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 60th 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 ‘19th
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 19th
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 19th century
novel, partly a historical novel, partly a novel of everyday life.
But at the centre of a 19th
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 19th
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…
