NICHOLas 8. BIRKS COLONIALISM AND CULTURE From ‘Introduction’ Colon ome ‘Oloniatis, University of Michigan Press, 1gs0, li”? Atn Arbor: (Europe is literally the creation of the third work. =.= Frantz Fanon P.M, Forster esents nothing ext é provide the only face in which the fully r THE OPENING CHAPTER OF A Pasage to Indi describes the geographical setting of the novel. The lndscape ordinary,’ nothing, that is, except the Marabar Caves. Although the 71 visible wrinkle, they also contain the ambivalent space of the echo, # ual fears of a British memsahib become. projected onto tI» dark, glassy walls of terror. Hallucinations of violation become inscribed in the fr~t of rape, at once retaphor of exploitation and the patriarchal pillar ef colorist tonor. The ‘evens! atthe eaves dinipit the narrative and display the tersible totality of cvlonis| word tee are, in the end, only the colonizers and the colonized. : . Forster asserts that colonialism is more than just a narrative of momentary disarray, for colonislism hae hecome nature itself, The landscape tells all: the Indian city of Chandrapore ‘seems made of mud, the inhabitants of mud moving. So abased, sc .nonotonous is every- thing that meets the eye, that when the Ganges comes down it might be expected to wash the txerescence back iyto the soil, Houses do fall, people are drowned and lef rotting, bot the general outline of the town persists, welling here, shrinking there, like some low bit indestructible form of life.’ Anticipating Said’s critique, Forster iro cally notes that what- ‘Yer cultivated decoration might have marked the natural contours of saurd water ‘stopped 0 1 was it ever democratic,’ Otherwise, it is all nature at its lowest atten century, noi exit Forster's writing inscribed colonialism and its antinomies so dramatically into the very Cur ofthe natural world, his poetic conceit was appropriately chosen.’ Nature, after all, rece oT that is given, exenipt from the capacity of humans to shape it and of historia! #25 to change it, And though nature seems invariably to stand in some kind of oppo im : jeulS-culture, it is also the case that culture is a way of talking akout nature; culture, 9 0 S theo congeries of values, belielS, practices, and discourses thst ature, Ni elf, 28 well as the various forms of natures Uw opology as thé residues of cultural constsetion. Poetic the ethnography of British colonialis:z in India. For Forstety culture. Bt} Scanned with CamScannerial peripheries, the anthropological givens ofa in by colonial encounters. Often, these trang and over ag er races such as India became, through eg. Paature, and freed fas history. Tha en 7 soms of a millenial geology of colonial sya." inti ans by which histories of lost id the ideological i sei the culture and nature of the colonized were ony ies were seem 35 of colonial control a colonial r villages, and (0 oval facts conquest were ers. For and the same. al conques Although coloni organization, political power, and econd) ‘aviety of cultural technologies. Colonit! coves predicated om the power of superior ar may mic wealth, it was also based on a complexly related ism not only has had cultural effects that have too tfien been either ignored or displaced into the a Togs a er " orld capital, twas ise s clr project of control. Colonia! ano ge bt embllc ons conquest and was prodsced by it; in certain important ways, culture was what colonialisa sys all about, Cultural forms in newly classified ‘traditional’ societies were reconstructed and Transformed by and thr agh eolonil technologies of conquest and rule, which created new categories and oppositions between colonizers and colonized, European and Asian, modem and traditional, West and East, even male and female. The_anthropological concept of culture might never have been invented without 2 colonial theater shat burl: necessitated the knowledge of culture (for the purposes of control and regulation) end provided a colonized constituency that was_patticulay}y. amenable. to “iv! Wi aan, ire cad note been o simultaneous), and so success ordered and orderly, given in nature at the same time that it was regulated by the state. Even as much of what .ve now recognize as culture y the cosy tal at pn vented Beste af Clee es con encounter, allied network of proeses that spawned naons in Qo mee® 888 ASO produced out of the aber ? tations in the first pl é necessitated notions of culture that marked groups off frgsy Pees Claims about nationality uniting language, rare, neography, and history in and foilitated new csis's of this kind, re-creating of conquest and rul om i ingle a another in essential ways, : ‘cept. Colonialisin encouraged Tope and its others through its histories cguid_not be cont and the ends of co internal colonialisms. Colonial thesters extended be, in g colonized spaces, emerying within both metopaligg end the wt socictirs, Culture bess fundamental to the Formation ck spencer divisions in Western bourgeois society, and to deyehas® oe nationality. At the same time, metropolitan histories jafluenced by colonial events; sexuality in Sumatra, torty Coven — were all dsplicements of the fault lines af « 35 invented es of colonial ies Were alization of Tein the ace, biology, pading 2PRO, da : that they became fun nemtal moments in the unfoldint 8 cap ind heavil narra in the ly The parallel m of colonizers and coleoized.an te vr writ the Marabar uly om the otber rake itanore diffiult thn ever to devs pet Ifeulturc itself, as an object of knowledge and a mod = s-relation t0 colonial histories, it ig at) gf Ly cific cultural forms were themselves © yen ine dating when we regs thse ty, the nat Sours, 8 of 5; Scanned with CamScannerENE ERIS NAO NMULIURE OF became fundamental to the development of resistance against coloinism, most no vatinalist movements tht used Western ntions of maton ners election to justify claims for independence. In turn, Western colonial nations dil not sin iy elt colonized nations for economic profit, but depended upon the process of colton ad colonial rule for securing the nation-state itself: developing new tec':nologies of state rule, maintaining and deepening the ruptures af classed, patriarchal society ringa tin of lors and democratization, consolidating Western control over the development of sold capitalism, an schveving international cultural hegemony fn reas ranging fre" fskon tothe noe = bringing both colonialism and culture back home. Looking at colonialism as a cultural projeet of control thus focus: tention onthe inter dependency of these terms, on the complex interplay of coercion atl hegemony, on the categories of thought that generally orient scholarly consideration of loi history or istor Jal anthropology. Linking culture and colonialism does not efface the vilenee of eleisim, Not only does this linkage preserve a sense of the violent means by which colonialism was “effected and maintained, it allows us to sce anew the expanded domains of wolence, to realize that cultural intervention and influence were not antidotes to the britality of domination but etensions of it, Representation in the colonial context was violent; clasifieston = totalizing Form of control. Brute torture on the body of the colonized was not the sme 28 the publie eakbition of a colonized body, but these two moments of eoloiel power shared in more thn they differed, And torture became terror through the culture of colonialism itself Now that decolonization and the twentieth-century transformations of the world order have rendered colonialism a historical category, linked to the present more by such terms 25 neo and post than by any formal continuity, there i both license ate! risk in our collective interrogation of the colonial past. Colonialism is now safe for schola:ship, and culture seems an appropriate domain in which to measure the effects of colonialisin in the contemporsry ‘world, Ts it possible that, in calling for the study of the aesthetics of colonialism, we right end up acstheticizing colonialism, producing a radical chic version of ro} nostalgia? Is ie thely that by linking ‘colonialism and culture, we might ignore the extent to which colonialism heeane inelevant due to transformations in the work! economy having to-do with the hege mony of superpowers and the internationalized structures of late industrial capitalism? Might ‘ve became so complicit in the displacements of postmodernity that we feil to recognize the informal continuities between the colonial past and the new world evder present? These that we should not let slip away, However, there | conjuncture that we shoul: not lose. For the tic transformations in certain <-vemic landscape shaped questions and discow~s in the past are being clonialism can,be seen.both 2.2 histones! anoment plitical. and economic project: in the modern era = fon, Culture can be seen both 35 8 historically const [practices and as a regime in w hicl power achieves its plonialism and culture can be seen to provide a new phy of the history and eflects of power. ctive on the history of the o'! cartography returning, tenment was the age Bae when reocon leatived ae 9 quality or attitude, ore first the al particularities, Reason mace discovery the iamperae r dependent on discovery nor «riven by it, What gets pialism provided a theate: for the Enlightenment Scanned with CamScanneraked discovery and reason. Science flourished in the cig. atory that li ay of indivi is - oem of the intense curiosity of individuals working in Europe srial exgansion both ecosstated and facilitated the active exercise of ty tut because colon as through discovery ~ the Sings surveying, mapping, naming, ang centife imagination. i itori scientific imagins i new regions that science itself could open new territories of con. imately possessing = oF NY ny, and anthropology were all colonial enterprises, Even " hy, ge0u2phYs : i ae onl aim vital colonial connections, for it was through the study and his ta ee at Eo’ BY and culture could be celebrated as unique an) triumphant. ‘As the world was aped for Europe through cartography — which, writ large, included ships logs, narrative routs maps, the establishment of boundaries, the textualization of treaties, the compotion of epic, the Fighting of wars, the raising of flags, the naming and appropt- ation of newly dscovers.! spaces, the drawing of grids, the extermination of savages (and the lst eould go on and ov, ~ s0 also it became peopled by lassificational logics of metonymy atid exclusion, reengnitign and opposition, Marking land and marking bodies were related activities; nt ony dil Lund seem to determine rmuch of a putatively biological nature, bodies themselves became markers of foreign lands. Before places and peoples could be colonized, we eo matt ss oregy as ‘other,’ as.‘colonizable,' If geography and identity seem a eae. ch doscly related, the age of discovery charted out new possibilities tenes less a’ process that began in the European metropole and Tanai of ecg bileroaiel en new een within the world facilitated the pool a A eee a ae cong the first place. But colonialism was not only tapes rate eel a accumulation of all kinds, fram knowledge splamee ble show aaa cmmand poet. There were compelingrensons to invent » uniting such disparate projects as the precarious formation of n: ing cause with effet. It is ig tempting but wron: outcome 5 , i eon : that, thogh aed eat to a congeries of activities and a conjunction of and even contradic inal fee s Fs tory. W could be argued Fr es se usually diffuse, disorganizeds ean fd Part on the illcoordina power of colonialism as a system of rule qeefiilewe secure to ima ee en onal baat shah asa ther poeanaine el as totalizing’ and Rie eal powe was rly aware of ake gat dependent on their knowled oid ruler , power... ‘ways in which knowledge was, ige, they themselves Hegemony is perhaps the yw, . in any direct or strategic ely coment but repel ie 220M Word to use for Gull society, notably st sent Rey 1 domination into ava fers align themselves and modernity 0 aeribe ihe intentrality or aystematcity . © colonial con ied instftational ial context, Nevertheless, colonialism east Si = Scanned with CamScannerCOLONIALISM AND CULTURE 61 ‘An example of this process can be seen in the history of the casts system in India, For anthropology, for social theory, and for contemporary political pract'ce in India, culture in India seems always to have been principally defined by caste. Caste 1s always been seen as central in Indian history, and as one of the major reasons why India bos no history, certainly no sense of history. Caste defines the core of Indian tradition, and caste is today — as it was throughout the colonial era — the major threat to Indian modernity. However, I have argued elsewhere that much of what has been taken to be timeless tradition is, in fact, the para- doxical effect of colonial rule, where culture was carefully depoliti-’zed and reified into a specifically colonial version of civil society. In ethnographic fieldwork i the reading of texts traditionally dismissed as so much myth and fabulous legend, in recons!: acting the precolonial history of Indian states and societies, in reading colonial texts, and. is charting the contra- dictory effects of colonial rule, 1 found that the categories of culture -nd history subverted cach other, opening up supplemental readings of ‘caste’ that made ir seem more a product of rule than a predecessor of it. t _. «The success of colonial discourse was that, through the census landholding, the law, inter alia, some Indians were given powerful, stakes in new formulations and assumptions about caste, versions that came increasingly to resemble the depoliti izect conditions of colonial rule, These versions were then canonized in the theoretical construct! yas of caste by anthro- pology, first in the hands of colonial administrators, later in the imaginations of such powerful iinkors and sendemnies ag Louis Dumont, Caste became the essence of Indicn culture and civilization through historical process, under colonial rule, This reference to anthropology reminds us that Western scholarsh:")) has consistently been part of the problem rather than the solution, Scanned with CamScanner