Additions to 'Empires and Metaphors'

Extra bits:

By the way… it seems appropriate, given that Winston Churchill is canonically one of the Doctor’s best friends, to point out that he was personally responsible for letting 4.4 million people (by some estimates) starve to death in the Bengal Famine of 1943-44.  He chose to keep and divert food that could have been used for famine relief, so that it would be available for troops in Europe.  It wasn’t even food immediately needed.  It was reserve food.  Churchill explicitly said the starvation of Indians mattered less than that of Greeks and other Europeans.  When Mountbatten, Supreme Allied Commander in South East Asia at the time (if Prem and Kunal had been real they’d have been ultimately serving under him), tried to send 10% of his supplies to Bengal to help relieve the famine, Churchill reduced his supplies by 10%.  “I hate Indians,” Churchill said in response to the news that they were dying in their millions, “They’re a beastly people with a beastly religion.”  Just the one?  But Winston was persistently ignorant about the people he hated with such a passion that colleagues thought him deranged on the subject.  He is reported to have said that it was their own fault for breeding like rabbits.  On receiving desperate pleas for famine relief from the British authorities in India at the time, Churchill scrawled in the margin “Why hasn’t Gandhi died yet?”

It’s odd that Chomsky should say that Kissinger’s “everything that flies on anything that moves” remark is as close as we get to an explicit call for genocide in an official document, when we have the papery proof of Churchill’s connivance in allowing the Bengal Famine.  These days, British citizens descended from people who suffered and died in the Bengal Famine have to see Winston’s face every time they handle a five pound note.

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There is actually a classic Doctor Who story which touches on the British exploitation of India.  It’s ‘The Sun Makers’ from 1977.  Seriously.  Often interpreted as a right-wing whinge about the big state and taxation - and that may well be how it started out in the mind of its politically complex writer - the story is also about the East India Company.  “The Company,” in the story, is actually an alien conglomerate who have effectively bought out the human race of the future in a hostile takeover.  The government of the human colony on Pluto has been privatised.  There is no market with competing companies, just a central authority which mercilessly taxes the people, which leads people to see the system depicted as ‘socialist’, by which they mean monolithically statist and parasitic via taxation.  But, in ‘The Sun Makers’, where the state should be there is only The Company, except for a layer of police and local governors who report directly to it.  And the ‘taxes’ are actually charges for services and goods on which The Company now has a monopoly.  The ‘taxes’ are not reinvested in the society in ways which benefit the people beyond making it possible for them to keep working.  ‘The Sun Makers’ thus manages to not only be a prophecy of neoliberalism (state authoritarianism and increased exploitation of workers in service of increasingly privatised power) but also a satire of ‘communism’.  That system, still dominating Russia and other such states in 1977, was actually a form of authoritarian and bureaucratic state capitalism in which the state took on the form of a single state capital, and thus also the exploitative role of the capitalist class, extracting surplus from the workers - which is the actual basis of capitalism, not ‘free markets’ or anything like that.  The fact that the story can look like both systems at once should tell us a great deal.  But we stray from the point.  The point I want to make here is that the system in ‘The Sun Makers’ also looks remarkably like the way the East India Company ruled India through the 18th and 19th centuries up to the Mutiny, whereupon the British government took more open and direct control.  (By the way, the fact that the system in the story can also look like this, as well as looking like neoliberalism and Stalinism, should tell us even more.)  

The East India Company - which was routinely referred to as simply “the Company” - ran India as a business concern, albeit while using military force (written into their charter by Elizabeth I) and backed by British government subsidy.  They routinely used torture to extract ‘taxes’.  As Shashi Tharoor says, after ending the original system favoured by Robert Clive, of ruling via local ‘nawabs’, the Company set up

a professional cadre of Company servants who were to govern the country for the Company, reserving all high-level posts for the British, and placing Englishmen in charge of each district with the blunt title of ‘Collector’, since collecting revenue was their raison d’etre. The Collector usually exercised the dual function of magistrate in his district. The British thus ran government, tax collection, and administered what passed for justice. Indians were excluded from all of these functions.

The alien representative of the Company in the story is called the Collector.  His rule is open, only faintly hidden by the local Gatherers.  Formally, the gathering and collecting is of taxes.  Really, we’re talking about corporate profits.  The regime has institutionalised torture to keep itself going. 

One of the arguments put forward by those who want to defend British imperialism in India is the idea that India benefited from it materially, in terms of unity, democracy, wealth, facilities, etc.  This isn’t the place to go into that in detail (spoiler: it’s bunk) but it needs to be emphasized, as Tharoor does in his book, that the British never gave India anything that wasn’t primarily of benefit to them and their ability to extract profit.  For instance, India got a railway system out of the empire.  But that railway system was put in place to allow the transportation of loot out of the country, across land to ports and away.  Like the artificial suns in the Doctor Who story, for which the people must “Praise the Company!”, but which actually just make the working day as long as possible, the railways were a tool of the oppressor rather than a gift to the oppressed.

Stepping over the huge issue of how the hegemonic whiteness of the cast in ‘The Sun Makers’ destabilises the metaphor, the interesting issue from our point of view here is how persistently the story has been misunderstood, how little the metaphorical resonances with British imperialism have been noticed.