The Penguin History of the World

For the purpose of understanding Asia’s recent role in world history, two zones of Asian civilization remain as distinct and significant as they have been for centuries. A western Asian sphere is bounded by the mountain ranges of northern India, the Burmese and Thai highlands and the huge archipelago of which Indonesia is the major component. Its centre is the Indian Ocean and in its history the major cultural influences have been three: Hindu civilization spreading from India to the south-east; Islam (which also spread eastward across it); and the European impact, felt at first through commerce and missionary Christianity, and then for a much shorter era of political domination. The other sphere is East Asian, and it is dominated by China. In large measure this is a function of the simple geographical fact of that country’s huge mass, but the numbers and, sometimes, the migration of its people and, more indirectly and variably, China’s cultural influence on the East Asian periphery – above all, Japan, Korea and Indochina – all form part of the explanation. In this zone, direct European political domination of Asia had never meant as much as it did further west and south, in either extent or duration.

It was easy to lose sight of such important differences, as of much else imposed by history, in the Cold War world after 1945. In both zones there were countries that seemed to follow the same road of angry rejection of the West, using western nationalist and democratic concepts and appealing to world opinion on long-familiar lines. India absorbed within a few years both the princely states, which had survived the British Raj, and the subcontinent’s remaining French and Portuguese enclaves in the name of a truculent nationalism that owed little to domestic tradition. Soon, the Indian security forces were energetically suppressing any threat of separatism or regional autonomy within the new republic.

Perhaps this should not have been surprising. Indian independence was, on the Indian side, the work of a western-educated élite, which had imported ideas of nationhood, equality and liberty from the West even if it had at first only sought equality and partnership with the Raj. A threat to that élite’s position after 1947 could often be most easily (and sincerely) understood as a threat to an Indian nationality that had in fact still to be created.

This was all the more true because the rulers of independent India had inherited many of the aspirations and institutions of the British Raj. Ministerial structures, constitutional conventions, division of powers between central and provincial authorities, the apparatus of public order and security were all taken over, stamped with republican insignia, and continued to operate much as before 1947. The dominant and explicit ideology of government was a moderate and bureaucratic socialism not too far from the then current British mode, and not very far removed in spirit from the public-works-and-enlightened-despotism-by-delegation of the Raj in its last years. The realities that faced India’s rulers included a deep conservative reluctance among local notables who controlled votes to disturb traditional privilege at any level below that of the former princes. Yet profound problems faced India – population growth, economic backwardness, poverty (the average annual per capita income of Indians in 1950 was $55), illiteracy, social, tribal and religious division, and great expectations of what independence ought to bring. It was clear that major change was needed.

The new constitution of 1950 did nothing to change these facts, some of which would not begin to exercise their full weight until at least the second decade of the new India’s existence. Even today, much of life in rural India still goes on virtually as it did in the past, when war, natural disaster and the banditry of the powerful allowed it to do so. This implies gross poverty for some. In 1960, over a third of the rural poor were still living on less than a dollar a week (and at the same time, half the urban population earned less than enough to maintain the accepted minimum daily calorie intake required for health). Economic progress was swallowed by inequity and population growth. In the circumstances it is hardly surprising that the rulers of India should have incorporated into the constitution provisions for emergency powers as drastic as any ever enjoyed by a British viceroy, providing as they did for preventative detention and the suspension of individual rights, to say nothing of the suspension of state government and the submission of states to Union control under what was called ‘President’s Rule’.