IT is surprising to see how much our colonial past has brainwashed us.
The works of Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936), for instance, have been a part of our syllabi at different levels. As a child, this writer studied excerpts from Kipling’s Jungle Book, which were included in class VIII English textbook (at an Urdu-medium school, mind you). Kipling was held in high esteem in India as well, though later on the author became a controversial figure in nationalist Indian circles.
A known racist and a self-confessed freemason who not only supported Colonel Dyre — the person responsible for Jallianwala Bagh Massacre — Kipling was a pro-imperialism author. Offering a justification for colonialism, Kipling in his poem ‘The White Man’s Burden’ advised the United States to take control of the Filipino people and their land, as it was the duty of the white nations to spread civilisation to the non-white races, as if the world, except for the West, was inhabited by the savages.
As compared to Kipling, E. M. Forster (1879-1970) is considered rather different as he presented the relationship between the British, the colonisers, and the local Indians, the colonised, in a realistic manner. Instead of trying to prove the superiority of white men over the natives, Forster depicted how the natives were treated by the colonisers. Yet, ironically, Forster never won a Nobel, though he was nominated for it many times, and Kipling won a Nobel Prize in Literature in 1907.
Forster has set his A Passage to India (1924), in the Indian subcontinent in the early 1920s, when the political movements against the British Raj had begun. Forster presents the friendship between Dr Aziz, a local physician, and Fielding, the British principal of a college in India, to reflect, symbolically, upon the relationship between the British and the Indians during the British rule.
Though Forster is appreciated for his depiction of India and the plight of Indians in A Passage to India, he was criticised for certain aspects of the novel. Some modern postcolonial studies have some reservations against the novel.
A Passage to India — the title was borrowed from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass — is by far Forster’s most successful novel and it has been translated into several languages, including Spanish and Chinese. It has been adapted for film and stage. Now it has been translated into Urdu.
Rendered into Urdu by Syed Saeed Naqvi and just published by Karachi’s City Book Point, the book is titled India Ka Aik Safar. Naqvi has referred to some of the criticism against the novel in his brief preface and says that “expansionism is a human weakness and instinctive behaviour, but it cannot be justified by calling it exploration, curiosity, search or adventurism. ... Expansionism has caused to produce a gigantic body of literature and A Passage to India is an important novel. Written against the backdrop of British Raj in India, it was received well as it depicted the Hindus, Muslims and British in an unbiased manner. Forster tried to not narrate the relationship between the British and the locals from any peculiar point of view. Forster did not shy away from portraying the moral decay of the British and their hypocrisy, adds Naqvi.
But Naqvi admits that from a postcolonial point of view, the novel was criticised and Edward Said wrote that the failed attempt at establishing a durable friendship between Aziz and Fielding is a metaphor signifying the difference between East and West. Sara Suleri, as put by Naqvi, has criticised A Passage to India and she thinks it is a secret attempt to write 19th-century colonial imperialism against the 20th-century backdrop.
A much talked about concept of colonial and postcolonial studies is cultural “hybridity” and it refers to a situation where the colonised try to copy the cultural ways, norms and values of the colonisers and the result is not simple: it is chaotic and sometimes tragically comic, something that has been narrated in Nazeer Ahmed Dehlvi’s novel Ibn-ul-Vaqt. The main character in the novel, aptly named ‘Ibn-ul-Vaqt’, or time-server, a local Indian Muslim, tries to ape his British officers and becomes a butt of jokes as natives think his ‘hybrid’ cultural ways are simply ridiculous. Even his British officers scoff at him. It is exactly the same idea that Akber Allahabadi was trying to get across with his satirical Urdu verses. This acculturation is to be found in A Passage to India, though it sparingly uses the vernacular signifiers embedded with English vocabulary, a trend that caught the fancy of latter-day Anglo-Indian writers.
Syed Saeed Naqvi has published short stories, a novel, a collection of poetry and several translations before the work mentioned here.
Published in Dawn, August 2nd , 2021
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