Writings from Peru and India Through a Postcolonial Lens

LIMITS OF COMPARATIVISM? WRITINGS FROM PERU AND INDIA THROUGH A POSTCOLONIAL LENS by Lipi Biswas Sen A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosphy Graduate Department of Spanish University of Toronto © Copyright by Lipi Biswas Sen 2009 Abstract Limits of Comparativism? Writings from Peru and India through a Postcolonial Lens Doctor of Philosophy, 2009 Lipi Biswas Sen Graduate Department of Spanish, University of Toronto This thesis examines the premises postulated by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, Helen Tiffin and Homi K. Bhabha within Postcolonial theory. The theorists suggest that these strategies can be applied to the entire literary production emerging from the erstwhile European colonies in Asia and Latin America; hence the aim of this project is to test the validity of their claim. Given the vastnesss of the theory, the scope of this study has been confined to the analysis of hybridity, Nativism, and mimicry. Critical works by Benita Parry, Walter Mignolo, Neil Lazarus, and others, have been taken into consideration. José María Arguedas (1911-1969), Arundhati Roy (1963-) and Geetanjali Shree (1957-), writing in Spanish, English and Hindi, respectively, were chosen to represent Peru and India. The Hindi novel was included to address the lack of adequate research in the field of vernacular literature within Postcolonial studies, as most of the critics have concentrated on texts written in the former colonizers’ languages. Language and culture have been the cornerstones of this theory hence they form an important part of my analysis. The dissertation foregrounds the relation between Spanish, English and the vernaculars in the text-nations crafted by Arguedas, and Roy. Their narratives indicate that the vernacular melds with the colonizer’s language to form a hybrid tongue, but the manner in which hybridity is constructed depends on the geo-political character of each society. The role of Hindi, its relation to English and Urdu, as well as the ii invention of its Sanskritized version during the colonial period, is examined in Shree’s narrative and her work is particularly insightful in this regard, as hybridity and Nativism are portrayed very differently in her novel. In this way my thesis demonstrates the difficulty of carrying out a comparative analysis of the entire literary corpus emerging from the erstwhile European colonies based solely on their shared colonial experience. iii Acknowledgements It would have been difficult to write this dissertation without the constant encouragement and support of my Supervisor, Prof. Rosa Sarabia. Her suggestions were always stimulating and challenging. My gratitude goes out to my Co-Supervisor, Prof. Chelva Kanaganayakam, and Reader, Prof. Néstor Rodríguez, for their insightful comments. I am grateful to Prof. Stephen Rupp, Chair of the Department, for his understanding and help at all times. I would also like to thank my Professors in Jawaharlal Nehru University for their academic and administrative assistance over the years. I thank my parents for their support and, Arindam Sen, my husband, for his companionship and patience. The project has come to an end, and I only wish my father, Alok Biswas, were alive to see it, but his memory is always with me and I dedicate my work to him. There are others whose help I would like to acknowledge, but it would not be possible to do so given the constraints of space, so a big thank you to everyone who helped me get this thesis done. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter Page Introduction-Hybridity and Nativism: Setting the Parameters………………………………………………...……....1-41 I. Crafting the Language of the Nation: An analysis of the Linguistic Strategies in the Narrative of José María Arguedas……………………………………………………………..42-91 II. Hybrid Tongues? Language and Nation in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things and Geetanjali Shree’s Hamara Shahar Us Baras ….…………………………………..………...….92-144 A. English and the Vernacular in The God of Small Things ……………………………………………...……..…….93-110 B. Writing against the grain in Hamara Shahar Us Baras ….…. 110-138 C. Conclusion………………………………………………....… 138-144 III. Of Harawís, Huaynos And Turupukllays – Culture And Nation In José María Arguedas’ Yawar Fiesta ………………………………145-199 IV. Weaving the Cultural Fabric of the Nation in Hamara Shahar Us Baras …………………………………………...…..…….……….200-234 Conclusion: Limits of Comparativism?......................................................235-250 V.Works Cited……..…………………….…………….…………………251-270 v Introduction- Hybridity and Nativism: Setting the Parameters for Analysis of Texts from Peru and India Postcolonial theory was developed in the 80s in order to study the consequences of colonialism, which some critics believed was not being addressed effectively by the existing instruments of analysis. Ania Loomba explains the meaning of the term ‘postcolonial’ succinctly in her book Colonialism/Postcolonialism , “[…] the prefix ‘post’ […] implies an ‘aftermath’ in two senses --temporal, as in coming after, and ideological, as in supplanting.” (1998, 6). It is the second definition, that of an ideological aftermath, that forms the basis of the work, The Empire Writes Back. Theory and Practice in post-colonial literatures by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin published in 1989. This work marked a watershed in the way this theory could be used to analyze literature in this context . According to Ashcroft et al, “Post-colonial literatures developed through several stages which can be seen to correspond to stages both of national or regional consciousness and of the project of asserting difference from the imperial center” (4-5). That is they engage with the imperial centers during the colonial experience, and continue to do so even after independence, in an effort to dismantle the cultural and historical hegemony established since the first moment of contact between the colonizers and the colonized. The authors go on to suggest four models which they feel would adequately account for these experiences. The first is a national or regional model which highlights the distinctive features of certain national or regional experiences; the second is the race based model which discovers certain shared features in various national literatures such as ‘Black writing’; the third is the comparative model of varying complexity which seeks to account for particular linguistic, historical, and cultural features across two or more post-colonial literatures; the fourth and 1 2 the most comprehensive is based on models which argue for features such as hybridity and syncreticity as fundamental elements of post-colonial literatures (1989, 15). The theorists further suggest certain literary strategies, some of them based on language and place of writing, as techniques used by post-colonial authors to state their point of view. The models of study mentioned above have served as a paradigm particularly in studies related to South Asian authors. In fact, both Ashcroft and Fernando de Toro, in their articles “Modernity’s first-born: Latin America and post-colonial transformation” and “The postcolonial question” published in El debate de la postcolonialidad en América Latina (1999), claim that, though this theoretical framework is concerned primarily with the experiences of people from the erstwhile colonies of Britain and France, it can be extended to include the countries formerly colonized by Spain and Portugal as well. Critics such as Aijaz Ahmad (1994), Arif Dirlik (1994), Anne McClintock (1992), Neil Lazarus (2004a, 2005), Benita Parry (1994, 1995, 2004), Ella Shohat (1992), amongst others, have argued that it is difficult to analyze the experience of all the erstwhile European colonies within a single theoretical framework. This matter has also been debated at length by Walter Mignolo (1993), J. Jorge Klor de Alva (1995), Santiago Colás (1995), Fernando Coronil (2004), Roman de la Campa (2002), Hernán Vidal (1993), and others, in the context of Latin America. One of the reasons for this polemic is the open ended strategies applied to the literary corpus emerging from all the former colonies which presumably reflect these techniques (while leaving a large majority in the margins) that has led to heated discussions. Nevertheless, it is difficult to deny the fissures opened by postcolonial theory within the academic world as scholars still debate the 3 feasibility of its application, 1 especially given the current neo-colonial economic and socio- political conditions prevailing in the former colonies. An important critique of the theory proposed by Ashcroft et al and Homi K. Bhabha, is their failure to acknowledge and incorporate the views of scholars and writers who have already commented extensively on the role played by language and culture (two vital elements in the theory postulated by them), much before the advent of Postcolonial theory. I would like to mention here the seminal work done by Inca Garcilaso de la Vega (1539- 1616), the mestizo historiographer from Peru, in his Comentarios reales (Royal Commentaries) as also Felipe Guaman Poma (1535-[1616]) in El primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno (1615). The linguistic strategies used by Garcilaso de la Vega and Guaman Poma prove that the historiographers had recognized quite early on the role played by language in the colonial project. Language for them was not a neutral tool to report history but an instrument to justify the conquest and colonization of Latin America. The two cronistas subverted the institutions

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