Welcome to another lecture on postcolonial
literature.
As I said in our previous meeting, that today
we will start discussing postcolonialism from
the Indian perspective.
But before we start doing that, let us take
up Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart for
one last time because I think that novel will
help us connect with our discussion today
better.
Now usually when students read Things Fall
Apart, especially after reading Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness, like we have done and after
reading Achebe’s criticism of Heart of Darkness,
in his essay “The Image of Africa”, they
are left with a slight confusion.
And the confusion tends primarily from the
fact that, what they expect Achebe to do in
the novel, especially after their reading
of “Image of Africa” is, they expect Achebe
to criticise European colonial oppression
in Africa from an African’s standpoint.
But as we have discussed in our previous lecture,
when we read Achebe’s novel, what you find
is that in Things Fall Apart there is no simple
condemnation of the European colonial authority.
Colonial authority represented by the figure
of the District Commissioner, if you remember,
who was also the author of the book Pacification
of the Primitive Tribes of Lower Niger.
Now, instead, or rather on the contrary, what
we see Achebe doing in his novel is, he is
focusing primarily even on the fault lines
that were already present within the precolonial
Umuofian society.
And as we have seen things fall apart in the
novel, primarily because the central figure,
who is Okonkwo, he cannot hold the community
together.
And he, as a centre of that community, fails,
falters, and ultimately sort of, commits suicide.
Now, therefore in Achebe’s novel, we see
that the main preoccupation is not so much
with the external pressures of colonialism,
that does play a role in dismantling the society,
but the primary focus is not that.
The primary focus is on the precolonial society,
African society, itself.
And how certain very problematic fault lines
exist already within the society which leads
to its ultimate downfall under the pressure
of colonialism.
But the question here is why does Achebe spend
so much more time finding fault with the precolonial
African society and its traditional practices
than with portraying the violent intrusions
of European colonisers who subjugated Africa?
Now, to get an answer to this question we
have to remember that though countering the
colonial perspective as it appears in European
novels like Conrad’s Heart of Darkness might
have been one of the reasons behind Achebe
writing his novel, Things Fall Apart is however
not just meant as an answer to Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness and its portrayal of Africa.
In other words, Achebe was not merely writing
back to the West.
Rather, he was also engaging with his fellow
Africans and with his contemporary milieu
with the novel.
So we should remember that, though Things
Fall Apart at one level is an attempt to counter
the colonial discourse on Africa as it appears
in novels like Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,
it is not solely about that.
It is also about engaging with the fellow
Africans and with the contemporary African
milieu.
So Achebe was not merely writing back to Conrad,
he was also writing to engage with his fellow
Africans.
And what was that contemporary milieu within
which this book was produced?
Well, we should remember that Things Fall
Apart was written during the 1950’s.
And anyone who is familiar with African history
will know that this was the decade when agitations
to gain independence from the European colonial
rule was sweeping across the entire African
subcontinent.
Indeed, the year 1958, the year when Things
Fall Apart was published, was also the year
when the motion for the Nigerian independence
was passed and it was agreed that Nigeria
will become an independent nation state from
the 1st of October 1960.
So, as you can see Things Fall Apart was written
not at a time when colonial forces were making
fresh inroads in Africa.
Rather, it was written at a time when the
process of decolonisation was in progress.
And in this milieu of decolonisation, when
the Colonial structure was being discarded
and Africans were searching for alternative
ways of politically, socially, and culturally
organising their lives, Things Fall Apart
tried to take stock of the precolonial African
society.
Now, in various parts of the once colonised
world, to do away with the colonial structure
often meant, or rather I should say, was often
accompanied by a desire to revert back to
a precolonial past which is again often assumed
to be some sort of a golden age.
Now, Things Fall Apart cautions against any
such simplistic desire to revert back to the
past by revealing the many fault lines and
internal contradictions that plagued the African
society even before it came under the corrupting
influence of the European colonialism.
So, as I said earlier, things fall apart in
the novel precisely because, the traditional
centre of the African society, could not hold
them together and what the novel seems to
suggest therefore is that there is no easy
way of going back to the precolonial past
without thinking through the crisis that undermined
it.
And Achebe seems to be pointing out that the
crisis was not merely external, there are
many things wrong internally also within the
precolonial society.
Now the reason I started today’s discussion
with Things Fall Apart is because it introduces
us to a new set of concerns within the field
of postcolonialism.
So far in our discussion of the various literary
texts we have concerned ourselves with the
process of colonialism and with colonial discourse
analysis.
But as Things Fall Apart exemplifies, much
of the literature that is today read under
the banner of postcolonialism concerns itself
with the process of decolonisation.
And in today’s lecture this is going to
be our main concern.
We are going to look at the process of decolonisation
through the Indian perspective.
Now when I say the “Indian” perspective,
it is important to ask the question whose
perspective or what is that perspective which
I am identifying here as the Indian perspective?
Now, one could have asked the same question
while we were discussing the African perspective
in our previous lecture but because the Indian
context is more intimately familiar to us,
I think this is the ideal time for us to pause
and take a look at the very important question
and try and understand the ramifications of
this question.
Now I think all of you will agree that qualifiers
or adjectives like African or Indian are too
vague to mean anything precise and that is
primarily the case because of the immense
social, cultural, economic diversities and
variations that these qualifiers incorporates
within themselves.
So, let us try to look at the adjective “Indian”
more closely.
And, this is important because for the next
few lectures we will be using this qualifier
very often.
So, what does Indian mean?
At least, what does Indian mean within the
context of this series of lecture on Postcolonial
literature?
When I use the word Indian perspective on
decolonisation, what I primarily mean is the
perspective of the Indian middle class.
Right.
But again middle class is also a term which
can mean different things to different people.
So let me clarify here that I base my understanding
of the term middle class on Sumit Sarkar’s
historical study titled Modern India 1885-1947.
And in this book Sarkar defines a middle class.
And I have sort of tried to divide that definition
into these points.
But this is how Sumit Sarkar defines middle
class in his book.
So, he says that middle class was the new
English educated group of people who started
emerging as a distinct section of the Indian
society during the 19th century.
And then, commenting on the social roots of
this new middle class, Sarkar observes that
though this class styled itself after the
bourgeoisie, who formed the middle class in
the West, they were almost entirely dissociated
from the entrepreneurial business activities
that typically form the material basis of
the bourgeoisie in the West.
So, if they were not engaged in business,
how can one classify themselves in terms of
the occupation?
Well, they were engaged in government employments.
Or, you could see the middle class engaged
in professions like law, education, journalism,
medicine, etcetera.
And their English education made them eminently
suitable to take up these government jobs
as well as for these professions.
Now, here to complete the socio-economic picture,
I must also add that this newly emergent middle
class also had some form of connections with
land and a part of their income came from
the land rent that they collected as petty
landowners or small landlords.
And, well, during the 19th and early 20th
century, it was perhaps only in Bombay that
one could see some connection between the
Indian middle class and business but we will
need to remember that by and large big business
in India under the colonial governance was
directly controlled by the ruling Europeans.
So, a large section of the Indians were not
involved in big business under the colonial
rule.
Now before I go into the reasons for choosing
this particular section of the population
to discuss the Indian perspective on decolonisation,
I need to remind you that they were not the
first group of people who came up with the
idea of decolonisation in India.
Indeed, much before the Indian middle class
came into the picture there were other social
groups like the tribals for instance or the
peasants who were regularly agitating against
the colonial rule in India.
And indeed, there is this other book by Sumit
Sarkar, the very readable book titled “Popular”
Movements and “Middle-Class” Leadership
in Late Colonial India, which beautifully
explores these forms of anti-colonial agitations,
which preceded the rise of the middle class
and which continued even while the middle
class started gaining prominence.
But having said this I would still like to
focus on the middle-class to study the Indian
perspective on decolonisation primarily for
these two reasons:
The first reason is that it was the middle
class who from around the late 19th century
could forge an anti-colonial discourse which
got accepted as the national discourse.
In other words, the middle-class, while arguing
against the colonial rule, could put themselves
forward as representatives of the entire nation
and they could convince the various other
sections of the Indian population that the
middle-class leadership represented the interests
of all the factions of the Indian population.
And to understand this, you can actually perform
a very simple experiment.
So, just try and think of any major figure
who emerged as a leader during the middle-class
led anti-colonial struggle that started in
India from the early 20th century.
Any leader who played a prominent role in
the anti-colonial struggle from the early
20th century onwards.
Now, chances are that the figures that you
have thought belongs to the middle-class.
So, for instance, if you have thought of Bal
Gangadhar Tilak or Bipin Chandra Pal, or C.R.
Das or M.K. Gandhi or Jawaharlal Nehru or
Subhash Chandra Bose, you would notice that
they were all English educated and were involved
in one kind of profession or other.
Indeed, if you carefully go through this list
of names that I have just read out, you will
see that most of them were actually trained
as barristers.
But, when you think about their engagement
with the anti-colonial, in sort of Independence
movement, you think of them as national leaders,
as leaders who claimed to speak on behalf
of the entire nation, the entire Indian population,
rather than on behalf of, say, just the barristers
or just the English educated middle-class.
You do not think of them like that.
Right.
Now whether they were truly representative
of the interests of all the sections of Indian
population or not is a matter of debate, and
indeed the literature available on this debate
is voluminous.
But what is important to note here is that
these representatives of the middle-class
were able to forge a counter discourse to
colonialism, which claimed to be the discourse
of the nation.
So, when we discuss the Indian perspective
on decolonisation, we therefore will be actually
discussing the perspective as presented through
the nationalist discourse of anti-colonialism
generated by the middle-class.
Because it is only in this middle-class discourse
that we first come across the notion of a
nation speaking out against the colonial rule.
The second reason for focusing on the middle-class
is because the kind of Indian literature that
gets studied under the category of Postcolonial
literature remains predominantly the production
of the middle class.
And we will discuss this middle class bias
as well as the attempts made within postcolonial
studies to go beyond the narrow confines of
the middle class and their concerns when we
discuss subalternity later.
But for now, let us return to the discourse
of nationalism which the middle-class created
to counter the colonial discourse.
Right.
Now, the origin of the middle-class nationalist
discourse can be traced back to the 19th century
and the most important questions around which
this discourse crystallised were: 1.
Why was India colonised? and 2.
How can it become free again?
So, very simple, very basic questions but
fundamental questions nevertheless around
which the middle class generated this discourse
of anti-colonial nationalism.
Now by the end of the 18th century and the
beginning of the 19th century, thanks to the
works of such European orientalists like William
Jones for instance, H.T.
Colebrooke, Nathaniel Halhed (these are names
which I have already mentioned in my previous
lecture, in one of my early lectures, if you
remember), now thanks to them it was already
established that the Indian language of Sanskrit
shared a very strong affinity to the European
classical languages like Greek and Latin.
And for the Europeans this led to the assumption
that some kind of civilizational affinity
existed between classical Europe and classical
India.
Now in the colonial discourse, therefore,
India unlike Africa was not outright dismissed
as land of barbarians and savages.
It was not a dismissed because of this notion
of affinity.
If anything was related to the exalted classical
age of the Greeks, for instance, then how
can one dismiss it as a land of barbarians?
Rather, the way the colonial argument was
shaped was like this that India was once a
civilised land but its people had now fallen
from that grace and that is why they need
the mature and enlightened guidance of the
colonial authority to conduct their affairs.
And here, I think you can realise that we
are back again to the idea of colonialism
as a civilising mission.
So, unlike Africa, India was regarded as a
once civilised country, a once civilised land
but clearly the level of civilisation from
the European perspective had gone down.
And that was the excuse which the Europeans
used to say that, see, we are here to civilise
or to re-civilise, in want of a better word,
the Indians.
Now, in its early phase, the middle-class
nationalist discourse readily adopted this
idea of a golden past as well as the narrative
of the fall from grace because that helped
explain why India had become colonised in
the first place.
So, the middle class nationalists therefore
argued that clearly India had started lacking
some quality which they had possessed during
the fabled golden age of the past, which was
why the outsiders could come and colonise
the land.
So far the early form of a middle class nationalist
discourse and the colonial discourse was more
or less in agreement.
There was no major divergence.
Where they started, where the colonial discourse
and the middle-class nationalist discourse
started diverging was the point where the
early nationalists argued that it was possible
to return back to that fabled golden past
by rectifying the shortcomings that had led
to the fall.
So as you can see here, in any movement towards
decolonisation there exists a natural tendency
to glorify the precolonial past and a desire
to return to that fabled past.
So when Chinua Achebe was writing about precolonial
Africa in his Things Fall Apart, he was trying
to make an argument precisely against this
simplistic attempt to return to a fabled past
as a solution for the present problems.
But as we shall see in our next few lectures,
the conviction that a movement away from colonialism
should mean a return to a golden past strongly
underlined the middle-class nationalist discourse
right from the 19th century down to the Gandhian
era of the 20th century.
However, we need to note two things here.
Firstly, though the notion of a golden past
remained mostly constant, different middle-class
intellectuals conceived it differently.
Thus, if we trace the development of the Indian
nationalist discourse from the 19th to the
20th century we will find in it differing
opinions about what constitutes the golden
age for instance, about the time when it ended,
about the reasons which led to its demise
and things like that.
So, about the golden age there exists significant
diversity within the national discourse.
The second thing that we should note is that
if we study the nationalist discourse we can
find in it diverging opinions about how Indians
should recover themselves from the degenerate
state that they are apparently in the present
and how they should regain the golden age.
Now, we will explore these differences more
closely when we deal with individual literary
texts but for now we should keep in mind the
basic cyclical pattern:
And, here you can see the pattern starts with
the golden past and then it proceeds to the
fall and then it loops back to the past through
a future possibility of recovering the golden
age.
And this pattern remained more or less constant
throughout the development of the nationalist
discourse.
So in our next lecture we will analyse this
cyclical pattern more closely with reference
to specific literary texts.
Thank you.
