IndiaStar bookreview
Between the Lines--
South Asians and Postcoloniality
edited by
Deepika Bahri & Mary Vasudeva
Professor Sukeshi Kamra in her essay,
replete with textual analysis, challenges:
"How are Rushdie's texts different from
the scores of texts that violated both
nation/Orient and Oriental female?"
"It was the hauteur of a full-blown
colonizer complex afflicting the
Muslims that led to the partition
of India and continues to plague
South Asia. To paraphrase a
famous book title in Postcolonial
Studies: decolonizing the
South Asian mind,
anyone? " -- C. J. S. Wallia
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Between the Lines: edited by Philadelphia: Temple University Press,
1996
Between the Lines: South Asians and Postcoloniality, a new scholarly anthology, analyzes from various theoretical perspectives the "false homogeneity implied by terms like South Asian, postcolonial, and diaspora." Most of the 20 contributors are of Indian origin and currently teach in the English or Cultural Studies departments of North American universities. In one of the best essays of the anthology, "Coming to Terms with the Postcolonial," Deepika Bahri, assistant professor in postcolonial literature and theory at Emory University, presents a 22-page text that builds on 84 citations, explicating the origin, development, and current status of Postcolonial Studies. Bahri notes that "the term 'Postcolonial' began to circulate in the Western academy" in the early 1980's and congealed in 1989 with the publication of The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-colonial Literatures, edited by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tifflin. Academics reacted to the term "Postcolonial" more favorably than to the pejorative "third world"; administrators welcomed it as less threatening than "imperialistic" or "neocolonialistic." And the prevailing political stances of poststructuralism and postmodernism readily provided it a sympathetic audience. In recent years, a number of South Asians have been hired in North American universities to teach postcolonial literature. Bahri asks whether "the employment and promotion of these individuals in 'Postcolonial Studies' as surrogates for real social change circumvents the need to acknowledge the marginalization and exploitation that continues unheeded while the academy . . . racks up points on the scorecard of cultural diversity." Among the most prominent in Postcolonial Studies is Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, the Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University, who refers to herself, with self-conscious irony, as "a highly commodified distinguished professor." In her interview with the coeditors, Spivak says, ". . . having thrown in our lot with a northern economy - an exploitative economy, in fact - whether we like it or not, we are, in our every day, agents of exploitation . . . . The first step may be to discover how the nation of origin is suffering in a new world where we are agents." The anthology offers many insightful essays, making it difficult to select the half dozen for this brief review. Sukeshi Kamra, professor of English at Okanagan University College, Canada, in her essay "Replacing the Colonial Gaze: Gender as Strategy in Salman Rushdie's Fiction" criticizes Rushdie's work as "Orientalizing." Rushdie has long been guilty of pandering to Eurocentric views of India as I have argued in "The Rushdie Phenomenon: A Second Look" (Konch multicultural literary magazine, 1996). Moreover, asks Kamra, "Rushdie's narrators appropriate the feminine to construct a female space out of which the masculine writer can speak, then the female is of necessity as marginalized and perhaps even fetishized, albeit differently, in his texts as she is in the Orientalist text. Is there a female in these texts?" Citing noted critics like Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak ("the women in 'Shame' seem powerful only as monsters of one sort or another") and Aijaz Ahmed ("the typologies within which Rushdie encloses the whole range of woman's experience in 'Shame' are misogynist in nature"), Kamra, in her essay, replete with textual analysis, challenges: "How are Rushdie's texts different from the scores of texts that violated both nation/Orient and Oriental female?" Indrani Mitra, assistant professor of English at Mount St. Mary's College, Maryland, in her essay, "Luminous Brahmin Children Must Be Saved: Imperialist Ideologies, 'Postcolonial' Histories in Bharati Mukherjee's 'The Tiger's Daughter'" questions whether Mukherjee's work should be included in the canon of Postcolonial literature at all. Although Mukherjee has labelled herself as a postcolonial, she has also firmly resisted "any attempt by critics to cast on her an Indian identity. She refuses to write the narrative of expatriation, she says. In her now famous essay on immigrant writing she denounces the chronic homesickness of self-conscious exiles such as Salman Rushdie and Amitav Ghosh. . . . With India as a palpable material reality of 850 million lives, she has severed all ties." In her textual analysis of Mukherjee's "The Tiger's Daughter," Mitra shows that Mukherjee's work is not an example of "resistance literatures produced in the imperialist and neoimperialist sites of struggle." To include it, she warns, could make Postcolonial Studies, in Regis Debray's words, "become another shapeless sack into which one could simply dump peoples, classes, races, civilizations and continents so that they might more easily disappear." Novelist M.G. Vassanji in "Life at the Margins: In the Thick of Multiplicity" notes that the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's TV likes to make "gleeful announcements that a majority of Canadians are against multiculturalism." One of its news items showed as an example of "melting-pot integration a Chinese group reciting Christmas carols, followed by a scene of multiculturalism at work - a Sikh ceremony in a 'gurudwara' (temple); thus the broadcast implicitly identified the country as Christian, oblivious to the fact that in a modern democracy people are free to practice any faith and that indeed there are non-immigrant white Sikh converts from Christianity." Nonetheless, Vassanji, a longtime resident of Toronto, celebrates living there: "I find it one of the most livable cities anywhere. It is home, yet I sometimes feel I could not survive in Canada outside its city limits. . . . Life at the margins has its comforts, and in multiplicity there is creativity and acceptance." Amritjit Singh, professor of English at Rhode Island University, in his essay "African Americans and the New Immigrants," observes that South Asian immigrants often accept the Euro-American majority's stereotypes of African Americans. As a result, many South Asian immigrants attempt to distance themselves from African Americans, which, he urges, is not right. Gauri Viswanathan, associate professor of English at Columbia University, says in her interview with the coeditors: "Much of what passes by the name of postcolonial theory is too esoteric and arcane to have much influence outside." She recommends turning literary criticism into "a viable tool for analyzing contemporary trends in cinema, literature, the arts and so on, that can speak to a broad audience." Sound advice, indeed. Many of the 20 essays in this anthology are easily accessible to the general reader; however, some of its essays, like most publications in Postcolonial Studies, are riddled with obfuscatory jargon. This, I suspect, arises from the same factor that renders Sociology less accessible to the generalist. In The Sociological Imagination, C. Wright Mills noted that "a turgid and polysyllabic prose does seem to prevail in the social sciences . . . . Such a lack of ready intelligibility, I believe, usually has little or nothing to do with the complexity of thought. It has almost entirely to do with certain confusions of the academic writer about his own status." Unfortunately, some academics even in the Humanities reject requests for "ready intelligibility" as anti-intellectual populism. In a recent discussion on the Postcolonial list (the email address:postcolonial@jefferson.village.virginia.edu), I sent my rejoinder: Lucid substantive writing takes much more intellectual effort than the mere lifting of slender ideas and inflating them with the miasma of obfuscatory jargon. Besides the addiction to obfuscatory jargon in current Postcolonial Studies, I question its conflation of "colonizer" almost exclusively with European. What about the Chinese colonization of Tibet and the subsequent Tibetan expatriate communities in India, North America, and elsewhere? What about the pervasive persecution of the Gypsies, the long-lost children of India, ever since their emigration in the tenth century? What about the Arab/Islamic colonization of India? In his much-discussed recent book, Islam: The Arab National Movement, Anwar Shaikh states: ". . . non-Arab Muslims such as those in India prefer Arabia to their own motherland and do not realise that the grandeur of Arab nationalism has paralysed their own sense of national honour. . . . This is the height of brain-washing." It was the hauteur of a full-blown colonizer complex afflicting the Muslims that led to the partition of India and continues to plague South Asia. To paraphrase a famous book title in Postcolonial Studies: decolonizing the South Asian mind, anyone? Predictably, Anwar Shaikh, a British national, has been also recently "fatwa-ized" for his writing. His publicaions include Eternity -- a scholarly work on Sufi mysticism -- and the quarterly magazine, Liberty. If it's politically correct to place Salman Rushdie's work within the canon of Postcolonial Studies, why not Anwar Shaikh's? "Between the Lines" anthology does not raise any of the above three questions and some of its essays are flawed with obfuscatory jargon. Nonethless, it is an excellent introduction to the burgeoning field of Postcolonial Studies.
(i) Konch multicultural literary magazine (ii) Anwar Shaikh's books are published by
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