Transcription
Hello everyone. So today, we are going to start our lecture series. Um, we are going to do it in bits and pieces, in smaller episodes, so that we can cover a lot, a whole lot, without it seeming to be a burden.
The first thing that we are going to start with is postcolonial literature because postcolonial literature, I think, is one of the most important subgenres of literature in the current political landscape. Other than that, postcolonial literature was also one of the subjects that I majored in when I was doing my masters in literature. So, let's begin with understanding what exactly is postcolonial literature.
So, postcolonial literature is essentially a literature that challenges the Eurocentric ideologies regarding the Third World nations. When I talk about the Third World nations, I talk about nations like India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, nations that were previously colonized by a colonial power.
Now, what exactly does postcolonial literature mean? Postcolonial means the kind of literature that was developed in or written in nations that were previously colonized. There is, however, a school of thought, a discourse, that if you're talking about nations that were previously colonized, we can also consider British literature as postcolonial literature because even the British islands in the 1100s were colonized, be it by Anglo-Saxons or Normans.
However, a strong critique to that is that when we talk about postcolonial literature, we talk about the literature that emerged as a literature against the British colonial powers, specifically because after the 1700s, when the East India Company was making its rounds and when the British Empire had enough power to go all around the world colonizing people, they could have stopped because maybe their nations had been through something similar. But they did not, because of the capitalist profits that they were getting out of it.
Now, when we are going to talk about postcolonial literature, we are going to refer to the postcolonial literature that emerged as the literature of resistance, hope, and anger against the predominantly British Empire and also the American empire. We'll talk about it later on.
According to P.K. Nyer, by the way, this is the book that I referred to when I was doing my masters. So, according to P.K. Nyer, postcolonial literature is the kind of literature that critically engages with the history of racism, oppression, and injustice committed in the name of race and ethnicity. It is a literature that is technically known as the literature of protest because here in, we see writers from nations that were previously colonized, that were previously not given any power. Writers from such nations coming out and trying to reclaim their narrative, trying to tell the world their own stories.
One of the propounders in these theories when it comes to India is Salman Rushdie. Salman Rushdie gave the theory of the empire writes back. It technically means using the English language, the language of the British Empire, to write the stories that talked about their exploitation of us. So, basically, this ideology meant that we have the power of pen with us, be it for whatever reason, but English is a global language. English is an international language, and we can use this language in order to educate and inform the future generations of the world about the kind of exploitations that were done on our people.
Another prominent postcolonial writer who favors this argument is Chinua Achebe, who's also known as the father of African English literature. Chinua Achebe is the writer of one of the seminal texts of postcolonial literature known as *Things Fall Apart*. Achebe was a firm believer that we can use the English language to educate the masses, the younger English generation, about the kinds of traumas that their past generations have inflicted on us. The kind of oppression that the Third World nations have faced.
However, there have been writers who oppose this ideology as well. Writers like Guggi Wa Thiong'o strongly believed postcolonial writers should not be giving any kind of agency to the English language, that we should not be using the English language in order to communicate or in order to tell our stories. If they want to know our stories, they have to learn our language.
Now, even though, even though morally, we can understand this point of thought, morally, we can agree with this discourse, we have to understand that English is a language that most of the people out there in the world understand. And if we use English, we can actually tell our stories to more people, to people who do not necessarily share our regional languages. That is how the theory of empire writing back comes in the picture.
So, when we talk about why we have to tell our stories to them, why is it we against them, we have to also understand the idea of Orientalism and Occidentalism. Edward Said, in his seminal text *Orientalism*, described the ideology that the West has always tried to showcase the East as exotic and to showcase the Eastern people as the native population or the indigenous population that was in dire need of the West, that really needed the West to go over there and civilize them.
So, this also brings to notice the othering of people from the East. Homi Bhabha gave the theory of othering in his text *The Other Question*, where he talked about how the West deliberately creates stereotypes against the people from the East in order to term them as the others, as people who do not belong in this land, but the people who have come to this land and and they are now trying to live in this land that does not belong to them, completely forgetting that that is exactly what they did to the people of the East.
Now, when Homi Bhabha is pondering on this thought, he says that it often happens that because of this definite othering, we as people of the East end up thinking that we do not belong where the supremacist population belongs, which is also something that gives birth to the inferiority complex that exists in most of the people in the East or in the people in previously colonized nations.
Homi Bhabha further goes on to assert that how this othered population continues in their life to mimic the Western population in order to be accepted by them because this inferiority complex leads them to believe that they have to be exactly like the people from the West in order to be accepted in the world. Which is why then, even we talk, we end up often trying to mimic the accents that we see in TV series. You know, when I was young and I would have problems in speaking English, people would always say that, you know, you should try watching *Friends*, you should try watching *How I Met Your Mother*, you should try watching these sitcoms, these shows in order to learn English, which is a good way. But what it does is that it makes you feel that because you do not have any representation in these shows, you have to speak in the way that they speak. You have to speak in the exact same dialect, in the exact same accent, which is why we end up mimicking them.
Um, this is also something that Ashish Nandy in one of his essays talks about, where he talks about the Westernization of the Indian mind, where he says that even though we are free from the shackles of colonialism in our minds, we are still colonized because we still believe, we still firmly believe that if only we look a certain way, if only we speak a certain way, we will be accepted into the society, we will be understood by the people in the West. And it is extremely important for the people in the East or for the people from previously colonized nations to be accepted by the West. It is something that comes from this inherent inferiority complex that all of us seem to have.
And out of this emerge the constant stereotypes that the West continues to impose on us. If you've seen *The Simpsons*, in *The Simpsons*, they show one Indian character who has a very specific accent. And there was a point of time during which all the American series would have one token Indian character or one token South Asian character who would have a very specific accent that would essentially mock the entire population of that nation because not everybody speaks the same way in one nation.
However, now the landscape, the cultural landscape has changed a lot. Shows like *Ms. Marvel* are consciously trying to stay away from those stereotypes and tell the stories of the Indian subcontinent and the immigrants who came to America for different reasons without actually imposing any specific stereotypes. Rather, they are focusing more on the stories of these people. *Ms. Marvel* did not shy away from showing the partition of India and Pakistan and all the people that were lost because of the partition.
So, today, we are going to wrap this session here. In the next session, we are going to talk about partition literature. For today, your homework is, this seems so foolish. For today, your homework is to read Salman Rushdie's *Imaginary Homelands*. If you want, you can watch *Ms. Marvel*, which is an amazing show. Also, I know that every English teacher says this, and I hate myself for saying this, but please read Shakespeare, specifically *The Tempest* by Shakespeare. It'll help you a lot in understanding what a postcolonial figure or what a figure who was previously colonized feels in a world that forces him, her, or them to believe that they do not belong there, or that because of the language that they speak, they cannot be considered superior, and that their ethnicity decides that they would be the slaves or the slave owners.
Thank you so much for watching till now, and we'll continue in the next.