The Colonial Question: Ego as The First Coloniser

A man reaches a mountain pass at first light, three hours of walking in the dark behind him. The valley below has not yet been entered by the sun; the river on its floor is a grey thread, older than the language he thinks in. He stands still for perhaps a minute. Then the phone comes out, the shot is framed, his own face is recorded against the ridge, and a few words are spoken about how places like this must be protected before they are lost. By the time he resumes walking, the pass has quietly changed hands. It has become scenery for his morning and proof of his sensitivity; by evening, it will be material for his page. No stone has moved, no tree has been cut, and the acquisition is complete.

I begin with him because the world has spent recent days arguing about acquisition on a much larger scale. Elon Musk endorsed, with a single word of agreement, a post claiming that colonialism cannot explain poverty: Ethiopia was never colonised and stayed poor, Vietnam was colonised and bombed and now grows fast, so retire the excuse. The arguments that gathered around the repost went further. Colonies, it was claimed, were mostly unprofitable, with more spent on railways and roads than was ever carried away; and Singapore and Hong Kong wore the colonial yoke for over a century and now outshine their neighbours. The opposing camp produced its own ledger: the drain of wealth, the famines, the de-industrialisation of Bengal, the museums of Europe furnished with other people's history.

Both camps, notice, are auditing the coloniser. One counts what he took, the other counts what he spent, and the audit never closes because the principal actor appears in neither set of books. Colonisation, at its root, is less an event in economic history than an operation of the human ego, an operation performed daily on valleys, rivers, animals and people, and performed, in a direction rarely examined, on oneself; the man at the pass was running the empire's software on an ordinary morning. Until that operation is brought into the open, the debate about empires will remain what it has been for a century: two ledgers shouting across a question neither can answer, which is how a trading company's warehouse guards came to rule two hundred million people.

Three Thousand Men at Plassey

The East India Company received its royal charter in 1600 as a commercial venture, and a company, by definition, keeps no army. What it kept in India were factories, and the word in that era's vocabulary meant not production but storage: warehouses at Surat, Madras, Bombay and Calcutta, holding indigo, cotton, saltpetre and spices against the sailing season. Warehouses need watchmen, and watchmen, later supplemented by local recruits, were the whole of the Company's armed presence for a century. For roughly a hundred years, it traded, petitioned, bribed and waited. Then Aurangzeb died in 1707, the imperial structure cracked into fragments, every regional power began trying its luck in the scramble, and the Company quietly joined the queue.

At Plassey in June 1757, it fielded around three thousand men, the majority of them Indian sepoys, against the Nawab of Bengal's force of roughly fifty thousand. Bengal, then among the wealthiest provinces on earth, changed hands in a day. Buxar followed in 1764, and Buxar deserves more attention than it receives, because the coalition that took the field there was as grand as the subcontinent could then assemble: the deposed Nawab of Bengal, the Nawab of Awadh, and the Mughal emperor Shah Alam II himself, together fielding some forty thousand men against a Company force counted, in the most detailed records, at barely over seven thousand. The coalition was routed in a morning. A year later, at Allahabad, the emperor of Hindustan signed over the diwani, the revenue administration of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa, to a corporation of foreign merchants, and accepted in exchange an annual payment from that corporation. A trading firm had become the tax collector of some twenty million people, with the emperor's seal on the arrangement. With Bengal's revenues behind it, the Company took, over the next half-century, Mysore, the Marathas and finally Delhi.

Hold the proportions without flinching, and bring them into the present: it is as if the security contractors of a foreign shipping firm seized the richest state of a continental power, and the power answered by fragmenting further and supplying the contractors with recruits. The favourite explanation is treachery: Mir Jafar was purchased, the bankers of Murshidabad conspired, the English were cunning. Every item on that list is documented and true, and the list still falls short, because treachery is the most evenly distributed commodity in political history; Indian courts had refined intrigue into an art form centuries before the first European sail appeared off the Malabar coast, and no one colonised India with it. Bribery can decide an afternoon; it cannot administer a subcontinent for two centuries against the will of its inhabitants, unless the will itself has gone missing, and the economic record says it went missing long before any Company ship dropped anchor.

The long-run reconstructions of Angus Maddison place the last period of rough parity between Indian and West European prosperity around the tenth to eleventh century. By 1600, in the more recent estimates of Stephen Broadberry and his colleagues, Indian income per head had already slipped to around three-fifths of the English level, and the slipping had begun while English merchants were still petitioning at Surat for permission to build their first warehouse. The decline did not begin with the Portuguese, the Dutch, the French or the British; they arrived to find it centuries old. Colonial rule then turned a decline into a collapse: by 1871, on the same estimates, average Indian income stood at less than a sixth of the British figure. Both facts must be held together, and almost nobody holds both. The coloniser impoverished India brutally, and the weakness that admitted him predated him by half a millennium.

What of the new debate's favourite ledger, the claim that empire did not pay? It has scholarly backing in one narrow sense: Davis and Huttenback's study of British imperial finance between 1860 and 1912 found the empire a net burden on the British taxpayer, with profits flowing to a small investing class while the public funded the navy that protected them. But the exceptions were never rare. Remittances from the Dutch East Indies supplied, in some mid-nineteenth-century years, as much as a third of the entire Dutch state budget; Leopold's Congo was a private extraction estate; and the celebrated Indian railways were built with British capital on returns of around five per cent guaranteed against Indian revenues, meaning Indian taxpayers underwrote the investors' profit whether or not a single train paid its way. The infrastructure argument collapses the moment one asks who actually footed the bill. As for Singapore and Hong Kong, they were entrepôt ports, small trading stations with no hinterland to strip, about as representative of the colonial norm as the cashier's till is of the mine. Yet grant every correction on every side, and the audit remains what it always was: external. Whoever wins it has explained nothing about Plassey. A subcontinent cannot be conquered at those odds; it can only be acquired, and an acquisition, unlike a conquest, requires somewhere in the transaction a seller, who is never a nation, because nations sign nothing and the signing is always done by egos.

The Word for a River

The ego is the sense of being a separate, bounded something, and separation is its founding condition: inside the skin, me; outside the skin, world. The division is not chosen; it is in place for as long as the body lives. Speaking on the Isha Upanishad at Oxford earlier this month, I described the ego as a coloniser whose first colony is the body itself, kept alive not out of love but out of self-interest. From the division, everything follows with the regularity of grammar. Whatever stands outside the boundary is encountered as an object; the object is assessed as material; the material is assigned a use. The river stops being a river and becomes irrigation potential, hydropower, frontage; the forest turns into timber, carbon stock, scenery, or a conservation project. None of this is greed; it is structure, which is why the ego that calls itself an environmentalist and the ego that calls itself a developer are performing one and the same operation, encountering the world as object and assigning it a role in their own project, with only the roles differing. The word that announces the operation sits openly in every modern language: resource. To call a river a water resource is to declare that the river's existence is justified by its utility to the one speaking. And the vocabulary only wrote down an attitude far older than itself; converting the world into material has been the ego's native grammar since before any language recorded it. A child who picks a flower to win a mother's approval has already performed the complete operation, the flower's existence as flower overwritten by its small role in the child's emerging economy of identity.

Scale the operation and empire appears, not as an aberration of the human story but as its enlargement. What a survey office does to a province is exactly what the man at the pass did to the mountain, performed with instruments and paperwork, and backed by a navy. Land entered the colonial books as revenue; forests entered as timber yield; rivers as navigation and irrigation; human beings entered as labour, to be recruited, taxed or shipped wherever the project required. None of it is evil in itself; the body needs food, shelter and warmth, and some conversion of the world into material is the price of staying alive. But the ego does not stop at survival, because its incompleteness is structural and no quantity of extracted material resolves it, so the extraction continues past need and past comfort, beyond abundance itself, until the ordinary operation is running at industrial scale. The plantations of the Caribbean, the mines of Potosí and the indigo fields of Bengal differ in geography and idiom, never in grammar. Strip the ideological decoration from colonialism, and what remains is the ego's foundational move conducted with ships and ledgers: the world as material for my project. The gunboats carried nothing new; they carried the unexamined ego, armed and incorporated.

But appetite explains only the predator, never the catch. Every court the Company encountered ran on the same acquisitive grammar; the Nawabs and the Marathas were not innocents grazing in Eden. Why, then, did one ego-project, fielding warehouse guards, succeed against contemporaries who outnumbered it a hundred to one on their own soil? Because the operation runs in a second direction, and the second direction is the one nobody audits. The ego converts the outer world into material, and when its own centre grows too heavy to carry, it performs the same conversion on itself, handing itself over as material to whatever promises to manage it. Out of the first direction come the world's colonisers; out of the second come its colonised.

India's case is the second direction written across eight centuries. A society is held by its centre the way a wheel is held by its hub; spokes without a hub are not a wheel but a heap. India's hub was its wisdom tradition, and just before the tenth century, Acharya Shankar had clarified what the tradition at its source actually says. Its operational content was radical: the final authority a human being seeks is not stationed elsewhere; one's own centre is the seat of it. A person who has verified this in his own experience cannot be commanded from outside. He may be killed; he cannot be ruled, because there is nothing external to him high enough to receive his surrender. Read as a description of psychology rather than a metaphysical decree, this is the most insurrection-proof teaching ever composed, and for precisely that reason, it could not be allowed to stand.

Within a few centuries, the teaching had been recaptured by the intermediaries it threatened and inverted into its opposite. The controller of destiny was relocated to the heavens, fate was declared written in advance, and the licensed reader of the writing returned to the centre of the social order. And the inversion sold, which is the part that must be admitted, because fatalism offers the ego two comforts no honest philosophy can match: it dissolves responsibility, since a decreed failure is nobody's failure, and it sedates fear, since a future written down somewhere can presumably be read in advance and adjusted by remedy and ritual at a modest fee. Fatalism was never imposed on the ego; the ego purchased it, and purchased it gratefully, because carrying one's own authority is the heaviest load a human being is ever offered, and here was a doctrine that took the load away and called the unburdening sacred.

What follows from a surrendered centre followed with terrible coherence. In the name of religion, what got patronised was the husk: ritual without enquiry, story in place of philosophy, rank assigned at birth and enforced as divine will. Stories ask to be believed, and the more they are repeated, the deeper the belief settles; philosophy asks to be tested, and a fated world has no use for testing. Enquiry withered, because a fated world rewards petition rather than investigation. There were no great discoveries to speak of, little new literature worth the name, no urge to sail out and know the world; the scientific temper thinned across the very centuries in which Europe's quickened. A society that had outsourced its hub fragmented along every available line and ranked itself by birth, since egos denied inner authority will manufacture authority from ancestry. And the diamonds were lying in the house the whole time. The sages had already offered the highest the human mind has reached; the core was present, named, written down. A civilisation chose the packaging over the core, and the choice was not made in some council chamber on one bad afternoon. It was made the way all such choices are made: one ego at a time, each finding the husk more comfortable than the demand the core would have placed on it. By the time the first sails appeared, the operation was complete in its essentials. A population of individually surrendered egos cannot really be defeated, because nothing is left standing to defeat; what it resembles is an estate waiting for a manager, and an estate does not resist managers; it receives them. The Company never installed the colonised condition in India; it found the condition already installed, centuries old and fully operational, and did little more than change the name on the lease. The fifty thousand at Plassey did not lose to three thousand on that June afternoon; the losing had been done one interior at a time, generations earlier, and the field merely published the result.

The Flag Is Not the Territory

In August 1947 the administration was transferred, and the transfer was real: laws were rewritten, offices changed hands, a new flag rose over the buildings. The arrangement, though, was never territorial, and so no ceremony could reach it. The operation continues, under a sovereign flag, in both of its directions.

Outward, the grammar is untouched. The rivers of free India are filed as water resources, the forests as land banks and offset inventory; the survey office changed masters, not method. An ego that looks at a living forest and sees stock has not been decolonised by the new flag above the office; it has merely been localised. And the opposition runs on the operation it opposes: protecting nature is now itself an industry of conferences, funds and careers, the forest passing from the developer's ego to the conservationist's ego without once being met as something that exists outside anyone's project. The action can be correct while the actor is the ego, and a saved forest is a saved forest, but a crisis produced by the colonising operation will not be ended by egos that have merely redirected the operation from extraction to preservation.

Inward, the ego's surrender has diversified its portfolio. The chart still clears marriages that knowledge of the person should be clearing. The auspicious hour goes on scheduling what judgment should schedule, and the fee is still paid to know a future that obedience then helps to script. And the newer appointees are sleeker than the old. A feed now decides, for several hundred million citizens, what they will see in a day, and therefore what they will want and fear and eventually buy, and the consent is renewed nightly, thumb on glass, with a willingness no colonial power ever extracted at gunpoint. Ideologies are retained to do the thinking and influencers to do the aspiring; market sentiment, meanwhile, handles the fearing. Each appointment is welcomed for exactly the reason the heavens were welcomed a thousand years ago: it takes the load of one's own authority off the appointee's hands, and the relief is immediate. The coloniser, in whichever century he arrives and whatever uniform he wears, never breaks the gates; he is received at gates opened from inside, by a gatekeeper grateful for the visit.

This is why a country cannot be decolonised by decree. It was never colonised by decree; the occupation was assembled out of individual surrenders, one interior at a time, and it can be dismantled only at the same address. The address is not comfortable to visit. Seeing the mechanism, even seeing it vividly, changes nothing by itself; a person can absorb every figure in this article, nod at Plassey, and consult the chart before bed, because the mind is entirely capable of framing its own diagnosis and hanging it on the wall of the cell. What operates is seeing joined to intent: the deliberate withdrawal of consent, repeated at the exact points where consent is given. Before the chart is matched, the unglamorous question of what one actually knows of the person; before the feed is opened, the more uncomfortable question of who is about to do one's wanting; before the next river is filed as a resource, the question of whom the filing serves. The discomfort of such questions is their only credential; the comfortable question is always the one the ruler supplies.

And there is no liberated condition waiting at the end of the work, no date for a calendar, no restored golden age in which the matter closes and the bunting goes up. The ego that waits for that ceremony has already appointed its master of ceremonies. The post of ruler never falls vacant for long; the next applicant is always approaching the gate, promising to carry what feels too heavy to carry alone. Freedom, if the word is to mean anything, is no possession conferred once and held thereafter; it is the continuing removal of the rulers one keeps appointing, and there is no final removal that finishes the job. The gate has no permanent lock. There is only the watching, and the next knock.

The man at the pass, meanwhile, has begun his descent, the photograph still unposted in his pocket. Somewhere on the phone in his pocket, the debate about empire is still running, ledger against ledger, and it is arguing over his head; the nearest coloniser, the only one within his actual reach, is the one holding the phone. No argument will help him with that one, because the operation he performed at the top is not a habit available for renunciation; it is how an ego perceives, and he carries no other instrument of perception.

As long as the skin marks a boundary, there will be an inside and an outside, and whatever stands outside will be sized up for use; the valley was always going to become something of his, because the one looking at it is an ego and has no second way of looking. What remains open to him is narrower and stranger. He can catch himself in the act. Somewhere on the way down, he may notice, mid-thought, that the valley is being converted again, into an anecdote this time, and the noticing will not stop the conversion, but it will break its automaticity. For a moment too brief to measure, the valley will simply be there, assigned to nothing, owned by no caption, and the ego will not have vanished but thinned, enough to let one place exist without a role in anyone's project.

It may be the first such moment the valley has received from his species: a moment of going unused. No treaty ever delivered that to anything, and no flag has either. Then it will pass, because such moments pass; the photograph will go up, the caption will get written, and the colonisation will resume inside a minute, since that is what the coloniser does. The valley, in any case, never needed his protection. It needed him to see what he does to it by the mere act of perceiving it. The seeing will rescue nothing and settle nothing, and it is still the only beginning that does not turn, in the same breath, into one more form of the problem.

Acharya Prashant is a philosopher and author whose work centres on self-inquiry and its application to contemporary life; Views presented are personal.