A lightly edited version of this article appeared on News18 here.
Were Indians colonizers? Yes, says Nehru. Was India conquered by Hindu imperialism? Again, Nehru says yes. Okay, then would you say that someone like Mahmud Ghazni, who destroyed Somnath temple, was a Muslim imperialist? Stop right away, Nehru tells you. That would be going too far. The motives of Mahmud Ghazni were political, not religious.
This festival season, I sat down to read again Nehru’s Glimpses of World History. The 1000 page book is truly awe inspiring as the work of one man. Where else could you learn about things from ancient Byzantium, to the Shang dynasty in China, all the way to the struggle between the US dollar and the British pound in the 1930s? On almost every page, you learn something new and interesting. Here is an example. The city of Port Blair, the capital of Andaman and Nicobar Islands, has recently been renamed as “Srivijayapuram.” Nehru tells you in detail about the Sriviijaya empire, from the 7th century to the 11th century, which he says was not very different from the British empire.
But this is where Nehru begins to make you uncomfortable. For a whole chapter, he describes Indians as colonists, exploiting the people of what is now mostly Malaysia or Indonesia. According to Nehru, these were the “Hindu colonies of the east.” The colonizers he says are mostly Tamils from the Pallava kingdom. But he speculates that some might have also been from Odisha, Bengal, and even Gujarat.
“Another Chandragupta arose in Pataliputra and started a period of aggressive Hindu imperialism,” Nehru writes. He repeats the charge of “Hindu imperialism” at least three times in his book, which has a chapter dedicated to “Hindu imperialism under the Guptas.” While many Indians see the reign of Chandragupta Vikramaditya as a golden age, Nehru is a lot more dismissive. He notes that such periods of “aggressive imperialism” have little importance in the long run. Nevertheless, some good art and literature came out of the Gupta period, and he says that we can take some pride in that.
The charge of “Hindu imperialism” seems particularly harsh. And politically unwise, written at a time when India was engaged in a great anti-imperialist struggle. And Nehru was supposedly leading that struggle. If Hindus are also imperialists, on what basis can we oppose the British? But then, maybe Nehru was the kind of person who could say things that make people uncomfortable. In that case, would Nehru be willing to say the same about Muslim empires?
Not at all. When it comes to Mahmud Ghazni, Nehru refuses to identify the former as a Muslim imperialist. About Mahmud, Nehru writes, “He was a Muslim, of course, but that was by the way … He came to India to conquer and loot, as soldiers unfortunately do, and he would have done so to whatever religion he might have belonged.” In the next paragraph, Nehru quickly switches to describing Mahmud’s love for beautiful gardens. About the actual destruction of Somnath temple, Nehru takes a mocking tone. Some 50,000 people were massacred, but that was because they had gathered in the temple in hope of divine protection, “waiting for the miracle which did not happen.”
The modern reader will recognize in these writings the beginnings of Indian “secular” thought. In the eyes of the state, all religions are equal, but some religions are more equal than others.
Some of the things in Nehru’s book are truly bizarre. Take this passage, for example: “Among the ancients, we do not find the scientific method in Egypt, or China, or India. We find just a bit of it in old Greece. In Rome again, it was absent. But the Arabs had this scientific spirit of inquiry, and so they may be considered as fathers of modern science. In some subjects, like medicine and mathematics, they learnt much from India.”
Of course, that’s just wrong. How could someone possibly believe that a mathematician like Aryabhatta, or a physician like Sushruta, the Chinese who invented gunpowder, or the Egyptians who built the great pyramids did not have a spirit of scientific inquiry? Second, can anyone even follow Nehru’s logic here? So the Arabs learned medicine and mathematics from Indians, but somehow Indians had no understanding of the scientific method? Nehru then goes on to say that the Arabs invented the mariner’s compass (wrong again). Let’s just say that “Whatsapp University” might be older than you would think.
Nehru’s fondness for Muslim empires also leads him down some of the darkest alleys of history. For about 600 years, the Ottoman empire had existed in West Asia, and its subject peoples had been the Bulgarians, the Greeks, the Armenians, the Serbians, and most of the southern Slavs. Between 1915 and 1917, during the First World War, the Ottoman Turks carried out the systematic murder of 1.5 million Armenians. Much like the Germans did to the Jews during the Second World War. Even today, the Turkish government denies the Armenian genocide. But among historians, there is no debate. No serious scholar would deny either the Holocaust or the Armenian genocide.
But Nehru tells the story differently. In a version that plays straight into the hands of Turkish apologists, Nehru writes that the Armenians were a “tool” of foreign powers to weaken the Ottoman empire. Instead of calling it mass murder, Nehru describes it as a conflict between the Turkish government and the Armenians, which he says resulted in “bloody massacres.”
Even before the events of 1915-17, the Turks had carried out a massacre of 300,000 Armenians in the 1890s. But Nehru refuses to see the difference between empire and its subjects. He says that the Turks and Armenians had “mutually killed each other.” At another place, he writes that the “Armenians were as guilty of massacring Turks as the Turks were of massacring them.” The two groups “embraced and shed tears of joy” he writes, describing the rise to power of The Young Turks, the Nazi like organization that ultimately carried out the Armenian genocide of 1915.
The Nazi comparisons are not incidental. Through the 1920s and the 1930s, the Nazis always looked up to the Turkish example as a model of what they wanted to do in Germany. Mass deportation and murder of minorities, which would allow the Germans to have lebensraum (living space). The Fuehrer himself was a fan of Mustafa Kemal, the Turkish leader who had given himself the title of Ataturk, meaning Father of the Turks. “Who, after all, speaks today about the annihilation of the Armenians?” Hitler asked rhetorically on August 22, 1939. This was ten days before he started the Second World War.
In a particularly embarrassing passage, Nehru admits to celebrating when the Turkish army in 1922 pushed the Greeks to “Smyrna and the sea.” While he does mention the burning of Smyrna (today Izmir in Turkey), Nehru glosses over the fact that Mustafa Kemal’s forces entered the city like Genghis Khan in the middle ages, massacring 100,000 Greeks and Armenians. In Nehru’s account, the Turks are either victims of the Greeks, or merely responding to provocation. He also refers to the population exchange between Greece and Turkey in 1923, but maintains that it happened at the request of the Greeks. Again, Nehru leaves out the fact that the Turks had massacred 900,000 of their Greek subjects during the First World War. Just like they had massacred 1.5 million Armenians.
Interestingly, Nehru does criticize Turkey and Mustafa Kemal, but for their atrocities on the Kurds, who were also Muslims. Perhaps oppression matters to him only when the victims are from a certain special religion.
If Nehru downplayed the crimes of Muslim empires, his treatment of the Communist empire reads like pure propaganda. In 1932, the Soviet effort to force people onto collective farms led to a terrible famine, which killed over 3.5 million people in the Ukraine. Speaking like a brainwashed Communist foot soldier, Nehru seems to think the famine was some kind of conspiracy by the victims themselves. He writes about how the government had to take “drastic steps” against “sabotage,” “stealing of communal property” from collective farms and “counter-revolution,” which were all punished by death.
Nehru is talking here about Stalin’s party thugs, who went on a rampage, torturing peasants, raping women, and executing anyone they suspected of hiding grain. For failing to meet official production targets, thousands were sent to gulags to be worked to death.
And what were these acts of “sabotage” and “counter-revolution” that Nehru was referring to? In his book Bloodlands, historian Timothy Snyder describes Stalin’s twisted logic: “A peasant slowly dying of hunger was, despite appearances, a saboteur working for the capitalist powers in their campaign to discredit the Soviet Union.” The sight of starving children in the streets became an embarrassment to the Communist regime. The police were supposed to pick them up and send them to death camps. “About twenty thousand children awaited death in the barracks of Kharkiv at any given time,” Snyder writes.
This reminds me. Every year on November 14, we Indians celebrate Nehru’s birthday as Childrens’ Day. Sure, go right ahead.
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