Revisiting history

“Meditation is a form of idleness
Inactivity dissolves the final dread.”
From Songs of Nepenthe by Bachchoo

Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves. Mahatma Gandhi rid India of British rule. God’s in his heaven and all’s well with the world. So it was written and repeated and so it was learnt by me and my generation, at my grandmother’s knee and at school.
About the last proposition the doubts grew early. The India around me seemed to testify otherwise. It was not at first a matter of disputing God’s existence or location, but all was certainly not well with the world.
The other two propositions remained firm and were reinforced by school history texts. By the time Richard Attenborough and Ben Kingsley presented their Gandhi to the world, I had undergone several reverses of belief and ways of assessing history.
Now more than two and a half decades later, Steven Spielberg and Daniel Day-Lewis bring Abraham Lincoln’s dilemma to the screen, portraying him as more complex and his circumstances and political actions as more nuanced than my original proposition allows.
Day-Lewis’ Oscar-winning performance and the drama of the film taught me a few things and introduced me to characters and events I hadn’t, with only a general knowledge-view of American history, known about. The film also sent me looking further — to a new book about the American civil war and Lincoln’s politics, called Freedom National: the Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861-65, by James Oakes. I suppose I was looking for an answer to a question to which I have had, in various phases of development or delusion, several wavering answers. The question is, quite simply, “Did Abraham Lincoln intentionally and heroically liberate the slaves?”
A child’s first view of history is mythological. Figures loom largest. Noah saved all living creatures from the flood; William conquered Britain; Ashoka united India; Aurangzeb stubbornly brought about the downfall of the Mughal empire; Lincoln freed the slaves… People dominate. They are the movers, the shakers of the earth and it makes sense.
Then comes adolescence and the awareness that history is not the story of kings but the story of the people. One embraces that doctrine with all the enthusiasm of the new republican and then follows the theory.
In my adolescence and through my 20s, it was the enduring influence of Marxism, which unlike some “Communists”, I actually bothered to study. Some time ago, I asked a supposedly “Marxist” Indian intellectual what the second volume of Marx’s Das Kapital was called. He couldn’t say. I told him it was a difficult tract called Theories of Surplus Value, but he didn’t want to know and was not even ashamed of failing the test. He was happy with his portrait of Stalin and abuse of the “bourgeois parties” who had won the vote in his state.
My study underlined the productive movements that lay beneath historical development. Slavery in America was not abolished by Lincoln and his civil war but by the need of the nascent capitalist industries in the North for free labour from the South. That was a profound sort of understanding. It told me and the comrades I shared it with that Gandhi hadn’t “liberated” India, rather, the net value of the Indian empire had become a negative asset to Britain. Retaining India was costing Britain money. It was an economic liability and so was best jettisoned.
So also, looking back in history, the crusades were not wars fought for the possession of the Holy Land and its sacred soil and icons by Christians and Muslims, but a dispute over the trade routes through West Asia to the treasures further afield.
It was an adequate historical framework, appropriately displacing the idea that history was made by the will of individuals. The framework sustained me through arguments at university and then I was faced with the practical world of Britain in which I had to pay the rent and buy some food and some booze if anything was left over.
The late ’60s and early ’70s were hard times for immigrants to Britain. The shelter of Cambridge University life had, for me, gone. I was now any “Paki” on London’s streets and labour market.
Several forms of disillusion pursued me and I ended up, through various machinations, and membership of the Indian Workers’ Association in Leicester (read my novelistic memoir London Company for details), in the British Black Panther Movement.
I was amongst its various, for the most part, West Indian members, cast as the Asian intellectual. This entailed addressing “ideology classes”, which embraced a universe of subjects, including the history of emancipation in America. The theory then fashionable in the movement was derived from reading accounts of slave revolts in the US and reading the works of W.E.B. Dubois. The thrust of this argument was that the abolition of slavery was not the work of any white man, but the result of the various revolts of the slaves themselves. It was and remains an alluring prospect. The self-movement of peoples! The slaves of the American South freed themselves through struggle, the blacks of South Africa defeated apartheid, dalits liberated themselves from the binds of caste! It was a doctrine that distanced and negated alien benefactors from the liberation of the benefacted.
Then in betrayal of one’s own enthusiasm, facts began to balance the picture. The film Lincoln demonstrates the commitment of the man against all odds, his own supporter’s misgivings and the grandees of his party to push through the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution that abolished slavery for ever.
James Oakes’ book goes further. It unequivocally asserts that Lincoln and the Republican Party of his times were committed to the abolition of slavery as a moral principle rather than as some changeable adjunct to keeping the Confederate states within the Union.
Did it teach me something? Or am I merely reviewing my own ideological evolution? I think I should be told.