Welcome back to the course on postcolonial
literature.
Now in our previous lecture, we discussed
the various meanings of the term postcolonialism,
and we also explored the various nuances of
the two components - the word “colonialism”
as well as the prefix “post” - which comes
together to form the word postcolonialism.
In today’s lecture we will try to understand
the relevance of the term postcolonialism
from within the field of literary studies.
But before we begin our discussion on that,
it is important to note here that the word
postcolonialism, unlike, say for instance,
the word “imagism”, was not specifically
coined to signify a particular kind of literature.
In fact, the use of the term postcolonialism,
which can be traced as far back as the late
19th century, had little connection with the
field of literature till almost the late 1980’s.
And till that time in fact, the word postcolonialism
was primarily used as an adjective to refer
to conditions or situations which occurred
or existed after the end of colonial rule
in places like America for instance or India.
So in this context postcolonialism meant post-independence
and it was almost always used, the word postcolonialism
was almost always used with a hyphen separating
“post” from “colonialism”.
Now it was only since the late 1980’s and
the 1990’s that postcolonialism became an
integral part of literary discussions and
it brought together two already existing areas
of study within the field of English literature.
If you look at the slide then you will see
that the first area which got incorporated
within the field of postcolonial literature
was referred to as “commonwealth literature”.
And the other area was referred to as the
study of “colonial discourse” or “colonial
discourse analysis”.
So these two separate aspects came together
to form the field of postcolonial studies
and they in a way form the roots of postcolonial
literature as a field of literary studies.
So therefore it is very important to understand
these two constituent parts if we want to
explore postcolonial literature at any length.
So today let us start with the category of
commonwealth literature.
Now the word commonwealth signifies a grouping
of nation.
A grouping of those nations or those nation
states which were once British colonies.
The British empire which had reached its peak
in terms of occupied territory by the 1920’s,
and here you can see the map of the British
empire in 1921, this empire as depicted in
this map, by the shaded area in this map,
had started breaking up from 1940’s.
And in fact, India was
one of the first nation states to break away
from the British empire.
Now the sovereign nation states which were
emerging out of the British empire and which
shared a common history of British colonialism,
voluntarily decided to form a confederation
with the British monarch as its head.
And this confederation of sovereign states
which were once British colonies came to be
known as the commonwealth.
And this grouping of nation of course still
exists.
And this is a map of the states that form
the commonwealth today.
And if you see that the highlighted areas
in green are the countries which are the member
states.
If you look at this map carefully, you will
realise that not all countries which were
British colonies are now part of the commonwealth.
Of course, some states which were once part
of the commonwealth decided to leave later
on, for instance, the African state of Gambia
or more recently Maldives, they have left
the commonwealth, initially they were part
of the commonwealth.
But there is one country which, though it
was a British colony at one point of time,
was never really a part of the commonwealth
of nations.
And that country which is conspicuous by its
absence is of course the United States of
America.
Now if you remember your history, you will
know that the United States of America was
part of the British empire, was ruled from
Britain till 1776.
Indeed, even today America celebrates the
4th of July every year as its date of independence
from the British rule.
But this erstwhile British colony does not
feature in the list of commonwealth nations
and it is of course an anomaly.
And this anomaly is only one of the anomalies
which plague the concept of commonwealth.
And, in fact, the number of anomalies got
compounded when the term commonwealth started
being used by the academicians to designate
a particular kind of literature.
The first major attempt to use the term commonwealth
to denote a specific literary category was
made in 1964 when the University of Leeds
in England organised what was called the first
Commonwealth Literature Conference.
And this conference was an effort to bring
under a single umbrella the significant amount
of English literature that was coming out
of the once colonised part of the British
empire.
For instance, by the time of the conference
by the 1960’s, authors like R.K.
Narayan from India, V.S.
Naipaul from the West Indian island of Trinidad,
Chinua Achebe from Nigeria, all these authors
who belonged to the once colonised part of
the world, colonised by Britain, were being
regularly published in Britain and in America
and their names had become quite familiar
within the field of literary studies.
Now this conference organised by the University
of Leeds was an attempt to bring authors like
Naipaul, Narayan, Achebe to the fore and to
form a field of literary studies around their
works.
And this field of literary studies was referred
to as a field of commonwealth literature.
Now, just like in the political group of commonwealth
nations America remains conspicuously absent,
even in the category of commonwealth literature,
the literature of America never featured.
But what was even more curious was that the
category of commonwealth literature never
included the literature of Britain, in spite
of the fact that Britain was and still is
very much a part of the commonwealth of nations
and it was the metropolitan country of the
colonial empire.
But, in spite of that, British literature
was never a part of the category that was
studied and discussed using the name Commonwealth
literature.
The Indian born novelist Salman Rushdie, while
attending another conference on Commonwealth
Literature held nearly twenty years after
the first conference at Leeds, noted that
there was in fact a politics going on behind
how the term Commonwealth literature, the
category Commonwealth literature was being
used.
His argument was that Commonwealth literature
was used to group under itself all the English
literatures that were emerging from the once
colonised parts of the world but it did not
include British literature because it wanted
to segregate the English literature emerging
from the colonies as a separate group of literature.
Now why this segregation?
According to Rushdie there was no way that
such a significant amount of English literature
could be altogether avoided.
But the next best thing was, according to
Rushdie, to separate this amount of literature
coming from the colonies under a separate
category and to label them in a manner that
they can be identified as English literature
which was not really at par with British literature.
So it was a category of inferior kind of English
literature almost.
This was according to Rushdie the hidden politics
that was being played out in the metropolitan
universities when the Commonwealth literature
was being discussed as a category.
What also concerned Rushdie was that within
the field of Commonwealth literature, the
authors and their works were arranged in neat
subgroups according to their nations of origin.
It was thus expected that an author born in
India will write only about India and his
or her writings will represent an essence
of Indianness that was unique and that was
uncontaminated by anything else.
That is for instance, a novel by R.K.
Narayan for instance was supposed to embody
a unique essence of “Indianness” that
was assumed to be different from say the essence
of “Australianness” that one might find
in the writings of someone like Patrick White,
which in turn was supposed to be different
from say the essence of “West Indianness”
that was supposedly found in the work of V.S.
Naipaul.
Now such an attitude towards literature was
problematic at two different levels.
Firstly, the post 16th century period of European
colonialism was also marked by a tremendous
amount of human movement.
People moved around a lot because travel was
much easier compared to earlier times.
And they moved around either because they
could afford to travel or because they were
displaced, forcibly evicted due to various
economic and political reasons.
Take the case of Rushdie for instance.
Salman Rushdie was born in Bombay.
He then went to England as a student and subsequently
settled down there.
His family in turn moved from India to Pakistan
and settled down in Pakistan.
Now Rushdie of course has written a lot about
India but he has also written about Britain,
as well as about Pakistan.
So does this make Rushdie an Indian author,
does it make him a Pakistani author, does
it make him a British author?
What is that national category under which
we should keep the works of Rushdie?
It is a problem, it is a conundrum.
And if it is so difficult to pin down an author
coming from one of the ex-British colonies,
then it is not difficult to imagine how impossible
it would be to pin down entire cultures within
the confines of one nation state or another.
Take for instance again the example of another
Indian author Rabindranath Tagore.
Now Tagore’s work proved to be very influential
in South America after his poetry was translated
by the Argentine author Victoria Ocampo.
Similarly the literary technique of magic
realism which was invented by authors like
Gabriel Garcia Marquez in South America during
the 1960’s and 1970’s influenced various
Indian novelists including Salman Rushdie.
Now the category of Commonwealth literature,
by not factoring in this interconnected nature
of literary and cultural influences as well
as the problematic relationship of authors
from ex-colonies with the land of their origin,
was failing as a category, a category through
which works of authors as different as Rushdie,
Achebe, Naipaul and Narayan can be studied
together.
The attempt to read literature by using national
framework was also problematic in another
way.
The literature that a commonwealth nation
like India for instance produces is produced
in many different languages.
Isn’t it?
English is definitely one of the languages
in which Indian literature is produced but
that is far from being the only language in
which Indian literature is produced.
Now, though the category of Commonwealth literature
used the concept of nation and national traditions
to group authors and their works, it never
really looked beyond the English literature
that was coming out of the colonies.
And as the case of India shows us that such
a focus on English literature is not only
a very limited focus but it is also not in
sync with the complex literary landscape that
the erstwhile colonies of Britain presented.
So Commonwealth literature, therefore, soon
became an unworkable category, both because
it was not international enough and because
it was not national enough.
Not international enough because it did not
take into account the cross-cultural influences
and the cross territorial affiliations of
the authors coming from the once colonised
parts of the world.
And simultaneously not national enough because
it was not taking into account the various
kinds of non-English literature that was also
emerging out of the colonies.
However, the most problematic aspect of the
category commonwealth literature was the way
it connected the literature coming out of
the colonies with the colonial empire.
The notion of a commonwealth headed by the
British monarch is almost inevitably informed
by a spirit of nostalgia for the bygone days
of the British empire.
Indeed the category of Commonwealth literature
can be interpreted at one level as an attempt
to culturally keep together an empire which
was no longer a political reality.
But political decolonisation was achieved
by the nation-states that emerged out of the
shadow of British rule through a prolonged
anti-colonial struggle and the authors who
came out of these parts of the world, the
once colonised parts of the world, were heirs
to this anti-colonial legacy as well as to
the legacies of colonialism.
It is therefore no wonder that the feeling
of nostalgia for the colonial empire that
lurked, and I would say still lurks, behind
the term commonwealth would make the label
of commonwealth literature unattractive to
some of the very authors that it supposedly
describes.
And this kind of aversion towards the category
of commonwealth literature was perhaps best
displayed when the novelist Amitav Ghosh refused
to let his novel The Glass Palace be considered
for the 2001 Commonwealth Writers prize.
One major reason for this decision, as Ghosh
writes in his letter that he sent to the award
giving committee, had to do with the nostalgic
memorialisation of the colonial past which
informed the idea of commonwealth.
According to Ghosh, such glorification or
such glorified memorialisation of the colonial
past was precisely what he was trying to resist
through his novels like The Glass Palace.
And, therefore, he could not allow it to be
included within the race for a prize that
had the word commonwealth associated with
it.
And this was true for many writers who were
emerging from the ex-colonies of Britain.
They were writing against the idea of the
colonial empire.
Yet the category of commonwealth literature
remained largely impervious to these elements
of anti-colonialism.
So by the 1990’s commonwealth literature
as a literary category was losing favour and
it was losing favour for various different
reasons.
We have already discussed them.
But in this slide I have enumerated them.
So commonwealth literature was problematic
as a category firstly because it neither included
the literature of erstwhile colonies like
America nor did it include the literature
of metropolitan Britain.
It was also problematic because it did not
take into account the cross-cultural influences
and the cross-territorial affiliations of
authors from the ex-colonies.
It did not take into account the non-English
literatures that was emerging from commonwealth
nations like India for instance.
And finally the category of commonwealth literature
involved a nostalgic glorification of the
legacies of colonialism.
So these were the various problems because
of which the category of commonwealth literature
was losing favour within literary circles
and it started losing favour by the 1990’s.
And 1990’s was the time when postcolonial
literature emerged as a replacement.
Now if we look at the kind of literature that
was being grouped together using the term
postcolonial, we will see that there is not
much difference between postcolonial literature
or what was being discussed as postcolonial
literature and the archive of commonwealth
literature.
For instance, authors like R.K.
Narayan, Derek Walcott, Ngugi Wa Thiong’o,
Chinua Achebe, Salman Rushdie, all of them
who were being read under the banner of commonwealth
literature were also relevant within the category
of postcolonial literature.
However, though the literature remained the
same, almost the same, the critical approach
to this literature underwent a sea change.
As we will see later in this course, unlike
commonwealth literature, the field of postcolonial
studies is underlined by a keen awareness
of the fact that both cultures as well as
people who produce these cultures, both of
them are incessantly travelling, they are
crossing borders, they are intermixing with
one another and they are not fixed within
national boundaries.
Also it is worth noting that though postcolonial
literature too concerns itself primarily with
literature written in English, yet unlike
commonwealth literature there is a genuine
attempt to incorporate non-English literatures
within its canon.
And one good example would be the works of
the Bengali author Mahasweta Devi, which forms
today part of the canon of postcolonial literature.
It is very much a part of discussions on postcolonial
literature today.
And the original works of Mahasweta Devi of
course are all in Bengali and not in English.
However, having said this one should also
admit that postcolonial literary studies still
predominantly confined itself to English language
and even though I said that Devi’s works
are popular within the field of postcolonial
literature, yet they are accessed only as
translations, in their translated forms.
And Gayatri Spivak, a name that you will later
encounter during this course, is one of the
major theorist of postcolonial literature
and also the English translator of Mahasweta
Devi’s work.
However, the most radical change in the approach
to literary texts that distinguishes postcolonial
literature from commonwealth literature is
the former’s focus, the focus of postcolonial
literature, on anti-colonial resistance.
Whereas commonwealth literature was informed
by colonial nostalgia, by a glorification
almost of the legacies of colonialism, postcolonial
literature is informed by a highly critical
approach towards colonialism.
Indeed, postcolonial literature is not merely
a grouping of literature that has emerged
out of the colonies or ex-colonies of Britain.
Rather it is a grouping of literature which
attempts to subvert and undo the effects of
colonial violence.
This critical attitude which informs the postcolonial
studies today is a legacy of what I have referred
to earlier in this lecture as “colonial
discourse analysis”.
And we will learn more about this concept
of “colonial discourse analysis” in our
next lecture.
Thank you.
