MAEG-09 VARDHAMAN MAHAVEER OPEN UNIVERSITY, KOTA CONTENTS Preface i Introduction ii Block-I Unit-1 Chinua Achebe’s : Things Fall Apart - I 1-13 Unit-2 Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart - II 14-24 Unit-3 Ice-Candy Man - I 25-42 Unit-4 Ice-Candy Man - II 43-51 Unit-5 “The Journey” by Jean Arasanayagam 52-68 Unit-6 “A Letter from India” by Intezar Hussain 69-79 Unit-7 A Study of Urmila Pawar’s “My Four Enemies” 80-91 Block-II Unit-8 Postcolonial Poetry 92-101 Unit-9 Language : Kamala Das’s and R. Parthasarathy’s Poems 102-118 Unit-10 Language : P.K. Page’s and Derek Walcott’s Poems 119-131 Unit-11 Territory and Homeland I 132-143 Unit-12 Territory and Homeland - II 144-157 Unit-13 Psychological Aspects of the ‘Self’: African Poetry 158-173 Unit-14 Perceptions of Women : Poems 174-189 Block-III Unit-15 Arun Prabha Mukherjee “Race Consciousness of a South 190-203 Asian (Canadian, of course) Female Academic” Unit-16 Partha Chatterjee: “Whose Imagined Community?” I 204-217 Unit-17 Partha Chatterjee: “Whose Imagined Community?” II 218-229 Unit-18 Ashis Nandy’s the Intimate Enemy I 230-242 Unit-19 Ashis Nandy’s the Intimate Enemy II 243-256 Block-IV Unit-20 A Study of Tale-Danda I 257-273 Unit-21 A Study of Tale-Danda II 274-292 Block-V Unit-22 “The Diaspora in Indian Culture” by Amitav Ghosh 293-303 Unit-23 Naipaul’s the Wounded Civilization I 304-314 Unit-24 Naipaul’s the Wounded Civilization II 315-324 PREFACE Welcome to this course on postcolonial literature, the material for which has been carefully selected and prepared to enable your study. This is a dynamic area, extremely relevant to the questions of identity, nationhood, location and power structures. I take this opportunity to thank the writers, senior scholars all, who have spared their time to write the units for this course. My thanks are also due to Kshamata Choudhary for all the effort she has put into this. We hope the readers/learners enjoy this as much as we have enjoyed writing and putting it together. Jasbir Jain i INTRODUCTION Postcolonial is a term that is off-repeated and often talked about. More important than the term itself are the questions such as why the need for the term arose, why it became popular and what does it achieve when incorporated into literary theory. Finally, what is it that it leaves out and, in order to make up for the shortcomings, what are the likely strategies the writer and the reader can adopt. It is a term which has been created with a retrospective framework in mind. Thus we extend its application to literatures that were being written much before the term came into use. It is at times used with a hyphen. Elleke Boehmer’s views are that post-colonialism when used with a hyphen marks shift in time and is the period after the independence of colony, while postcolonialism without a hyphen indicates the response/resistance to colonialism from its very beginning (Colonial and Postcolonial Literature, p.3). T. Vijay Kumar similarly feels that the hyphen emphasizes the ‘colonialism’, it effectively separates the colonial past from the postcolonial present (Trivedi and Mukherjee, “Post-colonialism or Postcolonial?”, pp.196-197). One is however inclined to treat this more as a matter of attitude. As long as one feels constantly responsive to the colonial interaction one marks it with a hyphen, and once when one casts off the burden, it becomes a matter of the past. Vijay Kumar cites Ashis Nandy when he says “India is not non-West; it is India”, that is we define ourselves through our own being and existence. Fairly increasingly, the term is now being used without a hyphen. Why postcolonialism? It is important to engage with the writing and the theory behind it in order to (a) understand histories, (b) encounter the narratives of dislocation; (c) effect a rupture with hegemonic influences; (d) work out a relationship between indigenous aesthetics, subaltern histories, native concerns and writing on one hand and the western readings and interpretation of these. For any scholar with any serious academic aspirations, it becomes necessary to engage with the above issues as, in the last fifty years or so, the nature of writing and its critical evaluation have changed making new demands on scholarship. In the 60s there was a huge debate going on whether ‘protest’ literature could be considered good writing or not. Actually right from the thirties onwards, when ideology made a forceful entry into writing, the argument between ‘commitment’ and ‘propaganda’ surfaced. Later, works like Things Fall Apart were initially seen as ‘protest’ writing and thus falling outside the pattern of aesthetic judgment. Western criticism was unable to accommodate this kind of literature and critics began to debate whether new forms of evaluation and aesthetic yardsticks had to be worked out. This was a ‘colonial’ attitude, with those in power unwilling to accommodate difference. When gradually centres of Commonwealth writing and later Postcolonial Literature were instituted, it was more as a concession to the writings from the erstwhile colonies than as an acknowledgment of their value. Arun Prabha Mukherjee sees it as a gesture of clubbing all the together literatures, from different historical and geographical backgrounds, ii under a convenient umbrella of postcolonialism and in the process, ignoring their heterogeneity (1996 : 13-15). Arif Dirlik located the emergence of postcolonialism as a parallel to the "consciousness of global capitalism in the 1980s", which marked the arrival of the Third World intellectuals in the First World academia (329). Postcolonialism has several plus points. Some of these are : (i) a marked shift in literary aesthetics; (ii) transformation from an ‘object’ position on part of the colonised to a new self- conscious awareness of a ‘subject’ position; (iii) a delving into one’s own history, past and culture and interrogating it; (iv) legitimisation of protest as a subject matter of literature; (v) an increased consciousness of economic and ideological issues; (vi) analysis and theorisation of the concepts of identity and identity formation; (vii) increased visibility for the erstwhile colonies; (viii) compelling the ‘other’ into an act of self-reflection; (ix) enhancing the openness of narrative and linguistic structures as folk forms, ways of storytelling and languages make their entry into mainstream literature; (x) as power-structures are opened out, contested and resisted, a continuous process of change is initiated. One could go on listing a number of shifts, several overlappings and merging into others, but it is important to recognize that neither the writing, nor the theory has stood still. It is constantly in a state of flux. Other Issues and Concerns : There are several minus points as well which scholars constantly question and resist. Some of these are : (i) its concern, especially in the first phase, with literatures written in English. It is only approximately from 1990 onwards that literatures in translation have made an entry into this area; (ii) it has increasingly become identified with the diaspora and its writing; (iii) theorisation from the erstwhile colonies is either limited, or has gone unrecognized, or has been formulated by diasporic critics. This has given an opportunity to western critics to say that the Third World continues to supply the raw material for theory formation by the west (Mitchell qtd. by Darshan Perushek, “Postcolonial Realities, Poststructuralist Diversions: An unamused Exchange”, Economic and Political Weekly, January 29, 1994); (iv) the homogeneity which has been imposed on literatures emerging from the former colonies is also a limiting factor; (v) we have also to constantly go on re-evaluating all critical terms and positions as several of these are prejudicial to the interests of the Third World. Each term needs to be opened out, discussed and debated. We need to question them in order to resist hegemonic formations. (vi) Somewhere the whole notion of quality is still missing. iii On-going Discourse Despite the above minus points, postcolonialism is a discourse that needs to be engaged in, as terms such as identity, nation, homeland, memory, nostalgia as well as hybridity and mimicry need to be questioned, re-viewed, re-presented and asserted over and over again. In this course we have tried to address several of these problems. The units have been divided accordingly. We have two novels - one deals with Africa, the other with the partition; three short stories, each one of which opens out a new discourse and takes you to a different country, class or caste. One of them is about dalit identity, another about the impact of the country’s division on the Muslim identity, the third on Sri Lankan strife. The poetry section is divided along language, homeland and territory, women’s positions and psychological expressions. Then you have a play about resistance and social change, a travelogue, a short political commentary woven into the diasporic condition and two very perceptive studies on ‘imagining the nation’ and on the liberation of the nation psyche. This is a journey of self-discovery. And travelling on this road will help you understand your position vis-á-vis the global issues. We travel through the different genres: fiction, poetry, autobiography, travelogue, drama, social and literary criticism and through different landscapes, histories and geographies. Some of the best minds in the country have prepared these for you. But please remember that the text is always important. You need to read it and encounter it first hand. Quality does not admit of short-cuts.