'I remember a whole summer sitting in my room at Oxford trying to write my dissertation and not being able to find any theoretical framework which I could adopt...'

Professor Homi K Bhabha LiVE …

8.30 PM | 01 February 2021

The Legendary Homi K Bhabha, considered one among the famous ‘trinity of Postcolonial Studies’, delivered the 60^th Lecture of the Calcutta Comparatists’ online lecture series, this evening at 8.30 pm.

Excerpts from his Illuminating Interactive Session -  

Question: You’ve started your journey from Mumbai and then to London and then to Chicago. As a boy from Mumbai, what made you interested in Postcolonial theory and criticism?

Homi K Bhabha: I didn’t start off with the availability of a Postcolonial theory as we know it today, although it is a term that has many definitions and many takes on the definition.

It was not a term of art, criticism or school or theory.

I did my English literature from Elphinstone College [University of Mumbai] and then at Oxford. [M.A., M.Phil., and D.Phil. in English Literature from Christ Church, Oxford University]

When I did my dissertation, at Oxford, I decided to work on V S Naipaul. He was a controversial choice, because as you know, he is greatly admired by many writers, including me, but many people from the postcolonial world at that time found that he was not sympathetic to the postcolonial cause. They found him as a ‘19^th century liberal’.

I found that problem very fascinating. I found the conflict or the tension between admiring a writer profoundly for his vision, insights and the richness of his perspectives, and yet having differences with that writer’s politics and his views on history and society.

When I started working on Naipaul, there was no postcolonial theory to appeal to, or to address or to help in my own work. The available theories that were actually quite useful were the Marxist and Structuralist theories at that time.

That’s how I got into this area, and then of course I discovered the work of Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak.

Even at that time, Said had been known for his work on Orientalism – the idea of postcoloniality emerged only later.

My own journey started through English literature. But then, when I started reading texts from the colonial world and the postcolonial world, I began to see the kind of critical apparatus of European literary theory didn’t quite answer the questions I was asking. It didn’t look at the history of literature from the perspective that I wanted to. And Naipaul for me was very important.

Because if you think of one of his famous books, A House for Mr. Biswas, you begin to see the tensions or paradoxes I’m taking about. The book is avowedly a kind of Dickensian novel. Naipaul was a great admirer of Dickens, and so he wrote a kind of 19^th century Dickensian style of novel full of anecdotes, full of characters, depth of perspective on the society of the Caribbean, Trinidad in particular from which it came. It was saturated with the spirit of the 19^th century novel, partly a historical novel, partly a novel of everyday life.

But at the centre of a 19^th century novel, is the notion of a hero, that’s why they call it a Bildungsroman – a character whose biography as it were, works through the novel, creating a sense of accommodation to his or her society although there are moments of dissatisfaction with that society.

At the end of the day, the Bildungsroman is a novel of coming to terms with your society, coming to terms with your fate. And here at the heart of this novel, you have this tragic-comic character Biswas who never felt accommodated!

That’s why the title – A House for Mr. Biswas! Right through the novel, he lives is various people’s houses, he builds his own houses, but he never has a sense that he really belongs – that he’s really been able to occupy a space that he feels at home in!

And so I thought how interesting that the formal apparatus of a bildungsroman or a 19^th century European form is being used to tell the story of a figure from a colonial world, a descendant of indentured labour, - a novel which looks at slavery and indentured labour, huge forms of displacement and diasporic upheavals after all the families like the one that Naipaul describes, came in the 1850s, from India and settled in the Caribbean, and the Indian indentured labourers were also misfits between the black slave society and the white slave owners.

So these kinds of social and cultural conflicts made me think about what we then began to formulate as ‘postcolonial critical thought’.

Question: So we can say that this was a very specific event or incident that actually led to an orientation towards this theory –

Homi K Bhabha: In my case, yes! I remember a whole summer sitting in my room at Oxford trying to write my dissertation and not being able to find any theoretical framework which I could adopt, and therefore I felt for myself at least that I needed to create a kind of an approach to this body of work. And then of course, I extended it to look at a number of other problems, a number of other writers and artists.

So I’ve been writing as much about artists as I do about writers, and hence my writing is very much trans-disciplinary and intersectional.

Question: Thanks to that dissertation and that day in Oxford, that we have so many books by you… Coming back to your work, how do you think an author’s idea, and relationship with Utopia, get shaped with the changing trajectory of postcolonial literatures?

Homi K Bhabha: That’s a very interesting question. I don’t believe that in the main, the ideal of utopianism is the foundation of at least the postcolonial writers and thinkers that I myself focus on or work with.

I think, first of all, let’s talk about utopia. When you have utopian thinking, you naturally have dystopian thinking. Utopia and dystopia they come together, they work together. So it’s a kind of binary formation.

And I think, that the form of historical struggle, resistance and survival that afflicts many postcolonial societies does not simply give them the privilege of either Utopianism, which is a certain kind of historical vanity, however good it might be, to assume that you can have a Utopia depends upon a certain sense of sustainability, a certain sense of confidence in the world.

And dystopia, sometimes can be an indulgence, that you think everything is falling apart, and the two are continually balancing each other. I think the many parts of the world that I’m interested in, balance somehow between the two.

There are often these writers who come from these countries, and in their works they reflect these societies where the utopian ideal is very difficult to envisage, and because they have to survive on a day to day basis, against the asymmetries of power, against forms of domination, against forms of oppression, they cannot afford to be dystopic – to put it in a metaphoric phrase – however melancholic, they have to get up and work – they have to do what they have to do – they’ve to face reality. So I don’t think utopia and dystopia are the major forms I have detected in these fictions.

Now it is the case that in the immediate moments after anticolonial struggle has succeeded, and you have confronted your own freedom, the hour of midnight as Nehru put it, then there are moments where you do feel, the whole future is yours, the world is yours.

But as the great writer and thinker and political revolutionary Frantz Fanon was able to see very quickly, - and Fanon has been a great influence in my own life, and in my own work, - as soon as you emerge into this world of what you think is freedom and autonomy, you begin to see the problems outside because as a new postcolonial, independent country, you have suffered 200 years and more of colonialism, then you become dependent on the IMF, the Washington consensus, on huge loans to make your own society, to rebuild and shape your own society the way in which you want it.

Almost at the very moment in which freedom comes at midnight, you begin to see the high noon of difficult decisions and complex decisions and particularly at that time, at that historical moment, you had a cold war going on!

So new nations either had to align themselves with the socialist societies or with the capitalist liberal societies. You became a victim in their war as much as you kept saying, we are non-aligned nations. It was not realistic to be non-aligned. And Fanon also says, as soon as you begin to have a national bourgeoisie that is dependent on foreign aid, on foreign powers, then you also have a conflict of loyalty, you have corruption emerging into those systems partly because they are systems that do not have their own economic sustainability that is being depleted through the long years of colonialism.

So these are very complicated situations which is why I don’t think the utopian and the dystopian are models that in my view have been illuminating for me.

What has been illuminating for me is the way in which a lot of postcolonial literature has made very powerful critiques of the vanity of notions of western progress, western success, western notions of consent, western notions of citizenship, western notions of sovereignty.

Many diasporic writers, even as they emigrated to these great metropolitan centres, began to see the shortfall between what these once imperial metropolitan centres claimed for themselves and how they actually practiced their ideals on which they were based.

So I see the notion of critique, both formal and ideological, as being very important. But more recently, in thinking about the space between utopia and dystopia, I’ve been fascinated by the thoughts of Locke and Adorno!

To be continued…