PLAGIATPLAGIAT MERUPAKAN MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TIDAK TERPUJI TERPUJI
THE IDENTITY RE-NEGOTIATION OF INDIAN SEPOYS IN AMITAV GHOSH’S THE GLASS PALACE : A POSTCOLONIAL READING
AN UNDERGRADUATE THESIS
Presented as Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Sarjana Sastra in English Letters
By
GABRIEL GRADI MAHENDRA
Student Number: 104214075
ENGLISH LETTERS STUDY PROGRAM DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH LETTERS FACULTY OF LETTERS SANATA DHARMA UNIVERSITY YOGYAKARTA 2015 PLAGIATPLAGIAT MERUPAKAN MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TIDAK TERPUJI TERPUJI
THE IDENTITY RE-NEGOTIATION OF INDIAN SEPOYS IN AMITAV GHOSH’S THE GLASS PALACE : A POSTCOLONIAL READING
AN UNDERGRADUATE THESIS
Presented as Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Sarjana Sastra in English Letters
By
GABRIEL GRADI MAHENDRA
Student Number: 104214075
ENGLISH LETTERS STUDY PROGRAM DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH LETTERS FACULTY OF LETTERS SANATA DHARMA UNIVERSITY YOGYAKARTA 2015
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A Sarjana Sastra Undergraduate Thesis
THE IDENTITY RE-NEGOTIATION OF INDIAN SEPOYS IN AMITAV GHOSH’S THE GLASS PALACE : A POSTCOLONIAL READING
By GABRIEL GRADI MAHENDRA Student Number: 104214075
Approved by
Paulus Sarwoto, S.S., M.A., Ph.D. Advisor
Elisa Dwi Wardani S.S., M.Hum. Co-Advisor
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A Sarjana Sastra Undergraduate Thesis
THE IDENTITY RE-NEGOTIATION OF INDIAN SEPOYS IN AMITAV GHOSH’S THE GLASS PALACE : A POSTCOLONIAL READING
By GABRIEL GRADI MAHENDRA Student Number: 104214075
Defended before the Board of Examiners on May 12, 2015 and Declared Acceptable
BOARD OF EXAMINERS
Name Signature
Chairperson : Dr. F. X. Siswadi, M.A. ……………
Secretary : A. B. Sri Mulyani, M.A., Ph.D. ……………
Member 1 : Drs. Hirmawan Wijanarka, M.Hum. ……………
Member 2 : Paulus Sarwoto, S.S., M.A., Ph.D. ……………
Member 3 : Elisa Dwi Wardhani, S.S., M.Hum. ……………
Yogyakarta, May 29, 2015 Faculty of Letters Sanata Dharma University Dean
Dr. F.X. Siswadi, M.A.
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STATEMENT OF ORIGINALITY
I certify that this undergraduate thesis contains no material which has been previously submitted for the award of any other degree at any university, and that, to the best of my knowledge, this undergraduate thesis contains no material previously written by any other person except where due reference is made in the text of the undergraduate thesis.
Yogyakarta, April 29, 2015
Gabriel Gradi Mahendra
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LEMBAR PERNYATAAN PERSETUJUAN PUBLIKASI KARYA ILMIAH UNTUK KEPENTINGAN AKADEMIS
Yang bertanda tangan di bawah ini, saya mahasiswa Universitas Sanata Dharma
Nama : Gabriel Gradi Mahendra Nomor Mahasiswa : 104214075
Demi pengembangan ilmu pengetahuan, saya memberikan kepada Perpustakaan Universitas Sanata Dharma karya ilmiah saya yang berjudul
THE IDENTITY RE-NEGOTIATION OF INDIAN SEPOYS IN AMITAV GHOSH’S THE GLASS PALACE : A POSTCOLONIAL READING beserta perangkat yang diperlukan (bila ada). Dengan demikian saya memberikan kepada Perpustakaan Universitas Sanata Dharma hak untuk menyimpan, mengalihkan dalam bentuk media lain, mengelolanya dalam bentuk pangkalan data, mendistribusikan secara terbatas, dan mempublikasikannya di internet atau media lain untuk kepentingan akademis tanpa perlu meminta ijin kepada saya maupun memberikan royalti kepada saya selama tetap mencantumkan nama saya sebagai penulis.
Demikian pernyataan ini saya buat dengan sebenarnya.
Dibuat di Yogyakarta Pada tanggal 29 April 2015
Yang menyatakan,
Gabriel Gradi Mahendra
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‘Tis better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all - Lord Alfred Tennyson
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For my family and you
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I have talked to relatively not so many people, hundreds of them, about my undergraduate thesis. Not because of an unwillingness to learn from other people, but I just felt that I became so depressed and confusing when talking about this thesis. Therefore, here I would mention those few who have helped me to feel enough with my inferiority and gave me a spirit to keep struggling to finish this academic achievement.
First of all, there is God the Almighty who I talked to in prayers, who keep giving me miracles until this day. I also talked in scheduled meetings with Paulus
Sarwoto, Ph. D, my thesis advisor, and Elisa Dwi Wardani S.S., M.Hum. who told me the way when I felt lost in my mind. There are also others, whom I talked to in different occasions: Vania, Ari and Cuimbra who have become inspiring companions in my thinking process; Diyan who has introduced to me sweet acceptance; all my crews in Our Town play production who whispered to me a good hope by their friendships; Beny and Doni who shared with me passionate conversations and good hopes; Rm Andri who has supported me with gentle understanding.
I talked daily with my family: Ibuk, Brian, Gretto, Simbok. I seldom talked with them about my thesis, but they always enacted a sentence that says
‘Education will give us better living’. They mean a lot to me.
I also have met so many people until this day, impossible to name each of them. Yet, I believe they are interconnected to each other in a way that has built within me a broader understanding about life. ix PLAGIATPLAGIAT MERUPAKAN MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TIDAK TERPUJI TERPUJI
TABLE OF CONTENTS
TITLE PAGE ………………………………………………………….. ii APPROVAL PAGE …………………………………………………… iii ACCEPTANCE PAGE ……………………………………………….. iv LEMBAR PERNYATAAN PERSETUJUAN PUBLIKASI KARYA ILMIAH ……………………………………………………. v STATEMENT OF ORIGINALITY …………………………………. vi MOTTO PAGE ……………………………………………………….. vii DEDICATION PAGE ………………………………………………… viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ………………………………………….. ix TABLE OF CONTENTS …………………………………………….. x ABSTRACT …………………………………………………………… xii ABSTRAK …………………………………………………………………….. xiii
CHAPTER I: INTRODUCTION …………………………………… 1 A. Background of the Study ………………………………………. 1 B. Problem Formulation ………………………………………….. 4 C. Objectives of the Study ………………………………………… 4 D. Definition of Terms ……………………………………………. 4
CHAPTER II: REVIEW OF LITERATURE ……………………… 6 A. Review of Related Studies …………………………………….. 6 B. Review of Related Theories …………………………………… 9 1. Elements of Fiction ………………………………………… 9 a. Society in a Novel ……………………………………… 10 b. Characterization of Fictional Characters ……………… 12 2. Postcolonial Theory ……………………………………….. 13 a. Postcolonial Identity …………………………………… 13 b. Hybridity ………………………………………………. 14 c. Mimicry ………………………………………………… 17 d. False Consciousness …………………………………… 18 C. Review of Related Backgrounds ………………………………. 19 1. India Under British Control ……………………………….. 19 2. The Indian Army ………………………………………….. 27 D. Theoretical Framework ……………………………………….. 30
CHAPTER III: METHODOLOGY ………………………………... 31 A. Object of the Study …………………………………………… 31 B. Approach of the Study ……………………………………….. 31 C. Method of the Study …………………………………………. 33
CHAPTER IV: ANALYSIS ……………………………………….. 35 A. The Identity of India as a Manifestation of India Value System ………………………………………………... 35 x PLAGIATPLAGIAT MERUPAKAN MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TIDAK TERPUJI TERPUJI
1. The Caste System and Indian’s Social Behaviors …….. 37 2. The Centrality of Family and Village …………………. 41 3. National Awareness and the Growth of Westernized Indian Middle-Class …………………….. 45 B. Colonial Discourse in the British India Military System ... 49 1. The Mission of Liberation …………………………….. 51 2. The Ambivalent Representation of British Indian Army …………………………………………… 57 3. The Discourse of Mimicry ……………………………. 62 C. Arjun’s Re-Negotiation of Self …………………………… 68 1. Arjun’s Discovery of False Consciousness in British Colonialism …………………………………… 70 2. Arjun’s Re-Negotiation of Self ………………………. 73
CHAPTER V: CONCLUSION ………………………………… 78 BIBLIOGRAPHY ………………………………………………. 83
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ABSTRACT
Mahendra, Gabriel Gradi. The Identity Re-Negotiation of Indian Sepoys in Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace: A Postcolonial Reading. Yogyakarta: Department of English Letters, Faculty of Letters, Sanata Dharma University, 2015.
This study analyzes the process of identity re-negotiation found in Amitav Ghosh’s novel, The Glass Palace. The one who undergoes such process is named Arjun, an Indian man who decides to go soldiering in the British Indian Army. For this Army is an imperial institution, it implores also colonial discourses invented by the British. In this story, Arjun, who has formerly lived in Indian society with all its fatalism and social conceptions, finds freedom and access to modernity when he can be in the rank of Officers. However, at the end, he regrets about that fact, for by dwelling in the rank with other British Officers, he has accepted to be molded into ilusional identity. Thus, his struggle is then funneled to re-negotiate his identity, to re-collect his past and to find individual independence in a context where everything has been handled by British colonialism. The objectives of this study are divided into three problem formulations. The first is to find how Indian society, with its values and prescriptions, develops the conception of Indian identity. The second is to know how British India military system in the British Indian Army articulates colonial discourses. The third is to understand the process of Arjun’s identity re-negotiation that participates both Indian identity and ‘English’ values he learns throughout his carrier. I use postcolonial approach focusing on subject formation in postcolonial context. The theories that I use are Bhabha’s theories of hybridization, liminality, discourse of mimicry and colonial stereotypes. I also use some critiques to Bhabha’s theories which come from other theorists like Benita Parry and Stuart Hall. In the analysis I also use a theory of False Consciousness in scrutinizing the state of mind of the character being analyzed. My method is library research. I found the evidence from literary texts and connect each evidence to give me information about the case. The result of my study is an understanding that Arjun’s re-negotiation is genuine. His re-negotiation process is not a celebration of hybridized being; instead, he defines his identity by common anti-colonial conception of colonized/colonzer binarism. However, this essentialist concept of identity speaks more than a narcissistic desire for Self. It is a strategic mechanism to claim a power in a situation when everything has been conquered and shaped by British colonialist’s values.
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ABSTRAK
Mahendra, Gabriel Gradi. The Identity Re-Negotiation of Indian Sepoys in Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace: A Postcolonial Reading. Yogyakarta: Program Studi Sastra Inggris, Fakultas Sastra, Universitas Sanata Dharma, 2015.
Studi ini menganalisa proses re-negosiasi identitas di novel The Glass Palace. Karakter yang mengalami proses ini bernama Arjun, lelaki India yang memilih menjadi tentara di British Indian Army. Karena badan ketentaraan ini adalah institusi imperial, maka terdapat pula wacana kolonial yang dibuat oleh bangsa Inggris. Cerita ini kemudian menceritakan Arjun yang semula tinggal di masyarakat India bersama tatanan nilainya, justru menemukan kebebasan dan modernitas ketika dia bisa berada di kelas Officers. Akan tetapi, pada akhirnya Arjun menyesal bahwa dengan berada satu jabatan dengan tentara Inggris lainnya, dia telah setuju untuk dibentuk ke suatu identitas palsu. Dengan begitu, usahanya kemudian diarahkan untuk menegosiasi kembali identitasnya, menemukan kembali masa lalunya dan menemukan kemerdekaan pribadi di tengah situasi yang serba dibentuk oleh kolonialisme Inggris. Tujuan studi ini dibagi menjadi tiga rumusan masalah. Pertama, studi ini ingin menemukan bagaimana tatanan nilai di masyarakat India membentuk konsepsi identitas mereka. Yang kedua adalah untuk mengetahui bagaimana institusi ketentaraan British India Army mengartikulasi wacana kolonial. Rumusan yang ketiga adalah untuk mengerti proses re-negosiasi identitas Arjun yang melibatkan identitas India-nya dan nilai-nilai kolonial Inggris yang dia pelajari selama berkarir sebagai tentara. Saya memakai pendekatan pascakolonial yang berfokus pada pembentukan subyek dalam konteks pascakolonial. Teori-teori yang saya pakai adalah teori hibridisasi, liminalitas, wacana mimikri dan stereotip dari Bhabha. Saya juga memakai kritik atas teori Bhabha yang berasal dari Benita Parry dan Stuart Hall. Di dalam analisis, saya juga menggunakan teori ‘kesadaran palsu’ untuk membedah kondisi pikiran sang karakter. Metode yang saya pakai adalah studi pustaka. Saya menemukan bukti- bukti dari teks dan kemudian menghubungkan bukti tersebut demi memberikan saya informasi mengenai permasalahan yang sedang ditekuni. Hasil studi saya adalah pemahaman bahwa proses re-negosiasi identitas Arjun tidak bisa digeneralisasi dengan kebanyakan kasus. Prosesnya bukan merupakan perayaan atas sosok hibrid; justru, dia mendefinisikan identitasnya berdasarkan konsepsi penjajah/terjajah yang umum pada gerakan anti-kolonial. Konsep identitas yang nampak esensialis ini berkata lebih dari sekedar pandangan egosentris mengenai ke-Diri-an, tapi merupakan suatu strategi untuk sanggup mengklaim kekuatan di tengah situasi yang sepenuhnya telah dikuasai nilai-nilai dan wacana kolonialisme Inggris.
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CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
A. Background of the Study
Postcoloniality is the context of global understanding today. We cannot understand the presence of today’s world unless we accept the history of colonialism. At the aftermath of World War I, European countries have ruled over four-fifth of lands and seas of the world. Henceforward, it is not surprising today that almost all the tiny detail of our daily life is indicated with Western values and culture. However, we don’t have to be suspicious that the Enlightenment of
Western philosophy and culture should be reasoned as a bad thing. As the history of the past records it, Western ‘civilization’ has contributed in the development of better world, such as rules of government and justice, aesthetics in arts and literature. Yet, though highly certified for its contribution, opposition is still inevitable.
One fundamental cause is the development of homogeneous culture of man, and coincidentally, the oppression towards difference. Apartheid in Africa, seclusions of the Aborigines in Australia, and displacement in every colonized country are the evidence that colonial power has civilized the native people with exclusionary demand. Postcolonialism, then, was born when people started to realize it. It has its grain in the demand of justice for the deprived and oppressed.
The problem is even when colonial discourse is said to “[be] initiated as an academic sub-discipline within literary and cultural theory by Edward Said’s
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Orientalism in 1978” (Young: 2001:74), this field still needs further elaboration in public consciousness. We should confirm, despite the globalizing awareness of inevitable tainted history, many people are still in ceaseless effort to retain the original, pure identity. It is shown in the nationalistic fetishism even in local level: people of second-generation of migrants are still constituted as minorities in some countries. Hence, the aim of this study is to learn how the postcolonial identity should be defined, as this demand exists also in some fictional works.
The Glass Palace (2001) is the case in which postcolonial theory will be used as the means of analysis. The Glass Palace is a novel by Amitav Ghosh, an
Indian-born historian, journalist and writer who now lives in the U. S. The novel mainly tells about the struggle of a band of people in a turbulent transition. The displacement of Burmese Kinghood by British government, the course of World- wars, and migrations from one country to another seem to be the situational background in which the characters are bound. Postcolonial atmosphere permeates in this story because the story is conducted to tell the journey that exceeds the boundary of a nation, narrating an experience of cross-cultural interactions. .
As a sort of epic-historical fiction, this novel is full of factual verifiable data. The Glass Palace is also praised for its openness to indigenous culture. The beginning chapter of The Glass Palace, The chronicle of King Thebaw of Burma, who began the quarreling over teak plantation with British Government in 1885, is said to be a true event. However, the overall story is obviously a work of creative hands and mind of Amitav Ghosh, so we should treat carefully the factual events in the story.
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The most haunting, and also tragic, moment in The Glass Palace is perhaps the struggle of the Indian Sepoys, in which an Indian man named Arjun is among them. As one of the Indian Sepoys, men of arms who are native to India but working for British Indian Army, Arjun existence is somehow certified as only ‘tool’, without mind of his own; he “count[s] for nothing” (Ghosh, 2001:30).
In fact, Indian officers seldom realize it. They keep living in British military discourse and culture, unaware of the consequence. A reader would feel pity for
Arjun when he is bewildered in realizing that he becomes the ‘British stooge’ indeed, after long years of attempt to be a sahib or a foreigner-like citizen:
“…except for the colour of our skin, most people in India wouldn’t even recognise us as Indians” (Ghosh, 2001:439). This unmet expectation has aroused some questions: What would he do with his hybrid presence? How would he negotiate his identity? What aspects of himself would prevail in negotiating his identity?
This study focuses on the identity negotiation of Arjun. From the defeat he feels and his regret of a ‘tainted’ self-identity, Arjun shows the moment of agony set forth by the truth of his search for ‘englishness’. In Bhabha’s term this revelation shows how the pursuit of ‘Englishness’ is just “a dream of the deprived, the illusion of the powerless” (Bhabha, 2004: xi). Because realization is often too late to come, what we can do is to study the case and prevent it to spread more vastly. If the analysis of identity negotiation is on the right track, this study can be beneficial for re-imagining the orientation process of today’s postcolonial identity.
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B. Problem Formulation
This study will be based on answering three definite problems, which are:
1. How does the Indian value system preoccupy` Indian identity?
2. How does the British India military system rearticulate colonial
discourses?
3. How does Arjun re-negotiate his Indian rootedness, or Self, after
participating himself in the British Indian Army?
C. Objectives of the Study
This study has three objectives. Its first aim is to provide a thorough analysis on how the society of India conceives a presumption of Indian identity.
Secondly, this study aims to understand how British Indian military system, underlying all mechanism in the British India Army, rearticulates colonial discourses. Finally, the third objectives is to scrutinize how Arjun re-negotiates his ‘Indian identity’, or Self, after participating in the British Indian Army..
D. Definition of Terms
Sepoy, Persian name for ‘soldier’, was formerly designated for an Indian soldier. British sepoy, then, is a name referred to the native Indian who fight for and trained by British Army (Mason, 1974: 5). Sepoy specifically refers to the rank of Infantry Private in the British military system. It has been initiated into use in the forces of the British East India Company, which has established the first
British settlement of British dominion in the eighteenth-century. After India
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joined the British Commonwealth, sepoys have constituted the majority in British
Indian Army.
In this study, the phrase ‘identity re-negotiation’ is derived from an understanding from Homi Bhabha’s book The Location of Culture (1994). Instead of thinking that culture and difference is pre-given, Bhabha states that from the minority perspective, difference is an “on-going negotiation that seeks to authorize cultural hybridities that emerge in moments of historical transformation” (Bhabha, 2004: 2). So, we can infer that identity re-negotiation is a process of authorization of cultural hybridities signified by emerging difference, which is unique in postcolonial context. The prefix ‘re-‘ implies that Arjun has twice negotiated his identity: once in becoming like an ‘Englishman’, and twice when he manages to rediscover his Indian Self.
The term ‘postcolonial’ which is used in this study will relate to what John
Mcleod has defined in Beginning Postcolonialism (2000):
“...we will be thinking about postcolonialism not just in term of strict historical periodisation, but as referring to disparate forms of representation, reading practices and values. These can circulate across the barrier between colonial rule and national independence” (Mcleod, 2000:5).
Mcleod’s definition makes a certain framework that Arjun as the character in The
Glass Palace, though still lives under British domination and sovereignty, will be analyzed and criticized as an embodiment of postcolonial values.
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CHAPTER II
REVIEW OF LITERATURE
A. Review of Related Studies
The Glass Palace is notably a historical novel. It is stated By F. L. Aldama in Unraveling the Nation from Narration in Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace
(2005). That assumption thus justifies for the ‘fictionalizing’ of real historical occurrences found in the novel. On the other words, The Glass Palace moves beyond the demands of truth and the facts found in archival, autobiographical sources, “the author of the historical novel is free to imagine and invent the
‘facts’” (Aldama, 2005:7). It is evident in a third-person narrator that “relates a story in a helical fashion that simultaneously fictionalizes and makes real historical subject and event” (Aldama, 2005:7). The parcel of this consensus is that historical event can give cause for deep psychological probing of the character’s inferiority.
Also on the convention of narratorial basis, Aldama argues that The Glass
Palace’s story is shaped by Romance genre convention. The evidence is the love- story, between an Indian, Rajkumar, and a beautiful maid named Dolly, which has set them forth to a quest which leads to the rise and fall of three generations family in a great epic proportion. This argument tries to explain Pankay Mishra’s remarks on the novel that the characters are seldom described in round characteristics; so “the king and peasant alike in The Glass Palace lack a complex inner life” (Aldama, 2005:10).
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Postcoloniality becomes a subsequent issue when The Glass Palace takes the history of British sovereignty over India as its basis. Aldama described The
Glass Palace as a story “chock full of hyphenated [South Asian hybrid] characters who seek a sense of place and belonging – a home – within homelands torn apart by colonialist and imperialist invasions and civil wars” (Aldama, 2005:6). It is resonant with Tuomas Huttunen’s study (2003), stating that:
one of the central themes in The Glass Palace is the way colonial discourses (primarily the military discourse) have moulded the subaltern identity and resulted in severe alienation (Huttunen, 2003:65).
According to Huttunen, this self-alienation is most apparent in Arjun after he lives inside the British Indian Army. Huttunen confesses how colonial discourse and military system become so disabling and dooms Arjun, who has been inexplicably molded to be a war-machine under the imperialist discourse:
Arjun,.. can initially express himself only within the discourse of the military culture. As he finally realizes his condition as a puppet of this colonial discourse and manages to create some distance from it, he is left with nothing. He has nowhere to place his allegiances (Huttunen, 2003:65).
This finding shows how mimicry works unconsciously. The feeling just creeps up in him, and at the end military discourse has eaten up all his sense of self. He has been slowly alienated in his pleasure of being almost British. For me, it is enticing, and creating skeptical questioning, to know that Arjun ‘is left with nothing’. In what justification can we say that this mimic man is left with nothing, so “no language would help him build a new self with other affiliations”
(Huttunen, 2003:65)?
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Huttunen in The Ethics of Representation in the Fiction of Amitav Ghosh
(2003). Huttunen’s Ethics is influenced by Radhakhrisnan’s theory (2003) and
Levinas’ view of ontological problem of the Other (1969) which push Huttunen to discover the mission of ethical levelling in the novel. In it he tries to show how
Ghosh explicates indigenous tradition and values, Other’s culture, in order to make it intelligible. To achieve its aim, Huttunen focuses on Amitav Ghosh’s narrative strategy for an ethical representation of the colonized Others “across myriad discursive divides and asymmetries in various circumstances” (Huttunen,
2003:4). By ‘ethical representation’, Huttunen points out to Ghosh’s characters in the novels which stem “from varying social backgrounds” and come through as
“caricatures of the ideologies they represent” (Huttunen, 2003:62). So, the characters become the symbols of diverse ideologies existing in the novel.
Another study considering the ethical representation in Ghosh’s novels has been done by Shameem Black (2010). Black comments on Ghosh’s narrative style as an instance of ‘flattened aesthetics’ meant to make the linguistically diverse characters sound alike. This changing of style, as commented by Huttunen, markedly corresponds to the shift in the emphasis of concern “from the narrative appropriation of the target of representation to that of readerly openness”
(Huttunen, 2003:62). Thus, we can infer that Ghosh in The Glass Palace has managed to use English as its linguistic medium in order to ethically represent the marginalized culture within the body of English philosophical system .
Another unique quality of Ghosh’s narrative style is that his narration offers a sensitive and multifaceted view on contemporary problems. In his
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monograph of Ghosh’s works, John C. Hawley (2005) suggests that any critics working on Ghosh’s novels should acknowledge their generic heterogeneity and discursive inventiveness which enable Ghosh to attain such sensitivity to multifaceted colonial problems. By the same view, Radhakhrisnan examines the concept of imagination and space in Ghosh’s novels:
Space in Ghosh‘s narratives is manifested as a many-faceted problematic that brings together time, place (imaginary and real dimensions), location (whether geographical or discursive) and identity (both personal and national/communal/collective) (Radhakhrisnan, 2003: pp. 27-28).
These studies that I have reviewed give me an idea that any conceptual literary theories are challenged to examine the alterity found in The Glass Palace.
Most studies of The Glass Palace regards the evocation of colonialism from the colonised’s point of view, embodied by Ghosh as an Indian writer, as an ethical representation of Eastern culture, the Other of European ontology. Hence, when I found that some characters in The Glass Palace are narrated as having complex self-questioning which is caused by severe alienation done by British imperialists,
I then dedicate my own study to ethically represent Indian Self by examining his identity re-negotiation which is a struggle to counter colonial alienation. I imagined that by doing this, we can open up an opportunity for postcolonial societies in our present day, to have a chance to speak their thoughts.
B. Review of Related Theories
1. Elements of Fiction
Since this study focuses on the identity negotiation of a fictional character, some elements in fiction are regarded as the primary source of information. Those
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elements are theorized as the Society in a novel and Characterization of fictional characters.
a. Society in a Novel
In life as is in art, what is defined as society is not a concrete thing,
though exist. The emerging of society is a corollary of “patterned, formal
relationships among aspects of our experience" (Langland, 1984:5). Such
abstract thing probably leads to an uneasy consensus: it can be everything in
one’s milieu. The term society in a wide sense comprehends what we call
‘medium’: "not merely peoples and their classes but also their customs,
conventions, beliefs and values, their institutions – legal, religious, and
cultural – and their physical environment.” (Langland, 1984:6).
Society, as a medium, functions in an aesthetic framework. Elizabeth
Langland calls this function as "formal roles of society" (Langland, 1984:4).
The possible formal roles of society depend upon form and structure in the
novel. Form is the embodiment of “statement of values” (Langland, 1984: 8).
These values, which should be put outside ethical judgment, then affect the
development of a novel’s structure. The structure includes “the elements of a
work subject to deliberate manipulation within the text" (Langland, 1984: 8).
To speak of the formal role of society, then, we speak of “the ways in which
structural elements of a particular depiction are combined and evaluated to
make society itself an integral part of a novel's form” (Langland, 1984:9).
The basic scheme of novelistic form is "individual's encounter with the
society” (Langland, 1984: 7). In this scheme, the individual’s role is primary,
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society secondary. Explained by Maurice Shroder, the primary position of the
characters puts the novel's subject as an education “[for the characters] into the
realities of the material world and of human life in society" (Langland, 1984:
7). So, the society in a novel is placed as the context of the characters’ growth
and self-realization; society is not there for the sake of itself. Though its basic
role is a rather antagonistic one, society can acquire protagonist role but only
in thematic term: "The individual characters remain central to the novel's
movement, but their behavior reveals social rather than individual ethics"
(Langland, 1984: 7).
The particular formal role or function of society depends on
manipulation of three perspectives for judgment: that of “the protagonists, the
perspective created by the medium and an evaluative framework that mediates
between the other two" (Langland, 1984: 10). The medium to which a
character responds and in which a character exists defines a set of values
distinct from that of the character. Then, the narrator, interpreting the
character in the medium, provides the evaluative framework for the whole.
The adequacy of interpretation will depend on narrator's reliability: "If a
narrator is omniscient, then his perspective will be definitive in interpreting
the interaction of character with medium" (Langland, 1984: 9). In other words,
an omniscient third-person point of view provides the most reliable testimony,
since it knows whatever happen inside a character’s mind.
While the narratorial perspective becomes the evaluative framework,
society still has the prominent position in developing the plot of the story.
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Society and social convention function as “yardsticks to measure individual
moral growth and to make moral distinctions among individuals" (Langland,
1984: pp. 12-13). Society, despite its possibility for faults, can also be flexible
enough to accommodate the full realization of individual possibility. Society
can also be depicted as the destruction of human possibility. In some
sociological-naturalistic novels the conflict is weighed between individuals
and society in such a way that “the most admirable characters are most subject
to destruction since their best qualities leave them more vulnerable"
(Langland, 1984: 12). However, the twentieth century has also seen
experiments that altered the basic relationships among protagonists, society,
and narrator. The line between objective and subjective has blurred, “reality is
in doubt”, but “a premise is that some essential truth, however inaccessible,
remains” (Langland, 1984:14). In such genre, society functions in structure as
an inner imperative giving objective force in the characters' lives.
b. Characterization of Fictional Characters
One proposition that is offered by M. J. Murphy in Understanding
Unseen (1972) is that a writer has a limitless access to the thoughts of his
characters. Using the ‘eye-of-God’ method or any method that involves the
‘stream of consciousness’, “a writer can lay bare the innermost thoughts of the
characters” (Murphy, 1972:161). As the creator of a story, a writer should be
believed as the major omniscient subject of his creatures. It is to underline that
all the occurrences including events, dialogues and thoughts of any characters
are not dream-like, disjunct moments emerging from unconscious realm of
12 PLAGIATPLAGIAT MERUPAKAN MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TIDAK TERPUJI TERPUJI
mind, but it has originated from the author’s ‘stream of consciousness’, and
therefore believable and qualified.
Moreover, Murphy also names some means of characterization that
writers often use. The means of description include: Personal description (a
person’s appearances); character as seen by another (through the eye and
opinions of another); speech (through what the person says); past life (letting
the reader learn something about a person’s past life); conversation of others
(the things they say about him); reactions (how a person reacts to various
situations and events); direct comments, and thoughts (Murphy, 1972: 161-
171). Most writers seldom use these means individually, but blend them
skillfully, so that the reader “carried along by the stream of the narrative” is
often unaware of the means being used (Murphy, 1972: 173).
2. Postcolonial Theory
I focus my utilization of postcolonial theory for scrutinizing Arjun’s re- negotiation of Self. Therefore, main body of the theories are related to postcolonial identity and some theories of colonial discourses.
a. Postcolonial Identity
According to Bhabha in The Location of Culture (1994; Routledge ed.
2004), in the postcolonial text the problem of identity returns as “a persistent
questioning of the frame, the space of representation, where the image… is
confronted with its difference, its Other” (Bhabha, 2004:66). The need for
knowledge of such ‘frame’ then leads him to a concept of writing.
13 PLAGIATPLAGIAT MERUPAKAN MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TIDAK TERPUJI TERPUJI
Bhabha’s statement of writing identity, or the strategy of doubling,
tries to revise any understanding of identity whose basis is self-consciousness,
which in his terms becomes the ‘vertical dimension’ of identity, the dimension
of depth. This depth is a common language of identity to measure the Self,
hence as far as this consciousness can be extended backwards to any past
action or thought, “so far reaches the identity of that person” (Bhabha,
2004:69). The replacement of such depth with the strategy of doubling has
grown from Bhabha’s understanding of identification:
Each time the encounter with identity occurs at the point at which something exceeds the frame of the image, it eludes the eye, evacuates the self as site of identity and autonomy and… leaves a resistant trace, a stain of the subject. We are [confronted] with the discursive strategy of the moment of interrogation, a moment in which the demand for identification becomes, primarily, a response to other questions of signification and desire, culture and politics (Bhabha, 2004:70-71).
As a response to the Other the image’s representation is always spatially split
– “it makes present something that is absent – and [it] temporally deferred”
(Bhabha, 2004:73). From this point, Bhabha reassures that identity is never an
affirmation of a pre-given identity, but rather a product of on-going process of
negotiation and articulation of cultural hybridity.
b. Hybridity
Hybridity is the basic concept in Bhabha’s discourse of postcolonial
identity. Yet, discussing this terms will be incomplete without an
acknowledgement of his utilizing of the concept of the ‘beyond’. Following
philosopher Heidegger, going ‘beyond’ considers the boundary, of time or
space, as not at which something stops, but it is when “something begins its
14 PLAGIATPLAGIAT MERUPAKAN MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TIDAK TERPUJI TERPUJI
presencing” (Heidegger, 1971:152). The ‘beyond’ here is marked by the
liminal, that which in the border or threshold of culture or identity. It is in this
liminal space, the beyond, of settled identity or culture where interaction
happens. The liminal is, thus, central of creation in new identity meaning, or
as Bhabha suggests, the space becomes the sites of collaboration and
contestation in redefining postcolonial identity. Nevertheless, though the
‘beyond’ signifies spatial distance and opens up collaborative process, our
project to ‘exceed the barrier of boundary’ is unknowable without “a return to
the ‘present’ which, in the process of repetition, becomes disjunct and
displaced” (Bhabha, 2004:6). However displeasing this displacement might
become, Walter Benjamin describes this disjunct moment as the establishment
of the conceptual ‘present’ as the “time of the now” (quoted in Bhabha,
2004:6). To dwell in the ‘beyond’, then, is to
inhabit an intervening space, ... to be part of a revisionary time, a return to the present to redescribe our cultural contemporaneity; to reinscribe our human, historic commonality; to touch the future on its hither side (Bhabha, 2004:10).
Bhabha goes back to Fanon to suggest the importance of hybridity in
colonial condition. It is Fanon’s narrative of colonial condition which
illuminates the phenomenon of ‘psychic trauma’: a psychic damage when the
colonial subject realizes that he cannot attain the whiteness he was taught to
desire, or to shed the blackness he had learnt to devalue. Henceforward,
Bhabha states that the reality of colonial sphere is, however, a split presence:
It is not the Colonialist Self or the Colonised Other, but the disturbing distance in between that constitutes the figure of colonial otherness— the White man’s artifice inscribed on the Black man’s body. It is in 15 PLAGIATPLAGIAT MERUPAKAN MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TIDAK TERPUJI TERPUJI
relation to this impossible object that emerges the liminal problem of colonial identity and its vicissitudes (Bhabha, 2004:117).
This colonial otherness not just evokes the ambivalence of colonial subject,
but, as Bhabha suggests, is the effect of the colonial authority in circulating
the stereotype of inequalities between the Colonized and the Colonizer.
However, Bhabha thinks that colonial authority undermines itself by being
unable to communicate its authenticity. In his essay, “Signs Taken for
Wonders” (1985), Bhabha concludes that colonial authority is always
ambivalent: “[it] split[s] between its appearance as original and authoritative
and its articulation as repetition and difference” (Bhabha, 1985:150).
Unavoidably, colonial authority has established a gap in its discourse, and it is
in this gap that Bhabha puts his strategy of colonial resistance.
Engaging psychoanalytic language of subject formation has made
Bhabha’s hybridity generalizing specific problem of identity. Loomba states
“We cannot appreciate the specific nature of diverse hybridities if we do not
attend to the nuances of each of the cultures that come together or clash during
the colonial encounter” (Loomba, 2005:150-151). To resolve the complexity
of hybrid presence, Stuart Hall states that we should see the process of
identification as a “matter of ‘becoming’ as well as of ‘being’” (as quoted by
Loomba, 2005:152). Thus the colonised cannot simply turn back to find pre-
colonial collective identity, and to the past where something is waiting to be
found to strengthen the sense of nativism. Since our history has been ruptured
by colonialism, we should decouple it from its colonial deployment and to
appropriate it to designate identity as constructed process. 16 PLAGIATPLAGIAT MERUPAKAN MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TIDAK TERPUJI TERPUJI
Recent studies and theories on postcoloniality has developed attitude in
comparing hybridity with rootedness or nation. Kortenaar has reminded that
neither authenticity nor creolization is an inherently progressive or regressive
position (Kortenaar, 1995:40-41). Authenticity can be both enabling or
destroying, as it is evident in some characters in postcolonial fictions. The task
in scrutinizing postcolonial mixed identity, Loomba says, is then “to locate
and evaluate their ideological, political and emotional valencies, as well as
their intersections in the multiple histories of colonialism and postcoloniality”
(Loomba, 2005:153).
c. Mimicry
Colonial mimicry, as Bhabha suggests, is “the desire of a reformed,
recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not
quite” (Bhabha, 2004:122). Mimicry as the strategy, however, affects both the
colonial subjects and the legitimation of colonial authority.
The ambivalence of mimicry, almost the same but not quite, makes the
colonial subject and its authority share a somewhat ‘partial’ representation.
Partial here, as Bhabha explains, means ‘incomplete’ or ‘virtual’:
It is as if the very emergence of the ‘colonial’ is dependent for its representation upon some strategic limitation or prohibition within the authoritative discourse itself. The success of colonial appropriation depends on a proliferation of inappropriate objects that ensure its strategic failure, so that mimicry is at once resemblance and menace (Bhabha, 2004:123).
The menace of mimicry, Bhabha urges, is the double vision it sets
forth. Mimicry does not only discover the ambivalence of the colonial
discourse but also disrupts its authority. Its threat, Bhabha would add, 17 PLAGIATPLAGIAT MERUPAKAN MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TIDAK TERPUJI TERPUJI
comes from the prodigious and strategic production of conflictual, fantastic, discriminatory ‘identity effects’ in the play of a power that is elusive because it hides no essence, no ‘itself’ (Bhabha, 2004:128- 129).
In Bhabha’s comment, the desire to emerge as ‘authentic’ through mimicry is
treated as “the final irony of partial representation” (Bhabha, 2004:126).
However, this partial presence also exists in the colonial subject. The native
people who accept the invitation to be mobilised in the discourse of mimicry
efface “[the] effect of a flawed colonial mimesis, in which to be Anglicized is
emphatically not to be English” (Bhabha, 2004:125). Despite any invocation
of such characters, they put themselves in a discourse that refuses to be
representational.
d. Althusserian Ideological Interpellation
In his book Ideology (2003), David Hawkes argues that truth can
become “a rhetorical device by which the powerful maintain their dominance
(Hawkes, 2003:7). A multiple representation of reality is thus reduced to one
conception by undialectical mode of thought. When this ideology, or false
consciousness, is successfully maintained, it becomes canonical, firm and
obligatory to a people; and as Althusser puts it in For Marx (1969), “its own
problematic is not conscious of itself… unconscious of its ‘theoretical
presuppositions’” (Althusser, 1969:69).
Althusser himself insists on the inevitability or even utility of an
ideological perspective. Even in a least oppressive situation, as Steven B.
Smith adds it, in order to respond to the demands of the condition of existence
“men will continue to live their lives under the sway of illusion and myth” 18 PLAGIATPLAGIAT MERUPAKAN MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TIDAK TERPUJI TERPUJI
(Smith, 1984:134). It is made possible by the ‘practico-social’ function
ideology is called upon to perform. Althusser describes this function as
performing through a process of interpellating concrete individuals as “[a]
centre of initiatives, author of and responsible for its actions” (Althusser,
1971:169).
C. Review of Related Backgrounds
1. India Under British Control
In the imperialism course India has acquired notable story. Her distinction is primarily developed by her acquaintance as the colony of the British Empire, a bond of allegiances to the King or Queen of Great Britain. As a country in which the Hindu caste system was so rigid in arrangement, India had maintained and justified for centuries a kind of segregation which was believed to be mandated by the sacred texts of that religion. Yet, the British seamen and missionaries, as the pioneers of the voyage to the Outside World, inferred that such ancient culture and social system should be placed upon by Western civilization. Here grew three reasons for the establishment of British Empire:
the desire to increase trade, the search for new homes for a population overcrowded in the mother country, and the impulse to confer civilisation, Christianity and decent government upon peoples who have lacked those advantages (Williamson, 1954: 3).
Driven from those reasons, the Empire has made many policies and charters. As it was to the other colonies, such ideas have brought success and loss to India, beginning from the first trading post in Surat on the 16th century to its independence in 1947.
19 PLAGIATPLAGIAT MERUPAKAN MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TIDAK TERPUJI TERPUJI
The Great Britain got their control upon India since the establishment of the East India Company. The Company was a trading company from London and its improvement was rapid. Two centuries later the East India Company, granted full authority from the Crown of English for the trading posts in India, has gained power and prosperity:
The actual state of affairs [in 1760] was, therefore, that the governor and council at Calcutta really controlled the country, since they could make or unmake the Nawab, and that the latter was much more a tax-collector for the British than an independent sovereign. It was a situation of which unprincipled men could take advantage, and it must be confessed that the company’s servants behaved badly… Europeans in India did not yet realize that they were the strongest power in the country. They thought of themselves as a feeble handful in face of vast native forces. The idea that they could be morally responsible for the welfare of the native multitudes had never occurred to them. They had been sent out, not as government officials, but as the clerks and merchants of a trading concern. No one had told them that it was their duty to provide just government for the native population; their primary duty was to make profits for the company and to defend its property from attack (Williamson, 1954: 200-201).
In 1773, a Regulating Act became a fact which gave the King’s ministers control upon the trading company. This Act concerns about providing good government in India for “events had made it evident that a trading company was not a fit instrument to rule millions of people” (Williamson, 1954: 202). It must be said earlier that the home government had never desired any full responsibility in
India. But, in regard to any scandals and irresponsibilities existing in the
Company, and also a need to provide just government in India, William Pitt, as the Minister, passed into law the India’s Act wherein “the company remained in charge of its commercial affairs and kept the mass of the patronage, although the higher posts were to be filled by the crown” (Williamson, 1954: 207). So, from that time, the British Crown became the effective ruler in the British India.. 20 PLAGIATPLAGIAT MERUPAKAN MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TIDAK TERPUJI TERPUJI
As it has been said earlier, the British government was so reluctant to undertake power in India inasmuch as any attempt to extensify British rule in
India was said to be contrary to the declaration made by Pitt. It was sincerely meant, for any responsibility in India “seemed to entail more peril than profit”
(Williamson, 1954: 207). However, the British parliament, regarding themselves as “a peace-loving power, yet with a valuable trade to defend”, were the neighbors of warlike native power who were likely to challenge the strength of the British; ultimately, it became a choice “between conquering or being conquered, with the
Pax Britannica as the only permanent peace that India could hope to enjoy”
(Williamson, 1954: 207). As the events became history, British parliament, as sometimes stated by historians, have a justification for its rule in India:
In practice it was much more of a liberating than a conquest of the peoples themselves, for it introduced equal justice and personal freedom where all had been violence and oppression. The trembling peasant had been used to bow low before his ruler and salute him as ‘Protector of the poor’ (Williamson, 1954: 207).
Acting as to ‘liberate’ indigenous people and to introduce equal justice, British sovereign then expresses their ideas that the lives of Indians should be improved.
At this point, the British started to plant the seed of Western civilization within the Indian soil.
Governor-general, placed as the representative of British parliament, in
India then became the prime author of policies and law enforcer in that country.
Among many resolutions and policies, which concerned defence and trading, there were policies regarding culture and belief worth notion. In 1828-1835, Lord
William Bentinck became the governor-general and he has made illegal “the
21 PLAGIATPLAGIAT MERUPAKAN MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TIDAK TERPUJI TERPUJI
taking of life on pretext of religion (widow-burning and the murders by the thugs) and he introduced the European system of education in newly founded Indian colleges” (Williamson, 1954: 213). However, the well meant reform didn’t reach its aim and it was more visible when Dalhousie, a later official, became the chief official:
During Dalhousie’s rule India came more closely into contact with Western ideas than ever before. The new system of postage by means of adhesive stamps was a novelty displeasing to conservative minds, and still more so was the electric telegraph whose lines began to spread over the country. A beginning was also made with railway construction, although the great main lines of later days remained only in the stage of planning and discussion. European education and the efforts of missionaries had in some quarters a disturbing effect. These matters have often been described as contributing causes of the great rising that was to follow in 1857, and to a small extent they were, but their importance should not be exaggerated. The Mutiny was what its name implies, a revolt primarily of the soldiers, and their discontent was chiefly due to military reasons (Williamson, 1954: 217-218).
The Indian Mutiny happened in 1857 which was caused by military discontentment. It follows that in 1858 the parliament passed the Government in
India Act which “ended the authority of the East India Company and transferred all its functions to the crown” (Williamson, 1954: 220). Since that date, peace has prevailed throughout India and the government then devoted more revenues for military expenditure for “if it has been necessary to depose a reigning prince for misgovernment, his state has nevertheless reserved its privileged position.”
(Williamson, 1954: 353). Also in this era, there were much reformation on other aspects of medicine, transportation and education system. This reformation has produced an awareness for political body among the natives, which was supported by the home government:
22 PLAGIATPLAGIAT MERUPAKAN MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TIDAK TERPUJI TERPUJI
The first meeting of the Indian National Congress took place in 1885. It was a body of reformers who assembled to discuss their projects. Government (then under the viceroyalty of Lord Dufferin) regarded it as a healthy sign of interest in public affairs and was ready to make such concessions as were warranted by the state of the country. These did not include “swaraj”, or self-government, but they did extend to further consultation of Indian opinion. (Williamson, 1954: 359-360).
Though at the beginning there is no discussion of self-government, native remofmers have understood, after learning from English literature and living within Western sense of freedom and liberation, that they should assume more responsibility for their own nation.
The late of 19th century and towards the two world-wars India has undergone critical period. In that time, a most notable Viceroy, Lord Curzon, has made at least two great reforms that should be noted here. First was in defence: he reformed the Punjab province to the North West Frontier Province. This reform has been caused because the province is the neighbor of warring tribesmen who lived in the border between India and Afghanistan. Curzon also pursued “the plan of enlisting irregular forces from the tribes, placing them under British officers, and letting them fight their refractory brethren when necessary” (Williamson,
1954: 358). The second is in education: “In 1904 he passed a Universities Act to remedy the wasteful state of affairs by which multitudes of half-educated persons were turned loose upon society without any real competence for the jobs they aspired to fill” (Williamson, 1954: 359). There were those great reforms in India at the turnover of the century, while at the same time a resentment to white people were spreading in Asia and India seemed to shared that feeling.
23 PLAGIATPLAGIAT MERUPAKAN MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TIDAK TERPUJI TERPUJI
From Curzon’s time onwards there were “alternate periods of intense unrest and comparative quiescence” (Williamson, 1954: 359). The majority of people seemed to enjoy the state of the country, but the revolutionries consisting in the minority were active and intelligent. At this time of political unrest, British government was effaced by difficult condition:
The National Congress became the platform of impassioned orators who pictured themselves as the future rulers of an independent India… [British officials] had the difficult task of restraining agitation whilst admitting that the agitators, from their own point of view, were not men who ought to be regarded as criminals (Williamson, 1954: 360).
Shortly after Curzon resigned from his office, a new Liberal government came into power. Its Secretary for India, Lord Motley, then proposed a clause that it is the British government which is responsible to lead India for the self-government.
But he understood that any radical changes of sellf-government would resulted in chaos, so he thought that prolonged training was necessary to teach the inexperienced natives to work out a sound governmnet over “a population of three hundred millions amid all the difficulties that beset rulers of India” (Williamson,
1954: 360). That was the state of affairs before the first world war happened in
1914; there was growing sense of nationality, extrimists were noisy but few, but the majority were pleased by the existing government. At the home government in
London, there also growing a proposal and the beginning of the Commonwealth of Nations.
In the twentieth century a sense of imperial federation was growing much greater than before in the Parliament. It was started in 1885 by the Imperial
Conference which was held in friendly atmosphere and has made some notable
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policies. The problem was that it assumed a form of super-government which came into conflict with another feeling equally strong, “the nationalism of the dominions and the greater colonies” (Williamson, 1954: 371). India has also included in the allegiance to the British sovereign, and at the warring time in the
African Seven Years War and the First World War India gave a notable support:
Her vast population contained a majority of very poor and ignorant people with no conception of history or politics or the meaning of the issues at stake. Large sections of the Indian races were avowedly unmilitary and outside the scope of recruitment, the fighting peoples being in the minority. Yet from these latter a million men were sent into the field (Williamson, 1954: 379).
British statesmen has corrected their underestimation of India which was regarded as ‘young nation’ among the ‘old nations of ancient civilization of European’; they then tried to find a way in expressing their made-up mind. It is then became the cause of Treaty of Versailles which has established the League of Nations with India become ‘distinct national member’, “accepting the same rights and responsibilies as the other nations whether new or old” (Williamson, 1954: 381).
This League of Nations then became the British Commonwealth in 1919. The granting of the ‘same rights with other old nation’ doesn’t assume the self- government for India, and Indian political leaders still not ceased to be impatient for it.
The First World War was guessed to be short, and it made any discussions of India’s self-government to be postponed. Eventually, the Indian National
Congress, formerly representing many shades of opinion, has fallen to the power of extrimists “[who] suspected that the British were playing false” (Williamson,
1954: 395). It was at this time (1919-1920) when Mr. M. K. Gandhi became Head 25 PLAGIATPLAGIAT MERUPAKAN MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TIDAK TERPUJI TERPUJI
of the Congress and devoted himself to the ending of British rule. “He had a horror of cruelty and violence, and taught that British rule should be overthrown by moral resistance without the use of force”, nevertheless, his doctrines were the cause of violence and bloodsheds, “for he roused his followers to a pitch of excitement in which neither could they control themselves nor he them”
(Williamson, 1954: 398). Gandhi began his non-co-operation to British authority in the 1920’s that advised that Hindu people should not enroll in the position of
British government in India. This has hardened and consolidated the Congress but different condition and assumption was flowing in the majority of Indians:
Many were employed in the public services and in the army, and they put loyalty to the state above revolutionary doctrines. Many moderate politicians saw that an estremists’ revolution would end in chaos and disaster for all India. They refused to boycott a government which meant to do its duty to the country, and they took office in the new ministries and learned to be competent administrators. These Indian liberals were patriotic men no less than the Congress leaders, and they were serving India to greater purpose. In the ten years that followed the Act of 1919 they made solid progress in creating a body of Indian ruling men fit to take fuller responsibility (Williamson, 1954: 399).
Formerly non-violences were placed by violence and assassinations of officials, in which “many of them Indians who were devotedly serving their country”
(Williamson, 1954: 400). It become the sacrifices for the upcoming self- governance.
Full province self-government has been achieved by some central provinces. But it was a fact that some princes was in conflict with this term because they “were satisfied with their existing positions and had no wish to change it” (Williamson, 1954: 401). But the real difficulty was between the
Moslems and Hindus: 26 PLAGIATPLAGIAT MERUPAKAN MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TIDAK TERPUJI TERPUJI
The Moslems were incurably suspicious of an intended Hindu tyranny, and the proceedings of the Congress party gave ground for their fears. The British government could not resign control when the inevitable result would have been civil war (Williamson, 1954: 401-402).
Yet, finally, after the Second World War the British government has been ready for an all-Indian government after a long discussion mainly for the determination of the Moslems in having the separate state of Pakistan:
In 1946 the real decisions were taken. Mr. Attlee, the British Prime Minister, stated that the self-determination of India would be complete and that she would be free to leave the Commonwealth if she chose to do so… In England Parliament passed the Indian Independence Act, which created the two dominions of Pakistan and India and came into force on August 15, 1947 (Williamson, 1954: 426).
India chose to be a republic, having no allegiance to the King of Great Britain but still becoming the member of the Commonwealth, which becomes a new kind of relationship, “and was ratified… in 1949” (Williamson, 1954: 426).
2. The Indian Army
Just like in other dominions in the British Empire, the Indian Army in the nineteenth century was operated “alongside units of the British Army, funded by the British government in London” (Raugh, 2004:179). The history of The Indian
Army is often related to an occurrence in British Empire called the Indian Mutiny of 1857. At that incident, those who are recruited to the Indian Army were originated from Muslims in the Bengal Presidency and high caste Hindu mainly natives of Oudh. These troops took part in the Indian Mutiny, in order to reinstates the Mughal Emperor, Bahadur Shah II, partly as a result of insensitive treatement by their British officers. Accordingly, to overcome the chaos and to handle down
27 PLAGIATPLAGIAT MERUPAKAN MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TIDAK TERPUJI TERPUJI
the situation, in 1858 the British Crown took over direct rule of British India from the former authority.
During 1903-1947, Lord Kitchener, as the Commander-in-Chief, took his responsibility to reform the Indian Army. His reformation includes the institution of “higher level formations, eight army divisions, and brigaded Indian and British units” (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Indian_Army).
By the early 1900s, despite the less prestigious postings than the British’s, the pay of the Indian Army was significantly greater so that officers could live on their salaries. Moreover, vacancies of the Indian Army were much sought after and generally reserved for the higher placed officer-cadets graduating from the
Royal Military Academy Sandhurst.
The term ‘Indian Army’ itself refers to the force in which personnel was recruited locally and permanently based in India. As the sepoys have been recruited from local Indian in primarily Hindi areas, British officers were expected to learn to speak the Indian languages of their men. British officers commonly recruit the native soldier, or sepoy, from what the British called the
‘martial races’, including Sikhs, Awans, Gakhars, and other Punjabi Mussulmans.
After the Kitchener’s reforms ended in 1909, the Indian Army was organized along British lines. An Indian Army division consisted of three brigades, in which three battalions were of the Indian Army and one battalion of
British. The Indian battalions were “not segregated, with companies of different tribes, castes or religion.” (en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/British_Indian_Army).
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At the clash of World War II, the Indian Army has enlisted 205,000 men.
In supporting the British power, on the Second World War the Indian Army soldiers were raised up to 2,5 million all-volunteers men, becoming the largest in history. Additionally, with the establishment of two armoured divisions, an airborne division and also the providing of weapons, training and equipment the
Indian Army had considerable independence. In this much sought war, the
Germans and Japanese were successful in recruiting combat forces from Indian prisoners of war. Those Indians are prisoned men joining forces known as the
Tiger Legion and the Indian National Army (INA). At that war, about three-fifths of 55,000 Indians, taken as prisoners in Malaya and Singapore, then joined the
INA which fought Allied Forces in the Burma Campaign, and some others became guards at Japanese camps. However, some Indian Army personnel resisted to be recruited by Japan and remained prisoners and were taken to
Japanese-occupied areas of New Guinea as forced labor.
On the aftermath of World War II, as a result of the Partition of India in
1947,
[the] formations, units, assets, and indigenous personnel of the Indian Army were divided, with two thirds of the assets being retained by the Union of India, and one third going to the new Dominion of Pakistan (Lapping, 1985:75).
Most of the moslems in the Indian Army personnel then proceeded to join the
Pakistan Army. Due to to a shortage of experienced soldiers, some British officers remained in Pakistan until the early 1950s. Soon after the Partition, from 1947 to
1948, a war called The First Kashmir War began, causing a rivalry which has continued into the 21st century. 29 PLAGIATPLAGIAT MERUPAKAN MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TIDAK TERPUJI TERPUJI
D. Theoretical Framework
I use postcolonial approach in viewing the Identity re-negotiation of
Arjun, a colonised subject in The Glass Palace. This perspective is applied in order to examine the problem of subject formation undergone by a mimic man in the British Indian Army. Bhabha’s hybridity and liminality are used to examine
Arjun’s desire and resistance to the British imperialists, his former co-workers.
Since his struggle is mainly caused by the discourse of mimicry, I use Bhabha’s psychoanalytic reading of mimicry and the theory of false-consciousness to analyze the vicissitudes and nature of colonial strategy. Given account to
Loomba’s criticism on Bhabha’s generalized hybridity, I then take the point of
Indian Society as the context in which Arjun’s hybridity should be learnt. The information of this society is limited to begin in 1923, just as the year of Arjun’s birth, to post-World-War II in which India Nationalist Movement sets its rebellion against the Empire. The theory of characterization becomes the tools to point out the ‘characterization’ of Indian Society and British Indian Army. I also refer to some related studies upon The Glass Palace and use them to enrich the analysis of
Arjun’s hybridity.
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CHAPTER III
METHODOLOGY
A. Object of the Study
The Glass Palace (paperback ed. 2001) is a historical novel by Indian writer Amitav Ghosh. The title of the novel derives from the Glass Palace
Chronicle, which is an old Burmese historical work commissioned by King
Bagyidaw in 1829. This novel was published by HarperCollinsPublishers and now it has been translated and published in 25 different languages.
The Glass Palace has won several awards and prizes. This 522-pages novel was The Eurasian regional winner in the “Best Book” category of the 2001
Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. On the same year, it was the Winner of Grand
Prize for Fiction in Frankfurt eBook Award. Also in the year 2001, New York
Times included The Glass Palace as the Notable Books of 2001.
Nay Win Myint, a Burmese writer, has translated The Glass Palace into
Burmese and the novel was published as series in one of Burma’s leading literary magazines Shwe Amyutay. But, because the last part of the novel is an extended elegy to Aung San Suu Kyi, the Burmese Press Scrutiny Board asked for many cuts in that Burmese translation.
B. Approach of the Study
This study is aimed to be a postcolonial reading of a literary work. One significant idea of postcolonial criticism is “to further undermine the unversalist
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claims once made on behalf of literature by liberal humanist critics” (Barry,
2002:192). This idea of unseating liberal-humanist approach has born from the belief that in such universalism, “Eurocentric values, principles, norms and practices are being promoted” (Barry, 2002:193).
There are characteristics of postcolonial reading. Firstly, it refuses the perception for the non-European as exotic or immoral ‘Other’. This awareness is evoked also by a rejection on contemporary and modern nation, for it has been tainted with the colonial status. Secondly, it pays much attention on language.
Some postcolonial writers have concluded that “The colonisers’ language is permanently tainted, and that to write in it involves a crucial acquiescence in colonial structures” (Barry, 2002:195). The third characteristic is that it emphasises on identity as doubled, hybrid, or unstable. Fourthly, there is ‘cross- cultural’ interaction in the transition undergone by postcolonial writers. This interaction involves three phases:
... Adopt, when a writer tries to adpot the form of colonial literature; ... Adapt, since it is the phase where European style is adapted to a non- Western material; ... Adept, a phase in declaration of ‘cultural independence’ that the writer make a form of literature without any reference to Western norms (Barry, 2002:196).
This study uses poststructuralist view of postcolonial criticism. The most common theorists of this view is Homi K. Bhabha and Gayatri C. Spivak. Bhabha has written some books concerning to redefine the postcolonial identity, arguing that in the globalizing world there is an urgent need to regard someone’s identity as hybrid and always in flux of an on-going identification process. By theorizing
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and offering a radical redefinition of identity and culture, Bhabha has opened up a new ground for postcolonial study, mainly of postcolonial identity..
C. Method of the Study
This study is conducted as a library research. Mary W. George (2008) defines this method to involve “identifying and locating sources that provide factual information or personal/expert opinion on a research question; necessary component of every other research method at some point” (George, 2008:6).
Therefore the body of this study involves plenty of citations from experts in postcolonial study. The citations from their essays or books can be said as the trace of the development in the study of postcoloniality.
This study uses as a primary source a paperback edition of novel The Glas
Palace by Amitav Ghosh, published by HarperCollinPublishers in 2001. The secondary sources is a compilement from postcolonial books or essays. Among those books are The Location of Culture (1994) by Homi K. Bhabha and
Colonialism/Postcolonialism (2005) by Ania Loomba,
The steps used in conducting this study were: firstly, analyzing the research situation. In this step, I found out more information about postcolonialism and what studies have been done in this field. Secondly, beginning preliminary readings on some related studies and theories. I focused on the development of postcolonial study and on looking out for some recent issues that could be furthered over. Those bulk of readings were found in the University
Library or in the internet. Thirdly, framing the research questions. I quick evaluated the novel and chose certain topic from the story to be studied. From this
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phase I arranged consultation meetings with my thesis advisor. Fourthly,
Collecting the data. The data here taken from the secondary and primary sources, and involving some citations and notes-taking. In this phase, I also started to build my bibliography. Though the topic has been chosen, I kept an open mind in reading carefully the sources in order to know what can be best learnt from the case. I also kept guarding my schedule in order to make the study finished at the due date. Fifthly, finishing data collection and starting to analyze the data. At first,
I sorted and grouped the data into meaningful arrangement. Then I made an outline for the analysis in order to make the most best interpretation framework.
In this phase, I worked on the chapter of analysis and conclusion of this study.
Sixthly, I reviewed the overall position of my study and organized final meetings with my thesis advisors. At this phase I completed necessary administrative parts of this study. When all has been ready, I registered this study for the thesis defense.
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CHAPTER IV
ANALYSIS
The method of this chapter is contextual analysis. It emphasizes the interconnectedness between character and society. My assumption here to use that method is that the India society, as a medium according to Langland (1984), has provided certain set of values which conceives Indian identity. In The Glass
Palace (2001), it is in relation to such conceptualization that an Indian named
Arjun defines the core of his being. However, in the novel, I have identified the
British-Indian military sytem as embodying another value system which position
Arjun as the subject. Both systems have values that intervene and challenge each other. For India has a presumably older and rigid social prescriptions, a relatively
‘younger’ medium like the British-Indian military system, in fact, yields more effects. The problem is those effects are mostly disturbing and disabling. Arjun himself suffers from the identity effect which is self-alienation. He is, after all, caught in a tension between his India rootedness and English image he has learnt to desire. Therefore, the analysis in this chapter aims to provide the evidences of the re-negotiation process participating both systems, that leads to his decision of what values should prevail within and assume his identity.
A. The Identity of India as a Manifestation of India Value System
In The Glass Palace (2001), Arjun was born and lives in Calcutta, India, therefore, within India society. This fact places India value system as the medium
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in which Arjun conceptualizes his Self. Although later in his life he joins the
British Indian Army, and is exalted by his English image, he fails to ignore his
India rootedness. Thus, by also trying to answer the first problem formulation of this study, here I describes the India value system to justify its impact to his re- negotiation process.
I use the phrase ‘Identity of India’ as the title of this subchapter. This is to refer to the general conception among the Indians that spring from a set of values that regulate the society where they live in. Langland (1984:6) proposes that a set of values, as an abstract regulator of society, can consist of everything in one’s milieu. It can be the ethics, beliefs, religious system or any institution that operate a certain area. Since The Glass Palace does not draw equal details on every aspect or value, I also uses the description of values from some co-texts to help us understand India society. However, the values cannot be arranged in a neat division. We should understand that in the society, systems do not work separately; so, we will find that those values affect each other and their connections are beyond deliberate organization. That is why, rather than discussing values in their usual domains like the religious or the ethics systems, I mention particular social phenomena and then discuss what values lay behind them and why they become significant.
I hope this analysis will not be misjudged for essentialising Indian identity.
I do not try to convince my reader that what is provided below assume the exact
Indian identity; they are general conceptions that exist within the society. A character like Arjun can subjectively choose one value and leave the other. And
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from this definition also, his identity invests its chance for power and destruction.
This is such sense of Indian identity, or I like to say ‘rootedness’, that participates in Arjun and constitutes his re-negotiation of Self.
1. The Caste System and Indian’s Social Behaviors
Ghosh in The Glass Palace depicts India as a country with an intense arrangement of religious practices. He narrates that after knowing Arjun is accepted in the Indian Military Academy, Arjun’s father “immediately organised an expedition of thanksgiving to the temple at Kalighat” (Ghosh, 2001:257). Also another figure, a Hindu widow named Uma Dey, is regarded a legend by her nephew for she chooses to escape a usual lot of her kind in expense for her political movement. Those are only some details that indicate a strong existence of religious teaching and formalities in the society.
The rigidity of religious custom in India can be scrutinized by consulting
India’s history itself. According to Ronald Segal (1965:15), India was a Hindu society. Hinduism in India was not merely religious practice and principle, rather it was a way of life, the principles were the core of governing and social organization. In India, Hinduism was not limited to sacred rituals in a hidden temple or private murmurings; it existed everywhere, prescribing the multitudes of rights and obligations and thus conditioning the Indians in rigid social constraints.
At the heart of Hinduism was the doctrine of dharma or duty. It asked every Indian, as a requirement of the unity with God, an absolute acceptance of one’s condition and absolute obedience to the rules. From it derives the caste
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system, a hereditary system of social levels that rank the society into many divisions by different tasks and obligations. The life of Hindu within the caste system was managed by the avoidance of rituals and castes pollution, thus constituting inflexible rules of every aspect of life. They in fact embodied the rule of living in India, the living principle of social behavior.
Ghosh as an author has put indifference and resignation to be India’s social traits. And one may assume the caste system as the main cause. He narrates in The Glass Palace how an Indian soldiers are always amazed at seeing the prosperity of other colonies like Singapore or Malaya, and are struck by the revelation of India’s poverty:
…in india, they would have taken such poverty for granted; that the only reason they happened to notice it now was because of its juxtaposition with Malaya’s prosperous towns… as though the shock of travel had displaced an indifference that had been inculcated in them since their earliest childhood (Ghosh, 2001:346).
When Ghosh narrates that poverty is being ‘taken for granted’, he only says that the Indians have learnt since their childhood to be accustomed with poverty and hunger. It exhibits that the doctrine of dharma or natural duty of a person also regulates the society in The Glass Palace. A poor man from a low caste will remain poor until his death, not primarily because an inability to overcome the poverty, but because he thought he should be so. That this drained willingness to go away from the wretched slums has become an indifference is probably caused, as Ronal Segal explain it (see Segal, 1965:19), by the position of poverty as intercastes throughline. By the formal distribution of the caste rights and obligations, higher and lower castes complemented each other, making a
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social set of submissions and preserving poverty of the poor. This was the reason why poverty in India was said to be inescapable. It is also by such social condition that, in The Glass Palace, an Indian wants to be a soldier, a nationalist figure aspires for social reform.
While religious fatalism asks an Indian to deny himself, poverty is always burdensome for some others. As a public worker in Singapore, Saya John witnesses how Indian soldiers come to the hospital after fighting for the British.
“Most of them are... mainly peasants [from] small country villages” (Ghosh,
2001:29). Saya John remembers that those sepoys are still boys, and he asks them the reasons why they go out fighting when they should be planting on their fields.
The answer is obvious: “Money…” (Ghosh, 2001:30). However, it is only a small amount of money. As a Chinese descendant, Saya John cannot imagine how
Indians may allow themselves to be used to fight other people's wars with so little profit for themselves. Unreasonable choice it might seem. However, soldiering for the Indians is a breakthrough from the constraints of caste formalities and also poverty. A very little amount of money is perhaps ridiculous for those who have lived a prosperous living. But, little money and a better provision by the British can be much better than everlasting poverty and deprivation which are the profile of their India society. So, soldiering is never always a professional aspiration, rather it is a source of hope for the Indians to loosen the tight grip of poverty and caste formalities.
The depriving caste system and formalities at least culminates in a vision of social reform in The Glass Palace. Uma Dey confesses that in spite of the
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annihilations and oppressions brought about by the colonialists, many terrible religious constraints have long tortured Indian people even before the British invasion:
‘Look at the way women are treated even today, look at the caste system, untouchability, widow-burning… all these terrible, terrible things’… Uma retorded sharply: ‘Let me be the first to admit the horrors of our own society – as a woman I assure you that I am even more aware of them than you are… Mahatma Gandhi has always said that our struggle for independence cannot be separated from our struggle for reform’ (Ghosh, 2001:294).
As a woman, and a widow, Uma Dey is the key witness of the subaltern voice in conforming with the caste system and other religious practices. If then she proposes, in accordance with Gandian movement, a social reform, her statement should be understood in the light of her position in the society. Uma Dey, a widow, belongs to a higher caste, probably the Brahmin caste. If she manages to loosen her unity in the society by refusing the usual lot of Hindu widow and then really reforming the social framework, it will not give much damage for her. But on the other hand, so many people, especially of the lower castes, depend themselves on the unity in this caste system. Thus, the case of social reform signifies the imbalance demography in the society. The small number, liberal high-caste Indians like Uma Dey urge a social reform in India, while almost the whole India society believe in an absolute obedience to Hinduism as a social framework. However, since those liberated high-castes are the ruling Indians, in
The Glass Palace the awareness of India society as social yet personal humiliation becomes a national issue and social reform a vision.
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2. The Centrality of Family and Village
As I have said earlier, most people in India live in a bitter satisfaction, if not hopelessness, with the caste system. It is also an adherence to this system that organizes Indian villages (see Segal, 1965:17). As a manifestation of this organization, in The Glass Palace, as is often strongly agreed upon by Aldama
(2005), the family becomes the central axis of the story. It employs a proximity of family opinions and principles as the developer and source of Self image.
Reading The Glass Palace as postcolonial story, one will see the dim light of India national bondage. It is not unlikely if the context is India. The primary linkage among Indians are their association with their villages. Look at a statement from Hardy, an Indian soldier, about the previous generations of Indian sepoys who simply neglect their association with the colonizers: “The truth is yaar, they weren’t interested; they didn’t care; the only place that was real to them was their village” (Ghosh, 2001:349). Starting from Hardy’s statement I asks myself what produces the strength of village identity, why it becomes the only real circumstances to an Indian. My queries found that it is the proximity of order in a village that constitute the case.
A village was all that a conservative Indian belonged to. Villages in India were not cohesive, they are built with a pattern of internal divisions rather than a unity (Segal, 1965:17). Within it, the people lived in segmentation of major caste- groups. As the system directed the people to preserve caste cleanliness, they did every aspect of life with a conformity to their caste order. After all, a sense of belonging emanated from this submission to caste order, a context which was no
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larger than a village border. This is also the social system underlying the existence and proximity of family and village in The Glass Palace, though in some extent the characteristics of villages, especially in a city of Calcutta, are of a rather anomalous one.
Arjun’s family, in fact, characterizes that detachment from usual village system. His family has long been dwelling in Calcutta since the life of his grandfather, nearly in the beginning of 19th century. His family seems to be of the higher caste because they have a house which has a name, Lankasuka, and his grandfather is “an archeologist and a scholar” (Ghosh, 2001:184). In that time, it is impossible if people of lower caste can have a chance for higher education.
Then, to have an academic degree means to be educated in westernized way of thinking, thus building liberal perspective of life in one’s mind. And in this circumstances, Arjun’s grandfather develops his family’s character.
But first, we should also acknowledge that the family lives inside India society. It is important because the family still retains the patriarchy which reflects the usual role system in the society. In Arjun’s family, the role of his father is the breadwinner while his mother seems to have the larger role in the domestic part at home. However, Arjun’s mother still have limitation of her role, especially if it deals with tradition. Once when she knows that the mothers of two prospective grooms for Manju, Arjun’s twin-sister, has humiliated her daughter,
Arjun’s mother only “[has] been apologetic afterwards, but she’d made it clear that it wasn’t in her power to ensure that these incidents would not be repeated: this was a part of the process” (Ghosh, 2001:264). On the other hand, Arjun’s
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father has the major part within the family. He is the leader and decision maker of the family: “How could you do this, Arjun? And without saying anything to us?’… ‘[His relatives say], You wait till your father gets home” (Ghosh,
2001:257). The role distributions between men and women, son and daughter, husband and wife display the relation between the two gender. The male Indians have more free will, can make their own decision and gain prime position related to the other gender, while the female Indians live dependently to the men within the family, but they are respected to conduct the domestic life at home. However, it is also by the role of the father that liberal view is regenerated in the family.
The principle of a father must become the principle of the whole family.
Arjun’s grandfather never insists to his family on rigid customary observances to
Hindu. The success of developing liberal family then is shown when Uma Dey,
Arjun’s aunt, is proposed for marriage by a middle-class man from Bengali, named The Collector, who has educated himself in Cambridge. His marriage proposal to Uma Dey indicates the reputation of Arjun’s family as able to follow him to step out into the society and live in modern ways. At another extent,
Arjun’s father is no less liberal; he works as an accountant in a shipping company.
It indicates that liberal view has let him to work as a middle-class Indian, and forget his social code of Brahmin caste which forbids such profession. Moreover, when Arjun gets the announcement that he passes the examination to the British
Indian Academy, an imperial institution, Arjun’s father supports him wholeheartedly. Though his chief reason mainly lies on economical and social considerations, that working for the British will give his son much money and lift
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the social status of the family, Arjun’s father has shown that his liberalist view is found so decisive within the family.
If we ask ourselves what is so important in this centrality of family, the answer is that family becomes the epicentre of an Indian in making a decision for life. In this proposition also Arjun develops his consciousness. If I said earlier that village unites the people and makes itself as a source of pride, it does not happen in Indian cities. A city-life in Calcutta at least differentiate its subjects for it lacks those kind of social strata and orderings. As a headquarter of British government,
Calcutta does not rely its life from conservative Hindu system; as the result,
Indians live individually within the family and each of them may compete to each other. It finally produces progressive thinking and competitive spirit that characterize the city-life. A statement around the dining table in Arjun’s family at least can illustrate the spirit of progress of that city: “Is the boy going to make anything of himself?” (Ghosh, 2001:257). Imagine that this question will not exist in the slums of Hindu villages, when everyone lives peacefully in an absolute obedience to his dharma. It is probably in responding to that query of ‘making anything of himself’, that Arjun decides to sit for the examination of British
Indian Army. He neglects his Hindu lot and chooses freely to climb up the soldier ranks. After all, the centrality of family is the point of difference between a village and a liberal city. Thus, I think it is still logical to think of India with an assumption that one’s origin develops his way of thinking.
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3. National Awareness and the Growth of Westernized Indian Middle-Class
In The Glass Palace, India is portrayed as entering a new phase of nationalism. Historical figure and groups like Mahatma Gandhi and the India
National Army (INA) are utilized to strengthen Ghosh’s priority on the discovery of national identity. Ghosh himself seems intentionally created the anti-colonialist activist, Uma Dey, to magnify the importance of her compatriots in conceptualizing Indian identity. It seems essentialistic, but I think there are reasons in The Glass Palace that move those Indians in visioning such project.
The growth of national awareness seems to be the consequence of British colonialism itself. Perspectives are many, but in The Glass Palace the emergence of national awareness is funneled into a unified criticism toward the ruthlessness of British government. I concluded that in this tension among both powers, the focus is mainly on the military deployment, because it affects other aspect of
India’s government; from economics, “the army was small in number [but] it consumed more than was the case in countries that were castigated as
'militaristic'”, to politics: “it was the impoverished Indian peasant who paid both for the upkeep of the conquering army and for Britain's eastern campaigns”
(Ghosh, 2001:221). The condemnation may lead to a justification that India was being ruled with military, despotic practice by British authority. However, it was true that the colonizers have often used the army to control warring emperors, but such agenda was agreed upon by the Indians for it was projected to bear peace upon the country. What is problematized by some people, if not all, is the way
British Empire represents India. After some occurrences of displacement, India
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has come to realize that to be under the Satanic Empire, that is how Mahatma
Gandhi refers to the British, will not do any good for the country. Moreover, the urge is also a sign of culmination on the delayed government transfer which has boiled Indians’ anger and suspicion toward the British: “Many could also be heard to voice bitter condemnation of Britain’s declaration of war on their behalf, without any binding guarantees of eventual independence “(Ghosh: 2001,305).
That is it, the nationalists often problematize ambivalent representation of British
Government in India. They, the British, have been described as exhibiting barbaric actions in the development of the Empire, quite contrary to their ideals of civilization. However, I found that the nationalist activists are no less ambivalent in their project of national identity.
The anti-colonialist activist often neglect that India is a unity of regional varieties. An activist like Uma Dey may condemn the British to be responsible for the “racialism, rule through aggression and conquest” (Ghosh, 2001:294). She will propose the number of victims to strengthen the evidence that the Empire should come back to their home. However, it is strange that Uma Dey forgets conquests – from Aryans, Guptas, or Mughal emperors – have happened in India’s past and then produced regional differences around the country, not establishing national registers. An Indian who is aware of India’s history, must also know that racialism by invaders and religious impurement is not a new monopoly by British conquest. Moreover, for the totalitarian emperors are only muted and controlled by the British, I suppose Uma Dey is not aware that if the British depart from
India, the country will face the danger of being separated into smaller totalitarian
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conquerors. However, an anti-colonialist like Uma Dey has a ground to anticipate possible confrontation by some loyalists of British government. She is aware of the extent if British government is still ruling in India:
the conditions being created in their homeland were such as to ensure that their descendants would enter the new epoch as cripples, lacking the most fundamental means of survival; that they would truly become in the future what they had never been in the past, a burden upon the world… that a time was at hand, when even the fall of the Empire and the departure of their rulers would make little difference (Ghosh, 2001:222) [my emphasis].
Such statement is resonant with common perception among the nationalists. She seems to romanticize a bittersweet moment of India’s poverty and stagnation, which has distracted me to ask what India has been in the past. And the images that come from the novel appeared to be what Rajkumar, an Indian boy, says to himself: the image of the “ties [that] had been sundered by a century of conquest... no longer existed even as a memory” (Ghosh, 2001:47).
On its praxis, regional proximity often counters the vision of national identity. It concerns with Uma’s political movement in 1930, a time when the public interest is pointed toward regional issues rather than a scene that their fellow Indians are being posted in Burma and ordered by the Empire to kill
Burmese rebels: “The Indian public was consumed with the preoccupations of local politics and had little time to spare for Burma” (Ghosh, 2001:253). It is a clue that people in Calcutta, of Bengal province, are not attentive to the way imperialism molds Indian identity into a colonizer in Burma. Despite the Empire has power to control knowledge and information and that Bengali people seldom contribute to military career – “for generations the recruitment to Indian Army has
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been ruled by racial policy that eliminates almost every man from Bengali”
(Ghosh, 2001:257) – what appears in public mind strengthens my proposition that the majority of Indians still believe in a fragmentary, regional identity, rather than the India national identity. This fact finally reveals the characteristics of this project of national identity. It also gives a sign of the position in the society that is established by the Indian nationalists to bear power and social function.
Indian nationalists are constituted of Westernized Indians who gradually establish the middle-class of India, a class which does not exist in a traditional
Hindu caste system. In The Glass Palace, it is told that these people are centralized in Bengal, for it is the epicentre of cultural and literal growth in India.
As the people who dwell in the headquarter of British government in India –
Calcutta is the headquarter until 1911 – there are many people from this province who bestow a chance for western education. Thus, the growth of westernized
Indians increases simultaneously with liberalism. Those westernized Indians at the outset are projected by the British to fill the positions in public civil service, however, I found that the plan is contraproductive for the authority. Liberal
Indians have been no more indifferent when they are educated in Europe – Uma
Dey herself has a chance to visit European countries and the U.S. – and they have realized the problem with the government. From its history, as Ronald Segal explains it (Segal, 1965:92-96), when in 1911 the partition of Bengal was revoked, it produced a suspicion that the British tried to meet the demands of political advance by distractions of communalism. What is lacking in The Glass
Place, if I may point out, is that India’s discontentment to British authority was a
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religious matter. After the Mutiny of 1857, most Indians reacted that religion in its existing state could not withstand English encroachment, thus, managed to purify the religion to secure the heritage. If in the novel Ghosh focuses on the military utilization to strengthen the Empire, it is just a subsequent subject growing from this religious intention.
If we come back to Arjun and realize that within him there is only a weak sense of national identity, probably it is because the national identity has very little functionality. Thus, if an Indian questions his identity, it is not really surprising if it will only produce bewilderment, especially to those who live in higher castes or those who betray that Hinduism is the real means of unity in
India. We may suppose that this national awareness will grow hand in hand with the progress of the nationalist movement and its Congress, but I can say that in
The Glass Palace this project cannot tackle down the imbalance within the society; a vision of national movement still belongs to those small numbered, westernized middle class Indians, while the rest of the country remain loyal to the
British.
B. Colonial Discourse in the British-India Military System
This subchapter is dedicated to analyze colonial discourse which is rearticulated in the British Indian Army. The importance of colonial discourse in the Army is that it may develop identity hybridization, which to some soldiers, like Arjun in The Glass Palace, becomes the most bewildering experience. Not only does its form mandate direct imperial relation between the Army and the
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British Empire, but this military institution also becomes a place for the colonizer to productively exercise colonial discourses. As Bhabha suggests (2004:119), in a form of governmental institution colonial ideologies can collaborate more openly because there coexist progressive ‘Western’ systems that bestow justification for the colonial subjectification and hierarchization. Bhabha’s argument is resonant with the military experience in The Glass Palace where stereotypical knowledges go hand in hand with the discourse of modernity and freedom. What follows from this fact is I use mainly Bhabha’s theories of hybridization, stereotypes and discourse of mimicry to scrutinize the military phenomena in The Glass Palace. I deliberately chose his theories because in his Location of Culture (2004), he has established a thorough analysis on the core of colonial discourse, its ‘regime of truth’, and its rearticulation in other forms which from my limited readings does not exist in other postcolonial theories.
I identified three major phenomena in the British Indian Army. All of them explicate the characteristics of British colonialism in India. Moreover, the divisions are very advantageous because they can esablish holistic understanding on the major occurrences in the Army. I would also add that my aim for this subchapter is to answer my second problem formulation and to establish the link of Arjun’s re-negotiation process which indicates the participation of colonial discourses he has learnt to adopt. Without analysing colonial discourse in the
Army, I think it is impossible to understand Arjun’s identity development.
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1. The Mission of Liberation
The British Empire had long been attributed by historians as the most controversial government. The Empire kept ruling a colony while acting like the
Britain was the only power its colony could hope for freedom and liberty.
However, the colony dwellers at some point came to interpret that such appealing responsibility is only another disguise to advance the imperialism. In The Glass
Palace, Ghosh portrays this controversy of the Empire mainly by its military institution in India, the British Indian Army. Ghosh’s choice of military deployment is inevitable. Ghosh emphasizes the proximity of Indians in this case by saying that in British invasion to Burma in 1885, from ten thousand soldiers
“almost two-thirds [are Indian] sepoys” (Ghosh, 2001:26). From this fact, I then inferred on how deeply involved the Indian soldiers are in enforcing the British mission of liberation throughout the Empire; while at the same period, the Indians, institutionalised within the British Indian Army, become a means for the British
Empire to tighten her grip on India.
The method to propagate the British liberation mission varies. In India, it is the Indian soldiers who become the direct object of such propaganda. They become an easy target of surveillance for they are concentrated within the British
Indian Army. A firsthand observation of what happen in the Army is best inferred from a statement by Giani Amreek Singh, formerly working for British Empire but then deserting the British Indian Army:
We were told that we were freeing those people. That is what they said – that we were going to set those people free from their bad kings or their evil customs or some such thing. We believed it because they believed it too (Ghosh, 2001:224). 51 PLAGIATPLAGIAT MERUPAKAN MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TIDAK TERPUJI TERPUJI
. Arjun’s letter to his twin-sister, Manju, also describes how Indians are used by the
Empire. In his letter, Arjun tells about his amazement of how his battalion, the 1/1
Jats, has long been praised for its history:
During the Mutiny our troops stayed loyal – one of our companies was in the column that captured the old Emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar, at his hidy-hole at Humaun’s tomb. I noticed something that I bet would interest Dinu and Neel – the Royal was in Burma during General Prendegast’s advance on Mandalay and it fought so well that it came to be known as ‘Jarnail-sahib ki dyni haat ki paltan’ – the general’s right-hand battalion (Ghosh, 2001:262) [my emphasis].
The Empire’s mission to ‘liberate’ the peoples is not monopolised by the British.
Indians, as the soldiers, are invited to follow the British to bear peace and freedom in India and other colonies. Indian involvement to such enforcement at least has a consequence. A loyalty for Indian soldier inevitably forges into two ways. Most often an Indian sepoy cannot identify whose safety should come first: India from the coming colonizer or Britain from the warring and barbaric native emperors.
We can analyze such duality from Arjun’s letter. Notice how Arjun sees the honors. His awe shows his agreement with the imperial authority regarding the captures of Bahadur Shah Zafar and the loyalty of his battalion during the Mutiny in 1857. Within his awe, it is visible that he believes the British have done excellent works. However, his reverence to British expansion is confused by his reference to himself. In the same letter he would proudly announce that he is going to be “the first Indian officer in the 1/1 Jats… as though [he’s] representing the whole country” (Ghosh, 2001:262). One in thinking about his claim as an
‘Indian’ officer would wonder how he defines India, how he can think himself as representing the ‘whole country’. The confusion may spring from his ignorance 52 PLAGIATPLAGIAT MERUPAKAN MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TIDAK TERPUJI TERPUJI
that Bahadur Shah Zafar is the former native Emperor of India and that the rising of Indian Mutiny of 1857 is caused by military dissatisfaction toward the British.
Arjun’s statement, at least, points out to the tendency of Indian soldier to believe what the British believe. Offered by this fact, I thought of how the deprivation of one’s own nation is regarded acceptable for the native people, the deprived. If
Indian soldiers admit colonial displacement as a kind of success, there must be other factors that coexist with colonial ideology.
Justification may be produced by cultural boons of colonialism. Within the
Army, Indians learn about freedom and other ‘Western’ way of thinking.
Confined inside the wall of Army institution, Indian soldiers stimulate a kind of pride. They use metaphors in strengthening, and emphasizing, the fellowship they take with immense fuss. At some times they call themselves ‘brothers’ but at different times they extend the bond among themselves beyond mere kinship. It is when they see themselves as the First True Indians:
‘Look at us-‘ they would say, - ‘Punjabis, Marathas, Bengalis, Sikhs, Hindus, Muslims. Where else in India would you come across a group such as ours – where region and religion don’t matter – where we can all drink together and eat beef and pork and think nothing of it?’ (Ghosh, 2001:278) [my emphasis].
That narcissistic view of themselves makes Indian soldiers replicate the British.
Giani Amreek Singh witnesses how the British think that “in their eyes freedom exists wherever they rule” (Ghosh, 2001:224). Similarly, Indian soldiers argue a totalizing definition of freedom and civilized peoples. At least what differentiates
Indian soldiers is their emphasis on unity. They see the ‘True Indians’ are those
Indians who can get rid off the usual traditions, customs and castes which often
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encapsulate Indian society into a fixed class and castes order. Here, by the term
‘True Indians’, they regard common Indians, or said reversely as the ‘untrue’ or
‘false’ Indians, from a Western perspective which is alien and unrepresentative.
Obviously, the trace of freedom or modernity discourse where traditional Indians
‘can all drink together and eat beef and pork and think nothing of it’ has given the men a sense of liberation from old usages. However, that the Indian soldiers believe their ideas, either about their imperial masters or their nation root, as better than the conception of common Indians, it only reveals the pleasure in accepting colonial discourse.
Bhabha suggests that colonial discourse is made productive by ‘the regime of scopic drive’ (see Bhabha, 2004:109). It emphasizes the visibility or the look as the primal means of colonial identification. It is worked out by relating the appearance of colonial subject with the Imaginary, the Ideal ego, which in the context of British colonialism in The Glass Palace only make the British to appear superior than the Indians. A repertoire of this Ideal concept is visible in the monumentality of history, modernity, freedom or progressive development that assume ‘white’ representation. So, the attributes of ‘Royal’, signifying a direct relation with the British kinghood, or the ‘general’s-right-hand’ battalion, are pleasurable for the Indians for it matches them with the Ideal conception.
However, the ideal image is just a myth of identity and is often confronted by alienating reality. As it is pervasive in The Glass Palace, the British colonizers, in order to strenghten their ‘white’ identity, then produce stereotypes and infamoulsy represent the indigenous culture as if it is within their area of knowledge. Bhabha
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argues (2004:104) that the representation of Other is a strategy to control the people who seem to confront some established way of thinking. Therefore, in the
Army, we find a British officer thinking that Indian officers “would destroy the army; everyone would be at each other’s throats and the whole thing would fall apart” (Ghosh, 2001:283); concomitantly, the majority of Indian soldiers really believe in what the British are doing: “they believe that the British stand for freedom and equality” (Ghosh, 2001:284). And finally, the discourse gains its succes by making the distinction of the British and Indian officers as a ‘nature’ among the men:
Every institution has its own logic, and the British Indian army has always functioned on the understanding that there was to be a separation between Indians and Britishers. It was a straightforward system: they stayed apart, and obviously both sides felt that this was to their benefit. It’s no easy thing you know, to make men fight. The Britishers found a way of doing it, and they made it work (Ghosh, 2001:283-284).
From my analysis, the word ‘separation’ dims out the truth of ‘hierarchization’.
Ghosh narrates in his novel, that from the Army’s beginning the class of officers only belongs to the Englishmen and the Indian soldiers, as if obediently complicit with the caste rule of their borrowings, accept the strata and proudly maintain the position. This colonial subjectification powered by the mythical relationship with the Imaginary of ‘white’ identity at one time and another keeps flashing the wrapped intention of the British.
The myth of ‘white’ identity leaves some sites of ‘lack’ that should be masked by other stereotypes. At times, when the Indian soldiers feel that the equality and freedom they have been told about is “a carrot on a stick – something that’s dangled in front of their noses to keep them going, but always kept just out 55 PLAGIATPLAGIAT MERUPAKAN MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TIDAK TERPUJI TERPUJI
of reach” (Ghosh, 2001:284), the British officers produce other stereotypes or discourses that will ensure the necessity of British colonialism. Such as this:
I think we both know that our morale is not what it might be. But this is, of all times, the last in which anybody should waver in their loyalties. The reverses we’ve suffered are temporary – in a way they are a blessing in disguise… (Ghosh, 2001:417) [my emphasis].
It is true that within the Army, a strong sense of loyalty among the men exists. It is only estranged by the imperial status, the in-between position of British Indian
Army. There could be any blessings, but from whom? The Indians who help the colonizers to maintain their authority in India are not accepted by native Indians, on the other side, the Empire with its sterotypical knowledge of the Indians is incompatible for it problematizes “the signs of racial and cultural priority” of colonised subjects (Bhabha, 2004:125). This promise of blessings implies the aggressivity of colonial subjectification. At other times, the stereotype is rearticulated afresh by other consideration:
there’s only one reason why England holds on any more – and that is out of a sense of obligation... There’s a feeling that we can’t go under duress and we can’t leave a mess behind. And you know as well as I do that if we were to pack our bags now, then you chaps would be at each other’s throats in no time – even you and your friend Hardy, what with him being a Sikh and you a Hindu, a Punjabi and a Bengali’ (Ghosh, 2001:417).
Those stereotypes only explicate the urgency to maintain the myth, the historicity of ‘white’ identity. This need to keep the supremacy of the white British, however, is only aimed to justify the colonial subjectification.
The mission to liberate people using the British Indian Army, or specifically the Indians, at least only reflect the symbolic struggle of the colonizers in defining their identity. The Glass Palace witnesses the decline of the
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British Empire; and the subjectification of colonies and the peoples is an important strategy to fortify the Empire. By strengthening its authority in the colonies, and distributing the vision of modernity and freedom, the Empire is thus establishing a colonial consciousness that conforms any stereotypes which able to keep the assumption of the British as superior peoples,
2. The Ambivalent Representation of British Indian Army
The core problem of the British Indian Army is its ambivalent relationship with India as the colony of the British Empire. It implies the Empire/colony relationship in which the Army is somehow placed in-between the two powers.
The relationship forms every Indian soldier as implacable, homeless; his existence is blasted from assured identification as an Indian. To begin this point, I will discuss a scene in The Glass Palace that mentions an inscription at the Indian
Military Academy which deeply puzzles Hardy, Arjun’s Indian compatriot.
Despite its name as pointing to India, the Academy projects itself to produce imperial soldiers:
The safety, honour and welfare of your country come first, always and every time… Where is this country? The fact is that you and I don’t have a country… why was it that when we took our oath it wasn’t to a country but to the King Empreror – to defend the Empire? (Ghosh, 2001:330) [original italics].
In the British India military system, every Indian soldier takes his oath to the
British Kinghood. It projects the Indians to serve directly to the Empire, thus neglecting the presence of India as geographical location from which the people originate. That is the source of confusion for an Indian soldier: he is disturbed by uncertain nationality. Becoming a dweller of a colony urges any Indians to
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subordinate their service, trust and loyalty to the Empire so distant and untouchable, only represented by some Englishmen and alien rules. We can compare this phenomenon with military behaviors of Indian soldiers, or ksatriyas, hundreds of years before the coming of British invaders. According to Arjun, soldiers at that time “had fought out of religious belief, or because of allegiance to their tribes, or to defend their kings” (Ghosh, 2001:347). In my perspective, proximity and distance constitute the differences. It was the allegiance to certain actual surrounding tribes and religious belief that gave assurance to past Indian soldiers about what they were doing. The British Empire, on the other hand, is quite alien in culture and religious belief; moreover, the strangeness is doubled by geographical distance between India and Britain. Logically, if there is no stable statement of nationality, the mission of the Army shall be so ambivalent. The mission to liberate other nations should not be workable at all, for it is uncertain upon whom the soldiers should defend. However, the British India Army has strategically pushed every Indian to align himself in the business of the Empire and accept the uncertainty. The Army has been successful in establishing false- consciousness within the troops by deploying masked conception that give illusory perspective. Even to overcome the distractions, some soldiers like Arjun manage to look at soldiering as “a job, a profession, a career” (Ghosh, 2001:347) thus ignoring his ambivalent nationality and illogical colonial enterprise; and
Arjun submits himself wholeheartedly to the Empire. In colonial phase, such decision only directs the soldiers to be utilized freely by the ruling power.
Soldiering is no more including any conscious volition; Indian soldiers are only
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means in the hand of colonizers. In British India Army then, as Arjun believes it,
“there was none who was not a mercenary” (Ghosh, 2001:347).
I now want to shift this discussion to the attribute of ‘mercenary’ of Indian soldiers. Throughout the narrative of military deployment in The Glass Palace, majority of people regard the British India Army as robbing psychological awareness of the Indians. Mahatma Gandhi thinks that India would only benefit from having “men of conscience in the army. India needs soldiers who won't blindly obey their superiors” (Ghosh, 2001:258). Different figure, Saya John, also refers to the spirit of Indian soldiers as ‘evil’ whenever the soldiers fight from
“neither enmity nor anger,… without protest and without conscience” (Ghosh,
2001:30). But the most explicit attribution, and condemnation, is when Burmese people call the British India Army as “the army of slaves” (Ghosh, 2001:288).
This case, actually, only signifies psychological pathology.The guilty of this absentia should not be pointed only to the British colonizers; the job itself, soldiering, has a nature of ‘mindlessness’ in the form of order and loyalty. I agree with Hardy, who argues that there is “something very primitive” about what they do when someone wants to risk his life without knowing the reason, “it was as if my heart and my hand had no connection” (Ghosh, 2001:407). I imagine that this characteristic does not only exist in the British India Army; every Army does and works the same way. It is impossible to betray the order because Army works in obedience to it. However, I do not suppose to annihilate the problem and see it for granted. My curiosity is then pointed toward why it is so problematic in the context of India.
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Taking order to ‘kill without conviction’ becomes inevitable to every soldier; it is the nature of the job. The problem lies on the master of operation, the
British Empire. The British colonizers are called as ‘satanic’ for they order the
Indians to kill other people ‘that should be their friends’. The Empire failed to understand who the Indians are, and how they think about others. There is a cultural gap that makes India would not stand anymore British encroachment.
Therefore, I suppose that the resistance springs from different assumption of
‘Self’, or cultural identity, between Indians and the Britishers. It then manifested in conflicting interests and religious beliefs.
As a colony, India is positioned on the periphery of the Empire. This positioning seems deliberate when the result is India working as the ‘garrison’ of the Empire; the colony fortifies the central home from the coming attacks by providing Indians as the soldiers. Positioned like this, India will be the most damaged subject. The development on modern lives, freedom and progressive government, therefore, are only a strategy to validate subjectification and subjugation of India because it will give way for British colonialism to sap India’s resources, “the impoverished Indian peasant who paid both for the upkeep of the conquering army and for Britain's eastern campaigns (Ghosh, 2001:221). The peripheral position of India, and Indian soldiers, within the Empire also yields on the forgetting of the colony in the Empire’s business or victories. An Indian soldier, however good he is, will never be credited. They should be accustomed to know “how all those brave young soldiers were always Australian or Canadian or
British” (Ghosh, 2001:406). Here, the British Empire would assume its victory as
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the victory of the whole colonies. But this representation of wholeness does not work in British colonialism. Perhaps some examples can describe the case. The first example is a quarrel between Arjun as an Indian soldier with Burmese people:
‘We aren’t occupying the country,’ Arjun said, as lightly as he could. ‘We are here to defend you.’… ‘From whom are you defending us? From ourselves? From other Indians? It’s your masters from whom the country needs to be defended (Ghosh, 2001:288) [my emphasis].
Another scene is at the outset of World War II. During the war, the British India
Army is fragmented. Some soldiers remain in the Army, and the others are turning against British and then fight for Japanese. The perspective in welcoming the
Indian prisoners underlines the case:
To the British they were JIFs – Japanese Inspired Fifth Columnists. They were regarded as traitors – both to the Empire, and to the Indian army,.. The Indian public, however, saw the matter quite differently. To them… it was the defeated prisoners of the Indian National Army that they received as heroes – not the returning victors. (Ghosh, 2001:479).
The assumption of part as a whole is unattainable. I think it is because in the way to represent the colony, the Empire has deprived and displaced first the peoples and native authority. Moreover, the promise of progress and modernity is betrayed by unjust and perverse articulations of its praised civilization. So, it seems unavoidable when India then has a mechanism to differentiate herself with the
British when the Empire declares the war against Germany on the behalf of its colonies. In a mocking tone, most Indians believe that “Indians should refuse to participate in this war… a competition for supremacy among nations who believed it to be their shared destiny to enslave other peoples” (Ghosh, 2001:319).
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Thus, the tension of master/colony, central/periphery is maintained by both powers to produce significant stance in colonial relationship.
After all, when the centre and the colony are going restless, the soldiers in the British India Army become deeply disturbed. Indian soldiers are caught in- between the two. They are offered two responsibilities, that is, to work in the
Army and serve the Empire, or to defend India and its peoples from further deprivation from the colonizers. Therefore, the only decisive and discerning factor in the Army, of choosing which economy should prevail, is the only way an
Indian soldier personally justifies his vision in soldiering and his perspective of the Empire or its colonialism.
3. The Discourse of Mimicry
Besides its unsettling position, there is another colonial mechanism within the British India Army which is utilized to foster Western superiority. The discourse, called by Bhabha (2004:122) as ‘mimicry’, teaches every Indian soldier to have a desire on Englishness. This mechanism is found so significant in The
Glass Palace when Indians have entered the rank of Officers, thus working in the same level with their British counterparts. However, though giving some access to
Indian soldiers, this discourse will only disrupt Indian subjectivity, for without provision it will mold every person into delusional identity. On the other side, mimicry also progressively estranges the authenticity of Western, or English, identity of which the colonizers assert in appropriating colonial subjugation.
In the Army, the discourse of mimicry is firstly introduced through the medium of language and culture. For example, the first letter Arjun sends to his
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sibling while he has got into the Indian Military Academy has shown the change in his language. The narration is written as below:
How well he wrote - in proper sentences and paragraphs. When they were together they always spoke Bengali, but the letters were in English - an unfamiliar, idiomatic English, with words of slang that she didn't recognise and couldn't find in the dictionary (Ghosh, 2001:259).
Language is a means of communication; moreover, it is a signifier of culture and way of life. The use of English marks the shift Arjun made in order to appear more British, thus a possible sign of cultural betrayal. However, we may beware that the change is inevitable since Arjun is “the only Bengali in sight” (Ghosh,
2001:283); in order to get in tune with other soldiers from different races, he is forced to use a unifying language. The fact is such language does not exist in
India, since its regions have varieties of linguistic differences that resist fusing with each other. Therefore, the colonizer, with their economy to unite the Army, finds it beneficial to enforce the using of English. It is also to the advantages to the British when the use of English makes the reality then is represented within
English philosophical system. However, the colonizers do not stop at that point.
They thrust further in proposing English culture within the Army. To make successful the discourse of mimicry, they unethically deprive cultural differences, in which Indian culture, as Other, is then represented as inferior than the English.
What I mean with cultural deprivation is the norms on dining table represented in The Glass Palace. Foods become the means in articulating mimicry discourse. In Manju’s wedding, after a dinner, there is a conversation:
Every meal at an officers’ mess… was an adventure, a glorious infringement of taboos... Not was this just a matter of satisfying appetites: every mouthful had a meaning – each represented an advance towards the 63 PLAGIATPLAGIAT MERUPAKAN MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TIDAK TERPUJI TERPUJI
evolution of a new, more complete kind of Indian…They tested not just their manhood, but also their fitness to enter the class of officers. They had to prove, to themselves as well as to their superiors, that they were eligible to be rulers, to qualify as members of an elite: that they had vision enough to rise above the ties of their soil, to overcome the responses instilled in them by their upbringing (Ghosh, 2001:278-279) [my emphasis].
Food regulation in the Officers’ rank informs the differentiating process within the Army. By only serving English foods, it implies that whoever has come up to the Officers’ rank must be British or adopt British identity. This presumption, besides giving a sign of stereotyped elite-ness of the British, informs the necessity for an Indian to accept mimicry as a demand of the rank. The productivity of the discourse is made visible by the rank’s historicity; Englishness is instilled to be the nature of the rank which requires qualification of certain taste distinct to the
Indian’s. What it yields then is a ‘cultural miscegenation’, which from T. B.
Macaulay’s vision is to form a class of “Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes” (Macaulay, 1958:49). In such regulation, however, we can suspect why
Officers’ rank demands an adaptive desire for English culture and what is imagined by the British when they manage to do so.
I suppose that this mimicry in the Officers’ rank, the requirement to resemble the British, is a strategy to reform Indians, the inappropriate Others.
Such colonial mimicry, as is theorized by Bhabha, is “the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite” (Bhabha, 2004:122). To depart for an object that is ‘almost the same, but not quite’ the Army, to mention only particular examples depicted in The Glass
Palace, uses language and food choice. These articulations of the discourse should firstly direct every Indian to conform the existing definition of superiority 64 PLAGIATPLAGIAT MERUPAKAN MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TIDAK TERPUJI TERPUJI
that secure the identification to colonizer’s Self; and the discourse is after all productive in theorizing the elite-ness of Englishmen. It is proven when the Indian soldiers identify the destination of their being within the Army as a losing free from their Indian upbringing: “’Look at us! ... we’re the first modern Indians… we’re the first Indians who’re not weighed down by the past’” (Ghosh, 2001:
279). What more is a unique pride of the Indians for being related to the colonizers. The reasons are analyzed by Dinu, Arjun’s nephew, who states his analysis below:
In the army… Indian officers were a band of the elect; they lived in a proximity with Westerners that was all but unknown to their compatriots. They shared the same quarters, ate the same food, did the same works: in this their situation was unlike that of any of the Empire’s other subjects (Ghosh, 2001:279).
Such is an interpretation of British identity. In my analysis, the focus here is not to the colonial relation of colonizer/colonized, but the ‘superiority’, elite-ness of
British identity. Every Indian soldier does not assume his position in the Army as a colonizer toward India, but he portrays himself as a civilized, ‘true’ and different from his compatriots. Thus, it shows that the identification wihin the Army is built upon the object relation with the orientalist imagery which underestimates or devalues Eastern knowledges and cultures and previleging Western Self.
Obviously, I can say this phenomenon as a cultural bragging of which the assumed quality is, however, delusional, mythical.
Mimicry leads an Indian soldier to have a desire for delusional myth of identity; and I think this is the core problem. This delusion of identity-image is not realized when the Indians are still roaming within the exact boundaries of the
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Army, when discourse distributions are assured by homogenous society.
Estrangement, however, happens outside the usual limit of the Army; it is when the Indians are mobilized outside the disciplined colonial society of India and granted chances to meet people of other British colonies. An Indian soldier who has ever claimed a superior image – ‘Look at us!... we’re the first modern Indians’
– will be shocked when out of uniform they were often mistaken for “coolies… At other times – and this was worse still – they would find themselves being looked upon with something akin to pity” (Ghosh, 2001:346). Moreover, their assumed
‘Englishness’ – manners, tastes, language – cannot keep them from social seclusion when it comes to racial signs: “No Asiatics allowed” (Ghosh,
2001:345). Therefore, those estrangements of identification disclose their ambivalent image which recalls Macaulay’s object of colonial mimicry – ‘Indian in blood and skin, but British in manner and tastes’ – a creature of hybrid quality.
However, mimicry in the Army diiferentiates its strategy; it does not reflect the partial development as is theorized by Bhabha (2004:pp.123-124). If the mimicry in general context of India still negotiates civilization with social castes or indigenous culture, that is producing “low mimetic literary effect” of civilizing idealism that can prevent revolutionary acts (Bhabha, 2004:122), within the Officers’ rank, civilization and other discourses to make the Indians resemble the British seem at first total and complete. It is as if an Indian is able to represent himself as an Englishman, outside and beyond Indian culture that has shaped his past. However, the difference between Indian and British is irreconcilable from the visibility of skin color. ‘Asiatics’, for example, should signify certain complex
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definition of physical characteristics often recognized from visual perception – distributed through film, printed materials, direct appointment. As this visibility becomes a primal identification, an Anglicized Indian is ceased to be identified as an Englishman. However, I do not understand why it is easier for a colonized individual to identify his Anglicized compatriots as ‘English’, as is shown by
Kumar, Arjun’s batman: “[Arjun is] the one who’s the most English” (Ghosh,
2001:297), while the colonizers seem to cling to the epidermal schema in colonial identification. After all, it only makes way to Bhabha’s emphasis that the mimic men can only “repeats rather than re-presents (Bhabha, 2004:125). It is why
Arjun, in his bewilderment before going over to the Japs in World War II, asks
Hardy how then to place all values that they have learnt:
Just look at us, Hardy… What are we? We’ve learnt to dance the tango and we know how to eat roast beef with a knife and fork. The truth is that except for the colour of our skin, most people in India wouldn’t even recognise us as Indians. When we joined up we didn’t have India on our minds: we wanted to be sahibs [foreigners] and that’s what we’ve become. Do you think we can undo all of that just by putting up a new flag?’ (Ghosh, 2001:439) [my emphasis].
By asking ‘What are we?’ there is a sign that the image – dancing and eating mannerism – signifies nothing. It never settles down identification. Nevertheless, though the Indian Officers are never recognized as ‘English’ despite their learning and Western civilized being, this resemblance to the British counterparts after all erradicates the assumed superiority of English Self; it agrees Bhabha’s conception that “mimicry is at once resemblance and menace” (Bhabha, 2004:123).
The discourse of mimicry besides giving a sense of traumatic homelessness to an Indian Officer also disrupts colonial discourse in general. I
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argue that it is caused by the destruction of oriental stereotypes of the East as childish, barbaric or stupid. This phase signifies that a stereotyped Indian can raise to the rank of Officers and thus is equivalent to the British Officers. Positioned equal with the British, Indian Officers begin to assume the rights for just proportion within the Army:
You see we all do the same work, eat the same food and so on. But the chaps who’re trained in England get paid a lot more than we do… chaps like Hardy care very much about these things. To them this is not just a job (Ghosh, 2001:284).
Indian officers of the battalion also realize the perverse articulation of civilization brought about by the colonizers. They refers further for a refusal to participate in
World War II: “that this was a competition for supremacy among nations who believed it to be their shared destiny to enslave other peoples – England, France,
Germany” (Ghosh, 2001:319). The observer now becomes the observed; and observing the British pervert civilization, war and subjugation, the Indians then realize how the colonizers are no more civilized then them. It is in this realization that some Indian Officers then turn their gaze from the British, and after being psychically and physically subjugated, they start to recollect bits of their past history as Indian that can ease them with a sense of Self.
C. Arjun’s Re-Negotiation of Self
Identities are points of temporary attachment to the subject positions which discursive practices construct for us (see Hall, 2000:19); hence this section aims to scrutinize Arjun’s changing sense of Self which is triggerred by the discursivity of Army mobilisation. Such mobilisation is a mechanism in the Army to distribute
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the service of the soldiers in many areas throughout the Empire. In The Glass
Palace, the battle-seasoned Indian soldiers are distributed to fight for “the Allies, in North Africa, in Southern Europe” (Ghosh, 2001:479). All of them are ordered to act in the name of the Empire, in other words, to fortify the Empire. Whereas this military distribution is not of Indian cause, some Indian soldiers are personally disturbed afterwards. They pose enigmatic queries on colonial representation, and moreover, Indians’ political and individual independence.
These disturbances also affect Arjun’s mind, however, though he at many occasions has often been so restless in stating his awareness on colonial regime of truth (Ghosh, 2001:284,431).
Arjun’s bewilderment is somewhat more intense, for he has come to the rank of Officers, where life signifies bold Englishness. Here he accepts the invitation to betray his Indian root by adopting British identity. Thus, as the matter intensifies and resistance to colonial depersonalization becomes inevitable,
Arjun’s enigmatic questioning of Self, or his frame of representation, shapes the most important phase in his life under British colonialism. It is pitiful to know when the realization, of being deformed in the hand of the British, come into his mind, Arjun is left with nothing than a sense of a tainted self: “It is a huge, indelible stain which has tainted all of us” (Ghosh, 2001:518). The crisis of this phase is, after all, his decision to re-negotiate the Self by first re-orienting his servitude and loyalty, and then choosing his genuine act “to inflict his defeat”
(Ghosh, 2001:519).
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I have organized this section into sequential analysis. To begin analyzing
Arjun’s Self re-negotiation phase, I firstly acknowledges his discovery of false consciousness within the British India Army and also British colonialism. Then, to finish this part of analysis that aims to answer my third problem formulation, I lays out Arjun’s decision-making in re-negotiating his identity.
1. Arjun’s Discovery of False Consciousness in British Colonialism
Army mobilization takes place in different posts; each post at least gives a freshly strange revelation. Each post shows the crack or ‘lack’ in British colonial discourse. Tyersall Park Camp has been shaken by internal friction between the
British and Indian soldiers; Indian Officers in Singapore are being misjudged as coolies without their military uniforms; prosperous Malayan colony ponders
Indian soldiers’ mind that they, after all, belong to the extreme poverty of India.
Anything seems detotalized, relative: “They seemed to lose themselves in a labyrinth of hidden meanings” (Ghosh, 2001:345). Hence, these slips of colonial discourses slowly disrupt colonial intricacy. At this point, Arjun as one of the
Indian soldiers believes that there is something untrue or tricky in British colonialism.
Arjun feels that there is a ‘power’ in British colonialism that is responsible for his ignorance to India and the deformation of indigenous people. However, the complex situation prolongs Arjun’s discovery to identify such ‘power’. Thoughts like: “never experienced the slightest doubt about his personal sovereignty; never imagined himself to be dealing with anything other than the full range of human choice” (Ghosh, 2001:431), actually only refers to the mist of his mind.
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Such colonial false consciousness is produced by mechanism implied in stereotypes and other colonial discourses. Bhabha himself argues that psychological co-optation in a discourse like mimicry is productive since the instances of metonymy as signifiers of colonial difference – dependent Indians, the difference between being Anglicised and being English – “are the non- repressive productions of contradictory and multiple belief” (Bhabha, 2004:129).
Thus, we then understand why it takes a long time for Arjun to realize that, for instance, soldiering for Indians “is more than just a job” (Ghosh, 2001:407).
Colonial stereotypes also strengthen Arjun’s threshold of consciousness which filters out undesired thoughts and objects. By implicitly involve himself in such mechanism, he builds dual consciousness in his mind: half to his own mind and the rest to a representation of power that directs him from outside. And it is the duality that disconnects his mind/body relation: he does the direction, the killing not from his own volition – a mercenary. This state of mind nevertheless marks the nature of civilization brought about by the British master.
Consulting ‘On Liberty’ (J. S. Mill, 1972), Bhabha argues that British colonialism upon India, and British Indian Army in particular, should be viewed as a kind of despotism (Bhabha, 2004:137). Home government in ruling India claimed a monocausal point of view to prepare the Indians for high civilization.
Therefore, by affirming despotic authority – primordial fixity, monocausality, social death – Bhabha assures that British colonialists never “inspire a colony of individuals… [it] can only instill the spirit of servitude” (Bhabha, 1994:137). In
The Glass Palace alike, so on in the servitude to his master, seasoned with
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immense truthfulness, Arjun can only reproduce masked-up reality without adequate amount of volition. Thus, if such fatalism is compared to despotic
British colonialism, it only leads to the existence of the regime of fear within colonial subjectification.
Arjun discovers this regime of fear when he is lost in his search for an authentic being. Thus, his case implies that colonial terror brings a deep existential turbulence to colonial subjects. Fear has taken a major part that shapes
Arjun’s mind; it is a “terror that made you remould yourself… - to the point where you lost your awareness of the fear that had formed you” (Ghosh,
2001:430). The result of this real yet ‘virtual’ terror are colonial differences, being called by Bhabha as “the metonymy of presence” (Bhabha, 2004:128). By the productive terror in British colonialism, Indian sepoys appear to become war machines, garrisons of the Empire. By fear also, Indian soldiers become ‘slaves’ on the hand of British masters, “every action constantly policed, watched, supervised” (Ghosh, 2001:522). Such attribution might not merely a mockery for
Arjun’s being. It reveals his paradoxical life, for he often argues that he is aware of British subjugation, but nonetheless gives himself to be deformed by British colonizers (see Ghosh, 2001:430-431). What follows from such revelation is the disturbance of colonial status quo. And Arjun himself starts to undermine colonial agenda.
The British Empire fails to appear lawful and authorial in India.
Particularly to Arjun as an Indian Officer, the slips in articulating representational strategy throughout the Army mobilization confounds any authenticity produced
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by colonial discourses. What is found inside the discourse is only myth that produces false consciousness:
it would follow that he had never acted of his own volition; never had a moment of true self-consciousness. Everything he had ever assumed about himself was a lie, an illusion. And if this were so, how was he to find himself now? (Ghosh, 2001:431) [my emphasis].
If the Self he longs to desire is only a delusion, so does other British claims for authenticity and cultural superiority. It makes any pursuit of ‘hybridized’ being,
Anglicized Indian, is no longer tenable since Arjun thinks it only shares the delusions of British identity. Arjun wants to find a moment of ‘true self- consciousness’ which can bring him a sense of authentic Self. And after all, under these circumstances, he is eager to find his hope in Indian society.
2. Arjun’s Re-Negotiation of Self
Arjun feels and admits how India as geopolitical and cultural entity claims something in him. He reflects on the ‘grey’ area of British Indian Army under
Empire/colony relationship and he concludes that some privileges he acquired are delusional, keeping him from realizing who he really is. However, it is unique that his search for Self is also a quest for consciousness that can describe his being:
These were things he did not know how to say, in any language. There was something awkward, unmanly even, about wanting to know what was inside one’s head… It was strangely crippling to think that he did not possess the simplest tools of self-consciousness – had no window through which to know that he possessed a within (Ghosh, 2001:428).
If Arjun tries to find a kind of ‘true consciousness’, it is not surprising that he does a strategic nativism, searching certainty in India collective consciousness.
Hence, it is why Arjun refuses a promise of blessing from the Empire or “a very long memory when it comes to questions of allegiance and loyalty” (Ghosh, 73 PLAGIATPLAGIAT MERUPAKAN MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TIDAK TERPUJI TERPUJI
2001:417). After Arjun realizes the lie in adopting ‘English’ identity, he turns away from such promise of blessing and memory and manages to fight back the
Empire he had served. His re-negotiation of Self, then, is inseparable from his strategic colonial resistance.
Some cultural theorists have long debated on anti-colonial struggle resonant to Arjun’s decision. In the novel, Arjun says that he would never be able
“to slough off the taint of his past and the cynicism that came with it, the nihilism” (Ghosh, 2001:522) [my emphasis]; by saying that, he implies that there is a ‘pure’ being. Such essentiialism is undermined by Robert Young for the native alternatives may simply represent “the narcissistic desire to find an other that will reflect western assumptions of selfhood” (as stated by Parry, 2004: 42).
However, Stuart Hall in ‘Cultural Identity and Diaspora’ (1990) warns us not to underestimate the power and hope from such resistance. Colonial struggles in embracing a shared history to define a collective ‘one true self’ should not be neglected because from it entails the powerful act of “imaginative rediscovery”
(Hall, 1990:224); yet he also ensures that indivisible collectivity is not possible, the past is no longer the same. And inferred from this, Arjun may truly find power from his past, but the rediscovery should also decouple India’s past with the history of colonialism. The fact of colonialism in India cannot be neglected in an active performance of anti-colonial struggle.
If we move further, we may ask the reasons that make Arjun resists colonialism by first establishing the binary opposition of colonizer/colonized. His strategic resistance is perhaps produced by his helplessness to the imminent result
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of British colonialism: “…what are the chances that we’ll be able to do anything for ourselves?” (Ghosh, 2001:438). Here is stated that Arjun’s focus in his re- negotiation of self is on individual psychological sovereignty of a formerly colonised subject. He implies that the British has stolen his chances to react from his own consciousness. Thus, whereas British colonialism has worked on strategic closures upon some play of power and difference, Arjun manages to opens up a space for him that can make him appear authentic and free.
Arjun re-negotiates his identity; he decides what values should prevail within him. As an Anglicized Indian, he should firstly face the effect of mimicry.
After a long process to derogate Indian rootedness, he should face the fact that the core of his being is something that he has managed to forget. Such turning-back produces what Bhabha (2004:13) says as an ‘unhomely’ moment. Arjun says,
“The realities of a few minutes before now seemed like an incomprehensible dream… “ (Ghosh, 2001:440). He puts aside the illusional certainty produced by his ‘English’ image. In decolonizing himself, he becomes a new Indian; however, some values he gathers from British colonialism has become part of himself so that it still affects his decision.
Arjun’s genuine act of anti-colonial struggle is also determined by his personal development in the British Indian Army. Arjun is a soldier. A principle that nothing is possible “without loyalty, without faith” (Ghosh, 2001:441) is instilled within him since his life in the Indian Military Academy. And it is a evident that then throughout his career in British-Indian Army, he has become
“someone trained to destroy” (Ghosh, 2001:440-441). Therefore, his language is a
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language of fighting, victory and defeat. We can compare Arjun’s decision with his compatriot, Uma, who also implores anti-imperialist perspective. In the heart of anti-imperialist like Uma, patriotism is a regulatory force. But, she thinks that
Indians are facing such a giant empire that popular resurrection and resistance inspired by legend and myth “stood no chance of prevailing against a force such as the Empire – so skilful and ruthless in its deployment of its overwhelming power” (Ghosh, 2001:254). On the other hand, Arjun goes otherwise. He fights for India; he tries to destroy the Empire through weapons and bullets.
Nonetheless, his action has reason as follows:
‘But, Arjun… You must see that you don’t have a hope…’ At this, Arjun laughed. ‘Did we ever have a hope? We rebelled against an Empire that has shaped everything in our lives; coloured everything in the world as we know it. It is a huge, indelible stain which has tainted all of us. We cannot destroy it without destroying ourselves. And that, I suppose, is where I am…’ (Ghosh, 2001:519) [my emphasis].
Arjun shows his helplessness in confronting the British Empire. In his search of authentic Self, he finds that the Empire and its discourse has robbed everything including his consciousness. He is mummified into colonial status.
At this point, some critique to the discourse of hybridity comes to the surface. Bhabha can suggests that one in this identity confusion should
“manipulate his representation” (Bhabha, 1994:93) and put aside any fixity of national rootedness. But I render it unfavorable to Arjun, regarding the nature of loyalty that has become the culture of Arjun’s personhood. Yet, Arjun does not post a merely simplistic colonizer/colonized binarism. The play of image, as it is often proposed by the discourse of hybridity, is impossible for Arjun. He should decide a power to put his loyalty; there should be no duality. 76 PLAGIATPLAGIAT MERUPAKAN MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TIDAK TERPUJI TERPUJI
Moreover, his statement that ‘we cannot destroy it without destroying ourselves’ is just another way to claim his own power. At the end of his life,
Arjun kills himself inside the Malayan jungle with hopeless but vengeful anger.
This kind of suicide needs a gentle consideration. In a situation where everything has been shaped by the English hand, Arjun tries to find a hole or space when he can claim his individual freedom, which is his free-will. By this idea, he hopes to inflict his final defeat. After all, it underscores an urgency of personal freedom in
Arjun’s re-negotiation of Self.
Finally, Arjun re-negotiation process is genuine. The Self he claims is not a celebration of hybridity he chases over in the Academy and as an Indian Officer in the Army. There is no pride anymore of being a reformed Other because it is only a lie for his being. That is why Arjun’s re-negotiation process cannot be generalized in usual analysis of hybridization. However, Arjun should be judged in acknowledgment of his thought and regret that it is impossible to claim a true
‘Indian’ Self when the culture has been mummified into colonial predication.
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CHAPTER V
CONCLUSION
Identity re-negotiation is a particular, genuine phenomenon that happens in a specific condition of society. As it is found in The Glass Palace, we will find that even in a given society, a character may have distinct ways from others in responding to the surroundings. Thus, regarding the primary role of medium, to conclude Arjun’s subject formation, I would like to turn back to my analysis of
Indian society first.
India in British colonialism is full of contradiction; there are many obstacles to define a unified Self. The Glass Palace witnesses that when caste orders are utilized as a bonding device to everyone living in villages, liberal life in a city like Calcutta may destroy such social strata and orders. As people in
Calcutta have intense appointments with British people, they start seeing the religious teachings and prescriptions as a kind of fatalism. Hence, if Indian villagers live for peace and social harmony, though may be regarded indifferent for their wretched condition, city people in Calcutta search for individual freedom and achievement; and therefore, they are more centralized in family rather in a bigger social group.
Even before the coming of British traders, and then colonizers, India’s history has been filled by a series of wars and conquests. I would suggest that
India is a constitutionalized regional linguistic varieties and social differences. It results in a weak national identity. The unifying device in India is indeed
Hinduism, rather than national identity. Although one may say that the social
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stagnation it produces is inagreeable, caste orders are what majority of people feel comfortable with. National identity on the other hand, is a conception by minority group of westernized middle-class Indians. A national figure like Uma Dey may say that India needs social reform and also propagate that India is distinct from satanic British Empire; yet, as a middle-class woman living in a liberal Calcutta, she is probably not aware of social unity dependent on such social codes. While this westernized middle-class Indians constitute only small number of people in
Indian society, their proposal of national identity remains their own. It means that
Indian identity is inexistant in majority of Indians’ mind.
Arjun, however, lives in Calcutta and he is surrounded by that liberal view. Arjun’s life is centralized in his family; he does not display a strong dependence and obedience to usual caste system. Moreover, since Calcutta is a home for anti-colonial movement, and his aunt, Uma Dey, is one of the national figure, Arjun has already known the issue of Indian identity. He knows, however, about regional separatism in India, yet his consciousness believes that the irreconcilable differences can be unified in a single identity.
Such consciousness also pushes Arjun to re-negotiate his identity after holding his career and adopting ‘English’ identity in the British Indian Army. This process is actually preceded by a kind of regret. In such imperial institution, Arjun finds that the articulation of colonial discourses or Western values, that he has learnt to desire, have become an irony.
In my analysis, I found that British colonialism is Englishmen’s attempt to secure their conception of Self. Therefore, their efforts to develop an Empire and
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liberate people in colonies are only an agonistic process to retain Western
Imaginary, a mythical image that after a long history has become ancient and canonical. This praised image is instilled in the British Indian Army; thus, Indian soldiers are affected by the regime of scopic desire. Assisted by the existence of colonial stereotypes and British Officers, Indian soldiers are trained to build an object relation with such mythical image; they desire, and are demanded more intensely by the Officers’ rank, to adopt ‘English’ identity. This adoption is proliferated by confined military life, where surveillance – by discourse of mimicry, colonial stereotypes – become more productive. It, thereofer, establishes a false consciousness in the Army.
Arjun, as one of Indian Officer, cannot understand his action; he cannot discern whether his action is by his own volition or by other’s. In other words, his personal freedom is questionable. By colonial stereotypes, masking any ‘lack’ found in theorizing the ‘English’ image, the British colonizers have not only possessed weapons and governmental power, they have shape colonial reality to conform the image. In Arjun’s case, it is made worse by the discourse of mimicry, when, after all, to be Anglicized is different to be ‘English’. When Arjun is settled in the Officers’ rank, he has been accepted that becoming a shahib, a foreigner, is possible. The discourse of mimicry has given false consciousness that an Indian, or let’s say an indigenous person, can represent himself outside his own native culture. The fact is British Empire problematizes racial and color sign of colonized subjects. As long as Arjun visually looks like an Indian, however
‘English’ he might show in his manner and taste, he is still an Indian. Therefore,
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in colonial context, and even in Officers’ rank in the British Indian Army where representation seems possible, Arjun as a mimic man can only imitate the British.
After all, realizing that an image he has learn to adopt is just an illusion, Arjun redirects his focus to find his authentic being.
Arjun’s identity re-negotiation process is a search for his personal sovereign. He longs to have a chance to speak his own thought; he wants to combat British colonialism that has shaped everything in his milieu. In addition, he is also a soldier, and as the culture in soldiering forbides duality, he decides not to celebrate his hybrid presence. Any traces of English value has been assumed as a taint for his being. His re-negotiation, then, includes strategic nativism which is common to anti-colonial movement. He establishes colonized/colonizer binarism and believes that there is a ‘pure’ identity. Despite any possible moralistic or philosophical judgement, Arjun’s decision for this strategy seems inevitable.
Different with Uma Dey who still believes, and is surrounded by other nationalists, that Britsh colonialism can be turned down by non-violence movement, Arjun is so hopeless that Indian people will have a hope when their consciousness has been shaped by British colonialism. He, and probably every
Indian, has been defeated. There is no space for true ‘Indian’ identity.
That is why then, in the end, he kills himself. His suicide in the Malayan jungle might be viewed as his claim for his free-will under the deprivation of colonialism. Killing himself actually is an action to inflict his final defeat.
However, again, his action also is not free from colonial discourse, because his action is actually a response to British domination.
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Yet, to end this paper, I can only say that postcolonial society is still open for analysis. It is mainly because, from Arjun’s identity re-negotiation, specific historicity plays an important role in shaping personhood. Hybridization is not the only answer. What we can do in further studies are to ethically and emphatically listen to the struggle of a formerly colonized people, and justify their efforts in accordance to their specific background.
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