Welcome dear participants.
In the previous module, we have discussed
the theoretical beginnings of the postcolonial
theory.
In today's module, we would start a discussion
about the key concepts and would also incorporate
the major contributions of certain theorists.
The key concepts are here.
The first concept which I would discuss is
the concept of othering.
The concept of othering is based on binary
opposition which we have discussed in detail
during our discussions on postmodernism.
As Said has talked about the concept of othering
in his book on orientalism.
This is an issue of racial othering.
The binary based on racial hierarchies, the
white and the black, the West and the East,
the European and the non-European always providing
a place of privilege to the West.
So based on the white supremacy discourse,
the colonized others are seen as heathens,
savages, intellectually inferior who have
to be saved somehow.
So colonies are seen as being devoid of rationality,
culture and society and the ideology of White
Man's Burden was used to justify colonial
exploitation, domination and expansion also.
This poem by Rudyard Kipling on the White
Man's Burden brings up this idea very clearly
when he says that a particular colonized person
is like a half devil and half child who has
to take up the White Man's burden in patience
to abide to veil the threat of terror and
check the show of pride.
The sorrow and trauma of a colonized person
has been very successively presented in this
poem by Rudyard Kipling.
The literature of the colonizers has traditionally
infantilized the colonized and presented them
as either exotic or demonic characters.
We can take the example from Shakespeare's
play, The Tempest, where the Prospero and
Caliban controversy is one of the best examples
of it.
Whereas Caliban has been presented simultaneously
as an exotic as well as a demonic character.
The similar has been the portrayal of the
natives in the Heart of Darkness by Conrad
and the Character of Friday, in Robinson Crusoe.
Edward Said in his treatise has taken up Foucault's
discourse analysis to explore the power/knowledge
dynamics in the production and dissemination
of oriental stereotypes.
The orientalist stereotypes are based on how
the West perceives the Eastern people to be.
According to them in their own assumptions
and stereotypes, the orient is timeless.
It is exotic.
It is morally and sexually lax.
It is irrational, it is heathen and therefore,
it has to be saved.
And saving them is the burden of the White
man.
So we find that this concept of othering ultimately
is also interlinked with other key concepts
of the postcolonial ideology.
Another aspect which is very important to
understand for us is the idea of diaspora.
Diasporic studies are also an independent
field of study but is a part of postcolonial
theories, their implications have to be understood.
The term diaspora etymologically has been
taken from a Greek word diaspeiro which means
scattering, dispersion.
And this very word brings up a very keen and
sharp kinesic image before us that of a villager
scattering the seeds in order to plant them.
It refers to the displacement of the people,
dispersion of the people from their homelands.
Historically the earliest use of the term
is found in the Bible where it refers to the
Jews dispersion recorded in the Old Testament.
Later on we find that during the colonial
role, it was the endangered labor and the
transatlantic slave trade which resulted in
the mass and forced diasporic migration of
people.
The widespread migration in the second half
of the 20th century was also a result of globalization
and the aftermath of the colonial rule sometimes
in search of a better education, sometimes
in search of a better life, sometimes to escape
the poverty created by the colonized role.
Critics define a diasporic population as one
that gets displaced voluntarily or involuntarily
from their native lands, their countries and
are united by their collective memory of the
myths and cultures and the language of the
homeland.
The Oxford English Dictionary shows that the
first recorded usage of the word diaspora
in English was in 1876 where it referred to
the “extensive diaspora work of evangelizing”.
The term became widely assimilated by the
1950s with long-term expatriates in significant
numbers moving from one country to other and
also erstwhile colonies came to be referred
to as people of diasporic origin.
An academic field, Diaspora Studies, has become
established relating to this sense of the
word.
If we have to understand the characteristics
of Diaspora, we have to refer to critics like
William Safran and others.
Diasporic people share a desire to return
to the homeland and this desire is often characterized
by a nostalgic memory of the homeland.
The mythicization of the homeland as a desirable
place sometimes remains a utopia only and
it is also possible that they do not actually
move back to their own country of origin but
this type of a desire, a utopia that the homeland
is the desirable place always exercises as
a pull.
So this imaginary home is a place of no return
in fact, a place within the diasporic imagination
as several literary critics have also shown
in their creative and critical works.
Even physical return to the homeland is not
a return to the place of origin as the diasporic
identity is constituted as a product of the
influences of the host culture and the native
culture or the home culture.
In the context of Indian diaspora, we find
that the historical roads of diasporic population
go back to several centuries.
Even in the prehistorical times or rather
those times about the history of which we
do not have very clear records, we find that
the diasporic movement had taken place.
The Buddhist monks had travelled to various
other countries, various kingdoms particularly
in the south had relationships marital and
military relationships with various other
countries.
However, we find that the recorded and documented
diasporic movement of Indian people begins
as early as the 11th century when there was
a large scale exportation of Indian slaves
to the Central Asia.
Unlike the transatlantic slave trade, the
trade of Indian slaves is not very keenly
documented but still there are enough historical
documents to support this claim.
So India has been a main supplier of slaves
till 17th century.
This policy of exporting Indian slaves to
the Central Asia was followed by the Turks,
by the Afghans and also by the earlier Mughal
rulers of India.
It was only during the reign of Shah Jahan
that there was an official attempt to stop
the export of Indian Slaves and gradually
we find that it petered out towards the last
stage of the Mughal era.
During the British time, we find that the
land settlement and oppressive revenue collection
had made peasants lose their lands to landlords
and it resulted into another practice which
was called as indentured labour.
We find that in the international scenario,
the movement of Indian diaspora, the movement
of Indian slaves and labourers was also marked
by the fact that the slavery as a custom was
officially abolished in 1843.
And there was a need of supply of cheap labour
on plantations in other British colonies like
Mauritius, Guyana, the West Indies and Fiji
as well as in other European colonies including
colonies in West Africa, Peru and Cuba.
So Indian labour substituted the newly liberated
African slaves in these countries and the
British Empire started the tradition or the
custom of contract labor or the wage labor.
So as an outcome we find that hordes and hordes
of Indian people were sent forcibly or sometimes
they were lured and entrapped to take up these
type of contracts either by the circumstances
because they were so poor.
Now the system of contract and wage labor
was introduced by the British government.
And sometimes people were sent forcibly and
sometimes they were entrapped because they
had lost their land and they were poor.
So we find that the diasporic movement is
very well recorded and we can trace the diasporic
movement of states from Tamil Nadu and Andhra
Pradesh to Burma, Malaysia and Sri Lanka.
From Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, we find that
the diasporic movement had been to fifteen
British, French and Dutch colonies primarily.
And from Punjab, we find that the Sikhs and
Muslims went to East Africa what is known
as Uganda now.
So we find that the indentured labour, this
custom which was started after the abolition
of slavery in America, continued till 1917
and it was only when the World Wars started,
then this system was finished because the
empire at the time needed Indian soldiers
and not the Indian slaves.
So we find that all these actions were taken
up by the colonized powers in order to serve
their own interest.
And the interest of the colonized people were
never taken into for granted.
Under the postcolonial theory, there is an
attempt to rewrite the history to understand
the exploitation of the colonized people,
we find that there is a tendency to talk about
these aspects of cultural memories.
Among the main theorists, we find that along
with Fanon, Edward Said, Spivak, there are
also writers like Bhabha, Vijay Mishra and
Stuart Hall who have contributed mainly to
our understandings of postcolonial theory.
There are several literary writers also who
we can list over here.
Particularly I would say Naipaul, Bharati
Mukherjee, Meena Alexander, Kiran Desai, Jhumpa
Lahiri, Chitra Devakaruni, etc.
When we talk about the key concepts, another
key concept is double consciousness.
This concept has been formulated by W.E.B
Du Bois and the concept of double consciousness
resonates with the ideas of Frantz Fanon when
he talked about the divided self or the fragmented
self.
Fanon has talked about the consequences of
identity formation by a colonized person.
He had said that a colonized person because
of an ingrained shame in his personality,
his traumatic experiences of inferiority and
similar complexes tries to learn the values
of the colonizers.
And he tries to understand their language,
their cultures, their values, their way of
life.
But ultimately it remains like a mask which
covers the uncivilized nature which is indexed
by the black skin of the people.
Fanon has said that a man is expected to behave
like a man but he was expected to behave like
a black man.
So the equality is never accepted in our behaviour
between the colonizer and the colonized people.
This idea has been presented for the first
time documented very well by Frantz Fanon
in his book Black Skin, White Masks published
in 1952, A Dying Colonialism in 1959, and
The Wretched of the Earth in 1961.
So we find that Fanon had started this idea
of double consciousness.
Du Bois has described double consciousness
as, “two souls, two thoughts in one dark
body”, which later on Meena Alexander altered
as, “many souls, many thoughts in one dark
body”, pointing out the fact that a migrant's
experience is multiple and the subject positions
are also multiple.
So when these writers talk about the psychological
effects of colonialism on the colonized, the
objectification of a person simply on the
basis of one's skin colour which leads to
an identity crisis among the dark skin colonized
people.
Then Meena Alexander and Du Bois have talked
about two souls and many souls.
So these ideas ultimately formulate the basis
of various themes in the writings of postcolonial
writers like Naipaul, Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh,
Walcott and others.
Another major term which is used in postcolonial
theory is the Subaltern.
The word was introduced by Gramsci to refer
to the working class.
The lexical meaning of Subaltern is of a person
who belongs to a lower status or a low ranking
military official.
This term was popularized later on by Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak in her 1985 essay, Can
the Subaltern Speak?
Her essay was a critique of the work of those
theorists who constituted the subaltern studies
group namely Ranajit Guha, Dipesh Chakravarty
and Shahid Amin among others.
She has criticized the extensive use of European
theorists like Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari
in formulations on postcolonial issues and
wonders about the authenticity of the subaltern
speech, the ways in which subaltern resistance
and protest can be appropriated by various
discourses.
She also thinks that the subaltern talk does
not achieve the dialogic level of utterance
because the act of speech is not completed
till it is heard.
So she asks the question further, who speaks
for the Subaltern?
Spivak insists that the word subaltern is
not just a classy word for the oppressed,
for other, for somebody who is not getting
"the piece of pie."
She points out that in Gramsci's original
covert usage it signified “proletarian”.
And we have to remember that Gramsci was sending
his writings out of the prison.
So he used to encrypt his own writings so
that they could pass through the boundaries
of the jail.
So in his original writings, Spivak has correctly
pointed out the use of the word subaltern
has been there for the proletarian.
A person whose voice could not be heard, who
is being structurally written out of the capitalist
bourgeois narrative.
In postcolonial terms, as she says in her
interview with de Kock, "everything that has
limited or no access to the cultural imperialism
is subaltern”.
It is a space of difference.
Now who would say that's just the oppressed?
The working class is oppressed.
It's not subaltern."
So she has clearly differentiated between
the subaltern and the working class.
Another concept which we have to understand
in the context of postcolonial theory is history.
Colonizers contempt towards the intellectual
traditions of occupied countries is well established.
And therefore, the postcolonial writers felt
that they have to rewrite the history.
This idea was supported by the postmodernist
idea that the history cannot be a single one
and that there would always be plural voices.
Fanon has written in his Wretched of the Earth,
"Colonialism is not satisfied merely with
holding a people, in its grip and emptying
the native's brain of all form and content.
By a kind of perverted logic, it turns to
the past of oppressed people and distorts,
disfigures and destroys it."
Fanon's idea is so true that we can find that
similar indications are present in various
writings of British colonial officers from
time to time.
One particular incident which I would quote
over here is from Macaulay's infamous: minutes
of 2nd February, 1835."
Though there is a continuous debate going
on as to the place where he had actually delivered
it.
Was a delivered in Calcutta or was it delivered
in London.
But the records of the minutes dated 2nd February,
1835 are available in a documented shape.
And I quote, "it is, I believe, no exaggeration
to say that all the historical information
which has been collected from all the books
written in the Sanskrit language is less valuable
than what may be found in the most paltry
abridgements used at preparatory schools in
England."
So the manner in which the intellectual tradition
of a whole culture has been rubbished in a
contemptuous manner by a colonizer is manifest
in Macaulay's writings.
And it has been universally present in other
countries and in other colonial context.
So we find that the Western countries, the
European powers, the White supremacy in fact
believed in their own normativity.
And therefore, they termed that the colonized
people, the colony under them is barbaric
and uncivilized.
And they wanted a reconstruction of the people.
In the same manner, we find that the postcolonial
theorists want a reconstruction of history
and the colonized intellectuals have started
to rewrite the history in order to understand
their own legacy in a better manner.
So postcolonial writers and theorists interrogate
and destabilize the truth value of dominant
and hegemonic forms of history and historiography.
They map the history of decolonization, the
diversity and complexity of perspectives and
methods of resistance and an attempt to rewrite,
reconfigure colonial history by writing alternative
and parallel narratives that challenge the
perspectives of the colonial powers.
According to Nasrullah Mambrol, the postcolonial
preoccupation with history addresses issues
such as interrogating the effects of colonialism
in terms of cultural alienation, the anti-colonial
struggles of the Third World and the rise
of nationalism in different countries which
were erstwhile colonies, the creation of mimic
men in the colonial culture, the appropriation
of history by the colonial master, attempts
to retrieve and rewrite their own histories
by the formerly colonized cultures and different
modes of representations of truth as is understood
by the colonized people.
So we find that the process of retrieval of
history for a postcolonial culture invariably
includes an intense awareness that native
history without colonial contamination is
not possible.
The Subaltern Studies project seeks to discover,
beneath the layers of colonial historiography,
the local resistance to colonialism.
In a way we can say that it is the history
from below utilizing resources in native languages
and non-colonial forms of history recording
such as folk songs, ballads, letters, memoires,
etc.
It has also given rise to anti-colonial writing
or let us say cultural nationalist writing
which is also given rise to Negritude Movement,
African Aesthetic, etc.
Another idea which is important to understand
in the context of postcolonial theory is idea
of Race as a socially constructed category.
I would like to quote Howard Winant who in
his essay "Race and Race Theory" published
in 2000, gives an overview of the origins
of the concept of race and takes us through
the development of sociological theories in
this context from its 19th century positions
which had emphasized on biologism to the contemporary
theories of sociohistorical interpretations.
He says that the racial categorization is
basically a European invention and it is also
intimately connected with the beginnings of
modernity and the creation of modern political
period.
And as we have discussed earlier the nexus
of economy and political supremacy have always
had a place in the establishment of the colony.
So the dawn of the seaborne empire, the conquest
of the Americas, the global economic integration,
the rise of the Atlantic slave trade, etc.
were all connected elements in the genealogy
of race.
And this aspect has also been posited by Winant
in his essay.
Antonia Darder in her essay suggests that
the notions of race are a primarily ideological
construction of racism or a racialized interpretation
of phenotypically and regionally different
human beings.
People who are differentiated on the basis
of phenotypical features are also represented
collectively as they posses certain cultural
characteristics with the result that the population
is represented as exhibiting a specific profile
of biological and cultural attributes.
And the concept of differences has been abolished
in this understanding.
The deterministic manner of this representation
means that all those who possess signified
phenotypical characteristics are assumed to
possess the additional characteristics.
So we find that this particular idea of race
incorporates a basic understanding that the
racial features are common not only in terms
of biology or skin colours but also in terms
of cultural attributes.
So critical race studies, ethnicity studies,
and specific traditions in literature and
philosophy, etc. have suggested how this issue
of race has occupied a central place in the
development of different movements and how
it is important for us to understand the postcolonial
theories.
The issue of gender as we have discussed in
detail earlier also in the context of postcolonial
theory talks about the double oppression of
women under colonialism, imperialism and patriarchy.
So critical writings pay a special attention
to the role of gender and sexuality and the
experiences of men and women of colour or
men or women of different race, races which
have been subjugated under the colonial empowerment.
So postcolonial gender studies examine how
class, caste, economy, political empowerment
and literacy have contributed to the condition
of women in the postcolonial countries.
And this aspect we have discussed in detail
in the context of our discussions of writers
like Audre Lorde and Patricia Collins as well
as Alice Walker.
And now we come to a discussion of major theorists
of postcolonial studies.
So these have been the prominent words with
which we have to be familiar when we start
talking further about the postcolonial theories.
Now as far as the theorist of postcolonial
study are concerned, we would particularly
focus on Edward Said, Gayatri Chakravorty
Spivak, and Homi Bhabha.
So Edward Said has been associated with the
beginnings of postcolonial theory with the
publication of his book Orientalism in 1978
in which he has given an account of the cultural
representation of the Orient.
Major discussions of Edward Said along with
the discussions on Spivak and Bhabha will
be taken over further in the next module.
Thank you.
