The image of Europe in postcolonial Pune.

Uniwersytet Jagielloński w Krakowie Rijksuniversiteit Groningen - Master of Arts Thesis Euroculture 2009/2010 The image of Europe in postcolonial Pune. The Indian academic perspective on Europe. Postcoloniality, Postcolonialism and Hybridity. Submitted by: Giacomo Orsini s1951939 orsoz@hotmail.com Supervised by: dr. M.C. Margriet van der Waal dr. Marcin Galent Place, date Signature I, Giacomo Orsini hereby declare that this thesis, entitled “The image of Europe in postcolonial Pune. The Indian academic perspective on Europe. Postcoloniality, Postcolonialism and Hybridity”, submitted as partial requirement for the MA Programme Euroculture, is my own original work and expressed in my own words. Any use made within it of works of other authors in any form (e.g. ideas, figures, texts, tables, etc.) are properly acknowledged in the text as well as in the List of References. I hereby also acknowledge that I was informed about regulations pertaining to the assessment of the MA thesis Euroculture and about the general completion rules for the Master of Arts Programme Euroculture. Signed ....................................................... Date ...................................................... 1 Table of contents  Preface.........................................................................................................................3 1. Introduction.................................................................................................................4 2. On the meanings of the postcolonial...........................................................................9 2.1. On the meanings of postcolonialism..................................................................11 2.2. On the meanings of postcoloniality....................................................................16 3. Methodology. A qualitative research.........................................................................21 3.1. Reading...............................................................................................................22 3.2. Speaking.............................................................................................................24 3.2.1. Talking about Europe and postcolonial India..........................................24 3.2.2. Narrating Europe.....................................................................................27 4. Postcolonial knowledge.............................................................................................32 4.1. Sociology and India............................................................................................34 4.1.1. The Department of Sociology of Pune University..................................39 4.1.1.1.Opening sociology.............................................................................40 4.2. English, English studies and the colonies..........................................................44 4.2.1. Postcolonial English studies at Pune University.....................................50 5. On the perception of Europe in a postcolonial context.............................................54 5.1. Europe, India and “uneven development”.........................................................57 5.2. Stereotypes and experience: Indian nationalism in the mirror..........................60 5.3. Experiencing stereotypes: European prejudices in the mirror..........................62 6. Conclusion.................................................................................................................67 7. Bibliography..............................................................................................................70 2 Preface To try to understand yourself from the other’s perspective is, in every dimension of our life, one of the most difficult experience to be achieved and fully accepted. To understand Europe and the European identity, looking at it from outside of it, is as fascinating as it is a difficult task. However, to understand how Europe looks from outside of it has an undeniable academic value, being at the same time an intriguing way to question European identity itself. These are some of the reasons that led me to approach the study of the image of Europe, from the postcolonial perspective of one of the most important academic centre of India. Since the first steps of this research, the aim was to think about an alternative to the Eurocentric paradigm that, through colonialism, made of Europe the only centre from which critically to observe the rest of the world. However, before to start, I feel the need to thanks all those who helped me in this complicated but fascinating experience of understanding. In particular, I want to thanks all the scholars that helped me on finding the right points of view and the correct perspectives. Hoping to do not forget anyone, my thanks go to my supervisors Margriet van der Waal and Marcin Galent, for their punctual advices and suggestions. To professors Sharmila Rege, Anurekha Chari and Swati Shirwardkar for their inestimable help to make me aware of what does it means to understand social sciences from a postcolonial perspective. To Mangesh Kulkarni for his willingness to share with me his own peculiar view of postcolonialism and postcoloniality and to Lars Klein for the suggestions he gave me during the conversations we had in the canteen of the University of Pune. I would like also to thanks professors Aniket Jawaree and Raj Rao of the Department of English for their collaboration. A special thanks and hug go to my friends Santosh Sabale, Richa Singh and Sanjay Kumar Kamble, as well as to Ashutosh Thakary for his fundamental help. I cannot forget to thanks my parents, that supported me during all these years of study, travels, explorations and experiences. Finally, I do the greatest good luck to Enrica, my niece, who was born a few days before I finished to write this thesis. 3 1. Introduction Tagore [...] argues against an intense sense of the dissociation of Indian from other people elsewhere. [He] also rejects [...] the temptation to see Indian culture as frail and fragile, something that will break if touched by other cultures and which has to be protected through isolation from outside influences.1 [the] tranquillity [of the oppressor] rests on how well men fit the world the oppressors have created, and how little they question it.2 Through colonialism, Europe built up an Eurocentric world in which many categories of culture and knowledge, explicitly and implicitly, were and are built up around an assumed centrality of Europe and the West. The rest, as everything non-European or non-Western, became since that time marginal. The colonial enterprise, was spread and imposed all over the world as a system of knowledge and perception of the globe whose the centre was the European metropolis, surrounded by the non-European periphery. As Joanne P. Sharp clearly pointed out: [...] colonialism was distinct [...] because of its unprecedented scale but also because of its establishment alongside a specific form of rational knowledge (called the European Enlightenment). [...] The way that European colonists came to know the world has been highly influential. The combination of scientific knowledge and capitalism within the context of superiority provided the framework through which the new lands and people became known to the Europeans and subsequently became the basis for European control of them.3 Such a world was organized around a binary structure in which the perception of Europe existed in its opposition to non-Europe. The centre begun to perceive itself in distinction to its own periphery, as two separated entities. For knowledge, this “binary [saw] Western societies as modern societies [...] against [...] non-Western societies, or preliterate, premodern societies”.4 In all fields of study, colonialism reshaped knowledge, producing a binary universal understanding based on positivist assumptions 1 A. Sen, The Argumentative Indian. Writing on Indian History, Culture and Identity (New York: Picador, 2005), 349. 2 P. Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972), 63. 3 J. P. Sharp, Geographies of Postcolonialism. Space of power and representation (New Delhi: Sage 2009), 4. 4 S. Patel, “Beyond the Binaries: A Case for Self-Reflexive Sociologies,” Current Sociology 54, no. 3 (2006), 386. 4 where European Enlightened rationality was held to be the very and the only centre. The same civilizing mission through which colonialists justified their territorial expansion, was based on “the production of irreconcilable difference between ‘black’ and ‘white’ [while expanding] the contact between Europeans and non-Europeans, generating a flood of images and ideas on an unprecedented scale”.5 This universalizing and Eurocentric knowledge was spread across almost the totality of the earth’s surface, through the establishment of colonial educational systems in which universities became places for the reproduction of colonial power. With the decolonisation, such an unbalanced structure of the world did not disappear in favour of an eventual alternative configuration of knowledge and world understanding. In the territories of the ex-colonies, Eurocentric sciences and humanities still dominate the scene, reproducing the European conception of a world defined by binaries. At the same time, while increasing the transcontinental mobility and the consequent interactions of both students and professors, in Europe and outside of it, new academic perspectives increasingly try to challenge mainstream Eurocentric knowledge. Among such contemporary challenging academic attempts, probably the most fascinating one is the theoretical approach known as postcolonialism or postcolonial theory. As a “disciplinary project devoted to the academic task of revisiting, remembering and, crucially, interrogating the colonial past”,6 it, during a period of about thirty years, exponentially increased its influence and relevance in the study of the humanities throughout the globe. This, created the apparently contradictory situation where in the same departments of the academies of the ex-colonies, mainstream perspectives are taught together with new critical approaches, such as postcolonialism. This happens in an environment in which the unequal influence of the West and Europe create situations of global inequities and marginalisation. At the same time, also within Europe, postcolonial theories started to generate a similar situation in which scholars begun to question the European binary selfunderstanding. Inside and outside the academic context, such self-questioning perspectives found its translation into a renewed attention toward identity and its definition, especially thinking to a relatively new social, cultural and political entity as it is the EU. There is indeed a lot of discussion in the European academies, as well as throughout the continental public sphere, about how an eventual European identity 5 6 J. P. Sharp, Geographies of Postcolonialism, 53-54. L. Gandhi, Postcolonial Theory. A critical introduction (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009), 4. 5 should look like. Much of these discussions are mainly focused on the attempt to overcome the exclusory system of differences based on national identities, on essentialist and monolithic perception of identity, in favour of more inclusive concepts such as multiculturalism, transculturalism and cosmopolitanism.7 Western academics as Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, ten years ago wrote that “colonialism constructs figures of alterity [...] negative construction[s] of non-European others [that] finally [...] founds and sustains European identity itself”.8 At the same time, actual theoretical efforts to define a European identity are unlikely to escape the production of new binaries. As certified by Marijke Cornelis et all. nowadays: discussions within the European Union about the possibility of achieving a singular European identity largely are stalled in a debate between unqualified multiculturalism and absolute monoculturalism. [...] Continuing to frame the debate as a stark choice between these two views, [it] institutionalizes an unproductive dichotomy.9 Then, the idea to oppose each other multiculturalism and monoculturalism, risks to do not escape a binary understanding of identity, centred around the tense relation between two theoretical categories as multiculturalism and monoculturalism are. Once more, there is not a third way to intend identity itself, but only two options apparently in contradiction among themselves. In this very complex frame, India represents one of the places where such dynamics of re-formulation of the universal, are gaining an increasing relevance and prominence, in both the academic and the non-academic contexts. The contemporary central position that the country is assuming, in both the economic and political international stage10, is accompanied by a growth of new academic paradigms, and a dynamic process of internal innovation of national academies.11 The sub-continental country is opening itself more and more to the rest of the world without forgetting the colonial past and the postcolonial present. A dramatically increased number of interactions with European scholars and academies are characterized also by practices 7 G. Delanty and C. Rumford, Rethinking Europe. Social theory and the implications of Europeanization, (Oxford: Routledge, 2005), 75. 8 M. Hardt and A. Negri, Empire, (Harvard University Press: London, 2000), 142. 9 M. Cornelis, R. Pinxten and R. A. Rubinstein, “European Identity: Diversity in Union”, International Journal of Public Administration 30, no. 6-7 (2007), 687. 10 P. Khanna, “Il futuro dell’India è tra i grandi del mondo”, Limes. Rivista Italiana di Geopolitica, no. 6 (2009), 157-162. 11 S. Patel, “Higher Education at the Crossroads”, Economic and Political Weekly 39, no. 21 (2004). 6 of reformulated relations between who was once the colonised, and who was the colonizer. New spaces of dialogue and mutual understanding are open, also thanks to the growth of students and professors exchange programs that impressively increased a more bidirectional, transcontinental mobility. Inside this complex picture, where both the ex-colonies and Europe started a process of self-reflection, this thesis methodologically attempts to subvert the Eurocentric construction of identity and knowledge. Indeed, as it appears from the title, the aim is to investigate and define the image of Europe, as it is perceived from outside, by non-Europeans. To do this, it has been selected a specific social and cultural context, represented by two departments of Pune university, where professors and students have been questioned about Europe and European knowledge, in order to define the academic environment where their perception of the old-Continent developed. For this thesis, the ‘other’ has been neither passively nor negatively involved, being rather positively implicated in the research process, becoming the primary source of information, enabled to address the research itself. It is not any more the object of observation, but rather one of the active subjects of the investigation. In practice, starting from a discussion of the two strictly related concepts of postcoloniality and postcolonialism, the following pages are an elaboration and analysis of the relations between non-European and European knowledges, within a non-European academic context, to conclude with a discussion on the perception of Europe by non-European individuals. In other words, the objective is to define the image of Europe in a Indian academic reality, focusing on the processes through which such an image has been shaped. Therefore, the nonEuropean is fundamental for the definition of the European, but in a radically opposed way to the oppositions-based one that colonialism generated. Hence, according to what has been described until now in these first lines, the thesis presents the results of a three months field work spent among the sociology and the English departments of the Pune University. The research has been articulated as an analysis of narrative and academic literature on the postcolonial, both Indian and nonIndian, accompanied by interviews with local professors and students. Basically, the thesis is divided in three main parts. It starts from a discussion and definition of the meanings of both postcolonialism and postcoloniality - chapter one - as they will be understood in the following analysis. Representing the introductory research step, the discussion of the postcolonial comes first, to contextualize all further discussions. The following chapter - chapter two - is a description of the methodology that has been 7 elaborated for the different phases of the investigation. After these two preliminary chapters, a third section - chapter three - concerns itself with the relation between European and non-European knowledges. In particular, it contextualizes the discussion on postcolonialism and postcolonaility in the departments of English and sociology of Pune University. It presents the results of a deep and articulated literature study, accompanied by a considerable number of interviews with professors of the same departments. In other words, this section of the thesis consists of a description of how non-European places of knowledge production, such as these two university departments, relate themselves to Eurocentric knowledge on one side, and postcolonial theories on the other. Then, continuing from such a deep contextualization, the last chapter - chapter four - presents the results of three narrative interviews with Pune University students from the two departments analysed before. The common feature shared by these students is that they very recently went to different European universities, for diverse one-year student exchange programs. They were asked to narrate their own European experiences in order to give an idea of how they perceive Europe. This was done focusing both on the everyday life, and their new academic context abroad. These students’ views could somehow represent a source of inspiration for new ways to comprehend identity on one side, and the contact between European and non-European academic and non-academic knowledges and cultural contexts on the other. Their awareness of the field of postcolonial theories, that are significantly popular in the departments of Pune University where they were educated, crossed with their experiences in European academic contexts, is expected to produce an articulated image and perception of Europe from a non-European position, able to open new horizons for intercontinental mutual understanding. 8 2. On the meanings of the postcolonial Colonialism colonises minds in addition to bodies.12 No discussion of the 'postcolonial' should proceed without participants making known their understanding of the term.13 Postcolonial is a term that refers to a very wide range of meanings. Within such a variety, inevitably there are even contradictory and incompatible connotations. As a matter of fact, most of the controversies move around the term itself: [...] the prefix “post” complicates matters because it implies an “aftermath” in two senses – temporal, as in coming after, and ideological, as in supplanting. It is the second implication which critics of the term have found contestable: if the iniquities of colonial rule have not been erased, it is premature to proclaim the demise of colonialism. A country may be both postcolonial (in the sense of being formally independent) and neo-colonial (in the sense of remaining economically and/or culturally dependent at the same time).14 Since postcolonial theory started to be discussed, critics have claimed an inherent inadequacy of the term itself. Indeed, according to them, the prefix “post” in postcolonial works as a dangerous fiction: it covers the real condition of domination and subjugation that many non-Western countries and peoples are still experiencing. As noticed by Linda Hutceon “the prefix post not only is premature but also has the disadvantage of embodying the ideology of linear progress that underpinned empire, as well as continuing to orient analysis around the colonial centre”.15 Others have instead defended postcolonial theory as a crucial social criticism, necessary to subvert the unequal distribution of the power in the world.16 However, the issue is relatively easy to overcome if instead of looking at the prefix, the attention is rather concentrated on the possible articulations of the endings, as well as on the analysis of the contents that the term implies. Thus, the postcolonial can be articulated as postcolonialism and 12 A. Nandy, The intimate enemy. Loss and recovery of self under colonialism, (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994), 6. 13 B. Parry, “The postcolonial: conceptual category or chimera?” The Politics of Postcolonial Criticism 27, (1997): 3. 14 A. Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism (Special Indian Edition) (Oxon: Routledge, 2007), 12. 15 L. Hutceon, “Introduction: Colonialism and the Postcolonial Condition: Complexities Abounding,” PMLA Special Topic: Colonialism and the Postcolonial Condition 110, no. 1, (1995), 9. 16 P. Mongia, Contemporary Postcolonial Theory. A reader (New Delhi: Oxford India Paperbacks, 1996), 1-3. 9 postcoloniality. These two expressions refer to diverse but not necessarily contradictory meanings. Indeed, if under the umbrella of postcolonialism are included all those theories that challenge the colonial and universalizing European logics of appropriation, postcoloniality refers rather to the concrete condition of dependence, both economic, cultural, political and social, characterizing many non-European states nowadays. However, “the existential resonance of ‘the postcolonial’ or of ‘postcoloniality’” is not inherently opposite to the academic dogma of the postcolonialism.17 I would rather say that such idealised incompatibility is neither realistic, nor it implies any constructive significance. In a way, we can see one – postcoloniality – as the field in which the other – postcolonialism – develops; at the same time, postcolonialism finds in postcoloniality its core challenge. Indeed, postcolonial studies aim to subvert the postcolonial condition characterizing the contemporary. In his work “Beginning Postcolonialism”, John McLeod writes: ‘postcolonialism’ recognises both historical continuity and change. On the one hand, it acknowledges that the material realities and modes of representation common to colonialism are still very much with us today, [while] on the other hand, it asserts the promise, the possibility, and the continuing necessity of change.18 Nevertheless, it is still necessary to further contextualize which meanings of postcolonialism and postcoloniality will be used in the following pages. Indeed, despite the brief categorization developed above, both terms entail a various range of diverse realities and relations. Potentially, they cover a huge number of phenomena, dynamics and theoretical approaches. For the purpose of this thesis, only a limited number of features of postcolonialism and postcoloniality most relevant to this study will be taken into account. Then, in order to give to the reader some of the basic tools for the understanding of the framework in which the all research is included, those features are discussed in the following two sub-chapters. Further specifications are instead reserved for the next steps of the thesis, when the discussion will be restricted to certain areas of research, such as the influence of postcolonial discourses on contemporary nonEuropean social sciences. 17 18 L. Gandhi, Postcolonial Theory, 3 [emphasis added]. J. McLeod, Beginning Postcolonialism (New Delhi: Viva Books, 2010), 33. 10 2.1. On the meanings of postcolonialism Analysing large parts of the diverse theoretic production on the concept of the postcolonial, some main common features can be distinguished, as coexisting in either dialogic or oppositional relations. As a matter of fact, postcolonialism can be seen as a radical “separatist resistance to Western cultural hegemony”19, and as “a body of writing that attempts to shift the dominant ways in which relations between Western and non-Western people and their world are viewed [forcing] its alternative knowledges into the power structures of the West as well as the non-West”.20 In other words, Not only [postcolonialism] has been privileged as the position from which to deconstruct colonialism's past self-representations and legitimating strategies but it is also designated the location for producing properly postmodern intellectual work on the contemporary world.21 Since the publication of Said’s book Orientalism22 in 1978, postcolonial theory has challenged two main instruments of colonial authority, namely knowledge and power. Taking inspiration by Foucault, who described knowledge and power as integrated with each other23, Said’s Orientalism refers simultaneously to an academic endeavour on one side, as well as to a form of representing everything non-Western through which the dominance of the West over the East has been established, confirmed and recognised. Then, instead of concentrating all the critical analytical effort exclusively on the economic and political dimensions of European and colonial dominance, the attention has been shifted to knowledge. In this new theoretical frame, the positivist understanding of knowledge as something objective and universal started to be challenged. Indeed, according to postcolonial theorists, the postcolonial representation of the world has been historically generated in Europe, to be later violently transferred and imposed outside the oldContinent through colonialism: “Western ways of knowing […] have become 19 A. Sen, The Argumentative Indian, 139. I. Marion Young, “The logic of masculinist protection: reflections on the current security state,” Sings: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 29, no. 1 (2003): 2. 21 B. Parry, “The postcolonial...”, 3. 22 E. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1978). 23 M. Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (London: Tavistock, 1970). 20 11 universalised to the extent they are often seen as the only way to know”.24 Then, the founding mission of postcolonialism becomes a critical re-reading of history, to reveal its inherent Eurocentric construction influencing our understanding of the present. As effectively stated by Walter Mignolo “knowledge is also colonised and, therefore, it needs to be de-colonised”.25 It is in fact important to recognize that “Eurocentric world history is more than a theory: it is a vast complex of beliefs, a world model, made up of countless statements of fact and explanatory theories”.26 Postcolonialism, on the other hand, can be seen as a negation of Eurocentrism, somehow producing a sort of destructive tension with everything definable as European. As stated by Gyan Prakash, such criticism “seeks to undo the Eurocentrism produced by the institution of the West’s trajectory, its appropriation of the other as History, [trying] to fiercely combat the persistence of colonialist knowledge in nationalist and mode-of-production narratives”.27 Thus, with part of its roots in poststructuralist theories28, postcolonialism tries to subvert European discourses. In his insightful book Provincializing Europe, the Indian author Dipesh Chakrabarty wants to “provincialize or decentre”29 Europe. By proving how history has been structured to accommodate Europe at the centre of the world, the author shows how the periphery discovers its own historically imposed marginality, beginning to claim contemporary multiple centralities. Introducing his book, Dipesh Chakrabarty writes: Provincializing Europe is not a book about the region of the world we call “Europe”. That Europe, one could say, has already been provincialized by history itself. Historians have long acknowledged that the so-called “European age” in modern history began to yield place to other regional and global configurations toward the middle of the twentieth century. European history is no longer seen as embodying anything like a “universal human history”. [...] The Europe I seek to provincialize or decentre is an imaginary figure that remains deeply embedded in clichéd and shorthand forms in some everyday habits of thoughts that invariably subtend attempts in the social sciences to address question of political modernity in South Asia. The phenomenon of “political modernity” [...] is impossible to think of anywhere in the world without invoking certain categories and concepts, the genealogies of which go deep into the intellectual and even theological 24 J. P. Sharp, Geographies of Postcolonialism, 110. W. Mignolo, “Globalization and De-Colonial Thinking,” in Cultural Studies, edited by Escobar Arturo and Walter Mignolo (Durham: Duke UP, 2008), 2. 26 J. M. Blaunt, Eight Eurocentric Historians, (New York: The Guilford Press, 2000). 27 G. Prakash, “Postcolonial Criticism and Indian Historiography”, Third World and Post-Colonial 99, no. 31/32 (1992): 8. 28 L. Gandhi, Postcolonial Theory, viii, and P. Mongia, Contemporary Postcolonial Theory, 2. 29 D. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: postcolonial thought and historical difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 3-4. 25 12 traditions of Europe. [...] What historically enables a project such as that of “provincializing Europe” is the experience of political modernity in a country like India. European thought [...] is both indispensable and inadequate in helping us to think through the various life practices that constitute the political and the historical in India.30 This re-formulation of world history leads to another key concept of postcolonial analysis: multiple modernities. As effectively summarised by the Italian scholar Sandro Mezzadra, the critical reading of colonial history, inevitably produces “the multiplication of modernities, in the discovery of alternative paths of experiences of modernization [that help to] understand modernity not that much as an ‘unfinished project’ but rather [...] as a contested field”.31 Therefore, postcolonial discourse can be transferred to the present, representing a tool enabling the reader to deconstruct the Eurocentric idea of a unique line of progress and development. There is no one unique future, but many, each generated by different presents. But, postcolonialism does not extinguish its subverting theoretical effort at this point. Indeed, if the past, the present and a possible future have been written by Europe and the West, from a non-European and non-Western point of view it is possible to say that the others of both the West and Europe, have been silenced. They become the subalterns of the world’s past and present: voiceless entities submitted to the dominant voice of the West. The Indian scholar Gayatry Chakravorty Spivak used the Foucauldian concept of “epistemic violence”32 to underline how, by the diffusion of European universalizing knowledge, non-Western culture become marginalised if not “wrong”.33 Spivak effectively described such conditions in her famous essay Can the subaltern speak?.34 It represented and still represents one of the most powerful “interrogations of the academic effort to give the [...] subaltern a voice in history”.35 This attempt to give voice to the voiceless subjects of history started its mission by discovering the silenced histories of the colonies. Those subalterns, those invisible figures of the past, inhabited the margins of the colonies becoming the marginalised of 30 Ibid., 3-6. [emphasis added] S. Mezzadra, “How Many Histories of Labor? Towards a Theory of Postcolonial Capitalism” (presentation, After Europe: Postcolonial Knowledge in the Age of Globalization, University of Chicago, Chicago, March 12 2010). 32 G. C. Spivak, “Can the subaltern speak?,” in Marxist Interpretations of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Basingstoke: Macmillian Education, 1988), 272. 33 J. P. Sharp, Geographies of Postcolonialism, 111. 34 G. C. Spivak, “Can the subaltern speak?,” 271. 35 J. Sharpe and G. C. Spivak, “A Conversation with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: Politics and the Imagination”, Signs 28, no. 2 (Winter, 2003): 609-610. 31 13 the marginalised: they are peasants, women, lower castes and individuals from the lowest social classes. Soon, voices from the subaltern studies’ academic reality, located neither in Europe nor in America but in the territories of the ex-colonies, began to denounce how the same logic of marginalization and negation of the subalterns were perpetuated also by postcolonial theorists: The experiences of the marginalised are used in postcolonial theories, but without opening up the process to their knowledges, theories and explanation. When there is a meeting it is in the centre – in the (predominantly) Western institutions of power/knowledge [...] and in the language of the West (science, philosophy, social science and so on, expressed in English, French, Spanish...).36 As a critic of the critics, the subaltern studies group tried to broaden postcolonialism. By affirming the need for subalterns to speak for themselves, being not any more a passive object of observation, the debate was moved to a crucial and divisive question, involving geography, history and social structure: “who can speak for whom?”. The answer tended to exclude from postcolonial theoretical elaboration all the non-subalterns: the Europeans and Westerns first of all. Such a sceptical approach, we will see, characterizes most of the postcolonial academic context in a country such as India. There, the postcolonial theoretical discourse is often suspiciously perceived as another Western intrusion. Nevertheless, another concept generated inside the frame of postcolonialism, somehow permitted to overcome the impasse generated by the subaltern studies discourse, by creating another space of experience. It is the space of hybridity, to be thought of as opposite to cultural essentialism37 and as a “complex relationships emerging from conditions of globality, postcoloniality and migration”.38 It is the third space of human theoretical production and daily experience, that is neither in the First nor in the Third worlds, being both of them at once. This in-between space, that has been firstly described by Homi Bhabha39, “is not just the bringing together of two cultures, but is also the creation of something new out of difference”.40 Then, as underlined by Fazal Razvi, “by deploying concepts like hybridity [...] postcolonialism 36 J. P. Sharp, Geographies of Postcolonialism, 112. L. Gandhi, Postcolonial Theory, 123. 38 A. Asgharzadeh, “The Return of the Subaltern: International Education and Politics of Voice”, Journal of Studies in International Education 12, no 4 (Winter 2008): 336 [emphasis added]. 39 H. Bhabha, The location of culture, (London: Routledge, 1994). 40 J. P. Sharp, Geographies of Postcolonialism, 132. 37 14 has effectively become a reconciliatory [...] category”.41 From this point of view, the hybrid subject is seen to exist somewhere in the encounter between two or more cultural, social, and political paradigms. It is part of all of them while not completely belonging to any one of them: it represents the global and the local spaces in their interaction. The conceptualization of the hybrid subject “is a movement away from location, not the claiming of a new, specific location”.42 Thus, and this is probably the most important feature, the hybrid subject is not an Europeanised or Westernised one, nor is it a non-Western or non-European one. Rather, the hybrid subject is a figure inbetween and over diverse cultural, political and social patterns. Going back to the main subject of this research, it is possible to understand how the hybrid subject as a specific theoretical product of postcolonialism, is extremely important while approaching students who have experienced any kind of international and intercontinental mobility. Somehow, it is possible to say that those students embody such an in-between space of understanding, experiencing and living a multiple geographical, social and cultural place at the same time. Then the “displaced” person, in this case the international student, could be the hybrid subject, simultaneously outsider and insider, being not completely any one of them. But, according to what has been underlined by many scholars who criticize the idea of hybridity, the subject who lives abroad in a different cultural and social context from his or her own, becomes rather the object of two polarizing phenomena. Indeed, on the one hand he or she can reinforce his or her own self-identification as a member of his or her own original imagined community.43 Alternatively, under the cultural European and Western hegemonic pressure, the original identity of the dislocated subject can suddenly disappear to be replaced by a new one conforming to the actual cultural and social context and demands. But, such structural criticism of the postcolonial idea of hybridity, could be effectively overcome by taking into account the concept of translation. As noticed by Gregor McLennan, who elaborates what Homi Bhabha stated, 41 F. Razvi, “Postcolonialism and Globalization in Education,” Cultural Studies, Critical Methodologies 7, no. 3 (2007), 260. 42 J. Hiddleston, “Derrida, Autobiography and Postcoloniality”, French Cultural Studies 16, no. 2 (2005), 293. 43 D. Fitzgerald and R. Waldinger, “Transnationalism in Question,” The American Journal of Sociology 109, no. 5 (2004), 1178. 15 [a] constant intellectual, political and psychic negotiation [has been] happening between the colonizing and colonised subject positions, so that variable hybrid moods, conditions and products emerge over time. Today, that initial hybridity has been intensified by a greater presence of migrant peoples within the West itself, and marginal groups engage in new processes of cultural hybridization, as colonizer and colonised identities repeatedly clash and mix, shaping unstable – but always different – postcolonial interpretations.44 Once again, the debate over postcolonialism shows intrinsic vastness and internal plurality. However, as it will became more clear in the next pages, all these dimensions of postcolonialism - resistance to the Western and European universalizing power and knowledge, provincialization of Europe and multiplication of modernities, subaltern studies and the concept of hybridity together with the hybrid subject - coexist dialogically in many non-European academic contexts, as Pune University. Then, in this study, the problem of the re-writing of history, the academic attempt to give voice to the subalterns and the concept of multiple modernities, as briefly described above, will be dealt with. On the other hand and as previously mentioned, the hybrid subject is instead often suspiciously seen by non-Western intellectuals. Indeed, for part of the postcolonial intellectual reality, especially the one closer to the group of the subaltern studies, hybridity seems nothing more than an attempt from the West to regain the possibility of speaking for the non-West. Nevertheless, even such a critical impasse is a subject of constructive discussion and transcontinental dialogue and confrontation. 2.2. On the meanings of postcoloniality After having discussed postcolonialism, the attention has to be directed toward the other alternative delineation of the postcolonial. Postcoloniality could be defined as a contingent condition.45 Somehow it seems an inevitable situation from which it appears almost impossible to escape. “Anti-colonial resistance or nationalism [...] and colonial discourse are governed by identical protocols”46, revealing as even the process of decolonisation could be understood as somehow colonised - when following the same logics of the colonisers. From this point of view, as briefly discussed before, the prefix 44 G. McLennan, “Sociology, Eurocentrism and Postcolonial Theory,” European Journal of Social Theory 6, no. 1, (2003), 73 [emphasis added]. 45 S. Mezzadra, La condizione postcoloniale, (Verona: Ombre Corte, 2008). 46 P. Roy, Indian Traffic. Identities in question in colonial and postcolonial India, (University of California Press: Los Angeles, 1998), 177. 16 “post” seems to be quite inappropriate: postcoloniality is intended in this thesis to refer, to a limited extent, to the overlap of neo-colonialism and the changes determined by the end of direct European rule over European colonial territories: The newly independent nation-state makes available the fruits of liberation only selectively and unevenly: the dismantling of colonial rule did not automatically bring about changes for the better in the status of women, the working class or the peasantry in most colonised countries. [...] A version of [colonialism] can be duplicated from within.47 Besides, if the influence of the colonizers in their previously colonised territories has basically changed its operative forms, it is still exercised in new, direct or indirect ways. Then, from this point of view, postcoloniality has to do with the “present inequalities – political economic and discursive – in the global system”.48 It includes world economic exploitation, politics of subjugation and unequal cultural power relations. There are many ways to define such an uneven global condition, the analysis of which has been especially relevant in the recent academic discussion on globalization. Among others, the description of this world condition, elaborated by Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt in their book Empire, is one of the most provocative.49 They describe the global order as a sovereign new world regime that has been established in a completely different form than the ones during the time of European empires. A new order in which, without the need to direct rule, powerful nations tend to incorporate the other into the global system they established first.50 The idea of development itself, as promoted especially by the USA during the 1960s, is also still entailed into the frame of postcoloniality: The world view of development was still based on a hierarchical and patronising model of the world: that there were developed and developing nations [...] as if all the countries could be located along one linear path to development, with the USA [and Europe] in the present and the other countries located somewhere behind but aspiring to achieve the same heights.51 Beyond this analysis, mostly focused on the economic and politic dimensions of postcoloniality, more important for this thesis is to consider the postcolonial condition 47 A. Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism, 16. P. Mongia, Contemporary Postcolonial Theory, 1. 49 M. Hardt and A. Negri, Empire. 50 Ibid., 181-182. 51 J. P. Sharp, Geographies of Postcolonialism, 78. 48 17 of knowledge. It has to be kept clearly in mind that most of the academic work in nonWestern or non-European places is still highly influenced by Western and European structures. Besides, such non-Western intellectual production has been always secondarily located in the world academic stage. In an unequal relation of power that roots, among other factors, on the colonial education systems and on the current organization of publishing and public academic events, the universalising European culture is still present, producing theoretical tensions, inside and outside non-Western and non-European academies: The colonial aftermath is fundamentally deluded in its hope that the architecture of a new world will magically emerge from the physical ruins of colonialism [...] The triumphant subjects of this aftermath inevitably underestimate the psychologically tenacious hold of the colonial past on the postcolonial present [...] The perverse longevity of the colonised is nourished, in part, by persisting hierarchies of knowledge and values [...] of some people and cultures. [Decolonisation] barely disguises the foundational economic, cultural and political damaged inflicted by colonial occupation.52 Yet, as for the subaltern studies group, some intellectuals locate postcolonialism itself into the category of Western or European universalizing knowledge. John McLeod, paraphrasing the Indian scholar of English studies Meenakshi Mukherjee, underlines that “concepts and nomenclature of postcolonialism have been fashioned in Western [...] universities”53 being after implemented and used by academics from the ex-colonies. Once again, the knowledge produced in the metropolis seems to be forcibly exported to the “provinces”, as if there would be no way to escape from the universalizing logic of European and Western cultural hegemony. But if, on the one hand, Mukherjee’s reasoning has to be taken into consideration, it is also true that, as has been seen before while discussing postcolonialism, this refusal of everything coming from Europe and the West is not necessarily productive or desirable. Indeed, looking to the argument addressed by most of the postcolonial theories, there is no need to stop considering them as valid and possible alternatives that challenge universalizing European and Western knowledge. Thus what has been presented until now forms a preliminary step onto the vast terrain of the concept of postcolonial. As we have seen, postcoloniality tends to include postcolonialism, recognizing it as another universalizing and forced European and 52 53 L. Gandhi, Postcolonial Theory, 7. J. McLeod, Beginning Postcolonialism, 247. 18 Western intrusion into the non-European and non-Western world. On the other hand, postcolonialism identifies postcoloniality as the current condition in which what developed itself, and which it tries to challenge. Culture, knowledge and history must be rewritten and redefined, as they represent those fields of the contemporary postcolonial condition in which postcolonial theory can play its most concrete and fascinating subversive potentials. Hence, there is no validity in seeing any binary opposition between these concepts. Indeed, as shown until now, they live rather a dialogical relation in which they coexist being one somehow inside the other and vice versa. This is especially true if we look at non-European academic contexts, in which many curricula are pervasively structured along European and Western models, coexisting in the same departments alongside creative, brilliant new constructions of unconventional or non-mainstream Western and European spaces of knowledge. These new theoretical areas can be built on the refusal and negation of the European episteme, or, alternatively, in a dialogic relation with them. In the latter case, these alternative theoretical spaces are a concrete attempt to escape what appears as the “natural” binary oppositions of the West/the rest, north/south, European/non-European: these binaries are part of a matrix of other binaries, such as, the other against the I, the East against the West, the Orient vs. the Occident, the colonised against the imperialist, the traditional against the modern, the particular against the universal and are part of an episteme that represents the project of [European] modernity.54 Inside this frame, Indian academic contexts represent a privileged place from where it is possible to see and analyse all these academic dynamics. Indeed, thanks to their deep involvement in the postcolonial theoretical discourses on the one side, and their still strong legacies with their colonial pasts on the other, Indian academies constitute laboratories in which these dualisms are often exasperated, as well as innovatively reconciled. Tensions are especially present, as we will see, in those departments that were originally structured as extensions of the colonial power, as part of the hegemonic machine built by the colonizers to rule the colonised. 54 S. Patel, “Beyond the Binaries”, 382. Professor Sujata Patel was, until 2009, professor at the Department of Sociology of Pune University. In S. Patel, interviewed by students of Pune University, 2009, transcript. 19 Throughout the next pages, the result of theoretical discussions on postcolonialism and postcoloniality presented until now will be employed with reference to a concrete nonEuropean academic context. The question is how that, which has been briefly described until now as postcolonialism, is translated in practices, if it is, and to what extent colonial structures still presently influence an advanced Indian centre of knowledge. This is extremely important for the following attempt to understand how a certain cultural reality – namely the one in Pune, in India - influences the elaboration of the perception of Europe. Specifically, for the Indian case, the European past is understood predominantly referring to the time of the British Empire, without forgetting also the Dutch, Portuguese and French occupation.55 The articulation of the present imaginary of Europe in the eyes of many Indians is certainly influenced by the past colonial legacies and the present unequal relations of power, no less so in those academic contexts where those historic and theoretical questions are deeply debated. As strikingly expressed by professor Aniket Jawaree, such complexity can also be summarized as follows: The postcolonial situation [can be understood] as a double one where on the one hand you have to criticize the colonial period, but on the other acknowledge that we are indebted to that same period. A pure condemnation of the colonial is not possible [...] for postcolonial thinking. Many ideas are inherited from the ones the colonials brought here. On the same time we have to criticise colonialism, because it was an oppressive project and so on. That is the way I understand postcoloniality, that is the difference between merely be anti-colonial and being postcolonial.56 Then, such a postcolonial double dimension of the relation between Europe and India has been investigated and questioned to different scholars of Pune university. This has been done by using a qualitative methodology that aimed to actively include the numerous subjects and that will be described in the next chapter - chapter 3. 55 C. Bulbeck, Re-orienting Western Feminism: Women’s Diversity in a Postcolonial World, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 23. 56 Professor Aniket Jaaware of the Department of English of Pune University, interviewed by the author, October 16, 2010. 20 3. Methodology. A qualitative research Qualitative research methods provide a means by which the social world can be understood from the perspective of those who inhabit it.57 Though understanding complexity is not exclusive to qualitative inquiry, qualitative methods are notably suited for grasping the complexity of the phenomena we investigate.58 As already indicated by the title of this chapter, the methodology chosen for this research can be defined as a qualitative one. Indeed, the aim of this thesis is to describe how Europe is perceived from a specific non-European academic context as two departments of Pune university. To define this perspective, it has been considered if and how the specific analysed educational contexts influence and address the perspective of individuals about Europe, by actively involving these individuals in the diverse research’s steps. In this frame, the interaction among many elements of diverse spheres of the human experience plays a role, increasing the complexity of what has to be investigated. Therefore, quantitative methods appear less appropriate for such a tasks, as such an approach would be unable to describe the multitude of diverse aspects characterising different subjectivities. The use of a qualitative method results as a better approach, allowing the deepening of each case, for a better understanding of the dynamism that is expected to be found in a globalized context. Michael P. Grady, describing the reasons for the shift from a prevalence of quantitative researches, to qualitative ones, that interests contemporary social sciences, reveals some of the reasons that led me to choose a qualitative research methodology: Quantitative research is built on a positivist approach that dominates natural science investigations. But recently an increasing number of researchers have begun to question whether positivism is the best approach for conducting research in the social sciences. A significant number of researchers in the social sciences now use qualitative research because of the compatibility of qualitative methods with both the questions being examined and their view of reality as changing and dynamic. [...] This is not a question of which is better, quantitative or qualitative [...] Qualitative research proceeds from different assumptions than those on which quantitative research is based. The view of reality with which qualitative 57 M. J. Birks, Y. Chapman and K. Francis, “Breaching the Wall: Interviewing People from Other Cultures”, Journal of Transcultural Nursing 18, no. 2 (2007): 155. 58 A. Peshkin, “Understanding Complexity: A Gift of Qualitative Inquiry”, Anthropology & Education Quarterly 19, no. 4 (1988): 416. 21 researcher are concerned is complex and cannot be reduced to a set of discrete variables.59 As for the broader context of the social sciences, I selected a qualitative approach, instead of a quantitative one, because of: the expected complexity of the phenomenon I was approaching, the impossibility to reduce the discussion to an analysis of discrete variables, the understanding of reality as dynamically changing, and a critic to the use of positivist research techniques while investigating personal perspectives. Thus, organised in different steps, my research goes through an articulated analysis of a vast corpus of literature, complemented by a series of two technically different kinds of interviews. This section of the thesis will explain to the reader the methodology selected for this research, and why it has been chosen. Subsequently, the following pages are organised in two main sections. The first is devoted to the explanation of how literature was selected and analysed, while the second tries to adequately describe the typologies of interviews used. 3.1 Reading The first obstacle that had to be faced, was the absolute lack of literature regarding the specific topic of the perception of Europe from a non-European, academic context. However, on the topic of postcoloniality and postcolonialism fortunately a huge literature is available. Besides, looking at those texts concerning the controversial concept of the postcolonial, much has been written in this respect regarding India. Thus, different strategies have been implemented to detect the most adequate literature for the diverse analysed subjects. I will present these research steps chronologically, as I developed them during my fieldwork. This strategy aims to give to the reader a more realistic overview of the most practical issues concerning the research itself as I faced and overcame them. Before flying to India, I begun reading some of the books considered as the best examples of the most popular Indian, English written, postcolonial literature.60 Framed into the research objectives, the aim of reading such literature was to have a preliminary 59 M. P. Grady, Qualitative and action research: a practitioner handbook, (Bloomington: Phi Delta Kappa Educational Foundation, 1998), 8-9. 60 J. McLeod, Beginning Postcolonialism, 125. 22 opinion about India and how the postcolonial is narrated by prominent Indian authors. Specifically, I read Midnight’s Children61 of Salman Rushdie and The God of Small Things62 written by Arundhati Roy. Both of these texts are examples of postcolonial literature, since they have been written after the Indian independence, and are also postcolonial because they critically approach India’s colonial cultural, social and political heritage. After this preliminary step, my attention moved to more academic literature, concerning Eurocentrism, postcoloniality and postcolonialism. In particular, I focused on the writings of Indian authors such as Leela Gandhi63, Amartya Sen64 and Homi Bhabha65 without excluding particularly important works written by non-Indian intellectuals such as Joanne P. Sharp66, John McLeod67 and Edward Said.68 This research section intended to improve my knowledge of postcolonialism as a theory, and my understanding of postcoloniality as a condition, without forget the centrality of Eurocentrism in the relation between European and non-European knowledges. An important aspect that has to be mentioned is that I accessed most of these books at the Pune University libraries - especially those of Sociology, Women’s Studies and English departments - in order to have a picture of the material available to the local students. This was facilitated by the fact that, at that time, I was having the first talks with Pune University professors who suggested me to read books available in the libraries of their own departments. After having investigated postcoloniality, postcolonialism and Eurocentrism most broadly and on a global scale, I narrowed my attention to the mostly Indian academic literature concerning postcolonial sociology and English studies in India. Once more, the selection of the material has been partly driven by the suggestions of local professors, and partly by the result of my own researches both on the web and in the archives of the local libraries. Extremely important have been also the academic articles and books that I could access at the Pune University Centre for Social Sciences and Humanities – CSSH.69 61 S. Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, (London: Penguin, 1991). A. Roy, The God of Small Things, (Harper Collins: London, 1997). 63 L. Gandhi, Postcolonial Theory. 64 A. Sen, The Argumentative Indian. 65 H. Bhabha, The location of culture. 66 J. P. Sharp, Geographies of Postcolonialism. 67 J. McLeod, Beginning Postcolonialism. 68 E. Said, Orientalism. 69 http://www.humanities.unipune.ernet.in/index.html 62 23 3.2 Speaking As I already mentioned in the introduction of this chapter, the core part of my research entails the discussion of the results of a number of interviews I had while living in Pune. Such interviews were carried out following different formats. Diverse approaches depended on the subject interviewed and the kinds of information I was interested about. Basically, two different strategies, for two different kinds of subjects, were considered. The next two sub-sections of this chapter will describe how these interviews have been organised and which have been the debated topics. First, I will describe the talks with the professors of Pune University and conclude with the crucial conversations with local students that studied in Europe. These two different groups correspond with the implementation of two diverse interview techniques. These have been, respectively, informal and unstructured talks with the professors, and a peculiar kind of in-depth interview – that will be described more precisely in subsection 3.2.2 – with the students. 3.2.1 Talking about Europe and postcolonial India The first interviewed group consisted of seven professors of Pune University, almost all from the Department of Sociology, the Women’s Studies Department and the Department of English. Indeed, besides these academic fields, I only had a talk with professor Mangesh Kulkarni from the Department of Politics and Public Administration of the same University. The choice of the departments has been not incidental. Regarding the Department of Sociology and the Women’s Studies Department - that is part of the Department of Sociology - the main reasons for interviewing faculty from these departments were my familiarity with those academic areas, together with the fact that I was studying there. This presented an indubitable advantage, since I could easily get in touch with the professors and even attend their lectures in some cases. Besides, as we will see in the fifth chapter, both postcolonialism and postcoloniality are extremely actual topics debated and taught in those areas of the social sciences. In the case of the English department, it is probably enough to remember that postcolonialism appeared 24 first as “literary analysis”.70 In any case, the choice of both these departments will be further clarified once discussing postcolonial sociology and English studies in India which I do in chapter four. Regarding professor Mangesh Kulkarni, I decided to talk with him about my research, as he is collaborating with the Euroculture programme - of which I was part as well - delivering lectures on postcolonialism both in Pune and at the European universities of the Euroculture consortium.71 Consequently, I regarded him to be an expert on postcolonial related topics, as well as extensively involved in the relations between Pune and European universities. The expected function of these talks was to gradually address the research topic itself, while offering at the same time the possibility to talk about Europe with subjects familiar with the topics of postcolonialism and postcoloniality. Besides, my intention was to have an effective contextualization of the departments where the professors worked, regarding the relation with other European academies, as well as with the teaching of postcolonial theories.72 One of the main intentions was to make clear how the interviewee was the expert - even if I was already familiar at least with the postcolonial concept - me being the student - that was obviously facilitated by our real relation as professor and student. In this way I wanted the professor to feel encouraged to share with me as much information as she or he could. As matter of fact, “the researcher’s interviewing techniques are motivated by the desire to learn everything the participant can share about the research topic”. 73 On the other hand, I began each interview with an extensive introduction about my research topic, trying to keep the discussion as much as possible within the limits of what I wanted to investigate. Moreover, at the very beginning of the talk I asked to the interviewee to clearly pronounce their personal information - name and surname - and their job position to the recorder, as to enforce the perception that, after all, the encounter was still an interview. 70 J. McLeod, Beginning Postcolonialism, 23. The Euroculture consortium involves the following European universities: Universidad de Deusto of Bilbao, Georg-August Universität Göttingen, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, Uniwersytet Jagiellonski of Krakow, Univerzita Palackého v Olomouci and Uppsala Universitet. See http://www.euroculturemaster.org. Professor Mangesh Kulkarni was indeed “awarded [with] an Erasmus Mundus Scholarship of the European Commission to teach and conduct research at universities in Gottingen (Germany) and Bilbao (Spain)”, http://www.unipune.ac.in/dept/mental_moral_and_social_science/politics_and_public_administration/ppa _webfiles/pdf/KulkarniMangesh.pdf. 72 P. Mongia, Contemporary Postcolonial Theory. 73 N. Mack, C. Woodsong, K. M. McQueen, G. Guest, E. Namey, Qualitative Research Methods: A Data Collector’s Field Guide, (North Carolina: Family Health International, 2005), 29. 71 25 Besides this articulated frame, one of the main goals was also to create a confidential environment before the start of interview itself. To do so, I basically used one technique: before the actual interviews took place, I had numerous small talks with the professors. These fortuitous meetings happened in neutral locations such as the departments’ corridors or classrooms, where we briefly discussed my research doubts and interests. In some cases the interview or discussion was conducted over a number of occasions, as for example with professors Anurekha Chari and Sharmila Rege. Indeed, as Melanie J. Birks et all. noticed: [The] establishment of a solid rapport between the interviewer and participant is an essential element in any research setting. Both parties must be secure in the level of comfort and trust in the research relationship before the focus of the research is broached […] the use of repeat interviews [is] also identified as a strategy to enhance the level of comfort of the participants and therefore the breadth and depth of the information provided by them.74 Moreover, each interview happened in the professor’s office, making them feel comfortable. Besides, presenting the interviews as the first fundamental step of my research, the informers felt directly involved in my work. This sincere strategy aimed to create a participatory feeling that, in my opinion, facilitated the achievement of a high degree of confidentiality and collaboration. The topics discussed during these conversations were:   the meanings of both postcolonialism and postcoloniality; how the structuring of the department’s courses is influenced by postcoloniality. This point was intentionally addressed not about the interviewed professors’ own courses, but rather about the courses of their colleagues, as I expected no one  admitting to be influenced by European or Western models;  questioned and also discussed in relation to the informant’s own courses; the relevance of postcolonialism for the teachings in their department was the interviews ended with some more relaxed talks about any eventual academic experiences in Europe and with European scholars. At this point, usually at the very end of every conversation, we exchanged some evaluation of the recent changes in the relations between their department and European ones. 74 M. J. Birks et al., “Breaching the Wall: Interviewing People from Other Cultures”, 152. 26 3.2.2 Narrating Europe The second type of interview employed was the one that required the most effort, in terms of both the theoretical preparation and the practical execution. Indeed it was a kind of in-between technique, sharing characteristics of the in-depth and the narrative interview methods. Both these two mentioned methodologies are characterised by a low degree of structuring, aimed as much as possible at free and original interaction within interviewer and interviewee. Indeed, “the narrative interview is classified among the qualitative research methods [...] to be considered a form of unstructured, in-depth interview with specific features”.75 Thus, before moving to the description of the contents considered during the interviews, it is useful to spend some space to describe what these two qualitative methodologies are, why they were selected and how they were interpreted and implemented. The in-depth technique “involves conducting intensive individual interviews with a small number of respondents to explore their perspective on a particular idea, program, or situation”.76 Technically speaking, the researcher “engage[s] with participants by posing questions in [a] neutral manner, listening attentively to participants’ responses, and asking follow-up questions and probes based on those responses”.77 To summarize, in-depth interviewing [is] a means of obtaining information from the perspective of the participants and informants themselves. In-depth interviewing permits collection of data from the viewpoint of those who experience the phenomena of interest, including the meaning that these individuals assign to the experience.78 Being interested on how specific social and cultural contexts and dynamics influenced the perception that certain individuals had about Europe, the in-depth interview technique was selected as the most appropriate means of investigation. In other words, questionnaires or structured interviews would have limited the amount and 75 M. Bauer, “The Narrative Interview. Comments on a technique for qualitative data collection”, Papers in Social Research Methods – Qualitative Series 1, (1996): 2. 76 C. Boyce and P. Neale, “Conducting In-Depth Interviews: A Guide fro Designing and Conducting InDepth Interviews fro Evaluation Input,” Pathfinder International Tool Series. Monitoring and Evaluation – 2, May 2006, http://www.esf-agentschap.be/uploadedFiles/Voor_ESF_promotoren/Zelfevaluatie_ESFproject/m_e_tool_series_indepth_interviews.pdf. 77 N. Mack et al., Qualitative Research Methods: A Data Collector’s Field Guide, 29. 78 M. J. Birks et al., “Breaching the Wall: Interviewing People from Other Cultures”, 150. 27 the type of information discussed to a more superficial level: a long talk developed in a friendly and confidential environment provides greater assurance to reach the expected goals than a much more impersonal and less engaging questionnaire. Besides, one of the key features of the in-depth and narrative interview techniques is to leave the informant free to structure his or her own specific descriptions, without being influenced by the interviewer’s previously established structure: qualitative, in-depth interviews must be flexible. The information that is sought is from the perspective of the participant and the use of a rigid framework may result in a directive approach that renders the story that the researcher expects or wants to hear, rather than a narrative account from the perspective of the person being interviewed.79 Last but not least, with Santosh Sabale80 and Richa Singh81 - two of the three interviewed students - I had a previous friendly relationship that facilitated the building of confidence necessary to have more successful interviews. Indeed I knew both of them in the very first days of my stay in Pune. This happened because Richa Singh works as tutor at the international students’ office of the university, while I was introduced to Santosh Sabale by Sanjay Kumar Kamble, a teaching associate of the Women’s Studies Department that I met during my first class of “Feminism, global and local”.82 As I said before, the talks have been adapted to some of the characteristics of another interview technique, namely the narrative one. This methodology was firstly discussed by Fritz Schütze.83 As observed by Jane Elliot, over the past twenty years there has been a dramatic increase in interest in narrative among those adopting qualitative approaches to research. In particular, it has been suggested that allowing respondents to provide narrative accounts of their lives and experiences can help to redress some of the power differentials inherent in the research enterprise and can also provide good evidence about the everyday lives of research subjects and the meanings they attach to their experiences.84 79 Ibid., 153. PhD student of the Department of Sociology of Pune University. 81 Former student of the Department of English of Pune University, now teaching English and working with the Pune University International Centre. 82 The course, taught by professor Sharmila Rege, was one of those I attended for the entire semester I spent in Pune. 83 M. Bauer, “The Narrative Interview. Comments on a technique for qualitative data collection”, 2. 84 J. Elliot, Using Narrative in Social Research. Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches, (New Delhi: SAGE Publications, 2005), 17. 80 28 Technically speaking, the narrative interview methodology differs from the pure in-depth technique as the core part is represented by a narration by the interviewee, following an articulated introduction of the research topic by the interviewer. This phase is not to be interrupted by the researcher/interviewer, who has rather to base any further questions on what is narrated by the informant.85 Indeed, “instead of foisting the standardised interview on respondents, the interviewer allows respondents to tell their own story, to offer their own ‘narrative’”.86 Then, following this narrative step a questioning phase should follow: [...] after the narration has come to a 'natural' end the interviewer opens the questioning phase. This is the moment when the attentive listening bears fruits, and [...] questions of the interviewer are translated into immanent questions to complete the gaps in the story. The questioning phase starts after the interviewer has sufficiently probed the end of the main narrative.87 Differently from the professors’ interviews when we spoke mostly of theoretical categories as postcolonialism and postcoloniality, with students I wanted to speak about an important and recent experience of their own lives, as the year they spent living abroad. Then, the choice to use some elements of such methodology, depended basically on two factors. First of all, the idea was to make the informants feel free to share any aspect of the time he or she spent in Europe. Besides, the episodes chosen by the interviewee represented by themselves a useful set of data. Moreover, there was also a less technical reason, which reflected instead a theoretical perspective I wanted to coherently address in my work. Indeed, as effectively stated by Robert Atkinson, to use of the narrative interview as a research tool is [...] to understand other persons’ experiences in life or their relations to others, to let their voices be heard, to let them speak for and about themselves first. [...] It is through their construction of the realities, and the stories they tell about those realities, that we, as researchers, learn what we want to from them.88 85 M. Bauer, “The Narrative Interview. Comments on a technique for qualitative data collection”, 7. M. Burawoy, ”The Extended Case Method”, Sociological Theory 16, no. 1 (1998): 13. 87 M. Bauer, “The Narrative Interview. Comments on a technique for qualitative data collection”, 7. 88 J. F. Gubrium and J. A. Holstein, Handbook of interview research : context & method, (New Delhi: SAGE Publications, 2001), 124. 86 29 However, as stated by many scholars, both the in-depth and the narrative interview methodology schemes have not to be strictly reproduced. Indeed, contingent situations can determine variations from the orthodox methodology. As a matter of fact, the rules of the narrative interview define an ideal-typical procedure which may rarely be accomplished. They serve as a standard of aspiration. In practice the [narrative interview] often requires a compromise between narrative and questioning. The narrative reveals the diverse perspectives of the respondents on events, standard questions however are required to make comparisons across many interviews on the same issue [...]. Furthermore, an interview may go through several sequences of narration and subsequent questioning.89 The choice to use some of the characteristics of the narrative interview technique was primarily motivated by the fact that I wanted the informants to feel participating in my research. On the other hand my aim was also to maintain some control over the interviews, by addressing the discussion of certain topics rather than others. Then, once passing to the questioning phase, the talks took more the appearance of in-depth interviews, where some of the points that I planned to discuss, were finally discussed instead of basing my choice of topics exclusively on what was narrated by the informant. Basically, the interview’s structure was composed of the following parts:  previous and detailed explanation of the research, trying to establish a relaxed context. Instead of an interview, I wanted the talks to seem rather as discussions  among colleagues; once this introductory part was concluded, the informant was asked to start to narrate his/her - one year - experience in Europe. As explained before, here the interviewer’s role was limited to listening, sporadically encouraging the  interviewees to follow the narration until its natural end; once the narration was finished, I asked for more details about what the student felt when they approached the European context. Here I tried to steer the discussion toward a comparison between the Indian and the European cultural and academic environments. At this point, in a sort of mutual exchange of ideas, we discovered both similarities and differences between the two realities - Europe and India. Another important point discussed has been how their experience abroad affected the image of Europe those students had in their minds before leaving India. This 89 M. Bauer, “The Narrative Interview. Comments on a technique for qualitative data collection”, 11. 30 strategy mainly aimed to reveal some of the preconceptions regarding Europe that accompanied the students while physically approaching Europe, rather than an analysis of process through which such preconceptions have been challenged. 31 4. Postcolonial knowledge Ancient Indians had hailed knowledge as 'a liberating force'; Bacon popularised it as 'power to control.'90 ‘See, you’re smiling!’ Rahel said. ‘That means it was you. Smiling means “it was you.”’ [...] ‘That’s only in English!’ Velutha said. ‘In Malayalan my teacher always said, “Smiling means it wasn’t me”’.91 Places of non-thought […] today have been waking up from the long process of Westernization.92 The one between knowledge and colonialism, has always been a controversial relation. It has been already mentioned at the beginning of this thesis how the world we live in, as well as the one our minds get to know through narratives and sciences, speaks a Eurocentric language. “Colonialism reshaped existing structures of human knowledge [and] no branch of learning was left untouched by the colonial experience”.93 Consequently, it is safe to say that colonial discourses generated and structured the global reality we live today: people do not see the world entirely as it is, but always through the distortions of cultural values and expectations [...]. Discourses define the parameters of what can be known and understood at any point in history and in any place. They can be thought of as a lens through which people interpret the world, which is not unchanging but is temporarily and spatially specific. Discourses do not simply structure knowledge but also what is included as knowledge, such as what are the reasonable questions to ask.94 Through the colonial experience, academic and non-academic discourses have been globally centred in Europe. Indeed, as examined by many scholars, although Europeans and non-Europeans did not meet each other for the first time in history, colonialism conditioned world knowledge as nothing else did before. The founding characteristic of such universal European knowledge, implicitly supporting the colonial adventure on the wings of positivist enthusiasm, was the construction of binaries. The 90 D. Kumar, “Science and Society in Colonial India: Exploring an Agenda”, Social Scientist 28, no. 5/6 (2000): 24-46. 91 A. Roy, The God of Small Things, (Harper Collins: London, 1997), 177-178. 92 W. Mignolo, “Epistemic Disobedience, Independent Thought and Decolonial Freedom”, Theory, Culture and Society 26, no. 6-7 (2009): 162. 93 A. Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism, 53. 94 J. P. Sharp, Geographies of Postcolonialism, 9-19. 32 self, European, was opposed to the other, the non-European. Inside this opposition, lay the need for the first to shape and subordinate the second. Indeed, as confirmed by the analysis of Joanne P. Sharp, the definition of civilisation and barbarism rests on the production of an irreconcilable difference between ‘black’ and ‘white’ [...]. Colonialism expanded the contact between Europeans and non-Europeans, generating a flood of images and ideas on an unprecedented scale. Previously held notions of inferiority of nonEuropeans provided a justification for European settlements, trading practices, religious missions and military activities; but they were also reshaped in accordance with specific colonial practices.95 By speaking the language of difference, these binaries generated hierarchies. This structure, where some people, concepts and values come firsts and others seconds, was built on a European scientific assumption: because of the use of Cartesian reason, knowledge is conventionally believed to be objective and therefore completely independent from the context in which it is generated: Once upon a time scholars assumed that the knowing subject in the disciplines is transparent, disincorporated from the known and untouched by the geo-political configuration of the world in which people are racially ranked and regions are racially configured. From detached and neutral point of observation [...] the knowing subject maps the world and its problems, classifies people and projects into what is good for them.96 This neutral subject was the white, enlightened coloniser: his mission was to use his own scientific tools to understand and categorize the world he was discovering, conquering, civilizing and modernizing. The effect was a marginalization of every other form of knowledge through a negation of them, or by negotiation from an uneven power position. Through colonialism then, European modernity was forcibly spread but also gradually negotiated; generating spaces of mixed knowledge. The original cultural and scientific impositions of the coloniser were renegotiated and adapted to the new realities they had to invade, through the encounter with the colonised and his or her cultural and scientific indigenous backgrounds. It was “a mixing, a ‘hybridity’, which has become an important issue in colonial discourse theories”.97 95 Ibid., 53-54. W. Mignolo, “Epistemic Disobedience”, 160. 97 A. Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism, 63 [emphasis added]. 96 33 As we have seen, in postcolonial times this world knowledge structure began to be challenged both from inside and outside itself. A new perspective started spreading among the academies of the First, the Second and the Third worlds. Looking to humanities and social sciences, a new discourse appeared: “it involve[d] estranging, contaminating or misreading the master discourse, at times imposing suppressed knowledge and at others making unanticipated, slight alterations, with the overall effect of denying or subverting dominant authority”.98 Postcolonialism started then to meet and challenge postcoloniality. In the ex-colonies, education was reformed and the relevance of postcolonialism as a theoretical frame began to increase. From the Department of English, postcolonial theories gradually contaminated social sciences and the rest of humanities. As we will see in the following pages, India was from the very beginning involved in such dynamics of re-negotiation of the world understanding, giving voices first to nationalistic instances and then to more elaborated alternative voices. Of course Pune University did not constitute an exception in this reforming, academic landscape. The following two sub-chapters then, present the most recent developments in both English and the Sociology departments at Pune University. Indeed, in the academic context they represent probably the most concrete and actual examples of the interaction and interference between postcolonialism and postcoloniality. Thus, by starting from an explanatory overview of how postcoloniality and postcolonialism have been coexisting in India, regarding to these two specific disciplines, the analysis will focus on some of the results of the field research conducted in Pune between August and November 2010. 4.1 Sociology and India Academically speaking, sociology in India appeared first as ethnography and then as anthropology. “If in the late 19th century, sociology found its distinct identity in Europe, the same was true in India, as in many other parts of the colonised world. However, in the case of India, sociology found its representation as [ethnography first and as] anthropology [later]”.99 Indeed, it was introduced in the academic context of 98 I. Kapoor, “Capitalism, Culture, Agency: Dependency versus Postcolonial Theory”, Third World Quarterly 23, no. 4 (2002), 652. 99 S. Patel, “Beyond Binaries”, 383. 34 India by differentiating it from the way in which it was taught and thought in the British metropolis. Moreover, “in pre-independence India the nationalists considered anthropology an instrument of colonial policy”.100 For British rulers Indian “premodern civilizational society [needed anthropology to] categorize and classify [...] groups and communities so that rule [could] be facilitated”.101 As effectively underlined by Immanuel Wallerstein, the social sciences has been structured around a clear distinction between those disciplines that looked to the modern and civilised world, and those instead addressed toward non-modern and uncivilised realities.102 If sociology was part of the first category, anthropology and ethnography were included in the latter one. Subsequently, India was considered and academically reproduced as a non-modern world in opposition to modern Europe, while sociology was obscured by the shadow of anthropology. Besides, the theories and practices of [the] sociological discipline can be broadly divided into two parts. The first is visible and universal. It can be discovered in books; articles published by international publishing houses, in conferences [and] can be heard in lectures within classrooms. It is the official version of the discipline’s self identity [...] stating that modernity refers to modes of social life or organisation which emerged in Europe and [...] sociology [...] is a study of that modern social life [...] Oftentimes this version has a slight recognition of the ‘other’, that is, those that are not completely ‘modern’; such societies are considered ‘modernising societies’ or those which are ‘traditional societies becoming modern’.103 Such intrinsically Eurocentric sociology appeared from the very beginning as a conservative discipline, as “a discourse born into the world uncomfortable with the upheavals of the early nineteen century”104 where there was the need to order and classify. In this ordered conceptualization of world and knowledge, the binary between the colonies and Europe, between the uncivilised and the civilised, the traditional and the modern, was finally deeply rooted in academic and non-academic minds. However, it has to be considered that “colonialism did not inscribe itself in a clean state”105, and that British sociology did not invaded a sociological vacuum. As 100 E. Ben-Ari, S. Farid Alatas and J. Van Breman, Asian Anthropology, (London: Routledge, 2005), 162. S. Patel, “Beyond Binaries”, 383. 102 I. Wallerstein, Open the social sciences, 36. 103 S. Patel, “Sociology’s ‘Other’: the Debates on European Universal” (Lecture at Department of Sociology of Pune University, September 15 2010). 104 G. McLennan, “Sociology, Eurocentrism and Postcolonial Theory”, 70. 105 A. Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism, 21. 101 35 confirmed by Ramkrishna Mukherjee, one of the founders of Indian sociology, protosociological practices were already active in India, far before the arrival of the British: Kautylia (c. 300-400 B.C.) advised the king to collect data about the country and the people, and his treatise Artashastra contains a substantial amount of aforesaid information. Amongst some others, a well-known treatise of this kind, written during the reign of Akbar (1556-1605) is Abul Fazl’s Ain-i-Akbari. Also the literature of the period especially during the 13th-16th century, testifies to the corresponding role of the social polity.106 From this background, post-independence Indian sociology developed following different paths. As described by the Indian sociologist Sujata Patel, in the period following immediately after post-independence, the new Indian, national sociology appeared, reproducing the binaries established during the colonial period. She argues that “the binaries put into practice during the colonial period were refashioned [by postindependence Indian sociology] in the context of the tradition-modernity thesis”.107 This was determined especially because in that period, social sciences and humanities, and more broadly the academic context in general, were extremely engaged with nationalistic discourses. This new sociological tradition Identifie[d] itself as being indigenous and framing endogenous knowledges [being] generally culturist in its orientation. It focuse[d] on creating ‘alternative’ sociological theories and perspectives. It ha[d] emerged with the decolonisation process and draws [drew] its culturalist frames for nationalist ideologies and movements.108 Professor Govind Sadashiv Ghurye, known as the father of Indian sociology, promoted the creation of a national discipline. This nationalistic discipline was based on the understanding of India and the construction of Indian identity, and by and on traditions: central for the sociological analysis were religion and the traditional institutions “of caste, kinship and family”.109 Such conceptualization of Hindu India reproduced the binary separation of the modern West and the traditional East. As in most of the other postcolonial realities, this represented to a certain extent, an attempt to 106 R. Mukherjee, “Indian sociology: historical development and present problems”, Sociological Bulletin 22, no. 1 (1973): 31-32. 107 S. Patel, “Beyond the Binaries”, 387. 108 S. Patel, “Sociology’s ‘Other’”, 5. 109 Ibid., 6. 36 create a national identity capable to challenge and reformulate the colonial heritage.110 The alternative to this essentialist and traditionalist approach, the Lucknow school, was instead speaking of modernity through the use of traditional language. The idea was to juxtapose the European sociology with another Indian, but modern approach, one able to develop from Indian social problems and dynamics its own, potentially universal, social theory.111 A central role was played by the historical analysis of the Indian past: Lucknow sociologists were together affirming three claims: the first was ontological - that the Indian social order was to be assessed in terms of change, of historicity and of ‘progressivism’; the second was methodological – a need to theorise the mechanics of change and that of history and the last was epistemological one - to create a knowledge that assess this change through analysis of its own history.112 Somehow, both these different post-independence Indian sociological schools tended to reproduce and enforce the dichotomy between modernity and tradition globally established by the spread of European colonial knowledge. According to the Ghurye’s school, modernity was refused in favour of tradition, while for the Lucknow school Indian tradition represented the place on which to base Indian universalizing modernity. In both cases modernization theory was legitimised and placed centrally: Generations of students were taught the way modernity in India would mirror the processes as they occurred in the West. No wonder sociology/anthropology promoted specializations such as industrial and urban sociology or sociology of professions, despite the fact that agriculture remained the main and dominant activity and urban life was heavily dependent on First World metropolitan economic investment. [...] Students learned about industrial organizations, assembly line production and urban social problems through textbooks. [...] No wonder there was little to no reflection on the application of these positions.113 As stated by Walter Mignolo, “scientific designs [did] not respond to [Indians’] needs and visions but to needs and visions of Western Europeans”.114 Besides, “institutional arrangements, disciplinary definitions and hierarchies, legitimizing publications, and institutional authority [resided] mostly within the core, with the 110 Ibidem. P. C. Joshi, “Founders of the Lucknow School and their Legacy: Radhakamal Mukerkee and D. P. Mukerji: Some Reflections”, Economic and Political Weekly 21, no. 33 (1986): 1458. 112 S. Patel, “Sociology’s ‘Other’”, 7. 113 S. Patel, “Beyond the Binaries”, 388-389. 114 W. Mignolo, “Epistemic Disobedience”, 167. 111 37 periphery left simply to mimic the core’s dominant discourses and practices”.115 This tense academic situation led Indian sociology to a turning point from where “to break loose from the colonial bonds that set limits [of] range, constricted [the] vision and blunted [the] purposes”.116 As “sociology has been comparatively slow to engage with the growing programme of argument and research in the human sciences around postcoloniality and postcolonialism”117, also Indian sociology started to interact with the concept of postcolonialism quite recently only. In the Indian case it “combines Marxist and neodependency positions with poststructuralist perspectives of subaltern [...] studies”.118 Indeed, as seen before, while broadly discussing the concept of the postcolonial, this new and alternative social theory needed to escape the European and Western episteme. Otherwise, the colonial universalizing knowledge would be easily reproduced under a new form. Thus, after having questioned the entire discourse on European modernity without negating it a priori, the mission of this new sociology, in India as well as in many other of the ex-colonies, was to create a new inclusive social theory.119 The point, once more, was to bring to light how Eurocentric social theory is based on the construction of dualisms, such as the masculine and feminine, reason and body, subject and object and so on. These hierarchal binaries, implying a superior and an inferior term, have been fundamental for the generation of the European colonial and postcolonial world with subordinate and dominant peoples and knowledges.120 Thus, in contrast with the Indian alternative sociological approaches taken into account before, this growing new theoretical perspective tried and tries to go beyond such binaries. Nevertheless, this new dimension of the Indian sociological discourse, being still not completely defined, is experiencing a continuous redefinition and discussion that do not allow for any definitive classifications and categorizations. Going back to the works of the Indian sociologist Sujata Patel, she underlined that, a new perspective called postcolonial studies [...] tries to confront the binaries on which sociological and anthropological knowledge has been constructed. [...] The postcolonial critique gives us a window, a first step to enter the new world of 115 F. Rizvi, “Postcolonialism and Globalization in Education”, 257. S. Dube, “Indian Sociology at the Turning Point”, Sociological Bulletin 26, no. 1 (1977): 1. 117 G. McLennan, “Sociology, Eurocentrism and Postcolonial Theory”, 69. 118 S. Patel, “Sociology’s ‘Other’”, 4. 119 Ibid., 12. 120 E. Lander, “Eurocentrism, Modern Knowledges, and the ‘Natural’ Order of Global Capital”, Nepantia: Views from South 3, no. 2 (2002): 246. 116 38 constructing new sociologies. Self-reflexive sociologies need to break and open the binaries on which they were constructed, interrogate the divisions embodied in the construction of knowledge of society, move away from the universalisms of classical theorists of early modernity and assess the many different ways to understand the consequences of this modernity both in terms of social processes and their knowledge systems. This self-reflexivity needs to be extended to sociological/anthropological knowledge produced in ex-colonial countries from orientalist and nationalist-indigenous perspectives. These remain trapped in elite representations and occlude the understanding of the diverse ways in which new forms of modernities are emerging from the margins.121 This still tentative attempt to reorganize Indian sociology as resisting European universalizing knowledge binaries coexists with many other forms of academic struggles and dialogic relations to and with the academic West. These alternative approaches to social sciences in general and sociology in particular, share the same physical space with many non-European and European academic contexts. In most of the Indian academies, European classical sociologists such as Émile Durkheim and Anthony Giddens are discussed in the same department where courses on Indian sociology are taught also by reading Ranjit Guha, one of the founders of the subaltern studies group.122 Thus, instead of being perceived as a paradox, this new approach is looked on rather as a dialogic experiment. Somehow, and this is the point to be analysed, postcolonialism and postcoloniality coexist and interact in the same physical academic space. 4.1.1 The Department of Sociology of Pune University While speaking of the results of the field research, this sub-chapter wants to contextualize the discussion on the postcolonial at the Department of Sociology of Pune University. In this overview, the department’s syllabi will be considered, mixed with an elaboration of several friendly talks with the professors of the same department. Substantially aware of the complexity and vastness of the mission, the aim is to understand how the theoretical discussion articulated since now regarding postcolonialism and postcoloniality, is translated in practices and interpreted in a specific Indian academic context. Nevertheless, the idea is neither to definitely 121 S. Patel, “Beyond the Binaries”, 392-393. “Syllabus for M.A. Degree. Credit and Semester System (2009-2011)”, (Pune University Department of Sociology). 122 39 categorize, nor to improperly simplify the giant complexity implicit to such intellectual discussion. Rather, the objective is to offer an indicative image of how the teachings are organised in a postcolonial academic context, as a result of a period of three months of observations spent in the Department of Sociology. Besides, some space will be devoted to a few marginal considerations on the way in which the interaction with Europeans and European academic contexts changed within the department in recent years. 4.1.1.1 Opening sociology According to Sharmila Rege, the head of Women’s Studies at Pune University123, “postcoloniality is most starkly present first and foremost through the inequality of languages. In a state university124 more than 50% of students have studied in the regional language (in fact many versions of it) up to their graduate studies. Access to English reading materials is not just a matter of language, but also of being alien to the historical context in which the debates happened”.125 Language in India, as in many other postcolonial academies, is the first relevant and fundamental indicator of the extent to which it is possible to speak of postcoloniality: The hierarchy of standards between central and state universities draws not only on superior infrastructural facilities but also on English being the medium of teaching and research in the former as against the local/regional languages in the latter [...]. In regional professional bodies the ‘language question’ often appears as an opposition between elite sociology practised in English and the more down to earth sociology practised in the vernacular.126 The language question is then perceived as colonial heritage, also reproducing internal uneven binary relations. Indeed, it involves the internal reproduction of exclusion into the circulation and creation of knowledge. Professor Mangesh Kulkarni of the Department of Politics and Public Administration of Pune University, while discussing about postcoloniality in his department, firstly told me: 123 The Women’s Studies Department is associated with the Department of Sociology. The Indian higher education system is basically divided in state and central universities. Nowadays there are more than 300 universities and equivalent institutions in the country. 125 Professor Sharmila Rege of the Women’s Studies Department of Pune University, e-mail message to the author, October 19, 2010. 126 S. Rege, “Exorcising Fear of Identity: Interrogating the ‘Language Question’ in Sociology and Sociological Language” in Doing Sociology in India: Genealogies, Locations and Practices, edited by Sujata Patel (New Delhi, OUP, in press). 124 40 the same language in which we are speaking, is English, and the same democracy in which we live was clearly inspired by the British colonizers. The sciences, especially the social sciences but also philosophy, has been deeply influenced by British or English knowledge.127 These preliminary discourses find their translation and resistance in the same departments in which they are developed and analysed. For instance, as English is the language in which lectures are compulsorily given in each department of Pune University, a Marathi translation is often included. Besides, in both the courses I attended128, material was at least partially provided in Marathi. Marathi speakers who can only read and understand English, but that are not able to speak it, were allowed to participate in any discussions, by using their own regional language. Such devices can be understood as forms of resistance, since they require a voluntary additional charge of work for the translations, with the aim to open the discussion and the understanding of the issues debated. It might be possible to say that, if postcoloniality is embodied in the imposition of English as the teaching language, postcolonialism find its place in the act of translation. Following the analysis of how postcolonialism and postcoloniality interact in the same specific academic context, it is fundamental to consider also the course structures. A relatively superficial understanding of them comes from the reading of the syllabi. However, it is necessary to be aware of how they only partially correspond to what is really taught. Indeed, as suggested by professor Sharmila Rege, “often what is written in the syllabus is only part of what we teach in our courses. The Indian system requires articulated and complex procedures that have to be followed to formalize a certain course outline”.129 As a result, the discussion that follows below is only an indicative overview of the organization of the courses and structuring in a specific postcolonial academic context, rather than a deep analysis of them. The syllabi taken into consideration refer to the M.A. degree of the Department of Sociology and specifically to the periods 2006-2008 and 2009-2011. The choice to consider only those two very recent documents, depends on the fact that they are the first ones elaborated with a 127 Professor Mangesh Kulkarni of the Department of Politics and Public of Pune University, interviewed by the author, August 16, 2010. 128 “Feminism: beyond global and local” at Women’s Studies Department and “Sociology of India” at the Department of Sociology. 129 Professor Sharmila Rege of the Women’s Studies Department of Pune University, interviewed by the author, October 1, 2010. 41 certain degree of autonomy from the UGC (University Grant Commission)130 - not granted before 2006 to state higher education institutions, such as Pune University: Structuring [the syllabi] independently will not take place unless that freedom is given by the structure itself. The departments are not yet completely autonomous since the statutory regulations of approval procedures apply. However, on the level of practice, we have devised ways to include experiments during the most recent years.131 Despite this claimed recent independence, in both the syllabi the first compulsory course is given as “Classical Sociological Traditions”.132 The course is organised through the study of European social theories together with the analysis of the works of prominent authors from both Europe and the US. But, although such sociology is presented as classic, and therefore universalising it, both syllabi include a discussion on the “limitations of classical theory: race, gender [and] colonialism”.133 The second compulsory course is “Sociology of India”. Here postcolonialism is clearly present in many of the forms discussed in the previous chapter. The history of Indian sociology is in fact presented as “Colonial, Nationalist, Indological (Ghurye), Structural-Functional (M. N. Sriniwas), Dialectical (D. P. Mukherji, A. R. Desai), Subaltern (R. Guha), Non Brahmin (Phule, Dr. Babasaheb Amedkar) [and] feminist (N. Desai, L. Dube)”.134 Most of the authors mentioned in brackets, that are those studied for each specific argument, are Indians and definable to different degrees as members of the postcolonial studies group. Among the obligatory courses, other interesting ones for this research are “Introduction to Sociological Theories [and] Methodology of Social Research”.135 If the first course apparently considers only Western scholars from Bronisław Malinowski to Claude Levi-Strauss, the second opposes positivist, post-modernist and poststructuralist perspectives. Moving the attention to the third semester mandatory courses, 130 “A critical element regarding state's policy is the confusion between the intent and the actuality of the UGC Act, which governs the relationship between UGC and universities and affiliated colleges. [...] The first provision stated that no university could be established without the approval of the UGC and the ministry of education. Secondly it also affirmed that the UGC had the authority to derecognise any degree”, in S. Patel, “Higher Education at the Crossroads”, 2151. See also http://www.ugc.ac.in/. 131 Professor Swati Shirwardkar of the Department of Sociology of Pune University, e-mail message to the author, October 8, 2010. 132 “Syllabus for M.A. Degree. Credit and Semester System (2009-2011)”, (Department of Sociology of Pune University, 2009), 1; “Syllabus for M.A. Degree. Credit and Semester System (2006-2008)”, (Department of Sociology of Pune University, 2006), 5. 133 “Syllabus for M.A. Degree. Credit and Semester System (2009-2011)”, 7; “Syllabus for M.A. Degree. Credit and Semester System (2006-2008)”, 9. 134 “Syllabus for M.A. Degree. Credit and Semester System (2009-2011)”, 9. 135 Ibid., 4. 42 only in the case of “Sociology of development”136 the literature includes contributions from non-European or American scholars: most of them are indeed both SouthAmerican and Indian. Going to the optional courses, the image is much more complex and articulated, including many alternatives, making it impossible to take all of them into consideration. The “Political Sociology”137 course is partly devoted to the theorization of the nationstate from a sociological point of view and through European perspectives, confronting this analysis with the discussion of the postcolonial state, by studying the Indian case. “Sociology of Education”138 includes the study of works by scholars such as Sujata Patel, Amarthya Sen and Jean Dreze, all linked to different extents to postcolonialism. The course on “Modern India: issues and perspectives”139 includes the discussion of “modernity in India, the modernization paradigm, ‘mistaken’ modernity, ‘our’ modernity [...] alternative Dalit140 modernity [and] gender modernity”.141 Similarly, also the courses of the third semester on contemporary social theory, articulate the discussion on modernity in the same, plural, way. Besides, more courses are specifically and exclusively addressed toward Indian issues, such as “Dalit Studies: Issues and Perspectives [and] Popular culture, Ideology [and] Politics in India”.142 While discussing the dimensions of postcolonialism and postcoloniality in a nonEuropean context, the relations that this specific academic reality maintain with its corresponding European ones, have to be at least briefly examined. Indeed, as professor Anurekha Chari emphasises, in the last 10 years, much more activities have been established especially with Europe. Before in fact the university was already active, but almost exclusively looking to the Asian region, meaning Thailand, Iran, Iraq and so on. Now it is evident that there is this new interest for and from Europe. Last year in my class I had seven European students that, in a total of forty people, represented a high and relevant portion. This was absolutely not the case a few years ago [...] We never had so many European students and lecturers. The Euroculture programme, the Erasmus Mundus programme, External Windows and so on.143 136 Ibid., 5. Ibid., 16. 138 Ibid., 31-32. 139 Ibid., 33. 140 The term ‘Dali’ is a self-designation that refers to a mixed population of various caste groups that are traditionally perceived as lower class, unsuitable for making personal relationships. 141 Ibidem. 142 Ibid., 6. 143 Professor Anurekha Chari of the Department of Sociology of Pune University, interviewed by the author, August 20, 2010. 137 43 This observation is confirmed by the evidences. Walking along the corridors of the Department of Sociology, to meet a European student is not rare. Coming from many different European countries, most of them are there especially thanks to the Erasmus Mundus144 student exchanges funds that include, for instance, the program India4eu.145 Besides, looking back at 2009, around eight professors from humanities departments went to Europe. What does it mean? We almost have not time to take our classes, because there are that many professors from Europe coming here and giving their lectures, with us going there giving our lectures [...] I have the feeling that earlier India was treated more just as a key study, looked at as exotic or whatever. But now European students are coming here also to study at the university and we can dialogue with European scholars in a more balanced plan. This is for me a key and crucial issue.146 On the other hand it is also true that “often the exchange programmes are too rushed (tourist mode of engagement) with inequalities at the institutional level (admission process, credits/credit transfers)”.147 Of course then, beyond this brief analysis, there is much more complexity still characterised by unbalanced relations and cultural intrusiveness. Nevertheless, all these features distinguish at least a direction that is somehow increasing its relevance in non-Europeans and few Europeans contexts. This new horizon is based on mutual exchange of knowledge, dialogic relations and the creation of a global, at the same time local, hybrid space. 4.2 English, English studies and the colonies As we saw in the last section, the language question is central in the ex-colonies. This is especially true if looking to those places where knowledge is produced and then regionally, nationally and internationally diffused. “The nature of [...] domination 144 http://ec.europa.eu/education/external-relation-programmes/doc72_en.htm http://www.india4eu.eu/ 146 Professor Anurekha Chari of the Department of Sociology of Pune University, interviewed by the author, August 20, 2010. 147 Professor Sharmila Rege of the Women’s Studies Department of Pune University, e-mail message to the author, October 19, 2010. 145 44 includes the universality of English”148 and then the colonizers’ language can be inscribed among the instruments through which postcoloniality is realised: After independence, many colonial nations inherited economic, governmental and educational institutions, several of which were often administrated in English. The English language is a part of this colonial ‘inheritance’. Its existence as the language of the colonial power has complicated its status.149 Thus, one of the main tools used by the British to dominate India and, to different extents and in diverse forms, other colonies, was English. This, together with the imposition, diffusion and establishment of the English educational system, aimed to create a new hierarchical organization of power. The goal of this system was clear: Lord Macaulay's (infamous) reformist and influential minute of 1835, [English educational system in the colonies aimed] to form a class who may be interpreter between us and the millions who we govern, a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.150 Thus, not only English and colonial education were essential to rule, but they also internally reproduced power inequalities and hierarchies. This point was already treated before when the harsh and explicit words of professor Sharmila Rege were mentioned. The language question in Indian state universities underline that colonial power structure remained in many aspects intact, and was even reinforced over time: In anticipation of post-independence India, where English would remain the privileged language of administration and the ruling elite, [Gandhi] objected with some fervour to ‘the harm done by this education received through a foreign tongue [denouncing that] it has created a gulf between the educated classes and the masses. We don’t know them and they don’t know us’.151 In this context English literature played a core role “in constructing the binary of a European self and a non-European other [as it] both reflects and creates ways of seeing and modes of articulation [...] crucial to the formation of the colonial discourses”.152 As 148 K. J. Broadfoot and D. Munshi, “Diverse Voices and Alternative Rationalities : Imagining Forms of Postcolonial Organizational Communication”, Management Communication Quarterly 21, no. 249 (2007): 258. 149 J. McLeod, Beginning Postcolonialism, 122. 150 V. Selvaratnam, “Higher Education Co-Operation and Western Dominance of Knowledge Creation and Flows in Third World Countries”, Higher Education 17, no. 1 (1988): 44. 151 L. Gandhi, Postcolonial Theory, 147. 152 A. Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism, 66. 45 noticed by many intellectuals, English classic literature as it was used and introduced into the colonies, had a culturally destructive impact. Through the study and diffusion of such literature and into the broader context of the imposed English educational system, Departments of English became then a fundamental seat of power for the colonizers. After the Indian independence these departments were restructured, deeply rediscussing their position inside the postcolonial humanities. Professor Aniket Jaaware, from the Department of English of Pune University, clearly stated that, as long as English Department was conceived, we taught English literature. Then, I think that English Departments in India, in Africa and all the ex-colonies have lived [a postcolonial] condition from the very beginning, because of the inherent paradox presents on teaching English [and English literature] in an independent ex-colony.153 During and immediately after the colonies, in almost the totality of these departments the main teaching has been classical English literature. As observed by many postcolonial theorists, most of these classical texts, even if apparently both temporally and conceptually distant from the colonial mission, served colonial interests. As they were taught, they normalised a Eurocentric vision in which European culture and texts, and specifically the English ones, were superior. Colonised people began to be educated trough European cultural patterns by the study of European literature. What was narrated by European classical texts became Indian, African or Caribbean ruling class values and behavioural models: English literature was instituted as a formal discipline in London and Oxford only after the Indian Civil Service examination began to include a 1000 mark paper in it, on the assumption that knowledge of English literature was necessary for those who would be administrating British interests. Soon after, it was also deemed important that natives themselves be instructed in Western literature [...] English literary studies became a mask for economic and material exploitation, and were effective forms of political control.154 On the other hand and similarly to sociology, both English and the English educational system did not enter in a vacuum, in an empty state, but rather an active and dynamic literary and linguistic space. English itself was not able to properly correspond 153 Professor Aniket Jaaware of the Department of English of Pune University, interviewed by the author, October 16, 2010. 154 A. Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism, 76-77. 46 to some of the sounds, meanings and symbols of the cultural places in which it was introduced. It is safe to say that “English [...] changed into ‘english’ through its use in new environs”.155 It means that as in many other fields of knowledge, language first was an object of translation, adaptation and modification, where the colonised acted also as active subjects of this mutual forced exchange. Similarly to English and as described by Ania Loomba, also the rooting of the English educational system in the colonies followed a similar logic in which the colonised were not passive subjects only: “Indians themselves demanded English education, including reformers and nationalists who were opposed to British rule in India. British educational policy was also moulded by indigenous politics, and was not simply exported to India”.156 As a matter of fact, If we look for example to the 19th century Indian literature in modern Indian languages, as Marathi or Bengali, [it is possible to] see that the intellectuals of that time were not imitating the English and the Europeans, literature and ideas. English and European were for example examined and discussed and some of them were taken into Indian culture in general, and some others easily not. I do not like to follow seeing this dualistic relation as if the English came here and dominated us and that is it. No, there has been much more complexity.157 In the light of all these dynamics involving English language and the English educational system on the one side, and colonial power and Eurocentric structures of world knowledge on the other, the Department of English of the ex-colonies faced a crisis. Such predicament led to a deep self-interrogation of the academic discipline that generated a complex reformulation of itself. With “the famous crisis [...] in the 1980s and the 1990s [...] the teachings in English Departments changed almost everywhere outside Europe”.158 As described by the Indian professor Tejaswini Niranjana, the challenge to English literature in our cultural context needs to be seen as part of a lager process of critical evaluation and the creation of resources. To effectively confront the existing paradigm of English studies two questions which have significant implications [...] are ‘what is to be taught’ in English Departments and ‘how to teach it’ [...] The ambivalent enterprise of teaching 155 J. McLeod, Beginning Postcolonialism, 125. A. Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism, 76. 157 Professor Aniket Jaaware of the Department of English of Pune University, interviewed by the author, October 16, 2010. 158 Ibidem. 156 47 English [and English literature] in India could perhaps be re-evaluated, deflected and re-inflected through the reading of post-colonial texts.159 The discussion spread among the Department of English all over the world, in particular those of the ex-colonies. If, for some academics, especially Africans, the entire discipline should have been eradicated by their own independent states160, others promoted different patterns of reformulation of the teaching of English studies. A tendency was to gradually exclude from the syllabi all the most suspicious classics, including instead more local authors, gradually and partially replacing the colonial with the postcolonial. From this perspective non-British and non-canonical authors began to increase their relevance for literary analysis, with a consequent reduction of the importance attached to the mainstream classic English literature. Besides, such a classical literature started to be historically contextualised, to reveal its implicit imperialist contents. This hybrid approach is summarised by Lela Gandhi as follow: Rather than permit students to pursue a mystified ‘love of Shakespeare’, postcolonial pedagogy undertakes to historicise the received curriculum – and inherited literary affections – with a view to reveal what Viswanathan describes as ‘imperialism’s shaping hand in the formation of English studies’.161 As the forefront of postcolonialism, this new reading of mainstream English literature is a resistance to Eurocentric universalizing knowledge, without being a radical negation of it. Central is the idea to contextualize and then historicize texts: “today, even those works where the imperial theme appears to be marginal are being reinterpreted in the context of European expansion”.162 For instance, writing about her experience of the study of English Literature in India, Meenakshi Mukherjee has defended postcolonialism as an emancipatory concept on the grounds that ‘it makes us interrogate many aspects of the study of literature that we were made to take for granted, enabling us [...] to re-interpret some of the old canonical texts from Europe from the perspective of our specific historical and geographical location’ [...] The re-interpretation of ‘classic’ English literary works has become an important area of postcolonialism.163 159 T. Niranjana, “'History, Really Beginning': Compulsions of Post-Colonial Pedagogy”, Economic and Political Weekly 25, no. 42/43 (1990): 2379. 160 “In late October of [1968] Ngugi and some of his other colleagues in the Department of English at the University of Nairobi composed a contentious paper entitled ‘On the Abolition of the English Department’.”(L. Gandhi, Postcolonial Theory, 146). 161 L. Gandhi, Postcolonial Theory, 146. 162 A. Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism, 72 163 J. McLeod, Beginning Postcolonialism, 139. [emphasis added] 48 This openly critical approach to classics became an enriching self-reflexive exercise for many non-European and European scholars. Engaging mainstream literature from such a new perspective mined the foundations of rooted and deeply assimilated knowledges and knowledge structure. This enlarged the spaces of resistance to the universalizing European and more recent American knowledges, generating in many of the ex-colonies a new consciousness. Since postcolonial critical theory began to circulate among the academies of the world, English studies has always been the main container of postcolonialism and postcoloniality. As underlined by professor Aniket Jaaware, postcoloniality is implicit to the teaching of English and the establishment of the Department of English in the excolonies. Moreover, considering the prominence of the study of mainstream British literature on other alternative English, non-British literatures, the existence of such conditions of uneven knowledge power relations is confirmed in practice. On the other side, since the crisis in the postcolonial Departments of English of the Third world in the late twentieth century, this postcoloniality has started to be resisted and gradually undermined. A new historically contextualised reading of English mainstream literature, accompanied by a growing relevance of alternative and non-British narratives, have shuffled the cards on the table, opening new horizons of knowledge. Looking at the position of India in the postcolonial field, another factor is controversially subverting the dominance of European literary discourses in both nonEuropean and European locations. Indeed, in the Departments of English across the world, Indian English writing authors have begun to dominate the scene, thanks to their critical postcolonial approaches. At the same time, the fact that the worldly most influential Indian authors write in English, generates an apparently contradictory situation: India’s languages are various, including Hindi, Urdu, English, Punjabi, and Bengali, to name a few. Yet there has developed an exciting body of Indian literature in English, produced by such figures as R. K. Narayan, Nayantara Sahgal, Anita Desai, Salam Rushdie [...] Amitav Ghosh [and Arundhati Roy].164 Paradoxically, this Indian literature written in English by a restricted and cosmopolitan section of Indian population, started to be identified as the new Indian 164 Ibid., 125. 49 national literature, especially by Western academics. If this can be, as it is, subject of new criticism, it has to be considered how these authors “might use English in subversive ways”.165 Their narratives indeed most of the times critically approach the theme of postcoloniality, becoming voices of what we called here postcolonialism. Their use of English is often rather a mix between English and Indian regional languages, materializing somehow a postcolonial English. The relations between English, English literature, and the study of both of them in once-colonised academies, present a fascinating and tense complexity that moves around the relation between postcoloniality and postcolonialism. These intricate dynamics are reproduced also in the specific case of the Department of English of Pune University. 4.2.1 Postcolonial English studies at Pune University Thus, the Department of English of Pune University has not been immune to the changes and the tensions described above. Despite the limitations for the autonomous formulation and structuring of the syllabi in Indian state universities, an increasing space is devoted to the teachings of postcolonialism as well as local, regional and basically non-British English literatures: We have very few courses on [British] English Literature, and almost none of them are compulsory. On the other hand, we have optional courses on most of the new literatures. So we treat English literature and the new literatures on the same footing. This is a decentring gesture that serves to dismantle the hegemonies. [...] The teaching of Creative Writing by a practising writer like myself further adds to the subversion of canonical literature. Most of the research I have supervised at the Ph.D and M Phil levels have also been on non-canonical texts. It is for these reasons that I would regard my department as truly postcolonial.166 What is affirmed by professor Raj Rao is partly confirmed by the department’s syllabus, since the core course of the third semester is “South Asian/Indian Writing in English”.167 Besides, during the four semesters of the M.A. in English Studies is 165 Ibid., 126. Professor Raj Rao of the Department of English of Pune University, e-mail message to the author, September 30, 2010. 167 http://www.unipune.ac.in/dept/fine_arts/english/english_webfiles/syllabus.htm 166 50 available a course in “Creative writing”168 (I and II) as well as a two module course in “Alternative Literature”.169 With regard to the latter course, while looking at the outline as it is described in the syllabus, it visibly shows its entire intrinsic adherence to postcolonialism as a social and geographical relocation of the literature analysis. Module I is indeed a study of a specific Indian caste literature: Indian Dalits are one of the exploited, subjugated and suppressed social groups. Their writing reflects their plight in the Indian social system. Hence for study in this course, samples of texts in English, from various genres will be selected. Dalit writing from various states in India will be selected. The second module of the same course reveals even more harshly to what extent the very aim of this course is to decentre literature analysis, even when discussing European writers: While writers of gay and lesbian sexual orientation from Britain, America and Europe are studied as part of the canon, the way their vision is influenced by their different sexual orientation is rarely addressed. With such issues coming to the forefront of political debate all over the world, it is time to examine how these writers, even when they belong to the mainstream, actual de-centre and disrupt, irrespective of whether their work is overtly, or only covertly gay. The publication of two anthologies by Penguin India in the late 90s indicates that there is a body of gay and lesbian writing from within India as well. This writing will be studied both as literature, and as socially resistant. Exploring the issue of the personal as political, connections will be sought to be made with other kinds of resistant writing, such as women’s literature and Dalit literature.170 Besides, a course on postcolonialism is an optional course of the third semester. Lecturers “will introduce students to post-colonial theory, beginning with Edward Said, and end with contemporary debates in post-colonial theory. It will also introduce students to post-colonial approaches to modern Indian literature in modern Indian languages”.171 Last but not least, as will become clear when discussing the interviews with students, a course on Bollywood cinema has been recently established. This new addition is important to mention, as it presents a dialogic method of discussing Indian movies also in the light of their legacies with English narratives. Substantially, beyond the fact that, as for sociology, the syllabi represent only partially the concrete teaching 168 Ibidem. Ibidem. 170 Ibidem. 171 Ibidem. 169 51 practices, “now [...] courses in philosophy of language, in postcolonial literature, Indian literature in English, Indian literature in English translation [can be taught, reducing] the focus on British English literature only”.172 On the other hand, as it was with the Department of Sociology, postcoloniality seems to be still present too. For the first two of the four semesters, core and optional courses are completely addressed to British, American and European literature and literary theory. Among them, the first is “Literary Theory and Criticism I [that looks at] Plato and Aristotle [...] medieval rhetoric [and] Renaissance in the Arts and the Recovery of Classical Values”.173 Besides, the presence of “Shakespeare Studies”174 as one of the optional courses for the first semester reveals to what extent it is still possible to speak of a teaching and learning environment of postcoloniality in the case of Pune University’s Department of English. However, the outlines of all these courses, as well as of the others addressed to British literary production, always refer to a critical reading of European literature. Such critical lecture mostly means a contextualization, historical, political and social, of the author and his or her own narratives. What was said in the case of Pune University’s Department of Sociology, is also true in this case. We can see to what extent postcoloniality and postcolonialism live a relation of recursion next to each other: Institutionally English Departments had to face the question of why were we teaching English in India, in an independent Indian nation. But on the other hand we knew how English was already influential and important in our society, because of the colonial period. Then we had to organize our teachings consequently to these considerations, reflecting and realizing that the problem is not twofold but is manifolds. Therefore what we tried to do was to look to the 19th century in Asia, and the literature in original languages at that time, keeping in mind the idea of how important it was also to understand how original Indian literature evolved in that period, before, during and after the colony. [...] The political independence did not correspond to the knowledge production independence.175 To conclude, it has to be underlined that the connections between European Departments of English on the one side, and the Pune one on the other, have 172 Professor Aniket Jaaware of the Department of English of Pune University, interviewed by the author, October 16, 2010. 173 http://www.unipune.ac.in/dept/fine_arts/english/english_webfiles/syllabus.htm 174 Ibidem. 175 Professor Aniket Jaaware of the Department of English of Pune University, interviewed by the author, October 16, 2010. 52 dramatically grown during the last years. As stated by professor Aniket Jaaware, “there is much more interest from Europe”176 making those exchanges real bilateral ones, compared to those of the past. Nowadays, Pune University’s Department of English has forged good relations especially with the German universities of Dresden and Tübingen, as well as with other Italian, French and British academies, involving students, doctoral candidates and professors in the frame of the Erasmus Mundus exchange program promoted by the European Commission. Considering how colonial and postcolonial powers are identified with Europe and looking to the richness of the academic discussion on postcoloniality and postcolonialism in India as well as in many other ex-colonies contexts, it could be said that a certain academic image of Europe is certainly introduced into the Indian universities. Thus, in the next chapter, this complex discussion will lead to the analysis of the interviews I had with Pune University students that went to Europe, participating in diverse student exchange programmes. The purpose will be to analyse how, passing through an academic elaborated experience, the contact with Europe by Indian students influenced their perception of Europe itself. As for sociology and English studies, the encounter between the European and the Indian realities implies a huge complexity in which postcoloniality and postcolonialism live together rather than being separate. Somehow, such an interrelated intellectual conjuncture, produces hybrid subjects whose perceptions of the world, we will see, is characterized by some apparent contradictions. Whithin such contradictions, the interaction between postcoloniality and postcolonialism bacame more visble. 176 Ibidem. 53 5. On the perception of Europe in a postcolonial context [D]al momento che l’immagine dell’Europa e della sua “civiltà”, fin dal XVI secolo, prende forma entro un movimento di costante comparazione con l’immagini delle “barbarie” […] delle genti “selvagge” che abitano gli spazi aperti della conquista europea, quelle genti non sono confinate a marcare il limite esterno dell’Europa. Esse sono piuttosto da principio implicate nel lavoro teorico e pratico che conduce l’unità dello spazio europeo nonché i concetti attraverso cui quell’unità trova articolazione.177 The meaning of the words of professor Sandro Mezzadra that I quoted above, inspired the selection of the topic of this research. Indeed, underlining how since the sixteenth century the image of Europe is built up the existence of the ‘other’ - the non-European he claims the centrality of this ‘other’ in the building of Europeaness and the European unity. In other words, if the centre exists because of its margins, then such margins are not any more peripheral, but become rather fundamental - central - for the understanding of the centre itself. Then, as to affirm such centrality of the ‘other’, along all of this research who speaks about Europe has been the non-European. Such a structuring assumption, already utilised during the previous chapter, is even more important for this last section of the thesis. Indeed, in this concluding step of my argumentation, the word is given to three students of Pune University. As already explained, they have been selected because they study in the two departments analysed in the last chapter - English and sociology - and they went to Europe for a student exchange program. They are two men and one woman. Santosh Sabale is a “PhD student at the Department of Sociology”178 who spent ten months at the Deusto University of Bilbao, in Spain. Richa Singh and Ashutosh Thakari are two former M Phil students of the Department of English: they were in Europe for ten months as well, but in Germany, at Tübingen University. The fact that they studied in Europe and in the two previously considered departments of Pune University, imply two important consequences. First, because of their academic 177 “Since the image of Europe and of its ‘civilization’, from the sixteenth century, is shaped by a movement of constant comparison with the images of "barbarism" [...] of the "wild" people that inhabit the open spaces of the European conquest, these people are not confined to mark the outer limits of Europe. They are rather on the principle involved in the theoretical and practical work leading to the unity of the European area and the concepts through which that unity is articulated”, S. Mezzadra, La condizione postcoloniale, 75 [translated by the author]. 178 Santosh Sabale, PhD student of the Department of Sociology of Pune University, interviewed by the author, October 27, 2010. 54 education at Pune, they were expected to be familiar with both postcolonialism and postcoloniality. Second, the time that they spent in Europe, inevitably influenced their perception of Europe because they had direct contact with its cultures and societies. To a certain extent Richa Singh, Santosh Sabale and Ashutosh Thakari would represent for this research, the hybrid subject as it is described by Cristina Beltran: the hybrid subject has been hailed as an anti-essentialist approach to identity, one that takes experience into account but celebrates multiplicity and fluidity over stability and singularity. [However, it is important to avoid] hybridity [to become] a kind of foundational or "fixed" identity that forecloses more creative and productively defiant approaches to identity and subjectivity. Rather than risking a radical re-conceptualization of subjectivity that calls existing categories into question, theorists of [the hybridity-related-concept of] mestizaje too often reproduce already-existing narratives of romantic identification and exclusion. Instead of highlighting the contradictory and incomplete nature of subjectivity, contemporary theories of hybridity continue to invoke the category of experience as a fundamental precondition for political agency and knowledge.179 Specifically, for Richa Singh, Santosh Sabale and Ashutosh Thakari, the fact that they spent almost one year in Europe is taken to be the main factor - but not the only one - that allows to speak of a hybrid identity when referring to them. However, and it will be clearer reading the following pages, such supposed hybridity is not conceived as a totalizing category. This means that, rather than to understand hybrid identity as a peculiar category distinguished from the rest, hybridity is best seen as the condition that leads the subject to challenge his or her own monolithic essentialist identity. In other words, hybridity is seen in these pages as a process of overcoming of identity boundaries, rather than as a specific, fixed condition. The point is not to support any claim of the uniqueness and separateness of the hybrid subject and identity over nonhybrid subjectivities. An ideal hybrid identity is understood rather as a constant and never-ending process of negotiation and contradiction, unable to reproduce dynamics of otherness, because of its own implicit borderlessness. The idea of the hybrid subject that is taken into account in these pages is the one of an individual that, through his or her own experiences, overcomes the conception of a bordered identity outside of which there is the other. Richa Singh explained that she went to Tübingen because she “wanted to bring an all new perspective to how [she] looks at everything. [...] Just as an experience, [she] wanted to go abroad, in another cultural environment, to experience 179 C. Beltran, “Patrolling Borders: Hybrids, Hierarchies and the Challenge of Mestizaje”, Political Research Quarterly 57, no. 4 (2004), 596 [emphasis added]. 55 what does it mean to challenge my own identity”.180 To live abroad can be not just a spatial experience. It could represent rather a way to put under pressure your own limits, in order to identify and perceive them. It is along the ‘identity borders’ that otherness become visible, revealing itself. In this chapter are presented the most relevant points which have been discussed with the Pune University students when we talked about Europe, a few months after they had returned back to India.181 As explained in the third chapter, the methodology chosen for the interviews has been a mix between narrative and in-depth techniques. It allowed the interviewee to steer the first part of the interview, while I could keep more control over the second section, to focus the discussion around a comparison between Europe and India. At this point, I tried to place more emphasis on the similarities rather than the differences between the old- and the sub-Continents. This decision was taken coherently with the postcolonial connotation that this research claims to have, trying to escape from any Eurocentric or Westerncentric binary perspective. The point in favour of a methodology that tries to focus on similarities rather than differences, is poignantly described by Amartya Sen: One consequence of Western dominance of the world today is that other cultures and traditions are often identified by their contrasts with contemporary Western culture. Different cultures are then interpreted in ways that reinforce the political conviction that Western civilisation is somehow the main, perhaps the only, source of rationalistic and liberal ideas. [...] Once established, this view of the West, seen in confrontation with the rest, tends to vindicate itself. Since each civilisation contains diverse elements, a non-Western civilisation can then be characterised by referring to those tendencies that are most distant from the identified ‘Western’ traditions and values. These selected elements are then taken to be more ‘authentic’ or more ‘genuinely indigenous’ than the elements that are relatively similar to what can be found also in the West. [...] Through selective emphases that point up differences with the West, other civilisations can, in this way, be redefined in aliens terms. [...] When identity is thus ‘defined by contrast’, divergence with the West become central.182 Thus, agreeing with what Amartya Sen wrote, the interviews themselves represented, in some aspects, an attempt to escape the logic of otherness. Therefore, in 180 Richa Singh, former M Phil student of the Department of English of Pune University, interviewed by the author, October 02, 2010. 181 Santosh Sabale, Richa Singh and Ashutosh Thakari spent in Europe the academic year 2009/2010, coming back to India between August and September 2010. 182 A. Sen, The argumentative Indian, 286-285. 56 the next pages three relevant issues – related to the problem of the postcolonial and postcolonialism - that emerged during the talks, are discussed 5.1 Europe, India and “uneven development”183 During the narrative part of each interview, the same concern has been spontaneously mentioned, in different ways and with a certain emotive participation, by all the students. The debated point was that of the comparison within the developed Europe and the under-developed India. To understand what is going to be discussed, it is essential to spend some words on the Marxist category of “uneven development”184, as it has been explained by Dipesh Chakrabarty: historicism [...] posited historical time as a measure of the cultural distance (at least in institutional development) that was assumed to exist between the West and the non-West. In the colonies, it legitimated the idea of civilization. In Europe itself, it made possible completely internalist histories of Europe in which Europe was described as the site of the first occurrence of capitalism, modernity, or Enlightenment. [...] The point is [that, once scholars] speak of “uneven development,” [...] they all ascribe at least an underlying structural unity (if not an expressive totality) to historical process and time that makes it possible to identify certain elements in the present as “anachronistic.” The thesis of “uneven development,” as James Chandler has perceptively observed in his recent study of Romanticism, goes “hand in hand” with the “dated grid of a homogenous empty time”.185 Then, through historicism, a certain development - that of the developed - became the only desirable future for humanity, a global and universal goal to which every under-developed-country would have to strive. It creates the sort of line of history, already discussed in the last chapter, where at the most advanced point Europe and all the Western countries can be found, followed by the rest: a unique destiny for the future of non-Europeans. This future is nothing else than the European present. Such a perspective has proven to be relevant for the construction of how the interviewees perceive the comparison between India and Europe. Ashutosh Thakari, speaking of what he felt when experiencing the reality of the Tübingen University, affirmed: 183 D. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 12. Ibidem. 185 Ibid., 7-12 [emphasis added]. 184 57 India is a developing country, while Germany is a developed one. Among many others, the first example that comes to my mind is punctuality: in Germany students and professors are punctual. Here, as you know, this is not the case at all! May be in the future we will be also able to be as efficient as you are, but we have to work a lot to change and to reach certain standards.186 It is understandable how Ashutosh Thakari locates punctuality as a development index, fixing the path that India has to go to reach the desired objective of development. A singular characteristics common to all the interviews is that no one of the interviewed students avoided to express, at least once, some comment concerning an eventual development gap between Europe and India. This somehow surprised me, as I never asked anything about it, while all the time it came spontaneously from the interviewees. Richa Singh, for instance, shared a similar perspective to that of Ashutosh Thakari. She said: In Europe and in the West they are far ahead! I mean, if I think just to the approach to education, I can say that it is much better there than here. There you have to learn how to do research since you start your studies, while here no one teaches us anything about it!187 This sensation of being in a “far ahead”188 place influenced also Richa Singh’s more intimate feelings, especially during the first months that she spent in Tübingen. She said: I was always a really good student in India. [...] Suddenly, when I went to my first classes in Tübingen, I discovered that I had nothing interesting to say. I mean, initially I felt a bit stupid compared to my fellow students. Anyway, after the first months, gradually I started speaking. It may not have been any intelligent comment, but still I made a point to speak. And the professor were so polite: whatever I said in the class, they never made me feel stupid.189 For Richa Singh, what can be conceived as a cultural and historical issue, was internalised: it became a personal feeling of inferiority very present in everyday life. 186 Ashutosh Thakary, former M Phil student of the Department of English of Pune University, interviewed by the author, October 01, 2010. 187 Richa Singh, former M Phil student of the Department of English of Pune University, interviewed by the author, October 02, 2010. 188 Ibidem. 189 Ibidem. 58 Santosh Sabale looked at the issue from a completely different perspective. He showed indeed a diverse sensitivity to the topic: The system in Europe is an important thing to learn as well as the European way of thinking: freedom is a high value and positivism is still there, in many of the things that people do and think. Rationality is still the first thing! Positivism! [...] On the other hand people looked to us, the Asian people, as very traditional, and this is true in Spain, in the Basque country and even in France. It is nothing more than the colonial way of thinking. They have not escaped this colonial bureaucratic structure, this colonial idealization of the East.190 At this point, Santosh Sabale showed all his familiarity with postcolonialism, as both Richa Singh and Ashutosh Thakari did later during their interviews. Indeed, both Richa Singh and Ashutosh Thakari pointed out that postcolonialism represented their actual academic research interest. Ashutosh Thakari, before leaving from Germany “applied for a PhD position in Tübingen, [with] a thesis proposal on postcolonial theory, looking at a contemporary Indian writer who writes in English”.191 Richa Singh, on her side, wanted to apply for two different PhD positions in Germany and in the Netherlands, with a thesis proposal on the “British travellers’ tales”,192 a topic that constitutes one of the main fields of investigation in the area of postcolonial studies.193 Richa Singh’s and Ashutosh Thakari’s academic interests on the one hand, and what they said about development on the other, seems to contradict the most radical conception of hybridity, that considers it in an essentialist way. Indeed, if “for many theorists [hybridity] represent[s] the icon of postcolonialism, [as] something which celebrates ambivalence and impurity [offering] a profound challenge to the colonial logic”194, this tend to be contradicted by Richa Singh’s and Ashutosh Thakari’s concern about development. This, of course, depends on the meaning that is attributed to hybridity itself. Indeed, this would not constitute any contradiction if the hybrid identity is understood in opposition to the essentialist one, as a borderless, on-going and neverending process of transformation. To live in another country than your own, not only means the transgression of national borders, but can also represent a challenge to the 190 Santosh Sabale, PhD student of the Department of Sociology of Pune University, interviewed by the author, October 27, 2010. 191 Ashutosh Thakary, former M Phil student of the Department of English of Pune University, interviewed by the author, October 01, 2010. 192 Richa Singh, former M Phil student of the Department of English of Pune University, interviewed by the author, October 02, 2010. 193 J. P. Sharp, Geographies of Postcolonialism, 38. 194 Ibid., 122. 59 most essentialist ways of perceiving identity itself. This process of self challenging and questioning, inevitably faces an endless series of contradictions and reflections, representing the very meaning and substance of hybridity. 5.2 Stereotypes and experience: Indian nationalism in the mirror Another key issue came out when the interviewees had to think about how the idea and image of Europe they had before leaving India, was challenged by their ten months experience abroad. In particular, it was the idea that in Europe, family constitute just a marginal value and life-dimension. Indeed, this assumption, which was completely subverted by the experience of the students, reveals its importance for the analysis developed in this thesis when linked to the role played by the family within the Indian postcolonial nationalistic rhetoric. Dipesh Chakrabarty describes the relation within the Indian colonial experience and the identification of the family as the social backbone to be opposed to the colonizing European individual: for a long time, a romantic idealization of the extended family left little room for the development of a language of European-style individualism, whatever the actual practices of everyday life. Colonial rule brought about many of the desires and institutions of European bourgeois modernity but without, it would seem, the family romance of bourgeois Europe.195 Chakrabarty, citing an anonymous Bengali-written source, shows then what the role played by the family was for the building of Indian nationalism: There cannot be any improvement in the state of the nation without improvement first in the domestic and political spheres. Obedience is the fundamental aspect of life in both politics and the family; in the latter the father and the husband is the master. The degree to which a society will obey rules depends on [practices] at more fundamental levels. [...] Well-trained children are the pride of the country. [...] With bad training and corrupt morals, they only bring disgrace to the family and [...] the nation”.196 195 196 D. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 215-216. Ibid., 224-225. 60 Apparently, such emphasis on the Indian family tradition aimed to oppose and challenge the European or Western purely capitalist modernity. Tapan Raychaudhuri, paraphrasing Bhudev, explained that, as for postcolonial Indian nationalism, “an excessive preoccupation with money was [...] one of the least acceptable features of Western society [making] Westerners hesitant to accept or give financial help even where close relatives were concerned”.197 According to this logic, Indians are, instead, all brothers and sons of the nation, and families are the fundamental bricks of the Indian nation. Such an idea of family playing a core role in the foundation and definition of Indian national identity, reproduces dynamics of otherness where the other becomes an ‘exotic’ European, pure capitalist and individualist society. As I said, also this issue that I would like to call ‘of reflected otherness’ - as if the otherness firstly established by the Europeans toward the Indians, is reflected by a symmetrical otherness produced by Indian rhetoric toward Europeans - was spontaneously discussed by all the three students in very similar terms to my surprise. Richa Singh, in particular, has been quite explicit: in India we grow up with certain stereotypes about Europe and the West that I discovered [to be] absolutely untrue while staying there. For example here in India we think that Western or European people have not a closest family and children do not respect parents.198 And, she added immediately after: We grow up with these stories, but once you can go [to Europe] you realize that it is not like that. [...] At least in Germany, I did not felt anything like that. I mean, my friends were as close to their parents as I am to my parents. [...] I would say that in India there is a lot of wrong knowledge about the West. One is for sure this emphasis on family that is also related to that one about children that move out of home when they are just fifteen. This is not true at all! Moreover, once I understood that, I also realised that in India as well, after you finish the high school, you go to study outside your town. If you look at me, what would you say then? I am studying outside my hometown already for four years. What would you say then? Do I not love my parents?199 197 T. Raychaudhuri, Europe Reconsidered: Perceptions of the West in Nineteenth Century Bengal, (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988), 88– 89. 198 Richa Singh, former M Phil student of the Department of English of Pune University, interviewed by the author, October 02, 2010. 199 Ibidem. 61 As said before, if Richa Singh was the most explicit about this topic, she was not the only one revealing a very similar experience and feeling. Ashutosh Thakari admitted that “when [he] went [to Germany, he] was expecting German people to be introvert and self-dependent: individualists. But when [he] arrived in Tübingen, [he] immediately realised that [he] was almost completely wrong”.200 Thus, from such perspective and taking then into account Indian postcolonial nationalism, it is possible to see how those stereotypes produced by the binary rhetoric of the otherness, can influence the perception of the unknown ‘other’. At the same time, it is clear also how the experience of direct contact with the stereotyped reality can subvert the perception that the subject has of that specific context. These two dimensions characterize hybridity as a progressive path of understanding, able to challenge the binary structure of the world. The places where hybridity works as a source of mutual understanding, are the encounter between different cultural, social and political systems. There, stereotypes are challenged, making of the margins, of the borders, real transcultural bridges. This proves once more that the centre of the hybrid experience or encounter is the margin, where the boundary become a place of encounter. 5.3 Experiencing stereotypes: European prejudices in the mirror As a counterbalance to what said in the last subchapter, Santosh Sabale and Richa Singh experienced through their own skins how Europeans stereotype Indians or, more broadly, Asians. In this regard, it is especially interesting to quote a long part of the interview I had with Santosh Sabale: Together with other Asian students, at the beginning I had a very bad experience. It happened when we went to talk with an employee of Deusto University in charge of the assistance for the international students. What we discovered at that time was that, instead of being formally considered as international students, she defined us just as immigrants. We were immigrants, not anymore international students! The whole story made me feel very bad. I would say that this feeling of being treated as different was very present there in Spain. Less in France, where [...] I had the perception that there are good policies for integrating ‘outsiders’. [...] This could be a very important point, and it was for sure a very difficult point 200 Ashutosh Thakary, former M Phil student of the Department of English of Pune University, interviewed by the author, October 01, 2010. 62 to experience. For all of us, the Asian students, to be recognised as immigrants rather than international students, was really hard to understand. The same was for the Africans that were recognised as international students, but in a different way if compared with Americans or Japanese. [...] I would say that first the language and then the academic system, were the main factors dividing us from the rest of the people. I can say that something is bad also in your society: the feeling of otherness! Most of the Asians are not considered as the rest! This was a big issue for us. [...] This is probably the reason why most of the Asian students did not participate in any of the activities organised by the faculty, from parties to excursion and seminars. They thought that they were not recognised by the system, and then their attitude became negative: they wanted just to stay there until the end of the programme, to come back immediately after. [...] I decided not to do the same, as I realised that I was there to understand. I wanted to understand, because I am aware that people have different ways of thinking. Europeans at that time seemed to me able to speak of human rights, good and polite while relating to each other, but unable to integrate different people. [...] In Europe you are somehow racist!201 Undeniably, Santosh Sabale’s analysis seems to capture a focal point: otherness in Europe can be felt and experienced in everyday life, being even institutionally reproduced. But such marginalization works in many different ways, taking more or less explicit forms. In this sense, the episode Richa Singh told me about is particularly significant: At the university there were conferences about India and, one day, I decided to go to one of them. Unfortunately, I came back quite annoyed for what I saw and heard. Indeed, India was portrayed only as a poor country, with all the negative things highlighted. No one spoke about India’s progresses in the fields of information technologies, infrastructure and all the other improvements that India is experiencing in the last years. There are a lot of positive things coming out from India! Why they did not talk about that? I think that, to a certain extent, India is still exoticised, but in a new way. Now the idea is that all India live in a slum! During another conference about India, still held in Tübingen, a documentary on the slum of Calcutta was shown right before the famous movie Slumdog Millionaire202 of the British director Danny Boyle. It is very sad to think about the big damage that that movie did to India! [...] Do you know what happened to me one time in Tübingen? I remember that I went to visit an Indian friend at her place: she was sharing her apartment with two German girls. So, one of them went to me saying that she was planning to come to India. So I said: “you are more than welcome”. And she asked me: “well, if I come to India, can I stay at your place?”. And I answered: “of course you can!”. And she, surprised, told me: “do you have a home?”. I said: “of course I have!”. And she replied: “I thought that most people in India does not have a home, and they sleep on the road”. It 201 Santosh Sabale, PhD student of the Department of Sociology of Pune University, interviewed by the author, October 27, 2010. 202 http://www.slumdogmillionairemovie.co.uk/ 63 was so humiliating for me! I asked what did she mean, and she sadly answered me: “no, I am sorry, but it is that I just thought it was all like in Slumdog Millionaire”.203 The episode that Richa Singh decided to share with me, goes straight to the point by effectively describing how the logic of otherness is reproduced also nowadays, exoticising the ‘other’. The means through which such exoticisation take place are many and, among them, movies can play surely a fundamental role. Nevertheless, agreeing with the impressions that all the students discussed with me, these episodes represent only a part of their experience in Europe, which they judged positively overall, because of many other aspects. In particular, remaining in the academic context, the general perception that the students had was that in Europe there is a diffuse and high interest for India. For instance, Ashutosh Thakari could attend a course on “Indian Literature in English”204 and he was also asked to change his PhD research topic from “a British novelist [to an] Indian novelist who wrote in English”.205 Besides Ashutosh Thakari’s own interests, this advice came directly from his German supervisor, who considered it extremely interesting to have “an Indian writing about an Indian author who write in English, from a postcolonial perspective”.206 But also Richa Singh, despite the episode described above, confirmed that, at least at Tübingen, there was “a big interest for India and, speaking of my department, in particular for postcolonial literature and postcolonial theories”.207 She described to me that, once she went asking for possible PhD positions available at Tübingen, she was steered toward the study of “British travel literature, [once again] from a postcolonial perspective”.208 Trying to summarize, the image of Europe that comes out from these talks is for sure a complex one, which in reality differed among the three students more than it appears in this last chapter. Indeed, despite the similarities I mentioned in the last three subchapters, there were many divergences between the interviewees as well. In any case, it is still possible to delineate some of the features of this image of Europe. The topic of 203 Richa Singh, former M Phil student of the Department of English of Pune University, interviewed by the author, October 02, 2010. 204 Ashutosh Thakary, former M Phil student of the Department of English of Pune University, interviewed by the author, October 01, 2010. 205 Ibidem. 206 Ibidem. 207 Richa Singh, former M Phil student of the Department of English of Pune University, interviewed by the author, October 02, 2010. 208 Ibidem. 64 the ‘uneven development’ was very present along all the interviewees, deeply conditioning every analysis of their experience for both Richa Singh and Ashutosh Thakari. We saw that for Santosh Sabale the perspective was completely subverted. In our discussions, this idea of the European development as the ultimate goal was accompanied by another kind of rhetoric that revealed how pervasive the influence of the logic of otherness was. Indeed, all the respondents used the pronouns ‘you’ and ‘they’ when speaking of the Europeans, referring to Indians or Asians with the pronouns ‘us’ or ‘we’. Besides, the discourse on the stereotypes - see chapter 5.2 - discloses another fundamental dimension where the logic of otherness seems to be the key factor shaping the image of Europe outside of it. Indeed, according to the Indian nationalistic rhetoric that shapes the stereotypes on Europe that accompanied Ashutosh Thakari, Richa Singh and Santosh Sabale when they went to Europe, modernity is somehow dissociated from the concept of development. Indeed, modernity, as the antinomy of tradition, takes on a negative value if compared with the superior and original Indian tradition. There is a very complex contradiction going on at this point: tradition is at the same time assumed to be a positive value, while criticising European individualist modernity, becoming negatively perceived as an obstacle when speaking of Indian development. Moreover, the pervasiveness of the logic of otherness is confirmed by the fact that, despite my efforts to address the interviews on the similarities rather than differences between Europe and India, as suggested also by the above-mentioned reasoning of Amartya Sen, no such similarities were referred to. To be true, what was considered as the most similar aspect, was the “lack of real big differences. Differences were much less relevant than I expected, but small differences were everywhere”.209 In particular, what the students found less different than they expected, was the role of tradition and family in European society. Concluding, the few but dense points described above give us an image of Europe that for Santosh Sabale, Richa Singh and Ashutosh Thakari changed throughout the ten months of the exchange program. Their exposure to the new continental context provoked a reformulation of existing preconceptions, both positively and negatively. The hybrid experience, as it is formulated in this research, is then mainly characterised by a constant process of negotiation and re-negotiation, being full of what we perceive 209 Ashutosh Thakary, former M Phil student of the Department of English of Pune University, interviewed by the author, October 01, 2010. 65 as contradictions. The postcolonial awareness of the three students is often discredited by what their experience led them to say. If on one hand this could be seen just as the inability to translate the ‘theory’ - postcolonialism - in ‘practice’ - the way of perceive the world - in my opinion it also reveals the very meaning of hybridity, as an in-between place where everything the subject believes, become questionable by the same subject. 66 6.Conclusion The reflexive relation is different from the hyphenated one as such, signalling a critical and transformative selfunderstanding. [...] Identity does not rest on a secure foundation. The singular expression of [a certain identity] is to be found in critical and reflexive forms of self-understanding.210 Tagore, who was proud of the fact that his family background reflected ‘a confluence of three cultures, Hindu, Mohammedans and British’, emphasised the need to be vigilant in defence of this open-minded tradition and to help it to flower more fully.211 Throughout this thesis many of the dimensions involved in the relation between Europe and the world outside of it were approached. Starting from the description of two of the most effective and influential concepts, namely postcoloniality and postcolonialism, we have contextualized these two categories in a concrete academic and cultural reality outside of Europe. Indeed, we have seen how the postcolonial is understood in two departments of the same university, namely the Sociology and English Studies departments at the University of Pune. In this way, an articulated picture of the main challenges that knowledge faces in the ex-colonies in order to free itself from any Eurocentric perspective was constructed. Besides, the discussion on Indian academic postcolonialism and postcoloniality revealed to the reader some of the most important features of the image of Europe that is discussed and introduced in two important academic departments. There, the two apparently contradictory dimensions of the postcolonial generate hybrid spaces of knowledge where new and challenging approaches and perspective are elaborated. Then, thanks to an analysis of this picture, the academic environment where the interviewed students studied, could be made sense of. Finally, the most important points touched on, while speaking of Europe with the three interviewed students, were described and analysed, trying to give an indicative view of how non-Europeans perceive Europe. These concluding interviews, gave to the reader an image of which specific kind of hybridity I wanted to take into account and to describe at the same time. This hybrid subjectivity appears indeed an in-between place, expressing some apparent contradictions, that have been read throughout this work rather as negotiations and reformulations of the self, as well as of the perception of the 210 211 G. Delanty and C. Rumford, Rethinking Europe, 76. A. Sen, The argumentative Indian, 32. 67 surrounding reality and world. The experience - in particular that of having studied one year in Europe after having being educated in India - became central, shaping a borderless and transforming identity. Inside this framework, a key role has been played by the methodology implemented for this research and that has been structured step by step, also as a result of the advices of the interviewed local professors and students. This aspect of the investigation makes it safe, to a certain extent, to say that the interviewees have been, at the main time, object and subject of the research work by actively participating in the structuring of the research itself. Somehow, it is possible to speak of a participatory methodology that tried to place at the same theoretical and practical level the observer and the observed, putting into question the binary between the researcher on one side, and the investigated subject on the other. Going back again to the results, it appears clearly that Eurocentrism is still influencing world knowledge, being a difficult obstacle to overcome even for those familiar with postcolonial criticism. The idea of an advanced and fully civilized Europe still shows all its power and persuasion under the contemporary name and form of ‘development’. Besides, the logic of otherness shows to be widely reproduced outside of Europe. On the other hand, an impressive growth of original re-formulations of culture and academic perspectives demonstrates all the vivacity and subverting power of the works of Indian - and in general postcolonial - academics. The hybrid spaces of the universities scattered throughout the territories of former colonies, testifies the vastness of the potential horizons of knowledge and cultural interaction available to humanity, once it has escaped the colonial Eurocentric binary structure of knowledge. We have seen how postcoloniality and postcolonialism interact without necessarily reproduce any binary contradiction: they rather share the same physical and theoretical spaces, creating hybrid experiences and formulation of the world understanding. In a Europe that is looking for a definition of a cosmopolitan European identity, postcolonial India can be an immense source of inspiration. Rabindranath Tagore wrote during the first half of the last century: “of course if, in the process of knowing America, one begins to lose one's identity and falls into the trap of becoming an Americanised person contemptuous of everything Indian, it is preferable to stay in a looked room”.212 Today, an academic and extra-academic postcolonial hybridity as the 212 R. Tagore cited in A. Sen, The Argumentative Indian, 105. 68 one discussed in the last chapter, can be a model on which to build that still undefined cosmopolitan identity so eagerly sought after in the European academies, as well as in many sectors of the European civil society and public opinion. As the colonial experience was central for the formulation of the myth of the European civilizing superiority, postcolonialism and hybridity can be the brick with which to start building a new world order, and a new European and supra-European cosmopolitan hybrid identity. 69 7. 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