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Assignment
The Post - Colonial Literature
S. B Gardi
Department of English, MKBU
Nirali N. Makvana
Sem :- 3
Roll no. 15
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Towards a Critique of Colonial Violence: Fanon's Black Skin and White Mask & Gandhi's Hind Swaraj
♧ Introduction :-
Colonialism is both a practice and a worldview. As a practice, it involves the domination of a society by settlers from a different society. As a worldview, colonialism is a truly global geopolitical, economic, and cultural doctrine that is rooted in the worldwide expansion of West European capitalism that survived until well after the collapse of most colonial empires. Historically, Colonies in the strict sense, " Settlement " had existed long before the advent of global capitalism. The English word, " Colony " is derived from the Latin term, " Colonia " denoting an outpost or settlement. However, Colonialism as a principle of imperial statecraft and an effective strategy of capitalist expansion that involved sustained appropriation of the resources of other societies, indeed religion of the world
for the benefit of the colonizing society, backed by an elaborate ideological justificatory apparatus is a modern West - European invention par excellence emerging from the 15th century onwards.
♧ Definition ( Colonialism ) :
As Gayatri Spivak argues,
" Representation has two interlocking aspects: vertreten (approximately meaning “stepin someone's place, represent politically in the formal sense”) and darstellen (roughly “re-present, place there,portray”). The tortuous history of colonial representations unfolded in a field of power marked by these two dimensions: The former severely limited the contexts in which the colonized subject could represent herself, and the latter ensured that representations were neither natural nor innocent, as they were always implicated by colonial social relations. "
The word colonialism, according to the Oxford English Dictionary(OED), comes from the Roman ‘colonia’ which meant ‘farm’ or ‘settlement’, and referred to Romans who settled in other lands but still retained their citizenship. Accordingly, the OED describes it as,
" A settlement in a new country … a body of people who settle in a new locality, forming a community subject to or connected with their parent state; the community so formed, consisting of the original settlers and their descendants and successors, as long as the connection with the parent state is kept up."
♧ Foreword: Remembering Fanon : Self, Psyche and Colonial Condition :-
" O my body, make of me always a man who questions! "
Black Skin, White Masks
The book, " Black Skin White Masks " divided into Eight chapters. The title of each chapter reflects the harsh reality of racism and desire of the black people and white people which portrays the picture of colonial mentality toward racism. The book looks at what goes through the minds of blacks and whites under the conditions of white rule and the strange effects that has, especially on black people. The book started out as his doctoral thesis that he wrote to get his degree in psychiatry. So it is written for white French psychiatrists and speaks mainly about Martinique and France in the early 1950s. The Chapters are :-
The Black Man and Language
The Woman of Colour and the White Man
The Man of Colour and White Woman
The So Called Dependency complex of the Colonized
The Lived Experience of the Black Man
The Black Man and Psychopathology
The Black Man and Recognition
By Way of Conclusion
ln articulating the problem of colonial cultural alienation Fanon radically questions the formation of both individual and social authority as they come to be developed in the discourse of Social Sovereignty. The social virtues of historical rationality, cultural cohesion, the autonomy of individual consciousness assume an immediate, utopian identity with he subjects upon whom they confer a civil status. The civil state is the ultimate expression of the innate ethical and rational bent of the human mind; the social instinct is the
progressive destiny of human nature, the necessary transition from Nature to Culture.
Fanon grew up in Martinique, an Island in the Caribbean ruled by France. The Capital of France, Paris was the metropole, the centre of the empire. Martinique was the bush, the outback, the hinterland, a nowhere kind of place.
All the top people in Martinique either came from France or received their university education there. They all spoke in perfect French. But most black people in Martinique did not. They spoke Creole, a dialect of French noted for its Swallowed r's. Its closest counterpart in America is Ebonics. Everyone is taught to look down on at school. The middle class tries not to speak it at all except to servant and shame their children out of using it. Fanon noticed that when people came back from France after receiving their university education they would speak in painfully perfect French and yet even if you speak perfect French the racism does not stop.
♧ Mahatma Gandhi's Hind Swaraj and Colonialism in India :-
Much has been said about Mahatma Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj over the last century. It has been seen as Gandhi’s answer to the revolutionaries, with whose methods he differed. Where does it stand for in the context of a time when colonial hegemony was the order of the day? What sentiments would it have evoked on minds of readers? We do not know for sure, but a textual analysis of the work can be a step towards analysing the message it contained. The text is like none other. It counters – even if through the employment of much polemic – the fundamental claims of colonial modernity in India.
The British came to India and colonised it at a time when western Europe was witness to an array of processes that would usher in a modern world. The Church had been questioned, the scientific revolution had burst forth, and the 18th century Enlightenment had also impacted the way people thought of themselves.
Reason had replaced tradition as an a priori path to knowledge. And perhaps replaced the idea of God, to a limited extent. Yet, this coming of age of autonomous human agency was in practice accompanied by colonial expansionism.
The normative promises of the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution were seamlessly transformed into colonial exploitation and even racism in practice. Antonio Gramsci’s writings bring forth the distinction between the pre-modern, totalitarian state and the modern, hegemonic state. The British saw themselves as a “modern” and modernising state in India. Gandhi in 1908 mounted, in Gramscian terms, a counter-hegemony, a war of position, in the form of the Hind Swaraj . It attacked colonising Europe not on their not being European enough in a modern, hegemonic, sense, but in being fatally modern-European. He imagined the nation in profoundly anti-modern ways in the Hind Swaraj . He dismissed mechanised production; centralised, modern states with powerful armies; modern medicine; the idea of rule of law, and also parliamentary democracy. The point here is not whether he retained these ideas till the end. The point is the breath of life these ideas may have brought to a struggling people further hurt by the colonial claim that they were an inferior civilisation. He adds,
“The English have not taken India; we have given it to them. They are not in India because of their strength, but because we keep them.”
He argues, “We have managed with the same kind of plough as existed thousands of years ago. We have retained the same kind of cottages that we had in former times and our indigenous education remains the same as before. We had no system of life-corroding competition. Each followed his own occupation or trade and charged a regulation wage. It was not that we did not know how to invent machinery, but our forefathers knew that, if we set our hearts after such things, we would…lose our moral fibre. They further reasoned that large cities were a useless encumbrance and that people would not be happy in them. They were, therefore, satisfied with small villages.”
Textually, Hind Swaraj is an engagement with what freedom means. It disagrees fundamentally with those for whom the freedom of India meant the transfer of political control from British to Indian hands but retention of all British institutions, from the Parliament to a modern, standing army. As Gandhi puts it, “We want English rule without the Englishman. You want the tiger’s nature, but not the tiger; that is to say, you would make India English. And when it becomes English, it will be called not Hindustan but Englistan. This is not the Swaraj (freedom or self-rule) that I want.”
♧ To Sum up :-
After World War II, formal colonisation gave way to more indirect control, largely through economic intervention (known as ‘neo-colonialism’, a term that was coined by the Ghanaian anticolonial leader Kwame Nkrumah to describe the condition of Africa in the (1960s), or through puppet regimes, such as the US control of South Vietnam, or through military intervention (such as the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, or more recently the US occupation of Iraq). These later histories alert us to both the differences as well as the continuities between formal and more oblique forms of colonial control, a subject to which we will return periodically.
♧ References :-
♧ Böröcz, József, and Mahua Sarkar. “Colonialism .” SAGE, 2012, pp. 229–234.
♧ Fanon , Frantz. BLACK SKIN WHITE MASKS . Pluto Press, 1986.
♧ Loomba , Ania. Colonialism/Postcolonialism . 3rd ed., Routledge , 2015.
♧ Pathak, Vikas. Gandhi's 'Hind Swaraj', Which Represented a Powerful Counter-Hegemonic Pitch, Challenged Colonialism. 12 Oct. 2019, www.nationalheraldindia.com/opinion/gandhis-hind-swaraj-which-represented-a-powerful-counter-hegemonic-pitch-challenged-colonialism.
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