Category: Loomba

It is interesting to observe the terminologies that I came across this week’s reading. Colonialism, Post – colonialism, anti-colonial, and decolonizing………. Few years back in India when I was first introduced the term and read just the basic concept of Post – Colonialism I was very fascinated with it. I was thinking about my research topic at that time and I told my supervisor that I want to focus on Latin American literature in Post colonial era. She asked me what do I understand by Post colonialism and I said the phase after colonialism is post colonialism. She told me that I have to study it in depth to understand it as it is not as simple as I have understood it. Anyways, my research topic shifted to something else where I had to focus and study other theories. All that I understood at that time about Post colonialism was that it is a complex phenomenon and cannot be simplified in the manner as I did it.

Here, in UBC I got to read Post Colonialism again after those years where I was first clear about my ideas but got confused with it. However, Ania Loomba shakes my basic understanding of Post colonialism when she says “This makes it debatable whether once – colonized countries can be seen as properly ‘postcolonial’” (1104). The little that I understood in relation to my country, India, got shaken with this line. I started questioning myself ‘what is Post colonialism’. Not only that, I am also now confused with the term ‘colonialism’ when she says “’Colonialism’ is not just something that happens from outside a country or people, not just something that operates with the collusion of forces inside, but a version of it can be duplicated from within” (1106). Which made me curious about the terms and I started wondering whether post colonialism existed in India during the colonial period if colonialism can exist in Post colonial period? As Ania Loomba talks about the elites of Latin America who according to J. Jorge Klor de Alva ‘were never colonial subjects’. In the same way we still see the elements of colonialism existing in different parts of the world. For example in India, people after more than sixty years of Independence talk about whether we are truly independent or was it an illusion and we are still colonized probably by new colonial powers. Or the farfetched villages in India where we both are foreigners for each other (the villagers and people outside the villages. The urban people or other district people), they are ignorant about the policies and norms run by the Government of India but have their own norms and regulations and live with it. I do not know if we can term this as colonialism or decolonialism (contesting back to the ‘colonial Government’) or probably ‘Post-colonialism’.

What makes the terms especially colonialism or post colonial complex is their heterogeneity. They cannot be used homogeneously throughout. Though Post- colonialism could be termed loosely as a voice from the periphery and not from the centre but what I understood from the readings is that this peripheral voice could come from the Centre as well because even the centre is heterogeneous.

In this weeks reading, once again we are encountered with the difficulty of defining term and concepts. Like in other weeks this week there are many terms the main on is colonialism. I found the text by Ania Loomba to be very interesting because she starts by stating how the definition of colonialism is hard to define. The first definition she gives is a dictionary definition: “a settlement in a new country… a body of people who settle in a new locality, forming a community subject to or connected with their parent state; the community so formed, consisting of the original settlers and their descendants and successors, as long as the connection with the parent state is kept up.” (1100) of course like with any definition of colonialism we faults. Loomba sates that ” This definition, quite remarkably, avoids any reference to people other than the colonizers, people who might already have been living in those places where colonies were established. Hence it evacuates the word ‘colonialism’ of any implication of an encounter between peoples, or of conquest and domination. There is no hint that the ‘new locality’ may not be so ‘new’ and that the process of ‘forming a community’ might be somewhat unfair. Colonialism was not an identical process in different parts of the world but everywhere it locked.” (1100). It is so praising that a dictionary definition the term would be defined in such a passive and non confrontational way. When of course history has shown that colonization has been one of the most bloody processes that human history has encountered. Loomba continues stating that colonization is nothing new and that before the European colonization many other like the Romans, China, the mongols and many others had been colonizing vast amounts of territories, but the question arises what was different with the European colonization and one explanation proposed by Marx is that the Europe colonization has gone hand in hand with capitalism. In other word money and goods is the difference there were a trading of goods and work force that was traded between the colonized and colonizer. Of course this is what made the encounter more violent because greed played a big role in colonizing. there was less goods that is why colonization was so important. Loomba later defines colonization as “So colonialism can be defined as the conquest and control of other people’s land and goods. But colonialism in this sense is not merely the expansion of various European powers into Asia, Africa or the Americas from the sixteenth century onwards; it has been a recurrent and widespread feature of human history.” It was not just a need of territory but of goods. Later the article talks about imperialism which can be related to monarchy and how this was necessary before giving way to colonialism which was hand in hand with capitalism and also gave way to neocolonialism. He later state a that ” Modern colonialism did more than extract tribute, goods and wealth from the countries that it conquered – it restructured the economies of the latter, drawing them into a complex relationship with their own, so that there was a flow of human and natural resources between colonised and colonial countries. This flow worked in both directions” this is interesting because this interrelationship that Loomba talks about has give way to globalism and interdependence not only within colonized and colonizer relationship but between other colonized and colonizing countries.