The subaltern’s tale

Substantial effort is needed to overcome a deep-seated inferiority complex in us.

Despite overwhelming superiority in firepower and strategic advantage in their attacks on unsuspecting beasts of the jungle, hunters manage to emerge as heroes in their tales about the trophies hanging on their walls. An African proverb explains that until the lions have their own historians, tales of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.

For the past few centuries, people of European origin have dominated the world. Nearly all the stories being told about this era glorify them. In Orientalism, Edward Said showed that European imperialism and colonisation permeates all aspects of their literature and thought. A disturbing implication is that the idea of European superiority is implicitly absorbed by anyone who consumes their literary, cinematic or other intellectual or social products. Historian Henri Pirenne showed how the attempt to picture themselves at the centre stage of history has led Europeans to a substantially distorted understanding of world civilisations. Efforts of such scholars have led to the understanding that much of our common stock of wisdom about human beings and their history is “eurocentric.” Deep and valuable insights about ourselves emerge when we try to get past these blinds.

One of the central themes of the European world view is the idea that the dawn of the age of reason first occurred in Europe. It is a sign of weakening European hegemony that strong evidence against this thesis is now emerging. In The Theft of History, Jack Goody documents how Europeans borrowed and adopted inventions of other civilisations and claimed them as their own. The Incas were master botanists and created maize by cultivating and cross-breeding inedible and poisonous plants. Muslim discoveries in mathematics, cartography, heliocentric astronomy, physics, optics, pharmacopia and surgery have been largely suppressed, and European imitators have been put forth as originators of these ideas.

The one-sided tale of European power naturally creates an inferiority complex among the vanquished. For example, a while ago, an article published in Dawn stated that the British brought the concept of public education to the subcontinent.  In fact, research by historian Leitner reveals that British rulers crippled and destroyed the indigenous educational systems of Punjab. Evidence of the embarrassment and shame of our ancestors, heritage, traditions, and of nationality is found in a broad spectrum of writings by Pakistani authors. On the basis of an incident where two men were beaten to death in front of spectators, a columnist for the Express Tribune recently proclaimed that we are a nation of cockroaches; comments on this column are almost uniformly admiring and agree. In Germany, millions of innocent civilians including large numbers of women and children were burned alive in ovens. As the award winning sociologist Zygmunt Bauman has shown in his book Modernity and the Holocaust, this occurred with the knowledge, cooperation and tacit consent of large numbers of the German population. Yet I do not know of Germans who call themselves cockroaches.

The project of telling the story from the point of view of the vanquished has been named “Subaltern Studies,” and has made a lot of progress in India but not as much in Pakistan. It is encouraging that what we used to call the Mutiny of 1857, our children study as the War of Independence. However, substantial additional effort is needed to overcome a deep-seated inferiority complex which makes us seek foreign experts for solutions to domestic problems.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 6^th, 2010.