What emerges so far in the conversation regarding human rights and the postcolonial as you read Cesaire,Said, and Amitav Ghosh? How do any of these writers contend with some of the issues surrounding race and scientific racism outlined by Loomba in her introduction to postcolonial studies? Are there any overlaps with the concerns expressed by Dawes about the politics and poetics of representation in human rights work, such as the (im)possibility of building empathy towards historically oppressed, enslaved, or marginalized constituencies by those who claim to speak for them?
These questions are broad and generally designed to target and steer the ongoing discussion in the course. Focus on any one strand of thought or line of inquiry that animates you, and anchor your summary and reflection in details from particular passages that relate to your questions.
Please post your response as a comment here by Monday October 10 and well before 11.30 am.
These questions are broad and generally designed to target and steer the ongoing discussion in the course. Focus on any one strand of thought or line of inquiry that animates you, and anchor your summary and reflection in details from particular passages that relate to your questions.
Please post your response as a comment here by Monday October 10 and well before 11.30 am.
Césaire spends some time talking about how European colonisers equated Christianity with civilisation and put Paganism and savagery under one umbrella. Ghosh brings this point up in his introduction of Paulette Lambert, where he says that Justice Kendalbushe was ‘shocked’ to realise that she was not aware of what the scriptures said.
ReplyDeleteIn reiterating his point that Paulette’s “godlessness is a disgrace to society”, Kendalbushe says, “You are but a step away from chanting like a Sammy or shrieking like a Sheer”. Here, he seems to be speaking on behalf of the entire European society that their predominantly Christian way of life is the ideal one and that of the ‘Gentoo and Mom’den’ is highly detestable and undesirable.
Césaire then says that this idea of a civilisation put forth by the colonisers is just a farce as they achieve all their ends by decivilising themselves and awakening their buried, brutal instincts which result in greed and race hatred. Therefore, with all the human rights violation that the colonisers indulge in, they are the ones, according to Césaire, who assume the role of the savage.
Sea of Poppies is only too full of instances that speak of the injustices meted out to Indians by the British. They threatened Indian farmers to grow poppy instead of food crops and physically abused the overworked and underpaid labour force.
British hypocrisy is also put on full display in Ghosh’s narrative as they make money out of opium exports, while the usage of the substance as a narcotic was looked down upon in Britain. Also, at a time when all of Europe sang praises of human rights and the right to life, the British in India, negated that essential right at every opportunity and even continued the practice of slavery and encouraged prostitution.
Here again, we find a connection with what Césaire says, for he talks of the oppression of Asians and Africans practised and legitimised by Europeans, who condemned Adolf Hitler for killing and torturing several white people.
Therefore, he says, what was unforgivable in Hitler for Europeans was the negation of the white person’s right to life, while hordes of them believed they were performing angelic deeds by unleashing Hitler’s weapons on coloured people as this would set their crooked ways of life straight. This infantalisation of the East is prevalent in Sea of Poppies too.
Parvati Mohan.
Dawes in his essay on Human Rights remarks that we value art because it is, in a sense, essential to the free and full development of personality, because it promotes human flourishing. Thus if we value Amitav Ghosh’s ‘Sea Of Poppies’ as a piece of art we have to believe that it will promote some kind of human development. But as we ride through the novel we find just the opposite. It bleeds its heart out speaking about the tyranny of the British colonizers over the helpless Indians.
ReplyDeleteCesaire in his work talks about the distance between colonization and civilization. He gives us a study about how colonization works to decivilize the colonizer, to brutalize him in the true sense of the word,to degrade him, to awaken him to buried instincts, to covetousness, violence, race hatred and moral relativism. If we take a closer look at Ghosh’s novel we find the strains of all of these in bits and pieces but what we predominantly find is the presence of the want to dominate and oppress. Let us now take a portion of the novel itself to exemplify the point further. In chapter IV of the novel, a conversation between Mr. Burnham, an important member of the opium trade and Zachary held my attention in this regard. When Burnham talks about the future of Ibis, Zachary learns that the next shipment will be to deport slaves to the Andamans. The conversation strides on to reveal Burton’s view on slavery and racism. He remarks that it is sad but true that there are many who will stop at nothing to halt the march of human freedom. According to his views, freedom is what the mastery of the white man means for the lesser races. To him the Africa trade was the greatest exercise in freedom since God led the children of Israel out of Egypt. From his words we get an inkling of the thought process of the colonizers.
Loomba drags home this very point when he talks of Racial and Cultural difference. He says racism has been present since biblical times. Blackness has been associated with the descendents of Hm, Noah’s bad son and with the forces of evil. Thus a frame of mind that has been present since time immemorial cannot be easily shed. The European colonizers associated bad traits in a human being like laziness, aggression, violence, sexual promiscuity etc with the colonized. Race thus became a marker of an ‘imagined community’.
Thus we see that the questions posed by Loomba and Cesaire about the colonized and colonizers is the same concerns that Amitav Ghosh potrays in his novel where he predominantly shows the injustice meted out to the natives by the oppressers.
Loomba, in her introduction, questions if post colonial writers are engrossed in highlighting cultural and racial differences despite having a different viewpoint. She talks of racial differences intensifying the link between biological features, psychological and social attributes.
ReplyDeleteIn this context, Ghosh’s description of Kalua in Sea of Poppies gives an impression about racial stereotyping. For instance, Ghosh mentions how Kalua—Blackie—became his nickname because of his skin colour. From being born in a lower caste family to the eating habits of Kalua that reflect his intelligence or the lack of it, Ghosh has attempted to toy with the idea of stereotyping of this character. Stereotyping could also indicate the period of existence of the character and place in which the character has been built.
Loomba says ‘Race thus became a marker of imagined community’.
She makes a mention of an American journalist’s interview with Haiti’s Papa Doc Duvalier that shows the nexus between racial purity and social dominance. Here it is interesting to note that Ghosh, in his writing, describes how reluctant Deeti was, to even hand over a package to Kalua since he belonged to a lower caste. It was obvious that she placed norms of the society beyond self. This could be observed where Ghosh writes, “They made their way towards Ghazipur, sitting at either end of the cart’s bamboo platform, so far apart that not even the loosest of tongues could find a word to say, by way of scandal or reproach.” But it is intriguing to spot the concern that Deeti had if Kalua would consume the opium. In the latter half of the book, surprisingly, she elopes with the same man. Quite a revolutionary act for an upper caste widow to run away with a man whose face she deterred to see fearing the society.
Thus, as Loomba describes, racial constructions develop alongside the social hierarchies which have been misused to subjugate people.
Sunitha Sekar
The concept of domination has been maintained throughout history. In the last six-seven centuries this concept came to be factored by the ideal of race as Western European countries began to colonize countries in Asia and Africa and the continent of America.
ReplyDeleteRace also came to become synonymous with communities. With Genghis Khan, there came to be formed certain notions about the appearance of the Chinese. This is evident in the Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh where Zachary has certain pre conceived notions about the Laskars, which are reinforced when he witnesses some of them who do not appear to be civilized in their appearance. Charles Kingsley is horrified at the sight of the uncivilized Irish white men as he had internalized blacks as being uncultured and unsophisticated.
The notion of trade to colonize countries is evident when Burnham conveys to Neel the intention of the British to go to war with China to carry on trade in opium. Burnham says, “For freedom – for the freedom of trade and for the freedom of Chinese people. Likewise, the economy of the subject population is aligned in such a way as to benefit the colonizer.
With increased proselytization 16th century onwards, discovery of new areas for domination, and the swell in trade which necessitated subjugation of native populations, the colonizers especially from the West came to use Christianity as an alibi for taming the savage. This explanation is further used by the colonizers to forcibly acquire the resources of the their land.
The idea of domination is evident even in caste based societies such as India, where Deeti at once keeps herself concealed from Kalua while on his cart in keeping with the mores of her caste in public. Their relationship is nuanced in the sense that she’s reminded of her first encounter with him when she stroked his body while he lay unconscious.
Bincy Mathew
The relation between the colonizer and the colonized is the undercurrent in Sea of Poppies. This relationship is brought forth through different characters, standpoints and settings. I would expand by looking into the interactions between Raja Neel Rattan Halder and Mr. Burnhum. Neel is the zemindar of Raskhali and the lineal fascination for the west is seen in their preferences: Anglicized version of the Indian boat, the wish to learn the language of the colonizer. And as Loomba says their lives had been woven by the fabric of the empire.
ReplyDeleteYet, Neel feels in his bones an anxiety about this old relationship; that despite all the refinement of tastes and the learning of the language, he remains to be an outsider, an inferior as is outlined by Ghosh when he says ‘by both temperament and education, Neel was little fitted for the company of such men as Mr Burnham, and they in turn tended to regard him with a dislike that bordered on contempt.’
Also evident is a certain ambivalence in Neel; a simultaneous wish to hold on to the fingers of the British and also to let it go. This feeling of ambivalence, as Loomba ideated in her essay is, in itself, a product of imperial duplicity.
The manner in which the relationship takes a U-turn further emboldens some of the points that Cesaire made when he says that between colonizer and colonized there is room only for intimidation, forced labour, pressure, the police, taxation, theft, rape, compulsory crops, contempt, mistrust, arrogance, self-complacency, swinishness, brainless elites, degraded masses.
Edward Said in his essay on Orientalism says: The relationship between occident and orient is a relationship of power, domination, of varying degrees of a complex hegemony. This is exemplified in the power equations between Neel and Mr. Burnhum and also throughout the novel.
Cesaire’s works focuses on de-colonization. He focuses on the impact of the colonized, it s culture and history. According to him there is no justification for colonization as none of the acts can be justified. Colonization on a number of levels works to decivilize the colonizer,brutalise him and to degrade him in any possible ways. Therefore the question of who the savage is put out to the audience.
ReplyDeleteThe biggest problem according to Cesaire here is the Christian pedantry which laid down dishonest equations and called Christianity civilization and paganism-savagery, from where the unequal series of human rights evolved with the negroes and Indians being its victims. Therefore he says any civilization that justifies colonization is a sick civilization, one which is morally deceased.
The entire concept of de-familiarizing the native with his own culture and tradition and roots is used by Ghosh as well. Taking from Loomba, Ghosh too focuses on the scientific racism and categorization. Zachari himself being from an oppressed class has a racial gaze. His prejudices come across to be racial clearly. The larger comment by Ghosh obviously seems to be on the concept of America as being the “exceptional” one where all the others re under it. Ghosh purpose here is to represent a desire for assimilation.
This also relates to what Franz Fanon talks about, in his book called “BLACK SKIN WHITE MASKS: where the black wishes to separate himself from his own identity and adopt the “skin” of the white. This is what fanon calls the divided self perception. The Black Subject loses his native cultural originality and embraces the culture of the mother country. As a result of the inferiority complex engendered in the mind of the Black Subject, he tries to appropriate and imitate the cultural code of the colonizer.
Therefore, as this complex sets in the black subject, Cesaire says between the colonizer and the colonized there is only one room for, which is forced labor, taxation, theft, rape , arrogance and brutality. The colonized for the colonizer is a pile of degraded masses.
Ania Loomba, in her book ‘Colonialism/Postcolonialism’, correctly points out that the coloniser cannot always be held responsible for all the transgressions in the colonies in their post-colonial era. She says therefore, that while the Coloniser does not deserve impunity, it is still paramount to identify those sticky issues that have conditioned the colonies even before his (the coloniser’s) arrival.
ReplyDeleteA few passages in Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies struck a chord with me on this front. In the paragraph that described Deeti’s husband Hukam Singh being chauffeured by the simple-minded giant Kalua, a clear distinction of class and caste emerge:
” Kalua, the driver of the ox-cart, was a giant of a man, but he made no move to help his passenger and was careful to keep his face hidden from him: he was of the leather-workers' caste and Hukam Singh, as a high-caste Rajput, believed that the sight of his face would bode ill for the day ahead... [he] sat facing to the rear, with his bundle balanced on his lap, to prevent its coming into direct contact with any of the driver's belongings.” (4)
In other words, colonialism often reflected the colony’s previous state of affairs. Class and caste bias and religious and communal disharmony existed long before the British came to India and still exists in its modern postcolonial form. While the coloniser showed proclivity throughout towards taking advantage of these divides that prevailed in the country, he certainly cannot be held responsible for their inception.
It is important hence to note, as Loomba emphasises, Colonialism is not just something that happens from outside a country or a people, not just something that operates with the collusion of forces inside, but a version of it can be duplicated from within (Loomba, 16).
Colonialism, according to Loomba, did not inscribe itself on a clean slate, and it cannot therefore account for everything that exists in ‘postcolonial societies’ (21). She believes that the food, music, language, art and culture that one associates as postcolonial attributes, in fact evoke earlier histories or shades of culture that elude the term ‘colonial’.
- Evelyn Ratnakumar
Amie Cesaire in "From Discourse on Colonialism" talks about how the Europeans(colonisers) have for long being justifying the 'oppression','subjugation' and 'exploitation' of the colonised and enslaving them. He makes a strong point while elaborating this further by saying "Europe is indefensible". He also points out the hypocrisy practised by them when they talk of Hitler as a someone who did wrong and goes on to say that they do this only because the victims in that case were the whites themselves. Infact, he mentions how Hitler is inside all of them.
ReplyDeleteOn one hand where Edward Said talks about exploring internal consistency in the idea of Orientalism , 'East as a career', pattern of relative strength between the East and the West(where he says ....relationship is of power, of domination , of varying degrees of complex hegemony); Amitav Ghosh also deals with the issue of coloniser and colonised. The line on page 13, para 3 ... "to break up these groups....,and although THEY CAME CHEAP....by a single able seaman." shows how coloniser thought of the colonised as nothing more than an object/a thing ('Thingification' mentioned by Cesaire). At the same time, it shows how lowly and inefficient they thought colonised people to be.
Loomba also analyses and puts forth the question in her introduction "how does the colonial encounter restructure ideologies of racial, cultural, class and sexual difference?" Again, Dawes and Loomba both raise the point and problem of "sub-altern representation by the intellectuals" and Amitav Ghosh tries to represent these people and their hardships in quite a justified way in his novel.
ReplyDelete-Anumeha
Césaire starts by explaining what colonization is not and what all it was defined as. In ‘Discourse on Colonialism’, Aime` Césaire shows hypocrisy as the soul of European civilization. In the writing, he points out how European civilization today fails in justifying itself when it comes to ‘reason’ and ‘conscience’. This hypocrisy he blames on the ‘Christian pedantry’. This is the basis of the equation, ‘Christianity = civilization, paganism = savagery’. This clubbing of paganism and savagery is clearly shown by Amitav Ghosh in Sea of Poppies through Paulette Lambert. Even someone like Paulete Lambert, who is of European descent but bought up by Jodu’s mother who is an Indian, is treated in biased way and is somewhat looked down upon.
ReplyDeleteThis is portrayed by the author especially in chapter nine of the book. Paulette takes a ‘fright’ at the thought of spending an evening ‘at the side of Justice Kendalbushe,’ ‘it was not a pleasant prospect,’ as he would try to ‘civilize’ Paulette by making her read the Bible and occasionally would ask questions about it. Ghosh makes it a point to mention that Justice Kendalbushe was ‘shocked’ when he got to know that she was not aware of what the scriptures said.
Paulette is treated as an outsider as she was raised by Jodu’s mother and has ‘savagery’ in her. This is why Mrs. Burnham is trying to ‘civilize her by instilling Biblical thoughts. It is clearly shown that Paulette came ‘as low as she did in the order of social precedence’. She was always made to sit next to the most undesirable guests.
According to Césaire, the European colonisers’ idea of a civilisation is a farce as they achieve all their ends by ‘decivilising’ themselves and awakening their buried, brutal instincts which result in greed and race hatred. All this brings is savagery.
The book brings out this savagery aptly. For example the farmers were compelled to grow poppy because that was generating revenue for the East India Company. British hypocrisy is displayed in clear terms in Gogh’s novel as British were making money out of the opium export as money was no longer money alone but also capital. Another example is the practice slavery in India, even after it was abolished world over.
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ReplyDeleteCesaire talks about how colonization actually de-civilizes the colonizer, brutalizes him in a way that awakens him to his true instincts of covetousness, violence and moral relativism. He also talks about the boomerang effect wherein the colonizer to ease his conscience thinks of the native as an animal and treats him the same. While doing this he in fact becomes the animal himself.
ReplyDeleteThis is seen in Ghosh's sea of poppies too when Neel Rattan Haldar is humiliated at the hands of the colonizer when taken into custody. It irks the colonizer to know that Neel speaks fluently in the colonizer's native tongue. He is not able to digest this fact as he thinks of this native as nothing but 'inferior', 'uncivilized' and 'incompetent'. Thus to ease his ego he treats the native (Neel) like an animal, humiliating him in the most brutal and savage manner and thereby becoming an animal himself. This shows how the colonizer who claims to 'civilize' the 'uncivilized' is in-fact barbaric and diseased himself any without any sense of right and wrong.
Also, Cesaire’s idea that a civilization that uses its principles for deceit and trickery is a dying civilization is precisely seen in Ghosh’s text where the colonizer slyly carries out his interests and vindicates himself on the pretext of ‘God’, ‘duty towards humanity’ and ‘greater good’(115-117). Christianity is used all throughout the text by the colonizer to justify his evil motives and to promote his own interests. Cesaire also says in his discourse that Christianity is really the main culprit and the dishonest equations the colonizer had laid down (Christianity=civilization and Paganism=savagery) was with the motive of subjugating the native population.
Aimé Césaire in his 'Discourse on Colonialism' talks about the European colonizers who were “slavering apologists”. He outlines a period when moral relativism was used to serve the mercenary ends of the oppressors.
ReplyDeleteThe didactic observations used by the colonizers are evident in ‘Sea of Poppies’ too. For instance, in the conversation between Benjamin Burnham and Zachary Reid about indentured labour and slavery, Burnham justifies the actions of the British by employing biblical rhetoric. He states that "the Africa trade was the greatest exercise in freedom since God led the children of Israel out of Egypt”. He also refers to the process of making slaves of the natives as their "march to freedom".
This perspective, which was generally held by the average white supremacist, is very obviously skewed. It falls in line with the colonialist nature that Césaire attacks - a nature that imbibed Christian pedantry and served to propagate the incorrect equation that Christianity=civilization. In reality, he says, colonialism wasn't remotely related to or justified by evangelism and was not the result of any pure purpose. He makes the point that the chief forces behind colonialism were all those that intended to extend their own economies to the colonies by force, and profited out of the capitalism that resulted.
Césaire also makes the larger point that colonialism ends up 'decivilizing' the colonialist, by awakening the baser instincts in him. These are traits that are manifest in the colonizers and are brought forth in the inhumane thread of argument that Burnham pursues.
- Athirupa Manichandar
Aimé Césaire, in the Discourse on Colonialism, establishes how colonization works to decivilize the colonizer, and the power structures that determine the relationship between the colonizer and colonized is defined by forced labor, brutality, cruelty, sadism, contempt, mistrust and self complacency.
ReplyDeleteThis gets reflected in Amitav Ghosh's Sea of Poppies where, to illustrate, Ghosh writes about the zamindar of Raskhali - Neel Rattan - whose father had entered into a trade agreement with Mr.Burnham, the opium trader. However, with the Opium trade coming to a halt and due to profilgacy on part of the zamindar,he starts to lose money. He ultimately ends up bankrupt and refuses to give up his ancestral land which Burnham demands be given to him as a part of paying off the debt ! In the end, he is framed in a case of forgery and tried by the courts. In this entire incident, the contempt and derision that Burnham holds for the Zamindar and his ilk comes forth. Ghosh, needless, to say manages to portray the picture of a colonizer and the contours of his attitude towards those he holds as inferior to him.
This aspect of the Ghosh's narrative, as well as the unequal equations of power between the two, reflects the inequality in power-relations between the Occident and the Oriental, that Edward Said has written about. The same finds mention in Cessaire's writing.
Interestingly we find that even now,these power equations between the Occident and what it considers to be the 'other' exist, and therefore the question arises - is the term post-colonial, a relevant one, as Ania Loomba explores in her essay. Tough questions, with no easy answers.Our future discussions would do well to focus on the broad contours of the debates that the readings have thrown up.
- Sattwick.
A major part of Amitav Ghosh’s narrative was representative of the paradox of language(as described by Dawes in his essay). The idea of the colonizer communicating with the colonized in the language of the colonized and vice-versa was particularly striking to me. The character of Paulette, who belongs to the colonizing race and is French, communicates in Bengali more effectively than she does in English, owing to her French-Indian upbringing. We see the thin line of colonizer and colonized blurring with the representation of this character. Although she is not a colonizer herself, she is considered to be a part of the ruling race and hence faces an identity crisis when she is brought into the Burnham household.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, Babu Nob Kissin Pander’s character is representative of the colonized who patronize their colonizers. Although a Bengali himself, he wishes to speak and be spoken to English. The very fact that he can speak the language of the colonizer is of great value and importance to his identity.
Throughout the narrative, the author has used a multitude of words from the Laskari language, even the dialect of the ruling race is full of words like ‘guzalkhana’, ‘Pugli’, which are derived from native Indian languages. This is indicative of the paradox of language, the fact that the ruling race is forced to communicate in the language of the colonized to continue to rule over them.
In school, while reading Social Studies we had to read Nepal's History on unification of small states by King Prithvi Narayan Shah. There, are accounts of his 'bravery' where he chopped whole indigenous community's ears and noses, de-skinned them alive and rubbed salt on their body because they resisted. This act of his has been glorified in the school text as his act was for 'greater good' and those people were 'savages' not to follow the Great King.
ReplyDeleteI was reminded of that particular school textbook which glorified the violence used upon indigenous people in creating modern Nepal by King Prithvi Narayan when we read Amitav Ghosh's Sea of Poppies. There, Zackary Reid remembers the incident at Gardiner's shipyard in Baltimore where he had seen Freddy Douglass being brutally murdered by four white carpenters: "…a face with a burst eyeball, the scalp torn open where a handspike had landed, the dark skin slick with blood…" (Ghosh 51) This brutality upon black man from white carpenters is a sheer form of colour racism. To murder a person with this much of brutality can nowhere be a considered human act but of an animal if not lower.
To prove they are superior they (white carpenters) act so inhumanly. These types of violence are condemned by French poet/politician Aime Cesaire in "From Discourse on Colonialism". In the article he refers to massacre of the Annamese and says, "…but because I think that these heads of men, these collections of ears, these burned houses, these Gothic invasions, this streaming blood, these cities that evaporate at the edge of the sword, are not to be so easily disposed of. They prove that colonization, I repeat, dehumanized even the most civilized man; that colonial activity, colonial enterprise, colonial conquest, which is based on contempt for the native and justified by that contempt…that the colonizer, who in order to ease his consciences gets into the habit of seeing the other man as an animal …and tends objectively to transform himself into an animal…" (176-77)
Going through these events in histories and literature we can see that colonizer or suppressor make attempts at glorifying their act of violence against another race. But, as Cesaire puts it during their so called glorious acts they actually turn into animals. It makes me wonder if for colonizers it was just not only of colonizing but introducing racism in society to get the feeling of superior or more civilized than other. But, to feel superior and civilized than the native they turn into violence and in the process become an animal.