Riddles of Belonging: India in Translation and Other Tales of Possession

Can the Subaltern Joke? (to open)

1 Can the Subaltern Joke? (to open) People say that on one of his later visits to England leading up to Independence , M. K. Gandhi was asked by a reporter, “Mr. Gandhi, what do you think of British civilization?” In past speeches and interviews, Gandhi had been quite critical of Western modernity as a capitalist, industrialist system , especially as exported to the Indian colony. This time, however, he is said to have replied to the question of British civilization cheerfully, as if in all earnestness, “I think it would be a very good idea.”1 It is perhaps easy to imagine why this exchange has been repeated so often in the intervening years, and with such glee: here, contained in a clever, sassy quip, is a most damning critique of the uneven political and economic relationship between colonizer and colonized. Rather than assuming “civilization” to be a static, fixed entity that the British have possessed as a matter of course since time immemorial (or at least since the waning of the Roman empire) and rather than assuming that the British are necessarily in the superior position to help people in India (re)acquaint 2 Can the Subaltern Joke? (to open) themselves—somewhat derivatively—with their own version of “civilization ,” Gandhi’s response points playfully to an imaginary future—mischievously conditional—with no such fixed logic of relation. This little bit of dialogue between the upstart Indian nationalist and the straight-man British journalist draws attention to the precarious positionality of each speaker in relation to one another. We understand at the outset that they both cannot but represent the larger historical forces at work at the time; the wordplay reveals that the engagement between them (the civilizations, the men), while pretending to be fixed and static, is actually quite dynamic and has been all along. It is in this moment that we can sense most vividly that “civilize” is a transitive verb and that Indian speakers need not necessarily always be the object of British imperial grammar but might instead repeat such a sentence with themselves in the nominative and the British, the accusative. Not just the mirthful subversion of the expected grammatical relation but the fact that this bit of dialogue has been recounted so often through the decades should make us see that its power then and now derives from our conventions of ongoing repetition and can be understood only as part of its larger discourse network. Quick as a breath, Gandhi’s playful response invites us to think through a more basic and thus provocative set of riddles raised by the unexamined grammar of colonialism: What is it to be civilized ? Does a people that has enslaved another have a right to call itself civilized? What might a just response be to the wholesale takeover of one’s country when done in the very name of justice and civility? That is, how should one respond civilly to incivility? How should one respond ethically to injustice? Of course, Gandhi asked a more particular version of this riddle openly and directly in his role as nationalist leader: How can one respond nonviolently to colonial violence? The very act of calling the British system unjust, uncivil, and violent introduced a new vocabulary for addressing the situation—justly, civilly, nonviolently. One might argue that the humor in evidence above is but one such tactic of nonviolent resistance and thus shares with it both the successes and limitations of that strategy. Indeed, at the time and in the years since, a range of politicians, scholars, and activists have asked whether Gandhi’s movement was as inclusive and empowering for all Indian citizens as has been claimed.2 More recently, postcolonial theorists have looked once more to Gandhi’s work to provide alternative Can the Subaltern Joke? (to open) 3 understandings of indigenous resistance to colonial authority.3 My interest in the topic is more particular: I begin with this playful repartee not in an attempt to analyze the historical details of Gandhi’s leadership, nor to debate the legacy of nonviolent resistance, but instead to analyze it as an example of the useful deployment of playfulness as a political tool. How do we explain the procedures by which Gandhi’s rhetoric has empowered not only the isolated speaker but generations of speakers in turn? Tostart,wemightnoticethatthisplayfulparley,likesomanyexchanges— verbal, cultural, or economic—is most handily described as taking place between two...