The ‘ middle-caste ’ of post-colonial literature: post-colonial class dynamics and the psychology of western superiority
Aristou Meehan
The purpose of this essay is to examine how post-colonial class dynamics are rooted in an underlying psychology of western superiority, and how this can be observed in post-colonial literature. The dynamics between class, gender, race, and religion create a modern ‘caste - system’ that can be observed in many post-colonial texts. The majority of those narratives that reach a western audience are written by a privileged minority, a proposed ‘middle - caste’, that exists within a liminal cultural and social position between wealth and poverty, colonizer and colonized. In writing for a western audience there is an inherent struggle for integrity, and by writing within the context of the w estern literary canon a kind of ‘dual heritage’ is adopted. In The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures , Ashcroft et al. define the term ‘post - colonial’ as ‘ all the culture affected by the imperial process from the moment of colonization to the present day ’ . 1 They further describe post-colonial literature as ‘ essentially political ’ for its ability to ‘ radically question the apparent axioms upon which the whole discipline of English has been raised ’ . 2 Literature as a force for political change in post- colonial societies is further explored in Sanjay Joshi’s Fractured Modernity: Making of a Middle Class in Colonial North India , 3 where Joshi asserts that ‘ western-style education and new forms of communication, such as newspapers ’ allowed ‘ a group of literate men ’ in Lucknow to define a new ‘ moral, cultural, and political code ’ and position themselves as ‘ the new middle class ’ . In R.K Narayan’s 1945 novel The English Teacher , Narayan subtly presents how entrenched beliefs in western superiority shape the aspirations of the Indian ‘ new middle class ’ . The titular English teacher, Krishna, views his wife Susila’s spirituality and reading of ‘native’ Indian texts as being markers of lesser sophistication, as his definition of ‘civil ize d’ is highly influenced by the ‘ western-style education ’ that he finds himself a part of. In encouraging his wife to read – ‘ You must spend some more time reading or stitching or singing. Man or woman is not born merely to cook and eat ’ – we quickly learn that Krishna’s true concern is not for Susila’s reading per se (he dismisses ‘ the Tamil classics and Sanskrit texts ’ that she reads ‘ without help ’ ), but rather her disinterest in the western texts that he forces upon her. When he scolds her: ‘ You have neglected your books ’ , he refers to the copies of Ivanhoe and Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare that he has given her - in short, the western literary canon. We see him trying to ‘convert’ Susila away from her religious literature and practice and instead adopt his own worship of ‘the g reat English classics’. This crusade hijacks a key moment of romance and creativity with his wife in which he writes her poetry, choosing to test her knowledge instead by copying Wordsworth’s She Was a Phantom of Delight directly and reciting it to her ‘ as if to [his] class ’ . This small moment can be seen as symbolic of Krishna’s mimicry of the English colon izer. Though he
1 Ashcroft et al 1989: 2. 2 Ashcroft et al 1989: 196. 3 Joshi 2001; see also Roy 2002.
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