Empires and Metaphors

Part 2 of my response to 'Demons of the Punjab'

As noted last time, through its strategy - deliberate or not - of eloquent silence, 'Demons of the Punjab' almost says that Partition represents the British in India killing millions.

This is, by the way,  profoundly true.  But it is, like many simple truths, a summary of a complex reality.  It is true that intractable political arguments and gameplay between the Indian parties - mainly Congress and the Muslim League - helped stymie British attempt to avoid Partition, which the British wanted to avoid.  It is true that the British authorities didn’t mean to cause the horrors of Partition, didn’t themselves take part in the atrocities, and didn’t foresee them.  It is true that most of the violence was committed by Indians attacking other Indians.  

But it is also the case that the explosion of violence and displacement was foreseeable, and that the inevitability was there for the British to see and understand, had they only cared to do so.  Mountbatten - a vain, ostentatious man who made a fetish of decisiveness - recklessly brought forward the date of Partition by about ten months so that it would happen on the anniversary of him accepting the surrender of Japanese forces in Asiau.  The lines drawn across the maps were drawn by Sir Cyril Radcliffe, a British civil servant who knew nothing about India before he arrived there to improvise the creation of two new countries by carving it into pieces.  The exact lines of demarcation were not published until after the formation of Pakistan and independence of India had been announced, leaving millions of people unsure where their homes would end up, and whether they should flee, and where to flee to if they did.

But then Churchill had (arguably) sabotaged a previous plan for Indian independence - one not involving outright Partition - that he’d been politically forced to offer during the war.  And so on.

You cannot understand Partition without reference to the British Empire’s near-200 year domination of India.  Even Partition itself had a dry-run in the 1800s when the British Viceroy at the time - Lord Curzon - attempted to partition Bengal for political reasons.  During their rule of India the British had impoverished, deindustrialised, and looted the country.  (‘Loot’ is actually a Hindi word, itself part of our loot.)  British policy, based on capitalist dogma and racism, caused and/or exacerbated a sequence of unnecessary famines that killed - by some estimates - 35 million Indians.  Shashi Tharoor has called it, with justice, the “British Colonial Holocaust”.

Throughout the colonial period, the British subjected Indians to systematised, institutionalised racist abuse, oppression, and insult.  The British Empire used the people of India as troops, and fought wars - including the two World Wars - that they would never have been able to fight had it not been for Indian soldiers, Indian casualties, Indian money, Indian resources.  The Viceroy at the time of the outbreak of World War Two, Lord Linlithgow, simply declared that India was at war with Germany without consulting its people.  The British promised the Indians self-rule if they fought for the empire during World War One and then reneged on the promise afterwards, and outlawed and crushed protest - which led to the infamous Amritsar massacre, in which General Reginald Dyer slaughtered perhaps a thousand civilians, including women and children, who were celebrating a festival despite a restriction on public gatherings.  Kipling described Dyer as a hero.  

The British ruthlessly and brutally repressed resistance all the way through the history of the Raj.  They suppressed all attempts at unified struggle between different groups with special savagery - particularly after the so-called ‘Indian Mutiny’ of 1857, a huge revolt which unified insurgents across ethnic and religious lines.  For instance, Hindus and Muslims cooperated to put a Muslim Mughal ruler back on the throne in the old Mughal capital Delhi.  (The atrocities of the insurgents were greatly exaggerated in the British press but some were undoubtedly horrific.  The reports led two eminent Victorians to instructively divergent responses.  The beloved bourgeois humanitarian Charles Dickens fantasised in a letter about exterminating the entire Indian race.  Karl Marx however, while he undoubtedly got many things wrong about India, and failed to entirely transcend the racism of his milieu, saw the ‘Mutiny’ - atrocities and all - as a result of, and an understandable reaction to, the barbarity of British rule.)  

You cannot understand Partition, in which peoples who had lived intermingled for generations turned upon each other, without understanding that the British had systematically exacerbated, extended, solidified, and institutionalised divisions - economic, ethnic, and ideological - between Indians.  They did this over centuries, as part of a conscious policy they called ‘divide et impera’ (divide and rule), and which they modelled on ancient Rome.  They invented racial differences using 19th century imperial racial ‘science’, imagining ‘martial races’ among the Indians who would be more loyal, and populating the Indian army with them.  They extended privileges to compliant rulers, classes, groups, etc, which separated them socially from their compatriots.  They used the technique of the census to classify and categorise people; reifying, exaggerating, or just plain inventing cultural, geographic, and racial divisions which they then treated as innate and impermeable.  They rigidified caste distinctions which had, in pre-colonial times, been fuzzy and malleable, one fluid identity among many, into a rigid system.  They did the same with religion,  stoking divisions between Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, etc, often sponsoring and supporting one group against another when it suited their purposes.  They supported and sponsored the Muslim League as a way to diminish the ability of Congress to unify Indians against British rule.  Congress has originally been a pluralist party with members and even leaders who weren’t Hindus.  It became associated almost exclusively with Hindu interests against the will of many of its members, and under pressure from the polarising forces engineered outside as a way to contain it.  The British authorities played the religious groups and parties off against each other, until divisions and mistrust were rampant.  

The British do not, of course, bear exclusive personal responsibility.  Nothing is ever that simple, and moral and political clarity about the culpability of the British doesn’t require us to absolve Indians to the point where they become pure, perfect, and passive victims.  The Muslim League could be intractable, and played politics.  Congress failed to grant sufficient concessions to ensure Muslim safety and a degree of self-determination as a (large) minority in an inevitably Hindu-dominated united and independent India.  Both sides united to betray and suppress resistance from below in which working class activity - strikes and mutinies - saw workers and sailors etc joining forces across lines of religion.  This was because neither were ultimately really parties of the working people, and both had eyes on their own power.  For instance, despite Gandhi’s pose as a man of the poor, and Nehru’s left-orientation, both they and Congress were backed by Indian landlords and capitalists.  

But then both Congress and the League were working within a system essentially designed by the British.  When, at long last, the British were forced to begin to grant some measure of democracy in India, they did so in such a way as to both ensure their own continued power and their policy of ‘divide et impera’.  The franchise they extended was relatively small, and regional so that the Viceroy’s power at the centre was untouched.  It fit into their established system of devolution to cooperative local elites.  And - crucially - they kept the Muslims and Hindus divided into separate electorates, with Muslims only able to vote for Muslim candidates, and Hindus likewise only able to vote for Hindu candidates.  In my admittedly amateur opinion, the separate electorates are among the biggest contributing factors to ultimately creating Partition.

*

There are Doctor Who stories which take a much harder line on empire, even specifically the British Empire.  And yet what do I mean by ‘specific’?  ‘The Mutants’ (1972), for instance, obviously directly refers to the British Empire, to British colonialism and its devastating effects, to the exploitation inherent in it, to the racism of the British, to their dogma that the natives need them, and to Britain’s scramble to cut and run when empire became unsustainable.  It is far more specific in that sense, far more all-encompassing, far more overtly angry than ‘Demons of the Punjab’ which, as I said in my Presscast, must be judged by its decision to focus on a small group of people at the fringes of huge events.  This is the episode’s prerogative (so to speak), and it deserves to have that respected, and to be judged on the terms it thus chooses for itself.  It is an admirable decision in many ways.  It gives us the first televised Doctor Who story ever to be set entirely in Asia and to have no European guest characters.  That is not to be sniffed at.  It focuses on, and represents, people who are criminally unrepresented in our narrative culture industries: poor people of colour, and Asians specifically.  Similarly, I can understand why a story about survival, about progress, about reaching ultimate happiness, and not dwelling on the past or wallowing in resentment, might be attractive.  Why should the stories of people of colour always have to be about nothing but tragedy?  I recently watched Get Out, and I totally get why they went with the unsatisfying ending they did.  The other ending might’ve been more savage in its condemnation of white society, but it would’ve offered nothing but defeat, yet again, and in the form of an all too familiar sight.  So yes, ‘Demons’ has an ending about Umbreen being happy - after the story of her, and people like her, trapped in the middle of a situation they can’t control, but coping. That story has, of necessity, a narrow focus.  There are certain things it is choosing not to do.

By contrast, a story outright about the perfidy of the British in India would be yet another story of defeat, and yet another story about rich white people.  ‘The Mutants’ is mostly about white people, despite being ‘about’ how the British Empire (and European empires generally) colonised Africa, exploited Africans, and created racist apartheid systems.  In ‘The Mutants’, even the black people are, so to speak, played by white people.  (Moreover, as we touched upon elsewhere, they are cast as the ‘aliens’ that the ‘humans’ - i.e. the Europeans - encounter on their explorations.)  ‘The Mutants’ is, in that sense, completely unspecific.  It doesn’t mention Rhodesia or South Africa.  It has only one black man in it (still more than most old Who stories have), and he - in what looks like some kind of politically complex semiotic recurve effect - is put among the imperial overlords.  While specific in the number of issues and historical realities it refers to, while specific in an overarching sense, while specific in that its subject is European imperialism and the things it actually did, it is also unspecific in that it does so in code, even silently.  Like ‘Demons’, it is loudly silent, in the sense that there are certain words and people and places, certain real world things, that it never mentions - but it pointedly raises its own silence about them; it refers to them repeatedly without saying their names aloud.  

‘Demons’ and ‘Mutants’ - by which I mean the two distinct narrative strategies they represent - begin to look like mirror images of each other.  Both can achieve different kinds of specificity.  For convenience we’ll be crude and create a dichotomy between macro and micro specificity.  ‘The Mutants’ can be macrospecific, in that it refers to the broad political sweep of the history of imperialism, and its meaning.  ‘Demons’ can be microspecific in that it can get us into the homes and lives of specific types of people.  

I bet there were people at the time who latched onto ‘The Mutants’ and stuff like it, despite there being hardly anyone who looked or sounded like them in it, despite it saying nothing directly about their lives or pasts, despite it clearly not being aimed at them.  They will have done this because they had to, because they didn’t have other options, because it was that or nothing, and because they recognised that, for all the barriers between it and them, it was fundamentally, at least on some level, about them, and about their history.  This is what marginalised people do.  Because they have to.

The problem of allegory has been much discussed.  Here I just want to stress that it simultaneously allows greater condemnation and also a kind of vague shiftiness, a possible evasiveness, about what it connects to, and to whom it's addressed.   As we’ve seen, ‘The Mutants’ isn’t aimed at the people who are or were the actual subjects of the colonial history it satirizes.  Furthermore, the fact that it is written ‘in code’, so to speak, puts in another layer of separation - not because people won’t ‘get it’ necessarily, but because the great strength of metaphor is its instability, its openness.  Allegory, while a kind of metaphor, has become (it wasn’t always that way) a kind of shutting down of possibilities.  The more the metaphor is pinned down to become one-to-one allegory (i.e. Napoleon the pig = Stalin), the more the text looks like a crossword puzzle rather than a living and breathing work of art, and the more it forecloses on possible meanings and interpretations.  This can be very satisfying for someone who goes to the text looking for a salutary message that is to their taste.  And such things can be valuable political interventions.  But they are also foreclosures on possibility.  They are statements rather than questions.

There is also the question of register.  One of the ways in which Doctor Who has managed to get away with making some fairly incendiary political statements over the years is because it is pitched at children, or at least at families.  You’d think that there would be extra-sensitivity about material aimed at children… and, of course, there has been.  But it has mainly focused on what will disturb children, or possibly inculcate bad and dangerous habits.  This is an entire can of worms all by itself and we won’t get into it here.  (It’s been looked at on this site.)  But one of the worst ‘bad habits’ that Doctor Who supposedly sometimes taught children was overt mistrust or disrespect for the proper authorities in Britain.  Some of the biggest kerfuffles in response to Doctor Who’s alleged surfeit of scariness were about depictions of policemen - or at least people or creatures disguised as policemen - as sinister.  It’s telling not only that this triggered an intense response, but that ‘evil cops’ is what it took.  The copper’s face coming off to reveal an Auton beneath is what upset people, not the metaphors about the monstrosity of capital itself that the show was doing at the same time.  It gets away with the deeper and more radical critique not just because of the ‘codedness’ of metaphor but also because the entire show is pitched at a certain register.  It is aimed at - or is at least culturally understood to be aimed at - children.  These days people are more aware of political metaphors even in children’s fiction.  In the eras spanned by classic Who there was much less popular awareness of, or conversation about, such things.  This being the case it is only to be expected that the even-further-out-of-touch establishment - in the BBC hierarchy, the mainstream media, conservative watchdogs, educational authorities, MPs, etc - would miss it totally.  

But this itself raises questions that are not easily answered.  If a political metaphor happens in the forest and there’s no-one there to hear it, does it make a sound?  Do the kids understand that they’re watching a metaphor and/or a satire?  I’d hesitate to say they don’t.  Kids are often far more astute in their appreciation of art than adults, because they haven’t yet had loads of filters installed in their heads.  Even so, there’s going to be an extent to which the specificity of the metaphor is lost, because they lack knowledge with which to connect the metaphor.  Some of them will acquire such knowledge, but it will often be ideologically slanted and thus distorted, and many of them will be deprived of it by unjust lack of access to education.  Metaphors which are not open to the children (or adults for that matter) of one disadvantaged class are inherently politically distorted in favour of the status quo, whatever their actual content.  One of the aims of classic Doctor Who, at the start, was… well, not so much to address this imbalance in a direct way, but to do so indirectly by universalising access to knowledge via popular entertainment for children.  This is the utopian strain in Reithian paternalism, a form of elitism repurposed by social democracy.  

And then there is the question of whether such educative purposes in art are themselves a form of foreclosure upon the openness of reading.  Isn’t there a value, especially in a utilitarian capitalist world that thinks things only have worth if they are profitable and thus subject to market strictures and disciplines, in the very purposeless?  In art with a multiplicity of possible purposes and meanings?  Art for the sake of that kind of delight alone?  And yet isn’t all narrative art, all fiction, fundamentally about questions of justice?  Isn’t that the central social act of reading?  To imagine oneself in the place of the characters and to question their actions, via your own history and intuitions, in social and thus inherently political situations?  To ask if this or that action is just, and if so - or if not - what that means?  Isn’t it mistaken to imagine you can take that out of narrative art?  Isn’t the project of trying to do so inherently political?  Inherently conservative, even?

What you lose in the literalism, the specificity, you gain in the focus on the normally forgotten.  What you gain in the openness of metaphor, you lose in the directness and the opportunity to remember actual people.  But, socially embedded and contingent as they are, both strategies are ‘lossy’.  There is a sense in which the episode is attempting to merge the two approaches.  We get clearly metaphorical aliens in the middle of a non-metaphorical story… or at least, a story that is being literal about Partition itself, its actual subject matter, even if it is asking to be taken metaphorically about things like tolerance between communities in the world today, perhaps especially with regards Muslims.  (It is, of course, refreshing to see a story about Muslims who are, by and large, portrayed without reference to prevailing Islamophobic stereotypes.)  The emblem of this attempt at a merging of the literal and the metaphorical may be the central metaphor and mcguffin of the story, the watch.

Little of the complex historical context behind the human scrabble for survival during Partition is touched on in ‘Demons of the Punjab’.  But really… how would one go about touching on this complex history in an episode of Doctor Who?  The only way would be to emulate the strategy used by the old 60s historicals which drop the Doctor into the middle of, say, Culloden or the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre.  But, aside from all the other reasons why they just wouldn’t happen today, we have to acknowledge a few things.  Firstly, those stories ‘work’ in the technical way they do because they are not attempts to detail history but are actually literary pastiches.  Visits to historical genres, not historical periods.  This is true even before the 60s historicals become blatant about it.  It is as true of ‘Marco Polo’ as it is of ‘The Highlanders’, though the inflection is different.  Secondly, we have to admit that, as depictions of actual history, and investigations of why historical horrors like Culloden or the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre happened… they suck.  They do not even begin to get to grips with the actual history of English imperialism in Scotland, or the wars of the European Reformation.  Not even in a way that would satisfy a mainstream historian, let alone a radical historian.  They recycle schoolbook stories about national rivalries and machiavellian Catholics.  Thirdly, we have to admit that those old historicals are profoundly Eurocentric.  It’s worth noting that ‘The Highlanders’ is as close as Doctor Who has ever gotten to depicting the 18th century New World slave trade… and it’s a near-recitation of the ‘white slavery’ myth now resurrected by, and beloved of, today’s racists.

‘Demons of the Punjab’ fails to be a full thesis about what caused Partition, but it isn’t trying to be.  It’s trying to be a human story about people not usually represented.  Not usually seen.  We, the viewers, outside the storyline, become the ambivalent demons, asked only to bear witness.  There is a purity in bearing witness alone.  

And yet don’t they implicitly make a political judgment by simply bearing witness to the unseen, unmourned, forgotten deaths?  These are by definition going to be the unjust deaths of the poor… simply because of the kind of world we live in.