Look to the West: Thread III, Volume IV (Tottenham Nil)!
- Thread starter Thande
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MORE (please and thank you, and at your own reasonable pace).
Did you come up with the whole idea of Societism from the song Imagine? It is a rather absurd, naive song.
Weird ghetto* for the racial minorities. Or were they just foreigners, with home-grown non-whites living among the English Liverpudlians? I guess we'll find out.
Did you come up with the whole idea of Societism from the song Imagine? It is a rather absurd, naive song.
Weird ghetto* for the racial minorities. Or were they just foreigners, with home-grown non-whites living among the English Liverpudlians? I guess we'll find out.
Of course it's good to see that you're back in the saddle with this, your first timeline, and one of the seminal works on this entire board 
I'm not going to lie and say I wasn't pulling for you to launch your promised eventual revamp of Cronus Invictus instead, but I'm sure its day will come too, someday.
And reusing the "Tottenham Nil" joke! Does that make it a running gag?
I'm not going to lie and say I wasn't pulling for you to launch your promised eventual revamp of Cronus Invictus instead, but I'm sure its day will come too, someday.And reusing the "Tottenham Nil" joke! Does that make it a running gag?
Ah, and "Look to the West" is finally back! Wonderful news. Long time lurker and first time poster. I finally decided to sit down over the summer and give this epic a read. I'm certainly not disappointed. It's almost certainly one of the best timelines on the whole site, Thande. Job well done.
I was wondering what, exactly, Diversitarianism would be like. Truth be told, I imagined it would more or less be like how it turned out so far, but it's still incredibly bizarre actually reading about it. It seems so...alien from an OTL perspective. I've also noticed that, at least so far, all of its adherents that have been revealed are European (Ireland, England, super!Belgium, Russia). I know better than to ask if this has some significance, but still, makes me feel that it was probably created there (the isolation of an entire ocean certainly helping, of course).
Societism, too, looks like it'll be a fascinating but equally troubling vision of the world. Looking back over the previous chapters, I almost get the impression of Jared's *USA in "Decades of Darkness" for the UPSA. Perhaps stopping its rise as a global power was possible at some point, but everyone was too distracted to do so, and in the future it'll be a problem that simply won't go away. How the UPSA's current democracy will mesh with what appears to be autocratic, slave-owning ideals will be very strange to witness, that's for sure. I'd also wondered what sort of religion Societism would express (considering how Catholic the UPSA apparently is), but state atheism - choosing Lennon's "Imagine" to open this volume had me chuckling - does make sense.
It's also occurred to me that, since all are presumably some persuasion of capitalist, the Diversitarian vs. Societist 'Quiet War' could go on forever...
Some random questions:
-We will be hearing about the Moronites sometime soon? It's been quite a while since we've heard anything out of Tierra del Fuego from them.
-Similar with the Ottoman Empire and the Janissary Sultanate. Are these two in the works as well?
-The continued Dutch presence in the Cape region has been left more or less vague. Would I be right in guessing that it's going to be pretty ugly when the Belgians begin to squabble with the Stadtholder-led republic? Who will try to get the native Africans on their side first will certainly be something to watch...
-Is there a particular year that you plan on stopping LttW on?
I was wondering what, exactly, Diversitarianism would be like. Truth be told, I imagined it would more or less be like how it turned out so far, but it's still incredibly bizarre actually reading about it. It seems so...alien from an OTL perspective. I've also noticed that, at least so far, all of its adherents that have been revealed are European (Ireland, England, super!Belgium, Russia). I know better than to ask if this has some significance, but still, makes me feel that it was probably created there (the isolation of an entire ocean certainly helping, of course).
Societism, too, looks like it'll be a fascinating but equally troubling vision of the world. Looking back over the previous chapters, I almost get the impression of Jared's *USA in "Decades of Darkness" for the UPSA. Perhaps stopping its rise as a global power was possible at some point, but everyone was too distracted to do so, and in the future it'll be a problem that simply won't go away. How the UPSA's current democracy will mesh with what appears to be autocratic, slave-owning ideals will be very strange to witness, that's for sure. I'd also wondered what sort of religion Societism would express (considering how Catholic the UPSA apparently is), but state atheism - choosing Lennon's "Imagine" to open this volume had me chuckling - does make sense.
It's also occurred to me that, since all are presumably some persuasion of capitalist, the Diversitarian vs. Societist 'Quiet War' could go on forever...
Some random questions:
-We will be hearing about the Moronites sometime soon? It's been quite a while since we've heard anything out of Tierra del Fuego from them.
-Similar with the Ottoman Empire and the Janissary Sultanate. Are these two in the works as well?
-The continued Dutch presence in the Cape region has been left more or less vague. Would I be right in guessing that it's going to be pretty ugly when the Belgians begin to squabble with the Stadtholder-led republic? Who will try to get the native Africans on their side first will certainly be something to watch...
-Is there a particular year that you plan on stopping LttW on?
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Thande
Donor
Yes, by all means.
Societism actually originally comes from a short TL Ian wrote on this site's frontpage, back when this site had a frontpage, in which the ideology was called Unionism. Obviously I have considerably fleshed it out and added my own ideas because that was only a short piece that didn't go into more detail than 'ideology which demands global unification as its ultimate goal'.
It did occur to me a while back that Imagine fits the general thrust of Societism quite well though (though not perfectly; see below). I am a massive fan of the Beatles but I will never quite understand why that song became so popular. Zeitgeist, I suppose.
Thank you for your kind words; I'd actually forgotten you had read this TL, which shows you what happens when one hasn't been writing lately and you miss out on all these relatively new people commenting...Of course it's good to see that you're back in the saddle with this, your first timeline, and one of the seminal works on this entire board
I'd forgotten about that! Well let's not rule it out...Brainbin said:
I'd forgotten I'd already used it to be honest (I do that a lot, I once had two chapters with the same punning title before somebody pointed it out...) As far as I know, the joke originally comes from Spike Milligan, though it may be older still.And reusing the "Tottenham Nil" joke! Does that make it a running gag?
Thank you for the kind words
It was actually a bit inappropriate of me to do that part because Societism is not actually atheist, but I couldn't think of a way to do justice to that without changing the words of the song. So it's just a wee bit misleading: Societism is more in the 'state church also functioning as a propaganda arm of the state and fundamentally inseparable from it' mould a la Tsarist Russia. The symbolism of the fallen cross with the Eye of Sanchez plastered over it can instead be interpreted as the 'real heart of the faith' dying away and being replaced with worldly political concerns, perhaps, which arguably is a far more insidious move than an 'honest' atheistic persecution of religion a la Revolutionary France or the Soviets.Nevermore said:
"The present", i.e. 2015. When I started, I had assumed that I would reach in-story 2015 long before OTL 2015 rolled around; now I'm not so sure...Nevermore said:
Last edited:
Thande
Donor
And we also have our first 'proper' chapter of Volume IV
Part #151: Indian Autumn
“The man who judges two equally brutal oppressors to be different if they wear different faces does not deserve freedom from oppression”.
*
From: “In Bad Company: India from the Wars of Supremacy to the Great Jihad” by Heinrich Jahn (1980)—
It is of course a popular misconception to say (as Gaspard did in 1924) that the history of India from the end of the Jacobin Wars up until the time of the Great Jihad was ‘the history of a few great men, only two of whom were natives’. What arrogance! What an insult to a region as great and diverse as India, with her melting pot of languages and religions, her history stretching back to a time when Europeans thought this newfangled fire thing would never catch on! In part this book was written to dispel this misconception and to educate others about Indian history in this period, both the forgotten figures of importance that bestrode the land and the great masses of the people whose stories remained untold and ignored even in their own time, yet who are the real workers of change and progress in the world, as the Enemy will never learn.
Indeed, if Gaspard’s misconception can be defended, it is to say that his ‘only two natives’ were both men who arose from this anonymous mass to a position of prominence, acknowledged as so few of their kind are by the world to be the pivots of history about which that world turns. On the face of it, if one is selective at least their biographies might sound similar. Both men, as noted above, from poor and disadvantaged backgrounds, both with a drive and fiery passion that would ensure they would not forever remain in that obscurity, and both were Islamic holy men. Yet they were blood enemies at the end, and it is this that history remembers. They were, of course, Faruq Kalam—the man his followers still know as ‘the Mahdi’—and Nurul Huq, known to everyone as the Father of Bengal.
Much about both Kalam and Huq remains debated, in part due to their humble origins: few were likely to make coherent records about them. It does not help that it is known that Huq, at least, was certainly born under another name—though what that name was is itself debated—and some of Faruq Kalam’s followers claim the same about their man, probably motivated by a disagreement within Islam about whether the prophesised Mahdi is meant to be born with a particular name or not. Given this fog of lies and half-truths told about two figures that have become positively mythic, all we can do is give what is generally accepted to be ‘the story’ and then critique it, in the knowledge that—as we have already seen—the popularly accepted ‘truth’ rarely has anything to do with the genuine article.
Of the pair, Huq was born earlier. He entered this world in a village in Bengal, not far from Calcutta but its identity otherwise unclear, in 1765. Huq was born a lower-caste Hindu, though certainly not, as some have claimed, a dalit untouchable. He is usually found identified as a member of the Shudra varna, though a few sources call him a Vaishya. Whatever his birth position in the complex caste system, he was certainly born into a poor and deprived family. He was also born into a Bengal reeling from the aftermath of Britain’s victory in the Third War of Supremacy and what that meant for its people. Having been defeated by the French in the Second War and lost Madras, the British had been determined to retake it in the Third, but their military buildup had alarmed their onetime ally Siraj ud-Daulah, the Nawab of Bengal, who feared the British planned to depose him. He had reacted by turning on the British, taking the British Fort William in Calcutta and causing the deaths of many British soldiers by imprisoning them in the hellish conditions of the tiny cell known as the ‘Black Hole of Calcutta’.
This move had proved to be a self-fulfilling prophecy, with the furious East India Company turning its full attention on the Nawab, destroying his army and killing him in a series of battles throughout the latter part of the Third War. The EIC’s rampage of vengeance had succeeded in imposing direct British control over Bengal, at the price of effectively conceding control over southern India to the French, something that would prove to become so cemented that the British would never seriously threaten it again. And of course any attempt to spin this as a victory ignored the fact that the BEIC had never wanted direct political control over any part of India: what they wanted was trade, trade on their terms, and anything more was simply an expensive distraction. For the moment, though, the BEIC clung to anything it could paint as a victory in what had otherwise been an embarrassingly damp-squib corner of the glorious fireworks display of the Third War elsewhere, particularly in North America. The Company handed over titular control over Bengal to six worthless princelings who could spuriously claim some sort of descent to the Mughal royal family, carving up the country into artificially created provinces drawn in five minutes by a bored clerk with a map and a pencil. The real power was in Fort William, where the BEIC’s Presidency of Calcutta—now the only Presidency worth anything—was based.[1] Its President was Warren Hastings, who ruled with a rod of iron in one hand and a blank cheque from London in the other.[2]
Thus it was that Nurul Huq’s formative experience was the devastating Bengal Famine of 1770,[3] which was blamed (with some justice) on the BEIC’s ruthless economic policies, forcing farmers to grow opium poppies for trade rather than crops for example. The BEIC also reacted to the drop in profits caused by the famine by raising taxes on those who could least afford to pay, a policy predicated on the Company’s assumption that Indians were so hierarchical that all they had to do was keep the ruling castes happy and the rest would fall into line. Such an approach would inevitably spark anger years down the line among the young ones who struggles to survive in the famine, not least boys like Nurul Huq who lost family members in the process. It was at that point (or so most sources claim) that Huq decided he hated the British more than anything in the world, and resolved to dedicate the rest of his life to the destruction of British power in India.
It is generally assumed (though, of course, not without some taking the opposite side of the argument) that Nurul Huq’s conversion to Islam was a purely political move, and that he either remained the Hindu of his birth or was some form of imprecise agnostic in his heart. Certainly the conversion helped him with his position. Though Islam in India could not be entirely dismissive of the idea of caste, it was certainly a religious/cultural sphere in which social mobility was more attainable. Regardless of the demographic numbers, Muslims were associated with positions of power and considered something of a ruling class, especially by the British themselves. There was also the point that Muslim holy men were considered more...dangerous than their Hindu counterparts by the British and the other European colonialists, more likely to be able to assemble a crowd of rebels whose activities would at best eat into profits and at worst threaten colonial control over a region. The French would learn in 1815 that the mere rumour of Muslim sepoys being issued muskets greased with the fat of the abominable pig was enough to incite a revolt, and after that incident—which was swiftly followed by the formation of the joint India Board—the colonialists were always careful to tiptoe around issues liable to rouse up the Muslims. Nurul Huq certainly wanted the British to be scared of him, and his decision to study at a madrassah and become an imam fits that determination. But perhaps we are too cynical to suggest that that was all there was to it.
Where Nurul Huq differed from the countless angry young men forged in the bitterness of the famine was that he understood that confronting the Company in the field was unlikely to achieve anything, a point confirmed when the India Board was formed and the various trading Companies effectively agreed to help support each other rather than compete and risk losing control altogether as a result—as the French Governor-General Missirien put it, rather than fighting over the size of your slice of a small cake, work together to bake a bigger cake. A consequence of this was that the Portuguese, French and British East India Companies would help each other put down revolts, even when their home countries were supposedly at war, as in the case of the farcical Anglo-French ‘war’ during the Popular Wars for example. Nurul Huq was there in the middle of all this, making observations. One of the things he observed was that the British, French and Portuguese EICs seemed to be growing closer to one another than any of them felt to their home countries, especially the British who were effectively operating independently due to the policies of the Marleburgensian regime. This was true to a lesser extent of the French, who had been left on their own for years during the Jacobin Wars and Paris had never quite regained full control after the Restoration. The Portuguese were infected with some of this attitude and reacted by being strongly opposed to the centralising Aveiro Doctrine under John VI when he came to the throne. Nurul Huq concluded ‘as so many conquerors before them, they are losing their identity, and becoming part of India’. It had happened many times before in Indian history. The name ‘Mughal’ itself was a corruption of ‘Mongol’, betraying the empire’s Timurid roots, yet no Mughal today would think of himself as a foreign Mongolian ruler. The same seemed to be happening with the Europeans.
“Think not that I will lie back and forgive them their transgressions because of this,” Nurul Huq is recorded as saying, “but it does encourage me that my way is best.” ‘My way’, as opposed to the fruitless rebellions of his contemporaries, was infiltration from within. Nurul Huq himself remained an independent actor, ‘that troublesome blackamoor mussulman priest’ as one British writer dubbed him (probably having removed expletives beforehand), but he infiltrated his followers into the Company’s native service as sepoy officers and clerks. Huq had it both ways. He could have one of his clerks deliberately mess up an administrative detail to create a crisis, and then intercede as the great Imam Nurul Huq, friend of the people and enemy of the British, to condemn the Company for its negligence and force them to deal with him to smooth the issue over. Of course, given the Company was the Company, not all the matters Nurul Huq interceded over were of his own creation. He was always careful to ensure that he was always just too slightly useful as a means for the Company to solve these problems that they wouldn’t consider ‘taking his piece off the board’, as longtime Governor-General John Pitt euphemistically described it. Nurul Huq did not restrict himself to Muslim matters, either, interceding on behalf of Hindus, religious minorities, and in one case even a group of British travellers who claimed to have been ripped off by a corrupt Company clerk—a white man no less. Nurul Huq both made a name for himself back in Britain—for the travellers were from powerful families and shared their stories—and embarrassed the Company in India. These two matters converged when the Company offered to transport Nurul Huq to Britain so that he might put some of his complaints and proposals about Company administration direct to London. Huq was initially suspicious that the trip would be one way, but eventually agreed.
Huq’s voyage to Britain took place in 1824 and changed his view of matters forever. His glimpse of Marleburgensian London was extensively recorded in the writings of his secretary. His views on industrialism are well recorded elsewhere and we need not concern themselves here, but what Huq himself considered to be his great revelation was over the class system in Britain. “I always thought them to be true believers in the Linnaean Racism that the French Jacobins espoused, even as they denied it,” Huq said. “To believe that white men or Christians are inherently superior and thus have a God-given right to rule over the rest of the earth. Now I see that that was, at most, an excuse. For they treat their own poor quite as ruthlessly as they do the people of Bengal.” Huq’s impression may of course have been coloured by the fact that he witnessed Britain under the oppressive Marleburgensian regime: had he been able to visit under Charles James Fox, he might have come away with different ideas. But there is no profit in such counterfactuals.
Huq’s brief trip to London—in which he indeed put his views to the Colonial Office, such as it was, only for the notes to lie forgotten in trays as Britain descended into civil war the next year—changed his ideas about what he was trying to achieve in Bengal. Some writers have also suggested that his hearing stories from his ever-spreading web of agents about other parts of India may have also played a role: Huq was too young to remember Siraj ud-Daulah or his ilk, but stories about Indian princes in the north might well have made him consider that, just like white men, Indian rulers were quite capable of being brutal oppressors of the poor regardless of skin colour and without any European influence. Whether this is true or not, Huq’s drive shifted from a national or racial cause to a social one. It is of course absurd (as some Russian writers have claimed) to try and suggest that this made Huq ‘proto-Societist’: his Mentian urge to see the ruling classes brought low and social justice brought to the poor was the antithesis of Societism. The change in Huq’s views worried some of his followers who were concerned he had been ‘converted’ in Britain to supporting colonial rule, leading to his famous rebuttal: “I still hate them, and I still want to see them burn. But now I hate them not because they are white or Christian. Now I hate them because they have power. And when they are cast down, we shall not replace them with ourselves, or with anything. The people shall rule themselves.” No, not ‘proto-Societist’; if anything Huq was a ‘paleo-Jacobin’, drawing on the same levelling impulses that had motivated the French Revolution in its early, heady days, before Linnaean Racism came to dominate everything.
However, one can somewhat see where Huq’s doubters were coming from. His approach had always been a gradualist one, one of slow infiltration, but previously it had always been with the unspoken assumption that one day there would be a reckoning, that Huq would call on his infiltrators to sabotage the Company from within and lead a rebellion against it. Now, though, it seemed that Huq viewed the infiltration and influence as a means to an end in itself, that gradual reform and creeping native control from within could effectively reclaim Bengal for its people without firing a shot, and then allow him to enact his egalitarian views on the country. In 1834, after solving a particularly sticky dispute in Oudh[4] which had threatened Britain’s longstanding influence in Lucknow, Huq was able to bargain for the creation of something he had long called for: a Governing Council based in Calcutta that would formally govern the country, not the Company’s Board of Directors unofficially influencing the useless princelings. Huq argued that such a mode of government, honest about where power truly lay, would be able to both improve the lives of Bengalis and improve the Company’s profits—fewer corruption bottlenecks. Governor-General Sir Paul Cavendish, having been worn down over the years, reluctantly agreed and the ten-member Council was instituted, according to Huq’s wishes: one half Company men and one half natives, with the latter being carefully demographically balanced between Hindus and Muslims. There was no ‘first among equals’ in the Council, with each member having an equal vote and responsibilities for a particular department that rotated. (It is ironic, but often noted by Bengalis with chips on their shoulders, that Bengal effectively created this mode of government several years before Britain under the Populists adopted it). The Governor-General dealt with the Council and could veto its decisions, but his veto could be overriden by a two-thirds vote—something Cavendish readily agreed to as he never dreamed that enough of the white half of the Council would ever join with the native half for this to be possible.
The Council’s effectiveness was proven by a much-praised response to a minor crop failure in 1837, helped along by Huq’s propaganda circulating throughout mosques (and not a few mandirs) across the country and beyond, which made out the crisis to be bigger than it had been and the response thus more decisive. Huq’s men drew a contrast to the Bengal famine of now more than sixty years before that had inspired Huq in the first place. The result was that now the Governor-General could not consider casually abolishing the Council without risking the same kind of popular uprising he would expect from pork-greased muskets. The Council was popular. Too popular, said some discontented radical supporters of Huq, who worried that a little reform had gone far enough for the man in his old age. They underestimated him, of course, as so many did. Huq was not the sort of man to sit back and await an ‘inevitable revolution’, which he did not expect to see in his lifetime: he intended to work against the British in India, in his uniquely subtle way, until the day he died.
And so it is thus the ultimate irony that the ‘inevitable revolution’ against colonialism did come in Huq’s day, and he found himself on the wrong side, fighting for the men he had spent his whole life trying to topple. For that revolution was the Great Jihad, and it was led by the other of Gaspard’s “two great native men”: Faruq Kalam, the Mahdi...
[1] The three Presidencies of OTL were Bombay, Calcutta and Madras, of which Bombay was initially considered the most senior. In TTL, Madras is lost to the French, and as Bombay is an isolated coastal enclave whereas Calcutta is the centre of a large country directly controlled by the BEIC, Calcutta soon became the most senior.
[2] Unlike OTL where Hastings was famously recalled to Britain over various abuses of power and subject to a farcically long trial in which one-third of the Lords judging it managed to die in the process. This is partly due to different British political trends in TTL after the Second Glorious Revolution, partly due to the government being involved in the buildup of British troops that led to Siraj ud-Daulah’s betrayal and thus the Company criticising too direct interference from London as counterproductive to their work, and partly because the British government at this point is deeply focused on the Empire of North America in the Troubled Sixties, hammering out the agreement that would become the 1788 Constitution.
[3] Which also happened in OTL.
[4] Modern Awadh.
Part #151: Indian Autumn
“The man who judges two equally brutal oppressors to be different if they wear different faces does not deserve freedom from oppression”.
– Pablo Sanchez, The Winter of Nations, 1851
*
From: “In Bad Company: India from the Wars of Supremacy to the Great Jihad” by Heinrich Jahn (1980)—
It is of course a popular misconception to say (as Gaspard did in 1924) that the history of India from the end of the Jacobin Wars up until the time of the Great Jihad was ‘the history of a few great men, only two of whom were natives’. What arrogance! What an insult to a region as great and diverse as India, with her melting pot of languages and religions, her history stretching back to a time when Europeans thought this newfangled fire thing would never catch on! In part this book was written to dispel this misconception and to educate others about Indian history in this period, both the forgotten figures of importance that bestrode the land and the great masses of the people whose stories remained untold and ignored even in their own time, yet who are the real workers of change and progress in the world, as the Enemy will never learn.
Indeed, if Gaspard’s misconception can be defended, it is to say that his ‘only two natives’ were both men who arose from this anonymous mass to a position of prominence, acknowledged as so few of their kind are by the world to be the pivots of history about which that world turns. On the face of it, if one is selective at least their biographies might sound similar. Both men, as noted above, from poor and disadvantaged backgrounds, both with a drive and fiery passion that would ensure they would not forever remain in that obscurity, and both were Islamic holy men. Yet they were blood enemies at the end, and it is this that history remembers. They were, of course, Faruq Kalam—the man his followers still know as ‘the Mahdi’—and Nurul Huq, known to everyone as the Father of Bengal.
Much about both Kalam and Huq remains debated, in part due to their humble origins: few were likely to make coherent records about them. It does not help that it is known that Huq, at least, was certainly born under another name—though what that name was is itself debated—and some of Faruq Kalam’s followers claim the same about their man, probably motivated by a disagreement within Islam about whether the prophesised Mahdi is meant to be born with a particular name or not. Given this fog of lies and half-truths told about two figures that have become positively mythic, all we can do is give what is generally accepted to be ‘the story’ and then critique it, in the knowledge that—as we have already seen—the popularly accepted ‘truth’ rarely has anything to do with the genuine article.
Of the pair, Huq was born earlier. He entered this world in a village in Bengal, not far from Calcutta but its identity otherwise unclear, in 1765. Huq was born a lower-caste Hindu, though certainly not, as some have claimed, a dalit untouchable. He is usually found identified as a member of the Shudra varna, though a few sources call him a Vaishya. Whatever his birth position in the complex caste system, he was certainly born into a poor and deprived family. He was also born into a Bengal reeling from the aftermath of Britain’s victory in the Third War of Supremacy and what that meant for its people. Having been defeated by the French in the Second War and lost Madras, the British had been determined to retake it in the Third, but their military buildup had alarmed their onetime ally Siraj ud-Daulah, the Nawab of Bengal, who feared the British planned to depose him. He had reacted by turning on the British, taking the British Fort William in Calcutta and causing the deaths of many British soldiers by imprisoning them in the hellish conditions of the tiny cell known as the ‘Black Hole of Calcutta’.
This move had proved to be a self-fulfilling prophecy, with the furious East India Company turning its full attention on the Nawab, destroying his army and killing him in a series of battles throughout the latter part of the Third War. The EIC’s rampage of vengeance had succeeded in imposing direct British control over Bengal, at the price of effectively conceding control over southern India to the French, something that would prove to become so cemented that the British would never seriously threaten it again. And of course any attempt to spin this as a victory ignored the fact that the BEIC had never wanted direct political control over any part of India: what they wanted was trade, trade on their terms, and anything more was simply an expensive distraction. For the moment, though, the BEIC clung to anything it could paint as a victory in what had otherwise been an embarrassingly damp-squib corner of the glorious fireworks display of the Third War elsewhere, particularly in North America. The Company handed over titular control over Bengal to six worthless princelings who could spuriously claim some sort of descent to the Mughal royal family, carving up the country into artificially created provinces drawn in five minutes by a bored clerk with a map and a pencil. The real power was in Fort William, where the BEIC’s Presidency of Calcutta—now the only Presidency worth anything—was based.[1] Its President was Warren Hastings, who ruled with a rod of iron in one hand and a blank cheque from London in the other.[2]
Thus it was that Nurul Huq’s formative experience was the devastating Bengal Famine of 1770,[3] which was blamed (with some justice) on the BEIC’s ruthless economic policies, forcing farmers to grow opium poppies for trade rather than crops for example. The BEIC also reacted to the drop in profits caused by the famine by raising taxes on those who could least afford to pay, a policy predicated on the Company’s assumption that Indians were so hierarchical that all they had to do was keep the ruling castes happy and the rest would fall into line. Such an approach would inevitably spark anger years down the line among the young ones who struggles to survive in the famine, not least boys like Nurul Huq who lost family members in the process. It was at that point (or so most sources claim) that Huq decided he hated the British more than anything in the world, and resolved to dedicate the rest of his life to the destruction of British power in India.
It is generally assumed (though, of course, not without some taking the opposite side of the argument) that Nurul Huq’s conversion to Islam was a purely political move, and that he either remained the Hindu of his birth or was some form of imprecise agnostic in his heart. Certainly the conversion helped him with his position. Though Islam in India could not be entirely dismissive of the idea of caste, it was certainly a religious/cultural sphere in which social mobility was more attainable. Regardless of the demographic numbers, Muslims were associated with positions of power and considered something of a ruling class, especially by the British themselves. There was also the point that Muslim holy men were considered more...dangerous than their Hindu counterparts by the British and the other European colonialists, more likely to be able to assemble a crowd of rebels whose activities would at best eat into profits and at worst threaten colonial control over a region. The French would learn in 1815 that the mere rumour of Muslim sepoys being issued muskets greased with the fat of the abominable pig was enough to incite a revolt, and after that incident—which was swiftly followed by the formation of the joint India Board—the colonialists were always careful to tiptoe around issues liable to rouse up the Muslims. Nurul Huq certainly wanted the British to be scared of him, and his decision to study at a madrassah and become an imam fits that determination. But perhaps we are too cynical to suggest that that was all there was to it.
Where Nurul Huq differed from the countless angry young men forged in the bitterness of the famine was that he understood that confronting the Company in the field was unlikely to achieve anything, a point confirmed when the India Board was formed and the various trading Companies effectively agreed to help support each other rather than compete and risk losing control altogether as a result—as the French Governor-General Missirien put it, rather than fighting over the size of your slice of a small cake, work together to bake a bigger cake. A consequence of this was that the Portuguese, French and British East India Companies would help each other put down revolts, even when their home countries were supposedly at war, as in the case of the farcical Anglo-French ‘war’ during the Popular Wars for example. Nurul Huq was there in the middle of all this, making observations. One of the things he observed was that the British, French and Portuguese EICs seemed to be growing closer to one another than any of them felt to their home countries, especially the British who were effectively operating independently due to the policies of the Marleburgensian regime. This was true to a lesser extent of the French, who had been left on their own for years during the Jacobin Wars and Paris had never quite regained full control after the Restoration. The Portuguese were infected with some of this attitude and reacted by being strongly opposed to the centralising Aveiro Doctrine under John VI when he came to the throne. Nurul Huq concluded ‘as so many conquerors before them, they are losing their identity, and becoming part of India’. It had happened many times before in Indian history. The name ‘Mughal’ itself was a corruption of ‘Mongol’, betraying the empire’s Timurid roots, yet no Mughal today would think of himself as a foreign Mongolian ruler. The same seemed to be happening with the Europeans.
“Think not that I will lie back and forgive them their transgressions because of this,” Nurul Huq is recorded as saying, “but it does encourage me that my way is best.” ‘My way’, as opposed to the fruitless rebellions of his contemporaries, was infiltration from within. Nurul Huq himself remained an independent actor, ‘that troublesome blackamoor mussulman priest’ as one British writer dubbed him (probably having removed expletives beforehand), but he infiltrated his followers into the Company’s native service as sepoy officers and clerks. Huq had it both ways. He could have one of his clerks deliberately mess up an administrative detail to create a crisis, and then intercede as the great Imam Nurul Huq, friend of the people and enemy of the British, to condemn the Company for its negligence and force them to deal with him to smooth the issue over. Of course, given the Company was the Company, not all the matters Nurul Huq interceded over were of his own creation. He was always careful to ensure that he was always just too slightly useful as a means for the Company to solve these problems that they wouldn’t consider ‘taking his piece off the board’, as longtime Governor-General John Pitt euphemistically described it. Nurul Huq did not restrict himself to Muslim matters, either, interceding on behalf of Hindus, religious minorities, and in one case even a group of British travellers who claimed to have been ripped off by a corrupt Company clerk—a white man no less. Nurul Huq both made a name for himself back in Britain—for the travellers were from powerful families and shared their stories—and embarrassed the Company in India. These two matters converged when the Company offered to transport Nurul Huq to Britain so that he might put some of his complaints and proposals about Company administration direct to London. Huq was initially suspicious that the trip would be one way, but eventually agreed.
Huq’s voyage to Britain took place in 1824 and changed his view of matters forever. His glimpse of Marleburgensian London was extensively recorded in the writings of his secretary. His views on industrialism are well recorded elsewhere and we need not concern themselves here, but what Huq himself considered to be his great revelation was over the class system in Britain. “I always thought them to be true believers in the Linnaean Racism that the French Jacobins espoused, even as they denied it,” Huq said. “To believe that white men or Christians are inherently superior and thus have a God-given right to rule over the rest of the earth. Now I see that that was, at most, an excuse. For they treat their own poor quite as ruthlessly as they do the people of Bengal.” Huq’s impression may of course have been coloured by the fact that he witnessed Britain under the oppressive Marleburgensian regime: had he been able to visit under Charles James Fox, he might have come away with different ideas. But there is no profit in such counterfactuals.
Huq’s brief trip to London—in which he indeed put his views to the Colonial Office, such as it was, only for the notes to lie forgotten in trays as Britain descended into civil war the next year—changed his ideas about what he was trying to achieve in Bengal. Some writers have also suggested that his hearing stories from his ever-spreading web of agents about other parts of India may have also played a role: Huq was too young to remember Siraj ud-Daulah or his ilk, but stories about Indian princes in the north might well have made him consider that, just like white men, Indian rulers were quite capable of being brutal oppressors of the poor regardless of skin colour and without any European influence. Whether this is true or not, Huq’s drive shifted from a national or racial cause to a social one. It is of course absurd (as some Russian writers have claimed) to try and suggest that this made Huq ‘proto-Societist’: his Mentian urge to see the ruling classes brought low and social justice brought to the poor was the antithesis of Societism. The change in Huq’s views worried some of his followers who were concerned he had been ‘converted’ in Britain to supporting colonial rule, leading to his famous rebuttal: “I still hate them, and I still want to see them burn. But now I hate them not because they are white or Christian. Now I hate them because they have power. And when they are cast down, we shall not replace them with ourselves, or with anything. The people shall rule themselves.” No, not ‘proto-Societist’; if anything Huq was a ‘paleo-Jacobin’, drawing on the same levelling impulses that had motivated the French Revolution in its early, heady days, before Linnaean Racism came to dominate everything.
However, one can somewhat see where Huq’s doubters were coming from. His approach had always been a gradualist one, one of slow infiltration, but previously it had always been with the unspoken assumption that one day there would be a reckoning, that Huq would call on his infiltrators to sabotage the Company from within and lead a rebellion against it. Now, though, it seemed that Huq viewed the infiltration and influence as a means to an end in itself, that gradual reform and creeping native control from within could effectively reclaim Bengal for its people without firing a shot, and then allow him to enact his egalitarian views on the country. In 1834, after solving a particularly sticky dispute in Oudh[4] which had threatened Britain’s longstanding influence in Lucknow, Huq was able to bargain for the creation of something he had long called for: a Governing Council based in Calcutta that would formally govern the country, not the Company’s Board of Directors unofficially influencing the useless princelings. Huq argued that such a mode of government, honest about where power truly lay, would be able to both improve the lives of Bengalis and improve the Company’s profits—fewer corruption bottlenecks. Governor-General Sir Paul Cavendish, having been worn down over the years, reluctantly agreed and the ten-member Council was instituted, according to Huq’s wishes: one half Company men and one half natives, with the latter being carefully demographically balanced between Hindus and Muslims. There was no ‘first among equals’ in the Council, with each member having an equal vote and responsibilities for a particular department that rotated. (It is ironic, but often noted by Bengalis with chips on their shoulders, that Bengal effectively created this mode of government several years before Britain under the Populists adopted it). The Governor-General dealt with the Council and could veto its decisions, but his veto could be overriden by a two-thirds vote—something Cavendish readily agreed to as he never dreamed that enough of the white half of the Council would ever join with the native half for this to be possible.
The Council’s effectiveness was proven by a much-praised response to a minor crop failure in 1837, helped along by Huq’s propaganda circulating throughout mosques (and not a few mandirs) across the country and beyond, which made out the crisis to be bigger than it had been and the response thus more decisive. Huq’s men drew a contrast to the Bengal famine of now more than sixty years before that had inspired Huq in the first place. The result was that now the Governor-General could not consider casually abolishing the Council without risking the same kind of popular uprising he would expect from pork-greased muskets. The Council was popular. Too popular, said some discontented radical supporters of Huq, who worried that a little reform had gone far enough for the man in his old age. They underestimated him, of course, as so many did. Huq was not the sort of man to sit back and await an ‘inevitable revolution’, which he did not expect to see in his lifetime: he intended to work against the British in India, in his uniquely subtle way, until the day he died.
And so it is thus the ultimate irony that the ‘inevitable revolution’ against colonialism did come in Huq’s day, and he found himself on the wrong side, fighting for the men he had spent his whole life trying to topple. For that revolution was the Great Jihad, and it was led by the other of Gaspard’s “two great native men”: Faruq Kalam, the Mahdi...
[1] The three Presidencies of OTL were Bombay, Calcutta and Madras, of which Bombay was initially considered the most senior. In TTL, Madras is lost to the French, and as Bombay is an isolated coastal enclave whereas Calcutta is the centre of a large country directly controlled by the BEIC, Calcutta soon became the most senior.
[2] Unlike OTL where Hastings was famously recalled to Britain over various abuses of power and subject to a farcically long trial in which one-third of the Lords judging it managed to die in the process. This is partly due to different British political trends in TTL after the Second Glorious Revolution, partly due to the government being involved in the buildup of British troops that led to Siraj ud-Daulah’s betrayal and thus the Company criticising too direct interference from London as counterproductive to their work, and partly because the British government at this point is deeply focused on the Empire of North America in the Troubled Sixties, hammering out the agreement that would become the 1788 Constitution.
[3] Which also happened in OTL.
[4] Modern Awadh.
That Huq would be considered something of a Socialist in otl. Is the book exaggerating his revolutionary nature though. After all that would be the diversitarian thing to do. (I assume the writer is diversitarian due to the fact that he seems to be cheerfuly and proudly flaunting his biases)
Thande
Donor
I should point out that to some extent Huq is a fierier, Muslim, lower-caste version of Raja Ram Mohan Roy; to some extent the same trends were at work in British Bengal in OTL. The difference is that in TTL Bengal is not simply one part of what was becoming a universal British empire in India: it is the only place Britain really has control over, and that changes attitudes both in London and Fort William about how to deal with people like Huq--they can't just call in sepoy troops from elsewhere in India to put down a mass rebellion, even given the India Board agreements which mean the French and Portuguese should theoretically help. So Fort William is in a weaker position, hence why the Governor-General reluctantly grants concessions here (that and the fact that Huq has genuinely been somewhat useful for the Company in settling disputes and is worth keeping on side for his own sake).
Very happy to see this timeline back! You have done such a good job of making this AH world seem vivid and real, that sometimes I find myself thinking about it as if it actually happened.
My favorite timeline on the whole site.
My favorite timeline on the whole site.
Thande
Donor
Very happy to see this timeline back! You have done such a good job of making this AH world seem vivid and real, that sometimes I find myself thinking about it as if it actually happened.
My favorite timeline on the whole site.
Thank you for the kind words.
The next few updates, like this one, will be covering events in the rest of the world, which was somewhat neglected due to the Popular Wars' focus on Europe and to a lesser extent the New World. The next will probably be China, but aside from that I don't have much preference about which areas to write in what order, so let's have some calls from the crowd on where you'd like to see written about.
Kaiphranos
Donor
Something about the Space-Filling empire? Or Japan--how's the Russian Far East doing, anyhow?
I'm happy to see LTTW returning! I know it's not the priority, but what is happening in Perusia? If you want help on anything French, you can send me a PM ( it would be more idiomatic to have "connard d'américain").
otherwise it's always fun to hear about the Russian far east, Yapan, Aleyska and Gawai (I hope I got them right).
On the updates, it's very interesting to know more about the ideologies of this world.
otherwise it's always fun to hear about the Russian far east, Yapan, Aleyska and Gawai (I hope I got them right).
On the updates, it's very interesting to know more about the ideologies of this world.
Thande
Donor
I realised a while back I haven't been responding enough to people's comments, so I'm going to try and make a habit of it.
(for anyone wondering, mowque kindly held over the text for this episode so I could post it from my work computer after some minor revisions)
Those are on the list...though every time I try and write about Russian Japan it seems to wander off to China or elsewhere. I suppose that makes a certain amount of sense from an in-timeline perspective give the whole 'Japan is an unimportant backwater in TTL undeserving of being covered in detail' thing, but I will get to it!
Your appreciative-ness is noted
Stay good, mowque
(for anyone wondering, mowque kindly held over the text for this episode so I could post it from my work computer after some minor revisions)
Thank you for your advice on French--I always get it wrong, usually about gender though. Your memory is correct except Hawaii is (sometimes) known as Gavaji in TTL. The ideologies, of course, are now at the forefront...
In the Chinese sense...or the Indian in this case I suppose.
Thank you. And give it time
Wasn't it suspected that the domains of the Austrian Habsburg will be very vulnerable to Societism?
Not to mention the greater diversity and longer and better recorded history compared to the western hemisphere.
Why do people think that the Combine will be autocratic and pro-slavery?
It hasn't been left vague. We know that the Cape Republic will lose its capital to the new Belgians and merge with the already indepedent Boertrekkers.
You mean Imperial Russia which is not quite the same as Czarist Russia despite many overlappings.
The correct spelling of LTTW Japan is Yapon.
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