Politics and culture

Post colonialism

Introduction

This paper is an attempt to read Post colonialism as an effort of transcendence of the actual. Thoughts are considered to be an effort of the transcendence: the mind keeps travelling into future as a constant journey; language builds systems of power; ideologies are victims of self-preservation quality of species; new ideologies find out the politics of old ideologies, with their own politics and materialism; step by step society is built following the inner dreams; the entities pushed to the margin in the course of history are now dreaming of centre. The shift to globalization redefines the geographical location of the narrator. Universalization of positions has become a necessity in the age of Communication and the other side of the coin is that particularization is equally being strengthened to keep its identity. The world has become one unit with an international language emerging powerfully, at the same time it is shrinking in identity crisis.  It is from this perspective this paper reads theories.

The impact of science on thought

Science, the child of rationalism along with institutionalized   religious systems, has played a great role in shaping the western mind in a different way from the east. Rationalism started off with Greek philosophy and dominated the European intellectual domain. When he analyses issues of rationalism and irrationalism, Karl Popper advocates “a modest and self-critical rationalism which recognizes certain limitations” (p.254).

He identifies two rationalist positions as critical rationalism and uncritical rationalism. But adopting rationalism or having faith in reason becomes a behaviour or habit. Habits can become fixed and settled. The adoption of uncritical rationalism thus leads to irrationalism, or fixed ideas. “So rationalism is necessarily far from comprehensive or self-contained” (Popper, p.255). Whereas ‘critical rationalism’ is closely akin to ‘the scientific attitude’.  It is supported by ‘imagination’ and ‘combined with a basically equalitarian and humanitarian outlook’ (p.255).

Further Popper agrees with Mac Murray and quotes him who says: ‘Science is the product of Christianity’. Popper says,

I fully agree with this, for I too believe that our Western civilization owes its rationalism, its faith in the rational unity of man and in the open society, and especially its scientific outlook, to the ancient Socratic and Christian belief in the brotherhood of all men, and in intellectual honesty and responsibility (p. 269).

Religions and philosophic systems train a particular people slowly into a certain style of functioning in society; it develops certain attitudes. Identities are created with ideologies, later leading into questions of roots and racial characteristics. Human species have divided themselves East and West based on these ideological differences.  Popper goes on to say that

Marx himself as early as in 1847 distinguished about seven or eight different ‘pre- Marxian Sources’ of socialism, and among them also those which he labeled ‘Clerical’ or ‘Christian’ socialism, and that he never dreamt of having discovered socialism, but only claimed that he had made it rational; or, as Engels expresses it, that he had developed socialism from a Utopian idea into a science (p. 279).

Marx became the fine tuning point of systems of thought that took charge of the western mind, expressing them in a scientific and coherent manner. When the ideas are found in religion, science treats them as utopian ideals, and when they are scientifically rationalized, they become a modern subject or political movement. The transition from utopian level to scientific level has to be well established by a powerful mind and Marx did it in the case of communism.

Historians wrote on “specific and peculiar rationalism of western culture” (Max Weber in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, p.26). The Weberian pride in western rationality is noteworthy of attention, reflecting the attitude of a people growing in economic power. Critiques of Reason have begun from the time of Kant. Still, the faith in Rationalism has not dwindled in any way.

Eurocentrism

Rationalism has been behind the tremendous changes that took place in western culture resulting in different modes, economic power, knowledge systems, political models and these differences are now perceived as a division in a hierarchical model of First, Second and Third Words. Development led to domination and things slowly started centering on Europe. Our world now is Eurocentric, whether we like it or not. Nation/state and common education cannot be wiped out from the brows of Mankind, still another major contribution comes from yet another civilization in systems of politics and knowledge structure.

How did this Euro centrism begin? The winner creates stories putting him in the centre of it, pushing everyone else to the corner. This need for domination, the need for attention is always found behind victory. To reinforce materialism, the victorious human mind keeps on talking about its right qualities and the other’s wrong qualities. Concepts like ‘forward’ and ‘backward’ emerge gradually. Material wealth and power are dependent on certain qualities like belligerence and a violent desire to win and get attention and dominate fellow species as one group over another – a clannish quality of human species.

Post colonial scholarship questions Eurocentrism revealed in western scholars of the past. Critiquing Weber’s faith in western rationality, James Morris Blaut says, “Weber saw social evolution as essentially an intellectual progression, as ascent of human “rationality”, meaning intellect and ethics, from ancient to modern society” in his book Eight Eurocentric Historians (p.19). He further points out Eric L.Jones’s concept of the “European miracle” (p.15) emphasizing on the non-rational arguments of historians; Michael Mann in 1986 proposed that the “core of civilization (”social power”) moves readily westward (p.15).

The Western mind has consistently shown aggressive qualities leading it towards domination and victory and used all its weapons to achieve the same – science, religion and ambition. It always strove for more territories, and raw materials. It developed its naval powers and encouraged them to find new lands as new sources of income. It used its rationalistic tendencies and created geopolitical discourses where “a constellation of writings and images produced by a varied constituency operating in several loci, including the universities, the media and government ministries” (Heffernan, p.28) to justify itself academically.

Heffernan argues that geopolitics was born out of this context. There was a “‘geopolitical panic’ particularly in Europe”, a historical and geographical juncture “where an entire generation of politicians, diplomats and intellectuals” devised “strategies to cope with the apparently imminent collapse of their familiar world order” (p.29). Economic and political thinking of Europe was scared that “geographical size would determine national power”. “Principal imperial powers” scrambled “for imperial space from 1880’s onwards” (p.29) trying to make use of the land of the savages available in plenty.  Heffernan’s argument is from the angle of geography:

Over 16 million square kilometers (20 per cent of the earth surface) and 150 million people (10 per cent of the world population) were added to the European empires during the last thirty years of the last 19th century… Colonies were coveted not for immediate economic gain (still less for moral reasons) but as symbols of an otherwise vulnerable national pride. No self-respecting power could be without its place in the sun. Colonial expansion became an attempt to acquire comparative territorial advantage outside Europe in the hope that this would allow small European states to survive in the coming world order ( p.29).

When we look at this European experience dominated by ambition from Heffernan’s view, we realize Popper’s  longing for ‘critical rationalism’ becomes marginalized against self-survivalist tendencies of human beings. ‘Geopolitical’ panic is the fear of future failure. When humanity is chased by fear of survival, ‘Critical rationalism’ remains an ideal. The western mind with its imperialistic tendencies dreamt of India for centuries as it wanted to expand its territories and dominate the world and India’s vast territories with its opportunities for growth was very attractive to its ambitious nature to conquer.         

For the European geopolitical imagination, India was the land of plenty, the land of pearls and spices, which it wanted to see, understand and conquer. India was Europe’s dream. The European kingdoms competed with each other in establishing colonies. Unhappy and discontented with its geological limitations, Europe went in search of new dominions and thus launched its imperialisms abroad. It took half millennium of hard work, disciplined and systematic organization for the imperialistic attitudes to leave a stamp on the rest of the world’s psyche with their mark of colonialism.  Imperialistic presences changed their political coloring later and are continuing with their original shape of economical and cultural domination of the other parts of the world. Geopolitical imaginations have proved to be much more powerful than the objectivity aimed at by human knowledge systems. The modern responses to these past experiences have been equally away from objectivity.

The European imagination gained tremendously with the contact with the other civilizations; these civilizations did not appear to be civilizations to the trained eye of Europeans who by this time had developed their own perspective of what a  civilization is and how it should be measured. They had evolved their metrics.  But the savage, in newly seen countries had a romantic freedom that the civilized European longed to get back. Roughly the Rousseauean quest for freedom can be said as an inspiration of the noble savage. Rousseau’s discourse always had the savage at the background.

Orientalism

                               

In the era of    globalization, the rest of the world faces colonialism and questions its legitimacy. Global thoughts and emotions have entered the scenario of centralized human knowledge systems and knowledge hierarchies are being questioned and their structures are disturbed opening up to new avenues of thinking. Edward Said represents these new avenues of thinking and feelings. He questions the dominating and condescending tone of western knowledge systems in his book  Orientalism.

He analyses the prejudices present in academic disciplines.  `Orientalism’ is studied by Said as a mechanism, which constructed the orient in a political, sociological, ideological and scientific sense. It was the European idea of the orient.  The ideology of the orient was developed during the 19th century. Paris became a center for Sanskrit studies. The French deciphered the Zend- Avesta. German oriental scholarship refined and elaborated techniques and applied them to texts, myths, ideas and languages almost literally gathered from the orient by imperial Britain and France. The orient was identified as the land of plenty and countries vied with each other to learn more about it only to subdue it and colonize its resources.

Europe, as described by Said, seems to have been obsessed with the idea of dominating the orient. Said narrates the story of imperialism how it spread its tentacles and swallowed other parts of the world and tried to strengthen itself. The main argument in the book is how the interest in the orient was becoming an ideological construct of the Western intelligentsia who instead of being humanistic towards the colonies were actually involved in empire building. Said suggests that global justice should be practiced in academic research, instead of making partial judgments based on geographic or identity prejudices. He argues that ideologies are created by humanity to promote the self of particulars. ‘Orientalism’ cannot stand the test of rationalism. To prove his point Said uses political issues and texts or  literature, treating works of art as pieces of political documents containing agendas and inner meanings, giving a materialistic reading, paving way to a new kind of social science research, reading the material meaning of texts.

Said traces this interest of the Europeans in the orient to Greek times. He questions the identity of Asia as perceived by the Greeks. He talks about how Aeschylus perceives Persians. Reading Aeschylus, living in a global society, one need to stretch imagination to visualize the way Aeschylus must have perceived the globe. Said ignores such perspectives, as he has to create the atmosphere to prove the Greek prejudice. He says,

What matters here is that Asia speaks through and by virtue of the European imagination, which is depicted as victorious over Asia, that hostile ‘other’ world beyond the seas. To Asia are given the feelings of emptiness, loss and disaster that seem thereafter to reward Oriental challenges to the West… (p. 55-56).

Aeschylus writes like a Greek writer identifying with the Greek victory and thus alienates Asia, is Said’s comment here. He expects the creative artist to raise himself above the concepts of countries and kingdoms. When writers take one side of the case, writing becomes a medium of cultural power. To Said a poet, has to be basically a global citizen and not write against another land and should have the ability and the sensitivity to feel the pain of the loser also.  In short, in his views, literature should not be hegemonic, but humanistic. Aeschylus betrays his prejudices when he refers to Asia as a land of emptiness, which negates the civilization of Asia totally. The lines establish the Greek culture as superior to Asian cultures. Said finds fault with this partiality in European imagination and expects the artist to rise above the frame works of mother land and other such borders. A work of art should be universal and not bound by any identity limitations.

          These global ideologies of universality demanding a global view from the author are further expanded and developed in another important work, Culture and Imperialism. Together with the earlier book Orientalism, Culture and Imperialism set the tone of postcolonial studies. The book analyses the patterns of relationship between the modern metropolitan West and its overseas territories. Said reinterprets a few 19th Century English novels.  Of all the novels, the novels of Kipling and Jane Austen, obviously considered the canon texts, receive maximum attention from him. His interpretation of Kim by Kipling reveals the imperialistic tendencies and models of colonialism, which the writer has not negated. Said refers to Kim, as a successfully sustained and mature piece and accepts his literary position as a master stylist, one who acquired a large audience. The question he asks is: Does Kipling portray the Indians as inferior or as somehow equal but different?

Said goes ahead and gives a short summary of the novel followed by an extensive and detailed discourse analysis looking at the novel from a political angle. Suitable passages are selected which can easily give in to such readings. All the while the artistic achievement and workmanship of Kipling are not questioned. An interesting analysis in the book is a reference to the description of Indian Sepoy mutiny by a loyalist soldier who is respected by the British Deputy Commissioners. Said quotes from the novel:

A madness ate into all the army, and they turned against their officers. That was the first evil, but not past remedy if they had them held their hands. But they chose to kill the Sahib’s wives and children. Then came the Sahibs from all over the sea and called them to most strict account (Culture and Imperialism, p.178).

Now, this passage is analyzed by Said in the typical fashion of colonial discourse studies:

W hen Kipling has the old soldier describe the British counter-revolt- with its horrendous reprisals by white men bent on ‘moral’ action- as ‘calling’ the Indian mutineers ‘to strict account’, we have left the world of history and entered the world of imperialist polemic, in which the native is naturally a delinquent, the white man a stern but moral parent and judge. Thus Kipling gives us the extreme British view on the mutiny, and puts it in the mouth of an Indian, whose more likely nationalist and aggrieved counterpart is never seen in the novel (p.178).

Said’s complaint is that the creative imagination of Kipling is one sided and highly subjective reflecting his strong faith in British imperialism. What is worse is that these imperialistic ideologies are spoken not by a British man in the novel, but an Indian- a soldier or a Sepoy- turning against fellow Indians, which is hailed by the British as a sign of loyalty. Kipling refuses to recognize Indian nationalism, and thus he fails to accept reality, and instead constructs his own sense of reality. The India that Kipling presented to England was the India of his imagination. It was not the real India. Kipling writes like a true British subject. He is writing to his British readers discussing things from a British point of view. Kipling creates an ambience where the British feel they are right and the others are wrong. A writer of the stature like Kipling himself has not arisen above the immediacies of life. He has only catered to his readership. Texts should maintain a philosophical distance from actualities and identify with it is the message of Said. A writer takes a higher position in society and therefore must be a philosopher distancing himself from the prejudices of society.

Said creates an image in our mind as if only the British writers put hidden political agenda into their texts and writers from the other countries do not so. His argument is so cleverly done that an Indian reading it will be exited into anger towards western systems and start thinking India never had such agendas in literature and also get the idea that India is good and Britain is bad. It is here Said encourages identity politics in critical writing which he himself is against in creative writing. Said calls it “Cultural poverty of identity politics” in 2001 ( Reflections on Exile, p. xv).

Indian texts

When Kipling was busily strengthening the identity of the British what was the writers from other countries doing is the question that research has to take up. When the colonizer’s culture was establishing its imperial discourse, what were the colonized doing? What were the Indian writers writing about? What was the geopolitical imagination of the colonized?  What do the cultural artifacts in India during colonization tell us?   What were the Indian writers thinking and writing about? Can art move towards a higher ideal? Can it be impartial and be just as Said expects it to be? Is only European literature so partial in nature or other literatures too?

A Tamil novel Sivagamiyin Sabatham  serialized in a weekly magazine by Kalki in the 1940’s can be taken for analysis. He was a very popular writer then and even now his novels reprinted. Recently even his translated novel (Ponniyin Selvan- Tamil to English) sold well. Sivagamiyin Sabatham is an artistic masterpiece, well structured. It created immortal characters like Sivagami, Narasimavarma Pallavan and Naaganandhi. In an intense political period of nationalism why did Kalki write historical novels ignoring social needs is one of the many accusations against him. In Sivagamiyin Sabatham, he created his own world of fantasy and imperialism singing the glory of Tamil culture, Shivism, Bharathanatyam, sculptures in Mamallapuram and celebrated the victories of the Tamil Pallava kings over the Karnataka Chalukya kings. The Tamils are the ‘we’ and the Chalukyas are the ‘others’. Shivites are the ‘we’ and Buddhists and Jains are the ‘others’. Contemporary, post colonial critical opinion recognizes this novel as a hegemonic text of caste and religion with imperialistic tendencies.

A passage from the novel can be analyzed in Saidian style. In the third volume Kalki narrates a scene between the Pallava Queen and Thirunavukkarasar or Appar (one of the composers of the Tamil Bhakti poetry, Tevaram). He has just returned from a pilgrimage to the north and says,

I saw so many temples in North India. I went even up to Mount Kailash. But the temples in South India are really great. There is no other temple equivalent to our Lord Agaambareswar temple. Thirutillai, Thiruvaiyaaru and Thiruvaanaikaa temples are better than any other temple. I am planning to go to South India to worship at these holy places. (SS, p.63)

A geopolitical reading of the passage reveals the geographical constructs here. We have the opposing forces of North and South. In Aeschylus and Kipling the binary opposition was East and West. The questions, which came to Said when he read Kim, come to our mind also:  Who is talking? -  The character or the author? Is it Appar or Kalki himself? The novelist represents truth from his geographical and cultural point of view. Preferring South to the North can be interpreted as a sign of hegemony, just as West to East. The hegemony found in Western discourse by Said is also found in the Eastern discourse.

The Occidental geopolitical imagination thought of the orient as the ‘other’, whereas in Oriental geopolitical imagination the ‘other’ is not the Occident, but  another region- sub national or intra national. The European has thought more about the Asian. But the Asian has had his own problems in which the westerner plays no role. And this justifies Said’s ‘Orientalism’ as the dream of the European mind.

Good vs. Evil as a strategy

Coming back to the use of binary oppositions by  writers of narrative, these are used to establish the identities of the people presented. To set off anything, particularly a contrasting element has to be used and the writers invariably fall upon the old pattern of using good against evil to establish the story line. Unfortunately in dealing with historical and geographical themes, good vs. evil can be very complicating as one land, one race can become bad. This dialectic between the self and the other is a time-tested method used by writers who normally identify with one side and alienate the other side. The Greek Aeschylus, the English Kipling and the Tamil Kalki are examples of such writers. The modern Hollywood cinema, living in a global society, with a market all over the world builds enemy hood outside of the universe – dead and gone animals or species from other worlds. Whatever it is, narration cannot be done without the strategy of good vs. evil. The reader or the viewer’s location decides the geographical framework of the narrator.

In Kalki, we see another element – the element of resistance to the concept of nation, to the idea of democracy -  if we analyse the political situation in India during 1930’s and 1940’s. Britain and the top congress leaders were involved in constructing the notion of nationhood- India- a nation/state. The concept of a nation in a democratic setup  was a new political order in the making. India was being created, built and developed on the model of European nations. Indians had no choice, but to accept this new political system of a democratic nationhood. Along with this construct of nation there was another ideological notion, called nationalism. Indian political ideology in the nineteen forties was talking about unity in diversity. Poets were singing about mother India. Bharat Mata was created and given a character, costume and shape. The concept of oneness was in the air. In such a scenario, Kalki was responding to other different voices- voices of his region- asking for a regional identity. In the memory of the Tamils the Northerners were enemies to be conquered. They were aliens speaking different languages. Kalki, having the fine sensitive qualities of a writer felt the pulse of his people and produced works of art, which the people devoured. Arts limit themselves with their entertainment values.

Kalki was also healing the wounds of colonization. Kalki’s novels are the reassertion of the Tamil identity, which he felt should not be lost in the sea of a bigger nation. Kalki exploits the oppositional elements of Tamils vs. Chalukiyas and glorifies the Tamil traditions. He fantasies. In a way it is also a kind of quiet resistance- resistance to the domination of the European and resistance to the domination of the north (that was how the concept of nation was and is interpreted by the south)- and establishment of self-sustenance of a region.

Such an analysis of Kalki as a resistant writer rising to the ideological needs of a society paves the way to look at Kipling also as rising to the ideological needs of his era in the same way. The average Britisher in the 19th century found nothing wrong in Imperialism. People build imperialisms. Writers reflect this desire. The British imagination, representing a small island always wanted more land. And India had vast territories. British political and even ordinary discourses would tell us a lot about the Britishers’ constant references to the Roman Empire. The people wanted to expand their territories and construct an empire and they worked for it. It was the ideology of the common man and that means it was the opinion and public will of the majority. Both Kalki and Kipling are master stylists of prose and also people’s writers. The combination of talent and expression of the public will make them successful novelists, but with strong hierarchical models of thinking- which also expresses the majority and popular culture.

When hegemonic structures are proved in systems of writing, what is the role of a writer in a society? Can a writer rise above his society? What is the right stand for a writer? Is storytelling possible without a presentation of the opposites? Said would have answered simply by saying a writer has to have enough sensitivity that it should not be blocked by any ideological constraints of nation, religion, caste etc. and should identify with the less privileged. Here is a contradiction. The creative imagination should not be blocked by any political constructions, but reflect and identify itself with the politics of the marginalized. That means creativity should not support the winner but the loser. Literature has an ethical role to play, is the expectation. The writer is a great moralizer who has to guide humanity towards harmony and peace. Writers have to take the side of the ordinary man against any kind of hegemonic structures. His thinking is humanistic.

Said’s model doesn’t project equality, but shows a bend towards the minority. It does not discuss objectivity. Though he expects western literature to understand the ‘other’, he himself doesn’t try to understand other things which are against his likes. If the academic discipline of ‘Orientalism’ has not understood the Orientals properly, has the discipline of ‘Post Colonialism’ understood the occidentals properly? What is the role of scientific objectivity in both orientalism and postcolonialism?

Said’s Humanism

What is the origin of this intellectual humanism in Said? We find the source when we read The Politics of Dispossession where he tells us his marginalized position as a Palestinian Christian being refused his own land as he was one of the thousands of refugees who were forced to leave their lands to carve a new nation and territory in Israel for the Jews. When we loose, fail and become the less privileged we feel the pain of dispossession and expect kindness and humane feelings from others. In the book, in a moving passage Said tells us how he went to Israel with his wife and children to see his family house, the house where he was born only to realize that it was not even occupied by a Jewish family but by a fundamental Christian group. Said writes about it:

It took almost two hours to find the house. … there the house was, I suddenly knew, with its still impressive bulk commanding the sandy little square… my daughter told me that using a camera with maniac excitement, I reeled off 26 photos of the place, which, irony of ironies bore the nameplate ‘International Christian Embassy’ at the gate. To have found my family’s house now occupied not by an Israeli Jewish family, but by a right wing Christian fundamentalist and militantly pro- Zionist group was an abrupt blow for a child of Palestinian Christian parents. Anger and melancholy took me over (p.180).

The critic is shaped by the society that shapes the creative writer too. Perspectives are bound by time and space and no thinking individual can escape it. Said’s experience has shaped his thinking just like every thinker and writer. He is now thinking from a particular point of view. Escaping this frame work of our own experience thus is  very difficult for a human being whether he is an academician or not. The experience creeps into writings and decides their shape. The Jewish philosophers, German and French philosophers and the field of Post Structuralism itself is shaped by the Jewish Holocaust. Even Popper has his own experience that has made him to react so strongly to hegemonic tendencies. The powerful voice  present in Post Structuralism is the voice of pain speaking after the Second World War. Philosophers lost their respect for the ‘Word’, as it did not prevent the atrocities of  ethnic pride and arrogance or irrationalism in the German society – in its academia, that Popper blames Hegel and Marx for making people fanatical. With the highest achievement of science and technology, the western society became self-assured and the World Wars and the atrocities made the philosophers raise fundamental questions about life – is it right to respect ‘Right”?

Society is now ready to take the next step in thought – a step towards total objectivity and ‘critical rationalism’, as Popper points out. How do avoid future irrational behaviour? The answer lies in the route to anti-hegemony. ‘Human Rights’ has become the modern agenda breaking hierarchies and Establishments. That is the way texts have to structure themselves aiming at a new model of writing beyond the current methodologies. Philosophers want to re-establish an area where texts will move beyond politics and materialism. Texts have to rise high and reach a position where they remain pure ideologies. They should not divide people against themselves; instead they should bring all the world together; they should practice equality; all races must be practiced; all religions must be respected; all languages must be respected; all belief systems must be respected; a post modern world of equality must be practiced.

Said sees the world as a place of hegemonic structure where centrism plays a major role. One has to be associated with powerful systems otherwise will be marginalised. He feels the pain and anger when he sees these systems of power even in objective knowledge’s domain.

Said’s writings can be interpreted as the recording of the East’s anger which has created an atmosphere in the academic circles for inter- disciplinary works. But the East has problems within itself. Here dispossessions have taken place which has gone unrecorded most of the times. When Indians talk about post colonialism this issue becomes very becomes very sensitive and we become uncomfortable. When we question the westerner for creating centrism we should also question our own centrism. Said’s The Politics of Dispossession, draws parallels in Indian society.

Indian dispossessions

The Tamil writer, Prabanchan’s novel, Vaanam Vasappadum, narrates many scenes of dispossessions. The novel was written in the 1990s representing a society that has by this time undergone so many changes like reservation for lower castes, from the period of Kalki, and the writer self-consciously discusses the social issues in Tamil Nadu, basing his story on the diary of Mr. Pillai in Pondicherry. In one of the chapters the scene is set in a caste oriented society where the upper caste man kills a lower caste man for refusing to give away a small piece of farming land. The lower caste man pleads calling him God. The land is given to him by his forefathers and he doesn’t want to give it away. The land is not simply a piece of soil to him. It is his Goddess. Later the man falls on the ground and weeps. But he is flogged and killed, his body thrown away by his own brother under the instructions of the upper caste man. This is also a case of dispossession- a politics concerning land. The marginalized people do not have any right over anything in a caste based society.

Considering this hybrid quality in the Indian rigid structure of caste what would be the point of view of modern India towards colonialism and post colonialism? Books written on any topic, colonialism or post colonialism or orientalism tend to have certain partialities and do not, probably cannot present the truth as the writers themselves are caught in this complex web of social hierarchy.

Derrida analyzes a similar problem in his book, Writing and difference. When we try to represent the real truth without any personal colouring or in other words, when we attempt to write pure literature, do we really succeed? He says, 

Original illegibility is not simply a moment interior to the book, to reason or to logos; nor is it any more their opposite, having no relationship of symmetry to them, being incommensurable with them. Prior to the book (in the non  chronological sense), original illegibility is therefore the very possibility of the book and, within it, of the ulterior and eventual opposition of “rationalism” and “irrationalism”. The Being that is announced within the illegible is beyond these categories, beyond, as it writes itself, its own name. ( p. 95).

This is training our intellectual sensitivity to look at any concept as something which is rooted in some experience- whether written or unwritten. Derrida’s illegibility is common human experience in its virginal state without being classified. It is the ‘thing’ of future imagined as ‘tomorrow’ or Utopian. Texts transcend the actual and post colonial criticism is no exception.  

Can a writer aim at preserving this ‘Original illegibility’ without stamping it with his subjective attitudes? Original life in its purest form can never be presented is the conclusion of Derrida. In fact in text it may have disastrous results. Derrida quotes Maurice Blanchot: “Is a man capable of a radical interrogation, that is to say, finally, is man capable of literature?” (p. 95). What would be the position of such literature without personal feelings and opinions? Derrida says  considering the question of Maurice Blanchot that , “one could just as well say, on the basis of a certain conceptualization of life,  “incapable” half the time. Except if one admits that pure writing is nonliterature, or death itself. The question about the origin of the book, the absolute interrogation, the interrogation of all possible interrogations, and the “interrogation of God” will never belong to a book” (p.95-96).  As Derrida agrees bringing interrogations or political and other questions is in itself asking for the Utopian world where the ‘word’ will not carry the ‘mind’. Writers will try their best to write without any politics in their writings and will fail, as history will haunt their writings. The kind of writings expected by Said may not be possible looked at from  Derrida’s perspective.

When Popper projects a model of rationalism which accepts its limitations, it seems to be a better model than the one presented by Said. The latter’s model for literature projects a kind of universalism where the writer is expected to go beyond any construction of society - religious, economical, political etc. No conceptualization or imagination has to be taken as the Right, as any Right will have a hidden agenda just like the Left.   But when Said uses this tool to question the assumptions of the West, another concept emerges in a concrete form, the concept of destroying Eurocentrism to bring some other centrism, which is not at all, neutral.

The Post Colonial view of Eurocentrism has become crystallized as a theoretical concept in academic circles and every European work of art is now looked through this looking glass. It is as if the European is a monster who has gobbled up humanity as a whole and the rest of the world is so good that in contrast the European is the villain. Can any truth be that simple? When the white man pictures the Asian as backward there is an agenda behind it. Similarly when the Asian is trying to project the European responsible for all the faults in the world, there is a hidden agenda here too. 

Derrida says that we have to arrive at truth or Being reaching beyond categories. ‘Post- colonial studies’ in India has become highly categorized all the while claiming that it is Derridian in approach. The attempt at finding the truth is one sided. If we use Popper’s way of looking at truth we are reminded by him that any rationalism has to be ethical. Popper goes back to Socrates to guide his thinking. Respecting the other man, and being aware of once own limitation are the precepts of Socratic reasoning. ‘The adoption of rationalism implies… a common language of reason” (Open Society, p.263).

If we bring this Socratic rationale of concepts, Eurocentrism becomes a problematic ideology just like orientalism. When we find fault with others we must be aware of our own limitations.

‘Post colonial studies’ in the Indian context is once again a typical example of human mind which tries to use ideologies to protect itself. Human prejudices and survival tendencies are universal and there is no difference between east and west in this matter. Practicing impartial ideologies probably may not be possible for the human mind with its biological brain influenced by forces inside and outside. A balanced, global, perfectly rational mind without any geographical or historical identity becomes an ideal, a dream, a search for beyond that is found to be very difficult and even impossible to practice.

Derrida’s emphasis on total objectivity will only become the symbol of ideology, another Utopian dream,  which would be discussed at length and not practiced.  The kind of ‘logo centrism’ he wanted to avoid will enmesh his own writings.

Ambivalence of the colonizer or ‘word’?

When we analyze the discourses of the colonizer, it becomes essential to look at the discourse of the colonized regarding the coloniser too.  In his essay, “‘Of Mimicry’ and man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse”  Homi K. Bhabha quotes Jacques Lacan’s theory of mimicry as a framework to his essay:

Mimicry reveals something in so far as it is distinct from what might be called an itself that is behind. The effect of mimicry is camouflage..…It is not a question of harmonizing with the background, but against a mottled background, of becoming mottled- exactly like the technique of camouflage practiced in human warfare (p.414).

Lacan defines mimicry as ‘an itself that is behind’. Bhabha establishes the ‘itself behind’ as the partial gaze of the colonizer. The European who came to India and other countries looked down upon the native. If we consider the experience of looking at a stranger and passing remarks we realize it is a universal phenomenon.  When the colonizer mocked the native what was the attitude of the native towards the colonizer? The Tamil novels of Prabanchan and Pudumai Pithan reveal the mind of the Tamils regarding the European.  Pithan in his story “Chittannai”, describes  a student’s appearance: “Varnam poosia Vellaikarachi yudhadu pola sivaperiya udhadu” (His lips were red like the painted lips of a white woman) (Pithan, p.7. Italicized line mine).  The Tamil equivalent of white woman can have many variations- Vellaikari, Vellaikarachi and Vellaikaramma. The use of the form ‘Vellaikarachi’ reveals the attitude of Tamils to Western women with their make up. Feminists may interpret this phenomenon as a patriarchal sign. How do we look at this particular choice of Pithan?    

Barthes says,

Language is neither an instrument nor a  vehicle: it is a structure, as we increasingly suspect; but the author is the only man, by definition, to  lose his own structure and that of the world in the structure of language (p.187).

The writer converts every explanation into a spectacle. Pudumai Pithan uses the term ‘Vellaikarachi’ to the reader with whom he shares a certain amount of sneering at the ways of the foreigner. He is addressing his fellow men and women. It is more like a private conversation as that is not the way the Indians would talk in front of the whites. Barthes defines language as “the institutionalization of subjectivity” (p.187).  The image Pithan is using here to evoke the picture of the effeminate looking boy. The young boy looks like a girl and to drive home the message clearly , Pithan uses a particular form of a word.

He stamps a strong regional, and patriarchal view there, institutionalizing it, most probably unconsciously.  The White woman with painted lips, as a social presence must have shocked the men in the early 20th Century in Tamil Nadu, why men alone, even woman were and are still against lipstick, as it is looked at as a sign of westernization. Even now as a costume it is worn only by fashionably women in cities and towns.  So the painted lipped white woman becomes a sign of sarcasm and smirk among Tamils.  It is a  negative imagery mocking at the British or French Colonial presence in India.  These attitudes of smirk were not expressed in front of the Imperial Presence but only behind. Can we call it the ‘mimicry’ of Bhabha?

The ‘Vellakarachi’ in the eyes of a Tamilian becomes a symbol of mockery – mocking at imperialism, laughing at it behind its back. It also reveals one of the myths that the Tamilian has – that any one wearing lipstick is too modern. Barthes tells us; “Myth hides nothing and flaunts nothing: it distorts; myth is neither a lie nor a confession:  it is an inflection” (p.116).  The inflection here is the ‘chi’ in Vellaikarachi.  By slightly tilting the language the people shift the meaning of the word, and bring a comical effect and also a socially lower position. The myth of the white woman with painted lips is also a mockery as we said earlier. It is a kind of mimicry. About the phenomenon of mimicry Bhabha  says,

The menace of mimicry is its double vision…a result of what I’ve described as the partial representation / recognition of the colonial object… They are also, as I have shown, the figures of a doubling, the part – objects of a metonymy of colonial desire which alienates the modality and normality, of those dominant discourses in which they emerge as ‘inappropriate’ colonial subjects. A desire that, through the repetition of partial presence, which is the basis of mimicry, articulates those disturbances of cultural, racial and historical difference that menace the narcissistic demand of colonial authority          ( p.417).

If the Easterner also had believed in documenting his experiences like the Westerner, we would have had ample examples to show these qualities visible in the western writings present in the writings of the east too.  The cultural difference in the experience narrated by Pithan is the image of painted lips of the white woman. If we look at this image closely we are able to visualize a white woman with painted lips probably  wearing a  man’s clothes.  The young boy in Pudumai Pithan’s story has lips red in colour, short hair and thin mustache making him almost look like a white woman.  To the Tamil ‘gaze’ this is funny and low.  The Tamil mind has fixed notions of dressing for men and women and the boy has crossed the cultural borders.  His hair is quite long and his moustache is just growing.  The picture is comical to Pithan and to the readers because this comedy is common knowledge. The writer is crystallizing it. It is the comedy and derogation arising out of a situation where an Easterner who is found in the act of trying to imitate the West is laughed at by another Easterner as well as an Easterner laughing at the living style of the west itself. Like the ‘lying Asiatic’ myth of the West,  the Indians have ‘painted lipped white woman’ myth.  

When we read Prabanchan‘s historical novel  Manudam Vellum and Vanam Vasappadum set in the 19th century,  we come across, phrases like “Parangi” and “Vellaikarachi” to refer to the westerners which are used by people among themselves. When they have to talk to the Europeans they use terms like ‘ Peruman’  ‘Durai’ and  ‘Prabhu’- all formal terms coated with respect. 

In Vanam Vasappadum,  Prabanchan narrates a judgment session with a Frenchman, a Turk and other Tamils. And the Frenchman quotes Chitrputran, the clerical assistant to Lord Yama in Hindu mythology. A Tamil upper caste Mudaliar immediately tells Ananda Ranga Pillai, “Ade, Parangian yellam nammoda puranthai, thathuvathai  sollumbadi aache” (oh! It has come to such a situation that these white men are quoting from our mythology and philosophy) (Prabhanchan, p. 512, italicized lines mine). ‘Yellam’ is an inflection which conveys the speaker has absolutely no respect to the white man, and even considers him as a lower caste.

The upper caste Tamils did not exactly have the awe and respect for the Europeans as their consciousness was very elite. It was the lower caste people without any psychological, financial and social security who stood in awe of the colonizer to whom imperialism approached as friendly missionary hands. While the upper caste Indian played a double role of being polite in front and mocking at the back  during the colonization, the lower castes must have stood in awe, and there is a high possibility that they also could have had nick names for the white man and may have laughed at him and the upper caste men behind their backs but unfortunately there are no records as even education was denied to them. It is more like laughing at the boss at the back.

The colonial experience in India is varied, with multiple and hierarchical layers of attitudes and focus because of the system of caste which divided the people and robbed their strength, also created small groups and made space for sharing common fun and snide remarks.

Mimicry is a universal method to fulfill desires of domination and superiority and some times to get even, if found in one discourse would be there in another too.  In oral traditions esp. in ‘Villupattu’ in Tamil Nadu, even now great lamenting is done for the destruction of kingdoms by the Whites where blatant terms are used to describe the Wsesterners. Mimicry is a natural phenomena providing laughter as well as, as Bhabha says, creating differences between one and the other. 

Any concept in any work of art can be deconstructed and  politicized as power is the expression of man’s insecure need to dominate and will be present in all writings. Every man, every nation, every civilization wants it and one way of domination is to underplay the achievements of the other, and make fun of it. Gertrude Himmelfarb in “Telling it as you like it: postmodernist history and the flight from the fact” gives us some insights about this postmodern denial of fixities. The fixity of language is denied; of history is denied. Himmelfarb says that Foucault and Derrida have post-modernized it by questioning its fixations:

In postmodernist history, as in postmodernist literary criticism, theory has become a calling in itself. Just as there are professors of literature who never engage in the actual interpretation of literary works-and even disdain interpretation  as an inferior vocation-so there are professors of  history who have never(at least to judge by their published work) done research in, or written about, an actual historical event or period. Their professional careers are devoted to theoretical speculation about the nature of history in general and to the active promotion of some particular methodology or ideology of history (p.162).

Popper’s perspective of postmodernism has collided and collapsed the borders of literary and non-literary expressions as a logical progress of the western intellectual thought or an evolution. Rationalism questions art, religion, social hierarchies or any other traditional power symbols in society. Popper  claims rationalism is morality in thinking just like Said whose rational or postmodern approach to Kipling is from an ethical point of view-politically ethical and humanistic. Popper says:

The intellectualist who finds our rationalism much too common place for his taste, and who looks out for the latest esoteric intellectual  fashion, which he discovers in the admiration of medieval mysticism is not, one fears, doing his duty by his fellow men. He may think of  himself and his subtle taste superior to our ‘Scientific Age’ to an ‘Age of industrialisation’ which carries its brainless division of labour and its ‘mechanisation’ and ‘materialization’ even into the field of  human thought. But he only shows that he is in capable of appreciating the moral forces, inherent in modern science (p.266).

Orientalism employing subjective rational methods attacks the power system in British intellectual constructions as an effort to bring back the margin to the centre. To achieve this aim of deconstructing the western intellectual assumptions, Said victimizes literature.

Once we politicize our literary  readings, and once we use  rational weapons on literature the natural narrative of spontaneous reading of literary works is highly disturbed. Himmelfarb’s argument is,  why bring unnecessary readings into literature. How far philosophic tools can be used to understand literature? To achieve what purpose? We have been analyzing the political dreams of the text. What are the dreams of theories on texts? These are the questions the next age must take into consideration.

Said writes about the position of literature in society: “To value literature at all is fundamentally to value it as the individual work of an individual writer tangled up in circumstances taken for granted by every one, such things as residence, nationality, a familiar locale, language, friends, and so on” (xv). The interpreter has to separate and incorporate these elements, he further states.  Reading the identity and not reading the identity has to be done by the reviewer.  It is easily said than done. The former is very interesting as deconstructing unintended meanings out of texts becomes an intellectual game. Balancing meanings belongs to the arena of ‘critical rationalism’ that criticizes itself in the effort to rationalize criticism.

Bibliography

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3.                 Bhabha, Homi K. “‘Of Mimicry’ And  Man: The Ambivalence Of Colonial Discourse”, Deconstruction  a Reader. Edited by Martin Mc Quillan. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, , 2000.     

4.                 Derrida, Jacques. Writing and Difference. London: Routledge, 1967.   

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6.                 Himmelfarb, Gertrude. “Telling It As You Like It:   Postmodernist History And The Flight From Fact”, The Post-modern History Reader. New York: Routledge, 1997.  

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10.            Prabhanchan. Manudam Vellum. Chennai: Kavitha Publications, 1997.  

11.            Prabhanchan. Vanam Vasappadum.  Chennai:Kavitha  Publications,  1993.     

12.            Said, Edward W. Culture and  Imperialism. London: Chatto & Windus, 1993.   

13.            Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New Delhi: Penguin Books,  1991.

14.            Said, Edward W. Politics of Dispossesion. London: Vintage, 1995.       

15.      Said, Edward W. Reflections on Exile and other Essays. New Delhi: Penguin, 2001.