A Hundred Horizons

A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire
By Sugata Bose
Permanent Black
Price Rs 695; pages 333

In November 1903, when he undertook a flag-waving voyage from Karachi towards the Persian Gulf and beyond, George Nathaniel Curzon gave India a dream. The die-hard imperialist that he was, Curzon dreamt of a British-ruled India that had its strategic perimeter extending to the Persian Gulf in the west and the Malacca Strait in the east.

Post-Independent India, fighting continental wars, forgot that dream. Till the Tamil rebels of Sri Lanka started pin-pricking the sole of India's feet and a ragtag rebel group unseated President Gayoom of the Maldives. Suddenly, about eight decades after Curzon left the shores of India, India looked to the ocean. But not deeply enough-till the tsunami hit. As Sugata Bose says, "The unity of the Indian Ocean world had been demonstrated in the most tragic fashion by a great wall of water moving at the speed of a jet aircraft."

Bose, a professor of history at Harvard, however, seems to disagree with those who exhort India to adopt a Curzonian strategic doctrine. He says neo-conservative polemicists and strategic analysts are calling on the US to take up Britain's imperial mantle and India to adopt a Curzonian strategic doctrine. This, he says, reflects selective amnesia. Bose then gives two aspects of this amnesia.

Unfortunately, both relate to the bluster about the American role. Bose's book is extremely well-researched, and poetically written, but is a disappointment to an Indian reader. It appears the author wastes all his researched knowledge and writing skill in a cesspool of neo-left confusion. Bose himself finds in the British, or Curzonian, continuation of Mughal regalia an attempt at drawing historical legitimacy. And then commits the same mistake that ultra-nationalist historians make-of forgetting that republican India's prime ministers address the nation on I-Day from the Mughal fort and the pageantry that heralds the swearing-in of a President in the Rashtrapati Bhavan is much that same pageantry that accompanied viceregal inaugurations.

So, despite post-imperialist deconstructivism, old strategic urges remain, imperialistic or otherwise. Just as communist USSR could not escape the insecurities of Czarist Russia, republican India cannot break out of the strategic insecurities and expansionist urges born out of those insecurities, experienced by British India. The humanistic urges of a Tagorean voyage through almost the same route that Curzon took cannot be mutually negating-rather, a dispassionate historian should find them complementary. To be brutally historical, they are just as complementary as the Bible-wielding missionary was to the colonising colonel.

To have a strategic vision is not being expansionistic. Here again, the example of Curzon would suffice. Though an unabashed imperialist, Curzon was against imperial over-reach in the Mesopotamian campaign (appropriately, and thought-provokingly, described as the first Gulf War by Bose).

The book is a well-crafted attempt but this reviewer would submit that the strategic link, sought to be replaced, emerges stronger. The other flaw is that it has an overdose of Bengali intellectualism, complete with Tagore and Bose.

By R. Prasannan
http://www.manoramaonline.com/