Stormborn posted:This is a thesis on which all you yammer mouths on post colonial writings need to sink your teeth in. I do not agree with much of what she said. She seemed to relish in the idea she is not constrained by theoretical foundations of academia but one knows one cannot function without gathering ones ideas as a coherent thematic whole and the act of doing often seeks the shade of some theoretical umbrella.
The minute a post colonial writer puts pen to paper they deploy ideas inherent in their intellectual beginnings and that is in the social ethos of the colonized. Just as Edward Said in his Orientalism struggled to formally organize a new direction for post colonial thought and end up relying on its institutional foundations for delivery of his ideas, so too we see seepage to it in her work. We see the same thing for example the Negritude movement in France where the most fervent attempts to distance themselves from the western tradition was part of their academic project and where we got some of the most prodigious post colonial works.
She sought to identify with Naipaul and Naipaul is foremost a white man in Indian clothing. He tried to distance himself from his colonial tribes as much as he can all his life. In that he became a contradiction and often delivered a confusing view about his origins.
To the specifics, Indian has four caste but there were thousands of sub castes arranged by work specialization or Jats all securely entrenched in their particular niches., The brits did not invent that. That is endemically Indian. She said that Sepoys were deported and this is not so by any of the accounts. If caught they were jailed. Most who came did not declare themselves to be rebels but as refugee hiding from the Brits. Further, indenturship in Mauritius and Fiji started a long time before the Sepoy Mutiny and these communities were firmly established. Guyana also had a few thousand indentured by that time and why they were brought was declared explicitly by Gladstone...for work and mitigate african flight from the plantations at the end of apprenticeship.
This is the impression conveyed by contemporary Guyanese historians like Mangru et al. Also, names has significance and the Brits document these and even the mistakes can be back tracked. The indentured stated their caste designation and the accounting was that few were Brahmins. Obviously, the prevailing belief that the pursuit of a better life was a substantial lure. This does not discount some were duped but my point was that the secure and well placed in the society do not uproot themselves and take across the oceans for adventure.
Also, Guyanese brand of Hinduism is a resistance brand of Hinduism. It was a deliberate tact taken beginning with the formation of the BEGIA. It was not easy for Brahamins to impress castisem as easily as they have in indian because all indentured faced the same form of aggressive christianization effort by the brits and they were very distinct people from various distinct traditions in India.
I have more complaints ie on how Indians self identify and their thinking about india but that is for later when I read the rest of the thread.I agree with her on many of here conclusions but those are for another time.
Faminie made men looked like Christ hung on the Cross. One Indian writer wrote of the times, "skeletal frames moved from place to place to survive, clad in loin cloth, exposed hipbones as Christ hung on the Cross."