Freedom’s Backstory

There is an unmistakable stamp of authority in Priyamvada Gopal’s compelling history of self-dete­rmination by colonial subjects in her magisterial Insurgent Empire. Having courted con­­troversy in questioning historian Niall Ferguson’s assertion of the British Empire’s “benevolence” over its subjects on an infamous 2006 BBC show, Gopal has shown courage of conviction by confirming that colonised peoples were active agents in their own liberation. Insurgent Empire is a credible revision of colonial history.

Gopal lends an authoritative rejoinder to the old, entrenched view that the empire was a necessary undertaking to ‘civilise’ natives. Historical accounts provide evidence to the contrary, with colonised people remaining hostile towards any such undertaking. In the words of lawyer and jurist John Bruce Norton, who claimed to have foreseen the great 1857 Mutiny, the pedagogic value of the sepoys’ asking the British to examine their own bet­rayals called for a certain kind of reverse tutelage, seeking the opp­ressor to learn from the opp­ressed. It was a call for the ruling elites to bend their ear low to their subjects—to listen and integrate. In contrast, the enclaves of power did just the opposite.  

Following the mutiny, in the late 19th and early 20th century, the colonial system produced grinding situations for peasants. The sustained unrest among the masses was vividly captured by many critics of the empire, who found that cataclysmic revolt was not impossible. For Keir Hardie, Labour Party pioneer and a natural-­born critic of the imperial project, the dissatisfaction with imperial rule was so deep-rooted as to warrant convulsions; for journalist Henry Nevinson the power of resistance had made thoughts of imperial benevolence obsolete; and for future British Prime Minister Ramsay Macdonald, renascent national pride had taken roots from the idea of Swadeshi. Insurgent Empire provides clear evidence that resistance to the empire had generated dissent around the imperial project within Britain as well, which had emboldened the movement and lent support for self-rule to become a reality.

It is an instructive reading on how Indian agency became a currency that the empire could no longer ignore, and which only helped its own working class learn that their oppression wasn’t any different from the injustice unleashed by their ruling elite in the faraway land. In these times when popular dissent is viewed with utter disdain, Insurgent Empire gives us a layered sense of how dissent in colonial contexts can be interpreted to revise and radicalise existing dissenting tendencies. Gopal’s use of the narrative texts of anti-colonial resistance helps to elucidate the relationship between ‘outside’ and ‘inside’. Howsoever marginalised, it is clear that dissent must articulate itself against the dominant at all times.    

Insurgent Empire makes a somewhat different reading of the native peoples’ movement for emancipation. It articulates freedom as a human desire for self-assertion across colonised lands. It argues that the treatment of resistance as mere episodes harbours a serious cost, which both the oppres­sed and the oppressor had to bear. One can find a sense of discovery in the manner in which Gopal has interrogated the diversity of records in weaving a comprehensive history of anti-colonialism. Besides the political and historical, her study provides insights on the difficulties that the empire encountered in understanding the colonised mind.

What is more disturbing is the persistence of mythology in the minds of Britons that ideas of freedom and liberty were indeed bes­towed on colonial subjects by imperial masters. No surprise, therefore, that successive British premiers have repeatedly asserted that “the days of Britain having to apologise for its colonial history are over”. Gopal has painstakingly tried to undo this, urging Britons to interrogate such myths and instead lay claim to the more challenging history of their own emancipation in the wake of widespread rebellion. Insurgent Empire is an amb­itious undertaking that arg­ues against disdainful dismissals and act­ive silencing of dissent and resistance to fully decolonise the minds of the powerful in the postcolonial world.