of Sikhism flourished. This had always been the norm in India, where religious identities had been multiple and defined regionally.
¹⁰⁴
But during the 1870s Sikhs began to develop their own reform movement in an attempt to adapt to these new realities. By the end of the nineteenth century, there were about a hundred Sikh Sabha groups all over the Punjab, dedicated to an assertion of Sikh distinctiveness, building Sikh schools and colleges, and producing a flood of polemical literature.
¹⁰⁵
On the surface these groups seemed in tune
with Sikh tradition, but this separation entirely subverted Nanak’s original vision. Sikhs were now expected to adopt a single identity. Over the years a Sikh
fundamentalism would emerge that interpreted the tradition selectively, claiming to return to the martial teachings of the tenth guru but ignoring the peaceful ethos of the early gurus. This new Sikhism was passionately opposed to
secularism: Sikhs must have political power in order to enforce this conformity. A tradition that once had been open to all had been invaded by fear of the “other,” represented by a host of enemies—Hindus,
heretics, modernizers, secularists, and any form of political dominance.
¹⁰⁶

There was a similar distortion of the Muslim tradition. The Briti
sh abolition of the
Moghul Empire had been a traumatic watershed, summarily demoting a people who hitherto had seemed virtual masters of the globe. For the first time, they were being ruled by hostile infidels in one of the core cultures of the civilized world. Given the symbolic importance of the ummah’s well-being, this was not simply a political anxiety but one that touched the spiritual recesses of their being. Some Muslims would therefore cultivate a history of grievance. We have previously seen that the experience of humiliation can damage a tradition and become a catalyst for violence. Segments of the Hindu population, who had been subjected to Muslim rule for seven hundred years, had their own smoldering resentment of Moghul imperialism, so Muslims suddenly felt extremely vulnerable, especially since the British blamed them for the Mutiny of 1857.
¹⁰⁷

Many were afraid that Islam would disappear from the subcontinent and that Muslims would entirely lose their identity. Their first impulse was to withdraw from the mainstream and cling to the glories of the distant past. In 1867 in Deoband, near Delhi, a cadre of ulema began to issue detailed
fatwas that governed every single aspect of life to help Muslims live authentically under foreign rule. Over time the
Deobandis established a network of madrassas throughout the subcontinent that promoted a form of Islam that was as reductive in its own way as the Arya Samaj. They too attempted a return to “fundamentals”—the pristine Islam of the Prophet and the rashidun—and vehemently decried such later developments as the Shiah. Islam had for centuries displayed a remarkable ability to assimilate other cultural traditions, but their colonial humiliation caused the Deobandis to retreat from the West in rather the same way as
Ibn Taymiyyah had recoiled from
Mongol civilization.
Deobandi Islam refused to countenance
itjihad
(“independent reasoning”) and argued for an overly strict and literal interpretation of the Shariah. The Deobandis were socially progressive in their rejection of the caste system and their determination to educate the poorest Muslims, but they were virulently opposed to any innovation—adamant, for instance, in their condemnation of the compulsory education of women. In the early days, Deobandis were not violent, but they would later become more militant. They would have a drastic effect on subcontinental Islam, which had traditionally leaned toward the more inclusive spiritualities of
Sufism and Falsafah, both of which the Deobandis now utterly condemned. During the twentieth century they would gain considerable influence in the Muslim world and would rank in importance with the prestigious al-Azha Madrassa in
Cairo. The British subjugation of India had driven some Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims into a defensive posture that could easily segue into violence.

With the transformation of manufacturing came one particularly portentous technological development: the creation of modern weaponry. The new guns and shells developed by
William Armstrong, Claude
Minié, and
Henry Shrapnel made it easy for Europeans to keep their colonial subjects in line. They were initially unwilling to use these new machine guns against their fellow Europeans, but by 1851 Minié ball—firing rifles had been issued to British troops overseas. When they were used the following year against
Bantu tribesmen, marksmen found that they could pick off the Bantu at a distance of thirteen hundred yards without having to see the devastating consequences of their action. This distance led to a dulling of the innate reluctance to kill at close quarters. In the early 1890s, during an encounter between the
German East Africa Company and the
Hehe tribesmen, an officer and a soldier killed around a thousand natives with two machine guns.
¹⁰⁸
In 1898 at the
Battle of Omdurman in the
Sudan, a mere six
Maxim guns firing at six hundred shots a minute mowed down thousands of the
Mahdi’s followers. “It was not a battle, but an execution,” an onlooker reported. “The bodies were not in heaps … but … spread evenly over acres and acres.”
¹⁰⁹

The new secular ethos was quickly able to adapt to this horrific violence. It certainly did not share the universalist outlook promoted by some religious traditions that had helped people cultivate a reverence
for the sanctity of all human beings. At a conference in
The Hague that debated the legality of these weapons the following year, Sir
John Armagh explained that “civilized man is much more susceptible to injury than savages.… The savage, like the tiger, is not so impressionable, and will go on fighting even when desperately wounded.”
¹¹⁰
As late as 1927, U.S.
Army
Captain Elbridge Colby could argue that “the real essence of the matter is that devastation and annihilation is the principal method of warfare that savage tribes know.” It was a mistake to allow “excessive humanitarian ideas” to inhibit the use of superior firepower. A commander who gives in to this misplaced compassion “is simply being unkind to his own people.” If a few “non-combatants” were killed, “the loss of life is probably far less than might have been sustained in prolonged operations of a more polite character. The
inhuman
act thus becomes
actually humane.
”
¹¹¹
The pervasive view that ethnic difference rendered other groups not quite human had resulted in a casual acceptance of the mass slaughter that mechanized arms had made possible. An age of unimagined violence was dawning.