'It pained him...that he did not know where the universe ended.'

In the beginning of Joyce's "Portrait", Stephen attempts to place himself within the larger structures that surround him. Beginning with himself, he traces his belonging to his country, nation, and eventually, the universe' (27). While he believes that 'after the universe' comes 'nothing', he is troubled by whether there is 'anything round the universe to show where it stopped before the nothing place began' (28). This failure to 'know where the universe end[s]' not only 'pain[s]' him, but makes him 'fe[el] small and weak' (28). Here, Stephen's uneasiness is three-fold:

1) The 'nothing place' (28) is something Stephen doesn't understand;

2) It is therefore regarded as something other to him, and is hence excluded from the list of places he belongs to;

3) He thus attempts to keep it at a distance from him by imagining that something exists to demarcate it as a different space altogether. This, however, fails, as he is unable to answer whether there is a 'wall' or a 'thin thin line' separating the universe' and 'the nothing place' (28).

These result in Stephen's anxiety, as his attempts to compartmentalize the world into neat categories of understanding go awry. This seems to parallel the uneasiness that the colonial powers felt when ruling their colonies. Replace Stephen's 'nothing place' with 'the native', and 'the universe' with 'the white world', and you have the colonizer's anxiety. In this new case, safety comes from the neat categories of the colonizer and the colonized- recall Chatterjee's argument that colonialism was based on ruling through difference and exclusionary tactics. Similarly, this safety is threatened with the blurring of boundaries between the colonizer and the colonized- recall Stoler's argument about metissage and metisse children, Ellis' outrage at a servant's improving English and the mere thought of a native as a member of the club, and other instances where transgressions of boundaries spell trouble.

[[Just a thought- in relation to our class' title, the modernist writer's attempt to be unafraid of the unknown is intriguing. Instead of 'feel[ing] very tired to think [of such big things]' (28), modernist writers embrace the unknown and the dissolution of neat boundaries, as these allow for new possibilities to be opened up. In doing so, they (attempt to) transcend the limitations of what the Empire was fearful of.]]

Chatterjee and Burmese Days

I think Chatterjee’s article has certain resonances in Burmese Days, because language is indeed a “simple and practical sign of difference” (Chatterjee 25) between the colonizer and colonized in the text. This is evident when Ellis tells his butler, “Don’t talk like that, damn you—“I find it very difficult!”…“Please master, can’t keeping ice cool”—that’s how you ought to talk. We shall have to sack this fellow if he gets to talk English too well. I can’t stick servants who talk English” (23). I think Ellis is infuriated precisely because that which differentiated his butler and him as different peoples has been lost—the colonized native can now imbibe the white colonial master’s speech perfectly, what then separates them and marks Ellis as superior?

This idea of language being a sign of difference is also evident in Verswami who is constantly depicted as speaking with an ‘s’ at the end of some words like “iss”, “wass”, “hass”. By showing how Veraswami speaks a less perfect form of English, the text inadvertently shows how he is different and ultimately inferior to his colonial master.

However, there is one occasion where I feel that the difference that is based on language is shown to be reconcilable. This is the scene where Flory and Elizabeth are on a canoe together and Flory asks the canoewoman “How far, grandmamma?’ (163):

‘The distance a man can shout’, she said after reflection.
‘About half a mile,’ Flory translated.

Despite the apparent differences in the languages of the colonized and the colonizer, here, there is a very successful translation from a language that is based on sentiment to one that is based on rationality and I thought this was a very brief moment where differences were shown to be reconcilable and meaning translatable across culture and language.

Why Elephants are Shot

I fell asleep yesterday night while reading Chatterjee before I could post. Had this killer medical gem test yesterday. For that my sincere apologies.

I shall attempt to link the Chatterjee to Shooting an Elephant. The main thing I took away from the reading was that of the deviation of the colonial government in India from the idealised Western modern notion of a democratic government. Under the essay's heading "It Never Happened" Chatterjee discusses the idea of British colonialism as one of a "centralising tendency of 'military-fiscalism' inherited from previous regimes" (27), one that essentially bases itself on differences (in this reading, it is racial differences) in order to perpetuate fiscal power that is in favour of the ruling British power. In relating this to Orwell's "Shooting an Elephant", Orwell can be seen as discussing how power structures are created and sustained. Through the narrative's biographical re-accounting of a trivial incident, he draws parallels to empire and its basis of rule. In the nameless narrator's account of how the Burmese, the "yellow faces" egged him "a thousand wills pressed me on" into shooting the elephant, the idea of how power as based on a performative, collective set of rules that the parties agree upon and perpetuate. As the narrator states earlier on, the British individual becomes " a sort of hollow, posing dummy, the conventionalised figure of a sahib." In relating this to Chatterjee's article, can we then say that colonialism is merely a replacement of one "native" power regime with another power regime. That all regimes are ones based on differentiation and performative rules.

From a Distance

Physical and metaphorical distance is used at length in Orwell’s short story.

It was only in a “job like that [a colonial position] you see the dirty work of the Empire at close quarters”. The close proximity to the colonial administration reveals the lurid details of the Empire. Here, working within the “machine” allows for a microscopic view of the Empire that churns out dirty linen.

“That is invariably the case in the East; a story always sounds clear enough at a distance, but the nearer you get to the scene of events the vaguer it becomes”. In this instance, the closer one gets to the event [perhaps truth?], the more complicated and superfluous the event gets. This particular microscopic view provides too many details that one loses sight of the larger “picture” at hand.

The elephant, at a distance, “looked no more dangerous than a cow”. However, the elephant might charge if one went too close to him. This lends to the idea of appearances, and how things appear to us at a distance.

Metaphorically speaking, this idea of appearance and distances can be related to theory and practice. The idea of the modern state as a theory, with its “universality” is well and good. However, the actual practice of the implementation of the modern state seems to be a “misfit” with the colonized country.

Distance, in terms of time, also allows for a “clearer” picture or “different” picture for the viewer. Revisionist history works in the same temper. It is with temporal distance that historians can start drawing links of the events that occurred. I’m not purporting that revisionist history is an objective, detached one. I’m positing that the closer one is to the event, it seems, the more subjective and complicit one may be.

297 words

Framed: the problem with "discursive frameworks"

Aptly enough, the Chatterjee article enacts what it advocates: switching perspectives on colonialism (with a confidence in its agency to do so that we don’t see in Achebe and Fanon) in order to gain new insights into how our perceived reality is dictated by subjective cognitive frameworks.

One such schema is ideology. Chatterjee demonstrates how the meaning of ‘-isms’ – he mainly mentions three: imperialism, capitalism, modernity – can morph according to who defines them. Chatterjee has an invested interest in how these three relate to each other because he writes from the framework of Indian nationalism himself: for example, defining imperialism in terms of capitalism rather than civilizing/power terms calls to mind the Leninist definition of imperialism as “the highest stage of capitalism”. The subsequent implication that history progresses in stages (as Marxists argue) strengthens the claim that colonialism is but one stage in India’s history. Frameworks, therefore, shape thought and reality. In Shooting an Elephant, colonial rule manifests itself in frameworks of colonial difference: reference is made to a “Dravidian coolie”, which alludes to (outdated) 19th-century anthropology’s method of classifying race by language families; the narrator’s actions are made “legally…right” by British-imposed law.

However, Chatterjee works on the assumption that one has the power to change one’s framework. Shooting problematises this: cognitive frameworks can be deeply ingrained and might clash. The narrator (like Orwell himself) feels conflicted because he tries to espouse a liberal, anti-imperialist stance but his identity schema as a British officer simultaneously implicates certain views of the colonial subject. There is also the question of how liberating switching frameworks can really be – nationalism and Chatterjee’s conception of indigenous history all seem to fit Western epistemological moulds.

And while Chatterjee and Orwell work in counterpoint showing how frameworks can help shape/ossify reality, there still seems to be something lacking – maybe because language itself is a framework of sorts. Orwell said that “good prose is like a windowpane”, but ultimately a barrier of glass remains, separating window-frame from messy reality.

Magic rifle

It’s difficult to compare this week’s readings, but I’ll give it a shot (pun!) anyway.

To support his claim that “the spread of modern institutions or technologies had not weakened the hold of caste in anyway, Vincent Smith argues that

The necessities of cheap railway travelling compel people to crowd into carriages and touch one another closely for many hours ... The immense practical advantages of a copious supply of good water from stand-pipes in the larger towns are permitted to outweigh the ceremonial pollution which undoubtedly takes place … but such merely superficial modifications of caste regulations.

I have a similar observation in Orwell’s Shooting an Elephant. The rifle superficially and temporarily unites the narrator and the Burmese but the essential difference between them as colonizer and colonized are never at anytime or in anyway effaced even though there are moments of shared ‘connection’ between the two.

The narrator “was momentarily worth watching” by the Burmese when he has “the magical rifle” in his hands. The rifle also unites the narrator and the Burmese for the common purpose of hunting down the elephant. The narrator with his “rifle in hand” has “two thousand people marching at my heels” while he tracks down the runaway elephant. The rifle unites the narrator and the Burmese psychologically, albeit in different contexts. The narrator was psychologically pressured by the Burmese to shoot the elephant and exhibit his “sahib” omnipotence, while the Burmese are psychologically excited by the spectacle of the narrator killing the elephant and to scavenge the meat and tusks off the dead elephant. At the pull of the trigger, the narrator “heard the devilish roar of glee that went up from the crowd”. Once the rifle has been utilized and the elephant shot, everything reverts back to ‘normal’ (the indifference between colonizer and colonized). The indifference is made more explicit with the discussion of the coolie’s death as measured in his economic value (“elephant was worth more than any damn Coringhee coolie”) and as legal evidence to give the narrator “sufficient pretext for shooting the elephant”.

I might be pushing this a bit far, but the various steamships in Heart of Darkness, the Patna in Lord Jim, and the trains and cars in A Passage to India seems to provide spaces for the colonizer and colonized to come together?

Shooting an Imperialist…

(I hope all we have to read is "Shooting an Elephant" the short story, rather than the anthology!)

Every time I read "Shooting an Elephant" I find myself hoping it's ironic rather than faithfully autobiographical. If it's the latter, Achebe should switch targets, because for an 'anti-imperialist' text, "Shooting" is sure racist. Perhaps Orwell was aware that serial imperialists could probably be best persuaded to drop the 'white man's burden' by considering that "when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom he destroys," but the sheer negativity of Orwell's portrayal of the Burmese makes you wonder why his narrator even bothers to mention his imperialist "guilt." For all his anti-imperialism, his words embody the white supremacist's ideology - that "an elephant was worth more than any damn Coringhee coolie" is reflected well in his respective descriptions of the "preoccupied grandmotherly" animal he hated to shoot, and the "sea of yellow faces above…garish clothes" that "[push]" him "to and fro" like an "absurd puppet," of whom he was "very glad the coolie had been killed."

It reminds me very much of the revisionist case Chatterjee covers, where historians such as Washbrook, ostensibly attempting to "restore the 'Indianness' of this historical narrative and 'recover the subject from European history,'" (30) put forth a history that "can with such ease spirit away the violent intrusion of colonialism and make all of its features the innate property of an indigenous history." (32) Of this and Orwell, as a postcolonial subject I can't help but think, 'if you're on our side, I'd hate to see who's against us.' If we recall that imperialism is, as Chatterjee points out, predicated on the "mark[er of difference [that] is race," (19) in replicating this racist presentation with no recourse, "Shooting" technically replicates too imperialist ideology, and is thus, despite its claims, ultimately a text that testifies to the 'truth and justice' of imperialism.

(P.S. Dr Koh, a thousand - nay, million - apologies for erroneously bothering you about the readings! The corrective email had totally slipped my mind through, er, post-mid-term amnesia doubtlessly fuelled by vain hopes of not having to read another article for my presentation week… *kowtow, kowtow, grovel*)

Ripon and The Shooter are homies

I got this sense from Chatterjee that the Whites themselves were divided into opposing camps and that the colonial regime was a struggle for them too. I don’t just mean that on the level of liberal vs. conservative but on a greater level, between doing something which was right for everyone and doing something which was right for a select few and in line, for oneself. Between believing that theory and practice ought to reflect each other and “sensibly” believing that theory is just easy talk and practice is a whole other matter. The Ilbert Bill Affair was damning evidence, for me at least, that some Whites earnestly wanted to help develop India and its people. Ripon was particularly interesting because as a liberal, he introduced the bill but as a politician, he took it back.

And Ripon was who I thought of as I read Orwell and followed the thoughts/feelings of the protagonist. The protagonist says “Theoretically-and secretly, of course- I was all for the Burmese and all against their oppressors, the British” but practically, he cannot be so. The incident of shooting the elephant he says, better highlighted to him “the real motives for which despotic governments act” which is basically, the need to maintain that position of authority/of being stronger and wiser than the native. That is why Ripon and the protagonist struck me as being stuck in the same situation of having to do what was necessary over what felt right to oneself. Ripon may have genuinely wanted to help correct the “anomaly” but to rectify that “error in tactics”, he had to retreat and allow the “European British subjects” to maintain their position of privilege. The protagonist wanted to spare the elephant but to maintain his position of authority, he had to shoot the elephant.

Shooting an Elephant- a different kind of anti-colonial text

“Shooting an Elephant” is to me an anti-colonial text that is very different from the way Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” is anti-imperialist or anti-colonialist. This stems from the fact that Orwell evaluates colonialism from the standpoint of the coloniser and how it affects him adversely, rather than from that of the colonised.

This is evident when it is the Europeans who are targeted by the natives rather than the other way round, as typically depicted in anti-colonial texts. In Chatterjee’s article, she discussed the idea of “colonial difference” and how differences between the cultures of the colonised and coloniser were what legitimised the power and authority of the coloniser. I find it interesting that Orwell depicts the reversal of this situation and shows how it is precisely this difference that causes the European coloniser to be “baited” and mocked at by the natives. This difference, which initially distinguished the Europeans as being superior has now become the very thing that marks their victimisation.

Orwell also evaluates colonialism from the standpoint of the coloniser by showing how colonialism takes freedom away not from the colonised but from the coloniser himself, as evident when the narrator felt compelled to shoot the elephant just to live up to the expectations of the natives. The fact that the narrator could even envision himself as “a puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow faces” further proves how he has fallen under the control of the colonised peoples, moving solely according to their will. Colonialism, here, deprives the coloniser and not the colonised of freedom. As the narrator says, “when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys”.

It is for these reasons that SAE strikes me as very different kind of anti-colonial text.

To Live and Die in Colonial Difference

To live and die in the landscape of colonial difference, the elephant is the metaphor of the liberty and historicity of the colonized. The villagers’ living in servility to the European law of their land is the elephant’s submission to be chained when in “must”, their useful deaths (to justify the European’s killing of the elephant) if trodden by the elephant becomes the elephant’s own death to justify the European’s worth in the larger context of the colonial enterprise and his respect demanded of the colonized.
Just as Chatterjee’s argument sketches the colonised’s need to be similar to the coloniser and yet maintain internal differences, we see in Orwell’s short narrative the nationalism that Chatterjee prescribes to be vaguely forming. The Burmese live the compartmentalized lives as dictated by the Europeans, but at the same time unveil the similarities of the European to their own selfish needs when Orwell’s narrator, in killing the elephant for his selfish ends, see the Burmese selfishly interested in the elephant for its flesh.
Do we then think of it as how Chatterjee plays with the “[turning]” of “tables”, that colonialism was brought on by the way the Burmese behave and might have in the past, or is it a symptom of “culture system” that the colonizers have manipulated the way the colonized behaved to suit their progression? The elephant then, in being killed by the European and consumed by the Burmese, lives the life of Chatterjee’s “historical theory” personified, an interaction of the indigenous history and the European history of the colonial state.

The creation of colonial history

In “Shooting an Elephant”, the narrator is pressured by the natives to kill the elephant against his own will. I am wondering if this idea of the colonizer as merely a “puppet”, “expected to perform certain roles”, can be seen in relation to the revisionist argument cited in Chatterjee’s article. In the revisionist history, Indians can be constructed as “active agents and not simply passive bystanders and victims in the creation of colonial India” (29) – that as subjects in their own history, they play a central role in the continuity of India from pre-colonial to early colonial, which thus posits colonialism as “a rather brief interlude, merging with the longer narrative” (30). Although “Shooting an Elephant” is not on Indian colonial history, but in a similar sense, the colonizer in “Shooting an Elephant” seems to play little function in the creation of Burmese history. It is the natives who construct the white man’s role. Whatever power he possesses is sustained by the natives, who appear as “active agents”, insistently pushing the White Man along to fulfill certain roles. Thus the shooting of the elephant can be seen as perhaps a symbolic loss of the colonizer’s power and the "influential" role he is “expected” to play in the making of a colonial history. In that light, we can see how subjectivity can be restored to the natives.

Violence in Orwell’s Shooting an Elephant

The mere title blasts at you the idea of physical Violence in the word “shooting”. It connotes a deliberate desire to inflict pain through violence, and placing it in terms of modernism, the symbol of the gun (the mechanized weapon) is metaphorical of the other kinds of violence the West inflicts on the east. In terms of Social Violence we see strict classifications of class &capabilities where the “sub-divisional police officer “ suffered “anti-European feeling” and the locals are seen as merely a blur, a mass, “an immense crowd” and the victim as “ an Indian, a black Dravidian coolie”. The locals are identified as a large statistic, the colour of their skin, or by nature of the fact that in opposition to the intellectual, rational, modern west, theirs is physical work. Looking at psychological violence, we see the need to perform role(s) because of pressure from others, pressure of institution(s); The colonizer as colonizer and the colonized as the “other”. Linguistic Violence sees tensions between English and the native tongue in the difficulty of expression on an individual and communal level. The narrator describes the elephant as being one that while was not wild, was one “which had gone “must”. This (mis)use of language shows the inability to reconcile cultural differences in language and the way of life; the narrator’s rejection of his position as imperial authority, and as a westerner entrenched in the east. We see violence on language in the forced way in which the locals’ speech is mapped onto western tones/sentence structures. When the old lady warns, “Go away child! Go away this instant!”, the formal language of the west (which can be seen perhaps as the formal institution of imperial bureaucracy) imposes itself on the eastern speech(which can be seen perhaps as the ability for the east to be truthfully expressed).Linking this to Chatterjee, does this suppose that violence is also then a site of colonial difference?