Hetty Sorrel: A Perfect Representative of Loamshire in Adam Bede

Nature-Background: Hetty Sorrel is a typical specimen of the Loamshire world. According to George Creeger, “Hetty is a perfect representative of the Loamshire-Hayslope world. Moreover, the background landscape keeps changes in keeping with changes in her fortune and career. In the novel George Eliot’s presentation of nature-background is strictly utilitarian, as in that of Hardy in Tess of the D’Urbervilles.” 

Hetty has the fertility of the Loamshire world and also its beauty but conceals an essential hardness. To think of Hetty as she first appears in the book is to think her a being in certain places, themselves microcosm of Loamshire, the Hall Farm dairy, its garden and the Grove of Arthur’s estate. Each of these places has an individual aura, but all are suggestive of fertility and growth. Furthermore, these places are appropriate to a particular phase of Hetty’s relations with Arthur. Their first meeting occurs in the Hall Farm. GEORGE ELIOT emphasizes its cleanliness and purity, but it remains subtly sexualized because of its nature and associated imagery. More explicitly sexual is the meeting which takes place in the Grove of Arthur’s estate. Henry James regards Hetty Sorrel as the least ambitious and, on the whole, the most successful of GEORGE ELIOT’s female figures. He is of the view that Hetty’s misfortune makes her the central figure of the book. The part of the story which is concerned with Hetty appears to him to be the most forcible. He concludes, “About Hetty Sorrel I have no hesitation whatever. I accept her with all my heart.”

Beauty & Harness of the Youth: A second link between Hetty and the Loamshire world is that of her beauty. It was GEORGE ELIOT writes, “a spring tide beauty, the beauty of young frisky things.” Such beauty, at once suggestive of fertility and is difficult to comprehend it effect. George Creeger says, “It is a false beauty because it conceals a core of harness, as does the beauty of Loamshire itself. The people of Stonyshire observe her apparent beauty and those of Loamshire know her hidden hardness as Mrs. Poyser says, “Hetty’s heart is as hard as a pebble.’ She is a heartless beauty or rather a beast personified as beauty. Hetty’s hardness is childish or at best adolescent egocentricity. All people and events have value or significance only as they affect the narrow circle of her own life otherwise they are not important. At the news of Mr. Bede’s death, Hetty is concerned only as long as she thinks it is Adam who is meant; when she discovers her error, she lapses into indifference. She cares little about the Hall Farm, her family, aunt and uncle. So there is a persistent strain of narcissism in her. One thinks of her inordinate love of fine clothes and adornment. In such scenes she looks as if she were a worshipper. Before a mirror she turns up her own sleeves and kisses her arms with the passionate love of life. Even her love of Arthur is tinged with the same quality; in him she finds the objectification of her day-dreaming desires. What she loves in him is not so much Arthur as her own self.”  

Failure to Grow and Mature: Loamshire-Hayslope is a sheltered world, an earthly paradise. It is rich, fertile and beautiful world where nature is generous and abundant in this beautiful and fertile world, the poor Hetty has lived a sheltered life, entirely free from cares and worries which are the common lot of humanity. The result is that she has grown up without maturity. Growing up needs struggle; it is a process of facing difficulties and hardships. Childish creatures like Hetty in the Loamshire world are not called upon to face any such challenges; hence they remain immature and childlike. She has fantasies and day-dreaming in which she lives. She has developed a subjective world which entirely prevents her from looking at the objective world with total impartiality. She has always wished finery, clothes and jewelry. She dreams of a majestic life like Mrs. Irwine’s and finds herself being taken in a splendid carriage. In the chapter entitled, Hetty’s world, the novelist gives us detailed emotional fantasies. She couldn’t marry Adam because he didn’t come up the standard of her conception of a lover. It was only Arthur whom she adored. Hetty’s dreams were all full of luxuries. The admiring glances from Arthur’s eyes intoxicated he and she moved about and worked, lost in the world of her dreams. “A new influence had come over Hetty – vague, atmospheric and full of prospects.” Hetty was quite uneducated - a simple farmer’s girl, to whom a gentleman with a white hand was dazzling as an Olympus god. The Admiration of Arthur is like a strong wine that goes to her head and transports her to a world of fantasy. It is an enchanted world in which Hetty lives and moves. Arthur and Hetty are both willful children living a sheltered life in Loamshire which may be called an earthily paradise.  They are babes who fall an easy prey to the temptations of the devil. They are not mature enough to see the consequences of their actions. They realize only after the fall when it is too late. Much of the tragic catastrophe of both Hetty and Arthur springs from the fact that they are willful children performing adult actions in an age which is not golden. When the fantasy breaks and the dream is shattered on reading Arthur’s letter, she is dazed and bewildered and heart-rending tragedy is the result. George Creeger points out that “Hetty is as much a victim of Loamshire as its representative.” 

Conclusion: She has spiritual deadness and hardness so Dinah tries to prepare her for the possibility of pain in life in the early part of the novel, but Hetty remains deaf to all these things because she is self-centered. The effect of Hetty’s ordeal is to externalize the hardness which is concealed in her heart, although she changes towards the end of the story. No one in the Loamshire is ready to accept the actions of Hetty not forgive her or in any way help her, but Dinah Morris is able to restore Hetty to humanity - to a better humanity, at least, than that with which she had been endowed by her own world. 

“Rebel” by D.J. Enright

Character-Sketch 

The title of the poem looks very startling; but when we read the poem, we find no fights, revolution or conflicts; typically expected of the presence of a rebel. Here the word ‘rebel’ does not refer to a political activist or non-conformist; but a person who is socially a misfit. He has no political aims; but has only personal urge to expose himself before others. "The Rebel" is a lightly expressed poem written in a casual style free of any bitterness or criticism. The poet shows the character of rebel. One who does not conform to the norms of society and has a contradictory attitude based on self-assertion. This is not typically a political rebel who wants a revolution in the country; but this is a common adolescent boy who, for his inexperience, exhibits himself so as to draw attention. The concept of rebel is wrapped up in each and every line of the poem. Our expected is dazzled when we find such contradictory statements as ‘long hair’ and ‘short hair’, We do have such rebels in society. The title of the poem is not imaginary; but realistic.

William Davies’ “Leisure”: Main Theme

Williams Davies’ ‘Leisure’ unveils the richness of life as embodied in nature and wants us to avoid falseness of life as exemplified in our daily pursuits. The poem has an important theme that is to change our attitude to nature; from that of indifference to seriousness. The main theme is that we should abandon our material pursuits and establish a firm contact with nature to lead a rich and diverse life. The poem starts with a rhetorical question, i.e. the author is sure you will agree with him that it’s important to have free time. The idea of “stand and stare” is picked up all through the poem. He reminds us that even animals have time to look at things; then moves on to looking at animals and then to broader pictures like the wonders of the night sky and finally Beauty itself – personified as a dancing girl. So by the end of the poem we've realized that if we don’t forget our pursuits, we miss everything – all the beauty, joy and movement of life. Thus the writer has criticized modern man for his leisure-less material life devoid of natural beauty.

Literature and Globalization

Art, in all its forms, has always been a product of human mind processes, and the mind processes aren’t totally independent of the effects of the stimuli coming from the world out there. Human actions are affected by their milieu − social, political, economic and cultural − and affect the milieu in their turn. Thus, literature has a reciprocal relationship with the people and systems of its own time and before and after it. The degree and extent of the circles of influence in which the production, dissemination and reception of literature fall have been changing in types and radii with the changing times. Gone are the days when printed knowledge used to travel at snail’s pace and cover geographical distances in a world with frontiers and checks and restraints. Today, the dissemination of knowledge occurs at the speed of light through the World Wide Web in a world sans frontiers and nearly sans any kind of check or restraint on its movement or speed of dissemination. In a span of less than a hundred years, the world and kind of literature it produces have undergone a sea change. The central factor behind such a huge change is globalization. The technical innovations that belong to the age of globalization have changed the way human beings think and react. The intellectual horizon of an average individual − expanded post-globalization – has limits imposed only by the individual’s own thirst for knowledge.

Globalization can not be given an all inclusive definition because the process has been perceived in various ways by different people. Moreover, its positive and negative effects too have been weighed against each other to make pronouncements ranging from rapturous optimism to uninhibited ranting about an inevitable doom that is the logical conclusion to the story of globalization. Taking the golden mean may prove to be the most fruitful. Globalization can be seen as a process that expands the economic frontiers in such away that trade and commerce are conducted keeping the overall world market in mind, and not mere national or regional ones. What began at the level of economy, spread at a fast pace to socio-political and cultural spheres and globalization started to indicate something like merging of spatial boundaries and shrinking of time taken in reaching from one point to another. Thus, globalization may be seen as an ongoing process that made it possible for the peoples of the world to overcome many barriers and come together. When one looks at the phenomenon of globalization, one finds that there is a lot that remains hidden and whatever is visible is only the tip of the iceberg. Equality is one of the desired objectives of globalization but the two World Wars and the post cold war scenario have shorn the world of any kind of faith in humanity.

The post-postmodern world of the twenty-first century is characterized by the absence of any kind of faith. It doesn’t believe in the “invisible hand”. Neither does it trust the “innate goodness” of those in power to think for the welfare of others. Theories on globalization try to find out the dynamics that evolves out of the interactions between various nations and bodies that are definitely unequal in power and pursue diametrically opposite goals and conflicting interests at times. In many ways, globalization is a continuation of the scourges of colonialism and imperialism. It is seen as a means of exploitation of the poor and powerless by the rich and powerful, e.g. the apathy shown by corporate giants towards the extent of exploitation and living standards in the sub Saharan Africa is not very different in comparison to that shown by the imperialist and colonial powers till the mid-twentieth century. Globalization has also been seen as a menace that threatens cultures, languages, and ways of life of the peoples away from the centre of the power discourse. Income, information and education gaps between the rich and the poor are widening not narrowing; economic crises, trade imbalances and structural adjustments have precipitated a moral crisis in many countries, tearing the basic social and cultural fabric of many families and communities apart… (Chinnammai) They are being marginalized and finally their culture, languages and ways of life are eliminated effectively through substitution by their counterparts in the dominant force. Thus globalization is a “homogenizing force that threatens to wipe out local cultures” (Jay).

 The corporate giants that function at trans-national levels have become immensely powerful in the age of globalization, and they have exploited human and natural resources equally dangerously and irresponsibly, without any concern for sustainability. All the disadvantages of globalization notwithstanding, this fact can not be denied that the advantages of globalization are many. Irrespective of which one weighs more on the scale, globalization is a process that doesn’t seem to be stopping or stoppable in the near future. Gutenberg brought the first revolution in the world of written words by inventing the printing press. He made it possible for the words to be reproduced with accuracy and with a speed resembling that of lightening, as compared to the speed at which hand-written books were produced before the invention of the printing press. The printed books could be produced very fast and in much larger numbers. This change in the means of production played a very significant part in bringing about the Renaissance of learning. With the increase in the speed of the modes of transport, the rate of dissemination of printed words increased and it brought about a very significant change in production, dissemination and reception of works seen as literature. The man who wrote in the medieval ages had in his mind people of his city, region or nation as readers. The Renaissance and post Renaissance writer wrote for that part of the known civilized world that spoke the same set of languages. The modern writer wrote keeping that part of the world in mind with which he had socio-political, cultural or linguistic affinities. The writer in the age of globalization writes keeping the global village in mind. Thus he produces a world literature. Al-Azm points out that Goethe was the first person who gave the idea of a world literature or Weltliteratur, “transcending national limits, cultural boundaries and provincial traditions”, and globalization has produced something akin to Weltliteratur, at least partially, if not wholly or substantially. It is written for a market that comprises real and virtual players and networks and whose forces determine the shape the writing will take. Decisions are determined by the market that has to be catered to and by the kind of reception a work will get. As Paul Jay asserts, globalization ensures that the “contemporary production and consumption [of literature] no longer take place within discrete national borders but unfold in a complex system of transnational economic and cultural exchanges characterized by the global flow of cultural products and commodities”.

To begin at the beginning of the life cycle of the creative production, a writer conceives the idea of writing a piece of literary work with certain considerations in mind. Today’s professional writers are market driven – they have to be, as their survival depends on the circulation, reception and reach of what they write. They do not write in isolation from the society without thinking anything about the fate of their writing as did their counterparts not more than a hundred years ago. For them, market is the taskmaster and even their God. What happens to their writing career after their books hit the stands depends on who talks about them and what kinds of awards they get. As a result of rapidly accelerating globalization we are moving toward a world market for literature. There is a growing sense that for an author to be considered “great,” he or she must be an international rather than a national phenomenon … the arbiters of taste are no longer one’s own compatriots—they are less easily knowable, not a group the author himself is part of (Park). As an author is in the process of creating a work, most of the times even before he starts working on it, he has to look into the matters like the prospective publishers and promotional campaign that the publishers will run before the launch of the book. The book has to be talked about in the right circles by the people who matter and must get the media’s spotlight, and if possible, a Booker or a Nobel. The audience an author targets is neither homogeneous nor fully known or predictable. It is an international audience whose tastes the author has to cater to, and such a heterogeneous set of people is not pleased easily. In addition to buying the book from various bookstores, the buyers also have access to the sites viz. Amazon.com, from where they can very easily order and purchase the book. Moreover, an international market of the age of globalization also means that the work must avoid obscurity arising out of a need of background or cultural context linked knowledge. In particular one notes a tendency to remove obstacles to international comprehension …Kazuo Ishiguro has spoken of the importance of avoiding word play and allusion to make things easy for the translator… culture-specific clutter and linguistic virtuosity have become impediments… (Park)

Thus the reader has come to the centre of the process of production of literature. The consumers’ demand generates supply in the commodity world market. The same is true in case of literature too. Therefore, for an average international reader, “it has become easier to sidestep the slow and heavily institutionalized process of canonization” (Vriezen). Moreover it may also gives birth to an international literature: novels, poems, travelogues etc. Such a novel will be, as Rushdie put forth in his article entitled “In Defense of the Novel Yet Again,” published in the special issue of The New Yorker the kind of novel that globalization has given birth to is “postcolonial … decentered, transnational, interlingual, [and]cross-cultural” (qtd. in Al-Azm, 47) Such poetry will have, as Leevi Lehto’s Plurifying the Languages of the Trite puts it: independence vis-à-vis National Literatures, including institutionally [...]; mixing of languages; borrowing of structures – rhythmical, syntactical – from other languages; writing in one’s non-native languages; inventing new, ad hoc languages; conscious attempts to write for more heterogeneous, non-predetermined audiences… (qtd. in Vriezen). Existing in a veritable pot-pourri of socio-cultural influences and especially exposed to them as their work demands it, a writer is always absorbing new ideas bombarded from all types of media. Being dependent on the successful and artistic synthesis of ideas assimilated in the course of life, their work is thus firmly shaped by the kind of exposure they had. The global market for the types of books in demand follows a trend. Once a technique or kind of work grabs public attention and best-seller lists, an avalanche of books following the pattern appear in the market in no time. Thus starts a trend that has a life cycle and span of its own e.g. “magical realism, which began as a recognizable signature from Asian and Latin cultures, over time has come to seem almost normal as it’s been embraced by Western writers.” (Black)

Orhan Pamuk or Salman Rushdie are prime examples of the new breed of global writers whose origin owes to the openings availed to them by the forces of globalization. They are hailed all over the world as great writers but in their own country, amongst their own people, there are large sections that see them as mere panderers to the western tastes. There are many writers, e.g. Soyinka and Achebe from the continent of Africa, who react against the forced homogenization of literature that globalization has brought about. These writers go back to their roots and revive the traditional forms of the literature of their respective countries or tribes. This countercurrent in literature is a part of the larger post-colonial discourse.

English being the language of the colonialist forces from whom their countries had won freedom painfully, these writers passed through three stages: unquestioned acceptance and imitation, partial questioning and alteration and rejection and creation of new forms of literature that they had inherited from their colonial masters. They are not the sole representatives of their countrymen or culture. They only represent a set that has chosen one way. The other set with different choices has writers that are “de-rooted and have to cure this handicap through ‘a cultural imagery,’ trying to overcome their fear of not belonging anywhere and nowhere. The writer adopts a caricatured identity…as ‘World’s Citizen,’” (Boneza). The hegemony of English language and literature is directly linked with the forces of globalization and polarization of powers – both military and monetary. English literature is published and launched by big publishing houses like OUP or Harper-Collins that belong to USA or UK. The literature of other languages is translated into English and enrich it. The reverse process of appearance of English books into other languages and countries does not reach global levels or standards in general (Black). Thus a writer has to write in or get translated into English so that he may reach a global audience. The big publishing houses determine to a large extent the types of books that’ll see the light of the day and their decisions are determined by market diktats. Thus globalization suppresses variety and does not give a level field to small or relatively less known names. Still, as globalization is to stay, literature must find ways of surviving and even thriving. Literature can’t ignore the forces of the globalized world that act on it as they are too strong to be ignored. The best way would be constant vigilance and openness to new innovations and ideas that originate through the processes of globalization thus getting affected by them but also trying to modify their effect an to make its survival as a genuine art form possible.

Sea of Poppies: Postcolonial strands of the Commonwealth Literature

The term Commonwealth of Nations, under the titular headship of Queen Elizabeth II’s benevolent gaze, gives the impression of a unity that is deceptive. Although all these nations are theoretically united under one umbrella, there exists a chasm that separates them. There are two sets of nations: the white and the new (black/brown) commonwealth. The new commonwealth has had a recent past in which it had experienced domination and colonization under the British Empire, the largest imperial and colonizing power in the history of mankind, even as late as the 1980’s. Literature of a large number of these countries was denoted as that of the third world in the past due to their developing or underdeveloped status of their economies, and even “before the coinage of [the term] ‘postcolonial’, one was accustomed to speak of what the novels of Gabriel García Márquez and Chinua Achebe had in common over and against, say, those of Margaret Drabble and Alain Robbe-Grillet. The reference … was to the ‘third world’” literature (Larsen 24). The term postcolonial has nothing to do with the specific geographical location or the point of origin of a specific thought. It is related more to the nature and orientation of a thought or an idea. It is a paradigm shift, comparable to the post quantum theory shift in the paradigm of the hitherto Newtonian Physics. From a west centric approach to world history, the spread of democracy resulted into a more diffused and decentralized approach to history. Thus dominant discourses were challenged effectively and even replaced by strategically developed mini or local narratives in the countries that had been exploited in the past. The literature taking birth in these various nations is very diverse in nature, yet it has something that becomes visible occasionally, and runs as a subterranean stream at other times. That thing is its response to its colonial past. It is this past that joins the peoples and experiences of these countries, and their literature too. Writers and artists of the commonwealth, willingly or unwillingly, have inherited their country along with their colonial past. Amitav Ghosh is one such writer. Although he had withdrawn The Glass Palace from the final list of Regional Commonwealth Writers’ Prize in 2001 , declaring:

As a grouping of nations collected from the remains of the British Empire, the Commonwealth serves as an umbrella forum in global politics. As a literary or cultural grouping however, it seems to me that ‘the Commonwealth’ can only be a misnomer so long as it excludes the many languages that sustain the cultural and literary lives of these countries (it is surely inconceivable, for example, that athletes would have to be fluent in English in order to qualify for the Commonwealth Games). (qtd. in Roy Chowdhury)

He does benefit from the legacy of India’s being a part of the Commonwealth. Ghosh’s assertion on the pride of language and nation arises out of his intellectual constitution that was built in a postcolonial India: a part of the Commonwealth. It gives him a dual advantage of a local-postcolonial and, at the same time, a global perspective. He is a commonwealth writer whose fiction curiously, strongly and predictably enough, abounds in postcolonial themes “of cultural translation, of braided temporality, of marginality itself” (Boehmer and Chaudhuri 3). His Ibis trilogy promises to be his most thoroughgoing take on postcolonialism; a backward glance at the infamous opium trade cycle that finally lead to the Anglo-china Opium War and China’s subjugation to the omnipotent “free trade”. Sea of Poppies, the first part of the trilogy starts a cycle of stories that is continued in the next book: River of Smoke. History seeps into the stories of the characters in so many ways that they become histories of colonial exploitation. This paper focuses on Sea of Poppies to highlight the common themes of commonwealth writing that are conspicuously present in it.

Quest for identity is one of the central themes of the commonwealth literature. The reason behind it lies at the core of the existence of the peoples who had been under the yoke of the empire for over two centuries. Sea of Poppies has several characters on their personal quests for identity. Baboo Nabo Kissin happens to be one such person. He had been expectantly waiting for the transformation of his mundane self into his deceased, revered and ethereal aunt. It is against all logic, but he has faith. Signs are sent to confirm his faith. He happens to meet Lord Krishna himself, in his latest incarnation: Zachary Reid, or that’s what he fully believes in. It is his quest that gives his courage to overcome his fear of losing his Brahmin caste by actually crossing the black waters. Mr Zachary Reid was transformed into Malum Zikri, Deeti became Aditi, Kalua became Maddow Colver, Jodu turned into Azad Naskar, Paulette into Putleshwari or Pugly and Raja Neel Rattan Haldar into just Neel. They forged or found a new identity for themselves, and the colonial setup acted as a catalyst for their transformations.

The relationship between the colonized and the colonizers is shown in its various hues in Sea of Poppies. There’s always a tension in even the most cordial and beneficial kind of relationships, especially with the rise in the power that the colonizer had over the colonized. The closest relationship between a native and a white person exists between Jodu and Paulette. They are like siblings, yet their race separates them, despite Paulette’s nearly “going native”. Baboo Nobo Kissin and Mr. Burnham’s is another prominent and inseparable pairing in the novel. Yet, the Indian gomasta is never at ease in presence of his English master. He remembers how he was abused by his past and present masters with kicks and vituperations, and maintains his dignity even in such circumstances. Raja Neel Rattan Haldar was ruined because of Mr. Burnham’s heartlessness and treachery. These instances are parts of the set of unequal relationships between the colonizer and the colonized. When blown into right geographical proportions the same kind of problems existed at national and international levels too. The complicated and problematic relationship between the white man and his subjects makes the core of much that is categorized as commonwealth literature. Serang Ali and Zachary Reid are another couple separated by their race. The lascar is behind Zachary’s success in reaching his position, yet he can never be one of the Zikri’s people. There remains a distance between them, although he takes proprietarily pride in his protégé’s ascent. Serang ali’s influence on Zachary Reid is immense and deep. He is the sartorial and behavioural father who completely transformes his unadopted yet own son. He even gives him a new name: Malum Zikri, which means one who remembers. There’s a deep bond between a partially white (or, partially black) Reid and the yellow and brown natives of his lascar crew. It’s not just a coincidence that the only male member of the master race, who is sympathetic with the natives, even to the extent of becoming a part of their community, happens to be an American, and not a British subject. The very danger of his “‘going native’ … [that] encompass[es] lapses from European behaviour, the participation in ‘native’ ceremonies, or the adoption and even enjoyment of local customs in terms of dress, food, recreation and entertainment” that is most feared by the colonizers(Ashcroft 115). As Mr. Doughty tells Zachary, “Mind your Oordoo and Hindee doesn’t sound too good: don’t want the world to think you’ve gone native” (Ghosh 73). There is a curious inversion of this fear in the native’s mind too. It is best exemplified in the pressure built upon the Europeans regarding the behaviour and dress code they were expected to observe without any margin for deviation. It is this very pressure that forces Paulette to wear her saree clandestinely, only at night when she was away from the censuring eyes of the native servants of Burnham’s, because they expected her to dress and behave following the unwritten and undeclared code of expectation from the master race. It is once more confirmed when she has to speak the variant of English acceptable to Babu Nobo Kissin, Mr. Burnham’s gomasta, and not Bengali that she knew well and that was the Indian’s mother tongue too. The purity of language and culture were very important pieces in the jigsaw puzzle of the Empire in which the work of resin, that bonded all the pieces together, was performed by the racial pride, even chauvinism that resided in the hearts of the master races.

When a particular position becomes precarious and untenable reason is utilized to buttress it. Repeated falsification of truth and invention of facts becomes essential when an unnatural imposition has to be shown as the natural order of the things. History is white washed, revised, reread and re-presented in various ways to support otherwise unsupportable claims and to hold hitherto untenable positions. An element of narration had always been present in history because of one simple reason: even a simple collation of facts has to be made on the basis of some conscious decisions and has to pass through the human medium that invariably alters the content. In Sea of Poppies racialization and rationalization of history are shown at work through dialogues and narrative accounts. Neel’s accidental stumbling upon a theme that would keep Mr. Burnham’s mind fully and enthusiastically occupied – “Free Trade” – also serves to expose things unsaid. He gives a white man a chance to show his superiority – personal and racial – over a brown zamindar. He is happy to announce “When the doors of freedom were close to the African, the Lord opened them to tribe that was yet more needful of it – the Asiatick” (Ghosh 118). The black/brown/yellow races were the subject races to be marginalized and silenced effectively and to be effectively written out of the power discourse. After the slave trade was made illegal, merchants like Mr. Burnham quickly shifted to other lucrative areas. Only one similarity remained between their old and new trades – profit generated out of shameless and inhuman exploitation of the colonies. The Africans were sold as slaves for profit and then the Indians were transported as indentured immigrants to generate capital to be used for supplying opium and finally subjugate the Chinese. Physical, physiological, mental, socio-political and economic subjugation of the native populations was the sole aim of the strongest class in the whole Empire: the merchant class. They had made it appear very natural that the Chinese consumed opium, so much so, that Neel was astonished to hear that the kind of history he knew was totally untrue. Here, the narrator’s subtle intervention must be acknowledged. In his own attempt at revisiting history, he tries to expose the wrongs of the past in his novel. Reason is shown working devilish schemes very transparently in Sea of Poppies.

The pseudoscientific racial theory of the colonizers had been carefully propounded and propagated in order to make the subjection and subjugation appear natural and according to the “binary typology of advanced and backward(subject) races” (Said 206). The legitimation of exploitation was facilitated “by anthropological theories which increasingly portrayed the peoples of the colonized world as inferior, childlike, or feminine, incapable of looking after themselves… and requiring the paternal rule of the west for their own interests(today they are deemed to require ‘development’)” (Young 2). The white man had to shoulder his sacred burden. It was a sacrifice that he had to make. He had to colonize, control, exploit, tyrannize and even kill the black/brown/yellow peoples of the world, in order to civilize them. The white man’s arrogance is reflected unconsciously in the smallest of things. During Neel’s trial, the judge declared that India had been “opened to the benefits of civilization… [the Englishmen were] chosen to burden with the welfare of such races as were still in the infancy of civilization”(Ghosh 349). By the time Neel’s trial ended, it was very clear to him “that in this system of justice it was the English themselves – Mr Burnham and his ilk – who were exempt from the law as it applied to others: it was they who had become the world’s new Brahmins”(Ghosh 353).

The clear cut bipolar division of the world into advanced/backward races went a long way towards convincing the ruler and the ruled races alike. Sea of Poppies treats the theme of postcoloniality with frankness and indicts the ills of the colonial era without mincing any words. There are characters who speak as the writer had been speaking to the media about the factors behind the genesis of his novel. Amitav Ghosh mentioned in his interview with a BBC correspondent, “Opium financed British rule in India”, that he had started Sea of Poppies as the story of indentured immigrants from Bihar. With the growth of the volume of the story history entered it. The indentured immigration from India, that had started in the 1830’s, is shown curiously merging with the Anglo-China opium war and the consolidation of the Raj’s position in Asia. Opium became the medium of strengthening and expanding the Empire, as it was behind the generation of huge revenues that went into the Empire building. In the beginning of their interactions with china, the west was totally at a loss because the Chinese wanted none of their products, whereas, they neede a lot from there. Thus originated a kind of trade that was in favour of the Chinese. It was totally according to the diktats of Free Trade, yet it was unprofitable. So it had to change. Opium became the medium of change when it was insidiously inserted into the Chinese market, legally, and later, against the law of the land. The “trafficking in opium tilted the balance of global trade to benefit the west”(Brook 3). The edicts of the Chinese emperor against opium were proven to be powerless because of the “deadly combination of expanding Chinese demand and skyrocketing British supply. … Lin Zexu was appointed imperial maritime commissioner in 1838 to stop the opium trade” (Brook 6). His tough measures culminated into the opium war (1839-42), that ended with a shameful defeat for the Chinese. It was this defeat, some historians claim, that opened China to the western influence and resulted into its modernization. Just like some claim that India benefited largely through its colonization by the British because they gave it the foundation of modern nationalism and all the basic institutions required to run a state effectively. As if India was a wilderness, sans any system, before 1757 and it would never have modernized itself had it not been shamefully and deleteriously exploited by its colonizers. The other side of the same coin of exploitation was the havoc wreaked on the Indian farmers. This devastation of the economy of two prosperous Asian nations was whitewashed by the white people and even some native historians is shocking.

The gap between the resources of the colonized and the colonizer is not just of economic power and dependence. It spreads into the superstructure and creates two separate spheres of existence. Those who have power “do what their power permits them to do [and] … pretend that it is for some higher cause” (Ghosh 388-89). Maintaining the status quo is in favour of the powerful. They tolerate the socio-political structure of the colonized nations because it benefits them. They actively uphold the native’s rights when it benefits them and at the very next moment show their real selfish motive that lies hidden behind the façade of a civilized system of governance. As Captain Chillingworth clearly points out:

“that in matters of marriage and procreation, like must be with like, and each must keep to their own. The day the natives lose faith in us, as the guarantors of the order of castes – that will be the day, gentlemen, that will doom our rule. This is the inviolable principle on which our authority is based.” (Ghosh 718)

There is no escape for the powerless. Living on the margins is very dangerous. The English sahibs created and controlled the whole power structure. The subaltern didn’t have any voice, right or human status. Thrown on the periphery, he was forced to observe thecentre of power and its functioning from a distance. The peasants of India, who were forced to grow poppy, instead of food grains or vegetables, were exploited to such and extent that they barely survived and started floating toward marginality and landlessness.

Another theme of the literature of the commonwealth: race engendered sense of inherent superiority (in the master race) and inferiority (in the subject races), is brought forth very clearly and forcefully in Sea of Poppies. Moreover, Ghosh seems to be creating that much wanted space, so that the subaltern can really speak. In a postcolonial twist to the stereotypical perspectives, this Sea of Poppies gives precedence to the perspective of the colonized over that of the colonizer. It’s not because of any bias in the narrative voice but because of the predominance of subject voices that are heard in the polyphony of positions centred on characters portrayed in the form of individual subject consciousnesses. History is revisited and judgement is passed over the power misused to exploit the imperial subjects in the.

Sea of Poppies very clearly and poignantly brings forth one of the main and recurring motifs of the commonwealth fiction: the mechanism of exploitation, in its full detail. It shows how the farmer was exploited and how the agricultural timetable of a nation and the sustainable lifestyle of its people were altered with devastating effects on the economy. Deeti remembers the good old days when the fields “would be heavy with wheat in the winter… now, with the sahibs forcing everyone to grow poppy, no one had thatch to spare… poppy had been luxury then, grown in small clusters between the fields that bore the main winter crop”(Ghosh 42). The vicious cycle of debt that the farmers of the opium belt entered, made any idea of escape impossible. The grain crops and vegetables were not grown. There was only a Sea of Poppies in all the fields. To feed their families they took more debt and thus they became more confirmed in their state. Opium broke the very fabric of the society, as was the case when Deeti and Kalua came across the impoverished transients in Chhapra, “driven from their villages by the flood of flowers that had washed over the countryside” (Ghosh 298). Hunger pressed them so much that they were ready to forget all bindings of caste, religion and concern for life and it safety. They only had one thing in their minds: survival. That’s why they signed agreements to work on the farms in some unknown lands, even hazarding to cross “black waters”. If money was the main motive behind the exploitation of the Indian farmer. The same was true in the case of the Chinaman too. He was drowned in the river of smoke, while the white suppliers of opium glibly produced altruistic justifications all the time: “Indeed, humanity demands it. We need only think of the poor Indian peasant – what will become of him if his opium can’t be sold in in China? Bloody hurremzads can hardly eat now: they’ll perish by the crore” (Ghosh 385). The very idealistic Mr. Burnham, the devotee of Free Trade, surprisingly happens to be a very forceful supporter of the English merchant’s right to supply opium to china, even if the Chinese are against it. He sees the Chinese emperor’s edict against opium as halting the “march of human freedom” and, ironically, explains it to a racially mixed Zachary that freedom meant “mastery of the white man” (Ghosh 117). He very happily and confidently expresses his joy at America’s being the last bastion of liberty: because slavery is legal there!

Sea of Poppies is a tale of the effects of racialization and rationalization of history on the subject races: colonized, tormented and exploited. It presents the central concerns of commonwealth (postcolonial) literature very clearly. One of the clearly fore grounded themes is the mechanism of how the pseudoscientific theories of race, with its binary division of backward/advanced race, is translated logically into master/subjest races and then, naturalized and internalized by the ruling and the ruled alike. The novel also presents through its narration and actions and words of prominent characters, how economics drove history of the colonies that were later designated as the Commonwealth. Moreover it also shows how the lust of money and power drives ethics and reason too. Money blinded the exploiters so much that they forgot the tenets of Christianity and liberal humanism. The mechanism of exploitation is presented in its full ghastly detail, sometimes very vividly and graphically. With all these strands of the concerns of eternal nature are woven the strands that belong to a puny individual characters personal quest and destiny. The public and the personal-private elements are artfully annealed to convert them into something rich and strange.

Revisiting Macaulay’s Minute in a Postcolonial World

Decolonizing English language teaching in South Asia, especially in the Indian subcontinent, is an issue that has become of central importance in the academic scenario of the erstwhile colonies of what was the British Empire once. ELT is a part of the overall education policy and the policy has developed in a continuous process traceable to the colonial era. There are two extreme stances in the spectrum of responses to colonialism through ages. Between them lies a whole array of intermediate positions. The extreme stances are of welcoming or expecting “recolonization” while condemning all that is native, and the other extreme is of opposing and condemning indiscriminately all that colonization stood for or brought. If we focus on the responses in India only, on one hand there are those who are all praise for the Raj era and wax eloquent about how it civilized a nation that got even the concept of nationhood from its colonial masters. They rightly point out how the administrative structure and the basic civic systems of the subcontinent were laid down by the British. They also point out how the enlightened modern way of thinking and education was the gift of the colonial masters. They glorify the Raj and are anglophiles to the hilt. On the other hand there lies a set of persons who blame the Raj unreservedly. They equate evil with the colonizers and ascribe all that is good to those who oppose them. The hypothetically ascribed intentions of the colonizers negate all they had done in and for the colonies, even when the effect was totally positive. It is this extreme band whose favourite document that exposes the colonial policy is Thomas Babington Macaulay’s Minute of the Educational Policy (the Minute), 2 February 1835, that Lord William Bentick had later assented to and that was the cornerstone of the long term development of the education system of the Indian subcontinent:

The Minute had the support of the powerful government lobby and was a classic example of using language as a vehicle for destabilizing a subjugate culture with the aim of creating a subculture. As Macaulay says, this subculture in India would consist of: a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern, a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinion, in morals and in intellect. (Sharp qtd. in Kachru 37)

They find its sentences and parts, never the whole body of thought contained within or its main intent, very strongly supporting their side. They quote repeatedly and out of proper context only those limited parts, drawing reductionist, essentializing and simplistic conclusions from them. They choose specially the following parts: “a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature ofIndiaand Arabia.” and, We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern, –a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect.

It has been done in a Goebbelsian manner: so many times that for people, in general, the moment the Minute is mentioned these lines, especially their intention flash to the mind’s eyes. The present paper is not at all an apologia, either for Macaulay’s intention or the wisdom underlying his Minute; more so, because the Minute had not a single idea that was “invented”. Macaulay was just presenting the then prevalent line of thought that had matured through the long struggle between the two major and contending views the colonizers held of the colonized of the East: the Orientalist versus Anglicist controversy. It was the overall discourse, i.e. “large body of texts with a similar intent and set of protocols”, of contrapuntal positions (Paranjape). It had generated all the ideas and the heat, one part of which is strongly present in the Minute. Neither extreme of views was race exclusive, as they had both white and brown proponents, depending on the part of grand narrative they were interpellated with. Yet, they did constitute parts of a structure and could only function while belonging to it. The Minute only present a set of ideas, not essentially and exclusively related to either the content or the medium of education. Moreover, to make the point clear, it must be mentioned that Raja Ram Mohan Roy was a great supporter of the medium of instruction being English, instead of the then prevalent languages of the schools: Sanskrit and Arabic. His reason to support an alien language was that he believed it would create opportunities of opening the mind of the students to the western ideas, ideals of modernity and modern science.  His letter to Lord Amherst that he had written in the year 1823, presents his point persuasively. The nineteenth century Indian Renaissance was largely the outcome of the exposure of the Indian intelligentsia to the Enlightenment ideas, albeit a bit belated in comparison to the other colonies viz. the USA. Roywas totally against the blind adherence to the word of the “shastras” that the religion of his time strongly prescribed. He favoured an education system that benefited from rational thinking and modern advances in science, medicine, technology etc. He knew that to break the clutches of a superstitious and enfeebling set of practices that was called religion in his time, he would also have to destroy the whole system that sustained it, and Sanskrit or Arabic based education system was at its root. So he prepared to do away with the very root. He opposed the opening of educational institutions that forwarded the teaching of classical and conservative Hindu or Muslim languages and education with the funds provided by the Government. These educational institutions, subsidized as they were, only fattened the evil ignorance of the masses. It is in this formative phase of Indian education system that Roy and Macaulay strove to better the lot of the masses. Macaulay’s Minute has thoughts that run exactly parallel to Roy’s letter and to study the Minute in this context will provide valuable insight into the working of modern minds. Roy, Macaulay and many others made their stand against the then very strong orientalist lobby and reasoned to prove the assumptions and methods of their opponents wrong. In the long run they emerged victorious. Their side won and their victory decided the direction in which the education system of the Indian subcontinent would finally develop. In a way, it also decided bilingual system of education with English as a Second Language eventually.

It is very important to focus on the Minute in detail because it is from this point of origin that whole subsequent system is alleged to have come, especially by those who criticize it. Roy wanted a system of education that gave a rational outlook and took one away from the superstitions that were fed to the masses by the then prevalent systems, viz. the madarasas and pathshalas that gave only a very conservative kind of education in Sanskrit or Arabic. Macaulay opposed the same system of education in India, just like his enlightened Indian predecessors, and very much like his enlightened Indian successors. He asserts: “a Government pledging itself to teach certain languages and certain sciences, though those languages may become useless, though those sciences may be exploded, seems to me quite unmeaning”. His prophetic words were eventually proven right and his intention was adopted by patriotic Indians in the century that followed. English is the language of higher education, science and technology, medicine etc. in the Indian sub-continent, and not Hindi, Urdu, Sanskrit or Arabic. Hypothetical projections of a past that could have led to an alternate present have been made by the extremists, but they disregard the simple fact that analysis of hypothetical situations doesn’t yield concrete results. Today’s reality is, that the books and journals in the field of higher education and research are mostly in English and not in the vernacular or classical languages, just as Macaulay had written “that the intellectual improvement of those classes of the people who have the means of pursuing higher studies can at present be affected only by means of some language not vernacular amongst them.” the decision taken by the history was regarding the question Macaulay had asked: “What then shall that language be? … which language is the best worth knowing?” Although the first question has been answered decidedly, the question of value of the language is too subjective to be answered with finality. His infamous assertion regarding the second questions must be mentioned to in relation to the debate. He was asserting the intrinsic superiority of the literature etc. of his nation and asserting what was the most prevalent view of his times. He was wrong, as the hindsight decrees; yet, he wasn’t exaggerating or being unnaturally mean. Yet, whatever he writes about the historiography of Sanskrit texts, although a bit exaggerating, has been proven to be accurate by the modern historians:

But when we pass from works of imagination to works in which facts are recorded and general principles investigated, the superiority of the Europeans becomes absolutely immeasurable. It is, I believe, no exaggeration to say that all the historical information which has been collected from all the books written in the Sanskrit language is less valuable than what may be found in the most paltry abridgments used at preparatory schools in England. (Macaulay)

The problem he presented was of educating a people who could not be educated in their mother tongues. His confident assertions may be proven fallacious, illogical, even ridiculous today, but his prediction turned out to be true. English is the coveted and the most popular medium of education in urban India, that is a part of the global village called the world. The hegemony of English language and literature is directly linked with the forces of globalization and polarization of powers – both military and monetary. As far as India is concerned, English happens to be the passport for securing gainful employment in the private sector. Thus, it acts as it did nearly two centuries ago, as is mentioned in that much detested and debated about document. Macaulay had very confidently and rightly asserted:

InIndia, English is the language spoken by the ruling class. It is spoken by the higher class of natives at the seats of Government. It is likely to become the language of commerce throughout the seas of the East. It is the language of two great European communities which are rising, the one in the south of Africa, the other in Australia, – communities which are every year becoming more important and more closely connected with our Indian empire. Whether we look at the intrinsic value of our literature, or at the particular situation of this country, we shall see the strongest reason to think that, of all foreign tongues, the English tongue is that which would be the most useful to our native subjects.

He was right. Even the most recent developments in history bear witness to this fact. English gave Indians advantage over the Chinese in winning considerable employment opportunities in the recent times in BPO and KPO sectors. So much so, that Obama himself had to exhort his countrymen to compete well with the English speaking Indian population. The large pool of Indians who know English is the main reason behind a lot of economic development, especially in the service sector.

One very relevant issue touched in the Minute is relevant even today. The issue was: whether the vernaculars should be promoted, instead of English, especially when good basic textbooks at the level of even secondary education, are not easily available. In the past it had been decided in favour of English. As Roy and many of his enlightened contemporaries had demanded, Maaculay too, supported teaching of European science, instead of a jumble of unsystematic and entirely confused science in the classical languages and vernaculars. The assertion he made is hotly debated even today. Makrand Paranjape, in his “Decolonizing English Studies: Attaining Swaraj”, very interestingly presents the case of the native science and medicine by giving one of the most popularly given example of the small rural furnaces in India that produced, and even now do so, high quality steel. Then he mentions people in the eighteenth century Bengal providing inoculation from small pox moving from one place to another, and Pune barbers performing intricate nose surgeries. He recommends more such recoveries in order to mend the rupture in the mind of the colonized from his past. Yet, he conveniently forgets to mention the fact that after the spread of the Industrial Revolution all over Europe and then, the world, cottage and small scale manufacturing of steel could not keep up with market demand, and had to give way to large scale steel production in huge factories. He does not affirm that the majority of the people in the erstwhile colonies, once they are aware of the modern medical science’s advancements even if they had never had any formal education, would trust doctors trained in western medicinal science and surgery for severe cases. What “is” cannot be challenged because it could have been something else. Iconoclasm, just for its own sake, is not a very advisable practice. Decolonization as a rationalizing and liberating practice, in line of the hitherto incomplete Enlightenment project, is very much a part of the grand narrative of progress that the West (from where nearly all the colonizers came) supports. Just because it is supported by the West, it doesn’t become automatically wrong and opposable. Macaulay compared the opening up of India to English language, culture, stream of philosophy and literature, to the opening up of Europe to Greek and Latin cultures, languages and knowledge during the Renaissance. He very strongly presents his case with help of Russia’s development as an example. The Russian young man was civilized and led to development “by teaching him those foreign languages in which the greatest mass of information had been laid up, and thus putting all that information within his reach. The languages of western Europe civilised Russia. I cannot doubt that they will do for the Hindu what they have done for the Tartar”. The assumption underlying this assertion is that industrial and scientific progress and civilization are good and must be striven for. If the assumption is questioned, then Macaulay appears to be wrong, nay, evil in his intention: aiming to give progress and civilization, as he knows them, to the colonies.

The question of civilization has been raised and answered variously in various times and climes. To bring the issue closer home, Mahatma Gandhi’s views can be relevantly cited. What were civilization and its gifts to Macaulay was poison and corruption to the Mahatma. In his Hind Swaraj he writes about the “disease” called the western civilization. He used the famous dream argument of Descartes, who, ironically, is the central pillar of that very civilization’s central strand of philosophy, traditions of rationalism and free thinking. Gandhiji asserts that people couldn’t criticize the Western civilization unless they were freed of its influence. He went on to criticize that “bodily welfare” was being made the “object of life” (29). Strangely enough, he even seems to dislike the spread of the power to be printed, read and understood, democratically and without any limitations or impositions, because “Formerly, only a few men wrote valuable books. Now, anybody writes and prints anything he likes and poisons people’s minds” (29). All that science and technology have achieved in their so called “march of progress” meant nothing to him in comparison to what it had spoiled. He cites the development of war machines and the exploitation of the masses by a few super-rich people. He is in favour of religion and asserts that the Western civilization has lost it. Finally he solemnly pronounced: “According to the teaching of Mahommed this would be considered a Satanic Civilization. Hinduism calls it the Black Age” (30). As this extreme view of civilization is generally not held by most of the people in the world, they do enjoy the fruits of this very “Satanic Civilization” and try to improve upon it instead of denouncing it and discarding it in favour of a hypothetical (Eutopian) Ram Rajya. Macaulay belonged to the pragmatic set and took progressivism to be good. He recommended the same for the colonized.

The strongest reason that Macaulay put forth to oppose the subsidized education of traditional type in Sanskrit and Arabic and to support modern Western Education in English medium, was the simple matter of the market demand creating its supply. The classical and vernacular medium and the traditional type of education in Indiaforced on the native populations “the mock learning which they nauseate”. To prove it he presented the fact that the Arabic and Sanskrit medium students needed to be paid for studying while people pay to get education in the English medium schools. He demanded that “the people shall be left to make their own choice between the rival systems of education without being bribed by us to learn what they have no desire to know”. The same is true for today’s India too, where the madarsas and Sanskrit pathshalas are criticized for their supreme unconcern for what is required of their students in real life, and their total neglect of the demands of the existence in modern society. More and more people are sending their children to the English medium schools and there is a proportionate decline in the number and popularity of schools that teach in classical languages based or vernacular mediums only. Even poor people send their children to English medium schools in hope that learning English would definitely enhance their employability and will finally help in moving up from the social stratum they belong to. The same motivation was working exactly in the same manner in Macaulay’s time too. The language of power was creating market and learners at a very fast pace; just as it had done in past after the Muslim invasion and expansion in India. Macaulay very incisively opines: “Nothing is more certain than that it never can in any part of the world be necessary to pay men for doing what they think pleasant or profitable”. He had ample support favouring English against the classical languages of learning. He quotes facts and statistics to support his point and illustrates it with an example of the petition that the students of the Sanskrit College had presented to the committee that had say in policy making. They needed an employment that allowed bare existence because what they head learnt devoting the best years of their lives was not the market’s demand, so they were no gainfully employable. “They have wasted the best years of life in learning what procures for them neither bread nor respect”. He called “the state of the market…the detective test” of the desirability or demand of his times. It also happens to be the demand of our times. He very strongly and clearly puts forth: “What we spend on the Arabic and Sanskrit Colleges is not merely a dead loss to the cause of truth. It is bounty-money paid to raise up champions of error”. His is the voice of reason and is echoed even today in many modern, liberal, even religious Hindus and Muslims. He was totally against the fostering of superstition and also against the languages that became its medium. He was like his European predecessors, especially like Diderot etc. in the 18th century France, and also like the enlightened Indians viz. Roy. He was also like many who followed the same line of thought and action later in India.

Analysing Macaulay’s premises, assumptions and claims leads one to a coherent and distinct attitude he had towards life and humanity. He appears to have a firm faith in the superiority of the West over the East – aesthetically and intellectually, arising implicitly out of its geopolitical superiority. He believes in his appeal to reason and not to emotions to bring about the change that he finds to be positive after a logical analysis of facts in hand. He had a firm and unquestionable loyalty to his nation and has unshakeable faith in the bright future of the Empire and its language. He may have been proven wrong about the geopolitical and temporal strength and extent of the Empire, but he was accurate about the predictions he made regarding the strength and future of the linguistic entity called the Empire of English language. Two hundred years after the Minute were written, Randolph Quirk expressed a similar confidence in the future and power of his language: “a language – the language – on which the sun does not set, whose users never sleep” (qtd. in McArthur xiv). It is this very empire of English language of whichSouth Asia is a part.

Macaulay was not a blind racial chauvinist that many portray through the pieces from his minute. He was a liberal and rational man. He could see what was true and was ready to stand for it. He was not at all condescending like his various orientalist contemporaries in wrongly believing “that no native of this country can possibly attain more than a mere smattering of English”.  His was a pragmatic outlook and his practical approach did prove to be the right one in the long run. He very justly adduces examples of Indians:

There are in this very town natives who are quite competent to discuss political or scientific questions with fluency and precision in the English language. I have heard the very question on which I am now writing discussed by native gentlemen with a liberality and an intelligence which would do credit to any member of the Committee of Public Instruction. Indeed it is unusual to find, even in the literary circles of the Continent, any foreigner who can express himself in English with so much facility and correctness as we find in many Hindus…One may insinuate towards some ulterior motive in the passage given above, but then, the same may be done with their side of discourse too. Macaulay’s bonafide intention was proven exactly when he had presented the Minute before the Supreme Council of India “embodying his views and announcing his intention of resigning if they were not accepted” (Bryant qtd. in Kachru 37). His honesty and intention are also reflected in the very part of his Minute that has supplied the heaviest artillery to his critics:

that it is impossible for us, with our limited means, to attempt to educate the body of the people. We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern,  –a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect. To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population. [Italics mine]

I have italicized all that had not been quoted in the present paper before reaching this part. It has been done to provide the exact context to Macaulay’s famous “villainous”, colonizer’s sentiments of exploiting the masses through the creation of a “class of clerks”. If the italicized parts are read closely, it’ll be found that the practical man was right in framing a policy with “limited resources” in mind. It’ll also be found that the final aim and explicit intention of the writer was to “refine and enrich” the vernacular dialects ofIndiathrough the very class that was trained in the English language, physical, moral and intellectual strengths and culture: the interpreters in true and complete sense of the honourable word. He was firm in his faith and wantede progress for the country his race had colonized. Whatever the faults of his race might have been, Macaulay’s Minutes do offset them by showing an honourable and truthful English gentleman trying his best to “accelerate the progress of truth”.

Macaulay’s legacy stayed. As Kachru’s 3 circles very clearly indicate, most of the erstwhile British colonies in South Asia (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka) are found in the Outer Circle of English speakers (qtd. in McArthur 100). English stayed, even after the Empire was done away with. The legacy of colonialism that undoubtedly benefits those erstwhile colonies is English language that was once alien to these soils. It has now taken roots that have gone too deep to be uprooted in near future. A whole class of people is confident enough to make English their second language, and proudly affirm it, without any guilty conscience on “having betrayed their mother tongue”. Macaulay’s aim of creating an intermediary class was fulfilled. He did not know it fully that his prophesy would come true one day, especially when he was mentioning the future of English language in the world. Neither was he wrong about the impact of the language on the economy and socio-political and intellectual geography of the world.

The Legacy of Macaulay’s Minute

“India won freedom on 15 August 1947.”

A statement that’s a fact can never be challenged. Or it can be; depending upon the fact and the way it is used, along with the hidden assumptions that are made in order to reach the inference. There are two very important words in the statement that is at the beginning of this paper: India and freedom. India as a geopolitical entity definitely came into existence on the date mentioned in the sentence. It was freed of any foreign control on the date mentioned above, but India as its people in totality was not granted independence. Yet, looked at in the hindsight, the assumptions may be challenged. Every Indian citizen, of any class, creed or caste, was guaranteed liberty, equality and justice in its constitution that came into force in 1950. The English colonials went away, but the colonization remained, in essence, intact. The white sahib left, but the brown sahib took his place smoothly and the transition was complete. A postcolonial perspective of the things reveals that the discriminatory power structure was left intact and was strengthened in the years to come by those with vested interests. Class, religion and caste became the bases for a very rigid stratification of the Indian society. Social mobility was the only means, apart from a nearly impossible or hopelessly and vaguely distant revolution, to change one’s status. The English had gone, but they had left behind their legacy: the whole political system of India, along with its institutions that ran the whole nation, beginning from district to national level. They had also left a class of rulers in their place that consisted of a very strong and irreplaceable bureaucracy. It was the “culture determining group…the so called elites of India…busy…observing the latest developments in the West” (Paranjape). It was impossible to do away with, and, at times, appeared to be even more powerful than the legislature or the judiciary. The one language that acted as the force binding all the persons in the upper echelons of this bureaucracy was English: both pre- and post-independence. It is not just in India that it happened. It happened equally in all the erstwhile colonies, e.g. those in Asia and Africa. Thiong’o, in Nigerian context, shows “how English serves to uphold the domination of a small elite and of the foreign interests that they are allied with”(Kachru et al 307). In India too, those who ruled generally interacted in English. Moreover, English remained the official language of interdepartmental communication. Although, 

the constitution of India[had] specified 26 January 1965 as the date on which English would no longer be used as an official language of the new state. Since then, in spite of attempts to phase out English, practical difficulties in implementing the original constitutional mandate have convinced the successive governments to leave the status quo undisturbed. (Kachru et al161-62)

It was the knowledge of this language, just like that of Persian or Arabic in the age of the Mughals, was and is, the surest way to better employment opportunities. English was and is a definitely and distinctively powerful language used by those in power. It is the surest, best and fastest way to achieve the mush coveted social mobility in India. Ironically, “English is the paradigm modern language of political and economic power; …the factor responsible for disenfranchisement of a vast majority of populations in the third world” (Kachru et al 305). There are, in fact, two nations in our country today: one that is designated as Hindustan, and the other India. Hindustan speaks vernaculars and dreams of climbing the power and social ladder. The English speaking, rich and powerful section of our country are designated as India by thinkers today. The present paper is an attempt to trace the development of India and Hindustan from the pre-independence India. Its focus will be on Thomas Babington Macaulay’s Minute of the Educational Policy (the Minute), 2 February 1835, that is widely blamed or acclaimed as the foundation of the future education policies of India, hence of future India. Taking up such an old link in the chain of colonial policy and using the past as a parallel to the present is justified by the fact that the past continues to live with minor changes even today. Even today there exist in India the powerful elite who rules and the powerless masses that is ruled and exploited. Even from today’s free India, there is a huge drain of wealth, like its pre-independence colonial days, to both a parallel black economy and to various foreign bank accounts. The juggernaut set in motion in the nineteenth century crushes the bones of millions of Indians even today, although they are citizens of a free democracy with freedom to choose between a whole set of options between a life in perpetually powerless poverty and a slow but definite descent into death. It is also important because English Language Teaching (ELT) policies in India descended from those of the Raj era, just as many of the implicit assumptions regarding education and value of native civilization and languages. “It is education that plays the dominant role in suppressing local languages and forcing alien languages and cultural values onto people” (Kachru et al 306). In India, as Macaulay had planned, the system and medium of education planted in the past did their work perfectly.

Thomas Babington Macaulay’s Minute of the Educational Policy (the Minute), 2 February 1835, that Lord William Bentick had later assented to, was the cornerstone of the long term development of the education system of the Indian subcontinent as it “had the support of the powerful government lobby and was a classic example of using language as a vehicle for destabilizing a subjugate culture with the aim of creating a subculture” (Sharp qtd. in Kachru 37). Macaulay had written it, as a Member of the Council of India, in reaction to the policy of education being followed in India at his time. The 1813 Act of the British Parliament had set apart one lac rupees “for the revival and promotion of literature, and the encouragement of the learned natives of India, and for the introduction and promotion of a knowledge of the sciences among the inhabitants of the British territories” (Macaulay). Macaulay was totally against the way the above mentioned amount was used. He was heavily critical and disapproving of the Arabic and Sanskrit literature. His idea of “a learned native” was of a native “familiar with the poetry of Milton, the metaphysics of Locke, and the physics of Newton”, i.e. Indian only in external features, but for all intellectual and practical purposes steeped in western, nay English philosophy, science and literature. A scholar of the Sanskrit sacred books, Hindu rituals and philosophy was not to be called learned. Moreover, Macaulay based his strong plea for change in the educational policy on the explicit mention of the promotion of the knowledge of science among the colonized natives. The orientalists were campaigning for the maintenance of the status quo. Macaulay, on the other hand, was very sure of the uselessness of teaching “certain languages and certain sciences, though those languages may become useless, though those sciences may be exploded”. He claimed with certainty that the vernaculars would become useless with the passage of time, being replaced by the dominant language: English. Time proved him wrong. Hindi, Urdu, Bengali and Tamil are spoken by a very large proportion of the world’s population today. The number of people who call these languages their mother tongue is increasing day by day. Macaulay’s claim of the unscientific native sciences was not reached at through a scientifically valid research and analysis of only facts. It was based on baseless and immature opinions of an opinionated white man. Paranjape, in his “Decolonizing English Studies: Attaining Swaraj?” points towards the…examples of our indigenous science and technology… the advanced metallurgical traditions of India. Nowadays we talk about the need to cut down on the high energy expended to make steel. In India, we had a tradition of small furnaces in which we made pretty high quality steel in villages. This skill was known and recorded in the 18th century and still continues today. Another example is inoculation. In Bengal there were people who toured the countryside inoculating adults and children against small pox. In the early 18th century, the British were learning from them. The latter made records, some of which are still available. Yet another example is plastic surgery. In Pune, for instance, barbers were expert plastic surgeons. There are detailed British records of how a person whose nose was cut off had a new nose grafted on to his face. Now, nose surgery is very sophisticated. Even today not everybody can do it. So also the case of artificial limbs, especially the world-famous Jaipur foot. These were made, and continue to be made, extremely effectively in India. These knowledge systems-and many more-were available in India in the 18th century and some of them survive to this day.

Macaulay’s confident assumption of the eventual exploding the native sciences was made with an arrogance that knew no bounds. It was with this very characteristic faith in his white racial supremacy that he declared: “We have a fund to be employed as Government shall direct for the intellectual improvement of the people of this country”. The unsaid yet widely believed opinion of his time was that the Orientals were beasts of natural impulses, given to the pleasures of flesh, and nothing else. His generalizations are so totalizing and confident that they leave one speechless with intellectual rage. He had the courage to pronounce: “All parties seem to be agreed on one point, that the dialects commonly spoken among the natives of this part of India contain neither literary nor scientific information”. He was not alone in explicitly or implicitly mentioning so. There were many, among the colonized too, who were of a similar opinion. They had, as Paranjape points out, an “insufficiency thesis” regarding their own culture and its products. Raja Ram Mohan Roy, a famous social reformer and enlightened Hindu who started Brahmo Samaj movement in Bengal, did not “have much use of traditional or Sanskrit learning”. He demanded for his countrymen the knowledge of the western sciences and the modern empirical method. It is this very “unqualified enthusiasm for techno-modernity” that Gandhi later opposed in his Hind Swaraj. “His Hind Swaraj …contains the anti-thesis of Rammohun’s insufficiency thesis. Gandhi advances what might be termed the complete self-sufficiency thesis. He says Indian civilization is superior to modern civilization”(Paranjape). He had questioned the very idea of a “western” civilization, defending his point by reporting the instance of: “A great English writer[‘s] work called Civilization: Its Cause and Cure. [W]herein he …called it a disease” (29). He went on to conclude: “According to the teaching of Mahommed this would be considered a Satanic Civilization. Hinduism calls it the Black Age” (30).

Macaulay was not making his assertions on his own authority, or in opposition to the claims of the point of view he opposed. In fact, one of his most infamous assertions is made on behalf of both Orientalists and Occidentaslists, as he had “never found one among them [the Orientalists] who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia. The intrinsic superiority of the Western literature is indeed fully admitted by those members of the committee who support the oriental plan of education”. It was their faith of their superiority, fed by their collective chauvinism, which made the colonizers blind to reason. Macaulay mentions very clearly that even among the orientalists, the Sanskrit and Arabic poetry, the best and choicest fruit of these classical languages, was seen as inferior to the European one. The Minute had not a single idea that was “invented”. Macaulay was just presenting the then prevalent line of thought that had matured through the long struggle between the two major and contending views the colonizers held of the colonized of the East: the Orientalist versus Occidentalist controversy. It was the overall discourse, i.e. “large body of texts with a similar intent and set of protocols”, of contrapuntal positions (Paranjape). It had generated all the ideas and the heat, one part of which is strongly present in the Minute. Neither extreme of views was race exclusive, as they had both white and brown proponents, depending on the part of grand narrative they were interpellated with. Yet, they did constitute parts of a structure and could only function while belonging to it. The Minute only present a set of ideas, not essentially and exclusively related to either the content or the medium of education. It is very important to focus on the Minute in detail because it is from this point of origin that whole subsequent system is alleged to have come, especially by those who criticize it.

Macaulay made sweeping generalizations disregarding both common sense and specific examples that might have proven it otherwise. He claimed that the English had “to educate a people who cannot at present be educated by means of their mother-tongue”, while either ignoring or ignorant of the fact that in Bombay presidency vernacular was successfully used as the medium of instruction in schools. His linguistic chauvinism knows no bounds when he asserts confidently that English stood “pre-eminent even among the languages of the West”. His claim was neither unique nor uncharacteristic of his times. In addition to the obvious superior intrinsic value of English language, he was also presenting more concrete reasons:

In India, English is the language spoken by the ruling class. It is spoken by the higher class of natives at the seats of Government. It is likely to become the language of commerce throughout the seas of the East. It is the language of two great European communities which are rising, the one in the south of Africa, the other in Australia, –communities which are every year becoming more important and more closely connected with our Indian empire.

Thus he was presenting a very strong case for the adoption of English as the medium of education and also for an insidious infiltration of young minds when they were the most impressionable. He knew that “language is a system of culture, not merely a system of communication. [and a]… culture is deeply embedded in a language” (Paranjape). Thus he was aiming at something much more significant than just the medium of instruction. His explicitly expressed objective, just like that of his race, was regarding “a great impulse given to the mind of a whole society, of prejudices overthrown, of knowledge diffused, of taste purified, of arts and sciences”. His race was there to civilize the ignorant barbarians of the East and he knew that the white man’s sacred burden ought to be shouldered with a dutiful faith. His arrogance, a very characteristic imperial arrogance, oozes out of the whole body of the text. He takes the implicit assumptions of his time as self-contained and self-sustaining axioms of the perfect Euclidean Empire. His certainty is amazing, as is his unshakeable faith in the superiority of his race. He opines that, “when a nation of high intellectual attainments undertakes to superintend the education of a nation comparatively ignorant”, the learners must be guided by their masters (pun intended), and not the other way round. His generalizations had no rational ground or support. He declared the literature, history, metaphysics and theology of India as “absurd”. With a very strongly chauvinistic assumption regarding his race and its culture, Macaulay asserted that the British must try to create a class of Indians who would act as interpreters between their countrymen and their white masters. He envisioned very shrewdly the creation of “a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect”. To a large extent he succeeded in his plan. The postcolonial theory very clearly states that it is impossible for an alien nation to colonize and exploit another nation until they get ample support from certain sections of the colonized people themselves. The collusion of the colonized with the Empire was one of the main reasons not only behind its successful entry into India, but also behind the sustenance of the colonial rule. Macaulay’s success was so complete that even today a whole set of counter currents run in the Indian system, as was mentioned in the beginning of this paper. The colonizers had created an elite and language was an important element in the successful execution of their plans as “the colonizers were also in part linguistic codifiers, who were able to act as gatekeepers for those who wished to share in the economic and other benefits of becoming English users” (Kachru et al 307-08).

Macaulay’s confident assertions may be proven fallacious, illogical, and even ridiculous today, but, ironically, his prediction turned out to be true. English is the most coveted and the most popular medium of education in urban India. The hegemony of English language and literature is directly linked with the forces of globalization and polarization of powers – both military and monetary. As far as India is concerned, English happens to be the passport for securing gainful employment in the private sector. Thus, it acts as it did nearly two centuries ago, as is mentioned in that much detested and debated about document. Even poor people send their children to English medium schools in hope that learning English would definitely enhance their employability and will finally help in moving up from the social stratum they belong to. The same motivation was working exactly in the same manner in Macaulay’s time too. The language of power was creating market and learners at a very fast pace; just as it had done in past after the Muslim invasion and expansion in India. Macaulay had very incisively opined about the market demand for his language and its eventual spread in India: “Nothing is more certain than that it never can in any part of the world be necessary to pay men for doing what they think pleasant or profitable”. He had ample support favoring English against the classical languages of learning. Analysing Macaulay’s premises, assumptions and claims leads one to a coherent and distinct attitude he had towards life and humanity. He appears to have a firm faith in the superiority of the West over the East – aesthetically and intellectually, arising implicitly out of its geopolitical superiority. He may have been proven wrong about the geopolitical and temporal strength and extent of the Empire, but he was accurate about the predictions he made regarding the strength and future of the linguistic entity called the Empire of English language. Two hundred years after the Minute was written Randolph Quirk expressed a similar confidence in the future and power of his language: “a language – the language – on which the sun does not set, whose users never sleep” (qtd. in McArthur xiv). It is this very empire of English language of which South Asia is a part. A look at Kachru’s three circles very clearly indicates that Macaulay’s legacy stayed. Most of the erstwhile British colonies in South Asia (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka) are found in the Outer Circle of English speakers (qtd. in McArthur 100). English stayed there, even after the Empire was done away with. It has now taken roots that have gone too deep to be uprooted in near future. Macaulay’s aim of creating an intermediary class was fulfilled. He did not know it fully that his prophesy would come true one day, especially when he was mentioning the future of English language in the world.

Truth in Auto/biography Rousseau’s Confessions and My Experiments with Truth

Pontius Pilate asked Jesus a question when he claimed to be a witness to truth: “Quod est veritas?” (John 18:38). His remark has been interpreted in various ways through the ages, but the fundamental question remains: “What is truth?” It is also from where the present paper originates. Unless one addresses to this question satisfactorily, it’d not be possible to graduate to our next question: Do biographies and autobiographies reveal truth? Therefore, the present paper will deal the problem in hand in two parts: one dealing with the nature of truth and the other with truth in the historically located narratives of human beings called auto/biographies. To avoid further complications, an auto/biography will be accepted as one based on the intention and explicit mention of the fact that the narrator/writer/protagonist happens to be a real life, historically placeable, sentient entity.

Defining any abstract quality has always been very easy. Only proving the definition right before the barrage of exceptions complicates the matter. Provisionally, just as the point of departure, truth may be defined as “that which is accepted by everyone to be correct or right”. It’s simple enough; deceptively so. The solar system (ironically, or was it called the earth system then?) was accepted to be geocentric before Copernicus (just to take a name) took the risk of proving otherwise. Was it true before Copernicus proved it otherwise and false afterwards? Does truth have a solid foundation, or it stands on a slippery base. Is it eternal, objective and “real”, or just a social construct that is relative, temporary and subjective? Our knowledge of truth is a part of the total body of knowledge that we possess which is our database on whose basis we judge whether what we know is true or not, following an abstract, semi-conscious and nearly automatic process at the back of our mind. The process is called semi-conscious because its steps are so fast at times that it appears to go on without any conscious effort. Yet, it’s not totally unconscious, as our dreams prove. Until the dream ends, one’s unsuspecting self remains in a world constructed by the conscious mind on the input affected by the unconscious part. One believes it to be true and realizes that it was not so on reflection after returning to a conscious state, provided one remembers the dream’s “untrue” part and also provided there is such a difference. If the dream state is taken as an analogy, sans the benevolent God that Descartes posited, one’s existence with the truths of sleeping and waking worlds is at an equal ease and effortlessness. Moreover, there is no way of knowing one state, or one truth, from the other as long as one remains in the un-knowing or dream state. Thus, ignorance does turn out to be bliss. Therefore, an ignoramus’s truth will not be the same as that of someone who knows comparatively more. Socrates had spoken so eloquently in his apology about how by his knowing of his ignorance he knew more than others: “for he knows nothing, and thinks that he knows; I neither know nor think that I know” (Plato). Yet, he had to drink hemlock. Despite Socrates’ demonstrating very clearly how he was falsely accused, at least for the time being, truth was shown as falsehood, and most people believed the opposite to be true. Both Jesus and Socrates died martyrs in the name of truth; but what is truth?

Relativism will not accept any claims truth makes at absoluteness. Linguistic determinism will prove that truth is a construct, and not something existing objectively. Pragmatism will simply scoff at such a wasteful hair-splitting expenditure of time. Yet, the one working definition without which no progress can be made here is that of truth. A brave attempt is all that is required to reach truth. In “What is Enlightenment” Kant asserts:

Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed nonage. Nonage is the inability to use one’s own understanding without another’s guidance. This nonage is self-imposed if its cause lies not in lack of understanding but in indecision and lack of courage to use one’s own mind without another’s guidance. Dare to know! (Sapere aude.) “Have the courage to use your own understanding,” is therefore the motto of the enlightenment.

Enlightened to the core, and awaken from his dogmatic slumber, Kant did dare to use his “own understanding without another’s guidance” and to know. More than that, he also dared to convey the truth about what he knew through his Critiques and his Prolegomena. So, was truth found or defined finally, conclusively and unquestionably? Not at all, if the history of philosophy is to be believed. Plato, an idealist, had proven through his various myths that there was something like Truth. He had claimed that the philosopher (as in a lover of wisdom and truth) had an access to that Truth through his use of reason and the poet through inspiration. He remained uncharacteristically subtle and elusive when it came to defining and describing what that final point of convergence was. So did the footnotes to him, i.e. his successors in the western philosophical tradition. It was like: you know it when and if you reach there; it can’t be taught, shown or explained. The moment one attempts to grasp truth, one is at the farthest remove from it, says the Zen philosophy. Sansara is all maya, says the Indian classical thought. So there remains no question of fixing the point called truth in the world of mundane elements and events, unless, of course it is absolutely essential.

“The truthfulness or not of autobiography is essentially a matter that must be left to biographers and philosophers. The plausibility of an autobiography however must find its authentication by the degree to which it can correspond to some approximation of its context” (Drabble 53). As we have chosen to focus on the truthfulness, and not just plausibility, of the text this paper will make one more attempt at fixing the working boundaries of truth, but only in one specific instance. It is the truth in an account of the events of a character’s life – fictional or real- written by the person himself or by someone else, in what we are interested. This definitely makes the task less complicated by narrowing down the number of possible exceptions and objections. To play a game, one must compile a set of rules that all players abide by. If any attempt is to be made to test the veritas quotient (let’s call it VQ) of a biography or autobiography –literary or otherwise, one must first define the scale. The beginning must be the conventional zero, i.e. totally false and proven to be so; and the end of the scale may be any convenient number greater than zero that denotes total truthfulness. The falseness or truthfulness of the text under question has to be assayed against some objective and external indicator. That indicator happens to be history in case of texts that claim to be “real” life events, psychology helps partially in testing the validity and truthfulness of the mind processes revealed after introspection, and philosophy in the form of theory if the text claims to be fictional and literary, or at least “factional”. History, psychology (or philosophy of mind) and philosophy intersect to form the kind of litmus for a text whose VQ must be tested in order to reach any satisfactory conclusion regarding the trustworthiness of the narrative. Even this approach, scientific it may sound, is not fool-proof. There are factors that any objective test cannot test, e.g. facts can be tested against externally existing and recorded history, the emotions, intentions and interpretations presented by the auto/biographers can never be proven correct or otherwise with one hundred percent certainty. Out goes VQ then. Concreteness is the element missing in this predominantly abstract discussion. Examples will be used in the lines that follow to make the task easier.

All fiction is autobiographical and hard determinism will claim the same for all writing. The Brontë sisters, Dickens, Tolstoy, George Eliot, D H Lawrence, Maugham, Joyce, Fitzgerald, Proust, Hemingway, Miller, Ellison, Rand, Kerouac and the list is interminable, all presented autobiographical elements in their fiction. Yet there is a consensus of sorts on the genre wise compartmentalization of texts and auto/biography is a commonly accepted and recognizable genre in English at least since Wordsworth’s The Prelude. St. Augustine’s and Rousseau’s famous autobiographies, both called Confessions, are classics and pioneering attempts made before the word was ever used.Saint Augustine starts his autobiography with:

In God’s searching presence, Augustine undertakes to plumb the depths of his memory to trace the mysterious pilgrimage of grace which his life has been–and to praise God for his constant and omnipotent grace. In a mood of sustained prayer, he recalls what he can … [and] concludes with a paean of grateful praise to God [emphasis mine] (13).

The one central trait of his autobiography is its, and his, holding and propagating an intense kind of  theocentricity that finds all things mundane and material totally inconsequential. Rousseau’s Confessions is more egocentric than theocentric. Keeping with the tradition, Rousseau makes his intention clear in the very beginning of his autobiography:

I mean to present my fellow-mortals with a man in all the integrity of nature; and this man shall be myself. I know my heart, and have studied mankind; I am not made like any one I have been acquainted with, perhaps like no one in existence; if not better, I at least claim originality… I may have supposed that certain, which I only knew to be probable, but have never asserted as truth, a conscious falsehood [emphasis mine] (7). 

The various times he refers to himself in the very first paragrapgh will act as a fair indicator of the real subject of his work. Closer home, Mahatma Gandhi’s autobiography is an example that can be picked by virtue of its, and his, being most widely known. Moreover, it also conforms to the commonly accepted definition of autobiography as “the author…. declares that he is the person he says he is and that the author and the protagonist are the same” (Anderson 3). Gandhiji does not declare his intentions as he begins; instead, he jumps straight into introducing his parents and background. Intentions come later, that too, as side observations. If the truth of writing is tested against that of the world and judgement is passed to declare the faithfulness of the text to truth, Ganhiji intended to present only truth and made a valiant and thorough effort too. He knew that being truthful would not be easy. In the chapter on his child marriage he writes: “Much as I wish that I had not to write this chapter, I know that I shall have to swallow many such bitter draughts in the course of this narrative. And I cannot do otherwise, if I claim to be a worshipper of Truth” (5). The intention is clear in both the cases and they intend to report the events of their lives truthfully. They assume their truth to be our truth too, as they see truth as something objective, absolute and external to the subject.

The way they recount their past and the people they came in contact with presents two different modes of autobiographical writing. Rousseau reports how his father used to read the books of his mother’s collection at night, with him alongside. He presents that fact as strong force writing on the tabula rasa of his mind. While mentioning his parents Rousseau writes that since their very childhood there was a: “natural sympathy of soul [that] confined those sentiments of predilection which habit at first produced; born with minds susceptible of the most exquisite sensibility and tenderness” (8). Abstract ideas abound in the description that are unverifiable too. In contrast to Rousseau, Mahatma Gandhi writes of his father as: “To a certain extent he might have been given to carnal pleasures. For he married for the fourth time when he was over forty. But he was incorruptible and had earned a name for strict impartiality in his family as well as outside” (3). The qualities mentioned in the account are either objectively verifiable or logically reached at. The similar kind of treatment of persons and events may be seen in their respective autobiographies.

Rousseau’s idea of truth was given out as generalizations interspersed with facts in the text. Moreover, unlike Wordsworth, his egotism was not sublime. It bordered on self-aggrandizement at times: “We suffer before we think; it is the common lot of humanity.  I experienced more than my proportion of it” (7). His assumptions and his hidden sense of importance come to the fore very frequently in his autobiography. Gandhiji, on the other hand, presents another kind of introspection. He keeps as close to the externally observable fact as possible and gives an analysis of emotions, feelings and other abstractions generally when they are his own but tries to keep the focus away from himself as a person. Self-effacement is what he attempted, and nearly succeeded too. He sometimes does stray from the path of objectivity but much less than Rousseau. The following lines do have a hint of self-importance, but unlike Rousseau’s, it is very dry and ungloating in nature: “Since then I have twice been to Kashi Vishvanath, but that has been after I had already been afflicted with the title of Mahatma … People eager to have my darshan would not permit me to have a darshan of the temple. The woes of Mahatmas are known to Mahatmas alone” (128). All is not rotten with Rousseau’s introspection and self-presentation. His critical glimpses of his nature succeed to shed light on human nature in general, especially of his age, with emphasis on purity of sensations and sentiments:

An infinity of sensations were familiar to me, without possessing any precise idea of the objects to which they related--I had conceived nothing--I had felt the whole.  This confused succession of emotions did not retard the future efforts of my reason, though they added an extravagant, romantic notion of human life, which experience and reflection have never been able to eradicate (7-8).

His introspection and his special facility in presenting his psyche as on a postmortem table after the autopsy, make the text full of deep insights in the individual’s, and by corollary, general psychology. He does generalize and it happens to be one of his weaknesses, yet, it makes him and his story interesting for a modern reader. It’d have definitely had more attraction for his contemporaries. Although absolute statements are his weakness he uses them very artfully, as in his comment regarding his relation with his cousin Bernard when he claims that “a similar example among children can hardly be produced” (15). The Mahatma’s generalizations are not personal in nature. His purpose is different as he affirms: “I must reduce myself to zero. So long as a man does not of his own free will put himself last among his fellow creatures, there is no salvation for him. Ahimsa is the farthest limit of humility” (Gandhi 269). There’s a clear resonance of Christianity, especially the New Testament, and even in that Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount on his ideas. Nietzsche wouldn’t’ be very pleased with Gandhiji’s attempt at strengthening of the ideal of meekness, sacrifice and selfless service. Yet, that is what he does throughout the autobiography. A devout worshipper of Truth that he saw as God, Gandhiji tried to reach it through his honest introspection. Whatever he found out was reported without any kind of polishing. Self-purification was his aim and he attempted to purify others who came in contact with his ideas too- personally or through printed words. That’s why his sole attempt was to present unadulterated truth because nothing else would solve his purpose.  It is his content that lends his plain and totally utilitarian style an aura of its own. Rousseau, on the other hand sees pride as a positive and uplifting trait: “but if this pride is not virtue itself, its effects are so similar that we are pardonable in deceiving ourselves” (325). The Gandhian humility must neither be expected nor met with here. Yet truth can be present in various forms in various places. So it’s in Confessions too. The reader has to sift through a lot of chaff before reaching the grain of truth. Patience and empathy, always the virtues for a communicator, are demanded especially of the reader looking for an objectively verifiable truth.

History, psychology and philosophy come to the rescue of the unsure reader who is trying to reach truth in the two autobiographies. First of all, as far as history is concerned, the chronological data is definitely correct in both the texts, yet Confessions depends less on and uses smaller proportions of such information because it is generally an account of the processes of the author’s mind and not just plain recounting of events. Gandhiji, on the other hand, kept scrupulously close to the historically verifiable facts. Moreover, he kept the level of revelation of his subjective self relatively low. Therefore, more historical truth is to be found in his autobiography in comparison to that of Rousseau. The proportion of the analyses of mind processes is more in Rousseau’s than in the other text. Thus the psychologically verifiable truth (and ironically, for the same reason, falseness) is present more in Rousseau’s work. The most difficult part of ascertaining the truth claim is when one reaches philosophy. Both the texts have rich philosophical content, as both are the autobiographies of deep and original thinkers who affected the minds of millions and even determined the flow of history of their times. Their thoughts continue to affect the posterity. Content-wise, Rouseau’s work focuses more on presenting his personal views and beliefs, whereas, the other focuses more on facts. Yet, there are parts that intensely and pithily present the Mahatma’s philosophy so effectively that its comparative absence is made over. As far as the plausibility is concerned, both the texts pass the test, as the reader believes the writer-protagonist but then, so do many fictional autobiographies.

As far as the truth factor is concerned, it’s difficult to pass any final judgement. Both the autobiographies have their share of historical, psychological and philosophical truths. Thus both are true. At the same time, in some respects, both are false or inadequate too. The same may be applied as a generalization on the whole auto/biographical genre.