A History of Forking Paths

IN HIS FINAL moments upon the cross, Nikos Kazantzakis writes in his extraordinary and controversial novel The Last Temptation of Christ, Jesus of Nazareth was momentarily seduced by Satan who arrives as a little girl-angel. What Satan offered Jesus, in this modern retelling, is neither prodigious wealth nor political power but something breathtakingly commonplace—the pleasures of family life, the comforts of a wife’s embrace, and the unconditional love of young children. In Genesis, temptation takes the form of abandoning belief in the word of God in exchange for intellectual desire to know reality, to discern good and evil for oneself. In contrast, for Kazantzakis, the temptation is not a fruit of knowledge, but the very garden itself. Only here, it is the garden of forking paths, where each path leads to a life not lived, a reality in some cosmic Monte Carlo simulation.
Historians have, of course, thought for centuries about forking paths, about careers of people and destinies of nations that could have been otherwise. For many, the path we choose as nations and as individuals is a consequence of our labours blessed by munificent Gods. As late as the 16th century, Machiavelli himself, no shrivelling violet, famously ascribed much of what follows in the lives of individuals, and therefore the history of nations, to Fortuna—a goddess who is generous towards those who work to worship her through labours, but is also one who is capricious, almost without mercy, in her willingness to repossess her benedictions. By the time scientific reasoning began to find more legitimacy in the Enlightenment era, historians began to wonder more explicitly—sometimes jokingly, on other occasions more seriously—about more mindless, random events that have led us to the present.

Understandably, there has been an element of play about this—as if one were serious about it only up to an extent and no more. In the 18th century, the great historian Edward Gibbon asked, with his tongue firmly ensconced in his cheek, but nevertheless still speaking to a rising awareness of alternative histories, what would have followed if Charles Martel, the Frankish overlord, had been defeated by the Umayyad Caliphate in 732 AD in the Battle of Tours (the Arabs call it Ma’arakat Balaat ash-Shahadaa, or the Battle of the Highway of Martyrs) near the French city of Poitiers. Gibbons said, in case of such an eventuality, “the Arabian fleet might have sailed without a naval combat into the mouth of the Thames. Perhaps the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pupils might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Muhammad”. While Gibbon was spitballing, his counterfactual world was still nevertheless dependent on the outcome of an event where human will, insight, and ultimately labours still had a role to play.

For the philosopher-polymath Blaise Pascal however, history pivoted on even more discrete random events with little need for human cognition. In his justly famous set of reflections titled Pensees, he wrote: “Cleopatra’s nose, had it been shorter, the whole face of the world would have been changed.” What he meant was that absent a domineering nose, which was assumed to augment her great beauty, Cleopatra would have never been able to seduce Julius Caesar and Mark Antony and neither would have great Roman civil wars been fought in the name of Ptolemaic Egypt. This kind of extreme what-ifs has understandably, however, riled up many, particularly those who invest a great amount of intellectual and emotional energies to construct a materialist history, filled with cause and effect, of the present. The great Marxist historian EP Thompson, who was no fan of alternative histories, far less Pascal’s absurdities, described the whole exercise with a colourful Teutonic descriptor: geschicbtswissenschlopff, as ‘unhistorical shit’.

But alternative histories serve more purpose than meets the eye. Economists have used this to ask, or tease out, the impact of policy measures. The economic historian and Nobel winner Robert Fogel studied the impact of railways on Gross National Product of 19th century America, while nearly a generation later James Heckman at the University of Chicago invented techniques and statistical estimators to quantify policy interventions that could have been. What alternative histories, if done carefully, allow us to some extent is ask how reliable are our underlying assumptions about why our present is as it is. Over the past century, no event in Indian history has been of greater significance than its independence. Was this because of one man, a generation of leaders, historical contingencies, or merely an inevitability given the steady erosion of colonial powers? Such questions acquire vividness, especially when one imagines what would have followed if World War II had a different outcome.

In an essay by the historian Andrew Roberts, titled ‘Hitler’s England: What if Germany had invaded Britain in May 1940?’, is a section about Lord Halifax’s discussions with Hitler about India. Ever ready to shed other people’s blood to bolster his flaccid inadequacies, Hitler offered up his solution on how to ‘deal with Indian nationalism’ with a simple prescription: shoot Gandhi. Roberts reports that Lord Halifax, who had originally mistaken Hitler for a footman and ‘nearly handed him his coat’, looked at Hitler ‘with a mixture of astonishment, repugnance and compassion’. Notwithstanding the outrageousness of this suggestion, the idea of the Nazis winning the World War II has retained its lure across popular culture. Perhaps, no more influentially than in science-fiction writer Philip K Dick’s short novel The Man in the High Castle, where the author imagines a world where the Axis powers have won, slavery in America is back, and America is split between the Nazi Reich and the Greater Pacific States controlled by Japan under Emperor Hirohito. In the original novel, India barely figures, except as validation of the German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s genius. In this alternate world, Rommel defeats the British in North Africa and then proceeds to capture the Middle East and its oil, before joining up with the Japanese in India. In this imagined dystopia, India is split between the Nazis and the Japanese.

This setting, of course, in the hands of an imaginative writer, would offer itself up as an apocalyptic canvas to draw on—notwithstanding the moral obscenity of imagining the Nazi swastika fly over the Viceroy’s House, what we today call Rashtrapati Bhavan. Questions inevitably abound about this other world: how would the Nazis share India with the Japanese, who presumably would have won the Battle of Kohima. There is the morally pestilential choice that the Nazis offered every country (from France’s Vichy regime to Greece’s Security Battalions) they successfully invaded—which Indians would become Nazi collaborators? Or would the Nazis have found India too complicated, too large, too messy that in the final reckoning their rule would be indistinguishable from the British one? And what public spirited questions would have followed such a conquest—would a new generation ask what Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay asked a century earlier, ‘Bharatbarsha paradhin keno?’ (Why is India subjugated?), or would we have internalised new humiliations, only this time with Lord Macaulay being replaced by Alfred Rosenberg.

All this, of course, comes to mind because we have come to the end of the new century’s teenage years. If instead, we begin in 2009, the global economic system faced near catastrophic outcomes then but the political order of liberal democracies was largely stable notwithstanding the usual self-serving hypocrisies that are sold to us as ‘values’. By the end of 2019, however, this political world has largely turned upside down. Now, even as the global economic system has had a decade-long revival, substantial portions of the world’s polity has returned to a kind of ethnocentric populism—particularly in Europe and America—that has no use for the shibboleths of liberal democracy. Had somebody offered up our present state of affairs as a possibility in 2009, we would have thought of it as an alternative reality. What awaits us in the next decade is either a reversion to a muddled political centrism, after a brief flirtation with populism, or a further veering to the extremes, which merely confirms that the age after World War II, its nation states and institutions, has truly come to an end. What awaits us then in case of the latter is another world, an alternate reality, which we may today dismiss as distant and unlikely.

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