TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. INTRODUCTION ...... 2
2. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK ...... 4
2.1 COLONIALISM, IMPERIALISM, POSTCOLONIALISM AND POST-COLONIALISM ...... 5 2.1.1 Colonialism and Imperialism ...... 6 2.1.2 Postcolonialism or Post-Colonialism? ...... 11
2.2 WHAT CAN BE STUDIED AS POSTCOLONIAL AND HOW? ...... 16 2.2.1 Some Important Formulations and Concepts ...... 23
2.3 A SHORT CONCLUSION ...... 40
3. FROM THE RAJ TO ‘THE LAND OF THE PURE’: A VERY BRIEF HISTORICAL OUTLINE ...... 41
3.1 THE EAST INDIA COMPANY – THE PIONEER OF THE BRITISH CONQUEST OF INDIA ... 42
3.2 DIRECT BRITISH RULE AND ITS CHALLENGES ...... 44
3.3 INDEPENDENCE AND PARTITION ...... 54
3.4 A SHORT NOTE ON THE NAME OF PAKISTAN ...... 57
4. CRICKET AS A BODY CULTURE AND ITS PLACE WITHIN THE STUDY OF POSTCOLONIALISM ...... 57
4.1 SPORT AND POSTCOLONIALISM ...... 58
4.2 CRICKET AND BRITISH IMPERIALISM/COLONIALISM IN THE INDIAN SUBCONTINENT 65
4.3 CRICKET AND COLONIAL RESISTANCE IN INDIA ...... 75
4.4 CRICKET, PARTITION AND NATIONALISM ...... 77
4.5 CRICKET, POSTCOLONIALISM AND THE RELATIONS BETWEEN PAKISTAN AND ITS
FORMER METROPOLIS ...... 81 4.5.1 Cricket and the Pakistani Other ...... 88
5. CONCLUSION ...... 93
6. APPENDIX ...... 96
7. ENGLISH RÉSUMÉ ...... 99
8. CZECH RÉSUMÉ ...... 100
9. WORKS CITED AND CONSULTED ...... 101 1. Introduction
Though already quite an experienced traveller, since I visited Pakistan in the summer of 2008, I have held the country in the greatest affection compared to other destinations of my journeys. Both the country‟s outstanding scenic beauty and its colourful society have got under my skin. As I had the chance to spend almost two months there I was able to catch various glimpses of Pakistani cultural and social life at various places throughout the country, mainly in its northern part. What caught my attention very soon after my arrival were some of the aspects of Pakistani social and cultural life that are obviously connected with the country‟s colonial past. It has become my ambition to link my own personal experience and love for the country and its people with the field of my study and some of the knowledge I have gained in the course of it, thus learning more about the region and the way its contemporary face and condition have been shaped. The connection is by all means not difficult to find thanks to
Pakistan‟s colonial past. And hence the idea has emerged to explore the cultural impact of the colonial legacy on the society of today‟s Pakistan in my MA thesis. As soon as I started to think more seriously about the thesis it became clear that the topic must be narrowed down as the field of post(-)colonial studies encompasses a huge variety of issues.
Pakistan emerged as an independent state in 1947. After almost ninety years under the
British rule, the country has been established as a state of Muslims from the Indian subcontinent, separating itself from today‟s India, Bangladesh and Burma as a result of the
Partition of India.
The British rule over the Indian subcontinent officially started in 1858 when Queen
Victoria, the then representative of the British Crown, took over the administration of the subcontinent from the British East India Company. The British influence over the area, however, began to spread already more than two hundred years earlier through the trading
2 activities of the East India Company. A treaty of friendship was negotiated between an
English diplomat Sir Thomas Roe and the Mughal emperor Jahangir in 1615.
After such a long time, it is natural that the British have left an indelible imprint on the society of the Indian subcontinent and hence also on the society of contemporary Pakistan whose cultural identities are rooted in the common history of the subcontinent. The English language, which is used as one of the official languages in Pakistan and the lingua franca of the country‟s elite and most government departments, is only the most obvious example.
There are many other aspects of Pakistani cultural life that bear traces of the former British presence in the area. As I started to consider dealing with the importance and effects of some of these aspects on the Pakistani society and culture in my thesis, I tried to spot the feature that would be present throughout various social strata and important for the majority of the people. And I have found out that it is not just the English language that has had an immense effect on so many people of the region; even more people seemed to have appropriated yet another thing the British had brought – the game of cricket, for which the vast majority of
Pakistanis have developed a real passion.
In the field of post(-)colonial studies, not much has been written on the issue of sport as compared to other topics that have been dealt with. Nevertheless, sport can certainly be considered an undeniable part of different cultures; it can be seen as a form of expression and representation in the same way other features of human activities and behaviour that come under the heading of culture are. This fact has also contributed to my decision to choose cricket as one of the cardinal aspects of Pakistani culture and to demonstrate its importance as a colonial legacy. In my thesis, I will examine the nature of the link between
(post-)colonialism and issues like sport with particular focus on cricket which may seem marginal at first glance but which, as I will try to justify, can have its special significance. My aim is to explore the various reasons for and implications of the appropriation of cricket by
3 the Pakistanis and the role the game has gained in contemporary Pakistan‟s society. I will elaborate on the importance of cricket in Pakistan as a feature of the complex (post-)colonial discourse. Hence I will draw attention to the perceptions and development of the game in the
Indian subcontinent, to the cultural impact that the game has made on the society, and the ways in which the game works as a tool of redefining the mutual relationship of the former colony with its metropolis.
My thesis is divided into three larger sections. The initial section is dedicated to the theoretical framework through which the main topic of my thesis is approached. It will provide an overview of concepts relevant to post(-)colonial analysis with respect to the argument of this work. The next part deals with a brief history of the Indian subcontinent under the influence of the British. On this historical background the story of cricket in colonial India and later in Pakistan, and the way it has been appropriated in the region will be illustrated in the last section. That section is devoted to cricket as a feature of the (post-) colonial discourse and makes use of the information provided in the first two parts of the thesis.
2. Theoretical Framework
This section is meant as an introduction to the immensely complex fields of colonial and post(-)colonial theories. It will point to different academic approaches and disciplines that have shaped the body of contemporary post(-)colonial analysis and that have provided it with the necessary terms and concepts. It is designed for the reader to get an insight into the relevant fields and thus to present the necessary apparatus for grasping the mechanisms that have operated in the processes of framing the contemporary identities of post-colonial subjects. However, as the extent of postcolonial studies is extremely large, this thesis
4 obviously cannot aspire to provide an exhaustive image of the field with all the precursory theories and their consequent implications. Loomba in this respect claims that
the term „post-colonialism‟ has become so heterogeneous and diffuse that it is
impossible to describe satisfactorily what its study might entail. But this
difficulty is partly due to the inter-disciplinary nature of postcolonial studies
which may range from literary analysis to research in the archives of colonial
government, from the critique of medical texts to literary theory (2).
Thus this section is aimed at providing just an overview of the theoretical approach and it will focus on the points relevant to the scope of this work.
The above-mentioned text, on the other hand, can easily be read as justification of the ambition of this thesis to examine cricket, a professional sport as well as a favourite pastime, as a cultural phenomenon through the optics of post(-)colonial analysis. According to another academic devoted to the postcolonial study, we can now deal with a “variety of activities often called „postcolonial‟ that it is not very easy to find an appropriate point of departure”
(McLeod 2000, 2). Hence this section will seek the suitable point from which the critical theory of the postcolonial can be seen and applied on this work‟s particular topic.
2.1 Colonialism, Imperialism, Postcolonialism and Post-
Colonialism
It has been generally recognized by now that modern European colonialism and imperialism have affected, to a certain degree, most of the world. The figures here speak for themselves: “By the 1930s, colonies and ex-colonies covered 84.6 per cent of the land surface of the globe” (Loomba 3). However, this recognition “has not always led to an understanding of the continuing effects of colonial and neo-colonial power” (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin
2000, 1). It has been the tool of postcolonial analysis with which many scholars have aimed at
5 making clear the nature and impact of power relations established by the colonial endeavours and its implications for the modern globalised culture and politics. But as postcolonial analysis draws on a huge variety of theoretical approaches, it has itself been the subject of a lively academic debate. Therefore it is necessary to make clear some of the most important concepts and the way they will be used later in this thesis.
2.1.1 Colonialism and Imperialism
These two terms have sometimes been used interchangeably in the works of authors writing on the expansionist policies of the Western World. But it is important to distinguish between them for the sake of understanding how relations between western and non-western peoples have been formed – the relations that are important to take into careful consideration when dealing with cultural legacies of colonialism.
Imperialism, a term generally referring to the formation of an empire, can be seen, according to some influential scholars, as a precondition of colonialism (Boehmer, qtd. in
Loomba 10). Said in this respect claims that “„imperialism‟ means the practice, the theory, and the attitudes of a dominating metropolitan centre ruling a distant territory; „colonialism‟, which is almost always a consequence of imperialism, is the implanting of settlements on distant territory” (8). It is useful to note here that this thesis will be working with the terms in the sense they have gained since the post-Renaissance period. I will neither be using the term imperialism in a specifically economic sense Lenin did in his Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism where he linked it to “a particular stage of the development of capitalism” but rather as “a global system” or “an economic system of penetration and control of markets”
(Loomba 10-11). In a bit simplified way for the needs of this work, imperialism can be regarded an ideological, political and economic force pertaining to colonialism as the actual practice of seizing and settling foreign lands. Imperialism is then a system existing in the metropolis upon which domination and control is exerted over the colony.
6 Colonialism is to be understood, according to the outlined approach, as “the specific form of cultural exploitation that developed with the expansion of Europe over the last 400 years” (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin 2000, 45). Naturally, the cultural exploitation was an accompaniment of physical occupation of the colonised territory – of building settlements, and exploitation of natural resources. A relationship of oppressor – oppressed had developed between the people of the imperial power and the people(s) of the colony. Said in his book
Culture and Imperialism claims that “the metropolis gets its authority to a considerable extent from the devaluation as well as exploitation of the outlying colonial possession” (70). The relationship between the metropolis and the colony “was locked into a rigid hierarchy of difference deeply resistant to fair and equitable exchanges, whether economic, cultural or social” (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin 2000, 46). It was the distinction between races that became an important aspect of institutionalisation of such unequal relationship. This kind of relationship, it should be said, existed also in the case of non-indigenous inhabitants of settler colonies who were seen as inferior and degenerated from contact with other races.
As has already been said, the imperial power, or metropolis, exerted considerable control over its colony. Thanks to its economic, political and military dominance, the metropolis was able to spread its ideas and thoughts throughout the colony, and hence to exercise control also over the means of representation through education and publishing. This fact has to be taken into serious consideration, as “it was the power of imperial discourse rather than military or economic might that confirmed the hegemony of imperialism in the late nineteenth century” (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin 2000, 127). But it is also important to bear in mind that this discourse was not at all a one-way flow. The imperial powers have also been hugely influenced by the colonies, particularly culturally-wise. In this respect Said points out: “So vast and yet so detailed is imperialism as an experience with crucial cultural dimensions, that we must speak of overlapping territories, intertwined histories common to
7 men and women, whites and non-whites, dwellers in the metropolis and on the peripheries
[…]” (72).
I have so far outlined the link between imperialism and colonialism and the relationship of the colonised to the colonisers. Loomba claims that “the imperial country is the
„metropole‟ from which power flows, and the colony or neo-colony is the place which it penetrates and controls” (12). This is certainly true as regards the power relations. But I have also drawn attention to the notion of interdependency between the metropolis and its colony as concerns cultural influences. However, we must bear in mind the fact that the combination of imperialist ideology with the knowledge available to the European colonial powers based on the Enlightenment resulted in the attitude of superiority towards the colonised world.
These aspects created “the framework through which the new lands and peoples became known to the Europeans and subsequently became the basis for European control of them. In many cases, this knowledge also became the way in which the peoples the Europeans ruled came to know themselves” (Sharp 4). The colonialist system was thus theoretically justified for both sides by the idea of possible improvement for the inferior colonised, of elevating their status to the status of the colonisers at some future time. But in fact that time never came and the subjugated peoples had to struggle by different forms of opposition or resistance to the colonial powers in order to gain independence. Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin point to an important fact when they write:
It is significant that no society ever attained full freedom from the colonial
system by the involuntary, active disengagement of the colonial power until it
was provoked by a considerable internal struggle for self-determination or,
most usually, by extended and active violent opposition by the colonized. It is
one of the great myths of recent British colonial history in particular that the
granting of independence to its colonies was the result of a proactive and
8 deliberate policy of enlightenment on the part of the British people, a policy
that distinguished British colonialism from the inferior and more rapacious
European brands (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin 2000, 49).
It can thus be inferred that the colonial policies were based on discrimination of the colonised subjects and this discriminatory attitude of the metropolis did not usually change even after the granting of federal or independent status. It was the above-mentioned division between races that permeated this discrimination which could therefore extend beyond the colonial rule itself. As Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin put it: “Racial discrimination was, in the majority of cases, a direct extension of colonial policy and continued to receive both overt and covert support from the ex-colonial powers […]” (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin 2000, 50).
Therefore we cannot think of colonialism as a ceased or terminated process delimited by decolonisation. Colonialism, in fact, has in most cases solely modified and developed since the post-independent period into its successive stage referred to by many as neo-colonialism.
A term which in its wider sense links the historical development of colonialism with today‟s world of globalisation, for it “has come to signify the inability of so-called Third World economies to develop an independent economic and political identity under the pressures of globalization” (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin 2000, 163). Thus there emerges an important link between distant times and places. We all seem to be affected, according to such a view, by the colonial aspirations of European imperial powers. McLeod claims that the link
is both a historical or material one, and a cultural one too. The administrative
and governmental realities of European colonialism may no longer be in the
ascendancy at the end of the twentieth century with the coming of
independence in many nations across the globe, yet colonialism’s historical
and cultural consequences remain very much a part of the present and still
have the capacity to exert „pressures‟ today (McLeod 2007, 4).
9 The situation naturally cannot be perceived as an unchanging one. Much has changed with the end of the Europe‟s colonial powers‟ competition on the colonial field where they pursued to enlarge their fortunes and furthered their greed for power. From what has been said it follows and must be kept in mind that colonialism has not really stopped but rather has been modified into a new political, economic and cultural global structure.
To conclude this subsection I want to sum up some important implications of the
European imperialism and colonialism as discussed above. Based on the provided discussion, we can argue that imperialism worked in a way as a certain mindset as well as a material tool which brought the modern European colonialism into existence. Colonialism itself then has had profound influences on the development of the world, as we now know it. First, we have to consider the demographical and geographical consequences – colonialism has made an irrevocable impact on many environments around the world as well as on its populations.
Many lands were seized and settled and their inhabitants attacked, suppressed and discriminated as they were considered inferior and lacking the same levels of humanity as the colonisers. By these notions, it must be remembered, also the people coming to live in the newly settled and transformed environments were changed.
This leads to the second important point which is connected with the unequal imaginative distinctions that had been enshrined in the minds of people on both sides of the contact line. The colonisers were considered civilized, rational, cultured and educated, whereas the colonised were seen as barbaric, naive and ignorant. Upon these views the unequal power relations “that pivoted around apparently real yet ultimately imagined differences” (McLeod 2007, 3) were established. Thus new kinds of interdependent identities arose with the establishment of colonialism, identities whose relation in fact became much more complex than a simple binary opposition between coloniser and colonised. They had been constituted by mix of ambivalent feelings of dependency and reliance (even on the side
10 of the coloniser – e.g. for labour or local knowledge) on the one hand, and of disdain and contempt on the other hand. It is clear that one identity could not exist without the other.
Those who appeared in the new colonial relations encountered conditions that “required and shaped certain kinds of behaviour, described and imposed new models of identity, and recodified cross-cultural relationships through European-derived models of difference and inequality” (McLeod 2007, 3).
Third, the material and economic aspects of colonialism should be noted. As the extension of imperialism, colonialism almost always involved exploitation of the colonies‟ natural resources and their trade. The colonial locations also played a vital role as markets for
European goods. McLeod claims that “the fortunes and success of modern Europe – perhaps of modernity itself – depended squarely on the pecuniary pursuits of empire. Empire, colonialism and colonized people are not marginal, or additional, but lie at its very heart
[…]”(McLeod 2007, 2).
It was the purpose of the discussion provided in this subsection to briefly point to the nature and some consequences of the modern European colonial endeavours and expansion as a continual process with implications for the current world order, especially to some of the aspects that are relevant for the focus of this thesis. It should have introduced the reader to a complex set of intertwined concepts connected with colonialism and imperialism. Having built awareness of such concepts, I can now proceed further and offer an insight into some of the questions and problems linked with post(-)colonialism and its study.
2.1.2 Postcolonialism or Post-Colonialism?
I want to open this subsection with an explanation of the rather messy spelling with which I have been using the word post(-)colonialism or (post-)colonial so far in this thesis.
This will also help the reader to see what are the various implications and meanings that the
11 word suggests and the various concerns of different academic approaches that have labelled themselves post(-)colonial.
To start with the more obvious explanation, in the Introduction, I put in some cases the whole post- prefix into brackets, using the word in this way: (post-)colonial (discourse). By doing so I wanted to clearly imply that the chosen topic will be dealt with from the perspective of a continual, uninterrupted development of cultural environments since the time they started to be hugely influenced by modern European colonialism.
Secondly, I have also used the word with just the hyphen, separating the prefix, hidden in parentheses: post(-)colonialism. By this I wanted to prepare the grounds for the ongoing discussion on the problems of delimiting the scope of the academic field. For, as I will briefly point to, there is no real congruence between the scholars devoted to the study of the post(-)colonial, even in using the word itself. The difficulty and complexness of the concept, as Featherstone observes, “has led to much debate, to hyphens and parentheses demarcating the prefix, and to some theorists […] avoiding the term altogether” (4-5). First problems with delineating the term arise already as soon as it comes to determining its temporal span. It is thus necessary to set a certain strategy with which the term will be used further on in this thesis.
According to many authors, the hyphen in the word „post(-)colonialism‟ designates its temporal value. When used hyphenated, it is usually seen as “a compound in which the „post-‟ is a prefix which governs the subsequent element. „Post-colonial‟ thus becomes something which is „post‟ or after colonial” (Mishra and Hodge 276). It follows that by using this form we would restrict our examination to a certain historical period coming with decolonisation and independence from colonial powers. This would, however, be in collision with the already proposed notion of a continual development, “as it over-emphasises the break” (Sharp
4). Featherstone suggests what would be the dangers of restricting the analysis in such a way:
12 The implicitly neat break between the colonial and the postcolonial
consequently threatens to elide both the often lengthy transitional periods of
change and struggle between colony and „independence‟ – actually, the most
intense moments of physical risk, ideological debate and cultural redefinition –
and the persistence of colonialism in other economic, cultural and political
forms after the formal end of its military or governmental presence (4).
To limit oneself to the examination of conditions emerging after formal decolonisation would thus mean losing much important context. It is more to the point, as Loomba suggests, “to think of postcolonialism not just as coming literally after colonialism and signifying its demise, but more flexibly as the contestation of colonial domination and the legacies of colonialism” (16). Therefore we have to disconnect the term „postcolonialism‟ from formal end of colonial rule and acknowledge “that the material realities and modes of representation common to colonialism are still with us today, even if the political map of the world has changed through decolonisation” (McLeod 2000, 33). From now on, I will stick to the use of the non-hyphenated form of the term, for thus it will serve the purpose of the argument of my thesis. Because it is in this sense that “postcolonial studies requires us to recognize and explore the inseparable relationship between history and culture in the primary context of colonialism and its consequences” (McLeod 2007, 8).
Apart from the chronological dimension, however, the term reflects certain epistemological categories. In this sense it represents an ambivalent position towards knowledge generated in the culture of the colonial oppressors. While it is, and obviously must be, based on it, postcolonial analysis also challenges and contests some of the academic approaches established earlier in the Western world. In other words “it also involves a challenge to the prevailing knowledges concerning the world and its myriad culture which both resourced and resulted from European colonial practices”. Thus, curiously, “postcolonial
13 studies continually challenges […] the very forms of knowledge which partly have enabled its emergence and existence” (McLeod 2007, 9). Taking such a stance, chronologically- as well as epistemologically-wise, allows for the inclusion in my analysis of subjects and realities also influenced by colonialism although they have existed within the culture of the metropolis. This step is necessary to take because “both the „metropolis‟ and the „colony‟ were deeply altered by the colonial process. Both of them are, accordingly, also restructured by decolonisation. This of course does not mean that both are postcolonial in the same way”
(Loomba 22). In consequence, we can observe in what ways a certain cultural phenomenon has been reworked by the postcolonial setting in both the former colony as well as its former metropolis.
Yet another problem arises, as I have already implied above, when we consider the geographical dimension of postcolonialism. However, geography is an important aspect of the postcolonial analysis. As Sharp suggests, “postcolonial theories seem to be very geographical in that the language used talks about spaces, centres, peripheries and borders” (5). The postcolonial obviously encompasses an immense variety of peoples and territories. Each of the subjects that have entered the realm of the postcolonial as well as each of the postcolonial locations naturally has its specifics. For as there were various ways in which colonial policies were formulated and pursued across the world, there have also occurred various developments of postcolonial conditions and experience. Loomba in this respect observes that “the legacies of colonialism are thus varied and multiple even as they obviously share some important features” (20). And, as Hulme claims, the term „postcolonial‟ offers a handy generalisation in the sense that “it refers to a process of disengagement from the whole colonial syndrome, which takes many forms and is probably inescapable for all those whose worlds have been marked by that set of phenomena […]” (qtd. in Loomba 21). In this thesis such shared
14 features of the postcolonial process will be taken into account and I will draw some more of the reader‟s attention to them later.
As suggested so far, it is useful to approach the postcolonial with a certain degree of generalisation. It is also necessary, on the other hand, to pay attention to the particularities that have shaped different postcolonial environments. Sharp offers a geographical version of postcolonialism that “is attentive to the ways in which texts are changed as they are translated into practice in particular places around the world” (6). This is certainly a useful point, though it misses one important generalisation at a different place, as Sharp uses the word „text‟ in its literal meaning as something that is written. We can, nevertheless, easily include any cultural text instead, which allows for the application of the approach on different cultural phenomena.
This thesis, as has already been explained, will later address the question of postcolonialism in a very specific way, drawing the attention to a particular location – Pakistan – as well as to a particular cultural phenomenon – cricket. This effort can be proven right and meaningful by the following quote:
Although the word „postcolonial‟ is useful in indicating a general process with
some shared features across the globe, if uprooted from specific locations,
„postcoloniality‟ cannot be meaningfully investigated, and, instead the term
begins to obscure the very relations of domination that it seeks to uncover
(Loomba 22).
Thus it is in accordance with the proposed approach, that I will limit the discussion of this thesis to the area of British colonial activity on a particular territory, and its very specific manifestation.
This subsection was designed to offer an insight into some of the problems that are connected with the field of postcolonial studies. It has shown how heterogeneous the field is with all the inputs that have been entering the postcolonial debate. Most importantly,
15 however, this subsection served the purpose of introducing a particular coherent strategy within the field of postcolonial studies that will be followed in this paper. In the following discussion, I will be using the word „postcolonialism‟ or „postcolonial‟ uniformly and in accordance with conclusions of the propositions raised above. And vice versa, when I use the word hyphenated – „post-colonialism‟ or „post-colonial‟ – then it will be done in order to refer to the period since decolonisation. I would like to apologize to the reader for the rather distracting spelling I employed in the preceding sections but I hope I have justified why I did so, and that it has accomplished the task of drawing special attention to the problem.
2.2 What Can Be Studied as Postcolonial and How?
In this subsection I will briefly look at the various topics that come under scrutiny within the field of postcolonial studies. By doing so, I want to show what has been the predominant material of postcolonial analysis so far. This will allow for introduction of the main scholarly focus and areas of interest within the field, as well as for raising some points and questions that do not follow the most common approaches.
I have already alluded to the importance of cultural representations in connection with colonialism. For colonialism was not only a tool of exporting European technologies and material inventions to the colonised territories but also a means of spreading the western thought and knowledge and cultural patterns. Besides, colonialism naturally also worked in favour of gaining new knowledge as it “expanded the contact between Europeans and non-
Europeans, generating a flood of images and ideas on an unprecedented scale” (Loomba 54).
The Westerner‟s eye saw the colonised as different, as the „other‟. Difference was the main characteristic. Such otherness, as I have shown, was seen as something inferior to the
European, Caucasian standard, and as a justification for exploitation. Colonial subjects were often even dehumanised and perceived as things, race being the signifying factor. Fanon describes the thus generated situation:
16 this world cut in two is inhabited by two different species. The originality of
the colonial context is that economic reality, inequality and the immense
difference of ways of life never come to mask human realities. When you
examine at close quarters the colonial context, it is evident that what parcels
out the world is to begin with the fact of belonging to or not belonging to a
given race, a given species. In the colonies the economic sub-structure is also a
super-structure. The cause is the consequence; you are rich because you are
white, you are white because you are rich (qtd. in Loomba 24-25).
It can be inferred that the division between races corresponded in colonies with the division between classes. „Otherness‟ thus also meant living under completely different economic conditions that usually were very far from favourable. Such dehumanising effects of colonialism had consequences for the psyche and subjectivity of the colonised but also of the coloniser. Hence in those realms as well differences arose, and in the mind of the colonised a persistent feeling of inferiority started to build up, while the coloniser deepened his notion of his superiority. Naturally, these differences were mirrored in the cultural and intellectual practices of both the colonising „self‟ as well as the colonised „other‟. It can be thus assumed that the cultural effects of colonialism were inextricably bound up with the economic processes that took place at the colonial site. Hence, as Moore-Gilbert argues, to grasp the postcolonial situation requires that its analysis is preoccupied with forms that
mediate, challenge or reflect upon the relations of domination and
subordination – economic, cultural and political – between (and often within)
nations, races or cultures, which characteristically have their roots in the
history of modern European colonialism and imperialism and which, equally
characteristically, continue to be apparent in the present era of neo-colonialism
(qtd. in McLeod 2007, 8).
17 Cultural and scholarly manifestations of such relations that postcolonial analysis seeks to examine have been produced by members of both „classes‟ – the (former) oppressors as well as the (former) oppressed. Both are equally relevant to postcolonial analysis.
At colonial times, cultural and scholarly production on the side of the coloniser tended to work in favour of devaluing and controlling the colonial subjects. It stressed the Europeans‟ supremacy and claimed the white man‟s positive role in elevating the colonised subjects into higher and better form of humanity. Thus it supported the colonial status quo and pursued reproduction of imperial ideological values. The colonised saw the dynamics of colonialism in a different light – they perceived their original culture as a site of colonial oppression but also as a vital tool for resistance which could challenge, critique, question or condemn the oppressors‟ ways of seeing reality. Not all subjects involved in the colonial discourse, nevertheless, can be described in this way. There naturally were some Europeans who admired the culture of the colonised and protested against their exploitation. And, similarly, there were those among the colonised who were complicit with colonialism and willingly serviced it, thus pursuing their own prosperity.
With the help of cultural and intellectual products described above as well as those that have emerged since the period of decolonisation, postcolonial studies strives to explore and theorise the relationship between the realm of culture and the historical, political and economic consequences of colonialism. This relationship, according to McLeod,
has been examined often in three distinct areas. First, critics have investigated
the ways in which European cultural and intellectual practices – the novel,
poetry, opera, painting, anthropology, etc. – symbolized or contested the
historical practice of colonialism as it happened. Second, a great deal of work
concerns how once-colonized cultures have formulated their own responses to
the history of colonialism and resistance to it, especially during, and in the
18 wake of, decolonization. A third area of concern is the contemporary unequally
globalized condition of the world, and the enduring exploitative cultural and
national relations […] (McLeod 2007, 7).
Apparently, the most frequent medium of these cultural manifestations has been a written text.
Textual materials are also most conveniently approachable for an academic analysis. That is perhaps why postcolonial studies has privileged analysis of literature, with most focus so far on literatures written in English, along with discourses of postcolonial theory itself. Procter in this respect observes that “the earliest accounts of postcolonialism in foundational texts like
Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin‟s The Empire Writes Back […] took literary culture as their primary focus” (173). The fact that this is a rather continuing tendency can be easily evidenced when we take into account the contents of some of the most acclaimed and spread readers in postcolonial studies (e.g. The Post-Colonial Studies Reader edited by
Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin, Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader edited by Williams and Chrisman or Postcolonial Discourses: An Anthology edited by
Castle). McLeod in this respect points to the fact that “postcolonial thought in its early years impacted most notably in British and American cultural studies and, most importantly, the study of English and English-language literatures. Some of the field‟s most influential thinkers […] write in English and have spent a significant amount of time using English literary examples when explicating their ideas” (McLeod 2007, 10). Thus the term
„postcolonial‟ has been firmly anchored mainly in the anglophone academia and has gained wide currency in English. McLeod, nevertheless, apprises his readers that some significant contributions to postcolonial studies have recently appeared in francophone, hispanic and lusophone contexts (McLeod 2007, 11). The main point I wanted to raise, however, is that in postcolonial studies analyses of textual material prevail. Mishra and Hodge draw the readers‟ attention to this problem in their essay when they describe a term „counter-discourse‟ which
19 appears in Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin‟s theoretical account on post-colonial literatures The
Empire Writes Back as a “broader, somewhat depoliticized category” into which “the centrality of action in a retheorization of history as a class struggle […] is transformed by the authors of EWB […]”. Mishra and Hodge claim that “the danger here is that the post-colonial is reduced to a purely textual phenomenon, as if power is simply a matter of discourse and it is only through discourse that counter-claims might be made” (278). The reason for this reduction in analysed material may lie in, as I have already mentioned, the availability of different cultural texts (meant in a general sense as phenomena). Featherstone claims that for postcolonial studies the problem of access is quite a disturbing one as it is relevant to the very question of cultural and economic power, and representation and distribution that lie at the core of the discipline‟s politics. He sums the range of the issue as follows: “It is a truism for many humanities subjects to say that access to texts allows, rather than reflects, representativeness. However, in postcolonial studies, it is a truism, that touches upon crucial issues of representation, and upon the economic and ideological control of production and reproduction of narratives of „other‟ cultures” (Featherstone 9). It cannot be said, though, that no attention has been paid to other cultural manifestations than literary or textual. There have certainly been some contributions in the field devoted to analyses of music, cinema or theatre, a trend which has perhaps been growing. But the proportion has by all means been in favour of literary texts. The field lacks, as Featherstone observes, more attention to popular culture,
“at least in what has become its academic mainstream.” He points out that “it is a neglect that is, in many ways, surprising, given postcolonialism‟s stated interest in reconfiguring dominant cultures, and exploring the conditions and resistance of subalterns” (8). If there has not been much interest in popular culture in general within the postcolonial studies field, there has naturally been even less treatment of its specific manifestations. Body cultures like dance and
20 sport “have been underrepresented in the main anthologies and readers in the field”
(Featherstone 29).
Quite considerable concern with these cultural forms in connection with colonialism, however, can be traced throughout the work of Trinidad-born author C. L. R. James (1901 –
1989). (James‟s theoretical writings on these topics, unfortunately, are not available in the
Czech Republic. Thus his work is known to me only as far as it has been mediated by other scholars.) Given his place of birth, James was focused primarily on the West Indies. James expressed, even before cultural studies were officially constituted, the need for careful study of popular cultural forms like music, cinema and sport within the humanities. For it was in these forms where he saw a great potential of critique and challenge of imposed orders. As
Featherstone says, James put much emphasis on the capacity of these forms “both to achieve and express awareness of the social formations and historical processes that produced them, and through that awareness to participate in challenge and change” (27). In his writings on popular and body cultures, James was deeply preoccupied with cricket and its different roles in the anti-colonial struggle. But he was also struck by its „artistic‟ nature, and as Manthia
Diawara claims, “James elevates cricket over all the British games by comparing its mimetic effect to painting, the stage, and the movie screen, where characters play roles that move spectators to laughter, terror and piety” (836). Grant Farred, then, in his essay describes
James‟s effort to make visible the link between anti-colonial politics and cricket: “The political leaders and the cricketers operated within different historical conjunctures, but it is
James who sets them in dialogue with each other, providing an intellectual context in which these figures‟ common backgrounds, political visions, and sustained commitment to reorganizing Caribbean society could be understood as constituting a lineage of resistance to colonialism” (35). In what ways did James see the sport as a tool of colonial resistance? For
21 James it was the articulate body of a sportsman that fascinated him as a means of expressing attitudes without any need to speak. Featherstone claims that for James
the body in movement was a dynamic sculpture shaped by a dialectical tension
between individual will and desire, and the forms and constraints of its social
environment at a particular historical moment. Whilst the body has always
been at the painful centre of colonial and imperial history, it was James who
first articulated its capacity for expression and resistance, not through violence
necessarily, but through the detailed aesthetics of the body‟s response to
stimuli at a particular moment in history (27).
Thus the movements performed in the game were a part of a political theatre for James who, not limited by the traditional definitions of „art‟, saw artistic expressions of rebellion in such unexpected phenomena like a batsman‟s stroke in a game of cricket. James contributed substantially to the field of postcolonial studies by presenting alternative areas of interest. He drew the attention to phenomena whose role has often been underestimated – body and popular cultures – and pointed to their connections to other cultural practices and their political potential. This was an important input, for, as I have shown, the emphasis in postcolonial studies has predominantly been on reading the postcolonial conditions through high cultural discourses of literature. But there are also the other forms – of popular and body cultures – whose performances allow for another approach to the scrutiny of relationships of the oppressed to dominant cultures. This can be done, as Andrew Ross claims, through these cultures‟ “aggressively indifferent attitudes toward the life and the protocols of knowledge”, and their focus “on pleasures which a training in political rationality encourages us to devalue” (qtd. in Featherstone 30). When we include a study of body cultures such as sport into postcolonial analysis, we can explore in what ways their performances have contributed to the process of challenging colonial authorities or construction of national identities. On the
22 other hand, we can also ask how such performances have been used as expressions of postcolonial authority. One of the prominent scholars of the postcolonial field, Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak, points out that “to make visible the unseen can also mean a change of level, addressing oneself to a layer of material which hitherto had no pertinence for history and which had not been recognized as having any moral, aesthetic or historical value” (qtd. in
Loomba 72). She thus makes clear the advantage of dealing within the postcolonial analysis with other than only literary texts. Later in this thesis I will show what can be some of the connotations of cricket in terms of postcolonial analysis, and I will do so on an example of a specific postcolonial location, as proposed earlier.
2.2.1 Some Important Formulations and Concepts
In this subsection I will briefly introduce the reader to some of the formulations and concepts that are very often used in postcolonial analysis and that are also relevant to the topic of this thesis. Again, this will not be any exhaustive account of the theoretical constructs that enter into the various descriptions and analyses of the postcolonial. For, as I have already noted above, the study of postcolonialism addresses an immense variety of issues. Thus the focus here will be narrowed in order to meet the demands of the ongoing discussion.
Postcolonial studies draws upon a variety of inputs and scholarly practices, like poststructuralism, postmodernism or psychoanalysis among others, and their associated strategies. There have developed, nevertheless, four broader critical approaches within the postcolonial theory that we have to take into account, as they have brought important conceptual innovations into the field: poststructuralist, culturalist, materialist and psychological. Each of these strands has provided the postcolonial analysis with useful tools though their respective representatives sometimes oppose each other. I will not, however, incline to any of these theories in particular. Rather, I will promote their significant contributions, no matter which of these approaches they have been prominent in. I will also
23 briefly outline what have been the major implications of these approaches for postcolonial studies.
Poststructuralist thinking has been one of the most influential critical approaches that have shaped the study of postcolonialism. Its impact on postcolonial studies has been “widely acknowledged by many critics who are both critical of and sympathetic to poststructuralism”
(Morton 161). Some of the prominent critics of the field, e.g. Bhabha, Spivak or Robert J. C.
Young, have drawn upon poststructuralism, mainly on its questioning of the values existing in the Western thought since the European Enlightenment, like universalism, dialectical thinking or Eurocentrism among others.
A big influence of poststructuralist thinking on the postcolonial field was the critique of dialectical thought that was established in the European humanities by the nineteenth- century philosopher Georg Wilhelm Fridrich Hegel. According to Hegel‟s philosophical concept, “the dialectic is constituted of a dichotomy between two antithetical terms, such as the master and the slave, or the state and civil society, which are resolved through a process of negation and sublation” (Morton 162). This notion of Hegel was underpinned by
Eurocentrism and racism which he expressed, for example, in his view of Africa as “an unhistorical continent, with no movement or development of its own” (qtd. in Morton 163).
Thus though Hegel‟s dialectic provided many thinkers with a means of accounting for systems of historical injustice or oppression, like slavery or colonialism, it also made some, like Bhabha or Frantz Fanon, “question and rethink the categories of Hegelian thought”
(Morton 163). Fanon, a Martinique-born psychiatrist, for example, criticised the Hegelian thought on the colonial background. He dismissed Hegel‟s view of black people as savage and inferior, a view that did not allow for understanding, through the philosophical concept of the dialectic, of these people‟s struggle for the recognition of self as an autonomous human being.
This struggle was, according to Fanon, partly reflected in “the native‟s” movement for
24 decolonisation. It is thanks to the recognition of self that “he [„the native‟] knows that he is not an animal; and it is precisely at the moment he realizes his humanity that he begins to sharpen the weapons with which he will secure his victory” (Fanon, qtd. in Morton 165). In consequence, this critique raised the question of the identity of colonial subjects, a question that, as we will see, has been reflected by many other scholars devoted to the study of postcolonialism.
Another important poststructuralist input that has entered the postcolonial debate was deconstruction, as represented mainly by the work of French philosopher Jacques Derrida.
Derrida in his work questioned and challenged the western humanist conception of metaphysics, the branch of philosophy that investigates the nature and principles of reality, including, for example, the relationship between mind and matter. Language played a very important role in his critique of the humanist postulation claiming individuals to be the only source of meaning or action. Derrida did not see language “as the creation of the speaking subject; rather the subject becomes so only by schooling his speech to a socially determined system of linguistic prescriptions” (Loomba). Thus, according to this view, it is language that is considered the force shaping or constructing subjectivity. Derrida also focused on the question of the ability of language to convey meaning. He suggested that there is always a gap between words or linguistic signs and their meanings, and that this gap is evident in every utterance. He claimed that “no utterance or text is capable of perfectly conveying its own meaning. But all texts, if analysed closely enough, or deconstructed, reveal their own instability, and their contradictions” (Loomba). Hence it is not directly in texts or utterances that meaning can be found, but rather meaning “is the result of this gap, slippage or what
Derrida calls „différance‟” (Loomba 36). This notion, then, has become attractive for many postcolonial thinkers. Spivak, for example, uses this concept to show how the systems of western thought that worked in favour of maintaining and expanding colonialism can also
25 work as a tool for questioning and challenging that system itself. She explains her approach as follows: “A deconstructive politics of reading would acknowledge the determination as well as the imperialism and see if the magisterial texts [of western philosophy] can now be our servants” (qtd. in Morton 167).
Also for the “unofficial” founder of postcolonial studies, Edward W. Said, poststructuralism was an important input. In his highly influential Orientalism, Said extensively employs the concept of a discourse as developed by the French poststructuralist philosopher Michel Foucalt. Said acknowledges Foucalt‟s influence in the introduction to
Orientalism:
I have found it useful […] to employ Michel Foucalt‟s notion of a discourse
[…] to identify Orientalism. My contention is that without examining
Orientalism as a discourse one cannot possibly understand the enormously
systematic discipline by which European culture was able to manage – and
even produce – the Orient politically, sociologically, ideologically,
scientifically, and imaginatively during the post-Enlightenment period (qtd. in
Morton 161).
Since then the notion of a discourse in the Foucauldian sense has been widely used in contemporary postcolonial criticism. Said extensively elaborated on the concept in his
Orientalism, thus bringing into currency another influential term – colonial discourse. Though since its release the book has provoked much criticism on some of its claims, it has also been generally credited for its important contributions to the debate about the Orient‟s construction in the Westerners‟ thought. Said pointed to the fact that the European view of the East was bounded by the system of binary oppositions between “us” and “them”. As I have already mentioned in the subsection on colonialism and imperialism, such a system created the opposing notions of barbaric, irrational “other”, and civilised, rational “self”, and had its
26 consequences for the relationship between the colonised and the coloniser and for creating their respective identities. Said showed his readers what really stood behind the unequal distribution of power between these two worlds: it was the language, the culture and the institutions regulating the everyday life, or, in other words, the colonial discourse.
Originally, the word discourse stood for any kind of utterance or conversation but gradually it came to denote rather a more formal speech or a treatment of any subject at length. For Foucalt, however, the term did not have much to do with the act of speaking. He saw discourse as “a strongly bounded area of social knowledge, a system of statements within which the world can be known” (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin 2000, 70). Consequently, it is a particular discourse that shapes our vision of the world, for it is through this system that we come to an understanding of ourselves, of our place in the world and of our relationships with other participants in that particular discourse. The concept, then, has important implications for power relations, as it draws a line between knowledge and power. For it implies that those who are in power are also in control of knowledge, or they “have control of what is known and the way it is known” (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin 2000, 72), and vice versa, those who have that knowledge can exercise power over those who do not have it. This notion becomes particularly important when we consider the relationship between the coloniser and the colonised. Following this logic, it is the system of the coloniser‟s knowledge imposed upon the colonised which works as a means of control of the colonial subjects. Built on these presumptions, colonial discourse, as Loomba claims,
indicates a new way of conceptualising the interaction of cultural, intellectual,
economic or political processes in the formation, perpetuation and dismantling
of colonialism. It seeks to widen the scope of studies of colonialism by
examining the intersection of ideas and institutions, knowledge and power.
Consequently, colonial violence is understood as including an „epistemic‟
27 aspect, i.e. an attack on the culture, ideas and value system of the colonised
peoples (50-51).
The outlined features of the colonial discourse as an instrument of power clearly point to the ability of such a discourse to work as a system within which subjectivity and cultural identity of postcolonial subjects have been created. These are topics that have been widely discussed, among others, in the work of an important contributor to the study of the postcolonial, Homi
K. Bhabha, and I will deal with them later in this subsection.
So far, I have shown what have been some of the important influences of poststructuralism on the development of postcolonial studies. By its critique of some of the western philosophical concepts such as the dialectic or the humanistic notion of subjectivity, poststructuralism has provided postcolonial theorists with a set of tools to challenge colonialism and its cultural legacies.
It is the realm of culture that is perceived as the core for analysis of postcolonialism by scholars who are inclined to culturalist criticism. According to Procter, culturalism should be seen as “the tendency to foreground and explore the central role of culture in maintenance of
(neo-)colonial power and postcolonial dissidence.” Culture is thus perceived as “a crucially determining factor in the ways we see and act upon the world, and not simply […] a passive reflection of social reality” (Procter 173). The importance of culture as a site of colonial oppression on the one hand, and as a tool of anti-colonial struggle on the other hand, has already been stressed above in this section. One of the most prominent and prolific advocates of culturalism has been Stuart Hall who, nevertheless, has in his work drawn much on developments in Marxist thinking. In his essay entitled When Was ‘The Post-colonial’?
Thinking At The Limit, he explains his view of culture (both of the coloniser and the colonised) as a key place of formation of social realities during as well as after the period of colonisation. Hall suggests that
28 one of the principal values of the term „post-colonial‟ has been to direct our
attention to the many ways in which colonisation was never simply external to
the societies of the imperial metropolis. It was always inscribed deeply within
them – as it became indelibly inscribed in the cultures of the colonised. This
was a process whose negative effects provided the foundation of anti-colonial
political mobilisation, and provoked the attempt to recover an alternative set of
cultural origins not contaminated by the colonising experience (246).
Thus for Hall politics is strongly influenced by culture because it is through culture that political realities are mediated and constructed. Here Hall obviously gets into discord with those thinkers who tend to ascribe the leading role in such processes to the material and economic factors. These materialist critics, for example Neil Lazarus, Laura Chrisman or
Benita Parry, accuse the culturalist approach of neglecting “the „material‟ realities […] with which the [cultural] text engages and which in turn have shaped the text” (Murphy 181).
There have been assumptions made by some of the materialist oriented critics that culturalism leads to leaving out political concerns. But according to Procter, culturalism, quite on the contrary, “might offer a vital political approach in demystifying and challenging (neo-) colonial „truths‟” for it
enable[s] the critique of supposedly indisputable truths or facts – such as
scientific „proof‟ in the nineteenth century that Africans were more primitive
than Europeans – that present themselves as self-evident, common-sensical or
natural at particular moments. What is apparently „true‟ might better be
thought of as discursive in this context: as resulting from cultural prejudice or
problematic, provisional ways of representing the world (176).
We can see, as this observation suggests, that the role of culture must not be neglected as regards the political realities surrounding the postcolonial development of the societies in
29 question. At the same time, however, we should bear in mind that the cultural component should not be overemphasised at the expense of the material. And equally, all the different cultural manifestations and phenomena should be treated with enough attention, with no particular cultural sphere being over-represented in the analysis, which I have already pointed to above.
Some critics of a strong materialist persuasion, like Arif Dirlik for example, have made the whole field of postcolonial studies a subject of critique on the ground that they actually equated postcolonialism with “„a culturalism‟ […] that is complicit with global capitalism” (Procter 177). Thus there has occurred a “materialist turn in postcolonial studies” since the 1990s that has resulted, among other things, in “downsizing and deligitimation of the key assumptions of culturalism, for example, the common sense view […] that literary texts should form the starting point of critique of colonialism” (Procter 174). Robert Young, for example, claims that colonial discourse analysis has been reduced to “just a form of literary criticism” (qtd. in Procter 174). I have already observed above, partially in accord with these claims, that literature has been the most frequent material of postcolonial analysis.
I have also pointed to the advantages of including other than literary cultural manifestations in the analysis. This thesis will thus remain faithful rather to the culturalist tradition while taking into consideration the potential of the materialist approach. The point here is that there presumably does not exist any clear-cut divide between the cultural and the material. As
Procter claims, “many postcolonial critics would argue that the economic and the cultural are two sides of the same coin and that it is impossible to separate one from the other” (175).
As regards the purpose of this thesis it is useful to consider some of the materialist concepts in this discussion. For materialists, the thought of Karl Marx, a nineteenth-century
German political theorist, represents a kind of starting point. Though not all materialist critics are Marxists (in the sense that they dismiss capitalism as a system of exploitation), they have
30 drawn on some of Marx‟s key concepts, or as Murphy puts it “their work is informed by
Marx‟s conceptual framework for the analysis of power relations within society” (181). One such key concept of Marx is that of the relationship between base and superstructure. The base represents the underlying economic and political system of a society, whereas the superstructure stands for the culture and institutions, or, in other words, ideology (Loomba
26), that rely upon this system (Murphy 181). People living in a particular political and economic system are profoundly influenced by its ideology. Ideology, as Loomba explains,
“does not […] refer to political ideas alone. It includes all our „mental frameworks‟, our beliefs, concepts, and ways of expressing our relationship to the world” (26). In order to grasp the way in which such social ideas arise and the way they are used by the ruling classes, it is useful to consider the thought of Antonio Gramsci, the early twentieth-century Italian
Marxist. Gramsci examined how ideologies work. He claimed that ideology is a vital tool of the ruling classes with which they control the subject classes. For understanding the power relations operating between these two groups Gramsci developed the concept of hegemony, which can be described as “power achieved through a combination of coercion and consent”
(Loomba 30). Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin describe hegemony basically as “the power of the ruling class to convince other classes that their interests are the interests of all” (Ashcroft,
Griffiths, and Tiffin 2000, 116). Thus the ruling classes achieve domination not solely through force but also by creating subjects who express their consent to be ruled. Loomba explains the role of ideology in this process: “Ideology is crucial in creating consent, it is the medium through which certain ideas are transmitted and, more important, held to be true”
(30). The ruling class can thus exert its domination by controlling the economy and state apparatuses like education and the media (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin 2000, 116). Stoddart then summarises how the concept of hegemony works:
31 Gramsci switched the Marxist analytical emphasis from the economic base to
the cultural superstructure, arguing from the Italian case that even severe
deprivation in the base could not easily shake the belief of the masses in values
shared with the ruling groups and conditioned by cultural attitudes formed in
the superstructure. There are, Gramsci argues, beliefs and traditions in any
society that may well transcend more divisive issues (652).
What is very important in Gramsci‟s notion of hegemony as regards the colonial rule is that there are values common to the both classes that are not simply imposed upon the ruled from above. Rather there are some ideas of those who are oppressed that are transformed and incorporated by the ruling group into the working ideology, which makes it “attractive” for the oppressed. This is what allowed for the colonisers takeover of a colony though the colonised may have substantially outnumbered the occupying military power. Ashcroft,
Griffiths, and Tiffin claim that the colonised people‟s “desire for self-determination has been suppressed by a hegemonic notion of the greater good, often couched in terms of social order, stability and advancement, all of which are defined by the colonizing power” (Ashcroft,
Griffiths, and Tiffin 2000, 116). Gramsci made it clear, as Loomba observes, “that subjectivity and ideology are absolutely central to the processes of domination” (32).
The development of subjectivity, and other mental processes, in the postcolonial setting is the focus of psychological approaches. Such approaches, as Ward suggests, “seek to understand not only the relationship between different cultures but also between past and present” (201). By taking such a perspective, “a psychological approach […] often establishes a way of reading which is attentive to the psychological effects of colonization and/or decolonization on formerly colonized and, frequently, colonizing peoples” (190). The key figure representing psychological approaches towards the postcolonial is the already mentioned psychiatrist Frantz Fanon. Fanon made the point in his writings that colonialism
32 had pernicious effect on the psychology of the colonised peoples. The subjectivity of the colonised was thus destroyed by the colonial oppression. Fanon saw colonialism as a force
“that dislocated and distorted the psyche of the oppressed. The colonised could not „cope‟ with what was happening because colonialism eroded his very being, his very subjectivity”
(Loomba 122). Thus it is the whole machinery of colonialism that is seen as
“psychopathological” (Loomba). Colonialism has damaged the notion of the self of the oppressed and has had distorting effects on the human relations within the colonial environment, thus affecting also the coloniser. As the psychological, and mainly the psychoanalytical view also aims at explaining self-determination, socialisation and formation of relations to notions like power or domination among the colonised subjects, it has provided the postcolonial debate with vital tools for analysis of colonial identities and the dynamics of colonial resistance. It is very fruitful to take into account the vital contribution of Gramsci who stressed “the importance of subjectivity in the study of domination” (Loomba 126), and combine it with the psychological accounts of subject-formation, in order to grasp the view of the colonial subjects striving for resistance and autonomy under the complex conditions of economic and political domination. In this respect Loomba claims that one of Fanon‟s major achievements were the “attempts to combine a socio-political critique and activism with an analysis of colonial and anti-colonial subjectivities” (128).
Fanon‟s work has had a great influence on Homi K. Bhabha who has been, along with
Stuart Hall, deeply preoccupied with the question of postcolonial subjectivities and cultural identities. Two important concepts dealing with postcolonial subjects have been associated with the work of Bhabha. These are hybridity and mimicry. Hybridity, which technically denotes a crossbred species, has been employed by Bhabha in postcolonial theory in the analysis of the interdependent relationship between the coloniser and the colonised. The interdependence existing in that relationship results in the “mutual construction of their
33 subjectivities” (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin 2000, 118) that are both influenced by a colonial context. Hybridity, as a certain fusion of different cultural impetuses, is thus reflected in cultural identities of both the colonial subjects and the colonising oppressors. Their identities are formed in a space of contradiction and ambivalence. It is hybridity that creates such a space and Bhabha calls it the “Third Space of enunciation” (qtd. in (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin 2000, 118).
An important aspect of the relationship between the coloniser and the colonised is ambivalence, a concept first employed in psychoanalysis to describe a feeling of wanting a certain thing and its opposite at the same time. Bhabha uses ambivalence to characterise the relationship of the colonised to the coloniser as one in which “complicity and resistance exist in a fluctuating relation within the colonial subject. Ambivalence also characterizes the way in which colonial discourse relates to the colonized subject, for it may be both exploitative and nurturing, or represent itself as nurturing, at the same time” (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin
2000, 12-13). When looked at from such a perspective, the colonial discourse fails to assert its clear-cut authority as the simple relationship between the coloniser and the colonised is disturbed. The colonial discourse thus cannot “produce compliant subjects who reproduce its assumptions, habits and values” (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin 2000, 13). The colonial subjects do not reproduce but hybridise the values of the coloniser in the “Third Space of enunciation” that they share. And thus the colonial “authority may also become hybridized when placed in a colonial context in which it finds itself dealing with, and often inflected by, other cultures” (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin 2000, 14). The “Third Space of enunciation” is an “in-between” space formed on the border between the cultures of the coloniser and the colonised and it is this space “that carries the burden and meaning of culture, and this is what makes the notion of hybridity so important” (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin 2000, 119).
34 Mimicry is a term that is closely related to the concepts of hybridity and ambivalence as outlined above. As I have already pointed to, it was the aim of the colonial authorities to create subjects that would reproduce, or mimic, the values of the metropolis. As Bhabha asserts in his essay Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse, “colonial mimicry is the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite.” Consequently, as Bhabha also points out “the discourse of mimicry is constructed around an ambivalence; in order to be effective, mimicry must continually produce its slippage, its excess, its difference” (Bhabha 266). Thus when the
Other is encouraged to adopt the cultural habits, assumptions and values of the coloniser, the result is not a subject bearing the same features as the colonial master. The outcome is rather
“a „blurred copy‟ of the colonizer that can be quite threatening” (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and
Tiffin 2000, 139). It is because this “flawed colonial mimesis” (Bhabha 267) is very close to mockery, as “it can appear to parody whatever it mimics” (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin
2000, 139). Apart from resemblance, mimicry bears a certain menace that lies in “its double vision which in disclosing the ambivalence of colonial discourse also disrupts its authority.
And it is a double-vision that is a result of what I‟ve described as the partial representation/recognition of the colonial object” (Bhabha 268). The importance of the concept of mimicry as developed by Bhabha is thus its potential to disclose the limits of the colonial authority that can always be destabilised from within. Such a threat for the coloniser, importantly, does not come “from an overt resistance but from the way in which [mimicry] continually suggests an identity not quite like the colonizer” (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin
2000, 141).
It is the common underlying quality of the above-introduced concepts of Bhabha that they point to the potential dangers which the colonial authority poses upon itself by its very endeavours. Thus they can also be useful in considering the various challenges and forms of
35 resistance to colonialism. Loomba illustrates in what ways such challenges could work when she observes that “anti-colonial movements and individuals often drew upon Western ideas and vocabularies to challenge colonial rule and hybridised what they borrowed by juxtaposing it with indigenous ideas, reading it through their own interpretative lens, and even using it to assert cultural alterity or insist on an unbridgeable difference between coloniser and colonised” (146). This difference, as Mishra and Hodge suggest, “is recognized but contained within a single patter, the coexistence of two kinds of relationship to the language and culture of the centre: „abrogation‟ or refusal, and „appropriation‟” (278).
Such reflections on the nature of relationships on colonial locations uncover very important characteristics in whose light colonialism can be seen as something that is implicitly doomed to failure. The ambivalent, hybridised postcolonial culture provides a
“model for resistance, locating this in the subversive counter-discursive practices implicit in the colonial ambivalence itself and so undermining the very basis on which imperialist and colonialist discourse raises its claims of superiority” (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin 2000,
121).
Such considerations also have implications for the various anti-colonial movements that emerged in colonies and for the question of forming cultural identities at the post-colonial locations. With the above-raised thoughts kept in mind we can see that it is no more necessary, not even possible, for the once colonised to seek the foundations of their new identities in some ethereal images of pre-colonial cultures. For, as Stuart Hall claims, the search of colonised peoples for their cultural identity cannot be done by simply turning “back to the idea of a collective pre-colonial culture, and a past „which is wanting to be found, and which when found, will secure [their] sense of [themselves] into eternity‟”. But still Hall does not dismiss the power of shared origins and histories. For “histories have their real, material and symbolic effects. The past continues to speak to us. But it no longer addresses us as a
36 simple factual „past‟, since our relation to it, like the child‟s relation to the mother, is always- already „after the break‟.” This break naturally represents the period of colonial domination after which not completely different identities can be created, but rather identities that stick to a “sense of difference which is not pure „otherness‟” (qtd. in Loomba 152-3). These new identities had to address not only political issues of anti-colonial struggles but also psychological and emotional aspects, as I have shown above. The idea of the nation was a very strong force empowering various anti-colonial movements.
The issue of nationalism and nation-formation is so wide and complex that it is far beyond the scope of this thesis to provide any satisfactory account of it. However, I feel it is necessary to acquaint the reader with a few basic thoughts that will be helpful as regard the discussions of the next sections. First, it is important to bear in mind that the concept of nation is a social construction, and thus no community that is labelled as a particular nation can be perceived as a natural entity. Ernest Renan, a French nineteenth-century Orientalist, characterised a nation in his lecture called What is a nation? delivered at the Sorbonne in
1882 as follows:
A nation is a soul, a spiritual principle. Two things, which in truth are but one,
constitute this soul or spiritual principle. One lies in the past, one in the
present. One is the possession in common of a rich legacy of memories; the
other is present-day consent, the desire to live together, the will to perpetuate
the value of the heritage that one has received in an undivided form (20).
The conditions upon which nations can be established, Renan adds, include “common glories in the past and […] a common will in the present; to have performed great deeds together, to wish to perform still more” (20). Though Renan‟s lecture focused on the issue of nation strictly from the European point of view, it certainly addresses some points that have validity also for the colonial setting. Renan touches upon the relevant point in his claim that “suffering
37 in common unifies more than joy does.” He also reminds us that as regards national memories, “griefs are of more value than triumphs, for they impose duties and require a common effort” (20). These thoughts, as Loomba observes, resonate with the ideological base of various anti-colonial struggles that “repeatedly [invoked] the idea of glorious pre-colonial traditions […] which have been trampled upon by the colonial invader” (164). Still, we have to bear in mind that new post-colonial identities could not have been created by a simple return to pre-colonial cultures and traditions. These identities have arisen, rather, from a complex mix of cultural inputs, partly by imitation and appropriation of the coloniser‟s values, partly by their strict refusal that emphasised the difference from the coloniser.
An important account of the nature of nation and nationalism is presented in an influential study of a contemporary scholar Benedict Anderson called Imagined Communities:
Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. For Anderson, each nation is fundamentally an “imagined community”, as the title of his book suggests. He sees nations in this way because, as he claims, their members can never come to an individual contact with each other, or even know each other. Despite this fact, however, citizens of a certain nation live together in a common mental image of a shared community. Anderson also claims that such an image of nation was shaped by “the demise of feudalism and rise of capitalism” because feudalism “allowed bonds to exist across national or linguistic boundaries” (e.g. based on religious affiliation). The new capitalist order, however, “attempted to create a different sense of community, which cut across class lines and religious or other divides within a more bounded geography” (Loomba 156). The means for that was a shared culture that could effectively be created by different printed forms of communication like novels or newspapers. These new ways of communication also helped to create certain standardised languages that could be understood by diverse groups of people (Loomba). Thus, as Anderson claims, “the convergence of capitalism and print technology on the fatal diversity of human
38 language created the possibility of a new form of imagined community, which in its basic morphology set the stage for the modern nation” (qtd. in Loomba 156). Anderson then describes the development of the concept of nation with the final form being the “nation- state” as introduced after the First World War and reinforced after the Second World War.
The notion of modern nation is thus to be perceived as a Western invention brought into existence by various inputs that cannot be effectively dealt with in this thesis. However, the important implication that arises here is that also in colonies, the anti-colonial nationalist movements were informed by the Western thought and its models of nationalism and nation- state. As we have seen above, however, the colonial subjects did not merely mimic their
European oppressors, but they also stressed their otherness. And hence, as Loomba suggests,
“anti-colonial nationalism all over Asia and Africa was not modelled upon simple imitation but also by defining its difference from Western notions of liberty, freedom and human dignity” (160).
One important concern that a nation as an imagined community has to be confronted with is the fact that no such community is a homogeneous entity composed of individuals with identical values and positions, and equal social statuses. Rather, it is a very diverse and stratified group of people. There exist different subgroups that can be characterised by gender, race, class etc. Some of these subgroups may be marginalised, co-opted or even excluded.
Loom observes that “the forms of marginalisation may vary: women were openly excluded from citizenship in Napoleonic France; the lower castes in India were invited to participate in terms that underlined their subordination” (165). Hence for the idea of nation as a shared community to be successful in a nationalist movement, there must exist something that roughly expresses the feelings of all people concerned. Different national ideologies usually provide for this, “in which specific identifiers are employed to create exclusive and homogeneous conceptions of national traditions. Such signifiers of homogeneity always fail
39 to represent the diversity of the actual „national‟ community for which they purport to speak, and, in practice, usually represent and consolidate the interests of the dominant power groups within any national formation” (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin 2000, 150). How strong such identifiers are, can be proved by the observation made by Timothy Brennan who in his essay
The national longing for form claims that “race, geography, tradition, language, size, or some combination of these seem finally insufficient for determining national essence, and yet people die for nations, fight wars for them, and write fictions on their behalf” (49). I have already stressed the important role of culture as a tool for forging the bonds within different groups of people. Brennan points to culture‟s power in unifying a nation when he claims that
“nations […] are imaginary constructs that depend for their existence on an apparatus of cultural fictions […]” (49). Nevertheless, as regards the relation between culture and nation, it is important to bear in mind the fact that a nation as an imagined community is a widely diverse group of people, which is naturally reflected also in cultural differences within such a group, and it has always been difficult to create “national cultures that might preserve, indeed nourish, internal differences” (Loomba 170). Thus no national culture is a solid whole but rather, as Cabral reminds us, an “expanding and developing phenomenon” (qtd. in Loomba
170). And consequently “nations, like other communities, are not transhistorical in their contours or appeal, but are continually re-imagined” (Loomba 170).
2.3 A Short Conclusion
This whole section was designed for the reader to get the necessary insight into the theoretical framework that has recently been used in various analyses of postcolonial settings, focusing predominantly on the issues of this complex whole that are relevant for the topic of this thesis. I have briefly introduced the prerequisite phenomena that have lead to the postcolonial nature of the contemporary world. I have also pointed to the initial problems of approaching different cultures with the tools developed in the field of postcolonial studies that
40 arise as soon as we attempt to delineate temporal, geographical and epistemological dimensions of the postcolonial itself. The reader has been acquainted with various theoretical formulations and strands of critical thought that have shaped the study of postcolonial subjects. I have also shown what cultural manifestations have frequently been used in this study and what practices of postcolonial cultures may have been underrepresented. Apart from that, I have also introduced certain concepts and notions that I consider to be a part of the necessary knowledge base for engaging in the following discussion of this paper. Given all that has been dealt with so far, how should one approach the analysis of colonialism and its consequences in order to get a reliable image? Loomba suggests that “colonialism […] should be analysed as if it were text, composed of representational as well as material practices and available to us via a range of discourses such as scientific, economic, literary and historical writings, official papers, art and music, cultural traditions, popular narratives, and even rumours” (Loomba 82). And as I have shown above, it is very useful to try to single out a particular piece of this mosaic and have a look at it in such a way in which it effectively mirrors what has actually been happening on a particular postcolonial location, within a particular cultural context.
3. From The Raj to ‘The Land of The Pure’: A Very Brief
Historical Outline
This section will briefly acquaint the reader with the history of the Indian
Subcontinent under the British government. It is meant as an insight into the historical background of the British political influence over the area and its peoples. Its primary focus will be the illustration of the main milestones in the development of the British rule towards its decline and the end of the imperial domination which resulted in the Partition of India and the creation of independent Pakistan, the postcolonial location of my interest, and India.
41 3.1 The East India Company – The Pioneer of The British
Conquest of India
From the 16th century India had attracted interest of future European colonial powers like Portugal, France, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. It was in the early 1660s that the British established their trading post in Bombay which they acquired thanks to alliance with the Portuguese against their Dutch rivals. As Keay claims, “the place was transferred to
Charles II as part of his Portuguese wife‟s dowry. Although Bombay itself was as yet of no commercial value, the English thus acquired a territorial toehold adjacent to the busy shipping lanes of the west coast” (348). Through the trading endeavours of the East India Company, which “was granted its royal charter in 1600” (Fhlathúin 25) the British had begun to exert influence over the region long before their rule was officially established. The East India
Company had monopoly over all British trade in the area, thus gaining substantial economic and political power. In the 18th century the British took advantage of the decline of the
Mughals‟ control of India, a dynasty that had ruled the land since 1526, and started to form alliances with rulers of strong local centres of government. In this effort to gain territories the
British found themselves in competition with the French. Armies of both European powers were partly dependent on native recruits as considerable components of their respective forces. It was the British East India Company, eventually, that gained the full control of India.
As Fhlathúin points out: “British victories in a series of actions between 1746 and 1761 established the EIC [i.e. the East India Company] as the predominant European force in India.
Robert Clive, who had already distinguished himself in action against the French, took charge of Bengal, agreeing to pay the Mughal emperor a fixed annual fee in return for full control over the state‟s revenues.” The East India Company was gradually transforming “from a trading company into a semi-autonomous state, at first one of many and then the reigning power in India” (Fhlathúin 26). The operations of the East India Company were aimed at
42 managing of the Subcontinent through alliances with rulers of different Indian kingdoms.
Such alliances were eventually transformed into actual administration of the kingdoms whose rulers died without a recognised male heir. This policy, referred to as the “doctrine of „lapse‟, attached to the prerogative by which accession was recognized in a subsidiary state, was used for the annexation of a number of territories by disallowing the adoption of an heir, though valid by Hindu law where there was no natural succession” (Watson 134). Other kingdoms were made subject territories of the company‟s rule on the pretext of being misruled by their original rulers. This was the case, for example, of “the rich and historically powerful kingdom of Oudh” (Fhlathúin 26). The company‟s power had thus extended over around three fifths of the Indian subcontinent. This power was then, step-by-step, being transmitted on the British government. In 1773, the company was brought under the state control according to the East
India Company Regulating Act. By 1813 the company lost its monopoly and afterwards it operated as a branch of the British government. Though India never became white settler colony like North America or Australia for example, and thus there were not so large numbers of the British coming to the Subcontinent, the presence of the East India Company, its employees and administrators, and the British rule had profound effects on indigenous Indian societies. Bengal, for example, was exposed to economic decline and famine during the first years of the company‟s administration. Fhlathúin thus illustrates the impact and the changes that were brought about by the British involvement:
Across India, changes in the relationships between landholders, farmers and
the state tended to disadvantage the old aristocratic classes, as well as leading
indirectly to the growth of a strong middle class, especially in Bengal. The
activities of missionaries – who succeeded in disseminating Western education
where they often failed in making converts – and the EIC‟s need for English-
43 speaking intermediaries both contributed to the rise of the English language
(26).
The old patterns of traditional societies of the region were distorted. Alongside, a new lingua franca or the whole subcontinent started to pave its way towards its general acceptance. And finally the people of the Subcontinent accepted also the British rule. R.C. Dutt, a Bengali writer and historian of the end of the 19th century, claims that “the people of India submitted to British rule because it was infinitely better than that which obtained in India at the end of the last century” (qtd. in Lloyd 148). The British were successful also because they were able to bring peace to the area which had been perturbed by frequent clashes between different kingdoms. General consent of the Indians was essential for the British, for, as Lloyd observes,
“if they had not been accepted by the Indians, the East India Company – heroic though many of its employees showed themselves to be – could hardly have conquered so large a territory with such limited resources” (148).
3.2 Direct British Rule and Its Challenges
The direct rule by the British Crown was established in 1858 when the East India
Company lost its authority. What had led to this loss was an Indian revolt of 1857 – 1858 that was based mainly on disaffection with the practices of the British gradual annexation of
Indian territories (the Kingdom of Oudh, referred to above, was annexed in 1856) and the dissatisfaction of the Indian elites with the loss of power and money from state revenues.
Moreover, many people in India were bitter about British interference with Indian culture and religion caused by intended Christianisation that accompanied such a takeover of administration of the land.
The revolt arose as a rising within the East India Company‟s Bengal army and the trigger for it was a seemingly unrelated problem of new cartridges that were rumoured to be lubricated with animal fat. As these had to be bitten before loading, both the Muslim and the
44 Hindu members of the army were offended by taking the risk of defilement in case the fat came from pigs or cows respectively. “The first mutineers were men of the 19th Bengal
Infantry, stationed at Berhampur, who refused to accept the issue of new cartridges on 26
February,” as Ferguson puts it (122). The rebellion, that turned out to be a death and life struggle with appalling atrocities committed on both sides, spread quickly mainly through the northern part of India and apart from soldiers it was supported by such various groups of
Indian people – landlords and tenants, high and low castes, Hindus and Muslims, rural and urban people – that it has been seen by many as a kind of national uprising. Therefore it is now also referred to as the “First War of Indian Independence”. Many historians, however, are against this designation of the event, for, paradoxically, “there was […] something of a national character in the composition of those who opposed the rebellion as well as in that of those who supported it” (Keay 437). In other words, some historians are far from seeing the event as a national revolt for the fact it failed. As Watson observes, “the British were never entirely alone, and while the rebels had fighting spirit their counsels were divided and their leadership local or non-existent” (144). The other titles of the event thus include the “Indian
Mutiny” or the “Great Rebellion”. Importantly, the British existence in the Subcontinent survived. The most significant result of the revolt was the transfer of authority from the East
India Company to the Crown in 1858, “ending the anomaly whereby a corporation had governed a subcontinent” (Ferguson 147). And in 1876 the Queen was declared empress of
India.
The fact that the British learnt their lesson from the mutiny was reflected in Queen
Victoria‟s proclamation that marked the transition of power from the company to the British government. In November 1858 the Queen gave her Indian subjects two assurances about the future administration of India: the proclamation “specifically disclaimed any „desire to impose
Our convictions on any of Our subjects‟ and ordered British officials to abstain from
45 interfering with Indian beliefs and rituals […]” (Keay 445), and also it “referred to „the principle that perfect equality was to exist, so far as all appointments were concerned, between Europeans and Natives‟” (Ferguson 148). Besides, yet another change in the British rule over the Subcontinent was announced. The government of India, as the Queen declared, would now be carried out in India itself. In fact, however, much of the authority over the directly ruled territories, which comprised about three-fifths of the total area of the
Subcontinent, rested with the Secretary of State for India in the British Cabinet in London.
The highest representative of the Crown working in India itself was the Viceroy who had a six-member Cabinet to advise him. Despite the announcement made by the Queen about the desired equality between the “Europeans” and the “Natives” there was not “a shred of representation of the Queen‟s millions of Indian subjects” (Ferguson). And in practice, as the words of a later Viceroy clarify, India was “really governed by confidential correspondence between the Secretary of State and the Viceroy” (qtd. in Ferguson 148). The remaining two- fifths of the Indian Subcontinent that had not come under the British rule were governed independently by over 560 large and small princely states, “some of whose rulers had fought the British during the „Great Rebellion‟, but with whom the Raj now entered into treaties of mutual cooperation” (Kaul). In these states, domestic affaires continued to be controlled by their respective princes. These elites of princely India later turned out to be crucial allies, as they provided the British government, on the basis of loans, with substantial financial and military support during the two World Wars.
The administration staff working in India were recruited from the members of Indian
Civil Service. This body that was a part of Government of India under the British rule gradually started to employ native Indians. Nevertheless, there still existed major social barrier between Indians and Europeans based on race. According to the historian Chandrika
Kaul, this social divide was actually the consequence of the “Great Rebellion”. Kaul claims
46 that “the „Great Rebellion‟ did more to create a racial chasm between ordinary Indians and
Britons. This was a social segregation which would endure until the end of the Raj […].”
Though the British criticised the Hindu caste system as a form of social stratification, they themselves were bound by their deeply rooted notions of class and elitism. And, in fact, the
British made use in their administration of India of the caste and religious affiliation of their
Indian subjects in order to categorize the Indian people. Hopkins points out that “the colonial state used these categories to create communal rights and entitlements as well as to facilitate communal punishments.” The consequences of such categorisation, as Hopkins adds, “varied widely throughout India, with members of the „same‟ community experiencing differential treatment in the various regions of British India as well as in the princely states.” The communalist politics was used to decrease the impact of Indian national political discourse that started to emerge in the late nineteenth century. To maintain its position, “the
Government of India combined a policy of co-operation and conciliation of different strata of
Indian society with a policy of coercion and force” (Kaul). The British believed that without their intervention in India, the country “would fall apart in the face of the enormous divergences of its peoples, languages and religions,” and that they were “destined to rule the country in perpetuity” (Strong 437). Thus India remained, for almost ninety years under the official British rule, Britain‟s “jewel in the crown”.
Nevertheless, as education, literacy and the Western thought spread through the
Subcontinent, the Indians began to gradually realize that they were being deprived of freedom and their political rights. In consequence, various nationalist efforts striving for independence started to emerge, as I have already indicated above. The British themselves sowed the seed of resistance against their colonial rule. The fact that various anti-colonial movements often drew upon the ideas and thought of colonial oppressors is one of the paradoxes accompanying colonialism and has already been described in the theoretical section.
47 Different nationalist movements in India had been gaining wider support since the foundation of the Indian National Congress. It was established in 1885 “as an all India, secular political party” and its foundation “is widely regarded as a key turning point in formalising opposition to the Raj” (Kaul). Initially the Congress, founded by Allan Octavian
Hulme, an English civil servant, was intended as a body that would work in close association with the British government and that would channel and thus soothe Indian disaffection. At its beginning, the Congress was attended by members of the educated middle-class, loyal to the
British Raj but by the interwar years it became a mass organization and “the crucible of modern Indian nationalism” (Ferguson 171). As Hopkins puts it, the Congress transformed itself from “a vehicle for the collaborative elite to advocate their interests” to “a party advocating home rule (swaraj) and eventually independence.” Nevertheless, in the highly diverse environment of the Indian subcontinent it was not possible for the Indian Congress to act as a homogeneous political body. Thus, though it succeeded in reaching broad consensus, the Congress “was often dominated by factionalism and opposing political strategies. This was exemplified by its splintering in 1907 into the so-called „moderate‟ and „extremist‟ wings, which reunited 10 years later” (Kaul). Another divide within the Congress was the question of using violence in the struggle against the imperial oppression. The group that advocated the use of violence as a justifiable weapon in the anti-colonial fight was represented mainly by Subhas Chandra Bose, the founder of the India National Army. The opposing fraction of those who stressed non-violent resistance was led by the iconic figure of
Mahatma Gandhi “who introduced a seismic new idiom of opposition in the shape of non- violent non-cooperation or „satyagraha‟ (meaning „truth‟ or „soul‟ force)” (Kaul). Gandhi was able to gather mass following for his campaigns of non-violent civil disobedience, drawing upon support across various communities and social groups attracted by the idea of Indian nationalism and, importantly, by Ghandi‟s status as a religious figure. As Lloyd observes,
48 Gandhi was, in some ways, ideally suited for his role since “the great majority of Indians were still peasants, and recognized only two types of power – that of the ruler, typified by the King-
Emperor and his Viceroy, and that of the holy man. For the majority of Indians Gandhi was a saint, and if he told them to follow his political lead they would do so mainly because of his religious position” (310). Hopkins thus summarises Ghandi‟s achievement of changing the
Indian popular political sentiments by his cross-communal appeals: “Gandhi‟s efforts redefined the bounds of India‟s public political space, including parts of society, such as women and so-called untouchables (dalits), previously excluded from political participation.”
However, in the then India of two major religious communities – Hindu and Muslim –
Ghandi‟s agenda could only win favour with the former group. The latter, making up only twenty percent of the population of India, had different religious commitments and drew upon a different set of teachings of Islam. The adoption of a political approach that was so distinctly Hindu had the effect of driving the Muslims out of the Indian Congress and led to concerns of some Muslims about being politically underrepresented in the imperial structure.
As Kaul points out, already “from the late 19th century, some of [the Muslim] political elites in northern India felt increasingly threatened by British devolution of power, which by the logic of numbers would mean the dominance of the majority Hindu community.” Those
Muslims who were striving for political power formed a party in 1906 that would stand for their distinctive interests. That body, called the All-India Muslim League, “was born to promote the cause of the Muslims of the Indian subcontinent” (Ziring 4). Its representatives attempted to allay fears of the League‟s possible aggressive militancy that could be seen as a result of its all-Muslim character by stressing their desire to “live at peace with the other communities” and emphasizing that the League “was not another extremist organization, but rather a political party committed to constitutionalism and the rule of law in the India of the twentieth century” (Ziring 4). It took, however, a long time before the League was able to
49 gain confidence of the majority of the Muslim population in India since for the Muslims it was first necessary to reconcile their own differences. Even the 1937 election in India showed how large was the extent of the Indian Congress‟s political power when it overwhelmingly won also in the Muslim provinces, leaving the Muslim League without the possibility to form its own ministries. Nevertheless, the Muslim League achieved its first successes early after its foundation. As Kaul claims, “they achieved something of a coup by persuading the British that they needed to safeguard the interests of the minorities, a demand that fed into British strategies of divide and rule. The inclusion of separate electorates along communal lines in the
1909 Act, subsequently enlarged in every successive constitutional act, enshrined a form of constitutional separatism.” Despite the religious differences, the Congress and the League proved capable of cooperating successfully on a political level. An example of such cooperation was a campaign organized by Ghandi to support the Sultan of Turkey as the
Caliph, the successor of the messenger of Allah. For Muslims he was a religious leader and the British were attacking his position as Sultan. Ghandi knew that the campaign to defend the
Sultan‟s status as the Caliph would help to mobilize the Muslims against the British. And he was right. Lloyd observes that “some Indians thought this approach artificial, but it was successful; Hindus and Muslims were able to co-operate against British rule better than at any other time” (286). (This movement was, however, eventually put to an end by Mustafa Kemal
Ataturk whose seizure of power led to dissolution of the Ottoman empire). Another time when the two bodies worked well together was during Non-Cooperation movements in 1920-1922.
In this respect it is also important to note that Mohammad Ali Jinnah, who was later acclaimed as the Quaid-i-Azam, the Great Leader of Muslims, and who became one of the most influential figures in the fight for Pakistan as an independent Muslim state, was a member of the Indian Congress until 1920.
50 The first serious turning point in the British-Indian relationship was marked by the
First World War. Britain entered the war already weakened by its continuous efforts to hold the Empire together. About twelve years before the Great War, this proved especially difficult in South Africa. Britain had to fight the Boer War there, which cost the British £300 million and thirty thousand men. Strong claims that “the war had been a shock to the British government. It had taken half-a-million men to crush an enemy with only sixty thousand. It was an appalling indictment of the British army” (474). In the Great War, hence, the British depended heavily on their colonies. To pursue the war, Britain not only needed financial and military support from its allies among the Indian princely states, as I have already noted above, but it also depended on its colonies for “a steady stream of men who were transported thousands of miles to fight, and many to die, in the trenches of France” (Zirling 23). Many of these men were recruited also from Britain‟s Indian subjects. Various political leaders in India demanded that the British honour the Indian commitment. The massive human sacrifice should have been compensated by a promise that when the war was over, the people in the colony “would be given a good measure of self-government, if not outright independence”
(Zirling 23). Thus, by the end of the war, a consensus was reached among the British governing circles that India would have to be granted independence. No exact time was set, however, for this to happen, and the pace of change was not satisfactory to the Indian politicians as well as to many ordinary Indians. The pressure from the rising tide of nationalism was mounting. This pressure was exerted not only by the political elites gathered in organisations like the Indian Congress and the Muslim League but also by the activities of the lower classes of Indian society. As Kaul puts it, “the „subalterns‟ [exerted this pressure] through the acts of peasant and tribal resistance and revolt, trade union strikes and individual acts of subversion and violence.” Thus when emerging from the First World War, the Empire found itself even weaker than when it had entered it.
51 The Government of India attempted to lessen the endeavours of the Indian pan- nationalist movements by showing the will to share the political power. It started to offer to the Indian elites the chance to take part in local elected assemblies. This was happening through introducing various acts and reforms. However, as the Government of India delegated some governmental responsibilities to the local administrators, it still tried to retain the control of issues that it considered fundamental to its current position. Among these were mainly defence, communications, finance and foreign affairs. The government created eleven full-fledged provinces with the intention to introduce federalism as a political structure that would frame the governance of the Subcontinent. Zirling claims that “the essential approach emphasized provincial government in indigenous hands with shared responsibility, but overall viceregal control at the centre.” This would mean that “the Indian provinces would be accountable for day-to-day governance, while the central government sustained the union and hence continued to oversee questions of security, foreign policy, communications, and finance” (24). As such reforms and constitutional enactments created a wide range of opportunities for Indian politicians at different levels of government, they also worked in favour of challenging the status quo. Kaul sums it up as follows: “Britain‟s strategy of a gradual devolution of power, its representation to Indians through successive constitutional acts and a deliberate „Indianisation‟ of the administration, gathered a momentum of its own.
As a result, India moved inexorably towards self-government.”
The decisive blow to the British government in India came with the Second World
War. At the time, all the factors, long- and short-term ones, leading to the Indian independence were quickly getting unbearable for the British government. The cost of the war and the demands it put on the British combined with the nationalist struggles in India made an environment in which running the Empire was both politically and economically very difficult. Moreover, it was gradually proving not cost effective.
52 When in 1939 Germany invaded Poland, the government of Britain, bound by its commitments, entered the conflict and the Second World War officially burst over Europe.
Britain once again found itself dependent on the support from its colonies with India being the vital extension of the Empire. The Viceroy in India committed the country to the war without even having consulted this with the Indian representatives from the Congress. The Congress announced that such a resolution should have been discussed in advance; moreover, it was not interested in a conflict that it perceived as a European affair with no real importance for the people of the Subcontinent. The British, however, did not pay any attention to such claims and as Lloyd points out, “they were sure that India ought to be brought into the war and would have found Congress reservations on political or pacifist grounds a tiresome irrelevance”
(312). As a response to the declaration of war without its consent, the Congress ordered all of its provincial ministers to resign in protest. As Zirling notes, “calling the British action arbitrary and unconstitutional, a new campaign of civil disobedience was engineered by the
Congress Party and led Mahatma Gandhi” (29). The Muslim League, now led by a Bombay lawyer Muhammad Ali Jinnah, took the advantage of the situation newly arisen with the cessation of the rule of the Indian Congress. Jinnah announced his party‟s support for the
British war efforts. Jinnah thus became a more trustworthy partner of the British than his counterpart from the Congress, Jawaharlal Nehru, though he still retained his dignity and a certain distance in his negotiations with the British government. He wanted the British to appraise the Muslim commitment in the war properly and pointed to the fact that the Muslim minority in the Subcontinent should be given more political voice.
As regards the Muslim League‟s position as a political party, Jinnah endeavoured to gain for it a mass support from the vast majority of the Subcontinent‟s Muslims, a goal he failed to achieve in the 1937 election. He knew that in order to be successful he needed to adopt a policy that would resonate with the feelings of all the Muslims in the Subcontinent.
53 And in 1940 such a policy was officially introduced, though it had been academically conceived already about ten years earlier. This policy had a simple slogan: Pakistan. The idea of an independent state for the Muslims was in accord with the growing Muslim separatism deepened by the rise of the communal violence from the 1920s. Thus Jinnah committed the
Muslim League to a strategy leading to partition and separation. His position towards the
British in this effort was rather favourable, as I have indicated in the preceding paragraph. It was gradually becoming clear that the independence that was getting more and more tangible in the light of the current conditions would not possibly come without the partition.
The reasons leading to independence of India were very complex and composed of different long-term as well as short-term factors. During the Second World War the difficulties the British had to deal with in India were growing. In the Subcontinent they were still being confronted with pan-nationalist movements and campaigns of civil disobedience.
One such campaign turned into an open rebellion in 1942 under the name “Quit India”, after
Gandhi was removed from its leadership by arrest. There were, however, also extreme anti-
British nationalist efforts. During the war these efforts were transformed by Subhas Chandra
Bose, former president of the Congress, into the creation of the Indian National Army. By
1945 the troubles of the British in the Subcontinent had mounted to the degree that Indian independence became an imminent reality.
3.3 Independence and Partition
When the Second World War ended there were no more doubts that the British would have to leave India. The proposition had already earlier been supported by the Labour party which was elected to power in 1945 with the hope that it would be able to bring about a post- war plan for social welfare. Britain found itself in a desperate financial state in which granting independence to its colonies was not a moral gesture but rather an economic necessity. Lloyd points out that “the economic position of the British at the end of the war showed what an odd
54 empire they ran. Their problems were matched by the increased prosperity of several colonies.” A substantial part of Britain‟s military activity had been covered by loans from the colonies. As Lloyd adds, “as a result Britain ended the war owing about £2.5bn. to her colonies […]; India emerged as a major creditor” (322). Having reached such an economic advantage, India, as well as other colonies, appeared to have few financial problems to take care of their own affairs. The British government reached the decision to leave the Indian subcontinent as soon as possible.
The date for the British departure from India was originally intended to be 1948. But by the time the last Viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, arrived in India in 1947 to check its state of affairs, he found out that “the structure of government was already in a state of dissolution.
Mountbatten had no choice other than to pull back the independence day to 15 August 1947”
(Strong 531). The British opted for a hasty withdrawal with an uneasy task of transferring their power on the Subcontinent as quickly and efficiently as possible. Though until 1940 the
British government had favoured the view of independent India as a federal unity it was now clear that independence would not be possible without partition. Zirling illustrates how ill- conceived the British view was:
If the crux of British power and dominance in India lay in the segmentation
and exaggeration of differences, ho did they imagine that hey could eventually
depart from India leaving behind a compatible and accommodating population,
under a unitary system centred on the rule of Anglo-Saxon law, and dedicated
to the cause of liberal, democratic principles? How could the British have
genuinely believed that an autocratic experience could be transformed, with
almost no preparation, into a free and open, as well as competitive, self-
governing political system? How could a multinational state, the majority of
whose population remained illiterate, impoverished, and largely uninformed,
55 carry forward an experiment in sophisticated living that even in the European
countries of the day was sadly lacking? Britain‟s failure to follow the logical
progression of its rule in India was ultimately the key element in the struggle
[…] that was writ large in the partition of the subcontinent and the resulting
formation of Pakistan (26-27).
The idea of Pakistan as an independent state for the Muslims of India had become the policy of the Muslim league led by Jinnah in 1940, as I have noted above. In the election of 1946 the party proved that it had gained the position of the chief representative of the Muslims in nation-wide politics. Given such a position of the League as well as the rising communal violence between the Hindus and the Muslims, there was no other choice for the British government as well as for the Indian national Congress than to accept Jinnah‟s demands. It was inevitable that the independence of India would be accompanied by the partition of the
Subcontinent into two sovereign states, the Dominion of Pakistan (which was later divided into Pakistan and Bangladesh) and India. As Lloyd observes, the proposition of the partition
“forced upon everybody the practical task of dividing the army, the civil service, and the government‟s assets between the two new states, and the more explosive problem of fixing their boundaries” (325). The Subcontinent was officially divided according to a scheme designed by Sir Cyril Radcliffe. What followed the partition was a fury on both sides which resulted in excessive communal violence and horrendous migration. Lloyd thus illustrates the incredibly tense situation: “Tens of millions of people found the new boundaries had suddenly turned them into religious minorities, and millions of them set out to cross to the other side, where they would belong to the majority. Members of the religious majorities stirred this up by attacking people who did not leave or by attacking refugees while they were fleeing, and this led to massacre” (325). Such chaos and bloodbaths have been attributed mainly to the haste with which the power from the British was transferred. It must be however remembered
56 that the outbreaks of violence between the two religious communities already at the time preceding the partition would have made the goal of peaceful transfer of power unattainable even under the best conditions. Ironically, the partition and the creation of Pakistan have left the independent India a non-Muslim state with the largest Muslim minority.
3.4 A Short Note on the Name of Pakistan
The name for the newly established state for the Muslims of the Indian subcontinent was coined already in 1933 by Rehmat Ali, a young Muslim student in Cambridge at the time.
He fashioned the name in his essay by arranging an acronym from the Muslim territories of the northwestern part of the then India. Those were, at that time, meant to form an independent Muslim state (Ziring 31). The territories in question were Punjab, Afghan,
Kashmir, and Sindh. Later, the policy was extended to include also the Muslims in eastern
Bengal (Lloyd 315). The word Pakistan, moreover, means “the land of the pure” when translated into Urdu, which was certainly considered when the name for the state was drafted
(Ziring 31).
4. Cricket as a Body Culture and Its Place Within the
Study of Postcolonialism
The reader of this paper has already been introduced to a broader context of postcolonial discourse and to some of its general prerequisites and implications. More attention has subsequently been drawn to certain concepts, formulations, terms and issues with the intention to acquaint the reader more closely with some of the various specific domains and approaches towards them within the study of the postcolonial. Then a particular postcolonial setting has been illustrated in more detail by providing a brief outline of its political history as shaped by the colonial experience. Such a course has intentionally been
57 pursued in order to narrow the scope of the discussion step-by-step. This final section can thus be fully devoted to a very specific feature of the legacy of British imperialism as experienced on a particular postcolonial location. As I have already pointed out, the attention will be focused on cricket and its story in the Indian subcontinent, with particular interest in Pakistan and its link with the game.
Cricket will be approached in a wider context as a cultural phenomenon. Sport, it can be claimed, is a body culture that has much relevancy for the examination of a certain cultural environment. As I have already noted above, the analysis of bodily practices has been underrepresented in the study of the postcolonial. But I have also pointed to the fact that the inclusion in postcolonial analysis of body cultures such as sport can seek to address and answer important questions of the field. Through the realm of sport, such important issues as identity, nationalism, or colonial resistance can be approached. Sport can also be examined as a tool used by colonial authorities to pursue their aims in their colonies.
This paper strives to contribute to the massive body of works devoted to postcolonialism with a view taken from a perspective that has obviously been underestimated, as has been proved above. It is going to justify that cricket is well worth examining and has its unshakable place in the postcolonial analysis.
4.1 Sport and Postcolonialism
In order to fully grasp the importance of sport as a fruitful vehicle for the study of postcolonialism, it is necessary to consider its inherent qualities as a very potent cultural phenomenon. Clifford Geertz in his anthropological account on sport observes that such an activity, be it actively performed or passionately observed, in particular cases of a truly popular sport involves what he calls “deep play”. Participation in this “deep play”, as a player or a spectator, bears implications of fundamental cultural values. As Featherstone reminds us,
“for Geertz, a sport that involves “deep play” is one that demands and stages significant social
58 and personal investment in the performance and its outcome. Such play enacts a social truth that is unavailable trough other social practices” (67). Sport has become in many cultures a mass activity surrounded by a matrix of meanings and implications thus it can provide a very useful commentary on social values and relationships with which a certain cultural environment has been invested. In postcolonial environments this commentary becomes even more important as a cultural narrative given the contemporary globalised nature of sport and its quality as one of the most commonly shared forms of human activity. It is important, as I already have alluded to in the second section of this paper, to consider sport as a form of
“cultural text” that in its interaction with other “texts” of a given culture works as an important “interpretative guide to itself, a story that a culture tells about itself” (Featherstone
68).
I have also pointed, at several places above, to the potency of sport when approached as a body culture. By doing this, we can perceive the implications of a sport that are inherent in the performing body of a player or athlete. In this way the sporting body can be seen as acting out an artistic expression of the sportsperson‟s identity. Thus it can help to reveal the individual will and desires as constrained by a certain social order at a given historical moment. In such a performance a capacity can found for conveying the mixed feelings of resistance and obedience of the colonial subject. As Eichberg proposes, a body culture “as a ritual of „the social body‟ […] is rooted deep in the material fundaments of society, figuring patterns of work and even prefiguring revolutionary changes” (qtd. in Featherstone 69). In this way the body can be seen as having the cultural potential of formulating new meanings and challenging the given ones within the contested environments of postcolonial societies.
Another important aspect of sport as a body culture that provides the ties with postcolonialism is the body itself, in this case with the crucial attention being paid not only to its performance but also simply to the way it looks. As has been noted, an indispensable
59 feature of colonial activities were the various, more often than not, negative perceptions of the physical traits of colonial subjects. According to such traits, that can be claimed to have contributed to the formation of the social construct of race, the colonial subjects were seen as inferior to the European, Caucasian standard. The important contribution of Said has been in his explanation of how the West constructed its knowledge about the Orient, the knowledge that was shaped by the image of the colonised as the “other” who was visibly different. The relationship between the coloniser and the colonised was enclosed in the strict system of binary oppositions between the civilised and rational “self”, and the barbaric and sensual
“other”. Justification of cultural, as well as economic, exploits that accompanied colonialism was largely based on these differences between races. The racial distinction became the tool for institutionalising of the unequal, discriminatory relationship between the colonial master and his subject. Representation by various cultural manifestations of the racial differences was one of the means of such institutionalisation of the exploitive attitude towards colonies. Sport, as will be shown, can serve the purpose of underlining these differences; but, on the other hand, it can also work as a vehicle of contesting and crossing the firm racial boundaries.
As Bale and Cronin point out, from the representations of racial differences of the colonised “it is a short step to fitting them into body-classes or groups and to ending up with stereotypes. This is especially appropriate in the context of sports, since physique was particularly important theme in the European construction of the athleticism of various groups of people in the colonized world” (2). It is obvious that such colonial constructions have had substantial implications. For thus generated stereotypes continue to shape vision of many contemporary Westerners; and hence the sport‟s importance for the cultural analysis of the current postcolonial world can easily be claimed. It is also through the sporting discourse that the West strives to continue to exert and retain at least some of its former power over the
Third World. As Dimeo and Kay observe,
60 the recent literature on sport and postcolonialism suggests that Western
cultures continue to construct „others‟ in oppositional, dichotomous terms,
often as inferior, but at times with a certain ambivalence in which envy and
desire can mix with assumptions of intellectual weaknesses, i.e. in the image of
the „noble savage‟ or the „exotic East‟. In this way, power is inextricably
connected to knowledge, and the „West‟ retains the power of constructing the
„East‟ through discourse (1264).
The body‟s centrality in the study of sport makes the act of performing of an apparently irrelevant leisure activity a vital feature of postcolonial examination. For as Spurr observes,
“the body, rather than speech, law or history, is the essential defining characteristics of primitive people.” Thus he once again reminds us that it was “the body of the primitive” that worked as the most important sign according to which he was represented (qtd. in Bale and
Cronin 2). The sporting body when properly looked at from the postcolonial perspective can thus present a viable asset to the postcolonial discourse.
The discussion provided in this section so far, has at a few points already touched also upon the issue of temporal delineation of postcolonialism in connection with sport. As I have shown in the part of this paper devoted to the theoretical account on postcolonialism, we cannot think of postcolonialism as coming to existence only at the time of decolonisation, or with the independence and demise of colonialism. Rather, postcolonialism must be perceived flexibly as involving also the challenges of colonial domination and the legacies of colonialism. We come to the same conclusion when we conceive of the temporal span of postcolonial sport. For sports were used also to support the colonial endeavours and after being appropriated or acculturated they have become an indelible part of various postcolonial cultures. Bale and Cronin clearly claim that “sports were part of the colonizing process, and
61 have remained in most colonized countries following independence.” And they stress the postcolonial nature of global sport by pointing to the fact that
the international governing bodies of sport are often still intent on a colonizing
mission. For example, the International Association of Athletics Federations
[…] seeks to promote in its member countries […] an „athletics culture‟ that is
an „environment in which athletics must grow and develop. Every member
federation must see that the athletics culture in its country is broadly based and
as strong as possible‟ (3).
This also chronologically fits the agenda of the study of sport into the pattern provided by the theoretical accounts of the postcolonial.
Given all the features of sport described above that make it suitable for the postcolonial analysis, it is now necessary to specify what actually can be comprehended within the concept of postcolonial sport. Bale and Cronin suggest that there are seven types of postcolonial sports or “sportoid forms” to be considered according to propositions in literary studies, as raised by Ashcroft and his associates. These “sportoid forms” are the following:
1. Pre-colonial body cultures that survived colonialism (e.g. Rwandan “high
jumping”).
2. Indigenous body cultures that were transformed into modern sports (e.g.
lacrosse).
3. Body cultures that were “invented” by a former colony (e.g. baseball in the
U.S.A.).
4. Colonial sports that were modified by former colonies into distinctly
“national sports” (e.g. Australian football).
5. Sports that have been diffused by Empire and adopted, without rule
changes, in colonised countries (e.g. soccer).
62 6. Sports initially introduced during colonisation but that have adopted
“regional styles” f their own (e.g. Brazilian soccer).
7. “Hybrid sportoids” (e.g. Trobriand cricket) (4).
It is obviously the fifth category that is relevant for the present paper. Cricket, as will be illustrated later, was introduced in the British colonies by the British agents of colonialism and has been appropriated in many of them, as is also the case of the Indian subcontinent and thus the modern postcolonial states of Pakistan and India.
When we take a closer look at the modern sport, we can even say that it is a postcolonial phenomenon as a whole. Considering many professional English football clubs or British national track and field team is a point in case. There are many athletes performing in Britain or even representing Britain as their homeland now who have their roots in some of the former British colonies. Bale and Cronin call those sportspersons “sports workers who are colonial extractions” (4). On the other hand, the development of modern sports in many of the
Third World countries is actually a colonial legacy. As modern sports now usually work in favour of promoting the modern post-colonial states, they originally served as one of the means of colonial social control. Bale and Cronin put it as follows: “It is clear tat sport was part of the „civilizing‟ mission of imperialism, and thus an essential part of the colonial experiment. Sport in its many forms is thus a legacy of colonization” (5). Featherstone then informs us in what way this legacy has been reworked, as he claims that “the involvement of postcolonial cultures in games that were introduced by colonists becomes […] at best a conservative process, a mimicry of the concerns of colonialism, not a transformation of them”
(69). We will later see how cricket has been mimicked and hybridised in colonial India and modern Pakistan in order to help to express the local postcolonial identities. Another important issue that the discussion of postcolonial cricket in this paper will address is the underlying feature of globalised modern sport that makes it a colonial extension and that is
63 used in the context of global sport business for the sake of a “continuing informal imperialism” (Bale and Cronin 5). I will point to the fact that in the domain of international cricket there have been efforts of certain English bodies to retain its colonial power.
As I have already alluded to, a very important function of postcolonial sporting practices have been their might in the various expressions of resistance and their potency to challenge, at least on a symbolical level, colonial oppression. Czech and Slovak readers of this paper may still have in mind the way in which ice hockey matches between the Soviet
Union and the Czechoslovak Republic at the time of a stiff communist era were perceived as a chance to show symbolically the disobedience and strength of the oppressed Czechoslovaks.
After having emerged victorious from these battles the Czechoslovakian players were celebrated as heroes who had been able to show their defiance and resistance against the oppressing Soviet power. These matches attracted attention of many Czechoslovakian spectators who were not ice hockey- or even sports- fans, as I know from the experience of my parents. But they felt as if the players had been acting on their behalf. Such an example shows clearly that not only performance itself but also support of and spectatorship of sports matches has the power to represent postcolonial identity. (And I believe that with a certain degree of generalization the relationship between the former Czechoslovakia and Soviet
Union can be regarded postcolonial though the Soviet imperial expansion was not based on the same economic preconditions as, for example, the British colonialism.) The sports arena can thus be symbolically seen as one of the key sites of struggle for self-determination, and
Bale and Cronin claim that it “can be thought of as a container of resistance rather than focus for it; perhaps resistance and political action can more readily take place „beyond the boundary‟” (6).
We have already seen in what ways the Western representations (be it textual or visual via e.g. painting or later photography) were important for creating dominance of the West
64 over the East. The western thought and knowledge have been very important vehicles in this process. I have shown how Said with the help of poststructuralism criticised the way
Europeans constructed their notions of the Orient by their descriptions and teachings of it that were ready-made for claiming their superiority and thus justifying their domination. Such representations created a discourse which, as we have seen, provides not only thoughts or images but also power structures. This discourse had been brought to existence by a body of various cultural “texts” produced by the West. But, as has also already been noted, there is the problem with texts that under a close scrutiny they show “their own instability, and their contradictions” (Loomba 36). The real meaning of texts is to be found in a space somewhere between their claims and counter-claims (differénce), which is exactly the place that can be used for challenging dominating systems created by such texts (see the accounts on Foucalt and Derrida in the second section of this paper). Now it will also be my interest to show in what ways cricket as a postcolonial sport and a cultural text can fit into this pattern of postcolonial discourse. The key areas, to be summed here, include the way in which cricket was complicit with colonial domination; the potential of cricket to express resistance; the way in which postcolonial cricket has been represented in other texts; the way cricket has been, since its acculturation, invested with new meanings in the Indian subcontinent and later in
Pakistan, and what has been the nature of these meanings.
4.2 Cricket and British Imperialism/Colonialism in the Indian
Subcontinent
After the historical insight into the circumstances of the British presence in the Indian subcontinent we already know that the time they managed to defend their position there was not at all short. Given the extent of the area and the huge mass of people over which the
British exerted their rule, it is certainly at least surprising that they were able to hold their
65 power for such a significant period of time. This becomes even more surprising when we consider that they did not, and actually could not, assert their position in the Subcontinent plainly by military coercion. The British force was simply not strong enough, considering the span of its subjugated territories, to maintain its colonies in a military, coercive manner. Even as regards the civil service, the Imperial power could afford to deploy in the Subcontinent only comparatively few of its own people. As Stoddart observes, “at its numerical peak the elite Indian Civil Service cadre contained only about eleven hundred men, and for most of the
1858-1947 period the total was below one thousand. There were large standing armies, certainly, but colonial recruits constituted a substantial section within them, and the armies might justifiably be seen more as symbolic deterrent than direct repressor” (649-650). It was rather a different type of power that constituted the pillar of the British domination and that helped them in their efforts much more efficiently. It was the power imposed on the territory and its peoples by the British values, sets of ideas and beliefs, customs and rules, and social conventions; the power of culture exerted through the cultural colonial discourse. The British soldiers naturally had their part in this discourse, but besides them there were a host of other
British agents spreading the crucial knowledge and thus creating the British hegemony over the Indian subalterns. Stoddart provides his reader with a list of such British “servants”:
“administrators, military officers, industrialists, agriculturalists, traders, financiers, settlers, educators, and advisors of various kinds” (650). Stoddart further explains that
The significance of these ruling cultural characteristics is that they were
consciously maintained within governing circles and were fostered within
carefully selected sections of the colonial populations more through informal
authority systems than through formal ones such as the bureaucracy or the
military. The success of this cultural power rested with the ability of the
imperial system to have its main social tenets accepted as appropriate forms of
66 behaviour and ordering by the bulk of the client population, or at least by those
important sections of that population upon whom the British relied for the
mediation of their ruling practices, objectives, and ideology (650).
One important means in the process of establishing the British authority was obviously the
English language. Linguistic determinism, as represented by the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis for example, argues that the way we experience the world is shaped by the language we use. As I have already pointed out, even in today‟s Pakistan English is one of the two official languages. This colonial legacy is thus clearly conceivable as a bearer of British values, still pertinent to the Pakistani society in a sense. But as I have also alluded to in the Introduction, anyone who takes a little closer look at modern Pakistan discovers yet another feature of the
British legacy that has been embraced by its society – the game of cricket. And though there is no real proof for that, I take the risk of claiming, on the basis of my personal experience, that this feature of the colonial legacy has gained maybe even wider acceptance and popularity. For cricket is mastered better than English by many members of contemporary
Pakistani society. Stoddart makes an important point in this respect when he reminds us that
“perhaps the most neglected agency in the process of cultural transfer from Britain to her colonial empire is that which involved sports and games” (651). I will now show how cricket worked as a substantial vehicle in this transfer.
Cricket arrived in the Subcontinent in the first part of the 18th century and at the beginning it was just a pastime of British soldiers and sailors. As Kaufman and Patterson claim, “British soldiers are said to have played the game in India as early as 1721” (101). The early matches were conducted “between different regiments or different suburbs of the colonial towns” (Guha 158) where the Indians were mere spectators. Originally, the British had no intention of popularising the game in India. It was actually about one hundred years later that the first Indians began to play. The game attracted the attention of Indian elites, as
67 they perceived it as a sign of superior social status. The Parsis of Bombay, a wealthy, commercially successful and westernised community whose ancestors had come to India as emigrants from Persia, were the first to take part in the game. Guha illustrates the spread of cricket among the Parsis as follows: “In the 1830s, Parsi boys began imitating white soldiers, improvising the implements of cricket by using hats as wickets, umbrellas as bats, and old leather, stuffed with rags and sewn up, as balls. In 1848, these boys (now men) established the
Oriental Cricket Club” (158). Cashman further explains that it was no accident that this community was the first to cultivate cricket. He claims that the Parsis “acted as cultural brokers between the British and Indian society […]. In the tradition of colonial elites, the
Parsis took up the game of cricket, along with other imperial customs, partly to demonstrate their fitness for the role of collaboration” (qtd. in Kaufman and Patterson 102). According to
Guha, some thirty cricket clubs were established by Parsis in the 1850s. As the Parsi bourgeoisie saw the game as a tool for forging their ties with the British masters, their clubs
“were named for British viceroys and statesmen and for Roman gods: Gladstone, Elgin,
Ripon, Jupiter and Mars, for example” (158). Following the Parsis‟ success at the game, the elites of the two major Indian religious communities – the Hindus and the Muslims – soon also took interest in cricket and joined in. The reason was partly social and business rivalry between the groups and the will to assert their social status. The first Hindu club was formed in 1866 and was named Bombay Union; the first Muslim club appeared in 1883 thanks to an influential Muslim family from Bombay.
Thus by the late 19th century cricket “had acquired a genuine popular appeal in
Bombay” (Guha 159). In 1907 the first cricket tournament, the Triangular Tournament, took place in Bombay and, as its name suggests, brought together three teams – a European team, a
Parsi team, and a Hindu team. The Muslims joined this competition, which had become an annual event, in 1912. In 1937 it was finally opened to all other Indian communities by
68 introducing a fifth category plainly called “The Rest”, thus bringing together through the game the whole Indian “cultural mosaic” (Guha 160). The tournament that eventually became the Pentangular ran until 1946, and played “a formative role in the development of cricket in
India” (Guha 160). A series of tournaments that started to be held regularly throughout the
Subcontinent followed the Bombay example, and the passion for cricket soon overran the whole India, with major events taking place in Karachi, Nagpur, Delhi, Lahore and Madras.
The teams participating in these competitions were organised on the same basis as in the
Bombay tournament – according to communal affiliation.
Though the introduction of cricket among the Indians was rather accidental, the British soon realised that it can well be used as part of their colonial policy, and started to deliberately “export” the game to India with the whole “cricket culture” that accompanies it.
A very obvious tie of the game to the colonial policy emerges when we remember the politics of divide-and-rule, or the communalist politics, which the British used to decrease the impact of Indian nationalism (see the section devoted to the history of British rule in India). As has just been shown, the Indian cricketers organised themselves on communal basis by joining
Parsi, Hindu, Muslim, or Sikh clubs. And within the Hindu clubs the caste was a crucial organising factor. As Guha claims, “Hindu cricket clubs in Bombay were themselves organized on caste lines. Social intercourse was even more restricted across religions: it does not come as a surprise that Parsis and Muslims also took to making up teams of their own”
(165). This definitely helped the British in their effort to stress to the Indians the immense diversity of the Subcontinent‟s population which needed to be held together by the colonial rule and which was at odds with Indian nationalism. On the other hand, despite the strict social stratification there was no danger of defilement for the players of different religious or caste affiliation when they met in a cricket match, as there is no physical contact in the game.
69 This also allowed for the encounters of colonial masters and their subjects on the cricket field.
As Kaufman and Patterson claim, the fact that
cricket requires no physical contact between players explains in part its
diffusion to mixed-race and deeply class-divided colonies […]. Interracial play
was permissible as long as it did not involve close contact, as with cricket. The
formal attire of official cricket matches also helped smooth the way for
integrated play – even in the searing heat of India and the Caribbean, players
were expected to wear white or cream flannel trousers and long-sleeved white
shirts (93).
As this observation proves, cricket turned out to be an ideal companion of other social practices that the British used in their colonising mission.
One of the most important areas in which colonisers could efficiently transmit their values to Indians was obviously education and its various institutions that had been set up in the country. Being faithful to the English tradition, the schooling system provided at institutions established by colonial administrators or staffed by British teachers included sports, and most notably cricket, as an indispensable part of education. One of such cases was, for example, the Muslim University in Aligarh, in northern India, “where a succession of
British professors had encouraged the sport as a means of fostering teamwork and community solidarity” (Guha 161). Promotion of cricket was also prompted by the creation of various distinctly British secondary schools throughout India where indigenous students even of lower status got in contact with the game. With reference to colonial India Kaufman and Patterson observe that “in the Asian Subcontinent […] promising young lads from low-status households were sometimes sent to English-style boarding schools and thus introduced to cricket” (92). The game thus represented an important complement and ally of the Western thought and was spread with it through various teaching institutions. Stoddart provides an
70 illustrative example of the way in which cricket and schooling worked hand in hand as two important agents serving to strengthen the imperial order:
Just as the elite English schools embraced the games ethic, so did similar
institutions throughout the empire, schools which were invariably staffed by
products of the English system. Prince Ranjitsinjhi, who became one of the
greatest cricketeers in England before World War I and consequently the
popular model for what was „possible‟ more widely in India, was educated at
Rajkumar College, set up in Rajkot State to educate sons of the Indian princes.
Ranji spent hours every day under the tutelage of an English cricket coach,
becoming the living proof, it was thought, of the adage that practice makes
perfect (654-655).
Cricket, endowed with a culture of its own that stems to a large degree from the system of values pertinent to the ideals of Englishness, thus worked as a substantial aid in colonial education of Indian subjects. The education whose aim was to spark in Indians loyalty and admiration towards the British crown and the values it represented. By playing the game,
Indians were supposed to stick to the principles of teamwork, obeying established rules and authorities, and respect and loyalty towards fellow players. This was, then, the part of cricket in the “civilising” task that accompanied the British colonial mission. As Stoddatr puts it, “to play cricket or play the game meant being honest and upright, and accepting conformity within the conventions as much as it meant actually taking part in a simple game” (653). The great strength of cricket in this respect, as opposed to formal education, lay in the fact that it was not imposing the above-mentioned values on the Indian subjects formally and directly by their colonial masters. Instead, the set of values and principles surrounding it was to be internalised rather subconsciously by engaging in a pleasing and popular leisure time activity.
71 From a more general perspective, thus, cricket can be considered a powerful and basically informal social institution capable of passing on a system of attitudes, values and beliefs that could be shared by the colonial master and his subjects. At the same time, however, it was used to enhance the distance between the ruler and the ruled, as it included in its code traces of the British social environment. As Stoddart observes, the game of cricket is organised around tight “lines of social demarcation and hierarchy, […] lines which extended into the wider milieu, were found around the colonial globe” (661). Hence the game helped to fuel the process of social and cultural formation in the colony that corresponded with the ideas of the colonial ruler who found in it the “professed ability to discipline and civilize men,
English and native alike” (Kaufman and Patterson 91). The English elites therefore encouraged their colonial subordinates to play cricket also for, say, mercenary reasons. In this respect, however, cricket was far from being an integrating force. As has just been explained
– the game stressed the strict and rooted social divide while investing it with British principles and thus transforming it according to the views of colonial masters. This can also be inferred from what has been said about the communal organisation of formal cricket matches. These remained for a long time the privilege of higher social classes. Stoddart notes that “in India, minority communities and government service personnel provided the founding groups in cricket, and the game grew little beyond them, remaining a largely urban and upper middle- class phenomenon” (Stoddart 662).
As has already been alluded to, cricket was seen as a potent vehicle for transferring the appropriate British moral code from the imperial agents to the local population in the colony.
At the heyday of the British empire sport in general and cricket in particular became praised for this force which helped to convey the moral as well as behavioural link between the imperial power and its subjugated territories. This appraisal was from the late 19th century onwards articulated by various cricket tours dispatched from Britain to India. In order to boost
72 this process of cultural transfer and conversion of the locals as much as possible, Indian teams were also invited to play in Britain. Apart from the chance to improve their playing skills,
Indian players were mainly expected to receive extended social education. An exciting account of such a cricket tour of an English team in India was given by a historian called
Cecil Headlam. He was a member of a team that travelled through India in the winter of 1902
– 1903 under the name of “Oxford Authentics”. Headlam described in his book his experience with Indian cricket and the ceremonies the team took part in. About the force of the game he observes the following:
First the hunter, the missionary, and the merchant, next the soldier and the
politician, and then the cricketer – that is the history of British colonisation.
And of these civilizing influences the last may, perhaps, be said to do least
harm. The hunter may exterminate deserving species, the missionary may
cause quarrels, the soldier may hector, the politician blunder – but cricket
unites, as in India, the rulers and the ruled. It also provides a moral training, an
education in pluck, and nerve, and self-restraint, far more valuable to the
character of the ordinary native than the mere learning by heart of a play by
Shakespeare or an essay of Macaulay (qtd. in Guha 166).
Headlam thus clearly uncovers the ties between cricket and the colonising efforts while ascribing to cricket its proper historical role “among the last and most benign influences of imperial rule” (Guha 166). The game‟s cultural power, however, also gains obvious and keen appreciation in his account.
But not only scholars were fully aware of the advantages of widespread introduction of cricket into the colony. Colonial governors in India played a very important part in making cricket at home in the Subcontinent. Stoddart claims that they emphasised the game “as a ritual demonstration of British behaviour, standards, and moral codes both public and private”
73 (658). The author then provides an example, among others, of Lord Harris, “first of the modern English cricket bosses and a late-nineteenth-century governor of Bombay, [who] believed that selected groups of Indians would be ready for some political responsibility when they had assimilated the playing and behavioural codes of cricket” (658). It was for this reason that Harris, while in office in Bombay from 1890 – 1895, sponsored tournaments between English and Indian teams. The game thus got overt political support. This support, noticeably, came not only from British elites but from the local as well. Cashman claims that playing cricket was endorsed and encouraged by Indian elites who acknowledged it as “an aristocratic game which upheld traditional notions of social hierarchy and patronage” (qtd.
Kaufman and Patterson 92). Hence Indian rulers, like their British counterparts, came to realise cricket‟s capability of reaffirming authority over their constituencies. Colonial elites, as Kaufman and Patterson note, were “comfortable in their place atop the social hierarchy,
[therefore] had little reason to discourage those beneath them from playing a game that paid symbolic homage to British cultural and political hegemony; in fact, elites tended to regard cricket as a good means of „civilizing‟ natives in their own image” (99). In consequence, the game also provided a medium for social interaction between colonial and local leaders.
As regards the acceptance of cricket among the various social strata of Indian society, it was mainly based on the possibility to symbolically enter the world of people who were higher on the social ladder – those from the native upper-middle and lower-middle classes could be seeking a contact with the white-dominant world; whereas those from lower castes could symbolically assert themselves in ways that were not permitted in ordinary social contact. Given the fact that cricket became attractive to all strata of Indian society, the game could work without any obstacles as a major component in the machine of British cultural imperialism. A very important aspect of the wide popularity and support of cricket, and thus its potency in terms of cultural imperialism, stems from the game‟s “voluntary imposition by
74 its new converts rather than from an arbitrary imposition by the imperial masters […]. In cricket, some of the strongest upholders of the faith were Indian and West Indian players or administrators newly won over” (Stoddart 663). Cricket was thus a great means for the British of shaping the Indian colonial society according to approved codes and values.
4.3 Cricket and Colonial Resistance in India
In the preceding section I have shown in what ways cricket worked as an imperial tool of the British, fostering the cultural seizure of colonial India. But as has already been demonstrated on the example of imposition of dominant Western thought through the colonial discourse, such colonising tools have often been reworked by colonial subjects to serve quite contrary purposes. The concepts of ambivalence, hybridity and mimicry that have been illustrated above should be remembered. Cricket, as I will show, was in colonial India also endowed with ambivalence, became hybridised and mimicked, and thus was used in challenging and resistance to colonialism.
Ambivalence, in a simplified way, stands for the fluctuating relationship of the colonised to the coloniser, characterised by complicity and resistance at the same time.
Cricket, as has been explained, worked well in creating compliant colonial subjects. The game‟s strong ties to English imperialism made it attractive to those who cherished the colonial metropolis and its values. The same ties, however, were also the reason why cricket was popular among those who yearned, at least symbolically, to defeat the imperial power.
Some indigenous players in India thus saw cricket as a means of symbolical fight against the colonial oppression, as the game offered them an opportunity to contest the British on their own field. One of the opportunities to challenge the British authority on the cricket field came in February 1906. A Hindu team comprised of players from territories of both present-day
India and Pakistan played the British in a representative match in Bombay. The Hindu team managed to win the match against all odds and the news of their heroic victory slowly
75 travelled up the country. Guha thus describes the reaction that such news sparked among nationalists: “When it reached distant Punjab, the Tribune of Lahore, a leading nationalist newspaper, was exultant. Searching for a suitable comparison, it settled upon another recent victory of Asia over Europe, that of Japan against Russia on the battlefield. The Hindu cricketers had apparently been as dignified in victory as their Japanese military counterparts”
(167). The victorious sportsmen were seen as national heroes and bearers of the important anti-colonial massage. The potential danger which the colonial authorities posed upon themselves by introducing their sport in the colony is well described by Stoddart: “One immediate problem for the imperial power was that, having encouraged the measurement of social progress by comparing colonial against British achievements in sport, there would always come the day of a colonial victory that might be interpreted as symbolic of general parity” (667). The important thing that we should bear in mind here is the fact that not only active participation in the game but also spectatorship is culturally significant, as I have already pointed to above. For as Featherstone reminds us, with a reference to Geertz and his notion of deep play, “the spectators are not passive consumers, but constituents of what is always in some sense a culturally meaningful drama” (78). Thus successes of Indian teams against their colonial masters were gradually becoming expressions of national identities striving for independence.
In the case of cricket, we can also find examples of the way in which colonial subjects mimicked and hybridised the values of colonial authority. The colonised, we should remember, were encouraged to adopt the cultural habits, assumptions and values of the metropolis. Cricket, we have seen, was meant to support this process. But we also already know that the colonised did not simply reproduce the approved values. Rather, they mimicked them, thus continually suggesting an identity that is almost the same as the coloniser‟s, but not quite. This mimicry, then, discloses the ambivalence of colonial discourse and also disturbs its
76 authority. I have found the following description of a disagreement over a Hindu umpire‟s verdict in a cricket event a fruitful example. In that match of 1916, the Hindus played the
British when a famous English cricketer, an army major, argued with the umpire and refused to accept his decision:
[The umpire, Mr. Pai,] crisply ordered the cricketer off the field. When the
major wrote an intemperate letter to the Hindu Gymkhana calling the umpire‟s
character into question, he was answered with a homily on sportsmanship, that
quintessentially British characteristic so absent in this case. The Gymkhana
wrote icily that it did “not agree that Mr. Pai with his well-known credentials
could with any propriety be called a „Bad Umpire‟”. The major‟s imputations
with regard to Pai‟s character were, it said, “entirely opposed to the interests of
sport and are calculated to create general unpleasantness”. And, in any event,
the cricketer had “no right to challenge the decision for an umpire‟s decision
must in all cases be held to be final” (Guha 167-168).
Thus also on the cricket field the codes of the colonial authority were reworked to assert the identity of the colonial subject. Instead of assuming moral purity and undisputable authority of a white English player by showing uncritical respect, cricket and its principles were used to express resistance towards such assumptions.
4.4 Cricket, Partition and Nationalism
We have already seen that much of cricket activity in colonial India was organised on communal basis. As regards the major official cricket events, however, the communal affiliation was the core factor in recruiting players for the participating teams. It can be claimed, then, that a more or less proportional sample of the whole Indian society gathered at such occasions, presuming that the popular tournaments drew the attention of supporters of each team. Cricket could thus be viewed as a strong unifying force of the various Indian
77 religious communities, as they used to meet regularly at occasions for which they shared the same interest. This view was supported by some contemporary players (see Guha). Hence, presumably, it could work in favour of forging the all-India nationalism. But, naturally, there is always rivalry present in any sport, cricket being no exception. In consequence, when clashes between the two major Indian religious communities started to emerge and gradually divided the country, cricket, a great all-India passion by that time, could not be seen as a unifying force anymore, but rather as playing the exactly opposite role. Actually, it is quite likely that communal cricket had always been adding to separatist sentiments.
The all-Indian nationalism was the policy of the Indian Congress Party, for which reason it always tried to draw to its ranks, apart from the prevailing Hindus, members of all
Indian communities – Muslims, Parsis, Sikhs and Christians. From the late 1920s, nevertheless, the Hindus largely dominated the party. In the two following decades many of the Muslim members joined the political rival, the Muslim League. When religious riots emerged in northern and western India, the relationship between the Hindus and the Muslims deteriorated swiftly. In this situation it was always more difficult for the Congress to claim to represent the whole nation. It gradually started to appear obvious that India was not one but two nations at least. And the cricket field “increasingly became a battleground for the resolution of what was to become the most intractable question of Indian politics: whether
India was a nation or merely an assemblage of different communities given an artificial unity by the fact of British rule” (Guha 175). In the atmosphere surrounding the growing hostilities between the two largest religious communities, the existence of communal cricket could only seriously damage the prospect of unified India. Though some of the then players believed that communal cricket had not stressed “any communal differences”, but rather “fostered healthy rivalry and promoted communal unity” (qtd. in Guha 184), it in fact gradually strengthened the mutual rivalry between the Hindus and the Muslims, and thus helped to “consolidate and
78 legitimate the demand for Pakistan” (Guha 183). Eventually, also on the cricket field the struggle over the question whether independent India would become one nation or two took place. As Guha suggests, “„Communal‟ cricket thus always had within it elements of
„communal‟ conflict” (189). Though cricket had become the common denominator of the whole Subcontinent, the essential competitiveness present in it as in any other sport fostered the effects of differences prevailing in the colonial India, and thus bolstered the growing belief that India was not capable of creating one “imagined community”. As has been pointed to in the account on nation and nationalism in the second section of this paper, nations are always far from homogeneous groups. They are, as Anderson has coined them, “imagined communities” whose members must be connected by something, such as ideology, that roughly expresses the feelings of all people concerned. In case of India the ideology of religion outweighed that of the common secular belief in cricket that, however, remains a powerful tool for achieving national, as well as cross-national, solidarity.
After the partition and creation of modern Pakistan in 1947, cricket has become, in a sense, a part of national policies of both India and Pakistan. Both these countries have become successful in international cricket and the game draws there an incomparable following from all sections of their respective populations. As Dimeo and Kay assert, “social elites want to be associated with it, ordinary fans feel passionately about it, players of all backgrounds can become national heroes, and there is strong financial support through the media and commercial sponsorship” (1263).
In Pakistan, indeed, cricket has become a symbol of national pride and a central feature of its social and political life. Bandyopadhyay suggests that the game can even be considered Pakistani “only secular religion in the last few decades”. In his essay he provides this brief description of Pakistani fervour for cricket: “Pakistanis, it is often suggested, like talking, reading and writing about cricket. The passion with which Pakistani cricketers play
79 the game, the emotion with which the Pakistani masses watch their national team play, the admiration with which they worship their cricketing icons and the cricketing culture that has grown around this nationalist obsession are fascinating” (102). These observations imply how important cricket has been for assertions of Pakistani national identity and expressions of
Anderson‟s imagined commonality. As the following quote of Shaharyar Khan, the chairman of the Pakistan Cricket Board, proves, there is hardly anything that would equate cricket as such a powerful aspect of identity formation in Pakistan: “In Pakistan it [cricket] is the strongest unifying force amongst its people, young and old, rich or poor, man or woman, Shia or Sunni, Pathan or Sindhi. It brings a unity in peacetime only achieved in times of war” (qtd. in Bandyopadhyay 101).
After gaining independence, success on international field and mainly in matches against the former colonial oppressor was thus naturally seen as a major part of the achievement of decolonisation. As evidenced by one historian of cricket, victory over
England in the early post-independence period was perceived with excitement. Stoddart remembers that “in 1954, just seven years after their nation‟s creation, Pakistanis were thrilled that their team won a test during its very first tour to England, the only team in cricket history to have done so” (668). The importance of the link between cricket, decolonisation and the forming of new national identity has also been shown by overwhelming support for the
Pakistani team from those of Pakistani descent in England. An editorial published in a leading
English cricket magazine, the Wisden Cricket Monthly, in 1987 can easily prove this. The editorial read that “hordes of Pakistan „supporters‟ came not merely to watch the cricket but to identify – with a fanatical frenzy and to the embarrassment of Imran and his players – with
„their team‟” (qtd. in Williams 96). It is no wonder then, given the sport‟s popularity and potency, that cricket has easily found its way into Pakistani politics, diplomatic processes and negotiations, national economy, and maintenance of cultural development. Williams observes
80 that not only have governments interfered with Pakistani cricket in order to bolster their popularity on domestic scene, “but this also suggests that they saw success in test cricket as a source of national prestige” (100). All that has been mentioned suggests that the recent trends in perceptions and representations of cricket in Pakistan have tended to gradually disassociate the game from its colonial past, while central focus has shifted on the ties between cricket and patriotism. Performing well at cricket or showing loyal and fervent support for the national team can well be seen as a readiness of being a devout nationalist. How close and strong the ties between cricket and nationalism are can be inferred from the recent (March 2009) terrorist attack on Sri Lankan national cricket team in Pakistani Lahore. The assault was carried out when the Sri Lankan team was travelling to a stadium where it should have met the Pakistani team in a match. Though the background of the attack has not been revealed and the attackers have not been identified yet the significant fact remains that cricket has become a politicised commodity and a site of such extreme pressures.
4.5 Cricket, Postcolonialism and The Relations Between
Pakistan and Its Former Metropolis
It has been explained in the theoretical section that postcolonialism does not simply arrive with the demise of colonialism and independence of formerly oppressed territories, and does not represent a sudden change. What we encounter here is rather a continual, uninterrupted process of development of cultural environments, power relations, cultural and ideological exchanges and redefinitions. Postcolonialism suggests, as has been illustrated, that the current state of the world has been inflected by colonialism whose legacies in form of material realities and modes of representation are still pertinent to contemporary societies. We will now have a look at some features of Pakistani cricket that clearly point to its postcolonial nature.
81 I will once again briefly use the above-mentioned attack on Sri Lankan cricketers for the start. The connection of cricket and violence on a postcolonial location is the significant point here. According to Achille Mbembe, a postcolonialism theorist, “the colony is primarily a place where an experience of violence and upheaval is lived, where violence is built into structures and institutions” (qtd. in Morton 170). Mbembe thus suggests that colonial experience is tainted by violent political foundations of a colony. He then questions whether decolonisation and political sovereignty in postcolony can make any changes to these violent foundations. As the reality of many postcolonial sites and, among others, the case of Sri
Lankan cricketers demonstrate, it is very difficult to bring about any change. By drawing attention to this notion, however, I wanted to show that even in this respect cricket and its connection with politics can be involved in the postcolonial discussion.
Cricket, it can be assumed, is a truly postcolonial game. It was born in the metropolis and has been appropriated in colonies where it has outlived formal colonialism. Dimeo and
Kay in this respect claim that “cricket in particular is complex in postcolonial terms. England may be the historical „metropole‟ but it is gradually losing its grip on how the game is being commercialised and „globalised‟” (1264). As we already know, however, imperial powers usually tend to preserve their domination in various forms of cultural, political and commercial exchange with their former dependencies. In this sense cricket can be illustrative as regards power relations between Britain and the cricketing postcolonial countries. As the following discussion attempts to disclose, cricket has been an extension of British colonial power that has stretched beyond direct political rule.
In the world of international cricket, an English private members‟ club, the
Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC), used to work as a major governing and executive body.
Stoddart observes that the club “was the supreme lawmaker and settler of behavioural standards in that game […]. These hierarchies were a most important part of imperial rule
82 because culturally they emphasised the all-pervading British influence (659). The club was established in 1787 and until 1993 its president nominated the chairman of the International
Cricket Council (ICC), while the club provided the administration of the ICC. These facts clearly imply that the MCC was intent on keeping alive its colonising mission. That this sentiment has still been endorsed can be proved by a quote from the current MCC‟s website.
At one of the introductory web pages we can read the following: “Today, MCC‟s role remains as relevant as ever. From guarding the game‟s Laws to safeguarding its Spirit, and from promoting cricket to young people to looking after Lord‟s, MCC is committed to the good of the game.” The fact that the headquarters of the ICC remained at Lord‟s, the ground of the club, even after 1993 also provides evidence of the continuing British dominance in cricket‟s international administration. As regards the history of the ICC and its links with the British colonial system, Kaufman and Patterson raise these interesting points: “Cricket has never been an Olympic sport, and its main international body, the ICC, was originally an appendage of the British colonial state. Until 1965, in fact, it was the express policy of the ICC to admit only Commonwealth countries as members – the International Cricket Council was actually named the Imperial Cricket Council until 1965 […]” (85). The views of cricket as a colonial endeavour have not only been limited to those who hold the reins of the game‟s administration. William Deeds, a former Conservative minister and editor of The Daily
Telegraph from 1974 to 1986, was in 1994 reported in The Independent to have observed that when “we gave up the Empire and the white man‟s burden, we passed much of the load on to our cricketers” (qtd. in Williams 101).
The privileged position of England in terms of international cricket naturally raised opposition. In the 1980s and 1990s much of the resentment was expressed by the Pakistani delegates at the ICC. As Williams observes, “details of the ICC‟s internal politics are scarce.
Only briefest of statements are issued to the media after meetings. Sketchy evidence suggests
83 that friction was common between the England and Pakistani representatives […] England‟s privileged position was seen as a vestige of imperialism” (101). Pakistan raised several objections about the way international cricket was run and administered. Among these were, for example, protests against the dominance of Lord‟s (see above) and the England-Australia veto in the ICC‟s resolutions, or the call for neutral umpires at test matches (matches between national teams that have been granted a test status by the ICC). Much dispute at the ICC occurred mainly in 1993 when the site for the 1996 Cricket World Cup was to be settled.
English delegates had assumed that organisation of the event would be assigned to England, as had already been decided before. This decision was, however, overturned by the efforts of
Pakistani, Indian and Sri Lankan cricket officials, and it was eventually decided that the
World Cup would be jointly hosted by India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. Dimeo and Kay thus describe the circumstances of outvoting the expected English organisation:
When the 1996 CWC was awarded to South Asia, many traditionalists decried
the fact that money seemed so prominent a factor in the bidding process. The
South Asian organising committee, known as PILCOM, had essentially stolen
a march on England, who were favourites to host the 1996 event, by offering
larger financial deals to other cricketing countries and making promises about
merchandising and marketing (1268).
The final decision was met by severe criticism from many cricket administrators and observers in England. Much of it was based on reproaches against the South Asian contributions to commercialisation and globalisation of the game. This criticism was obviously founded upon, and contaminated by, a traditionalist, ethnocentric approach towards cricket. English cricket traditionalists simply saw it as a danger of spoiling the culture of the game. Dimeo and Kay, nevertheless, claim that the South Asian delegates by all means
“deserved the World Cup and held the future of the game, as the massive popularity of cricket
84 and its heroes facilitated much improved media deals, sponsorship packages and branding”
(1268). This was exactly what many saw as a threat to the “Spirit” of the game that MCC seeks to safeguard, and thus as a conduct that would go against “the good of the game.” The
Pakistani representatives at the ICC were denounced for their keen support of this pursuit.
Commenting the decision, an English journalist thus expressed his view in The Independent:
“To restrained English eyes, perhaps the most telling aspect of the sub-continent‟s enthusiasm for cricket is that it is fuelled partly by a love of fame and glamour” (qtd. in Dimeo and Kay
1268). Voices from the Subcontinent responded to such accusation by pointing to the reluctance of the English to accept the transition of power to former colonies, something unthinkable after the years of their domination. One of the Pakistani cricket administrators said that the English officials suffered from “the Raj hangover […]. They cannot accept the colonials beating them at their own game […]. The future of the game is shifting to the sub- continent” (qtd. in Williams 102). Dimeo and Kay argue that “the postcolonial hangover of old colonial days” is responsible for stereotypes and feelings of superiority that shape the attitudes towards South Asia that can be found also in media coverage. They claim that “the terminology used to describe South Asian people provides sufficient evidence of this. Alan
Lee, writing in the Times, described Pakistani fans as „hysterics‟ and Indian fans as
„impressionable‟ people who are happy to see players as „demi-gods‟; elsewhere he wrote of the „fevered, irrational atmospheres of Bangalore and Calcutta‟” (1269). Another answer from the South Asian supporters came in the critique of Mihir Bose, an Indian-born journalist, whose opinion was that the English representatives had expected the meeting to be “yet another old boys‟ gathering with the associate members continuing to be treated „much as the
Soviet Union used to treat its Eastern European satellites‟” (qtd. in Williams 102). Such fragments of the bitter exchange of views following the decision on the 1996 Cricket World
85 Cup arrangements provide an illuminating insight into the postcolonial tensions that dominate the cricketing relations between England and its former South Asian colonies.
In the atmosphere of these negotiations, Pakistan was seen and represented by English cricket journalists through the optics of persisting cultural imperialism. Pakistan‟s representatives were accused of attempts to improve their position in the administration of international cricket at the expense of England. The effort to increase the Pakistani influence was questioned and perceived with animosity. The editor of Wisden Cricket Monthly asked in
1986 whether the Pakistani efforts were informed by a “Lahore/Karachi aim to centre world cricket power there” (qtd. in Williams 102). One year later, a former England captain,
Raymond Illingworth, referred in Daily Mirror to a controversial incident between the
English captain Mike Gatting and Pakistani umpire Shakoor Rana during a test match in
Faisalabad, Pakistan. The incident resulted in a warning of the ICC that Gatting would be stripped of his captaincy in case he did not apologise. Gatting issued a written excuse under the threat. Illingworth then reacted in the press and claimed that the issue was part of
an international plot to deprive this country of its influence in world cricket – a
political power game.
Cricketwise, Pakistan has always been iffy, and Pakistanis, in the main,
difficult. Now they‟re becoming downright Bolshie. Given a chance they
would trample all over us […].
Out there I heard and read repeatedly of campaigns to take International
Cricket Conference to the sub-continent and to blazes with England […].
We have spread the game and made allowances for eccentricities in
other countries. But we have been weak […].
It‟s time we showed we won‟t tolerate being messed about (qtd. in
Williams 102).
86 Such harsh reactions demonstrate well with what resentment the prospect of the new balance of power in the ICC was met. Again, the words used allude to the melancholy with which some perceived the loss of colonial domination as it manifested itself in the dealings of international cricket.
Another politically incorrect remark that found its way to a cricket magazine in 1989 was connected with a debate over granting a test status to the Sri Lankan team, which would mean that Sri Lanka would also become a full member of the ICC. Pakistani officials, unsatisfied with the existing power relations, supported this move. The reaction in Wisden
Cricket Monthly read that “collectively the coloured group has bedevilled the game. It is time for others to form a common front in defence of it.” The author of it now saw the ICC as “that shoddy body” which had been getting “further and further off the rails for many years” (qtd. in Williams 102). Pakistan and India have been able to assert themselves increasing influence in the running of international cricket since the mid-1990s. With it, and with the astounding popularity of the game in the Subcontinent, cricket has been elevated to inexperienced spheres of commercialisation and globalisation. Thanks to policies introduced by the president of the
ICC, Jagmohan Dalmiya, an Indian businessman who was appointed to the office in 1997, and supported by Pakistan and Sri Lanka, there has been a great rise in number of one-day international matches being played also in countries with little tradition of cricket playing.
These matches have attracted mass television audiences, thus generating huge profits. With respect to such developments in international cricket, Dimeo and Kay observe that “somewhat ironic is [the fact] that the former imperial power and home of cricket, England, is no longer in a position to make the sport a viable commercial entity. Cricket has neither the popularity, marketing power or commercial base to make much impression on the British public and certainly will not in the foreseeable future be able to compete against soccer and rugby”
(1268). The commercialisation brought about by the Asian-led efforts, however, has caused
87 concerns among English traditionalists about devaluation of the right spirit of cricket.
Accusations have been made of greed and incompetence on the side of the Asian representatives. These views reflect the anxieties over the Asian drive in the administration of international cricket which has led to setting the game more in the context of the modern globalised sport and world in general. All this provokes strong cricket-colonial nostalgia rising from the fact that “a virtuous game that was the repository of cherished values, and was once a means of civilising the colonial native, has been appropriated by the native and become something contemptible in the process” (Dimeo and Kay 1273).
4.5.1 Cricket and the Pakistani Other
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, many of the England – Pakistan cricket matches were tainted by nasty feelings on both sides. Mutual resentment was sparked by a series of accusations of cheating aimed at Pakistani players and umpires. The umpires were accused of unjust decisions made in favour of the Pakistani team, and the players were denounced for ball tampering. Many in the English cricket embraced the view that cheating is common in
Pakistani cricket. This view was reflected in various observations of the Pakistani conditions.
Tom Graveney, a former English player and cricket broadcaster at that time, said to a reporter from Daily Mirror in 1987 that when “you go to the sub-continent you know that two things will happen. You will suffer Delhi belly – and you will get done by the umpires […]. Claims of cheating by Pakistani players are nothing new. They have been doing it since 1951 when I first toured there […] it has got worse and worse” (qtd. in Williams 93). Some cases of
Pakistani cheating were confirmed. Pakistani umpires unofficially admitted that captains of the Pakistani team were asked for instructions before some matches. One umpire claimed that the Umpires‟ Association was not independent enough of the Pakistan Cricket Board. Another admitted that there was some pressure on umpires to support the national team. As a result both these umpires resigned in 1980. Evidence was also obtained from video recordings that
88 Pakistani players tampered with the ball on some occasions. As a consequence, cheating became to be seen as part of Pakistani cricket policy. A wave of resentment rose, which was reflected in the British, mainly tabloid, press. Insulting and stereotypical labels dominated the headlines during Pakistani – England confrontations. Some of these read, as Williams records,
“PAK YER BAGS” or “PAK OFF THE CHEATS FOR FIVE YEARS” (96). Williams also remembers that tabloid “readers were offered the chance to win a „Sun Fun Dartboard – Stick
One on the Cheat of Pakistan!‟ which had an image of Shakoor Rana [the umpire who was involved in an incident with an English captain; see above] on it so that „you can hit him right between the eyes‟” (96). But stereotypical views were reflected also in broadsheets. In Sunday
Telegraph, for example, an article appeared claiming that “the Pakistan cricket board had a corrupt view of the game and that fair play was probably only seen on Pakistan cricket grounds when they were used for public floggings” (Williams 96).
In reality, however, based on the assumption that cheating is endemic in Pakistani cricket, any misunderstandings or mistakes by Pakistani umpires were seen as cheating.
Unjust decisions on the side of English umpires that favoured the English team, however, were perceived as benign human errors. As Williams observes, Pakistani umpires were dismissed as cheats, while English umpires were regarded as the best in the world” (97). And it should be remembered, as I have pointed out above, that it were the Pakistani officials who called neutral umpires, a demand that the ICC opposed. The England representatives were convinced that given the unprecedented mastery of English umpires, there was no need of neutral umpires at test matches in England. In 1985 the editorial in a prestigious English cricket publication claimed that with neutral umpires “England would never play under the best umpires which are their own, and that would hardly be satisfactory” (qtd. in Williams
98). There were contrary voices, however, among Pakistani players who saw a clear bias in
English umpires‟ decisions that prevented Pakistan from winning some matches. After a
89 series of matches in England in 1992 this became so obvious that even some English cricket reporters admitted that there were mistakes among the English umpires that aided English victories. The Guardian suggested that the umpires were “intentionally biased – all right, cheats.” Another account was, however, more open about the issue. His author observed that there was
a smell during the fourth Test I have never detected before in a Test in
England. There was something in addition to the inevitable, unconscious, bias
which umpires have towards home teams […]. Tight-lipped and highly formal,
the umpiring […] generated the impression that, come what may, judgements
were not going to be delivered in Pakistan‟s favour until England were safely
established in both their innings (qtd. in Williams 99).
Such observations clearly point to the fact that a certain degree of bias cannot be avoided in any prestigious match. More importantly, it obviously uncovers the truth that the English were not better in their behaviour, at least not substantially.
As regards the ball tampering issues, events in the early 1990s showed that the practice is not just an underpinning of Pakistani cricket that had become thus stigmatised. On the contrary, it was now disclosed that different forms of ball tampering had long been used also in English cricket. Williams claims that “on the England tour of India in 1976-77 laboratory tests proved that England players had smeared Vaseline on the ball to help their bowlers.” In 1992 “Michael Atherton was allowed to retain the England captaincy after being noticed by a television camera rubbing dirt on a ball and then misleading the match referee about this […]” (100). A few weeks later confessions of some English players followed. One said that players “have been messing up the ball as long as I‟ve been around, and from what I hear, a lot longer” and another declared that “everybody knows that ball-doctoring is as much
90 a part of English cricket as the tea interval” (qtd. in Williams 99). In reaction to the whole ball tampering matter an Asian newspaper published in England observed the following:
The issue is no longer about ball-doctoring or cheating […]. There is no sense
of justice or honour in the British press‟s crusade to ride the world of “Paki
cheats” […]. There is only one over-riding and uncontrollable emotion that is
fuelling this relentless attack – Jealousy. The only crime that Pakistan‟s
cricketers are guilty of is that of being simply better than England […] (qtd. in
Williams 97).
What is important to note in this respect is the fact that ball tampering on the English side did not trigger such sharp and broad reaction as the Pakistani acts.
All the beliefs that Pakistan could only beat England by cheating and double measurements applied on the respective teams and umpires clearly point to an important aspect prevailing in the postcolonial England – Pakistan cricket. It is the inability of some of the members of English society involved to accept the postcolonial conditions of their relationship towards their former colony. The aforementioned cases of stereotypical and insulting representations of the Pakistani “other”, to use Said‟s term, pertaining to the postcolonial discourse in cricket reflect the continuing views of moral and cultural supremacy that were an indelible part of the British imperial endeavours, and that were so promptly used for its justification. The “otherness”, as these cricket examples show, continues, unfortunately, to be perceived as inferiority. What this indicates in the postcolonial discourse is the persistent reluctance to abandon the course of imperial domination underlined by feelings of superiority.
Closely related to these perceptions of postcolonial “otherness” is the inability or lack of will to grasp, accept and respect difference as represented by cultural as well as physical alterity. This postcolonial mindset, too, found its manifestations in the Pakistan – England
91 cricket. Like many other areas, cricket has been a site of white hostility towards immigrants from the Subcontinent. I have already noted above that people of Pakistani ancestry living in
England often identified with the Pakistan team when they played in England. This support was seen as insufficient loyalty to English society and led to various racial abuses. In 1996
The Observer reported, for example, that at a Pakistan-England match in Leeds white spectators shouted “Stab the Paki” and there were “racist overtones right over the length and breadth of the Western Terrace […] loud, clear and squalid” (qtd. in Williams 95). Such racial insults were at times accompanied by fights, and led to mutual animosities between England and Pakistan supporters.
The inability to accept the culture of the “other” was also reflected by complaints of
English players about food and conditions when they toured Pakistan and by their views of the country. From their limited English perspective some saw it as “the kind of place to send your mother-in-law for a month, all expenses paid” (qtd. in Williams 95). Derek Pringle, a former cricketer and now a cricket journalist, remarked that few English players “ever attempted to embrace or understand the culture they were plonked in the middle of, preferring instead to cocoon themselves with videotapes and familiar comestibles” (qtd. in Williams 95).
The English players clearly stood for those who have been unable to grasp the political, economic and cultural conditions of contemporary Pakistan, or any other postcolonial location, in the context of its postcolonial development. For in order to get the complete picture, one is required to admit and understand the fact that the current state of affairs is to a large degree the result of the British impact as a part of European colonial expansion.
92 5. Conclusion
By focusing on a very specific form of cultural practice the present Master‟s thesis attempts to contribute to the wide-ranging discussion of the postcolonial. As the work of scholars like James, Geertz or Eichberg has shown, sport as both a physical performance and a great popular spectacle fits well into the category, alongside dance for example, of body culture. Any body culture has always been an important cultural phenomenon endowed with a lot of meanings and invested with a broad range of values. As such, body cultures provide much potency in an analysis of the cultural environment in which they thrive and which they, on the other hand, may partly shape as a strong force accompanying a whole range of other socio-cultural, political and economic factors. In the analysis of postcolonial cultures, as has been pointed to, this potency has rather been underestimated so far, and thus given relatively scant attention.
The work of some well-established figures in postcolonial studies, such as Said,
Bhabha, Hall or Spivak has also relevance to body cultures such as sport. Though these scholars barely touch on the issue of bodily practices, their findings can well be applied on the area. With the help of their and other works dealing with postcolonialism many important implications that sport in the postcolonial context carries can be considered.
Though the scope of the present thesis has gradually been narrowed to the Pakistani postcolonial experience and its reflections and parallels in the game of cricket, the paper has sought to provide a more general discussion on the issue of postcolonialism and its preceding stages in order to locate the key elements in the postcolonial discourse. The selected postcolonial location has also been introduced in a wider historical context, thus providing a brief insight into the background of the British political influence over the territory and its cultures. All this has been done for the reader‟s better orientation in the discussed subject.
With the main aim of my argument still in mind, however, I have focused just on the relevant
93 concepts and notions. Doing this was, nevertheless, a clear need, as the study of postcolonialism has become enormously complex, and could not have been dealt with properly in its breadth in this paper.
The final section of the thesis is meant as the climax of the discussion and has been inspired and partly informed by my personal experience and affection for Pakistan and its people. The reader‟s attention is fully drawn to the significance of sport in the postcolonial analysis. Cricket, as the de facto national sport in Pakistan, becomes obviously the prime focus. By setting the game in the postcolonial context, the present paper demonstrates what its role has been in the socio-cultural development of the Indian subcontinent: from being a tool of British cultural imperialism and colonialism to becoming a means of colonial resistance, national consciousness and identity formation. Cricket can thus be seen as an expression of postcolonial hybridity and mimicry, and reveals the postcolonial subject‟s ambivalence towards his colonial master. Brought to the Subcontinent by white imperialists, cricket was used in the colonial discourse to support the assumptions of white moral superiority and to
“civilise” the colonial subject by exposing him to sets of values and beliefs that were seen as
“proper”. After having been acculturated and appropriated in the Subcontinent, the game, however, has been invested with new meanings and functions, thus at times efficiently contesting some of the values it should have earlier promoted and defended. The Asian drive for greater commercialisation and globalisation of cricket can be seen as one of those new investments which, paradoxically, connects the game even tighter with one of the outcomes of
Western imperialism – the contemporary globalised World. The cricket context can also fruitfully illustrate how difficult it is to get rid of one of the colonial legacies, the still persistent assumptions of western superiority that were used in the colonial discourse to justify European colonial endeavours. Cricket as a catalyst in the postcolonial relationship
94 between England and Pakistan can thus clearly be considered one of those body cultures that
“perform the processes of postcolonial history” (Featherstone 94).
As regards the study of colonialism, Loomba claims that “each scholar, depending on her disciplinary affiliation, geographic and institutional location, and area of expertise, is likely to come up with a different set of examples, emphasis and perspective on the colonial question” (2). It was the aim of this thesis to point to a perspective that has been overlooked in the mainstream academia and to justify the relevance of Pakistani cricket for postcolonial analysis. And it was a welcome addition for the author that the work on the thesis provided him with the chance to elaborate on his personal, pleasurable experience.
95 6. Appendix
1. Teenage boys playing cricket on a city cricket field in Gilgit, Gilgit-Baltistan territory.
2. School uniforms have also remained as an imprint of the British influence in Pakistan, Gilgit.
96
3. Cricket is not the only British colonial legacy in terms of sport in Pakistan. Football tournament in Chitral, North-West Frontier Province.
4. Little boys practising bowling and batting on a street of Gilgit.
97
5. A painted sign of a cricket club in Lahore, the capital of Punjab Province.
Source: Author‟s photo archive.
Note: All images published in this thesis are the property of the author and cannot be reproduced without his consent.
98 7. English Résumé
This thesis elaborates on the significance of the game of cricket as a legacy of the
British colonialism in Pakistan. It approaches the game as an important and widespread cultural phenomenon through the theoretical framework of postcolonial studies.
The first part of the thesis introduces the reader to the theories of postcolonialism that are relevant to the scope of the discussion of this paper. It provides the reader with the necessary insight into the widely accepted concepts of postcolonial discourse and offers a concise outline of the main findings of some well-established authors of the field of postcolonial studies. The main argument of this section is the fact that examination of body cultures, an indelible part of wider culture of any society, has been underrepresented in the analysis of the postcolonial. Thus, as cricket obviously belongs to the sphere of body cultures, the paper attempts to contribute to the discussion of postcolonialism.
The second part of the paper acquaints the reader in brief with the history of the
Indian subcontinent under the British rule. Thus it describes the historical background of the political influence of the British Empire over the area and its peoples.
The final part is fully devoted to cricket and its place within postcolonial discourse.
First, it elaborates on the role of the game as an important tool for the practice of British cultural imperialism and colonialism. Then, cricket is shown as a cultural item that has been appropriated in the postcolonial location of the Indian subcontinent and has remained as a stronghold of Pakistan from which battles of colonial resistance and struggles over national identities have been fought against the former oppressor. The thesis thus aims to suggest that cricket as a body culture is a remarkable cultural phenomenon that is apparently relevant to the study of postcolonialism and has its place within postcolonial discourse.
99 8. Czech Résumé
Tato diplomová práce se věnuje významu kriketu jakožto britského koloniálního dědictví v Pákistánu. Kriket, který se na Indickém subkontinentu stal důležitým a populárním kulturním fenoménem, je nahlížen pomocí teorií rozvíjených v oblasti postkoloniálních studií.
První část uvádí čtenáře do širší problematiky postkolonialismu s důrazem na teorie, které jsou relevantní pro náplň této práce. Čtenář je tak seznámen se základními a široce uznávanými koncepty postkoloniálního diskurzu, stejně jako s prací uznávaných autorů oboru postkoloniálních studií. Hlavním argumentem této části práce je fakt, že oblasti tělesné kultury jako plnohodnotné a stálé součásti širší kultury jakékoli společnosti nebyla dosud v analýze postkoloniálních lokalit věnována dostatečná pozornost. Jelikož kriket je zřejmou součástí tělesné kultury, snaží se tato práce jeho zkoumáním přispět do obsáhlé diskuze postkoloniality.
Druhá část v krátkosti seznamuje čtenáře s historií Indického subkontinentu pod britskou nadvládou. Přináší tak popis historického pozadí politického vlivu Britského impéria na danou oblast a její obyvatele.
Závěrečná část se již plně věnuje kriketu a jeho pozici v postkoloniálním diskurzu.
Nejprve je objasněna důležitá role kriketu jako významného nástroje britské politiky kulturního imperialismu a kolonialismu. Posléze je poukázáno na sílu kriketu jako kulturního jevu, který si obyvatelé Indického subkontinentu osvojili a který posléze zůstal důležitým prostředkem, pomocí něhož Pákistánci obhajovali a definovali své národní identity a projevovali odpor vůči svému bývalému koloniálnímu utlačovateli. Práce se tak snaží poukázat na významnost tohoto kulturního fenoménu a jeho nezanedbatelné místo ve studiu postkolonialismu.
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