Postcolonial
English Literature: Theory and Practice
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FOREWORD
At a recent
seminar held at Deen Dayal Upadhyay Gorakhpur University I took the opportunity
of being the Keynote Speaker to express my suspicion that terms or phrases such
as "rewriting" or "counter discourse" or "writing back"
carry a certain violence, a certain confrontational energy. This energy may be
emotionally mobilising but may not be politically productive in the long run,
because its oppositionality seems to invoke and reiterate a neat and clear
binary; and neat and clear binaries seldom work when it comes to talking about
messy things like culture and identity, because there is no such thing as a
"pure" culture and no such thing as a "pure" identity. We
are all culturally impure, but some of us revel in the notion of being a
"pure Hindu" or a "pure Indian" when such purity is just a
linguistic lie. Very often language is used to prop up notions of cultural
purity. English still continues to be regarded in some quarters as a
"foreign" (and therefore untouchable) language. This is why it gives
me great pleasure to provide the foreword to this book because it continues the
healthy project of engaging with the postcolonial condition using what some
still regard as "the coloniser's language."
I congratulate Mr.
Dipak Giri for putting together a volume that does not believe in geographical,
racial, national, gendered boundaries as unbridgeable. The range of authors
discussed here - from Achebe to Roy - is a testimony to the ever-expanding
contours of postcolonial writing. The focus on fiction - Dattani being the only
playwright dealt with here - seems apposite because sometimes a condition
requires the length and breadth of a novel for its adequate treatment. The care
with which each contributor has tried to negotiate the tricky terrain of postcoloniality
is worthy of note. Volumes such as these are always welcome, because the
postcolonial condition is so overdetermined by innumerable and powerful
historical, socio-cultural, and economic forces that careful, tentative but
persistent identification of these forces and their impact is always to be
undertaken.
I hope that this volume will excite many minds, restart many conversations,
invigorate many thoughts, but not in the spirit of loud, confrontational anger.
Let us be humbled by the acknowledgement that pure oppositionality is
intellectually unhelpful and that dealing with our own postcolonial hybridities
with care and understanding may be the way forward.
Niladri R. Chatterjee
Professor
Kalyani University
West Bengal