self-subjugation

In "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man", Stephen diagnoses Ireland as being subjugated not only by the Catholic Church and the English colonisers, but also by the Irish people themselves. As Seamus Deane notes in his Introduction to the Penguin edition of the novel, “The double empire of London and Rome weighed so heavily on the Irish because they had grown to love their enslavement and to fear freedom and its responsibilities” (Introduction xxxv). The colonised Irish people are definitely then shown to be culpable in their own subjugation.

This reminded me a lot of "Burmese Days", where the natives too are represented as being inept and complicit in their own subjugation. While the Irish fear responsibilities as Deane says, the natives in "Burmese Days" are shown to be inept and incapable of taking up any responsibilities. This is evident when the camp that Flory presides over becomes a scene of complete disarray during his absence—“The whole camp was at sixes and sevens…Nearly thirty coolies were missing, the sick elephant was worse than ever, and a vast pile of teak logs which should have been sent off ten days earlier were still waiting because the engine would not work” (Chapter XVIII, page 207). Through this example the natives are definitely shown to be so inept that they seem better off under the dominion of a white master.

The natives are also shown to be complicit in their own subjugation through their pandering to the white master, as evident in the character of Dr Veraswami,who constantly deprecates the East and plays up the might of the British colonisers and the empire despite being kept in a servile position by this very colonial enterprise.

By portraying the colonised as being complicit too in their own subjugation, I think these two novels work to show how colonialism is not always a black and white affair where the colonisers are the ones subjugating and the colonised the ones suffering. They definitely paint colonialism to be a more complex affair where both the coloniser AND the colonised have a part to play in the conquering of the native country.