Ian McDonald

In a perfect world the pen would always be mightier than the sword and intellect would always defeat brute force. But the world is not perfect and more often than mankind can afford brute force has become the dominant influence in history.

Take the era of European imperial power. In the end that colonisation was based on brute force and not on any kind of spiritual, intellectual, or cultural superiority. In South and Central America, in Africa, and in Asia, peoples with marvellous ancestral civilisations, equal or superior to European civilisations, were conquered by crude, determined force, a harsher will to power, and a more ruthlessly effective technology.

Saddest aspect

One of the saddest aspects of this sad and terrible fact of history is that those who conquer by brute force try to make out that they deserve to prevail not because of greater might but because their values are superior. They say they have a mission, that they have come to take the place of a savage or backward culture. They say they have bodies to free and minds to enlighten and souls to save. A grab for gold and trade and land and power masquerades as an honourable crusade for the subject people's good.

Think of the brilliant civilisations in South America wiped out utterly by armed ruffians pretending to be God's emissaries. Think of the old and elaborately orga-nised and cultured societies of Africa lost and buried through the age of occupation and only lately emerging into the history books.

It is amazing to what lengths occupying power goes to cover up the beauty and distinctive cultures which they encounter. This was brought home to me vividly while reading an article about a remarkable book on British rule in India, recently reissued in London. This book tells a revealing story of how crude Philistinism virtually became official policy when the imperial rulers were confronted by the age-old and magnificent culture of India.

At the time of the British conquest India boasted the oldest and richest literary tradition in the world, yet this did not prevent Britons like Macauley getting up in the House of Commons to describe Hinduism as consisting only of what is "hideous, grotesque, and ignoble." Amid the rich culture of India over-mighty oafs paraded as carriers of civilisation. Their soldiers' cannon blew up Indian fortresses of remarkable workmanship. Their contractors pulled down palaces to use as ballast for railway tracks. Their settlers whitewashed lovely murals in stately homes to fit them for their own use. Temples were used as army coffee shops.

Discoveries indicating the greatness of the civilisation on which they were trespassing had somehow to be explained away because it was official policy that Indians could not be capable of such achievements. It was claimed, for instance, that the uniquely beautiful marble inlay work of the Taj Mahal had really been done by craftsmen imported from Italy. The fact that this sort of work had existed in India for centuries, long before it appeared in Italy, was conveniently ignored. Only when the 'silpa sistras', the traditional manuals which Hindu builders keep, were found did it become impossible to refute the evidence that all the builders of the Taj had been Hindu.

The truth is ...

There are hundreds of similar examples. The truth is that in India, as elsewhere in imperial domains throughout history, conquerors have especially hated and feared what was best in the cultures of the peoples they subjugated and have always taken deliberate care to diminish and demean any evidence of beauty, artistry, and intellectual achievement that they have found.

With that imperial era past, the new histories have been written. These histories at last reflect the truth that no conqueror ever dares to acknowledge - that the culture that he comes to overthrow is only too often older, more noble, and more enduring than his own.

And peoples around the world - Guyanese and all West Indians among them - more and more in these new histories learn that their far-ancestors were greater than they knew - not greater in pure, intimidating force but greater in the forms of beauty they created, the societies and the cultures that they fostered, and the spiritual values that they tried to cultivate.

Ian McDonald is an occa-sional contributor who lives and works in Georgetown, Guyana.