Theoretical Framework
Colonialism
Colonialism is the practice of
settling communities as the governing class from one country to another.
The term originates from the ancient Greek word ‘colony’ that means ‘the
foundation of an independent city by emigrants.’ However, the meaning of
the word changes with the development of the Roman Empire. It denotes
‘the settlement of a community in a conquered territory as a
battalion.’11Peter Childs and Patrick Williams, An
Introduction to Postcolonial Theory(Essex: Longman, 1997), 227.
Further citation to this work given in the text. Edward Said views
colonialism as an offshoot of imperialism—‘the practice, the theory,
and the attitudes of a dominating metropolitan centre ruling a distant
territory’22Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Chatto
& Windus.1993), 8. It is also one of many imperialist practices
concerned with ‘the settlement of one group of people in a new
location.’33John McLeod, Beginning Postcolonialism(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), 7.
Further citation to this work
given in the text. Imperialism considers the distant locations asterra incognita or empty lands and thus legitimises military and
empirical control over those lands. As a result, colonialism manifests
three chief features—settlement in a new place as an authoritarian
group, economic control over resources and finally, the governing of the
native people.44Bill Ashcroft and Others, eds., The
Post-Colonial Studies Reader (London: Routledge, 2003), 46; Elleke
Boehmer, Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Migrant
Metaphors (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005), 2.
European colonialism started with the desire to discover unknown worlds
in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries when the renaissance
revolutionised the maritime sectors. The Europeans searched for the new
and exciting that eventually led them to trade and profit in Asia and
Africa in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. However,
Europeans could not limit their desire in gaining capital and enriching
their metropolitan centres. Instead, they rose to the local political
powers and exploited the people and societies economically and
culturally. They consolidated their rule through Orientalist and
scientific discourses of discriminatory race, colour, ethnicity and
gender concepts and premises.55Edward Said. Orientalism ,
(Delhi: Penguine Books India, 1978), 9-12. Robert Young calls this
conquest and rule of distant territories the colonial desire to
penetrate and impregnate the exotic other.66Young. Colonial
Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London: Routledge,
1995): 181-82.
Post-Colonial Nation
Nevertheless, European colonialism could not go without resistance. The
British, the most potent imperial and colonial agent, encountered
anti-colonial risings. The local people desired an independent homeland,
began the anti-colonial movement and resisted the colonials. Simon
During contends:
The post-colonial desire is the desire of decolonised communities for an
identity. It belongs to that programme of self-determination which
Adorno, unlike Jameson, could envisage. Obviously it is closely
connected to nationalism, for those communities are often, though not
always, nations.77During, “Postmodernism or Post‐Colonialism
Today,” Textual Practice 1, no. 1 (1987): 43.
https://doi.org/10.1080/09502368708582006.
The colonised communities inhabited continents and subcontinents as
tribes, clans and kinfolks. They formed was known as samaj ,
assembly and jati , Caste or subcaste and rajjo ,
Kingdom.88Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary , s.v. “Samaj,”
(accessed August 17, 2021)
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Samaj; andWordNet 3.0, Farlex Clipart Collection , s.v. ”jati.” (accessed
August 17, 2021) https://www.thefreedictionary.com/jati. Hence,
they were not nations. The nation was Europe’s invention and one of the
marvellous gifts to the world.99Pārtha Chatterjee. The
Nation and Its Fragments : Colonial and Postcolonial Histories .
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020), 4.
Further citation to this work
given in the text. In a lecture, ‘What is a nation?’ Ernest Renan
says:
Nations… are something fairly new in history. Antiquity was
unfamiliar with them; Egypt, China, and ancient Chaldea were in no way
nations. They were flocks led by a Son of the Sun or by a Son of Heaven.
Neither in Egypt nor in China were there citizens as such. Classical
antiquity had republics, municipal kingdoms, confederations of local
republics and empires, yet it can hardly be said to have had nations in
our understanding of the term.1010Bill Ashcroft and Others.Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts (London: Routledge,
2013),135.
Nation originated into the breakdown of the classical and medieval
empires. Then, it gained traction in European social and political
contexts and, later, their desire to expand imperial power in the
foreign location. Thus, the Europeans imported and implanted the notion
of a nation into their Empires. This notion as a badge of modernity
enabled the natives to know themselves newly and towards the
anti-colonial risings. They struggled for an autonomous land and
identity based on their specific languages, cultures, and values,
different from the identity imposed by the colonial power. According to
majority language, ethnicity, religion, and communal groups, they
fabricated and fought for new borders to map their lands that eventually
broke down vast territories into small states.
Hence, a nation is not just there, a natural entity. Instead, it is a
form of social construction that comes into being at a particular point
of history and takes a stronghold in a specific people’s desire and
will. A nation’s conceptual foundation is nationalism— ‘an intense
devotion to one’s nation.’1111Richard A. Sauers.Nationalism . (New York: Infobase Learning, 2010), 1. ProQuest
Ebook Central. (Accessed August 17, 2021). Since the colonisers
subjugate the colonised, the latter manifests a spirit of nationalism.
They describe their land chained under colonial power, gain mass support
and tragically defend and contest their map and border with blood and
sacrifice. 1212Childs and
Williams, An Introduction , 206.
A post-colonial nation comes into being in this process. It ‘unitesmany individuals into one people ’ and becomes ‘an imagined
political community.’1313Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities:
Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, (New York: Verso
Books, 2006): 6. In this community, the members will never
know most of their fellow members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet
in the minds of each lives the image of their communion. Individualsthink they are part of a greater collective, that they share a
deep, horizontal comradeship.1414Ibid,. p 6.
Thus, the basis of a nation is a mutual sense of identity, collectivity,
belongings, fraternity, and freedom. Moreover, people describe the land
as their own—motherland, native land, or homeland and themselves the
sons of the soil and the defender of their mother. Thus, they inspire a
sense of origin, rootedness, and home.1515Childs and Williams,An Introduction , 205. Consequently, today’s world is a
collection of different nations, separated by borders, and often offers
a territorial vision of roots and home.
Cultural Hegemony
However, the post-colonial nation can become dystopian, 1616Bill
Ashcroft, “Introduction: Spaces of Utopia,” Spaces of Utopia:
An Electronic Journal 2, no. 1 (2012): 1-17. and nationalism can
become ‘a dark, elemental and unpredictable force.’1717Chatterjee.
The Nation and Its Fragments, 4. Power-hunger, greed, group politics
and nationalist elitism can weaken the nation.1818Frantz Fanon,The Wretched of the Earth , trans, and ed. by Constance
Farrington (London: Penguin Books, 1969),152; Amilcar Cabral,
“National Liberation and Culture,” in An Introduction to
Postcolonial Theory. eds Peter Childs and Patrick Williams (Essex:
Longman, 1997), 58; Chatterjee. The Nation and Its Fragments. 35-7;
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Die
Philosophic 14, no. 27 (2003): 42-58.
https://doi.org/10.5840/philosophin200314275. Specifically,
cultural hegemony can play havoc on the national consciousness and
destabilise the nation. Hegemony or cultural hegemony is a buzzword in
post-colonial writing. Several researchers on Chinua Achebe, Wole
Soyinka and Toni Morrison use the concept to understand imperial
relationships and colonial subject positions.1919Hussain Ahmed
Linton. “Towards a Critique of Cultural Hegemony and Nationalist
Resistance: A Reading of Wole Soyinka’s The Lion and the
Jewel.” Language in India 12, no. 2 (2012); Jing Chen and
Ting-jun Guo. “Escaping the Prison of White Cultural
Hegemony——The post-colonial reading of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest
Eye [J].” Journal of Nanhua University 3 (2005); and
Mohammed Ilyas. “Traumatic Portrayal of Nativity and Post-Colonial
Cultural Hegemony in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart ,”
International Journal of English Language and Literature Studies,
Asian Economic and Social Society, vol. 9 no. 2 (2020), 76-85.
Antonio Gramsci uses hegemony first in his Prison Notebooks . The
word originates from the Greek hēgemonía , which means ‘leadership
or, rule.’ Oxford English Dictionary explains hegemony as
“leadership, predominance, preponderance; especially the leadership or
predominant authority of one state of a confederacy or union over
others.”2020Brian Schmidt. “Hegemony: A Conceptual and
Theoretical Analysis.” Berlin: Dialogue of Civilization
Research Institute , August 15, 2018,
https://doc-research.org/2018/08/hegemony-conceptual-theoretical-analysis/.
(accessed 21 August 2021). As defined by Gramsci, hegemony is a
process of intelligent and moral leadership where the subordinate class
in a state accepts the ruling class without any force or coercion:
The ‘spontaneous’ consent given by the great masses of the population to
the general direction imposed on social life by the dominant fundamental
group; this consent is ‘historically’ caused by the prestige (and
consequent confidence) which the dominant group enjoys because of its
position and function in the world of production. 2121Antonio
Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, Ed. and Trans.
Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. (New York: International
Publishers, 1971), 12.
The bourgeoisie, the dominant class of a Western European nation, owns
the means of production and employs wage-labourers. It can promote its
interest in society through education, cultural practices, and media.
These apparatus work upon everyday codes, norms, language, myths,
religion and present them as standard and good sense. They restructure
them as a set of daily lived systems and creates a particular worldview
that people find proper and
acceptable. Moreover, the
bourgeoise presents itself as the bearer of these values and their
interests as the common interest for the common good. Therefore, its
rule is legitimate.
Consequently, the proletariat, the ordinary people, become ideologically
mystified. They encounter the dominant ideas and practices in their
everyday life in various social institutions. They see that what the
rulers do is related to their history and culture. Their interests are
natural and practical. In this way, the hegemony presents
a whole body of practices and expectations, over the whole of our
living: our senses and assignments of energy, our shaping perceptions of
ourselves and our world. It is a lived system of meanings and
values—constitutive and constituting—which as they are experienced
as practices appear as reciprocally confirming.”2222Raymond
Williams, Marxism and Literature. (Oxford [Eng.]: Oxford
University Press, 1977), 110.
The proletariat, therefore, feels pressure to follow the ruling culture
and consciousness. They do not understand that ruling-class philosophy
is little suitable for them. The latter systematically uses the civil
society (volunteer and cultural units like schools, unions, and
families) to circulate some cultural elements rational and progressive
and influences thoughts, ideas and cultural practices of individuals and
organisations. Thus, certain cultural elements become dominating and
more influential than others. The imperial cultures tend to be superior,
and the conquered ones are shocking and backward. 2323Said,Orientalism , 15.
Hence, covert coercion coexists with consent in hegemony that generates
a conflicting consciousness in the proletariat. This consciousness
represents a form of duality that pushes forward and pulls back the
force of resistance and transformation. On the one hand, the people
understand that they are subordinate. They desire to change their
position and claim equality and equity. They want to be united, act
against unjust cultural practices and upset the system. However, they
find it challenging to formulate causes of resistance against hegemonic
domination. They find the dominant cultures play upon their common sense
and familiar cultures. Again, they feel bound to the past and history
where they had a cooperative interaction with the ruling class. As a
result, the mass becomes mute and passive.2424TJ Jackson Lears,
“The Concept of Cultural Hegemony: Problems and Possibilities,”The American Historical Review (1985): 567-93.https://doi.org/10.2307/1860957.
Gramsci ascribes this paucity of voice partly to language. Language is a
powerful tool for domination. The ruling class makes discourses and
rhetorics to uphold their worldview and justify their rule. The
subordinate group is oriented to these linguistic tools through
economic, education and cultural institutions. So, they discover
themselves speaking in the bourgeoise language and limited within
boundaries of permitted discourses. They do not find an alternative to
these political vocabs, nor can they identify the source of their
unease. Hence the subordinate rarely can transcend the existing
discursive practice. Their consent mixes approval and apathy,
resistance, and submission.2525Ibid,. 569-70.