Sara Suleri’s nuanced reading is indispensable for a proper and balanced understanding of post-coloniality.

EVER since the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), discussions on cultural studies have generally centred on the loss of postcolonial identity. The colonisers were the centre, “the self,” and the colonised were the margins, “the other.” Said’s avowed aim was to expose Eurocentrism — the supercilious belief in the alleged superiority of Europe over Asia. How can we respond to this? The immediate way out would be to pay back in one’s own coin — write back to the centre, as is often said, quoting from Rushdie. Some intellectual historians (Aijaz Ahmad, for instance) have argued in favour of decolonising our mind and asserting the expressive aspect of our culture.

Reinterpretation

Sara Suleri, in her The Rhetoric of English India, persuades us, convincingly, to step outside this “alteritist” Orientalis paradigm (the binarism that is the common denominator of culture studies). She does this by reinterpreting colonial and postcolonial narratives to provide evidence that there has been a complicity and collusion between the coloniser and the colonised: the two are implicated in an equal measure, so to speak. Deploying Foucaultian methodology, she discusses the idiom, or rather the rhetoric, of English India through the writings of Burke, Kipling, Forster, Naipaul and Rushdie. Power does not flow one way: it circulates at all levels. It helps in the regular exchange of discourses and institutions through processes of mutual negotiation and not merely appropriation.

Burke’s sympathy for India is evident in his indictments of the policies of East India Company. He illustrates that the British colonial discourse — its colonising imagination — has never been able to represent faithfully the abundance of India’s history and culture. He dismantles the colonial stereotypes of Anglo-Indian narratives. Instead of romanticising the exotic India — the raison detre of travellers or visitors — he relies on what Suleri calls “the locutions of astonishment and horror.” India is much too vast a space to come to grips with while representing it in the medium of English language. E.M. Forster too is up against the same difficulty of being unable to portray, in plain words, the Indian mystique while describing the simple Marabar caves. From the point of view of the colonisers, India simply beggars description. The famous example of the British intellect’s inability to empathise with the rich Indian cultural wealth is manifest in Macaulay’s scandalous “Minute on Indian Education,” in which he say, “a single shelf of a good European Library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia”!

The rhetoric of Anglo-Indian English reached its pinnacle in the theatre of eloquence with Edmund Burke’s fiery impeachment of Warren Hastings in the British House of Commons. The British women who accompanied their husbands looked upon India more as an aesthetic object to be recorded in their diaries intended to be published back home after their return to England than as a country pulsating with life. India is represented at a level of neutral, non-involved participation. It is almost like an account of a wayfarer on a short sojourn.

Complex phenomenon

Kipling’s version is immature like an adolescent’s. For Eliot, Kipling was a versifier, not a poet. Oscar Wilde was not far from truth when he said that Kipling’s cultural descriptions seemed to him like “reading life by superb flashes of vulgarity.” E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India is all about colonial encounter and cross-cultural friendship. The centre of narration, in the novel, is the absence of continued friendship. The two men cannot meet. With Naipaul, however, narratology takes a different turn. In the absence of an imperial theme, where does a writer locate himself? Where does he exist? This explains the “profound ideological ambivalence” in what he says or writes. There is no postcolonial history available for him to locate himself. That is why he is at once the spokesman and interlocutor of the third world history. In the case of Rushdie, narrative becomes complicated and wholly self-conscious with its fantasy, magic realism and what not! The political backdrop of his fiction and the problem of censorship force him to employ technical forms of narration, opening up more and more narrative possibilities.

Thus Suleri proves that `alteritist’ reading, as advocated by Said and his followers is not the only way out. By her involuted, nuanced reading of these texts she demonstrates that the rhetoric of English India is a complex phenomenon: there is more to it than meets the eye. The Rhetoric of English India is indispensable for a proper and balanced understanding of post-coloniality.

M. S. NAGARAJAN

Reference Link:
The Hindu Online
http://www.hindu.com/lr/2006/05/07/stories/2006050700160400.htm
Sunday, May 07, 2006