Post-colonial thought is a product of anti-colonial thought which itself had established networks crossing continents in the second half of the nineteenth century. Thus, an African American journalist gives a better account of the 'first Indian War of Independence' in 1857, than was available in the mainstream press. How was this possible? The answer is that he was part of the Abolitionist movement and had lived in England. A big role was played by the humble 'lascar'- i.e. Merchant Mariner from the Indian Ocean littoral- and his counterparts from America or Europe. By the beginning of the Twentieth Century, 'coloured' lawyers, educators, pastors, Doctors etc had created institutions which fostered close links across oceans. There were different 'flavours' of anti-Colonial thinking- Marxist, Islamist, Gandhian etc.- but this did not stand in the way of the forging of alliances and the creation of a common agenda. As power increasingly passed to Nationalist parties in countries moving to independence, Anti-Colonial thought metamorphosized into an official State sponsored ideology whose spirit of internationalism was well represented by the Bandung Conference and the Non Aligned Movement. Once the problem of worsening terms of trade for primary producers was grasped this took on not just a Diplomatic but an Economic complexion. True, there were internecine problems for this 'Third World' which had found its own voice. Former colonies might go to war because of problems created by Imperial frontiers drawn by European Statesmen for their own purposes. Trade agreements might collapse and lack of infrastructure or paucity of Trade Credit might prevent cross-border or regional trade from burgeoning. Nevertheless, by the end of the Seventies there was considerable official literature as well as multi-national institutions of various types advancing a common agenda. I suppose the 'North South dialogue' culminating in the Brandt report represented the high-point of 'Post-Colonial' ideology as a broad-based organizing principle for formerly colonized countries. By then, the rising generation of diplomats and economists in Africa and Asia had considerable exposure to this ideology. It was usual for rising stars in the Youth wing of the ruling party to be sent to Conference where they would meet their peers from other Continents. Yet, post-colonialism in the Academy had no awareness of this. Consider the following penned by Leela Gandhi in her 'Introduction to Post-Colonial theory' published in 1998. Had she just asked some Uncle of hers in the Diplomatic service, he could have sent her a sample of the voluminous official literature on the subject. Because she was too busy reading Jane Austen & Charles Dickens as part of her Eng Lit degree, she may not have been aware of India's own very considerable contribution to anti-colonial and post-colonial ideology and praxis. That's why she wrote as follows-
In the last decade postcolonialism has taken its place with theories such as poststructuralism, psychoanalysis and feminism as a major critical discourse in the humanities.
Sadly the 'humanities' had become sub-human. Women thought 'Third Wave Feminism' was useless or mischievous. Psychiatrists found that 'the talking cure' cured nobody. Drugs did. As for 'post-structuralism' or 'post-modernism', both were meaningless. Structural Causal Models matter because they enable us to change outcomes or make better predictions. If you build a better mouse trap, the world will beat a path to your door. If you have a better SCM you can make a lot of money or gain a lot of influence. You aren't stuck teaching nonsense to credential-craving cretins.
As a consequence of its diverse and interdisciplinary usage, this body of thought has generated an enormous corpus of specialised academic writing.
An algorithm had been created whereby cretins got sheepskins in shit. The reward for those best at this was to get tenure teaching yet more moronic students.
Nevertheless, although much has been written under its rubric, ‘postcolonialism’ itself remains a diffuse and nebulous term.
Only because those who went in for it were nitwits. 'Post-colonialism' is what came after 'anti-colonialism'. It had its own quite sophisticated mathematical economics- as in the early work of Graciella Chichilnisky. Manmohan, who had worked under Prebisch- another pioneer- became Finance Minister of India some six years before Leela published this shite. Manmohan helped change India. He served two full terms as Prime Minister.
Unlike Marxism or deconstruction, for instance, it seems to lack an ‘originary moment’ or a coherent methodology.
Because it is nonsense. By contrast Anti-Colonialism was International, became better and better organized and, after the end of Imperialism, further developed as the uniting ideology of the 'Third World'- including countries from the 'periphery' like Argentina. Consider Amba Prasad Sufi- a Hindu who is considered an 'Islamists' because he helped the Iranians and the Iraqis to fight back against European powers. Mention of his name is a solvent when Iranian or Iraqi diplomats meet their Indian counterparts. What is more, it is this overarching ideology which permits Third World countries to carry on with mutually beneficial projects even after a dramatic regime change- e.g. the fall of the Shah not affecting the Kudhremukh Indo-Iranian project.
This book is an attempt to ‘name’ postcolonialism
why attempt to name John as John?
—to delineate the academic and cultural conditions under which it first emerged
it did not emerge from 'academic' or 'cultural' conditions. It emerged from opposition to European colonialism on different continents. But it could also embrace a country like Argentina which was a primary producer on the periphery and which thus faced worsening terms of trade. Moreover, it could find common ground with the 'Green' movement so as to tackle Climate Change which disproportionately harms former Colonies.
and thereby to point to its major preoccupations and areas of concern.
Narcissus was good looking. This is a case of a turd admiring itself in a mirror.
There are correspondingly two parts to the book—the first offers an account of postcolonialism’s academic and intellectual background,
Like my sister, Leela read English in Delhi. Unlike my sister, she did not go on to get an MA from the Commonwealth Institute in London and then an MPhil in International Relations from JNU. It was JNU which best curated the official post-colonial ideology that I have spoken about. Any Indian diplomat- which is what my sister became- was thoroughly indoctrinated in it. But so were a lot of Economists and other Civil Servants. The thing was real. There was even some private money behind it- e.g. from the BCCI bank. You could get a PhD in this from the I.R or Econ or Poli Sci Department and this would get you some sort of Government sinecure. Only a fool would go in for it if their subject was English.
and the second elaborates the themes and issues which have most engaged the attention of postcolonial critics.
A guy who gets sick of teaching Jane Austen isn't a critic. He is just a chap trying to escape to greener pastures. But all he produces is shit.
In the main, the intellectual history of postcolonial theory is marked by a dialectic between Marxism, on the one hand, and poststructuralism/postmodernism, on the other.
Marxism died. Postmodernism was still-born. Mathematics is now more, not less, structural and everything is becoming mathematical to some degree or other.
So, too, this theoretical contestation informs the academic content of postcolonial analysis, manifesting itself in an ongoing debate between the competing claims of nationalism and internationalism,
this was resolved at Bandung a decade before Leela was born. She may have heard of a writer by the name of Jawaharlal Nehru. He played a big role in it. There was also a Chinese poet named Mao. He too was very influential.
strategic essentialism and hybridity,
the first is the coinage of the cretin Spivak, the second that of Homo Baba. Both got PhDs in Eng. Lit. They know nothing about either anti-colonial or post-colonial theory and praxis. They were too busy reading Austen and Dickens and underlining the passages they really really liked.
solidarity and dispersal,
e.g. 'standing with Palestine' by staying the fuck away from it
the politics of structure/totality and the politics of the fragment.
neither exist. This shite might have been meaningful when the French Communist party looked like a contender for power. But that was long, long, ago.
Critics on both sides of this divide are persuasive in their claims, and compelling in their critique of theoretical opponents.
But they have no influence. The anti-colonial thinkers decided a long time ago that differences in ideology or religion should not matter. Solidarity was based on non-interference in internal affairs. We may term this a Rawlsian 'overlapping consensus'.
Neither the assertions of Marxism
e.g. those of Chairman Xi or Chief Minister Vijayan? Nope. These ignorant fucks don't know or care about either.
nor those of poststructuralism, however, can exhaustively account for the meanings and consequences of the colonial encounter.
The miracle is, some can tie their own shoe-laces.
While the poststructuralist critique of Western epistemology and theorisation of cultural alterity/difference is indispensable to postcolonial theory, materialist philosophies, such as Marxism, seem to supply the most compelling basis for postcolonial politics.
No. By 1954, when Nehru met Mao, it was agreed that there could be a common program regardless of internal economic arrangements. The Kremlin endorsed this view. Washington had to suck it up.
Thus, the postcolonial critic has to work
they are incapable of useful work
toward a synthesis of, or negotiation between, both modes of thought.
No. The anti-colonial ideologues agreed that no synthesis was required. Also, regarding common objectives, negotiation had to be with the Global 'North'- i.e. the advanced industrial economies. The substantive aspect had to do with improving terms of trade and the financing of infrastructure investment on favourable terms. Things like writing off sovereign debt and reducing conditionality on IMF loans were in the common interest.
In a sense, it is on account of its commitment to this project of theoretical and political integration that postcolonialism deserves academic attention.
It had received it. The ex-diplomat might become a Professor while the Professor might get a high appointment in the Civil Service. Manmohan started off as a Professor.
Finally, there is the question of postcolonialism’s constituency—the cultural audience for whom its theoretical disquisitions are most meaningful.
If you started off teaching Eng Lit, Economists and Diplomats aren't going to listen to you. Your constituency is those feeble minded enough to think it worthwhile to 'read' English in Collidge, as opposed to primary Skool.
In my reading of this field, there is little doubt that in its current mood postcolonial theory principally addresses the needs of the Western academy.
Not that part of it which has a high IQ. This is cretins addressing morons. 'Teechur, do I really have to read 'Pride & Prejudice'? It makes my head hurt.' 'No. Just write 'Austen's catachresis of the duodecimal alterity of the Deluezian rhizoid is the catachresis of that thing Spivak wrote about in her next book & is totes triggering.' Also, don't call me 'teacher'. I am your PhD adviser.'
It attempts to reform the intellectual and epistemological exclusions of this academy,
IR or Trade theory don't exclude actual postcolonialism. But that stuff gets super-mathsy. Cretins who 'read' Jane Austen for three years self-excluded themselves from it.
and enables non-Western critics located in the West to present their cultural inheritance as knowledge.
Fuck off! A guy who says 'I have a PhD on Rabindranath Tagore' isn't considered 'knowledgeable'. He is considered a poorly paid pedant unless he quit teaching and his Uncle got him a job with a Merchant Bank.
This is, of course, a worthwhile project
it really isn't.
and, to an extent, its efforts have been rewarded.
Punished. Having to teach shite to shitheads is a punishment out of Dante's Inferno.
The Anglo-American humanities academy has gradually stretched its disciplinary boundaries to include hitherto submerged and occluded voices from the non-Western world.
If you want a sheepskin in coolie shite, we will give it to you- for a price.
But, of course, what postcolonialism fails to recognise is that what counts as ‘marginal’ in relation to the West has often been central and foundational in the non-West. Thus, while it may be revolutionary to teach Gandhi as political theory in the Anglo-American academy,
it isn't. There are continuities with Transcendentalists like Thoreau. Still, the thing is deeply boring.
he is, and has always been, canonical in India.
No. It wasn't taught in India while he was alive. Lohia got a German Phd on Gandhian thought in the early Thirties.
Despite its good intentions, then, postcolonialism continues to render non-Western knowledge and culture as ‘other’ in relation to the normative ‘self’ of Western epistemology and rationality.
Whereas American Sociologists and Political Scientists made a thorough study of such things over the course of the Fifties and Sixties. That is why, when Spivak wrote about the Naxal movement in her native Bengal, she relied on the work of Marcus F. Franda who was born in Wisconsin and got his PhD in Poli Sci from Chicago. He did two years research in Bengal. Why? The Americans thought they needed to understand the politics and culture of shithole countries. Then they realized what people want is money, not being bombed incessantly.
Rarely does it engage with the theoretical self-sufficiency of African, Indian, Korean, Chinese knowledge systems,
Nonsense! Western Universities became very good at this. As Richard Crasto said 'the Vedas were written by Indians for Indians but are understood only by Germans'.
or foreground those cultural and historical conversations which circumvent the Western world. Nowhere is this book motivated by a desire for postcolonial revenge. It does not seek finally to marginalise the West—to render it an excluded and uneasy eavesdropper to cryptic exchanges between, for instance, Africa and India.
Bandung and so forth were well publicized and quite well covered by the Western press. There may have been a lot of 'eaves-dropping' going on. I have heard or official researchers repairing gaps in the Indian diplomatic archives on the basis of declassified US Intelligence documents.
Its manifesto, if any, is this: that postcolonialism diversify its mode of address and learn to speak more adequately to the world which it speaks for.
In other words, only Black or Brown peeps should get tenure. We can be stupider and more bigoted than any White dude.
And, in turn, that it acquire the capacity to facilitate a democratic colloquium between the antagonistic inheritors of the colonial aftermath.
Democratically elected leaders do so. Professors with PhD's in Eng Lit give tongue only to their own arseholes.
After colonialism
came Independence. Newly free countries tried to help those countries which were still colonized. Post-Colonialism had a political agenda till the fall of Apartheid. Previously, it also had an economic agenda based on a mathematical model of the economy which highlighted the problem of declining terms of trade for primary producers or 'the periphery'. It looked as though there was a collective action problem. Sadly the solution couldn't work even in theory because of purely mathematical problems of concurrency, complexity, computability, categoricity etc. There was no 'top-down' or 'substantive' solution. You had to embrace subsidiarity and permit 'Tiebout sorting'. Maybe things are changing now. De-dollarization is possible. Ending its 'exorbitant privilege' may unite an expanded BRICS. The spirit of Bandung may revive.
In 1985 Gayatri Spivak threw a challenge to the race and class blindness of the Western academy,
the Americans had been foolish enough to hire her to teach English and translate French philosophy even though her English was not good and she was wholly ignorant of European philosophy. She thought there was a guy in ancient Greece who had claimed to have jumped from the island of Rhodes to the mainland! She was thinking of Hanuman, the Hindu God. The Greek dude Marx mentioned had merely said 'when I was in Rhodes, I jumped a prodigious distance'. The retort was 'Imagine you are in Rhodes and jump now. Show us you aren't bull-shitting. '
asking ‘Can the subaltern speak?’ (Spivak 1985).
Winston came to India as a subaltern. Most people thought he was quite a good speaker.
By ‘subaltern’ Spivak meant the oppressed subject, the members of Antonio Gramsci’s ‘subaltern classes’ (see Gramsci 1978), or more generally those ‘of inferior rank’,
i.e. an Non-Commissioned Officer. But they can speak- indeed shout!- very well indeed.
and her question followed on the work begun in the early 1980s by a collective of intellectuals now known as the Subaltern Studies group.
Would the Naxals accept them as their mouth-piece? No. They were useless.
The stated objective of this group was ‘to promote a systematic and informed discussion of subaltern themes in the field of South Asian studies’ .
i.e. History from below. But, by then, 'subaltern' castes and tribes were gaining political power and re-writing history books and putting up big statues to their own heroes.
Further, they described their project as an attempt to study ‘the general attribute of subordination in South Asian society whether this is expressed in terms of class, caste, age, gender and office or in any other way’ .
They thought 'elite historians' looked down on them and said mean things about them behind their backs. But there are no 'elite historians'. The profession is looked down on.
... ‘subaltern studies’ defined itself as an attempt to allow the ‘people’ finally to speak within the jealous pages of elitist historiography and, in so doing, to speak for, or to sound the muted voices of, the truly oppressed.
But nobody gives a shit about Professors of History. Pedagogues aren't well paid. Nowadays, they aren't even allowed to sexually harass their grad students.
Spivak’s famous interrogation of the risks and rewards which haunt any academic pursuit of subalternity drew attention to the complicated relationship between the knowing investigator and the (un)knowing subject of subaltern histories. For how, as she queried, ‘can we touch the consciousness of the people,
do it by writing in their mother tongue. Ranajit Guha did so towards the end of his long life. But nobody was interested in his shite. Still, they thought he was smart to swap his Indian passport for a British one back in 1959. The problem with 'postcolonialism' is that, unless you are a diplomat or high official, it is more salubriously done on a campus in a country still ruled by White peeps.
even as we investigate their politics?
Spivak is famous for investigating Mamta's politics- thinks nobody at all.
With what voice-consciousness can the subaltern speak?’
The same as the rest of us. When a teaching assistant complains that she is paid less than minimum wage, we hear the subaltern speak.
Through these questions Spivak places us squarely within the familiar and troublesome field of ‘representation’ and ‘representability’.
Voters elect people to represent them in parliament. That's why people listen to Mamta, not Spivak.
How can the historian/investigator avoid the inevitable risk of presenting herself as an authoritative representative of subaltern consciousness?
Just say 'I read Eng Lit at Collidge. I'm as stupid as shit. Ignore me.'
Should the intellectual ‘abstain from representation?’
Intellectuals must have intellect. These guys abstained from acquiring any such thing.
Which intellectual is equipped to represent which subaltern class?
The guy from that class who, like Ambedkar has a couple of PhDs in Econ and who has practiced as a barrister and sat on high Councils of State. Still, if he doesn't get elected, he represents shit.
Is there an ‘unrepresentable subaltern class that can know and speak itself?’
We know of no such class. That is why 'class action' suits can succeed. This because in logic, mathematics & the law no class exists unless there is a predicate applicable to all in the class but not to the universal set.
And finally, who—if any—are the ‘true’ or ‘representative’ subalterns of history, especially within the frame of reference provided by the imperialist project? The complex notion of subalternity is pertinent to any academic enterprise which concerns itself with historically determined relationships of dominance and subordination.
Eng Lit really isn't concerned with this though no doubt some S&M literature may have literary merit.
Yet it is postcolonial studies which has responded with the greatest enthusiasm to Spivak’s ‘Can the subaltern speak?’.
Why? It is utterly hilarious. Spivak had a great aunt who didn't like having to go to school. She wanted to get married. Her brother-in-law said you will soon be too old and too ugly to get married. You will have to become a School Marm.' She hanged herself while on the rag. Why? Because Brahmins believe that the menstrual blood of an unmarried daughter flows back and pollutes the 'pinda' oblation to the ancestors. She was saying 'Daddy, you big meanie, you should have married me off. Instead you made me go to school and read Jane fucking Austen. I hope you burn in Hell!'
Spivak concocts a fairy-tale about this teenage girl actually being a Revolutionary tasked with assassinating some high official. She killed herself while on the rag to prove she wasn't preggers. This is nonsense. The hymen of the corpse is examined. If it is clear that she has been having a lot of sex, that fact might be noted- unless the family pays a little money to hush up the matter.
Thus, while Spivak concluded her provocative essay by categorically insisting that ‘the subaltern cannot speak’ ,
In 1923, the son of a poor Bengali priest published an autobiography that was well received in America. By then a Bengali poetess- Sarojini Naidu- was a prominent figure in Indian politics. Back in India, you soon had Chief Ministers and Cabinet Ministers born to very poor 'untouchable' families. Viceroy Wavell didn't like Jagjivan Ram because he was ugly. Then he found he was very good at handling his portfolio. Ram rose by merit. Had he become PM in 1977, India would now be ahead of China.
postcolonial studies has come to represent a confusing and often unpleasant babel of subaltern voices. How then, can we begin to make sense of—or, indeed, take sense from—this field?
Don't bother. It is shit.
The emergence of anti-colonial and ‘independent’ nation-States after colonialism is frequently accompanied by a desire to forget the colonial past.
Leela comes from such a country. The sins of the Brits were drummed into us from Primary School onwards.
This ‘will-to-forget’ takes a number of historical forms, and is impelled by a variety of cultural and political motivations.
There is no such will in any ex-colony.
Principally, postcolonial amnesia
refers to the Imperial country forgetting those pro-consuls it had previously regarded as heroes. Try going into an English pub and mentioning Robert Clive or Warren Hastings. Nobody has heard of either. As for the 'black hole of Calcutta' they suspect it is a reference to Rishi Sunak's rectum.
is symptomatic of the urge for historical self-invention or the need to make a new start
that is done by renaming all the streets after local politicians and substituting terms from the indigenous language for foreign words- e.g. Radio becomes 'Akashvani' (voice from the Sky).
—to erase painful memories of colonial subordination.
These are incessantly dwelt upon. Who doesn't know that Leela's ancestor was thrown out of a railway carriage?
As it happens, histories, much as families, cannot be freely chosen by a simple act of will, and newly emergent postcolonial nation-States are often deluded and unsuccessful in their attempts to disown the burdens of their colonial inheritance. The mere repression of colonial memories is never, in itself, tantamount to a surpassing of or emancipation from the uncomfortable realities of the colonial encounter. In response, postcolonialism can be seen as a theoretical resistance to the mystifying amnesia of the colonial aftermath.
If Leela had been born in Canada, she might believe some such thing. I was born in Germany and I would frequently ask elderly Indians who waxed eloquent on the British 'looting' of India, how often Viceroy Sahib had sodomized them. They would indignantly deny that the entire British Army had used them as catamites. I would then say 'I suppose you were an ugly child. Otherwise, why should those were looting you not also rape you?' At this point, they tend to swear at me in Punjabi and tell me to fuck off back to Madras.
It is a disciplinary project devoted to the academic task of revisiting, remembering and, crucially, interrogating the colonial past.
Ask it what it was like to be drained of its vital bodily essence by heinous acts of cunnilingus and fellatio perpetrated by evil Viceroys. People who studied Eng Lit at Hindu College should give an exhaustive account of the manner in which all the animals in Kipling's jungle book were sodomized by British subalterns like Winston Churchill.
The process of returning to the colonial scene discloses a relationship of reciprocal antagonism and desire between coloniser and colonised.
Winston Churchill kept raping Mahatma Gandhi because of his shapely buttocks. This antagonised Gandhi something fierce. I often asked why Gandhi wore a diaper. Why not be a fully naked faqir? The answer was that Churchill would have become very excited by the sight of Gandhi's naked bum. The Queen would not have been amused.
And it is in the unfolding of this troubled and troubling relationship that we might start to discern the ambivalent prehistory of the postcolonial condition. If postcoloniality is to be reminded of its origins in colonial oppression, it must also be theoretically urged to recollect the compelling seductions of colonial power.
Churchill seduced Gandhi by giving him chocolates and bouquets. Then he fucked the Mahatma in the ass. Colonial power was like that only.
The forgotten archive of the colonial encounter narrates multiple stories of contestation
Curzon would ask Churchill to let him have a go at fucking Gandhi
and its discomfiting other,
Gandhi was greatly discomfited by Churchill's penis.
complicity.
He should have reported the matter to Queenji. Silence implies consent- if not complicity.
In addition, the colonial archive preserves those versions of knowledge and agency produced in response to the particular pressures of the colonial encounter.
Very true. The India Office Library features detailed accounts of various colonial encounters with Gandhi's rectum. This is what caused post-colonial amnesia. Even Nehru does not allude to his own rape at the hands of the Viceroy's wife.
The colonial past is not simply a reservoir of ‘raw’ political experiences and practices to be theorised from the detached and enlightened perspective of the present.
Yes it is. Look at the Elgaar Parishad commemorating the two hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Koregaon Bhima. Some Mahars had fought for the Brits against the Marathas. The aim was to draw a wedge between the two communities.
It is also the scene of intense
political propaganda and organization
discursive and conceptual activity, characterised by a profusion of thought and writing about the cultural and political identities of colonised subjects.
No. There is some thought and writing about existing communities because this can be useful for political purposes. We know that 'colonised subjects', save in settler colonies, had little personal knowledge of or exposure to the Imperial power.
Thus, in its therapeutic retrieval of the colonial past,
i.e. recovered memories of your grandfather telling you about being sodomized by Lord Linlithgow
postcolonialism needs to define itself as an area of study which is willing not only to make, but also to gain, theoretical sense out of that past.
Theoretically, through our veins flows the blood of catamites who took it up the arse from successive Viceroys.
The colonial aftermath is marked by the range of ambivalent cultural moods and formations which accompany periods of transition and translation. It is, in the first place, a celebrated moment of arrival—charged with the rhetoric of independence and the creative euphoria of self-invention.
That's certainly true. Speaking generally, a newly independent country formed all sorts of new Institutions to carry forward all sorts of utopian projects. Then they ran out of money, or the President-for-life stole all the money and people began thinking of emigrating.
This is the spirit with which Saleem Sinai, the protagonist of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, initially describes the almost mythical sense of incarnation which attaches to the coincidence of his birth and that of the new Indian nation on the momentous stroke of the midnight hour on 15 August 1947: ‘For the next three decades, there was to be no escape. Soothsayers had prophesied me, newspapers celebrated my arrival, politicos ratified my authenticity’ (Rushdie 1982, p. 9).
Rushdie's father got his son a British passport before settling in Pakistan. Rushdie has no claim to be Indian. He is Pakistani. That is why his books weren't boring shite.
Predictably, and as Rushdie’s Indian Everyman, Saleem Sinai, ultimately recognises, the colonial aftermath is also fraught by the anxieties and fears of failure which attend the need to satisfy the historical burden of expectation.
Just as the pre-colonial aftermath. That's how aftermaths work. Trump's second administration is fraught with anxiety and fear of failure. What if China won't give him a trade deal? What if the markets start to fall? As things are, he needs 6 Democrats in the Senate to vote for his Budget.
In Sinai’s words, ‘I must work fast, faster than Scheherazade, if I am to end up meaning—yes, meaning—something. I admit it: above all things, I fear absurdity’ (Rushdie 1982, p. 9).
He means he must work fast to finish his story before Indira's goons come for him.
To a large extent, Saleem Sinai’s obsessive ‘creativity’ and semantic profusion is fuelled by his apprehension that the inheritors of the colonial aftermath must in some sense instantiate a totally new world.
Everyone does so, in some sense, by farting.
Saleem Sinai’s tumble into independent India is, after all, framed by the crippling optimism
optimism does not cripple. True, if you optimistically jump off a cliff, you may end up a cripple but it is gravity which is at fault.
of Nehru’s legendary narration of postcoloniality: ‘A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new; when an age ends; and when the soul of a nation long suppressed finds utterance . . .’ (Rushdie 1982, p. 116). To quote Jameson’s observations on postmodernism out of context, we might say that the celebratory cyborg of postcoloniality is also plagued by ‘something like an imperative to grow new organs, to expand our sensorium and our body to some new, yet unimaginable, perhaps impossible, dimensions’ (Jameson 1991, p. 39).
Post-coloniality was a human condition for people who lived through the Independence struggle. It involved 'growing' something new- viz. a sense of collective belonging of a nationalist, rather than religious, or caste based type. Interestingly, many people- including poor women- gained access to a 'dimension'- that of political empowerment- in a manner previously thought impossible. First Ceylon, then India and then Israel, gained female Premiers. There was even a spiritual or 'Theosophical' aspect to this. To be part of Annie Besant's Home Rule league was to enter into communion with Mahatmas on the astral (akashic) plane. Then along came a Gujarati mahatama, who performed the miracle of getting Nehru's sister to give up her Muslim husband and content herself with a nice Brahmin boy- which Gandhi obligingly supplied. But for this circumstance, the Nehrus would have been a laughing stock.
In pursuing this imperative, however, postcoloniality is
wanking and hopes someone is watching.
painfully compelled to negotiate the contradictions arising from its indisputable historical belatedness, its post-coloniality, or political and chronological derivation from colonialism, on the one hand, and its cultural obligation to be meaningfully inaugural and inventive on the other.
The thing is as foolish as my claiming to be the real Beyonce.
Thus, its actual moment of arrival—into independence— is predicated upon its ability to successfully imagine and execute a decisive departure from the colonial past. Albert Memmi,
a Jew who very quickly departed Tunisia when it became independent
the Tunisian anti-colonial revolutionary
he was no such thing.
and intellectual,
he taught high school
has argued that the colonial aftermath is fundamentally deluded in its hope that the architecture of a new world will magically emerge from the physical ruins of colonialism.
Yet, that's what happened though no magic was involved. Also, Memmi didn't escape from Tunisia on a flying carpet.
Memmi maintains that the triumphant subjects of this aftermath inevitably underestimate the psychologically tenacious hold of the colonial past on the postcolonial present. In his words: ‘And the day oppression ceases, the new man is supposed to emerge before our eyes immediately. Now, I do not like to say so, but I must, since decolonisation has demonstrated it: this is not the way it happens. The colonised lives for a long time before we see that really new man’ (Memmi 1968, p. 88).
We see new men in power. They speak Arabic, not French. They go to the mosque not the Church or the Freemason's lodge. Memmi couldn't even speak proper Arabic. He spoke a Jewish/Arabic dialect. It was by no means unusual even for genuine Arabs educated at a French high school to be unable to speak the literary form of the language. But even if they left Tunisia when it became independent they remained Tunisian- unless they were Jews.
Memmi’s political pessimism delivers an account of postcoloniality as
similar to my being Beyonce
a historical condition marked by the visible apparatus of freedom
I am free to shake my booty
and the concealed persistence of unfreedom.
I am not free to access Beyonce's bank account.
He suggests that the pathology of this postcolonial limbo between arrival and departure, independence and dependence, has its source in the residual traces and memories of subordination.
Which are like my memories of being Beyonce.
The perverse longevity of the colonised is nourished, in part, by persisting colonial hierarchies of knowledge and value which reinforce what Edward Said calls the ‘dreadful secondariness’ (Said 1989, p. 207) of some peoples and cultures.
In the case of India, you might say that people like Leela Gandhi were encouraged to speak English not Tamil or Gujerati or, worse yet, Hindi. But they were also encouraged to study STEM subjects. If you don't, at least crack the IAS exam. Otherwise you will be condemned to teach shite to cretins.
So also the cosmetic veneer of national independence barely disguises the foundational economic, cultural and political damage inflicted by colonial occupation. Colonisation, as Said argues, is a ‘fate with lasting, indeed grotesquely unfair results’ (1989, p. 207).
Egyptian or Arab Christians have felt so since the Islamic conquest.
In their response to the ambiguities of national independence, writers like Memmi and Said insist that the colonial aftermath does not yield the end of colonialism.
They got the fuck away from their countries of origin quickly enough. Said's dad was an American citizen. I suppose he hoped his son would become a lawyer or merchant banker and make a lot of money. Instead the fool taught literature.
Despite its discouraging tone, this verdict is really framed by the quite benign desire to mitigate the disappointments and failures which accrue from the postcolonial myth of radical separation from Europe.
Rushdie & Memmi rushed off to Europe. Said was more fortunate. He went straight to America.
The prefix ‘post’, as Lyotard has written, elaborates the conviction ‘that it is both possible and necessary to break with tradition and institute absolutely new ways of living and thinking’ (Lyotard 1992, p. 90).
This happened in India. The first president of India had the Viceregal mansion 'purified' with cow-dung. Say what you like about Curzon but a cow-dung fetish wasn't one of his foibles. Lee Kuan Yew records his discomfiture at having to eat with his hand at a dinner hosted by Nehru in the former Commander in Chief's mansion. But at least Indira kept the place clean. The Viceregal mansion was dirty.
Almost invariably, this sort of triumphant utopianism shapes its vision of the future out of the silences and ellipses of historical amnesia.
Nonsense! The thing is shaped by technocrats and 'futurists' who describe what they believe will soon be possible, with the aid of Scientific discoveries which are yet to be made. Sadly, STEM subjects cost money and require brains. Just send your idiot daughter to get a degree in Eng Lit and hope she gets a teaching gig.
It is informed by a mistaken belief in the immateriality and dispensability of the past.
Economics is ergodic. Where there is hysteresis (path-dependence) better mechanism design can get rid of the thing. Lyotard had studied worthless shite.
In Lyotard’s judgment, ‘this rupture is in fact a way of forgetting or repressing the past, that is to say, repeating it and not surpassing it’ (Lyotard 1992, p. 90).
The fool didn't get that Freud was a fraud.
Thus, we might conclude that the postcolonial dream of discontinuity is ultimately vulnerable to the infectious residue of its own unconsidered and unresolved past.
There was the project of a 'united front' against the former Imperial masters who might still have economic hegemony on global markets. But it either succeeded or failed for entirely economic- i.e. ergodic- reasons.
Its convalescence is unnecessarily prolonged on account of its refusal to remember and recognise its continuity with the pernicious malaise of colonisation.
Actually, the real malaise was pre-colonial. That is why Jews and Christians and Hindus were wise to get the fuck away from newly independent Muslim majority lands. On the other hand, an Emirate ruled by sensible people who want their country to get richer is perfectly safe. If they have lower taxes, move there by all means.
If postcoloniality can be described as a condition troubled by the consequences of a self-willed historical amnesia, then
there exists some method of causing amnesia which, if discovered, would be very marketable.
the theoretical value of postcolonialism inheres, in part, in its ability to elaborate the forgotten memories of this condition.
Why do so? If a guy has gone to the trouble and expense of achieving 'self-willed' amnesia, he may well beat the shit out of you if you restore his memory of taking it up the arse from Winston Churchill while drunk off his head.
In other words, the colonial aftermath calls for an ameliorative and therapeutic theory which is responsive to the task of remembering and recalling the colonial past.
Will it get paid for performing that task? No. Still, if you already have tenure in a shite Dept. nobody will stop you from pretending your students could pull down big bucks by psychoanalysing Tunisia. Sadly, it is Algeria which has the oil. Fuck you Algeria! Fuck you very much!
The work of this theory may be compared with what Lyotard describes as the psychoanalytic procedure of anamnesis, or analysis—which urges patients ‘to elaborate their current problems by freely associating apparently inconsequential details with past situations—allowing them to uncover hidden meanings in their lives and their behaviour’ (Lyotard 1992, p. 93).
If you get paid by the hour, make it clear that hour means 45 minutes. Also, please don't soil my couch.
In adopting this procedure, postcolonial theory inevitably commits itself to a complex project of historical and psychological ‘recovery’.
This is what I was trying to do when I asked elderly Punjabi how often Viceroy Sahib had sodomized them. The next step, obviously, would be to re-enact, and thus abreact, the trauma- i.e. I would make a bundle pimping them out to Nigel Farage.
If its scholarly task inheres in the carefully researched retrieval of historical detail, it has an equally compelling political obligation to assist the subjects of postcoloniality to live with the gaps and fissures of their condition, and thereby learn to proceed with self-understanding.
But that was also true of pre-colonality- e.g. Britain before it was colonized by Brussels. What is important is to get people to remember how many times various penises had entered their colons.
Salman Rushdie sheds light on this necessity in a wonderful moment of betrayal and reconciliation in Midnight’s Children, when the anti-hero and narrator, Saleem Sinai, reveals the cultural miscegenation and comic misrecognition of his celebrated birth.
Like Kipling's Kim or Tagore's Gora, he is actually a white dude who previously thought of himself as Indian. Something similar happened to Moses.
Early in the novel, and at the same time as Amina Sinai struggles to produce her child in Dr Narlinkar’s Nursing Home, a poor woman called Vanita suffers a neglected labour in the ‘charity ward’. The child she is about to bear is the unexpected consequence of an affair with an Englishman, William Methwold, who boasts direct descent from a particularly imperialistic East India Company officer. When these children are finally delivered, a somewhat crazed midwife called Mary Pereira
in love with a Communist. She thinks swapping the babies is a blow against the Class system.
switches Amina’s and Vanita’s babies around. Thus, Saleem Sinai, hailed by Nehru himself as the child of independent India, is really the son of a reluctantly departing coloniser.
While the Hindu cop is actually a Muslim who should have fucked off to Pakistan.
But this accident, as the adult Saleem insists, is the allegorical condition of all those who inherit the colonial aftermath: ‘In fact, all over the new India, the dream we all shared, children were being born who were only partially the offspring of their parents’ (Rushdie 1982, p. 118).
This is crazy shit. The parents of some of 'Midnight's children' would have had to pick them up and run for the border precisely because there was no shared dream. Rushdie was British and Pakistani. He couldn't claim an Indian passport because his father emigrated.
In his digressive self-narration, Saleem Sinai simultaneously refuses the guilt of unauthenticity and the desire to withhold the knowledge of his flawed genealogy. The Sinais, we are told, eventually reconcile themselves to the fact of Methwold’s bloodline, namely, to the hybrid inadequacies of their own postcoloniality. As Saleem explains: ‘when we eventually discovered the crime of Mary Pereira, we all found that it made no difference! I was still their son: they remained my parents. In a kind of collective failure of imagination, we learned that we simply could not think our way out of our pasts . . .’ (Rushdie 1982, p. 118).
Which is why Rushdie's family didn't emigrate to Pakistan. The plain fact is, they had a son and heir. Also, he was half European. That's a good thing. Europeans are hella smart.
We might modify this narrative wisdom slightly to say that, perhaps, the only way out is by thinking, rigorously, about our pasts.
And discovering that Winston Churchill sodomized our ancestors.
Postcolonial re-membering In his comments on Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, the postcolonial critic, Homi Bhabha,
A literature Professor from Bombay. He is a Zoroastrian- i.e. descended from people who ran away from Iran because of Muslim persecution. His people did very well under the Brits.
As for Fanon, the only comment I will make is that his country, Martinique, decided to retain its link with France. It has done very well. Haiti, on the other hand, is a shithole.
announces that memory is the necessary and sometimes hazardous bridge between colonialism and the question of cultural identity.
This simply isn't true. Zoroastrian 'cultural identity' was maintained by its own priests and savants. Colonialism meant they grew richer and thus could devote more resources to this project. Independence made no difference to them. Socialism did. More and more of their smartest young people moved abroad. So did some cretins like Homo.
Remembering, he writes, ‘is never a quiet act of introspection or retrospection. It is a painful re-membering, a putting together of the dismembered past to make sense of the trauma of the present’ (Bhabha 1994, p. 63).
Nonsense! It is something we have difficulty with because we drink too much. Also, if the present is traumatic, either move to some other place or get professional help of some sort. Remembering shit won't help you any.
Bhabha’s account of the therapeutic agency of remembering is built upon the maxim that memory is the submerged and constitutive bedrock of conscious existence.
It isn't. Computers have memory. So do we. The thing is useful at times.
While some memories are accessible to consciousness, others, which are blocked and banned—sometimes with good reason—perambulate the unconscious in dangerous ways, causing seemingly inexplicable symptoms in everyday life.
There is zero scientific proof that such is the case. Trauma does however have a statistically significant effect. Indeed, it can persist at the epigenetic level for a couple of generations.
Such symptoms, as we have seen, can best be relieved when the analyst—or, in Bhabha’s case the theorist— releases offending memories from their captivity.
This is magical thinking. Still, it is true that everybody recovered their memories of my being Beyonce, I'd be as rich as fuck.
The procedure of analysis–theory, recommended here, is guided by Lacan’s ironic reversal of the Cartesian cogito, whereby the rationalistic truth of ‘I think therefore I am’ is rephrased in the proposition: ‘I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think’ (Lacan 1977, p. 166).
Then people discovered that medication can work wonders. Paying a shrink is money thrown down the drain.
In the process of forging the reparative continuity between cultural identity and the historical past, the theorist/analyst is also required to recognise the qualitative difference between two types of amnesia. The mind, as both Freud and Lacan maintain, engages in either the better known neurotic ‘repression’—Verdrängung—of memory; or, and more devastatingly in its psychotic ‘repudiation’—Verwerfung (see Bowie 1991, pp. 107–9).
If you are stuck teaching Eng Lit even the very boring life of a psychoanalyst seems preferable. Also, those guys get paid a lot- right? Look at Frazier Crane and his brother Nils.
If the activity of Verdrängung censors and thereby disguises a vast reservoir of painful memories, the deceptions of Verwerfung tend to transform the troublesome past into a hostile delirium.
No they don't. The fact is, to get a sheepskin in a non-STEM subject you have to repress the urge to cry out 'all this is utter nonsense!' But that's not what turns your brain to shit. It is the fact that you studied shit and are now teaching shit and reading shit produced by your shithead colleagues. 'Hostile delirium' is not a bug, it is a feature of the system from which you earn your bread.
The memories and images expelled through the violence of repudiation enter into what Lacan describes as a reciprocal and ‘symbolic opposition to the subject’ (Lacan 1977, p. 217).
This is certainly true of turds. They are a reciprocal and symbolic opposition to each other till you pull the flush.
These phantasmic memories thus become simultaneously alien, antagonistic and unfathomable to the suffering self. To a large extent, the colonial aftermath combines the obfuscations of both Verdrängung and Verwerfung.
Because these nutters ascribe such obfuscations to all minds.
Its unwillingness to remember what Bhabha describes as the painful and humiliating ‘memory of the history of race and racism’ (Bhabha 1994, p. 63)
the Parsis remember this well enough. To their credit they tried to help their co-religionists still stuck in Iran.
is matched by its terrified repudiation and utopian expulsion of this past.
I can think of no Parsi of whom this is true. Homo must be about the same age as Kobad Gandhi or Jairus Banaji. They carry on the tradition of Dadabhai Naoroji dwelling on evils inflicted on India by the Brits. Yet, it was only thanks to the Brits that they rose up.
In response, the theoretical re-membering of the colonial condition is called upon to fulfil two corresponding functions. The first, which Bhabha foregrounds as the simpler disinterment of unpalatable memories, seeks to uncover the overwhelming and lasting violence of colonisation.
Violence costs money. The Brits were careful about money. Save in settler colonies, there was little violence and it didn't last long at all.
The second is ultimately reconciliatory in its attempt to make the hostile and antagonistic past more familiar and therefore more approachable.
It was already not just approachable but hugely enjoyable in the stories of Kipling.
The fulfilment of this latter project requires that the images expelled by the violence of the postcolonial Verwerfung be reclaimed and owned again.
This too had already been done. We understand that the Brits weren't horrible beasts. Still, like Dr. Tharoor, we may have to pretend otherwise if we serve the Dynasty which replaced the Windsors.
This is, of course, another way of saying that postcoloniality has to be made to concede its part or complicity in the terrors—and errors—of its own past.
There is no such need. Indians don't go around apologizing for the Black Hole of Calcutta- which, in any case, they assume is a reference to a portion of Mamta's anatomy.
In Sara Suleri’s words: ‘To tell the history of another
like Gibbon writing of ancient Rome?
is to be pressed against the limits of one’s own—thus culture learns that terror has a local habitation and a name’ (Suleri 1992, p. 2).
Gibbon understood that Pitt the Elder was probably raping his own sister. Would he also demand that his horse be given a seat in the House of Lords? I suppose so.
Thus, we might conclude that the forgotten content of postcoloniality effectively reveals the story of an ambivalent and symbiotic relationship between coloniser and colonised.
Gandhi couldn't have been buggered senseless if Winston and he hadn't had a relationship which, I suppose, might be called symbiotic. At a later time, Gandhi was constantly receiving and administering enemas. This is because the sly subaltern, Winston, had fucked off back to Blighty.
Accordingly, the reparative proddings of
Gandhi's rectum?
postcolonial theory/analysis are most successful when they are able to illuminate the contiguities and intimacies which underscore the stark violence and counter-violence of the colonial condition.
Winston whispered sweet nothings in Gandhi's ear. Sadly, he refused to perform a reach-around. That's why Gandhi became a seditionist.
Albert Memmi has argued that the lingering residue of colonisation will only decompose if, and when, we are willing to acknowledge the reciprocal behaviour of the two colonial partners.
When Memmi was young, Christians were the biggest threat to Jews. Muslims had often been their protectors. That would change.
The colonial condition, he writes, ‘chained the coloniser and the colonised into an implacable dependence, moulded their respective characters and dictated their conduct’ (Memmi 1968, p. 45).
Memmi had witnessed the Nazi occupation of France. But it didn't 'mould' shit.
Memmi’s predication of this perverse mutuality between oppressor and oppressed is really an attempt to understand the puzzling circulation of desire around the traumatic scene of oppression.
i.e. at what point did Gandhi start enjoying Winston's attentions?
The desire of the coloniser for the colony is transparent enough,
Not really. Save in settler colonies, the coloniser wanted money. Most didn't want to die of dysentery in a shithole. Moreover, few wanted to rape the inhabitants. British rule in India has left little in the way of a genetic footprint.
but how much more difficult it is to account for the inverse longing of the colonised.
Tell lies. That isn't difficult at all. Say 'Gandhi began to long for Winston's dick up his bum-hole. That's why he attended the Second Round Table Conference'.
How, as Memmi queries, ‘could the colonised deny himself so cruelly
why didn't Gandhi demand to be sodomized by Winston in return for accepting the Cripps Plan? How could he deny himself so cruelly?
. . . How could he hate the colonisers and yet admire them so passionately?’ (1968, p. 45)
This is easily done. You hate the guy who whupped your sorry ass. You passionately admire his strength and valour. This is Girardian 'mimetic desire'. Sadly, the 'pharmakos' scapegoat is likely to be the Jew or some other religious minority. Peter Navarro, Trump's trade advisor, is now blaming Hindu Brahmins (like Vivek Ramaswamy?) for Ukraine's suffering.
This situation of hate and desire described by Memmi poses a problem for ‘oppositional’ postcolonial theory,
Nonsense! Just point out that the fellow is a Jew and no more will be said about the matter even if what he had said was sensible.
which scavenges the colonial past for what Benita Parry describes as an ‘implacable enmity between native and invader’ (Parry 1987, p. 32).
Like pretending that the Nehru dynasty had been fighting the Brits when they served John Company as vakils. The Mahatma, too, started off as a loyalist who tried to recruit soldiers for the Great War.
The aim of this combative project is to promote, in Parry’s words, ‘the construction of a politically conscious, unified revolutionary Self, standing in unmitigated opposition to the oppressor’ (p. 30).
Nothing wrong in that. It's like saying 'nice to see you' when it isn't really nice at all.
In fact, the colonial archive mitigates these simple dichotomies through its disclosure of the complicating logic and reciprocity of desire.
Sadly, colonial archives aren't about desires. They are about stuff that happened and how much it cost.
It shows that the colonised’s predicament is, at least partly, shaped and troubled by the compulsion to return a voyeuristic gaze upon Europe.
Is Macron sodomizing Starmer? No? Fuck voyeurism then.
How should we as theorists respond to this gaze?
If a voyeuristic gaze is being turned on Europe you might phone Starmer and ask him nicely to let Macron mount him in some public place.
How does it fit into the theoretical economy of combat and enmity?
If your PhD is in Eng Lit, nobody gives a fuck about your 'theoretical economy'. You are useless. Also if you aren't a Psychiatrist, you have no business talking of schizophrenia.
There is a savage account of such postcolonial schizophrenia in Vikram Seth's novel, A Suitable Boy (1.993). The impossibly home-grown, or desi, shoemaker hero, Haresh,
who has an English diploma. He isn't home-grown. Also he attended St. Stephen's College which was considered more Anglicized than the equally good Hindu College, Leela attended.
is attempting to impress his suitability upon the heroine's obnoxious Anglophile brother;
he works for a British company. He is a brown 'box wallah'- i.e. a business executive. Under the Raj, they ranked below Civil Servants and Army officers.
Arun Mehra, who has just been holding forth about the singular joys of Hamely's toy shop. Mehra claims to know the exact location of Hamley's, 'on Regent Street, not far from Jaeger's'. And yet, when Haresh of the brown-and-white co-respondent shoes-politely inquires when the Mehras were last in the imperial capital, we discover that they have never been to London.
This is a mistake on Vikram's part. British companies sent junior staff for a spot of training (i.e. cheap labour) in London. That's why Satyajit Ray was able to spend time in London watching a lot of films.
There is an awful pause, long enough for our readerly sympathies to attach themselves firmly on the side of the shoemaker, before Arun splutters, .but of course we're going in a few months time'.
That may have been Leela's reaction. It wasn't mine. The fact is, because of the War and foreign exchange restrictions, there were a lot of people who hadn't yet been to London for the 'home leave' granted them under their contract of employment. Having studied the geography of its streets showed you were a careful planner. You mention when your office can spare you for your holiday and show you are determined to make the most of your opportunity. Indians like that methodical approach. It suggests professional competence. Moreover, one perk given to many box-wallahs was to have their kid's school fees in England paid by the company. Thus what Arun should have mentioned was that while in England they would be looking at suitable schools for their kids. Indians still respect the British education system. The moment you mention your plans for your children, Indians feel you are a good person. No harm in saying 'I don't want my boy to go to Winchester and thus turning into a boring math maven. I want him to go to Harrow. That way he will find plenty of school chums if he is ever sent to jail for embezzlement. Of course, if the fellow is destined for the lunatic asylum, Eton is the only place for him.'
Seth's harsh satire on the Arun Mehras exploits the stigma of unauthenticity which haunts the 'Orient's' longing for its conquering other.
No it doesn't. We get that Mehra works for a British Company. If his employer was Marwari, he would be chewing paan and quoting Tulsi Das.
And yet, there is a pathos even in the Mehras' excessive Anglophilia.
Nope. Arun's father died before he could scale the heights of the Railway Service. (I think this was the 'compassionate' reason Vikram's mother was given a clerical job by the Railways). Arun had become the man of the house. He had fallen on his feet. From the Bengali point of view, he had married very well. Thus he could provide for his younger brother. Since the chap cracks the IAS we know the elder brother will soon have to be very obsequious to that drunken fool.
Homi Bhaba might say
he might indeed say stupid shit because he genuinely was and is as stupid as shit. Studying and then teaching Eng Lit can do that to you more particularly if you come to hate the subject
that they are ideologically interpellated
neither has any fucking ideology. One guy is in the shoe business. The other works for a Managing Agency. Currently, Arun has seniority. But, very soon, the box-wallah will have to crawl to the IAS man. The reason Indians don't like Arun is that it is his duty as the senior male of the family to be very polite and humble to any prospective brother-in-law. To omit this courtesy is irreligious. It is hubris. It may draw disaster down on the family. What if the sister elopes with a Muslim? Only Mahatma Gandhi could perform the miracle of dissolving such marriages and arranging a 'suitable' boy. Sadly, Gandhi had been shot.
by the restrictive confinement of knowledge and value to the sovereign map of Europe.
Maps are not sovereign. The point about some Western European nations is that they managed to extract a lot of knowledge and value from Asia and Africa and America.
The Europe they know and value so intimately is always elsewhere.
Not always. Haresh has been there. Arun will go there. Neither knows or values it very greatly. That's why they aren't quoting European poetry to each other.
Its reality is infinitely deferred, always withheld from them.
Nonsense! It was no more withheld from them than it was withheld from Nehru- the last Englishman to rule India.
Worse still, their questing pursuit of European plenitude, their desire to own the coloniser's world,
Haresh was bitterly disappointed when he wasn't allowed to buy Buckingham Palace. He was offered Belgium for the same price but he told the Queen Gor-bless-'er to stick it where the sun don't shine.
requires a simultaneous disowning of the world which has been colonised.
Why? The Brits didn't disown even Lancashire when they colonised a goodly chunk of the Earth's habitable territory.
Arun Mehra can only sustain his apprentice brown-sahibship by speaking in the language of his conquerors.
India was independent. There were no fucking conquerors. Mehra spoke English because he had been educated in the English medium- as had Haresh.
A hard day in the office produces the following ruminations: 'The British knew how to run things . they worked hard and they played hard. They believed in command and so did he.... what was wrong with this country was a lack of initiative. All the Indians wanted was a safe job. Bloody pen pushers, the whole lot of them' (Seth 1993, p. 422).
This is funny because by the end of the novel we know Arun will have to bow and scrape to pen-pushers in Delhi. It is his younger brother who will 'command'.
And so Arun Mehra loses the respect of his author and his readers
because some Parsi dude is ploughing his wife
A more sympathetic gloss on the Mehras might suggest that
they need to socialize with Brits and upper class, Anglicized, Bengalis so that hubby gets promoted. If the dude works for a Marwari concern, wifey would be singing bhajans with the Sethni.
their postcolonial investment in Europe
they have none. Like Brits back then, Arun believes 'wogs begin at Calais'.
is also accompanied by a progressive, and ultimately crippling, loss of 'home'..
Nonsense! The wife is Bengali and is living near her parents in Calcutta. There are plenty of Khattris in the city. Nobody feels crippled by lack of masala dosa or chole bhatura or whatever. Calcutta caters well for its large migrant population.
_ In an early poem called 'Diwali', Seth offers a literary preamble to the Mehras
the family as a whole- maybe. But not Mr and Mrs Arun Mehra. The wife is Bengali. Kali Puja, not Diwali, will be celebrated.
through a considerably more sympathetic self-portrait (Seth 1994). This poem too considers the deleterious effects of a colonial education-
Seth was educated in independent India and then a Britain still independent of Brussels.
but with a greater sense of the irresistible literary and cultural temptations of Europe.
Fuck that. It is the Indian climate which is unbearable.
Its ambivalent apotheosis to 'Englishness' enacts
nothing. There can't be an apotheosis to anything. There can only be the apotheosis of something.
what Áshis Nandy has eloquently described as the 'intimate enomiťy' of the colonial condition (Nandy, 1983).
i.e. Winston sodomizing Mahatma Gandhi
Seth's poem is spoken from a
place of nostalgia. It is universal because almost every family- save for the very aristocratic or the veritable scum of the earth- has seen great changes over the last few generations.
cultural crossing where the privileges and passions attached to the magic of 'English' literature are constantly undone and unworked by an underlying sense of cultural transgression.
Nonsense! English literature supplanted Persian literature. What continued was caste based endogamy. That's where 'transgression' came in. Could Mummy find Vikram a 'suitable boy'? Not as the law then stood.
This is the poem-
Diwali by Vikram Seth.Three years of neurotic
Guy Fawkes Days– I recall
That lonely hankering–
But I am home after all.
Home. These walls, this sky
Splintered with wakes of light,
These mud-lamps beaded round
The eaves, this festive night.
These streets, these voices… yet
The old insensate dread,
Abeyant as that love,
Once more shifts in my head.
Five? six? generations ago
Somewhere in the Punjab
My father’s family, farmers,
Perhaps had a small shop
And two generations later
Could send a son to school
To gain the conqueror’s
Authoritarian seal:
English! Six-armed god,
Key to a job, to power,
Snobbery, the good life,
This separateness, this fear.
English: beloved language
Of Johnson, Wordsworth’s tongue–
These my ‘meridian names’
Whose grooves I crawl along.
You may try to crawl along those lines. But you have to have something to say. Banging on about your Kaka and your Mama and Too Too & Soo Soo simply isn't enough.
The Moghuls fought and ruled
And settled. Even while
They hungered for musk-melon,
Rose, peach, nightingale,
The land assumed their love.
At sixty they could not
Retire westwards.
Made us the Orient.
How could an Englishman say
About the divan-e-khas,
‘If there is heaven on earth
It is this; it is this; it is this.’
Macaulay the prophet of learning
Chewed at his pen: one taste
Of Western wisdom ‘surpasses
All the books of the East,’
And Kalidas, Shankaracharya,
Panini, Bhaskar, Kabir,
Surdas sank, and we welcomed
The reign of Shakespeare,
The undigested Hobbes,
The Mill who later ground
(Through talk of liberty)
The Raj out of the land…
O happy breed of Babus,
I march on with your purpose;
We will have railways, common law
And a good postal service–
And as I twist along
Those grooves from image to image,
Violet, elm-tree, swan,
Pork-pie, gable, scrimmage
And as we title our memoirs
‘Roses in December’
Though we well know that here
Roses grow in December
And as we import songs
Composed in the U.S.
For Vietnam (not even
Our local horrors grip us)
We don't do this. Maybe Dosco boys did so when Vikram was young. We did however import Pakistani qawwalis and ghazals in the Seventies.
And as, over gin at the Club,
I note that egregious member
Strut just perceptibly more
When with a foreigner,
I know that the whole world
Means exile for our breed
Who are not at home at home
And are abroad abroad,
Huddled in towns, while around:
‘He died last week. My boys
Are starving. Daily we dig
The ground for sweet potatoes.’
‘The landlord’s hirelings broke
My husband’s ribs– and I
Grow blind in the smoke of the hearth.’
‘Who will take care of me
When I am old? No-one
Is left.’ So it goes on,
The cyclic shadow-play
Under the sinister sun;
Because guys like Vikram who studied Econ prefer to gas on in a sentimental vein. Productivity is the other side of the coin of Utilitarianism. Sadly, the Brahmos never grasped this. The preferred Sen-tentious Sen-timentality. Sikh economists- Minhas, Manmohan, Montek- were a different kettle of fish.
That sun that, were there water,
Could bless the dispirited land,
Coaxing three crops a year
From this same yieldless ground.
Yet would these parched wraiths still
Starve in their ruins,
Into fat cocoons’? Sad soil,
This may as well be my home.
Because no other nation
Moves me thus? What of that?
Cause for congratulation?
No. This is a shit poem. You'd better get the fuck out of India before your style deteriorates any further.
This may as well be my home;
I am too used to the flavor
Of tenuous fixity;
I have been brought to savour
Its phases: the winter wheat–
The flowers of Har-ki-Doon–
The sal forests– the hills
Inflamed with rhododendron–
The first smell of the Rain
On the baked earth– the peaks
Snow-drowned in permanence–
The single mountain lakes.
What if my tongue is warped?
I need no words to gaze
At Ajanta, those flaked caves,
Or at the tomb of Mumtaz;
And, when an alap of Marwa
Swims on slow flute-notes over
The neighbours’ roofs at sunset,
Wordlessly like a lover
It holds me– till the strain
Of exile, here, or there,
Subverts the trance, the fear
Of fear found everywhere.
‘But freedom?’ the notes would sing…
Parole is enough. Tonight
Below the fire-crossed sky
Of the Festival of Light
Give your soul leave to feel
What distilled peace it can;
In lieu of joy, at least
This lapsing anodyne.
‘The world is a bridge. Pass over it,
Building no house upon it.’
Hasan of Basra attributed this saying to Jesus. He also proposed marriage to Rabia. She told him to sling his hook. Sad.
Acceptance may come with time;
Rest, then, disquieted heart.
Traversing the genealogy of a Puniabi family from rural
idiocy- as Marx says
self-sufficiency
they weren't self-sufficient. They were traders who had to pay tax for protection.
to colonised civility 'Diwali' chronicles the effort it takes for six generations of Punjabi peasants to finally gain 'the conqueror's authoritarian seal', by sending 'a son to school' (Serh 1,994 [1981], p. 64).
He says it was two generations. But plenty of successful Seths had no formal education. I suppose the family wanted a son in the Civil Service because it raised the family's status and might afford them some influence with the authorities.
Suddenly, family history is rewritten as a faltering generational progress into coloniality.
into learned professions or Government service of some type. But this would also be true of plenty of English or French or Irish people. Indeed, the Irish Catholic had a lot more to complain of.
The crisis turns on the paradox that what is eminently desirable through Englishnsss-'a iob . . . power'
was better and more rewardingly achieved by going to jail during the Independence 'struggle'.
is also, and at the same time, rendered utterly undesirable, once again, through the taint of 'snobbery, the good life' (1,994 [1981], p. 65)
The Revenue Minister's sons have no use for snobbery. They will get the good life even if they shoot their former lover because they believe he is fucking their mistress. Since the fellow happens to be Muslim, it follows that the only person he really wants to fuck is his half-sister who is the daughter of the mistress. Still, if Daddy is a Minister, sonny boy will be acquitted. Killing Muslims was one sure way to rise in Bihari politics of the period. Throw in a Dalit or two and you'd be in clover.
Likewise, and perhaps more painfully, the etymology of the language that is loved so intimately by the poet belongs elsewhere and at a distance,
Nonsense! India was well provided with etymological dictionaries.
to another-sometimes hostile and abusive-'tongue'. This younger Seth ponders the impossibility of crawling, willingly, beside the 'meridian names' of the English poets Jonson, .Wordsworth', in the face of. Macaulay's prophesy: 'one taste / Of 'Western wisdom "surpasses / All the books of the East"'
I suppose this is an early work. I believe Donald Davies at Stanford helped Vikram improve his style. The problem is that his bigotry keeps getting in his way.
Herein lies the faultline of what Seth describes as the 'separateness' and 'fear' [1981], p. 65) attached to the self-conscious acquisition of English.
He was sent to English medium schools. There was nothing self-conscious about it. Chinese he acquired self-consciously. Sadly, he didn't become a billionaire by using his knowledge of Chinese, Hindi and Economics.
To speak in the desired way is, from now on, to also learn how to speak against oneself.
To pretend to do so as though one really were a wealthy Seth who could personally lift up thousands of very poor people.
It is to concede, as Seth does toward the end of this poem, that his 'tongue is warped' (1,994 [1981], p. 68).
He doesn't say that. He says his heart is disquieted. Some fear grips him. Does it have something to do with a dumb cat burglar? Perhaps.
In his book 'The intimate Enemy, Ashis Nandy
whose family converted to Christianity and did things useful to the Nation- e.g. work for the YMCA
adapts Foucault's analysis of power to "account for the particularly deleterious consequences of the Colonial Encounter'.
i.e. the existence of the Bengali bhadralok. Sadly, there was no actual intimacy between Indian Christians and Europeans. The prayed together. They slept apart.
Nandy's book builds on an interesting, if somewhat contentious, distinction between two chronologically distinct types or genres of colonialism.
In India there was only one type. Territorial expansion and the attempt to make conquered territory cheaper to administer and to garrison. From the 1880's onwards there was a divergence of views as to whether this meant the aim was to make India fully self-governing and self-administering. By about 1909, this view prevailed and was put into action after the Great War.
The first, he argues, was relatively simple-minded in its focus on the physical conquest of territory-
General Slim had to reconquer Burma, Malaysia etc. But the game wasn't worth the candle.
whereas the second was more insidious in its commitment to the conquest and occupation of minds, selves, cultures.
It didn't exist. Christian missionaries wanted to spread their religion. That's why they became great champions of vernacular languages. Nandy is pretending his family was very intimate with Britishers who, all appearances to the contrary, turned their souls and minds white- even if their skin colour remained the same.
If the first bandit-mode of colonialialism was more violent,
Wavell used plenty of violence to put down the Quit India disturbances. But, that's also why he wanted the Brits to get the fuck out of the beastly place.
it was also, as Nandy insists, transparent in its self-interest, greed and rapacity.
Indian politicians and their families show none of these traits- right? On the other hand it is true that there was no notion of hierarchy in India before Europeans got there. There were no castes or religions or distinct genders. It was the British Census which forced Indians to choose between having a dick or a vagina. Previously you could have both. I suppose if you have to teach Jane Austen and can't pee standing up, you too may hope for a 'Postcolonial Theory' which erases the hierarchical distinction between STEM subjects and useless shite. Also, for peeing purposes, penises would be readily available to the fair sex. Meanwhile, the least a Professor of Eng Lit can do is to hold the hand of nations populated by darkies so they can acknowledge previously repressed memories of all their ancestors being sodomized by evil Viceroys.
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