A VIEW FROM AFAR ()— AN INTERVIEW WITH GYAN PRAKASH

• Robert Borofsky: One of the key questions regarding the colonial period is how to write about it. Both Sahlins and Kituai use colonial documentation to discuss the complex ways various parties were en- tangled. To what extent do you think it is possible to write about the colonial period without staying within the silences and framings of the data collected by the colonial regimes—without getting entangled, that is to say, in the colonial entanglements themselves? • Gyan Prakash: To begin with, one cannot simply use colonial documents as repositories of information. One needs to take into account not only the purposes for which they were produced but also how and why they were preserved. Secondly, one must read them for the kind of knowledge they authorize, a point Sahlins and Kituai are both concerned with. One needs to pay attention to the ruling con- cepts of the documents, to what they render thinkable as well as to what they imply is unthinkable. If I were to put it in Foucaultian terms, one needs to consider the type of truth regime the documents establish. Rather than claiming an all-seeing eye—that allows one to grasp what colonial officials could not—the intent would be to make the documents confront their own contradictions, their own silences. I do not mean the object should be to fill in the silences as a sort of com- pensatory history, to give the colonized a voice denied them by colo- nialism. Instead I would make the silences, contradictions, and am- biguities essential elements in the colonial story. If I can offer an example from my own book on Indian labor bondage for a moment, the problem I confronted when reading colo- nial documents in the archives was that I found the history regarding this topic had already been written. The question of bondage had al- ready been posed and answered. Free labor was assumed to be the natural human condition. And this assumption shaped inquiries con-

296 Gyan Prakash 297 ducted both by colonial officials and others into the reasons for labor bondage in . The frame of reference was: Given free labor, or freedom, is the natural human condition, why then does India differ from this universal pattern? I confronted this framework by treating the archive—and how documents were framed in it—as an inextri- cable part of the history of bonded labor itself. The second step I took was to write about the visions of the past that these bonded laborers had. Their visions could not be accommo- dated within the same framework as existing historical documents. As a result, I discussed the nature of oral testimony, especially how its principles of construction differed radically from the kind of ratio- nalist histories historians generally write. In other words, my response to the silences and the fabrications of the archives about the people constituted as bonded laborers was not to recover a more authentic history. Instead, I argued that the bonded laborers’ narratives of their past stood at odds with history as a disci- pline. The narratives were antidisciplinary, in a Foucaultian sense. Or to put it another way, the silences, myopias, contradictions, and fail- ures of the colonial archive served as a basis for outlining forms of knowledge that were incommensurate with those within the archive itself. • RB: Building on these comments, one of the common critiques of anthropology and history today is that they often succumb to cer- tain essentialisms, certain simplistic oppositions, in discussing colo- nialism. Certain nationalist writers seem to do the same. What dy- namics are at work, in your opinion, and to what degree does it seem possible to step outside of nationalist and Western essentialisms in writing histories of colonial entanglements? • GP: Generally, I do not think the issue is essentialism versus nonessentialism. It is true that essentialisms of various kinds have served domination, both colonial and nationalist. But I think it would be too simplistic to just declare oneself against essentialisms. We are dealing with essentialisms with widely different historical functions and effects. Many writers—here I am thinking particularly of Partha Chatterjee, for example—have written about how nationalists em- ployed many of the same essentialisms as the colonial rulers. But it is also true they were employed with different aims and effects. The primary nationalist aim and effect, of course, was to over- throw the colonial rulers. In doing so, it is true the nationalists im- posed their own elitist, majoritarian cultural definition of the nation 298 Colonial Engagements—A View from Afar (South Asia) that rendered other definitions and other aspirations minor and sub- ordinate. Even though Indian nationalism represented itself as univer- sal and secular, for example, it was deeply colored by the Hindu ethos and symbols. I am not saying the nationalist essentialisms are better. I am saying they are different. The general point I would make is that for students of colonialism, it is necessary to leave aside the essentialism versus nonessentialism question. Our analyses should focus on the nature and effects of the complicity between essentialism and domination rather than searching for a nonessentialist epistemology. • RB: In discussing the tensions of empire, both Thomas and Panoff emphasize colonial regimes were never simple, unified affairs. One model did not fit all sizes: Each European country and each locale contained its own contradictions and ambiguities in respect to colonial rule. How would you suggest we go about trying to make sense—in a general way—of the differences, conflicts, and contradictions within colonial regimes? • GP: I agree with both Thomas and Panoff that colonialism was not a uniform process. French differed from British colonies, German from American. The Spanish colonization of the Americas in the six- teenth century differed radically from the nineteenth-century Anglo- French pattern. Nor were colonial regimes free from contradictions, as these authors also point out. One can see contradictions, variations, and ambivalences as essential characteristics of colonial regimes. Different interests were at work in different places and different times. Mission- aries, businessmen, administrative officials, and military commanders frequently differed regarding the nature of colonialism’s “civilizing mission.” And Europeans in the colonies often found themselves split by class, rank, culture, and gender. A lot has been written about these complexities arguing that neither the colonized nor the colonizers were monolithic entities. Many motives, many interests were in play. There is a tendency in the literature, however, to use these com- plexities to argue against and undo the colonizer-colonized divide— to argue that reality was far more complicated than the myth and ideology of the divide. Another version of this is to argue the Euro- peans subjected their own working classes and women to oppressions comparable to those experienced by the colonized. I do not disagree with this. But I have a sense that this leads into a contest in victimhood: the Gyan Prakash 299 Europeans claiming they were as victimized as the colonized. What this overlooks is a crucial point about power. Namely, while the Euro- pean working classes and women were subjected to various kinds of oppressions, they also were citizens. The colonized, on the other hand, were not acceptable as citizens but only as subjects. This is the point that Mahmood Mamdani makes in his book on Africa. It is a signifi- cant distinction. So the issue is not whether regimes of power and discipline were not applied to Europe as well. Of course they were. But they were ap- plied with different effects. That is one of the points that I would in- sist on in thinking about the complexities of colonial regimes. If we come to the colonies themselves, for all the differences be- tween the missionary and the colonial official, between the poor white soldier and the general, colonial ideology still mobilized them as the ruling race, however incompletely. Colonial ideology emphasized the poor tommy soldier, no matter how subordinate, was still part of the ruling race. And, as a result, he was expected to behave according to the standards of that race. Different categories of Europeans may have held more or less posi- tive views of the natives. But colonial power still authorized certain representations of the colonized. There is the example of Las Casas. Las Casas, in the famous 1550 debate with Sepulveda, held that Amer- ican Indians were human and therefore possessed certain rights. But we should not forget that underlying this favorable view of the Indians was the proposition that the Indians were humans insofar as their con- duct and beliefs suggested that they were potential Christians. To the extent that they manifested feelings and practices that he interpreted as religious, or to put it another way, insofar as they appeared as crypto-Christians, the Indians met Las Casas’ standard of what con- stituted human. The point is that the power of representation still be- longed to Las Casas. This is what I take to be the great lesson of Edward Said’s Orientalism: It teaches us something about the power of representation and the power that authorizes such representation. Keeping this in view, I would say the complexities, contradictions, and historical variations in colonial regimes have to be seen as pro- cesses that the colonial divide itself engendered and encountered as well as something that it sought to contain and control. I do not see the two as opposites. Contradictions and variations go together with the colonial divide. • RB: The chapters by Belich, Grimshaw and Morton, and Merwin 300 Colonial Engagements—A View from Afar (South Asia) explore colonial strategies of domination. Your own books, Bonded Histories and Another Reason, examine this subject as well, emphasiz- ing the contradictory nature of the process. How would you suggest we approach the analysis of these ambiguous, ambivalent patterns of control—in South Asia, in the Pacific, and elsewhere? What guide- lines would you suggest for assessing these controls’ ambiguous effectiveness? • GP: My response flows from what I have just said about the issue of contradiction. But let me put it in a slightly different way in the context of Another Reason—as a way of extending the points de- veloped by Belich, Grimshaw and Morton, and Merwin. In Another Reason, I argue that various colonial contradictions and ambivalences do not negate the colonial boundaries of East-West, colonizer- colonized, or rational-irrational. Rather they are produced by these colonial dichotomies. The very exercise of colonial power creates ambivalences and estrangements. Homi Bhabha has made this point most eloquently, arguing that the pattern of colonial control alienates Western ideals. To rule despotically in the of liberty is to estrange the very ideals of civilization that the colonial rulers said they had. What I try to do in Another Reason is to suggest that these contra- dictions and estrangements become spaces not only for the reiteration of colonial power but also for its revision. They constitute zones and moments of struggle and resistance. To be sure, zones of hybridity un- settle colonial binaries. But I do not perceive them—as is sometimes seen—as a middle ground, as areas of convergence, accommodation, and cooperation. Quite the contrary: I view these hybrid zones as arenas where struggles ensue to rearrange power. I argue in Another Reason that the very colonial project of using what the British desig- nate as “universal reason” constitutes a particular means of alien rule. Universal reason is used as a means for ruling over the colonized. This alienates the ideology of science’s universalism. Science is unable to disassociate itself from Western power. And once it is framed in this fashion, science needs to adopt other guises and languages as well. In other words, its very functioning as an instrument of power requires its translation to other contexts. It is this translation or traf- ficking between the alien and the indigenous, between modernity and tradition that Indian intellectuals used to formulate ideologies and institutions directed to redraw colonial boundaries. I see the zone of hybridity—which in some interpretations is portrayed as a nice, soft, fuzzy arena—as an intensely conflictual, not consensual, arena. Gyan Prakash 301 The general point I would make is that these kinds of negotiations and revisions of colonial power do not cancel colonial dichotomies. Hybridity does not dissolve opposition. Difference does not cancel identity. Rather, one category enables the reformulation of the other. I see it as a kind of dialectical relationship. All of this makes us see colonial power as kind of a dynamic field, a field in which the very reproduction of colonial power produces con- tradictions and revisions that can help overthrow it. So it is not that once colonial power is established, the rest is repetition of that original moment. The very need to reproduce it produces, in turn, all these contradictions. What I try to do in Another Reason is address this kind of dynamism, showing that colonial governance in India produced conditions under which emerged forces and ideologies that mirrored Western patterns and yet were undeniably different and challenging to them. • RB: World War II was a critical event in reframing colonial poli- tics. In India, it presaged independence; in the Pacific, a new kind of development. Without World War II, do you think the colonial era would have ended as it did? • GP: I think in general that it is not just World War II but the entire interwar period that is important, that produced a kind of crisis in the liberal capitalist-imperialist order. World War II, of course, esca- lates it vastly. But a crucial part of the change was also the recogni- tion by Western powers, during this period, that the colonized would no longer tolerate alien rule in the old form. In thinking about World War II, one can see the old arrangements had gone into disarray. An important part of the disarray is the per- ception by colonial officials that the colonized themselves are making various demands that cannot be accommodated within the old kind of arrangement. Something new had to be done. The liberal capitalist- imperialist system no longer seemed to work as it had before. • RB: Given your research on South Asia, what seems most striking and interesting to you regarding colonial entanglements in the Pacific? What do you think might be intriguing comparative issues—intriguing questions—to explore? • GP: One thing is that the Pacific is vast. I would imagine things would change considerably in speaking about different places. My general sense is that colonial dynamics in the Pacific seemed to have followed a much more violent and brutal course than in South Asia. Colonialism in the Pacific seems to have failed to evolve the stable, enduring sort of structures that it did in South Asia. Discourses 302 Colonial Engagements—A View from Afar (South Asia) of nation, nation-state, governmentality of the scale that rose in South Asia appear to have been, from my reading of the colonial section, relatively less important in the Pacific. One gets a sense that colonial rulers in the Pacific saw populations in far more exotic and exoticiz- ing terms than colonial rulers in India. There is a difference in what Said calls orientalizing. Part of the reason may have been the scale of societies and the nature of polity that the colonialists encountered in the two places. But I think partly it is the result of a far more exclusionary version of colonialism in the Pacific. If I take a comparative example from Latin America, the con- trast is striking with South Asia regarding how the notion of writing, the notion of memory, the notion of history were all systematically supplanted by European forms in the former but not the latter. A comparative case Africanists note is that no matter how inferior the British considered Indians, they nonetheless acknowledge they had a civilization, a philosophy, and a . In Africa, the colonists viewed the colonized as a tabula rasa. They had nothing to offer. I got a similar sense reading the essays in the “Colonial Engagements” section. The British did not see the Maori, for example, as having anything valuable to offer. That is strikingly different from India. The only parallel to that I can think of is the way the British and then later on, after independence, the Indian government treated people called “tribals.” I think the kind of comparative work that would prove valuable would be to inquire into how, out of different colonial experiences, the colonized created different kinds of structures. These structures might, in the South Asian case, lead to independence and to a kind of postcolonial state. In the Pacific, on the other hand, they lead to structures that appear much more under Western domination. Such comparisons would allow us to think about what “postcoloniality” actually means: How “post” is postcolonial today?