Abstract
This chapter will explain the key aims of the book in addition to clarifying its methodology. The overall purpose of the book is to examine through the lives and works of canonical authors of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the encounter between the colonizers and the colonized in India. This encounter was marked not just by the exercise of power and of various kinds of resistance to power, but also by the struggle for autonomy and selfhood, the aspiration for svaraj and dignity. Always, such a struggle is not just about changing material conditions and structures of being, but also about the creation of a new consciousness. Talking about such a consciousness is only possible through some type or the other of translation or multilingualism, in which more than one set of terms or discursive styles will have to be engaged with. Finally, a successful marking of issues and insights will produce a third space that is neither colonizer nor colonized, neither oppressor nor oppressed, neither victimizer nor victim, but something else that defies such binary categories.
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Notes
- 1.
Aijaz Ahmad (2005) in “The Making of India” offers interesting comments not only on the verbal nuances of “making” in this context, but also the different factors, including the bhakti movements and the anti-colonial struggle, that contributed to it.
- 2.
The nation has often been narrativized in terms of conflict, not consensus, between actual personages—Gandhi vs. Ambedkar, Gandhi vs. Jinnah, Gandhi vs. Nehru, and Nehru vs. Bose; or between ideological positions—feminist vs. patriarchal, national-bourgeoisie vs. Marxist, dominant vs. subaltern, upper caste vs. dalit, and so on. However, the two, conflict and consensus are not opposites, but dialogically related, one emerging from or leading to the other, both continuously evolving and changing. In this context, see K. J. Shah’s “Dissent, Protest and Reform: Some Conceptual Clarifications.”
- 3.
Professor Braj B. Kachru’s extensive work on the Indianization of English (1983) is notable in this regard. However, as Probal Dasgupta (1993) observes in his rather original and somewhat contrary exposition published 10 years later, regardless of how nativized English is in India, its “Otherness” never goes away.
- 4.
I have argued this consistently; see for instance, “Indian Anglophony;” and Indian English and Vernacular India.
- 5.
For a distinction between power and authority see Norman Uphoff’s “Distinguishing Power, Authority and Legitimacy: Taking Max Weber at His Word by Using Resources-Exchange Analysis.”
- 6.
The late Professor K. J. Shah claimed that tradition consisted of anubhav or direct experience, action (achar) that follows, and vichar (thought) that can articulate the consistency of both. Even if not in this order, these elements recur in most key texts. See for instance his essay, “Of Artha and the Arthasastra.” Shah’s daughter, Dr Veeravalli Srinivasan, wrote her Ph.D. dissertation in philosophy (University of Delhi, 2000) on this very topic of “Exemplar vs. Ideologue.”
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Paranjape, M.R. (2013). Introduction. In: Making India: Colonialism, National Culture, and the Afterlife of Indian English Authority. Sophia Studies in Cross-cultural Philosophy of Traditions and Cultures, vol 2. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4661-9_1
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