Intellect and the Violence Capital

Reading the last ten chapters of Forster’s Passage to India and Fanon’s On Violence, I could not help but notice that even after minor triumphs and victories in the resistance of the colonized against the colonizers, the intellectuals relapse into a mode of complicity with the oppressors. Escaping the direct rule of the British in Chandrapore to a state of autonomy, Mau, ruled by a Rajah and advised by the British, Godbole and Aziz remain shackled to the whims of British “advice” on developing education and administration.

Fanon explains how the educated Native traverses the “good versus evil” space of the Manichaean colonial world. This “colonized intellectual” does not make intellectual gains by assimilating the oppressor’s culture and education, but merely “pawn[s] some of his own intellectual possessions”(13). By having the colonizers’ intellectual training, such a colonized individual moves upwards into a middle-ground between the colonizers and the colonized. Aziz and Godbole likewise perform such a role as described by Fanon. They find their existence incongruent with the masses, and yet not really British. Aziz thinks “I am an Indian at last”, but at the riverside celebrations he finds himself detached and watching afar with Ralph Moore. Godbole experiences a collective belonging with the Indian masses at the Temple’s ceremony of Shri Krishna’s birth, yet reverts to a sense of an “individual clod”(282). Both characters’ sense of individualism is described by Fanon to be the effect of hegemony by the colonizer (11).

Does such intellect then give the educated Native a false sense of representation? In his angry ranting throughout On Violence, Fanon seems to be aware of such a painful truth that the end of it, he is representing the rights of his land and his people in the language of the colonizers. The fact that he can only put through his argument eloquently in French is another violence that is within his own class, within himself. While Fanon describes the colony as a “compartmentalized world” that is “divided in two” and inhabited by different species”(5), this may be the linguistic violence that sets the educated Native apart from his brethren, apart from the cultural and physiognomical differences dividing the colonized space into three general compartments of the savage Native, the educated Native and the White man.

This then leads on to how the middle compartment of the educated Native acts as a damper to the resistance of the savage Native against the colonizers. Fanon describes the educated Natives to be opportunistic and self-preserving. Yet, such capitalist leanings are less evident in Aziz and Godbole. Sure enough, Aziz has to mind the upbringing of his children Godbole has to earn his keep, but their bourgeoisie ambitions and the need to represent the colonized become a violence in the Self of the educated Native.

But one thing is for sure, that the fragmentation of the colonized social strata prevents the pooling of resources for resistive violence. Fanon describes the capitalist colonizers’ vast violence capital to be overwhelming and seemingly infinite, as compared to the Natives’ primitive and puny violence capital. Short of an all-out attrition war, the resistances of the colonized by violence seem doomed before any action. The mediating, negotiating educated Native class functions to prevent that apocalyptic attritional suicide, as well as the continued pipeline to the siphoning of violence capital from the colony to the metropolis. This leeching is described by Fanon to be how “Europe’s well-being nad progress were built with the sweat and corpses of blacks, Arabs, Indians and Asians”(53). The tax collection and trade in Forster’s colony space serve as the parallel to such transfers of capital.

Thus, the control and usage of violence capital and hegemonising of educated Natives can be seen as a form of capitalist enterprise. In fact, more important than the economic measures to derive the dollars and cents from the colonies, colonial powers are seen to be economizing the values of the violence capital to retain the power politics of the colonization machinery, as such strategies ensure the continued profitability of controlling the colony.

- Weiquan