“From Africa to the Indian subcontinent, imperialism has left a trail of damage,” writes historian Michael Wood
Over the past four months I have watched the Israel-Gaza war with horror. And I have been struck by the growing international reaction to it all: the stark division between the Western world and the rising ‘Global South’, which increasingly no longer accepts the ‘rules-based order’ that it sees as being imposed by the West to support its hegemony. It feels like a big moment in history. Is a new world order emerging?
It has left me reflecting on the legacy of the age of colonialism. Some influential modern historians have argued that colonial powers were, on balance, a force for good, improving the lot of humanity. I disagree – and that is even before we mention the climate catastrophe, largely caused by the ravages of international capitalism.
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In my job, I have travelled the world and seen for myself the aftermath of empire. From apartheid South Africa and the Congo through to Afghanistan, the Americas and the Indian subcontinent, colonialism and imperialism have left a trail of damage. And that damage is both psychological and material. The development of traditional societies has been disrupted and arrested, ancient cultural identities have been erased in a few generations. And, as current events show, we are still living with the divisions we bequeathed.
Those divisions are laid bare in a powerful documentary by Krishnendu and Madhurima Bose, Bay of Blood, about the liberation war in Bangladesh in 1971. This story is largely forgotten today outside that country, but it is part of one of the most significant events in the history of the modern world, one in which the aftermath of empire had a catastrophic impact on millions of lives: the partition of India.
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Or perhaps we should say the partitions of India, because they took place over the course of a century. In fact, the tensions currently besetting Kashmir suggest that they are not over yet.
The viceroy of India, Lord Curzon, initiated this process with the short-lived partition of Bengal in 1905. (The British divided East and West Bengal on religious grounds to constrain voices for independence in Bengal, which was the intellectual powerhouse of 19th-century India.) Then, in 1947, came the great partition, which was driven, too, by religion.
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With huge loss of life, and the forced transfers of entire populations, British India was divided into three: India, and East and West Pakistan. It beggars belief that this arrangement could ever have been contemplated, let alone put into practice: a single country, Pakistan, whose two halves were separated by a thousand miles – one Urdu speaking, the other Bengali, with nothing in common but religion.
The cognitive dissonance of this whole disastrous idea was summed up in the founder of Pakistan, Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s, infamous speech declaring that “Urdu and only Urdu” would be the national language, and that those who thought otherwise were “enemies of Pakistan”.
In the new country, all power rested with West Pakistan. East Pakistan was denied money, resources and influence. Inevitably, an independence movement grew, and in an election in December 1970, the East Pakistan Awami League won the right to rule the entire country.
Needless to say, the West Pakistan establishment didn’t accept that, and the Pakistan army plunged the East into a nightmare that saw massacres, mass rape and the systematic murder of intellectuals, driven by racism towards the darker-skinned Bengalis. All this is harrowingly told in Bay of Blood. The crisis was only resolved by the heroic determination of Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi, who intervened on behalf of East Bengal. The Pakistani army was swiftly routed and a new country was born: Bangladesh.
One of the striking factors of this terrible episode was how much Cold War politics determined the mindsets of the West. Even when the Americans were shown clear evidence of genocide they still supported their client West Pakistan, sending a battle group to the Indian Ocean to threaten India.
It’s half a century since these tragic events, and nearly 80 years since the partition of 1947. We are still living with the consequences, with increasingly intolerant religious nationalisms emerging across the subcontinent. Jawaharlal Nehru – who would become the first prime minister of an independent India – set out his hopes for a secular state celebrating India’s “unity in diversity”. For now, at least, that noble aspiration seems to be receding.
This column first appeared in the March 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine