Review: Colonial Figures and Postcolonial Reading

Reviewed Work(s): Allegories of Empire: The Figure of Woman in the Colonial Text by
Jenny Sharpe: The Rhetoric of English India by Sara Suleri
Review by: Suvir Kaul
Source: Diacritics , Spring, 1996, Vol. 26, No. 1 (Spring, 1996), pp. 74-89
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press

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 COLONIAL FIGURES AND
POSTCOLONIAL READING

SUVIR KA UL

Jenny Sharpe. ALLEGORIES OF EMPIRE: THE FIGURE OF WOMAN IN THE

COLONIAL TEXT. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993.
Sara Suleri. THE RHETORIC OF ENGLISH INDIA. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992.

Biologists tell us that racialism is a myth and there is no such thing as a

master race. But we in India have known racialism in all its forms ever since
the commencement of British rule. The whole ideology of this rule was that of
the herrenvolk and the master race, and the structure of government was
based upon it; indeed the idea of a master race is inherent in imperialism.
There was no subterfuge about it; it was proclaimed in unambiguous
language by those in authority. More powerful than words was the practice
that accompanied them....
-Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of lndia (1946)

Sara Suleri begins The Rhetoric ofEnglish India with a critique of "some of the governing
assumptions" of the field of colonial cultural studies, which she sees as subject to a
debilitating "concept-function": "While the representation of otherness has long been
acknowledged as one of the must [sic] culturally vexing idioms to read, contemporary
interpretations of alterity are increasingly victims of their own apprehension of such
vexation. Even as the other is privileged in all its pluralities, in all its alternative histories,
its concept-function remains too embedded in a theoretical duality of margin to center
ultimately to allow the cultural decentering that such critical attention surely desires" [1].
Suleri enumerates some of the problems attendant upon "alteritist" methods of reading:
"While alteritism begins as a critical and theoretical revision of a Eurocentric or
Orientalist study of the literatures of colonialism, its indiscriminate reliance on the
centrality of otherness tends to replicate what in the context of imperialist discourse was
the familiar category of the exotic." In its single-minded devotion to the analysis of
difference, alteritism runs the risk of "representing 'difference' with no attention to the
cultural nuances that differentiation implies. Instead, alteritism reads to reify questions of
cultural misapprehension until 'otherness' becomes a conceptual blockage that signifies
a repetitive monumentalization of the academy's continuing fear of its own cultural
ignorance" [12].
In her account of academic processes, Suleri is surely right in claiming that, "in
contravention of the astounding specificity of each colonial encounter... contemporary
critical theory names the other in order that it need not be further known" [13], thus
providing theoretical models and vocabularies whose easy portability and schematic
applicability become the reasons for their institutional success. Now that a loose
affiliation of texts, revisionary reading practices, and literary histories are being institu-
tionalized (particularly in departments of English) under the disciplinary rubric of
colonial and postcolonial discourse studies, such a questioning of the protean versatility

74 diacritics 26.1: 74-89

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and analytical usefulness of notions of "otherness" or alterity is timely.1 In much academic
writing, the critique of colonial discourses ends where perhaps it should begin, by positing
the many forms of alterity that are invoked in the writing of the imperial, nationalist, or
even subaltern subject. Particularly in the work of literary theorists, this dynamic of self
and other proves entirely compelling when charted in and through textual representation,
and the metropolitan archive, both literally and figuratively open in our moment of
decolonization, provides ample opportunity to think about the reiterated motifs of
"civilization" and "barbarism," modernity and its antecedents, trade and empire, warfare
and conquest.
Yet what is to make such intellectual work "postcolonial" in any significant sense?
Today, "postcolonial studies" in the Anglo-US academy often suggests simply the
opening up of a new archive or a bringing together, in different ways, of various
interpretative or reading techniques developed by poststructuralist theorists. There is little
evidence that such intellectual work derives any of its critical functions and polemical
urgencies from the present-day cultural and intellectual life of the "postcolonial" nation
or nations whose historical legacy is under study. Metropolitan concerns and agendas
dictate the nature and process of inquiry, rather than a more appropriate sense of the
pressing issues that have priority in the national debates of once-colonized countries.
What is required is a different order of intellectual and ideological affiliation, in which
metropolitan "postcolonial" critics learn from what goes on in the postcolonial nation and
let such knowledge guide their literary and cultural projects.
The "postcolonial" cultural studies that might result will mine the colonial archive
not only to demonstrate how document after document, text after text, is uncannily home
to a wide variety of what we might call figures of poststructuralist speech, but to show how
this archive is a repository of the ideas, programs, pogroms, and, yes, rhetorical figures
that have provided the staple for imperial forms of knowledge production, administration,
and exploitation. Linda Hutcheon's cogent formulation of the issue may be useful here:
"Of the many meanings attributed to post, two have emerged as emblematic of the
dynamics of cultural resistance and retention. On the one hand, post is taken to mean
'after,' 'because of,' and even unavoidably 'inclusive of' the colonial; on the other, it
signifies more explicit resistance and opposition, the anticolonial" [Hutcheon 10]. If the
anticolonial dimension of postcolonial intellectual enquiry remains at best a piety, to be
gestured at and then ignored such that its imperatives do not suggest the nature and form
of inquiry itself, then it will not be unfair to think of "postcolonial theory" as yet another
textual analytics always in search of paradigmatic figures, for those exemplary instances
of formal and rhetorical play which can be recomposed into (often vertiginous) figures of
reading.
These general comments on colonial cultural studies began from and now return to
Sara Suleri's critique of the "static binarism between colonizer and colonized." Suleri
argues that "English India"-which term, she suggests, "is not synonymous with the
history of British rule in the sub-continent, even while it is suborned to the strictures of
such a history" [2]-produces narratives that

move with a ghostly mobility to suggest how highly unsettling an economy of

complicity and guilt is in operation between each actor on the colonial stage. If
such an economy is the impelling force of the stories ofEnglish India, it demands
to be read against the grain of the rhetoric of binarism that informs, either
explicitly or implicitly, contemporary critiques of alterity in colonial discourse.
The necessary intimacies that obtain between ruler and ruled create a counter-
culture not always explicable in terms of an allegory of otherness: the narrative

1. For an argument that begins on similar lines see Loomba and Kaul.

diacritics / spring 1996 75

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 of English India questions the validity of both categories to its secret economy,
which is the dynamic ofpowerlessness at the heart of the imperial configuration.
[3]

Suleri would like colonial cultural studies to "break down the fixity of the dividing lines
between domination and subordination," and to further question "the psychic
disempowerment signified by colonial encounter" [4]. These are, of course, as I have
suggested earlier, entirely laudable aspirations: we know that British India became
feasible because of trading, military, political, and administrative overlaps between
factors of the East India Company and indigenous economic and political powers, and this
imbrication alone should cause us to question the binarism of power and culture that sets
the colonizer absolutely against the colonized. However, it is not such a postnationalist,
postcolonial understanding of the historical processes of empire that energizes Suleri's
investigation. Her readings of colonial discourse suggest instead the application and
demonstration of key insights from psychoanalysis, narratology, and deconstruction,
often reifying what should be reading methods into axioms and conclusions. The text
under examination thus yields not so much accounts of cultural and historical contradic-
tion and change as repeated instances of similar narrative and psychic displacement.
Among other consequences, such critical practice leads to an astonishing flattening of the
contours of colonial power sharing, so that we are left with no fundamental distinction
between colonizers and colonized within the discourse of English India.2
For Suleri, the "dynamic of powerlessness" [3] and the "psychic disempowerment"
[4] that she sees at the heart of the colonial encounter cuts both ways, almost without
distinction. There are two main reasons why such a claim is tenable within Suleri's
argument: first, because of the "impact of narrative on a productive disordering of binary
dichotomies" [4]. I take this to mean that because "English India" tells stories of itself,
these stories, even as they narrativize the will to power, always offer evidence to the
contrary, and reveal those aporetic moments when the locutions of authority crumble into
the idiom of (cultural) terror. Thus, a literary critic of the texts of the colonial encounter
will be able to delineate the "psychic disempowerment" of the narratively tremulous but
presumably otherwise-politically, economically, culturally-highly empowered colo-
nizing subject. The paradigmatic colonial text, then, in this vision, is not the cultural or
anthropological document whose taxonomies become the knowledge-base for colonial
judicial and administrative action, but the "writerly" narrative whose attempts to make
sense of all that it represents are now revealed as no more than anxious, pathetic tremors
of colonial intent. In a curious reversal, colonial aggression is understood only as a
"symptom of terror rather than of possession" [6]. If more material transactions followed
from that aggression, they are absent, except in the most insubstantial way, in Suleri's
analysis. The analysis of narratives is of course a respectable literary-critical and literary-
theoretical end in itself, but its machinery is simply not adequate to any would-be
"colonial cultural studies."
Secondly, Suleri is able to construct a manifestly ahistorical literary and cultural
narrative, that of "English India," in which "the event of colonial encounter completely

2. The notion of colonial "hybridity" associated most centrally with the work ofHomi Bhabha
also denies, via intricate tropological and rhetorical analyses, the historical power of the colonial
"rhetoric of binarism," and, not surprisingly, it too derives its primary critical vocabulary from
psychoanalysis and semiotics. While this is not the place to elaborate on the near absence of
historical reference that allows for the dissemination of portmanteau theories like that of
"hybridity, "it is worthwhile to remember, as critics like Benita Parry andAbdulJanMohamed have
suggested, that it may be premature to deemphasize what JanMohamed calls the "Manichean
difference" between colonial authority and its subjects--a difference and an opposition that was
emphasized, indeed marshalled, by anticolonial movements.

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dispenses with chronology" [7], only because she subsumes the rhetoric of empire,
nationalism, and postcolonial writing within "a continually dislocated idiom of migrancy"
[5]. In her model, "migrancy as an interpretive figure ... implies that the stories of
colonialism-in which heterogeneous cultures are yoked by violence--offer nuances of
trauma that cannot be neatly partitioned between colonizer and colonized" [5]. This leads
to another breathtaking formulation: "the situation of postcolonialism, in other words,
informs each inception of colonial encounter, in which the migrant moment of dislocation
is far more formative, far more emplotting, than the subsequent acquisition of either
postcolonial nation or colonial territory" [5]. Salman Rushdie and a whole host of
contemporary writers and critics notwithstanding, it is a stretch to equate migrancy (even
as figure) with the situation of postcolonialism; most people have, in fact, stayed home
(however complicated and unhomely we wish to make our sense of that "home"). Their
emplotments of history, nationalist or otherwise, remember not only the distinction
between colonial acquisition and postcolonial nation (incomplete and uncertain though
empire and nation might seem at any historical moment) but also other, less celebrated,
forms of migration: indentured labor, for instance, or the movements of peoples after the
partition of the subcontinent. Suleri's model might have worked better if she had been less
Johnsonian in her understanding of the conceit of colonialism: heterogeneous cultures
were in fact yoked together by the colonizer's violence, and while trauma cannot perhaps
be neatly partitioned between colonizer and colonized, nor can it be, especially in
historical hindsight, apportioned equally. Finally, only literary-critical conceit can
underwrite a claim that since "narration occurs to confirm the precariousness of power,"
the idiom of English India suggests that the "troubled confluence of colony, culture, and
nation lends a retroactive migrancy to the fact of imperialism itself' [23]. The narcissism
of diasporic nostalgia, though a marked presence in creative and critical writing, does not
often swell to such revisionary hubris. Here, speaking through the self-referential pieties
of contemporary narratology, it finds powerful articulation.
The Rhetoric ofEnglish India also declares its intent to perform its analysis "in order
that the psychic predicament of the colonizer can in effect be disaligned from the
monolithic power accorded to him" [20], and Suleri calls for a colonial cultural studies
that seeks "to read more closely the structure of psychic subordination implicit in the
history of colonial domination" [21]. It is of course worthwhile to pay attention to the
psychic derangement of the colonizer (the madness of King George!) and to plot the
connections between this predicament and the development of systems of domination or
of less partial control: analysts of European fascism have asked similarly productive
questions. However, these analyses tend not to forget that their concern is to interrogate
the psychic reasons for the development of a horrific machinery of economic and social
control-it is the pathologies of power that they worry about, and the filigreed curiosities
of discourse are read symptomatically. While Suleri's vocabulary does occasionally
suggest an awareness of power relations other than those provided by the dubious embrace
of master and slave, she is not interested in the functioning of power as such, and
particularly not in the apparatuses of power whose particular development defines
colonial relations. Thus, for her, "the key term of transaction imposed by the language of
colonialism is transfer rather than power" [6]. Once again, this cultural and psychic
porosity is not the result of material or ideological processes but a feature of colonial
articulation itself: "the idiom of colonialism is necessarily proleptic: it must anticipate the
transfer of power even in the articulation of the acquisition of power" [21]. The idiom of
the colonizer has often been demonized by anticolonial nationalists, but it is quite
remarkable to hear it granted metaphysical, vatic properties: there need be no history of
colonial figures of speech because this speech subsumes historical understanding; it
speaks its own alpha and omega, and the entire blessed imperial sacrament in between.

diacritics / spring 1996 77

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 Despite such theoretical and rhetorical overstatement, the book offers some nuanced,
insightful analyses of canonical and less-familiar texts: two chapters on Burke and India,
a fine account of the workings of the picturesque as a mode of address and cultural
description in the travelogues and journals of some Anglo-Indian women, readings of
Kim as a figure for arrested colonial adolescence and of the Marabar caves (the "anus of
imperialism" [133]) in E. M. Forster's Passage to India, an argument that sees V. S.
Naipaul as much more haunted by his own Anglophile belatedness than any of his earlier
writing would suggest, and a concluding demonstration of the degree to which Rushdie's
fiction is complicitous with a psychology of censorship and shame. Suleri's accounts of
colonial figures foreground her sense of their terror and panic when confronted by alien
lands and cultures: "To the colonizing imagination, the Indian sublime is at its most empty
at the very point when it is most replete, dissolving the stability of facts and figures into
hieroglyphs that signify only the colonizer's pained confrontation with an object to which
his cultural and interpretive tools must be inadequate" [31], and she calls "attention to the
disempowerment of description that seizes colonial discourse even as it continues to
subscribe to the possibility of imperial inventories" [31]. But even here, the political and
material realities of colonialism are relentlessly disavowed as detracting from the project
at hand: "The actual political weight of geographic acquisition, however, can obscure the
centrality of a colonial obsession with the burden of inadequacy; it may also conceal from
us the impact that such fears made on the policy by which the domains of India were finally
brought under British rule" [31]. The reading technologies of psychoanalysis and
narratology can and have shown us that every text is obsessed with its own inadequacies-
that, in its de Manian derivation, has been the project of "theory" itself-but such
impeccable poststructuralist demonstrations seem far from postcolonial in concern or
emphasis.

Sara Suleri's book is a remarkable instance of the fact that much of the manner and the
force of such literary "postcolonial" readings is derived from the powerful textual
skepticism enabled by contemporary critical methods: we are able to show that all writing,
even (or especially) that which bespeaks its own authority, is shaped by anxiety and
performative excess. At its best, this attention to form has been a welcome reminder of
the remarkable ways, both witting and unwitting, in which linguistic and semiotic systems
encode the psychic and social exchanges and energies that characterize different human
collectivities and social formations-and this precisely because details of form, as much
as of content, are overdetermined by the contested imperatives of gender, class, and
cultural differentiation. Thus, many contemporary readings of historical, cultural, and
political documents have been very successful at demonstrating how such "texts" are
marked by the play of authorial desire and shaped by the logic of linguistic, cultural, and
ideological difference. However, all too many "rhetorical" readings subordinate any
critical accounting of the historical location or power of these texts to an investigation of
their construction, of the ease (or lack thereof) with which they tell their stories, deploy
characteristic tropes and arguments, organize their frames of reference or locate the
objects of their description and inquiry. The historical archive, in such readings, becomes
a series of largely disconnected textual moments, each of which can be opened up to
similar literary-critical decoding.
The critical irony here has often been commented upon---even as scrupulous
attention to the formal and rhetorical details of each text produces highly individuated
readings, these readings become exercises in the demonstration of literary sameness. A
conceptual and historical flattening results, in that each text offers similar testimonials to
the disruptive workings of tropological instability, intertextual reference, and the vicis-
situdes of narrative desire. Thus, for instance, a "postcolonial critic" might see fit to
subject any rhetoric of authority-imperialist or nationalist-to a similar and easy

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structural critique: when a freedom-arguing nationalist (like Nehru in the passage quoted
as the epigraph) speaks against imperial power and invokes an opposition between
colonizer and colonized, he or she can be read as replicating the binarism characteristic
of imperialist and racist discourse. That observation, true as it is, does not lead to any sense
of the distinct historical project or the different ethical charge of colonial and of nationalist
discourse, nor does it help us in identifying the contours of local, national reference in
Nehru's argument. To be successful in doing the latter, we must acknowledge that the
recourse to mobilizing oppositions like "we in India"-which are of course the
commonplaces of any claimed political collectivity-served particular political and
cultural ends even as it confronted imperial mythmaking.
Yet why should it matter to us if nationalist discourse in general derived so many of
its rhetorical and ideological principles from colonial authority? To wish otherwise, or to
long for an originary authenticity and purity of native thought and action, is to be simply
ahistorical or determinedly reactionary, in that the search for such purities is usually the
province of xenophobic and messianic religious revivalists. Nor should it be sufficient to
emphasize the continuities between colonial, anticolonial, and postcolonial discourses
simply because our techniques of critical reading can demonstrate similar patterns of
rhetorical complexity in representative examples from each. If there is a powerful
intellectual reason for examining the form and content of nationalist writing, it must
follow from our sensitivity, in the era of decolonization and its aftermath, to the ways in
which nationalist discourse prescribed ideological cohesion to disparate masses of
people, who may in actuality be "united" only in this rhetoric of anticolonial opposition.
Even as nationalists questioned and discredited key certainties and pieties of imperialism,
the ideological priorities of nationalist mobilization-their language of nation-have
themselves been interrogated by contemporary political movements that coalesce around
stratifications of class, gender, religion, or ethnicity.
Contemporary sociopolitical struggles and awareness, that is, have generated the
imperative to read both colonial and postcolonial texts (as indeed texts more generally)
by paying nuanced attention to those moments where the text betrays its own logic, where
the vicissitudes of cultural difference or material antagonism result in narrative figures
whose textual function suggests a more complex ordering of the text than first seems to
be the case. The colonial discourse studies that stem from these critical principles have
led to a fruitful body of work in a number of colonial and postcolonial archives, and the
study of colonial and postcolonial political and cultural formations is now achieving a
density and richness not easily found in the work of political historians of empire or of
colonial economic and social relations (upon whose work, however, colonial cultural
studies builds). There are of course several other reasons why the would-be "anticolonial"
critic must work hard to retain the intellectual priorities and possibilities articulated by
various anti-imperial nationalisms in their struggle for decolonization. The first is simply
that in the present historical moment, the creation of the "new world order" demands the
repression of such historical memory, so that the saga of empire and the global
reconfiguration of power and culture over the last four hundred years is retold in the past
tense, as a mythology whose archaic logic and effects are no longer with us.
More tellingly, for the generation of critics born during and after the period of
decolonization, who have no firsthand memory of colonization and no direct contact with
colonial power, the once-compelling rhetoric and iconography of nationalist discourse
seem increasingly like ironic commentaries on the failure of nationalist politics to fulfill
the material and cultural promises that it made. The idea of a nationalism that united
disparate peoples into a struggle for independence has given way to the idea of a national
elite or elites who mobilized the "nation" in the service of their class interests, and whose
anti-imperialism can now be seen as a cover for their control of the subaltern masses, who
in turn experience independence only as a change in rulership. Further, and this is a

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problem that has to do with the institutional locations of the largest number of "postcolonial"
critics, the present study of the colonial archive derives its priorities from issues of greatest
consequence in the Anglo-American academy-from the imperatives of multiculturalism
perhaps, or from other similar attempts to render more inclusive the dominant systems of
institutionalized knowledge. "Postcolonial" theory and practice, as is only to be expected,
differ in New Delhi and in New Haven, in Auckland and in Birmingham: this is not to
suggest that they do not share a common language, but to remind us that their accents and
even syntax bear witness to very different cultural and political practices.
This problem of intellectual priority and analytical urgency is exacerbated by the
disciplinary methods enshrined in and perpetuated by departments of English in particular
and of literary studies more generally. While the work of a "postcolonial" historian might
involve a welcome attention to the operations of textuality, or that of an anthropologist
might involve a sharp understanding of the historical place of ethnography in the
discourse of empire, the work of a "postcolonial" literary critic often does not widen its
scope enough to consider the terrain mapped by historians, anthropologists, or economic
historians (to name a few potentially useful academic groupings). This leads to locally
inventive readings of literary texts and other documents, but with only a fleeting sense that
these texts were and are responsive to and responsible for specific ideas of cultural
difference, imperialist self-legitimation, and the self-serving articulation of colonial
power. What we arrive at, in the name of literary or rhetorical readings, are demonstrations
of the self-reflexiveness of tropologies of sameness and difference, of the epistemological
uncertainty of figuration, of the deconstruction of the will to rhetorical power. That the
same figures can be (and have been) traced in medieval epic, Elizabethan poetry, high
Romantic discourse, and postmodern fictions is not cause for critical pause, nor is the fact
that texts produced at different periods in the making of empire (and thus implicated
within very different histories) all seem to respond equally well and compellingly to the
same techniques of reading.
Most unfortunate of all perhaps is the way in which such variants of "postcolonial"
theory detract from an accounting of the banal and brutal details of the creation of empires.
So certain are they that a reading of literary texts, or of other texts in literary ways, will
provide a decoding of the business of empire that there is no need to pay systematic
attention to histories of military and administrative action, the development of systems of
infiltration and control, or the periodic resistance of the ruled, or indeed to the bulk of
historical factors addressed, or repressed, by the text under study. (In fact it is arguably
the lack of attention to historical detail that makes such textual readings possible.) The
business of resistance itself is reified into an inevitable attribute of textual or rhetorical
play-in a travesty of Foucauldian analysis, it is the contradictions of the colonial or
metropolitan text that offer evidence of colonial cultural derangement, and it is a
discursive agon that substitutes for any account of the materially antagonistic and hence
agonized contact between imperial and colonized cultures. It is true that, in disciplinary
terms, this elaboration of textual testimony is an advance over unqualified celebrations
of authorial self or genius, and to that extent "postcolonial studies" is contributing to a
fundamental rereading and evaluation of the colonial archive, but we have to guard against
allowing the details of that reevaluation to congeal into a "postcolonial" corpus that finds
in literary-critical analyses a self-explanatory substitute for any examination of the
broader material and cultural practices of empire building, or of the aftermath of the
political dissolution of empires.
Because so much "postcolonial" critical energy is focused on the texts of the
metropolitan colonial archive, this archive tends to appear more inflated and all-
encompassing than it is already. That is, these texts and their concerns begin to stand in
for the concerns and cultural and rhetorical strategies of all the participants-colonizers
and colonized, collaborators and resisters, exploiters and exploited-in the processes of

diacritics / spring 1996 81

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empire. Rhetorical fissures and aporetic moments in these metropolitan texts provide not
only critical access to the subjectivity of the colonizer but also provide the parameters of
any discussion of the subject-formations of the colonized. This is itself an intellectual and
conceptual problem but particularly vexing for any anticolonial reading, which must
begin from the historical knowledge that almost nowhere in the world (even in genocidal
colonial operations like those of the Americas or New Zealand) did colonial authorities
succeed completely in delegitimating and denying local forms of cultural, social, and
economic formation. In most cases, in fact, colonial authority mapped onto and built upon
precolonial systems of governance and economic organisation-the British in India, for
instance, required and made very skillful use of local merchants and financiers and even
feudal authorities whose paramount power they usurped but whose local authority they
often refined and deepened. To that extent, the colonizer-colonized binary is an enabling
fiction produced, for profound historical and instrumental reasons, by the metropolitan
archive (even the designations of race-historically the most pernicious and emblematic
of taxonomic categories-were far more plastic in sociosexual, cultural, and administra-
tive practice). This binarism was of course mobilized, for opposite political ends, by
anticolonial nationalists, but this fact should not detract from our awareness that the
transformation of the social systems of colonized people often resulted from pressures
other than those directly traceable to colonial authority, especially as so many people
experienced that authority via multiple local mediations. Thus the textual records of
empire are answerable to contexts more nuanced than the colonizer-colonized polarity
would allow us to consider.
The project of colonial cultural studies is certainly larger than any exclusive
engagement with metropolitan texts would suggest. This is not to argue that we should
stop work on English or French literary and cultural texts-far from it, because that
archive is vast and interesting, and its creative and critical legacies still determine a great
deal of education in literary and aesthetic values, including in many formerly colonized
countries. It is important, then, to render clear its ideological assumptions and willful
blindnesses, and to show the shaping role of the will to empire (and, historically, of the
construction of actual empires) in the metropolitan literary and cultural imaginary. What
any critic of colonial culture who primarily examines the metropolitan archive must
constantly keep in mind is that the postcolonial emphases of her or his work will
necessarily demand a vital sense of the continuing, even structuring, legacies of these
cultural issues. While "independence" may mark a political break from the colonizer,
colonial socioeconomic, politico-legal, administrative, educational, and cultural prac-
tices remain hugely consequential, and they do so because they now serve local interests
as much as they do the arrangements of international power. Thus, postcolonial criticism
must function with a double historical awareness, of both the materials of the past and their
place in the material realities of the present. For this reason, the exhumation of the colonial
corpus is always a forensic act, one that asks its questions from the vantage point of a
contemporary investigation, one that puts on display the putrefaction of empire in order
to understand pathologies that malinger into the present. This does not suggest a
methodological demand unique to colonial cultural studies-all historical inquiry after all
offers evidence of the play of desire and self-legitimation that psychoanalysis terms
transference-but it does remind critics of a contemporary political and pedagogic
responsibility.
In more pragmatic terms, literary postcolonial critics must remember that the colonial
texts they work with, even if they have a metropolitan origin, must be located within
specific colonial histories-if the only frame of reference remains events and social
formations in Europe, without consideration of how events and social practices in the
colonies are transformatory of both colonized spaces and the culture of the colonizers,
then we will find it hard to exit imperial, eurocentric regimes of meaning-making and

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truth. As historians of colonial practices in general, and of the British empire in India in
particular, have long argued, to view colonial issues only from the vantage point of a
theoretical "postcolonialism" is to overvalue the transformative power of colonial
authority. The colonial past in India had many players, and postnationalist historiography
has been assiduous in pointing out that various economic, social, and political formations
in colonial India continued to exist outside of the arrangements of British India or
established very different relations with its colonial authority. Colonial texts most often
ignore such realities, for, from the colonizer's point of view, the only India that requires
classification and elaboration is the culture and geography that it surveys, desires, or
annexes. Ironically, conservative historians of India (whose assumptions and vocabular-
ies we would now see, rightly, as "Orientalist") often described an India frozen in an
archaic but splendid time and culture whose essential verities were undisturbed by the
coming of European merchants and colonizers. We must, of course, move away from such
a static, regressive model for "the wonder that was India," but not by positing the advent
of colonialism as the ineluctable reference point for all explanations of developments in
modem Indian political, cultural, and social history.

What might it mean for us to follow up on Suleri's concern for the "centrality of a colonial
obsession with the burden of inadequacy" and the "impact that such fears made on the
policy by which the domains of India were finally brought under British rule" [31]? Might
it lead us to the understanding that the figures of colonial fear do in fact have differentiated
histories, and are the products not so much of obsessional "colonial" (transcultural,
transhistorical) neuroses but of particular political and ideological motivations? And that
to interrogate textual figuration under the aegis of colonial cultural studies requires some
engagement with the policies and practices of empire? This is in fact the argument that
Jenny Sharpe offers in Allegories ofEmpire: The Figure of Woman in the Colonial Text.
Sharpe's inquiry begins from that moment in Paul Scott's The Jewel in the Crown when
the rape of Daphne Manners produces an anti-imperialist allegory in the novel. How, she
asks, "does the rape of an English woman by a gang of Indian peasants come to
represent-that is, stand in the place of-the rapaciousness of the British Empire?" [1].
Sharpe's answer invokes the "weight of a racial memory that has its beginnings in the
'Indian Mutiny' or 'Sepoy Rebellion"' [1-2]. In 1857, colonial narratives of the revolt
insisted on featuring the violation of English womanhood even though magistrates
"commissioned to investigate the so-called eyewitness reports could find no evidence to
substantiate the rumors of rebels raping, torturing, and mutilating English women" [2].
Anglo-Indian fiction that followed enshrined these reports and made rape a figure for the
colonial fear of the colonized but (potentially or actually) insurrectionary masses.
However, Sharpe is quite clear that in British India "rape is not a consistent and stable
signifier but one that surfaces at strategic moments" [2] and that "the European fear of
interracial rape does not exist so long as there is a belief that colonial structures of power
are firmly in place" [3]. In the Indian context, Sharpe suggests, the British fear of
interracial rape is articulated only after the 1857 revolt, and that rape should thus be
"understood as a highly charged trope that is implicated in the management of rebellion"
[21.
Sharpe insists on the details of the historical production and mobilization of the trope
of rape in particular because "the threat of the dark rapist appears with such frequency in
colonial situations that it is commonly explained as the projection of white fantasies onto
a racial Other" [3]. This leads to an unfortunate reification, where "upon presuming the
perception of the dark-skinned rapist to be the source rather than the effect of its discursive
production, we essentialize the racial and sexual meaning the stereotype articulates" [3].
Psychological explanation of this sort performs a "historical erasure" [3], providing an
oddly "rational" explanation of and even validation for "the organized violence that

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enabled a European minority to rule millions of natives in their own country" [4]. Stories
that feature native violence against European women provide alibis for orchestrated
judicial and military action against the colonized and have even greater long-term effects:
they endow the colonized body with one of its most aggressive attributes, the sexual threat
that criminalizes and defines. Indeed, such criminal designations are central to the fertile
colonial production of ideologically and administratively normative discourses of race.
Theories and paradigms of racial difference circulate with greater power and visibility
"when historical conditions make it difficult to presume the transparency of race-which
is to say, 'race' is all the more necessary for sanctioning relations of domination and
subordination that are no longer regarded as 'natural'" [5]. But it is not only the discourse
of racial identification that is developed via this foregrounding of the figure of the dark
sexual predator. In Sharpe's argument, the focus on rape causes the English woman,
putative object of Indian sexual violence, to surface as a key "cultural signifier for
articulating a colonial hierarchy of race" [4], her violated body a sign for the violations
of colonialism but also a sign of the moral authority of its social mission to "civilize" the
world. The "rapable" English woman, the Indian rapist, the (often) absent Indian woman,
and the English man who adjudicates, punishes, or retaliates-these become narrative
tokens whose circulation defines an important aspect of the cultural and "civilizational"
burdens of colonialism.
Sharpe's account of colonial relations begins with the success of the antislavery
movements in Britain and the degeneration of the West Indian plantation economy, which
meant that India took pride of place in the English colonial imagination. Antislavery
movements in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries redefined colonialism,
moving it away from vocabularies of economic self-interest to models of civilizational
superiority. Sharpe suggests this transition in a reading of Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre
(1847): "The progress of the heroine ... follows the itinerary of colonialism from the
abolition of slavery in the West Indies to the civilizing mission in India" [28]. Sharpe does
not plot a simple allegory here but offers a complex account of how the novel enables "a
new female subjectivity, the domestic individual" by "grounding 'women's mission' in
the moral and racial superiority of the colonialist as civilizer" [28]. More specifically, "the
moral agency of the domestic individual is contingent upon a national and racial splitting
of femininity-one that binds ambitions and passions to the West Indian plantation
woman and female self-renunciation to the Hindu widow" [28]. That is, the text produces
cultural, sexual, and domestic values for the ideal English woman by delineating and
disavowing competing options, which are marked as colonial and foreign. The story of
Jane's emancipatory struggle positions her as the guarantor of the social and moral
superiority of British culture-in working hard to become a social agent, she provides a
model of suffering but triumphant gender and class acculturation, as she does of a
missionary "humanizing" of her world.
Bronte's Jane does not of course leave home, and her version of individual
emancipation and social agency, framed as it is within colonial contexts, is not offered to
the colonies. But the English woman, as the rest of Sharpe's book argues, shows up in
crucial ways in colonial discourse-not as agent but as a mobile figure for the threat to
and the necessity of colonial authority. As the virtues of English civilization are
adumbrated for the benefit of audiences at home and abroad, and the missionary
vocabularies of sacrifice and social redemption become the staples of imperial propa-
ganda, the English woman, "barred from the noble work of the civilizing project... enters
a colonial iconography of martyrdom only in the capacity of victim. Unlike her male
counterpart, it is her brutalized corpse rather than her body of good deeds that is of
significance to the moral mission of colonialism" [55]. While this may sound like an
overstatement, it is borne out by the historical record-women as social reformers, as
agents whose self-sacrifice energized the machinery of colonial martyrdom, appeared in

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India as nurses, teachers, and governesses in the late nineteenth century. By then, the
events of 1857 had changed the form and declared function of the British presence in India
(in 1858, the British crown took over from the East India Company), and volumes of
British fiction and other commentary had addressed the revolt in order to "comprehend,
on the one hand, a native refusal of foreign rule where there should be consent, and, on
the other, colonial coercion where there should be benevolent guidance" [61].
The 1857 revolt distinguished itself from a number of earlier, more localized
insurrections and military campaigns against the British in that it was initiated by units of
the British Indian Army and led to the killing of British administrators and officers and
their families. English women's journals offer eloquent testimony to this fear of disorder
brought home, but, even more importantly, newspaper reports and popular accounts of the
year-long revolt sensationalized the killing of women and the "unspeakable" atrocity of
systematic rape (for which there existed no evidence), representing "insurgency ... above
all else as a crime against women" [67]. The fear-provoking truth effects of this lurid,
fetishized, excessive tale-telling, Sharpe argues, "have the same effect as an actual rape,
which is to say, they violently reproduce gender roles in the demonstration that women's
bodies can be sexually appropriated" [67]. Equally, such narratives enable a "structured
silence" about insurrectionary Indians killing English men-that dismembering violence
to the male body must not be represented, because to do so would be to "negate colonial
power at the precise moment that it needed reinforcing" [67]. The status of victim ascribed
to the English woman by this colonial discourse of rape thus "helped manage the crisis
in authority so crucial to colonial self-representation at the time" and (this is a point central
to Sharpe's argument) allowed the sign of the English lady-"her self-sacrifice, duty, and
devotion-to be extended to the social mission of colonialism. The signifier may be
woman, but its signified is the value of colonialism she represents" [67-68].
Sharpe also records the contrast between the victimized passivity of English women
and the demonized representation of Indian women (usually understood as secluded and
weak), who show up in these narratives as whores and harridans instigating--or leading,
as in the case of the Rani of Jhansi-Indian sepoys to revolt. Such description functioned
as the discursive prelude, and the justification, for the colonial counterinsurgency that
followed. Over the course of the year, the revolt was put down with a systematic
brutality-punishment was ritualized, public, and meant to be exemplary. Colonial
historiography legitimized these orchestrated military and judicial excesses as the
"uncontrollable rage of Victorian men responding to the knowledge that the sanctity of
their homes had been violated." As Sharpe astutely points out, such historical explanation,
"because it appeals to the separation of spheres that was so crucial to safe-guarding the
moral value of colonialism ... gives back to colonialism its own alibi" [76]. As colonial
narratives sensationalized the violation and then glorified the sacrifice of English women,
they preserved the

tenets of the civilizing mission by coding the British use ofphysical violence as
the extension of a moral influence.... In this manner, the social mission of
colonialism came to be increasingly represented as an immense sacrifice to
stamp out the last vestiges of savagery. Suturing the rupture of rebellion back
into the grand narrative of the civilizing mission, the tales of atrocities served
as a screen discourse for the savage methods used to ensure that natives knew
their proper place--but also for the vulnerability of colonial authority. [81]

Sharpe's analysis preserves a literary-critical understanding of colonial narratives as

indeed anxious, shrill, and tremulous about the sources of their own authority, and, even
more importantly, she recognizes that shrillness as produced by and contributing to

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particular, historically specifiable forms of colonial domination. This, as I have argued
earlier, is the powerful revisionary project of colonial cultural studies.
The popular success of Mutiny narratives created an enduring racist type, the Indian
man who desired white flesh to the point of violence, and whose depravity and general ill-
will toward women could be gauged from the prevalence of sati and female infanticide
in India. The aggression manifest in this putative rapist was in pointed contrast to earlier
representations of Indian men, particularly Hindus, as effeminate, weak, and easily
subordinated. As Sharpe argues, this new mythology was powerful enough to shadow a
variety of colonial cultural and even administrative processes: she calls attention, for
example, to the 1883 Ilbert Bill, which sought to grant Indian magistrates the right to try
Europeans in criminal cases in the rural districts. Colonial resistance to this bill, in which
women participated, emphasized the "mistreatment Englishwomen would suffer under
the new law. There was an outcry over the humiliation English women would have to
undergo if native judges were to hear cases of rape" [89]. Sharpe quotes from Annette
Ackroyd Beveridge's letter to the Englishman (6 March 1883):

Englishwomen have been forgotten while their rulers are busied in adding a new
terror to their lives in India. ... Six-and-twenty years [a reference to the 1857
revolt] do not suffice to change national characteristics ... I am not afraid to
assert that I speak the feeling of all Englishwomen in India when I say that we
regard theproposal to subject us to the jurisdiction ofnativeJudges as an insult.
It is not the pride of race which dictates this feeling ... it is the pride of
womanhood ... [I]n this discussion, the ignorant and neglected women oflndia
rise up from their enslavement in evidence against their masters. They testify to
the justice of the resentment which Englishwomen feel at Mr. Ilbert's proposal
to subject civilised women to the jurisdiction of men who have done little or
nothing to redeem the women of their own races and whose social codes are still
on the outer verge of civilisation. [90]

As feminist historians of colonialism have shown, Beveridge's position here is character-

istic of the pattern followed by Victorian and Edwardian women in their search for
emancipation: by positioning themselves as superior, on racial and civilizational grounds,
to Indian women and men, they lay claim to a consequential place in the imperial project,
thus strengthening their own demands for emancipation. Sharpe offers this negotiation of
power as the context for Flora Annie Steel's popular Mutiny novel, On the Face of the
Waters (1896), which she reads as part of the larger process that determined the place of
the Anglo-Indian woman, at home and abroad.
The memory of 1857 resurfaced in a diametrically opposed vocabulary as late-
nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Indian nationalists began to invoke it as the first
war of Indian independence. For colonial officials, 1857 suggested the precariousness of
British rule, and its events (insurgency always understood as the rape of white women by
Indian men) provided the frame of reference for acts of violent or nonviolent nationalist
protest well into the twentieth century. On 10 April 1919, an English missionary, Miss
Sherwood, was dragged off her bicycle in Amritsar, beaten and left for dead by rioters who
were exercised by the recent arrest of Gandhi and the deportation of local political leaders.
In response, the local military commander, General Dyer, ordered his troops to fire into
a peaceful protest meeting at Jallianawala Bagh: of the 1650 bullets fired, less than a
hundred missed a human target, and almost 400 people died. Eight months of public
protests were required to force the British government to initiate an inquiry; colonial
English men and women overwhelmingly supported Dyer, arguing that he had suppressed
a second mutiny and prevented English women "from being subjected to 'unspeakable
horrors'" [115]. Sharpe recreates this history, and analyzes the discourse surrounding the

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Jallianawala Bagh massacre, as a prelude to a superb reading of E. M. Forster'sA Passage
to India (1924). She notes that Forster (after his stay in India in 1912-13) had intended
to write an interracial love story of an Indian man and an English woman, but on his return
to India in 1921 found the country too changed to admit of that narrative. Jallianawala
Bagh and other political events had overtaken Forster, Sharpe suggests, and caused him
to reimagine the details of the relationship between colonized man and colonial woman:
thus, the "story of an interracial rape, more explosive by far, plays out the tension between
a dissenting native population and a defensive white minority" [117]. Sharpe's reading
of the novel is particularly sensitive to the questions that have vexed some other feminist
and anticolonial accounts of A Passage to India, which often fall into the trap of asking
who was in fact guilty of violence, colonial woman (Adela Quested) or colonized man (Dr.
Aziz)? Sharpe's account returns this opposition to its dubious genesis in colonial
discourse and argues that we must call attention to the "scene of exploitation" that exists
outside of the limits of this deadly polarity.
The critical use of "rape as a concept-metaphor for imperialism," Sharpe suggests,
requires us to be "attentive to the geohistorical specificity of such figures" [140-41], a
caution that she exemplifies in a reading of Paul Scott's The Jewel in the Crown. Scott's
putatively anti-imperial fiction, because it invokes the symbolic oppositions of the act of
rape preserved in the colonial memory of the events of 1857, provides an understanding
of colonialism in which only its fallen or abusive form is recognized via the normative
metaphor of rape. An "original" benevolence and a colonial culture of consent (violated
in the act of rape) are preserved, as is the crucial binary between colonizer and colonized.
Whether rape is understood as a figure for the resistance of an otherwise compliant
colonized agent or the abuse of an otherwise benevolent colonial authority, attention is
necessarily deflected, as Sharpe points out, from "the fractured scene of colonialism"
[156], with its far more differentiated locations of power and subversion. Sharpe's
account of Scott's The Raj Quartet locates the novels in the "raj nostalgia mode" (which
has been a growth industry in the last three decades), which she describes as "a mourning
for the loss of empire that masquerades as self-criticism, a resurrection of the civilizing
mission from its ashes... both a self-conscious reflection on and a 'muted celebration'
of Britain's imperial past" [144]. The events of 1857 structured colonial policy and
narratives, and they continue to provide-in Scott's novels and elsewhere-the central
figures of a nominally anti-imperialist, postcolonial position. Historical memory dies
hard, and the critical excavation of its palimpsestic, overdetermined forms demands a
sustained awareness of the circumstances of their origination and reception.

I wish to close this review with a brief account of one way in which the legacy of 1857
is preserved and de-naturalized in a Bengali novel, Rabindranath Tagore's Gora (1924).
The protagonist Gourmohan, called Gora ("fair" or "Whitey"), is an orthodox Hindu and
Chairman of a student Hindu Patriot's Society. Gora is marked by his looks: "one of his
college Professors used to call him the Snow Mountain, for he was outrageously white,
his complexion unmellowed by even the slightest tinge of pigment. He was nearly six feet
tall, with big bones, and fists like the paws of a tiger" [6]. Gora is aggressively antireform
and anticolonial, and the novel portrays him as militantly confirmed in his orthodox
Brahminism. However, in a stunning turn, he discovers on his father's deathbed that he
was not born Hindu: "'It was during the Mutiny,' began Krishnadayal, 'when we were at
Etawa. Your mother, in fear of the Sepoys, took refuge one night in our house. Your father
had been killed the previous day during the fighting.... He was an Irishman. That very
night your mother died after giving birth to you. From that day you were brought up in our
home"' [402]. Gora's reaction is couched in apocalyptic terms:

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 In a single moment Gora's whole life seemed to him like some extraordinary
dream. The foundations upon which, from childhood, all his life had been raised
had suddenly crumbled into dust, and he was unable to understand who he was
or where he stood. What he had called the past seemed to have no substance, and
that brightfuture which he had lookedforward to with such eagerness for so long
had vanished completely. He felt as though he were like the dewdrop on the lotus
leaf which comes into existence for a moment only. He had no mother, no father,
no country, no nationality, no lineage, no God even. Only one thing was left to
him, and that was a vast negation. [402]

Tagore's narrative preserves what Sharpe has defined as the colonial figure for the
Mutiny, the white woman in fearful retreat from the violence of the insurgent army sepoys,
and recognizes the traumatic historical power of that image in its account of Gora's
apocalyptic vision once the secret of his origin is revealed to him.
Yet the discourse of nationalism does not simply derive from or preserve colonial
figures; it is transitive and transformational, and rewrites them in its own image. Gora's
"negation" leads to one novelistic resolution of the questions of 1857, as a few days later
Gora finds himself confirmed in a new insight:

Today in a single moment that fortress of my own creation has vanished like a
dream, and I having got absolute freedom, suddenly find myself standing in the
middle of a vast truth!All that is good or evil in India, all her joys and sorrows,
all her wisdom and follies, have come in their fulness close to my heart. ...That
which day and night I have been longing for but which I could not be, to-day at
last I have become. To-day I am really an Indian! In me there is no longer any
opposition between Hindu, Mussulman, and Christian. To-day every caste in
India is my caste, the food of all is my food! [405-06]

Armed with this conviction, Gora becomes a follower of the reformist Brahmo teacher
Paresh Babu and dedicates himself to "the actual field of welfare for the three hundred
millions of India's children!" [406]. Tagore's own reformist zeal produces a wish-
fulfilling exemplar in Gora, and perhaps it is a measure of Tagore's sense of the
entrenched stratifications and divides in Indian society that Gora transcends these
divisions only by being born outside of them. But the secret of Gora's birth is not
attributable only to the intransigence and difficulty of the project of social and religious
reform in late-nineteenth-century Bengal. It also originates in the memory of the Mutiny,
and produces a character whose growth and vitality contest the normative figure of rape
(and its punishment) that colonial rhetoric and policy enshrined as the lessons of 1857. In
centering his counternarrative on the transformation of Gora, Tagore pays heed to the
power of colonial figures, but finds a vocabulary with which to evoke their historical
genesis and thus to contextualize their normative circulation. We have of course come a
long way-and this progress has had its costs as well as its benefits-from Tagore's
particular nationalist language and aspirations, but our postcolonial world is not so
changed that our intellectual urgencies and literary-critical methods can give up entirely
on the project of reading traumatic figurations in and out of their history. The transforma-
tion of Gora, after all, is a long and labored process, and one that is far from complete.

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 WORKS CITED
Bronte, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. 1847. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1994.
Forster, E. M. A Passage to India. 1924. New York: Harcourt, 1970.
Hutcheon, Linda. "Introduction. Colonialism and the Postcolonial Condition: Com
ties Abounding." PMLA 110 (1995): 10.
JanMohamed, Abdul R. "The Economy of Manichean Allegory: The Function
Difference in Colonialist Literature." Critical Inquiry 12 (1985): 59-87.
Loomba, Ania, and Suvir Kaul. "Introduction: Location, Culture, Post-coloniali
India: WritingHistory, Culture, Post-coloniality. OxfordLiterary Review 16
3-30, esp. 3-6.
Nehru, Jawaharlal. The Discovery of India. 1946. New Delhi: Oxford UP, 1989
Parry, Benita. "Problems in Current Theories of Colonial Discourse." Oxford
Review 9 (1987): 27-58.
Scott, Paul. The Jewel in the Crown. New York: Morrow, 1966.
- . The Raj Quartet. New York: Morrow, 1976.
Steel, Flora Annie. On the Face of the Waters. 1897. New Delhi: Arnold-Heine
1985.

Tagore, Rabindranath. Gora. 1924. Madras: Macmillan India, 1980.

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