“THE minstrel and the music, and the melody have all changed. Our very sleep has changed; the tale we used to hear is no longer told.

“Spring comes with new adornments; the nightingales in the garden sing a different song. Nature’s every effect has undergone a revolution. Another kind of rain falls from the sky; another kind of grain grows in the fields.”

So wrote the poet Akbar Allahabadi following the end of the War of Independence in 1857, his lament for a world gone and a war lost.

The mutiny, as the British called it, spanning from 1857 to 1858, had ended. It had not been successful. The East India Company now took formal control of the country.Its presence had been exposed now, not as a goodwill project but as an occupation whose goal was the extraction of resources.

This happened roughly 156 years ago last week and the aftermath of the loss was brutal, both in intellectual and actual terms. In his book, War of Civilisations: India AD 1857, Indian historian Amaresh Misra describes what followed as the “untold holocaust.”

As per his research, nearly 10 million people died in a murderous campaign led by the British against those who had dared to rise up against their rule. Conventional figures had asserted that the total count of those killed had been somewhere around 100,000.

Misra’s estimates may well be true. The task of recording history in that era, as in nearly all of them, was dominated by the British; it is unsurprising that they would fail to make a careful count of the numbers that fell. As the British author Charles Dickens bluntly said, “I wish I were commander-in-chief in India ... I should proclaim to them that I considered my holding that appointment by the leave of God, to mean that I should do my utmost to exterminate the race.”

If extermination was the goal, then the difference between 100,000 and 10 million was just a matter of zeroes.

The truth of the sentiment was substantiated by the poet Mirza Ghalib, a resident of Delhi during the war, who wrote in a letter that “they killed the helpless and burned houses. Hordes of men and women and commoners and noblemen poured out of Delhi from the three gates and took shelter in the small communities and tombs outside the city … the city had become a desert”.

It took a long time to win the struggle that began then and we all know how it ended. The British eventually left, and the subcontinent was divided into two. The question of whether what they left behind was too ravaged, too thoroughly looted to ever recover is an open one.

The Kohinoor diamond was cut and became part of the crown jewels, just the most well-known of pilfered treasures; countless petty British officers scattered around the decaying empire acquired all sorts of treasures, happy to cart them back to England for display as their exotic acquisitions from conquered lands.

Those tangible takings were the physical scars of colonialism and, ironically, they seemed to have been the easiest to contend with. Far more pernicious and potent have been the intellectual orientations that were the product of a legacy of having been conquered.

The old era, whose passing Allahabadi so eloquently lamented, was gone forever. The fact that modes of scientific progress and Enlightenment ideas had arrived as the harbingers of this death, and on the backs of an oppressive project of occupation, would taint them forever.

The Muslims of the subcontinent suffered a special and complete condemnation, unsure of how to accomplish the purification of ideas and concepts that were inherently good but circumstantially poisoned. Scientific education, female education, the development of statutory legal systems, all required an expunging.

One hundred and fifty six years, then, have perhaps not been enough to solve these conundrums.

Post-colonial Pakistan, watching the overt withdrawal of American and Nato forces next door, seems embroiled again in the same confusions. The Tehreek-i-Taliban, the self-styled soldiers of Muslim authenticity, burn down girls’ schools because girls’ education is a symbol of Westernisation.

Many oppose them, mostly silently, but the schools keep burning down and buses that cart students to and fro come under attack. The proponents of girls’ education continue to stress its importance for progress. It is akin to the same battle Sir Syed Ahmed Khan fought so many years ago.

One of the catalytic events that set the war of 1857 in motion was the rumour that the cartridges used by Indian soldiers in the British army were sealed with pork or beef fat, thus violating both Hindu and Muslim dietary restrictions.

With this, any doubt that the true intentions of the British were indeed nefarious was eliminated.

In contemporary Pakistan, the (misplaced) suspicion that a polio vaccination programme was a stand-in for a CIA spy operation seems to have done just the same.

What is left of the actual public health programme to immunise children is a widely held belief that it is a means of sterilising Pakistan’s population. Some truth requires complete condemnation, the misuse of something into a disavowal of the thing itself.

The curse of colonialism for Pakistan thus seems to be not simply the physical ravaging, the successful entrenchment, of regional and religious rivalries that had not existed before, or even the confusions about identity.

It seems also to be an eternal condemnation to fight over and over again the same war, where ideas — because of their attachment to Western war interests — are condemned completely and mistrusted wholeheartedly.

Female literacy, public health, democracy and its attendant freedoms are hence all condemned to be viewed with a suspicion that cannot be extricated from the burdens imposed on them by history.

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

rafia.zakaria@gmail.com