Sengupta Et Al, Anxieties Influences and After Critical

ANXIETIES, INFLUENCES AND AFTER
Critical Responses to
Postcolonialism and Neocolonialism
ANXIETIES, INFLUENCES AND AFTER
Critical Responses to
Postcolonialism and Neocolonialism
Edited by
Kaustav Bakshi
Samrat Sengupta
Subhadeep Paul
Contents
Preface ix
Postcolonialism: Charting the Uncanny xii
Introduction
SAMRAT SENGUPTA & KAUSTAV BAKSHI 1
THEMES AND VARIATIONS
At the Rendezvous of Conquest: Post-colonial 16

Possibilities and the Anxiety of Inference
KRISHNA SEN
Worldview Publications
An Imprint of Book Land Publishing Co. Post-colonial Studies: The New Intellectual Imperialism? 32
Delhi : 58 UB Bungalow Road, Delhi-11000 7 (INDIA) NILANJANA DEB
Kolkata : 510, Keyatala Road, Kolkata-700029
The Debate over Authenticity: How Indian is Indian 43
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be Writing in English, and How Much Does This Matter?
reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any RIMI B. CHATTERJEE
form or by any means, without written permission The Volatile Power-Equation: 61
from the publishers. W(h)ither Postcolonialism?/Whether Neocolonialism?
SUBHADEEP PAUL
(c) Collections, Worldview Publications, 2009
Individual Essays (c) contributors TEXTS AND CONTEXTS
ISBN 10: Premchand in Our Times: A Postcolonial 83
ISBN 13: Reading of Godaan
ANAND PRAKASH
Typreset by Illuminati, Delhi-110007 The Flight of the Eunuch: Mapping Homotextualities 91

Published by Sachin Rastogi for Book Land Publishing Co., in South Asian Diaspora Literature
Delhi-110007 printed at D. K. Fine Art Press (P) Ltd., Delhi ANIRUDDHA MAITRA
vi | Contents Contents | vii
The Decent Impulse: A Study of the 114 Postcolonial Detective: The Crisis of European 253
Father-Daughter Relationship as a Sign of Epistemology in Ngugi wa Thiongos Petals of Blood
J. M. Coetzees Response to Apartheid SAMRAT SENGUPTA
ARPA GHOSH
Lest We Forget: Colonial Voices and the Great War 266
The Unchartered Territory: A Comparative Study of 128 SANTANU DAS
Toni Morrisons The Bluest Eye and Buchi Emechetas
The Slave Girl Society and Political Environment in Shyam Selvadurais 286
CHANDRANI BISWAS Cinnamon Gardens
SAYANTAN DASGUPTA
Sitting on the Dust, Singing by the Road: 142
Writing Women in the Postcolonial Era Indian English Poetry in the Wake of Postcolonialism: 307
EPSITA HALDER A New Perspective
SHARMISTHA CHATTERJEE SRIWASTAV
An Impossible Choice: The Ethical Aporia in 164
The English Patient Possibility of Negotiation: Postcolonial Impasse in 322
KALLOL RAY Mahasweta Devi
SHREYA CHAKRAVORTY
Localizing the Global: Anxieties of Preserving 185
National Culture in the Globalized World of The Archetypal Psychomestry of Othering and Violence 334
Kuch Kuch Hota Hai in The Inheritance of Loss
KAUSTAV BAKSHI SISIR KUMAR CHATTERJEE
In Search of Swaraj: A Gandhian Reading of 202 Ezekiel and His Kind: Reflections on 358
R. K. Narayans The Guide Indian Poetry in English
NANDINI BHATTACHARYA SOMAK GHOSHAL
Karnad, South Indian Folk Theatre and Hayavadana 214

To say or not to say: Bildungsroman and Repressed 367
PARICHAY PATRA
Narratives in Jean Rhys Wide Sargasso Sea and
Trailokyanath Mukhopadhyayas Kankaboti
Prelude to Postcolonial Awareness: Krishnachandra 222
SREEMOYEE BANERJEE
Bhattacharyyas Swaraj in Ideas
PRADIP BASU
Politics of Nation and Community in 386
Gloria Naylors Mama Day: A Postcolonial 242 Selected Partition Narratives
Feminist Tempest SURANJANA CHOUDHURY
PRITHA CHAKRABORTY
viii | Contents
IN CONVERSATION Preface
Of New Centers and Old Margins: The Limits 394
of the Postcolonial
BILL ASHCROFT IN CONVERSATION WITH DEBASISH LAHIRI
I think they call me a postcolonial dramatist 405

because I write in English Ardent fans of literature, all three of us found our true calling when
MAHESH DATTANI IN CONVERSATION WITH SATARUPA RAY we were introduced to postcolonial studies. This is because we could
easily identify with the conditions of postcoloniality and the discussions
Editors and Contributors 410 surrounding them. We could feel almost palpably the necessity of the
empire writing back. On the other hand, our friends, initially proud
employees of Transnational Companies, started taking away few hours
of our day, almost daily, eternally complaining about their employers
and how they are mindlessly exploited. Quite a few of them had to
leave the country (some left willingly too) and settled abroad, mostly
in the United States. Soon more whinges flowed in through e-mails
and phone calls: how difficult was it to survive in a foreign country,
how inhumanly racist some whites were, unavailability of servants,
total lack of proper community life, inedible canned food, and a life
too fast to keep up. However, these complaints arrived mostly after
three-four months of stay in the US, when the dreamland had
sufficiently deteriorated into perdition. Once the dream paradise was
lost, the homeland left behind, all of a sudden, emerged as a new space
of desire. Again there were quite a few who hung on to the constructed
dream figment that is America, and stayed on, looking upon their
present situation as better than a dark homeland, still lagging behind,
in terms of wealthy living. While all these happened in our
neighbourhood, literary authors, filmmakers, painters, musicians, and
dramatists of the former colonies of American or European origin
kept on arriving in large numbers, wittingly or unwittingly addressing
in their works the present political and socio-cultural environment.
The book world began to be flooded with theoretical discourses and
arguments on Postcolonialism and Neocolonialism. Our bookshelves
too were soon populated with these.
And then, one evening in the Jadavpur University campus, we
x | Preface Preface | xi
hit upon the idea of this book. But the idea almost died as soon as work on Dattani in a fortnight and sent the playwright a long list of
it was born; for, our minds were assailed by the disturbing thought questions. Surprisingly enough, Dattani reverted back with the
that who was going to publish us. We shared our doubts with Pritha answers in a week. It seemed to us that all the battles were finally
Chakraborty, Lecturer in English, Durgapur Govt. College. She called won.
up her friend Anupama Moitra who redirected us to Sachin Rastogi It took three-four months for that grand idea to germinate, and
of Worldview. We were pleasantly surprised that Sachin showed in the next five months we spent sleepless nights hurrying our
interest in our project and agreed to take it up. What followed was contributors up and giving them sleepless nights too. Yet, a question
a Herculean task of gathering the right kind of essays conforming still kept nagging some cynics who repeatedly asked us why another
thematically to the title of our book. In this, we were whole-heartedly book on Postcolonialism and Neocolonialism. We humbly asked them
supported by our teachers who contributed some of their best papers. to wait for the book.
Krishna Sen, Nilanjana Deb, Nandini Bhattacharya, Rimi B.
Chatterjee, Epsita Halder, Sayantan Dasgupta and Chandrani Biswas December, 2008 Kaustav Bakshi
have all taught us, and were quite glad to be a part of our book. Many Kolkata Samrat Sengupta
of our scholarly friends working in this field also joined us and put Subhadeep Paul
in their best efforts. Special mention should be made of Suranjana
Choudhury who assisted us in editing and Indranil Mitra who kept
on boosting the project emotionally and morally. Such senior people
like Pradip Basu and Santanu Das whose guidance we seek now and
then also came on board.
We were initally not sure whether people like Bill Ashcroft and
Mahesh Dattani would consent to be a part of this project, owing
to there various academic and creative commitments. While dreaming
of a grand book, one of us casually said one day that what about
bringing in Bill Ashcroft. We laughed at such a proposition, but
somehow we felt that it might happen. By Gods grace, as it were,
Krishna Sen introduced us to Debasish Lahiri, a good friend of
Ashcroft. He was quite excited at the proposal and immediately set
to work. He kept on sending e-mails to the fiercely mobile Ashcroft
who answered the questions from various locations. In fact, Ashcrofts
interview was one of the earliest papers to arrive. When we managed
to secure Ashcrofts interview, we became more daring. Looking at
the content page of our book we found that we did not have many
papers on postcolonial drama. We thought of interviewing Mahesh
Dattani. And when it comes to interviewing high profile authors we
can think of none other than Satarupa Ray. She finished her ground
Introduction
Samrat Sengupta & Kaustav Bakshi
Colonial past / Neocolonial present
Joseph Conrads narrator Marlow, before embarking on a journey to

Africa, the dark continent, takes a retrospective glance at Britains past.
The seat of the greatest colonial power of the world, he observes, was
one of the dark places of the earth1. What Africa is to Britain today,
Britain was to Rome yesterday:
I was thinking of very old times, when the Romans first came here, nineteen
hundred years ago the other dayLight came out of this river since you
say Knights? Yes; but it is like a running blaze on a plain, like flashing of
lightning in the clouds. We live in the flicker may it last as long as the old
earth keeps rolling! But darkness was here yesterdaySand-banks, marshes,
forests, savages, precious little to eat fit for a civilised man, nothing but
Thames water to drinkcold, fog, tempests, disease, exile, and death, death
sulking in the air, in the water, in the bush.2
Marlows tale underscores the fact that colonization of the powerless by

the powerful, to put it naively, has a history so elaborate that it can
be traced back to the beginning of time. Yet when we talk about
colonization, we compress that history considerably, and tend to fix a
date of its initiation: the expansion of Europe with the noble mission
of Christianizing the world and exploration of commercial possibilities
overseas. The process, which officially began, say, in the late fifteenth
and early sixteenth centuries, never really stopped. A tripartite
restructuring of the world in terms of core/semi-periphery/periphery was
envisaged when parts of Western Europe began establishing economic
bonds with other countries of the globe, spurred by technological
innovation and the rise of market institutions, owing to a long-term
2 | Anxieties, Influences and After
crisis in feudalism. This marks the foundation of the modern World

System, consolidated in its current form in the mid seventeenth century.
This tripartite structure was not demolished after the formal
decolonization of former colonies after the Second World War. While
the locations of the core, semi-periphery and periphery changed, with
the emergence of the United States as a hegemonic power, and the rise
of wealthy industrial countries like Japan, the nature of the relationship
hardly altered.3
Vasco da Gamas arrival in India, in a way, marks the beginning
of formal colonization. The Portuguese epic poem Os Lusadas by Lus
Vaz de Cames (sometimes spelled Camoens in English) that celebrates
this grand voyage of the facundo capito (the eloquent captain), and
the consequent conquest of India by the Portuguese, is one of the most
significant literary works eulogizing the colonial enterprise. What makes
this poem particularly interesting is that the poet identifies the possibilities
of resistance this grandiloquent Western project might encounter. While
Vasco da Gama is assisted by Venus, he is strongly resisted by Bacchus,
associated with the East, and who deeply begrudges the infringement
of his territories. In fact, several cantos of the poem are devoted to the
various tricks and maneuverings to which Bacchus resorts in order to
oppose Vasco da Gamas passage to India. However, the Portuguese
captain surmounts all obstacles and lands in the Indian city of Calicut.
Os Lusadas, therefore, becomes prophetic: it forecasts the revolt the
Empire might rise to against its colonial master. And, as it is now well-
known, that Lus Vaz de Cames was right. The Empire did revolt, and
successfully oust the colonizers. But alas! The colonizers physical
disappearance did not really assure independence. An everlasting bond
had been solemnized: Bacchus had been defeated forever.
The colonizer no longer has his national flag flying high in the land
of the colonized. Yet he makes his presence felt so overwhelmingly, and
has entered into the consciousness of the colonial subject in such a way,
that the physical existence of the flag seems redundant. In fact, the
inhabitants of the former colonies still revel in the glory of independence,
hardly realizing their subjugated status. To quote the much-quoted Said:
(I)mperialismlingers where it has always been, in a kind of general
cultural sphere as well as in specific political, ideological, economic and
Introduction | 3
social practices.4 Therefore, the very use of the term postcolonial is

barely unproblematic. The formal dissolution of colonial rule bred high
hopes for the newly independent countries, but it wasnt long before
that they realized that the West hadnt yet given up on them they
were still tied to the West, economically, politically, ideologically. A true
post-colonial age never really came. While countries like India still
celebrate their so-called Independence Day ostentatiously, they are still
handcuffed to the Western powers. That is why, a Nuclear Deal with
the United States, all of a sudden and quite vehemently, jeopardizes the
subsistence of a coalition government in India, when the Left threatens
to walk out, contending that Indias increasing proximity to the US
is a recipe fiery enough to singe the countrys future and endanger its
sovereignty (as if India hadnt lost its sovereignty already).5 This anxiety
of losing sovereignty is not only specific to India, but all the former
colonies of the world (with the exceptions of perhaps Canada, Australia,
and New Zealand, the white settler colonies). Says Jane N. Jacobs:
Formal postcolonial status is a product of imperial cores conceding power over
colonized territories. More often than not structures of neo-colonialism
provided the very preconditions for such gestures of decolonization...
Contemporary resettlements and reterritorialisations undo the geographies of
colonialism. Yet diasporic groups, citizens of the newly independent nations
and indigenous peoples still face the force of neo-colonial formations and live
life shaped by the ideologies of domination and the practices of prejudice
established by imperialism.6
These social, political, ideological or military tie-ups between the

imperial cores and the colonies have transformed every form of culture
in such a way that they have lost their indigenousness: no form of culture
is uncontaminated or homogenous any more. All forms of art
literature, painting, music, cinema are informed by this phenomenon.
Hybridity is the order of the day; the possibilities of the nation-state
losing its cultural identity (as well as its political identity) are imminent;
this has bred tremendous anxieties in the former colonies, the diasporic
communities, the host countries harbouring these communities, and so
forth. In fact, globalization of the world has not erased differences;
rather, it has reconstituted and revalidated place, locality and difference.7
The main title of the book Anxieties, Influences, and After takes its
cue, as is evident, from the title of Harold Blooms celebrated book The
Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (1973). Although Blooms project
apparently has no connection with the phenomenon of colonialism/
postcolonialism/neocolonialism, his central thesis that every poet shares
an ambiguous relationship with his predecessors, and is bound to
produce poetry which is derivative of what already exists, can be
extended to the nature of relationship between the colonial master and
the colonized subject. The anxiety of influence a poet suffers from is
scarcely different from the anxiety the colonized subject suffers under
the unavoidable influence of the colonial masters culture. The colonial
master, on the other hand, is always on guard, for he too resists, rather
consciously, any influence of the colonial subjects culture upon its own.
But hybridization cannot be resisted successfully. The anxiety of
influence is even more palpable in the present-day world. To quote Arjun
Appadurai:
For with the advent of the steamship, the automobile and the aeroplane, the
camera, the computer and the telephone, we have entered into an altogether
new condition of neighbourliness, even with the most distant from
ourselvesThe world we live in now seems rhizomic, even schizophrenic,
calling for theories of rootlessness, alienation and psychological distance
between the individuals and groups on the one hand, and fantasies (or
nightmares) of electronic propinquity on the other.8
The Freudian concept of the male childs oedipal hostility towards the
father, the symbol of authority, yet his irresistible desire to model himself
on that figure, is the root of Blooms theory of the anxiety of influence.
The same ambiguous relationship is observed between the colonial
subject (the male child) and the colonial master (the father); the former
while inclined towards overthrowing the master, is deeply influenced by
the same and makes an attempt to shape himself accordingly. This in
turn breeds profound anxieties, both in the colonial subject and the
colonial master. Postcolonial and neocolonial discourses are, therefore,
by default, characterized by similar kinds of anxieties which this book
thoroughly examines. This volume would contribute in a small way to
the gigantic body of works on postcolonialism (and also neocolonialism)
that already exists. The following section makes an attempt to establish
the significance of this venture.
Introduction | 5
Postcolonialism and All That
One of the basic principles of postcolonial thinking is that you really should
not say, one of the basic principles of X is Y. Postcolonialism in its
epistemological orientation, stands against what it labels essentialism, the
identification of central or core characteristics, particularly of peoples, societies,
and cultures. However adhering to this prohibition makes it difficult to identify
or discuss anything, including postcolonialism.9
In the discourse of postcolonial studies the omnipresence of the shadow

of colonialism is widely acknowledged. The ethically ambiguous position
of postcolonial scholarship is manifest in Mbembes expression
postcolony10 that considers the existence of colonial and imperial power
structures in altered form which makes the world a postcolony. The
gesture of challenging the dominant power structures made by the
postcolonial studies is challenged often with a tendency to read
postcolonial as mere ideology11 as Neil Lazarus comments based on
Kwame Anthony Appiahs attack on postcoloniality as a comprador
intelligentsia: of a relatively small, Western style, Western-trained group
of writers and thinkers who mediate the trade in cultural commodities
of world capitalism at the periphery.12 However, any such essentialization
of postcolonial studies is difficult as it itself by its own making resists
essentialism. Ania Loomba and her co-editors in Postcolonialism and
Beyond suggest that it charts a path between utopianism and hip-
defeatism.13 Justifying the title of the volume, they quote Peter Hulme
in the Introduction:
So one of the fundamental beyonds suggested by my title is an encouragement
to strip off the straightjacket of those accounts and definitions of postcolonial
studies that simplify and narrow its range to the work of a handful of theorists
and a handful of novelists.14
It is needed to remember that postcolonialism doesnt specifically and

always speak about a historical period of European colonialism specifically
and always. Colonialism acts as a metaphor of cultural and epistemological
domination where truth value is ascribed to any one particular set of
values or knowledge system to hegemonize the other. Postcolonialism
resists any form of absolutism and considers the subject as an effect of
many intersecting discursive domains. For example, Feminist Postcolonial

theory in spite of declaring itself as a part of postcolonial studies criticizes
its dominant modes. The predominance of male-oriented theories in the
postcolonial canon itself is regulated by the logic of colonialism which
is patriarchal and heterosexist in nature. So the necessity for discussions
on feminist postcolonial writing is deeply felt. Reina Lewis and Sara
Mills in the Introduction of Feminist Postcolonial Theory: A Reader
comment:
But, as postcolonial studies has become established in the Western academywe
note that the dynamism of feminism provided for the early development of
critical studies in colonialism, imperialism, race and power has often been
overlooked. It is far more common to see allegiances proffered to the line of
male greats (for example, Frantz Fanon, Edward Said and Homi Bhabha) than
to acknowledge the contributions of women scholars and activists (such as
Angela Davis, Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde or bell hooks15
Complete freedom from colonial knowledge structures might not be

possible, but postcolonialism attempts to subvert and question those
presuppositions finding out new tools of analysis and collaborating with
other disciplines. The oft considered centre stage of postcolonialism
the idea of decolonization as proposed by anti-colonial thinkers like
Fanon has an air of absolutism about it. Therefore the idea of
decolonization as redemptive violence is rejected by Dipesh Chakrabarty.
He intelligently suggests that postcolonialism is a process of transition
from the colonial to the postcolonial as (i)n an actual historical
context...the colonizer and colonized are often engaged in a hybridizing
encounter.16 However, postcolonial scholarship cannot remain confined
to the history of colonial encounter particularly and is transhistorical.
Colonialism is important as long as it suggests the influence of European
metahistories to make us think in terms of the binaries of colonizer/
colonized, master/slave, civilized/savage, where one set of terms is
preferred over the other.
With the independence of the former European colonies the hopes
and aspirations of a society ideally free from all forms of domination
reached its zenith. However, as Neil Lazarus realizes, Independence was
a hoax. It signified a refinement of the colonial system, not its
Introduction | 7
abolition.17 We observe a new revolutionary Idealism based on Marxist

ideology emerging in the late 60s as an aftereffect of the failure of the
nationalist spirit which however was defeated eventually. The description
of the postcolonial condition with the failure of the ideals of nationalism
and Marxism given by Neil Lazarus where he says, After 1975, as many
commentators have observed, political sentiment in the West tended to
turn against Nationalist insurgency and revolutionary anti-capitalism
and which explains eventually the strong anti-nationalist and anti-
Marxist dispositions of most of the scholars working with postcolonial
studies18 corresponds to what Sunil Gangopadhyay says in the
introduction of an anthology of Bangla short stories published by
Sahitya Akademy. He says:
The country will be given a new shape; India will occupy the centre stage
of the World. The smugglers will be hanged over the lamp-post, there will
be no caste difference, the difference between the rich and the poor will be
minimized, right to education and health will be equally available to everyone.
But alas! Such golden days never came to the youth of that time19
The idea of the sovereignty of the nation-state is put into question.

Postcolonialism attempts to question the existing modes of domination
and establishes relation between the past and the present. The failure
of nationalist and Marxist idealism is not only conditioned by the late
capitalism but it is also a product of a certain way of uncritically
appropriating European knowledge/power system in those discourses
that tend to exclude the presence of the other voices in history. The
rise of postcolonial studies, therefore, not only helps us to study the
present postcolonial condition but also in a way identify the ghost of
the Western knowledge system that uncannily haunts the present.
Academic postcolonial scholarship eventually helps determining many
other postcolonialisms in different disciplines and in different countries.
In the discourse of postcolonialism different ways of legitimizing and
normalizing of a particular kind of knowledge system in several other
discourses is measured and contested. The fundamental problem is it
cannot be contained into any one predetermined discipline or
understanding. In the given figure we have tried to produce a rough
family tree of the multiplicity of postcolonial studies which shows the
varied range of disciplines and spatio-temporal zones it refers to.

However, it must be admitted that any such charting would be like
holding infinity in the palm of your hand and can never be complete.
Postcolonialism is still in the process of discovering its boundaries and
there are many areas yet to be explored adequately.
As the chart shows much of the theoretical foundations of postcolonial
scholarship are derived from the wests own self-criticism of its knowledge
system. The literary and cultural foundation on the other hand, has been
formulated in the productions of the previously colonized nations.
However we believe that some of the theoretical writings must have been
produced by the colonized, yet to be discovered: Dr. Pradip Basus
discussion of Krishnachandra Bhattacharyyas Swaraj in Ideas included
in our anthology, is only one instance of indigenous theorization.
The major influences of Postcolonialism are Foucauldian idea of
discourse, Marxist scholarship reflected through British Cultural Studies
and Gramscian-Althusserian ideas of hegemony and ideological state
apparatus, poststructuralism and postmodernism. Lacanian interpretations
of Freudian psychoanalysis considering subject as an effect of language
resists any essentialization of subjectivity and therefore the marginalization
of the other and helps in forming the theoretical base of postcolonialism.
Foucaults concept of discourse talks about the particular way of
producing and justifying a system of knowledge which normalizes its
basic premise and assumptions and evades questions regarding its
foundation. Man is an effect of a great many such discourses which
produces human subjectivity. Colonialism can be thought of as one such
knowledge system which however should be studied together and in
relation to other similar systems like capitalism or patriarchy which carry
the same legacy of European Enlightenment. Discussing Foucaults
What is Enlightenment? Leela Gandhi questions western epistemological
binary of mature and the immature sanctioned by Kant and shows the
relevance of Foucaults idea in postcolonial scholarship:
Postcolonial theory recognizes that colonial discourse typically rationalises itself
through rigid oppositions such as maturity/immaturity, civilization/barbarism,
developed/developing, progressive/primitive.20
Introduction | 9
When Derrida talks about differance, he on the basis of Saussearean

linguistics suggests that language works through a constant process of
difference and deference and the difference of a word gets infinitely
deferred from the other words in the vocabulary. It challenges the
western epistemological obsession with truth and helps in the postcolonial
understanding of the politics of signifier and the formation of meaning
and attribution of truth-value. Derrida through his reading of Heidegger
deconstructs the western metaphysics of presence and talks about an
absence which precedes the Being. Deconstruction resists any close
reading of the text (considering the textuality of any discourse) and
therefore paves way for postcolonial challenges to all hegemonic discourses.
Following critics like Homi K. Bhabha and Robert Young it is hard to
forget that
Postcolonial thought has combined the radical heritage of such theory
[Structuralism and Poststructuralism] with further ideas and perspectives from
tricontinental writers, together with other writers who have emigrated from
decolonized tricontinental countries to the west.21
Another example of this congruence would be the adaptation of

Gramscian idea of hegemony by postcolonialists which helped in the
understanding and theorization of Indian peasant insurgencies. David
Arnold suggests that the concept of hegemony provided Gramsci with
an explanation of why peasants remained disunited and passive.22 The
domination was internalized by the peasants themselves as a part of their
culture and their consciousness. However the Subaltern Studies scholars
like Ranajit Guha or Partha Chatterjee, however, repeatedly talk about
the dominance without hegemony23 operating amongst Indian subalterns
owing to the presence of a mediating, educated, bourgeois, middle class,
who could not rise above their immediate class interests and give pace
to the subaltern cause to establish a genuine hegemony in the Gramscian
sense. Following British historians (like Christopher Hill or E. P.
Thompson) writing working class history, Ranajit Guha believes that
peasant revolts should not be disengaged from peasant consciousness as
the risk in turning things upside down was indeed so great that he
could hardly afford to engage in such a project in a state of absent-
mindedness24. David Arnold quotes Raymond Williams and comments:

A lived hegemony, he argues, is always a process. It is not a rigid, all-
encompassing, unchallenged structure, but has continually to be renewed, re-
created, defended, and modified. There are always non-hegemonic or counter-
hegemonic values at work to resist, restrict and qualify the operations of the
hegemonic order.25
Theorists of British Cultural Studies like Raymond Williams have also

brought into attention the importance of cultural texts which might
throw a new light on history. The Cultural Materialists and New
Historicists engage in the study of literary and cultural texts and extract
the cultural assumptions, biases and politics. Cultural studies have tried
to break free the disciplinary and discursive barriers of scholarship which
tend to normalize itself through a humanist reading of literature and
culture. The Gramscian idea of hegemony should be studied in relation
to Althusserian concept of Ideological State Apparatus (ISA)26 ISAs
function in the normalization of a discourse and resist questions put
forth to its basic premises and assumptions which are culture specific.
The concept of ISA also interprets the failure of a revolution like the
student revolution in France in 1968-69. It describes how we are
hemmed in the postmodern condition where capitalism and cultural
imperialism chain our mind to ideas and structures internalized by us
(refer to Krishna Sens and Pritha Chakrabartys essays in this book).
This is important for the understanding of the so-called colonized mind,
ideologically dominated by the language and truth-values of the colonizer
and also for the realization of US cultural imperialism which following
western essentialist humanist tradition takes on the guise of liberalism
and markets its ideas to the rest of the world to which we get culturally
bound. Edward Saids Orientalism27 influenced by Foucault, Gramsci
and Althusser has shown how Europe generated the Orient as a
conceptual category in its discourses. This helps the postcolonialists to
understand the colonial power politics of the self and the other, and
also the subaltern studies scholars to study the fragmentariness and
hybrid formation of subaltern consciousness where they retain their
community identities based on tradition, religion, caste, etc without
essentializing them as a binary to the so-called civilized, educated and
Introduction | 11
emancipated.
The myth of a unified subject trying to model himself as an ideal
white, male, Eurocentric Man is demystified repeatedly in postcolonial
discourses. The discussion so far shows the impossibility of determining
the disciplinary boundaries of postcolonial discourse. Postcolonialism is
characterized by a kind of self-effacement which provides a resistance
to the formation of grand narratives. More often it is thought that
postcolonial skepticism might be the plea of the American imperialist
and multinationalist grand narrative who in the guise of a multicultural
model of tolerance actually promotes a universalistic culture that would
redefine the marginal cultures according to the logic of a consumerist
market economy. The varied range of arguments and debates and various
disciplines and subjects postcolonialism encompasses might make one
skeptical about what it really means. In the Introduction of his book
Refashioning Futures David Scott uses a quote from Stuart Hall which
says: Im not afraid of positionalities. I am afraid of taking positionalities
too seriously28. The problem of clearly making its positionality
understood is crucial for postcolonialism. Using Quentin Skinners
reading of R. J. Collingwoods philosophy Scott quotes from the former:
(T)he history of thought should be viewed not as a series of attempts to answer
a canonical set of questions, but as a sequence of episodes in which the
questions as well as the answers have frequently changed.29
Following this proposition it is important to understand how

postcolonialism has evolved and has given birth to its new avatars
depending on the time, place and situation. Simultaneously, therefore,
its object of critical enquiry and set of questions have also changed.
The central logic of this discipline is however the reversal of gaze.
It constantly looks at the peripheral. A characteristic of postcolonial
politics is the politics of becoming the centre. If the focus shifts towards
the periphery it ceases to be marginal any more. It is re-appropriated
and reinstated to its position at the centre. But every time this happens
a new kind of postcolonialism shall emerge. Postcolonialism shares its
post with postmodernism insofar as there is always a postponement
of the final moment of truth a Derridean deference of the meaning.
The identity of the postcolonial studies is therefore relational. It
constantly refers back to a colonial moment with respect to which it

is postcolonial. The colonial knowledge system acts as a philosophical
absence-presence. The irreducible colonial in each and every moment
of the postcolonial creates or helps to create a new version of
Postcolonialism with respect to the realization of that residual colonial.
So, the colonial is inextricably assimilated with the postcolonial.
Therefore, we have done away with the famous hyphen.
With the variety of sub-genres and neo-critical perspectives placed
under the banner of Postcolonialism everyday, this branch of study then
becomes a constant substitution of signs in a constant flux of evolving
meanings. Postcolonialism is a system of study that points out towards
a new process of understanding and therefore creates the possibility of
decision making but never does the same actually. This, however, makes
it unfailingly productive. Some of the sub-genres of this discipline are
Orientalism, Diasporic Studies, Globalization and Transnational theories,
Hybridity and Multiculturalism, Postcolonial Feminism and Subaltern
studies. In the chart provided with this essay we have shown the
influence and relation of subaltern studies with postcolonialism only in
order to capture the influence of other western critical theories which
got disseminated into postcolonialism through it and also because of
the status of Subaltern studies as an acknowledged academic programme
organized by a particular group of scholars that, however, later got
dispersed and shared its territory with postcolonialism. The other
disciplines studied under Postcolonial studies we shall avoid discussing
in details as the various articles included in this book shall demonstrate
those theories in action and shall determine the immense potential and
wide range of the subject which shall be put under-erasure/under-
creation every time. The success of the book and also therefore the
discipline shall depend on perjury and not on loyalty as Derrida talks
about the relation between fidelity and betrayal. He explains how he
poses his loyalty to thinkers like Freud or Heidegger through betrayal:
Within the experience of following them there is something other, something
new, or something different which occurs and which I sign. Thats what I call
counter-signA counter-signature is this strange alliance between following
and not-following, confirming and displacing; and displacing is the only way
Introduction | 13
to pay homage, to do justice. If I just repeat, if I interpret following as just

repetition, following in a way, just repeating not animating, its another way
of betraying.30
The contributors of this book have tried to pay homage and to enrich
the field of postcolonial studies through this process of counter-signature
where they have repeatedly questioned, defied and thus recreated the
canon as it is formed in the academic west. Apart from studying the
texts and issues already included as a part of postcolonial pedagogy,
readings of Mahasweta Devis fiction or Trailokyanath Mukhopadhyays
novel have created indigenous versions of postcolonialism as well as
unearthed hidden potential of such possibilities in bhasha literatures of
Indian subcontinent. Kaustav Bakshis study of a popular Hindi film
has also exposed the cultural legacy of colonial assumptions still scattered
in popular discourses of Indian culture and society. Interdisciplinarity
of postcolonialism is repeatedly experienced in several articles of the
book which explores the discipline from philosophical, historical or
anthropological approaches. Above all we hope this book shall add on
to and curve a new path for the immense potential of this field which
we believe is yet to be realized.
Notes
1. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, edited by S. Satpathy, (New Delhi:

Worldview, 2001), 5.
2. Ibid., 6.
3. See Immanuel Wallerstein, Modern World-System: Capitalist Agriculture and
the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New
York: Academic Press, 1974) and The Essential Wallerstein (New York: New
York Press, 2000).
4. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Chatto and Windus,
1993), 8.
5. Seema Sihori, Whats There to Hyde, Really? in Outlook, September 3,
2007, 42.
6. Jane M. Jacobs, (Post)Colonial Spaces, in The Spaces of Postmodernity:
Readings in Human Geography, edited by M. J. Dear and S. Flusty (Oxford
and Massachusetts: Blackwell, 2002), 193.
7. See M. J. Watts, Mapping meaning, denoting difference, imagining

identity: dialectical images and postmodern geographies, in Geografiska
Annaler 73B (1991), 7-16.
8. Arjun Appadurai, Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural
Economy (1990) in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader,
edited by Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (Hertfordshire: Harvester
Wheatsheaf, 1993), 325.
9. Philip Carl Salzman, Postcolonialism in Encyclopedia of Anthropology,
edited by H. James Birx (New Delhi: Sage Publications Ltd., 2006), 1912.
10. See Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (CA: University of California Press,
2001) discussed in The Postcolonial Challenge by Couze Venn (London:
Sage Publications, 2006), 4.
11. See Neil Lazarus, Introducing postcolonial studies in Postcolonial Literary
Studies, edited by Neil Lazarus (New York: Cambridge University Press,
2004), 5.
12. See Kwame Anthony Appiah, In My Fathers House: Africa in the Philosophy
of Culture (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 149.
13. See Ania Loomba, Suvir Kaul, Matti Bunzl, Antoinette Burton and Jed
Esty, Beyond What? An Introduction in Postcolonialism and Beyond,
edited by Ania Loomba et al. (Duke University Press, 2005), 4.
14. Peter Hulme quoted in Ania Loomba et al, Beyond What? An Introduction,
4.
15. Reina Lewis and Sara Mills, Introduction in Feminist Postcolonial Theory:
A Reader (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003), 1.
16. Dipesh Chakraborty, Introduction in From the Colonial to the Postcolonial:
India and Pakistan in Transition, edited by Dipesh Chakraborty, Rochona
Majumdar and Andrew Sartori (New Delhi: Oxford University Press,
2007), 3.
17. Neil Lazarus, Great Expectations and after: The Politics of Postcolonialism
in African Fiction in Social Text, No. 13/14, Winter-Spring, 1986, 55.
18. See Neil Lazarus, Introducing postcolonial studies, 5.
19. Translated by me from Sunil Gangopadhyay Bhumika(Introduction) in
Bangla Golpo Sankalan Volume IV: An anthology of Bengali short stories,
compiled and edited by Sunil Gangopaphyay (New Delhi: Sahitya Akademy,
2006), 1. The original Bengali text from which the translation is made
is as follows:
Notunbhabe desh gora hobe, bharot abar jogoto shobhay sreshto ashon
lobe Shomosto chorakarbarider phashite jhuliye dewa hobe rastar lampposte,
Introduction | 15
e desher nagarikder modhey sreni boishommo thakbe na, dhoni o doridrer

modhey byabodhan ghuchiye ana hobe, shiksha o shastho-parishebar
shoman odhikar pabe shomosto manush. Kintu hay, totkalin kishor-
kishorira temon shonali din dekhar sujog payni.
20. Leela Gandhi, Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction (Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 1999), 32.
21. Robert Young, Postcolonialism: A Historical Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell,
2001) 67-68. Also consult Simon Gikandi, Poststructuralism and
postcolonial discourse in Postcolonial Literary Studies, edited by Neil
Lazarus, and Eleanor Byrne, Postmodernism and the postcolonial world
in The Routledge Companion to Postmodernism, edited by Stuart Sim
(London and New York: 2005) for further ideas on postcolonialisms
relation with postmodernist and poststructuralist critical theories.
22. See David Arnold, Gramsci and Peasant Subalternity in India in Mapping
Subaltern Studies, edited by Vinayak Chaturvedi (London and New York:
Verso, 2000), 24-49.
23. See Ranajit Guha, Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in
Colonial India (London: Harvard University Press, 1997).
24. Ranajit Guha, The Prose of Counter Insurgency in Selected Subaltern
Studies, edited by Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (New York
and London: Oxford University Press, 1988), 45.
25. David Arnold, Gramsci and Peasant Subalternity in India, 36.
26. See Louis Althusser, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes
towards an Investigation in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays,
translated by Ben Brewster (London: New Left Books, 1971), 127-86.
27. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1978).
28. Stuart Hall, Politics, Contingency, Strategy quoted in David Scott,
Refashioning Futures: Criticism after Postcoloniality (Princeton, New Jersey:
Princeton University Press, 1999), 3.
29. Quentin Skinner, A Reply to My Critics in Meaning and Context: Quentin
Skinner and His Critics, edited by James Tully; quoted in David Scott,
Refashioning Futures: Criticism after Postcoloniality, 6.
At the Rendezvous of Conquest: Post-colonial
Possibilities and the Anxiety of Inference
Krishna Sen
There is room for us all at the rendezvous of conquest.

Aim Csaire, Return to My Native Land1
Uhuru [Swahili for Freedom]!2 Aim Csaires black Caliban cries

in Une Tempte (A Tempest) as he faces off against an exploitative white
Prospero on a Caribbean island, in a classic moment of the empire
writing back. The truest freedom that this Caliban ultimately wrests
for himself is, of course, the freedom to define himself in terms
different from the hegemonic colonial discourse of otherness and
marginality that has been imposed upon him. His final words to
Prospero figure the attempt to recuperate the colonised Self (or in
Ngugis terms, to decolonise the mind)3 in yet another paradigmatic
post-colonial gesture of resistance:
Understand what I say, Prospero:
For years I bowed my head []
But now its over! [...]
I dont give a damn for your power
or for your dogs or your police or your inventions!
[] you lied to me so much
about the world, about myself,
that you ended up by imposing on me
an image of myself:
underdeveloped, in your words, undercompetent
thats how you made me see myself!
And I hate that image and its false!
But now I know you, you old cancer,
And I also know myself. (64)
At the Rendezvous of Conquest | 17
This reference to the psychic violence inherent in colonial

strategies of representation is a startling anticipation of Said. Caliban
can come to this perception because he has finally seen through the
so-called civilising mission of European imperialism You didnt
teach me a thing. Except to jabber in your own language so that I
could understand your orders (27). His subversive self-awareness
extends to his equally contemptuous rejection of the apparently
benevolent colonisers Stephano and Trinculo (as opposed to the
overtly malevolent Prospero) they are befriending him, he realises,
only to hoodwink him into coming with them to Europe, where they
would make money by exhibiting his negroid body as a caricature
of humanity like a grotesque museum piece (a practice prevalent in
Shakespeares London).
However, instead of being alienated like Shakespeares Caliban
who used the colonisers language only to curse, this Caliban
assertively deploys the acquired tongue to rehabilitate his own identity
and to re-legitimize indigenous epistemologies. He invokes his native
thunder god Shango to neutralise Prosperos raising of the tempests,
and tries to tell Prospero that, according to his beliefs, nature is more
than a mere passive receptacle for the exhibition of Eurocentric
technological mastery (Prosperos magic) [] you think the earth
itself is dead. [] Its so much simpler that way! Dead, you can walk
on it, pollute it, you can tread upon it with the steps of a conqueror.
I respect the earth because I know it is alive [] (12). Moreover,
this Caliban claims equality, over and above freedom, by stubbornly
addressing Prospero with the French familiar appellation tu, as
opposed to the honorific vous. The more compliant Ariel of
Shakespeares play. who in this play is a mulatto slave conniving at
Prosperos nefarious designs for his own advancement, obsequiously
maintains the hierarchical vous. He arrests Caliban on Prosperos
command (57), and chortles gleefully as he watches Caliban labour:
I shall be the thrush that launches

its mocking cry
to the benighted field-hand
Dig, nigger! Dig, nigger! (60)
18 | Krishna Sen
This Ariel is not only a type of the culturally ambivalent mestizo

but also a prototype of the comprador who colludes with the
mtropole.
Russell West-Pavlov has raised the point whether, rather than
writing back to the looming interpellative shade of Shakespeare,
Csaire has in Une Tempte not simply confirmed stereotypes of the
marginality and parochiality of Third World literatures,4 presumably
in their perpetual citationality. Yet, despite its primary purpose of a
revisionary re-reading of Shakespeare, however, Une Tempte has
famously sought to transcend the narrow confines of a racialized
writing back. This has been achieved not merely through the
indigenising of Caliban and Ariel, but more specifically through
Calibans opening cry of Uhuru!, as well as through his defiant
rejoinder to Prospero towards the end of Act I. Refusing to accede
to the name by which he is designated by the conqueror/slaveholder
Prospero, he declares polemically Call me X! [] Like a man
[] whose name [i.e. history] has been stolen (15). Uhuru conjures
up Jomo Kenyatta and the ethos of pan-Africanism. The invoking of
Malcolm X (and by implication, New World negro slavery as well as
the larger African diaspora in later times) subsumes within the scope
of the play the transnational Black Atlantic addressed by Paul
Gilroy,5 as also the whole (apparently liberatory) counterdiscourse of
la Ngritude that Csaire formulated along with Lopold Senghor
and Lon Gontian Damas. That negritude was part of the project of
the play is evident from the original French subtitle Adaptation
pour un thtre ngre (the valency of thtre ngre is only
imperfectly captured by the usual English translation, Black theatre).
The ideal of negritude has not gone uncensored, however, even among
its own constituency. In an important critique, Maryse Cond has
questioned whether a black aesthetic predicated on the paradigm of
negritude does not in fact represent a capitulation to Eurocentric
cultural hegemony (the construction of the negro) rather than a
refutation of it.6
It is surely significant, then, that there is no clear victor in Une
Tempte. Prosperos grand masque of Roman deities at the wedding
of Ferdinand and Miranda (gesturing towards the deliberate theatricality
of imperial power) is rudely disrupted by Calibans invocation of the

tribal trickster god, Eshu - but in the end both Prospero and Caliban
remain trapped on the island. The Epilogue ironically inverts the
colonial binary of nature and nurture. An aged and enfeebled Prospero
is unable to authorise his writ and watches the island slips back to
its natural state, overrun with untamed vegetation and wild animals
opossums []. Peccarys, wild boar, all this unclean nature [].
Its as though the jungle was laying siege to the cave. [] But its cold!
Odd how the climates changed [](68). One wonders, though, what
sort of assertion of resurgent indigeneity this regression to primitivism
is meant to be. In any case, the textuality of the play undercuts its
message it is an Anouilh-like jeu in which a Master of Ceremonies
or Le Meneur du jeu calls up the characters, including the wind
and the storm, to play their parts. Is this the failure of both colonial
discourse and postcolonial resistance the one to securely dominate,
and the other to effectively liberate?
As this analysis reveals, Une Tempte encodes both the possibilities
as well as the problematics of the post-colonial enterprise. In terms
of the possibilities, it goes well beyond the kind of one-dimensional
writing back that is forever doomed to re-inscribing imperial
discourse in the very act of inscribing its counter-discursive stance.
Through the simple strategy of re-locating Shakespeare from the
beginnings of imperialism to the post-imperial phase, thereby opening
up a space to include the ideology of the Black Atlantic, the play,
inserts into its Shakespearean matrix the complex social, political and
cultural consequences of imperialism politicisation of the subaltern,
the contestation of elitist epistemologies, and nationalism on the one
hand, and comprador collusion, hybridity and diaspora on the other.
Further, the play gestures towards the epistemic violence of imperial
strategies of representation othering, museumisation, colonial
theatricality and colonial amelioration discourses. Then again, the
subtle incorporation of Black Atlantic ideology introduces an Afrocentric
perspective that significantly extends the parameters of Saidian
Orientalism. But on another level, the play remains susceptible to
neocolonial interventions in its falling back on nativist stereotypes as
the paradigm of negritude, and in its inability to construct an
20 | Krishna Sen
alternative model of African selfhood beyond tribalism (the Yoruba

deities Shango and Eshu) it simply reverses the nature/nurture
binary. Une Tempte is thus post-colonial both in its strengths and in
its weaknesses. What it does establish is the fact that the colonial
encounter was no simple opposition of black and white, or good and
evil, but an extremely complex cluster of social and ideological
formations with long-term historical consequences what might be
designated as a volatile node of multiply intersecting experiential
trajectories in which all parties (including, as we see in hindsight, the
conquerors too) were crucially affected and changed. In other words,
the colonial encounter was certainly not monologic (domination), nor
merely dialogic (resistance/writing back) it was heteroglossial.
That post-colonial theory at its inception unduly flattened out the
multi-stranded nature of this striated heteroglossia, that there was
more to the colonial relationship than mere oppositionality, that there
were crucial differences between settler and conquered colonies, and
that the term post-colonial itself is contentious in not only eliding
these complexities but also forever locking the former colonies of
the imperial European powers into a very narrow segment of their
long histories all these charges, and the numerous critical storms
raised by such totalizations, have triggered a series of refinements in
post-colonial theory. This is evident from the successive developments
and amplifications of post-colonialism as a heuristic and interpretive
tool in the work of one of its founding fathers, Bill Ashcroft7 The
Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures
(1989) was seminal in its inverting of the centre-margin binary with
respect to cultural productions in colonized societies, but it nevertheless
retained a strong sense of the centre as the ground of the margins
counter-representation of itself:
[] the alienating process which initially served to relegate the post-colonial
world to the margin turned upon itself and acted to push that world
through a kind of mental barrier into a position from which all experience
could be viewed as uncentred, pluralistic, and multifarious. Marginality thus
became an unprecedented source of creative energy.8
Contrary to popular belief, national differences were acknowledged

(Empire Writes Back 17), but there was perhaps too much emphasis
on excavating overarching similarities deriving from the common
trauma [] many thematic parallels across the different literatures
in english [the authors special term for colonial Englishes]9. Path-
breaking though it was, then, The Empire Writes Back was limited in
its scope, focusing only the cultural products of colonial resistant
discourses, and not the socio-political processes involved in the
formation of those discourses. Though he continues to foreground
culture as the special terrain of his kind of post-colonial analysis,
Ashcroft has become increasingly receptive to the specificities and the
material conditions of the different experiences of post-colonial
cultural formation. More important, he has extended that early
parameter of post-colonial agency as simply a writing back. Post-
Colonial Transformation (2001) carries forward the trope of redemptive
cultural practice by unconventionally de-linking post-colonial culture
from the moment of political colonisation, and depicting that culture
as a rhizomic network of (often subversive) transformational strategies
rather than as a linear chain of hegemonic influences flowing from
the coloniser to the colonised:
Post-colonial discourse is the discourse of the colonized, which begins with
colonization and doesnt stop when the colonizers go home. The post-
colonial is not a chronological period, but a range of material conditions and
a rhizomic pattern of discursive struggles [].10
Colonial hegemony is, according to Ashcroft, countered by the

culturally indwelling forces of habitation and horizonality11, which
are now offered as markers of innate native agency. Habitation
signifies the sustaining and mediating capacities of the local that may
be occluded but cannot be obliterated, and that interpolate the
interpellating imperial cultures in a variety of subversive ways:
horizonality gestures towards the procreative power of indigenous
cultures to adapt and appropriate and set new horizons for themselves
even when they are forcibly deflected from their natural paths of
development. In On Post-Colonial Futures: Transformations of Colonial
Culture (2001) Ashcroft further extends his argument to embrace both
22 | Krishna Sen
sides of the colonial divide. Distinguishing between the political

interpretation of colonial resistance as opposition, and the cultural
interpretation of colonial resistance which he identifies as
transformation, Ashcroft goes on to argue that the post-colonial
paradigm of transformation is double-edged in inflecting the cultures
of both the erstwhile colonizer and the erstwhile colonized:
It is transformation that gives these societies control over their future.
Transformation describes the ways in which colonized societies have taken
dominant discourses, transformed them and used them in the service of their
own self-empowerment. More fascinating, perhaps, post-colonial
transformation describes the ways in which dominated and colonized
societies have transformed the very nature of the cultural power that has
dominated them. This is nowhere more obvious than in literary and other
representational arts, but it remains a strategic feature of all cultural practice.
That is why cultural influence circulates, rather than moves in a straight line
downward from the dominant to the dominated.12
Transformation is thus complemented by circulation of cultural

practice, the ultimate consequence of this being the evolution of a
global culture13. It is interesting how this percolation of the insurgent
energies of the local into the metropolitan is offered in On Post-
Colonial Futures as an alternative to the political and economic
discourses of neo-colonial globalization signified by the Eurocentric
(primarily American) cultural/commercial/discursive domination of
the only apparently decolonized Third World, most famously articulated
in Hardt and Negris Empire which was published a year earlier in
2000.14 In a recent essay on globalization as transnationalism (seen
as an inevitable corollary of post-coloniality) rather than as neo-
colonialism Globalization, the Transnation and Utopia Ashcroft
re-affirms the liberatory nature of post-colonial cultural discourse and
the current (according to him) metamorphosis of the global into the
glocal. Claiming that the social sciences had become hopelessly
mired in the classical narrative of modernity, in dependency theory,
and in centre-periphery models, and that they could only be
redeemed as it were by postcolonial theorys emphasis on cultural
practices, Ashcroft goes on to valorise two dynamic patterns of
interaction accounting for the nature of global flows, the transformation
of the global by the local, and the circulation of the local in the
global.15
As Ashcrofts example illustrates, from its formal inception in the
1980s, post-colonialism (more than any other postmodern theoretical
formulation) has not remained static, but has sought (often inadequately
or contentiously) to address the entire heteroglossia of European
imperialism and its aftermath expectedly giving rise to the charge
that it signifies too many different things to too many people without
really being inclusive enough what might be dubbed the anxiety of
inference. In Resistance Theory/Theorizing Resistance, or Two
Cheers for Nativism, the West Indian critic Benita Parry has
stretched the terms of the debate from the material to the psychological.
She argues that simply identifying the post-colonial with a rhetoric
of resistance does not wash away the deep scars embedded in the
national psyche as a result of several centuries of exploitative
hegemony, the more so since the demeaning colonial construction of
the native in many cases continues to govern in a damaging way the
natives self-perception. Parrys argument is a variant of Kwame
Nkrumahs celebrated charge that the term post-colonial emits a false
optimism because it masks the pernicious reality of neo-colonialism,
in terms of cultural, economic, and sometimes even (covert) political
domination. Palestinian critic Ella Shohats extremely polemical essay,
Notes on the Post-colonial attempts to expose two fallacies implicit
in the term first, that it lumps together the white ex-colonized such
as Australians and Canadians with the black, brown and yellow ex-
colonized from Asia and Africa, as being equally disinherited and
marginalized, which is absolutely not the case; and second, that it
ignores people who have not technically been conquered, but who are
virtually colonized within their own county, like the Palestinians of
the West Bank.16 Another salvo in the politics of the post-colonial has
been fired by liberated Eastern European intellectuals after the
collapse of the former Soviet Union they contend that the
identification of colonization solely with nineteenth-century European
imperialism places under erasure the pain of the colonized peoples
of the Balkans and the Baltic under Soviet occupation.17
24 | Krishna Sen
To address the multi-dimensionality of all these various form of

imperialism(s), post-colonial theory has necessarily become
interdisciplinary, moving beyond its initial concern with literary and
cultural representation and production. From its early theorizations
about a simplistically resistant writing back and a uni-directionally
hegemonic Saidian Orientalism, to the dialogism of Bhabhas colonial
mimicry,18 and through Marxist theorizing on class and capital as
crucial aspects of colonialism (Robert J.C. Young has argued that
postcolonial theory operates within the historical legacy of Marxist
critique and that this remains paramount as the fundamental
framework of postcolonial thinking), 19 to post-structuralist
deconstruction of the raced and gendered discourses of imperialism,20
the ambit of the post-colonial has broadened out exponentially. The
field now covers post-colonial discourse theory, post-colonial cultural
studies, and post-colonial ethnicity and diaspora studies on the one
hand, and Empire studies of the various colonial centres on the
other,21 addresses issues of race, class and gender, and spans
disciplines such as the social sciences, literature, the fine arts, and
the histories of science and medicine. But interdisciplinarity, crossing
as it does the fault lines between different academic approaches, brings
with it its own set of tensions. As Homi Bhabha puts it
Interdisciplinarity is the acknowledgement of the emergent sign of cultural
difference produced in the ambivalent movement between the pedagogical
and performative address. It is never simply the harmonious addition of
contents or contexts that augment the positivity of a pre-given disciplinary
or symbolic presence.22
Interdisciplinarity, in other words, fundamentally changes the contours

of the primary argument it inflects.
Expectedly, then, the broadening of the terms of reference of the
post-colonial have transmuted some of its basic contours, moving
from predominantly cultural formations to, say, class formations.
These rhizomic transactions have also affected the nomenclature of
post-colonialism. Following a growing concern with the material
contexts of the politics and culture of imperialism, as well as the
extending of the concept of imperialism to that of Empire (pace Hardt

and Negri), the chronologically grounded post-colonial has transited
to the more densely packed notion of the postcolonial, as a site of
predominantly ideological rather than historical perspectives. The
authors of the first edition of The Empire Writes Back with its
essentialist rubric of literary resistance could hardly have anticipated
that the theoretical framework that they were among the earliest to
inaugurate would, by 2006, inflect the sociology of Youth Studies to
produce analyses such as European Youth Cultures in a Post-colonial
World: British Asian Underground and French Hip-hop Music
Scenes. Referring to Said, Spivak, Gilroy and Stuart Hall, the author,
Rupa Huq, claims that the discursive treatment of the two cases of
expressive youth culture that follows will serve as examples of much
of this post-colonial theorizing in its concern with immigrant youth
from past colonies in the two countries.23 Striking indeed is what
Antoinette Burton calls the pressure of postcolonial social, political,
and demographic realities on the production of modern knowledge24
Huqs essay stands as a startling but relevant example. Postcolonialism
(without the hyphen) now functions practically as an epistemology
rather than as merely an interpretive tool.
It is arguably these epistemological possibilities of the postcolonial
(as contrasted with the post-colonial) that have led to the scramble
to annex the term for subjectivities and conditions which are
tangentially or indirectly, rather than immediately and causally, related
to nineteenth century European imperialism thus making
postcolonialism (as the approach is now almost universally called) the
fastest growing theoretical domain in current times. One such
endeavour may be dubbed the postcolonialisation of America. In
Postcolonial Theory and the United States, Amritjit Singh and Peter
Schmidt have argued that (t)he US may be understood to be the
worlds first postcolonial and neo-colonial country (emphasis in the
original), and that, more crucially, the experiences of its African
American, Native American, and early Asian immigrants can only be
understood in terms of an internal Anglo colonization that equalled
European imperialism in its exploitative harshness and fuelled
26 | Krishna Sen
comparable stratagems of resistance.25 Similarly, Richard King, the

editor of Post-Colonial America, has justified the application of the
term in American Studies as being most expressive of the change,
decentering and displacement of Americas ethnic minorities.26
Anticipations of postcolonial theoretical categories, such as the
Manuel and Posluns concept of the Fourth World in 1974 have been
used to delineate the experiences of African Aborigines and Canadian
Inuits.27 While the notion of the Fourth World has been contested
by some critics with respect to aboriginal experience (see Nilanjana
Debs article below), it has been found useful in analysing the
experience of ethnic minorities by others, such as Bernd Peyer for
example.28 But the idea of interpreting colonial American literature
in postcolonial terms has been strongly contested by American Studies
practitioners themselves. Lawrence Buell, for instance, has argued that
one cannot apply a trope such as writing back even to an American
writer of the colonial period; speaking of Lee Fenimore Cooper, he
says that Cooper
played the postcolonial to the extent that he deferred to Scotts plot forms,
but he played the imperialist to the extent that his own narratives reflected
and perpetuated the romance of American expansionism [to the exclusion of
the Native American].29
While Ethnic Studies have clearly made productive use of some of

the master tropes of postcolonial theory such as hegemony, resistance,
appropriation, cultural empowerment and so on, yet another
contemporary application of postcolonial insights has been in the area
of Subaltern Studies, both as it originated in India as the Subaltern
Studies Collective, and as it flowered in Latin America as Latin
American Subaltern Studies. The progenitor of Subaltern Studies,
Ranajit Guha, has described the movement as both uniquely South
Asian and uniquely postcolonial.30 Characterising Subaltern Studies
as necessarily postcolonial(emphasis in the original) rather than as
simply yet another version of Marxist/radical history, Dipesh
Chakrabarty has drawn careful parallels between the two theoretical
approaches in his excellent and exhaustive essay, Subaltern Studies
and Postcolonial Historiography:
With hindsight, it could be said that there were broadly three areas in which
Subaltern Studies differed from the history from below approach of
Hobsbawm or Thompson (allowing for differences between these two
eminent historians of England and Europe). Subaltern historiography
necessarily entailed (a) a relative separation of the history of power from any
universalist histories of capital, (b) a critique of the nation-form, and (c) an
interrogation of the relationship between power and knowledge (hence of the
archive itself and of history as a form of knowledge). In these differences,
I would argue, lay the beginnings of a new way of theorizing the intellectual
agenda for postcolonial histories.31
These points of intersection and convergence have been further

explored in Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial edited by
Vinayak Chaturvedi.32
The third major extrapolation of postcolonialism in recent times,
deriving from the global/glocal dialectic of the spread and movement
of populations following nineteenth century imperialism and its
aftermath are Diaspora Studies, and the attendant issue of hybridity
and multiculturalism. Diaspora studies came into their own from the
mid-1980s as a province of the social sciences (but with a strong
literary component because of the concern with representation),
possibly as a response to increased migration, as well as to the (often
contentious) discourses and policies of multiculturalism in plural
societies (this very pluralism being a direct consequence of imperialism)
such as Canada (from as early as the mid-nineteen seventies), and then
Britain, the United States, Australia, and western Europe. Broadly
speaking, diaspora is regarded either as primarily a demographic
phenomenon or as primarily a psychological and/or cultural
phenomenon, though the categories often overlap. William Safran
(1991) and Robin Cohen (1997)33 categorise it as a demographic
phenomenon in their typologies of diasporas, with the typologies
themselves unsettling the notion of diaspora as a uniform condition.
Paul Gilroys The Black Atlantic (1993), while taking demographics as
its point of departure, radically extends the aesthetic and cultural
parameters by staging the Black diaspora, not as dispersal merely, but
as paradigmatic of a cultural politics transcending both the structures
of the nation state and the constraints of ethnicity and national
28 | Krishna Sen
particularity.34 The theorist par excellence of diaspora as the

(psychological/cultural) site of displaced consciousness fractured by
hybridity is, of course, Homi Bhabha, particularly in The Location
of Culture (1994) the point of the title being that the diasporic
subject has no home, but can only inhabit a succession of locations
as in Rushdies Imaginary Homelands or Agha Shahid Alis India
always exists off the turnpikes of America. A more recent manifestation
of diaspora studies and of postcolonialism generally, is transnationalism
as academic disciplines increasingly engage with what Arjun Appadurai
calls global ethnoscapes, featuring the new postcolonial/globalized
transmigrant who operates in more than one culture simultaneously.35
For example, in May 1990 the New York Academy of Sciences
sponsored a research seminar to study the multi-faceted impact of
[] mass movements on both sending and receiving societies in the
era of globalization, and to probe the consequent re-inflection of
concepts or terms such as melting pot, integration, assimilation,
syncretism, reinterpretation, pluralism, diffusion, cultural exchange
and acculturation []. The proceedings were published in 1992 (i.e.
two years before The Location of Culture) as Towards a Transnational
Perspective on Migration:36 the three editors followed this up in 1994
with a study of the impact of diaspora on the traditional concept of
the nation, entitled Nations Unbound.37
Clearly, these new directions in postcolonial studies have
problematized traditional concepts of society, class and nation a far
cry from writing back or even the cultural hegemony of Orientalism.
The future possibilities of this infinitely elastic (or so it seems)
discourse are dizzying and the attendant anxieties of referentiality and
relevance are bound to be acute. But for the moment one can only
echo Aim Csaire There is room for us all at the rendezvous of
conquest.
Notes
1. Aim Csaire, Notebook of A Return to My Native Land (Cahiers dun retour

au pays natal, 1956). Introduced and translated by Mireille Rosello, with
Annie Pritchard (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1995), 127.
2. Aim Csaire, Une Tempte, daprs La tempte de Shakespeare - Adaptation

pour un thtre ngre (Paris: Seuil, 1969); translated by Richard Miller as
A Tempest, Based on Shakespeares The Tempest Adaptation for a Black
Theatre (Rev.ed.; New York: Ubu Repertory Theater Publications, 1992),
11. All page references in parentheses from this play are taken from this
edition.
3. Ngugi wa Thiongo, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in
African Literature (London: James Currey, 1986).
4. Russell West-Pavlov, Transcultural Graffiti: Diasporic Writing and the
Teaching of Literary Studies (Paris: Editions Rodopi B.V., 2005), 83.
5. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness
(London: Verso, 1993).
6. Quoted in West-Pavlov, op. cit.
7. I am referring to the following texts Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffith and
Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial
Literatures (London and New York: Routledge, 1989); Bill Ashcroft, Post-
Colonial Transformation (London and New York: Routledge, 2001); Bill
Ashcroft, On Post-Colonial Futures: Transformations of Colonial Culture
(London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2001); Bill Ashcroft,
Globalization, the Transnation and Utopia in Narrating the (Trans)Nation:
The Dialectics of Culture and Identity, edited by Krishna Sen and Sudeshna
Chakravarti (Kolkata: Dasgupta, 2008), 1-24.
8. Ashcroft, Empire Writes Back, 12.
9. Ibid., 27.
10. Ashcroft, Post-Colonial Transformation, 12.
11. Ibid., 15-16.
12. Ashcroft, On Post-Colonial Futures: Transformations of Colonial Culture, 1.
13. Ibid., 2
14. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass. & London:
Harvard Uuniversity Press, 2000).
15. Ashcroft, Globalization, the Transnation and Utopia, 1-2.
16. Parrys and Shohats essays are both available in Padmini Mongia ed.
Contemporary Postcolonial Theory : A Reader (New Delhi: Oxford University
Press, 1997).
17. See David Moore, Is the Post- in Post-Colonial the Post- in Post-
Soviet? Towards a Global Post-Colonial Critique, PMLA, January 2001,
16:1.
18. Homi Bhabha, Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial
30 | Krishna Sen
Discourse in The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 121-

131.
19. Robert J.C. Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Oxford:
Blackwell, 2001), 6.
20. A cardinal example is the work of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.
21. I am thinking of studies of Englishness as constituted by the contingencies
of the imperial project, as for example Colin Holmes John Bulls Island:
Immigration and British Society, 1871-1971 (London: Macmillan, 1988);
Simon Gikandis Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of
Colonialism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996); Ian Baucoms
Out of Place: Englishness, Empire, and the Location of Identity (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1999); and David Rogers and John Mcleod
eds., The Revision of Englishness (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 2004).
22. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture, op. cit., 163.
23. Rupa Huq, European Youth Culture in a Post-colonial World: British
Asian Underground and French Hip-hop Music Scenes in Global Youth?:
Hybrid Identities, Plural Worlds edited by Pam Nilan and Carles Feixa
(London: Routledge, 2006, 14-31), 16-17.
24. Antoinette Burton, On the Inadequacy and Indispensability of the
Nation in After the Imperial Turn: Thinking with and through the Nation
edited by A. Burton (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003, 1-23), 2.
25. Amritjit Singh and Peter Schmidt (eds.), Postcolonial Theory and the United
States: Race, Ethnicity and Literature (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi,
2000), 3-69.
26. Richard King (ed.), Post-Colonial America (Champaign: University of
Illinois Press, 2000), 7.
27. George Manuel and Michael Posluns, The Fourth World: An Indian Reality.
With an Introduction by Vine Deloria, Jr. (Don Mills: Collier-Macmillan
Canada, 1974).
28. Bernd Peyer, The Tutord Mind: Indian Missionary Writers in Ante-Bellum
America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997).
29. Lawrence Buell, American Literary Emergnce as a Postcolonial
Phenomenon in American Literary History Vol. IV (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1992, 411-442), 435.
30. Ranajit Guha, Subaltern Studies: Projects for our Time and Their
Convergence, in The Latin American Subaltern Studies Reader edited by
Ileana Rodriguez (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001, 35-46), 42.
31. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Subaltern Studies and Postcolonial Historiography,
in Nepantla: Views from South, I:1, 2000 (9-32), 10 and 15.

32. Vinayak Chaturvedi ed. Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial
(London: Verso, 2000).
33. William Safran, Diasporas in Modern Society: Myths of Homeland and
Return. Diaspora 1:1, 1991, 83-98; Robin Cohen, Global Diasporas: An
Introduction (London: University College London Press, 1997).
34. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness
(London: Verso, 1993), 19.
35. Arjun Appadurai, Global Ethnoscapes: Notes and Queries for
Transnational Anthropology, in Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large:
Cultural Dimensions of Globalisation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1996), 48-65.
36. Nina Glick Schiller, Linda Basch and Cristina Blanc-Szanton eds. Towards
a Transnational Perspective on Migration Race, Class, Ethnicity and Nationalism
Reconsidered . New York: Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences,
Vol. 645, July 6, 1992. The immediately preceding quotation is from p.
vi.
37. Linda Basch, Nina Glick Schiller and Cristina Blanc-Szanton eds. Nations
Unbound: Transnational Projects, Postcolonial Predicaments and
Deterritorialized Nation-States (New York: Gordon and Breach, 1994).
Post-colonial Studies: The New
Intellectual Imperialism?
Nilanjana Deb
Post-colonialism has spawned a vast matrix of critical theory.

However, scholars such as Leela Gandhi have observed that post-
colonial studies have come to represent a confusing and often
unpleasant babel of subaltern voices.1 Despite its imprecise definition,
post-colonial studies have taken on an interdisciplinary character
within the humanities, ranging from history and cultural studies to
education and literary criticism. Although it is nearly impossible to
define what post-coloniality is, given the contested issues it
encompasses, what might seem more feasible is to define what it is
not. With or without the much-debated hyphen in the term post-
coloniality it is not always possible to map the diffrance in the
meaning of the term that occurs when post-coloniality is situated
geographically, historically, and culturally. For example, Ella Shohat
feels that, echoing postmodernity, post-coloniality can be taken to
be the indexical marker of a contemporary state, situation, condition
or epoch2. The use of the term in this sense implies linearity; a
superceding that is not entirely true of what post-colonialism stands
for. Even more dangerous, according to her, are post-colonial
formulations that blur national and racial formations that are very
different as being equally post-colonial. If we follow Ella Shohats
argument, situating the United States and Nigeria as equally post-
colonial masks the unequal relations of the white settlers in North
America to the European center by equating them to the relations
of the Indigenous peoples of Nigeria to the European colonizers.
Shohat argues that the critical slippage in meaning occurs when the
suffix post is thus applied to two very different experiences of
colonization. 3
Post-colonial Studies: The New Intellectual Imperialism? | 33
This differnce is complicated by the ambiguity in the notion of

post-coloniality that allows for the masking of the histories of violence
that Indigenous people faced under colonization and continue in many
instances to face under neo- or continuing colonization. Critics of
post-coloniality such as Shohat feel that this undifferentiated use of
the term has diminished its political agency. For her, a materialist
reading of post-coloniality sees and acknowledges the minorities and
marginalized people that colonization creates. It acknowledges the
historical and continuing brutalities that construct those minorities.
One the other hand, a discursive reading of post-coloniality does not
disturb the faade of equality that post-coloniality creates as a common
experience of ex-colonials. Within this reading, post-colonialism
simultaneously indexicalizes actual geopolitical spaces, that is, the
Third World countries that became independent after World War II,
thereby periodicizing post-colonialism. At the same time, post-
coloniality refers to the diasporic circumstances since the last five
decades or so of the twentieth century - from forced migration to
voluntary immigration - within the metropolitan First World. Post-
colonialism in this sense refers to discursively dissimilar forms of
representational practices and values.4
The problem of clubbing such discourses under the banner of
post-coloniality is that tropes of resistance, mimicry and transgression,
frequently found in the literature of nations that have a history of anti-
colonial struggle, can become a marker of the expectations that the
reader trained in post-colonial literary study has from an immigrant
or minority writers work, even that coming out of the privileged
location of a First World university. While such tropes may indeed
be a part of the works design, to always read resistance into texts
where the authors intentions are different could become a form of
critical assimilationism as well. Ironically, this kind of reading can
happen out of the urge for critical coalition-building among non-
dominant groups within the milieu of First World multiculturalism.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. has pointed that,
under the sign of multiculturalism, literary readings are often guided by
the desire to elicit, first and foremost, indices of ethnic particularity,
especially those that can be construed as oppositional, transgressive, subversive.5
34 | Nilanjana Deb
Ironically, post-colonial theorists have emphasized this very particularity

and specificity in order to highlight the political, even emancipatory
nature of the field. It is now critical commonplace to focus on cultural
specificity. For example, Stephen Slemon asserts that that research in
the field of post-colonialism must address the local, at least at the level
of material applications. As he reminds us,
If we overlook the local, and the political implications of the research we
produce, we risk turning the work of our field into the playful operations
of an academic glass-bead game, whose project will remain at best a
description of global relations, and not a script for their change6
While the need to locate texts within specific cultural contexts is

necessary, this can often cloud a larger issue that of the absorption
of new literatures within the post-colonial spectrum without thought
given to whether the literatures are at all post-colonial or amenable
to post-colonial readings. The emphasis on the local can lead to the
assimilation of new literatures within the category of the post-
colonial, and the imposition of reading frameworks of the sort that
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. mentions. In the scramble to locate new texts
to feed the burgeoning industry of post-colonial studies, post-colonial
theory can turn into a tool for intellectual neo-colonialism.
Aboriginal literatures are a case in point. There is, in the opinion
of Linda Smith, a suspicion among Indigenous scholars that
the fashion of post-colonialism has become a strategy for reinscribing or
reauthorizing the privileges of non-Indigenous academics because the field of
post-colonial discourse has been defined in ways which can still leave out
Indigenous peoples, our ways of knowing and our current concerns.7
For example, Dee Hornes Contemporary American Indian Writing:

Unsettling Literature examines Aboriginal authors through Homi
Bhabhas frame of mimicry. Horne argues that authors such as
Thomas King, Jeannette Armstrong, Ruby Slipperjack, Beatrice
Culleton, Tomson Highway and Lee Maracle deploy trickster
mimicry in order to bring about decolonization. Hornes work
indicates an uncritical acceptance of the authority of the postcolonial
critics and theorists she cites. The entire text is shaped by the
colonizer-colonized binary that is a commonplace in post-colonial

studies, without mentioning that Aboriginal literature is not necessarily
dependent on this relationship. 9
On the surface of things, there are many reasons why Aboriginal
literatures are too easily assumed to be part of the assortment of
literatures termed post-colonial. There are many aspects of cultural
resistance and survival that are similar to patterns seen in former
colonies such as India or various African states, and these parallels
need to be scrutinized before moving on to the need for a separate
aesthetics for Aboriginal peoples.
The preservation or revival of the mother tongue as a form of
cultural self-assertiveness and an expression of a communitys nationalist
ideology is a phenomenon common to most former colonies. It is
also seen in many Aboriginal communities today. In addition,
postcolonial theory sees the appropriation of the colonizers language
to make it bear the burden of ones cultural experience as a
manifestation the experience of hybridity in the wake of contact
between the colonizer and the colonized. A characteristic of most
formerly colonized societies is the development of hybrid or new
englishes, where native grammar and vocabulary modifies the intruding
language. Thus, a socially acceptable form of bilingualism develops
within the (post)colonial community in which both the mother tongue
and the colonizers tongue (if not one and the same) have an important
function for the community. In Aboriginal cultures as in many African
ones, the movement between orality and literacy in Aboriginal
literatures is a crucial factor in the development of narratives, both
fictional and factual, about the past and present of the people.
The colonial discourse entailed a clash of weltanschauungen or
world views, and in all cases of colonization, linguistic imperialism
involving the manipulation and dissemination of the written word was
a major characteristic. The clash of oral and literate culture is seen
in the actual loss of land and territory suffered by many Aboriginal
peoples, through the signing of treaties and other forms of negotiation
that equated written text and territory. Among Aboriginal peoples in
North America, for instance, diplomatic agreements were traditionally
concluded verbally and usually in the presence of those concerned and
36 | Nilanjana Deb
promises thus made in public became part of the collective memory

of the community.
The disruptive potential of literacy is also evident in another
common feature of colonialism, the drive to alter native religious
beliefs. European missionaries were quick to identify the associations
that colonized peoples made between technological advances and
religious prowess, and contrasted the permanence of the printed
biblical word with the supposed impermanence of oral narratives.
However, many Aboriginal belief systems persisted, in whole or part,
developing forms of syncretism and compartmentalization that preserved
their faiths or allowed the subterranean persistence of Aboriginal
practices within Christianity.
One factor that distinguishes settler societies from other former
colonies is the minority status of the colonized, as opposed to colonies
such as India where the colonized were numerically a majority. As
a result, the perceived minority status of the community within the
colonial state leads to two strands within the collective consciousness
of the community. There are keepers of the communitys cultural
heritage, for example elders, who emphasize tradition as a barrier
against uncontrolled imitation. In the later stages of the colonial
encounter traditionalists cannot completely isolate the traditions of
their community from outside influences, and so the role of
individuals who cross cultures, as well as cultural production that
addresses or bridges opposed worlds, becomes crucial. This pattern
can be seen to have similarities with developments in the national
movements of other former colonies as well.
Thus, contemporary Fourth World9 cultures have many features
that can allow them to be subsumed within the rubric of post-colonial
studies. One of the ways in which Euro-American cultural imperialism
is exercised in the colonial context is by the creating of separate
aesthetic standards for the reading of mainstream and marginal
literatures. On one hand, literature that adheres to Western standards
is seen as classical or universal, while literature that deviates from this
norm is sidelined as primitive, political, or regional. While the
empowerment of the marginal voice as a function of post-colonial
studies has become a given, the gradual colonization of Aboriginal
literature by post-colonial theory in the last decade or so demands

that the notion of decolonisation be revived in literary studies.
In her unpublished doctoral thesis, Metis scholar Dr. Emma
LaRocque describes postcolonial theory as a giant runaway rumball,
picking up an inchoate tangle of philosophical bits and bytes as it
avalanches its way to where? Who can cogently tr/eat this thing?10
Post-colonial theory includes within it elements of anti-colonial
thought as well as more recent influences of post-modern theory. These
divergent strands lead to the rather complicated response to Aboriginal
cultural production that we find in the much-read overviews of post-
colonial literature such as The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. Compilations
such as these are often received as primers for university students
of post-colonial studies and their shorthand representations of
Aboriginal literary studies not only marginalize the subject, but also
indicate to Aboriginal readers the lack of serious engagement with
it. Here, theorization about Indigenous writing is limited to a few
selections in a section called Ethnicity and Indigeneity, a textual
marginalization also seen in Elleke Boehmers popular textbook of
post-colonial theory, Colonial and Postcolonial Literature11 and the
introductions to post-colonial theory by Loomba and Gandhi.
Only Mudrooroo and a few non-Aboriginal academics who focus
on the issue of white representations of the Indigene and the problem
of authenticity are represented in The Post-Colonial Studies Reader.
The introduction to the section declares that the First-Nations, have
in many ways become the cause celebre of post-colonialism. No other
group seems so completely to earn the position of colonized group,
so unequivocally to demonstrate the processes of imperialism at
work.12 Thus, at the very outset, resistance is made out to be the
defining feature of Aboriginal identity. The editorial voice sees
Indigenous groups as an ideal subject for post-colonial studies on
the grounds of the possibility of resistance, but denies intellectual
agency to these groups by suggesting that they fall into the discursive
traps set by the colonizer, for example, by succumbing to the
anthropological nomenclatures of authenticity that reinforce the
centre/margin binary. The introduction advises that essentialism is
locally strategic but ultimately self-defeating. In what way the
38 | Nilanjana Deb
strategic assertion of identity for a severely dispossessed group can

be ultimately self-defeating is not clarified, particularly in the face
of the fact that Indigenous communities have to deal with multiple
sources of power within the post-colonial states in which they are
located, with the administrative setup of the state, province, district
or municipality, and are required to provide proof of Indigenous
identity. It is at these the levels of material reality that Indigenous
communities strive to achieve their specific goals: political mobilisation
requires a certain politics of identity.14
Anti-colonial thinkers, including Aboriginal activists, point out
the weakness inherent in post-colonial studies as a result of imbalances
between the materialist and discursive origins of the field. For
example, Mikmaq author Marie Battiste in Reclaiming Indigenous
Voice and Vision reminds us that Indigenous thinkers use the term
postcolonial to describe a symbolic strategy for shaping a desirable
future, not an existing reality.14 For her, the term is an aspirational
practice, goal or idea.15 According to her, (post)colonial Indigenous
thought should not be confused with post-colonial theory in literature.
The material reality of Aboriginal lives under colonial regimes is often
forgotten in the search for discursive extensions of the field of post-
colonial studies.
At no point does the introduction in the Post-Colonial Studies
Reader acknowledge the intellectual agency and decision-making
power of the Indigenous communities that it seeks to warn against
essentialism. It is not surprising, therefore, that Native American
scholar Louis Owens speaks of a double barrier to the development
of new critical direction in the reading of Aboriginal writing: the
Indigenous communities rejection of the critical and cultural imperialism
of the metropolitan center, as well as the metropolitan centers
hypocritical lack of interest (despite espousing policies of
multiculturalism) in seriously engaging with the voices of minorities
who would seek to construct and represent themselves.17
Epistemological differences in cultural production prompts
Aboriginal scholar Kimberly Blaeser to state that the literatures of
Aboriginal people have a unique voice and that voice has not always
been adequately or accurately explored in the criticism that has been
written about the literature17 Blaeser cites major American critics

of Native literature such as Hertha Wong, Arnold Krupat, William
Bevis and Louis Owens, who state that alternative ways of understanding
are required for the analysis of apparently western forms such as the
autobiography when they are used by Native writers. She suggests that
the pedagogy of these texts and the ways in which they give pleasure
to the reader are different from the Western tradition. Thus, for
Blaeser, The insistence on reading Native literature by way of
Western literary theory clearly violates its integrity and performs a new
act of colonization and conquest.18 Thus she draws attention to the
growing need for theoretical frameworks that arise out of and are
specific to Aboriginal literatures/oratures.
The simultaneous assimilation and marginalisation of Indigenous
thought within postcolonial studies, as well as the critiques of post-
colonial theory by Aboriginal scholars, raise some important questions.
Where does the giant runaway rumball stop? Can post-colonial theory
stretch itself to ethically engage with epistemologically different
cultural products on their own terms? If post-colonial theory is used
to impose stock readings upon new minority writing, should the
solution be literary separatism as advocated by a number of Aboriginal
scholars?19 A greater self-reflexivity regarding the political implications
of the deployment of post-colonial theory can prevent it from
becoming a new front for intellectual imperialism in literary studies.
Post-colonial theory can only have limited applicability in the case of
Aboriginal literatures. The scrutiny of these limitations may help in
reviewing the ways in which other culturally different texts, perhaps
better known, have been (mis)read through post-colonial lenses in the
past.
Notes
1. Leela Gandhi, Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction (New York:

Columbia University Press, 1998), 3.
2. Ella Shohat, Notes on the Post-Colonial, Social Text 31/32 (1992):
101.
3. Ibid., 99-112.
40 | Nilanjana Deb
4. Ibid.
5. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Beyond the Culture Wars: Identity in Dialogue,
Profession 93 (New York: Modern Language Association, 1993): 8.
6. Stephen Slemon, The Scramble for Post-Colonialism, in The Post-
Colonial Studies Reader, edited by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and
Helen Tiffin (New York: Routledge, 1995), 52.
7. Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies, 24.
8. See Dee Horne, Contemporary American Indian Writing: Unsettling Literature
(New York: Peter Lang, 1999).
9. Since the early Seventies, the term Fourth World has gained increased
currency among activists and scholars concerned with aspects of Indigenous
cultures, especially after the publication of George Manuel and Michael
Poslunss The Fourth World: An Indian Reality (New York: The Free Press,
1974).
Specifically, the term Fourth World refers to those diverse colonized
people who now find themselves marginalized minorities on lands that
were once theirs.
10. Emma LaRocque, Native Writers Resisting Colonizing Practices in
Canadian Historiography and Literature (Ph.D. diss., University of
Manitoba, 1999), 67.
11. In Colonial and Postcolonial Literature, Elleke Boehmer defines colonial
literature as writing concerned with colonial perceptions and experience,
written mainly by metropolitans, but also by creoles and Indigenes,
during colonial times. See Elleke Boehmer, Colonial and Postcolonial
Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2005), 2. The term creoles
and Indigenes is simply read as the other of metropolitans. A few pages
later, Boehmer clarifies, by creole is meant those who are descendants
of settlers yet who are Indigenous to their land of settlement in the sense
of being native-born,(Boehmer, 9) a definition that is homogenizing, and
grossly incorrect, to say the least, in the context of contemporary settler
colony politics. The term Indigene is left undefined, and one is left in
doubt of the validity of Boehmers definitions in the face of the
postcolonial diversity that is celebrated in the book. The entire text
displays the malaise it diagnoses, namely, the tendency in homogenizing
critical discourses to overlook material and political contexts. This can
be illustrated from the way in which Indigenous writing across the world
is subsumed into Boehmers overview of postcolonial writing in five pages,
containing factually outdated material that should have been erased in the
second edition. There is no attempt to incorporate recent developments

in Aboriginal theory and literature beyond the work of Aboriginal-
identified Mudrooroo, cited repeatedly by Boehmer, despite his recasting
himself as a global nomad after the controversy over his non-Aboriginal
identity. There is no mention of more recent anti-colonial writing by
Aboriginal Australians apart from Mudrooroo, Archie Weller and Kath
Walker. As for other Indigenous writing, Maori writing at least gets
honourable mention in a paragraph or two: Native Canadian writing does
not make it to Boehmers brief can(n)on, and Metis writing, one assumes,
is lost somewhere in the definition of creole in Boehmers introduction.
12. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, eds., The Post-Colonial
Studies Reader (New York: Routledge, 1995), 213.
13. Linda Tuhiwai Smith acknowledges the normative status of the post-
colonial writers such as Salman Rushdie and Ngugi wa Thiongo, but sees
a certain connectedness with the Indigenous experience of imperialism
because these are writers whose histories were also interrupted and
reshaped by the experience of imperialism. For her, the difference is that
for Indigenous peoples, in whose lives imperialism is a continuing and
brutal reality, the process of struggle cannot be carried out only at the
level of text and literature. See Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing
Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (London: Zed Books,
1999), 19. This reduction of the political to merely the textual in post-
colonial studies has been criticized not only by Indigenous scholars but
also critics such as Edward Said, who stated that all the energies poured
into critical theory, into novel and demystifying theoretical praxes like the
new historicism and deconstruction and Marxism have avoided the major,
I would say determining, political horizon of modern Western culture,
namely imperialism. See Edward W. Said, Secular Interpretation: The
Geographical Element, and the Methodology of Imperialism, in After
Colonialism, edited by G. Prakash (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1995), 37.
14. See Marie Battiste, ed., Reclaiming Indigenous Voice and Vision (Vancouver:
University of British Columbia Press, 2000).
15. Linda Tuhiwai Smith comments, post-colonial discussions have also
stirred some Indigenous resistance, not so much to the literary reimagining
of culture as being centred in what were once conceived of as the colonial
margins, but to the idea that colonialism is over, finished business. This
is best articulated by Aborigine activist Bobbi Sykes, who asked at an
academic conference on post-colonialism, What? Post-colonialism? Have
42 | Nilanjana Deb
they left? Decolonizing Methodologies, 24.

16. Louis Owens, The Song is Very Short: Native American Literature and
Literary Theory, Weber Studies 12.3 (Fall 1995).
http://weberstudies.weber.edu/archive/archive%20B%20Vol.%2011-16.1/
Vol.%2012.3/12.3Owens.htm, date accessed: 3 November 2003.
17. Kimberly Blaeser, Native Literature, 53.
18. Ibid., 55.
19. See, for example, Craig S.Womack, Red on Red: Native American Literary
Separatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).
The Debate over Authenticity: How Indian is Indian
Writing in English, and How Much Does This Matter?*
Rimi B. Chatterjee
Thanks to the demographic currents known as the diaspora, Indian

writing in English is now done by a diverse bunch of people scattered
around the globe, some of whom actively contest the idea of
Indianness when it is applied to them, while others seek to embrace
or ignore it. In addition, much of the critical and theoretical writing
about IWE, as well as a lot of postcolonial theory, has been produced
by this same somewhat-Indian group, many of whom are based in
academic institutions in the Anglo-American world. I believe this has
some interesting implications for how both this literature and this
theory are written and consumed.
Although the dialectic of authenticity can be found in other
literary genres, no other genre has to deal with quite such a tangle
of languages, ethnicities, journeys and voices as Indian Writing in
English does. This clumsy phrase, along with Indo-Anglian Writing,
Writing in English by People of Indian Origin, and Indian English
Writing, is an example of the unhappy constructions that, like
Sukumar Rays fantastic animals, have flapped and slithered their way
into literary criticism as people have tried to describe this geographically
unstable and ethnically indefinable genre. Perhaps authenticity functions
as a necessary yardstick in this shifting terrain, or perhaps its certainty
is an illusion. To try to impose some order on this mess, Ill throw
my hat in the ring and propose here the term Indish writing to refer
to the genre of works in English by people who are to some extent
*An early version of this paper was published by the Ram Krishna Mission Vidya
Mandir as part of the proceedings of the conference titled Indian Writing in
English: A Quest for Definition in 2008.
44 | Rimi B. Chatterjee
Indian or who dont mind being called Indian. I prefer this term to
Indic since that term is already used in Indology to denote
manuscripts and sources from South Asia. Within this category we
could have subdivisions: Indish diasporic writers, Indish resident
writers, and a third category which I will call anasporic: the writers
who have returned. Indish would also allow us to consider writers
who left India before Partition, who might legitimately dislike being
called Indian.
Is there any reason why, when it comes to any Indian fiction
in English, there should be an obsession with the issue of its
Indianness? asks Amitava Kumar in his book Bombay-London-New
York.1 It is a question that Indian writers writing in English often ask
with varying levels of anguish. Kumar tries to answer the question
by delving into narratives of the self, both his own and others, looking
for fragments that might be assembled into a contingent yet coherent
whole a chutney or possibly a khichri.2 Vikram Chandra produces
a similar cri du coeur in his article The Cult of Authenticity, where
he memorably details an encounter with a young Meenakshi Mukherjee
who accuses him of marketing Indianness to the West.3 Clearly an
Indish writer faces these questions with some trepidation.
But what is Indianness? To answer this question is a perilous
undertaking and many scholars have attempted it with indifferent
results: there is no single answer which satisfies everyone. This
question vexes literary critics, political scientists and market researchers
alike. However, if we ignore the fine detail, it is possible to discern
a rough-hewn pop Indianness coming through in peoples conversations,
their reaction to films and sporting events, and their day to day
activities. Indianness or some version of it is packaged for us
by the cinema, by ads, by sport, by stories, by plays and songs, by
newspapers, by the pictures painted on compound walls. It postulates
a felt community, as Rajat Ray would put it: a commonalty of feeling
which we posit in others and feel in ourselves, and on which we base
our understanding of a bond.4 We always assume that this feeling is
a shared experience, but we cannot really know how others experience
their Indianness and on what they base it. It is this Indianness, fluid
and indefinable, which is held up by every popular reviewer or
The Debate over Authenticity | 45
interviewer who takes it upon themselves to give an Indish writer an

Indianness rating. However, this enterprise has not usually been
regarded as very respectable, and most academic critics have either
avoided it or couched it in guarded language. It took someone on
the periphery to articulate, in somewhat coherent terms, the key
questions of this enterprise.
In 2000 M. Prabha, in her book The Waffle of the Toffs, presented
a compendious statement of this form of pop criticism, based on what
I might call the Income Test Theory of Indian Authenticity.5 Prabha
surveys the field of Indian literature as she sees it, rating authors for
their backgrounds (low class good, high class bad), education
(indigenous good, foreign bad), income (rich bad, poor good,
government servant best) and ethnicity (Bengali bhadralok bad,
everyone else good, Tamil excellent). The achievements of the
privileged are discounted as being functions of their privilege, while
those without privilege get additional brownie points for their
origins.6 Not surprisingly, Prabhas criticisms, the wacky along with
the serious, have not been answered by any commentators who
consider themselves serious critics of literature. This is no doubt partly
because of Prabhas rather peculiar style. Her prose is florid and
excessively prolix: she describes Krishnaswamy Nagarajans Chronicles
of Kedaram with the line, The consuetude and mores of the littoral
conurbation are nuanced with a fine delicacy,7 and many such gems
are scattered throughout the book. Given the linguistic snobbishness
of most critics, this of course tends to deny Prabha a serious audience.
But if one overlooks her burning desire to unseat Tagore from
his position of pre-eminence, one can find some valid points hiding
under the persiflage.8 She accuses, with some justice, Indish writers
of being wary of entering the worlds of the dispossessed, the rural
and the other, with the rare exceptions of Mulk Raj Anand (to whom
she offers grudging praise) and Mahasweta Devi. It is unclear whether
she counts the latter an honorary Indish writer or an authentic regional
language (henceforth bhasha) writer who shows up the shallowness of
the Indish brigade; she does not distinguish between the English and
the Bengali texts of Mahasweta Devis work and treats both kinds
as if they emanate directly from the author. She repeatedly shows this
blindness to the implications of translation, for example where she

discusses Arthur Rimbaud (64-65) or Franz Kafka (79-80) in the
section where she boldly applies Income Test Theory to Western
literature. I dont think she has read the latter two in the original,
but I will stand corrected if she has.
However, these shortcomings tend to mask the fact that Prabha
has a valid point: the toffs she rails against tend to write about people
like them. The term toffs, or toffeenoses (British slang for the upper
class), is telling, and suggests that there is a sense of social and
economic grievance underlying Prabhas critique. It is somewhat
unfair to the creative writer, since the decision to write in a given
language is not entirely amenable to conscious choice. The writing
of fiction (even more than non-fiction) comes from a deep place in
the psyche, and unless one can feel and dream in a language and its
concomitant world, one will not be able to write well in it. Hence
the insistence by creative writing teachers that one write what one
knows. Of course not all writers follow this rule, and some break it
with success, but it is by and large true.
However, Prabha has a point. The toffs do find it easier, because
of their wealth and social status, to attract media attention and
publishers. Their visibility turns them, whether they like it or not,
into representatives of India to those who know little about the country
but can read English. Therefore what they omit is effectively silenced.
This is a serious charge, but Prabha fails to follow it up by examining
why these writers, barring a few exceptions, do not venture outside
their class and castes, and she remains blinded by her obsession with
background and biographies. It is to be noted that she is unimpressed
by the fact that Amitav Ghoshs subjects range much farther than his
class and time, presumably because his St-Stephens-College-and-
Oxbridge education disqualifies him in the authenticity sweepstakes.
Instead, Prabhas concentration on background leads her into the
absurdity of championing Nirad C. Chaudhuri, that quintessential
Englishman, as the authentic Indian writer on the grounds of his
childhood deprivation and his persecution in middle life by All India
Radio.9
However, in spite of all this, I agree with Prabha that the average
Indish writer is generally too timid in confronting themes that are

not contemporary, urban and middle class, and along with Prabha I
would like to see them tackling these themes more extensively.10
However, I disagree with her regarding the cause of this timidity,
which she attributes to the cultural cringe of the Indian writer in
English towards the global putative English-speaking world including
former colonists and present superpowers. I believe that if the Indish
writer cringed to such beings, he or she would not presume to write
about the West at all, and would talk only about sundry exotic aspects
of India: bhel puri, mehndi, communal riots. There are such writers
in the market (I will not name them) but they constitute a minority.
Instead, I believe that the cultural cringe that prevents these
writers from writing with more acuity about India, is instead towards
the bhasha writer. Many Indish writers who live abroad have had only
brief or no contact with India, and have never really lived here as
functioning adults. What little they know is often confined to family
lore, childhood memories, the media, gossip and rumour, stories and
legends, in short, the cultural baggage of the first (or subsequent)
generation of naturalised citizens in the West, and is not strong enough
to allow them to take their imagination into worlds they have not
known, such as the village or the slum. By contrast, the best of the
bhasha writers write immeasurably more accurately, passionately and
tellingly about Indian realities, as is only to be expected. The bhasha
writers also have a close relationship with their regional publishers,
booksellers and media, and easier access to a coherent, literate and
aware audience that appreciates their work and flocks to their book
launches, all within a defined geographical region. In the public arena
of their bhasha, they are far bigger celebrities than the average Indian
writer in English is in the same circle.
This brings us to another question: how important is location?
Does the place of a writers domicile have very much to do with his
or her writing? It is a fact that most Indish writers live outside India.
There are reasons for this. Partly it is historical: the better educated
are most likely both to write in English and to emigrate. But it is
also because the dynamics of Indish publishing within India are
complex and problematic. In India the English-reading audience is
widely scattered, lives in various cities and towns, is much more

heterogeneous than a given bhasha audience, and costs money and
time to reach. This means that to successfully publish a book in
English in this country, a publisher must have a wide distribution
system with the ability to sustain slow returns, as well as high visibility.
Only large and well funded usually MNC publishers have these
features. It is much easier to deal with these firms from the West
through an agent. The higher cost of selling new English fiction in
India explains why there are almost no small publishing firms
producing it in this country, whereas there are a plethora of such firms
in the regional languages. If Indish writers living in Indian do make
it big, it is because thanks to the good offices of friends abroad they
have got a foreign publisher, won an award or two, and been lionized.
Graham Greene persuaded David Higham Associates to take on R.K.
Narayan, with memorable results. In general sales for resident Indish
writers lag behind not only the sales of their migr Indish cousins
but also of the bhasha writers as well.
Indian residents writing in English have no literary awards to
compete for, beyond the rather boring Sahitya Akademi award and
the barely-there Vodafone Crossword Award which has changed
sponsor three times in the last five years. The winner of either gets
two column inches in national newspapers and five minutes of fame
on the networks. By contrast, bhasha channels devote more space and
attention to their literary lions, as do bhasha newspapers, and most
well-established bhashas have at least one prestigious award for writers
to aspire to. Writers in English who continue to live in India,
therefore, are doubly disenfranchised, and are usually urged by their
friends and family to apply for a visa to the West forthwith. Agents
abroad are also largely uninterested in representing writers from Third
World countries unless they are sufficiently exotic to be a find: in
the West, authors are expected to be on the scene, actively promoting
their titles. In the intensely competitive world of Western publishing,
author absence or un-marketability can sink a book. However, the
argument from authenticity persists in seeing the Indish writer as
privileged, since it assumes that all such writers are without exception
non-resident Indians (NRIs) earning in hard currencies.
Even if the writer stays in India, there is still a question mark

hanging over her use of the English language. When the English
language came to these shores, it came as a special package for the
elite, a bundle of language, literature, ideas, technologies and manners,
and those who embraced it usually took on more than the language.
Two critiques developed in response. One was a critique-from-below,
expressed in verbal and visual lampoons of babu culture and
deliberate misconstruings of Western ideas and concepts, and the
other was a critique-from-above.
Within a generation of the debut of Western education on Indian
shores there arose a group of highly educated Indians who used the
ideas and language of the European Enlightenment to question and
criticize the British enterprise in India. Threatened by the prospect
of educated Indians leading the masses against British power, the
British discovered that these people were not the real Indians. The
urban Babu, with his Oxbridge degree and patent leather shoes, was
a hothouse flower; the real India was up-country, in their quaint
phrase, and accessible only to sahibs voyaging forth with horse and
hound in the company of their Hindostani helpers.
The exploitative nature of this dichotomy is plain to see: its
objective was to strike at the basis for the Indian middle classs claim
to speak for the people, to destroy the confidence of the babus in
fighting for India, real or imagined, and to dissuade them from joining
forces with these real Indians while teaching the real Indians to
distrust the Babus. That we have still not shaken off the legacy of this
ploy is our shame, not that of our former rulers (although the average
British reviewer is still capable of trotting out these hoary stereotypes
without blinking). Now the same cry is taken up, but this time by
those who are better convinced they are the real Indians at least
until someone poorer, less westernised, more rural and more
comprehensively oppressed, comes along. This prejudice still underpins
a good deal of Indias politics and popular attitudes, casting as true
Indianness anything, good or bad, that seems untouched by the reality-
draining forces of Westernisation.
Thus along with the supremacist blindness of the West on one
side, the non-resident Indish writer is pressured from the other side
by nativism from home. The only territory available appears to be

the in-between land of urban ghettos, from Gurgaon and Colaba to
Silicon Valley and Bradford, with a brief layover in Trinidad and
Tobago, and writers have stuck to telling the stories of these not-quite-
anywhere places. However, the tales and fables of this fragment of
diasporic experience are perceived by the global English speaking
community to be the only Indian narratives in town, and the
experience of one person or one culture is taken as emblematic of
the experience of all. Thus if one is reading the news in English, one
might be tempted to state foolishly, like Salman Rushdie and William
Dalrymple, that nothing of interest is written in India, and all the best
Indian writers live abroad.
A subtler form of the critique-from-authenticity has been evolved
by Tabish Khair in his book Babu Fictions.11 Khair teaches at the
University of Copenhagen, so presumably he belongs in some respect
to the toffs. Nevertheless, he is uneasy with the global phenomenon
of the English novel and the class of people who write India in English
for the world. He states that to the global audience, the Indian writer
in English is an informer (he quickly divests the term of its pejorative
significance) on matters Indian. However,
[I]t is nevertheless necessary to query a simplistic identification of these
voices with India or Indians, a ready conferment on them of the capacity
to be allied with the disadvantaged simply because India, as a nation, may
be perceived as disadvantaged in comparison to, say, the USA, England or
Germany. The legibility of [the writers] script itself obscures the fact that
they are not simply mirrors of Indian realities but are translators of it.12
Khair has clearly noted the global communitys reductionist tendency

to read the displaced Indian writers story as the only story, and he
has been deeply disturbed by it. He cautions the non-Indian reader
that, although India is in their minds often a synecdochic symbol
for under-privilege, the individual writer may not be underprivileged
in Indian terms. He avers that Indish writers may, intentionally or
inadvertently, give their audiences the impression that their work is
the Great Indian Novel (would anyone ever talk about a Great British
Novel, or attempt to write one?). In a society which wants its exoticism
neatly packaged with the messy bits cut off, there are material benefits
for advertising oneself as the one-stop-shop for explanations of the
mysterious East. Khair puts his finger on this: the Indian writer should
not be taken by her European reader as the mouthpiece of the nation,
regardless of how the publishers market the book. Nevertheless, Khair
is careful to hedge his arguments with caveats, lest he condemn the
righteous with the perfidious. He is careful to level his criticisms at
writers who lack serious knowledge of India that is derived from actual
personal experience.
Having made his point, Khair goes on to cover his back by
repeating that his approach should not be seen as an attempt to deny
that Indian English fiction can ever cross the so-called class/cultural
barrier because its writers cannot do so physically. It is difficult to
see what he means by this. Perhaps he is acknowledging the power
of imagination to transcend physical barriers, or maybe he is referring
to the expense of researching India from the West. This is interesting,
as no one regards Amartya Sens economics as an attempt to cross
the class/cultural barrier by a member of the privileged class, though
it is hard to be more privileged than the Master of Trinity. People
may disagree with Sen, but they dont question his right to write about
poverty. Opinions are fuzzier with literature: there is no way that a
book works in the same way as a theory: it does not produce testable
conclusions, nor throw up observable facts. But it does leave a moral
residue in a reader; it does present images which may be stereotypes
or inspirations, it does persuade a reader to think in a certain way,
and it is always a personal statement stamped with the identity of its
author. And that is where criticism comes in.
Khair moves from this disclaimer to a theory of alienation derived
from Marx which he wishes to apply to the works of Indish writers:
This remains the core of alienation: where the relations and needs that
constitute a human being (and the products of her/his objectification)
become abstractions and that which has been made by the human being (as
a consequence of the relations and to fulfill his/her needs) becomes real. In
sociocultural fields this often results in an appropriation and (shall we say)
explanation or narration of other realities on ones own (dominant) terms
and the occlusion of crucial aspects of other realities.13
This is veering close to a direct statement of Khairs position, which

is not that different from Prabhas: that the distance from India, mental
and physical, achieved by the expat14 writer in English, allows the
exercise of a seeming authority which masquerades as authenticity to
the uninformed, but is false. Khair seems to be saying here that a
lazy understanding of a foreign culture relies on emblematic things
that stand alone and ignores the complex web of relations in which
these things stand. Hence the often iconic nature of representation
that India undergoes in Indish fiction written abroad: the spices, the
arranged marriages, the cows on the streets, the women going to the
temple, smells, squalor, and beautiful crafts. For an expat looking to
make a literary career in the West, India is a resource to be carefully
exploited, like a recipe book handed down in the family to the owner
of an Indian takeaway. It is a USP, a passport to imaginary worlds
(while the physical passport moves in the opposite direction, as
Amitava Kumar points out) that can be lent to the Western reader
in search of a thrill.
Khair then goes on to look at four writers who, in his opinion,
transcend this cheap version of Indian writing and produce narratives
that fight and overcome the temptation to sell India short. Two of
these writers, Raja Rao and R.K. Narayan, are also praised by Prabha.
The other two, Rushdie and Amitav Ghosh, get their share of bashing
from her in quite colourful language. It is notable that Khair disposes
off the zenana in a short chapter titled Gender and Class, then goes
on to full length individual critiques of the four men. These follow
more or less standard lines of critical inquiry, focusing on the dialogic
and dualistic aspects of the works; alterity, subalternity. The questions
of readership, audience and intention, which the introduction hints
at, surface only in a very muted form, and largely the inquiry follows
well-trodden paths and does not fulfil the promise of the introduction.
Khair thus loses the sense of context he produces initially, as when
in the chapter Language he comments on the presence of a Notes
and Glossary at the end of Kanthapura and their absence from the
works of Rushdie and Vikram Seth. He discusses these choices as
if they were transparently the result of the authors decisions, citing

interviews where Seth, for example, defended the absence of notes
from his book. The fact is, Western publishers hate notes and
glossaries (a common saying among Western publishers is every note
decreases sales by half ), while Indian publishers largely have no
opinion on them. An author who wants notes in the West usually has
to argue long and hard, while in India publishers are quite happy to
give the author his or her head in the matter. Once the book is
produced, it is up to the author to defend it, warts and all, and it
is bad form to wash ones dirty editing laundry in public. But Khair
persists in treating the published book as an airy mind-child of the
author, unmidwifed by any human agency. He thus loses an
opportunity to discuss publishers roles in shaping both the text and
the audience. One of the reasons why Indian writers in English do
not attempt new and startling themes is the essential conservatism of
foreign publishers with an India list, who seem to read such texts with
a spices, arranged marriage and communal riots scorecard to hand.
Even if the worst orientalist excesses of the publishers editor are
headed off, the cover is bound to brim with the exotic east. Agents,
who know they have to sell a book to publishers, are often the first
bastion of this belief, and it is extraordinarily difficult to persuade
them to accept a book which doesnt fit their preconceived idea of
an acceptable Indian story.
Savvy Indish writers have grasped this and are turning it into hard
cash. Kavya Vishwanathans failed attempt to write a chick lit book
was only one instance that raised enough dust to be seen as far away
as Calcutta. But take as an example another recent book, For
Matrimonial Purposes, written by a fashion publicist about surprise,
surprise! a fashion publicist.15 This book appears to be written on
what we might call the Shobha De Quick Pakora16 System of Chick
Lit Production. The receipt goes as follows: Take one obscenely
wealthy Bombay merchant family, with an unmarriageable daughter.
Send said daughter to West by buying her a place in private New Jersey
college (price not mentioned) to pursue Further Studies, where she
picks up slick New York fashion lingo along with Manolo Blahnik
collection and sense of cultural confusion. However, she remains good
girl at heart, pursuing husband just like Mamma taught, turning down
exploitative white boys and planning wedding trousseau. There follows
much bitter-sweet comedy caused by boy-viewing en famille, told in
hip Sex-and-the-City fashionista-speak. The dish is laced with badly
transliterated Hindi/Gujarati/Sindhi, lots of vegetarian biryani and a
venal astrologer. As garnish, add one happy ending lightly sprinkled
with chatpata17 philosophy. Dare I call this new urban, traditional,
from established family, open-minded but homely, pure vegetarian
Indian concoction, Chick Pea Lit?
For Matrimonial Purposes is clearly a stunt, and the book is
entertaining enough if you like that sort of thing: so long as its
limitations are recognized it is perfectly harmless trash. However, each
chapter has as its epigraph a quotation from an odd assortment of
decently forgotten Orientalist texts on Hindu marriage and society,
with Tagore (once again) looking a bit lost among them. Furthermore,
unlike Meera Syals Life Isnt All Ha Ha Hee Hee, which has a similar
theme, this book fails to challenge gender discrimination in any
serious way, since it contrives to resolve the heroines story while
preserving the traditional pieties. In that respect it is nothing but a
rather pretentious Indian Mills and Boon romance in hardback,
created by someone who knows how to play the market. However,
to regard it as representative of India would be like getting an idea
of Britain from the novels of Barbara Cartland. Unfortunately, some
people are silly enough to do this. To an Indian critic based in the
West, hearing Sunday supplement reviewers gush about the authenticity
of such a book must indeed feel like purgatory.
So India is a marketable commodity for some and the object of
nostalgia for others, or both at once. The diasporic Indian writer,
unlike the diasporic anything else, frequently insists on being seen as
Indian, and of returning to Indian themes. There is a reluctance to
sink into the homogenous Western context of the host country. People
who in other respects seem completely Western will betray nostalgia
for the land they left that is usually seen only in the forcibly exiled.
Perhaps the migrs persist in this because the racial and cultural
stereotyping they face in the host country wakens long-banked fires
of patriotism. Perhaps the passport of the mind is never relinquished.
Indians are good at hanging on to their roots (or their roots at hanging
on to them). Choices in cuisine, customs, marriage practices, faiths,
languages, dress, appearance and habits serve to keep them relatively
unblended into the scenery, both in their own eyes and in those of
their adoptive compatriots.
So when they discuss the Indish writer, both reviewers and
academics at home and abroad see in their minds an NRI, or at least
a person who spends more than half their time in the West (this would
include even migratory birds like Vikram Chandra and Amitav
Ghosh). To those left at home in India, the NRI was, till recently,
a person who might be envied or pitied, but always as someone
fundamentally different from the desi. Since the category NRI maps
so neatly on to Indish writer, many of the attitudes Indians take to
Indish writers are subsets of the general attitudes to NRIs. In the
1970s and 1980s, NRIs were still largely alien: they had gained
fabulous wealth and lost the discomforts and difficulties we still
struggled with in India, but in the moral arena we could rejoice that
they had lost contact with the real India which, like Shashi Kapoor
in the Yash Chopra blockbuster Deewar (1975), we poor stay-at-homes
still had, and we could say proudly with Shashi, Mere paas Ma hai.18
Then, some time in the mid 1990s, things started to change.
Following the winds of globalization, certain identification with and
sympathy for NRI themes began to enter mainstream India cinema,
with Dil Se, Hum Aapke Hain Kaun, not to mention Monsoon Wedding,
etc. Indian urban middle class life slowly but surely started to acquire
the markers of Westernization: access to shiny shopping malls, swank
cars, cool clothes, gadgets, all the accoutrements of the affluent society
as seen on television, although power cuts continued to chop hours
out of the day for most urbanites and occasional floods and droughts
disrupted life in their appropriate seasons. The opening of the media
has also allowed us to see some of the blots on the face of Western
civilization, and caused some of the romance to drain away. We have
started to resent the NRIs less, since we are becoming more like them,
and we see them clearer. Cheap airfares have allowed many to visit
their NRI relatives and understand the real meaning of the Western
dream. Accordingly, at least among the creamy layers, the obsession
with Indianness (and its Other, foreignness) has begun to abate.

Younger writers are less likely to face the firing squad on this issue
(it is significant that none of them feature in Prabhas book), and they
are less likely to speak out on it as well. In films it has become almost
routine to present NRI characters. The recent Aaja Nachle, Madhuri
Dixits comeback vehicle, not only showed an NRI divorcee returning
to India, but even allowed her to go back to New York at the end
of the film and enjoy a latte with the handsome Raja sahib who clearly
jet-sets with the best (Raja sahib first appears in an apron with self-
made pizza). For many in their twenties today, Indianness is
understood in its basic grammatical sense of whatever Indians do and
are wherever they might be located geographically.
This has, however, resulted in a swing in the opposite direction:
critics seem to think that since the whole Indianness debate has lost
steam, there is nothing left to say about contemporary Indish writing.
Thus Kiran Desais rather naive take on the Gorkhaland agitations
of the 1980s, in The Inheritance of Loss, was let off with only a minor
rap on the knuckles by the reviewing community. In the book she
confines her vision to a small community of upper class Bengalis in
their hillside homes, for whom the agitation means a lost dog and
bad service at Glenarys restaurant. Although this may hold true from
the viewpoint of the characters, the author need not confine her vision
to what her creations can see; Desai provides no authorial commentary
on the involvement of the young Nepali tutor, Gyan, in the unrest,
and we are left to see his participation as the youthful unruliness that
the family thinks it is. For the purposes of an NRI Indish writer
writing for a Western audience it is, perhaps sufficient: her readers
in the West are not interested in this political peccadillo among the
servants. I dont think that here the defense of artistic necessity holds
good. If one is going to write about a social movement, however
tangentially, one might as well make a good job of it, or why bother?
If writers do have a responsibility to their readers and their sources
of inspiration (and I believe they do) then to shirk that responsibility
is simply to be a bad writer. By contrast, the chapters of the book
which deal with the old cooks sons life as an illegal labourer in New
York are much more deeply felt, and bite hard.
The truth is many Indians in India today, let alone around the
world, are just as isolated from such issues in contemporary Indian
politics. Well, in a sense they always have been, but the guilt attached
to that isolation is now dissolving. The deracinated po-mo Indian
writer in English, swanning from one mega metropolis to the other
or picnicking with Pimms and strawberries in the English countryside,
is becoming more like us than we ever expected. Hence the us and
them venom of the not Indian enough lynching cry has muted to
a ritualistic grumble. The more upmarket distros of this outlook, such
as the theories of subalternity and alterity, have not yet remade
themselves to function in a world where difference is negotiated and
fluid. The bankruptcy of so-called post-colonial criticism (an outdated
term if ever there was one) shows in the fact that, post the demise
of Indianness and its children, there is no criterion of value to put
in its place.
Perhaps one reason is that many of the post-colonial critics
themselves belong to the nowhere-everywhere group of NRI Indish
writers, and moreover have to hold down positions in Western
academe, which is as avid a consumer of the exotic as shoppers at
Anokhi. These critics, speaking to Westerners about India, lack
reflexive criticism from the people they theorise about, or who have
to use their theories, and this has let them reign without serious
opposition, since their subjects/followers cant share their platform.
In the Spivakian sense all resident Indian writers and critics are
subalterns compared to this group because they get to publish with
global publishers less, attend less international conferences, get quoted
less, appear on world television networks less, are ineligible for news-
making awards, and dont have agents. This puts Indian critics in the
weird position of having less right to speak about Indian literature
than West-resident writers of Indian origin who have such access.
From our point of view, it is more meaningful to ask, If the subaltern
shouts its head off, will the superaltern listen?
Spivak subsequently refined her arguments by defining the
subaltern as that which cannot speak, and which presumably is only
knowable because Spivak tells us about it. Anything which speaks,
therefore, cant be subaltern. The subaltern is thus a classic Platonic
noumenon which is by definition unknowable except by inference,

and therefore useless as a tool for understanding the world we live
in. And this is the theory that has ruled post-colonialism for two
decades.
So where do we go from here? If Indianness as a critical category
is dying, what can legitimately take its place? How should we construct
a helpful, perceptive and culturally relevant body of criticism of Indish
literature? One thing is certain: this criticism must look inward more
than it has done so far. Rather than ask how a particular work may
or may not appear to a given readership, we should accept the
multiplicity of readerships available to authors today, and the fact that
a work may appeal to many readers in different ways and say different
things to them. Let us accept it as given that the West reads, say,
Midnights Children differently than we do. Let us also accept that a
book like Midnights Children will speak to us differently than a book
like Trotter Nama (which for me remains the Great Indian Novel) and
that perhaps in India the latter has more to say to us than the former.
But this does not invalidate either as literary works. There is no League
Table of Indianness, nor is there an Indish Writers Visa that must
be granted to or withheld from anyone whos ever eaten bhel puri or
avakkai.
We should rather ask the questions that matter about Indish
writing: we should ask about its range of themes, its politics, its
adventurousness and originality, about its talent and technique. If
there are kinds of Indish writing that have not yet been tried, we
should ask why no writers have attempted them, and we should ask
whether we need them. This way of looking at the genre posits a closer
connection between the writer and the critic. If we accept, six decades
after Independence, that Indish writing (perhaps more than Western
literatures in English) is still a genre-in-progress, then, we also accept
that the readers and the writers have a long way ahead of them, and
need to get moving. Vast fields of fictional experience as yet remain
unexplored. It is for this that we must ask we must demand that
writers branch out from the themes and trends that have dominated
Indish literature to date, and that critics too refocus their thinking
from the historical juxtapositions of the past to the unfolding dynamics
of the future. The particularly long lines of transmission from

Western academe to the seminar rooms of India of postcolonial
criticism have rendered it, like the London newspapers in colonial
India, chronically out of date. This is a challenge that the present
generation of critics must face and overcome.
Notes
1. Amitava Kumar, Bombay-London-New York, quoted in Oindrila Mukherjee,

review in India Star Review of Books, http://www.indiastar.com/
oindrila1.htm, accessed 20 July 2007.
2. Amitava Kumar, Passport Photos (New Delhi: Penguin, 2002).
3. Vikram Chandra, The Cult of Authenticity, Boston Review, http://
bostonreview.net/BR25.1/chandra.html, accessed 20 July 2007.
4. Rajat Ray, The Felt Community: Commonality and Mentality before the
Emergence of Indian Nationalism (New Delhi: Oxford University Press,
2003).
5. M. Prabha, The Waffle of the Toffs: A Sociocultural Critique of Indian
Writing in English (New Delhi: Oxford and IBH, 2000).
6. Ibid., xx. Privilege is a rather idiosyncratic category here, for Prabha
does not explain why she thinks Bengalis as a community are more
privileged than Tamils, the only explanation she offers is the blindingly
illuminating comment that Calcutta was the capital then, Delhi is the
capital now.
7. Ibid., 21-22.
8. Prabha lambasts Tagore on the basis of a comparison between Gitanjali
and The Wreck of the Deutschland, but appears ignorant that there is any
difference between a translation and an original work, and (perhaps more
forgivably) is unaware of the history of the Macmillan translation of
Gitanjali which had very little to do with Tagore (12-13).
9. Ibid., 29-32.
10. Prabha is, however, a little unfair in contrasting writers in English with
writers in other languges, some of which she has, of course, only read in
translation.
11. Tabish Khair, Babu Fictions: Alienation in Contemporary Indian English
Novels (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001).
12. Ibid., 20-21.
13. Ibid.
14. Expat is the chick clipped form of expatriate.

15. Kavita Daswani, For Matrimonial Purposes (New York: G.P. Putnams
Sons, 2003).
16. Pakora is a crispy snack made of gram flour and stuffed with chicken,
vegetables or fish, normally had with tea or coffee.
17. Chatpata is a colloquial term meaning spicy or peppery, generally used
in connection with tidbits.
18. This translates as I have my mother. This dialogue is the climax of an
altercation between two estranged brothers, Amitabh Bachchan, the
successful gangster and Shashi Kapoor, the honest police inspector. When
Bachchan hotly justifies his going astray by flaunting the material
possessions his connection with the underworld has enabled him to have,
Kapoor coolly remarks that he has won their mother to his side. The
material gains when weighed against the mother are next to nothing.
Bachchan is visibly put off and despairs at his most valuable loss. The
mother is obviously the much contested symbol of bharat-mata- Mother
India. This dialogue had taken the nation by storms in the mid-70s. Later
this dialogue was spoofed many a time in comedy shows on television and
many other Hindi films, as well. The authors intention is humorous and
belongs to the tradition of parodying this very serious dialogue on popular
shows.
19. Po-mo is the cool short form of postmodernism.
The Volatile Power-Equation: W(h)ither
Postcolonialism? / Whether Neocolonialism?
Subhadeep Paul
Britannia to Americana
Postcolonial Studies has perhaps been the most dominant cultural

theory and critical trend and practice of the nineties and after.
Following the impetus of Reception Theory in the seventies and radical
revisions in New Historicism in the eighties, Postcolonial Studies has
exerted the most decisive influence on theories and politics of identity.
The growing influence of Cultural Studies in the eighties, stemming
from multifarious researches in socio-cultural signifiers and signifying
practices realized the necessity of examining the peripheral discourses
excluded from consideration due to a preponderance of Euro-
American-white-male elitism. However, with more than half a decade
of critical engagement with Postcolonialism, the question is being
raised whether there has been enough of writing and striking back
to the center. The fact can hardly be ignored that Postcolonial Theory
has itself tended to become some sort of an elite, placing some
erstwhile marginal critics of the Third World in the cynosure of the
Western academia, who in turn have obfuscated each other with a
conflicting hop-scotch of terminologies and conceptualizations.
However, just as Foucaldian notions of power-structures still remain
a governing paradigm in the analysis of power-relations, similarly, the
concern with postcolonialism can hardly be ruled out in the context
of contemporary socio-political state of affairs.
For the aforementioned reason, this paper seeks to bridge the
gap created between the abstractions of high (postcolonial) theory and
the dynamics of contemporary international relations. The paradigm
62 | Subhadeep Paul
of postcolonial theory formulated through a study of the aftermath

of British Imperialism on its erstwhile colonies is not wholly redundant
in the context of the trajectory Postcolonial Studies has taken in
enlightening us on 21st century power-operatives. But the complex
dimensions that international affairs had taken in the New World
Order spearheaded by America and the reaction of the rest of the
world to this, necessitates a re-evaluation of standard postcolonial
criticism and the feasibility and extent of its application.
If colonialism be an ongoing process, neocolonialism, as the term
itself shows, is its obvious take-over. Before dealing with the term
neocolonialism, a searching introspection of its terminological
precedents needs be taken into account. While an overt skepticism
of critical terms such as the aforementioned one prevents academic
analyses of burning issues (viz. colonialism and its multifaceted
impact), it is simultaneously important that they should be taken with
a grain of salt. Critical terms are coined for the sake of conceptual
clarity of abstractions but very often they tend to be generalized
umbrella-terms and land up encompassing more than their definitional
parlance actually allows them. However, for the sake of conceptual
understanding and clarity, the state of the contemporary global world
order might be broadly addressed as neocolonial just as the
postcolonial is held to be a take-over of whatever followed colonialism.
Terms like colonialism, imperialism and hegemony are over-
archingly synonymous (despite the subtleties of their marginal
differences) and imply varied forms (and degrees) of the exercise of
power and control of one (or more) agencies over other agency/ies.
Similarly the term neocolonialism (that has been in vogue for quite
sometime now) indicates the dictates of some Subject over some
Other but the monolithic polarizations have given way to more and
more complex forms of domination and subordination. This paper
will address the varied instances of suppressive and oppressive forces
that are at work in the contemporary world order having colonizing
tendencies that have replaced British Imperialism and created an
imbalance in power equations. The prefix neo obviously indicates the
phase following the demise of British Imperialism but its validity
would remain as a generic/critical term, without homogenizing the
The Volatile Power-Equation | 63
neocolonial/neo-imperial phase as one-dimensional.

If there is an understanding of a space (no matter how
controversial) between pre-colonial uncertainty and postcolonial
transparency, the question arises as to whether the same can be said
to exist between the postcolonial and what is generally understood
to be the neocolonial period. The definition of specific critical
terminologies related to the phenomenon of colonialism is rendered
problematic by specific choices that the critic/reader/evaluator has to
make, based on his/her positional relationship to this field of study
that is concerned with significant power dialectic. Colonialism
enforces a particular kind of mentality that breeds both conformity
and resistance. Thus a particular critical term engenders related
terminologies that overlap in certain degrees but also maintain certain
subtle differences. Colonialism is integrally related to the process of
colonization, whose nature is clearly evident from Aime Cesaires
words when he equates the presence of violence, excess, waste,
mercantilism, bluff, gregariousness, stupidity, vulgarity and disorder
as the barbarian American hour.1
Cesaires observation describes the excesses of bourgeois Europe
but also establishes a parallel with American hegemony in the
contemporary world order. It needs no mentioning that neocolonialism
has largely been understood as synonymous with the latter. Interestingly
the neocolonialism of recent times comes as a problematic presence
because it succeeds the popularization of Postcolonial Studies all over
the world. Just when we thought that Postcolonialism had served its
purpose, we discern a new hegemonic equation on a pan-international
state. And critics have jumped on the bandwagon of explanation trying
to identify what went wrong after the mighty British Empire was
dissolved and the formulation of distinct identities for aspirants to
statehood was inspired by the spirit of nationalism.
The Clash of Civilizations
In Amitav Ghoshs The Glass Palace, when tensions arise in the

Indianised batttalions of the British army regarding emergent
nationalist issues, particularly the question of independence,
64 | Subhadeep Paul
Lieutenant-Colonel Buckland makes a decisive statement to his

subordinate Lieutenant Arjun:
Everyone knows that the days of the Empire are over - were no fools you
know...The Americans have been telling us for years that were going about
this the wrong way. One doesnt have to keep up an Empire with all the
paraphernalia of an administration and an army. There are easier and more
efficient ways to keep a grip on things it can be done at less expense, and
with much less bother...The truth is that theres only one reason why
England holds on any more - and that is out of a sense of obligation...And
you know as well as I do that if we were to pack our bags now, then you
chaps would be at each others throats in no time...2
Colonel Bucklands statement is a rightful pointer to the trajectory

neocolonialism had taken since the collapse of the Soviet Socialist
Camp. The Americanization of the world has been, as many radical
critics opine, a slow but very steady process, accentuated only after
the Cold War when there remained virtually no other superpower at
par with America. Left-wing critics, scathing in their multifarious
critiques of American hegemony, go to the extent of claiming that
the latter is unparalled in its one-sidedness, in the whole of human
history till date. There is no denying that the charges against American
hegemony are more complex and radical than those placed against
the erstwhile colonizing missions of Britain and other European
powers. That colonialism is exploitative at its core is almost axiomatic
but at its physical fullest in the form of British imperialism, there
was certain complicity with the local agency/ies that had partially
enjoyed the fruits of the benevolent/ enlightened imperial set-up in
the home soil. Although the enlightened nature of such an imperializing
practice is equally questionable because the profit of the minority, (the
intelligentsia/landowning-class) was actualized at the cost of the
exploited majority subaltern, it was nonetheless true that the material
establishment of an integrated network of administration and governance
was the first concrete example of a unified ethos that served to provide
inspiration and impetus to the nation-building idea. The foundation
of this structure of governance still remains in most independent
nations that were erstwhile colonies of the Empire. In India, for
example, this edifice still remains (as in the executive, legislature and
judiciary bodies) because no better alternative was found or even if
it was found, it proved to be too dear for a nation in the making,
post-independence. US hegemony however, has studiously avoided
any material base-making initiatives in the nations where it has time
and again poked its nose. Its invisible Empire is structured on a
principle of economic sanctions, checks and balances, diplomatic
policies, political policing and persistent military and nuke threats
from behind.
Of all critics who have time and again questioned and resisted
US interference in world affairs, probably none have been more
contemptuous of the former than the Jewish leftist dissident Noam
Chomsky. The Chomskian leftist model of social critique of American-
led global hegemony (famously or infamously designated as the new
world order) has inspired successive resistance theories against the
lopsided power-equation of the contemporary world. In work after
work, Chomskys lifelong diatribe is one and the same, i.e. the charge
that the causal agent of the condition of the international unrest of
today is America, its policies and actions, something that he
historically contextualizes:
The United States had been the worlds major economy long before World
War II, and during the war it prospered while its rivals were severely
weakenedBy the wars end, the United States had half of the worlds
wealth and a position of power without historical precedent. Naturally, the
principal architects of policy intended to use this power to design a global
system in their interests.3
Furthermore Chomsky does not endorse his views simply on

subjective preferences but rather bases them on a plethora of factual
support. For instance, regarding the international debt crisis that had
accentuated almost five-fold since the 1970s putting non-OPEC
countries in a hard hit condition by making them vulnerable to US
monetarist policies, Chomsky blames the latter:
It is hard to resist the conclusion that one of the chief purposes of the debt
strategy as it actually evolved, and of the harsh conditionalities that were
imposed, was to teach the developing countries a lesson, to put them in their
66 | Subhadeep Paul
place, to so frighten and weaken them and make them so obviously

dependent on the favours and subject to the dictates of the industrial North,
that it would be a long, long time before they would ever again have the
effrontery to attempt to confront the North with demands for a restructuring
of the international economic order.4
Chomskys libertarian views expose the irony of the international

standpoint upheld by the US in tandem with its closest economic and
political allies (viz. Britain). Euro-American elitism operates on global
eyewash that is provided by its self-coined rhetoric. For instance the
new world order promotes the idea that it upholds the concept of free
trade as the ideal of universal prosperity and especially as a solution
to the third worlds economic problems. However with the imposition
of such a policy, growth rates have actually declined because the
superpowers today (inspired and led by the sole hyperpower America)
have themselves violated the rules of the game by overtly subsidizing
their multinationals and obliging heavily indebted Third World nations
to comply with market forces they create. Such complicity does not
redeem these Third World countries but far from that make them
compromise with the development of their basic infrastructures like
primary healthcare and education, only to watch the prosperity of
Western investment in front of their own eyes and on their very soils.
Ziauddin Sardar too opines on similar lines:
Free markets is simply a euphemism for free mobility of American capital,
unrestrained expansion of American corporations, and free (unidirectional)
movement of goods and services from America to the rest of the world.5
It is thus but inevitable that the phenomenon of globalization (when

it comes to free access of ideas and resources to all and sundry on
a pan-global scale) is, in Chomskian parameters, not exempt from
censure. According to Chomsky, in the name of globalization, the
correlation between economic growth and social welfare that has often
held (e.g. in the post-war period, pre-liberalization) has been severed.6
There definitely is, comparatively speaking, a greater international
exchange of commodities, ideas and information post the1980s but
it is also observable that this so called exchange is lopsided and
dominantly in favour of The United States of America. This explains
why despite Americas self pro-claimed benevolence on a global scale,

its massive military and nuke base manifests its deep-seated fear and
mistrust of nations that should be technically inconsequential when
it comes to the might of America. Chomsky explains this in terms
of, what he describes as, the rotten apple theory. The socialism of
countries, both small and weak, like Nicaragua, Chile and even tiny
Grenada is threatening for the US because the success of such
countries with diminutive resources may mobilize antagonism in other
comparatively equipped nations whose revolts would rot American
imperial interests. On similar lines, what America exports overseas
as commercial and cultural capital, though useful in certain areas is
elsewhere looked upon as junk, outdated stuff or products that have
been marketed and outsourced by stifling the markets of their
alternatives (the trillion dollar American pharmaceutical industry, for
instance). At the same time not everything is doled out to every nook
and corner of the world. Information copyrights and patents for
instance, are zealously held back, while the distorted information of
the First World is spread all over the globe. Ziauddin Sardar observes
how this affects (and is made to affect) not just non-Americans but
the American citizenry itself:
The American media is notoriously parochial. With the exception of a couple
of national newspapers, foreign news is, by and large, conspicuous by its
absence. Television, the medium that citizens watch and use more than any
other, ventures outside the national boundaries only to report disasters and
American-led wars. As the American media has acquired a global reach, it
has simultaneously, and paradoxically, become even more parochial and
banal. Diverse and dissenting voices have been filtered out to create a bland
media monoculture dedicated to promoting consumerism, business and the
interests of the government and the power elite, and to keeping the masses
entertained and docile. This is not the outcome of a free market operating
as a natural law it is the product of conscious state policy.7
Understandably therefore, America not only rations out to the world

their pre-fixed quota of resource consumption but also dictates how
they should consume them! Leftist dissident Aijaz Ahmed draws a
parallel between the imperialism of our time and the fascist regimes
of the 1930s when he shows why regimes of universal surveillance
68 | Subhadeep Paul
which would abolish the conception of civil liberties are as bad

as the military acquisitiveness of fascist empires like Nazi Germany:
(T)he good American today is where the good German once was. One
needs to remember that the Nazi dream of acquiring a global empire has
indeed been realized but by the United States of America. The imperialism
of our time shall not replicate the entirety of the fascistic forms of the past
century, but there is also a fundamental continuity between the two
historical moments. The brave individuals and groups in the US who work
so hard to build anti-racist, anti-war, anti-imperialist movement are faced
with the whole weight of this history, past and present.8
The trajectory of advancement that globalization has taken since the

last decade manifests it as delimiting in many ways to citizens of the
Third World that accounts for the considerable resistance against this
much-hyped phenomenon upheld by the G8 as the marker of universal
progress. Ahmed anticipates a more cataclysmic resistance in years
to come:
War against the planet had brought forth the first planetary rebellion against
it [as revealed by the] outpouring of humanity against an imperial war
which has not even begun on the scale at which it was being planned [and]
is of course deeply connected with the anti-globalization movements 9
America therefore is perceived as the proverbial wolf in sheeps

clothing for trying to masquerade as the saviour of the 21st century
world while actually being the worst exploiter history has ever known.
After 9/11 when the heartland of the hyperpower was attacked for
the first time in a major way since Pearl Harbour (that was far minor
compared to this offensive terror attack) the vulnerability of America
(despite the superb cordon established by its military and espionage)
was not only proved but also deeply felt for the first time. The US
President George W. Bush declared it as a challenge to democracy
and a proof that the world is envious of the prosperity of US
democracy and Americas championing of democracy (that was
elsewhere not so promising). Historian Eric Hobsbawm makes an
interesting general observation that discursively works as a counter
point to Bushs claim:
There are words nobody likes to be associated with in public, such as racism
and imperialism. On the other hand, there are others for which everyone is
anxious to demonstrate enthusiasm, such as mothers and the environment.
Democracy is one of these.10
Elsewhere Hobsbawm shows how the basic paradigm of democracy

is maintained by all types of governmental forms and categories
because fundamentally the 21st century is the age of democracy by
universal consensus and without its example most rules would not be
able to survive in the long run:
In the age of the common man, all government is government of the people
and for the people, though patently it cannot in any operational sense be
government by the people. This was common ground to liberal democrats,
communists, fascists and nationalists of all kinds, even though their ideas
differed about to how to formulate, express and influence the peoples will.
It is the common heritage the twentieth century, that century of total wars
and co-ordinated economies, has left to the twenty-first.11
It is therefore but natural that the US would parade itself and

its enterprises as essentially redemptive in the common good of
humanity and any antagonism (in any form) to its actions is a gesture
of a lack of civility on the part of the opposite camp. This accounts
for the ever-growing antipathy towards America (and its allies the
exploitative West) by the rest. But it is not that the delusions that
the governing order of America suffers from (or rather strategically
cherishes and upholds) fully escapes the notice of its own citizenry.
This is revealed in the lyrics of a popular song called Civil War by
Guns N Roses, one of Americas leading rock bands of the nineties:
What weve got here is failure to communicate.
Some men you just cant reach...
So, you get what we had here last week,
which is the way he wants it!
Well, he gets it!
N I dont like it any more than you men.
Look at your young men fighting
Look at your women crying
70 | Subhadeep Paul
Look at your young men dying

The way theyve always done before
Look at the hate were breeding

Look at the fear were feeding
Look at the lives were leading
The way weve always done before
My hands are tied

The billions shift from side to side
And the wars go on with brainwashed pride
For the love of God and our human rights
And all these things are swept aside
By bloody hands time cant deny
And are washed away by your genocide
And history hides the lies of our civil wars
Dyou wear a black armband

When they shot the man
Who said Peace could last forever
And in my first memories
They shot Kennedy
I went numb when I learned to see
So I never fell for Vietnam
We got the wall of D.C. to remind us all
That you cant trust freedom
When its not in your hands
When everybodys fightin
For their promised land
And
I dont need your civil war
It feeds the rich while it buries the poor
Your power hungry sellin soldiers
In a human grocery store
Aint that fresh

Look at the shoes your filling

Look at the blood were spilling
Look at the world were killing
The way weve always done before
Look in the doubt weve wallowed
Look at the leaders weve followed
Look at the lies weve swallowed
And I dont want to hear no more
My hands are tied

For all Ive seen has changed my mind
But still the wars go on as the years go by
With no love of God or human rights
Cause all these dreams are swept aside
By bloody hands of the hypnotized
Who carry the cross of homicide
And history bears the scars of our civil wars
We practice selective annihilation of mayors

And government officials
For example to create a vacuum
Then we fill that vacuum
As popular war advances
Peace is closer

It feeds the rich while it buries the poor
Aint that fresh
And I dont need your civil war
72 | Subhadeep Paul

Aint that fresh
I dont need one more war
I dont need one more war

Whaz so civil bout war anyway12
It is therefore evident that American neocolonialism is characteristically

distinguished from the erstwhile colonizing forces of Europe owing
to the utter insouciance with which it treats the rest of the world.
Despite the varied dissenting voices of conscience within America,
the political America, largely insensitive to the voices outside its
limited circuit, is breeding both perversity and paranoia in non-
Americans (as much as it is brewing up resentment among enlightened
subjects of America itself ). America has taken too much from the
world (lawfully or otherwise) and given too little in return. It has
indebted developing nations so precariously that their fundamental
necessities have had to be compromised with. Besides that it has
squeezed cultural plurality to conform it to the terms and conditions
of its own cultural paradigm through the mechanical capitalist
pyrotechnics of its media, marketing and PR empires. If the world
is a television set whose broadcast network allows the co-existence
of multiple channels of cultural choices, America keeps the remote
in its hand by force and declares that its own dovetailed primetime
would be telecast 24x7, 365 days a year! This metaphor of the TV
is highly significant because it shows how America holds on to its
cultural imperialism despite its lip service to promoting the cause of
the multicultural ethnographic mosaic both within and without its
national boundaries. To make matters worse Americas deliberate
misconstruction of the greater world and its attempts to obliterate the
effects of the legacy of British colonial history has taken its toll on
the nation whose Frankensteinian manifestation is 9/11.
9/11 is not a bolt from the blue NDE (near death experience)
of the Biblical Doomsday but a volcanic eruption whose smoke and

earthquakes i.e. its warning signals had been by and large ignored.
The might is right policy that America thrusts upon the face the world
but chooses not to confess unlike the stiff upper crest boast of its
predecessor (British Imperialism). Americas culture of violence (that
spreads its fangs in many forms like its campus shoot outs, verbal
definitions of right and wrong in its idiosyncratic diplomatic idiom,
its military arsenal and arms corporations et al) boomerangs on itself
in the form of terrorism and fundamentalist outbreaks.13
Americas problems are to do with a mind-set that goes by a
particular credo of political rhetoric. It assumes economic annexation
of nations that it terms as failed states where the choices of the
indigenes hardly matter to it. It believes that choices always exist in
binaries. It is not that one has to choose whether one is for America
or against it. One can be both or neither, irrespective of whether that
person is an American or a non-American. Americas policy of
commission or omission for others and the exceptionality of an
international passport reserved for itself will cost it dear in the long
run as it did for the British Empire and Nazi Germany. America
cannot forever ignore the tide of protest that is brewing in the rest
of the world as it keeps on acting on a predetermined policy geared
to pre-emptive use of aggressive power in the name of self-defense
and pro-active democracy building14
The culture of violence that America has given a fillip to, has,
however, made it an archetype for the rest of the world that not only
lives in constant fear but has also started living by constant fear as
well. The Cold War was a decisive and defining moment for the rest
of the world as to the trajectory of action(s) emergent nation states
should adopt to realize their individual American dreams. The result
was a universal horror, a veritable war of the worlds situation (to cull
from the title of H.G. Wellss sci-fi classic). It thus becomes important
to consider the other side of the picture as well than just playing blame-
game with America for all the ills of the world. Rightist observer and
hard-core anti-Chomskian critic, David Horowitz believes that
despite the lofty ideology of the leftist camp, the threats of Communist
expansion and conquest was a crucial catalyst deciding US global
74 | Subhadeep Paul
military deployment. According to Horowitzs data, US aggressive

military policies and actions are justified and Chomskys grossly
exaggerated facts are nothing but subversive agitprop:
Between 1945 and 1946, in fact, America demobilized 1.6 million military
personnel. By contrast, the Soviet Union (absent from Chomskys narrative)
kept its two-million-man army in the countries of Eastern Europe, whose
government it had already begun systematically to undermine and overthrow.
It was, in fact, not Chomskys perfidious plan, but the Soviet absorption
of the formerly independent states of Eastern Europe in the years between
1945 and 1948 that triggered Americas subsequent re-armament, the
creation of NATO and the overseas projection of Americas power. All these
steps were designed to contain an expansionist Soviet empire and prevent
a repetition of the appeasement process that had led to World War II.15
American interventions, according to Horowitz, had actually brought

democratic socialists to power than promoted American capitalists.
The 1947 civil war in Greece became a bone of contention between
Pentagon and Kremlin, and the Pentagons success in preventing the
latter from spreading beyond Eastern Europe was actually beneficial
in the long run because it thwarted the establishment of a Soviet police
state, coupled with the defeat of the Greek Communist Left that ...
paved the way for an unprecedented economic development benefiting
all social classes and the eventual establishment of a political
democracy.16 Understandably Horowitzs critique of Communist and
Marxist forces is the same that is levied against the US itself, i.e. what
it practiced (and still does) was entirely contradictory to what it
preached and promised:
Needless to say, no country in which Chomskys anti-fascists (i.e. Communists
and Marxists) won and there were several ever established a democracy
or produced any significant betterment in the economic conditions of the
great majority of its inhabitants. These countries included Hungary, Romania,
Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Poland, Bulgaria, Albania, Lithuania, Estonia
and Latvia, among others More generally, there are no good examples of
progressive social experiments anywhere in the world to serve as the threats
that Chomsky invokes. There is not a single Marxist country anywhere that
has ever provoked a good example in the sense of making its economy better
or its people freer. Chomsky seems to have missed this most basic fact of
twentieth-century history: socialism doesnt work, and to the extent that it

does work, its results are horrific.17
Horowitzs statement of facts is definitely worth noting. US intervention

in the Korean crisis saved South Korea from the aggrandizement of
the North. In the South, per capita income raised from $250 in 1950
to $8490 as per recent standards, primarily due to the security
provided by its US military base and business investments, while the
Communist North is one of the poorest countries in the world whose
citizens starved as its Marxist despot enthusiastically invested the
limited national capital in an intercontinental ballistic missile program.
The communist utopia in Vietnam was shattered due to favoritism
tactics practiced by its Marxist police state. When America withdrew
its troops from the Indochinese peninsula after the Vietnam debacle,
the Khmer Rouge eliminated two million Cambodians as a stepping
stone to their new foundation. Cuba, the second richest country in
Latin America in 1959 is an economic basket case today, just as
Nicaragua and Haiti were damned by Marxist fanatics. This is
Chomskys point about Marxist Grenada: [The] weaker and poorer
a country is, the more dangerous it is as an example [italics in original].
If a tiny poor country like Grenada can succeed in bringing about
a better life for its people, some other place that has more resources
will ask, why not us?18 Elsewhere Chomsky asserts in a typical
agitprop manner:
Grenada has a hundred thousand people who produce a little nutmeg, and
you could hardly find it on a map. But when Grenada began to undergo a
mild social revolution, Washington quickly moved to destroy the threat.19
Horowitz subverts Chomskys claim as typical communist claptrap.

The Reagan administration intervened in Grenada owing to certain
emergency obligations. The period 1979-1983 was tense for the US
because guerrilla armies were spreading totalitarianism in Central
America. Communist Cuba was constructing an airbase for
accommodating Soviet nuke bombers in Grenada because in 1973
a coup detat established a Marxist dictatorship in Grenada. However
tussle between the dictator and his minister of defense made the latter
assassinate the former and put the entire island under house arrest,
76 | Subhadeep Paul
including US citizens resident there:

Nor was the United States government the only one concerned about the
events in Grenada. The US intervention was made at the formal request of
four governments of Caribbean countries who feared a Communist military
presence in their neighborhood. Finally, a public opinion poll taken after the
US operation showed that 85% of the citizens of Grenada welcomed
Americas help in restoring their freedom.20
Salman Rushdie too makes a point about the real problem in the world
of today. He points out that globalization itself should not necessarily
be the object of ire but rather the inequitable distribution of global
resources. Rushdie undercuts Andre Malrauxs claim that the third
millennium must be the age of religion by positing the view that it
ought to be rather the age in which we would eventually transcend
our need for religion. In other words, general human happiness and
well-being and not purist codes of conduct need be the benchmark
of demarcating the good from the bad:
the debate about cultural globalization and its military-political sidekick,
intervention, has continued to intensify, and anti-American sentiment is on
the increase. In most peoples heads, globalization has come to mean the
worldwide triumph of Nike, Gap and MTV, the metamorphosis of Planet
Earth into McWorld. Confusingly we want these goods and services when
we behave as consumers, but with our cultural hats on we have begun to
deplore their omnipresenceIf the international community, which in
these days is little more than a euphemism for the United States, fails to
intervene promptly in Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo, it is excoriated for that
failure. Elsewhere, it is criticized just as vehemently when it does intervene:
when American bombs fall on Iraq, or when American agents assist in the
capture of the PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan21
To elaborate on this contradiction, Rushdie points out to the fact that

there are groups of people who are blind to the contradictions inherent
in themselves:
the United States will continue to be surprised by the level of the worlds
ingratitude. The globalizing power of the American culture is opposed by an
improbable alliance which includes everyone from cultural-relativist liberals
to hardline fundamentalists, with all manner of pluralists and individualists,
to say nothing of flag-waving nationalists and splintering sectarians, in

between.22
Rushdie warns against the consequences of an unwarranted and

lopsided antagonism towards globalization as necessarily being confused
with a hatred for America that can be as fatal as 9/11 and even outside
American soil:
Amid this din of global defensiveness, little thought is given to some of the
most important questions raised by a phenomenon which, like it or not, isnt
going away any time soon. For instance do cultures actually exist as mlange,
adulteration, impurity, picknmix at the heart of the idea of the modern, and
hasnt it been that way for most of this all-shook-up century? Doesnt the
idea of pure cultures, in urgent need of being kept free from alien
contamination, lead us inexorably towards apartheid, towards ethnic cleansing,
towards the gas chamber? 23
Logically therefore Rushdie does not claim the necessity to camp on

any side and play the age-old blame-game but being critical on rightful
grounds:
There are fundamental freedoms to fight for, and it will not do to doom to
their fates the terrorized women of Afghanistan or of the circumcision-happy
lands of Africa by calling their oppression their culture. And of course it
is Americas duty not to abuse its pre-eminence, and our right to criticize
such abuses when they happen when, for example, innocent factories in
Sudan are bombed, or Iraqi civilians pointlessly killed.24
The Postcolonial Future/The Future of Postcolonialism
Amidst these views and counter-views among opposite camps,

postcolonial criticism seems to land up in an uncertain territory
concerning its plausible trajectories for the future. However it is to
all extent credible that Postcolonialism will remain a pertinent area
of research as long as manifestations of writing back to the centre
and striking back to the margins continue. In one of his illuminating
books in this area, Couze Venn rightly observes:
[The] recognition that new forms of colonization are at work in transforming
the world today, more insidious and totalizing than previous forms
78 | Subhadeep Paul
[necessitates] interrogating the present conjecture through a reconcept-

ualization of problems ranging from issues of modernization and identity to
the problem of establishing a political economy of postmodern times that
could open up new grounds for imagining alternative worlds. 25
The present world order is a volatile one. The legacy of British

Imperialism is still a haunting one in nations that have formally
obtained independence from its shackles but have been psychologically
altered forever due to the colonizing missions. The Nazi Holocaust
and the atomic bomb fiasco in Japan are potent reminders of what
consequences political extremities can lead us to. There is no elixir
for the pathologically chronic malady that the world is suffering today,
save mediating tensions through effective resolutions that are amicably
pacific in nature. That is precisely where there is a big lack because
at the level of negotiations the big door promise is ceaselessly
thwarted with punitive back door reservations. US impositions and
the proverbial wolf in sheeps clothing diplomacy in politically
turbulent regions of the world viz. the Middle East (the Palestine-Israel
saga) and South Asia (the Indo-Pak saga), for instance, can go on
forever, if prolonged but the age-old colonial policy of divide and rule
sags after a point of time, no matter how long that takes. At the
microcosmic level, nation states must learn how to think global and
act local to maintain parity between the two to actualize Zygmunt
Baumants ideal of glocalisation. Social policing must be reduced to
zero level (and this should be accounted for at every level). The prime
suspect is definitely, at its core, the impression of the US as the
unsurpassable Hegemon of all times that problematizes the responses
of other assemblages viz. the Islamic world and the Third World. The
problem of fundamentalism is not merely a religious one but has to
do with strictures of orthodoxies that are often state-aided. When
American monoculture and markets operate in the name of
multiculturalism, fundamentalism functions as an easy lure, though
giving into it is as life-defeating as the worst hegemonic order. Stuart
Sim rightly observes that though the fundamentalist mentality is
derivative from the social environment itself, there is no rationale to
blindly succumb to it:
The fundamentalist mentality is also a search for the power and control that
the dominance of your system of belief brings, whether in the sphere of
religion, economics or politics; as well as for self-definition in the face of the
spread of multiculturalism. Going back to basics is an attempt, however
misguided, to hold radical change at bay and, if possible, to turn back the
clock to a time when the world, apparently at least, conformed to your value
systemIts little better than nostalgia in each case, and misplaced nostalgia
at that: fundamentalists almost always see the past as simpler than it was
in reality. But all of us are capable of exhibiting this kind of behaviour, no
matter how open-minded we may be or think we are. The fundamentalist
mentality is part of human nature: thats why it requires such careful
monitoring. Like all aspects of human nature, it can be encouraged or
discouraged. Its in the skeptics interest to provide as much discouragement
as possible, to show that we need not give in to this kind of impulse. The
disposition towards authoritarianism and dogmatism may lurk within us, but
thats no reason for allowing it to dominate and thus set the tone, and the
values of our society.26
At a sociological level we call for that true socio-cultural collage where

particularities remain distinct and sacrosanct without conflicting with
the overall global mosaic. But at the level of theory, Postcolonialism
has still many more miles to go. The ideological framework that was
formulated since Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffins The Empire Writes Back
and subsequently explored, appended or reformulated in varied critical
works bears the challenge of conditioning theoretical discourse with
newer paradigms and phenomena of power relations and equations.
The attempt at theorizing Postcolonialism in a neo-colonial light offers
a significant interdisciplinary challenge and to be wary of the practice
of theorization for its own sake, such that it tends to be divorced from
the ground reality. Alternative theorizations, in keeping with alternative
ways of being, might be necessary to analyze the causes and
consequences of disenfranchisement that may take various symbolic
and material forms. For instance more recent theoretical models like
the Dependency Theory and World System Theory popularized by the
likes of Samir Amin, Johan Galtung, Andre Gunder Frank and
Wallerstein deserve credible mention, for highlighting the strains
caused between a prospering centre and impoverished peripheries.27
80 | Subhadeep Paul
But economic colonization is not the only form of dominance that

needs to be countered at every level. In a world getting increasingly
sophisticated with every passing day, the general tends to become
more important than the particular. A persons social identity becomes
more important than his individual essence; the market becomes more
important than the individual consumer; property becomes more
important than wealth. Total decolonization is neither possible nor any
attempt to it desirable in a world where the functional reach of terms
like hybridity, diaspora, syncretism, creolization, mestizaje,
transculturation and especially translation is becoming more and
more significant. For instance art and music weave newer patterns
of creation through cross-overs and polyglotization. There is no issue
of politicization involved in these issues so long as cultures on either
side of the diad are not choked of their distinct individualities either.
But this equation is radically subverted when a centre or sovereignty
emerges (that in the name of neo-liberalism and globalization) and
initiates a de-territorialized yet thoroughly globalized system of
hegemony a dominance that does not call for the direct control
over territory and the polity (that may be rightly described as neo-
feudal in nature) but nonetheless maintain feudal relations of power,
operating through dispatches of overseas institutions, business
corporations, unevenly framed international laws that undertake
constant surveillance and policing but that are paraded as effected in
the interest of general security and global well-being.28 To counter this
multi-lateral resolutions must be as much initiated as encouraged
across national boundaries. If superpowers cultivate the tendency to
perennially use high-hand tactics, they must not consider it the failure
of civilization if their actions boomerang back on them as fundamentalist
and violent responses like 9/11. At the same time the fundamentalist
and purist mentality must realize that violence is not the answer to
the abuses of power. The world needs to protect itself from more 9/
11s and Hiroshima-Nagasakis alike. The need of the hour for both
social theory and practice is to find out ways and means to contain
this virus of the culture of debt and the debt of culture and facilitate
the co-articulation of alternative identities (national or individual),
each distinct in their own ways but sharing common intersecting
points nonetheless. As such the future of Postcolonialism as a field

of study and research lies in charting out alternative trajectories of
realizing a postcolonial future (in both literal and metaphoric sense
of the term) and venturing out on those trails of discovery.
Notes
1. See Aime Cesaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (New

York: Monthly Review Press, 1972).
2. Amitav Ghosh, The Glass Palace (London: Harper Collins Publishers,
2000), 416-417.
3. Noam Chomsky, Profit Over People Neoliberalism and the Global Order
(New York: Seven Stories Press, 1999), 20.
4. Nassau A. Adams, Worlds Apart (London: Zed Press, 1993), 170.
5. Ziauddin Sardar and Merryl Wyn Davies, Why Do People Hate America?
(Cambridge: Icon Books, 2002), 195.
6. Noam Chomsky, personal communication with Jeremy Fox, 10th February
2000. For further details see Jeremy Fox (ed.) Postmodern Encounters:
Chomsky And Globalisation (New Delhi: Worldview Publishers, 2001), 34.
7. Ziauddin Sardar and Merryl Wyn Davies, Why Do People Hate America?
(Cambridge: Icon Books, 2002), 87.
8. Aijaz Ahmed, Iraq, Afghanistan and the Imperialism of Our Time (New
Delhi: Leftword Books, 2004), 268-269.
9. Ibid., 119.
10. Eric Hobsbawm, Globalisation, Democracy and Terrorism (London: Little
Brown, 2007), 95.
11. Ibid., 100.
12. The protest song Civil War by hard rock band Guns N Roses originally
appeared on the 1990 album Nobodys Child, a fundraising compilation
for Romanian orphans but was released in 1993 in their album Use Your
Illusion II.
13. For a more thorough exploration on the issue of how Americas exercise
of violence on a global scale had inspired other non-occidental power-
forces to aspire for alternative hegemonies of their own Frankensteinian
design, see my paper Beyond 9/11 and NY Blues: An Analysis of the
Politics of Violence in Meena Alexanders Manhattan Music due to appear
in Essays And Studies (2007-08), Journal of the Department of English,
Jadavpur University, Kolkata.
82 | Subhadeep Paul
14. Ziauddin Sardar and Merryl Wyn Davies, American Dream: Global
Nightmare (Cambridge: Icon Books, 2004), v.
15. Peter Collier And David Horowitz, The Anti-Chomsky Reader (New Delhi:
Viva Books Private Limited, 2005), 188.
16. Ibid., 191.
17. Ibid., 191-192.
18. Noam Chomsky, What Uncle Sam Really Wants (Tucson, Arizona: Odonian
Press, 1992), 23.
19. Ibid., 22.
20. David Horowitz, Noam Chomskys Anti-American Obsession, in The
Anti- Chomsky Reader, edited by Peter Collier And David Horowitz (New
Delhi: Viva Books, 2005), 193.
21. Salman Rushdie, Step Across This Line (London: Jonathan Cape, 2002),
296-97.
22. Ibid., 297.
23. Ibid., 297.
24. Ibid., 298.
25. Couze Venn, Rethinking the scope of the postcolonial: Postcoloniality
and the new world order, in The Postcolonial Challenge: Towards
Alternative Worlds, ed. Couze Venn (London: Sage Publications, 2006), 1.
26. Stuart Sim, Fundamentalist World: The New Dark Age Of Dogma
(Cambridge: Icon Books, 2004), 21-22.
27. For more details see Wil Hout (ed.) Capitalism and the Third World:
Development, Dependence and the World System (Brookfield: Edward Elgar,
1993).
28. The generalizing tendency towards a one-dimensional definition of what
lies beyond the colonizers own domain that becomes the stepping stone
to universal annexation, becomes the moot point of the clash of
civilizations operating on both economic and cultural planes. For a
penetrative insight of the cross-over from the postcolonial to the
neocolonial within a basic framework but with major alterations of
appropriation, see Empire, edited by M. Hardt and A Negri (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).
Premchand in Our Times:
A Postcolonial Reading of Godaan
Anand Prakash
History of the colony would always be at the back of what we call

postcolonialism today it is this history that could appropriately
define the trend of postcolonialism for us and take us into the
paradigm of the society/ community/ communities that confront us
in our times. Thus we have challenges that emanated in a significant
sense from the two world wars and the overall twentieth century
capitalism. These were meaningfully negotiated by our writers such
as Tagore, Premchand and Subramanya Bharti all of whom were part
of Indias National Movement. In this essay, I briefly indicate the
appeal that Premchands well-known novel Godaan has for the twenty-
first century reader in not just its varied and detailed descriptions but
approach that helps us build a sharply critical perspective on the issues
we face. At the same time, I also stress in Godaan the peculiar
aesthetic of an era that extends to our period of intense ideological-
political clashes. This aesthetic is linked with the way Godaan ended
the ending of this novel is radically different from that of any other
novel Premchands wrote before Godaan.
Premchands relevance to the world today, the third world
particularly, cannot be overemphasized for the precise reason that he
captured a colonial experience the after-growth of which we face in
our surroundings in a concrete sense. Premchands Godaan would take
us straightaway to the apparently progressive stance of a benevolent
landlord (Rai Sahib) who seeks to thrive on the popular support that
the villages of his territory would provide him. The economic edge
of Rai Sahibs exploitation of the peasantry can be seen as further
sharpened by the ideology that most tenants evolved through
84 | Anand Prakash
interpretations of religion, morality and ethics in the novel. Most

peasants on Rai Sahibs land revere him; some, indeed as Hori,
empathize with him feel the pain that the landlord undergoes in
the process of exploiting the tenants. All his life, Hori has allowed
himself to be dictated by the call of duty, dharma a euphemism for
accepting ones fate with all its bindings and determinants. As a parallel
to his dharma can be seen Rai Sahibs role of extracting the maximum
profit from peasantrys labour the landlord-peasant bonding defines
the identity of each under an entrenched code.
Premchand was able to decipher this code almost entirely on the
strength of his involvement in the Indian National Movement, his
view being that modern secular principles could alone vouchsafe the
integrity of the anti-imperialist campaign. Still, there were debates and
clashes among the writers of the period with respect to Indias past
and the broader belief systems prevailing in society. Premchand
himself struggled to come to terms with the ideological-cultural issues
that he faced in the nineteen twenties and thirties. A close reading
of Godaan would testify to the prevalence of approach-related
difficulties that are mirrored ever so clearly in the pages of the novel.
The writer has taken particular care to peep into the minds of a
number of important characters in Godaan who are seen as changing
and evolving before the very eyes of the reader. They see, grasp,
analyze and self-analyze.
Grappling with the seminal issues of the day through descriptions
and representations, Premchand provided to the novel form a peculiar
Indian aesthetic, an aesthetic that is rooted in the urgent ideological-
political requirements of the time. This makes Godaan a useful link
between the reader on the one side and the thinking, speaking,
differing characters on the other. The deep chasm witnessed in the
psyche of the characters along with that of the authorial voice in the
novel points towards their need to articulate in a cogent manner the
process driving them towards mutually-contradictory answers. The
problem in Premchands context is aptly explained by P.C. Joshi thus:
To reassess the situation in a new way, the writer in the nineteen
thirties :
Premchand in Our Times | 85
had to outgrow the outlook of unhistorical ruralism which idealized Indias

old village community. By contrasting Ram Rajya of the past with the Satanic
rule of British colonialism, this ruralist ideology called for a return to Ram
Rajya. One had thus to transcend the outlook of paternalistic landlordism
which glorified the good old landlord as an alternative to the rapacious new
landlord growing stronger under the impetus of money economy (Emphasis
in the original).1
It is interesting to note in the above quotation terms such as ruralism

and Ram Rajya. The former denotes an acceptance of the given
village, a static entity surviving on self-contained culture. To a section
of the urban middle class, ruralism may be an escape route from the
crisis they are trapped in. Many of us in post-Independence India
long to forget ourselves in an imaginary world informed by innocence.
Keeping this in view, one could also argue against literacy and
education that could put the innocent villager in touch with others
elsewhere. This gives legitimacy to the wish to hold on to a pure world,
unadulterated by clashes and differences. Thus, preservation of the
good and spontaneous in life, in the form of village community where
people live by mutual trust, becomes an important option. The latter
term Ram Rajya stands for a larger order under which different
sections of society lead a contented life doing the duties and
responsibilities assigned to them. It is obvious that sanction for
ruralism and Ram Rajya comes from a total acceptance of things that
prevail. The notion at the root of these terms is that of permanence.
Premchand, however, showed in Godaan that the village in the
thirties was under threat from outside and inside. It symbolized a
world of clashing interests that sought help from the existing levers
of state (police, economic and religious bureaucracy patwari,
purohit, etc) as well as convention, morality and ethics that the
peasantry and the dalit community had imbibed from their social
environment. Votaries of the status quo in the nineteen thirties
theorized about an uninterrupted tradition of Indianness. These
votaries stand relentlessly critiqued by the text of Godaan. We have
to consider whether India of the post-Independence period has freed
itself from such a view and moved ahead towards some sense of
equality and freedom, things that were substantially projected as goals
86 | Anand Prakash
during the National Movement. To my mind, our postcolonial context

has extended a number of theses in favour of ethnicities and identities.
The text of Godaan could be meaningfully used to measure the
sustainability of theses such as these. My own contention is, as Joshi
has argued, that a humanist-secular intervention, inspired by texts
such as Premchands Godaan, is necessary to undo restrictions
imposed on todays society by numerous structures both repressive
and ideological.
We have to ponder over the transformation that took place during
the period since the 1930s through Indias Independence in 1947 to
the nineties that saw the new economic order and imperialist
globalization to realize that the modern landscape (literally) tells us
of a structured code with its own distinctive identity in the middle
of relating and bonding of individuals, families and groups.
One cannot but note the streak of a brutal ruler in Rai Sahib
the man combines the idealism of a visionary with the pragmatic
clarity a profit-seeking agency. Rai Sahib has correctly interpreted the
winds of change blowing across the country and for him the day is
not far when Indias own political centres would assume legislative and
administrative roles. We see in Godaan the concretization of a social
group unified in its diverse functions to establish its hegemony and
guide the future course of events in the country to its own advantage.
Let us consider in some detail the question of form raised earlier
in the discussion. Godaan is an all-encompassing fictional entity. It
talks not merely about a small number of peasants in a village but
about the peasantry as a class whose face we read in the totality of
the novel. On every page of it, we encounter unanticipated jumps and
shifts that make us pause and think. This forms into a whole pattern
that is disturbing to the core since it significantly destabilizes the
readers complacency and creates ideological fissures in her or his
psyche. In comparison with the Indian reader of the nineteen thirties,
the novel poses challenging questions still more sharply to the post-
Independence reader in that the exploitative system of the last few
decades seems to be an extension of what people saw in Premchands
time. The shifts and jumps present in the novel assume truly
horrendous proportions when the novel reaches its end. Questions,
responses and comments that the author has presented page after page
in the novel have a repetitive nature about them (constitute as they
do the form of the narrative) because of which the cumulative effect
of the novel at the end is that of a lasting shock administered ruthlessly.
This makes the last chapter of Godaan appear as one more attempt
at composing the same text that has gone on in this manner from
the beginning itself the author attempts once again, as it were, to
say the same thing that he has been at pains to do all along. Read
in this manner, Godaan may satisfy the postcolonial urge to see each
description of the social scene as part of a sequence as also an act
negating its own sequential logic of movement the characters decide
to step on but stay where they were earlier.
The last chapter of the novel opens with,
For two days the village rocked with revelry. Music rang out, songs filled the
air, and finally Rupa departed with much weeping and wailing. Hori was
never seen to leave the house, however, as though he were hiding in disgrace.
In the original Hindi text, weeping and wailing would denote

sentimental parting with the dear ones and is to be read along with
revelry and songs filled the air. It has nothing to do with Horis
disgrace in the following sentence. Thus, the disgrace in question
has no apparent link with the rocking village. Why then has the author
presented this schism? Such a schism defines the logic of the form
of Godaan in its entirety. After dwelling on Gobars success in the
town because of which Hori spent a few days of happiness (this forms
the next two paragraphs of the chapter), the author takes us back to
Horis helplessness against the social odds, who feels guilty that he
was unable to meet essential requirements of living with grace in the
village. Gobars response to this is immediately personal and general
(ideological) simultaneously. To quote:
But what else could you have done? Ive been an unworthy son, your fields
arent producing anything., and theres no money available anywhere. Theres
not enough food in the house to last even a month. Under such circumstances,
there was no other way out. How could you live if the land were lost? When
a man is helpless he can only resign himself to fate. No telling how long this
rotten state of affairs will go on. Prestige and honour have no meaning when
88 | Anand Prakash
a man cant fill his stomach. If youd been like the others, squeezing people
by the throat and making off with their money, you too could have been
well-off. You stuck to your principles and this is the punishment you get for
it. If I had been in your position, Id either be in jail or Id have been hanged.
I could never have tolerated my earnings going to fill up everyone elses
houses while my own family sat by muzzled and starving.2
From the individual peasants poverty, this passage takes us through

fate, rotten state of affairs and Prestige and honour to the final
call of taking an interventionist initiative against the system as a whole.
At the same time, Premchand does not forget to pinpoint the anarchist
streak in Gobar (an example of negation of the argument that he is
presenting) who has rushed to the conclusion that Id either be in
jail or Id have been hanged. Still more pertinently, Gobar reflects
a mode of thought rooted in individualist abstraction my earnings
going to fill up everyone elses houses. The dramatic form of this
representation helps us reach the scenario of the nineteen thirties with
a perspective of egalitarianism that is still meaningful in our era.
It appears that Godaans ending is focused more upon the reality
of the peasant household as part of a system of production than upon
the distant future visualized by the Indian intelligentsia in the thirties.
For Premchand, the immediate helplessness of Hori has turned into
an inevitability from which there is no escape. Thus, Hori has finally
ceased to be a peasant since the system whose ends he served has
fundamentally given way to a different kind of tangle that would have
its own laws to restrict people in their pursuit of stability and
fulfilment. Hori, in the midst of such a process has turned into a wage-
labour. Geetanjali Pandey interprets the situation rather pessimistically
when she says that
At each step it seems that things (for Hori) could not be worse. But the
hope is constantly belied Only death releases the broken man from the
web of fate which has robbed him even of his sense of dignity3.
This may, however, be a bit off the mark for the reason that
Premchands representation of Hori is aimed to positively reflect on
the dignity the Indian peasant preserved through centuries.4 Instead
of being robbed of his dignity, Hori dies the death of a hard-working
struggling individual. He shines also because the people surrounding

him subsist on his labour. In the case of people constituting the
exploitative social structure victimizing Hori, we discern an insensitivity
that emanates from a life of dependents and hangers-on. Horis death,
for this reason becomes an assertion of the essential human trait of
living with principles meant to bind all members of a social group
into a vibrant community of dignified individuals. In Godaan, such
a community remains a distant dream. But Premchand dared to
project this dream in terms of a society that evolved through struggles
against forces of injustice and violence. Premchand identified such
forces in British imperialism, the Indian caste system and the
emergent capitalism that would spread its net wide in the decades to
come. The appeal of Premchand lies in this recognition of the forces
of oppression in his time. At the same time, Godaan helps us articulate
an appropriate response to our world from an angle that sets store
by integrity, goodwill, fellow-feeling and justice. Horis death at the
end brings forward these virtues of a life meaningfully lived. Such an
approach inspired Premchand to use for his novel the ever-breaking
repetitive (non-moving) form that necessitated constant questioning
of the ways in which people lived and thought. Viewed thus, Godaan
ceases to be a tale of woes and tragic happenings that visit Hori the
peasant. We should not overlook the fact that even as Hori dies at
the end of the novel, his comrade-in-arms Dhania has survived, to
face the enormous network of the state, as well as social orthodoxy,
morality and religion. Premchand gives an immensely significant
dialogue to her with which she puts in place such as Pandit Datadin.
Before Dhania collapsed on the ground, unconscious, she had this
to say to him: Maharaj, there is no cow nor calf nor money in the
house. There are only these few coins. This is his (Horis) godaan,
his gift of a cow.5
Notes
1. P. C. Joshi, Munshi Premchand and the Indian Village, in Premchand:

Our Contemporary, edited by Shivkumar Misra (New Delhi: National,
1986), 41.
90 | Anand Prakash
2. Gordon C. Roadarmel, tr., The Gift of a Cow: A Translation of the Classic

Hindi Novel Godaan (Delhi: Permanent Black, 1998), 430
3. Geetanjali Pandey, Between Two Worlds: An Intellectual Biography of
Premchand (New Delhi: Manohar, 1989), 165.
4. In this regard, we are reminded of the remark made about Premchand
by Jainendra Kumar in his reminiscences. To quote: Premchand was
introverted about religion. His faith was of an intellectual kind: He
always started with doubts and questions and then sought the answers.
But the fundamental life-promoting moral values in their sum-total
Premchand accepted and defended throughout his life (emphasis added).
Thus, one could draw a sort of parallel between Hori and the author to
say that Premchand projected a part of his own life-promoting values
through Godaans Hori. Jainendra Kumar, Premchand: A Life in Letters
(Agra: Y.K. Publishers, 1993), 30.
5. Roadarmel, 437.
The Flight of the Eunuch: Mapping Homotextualities
in South Asian Diaspora Literature
Aniruddha Maitra
When a practitioner of homosexual acts, or a body that carries any of many

queering marks moves between officially designated spaces nation, region,
metropole, neighborhood, or even culture, gender, religion, disease intricate
realignments of identity, politics and desire take place.
(Patton and Snchez-Eppler, Queer Diasporas)1
Out of men I have met at bars, through ads, out of potlucks and outings
to Hindi films, out of trips with friends to Mexico or Russian River, out of
cocktails, drag parties, and India Day parades, I am trying to make myself
a family. But I never know if I have got the recipe right.
(Sandip Roy, Leaving Home to Go Home)2
What strikes the student of Diaspora Studies while examining a steady

production of literature (letters, novels, short stories, autobiographies,
and political tracts) in the last fifty years by writers of the South Asian
diaspora, is the reticence around and hesitation to engage with issues
of sexuality and sexual preference. Relatively less known early texts
like Krishnalai Shridharanis My India, My America (1941)3 and Dalip
Singh Saunds Congressman from India (1961)4 evince a clearly
masculinized disbelief in the British colonial assertion of the
incommensurability of cultures5. While both these works produced
in diaspora record the political and intellectual journey of the
(heterosexual) male immigrant in the United States, later texts like
Bharati Mukherjees Wife (1975)6, Anita Desais Bye-Bye Blackbird
(1985)7 Chandani Lokuges If the Moon Smiled (2000)8 and more
recently Monica Alis Brick Lane (2003)9 do attempt to focus on
gendered experiences of migration. Memoirs of female immigrant
experience have recently also found an audience and entered academic
92 | Aniruddha Maitra
departments. But since most of these diasporic texts seek to provide

(although different but comparative) narrative possibilities of diasporic
Indianness defined and limited by heterosexist definitions of the
nation and the family, mainstream South Asian diaspora literature can
be accused of being guilty of eliding queer subjectivity and of
eschewing engagement with a queer critique of the nation.10
The emergence of a queer diaspora genre and the deployment
of the queer by few writers in diaspora therefore demand critical
attention. The works of Hanif Kureishi, Shani Mootoo and Shyam
Selvadurai allow us to think of diaspora outside a masculinist,
heteronormative paradigm and to supplant a model of the South Asian
diaspora that privileges heterosexual subjectivity. In this paper I briefly
examine queer strategies and the effects of queer hybridity in three
texts of the South Asian diaspora. Establishing the political framework
of the queer diaspora with the help of Gayatri Gopinaths seminal work
in the area, I begin queer-reading by critiquing her analysis of Hanif
Kureishis My Beautiful Laundrette (1985)11 and then pay attention to
the duality of queerness in Kureishis novel The Buddha of Suburbia
(1990)12. Devoting constant attention to the queer diasporic critique
of the nation, I finally look at Shani Mootoos Cereus Blooms at Night
(1996)13 as a text that (unlike Kureishis novel and screenplay) revels
in identity politics and yet attempts to transcend it with the aim of
radically reordering the domestic/national space. The deconstructive
power of the diasporic flight I argue emerges from a fantastic
deployment of the queer in Mootoos novel.
Queering Diaspora
It is important to recognise that the contemporary use of diaspora

has, in the last decade, shifted from the older developmentalist
narrative of migration, exile, integration and eventually assimilation
to a focus on heterogeneity and the politics of ethnicity.14 Finding
limitations with the language of immigration, anthropologists like
Nina Glick Schiller, Linda Basch and Cristina Szanton-Blanc have
defined transnationalism as, the process by which immigrants forge
and sustain multi-stranded social relations that link together the
The Flight of the Eunuch: Mapping Homotextualities | 93
societies of origin and settlement. Transnationalism, by definition,

also emphasizes the idea of national formation: by living their lives
across borders, transmigrants find themselves confronted with and
engaged in the nation-building process of two or more nation states.15
But participation in such projects is, however, problematised the
moment the transnational hesitates to conform to the expectations of
popular nationalisms, particularly those that have thrived on a
potential for a revivalist nostalgia and national re-purification. Many
of these mainstream versions are deeply influenced by nationalistic
totalitarianism of right-wing practitioners of Hindutva in India. To
be Indian in the popular sense is to be able to retain visible markers
of Indianness in diaspora, demonstrated through specific understandings
of authentic Indian culture. Queer sexualities therefore directly
disrupt and threaten constructions of diasporas reliant on official,
received versions of the nation and the family, simply because
queerness challenges compulsory heterosexuality and traditional notions
of kinship and national identity.16 Throughout the 1990s, the South
Asian Lesbian and Gay Association (SALGA) battled the National
Federation of Indian Association (representing heterosexual Indian
immigrant businessmen in diaspora and hence bourgeois sexual
morality) to participate in New York Citys India Day parade. Clearly,
SALGAs participation in an event that celebrates nationalism cannot
be accommodated within a diasporic script that sees the country of
origin as patriarchal (and predominantly Hindu), and heterosexual.
Analysis of the queer in diasporic cultural production therefore
allows for an alternative reading of diaspora, one that in its most
radical form can challenge the nationalism-heterosexuality dyad. As
Gopinath suggests,
The concept of the queer diaspora enables a simultaneous critique of
heterosexuality and the nation form while exploding the binary of oppositions
between nation and diaspora, heterosexuality and homosexuality, original and
copy.
If diaspora needs queerness in order to rescue it from its genealogical

implications, queerness also needs diaspora in order to make it more supple
in relations to questions of race, colonialism, migration, and globalization.17
My Beautiful Laundrette: Ambivalence Towards Male Queerness
Gopinaths recently published Impossible Desires begins with a critique

of Hanif Kureishis queer politics in the screenplay My Beautiful
Laundrette, made into a film by Stephen Frears in 1985. Gopinath
argues that Kureishi privileges male homosexuality complicit with
patriarchy and that by foregrounding the relationship between a white
working class Johnny and a second generation diasporic Omar, the
author completely neglects the subversive potential of the queer
female diasporic. Speaking of the disappearance of the heterosexual
female diasporic Tania, (Omars cousin and object of heterosexual
affection in the film) Gopinath writes:
She thus marks the horizon of Kureishis filmic universe and gestures to
another narrative of female diasporic subjectivity that functions quite literally
as the films vanishing point. Kureishis framing of the female diasporic figure
makes clear the ways in which even ostensibly progressive gay male articulations
of diaspora run the risk of stabilizing sexual and gender hierarchies.
(emphasis added).18
But Gopinaths reading, I would argue, is an incomplete analysis of

queer politics of My Beautiful Laundrette and a rather myopic reading
of Kureishis politics of hybridity. Unlike writers like Shani Mootoo
and Shyam Selvadurai, Kureishi here is not really concerned with the
delineation of a politicized gay or lesbian identity. Same-sex,
interracial and indeed interclass relationships are deliberately deployed
by Kureishi to blur lines of difference and to reflect the brutally
disruptive effects of class, national and family categories in Thatchers
Britain. Whether the relationship between Johnny and Omar is at all
meant to be progressive articulation of a homosexual relationship
is disputable: it remains in the closet and is never questioned by
patriarchal authority. Neither Johnny nor Omar feels the need to
come out or identify themselves as gay and the screenplay clearly
cannot be categorized as a coming out narrative. Through Omar,
Kureishi seems to be more inclined to demonstrate a more complex
anti-identity politics (which I explore further through my reading of
Karims character in The Buddha of Suburbia) conveyed, as it were,
through a polymorphous sexuality. What marks Johnnys homosexual

relationship with Omar is not just race but the equally crucial category
of class that needs to be included in analysis each time we undertake
an excavation of the legacies of colonialism and racism.19 Kureishis
focus, I will contend, is not to privilege male queerness (at the cost
of the elision of the female diasporic subjectivity)20 but rather to point
to the peculiar reality of hybridity in Thatchers Britain: the ineluctable
(sexual) interaction between (raced) bodies is evinced through both
heterosexual coupling (between white working class Rachel and
Omars affluent immigrant uncle Nasser) and a homosexual relationship
(between Johnny and Omar) in Kureishis text. Politicizing either leads
to a limited reading of the authors ambivalence and his strategies of
mapping queerness onto hybridity in diaspora. Sexual hybridity in
My Beautiful Laundrette functions at one level, almost as a sly
metaphor for cultural hybridity and heterogeneity that are inevitable
(but completely at odds with Thatchers vision of a strong, white,
homogeneous British identity) and serves to emphasize the sort of
in-between-ness21 that, ironically, Salims Anglo-Indian wife Cherry
finds unbearable.
At another level, Kureishi deploys interracial male homoeroticism
in My Beautiful Laundrette, not to willfully ignore a possible collusion
between patriarchy and male homosexuality, but instead to point to
an inversion of a colonial reality in postcolonial Britain. In his
analysis of Ackerleys Hindoo Holiday, Zahid Chaudhury analyzes the
absence of disruption between homosocial and homosexual bonds in
colonial Chhatarpur in India, and shows how Ackerleys potentially
counterfrictional homoerotic relations with his male servants in
Chhatarpur are unable to subvert the larger colonial structure:
The status quo remains unchanged; colonial binaries (powerful/powerless,
ruler/ruled) remain in place. This result is ensured by the creation of a space
in which homoeroticism functions without subversion, and instead is
subsumed in the overarching imperial framework space in which
homoeroticism functions as a buffer zone of sorts, in which the potentially
subversive bends to the laws and forces of the greater colonialist machinery.22
In other words, interracial homoerotics structured by colonial

hierarchy and racial superiority (and hence often tantamount to

homosexual appropriation of the colonized) fails to challenge the
heterosexist, patriarchal nature of the colonial mission. The relationship
between Johnny and Omar in My Beautiful Laundrette, I would
suggest, is not ignorant of these unequal transactions carried out
against a colonial backdrop. If Johnny succumbs to racism by joining
skinheads in Powells Britain, years later, upwardly mobile and
disingenuous Omar uses his social mobility to appropriate a homeless
working-class Johnny and simultaneously revives an adolescent
homosexual relationship. Again, as in many of the colonial encounters,
even in a postcolonial context, Kureishi makes strands of homoerotic
affection and exploitation difficult to separate. However, arguably,
certain roles have been reversed in a Britain that is no longer a Welfare
State. It is Omar, the immigrant who manipulates the relationship
providing his lower class23 white lover with work (that includes
assaulting skinheads to protect the laundrette they open together),
shelter and employment, and at the same time goads Johnny to feel
guilt for his racist past:
Omar: What were they doing on marches through Lewisham? It was bricks
and bottles and Union Jacks. It was immigrants out. It was kill us. People
we knew. And it was you. He saw you marching. You saw his face, watching
you. Dont deny it. (emphasis added)
(Johnny kisses Omar then leaves him, sitting away from him slightly. Omar
touches him, asking him to hold him.)24
***
Omar: I want big money. I am not gonna be beat down by this country.
When we were at school, you and your lot kicked me all round the place.
And what are you doing now? Washing my floor. Thats how I like it. Now
get to work. Get to work I said. Or youre fired!25
Gopinath acknowledges that Omar in a sense reverses the historical

availability of brown bodies to a white imperial gaze and that an
erotics of power constantly militates against the treatment of the
homosexual relationship as being subversive and anti-racist.26 But she
denies Kureishi the uncertainty that marks his queer signature and
accuses him of stabilizing sexual and gender hierarchies27, a charge

that also requires revision and scrutiny.
It is difficult to agree with Gopinaths reading of Nassers daughter
Tanias character as merely a conduit and foil to the desire between
Johnny and Omar.28 Tanias honest utterance (I hate families29),
as she abandons the traditional family structure, does compel us as
readers to see her departure not as disappearance but rather as an
act of nonconformity that partially echoes another female diasporic
Jamilas rebellion in The Buddha of Suburbia.
Although Tania clearly uses a heterosexual register to bare her
breasts from behind a window to catch Omars attention when he
visits Nasser30, it is a hilarious and yet powerful moment of resistance
and individuation of non-heteronormative female diasporic subjectivity
articulated from within the domestic space. And interestingly,
Kureishi juxtaposes Tanias act, strategically, against the male immigrants
claims of fighting racism and discrimination in the outer (and hence
ostensibly more political) domain of public life in diaspora:
Nasser: What chance would the Englishman give a leftist communist
socialist?
Zaki: What chance has the racist Englishman given us that we havent torn
from him with our hands? Lets face up to it. (And Zaki has seen the breasts
of Tania. He goes white and panics.)31
It is true that Tania does not represent queer female diasporic desire
in Kureishis text. However, it is also impossible to dismiss her as
a fixed identity upon whom a chauvinist uncritical mapping of male
queer desire in diaspora depends. In fact it is Tania who provides
a trenchant critique of the family as well as of the erotics of power
at work between Johnny and Omar:
Tania: Omo just runs you around everywhere like a servant.
Johnny: Well, I will stay here with my friend and fight it out.
Tania: My family, Salim and all, theyll swallow you up like a little kebab.
Johnny: I couldnt just leave him now. Dont ask me to. You ever touched him?
(She shakes her head) I wouldnt trust him though32. (emphasis added)
At no point then, does My Beautiful Laundrette lend itself to being

labeled progressively queer. By foregrounding male-male relations in

diaspora and deploying them for multiple purposes, Kureishi leaves
little room for smug complacency around notions of (exclusively) male
queer hybridity and warns against possible exclusions. Again it seems
unfair to suggest that he ignores Tanias subjectivity. Directions at the
end of the screenplay clearly indicate that it is through Tanias point
of view that Johnny and Omar are seen to covertly cohabit inside the
laundrette, a space created out of Nassers patriarchal dominion and
coextensive with it.
Locating Queer (Feminist) Agency in The Buddha of Suburbia
If Kureishi rejects the politics of representation entirely in My

Beautiful Laundrette, his semi-autobiographical novel The Buddha of
Suburbia (1990) further complicates the queer-diaspora conflation by
including both his protagonist Karims opportunism and his friend
Jamilas feminist agency. Queer sexuality does not subsume the novel
but again serves to buttress diasporic hybridity, bring out its anxieties
and simultaneously question notions of identity (national/sexual) by
refusing to settle into convenient binary distinctions. Kureishis
homotextualities (borrowing Owen Heathcotes term for the ongoing
constructions and deconstructions of both homosexuality and its
environments)33, I wish to argue, offer unconventional readings of a
heterogeneous diaspora by queering its heteronormative text in
complex ways.
Unlike his friend Jamila (who joins the feminist movement and
racial politics) the novels protagonist Karim prefers ambiguity, a
sexual indeterminacy that apparently mirrors his turmoil-rich diasporic
restlessness and racial hybridity:
Perhaps it is the odd mixture of continents and blood, of here and there,
of belonging and not, that makes me restless and easily boredI was looking
for trouble, any kind of movement, action and sexual interest34
Although he never attempts self-description as being bisexual or

queer, Karim admits to his bisexuality, his unusual nature of being
able to be sexually attracted to both men and women and to his
hesitation to choose between either. Bisexuality here could be seen

to reinforce the notion of identity as fluid, in flux and perpetually
under construction. And the hybridity of Karims bisexuality can
conveniently imbricate that of biracial origins reinforcing the in-
between-ness and the formation of the third-space that the diasporic
inhabits. Karims queer desire for his friend Charlie thus emerges as
a result of a peculiar interaction between Karims diasporic self and
shards of urban culture encountered in a racially charged and class-
conscious suburban London. Trying to conceive of life as being full
of mysticism, alcohol, sexual promise, clever people and drugs35.
Karim learns to flirt with notions of the queer as performance, what
Roger Baker calls genderfuck and androgyny, prevalent in pop culture
since the 1950s. Charlies new avatar Charlie Hero ( la Mick Jagger
of The Rolling Stones) learns to use the allure of the camp,
androgyny and drag avoiding any explicit admissions of queerness.
Baker calls this dalliance with the queer ambisexuality practiced by
icons of popular culture. Although initially attracted to this use of
queer as a ruse, Karim rejects ambisexuality as performance and
ultimately falls out of love with Charlie. Karim tires of bourgeois
sexual experimentation one night in New York, witnessing Charlie
trying to discover the deep human love of pain with a woman he
invites to his flat:
And it was at this moment, as she blew out a candle, lubricated it and forced
it up his arse, that I realised I didnt love Charlie anymore. I didnt care either
for or about him. He didnt interest me at all. Id moved beyond him,
discovering myself through what I rejected.36
But Karims identity refuses to stabilize. He neither probes into his

perversion nor identifies with a queer subculture. He stereotypes his
gay co-actor Richard in Pykes theatre group and does not seek a
shared queerness when he walks/cruises the city. He keeps his
distance from prostitutes and drag queens in Nashville and consciously
marks himself out even as he describes liminal queer zones with
lesbian bars, gay pubs in Brixton. And almost analogously, he shuns
demonstrations against racism, willingly lampoons the Indian immigrant
on stage and evens dons the ethnic drag of Mowgli to succeed as
an actor. Paradoxically, Karim also acknowledges that he has been a

victim of racial discrimination as a second-generation immigrant in
Enochs England. It is interesting that he articulates his diasporic
isolation after his brief affair and rupture with his white lover Eleanor:
And we pursued English roses as we pursued England; by possessing these prizes,
this kindness and beauty, we stared defiantly into the eye of the Empire and
all its self-regardWe became part of England and yet proudly stood outside it.37
(emphasis added)
In spite of his bisexuality, Karim confines himself to the patriarchal

(heterosexist) framework, evident in the comparison that he institutes
between England and English roses. Like Omar in My Beautiful
Laundrette, Karim does little in the novel to subvert patriarchy; and
it is the second-generation female immigrant Jamila who undertakes
that radical diasporic task.
Although Kureishis readers have access to Jamilas character only
through Karims subjectivity, Jamila emerges as a deeply layered
postcolonial female sexual subject in the novel. While Karim faces little
threat from patriarchy at home (his homosexuality is ignored and then
tolerated by his father Haroon), compulsory heterosexuality is foisted
on Jamila by her father Anwar. And yet Jamila challenges the
heterosexual monogamist marital norm of the nation in diaspora.
Her readings of sexual politics of Simone de Beauvoir and the Black
feminism of Angela Davis make her deeply conscious of her
conflicting and deeply meshing identities. As a postcolonial feminist,
Jamila comes to see sexuality as indomitable fractious and pleasurable.
She simultaneously develops a strong anti-racist politics as an Asian
in Britain. If Karims queerness and opportunism make him drift
between interstitial moments of hybridity unwilling to politically
harness the ongoing in-between-ness, Jamila consciously politicizes
her queer self. As a borderland bisexual figure, a sexual subaltern
in diaspora, she senses her own isolation and the need to be part of
a commune that repudiates both racial and sexual oppression. In spite
of his irreverent attitude, Karim is compelled to perceive Jamilas
determination towards the end of the novel:
Her feminism, the sense of self and fight it engendered, the
schemes and plans she had, the relationships which she desired to
take this form and not that form the things she made herself know,
all the understanding this gave, seemed to illuminate her tonight as
she went forward, an Indian woman, to live a useful life in a white
England.38
It is significant that even Jamilas husband Changez fits into the
alternative familial arrangements of life in the commune that Jamila
chooses to move to after Anwars death. It is a space that is almost
heterotopic in that it is like, to quote Foucault, a kind of effectively
enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other sites that can be
found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested,
and inverted.39 The commune holding heterosexual, bisexual, lesbian,
other diverse sexual desires, political affiliations and racial origins into
a comradeship, acknowledges the notion of different identities and
constructs co-existing in one space. But unlike Foucaults heterotopia,
the aim of the commune is not to restrict, exclude or demonstrate
any form of power. Instead the communes philosophy chooses to
recognise, as Simon the lawyer (and Leilas biological father) says, that
The problemwas how to overthrow, not those presently in power,
but the whole principle of power-over.40 (emphasis added).
But as readers of cultural texts, how are we to interpret Kureishis
queer politics if Karim and Omar as queer (male) protagonists do little
to critique expectations of heteronormative patriarchal forces? Why
does it always take a (female) Tania or a Jamila to deal effective blows
to the fantasies of heterosexual patriarchs in diaspora? Why indeed
is Karim made the protagonist by a Kureishi who seems to almost
endorse the ambisexuality that Charlie represents? Answers to these
questions might lie in the representational strategy of disidentification
suggested by Jos Muoz. Theorising on the queer of colour, Muoz
writes:
Disidentification is the third mode of dealing with dominant ideology, one
that neither opts to assimilate within such a structure nor strictly opposes
it; rather disidentification is a strategy that works on and against dominant
ideology.41
In other words, disidentificatory queer strategies in Kureishi could

be seen to allow for both pleasure and critique of the dominant

(masculinist heterosexual) representation. (The Buddha of Suburbia
significantly ends with the announcement of a heterosexual marriage
between Haroon and Eva at a dinner from which Jamila is
conspicuously absent.)
It might be easier to understand Kureishis ambivalence if we
appreciate his de Certeauian tactical use of identity temporary
projection of the self over an area that the tactic (unlike strategy)
does not hope to make its own.42 But as a student of Cultural Studies
who grew up in postcolonial India, I am still not convinced about
a greater power of dissidence of tactic compared to the critical abilities
of strategic essentialism, the risks of deploying the latter notwithstanding.
I have tried to demonstrate why I do not agree with Gopinaths reading
of Kureishis queer hybridity as one that completely obfuscates female
subjectivity and female queer desire. (And by female queer I do not
mean exclusively lesbian.) I also do not uphold the essentialist view
that all gay male frameworks are invariably complicit with dominant
nationalist and diasporic scripts. But I do agree that a queer
perspective needs a feminist understanding of the queer for an
unambiguous critique of heterosexist nationalism, to be able to
identify ways in which bodies, desires, subjects deemed impossible
within dominant diasporic logic intervene into the public culture of
diaspora.43 It is in the context of a feminism-informed queer strategy
that I finally look at Shani Mootoos novel The Cereus Blooms at Night.
Cereus Blooms At Night: Vision of a Shared Queerness
A stark contrast to the ambivalence (through pleasure and critique)

in Kureishis texts, Mootoos Cereus Blooms at Night is a consistently
queer project that seeks an unambiguous dissolution of hetero-
patriarchal assumptions of the nation state. Like the works of queer
Cuban exiled novelist Reinaldo Arenas that demonstrate how sexuality
makes people move, how moving affects the practices of representation
and an investment in some sort of return,44 Mootoos novel also stages
a comparable re-patriation to queer the home space by undertaking
a project of revisionist historiography. But unlike Arenas who awaits
intervention as a revenant, a monument, a sexually and politically

charged figure post-mortem, Mootoos fictional narrator actually
returns from his self-imposed exile to his home-island to unsettle
hegemonic systems of thought. It is significant that the self-imposed
exile of Mootoos male homosexual narrator Tyler is inextricably linked
to his sexuality, a perversion that he has struggled to come to terms
with:
Over the years I pondered the gender and sex roles available to people, and
the rules that went with them. After much reflection I have come to discern
that my desire to leave the shores of Lantanacamara had much to do with
my studying abroad, but far more with wanting to be somewhere where my
perversion, which I tried diligently as I could to shake, might be either
invisible or of no consequence to people to whom my foreignness was what
would be strange.45
But Tyler does not remain in exile; he returns to his (postcolonial)

island to gradually assert his queerness and simultaneously piece
together the queer past of his patient Mala Ramchandin at the Paradise
Alms House. Mootoos narrative strategy (alternating largely between
Tylers voice and that of an omniscient narrator) invites us to see
fiction, not as non-history per se but as a historical narrative of
another genre. History here is a composite of both dominant
discourses as well as queer interpellations that are counter disruptive.
Fictional meta-history in Cereus Blooms at Night advances the
possible and the imagined as historys creative counterpart by
focusing on both aesthetic and cognitive modes.46 As we return from
a postcolonial (Tylers) present to a colonial and imaginary
Lantanacamara (to trace Malas past), Mootoo implicitly refers to the
history of the Indian diaspora in the Caribbean: Malas grandfather
old man Ramchandinis an indentured field labourer from India.47
But the story of Chandins heterosexual deprivation (he is debarred
from marrying a white Lavinia although he is adopted by her father)
merely serves as a prelude to complicate the narrative of culture, sex
and the colony that the novelist does not see as exclusively (and
oppressively) heterosexual. Cereus Blooms at Night thus steps into a
relatively uncharted zone of female homoerotic desire in a colonial
context. And here the interracial sexual relationship between Chandins

Indian wife Sarah and white Lavinia is not marked by the complexities
of colonial male homoerotics. It is interesting that the lesbian
relationship between Sarah and Lavinia in the novel is ignorant of
both racial and class hierarchies a contrast to the relationships
between Ackerley and his Indian male servants and is only deployed
as an animadversion on a hypermasculinist colonial enterprise.
Sumita Chatterjee in Communitarian Identities and the Private
Sphere: A Gender Dialogue Amongst Indo-Trinidadians (1845-1917),
points out that scholarship studying aspects of community and identity
formation in diaspora has mostly looked at public-sphere activities,
often ignoring the vitality of the domestic sphere. Although domesticity
was by no means the sole signifier of women in diaspora in Trinidad,
Chatterjee concludes that it was within this feminised domestic space
that social constructions of gender, Indian womanhood and even
Indias were tacitly challenged:
It was in this exclusively female world, largely undocumented by official and
missionary scribes, that women in all probability experienced the greatest
degree of enjoyment and empowerment, establishing their own codes of
behaviour and definitions of femininity and masculinity. 48
Mootoo, I would argue, sets up such an exclusive female space that

queers Sarahs (and ultimately Malas) home and her daughters who
slowly begin to absorb the nature of the relationship between their
mother and their Aunt Lavinia. This process of queering home, the
kitchen and the sewing room (sites that are in fact supposed to be
repositories of essential values of the ethnic hearth), is crucial to
Mootoos project of re-reading the dominant narrative:
It seemed to the children that their Mama and Aunt Lavinia were wanting
to conduct all their visits indoors, or only as far outdoors as the backyardPerhaps
it was only the photograph that caused Pohpoh to later imagine that Aunt
Lavinia had also stood there with Mama, because she had an indelible
impression of them both leaning on the narrow sink basinAunt Lavinia and
Sarah spent most of those days in the sewing room downstairsAunt Lavinia and
Mama down in the sewing room, Aunt Lavinia and Mama sitting on the sofa
bed down there49 (emphasis added)
Desire between two women, ignorant of the erotics of power, renders

unstable the patriarchy that defines Chandins household, and directly
threatens his heterosexuality. Sarahs erotic pursuit and her elopement
with Lavinia to the Shivering North Wetlands thus become a means
to circumvent the trappings of colonial patriarchy. But the brutal
effects of misogyny and violence endorsed by colonial patriarchy are
most agonizingly experienced by Sarahs daughter Mala and her sister
Asha: Chandins misogyny drives him to assault his own daughters.
Abandoned by both her mother and her sister Asha, Mala then seeks
to utterly transform the colonial home whose patriarchal underpinning
has brought her nothing but misery. Her insane reaction to Chandins
final assault is also subversively queer since it ultimately seeks a
complete bouleversement of domesticity that has oppressed her for as
long as she can remember:
With piercing eyes she would pull the walls of that house down, down,
down, and she would gather the two children to her breast and hug them
tightly, rock and quiet them, and kiss their faces until they giggled wildly.50
Malas radical stance prompts her to completely alter, defamiliarise all

that is recognisably domestic under the rubric of the colonial
experience. In a sense, she queers the house by building a partition
of piled furniture to separate her kitchen, by allowing birds, insects,
snakes and reptiles and the abundant foliage to gossip among
themselves51 on her property, and most powerfully, by letting her dead
father rot in his bed. Just as Kureishis Jamila joins the commune after
Anwars death (having buried him on a grassy surface where
homosexuals cruise and sunbathe), Mala too attempts to redefine the
space she wishes to inhabit after the death of Chandin. Malas
queerness then easily communicates itself to the other queer
characters in the novel: nurse Tyler and his hermaphrodite lover Otoh
Mohanty. As Tyler himself admits, it is a shared queerness with Mala
that allows him to gain the full story.52 Otoh too, wants to share the
secret of his/her hermaphroditism with her, even at the risk of being
caught walking the streets dressed like a woman.53 Tylers decision
to stand tall with his unusual femininity54 and to distinguish his
perversion from that of Chandin, is a decisive step towards queering
a postcolonial Lantanacamara. Interesting in this context is the

recurring use of transvestism in the novel and the role it plays in Tylers
self-assertion. Martins Manalansans understanding of the ritualistic
dimensions of cross-dressing in diaspora in Diasporic Deviants/
Divas is worth considering here. Although Manalansans work focuses
on the transformation of the Catholic ritual of the Santacruzan by
Filipino gays in New York, his perception of the identity of the
Filipino bakla is relevant to the queer diasporic core of Mootoos text.
The construction of the bakla (not exactly a cultural or linguistic parallel to
the gay man), centers on epicene and interstitial qualitiesFor many of my
informants, cross-dressing was one way of confronting the vicissitudes of
diasporic living, from finding a sense of belonging in the gay community to
engaging racist practices.55
To Manalansan, cross-dressing in diaspora thus validates the spaces

for same-sex desire and sexuality that cannot be captured in rigid
hetero/homo identities alone; but the act of cross-dressing also gives
the diasporic and postcolonial queer a deeply personal identity and
a defiant political perspective within a larger framework of race and
gender in diaspora. Transvestism as a political act directly confronting
binaries, functions by virtue of a similar queer ethos in Cereus Blooms
at Night. An effeminate Tyler seeing himself as not a man and not
ever able to be a woman cannot be conveniently labelled as being
gay. But Mootoos strategy, as I have to argued before, is to subtly
rework home itself, suggested this time, by a more rigidly Foucauldian
heterotopic space of the Alms House. Malas nurse Tyler is initially
unable to fathom the power of his own transvestism, being suspended
nameless in the limbo state between existence and non-existence. But
the crucial moment of anagnorisis comes only as Tyler (in a nurses
dress) watches Mala resisting prescribed (gendered) domesticity by
piling furniture in her room inside the Alms House:
Just as I was hoping that the tower would come crashing down and
extinguish me forever, a revelation came. The reason that Miss Ramchandin
paid me no attention was that, to her mind, the outfit was not something
to either congratulate or scorn it simply was. She was not the one to
manacle nature, and I sensed she was permitting mine its freedom. I took
the drawer from her, climbed up on her bed and placed it at her towers
peak.56
The strategy of unearthing queer desire within the island is perhaps

best conveyed by Mootoo through the sexuality of Otoh Mohanty,
the hermaphrodite offspring of Malas lover Ambrose, and eventually
Tylers lover. Otohs androgynous nature is one that attracts Tyler as
well as the heterosexual population in the Caribbean town of Paradise.
But that Otoh is a hermaphrodite is never really a problem and the
transformation of Ambrosia to Otoh is apparently so flawless, that
even the nurse and doctor who attended the birth, on seeing him
later, marvelled at the carelessness of having declared him a girl.57
Tyler and Otoh, enacting femininities and masculinities of various
degrees, ultimately find a partner in each other. Essences and
fundamentals of either category of the masculine or the feminine are
ultimately completely dispensed with by queer hybridity in the novel.
Otohs mothers comment on her childs hermaphroditism is an honest
admission of how queer Lantanacamara actually is:
Now the fact of the matter is that you are not the first or the only one of
your kind in this place. You grow up here and you dont realize that almost
everybody in this place wish they could be somebody or something else?58
The Flight of the Eunuch59
To sum up I will have to return to Gopinaths reading of Mootoos

novel. I agree with Gopinath when she says that in Cereus Blooms at
Night (as in Selvadurais Funny Boy), desire must be conceptualized
in motion, traveling as it does both diasporically and in place.
Mootoos characters do indeed infuse the space of home with multiple
forms of queer desire, and thus reveal the fiction of sanitized
heterosexuality on which the idea of home as household/community/
nation depends.60 However, Gopinaths insistent privileging of queer
female desire, of the female subject at the centre limits her own
expansive treatment of the queer as an effective tool for critique.
While there is a need to address the lack of theoretical engagement
with female queerness in diaspora, a paranoid reading of all male
texts might actually be counterproductive. If queer diasporic critique
recognizes the possibility of articulation of connections between

different forms of (sexual) marginalization, then it might indeed be
possible to transcend identity politics and move towards a kind of
intersectionality61 that the reading of Mootoos text already yields.
I do not for a moment suggest that identity politics should be
disregarded altogether. I have tried to demonstrate how Kureishi
vacillates between identity and non-identity politics to emphasize
perhaps a realists approach. Mootoo on the other hand mobilizes
identities of her characters to move towards a common vision of
solidarity and power.
However, Mootoos queer tableau, it must be remembered, is also
queerness idealized. An ahistorically positioned Otoh Mohanty, as a
hermaphrodite, experiences neither the trauma of Herculine Barbin62
nor the stigma of a transsexual or a hijra in a postcolonial world. The
construction of Otoh as the quintessential transitional subject, a
figure that acts as a metaphor for other forms of crossing and travel
in the novel63 is therefore evidently at the same level of the fantastic
and of, as it were, the anti-real of Malas overgrown garden surfeited
and yet empowered by the heady fragrance of the night-blooming
cereus. This queer excess, I would suggest helps Mootoo to hint at
a queer critique that is at once gender-sensitive and gender-neutral.
The primacy of sexual difference is laid aside for a moment as Tyler
and Otoh unite in Malas presence at the Alms House and hearken
back to desire between Sarah and Lavinia. What I am arguing against
then is the a priori opposition that a rigidly defined queer diasporic
framework can set up between what Gopinath seems to see as mutually
opposing male and female homotextualities. It is only if we evade
such a reductive reading, and guard queer reading practices against
what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick calls the stultifying side effects of the
hermeneutics of suspicion,64 that the unfettered queer/diaspora can
take flight.
Notes
1. Cindy Patton and Benigno Snchez-Eppler, eds. Queer Diasporas (Durham

& London: Duke University Press, 2000), 3.
2. See Sandip Roy, Leaving Home to Go Home. in Because I Have a Voice:
Queer Politics in India, edited by Arvind Narrain and Gautam Bhan (New
Delhi: Yoda Press, 2005), 231.
3. Krishnalai Shridharini, My India, My America (New York: Duell, Sloan
and Pierce, 1941).
4. D. S. Saund, Congressman from India (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1960).
5. See Sandhya Shukla, India Abroad: Diasporic Cultures of Postwar America
and England (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2005) for a discussion on
trends of early male immigrant writing out of the United States, 145.
6. Bharati Mukherjee, Wife (1975) (Ontario: Penguin Canada, 1987).
7. Anita Desai, Bye-Bye Blackbird (New Delhi: Orient Paperbacks, 1985).
8. Chandani Lokuge, If the Moon Smiled (New Delhi: Penguin, 2000).
9. Monica Ali, Brick Lane (London: Doubleday, 2003).
10. I use the term queer not merely as an acceptable elaboration or a
shorthand for lesbian and gay; queer in this essay is a theoretical
device to bring together all kinds of practices, behaviour and identities
that de-stabilize unproblematic heterosexuality; the term includes
bisexuality, transsexualism, transvestism, hermaphroditism, gender
ambiguity and a disparate range of marginalised erotic fates that always
do not fit into convenient schemas.
11. Hanif Kureishi, My Beautiful Laundrette and Other Writings (London:
Faber & Faber, 1996).
12. Hanif Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia (London: Faber & Faber, 1999).
13. Shani Mootoo, Cereus Blooms at Night (Delhi: Penguin Books, 1998).
14. Arguably, Diaspora and Migration Studies continue to be acutely (and
responsibly) conscious of the division of experience, and of what Sandhya
Shukla calls negotiations structured by difference that separate for
example, the dispossessed refugee of a chitmahal from the migrant
intellectual who is capable of theorising on loss turning into the language
of metaphor. And diaspora as a conceptual tool recognises the various
degrees of compulsion that produce various kinds of migrant subjectivities.
But it is also true that an older assimilation-based model (embracing
concerns about cultural assimilation and loss of identity in the original
use of the term) has been gradually replaced by a more complex approach
to movement across borders. Sandhya Shukla, India Abroad: Diasporic

Cultures of Postwar America and England (New Delhi: Orient Longman,
2005).
15. Glick Schiller, Nina Linda Basch, and Christina Blanc-Szanton.
Transnationalism: A New Analytic Framework for Understanding
Migration. in Towards a Transnational Perspective on Migration. Annals of
the New York Academy of Science, 1992. 645: ix-xiv
16. For Shuklas analysis of what she calls generations of Indian diaspora,
see Sandhya Shukla, India Abroad: Diasporic Cultures of Postwar America
and England, 235-236.
17. Gayatri Gopinath, Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian
Public Cultures (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2005) 11,
21, 24.
18. Ibid., 4, 5.
19. Ibid., 4.
20. Ibid., 5.
21. For more on the conflicts in the in-between space of communities in
the diaspora, see Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York:
Routledge, 1994).
22. Zahid Chaudhury, Controlling the Ganymedes: The Colonial Gaze in
J.R. Ackerleys Hindoo Holiday. in Sexual Sites, Seminal Attitudes: Sexualities,
Masculinities & Culture in South Asia, edited by Sanjay Srivastava (New
Delhi: Sage, 2004), 97.
23. Ibid., 36.
24. Ibid., 43.
25. Ibid., 51.
Public Cultures, 2.
27. Ibid., 5.
28. Ibid., 4.
29. Hanif Kureishi, My Beautiful Laundrette and Other Writing, 22.
30. Ibid., 21.
31. Ibid., 21.
32. Ibid., 63.
33. Owen Heathcote, Masochism, Sadism and Homotextuality: The Examples
of Yukio Mishima and Eric Jourdan, Paragraph, vol. 17, no. 2, 176.
34. Hanif Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia, 3.
35. Ibid., 15.
36. Ibid., 255.

37. Ibid., 227.
38. Ibid., 216.
39. See Michel Foucault, Different Spaces. in Essential Works of Foucault,
vol 2: Aesthetics, Method and Epistemology, edited by James D. Faubion
(New York: New Press, 1998), 175-185.
40. Hanif Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia, 218.
41. Jos Muoz, Disidentifications: Queer of Colour and the Performance of
Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 11.
42. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven
Randall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 38-39.
Public Cultures, 164.
44. See Reinaldo Arenas, Before Night Falls: A Memoir. For an analysis of the
theme of repatriation in the works of Arenas, see Benigno Snchez Eppler,
Reinaldo Arenas, Re-writer Revenant, and the Re-patriation of Cuban
Homoerotic Desire. in Queer Diasporas, edited by Cindy Patton &
Benigno Snchez-Eppler (Durham & London: Duke University Press,
2000), 154-180.
45. Shani Mootoo, Cereus Blooms at Night, 47-48.
46. For an excellent discussion on the relationship between history and
fiction in the context of literature of the Indian Partition, see Subhoranjan
Dasgupta, Historys Creative Counterpart: Partition in Akhtaruzzaman
Elias Khowabnama. in The Trauma and the Triumph: Gender and
Partition in Eastern India, edited by Jasodhara Bagchi & Subhoranjan
Dasgupta (Kolkata: Stree, 2003), 30-43.
47. Shani Mootoo, Cereus Blooms at Night, 16.
48. Sumita Chatterjee, Communitarian Identities and the Private Sphere: A
Gender Dialogue Amongst Indo-Trinidadians (1845-1917). in Community,
Empire and Migration: South Asians in Diaspora, edited by Crispin Bates
(New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2001), 213-214.
49. Shani Mootoo, Cereus Blooms at Night, 55-57.
50. Ibid., 142.
51. Ibid., 127.
52. Ibid., 48.
53. Ibid., 121.
54. Ibid., 247-248.
55. Martin F. Manalansan, Manalansan IV, Martin F. Diasporic Deviants/
Divas: How Filipino Gay Transmigrants Play with the World. in Queer
Diasporas, edited by Cindy Patton & Benigno Snchez-Eppler (Durham
& London: Duke University Press, 2000), 190-191.
56. Shani Mootoo, Cereus Blooms at Night, 77.
57. Ibid., 110.
58. Ibid., 238.
59. My use of the word flight is an attempt to bring together Mootoos
imaginative queer flight with notions of a flight, passage and trans-border
travel that diaspora evokes. Here I am suggesting a risky conflation
between queerness and migration through the apparently polysemous
word hijra. I say apparently because I am really referring to two different
words with different pronunciations: the Urdu word hijda (often
misrepresented as hijra, without the dot beneath the r and hence eliding
the retroflex) and the Arabic word hijra. In Arabic, hijra (a variant of
Hegira) refers not just to Prophet Mohammads flight from Mecca to
Medina in the seventh century, but also suggests a departure (flight) from
ones own country. And in Hindi (originally from Urdu), hijda refers to
those who identify as transgender, and represents a continuing Indian
tradition that defies heteronormative understandings of gender, sexuality
and the body. In India, hijda is also used as a form of homophobic abuse
directed against those who do not fulfill heteronormative, gendered
expectations. Hijda as the third gender and hijra as migration can thus
be homographs (and homophones) only through misrepresentation. Seeking
the union of queerness and diaspora, dreaming of a union of two forms
of in-between-ness in the (erroneously located) polysemy of hijra would
arguably be a vulgar conflation. It would be an act of violence that
obfuscates the hegemonic influence of the English language over Arabic
and Urdu, the ostracism faced by the hijda community in India, and the
reality of a US federal law that debars transsexuals from immigrating
through marriage. At the same time, I am tempted to suggest that the
contemplative logic behind such a catachrestic corruption can also be a
mapping of subversive possibilities, the deprovincialization of performativity
and of queer politics.
61. For more on the approach of intersectional activism, see Jaya Sharma
and Dipika Nath, Through the Prism of Intersectionality: Same Sex
Sexualities in India. in Sexuality, Gender and Rights: Exploring Theory and
Practice in South and South East Asia, edited by Geetanjali Mishra and
Radhika Chandiramani (New Delhi: Sage, 2005), 82-97.
62. See Michel Foucault, Herculin Barbin, Being the Recently Discovered
Memoirs of a Nineteenth Century French Hermaphrodite, translated by
Richard McDougall (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980).
64. For a compelling essay on reading practices embodied in what Paul
Ricoeur famously called the hermeneutics of suspicion, see Eve Kosofsky
Sedgwick, Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading; or, Youre So
Paranoid, You Probably This Introduction Is about You. in Novel
Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction, edited by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
(Durham & London: Duke University Press, 1997), 1-35.
The Decent Impulse: A Study of the
Father-Daughter Relationship as a Sign of
J. M. Coetzees Response to Apartheid
Arpa Ghosh
In J. M. Coetzees 1980 novel Waiting for the Barbarians, at one point

the Magistrate says:
I gave the girl my protection, offering in my equivocal way to be her father.
But I came too late, after she had ceased to believe in fathers. I wanted to
do what was right, I wanted to make reparation. I will not deny this decent
impulse, however mixed with more questionable motives: there must always
be a place for penance and reparation. Nevertheless I should never have
allowed the gates of the town to be opened to people who assert that there
are higher considerations than those of decency.1 (88-89,WFB)
The Magistrate refers to the blind and crippled barbarian girl who
evokes his guilt and sympathy and yet who remains inert to his erotic
ministrations refusing to respond to his guilt-induced gestures. It is
interesting that the father-daughter relation is always tied up with guilt
and sexuality in Coetzees novels. Against the backdrop of apartheid,
an irrational system that legitimized discrimination and injustice on
the basis of colour and race in South Africa between 1948 and 1991,
normal and abnormal relations often get confused and distorted. The
family trope with its emphasis on the parental/filial relations is nodal
to Coetzees novels as much as it is to the novels of his two white
compeers Nadine Gordimer and Andre Brink.
As a dissident novelist Coetzee is cynical of all structures. He
begins his novels at a point where a family or a community is already
in a state of severe damage and fragmentation. From that point
onwards his persistent questioning of the validity of all aspects of the
family-paradigm takes things to a point of disrepair and disintegration
Arpa Ghosh | 115
where all component factors are subject to scrutiny and suspicion.

Whereas Gordimer and Brink are proleptic and optimistic in their
approach to the problem of apartheid, sensitive and alert to its specific
features, Coetzee is unremittingly pessimistic in his focus on the
nature and extent of harm done by apartheid and concurrent forms
of colonization and this is reflected in his representation of family
and family relationships. In his novels we come across completely
shattered individual relationships and essentially dysfunctional social
equations; fathers who betray daughters, children who murder
parents, mothers abandoned by their daughters, and cruel pestilential
children detested rather than loved by parents. Like Gordimer and
Brink, Coetzee too uses the family as trope to portray in miniature
the evils and oppressions of a patriarchal system like apartheid. Like
them he also concentrates on white individuals in most of his novels,
but unlike them he completely strips his characters of all power and
self-esteem, in such a manner that all his characters irrespective of
colour are eventually victims of exploitation and oppression.
In the Heart of the Country (1977) has as its central character the
neurotic and sterile white spinster Magda who, jealous of her fathers
rapacious and promiscuous overtures towards other women, may or
may not have committed patricide. The novel segmented in the form
of diary entries is a series of confessions by Magda, often self-
contradictory and illogical. The white farmers murder in the hands
of his daughter Magda unleashes a regime of anarchy in the isolated
farm where father and daughter were the sole white residents served
by a black servant Hendrik and his wife. Magda is beset with
confusion and sense of powerlessness, unable to delineate along clear
lines the master/servant relationship that carried meaning in the lives
of Hendrik and his wife during her fathers lifetime. In every possible
way Magda fails to take over her fathers authoritative position as
colonizer. She is weak, untutored, hopelessly intellectual and romantic
and worst of all, frigid and sterile. Magdas sterility takes away from
her the basic agency of a woman; her power to conceive a child. The
relation that Magda shares with her father is an intricate web of power,
powerlessness and complicity. On one hand Magda, the unwilling
colonizer, hates her father. On the other she cannot evade her own
116 | The Decent Impulse
complicity in the power equation that her father has generated

between himself and the black servants. In a scatological passage she
broods:
Every sixth day, when our (Magda and her fathers) cycles coincide, his cycle
of two days, my cycle of three, we are driven to the intimacy of relieving
our bowels in bucket-latrine in the malodour of the others fresh faeces,
either he in my stench or I in his. Sliding aside the wooden lid I straddle
his hellish gust, bloody, feral, the kind that flies love best, fleckedwith
undigested flesh barely mulled over before pushed through. Whereas my
ownis dark, olive with bile, hard-packed, kept in too long, old, tired. We
heave and strain, wipe ourselves in our different ways with squares of store-
bought toilet paper, mark of gentility, recompose our clothing, and return
to the great outdoors. Then it becomes Hendriks charge to inspect the
bucket and, if it prove not to be empty, to empty it in a hole dug far away
from the house, and wash it out, and return it to its place. Where exactly
the bucket is emptied I do not know; but somewhere on the farm there is
a pit where, looped in each others coils, the fathers red snake and the
daughters black embrace and sleep and dissolve. (34-35, HOC)
Red is associated with violence and brutality while black the colour
of bile is linked with resentment and sullenness. The unholy nexus
between father and daughter, borne out by the verbs embrace and
coiled. Magdas identification with her father exists at a subterranean,
subconscious level concealed yet undeniable. She cannot refute her
race, nor can she deny knowledge of her fathers intimate secrets. The
crime of passion that she commits marks her close attachment to the
dying order while betraying her hatred for it. Magdas reaction depicts
vitiation of normal family ties in the context of colonization and
racism. The overwhelming challenge that Magda faces, that she is
unable to handle, after her fathers death, is the mode of interaction,
verbal and non verbal, between herself and her black servants, Henry
and Klein Anna. Magdas failure is the failure of the white imagination;
Coetzees and the white liberals; to come up with a viable alternative
to hard-headed colonialism as practiced by the white farmer, a
representative of the older, brutal regime, while retaining the trappings
of power.
A criticism levied against Coetzee by critics like Stephen Watson2,
Arpa Ghosh | 117
is that economic relations, a nodal problem in the context of

apartheid, rarely feature in his novels. However, in this novel the
question of money is brought up at a crucial time. Magdas fathers
relation with Hendrik is marked by clarity of perspective with the
former paying her servant in cash. In Magdas reign the simplicity
of the relationship is damaged when she pleads ignorance about the
financial resources of the farm and fails to pay her labourers. Instead
she tries to raise their status by inviting them to stay in the house
and waiting upon them. Magda even seeks to revert to an earlier mode
of exchange, barter. She makes feeble attempts to strike up a
friendship with her black dependents without completely relinquishing
her overlordship. But such a mode is unacceptable to the black
labourer and his wife. The familial hierarchies of the old order that
had begun to disintegrate with the sexually unappealing and sterile
daughter violently assaulting her father and step mother, now crumble
completely when the black servant repeatedly violates his white
mistress.
The old order shattered by the murder of the farmer, anarchy
and disarray take its place. The novel was published in 1977 a year
after the Soweto Revolt that disclosed a new, aggressive face of young
Africa. The issue was the imposition of the Afrikaner language as the
only medium of study. The black schoolchildren of Soweto took out
protest marches in sharp protest against this grossly unjust law. The
schoolchildrens upsurge signified the refusal of the new generation
to respect the liberal values of their fathers who had allowed white
liberals and communists to speak on their behalf. The new generation
deliberately chose to ignore the handful of well intentioned liberals.
In his denunciation of liberals the charismatic young black leader
Steve Biko said:
Who are the liberals in South Africa? It is that curious bunch of non-
conformists who explain their participation in negative terms; that bunch of
do-gooders that goes under all sorts of names liberals, leftists etc. These
are the people who argue that they are not responsible for white racism and
the countrys inhumanity to the black man these are the people who claim
that they too feel the oppression just as acutely as the blacks and therefore
should be jointly involved in the black mans struggle for a place under the
sun; in short these are the people that say they have black souls wrapped
in white skins3
Perceiving the liberals intervention in negative terms is the link

between Coetzees text and Bikos thesis. Magdas self definition as a
zero, null, a vacuum towards which all collapses inward, a turbulence,
muffled, grey, like a chill draft eddying through the corridors,
neglected, vengeful (2, HOC) while distancing her from her father
robs her of a coherent ideology by means of which she can define
herself in positive terms.
In the Heart of the Country grapples with the question of protest
from the epistemological rather than political angle. The value of
Afrikaans as a medium of interaction between the black and white
denizens of South Africa is challenged. It is interesting that among
the three novelists, only Coetzee takes up the issue of language, not
once, but repeatedly, drawing attention to its use as a basic weapon
of tyranny. Seeking to alter the nature of her relations with Hendrik
and Klein Anna, Magda is frustrated by the Afrikaans language that
is scarred by marks of oppression.
I cannot carry on with these idiot dialogues. The language that should pass
between myself and these people was subverted by my father and cannot be
recovered. What passes between us now is a parody. I was born into a
language my heart wants to speak, I feel too much the pathos of its distances,
but it is all we have. I can believe there is a language lovers speak but cannot
imagine how it goes. I have no words left to exchange whose values I trust.
(106, HOC)
Her inability to communicate meaningfully with the blacks, her

inability to understand the language of the skygods, her drawing of
the supine, spread-eagled female figure emphasizes Magdas lack of
agency, her feminized, powerless position. In a landscape that can only
be described as a non-farm or an anti-farm Magda herself runs the
threat of becoming a non-person, a mad old woman who is the sole
denizen of a wilderness, the sole witness of the eradication of her
history, and one who, in the absence of a meaningful language, resorts
to one that has no relevance in South Africa. In this novel centred
on the consciousness of a member of the colonizer-race Coetzee takes
Arpa Ghosh | 119
away from her the last vestige of authority and power betraying the
artificiality and provisionality of all power structures. Notably, even
in an early non-realist novel like In the Heart of the Country the power
configurations of colonial and race relations are studied through the
classic realist paradigm of family: father/daughter, master/slave
relations. The white person as depicted in this seventies novel is at
a dead end washed up on the leeward side of history. Coetzees deep
pessimism regarding the future of the whites, that finds its first
powerful depiction in this novel, deepens with time.
In the 1980 novel Waiting for the Barbarians written at a time
of violence and lawlessness in South Africa in the wake of Steve Bikos
murder in police detention, the father-daughter motif is not immediately
evident as it is in the previous novel. The motif is not a given, but
is rather arrived at through cogitation and self-realization on the part
of the Magistrate, the reason being that the Magistrate and the
barbarian girl are not biologically related and do not even belong to
the same race. A prominent postcolonial motif in Waiting for the
Barbarians is the unwilling colonizer, the compassionate colonizer; the
jackal in sheeps clothing (78-79, WFB). The barbarian girl, captured,
tortured, blinded, crippled and largely inert in her responses to the
friendly/atonement/erotic gestures of the Magistrate is ostensibly a
symbol of the passive empire, taken by force by the brutal colonizer.
In the beginning the relationship between the Magistrate and the girl
is clearly that between a guilt-ridden colonizer and an enigmatic, silent,
passively resisting subject. The Magistrates interest in her is curatorial4
rather than exoticist or magisterial, but the stress is definitely on
knowledge as power. He is eager to read her like a text but she
remains closed, enigmatic, elusive and impenetrable to him.
But with this woman it is as if there is no interior, only a surface, across
which I hunt back and forth seeking entry. Is this how her torturers felt
hunting their secret, whatever they thought it was? (46, WFB)
The desire the colonized woman arouses in the male colonizer is an

oft-repeated trope in colonial fiction. Usually a female slave/captive
signifies the riches and possibilities of the unexplored colony.
However the Magistrates sexual impotence in relation to the damaged
body of the barbarian girl points to Coetzees effort to invalidate and

subvert this trope. Whereas the stereotypical colonizer-text
pornographically depicts the settler as a priapic ravisher, the Magistrate
is shown to lose his sexual drive in his moments of intimacy with
the girl. Coetzee refutes the favoured trope of the captive, aborigine
female figure as a paradigm of conquered land to be ravished by the
colonizer, replacing the trope by an intriguing, multipart character
who gradually reveals facets of her personality, refusing to give up her
meaning at any one given instance. Gayatri Chakraborty Spivak
formulates:
No perspective critical of imperialism can turn the Other into a self, because
the project of imperialism has always already historically refracted what
might have been the absolutely Other into a domesticated Other that
consolidates the imperialist self.5
The barbarian girl refuses to be the domesticated other. She retains

her secret till the very end.
His lifelong engagement with alien linguistic signs of the
barbarians brings home to the Magistrate the impossibility of
recovering vanished history. The magistrates commitment to the blind
barbarian girl however is a developing bond that grows and matures
into something akin to a father-daughter relationship in which the
father is protector rather than betrayer/ravisher. The irreparable
damage done to the girls eyes and feet by the torturers is symbolic
of the vicious disruption that colonizer culture wreaks upon aborigine
culture. Yet the story does not end there. The blind, crippled girls
pulsating entity, her silent resistance to appropriation and her dignity
as human subject gradually draw the magistrate out of his self
absorption and half-erotic, half-remedial voyeuristic gesture of washing
and anointing the girls broken body, of his own volition, he takes
the concrete step of leading the girl out of the settlement in a bid
to restore her to her people. Like the poplar slips the girl refuses to
give up her cultural secrets, but unlike them, she is much more than
silenced, fossilized history. She is also a young, vibrant, fertile woman
who menstruates and who, as the magistrate comes to know much
later, confides in one of the settlement prostitutes about her
Arpa Ghosh | 121
unhappiness regarding the magistrates silence. The girl provokes the

Magistrate to question his own identity as detached colonizer and
review his relationship with the girl. The fiction of identity is revealed
to the Magistrate through his interactions with the girl. Initially, the
Magistrates position as man-in-the-middle was more a result of his
topographical placement at the borders of the Empire than a position
arrived at through experience and cogitation. The barbarian girl
provokes self-questioning and self-analysis till the Magistrate realizes
that he is truly a lost subject of history. The erotic overtures of the
Magistrate are replaced by more fulfilling emotion once the girl is
out of reach of the pernicious hands of the empire. In a dream the
Magistrate sees her as an able-bodied, festively dressed child cooking
and disbursing fresh bread. (119,WFB) In a rare affirmative passage
in the Coetzee oeuvre, the Magistrates parental affection comes
through:
Where did a child like you learn to bake so well in the desert? I want to
say. I open my arms to embrace her, and come to myself with tears stinging
the wound on my cheek. (119, WFB)
Even though the Magistrate is overcome by a sense of inadequacy,

his decent impulse as a thinking, compassionate individual who
constantly reviews his historical status as colonizer is depicted through
this evolving relationship; the girl who he first treats like a passive
subject but gradually grows to love as a fellow human being.
Significantly, the magistrates self-knowledge and emotional evolution
is not part of a larger scheme of things, but rather intensely private
and well outside the rubric of empire.
Disgrace (1999) is Coetzees first post-apartheid novel dealing with
the fear, anguish and pessimism of the white male protagonist David
Lurie, a sexually charged, predatory, university teacher whose shameful
dismissal from his post for taking sexual advantage of a student triggers
off events that bring home to him his peripheral position in the
postcolonial South African state. In significant ways the three novels
are linked by the presence of a barren stretch of land passing off for
farm/settlement, the middle-aged white male as father/predator who
views women as inferior creatures available to satisfy his lust, and the
female as victim figure. Magda, even though she murders her father,
is a victim of circumstances, raped by her black servant and deeply
troubled by her own inadequacy as usurper colonizer. In Disgrace the
victim of postapartheid violence is Lucy, David Luries self-effacing
lesbian daughter. David, a man in the habit of taking sexual advantage
of vulnerable, powerless females, discovers through a cruel twist of
fate, that as a father he fails to save his daughter from being gangraped
and impregnated by three black youths. In a South Africa that is no
longer in the thrall of white rule, David finds his elemental role of
patriarch/father in jeopardy. The family structure is scrutinized in the
perspective of the changed socio-political scenario of postcolonial
South Africa. From the neurotic spinster Magda, who, after rebelling
viciously against the authority of her father, is unable to set up a
reformed order, and instead crumbles into incoherence and insanity,
we come a long way to the undemonstrative lesbian mother-to-be,
Lucy, who by accepting her bleak fate as the mother of an unborn
coloured child, and the consort of her social inferior and torturer,
the black man Petrus, moves out of the order of her father into a
completely new sociological set up:
I cannot be a child for ever. [Lucy says to David] You cannot be a father
for ever. I know you mean well, but you are not the guide I need, not at
this time. (161, D)
A new kind of family structure is posited where the male authority,

now black instead of white, (Petrus instead of David) is as self-centred
and rapacious as the former, but where the mother is capable of
crossing the colour bar and making a courageous gesture towards
reconciliation.
This is a novel where old assumptions are systematically denied
and ciphered. The first assumption is the concept of the farm. The
Afrikaner plaasroman idealizes the farm and its life. Ownership,
preferably white male ownership, is an idea integrated to this concept.
Mans relation with his animals is regulated by the same ownership
laws. Animals are for blind servility and consumption. The ordered,
hierarchical existence of the farm has as its nodal point the white baas.
Lucy refuses to use the old terms; Stop calling it the farm, David.
Arpa Ghosh | 123
This is not a farm, its just a piece of land where I grow things
we both know that. (200- original italics). Elsewhere she says,
Yes, I agree, it is humiliating. But perhaps that is a good point to start from
again. Perhaps that is what I must learn to accept. To start at ground level.
With nothing. Not with nothing but. With nothing. No cards, no weapons,
no property, no rights, no dignityYes, like a dog. (205)
Lucy, unlike Magda, is keen to arrive at some meaning surrounding

her existence, and to all intents and purposes, though the cost is heavy
and the sacrifice monumental, she succeeds in identifying her role
and location in post-apartheid society. Of greater importance is the
fact that along with her, David Lurie too finds some kind of
significance in the life he is going to lead in the countryside henceforth
as Lucys aging father.
In this novel the fatherdaughter relationship is radically different
from the father-daughter relationship of In the Heart of the Country.
Brian Macaskill accuses critics like Sheila Roberts and Robert M. Post
of indulging in baneful readings of In the Heart of the Country. He
says:
that ilk of reductive allegorizing which identifies Magdas father as the
Afrikaner government while associating Magda with the oppressed black
race (Post 70), or which interprets the farm as standing for South Africa
itself, the father as Afrikaner baas, and Magda as the ineffectual, dreaming
liberal, or which reads Magdas use of language as a showing of white
South Africa getting drunk on words but incapable of saving action6
Obviously Macaskill objects to the fact that critics have chosen to

garb the father-daughter trope of the novel in simple, one-to-one
political attire. However, a reason why In the Heart of the Country
lends itself to such overt political allegory is that the white farmer and
his daughter Magda are in many ways stereotypes of the Afrikaner
tribe. The authoritative, randy, bullying, Afrikaner father-figure is a
recognizable type that is also to be found in the novels of Gordimer
and Brink. The frigid, bullied, schizophrenic and subversive Afrikaner
female is a predictable type of the colonized white female to be found
in the fiction of Andre Brink (A Chain of Voices, The Devils Valley).
It is easy to read allegorical meanings into such generic types.
Moreover, the relation between father and daughter in In the Heart

of the Country is regulated by the codes of authority and submission
connected with the patriarchal Afrikaner society. The frustrated female
rising against patriarchal authority is a predictable and widely used
trope in the recognized fictional conventions of South African
dissident fiction (Burgers Daughter, A Chain of Voices, Imaginings of
Sand), more so than an authoritative, male chauvinist, Afrikaner
fathers gradual cleaving to his lesbian daughter as has been sensitively
depicted in Disgrace. To that end, in his first post-apartheid novel,
Coetzee does succeed in moving away from stereotype. Davids
relationship with Lucy gradually moves from the realm of the public
to the private, to a point where Davids only residual identity is that
he is Lucys father. The novel ends with the lines Yes, I am giving
him up. (218). David says this when he is finally giving up the lame
dog for euthanasia, a lame stray dog for which he had started feeling
affection and would have liked to keep alive. This final giving up is
the nadir of Davids existence. At the start of the novel David as
specialist in Romantic literature has already lost his preeminence as
no one likes to be taught the Romantic poets anymore. From the
stripping away of sexual pleasure that he derived first from Soraya
a call-girl, then Melissa his under-age student, to the gradual stripping
away of his social position as professor of literature, his livelihood,
his dignity when he becomes the butt of joke of the campus and his
ex-wife, and finally to the travestying of his pride as an educated,
superior Westerner when his daughter sends him as emissary to
Petrus to convey her acceptance of Petrus marriage proposal Davids
trajectory is one relentless, denudation of rights and privileges. Even
the pitiful cur that followed him about has to be relinquished.
However, the one right that David refuses to give up, in fact the right
that he rediscovers along the route to self-abnegation is that of
fatherhood, not as an authoritative, patriarchal right as per the
Afrikaner convention sees it, but as the basic, human right of the
father to share his daughters troubles. Thus David returns for a second
time to spend the rest of his days with his daughter and stand by her
through her pregnancy. Lucy, by her patience, acceptance and sacrifice
clings to her piece of land, roots herself in post-apartheid South Africa
Arpa Ghosh | 125
in a manner that appalls and impresses David.

David Luries own existence, replete with promiscuity, cynicism
and an adherence to Western conceptual modes of living and thinking
has led to a sterile mode of life. It has yielded little meaning or
satisfaction. His daughters way of life is more attuned to the rhythms
of Africa. Though Disgrace is pervaded by deep, abiding pessimism,
the narrative reaching us through the ravaged, battered, humiliated
consciousness of David, there is a small, humble affirmation, a
promise, tentative and bleak, of continuity and rootedness in the soil
of Africa.
The deep pessimism that informs all of Coetzees novels originates
from the radical disjunction of known, recognizable structures of
human relationships. These shattered structures are not replaced
however by more radical, experimental structures as they are in some
of Gordimers later novels. The legitimacy of established human
structures is questioned and displaced by Coetzee in minute, intricate
ways. The changing stand of the dissenting colonizer in the context
of apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa is surveyed in the three
novels. The white colonizers gradual diminution and powerlessness
as social entity, and informed passivity in the theatre of a politically
turbulent South Africa is the chief subject of Coetzees observation
and analysis. One can either like Magda, the Magistrate or David
Lurie, be a lost subject of history, or like Lucy and the barbarian
girl disappear into faceless mob of postcolonial South Africa,
surrendering individual ego and pride.
Over a period of two decades we find Coetzee subtly changing
his narrative position modifying and revising the father/daughter trope
in response to the changing political scenario of apartheid. But notably
his skepticism about the possibility of atrocities being repaired by
penance and atonement gestures remains unaltered over the years. His
characters are therefore resigned and apathetic rather than enthusiastic
and positive about a new future. Also, considering the fact that
apartheid was a patriarchal system it is significant that Coetzees
ideology is male-centred. Though as an artist he has engaged in
extensive experiments with form, his basic ideological concern about
the aging white males sexual crises remains unchanged over the years.
The female in this context is passive and disempowered. Voicing his

dissatisfaction with Lucys character a critic says:
Symbolically, she [Lucy] provides an excellent counterpoint to her father; in
human terms she is implausible. We await a moment of vulnerability, an
explosion, a revelation that never comes. She speaks in the same polite tone
throughout; she does not seem to grow or change. To her father, and to us,
she remains a blank mysterious figure, a useful symbol, but never alive. I
have a life of my own, she tells her father, but what it consists of we cant
discover. Her character is an unproven theorem.7
Magda, Lucy and the barbarian girl are characterized by their

powerlessness and submission to the tortures and atrocities that are
the consequence and aftermath of an exploitative system. The focus
in all three novels is the man, his receding agency, his sexual
frustration and finally his fall that consigns him as a lost subject of
history. These constants betray J. M. Coetzees ambivalence as a white,
male, Afrikaner dissident novelist writing against apartheid.
Notes
1. All textual quotations are borrowed from: J. M. Coetzee, In the Heart

of the Country (London: Vintage, 1999).
, Waiting for the Barbarians (Great Britain: Minerva, 1997).
, Disgrace (London: Vintage, 2000).
2. Stephen Watson points out that Waiting for the Barbarians avoids the all
important question of the economic aspect of colonialism, the fact that
the indigenous population has been deprived of its land and resources by
a colonizing group.
both yesterday and today the motive force of colonialism was

essentially an economic one. Behind it lay the desires for land, raw
materials, cheap labour and the recurrent crises in capitalist production
in Western EuropeSince Coetzees work is apparently so specific in
its allusions to colonialism, one might expect to find some mention
to material factors in it. Yet one seeks for these in vain.
Stephen Watson, Colonialism and the Novels of J. M. Coetzee in

Critical Perspectives on J. M. Coetzee edited by Huggan and Watson,
(Basingstoke: Macmillian, 1996), 18-19.
Arpa Ghosh | 127
3. Steve Biko, I Write What I Like (London: Heinemann, 1978).

4. Amartya Sens categorizations about the Wests interest in the Orient in
part counter Edward Saids thesis of Orientalism and in part give finer
point to it. Instead of lumping all Western scholars engaged in the study
of the Orient in the single category of the Orientalist who equates power
with knowledge, Sen makes finer demarcations:
Attempts from outside India to understand and interpret the countrys

traditions can be put into at least three distinct categories, which I
shall call the exoticist approaches, magisterial approaches and curatorial
approaches. The first concentrates on the wondrous aspects of India.
The focus here is on what is different, what is strange in the country
that, as Hegel put it, has existed for millennia in the imagination of
the Europeans.
The second (magisterial) category strongly relates to the exercise
of imperial power and sees India as a subject territory from the point
of view of its British governors. This outlook assimilates a sense of
superiority and guardianhood needed to deal with a country that
James Mill defined as that great scene of British action
The third (curatorial) category is the most catholic of the three
and includes various attempts at noting, classifying and exhibiting
diverse aspects of Indian culture. Unlike the exoticist approaches, a
curatorial approach does not look only for the strange (even though
the different must have more exhibit value), and unlike the
magisterial approaches, it is not weighed down by the impact of the
rulers priorities (even though the magisterial connection would be
hard to avoid altogether when the authors are also members of the
ruling imperial elite, as they sometimes were).
Amartya Sen, The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian Culture,

History and Identity (London: Penguin, 2005), 141-142.
5. Gayatri Spivak, Three Womens Texts 253, quoted in David Attwell,
J. M. Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing (California: University
of California Press, 1993), 82.
6. Brian Macaskill, J. M. Coetzee: Charting the Middle Voice, in
Contemporary Literature, Volume 35, Fall 1994, Number 3, 469.
7. Michael Ravitch, J. M. Coetzee: Fiction in Review, in Yale Review,
Volume 89, Number 1, January 2001, 147-148.
The Unchartered Territory: A Comparative Study
of Toni Morrisons The Bluest Eye and
Buchi Emechetas The Slave Girl
Chandrani Biswas
The study attempts to place in a critical perspective the similarities

and differences in the portrayal of the marginalized status of black
women in the fictions of two women writers: Toni Morrison in the
African American literary tradition, and Buchi Emecheta in the
Anglophone Nigerian literary tradition, taking into account the
diverse socio-cultural contexts in which the texts are situated. The
analysis also takes into account the social, cultural and political
processes in terms of race and gender in both the cultures. The study
opens up diverse issues associated with the representations of gender
in a racialized world. The analysis also explores the positioning of the
black women subject as other, from the point of view of two black
women writers. Thus it takes into account the trials and tribulations
of the black womans experiences from a perspective of self-conscious
subjectivity. The analysis of fictional representation also involves an
investigation of the formation of multiple, negotiated subjectivities
and social identities with reference to the black women subject.
The linking together of the four ideas black, other, sinner, dangerous
runs throughout all the manifestations of medieval Christian thought. The
Saracen, the enemy in the epic poems and the bird that distracts the saint
at prayer are black. Gernot Rotter has also shown that Arab writers,
sometimes drawing on astrological theories, depicted terrifying demons with
Negroid traits and described gigantic Africans as black as Satan.1
Such conceptual notions about blackness can be traced to diverse

socio-historical, economic and political processes of exploitation,
segregation and marginalization in the history of white civilization as
The Unchartered Territory | 129
also in the African American and African histories. The development

of racism is related in a pronounced way to the historical experience
of slavery, colonialism and other institutions of white supremacy. A
recurrent debate about the history of slavery is the issue of the
relationship between processes of capitalist economic expansion and
exploitation and the emergence of racism and racist ideologies.
Slavery in its various historical forms and specifically the Atlantic slave trade,
did not have a purely economic rationale and its impact was as much on
social and power relations as on economic institutions (Patterson, 1982). In
relation to the Atlantic slave trade there is a wealth of historical evidence
about the impact that the institution of slavery had on European images of
Africans. (Manning 1990; Lovejoy 1983)2
The American whites attitude to their black subjects was considerably

influenced by the Englishmens prejudice against blackness. As a result
of early contacts with Africa, Englishmen tended to associate blackness
with savagery, heathenism, and general failure to conform to European
standards of civilization and propriety contributing to this predisposition
to look upon Negroes with disfavour. The association of black with
evil was deeply rooted in Western and Christian mythology. It was
natural to think of Satan as the Prince of Darkness and of witchcraft
as black magic. On the unconscious level, twentieth century
psychoanalysts have suggested that blackness or darkness can be
associated with suppressed libidinous impulses. Carl Gustav Jung has
even argued that the Negro became for European whites a symbol
of the unconscious itself of what he calls the shadow, the whole
suppressed or rejected side of the human psyche.
Race is thus a conceptual construct that results out of a complex
interaction between a variety of political and social processes. From
the inception of slave trade, black people came generally to be
identified with physical labour and were designated as inferior. The
Negroes were not only perceived but also projected by white scholars
as descendants of a different racial group, which eventually led to
exclusivist practices in social interactions. Winthrop Jordan rightly
observes that slavery and race prejudice may have been equally cause
and effect continuously reacting upon each other, dynamically joining
130 | Chandrani Biswas
hands to hustle one Negro down the real to complete degradation3.

Otherness is not merely restricted to perceptions of race but
extends itself to include gender also. In the context of hierarchical
relations of power the other is coded as female as opposed to the
dominant self which is essentially male. The images of women in
various anthropological, historical and cultural male-centred studies
essentially project them as non-actors in history. Their activities are
invariably confined to the private space and they are rarely shown as
playing pivotal roles in social and historical development. But even
the position of other that woman occupies in the context of
hierarchical relations of power is not essentially universal and
unchanging in all contexts. There are historical complexities that
cannot be reduced to simple dichotomies of European self and exotic
other. There are cultural and gender complexities that also cannot be
reduced to facile assumptions of man-dominant-subject and woman-
object-other. It is important to note that race plays an important role
even in considering issues of gender marginalization. The black
woman is thus almost always objectified as the other in opposition
to the white female subject.
The black woman was considered a significant breeder of future
slaves by the white plantation owners. The black womans value as an
individual rested primarily on her reproductive capacity. As early as
1660s Negro women brought a high price because their issue was
valuable and because they could be used for field work while white
women generally were not4. Just as it is important for our project
to comprehend the nature of the Eurocentric gender conceptions of
the role of black women, it is equally imperative for cross-cultural
comparison at this point to briefly consider the status of the African,
specifically Igbo women in the African socio-cultural context in pre-
colonial and post-colonial historical situations. In its search for the
origin of the word nwanyi (woman) the Igbo folklore on the African
tradition tells the story of womanhood where the name of the female
child is derived from the Igbo word nwa nyiri anyi or a child that
cannot be controlled. Eleanor Leacock in her study of womens roles
in pre-colonial African societies asserts that in the hunting, gathering
and early horticultural societies, relations between sexes were equal.5
The equality expressed in the communal household, the reciprocal

division of labour, the independence of the wife and children and the
decision-making powers of the woman deteriorated with the advent
of class society. Colonialism brought about a distinct decline of
womens power in traditional politics. Leith Mullings observes that the
disruption of the status of African women is bound to the disruption
of African society as a whole through colonialisms imposition of a
social structure based on stratification by class and sex.6
Black women in such a racist, sexist socio-historical matrix have
been doubly objectified as black and as women; under white
supremacy and under black patriarchy. The African woman is doubly
displaced for historical reasons. In spite of some degree of economic
and political freedom in specific African societies, African women
even in pre-colonial era were subjected to certain systems of socialized
oppression such as female circumcision. Colonialism endorsed certain
alien patterns of cultural behaviour that disrupted the basis of certain
indigenous practices as well as endorsed a new system of subjugation.
But the degree or extent of subjugation is so diverse that it would
be a misnomer to use a unitary label to homogenize the experience
of all marginalized subject. As. A. Brah observes:
Our gender is constituted and represented differently according to our
differential location within the global relations of power. Our insertion into
these global relations of power is realized through a myriad of economic,
political and ideological processes. Within these structures of social relations
we do not exist simply as women but as differentiated categories such as
working-class woman, peasant woman, migrant women. Each description
references a specificity of social condition. And real lives are forged out of
a complex articulation of these dimensions.7
The focus of this paper is on the redefinition and reformulation of

the black woman subject as the other with particular reference to texts
authored by Toni Morrison and Buchi Emecheta. The paper in other
words will attempt to work upon the representation of the experience
of marginalization from the point of view of the other. It is also
imperative for us to consider how the two black women writers in
their respective literary traditions transform the objectification of
black women in the process of becoming the subjects.

Toni Morrisons novel The Bluest Eye (1970) exposes the complexity
inherent in the black woman subjects attempts at self-definition. The
black subculture is represented by the deficiencies of the black
American family which is positioned as the other to reinforce the
stereotype of the white family described in terms of a childish over
simplification of Claudias house which is Old, cold and green, at
night a kerosene lamp lights one large room, the others are braced
in darkness, peopled by roaches and mice8, the white household is
green and white. It has a red door. It is very pretty. Here is the family
Mother, father, Dick Jane live in the green and white house. They
are very happy.9
The Breedlove familys sense of utter hopelessness is externalized
in their appearance. Both literal and spiritual poverty manifest
themselves as ugliness in a world in which beauty is equated with
success, poverty with ugliness. The image of the happy, white family
that Claudia as the narrator projects is embedded in the values of
white, middle class bourgeois life associated with a kind of surface
affluence, neatness and cleanliness alien to Cholly and Pauline
Breedlove. The secret of such material affluence is certainly tied up
with the question of power. Michel Foucault in Power and Knowledge:
Selected Interviews and Writings observes,
Power must be analyzed as something which circulates, or rather as
something which only functions in the form of a chain. It is never localized
here or there, never in anybody is hands, never appropriated as a commodity
or piece of wealth. Power is employed and exercised through a net-like
organization. And not only do individuals circulate through its threads, they
are always in the position of simultaneously undergoing and exercising this
power. They are not its inert or consenting target, they are always also the
elements of its articulation. In other words, individuals are vehicles of power,
not its points of application.10
It is this power running through all capillaries of the social structure

that renders Cholly and Pauline Breedlove so helpless and powerless.
The power hierarchy rests heavily on the hearts of the young recipients
of oppression that the entire process and structure of oppression are
taken as natural. People, as the representatives of marginalized
oppression, are completely denied access to any apparatus of power

in society. D. Cooper in this context articulated the feminist/
Foucauldian challenger of reference:
Power is a phenomenon that is exercised rather than a commodity that can
be possessed. Thus power is not a resource that belongs to individuals or
groups, where, if some have more, others will automatically have less, but
is rather incorporated in numerous practices. People exercise power through
the effect their actions have on others actions, [] Power is seen to be
productive through its various mechanisms or technologies. Power shapes,
Creates and transforms social relations, practices and institutional processes
Power is not centralized in a state or single apparatus, but present
throughout social relations.11
Claudia as a thinking black female subject attempts to deconstruct

the meaning of such power by tearing off the doll presented to her
at Christmas. The doll is an iconic emblem of white femininity which
is so desirable to the black underprivileged girls that by possessing
the representation of beauty in an inert object, they seem to arrive
at the ultimate source of beauty. The sense of beauty is analogous to
the standards of femininity that were applicable to the slave woman
in the plantation of the white master. In fact the very concept of white
beauty dependent on a sense of frailty, helplessness and delicacy that
is endorsed in opposition to the values and attributes represented by
the black other is often desired by the black female subject. In the
plantation, if the image of the delicate, alabaster lady had to be
nurtured, then it was imperative to create the image of yet another
woman who was tougher, more hardworking, and indifferent to
physical hardships and who could take care of her mistresss children
and family with greater efficiency. Quite evidently, the black female
has been role-set in the position of the unattractive, hardworking
almost defeminized object valued only for her labour that would bring
economic prosperity to the white planter. Thus, girls like Claudia,
Pecola or even their mothers have to constantly fight against the
powerful presence of the white feminine women. It is against such
a perpetual practice of objectification in the socio-cultural space that
Claudia destroys the white doll that seems to be the source of hidden
oppressive structures. As Claudia observes:
I was physically revolted by and secretly frightened by those round moronic

eyes, the pancake face, and orange worms hairI could not love it. But I
could examine it to see what it was that all the world said was lovable. Break
off the tiny fingers, bend the flat feet, loosen the hair, twist the head
around12.
Morrison juxtaposes two opposing attitudes to the white doll from

the perspectives of two black adolescent girls of the same community.
Whereas Pecola aspires towards the stereotypical standards of white
femininity as symbolized by the white doll, Claudia consciously rejects
the same. Pecolas aspiration towards the ideal of white beauty is
symptomatic of a sense of negative self-concept prevalent among
children in the black community. Darlene Powell Hopson along with
Derek Hopson conducted a path-breaking study using dolls to
demonstrate the negative effects of racism and segregation on black
children:
When given a choice between a white doll and a black doll, nearly 70
percent of the black children in the study chose the white doll. The Clarks
findings became an important factor in Brown V. Board of Education in
1954. Based on their own doll tests and their clinical work with children,
in great numbers continue to identify with white images is even when black
images are made available.13
If black children continue to identify with white images it may be

because even the positive black images including Black Barbie dolls
serve to reinforce their second-class citizenship. Just as profound is
the sense of hatred that Claudia nurses at the social system that renders
them powerless to wield the look, similarly profound is Paulines
hatred for bearing a girl child who bears the look that shames her.
Eyes all soft and wet. A cross between a puppy and a dying man. But I
knowed she was ugly. Head full of pretty hair but Lord she was ugly.14
D.W. Winnicott proposes that the core of what eventually forms an

individuals self-concept begins with the mirroring that occurs between
mother and baby. Typically, the baby sees himself or herself when
it looks into the mothers face15. In this sense, Pecolas first perception
is her mothers reflection of her ugliness. This sense of self negatives
is rooted in what Lewis Gordon calls absence in Bad Faith and Anti
Black Racism:
In an anti-black world, blackness signifies absence, the absence of identity
in the full sense of a self, a perspective or a standpoint with its own self-
referential point of view.16
Even Pauline Breedlove does not have any dream about herself
or her home. Her ideals of life were derived from the coloured vision
of the white bourgeois society. Her frustration stems from the fact
that she is unable to accept her status as a black working class woman
aspiring to achieve the position of a glamorous Jean Harlow. Her
alienation becomes all the more effective as she does not belong to
a community rooted to the soil. For locating the humiliation of the
black woman, it is also essential to look at the workings of a black
patriarchy. Just as black women have been the objects of ridicule and
thus been reduced to a state of subservience, the black mans psyche
has also been influenced by the oppression faced by him in slave
culture. Inaccessibility to the apparatuses of society that make and
sustain ideological harmony has rendered him all the more hapless.
The black male subjects pessimistic view of life is also infused with
an inability to exercise power in various social relations as also at
home. Morrison shows how the humiliated black male makes the
black woman the object of her displaced fury. Cholly directs his
frustrations, anxiety and disillusioned state of powerlessness to Pecola
in the act of raping his own daughter. Pecola fails to respond to her
state of objection in any way and thus becomes even more muted
as the oppressed object. It is however Claudia Macteer, Pecolas friend
who retrieves a state of subjectivity which had been dislocated through
a historical process of continuous objectification. It is through her
retelling of the oppressive experience of being the other as a black
woman that a strategy of survival is worked out in the novel.
Buchi Emecheta, in the Anglophone Nigerian literary tradition
portrays the experiences of the Igbo women in her novel The Slave
Girl (1977). Contrary to the mythicized stereotype of the subservient
African woman, Umeadi, Ojebetas mother is not confined only to
the domestic space. In opposition to the image of the rootless, urban
bred African-American, she is self-sufficient and independent. Umeadi

usually went to Asaba to sell her farm produce17. The idea of
femininity and the concept of womanhood as constructed by white
patriarchy is primarily dependent on an estrangement of woman from
the forces of production and her consequent reduction to a position
of absolute subservience, by virtue of being a mere procreator. Such
a limited concept was ideally applicable only to define the material
conditions and status of white bourgeois woman. The primitive,
African woman, quite contrary to the popular Eurocentric conception
has a different history to narrate.
In African hunting and gathering societies and village communities,
the female contribution to labour for the production of subsistence
is significant. Both males and females contribute to subsistence, men
do the largest proportion of game-hunting and women predominate
in the gathering of vegetable products. Emphasizing the independent
nature of womens existence, Emecheta writes,
A pregnant Ibuza woman would simply always carry a cooking knife with
her, just in case she gave birth to her baby on her way to or from the market
or farm. If she were lucky she might have someone with her who cut the
chord; if not, she would cut the chord herself, rest a while, put her new baby
on her back and thread her way home18.
The community in which Ojebeta is brought up for the first seven

years is one which is based on an agrarian economic pattern. It is
a community where women are equally responsible for generating
income in the household as men. Jeane Koopman points out in an
article entitled The Hidden Roots of the African Food Problem:
Looking within the Rural Household that in the production and
processing of foodcrops, womens responsibilities and labour inputs
normally exceed mens19. Ojabetas mother or for that matter any other
women in the Ibuza community has a distinctive role to play as
independent economic agents. At this level, the conventional, patriarchal
familial pattern does not enter into any conflict with the womens
economic independence. But ironically that very society which grants
such economic liberty to the women cannot prevent the female subject
from becoming an object of economic transaction.
Ojebeta is sold off as a slave girl by her own brother Okolie in

a distant community far away from her village. What is evident from
Okolies conversation with his clients is the fact that neither the
community nor the bargaining agents can endorse the meanness of
the base transaction procedure. Slavery was not a purely colonial
phenomenon. In many African societies slaves were kept from pre-
colonial times. Okolie sells off his sister only to buy him a few tinsel
objects that would beautify his body on the coming of age dance.
Okolie sells off his sister without even realizing that she could
have grown up to be an asset for him as an able farm hand. He would
also have procured his share of the bride price during his marriage.
But his lack of foresight, inefficiency as a farmer and absence of family
wisdom results in the unfortunate transaction. Ojebeta undergoes a
radical change in her life through her accidental entry into an alien
community through cash negotiation. Yet ironically it is through this
process of destabilization that the female subject, now reduced to the
position of an object in the slave girl is exposed to a new set of social
norms. From the silent presence of the women in the farming
community, she is radically exposed to a group of negotiating,
individualistic, businesslike women like Ma Palagada. Ojabetas
transition from a dominant agriculture-oriented economic base to a
completely market-oriented economic society is a crucial turning
point in the narrative. Ojebetas exposure on the other hand to the
entrepreneurial skills of Ma Palagada is certainly significant for even
in her state of subjugation she sees better role models. Ma Palagoda,
the woman who controls, dictates, negotiates and settles the business
deals is reminiscent of the innumerable women entrepreneurs who
are an integral part of diverse groups in African society. Records of
womens entrepreneurial activities go for back into the pre-colonial
past, for example the Igbo women in Onitsha and the women traders
in the Senegambia region of Senegal known as Signares, in
collaboration with European merchants became women of wealth and
prestige and intermediaries, providing access to Africas Commercial
network. Thus even in societies where the African male is the
dominant patriarch one comes across admirably strong and independent
women.20
Not only does Ma Palagada represent this kind of autonomy, she

also looks into the overall well being of her household, not excluding
the slave girls, thus playing the role of a benevolent matriarch.
Contrary to such an image of the Igbo woman, one can juxtapose
and rethink the servile status of Pauline Breedlove in the African-
American context. The world in which Pauline lived was one in which
everyone was in a position to give them orders. White women said,
Do this. White children said, Give me that. White men said, Come
here. Blackmen said, Lay down.21 Also Pecola has no value either
to her mother or to her father who is a powerless individual. She is
rendered all the more lonely on account of her ugliness which is a
part of her racial identity that cannot be erased at any cost. But
Ojebeta in her society has value enough to be an object of cash
transaction in a negative sense. But being an integral part of a civil
society which professes no feeling of racial inequality, Pecola is useless
even as an object of transaction. Nobody would take her.
This is not to suggest that Ojebeta as a female subject does not
suffer under oppressive structures in the slave-run household. As an
observant and sensitive young black girl she does not fail to notice
the diverse mechanisms of oppressive structures operating within the
household. The slave subjects are not offered any cash money in lieu
of their labour as sewing girls in the cloth-trade, house-servants and
attendants. The fact that they are provided with food, clothing and
a roof above their heads shows the exploitative nature of post-colonial
oppression. The buying and selling of slaves through a cash nexus is
a post-colonial practice, yet Ma Palagada cleverly appropriates the pre-
colonial economic system of erasing the distinction between household
labour and labour exploited in trade. Not only is the slave exploited
economically on account of her being bought as human property, she
is also subjected to sexual exploitation with the increased interaction
with the white, Christian traders. The slave girls are sent to the nearby
church to please Mrs. Sopson who offers to educate the primitive
black subjects. Even the little formal education that is offered to the
slave girls is done to please the white traders to procure better trading
contracts and to maintain the supremacy of the Palagada hold in the
trading market.
However as a slave, the greatest sign of transgressive rebellion

in the narrative is reached at a point where Ojebeta refuses to continue
in her slave station after her matriarchs death. It is in this sign of
rebellion that we can locate an emergent gender ideology where the
female subject manipulates her awareness of the material condition
in order to chalk out her own course of action. Yet on the contrary
it is crucial to relate Ojebetas new realization with the ready reception
that she receives from her family of origin. Once dislodged from her
social and familial space, Ojebeta is re-accommodated back into that
very community from which she was exiled. It is this community again
which equips her with new survival strategies.
Yet unarguably the independent women subject is still bound by
certain norms of commercialized negotiation which is an integral part
of the business transaction of the post-colonized world. In a symbolic
ritual transaction emblematic of transference of power, the slave
subject, though freed from the oppressive network of a slave culture
is fettered hand and feet to a new owner which is her husband. The
authorial observation at the novels closure is significant.
So, as Britain was emerging from war once more victorious, and claiming
to have stopped the slavery which she had helped to spread in all her black
colonies, Ojebeta, now a woman of thirty-five was changing masters.22
Where as Pecolas otherness is to a large extent shaped by her

peripheral status within the family, Ojebeta in Emechetas The Slave
Girl is threatened and dislodged from the security of her familiar social
space to an alien slave-trading community where she is considerably
marginalized. Yet ironically through her experiences as other in the
community of slaves owned by Ma Palagada that she empowers herself
with the skills and tools of survival and self-preservation. Ojabetas
exposure to a different set of social conventions liberates her mind
from the pettiness of rural constraints to attain a more panoramic
vision of life and reality. The transference of allegiance from her
owners to her husband does not effectively release her from her
circumscribed status as a marginalized woman in a patriarchal culture.
Whereas Morrisons Pecola is already an other within the limits of
the dominant, white and black cultural spaces, Emechetas protagonists
experience otherhood only when threatened out of the boundaries

of social milieu only to be brought within its folds at the end.
Notes
1. Terry Collits, quoted in Chris Tiffin and Alan Lawson, eds. De-Scribing
Empire: Post-Colonialism and Textuality (London and New York: Routledge,
1994), 65-66.
2. Cornell and Hartmann, quoted in George Frederickson, Social Origins
of American Racism, in Racism edited by Martin Bulmer and John
Solomos, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 12.
3. Winthrop D. Jordan, quoted in George Frederickson, Social Origins of
Amercian Racism, in Martin Bulmer and John Solomos, op.cit., 73.
4. Winthrop D. Jordan, op.cit., 77
5. Cited in Nancy J. Hafkin and Edna G. Bay, Women in Africa Studies in
Social and Economic Change (California: Stanford University Press, 1976),
239.
6. Leith Mullings, Women and Economic Change in Africa in Nancy J.
Hafkin and Edna. G. Bay, op.cit., 240.
7. Avtar Brah, quoted in Deblie Weekes and Terri Mac Dermott,
Conceptions of Power/between Black and white Women in Gabriele
Griffin, Feminist Activism in the 1990s (London: Taylor and Francis Ltd.,
1996).
8. Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (New York: Washington Square Press,
1970, Rept. by Pocket Books, 1972), 117.
9. Ibid., 115-116.
10. Debbie Weekes and Terri MacDermott, op.cit., 115.
11. Ibid, 115-116.
12. The Bluest Eye, 20.
13. Cited in Ana ducille, Black Barbie and the Deep Play of Difference in
Feminism and Cultural Studies, edited by Morag Shiach (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1999), 118.
14. Morrison, The Bluest Eye, 20.
15. D.W. Winnicott cited in Roberta Ruberstein, Pariahs and Community,
in Toni Morrison: Critical Perspectives, Past and Present, edited by Henry
Louis Gates., Jr. and K.A. Appiah (New York: Amistad, 1993), 127.
16. Lewis Gordon, cited in Linda Martin Alcoff Philosophy and Racial
identity in Martin Bulmer and John Solomos, op.cit., 37.
17. Buchi Emecheta, The Slave Girl (London: Fontana Paperbacks, 1977), 14.
18. Ibid., 20-21.
19. Jean Koopman, The Hidden Roots of the African Food Problem:
Looking Within the Rural Household in Womens Work in the World
Economy, edited by Nancy Folbre, Barbara Bergnan, Bina Agarwal and
Maria Floro (London: Macmillan, 1992), 87-88.
20. Nancy J. Hafkin and Edna. G. Bay, op. cit.
21. The Bluest Eye, 109.
22. The Slave Girl, 222.
Sitting on the Dust, Singing by the Road: Writing
Women in the Postcolonial Era
Epsita Halder
After independence, the colonialism/decolonization and Empire/

Nation dynamics of a once-colonized nation sought to reframe the
weighty claims of history. Within this dynamics of the nation-building
process, a nations negotiation with the collective identity in its review
of the past whose pasts are to be remembered and whose are not
would relate not only to the survival of elitist historiography but
also a contemporary understanding of social justice and belonging-
ness. A right to belong to the nations history would become the crucial
factor to conceptualize and write history for a post-colonial nation.
In my paper, I would like to argue that it is the women of a colonized
country who remain erased from the discursive space of historical
experiences. Within the archival and literary spaces of a nations past,
within the narratives of the colonizer and indigenous intelligentsia,
women were simply ignored2 as viable subjects of history. Despite the
purported retrieval, I would like to emphasize here that it would not
be easy to discuss the re-turning to history in the postcolonial era with
woman as a static and unified subject.
For the purposes of argument, I have chosen a Maghrebian novel
in French Lamour la fantasia an Algerian novel (pub 1985, English
translation 19894) by Assia Djebar, which would be compared with
a Bangla short story Mahasweta Devis Douloti. I would be
comparing the ways by which the authors deal with the retrieval of
women who have been erased and excluded as historical subjects.
When these two authors engage with the experiences of women, we
would see that the term woman is designated within a complex
dynamics of history, experience and re-presentation. However, the
category of experience would be addressed by focusing not on women
Writing Women in the Postcolonial Era | 143
but on the embodiment of women; the way women have been

produced in a particular social-ideological configuration. Moreover,
when experience and re-presentation are at hand as categories, I would
like to probe how these authors deal with the questions of mediation,
and if at all problematize the questions. By comparing these two texts,
I would attempt to delineate a strategy to read these Third World texts
together to engage with the question of writing women in a
postcolonial era. My reading would pose the claims of literature as
showing the limits of archiving and history-writing, and as such a
discursive space which continues to problematize the question of
representing the experience of women, even after history/social
sciences refuse(s) to carry on. Assia Djebar took a personal journey
into the corners of Algeria which resulted in Lamour la fantasia in
French, interspersed with untranslatable Arabic words and modes of
oral enunciation. This narrative, what she calls an attempt at
autobiography or a preparation for an autobiography, becomes a
dialectic space of French/Arabic, written/oral, archive/testimony,
history/literature. By re-opening the space of the colonial archives,
by engaging with the collective memory of women, she re-constructs
the schema of binary opposites, offers a synthesis. French as a
language is also considered to be a space of ambivalence5.
Mahasweta Devi, as a writer-activist, draws heavily from the
ethnic communities who have been completely erased (or
misrepresented) from the elitist nationalist historiography. By referring
to the violent zone of contact between the colonial power and the
ethnic communities, she creates a critical world view in the
construction of the ethnic other in the indigenous bourgeois psyche.
Her texts become the linguistic arena of social struggle where she
explores a multiple language register, creating a sort of multi-discursive
space, as a strategy to engage with experience, here of the gendered
subaltern, named Douloti. Writing a (hi)story of the tribals, for
Mahasweta, is about showing the difficulty of writing it.
Djebars novel is an intervention into the colonial representation
of her native land with nomadic memory and intermittent voice. It
is the memory of the women who took part in the Algerian war of
independence that she engages with/collects/recovers.
144 | Epsita Halder
I seize on the living hand, hand of mutilation and memory, and I attempt
to bring it the qalam.6
Here, the retention of an Arabic word qalam (writing, ecriture) in

a French novel, the sign of the authors belonging to a bilingual
hybridity opens the scope for a postcolonial methodology 7, the way
Djebar creates an ambivalent space for French. Qalam invokes an
Arabic Islamic past which denied its women the access of the
technology of writing, a specific mode of self-representation. How
could she say I? 8
Make her invisible. Make her more unseeing than the sightless, destroy in
her every memory of the world without. And what if she has learned to write?
The jailer who guards a body that has no words and written words can
travel may sleep in peace: it will suffice to brick up the window, padlock
the sole entrance door, and erect a blank wall rising up to heaven.9
Djebars engagement with French torments and tears her apart because
she has a tumultuous love-hate relationship with this language, which
despite giving her an opportunity to come out of the cloistered harem,
also inscribes on her the signs of colonial domination and subjection
of her civilization. She engages with her mother tongue, the voices
of the Algerian women enriched with their experiences, unspoken and
unwritten, because she is weighed down under the oppressive burden
of my (/her) heritage10 and feels that her mother tongue as the
medium of the experience of the women as subjects of history remains
unspoken it crouches in this dark night like a woman begging in
the streets11. She will have to tell the tale.
Is she writing the unspoken story of her community women,
marginalized under both pre-colonial patriarchal Islam and colonial
historiography in the colonizers language and bringing them to the
dazzling metropolis? We will come to this point only after discussing
her strategic re-creation of the colonial archives within the scope of
the narrative. We do realise that in the first and second sections of
the narrative titled The Capture of the City and The Cries of the
Fantasia Djebars autobiographical accounts are crisscrossed by the
historical moments from the colonial period and by the violent
encounters between the colonizer French and the native tribes.
I say a strategic re-creation, because in the first historical chapter

when the French army was approaching the Algerian Impregnable
City, the narrator fixes the time as at the exact moment when the
sun suddenly blazes forth above the fathomless bowl of the bay. It was
five in the morning12. I would say that, this is the moment when
two civilizations and two time frames come face to face with each
other. The indigenous way of conceptualizing time in the first sentence
would be erased by a violent thrust of the homogeneous empty time
- the rational and historical time. The following narrative in this
chapter unfolds itself in a historical chronological time, but what the
narrator brings here is her imagination, her speculative rendering of
events which rearranges the archival narrative. Archival, because what
happened this morning was narrativized and preserved as the part of
the colonial discourse. Amable Matterer, first officer of the Ville de
Marseille, [t]he same daywrites of the confrontation, dispassionately,
objectively13.The narrator draws from the archives by exploring and
exhuming little-known eyewitness accounts written by the war artists,
war correspondents and obscure officers, thus creating a sheer sense
of dilemma within archival language as she recreates the scene.
I wonder, just as the general staff of the fleet must have done, whether the
Dey Hussein has gone up on to the terrace of his Kasbah, telescope in hand.
Is he personally watching the foreign armada approach? Does he consider this
threat beneath contempt? ...Is he unmoved?14
The drama heightens when she uncovers the barbarous act of

enfumade in 1845, when the French military officer Pelessier set fire
to the caves, smothering to death 1,500 rebellious Berber men, women
and children.
Pelessier, speaking on behalf of this long drawn-out agony, on behalf of fifteen
hundred corpes buried beneath El-Kantara, with their flocks unceasingly
bleating at death, hands me his report and I accept this palimpsest on which
I now inscribe the charred passion of my ancestors.15
The verbs like wonder, imagine (I imagine the details of this nocturnal
tableau16), piece together (I, in turn, piece together a picture of that
night17), destabilizes the dispassionate, objective prose of the
officers, the truth-claims of the archives. The narrator re-constructs
146 | Epsita Halder
the objective truth of the archives by processing it through emotional

languages.
Archives are not merely repositories of past events. Concepts of
history are shaped, controlled and distributed by archives. It is the
question of power/knowledge which gets crystallized within the
material and the metaphorical space of archives. An archive,
according to Foucault in Archeology of Knowledge, is the law of what
can be said, the system that governs the appearances of statements
as unique events18. Djebars attempt is to displace that archival,
recorded knowledge about Algeria by destabilizing its truth-claims.
She does it by using memory as a social function, as a tool to
interrogate absences/gaps and agencies in historical records. It is the
unexplored memory of the Algerian women involved in the war of
independence which she treats as the instrument of intervention.
Here, the moment of remembering the freedom struggle becomes the
moment of realization of freedom for women, as it is this memory
of their lived experience which has been silenced in the creation of
an alleged inclusive post-independence African historiography.
how marginalized women continue to be silenced, even in attempts to
create inclusive archives of the present and stories of the past, and the
implication of this for the construction of belonging, social standing and
citizenship. 19
And,
She is there only to be spoken of as absent, recalled as a reminder of her
dispossession, and not permitted her version of her story.23
By exploring memory as the viable form of history, Djebar uses

memory as a tool to restore female agency over history, a particular
belonging of a gendered individual to the collective, to the social,
which reclaims her citizenship in a postcolonial state. Moreover, it
is this interrogation (engagement and re-presentation) of their
memory-space that conspicuously points out the loss and gap within
the grand narrative of history. The memory-project of Djebar
ultimately justifies itself by critiquing both archive (as a set of laws)
and the makers and interpreters of the archive21. Djebar narrates the
visual representation of Algeria through Eugene Fromentine (who, the
narrative says, is an elegant and amiable tourist fond of hunting and

autumnal landscape), who began his travels in Algeria that was
crushed beneath the weight of twenty-two years of unremitting war
which eventually constituted a part of the archive:
In June 1853, when he leaves the Sahel to travel down to the edge of the
desert, he visits Laghouat which has been occupied after a terrible siege. He
describes one sinister detail: as he is leaving the oasis which after six months
after the massacre is still filled with its stench, Fromentine picks up out of
dust the severed hand of an anonymous Algerian woman. He throws it down
again in his path.
Later, I seize on this living hand, hand of mutilation and memory, and I
attempt to bring it the qalam.22
I had to repeat the last sentence, because this statement becomes the
crux of my analysis; Djebars mediation as a narrator helps me to
formulate a problematic, to engage with the theory of experience of
women and a theory to represent the experience of women.
In the third section titled Voice Djebar narrativizes the experiences
of women involved in the guerrilla warfare. Restoration of womens
experiences has become a legitimate process to build postcolonial
archives to reclaim citizenship for women in the material (legal and
formal rights) and metaphorical (belongingness and the question of
identity) dynamics of the postcolonial nation-building process. In this
process, voice becomes the authentic moment of womens identity.
It is the inclusion of and emphasis on the voice of women that
corresponds to the event of women speaking for themselves.
When direct expressions of real women are recovered, a queasy
unease about experience arises. The postcolonial archiving project and
the textualization of the womens speech posit a claim of authenticity
on the direct experience ignoring the question of mediation. The
Amazwi Abefisazne project of archiving post-apartheid South Africa
thoroughly critiqued the sanitizing thrust of the archiving project of
the National Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The Amazwi
Abefisazne incorporated womens experience of contemporary state
and domestic violence and the inevitable trauma that were silenced
in the TRC archives. But what remained unproblematized in the
Amazwi Abefisazne archives was the authenticity of experience itself.
148 | Epsita Halder
When third-world feminists like Miranda Davies, Madhu Kishwar

and Ruth Vanita started positing womens direct and lived experiences
to authenticate both womens agency over their personal and collective
being and their status as non-Western women, the question of
mediation was also simply bypassed. According to them, the ontological
truth of women (being-in-itself ) creates the voice. Moreover, it is
the historians authenticating presence during their speech act and the
historians right to write the speech act that (re)presents the speech
as the truth23. There is a tendency to make the investigating subject/
historian invisible or transparent, so that the spoken account of the
native women can be represented without any injury, as it were,
through mediation24. Sometimes, these feminists reiterate the liberal
feminist agenda of sisterhood which is not aligned along the axes of
class, caste and ethnicity. By the virtue of being woman, by the
sameness of the flesh, these historians (elite urban women) feel they
can engage with the native women and celebrate biological and
ontological womanhood.
A word in the above quoted section, palimpsest, according to
the Oxford English Dictionary, is a parchment or other surface on
which later writing has been superimposed on effaced earlier writing
and something that bears the visible traces of an earlier form. I can
link this word to Gayatri Chakraborty Spivaks essay Can the
Subaltern Speak? in an inter-textual leap, as Spivak elaborates on the
palimpsestic narrative of imperialism. As palimpsest has roots in
Greek etymology, I can easily bypass the theoretical problems related
to translation. Both Djebar and Mahaswetas texts show the diachronic
mechanism of the palimpsest where both the authors respectively talk
about the Islamic and Brahminic constructions of the other, which
somehow continued in the imperialist period. I will try to build up
an illustrative space around the question of Spivak and try to engage
with the issue of representation.
Mahasweta Devi evokes a sense of difference-within while
demonstrating a nations history.25 She writes about the tribal
communities and emphasizes on the gaps within elite nationalist
historiography which failed to create a space for the ethnic communities
within the discourse of nation. Her writings become a critique of civil
society a raw mimicry of the civil society - when she shows that
the dynamics of the project of decolonization undertaken by the
postcolonial bourgeoisie actually fail to replace the empire. The tribals
remain perennially outside the ambit where the reversal of power from
the Empire to nation occurs; they remain displaced without belonging
to the nation-state. Their material and metaphorical space of belonging
remains unattained. Within the palimpsest of imperialism, the pre-
colonial language of loyalty towards the Brahmin and Rajput
communities are superimposed on the modern institutes to produce
terms like Boss-Gormen, Boss-Sir-Sarkar-Lord etc. It is a palimpsest
where a feudal system like bonded-slavery with its gendered twist
survives as bonded-prostitution in the post-independence era.
[Her father] stumbled on his face when he tried to pull the cart with the
ox yokes on his shoulder at [his boss] Munabars command. His broken body
gave him the name Crook. And Douloti has taken the yoke of Crooks bond-
slavery on her shoulders. Now Latia is her client, her body is tight. Going
down and down Douloti will be as skeletal as Somni. She will repay bond-
slavery loan as a beggar.26
Can the stories of Doulotis body be told? Does her body have a voice
that can perform her identity? Does Douloti journey from belonging
to the system of bonded-slavery to the promise of citizenship? Does
her community of the Kamiya-Nageshia at all come under the forces
of colonialism/decolonization transformation?
Mahaswetas writings help us to re-engage with the critique of the
elitist historiographies by a class-based definition of the subaltern
which missed out the perspective of gender27. Mahaswetas gendered
subaltern will remain as an aporia within the nationalistic imagination
about woman. Her body and her social-moral growth cannot be placed
and interpreted in terms of the ideology of Bharatbarshya where
womens bodies are used as a metaphor for nation. Doulotis body,
Dopdis body (in Mahaswetas short story Draupadi), Yashodas body
(in Stanadayini), Gangors body (in Choli Ke Piche Kya Hai)
are aberrations. The way their bodies are gendered is linked with the
subalternity of their communities, which remains outside the legitimacy
of a nation. Moreover, more than remaining outside the space of the
150 | Epsita Halder
organized labour, it is Doulotis life as a bonded-prostitute that shows

the particularity and peculiarity of a womans subaltern body.
Sometimes they speak: Gangor breaks out in pointless anger when
the photographer who clicked her bare-breasted returns to her village
only to find that she was gang-raped and her breasts were cut off due
to her exposure to the sensuality of his camera lens.
But does her speech elevate her as the agent of her own history?
What is the philosophical significance of her experience? Does her
speech link Gangors personal history to the history of the collective,
to the history of nation? Or, is it a violent moment between
victimhood and a vindication of resistance? When Dopdi Mejhen was
gang-raped in custody, Mahasweta re-writes the non-nationalist
feminists like V. Patel and Gail Omvedts unilinear and de-contextualized
celebration of the strength, resistance and militancy of the tribal
women and the uniqueness of their culture28 . For Mahasweta, it is
important to show the strength and power of the ethnic agent in a
particular moment of decolonization, within a complex interrelation
between state, civil society and the ethnic communities where her
ethnic is gendered. It is Dopdis body through which she speaks of
her resistance. Her raped, bloodied and wounded body, strong and
fearless, simultaneously becomes the capital to invest the agency of
political militancy and guerrilla warfare and the gendered territory
where the army can inscribe sexual violence.
Now the question is, can she speak her experience? If she speaks,
do we understand it as speech? How can this experience, if at all
told, be preserved and transmitted through writing? Mahasweta
deploys particular narrative strategies to focus on the gap between the
narrators knowledge and the life and intention of the subaltern
protagonists. The enlightened Dalit Prasad, a member of the Harijan
Association, the missionary Father Bomfuller, Bano Nageshia,
Puranchand from Gandhi Mission and the school teacher Mohan
Srivastav came to the prostitute quarters to survey the effects of
bonded-labour in the Palamau district. They wanted to move for the
legal abolishment of bonded-slavery. It was revealed that Douloti had
already returned Paramananda an amount of Rs 40,000 as a bonded-
prostitute (Rampiyari said in the story, You are not a rendi, a
prostitute. You are the kamiya, the bonded prostitute of Paramananda,

the Brahmin.29) against her fathers loan of Rs 300 taken years back
When the Father conversed with Prasad, Puranchand and Mohan
regarding how to make a case of bonded-slavery, their conversation
became the conflicting site of social ideologies. When they were
interviewing another prostitute, Douloti talked to Bano, one of her
village relatives. She talked at length, for at least 23 lines, the longest
dialogue in the story. (In this narrative, if she spoke at all, she did
it in broken sentences, sometimes in monosyllables.) Douloti spoke to
Bano about her realization about the complementarity between her
loan and the saleability of her flesh. She wanted Bano to take her away
from the debate of the babus over the bonded-slavery issue to her
childhood, to wintertime, to the smell of roasted wheat dough her
mother used to put on the kitchen fire.
But does she really tell Bano all these? Is she able to form a 23-
line-long discursive project to voice her realization? How does Bano
perceive and conceive what Douloti is telling her?
Bano alone knew that how pervasive the darkness is in the lives of Douloti
and others like her. His heart alone was bursting with compassion.30
Douloti sat near Bano and started caressing his feet with her palms.
For Mahasweta, this non-discursive gesture the physical enactment
of respect and affect on the part of Douloti helped Douloti and
Bano to overcome the constraints of silence, the curse of the lack
of intelligible words. Douloti did not use any words; she perhaps lacked
the faculty to think and speak about her own situation. The narrative
strategy deployed by Mahasweta shows the gap between the knowledge
of the historian/author and the subaltern like Douloti. Mahasweta
displaces the omniscient, omnipresent narrator. She does not speak
on behalf of her protagonist.
Doulotis fingers speak to Bano, Why pine for us Bano Chacha? Kamiouti
loan never exhausts. I cannot calculate what does 300 rupees loans make in
eight years. The lord has extracted forty thousand rupees from my flesh.
Yet, the loan exists. I will have the loan until my flesh remains saleable.
Then I will turn a beggar
152 | Epsita Halder
Dont pine for me Bano Chacha. Instead, speak in silence the

way I am using silence to speak to you. (emphasis mine)31
What they speak in words after that is very simple and precise,
full of Banos concern. But, the following conversation lacks what we
can call the total transparency of knowledge.
Bano said, Why is your hand so hot?
Its always like that.
Do you have fever?
Maybe.32
Here, neither Douloti not Bano could understand that Douloti

was already infected with venereal diseases. However, if they could
understand, the course of the narrative would not change. It would
offer the same fate to Douloti, the kamiya-rendi. But, Mahasweta
creates a deliberate gap between the knowledge of the readers and
that of the protagonists. The readers can anticipate the disease while
Douloti fails to do so. Doulotis failure is the failure to speak.
Is there any gap between history and literature when these discourses
deal with the voice which embodies experience? Spivak said that
historians unravels the text to assign a new subject-position to the
subaltern, gendered or otherwise and the teacher of literature does
it to make visible the assignments of subject-position33. My question
is what does an author of literature do? If a statement involves the
positioning of a subject (the I-slot) within a discourse then the author
shows both the possibility and impossibility of the speech act,
discursive and non-discursive, and also the possibility and impossibility
of making the subaltern gender the subject of its own story.
The life of Douloti is itself a mimicry of her name, meaning
bountiful. Her destiny is that of every prostitutes in the quarter. At
the end of the narrative, like any other prostitute when she was
thoroughly contaminated with venereal diseases and transferred to the
bigger hospital, she decided to return home. Here, her homecoming
produces a travestying moment of affect which cannot be interpreted
in the language of the middle-class ideology, because, as a prostitute
she lives outside of the economy of family, the space of the
socialization of affect. Doulotis affect has no socialization, though in
the prostitute quarters, there is a kind of parody of family, where

another prostitute, Somni, plans to send her son to the missionaries.
However, Douloti arrives at her village in the night, devastated and
decaying, choosing one bright spot at the village school playground
to die. When schoolteacher Mohan Srivastav comes next morning
with students to hoist the flag to celebrate the Independence Day, he
discovers a dead Douloti, spread-eagled on the centre of the white-
washed ground, her sick blood covering Indias map drawn the day
before. Her body is neither Dopdis body that strips on the face of
her next rapist, Senanayak, to embody anger and resistance, nor that
of Bhubaneswari Bhaduri who re-wrote the palimpsestic narrative of
the sati in the colonial period (she defied both the British understanding
of sati, where white men are saving brown women from the hands
of brown men, and its traditional Brahminical construction)35 by
committing suicide. Though the narrativization of defiance is not easy
to decipher in both the cases, we get the opportunity to decipher some
meaning from codified bodily performances. But in Doulotis case,
we just see a sheer amount of victimhood. Neither has she a voice,
nor does her body carry the inscription of her resistant self. So, what
does she speak? Can Douloti speak? How would a historian assign
a subject-position to her? How would she tell a tale? In my opinion,
Djebar has something to say about this.
Djebar says she is living to tell the tale. How does she engage
with history, with womens experience? Is it what she explains, Voice
answers to voice and body can approach body 36? The third section
starts with an epilogue:
And I come to the fields and spreading courts of memory, where are treasures
of unnumbered impression of things of everything of every kind, stored by
the senses37.
Is it a celebration of the senses then, the affect through which she

recovers, re-discovers womens tales?
Djebar as the narrator in the third section tells the tale of Cherifa,
a female guerrilla of Algerian war of independence, in a first-person
narrative which is juxtaposed with a third-person narrative, where the
narrator tells Cherifas story from outside. The third-person narrative
154 | Epsita Halder
gives space to the narrators reflection on the experiences of Cherifa,

in the way narrator can engage with her voice. A shift in the person
of the narration actually focuses on both Cherifa as the witness and
the narrator the witness of the witness 38 if we consider Cherifas
voice as a kind of testimonio39. This shift distances the narrator from
the experience of Cherifa in the third person narrative, where the
narrator, in an emotive and passionate language, attempts to interpret
Cherifa as the Antigone of her community who experienced her
brothers death in the middle of the armed conflict between the French
army and the Algerian guerrillas and decided to give him a burial
amidst war, risking her own life in the bargain. Later, she would be
caught, imprisoned and obviously tortured. The first-person narratives
of the mountain women constitute this section where without any
prior information one testimonial space ends and a new one starts,
creating a palimpsest, with one voice fading out and giving rise to
another voice without a barrier between experiences.
her voice shrills out, stumbling over the first notesthen the voice
cautiously takes wing, the voice soars, gaining in strength, what voice? That
of the mother who bore the soldiers tortures with never a whimper? That
of the little cooped-up sisters, too young to understand, but bearing the
message of wild-eyed anguish? The voice of the old women of the douar who
face the horror of approaching death-knell, open-mouthed, with palms of
fleshless hands turned upwards? it is the voice of the child whose hands
are red with henna and a brothers blood?40
The strategic arrangement of this kind of narrative entertains neither

a sovereign female subject nor a sovereign and authentic recovery of
the past. It invokes voice as the polyphony of voices present and
absent thus opening up possibilities for other lives and experiences.
It also makes visible the recorder/the historian/the elite woman and
her dilemma over the recorded voice and the problematic of
representation. When Cherifa recounts her experiences, relives her
memory, the narrator says, When she tells her story, twenty years later,
she mentions no interment nor any form of burial for her brother
lying in the river bed41(emphasis mine).
We should be attentive to the deliberate use of the word story,
which does not carry the authenticity of lived experience, but the
connotation of memory, a re-creation of what happened, with its own
dynamics of claiming and critiquing history. Djebar is not claiming
any authenticity for the recounted memory of the guerrilla women,
She pauses, picks up a taleDo her words bring it [the burden of
memory] to light?, (141, ibid) In a series of chapters named
Embraces, the narrator opens up the space of interaction between
Cherifa, aging and in poor health, with herself. The act of recounting
and representing memory is always interspersed with loss, lapse and
hesitation. There is something which is irretrievable, cannot be
spoken, what nostalgia will cause her voice to fail presently?42 and
what Djebar would offer to is Only a handfuls of husks, culled from
my memory, what do I seek?43 (emphasis mine). Djebar would not
claim the authenticity of her own narrative; it is also her memory
which had recorded the voices, equally slippery in holding the truth.
Whatever she would write, her position would be, I try my hand
as a temporary story-teller44, would be, I have captured your voice;
disguised it with my French without clothing it. I barely brush the
shadow of your footsteps45.
However, Mahasweta oscillates between orality and literacy while
writing the history of bonded-slavery of Palamau district. She refers
to a song sung by old kamiya women:
Power of loan, by the power of loan
2 rupees ten rupees a hundred rupees more
Ten ser wheat five ser rice
Munabar lends us
We dont know what to do
We stare like the stupid, like the dumb
Power of loan, O Maharaj
By the power of loan
He is the Patoyari, Forest Officer he is
He is the police post, he himself is the police
If he wants to go to the town
The rail stops at the Chowkipura halt
Minister comes if he invites
Hes become the Sarkar by lending us anything
156 | Epsita Halder
We dont have freedom anymore.46
Mahasweta intervenes when Brahmin Paramananda wants to marry

the untouchable Douloti. Then heaven comes down on the sinful
earth, on the cursed Palamau47. The sharpness of her satirical prose
ranges from folkloric register to a very realist social-scientist kind of
narration followed by a 13-lined poem. But she creates a sharp
distinction between the Nageshia orality and her poem in the way
she always makes the consciousness of the narrator visible. Her poem
is just an extension of her prose; it is her voice, her commentary on
the system. If Douloti could speak, the narrator would not have
needed to let her speak in silence.
Here, human beings, Nageshia-Parhaia-Oraon-Munda-Bhuia-
Dusad-Ganju-Dhobi-Chamar, are all ajirsocial scientists who collect
data during their travels across Palamau cleverly avoid how, by virtue
of being compelled to take loans from so-called higher castes for
wedding-shadi-shraddh-pujas, small farmers are becoming bonded-
slaves.
These scholars want governmental support
The government needs the support of the jotdars
The feudal lord of the land, this new caste of the Junkars
This caste is the creation of the Government of India
But you should not write this, should not write this, because.48
Spivak rethought her conclusion The subaltern as female cannot be

heard or read49 in her essay Can the Subaltern Speak? in the
chapter entitled History of her book, A Critique of Postcolonial
Reason. Spivak was compelled by Abena P.A. Busia who said,
Spivaks account does offer us fruitful reinscription of womens voice by
giving us another way of reading the womans bodythe body is invested
with meaning by the woman and is left as a text50.
Spivak analysed two kinds of self-immolation by the widows in this

chapter. What she did is a placement of those acts of self-immolation
within the palimpsestic dynamics of colonialism and nationalism.
Tradition would propose her self-immolation as an act of dharma
through which she can release her atma from the mutable streesarira/
female body. Burning herself on the funeral pyre of her husband is

the way for her to attain moksha/salvation. From within the discourses
of the Dharmasastras revived in the 19th century, it was not possible
to extract the intention of the widow whose psyche was saturated with
patriarchal inscriptions on sati. Her consent lacked autonomous
subjectivity. Between patriarchy and imperialism, the agency of
woman gets erased. According to Spivak,
Gulari (the sati) cannot speak to us because indigenous patriarchal history
would only keep a record of her funeral and the colonial history only needed
her as an incidental instrument. Another kind of self-immolation cited by
Spivak is by Bhubaneswari Bhaduri who committed suicide in her fathers
home in 1926 while menstruating. Spivak considers this act as an
interventionist re-writing of the traditional sati act. What Spivak noticed is
a failure within Bhubaneswaris immediate surroundings to read her suicide
as an act of defiance, where, by committing it, she was finally able to perform
what she intended to say. Bhubaneswari attempted to speak by turning her
body into a text of woman/writing.51
Spivaks despair that the subaltern cannot speak in the previous essay
came from the immediate mis-interpretation around Bhubaneswaris
suicide. She failed to convey what she said, her speech, enacted
through her performing body, was erased in the way her relatives
heard her. Both the colonial historian and his indigenous counterpart
are engaged in silencing her.
But, what I want to focus here is Spivaks statement: after
all, I am able to read Bhubaneswaris case, and therefore she has spoken
in some way52. It may appear as a I (can) read, therefore she speaks
kind of schema; as an unspoken claim of a sort of transparency
between what subaltern speaks and what historian/investigator is able
to read. But, in my opinion, Spivak demands a diachronically distant
decipherment of what the subaltern had inscribed through her voice
or on her body. She said, All speaking, even seemingly the most
immediate, entails a distanced decipherment by another. She
acknowledges her decipherment as moot, that is, debatable.
Moreover, she alerts us that, this moot decipherment, a debatable
critical engagement to produce meanings from what the subaltern had
158 | Epsita Halder
said should not be identified with the speaking of the subaltern.

Rather, she acknowledges the historians/investogators complicity in
the muting whenever I hear him/her, the subaltern gets lost. In the
process of my hearing, his/her speech is silenced. Whenever I try to
represent the subaltern, the subaltern starts to disappear. Whenever
the subaltern gets disclosed, she is erased/effaced in that process.
I suggest that both Mahasweta and Djebar have made these
processes of representation/disclosure heavily nuanced, and hence
complex. When the subaltern is silent, what can a historian do? For
the historian, either the subaltern does speak which she (the historian)
is able to read and thus assign subject-positions on her, or she (the
subaltern) doesnt speak. Douloti has neither spoken, nor does she
offer her bloody body as her own writing. Djebar cannot ask the
mountain women raped during Algerian war of independence by the
French army, even using very private Arabic term, Sister, did you
ever, at any time, suffer damage?53. The knowledge of rape will not
to be transmitted; it will be respected. Swallowed.54. Then how can
Djebar say or theorize that the subaltern cannot speak of her
experience? How can she read her silence? Or how can Mahasweta?
Does silence means speechlessness?
Mahasweta proposes her gendered subalterns in a dynamics of
difference; it is a difference within the community in case of Douloti
where the gendered subaltern may fall within an asymmetrical
distribution of social access.
The object of this account is not Prasads quick transformation. Just as its
object is not Bono Nageshia joining Prasads party. Bono did not value
Prasad so much before. But the day Prasad, the son of a harijan, left the
Gandhi Mission and the Harijan Association, and gave witness in the
Freedom Party, Bono sought him out and mingled with him.Douloti didnt
know this news (emphasis mine).
And it is a difference within the bourgeois imagination as well. When,

next morning, Mohan (the schoolteacher) discovers the body, his
imagination of the cartography of the nation-as-mother drawn in fresh
lime was violently disturbed by the body of the bonded-prostitute
superimposed on the map. Conspicuously, this body/her body neither
can speak for itself, nor does its experience as an agent embody
Doulotis own life and collective history. But what happens in literature
is an excess of knowledge, an excess of historical knowledge which
allows us to read what she did or didnt speak. It is literature that goes
beyond history where both silence and the difficulty to engage with
and represent silence, can be represented through language. If Douloti
cannot speak, an author would represent her silence/speechlessness,
unlike a historian who would simply look at either speech or silence.
So, the author would not merely make visible the assignments of
subject-position, but would problematize the possibility and
impossibility of those subject positions in a nuanced language.
Djebars emotional belongingness to the harem women who lack
the agency of writing makes her pick up the pen. Love affect
is her reason. Emotional forces authenticate her writing women as
the subject of history. But her dilemma continues:
Can I, twenty years later, claim to revive these stifled voices? And speak for
them? What ghosts will be conjured up when in this absence of expression
of love (love received, love imposed), I see the reflection of my own
barrenness, my own aphesia.55
In a previous chapter entitled Aphesia of Love, Djebar gives the

meaning of aphesia: loss of the faculty of speech as a result of cerebral
affection. If it is Djebars own aphesia, loss of speech, she proposes
a very important point here. Perhaps she is trying to pose a limit on
the storytellers right to represent what the subaltern speaks or what
she doesnt. Perhaps the subaltern represents, in essence, an excess
of what our historical knowledge can bear. I am not introducing a
project of mythicization of the subaltern experience at the end of my
article. Rather, I am trying to echo Djebar when she poses this limit
of bourgeois knowledge and ability to interpret. I am proposing a less
transparent engagement in the project of writing women in the
postcolonial era. I am seeking for palimpsestic subjectivities. I am
trying to point the limits of elite knowledge/theoretical tools in writing
a subaltern experience and proposing literature as the space of showing
the marks of erasure and gaps in its language.
160 | Epsita Halder
Notes
1. In the 19th century, women (Indian) became the reference point to write
the history of India. As a reaction to colonial domination the culture of
nationalism again valorized women as the repository of pure Indian-ness,
as the space of uncontaminated spiritual values. As Partha Chaterjee says,
one fails to identify any autonomous subjectivity of women in both the
nationalist culture and the processes of reform. Partha Chaterjee, Nation
and Its Fragments (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993 ), 110-157.
In the nationalist struggle, women appeared in the contributive role
within the boundaries laid by nationalist men within the reformist
movement. Self-interested men are mindful of the improvement of
women only to the extent that it furthers their self-interest; not for other
reason (Prachina O Nabina, Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay).
2. According to Uma Chakraborty, a particular historiography can be traced
in the writings of the colonial officers and Evangelists whereby they tried
to conceptualize an Indian past. With respect to womens situation in the
past/present they charted out a barbaric Indian civilization as completely
antithetical to the Orientalist imagination of a glorious Indian past.
Women became the alibi in the arena of discursive/ideological struggle
between a history of India constructed by the colonizers and a counter-
history offered by the Hindu-nationalists based on Aryan revival. An
Aryan past always presupposed an exclusion of lower caste women from
the arena of representation (whom Chakraborty would call the Vedic
Dasi) and the valorization of the spiritual link between the Vedic and
contemporary women actually erased womens agency over history. Uma
Chakraborty, Whatever Happened to the Vedic Dasi, in Recasting
Women, edited by Kumkum Sangari and Suresh Vaid (eds.) (New Delhi:
Kali for Women, 1989), 27-87.
3. The term Maghreb generally applies to the North African Islamic
countries like Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia. When the Arab Maghreb
Union was established in 1989 to promote cooperation and integration
among the Arab states of North Africa, Mauritiana also signed the pact
along with Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia.
4. I had to rely on the English version of the text as I dont have the access
to French.
5. Ambivalence: I attempted to posit this term the way Homi Bhabha had
conceptualized it. The unthought through which colonial man is
articulated is that process of classificatory confusion that I have described

as metonymy of the substitute chain of ethical and colonial discourse.
This results in the splitting of colonial discourse into two attitudes of
external reality: one takes reality into consideration while the other
disavows it and replaces it by a product of desire that repeats and
rearticulates reality as mimicry. Homi Bhabha, Of Mimicry and Man:
the Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse, in October, no. 28, 1984, Spring,
132. Djebar would narrate this as a vulgar liaison between colonized
France and colonized Algeria.
6. Fantasia, 226.
7. Samia Mehrez, Translation and the Postcolonial Experience: The
Francophone North African Text, in Rethinking Translation: Discourse,
Subjectivity, Ideology, edited by Lawrence Venuti (London and New York:
Routledge, 1992).
8. Fantasia, 156.
9. Ibid., 3.
10. Ibid., 218.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid., 6.
13. Ibid, 7(emphasis mine).
14. Ibid., (emphasis mine).
15. Ibid., 79.
18. Michel Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge (New York: Pantheon,
1972), 29.
19. Cheryl McEwan, Building a Postcolonial Archive: Gender, Collective
memory and Citizenship in Post-apartheid South Africa, in Journal of
Southern African Studies, Vol 29, No 3, September 2003, 744.
20. Abena P A Busia, Silencing Sycorax: On African Colonial Discourse and
the Unvoiced Female, in Cultural Critique, Winter 1989-90, 81-104.
21. Who the makers of law are remained allusive in Foucauldian notion of
the archive. Derrida says that, it is the archons that have the power to
interpret archives. It is at their house, in that place which is their house
[archeion]that official documents are filed. Derrida, Archive Fever,
in Diacritics, 10, and Sandhya Shetty and Elizabeth Jane Bellamy,
Postcolonialisms Archive Fever, in Diacritics, Vol 30, No 1, 2000, 25-
48.
162 | Epsita Halder
22. Fantasia, 226.

23. Julie Stephens, A Critique of the Category Non-Western Woman in
Feminist Writings in India, in Subaltern Studies VI, edited by Ranajit
Guha (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989), 92-125.
24. See Gail Omvedt, We Will Smash the Prison: Indian Women in Struggle,
(London: Zed Press, 1980).
25. Gayatri Chakraborty Spivak, Woman in Difference: Mahasweta Devis
Douloti the Bountiful, in Cultural Critique, Vol 14, Winter 1989-90,
105-128.
26. Ibid., 112.
27. Ranajit Guhas definition of the subaltern: What is left out is the politics
of the people. For parallel to the domain of elite politics there exited
throughout the colonial period another domain of Indian politics in
which the principal .actors were not he dominant groups of the
indigenous society or the colonial authorities but the subaltern classes and
groups constituting the mass of the labouring population and the
intermediate strata of the in town and country that is, the people. This
was an autonomous domain. Ranajit Guha, On Some Aspects of the
Historiography of Colonial India, in Subaltern Studies I edited by Ranajit
Guha (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1982), 4. Spivak has criticized
this class-based definition by introducing the perspective of gender where
she will be called the gendered subaltern.
28. Omvedt, 115.
29. Mahasweta Devi, Douloti (Kolkata: Nabapatra Prakashan, 1985), 66.
30. Ibid, 106 (translation mine).
31. Ibid, 106-107 (translation mine).
33. Gayatri Chakraborty Spivak, Stanadayini, in Subaltern Studies V edited
by Ranajit Guha(New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987), 91-134
(emphasis mine).
34. Spivaks translation.
35. Gayatri Chakraborty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a
History of the Vanishing Present (Kolkata: Seagull, 1999), 198-311.
36. Fantasia, 129.
37. Ibid., 111.
38. Shoshana Felman, The Return of the Voice, in Testimony: Crisis of
Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, edited by Shoshana
Felman and Dori Laub (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), 204-
283.
39. John Beverley, The Margin at the Centre: On Testimonio, in The Real
Thing: Testimonial Discourse and Latin America, edited by Georg M.
Gugelberger (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996). Elzbieta Sklodowska
quoted George Yudice in The Politics of Remembering, the Politics of
Forgetting: Reading I, Rigoberta Menchu who said that, Testimonio
[m]ay be defined as an authentic narrative that summons truth in order
to denounce exploitation and to set right official history. Actually,
Djebars novel is a complicated space, a multi-discursive narrative with
autobiography, fiction/imagination, testimonio and oral history.
40. Fantasia, 126.
41. Ibid., 124.
42. Ibid., 142.
43. Ibid.
44. Ibid., 167.
45. Ibid., 142.
46. Devi, 11-12 (translation mine).
48. Ibid, 52-53 (translation mine).
49. Spivak, 1988, 308.
50. Busia, 1990, 103.
51. Spivak, 1999, 308.
52. Ibid., 309.
53. Fantasia, 202.
54. Ibid, 302.
55. Fantasia, 202.
An Impossible Choice: The Ethical Aporia in
The English Patient
Kallol Ray
The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje is not only a novel of love,

loss, estrangement and war, but it is also about human beings capacity
for resilience, their resonant gestures of affection and what is perhaps
most important their desire to shore up the fragments of time in the
volatile interstices that exist in between the official boundaries of
nation states and colonies. The disjunctive narrative hinges around
the motif of displacement and estrangement, the relationships of
people torn asunder by the plight of war, the disciplinary tactics of
colonial power, and the normalizations of nation states that are
precariously situated in a modernity where the centre has for long
failed to hold. In this essay I would like to tentatively read this novel
as an unfolding of an ethical space (from a Levinasian angle), as an
attempt to explore the problematic of responsibility of a fractured
subject (the Sikh sapper Kirpal Singh) trying to grapple with the many
incommensurabilities and differences of colonial discourse as an
apparatus of power.1 It is neither necessary nor adequate to take this
reading as an intentionally forced (mis)reading of the novel, although
I very well realize that the structural motors of the text are not
specifically geared toward articulating any sort of an ethical paradigm.
Ethics here is that singular modality of understanding the gestures and
actions of colonial subjects who in turn are trying to respond to the
call of the other; here ethics,
is not an obligation toward the other mediated through the formal and
procedural universalization of maxims or some appeal to good conscience,
rather ethics is lived in the sensibility of a corporeal obligation to the
other. [that is the lived reality of ones concrete particular duties to the other,
and not merely some abstract rationalized Kantian categorical imperative]2.
The Ethical Aporia in The English Patient | 165
It is only in the last section centered around the atomic explosion

at Hiroshima a section that is also the focus of this essay that
the novel adequately foregrounds the question of ethics or rather of
its impossibility, that is ethics as an experience of the impossible
an experience of the radical other (the wholly other or tout autre
according to Levinas) that escapes the signification of language, the
differential play of signifiers. Here impossible means indefinable,
something unknowable. It is only in the face of such an experience
of sovereign heterology (that is an extreme or liminal situation that
creates a rupture of logic and perception) where the economy of
standard rational understanding fail (in the case of this novel a literal
and metaphorical explosion, an explosion that is at once both internal
and external) that the ethical praxis of a subject (Kirpal Singh) is
mediated in the form of a necessary and immediate reaction. It is
a reaction in the form of a specific decision that by virtue of its radical
alterity, of its strange and silent nature becomes undeconstructible.
According to Spivak such decisions are undeconstructable:
for to open them to deconstruction is to open them to the law of differance.
Decisions based on such experiences involve aporias, or non-passages.
Aporias are distinguished from logical categories such as dilemmas or
paradoxes; as experience is from presupposition. Aporias are known in the
experience of being passed through, although they are non-passages; they are
disclosed in effacement, thus experience of the impossible.3
Before we move on to a reading of the novel a few words howerver

inadequate they may be about Emmanuel Levinas, the eminent
Jewish philosopher who described ethics as first philosophy, more
fundamental than ontology or phenomenology. An intimate friend of
Maurice Blanchot and a survivor of the Holocaust, Levinas reinvented
ethics through crucial displacements making it prior to any epistemic
question. However, the word ethics in Levinas is not free from the
spectre of metaphysics as he never bothered to seriously take into
account the Heideggerean dictum of the end of metaphysics. But the
usual conventions of metaphysical speculation about ethics gives way
to a radical rethinking of its parameters in his work where ethics
becomes primarily a concern with the dynamics of the confrontation
166 | Kallol Ray
of the subject with the other. Ethics, according to Levinas, is an

articulation of the demands placed by the other (an entity that is finally
unknowable beyond any essentialization) on a subject who comes into
being as an ethical subject precisely in his/her endeavour to respond
to the call of the other and in his/her readiness to substitute his/her
self in place of the other in moments of crisis so much so that the
subject becomes a hostage to the other. The other here means not
only any specific subject but each and every other of the world that
is humanity as such. This being hostage to the other happens precisely
because one is infinitely responsible to the other; and this condition
of oneself being infinitely responsible actually puts each other in a
relation of asymmetry or inequality; it is an inequality where the other
is always already priorized; the claims of the other on one is absolute.
And it is this absolute claim of the other on the subject that makes
ethics or ethical decision making a perpetual problem, an impossible
problem that can never be solved. It is because every decision that
an individual makes in face of such infinity always falls short of its
measure that the responsible decision making is never responsible
enough. Each decision requires a choice, and a choice is always of
one over the other; and a choice that one makes in favour of one
might be unjust to the other. A single act of ethical decision cannot
do justice to all. So ethical choices involve experiences of aporia where
one is faced with irreconcilable positions. There is no way out of this,
an absolute non-passage which any how needs to be passed through
by a choice of decision. It is an impossible choice which nonetheless
needs to be made, but this choice itself can never be rationalized or
grounded (something that makes Levinasian ethics different from
Kantian Moral Law that can be used to justify and ground the logic
of decision) or calculated on the basis of the logic of non-
contradiction. This makes the choice or decision always faulty, always
inadequate and unjust. This means that a just choice is never just
enough. And this formal domain of ethical decision making where
one needs to judge is called by Levinas politics, as for him every
act of decision based on judgment is political, and even private
choices are politically inscribed. Derrida calls it a politicization of
ethics; ethical decision making as political responsibility (this forever
problematizes the binary of public/private, and ethical/political). But

even for this infinite responsibility is necessary, as Derrida writes:
I believe that we cannot give up on the concept of infinite responsibility. I
would say, for Levinas and myself, that if you give up the infinitude of
responsibility there is no responsibility. It is because we act and we live in
infinitude that the responsibility with regard to the other is irreducible. If
responsibility was not infinite, if every time that I have to take an ethical
or political decision with regard to the other, this was not infinite, then I
would not be able to engage myself in an infinite debt with regard to each
singularity. I owe myself infinitely to each and every singularity. If responsibility
was not infinite, you could not have moral and political problems. There are
only moral and political problems, and everything that follows from this,
from the moment when responsibility is not limitable.4
Justice operates in the face of such infinitude and always fails to live
up to it; but we never fail to work in favour of justice, we never stop
anticipating the arrival of justice in the infinite temporality of the
future. We know that justice is to come; it is to make present an
absence, a lack. Another name for this justice, according to Derrida
is the messianic which he says is the coming of the other, the absolute
and unpredictable singularity of the arrivant as justice 5.
Instead of a dialectic of appropriation (evidenced in many pro-
Hegelian Western philosophical thinking) where the other is used
mainly for the integration and consolidation of the identity of the self,
ethics here is a respect for the infinite alterity of the other, a regard
for the unbreachable distance between the other and the same. Ethics
is an imperative to negotiate the impossible distance between the two,
a negotiation that never settles into categories of definitive
comprehension, and it is by this denial that it becomes a metaphysics
that transcends the assimilative conditions of western episteme and
becomes a more essential knowledge that is actually non-knowledge.
Ethics becomes the metaphysics of this negotiation, a
transcendence, like welcoming of the other by the same, of the Other by
me, is concretely produced as the calling into question of the same by the
other, that is as the ethics that accomplishes the critical essence of
knowledge.6
168 | Kallol Ray
The other according to Levinas always appears to the same in the

form of a face (visage) whose powers of expression do speak to the
ethical subject in so far as it has the capacity to put into question
the very spontaneity of the subject; and ethics as Simon Crithcley
argues
is simply and entirely the event of this relation is one in which I am related
to the face of the Other [...] whom I cannot evade, comprehend, or kill and
before whom I am called to justice, to justify myself.7
Now let us turn our attention to the novel. At the centre of the novel
is the mysterious English patient, his entire body burned beyond
recognition by fire during World War II. It is now the end of war,
and he spends his remaining days in a kind of ghostly posthumous
existence attended by the young, devoted Canadian nurse Hana in
the ruined monastery of Villa San Girolamo in northern Florence. The
man claims to have lost his memory except for some occasional lucid
images, which he spells out with a delicate lyricism that captivates
Hana who idealizes him as her despairing saint. The enigma of his
identity and the labyrinth of his past slowly unravel as they are joined
by Caravaggio, an enigmatic opium addicted thief and a young Sikh
sapper in the British army named Kirpal Singh with whom Hana falls
in love and who would be the primary concern of this paper. Mainly
through Caravaggios initiative we come to know of the patient as the
Hungarian aristocrat, cartographer and desert explorer Ladislaus de
Almasy a fictionalized version of a historical figure who is credited
with the discovery of the long lost legendary oasis of Zerzura in the
Libyan desert, the prehistorical cave paintings in the Uweinat
mountains and the cartography of the Libyan desert. Almasy is a self-
styled explorer pilgrim for whom the desert is, as he says a place
of faith where he and his explorer friends wish to remove the
clothing of[their] countries8 (139); he is unwilling to confine
himself to any political/strategic framework of identity, acutely
sensitive as he is to the pitfalls and parochial ideologies of identity-
games spawned by nation-states to facilitate and legitimize their own
destructive power struggles. As an eminent cartographer Almasy is
not unaware of his complicity however willy nilly with the so called
civilizing mission of Europe: he knows how his maps prepared under

the aegis of the British government are instruments for wielding
power. However, his romantic predilections make him worship the
desert and its irreducible elementality, as he says in an idiom of an
intoxicated romantic excess: Erase the family name! Erase nations!
I was taught such things by the desert. (139). His final disillusionment
about power-games go so far as to let him negotiate with the Nazis
for saving the life of his beloved Katherine Clifton. It is this tension
between his distinctive individual orientation and his position as an
agent in a colonizing mission that structures his precarious liminality
as an estranged colonizer, as a being who is perpetually unsettled by
his realization of being enmeshed in starkly imperialist ideological
power structures a realization that continually triggers a slippage,
a desire for excess that constitutes his economy of difference. Kirpal
even without knowing such things about Almasy gets attracted to him,
whereas a subsequent knowledge of the character of Almasy creates
a fondness for him in Caravaggio. Eventually all of these drifters
(international bastards according to Caravaggio), exiled from their
homelands start forming a tentative home like shelter amidst the ruins
of war in that deserted monastery. We gradually witness an emergence
of a gradual proximity among them while they try to come to terms
with the losses of war and bereavement. Their proximity is informed
by the ethics of care and love, evocatively depicted in acts of Hanas
tender nursing of Almasy and her passionate love making and
interaction with Kirpal, the slight brown young man hailing from
Punjab, a region rife with fierce colonial struggles against the British
whom she initially takes as a character out of the pages of Kiplings
Kim9. However, proximity in Levinasian terms is something technical;
it does not mean any spatial contiguity with the other;
the closeness of proximity does not refer to the shortening of distance, to

the two beings coming arm to arm or cheek to cheek (literally or
metaphorically), it is a unique condition of the ethical relation with the
other, it is pre-ontological, and pre-intentional (as intention presupposes a
degree of conscious knowledge and distance) urgent obligation, that is
anachronously prior to any commitment.10
170 | Kallol Ray
It is that which grounds the attention and obligation of the subject

to the other, of being hostage to the other. In a spirit of productive
misapplication if we roughly apply this concept shorn of its
metaphysical trappings to Kirpals situation as a colonial subject then
we would witness its radical problematization with the event of the
atomic explosion at Hiroshima. In Hanas eyes Kirpal is that man
from Asia who has in these last years of war assumed English fathers,
following their codes like a dutiful son [italics mine].(112) Despite an
apparent laziness in him observed by Hana during his exceptional
moments of quiet vulnerability when he is shy and withdrawn the
text says she imagines all of Asia through the gestures of this one
man. The way he lazily moves, his quiet civilization. (217) Kirpal
is imagined by her as stern and visionary, very much like those Sikh
warrior saints he sometimes talks about to her. This ambivalence of
perception the mix of laziness and saintly-heroic postures which
is a metonymic gesture (imagining Kirpal for all of Asia) of a
romantic essentialization of the other (a part of the nature/culture
binary where the oriental other is sedentary, pre-rational, mythical etc;
for example Kirpal while lying down is said to be looking more like
a corpse from a myth than anything living or human, 217) is unsettled
when Kirpal talks of his native people having a mysticalaffinity with
machines(272). His is a country where mathematics and mechanics
were natural traits...[and where] antidotes to mechanized disaster were
easily found.(188). In fact the entire text is full of the axiomatics
and mechanics of bomb making and disposal; it is full of profuse
details regarding the defusing of delayed action and unexploded bombs
with their convoluted paraphernalia of fuzes, gains, and superstructral
fittings, in a way working as metonymic registers of the dominant
technological hyper-rationality of the Western situation the hyper-
rationality that ultimately conditions the catastrophe of Hiroshima.
The disjointed narratives chronotopes concretize around the mechanical
clock time of timed bombs whose precise mechanisms Kirpal has been
taught to unravel with a strict yet imaginative methodical exactness
by Lord Suffolk, who is in charge of the British bomb squad unit
which recruits Kirpal. Lord Suffolk, in fact is the first of Kirpals
adopted English fathers. Kirpals interpellation into the English sphere
of life with all its cultural codes and normative presuppositions

(Kirpals words to Almasy: you [i.e. the English] stood for precise
behavior. I knew if I lifted a teacup with the wrong finger Id be
banished., 283) is mediated through the intimate private domain of
this aristocratic and eccentric autodidact, his secretary Miss Morden,
his chauffer cum assistant Mr. Fred Harts, and his family of sappers.
Their welcoming disarmingly intimate albeit respectful enabled
him for the first time since his exile to communicate with and in turn
be touched by the concrete human other. His transition however is
not a simple passage from being an object of ignorance (he is often
shunned and ignored as a colonized in the English barracks) to being
a nearly-selved other of the English; it is something more subtle and
ambiguous that could only be understood in terms of his position in
the contextual nature of the group. The trust and affective bonding
shared by the group constitutes a community whose ethical proximity
hinged around a paradoxical double structure; it is a community of
equals in a peer group, and at the same time assumed an asymmetry
of familial intersubjective relations with the father like figure of
Suffolk at the centre. The ethics of care founded on such radical
asymmetry is pithily narrativized in an anecdote which could also be
taken as a metonymic instance of cultural Oedipalization. Once Kirpal
on being offered to be taken to an English play by Suffolk and Morden
chose Peter Pan, and they wordless acquiesced ([italics mine] the verb
that highlights the quasi-parental proximity between them) and went
with him to a screaming child-full show. (197). Here, Peter Pan as
a discursive and performative site of fantasy is an enchanted though
rather displaced reflection of Kirpal in so far as both of them seem
to prefigure forms of otherness within vaguely speaking the English
imaginative cultural matrix. Peter Pan is that enchanted mirror in
which the interpellated colonial subject witnesses the fantastic allegory
of the other being domesticated; it is the moment of an unconscious
affiliation for Kirpal. His sheer child-like delight in watching the antics
of that perpetual youth is an unconscious facilitation of his positioning
within the normative-ideological grid of the English social system, as
the text says he was beginning to love the English. It is this sense
of love that conditions his proximity with Hana, a proximity that is
172 | Kallol Ray
described in the novel in uncannily Levinasian terms of sharing food

and all the sensuous delights of life, as according to Levinas the ethical
subject is precisely the one who in his enjoyment of the pleasures
of life knows its worth, knows how precious is life; thus for Levinas
the ethical praxis of intersubjective communication is constituted by
a sensibility of material life; the text describes that
He [i.e. Kirpal] held her [i.e. Hana] with the same strength of love he felt
for those three strange English people, eating at the same table with them,
who had watched his delight and laughter and wonder [the gaze of the
adopted father observing his growing son] when the green boy [i.e. Peter
Pan] raised his arms and flew into the darkness high above the stage,(197).
So Kirpals subjectivization is not enunciated within the ready made

parameters of a merely instrumental relation of power/knowledge that
is geared towards producing normalized stereotypes with a singular
politico-ideological intention, rather it is a Janus faced discourse
looking at once to the strategic and affective, the private and the
public; the fantastic and the real.
Suffolk teaches Kirpal that successful bomb-defusing depends on
understanding the character of ones enemy, as he says people think
a bomb is a mechanical object, a mechanical enemy. But you have
to consider that somebody made it. (189). Such faith in the
irreducibility of the human informs his training as sapper; it is
something to keep him unruffled in times of crisis in the words
of the text: to keep everything back from the surface of his
emotions. (191). It is this belief that a bomb is after all a human
mechanism that is put to question by the horror of Hiroshima, by
the sheer monstrosity of the bomb that exceeds his comprehension.
The novel sets two elaborate events (besides the penultimate one with
the Esau bomb) when Kirpal is tricked by the unexpected mechanisms
of the mine/bomb he is set to defuse: one is at the garden of the
villa with Hana by his side, and the other which is a large bomb
at Erith in England. In both these cases he is presented with a
technical impasse (the word he himself uses) that goes beyond his
knowledge but which nonetheless demands that he make a choice in
his process of defusing. Being hostage to the situation he finally makes
the choice which though arbitrary surprisingly proves to be correct

with the result of saving others along with him. Here, the impasse
in the sense of being a non-passable passage is being resolved or passed
through by the act of a correct choice a correctness, which, as
we will see, is impossible in ethical crisis, where the nature of decision
making is entirely different. So, in a way, these two events prefiguring
the problematic of aporia vis--vis choice and reason act as ironic
preludes to the final catastrophe of Hiroshima when the demands of
reason (in the limited sense of techne) is rendered irrelevant by the
very nature of the ethical crisis. In fact, his anxiety in the pre-explosive
stage of the first two cases is outstripped by his post-Hiroshima violent
despair which is the result of, a precarious unhinging in his sense
of Subjective Consciousness vis--vis that of his embeddedness in
historical times. On a temporal level he passes from an engagement
with mere synchronic clock time (the ticking of the bomb-timer) to
a diachronic experience of time, an intense subjective experience
through which the standard temporal order seem to come apart.
From his subjective inscription in linear historical time (the Benjaminian
sense of an empty, homogenous clock time) he passes on as we will
gradually understand to the necessity of appealing to the idea of
messianic justice whose expectation always operates around an
experience of such disjunction. As this messianic time or the time
of justice is opposed to the ontological or economic notion of time
and history that reduces and reifies individuals.11
At the last section of the novel, on hearing in his crystal set radio
the news of atomic bombing at Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the
Americans, Kirpal rushes into Almasys room in the villa. Weeping
and shuddering, he looks distant from his surroundings; the disjunctive
trauma of the event has unhinged him from synchronic time; an
intense diachronic experience for him when time in the sense of clock
time is out of joint. Taking Almasy for an Englishman who becomes
the symbolic representative of white oppression and technological
savagery Kirpal aims his gun point blank at Almasy accusing him
for his complicity in this act of unnamable horror of the white men
whose ships, histories and printing presses(Kirpals words) have
dominated the world; as he says Your fragile white island [i.e.
174 | Kallol Ray
England] that with customs and manners and books and prefects and
reason somehow converted the rest of the world. (283) However,
Almasy keeps silent. This silence is only broken by his quiet
exhortation to kill him, something that Kirpal despite all his rage fails
or rather refuses to do.
Nothing could be more ironic for a romantic anti-imperialist like
Almasy; and when Caravaggio says to Kirpal of all people he is
probably on your side he ignores him; he even ignores Hana. Kirpals
thwarted gesture of killing Almasy is a displaced and arrested signifier
of an originary act of parricidal violence that is the mythical site of
the Law of the Father, as he says to Caravaggio, in my country, when
a father breaks justice in two, you kill the father. (217) The dark,
peeled skin of Almasy exposed in its rawness and the brown skin of
Kirpal achieves a poignant resonance of a Levinasian face to face
encounter par excellence. According to Levinas the exteriority of the
other in the form of a face is the way in which the other presents
himself [to the Same] exceeding the idea of the other in me.12 Facial
expressions and gestures are crucial for Levinas in an intersubjective
ethical communication. Sensibility to the gestures and the body
language of the other (the non-verbal signification of the skin and
the human face) constitute for him the original language of ethics
that at times exceed the import of words. The sensibility to the bodily
gestures of the other is not a supplement to the verbal discourse, but
rather it helps in grounding the subject in the phenomenology of
bodily sensitivity in so far as the ethical being is a corporeal being
that is fully alive to and enjoys the facticity of bodily existence.
Attention to physical details and expressions in the novel is precise
and evocative, as is shown in the description of Kirpal in his moment
of crisis: Now his face is a knife. The weeping from shock and horror
contained, seeing everything, all those around him in a different light.
The language of the eyes which according to Levinas speaks silently
to the ethical subject is expressed in the silent, instantaneous
communication that Almasy and Kirpal had between them when the
former calmly consented to the latters maddening impulse to shoot
him: The eyes of the sapper and the patient meet in this half-dark
room crowded now with the world. He nods to the sapper. Do it,
he says quickly. (285) Kirpals failure to shoot Almasy who himself

is a suffering victim of the imperialist war-games is the result of his
response to the ethical injunction (something which Levinas
characteristically describes, in one of his interviews, as Thou shall
not kill) inscribed in the resonant yet silent face of the other it
is a response that marks his transition from the domain of the ethical
to that of law which in turn is inscribed in the realm of the political.
The singular sovereignty of Hiroshima has touched upon his
being, rendering him traumatized a trauma that unhinges him. His
trauma is not an originary trauma in the strictly Levinasian sense that
preconditions ones ethical coming into being (according to Levinas
the ethical subject is fundamentally constituted in its passivity through
a traumatic relation with a painful event/object that exceeds
representation) but this is trauma as heterology or rupture that in
trying to grapple with the extremity of the position paralyzes the ethical
co-ordination he previously had with the other three characters. His
apparent disavowal of their love and affection arises from being
painfully caught in the interstices of two worlds a world before and
after Hiroshima. What happens for Kirpal is neither a simple
withdrawal nor an opening out to the demands of the other, but a
violent reorientation of the economy of his proximity with the other
a violence that is apparently conditioned by the eruption of the
domain of the political into what is a private domain of intimate
alterity. It is something that Hana herself recognizes when in a letter
to his mother she laments
we heard the bombs were dropped in Japan, so it feels like the end of the
world. From now on the personal will be forever at war with the public [here
it is used in the sense of the political, something that she also refers to as
the feuds of the world]. If we can rationalize this we can rationalize
anything. [the sense of an impossibility of a formal rationalization of the
ethical aporia] (292)
This eruption of the political into the private contextualizes the
dimensions of private relations vis--vis the concerns of the outer
world (every aspect of the private is mediated through and imbricated
against this outer realm of the political), that is of the colonial nation
state, of the politics of racism and imperialism. Kirpals interrogation
176 | Kallol Ray
of the politics and praxis of colonial power-complexes brings up

concretely the question of justice, when the infinite responsibility
for the other is limited by the question of accountability for and of
the action of the other. If one is infinitely responsible to the other,
then one can never judge or question the others action; Kirpals
unhinging actually articulates this moment of questioning of and
judging the others action (to be precise the legitimacy of the colonial
master with his machinery), a moment when ethics becomes complicit
with the domain of politics (in Levinasian terms, ethics is always
already doubled into a political discourse, as no questioning is
apolitical), when proximity with the other needs to be mediated
through the demands and knowledge of political justice. His violent
reaction is an effect of this heterology a reaction that in trying to
act as a chiasmus for containing this double movement of ethical
responsibility and political justice implodes the boundary of his
colonial normalization; it is an excess that problematizes the economy
of proximity with the three characters let alone the European world.
However, Caravaggio feels the logic of Kirpals judgment to be right:
they would never have dropped such a bomb on a white nation.
Even Suffolks premature death as a result of a failure to defuse
a new type of bomb does not make Kirpal question this logic of the
legitimacy of this anonymous machinery of war and imperialism/
colonialism; it does not make him question his position in the colonial
machinery. On the contrary it consolidates his sense of infinite
responsibility to the other as Suffolks death provided the perfect
instance of the ethical substitubility of the one for the other that is
the example of one literally offering his life for saving others. The text
gives a revealing insight into this when it says
his [i.e. Lord Suffolks] absence here, in the sense that everything now
depended on Singh, meant Singhs awareness swelled to all bombs [a
synecdoche for the infinite extent of his ethical responsibility]...across the
city of London. He had suddenly a map of responsibility, something he
realized, that Lord Suffolk carried within his character at all times. It was
this awareness that later created the need in him to block so much out when
he was working on a bomb. He was one of those never interested in the
choreography of power. (195)
His lack of interest in the choreography of power presupposes not

a nave blankness in his subjective historical consciousness of the
conflictual economy of his position in the colonial power structures,
but a desire to disengage the ethical as private (the ethical relation
of responsibility for the other as a private moral injunction or calling)
from the public and the political. According to Levinas the ethical
as personal responsibility to the other is always already traversed by
the movements of the political, as Simon Critchley clarifies the
ethical relation does not take place in an a-political space outside the
public realm; rather ethics is always already political.13 This political
situatedness of ethics does not mean that ethics by itself is politics
but rather it has a possibility of being extended to a political discourse
ethics as a continual checking of the calculative praxis of politics
or more clearly ethics itself is politicized. According to Levinas
ethics becomes political only with the arrival of the third party (le tiers)
that is the larger polity, the people of a society, country or nation.
It amounts to asking how ones relation of responsibility to the other
is justified vis--vis the rights/interests of the third party or the many
others; it involves interrogating and consequently limiting ones
infinite responsibility to the other by holding the others action into
account in relation to the many others of the public domain. It means
asking/judging whether the others (that is to whom one is responsible)
action is right and justified for the many others; and consequently
revising ones position in relation to that judgment. So it is a putting
into question of the other by one. And one can only question the other
when the asymmetry i.e. the inequality of their relation has ceased
to matter or has been suspended. This questioning is ultimately about
the question of justice, of the principles and praxis of justice. It is
a question about the very question of justice. And the moment of
questioning about justice is always political, as Critchley succinctly
states that if ethical responsibility is the surplus of my duties over
my rightsthen the order of justice is one in which rights override
duties.14 Political justice is precisely this question of rights and
principles of the people. Kirpals radical questioning about the lack
of justice in the colonial situation occurs precisely by suspending the
asymmetry or the inequality of his ethical responsibility for the
178 | Kallol Ray
colonial other. By holding the entire colonial regime of white men

responsible for such atrocities, he passes from an affirmation of his
position in the system to that of a dissenting critical subject who no
longer finds himself ethically responsible to the colonial system. His
gesture of leaving the three of them is an effect of this disavowal as
the text says He has left the three of them to their world, is no longer
their sentinel .[italics mine] (286)
Kirpals initial desire to consider ethical engagement as a private
calling ensues from an allegiance to the spirit (pun intended) of
Suffolk; he knew he contained, more than any other sapper, the
knowledge of Lord Suffolk. He was expected to be the replacing
vision (196). Kirpals possibility of being the replacing vision is
predicated upon his private negotiation with the spirit of Suffolk
making his ethics a Derridean hantologie. Haunted by the spectre (the
absent presence) of Suffolk, his ethics is a spectral injunction; a
spectre that he as a dutiful son loves to carry as a shadow with him.
The text reveals that after Suffolks death when he escaped to Italy,
he had packed the shadow of his teacher [italics mine] into a knapsack,
the way he had seen the green-clothed boy at the Hippodrome [Peter
Pan] do it on his first leave during Christmas (197). This allusion
to the fantastic/phantomatic world of Peter Pan is a discursive gesture
at what one may call the strange logic of ethics, where the phantomatic
always puts into motion this reaching out to the other. Almasys
presence with his severely blackened and decaying body is like a
phantom to which Kirpal looked up as a figure of paternal authority,
as he himself says to him during their confrontation I sat at the foot
of the bed and listened to you, Uncle I believed I could fill myself
up with what older people taught me. (283). Since all hantologies
clearly inscribe the question of political justice, Kirpals initial desire
to keep his ethical position exempted from the demands of the
political bespeaks an ambivalence, a passive anxiety that did not want
to address the fact that his job as a sapper in an English bomb squad
is itself politically mediated. It is only after Hiroshima that his radical
questioning of the problematic of justice vis--vis the colonial
mechanisms clearly constitutes the rite of passage to the domain of
political justice; the spectral shadow of the thousands of dead in
Hiroshima forced him to reconsider the nature of his hantologie. As

Derrida argues that without a concern for the dead ones of the past,
one can never be responsibly engaged in an ethical relationship with
the other, be they living or dead or not yet born. This phantomatic
logic of ethics defines what one calls justice as Derrida writes in his
Exordium in The Specters of Marx
...no justice seems possible or thinkable without the principle of some

responsibility, beyond all living present, within that which disjoins the living
present, before the ghosts of those who are not yet born or who are already
dead, be they victims of war, political or other kinds of violence, nationalist,
racist, colonialistor other kinds of exterminations, victims of the oppressions
of capitalist imperialism or any of the form of totalitarianism.15
Kirpals aggression towards the darkened ghostly body of Almasy in

a way acts as a gesture of a quasi-Oedipal dissent to radically refashion
the parameters of his hantologie based in terms of adopted [colonial]
fathers (the plural form is used by Hana) and a movement towards
hantologie as political justice. He thinks he has been fooled by these
fatherly men, as he asks Almasy How did you fool us into this? (283)
Actually Kirpals initial consideration of his ethical responsibility
as a private mission exempted from the demands of the political
ensues from his sense of ambivalence of the colonial trajectory. Kirpal
makes this sense of ambivalence initially clear to Hana by speaking
of his dialogic encounters with his ardent nationalist elder brother
back in Punjab to which he grew estranged. For Kirpal his brother
was always the hero in the family..[while he] was in the slipstream
of his status as a firebrand (200). He tells Hana how his brother
reprimanded him and called him a fool for trusting the English
(217). He is appalled at how people like Kirpal could throw
themselves into English wars, while Asia is still not a free continent
(217). To this Kirpal, who saw himself at least initially as a man,
who unlike his brother had this side to...[his] nature which saw
reason in all things.(200) and which made him hate confrontations
with the colonial system, replied Japan is a part of Asia, and the
Sikhs have been brutalized by the Japanese in Malaya. (217) His
brother ignoring this logic of ambivalence that goes against the
180 | Kallol Ray
ideology of an imagined trans-national racial solidarity of the Asians

an ideology that ignores the differences and constructed nature of
politico-cultural and ethnic singularities keeps on saying to him that
one day he will open his eyes. Kirpal interprets the trauma of
Hiroshima as the moment of his revelation (the futurity of one day
is made present in the heterology) when he finally understands the
logic of the pro-nationalist political discourse of his brother: My
brother told me. Never turn your back on Europe. The deal makers.
The contract makers. The map drawers. Never trust Europeans, he
said. Never shake hands with them. (288) By affirming his brothers
judgment Kirpal as an estranged exile not only tries to reclaim
solidarity with his native land but also with a totalized Asian identity.
When Caravaggio corrects him that Almasy is not English, Kirpal
replies blatantly American, French, I dont care. When you start
bombing the brown races of the world, youre an EnglishmanYou
all learned it from the English. (286) In this essentialization of
European identities which become mere index to the colonial lust for
power the quintessence of being English for the colonized we
find an inverted mirror image of Almasys conflation of differences
in political/ideological identities of nations. Almasy, a cartographer
in The Royal Geographical Society of England, in his desire to live
up to the ethical demands of his relationship with his beloved
Katherine negotiates with the Nazis against the British, as for him
in this vulgar war of territorial possession each imperialist nation is
as bad as the other. This act though determined by disillusionment
with imperialism and ideologies of nation states dangerously
homogenizes the crucial political differences between countries like
Britain and Germany. Almasy in his effort to live up to the ethical
demands of a private relationship subverts the demands of larger
political justice, when justice becomes a question of the responsibility
for the innumerable others. On the other hand Kirpal haunted by the
spectre of justice to the brown races of the world resists the particular
ethical demands of his relationships with others, especially with Hana;
his final rejection of Hana is an act of disavowal that operates on
the logic of homogenized exclusion. Kirpals use of the adjective
brown in relation to the Japanese functions as a dissonant metonymic
register enabling him to homogenize Asian identity by making it

equivalent to his own distinctive ethnic attribute as a colonial subject.
Actually if we follow Levinas we would understand that there is an
inevitable limitation in carrying out ones responsibility to the other
as there are an infinite number of others to whom one is bound by
the same responsibility, a general and universal responsibility (what
Kierkegaard calls the ethical order).16 As I wrote in the beginning
of this essay that any singular act of decision making cannot do justice
to all and justice for all because it always inevitably involves a choice
of one over the other, sacrificing one for the other. This forms the
aporia of ethical decisions as Derrida says the concepts of responsibility,
of decision, or of duty are condemned a priori to paradox, scandal,
and aporia.17 The choices behind such decisions however presuppose
a radical asymmetry whose conditions cannot be rationalized or
justified; it carries an irreducible moment of the unthought that
transcends mere consciential understanding or theorization. But at the
same time trying not to understand it is not responsible enough; in
fact any interrogation of the nature of such ethical decisions make
us aware of the opacity or resistance inherent in it making it complicit
with the mysterious plenitude of silence. The novel speaks of Hana
in her future life remembering Kirpal during that day in August
turning into a stone of silence in their midst. (282) When Kirpal
on his day of leaving Hana and everyone behind is asked by her What
have we got to do with it [i.e. Hiroshima]? (288) he keeps resolutely
silent, as if his decision is the secret covenant he has with the
absolutely transcendent singular other, as if with the sovereignty of
God (in Levinasian ethics the absolute singularity of God and an
individual becomes strangely interchangeable). His secrecy and silence
is cast in the mould of the messianic, it is an anticipation of the
messianic; and this is made explicit to us when in a solitary motorcycle
journey across the plains of southern Italy, he remembers Almasy
singing Isiah into his ear. (294): And my words which I have put
in thy mouth shall not depart out of thy mouth. Nor out of the mouth
of thy seed. Nor out of the mouth of thy seeds seed. (294) The
remembering of this classic biblical passage of messianic exhortation
to secrecy as a mark of the sovereign covenant with God is not unlikely
182 | Kallol Ray
for a man like Kirpal nourished in western traditions, but what is

striking is his remembering it in a moment when he has taken the
decision to entirely disavow the West. What is even more striking
is while remembering it he feels he is being haunted by the spectral
presence of Almasy, he remembers Almasys words about the ancient
paternal sagacity of Isiah; this clearly indicates that his anticipation
of the messianic still makes him inscribed in an hantological pact with
the spectres of colonial authority; his ethical choice is framed by the
mores of a messianic eschatology. The very enunciation of his
ethicality is imbricated against the cultural-ideological matrix of the
west; the very hybridity of his subject position has enabled him to
mediate an ethical choice that is traversed by the movements of a
cultural other, the ethico-political mores of the deal making and map
drawing English.
Kirpals withdrawal from his relationship with Hana though is the
result of a decision taken in the name of messianic justice inscribed
in the realm of the political, fails to live up to the infinite demands
of justice. Justice is never there; it is always to come; always to make
itself present in some indefinite future when it is going to take the
entire world by surprise and terror; it is a moment like the moment
in Isiah remembered by Kirpal when The earth shall reel to and fro
like a drunkard, and shall be removed like a cottage. (290) Till then
we have to do with decisions that involve aporias. Unlike his technical
impasses of bomb defusal, Kirpal cannot solve his ethical aporia by
a correct decision; there is no correct decision. Kirpals decision
actually marks the movement from the ethical to the political, that
is the moment when the particular demands of his ethical/private
relationship with Hana is sacrificed to the political/public demands
of the people struggling against colonial subjugation. This decision is
predicated upon a homogenized division between the English and all
the brown races of the world a politicized division that operates on
a limited concept of a pro-nationalist anti-colonialism. Hanas
proposition that from now on the personal will be forever at war with
the public suggests the problematization of the binary of public/
private when the boundaries between the two would be made
indeterminate. This is not a chronological problematization of a binary
that was once determinate (as it never was since the private is always
inscribed in the public) but of the binary being troubled by a set of
conditions that force homogenizations. Finally we understand that
justice is an absent presence, in its very impossibility it makes the
ethical moment truly the experience of the impossible. The decision
of Kirpal concretizes this impossibility; we understand that justice is
never done; what matters is the madness of the decision.
Notes
1. See Homi K. Bhabha, The Other Question in The Location of Culture

(London and New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1997), 100.
2. See Simon Critchley, Post-Deconstructive Subjectivity in Ethics-Politics
Subjectivity (London and New York: Verso, 1999), 64.
3. See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Towards
A Vanishing Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003),
426.
4. Quoted in Critchley, Metaphysics in the Dark: A Response to Richard
Rorty and Ernesto Laclau in Ethics-Politics-Subjectivity, 107-108.
5. Ibid., the essay On Specters of Marx, 157.
6. See Robert J. Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West ?
(London and New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 2004), 47.
7. See Simon Critchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction: The Argument in
The Ethics of Deconstruction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
1999), 5.
8. See Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient, 139 (London: Vintage
International, 1993). All further references to the novel would be cited
within the text in parentheses.
9. In a sense one could feel that the ethical problematic in this novel is
always working against an invisible shadow of Rudyard Kiplings Kim. In
fact, Kirpals nickname Kip is like an anagram of Kiplings protagonist,
and among many other things, continuously draws our attention to a sort
of tentative differentiation between the two texts most notably in terms
of ethical ambivalence. In Kiplings novel, as Sara Suleri has pointed out
in her book The Rhetoric of English India (Delhi: Penguin India, 2005)
the reason for an absence of ethical conflict in the protagonist regarding
the matter of his divided allegiance to the British as well as to the native
Indians could not only be located in the repressed intentionality of the
184 | Kallol Ray
author. But in fact could be understood as a result of Kiplings anxiety

ridden authorial strategy to deal with a sense of his understanding of the
ambivalence germane to the colonial rule: as she writes :
If one of the manifestations of the anxiety of empire is a repression of the
conflictual model[...] then Kiplings transcriptions of such evasion point to
his acute understanding of the ambivalence with which empire declares its
unitary powers. (115)
In so far as this novel is concerned one might be tempted to ask does
the culturally Oedipalized Kirpal comes of age with his non-passable
passage through the ethical aporia? Even if we consider the question as
momentarily besides the point, we have to agree that in the narrative of
Kim where we find a lack in terms of ethical conflict, we are met with
plenitude in this novel, or, what we may call a reversal. When Hana
watches Kirpal sitting beside The English Patient it seemed to her a
reversal of Kim. The young student was now Indian, the wise old teacher
was English.(111) One might read this reversal as a reversal of the
structural parameters of the colonial/imperial narrative of Kim, the
reversal of the absence of the conflictual model, of absence made
present (a presence of the problematic that is resistant to the strategy of
deconstruction) This reversal makes way for, what we may call an
ostensible maturity of Kirpal, of his sense of being caught in the
interstices of two worlds. We should pay heed to Hanas thoughts, as the
text says in some ways on those long nights of reading and listening, [the
novel Kim] she supposed, they had prepared themselves for the young
soldier, the boy grown up, who joined them [italics mine]. (111)
10. See Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodern Ethics (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers,
1993), 86.
11. See Critchley, On Specters of Marx in Ethics-Politics-Subjectivity, 154.
12. See Critchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction, 5.
13. See Simon Critchley, A Levinasian Politics of Ethical Difference in The
Ethics of Deconstruction, 226.
14. Ibid., 232.
15. See Jacques Derrida, Exordium in Specters of Marx, Trans. Peggy Kamuf
(London and New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1994), xiv.
16. See Jacques Derrida, Whom To Give To in The Gift of Death, Trans.
David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 68.
17. Ibid., 68.
Localizing the Global: Anxieties of Preserving National
Culture in the Globalized World of Kuch Kuch Hota Hai
Kaustav Bakshi
Our inner lives are a parody. We have one foot in India, and the other in
the West, and we belong to neitherWe are alienated from the mass of our
people. We mouth platitudes about Indian culture without having read the
classics in Sanskrit. Instead we read the Time magazine to keep up. We are
touchy about India and look to the West for inspiration and recognition.1
I
The June 2007 issue of Filmfare features an interesting story entitled
15 Things Facing Extinction in Hindi Movies. One of these fifteen
things is the Nirupa Roy prototype of the hapless mother coughing
away endlessly at the even more hapless sewing machine. Sukanya
Venkatraghavan jokingly writes, Modern movie moms are hip, cool
and equipped with the knowledge that cough syrup normally soothes
the irritant throat.2 A month before that, on May 13, 2007, Sunday
Times of India had a Mothers Day Special write-up Mama Mia:
The new mom is a bomb by Ashwin Ahmed. Ahmed writes, From
the widowed garbed moral crusader of the 1970s, todays onscreen
Indian mom has come a long way: Wearing jeans, letting her hair
down (literally) and sporting Gucci bags, shes never looked so good.3
The transfiguration of the most contested symbol of the Mother
is in keeping with Hindi cinema going global. The trendy moms the
two above-mentioned articles discuss either belong to the privileged
middle class, the national bourgeoisie which, as Frantz Fanon
observes, has stepped into the shoes of the former European
settlement4 or to a diasporic community blissfully or not-so-blissfully
settled in London, Sydney, New York, or Los Angeles. However, it
is interesting to note that though the Mother has been happily allowed
186 | Kaustav Bakshi
a make-over, she is still confined within rigid moral barriers. The

essence of the Indian mother is desperately kept alive. In fact,
sufficiently westernized women are either taught to become mothers,
or they are depicted as having internalized the quintessential
characteristics of the mother almost naturally, despite themselves.
Ahmed laments, The 1967 Hollywood classic The Graduate, which
shows a bored suburban housewife, Mrs. Robinson, having no regrets
about seducing a young Dustin Hoffmann, still hasnt happened on
Indian screens.5 Even if the mother transgresses the moral code, she
does it under the pretext of ignorance, helplessness or compulsion and
is made to repent. The Mother has to be good, morally upright and
aware of the responsibilities of motherhood.
Jyotika Virdi writes, Women, or rather the symbolic field of
gender, is deployed by anticolonial impulse, positing the east as the
binary opposite of the west critical to imagining the new nation.6
However, the west is no longer some other place across the profane
kaala pani ; it is integral to and therefore inseparable from new India.
Now, the national has to be pitted against the transnational; for, the
east is not clearly distinguishable from the west any more. Closely
linked to this phenomenon is the rise of a consumerist middle class
which, in turn, led to the emergence of a new kind of romantic family
drama in Bollywood. Speaking about the unprecedented popularity of
the Bollywood romance genre in the 1990s, Virdi notes:
Interestingly, the romantic genres eruption coincides with increasing
liberalization of the Indian economy, first half-heartedly by Rajiv Gandhi in
the mid-1980s and then more aggressively by Narsimha Rao in 1991. While
western presence maintained itself in India throughout Indias post-
independence era, it was characterized by the desires of a small middle class
(6 percent of the population) which experienced a time lag in products,
fashions, and cultural trends arriving from the west. With liberalization the
pace of transactions and western-style production and consumerism accelerated
in the 1980s, and by the 1990s the time lag was replaced by dramatic
simultaneity. The National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER)
estimates that the middle class, or more appropriately the consuming class,
doubled in size to 12 percent in the 1980s and to 18 percent by the end
of the 1990s.7
Localizing the Global | 187
Gurcharan Das predicts that by 2020, half the population west of an

imaginary line drawn from Kanpur to Chennai would be middle class;
and by 2040, half the people east of the line would follow suit.8
The revolution in information technology facilitated an influx of
cultural products from the west, especially from the US and the
promotion of consumption. This in turn led to a further rise of the
new middle-class, the neo-colonial class, which gradually established
its cultural hegemony. Hindi commercial cinema of the late 1990s
and thereafter, concentrates on this ascending bourgeois life-style to
which the lower classes aspire. This neo-colonial class which has
become the major focus of popular cinema also includes the NRIs,
the rich diasporic Indians. While the west has entered and made a
home in the east, a sizeable number of Indians are regularly migrating
to and settling in the west. This has engendered a wide range of cultural
interactions between the subcontinent and the west, transforming in
particular the life of the middle class which contemporary Bollywood
cinema represents. In fact, as Arjun Appadurai and Carol A.
Breckenridge point out that while the middle class both potential
and actual is the basis of public cultural formations, another key
interest group shaping public culture is the variety of entrepreneurs
and commercial institutions that constitute what has been referred to
as the cultural industries. One of the most prominent of these
cultural industries is the entire film and closely related music industry,
with all its technical adjuncts. 9 If both the middle class and the film
industry play a major role in determining the nature of public culture,
the former would be naturally represented by the latter.
It would not be out-of-context to point out here that the culture
of going for a movie has also undergone a remarkable change. The
paraphernalia surrounding the phenomenon of going for a movie
includes shopping (not only clothes or jewellery, but also books, music
CDs, DVDs, and also for that matter electronic gadgets), eating out,
and net-surfing, all under the same roof. This has been facilitated by
the emergence of multiplexes that have almost revolutionized the world
of cine-goers. Notably, the multiplexes that charge rather exorbitant
entry fees compared to the stand-alone theatres are steadily increasing
in number both in the metros and in small towns. This trend in turn
is an important signifier of the kind of viewers the Mumbai film-

makers are presently targeting.
The proliferation of multiplex culture has also brought in its wake
the possibility of experimenting with film subjects. Films such as My
Brother Nikhil, Mixed Doubles, Page 3, Maine Gandhi Ko Nahin Mara,
Khosla Ka Ghosla, Being Cyrus, Parzania or Life in a Metro would
scarcely have found an audience even fifteen years ago. Made for a
niche audience, these films are, however, closer to reality, and any
fixated penchant for upholding or establishing a national identity is
barely noticed in the stories they tell. The responsibility of keeping
the essence of Indianness alive lies on the big-budget blockbusters.
It is interesting to note how even the blockbuster churners, specifically
of the topmost rung (namely, Yash and Aditya Chopra, Karan Johar,
Sooraj Barjatya, Sanjay Leela Bhansali and Vidhu Vinod Chopra), are
refurbishing and appropriating the tested hit formulae in consonance
with the changes in the socio-cultural environment. Hum Aapke Hain
Koun, Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge, Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, Hum Dil
De Chuke Sanam, Mohabbatein, Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham, Salaam
Namaste, Kabhi Alvida Na Kehna, or even for that matter the two
Dhooms have went down really well with both the mass and the class.
These films conjuring a dream world of opulence and plenitude seduce
the aspirant lower classes while creating a world that is an identifiable
yet hyperbolic representation of the one inhabited by the new middle
class. The multiplexes that show these films are now part of spectacular
shopping malls. These shopping malls, in turn, exhibit in seductively
decorated shops the cultural products the films promote. The physical
space of the shopping mall therefore becomes an extension of the reel
space of desire. Anne Friedberg observes:
Shopping mall cinemas demand [] expenditure. They provide the pleasure
of purchase without yielding a tangible product. Instead they supply a
commodity-experienceThe shopping mall and its apparatical extension,
the shopping mall cinema offers a safe transit into other spaces, other
times, other imaginaries. These elsewheres are available to the consumer in
a theatrical space where psychic transubstantiation is possible through
purchase. 10
In fact, producers of commercial films often tie up with international
brands of clothes, accessories, electronic gadgets and other cultural

products which infest the market concurrently with the release of the
film (sometimes carrying tags such as the Tashan Jeans Collection,
the Jodha-Akbar Diamond Jewellery Collection etc.). The upwardly
socially mobile viewers (Indian audiences in particular as they are all
too enthusiastic to model their lives on that of their favourite cine-
stars) are easily seduced into buying these products. The very
phenomenon makes them willing participants in global consumerism.
This in turn signals the adoption of culture which is specifically
foreign, and abandonment of old ways of life. Consequently, this
breeds a profound anxiety of sacrificing ones indigenous Indian
identity. The paradox inherent in these films is that while promoting
consumerism and encouraging the common people to embrace a
global lifestyle, they frantically engage themselves in preserving an
Indian identity. (The task is apparently not very difficult as they
smoothly cater to a pan-Indian11 audience) While affirming the middle
class world which has no clear ethos but money (This is not to say
that they are not virtuous; unlike older Hindi films, todays mainstream
cinema does not necessarily equate vice with material prosperity),
these popular movies seek to construct a tangible national identity.
Constitution of a national identity seems problematic and yet
obligatory at this stage of world history when the national boundaries
are rapidly dissolving. An India does exist on the map, but it is in
the danger of losing its essential being. Significantly enough, the
modern day Indian youth does not have a role model. All they have
are cricketers or film stars. In fact, the only concrete representative
of an Indian identity in the global world is perhaps the Indian cricket
team which again, as evident from the news about the feud amongst
players from different regions of the country, is divided amongst itself.
So, a specific Indian identity is at stake. The nation has been
transformed into a cultural site, a transnational site. The nation,
therefore, needs to be re-imagined. And the task has been taken up
by mainstream popular cinema that has always been a great favourite
of the middle as well as the lower class. And in imagining the nation,
the contemporary film-makers while inventing a new hero, have also
created a new heroine. Consequently, women who have served as
symbols of both home and the nation in colonial as well as postcolonial

discourses have again become a site of contest. While adopting a
western or more expressly an American life-style, this new Indian
middle class feels an urgency to institute its cultural superiority over
the west. This superiority or difference is established through the
portrayal of women, storehouses, as they were, of Indian traditions.
In this context, I choose to study in detail Karan Johars Kuch Kuch
Hota Hai (1998) which was a runaway success at the box-office. It
broke new ground internationally, because it became a success, not
only with Hindi-speaking Indian diaspora audiences and with African
and other third-world audiences who have traditionally appreciated
Bollywood films even if the dialogue component was inaccessible, but
also in subtitled versions with audience groups who saw it as
a new global trend, rather than something localized and exotic12
This movie successfully carried forward and strengthened the legacy
of feel good films kicked off by the megahit Hum Aapke Hain Koun
(1994) thereby turning into an inspiration for many subsequent
productions of the same genre.
II
If Hindi commercial cinema is an enormously influential cultural

discourse, defining and constructing an Indian identity, Kuch Kuch
Hota Hai is definitely an unputdownable landmark in the history of
Bollywood. With several popular films as its intertexts, Kuch Kuch
Hota Hai, may be seen as an arena which contains within it a number
of discourses about the rise of an aggressively capitalist consumerist
middle-class, the changing notions of morality, tested yet newer forms
of resistance to the west, and recasting the modern woman vis--vis
the threat to her essential identity posed by an overwhelming invasion
of the west.
The oft-used American slang cool immensely popular among the
urban youth of today, with all its connotations, is apparently a perfect
description of the paradigm Kuch Kuch Hota Hai represents (Noticeably,
during his college days, the male protagonist Rahulthe Shah Rukh
Khan character wears a chain with a pendant sporting the word
COOL. Subsequently, this COOL chain became a fashion statement

among teen-agers). The coolness of American culture, the opulence
and pomposity it parades, is irresistibly seductive; yet, an essential
Indian identity needs to be asserted, if not fiercely, in the face of its
onslaught. Not only the Indians, but the entire world is zestfully
embracing middle-class values and the life style of the Pepsi-Coke-
AXN-MTV popular culture. As a result of this, the world is
precariously at the risk of losing its diversity and heterogeneity. The
immanence of such a possibility has given rise to a profound anxiety
among people across the globe, for the prospect of living in a
homogenized world is not really a welcome one13. Though by
homogenization we mostly mean Americanization or commoditization,
alternative fears to Americanization also exist. As Arjun Appadurai
observes,
[F]or the people of Irian Jaya, Indonesianization may be more worrisome

than Americanization, as Japanization may be for Koreans, Indianization for
Sri Lankansfor polities of smaller scale, there is always a fear of cultural
absorption by polities of larger scale, especially those that are near by. One
mans imagined community is another mans political prison.14
The fear of losing an indigenous identity is therefore paramount.

Under such circumstances, the construction of a difference from the
others becomes compulsive. Kuch Kuch Hota Hai while revelling in
the cool American culture also propagates the necessity of preserving
an indigenous national culture. The immense success it enjoyed across
the globe, most notably in the third-world countries, bears testimony
to this fact.
The college-campus is perhaps the commonest site in Hindi
cinema for romantic encounter and its aftermath. In Kuch Kuch Hota
Hai, this site is remarkably transformed: the college campus is
designed more like a leisure space than a traditional educational
institute in India. A spacious compound, plush classrooms, new kind
of furniture, private lockers for individual students, Pepsi and Nescafe
machines, an indoor basket-ball court, a music counter with a DJ,
and walls covered with graffiti, cartoons, and a US flag underline the
iconography of abundance underlying the changing conditions of
India. The protagonists, Rahul and Anjali (Kajol), sport branded

outfits: Foreign brands such as DKNY, Polo Sport, Nike, Levis, and
Adidas appear in almost every frame. In this opulent campus, the
student-teacher equation has also undergone a prominent change.
Gone are the days of the dhoti-clad, bespectacled, and poverty-stricken
masters giving lessons in morality; instead, there is one Miss Briganza
(Archana Puran Singh), smart, slick, and cooler than her students.
She unabashedly defends the short-skirt, indulgingly responds to young
male students who flirt with her, and teaches Romeo and Juliet from
a coffee-table edition of the play. The principal, Mr. Malhotra
(Anupam Kher), is no moral vanguard; rather, he is far from serious.
He is fallible, boyish, and not too good at his job. He seems more
enthusiastic about college fests and flirting with Miss Briganza, than
in classroom teaching or other academic activities. Students treat him
more as friend than a principal, and are perfectly aware of his
vulnerabilities much to his comic discomfiture at times. His daughter
Tina (Rani Mukherjee) studies in Oxford University; he too was in
London for a considerable period of time.
The college-campus is the site where future citizens are made.
This site has become remarkably hybrid; it would not be an
exaggeration to state that it represents a transnational space in which
the modern day youth grow up. A highly westernized life-style, defined
by the kinds of clothes the students wear, the kind of games (for
instance, basket-ball, volley-ball, etc.) they play notably in the company
of cheerleaders* in the backdrop, and celebrations they participate in
(for instance, Friendship Day15), signals the transformation the rising
middle class is going through. The film, thereby, gives an idealised
picture of Mumbai advertising liberalization and the consumption
of multiplicity of commoditiesare posited as belonging naturally and
obviously in the urban Indian world16
* Recently the introduction of cheerleaders in the Indian Premier League matches

stirred up controversy across the country. The vanguards of Indian nationalism
dubbed the scantily clothed foreign cheerleaders as a serious threat to the purity
of Indian culture.
The visual utopia of over-abundance is extended beyond the

college-campus to the homes the protagonists inhabit. These grand
homes exhibit a magnificent range of appliances, consumerist
products, and most importantly have palatial dimensions that make
them almost unreal. However, such a representation of space is
metaphorical, if not completely fantastic. It is also in keeping with
the rise of a dynamic
middle class which is pushing the politicians to liberalize and globalize. Its
primary preoccupation is with a rising standard of living, with social mobility,
and it is enthusiastically embracing consumerist values and lifestyles.17
And films like Kuch Kuch Hota Hai promote these values and often
set the ideal standards of an upmarket lifestyle to which the growing
middle-class aspires.
While endorsing consumerist values, the film focuses on the
changing attitude of the older generation (Mr. Malhotra, Rahuls
mother Mrs. Khanna, and Rifat Bi are scarcely fastidious about
protecting old middle class values and seem sufficiently modern), the
new ambitions of the present generation (Anjali Junior18, Rahul and
Tinas daughter, wishes to become a VJ), the amazing influence of
television, specifically, Indianized American channels such as M-TV
on the children ( Anjali Junior is completely obsessed with the Neelam
Show. She enacts Neelam and borrows ideas from her to accomplish
the mammoth task of uniting her father with his college friend. In
fact, Neelam becomes a part of her life. The little girl seems to inhabit
the unreal space of the television and the real space of her living room
simultaneously.), new kinds of leisure spaces for the children (the
Sunshine Summer Camp in Simla), and the growing importance of
the west as a prospective economic resource (both the heroes, Rahul
and Aman the Salman Khan character frequent London and attend
Indian Exporters Conference).
Apparently, in this transnational space represented by the film,
rigidity of gender roles seems to have been assuaged. The portrayal
of Rahul is a significant departure from the traditional depictions of
mainstream heroes of the 60s, 70s, and 80s. He defies constructions
that are specifically masculine. Promiscuous and dandyish, he visits
the temple every Tuesday, is susceptible to cold (in an attempt to be

chivalrous, he gives his overcoat to a shivering Anjali; consequently,
he catches a terrible cold), and makes a show of his emotions in public
(he is definitely not among those who believe that boys dont cry).
On the other hand, Anjali plays basket-ball, loathes make-up, wears
male clothes, and dislikes being called a girl. A perfect tom-boy, she
is more at home with the guys than the girls, is least bothered about
her looks, is unkempt and sweaty, and is the happiest when she wins
a basket-ball game against Rahul. She too defies constructions that
are feminine. However, while Rahul remains the same, Anjali, almost
instinctively, surrenders to the demands society makes of her
biological sex.
III
Anjalis feminization is a form of resistance that indigenous Indian

cinema puts up against the cultural and economic imperialism of the
west. As R. Radhakrishnan puts it: In the fight against the enemy
from the outside, something within gets even more repressed and
woman becomes the mute but necessary allegorical ground for the
transactions of national history.19 Jyotika Virdi observes:
For more than a century now, the invention of the new woman has captured
the Indian imagination, constantly reinvented according to the exigencies of
the times. Although layers of meaning have accreted around the Indian
woman figure over time, its foundation rests on establishing her difference
from everything western.20
As evidenced by the articles referred to in the beginning of this paper,

nowadays, the Indian woman is allowed to go western outwardly, but
is expected to remain Indian at heart. Tina is a perfect example of
such a woman. She is remarkably westernized, having been born and
brought up in London. Yet she visits the temple every week, knows
bhakti songs by heart, and sacrifices her life to give birth to her
daughter for her husband was dying to have the baby. Tina is the ideal
Indian woman who becomes a point of reference for the tom-boyish
Anjali. Blissfully nonchalant about her femininity, Anjali becomes
painfully aware of her looks, attitude, and appearance when Tina
arrives and almost effortlessly seduces Rahul into falling in love with
her. Anjali loses the love game, and removes herself from the world
of Rahul, only to reappear eight years later. The mischievous tom-
boy of the college days is hardly recognizable. She is now a lady;
clad in chiffon saris and designer choli-ghagras, she is remarkably
poised, compliant, and calm.
In this context, its interesting to compare the picturization of the
two songs: Yeh ladki hai deewani and Ladki badi anjaani hai. The first
song establishes the relationship between Rahul and Anjali at the
beginning of the film; the second, while recalling the kind of equation
they shared in college, shows the alterations in the new equation, when
Anjali is sufficiently equipped to marry Rahul and act mother to his
daughter.
Generally, romantic film songs are symbolic representations of
sexual foreplay; carefully choreographed, these songs depict the boy
as overtly active and the girl markedly passive, and end with the boy
getting the girl. Yeh ladki hai deewani is a noteworthy departure from
this conventional picturization. Set in the college campus and the
beaches of Goa, in this song gender inequality is erased; mostly clad
in menswear, Anjali comfortably occupies a specifically male domain,
flaunting her biceps, fighting with the boys, pulling their legs, cheering
them as well as participating in the outdoor games they play. The
active/passive division is done away with, and the song ends
establishing Rahul and Anjali as equals.
Pitted against this song is Ladki badi anjaani hai. The lyrics are
a slight variation on that of the first song; but the choreography is
conspicuously different. The song follows a sequence in which Anjali
and Rahul play a basket-ball game. Interestingly, Yeh ladki hai deewani
comes just after a basket-ball match that Anjali wins; but Ladki badi
anjaani hai gleefully celebrates Anjalis defeat in a similar match.
Gender inequalities are forcefully constructed as Rahul proves to the
children that girls cannot play basket-ball. Anjali does not fight with
Rahul anymore; in fact, she accepts her defeat with remarkable
calmness. In fact, the sari Anjali wears during the game proves to
be the major handicap. She loses because of the sari. Rahul constantly
teases her for her new dress sense, but also approves of the same.
Ladki badi anjaani hai ends with Rahul gazing longingly at Anjali as
her sari flies off her body. In a desperate attempt to wrap the unruly
aanchal, Anjali recognizes the gaze but cannot return it; rather, she
reacts to it as a passive recipient. This is the climactic moment of
her surrender to Rahul. She is harnessed.
And all this happens in the summer camp. Anjali tells Aman that
she cannot afford to drop the camp as the children had become a
part of her life. Such a declaration is highly significant for it anticipates
her development into a mother-figure. In this context, Deniz
Kandiyoti is worth quoting:
On the one hand, nationalist movements invite women to participate more
fully in collective life by interpellating them as national actors: mothers,
educators, workers and even fighters. On the other hand, they reaffirm the
boundaries of culturally acceptable feminine conduct and exert pressure on
women to articulate their gender interests within the terms of reference set
by nationalist discourse.21
Anjali is, therefore, made to give up her originality, and act a sign
for Indian tradition and culture.
In the second-half of the film, when Anjali reappears, she is
sufficiently feminized; but her essential metamorphosis is completed
as she comes in touch with Mrs. Khanna, Rahuls mother (Farida
Jalal). The latter teaches her the essence of womanhood, while acting
as a proactive agent of restoring Indianness to the summer camp,
alarmingly westernized by Colonel Almeida (Johnny Lever), a
sycophantic admirer of the British Empire. He had a flag of Great
Britain flying high in the middle of the valley, much to the shocking
dismay of Mrs. Khanna who promptly pulls it down to replace it by
its Indian counterpart. She even goes to the extent of setting up a
puja ghar and makes aarti a routine activity for the children. In fact,
Anjali becomes a willing party to all this paraphernalia of worship (we
may recall that she is never seen in the vicinity of the temple in the
first-half of the film), and the bhakti chorus Raghupati Raghav Raja
Ram, Patit Pawan Sita-Ram she leads ends with the dramatic entry
of Rahul. The moment of this reunion is especially significant. The
covert suggestion is that the Almighty has a key role to play in assisting
Anjali win back her lost love.

In fact, in spite of widespread industrialization, spiritual practices
and family bonding have continued to play an important role in Indian
life. Gurcharan Das believes that India, despite its rapid westernization,
would be able to overcome dullness and bleakness due to the powerful
hold of religion. The persistence of God will be its strongest
defence.22
Spirituality and religiosity are, in a way, the strongest resistance
to complete westernization. Kuch Kuch Hota Hai upholds this fact.
However, we may note that the rituals the film promotes are
predominantly Hindu. This is rather crucial in understanding the
India the film imagines. In a compact summary of the rise of
Hinduism, Sunil Khilnani observes that Hindu nationalism has its
roots in the late nineteenth century Brahminic responses to colonial
rule. In the 1980s, it gained an imaginative hold over the middle-
class at large to whom it offered a religious idiom tailored for
democratic times. This political Hinduism was not quite traditional;
but its primary feature is its intrinsically decentralized structure. More
singular and unified definitions of Hinduism emerged under the
Brahminic patronage during the colonial period. Hinduism thereby
became a self-consciously emulative reaction to the challenges of
Christianity and Islam. In this sense a Hindu identity is as decisively
modern as a regional or national identity. This culturally unfamiliar
Hindu self-definition became popular with the westernized middle-
classes.23 Kuch Kuch Hota Hai advocates this Hinduism that re-
emerged after the general elections in 1991 and 1996 both of which
gave the country successive hung parliaments, and minority or
coalition governments. With the BJP coming to power in 1998 (as
the leading partner of a coalition government with 182 seats in the
Lok Sabha), a specifically Hindu nationalist identity was further
asserted. Kuch Kuch Hota Hai released in the same year, therefore,
imagines a more or less homogenized Hindu India, while cursorily
recognizing, if not completely alienating, the existence of other
religious groups, namely Muslims. Such representation is aligned with
the sensibilities of, what Amartya Sen calls, proto-Hindutva. The
proto-Hindutva enthusiasts are a larger group compared to the hard-
core advocate of Hindutva; they are comparatively less zealous and

less fundamental, and acknowledge the presence of other religions,
but agree with the ideology of Hindutva in giving primary status to
the Hindus in India.24 The introduction of Rifat Bi (Himani Shivpuri),
the Muslim Hostel Supervisor of St. Xaviers College, to the narrative
seems specially crucial in this context. Her role is that of a well-wisher
of the Hindu characters central to the film, while she herself seems
to inhabit uncomplainingly and almost happily a marginal status. The
implication is highly political the film while asserting the centrality
of the Hindus, also acknowledges the existence of the Muslims in an
attempt to redefine the equation between the two dominant religious
groups of the country. Although the film advocates a healthy equation,
it, nonetheless, does not attribute an equal status to the Muslims. The
paradigm represented by the film remains predominantly Hindu all
through.
Blending realism and fantasy, Kuch Kuch Hota Hai narrates the
tale of a neocolonial India, addressing and in the end apparently
expunging the anxieties of preserving its national culture. The tom-
boy is feminized, the adhura parivaar is completed, and modernity
is adopted through the conservative filters of religious piety and
domestic virtue. Both the women protagonists become the sites of
contest in which the conflict between the global and the local is played
out and resolved. In spite of the repeated assertion Pyar ek hi baar
hota hai (Love happens only once), Rahul falls in love twice. Rahuls
reconciling his love for the cosmopolitan Tina and the locally rooted
Anjali is remarkably symbolic of appropriation of the global by the
local. In fact, Thomas B. Hansen discussing the reception of the film
in South Africa makes an interesting point:
The importance of this film lies, therefore, in the intersection of two
dynamics: the internal circulation and debates on what proper Indianness
is, and should be, and the external dimension, the representation of the
community, of India and Indian culture as such to a larger South African
audience. The film was welcomed by so many because it served to make the
Indian community visible and recognized on the basis of its distinct cultural
heritage, suitably modernised, de-ethnicised and packaged to suit the tastes
of so-called cosmopolitan audiences.25
Kaarsholms views on the all-inclusiveness of the film shore up

Hansens: The film presents us with
a scenario in which the hip-hop and gangsta rap are mutated into work-out
exercises for well-nourished specimens of the Mumbai bourgeoisie, and one
which naturally and effortlessly leads to an extravagant, traditional Hindu
wedding as its conclusion and rounding off. In this sense, the film very
successfully represents a dream universe in which the local succeeds, is
marked by progress and middle-class prosperity, and assumes its obvious
place within a globalized modernity.26
The question that keeps on nagging us in the end is whether an India

as represented by the film exists at all. Cant we say that such a
representation that cautiously selects and deletes various aspects of
the reality that is India, is a state-controlled method of demonstrating
to the world an illusory picture of a remarkably progressive India that
is actually a reality only for a dominant bourgeoisie group that is still
a minority? If that is the case, shall we say that Kuch Kuch Hota Hai
optimistically anticipates a reality with which all of India can identify
in the future?
Notes
1. Gurcharan Das, The Rise and Rise of a Middle Class in India

Unbound: From Independence to Global Information Age (New Delhi:
Penguin, 2002), 283.
2. Sukanya Venkatraghavan, 15 Things Facing Extinction in Hindi Movies,
Filmfare, June 2007, 77.
3. Ashwin Ahmed, Mama Mia: The new mom is a bomb, Sunday Times
of India, Sunday, 13 May 2007, 9.
4. Frantz Fanon, The Pitfalls of National Consciousness in The Wretched
of the Earth, quoted in John Mcleod, Beginning Postcolonialism (New York
and Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 89.
5. Ahmed, Mama Mia: The new mom is a bomb.
6. Jyotika Virdi, The Cinematic ImagiNation: Indian Popular Films as Social
History (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2007), 207.
7. Virdi, The Cinematic ImagiNation, 201.
8. Das, The Rise and Rise of a Middle Class, 281.
9. Arjun Appadurai and Carol A. Breckenridge, Public Modernity in India
in Consuming Modernity: Public Culture in Contemporary India, edited by

Carol A. Breckenridge (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996), 7.
10. Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern, in
The Spaces of Postmodernity: Readings in Human Geography, edited by M.
J. Dear and S. Flusty (Oxford and Massachusetts: Blackwell, 2002), 451.
11. We may note that the euphoria for Hindi films in the southern states
of India namely, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Kerala is
quite negligible. Though Hindi movies are released in the multiplexes
(rarely in the stand-alone theatres) in Bangalore, Hyderabad, or Chennai,
the viewers are predominantly migrants (mostly IT professionals) from
other states, especially of the north, east or north-east. However, South
Indian films which are very often remade in Hindi are not conspicuously
dissimilar in content from the mainstream Bollywood flicks. They uphold
a more or less same ethos, though the treatment is different. Otherwise
the likes of Priyadarshan or Maniratnam would not have taken the risk
of remaking them for the rest of India; several other Bollywood producers
such as Boney Kapoor or Indrakumar have also borrowed plots from
successful South Indian films time and again.
12. Preben Kaarsholm, Unreal City: Cinematic Representation, Globalization
and the Ambiguities of Metropolitan Life, in City Flicks: Indian Cinema
and the Urban Experience, edited by Preben Kaarsholm (Calcutta and
New Delhi: Seagull Books, 2004), 15-16.
13. See Gurcharan Das, Modern vs. Western and A New Country in
India Unbound: From Independence to Global Information Age (New Delhi:
Penguin, 2002).
14. Arjun Appadurai, Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural
Economy (1990) in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader,
edited by Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (Hertfordshire: Harvester
15. The celebration of Friendship Day has a particular significance. (We may
recall that the year before the release of Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, the Yash
Chopra blockbuster Dil to Pagal Hai had popularised the celebration of
Valentines Day.) On the one hand, the popularity of these especial Days
boost the business of the greetings card industry like Archies and
Hallmark; on the other hand, the urgency of celebrating these Days
point towards individualization and disruption of communal living, based
on sharing and togetherness. The celebration of these Days is, in a way,
desperate attempts to sustain relationships and their meanings in a society
where communal and kinship ties are fast dissolving. The world of Kuch
Kuch Hota Hai while celebrating family ties, very subtly underlines the
possibility of complete individualization. Therefore, a natural bonding
like friendship needs to be concretized and recognized through friendship
bands. To put it rather blatantly and at the risk of sounding sentimental,
relationships are sustained through commoditization. For, you buy a
friendship band to convey your feelings to your friend. The same holds
true for the festivities associated with Mothers Day, Valentines Day, etc.
16. Kaarsholm, Unreal City, 18.
17. Das, The Rise and Rise of a Middle Class, 287.
18. Since Rahuls daughter is a namesake of his college friend, I choose to
call the former Anjali Junior, and the latter Anjali, to avoid confusion.
19. R. Radhakrishnan, Nationalism, Gender, and Narrative in Nationalism
and Sexualities, edited by A. Parker (New York and London: Routledge,
1992), 84.
20. Virdi, The Cinematic ImagiNation, 85.
21. Deniz Kandiyoti, Identity and its Discontents: Women and the Nation
(1991) in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, edited by
Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (Hertfordshire: Harvester
22. Das, India Unbound, 309, 355.
23. Sunil Khilnani, The Idea of India (New Delhi: Penguin, 1998; reprinted
in 2004), 186-187.
24. Amartya Sen, India: Large and Small in The Argumentative Indian:
Writings on Indian Culture, History and Identity (London and New York:
Penguin Books, 2005), 53.
25. Thomas B. Hansen, In Search of the Diasporic Self: Bollywood in South
Africa in Bollyworld: Popular Indian Cinema through a Transnational Lens,
edited by Raminder Kaur and Ajay J. Sinha (New Delhi: Sage, 2005),
251.
26. Kaarsholm, Unreal City, 17.
In Search of Swaraj: A Gandhian Reading of
R. K. Narayans The Guide
Nandini Bhattacharya
This essay was written in awareness of, and in response to, the fact
that M.K. Gandhis Hind Swaraj (1909) would be soon celebrating
its hundredth year of existence. Written on board of ship The Kildonan
Castle on Gandhis way back to South Africa from London1, this book
provided a startlingly radical alternative to the discourses of colonial
modernity and European paradigm of civilization all at a time when
the sun of prosperity was possibly shining the brightest on the British
Raj and when such discursive structures appeared not only infallible
but normative. My contention is that many of Gandhis creative
contemporaries in the world of literature and other arts were
conscious of, and responsive to, this radical alterity, articulated in the
Hind Swaraj in particular, and Gandhian writings in general.
While most of the early Indian English novels, such as Kanthapura,
Untouchable, Waiting for the Mahatma employ Gandhi both as a
character as well as a symbol, and Gandhian ideologies as their
structuring motif, I would like to refer to a more recent novel, R.K.
Narayans The Guide and show how Gandhian ideals, his most
cherished principles are worked out within its fictional space.
In a fifties novel like The Guide, Gandhi seems to have been
reduced to an irrelevant and comical aside, a cartoon-like picture
peering on a khadder bag full of vegetables, which an angry mama
(mothers brother) throws on the floor as a sort of defiant pastoral
retort to the urban debaucheries of Raju and Rosie. This irrelevance
of Gandhi in a 1950s novel seems to be only a logical extension of
the increasing irrelevance of Gandhian ideologies so far as the Indian
nation in the fifties was concerned. Burgeoning under the Nehruvian
five-year plans, this nation was foregrounding every thing that Gandhi
Nandini Bhattacharya | 203
had opposed during his lifespan rapid urbanization, investment in

heavy industry and technology, unabashed worship of money, material
success, and brute power. R.K. Narayan is a deceptively simple
novelist who seems to subscribe to this general consensus about
Gandhian irrelevance in the India of the fifties, and by analogy
Malgudi (a spatio-temporal matrix, which his fictional characters
inhabit) of the 1950s. A closer reading however reveals that the
narrator of The Guide proceeds to celebrate those very discredited,
outdated Gandhian ideals, and give them a new valency through the
narrative texture of the novel.
Narayans use of Gandhian ideologies in The Guide can be truly
appreciated through an understanding of the discourse of Swaraj.
Significantly, Gandhi used the term Swaraj to connote a radically
alternative position; to contest and deconstruct the normative position
granted to the European independent nation-state, or what was in
more common parlance was known as the Raj. As Bikhu Parekh notes:
Since the civilization Gandhi wanted the Indian state to nurture was
sympathetic, tolerant, spiritual and open, his vision of India had little in
common with the collectivist, monolithic, aggressive, and xenophobic
nationalism of the Western and central European countries2.
As Swaraj was an entirely different concept, and not a mimic

European nation, a transition from British Raj to Indian Swaraj, was
not simply about replacement of the white ruler with a brown ruler.
As Gandhi repeatedly noted he was not interested in replacing King
Stork with King Log, that is, similar kinds of rule only under different
names. For one thing, the attainment of Swaraj for Gandhi was more
of a psycho-spiritual exercise, an intensely private effort, rather than
an entirely political, economic and public movement. Attainment of
Swaraj (literally self-rule) was as much a matter of gaining a paradise
within [] happier far.3 through a conscious overcoming of vices
such as propensity for greed, lust and violence, as it was about the
inculcating of certain virtues such as the willing renunciation of
material things, an internalization of a spirit of love towards all living
beings.
A number of political thinkers have defined Gandhi as an
anarchist, as he continued to believe with Thoreau that a government
204 | Nandini Bhattacharya
is best which governs the least. Gandhi went on to define most state
power as repressive and coercive; advocate progressive decentralization
of monolithic state power, as well as practice of rigorous, puritanical
self discipline for each member of his imagined nation, or what he
defined as a disciplined rule from within4, as the surest path to the
attainment of a true Swaraj.
It is because Gandhi continued to define his alternative nation,
his Swaraj in psycho-spiritual terms that he never confined its
existence to one particular national boundary. In an essay entitled
Nationalism v/s Internationalism published on 18th June, 1925 in
Young India he noted that though his concerns were chiefly about
India, he was concerned about the welfare of the whole world and
asserted the Indian experiment of Swaraj would attempt to avoid the
narrowness, selfishness and exclusiveness, which is the bane of
modern nations and find full self-expression for benefit and service
of humanity at large.5
For Gandhi, the colonial state, the very European concept of
nation-state or Raj, was based on valorization of limitless desire for
money, sex, and material objects, worship of technology, and
legitimization of violence as a means of fulfilling such desires, and
therefore needs to be opposed on ethical grounds. Gandhi spoke about
the twin virtues of aparigraha (renunciation, the cultivation of a non-
acquisitive, non-desirous mindset) and ahimsa (non-violence that is
fuelled by love for all beings) as the ideological bases of his imagined
nation, his Swaraj. The virtue of aparigraha was often extended to
include the virtue of controlled chastity, the willing renunciation of
sexual desires. In Hind Swaraj he stated that chastity is one of the
greatest disciplines and in Young India of 1920, he demanded celibacy
to be central to national reform. According to Joseph Alter, even the
title of his journal Young India connotes an imagined celibate nation.6
These ideas are most cogently spelt out in his 1909, tract Hind
Swaraj, where he speaks about evils of fetishizing technology,
worshipping material things and legitimizing violence, as the primary
crimes that the Western nation-state has perpetrated upon
underdeveloped countries like India all in the name of civilization
and progress. Gandhi notes that in India the evils of what go in the
In Search of Swaraj | 205
name of modern civilization have expressed themselves chiefly in the

form of urban living, and the flourishing of modern technologies such
as the railway-system. Urban living has increased greed, and desire
for material success; the railway-system, which has been touted as the
epitome of Western civilization, has only succeeded in tightening the
noose of colonial control around Indian necks, while transforming
Indians into a more materialistic and money minded kind of people
than ever before, inducing them to turn their backs on virtues of
sharing and caring. As Gandhi writes in his Hind Swaraj:
It must be manifest to you that, but for the railways, the English could not
have had such a hold on India as they have. [] Railways have also increased
the frequency of famines because, owing to facility of means of locomotion,
people sell grain and it is sent to the dearest markets. People become careless
and so the pressure of famine increases. Railways accentuate the evil nature
of man. Bad men fulfill their evil designs with greater rapidity. The holy
places of India have become unholy. Formerly, people went to these places
with very great difficulty. Generally, therefore only the real devotees visited
such places. Nowadays rogues visit them in order to practice their roguery.7
In this context, it would be useful to look at another contemporary

text, penned by a writer who was not only implicated in the anti-
nationalist movement, but also closely associated with Gandhi and his
ideals. I am speaking of Saratchandra Chattopadhaya, the President
of National congress of the Howrah Zilla, in undivided British Bengal,
and his employment of the railways as a trope of evil desires, in his
fictional works. In his Srikanto iii the eponymous hero wanders into
a situation where he is obliged to tend to his long lost acquaintance
Satish Bharadwaj, suffering from cholera. As Srikanto witnesses the
dying of Satish, as well as the ghastly suffering and death of a young
child from coolie barracks for lack of potable water, and non-
availability of any medical help, he cannot but agree with the village
elders that there is an intrinsic link between the desecration of the
Indian countryside, the sufferings of common people and the
establishment of new railway lines:
Really, what was this great compulsion on the part of the colonizer, to tear
apart the countryside with another railway line? Did the people of this
country ever want such a thing? They never did. And yet the masters must
have it. We dont have lakes, ponds or wells; not a drop to drink. Cattle
die a gruesome death in summer months, parched of thirst. Would Satishbabu
himself have died of cholera, if clean drinking water were freely available?
Innumerable diseases, ranging from cholera to malaria now ravage the
countryside, but are our masters worried about it? No way! They are only
concerned about establishment of some more railway lines, so that every bit
of local agricultural produce can be transported abroad!8
What is more, like Gandhi, Saratchandra is able to establish inevitable

links between the expansion of the railway system with the swelling
of human greed as well as the corruption of the cooperative,
community-based mindset of rural India. As the village elder makes
the necessary differentiation between pre-and post-railway India:
Sir when we were young, there was a not a railway line within 20 miles of
our house. How cheap and abundant were things then! If someone had some
farm produce, the entire rural community got a share of it. Now no one
wants to share even two bundles of spinach growing in ones backyard. Lets
save it for the 8.30 local and hand it over to the middle-man, so that we
earn some money, they say. Now the other name for giving is unnecessary
wastage. Sir, the sad thing is that men and women have become totally
dehumanized caught up in this great craze of making money.9
In the Gandhian scheme of things, while fetishizing of machines is

one of the great evils visiting colonized India, the other is almost
inevitably, its urbanization; its turning back on village life and
community-value systems. Urban India, with its ruthlessly materialistic
mindset, and unabashed worship of god mammon, represents the
other face of alienated India, just as railways represent all the evils
of modern, materialistic, machine-dependant civilization. Gandhi
notes that
large cities were a snare and a useless encumbrance and [] people [were]
not [...] happy in them, that there [were] gang of robbers and thieves,
prostitution and vice flourishing in them [].10
It is only natural that Gandhi would advocate a return to village

India as well as the adoption of a non-materialistic, alternative
technology driven lifestyle, to discover that ideal of Swaraj. True
Swaraj is to be found by returning to village India, both literally and

metaphorically, literally to a space aligned to nature, and metaphorically
to people who have rejected a life of unlimited desire to adopt the
ideal of aparigraha, the spirit of renunciation.
The narrative of The Guide is worked out between this axis of
bhog (unlimited enjoyment, submission to desires), which is the
essence of Raj and tyag (renunciation), which epitomizes an ideal state
of Swaraj. Through the transformation of a rogue called Raju and by
association, the transformation/metamorphosis of alienated Malgudi
(a spatio-temporal trope of the Indian nation) Narayan, presents an
almost literal working out of the Gandhian doctrine of transition from
a life of bhog to a conscious adoption of tyag; from a state of bondage
which is the raj to a domain of freedom, which is Swaraj or self-
rule.
Chronologically speaking, the story of The Guide begins in an
idyllic, quasi-pastoral setting, with a father, mother and their infant
son, living amidst nature, and dwelling in a house made of natural
objects such as clay, planks of dealwood, and coconut leaves. Little
Raju spends carefree days under the shade of the spreading tamarind
tree, while his father and mother live a simple unostentatious life,
loved and supported by a community of neighbours and friends. Note
that Rajus parents remain satisfied with little, even when they become
rich, and his mother considers the buying and use of the juthka (horse
carriage) an unnecessary expenditure, as well as an equally unnecessary
exercise in ostentatious living.
Within this veritable Garden of Eden, the railways enter like the
proverbial serpent and go on to disturb and transform not only the
life of rural Malgudi forever, but also the nature of innocent Raju.
Railways infect the child like a malaise, as he picks up abusive
language from the railroad workers. Rajus father sends the child away
to a far off school as a punitive measure, but the harm has been done,
and Raju, unlike his father, has learnt to recognize money and material
success as the most important gods in his life.
In establishing an analogy between the railways, and vices such
as corruption, greed and crass materiality Narayan is actually
restating an Indian commonplace. In Srikanto iii, (written approximately
20 years before The Guide) both village elders, as well as Srikanto

admit that railways have a morally tainting effect on human beings.
Commenting on the dead Satishs moral deficiencies, his debauchery,
drunkenness and tendency to misappropriate money, an acquaintance
in the village notes How can a railway- man be any better; after all
he must have tasted the pleasures of abundant cash. Most people
like Satish Bharadwaj (Srikantos friend who dies of cholera) who have
come in close proximity of railways and its life, have become crude,
materialistic, corrupt and self-centred.
In The Guide, Rajus transformation is an extension of the
transformation of Malgudi itself. Malgudi successively loses its rural
as well as communal character, with the introduction of railway
system, just as it metamorphoses into a commercial town that no one
owns, to which no one belongs, and where the pursuit of money, sex
and material success are the primary and only goals. Unlike the old
Malgudi where a stodgy old couple brought up their child amidst
natural surroundings, supported and well-loved by a community of
neighbours, this is a new town, of amoral and alienated inmates
defined simply by their material success and connected to each other
only by the cash they exchange. This new spirit of crass materiality
is aided and abetted by a railway system, which brings in money in
the form of alien tourists, coming in hordes to consume Malgudis
natural attractions. These tourists are, in turn, fleeced by Malgudi
inmates, that would rather sell natural beauties as packaged items for
hard cash, rather than live in harmony amidst them, as Rajus
forefathers had done.
In many ways, Gaffur and Railway Raju (as he has now comes
to be defined) are symptomatic of this new Malgudi, a veritable urban
dystopia, swarming with touts and rogues waiting to fleece the
unsuspecting outsider. Significantly this new town is introduced with
the description of these charlatans: At the market fountain stood the
old shark Gaffur looking for a victim. He made a specialty of collecting
all derelict vehicles of the country and rigging them up.11 Joseph,
Raju, and Gaffur form a trinity of cheats, and repeatedly declare that,
they will provide any service required of them, irrespective of its moral
implications. When Raju discovers that some tourists want to employ
him as a quasi-pimp, he notes:

Well it was not my business to comment. My business stopped with taking
them there [the Peak House at the top of the deserted Mempi Hills, ideal
for such romantic assignations], and to see that Gaffur went back to pick
them at the right time.12
Gaffur does talk of morality (indirectly condemning Rajus living

together with a married woman Rosie) but only because Rajus
romantic indiscretions threaten to destabilize the nice applecart of
profit which this team of touts had built up, and not because Malgudi
is defined by any particular code of moral conduct.
To this Malgudi of infinite desires enters the beautiful Rosie, who is perhaps,
desire personified. From the very first day the parameters of relationship
between Rosie and Raju are clearly outlined Rosie stands for sexual as well
as monetary attractions that Raju has always unabashedly worshipped. The
twin attractions are heightened when Rosie metamorphoses into the dancing
star Nalini and begins earning spectacular amounts, all of which Raju uses
and enjoys. With the help of Rosie/Nalini, Raju becomes an important man
in the town, hobnobbing with big-shots, and eating and drinking away till
the wee hours of the nights.
The natural rhythms of Rajus fathers household, beginning with the

first rays of the sun, and ending with darkness, is replaced by Rajus
gambling and drinking away the nights and waking up in afternoons
with a hangover. The frugality of Rajus fathers household is replaced
by conspicuous spending on Rajus part. It is interesting to compare
Rajus mothers stodgy opposition to the buying of the juthka or Rajus
fathers ambivalent approach to the contraption to the ease and
nonchalance with which Raju spends money to show the world that
he has arrived.
The idea of unlimited and unabashed enjoyment of material
things (food, drinks and sex) or bhog was defined by Gandhi as the
malaise of modern urban civilization. This never ending pursuit of
desires reaches its culmination in Rajus hiding of Marcos book from
Nalini, (possibly because a book indicates an alternative perception
of life, which is acutely discomfiting to a material man like Raju) and
his forging of Nalinis signature to retain her jewellery box. These
actions are typical of a man who is suffering from the throes of desire
a disease that makes a person want more and more things, without
ever contemplating their real use. As Gandhi says:
(T)he mind is a restless bird: the more it gets the more it wants and still
remains unsatisfied. The more we indulge in our passions, the more unbridled
they become. Our ancestors therefore set a limit on our indulgences.13
Through an equally bizarre concatenation of events Rajus crime

of forgery is exposed, and he ends up in jail, losing at one stroke,
his fortunes as well as his source of sexual fulfillment, that is Nalini.
Strangely enough, Rajus redemption as well as the resurrection
of Malgudi, the city tainted by desire, is accomplished outside its
limits in a pristine village appropriately called Mangala, or the good
and holy. Mangala is significantly similar to Malgudis pastoral past,
comprising of a community of simple and trusting villagers like Velan,
who also live as a community and believe in human goodness. This
recurring feature of Narayans novels where characters discover and/
or work out an alternative and a superior lifestyle in the midst of
nature either in a far flung village like Mangala, or a pastoral retreat
away from the hurly-burly of modernity like Nallapas Grove has many
Gandhian echoes. Gandhis construction of the Indian village as an
alternative locus of civilization and the embodiment of true Swaraj
is definitely the thematic imperative of The Guide. Narayan sets up
an implicit correspondence between the implicit value- system of the
village-space of Mangala, and the reformative/redemptive process of
the sinner/rogue Raju, which takes place within those surroundings.
The unshakeable faith and implicit trust of the villagers in the
supposed god-man, transforms the rogue into a saint just as it redeems
Malgudi from its morally alienated condition.
Raju acquires the virtue of aparigraha, non-desire, through a long
and arduous process of identifying with other people and their needs,
slowly abandoning his ingrained habit of giving attention only to
personal wants. His final act of redemption is expressed through his
embarking upon a programme of life-threatening fast in order to bring
down the rains, and so save the lives of the drought-ridden villagers.
The perceptive reader would note that Rajus fasting programme is
by no means a homogeneous block but is marked by distinct stages

of development. Raju graduates from an unwilling faster, trapped in
the web of his own making to a man who considers the whole exercise
a punishment and lusts for food to one who has finally overcome all
desires and wants to deprive his body and perform an expiatory
suffering for the well-being of his community. In this context it would
not be too out of place to remind the reader that Gandhi (drawing
upon Hindu mythological sources) had repeatedly stressed the need
for tapas or ascetic rigour (usually expressed through life-threatening
fasts) as a means of achieving the desired Swaraj, and that had
repeatedly embarked upon such fasting programmes to achieve the
desired political objective. His Autobiography is replete with exhortations
to fast without desire and in the chapter entitled Bramhacharya-II
Gandhi notes:
Control of the palate is the first essential in the observance of the vow [of
bramhacharya] As an external aid to bramhacharya, fasting is as necessary
as selection and restriction of diet. [] Fasting is useful, when mind
cooperates with starving body, that is to say, when it cultivates a distaste for
the objects that are denied to the body. Mind is at the root of all sensuality.
Fasting therefore has a limited use, for a fasting may continue to be swayed
by passion.14
As Raju comes closer to the achievement of his personal Swaraj, a

conquest of lust, anger and unlimited desire, his language too, begins
to acquire a sparse, bare quality. While the world wants to capture
this miraculous moment, Raju seems to have removed himself from
all desires to show-off and this must be seen in the context of Rajus
eternal obsession to be the virtuoso performer, the showman par
excellence.
The fasting body is the most perfect expression of aparigraha and
tyag, the final renunciation of desires. Gandhi repeatedly discovers
contiguities between achievement of Swaraj and fasting without
desire, and speaks of fasting as a means of self-restraint.15 Many
scholars have described Gandhis fasting body as a kind of political
statement in itself, critiquing/questioning in visual terms, the body-
centric culture of the Western modernity. By freeing the body from
its needs Gandhi as it were creates an alternative nation, within his

person, a Swaraj, free from material cravings. The corpulent, and by
association, the feasting body of a Western leader like Winston
Churchill, at the height of his powers, covered from top to toe with
expensive clothing, and with a phallic cigar protruding from his
mouth, could be compared to the fasting and semi-naked body of
Gandhi, to have a sort of visual correlative of this contrasting idea
of nationhood16. Rajus well-clothed, well-drunk, well-sexed and well-
fed body is successively denuded, as he enters the final stages of
fasting, emaciated, Christ-like with hands spread eagled, and supported
by his followers.
However the important thing to note is that through Rajus most
final and definitive act of renunciation, aparigraha, he is able to
transform a selfish, materialistic, cynical and fragmented group of
people into a loving, trusting and sharing community, a community
united in their hopes that the miraculous may happen within their
midst. The real miracle is not the coming down of rains (which in
any case remains in the zone of a possible probability) but the miracle
of a community reborn. And may I remind my readers that for a brief
period in Indian history it was such a miracle that Gandhi had wrought
the metamorphosis of a self-doubting West-gazing community into
a nation, confident in its own identity, believing in its own thought
and practice systems the miracle of a Swaraj reborn.
Notes
1. For more details, refer to the edited by Introduction of M. K. Gandhi,

Hind Swaraj and other Writings, edited by Anthony J. Parel (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1997).
2. Bikhu Parekh, Gandhis Political Philosophy: A Critical Examination
(Macmillan: Basingstoke 1989), 194.
3. John Milton, Paradise Lost Book IX, in The Poems of John Milton,
edited by Cary and Fowler (London and New York: Longman, 1968).
4. See Interview with Journalists, 6 March 1931, CWMG, vol. 51, 220.
5. See CWMG, vol. 32, 12.
6. See Joseph Alter, Gandhis Body: Sex Diet and the Politics of Nationalism
(Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 2000), 8.
7. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj and other Writings, 267.

8. Saratchandra Chattopadhaya, Srikanto iii, in Sarat Rachanabali. Vol i.
(Kolkata: Deys Publishing, 1993) 223. All translations from Srikanto
from Bengali to English are my own.
9. Ibid.
10. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, 281.
11. R.K. Narayan, The Guide (Mysore: Indian Thought Publications, 1958),
56.
12. Ibid., 62-63.
13. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, 279.
14. M. K. Gandhi, The Autobiography or The Story of My Experiments with
Truth (1927-1929), translated by Mahadev Desai (Ahmedabad: Navajivan
Publishing House, 1940), 166-167.
15. Ibid., 265.
16. Significantly, Churchill expressed a visceral disgust of Gandhis frail body
and his mode of clothing (or lack of it). In 1931, he stated that it was
alarming and also nauseating to see Mr. Gandhi, a seditious Middle
Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir [] striding half-naked up the steps
of the Viceregal palace [] to parley on equal terms with the representative
of the King- Emperor. See Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, vols.
5, (Heinemann: London, 1976), 390.
Karnad, South Indian Folk Theatre and Hayavadana
Parichay Patra
Girish Karnads theatre reflects not only his preoccupation with a

handful of themes and his deft handling of them, but also his effort
to invest a different performance idiom through his experiments with
folk theatre forms. Karnads career as a playwright demands to be
situated within the larger context of play writing in the postcolonial
nation states all over the world. Post-independence Indian nation gets
narrated through the plays of Karnad, sometimes through the critique
of Nehruvian era (as in Tughluq), or through the plea for a little bit
of sense in the rulers of the state (as in the conclusion of Hayavadana).
Karnad and his contemporaries (Mohan Rakesh, Badal Sircar and
Vijay Tendulkar), tried to dispense with the existing theatrical
traditions of India relying upon proscenium stage and fourth-wall
realism. For instance, Hayavadana and Nagamandala are decidedly
non-realistic, its mythic structures and narrative style should be taken
at face value. The pre-colonial past of Indian nation is represented
through various forms; the colonizing process has been given enough
emphasis as well (as in The Dreams of Tipu Sultan).
My paper seeks to explore some of the unresolved thematic
complexities of Hayavadana, and explain at length Karnads use of
South Indian folk theatre forms. The situation of the post-60s Indian
drama and its postcolonial implications are something that I attempted
to analyze, in order to show how a novel theatrical idioms beginning
coincided with the birth of a nation. Karnad and his contemporaries
were involved in the process of writing a nation. And, as Homi Bhabha
taught us, the idea of a nation is inseperable from its narration.
Karnads nation-writing project is therefore focused on from a
postcolonial, indigenous perspective.
Karnad, South Indian Folk Theatre and Hayavadana | 215
As the world is divided

into two orbs :
One lit up by the Sun
the other hid in the Shade,
So also the human soul,
the habitation of gods,
is split into two realms [From, Bali: The Sacrifice]
Karnads Bali: The Sacrifice (Hittina Hunja in Kannada) opens with

the verse on the duality of human nature, the microcosm, which
reflects that of the macrocosm, the universe. The eminent theatre-
director Prasanna, who once directed Karnads Anju Mallige and Agni
Aur Barkha (Agni Mattu Male in Kannada) for the NSD. repertory,
commented, Karnad likes always to split the persona, present a
conflict and urge a confrontation between dualities. He does this in
all his plays.1 In Bali: The Sacrifice, we find the Queen torn between
two of her men, the king, her loyal husband, and the Mahout, her
secret lover, whom she visits at night. In Naga-Mandala, Rani becomes
confused enough to distinguish between the two, her crude husband
Appanna and the Naga, the tender Snake-lover who visits her at night
in disguise of her husband. The theatrical measure Karnad took to
complicate the problem was to make the same actor play both the
roles, Appanna and Naga. In Tughlaq we do not have a menage-a-
trois, but the eponymous character himself becomes a split personality.
Hayavadana, Karnads one of the most popular plays of all time,
consists of a main plot with the same problem of duality, problem
of a splintered self. Much is already written, discussed and webbed
on the Devadatta-Padmini-Kapila story, a story found originally in
Somdevs Kathasaritsagara and in Betal Panchavimsati, and later, retold
by Thomas Mann from a different perspective. Manns The Transposed
Heads was the immediate source for Karnads play, a story that
questioned the supremacy of the head over the other limbs of the body.
The subplot consisting Hayavadana, a man with a horses head, has
obvious resemblances with the main plot. And the play opens with
216 | Parichay Patra
the Ganesh Vandana, prayer to the God who himself carries an

elephants head on his shoulder. Yet he is the Bigneshwara, one who
removes all obstacles, and the play becomes a quest for completeness.
Devadatta and Kapila become involved in an endless enmity while
pursuing their own path in order to achieve completeness. This
symbolic enmity between the soul and the body destroys both of them.
On the other hand, Hayavadana achieves completeness, though, in
spite of becoming a complete man, he becomes a complete horse.
The relevance of Hayavadana is often questioned by the critics.
Prasanna argues that it is a mere exoticization of India in order to
sell Indian ethnicity in the Western market.2 Shankho Ghosh, in his
preface to the Bengali translation of the play, mentions Shambhu
Mitras pejorative comment on the (ir)relevance of the play.3
But this splintered self question is not merely a philosophical one.
Karnads plays are deeply rooted in the context of the post-
independence India. The reign of Tughlaq becomes a metaphor for
that of Nehru and the ahistoricity of Tughlaq. As Rita Kothari argues
it becomes a refusal to be drawn into the vortex of European
signification.4
The duality problem symbolizes the problem of the post-
independence India, and, as Soyinka tries to make the Nigerians
aware of the pre-colonial past as well as the post-colonial political
context on the eve of the Nigerian independence in his A Dance of
the Forests, Karnads splintered self question should also be read as
a cultural metaphor. The view gains ground through the dialogues of
Hayavadana, when he says:
So I took interest in the social life of the Nation Civics, Politics,
Patriotism, Nationalism, Indianization, the Socialist Pattern of SocietyI
have tried everything. But wheres my society? Where? You must help me
to become a complete man, Bhagavata Sir.5
Or, when he says:

Thats why I sing all these patriotic songs and the National Anthem! That
particularly! I have noticed that the people singing the National Anthem
always seem to have ruined their voices, so I try. But- but-it-it doesnt seem
to work. What should I do? 6
Regarding this newly-emerged nationalism Helen Gilbert comments:

(T)he play as a whole suggests that it is through this ability to acknowledge
human insufficiency that Indian Societies might forge a sense of nationhood,
founded not in philosophical models that dissect human identity, nor in
empty gestures of unity such as the singing of national anthems, but in the
recognition and integration of differences.7
II
Girish Karnad, along with three of his contemporaries, namely Vijay

Tendulkar, Mohan Rakesh and Badal Sircar, reshaped the theatre of
India in the 60s. His two plays, namely Hayavadana and Naga-
Mandala, are often hailed as the precursors of the resurgence of folk
theatre in India. Karnad himself says in an interview with Tutun
Mukherjee that Hayavadana is the first attempt of any urban Indian
dramatist to use folk techniques. It paved the way for other well-known
efforts like Vijay Tendulkars Ghasiram Kotwal, ChandraShekhar
Kambars Jokumaraswamy, Tanvirs Charandas Chor etc. but the first
urban production to take the folk route was Rasiklal Parikhs Mena
Gurjari, directed by the legendary Gujrati female impersonator
Jaishankar Sundari in 1953, as it adopted the conventions of the folk
genre bhavai. According to some theatre-researches, the process
further dates back to Tagores use of open air theatre accompanied
by folk songs and dances at Santiniketan or to Kota Shivarama
Karanths rejuvenation of Kannada yakshagana in Karnataka. Urban
Indian theatre till then was the continuation of the Colonial process.
The Britishers established playhouses in the three port-cities, Calcutta,
Bombay and Madras and encouraged the newly-emergent Westernized
bourgeoisie to adopt the Western style of acting and naturalistic
theatrical conventions. The urban middle class was contemptuous
about the folk theatre forms. Karnad himself being an Oxonian, once
thought, there was nothing to refer to: the natak companies and
yakshagana seemed to belong to another world altogether9 But
Karnads childhood memories seem to be fulfilled with the melodramatic
extravaganzas of the Parsi theatre (its comparative unpopularity among
the critics is proved by the total absence of any research work on
it except Catherine Hansens Parsi Theatre), Yakshagana, Natak

Mandalies and Natak companies. Karnad Says, I loved going to see
them and the magic has stayed with me. 10 Karnad later asserted
how he came to feel the importance and potentialities of the folk
theatre forms. Brechtian rejection of psychological realism and
emotional identification sensitized Karnad and his contemporaries to
the potentialities of non- naturalistic techniques available in their own
theatre. Brecht himself was influenced by the capacity of the oriental
performance forms to reject Aristotelian unities and his concepts like
Epic Theatre and Verfremdungs Effect were influenced by these
forms, as revealed in his article Alienation Effect in Chinese Acting.
So, Karnad started to rethink about these folk forms and the idea
of Hayavadana started crystallizing in him right in the middle of an
argument with B.V. Karanth about the meaning of masks in Indian
theatre and theatres relationship to music. Karnad later asserted how
aspirations and apprehensions played in the minds of his contemporary
dramatists as their generation was the first to come of age after India
became independent of British rule. They were plagued by the tensions
between the cultural and the colonial past, between the attractions of
Western modes of thought and their own traditions and among the
various visions of future that opened up, once the common cause of
political freedom was achieved. Karnad concluded, This is the
historical context that gives rise to my plays and those of my
contemporaries11. So, Hayavadana used those folk techniques through
which the Indians can imagine themselves as a Community. Suresh
Awasthi hailed the play as Indian theatres encounter with tradition.12
Erin B. Mee, in one of her articles, argued about the dangers of
essentialism involved in this process citing Partha Chatterjee and also
asserted that Hayavadana avoids this problem.13 Aparna Dharwadkar
remarked that these folk plays (Hayavadana, Naga-Mandala,
Jokumaraswami or Charandas Chor) grant much more freedom of
choice to the female characters than the urban plays like Mohan
Rakeshs Adhe Adhure or Vijay Tendulkars Shantata! Court Chalu
Ahe.14 But because of its folk elements, Hayavadna is a little
incomprehensible to the urban students who come to study English
in Indian universities. Once I asked Ananda Lal about it. Being one
of the specialists of Indian theatre, he approved the fact and told me

that it is less difficult to teach Hayavadana to the students of
northeastern tribal communities, as they are acquainted with their
own folk performance forms which give an immense value to the use
of masks. To make it comprehensible to the urban students, he often
encourages them to attend shows of south Indian theatre troupes
touring Calcutta or shows them video recordings of yakshagana.
III
Yakshagana15 or yaksha songs flourished in coastal Karnataka in ancient

times and the 12th Century Talamaddale was nothing but yakshagana
devoid of its dances and stagecraft. It emerged during the halcyon
days of Vijaynagar Empire in the 14th-15th Century and was influenced
by Bhakti movement and bhutaradhane (South Karnatakas ritual). In
the 18th century it traveled Pune and this event marks the beginning
of modern Marathi theatre.
In 20th Century it was rejuvenated by Kota Shivarama Karanth
as Vallathol Menon gave a new life to kathakali through his
experiments in Kerala. There are various variations of yakshagana like
mudalapaya and paduvalapaya. In an yakshagana performance, the
Bhagavata opens the play with an invocation. Then a hasyagara
(duologue) follows. After a little bit of dance, oddolaga(preliminary
entry of main characters) follows. A small hand-held curtain (tere)
conceals the entry of characters. Then the prasanga(script) begins with
stylized acting and improvised dialogue. If a battle makes the climax,
the play gets the title kalaga, and in case of a wedding, kalyana. Through
its opening invocation to Ganesha, the role assigned to Bhagavata, the
use of mime, martial arts, masks, dance, half-curtain and talking dolls
Hayavadana comes very close to yakshagana. In yakshagana we find
a synthesis of lokadharmi and natyadharmi or natural and theatrical.
Hayavadana too becomes a piece of meta-theatre, juxtaposing the two
modes of being.
Hayavadana had its most successful production under the
direction of B.V. Karanth, as Karanth was a master of yakshagana
and used it also for his adaptation of Macbeth (Barnam Vana). And
yet, Karnad argues that his is a modern play only borrowing some
suitable techniques from folk rituals and his Bhagavata is neither really
a yakshagana Bhagavata nor a Sutradhar of classical plays. The play
was performed all over India, even in Australia and Germany. Vijaya
Mehta recalled later how her Weimar theatre production in Germany
received two different responses from Germans and Indians.16 It
resembles the necessary duality in the storyline of the play.
But despite the problem of duality, Hayavadana ends with a note
of hope for the post-independence India, and through the Gods
blessings, everyone gets their desires fulfilled. The elephant-headed
Ganesha restores a grandson to a grandfather, a smile to a child and
a neigh to a horse. They all pray for the success of the rulers in all
endeavors and for a little bit of sense. At the end of Bali : The Sacrifice,
we find a similar tune of hope, equally applicable to Hayavadana, as
at the end of the violent night, the King and Queen get reconciled
and sing a meaningful song :
In the World once divided into two orbs
one lit up by the Sun,
the other, hid in the shade,
the orb in the shade

opens itself to the light
And warmth of the Sun.
Night gives in to day.

Death yields to life.
Like monsoons piled on monsoons
So life follows life.
And through the days,

through endless rainy nights
through life after life,
we hear the cock crow.
Notes
1. Prasanna, Problematizing Karnads Dramaturgy in Girish Karnads Plays:
Performance and Critical Perspectives, edited by Tutun Mukherjee (Delhi :
Pencraft, 2006), 329.

2. See, Ibid., 330.
3. Shankho Ghosh, Anubad Bishoye (About the Translation) Hayavadana,
translated by Shankho Ghosh (Calcutta: Papyrus, 1996), 9.
4. See Rita Kothari, Resistance to History : A Post-Colonial Reading of
Tughlaq in Interrogating Post-Colonialism, edited by Harish Trivedi and
Meenakshi Mukherjee (Shimla : Indian Institute of Advanced Study,
2000), 159.
5. See Hayavadana in Collected Plays, Vols 1 (Delhi : Oxford University
Press, 2006), 114.
6. Ibid., 183.
7. Helen Gilbert, Introduction to Hayavadana in Post-Colonial Plays : An
Anthology, edited by Helen Gilbert (London: Routledge, 2001).
8. See Ananda Lal, Introduction, Twist in the Folk Tale, edited by Ananda
Lal (Calcutta: Seagull, 2004), viii.
9. See Girish Karnad, 1989 : Theatre in India, Daedalus, 118, 4 : 334.
10. Karnad, 1995, Performance, meaning and the materials of modern
Indian Theatre, Interview, New Theatre Quarterly. 11, 360.
11. Karnad, Introduction, Three Plays (Delhi: Oxford University Press,
1994).
12. Awasthi 1989 : Theatre of roots : encounter with tradition, Drama
Review 33, 49. He considers it as a Postcolonial project of nation building
and myth-making.
13. Erin B. Mee, Hayavadana : Model of Complexity in Girish Karnads
Plays : Performance and Critical Perspectives, edited by Tutun Mukherjee
(Delhi: Pencraft International, 2006), 148.
14. Aparna Dharwadker, Introduction, Collected Plays, Vols. 1 (Delhi: OUP,
2006), xxix.
15. For a detailed description of yakshagana, see relevant entries in The Oxford
Companion to Indian Theatre, edited by Ananda Lal (Delhi : Oxford
University Press, 2003).
16. See Vijaya Mehtas interview with Pratibha Agrawal for Natya Shodh
Sansthan, Calcutta, 29th July, 1986, cited in Ananda Lals , We have a
play to Perform Today! : Karnads plays on Stage : 1984-1994 in Girish
Karnads Plays : Performance and Critical Perspectives, edited by Tutun
Mukherjee (Delhi : Pencraft International, 2006), 236.
Prelude to Postcolonial Awareness: Krishnachandra
Bhattacharyyas Swaraj in Ideas
Pradip Basu
Postcolonialism and Postmodernism
Postcolonialism1 has been gaining prominence since the 1970s. While

one may date its rise in the Western academy from Saids Orientalism2
(1978), the term post-colonial3 was consolidated by The Empire Writes
Back (1989)4. It is commonly believed that postcolonialism has largely
been induced by European intellectual products such as postmodernism,
post-structuralism, Marxism and so on:
In the main, the intellectual history of postcolonial theory is marked by a
dialectic between Marxism, on the one hand, and post-structuralism/
postmodernism, on the otherWhile the poststructuralist critique of
Western epistemology and theorization of cultural alterity / difference is
indispensable to postcolonial theory, materialist philosophies, such as Marxism,
seem to supply the most compelling basis for postcolonial politics.5
It is true that, as Ashcroft points out, post-colonial theory developed

as a way of addressing the cultural production of the colonized
societies. The post-colonial emerges from the cultural production of
colonized people, notably from the literary production, in English, of
African, Caribbean and Indian writers6. Nevertheless Ashcroft
suspects the distinction between the postmodern and the postcolonial
is becoming increasingly blurred. This confusion is caused partly by
the fact that the major project of postmodernism the deconstruction
of the centralized, logocentric master narratives of European culture
is very similar to the post-colonial project of dismantling the Centre/
Margin binarism of imperial discourse...Postcolonial theory is therefore
deeply implicated in the critique of Modernity.7
Pradip Basu | 223
Postcolonialism is stimulated by the postmodernism of Foucault,

Derrida, Lacan, Lyotard, Deleuze, Guattari etc. Western modernity8
to be more specific in our context colonial modernity has been
subjected to a spate of criticisms although in varying degrees by
scholars showing a wide range of inclinations such as postmodern,
postcolonial, post-structuralist, neo-Marxist, subaltern, feminist, post-
Marxist, etc. No doubt roots of these leanings can be traced for the
most part to Western philosophical traditions. This is exactly why
given the much publicized postcolonial concern for independence of
thought from the West, one could legitimately doubt the verity of the
postcolonial project and ask: dont you too draw heavily from the very
Western intellectual sources dependence on which you so vehemently
discard?
Krishnachandras9 Mission for Autonomy in Thought
Contrary to common belief, the present article seeks to show that the
postcolonial awareness was not always derived from the West.
Krishnachandra Bhattacharyya10, for instance, as early as in 1928-30,
long before the ideas of Foucault and Derrida, delivered a lecture to
his students11: Swaraj12 in Ideas13 (Hereafter S I) which drew
attention to the invisible domination of Western knowledge on the
epistemological practices of the colonized and advocated autonomy
in their very thought process14.
Sisirkumar Ghose, the editor of the book, Four Indian Critical
Essays, which included Krishnachandras lecture, provided a rsum
of Krishnachandras argument15:
To be creative one has to be critical, both of ourselves and what is coming
from outside. so far no Indian has passed judgements on English literature
that reflects his Indian heritage or mentality. It is the same with philosophy16.
To achieve a continuity of culture reappraisal and synthesis are called for17
synthesis may not be possible or necessary in every case18An imported
and tendentious education of which we have been victims, calls for mental
reservation and revaluation. In the case of the natural sciences the question
does not arise19. But in dealing with life-values a critical attitude is a sine
qua non20.
224 | Pradip Basu
Sisirkumar then discussed the articles of B. N. Seal, Tagore and

Aurobindo respectively. On Krishnachandra, he finally observed:
Sceptical of patchwork, in life as in thought, not only can he think
on a variety of topics, but think to a purpose21.
Cultural Subjection of an Unconscious Character
In Swaraj in Ideas, Krishnachandra expressed his discontent that

the nationalists were stressing Swaraj in politics but not in culture.
It is true that mans domination over man is felt in the most tangible
form in politics.
There is however a subtler domination exercised in the sphere of ideas by
one culture on another, a domination all the more serious in the consequence,
because it is not ordinarily felt22.
Political subjection, according to him, primarily means restraint on

the outer life. Although it gradually sinks into the inner life, the fact
that one is conscious of it operates against it. So long as one is
conscious of a restraint, it is possible to resist it or to bear it as a
necessary evil and to keep free in spirit23. Slavery begins when one
ceases to feel the evil and it deepens when the evil is accepted as a
good. He insisted: Cultural subjection is ordinarily of an unconscious
character and it implies slavery from the very start24. Distinguishing
between cultural subjection and cultural assimilation, he said:
When I speak of cultural subjection, I do not mean the assimilation of an
alien culture. That assimilation need not be an evil; it may be positively
necessary for healthy progress and in any case it does not mean a lapse of
freedom. There is cultural subjection only when ones traditional cast of ideas
and sentiments is superseded without comparison or competition by a new
cast representing an alien culture which possesses one like a ghost. This
subjection is slavery of the spirit: when a person can shake himself free from
it, he feels as though the scales fell from his eyes. He experiences a rebirth
and that is what I call Swaraj in Ideas25.
Sanjeeb Mukherjee rightly commented:

Swaraj in Ideas criticized the national movement against colonialism as
limited to only the twin goals of economic and political freedom. He called
Prelude to Postcolonial Awareness | 225
for freedom of the mind, freedom to think in Indian categories and dream,
an authentic future of India rooted in her traditions, as against replicating
the West by aping them26.
Surprisingly enough, the way Krishnachandra addressed the problem

nearly 80 years ago foreshadowed many of the current postcolonial
moves which engage with power relations in relevant contexts. Impact
of colonization on history, politics, economy, science, knowledge and
culture; the cultural as well as epistemological productions of colonized
societies; the imperceptible process of infiltration of values and
permeation of knowledge categories colonial modernity made happen:
are some of the priorities in the field. The questions highlighted are:
How did the experience of colonization affect the colonized and also
the colonizers? How were colonial powers able to control? What traces
have been left by colonial education, science and technology? What
were the forms of resistance? How did colonial education and language
influence culture, literature, arts and identity? How did Western
science, technology, medicine and philosophy change existing knowledge
systems? Should the postcolonialist writer use a colonial language or
return to a native language?27 Postcolonial theory takes as its task, inter
alia, the understanding and critique of the link between the structures
of knowledge and the forms of oppression of the last two hundred
years.28 According to Padmini Mongia,
The burden of postcolonial theory, therefore, is the burden of Western

philosophy, a rethinking of the very terms by which knowledge has been
constructed Postcolonial theory foregrounds the legacy of the Enlightenment
and modernity to underscore the significance that this legacy has had for
constructing the conceptual foundations of Western thought. Attempting to
dismantle Enlightenment certainties, postcolonial theory acknowledges their
continuing and residual power.29
Mongia further says, We are thus simultaneously alerted to the

problematic of representation, the collusion of power and knowledge30,
and the modes by which disciplines construct their object of study31.
No doubt Krishnachandra long back anticipated many of the anxieties
of contemporary postcolonialism.
226 | Pradip Basu
Imposed Culture No Assimilation
Krishnachandra doubted whether we assimilated our Western education

or it was an obsession. Certainly there had been some assimilation
but was the alien culture accepted after an open-eyed struggle? We
had a developed indigenous culture but the comparative value of it
had not yet been appraised. We received Western culture in the first
instance and then we sometimes tried to peer into our ancient culture
with the attitude of foreign oriental scholars. He continued:
Many of our educated men do not know and do not care to know much
of this indigenous culture of ours, and when they seek to know, they do not
feel, as they ought to feel, that they are discovering their own self32.
Krishnachandra affirmed:
There is no gainsaying the fact that this Western culture which means an
entire system of ideas and sentiments has been simply imposed on us. I
do not mean that it has been imposed on unwilling minds: we ourselves
asked for this education and we feel, and perhaps rightly, that it has been
a blessing in certain ways. I mean only that it has not generally been
assimilated by us in an open-eyed way with our old-world Indian mind. That
Indian mind has simply lapsed in most cases for our educated men, and has
subsided below the conscious level of culture. It operates still in the
persisting routine of their family life and in some of their social and religious
practices which have no longer, however, any vital meaning for them. It
neither welcomes nor resists the ideas received through the new education.
It dares not exert itself in the cultural sphere33.
Quite matching ideas we find in todays postcolonialism. It explores

how we have learnt to evaluate our life and culture on the basis of
the Western standards and have been taught to feel low-grade not only
in matters of political and economic affairs, but also in cultural and
knowledge practices. We consider everything ours inferior to theirs,
assumed naively that all this, even the very process of believing this,
is only natural and innocent of any determination by power,
uncontaminated by hegemony. We have whispered to ourselves that
our own cultures and knowledges are naturally substandard, second-
rate, lacking, deficient, lesser, imperfect, flawed and truncated as
compared to certain (supposedly) universal, normalized and standardized

criteria (actually set in an intricate way by the power of the West).
This is the result of an invisible, veiled, ambiguous and obscure
violence on our culture and knowledge systems brought about by
colonial modernity and Western education. The experience of
colonialism does not allow us forget the ingrained relations of power
between Western modernity and postcolonial societies. Thus the
postcolonial critics point to an epistemological violence persistent
even in the postcolonial period34.
Krishnachandra contended that there can be no vital assimilation
of the imposed culture. And yet the new ideas are assimilated,
imaginatively realized and fixed in language and in certain imposed
institutions. A drill in this language and institutions induces soulless
thinking which appear like real thinking. These ideas, springing from
the rich and strong West, induce in us a shadow mind that functions
like a real mind except in the matter of genuine creativeness.
Lack of Creative Contribution and Indian Judgements
After a century of contact with the West, Krishnachandra reminded,

there should be a vigorous output of Indian contribution in a
distinctive Indian style to the culture of world. It could be a
contribution to history, philosophy or literature, as may be enjoyed
by our countrymen who still retain their vernacular mind. This might
be recognized by others as reflecting the distinctive soul of India.
Krishnachandra was disappointed that barring a few there was not
much evidence of creative work by our educated men.
Krishnachandra referred to more modest forms of creativeness,
as evidenced in daily lives, e.g. in the formation of judgements about
our real position in the world. We spoke of world movements. We
had acquaintance with Western life. But we did not realize where we
stood and how to apply our bookish principles to our situation. He
said that:
We either accept or repeat the judgements passed on us by Western culture,
or we impotently resent them but have hardly any estimates of our own,
wrung from an inward perception of the realities of our position35,
228 | Pradip Basu
Krishnachandra commented that in politics, we began to realize that

we wrongly counted on principles that have application only to free
countries. We had no perception of the dark thing they call power
which is more real than any logic or political scholarship. In social
reforms, we never understood the inwardness of our traditional social
structure; never examined how far the sociological principles of the
West are universal in their application. We relaxed with an unthinking
conservatism or an imaginary progressiveness imitative of the West.
In the field of learning, Krishnachandra asked, how many of us
had distinctively Indian estimates of Western literature and thought?
No Indian passed judgements on English literature that reflected his
Indian mentality. One doubts whether it was his judgement at all or
whether it was the mechanical thinking induced through our Western
education.
While commenting on Krishnachandra, Sisirkumar mentioned36:
Even now there is a feeling, right or wrong, that English has been and still
is our window to the west. How much has the window revealed? Is
Macaulays ghost happy or has it been, finally, laid to rest?37
One need not demand, unduly or always, an Indian point of view; but its
studied neglect by a large section has not been to our advantage. To be
deliberately ignorant or, worse, supercilious about ones own milieu may not
help one to judge and appreciate better what flowered in foreign fields. A
knowledge of Natyasastra and Dhanvyalok would not incommode one in
approaching Poetics. If one does not affect amnesia38 or self-exile, the Indian
student of western literature is not exactly a tabula rasa. One of the tasks
of such a student was and is to provide an improved awareness of the regional
or national literature; another would be an independent evaluation of
western literature, if not science. The first has been tried here and there, the
second somewhat, if not totally, neglected
Indeed, now and then the expertise gives the impression of being plus royaliste
que le roi, a pose that will further alienate the tribe. We have to retain, even
improve upon past standards, if we may, but without loss of identity.
It is here that the earlier critical writings in English39 fall into their proper
place40.
Krishnachandra complained that in philosophy the modern educated

Indian failed in striking a synthesis of Indian and Western thought41.

There was no judgement on Western systems from the standpoint of
Indian philosophy. Some appraisement of Indian philosophy was
attempted from the Western standpoint. But there was no criticism
of the fundamental notions of either philosophy which is necessary
for any comparison. It is in philosophy where an effective contact
between Eastern and Western ideas was possible. The greatest
contribution of ancient India to the culture of the world is in
philosophy. If the modern Indian mind is to philosophize, it has to
confront Eastern and Western thoughts with one another and attempt
a synthesis or a reasoned rejection of either.
It is in philosophy, if anywhere, that the task of discovering the soul of India
is imperative for the modern Indian; the task of achieving, if possible, the
continuity of his old self with his present-day self42.
Hybridization of Ideas
Like many postcolonial thinkers such as Bhabha, Krishnachandra also

used the concept: hybrid. But he used it in a different - indeed, a
negative sense, not found in Bhabha and several others. According
to Bhabha43, colonial hybridity, as a cultural form, produced
ambivalence in the colonial masters and altered the authority of power.
While he originally dealt with narratives of cultural imperialism, his
work also applies to the cultural politics of migrancy in the
contemporary metropolis. This critique of cultural imperialist hybridity
meant that the rhetoric of hybridity became more concerned with
challenging essentialism and has been applied to sociological theories
of identity, multiculturalism and racism.
Hybridity is a problematic of colonial representation and individuation that
reverses the effects of the colonialist disavowal, so that other denied
knowledges enter upon the dominant discourse and estrange the basis of its
authority its rules of recognition44.
Bhabha stresses the interdependence of colonizer and colonized45.

Thus, claims that inherent purity and originality of cultures become
untenable. Bhabha urges us into this space to open up the notion
230 | Pradip Basu
of an international culture not based on exoticism or multi-

culturalism of the diversity of cultures, but on the inscription and
articulation of cultures hybridity.46 Bhabha recognizes that colonial
power established highly-sophisticated strategies of dominance; it
created the conception, in T.B. Macaulays words in his Minute on
(Indian) Education (1835), of
a class of interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern a class
of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in
morals and in intellect.
Bhabha, however, shifted the certainty of the colonizer and the

effectiveness of his intentions into an alarming uncertainty. Hybridity,
Bhabha argues, subverts the narratives of colonial power and dominant
cultures. The inclusions and exclusions on which a dominant culture
is premised are deconstructed by the entry of the once-excluded
subjects. The dominant culture is contaminated by the linguistic and
racial differences of the native self. The colonialist discourses
ambivalence is an illustration of its uncertainty. The migration of
savages from periphery to the homes of their masters creates fissures
within the very structures that sustain the center.
Most postcolonial writing has focused on the hybridized nature
of postcolonial culture as a strength rather than a weakness. The
oppressor cannot obliterate the oppressed nor does the colonizer
silence the colonized. The clash of cultures can impact as much upon
the colonizer as the colonized.
(H)ybridity and the power it releases may well be seen as the characteristic
feature and contribution of the post-colonial, allowing a means of evading
the replication of the binary categories of the past and developing new anti-
monolithic models of cultural exchange and growth47.
In contrast, Krishnachandra held that our education has not helped

us to understand ourselves, our past, present and future. He affirmed:
It has tended to drive our real mind into the unconscious and to replace
it by a shadow mind that has no roots in our past and in our real present.
Our thought is hybrid through and through and inevitably sterile. Slavery
has entered into our very soul48.
The hybridization is evidenced by the bizarre jumble of vernacular

and English in which the educated speak. Expression of cultural ideas
through vernacular medium is necessary for attaining Swaraj in
thought. He explained:
If I were asked, for example, to conduct todays discourse49 here in Bengali,
I would have to make a particularly strenuous effort. If the language
difficulty could be surmounted, it would mean a big step towards the
achievement of what I have called Swaraj in Ideas50.
The hybridization of ideas brought about by our education and

Western institutions is distressing, unnatural and may be seen as an
old-world Hindu looks upon varna-samkara. It does not simply mean
intellectual confusion. All vital ideas involve ideals. They embody an
entire theory and an insight into life. Thought or reason may be
universal, but ideas are carved out of it differently by different
cultures. Curiously enough, here he spoke in tune with post-
structuralist linguistic theory:
No idea of one cultural language can exactly be translated in another cultural
language. Every culture has its distinctive physiognomy which is reflected
in each vital idea and ideal presented by the culture. A patchwork of ideas
of different cultures offends against scholarly sense just as much as patchwork
of ideals offends against the spiritual sense51.
He, however, admitted some synthesis, but within limits of different

cultures. Life means adaptation to varying times and ideals. To live,
we have to accept facts and adapt our secular life and ideas to the
times. In spiritual life, however, rather the times have to be adapted
to our life. But the world confronts us not only with aggressive interests
but also with aggressive ideals. What response should our traditional
ideals make to these imposed ideals? We may respect them without
accepting, may attempt a synthesis without compromise or accept
them as the fulfilment of our ideals. But in any case a patchwork is
an evil.
Synthesis not Necessary in Every Case
As regards the conflict of Western ideas and ideals with our traditional
232 | Pradip Basu
ones, Krishnachandra argued, it is often confusion rather than conflict

which prevails. The problem is to clear up the confusion and to
develop it into a definite conflict. The realization of a conflict of ideals
implied a deepening of the soul.
While Tagore was an advocate of a synthesis of the East and the
West, Krishnachandra warned us of the excesses of such yearnings:
It is not necessary in every case that a synthesis should be attempted.
synthesis of our ideals with western ideals is not demanded in every case.
Where it is demanded, the foreign ideal is to be assimilated to our ideal and
not the other way. There is no demand for the surrender of our individuality
in any case: Svadharme nidhanam sreyah paradharmo bhayavahah52.
It is at this point of our discussion, we may try to figure out the basic
thrust of postcolonial awareness whatsoever be the subtle variations
within it: An awareness of making critique of (Western) colonial modernity
not simply for its (a) colonialist project of direct and spectacular political
domination (already stressed and assailed by nationalists) and (b) economic
exploitation (already exposed and focused by Marxists) over the vast
populations of the world; but also or rather more significantly, for its (c)
relatively invisible and subtle modes of penetration into the culture as well
as (d) imperceptible diffusion into the knowledge practices of the colonized.
The contention is that the West has not merely invaded our political
independence or perpetuated economic exploitation, but more
overwhelmingly pervaded our consciousness and disfigured even our
basic thought processes. The West misshaped in elementary ways how
we think, feel and do things; warped our ethical values; damaged the
sense of right and wrong; misdirected our ideas of good and bad;
blemished the indigenous perceptions of our social and personal lives;
and tarnished our home-grown notions of time, change, history,
freedom, progress, science, development, environment, knowledge,
truth and nature. It wounded our dignity but desensitized us; blunted
our self-esteem; blurred our vision; stained the native visualization
of work, labour, efficiency, and leisure; mutilated our understanding
of the relation between private and public spheres; redesigned our
family bonds and shapes; flawed the format of our social relations;
misrepresented to us our own conceptions of relations between man
and woman and plants and animals; and handicapped our attitude to
sex, security, the old, the youth and the children, the mad, the disabled
and the abnormal, the different, the other, the diseased and the
diseases, life and death. It refashioned our perspectives of war, truce
and peace; spoiled the local notions of politics, government and
democracy, meaning of economic activities, market, sale, productivity
and consumption; crippled everything through which we perceive
reality; and twisted even the basic sense of fulfilment in life.53
There are scholars who made thorough and painstaking critique
of colonial modernity in its diverse aspects, in varying degrees, and
from divergent points of view. To name a few: Said, Ranajit Guha,
Spivak, Partha Chatterjee, Gauri Viswanathan, Dipesh Chakrabarty,
Ashis Nandy, Shahid Amin, Bhabha, Ajit Chaudhuri, Nivedita
Menon, Soyinka, T N Madan, Gyan Prakash, Gyanendra Pandey,
Hardiman, Ashcroft, Ngugi, Rushdie, David Arnold, Sumanta Banerjee,
and others. Krishnachandra some 80 years back acted as a pioneer
of, and in many respects a predecessor to, them.
Two Forms of Rationalism
We are acquainted with the postcolonial critique of the universal truth

claim characteristic of Enlightenment Reason and Western modernity.
Eighty years back, Krishnachandra betrayed unfailing signs of such
awareness. Some believe in abstract ideals for all humanity, in a single
universal reason and religion. Krishnachandra admitted that there is
a case for universalism. The progress of a community and of humanity
implies a gradual unification of ideals. This is just the rationalizing
movement, the emergence of a common reason. But, Krishnachandra
added54, we have to distinguish between two forms of rationalism:
(1) reason is born after the travail of the spirit: rationalism is here
the efflux of reverence for the traditional institutions through which
customary sentiments are deepened into transparent ideals; (2) the
generalization of ideals is effected by unregenerate understanding with
its mechanical separation of the essential from the inessential. The
essential is judged not through spiritual insight, but through accidental
likes and dislikes. Age-long customs and institutions are brushed aside
234 | Pradip Basu
(in the name of reason) as meaningless and dead without any

imaginative effort to realize them.
Krishnachandra was certainly not an advocate of national conceit
and obscurantism. He maintained that it is wrong not to accept an
ideal that is a deeper expression of our own ideals simply because
it is foreign. A real guru has to be accepted irrespective of his
community. He warned, however, that every foreign ideal is not the
soul of our own ideal. Some foreign ideals have affinity with our own;
others have no real application to our conditions55.The so-called
universalism of reason or religion is only in the making, not an actually
established code. What is universal is only the spirit, the loyalty to
our own ideals and the openness to other ideals. We must not reject
them if they are found within our ideals and not accept till they are
so. The only way to appraise a new ideal is to view it through our
actual ideal.
Krishnachandra concluded: Universalism our greatest dangeris
the inevitable result of our rootless education and it stands more than
anything else in the way of what I call Swaraj in Ideas56.
Need for Critical Examination
Krishnachandra straightforward put it that less stress needed to be

given on the danger of national conceit. Our educated men suffered
more from over-diffidence57 than from over-confidence, more from
a rootless universalism than from clinging particularism. We were
more ready to accept others judgements about us than to resent them.
We regarded as sacred even the opinion about us of others, ignorant
of us.
Krishnachandra reminded us that history, philosophy or moral
sermon imparted to us through our education are unconsciously or
consciously of a tendentious or propagandist character.
They imply a valuation of ourselves, an appraisement of our past history and
present position from a foreign standard. Our attitude towards them should
be one of critical reserve, and not of docile acceptance. And yet the critical
attitude would in many cases be condemned by our foreign teachers and by
our own educated men as uncultured and almost as absurdly ignorant as a

hesitation to accept the truth of geometry. That is inevitable where the
education of a people is undertaken by foreign rulers. There is bound in such
a case to be some imposition of foreign valuations on the learner and a
discouragement of the critical attitude58.
Krishnachandras speech assumes an ambiguous political

significance when we read it today in the postcolonial light:
Europe remains the sovereign, theoretical subject of all histories, including
the ones we call Indian, Chinese, Kenyan, and so on. There is a peculiar
way in which all these other histories tend to become variations on a master
narrative that could be the history of Europe. In this sense, Indian history
itself is in a position of subalternity; one can only articulate subaltern subject
positions in the name of this history.
That Europe works as a silent referent in historical knowledge itself becomes

obvious in a highly ordinary way. There are at least two everyday symptoms
of the subalternity of non-Western, third-world histories. Third-world
historians feel a need to refer to works in European history; historians of
Europe do not feel any need to reciprocate. the greats and the models
of historians enterprise are always at least culturally European. They
produce their work in relative ignorance of non-Western histories, and this
does not seem to affect the quality of their work. This is a gesture, however,
that we cannot return. We cannot even afford an equality or symmetry of
ignorance at this level without taking the risk of appearing old-fashioned
or outdated59
Krishnachandra admitted that the question of imposition does not

arise in case of mathematics and the natural sciences. But whenever
there is valuation, there is a national, communal or racial viewpoint.
A valuation of our culture by a foreigner from the standpoint of his
own culture should not invite our immediate acceptance but critical
examination60. Docile acceptance without criticism would mean
slavery. Krishnachandras urge for cultural resistance makes him
relevant for todays postcolonialism which believes
colonized cultures have often been so resilient and transformative that
they have changed the character of imperial culture itselfThe attempt to
understand how post-colonial cultures resisted the power of colonial
236 | Pradip Basu
domination in ways so subtle that they transformed both colonizer and

colonized lies at the heart of post-colonial studies61.
Krishnachandra elaborated:
The critical attitude is demanded pre-eminently in the field of valuations of
ideals. Mere acceptance here makes not only for confusion but for moral evil.
But barring the concepts of the sciences even here there may be some
doubt62 all concepts and ideas have the distinctive character of the
particular culture to which they belong. I plead for a genuine translation
of foreign ideas into our native ideas before we accept or reject them. Let
us everywhere resolutely think in our own concepts.63
Finally, Krishnachandras evaluation of the Hindu caste system may

not seem acceptable but his call for Swaraj in ideas is inspiring:
In politics our educated menrealizethat they have absolutely no power
for good, unless they can carry the masses with them. In the social
spherethey still believe that they can impose certain reforms on the masses
by mere preaching from without, by passing resolutions in social conferences
and by legislation. In the sphere of ideas, there is hardly yet any realization
that we can think effectively only when we think in terms of the indigenous
ideas that pulsate in the life and mind of the masses. We condemn the caste
system of our country, butwe who have received Western education
constitute a caste more exclusive and intolerantLet us resolutely break
down the barriers of the new caste, let us come back to the cultural stratum
of the real Indian people and evolve a culture along with them suited to the
times and to our native genius. That would be to achieve Swaraj in ideas64.
Notes
1. For an introduction, Leela Gandhi, Postcolonial Theory: A Critical
Introduction (Delhi: Oxford University Press,[1998], 2001), (hereafter
PT).
2. Edward Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient
(Hammondsworth: Penguin, [1978], 1991).
3. Whereas some critics choose the hyphenated post-colonialism as a
temporal marker of the decolonising process, others question the implied
chronological separation between colonialism and its aftermath. They
argue that the postcolonial condition began with the onset rather than
the end of colonial occupation. It is claimed that the unbroken term

postcolonialism is more sensitive to the long history of colonial
consequences.
(a) PT, 3.
(b) For details, T.Vijay Kumar,Post-colonial or Postcolonial? Re-locating
the hyphen in Interrogating Post-colonialism: Theory, Text and Context,
edited by Harish Trivedi and Meenakshi Mukherjee (Shimla: Indian
Institute of Advanced Studies, 1996), 195-202.
(c) Elleke Boehmer, Introduction in Colonial and Postcolonial Literature:
Migrant Metaphors (Oxford and New York: Oxford University
Press,,1995), 1-11.
4. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back:
Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (London: Routledge,
1989).
5. PT, viii-ix.
6. Bill Ashcroft, Modernity, Globalizaton and the Post-Colonial, Journal
of Humanities and Social Sciences (Hereafter JHSS), Scottish Church
College, 3 (August 2006), 65.
7. Ibid., 65-74.
8. For discussions on modernity, JHSS, 3, Special Number on Modernity,
(August 2006).
9. Krishnachandras publications include: Studies in Vedantism, The Subject as
Freedom; articles: Sankaras Doctrine of Maya, The Concept of the
Absolute and its Alternative Forms, The Concept of Philosophy; The
Concept of Rasa (two articles). See About the Authors in Four Indian
Critical Essays : K. C. Bhattacharya, B.N. Seal, Rabindranath Tagore, Sri
Aurobindo, Jijnasa, edited by Sisirkumar Ghose (Calcutta, First Published,
March,1977), (hereafter FICE).
10. Krishnachandra was born in a Brhmana family of Serampur (Bengal) on
12 May, 1875. His grandfather Umakanta Tarkalankara was a Sanskrit
scholar trained in the indigenous seminaries of learning. His father
Kedarnath, less educated, worked in a mercantile house. A poor man with
a numerous family, he could hardly bear the educational expenses of his
children. Krishnachandra passed the Entrance Examination of the CU
(1891), entered the Presidency College, graduated with triple Honours
(1896) and was awarded the P. R. S. of the CU (1901). With brilliant
academic records, he joined the Education Department of the Government
as a Lecturer in Philosophy (1898), served with great distinction as a
238 | Pradip Basu
teacher of philosophy in most Government Colleges in Bengal and retired

from service as the Officiating Principal of Hooghly College (1930).
Once the Principal, Rajshahi College, he became Director (1933-1935)
of the Indian Institute of Philosophy at Amalner (Bombay) and the
George V Professor of Mental and Moral Philosophy at the CU (1935
-1937). He died on 11 December, 1949. Krishnachandra Bhattacharyya,
Editors Introduction to Vol. 1 in, Studies in Philosophy, Vol. 1, edited
by Gopinath Bhattacharyya (Calcutta: Progressive Publishers, First
Impression, 1956), (Hereafter SP), ix.
11. Krishnachandras relations to his students were extremely cordial and
many of them almost adore his memory. SP, ix.
12. Swaraj can mean generally self-rule (swa- self, raj- rule), self-governance,
freedom, autonomy, self-determination , independence, or home-
rule. Nationalists like Tilak or Gandhi often used it in the sense of
political autonomy or political freedom of India from the British colonial
rule. In contrast, Krishnachandra here stressed on freedom in thought.
13. Krishnachandra as Principal gave this speech to the students of Hooghly
College during 1928-30. For complete text, (a) Swaraj in Ideas(hereafter
S I ), FICE 13-22. (b) Visva-Bharati Quarterly, 20,2 (1954). For discussion
see, India Philosophical Quarterly, Oct-Nov 1984, Special No. on this
speech, cited in Anjan Sen (ed), Eurokendrikata O Silpa Samaskriti, Gangeo
Patra, Kolkata, Collection 13, Feb 1992.
14. The publisher of FICE wrote: The time has perhaps come to re-assess,
at least to know, the Indian critical response to English and western ideas
and literature. Four essays, a random harvest K. C. Bhattacharyas
Swaraj in Ideas, Brajendranath Seals The Neo-Romantic Movement
in Literature, Rabindranaths The Religion of an Artist and Sri
Aurobindos The Ideal Spirit of Poetry may serve to set off an inquiry
into an area which should be of interest not only to the student of
literature but also to those who care to study in depth the encounter
between civilizations in a significant context. Publishers Note, FICE.
15. FICE, 3-4.
16. Footnote: Sri Aurobindos The Life Divine and The Future Poetry would
seem to disprove the allegation. Interestingly, Professor Bhattacharya did
not look upon Sri Aurobindo as a philosopher, ibid,3.
17. Ibid, 3.
18. Ibid, 3.
19. Footnote: His quiet qualification even here there may be some doubt
is a masterly parenthesis. Ibid., 4.

20. Ibid., 4.
21. Ibid., 7.
22. S I, 13.
23. Krishnachandra was deeply interested in current Indian affairs and
though his office debarred him from taking an active part in politics, he
was ever since the Swadeshi Movement an ardent champion of extreme
nationalism. SP, x.
24. S I, 13.
25. S I, 13.
26. Sanjeeb Mukherjee, Chapter VIII in Civil Society and Western Societies:
Tradition, Modernity and Communism, <http://www.crvp.org/book/Series03>
27. Deepika Bahri, Introduction to Postcolonial Studies, Postcolonial Studies
at Emory, Fall 1996, <http://www.english.emory.edu>
28. Robert Young, cited in Introduction in (ed), Contemporary Postcolonial
Theory: A Reader, Ed. Padmini Mongia (New Delhi: Oxford University
Press, 1997) (hereafter CPT ), 5-6.
29. CPT, 5-6.
30. For Foucaults concept of Power/Knowledge, Michel Foucault, Power/
Knowledge, edited by Colin Gordon (NewYork: Pantheon, 1980).
31. CPT, 8.
32. S I, 14.
33. S I, 14.
34. Editorial, JHSS, No.3, 5.
35. S I, 15.
36. FICE, 1.
37. Footnote: See By way altering Lord Macaulays dream of another era,
it is time for a class of persons Indian in blood and colour and in tastes,
in opinions, in moral and in intellect. Dona Louisa Coomaraswamy,
Samskriti, Vol.3, No.3, July-Sept., 1956. FICE, 1.
38. Footnote: It seems romantic to expect that an adequate idea ill issue
out of amnesia out of divorce from the relevant experience of the race.
F. R. Leavis, Whats Wrong With Criticism?. FICE, 1.
39. Footnote: It is strange as well as revealing that Dr. K. R. Srinivasa
Iyengars Indian Writing in English does not mention criticism either in
the contents or in the index. FICE, 2.
40. FICE, 2.
41. (T)hough he (Krishnachandra) was widely read in Indian and Western
240 | Pradip Basu
philosophies, classical German philosophy and Advaita Vedanta were the

two forces that exercised a major influence on his intellectual development.
He had great intellectual energy and almost up to the end of his life he
used to revel in sustained philosophical discussions. SP, x.
42. S I, 16.
43. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994).
44. Ibid, 114.
45. The Post-Colonial Reader, edited by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and
Helen Tiffin (London: Routledge, 1995), 209.
46. Ibid.
47. Ibid.
48. S I, 16.
49. Footnote: This discourse was given at a meeting of the students of the
Hooghly College of which the writer was Principal, during 1928-30. The
present paper was recovered from Dr. Bhattacharyyas unpublished writings,
S I, 17.
50. S I, 17.
51. S I, 17.
52. S I, 18-19.
53. (a) Editorial, JHSS, No.3, 5-6.
(b) Pradip Basu, The Question of Colonial Modernity and Scottish
Church College in Scottish Church College 175th Year Commemoration
Volume (Kolkata: Scottish Church College, 2008).
54. S I, 19.
55. S I, 20.
56. S I, 20.
57. Krishnachandra was a man of very strong principles and also of strong
likes and dislikes; had great independence of spirit, never submitted to
official bullying; possessed a profoundly original mind and had an acute
analytic intellect combined with imagination and insight of a very high
order. SP, ix-x.
58. S I, 21.
59. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who
speaks for Indian Pasts?, CPT , 223-4.
60. Krishnachandra was an admirer of classical Indian music and good
literature. Abstemious in his habits with private life one of austere purity,
he was a conspicuous example of the Hindu ideal of plain-living and high
thinking. In socio-religious matters a conservative Hindu, both in habits
and outlook, he had contempt for the liberal Hinduism and the so-
called social reform movements in Hindu society as unmitigated evils.
He believed in the Hindu code of values and opposed all who maligned
it. SP, ix-x. It would be interesting to study Krishnachandras attitude to
scientific and technological advancements and secularism, on the one
hand, and Hindu system of child marriage, Brahmanism, casteism,
burning of Satee,, male polygamy, prohibition on widow re-marriage,
gender discrimination, untouchability etc. , on the other PB.
61. Bill Ashcroft Introduction in Post-Colonial Transformation (London &
New York: Routledge, 2001), 2-3.
62. In view of the ruthless criticism currently in vogue against scientism,
objectivism, positivism and empiricism launched by quite a few postmodern
and postcolonial thinkers, this apparently innocent passing remark of
Krishnachandra seems to have deeper implications which need separate
consideration - PB.
63. S I, 22.
64. S I, 22.
Gloria Naylors Mama Day :
A Postcolonial Feminist Tempest
Pritha Chakraborty
This islands mine, by Sycorax my mother,

Which thou takst from me
For I am all the subjects that you have,
Which first was mine own king; and here you sty me
In this hard rock, whiles you do keep from me
The rest o th island.
Caliban in Shakespeares The Tempest

(I.ii.331-332)1
So who it [Willow Springs] belongs to? It belongs to us [the native islanders]

clean and simple. And it belonged to our daddies, and our daddies before
them, and them too who at one time all belonged to Bascombe Wade.
So thanks to the conjuring of Sapphira Wade we got it. Sapphira was
African-born, Bascombe Wade was from Norway, and it was the 18 & 23
ing [the conjure of Sapphira Wade] that went down between them two put
deeds in our hands. And we wasnt even Americans when we got it was
slaves.
Gloria Naylors Mama Day2
Re-reading and re-writing of canonical English literary works have

become a significant aspect of postcolonial3 studies and as Meenakshi
Mukherjee explained:
it makes us interrogate many aspects of the study of literature that we
were made to take for granted, enabling us to re-interpret some of the
old canonical texts from Europe from the perspective of our specific
historical and geographical location.4
This process has been responsible for triggering Chinua Achebes

Gloria Naylors Mama Day: A Postcolonial Feminist Tempest | 243
critique of Joseph Conrads Heart of Darkness (1899), accusing the

latter of being a racist in delineating the Africans and their homeland;
and also resulted in the colonial interpretation of Jane Austens
Mansfield Park by Edward W. Said, who drew a corollary between
Austens novel and the British colony, Antigua. Apart from such
processes of re-reading, the questioning has led to re-writing of
classics, namely, Jean Rhyss Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), in which she
negotiates with and even ruptures the structure of Charlotte Brontes
Jane Eyre. William Shakespeares The Tempest has also not been
exempted from re-interpretations, and Caribbean writers like George
Lamming in Water with Berries (1972) and Aim Csaire in A Tempest
(1969) interestingly show Prospero as the exploitative usurper of
Calibans self-determinism and Caliban as the oppressed native
asserting his right to freedom.
Gloria Naylor (b. 1950) is not a typical postcolonial writer, but
being an African American, she tries to destabilize racial hegemony
like the postcolonial writers. Discourses on power relationships
between the colonizer and the colonized are often similar to studies
on slavery and master-slave relationships. Frantz Fanon had remarked:
Colonial racism is no different from any other racism.5 A
contrapuntal reading of Gloria Naylors Mama Day (1987), set amidst
the modern U.S. with its subtle shades of discrimination and racism
towards the minority, along with postcolonial writings sheds illuminating
light on issues of Neocolonialism. As the African American feminist,
bell hooks states: I believe that black experience has been and
continues to be one of internal colonialism.6 Internal colonialism
indicates socio-cultural practices by means of which American society
reinforces its social and racial hierarchy to retain the economic power
of its dominant class, and it can be described as a hybrid form of
colonialism. It instigates socio-economic injustice and links the
cultural hegemony7 and capitalist relations, which are experienced
within prominent social institutions such as education. Shakespeares
The Tempest has been often regarded as a metaphor of colonial history,
depicting colonial relationships and its setting has similarities with the
new English colonies in the Virginias. This essay will strive to analyze
how Naylors Mama Day is a counter-narrative of the Shakespearean
244 | Pritha Chakraborty
text and strives to re-construct an alternative postcolonial feminist

world order.
Most of the postcolonial writers and critics elucidate about how
classics of English Literature had been an inherent part of their
syllabi. Intrinsically this was a part of the process by which Western
colonial powers like Britain asserted their cultural and moral superiority,
undermining those of the native population.8 Naylor was no exception
to this process of acculturation. As an avid reader from childhood,
she started admiring writers like Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, the
Bront sisters, William Faulkner, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin.
She soon recognized that all of these writers were either white or male.
Explaining her reasons for becoming a writer, Naylor says:
I wrote because I have no choice, but that was a long road from gathering
the authority within myself to believe that I could actually be a writer. The
writers, I had been taught to love were either male or white. And who was
I to argue that Ellison, Austen, Dickens, the Brontes, Baldwin and Faulkner
werent masters? They were and are. But inside there was still the faintest
whisper: Was there no one telling my story? And since it appeared there was
not, how could I presume to?[Reading] The Bluest Eye [was] the
beginning.The presence of the worksaid to a young African American
woman struggling to find a mirror of her worth in this society, not only is
your story worth telling but it can be told in words so painfully eloquent
that it becomes a song.9
Naylors third novel, Mama Day, shares an interesting dialogic

relationship with Shakespeares The Tempest. The terrible storms, the
serious usurpers like the King of Naples and Ruby, the comic usurpers
like Stephano and Dr. Buzzard, suitors from the new world like
Ferdinand and George reveal striking similarities between the two
works. Both works also have a magical island as their backdrop and
the island in Mama Day is named Willow Springs.10 This focus on
place and, by signification, on space, is a characteristic of African
American writing, perhaps because of their migration and displacement
from Africa to America. The movement from the rural south to the
urban North in America is also a prominent part of the African
American writers cultural memory, which attains an expression in
their writings. This spatial trope recurs in Naylors oeuvre, and in
Mama Day, the island of Willow Springs is a no land and an everyland

that the writer creates. Mama Day contains a prologue explaining the
location and history of the island, Willow Springs. Naylor writes:
Willow Springs aint in no state....You can see that the only thing connected
us to the mainland is a bridge and even that gotta be rebuilt after every
big storm (3).
Thus Willow Springs becomes a transcendental world: a sort of I-

land or own land of the African Americans. Through the creation of
this island in its own spatio-temporal sphere, and through the myth
of the first conjure woman, Sapphira Wade, Naylor creates a
subversive world order with respect to the white patriarchal and
colonial hegemony of Shakespeares The Tempest. The map was a
construct of the colonial discourse and the isolated location of Willow
Springs, which is located Nowhere (271) and its non-existence in
the atlas makes it a symbol of the idyllic land of the natives, free from
colonial subjugation, resulting in a subversion of colonial paradigm.
The people of Willow Springs owned this island even when they were
slaves under Bascombe Wade, though, at that time, slaves could not
own anything according to the American law. The positioning of this
island outside the normal chronotopic paradigm enables Naylor to
build an alternative world, where: the laws about slaves not
owning nothing in Georgia and South Carolina dont apply, cause the
land wasnt then and isnt now is either of them places (55). This
is quite a dichotomy with reference to Calibans predicament in
Shakespeares The Tempest, where Caliban, the indigenous islander is
enslaved and disinherited from his own homeland. Naylor here uses
the postcolonial strategy of challenging the meaning of Shakespeares
play by criticizing its representations.11
Naylor also deconstructs the colonial hegemony through her
characterization it is the eponymous protagonist, Mama Day who
is akin to Shakespeares Prospero (it is noteworthy that Mama Days
actual name is Miranda); her great-niece, Cocoa, plays the role of
Miranda; and the Black engineer, George, whom Cocoa marries in
New York combines the characters of Ferdinand, Ariel and Caliban.
Naylor negotiates with Shakespeares text with a double perspective
she appreciates his work but is also determined to critique it by

creating a counter-discourse. In Shakespeares The Tempest, Caliban
clearly accuses Prospero for using him to gain knowledge about the
island, and then for enslaving him when the latters position of
superiority was secured:
...When thou [Prospero] camest first,
Thou strokdst me, and madst much of me; wouldst give me
Water with berries int; 12
Prospero replies to his lying slave: I have usd thee / Filth as thou
art, with human care13. The patriarchal colonizer, Prospero,
flaunts his act of exploitation of the native Caliban, who represents
the Other. The English colonists used religion and superior technology,
appearing, as magic to manipulate the natives and this is analogous
to Prosperos use of magical power to subdue and enslave Caliban and
Ariel. Prospero is equally adept at creating tempests and controlling
the forces of nature by virtue of his magic. In his taming of the cosmic
powers, Prospero almost attains the stature of a God-like figure.
Besides, he accuses the absent Sycorax for having been a foul witch
from Algiers, banished to the island for practicing sorcery so
strong / That [she] could control the Moon, make flows and ebbs14.
However, Naylor subverts this patriarchal colonial construct in her
novel. In Mama Day, the Sycorax-like figure is the absent Sapphira
Wade, the first conjure woman, an African-born slave who was sold
to Bascombe Wade. She married Bascombe, bore him seven sons and
made him sign a deed and give the island to her seven sons. Sapphiras
journey to Africa in the form of a fireball is an act of assertion of
her freedom from the man who bought her but could not master her.
Diverse stories exist about how she killed Bascombe after that. Thus
while Prospero dismisses Calibans claim as illegitimate in Shakespeares
work, in Mama Day, the Other gains a legitimate right to the
homeland. Naylors Willow Springs, like Lee Smiths Hoot Owl Holier
in Oral History, is an isolated community that serves as the repository
of memories and experiences of the Other, as opposed to the colonial
Western literature.
Moreover, the patriarchal dominance in The Tempest is replaced
with a matriarchal lineage in Willow Springs, whose present

embodiment is Miranda/Mama Day. Mama Day is the archetypal
Wise Woman, like Mattie in Naylors The Women of Brewster Place,
but she also possesses formidable powers used in helping and healing
the people of Willow Springs. She is Prospero-like in the use of her
mysterious and shamanic powers but while the latter uses it to
consolidate his despotic rule over the island, Mama Day uses her
magic for a benevolent purpose. She blends the elements of traditional
medical practice with folk and herbal remedies, which exist as a part
of her cultural memory. In the power shift from the patriarchal
colonizer to the matriarchal native, Naylor is successful in dispelling
the double colonization of women under imperial conditions.15 The
concept of double colonization has been elucidated upon by Kirsten
Holst Petersen and Anna Rutherford to refer to the ways in which
women have simultaneously experienced the oppression of colonialism
and patriarchy.16 The choice of the name Miranda for Mama Day
is noteworthy in this respect. In Shakespeares work Miranda is a
liminal figure, almost an Other under the patriarchal colonial
dominance of her father, but Naylor empowers her by making
Miranda a native conjurer-matriarch, free from any kind of
subservience. Mama Day, Cocoa and Sapphira can be described as
the native feminized version of the Triple Trinity the Mother, the
Daughter and the Holy Spirit. Through the creation of the Trinity,
Naylor achieves a paradigmatic shift in the religious sphere, whereby
the figures of the Holy Trinity are presented in a subversive mode,
in terms of both race and gender. This strategy employed by Naylor,
may be described by Irigarays concept of mimeticism. Luce Irigaray
writes: One way of disrupting the patriarchal logic in this way is
through mimeticism, or the mimicry of male discourse.17 Signifying
on Western patriarchal canonical texts, is a characteristic feature of
African American writing and Naylor is not exempt from this trend.
Naylor achieves a dual mimicry of the colonizer and the patriarch
in her novel Mama Day.
Naylors Mama Day is concerned with examining, deconstructing
and redefining Shakespeares The Tempest. It delves into the discourse
of macrocosmic power constructs. Mama Day or Miranda is a
subversive Prospero and an empowered savage. Naylor shifts the

Shakespearean characters from the margin to the center and makes
Mama Day the omnipotent power in her novel. In The Tempest,
Prospero controls his daughters life and chooses Ferdinand over the
rapist Caliban. But just as Caliban sees and desires Miranda,
specifically by seeing her as a mother of potential heirs, similarly,
Ferdinand sees and desires Miranda as a potential Queen of Naples:
hell people Naples with Ferdinands just as Caliban had desired:
Thou [Prospero] didst prevent me; I had peopled else / This isle
with Calibans.18 What becomes clear is Ferdinands status as the
approved, white European version of Caliban. Miranda is a passive
follower of her fathers instructions and depends on him to determine
her prospective suitor. In Mama Day, Miranda is the all-powerful
woman who plays an active role in determining her own predicament.
The Miranda-like figure of Shakespeares play is depicted in the
character of Cocoa, who is educated and chooses her husband George
in New York, without being dictated by anyones commands. Thus,
while the Shakespearean island subtly upholds the power politics of
the colonizer in regulating his subjects, Willow Springs is characterized
by freedom of choice and intellect. This deployment of strategies
countering the sub-textual colonial narrative of The Tempest makes
Naylors work an activity of putting meaning on the movean
important postcolonial strategy which motivates the re-writing of
classic texts.19 Hazel Carbys comment would prove to be useful in
understanding the distinction between the texts of Shakespeare and
Naylor. Carby explains:
Colonialism attempted to destroy kinship patterns that were not modelled
on nuclear family structures, disrupting, in the process, female organizations
that were based upon kinship systems which allowed more power and
autonomy to women than those of the colonizing nation.20
Naylors novel is a case in point to counteract this attempt of

colonialism. Cocoa is solely brought up in a female household, by
her grandmother, Abigail, and grandaunt, Miranda. The bonds shared
within the community of women and between generations of women
seem to be the strongest element in Willow Springs.
George, Cocoas husband from New York combines the characters

of Caliban, Ferdinand and Ariel. Georges visit to Cocoas island is
a learning experience for him. When Ruby casts her evil spell on
Cocoa, Miranda requires Georges help and his intense power of self-
belief to construct a metaphorical bridge between place, memory and
life for Cocoa to walk over. George sacrifices his own life for this
and ironically becomes fully assimilated into the community through
his death. Devoid of any personal history, George contributes to the
collective history of Willow Springs, through his death, and becomes
part of its lore and memory. He becomes a device of Mirandas
practice of voodoo, at times willingly (akin to Ariel) and at times
compellingly (like Caliban). But he is also like Ferdinand in being the
approved suitor of Cocoa. Susheila Nastas remark seems to explain
Naylors position as a writer:
[t]he post-colonial woman writer is not only involved in making herself
heard, in changing the architecture of male-centred ideologies and languages,
or in discovering new forms and language to express her experience, she has
also to subvert and demythologize indigenous male writings and traditions
which seek to label her.21
The interrelation between education and the nation in The Tempest

is significant as early modern nationhood was modelled on the classical
empire and an expansionist imposition of language and culture. 22
Prospero essentially plays the role of a teacher in Shakespeares
acclaimed work:
Except for Ariel, Prospero doesnt actually script the other characters. Instead
he manipulates, trains, and instructs them. Just as in sixteenth century
England where, according to historians, education was more socially mixed
than at any time before or after, Prospero develops education for all classes
of society, for aristocrats (such as Ferdinand) as well as for commoners (such
as Trinculo), an education that internalizes bonds of allegiance that confirm
and maintain Prosperos authority. Prosperos national pedagogy resituates
individuated subjects in a reinforced social order. His ability to contain their
movement and his all-knowing, all-seeing observation bring the disparate
spaces and times of the play into a single spatial and temporal dimension.23
Prospero initially has teaching plans for everyone. The nobles Alonzo,
Sebastian, and Antonio have to learn that their ill treatment of

Prospero had been a crime and they must be made ready to restore
Prospero as rightful Duke of Milan: Prosperos control over the
denizens of the island is achieved through magical spectacles,
enchanting music, and entertaining masques incorporated into his
broader educational scheme. 24 It is interesting to note that Prospero
does not teach the art of magic to his daughter, Miranda, but controls
not only her choice of a husband but also her natural activities he
makes her sleep and wake up according to his will. Prosperos attempt
to train Caliban is a European effort to educate the savages.25 Naylor
attains a subversive effect in her novel as she makes the native woman,
Miranda, the repository of all knowledge. Shakespeares Miranda is
denied knowledge, while Naylors Miranda has the power to control
others by virtue of her knowledge of the occult arts. Naylors Miranda
does not monopolize her knowledge, as Prospero does, but passes it
on to her grandniece, Cocoa, who is to become her successor as the
conjurer-matriarch of the island.
In her seminal essay Can the Subaltern Speak?(1985), Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak writes, [I]t is impossible for us to recover the
voice of the subaltern or oppressed subject.26 But this is what Gloria
Naylor achieves so effectively in Mama Day, by centralizing the Other
and giving voice to her narrative. Like Jean Rhys in Wide Sargasso
Sea, Naylor achieves a literary decolonization27 in Mama Day, that
involves a radical dismantling, subversion and appropriation of those
reading practices which were dictated by dominant European Codes
and discourses.28
Notes
1. William Shakespeare, The Tempest in Complete Works, edited by W. J.

Craig (London: Magpie Books, 1992), 5.
2. Gloria Naylor, Mama Day (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1989) 4-5. Page numbers
in parentheses will identify all further quotations from this text. The
omniscient narrator makes this remark while explaining the history of the
island, Willow Springs.
3. In this essay I have used the term postcolonial in accordance to John
McLeods explanation of it, as referring to disparate forms of representations,

reading practices and values in Beginning Postcolonialism (Manchester and
New York: Manchester University, 2000) 5.
4. Harish Trivedi and Meenakshi Mukherjee (eds.), Interrogating Post-
Colonialism: Theory, Text and Context (Shimla: Indian Institute of Advanced
Study, 1996) 3-4.
5. Franz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (London: Pluto, 1991) 88.
6. bell hooks, Outlaw Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994) 148.
7. Cultural hegemony is the systemic negation of one culture by another
as defined by Clovis E. Semmes in Cultural Hegemony and African
American Development (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1992) 1.
8. Gauri Viswanathan elaborates upon this aspect of colonial enterprise in
India in Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (New
York: Columbia University, 1989).
9. Gloria Naylor in A Conversation with Toni Morison, Critical Perspectives
Past and Present, edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and K.A. Appiah (New
York: Amistad, 1993), 37.
10. Naylors novel is reminiscent of Paule Marshalls Praisesong for the Widow
where Tatum Island parallels Naylors Willow Springs.
11. McLeod, 167.
12. The Tempest 5 (I.ii.332-4).
13. The Tempest 5 (I.ii.345-6), emphasis mine.
14. The Tempest 22 (V.i.269-70).
15. Leela Gandhi, Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction (Delhi: Oxford,
1998), 83.
16. McLeod, 175.
17. Toril Moi, Sexual Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (London:
Routledge, 1990), 139.
18. The Tempest 5 (I.ii.350-1).
19. McLeod, 167.
20. Ibid., 177.
21. Ibid., 178.
22. Allen Carey-Webb, National and Colonial Education in Shakespeares
The Tempest, Early Modern Literary Studies 5.1, May 1999, 20 June 2007
<http://extra.shu.ac.uk/emls/05-1/cwebtemp.html>.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid.
25. Ibid.
26. Ania Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism (New York: Routledge, 1998),

233.
27. P. Mallikarjuna Rao, R. Mittapalli and K. Damodar Rao (eds.), Postcolonial
Theory and Literature (Illinois: Atlantic, 2003), 70.
28. Ibid., 70.
Postcolonial Detective: The Crisis of European
Epistemology in Ngugi wa Thiongos Petals of Blood
Samrat Sengupta
(A)ll detective fiction is based on two murders of which the first, committed
by the murderer, is merely the occasion for the second, in which he is the
victim of the pure and unpunishable murderer, the detective.1
All detective fiction by definition acknowledges the possibility of a

narrative the narrative of crime and punishment where the latter
is arrived at through a process of detection. In that sense the title
of this essay might be baffling to the reader because it is about the
(im)possibility of detection and therefore a closure which happens
through the arrival of justice. Basically this is about the unmaking
of a detective story in the postcolonial era where security of finding
the truth is denied on the ground of multiplicity of meaning where
the moment of truth is infinitely deferred. If the detective reads
through the scattered signs and through a process of elimination
produces a narrative which pushes us towards the truth, here we shall
talk about recurrent failure of such signification and in a postcolonial
encounter the impossibility of knowing the other, the very conception
of which is based on a misrecognition. The myth of an omniscient
subject with the quality of Kantian a priori classifying and organizing
informations (Dictionary detects the plural version of information as
grammatically incorrect but the very argument of this essay shall show
information as essentially plural) which would make meaning possible
will be put into question and thus the knowledge-systems like
anthropology or history, based on the same logic of organization,
meaning making and arrival at truth. The tyranny of white European
254 | Samrat Sengupta
Knowledge system operated through several disciplines ranging from

philosophy, history, anthropology etc. followed the Hegelian binary
of mind and the matter or the subject and the object where the later
is possible to be known by the former. G. N. Devy thinks that
European scholars created the category of Anthropology to contain
the literary and symbolic practices in African cultures.2 He based
his argument on William S. Willis:
White rule with its color inequality is the context in which anthropology
originated and flourished, and this context has shaped the development of
anthropologyTo a considerable extent, anthropology has been the social
science that studies dominated people and their ancestors living outside
the boundaries of modern white societies.3
Other disciplines like indology, orientalism or comparative literature

also according to Devy follows the same logic of colonial domination.4
Similar argument is put forth by Peter Amato regarding modern
philosophy from which finally anthropology and history took its cue:
It has been a fundamental premise of the modern philosophical attitude to
place religious and social values outside of what it considers legitimate
philosophical thought. Modern philosophy, taking its cue from science, has
seen itself as an adventure in the explosion of myths of all sorts and
independence from all authorities. Thus, religious-inspired conceptions of
reality and mythic conceptions of reality have been seen as merely the
elements of superstition and obfuscation, having no place in philosophical
reason.5
All the major European philosophers have been used to see Africa
as outside civilization and history which they thought to be natural
as David Hume comments in On National Character:
I am apt to suspect the Negroes to be naturally inferior to the whitesSuch
a uniform and constant difference could not happenif nature had not made
original distinction betwixt these breeds of men6
The Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant also thought racial

identity in terms of rational capacity that This man was black from
head to toe, a clear proof that what he said was stupid7. Hegel in
his Lectures on Philosophy of History positions Africa as outside of
Postcolonial Detective | 255
history: (T)he land of childhood, which lying beyond the day of self-
conscious history, is enveloped in the dark mantle of Night.8 The
historical evolutionism propounded by the generation of Condorcet
and Hegel9 which thought that human history is a story of
cumulative change10 gradually in the 19th century under the influence
of Darwin yielded into a kind of biological determinism which
justified and naturalised the Africans as inferior, childlike and less
intelligent. If history is subjected to change and progress, whatever
lies outside this mobility of human civilization shall belong to
anthropology. If European civilization is marked by the presence of
history, Africa is characterized by the absence of it, being arrested
in time and evolutionary process. If history suggests movement and
flow, anthropology suggests a narrative foreclosure where from the
beginning till end the whole story can be taken down in the
ethnographers notebook and therefore interpreted. Therefore
anthropologyland lies passively like a crime in a detective story waiting
for the interpreter to provide us with the meaning. The role of both
detective and the anthropologist is that of an observer who is only
passively involved with the event and therefore is legitimised to
interpret on the ground of their garb of objectivity. The common
factor for both of them is that the story they deal with belongs to
other(s) and not to them. According to Amato much has been written
to justify that African thought should be considered traditional or
closed, as opposed to modern or open.11 While discussing how
the dynamic of the colonizer and the colonized, race and reason, and
Enlightenment and empire that underlies modernity as history12 helps
in the hierarchical mappings of time and space13 Saurabh Dube
quotes George Stocking, Jr.:
This history of anthropology may thus be viewed as a continuing (and
complex) dialect between the universalism of anthropos and the
diversitarianism of ethnos or, from the perspective of particular historical
moments, between the Enlightenment and the Romantic impulse.14
Therefore the ethnographic account of an anthropologist is like a

detectives speculations which lead up to the arrival of truth. It is
important to note that the gaze of the anthropologist can never be
free from every kind of value-systems. Rather the value of the observer
is not considered as something specific or individual. It is considered
anterior to all human value systems or cultural relativism as universal
i.e. natural or normal following the same hierarchy of universalism
versus diversitarianism as mentioned before. Therefore the differences
are studied on the parameters of Anglo-European knowledge systems,
which keep its own assumptions of normalcy implicit.
The apparent objectivity of the detective might also be studied
with similar critical estimate. The genre of the detective fiction differs
from the so-called mainstream novel in its concern about the world
of crime and delinquency an aberration of the normal. Mainstream
novel, though acknowledges the existence of other worlds dominated
by lawlessness, gives the bourgeois reader the satisfaction and security
of belonging to an every-day middle-class world outside the scope of
crime and legal intrusion.15 Detective fiction, though an aberration
from the every-day actually aims at providing similar restoration of
normalcy as D.A. Miller comments:
Whether the investigation is conducted by police or private detectives, its
sheer intrusiveness posits a world whose normality has been hitherto defined
as a matter of not needing the police or policelike detectives. The investigation
repairs this normality, not only by solving the crime, but also, far from
important, by withdrawing from what had been, for an aberrant moment,
its scene. Along with crime, criminology itself is deported elsewhere.16
However in some of the European literary texts which deal with

mystery and detection, the objectivity of the detective is put into
question giving birth to auto-irony and failure of the process of
detection. In the myth of Oedipus, the discovery of truth transforms
the seeker into a victim. The detective-observer can no longer stay
objective or outside the world of crime, disinterestedly interpreting
signs. Many of the so-called anti-detective novel, a postmodernist
experiment with fiction employs the myth of Oedipus like Thomas
Pynchons The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) or Alain Robbe-Grillets first
published novel, The Erasers (Les Gommes) (1953). Brian McHale
comments, when the anti-detective story empties the detective model
of its epistemological structure and thematics? What else but ontological
structure and thematics: postmodernist poetics.17 Supriya Chaudhury

while discussing the different aspects of genre comments:
Viktor Shklovskij suggested that literature proceeds by the law of the
canonization of the junior branch, renewing exhausted or ossified genres by
turning to the resources of popular culture and incorporating devices from
previously marginal subgenres, such as detective stories or farces, or even
from the realm of the nonliterary.18
The genre of detective fiction is likewise used in postmodernist

narratives in order to produce the anti-detective novel which
(f )rustrates the expectations of the reader, transforms a mass-media genre
into a sophisticated expression of avant-garde sensibility, and substitutes for
the detective as central and ordering character the decentering and chaotic
admission of mystery, or non-solution.19
In the next section of the essay I shall explore Ngugi wa Thiongos

novel Petals of Blood20 to show how the logic of a detective fiction
is put into question in a postcolonial context where the epistemic
violence (a term borrowed from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak)21 of the
once colonized knowledge systems and their absolutism is put into
question. The anthropological model of understanding and knowing
where the logic of the interpreter/analyst is never taken into account,
repeatedly suffers failure within the text where a baffled detective never
succeeds to read the signs or engages in a misreading.
II
Watson said he (Sherlock Holmes), if it should ever strike you that I am

getting a little overconfident in my powers, or giving less pains to a case than
it deserves, kindly whisper Norbury in my ear, and I shall be infinitely
obliged to you.22
Man forever is chained in his realm of signifiers which is incomplete

and cryptic. Every time he insists on knowing, he realizes that absolute
knowledge is impossible and can only be insisted upon. Truth is
infinitely deferred and is never finally arrived at. When the veiled truth
is unveiled he gets pleasure followed by a but which poses a new
question and lit up his desire for further knowledge. Man knows
through his language the chain of symbols to which he is adept and
uses it to explain and know. What is unknown is known in the light
of the known. Edward Said comments: men make their own history,
that what they can know is what they have made, and extend it to
geography23. J. M. Ellis in his book Language, Thought and Logic says,
To use language, in particular to state through means of language that
something is the case, is to process the immediate experience and relate
it to other experiences.24 According to Edward Sapir:
The fact of the matter is that the real world is to a large extent build up
on the language habits of the group. No two languages are sufficiently similar
to be considered as representing the same social reality. The world in which
different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with
different labels attached.25
Petals of Blood shows the hierarchical superimposition of one world

over the other, namely the white, ethnocentric, male, European,
western educated over the so called uncivilized, remote, agricultural
peasant community of black Kenyan people. This results in
incomprehensibility, sense of loss and confrontation with horrendous
expressions of lack in the symbolic chain of almost all the major
characters in the novel namely Munira, Wanja, Karega, Abdulla and
the investigation officer Inspector Godfrey.
Munira faces this problem of incomprehensibility soon after he
gets appointed to the post of teacher cum headmaster in Ilmorog
Primary School. It became impossible to teach the village children
of the Kenyan school with his European order of language. When a
child cries out in excitement seeing a flower Look. A flower with
petals of blood (21) , Munira tries to place the flower in the
European order of signs There is no flower called blood. What
you mean is that it is red. You see? (21) Then he goes on describing
its pistils and pollens in the so called essentialist, positivist scientific
order of discourse. But he is appalled at their questions Why did
things eat each other? Why cant the eaten eat back...? (21-22), etc.
He feels the failure of his teaching and also confronts his own lack
of knowledge. Throughout the novel he is seen as permanently
hemmed in the Christian, European order of discourse as we see in

his obsessions with ideas of God, law of God, sin and damnation.
As Stewart Crehan comments
Muniras adolescent sexual complexes, which result from this puritan middle-
class upbringing, take the form of a battle between flesh and spirit somewhat
reminiscent of early Lawrence except that in Muniras case spirit wins.26
After circumcision ceremony and Thangeta drinking when Munira

comes to know about the truth of Karegas brother being Ndinguri
who assaulted his father and Karegas love affair with his sister who
later committed suicide, Munira changes side and assumes the role
of his Christian father to take revenge. He pushes Karega off Illmorog
and gradually gives himself up to the Christian order. It shows the
impossibility of his shrugging off of the Christian ethics within which
he is permanently chained. His mind in real sense is impossible to
be decolonized. Similarly, Chui, the protest leader of Siriana student
movement gives himself up to the neo-colonial order and becomes
a money-making industrialist. Slavoj Zizek in his essay
Multiculturalism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Multinational Capitalism
rightly points out that
When the subject is endowed with symbolic authority he acts as an appendix
to his symbolic title, that is, it is the big Other, the symbolic institution,
who acts through him27
Wanja also acts as a dummy of this big Other which makes her adopt
the path of easy money and power/authority which she wants to enjoy.
Unable to cope up with the superimposed system of logic which
exposes her lack, she tries to seize the ultimate signifier, which for
her is power and money. She says, No, I will never return to the
herd of victimsNeverNever (294). She values more the exchange
value of things in accordance with the materialist-capitalist logic,
which is signified by two things her body and money, as Marx says
in Comments on James Mill (1844):
It is clear that this mediator thus becomes a real God, for the mediator is
the real power over what it mediates to me. Its cult becomes an end in itself.
Objects separated from their mediator have lost their value. Hence the
objects only have value insofar as they represent the mediator, whereas
originally it seemed that the mediator had value insofar as it represented
them.28
So both the body and the money are valued because of their role as
a mediator to access symbolic power. Even in order to protest or make
a move against neocolonial apparatus of exploitation and domination
one of the two things becomes absolutely necessary. Wanja is forced
to accept rape in the hands of Kimeria to continue their journey to
Nairobi in order to place their demands before the MP. Her father
once hated herb as a prostitute but when he is in want of money
demands it from her (336). Abdulla also hates her profession but is
grateful to her as Josephs education was possible with her money only.
Paradoxical nature of money can be best illustrated in Abdullas
comments Because of moneyBecause of moneyNdinguriGive
me money and I shall avenge you a thousand times.
Now I would like to talk about two revolutionary figures in the
novel namely, Karega and Abdulla. Karegas emergence as a persistent
protest figure, I think is due to his ambiguous position of an educated
proletariat for which he failed to place himself in either systems of
logic and forever insisted on producing a new society emblematic of
a new signifier that would be transcendental and would end his
problems once for all. On the other hand Abdullas pre-independence
revolutionary self gets exteriorized after independence as he looses a
part of his limb and his donkey substitutes the loss. The revolutionary
self symbolically through the donkey becomes an image of hardship
and struggle it helps the Ilmorogians to reach Nairobi and place
their protest to the government about the miserable condition of their
village. However the revolutionary spirit is permanently doomed with
violent inroads of neo-colonialism, which through epistemic violence
tries to recolonize the mind, as the donkey gets killed by a plane crash.
Neo-colonialism comes as an accident an accident that is abrupt
like death and marks the end of all dialogues and initiates the failure
of the process of signification and understanding.
Alongside the peasant-worker revolutionary struggle motif in the
novel, there is an implicit structure of a detective fiction in it as it
begins with the murder of three industrialists namely, Kimeria, Chui

and Mzigo and arrest of the suspects Abdulla, Munira and Karega.
Inspector Godfrey assumes the role of a supreme who, as evident from
his name operates with a God like omniscience and omnipotence to
suspect, investigate and detect the culprits. But the whole process
remains inscrutable to him finally, as he fails to read the situations
and minds of his suspects. The murder is committed by all three
separately, each with own set of reasons. It is however not possible
to know who did it first. The aspect of murder is more psychological
here than physical. The alibi of murder remains shrouded in mystery
and cause-effect relationship could never be established by Godfrey.
His logical imprecision is clearly evident in three instances. Firstly,
a Freudian slip he makes by calling Karega a general which proves
his unconscious parallelism of the protest leader with the leader of
a repressive state apparatus or RSA (a term borrowed from Althusser)
within which Godfrey works. Secondly, Godfrey falls prey to Wanjas
seductive narrative as :
In her youth she moved with a few policemen and she knew some of their
fixations and suspicions even about the most minute details, especially where
they had constructed a theory however erroneous. (322)
Finally, the inspector feels an inexplicable uncanniness within himself
He was a little surprised at himself because this kind of uneasiness was

hopelessly out of character with the equanimity with which he was wont to
view the flow of social and political events. (333)
His experiences with Ilmorog and its inhabitants was vastly different
from the neat man-controlled beauty of coffee and tea plantations
on hillsides and valleys and ridges of the undulating landscape
between Ruwa-ini and Nairobi where through Godfrey was travelling.
This uncanniness is owing to the confrontation of the gap in the
process of signification or knowing the permanent split between
subject and object where the subject can never know the object as
a subject. This failure of signification in understanding the other can
be observed in Arthur Conan Doyles detective story The Yellow
Face where Sherlock Holmes, the detective protagonist deals with

a case of a black child whose face is covered with a yellow mask which
used to appear horrendous to the spectators. Her mother wanted to
hide her identity because she was afraid if his present husband comes
to know that she was married to a black man previously and also had
a child with him, he might not accept. This is a story where unlike
other Holmes stories the detective experiences a failure of his art of
detection. Holmess failure to detect the case declares the failure of
western mathematical categories of analysis and understanding.
Michel Foucault in his discussion of Velasquezs painting Las Meninas
shows the impossibility of the subject the viewer the onlooker
to know the inside of the painter within the picture represented by
the canvas the backside of which is only visible.29
The novel however ends with a note of hope with a different
view of history, not like the grand European narrative of monumental
history30 with a beginning, middle and end and oriented by a
progressivist, positivist aim, about which Foucault comments:
a history given to reestablishing the high points of historical development and
their maintenance in a perpetual presence, given to the recovery of works,
actions, and creations through the monogram of their personal essence.31
Abdulla thought
(H)istory was a dance in the huge arena of God. You played your part,
whatever your chosen part and then you left the arena, swept aside by the
waves of a new step, a new movement in the dance. (340)
The metaphor of dance suggests the abruptness of history and

multiplicities of its movement rather than European grand narrative
of unity and logical precision involved with movement of time. Zizek
reaffirming the ideas of Etainne Baliber comments:
(T)he excess of abstract-negative-ideal universality [of Karegas dream of a
new and reformed society in this novel], its unsettling-destabilizing force,
can never be fully integrated into the harmonious whole of a concrete
universality [ideals of neo-colonialism and multinational capitalism].32
There is always an irreducible residue. The impossibility of meaning

to be arrived at actually makes meaning possible. The frustration of
the detective resists closure and helps the story to continue. This
becomes the space for creativity and continuity that insists for
meaning which is productive as well as transformative. Ngugi through
the introduction of Karegas abstract dream transforms the monologue
of an omniscient detective into a dialogue characterized by anticipation
and multiplicity of possibilities. The dialogue is atemporal and free
from any singular conception of meaning. It is on-going and always
creates a new space to think. It helps the reader alongside Karega,
the protagonist of the novel to confront an absence in his existing
chain of signifiers as there remains a perpetual search for meaning
that never comes to an end a meaning that is and always remains
in the womb of, to quote the last word of Karega in the novel,
Tomorrow
Notes
1. George Burton quoted in Tzvetan Todorov, The Typology of detective

fiction in Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader, edited by David Lodge
with Nigel Wood (Delhi: Pearson Education, 1988), 139.
2. G. N. Devy, Comparatism in India and the West in Critical Theory:
Western and Indian, edited by Prafulla C. Kar (New Delhi: Pencraft
International, 2005), 33.
3. William S. Willis quoted in G. N. Devy, Comparatism in India and the
West, 33.
4. G. N. Devy, Comparatism in India and the West, 33.
5. Peter Amato, African Philosophy and Modernity in Postcolonial African
Philosophy: A Critical Reader, edited by Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze (Oxford:
Blackwell Publishers, 1997), 76.
6. David Hume quoted in Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, Introduction:
Philosophy and the (Post)colonial in Postcolonial African Philosophy: A
Critical Reader, 7.
7. Immanuel Kant quoted in Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, Introduction:
Philosophy and the (Post)colonial in Postcolonial African Philosophy: A
Critical Reader, 7.
8. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy of History, translated by
J. Sibree (Kitchener: Batoche Books, 2001), 109.
9. Ernest Gellner, The Politics of Anthropology in Anthropology and
Politics: Revolutions in the Sacred Grove (Oxford, UK and Cambridge, USA:
Blackwell Publishers, 1995), 11.

10. Ibid., 11.
11. Peter Amato, African Philosophy and Modernity, 76.
12. Saurabh Dube, Introduction: Anthropology, History, Historical
Anthropology in Historical Anthropology, edited by Saurabh Dube (Oxford
and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 8.
13. Ibid., 8.
14. George Stocking, Jr. quoted in Saurabh Dube, Introduction: Anthropology,
History, Historical Anthropology, 6.
15. For a fuller discussion of this idea see D. A. Miller, The Novel and the
Police in The Novel: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory 1900-2000,
edited by Dorothy J. Hale (Oxford, UK and Cambridge, USA: Blackwell
Publishers, 2005), 541-555.
16. Ibid., 545.
17. Brian McHale, Constructing Postmodernism (New York: Routledge, 1992),
151.
18. Supriya Chaudhuri, Understanding Genre in Literary Studies in India:
Genology, edited by Subha Chakraborty Dasgupta (Kolkata: Department
of Comparative Literature, Jadavpur University, 2004), 8.
19. Stephano Tani quoted in Laura Marcus Detection and Literary Fiction
in The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction, edited by Martin Priestman
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 252.
20. Ngugi wa Thiongo, Petals of Blood (Oxford: Heinemann, 1986).
Henceforth all the references made to this novel will be of the given text.
21. The term means dominance of one knowledge system over other where
the former is legitimized in order to suppress the later. See Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak, Can the Subaltern Speak? in The Postcolonial
Studies Reader, edited by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin
(London and New York: Routledge, 1995). Spivak comments: The
clearest available example of such epistemic violence is the remotely
orchestrated, far-flung, and heterogeneous project to constitute the
colonial subject as Other (24-25).
22. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Yellow Face in The Complete Sherlock
Holmes Novels and Stories Volume II (New Delhi: Classic Paperbacks), 41.
23. Edward Said, From Orientalism in Contemporary Postcolonial Theory A
Reader, edited by Padmini Mongia (New Delhi: Oxford University Press,
1996), 23.
24. John M. Ellis, Language, Thought, and Logic (Evanston, Illinois:
Northwestern University Press, 1993), 85.

25. Edward Sapir, Culture, Language and Personality: Selected Essays, edited by
David Mandelbaum (Berkeley and Los Angeles : University of California
Press, 1961), 69.
26. Stewart Crehan, The Politics of the Signifier: Ngugi wa Thiongos Petals
of Blood in Postcolonial Literatures, edited by Michael Parker & Roger
Starkey (London: Palgrave, 1995), (103-104).
27. Slavoj Zizek, Multiculturalism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Multinational
Capitalism in New Left Review 225, 1997, 39.
28. Karl Marx quoted in David Hawkes, Ideology (London and New York:
Routledge, 1996), 98.
29. Michel Foucault, Las Meninas in The Order of Things (London and
New York: Routledge Classics, 2002), 3-18.
30. This term is quoted from Nietzsches Untimely Meditations in Michel
Foucault, Nietzsche, Genealogy, History in The Foucault Reader, edited
by Paul Rainbow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 94.
31. Michel Foucault, Nietzsche, Genealogy, History, 94.
32. Slavoj Zizek, Multiculturalism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Multinational
Capitalism, 40.
Lest We Forget: Colonial Voices and the Great War
Santanu Das
On the road from Estaires to La Bassee in France, south of the village

of Neuve Chapelle, the curious traveler comes across what might
initially seem to be an Orientalist fantasy. A green sanctuary is
surrounded by a white circular wall carved with Indian symbols and
interrupted by two chattries.1 At the centre towers a 15 metre high
monolithic column that recalls the inscribed pillars of Ashoka and is
surmounted by a Lotus Capital, the Star of India and the Imperial
Crown. On either side of the column are carved two tigers guarding
the temple of the dead. On the lower part of the column is inscribed
in English God is One, His is the Victory with similar texts in
Arabic, Hindi and Gurmukhi and on the solid wall at the back are
carved the names of 4700 soldiers of the Indian army. Engraved on
the Memorial is the following inscription:
TO THE HONOUR OF THE ARMY OF INDIA WHICH FOUGHT

IN FRANCE AND BELGIUM, 1914-1918, AND IN PERPETUAL
REMEMBRANCE OF THOSE WHOSE NAMES ARE HERE
RECORDED AND WHO HAVE NO KNOWN GRAVE.
This was the place where the Indian Corps first saw action in October
1914 and recaptured the village of Neuve Chapelle which the British
had lost, incurring heavy losses; this is now the site of the beautiful
and impeccably maintained Neuve Chapelle Memorial to the Indian
war dead. The memorial remains one of the most powerful and
poignant testimonies to what Edward Said has called the intertwined
and overlapping histories that bind together the empire and the
colonies.2
India contributed more than a million men to the imperial war
effort during the First World War. These included both soldiers and
Santanu Das | 267
labourers, who served in France, Mesopotamia, Persia, East Africa,

Gallipoli and in the Far East, demonstrating not only the world nature
of the Great War but its global reach for children of the empire. The
total number of Indian ranks recruited during the war, up to 31st
December 1919, was 877,068 combatants and 563,369 non-combatants,
making a total of 1,440,437.3 Between August 1914 and December
1919, India had sent overseas for purposes of war 622,224 soldiers
and 474,789 non-combatants.4 Fighting for the empire during the
first stirrings of nationalist uprisings, the Indian soldiers have been
doubly marginalized: by their own national history which has
understandably focussed on the heroes of the Independence movement
and by the grand narrative of the war which still remains distressingly
Eurocentric.5
This essay is part of a larger project that seeks to recover the
Indian experience of the First World War and how it is configured
in the cultural and literary imagination of the time. If imperial
propaganda, economic aid and recruitment were the chief forces that
drove the international war machine, indeed, it makes us think of
the war in terms of global market, multiracial labour and mass
mobilization how was the war understood and represented in the
colonies? The scale of mobilisation of the colonial forces for the war
was on an unprecedented scale as Britain, France and Germany called
upon their respective colonies to assist in the war efforts. Indeed, the
multiracial nature of the First World War is fast becoming the focus
of intense enquiry and debate. Indeed the contours of the Great War
and modern memory would look quite different when one considers
the contributions and the experiences of the Maori Pioneer Battalions,
Chinese labourers, African askaris or Indian sepoys, most of whom
fought out of abject economic need. 6
British writings of the time on Indian troops range from official
commentaries and testimonies such India and the War introduced by
Lord Sydenham (London, 1915), The Postal Office of India in the Great
War (Bombay, 1922), The Indian Corps in France (London, 1919) by
Merewether and Smith, or General Willcocks With the Indians in
France (London, 1920) to more subjective, literary accounts such as
Rudyard Kiplings The Eyes of Asia (New York, 1918). Indian soldiers
268 | Colonial Voices and the Great War
also haunt the war writings of Sassoon, Blunden and Junger, among
others. There was also contact between forces from the dominions
and colonies, as in the following letter by an Australian soldier abroad
the troopship Ionian:
The famous Gurkha Regiment now embarked on the Ionian. These troops
are very distinctive, they are short and nuggety of build, Nepalese men and
most wonderful fighters and as fearless as the lion. Each man carries a knife
known as a kugri [sic], a curved knife broadening towards the point which
they throw at the enemy. I have watched them practise and came to the
conclusion that I would rather be on their side than against them.7
Similar descriptions recur in newspapers, memoirs and diary entries

in England, but we seldom get to know about the inner world of the
soldiers. Thousands of semi-literate peasant-soldiers particularly
from Punjab were suddenly transported across the black waters to
various parts of the world to experience at once the exhilaration and
the trauma of industrial modernity. The original letters of the sepoys
are all lost but substantial extracts from them, translated for the
colonial censors, survive and are housed in the India Office section
in British Library. Consider the following note by an Indian sepoy
Mausa Ram:
The state of affairs here is as follows: the black pepper is finished. Now the
red pepper is being used, but, occasionally, the black pepper proves useful.
The black pepper is very pungent, and the red pepper is not so strong. This
is a secret but you are a wise man.8
Black pepper refers to Indian soldiers while the red to English: it

is a coded advice against further recruitment.
Here, I shall seek to unearth some of the structures of feeling
enthusiasm, ambivalences and anxieties, occasionally held together
engendered by the intertwined histories war and empire through
a dialogue between historical and literary material. I shall delimit my
focus to two stands of enquiry: first, the political and civilian responses
in India, focusing on the writings of Sarojini Naidu; second, the inner
world of the sepoys through their censored letters, and finding one
of its most moving records in Mulk Raj Anands war novel Across
the Black Waters, written in 1939, and published a decade later.
Santanu Das | 269
Responses to War
At the outbreak of the war in 1914, the King-Emperor sent a message

to the Princes and People of My Indian Empire9 exhorting them to
contribute to the imperial war effort. Indeed, apart from certain
isolated revolutionary activities10, the support for the war was
overwhelming. The native princes almost started competing with each
other with their extravagant offers. Belonging to families immensely
proud of their martial traditions and largely dependent on the British
Raj (though at the same time feeling somewhat impotent under British
rule), a European war was for many of them an adventure. The princes
started competing with each other with extravagant offers of men,
money, horses, and goods: for example, the Nizam of Hyderabad alone
contributed over a million rupees. Vast sums of money flowed from
the 700 odd native princes according to their wealth and prestige,
from a contribution of Rs 50 lakhs from the Maharajah of Mysore
to Rs 5 lakhs from the Maharajah Gaekwar of Baroda for the purchase
of aeroplanes for the use of the Royal Flying Corps.11 The munificence
of the princes was duplicated by smaller landowners and chieftains:
the Thakur of Bagli thus contributed Rs 4000 for the comforts of the
Indian troops in East Africa, Mesopotamia and Egypt: Socks, shirts,
mufflers, waistcoats, cardigan jacketstobacco, cigarettes, chocolates.12
More extraordinary were the response of the lady rulers or
Maharanis. Consider the following speeches by two of the most
powerful queens in India. The first is from a Hindu queen, Taradevi,
in Calcutta on 25 December, 1914 and the second from the Muslim
princess of Bhopal in the Delhi delivered at the Delhi War Conference
in April, 1918:
Gentlemen, though I am a lady of such an advanced age yet I am Kshatriya
and when my Kshatriya blood rises up in my veins and when I think I am
the widow to the eldest son of one who was a most tried friend of the British
Government I jump on my feet at the aspiration of going to the field of war
to fight Britains battle. It is not I alone, I should say, but there are thousands
and thousands of Indian ladies who are more anxious than myself, but there
is no such emergency, neither will there be one for the ladies to go to the
front when they are brave men who would suffice for fighting the enemies.13
Is it not a matter for regret then that Turkey should join hands with the
enemies of our British Government? All gentlemen like you have read, I
suppose, in the papers, how the British Government is now, as ever, having
Mohamedan interests at heart.India will leave nothing undone to justify
the confidence, the love, the sympathy with which the King-Emperor has
always honoured us. The need of the Empire is undoubtedly Indias
opportunity Now that the war has entered upon a more intense phase
we assure you that it will never be said that in this supreme crisis India when
weighed in the balance was found wanting.14
Official war speeches thus become the platform for the triumphant
assertion of loyalty to the British empire. Made by two powerful
women rulers of the time, they defy the neat coupling of women with
pacifism, or indeed, with anti-colonialism. Instead of a feminist
politics of resistance or indeed a maternal protective attitude towards
the subjects, we have in each case an imperious, authoritarian female
figure, sending off her men to war, somewhat like the figure of
Britannia in Owens war poem The Kind Ghosts.15
Within the colonial context, the above comments are both
fascinating and disturbing, especially in the way local caste and
religious politics are being manipulated. Kshatriya is the martial caste.
In the first extract, we have the image of the Hindu warrior-queen
invoking the caste and gender politics of a patriarchal, hierarchical
society for recruitment in the worlds first modern war. The second
quotation points to a specific religious issue: with the entry into the
war of Turkey whose sultan bore the title of Khalifa (Arabic for
steward) or religious leader, the English became anxious about the
possibility of jihad from the colonial Muslim troops. Here, the local
leader is being used to pacify her Muslim subjects and ensure their
continuing loyalty for the war against their religious brethren, making
their position somewhat analogous to the European Jews who could
be found on both sides of no mans land.
What was perhaps more surprising is the support from the
educated middle-class and the political bourgeoisie. On 12th August,
1914, Dadabhai Naoroji, one of the founding figures of Indian
National Congress, describing himself more of a critic than a simple
praiser of the British Rule in India noted:
Santanu Das | 271
the vast mass of humanity of India will have but one desire in his heart viz.,
to support the British people in their glorious struggle for justice, liberty
honour.16
Other senior nationalist leaders concurred: fund-raising was organised,

and different political parties and communities such as the All India
Muslim League, Madras Provincial Congress, Hindus of Punjab, the
Parsee community of Bombay as well as senior nationalist leaders such
as Surendranath Banerjea and Madan Mohan Malaviya concurred.
Fund-raising was organised and meetings held in cities such as
Calcutta, Bombay, Lahore and Allahabad. Pamphlets were produced
pledging support, one typical title (1915) being: Why India is Heart
and Soul with Great Britain. Addressing a big gathering in Madras,
Dr Subramania Iyer claimed that to be allowed to serve as volunteers
is an honour superior to that of a seat in the Executive Council and
even in the Council of the Secretary of State.17 On 8 September 1914,
Sir Gagadhar Chitnavis, seconded by the Raja of Mahmudabad,
moved a resolution in the Imperial Legislative Council to the effect
that the people of India, in addition to the military assistance being
offered, would share the financial burden imposed by the war on
England.18
The First World War catches the Indian national consciousness
at that fragile spot between a continuing (though increasingly qualified)
loyalty to the British Raj and early concerted nationalist movements.
The twin impulses are evident in the observations of Mahatma
Gandhi:
I thought that Englands need should not be turned into our opportunity,
and that it was more becoming and far-sighted not to press our demands
while the war lasted.19
Support for the empire at this critical juncture could later be used
to press for responsible self-government or Swaraj. As with Irish
nationalists or Jamaican volunteers, it was assumed that this loyalty
and sacrifice would later be repaid with greater national autonomy
and political recognition. Yet, beneath this political shrewdness, there
lay I would argue a deeper and more complex colonial anxiety,
captured most succinctly in a piece of doggerel verse:
Who calls me now a coward base,

And brands my race a coward race?20
It reveals what Ashis Nandy has called the psychological damage

caused by colonialism.21 If colonial ideology is based on the assumed
cultural, moral and racial inferiority of the ruled, it shows the
internalisation of the racist ideology by some of the local people
themselves: found wanting before the superior civilisation of the
West, and still smarting under the blemish of the Sepoy Mutiny (1857),
the First World War becomes an opportunity to set aright the racial
slur: local regional honour can paradoxically be salvaged through
imperial war service, a point I shall return to in the next section.
Fighting alongside the European colonisers on European soil against
other Europeans becomes the ultimate vindication of their izzat, a
word roughly translated as honour that recurs in the letters of Indian
soldiers. At the same time, it is also modern Indias point of entry
into history: if Europe was the place where history was made and
histories of the colonies were subsidiary to this grand imperial
narrative, the Great War was surely a guarantee of Indias direct
participation in its march.
The war writings of Sarojini Naidu
But how did the war affect the socio-cultural and literary imagination
of the time in India? What is astonishing is the enthusiasm and rigour
with which the educated middle-classes and the colonial administrators
addressed, absorbed, debated and wrote about the war and India.
Similarly, Indian contributions range from Bhargavas Indias Services
in the War (Allahabad: 1919) and Patiala and the Great War (London:
1923) to the political writings of Gandhi and Naidu to subjective
literary responses such as Svarnakumari Devis short story Mutiny
(originally written in Bengali and later translated into English) or the
compendious war journal All About the War: The Indian Review War
Book (n.d. 1915?) edited by G.A..Natesan.22 However, the ambivalences
and the anxieties that we have noted in the Indian responses to the
Santanu Das | 273
First World War find one of their most complex testimonies in the
wartime writings of Sarojini Naidu.23
Naidu was an internationally celebrated figure in early twentieth
century. She was christened the Nightingale of India for her poetry
in English and was one of the foremost nationalist and feminist
leaders, becoming the president of the Indian National Congress in
1925.24 In fact it was the First World War that occasioned her
encounter with Gandhi who was at that time raising an ambulance
corps in London.25 Actively involved in the war efforts through the
Lyceaum club in London, she then went back to India and at the
Madras Provincial conference in 1918, she made the following appeal:
It is, in my opinion, imperative that India should give the flower of her
manhood without making any condition whatsoever, since Indians were not
a nation of shop-keepers and their religion was a religion of self-sacrifice
Let young Indians who are ready to die for India and to wipe from her brow
the brand of slavery rush to join the standing army or to be more correct,
Indias citizen army composed of cultured young men, of young men of
traditions and ideals, men who burnt with the shame of slavery in their
hearts, will prove a true redeemer of Indian people.26
The smarting phrase nation of shopkeepers leaps out of the page and
reveals why this anti-colonial nationalist whose aim was to hold
together the divided edges of Mother Indias cloak ok of patriotism
would support Indias war service.. Consider The Gift of India,
written for the Report of the Hyderabad Ladies War Relief Association,
December 1915, and later collected in The Broken Wing: Songs of Love,
Death and Destiny 1915-1916:
Is there aught you need that my hands withhold,
Rich gifts of raiment or grain or gold?
Lo! I have flung to the East and West,
Priceless treasures torn of my breast,
And yielded the sons of my stricken womb
To the drum beats of duty, the sabres of doom.
Gathered like pearls in their alien graves,

Silent they sleep by the Persian waves.
Scattered like shells on Egyptian sands

They lie with pale brows and brave, broken hands.
They are strewn like blossoms mown down by chance
On the blood-brown meadows of Flanders and France.
Can ye measure the grief of the tears I weep

Or compass the woe of the watch I keep?
Or the pride that thrills thro my hearts despair
And the hope that comforts the anguish of prayer?
And the far sad glorious vision I see
Of the torn red banners of Victory?
When the terror and tumult of hate shall cease

And life be refashioned on anvils of peace,
And your love shall offer memorial thanks
To the comrades who fought in your dauntless ranks,
And you honour the deeds of the deathless ones,
Remember the blood of thy martyred sons!27
What would have been a lush, somewhat sentimental, war lyric from
an English poet in a distinct late Victorian-early Georgian vein
becomes rich and strange when produced by a nationalist Indian
woman. The tropes of gender, nation and colonialism are fiercely
knotted in the above poem. What is extraordinary is the way the
nationalist/feminist trope of the abject Indian mother from Ode
to India to Awake (Waken, O mother! thy children implore thee,/
Who kneel in thy presence to serve and adore thee!)28 is here
exploited to legitimise and glorify Indias gift to the empire: a standard
trope of anti-colonial resistance flows and fuses with imperial support
for the war with breathtaking fluency.
The poem remains a powerful example of how literature
illuminates the faultlines of history, exposing its contradictions and
ambivalences: anglicization and indigenousness, residual colonial
loyalty and an incipient nationalist consciousness, patriarchal glory
and female mourning are all fused and confused in the above poem.
More than a tribute to India or the war, Naidus poem is an ode to
the complex and intimate processes of colonialism: the most articulate
Santanu Das | 275
Indian woman-nationalist is steeped by virtue of her class and

education in the English patriotic and poetic tradition. In the early
nineteenth century, what British colonisation in India did successfully
was to produce a class of anglicised, indigenous elite immersed in
the English culture and literary traditions: a classic example is the
Indian poet Michael Madhusudhan Dutt who declared: Yes I love
the language the glorious language of the Anglo-Saxon in all its
radiant beauty.29 Though this adoration would significantly change
in the latter half of the century with the nationalist movement, one
could see the continuation of this anglicised colonial sensibility in
Naidu. While the abstract imagery of drumbeats of duty, sabres of
doom or the torn red banners of Victory is reminiscent of the Jessie
Pope school of poetry that Owen so famously ridiculed, the
aestheticisation of the dead soldiers in the second stanza with its
sensuous vocabulary pale brows, broken hands, blossoms mown
down by chance with their murmur of labials and sibilance links
the poem with the verse of Wilfred Owen, looking back to Tennyson,
Swinburne and Yeats.
In fact, the knotted relation between the tropes of gender, nation
and war in the poem is richly resonant with Owens The Kind Ghosts
with its disturbing combination of misogyny and eroticisation of
violence. Owen imagines Brittania as a femme fatale who lures her
men to death:
She dreams of golden gardens and sweet glooms,
Not marvelling why her roses never fall,
Nor what red mouths were torn to make their blooms.30
Naidus poem strikingly similar to former in its use of words such

as doom, torn, red bloom as well as in its decadent music shows
a common inherited Georgian vocabulary but at the same time, it
is also Owens poem turned upside down. First, Naidus poem is no
anti-war protest poetry; moreover, woman is no longer a seducer
addressed to in the third person by a male poet but rather a bereaved
woman imagined in the first person. The nation is no longer Britannia
but Mother India with whom the female poet and implicitly the
Indian reader identifies: the affective power of the war-bereaved
woman in this poem is here rooted in the native trope of Mother

India fettered by the colonial yoke. Thus, while pro-war and
seemingly derivative, it is at the same time gently subversive: it
testifies to the complexity of the colonial encounter, of how literary
influences are negotiated, and Naidu manages to inscribe both a
burgeoning national consciousness and her feminine identity onto an
imperial war poem. Indeed, the poem is significant for the
imagination of the nation and the writing of Indian history. If one
of the standard devices for the success of colonialism is the ideology
that native history mattered only as an extension of the imperial drama
rather than having any independent existence or value, Naidu
brilliantly uses the war to align native contribution with global events.
Her poem is not an aria for the death of the high European bourgeois
consciousness but rather for the just recognition of the Indian soldiers:
they fight not only in Flanders and France but also in Egypt and
Persia, revealing a different and more international geographical
imagination of the war than in the First World War verse of Owen,
Sassoon or Brittain. The last line of her poem reads: Remember thy
martyred sons. Is Naidu asking India to remember her sons, or, is
the empire called upon to remember Indias gift: the maternal
metaphor binds together empire, nation and the female poet.
There is also a certain political shrewdness which was shared
within the Indian National Congress: support for the war at this stage
could later be used to press for greater national autonomy. Indeed,
early in 1916, when asked to defend the rights of the native Indians
to carry arms which the English had banned, Naidu rose to the
occasion, citing the bravery of the Indian troops and the sacrifice of
the Indian women as a proof of loyalty and using it as an emotional
lever:
It may seem a kind of paradox that I should be asked to raise my voice on
behalf of the disinherited manhood of the country, but it is suitable that I
who represent the other sex, that is, the mothers of the men whom we wish
to make men and not emasculated machines, should raise a voice on behalf
of the future mothers of India
Have we not, the women of India, sent our sons and brothers to shed their
Santanu Das | 277
blood on the battlefields of Flanders, France, Gallipoli and Mesopotamia,

when the hour comes, for thanks, shall we not say to them for whom they
foughtremember the blood of martyred sons, and remember the armies of
India and restore to India her lost manhood.31
Indias contribution to the war efforts was to play a strategic role in

the socio-political atmosphere of the time: one of the most direct
results was the Secretary of State Lord Montagus announcement in
August 1917 that British policy was aimed at the progressive
realisation of responsible government in India.32
Soldiers letters and the war novel
But what do we know about the inner world of the sepoys who actually
went to battle? The first two Indian divisions renamed Lahore and
Meerut arrived at Marseilles during September and October, 1914
to joyous the cries of Vive la Hindus. Drafted to fill in the gaps left
by the heavy losses in the British Expeditionary Force, they initially
totalled 24,000 men of whom 75% were sepoys and 25% British.
They formed the Indian Expeditionary Force A and were put under
the command of Lt-General Sir James Willcocks.33 They were re-
equipped in Marseilles and took part in some of the severest fighting,
including the battles at Neuve Chapelle, Festubert and Loos, incurring
heavy casualties and earning the first Victoria Crosses to be awarded
to Indians. A total of 138,608 Indians served in France between
October 1914 and December 1915. On the other hand, the largest
number of Indians sent overseas some 588,717 men, including
295,565 combatants and 293,152 non-combatants (often forming
porter and labour corps) served in Mesopotamia, in the three
Ottoman cities of Baghdad, Basra and Mosul.34 The Mesopotamia
campaign has gone down in history for its mismanagement and
messiness, resulting in the disastrous siege in Kut-al-Amara. The siege
is now blamed on the shortsightedness of its commander Charles
Townshend who criticized the Indians as dejected, spiritless and
pessimistic and famously said, How easy the defence of Kut would
have been had my division been an all British one instead of a
composite one.35
Unlike the case of British, French and German troops, we do not

have detailed diaries, journals, poems and memoirs from these sepoys
who were largely recruited from the semi-literate peasant-warrior
classes of Northern India in accordance with the theory of the martial
races. What we have instead are hundreds of censored letters from
France and Mesopotamia. These letters, either dictated or written in
the native languages by the Indian sepoys, were translated into English
for the censors and ironically the English versions are what survive
today, housed in the British Library. The palimpsest nature of these
documents somewhat undermines their testimonial value but, as
David Omissi notes in the introduction to his excellent anthology
Indian Voices of the Great War: Soldiers Letters, 1914-1918, The
crucial issue is, surely, less what we cannot learn from these letters,
than what we can learn from them36. Indeed, these letters open up
the emotional world of these men, providing rare glimpses into a
unique area of consciousness and experience for which very few
written documents survive. The emotional range of these letters is
quite astonishing, ranging from excitement and rapture to horror,
homesickness and mourning.
Consider the following two letters, recording very different moods
at different stages in the war:
The country is very fine, well-watered and fertile. The fields are very large,
all gardens full of fruit trees. Every mans land yields him thousands of
maunds of wheat. The chief products are wheat, potatoes, beans and every
kind of grain except the noble millet. All the year round it rains three times
a week. There is no need to water the land.The fruits are pears, apricots,
grapes and fruits of many kinds. Even the dogs refuse them at this season.
Several regiments could eat from one tree. The people are very well-
mannered and well to do. The value of each house may be set down as several
lakhs and crores of rupees. Each house is a sample of Paradise. The people
far surpass the Egyptians. The wits are set wool-gathering by rosy cheeks and
dainty ringlets. Wherever you look you see the same. One is tempted to
exclaim O merciful God, that hast made all this from a little dirty semen.!
Praise be to God.37
May God keep your eyes from beholding the state of things here. There are
heaps and heaps of dead bodies, the sight of which upsets me. The stench
Santanu Das | 279
is so overwhelming that one can, with difficulty, endure it for ten or fifteen
minutes. Fine, stalwart young men are stricken down into the dust, and
others are struggling in the combat like fish pulled out of the water and
thrown down on the sand, with their handsome faces dimmed by the grime
of war. Nevertheless, the warriors, undismayed, continue their onward
course, despite the hail of shot and shell, and the numbers that fall on the
way wounded or killed. God does not show any pity for them in their awful
trial.38
The above letters are characteristic in the way the sepoys register at
once the exhilaration and the trauma of their Western sojourn. The
letters are often marked by a sense of metaphysical wonder at the
riches of the Occident. To the eyes of the peasant-farmer stationed
in rural France, the wealth of the country is registered not through
the lights of Paris but through agricultural and industrial modernity
whose products are quantified for the appropriate emotional response
of the recipient. The narrative of wheat and grain proceeds from the
litany of names of fruits to estimates of property value till the limit
of signification is reached, and description must take recourse to the
imaginative: a second Paradise. The bounty of the land is matched
by that of its womenfolk, and the sexual trace inherent in rosy cheeks
moves from the rhetoric of wonder to its abject origin: dirty little
semen. This is strikingly different from, and perhaps more colourful
than the accounts of mud and shellfire that one finds in the letters
of the European soldiers. The second letter bears more of a semblance
to what we have come to associate as the quintessential First World
letter, with the simile of the fish on the sand leaping out at us. On
the other hand, the phrase shot or shell, quarried out of Tennyson,
is clearly a scribal embellishment. What is important to remember
is that these letters are not unmediated authentic voices but what
Joanna Bourke has called emotion as narrative, informed by a
complex interplay between processes of perception, knowledge and
narrative traditions as well as a tantalizing textual history.39
The social reality of these soldiers, uprooted from their local
village and conscripted into modern industrial warfare, finds one of
its most evocative accounts in Mulk Raj Anands war novel Across the
Black Waters (1939). Anand wrote it while working for the Socialist
side in the Spanish Civil War. He is now largely forgotten in accounts

of literary history, but he was an important figure in the literary and
political map of early twentieth century London, straddling both
British and Indian modernism.40 He hovered on the fringes of the
Bloomsbury circle and was one of the foremost Indian writers to be
writing in English. Forster wrote the preface to his first novel. Anand
dedicated Across the Black Waters to the memory of my father Subedar
Lal Chand Anand, M.S.M, (late 2/17th Dogra) who underwent
training for the First World War though he possibly was not sent
overseas. However, many of his friends fought in the war, and Anand
would have known these people as a child.
Across the Black Waters is written very much in the shadow of the
legacy of Owen and Sassoon and other English war memoirs to which
it owes its tone of disillusionment. But at the same time it opens up
a whole new world in fiction written in English as Anand shows Lalu
Singh and his associates a group of Indian villagers disembarking
at Marseilles and, unlike their Anzac counterparts, negotiating
Western culture for the first time. The first third of the novel is an
exhilarating read unlike anything in the rest of English war fiction
as he aligns Indian village history with Europes Great War. The
villagers bring with them the structure of an extended Indian family
Uncle Kirpu, Daddy Dhanoo and Anand tries to capture the idiom
of Hindusthani speech: Ohe, ohe son, have some shame, have some
respect. The novel is an also exploration of Lalus complex subjectivity:
So we have come across the black waters safely he said to himself
apprehensively, as if he really expected some calamity, the legendary fate of
all those who went beyond the seas, to befall him at any moment. Truly, the
black, or rather blue, water seemed uncanny, spreading for thousands of
miles. It seemed as if God had spat upon the universe and the spittle had
become the sea. The white flecks of the foam on the swell, where wave met
wave, seemed like the froth churned out of Gods angry mouth. The swish
of the air as the ships tore their way across the rough sea seemed like the
fury of the Almighty at the sin which the white men had committed in
building their powerful engines.41
Anand draws on Indian folklore and mythology to show how they

Santanu Das | 281
structure modes of feeling of the sepoy as he journeys across the black

waters. The black sea was safe; the white mans land is where they
are all going to die as Anand subverts the conventional associations
of black and white. This is Conrads Heart of Darkness turned upside
down as Indians sail to Europe to face the horror! The horror! of
industrial modernity: it is also one of the earliest examples of the
empire writing back. On the other hand, the linking of industrial
modernity, war and whiteness is reminiscent of the English anti-war
novelist D.H. Lawrence. Anand is fully aware of the asymmetries and
injustices of this colonial war but he is equally attentive to the
insidious class and caste politics within the Indian camp. Anands
novel is not an aria for the death of the European bourgeois
consciousness but rather finding a voice for the working-class Indian
sepoy.
While postcolonial theory and its linguistic turns and counterturns
themselves become the object of study, there is a great need to recover
through historical and literary investigation the texture of the colonial
past its sensibility as well as its experiential dimension and the
example Ive chosen reveals the intricate links between colonialism,
empire and war. If modernity is understood in terms of improved
network of communication, industrialisation and cultural flow, the
sudden transportation of more than one million Indian soldiers and
labourers to different parts of the world must count as one of the key
points in the conjunction of modernity and colonialism. The theme
of India, empire and the First World War is a vast one, involving
multiple theatres of war, and different aspects of experience military,
economic, medical, political, social, cultural and literary and it
would easily spawn several books. My paper is an attempt to open
up the socio-cultural and literary world through a few strands and to
investigate particular intensities of feeling. For these emotions
continue to haunt the present. Said notes,
the meaning of the imperial past is not totally contained within it, but has
entered the reality of hundreds of millions of people, where its existence as
shared memory and as a highly conflictual texture of culture, ideology, and
policy still exercises tremendous force.42
In April 1999, a huge group of Sikhs from Britain, France and

Belgium made a pilgrimage to Ypres to pay homage to their ancestors
who fought in the war.43 This was a singular moment in European
(multi)cultural life: these people were claiming their share in the legacy
of the war and integrating their ethnic identities with European
history. As we prepare for the 90th anniversary of the Armistice next
year, we need to be alert to these different voices, bearing testimony
to the multiracial and international nature of the First World War.
Notes
1. See Stanley Rice, Neuve Chapelle Indias Memorial in France, 1914-1918.

An Account of the Unveiling. (London: Imperial War Graves Commission,
1928). Also see Michele Barrett, Subalterns at War: First World War
Colonial Forces and the Politics of the Imperial War Graves Commission,
interventions, Vol 9(3), 2007, 452-475.
2. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage, 1994), 19.
3. Indias Contribution to the Great War (Calcutta: Superintendent Govt.
Printing, India, 1923), 79.
4. Statistics of the Military Effort of the British Empire during the Great War,
1914-1920 (London: His Majestys Stationary Office, 1920), 777.
According to David Omissi, By the time of the Amistice, India had
provided over 1.27 million men, including 827,000 combatants,
contributing roughly one man in ten to the war effort of the British
Empire Indian Voices of the Great War: Soldiers letters,1914-1918 edited
by David Omissi, (London: Macmillan, 1999), 4.
5. While it is a critical commonplace to point out the absence of women
and working-class men from Paul Fussells enormously influential The
Great War and Modern Memory, it is rarely pointed out that all the soldiers
he talks about are white, if not English. Other examples of works which
have largely ignored the Indian Corps would include Liddell Hart, The
Real War (London, 1930), T.Wilson, The Myriad Faces of War (Cambridge,
1986), Niall Ferguson, The Pity of War (London, 1999) and C.Barnett,
The Great War (London, 2003). However, this is changing, and of course
there are notable exceptions such as Sumit Sarkars Modern India : 1885-
1947 (Oxford, 1989) and Hew Strachans To Arms (Oxford, 2001) which
include references to the Indian soldiers in the First World War. More
recently, there has been a renewed interest in these First World War
Santanu Das | 283
soldiers, as evident in Sugata Bose, A Hundred Horizons: The Indian

Ocean in the Age of Global Empire (Harvard, 2006). Important recent
works on India and the FWW would include: S.D.Radhan and Ellinwood
(ed.), India and World War I (Delhi: Manohar, 1978), David Omissi (ed.),
Indian Voices of the Great War: Soldiers Letters, 1914-1918 (Basingstoke:
Macmillan, 1999) and Gordon Corrigan, Sepoys in the Trenches (Staplehurst,
1999).
6. These include Keith Jefferys Ireland and the Great War (2000), Hew
Strachans The First World War in Africa (2004), Chris Pugsleys Te
Hokowhitu a Tu: the Maori Pioneer Battalion in the First World War (1995),
Richard Smiths Jamaican Volunteers in the First World War: Race, Masculinity
and the Development of National Consciousness (2005). Also see my
forthcoming edited volume Race, Empire and First World War Writing
(Cambridge University Press, 2009), which brings these scholars together
to recover and analyse the colonial contributions to the war.
7. Papers of George MacKay 3rd Engineer HMTS, 2 DRL/0874, Australian
War Memorial Archives, Canberra, Australia.
8. Omissi, Indian Voices, 49.
9. Quoted in India and the War (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1915),
40-41.
10. The most prominent activities in this regard were that of the Ghadr party
settled in North America as well as the Komagatamaru incident which
is archived in considerable details in the West Bengal State Archives,
Home (Political) Confidential, File 26 (1-39). Also see Bose, Indian
Revolutionaries during the First World War in Ellinwood and Pradhan
ed. India and World War I, 109-126.
11. Foreign and Political, 1915, Internal B, April 1915 Nos. 319. NOI,
Delhi; Political (Confidential), 1915 Proceedings 505, West Bengal State
Archives, Calcutta.
12. Foreign and Political, Internal B April 1915 Nos. 972-977, National
Archives of India, Delhi
13. Quoted in M.B.L.Bhargava, Indias Services in the War (Allahabad: Standard
Press, 1919), 205.
14. Ibid., 278-80.
15. The Poems of Wilfred Owen, edited by Jon Stallworthy (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1990), 158.
16. Dadabhai Naorji, Message, 12 August, 1914, in The Indian Review War
Book ed. G.A.Natesan (Madras: Natesan, n.d., 1915), Preface (opposite
contents page).
17. Quoted in India and the War (Lahore: Khosla Brothers, n.d.), 34-35.
18. Legislative Councils Proceedings, India (1914-15), Vol. LIII, 16.
19. Gandhi, M.K. An Autobiography or, The Story of My Experiments with
Truth, translated by Mahadev Desai, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982),
317.
20. Bhargava, Indias Services, 218
21. Nandy, Ashis, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under
Colonialism (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983), 3-4.
22. For a fuller discussion of this war journal, see my article Sepoys, Sahibs
and Babus: Reading and Writing about the Great War in India in First
World War and Publishing, edited by Mary Hammond and Shafquat
Towheed. (London: Palgrave, 2007).
23. My discussion on Naidu here draws substantially on my chapter India,
Women and the First World War in Womens Movements: International
Perspectives, 1914-1919, edited by Alison Fell and Ingrid Sharp (London:
Palgrave, 2007).
24. The standard biographies are Baig, Tara Ali, Sarojini Naidu (Delhi:
Publication Division, Government of India, 1974 and Hasi Banerjee
Sarojini Naidu: The Traditional Feminist (Calcutta: K. P. Bagchi, 1998).
Some early works on her are K.K.Bhattacharya Sarojini Naidu, the
Greatest Woman of Our Time, Modern Review (April 1949) and R.
Bhatnagar (n.d), Sarojini Naidu: The Poet of a Nation, Allahabad.
25. Gandhi remembers his first encounter with Naidu in London amidst the
excitement of war in An Autobiography or, The Story of My Experiments with
Truth, translated by Mahadev Desai (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982),
318.
26. Quoted in Bhargava, Indias Services, 208-209.
27. The Gift of India, The Broken Wing: Songs of Love, Death and Destiny
1915-1916 (London: William Heinemann, 1917), 5-6.
28. Awake!, dedicated to Mohammed Ali Jinnah, was recited at the Indian
National Congress, 1915, and collected in The Broken Wing, 43.
29. Michael Madhusuha Dutt, The Anglo-Saxon and the Hindu (1854),
quoted in Rosinka Chaudhuri, The Dutt Family Album and Toru Dutt
in A History of Indian Literature in English edited by Arvind Krishna
Mehrotra (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 53. See this
perceptive article for insights into the anglicised, colonial mind (53-69).
30. Jon Stallworthy, The Poems of Wilfred Owen (Oxford, 1990), 158.
31. The Arms Act, Speeches and Writings of Sarojini Naidu (Madras:
G.A.Natesan, 1918), 102-3.
Santanu Das | 285
32. Natesan, G.A. (ed.) Speeches on Indian Questions by the Rt. Hon. Mr
Montagu (Madras: G.A.Natesan, 1917), 1696.
33. For a succinct examination of the performance of the Indian forces in
France, see George Morton Jack, The Indian Army on the Western Front,
1914-1915: A Portrait of Collaboration, War in History, 2006 13: 329-362
34. Indias Contribution to the Great War (Calcutta, 1923), 78, 96.
35. Quoted in A.J.Barker, Townshend of Kut: A Biography of Major-General Sir
Charles Townshend (London, 1967), 197.
36. Omissi, Indian Voices, 9.
37. Military Department, Censor of Indian Mails 1914-1918, Part 2, L/MIL/
826, India Office Library, British Library
38. Omissi, Indian Voices, 245-6.
39. Joanna Bourke, Fear and Anxiety: Writing about Emotion in Modern
History, Historical Workshop Journal, 2003, 55(1), 111-133. Also see
Andrew Ortony (ed.), Metaphor and Thought (Cambridge, 1993).
40. See Saros Cowasjee, So Many Freedoms: Major Fiction of Mulk Raj Ananad
(Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1978).
41. Mulk Raj Anand, Across the Black Waters (Delhi: Orient, 1949), 8.
42. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 11.
43. See Holland, Bhupinder Singh, How Europe is indebted to the Sikhs?
(Waremme: Sikh University Press, 2005).
Society and Political Environment in
Shyam Selvadurais Cinnamon Gardens
Sayantan Dasgupta
Benedict Anderson has posited as a universal phenomenon, the

strategy of the ruled and the colonised being invited to become one
of the rulers.1 This was true of the South Asian colonial context as
well. As part of their Divide-and-Rule policy, not only did the colonial
rulers try to divide people along the line of religion, but they also tried
to indulge one group of people at the cost of others so as to keep
the resentment of the majority channeled against one group of the
ruled. Thus, a group of people was typically cultivated by the colonisers
to act as proxy rulers and to help the colonisers dominate the rest
of the native populace. One axis along which this was done was
language.
In India, TB Macaulays Minute on Indian Education (1835)
recommended the use of English education to create a class of people
who would be Indian in blood, but English in taste, in opinions, in
morals and in intellect. This class would protect British interests and
help rule the land for them. As Sajni Kripalani Mukherjee has pointed
out, The British agenda for education in India was always very clear.
The dissemination of Western education was to establish and
perpetuate their own power.2
Ironically, one popular strand of Indian historiography would go
on to argue that it was precisely this move to introduce English
language and literature to Indians that would, notwithstanding its
original purpose, end up enlightening the Indians and lead them to
demand independence.3 But nationalism was not simply a derivative
discourse in South Asia; it did not entail a mere borrowing of ideas
from Western civilisation as made available and accessible through
English education there was an element of choice exercised in what
Sayantan Dasgupta | 287
to adopt and what to reject from the West European notion of

nationalism, Partha Chatterjee has argued.4 The relationship between
colonial discourse and colonial subject is, after all, characterised by
ambivalence;5 and the mimicry of the colonial subject is necessarily
characterised by slippages and fractures.
In Ceylon, too, the British sought to use English language and
English literature to perpetuate the logic of colonialism. And this, as
we shall see, is quite evident in Cinnamon Gardens. When Ceylon
became administratively unified under the Colebrooke-Cameron
Reforms in 1833, English was made the language of administration.
It gradually began to be seen as a language that could open doors in
colonial Ceylon.6
In this paper, we shall try to locate colonial desire, ambivalence,
amnesia, cultural imperialism and other relevant nation-related
thematics in Selvadurais second novel Cinnamon Gardens (1998) . We
shall try and understand the nature of collaboration and the disjunctions
therein as constructed in the fictive world of Shyam Selvadurai.
The name of the novel derives from Cinnamon Gardens, a suburb
of Colombo. A hundred years ago, Cinnamon Gardens used to be
a protected cinnamon estate cultivated by colonial masters for their
profit. At the time of the events presented in the narrative, Cinnamon
Gardens is known as a residential area that houses the homes of
Ceylons elite.7 This moving in of the Ceylonese elite into a formerly
British space needs to be read not only on a physical level, but also
on a metaphorical register, I suggest. Chelva Kanaganayakam has
rightly written that the upper-class inhabitants of the fashionable
Cinnamon Gardens imbibe the worst traditions of colonialism and
emerge as the neo/new colonial elite of the country.8 The access to
this space that the colonial elite enjoys is mirrored by the access it
has to the language, literature and cultural codes of the European
rulers. Cinnamon Gardens, then, is a site that evidences the
reproduction of colonial culture it signifies the desire generated in
the mind of the colonised subject to step into the shoes of the coloniser
and to become a part of the ruling class and the structure of colonial
rule. Paulo Freires comments could very well refer to this Cinnamon
Gardens class:
288 | Sayantan Dasgupta
The more (cultural) invasion is accentuated and those invaded are alienated
from the spirit of their own culture and from themselves, the more the latter
want to be like the invaders: to walk like them, dress like them, talk like
them.9
This is a class of collaborators that Macaulay would have been proud

of a class that proudly espouses what it perceives to be emblematic
of British culture and taste and helps perpetuate colonialism.
Selvadurais positing of this class as a beneficiary of British rule is
quite clear and unambiguous. This craving for objects that symbolise
Western culture and civilisation at the cost of the indigenous10 is, of
course, not only of economic significance, but also of ideological
significance. The colonial economy generates the desire for Western
products in the mind of the colonial subject, persuading him or her
with the argument that they are superior.11 This is necessary as
colonialism itself arises out of a search for new markets and new
markets need to be created not by invading the land alone, but the
mind as well. Further, this conviction of the superiority of Western
products or ideas, when successfully implanted in the mind of the
colonial subject, will also help justify colonialism, thereby producing
a vicious circle.
What also needs to be noted is the names of the houses in
Cinnamon Gardens. Naming, as we know, is an act of power. It is
sometimes also an act of reconstruction settlers and colonisers have,
throughout human history, tried to reconstruct their lost homelands
by (re-)/naming new lands after their lost homelands. But the
ideological thrust of the colonising machinery is such that naming
often also implies amnesia in the case of the colonial subject:
The fine residences (of Cinnamon Gardens) bore names such as Ascot,
Elscourt, The Priory, The Grange, Chateau Jubilee, Rosebank, Fincastle, The
Firs; and the names of the occupants Reginald, Felix, Solomon, Florence,
Henrietta, Aloysius, Venetia, Tudor, Edwin.12
The use of European names, like the use of European furnishings and
fittings, may be read as indicative of the desire on the part of the
colonial subject to be as much like the coloniser as possible and to
pretend an allegiance and a claim to the colonisers cultural legacy.
Shyam Selvadurais Cinnamon Gardens | 289
This desire to transform oneself also implies a death-wish a wish

to forget ones past, ones own culture and ones own system of
namings.13 It is significant that the Mudaliyar Navratnams property
on Horton Place was called Brighton, named after Brighton Pavilion,
which the Mudaliyar had once visited as a young man. Indeed, the
manufacturing of tastes by colonial discourse is evident in the very
architecture of the houses in the Cinnamon Gardens area houses
with French doors, arched colonnaded verandahs, arched windows
and balustrades. From all this, it may seem that the colonial subject
is an ideal creation, one who accepts colonial discourses of power
and perpetuates them unquestioningly, trying to enter the category of
rulers by internalising and perpetuating these very discourses. Yet,
such a casting of the colonised is never unambiguous and seamless
and the fractures show soon enough in Cinnamon Gardens. As
Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin write:
When colonial discourse encourages the colonised subject to mimic the
coloniser, by adopting the colonisers cultural habits, assumptions, institutions
and values, the result is never a simple reproduction of those traits. Rather,
the result is a blurred copy of the coloniser that can be quite threatening.14
But before we go on to that, let us look at the school in colonial Sri

Lanka as a site for the manufacture of colonial desire and at how
it has been fictionalised by Selvadurai. Because of the way the status
of women is worked into the text through Selvadurais treatment of
colonial education, we shall also look at the gender question in this
context. While women have (traditionally) existed and continue to
exist in a situation of subordination15 in Sri Lanka, education has
had a significant effect in ameliorating the condition of women there.
The first pivotal event in this context was the triumph of Buddhism
in Ceylon. The other pivotal event was the onset of imperialism and
its effect on womens education. The Dutch had established parish
schools in parts of Ceylon that were under their control. Kumari
Jayawardena has quoted KM de Silva as arguing that these schools
were part and parcel of the Dutch ecclesiastical activity in Ceylon.
But the important thing for us to note in this context is the fact that
these schools were mostly co-educational. Women, thus, were in a
position to benefit from education side by side with men though of

course for a long time only a particular class of women would benefit
from access to these schools.
The Dutch power soon waned and the British supplanted them
in Ceylon in 1796. They inherited and persisted with the Dutch
education system including the co-educational parish schools. In the
early period of British rule over Ceylon, education was not a priority
for the colonial rulers. But, Governor North founded the first English
school for boys in Colombo in 1799 to train interpreters needed for
administrative purposes. And education began to command more
attention henceforth with the British.
Apart from the colonial administration, one must also look at the
role played by Christian missionaries in furthering education in
colonial Ceylon.
They opened schools using the local languages for the poor, and using English
for the privileged. Since converts were lapsing back into their traditional
religion after their marriage, English sister schools were started to produce
Christian wives for the converts.16
This is the history behind the education that Annalukshmi gets in

Cinnamon Gardens. On numerous occasions in Cinnamon Gardens,
the characters tend to understand their Ceylonese realities in terms
of literary works they have read. And, on most occasions, these
references are to English literary works. Annalukshmi interprets the
story of Aruls exile and the status of Seelan in terms of the Gothic
and romance novels she used to read.17 Again, Annalukshmis
preference for meeting the right man through other ways (than the
traditional proposal-interview method) is undercut by Kumudinis use
of tropes from English literature This is not Pride and Prejudice,18
akka, Kumudini said, making crushing use of her knowledge of
literature. Your Mr Darcy isnt going to ride up on a horse.19 Here,
it may be admittedly tempting to read this as Kumudinis critique of
Annalukshmis inclination to read local Ceylonese realities in terms
of English literature, but the absence of any other markers that would
support such a reading, coupled with the narrators tongue-in-cheek
reference to Kumudinis crushing use of her knowledge of (English)
literature prompts a completely different reading. Kumudinis apparent

critique is no critique at all, but rather a reiteration of the very tropes
it appears, at first glance, to critique. It seems more of a move, even
if an unconscious one, on Kumudinis part, to stake her claim to the
colonisers culture which, she has been taught to believe superior by
virtue of, among other things, her formal education.
When Annalukshmis would-be suitor, Mr Macintosh, does not
turn up to see her and instead runs away with his paramour, this
is how Manohari interprets the situation: Akka has been
abandonedDeserted like Miss Havisham in Great Expectations.20
This tendency to look for characters from Jane Austen21 and Charles
Dickens and others in colonial contexts is, as Ngugi has argued,22
symptomatic of a particular colonised mindset manufactured by
colonial discourses of education. It is worth noting that Annalukshmi
belongs precisely to this group of women her Western education
has made her more than a suitable wife; it has given her a teachers
certificate and this certificate has earned for her mobility, economic
independence and a freedom to live her life as she wants to. This
certificate is also; therefore, as we see in the novel, seen as
symptomatic of the threat23 she poses to the neat order of colonial
Ceylonese society. The potential of the teachers certificate can also
be gauged from the fact that it would give the holder of the certificate
the right of franchise if the Womens Franchise Unions original
demands were met24 as it happened, the Donoughmore Commission
approved universal franchise in Ceylon.
Returning to Cinnamon Gardens, Annalukshmis feelings of guilt
on being discovered reading up on Hinduism symptomise one form
of reaction to colonialist discourse. It is this feeling of guilt on the
part of Annalukshmi that leads me to hypothesise a very different
argument than the one forwarded by Karl Woelz in his review of
Cinnamon Gardens in Lambda Book Report.25 Woelz feels that
Selvadurais liberal allusions to Austen, Dickens, Hardy and Bronte
makes clear that Selvadurai is a great admirer of the nineteenth-
century British novel. This seems to be a complete misinterpretation,
robbing, as it does, the references of their political charge (I may also
put in here that when asked about writers who had influenced him,
Selvadurai talks of Anita Desai, Alice Munroe and Naguib Mahfouz

Austen, Dickens and Hardy are absent here; for details, one may
see The Personal is Political, Shyam Selvadurai interviewed by Jim
Marks for Lambda Book Report).26 For me, as a South Asian reader,
the repeated references are nothing short of parodic I read them
as deliberate interventions meant to highlight the politics of colonial
pedagogy and the way colonialist discourse uses education to generate
in the colonial subject an inability to locate culture anywhere beyond
or outside the colonisers space, and perhaps, as an effect of a
nationalist assertion, the indigenous space in times past. Hence, the
references to Austen, Dickens, Hardy and the Tirukkural, and even
the epigraph borrowed from George Elliot become part of one big
joke played on the reader, part of one great parody. Cinnamon
Gardens, then, in my reading, parodies precisely the values that are
sought to be imposed through certain readings of the very texts being
cited. The texts quoted, then, are not necessarily the object of
authorial homage, but rather are used to critique their use by
imperialist-colonialist discourse.
The very real incident of the Donoughmore Commissions visit
to Sri Lanka and the contemporary debates surrounding self-rule and
universal franchise are fictionalised by Selvadurai in Cinnamon
Gardens. Historically, the Donoughmore Commission on Constitutional
Reform visited Ceylon in 1928. It conducted a survey in Ceylon,
heard the arguments of various sides and groups and finally
recommended a limited female franchise to women over 30, but
when the reforms were implemented in 1931 all women over 21 were
granted the franchise.27 Among the groups the Donoughmore
Commission met were the Ceylon National Congress, which had been
formed in 1919 with Ponnambalam Arunachalam as one of the
founder members, and the Womens Franchise Union. The Womens
Franchise Union had been formed in 1927 by middle-class and
professional women, many of them wives of nationalist and labour
leaders.28 In December of that very year, it organised a meeting to
demand voting rights for women. One can understand now why
womens education assumes such an important role in Cinnamon
Gardens.
We move now to the Tamil-Sinhala conflict in Sri Lanka. We find

that the Ceylon Citizenship Act (1948), the Indian and Pakistani
Residents Act 3 (1948) and the Ceylon Parliamentary Elections
Amendment Act 48 (1949) together virtually disenfranchised Indian
Tamils in Sri Lanka and robbed them of citizenship rights. This
conflict had its roots in the colonial period itself. In spite of the
struggle for independence, discontent had always been simmering
underneath. One reason for this lay in the fact that successive
European administrations had depended on the Tamil minority,
Ceylonese and Indian, to help administer the country because most
Sinhalas were opposed to European rule:
This was compounded by the European colonial powers encouraging millions
of Tamils from South India to settle in Sri Lanka as a means of cheap labour
to work in the tobacco plantations in Jaffna and coffee, tea and rubber
plantations in the central hillsThis was deliberate colonial policy to dilute
and weaken majority Sinhala resistance to colonial rule.29
This tension came to a fore as the possibility of political independence

began to look more and more feasible. One of its most important
manifestations lay in the conflicting demands for group and territorial
electoral representation.
The Manning Reforms of 1920-21 abolished group representation
and introduced territorial representation. This gave rise to vociferous
protests from Tamils and other minorities and finally led to the
withdrawal of the Manning Reforms and the introduction of modified
group representation. Finally the Donoughmore Commission
introduced universal suffrage as well as territorial representation in
1931. These tensions are also textualised by Shyam Selvadurai in
Cinnamon Gardens. With the possibility of self-rule becoming a reality,
old loyalties are defined afresh in new terms. Balendran has always
known his father to be firmly part of the Queens House collaborator
class with no interest in local associations and their demands and
needs.30 Yet, two weeks before the arrival of the Donoughmore
Commission in Ceylon, the Mudaliyar meets members of the Ceylon
Tamil Association and decides to throw in his lot with them. A casual
reading may interpret this act as simply an attempt to group together
with ones own kind in a time of political uncertainty. But is this act
to be read purely in terms of a solidarity engendered by contemporary
political developments? My reading, keeping in mind the feudal
mentality of the Mudaliyar, seems to suggest otherwise this apparent
volte-face on the part of the Mudliyar, while it is surely part of an
imagined solidarity for ones own kind, is also directly related to the
need and desire on the part of the collaborator to ensure a status quo
of the prevailing socio-political structure.
The Mudaliyar tells Balendran by way of explanation that it is
necessary that we Tamils unite together. It is rumoured that the commission
will be granting greater self-government in the new constitution. This must
be stopped. The governor must retain all the powers he possesses. Otherwise,
we will replace a British Raj with a Sinhala Raj and we Tamils will be
doomed.31
The above quotation highlights the Mudaliyars desire for status quo
as well as the ambiguities of this stance. I would argue that this
apparent volte-face is not a volte-face at all; it marks, if anything at
all, a reiteration of the location of the Mudaliyar in the colonial context
and it signifies the search for new strategies, excuses and discourses
with which to fight the possibility of a disruption of order as he knows
it. The key to understanding the Mudaliyars stance within the
contemporary nationalist movement in Ceylon lies, I feel, in the
words, The governor must retain all the powers he possesses. Now,
in colonial Ceylon of the 1920s, the governor was responsible for
naming the Mudaliyar as well as nominating the Legislative Council
members. Thus, any erosion of powers of the governor will mean that
the smooth devolution of power from the governor to the Mudaliyar
class would face interruption. Thus, it is in the Mudaliyars interest,
having carved out a space for himself as a collaborator in the colonial
machinery, to try and ensure the continuation of the governors
powers. And in order to do so, he finds the bogey of a Sinhala Raj
a convenient excuse. That is not to say, of course, that fears of Sinhala
domination and a corresponding marginalisation of Tamils and other
minorities are unfounded. History, indeed, has proved otherwise.
Sinhala domination has indeed been responsible for the problematic
space that Sri Lankan nationalism has come to occupy, having come
into conflict with a Tamil nationalism. But, while prospects of a
Sinhala Raj are real and worrisome, to a certain class of beneficiaries
like the Mudaliyar Navaratnam, this very real prospect or fear serves
as precisely the excuse they had been eagerly awaiting and desperately
looking for to justify the continuation of British colonialism.
The politics of the sense of insufficiency and of inferiority with
respect to European civilisation that is imposed through educational
policies and various other colonialist interpellative discourses on the
colonised subject reveals itself very clearly in this section. We note,
for instance, the Mudaliyars words:
Besides, self-government would be fatal to this country economicallyWe
are a mere dot in the ocean. Without the might of the British Empire behind
us, we would be reduced to penury. Let us first put our house in order, show
that we are worthy of self-government, before it is granted to us.32
This can be read as a classic example of the manufacture of consent33

to being colonized how, through the effective use of various ISAs,
the colonisers try to, and often succeed in; convincing the colonised
that colonisation is for their own good. This process of manufacturing
consent is evidently also related to Orientalist34 practice which tries
to construct the Orient and its inhabitants as infantile,35 incapable
of taking rational decisions for themselves, barbaric, lazy, static and
irrational.
There are apparent slippages in this process, but more often than
not, these slippages are illusory. Let us take, for example, the passage
where the Mudaliyar constructs universal franchise as one of the
European ideas that are at odds with our great cultural tradition.36
This invocation of the past and this imagination of a great and hoary
tradition has its own politics in the colonial context. A re-invocation
of the past on the part of the colonised can be a strategy of combating
the amnesia that colonialist discourse attempts to generate with regard
to the history of colonised communities. This re-invocation, then,
becomes part of an attempt to remember, reconstruct and re-insert
indigenous history into the discursive relations between coloniser and
colonised. But, one of the dangers of this strategy is that it threatens
to lapse into some form of nativism37 where one ends up eulogising

and romanticising everything that constitutes this remembered history.
As part of a nativist strategy, and several scholars have already pointed
this out, one can end up eulogising sati, or the caste system,38 for
instance, and jump to conclusions like the one about the exalted
position of women in India in ancient times.39 With the Mudaliyar,
in the absence of any other indicators that could implicate him within
the folds of a struggle for national (re)construction, this argument must
be read merely as a nativist/ revivalist argument minus its political
charge, as an argument invented with the sole objective of maintaining
the status quo that would be disturbed if all Ceylonese men and women
got the right to vote. Thus, this invocation of the past, for him, serves
merely as a buffer to the redistribution of political rights and privileges
that would affect his position adversely.
Another section we need to study for better understanding the
dynamics of the times is the one that deals with the exchange between
Balendran and FC Wijewardena. The passage quoted below is
symptomatic of the tensions that accrue in South Asian space where
nationalism begins to get institutionalised as an ideal:
He brought out a tortoiseshell cigarette case from the pocket of his coat.
Divisions are appearing where I didnt even know there were any. He lit
himself a cigarette. Up-country Sinhalese versus low-country Sinhalese,
Karava caste versus Goyigama caste, Moors, Malays, Christian Tamils, Hindu
Tamils, Buddhists, and so on and so on. And not a bloody bugger is thinking
nationally, except us in the Congress.40
At a moment when nationalism begins to get institutionalised as

practice and as discourse in a (post)/colonial space, there is always
the possibility of the ruling classes appropriating the nationalist
ideology and using it to both coerce and persuade heterogeneous
minority groups or non-ruling classes to accept the old hegemony that
the ruling classes reproduce in this new political context. And often,
the association of the sacrosanct that is evoked by and invested in
the concept of the nation becomes a tool for such persuasion. By
imagining the nation as a homogeneous and uniform entity and by
imposing its own class or group needs upon the nationalist discourse,
the ruling classes or groups try to suppress heterogeneity, dissent and

claims of the minority/dispossessed. Such a model is particularly
relevant and problematic in the South Asian context given the marked
heterogeneity and diversity that characterises nation-states in South
Asia. Dissent and claims for acknowledgment of minority identity or
rights does not necessarily pose a threat to the discourse of nationalism
though it may endanger the interests of those who appropriate this
discourse and shape according to their needs. Nor does it necessarily
have to lead to secessionism. However the states in South Asia have
traditionally responded to dissent and claims to minority/ ethnic
identities and rights, as if they threatened the unity of the nation and
have launched offensives and enacted anti-terrorism laws that have
only served to transform campaigns for rights to secessionist
programmes.
It is in the light of this historical context that Wijewardenas
comments above have to be read. Perhaps the problem lies not in
the divisions that are appearing now, but rather in the feigned lack
of awareness that is part of Wijewardenas class inheritance. The use
of the marker tortoise-shell cigarette case is probably an important
indicator toward the authors own stance regarding the issue
Wijewardena brings up. It is all too easy, perhaps, for someone who
enjoys the privilege and the luxury of owning such an obvious symbol
of prosperity and who is a beneficiary of the homogenising discourse
of nationalism to try and imagine a seamless homogeneity in
Ceylonese society and to construct that imagined homogeneity as
natural in his discourse. The resurgence of identities that constitute
the complex of Ceylonese nationalism spells a challenge for the ruling
class, which tries to construct these identities as somehow contradictory
to the logic of the nation and the assertion of such identities as
somehow anti-national, even when they are aimed to protest a
homogenising discourse of nationalism that threatens to silence the
marginalised and the dispossessed. Such a construction is also
accompanied, as indeed we see here, by an attempt to appropriate
for oneself the aura of being more nationalistic (as opposed to
provincial a concept applied to sub-national identity claims) than
others. That is precisely what Wijewardena wishes or tries to do by
lamenting that only the Congress is thinking nationally. If thinking

nationally means suppressing identity claims and rights of the minority
or the dispossessed, then perhaps the virtues of thinking nationally
are notionally incorrect. And that is precisely what Balendran suggests
when he remarks hereafter that the Congress could try redefining
national.
In another argument between a Ceylon National Congress man
and a Ceylon Tamil Association supporter at the Mudaliyars birthday
dinner party, the Mudaliyar steps in to soothe frayed tempers and gives
the warring factions a common platform on which to unite.41 The
threat of AE Goonesinha and his Labour Union taking over the
running of the country and displacing the Ceylonese elite from their
position of pre-eminence turns out to be a rallying cry for elite Tamils
and Sinhalas, Congressmen and Tamil Association people alike. The
collusion of caste-class interests in the developing nationalist discourse
of 1920s Ceylon becomes most evident in the following passage:
In the good old days, people like him would have had to use the back
entrance, a guest said, alluding to Goonesinhas low caste. Now we have
to shake their hands and treat them like equals.42
The fact that Goonesinha provides a common platform to unite these

upper-class Ceylonese men is also to be read as an indicator of his
importance in the nationalist movement in Ceylon and the potential
he has of disrupting the appropriation of the discourse of nationalism
by the elite Ceylonese and by the Congress. At the time the novel
is set, Goonesinha had indeed become a force to reckon with
politically. More than 20,000 private and public sector workers in
Colombo joined the general strike that Goonesinha and his Ceylon
Labour Union had called in 1923, according to Jayawardena.43
Working-class women, in particular, were staunch supporters of
Goonesinha, she writes. All this had a background of a several decade-
old struggle behind it the working class in Ceylon had begun to
agitate for economic improvements and the right to unionise from
1890 onwards, resorting to strikes on numerous occasions.44 The
plantations and the tea estates had been sites of extreme exploitation
of workers. Trade unions did not appear in the plantations despite
the extreme exploitation there till 1931 because the workers were
given no opportunity to organise themselves. That is why Mr
Jayaweeras act of informing the tea estate workers of their rights and
encouraging them to go on strike45 to demand more humane terms
of work in Cinnamon Gardens is significant; it highlights a form of
self-assertion very different from the homogenising official brand of
nationalism preached and practiced by the Cinnamon Gardens elite.46
In Seelan, unlike in Annalukshmi, we see no such development
towards a questioning of the things he had been tutored to accept
as sacred and superior; and perhaps, that is why Selvadurai felt it
would be anachronistic to have Seelan and Annalukshmi unite in the
novel. Seelan is, right till the very end, all too eager to tell Kumudini
that (a visit to) the mother country is a must, 47 very enthusiastic
about talking of the sights and sounds of London, and is not at all
sure that British rule has not been good for the Ceylonese.48 He has
no hesitation in saying that he would be very unhappy to see the
British go.49 Further, he says:
I think that their renowned bias is often the fancy of those who are too
indolent for the stark realities of life. I am sure that in the absence of the
British, someone else would be found to blame.50
Here, Seelan comes across as the ideal colonial subject who has
internalised the colonialist ideology that the colonised people are not
developed enough to administer themselves and that it is part of the
White mans burden to rule them and turn them into civilised people
cast in the image of the colonizers. The success of the colonialist
ideology51 lies in its ability to win the consent of the colonial subject
to this logic and Seelan embodies the manufacture of this consent
a consent that has been carefully engineered through the effective use
of various Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs).52
Colonial collaboration is a motif that, in fact, permeates
Cinnamon Gardens. Perhaps that is natural for collaboration is indeed
one of the pertinent axes along which the colonial-imperialist process
can be mapped and understood. One of the earliest references to
collaboration we find in the novel is when we learn that Cinnamon
Gardens housed the best of Ceylonese society this gentry had
attained an affluence they never could have foreseen, through trade

in rubber, coconut, plumbago, and this a well-covered fact the
distilling of arrack.53 This affluence, of course, comes at a certain
cost. This affluence is theirs only in return for their collaboration and
allegiance to the colonial economy, which was geared to ensuring that
profits always flowed back into the so-called mother country.54 This
structure of political economy in the colonies meant that a vast
disjunction would be created between the collaborating class and the
rest of the indigenous population the affluence of the collaborators
was almost always in sharp contrast to the disproportionate poverty
and sufferings of the common people in the colonies. This contrast
is something that Selvadurai, even as a Diasporic writer, appears
palpably conscious of. This consciousness manifests itself in the words
spoken by Balendran55 to Richard while recommending universal
franchise for Ceylon:
You only have to step out into the countryside to find the crippling poverty,
the illiteracy, people dying from malaria and lack of proper medical
facilities.56
The same disjunction is also highlighted when Mr Jayaweera tells

Annalukshmi that he was the one who had encouraged the workers
to fight for their rights.57 Balendran and Mr Jayaweera, of course,
come from very different backgrounds and from very different
sections of society. Yet both of them display an awareness of the vast
disjunctions that have rent Ceylonese society apart as a result of the
colonial policies. Balendrans awareness represents the incompleteness
of colonialist discourse to completely cast the colonised, even the elite-
collaborator colonised, in the image of the coloniser and to seamlessly
convince him or her of an identity of interests. On the other hand,
Mr Jayaweeras dissent may be read as a more from-below dissent and
challenge to structures of oppression unleashed by the colonial state
and effected by foreign rulers acting in collusion with the national
elite.58
The Mudaliyar Navratnams role as a collaborator is something
that is part of his inheritance. Mudaliyars, after all, by virtue of their
professions, had always enjoyed the position of middlemen:
In the days before European domination, a mudaliyar, in the domain in

which he held sway, had served as a representative of the king. The British
had continued the mudaliyarships, but now it was an appointment by the
government based on loyalty to the Empire.59
Another passage which highlights the in-between position of the

Mudaliyars class and points to the absurdity of blindly imitating the
colonisers culture is the following:
The Mudaliyar Navaratnams60 study was an unfortunate example of what
happens when the furnishings of Europe are adapted (sic) without modification,
to a tropical climate. The curtains and the upholstery of the chaise-longue
and chairs were all of a thick red velvet. The upholstery had very quickly
worn off in places, and the curtains, despite repeated cleaning, were always
full of dust.61
It is quite possible to read this passage not just as a comment on

the imitativeness of the colonial subject of the collaborator class, but
also as a comment on the macropolitical level. The imprudence of
adopting something lock, stock and barrel from the colonisers culture
and applying it to the context and society of the colonised mirrors
a historical practice as well that of imposing British administrative
systems upon colonial Ceylon.
Notes
1. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and

Spread of Nationalism (London and New York: Verso, 1991), 110.
2. Sajni Kripalani Mukherjee, The Hindu College: Henry Derozio and
Michael Madhusudan Dutt, in An Illustrated History of Indian Literature
in English, edited by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra (New Delhi: Permanent
Black in association with Ravi Dayal, 2003), 41.
3. It is another symptom of a monstrous reality that this is the simplification
most often found in our school textbooks as well. The researcher
remembers encountering the same simplification in history textbooks
prescribed during his schooldays.
4. See Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A
Derivative Discourse? (London: Zed Books, 1986).
5. This is a concept that keeps coming back in Bhabhas writings. For further
details about the concept of ambivalence, see Homi K Bhabha, The

Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994).
6. Cinnamon Gardens is concerned with a group whose lives have little to
do with the rest of the country, writes Chelva Kanaganayakam,
highlighting the alienation of the Cinnamon Gardens elite. See Chelva
Kanaganayakam, Spicing the Past, in (Re)views, edited by Sayantan
Dasgupta, (Kolkata: Registrar, Jadavpur University, and Canadian Studies
Programme Director, Department of Comparative Literature, Jadavpur
University, in association with Shastri Indo-Canadian Institute, 2003),
140, reprinted from The Toronto Review of Contemporary Writing Abroad,
Volume 17, Number 2, Spring 1999, 111-116.
7. Kanaganayakam, Spicing the Past, in (Re)views, 136.
8. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. Myra Bergman Ramos (New
York: Continuum Publishing Company, 1989), 151.
9. This craving assumes ominous proportions when we recall Nira
Wickramasinghes reminder: It was dressed in top hat and tails that the
first Prime Minister of independent Ceylon, DS Senanayake hoisted the
Lion Flag on 10 December 1948 when the inauguration of the new
Parliament took place. Quoted from Nira Wickramasinghe, Dressing the
Colonial Body: Politics, Clothing and Identity in Colonial Sri Lanka (New
Delhi: Orient Longman, 2003), 8.
10. In the words of Tariq Rahman, writing in the context of British India,
new norms from the West were considered progressive on the Social-
Darwinist assumption that European society was at a higher stage of
evolution than the Indian one. Quoted from Tariq Rahman, Cultural
Invasion and Linguistic Politeness among English-using Pakistanis, in
Language, Education and Culture (Karachi: Oxford University Press,
2000), 195.
11. Shyam Selvadurai, Cinnamon Gardens (New Delhi: Penguin, 1998), 12.
12. For a very apt and sensitive problematising of the act of renaming, one
may read Bharat/Barry and Navaranjini/Jean Mangala-Davasinha/Mundys
story in Yasmine Gooneratne, A Change of Skies (New Delhi: Penguin,
1992).
13. This tendency is also very often critiqued as part of the nationalist
movement, and such critiques often fall into another trap that of
nativism and end up glorifying an imagined mythical past. One example
of this trend lies in Dharmapalas programme to restore a Sinhala pride
in their culture and construct a national dress code. Significantly, mens
dress as prescribed by Dharmapala was very much a Sinhalese dress
reminiscent of the Sinhalese dress worn by the kings Dutugemunu and

Parakramabahu quoted from Wickramasinghe, Dressing the Colonial
Body, 13).
14. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, Key Concepts in Post-
Colonial Studies (London: Routledge, 1998), 139.
15. Kumari Jayawardena, Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World (New
Delhi: Kali for Women, 1986), 109.
16. Ibid., 118.
17. Selvadurai, Cinnamon Gardens, 66.
18. References to Jane Austens works crop up more than once in Cinnamon
Gardens. It is tempting to read in this, more than mere coincidence. In
this context, Edward Saids comments are pertinent: PerhapsAusten,
and indeed, pre-imperialist novels generally, will appear to be more
implicated in the rationale for imperialist expansion than at first sight
they have been. Quoted from Edward W Said, Culture and Imperialism
(New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1993), 84.
20. Ibid., 177.
21. Elaine Park writes: Several characters allude to the plots of Austen
novels, contrasting them to their own experience and marking the
authors stylistic debts. Quoted from Elaine Parks review of Cinnamon
Gardens in Canadian Ethnic Studies, Volume 31, Issue 3, 1999, 183-184
(downloaded from EBSCO Academic Search Premier Database on 20
February 2003). Yet, the Austen refrain is much more than a stylistic
marker, I argue in this chapter it is a political act and can be read as
a comment on pedagogy and the colonisation of the mind by colonialist
ideology.
22. Ngugi points to the absurdity of the attempt of the African child to see
Jane Austens characters in the gossiping women of his rural setting and
writes critically of a Professor Warners ecstasy on finding that some of
his students had been able to recognise some characters of Jane Austens
novels in their own African villages. Quoted from Ngugi wa Thiongo,
Decolonising the Mind (London: Heinemann, 1986), 91.
23. A teachers certificate is commonly seen as a passport to spinsterdom by
some in Annalukshmis Ceylon. Aunt Philomenas implacable objections
to it stems from the fact that with this qualification, added to Annalukshmis
Senior Cambridge, she would be overqualified for many eligible boys
indeed, we see in the novel that Annalukshmis qualifications make it
difficult for her to meet a suitable boy.
24. It had been suggested that the age qualification should be 25 years.
The property qualification which was suggested was Rs 10,000 in a
womans right with a simple standard of literacy. Wage earners should
be in receipt of a monthly salary of Rs 100. The other qualifications
proposed were for graduates in any university in the British Empire,
graduates in the Ceylon Medical and Law Colleges and those holding
first class trained teacher certificates.
Quoted from Excerpts from an Article in The Ceylon Independent,
December 1927, on the Meeting of the Womens Franchise Union,
downloaded from http://www.interlog.com/~funnyboy/women.htm on 22
February, 2003.
25. Karl Woelz, review of Cinnamon Gardens in Lambda Book Report, Volume
7, Issue 12 (July-August 1999), 17-18 (downloaded from EBSCO
Academic Search Premier database on 20 February 2004)
26. The Personal is Political, Shyam Selvadurai interviewed by Jim Marks,
Lambda Book Report, Volume 5, Issue 2, August 1996, 1-3.
27. Jayawardena, Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World, 129.
28. Ibid., 128.
29. http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/umberto/chronolo.htm downloaded
on 22 February 2003.
31. Ibid., 29-30.
32. Ibid., 30.
towards an Investigation, in Essays on Ideology (London: Verso, 1984),
1-7.
34. See Edward W Said, Orientalism (London and Henley: Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 1978).
35. An extremely perceptive analysis of the consequences and politics of this
process of infantilisation (as the authors call it), and of its relationship
with imperialism, colonialism as well as neo-colonialism, is to be found
in Dorfman and Mattelart, How to Read Donald Duck (New York:
International General, 1975).
37. For an insightful problematisation of nativism, see Kwame Anthony
Appiah, Out of Africa, Topologies of Nativism, in The Bounds of Race,
Perspectives of Hegemony and Resistance, edited by D LaCapra (Ithaca, New
York and London: Cornell University Press), 134-163.
38. The Chronology of Historical Events in Sri Lanka from a Tamil

Perspective hosted on the compuserve website cites the example of
Singham, a Tamil author residing in Malaya, who writes in 1934
demanding the abolition of universal suffrage and the respect of caste
rules and distinctions. For details, see http://ourworld.compuserve.com/
homepages/umberto/chronolo.htm downloaded on 22 February 2003.
39. See Uma Chakravarti, Whatever Happened to the Vedic Dasi?
Orientalism, Nationalism and a Script for the Past in Recasting Women:
Essays in Colonial History, edited by Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid
(New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1989), 27-87.
41. Ibid., 70.
42. Ibid., 71.
43. Jayawardena, Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World, 132.
44. Ibid., 116.
45. One critic writes:
The 1930switnessed the strengthening of both labour movements
and Marxist-oriented politics. In that sense the novel deals with a
crucial period of Ceylonese history when major decisions were being
made about the future of the nation.
Quoted from Kanaganayakam, Spicing the Past, in (Re)views, 138.
46. The labour movement and the womens movement of early 20th century
Ceylon constitute very important element of Selvadurais perspective of
the national imaginary: He writes:
Of equal fascination to me was the growth of the labour and womens
movement which paved the way for a democratisation of Sri Lankan
society. Though so little acknowledged today, these movements have
left a lasting legacy that has prevented the country, despite the war
and the abuse of human rights, from descending into total anarchy.
Quoted from Selvadurai, Speech to the Canadian Booksellers
Association, downloaded from http://www.interlog.com/~funnyboy/speech.htm
downloaded on 22 February 2003.
48. Ibid., 359.
49. Ibid., 359.
50. Ibid., 359.
51. Here, I use ideology in the sense Marx and Engels use the term in The
German Ideology, i.e., as a false consciousness that distorts the real
relationship of the human being to his or her world this consciousness

is false precisely because an ideology which gains currency only reproduces
the interests of the ruling social classes.
towards an Investigation, in Essays on Ideology (London: Verso, 1984),
1-7.
54. Loomba, Colonialism / Postcolonialism, 4.
55. Balendrans position as collaborator is far less secure and far more
ambivalent than is his fathers. While Balendran does follow Western
codes of attire, which are as incompatible with the Ceylonese climatic
realities (He wore neatly pressed, white drill trousers and a coat for,
despite the heat, most Ceylonese gentlemen conformed to the standard
of European attire and dressed in a suit, Selvadurai, Cinnamon Gardens,
(28) as the Mudaliyars borrowed European furnishings are, he is ecstatic
about the possibility of universal franchise and the vast and beneficial
change it would bring to Ceylonese society, with its feudal subservience
and loyalties (30-31) and his house is not named after some remembered
monument or place in Britain, but is instead called Sevena, which is
Sinhalese for shade or shelter.
57. Ibid., 156.
58. In this context, we are reminded again of Ania Loombas contention
about internal colonisation in Loomba, Colonialism/ Postcolonialism, 12.
60. Another example of the Mudaliyars obsession with the West lies in his
fascination with Miss Adamson, his American secretary.
61. Selvadurai, Cinnamon Gardens, 27-28.
Indian English Poetry in the
Wake of Postcolonialism: A New Perspective
Sharmistha Chatterjee Sriwastav
The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those
who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is
not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.1
So wrote Joseph Conrad in his novel Heart of Darkness, both

describing and protesting against the colonial activities which subjugated
the inhabitants of almost half the world for centuries. Conrad was
an early critic. He saw colonization as a brute physical force where
the more powerful tore treasure out of the bowels of the landwith
no moral purpose at the back of it than there is in burglars breaking
into a safe.2 With the passage of time and sophistication of so called
civilization, as a result of the decolonizing process, the plunderers and
looters sobered down, setting free (at least physically) the blacks,
browns, and mulattos from their clutches. This seems to be a pretty
simple historical phenomenon where as a result of several political
uprisings such as the Indian Mutiny in 1857, or the Irish uprising
(1916). The British was warned for the first time and they felt the
need to retreat. What happens thereafter is a long historical and socio-
political saga.
Thought along these lines then, postcolonialism should be
considered as a phenomenon or ongoing process after the retreat of
the conquerors. Again postcolonial literatures are those that are
written after the colonial rulers have left the respective colonies.
However while identifying postcolonial traits in Indian English Poetry
(one of the genres in the corpus of postcolonial literature) the first
issue which unsettles the mind is : How should one explain the term
308 | Sharmistha Chatterjee Sriwastav
postcolonialism? or What is exactly postcolonialism? Is it as simple

as talking about the times where the Queen Empire or Company is
no longer there? Of course one should keep in mind that,
postcolonialism and all its connotations are inherited naturally by
Indians writing English Poetry (even though its English poetry).
For our purposes, it would be better to roughly explain post
colonialism as a psychological happening, than locate it temporally as
an aftermath of a historical phenomenon which involved the more
powerful physically ruling over the less powerful. Again should we pre-
suppose that postcolonialism necessarily follows and is a byproduct
of something which we know as colonialism? We know fully well that
a large section of the freed native remain neo-colonized i.e. heavily
dependent psychologically on the attractive and glossy consumerism
unleashed by the imperial powers. Then, borrowing, Ania Loombas
words, it would be best to strike a compromise by saying:
it is more helpful to think of postcolonialism not just coming literally after
colonialism and signifying its demise, but more flexible as a contestation of
colonial domination and the legacies of colonialism. Such a position would
allow us to include people geographically displaced by colonialism such as
African-Americans or people of Asian or Caribbean origin in Britain as post
colonial subjects although they live within metropolitan cultures.3
Postcolonial literature aims and should be a critique of and a

counterattack on the hypnotizing phenomenon of colonialism which
had clouded thousands of thinking minds. As Leela Gandhi puts it
in her book, Postcolonial Theory: postcolonialismis a disciplinary
project devoted to the academic task of revisiting, remembering and
crucially interrogating the colonial past.4
Literature or to be specific poetry should also try to recuperate
the history of the colonised people which had been obliterated in the
past. The concentration should be on highlighting the veritable
heritage of the native land and revel at ones strengths and merits. This
is more so because, as Gina Wisker points out :
much of this writing is tinged by neocolonialism that is, it probably inevitably
indicates how the various oppressions or (to a lesser extent) the opportunities
of colonialism still affect peoples lives, influence their thought processes and
Indian English Poetry in the Wake of Postcolonialism | 309
their self-respect, and also influence the language and meta language in which
they produce their literature.5
Given such a difficult task to fulfill, post independence [a term used

for the sake of easily locating the poets referred to] Indo-Anglian
poetry probably qualifies as a true postcolonial literary type in many
respects, just as it fails to meet the demands in a few areas. The poems
definitely explore the attitude of poets towards postcolonialism as a
sociopolitical and as a psychological phenomenon. They also seek to
find out how these feelings have been woven into the rubric of their
finest verses. For some Indian English poets, postcolonialism is a
celebration of the other worlds coming together to share their mutual
jubilation or at certain moments despondency. Its time to express:
Know that you arent alone
The whole world shares your tears
[ll 5-8, All Who Sleep Tonigh, Vikram Seth ]
One may symbolically interpret this whole world and their tears to
be the scramble of the colonized to be free from their fetters. Locating
the lines temporally, it would not be wrong to indicate that the
situation signals the aftermath of the colonial holocaust. Since all
serious literature, must be and needs to be gleaned out of its
immediate milieu, Indian English Poetry is no exception. To borrow
Vinayak Krishna Gokaks words, creativity (which includes literary
activity) would consider the aggregate of social and cultural conditions
that influence the life of the individual or community.6
Several such significant happenings in the postcolonial era have
deeply influenced many young poets. One such movement is the
partition of India and Pakistan on the day of the promised
Independence and the subsequent bitterness which continues to
smother the dignity of human life:
Did you expect dignity?
All you see is bodies
Crumpled carelessly, and thrown
Away.
The arms and legs are never arranged
Heroically. [ll 1-6, Battleline]
It is almost impossible to overcome the perpetual crisis which at times

belies with temporary relief, but is there back again to strike afresh:
These two countries lie
hunched against each other
distrustful lovers
who have fought bitterly
and turned their backs,
but in sleep drifted slowly
in, moulding themselves
around the cracks
to fit together,
whole again, at peace
Forgetful of hostilities
until, in the quiet dawn,
the next attack.
[ll 22-34, Battleline Imtiaz Dharker]
The picturization of the disappointing condition of ones own country

may not be in the true postcolonial spirit, but nevertheless it draws
attention to the other important issues of how colonization could be
perpetrated by a subtle, disguised and intellectual intrusion of the
bigger powers into the politics of the smaller nations. This becomes
a sort of a vendetta to upset the political and cultural stability of a
free country by getting it engaged in continuous quarrels with the
neighbouring regions. Thus, the postcolonial scenario invites a
reinterpretation where both physically and psychologically the natives
continue to be ruled by imperialist powers. Edward Said offers the
following distinction:
imperialism means the practice, the theory, and the attitudes of the
dominating metropolitan center ruling a distant territory; colonialism which
is almost always a consequence of imperialism, is the implanting of settlements
on distant territory.7
The result is a constant angst among the natives and resultant split
personalities, who remain severely afflicted by the wars between bigger
powers:
Kashmir shrinks into my mailbox

my home a neat four by six inches.
I always loved neatness. Now I hold
the half-inch Himalayas in my hand
[ll 1-4, Postcard from Kashmir, Agha Shahid Ali]
The fresh whiff of nostalgia however, does not only choose to mourn
the beautiful past, but also glorify the beauty and heritage of the
homeland, now lost but so long unsung:
And this the closest
Ill ever be to home. When I return,
the colors wont be so brilliant
the Jhelums waters so clean,
so ultramarine. My love
so overexposed.
[ll 5 10, Postcard from Kashmir, Agha Shahid Ali]
According to R. Parthasarathy, Indian verse in English did not

seriously begin to exist till after the withdrawal of the British from
India.8 It would be wise to accept such a claim for it was only in
the poetry from Nissim Ezekiel onwards, that we do find secularism
in verse bereft of romanticizing the religion, beauty and myth of the
land found formerly in the poems of Aurobindo or Sarojini Naidu.
Indian poetry reached maturity and adulthood with the consistent
publications after Ezekiels A Time to Change in 1952. Makarand
Paranjape asserts:
Turning away from religion, (the Indian English Poets) sought meaning and
order in personal relationships. They explored human sexuality and wrote
about it with confessional candour. Nature for them was no longer the
enabling and grand proof of Gods faith in the world; instead they wrote
about the city and its dirty, poverty-stricken and dehumanizing environs.
Finally, the poets increasingly resorted to irony as the best means of
representing their love-hate relationship with their surroundings.9
Is then postcolonial Indian English poetry only an observer of the

objective decadent reality? It is certainly not, given the idea that the
new school of poets saw the vision of a golden tomorrow crumble
into pieces. Cheated by the elders and vitiated by the partition
movement, there was more of questioning and a series of doubts about

the new independent native land. The poet was a stranger in a world
which he failed to recognize:
I resemble everyone
but myself, and sometimes see
in shop-windows,
despite the well-known laws
of optics,
the portrait of a stranger
[ll 1-6, Self-Portrait, A.K Ramanujan]
Often like Shakespeares Macbeth, he is dressed in borrowed robes,

quite aware that this is not where he should be:
His picture smiled at him: he stared at it.
The style was charming, and remote,
Some taste, a manner, and a little wit.
And yet he felt a tightening round the throat
As though he wore clothes that did not quite fit:
(Perhaps) a dead mans coat.
[ll 9-14, Landscape Painter, Dom Moraes]
Failure to acclimatize to the environment could be due to different

reasons for different poets. While it is pain of separation from
homeland for A. K. Ramanujan or Parthasarathy, it is a cultural and
religions gap for Ezekiel, Moraes or Mahapatra. For Mahapatra
alienation of the self takes the shape of shadows and silence:
and the unidentifiable dead shadows
strip the skin off my face,
and from the body of the last green spring
memory takes a road vague with the distance
of loneliness and hurt,
[ll 13-17, from Relationship-II]
Whatever the reasons may be, alienation and the fragmented image
of the self remains a haunting theme in modern Indian English poetry,
which again is a usual byproduct of the postcolonial consciousness.
Since, in Bhabhas words, Colonialism is read as the perverse
instigator of new politics of un-homeliness10. As such it is recognized

by critics as M. K. Naik that Indian English poetry seems to be
observed with the theme of alienated self:
While alienation is the dubious birth right of the modern artist in any
society, the situation of the contemporary Indian English poet reveals several
forces at work, which appear to generate a specially strong sense of alienation
in him. At the same time, it is paradoxical that while alienation is too much
with him; he does not seem to have succeeded fully in reacting adequately
to his predicament in a creative way.11
While one may disagree with the part that says that the predicament
does not find suitable creativity, there is a general consensus that
alienation and inner conflict becomes acute in case of diasporic poets
like R. Parthasarathy or A. K. Ramanujan or even Nissim Ezekiel.
Gina Wisker comments: Colonization, by removing people from
their homelands and forcing them to move elsewhere most often
through economic necessity, necessarily created diasporas and that
diasporas existence could mean: always feeling a little displaced,
duplititous, different, operating with a double personality and cultural
identity12
The feeling could come associated with embarrassment that one
is a wog or a westernized oriental gentleman as in R. Parthasarathy:
He had spent his youth whoring
after English gods.
There is something to be said for exile:
you learn roots are deep.
[ll 7-10, From Exile 2, R. Parthasarathy]
But it could also mean managing a rich culturally diverse self, which
makes best of the both worlds:
Sixty, and one glass eye
even I talk now and then of God,
find reasons to be fair
everywhere
to the even and to the odd,
see karma
in the fall of a tubercular sparrow,
in the newspaper deaths in Burma

of seventy-one men, women and children;
actually see the one in the Many,
[ll 41-50, Entries for a Catalogue of Fears, A. K. Ramanujan]
This could be achieved in that characteristic touch of irony and

humour so peculiar to Ramanujan. But at though diaspora evokes
(though not always) specific traumas of human displacement which
is so true of the Jews or of Africans, (found its best expression in
Ezekiel: A mugging Jew among the wolves, [l 7, Background
Casually]13 there is a need to strike back and boldly criticize the
colonial past. In Parrys words: [T]he construction of a politically
conscious, unified revolutionary self, standing in unmitigated opposition
to the oppressor.14
Poets such as Vikram Seth or Meena Alexander are ruthless in
their bitter criticism of the West and its imperialism:
Johns looks are good. His dress is formal

His voice is low. His mind is sound.
His appetite for works abnormal.
A plastic name tag hangs around
His collar like a votive necklace.
Though well-paid, he is far from reckless.
[ll 1-6, The Golden Gate 1.3, Vikram Seth]
Small stoppages in unknown places

where the soul sleeps :
Bahrain, Dubai, London, New York
names thicken and crack
as fate is cut and chopped
into boarding passes.
Our eyes dilate
in the grey light of cities
that hold no common speech of us
no bread, no bowl, no leavening.
[ll 5-10, 15-18, The Travelers, Meena Alexander ]
Keki N. Daruwalla, rings fiery against all oppression in Routine:

We munch to the street-crossing where young blood
fulfils itself by burning tramcars.
Beneath our khaki we are a roasted brown
but unconvinced, they wish to burn our khaki skins.
We are a platoon against a thousand.
[ll 14-18]
Showing the same vehemence that led so the removal of Apartheid

in the west. Adil Jussawala puts the tendency and condition in the
following words:
[T]he westernized Indian poet is among most recently-born of that breed
of twentieth century strays (Eliot was one of them) to be confronted with
the European condition of tribelessness, rootlessness & unrest15
Frequent ruminations of the colonial past is an attempt to remember

and reinterpret the embittered or joyous yesterday:
And a face I can never recollect is removing
The hub caps from our dull brown Ford.
The first words I mumble are names of roads
Thornhill, Hastings, Lytton;
We live in a small cottage
I grow up on a guava tree
Wondering where the servants vanish
After dinner, at the magic of the bearded tailor
Who can change the shape of my ancestors.
[ll 38 46, Continuities III, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra]
An empires last words are heard

on the hot sands of Africa.
The da Gamas, Clives, Dupleixs are back.
Victoria sleeps on her island
alone, an old hag.
Shaking her invincible locks.
[ll 28 33, Exile 2, R. Parthasarathy]
Ramanujans wistful recollections of childhood and the satirical
portrait of the colonial past in poems like Small-scale Reflections on

a Great House or Some Indian Uses of History on a Rainy Day,
The Last of Princes, where he remembers bales of cotton shipped
to Manchester, or the slow death of Aurangazebs dynasty or the prattle
of Madras petty clerks on how King Harshas men were paid richly,
only indicate the poets attempt to compare the past with the inherited
present. Ezekiels turning to God or Mahapatras desire to sink into
a slow silence by accepting the environment, is in a way attempts to
find solace for the bruised self. Gendzier describes the tendency as
the other directed nature of reactions of the colonized and the need
to struggle to free himself of this externally determined definition of
self.16
A very important issue that further complicates the psychological
ambivalence (dichotomy) of Indian English poets, is the subject of
Language. While the postcolonial or subaltern poets choose to speak
(to borrow the words of Gayatri Spivak17) and the marginalized other
come to the forefront with their discourse, the language chosen has
all the possibilities of bring severely criticized. While a few like Kamala
Das has shown the courage to single out their own language, others
like Parthasarathy have gradually felt it to be fetter, (paradoxically)
which stifles opinion who can ignore the powerful assertion of Kamala
Das:
Why not let me speak in
Any language I like? The language I speak
Becomes mine, its distortions, its queer nesses
All mine, mine alone. It is half English half
Indian, funny perhaps, but it is honest
[ll 9-13, An Introduction, Kamala Das]
Or the outcry of despair in R. Parthasarathys from Exile 2:

That language is a tree, loses color
Under another sky.
[ll 11-12]
Keki N. Daruwallas treatment of language as a mistress is probably

the most interesting admixture of humour, irony and iconoclasm:
No, she is not Anglo-Indian. The Demellos would

bugger me if they got scent of this,
and half my body would turn into a bruise.
She is not Goau, not Syrian Christian.
She is Indian English, the language that I use.
[ll 33-37, The Mistress]
In fact P. Lal, in the Writers Workshop Credo, that prefaced his huge
anthology, Modern Indian Poetry in English (1969), is emphatic and
does not share Parthasarathys despair. They see nothing un-Indian or
alien in their use of English and certainly do not regard English as
the language of the colonizer. As one of the poets puts it:
Certainly, ones personal identity cannot change easily, but language is only
one of its configurations. I cannot become English; I will remain a foreigner.
But I am not foreign to English.18
If one of the objectives of postcolonial writing is to slowly overcome

the colonial past then language could be used as a tool to: [Erase]
cultural difference(s) [which] helps assimilation, if that is what is
wanted.19
Those Others who catapulted themselves into the front row of
Indian English poetry writers are undoubtedly the women. Poets like
Kamala Das, Mamta Kalia or Gauri Deshpande are famous not only
because they belong to the cult of feminism, but also because they
have shouldered equal responsibilities with their male counterparts.
Their creativity shows the same energy and enthusiasm as Daruwalla,
Seth or Parthasarathy. The vehemence of establishing ones identity
is most strongly felt in Kamala Das:
I am a sinner,
I am a saint. I am beloved and the
Betrayed. I have no joys which are not yours, no
Aches which are not yours. I too call myself I.
[ll 56 59, An Introduction]
In this sense the whole ambition of postcolonial feminism is not to

assert oneself as a woman, but as a human being. Some feminist
postcolonial theorists, in the words of Leela Gandhi,
have cogently argued that a blinkered focus on racial politics inevitably elides
the double colonization of women under imperial conditions. Such theory
postulates the third-world woman as victim par-excellence the forgotten
casualty of both imperial ideology and, native and foreign patriarchies.20
Given, that an Indian woman would be forced to live under manifold

and multiple levels of subjugation, the women poets anti-colonialism
rivets around her struggle to establish her individual identity. She too
could be a critical observer and objective onlooker of a external
milieu:
theyd outstone
Go mateshwara, and be monument
to brotherly love, for yet
no one has picked my pocket
nor into my house broken,
I, as yet not run over by a bus
[ll 6-11, The People Who Need People, Gauri Deshpande]
Or lapse in the memory of ideal woman courage in Tribute to Papa:

You want me to be like you, Papa,
Or like Rani Lakshmibai.
Youre not sure what greatness is,
But you want me to be great.
[ll 17-20, Mamta Kalia]
There is an attempt on the part of the woman poet to break the

stereotyped domestic imagery of Goddess Lakshmi or Saraswati. In
a bold step the association is with Lakshmibai. Though Kalias
liberated womanhood is laced with irony, nevertheless she is practical
and mature. In a scathing satire she unmasks imperialist forces
operating within the system:
I wish you had guts, Papa,
To smuggle eighty thousand watches at a stroke,
And Id proudly say, My fathers in import-export business, you
know.
[ll 8-10, Tribute to Papa]
Conventions are broken and as these poets attempt a freedom from

the stale past where even their worthy male counterparts like Jayanta
Mahapatra question their lovely Ph.D and divorces.21
yet it must seek at last
And end, a pure, total freedom, it must will the mirrors
To shatter and the kind night to erase the water
[ll 28-30, The Old Play House, Kamala Das]
Diaspora, hybridity, feminism and what more, Indian English Poetry

deals which each of these colonial aftermaths in a perfectly balanced
and a beautiful way. There is no effusion of joys or major breakdowns
in case of ache. Everything is held in a restraint. One may question
the force or validity of such a lukewarm response but Indian English
Poetry is yet to fully bloom yet to gather the forces of its conviction
under a strong squadron. Buddhadev Boses allegation that Indian
English Poetry is heading for blind alleys is refutable given the
understanding that this entire gamut produces no less a variety of
theme forms and feelings than any other literary type. Postcolonialism
is a tough idea to struggle with. Unlike the Western counterparts who
believe in radicalism and revolution, the Indian English Poets seem
to be more emotive, personal and balanced in their response to
Postcolonialism. The onus remains to retrieve the lost glory of the
native land and to sing the song of ones own race because, to quote
Auden,
History, to the defeated
May say Alas, but cannot help or pardon.
[Spain 1937]
Works Cited (Primary Sources)
Paranjape, Makarand (ed.). Indian Poetry in English. Madras; Macmillan, 1993

Parthasarathy. R (ed.). Ten Twentieth Century Indian Poets. New Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 1976.
Peeradina, Saleem. (ed.). Contemporary Indian Poetry in English. An Assessment and
Selection. Delhi; Macmillan, 1972.
Ramanujan, A.K. The Collected Poems. New Delhi: Oxford University Press,1995.
Notes
1. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (London: Penguin Books, 1973), 31-

32.
2. Ibid, 61.
3. Ania Loomba, Colonialism / Postcolonialism (London: Routledge, 1998),
Reprint 2001, 12.
4. Leela Gandhi, Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction (New Delhi:
5. Gina Wisker, Key Concepts in Postcolonial Literature (London: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2007), 7-8.
6. Vinayak Krishna Gokak, Man, a participant, Creativity and Environment,
edited by Vidya Niwas Misra (New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1992), 12.
7. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Chatto & Windus,
1993), 8.
8. R. Parthasarathy (ed.), Introduction, Ten Twentieth Century Indian Poets
(New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1976), 3.
9. Makarand Paranjape (ed.), Introduction, Indian Poetry in English
(Madras: Macmillan, 1993), 20.
10. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 9.
11. M.K. Naik, Alienation and The Contemporary Indian English Poet, in
Studies in Indian English Literature (New Delhi: Sterling, 1987), 76.
12. Gina Wisker, Key Concepts in Post Colonial Literature, 26.
13. The poem Background, Casually from the anthology Hymns in Darkness
(1976) explores Nissim Ezekiels feeling of isolation and dislocation in an
alienated foreign setting. He, being a Jew, historically inherits a sense of
rootlessness.
14. Benita Parry, Problems in Current Theories of Colonial Discourse,
Oxford Literary Review, Vol. 9: 1-2. 1987, 30.
15. P. Lal, Homage to T. S. Eliot (Calcutta: Writers Workshop, 1969), 102.
16. I. Gendzier, Frantz Fanon: A Critical Study (New York: Pantheon, 1973),
23.
17. To know more about the problems of discourse of the marginalized read
G Spivak, Can the subaltern speak?, in Marxist Interpretations of Culture,
edited by Nelson & Lawrence Grossberg (Basingstoke: Macmillan
Education Ltd., 1988).
18. Amritjit Singh, Contemporary Indo-English Literature: An Approach, in
Aspects of Indian writing in English, edited by M.K Naik (New Delhi:
Macmillan, 1979), 3.
19. Gina Wisker, Key Concepts in Postcolonial Literature, 29.
20. Leela Gandhi, Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction (New Delhi:
21. Jayanta Mahapatra, paradoxically, questions the implications of womens
liberation in a free country. The expressions are from The Twenty-fifth
Anniversary of a Republic: 1975 from the anthology A Fathers Hours
(1976).
Possibility of Negotiation: Postcolonial Impasse in
Mahasweta Devi
Shreya Chakravorty
As noted in the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundations citation

recognizing Mahasweta Devi:
Hindu civilization is so old, pervasive, and deep, outsiders easily forget that
one-sixth of Indias population today is formed by people of an even older
civilization. In their forest habitat, Indias so-called tribals evolved apart from
the Hindus, who viewed them as beneath civilization.1
In 1871, the British classified these tribes as criminal. Being thus

labeled, they became ostracized targets of social injustice and state
violence. After independence, India ratified the British decision by
a 1952 act. As such:
When the economic juggernaut of modern times depleted the forests, the
stigmatized tribals were left to survive on the harsh fringes of Indias colonial
and postcolonial economy, often in relationships of cruel dependency.2
Mahasweta Devi writes and works for these Denotified and Nomadic
tribes the subaltern for whom independence is still a distant dream.
Academic neocolonialism is generally the hallmark of postcolonial
texts written in English. Fortunately for Devi, her translations by
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Samik Bandyopadhyay help relocate
her creative universe within the parameters of postcolonial discourse.
While expatriate writers like Bharati Mukherjee and Chitra Divakaruni
reiterate the discourse of freedom from the oppressive limitations of
postcolonial India to freedom in the Anglophone nations, Mahaswetas
inexhaustible productions of grim tte--tte with Indian reality give
no respite from the postcolonial crisis.
Her oeuvre is chiefly directed at exposing the illusion of
Postcolonial Impasse in Mahasweta Devi | 323
independence in the locale of decolonized India which repeatedly

reinscribes the violence of colonization. While at times oppressive
power of superstition weighs down heavily on the helpless protagonists
and concludes with their death, at other times, Devi creates
representative allegorical figures to magnify the diseased state of
postcolonial existence in India.
For example in Bayen, a poignant short story translated and
adapted into a play by Samik Bandyopadhyay, protagonist Chandidasi
Gangadasi is identified as the witch responsible for child death in a
dome community for which she is banished to lead a sub-human life
of tragic separation from her new-born child and husband. It is only
with her death that she is realigned with the social matrix which fated
her to such a ruthless seclusion. It is only when she dies preventing
a train disaster that the society feels proud of this otherwise dreaded
and ostracized member. The way in which her supernatural powers
are confirmed shows the grisly spectacle of a so-called progressive
nation yet lurking in medieval darkness in its fringes. Responding to
her call of duty as the protector of graves, one night Chandi goes to
cover the grave of her once favorite young girl Tukni with thorn
bushes. In the process, she is discovered by prying villagers who think
that she is digging open the grave to feed the dead child. Her being
a Bayen is thus established beyond any doubt. The meticulous detailing
and vivid realism in depiction of the theme shows the extent of
journalistic research that went behind Mahaswetas attempt of
addressing the issue of the witch through this short story. Known for
her characteristic practical involvement in the cause of her writing,
Mahasweta did not remain in the ivory tower of contemplation before
choosing her subject. Rather, she vigorously toured through the tribal
villages of West Bengal, Bihar and Orissa and stayed with the tribals
to understand their psyche which jealously guarded ideas of witch and
witch-hunting. She even addressed the same issue in journals like
Bartika and Parivartan. In the weekly journal Parivartan she wrote how
deeply rooted superstitions were responsible for identification and
even subsequent killing in a few cases of alleged witches in Santal and
Ho communities. Through this essay, Mahasweta tried to bring home
the fact that witches are not responsible for child-death, epidemic,
324 | Shreya Chakravorty
loss of crops and cattle and emphasized on the importance of raising

consciousness among these backward tribes against this unscientific
practice.
In her phase of long association with these communities
Mahasweta further realized the reason behind dependence on such
beliefs on part of such strong, united and courageous communities
as Santals and Hos. Being well aware of the fact that they are deprived
in various quarters by the government, these communities wish to
maintain their ubiquitous and unquestionable control over a few
thoughts and beliefs, however illogical, that they consider being their
very own. A similar fear of British interference in pre-independence
days impelled erudite Indians as Radhakanta Dev to oppose the
extinction of Sati, in spite of knowing how ruthless a practice it was.
On enquiring from a bright and educated Santal boy once, Mahasweta
came to know how the Santals hated intrusion into Daini Protha (the
tradition of identification and subsequent extinction of one alleged
of practicing witchcraft for malevolent purposes). It is an issue to be
solved by the highest court within their community. Outsiders are not
allowed to comment, or worse interfere. Mahasweta thus explains the
notion of allegiance leveling on blind faith towards inhuman social
dicta in order to discover a rationale behind such tribal practices. She
however admits that no such explanation can support as brutal a
practice as witch killing.
Getting to the root of the issue in her characteristic manner
Mahasweta goes onto explaining that in a poor backward district like
Singbhum, there is a practice of giving dowry to the girl during
marriage. Many such girls grow old with a lot of property in their
name. As such, they become the target of relatives who want to kill
the heiress at any cost to claim ownership over her property.
Sometimes, influential people capable of assembling a lynch-mob not
only execute the alleged witch but also her family-members; those who
would have become rightful owners of the womans property following
her death. One family after another has thus been brutally slaughtered
by rubble-raising leaders to claim possession over the land of the
alleged witch.
Having identified the cause of the problem, Mahasweta suggests
her own remedies. She wants government to become pro-active in

preventing the continuance of the practice of witch-hunting and
killing. She demands that the establishment should on the one hand
declare practitioners of this phenomenon punishable under law. On
the other hand, in order to prevent superstition from interfering with
rational thinking, scientific knowledge and education should be spread
to the grass-root level in these tribal societies. Strong public opinion
should be formed against this horrendous practice like that has been
created against Sati. Tribal folk should be made to realize that the
extinction of this practice will finally be beneficial for their society.
If only the government takes a decisive role in arousing consciousness,
the days of Jaani and Sokha will come to an end.3 But, on a closer
look, her stupendous effort and clinical analysis in these investigative
journalistic writings seems to betray frustration with a government
which has only exploited these simple and courageous sons of the soil
in the name of progress and development. Thousands of letters written
by Mahasweta addressed to the government ventilating grievances of
deprived tribal folk have mostly went unanswered. It is for this reason
that Mahasweta has announced her lone crusade against blighted
exploitative postcolonial Indian administrative machinery. In effect,
through decades she has become the one-stop resource center for
tribal folks in distress. But the improbability, if not impossibility of
furthering her legacy is an apprehension that clouds the horizon of
her creative canvas. Perhaps for this reason, her fictional characters
finally succumb to the establishment or even come to symbolize the
inherent cancer of destruction permanently planted in the heart of
postcolonial civilization. For example in Stanadayini (translated into
English by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak as Breast-Giver) Mahasweta
Devi shows through the character of Jashoda, a cancer inherent in
the heart of postcolonial India exploited to her extreme by her own
people. Mahasweta states:
Stanadayini is a parable of India after decolonization. Like the protagonist
Jashoda, India is a mother-by-hire. All classes of people, the post-war rich,
the ideologues, the indigenous bureaucracyabuse and exploit her. If
nothing is done to sustain her, nothing given back to her, and if scientific
help comes too late, she will die of a consuming cancer. I suppose if one
extended this parable the end of the story might come to mean something
like this: the ideological construct India is too deeply informed with the
goddess infested reverse sexism of the Hindu majority. As long as there is
such hegemonic cultural self-representation of India as a goddess-mother
(dissimulating the possibility that this mother is a slave), she will collapse
under the burden of the immense expectations that such a self-representation
permits.4
Mahasweta ruthlessly whips her lash at the vices of a postcolonial

Indian society given to hypocrisy, selfishness and erosion of values
through this remarkable short-story. While commenting on the spread
of commercialization of attitude in todays India, Mahasweta writes
about the importance of being a professional in a heartless city where
Even the mongrel on the path or side-walk, the greedy crow at the
garbage dont make room for the upstart amateur.5 Jashoda, the
protagonist of the story is a professional mother. She is a mother by
hire who gives respite to amateur mamas by feeding and bringing up
their children while they can enjoy life to their fullest without the least
bond of filial affection binding them towards their babies. In a brutal
travesty of a classic symbol of foster motherhood, Devi names her
protagonist Jashoda. Whereas in Mahabharata, Devaki is seen to be
relinquishing her claim on Krishna in a desperate bid to save his life
from the evil machinations of Kangsa, Indian mothers are eager to
leave back their children to their nannies in order to taste joys of
irresponsible livelihood.
Jashodas husband Kangalicharan is a classic example of ambiguous
social existence. By birth, he is a Brahmin and belongs to the highest
rung of the social ladder, but his economic condition has left him
on the throes of penury. The upwardly mobile Haldar household and
others merely pay lip-service to this poor Brahmin, literally a Kangali
or beggar. Kangali too does not behave like a true Brahmin. Unlike
the traditional Brahmins who were given to higher education in the
days of yore, he stirs the milk vat of a sweetmeat shop and steals flour,
samosas to make life a little easier for himself and family. Everyone,
from Nabin the pilgrim-guide to the youngest son-in-law of the Haldar
household is shown to be hypocritical. The youngest boy of the Haldar
household is shown to be morally corrupt and manipulating. He not
only physically exploits the elderly maidservant of the house but gets
her thrown out on a false allegation. The double standards of the
Haldar supremo however, are brought out with an effortless ease by
Mahasweta. When Haldarbabu promises to build Kangalicharan (by
then made lame by Haldarbabus youngest son) a sweetmeat shop,
everyone is surprised. Mahasweta says:
Haldarbabus change of heart is also Mothers will. He lives in independent
India, the India that makes no distinction between among people, kingdoms,
languages, varieties of Brahmins, varieties of Kayasthas and so on.6
This is a brilliant piece of irony aimed at even the lay reader to suggest
that distinctions among people on caste, class and money still exist
in a huge scale in India. The Democratic Republic promised to
Indians through Constitution is an unachievable premise on account
of the limitless greed for power and money of those at the helm of
affairs. Mahaswetas tirade does not stop here. She further comments
about Haldarbabu and states that he has not made his huge bank
balance in a post independence India that preaches egalitarianism:
he made his cash in the British era, when Divide and Rule was the
policy. Haldarbabus mentality was constructed then. Therefore he
doesnt trust anyone not a Punjabi-Oriya-Bihari-Gujarati-Marathi-
Muslim. At the sight of an unfortunate Bihari child or a starvation-ridden
Oriya beggar his flab-protected heart, located under a forty-two inch
Gopal brand vest, does not itch with the rash of kindness. He is a
successful son of Harisalall the temple people are struck that such a
man is filling with the milk of human kindness toward the West Bengali
Kangalicharan.7
Such a country which even after decades of achieving independence,

makes distinction between East and West Bengal well aware of the
fact that all of them are Bengali, born and brought up under an almost
identical culture can hardly claim to have truly progressed following
independence. The feeling that above all they are Indians is sadly
lacking from the members of such a country which boasts of being
the biggest unity in diversity. If such is the spectacle of the so-called
knowledgeable lot, what about the mass who are deliberately left away
from the center of privilege and power? They hardly know the name
of their own country, the difference between India and China and
far less about their basic or fundamental rights in a socialist republic.
It is an incurable disease that is shown to have affected all and sundry
in Mahaswetas vision: whereas sometimes it is the lack of compassion
and honesty, sometimes it is the lack of the right to knowledge. A
girl like Douloti in Douloti-the Bountiful does not know about any
other life than that of a prostitute bond-slave. Being a bond-slave is
equivalent to death upon entrance into a maze of unrefundable loss.
One cannot imagine the tremendous plight of a female bond-slave
deployed as a prostitute by pimps who marry low-caste girls to bring
them into this horrendous cycle of sexual exploitation. In the fear of
losing her honor to the village-head, Douloti is supposedly married
off to a Brahmin who makes a bond-slave out of her for only three-
hundred and fifty-two rupees. She has no idea that Having bonded
herself with three hundred rupees in 1962 how much has she raised
by 1970? Over forty thousand.8 This is the history of gross utilization
of subaltern women all across India. Prasad, Bono Nagesia and Father
Bomfuller have a detailed discussion on the causes and possible cures
of the practice of keeping kamiya whores. But neither peaceful, nor
violent means seem to be the solution for a practice in vogue among
the implementers of law as well as its enforcers. Thus, in spite of
belated concern by a handful about their woeful state of existence,
Douloti (anything but bountiful, not even in physique, now that she
has aged prematurely) dies on contracting a dreadful gonorrheal
disease. The journey of this simple rustic girl ends pathetically as she
somehow makes her way to Seora, her birthplace by spending her
last penny. It is both tragic and ironical that she dies on the way on
a school compound on the eve of Indian Independence Day. On the
morning following her death, school teacher Mohan Srivastava sees
the most tragic and unnerving scene of his life:
Filling the entire Indian peninsula from the oceans to the Himalayas,
here lies bonded labour spread-eagled, kamiya-whore Douloti Nagesias
tormented corpse, putrefied with venereal disease, having vomited up all
the blood in its desiccated lungs.9
This imagery is loaded with the bleak and sinister significance of

underclass existence in postcolonial India. If Jashoda in Stanadayini

symbolizes the cancer inherent in urban subaltern life in India,
Doulotis pathetic death is symptomatic of the terrible plight of rural
underclass women.
Thus, with a relentless pen aiming to strip the placid faade of
post-independence Indias corrupt system of operation, Mahasweta
repeatedly brings the travails of Indian subaltern to the fore, to whom
independence befitting a democratic nations citizen never existed.
And even if there is an attempt to rise in defiance against the leviathan
machinery of torture and exploitation, it takes place in Mahaswetas
creative universe through images spun in the form of vision or even
fantasy. For example, Mary Oraon in The Hunt manages to stand
up against the sexual advances of Tehsildar; a very rare act of resistance
on the part of subaltern found in Mahasweta Devi. But a deeper probe
suggests that Mary occupies a strange position of an emancipated
Oraon woman in the text. She is the illegitimate child of an Australian
planters son and localite Bhikni. Had she been the love-child of an
upper-class Indian, she would have been ostracized outright. But her
white blood and beautiful physical features make her unique and
coveted among her kinsmen. Her tremendous efficiency in selling
vegetables of Prasad farm at Tohri market and maintaining the Prasad
household (that used to be the Dixon household in the past) are said
to be on account of her Australian connection. Yes, there is
something true in Mary, the power of Australian blood.10 Thus, in
letting themselves get defeated hands down in front of Marys beauty
and integrity, the Oraons and even her employer Mr. Prasad are
actually re-enacting the colonial saga of white domination. She is a
subaltern but is treated like a daughter by her employer since she is
extremely efficient on account of her white blood. Thus, here is a
subaltern who makes her way towards the power nexus by exploiting
her mixed origin. In her society where men marry and women get
married to, she has chosen her partner in Jalim, a Muslim boy, the
leader of marketers and an intelligent fellow. She wishes to marry Jalim
as soon as one of their savings reach a hundred rupees. She can wait
patiently for that moment without the fear of being forced into a
relationship, whether legitimate or illegitimate since the color of
Marys skin is a resistant barrier to young Oraon men.11 And she

can lift her machete to save herself as well. This sense of pride and
dignity comes from an awareness of her efficiency and sense of
contribution to her community as well. Moreover, she is also
conscious of her emancipated status:
Just as she knows shell marry Jalim, she also knows that if she had
resembled any Oraon girl-if her father had been Somra or Budhna or Mangla
Oraon the Oraons would not have let this marriage happen.
Because she is the illegitimate daughter of a white father, the Oraons

dont think of her as their blood and do not place the harsh injunctions
of their own society upon her.12
Mary Oraon is a white subaltern, circumscribed yet liberated.
Based on a real-life character, she is one of those rare voices of protest
sounded from within the labyrinthine alleys of under-class exploitation
which utilizes an apparently reverse power politics to achieve a degree
of liberation from her status. Unlike Douloti who is completely
unaware of her financial contribution, Mary retorts:
The money I save you, and the money I make for you, how much do you
put together out of it yearly, Mistress Mother? Why should I take a cheap
sari? Ill dress well, use soap and oil, give me everything. Mrs. Prasad is
obliged to dress her well.13
Douloti could never have protested in this manner and all the money
she could surreptitiously save was meager tips from clients. But Mary
lived and saved rapaciously. By picking mahua, she had already saved
ninety-two rupees. Then on the night of Jani Parab, Mary hunts
ruthlessly for Tehsildar, kills him and takes all his money. This final
act of role-reversal where the predator is preyed upon by the bait,
where an outsider given to lust is ferociously punished by Mary serves
the dual purpose of retaliation and protest. Retaliation against the
injustice doled to her mother by a white dominator, protest against
the same form of colonial exploitation attempted by an Indian legacy
holder in postcolonial India. The drunken revelry in which this
impossible feat is achieved by Mary and her location beyond the
boundaries of restricted tribal existence makes her act of revenge and
reversal border on the unreal. Moreover her story ends on a mixed

note of ecstasy and apprehension; ecstasy on account of killing the
biggest beast in the form of an extremely corrupt man and apprehension
on account of an uncertain future with Jalim. In the dark of night,
she sets out to travel through a highly dangerous route to awaken Jalim
and flee somewhere. In a state of intoxicated frenzy, she forgets that
she can get killed on the way, Jalim may refuse to accompany her
without any prior intimation, or the murder can be discovered and
after associating it with her absence, she can be captured and punished
by law, the same law which does not discriminate between high and
low, rich and poor. Such an open-ended note on which the story
concludes puts a big question-mark before the feasibility of Marys
final attempt at emancipation.
Even Mahaswetas extremely powerful insurgent character Dopdi
Mejhens rebellion ends on a similarly open-ended note in Draupadi.
She is the most sought-after tribal Naxalite leader and informer who
is being hunted by the Establishments repressive state apparatus lead
by Senanayak. Following her disappearance from Bakuli, Dopdis skill
at self-concealment had made her an almost mysterious underground
figure by then. As such, Government uses Somai and Budhna, two
traitors of the Naxalite movement to track and capture Dopdi on her
way to the forest hide-out. Before surrendering, Dopdi ululates with
all her might to make her team aware of the impending search. Thus,
she saves her entire team before giving in herself. But what follows
is a grisly story of sub-human sexual assault on her. She is repeatedly
raped throughout the night by Senanayaks soldiers in a bid to do the
needful14. The wily leader who had lead so many downtrodden people
in the movement to assert claim over basic human rights lies debased,
spread-eagled, compelled, bound to four posts with active pistons of
flesh15 rising and falling over it. This is the ultimate humiliation of
an individual by taking advantage of her biological orientation. Yet,
even after this tremendous injury to the body, Dopdi Mejhens soul
remains indomitable. She confronts Senanayak the very next morning
stark naked and bloody. On being asked the reason behind her
madness, she replies, Whats the use of clothes? You can strip me,
but how can you clothe me again? Are you a man?16 Had the ravenous
lot of Senanayak possessed a minimum level of human respect towards

other individuals, irrespective of sex, class and caste, they could have
never been able to humiliate Dopdi in that gruesome manner. So
Dopdi protests telling that there isnt a man who she should be
ashamed of in that camp. That is why she prefers to be naked. How
can the predators of night pretend to be decent enough in the morning
to be embarrassed at the sight of a naked woman? In todays India
where organizations protecting womens rights are lobbying for
compulsory death sentence of the rapist for the murder of the victims
soul, what should be the punishment allotted for Senanayaks sub-
human lot? What should be the punishment allotted for each countrys
army which frequently resorts to such grisly measures to bring out
information from opposition? Confronting us with so many big
questions, Dopdi Mejhen, as the end suggests, would probably die
in front of Senanayaks bullets. She screams, What more can you do?
Come on, counter me come on, counter me ?17 Society cannot
accommodate such pioneering revolutionary characters. They are
almost fated to succumb to the social system which demands status
quo even at the cost of containing all sparks of rebellion within an
apparently placid exterior. Such points of rupture in the social fabric
have always been thus accommodated. Thus, Dopdis legacy might
have continued but she suffers tremendous humiliation at the hands
of establishment.
In this way, Mahasweta Devis creative universe repeatedly dwells
upon the impasse situation in which postcolonial Indian subaltern
existence is stuck. A quagmire of corruption and exploitation has
ensnared the lives of countless anonymous Indian faces who even fail
to make two ends meet, let alone carve a niche of their own. Engulfed
in the vicious cycle of penury and superstition, they have to dare just
in order to live, let alone dream. And even if they try to break out
of this trap, they win momentarily. Doom waits to engulf the last
sparks of rebellion in this country where off-the-center people, like
beasts, live of each other.
Notes
1. The Ramon Magsaysay Award, Journalism, Literature, and Creative

Communication Arts 1997: Mahasweta Devi (Manila: Ramon Magsaysay
Award Foundation, 2005), 1.
2. Ibid., 11.
3. Mahasweta Devi, Adivasi Samaj O Daini Pratha etc. (in Bengali),
published in Parivartan, Calcutta, 16-23 April, 1986.
4. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Breast-Giver: for author, reader, subaltern,
historian, in Breast Stories, by Mahasweta Devi, trans. Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak (Calcutta: Seagull, 1997), 78-79.
5. Mahasweta Devi, Breast-Giver, in Breast Stories, translated by Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak (Calcutta: Seagull, 1997), 40.
6. Ibid., 44.
7. Ibid., 44-45.
8. Mahasweta Devi, Douloti the Bountiful, in Imaginary Maps, translated
by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Calcutta: Thema, 2001), 85.
9. Ibid., 94.
10. Mahasweta Devi, The Hunt, in Imaginary Maps, translated by Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak (Calcutta: Thema, 2001), 3.
11. Ibid., 2.
12. Ibid., 5.
13. Ibid., 4-5.
14. Mahasweta Devi, Draupadi, in Breast Stories, translated by Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak (Calcutta: Seagull, 1997), 34.
15. Ibid., 35.
16. Ibid., 36.
17. Ibid., 36-37.
The Archetypal Psychomestry of Othering and
Violence in The Inheritance of Loss
Sisir Kumar Chatterjee
After Conrads Heart of Darkness, Goldings Lord of the Flies, and

Rushdies Fury, Kiran Desais The Inheritance of Loss is a most
profoundly disturbing book. In her second, quite deservedly Man
Booker-winning novel, Kiran Desai, who is not only a terrific writer
but also a terrifying one, is out to jolt us into an awareness of the
violence at individual, communitarian as well as ethno-racial levels
that tends to traumatize human life throughout the world.
The Inheritance of Loss is a postcolonial, postmodernist, semi-
documentary-semi-fictional work of art. There are two plot-seedlings
in it. One strand relates the story of Biju, a Nepali youth, and a
veritable embodiment of Indian diasporic entity, who has migrated
to America to find there the work of a cook. His trajectory is mapped
as a continuous process of shifting from one restaurant to another,
because he fails to manage to procure a green card. The other thread
involves a disturbed love story between Sai (who has lost her
cosmonaut parents in an accident, and is sheltered by her maternal
grandfather, a Gujrati Chief Justice called Jemubhai Popatlal Patel,
who lives a reclusive retired life) and a Nepali youth called Gyan, who
is her Mathematics tutor. These two strands are intertwined by
Pannalal, Bijus father, who works as the Judges cook. Set at
Kalimpong, a hilly town situated in the lap of the Himalayas in the
North Western India, during the GNLF insurgency, this globalized
novel for a globalized world1 is intermittently interspersed with spurts
of violent brutality shaking life in this hillside resort. But, as the two
narrative threads of the novel stride across continents in a globalized
milieu, eruption of violence is not confined to the territories of
Kalimpong and the adjacent regions alone. Savagery in its most bestial
Sisir Kumar Chatterjee | 335
form is seen to operate at a racial level in a so-called civilized country

like England too. And, what is more, barbarity is shown to take
complete possession not only of an insurgent mob but also of a highly
civilized and educated individual who had obtained the degree of ICS
from England. All this tends to persuade the reader to
phenomenologically probe the basic reason behind the manifestation
of aggression in man, who, it is a simple truism, is as much a product
of his politico-socio-cultural and ethno-genetic conditions as of his
inscrutable archetypal feeling universals inherited through a long
history of evolution.
The pervasive violence and atrocity that trouble the world
fictionalized in Kirans book may be construed as issuing out of the
archetypal instinctive drive of man, the greatest of animals, for
othering another human or sub-human object, because this act of
othering injects into him a sense of power and authority that helps
him nourish a feeling of superiority over someone or something, and
thereby define his identity. Thus, the novel shows almost every
important character both othering and being othered by another
character. And this instinctive pull of othering operates in an
individual as strongly and aggressively as it does in a race or an ethnic
community.
Gyan and Sai, involved in a romantic lock, are portrayed as
slighting and humiliating each other. One can, for example, refer to
their bitter bickering over the issue of Christmas after the GNLF
movement has started. While Gyan is leaving Sai after harshly calling
her a little fool, Sai shouts through her weeping, You dirty bastard.
Gyan counters her invective by reminding her of her colonial slavery:
Dont you have any pride? Trying to be Westernized. They dont want you!!!!
Go there and see if they will welcome you with open arms. You will be trying
to clean their toilets and even then they wont want you.2
Gyans anger at himself for giving in to Sai, goes to such an extent

that he betrays her and her grandfather to the GNLF men. Again,
after Gyan parts with Sai to join the GNLF movement, the girl one
day finds her lover at a GNLF rally in Darjeeling. She wants to shout
to him, but at that moment he caught sight of herand the dismay
336 | Sisir Kumar Chatterjee
on his face was followed by a slight ferocious gesture of his head and
a cold narrow look in his eye that was a warning [to Sai] not to
approach (215), a warning [to] her to stay away (249). And Sai
begins to scrabble for dignity and for sense. And she starts to abhor
Gyan for she could not believe she had loved something so
despicable. (249). This is how love is othered by hatred.
Biju is sub-classed by some of his friends who hold green cards,
by the owners of the American restaurants where he worked, and
finally, by the GNLF robbers. And Biju, in turn, others the Pakistanis
domiciled in America by describing them as Pigs pigs, sons of pigs,
sooar ka baccha (23). He nourishes a sense of privileged superiority
over those who seek his assistance for migrating to America. But Biju
cannot and does not help them. Interestingly enough, Biju experienced
the same humiliation when he approached Nandu, who lived in
Queens, for help.
Nandu had also not answered the phone and had tried to hide when Biju
arrived on his doorstep, and then when he [Nandu] thought Biju had left,
had opened the door (98).
While working in Harish-Harrys kitchen, one day Biju skids on some

rotten spinach and breaks his knee. When he requests Harish-Harry
to call a doctor for him because it is his responsibility, Harish-Harry
is terribly enraged, and instead of arranging for the treatment of Biju,
he begins to shout:
I hire you with no papersLiving here rent-freeWhat right do you have?
Is it my fault you dont even clean the floor? living like a pig. Am I telling
YOU to live like a pig? (188)
And Biju counter-asserts by vehemently rebelling against Harish-

Harrys exploitation of people like him:
Without us living like pigswhat business would you have? This is how
you make your money, paying us nothing because you know we cant do
anything, making us work day and night because we are illegal. Why dont
you sponsor us for our green cards?(188)
The Judge bosses over his cook, his dog (Mutt), his illiterate Gujrati
wife, Sai and Gyan. He, in turn, is othered indirectly by the British
The Archetypal Psychomestry of Othering and Violence | 337
people and directly by the British Government, by his Commissioner

friend who hated the Gujratis, and particularly the Patels because
he considered them to be cunning self-seekers, by Bose, his only friend
while they were in England, by Gyan, by the working class people
of Kalimpong, by the Kalimpong SDO, the policemen, and finally by
his granddaughter. After Mutt is stolen, Jemubhai, who is more
attached to the dog than to his human relatives, asks the plumber,
the electrician, the deaf tailors if they have seen the dog anywhere.
The people refer to his dog as kutti, which angers him. And, in
response to his question, he receives only blank faces and angry
laughter. The people insult him in his absence thus: Salaa
Machootwhat does he think? Were going to look for his dog? (289)
Then he goes to the SDO, who mildly snubs him by saying: A dog!
Justice, listen, just listen...People are being killedwe are in an
emergency situation, and after this the SDO fixed the judge with
a certain gluey look that convinced him he meant to be rude. (291)
The policemen, who are waiting in the front room, begin to snigger:
Ha, ha, ha. Come about his Dog? Ha, ha ha ha haMadman!..Dont
waste our timeGet out. (291)
Lola, one of the widow sisters, constructs a hateful, racial
perspective for the GNLF movement. When Noni argues that They
have a point, Lola vehemently protests by saying: NonsenseThose
Neps will be after all outsiders now, but especially us Bongs. Theyve
been plotting this a long while. Dream come true. All kinds of
atrocities will go on then they can skip merrily over the border to
hide in Nepal. Very convenient. (127) Lola ill-treats the GNLF
activists as well as the policemen. She also undermines the Gorkhas
when she remarks: These people arent good people. Gorkhas are
mercenaries, thats what they are. Pay them and they are loyal to
whatever. Theres no principle involved (247) She also tries to
ignore the GNLF men and the policemen who seek shelter in their
house when hunted by each other, and she herself in turn is grossly
insulted by Pradhan, when she goes to complain about the illegal huts
being built by his followers on Mon Ami property. Instead of arranging
for the retrieval of her property from the possession of the GNLF
boys, Pradhan says to her:
I am the raja of Kalimpong. A raja must have many queensI have four,
but would youdear Aunty, would you like to be the fifth?...And you know,
you wont be bearing me any sons at your age. So I will expect a big
dowryAnd youre not much to look at, nothing upnothing down. (244)
And, interestingly enough, Lola helplessly shifts the oppressive burden

of her humiliation on to her dead husband.
Pannalal is exploited by the Judge, and even the cook slights Gyan,
a youth of his own race by remarking, It is strange the tutor is
NepaliNepalis make good soldiers, coolies, but they are not so
bright at their studies(73). He also basks in a feeling of patronizing
superiority over other fathers. As the narrator writes, to bolster his
son and his own pride, the cook wrote on the blue airmail form: Dear
beta, please see if you can help the MetalBox watchmans son.(80)
Pannalal displays his positional superiority over the fruit wallah, the
deaf tailors, the inept plumber, the tardy baker in the market by
insulting them.
At the racial or national level Indians are hated by every other
nation. Saeed, one of Bijus acquaintances in America, heard from
other kitchens
what the world thought of Indians: In Tanzania, [in] Madagascar, [in]
Nigeria, if they could, they would throw them [Indians] out. In China,
they hate them. In Hong Kong. In Germany. In Italy. In Japan. In Guam.
In Singapore. Burma. South Africa. They dont like them. (77)
The narrator unambiguously depicts the plight of the Indian diaspora

in the following terms: It was horrible what happened to Indians
abroad and nobody knew but other Indians abroad (138). This is
countered and squared up intellectually and philosophically with an
emphatic valorization of India only a few pages later:
In fact, dear sirs, madams, we were practicing a highly evolved form of
capitalism long before America was America; yes, you may think its your
success, but all civilization comes from India, yes. (145)
And the narrator shows a marginalized colonizeds helpless way of only

verbally othering the colonizers thus :
He [Achootan] had spent eight years in Canterbury, and he had responded

by shouting a line Biju was to hear many times over, for he repeated it several
times a week: your father came to my country and took my bread and now
I have come to your country to get my bread back.(135)
Bijus friends settled in America are slighted by the American

Governmental policies regarding immigration, and they take revenge
by conveniently marrying and divorcing the American women. Indian
women are shown to other their male counterparts, who are
dehumanized by their craze for a green card, when they comment:
Must have got off the plane and run for an American dame so he
could get his green card and didnt care if she looked like a horse
or no. Which she does!!!! When one man appreciates the Indian girls
by saying, Our ladies are the most beautiful in the world, another
woman quips, Yes, our women are the best in the worldand our
men are the absolute worst gadhas in the whole wide world.(297)
Indian women in turn are marginalized by the androcentric society
and culture. This is poignantly revealed through Nimis plight. After
being terribly tortured and finally driven out by her ICS husband,
Nimi goes to her uncle for shelter. But, The uncle turned his niece
from the door.
The instinct of othering is shown to be operating even in the
psyche of the children. At a time of violent racism, when Lola and
Noni are coming back from the shop of Tshering, they see Little
children lined up in rows to spit at [them] as they walked by. (280)
The butcher is shown to habitually resort to a practiced violence
before he kills a goat: Before the butcher slit the goats throat, Biju
could hear him working up his disdain, yelling Bitch, whore, cunt,
Sali, at her, dragging her forward then, and killing her. (181) This
instinct of violence and othering characterizes the world of animals
and insects too. In course of her journey towards Gyans residence
at Bong Busti, Sai encounters the sights of Bees noosed by spiders
silk (254), rats and snakes in the rafters fighting over insects and
birds eggs, hens being chased by a randy rooster(255), and chickens
that form a grotesque bunch, rape and violence being enacted, hens
being hammered and pecked as they screamed and flapped, attempting
escape from the raping rooster (256), the rooster that climbed out
of the pot and began to strut about. He was the only grand thing
around, crowned, spurred, crowing like a colonial. (257) Sai also
notices the sight of A dead scorpion being dismantled by ants first
its Popeye arm went by, carried by a line of ant coolies, then the sting
and, separately, the eye. (250) Mutt, the Judges specially-bred bitch
(Sai once said to her grandfather, Your dog is like a film star) too
is acutely class-conscious, as she slights all kinds of scurrilous loafers
on the hillside, [the] wheedling strays, that is, those that are inferior
to her in terms of position and genetic features, although she connives
at the amorous advances of the gentleman dogs (284). And, interestingly,
Mutt too is savagely treated by some creatures more powerful than
her, the people who have stolen her, because she disappoints them.
When they find that Mutt is merely a fancy dog, they tied her to
a tree, [and] kicked her (321).
Othering is also manifest at a globalized level, when the readers
witness the lopsided policy of Air France airline, which, after many
passengers discover that they have lost their luggage, gives compensation
to nonresident Indians and foreigners, not to Indian nationals,
although the latter are paying as much as all the other passengers. This
is indeed a curiously disgraceful situation, where, as one Indian
woman points out, Foreigners get more and Indians get less. Treating
people from a rich country well and people from a poor country badly.
Its a disgrace. This is a situation where, as the narrator herself
remarks, Fortune [is] piled on more good fortune. They [foreigners]
had more money and because they had more money, they would get
more money. (298). It is interesting to note that Kiran Desais book
also presents the people of the third world countries as having their
own ways of counter-othering the first world countries like America.
This is brought out through the Ohio mans father, who had once been
to the States, and had not at all been impressed, even by the size of
the house:
What is the point? All that space lying there useless, waste of water, waste
of electricity, waste of heating, air-conditioning, not very intelligent is it? And
you have to drive half an hour to the market! They call this the first world???
Ekdum bekaar!
The novel thus may be read as showing that othering is an archetypal

compulsive instinct required for selfing. This instinct is most often
portrayed in the novel as manifesting itself in the form of a deplorable
brutality perpetrated on one individual by another or by a whole racial
or ethnic group on another, on one community by another. The Judge,
during his stay in England, felt humiliated when he had witnessed
the horrible scene of abject insult of an Indian boy, just like himself,
just like Bose, being kicked and beatenOne of the boys attackers
had unzipped his pants and was pissing on him, surrounded by a
crowd of jeering red-faced men. (209) When Jemubhai recalls this
experience, his candid, conscientious confession of his own sense of
guilt for not having protested against this gross racial barbarity but
of having selfishly escaped, makes us realize his angst and helplessness
to see the spurt of racial violence, and at the same time makes us
expect a civilized behaviour from him toward other people. But, our
expectation of Jemubhais manners and pattern of behaviour is
frustrated time and again. The way the narrator relates his mechanical
and animalish sexual encounter with his wife very subtly betrays the
psychic atrocity he perpetrated on her:
She grew accustomed to his detached expression as he pushed into her[and]
all of a sudden he seemed to skid from control and his expression slid right
off his face. A moment laterhe withdrew to spend a long fiddly time in
the bathroom with soap, hot water, and Dettol. He followed his ablutions
with a clinical measure of whiskey, as if consuming a disinfectant.(170)
No reader can connive at the outburst of his aggression when she

inadvertently dirties the toilet seat due to her ignorance of how to
use it. No one can forget the barbarity in his treatment of his wife
after he came to know that she had attended the Nehru Welcoming
Committee Meeting (where Mrs. Mohan had taken her):
He emptied his glass[of drink] on her head, sent a jug of water swinging into
the face he no longer found beautiful, filled her ears with leaping soda water.
Then, when this wasnt enough to assuage his rage, he hammered down with
his fists, raising his arms to bring them down on her again and again,
rhythmically, until his own hands were exhausted and his shoulders next day
were strained sore as if from chopping wood. He even limped a bit, his leg
hurting from kicking her. Stupid bitch, dirty bitch! No one would expect
him, again, to treat the father and the wife of the drunken but innocent man
tortured in the police custody with a horrendous apathy and indifference that
amount to cruelty.
When the wife (who looked raped and beaten already) and the father
of the drunk came to Jemubhai, walking half a day from a village
across the Relli River, and entreated him to do something, the Judge
reacted to their appeal thus: Why come to me? Go to the police.
They are the ones who caught your husband, not I. Its not my fault,
(263) and then he ordered them to leave the place. His insensitivity
becomes extremely crude when he thinks,
he had done his duty as far as it was any citizens duty to report problems
to the police, and it was no longer his responsibility. Give these people a
bit and one could find oneself supporting the whole family forever after, a
constantly multiplying family, no doubt, because they might have no food,
the husband might be blind and with broken legs, and the woman might be
anemic and bent, but theyd still pop out an infant every nine months. (264)
The Cambridge-educated ICS Judges words here point to the wastage

and misuse of scholarship and education which only turn humans into
humanoids. When these poor and hapless people come to him again
and ask for some food so that they do not die of starvation, and the
cook is about to give them some atta, the Judge barks, Dont give
them anything, and continues his chess game. They beg with hands
folded, heads bent, Can we live on no food at all? We will be your
servants foreverGod will repay youGod will reward you But,
the England-educated Judge remains unmoved and adamant, and he
orders his cook to Tell them to go. (282) No less brutal is his
treatment of Pannalal towards the end of the book.
The police, unable to control the GNLF activists, practise their
new method of torture on an innocent drunkard:
The more he screamed the harder they beat him; they reduced him to a pulp,
bashed his head until blood streamed down his face, knocked out his teeth,
kicked him until his ribs brokethe police were just practising their torture
techniques, getting ready for what was coming. When the man crawled out
on his knees, his eyes had been extinguished. (226-27)
This atrocity on innocence is indeed a mockery and a scathing

indictment of the role played by the protectors of law and order. The
Inheritance of Loss presents the climactic form of violence when the
GNLF supporters assemble at the Mela Ground of Kalimpong, and
very soon a ghastly, barbaric battle ensues between them and the
policemen. This scene portrays the most abominable eruption of
violence that human civilisation can ever afford to witness.
It is not difficult to explain the reasons behind the outbursts of
violence, whether it takes place at the collective, ethno-racial level or
at the individual plane. As Amartya Sen, in his latest book Identity
and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny theorises3, terrorism or racial or
communal aggression is the result of a philosophic insularity of vision
we indulge in violence when we put obsessive, insistent and
overwhelming emphasis on what Sen calls our unique identity, that
is, only one single aspect (religious, ethnic, regional, and so on) of
our identity, when we remain blind and are not clear-headed enough
to take into cognizance the fact of the multidimensionality or the
plurality of our identities, our diverse diversities.
The incidents of violence that take place in Desais novel both
at the individual and at the racial levels can be explained by placing
them within the theoretical perspective of the philosophy of identity
as a multi-layered concept and not a unitary entity. The Indian boy,
who suffered nightmarish humiliation and brutality in the hands of
a group of white men in England during Jemubhais stay there, for
instance, was simply a victim of gut racial hatred. The policemen
inflict inhuman torture on the helpless drunkard, because they
instinctively adopt this psychic measure to hide their failure to nab
the real culprits involved in the case of robbery in the Judges house,
because their identity as the custodian of security and law and order
is at stake as they are unable to subdue the GNLF Movement. When
they resort to a form of heinous barbarity in an effort to subjugate
the mutinous mob, it is indeed an extreme expression of their fear
of losing their identity as an armed and legally empowered community.
The macabre atrocities that the riotous insurgents perpetrate on the
fleeing policemen is, similarly, another manifestation of the obsessive
stress the rebellious Nepalis have put on their communitarian, and
long-exploited geo-ethnic identity, as evident in their slogan Gorkhaland

for Gorkhas and in the argument with which they legitimize their
demand:
We are laborers on the tea plantations, coolies dragging heavy loads,
soldiers. And are we allowed to become doctors and government workers,
owners of the tea plantations? No! We are kept at the level of servants
In our own country, the country we fight for, we are treated like slaves
[So] we must unite under the banner of the GNLF, Gorkha National
Liberation Front.(158-9)
It is not the fact that all the Nepalis or Gorkhas felt the urge to fight
for their freedom; and, reversely, nor is it true that the GNLF activists
did never go against the interest of the common Nepalis, or that the
Movement was at all spontaneous. But everywhere in the world a
riotous, mutinous mob are found to resort to violence at the slightest
provocation. The eruption of collective violence that the novel portrays
in such nauseating, disturbing details only betrays the universal
aberrational psychology of the mob that take any insurgency for an
opportunity to feed the starved beast in themselves by revelling in
anarchy and brutality, as the laws of the civilised society are then
suspended by a no-rule state of affairs. The irony of all this is that
Instead of foreign enemies, instead of the Chinese they had been
preparing for, building their hatred against, they must fight their own
people (278), which shows that the inevitable result of mob violence
in a country for any demand, whether justified or not, is inevitably
the devastating disintegration of the country itself, of the whole nation.
After the police-mob encounter at the Mela Ground, Kalimpong was
transformed into a ghost towneven one mans angerseemed
enough to set the hillside alight Thus, civilisation was put at stake
by violence, which affected all, and particularly the innocent
commoners:
The men trembled at home for fear of being picked up, being tortured on
any kind flimsy excuse, the GNLF accusing them of being police informers,
the police accusing them of being militants. (281)
and they had to live

within an imaginary line between the insurgents and the law, between being
robbedand being hunted by the police as scapegoats for the crimes of
others. (282)
The infernal carnage that the book depicts can thus be analyzed as
an expression of what Amartya Sen describes as the elementary herd
behaviour by which people [are] made to discover their newly
detected belligerent identities, without subjecting the process to
critical examination.4 The cause of the outbursts of violence in an
individual can also be traced, as mentioned earlier, to the crisis of
identity, which leads to the instinctive compulsion of othering. The
Judges cruel indifference to the father and the wife of the drunken
Nepali is his way of avenging the robbery in his house committed
by a few Nepali hooligans, an incident which has shaken the
foundation of his smug socio-positional superiority. His act of beating
Pannalal is also an expression of vengeance wreaked on a marginalised
unit of humanity for the loss of Mutt, the bitch, the othered animal
that had so far defined and justified the Judges existence as a master.
When he loses Mutt, the Judges intellectual, reason-dominated,
agnostic self appears to be simply a well-nurtured faade as it is
demeaned by his own archetypal self.
Gyan aligns with the GNLF and parts with Sai, because he seeks,
but does not find, the justification of his identity as an educated youth.
He ignores his identity as a tutor-cum-lover of the granddaughter of
a privileged and affluent citizen who lives a selfish life in what he thinks
is their legitimate territory. So, he chooses to prioritise his
communitarian adult self by showing his solidarity to the political
stance of his ethno-racial community. The narrator analyzes Gyans
thought-processes after his hearing the exciting and provocative
harangue of one of the staunch advocates of the GNLF Movement,
that propels him to rebel against his identity as what he takes for an
idle, irresponsible romancer, thus:
It was a masculine atmosphere and Gyan felt a moment of shame remembering
his tea parties with Sai on the veranda, the cheese toast, queen cakes from
the baker, and even worse, the small warm space they inhabited together,
the nursery talk. It suddenly seemed against the requirements of his
adulthood. He voiced an adamant opinion that the Gorkha movement takes

the harshest route possible. (161)
Gyan becomes so vociferously and aggressively postcolonial and anti-

West-aping- people including Sai that he goes to the extent of abusing
his beloved. After joining the GNLF movement, Gyan betrays not
only his beloved and her grandfather, but also an innocent and
philanthropic individual like Father Booty, who with his idea of dairies
might create a mini Swiss-style economy in Kalimpong. (257) Gyans
racial bias comes in sharp and fierce conflict with Sais counter-acting,
unprejudiced sanity in their mutually virulent verbal encounter over
the question of Father Bootys eviction from India. While Sai tells him:
Hes done much more than you ever will for people on this hillside,
an angry Gyan responds to this thus:
In fact, good thing they kicked him outwho needs Swiss people here? For
how many thousands of years have we produced our own milk?...We dont
want any cheese and the last thing we need is chocolate cigars.
Sai argues, If this is what youve been thinking, why didnt you boycott
the cheese instead of gobbling it down? Now you attack it? Hypocrite!
(258-59). The love between Gyan and Sai thus turns into a fierce
battle for insult and domination over each other when Sai tells Gyan,
Youre probably just sitting waiting for your mummy to arrange your
marriage. Low-class family, uncultured, arranged-marriage typestheyll find
you a silly fool to marry and youll be delighted all your life to have a dummy
(261).
Gyan can not digest Sais insult to himself and his family for it at
once evokes in him a sense of crisis of his socio-cultural identity, and
he violently retaliates, throwing her aside into the lantana bushes and
beating her about with a stick. Gyan thus fails to judge or make the
appropriate choice as to what relative importance to attach, in a
particular context, to the divergent loyalties and priorities that may
compete for precedence.5 His communitarian thinking goads him
on to see community membership as a kind of extension of [his]
own self , to presume that ones identity with ones community must
be the principal or dominant (perhaps even the only significant)
identity a person has.6 Gyan, in other words, by severing his link

with Sai, acts like a rational fool by stressing on his singular
affiliation.
Kiran Desais narrative, however, not only disturbs us by holding
up the abysmally bleak and irredeemably horrific picture of the
bestiality of the animal called man. It also shows some rays of hope
to be cherished even amidst the rampant inhumanity of man. As an
antidote to the spasmodic eruptions of violence, Desais book suggests
the necessity of inculcating the humane values of love, sympathy, pity,
fellow-feeling, mercy, mutual faith, endurance, forgiveness, respect for
the traditional mores of Indian culture, in short, to quote Amartya
Sen, a sense of the shared membership of the human race.7 It is
interesting to note that in a novel dominated by the people resorting
to violence and incidents of savage aggression, there are some
characters who, notwithstanding their own little human limitations,
stand out to uphold the message that what can save the world from
disintegrating into pieces is not the capitalistic extension of marketization
but the globalization of the practice of humanitarian virtues. They are
Biju, his father, the two widow sisters, Gyan, and, towering over them
all, Sai. It is they, who, like the five peaks of the Himalayas sheltering
a sadly shaken and terribly trembling hill town, salvage the world
depicted in the book from being miniaturized into a den of wolves
and monsters.
Interestingly enough, the title of the novel can be interpreted from
another, un-ironic, angle of vision. The word Inheritance, which is
evidently fraught with positive nuances, by virtue of being placed first,
is privileged over the noun Loss, which is undoubtedly negatively
nuanced. If one shifts this emphasis on Inheritance to apply to the
situation of Bijus life, then the title can be interpreted as suggesting
that the loss of the material affluence, of which America is the symbol,
is indeed worth inheriting, if in exchange for this loss, one can get
back ones dignity and freedom. Bijus triumph lies in the fact that
he does not come back to India with dejection or any sense of failure.
On the contrary, he returns with a sense of triumph in that he is saved
from having to compromise his basic human dignity. He comes back
home to be reunited with his father, experience a sense of regaining
his identity which can be a source not merely of pride and joy, but
also of strength and confidence, and savour the taste of figurative
homecoming as a release from the bondage of spiritual slavery. Biju
decides to come back home with the dream of rebuilding his home
in a securer way. He thinks that
hed build a house with solid walls, a roof that wouldnt fly off every monsoon
season. Biju played the scene of meeting his father again and again like a
movie in his head, wept a bit at the thought of so much happiness and
emotion. (286)
After stepping out of Dum Dum airport, Biju happens to discover

his true identity, a space within his own self, as his humiliation of
having to stay in America illegally is counterbalanced by his
achievement of the clarity of vision. As the narrator empathically
celebrates the end of Bijus demeaned diasporic entity with his
homecoming in a rebelliously postcolonial discourse:
This way of leaving your family for work had condemned them over several
generations to have their hearts always in other places, their minds thinking
about people elsewhere; they could never be in a single existence at one time.
How wonderful it was going to be to have things otherwise.(311)
The author underscores Bijus sense of emancipation from the

claustrophobic atmosphere of his perpetually fugitive and therefore
undignified existence in America in terms of the Nature images of
vastness, wilderness and abundance:
He felt exhilarated by the immensity of wilderness, by the lunatic creepers,
the shooting hooting abundance of green, the great caterwauling vulgarity of
frogs that was like the sound of the earth and the air itself. So, feeling
patient in the way one feels before the greatness of nature, impatient in the
way one feels with human details, he waited to see his father. (315)
However, while coming back home to Kalimpong from America, Biju

had taken along with him quite a few American goods bought with
the dollars he earned by temporarily selling his dignity. But,
significantly enough, he cannot take home any of these things, as the
GNLF goons rob him of everything, leaving him stark naked but for
his underpants, and poorer than when he had left Kalimpong. He is
even chased by the dogs set on him by the GNLF men, so that he
keeps on running in darkness without his baggage, without his
savings, worst of all, without his pride. Back from America with far
less than hed ever had. (317) Thus, Biju is completely dispossessed
of American affluence in all its forms. He loses all his material
possessions. But, the loss he suffers, the narrative implies, is worth
inheriting, for in exchange for this loss what he gains is of immeasurable
humane value he is finally rewarded with the most desired reunion
with his father. Bijus coming back to Kalimpong and to his father
reminds us of the homecoming of Langston Hughes, the African
American writer, who describes in his autobiography the exhilaration
that seized him as he left New York for Africa. He threw his American
books into the sea: [I]t was like throwing a million bricks out of
my heart. He was on his way to his Africa, Motherland of the negro
people! He basked in visualizing how he would soon experience the
real thing, to be touched and seen, not merely read about in a book.8
Pannalal, initially adopts a posture of uppish superiority over
those fathers who have failed to send their sons to America, but later
on this smug and snug feeling of superiority is sublimated by a genuine
philanthropic zeal, as he writes to Biju, Biju beta, you have been
fortunate enough to get there, please do something for the others
(95) An embodiment of traditional, logocentric humane values of his
own socio-cultural class, the old cook is haunted by a sense of guilt
for having cheated his master in many ways. After the telephone
connection with his son is snapped, his sense of guilt becomes acute
so much so that it leads him to feel a compulsion to undergo a process
of atonement, which, he believes, is possible to attain only through
candid confession of his moral degeneration and through being
physically punished by his master. Im a bad man, he says to the
Judge, Im a bad man, beat me, sahib, punish me. (319) His
exposure helps him gain a spiritual freedom after which he becomes
united with his son whom he embraces in his untainted arms two
generations, bereft of all false glitters that civilised life tempts us with,
standing in each others pure and purified embrace.
The two spirited widows of Kalimpong (131) are an embodiment of
human endurance. They have been subjected to hardships and humiliations.

But they extend themselves to shelter the hapless and desperate members of
distressed humanity, whether they come in the form of GNLF insurgents or
of the helpless policemen hounded by the rebels. Lola is shown to hide a
soft corner beneath her tough exterior, when she protests against mans
cruelty toward the animals: The trouble with us Indians is that we have no
love of animals. A dog, a cat is there just to kick. We cant resist beat, stone,
torment, we dont rest until the creature is dead and then we feel very
content (290)
Noni upholds the virtue of unprejudiced sanity. When Mrs. Sen

denounces the Muslims by commenting on the rapidity with which
they are multiplying, No self-control, those people. Disgusting.
(129), Noni humanely snaps: Everyone is multiplying. Everywhere.
You cannot blame one group over another. (129) Noni even allows
the GNLF boys to sleep in their house, and tries to convince Lola
that They have a point. (239)
Gyan was a victim of temporary misjudgement.9 It is true that
he had betrayed Sai and her grandfather in a fit of rage at Thapas
Canteen, after his quarrel with her over the Christmas. But, as the
narrator writes, Next morning, when he wokehe felt guilty all over
again. (177) The author herself evaluates Gyans character thus: He
wasnt a bad person. He didnt want to fight. The trouble was that
hed tried to be part of the larger questions, tried to become part of
politics and history. (272) Certainly, the Gyan who joined the GNLF
Movement is vastly different from the one who becomes disillusioned
in the end. Indeed, he becomes wise (the word gyan in Sanskrit literally
means wisdom) when he realises his folly and the importance of
simultaneously giving priority to dual loyalty or to his multiple and
conflicting identities, to human relations above all other considerations.
This explains why he suffers from a strong sense of guilt, which is
unambiguously revealed in the narrators analysis of his thoughts: how
could he have told the boys about the guns? How? How could he have
put Sai in such danger? His skin began to crawl and burn. (273) It
is then that he sincerely longs for reunion with Sai, and even takes
initiative toward this end. Ashamed and remorseful for what he has
done, he tries to effect his reconciliation with Sai by coming in touch

with the old cook and assuring him that he would find out the lost
dog of the Judge. The hazards and also the apparent humiliations
involved in this search would perhaps be his act of expiation.
Sai is the only character who is more sinned against than sinning.
It is true that she abuses Gyan and threatens his whole family with
dire consequences they will face for his act of manhandling her, but
she does so only when Gyan tramples upon her human dignity. She
is basically too nave and immaculate to betray her commitment to
her passion, which, once having been, will always be there. More
importantly, she can finally appreciate Gyans folly of prioritizing his
ethnic, communitarian identity over his identity as a lover or simply
as a human being, as quite natural. Through suffering she has learnt
to appreciate the variety of motivations that move human beings living
in a society, and can therefore rise to the height of forgiving Gyan
his failure to weigh the relative importance of his different obligations.
Sick with the desire to be desired (250), Sai ultimately realizes that
There was grace in forgetting and giving up (252) And so, as the
curfew was lifted, in order to salvage her dignity, Sai started out on
the undignified mission of searching for Gyan (252). This search is
thus suggested to be symbolic, if we keep in mind the etymological
meaning of the word Gyan. Sai is suffering and endurance incarnate,
a female Jesus. When the Judge treats the father and the wife of the
drunken man with inhuman indifference, Sai feels a genuine
humanitarian concern for these helpless creatures. Even during her
phase of emotional despair, she retains her sensibility and her psycho-
spiritual capacity to feel grateful for the greatness of [the mountainous]
landscape. (309) A doyen of sympathy and a representative of
archetypal femininity, Sais heart bleeds for every creature in distress.
It is her sublimation expressed through her capacity for showing
forgiveness that enables her to attain an inner illumination, and helps
her to realise at the end of the book the profoundest message of life:
truth [of life] was apparent [emphasis added]. All you needed to do
was to reach out and pluck it. (324) The truth that Sai realises is
that civilizations have been built by men and have been destroyed
through their own violence and brutality, but they have never been
able to disprove the verity of humane values and instincts:
All night it would rain. It would continue, off and on, on and off, with a
savagery matched only by the ferocity with which the earth responded to the
onslaught. Uncivilized voluptuous green would be unleashed; the town
would slide down the hill. Slowly, painstakingly, like ants, men would make
their paths and civilization and their wars once again, only to have it wash
away again (323)
The narrators comment on the affair of Gyan and Sai, before the
former joined the GNLF movement, is quite significant in this
context: Gyan and Sais romance was flourishing and the political
trouble continued to remain in the background for them (140). This
clearly implies that there are some basic humane instincts, which can
never be smothered by any socio-political upheaval. Despite all
turbulences raging in the background of life, Sai, the narrator
observes, had found freedom and space in love(143). The love story
of Gyan and Sai, thus, reminds us of the famous lines from Hardys
poem In Time of The Breaking of Nations : Wars annals will cloud
into night/Ere their story die.10 In fact, the very existence of violence,
aggression or barbarity at the very core of civilization in all ages all
the more necessitates the urgency of inculcating the humanitarian
virtues to effect a balance and thereby to contribute to the sobered
advancement of civilization. We need to exercise, for example, pity
and charity, because there is poverty in the world, just as we need
to show mercy and forgiveness because the world is troubled by
betrayal, misery and unhappiness. One is reminded of Blakes
contention in his poem The Human Abstract:
Pity would be no more
If we did not make somebody poor;
And Mercy no more could be
If all were as happy as we.11
We need, in other words, to keep on craving for attaining global peace

and transforming the world into a space for shared humanity by
putting in persistent efforts to form what Amartya Sen calls the global
civil society,12 by exercising love, pity, charity, mercy, sympathy and
other positive humane emotions as long as the civilisation continues

to be plagued by injustice, inequality and violence. Even if we
understand the word apparent in the framework of the Deconstructivist
philosophy of relativity of the meaning of signifiers13, then also we
can legitimately argue that Sais realization applies equally well to the
message the novel purports to convey. What Sai perceives is the simple
truth that no truth of life is absolute, and that therefore all truths are
only apparent, that hatred is as much true as love; inequality is as much
a reality as mans striving for bringing about equality ; injustice is as
pervasive as mans craving for justice; suffering is as much actual as
the necessity of inculcating fortitude and endurance; antipathy and
the instinct of othering are as much tangible as the exercise of
sympathy and of the effort to break free of the compulsive control
of the ego; violence and barbaric atrocity are as much part of the
human race as sanity and civilised behaviour; gain is as much worth
inheriting as even loss. This truth of life is articulated in a simple but
memorable phrasing even by an illiterate Pannalal, who hopes (in times
when Kalimpong has turned into a veritable inferno) that It will be
all right, everything goes through a bad time, the world goes in a cycle,
bad things happen, pass, and things are once again good (281)
This profound truth of life is succinctly objectified through Father
Bootys juxtaposition of the two contrary images: Very auspicious in
Tibet, rain and sunshine at the same time [emphasis added] (196),
through the image of the river Muhheakunnuk, the river [of life] that
flows both ways (267), and through the image of the sweeper woman
who combines a potent mixture of intense sympathy and intense
annoyance (296). Through Sai, Biju, Gyan and Pannalal, the book
upholds the comforting message that inhuman violence has been the
inextricable part of every phase of human civilization, but it has always
been and will always be counteracted by mans capacity for suffering
and for extending himself to a superhuman limit through love and
pity, that the loss of faith has always been and will always be
counterbalanced by its restoration through forgiveness, that the loss
of something apparently valuable has always been and will always be
counter-adjusted by the attainment or gain of something really
invaluable. The truth of life that Sai learns is simply that cruelty, terror
and violence in man co-exist with endurance, sympathy, pity, human-

ity and divinity; and that this truth about the co-existence of contraries
in man has to be perceived, assimilated and, above all lived, with the
Himalayan stoicism. The image of the peaks of the Himalayas appears
in the beginning and at the end of the book, to stay on in the minds
of the readers like something permanent in contradistinction to
whatever happens in between, the truth of which is only apparent. As
Blake writes in his poem entitled A Divine Image, which was
intended to thematically counterbalance The Human Abstract:
Cruelty has a Human Heart,
And Jealousy a Human Face;
Terror the Human Form Divine,
And Secrecy the Human Dress.
The Human Dress is forged Iron,
The Human Form a fiery Forge,

The Human Face a Furnace seald,
The Human Heart its hungry Gorge.14
Notes
1. See Inheritance of Lost Booker, by Amit Roy (London, Oct.11), in The

Telegraph, 12th October, 2006.
2. Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss, (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2006)
174. All quotations from The Inheritance of Loss are from this edition of
the book. The page numbers are given after the quotes.
3. The crux of Amartya Sens thesis is that
Our shared humanity gets savagely challenged when the manifold
divisions in the world are unified into one allegedly dominant system
of classification in terms of religion, or community, or culture, or
nation, or civilization
Amartya Sen. Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny (London:
Penguin Books, 2006), xiii. Sen exposes the illusion of a singular identity
that others must attribute to the person to be demeaned for the
purpose of denigration (along with descriptive distortions of the ascribed
identity). op. cit. 8. Violence, according to Sen,
is promoted by the cultivation of a sense of inevitability about some

allegedly unique often belligerent identity that we are supposed
to have and which apparently makes extensive demands on us... The
imposition of an allegedly unique identity is often a crucial component
of the martial art of fomenting sectarian confrontation.
op. cit. xiii.
4. Ibid., 10.
5. Ibid., 19.
6. Ibid., 33.
7. Ibid., 3.
8. Langston Hughes, The Big Sea: An Autobiography (New York: Thunders
Mouth Press, 1940; 1986) 3-10.
9. As Amartya Sen contends:
It is not so much that a person has to deny one identity to give

priority to another, but rather that a person with plural identities has
to decide, in case of a conflict, on the relative importance of the
different identities for the particular decision in question.
op. cit., 29. And Gyan evidently failed to make the right choice. As Sen
would have us believe, we should get rid of the illusion of unique
identity, of the misunderstanding that identity is a pre-fixed destiny,
should recognise our plural identities, and should embrace the truth that
identity is a matter not of discovery but of reasoned choice (op. cit.,
9). The prospects of peace in the contemporary world, Sen prophetically
asserts,
may well lie in the recognition of the plurality of our affiliations and
in the use of reasoning as common inhabitants of a wide world, rather
than making us into inmates rigidly incarcerated in little containers.
What we need, above all, is a clear-headed understanding of the
importance of the freedom that we can have in determining our
priorities.
op. cit., xvii Sens contention is that we all have to make choices about
which of our loyalties and affiliations we can remain committed to at a
given context or about whether we should not maintain a simultaneous
allegiance to all or quite a few of our involvements. One can cite the
example of the Caribbean poet Derek Walcott who, in his poem A Far
Cry from Africa, condemns the violence of man on man in a tone of
scathing satire and biting irony, when he says: The violence of beast on
beast is read / As natural law, but upright man / Seeks his divinity by
inflicting pain. Neruda, Walcott and Atwood: Poets of the Americas, edited
by Ajanta Dutt (Delhi: Worldview Publications, 2002; Rpt. 2004) 104.
In this poem Walcott also gives vent to his sense of psychic impasse
issuing out of an inner conflict between his innate pull of his loyalty to
his historical African background on the one hand and his irresistible
counterpull of his cultural allegiance to the English language and
literature on the other:
Where shall I turn, divided to the vein?

I who have cursed
The drunken officer of British rule, how choose
Between this Africa and the English tongue I love?
Betray them both, or give back what they give?
How can I face such slaughter and be cool?
How can I turn from Africa and live? (ibid. , 104-05)
Rabindranath Tagores Gora, too, was faced with a similar kind of mental
pull and counterpull when he had to ask whether he should carry on with
his advocacy for Hindu conservatism or explore the possibility of seeing
himself in terms of some other identity. Ultimately, however, Gora tided
over his intellectual crisis by choosing, with the help of his girlfriend, to
prioritise his identity as a human being who was at home in India, not
disturbed by the questions of religion or caste or class or complexion.
Amartya Sen, therefore, quite justifiably and wisely argues that Life is
not mere destiny (op. cit , 39), and that we all have to make choices
at crucial junctures about the way we should define our identity at any
given point of time in our lives.
10. Thomas Hardy, Selected Poems, edited by Tim Armstrong (London:
Longman, 1993) 238.
11. William Blake, Complete Writings, edited by Geoffrey Keynes (London:
Oxford University Press, 1966; Rpt. 1969) 217.
12. op. cit., xx.
13. Within the framework of Deconstruction, which undermines the notion
of binary opposition beloved of Structuralism, complementarity can be
one of the meanings of opposition. Deconstructivists argue that it is
possible to detect in each sign traces of the other words which it has
excluded in order to be itself. According to them, one term of an
antithesis secretly inheres within the other so that what is outside is
also somehow inside, what is alien also intimate. Terry Eagleton. Literary
Theory: An Introduction (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983) 128-33. Within
the Deconstructivist theoretical frame, therefore, the word apparent may
mean obvious or evident as well as what only appears on the surface,
implying thereby something hidden from the common perception or
experience.
14. op. cit., 221.
Ezekiel and His Kind: Reflections on
Indian Poetry in English
Somak Ghoshal
Is there an Indian poetry in English? If there is such a thing, then

is it poetry written by an Indian in English? Or is it Indian poetry
thats written in English? If you consider the terms on which these
simple questions are framed, you might end up with other difficult
questions. Sometimes, just a change of emphasis would be enough
to throw up several questions out of ordinary, seemingly banal,
enquiries.
That is what A.K. Ramanujan showed in 1990 in his now-famous
essay Is there an Indian way of thinking?1 He recalled the exercise
Stanislavsky would set his students. The aspiring thespians would be
given one question, and then asked to frame that same question in
different ways by modulating emphases and accent. In the process,
they would derive a range of possible meta-questions from the primary
one. For example, my opening question could yield at least two
possible versions depending on the tone in which I ask it: Is there
an Indian poetry in English? and Is there an Indian poetry in English?
The first question Is there an Indian poetry in English? is
directly related to national identity: whether Indianness is an inherent
feature of the poetry that comes out of India or is written by Indians
wherever they might be living. The second question, though not
entirely divorced from the first, has more to do with linguistics, with
the nature of the English language in which Indians write verse. It
arises, as Leela Gandhi wrote, out of
Ezekiel and His Kind: Reflections on Indian Poetry in English | 359
an unexamined suspicion of Indian Poetry in English; whereby, writing under

that unwieldy sign was either inadequately poetical because it was in Indian-
English or, and this more perniciously, inadequately Indian because it was
in poetical-English2.
The second, more linguistic, question cannot be studied in isolation

because of the ambiguous legacies bequeathed to it by the first
question of identity. English travelled to India primarily as a utilitarian
language. It was imported from the far shores by imperialists to ease
the burden of their foreignness in a strange land. It was this self-
interest that led them to teach the natives this language so that the
rulers could talk to the subjects. In a few hundred years time, however,
the latter were talking back at the former.
By the 19th century, newspapers, periodicals, journals and
pamphlets were using the English language in the cause of nationalism.
Of course, it would have been absurd if the end of learning a foreign
language would have been to use it exclusively for political activism.
Quite naturally, the potentials of the language were explored through
literary idioms as well. There were some writers, early Michael
Madhusudan Dutt and Toru Dutt for instance, who were captives to
Anglophilia, while others, like Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay and Sri
Aurobindo, cultivated a more disenchanted love for the language.
This fact of using a foreign language for literary activity gives rise
to insoluble questions about the origins of creativity: do writers chose
to write in a particular language or are they inescapably chosen by
it? Multilingualism also bristles with odd questions that cannot be
satisfactorily answered either: how foreign does a foreign language
remain after one has learnt it? Is there an acceptable point during the
learning of this language after which the language can become a part
of the learners consciousness, and therefore foreign no longer? Can
other languages influence identities, and by extension, perceptions of
the world, which are integral to the work of writing?
Even in the absence of convincing answers, these questions have
helped critics identify two distinct traditions of poetry-writing in
English in India the conformist and the heterodox3. The former
line can be traced from Toru Dutt to A.K. Ramanujan, Arun Kolatkar
360 | Somak Ghoshal
and beyond. It is characterized by aggressive Indian thematization

either through dense romanticist exhumation of Indian mythology, or,
conversely, through the journalistic prose-poetry of modern urban
nihilism. The latter involves an indigenization of poetic form itself ,
represented by Sri Aurobindos adaptation of the mantra as a verse
form in Indian English poetry or even by Agha Shahid Alis exploration
of English through the sprawling, courtly romanticism of the ghazal.
The self-aware crafting of poetry out of mixed traditions is
common to both these trends. Both make certain epistemological
appropriations important cultural shifts in the course of discovering
and understanding Western systems of knowledge and modes of
expression. Either way, it has been a hermeneutic journey, where each
school of poets mastered the art of creating meanings within contexts,
of bringing the familiar and the unfamiliar together into a world
harmoniously confusd (Alexander Popes phrase in Windsor Forest).
Ramanujan describes this phenomenon comprehensively:
Indian borrowings of Western cultural items have been converted and
realigned to fit pre-existing context-sensitive needs. When English is borrowed
into (or imposed on) Indian contexts it becomes part of Indian multiple
diglossia.4
Between these two types of creativity characterized by experiments

with form and content lies another, more hybridised, poetic self-
fashioning. It cannot be comfortably slotted into one or the other
category of writing because of its politically diffused approach.
Perhaps it is not all that original and can be traced to the
epistemological adventures of the East, its inherent tendency to
interpret and adapt Western thought within its own contexts. Yet, we
can hardly be sure that this is what such a form of self-fashioning
is doing, that it is not some sort of a joke on a serious attempt at
theorizing its premises! The uncertain nature of this third way makes
the very category of Indian poetry in English suspicious, provoking
the teasing questions with which I began.
This unique poetic sensibility treads on the thin line between the
colonial and the modern, hovering on the cusp of colonial modernity,
and playing mischievous games with notions of coercion, hegemony
and the anxiety of influence. This line of Indian poetry in English

challenged the lyrical Romanticism of preceding generations of
Indian poets (Michael Madhusudan Dutt, Tor Dutt and so on) as
well as replaced a tendency towards mystical obscurantism, of which
Sri Aurobindo is seen to have been particularly representative5.
Nissim Ezekiel together with some of his contemporaries like
P. Lal, R. Parthasarathy, Keki N. Daruwalla, Dom Moraes was
responsible for introducing this new idiom into Indian English poetry
that was neither conformist nor heterodox. It was more influenced
by the aesthetic shifts of Modernism that swept over a whole
generation of British poets in the Thirties than by the political ethos
of colonial modernity, residues of the Empire lingering on in
decolonised India.
However, Ezekiel arrived at this unique idiom after a circuitous
journey along traditional lines. He published his first volume of poetry,
A Time to Change, in 1952 after returning to India from England,
where he had lived since 1948. By this time, the Thirties poets had
dispersed, their chief inspiration, W.H. Auden, was living as an
expatriate in America, while his followers, Louis McNeice, Stephen
Spender, John Betjeman, Cecil Day-Lewis and others were all securely
established in the literary pantheon. Nevertheless, Ezekiel returned to
Bombay with the shadows of T.S. Eliot and Auden looming over his
verse, the opening lines of the title poem of his 1952 collection,
bearing this out beautifully:
We who shall leave the house in April, Lord,
How shall we return?
Debtors to the whore of Love,
Corrupted by the things imagined
Through the winter nights, alone,
The flesh defiled by dreams of flesh,
Rehearsed desire dead in spring,
How shall we return?6
One hears the cadences of the beginning of The Waste Land (April
is the cruelest month), the self-absorbed, erotic musings of the old
man in Gerontion, the aged eagle in Ash Wednesday stretching its
362 | Somak Ghoshal
wings, and, of course, there are phrases Debtors to the whore of

Love at once Shakespearean and reminiscent of the love poems
of the early Auden. However, this is just one face of Ezekiels poetry,
fleshed out of his awareness of high Modernism, a voice tremulous
with the anticipation of homecoming. It is also a strongly conformist
voice, informed by the vestiges of neo-Romanticism (of W. B. Yeats,
for instance) and the lyrical modernist tradition that had begun with
Eliots Prufrock and Other Observations (1919).
Ezekiel, of course, did not remain stuck in this conformist phase.
After all, his poetic persona was characterised by periodic changes
and reinvention, his was always a personality in process.7 By the
Sixties, he was gravitating towards a more individualist idiom, setting
out on a more complex, politically ambiguous, journey that would be
intriguing to post-colonial theorists. Coming at the beginning of the
decade, An Unfinished Man (1960), with its distinctly Yeatsian title,
seemed to herald this transformation in poetic self-definition.
Throughout the Sixties and the Seventies, Ezekiel experimented with
the English language, coming up, finally in 1976, with one of his most
original and memorable compositions, Goodbye Party for Miss
Pushpa T.S., the earliest of the Very Indian Poems in Indian English
that he wrote.
II
Ezekiel came upon this sub-genre of lyric poetry by trial and error.
At least, thats what is suggested by his confession that the Indian
English poems started initially as a by-product of his work as a
dramatist8. He went around the streets of Bombay listening and
recording carefully the English spoken by ordinary Indians; he would
mingle with the crowd in the suburban trains and eavesdrop on
conversations, collecting scraps of spoken English as well as broken
English. And all this he did to give credence to the characters of his
plays, who, as one of his friends had pointed out to him, had started
sounding all alike. The result of this ethnographic interest in linguistic
patterns was the peculiar, portmanteau language, Indian English.
This new idiom was also the logical outcome of living in India,
absorbing, audio-visually, the assortment of sights and sounds, having
to live a life, habitually, in the interstices of culture. For a multi-lingual
writer like Ezekiel he was from a Bene-Israeli family settled in
Bombay who grew up speaking Marathi and a bit of Yiddish, other
than English, the challenge must have been considerable. Writing
Indian-English was not just a linguistic translation, it also involved
relocation in terms of culture and identity, a venturing into the way
the mind grapples with a language not ones own. Raja Rao described
the human dimension of this problem in the Foreword to Kanthapura:
One has to convey in a language that is not ones own the spirit that
is ones own 9.
Social realism, thus, became an important template of dramatization,
as well as of poetry, for Ezekiel. The retired don, in The Professor,
who chats with the reader unhurriedly, becomes intensely credible and
alive because of the way in which he delivers his inane curriculum
vitae in a language one overhears on Indian roads. This immediately
evokes the register of words that are exchanged between neighbours
as they run into each other in the course of their morning-walk, or
when old friends suddenly meet in the middle of a fish-market. They
exchange the usual pleasantries and part with each other amiably:
If you are coming again this side by chance,
Visit please my humble residence too.
I am living just on opposite houses backside.10
Poems, such as this one, make us pause and wonder why Ezekiel
reproduces these nuances so unsparingly, like a tape-recorder that is
left hidden in a room to capture snatches of intimate conversations,
only to replay them to the highly embarrassed speakers later on. Is
his intent as mischievous? Or perhaps this is just one of his favourite
pranks, a way of satirizing the sing-song gait of Indian English? It
seems unlikely that satire is the predominant spirit of these poems:
there is something far more sophisticated happening here.11 In Irani
Restaurant Instructions the delightful list of dos-and-donts becomes
a metonym for local colour, the tone and tenor which defines the
public life of Middle India:
364 | Somak Ghoshal
Do not write letter

Without order refreshment
Do not comb
Hair is spoiling floor
Do not make mischiefs in cabin
Our waiter is reporting
Come again
All are welcome whatever caste
If not satisfied tell us
Otherwise tell others
God is great. 12
This is the kind of poetry that would have been approved by Philip
Larkin, who was, incidentally, Ezekiels contemporary.
III
In what sense are Ezekiels Very Indian Poems in Indian English

postcolonial? Apart from the simple logic of these poems being
written in independent India, there is another, more profound level
at which these utterances become meaningful. They are nothing more,
if read literally and out of a specified historical context, than fragments
strung together with no regard for grammar or syntax. These are post-
colonial poems by the very fact of being written at all in independent
India. They are remarkably free of anxiety in the ease with which they
make their claims as poetry. Had they appeared in the thick of the
colonial struggle they would have provoked fits of anger and
embarrassment. Post-colonial poems need not be written out of
anxiety, they may be written to write out anxiety from the fact of being
post-colonial.
In this sense, these poems cross a few barriers. Instead of
remaining just satires, they become expressions of self-assertion,
though not necessarily motivated by nationalist resentment, advocating
their variety of dog-English as perfectly legitimate and serviceable in
a newly-independent India. If postcolonialism claims the right of all
people on this earth to the same material and cultural well-being13,
then Ezekiels brand of post-colonialism could perhaps gain its amnesty
by becoming a means of securing cultural well-being.

For Miss Pushpa T.S., who is departing for foreignto improve
her prospect, her cultural well-being is in going away from the very
culture that has fostered her internal sweetness. With its central
theme of journeying out, Goodbye party for Miss Pushpa T.S.
becomes one of the earliest poems about globalization. Presumably
the poem is the opening speech of the Goodbye party at the end
of it the speaker asks others to speak spoken by someone important
enough to deliver it, someone whose confidence never flags, who
gushes forth with a steady torrent of incorrect sentences without
batting an eyelid. What we dont hear, although we sorely want to,
is the summing up by Miss Pushpa. Had we been privy to that crucial
bit of thanksgiving from her for the effusive praises of her admirers,
we would have known what prospects she would have been improving
by leaving the country her English, her knowledge of the beau monde,
or perhaps her chances of making a suitable marriage?
Curiosities abound in Nissim Ezekiels Indian English poems.
There are no answers, and it is equally difficult to decide whether
this genre mocks the Indian accent or valorizes it by making it
perfectly natural, requiring no apology for using it to write poems
about India. The latter reading of Ezekiels craft tries to persuade us
that Indian English was a form of empowerment. Perhaps it was so,
or perhaps it wasnt. The speakers who wax eloquent in Indian English
in Ezekiels poetry could be part of a sadder irony, like the women
in Eliots Prufrock who come and go/Talking of Michaelangelo.14
Miss Pushpas farewell party, according to Homi Bhabha, raises
a profound question:
Are we to be blind to the sincerity and solidarity, the playfulness and privacy,
through which people build their lives and words under conditions of duress,
just because the poem got the grammar wrong?15
If we applied this question more generally to Ezekiels oeuvre then

we are left with more worries than certainties about the nature this
kind of post-colonial poetry, about the extent to which it can be read
as an instance of the Empire talking back or remaining happy to prattle
on in a foreign language that has been made comfortably indigenous.
366 | Somak Ghoshal
Notes
1. A. K. Ramanujan, Is there an Indian way of thinking? in The Collected

Essays of A.K. Ramanujan, edited by Vinay Dharwadkar (New Delhi:
Oxford, 2000), 35.
2. Leela Gandhi, Preface, Collected Poems (New Delhi: Oxford, 1999,
Second Edition, 2005), xiii.
3. Ibid., xv.
4. Ramanujan, Is there an Indian way of thinking?, 50.
5. John Thieme, Introduction, Collected Poems, 2nd Edition, (New Delhi:
Oxford, 1999), xix.
6. Nissim Ezekiel, A Time to Change, in Collected Poems, 2nd Edition,
(New Delhi: Oxford, 1999), 3.
7. Thieme, Introduction, Collected Poems, xxviii.
8. Thieme, Introduction, Collected Poems, xxx.
9. Raja Rao, Kanthapura (New Delhi: Orient Paperbacks, 1936), 5.
10. Ezekiel, The Professor, Collected Poems, 239.
11. Bruce King, Modern Indian Poetry in English (New Delhi: Oxford, 1987),
101.
12. Ezekiel, Irani Restaurant Instructions, Collected Poems, 240.
13. Robert J.C. Young, Postcolonialiam: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford:
14. T.S. Eliot, Collected Poems: 1909-1935 (London: Faber & Faber, 1936),
12.
15. Homi K. Bhabha, Queens English. (Ebonics, nonstandard vernacular or
hybridized order of speech) in Artforum International, 1997.
To say or not to say: Bildungsroman and Repressed
Narratives in Jean Rhys Wide Sargasso Sea and
Trailokyanath Mukhopadhyayas Kankaboti
Sreemoyee Banerjee
Jane Eyre, who had been an ardent expectant woman almost a bride
was a cold, solitary girl again.1 This seems to be a moment of
regression in Janes bildungsroman after she had traversed a long way
from the half-imp half-fairy2 of the red-room mirror to the robed
and veiled figure3 on the verge of holy wedlock. M. H. Abrams
defines the bildungsroman as a novel of formation or a novel of
education the subject of which is
the development of the protagonists mind and character, in the passage from
childhood through various experiences and often through a spiritual crisis
into maturity, which usually involves recognition of ones identity and role
in the world.4
While talking about growth and maturity one naturally assumes an

objective gaze that affirms or negates the same. In relation to this
gaze the individual is always an objectified third person linguistically,
a he or a she or an it. In first-person narratives this leads to a
subject object dichotomy in the narrator himself. But usually, as it
happens, say in the novels of Dickens, it is an older self of the narrator,
located historically at a different point of time that retrospectively
describes the trajectory of his growth. The earlier self is an object
of this mature narrating self that exists in history and the two need
not clash with one another. However, growth and development are
terms which must be read culturally. Biological growth happens by
way of necessity; this cultural growth is a work of civilization. Freud
describes civilization as
368 | Sreemoyee Banerjee
the whole sum of the achievements and the regulations which distinguish our
lives from those of our animal ancestors and which serve two purposes
namely to protect men against nature and to adjust their mutual relations.5
The classic bildungsroman too is about the working of civilization on

an individual. In Great Expectations, the child Pip is struck with fear
for the first time on his finding himself in the midst of the dark flat
wilderness and starts crying with the simultaneous realization that the
small bundle of shivers growing afraid of all and beginning to cry was
Pip. 6 The perception of the self brings with it a simultaneous sense
of the otherness and discontinuity of the world outside. In Freuds
terms,
The infant at the breast does not as yet distinguish his ego from the external
world as the source of the sensations flowing in upon him.He must be
very strongly impressed by the fact that some sources of excitationcan
provide him with sensations at any moment whereas other sources evade him
from time to time among them what he desires most of all, his mothers
breastIn this way there is for the first time set over against the ego an
object, in the form of something which exists outside and which is only
forced to appear by a special action.7
The perception of the otherness of the objects around Pip begins with
the sight of his parents tombs. The realization that Philip Pirrip and
his wife Georgiana and their other infant sons are dead and buried
instills deep fear in the heart of the child. For one thing, at a
metaphorical level it means a kind of exclusion from civilization, since
family is the most important unit of civilization. At the deeper
psychological level it is a fear which comes on the child when the
scream for help goes unheeded. The security of the mothers breast
is denied to Pip and he vaguely comes to feel it himself. Almost
immediately the convict appears. He is outside the reaches of
civilization. In his physical hunger he regresses to a state of bestiality
whereby he licks his lips at the sight of Pips cheeks and says what
fat cheeks you ha got.8 Moreover his relationship with nature is very
different. Exposed to bitter cold he seeks identification with some of
the baser forms of life and says I wish I were a frog or an eel.9
In doing so he in a sense rejects civilization. He wants to be a part
To say or not to say: Bildungsroman and Repressed Narratives | 369
of the natural world in a way that it ceased to be a threat. Being an

escaped convict his relation with his fellow humans is also problematized.
He is an outlaw, an other to civilized people and in course of the
novel he would also come to symbolize the psychological other of Pip
his amoral, vengeful, criminal self. It wouldnt be wrong to say that
the subject is always an object in relation to civilization. Civilization
manifests itself most commonly in terms of family, social institutions,
and importantly through existing, accepted linguistic codes. Does the
growth or maturity that civilization ensures for an individual necessarily
ensure a parallel growth of the I i.e. the ego? Could it be that while
the third person pronoun traverses its path of growth the deeply
personal first person resists growth and persists in preserving itself
in its original essence? Freud believes:
In the realm of the mind what is primitive is so commonly preserved
alongside of the transformed version which has arisen from it that it is
unnecessary to give instances as evidence.10
If such be the case, then this primitive I actually resists narrative

and in that it resists history. Dickens narrative technique prevents
it from becoming a problem. In Great Expectations, certain characters
externalize and concretize Pips I and the aspects of the realist novel
give them an autonomy whereby they stand also as entities in their
own right. Magwitch and Orlick are two such characters. Thus the
narrating subject and the self narrated do not clash and the linearity
of the bildungsroman is preserved. But in Jane Eyre we see something
different. The trajectory of Janes growth is dotted with repeated
clashes between the I and the she. Barthes says:
Language is a purely social object, the systematized set of conventions
necessary to communication indifferent to the material of the signals which
compose it; as opposed to speech cover[ing] the purely individual part of
language.11
The bildungsroman traces ones growth from a state of speech to the

state of language. The first is free and hence potentially anarchic.
The self, perceived through this anarchic parole has to be suitably
tamed to fit the langue of the existing social order. 12 Talking about
Jane, the moral and ethical ambiguity of the half imp half fairy in
the red room, so suggestive of malevolence, is thus tamed in the adult
bride in Christian white on the verge of marriage and hence destined
for a well-defined position in society. The signification involved in
language is complicated by the connotative values conferred upon the
signs by social, political, economic and cultural factors. But Jane as
the speaking subject does not identify with either of the two images
mentioned above. She as it were joins in the general critical gaze to
define, explain and judge them. The self existing in language is a third
person as much to her as it is to the world. It is interesting if we
remember how many times Bront makes her young Jane narrate and
re-narrate the story of the Reeds injustice and cruelty. She first
narrates the Red-Room incident to the apothecary. Second, she has
Helen Burns as her audience and third, both Helen Burns and Miss
Temple. And all this in the space of some eighty pages.
The young Janes need is ultimately that of experiencing herself
as having a particular identity through language. These repeated
narrations ought to represent her in a particular light in the eyes of
the others. There are specific examples of Janes falling back upon
parallels which confirm her experience of herself and others through
language. Thus John Reed is not just any spoilt bully but becomes
a true parallel of the Roman emperors, Nero and Caligula. Jane tells
us I had drawn parallels in silence which I never thought thus to
have declared aloud after she had screamed the following at John
Reed: You are like a murderer you are like a slave driver you
are like the Roman Emperor!13 Through her metaphors, she not only
gives John Reed a particular persona but also creates one for herself
that of the slave, tortured, exploited and perpetually suffering. One
sees a strange dichotomy in the young Jane. While she imagines herself
as a slave and as the poor orphan child of Bessies song, she also
resists and resents any such description of herself by others. Thus we
hear her spirited question Master! How is he [John Reed] my master?
Am I a servant?14 To a great extent, to others Jane projects the
persona of a suffering orphan child. Inwardly she resents her
exclusion. The earlier chapters depicting Janes childhood at Gateshead
and Lowood show her in a rather ambiguous and complex relationship
with language. She resists language in the face of others while

conforms to it inwardly. Her speech at this stage is impetuous,
assertive, and at times aggressive. It hence often comes in great
conflict with language in which things have already been assigned
their names and attributes and exist undisputed, unperturbed. Thus
the polarities of a good and lovable child and a wicked and deceitful
one are already established as are the expectations from one who has
lost her parents and must depend on her relatives. Jane must conform
and fit into one or the other of these established ideas in order to
be accepted. In the second phase, in her search for a new servitude
Jane seems to be more or less successfully absorbed into the language
something predetermined, communal and outside the individuals
control. This is confirmed by Janes quite matter of fact way of
admitting that Liberty, Excitement and Enjoyment were no more than
sounds to her15. This Jane is far more reconciled to her identity than
the one who asked Am I a servant? The governess Jane likewise does
not bring her speech to counter the language of classification,
definition, and generalization. At the gathering at Thornfield there is
a long discussion about governesses which Jane reports and not
without a trace of amusement.16 She surely does not identify herself
with the grotesque delineations but she does not voice any objection
at being classed with them.
But the speech and language clash occurs later when she gets
engaged with Rochester. In the carriage with Adele and Jane,
Rochester engages in a kind of pseudo baby talk with Adele, describing
the fanciful persona that he has bestowed upon Jane in his vanity.17
In the whole exchange between Rochester and Adele, Janes voice is
not heard for once. This little episode is especially significant for a
number of reasons. Firstly, in Adele, here, Bront creates a surrogate
of the child Jane. Hence she can oppose her speech to Rochesters
language of control and possession in a way that we saw the child
Jane doing. Her simple, non-sentimental, direct questions lay bare
Rochesters assumptions, and the fact that she maintains her skepticism
till the end without once being convinced by what Rochester says,
has a twofold effect. Firstly it is an indirect triumph for Jane herself.
Secondly Rochesters language is proved quite stale and ineffectual in
relation to the child Adele as well as to his would be wife Jane.

Agreeing to be a part of language not only means compromising
speech but it also makes one into an accomplice in the connotations
that language involves. In its entirety it wouldnt be wrong to look upon
the bildungsroman as what Barthes calls the photographs without any
special interest studium.18 Barthes says, It is culturally that I participate
in the figures, the faces, the gestures, the settings, the actions. He
further asserts that to recognize the studium is inevitably to encounter
the photographers intentions, to enter into harmony...19 The obvious
path of the protagonists growth or education in the bildungsroman
can be compared to the studium of the photograph it is the authors
intention in as much as he is conscious of his genre. Opposed to the
studium is the punctum the element which rises from the
sceneshoots out of it like an arrow and pierces20 Is there such
a punctum in Janes bildungsroman? The three water-colour sketches
which Jane shows Rochester can be regarded collectively as the
punctum. For one thing, here Janes self expresses itself not through
the mediation of language. The narrating subject has to take recourse
to language to describe them. But the images do not arise tangibly
before our eyes through this description. The immediate viewer
Rochester finds them elusive and unsettling in their meaning. The
matter is further complicated by Janes own assertion that the pictures
do not even remotely replicate the visions she originally had. This
emphasizes the non-representability of her self. And what eludes
representation must also elude narration and history. Barthes remarks,
The studium is ultimately always coded, the punctum is notWhat
I can name cannot really prick me. The incapacity to name is a good
symptom of disturbance.21 Rochester betrays considerable amount
of unwilling disturbance and tries in vain to call a certain mountain
in the picture Latmos, thus trying to familiarize that which probably
does not have an objective topographical counterpart.22
Scholars often attribute fairy tale patterns to the plot of Jane Eyre.
In fact the plot fits in well with the fairy tales of Cinderella and Beauty
and the Beast. These tales can be looked upon as miniature bildungsroman
involving growing up or maturing in one sense or the other. But in
the I/she clash that happens in Janes bildungsroman suggests the
lurking of the shadow of another, not so well known Hausmrchen

of the Grimm brothers The Clever Elsie. Generally speaking, fairy
tales can be considered as suitable examples for what Barthes calls
Text of Pleasure.23 He defines the text of pleasure as the text that
contents, fills, grants euphoria; the text that comes from culture and
does not break with it, is linked to a comfortable practice of
reading.24 Opposed to the text of pleasure is the text of bliss. As
Barthes remarks, the text of bliss
imposes a sense of loss, the text that discomfortsunsettles the readers
historical, cultural, psychological, assumptions, the consistency his tastes,
values, memories, brings to a crisis his relation with language.25
The historical non-specificity of the beginning of fairy-tales and the

formulaic ending with the restoration of a moral order and the
promise of eternal happiness accommodate the fairy tales in the
cultures of all times and all places. Clever Elsie however strikes a
different note altogether. The story ends with Elsie in a deep crisis,
voicing her perplexed and possibly agonized question Is it I or is
it not I? in vain. It is a crisis of selfhood as experienced by language,
through the mediation of proper names. In other words, Elsie at this
moment finds herself in an unsettling situation where she must
confirm her relation to language26, as Heidegger puts it. According
to Heidegger, To undergo an experience with somethingmeans that
this something befalls us, strikes us, comes over us, overwhelms and
transforms us.27 In the first part of Grimms tale, Elsies apprehensions
about the pick-axe and her projected future vision can be looked upon
as a text of pleasure. She uses language through its historically and
culturally assigned values and in that she affirms her selfhood of being
clever Elsie. But in her crisis, with the fishing net jingling in her
ears, that language speaks to her as language.28 Elsies experience
of language is actually the reverse of the example that Heidegger gives.
He remarks Curiously enough when we cannot find the right word
for something that concerns us, carries us away, oppresses or
encourages us that language speak[s] itself as language.29 But Elsie
at the moment of her crisis cannot identify herself with her name any
more. The text of pleasure breaks at this point when Elsie is caught
in this dilemma. The reader is jerked out of his comfortable practice

of reading. In analyzing Stefan Georges poem The Word, Heidegger
remarks, no thing is where the wordthe name is lacking. The
word alone gives being to the thing.30 The crisis of naming would
suggest a crisis of being and Elsies text of pleasure breaks off when
she is trapped in this crisis and her running away suggests the
beginning of her text of bliss which resists representation through
the conventional language of the fairy tale. The bildungsroman of Jane
is, on the surface, very much a text of pleasure. It is in the cultural
and generic tradition of the protagonists movement through the
various challenging stages of life to reach a state of self-sufficiency,
to acquire a position in the existing social order. In this whole process
certain linguistic constructs are asserted and re-affirmed. The novel,
however, at points evokes the text of bliss only to resist it. Janes vision
of and alienation from her own mirror image brings her to the brink
of the crisis of Elsie but in each case it is checked in time. The text
of pleasure takes over in its urgency to run its course.
The author of the bildungsroman has the responsibility of
negotiating potential problems in and with the protagonist so as to
enable him or her to come to rest in a well-defined and socially
unambiguous sense of selfhood. In other words, the author in the
fictive space of the novel functions as the principle of civilisation itself.
This author fits well into Foucaults description of the author as
[A] certain functional principle by which, in our culture one limits,
excludes, and chooses; in short by which one impedes the free circulation,
the free manipulation, the composition, decomposition, and recomposition
of fiction.31
This according to Foucault is contrary to the common assumption

of the author being an indefinite source of significations that fill a
work.32 Rather he is the principle of thrift in the proliferation of
meaning.33
This establishes a direct relation between the author and language.
The author of the bildungsroman gives shape to the protagonists
selfhood as it is perceived through language. Dickens, in setting a fixed
ambition for Pip, arrests this proliferation of meaning, which would
have been a threat to a single unitary self, which finally finds its place
in society. He negotiates it through his brilliant characterization,
which externalises and objectifies Pips inner instincts, desires,
anxieties and fears. We can say that he rescues Pip from the disturbing
plurality of selves that these emotions and impulses might have
engendered. These are excluded from the protagonist but included in
the space of the realist novel. The idea of the author that Foucault
holds up subtly contradicts what he earlier says in the essay about
the writing subject. Writing is a question of creating a space into
which the writing subject constantly disappears.34 But can the author
of the bildungsroman really afford to disappear if he has to constantly
check the proliferation of meaning? In a way he does in the first
person novel. But this disappearance is only the semblance of a
disappearance.
Exclusion I feel is the key concept in Foucaults description of
the authors role, especially if we consider what Edward Said says
about novels. Said remarks that
Novels .end either with the death of the hero or heroine (Julien Sorel,
Emma Bovary, Bezarov, Jude the Obscure) who by virtue of overflowing
energy does not fit into the orderly scheme of things, or with the
protagonists accession to stability (usually in the form of marriage or
confirmed identity, as is the case with novels of Austen, Dickens, Thackeray
and George Eliot). 35
So when the proliferation of meaning sets in so as not to be arrested,

the author excludes the protagonist himself. But there is another
dimension to this exclusion. The novelists writing with a European
audience in mind exclude certain perspectives and histories and
according to Said the impulses giv[ing] rise to the European novel
converge with a complex ideological configuration underlying the
tendency to imperialism.36 Thus the very act of representation
acquires a political dimension. All cultures, maintains Said, tend
to make representations of foreign cultures the better to master or
in some way control them.37 If we think of Rhys wish to write
[Bertha] a life, we would realise that with this very wish Rhys is taking
upon herself the task of representation, which in itself is an imperial
legacy. Saids remark makes one wary of the very wish to represent,
since the remark calls into question the extent to which representation
can take one close to truth. In Bronts novel, Rochester does give
Bertha a narrated self through his representation of her past and
history. In wishing to write the poor ghost Bertha a life, Rhys is also
assuming Foucaults author-function of choosing, excluding and finally
arresting the proliferation of meaning. But it would be a mistake to
assume that Rhys is unconscious of it herself. Rhys response to
Bronts novel is twofold in nature. She is on the one hand the reader
of the novel and on the other hand she is the potential writer or shall
we say re-writer. Said remarks,
We know that these non-European peoples did not accept with indifference
the authority projected on them or the general silence on which their
presence in variously attenuated forms is predicated. We must therefore read
the great canonical texts. with an effort to draw out, extend, give emphasis
and voice to what is silent or marginally present or ideologically
representedin such works.38
Rhys embodies this contrapuntal reading39 in the narrative structure

of Wide Sargasso Sea. The projection of authority and silencing of
voices is worked into the novel through Rochesters narrative but,
more importantly, through Antoinettes narrative as well. It is through
the latter that Rhys also in a way disburdens herself of the
responsibility of representing and hence controlling the proliferation
of meaning. She can truly disappear as the writing subject. But how
does Rhys achieve this? Hilda Van Neck-Yoder in her essay Colonial
Desires, Silence and Metonymy: All Things Considered in Wide
Sargasso Sea calls into question the the reliability of the narrator as
a source of information and asserts that the real story, the other
side is told with the authority and authenticity of a first person
narrator, seducing the readers into accepting her story as the plausible,
the real version of what happened, into reading the text as an accurate
representation of reality.40 Neck-Yoder gives a number of textual
evidences to confirm Antoinettes censored narrative and her narrated
self. We can here legitimately ask if this is not an imperialist legacy
of silencing and representing that we encounter in so many European
novels of the 19th century. But who is being silenced? Antoinettes

narrating-self attempts to silence her real self through choosing what
should be narrated and excluding what might threaten the narrated
self and also to trace a particular trajectory of growth and acquiring
of an identity.
Antoinette portrays herself as an English girl harassed and
victimized by the niggers and also the helpless, misunderstood wife
of an English gentleman. Thus Neck-Yoder rightly remarks
To escape her mothers fate, Antoinette is driven to speak in order to be
perceived as white legally via her fathers names, Cosway and Mason, and
socially by foregrounding experiences that would mark her as belonging
within their ranks. She stresses her loneliness, her rejection by her mother
and even more importantly the hostility to herself and her family from those
categorized as coloured.Only with the cooperation of a not-seeing listener
can Antoinette constitute the ideal self, presenting herself as she wishes to
see herself: a body that fulfils the aesthetic norms upheld by the Jamaican
elite. 41
The I of this censored narrative converges with the she that
Antoinette is to the people who call her white cockroach.
The antipathy of these people inversely affirms the narrated self
she creates. The self that she silences, or in other words the narrative
that is repressed, is externalized in the figures of Tia, Amelie and
Christophine. Actually these three women figures represent three
dimensions of Antoinettes own selfhood. Christophine symbolizes the
mystery and the strength of the woman as other she instils unease
and fear in Rochester. Rochester can deal with her only by demonizing
and excluding her. In Bronts text Bertha herself had been demonized.
Christophine intersects Bronts novel in this and can hence be
identified with her Bertha. But in Christophines narrative of
Antoinette the latter as she comes closest to the I which Antoinettes
own narrative silences. Amelie is the erotic principle of Antoinette.
Unlike Antoinette, Amelie is sexually more of an agent than an object.
Her antagonism to Antoinette lays bare the fakery of the self that the
latter tries to construct. Antoinettes hatred for her is fundamentally
a hatred for her own repressed self that Amelie embodies. Amelie
poses a constant threat of betrayal of that which Antoinette is trying
hard to repress. And what about Tia? Interestingly, Tia, unlike Amelie
and Christophine, does not figure in Rochesters narrative and she
returns only towards the end at the completion of Antoinettes dream.
Tia represents the I of Antoinette who has resisted growth and
representation and Antoinette in the end must return to her. The
dream text of Wide Sargasso Sea has two dimensions. On the one hand,
it is its most obvious point of intersection with Bronts novel. The
trajectory of the dream text has an element of fatality about it. Its
end is predetermined by Bronts novel. But for Antoinette it remains
entirely at the level of a deep subjective experience. Rhys does not
interpret it and nor does Antoinette.
At the end of her third dream she says, Now at last I know why
I was brought here and what I have to do.42 She knows indeed but
do we know? Her dream reconstructs the broken picture of Coulibri.
But is it enough to say that Antoinette returns to her childhood self
at Coulibri? Is it enough to say that her bildungsroman is subversive
in its regression to childhood? The answers evade us. Her leaving the
room with the candle can be compared to Elsies leaving the village,
not to be seen again. Thus the actual narrative breaks up and
Antoinette disappears. She abandons the world of representation
the so-called text of pleasure. Thus her own mirror image is as much
a ghost to her as it is to the others. With the end of her dream she
enters the text of bliss and the language of the bildungsroman fails
to narrate it. While Elsies text of bliss begins with the crisis of
representation Antoinettes begins with the transcending of the same.
If Rhys in writing the Wide Sargasso Sea wished to write Bertha
a life since Bronts novel had denied her the same, in case of
Kankaboti it is possible to say that a similar and yet different motive
is at work. The first chapter entitled Prachin Kotha 43 tells a story
from where Trailokyanath Mukhopadhyayas novel takes off with an
altogether different agenda.
This ur-story is fundamentally the story of incest. Kankabotis
brother brings a mango and announces that whoever happens to eat
the fruit will have to marry him. Kankaboti in her ignorance and
apparent immaturity eats the fruit and her brother becomes hell-bent
on keeping his word. Scared and ashamed, Kankaboti takes a little
boat and sails away, thus escaping her brothers reach.

So much for the story but what is really interesting is the apology
that Trailokyanath offers at the end of it. He says that it is difficult
to believe it and that it is impossible. Then he announces his project
of telling the truth telling that which is possible and credible. In
this ur-story Kankaboti is a problematic and potentially dangerous
point. Does she really commit the transgression of eating the fruit
in ignorance? To summarize, this ur-story is replete with the threat
of the proliferation of meaning which the author of Kankaboti
decides to arrest. But while doing so he ends up creating what might
be called a conflict of narratives. The first part of the novel however
is not at all about Kankaboti. It is the beginning of Khetus
bildungsroman. But Khetu, cut perfectly in the model of Gopal in
Vidhyasagars Barnaparichaya, doesnt seem to be in the need of any
moral education. He is already in possession of great discretion and
is convinced enough in his values as not to face any spiritual crisis
as the hero of the bildungsroman is normally wont to do. The crisis
is created for Khetu by others. In the entire novel, Khetus passivity
and ineffectuality persist till the end and his crisis is resolved through
a providential moral transformation of others and not through his own
efforts in any way. In its entirety, Khetus is an unconvincing and failed
bildungsroman.
Trailokyanath locates Kankabotis narrative in her dream and
garbs it with the element of absurdity. But the dream text opens out
at places to the reader where it seems the author loses his control
over the proliferation of meaning. The dream begins with Kankaboti
setting out for the riverside to quench her burning thirst. By and by
she gets up on a boat to escape her family calling her back.44 This
is where the ur-narrative had broken off. The dream text at its outset
is a continuation of the ur-narrative in more than one sense. It begins
with Kankabotis burning thirst and the physical burning of fever. It
is as if she comes to being in very physical terms and this at the same
time means her entering into language. She becomes a speaking
subject as soon her body asserts itself. In other words, in the dream-
state she wakes up to being and hence to speech. And this being is
anarchic it rejects family, it rejects norms, it just pursues its own
goal driven by the immediate demands of the body. And this

establishes a link between this Kankaboti and her narrated self in the
ur-narrative. The connection is provided by the body. In the ur-
narrative Kankaboti succumbs Eve-like to her physical appetite in
consuming the forbidden fruit. She leaves her home and family in
a way to prevent further transgression of the body. From the ur-
narrative to the dream text the body asserts itself as the locus of desire
and transgression. The dream, however, is charged with conflict
between the so called author-function which relegates Kankaboti to
passivity even in her dream and between the readers whose
interpretation can grant Kankaboti her autonomy. We can understand
Kankabotis assertion of her autonomy through the character of
Nakeshwari the female ghost. In regarding Kankaboti and Nakeshwari
as the two polarities of womanhood, the reader enjoys the security
of the text of pleasure. But it is also possible to see them as two sides
of the same coin. Such a reading takes us into the realm of bliss.
Nakeshwari has a history which literalizes Kankabotis own history.
As a beautiful young girl she had been sacrificed by a dissipate king
as part of the ritual of protecting their wealth even after their death.
She resurrects after her death as the hideous demon.45 Kankaboti had
been the victim of the male heads of her family as also the society
and was going to be sacrificed to the institution of marriage.
Nakeshwaris life has the same predestined fatality as Kankabotis in
that she is to marry a consumptive ghost just as Kankaboti was
destined to marry the doddering old Janardan Chowdhury. Nakeshawri
in her relentless desire to devour Khetu in a way externalizes
Kankabotis own physical desire and takes the motif of appetite in
the ur-narrative further. The apparent moral polarity between these
two women fades into ambiguity when Kankaboti goes to the moon
to cut a bit of the moons roots and the moon-wife feels just as
threatened by her as she herself had been by Nakeshwari.
In the dream text the men are punitive, weak, and often
ridiculously pathetic. They are often terrorized if not controlled by
women. The guard of the sky, the moon-father, Kharbur the sorcerer,
the mosquito-father, the anglicized frog all confirm this fact. The
authorial voice takes over again in the last phase of her dream, in
the chapter entitled Sati. Through the painstaking realism of this

chapter the author in a way regains control and checks the
proliferation of meaning that the beginning of Kankabotis dream had
threatened. The burning thirst at the outset of her dream is literalized
in the burning of the funeral fire in which Kankaboti immolates
herself. By this time the author has successfully negotiated the problem
of the womans body and hence of her desires. As Sati, Kankaboti
settles in a peaceful slumber.46 Real fire does not hurt her although
the burning of fever had been so unbearable. The dream traces the
bildungsroman of a woman in relation to her body. It traces her growth
from a state of untamed, anarchic desire to a state where desire is
negated through the negation of the body. This woman is caught in
the fetters of representation; she is the perpetual she, the subject
written by the male author. This author is apparently pretty much in
the league of the fathers at home who commoditize the female body
for their own corrupt ends. At the level of reality Kankabotis I is
powerless to fight this constructed she. It is the dream which offers
the arena of the battle in the sense that here the reader can take things
to a great extent out of the authors hands. But her I in the dream
is externalized in the figure of Nakeshwari and the way Antoinette
silences her I, Kankabotis I gets demonized into the she of the
ghost. Writing about the authors of the Malleus Maleficarum,47
Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh remark:
The Malleus is militantly indeed psychopathically misogynistic. Intrepid
though they might be in contending with invisible powers, the authors of
the text were terrified of women to a degree verging on dementia.48
We know that such a terror of the female has been fundamentally at

work in the representation of women as demons or witches. The
author of Kankaboti works hand in glove with the religious fathers
at home and the white fathers across the sea in this demonization
of the beautiful nine year old girl into the lustful, malevolent
Nakeshwari. In the dream text when Kankaboti appears before Khetu
at the burning ghat she is initially taken for a ghost and Khetu invests
her immediately with the motive of terrifying him. Through this the
reader can indeed make subtle connections between Kankaboti and
Nakeshwari. In the dream it is ultimately not possible to keep them

apart in two polarized water-tight compartments. Their respective
identities acquire a fluidity by way of which one can come to substitute
the other. Kankaboti remembers an old fable just prior to burning
Khetus protective amulet. It is the fable of Tilaksundari and
Bhushkumro.49 The prince in this fable showers his love on
Bhushkumro, the wicked sister, disguised as Tilaksundari. It is
Tilaksundari, metamorphosed into a bird, who gets the message across
to the prince that his bride is not Tilaksundari as he thinks. The prince
on his own cannot tell the two apart. Thus womanhood cannot be
defined, classified and judged by patriarchy it always threatens with
its ambiguity and its double-edgedness. Thus Kankaboti burns the
amulet as the well-meaning, concerned, dedicated wife but in doing
that she unconsciously becomes an accomplice of Nakeshwari, her
own demonized other and makes Khetu vulnerable to her. The amulet
is a patriarchal inheritance. The two male ghosts had bequeathed it
upon Khetu as a protection against Nakeshwari.
Interestingly these are the ghosts of the king who had sacrificed
the young girl to protect their wealth. Nakeshwari, though duty bound
to them, is ultimately outside their control. She takes her observance
of duty to such an extreme that even her so called masters cannot
dissuade her from it in any way. The parallel to it is the woman who
takes her duty to her husband to the extreme of immolating herself
on his funeral pyre. The latter renders the efforts of the British
imperial fathers at abolishing Sati fruitless. It also frustrates the
magnanimity of the enlightened fathers at home who protest against
this social evil. It is a paradoxical situation where the woman uses
her obedience of patriarchal norms as a means to oppose certain
manifestations of patriarchy. The speaking subject in the dream text
is the she, the dedicated woman, very much in the tradition of the
mythical dedicated wife Behula.50 The novel of formation of this she
unites the male principles of bravery, adventurousness and enterprise
with the female principles of love, subjugation and devotedness.
Antoinettes dream ends with enabling her to ultimately transcend
representation and hence transcend the text of pleasure but Kankabotis
dream ends by claiming her back for patriarchal representation. In
other words, it draws her back into the silence and passivity of the
text of pleasure that the author writes. In reading Kankaboti and
Nakeshwari apart we succumb to the trap of this text of pleasure.
This is what the author intends.
Kankabotis I resides actually in Nakeshwari and the dream
does not exorcize the ghost. Later, the author tells us, while
recuperating from her fever, Kankaboti narrates her dream-story to
many people. But this narrative she must censor in her own way just
as the author wished to censor her ur-narrative. And nobody knows
what she would not say and why.
Notes
1. Charlotte Bront, Jane Eyre (New York: Bantam, 1981), 319

2. Ibid. p. 9
3. Ibid. p. 309
4. M.H. Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Term (India: Thomson Heinle, 1999),
193
5. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontent, translated by Joan Rivier
(New Delhi: Shrijees Book International, 2003), 290
6. Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (New York: Tor Classic, 1998), 2
7. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents translated by Joan Rivier
(New Delhi: Shrijees Book International, 2003), 303
8. Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (New York: Tor Classic, 1998), 3
9. Ibid., 5
10. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents translated by Joan Rivier
(New Delhi: Shrijees Book International, 2003) Please insert the page
number.
11. Roland Barthes, Elements of Semiology, translated by Annette Lavers and
Colin Smith (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975) Please insert the page
number.
12. langue (language)and parole(speech) are the two aspects of language as
formulated by Ferdinand Saussure. Barthes in his Elements of Semiology
postulates that there exists a general category language/speech, which
embraces all the systems of signs. In this paper I have often used these
terms in the Barthian sense.
14. Ibid., 6
15. Ibid., 88
16. Ibid., 188
17. Ibid., 286-288
18. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (London: Vintage, 1993).
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid.
21. Ibid.
23. Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, translated by Richard Miller,
(New York: Hill and Wang, 1975), 14.
24. Ibid.
25. Ibid.
26. Martin Heidegger, On the Way to Language, translated by Peter D. Hertz,
(New York: Harper Collins, 1971), 58.
27. Ibid., 57
28. Ibid., 59
29. Ibid.
30. Ibid., 62
31. Michel Foucault, What is an Author?, in Aesthetics, Method and
Epistemology, edited by James Faubion ( London: Penguin, 2000), 221.
32. Ibid.
33. Ibid.
34. Ibid., 208
35. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage, 1994), 84.
36. Ibid.
37. Ibid., 120
38. Ibid., 78
39. Ibid.
40. Hilda Van Neck-Yoder, Colonial Desires, Silence and Metonymy: All
Things Considered in Wide Sargasso Sea, in Texas Studies in Literature and
Language, Vol. 40, 12 January 2008 <www.utexas.edu/utpress/journals/
jatsll.html>.
42. Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (London: Penguin, 1966), 152.
43. Trailokyanath Mukhopadhyaya, Kankaboti (Kolkata: Mitra & Ghosh,
2002), 1.
44. Ibid., 43
45. Ibid., 79-80
46. Ibid., 126
47. Malleus Maleficarum or Hammer of Witches appeared around 1486 and

was authored jointly by Heinrich Kramer and Johann Sprenger. It is
supposed to adumbrate the manifestations of witchcraft and it does so
in legal, lurid and pornographic details Michael Baigent and Richard
Leigh, The Inquisition.
48. Michael Baigent & Leigh Richard, The Inquisition (London: Penguin,
2000), 110-111.
49. Mukhopadhyaya Kankaboti, 69.
50. Manashamangal, a Bengali epical narrative written between the thirteenth
and eighteenth centuries, celebrates the power of the snake-goddess
Manasha, banking heavily upon fertility symbols. The poem tells the story
of Behula and Lakhindar. Chaand Saudagar, Lakhindars father, relentlessly
defies Manasha and refuses to worship her. Infuriated, Mansaha sends a
venomous serpent to kill Lakhindar on his wedding night. Chaand,
apprehending Manashas ploy, had constructed an iron-house for the
wedding night. But that proved to be useless. Behula, with her husbands
dead body, sails in a boat to heaven, all alone. There, she dances and sings
in front of the gods, begging for her husbands life. The gods are appeased
and Lakhindar gets back his life. Behula comes back to earth and
popularizes the supremacy of Manasha.
Politics of Nation and Community in
Selected Partition Narratives
Suranjana Choudhury
In most of the Partition narratives the representation of dynamics of

nation and community has been of major importance. In the arena
of postcolonial debate nation has been conceived of as a ground of
debate and dispute, a site for the competing imaginings of different
ideological and political interests. The question of uniformity of
nation-ness and the fragmentation of a unified community in the phase
of partition and further shaping of a fuzzy, malleable community would
be investigated in this paper. The nation is often looked upon as an
abstraction that nationalists and elites in general have constructed to
serve their ends. It is necessary to examine if nation could be viewed
as a construct or a product of a real historical process. During the
Partition, the religious allegiances of the people played the central role
in the making of nation states of India and Pakistan. The two texts
Atin Bandopadhyays Neelkontho Paakhir Khonje and Bapsi Sidhwas
Ice-Candy-Man, which I would take up to validate my argument
incorporate the complex processes of formation of nation and
reappropriation of community during the Partition.
The representation of Indias variegated and complex social
structure in the narratives of Bandopadhyay and Sidhwa give us an
insight into the interplay between religious assertion and politics of
nation formation. Gyanendra Pandey and Peter Geschiere in the
Forging of Nationhood comments: The story of the struggle to realize
nationhood and sovereign statehood has also been a story of how to
deprive certain groups and peoples of citizen.1
Religion remained the social bond that defined the characteristics
of the nations during Partition. The process of rediscovery and
realization of difference conditioned by religion is one of the primary
Politics of Nation and Community in Selected Partition Narratives | 387
concerns of Atin Bandopadhyay in Neelkontho Paakhir Khonje. Atin

Bandopadhyays focus is on the small village of erstwhile East Bengal.
He shows how an economically deprived village community gets
infected by communal tension and ultimately breaks down into pieces.
Ernest Renan has defined nation as a soul, spiritual principle2, the
essence of nation is a psychological bond, which joins the people into
one community. The village community of Neelkontho Paakhir Khonje
is not racial or tribal in its nature but it is historically constituted
community of the people. Bandopadhyay draws our attention to the
fact that the seeds of the idea of Partition can said to have been laid
within the economic and social differences that existed between
Hindus and Muslims. In an interview to Urvashi Butalia, Bir Bahadur
Singh had said :
...if a mussalman was coming along the road and we shook hands with them
and we had say a box of food or something in our hand that would then
become soiled and we would not eat it, if we are holding a dog in one hand
and food in the other there is nothing wrong with that food.3
Atin bandopadhyay tries to convey through his novel that the state
of harmony in pre-partition phase was built on concrete, material
differences. Jabbar, a character in the story speaks about this
difference: Hindu ra amago dekhle sap phalay, amrao sap phalamu
(whenever Hindus come across us they spit at us, we would do the
same to them).4 Sunil Gangopadhyay too expresses a similar view
point in Purba-Pashchim, when Pratap Majumdar visits his friend
Mamuns village he is not allowed to stay with the family because in
the past Mamuns father was ill treated by a Hindu family owing to
his own religion. In Neelkontha Paakhir Khonje the process of
disintegration and division is slow in the village because it is divorced
from the whirlpool of political activities occurring in towns and cities.
Partha Chatterjee while discussing the manifold uses of jati in the
essay Communities and the Nation5 posits before us many senses
in which the word jati can be used like jati as origin, jati as classes
of living species, jati as varna (colour), jati as lineage, jati as
collectivities bound by loyalty to a state or organized around the
natural and cultural characteristics of a country or province. In the
388 | Suranjana Choudhury
pre-partition phase the villagers proclaim a bond of kinship, a natural

bond that unite all who share the same origin and therefore must share
the same destiny. The social hierarchy which he depicts is topped by
the Thakur family whereas most of the other villagers belong to the
economically downtrodden group. However the differences and
particularities which existed within each religious group got undermined
under the singular campaign of demand for a separate homeland. An
invisible barrier grows between friends like Malati and Samu or Shona
and Fatima on the basis of their religious faith. Manik Bandopadhyay
in the short story Chhele Manushi traces a similar pattern of mutual
hatred and distrust. Badruddin Umar while speaking about the
resentment among the Muslims says:
What was quite amazing during the struggle for independence in the 1940s
was that the Muslims of the clearly Hindu majority areas like the United
provinces, Bihar, Assam and the southern provinces joined the ranks of the
Muslim league in large numbers in demanding Pakistan which according to
Lahore resolution did not itself include the areas.6
The growing separatism in Indian national politics is manifested

through the gradual fragmentation of this village community. The
creation of Pakistan as a homeland for Indian Muslims is a
demonstration of how the vocabulary of politics and social discourse
of the subcontinent is rooted in religion. The community of fate7
as stated by Anthony Smith formed by the merging of common
customs, rituals, language, art and liturgies come under the threat of
religious separatism in the story. The communitarian harmony totally
collapses at the moment of Partition. Gyanendra Pandey speaks about
this disruption of community: The breakdown of community, as I
have termed it brings with it a breakdown of all communication and
explanation.8 But it really becomes difficult for the villagers to grapple
with the reality of Partition when it actually happens. The narrative
of Atin Bandopadhyay expresses a sense of disbelief that something
like the Partition could have happened at all, that people could be
cut off so cruelly and suddenly from their roots. This sense of disbelief
and non-acceptance of reality is pervasive in most of the narratives
on Partition. A similar theme runs in another major fiction on
Partition, Khushwant Singhs Train to Pakistan. The villagers of Mano

Majra get awestruck by the sudden roll of events which completely
disintegrate their sense of existence. The villagers like Meet singh or
Imam Baqsh find it very difficult to evict themselves from communitarian
harmony which had grown and strengthened with years. The growing
rift and anger amongst Hindus and Muslims pave the way for the
division of the country. Through the expressed anguish of Isham
Shekh, the unfailing servant of Thakur family the trauma of
displacement can be inferred. The euphoria connecting independence
celebration rises high in East Pakistan because, for people like Akalu,
Samu it is also the birth of a new nation. However the arrival of Jinnah
brings another shocking news to them that Urdu would be imposed
upon the Bangladeshis as the national language. Many sensible
politicians had apprehended the danger of geographical division on
the basis of religious affiliation. Mr. Sarat Chandra Bose had stated
earlier:
To my mind a division of provinces on the religious basis is no solution of
the communal problem. Even if the provinces were to be divided Hindus
and Muslims will have to still side by side in them and the risk of communal
conflicts will remain.9
The attempt to bring together the eastern and western wings of

Pakistan under the unified idea of nation turns out to be failed
enterprise. The major question which is being raised in the course
of the novel is whether religious and linguistic nationalism can be
contained in a satisfying nationalist resolution. It becomes obvious
that Islam can remain as a matter of personal faith, as a part of peoples
culture, but not as determining element of nations political identity.
Ernest Renan in his discussion about the formation of nation had said
that the modern nation is a historical result brought about by a series
of convergent factors and this convergence breaks very often. Atin
Bandopadhyay engages himself with problem of assertion of a new
national identity in Neelkontho Paakhir Khonje. East Pakistan is
reduced to a linguistic minority in the new framework of nation. Atin
Bandopadhyay then focuses his attention to the revolutionary activities
of the youth in East Bengal. The tendency to break away from
linguistic imposition proves that the thesis of nation with religion

being the defining factor is inadequate. Ian Talbott in Pakistan: A
Modern History has spoken of this problem: Language and religion
rather than providing a panacea for unity in a plural society have
opened up pandoras box of conflicting identities.10 Neelkontho
Paakhir Khonje touches upon this vital issue by recording the evolving
consciousness of individuals like Samu and Fatima as they internalize
the terrible external reality of Partition. The myopic vision of the
politicians has succeeded in dividing the country but the growing
resentment within the same national territory has shown the failure
of such a division. The fragmented psyche of the village community
posits before us the vital question if collectivity has a fixed
determinate form or there are many such collectivities to which an
individual might belong and how these could be arranged Muslim
->Bengali or Bengali->Indian or Hindu->Bengali or Bengali->Pakistani.
There is a constant slide from one sense of community to another.
Bandopadhyays primary focus remains on the unstable nature of a
collective bond defined by different factors at various phases of
history.
Homi K. Bhabha in Nation and Narration speaks about the
implication of conceptual indeterminacy of nation on the discourses
and narratives that signify a sense of nation-ness. Bapsi Sidhwa too
focuses on this aspect in Ice-Candy-Man. The setting of the novel is
confined to a few families residing in the affluent fringes of Lahore.
The story is narrated by Lenny, the Parsee child. The consciousness
which articulates the ongoing roll of events does not inhabit the centre
stage of activities. The equation of nation and community is triangular
in nature and it worked out between Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs in
the western part of the country. A Parsee is not really included in the
entire frenzy of territorial division, migration and dislocation.
However through her narrative Sidhwa brings into highlight the
shifting notion of nation and the subsequent moulding of community
during the time of Partition. My reading of the novel is premised on
the assumption that idea of nation and community is never conclusively
fixed and it constantly undergoes the process of constitution and
reconstitution. The novel describes the horrors of Partition very well,
the changing loyalties of the circle of friends who ultimately transform

into fiend bring forth the true horror of Partition. Historically we find
that the formation of nation states of India and Pakistan at a specific
point of time was made possible only at the cost of fragmentation
of several ethnic groups at one level. At the time of partition various
cohesive and composite units of population sharing a sense of
solidarity and unity on the basis of common territory and collective
past came under the divisive forces of religion. The alliance formation
is not abrupt, it is rather conditioned by past occurrences of
alignment. The trend of unity between the Hindus and Sikhs against
the Muslims is suggested in the novel. Harnik Deol too says in this
regard: Despite the drawing of communal boundaries between the
Sikhs and Hindus over several decades the bonds of between the Sikhs
and a large body of Punjabi Hindus were strong.11 In the early section
of the novel there exists mutual harmony between Hindus, Muslims
and Sikhs and they are free from the clutches of communal hatred.
Sidhwa outlines the general mindset of the people towards Hindustan-
Pakistan issue. Lennys visit to Rannas village gives such a hint of unity
and peaceful coexistence: To us villagers what does it matter if a
peasant is a Hindu or a Muslim or a Sikh?12 But soon tension mounts
and there is a clear cut division among the people on the basis of
religious affiliation. The sense of attachment to each other becomes
fragile. Sidhwa displays that the process of construction and
reconstruction of nation is mainly accomplished by people in power:
Gandhi, Jinnah, Nehru, Iqbal, Tara Singh, Mountbatten are names I hear.
And I become aware of religious differences. It is sudden. One day everybody
is themselves and the next, they are Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Christian.13
Chaman Nahal in Azadi too speaks about intense antipathy towards

each other:
It was not a question of his personal views, the League or Jinnah sahib knew
better. They said view your Hindu neighbours with suspicion and he did that.
They said there should be a Pakistan and he shouted for Pakistan14
The act of drawing and redrawing maps poses a serious threat to an

individuals existence, his fate is inexplicably linked with the process
of geographical division. Masseur speaks about it: If the Punjab is

divided, Lahore is bound to go to Pakistan. There is a Muslim
majority here...15 The problematics associated with geographical
rearrangement gets manifested through the anxiety about belonging
and identity experienced by its victims. The logic of setting national
boundaries poses a threat to the existence of millions of people of
the subcontinent: Within three months seven million Muslims and
five million Hindus and Sikhs are uprooted in the largest and most
terrible exchange of population known to history.16 No logic, no
reason can avert the eruption of massive violence during Partition.
It becomes a case of offensive assertion of us against them and it
is evident in most of the Partition narratives. The grim story of Ranna
unleashes the mindless politics of victimization and the total breakdown
of social disorder.
Speaking about the politics of victimization in the process of
reorganization of nation and community, Sidhwa brings forth the
aspect of ideological crosscurrents of the time. Her narration signals
that manifestation of violence occurs on the basis of pre-existing
differences and hostilities between people. The gradual dissolution is
recorded in the novel. It needs to be mentioned in this context that
the complex trajectory of subjugated women in relation to the violence
erupted during Partition is one most of the most important thematic
concerns of the novel. However an insight into this aspect would
require an altogether different focus and perspective.
Notes
1. Gyanendra Pandey and Peter Geschiere edited by The Forging of

Nationhood (New Delhi: Manohar, 2002), 11.
2. Ernest Renan, What is a nation? in Nation and Narration, edited by
Homi K. Bhabha (London: Routledge, 1990).
3. Urvashi Butalia, The Other Side of Silence:Voices from the Partition of India
(New Delhi: Penguin,1998), 40.
4. Atin Bandopadhyay, Neelkontho Paakhir Khonje (Kolkata: Karuna Prakashani,
1990), 19. (all translations are mine).
5. Partha Chatterjee, Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial
Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 222.
6. Badruddin Umar, The Emergence of Bangladesh, Class Struggles in East

Pakistan (1947-1958) (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2004)
7. Anthony D.Smith, The Origins of Nations in Nations and Identities,
edited by Vincent P. Pecora (Massachusetts: Blackwell, 2001), 339.
8. Gyanendra Pandey, Partition and the Politics of History in The
Nation,The State and Indian Identity, edited by Madhusree Datta, Flavia
Agnes, Neera Adarkar (Kolkata: Samya, 1996), 11.
9. The Nation, Calcutta, Sunday, March 19, 1950, 4.
10. Ian Talbott, Pakistan: A Modern History (New Delhi: Oxford University
Press, 1998)
11. Harnik Deol, Religion and Nationalism in India: The Case of the Punjab
(London: Routledge, 2000), 82.
12. Bapsi Sidhwa, Ice-Candy-Man (New Delhi: Penguin, 1989), 56.
13. Ibid., 93.
14. Chaman Nahal, Azadi (New Delhi: Penguin, 2001), 42.
15. Bapsi Sidhwa, Ice-Candy-Man (New Delhi: Penguin, 1989), 128.
16. Ibid., 159.
Of New Centers and Old Margins:
The Limits of the Postcolonial
Bill Ashcroft in conversation with Debasish Lahiri
Lahiri: Do you think that Postcolonialism is really a new liberatory

discursive emanation or is it something out of the wake of
Eurocentrism that has not abated as yet? Is postcolonialism the
academic antithesis to the revolutionary movements and successes in
the 1960s, like in Algeria? Is it possible to see its emergence as a
metropolitan excursion into language trying to bury the ghosts of anti-
imperial anxieties?
Ashcroft: Post-colonial theory is a way of reading the liberatory actions
of colonized and formerly colonized writers. It is important to realize
that post-colonial theory is not the theory of everything but is
concerned with the ways in which writers have engaged the forces
of colonialism and imperialism by appropriating the imperial language
and using it in projects of cultural empowerment. It is, first and
foremost, a literary phenomenon, but post-colonial theory has
developed the critical tools to address the wider sphere of relations
between local and global in the contemporary globalized world. In this
respect it branches out from literary production to cultural production
of various kinds. When I say it engages imperial dominance, I mean
that it engages this in various ways, not merely in directly oppositional
and antithetical ways. My view is that the most effective and far
reaching form of resistance mounted by post-colonial cultural producers
is the kind of transformation of dominant discourses best demonstrated
by post-colonial writers.
This is why some of us continue, perhaps forlornly, to use the
hyphenated spelling of the term. We do it to insist on the fact that
post-colonialism is not a movement, (although it is liberatory) it is
The Limits of the Postcolonial | 395
not a Master Discourse or a Theory of Everything. Nor is it a

homogenizing approach to all cultural activity. It is a way of reading
the cultural production of colonized and formerly colonized people.
If it has developed the tools to analyze contemporary global realities
it does so with an eye to the fact that it is grounded in the historical
realities of imperialism and colonialism. Many people want post-
colonial theory to include everything, even economics, or at least they
criticize it for not including those things. If there is a post-colonial
reading of social phenomena then it is always ready to be performed,
but let us not expect it to be a theory that has something to say about
everything in the world.
Lahiri: In your Empire Writes Back you commented on how a major
feature of postcolonial literatures was a concern with place and
displacement. In fact you located the postcolonial crisis of identity
at this site to the extent that it became the pressing concern of the
postcolonial subject to develop or recover an effective identifying
relationship between self and place. In specific relation to postcolonial
studies how far do you think this concept of nomad thought, as
outlined by Deleuze and Guattari, an arrangement of thought that
escapes empire, conquers empire, and ceaselessly invents administrative
apparatuses for empire, would be effective in explaining the unhinging
of space in these days of global cultural and capital transfusion?
Ashcroft: Place is critical to all subjects because it is the context in
which notions of identity come into being. Place doesnt exist unless
it is first imagined and in this respect is always a dynamic relation
between the material and the discursive. The impact of a colonial
language on people, whether they remain in the place of their birth,
or are displaced in one way or another, radically complicates and
intensifies the production of place. A colonial language doesnt
necessarily displace people from a sense of location, but it provides
a dissonance which may, like most other forms of imperial intervention,
appear to disempower colonial peoples, yet gives them the means with
which they may transform, communicate and disseminate their
experience of place.
With regard to nomadism I would say that this begins within the
396 | Bill Ashcroft in coversation with Debashish Lahiri
nation. It is not merely a transnational process in the sense that it

occurs once national boundaries are crossed. But beginning within
national boundaries, this phenomenon what I would call the
transnation demonstrates something very interesting about the
production of place. It shows that notions of place are not static, and
the development of intense relations with place (such as the relationship
with mother India) may occur as a function of movement rather than
stasis. Individuals have always shown that they can move across formal
boundaries with impunity, and constructions such as the nation may
be taken up and dropped at will as loci of personal identification. In
this respect individual subjects, who constitute what has come to be
referred to as the local demonstrate considerable agency in their
relation to formal constructions of social being. This concurs with
Stuart Halls notion of subject position but it reminds us of the agency
involved in the performance of identity.
Lahiri: When writers in the genre of postcolonial theory perform the
coupling of the postcolonial with theory, then one of the key
epistemological challenges is the terms on which such a coupling can
be sustained. And when they set out to speak of the imperialist
dynamic driving the representational modes of the postcolonial world,
then the central critical task is to confront the imperialist moment
at the centre of their own discourses. Is the postcolonial theorist then
to define him/her-self in the negative? Does he/she have a location
or is he/she merely a trace of the long-ago disseminated energy of
insouciant response to the constricting economies of hegemonic
rhetoric?
Ashcroft: Well, that is a mouthful! Lets think about some practical
examples of the imperialist moment at the centre of their discourses.
The world is defined in spatial and temporal terms by the Eurocentric
discourses of space and time the mechanical clock, the Gregorian
calendar and the Mercator projection atlas. There are many other ways
in which we might categorize space and time but the entire world
operates within these discourses without any impediment to the
production of local cultural meaning. You could say the world
continues to identify itself within imperialist discourses, but various
parts of that world do so, and continue to interpolate dominant

discourses, while still managing projects of liberation from imperial
domination. You could extend this dynamic to the operation of global
realities today and post-colonial analysis demonstrates that local
agency is still possible within the context of global technologies and
global discourses.
This of course includes the post-colonial theorist or critic. Such
a person is not just a trace but an actor, an agent, capable of inserting
a particular vision of the liberatory into the dominant milieu.
Lahiri: Could you elaborate upon your concept of Postcolonial
Interpolation that you outlined in your seminal essay Legitimate
Postcolonial Knowledge? How would you connect it with Althussers
proposition of the interpellation of the subject, the summoning or
calling into being of the subject by ideology?
Ashcroft: Interpolation is a word I use specifically to counter the
implication in Althussers notion of ideology that the subject is passive.
Interpolation describes the access such interpellated subjects have to
a counter-discursive agency. This strategy involves the capacity to
interpose, to intervene, to interject a wide range of counter discursive
tactics into the dominant discourse without asserting a unified anti-
imperial intention, or a separate oppositional purity. Post-colonial
subjects, in their ordinary dialogic engagement with the world, are
not passive cyphers of discursive practices. When we view the ways
in which a dominant discourse may operate to keep oppositional
discourses located, defined and marginal, we see the strategic
importance of a form of intervention which operates within the
dominant system but refuses to leave it intact. Fundamentally the
process of insertion, interruption, interjection, which is suggested by
the act of interpolation, is the initial (and essential) movement in the
process of post-colonial transformation.
Lahiri: In your book Postcolonial Transformation you argue that
postcolonialism and postmodernism are both discursive elaborations
of postmodernity, which is itself not the overcoming of modernity,
but modernity coming to understand its own contradictions and

uncertainties. Is Postcolonialism then a merely self-reflexive exercise
or the ceaseless pursuit of the illusory refractions of radical political
desires in language? Will Postcolonialism survive as the unconscious
of the academy? Is it a viable survival strategy?
Ashcroft: One of the things we must be clear about is that post-
colonialism is not postmodernism with politics. While both
postmodernism and post-colonial theory emerge as discursive
elaborations of modernity, post-colonial analysis is concerned with
some very material historical outcomes of modernity, namely the fact
that the Enlightenment, with its view of human centrality and human
equality is marked by the deep contradictions of imperialism and
slavery. In this sense I am talking about Modernity with a capital M,
the period, the discourses and the consequences of Europes dominance
of the world. Post-colonial theory is not a political movement but a
way of reading the responses to the contradictions of modernity by
colonized and formerly colonized people colonization being itself
a consequence of Modernity. It provides a language by which those
formerly colonized people, what is sometimes egregiously called the
Third World, may create a world audience.
Lahiri: What do you consider the dialectical relationship between local
histories and global designs? Is it not true that in a sense the questions
posed by local histories have acquired new relevance given the
globalization of culture? How would you like to react in this
connection to the criticism of your own work as being more universal
and encompassing in its readings of cultural and political reality?
Ashcroft: Yes, local histories have acquired a new relevance, as have
local cultures and cultural production, because globalization constantly
works toward the homogenizing of culture and the ironing out of the
wrinkles of the local. But local histories are not somehow sequestered
from the global. Local histories have always had to fight for a place
in History since the histories of colonized people are habitually
regarded as myth. But by appropriating global languages such as
English such histories may interpolate global discourses. The
homogenizing effect is modified and transformed by the interpolation

of the local.
Regarding my own work, I think a lot of people become confused
about the fact that colonized cultures of very different material realities
and historical trajectories, cultures as different, say, as Caribbean and
settler colonial, may share similar strategies in their engagement with
imperial culture. This doesnt make them the same, it makes them
strategic bedfellows. Language is the demonstration of this par
excellence and I see language and literary production as the model of
the broad engagement between colonizing and colonized cultures. This
in turn becomes a model for the engagement between the local and
the global.
Lahiri: Colonialism had begun as a consensual anxiety towards the
propagation and discovery of sameness across diverse geographical
space, how then can we explain the imperial turn towards difference
and its incorporation into the idea of differential empires, empires
with unique chronotopic potentialities and thus unrelated to any other
such emanation in history?
Ashcroft: I dont think there is any imperial turn towards difference.
Difference is always threatening because it is always, or nearly always,
held to imply a criticism. Sadly academic theorists are not immune
to this response. It is the fear of difference that lies at the heart of
the civilizing mission, but it is the fear of difference that underlies
much in the academic world, including the fear of post-colonial theory.
Lahiri: The impact of colonial experiences in Africa on French theory
is pervasive and its influence can be discerned in such diverse theorists
as Louis Althusser, Helene Cixous and Jacques Derrida, Michel
Foucault amongst others. However, as Robert Young has pointed out,
if so-called poststructuralism is the product of a single historical
moment, then that moment is probably not May 1968 but rather the
Algerian War of Independence. Moreover, the French avant-garde has,
in turn, powerfully influenced the operation and deployment of
postcolonial theory across disciplinary boundaries to the extent that
it has been used to decipher and comment upon issues of Anglophone
colonialism. Do you think that this critical deployment of theories

emanating from France in the 1960s in matters Anglophone is a
tenable discursive model? What according to you are the major
schisms between French and British colonialism and can they be
studied with the aid of a single theoretical model?
Ashcroft: This is an extremely interesting phenomenon and deserves
some pondering. Its fascinating that the most important theoretical
elaboration of French poststructuralism occurs in the work of theorists
whose early experience or later political life are informed, inflected
by or implicated in the disruptions of French colonialism. The most
intriguing question in contemporary theory remains: Why are so many
French poststructuralist thinkers either from or connected to Algeria?
Equally interesting, perhaps, is the question: Why has this origin
been so systematically suppressed in discussions of French theory?
With the exception of Hlene Cixous, almost all Algerian theorists
appear to have the same attitude to their birthplace as the Duke of
Wellington had to his Irish origins when he said: Had I been born
in a stable, Sir, would that make me a horse? This silence is at least
as interesting as the great number of Algerians who are accepted as
French theorists.
The point about Robert Youngs comment is perhaps not so much
the significance of the war itself as the fact that its major proponents
were Algerian. The impact of colonial-Africa on French theory is
fascinating. Jacques Derrida, Jean-Franois Lyotard and Hlen
Cixous were born in Algeria as was Althusser, I believe, and Foucault,
Bourdieu and Michel Lieris all had formative experiences in Northern
Africa.Yet their African colonial experience and their Algerian identity
and heritage had, until very recently (with the exception of Cixous),
had been completely hidden from view.
My view is that this is no accident. Derridas, Lyotards and
Cixouss intellectual heritage, and the questions which have become
so much a part of their oeuvre otherness, difference, irony, mimicry,
parody, the disruption of modernity and the deconstruction of the
grand narratives of the Enlightenment tradition emerge from the
disruptive ambivalence of their own post-colonial connection. Given
this colonial identity, it is perhaps not surprising that Derrida, Lyotard

and Cixous produce some of the most far reaching challenges to the
Enlightenment precepts of European culture. The ambivalence of their
identification with either Algerian or French culture underlies, in
particular, their radically provisional view of subjectivity. It is this
sense of a lack of belonging, despite occupying a privileged class and
cultural position in the colony, and, more importantly, a subtle
suppression of this experience, the suppression of their African
identity, from which their contestation of a secure and located subject
emerges.
Lahiri: Postcolonialism is always entangled with ethical questions and
yet the ethical turn in Postcolonial Studies took its own time in
coming. How do you assess the role of theorists and philosophers like
Levinas, Sartre and Derrida in the development and furthering of the
ethical strain in Postcolonial Studies? What role do you see it playing
in the postcolonial future?
Ashcroft: To be honest, I get a little tired of people connecting post-
colonial theory with poststructuralism. The colonial discourse theorists,
Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak owed a lot to poststructuralism,
but post-colonial theory is concerned much more with the activity of
post-colonial cultural producers. Post-colonial theory has always been
ethical because it has always been concerned with justice. This is why
I am committed to the field, despite the apparent disgust with which
some contemporary Marxists regard the ethical. With regard to
theory, whether Levinas, Benjamin, Foucault or Derrida, I see all
theory as a collection of spare parts that can be used for various
purposes. If you wanted to be cruel you could say that poststructuralism
is a broken down car that can be cannibalized for spare parts to be
used for various kinds of theoretical, discursive and political purposes.
That is the way in which my post-colonial theory has always related
to contemporary poststructuralism. Theories are not ways of being
but intellectual tools.
Lahiri: In your speech entitled Post-colonial Globalization: The Post-
Washington Consensus that you later developed into an article of the
same name you talked refreshingly and powerfully in favour of a

globally inflected local reality. You used two crucial terms in this
connection, Transformation and Circulation, in trying to explain the
complex nature of global flows. Could you elaborate on that and show
our readers how this cultural turn in globalization studies can be
availed of as a way of understanding emergent realities?
Ashcroft: Transformation refers specifically to local agency and its
demonstration in the capacity of local cultural producers to transform
imperial, and now global discourses and technologies for the purposes
of local empowerment. Again, as I have said, post-colonial literature
offers the most potent model of this process but it is true of other
forms of cultural production, and it is the primary way in which the
global is transformed at the local level.
Circulation refers to a different form of transformation that
comes about which the local in the form of diasporic subjects, that
phenomenon I now call the transnation circulates globally, disseminating
the local and thus potentially and actually transforming global
discourses. This is quite similar to Appadurais view of global flows,
but my point is that Transformation and Circulation offer two distinct
dimensions of local agency in a global setting.
Lahiri: In your speech The Emperors New Clothes delivered at the
ACLALS triennial in 2004 you spoke of a current of globalization
that has moved through socio-historical unevenness from modernity
to postmodernity. How does postcolonialism figure in such a study
of systemic changes and shifts in paradigm?
Ashcroft: As I have said, we have to be very careful about ascribing
to post-colonial theory the status of a master discourse. It is above
all concerned with the production of colonized and formerly colonized
people. But it is valuable in analyzing globalization because it provides
the tools by which we can detect local agency. We dont need to be
melancholic about the oppressive and homogenizing power of
globalization because post-colonial analysis has demonstrated the
continuing agency of the local. Nevertheless issues of power bifurcate
between globalization and US imperialism the two are not the same
thing and post-colonial theory is particularly well prepared to analyse

this.
Lahiri: In your On Postcolonial Futures the quite brilliant chapter on
postcolonial excess definitely champions the life, work and
commitments of Edward Said but do you feel that the chapter is also
pervaded with the spectre of Fanon with his Wretched of the Earth
burrowing within the texture of your text and adding new resonance?
Ashcroft: As a matter of fact, the particular notion of post-colonial
excess advanced there owes little either to Said or Fanon. Fanons is
of course the ur text of post-colonial studies, but post-colonial theory
has advanced a very long way beyond his concept of violent overthrow.
Excess is the capacity to exceed boundaries of all kinds. It is about
going beyond rather than breaking down, it is about occupying the
cracks in discourse, interpolating dominant cultural technologies in
order to appropriate them for the purposes of cultural empowerment.
Lahiri: You have been a pioneer of sorts once again when it comes
to the inclusion of the United States of America within the purview
of Postcolonial Studies. How do you see the tryst between the U.S.
and postcolonialism developing in the near future especially as the
U.S. has clearly emerged as the hyper-nation of the world, the new
imperium?
Ashcroft: In The Empire Writes Back we suggested that the US was
post-colonial in that its cultural production was formed out of an
engagement with imperial power this would certainly characterize
American literature in the 19th century. But the history of the US
shows us some very salient features of the post-colonial condition.
Being colonized does not prevent you from being colonizers in your
turn. The US is now the perpetrator of the most powerful empire in
history, an empire no less oppressive than any before it. The moment
of change came when Teddy Roosevelt suggested that the United States
needed to take over the civilizing mission. Since then America has
been responsible for overthrowing more governments, mostly
democratically elected ones, than any empire since the Romans. So
we can examine the US and see the course of empire out of a former
colony, but post-colonial reading also remains appropriate in the

internal colonization that continues in the United States to the present
day.
Lahiri: Your forthcoming book Postcolonial Utopias brings together a
brilliant ensemble of ideas about the objectives of postcolonial
theoretical praxis by looking at our discipline through the lens of
utopian theory. Could you dwell on the major facets of our disciplinary
study of Postcolonialism that your new book will touch upon and
attempt to refashion?
Ashcroft: People have been calling me utopian for so long that I
thought I would write a book about utopia. To more precise the book
is about post-colonial utopianism. We live in an age in which hope
is ever more necessary to social existence. Utopia is by definition
impossible, an unachievable ideal, a fanciful dream, unrealistic and
naive. Yet utopian theory has undergone a vigorous renaissance during
the post-Cold War period of global empire. The concept of the utopian
remains a conceptual anchor to any theory of a better world, any hope
for social change and amenity. So I am determined to continue to
talk about utopia. For although not everything we imagine may be
achievable, what is never imagined cannot be achieved.
But if we look at the example of Thomas Mores Utopia we
discover that there is something very paradoxical about utopias. They
cannot exist without the kind of regulation that makes them
Dystopian. All realized utopias a degenerate! To create a utopia is to
fail to achieve the utopian. Imperialism has been energized by its own
utopian vision in the form of the civilizing mission. Curiously, we
see the seeds of this in Mores Utopia and post-colonial utopianism
exists to contest this imperial vision. Post-colonial utopianism hinges
on a rather profound paradox: all realized utopias are degenerate
because they fail to resolve the contradiction between the education
and the manipulation of desire, but without utopianism, without the
hope for a better world, liberation is not possible. When we begin
to dig into the literature we discover how pervasive the spirit of
utopianism, the spirit of hope remains in post-colonial writing.
I think they call me a postcolonial dramatist because
I write in English
Mahesh Dattani in conversation with Satarupa Ray
Ray: What does postcolonialism mean to you? Do you at all believe

in this idea?
Dattani: I think postcolonial is an overused word. Yes this is post
colonization, but the word itself is too backward looking. Post-
independence is at least forward and progressive. However, you cant
fix a time or place with another time or place. It is way too simplistic.
Languages and cultures are living and evolving. Influences are
incorporated and made mainstream. Its a bit like calling the 21st
century, post 20th century. 21 comes after 20 and thats the way it
is. You wouldnt have a 20 without a 19 and so on.
Ray: Do you think a writer can be consciously postcolonial?
Dattani: I suppose so, if that is really the intention. To make a point
of it.
Ray: Do critics call you a postcolonial dramatist because of your
original location?
Dattani : I think they call me a postcolonial dramatist because I write
in English. They wouldnt dare call Tendulkar or Karnad postcolonial.
That way even English writing in England today can be called
postcolonial by the same argument. It seems equally silly though.
Ray: Have you ever felt the urge to go through the contemporary
theories of nationalism, postcolonialism or neocolonialism? Do these
theories matter to you at all?
Dattani: Not at all. They bore me. I write because I need to. The
politics of writing in my time and place should be reflected in my
406 | Mahesh Dattani in conversation with Satarupa Ray
work rather than my attitude. It is for others to put the suitable labels.
I am not a theorist. As a writer I offer my imagination and my sense
of reality.
Ray: How do you view modern Indian theatre vis--vis forms,
languages, craft, socio-political-cultural impulsions, impact of colonial
legacy and inherited local traditions?
Dattani: A lot of what we have today is definitely derived from
European sources rather than our traditional drama. Our traditional
concept of natya incorporates dance, drama and music in one holistic
performance art. The European model sees them as different. The
concept of a novel or novella is western; the concept of drama without
music or dance is western. But that does not make it any less Indian.
If the world can borrow the concept of zero from India, the concept
of non-violence, the concept of vegetarianism etc. and yet retain its
cultural identity, so can we.
Ray: Your plays like the Uma Rao trilogy have English characters. They
are the other and marginalized in the different circumstances. What
was the motivation behind the creation of such characters?
Dattani: The plays were commissioned by BBC for middle class
English listeners. In order to reach out to such audiences I thought
it might be a good idea to have English characters who could be told
things about India. That way the audiences could make the journey
through the characters they could relate to.
Ray: Your plays are often staged in the cities of the west. Why is it
so? Is it commercially more viable in the west?
Dattani: Not really. The shows abroad are few and far between. I guess
anything Indian has a market overseas. And any market is worth
exploring.
Ray: What is the difference in audience receptivity to your plays in
India and the west?
Dattani: The reaction in London for my play was God, we did not
know this happened in India. At home the reactions are more varied
and not related to the milieu as much as it is to gender, sexuality,
I think they call me a postcolonial dramatist... | 407
and patriarchal order which are the key issues in my plays.

Ray: What kind of audience do plays have in India or in the other
parts of the world? Are they the erudite kinds, or also the masses?
Dattani: I was very impressed by Marathi theatre, where I saw a
weekend matinee show which was houseful. They have thousands of
shows. They travel to towns and villages across Maharashtra. Travelling
companies like the Gubbi Veeranna Company in Karnataka or
Surabhi of Andhra may have had a wider reach. I am not sure what
we have today is really reaching out the way it should.
Ray: How do you place postcolonial drama with respect to the growing
popularity and global appeal of the postcolonial novel?
Dattani: There is Wole Soyinka who is popular and maybe a handful
more like Athol Fugard. They are playwrights who are consciously
postcolonial, I think. That is what their writing is all about. Hence
they reach out across the border to the colonizers shores.
Ray: Which is a tougher competitor of contemporary drama? Films,
television serials, or novels?
Dattani: Television is the competitor to all other arts. When comfort
and convenience comes before a cultural experience, we are in the
process of dying as a civilization.
Ray: What has been the reception of plays on homosexual themes in
India?
Dattani: Varied. I guess it is received with some kind of amusement
or disdain. Of course there are enough among the audience who can
see the dramatic content beyond the sexuality of the characters.
Ray: Do you think that tolerance towards alternative sexualities have
increased in India? If yes, has globalization of Indian culture any thing
to do with it?
Dattani: Globalzation has everything to do with popular Indian
culture. Look at the changing face of Bollywood. Themes that are still
now seen as taboo find themselves in mainstream cinema.
408 | Mahesh Dattani in conversation with Satarupa Ray
Ray: How do you see Indian theatre evolving in this post-colonial grid
under the impact of globalization?
Dattani: It will survive if it has an audience. Otherwise it is a futile
exercise or worse, an artistic indulgence. It rests entirely on what
people wish to do in their spare time.
Ray: What are the connections between past and present in contemporary
Indian theatre?
Dattani: I think we are moving on taking with us something of the
past but also constantly evolving even without our awareness. For
instance Bharata Natyam may have its origins in the Naya Shastra
or Abhinaya Darpana, but the repertoire as performed today is barely
a hundred years old and we dont know it.
Ray: Are there any fundamental links between Indian and Western
drama?
Dattani: Of course there has always been a lot of borrowing both ways.
Brechts concept of epic theatre which was the foundation of modern
European theatre is a standard convention in Indian theatre.
Ray: How has the inclusion of native myth, history, folk narrative and
socio-political experience changed in the postcolonial theatre?
Dattani: Havent a clue.
Ray: How have performative conditions and context been modified
in the art of stage setting?
Dattani: The company theatres like Prithvi and Gubbi Veeranna used
elephants and horses on stage. They also included magic tricks to
enthrall the audience. Today, theatre has more to do with the
interaction between the live artist and the audience. But people are
still enthralled by stage effects and elaborate sets for at least fifteen
minutes.
Ray: Since you are also into film-making, do tell us the difference
between writing a screenplay and designing a play.
Dattani: In a screenplay you tell your story through pictures, going
I think they call me a postcolonial dramatist... | 409
where the action goes. In theatre you contrive your action to make
it all happen in a way that unifies the time and place to the action.
Ray: Are we going to see any new film by Mahesh Dattani in the
near future? If yes, what theme are you working on?
Dattani: Yes, a bit premature to talk about it now as it is still in the
scripting stage.
Ray: And what about your new plays?
Dattani : Just completed another play for BBC called The Girl who
Touched the Stars.
Ray: What, according to you, is the future of Indian English theatre?
Dattani: I wish I knew the future.
Editors and Contributors
Kaustav Bakshi is a Lecturer in English, Haldia Govt. College,

Vidyasagar University. He has been awarded an M. Phil for his work
on the urban narratives of Rohinton Mistry at the Department of
English, Jadavpur University. He is currently engaged in a Minor
Research Project on Diaspora Studies sponsored by the UGC and
in editing a classical English text of the Victorian Age. He has recently
co-edited a volume of critical essays on Indian English Poetry. His
areas of specialization include Classical British Literature, Indian
Writing in English and Indian Popular Culture.
Samrat Sengupta completed his Masters in English from Jadavpur
University. Currently he is working as a University Research Scholar
at University of Kalyani, English Department. He is pursuing his
doctoral work on The Ethics of Decolonization. His interests are
Postcolonialism, Poststructuralist theories, Diasporic studies, Cultural
Studies, Indian Writing in English and Modern Bangla Literature. He
has contributed literary essays to books and journals and has presented
papers in national and international conferences.
Subhadeep Paul is currently a U.G.C. Sponsored Senior Research
Fellow in the Department of English, Jadavpur University. He is
pursuing a doctoral programme on The Cultural Ramifications of
East-West Polarisations in Select Works of Indian Fiction in English.
His specialises in Indian Writing in English, Postcolonial and
Diaspora Studies, Cultural Analysis and Creative Writing. He is the
author of Finite Sketches, Infinite Reaches, an anthology of his select
poetry, released by Writers Workshop, Kolkata. He is presently
working on a set of short stories and a quest novel.
Editors and Contributors | 411
Sreemoyee Banerjee has completed her M.A. in English from

Jadavpur University and now she is pursuing M. Phil from the same
department. Currently she is teaching English and German in Doon
School, Dehradun. She has been involved with the teaching of German
as a foreign language for quite some time. Her interests include
Language, Philosophy, European Cinema and Western Classical
Music.
Pradip Basu is Reader in Political Science, Scottish Church College,
University of Calcutta. His doctoral thesis is on Maoism in West
Bengal, 1953-1967, under the supervision of Dr. Partha Chatterjee.
Formerly, Research Scholar, Center for Studies in Social Sciences,
Calcutta and Teacher Fellow, Indian Council of Social Science
Research, he has authored several articles on Naxalism, Marxism and
Postmodernism. He is Chief Editor of the Journal of Humanities and
Social Sciences, an international refereed yearly. His books include
Naxalbarir Purbakshan (1998), Towards Naxalbari (1953-1967) (2000),
and Uttaradhunik Rajniti o Marxvad (2005).
Nandini Bhattachaya is Reader, Department of English, Bethune
College, and Guest Lecturer, University of Calcutta. Her works
include essays in various critical readers on Postcolonial theory and
Indian English literature. She is the author of two monographs, R.K
Narayans The Guide: New Critical Perspectives (2004) and A Lovesong
to Our Mongrel Selves: Problematics of Identity in Novels of Salman
Rushdie (2004), has edited Mulk Raj Anands Untouchable (2007) and
is also the co-author of Narratives of Frailty: Saratchandra and the
Colonial Encounter: An Alternate Mode of Hindu Self Fashioning (2008)
along with Professor Jharna Sanyal of the Department of English,
University of Calcutta.
Chandrani Biswas is Reader, Department of English, St. Xaviers
College, and Guest Lecturer, University of Calcutta. Her doctoral
programme is on African womens literature. She has written papers
and articles on such diverse topics as Women Power in African
Fiction, Gender Power Relation in African Fiction, Role of
Indian Scholars in Inter-Disciplinary Approach to Literature and
412 | Anxities, Influence and After
Cultural Studies, Anita Desais Female Protagonists, and others.

She is the author of the monograph Women and War: A Study of the
Novels of Emecheta, Ekwensi and Amadi which is one of the major
texts taught at the Jawaharlal Nehru University.
Pritha Chakraborty is a Lecturer in English, Durgapur Govt. College,
Burdwan University. Her M.Phil dissertation is on Gloria Naylor and
she has publications on African American Literature and on Eugene
O Neills Thirst. She is currently pursuing a doctoral programme on
African American fiction. Her areas of interest are Films, Culture
Studies, feminist and postcolonial theories.
Shreya Chakravorty is currently pursuing her M. Phil on Postcolonial
Feminism from the Department of English, Jadavpur University. She
has currently been selected by Ohio State University for conducting
a Ph.D. in English Literature. She has published poems in both
English and Bengali.
Rimi B. Chatterjee is Senior Lecturer, Department of English,
Jadavpur University. She is the author of the monograph Empires of
the Mind: A History of Oxford University Press in India during the Raj
which won the SHARP deLong Book Prize for 2007. Her novels Signal
Red and City of Love have been published by Penguin. Her translated
works include Titu Mir by Mahasweta Devi and Apon Katha by
Abanindranath Tagore. She has also worked in publishing for the
imprints Stree and Samya.
Sisir Kumar Chatterjee is Reader, Department of English, Chandan-
nagore Government College, Burdwan University. His PhD dissertation
is on the poetry of Philip Larkin. He is the author of the monograph
Philip Larkin: Poetry That Builds Bridges. He has published articles
in different established journals and presented papers in several
national seminars.
Suranjana Choudhury, having completed her M. Phil from the
Department of English, Jadavpur University is currently pursuing her
doctoral programme on Partition Literatures as a U. G. C fellow from
the Department of English, University of Calcutta. Her areas of
interest include Modern Bengali Literature, Cultural Studies and

Diaspora.
Santanu Das teaches at Queen Mary, University of London and has
held research fellowships at St. Johns College, Cambridge and at the
British Academy, London. He is the author of Touch and Intimacy
in First World War Literature (Cambridge, 2006) and works on early
twentieth-century English literature and culture. He is currently
editing for Cambridge a volume of collected essays titled Race, Empire
and the First World War and completing a monograph on India and
war writing.
Sayantan Dasgupta is Lecturer, Department of Comparative Literature,
Jadavpur University. He is the author of Indian English Literature: A
Study in Historiography and Shyam Selvadurai: Texts and Contexts. He
is also the editor of Nationalism: A Reader.
Nilanjana Deb is Senior Lecturer, Department of English, Jadavpur
University. Her research and teaching interests include Postcolonial
Literatures and Orature, Diaspora Studies, Settler Colony Literatures,
Translation Studies and Subaltern Literatures (including Dalit and
Indigenous Writing). She has received prestigious fellowships from
various international universities and institutions. She was awarded
her PhD in 2008 for the literary historiography of the Anishnaabe/
Chippewa of Canada and the USA, and the Nyoongar of Australia.
She has published articles on Australian literature and Aboriginal
Studies. She is currently principal investigator of a pilot project at
the School of Cultural Texts and Records.
Somak Ghoshal read English at Jadavpur University and University
College, Oxford. He works for the editorial pages of The Telegraph,
Calcutta. He writes on Literature, Visual Arts, Hindustani Classical
Music, Law, and Modern South Asia. His Late Style and Modes of
Life-Writing in Jamess The Ambassadors is forthcoming in Essays and
Studies, published by the Department of English, Jadavpur University.
Arpa Ghosh is Lecture, Department of English, Vivekananda College
for Women. She has done her doctoral research on white fiction in
414 | Anxities, Influence and After
apartheid South Africa. Her area of specialization is fiction, classic,

contemporary and postcolonial. At present she is working on the grand
narrative in Bengali fiction. She is also a creative writer. Her short
stories and articles negotiate with immediate urban reality. She also
takes a lively interest in Indian classical music and commercial Hindi
films.
Epsita Halder teaches Comparative Literature in Jadavpur University.
Her areas of interest include issues of gender, ecology and performance.
Currently, she is working on the Bangla Marsiya Kavya tradition. She
is invoved in a project collecting texts on the construction of ecology-
ethnicity continuum in colonial Bengal. She has published articles in
several journals.
Debasish Lahiri is a Lecturer in English, Lal Baba College, University
of Calcutta. He is also a guest-faculty at the Rabindra Bharati
University, Kolkata. He has published widely in the areas of
Postcolonial theory, European Modernism, and the English Renaissance
in major international journals and volumes. He is also a published
poet with publications in leading international poetry journals.
Aniruddha Maitra completed Masters in English from Jadavpur
University, Kolkata and has worked as a television journalist in New
Delhi. His area of interest is the cultural production of the queer
South Asian diaspora and its relationship with trans/national activism.
He is currently pursuing a doctoral programme at the Department
of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University in the United
States.
Parichay Patra has recently completed his MA from the Department
of English, Jadavpur University. Published papers in international
journals and presented papers in various national and international
conferences. He is a member of preview committee of short and
documentary section of Kolkata Film Festival and writes film reviews
regularly in the bulletin published by Nandan. His areas of interest
are Postcolonial Studies, Theatre, Film Studies, and Critical Theories.
Anand Prakash taught in the Department of English, Hans Raj
College, University of Delhi. He has authored a number of books on
various subjects, besides editing many books. He has written

extensively in Hindi on short and long fiction, trends in criticism and
thought as well as on Hindi poetry. In addition he has written poems
and short stories and scripted plays as well as translated poetry, short
fiction and criticism from English to Hindi and Hindi to English.
Satarupa Ray is working as Editor (Content) with a leading offline-
online book retailer in India. She has contributed articles, interviews
and reports for The Times of India, The Statesman and Readers Digest.
She was nominated for Indian Young Publisher of the Year Award
2007 held by British Council early this year. She has interviewed
award-winning authors including Gunter Grass, Late John Fowles,
Thomas Keneally, Amitav Ghosh, Amit Chaudhuri, Bapsi Sidhwa and
Kiran Nagarkar.
Kallol Ray having completed his Masters in English from Jadavpur
University, is currently pursuing research in Cultural Studies as an
ICSSR Doctoral Fellow at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences,
Calcutta. His chief areas of interest are modern/postmodern literature,
critical theory, philosophy, and visual studies.
Krishna Sen is a Professor in the Department of English, University
of Calcutta. She was Visiting Professor at the University of Vermont
and Leverhulme; Visiting Professor at the University of Leeds. She
received a National Merit Scholarship, a Commonwealth Educational
Fellowship to Britain, a Nippon Fellowship to the Salzburg Seminar,
and an NEH/Fulbright grant to UCLA. She has published with Orient
Longman, Penguin India, Blackwell and Routledge, and has contributed
scholarly articles to several national and international journals.
Dr Sharmistha Chatterjee Sriwastav is Lecturer, Department of
English, Rishi Bankim Chandra College for Women, University of
Calcutta. Her PhD dissertation is on Post-Independence Indian
English Poetry. She is also interested in British Romantic Literature
and has contributed articles on Postcolonialism, Womens Empowerment
and Gender Studies. She is presently completing her Diploma on
English Language Teaching from Central Institute of Indian & Foreign
Languages, Hyderabad.

Sengupta Et Al, Anxieties Influences and After Critical

Transféré par

Informations du document

Copyright

Formats disponibles

Partager ce document

Partager ou intégrer le document

Options de partage

Avez-vous trouvé ce document utile ?

Ce contenu est-il inapproprié ?

Droits d'auteur :

Formats disponibles

Sengupta Et Al, Anxieties Influences and After Critical

Transféré par

Droits d'auteur :

Formats disponibles

ANXIETIES, INFLUENCES AND AFTER

THEMES AND VARIATIONS

At the Rendezvous of Conquest: Post-colonial 16

Typreset by Illuminati, Delhi-110007 The Flight of the Eunuch: Mapping Homotextualities 91

Karnad, South Indian Folk Theatre and Hayavadana 214

I think they call me a postcolonial dramatist 405

Colonial past / Neocolonial present

Joseph Conrads narrator Marlow, before embarking on a journey to

Marlows tale underscores the fact that colonization of the powerless by

crisis in feudalism. This marks the foundation of the modern World

social practices.4 Therefore, the very use of the term postcolonial is

These social, political, ideological or military tie-ups between the

Postcolonialism and All That

In the discourse of postcolonial studies the omnipresence of the shadow

It is needed to remember that postcolonialism doesnt specifically and

many intersecting discursive domains. For example, Feminist Postcolonial

Complete freedom from colonial knowledge structures might not be

abolition.17 We observe a new revolutionary Idealism based on Marxist

The idea of the sovereignty of the nation-state is put into question.

varied range of disciplines and spatio-temporal zones it refers to.

When Derrida talks about differance, he on the basis of Saussearean

Another example of this congruence would be the adaptation of

mindedness24. David Arnold quotes Raymond Williams and comments:

Theorists of British Cultural Studies like Raymond Williams have also

Following this proposition it is important to understand how

constantly refers back to a colonial moment with respect to which it

to pay homage, to do justice. If I just repeat, if I interpret following as just

1. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, edited by S. Satpathy, (New Delhi:

7. See M. J. Watts, Mapping meaning, denoting difference, imagining

e desher nagarikder modhey sreni boishommo thakbe na, dhoni o doridrer

There is room for us all at the rendezvous of conquest.

Uhuru [Swahili for Freedom]!2 Aim Csaires black Caliban cries

This reference to the psychic violence inherent in colonial

I shall be the thrush that launches

This Ariel is not only a type of the culturally ambivalent mestizo

of imperial power) is rudely disrupted by Calibans invocation of the

alternative model of African selfhood beyond tribalism (the Yoruba

Contrary to popular belief, national differences were acknowledged

Colonial hegemony is, according to Ashcroft, countered by the

sides of the colonial divide. Distinguishing between the political

Transformation is thus complemented by circulation of cultural

To address the multi-dimensionality of all these various form of

Interdisciplinarity, in other words, fundamentally changes the contours

extending of the concept of imperialism to that of Empire (pace Hardt

comparable stratagems of resistance.25 Similarly, Richard King, the

While Ethnic Studies have clearly made productive use of some of

These points of intersection and convergence have been further

particularity.34 The theorist par excellence of diaspora as the

1. Aim Csaire, Notebook of A Return to My Native Land (Cahiers dun retour

2. Aim Csaire, Une Tempte, daprs La tempte de Shakespeare - Adaptation

Discourse in The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 121-

in Nepantla: Views from South, I:1, 2000 (9-32), 10 and 15.

Post-colonialism has spawned a vast matrix of critical theory.

This differnce is complicated by the ambiguity in the notion of

Ironically, post-colonial theorists have emphasized this very particularity

While the need to locate texts within specific cultural contexts is

For example, Dee Hornes Contemporary American Indian Writing:

colonizer-colonized binary that is a commonplace in post-colonial

promises thus made in public became part of the collective memory

literature by post-colonial theory in the last decade or so demands

strategic assertion of identity for a severely dispossessed group can

written about the literature17 Blaeser cites major American critics

1. Leela Gandhi, Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction (New York:

second edition. There is no attempt to incorporate recent developments