Thursday, September 24, 2009
Words as weapons
Thinking more about the curious puzzle at the heart of Twilight in Delhi, the authorial presence as educated, arguably haughty observer of his people. It occurs to me that in addition to using the oppressor's tongue to attack the oppressor, Ali's narrator persona serves to buck the homogenization we've talked about in class. Maybe I'm belaboring the same point, but maybe there's a distinction. The British came and looked on the entire country as one big mass of uncultivated dark people; Ali's voice comes from an emerging perspective, the deeply ambiguous and puzzling plight of the displaced but (relatively) well-off Indian living in Western civilization.
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i think it also speaks to the whole colonization process that so many indians took the education that they could get from their oppressors and turned it around on them, not only using their words and ideas against them, but also finding the vocabulary and rhetoric with which they could fight for their country. learning in a free country surrounded by freemen gave them a better way to speak to theirs oppressors pathos and point out the undeniable fact that they too are men.
ReplyDeleteAjai, can you clarify what you mean by homogenization?
ReplyDeleteOk, I read the post again and realized that you do in fact clarify what you mean by homogenization. Only now, I have to argue this notion by proposing that this "homogenization" may have happened in the orientalizing notions that existed in the British empire that were physically away from India, but in India, there seemed to be an oppositional force that was set up between the Hindu Indians and the Muslim Indians because the Muslims, having lost a certain degree of agency after the fall of the Mughal hegemony were much more likely to foment rebellion.
ReplyDeleteI do agree, however, with your first point...British education was certainly a tool for Ali and several other foreign educated Indians.