HISTORY GONE WRONG? 395
a monopoly of violence, restrained only by the occasional, random,
even whimsical wisdom of the ruler. These societies were not without
a sense of justice: one historian even speaks of "the vitality of a constant
moral code made self-aware by a compassionate society."^1 (Reading the
laments of contemporaries, including visitors from Europe, I find such
a view curiously optimistic.)
Below the divider, people had no rights, no security; only duties and
submission. Resistance was next to impossible. The only escape from
abuse was to fly or hide—the invisibility of nobodyhood. As one of the
caliphs in Baghdad is said to have said: "The best life has he who has
an ample house, a beautiful wife, and sufficient means, who does not
know us and whom we do not know."^2 He knew. In such a society, to
know and be known by power was to ask for trouble. A Sufi saint put
it well when asked to receive the ruler: "My house has two doors; if the
Sultan entered it through one, I would leave it by the other." Of course
only a saint could afford to talk that way, and only a saint would be
asked. How, then, could the masses identify with king or kingdom? Re
cruitment into the armed forces could only be a form of servitude.
Fighters tended to be either slaves or mercenaries, wanting in zeal and
loyalty.
In India, the Moghul empire was already fragmenting when the Eu
ropeans arrived; the death process was under way and nothing could
have reversed it. This subcontinent, apparently destined to oneness by
shape and religion, had in fact never been able to cohere. One invader
after another had come in across the northwest passes and imposed its
rule on the Indus and Ganges basins; but the south had always held
out, tenacious in its linguistic and cultural nativism, like a spring in
compression. So, no unity: "The country seemed to fall asunder at the
touch."^3
But then why not a system of independent nation-states as in Eu
rope? Why, "given the makings of a similar set of competing polities,
did no states system emerge?"^4 Because, I think, these aristocratic
tyrannies, large and small, could not create the popular identities
needed to bond a people and make it feel different from, even superior
to, its neighbors. Religion might have done—Muslims vs. Hindus—
but that would not serve as a national definer (discriminant) until the
twentieth century. Had the Europeans not come in the seventeenth
century, India would simply have reverted to the internecine divisions
and troubles that had been its lot for millennia.
The British changed everything. They brought the administrative ex
perience and superior technology that permitted a tiny force to govern