“What if India & Pakistan Had Joined Forces To Fight A War Against The British Empire”: The thrilling sub-genre of Alternate History (Part I)
One of my favourite genres is ‘alt-hist’. Or, to spell it out, Alternate History.
It’s often considered a sub-genre of Science Fiction, or, as some people prefer to call it, Speculative Fiction.
That’s because, most of the early alternate history stories were first published under the SF genre, the theory being, I guess, that SF readers were more open to such flights of imagination.
What is alternate history? In case you don’t know already, it’s historical fiction with a key fact changed. That’s a very broad and general, um, generalization. But it’s close enough.
Imagine, for instance, a novel set in the American South, around the time of the Civil War. The South is fighting a losing battle.
Suddenly, a mysterious group of people appear and offer the Southern generals a strange, wonderous new kind of weapon: an automatic gun.
Compared to the weapons currently in use, this amazing device can rip any Civil War army to shreds. And these mystery people are offering to supply as many automatic guns as the Southern army requires, in order to help them win the war.
This is the basic story of Guns of the South, the most popular, widest known Alternate History novel in recent times.
Published almost fifteen years ago, it became a massive bestseller and its author, a struggling fantasy and science fiction writer named Harry Turtledove, has since then gone on to write several series of Alternate History novels.
So much so that he’s now considered to be the ‘master’ of Alternate History.
Now, as you must have observed, the automatic weapons in Guns of the South come from the future. So it’s also a time-travel novel, in a sense.
That’s common of many Alternate History novels. They mix some element of SF, or Fantasy.
But the primary thrust is always on the historical retelling.
They say SF is the ‘What If’ genre.
As in, most SF novels ask the question, ‘What if…’
And then follow that idea through to its logical, even not-so-logical, quite incredible, but scientifically possible conclusion.
By that measure, Alternate History is the genre of ‘What might have happened if…’
So, for instance, we could postulate a world wherein India and Pakistan were never Partitioned, and instead the people of both lands united to oust the British invaders in a bloody war, just like the American War of Independence.
(Just as an aside, notice how the British are quite willing to call the American War of Secession, as it was once known, a war of “Independence”, but turn purple and blue and other colours when you try to call our own Indian War of Independence by the same name? “It was a bloody mutiny,” they rail and rant, “because India was a colony of the British Empire.” Well, my dear Onion Jack, so was America, wasn’t it? Yet they called it a War of Independence. So, accept it and deal with it, move on, okay?)
Or you could have a world wherein Hitler and Nazi Germany succeeded and ruled the world.
Or you could have a story about what might have happened if Asia had dominated the world rather than the western nations.
The possibilites are endless.
Alternate History is by definition an intelligent reader’s genre.
Because you have to first be interested in history itself. And then, you have to be mature enough to appreciate and enjoy historical fiction.
(It’s commonly enough known that anybody can read and understand non-fiction–the genre in which your daily newspaper is written, but it takes a greater intelligence and sophistication to appreciate fiction; the more sophisticated the ideas and sub-genre of fiction, the more intelligence required to appreciate it.)
Then, you have to know enough history, at least in the outline and basic details, to appreciate the thrill of the ‘What might have happened if…’ question.
So, for example, someone who doesn’t know that India and Pakistan were once a single country that was Partitioned through the machinations of British politics on the eve of Britain’s departure from these shores would probably not find much thrill in the notion of India and Pakistan working together to reject the idea of Partition and fighting the British side by side.
While anyone from this part of the world would probably get a kick out of the whole idea.
Imagine Jinnah and Gandhi working together to beat the Brits!
Imagine waging pitched battles against the Brits, and rebelling against them not just on the subcontinent but across the world–don’t forget, the second world war was going on at the same time as the last throes of our independence struggle.
Maybe some of you think it would be impossible. But who knows. Stranger things have happened in history itself.
So why not?
There’s a lot of Alternate History out there. A lot of it’s good stuff.
But a lot of it’s not really identifiable to Indian readers.
Let’s face it, who gives a shit about whether the American South won or the American North won.
There were still 10 million African slaves left rootless when the war was over, right? Not to mention the harrowing terror of racism that followed the Civil War, which was by no means restricted to the South.
Not to mention the decimated American Indian populations of the American continent.
And while Hitler certainly needed to be stopped by any means possible, what did the Allies do to prevent their allies during WWII, the Russians, from launching their own pogroms, resulting in the dreaded gulag camps, worse than concentration camps, and responsible for the death of as many if not more innocent Russians as the unfortunate Jews who died in Nazi pogroms?
Or the millions of innocents who were massacred by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia’s Killing Fields.
Or the millions being slaughtered today in the tribal wars in Africa’s central and western regions?
So, you’ll excuse me if I don’t buy into the American fantasy of their’s being the only Good and Right culture and everyone else being either outright Evil, or just plain too ignorant to come over to the American way of thinking.
The reason I mention this is because a lot of Alternate History fiction has this somewhat contentious US-centric viewpoint.
That’s because most Alternate History fiction is written by American authors.
And it’s written postulating ideas for stories set in worlds which are often thinly disguised ‘Us Versus Them’ stories.
Except that the US always stands for the USA, not US as in humankind in general.
And ‘Them’ always stands for any other culture that’s non-USA.
If you can overlook that pig-headed viewpoint, Alternate History novels can be pretty entertaining. In a way, they actually expose this Americancentric way of thinking and shine an interesting light on the current American megalomania, the Bush dream of a worldwide American Empire, underwritten by McDonalds and Ruffles Lays and Pepsi, and enforced by American-controlled World Bank aid and trade agreements and of course, well-timed wars in regions that control resources vital to American development, like, for instance, oil reserves.
But let’s put aside the politics for a moment (hard to do because most Alternate History, like most History, is about politics, but let’s try anyway) and look at some of the books in this sub-genre worth reading.
In the next part of this series, I’m going to list some of my favourite alt-hist authors and books.
(…to be continued)
This entry was posted on Monday, August 29th, 2005 at 7:42 pm. It is filed under Ashok.
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