Welcome back to yet another lecture on Literary
Theory and today, the topic of our discussion
will be postcolonialism. As we discussed in
our previous lecture, the postmodern condition
is marked by the delegitimization of a single
grand narrative and the foregrounding in its
place of little narratives or petit récits.
One of the most powerful manifestations of
this postmodernist turn is the rise of postcolonial
studies within the various departments of
English literature, the world over from around
the 1980s and 1990s, 1980s onwards.
As we will see in this lecture as well as
the following one, in fact, the main thrusts
of postcolonial studies has been to undermine
and delegitimize the grand narrative of European
colonialism which gained ascendancy, especially
during the 19th and early 20th century. This
is complemented by a sustained attempt by
postcolonial scholars, to foreground the little
narratives of the people who were and, indeed,
in some cases still are subjugated by colonialism,
either politically, or culturally, or economically.
Today's lecture would try and track the genesis
of postcolonialism as a coherent theoretical
field by especially, focusing on the works
of Edward Said, but before we start discussing
Said, let us take a look at the various meanings
of the term postcolonialism. And I would,
however, like to mention here that this lecture
as well as the next one will build upon the
10-hour course on Postcolonial Literature
that I had earlier offered on the NPTEL platform.
So, those of you who have already done that
course should use my lectures on postcolonialism
in this series, as a way to refresh your memories
of that course and to go over some of the
concepts anew that you have already done.
And those of you who have not done that, 10-hour
course on Postcolonial Literature, my suggestion
would be that you will perhaps find some of
the topics that I will discuss in these lectures
on postcolonialism here, in this series on
Literary Theory, to be slightly cryptic.
So, my suggestion would be that if you want
a detailed elaboration of any of these topics,
you should go to that 10-hour lecture series,
which is available online and you should go
to the relevant lectures there in that series,
where I have discussed everything that I will
be talking about here in this lecture and
in the next one in a great deal of details.
So, first let me come to the term postcolonialism.
This term is constituted of two parts: at
its root it has the word colonialism, which
is derived from the Latin word “colonia”
and the term postcolonialism also has another
very important component which is the prefix
post, but we will discuss the significance
of this prefix later. First, let us focus
on the word colonialism.
Now, as I just mentioned, the word colonialism
derives from the Latin root word “colonia”,
which at the most fundamental level means
something like a farm land or a landed estate,
but to understand the full significance of
this term colonia, we will have to know something
about the original context in which this term
was used.
Now, as you will know from your school level
history lessons, the Roman Empire had, for
a very long time indeed, an aggressive expansionist
policy. And during the first 100 years of
the Common Era, the Roman Empire that stretched
from the modern day Iraq and the Persian Gulf
in the East, to the modern day Portugal in
the West, and from Egypt and the northern
fringes of Africa in the South, to England
in the North was, in fact, constantly expanding.
Now, within this expanding Roman Empire, one
of the prevalent practices was to reward veteran
soldiers of the Roman army, with vast stretches
of landed estates or colonias; and these landed
estates were situated in the newly occupied
territory and this was one of the major form
of rewards granted to veteran army soldiers.
Now, the soldiers who would go and settle
in these landed estates would retain their
Roman citizenship and in return, they were
expected to protect the Roman interests in
the newly occupied territories and keep the
native inhabitants of those lands under subjugation.
So, colony, which is the modern derivative
of the term colonia and from which we ultimately
derive the term colonialism, retains two very
important aspect of the ancient Roman practice
that I have just discussed with you.
The first aspect is that a modern colony,
like the ancient colonia is established through
a process of violent subjugation, and the
second aspect, which modern colonialism shares
with the Roman practice of establishing colonias
is that, it involves a relationship between
two different territories between, what is
called the metropolis and the periphery, and
these are important terms within the field
of postcolonial studies.
So, what is a metropolis? Well, a metropolis
literally translates into a mother city or
a mother country and in the context of Roman
colonia, for instance, the metropolis was
Rome, which was at the centre of the Roman
Empire and to which all Roman citizens were
affiliated. The occupied territory, on the
other hand, in which there were those colonias
were periphery to the mother country or the
metropolis.
So, if we are talking about the Roman Empire,
Rome is a metropolis and a place like Britain
for instance which was a Roman colony at one
point in history was the periphery within
this scheme of things. And if we apply this
model to understand more recent forms of colonialism
like for instance; the British colonialism
of the 19th century then Britain would be
the metropolis, the country which is at the
centre of this colonial empire and a place
like India for, instance, or a place like
Nigeria, they would be peripheries of this
metropolis, this mother country.
Now, though I have traced back the etymological
roots of the word colonialism to the ancient
Roman empire, the modern use of the word colonialism
especially, as it is understood within the
field of postcolonial studies is restricted
to the forceful subjugation of various countries
in the global South by certain European powers
roughly from around the 15th century C. E.
These European powers included a number of
nations, like Portugal, for instance, Spain,
there was Netherlands, but postcolonial studies
has actually remained mostly focused on British
and French colonialism which started slightly
after the beginning of Spanish colonialism,
for instance, or Portuguese colonialism and
which reached its peak around the 19th and
early 20th century. And during this period
of time, the metropolis of Britain and France
was connected to vast stretches of Africa
and Asia, which served as their colonial periphery.
Now, one of the basic characteristic features
of this modern colonialism with which postcolonial
theory concerns itself is capitalism. And
to understand this crucial link between capitalism
and colonialism, let us begin by briefly looking
at how capitalism functions. Capitalism is
perhaps most simply defined as the process
of investing money or capital to make more
money, in the form of profit, and the West
had been moving from the feudal mode of economy
to this new capitalist mode of economy from
around the 14th and 15th century onwards when
mercantilism, long distance trade started
flourishing.
However, the phase of capitalism that is most
integrally associated with the kind of colonialism
that we are focusing on is the industrial
phase of capitalism really and this phase
started to gain momentum from say the late
18th and early 19th century, when the effects
of the industrial revolution gradually started
setting in.
And this industrial revolution which had it's
origin in England, allowed the Western countries
to produce far in excess of their consumption.
Which means that the mechanization of the
production process led to a huge accumulation
of surplus products which during the 19th
and early 20th century became a source of
great wealth for Western European countries
like Britain, for instance, or France; but
though I have talked about increase in wealth
and profit through the excess production,
if you look at the phenomenon of increasing
production within the capitalist system carefully,
you will see that on the surface, it is actually
associated not with an increase in profit,
but with a decrease in profit on the surface
apparently. Let me explain this by putting
forward an example. Let us take the instance
of shirt production for instance. Now, let
us say that to begin with, I only have enough
resources to produce clothes for my own self,
which I do along with my family, entirely
for our own personal consumption, for our
personal use.
Now, let us say that industrial revolution
happens and with the advent of mechanized
power looms, I suddenly become able to produce
shirts in far greater numbers than I require
for my own self and my own family. So, what
do I do? I use this excess production to sell
in the market and earn myself profit, right.
This is how capitalism starts working. Now,
let us say that I sell in the market each
shirt that have made, for a certain amount
of money and I make a profit of rupees 100
from each shirt.
Now, in the market I am not the only seller,
there are other sellers of shirts as well
and some of these sellers in order to cut
me out of the business and to win all the
customers for themselves reduce their profit
per shirt to rupees 50, let us say. Now, in
order to stay afloat in the business and to
win back the customers, I will then have to
reduce my profit margin even further, right.
I will probably let us say, I will have to
reduce it down to rupees 25, which will in
turn elicit a similar response from my rivals.
So, in a free market, as you can see here,
we are confronted with a race to the bottom
as far as profit is concerned and this is
one of the key features of capitalist economy.
Now, if I am confronted with such a situation,
I can remedy this phenomenon of constantly
falling profits in two different ways; the
first way is to decrease the cost of production.
So, if I can somehow reduce the cost of the
raw materials and of the labour, that are
required to make the finished product, then
I will be again able to increase my profit
margin. This is because profit margin is basically,
the difference between the market price of
a commodity and its cost of production. So,
if my ultimate price of the shirt, the price
in which I am able to sell the shirt in the
market reduces, I can still hold on to the
profit margin by reducing the cost of labouring
input and the cost of raw materials.
This is one way in which I can hold on to
the profit. But there is also another way
and that deals with increase of my market
share. So, let us say that, because of intense
competition with my rivals I have had to cut
down the profit margin on my shirt from rupees
100 to rupee 1. Now, I can still make 100
rupees profit, if in place of selling 1 shirt,
I sell 100 shirts. So, for each shirt that
I was selling earlier, if I managed to increase
it to 100 shirts in the changed scenario then
I will still be able to earn a profit of 100
rupees, right, by increasing the market share.
So, in other words even if my profit margins
go down a 100 times, I can still go on earning
the same amount of profit, if I am able to
increase my market share 100 times. Indeed,
I can even increase my profit in spite of
falling profit margin, if I manage to expand
the market share of my product at a rate that
is faster than the rate in which my profit
margin is falling and here is precisely where
colonialism comes into the equation.
The industrialized European countries, colonized
vast areas of the global South to use their
territorial resources to produce cheap raw
materials like cotton for instance, like rubber
and these were used in the industrial production
of Europe and the subjugated population of
the colonies were also used as cheap labour
power, which helped the European colonial
metropolis to reduce their cost of production
even further. But apart from reducing the
cost of production, the colonies also helped
European profit making in another very different
way, which was by providing a captive market.
Think of the Indian colonial context, for
instance, not only did we provide cheap raw
materials in the form of cotton, in the form
of indigo, in the form of opium even and we
also provided cheap workforce in the form
of indentured labourers, but we also acted
as a captive market for goods produced by
the industries in the colonial metropolis,
right.
For instance, we were the market for the textile
industry, for instance which was flourishing
in places like Manchester. This connection
between industrial capitalism and European
colonialism explains why with the progress
of the former, that is industrial capitalism
during the 19th and early 20th century, the
latter, that is European colonialism, also
reached its peak. Indeed, the whole continent
of Africa was neatly parcelled out as colonies
between all the major European powers, precisely
to provide them with the needs for their growth
in profit.
It was in fact, meant to prevent a full scale
war between the Western industrialized nations
who were all scouting at that point in time
for cheap raw materials and cheap labour for
their factories and they were also looking,
of course, for captive markets for their industrial
products. Indeed, a race to colonize and to
exploit the resources of Africa, which for
the 19th century west had remained the only
major unmapped territory in the face of this
earth, was already underway by the early 1880s.
Belgium, in fact, was one of the first European
powers to move in and to occupy large parts
of the Congo basin to procure the important
raw materials of rubber and ivory was also
very important. This had set in motion, what
is known as “the scramble for Africa”,
in which all the major European industrialized
nations participated.
In the winter of 1884-1885, the German chancellor
Otto von Bismarck, he sought to settle the
matter of colonizing Africa amicably between
the European powers by holding a conference
in Berlin and as a direct consequence of this
notorious conference, the whole of Africa,
except, Ethiopia, Liberia, and some parts
of modern day Somalia, was passed off as colonies
and was shared between the major European
powers and what is especially ironic here
is that in that infamous Berlin conference,
which was to decide the fate of an entire
continent, for decades, there was not a single
African present.
To understand more about this connection between
capitalism and European colonial expansion,
especially, from within the African context,
I would recommend that you read the book titled,
African Perspectives on Colonialism, which
is written by the Ghanaian historian Albert
Adu Boahen. And it’s a thin book, a manageable
book and it is wonderfully thought provoking
as well as informative. So, this is a good
book to read.
So, now that we have a more or less a working
idea of what colonialism means especially,
within the context of postcolonial studies,
let us turn to the prefix post and its significance.
Now, usually when the prefix post is added
to any word, it is added before any word,
it signifies something that happens after
the event or the time period that is suggested
by the main word, to which it has been attached
as a prefix.
So, for instance if I ask you to meet me post
lunch on a certain date, you will understand
that our meeting will happen on that date,
after lunch. Similarly, if I say that I have
attended a post-midnight church service for
instance it will mean that I have attended
a church service, which was held after the
midnight hour.
So, according to this logic, when we attach
the prefix post to the word colonialism, it
should refer to things, political, cultural,
economic, social, and so on, that take place
after colonialism right, but here we need
to be slightly careful, because within the
field of postcolonial studies, after colonialism
does not mean after the end of colonialism.
Rather it means after the beginning of colonialism.
Let us try and understand this statement in
some more detail. Colonialism as a process
works on the colonized as well as on the colonizing
countries in a number of different ways and
I think this is pretty obvious to all of us.
This is why it is difficult, if not impossible,
to mention a specific ending when all of these
impacts, all of these connections that are
generated through colonialism comes to an
end simultaneously. Think about the Indian
context for example. What happened on the
15th of August, 1947 was only one aspect of
British colonialism coming to an end in the
subcontinent. In other words, on that date
15th of August, 1947 India ceased to be politically
governed by the British monarch and the British
parliament. But India's engagement with several
other colonial legacies continued, even after
that and in fact, is still continuing to this
day be it, for instance, in the field of cultural
engagement, be it in the field of economic
engagements, and so on and so forth. Even
the political decoupling between India and
British colonialism was only partially achieved
on the 15th August 1947 and this we can understand
very easily, if we notice that we still use
the parliamentary form of democracy, which
is very much a part of our colonial legacy.
So, as you can see, we really cannot have
a definitive date on which European colonialism
ends and this definitive date is neither possible
in the Indian context, nor is it possible
in the context of the global South.
This is why postcolonialism at least within
the field of study that bears its name is
understood, as the sum total of all the various
social, political, economic, and cultural
changes that are brought about following the
first impact of colonialism. So, postcolonialism
starts not with the end of colonialism, but
rather with the beginning of colonialism and
if we are focused on the context of British
colonialism in India, for instance, then this
postcolonialism does not begin in 1947, but
rather it can be traced back, at least as
far back as early 18th century when the then
Mughal emperor Farrukhsiyar granted through
his firman, or official order, in 1717, duty
free trading rights in the Province of Bengal
to the British East India company.
Well now, that we have explored the term postcolonialism
in depth, let us try and see what constitutes
postcolonial theory per se and we will discuss
this topic with reference to the works of
three iconic figures, in the field of postcolonial
theory and, in fact, they are often regarded
as the holy trinity of postcolonialism. And
here, the three figures that I am talking
about are Edward Said, Homi Bhabha and Gayatri
Chakraborty Spivak.
So, today we will start with Said and his
seminal text Orientalism whose publication
in a way inaugurated the field of postcolonial
theory, but here I must mention that there
is a figure who predates Edward Said and his
pioneering text and who is today considered
to be one of the key figures within postcolonial
theory.
He is the psychiatrist, philosopher and cultural
theorist from the Caribbean Island of Martinique
Frantz Fanon, whose dates and 1925 and 1961
and whose texts Black Skin, White Masks and
the Wretched of the Earth, they today enjoy
canonical status within the field of postcolonial
studies. And indeed his theory that colonialism,
even when it seems to end formally, like,
for instance as it did in India in 15th focused
1947, actually continues surreptitiously in
the global South, through the imposition of
a neo colonial order, by the indigenous middle
class leaders.
And this theory plays a significant role in
how postcolonial studies approach the question
of colonialism, they approach the question
of independence, nationalism, freedom movement,
etcetera, etcetera, but Fanon was only appropriated
by the postcolonial scholars once the field
was established following the 1978 publication
of Edward Said's Orientalism. So, it is to
Said, and to Orientalism that we will have
to turn, in order to understand the genesis
of the field of postcolonial theory.
Edward Said was born in British occupied Palestine
in 1935 and he died in America in 2003. Said
did his doctorate on Joseph Conrad from the
university of Harvard and he subsequently
became a professor at the Columbia University,
where he taught till the last year of his
life. During his career, Said wore a number
of hats including that of a scholar of comparative
literature.
He used to teach comparative literature in
Columbia university, but he was also a music
critic, he was a public intellectual, he was
known for his advocacy of the Palestinian
cause, but his most lasting academic contribution
is perhaps his book Orientalism, where he
explored how the European colonialism of the
orient or the east was not simply a matter
of military subjugation, military occupation.
It also involved the creation and the plural
proliferation of a peculiar kind of discourse
that legitimized the colonial subjugation
of the East by the West. It is this discourse
and the ways in which it gets generated and
circulated that Edward Said refers to as orientalism.
So, according to Said orientalism has three
different aspects: the first aspect is that
of orientalism as a way of thinking about
the orient, as a way of talking about the
orient, and by Orient I mean East, by whom
– well, by the occident, or the West.
So, in its first aspect, orientalism is a
peculiar kind of way in which the West or
the occident has traditionally thought about
and spoken about the orient, the East. The
second aspect of orientalism is that, it is
an academic discipline, and the third aspect
is that of orientalism as a corporate institution
for dealing with the orient.
So, let us discuss these three aspects one
by one. According to Said, the Western tradition
of thinking about the orient as a single entity
with a homogenous characteristic feature can
be traced as far back as the Greek tragedies
of the 5th century BCE and in this tradition
which starts from those Greek literature,
we find orient being depicted not just as
a landmass, but as another to the European
self.
In this imaginative geography represented
by orientalism as a peculiar way of thinking
about the orient, the orient is presented
as the exact opposite of all the qualities,
which the West consciously cultivates as part
of its cultural self fashioning. Thus, if
the West considers itself to be characterized
by a culture of masculinity, then the orient,
by contrast, assumes a feminine entity in
this imaginative geography.
If the occident likes to think of itself in
terms of mature adulthood, then the orient
becomes for them a representative of childish
immaturity, if the occident considers itself
to be at the pinnacle of civilization then,
of course, the orient comes to represent the
depths of Barbarism and moral and cultural
depravity. Now, Said argues that this peculiar
way of thinking and talking about the orient
as simultaneously, foreign loathsome and,
yet, excitingly the exotic gained a special
significance during the heyday of European
colonialism and provided a template for forming,
leading a discourse about the subjugation
of the East by the West.
In this later phase, orientalism emerged as
an academic discipline, which built upon the
millennia-old Western prejudices about the
orient, under the garb of objective scientific
knowledge gathering. So, now let us come to
this idea of orientalism as an academic discipline,
which according to Said began from around
the late 18th century and which represents
the second major aspect of what constitutes
orientalism. So, in 1798 something happened,
something very important, what was that?
Napoleon Bonaparte of France led an armed
invasion to Egypt and according to Said this
was a major turning point in the history of
the relationship between orient and occident
and the history of the colonial subjugation
of the East by the West and this is, because
Napoleon in his invasion was not only accompanied
by soldiers, but also by an army of scholars
and scientists, who would transform the occupied
territory in a field of academic inquiry and
systematic knowledge gathering.
This would in fact, lead to the production
of a multi volume Encyclopaedia of Egypt called
Description de l’Égypte, which would meticulously
describe the geography, the history, flora,
the fauna, the people of Egypt, and though
the perspective would be western and would
indeed be underlined by those millennia-old
prejudices that I have just talked about,
the encyclopaedia was presented as an exercise
in scientific knowledge gathering, written
from an apparently Archemedian vantage point
of objectivity.
Such “scientific knowledge gathering”
about the subjugated territory and its people
can in fact, be observed as a major characteristic
feature, in almost all of European colonialism
of the East and we can also for instance see
it, in the context of British colonialism
in India. Thus, we have figures like Warren
Hastings, who was the first Governor-General
of British India or colonial officers like
William Jones, for instance, Henry Thomas
Colebrooke, Nathaniel Halhed, all of them,
and they during the late 18th and early 19th
century researched, compiled and published
voluminously on various aspects related India.
So, just like the scholars and servants who
accompanied Napoleon Bonaparte to Egypt were
transforming Egypt from a land mass to a site
of academic inquiry, a site of western academic
inquiry to be precise, these people were also
doing the same with India and the most famous
examples of their scholarship was of course,
in the field of Sanskrit studies and the study
of ancient Indian scriptures. But they also
published academic monographs and papers on
subjects as diverse as Indian law, Indian
literature, astrology, Indian flora and fauna,
Indian history, etcetera.
The products of such systematic knowledge
gathering about the subjugated population,
about their society, and their land in the
form of various academic publications were
given pride of place in the libraries of the
West and soon the study of orient generated,
such full-fledged academic disciplines like
Egyptology, for instance, or Indology.
Indeed, this growing accumulation of academic
publications about the East in the libraries
and learning institutions of the west, soon
came to represent the most if not the only
authentic way of knowing the orient. In fact,
this conviction became so deep rooted by the
first few decades of the 19th century that
someone like James Mill, the British philosopher,
but also someone who was associated with the
East India Company, British East India company
could write these lines in the preface to
his multi volume History of British India,
and I quote:
(“This writer [...] has never been in India;
and [...] has a very slight, and elementary
acquaintance, with any of the languages of
the East. [...] [Yet] it appeared to me, that
a sufficient stock of information was now
collected in the languages of Europe, to enable
the enquirer to a certain every important
point, in the history of India.”)
The sheer audacity here is mind boggling.
He is saying that for an enquirer like him,
it is possible to ascertain every important
point about India, without even visiting India
or its people for a single day. According
to him, everything is already available in
the form of academic publications. Such knowledge
gathering about the orient deeply influenced
how orient was governed by the colonial authority
and this brings us to the third aspect of
orientalism, which is orientalism as corporate
institution. Now, as you will know from our
earlier lectures on Foucault, Althusser, and
Gramsci that subjugation is exercised, not
merely through brute force, but also through
several institutions through which power is
wielded indirectly.
This cluster of institutions through which
the orient was controlled systematically and
I am quoting from Orientalism here, “by
making statements about it, authorizing views
of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling
it, ruling over it” is what is referred
to by Said as the corporate institution of
orientalism. And as I have just stated the
way, this corporate institution functioned
and wielded its administrative power was heavily
determined by the biased view of the East,
which by the late 18th and early 19th century
had come to be translated into respectable
form of academic knowledge.
Now, as students of literary studies, we need
to keep in mind that this discourse about
the orient, underlined by the age old prejudices
of the occident and ratified by their colonial
institutions also deeply influenced the way
orient was being conceptualized and written
about by western literature, including celebrated
authors like Lord Byron, for instance, Gerard
de Nerval, Gustave Flaubert, Rudyard Kipling
and, of course, Joseph Conrad on whom Said
wrote his doctoral thesis.
Said, through his writings, offered an insight
into how the discourse that framed the works
of these canonical authors within the field
of literature was characterized not only by
a deep association with the process of colonial
subjugation, but also with the old occidental
bias about the orient, but Said’s intervention
into literary studies went very much beyond
this insight.
In fact, Said’s main purpose was not simply
to reveal this connection between literature
and colonial discourse, but also to undermine
it, by revealing its internal fault lines
and to do this Said developed a technique,
which is called the technique of contrapuntal
reading, and what is contrapuntal reading?
Well, it is a reading strategy, which tries
to read a text underscored by such colonial
discourse like orientalism, by questioning
some of its inherent assumptions, which its
author and its intended readers would have
shared as axiomatic.
So, for instance, a contrapuntal reading of
a 19th century British novel set in the orient
would proceed by undermining the basic assumptions
that the West, for instance, is civilizationally
superior to the East, or that the former is
somehow more masculine than the latter, or
that the occident is more mature than the
orient.
So, in other words, contrapuntal reading,
reads a text, approaches a text, against the
grain, and in Said this reading strategy has
actually come to occupy the centre of postcolonial
literary criticism, but I do not have a sufficient
amount of time here to actually show you,
illustrate to you, how contrapuntal reading
is done with reference to a particular text,
but if you are interested to know more about
it, I would suggest that you listen to my
lectures on Joseph Conrad’s novel, Heart
of Darkness in my other NPTEL course, on Postcolonial
Literature. So, with this, we end our first
lecture on postcolonialism. We will continue
with our discussion on this topic, in our
next lecture, where we will especially focus
on the works of Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Chakraborty
Spivak.
Thank you.
