Twentieth Century: An Age of Genocide
This is the text of Ashis Nandy's opening talk for the panel ‘Dialogue of the Century: The Legacy of the 20th Century, India and China’, at the University Museum and Art Gallery, The University of Hong Kong, in October 2018. The other panelist was Han Shaogong and the panel was moderated by Lydia H. Liu.
Lydia H. Liu: So to start the conversation my first question is to Ashis Nandy. What are the legacies of the twentieth century? Surely members of different communities will have different responses to that question. To some it involves the conflict between tradition and modernity, the drastic changes in both urban and rural settings. To others it involves the development of science and society, the rise of capitalism and the invasion that capitalism has made into culture. To your mind what are the most important legacies of the twentieth century?
Ashis Nandy: That's a very large question. I will take another three days to really answer it. I want to start by saying that the legacy of the twentieth century that we shall talk about is basically known to all of you. Whether we acknowledge that or not is a different issue...Before I go and actually answer that question, I also want to say one thing which I wrote for an introduction to my Chinese readers when a book of mine was being translated [into Chinese]. During the last hundred years in India, during the colonial period, when China and India were both victims of colonial domination, it was one of the major concerns of Indian intellectuals, as well as political leaders – public intellectuals you might call them today – that the traditional, direct linkages amongst the various Asian countries had been damaged by colonialism. These linkages no longer exist and we must try to rebuild them. Tagore’s Shantiniketan was built on that concept. It was a rural university, and the first institute of Chinese studies in the whole of South Asia was established by Profession Tan Yunshan. He was actually going to the United States to take up an appointment there, and, on the way stopped and met Rabindranath Tagore because he was a famous poet and the first Asian to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. The conversation with Tagore convinced him that his place was not in the United States but in Shantiniketan, in India, and he started the first institute for Chinese studies in this rural university near Calcutta.
Unfortunately, these attempts did not succeed. That is why I am speaking to you in English, not in an Indian language, and, if you come to India we will also provide you with a Chinese to English translator to speak to Indian audiences. Despite the fact that China and India constitute more than 40 percent of the humanity, this gap remains. So there is this part of the story. In one sense we have lost the civilisational battle. We might try to recover ourselves but that will take time. There can be no illusion about it.
Now, as far as the legacy goes, I will start on a pessimistic mode. If you ask me, I am not an economist; I do not care for the rate of growth or development profiles. I do not care for the internationalist institutions which are being set up; I do not think they are crucial for Asian societies, or, for that matter, African societies, or, for that matter, South American societies, but that’s a different story. But if you take an independent view of the twentieth century, for me, the first thought that has struck me is that the twentieth century is a century of genocide.
Data on genocide in twentieth century is available. Some genocides which were hidden are now known. Like the Indonesian genocide in the 1960s. Nobody talked about it earlier. It has come to the surface only recently. Armenian genocide – the Turkish government has been trying to hide that for decades, and the more they try to hide it, more details come out. So let us, for the moment, not go into these parts of the problem. My data is based mainly on the work R. J.Rummel has done in the University of Hawaii over many decades; [it] tells me that roughly 225 million people died in genocide in the 20th century. Of these you may be sorry to hear this, nearly 2/3rd – actually more than 2/ 3rd, above 2/3rd – died in the hands of their own states. So your state is no guarantor of your security. The situation was aggravated in the 20th century by new ways of initiating and ensuring genocides. The first genocide of the 20th century began in South West Africa, where it is a German colony where Hereros were all virtually wiped out, and the German general who ensured that, was very proud of the fact. He thought, these were scums of the earth. That’s where Germany got the courage to undertake that role in a larger scale within Europe, and genocide became a larger problem. Otherwise, nobody bothered about what happened to the Hereros and Namas. Some people say not more than 1,700 people from each of the two tribes survived. They were driven to the desert and the German snipers and machine guns were near the oasis. So once the thirsty people were trying to sneak into that part they were shot and killed. That was the first genocide of the twentieth century. It will not also please us, that is, those of us who have been shown different ideas on why genocides take place, that 2/3rd of the people – not the 2/3rd I have talked about – 2/3rd of the people, if you look at it from another point of view, came from secular countries. Secularism is no guarantee, or no protection against genocide.
The 20th century also created a new technique of genocide: famines. First tried out in Ireland which suffered from two famines with hardly any human intervention against it, all the way down to 1943 in my part of India, in Bengal, where there was a famine which killed 3 million. There was no crop failure. There was normal crop production but Britain was trying to build a buffer stock in case the Germans invaded Britain during World War II. So the crop was purchased wholesale by the British government and ships from the Calcutta port removed them off the market, so that the remaining crops were so costly that even the peasants who had sold the crops couldn't buy substitutes and survive. 3 million died. And the ships were waiting. It was admitted by Lord Mountbatten, who was the Viceroy of India that this was the case. A book on the Bengal famine has received some adverse criticism in Britain, which has been trying to defend Mr Churchill, the great champion of democracy, but it has not succeeded because the data and the documents are there. Lord Mountbatten, the last Viceroy of India, was asked by an Indian journalist, do you think you are responsible for the killing during Partition – the creation of India and Pakistan. He said yes, I hold myself responsible for that. 1 million died because the British Indian army at that time was a passive observer. But Mountbatten's argument was this: I have to buy credit for half a million lives. Though, by mistake, I led to the death of one million, I saved one and a half million during the Bengal famine because ships were waiting in Calcutta port to take even more grain out of East India to Britain and I did not allow that. So I saved one and a half million lives. So I have to my credit half a million lives. That’s what I will say to God when I meet him in Heaven.
Everybody knows about the two famines in the Soviet Union and one famine in China. I don’t have to tell the Chinese audience that these famines were also man-made. I leave that argument because everybody here knows it. I go to a different question now. This is the biggest question for the 20th century – we must know that. Where did this kind of ruthlessness and brutalization come from? What were the sources of it? For that you have to go back to the 19thcentury.
Though the Enlightenment values had come into European civilisation, they were consolidated in the 18thcentury and the early part of the 19thcentury. In the middle of the 19th century, the Enlightenment values produced a whole new set of theoretical works on human sciences, not science proper – that would come towards the end of the century – but human sciences. All the social sciences were born in that period. All the great philosophers who speculated about the future of humankind and where it should go were produced in the 19thcentury. That self confidence came from new discoveries of science and people wanted to extend that to the social sphere. Before that period when people who were the circumnavigators of the Earth – Drake [Francis Drake; 1577–1580], Captain Cook [James Cook, 1728–1779] and others, helped spread colonialism and the sun never set on British colonies – Hong Kong is one of them– we were in a different kind of world.
I believe that colonisation was the second attempted wave of globalisation. It was the trans-continent affect, spreading from Australia to all the continents. The first wave of attempted colonialism was the Atlantic slave trade. It was a four continent slave trade. We now know. It was not a simple matter of abducting blacks from Africa and taking them over the Atlantic to the New World. It was a fully flourishing, institutionalised way of trafficking human beings. If human beings can be bought and sold, that, I think, is the ultimate triumph of the spirit of capitalism. Let’s make no qualms out of it. The core of capitalism remains in that form of brutalisation and psychology. I have not gone into psychology yet. I have a right to look at it my way.
I asked this question – from where does the justification of this system come in? And again, I apologise for saying this – they came directly from the Enlightenment values. First of all, let me put it directly – as the spirit of Enlightenment spread; in some ways there was a secularization of a different kind – it broke certitudes – the kind of certitudes you had at the aid of faith. Nietzsche talked of God being killed. Yes, God may have been killed but, along with that, we may have also killed something of our moral status. There was an uncertainty and insecurity, so we looked for new divinities. Human beings began to look for new divinities and new certitudes. What will give certainty, and what can be inviolably held back in this desanctified, sanitised world?
And these new divinities were scientific rationality, total deification of reason, because science is valuable; two, the idea of progress through social evolutionary process; and a totally secularised world where objectivity was defined, or rather, re-defined as objectification. So you objectify human beings and social engineering and human engineering became a major slogan. You thought you have got the power of the divinities – omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence. So you get to decide what to do with humankind. Human beings became thinkers in statistics. Even the genocide data I have given, in 10,000, it’s a minor genocide, and 100,000, its a major genocide. These were numbers, figures; designated numbers define. And if you may think some persons can be cleaned out. The Nazi justification of genocide came from 19thcentury biology – the concept of public hygiene and eugenics. And Darwinian social evolution was applied in virtually every sphere of life.
So, cultures earlier were all different. China was different from India; India was different from China, but they were in the horizontal plane in the sense that you go and meet or get into the other civilisation and they would come to you. Cultures were different with different capabilities, different skills, different forms of creativity and different potentialities. For the first time, with the Darwinian theory of social evolutionism, the horizontal plane was converted into a vertical plane. So cultures are not only different but cultures are all the same. All human beings are the same.
But if you are different and I am different, that is not enough. I would rather say some cultures are advanced and some cultures are backward. I was like you yesterday. I have transcended that stage and I am no longer you. I have transcended and come into a superior stage and, if you read my text books and behave properly and be re-socialised, then, tomorrow you will be like me. So, in some sense I am in an advantageous position. I was in your stage and I have moved out of it, transcended it, therefore I can be the consultant on how to lead your life. Tomorrow you will be like me; I am in already in that higher stage. I will teach you how to do it. And, as far as your future goes, I am your future. You are wild and I am your future. It took 2 million people, 20 years to discover that they were backward.
Everybody began thinking in this social evolutionary model. Even the child no longer remained. A child who represented childhood as a valuable state of life in itself, but now, a child became an early prototype of man, an incipient adult who you must socialise. If you read accounts of Victorian childhood – Charles Dickens gives a break up and in those histories of childhood, you will see what kind of violence and oppression happened in the society in handling children and bringing them up properly. And what was happening to the child – child developing into an adult – the same logic was applied to societies. Cecil Rhodes talked about Africans as half savage, half child, and colonialism was seen as a pedagogical exercise. Early colonial powers like Spain and Portugal were mainly powers which wanted to build manors. The new colonial powers were not only after plunder and wealth; they were after the right to socialise, educate, cultivate, bring you into civilisation.
There was no exception. If you think that radical theory was better, then please read the correspondence of Marx and Engels. When France occupied Algeria after the war, one of them wrote that Algeria has been conquered by France, and Marx replied; good, now it will join civilisation. Algeria's history went to 2,500 years; France's history is shorter but here is the real arrogance. And China and India of course, were the degraded, old and senile civilisations which needed the vigour of young European civilisation. So this is the heritage of the twentieth century we have inherited.
I would have – I don't want to take too much of your time – I wanted to say this very clearly that some of the concerns that we have, come from this form of awareness – even the idea of Asia is a form of resistance . This idea is now ridiculed by students of strategic studies. They say there is nothing called Asia, nationalism is reigning. It is true, but nationalism itself is seen as an imagined community. If nationalism can be seen as an imagined community the concept of Asia too can be an imagined community. Some of the freedom fighters in India, China and other Asian countries, did toy with the idea of Asia as a larger political entity which deserves to join ranks to resist this domination which now, in some sense, we are more free to do it, but 100 years of education and socialization has not gone waste. So 40% of our customs in India and China today have an institutional structure, and political vision at the official level, at least, has absolutely been sold to the modern, Western knowledge system. I do believe that dissent must begin from there. Dissenting scholars, dissenting individual, dissenting writers, dissenting painters, dissenting musicians must provide the vision for Afro- Asian solidarity where they will become confident in one's own culture and culture will not be seen as a matter of social engineering but as something which is living in people. Even that they have survived culturally over the last 200 years is itself evidence that they have resilience, which they have something to offer. And I do hope that the next presentation will take us hitherto into this. Thank you very much for your precious time.
Ashis Nandy is one of India's most significant thinkers and public intellectuals. His work spans the fields of political psychology, sociology, nationalism, public conscience and culture. He is the author of many books, some of them seminal in Indian thought, such as The Intimate Enemy and The Savage Freud. For many years he was a Fellow and a Director of the Centre for Developing Societies in New Delhi. He was awarded the Fukuoka Asian Culture Prize in 2007, and the Hans Kilian Award in 2019.