The Angel of History

“TERROR IS nothing more than justice”—this is how Ridley Scott’s biopic on Napoleon, released in 2023, begins. A line so hauntingly resonant on the twenty-third anniversary of 9/11.

Napoleon starts with the terror of the French Revolution and the guillotine. Which claimed not only the French Emperor Louis XVI and his wife, Marie Antoinette, but wiped out the ancien régime. In less than a year, between September 5, 1793 and July 27, 1794, over 20,000 were slaughtered. 16,594 were executed after summary trials; another 10,000 rotted away and perished in prisons. Many more thousands were massacred. Thanks to the guillotine, decapitation took place with unceremonious, extraordinary, and unprecedented efficiency.

Walter Benjamin, in ‘Über den Begriff der Geschichte’, his famous, last essay that I cited in the previous column, highlights how time itself came to a standstill. The rebels who overthrew the French monarchy shot at all the clock towers in Paris at the same time. But to what end? The Republic was soon replaced by a new despotism, led by a man mistakenly dismissed by France’s enemies across the channel, as ‘that Corsican bandit’.

Napoleon not only crowned himself Emperor, but marched across much of Europe redrawing its boundaries. The lines that Benjamin quoted when the clocks stopped take on a new, far grimmer, more ironic meaning: time had not stopped but Napoleon’s time had arrived.

It was a tumultuous period that came to an end nearly 20 years later on June 18, 1815, in a small village in what is now Belgium, which gave a new word to the English language. Waterloo. There Napoleon was defeated by the joint forces of the British and the Germans under the command of the Duke of Wellington.

Arthur Wellesley, whom we knew too well in India as Tipu Sultan’s nemesis. The younger brother of the Governor General Richard Wellesley, Arthur routed Tipu in the Siege of Seringapatam in 1799. Elevated to a dukedom, he went on to become Britain’s prime minister twice over.

We remember the French Revolution for the slogan that reverberated across the world: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. It was invoked closer home by none other than the architect of our Constitution, ‘Babasaheb’ Bhim Rao Ambedkar, after the Mahad Satyagraha. Where ‘untouchables’ fought for their right to water from the common pond. Those three words are still blazoned on every government edifice in contemporary France.

Lest we forget, not only did it fail to bring in long-lasting democratic rule in France but the French Revolution led to a new monarchy, with a new upper-class elite. It also introduced a terrifying new instrument of punishment, the guillotine. The guillotine was no ordinary killing machine, but a modern apparatus of mass murder. A mechanised contraption of extermination. From here, it was only a short, if jagged line less than 140 years long, which led to the genocidal extermination of the Jews in Hitler’s gas chambers.

Of course, even if the guillotine was new, terror as an instrument of power, was not.

Terror has been used throughout history to subdue huge populations with horrible, devastating efficiency. An entire ideology, even theology of religious conquest, Christian and Islamic, but by no means confined to them, used terror repeatedly in pre-modern times, for rapine conquest and colonisation. Those who resisted were slaughtered, their wives and children incorporated into the new order. It was a convenient way to manage demographic as well as political change.

Cut to our own times, the gulags of the Soviet Union, the killing fields of China and Cambodia, our own bloody Partition riots, genocides of Armenians, Kurds, Yazidis, the ethnic cleansing of Hindus in Pakistan and Bangladesh, pogroms against Sikhs in Delhi and Hindu Pandits in Kashmir, massacres in Rwanda and elsewhere are some of the examples of terror deployed on a mass scale with tainted political ends.

Back to Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History, especially what he is most famous for. The ‘Angel of History’ which he contrasted with the dwarf hidden inside the chess machine. The machine always won the game of chess. But only because a great chess player, the Turkish midget, was hidden inside it.

The chess-playing thingamajig was only a pseudo machine, a puppet manipulated by human hands. But the guillotine was the real deal, a real machine. Albeit somewhat of a simple, even crude, contrivance.

Nevertheless, it is the guillotine, rather than the dwarf inside the pseudo-automaton, that presaged the victory of Deep Blue, the IBM supercomputer that famously defeated Bobby Fischer.

Benjamin, of course, had no way forward to either super computers or artificial intelligence. But the metaphor that he chose to counter the analogy of the dwarf inside the chess machine was also mechanically reproduced. It reminds us, rather uncannily, of another of his famous essays, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’.

I refer to the humbler monoprint by Paul Klee, the ‘Angelus Novus’ (1920) or the new angel, that Benjamin rechristened as the ‘Angel of History’. The Angel of History has his back turned to the future, “as though he were about to distance himself from something which he is staring at” (IX).

What is he staring at, wide-eyed and open-mouthed? As Benjamin tells us, “His eyes are opened wide, his mouth stands open and his wings are outstretched. The Angel of History must look just so. His face is turned towards the past.”

What does the Angel of History see that we are unable to? “He would like to pause for a moment so fair, to awaken the dead and to piece together what has been smashed.”

Alas, he cannot. Why? Because he too cannot stop the onrush of kaala, of time: “But a storm is blowing from Paradise, it has caught itself up in his wings and is so strong that the Angel can no longer close them. The storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the rubble-heap before him grows sky-high. That which we call progress, is this storm.”

Now comes the climax of the passage and Benjamin’s ‘Concept of History’: “History is the object of a construction whose place is formed not in homogenous and empty time, but in that which is fulfilled by the here-and-now.”

Benjamin posited two kinds of time, “homogenous, empty time” and “Jetztzeit,” here and now. The former is filled up with an endless progression of events, pedestrian, banal, “facts.” The onward march of history.

But the latter is the very “hour of God,” to use Sri Aurobindo’s phrase, when time itself stands still (Stillstellung): “It is messianic zero-hour of events, or put differently, a revolutionary chance….” That is the time to act. To explode out of history a new epoch: “He takes cognisance of it in order to blast a specific era out of the homogeneous course of history.”

The ordinary history of the world, Benjamin reminds us, is always written by victors. As our National Security Advisor Ajit Doval famously said in one of his speeches decades ago, “There is a Babar Road in Delhi, but no Rana Sangha Road.”

We are reminded of Benjamin’s famous quip, “There is no document of civilisation which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.”

Each victorious generation builds itself on victories past, regardless of who the victors were. As Jawaharlal Nehru himself tried to do in New Delhi, a capital that he inherited from the British after the transfer of power.

But it is only when history comes to a standstill that the oppressed can take capture power through the violent shock of revolution.

Such a time is almost akin to the moment of incarnation, the messianic or avataric irruption of the vertical timelessness into the endless horizontality of mundane time.

Veer Savarkar, similarly, wanted to seize the moment, to turn victims into victors. Mahatma Gandhi, on the other hand, did not regard Indians as victims at all. He considered the so-called victors pitiable because of the unspeakable violence they unleashed not just upon their victims, but upon themselves.

Both looked to the past to help refashion India’s future.

What is the theological answer to terror? Is it Gandhi’s non-violence, which is another name for radical love? Or the counter-violence of Savarkar?

Or something entirely different, which does not exclude either?

Hindus had found the answer long back by discovering the Rasa of Terror, the Bhayanaka, even finding appropriate deities to worship it. The terrifying Kala Bhairava. Or Smashana Kali. And a host of other terrible deities who also migrated into contiguous faiths, such as Buddhism and beyond.

Hindus found a way to turn terror into pleasure, to enjoy even the thrill of terror. Thus to overcome it.

Only the Hindus dared to celebrate the rasa of terror. They partook of it to overcome the terror of terror. And the fear of death itself. As all victims of terror, including 9/11, are called upon to.

Defending HinduismHindusHumbler MonoprintIndian historyPaul Kleeterror