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Abstract
Locating resistance in the very act of writing, this article explores the intellectual’s role as an interrogator and the reader’s through the act of responsive reading, enabling a connection across the passage of time. It seeks to free resistance from the confines of postcolonial discourse and to place it in the interaction between the individual and contemporary socio‐political constructs. Analysis focuses on Girish Karnad’s Talé‐Danda, while Raja Rao’s novel Kanthapura, Hanif Kureishi’s story “My Son the Fanatic” and other narratives illustrate the argument that resistance is integral to writing. The article concludes by showing how fantasy, myth and history are used as resistance strategies to generate counter‐discourses to hegemonic structures.
Notes
1 The applicability and adequacy of postcolonial theory and criticism have often been questioned. See Interrogating Post‐Colonialism: Theory, Text and Context, ed. Harish Trivedi and Meenakshi Mukherjee (Shimla: Indian Institute of Advanced Studies, 1996), especially the editors’ essays (3–12, 231–48); Jasbir Jain, “Postcoloniality, Literature and Politics”, Contesting Postcolonialisms, ed. Jasbir Jain and Veena Singh (Jaipur: Rawat, 2000); Ania Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 245–48.
2 “Mimic men” comes from V.S. Naipaul’s novel The Mimic Men (1967), about the difficulty of breaking away from a colonial past and the powerlessness of a new nation in the face of neo‐imperialism. “Punkah Wallah” is a minor character from E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924); the figure of the native with his handsome body is a symbol of mindless obedience and obliviousness.
3 For interpretations of A Passage to India as part of a liberal discourse, despite the failure to connect the East and West, see Lionel Trilling, E.M. Forster: A Study (London: Hogarth, 1944); and Peter Burra’s introduction to the 1979 Penguin edition of A Passage to India. Alternative, post‐David Lean interpretations are offered in Arun Prabha Mukherjee’s Oppositional Aesthetics (Toronto: Tsar, 1998) and Iqbal Masood’s “The Lean Legend”, The Indian Express 5 May 1991. Lean’s film brought about a sudden change in Indian interpretations of Forster, as it foregrounds the British perspective.
4 I am fully conscious of Arun Prabha Mukherjee’s use of the term “oppositional aesthetics” which, however, is concerned with acts of interpretation and evaluation; I use the word “poetics” for the way the text is brought into being; i.e. the creative process.
5 Shorter OED mentions it as 1923. An online entry defines fundamentalism as, “A type of militantly conservative religious movement characterized by the advocacy of strict conformity to sacred texts. Once used exclusively to refer to American Protestants who insisted on the inerrancy of the Bible, the term fundamentalism was applied more broadly in the late 20th century to a wide variety of religious movements. Indeed [ … ] many of the [world’s] major religions may be said to have fundamentalist movements.” “Fundamentalism”, Encyclopædia Britannica. 2007. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. 28 Apr. 2007 ⟨http://www.britannica.com/eb/article‐9390025⟩.
6 Sanskrit was the monopoly of the Brahmins and the caste system was heavily weighted against the lower castes, especially the shudras who constituted the bottom layer. The caste system forbade them any interaction with other social groups as well as entry to the temples. They were considered “polluted” on account of their work (disposal of human waste, skinning dead animals, etc.). The practice of endogamy further helped to strengthen the caste divisions. See G.S. Ghurye, Caste and Race in India (Mumbai: Popular Prakashan, 1969). Most resistance movements such as Buddhism and Jainism were also movements against the Vedic religion and its practices of sacrifice. The 12th‐century revolt led by Basavanna (himself a Brahmin), the prime minister of King Bijjala in AD 1160, was in opposition to Brahmanic hegemony. Basavanna rejected the notion of impurity and went on to establish a new religious identity of the Veersaivaites. This movement preached non‐violence, non‐ritualistic religion, gender equality and an end to endogamy. See Understanding Indian Society: The Non‐Brahmanic Perspective, ed. S.M. Dahiwale (Jaipur: Rawat, 2005).
7 The non‐Indian reader, unfamiliar with the history of the Indian freedom struggle, is referred to Richard Attenborough’s film Gandhi and David Hardiman’sGandhi in His Time and Ours: The Global Legacy of His Ideas (New Delhi: Permanent Black, c. 2003).
8 Rather than limit themselves to historical narration or analyses, contemporary writers increasingly connect the past with the present and critique the policies and ideologies of the political parties in an attempt to enter into a dialogue with them.
9 No matter how politically valuable Huntington’s work might be, such histories work across divisions and identification of collectivities.
10 Several postcolonial critics and theorists (e.g. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, Ashcroft et al., The Empire Writes Back, Bhabha, The Location of Culture) tend to locate resistance within anti‐colonial struggles and feminist resistance to patriarchal constructs. The aesthetics of the marginalized, like black and Dalit aesthetics, is also locked into racial and caste histories. Slemon’s essay initially extends his concerns to narrative strategies and interpretative theories and ends up getting locked in the settlers’ history. I argue that we need to go beyond this in order to realize the complexity of resistance discourse and its inherent conflict.
11 Intellectuals have, traditionally, held a place of respect in all cultures: as clerisy, priests, prophets and sages. Edward Said in “Secular Criticism” observes that “For the intellectual class, expertise has usually been a service rendered, and sold, to the central authority of society” (2). But resistance movements have often placed them in opposition. In India, the intellectual/establishment relationship has gone through several phases. Independent of political issues, the writer has also been viewed as a prophet and philosopher and as member of the elite. The Romantic movement led to the democratization of the relationship, with Wordsworth claiming the poet as a man among other men. George Orwell, in his turn, spoke of the writer as a non‐conformist and a dissenter and member of the general public at large.
12 Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks writes: “What does a man want? What does the black man want? At the risk of arousing the resentment of my colored brothers, I will say that the black is not a man. There is a zone of nonbeing, an extraordinary sterile and arid region, an utterly naked declivity where an authentic upheaval can be born [ … ] The black is a black man; that is as the result of aberrations of affect, he is rooted at the core of a universe from which he must be extricated” (10).
13 Ismat Chugtai was subjected to a court trial in 1944 for her story “Lihaaf” [The Quilt] for its alleged lesbianism, Mridula Garg was imprisoned overnight in 1979 following publication of Chitcobra [The Snake in the Mind], and Amrita Pritam was threatened with ostracism by the Sikh community: once in the 1950s for a poem about the partition of India and then upon publication of her autobiography Revenue Stamp in 1994.
14 The Naxalite movement, one of peasant insurgency, surfaced initially in 1967. It is named after its origin in the tribal belt of Naxalbari in North Bengal, and spread to other states in India following large‐scale uprisings and massacres. Despite some affiliation with left‐wing parties, in general it is an independent movement. As an economic struggle which appears as a class war, it has produced several heroes.