Introduction

Identities and Negotiations in Colonial and Postcolonial India

Imaginary Origins, Imaginary Crossings

The specter of originality and its lack seems to haunt much of the work on colonialism and the postcolonial condition at the current conjuncture. This preoccupation with originality and secondariness has, of course, a history, one that is frequently rehearsed. Its imaginary origin can be traced back to Macaulay’s notorious “Minute on English Education” of 1835, which defined what Gayatri Spivak has termed the “subject-constituting project” of colonialism as the production of secondariness: westernized (male) subjects, “a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.” ^[1] The melancholy success of such an interpellation was confirmed more than a century later by Frantz Fanon, writing (in the resonantly titled Black Skin, White Masks) on the conflictual economies of colonialism and racism: “For the black man there is only one destiny. And it is white.” ^[2] That the access to such a destiny was racially barred while remaining the only imaginative possibility for the (westernized) black male could not but be productive of profound pathologies. What was even worse, as Diana Fuss astutely suggests, was that “the black man under colonial rule finds himself relegated to a position other than the Other.…Black may be a protean imaginary other for white, but for itself it is a stationary ‘object’; objecthood, substituting for true alterity, blocks the migration through the Other necessary for subjectivity to take place.” ^[3]

More recently, Homi Bhabha, whose work bears the unmistakable imprint of Fanon’s thought, has sought an entry into questions of originality and repetition through Lacanian psychoanalysis and Derridean deconstruction.^[4] But where Fanon sees the command to mimic as a subjective death sentence, Bhabha plays with the deconstructive possibilities of that colonial stereotype. He theorizes colonial mimicry as the representation of a partial presence that disrupts the colonizer’s narcissistic aspirations and subjects Englishness to profound strain, whereby “the familiar, transported to distant parts, becomes uncannily transformed, the imitation subverts the identity of that which is being represented, and the relation of power, if not altogether reversed, certainly begins to vacillate.” ^[5] The ambivalence that undergirds the procedure of colonial mimicry produces simultaneous and incommensurable effects, destabilizing English and Indian identities as part of the same operation. This insight has proved enormously useful for scholars of colonial discourse, and indeed has found significant purchase among a large number of feminist, African Americanist, and queer scholars, who have long had a marked sense of the import of the concept of mimicry—and its cognates, masquerade, passing, and drag—for the theorization of a variety of identity politics. As is well known, feminists from Simone de Beauvoir to Luce Irigaray to a range of film theorists have pondered questions of identity, identification, and resistance through the lens of that ensemble of positions, affects, and activities to which one can assign the portmanteau term mimicry. Queer theorists have devoted considerable critical attention to the political-semiotic possibilities, radical and otherwise, of camp. For African Americanists, the subject of passing has a tremendously long and textured history in the overlapping domains of performance, theory, and literary production.^[6]

I would argue that even postcolonial scholars whose work is ostensibly remote from debates on identity politics have been engaged with the problematic of originality and mimicry; they have been engaged with the problematic that—for want of a better term—one might call “philosophical or epistemic secondariness.” Many of the debates about these issues have cohered not so much around individual subjects or identities as around the question of the nation, but in terms that resonate quite powerfully with debates on identity formation, whether in the metropolis or elsewhere. Specifically, the debates on nation formation have focused on the nation’s failure to “come into its own” in decolonization; “it is the study of this failure,” says Ranajit Guha, “which constitutes the central problematic of the historiography of colonial India.” ^[7] The classic articulation of this problematic is to be found in Partha Chatterjee’s splendid Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse (1986). In this book, Chatterjee takes to task Benedict Anderson and several other (western) theorists of the nation for the universalizing logic of their conceptualization of the nation. For Chatterjee, Anderson, for instance, conceives of the national idea almost entirely in terms of the contours of its Enlightenment and western European genealogy. Conceived and refined in Europe (despite its first verifiable appearance in the Americas), the idea of the nation proves to be one of the Continent’s most lasting and successful exports, reproducing itself globally and bearing an irresistible appeal (for a variety of reasons, including colonial ones) in places very distinct from its point of origin.^[8] Chatterjee reproaches Anderson and others for their refusal to see that repetition must engender disparities and for taking as a given the “modularity” of twentieth-century nationalisms, “without noticing the twists and turns, the suppressed possibilities, the contradictions still unresolved”;^[9] he taxes them, in other words, with effecting an erasure of (post)colonial difference. Using the case of India and of three prominent Indian nationalist males, Chatterjee demonstrates the difference of Indian nationalisms (from a western European blueprint) in their critical and equivocal negotiation of post-Enlightenment reason and modernity even as he establishes their dependence on the very conceptual categories they sought to disavow or overturn.^[10] The “failure” of the nation that Guha had identified as key to an understanding of Indian postcoloniality is thus the effect of an aporia, transfixed as the nation (or its representative) is between an insufficient originality and an insufficient imitativeness. In his more recent book, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories, Chatterjee provides an analysis of the modes through which (primarily male) nationalist elites undertook to establish their own spheres of sovereignty and originality and sought to reject a colonially scripted secondariness.^[11]

Much other recent work on colonial and postcolonial South Asia has turned on these poles of identity and difference, engaging these questions at a broad epistemic level as well as through specific tropes, figures, and texts.^[12] Dipesh Chakrabarty, in his important essay, “Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History,” has mournfully pondered the fact of a European universality that allows European historians to theorize without any particular attention to the “Third World”; this obliviousness nonetheless is productive of insights that postcolonial scholars find indispensable for their own work: “The everyday paradox of third-world social science is that we find these theories, in spite of their inherent ignorance of ‘us,’ eminently useful in understanding our societies. What allowed the modern European sages to develop such clairvoyance with regard to societies of which they were empirically ignorant? Why cannot we, once again, return the gaze?” ^[13]

The question of originality and its Other has thus been an irreducible if sometimes camouflaged component of our models of colonial and postcolonial elite identity formation as well as of nation formation; one of the aims of this book is to foreground it as such. And in aiming to reconstellate and extend some of the debates on originality, repetition, and negotiation, this book hopes to open up the field of identity formation and nation formation to a more heterogeneous model than that of anglicization. The model of identity formation proffered by the trope of the mimic man has been, it should be noted, subject to some friendly criticism. Feminists, while sympathetic to theorizations of colonial mimicry, have pointed to the gendered provenance of this figure and have noted Bhabha’s silence about crucial feminist theorizations of mimicry.^[14] (Fanon’s explicit marginalization of, if not hostility toward, the black woman in the raced and gendered psychopathologies he excavates in Black Skin, White Masks is, on the other hand, almost ostentatiously scandalous.) Besides, Jenny Sharpe notes, in a meticulous and indispensable critique of Benita Parry, “the tropes of ‘mimicry,’ ‘sly civility,’ and ‘hybridity’ that Bhabha deploys to stage what he identifies as the ambivalence of colonial discourse are all derived from the colonial production of an educated class of natives [whom Parry mistakenly describes as subaltern].” ^[15] None of this, of course, is meant to suggest that the work currently available on colonial mimicry and identification disallows any engagement with questions of sexuality, gender, religion, and class. My project, then, is to stage precisely such an encounter and, in the process, to imagine another scene of impersonation and doubling, since it seems to me that the representational functions in other contexts of this trope have not yet been significantly extended and complicated by postcolonial theory in its South Asian incarnation. This trope is, as I have already noted, central to the ways in which nationalism imagines itself: hence the production of the nation is almost invariably mediated—as we shall see—through such practices as Gandhi’s impersonation of femininity, an Irishwoman’s assumption of Hindu feminine celibacy, or a Muslim actress’s emulation of a Hindu/Indian mother goddess. Several of the chapters will seek to understand why such impersonation functions as a governing trope in nation formation and identity formation.

If questions of originality and simulation function, as one must assume they do, not just for and among “western” (a category that includes “westernized” Indian elites) subjects, how do they “translate” across or intersect with (relatively) heterogeneous cultural and discursive formations, some of which may be designated premodern or nonmodern and/or subaltern? With what traditions or conventions of (nonmodern or premodern) doubling, possession, and identification might the colonial sense of the term interact? What productive catachreses might emerge from such translations?^[16] What are the ways in which models of identity, difference, and imitation might have been prized from their occasions of (original) enunciation and indigenized, made “original,” for a variety of ends? We need to be vigilant, in considering these questions, about the specific ways in which impersonation/mimicry functions as a (cultural) relation rather than an essence, within specific conditions of enunciation and a specific address. The Vaishnava religious tradition in Bengal, for instance, has a long history of (male) female impersonation: male devotees have routinely assumed feminine garb and feminine modes of behavior in deference to a deity who is conceived of as masculine. What are the ramifications of such a staging in the face of a colonial disdain of “feminized” Indian males? The fourth chapter takes up this question in some detail. Another chapter (the sixth) studies a more “modern,” though provisionally Indian, mode of understanding impersonation and its affects through juxtaposing Bombay cinema’s protocols of (religious and gendered) representation and the production and policing of gendered religious identities. One of the ways in which to examine how authenticity and impersonation themselves are translated and become defamiliarized in alien territory is to track some notable moments in the indigenization of this trope; I do this not by way of providing an etiology or a grand narrative but in order to provide a heuristic model of the ways in which the trope can signify or translate differently.

Indian Traffic, then, hopes to chart a trajectory of a long century, encompassing colonial and post-Independence India, in order to explore the consequences and transmutation of the trope of originality and impersonation in the subject-constituting project of a range of subjects from En-glishmen to Indian women nationalists. It seeks to demonstrate the irreducible significance of this trope to questions of colonial subject effect, indigenous subject constitution, and nation formation. Such a focus inevitably raises a host of articulated questions. What kinds of representation serve to establish the colonial or postcolonial (elite) subject as “different” or “the same”? What identifications and desires are transformed and negotiated for both Indian and British subjects in the (uneven) field of colonial encounter? Within what symbolic orders or discursive formations does one account for the colonizer’s desire to “go native”? In what ways do Indian subjects themselves understand, deploy, and reinflect the mandate to impersonate? How does this resonate with the equally powerful imperative (proceeding with equivalent force from colonizer and nationalist) to “be oneself”? How is the terrain of the familiar on which impersonation depends imagined or imaginable? What losses and gains, pleasures and unpleasures are produced through this traffic? What kinds of displacements, repressions, and rearticulations can be said to occur when the place of the normatively male and normatively elite mimic is gendered and/or classed differently, occupied either by women, whether Indian or western, Hindu or Muslim, elite or otherwise, or by males not necessarily heterosexual and perhaps subaltern?

What I would also wish, importantly, to draw attention to is the multivalence of the trope, which we are sometimes in danger of forgetting. The effects of colonial mimicry are all too often read off exultingly as (almost unequivocally) menacing, without sufficient attention to the double and contradictory charge of the operation; despite Bhabha’s careful delineation of the dual charge of the operation, too many critics have been willing to read mimicry as another name for subversion. Without disregarding the uncovenanted and unsettling effects that are a by-product of mimicry, we would do well to remind ourselves at the same time of the enormous profitability to the colonial enterprise of the mimic man; mimicry can be harnessed to retrogressive ends and produce retrogressive consummations in addition to progressive ones. Certainly the instance of Kim illustrates powerfully for us the ways in which the very locutions and operations of impurity, dislocation, and hybridity that attach to this trope can be invoked as the ground of possibility for the consolidation of a colonial (rather than an anticolonial) legitimacy.^[17] Professions of hybridity and liminality—which are sometimes claimed as the badge of disenfranchised and oppositional groups—can be marshaled quite easily and persuasively for the self-aggrandizing (because self-marginalizing) cause of colonialism.^[18]

What I propose to consider here are not so much the volatile effects of the mimicry that generates the “not quite/not white” subject of colonialism (on which much work has been done) but the range of other, relatively untheorized prospects and identity formations beyond the bounds of male anglicization that emerge in colonial and postcolonial South Asia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries around the problematic of repetition and difference: the English (male) fascination with “going native,” the subaltern or indigenous (male) playing at indigenous subject positions, the Anglo-Indian homosocial assumption of both whiteness and Indian national(ist) status, the Irishwoman’s simulation of Hindu womanhood, (elite) Hindu and Muslim women’s negotiations of models of femininity and national identity (both colonial and nationalist), and the English mimicry of Englishness. The book is thus orchestrated around readings of some symptomatic moments and significant instantiations of the questions of originality and impersonation. I should add, if it is not already clear, that I read these questions less as governed by an intentionality or by a “habit of mind” than as a cluster of effects that are always required to be read. I should declare, moreover, that the book does not aim so much at being exhaustive (a clear impossibility, given the breadth of its object of investigation) as at opening up some (new) questions that must inform our understanding of how colonial originality and repetition are processed or negotiated.

I am interested in situating work on the organization of identities in colonial and postcolonial India within the immense and heterogeneous terrain of sociopolitical, ethicoreligious, legal, and popular-mythic discourses that have mediated Indian and British experience in the last century and a half. An irreducible horizon, then, for the analyses is the modern (colonial and postcolonial) history of the region, with its porous, intersecting, and mutually constitutive formations like colonialism, bourgeois nationalism, and modernity/modernization (later called “development”). My readings are addressed to the semiotic and discursive dimensions of such configurations; to this end I draw upon a variety of disciplines, media, and texts, colonial and postcolonial, literary, filmic, archival, journalistic, religious/mythic, and popular cultural. The regional and historical coherence of the material is not simply a way to rein in the endlessly proliferating possibilities of a topic that by its very nature seems to invite multiplication but a way also of examining the historical production of colonial ideas of originality and mimicry. Nonetheless, it is my hope that these readings may prove serviceable in other colonial and postcolonial contexts. Finally, in seeking to inaugurate a complex and context-specific understanding of the historicity of identity formation and the idioms of originality and secondariness, this book seeks to respond (albeit tentatively and fitfully, and often not in the same terms) to the theoretical challenge posed by Spivak’s 1989 essay, “The Political Economy of Women.” Here Spivak articulates one of the fundamental problems underlying the theorization of colonial and postcolonial subject formation:

The theories of subject-formation that we know are either psychoanalytic or counter-psychoanalytic.…We [“western” subjects, a category that includes elite postcolonials] are used to working with variations on, critiques of, and substitutions for, the narratives of Oedipus and Adam. What narratives produce the signifiers of the subject for other traditions? Always in a confrontation and complicity with the epistemic re-constitution of the subject-in-imperialism, traces of this psycho-biography can be found in the indigenous legal tradition, in the scriptures, and of course, in myth.^[19]

Given its emergence in the late-twentieth-century U.S. academy, this book is ineluctably situated in the terrain of the identity politics that continues to engross critical energies in the contemporary moment. Femininity has long been theorized as a nonidentity that masquerades as the real thing, fetishistically securing the illusion of male phallic plenitude. In more recent years, mimicry, drag, and passing—which form the terrain on which claims of difference and identity are contested—have become the practices/affects through which complicity and opposition have been investigated in the western academy. Although analyses of these practices have often tended to emphasize their destabilization of dominant identity formations through modes of irony, burlesque, or the affirmation of positive differences, scholars have also pointed to the fact that identities can never be fully self-sufficient even as they assert their difference from a compulsory sameness.^[20] My own investigation is informed by such a deconstructive sense of the discursive construction of dominance/originality and resistance/difference. It has been enriched by, and exists in a critical conversation with, the work in feminist, queer, and African American studies on the problematic of originality and difference for identity formation. My own interest in these questions, which are somewhat differently inflected in colonial and postcolonial situations, is less in the lack of coevality that marks the colonial or neocolonial terrain (though that is irreducible) than in the internally differentiated and negotiated terrain of such secondariness or impersonation, and its varied effects, pleasures, and costs.^[21]

The book hopes to demonstrate, then, that the representational and performative economies of colonial and nationalist discourses need to be resignified in relation to questions of originality and impersonation. The relations that Indian Traffic traces between symbolic orders, psychic processes, and colonial/national institutions in India will, I hope, offer a historically attentive, varied, and continually negotiated sense of how national and other identities have been perceived and performed. And it bears repeating that these questions need to be thought of not only in terms of the always already secondary status of that which comes “ after the Empire of Reason” ^[22] but in terms of their vastly different, incommensurable, and incalculable modalities and effects. I have no wish to imply that such traffic was a form of free trade or that exchanges were voluntaristic, coeval, or unmarked by violence and distress. Instead, I wish to insist on the productiveness (in the sense of invariably producing effects, shocks, and transmutations, though often of unequal degrees) of such commerce for all concerned.^[23]

If the prototypical comic actor in such an exchange is the babu whose anglicization guarantees his distance from Englishness, the first chapter, “Oriental Exhibits: The Englishman as Native,” takes up that figure who seems to be his converse (and his superior); it seeks to account for the peculiarly colonial (English) drive to occupy the place of Indianness. It focuses on the career of Richard Burton, colonial adventurer, linguist, and disguise artist par excellence. It examines the ways in which Burton assumes the identities of “your genuine Oriental,” considering the personae assumed both in Sind (India) and, more notoriously, in the Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Meccah (1855). I argue that the pilgrimage involves something more complex than passing for an Indian/Afghan/Muslim/native. Burton seeks to resignify—rather than imitate—native identity, so that the native, in order to have access to a subject position as a native, can only do so by modeling himself after Burton. And yet, despite Burton’s drive to name nativeness as his own creation rather than as a category that might be at least contingently autochthonous, he can only do so from a position of marginality, from a place that is a nonplace and an identity that is not one. As a “half-Arab, half-Persian” merchant in Sind, or as a Rangoon-bred Afghan in Arabia, he is an outsider who can pass as an “Oriental” because of his unknowability rather than his familiarity or, more properly, an unknowable familiarity; wherever he goes, he signifies not so much indigeneity as a ubiquitous and uncanny liminality.

Chapter 2, “Discovering India, Imagining Thuggee,” investigates the perils (and pleasures) engendered for colonial authority by a mimicry that is—like Burton’s—outside the familiar ambit of anglicization but—unlike Burton’s— gineered by Indian actors. What happens when Indians rather than Englishmen “go native”? And what happens when mimicry, which is meant to a guarantor of difference, becomes indistinguishable from mimesis? Such a narrative of an unsanctioned indigenous mimicry is to be found in the discourse of thuggee, a discourse that takes its most substantial form in the archives of the Thuggee and Dacoity Department as well as in some fictionalized accounts of thug life. The thugs were—according to this colonial archive—a professional cult of religious killers who, disguised as ordinary (Indian) citizens, lured unwary travelers to their death on the highways of the colonial state. The instance of thuggee intimates that far from being an easily recognizable and faintly ludic figure, the mimic man (in his incarnation as a thug) is a figure who “passes” in law-abiding society with unsettling ease; he embodies the failure of the difference supposedly guaranteed by such an interpellation. The thug’s conformity, not to a particular and exceptional Indian identity but to an infinite range of everyday Indian ones, opens up the unspeakable possibility that all Indian identities might be a matter of impersonation. Hence, for the colonial state, the problem of thuggee can only be resolved through the criminalization of the thug’s capacity for impersonation and through the production and sequestration of a distinct identity designated as thug.

Chapter 3, “Anglo/Indians and Others: The Ins and Outs of the Nation,” on Kipling’s Kim, examines the bar, or hyphen, that simultaneously couples and uncouples the Anglo and the Indian and that establishes both as hyperreal identities. It probes the ways in which a colony, rather than a nation, is figured as an “imagined community,” so that the Anglo-Indian male (who is carefully distinguished from the “foreign” Englishman) can perform as founding father and first citizen of India, displacing or placing under erasure the Indian (male) nationalist, the English (male) colonialist, and the symbolic figure of Mother India. Neither Angloness nor Indianness (the two components of this hybrid identity) is incontrovertible for Kim but must be unceasingly secured through an elaborate relay of identifications, desires, and impersonations enacted in the Great Game of colonial espionage. Kim is Irish, a poor boy of the Indian bazaars and more than once (mis)recognized as a “half-caste.” The nature of his (interstitial) whiteness or Angloness and its relation to an Indianness that is traversed at almost all points by anticolonial intimations are the focus of this chapter, which argues that the relationship is negotiated through Anglo-India’s attempt to make the subject of Indian nationalism its own.

Chapter 4, “As the Master Saw Her: Western Women and Hindu Nationalism,” addresses the gendered Indian subject of Indian nationalism—that which Kim must remember to forget. It investigates how the problematic of originality and impersonation might signify for Indian (male) nationalists and for the western women associated with them, or how it might signify differently from the paradigmatic model of anglicization. I focus on the relationship of three late-nineteenth-century figures—Ramakrishna, Vivekananda, and Sister Nivedita (Margaret Noble)—who were tied to each other through relations of religious mentorship and discipleship. Each was notable, in the capacity of mentor or disciple, for “putting on” a gendered (and/or raced) identity: Ramakrishna became a Hindu woman; Vivekananda, a hypermasculine Indian/western male; and Nivedita, a Hindu/Indian woman. I examine the gendered politics of these transactions of early Hindu nationalism, reading them as a significant constitutive moment in the gendering of national identity. Through what forms of impersonation, displacement, and surrogacy do Indian/Hindu nationalist males assume a position of mastery, in relation to Indian women and to western women and men? And why might such a project conceive of western woman as central to its imagination of itself? What is the functionality of the subordinate white woman turned Indian within a Hindu nationalism in pursuit of hegemony?^[24] Such a reading of the white female mimic in Hindu nationalism will, I hope, pose some new questions about globality and (western) feminism, especially in reopening a consideration of the role of western women (usually described as privileged, rather than masochistic or subordinate, in relation to Indian women and men) in colonial and postcolonial economies of power and desire.^[25]

Chapter 5, “Becoming Women: The Genders of Nationalism,” in turn takes up the women displaced by the white woman’s inscription as Indian woman, examining the identifications and identities made available for (elite) Indian (and implicitly caste Hindu) women in the high nationalist period. What is the trajectory of an Indian woman’s assumption or mediation of Englishness and/or Indianness? What are the implications for Indian women (and men) of the feminizing of male nationalisms or nationalists? As in the case of the previous chapters, I approach the questions of authenticity, impersonation, and delegation through the prism of an intersubjective dynamic. I read the poetry and biography/politics of an outstanding female poet and nationalist of the twentieth century, Sarojini Naidu (whose entry into Indian nationalism was facilitated by her exemplary triumph as a “feminine” anglicized poet) in relation to the biography/politics of Gandhi, whose cultivation of a “feminine” style of politics (in marked contrast to the muscular Hinduism of Vivekananda) is well known. I do this in order to thematize Indian nationalism’s difficulties with competing notions of “becoming Indian woman”; I speak, therefore, to the ways in which it must solicit and disavow Sarojini’s putatively frivolous (female) identity as a travesty of Gandhi’s more seemly and serviceable Indian femininity.

The sixth and concluding chapter, “Figuring Mother India: The Case of Nargis” examines how considerations of originality and impersonation structure questions of identity in the popular-cultural imaginary of the postcolonial Indian (Hindu) nation. It examines the career of Nargis, a female Muslim star of the Bombay cinema who achieved lasting fame for her representation of Radha, an idealized Hindu peasant woman in what may be the best-known popular Indian film, Mother India (1957). The chapter examines the transformation of Nargis into an icon of Indian (Hindu) womanhood, on screen and in domestic life, and the tense yet intimate relationship of such iconicity with the residual and repressed Muslimness of the star. The tension between Bombay cinema’s protocols of iconicity (where a Muslim actress repeats, offscreen, the [Hindu] role she plays onscreen) and the monitoring of Muslim identity (in which the Muslim’s Hinduness—coded as Indianness—is always wanting) must be read as a partial allegory of the place of the “good/assimilated Muslim” in the Indian/Hindu polity and psyche. In the Hindu fantasy of assimilation, this figure is simultaneously a locus of fantasy and desire and a problem that continually erupts into the self-possession of Indian/Hindu identity.

Discipline and Negotiation: Audiences, Constituencies, and Responsibilities

This book, like others of its kind, does more than thematize negotiation; it is perforce made to rehearse a series of disciplinary and theoretical negotiations in the very process of mapping it. Such a process is, I think, clarified and contextualized by routing it through in some of the debates and engagements currently under way in what is called “postcolonial (cultural) studies”; these debates, like those on identity formation and nation formation, are also suffused—in ways that are perhaps not surprising but still worth attending to—with the idioms of originality and simulation, purity and pollution, legitimacy and usurpation.

Among the most prominent of these engagements is the critique of the some of the governing assumptions of postcolonial studies that has been proffered by historians from a particular kind of marxist perspective; some of the best-known contributions are the ones by Rosalind O’Hanlon and David Washbrook, Arif Dirlik, and Aijaz Ahmad.^[26] For O’Hanlon and Washbrook the most immediate target of criticism is Gyan Prakash’s “Writing Post-Orientalist Histories of the Third World: Perspectives from Indian Historiography,” an important essay that offers a sustained critique of foundational historiographies—Orientalist, nationalist, and conventionally marxist—of India.^[27] Their response to this specific essay, though, becomes the occasion for a severely critical and wide-ranging analysis of the allegedly pernicious dependence of postcolonial studies on theories of radical indeterminacy supposedly derived from poststructuralism and postmodernism. For them postfoundational approaches, such as the ones favored by Prakash, cannot come to terms with the necessity of explanatory categories or explanatory fictions (however one designates these) and are inadequate for historical understanding or for theorizing any kind of change or contestation of a progressive kind; they can only be productive of intellectual and political paralysis. Poststructuralism is, in this analysis, indicted as unoriginal (we always knew that the grounds of our knowledge were uncertain and fictive) and unimaginative in its deployment of this (unoriginal) insight (its literal-mindedness disallows any work that is not repetitive and complacent and functions as mimicry without menace). As Prakash (in his response) recognizes, such a representation of postfoundational epistemologies (which are quite indiscriminately rendered as identical with each other, in addition to being imperfectly understood) may itself be embroiled in a certain impulse to mastery in its purist disavowal of “the productive tension that the combination of Marxist and deconstructive approaches generates.” ^[28]

The same repudiation of a hyphenated marxism with its concomitant pollutions that marks O’Hanlon and Washbrook’s essay informs Dirlik’s essay as well as Ahmad’s book, though the latter are concerned—in somewhat different ways—with the formation of that figure who has come to be known as the “postcolonial intellectual.” Both locate the emergence and institutional consolidation of such a figure within a late-capitalist formation and speak to the decisive coimplication of the “rise” of postcolonial studies in the academy with the increasing prominence of this relatively privileged diasporic/immigrant figure. I would not necessarily argue with such an appraisal, but where for a deconstructive reader this complicity would constitute the irreducible starting point for an analysis, for Dirlik and Ahmad it constitutes in the last instance forceful evidence of the corrupt and camouflaged careerism of diasporic postcolonial intellectuals. Such complicity, for them, is a powerful indictment of the subfield itself as opportunistic and politically retrogressive in its inescapable entanglement with the structures of late capitalism.

Outside the discipline of history, the debates over the ontological and political character of postcolonial studies have assumed a somewhat different hue, though—as we shall see—they, too, invoke in many instances a rhetoric of lawful limits and unlawful appropriation. Postcolonial (cultural) studies as it has evolved in the literary studies branch of the Anglo-U.S. academy has in some notable instances taken as its category of analysis the scrutiny of colonialism and its aftermath, or more broadly, North-South relations and their modern genealogy. It is a category not easily accommodable within the conventional periodizations and national formations favored by English and comparative literature departments or within the rubrics of the disciplines themselves; this categorically and disciplinarily anomalous condition is something it shares with—for instance—feminist studies, queer studies, and African American studies. It is a subfield that has, almost from the moment of its emergence in the metropolitan academy, been beset by profound doubts and apprehensions about its own institutional, political, and intellectual/disciplinary status; one scholar has wittily likened the anxieties surrounding it to those that traditionally have attended “the birth of a female child.” ^[29] The very term has aroused—both among the scholars situated within postcolonial studies so called and those “outside”—a large and often immoderate measure of hostility. Among the most celebrated and cited of these are the essays in Social Text of Anne McClintock and Ella Shohat, who have decried the term’s lack of iconicity and its ostensible abdication of a political charge; both accuse it of a prematurely celebratory character.^[30] McClintock and Shohat are surely in the right to insist that the question of decolonization must never be allowed to detach itself from the question of postcoloniality. Nonetheless, the call for an ideographic term that will perfectly mirror the discontinuities and heterogeneities of the field seems to me to be posing the wrong kind of demand, structured as it is by a logic of authenticity/fullness and masking/lack. In such a reading, the term postcolonial functions as a form of (failed) camouflage, the theoretical analogue to the mimic man of colonial discourse, whose difference from the genuine article invariably undermines his claims to legitimacy. Besides, as Stuart Hall observes in his learned and meticulously thorough response to the criticisms of Dirlik, Shohat, and McClintock, the term/description postcolonial endeavors to “construct…a notion of a shift or a transition conceptualised as the reconfiguration of a field, rather than as a movement of linear transcendence between two mutually exclusive states. Such transformations are not only not completed but they may not be best captured within a paradigm which assumes that all major historical shifts are driven by a necessitarian logic towards a teleological end.” ^[31]

Somewhat different from the interrogations of the term postcolonial within literary/cultural studies by Shohat and McClintock^[32] is Spivak’s reproach about the majority of literary critical attempts at work that is commonly called interdisciplinary: “the history of the institutional study of literature is one of great permissiveness.…When a literary critic makes like a political economist or a psychoanalyst she is speaking as an insider of her discipline in terms of her fantasy about what kinds of social value those other disciplines carry…If she does not attend to the generalizations I have laid out before you…[she]…acts out the pretentious self-marginalization of the sanctioned ignorance of so-called interdisciplinary talk.” ^[33] More urgently than perhaps any other scholar in the field, Spivak has warned us against becoming too comfortable in our (new) critical practices, insisting that we “do our homework,” that we “ earn the right to criticize,” and that we remember never to forget the compelling character of our disciplinary formation, interests, and responsibilities. It is a caution against disciplinary impersonation, or piracy, that we ignore at our peril. It is, moreover, a caution that has been repeated for literary critics directly and indirectly by historians, who have pointed out that though literary studies and, more recently, cultural studies, needs history, “historicizing” is not and should not be easy. And yet there is much to be said, too, for Ellen Rooney’s rejoinder that “disciplines posit objects of inquiry that cannot be useful to oppositional critics without being fundamentally revised,” ^[34] as well as for Spivak’s own assertion in innumerable instances that “knowledge is made possible and is sustained by irreducible difference, not identity.” ^[35] Neither do I understand Spivak’s caveats about interdisciplinary work to function as a prohibition. To her credit, she herself, despite the often stern quality, even purism, of her “disciplinary talk,” has not desisted from ranging far afield from literary criticism, claiming the terrain of philosophy, economics, history, and psychoanalysis (among others) as her own, violently refashioning them to other ends. In an argument about her critical (not disciplinary) practice, she has claimed that her undertaking is “the irreducible but impossible task” of letting (nonintersecting) philosophical formations like marxism, feminism, and deconstruction critically “interrupt” one another.^[36] This, it seems to me, is an intellectual move that could analogously be made across the discontinuities of the disciplines.

This question of (an always inadequate) dissembling and expropriation is a particularly live issue for those of us who are trained as literary scholars and situated in postcolonial studies, especially since we solicit multiple and sometimes reciprocally uneasy if not contentious constituencies of readers, whose demands or expectations are often incommensurable. It is conceivable that literary and other scholars in feminist and (British and American) cultural studies, whom I would wish to solicit as readers, might find the South Asian scholarship unfamiliar and therefore uninviting. It is also possible that some (though by no means all) South Asianist historians and social scientists might find in such an enterprise (which borrows materials from a number of disciplines and media) an instance of poaching or, more simply, of lack. Yet such risks must be taken if one is to address more than a very slender constituency of scholars exactly like oneself, trained in (English) literary studies, committed to an interdisciplinary cultural studies, and working on South Asian materials. I can only respond to such a situation by multiplying the questions that must be asked, rather than providing solutions or resolutions. How do intellectuals trained as English literary critics approach, prepare for, or lay a claim to the terrain of South Asian studies, where so much of the current work on colonialism and postcoloniality is taking shape? What indeed can—or should—the domain of postcolonial studies claim as its own, in ways that are different from the traditional claims of the disciplines? Given that postcolonial studies has its greatest visibility (under this banner) in departments of English and comparative literature (which do not necessarily teach or promote modern or classical Asian and African languages) but is in many ways parasitic upon the materials traditionally claimed by history, anthropology, political science, and philosophy, what are the ways in which it must move between and through disciplines? What are the forms of verifiability in each discipline, and how does postcolonial studies negotiate these discontinuities? What is its projected audience, its constituency, for its research and its teaching? What methods and what knowledge must it learn and unlearn? How does it understand its own limits, if these limits can ever be known in advance?

It is obvious that what these queries speak to, in many ways, is the institution of cultural studies, which has gained a large measure of respectability in (English) literary studies though not necessarily in postcolonial studies outside English departments. Predicated upon a notion of culture that is understood in terms of institutions, languages, and ideas as well as a large gamut of products and practices like books, films, fashion, and architecture, cultural studies is necessarily interdisciplinary and often antidisciplinary. It is, of course, not without its considerable risks. One of these is its instant metaphorizability, so that it can function as all things to all people. But, more seriously, in undertaking cultural studies one takes the risk of never being erudite enough to satisfy the demands of all the disciplines that one is using, addressing, and inhabiting; what one should know is quite literally incalculable. One’s work is always in peril of being construed as an instance of the mimicry that betrays its distance from the “real thing” (Spivak’s caricature of the interdisciplinary scholar). The risk of this insufficiency is, I would argue, fundamentally different from the “sanctioned ignorance” against which Spivak so often and so correctly inveighs. I believe I do not overstate the case when I say that cultural studies can only be undertaken with considerable fear and trembling. Nevertheless, it must be undertaken if certain kinds of questions are to be asked or reinflected, and in the face of the knowledge that (what one sees as) the difference of one’s questions may register as the wrong kind of question.

I pose this situation as a challenge and as a site of ongoing negotiation; I do it not in order to reconcile the differences in the divergent audiences that one is necessarily addressing or to argue for any kind of pluralism (“Can’t we all just get along?”) but in order to highlight the philosophical and disciplinary impasses and questions of methodology and accountability that confront many of us who are situated in that liminal and contested zone between and outside traditional literary studies, cultural studies, history, and area studies. I would like to adapt for my purposes Stuart Hall’s description of the “theoretical” and “political” questions in the cultural studies project as existing in an “ever irresolvable but permanent tension. It constantly allows the one to irritate, bother, and disturb the other, without insisting on some final closure.” ^[37] Perhaps such a tension between the cultural studies contingent and the disciplinarians is just what one must hope to sustain, explore, and dispute; it may be another name for negotiation.

Notes