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.