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Comparative Literature Studies 37.2 (2000) 256-260



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Book Review

Indian Traffic: Identities in Question in Colonial and Postcolonial India.


Indian Traffic: Identities in Question in Colonial and Postcolonial India. By Parama Roy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. vii + 236 pp. $45.00 hbk., cloth; $16.95 pbk.

In this insightful and sophisticated study of contested identities in colonial and postcolonial India, Parama Roy expands the notion of mimicry put forth by Frantz Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks. In India the colonial enforcement of mimicry was laid out in Macaulay's notorious "Minute on Education" of 1835 which set as a goal the creation of "a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect" whose function was to be "interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern." This English educated class of men, which spanned from the clerical to the elite and was epitomized in the persona of the Bengali babu, was ridiculed as failed Englishmen (most offensively in T. A. Guthrie's Baboo Hurry Bungsho Jabberjee, 1897) and scorned as degenerate males (as analyzed in Mrinalini Sinha's Colonial Masculinity: The "Manly Englishman" and the "Effeminate Bengali" in the Late Nineteenth Century). Yet they were also feared as potential subversive nationalists. What if, using their skills but transgressing their assignment, these middlemen became the voice of an insurgent Indian nation instead of fulfilling their mandate as spokesmen for British sway? Among their descendants are prominent postcolonial critics such as Ashis Nandy, Partha Chatterjee, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and, in this volume, Parama Roy.

Roy builds on the ambivalence of colonial discourse and the subversive effect of mimicry expounded by Homi Bhabha. The singular importance of this volume is that it complicates the significance of colonial mimicry by examining in discrete, yet mutually challenging chapters, cases of imitation by colonizers and other western protagonists and examples of crossings of gender and religion in colonial and postcolonial India, separating mimicry from a common association with Anglicization and westernization. The texts that provide a basis for this analysis strategically [End Page 256] range from well-known literary productions to historical records of the colonial period to post-independence (and nationalist) film, moving the agenda to an exploration of the role of impersonation and of the assertion of difference in nation and identity formation.

Although the book proceeds in overall chronological order, its thematic development is primary. It opens with a relatively simple case of impersonation, that of a Muslim pilgrim by Richard (later Sir Richard) Francis Burton as described in his Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Meccah (1857). Claims that some Englishmen could "pass" as natives recur in literary, historical, and biographical texts of the colonial period. They were rooted in ambivalence. While colonizers gloried in the challenge of "turning" into undetected undercover agents, they feared the lure of native life. As parents, most were intent on sending their offspring "home" for schooling so as to remove them from a perceived threat of physical, cultural, and moral contamination. "Passing for native" was as fascinating and glorious as "going native" was abhorrent. Yet, might they risk being caught in an assumed nativity without return? Mandatory preparatory education at the East India College in Haileybury and Addiscombe Military Academy was intended to steel civil and military personnel against the lure of native life on which the moral decadence of their eighteenth-century predecessors had been blamed. Whether or not, differently from Lawrence of Arabia, Burton sought to "resignify," rather than merely imitate, native identity by proposing his assumed persona as a model for natives to emulate, as Roy argues, it is clear that Burton's Muslim identity could only be obtained from a position of constantly shifting liminality. He could pull off the deception only by assuming transient and hybrid identities that were not native to his immediate location.

One of the most interesting sections of the volume is its multi-layered second chapter, "Discovering India, Imagining Thuggee," which exposes the seamlessness of...

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