The Colonial and National Formations of the National College of Arts, Lahore, circa 1870s to 1960s

The Colonial and National Formations of the National College of Arts, Lahore, circa 1870s to 1960s: De-scripting the Archive

The Colonial and National Formations of the National College of Arts, Lahore, circa 1870s to 1960s: De-scripting the Archive

Nadeem Omar Tarar

Anthem Press

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This edition first published in UK and USA 2022

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Copyright © Nadeem Omar Tarar 2022

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021951826

ISBN-13: 978-1-78527-792-4 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-78527-792-8 (Hbk)

Cover Image: The cover image is the property of Rashid Arshed and Sang-a-Meel. The photograph is from the Exhibition at the National College of Arts.

This title is also available as an e-book.

I dedicate this book to the traditional artists of Pakistan—the subalterns of South Asian art history

CONTENTS

List of Figures

Acknowledgments

A Note on Style

Introduction

Chapter One

Crafting Artists as Primitive Artisans: Ethnology, Exhibitions and Museums in Colonial Punjab

Chapter Two

The Visual Literacy Orientalism in Punjab: The Mayo School of Art in the Late Nineteenth Century

Chapter Three

From Hereditary Craftsmanship to Modern Art and Design for Industry: The Mayo School of Art in the Early Twentieth Century

Chapter Four

Framing of a National Tradition: Aesthetic Modernism and Traditional Art at the NCA

Epilogue

Notes

Bibliography

Glossary

Index

FIGURES

0.1 The state of administrative records in the storeroom in 1999

0.2 The birth of the NCA Archives, 2000

0.3 The staff of NCA Archives engaged in paper restoration, 2002

0.4 The research and documentation staff of NCA Archives, 2006

1.1 A photograph of Zamzamah canon, with auxiliary decoration by the students of the Mayo School, placed in front of the Lahore Museum, 1930s

1.2 The façade of the Lahore Museum, the 1950s

2.1 The coat of arms of the Mayo School of Art, designed by Lockwood Kipling

2.2 A group photograph of the pioneer teachers of the Mayo School of Art including Sher Muhmmad and Ram Singh, with the founding principal, Lockwood Kipling, 1880

2.3 A terracotta sculpture bust by John Lockwood Kipling

2.4 A handwritten letter by Bhai Ram Singh, Principal, the Mayo School of Art, 1911

3.1 The title page of the official magazine of the Tanning Institute, Jallundar, Punjab, 1935

3.2 A group photograph of the principal Lionel Heath and the staff of the school including Sher Muhmmad and S N Gupta, 1915

3.3 A faded photograph of Abdur Rahman Chughtai, 1920s

3.4 A copy of the Abdur Rahman Chughtai’s letter of submission of his paintings for the British Empire Exhibition

3.5 A photograph from the Annual Arts and Crafts Exhibition of the Mayo School of Art

3.6 The title page of a course book on industrial art designed, lithographed and printed at the Mayo School of Art, 1919

3.7 A publicity poster for fundraising for military hospitals during World War I, designed, lithographed, and printed at the Mayo School of Art, 1917

3.8 A publicity poster for an exhibition of craftworks in Lahore Museum, in 1917

3.9 An annual calendar designed by Abdur Rahman Chughtai, which was lithographed and printed at the Mayo School of Art, 1920

3.10 A publicity poster designed by Abdur Rahman Chughtai for a theatrical performance, which was lithographed and printed at the Mayo School of Art in 1918

3.11 An educational certificate for the Diocese of Lahore, designed, lithographed and printed at the Mayo School of Art

3.12 The title page of the book on morals prepared, designed by a student, Kundun Lal, which was lithographed and printed at the Mayo School of Art, in 1920

3.13 A group photograph of the school staff including S. N. Gupta at the retirement of Lionel Heath, Principal, Mayo School of Art, 1929

4.1 The first emblem of the state of Pakistan, made by Abdur Rahman Chughtai, 1947

4.2 The first postal stamp of Pakistan designed by Abdur Rahman Chughtai, 948

4.3 The second emblem of the state of Pakistan, designed by Mehraj Muhamad, a graduate of the Mayo School of Art, 1954

4.4 The building of the Mayo School of Art in the 1950s

4.5 President Ayub Khan, touring exhibition at NCA, 1962

4.6 The photograph of the first generation of students and teachers of the NCA with the principal, Mark Sponenburgh, 1960

4.7 President Ayub Khan, inaugurating the painting exhibition at the Karachi Arts Council, 1959

4.8 A photograph of the first Pakistani principal of NCA, Shakir Ali

4.9 Mark Sponenburgh’s final handshake with his students, while boarding a train departing from Lahore, 1961

4.10 The visiting American sculptor Mary Lewis and Haji Muhmmad Sharif

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Writing the book has been a long and arduous journey that has incurred many debts, both personal and institutional. The book grew out of my doctoral work on the early history of the Mayo School of Art at the Department of Art History and Theory, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia, for which my supervisor Diane Losche is warmly acknowledged for her profound belief in my work. The research for a postcolonial education was made possible through South Asia Regional Fellowship program of Social Science Research Council (SSRC), New York, in 2005–6. I also wish to thank Itty Abraham who was then with the SSRC for his insightful conversations on the comparative historical trajectories of the nation-states in South Asia that became part of the book. I would like to recognize the invaluable suggestions that I received from SSRC fellow Deeptha Achar at the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, India, that sharpened my understanding of the contrasting perspectives of art education in India and Pakistan.

In early 2007, as part of the Charles Wallace Fellowship program at the Department of History at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London, I was allowed to make the best use of the British Library and Archives. Avril Powell and Daud Ali at SOAS are remembered for their academic support and friendship. I am deeply indebted to Francesca Orsini at SOAS from whom I learned to historicize the contemporary miniature paintings from Pakistan as part of broader aesthetic traditions of the arts of the illustrated manuscripts of Northern India. In 2008–9, the Post-Doctoral Fellowship at Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), United States, allowed me to explore the aesthetic reinvention of the Indian painting as a national art. I am grateful to Aga Khan Program Director Nasser Rabbat and faculty member Nada Shabout for the fellowship opportunity. I also owe a huge moral and intellectual debt to Arindam Dutta at MIT, which can never be truly paid.

At the National College of Arts (NCA), Lahore, I would like to extend my deepest gratitude to Shabnam Khan, former principal of NCA for her unswerving faith in my abilities. Among those who shared the passion for archival research, Naazish Attaullah and Iram Zia are duly acknowledged. I would also like to thank Rabia Nadir, Shahid Mirza, Quddus Mirza, Hamra Abbas, Shaila Bhatti, Virginia Whiles, Fatima Zahra Hassan and Rashid Rana for sharing their passion for the history of art and architecture of Pakistan. I must also acknowledge the valuable contributions of Sajida Haider Vandal, former principal of NCA for supporting the NCA Archives (NCAA) which helped stem the loss of institutional memory. The photographic collection of NCA’s first instructor in photography, the late Mian Majeed, donated by Mian Waheed, which supplemented the written records at NCAA, needs to be acknowledged for posterity. I am thankful to the research and support staff of NCAA, Maaria Waseem, Gulzar Ahmad, Mubashir Ahmad and Asad Hussain. Among the historians associated with NCAA, I am grateful to Hussain Ahmad Khan and Tahir Kamran for their work. I am particularly indebted to Iram Zia for being a constant source of information and advice on institutional history. The book would not have been possible without her unrelenting support.

I cannot begin to express my thanks to Arif Chughtai, managing trustee of Chughtai Museum Lahore, for the generous help with museum publications and permission to reproduce images from the museum collection for the book. I would also like to thank Rashid Arshed, one of Mayo School’s last alumni, for his generous supply of a rare photograph of NCA’s history, which adorns the title of the book. At the Punjab Archives, Abbas Chughtai has been a generous source of information on the early history of the Mayo School of Art. I would like to thank Ahmed Saleem, founder of the South Asian Research and Resource Center, Islamabad, for the archival information on the history of Pakistan. Thanks are due to my anthropologist friend Sajjad Haider at the Quaid Azam University who has been a lifeline for online academic resources. Across the border, I am indebted to Ali Nadeem Rezavi a Professor of History at the Aligarh University, India, for his academic support.

From the Lahore circle of postcolonial intellectuals, I owe a special thanks to Amir Riaz, Khalid Malik, Saeed ur Rehman, Furrukh Manzoor Mahmood ul Hasan, Iqbal Qaiser, Syeda Diep, Farrukh Sohail Goindi and Abid Saqi for serving as a sounding board for ideas on the colonial and precolonial history of Punjab. Special thanks are due to Ahmad Ali, Samina Choonara and Maryam Hussain for their insightful suggestions and unwavering support. I would like to extend my sincere thanks to Kamil Khan Mumtaz, Sajjad Kausar, Mian Ijaz ul Hassan, Tanvir Anjum, Furrukh Khan, Iftikhar Malik, Nadine Zubair, Peter Hoffenberg and Farid Panjwani for reading and commenting on the parts of the book. I would like to express my deepest appreciation for my intellectual mentor Mubarak Ali whose scholarship and friendship added the historical lens to my anthropological training. For hospitality and care for over thirty years, I am indebted to him and his family members Zakia Mubarak and his lovely daughter Nain Tara. Aslam Gurdaspuri, Zafar Khan and Pervaiz Vandal are duly acknowledged for the mentoring. Among my undergraduate teachers, I would like to especially thank Mirza Athar Baig at the Department of Philosophy, Government College University, Lahore, for teaching me how to think philosophically before I learned to write critically from Jonathan Simmons, then at the University of Nottingham, United Kingdom. I owe a special debt to Muhammad Arshad, then a professor at the Cadet College Hasanabdal, who became my primary source of intellectual inspiration for pursuing a scholarly life, which , as it was for him, became my passion and occupation.

Among the family, I have to start by thanking my beloved wife, Izzah Khan. From reading early drafts to giving me advice on the cover, she is as important to this book getting done as I am. To my children, Unaiza, Sachal and Aizah for their blind faith in my scholarly pursuits that took me away from them! My in-laws, Adnan Wahab Khan, Khazina Khan, Abdullah and Arieb, are warmly acknowledged for their hospitality. I am indebted to Ahsan Khan, Azha Khan, Shoib Khan, Shifa Khan, Mr. and Ms. Sultan Mahmood Khan for providing me the solace to write during months of Covid lockdown in Lahore. My siblings, Farooq Umar, Bushra Ismail, Tahira Shaheed and Amir Razzaq are acknowledged for their interest in my work. I would like to extend my gratitude to my guardian angels Salman Humayun and Sheraz Hyder for their unparalleled support. Among the friends, Atta ur Rehman, Shahid Razzaq, Zahid Ali, Asad Jamal, Shahid Usman, Shozab Abbas, Adil Yamin, Amjad Bhatti, Ayub Malik, Ibrar Humayun, Izhar-ul-Hassan and Iram Hameed are warmly acknowledged for their love and care. I would like to express my deepest appreciation to Nauman Naqvi presently at Habib University for inspiring and cajoling me to move on against the odds. I am also indebted to the founding members of Gandhara Resource Center Pakistan, Ayyaz Kiani, Iqbal Khattaq, Iftikhar Uddin Siddiqui, Riaz Ahmad, and Iftikhar Ahmad for hosting me in the last phase of writing the book at Taxila, my last refuge.

I cherish the ever-lasting memory of my dear departed friends, Bilal Ahmad, Satish Saberwal, Qadir Baksh Khan, Zubair Shafi Ghouri and Arfan Ghani, whose intellectual footprint is all over the book. I recall the hazy memories of my late mother, and father, Muhammad Ismail Shaheed: the quest for their tacit traces infected me with a thinking disease.

I would also thank the anonymous reviewers for their useful comments that helped improve the manuscript. Thanks to everyone on the Anthem Press team who helped me so much. Special thanks to Megan Greiving, the acquisitions editor, Jayashree project manager and Ashwathy Chandrasekar, the ever-patient production manager.

I would also like to thank all those students of NCA Lahore, who labored with us for creating order out of the chaos at the NCA Archives. Thanks are also due to the NCA fraternity—whose uncritical veneration of the past inspired this study.

Parts of the chapters of the book have appeared in the following journals and books:

John Lockwood Kipling, Ram Singh and the Mayo School of Art, Lahore. special issue, Kipling Journal 273 (May 2018): 7–22.

Framings of a National Tradition: Modern Masters and National Art History in Pakistan. Third Text 25, no. 5 (September 2011): 577–93.

From ‘Primitive’ Artisans to ‘Modern’ Craftsmen: Colonialism, Culture, and Art Education in the Late Nineteenth-Century Punjab. South Asian Studies 27, no. 2 (2011): 199–219.

Aesthetic Modernism in the Post-Colony: The Making of a National College of Art, Lahore. International Journal of Art and Design Education, 27, no. 3 (November 2008).

Chromolithography and the Mayo School of Art, Lahore (1917–1920 CE) in Mazaar, Bazaar: Design and Visual Culture in Pakistan. Ed. Saima Zaidi (Oxford University Press, Karachi, 2009).

Gandhara Studios, Taxila, Pakistan, 2022

A Note on Style

The meanings of the Hindi, Persian, Punjabi and Urdu words which appear in the text are given in italics. Spellings of the foreign language words have been left as they were found in the original. To emphasize the pejorative nature of words, extensive quotation marks are used.

INTRODUCTION

I do not believe that authors are mechanically determined by ideology, class or economic history, but authors are, I also believe, very much in the histories of their societies, shaping and shaped by that history and their social experience.¹

Writing institutional history based on archival records has its unique challenges, especially when the bare skeleton of chronological history is a mystery. Two decades of working through administrative records, spread over a century and a half, to tell a story of an institution that has never been told before was like working out a heap of pieces of a huge jigsaw puzzle whose shape is unknown. Archival research is marked by intense isolation and in many ways resembles penal isolation. Not only is the labor isolated, but its rewards are unknown. A piecemeal approach for putting the historical facts together was the inevitable outcome, which resulted in a series of snapshots into the history of the formation and transformation of Pakistan’s premier art institution. The National College of Arts (NCA) in Lahore, established as the Mayo School of Art in 1875, is the Pakistani equivalent of London’s South Kensington School of Design (presently Royal College of Art, London, United Kingdom). The comparative renown of the Mayo School of Art, where Rudyard Kipling’s father, John Lockwood Kipling, was the founding principal, is matched by its relative obscurity in South Asian art history. Unlike other colonial art schools in South Asia, the NCA, with its status of a public university of arts in Pakistan today, has been scantily represented in contemporary scholarship. For the past half a century, the historical knowledge of the NCA did not grow beyond art historical accounts in the first two decades of the institution more than a century and a quarter old history.² This book seeks to fill some of that gap.³

From protracted discussions on the very purpose of a colonial art school to the development of the Mayo School of Art as the aesthetic center for artisanal industries and modern art and design for the whole of North India, the book analyses in depth the ideologies of the arts and crafts movement and the South Kensington agenda at work in the art and industry discourses in late nineteenth-century Punjab. It traces the career of disciplinary technologies of art schools, museums, exhibitions as well as regulatory discourses of colonial ethnology that together constitute the colonial subject of art education in late nineteenth-century Punjab. An archival study of the founding decades of the NCA analyzes the national art discourses that produce and sustain the great divide that now exists between educated artists, who are part of the universal modern art world, and unschooled artists, dubbed as artisans or craftsmen who were left out of the art scene and reduced to semi-industrial labor in South Asia. By turning the pages of the school’s history, from the days of its imperial glory as the Mayo School of Art under the British Raj to being the only public sector art college as the NCA in the early decades of the independence of Pakistan, the book describes the institutionalization of art education in the colonial and postcolonial period, while it unravels and deconstructs the disciplinary frameworks of art history and anthropology, woven into the imperial and national discourses, as diverse modes of objectification of indigenous art and artists.

This book is the articulation of an archival experience. It is, to borrow a phrase, biography of an archive in a practical as well as theoretical sense.⁴ Teaching cultural studies to students at the NCA, Lahore, in 1999 overlapped with the assignment of turning into an archive the vast corpus of unkempt records of the college administration since its inception as the Mayo School of Art (Fig. 0.1). Before that, no attempt had been made to gather, appraise, arrange and describe the NCA’s official records, which were abandoned in an advanced state of deterioration in a long-unused store (Fig. 0.2). The process of identifying, classifying, indexing and arranging the contents of each set of papers in chronological order, which went hand in hand with repairing and conserving the badly damaged papers, provided an early exposure, inter alia, to the taxonomic order of the colonial state in nineteenth-century Punjab. There was an incipient promise here of applying theoretical concepts drawn from academic study to actual historical problems furnished through the knowledge of archives. A unique type of knowledge, which notwithstanding its conceptual predilections, was no less dependent on the grossly physical exercises of emptying the cotton sacks stuffed with abandoned paper records, wrestling with huge scraps of moth-eaten office files as well as the final appraisal of documents for retention or disposal and processing them for publication (Fig. 0.3).

Figure 0.1 The state of administrative records in the storeroom in 1999.

Figure 0.2 The birth of the NCA Archives, 2000.

Figure 0.3 The staff of NCA Archives engaged in paper restoration, 2002.

The process of archiving sanitizes the records and, in many respects, deprives them of their original menace. It is the hindsight of a scholar who approaches them from the safety of a distance, in time as well in space, which ultimately reveals the facts of history. Scholarly use of an archive for extracting information is distinct from its disciplinarian origin as the technologies of rule.⁵ The production and upkeep of the record of administration were one of the central determinants of the colonial regime of discipline and regulation. The records generated by the school were classified and categorized according to their functions.⁶ The active records of the school were kept away and secured in official premises as if never to be revealed to those they were about. Power and control are rooted in the very etymology of the term archive. From the Latin archivum, residence of the magistrate, and the Greek term arkhe, to command and govern, the colonial archive ordered colonial knowledge by setting up templates of knowledge and by following a criteria of evidence, proof, testimony and witnessing to construct moral narrations.⁷ (Fig. 0.4)

Figure 0.4 The research and documentation staff of NCA Archives, 2006.

The collection of letters, circulars, memoranda, dispatches and reports that make up the bulk of the NCA Archives (NCAA) pertain to communication within the school, as well as between the school and other state departments within India, and with metropolitan institutions. An elaborate system of written accountability of the staff and the students in addition to uninterrupted paper trails between the school and various departments of the provincial and imperial governments, private businesses and educational institutions were the institutional forms of the scaffolding of the colonial state.⁸ As cultural artifacts of fact production and taxonomies in the making, the archive was the technology on which the structure of the colonial authority was built.⁹ Anna Laura Stoler argues thus:

Colonial statecraft was built on the foundations of statistics and surveys, but also out of the administrative apparatus that produced that information. Multiple circuits of communication—shipping lines, courier services and telegraphs—were funded by the state coffers and system of taxation that kept them flush. Colonial publishing houses made sure that documents were selectively duplicated, disseminated or destroyed. Colonial buildings were constructed to make sure that they were properly catalogued and stored.¹⁰

The structure of administrative knowledge served as a reference guide to the institutional policies and practices of the Mayo School of Art. The genre of official report was a vital component of colonial bureaucracy in India, which ordered the information system of the school administration. The historical contingencies of the genre derive from imperialist conquest and expansion to the remote parts of the world for geographical, military and economic aggrandizement. The report as the historical genre of writing belonged to the category of managerial writing or writing for control and was one of the techniques of acquiring effective control over greater distances through effective communication.¹¹ The colonial state in Punjab was managed by officials professionally trained to rule by the pen—to set standards of report writing, which was diffused throughout the administrative hierarchy.¹² The reports were characterized by dominant managerial concerns aiming to increase the efficiency of the administration and develop more responsive postures to the exigencies of happening on the spot. The colonial reports formed a representative field as well as textual evidence for formulating policies and procedures to direct and coordinate the administrative thinking at the center: It help[ed] tighten the center’s control over what happened in the periphery by constructing systematic, regularized ways of communicating activity.¹³

A number of fabled men of the British imperial bureaucracy, such as Richard Temple, Denzil Ibbetson and Baden Powell, who rose to become pioneers of Indian colonial anthropology were associated with the establishment and administration of the Mayo School of Art. Working within the frontiers of nineteenth-century European Indological and ethnological scholarship, these colonial administrator-anthropologists invented a theory of art and aesthetics of the primitive society of Punjab, in tandem with the evolutionary history of India. The ethnographic representations of society in Punjab as primitive, made through administrative reports, census and gazetteers, formed a cultural subtext to the art education and framed the construction of traditional styles of arts and crafts of Punjab. As an administrative appendage to the colonial governance, rather than an antiquarian interest, the ethnological surveys of the primitive tribes and castes of Punjab provided scientific grounds for the identification of artisan castes endowed with hereditary potentials for technical education to be preferentially recruited to the Mayo School of Art. The state museums as a permanent reservoir of official meaning sustained the structure of ethnographic knowledge, which was produced through various exhibitions and scientific surveys.¹⁴

The colonial knowledge produced by the British administration in Punjab is akin to Michel Foucault’s discourse of power relations in a society where knowledge is articulated by the various institutional forms which transmit and maintain power.¹⁵ Art education was situated within the relationships of domination and subordination between the colonizers and the colonized. As a material adjunct to British imperialism, the British imported the models of schools of design in Britain for the education of Indian art and craft workers, which were distinct from the academies of fine arts for the teaching of painting and sculpture.¹⁶ A number of art schools were established in the middle of the nineteenth century by the British, including the School of Industrial Arts in Madras (1854), Jamsetji Jeejeebhoy School of Art, Bombay (1857), and Calcutta School of Art (1854), which were to be controlled by the Department of Science and Art at the South Kensington until the twentieth century. The British government in India staged many regional and international exhibitions that were held annually from 1860 onwards, demonstrating India’s immense economic potential and diversity of resources and design manufacture.

One of the last of the four colonial art schools in India, Mayo School of Art was established in Punjab with an imperial objective: to perpetuate the memory of the Lord Earl of Mayo, the only Indian Viceroy to be murdered while in office. The Mayo School of Art played a key role in organizing, staging and furnishing exhibits for exhibitions in Punjab and represented British Punjab elsewhere in the world. With John Lockwood Kipling as the first principal and the key exponent of the arts and crafts movement in India, the Mayo School had on its staff some of the most renowned names in the colonial Indian art world, such as Ram Singh, Percy Brown, Lionel Heath, S. N. Gupta, B. C. Sanyal, A. R. Chughtai and Haji Sharif. The Mayo School has also given birth to the most celebrated Indian art historical publication in the world, the Journal of Indian Art and Industry, which, using the most advanced techniques of chromolithography, ran 30 illustrated volumes published by London’s imperial publishers.¹⁷

The Department of Science and Art under Henry Cole, the chief architect of the Great Exhibition of 1851 and its critics associated with the arts and crafts movement, filtered the appreciation of Indian art and artists in late nineteenth-century British India. The metropolitan institutions not only provided teachers, curricula and teaching materials to the colonial schools in the British Empire, but also guided their institutional career, albeit unofficially. The first international exhibition of nineteenth-century Britain, the Great Exhibition of 1851, raised to put the entire world on a comparative index of taxonomic classifications, foregrounded the ethnological studies of Indian vernacular or decorative arts of India in the colonial educational and industrial discourses of the nineteenth century. The arts and crafts movement in England, as the official ideology of late nineteenth-century Britain, also provided a hegemonic context through which the Indian aesthetic sphere was restructured and consumed by the colonial state in India. The liberal reformers of the arts and crafts movement configured the Indian artisan within a utopian Indian village culture, almost as noble savages of a preindustrial society, which formed the staple of ethnographic representations of the primitive artisanal tribes and castes of colonial India. Through the disciplinary apparatus of colonial exhibitions and museums, the metropolitan-colonial discourses created and sustained an image of the indigenous artist as primitive Other of the modern, Western artist, who, as a part of a primarily oral society, is devoid of the capacity for critical reflection. The colonial art education to impart drawing and designing skills to the primitive artists was allied to a broader discursive shift in the nineteenth century from oral to written, printed and visual modes of production, dissemination and reproduction of knowledge. Like the grammar schools in colonial India that were instituted to develop script literacy based on writing and reading skills, the art schools were the instruments for imparting visual literacy based on the drawings rooted in the canons of European art education.¹⁸

I. Colonial and Postcolonial Binaries: The Orientalist Tropes of Knowledge

In the history of Western thought, social reality has been constructed through a series of binary oppositions, of which the lead term is accorded analytic value and a universal status, while the other term is considered as residual and derivate in nature. In this bipolarity, the residual term makes little sense without the lead twin, as it had no independent conceptual existence. The scheme of binary opposition has ontological as well historical coordinates; it functions to franchise certain experiences as universal and normal and the others as derivative and pathological. As Mahmood Mamdani has argued, "if the former is rendered historical the latter is ascribed suprahistorical trajectory of