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.