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It was to ask a question about how thought was related to place.

(Dipesh Chakrabarty: Preface to Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, xiii)

If music be the food of love, play on,

Give me excess of it; that surfeiting,

The appetite may sicken, and so die.

That strain again, it had a dying fall;

O, it came o’er my ear like the sweet sound

That breathes upon a bank of violets,

Stealing and giving odour. Enough, no more,

‘Tis not so sweet now as it was before.

—William Shakespeare: Twelfth Night (Act I Scene i)

Imagine a 16-year-old girl walking into the first class of her English (Honours) course and hearing these immortal lines of Shakespeare for the first time in her life. There were about 20 students in that class, most of them being from schools around that region and a very few from English medium schools in Durgapur or Asansol in West Bengal. All of us were actually absolutely baffled by the lines that were being recited by the teacher—we were on a terrain that was not familiar to us, and we did not understand the significance and the connotations of the words being used. While, as 16-year-olds, we were all quite interested in ‘love’, this text seemed to move into realms we were not familiar with. We were being asked to familiarise ourselves with a world that appeared to be very remote to us and more so to me. The musicality of Illyria and Elysium did not mean much to us. The words did not strike chords in our minds. This class set the tone for the experience that we had to go through during the next 3 years in the honours course—a huge empty space lay between what we were reading and the way we were living our lives. This was 1968 when the entire Western world was being shaken by the ideas from France and the conventional wisdom of European and North American communities were being challenged.Footnote 1 In West Bengal also, the Naxalite movementFootnote 2 was gathering momentum, and thousands of students were involved in this struggle to change the existing social order. Our curriculum of course had nothing to do with these changes—we were simply following the pattern set by scholars during the nineteenth century.

I would like to narrate another experience of that time. It happened during our 3rd year in college. We were in the final year of our studies, and all of us thought that we needed to acquaint ourselves with the burgeoning area of Indian writing in English in our honours course, a course that was fully loaded with British texts from various historical periods. It was 1971, and the country was engrossed with the Bangladesh liberation war. All of us decided to go and speak to one of the teachers. We told him that we thought our syllabus should contain something from the new literatures showing up in the world. The teacher listened to us patiently and then said that the English honours programme was not open to “hybrid” writing and we were going to read only ‘pure’ British or English literature because that happened to be the best in the world. All of us were a bit disappointed, but since the observation came from one of our favourite teachers, we accepted it without protest. This was the situation in the 1970s in rural West Bengal, and I suppose the picture was more or less the same in all non-metropolitan parts of India. It could be that some isolated centres did change the syllabus to accommodate newer writing, but that was absolutely a freak case—in West Bengal, we were aspiring to be ‘pucca’ sahibs in our own way. We did not even imagine that “hybridity”, to borrow the term from Homi Bhabha (2004), would become one of the defining characteristics of postcolonial societies later, and we wanted to avoid any kind of fuzziness in our efforts to study ‘English literature’.

I need to locate myself in the terrain before I get into any account of the world that I lived in. Santiniketan (for those of you who do not know) is about a hundred miles away from Kolkata—the city that was the first anchor of colonialism in the country and the capital of British India until 1912. The school in Santiniketan was established by Rabindranath Tagore in the early years of the twentieth century, on a landed property of his father Debendranath Tagore, who found spiritual solace in the surroundings of that area in the district of Birbhum. Debendranath named the place Santiniketan—a place where bliss and peace prevail.

As we all know, Rabindranath Tagore was much opposed to the colonial education system prevalent in India—he had withdrawn himself from those schools in his own childhood. There is a mention of one school in Kolkata in his memoir Jeebansmriti (Tagore 1958). The students sang a prayer which was gibberish to him, and the words were simply nonsensical to all those kids shouting during prayer-time. There are many observations that can be found in his writings about the absolute disregard he had for a learning process which had no relation to the life surrounding it and he speaks profusely about what he wanted to do in his school in Santiniketan. To cut the matter short, I grew up in an environment which was in tune with nature—songs, dances and all kinds of other activities circled the curriculum that needed to be followed in order to prepare the students for the world. We never thought that academics was the only thing that we should be engaged in—there was much more than books to be followed, and all children grew up in an atmosphere that was free from the trappings of the colonial education system initiated long ago.

I completed my school successfully and, in a very obvious manner, decided to study ‘English’ as the honours subject though I was very fond of some other subjects like geography and political science. I am sure you know why I chose English—a lot of research has shown how the passport to prestige and social mobility in this country was related to your command of English. My obvious decision was linked to the assumption that by doing a degree in English, my job prospects would be better and I would find security that is usually not available through other subjects. Therefore, I had to study English literature. Nobody advised me about which subject I should choose; it was determined by larger forces about which we did not talk. Also, nobody explained why History or Philosophy could have been of more use to me if I did English literature. I chose my subsidiary subject to be Geography which I loved a lot.

In rural Bengal, that is, in Santiniketan, most teachers came from Kolkata, and they were largely drawn from Presidency College. One or two were from Bihar, and they were mostly in agreement with their colleagues from Kolkata. The ideology that almost saturated the curriculum was that there was an absolute necessity to know texts from the Anglican world, and the students should equip themselves to understand the intricacies of English literature in a particular fashion so that they followed the reigning conventions of the discipline. I don’t want to suggest that these conventions have been totally disregarded now—we still operate under them, and we are trapped in the discourses that we have imbibed through our education. This is where I started, and that was the point when we decided to go and ask for IWE in our curriculum, which resulted in a negative response from the faculty.

In hindsight, it appears to me that in our disciplinary world at that time, there was no existence of any ‘other’; others were supposed to dissolve in the pond of the self, created and sustained by our curriculum which preached the universality of literary studies. It was assumed that we would strive to acquire the values that English literature upheld to us. The standard was to be like the ‘best’ in terms of the values that spoke of ‘universality’, ‘timelessness’ and ‘transcendence’. There was no effort to relate our present to the past that we inherited—the involvement of the student was only in a marginal sense meaningful. Needless to say, I am not preaching the omission of English literary texts in our curriculum. I want to emphasise the fact that all canons are ideologically constructed, and therefore any other canon would have a programme inherent in it. I think the problem lies with our complete disregard for other canons, for other voices and peoples, and it appeared as if we were learning the ‘best’ in the world. I don’t believe that we cannot teach English literature to students who are outside the cultural orbit of that literature, but the method has to be completely different—the students should be able to identify with that literature through their own lives. Yeats, Eliot or Pound or even Shakespeare appear meaningful only if we are able to do that. In our curriculum, this effort was lacking, and the emphasis was on adapting ourselves to their views and their positions. We were never made aware of the fact that this is only one reading of the text, and like every ‘translation’ this also is one reading of the world, which means something. The message seemed to be that it was the only reading possible of the world.

Actually, the experience of studying English literature had some strange effects on us. All students in the department thought, or assumed, that they were slightly more privileged than the others in the college. We were a ‘chosen’ lot; we thought we were smarter and cleverer than the others around us. Literature in Bengali supported our assumptions—the major characters were mostly an M.A. in English, Tagore’s Amit Ray in Shesher Kobita leading the list. People acquired a ‘lustre’ of a certain kind when they had studied English Literature—they knew more of the world and were more sophisticated. Anyway, I finished my course and tried desperately to find a teaching job, and finally got it in the same university. I joined as lecturer in English to teach in Central University in 1978.

All through my college years and then at the beginning of my teaching career, I was always bothered and irritated by myself as a person. What exactly was I teaching to students in the class was a question that haunted me all the time. My life in Santiniketan was very fulfilling, and my singing and reciting kept me busy throughout the year. But what relationship did that life have to the texts I had read? That was a difficult and almost inexplicable position which I could not resolve. As later research shows, all of us who studied English literature in India, lived on multiple levels, and the different levels sometimes contradicted each other vehemently.

There was another factor at this point of time that disturbed many of us; we constantly felt that we were in some ways much less than our metropolitan counterparts. English literature students in Kolkata had a superior attitude, airs that definitely distinguished them from us, the people who came from the ‘hinterland’.Footnote 3 There was unmistakable snobbery in our colleagues from Kolkata—they knew better, it was assumed, because they came from the city and studied in English-medium schools and famous colleges which upheld the British texts most accurately. I may be mistaken, but that was the notion that prevailed amongst us. They dictated indirectly what needed to be studied and how we needed to study it. Shakespeare was the ultimate of knowledge, and the highest ambition was to study the drama of the Elizabethan period. We never disagreed. As noted earlier, my B.A. course started with a play of Shakespeare and for a whole year, the play was closely taught to us; I thought I was missing out on what the teacher was teaching because I could not follow what was going on in the play. My deeply rooted self, stood in serious conflict with the way in which the drama was taught. There were many such situations during my days as a student, and I always thought that it was my duty and requirement to rise up to the blessed position of a person who is learning the ‘best’ literature in the world, and I tried my best to inform myself of the history and philosophy of the English. Macaulay’s opinion was largely supported by our complete surrender to the ideology of lifting ourselves from the mire that we were living in.

It is not that there were no contrary realizations—there were occasions when many texts touched and related to our lives and we were moved, but in general, the experience was of “alienation”Footnote 4 from our immediate surroundings (Tharu 1998). I certainly identified with ‘issues’ or ‘ideas’ that came up through the texts, but the language most of the time did not act as a live wire through which my mind would wake up to consciousness. There was a serious lapse, a break in the communicative process. On the one hand, I was learning more of the English language, but all the other values inscribed in literature were creating problems with my being—there were multiple fault lines there. For example, I was very fond of the poetry of W.B. Yeats, and I could relate to the different voices of his poems. They touched me as a person who identified with the problems that they posed and spoke about. This was not the case with many other poets with whom I could not establish any relationship whatsoever.

As a teacher I was assigned to teach literary criticism and Romantic Poetry, and I tried to give my best. The questions that were dealt with in the class concerned matters very remotely connected to us—we attempted to imagine the beauty of the Lake District and the coffee houses in the eighteenth-century England to understand the texts that were in front of us. We also had to read Wordsworth’s The Prelude which appeared to be singularly unattractive to most of us because at that age we were not really interested in the ‘growth’ of a poet’s mind. As an individual on the other hand, I lived the life of a ‘Santiniketani’ who sang to her heart’s content and participated in all local festivals to the best of her ability. These festivals were all secular of course, because the place was Brahmo in religious perception, where no model of any god was worshipped. This fragmentariness of my beliefs shaped me as a person—I lived in different worlds as noted earlier and the world of religion and worship was only one of them.

A serious blow to my understanding occurred when I took admission in a Ph.D. programme at the Department of Comparative Literature in Amherst, Massachusetts, in 1985. I was asked a question several times at the beginning of the course—how much of my own literature did I know? This set my ‘self’ in a storm that I had never experienced earlier. Why did I not know much about my own mother-tongue literature? Why was it that the singular aim of many Indians was to study ‘English’ literature? What had I learnt from that discipline, and how had it affected me as a person? These questions came to my mind when I was being asked about my competencies. The assumption most probably was that languages are deeply connected to their speech communities, and a person who learns another language and reads its literature is twice removed from its reality. At that point of time, I was certainly not a bilingual who floated with ease in two languages. Many students in India are still like that—they are not necessarily easy enough with the English language which they learn with considerable effort. That explains the temptation of being anglicised in India—acquiring an ability to speak and behave like the English so that we could research in areas that had absolutely no connection to a very large section of the people in the country. This also creates the barrier within our own communities—the people who know English are the people who rule the country and decide everything around. The assumption of course was that we have to be like them and there was no value in our own forms of existences. My inabilities started showing up very convincingly to myself. I was handicapped by my own education; I could not talk much about my own literature with any ease. I had hitherto never thought that was necessary.

At the University of Massachusetts, I took up a course on literary theory and was asked to write a paper on various approaches to reading a text. The text I chose was Tagore’s Nashtanir (“The Broken Home/Nest”), and while writing that paper, I discovered that my ideas were in serious clash with the theories that I was reading. I made it clear at the beginning of the paper (difficult for myself to believe now) that I believed in the autonomy of literature and firmly subscribed to the notion of the autotelic nature of art; but then I could not reconcile those ideas with the theories I was reading—reader reception or historicism or postcolonialism. I was now on a dangerous ground; I had to decide how my pre-existing ideas could be reconciled with literary theories which demonstrated an intimate connection between the world and the reader. This was a time that witnessed the rise and proliferation of the ideas of Edward Said and many other poststructuralists in the American academy. How could I explain what I was taught as a student that English literary texts were for all times and for all places when I could not make an appeal in teaching a translated short story of Rabindranath to undergraduates in a class? What created a barrier in our understanding of texts that were from faraway lands and cultures which the students were not familiar with in their lives? The idea of reading “contrapuntally” formulated by Edward Said (2014) was not available to us at that point of time—the idea of critique as a mode of reading a text was non-existent.

That was the time when I started thinking about ‘difference’ as a theoretical tool. Was there really any validity to our understanding as human beings in a world that was becoming conscious of the difference of cultures in the globe and that did not wish away that difference? What difference did ‘difference’ make to us as human beings, and were all thoughts related to the place which produced those thoughts? Was I supposed to act in a way that was a replica of the English people, or was I supposed to be my own individual self who had her own anchors in reality? The conflict and tension were mostly in my understanding of myself as an agent who could break out of the network of knowledge handed over to me, a network that designated my place to be with the critics and writers who explained and analysed English literature in a certain way.

A crucial role in reorienting literary studies was the research publications of the scholars in the discipline of history, particularly those who moved the focus of the camera from the rulers to the ruled—the subaltern studies initiatives which clearly showed how grassroot-level activism shaped historical processes in the colonies. Undoubtedly, the pioneering work of the scholars made us aware of the existence of multiple modernities and communities that were not necessarily following the European rational tradition of the Enlightenment. Critics like Edward Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Homi Bhabha spoke from the American universities; others in India worked in the tune of literary studies with the research that was being published in the world. The works of Partha Chatterjee and Dipesh Chakrabarty steered students of English literature in India into realms that were never imagined earlier. Women’s writing received a similar focus through the work of Professor Susie Tharu and K. Lalitha’s massive compilation of work done in India by women (1991, 1993). Ashis Nandy and Meenakshi Mukherjee played a similar role in making us comprehend the very shaky nature of our assumptions regarding life and literature. I distinctly remember my uneasiness after reading Nandy’s Intimate Enemy (1983) in Amherst—many of my lifelong convictions received a shock after I read that pioneering work.

The crucial point in my own rise from a passive reader to an active interpreter of cultural matters received its final push from a course done with the African writer Chinua Achebe at the University of Massachusetts in 1987. In fiction written in English from the African continent, the voice of the native was always heard clear and loud, and Achebe told us to pay attention to our own voices in understanding the world. This was something very different from what I had learnt in India. Here, in India, I was trying hard to fit myself into the networks of discourses that already existed, and my own voice was not necessarily important in comprehending matters. Even the doctoral research that I did in India involved a lot of this assimilation of what others said about a textual tradition, and I think now that I could have done a better job if I ventured on my own to analyse problems and questions which came up in my mind. This is in a way an acknowledgement that we had been ‘slaves’ in our minds to a large extent—we rarely ventured out of the limits set by prevailing standards. Most probably many scholars who were taught in metropolitan colleges did not feel that way; they analysed and discussed Dickens or Eliot or Pound in a way that was not available to me as a person; I felt drawn by issues that related to me as a human being. I could only relate to texts that touched me as a person and with which I could establish a relationship because they dealt with issues that concerned me as a person who lived in specific historical times.

Meenakshi Mukherjee (2000) has written about how she was refused several times for jobs in Delhi University and elsewhere, the argument being that she was working in an area which was not considered part of the European canon—the English literature department did not have a place for her. The English departments actually had their best places for the scholars who followed the British line working in the area of Elizabethan, Romantic or Victorian or modern studies. I am most willing to accept that, but I expected that others who did not choose to work in those areas also needed to be heard and recognised. This is where postcolonialism offered a liberatory path, a path which was carved out of the blurred terrains in the world. My own growth as a reader or a person happened largely because the world was waking up to the strategies of the colonial empires in the world, and the texts were representations of those strategies in the subtlest forms. Even when the texts were not concerned with the colonial/postcolonial times, they had to be connected to the context and community that produced them. I was now more interested in that connection, that lifeline which existed in literary studies. I wanted to study those features of texts that told me more about life. I was ready to read everything “contrapuntally” where all voices were heard and where what was not said was as important as what was said.

I think most teachers of English in India had to go through this phase of questioning and analysis. We do remember the work done on the disciplinary stature of English studies in India in the late 1980s and 1990s to break open the limits imposed by our colonial history.Footnote 5 I should acknowledge the first course I did at the University of Massachusetts offered by Professor Ketu Katrak on Postcolonial Literatures. There was one other student in the course besides me—Isabella Matsikidze, a student from Zimbabwe. The reason why there was nobody to do that course was because students did not consider it worth doing. We started with the writings of Frantz Fanon and then read literatures from other parts of the colonial empires. Another teacher who was of immense support at this time at the University of Massachusetts was Gauri Viswanathan who had just joined the department after completing her thesis under Professor Edward Said at Columbia. Her Masks of Conquest (1989) was yet to be published. Rajagopalan Radhakrishnan was also there, and the presence of these teachers in the English Department made a huge difference to me—I was beginning to see the ‘Others’ in a new way.

I came to the Central Institute of English and Foreign Languages (CIEFL) at the end of 1994 and joined the Department of Distance Education. My mind was already far away from the texts I could not relate to in some way and I would not like to teach anything I could not relate to. My research work in Comparative Literature was concerned with Translation Studies; I analysed the auto-translations of Rabindranath Tagore from Bengali into English and I was deeply interested in cross-cultural interactions in literature or writing. What happens when representations cross cultural barriers and land in another place and time? Translated texts were minefields of information on these matters and I enjoyed unravelling them. My entry into the distance education programme also exposed me to a wide range of students who came from diverse locations in the country. I thought this was a boon for my abilities as a teacher; I could reorient them in a way that had been denied to them as students of English literature in this country. In fact, I think I am still doing that after more than two decades of my service here and enjoyed it fully.

My experience in teaching Postcolonial Literatures at the university remains the most satisfying phase of my learning as a person. I offered this course on Postcolonial Literatures for the first time in 1998, and it continued till 2008. I witnessed changes in the course as were characteristic of my own understanding of the discipline. We did not start with Fanon, as the Western universities did, but with Gandhi and Ambedkar to demonstrate anticolonial and anti-establishment writings.Footnote 6 We also studied diverse texts from the regional languages of India because there were students from various regions of the country. One thing amazed me while teaching this course—many of my students (about 50%) in the class did not know their mother tongue; they knew English only. While that is the case with major writers who have forcibly shaped English into Indian forms and dealt with topics that are typically of this country (Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines and The Hungry Tide are good examples), these students certainly did not possess the souls of their community any more. Uprooted from the country’s soil, they lived in the make-believe world of English. What could I do to help them find their own voices? I could only direct them to similar texts that spoke of such lost souls in the world.

I should admit that this is not a discussion of postcolonialism as a theoretical approach. I am not concerned either with the various discussions of its performance in the academies in various countries, such as the USA, Australia, India, Africa, Canada, etc. Here I am thinking about my own life only and the continuous modifications that it went through. Now I work in a department that is named “Literatures in English”, a name that we chose consciously to represent the diversities of the world, and I write lessons for distance-mode students who are far removed from the cities where we live. They should encounter the change and expand their idea of English studies, and they should know that they need to value their existences and not hanker after being like someone else any more.

Actually, I am most willing to accept ideas now which are absolutely contradictory to mine, and I think that this is the most fruitful effect of my engagement with postcolonialism. I am not only open to all voices in the world; I also see their right to exist in the world of ideas. While I have my own existence to nurture, I see the possibility of the existence of all other forms of living and all other voices. And as mentioned in Dipesh Chakrabarty’s (2009) view of the relationship between “thought” and “place”, I wholeheartedly subscribe to the existence of this relationship everywhere.

I would like to end with an anecdote which will give you an idea of my change as a person. When I joined CIEFL in 1994, I was quite intolerant of the idea of having a woman in my class whose face was covered with the veil. Not that I objected to the dress, but I had problems with not being able to see the face of the person because I could not see the responses of that person. I used to get very disturbed and did not know what to do. Two of my senior teachers, Professor Meenakshi Mukherjee and Professor Susie Tharu, suggested a way out. They told me that I should try to understand how I myself had sat in the American classroom wearing a 6-yard-long cloth on my body when everyone else was differently dressed. That was as shocking to them as this was to me. The comparison hit me hard; I realised how every culture has its own constructs and how fiercely they protect them. All human beings have a right to exist in the way they think fit to exist; there can be no evaluation of what is right and wrong by others who do not belong to that culture. The change has to come from the people who live that kind of life. If I could cover up my body, someone else could as well cover up her face; there could be no theoretical objection to these acts of living or dressing or eating, leave alone representations in literature or art.

It is time we realise what we are supposed to do in teaching in India—not to adopt values and standards from the Western world and repeat them but find out our own intellectual bearings and nurture them. Literary studies can only flourish if we embrace the “contrapuntal” method outlined by Edward Said, where even the minutest detail has a voice that tells you something. That is the gift of moving out of the jacket of disciplinary boundaries and embracing postcolonialism. The pedagogy of postcolonialism presupposes our acceptance of all parts of the world as equally valuable; we need to hear all voices and silences that exist. No one culture or literature or painting or poetry or any form of representation should claim superiority over others because all forms of expression are born out of specific histories in the world. If we cannot open ourselves to the varied expressions of all communities, we will be restricted in our reading of the world. Postcolonialism has offered a method to do so, and I am thankful for that.