‘Thingification’

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IT is another world — quite literally. Nasa has been releasing footage taken by rovers on the surface of Mars. Among the most striking clips is one which provides a panoramic view of the Red Pla­net.

Its eerie and hypnotic quality is only enh­an­ced by the fact that the video also includes so­­und — the rush of Martian winds as they swe­ep across the bare landscape. In the distance and above the red landscape of rocks and craters is a murky grey horizon. They sky over Mars is not blue.

The images and sounds captured by the rovers are a miracle of technology — a planet always at a distance is now very visible, and audible, on our phones and computers. It is incomprehensible that only a few hundred years ago, humans lived and died having only explored Earth. And then, the Space Age was upon them.

Today, explorations of the moon and Mars, and indeed of other reaches of the universe, are very much endeavours to lay claim to remote worlds that have only recently become real to us. It reminds one of colonialism. These otherworldly realms of which we are only now obtaining closer glimpses echo the idea of how conquering faraway lands may have seemed to colonising powers.

Take our part of the world. Without the easy availability of camera and given the initially small number of people that travelled from the British Isles to the subcontinent, there were few images or items to lend some reality to the existence of a world known as India whose residents were very different from the British. It follows that an integral part of the colonising endeavour was to make India ‘real’ to populations at home.

The question of how the identity of millions of Indians was constructed in the minds of white Europeans is worth considering.

This goal could not be achieved by simply showing people Indian goods or objects but to also prosper from these, and to show a particular sort of relationship of domination and submission in doing so. Making India real was presented (like space technology is today) as something unarguably positive, an example of the marvellous advances of pioneering spirits. As the philosopher Aimé Césaire wrote in his prescient essay Discourse on Colonialism, the process of colonialism could well be called ‘thingification’, where the people who are colonised — as was the case in the subcontinent — become commodities or objects in the eyes of the colonisers.

One way India and its inhabitants were rendered ‘real’ was through museum exhibits. In the archives of the Victoria & Albert Museum are recollections of some of the very first visitors to the ‘India Museum’, which had been established by the East India Company and was shut down in the 19th century. Its exhibits were shifted to what is now the V&A.

One of the objects that had garnered the most attention was something that subverted the premise that the white Europeans were simply better, more noble and moral and courageous than those they controlled. An early viewer, therefore, balked at an exhibit in a room called the Rajmahal where a mechanised tiger known as Tippoo’s Tiger mauled a white European officer as music played. The aghast viewer wrote: “The whole of this machine, formed of wood, was executed under the immediate orders and directions of Tippoo, whose custom it was, in the afternoon, to amuse himself with this miserable triumph over the English.”

The defeat of Tipu Sultan and the seizing of his tiger shows who was the conqueror and who the vanquished. Other visitors to the India Museum were more awed by the diversity of objects, especially the solid silver throne or howdah that once transported princes. The visitor is also intrigued by the belongings of Tipu, including a dream interpretation journal in which he wrote himself. Another visitor is awed by the doings of the India Office “when one considers that in this building are contained the central offices whence emanate all orders for the government of the immense Indo-Britannic Empire! Notwithstanding its blackened Ionic portico, it does look rather old and insignificant for a building of such importance.”

Another early account notes: “…we know next to nothing of the hundreds of millions of Hindoos who are our fellow-subjects; we gaze with surprise and wonder (…) at the proofs they send us of their unaccountable perseverance in minute and laborious undertakings, and of their unrivalled skill in such masterpieces of patience and manual dexterity; but of the Indian people (…) we know nothing, or next to nothing. Now, the East India Museum would afford a key to a good part, at least, of this mystery.”

There is only one record of an Indian viewing the exhibits. Rakhal Das Haldar was a student at the University College London and presented an account of the revulsion of the colonised. He wrote: “It was painful to see the state chair of gold of the late Lion of the Punjab [the throne of Ranjit Singh] with a mere picture upon it; shawls without Babus; musical instruments without a Hindu player, jezails and swords without sipahis and sawars; golden ornaments without bhobi [women]; and above all, hookahs without the fume of fantastic shape.”

These are despondent words but perhaps we, seated as we are in the far future, can take solace in the fact that even the once formidable British Empire collapsed.

However, this entwining of the past and present, how the identity of millions of Indians was constructed in the minds of white Europeans through the seized loot of their land is worth considering. Humankind’s search for new frontiers which may provide new opportunities is not over. The question is whether the new and pioneering can ever exist without the silences and the vanquished. Who and what will humans so addicted to the discovery of the previously unknown ‘thingify’ next?

The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy.

rafia.zakaria@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, December 4th, 2024