India was the first British colony to gain independence in 1947 – some 75 years ago. Yet, it was only last Wednesday that it honoured one of the architects of that independence in a manner that officially brought him to centre stage, so to speak. A holographic statue of Subhash Chandra Bose (soon to be replaced by one of granite) was installed in front of India Gate, under the cupola that once housed a statue of King George V. They also replaced the colonial hymn “Abide by thee” at the end of their “Beating Retreat” Republic Day celebrations with an Indian song composed after their 1962 War with China.
At the same time, over in Guyana, the passing of Balram Singh Rai precipitated a debate on his role in our independence struggle; his alternative strategy to that of Cheddi Jagan in that struggle, and the subsequent silencing of that role, akin to Subhash Bose’s. Most recently, the Government published six new “Atlantic Readers” for children at the nursery and primary levels to achieve literacy by Grade 4, and to address our “cultural complexities…(and) demographic uniqueness”. All of these efforts represent an ongoing attempt to eradicate debilitating traces of our colonial experience that were imposed during slavery, Indentureship, and its aftermath.
I have written before of these “lingering traces”, as analysed by the Latin American theorist Anibal Quijano, which he called the “Coloniality of Power”. He demonstrated that while “colonialism” might have ended, its structural features, dubbed “coloniality”, remain firmly in place. Quijano posits that we were all conscripted by a European-defined “modernity” that began in 1492 with the conquest of the Americas. It developed and extended the structures of power, control, and hegemony that emerged during the era of colonialism. He posits that the coloniality of power takes three forms: systems of (racial) hierarchies, systems of knowledge, and cultural systems.
Race was created to justify the enslavement of Africans, using Christian myths that included a “Great Chain of Being” with God on top, followed by his (all white) angels; then mankind, with Whites on top and Blacks/Africans at the bottom. Other groups, like Indians and Chinese, who ironically fought to maintain their subaltern status, were placed in intermediate positions. Remember Yesu writing about our “Coloureds” insisting they were “superior” to Africans, who in turn insisted they were superior to the “heathen Indian”? Indians reacted and asserted their “cultural superiority”, and even their “racial” affinity to Caucasians. Race still matters, and complicates our relationships with other groups wherever we Girmitiyas/Indentureds were shipped.
Quijano asserts that race remain embedded in capitalism, which was developed out of Europe’s conquests. “The other process was the constitution of a new structure of control of labour and its resources and products.” The global racial/ethnic hierarchy of Europeans and non-Europeans was an integral part of the development of the capitalist world system. That included transitional forms such as Indentureship, in which the control of labour was guaranteed without the moral opprobrium of slavery. The Girmits/Indentureds, then, are an important cog in the extension of coloniality from slavery. They represent the contradictions inherent in the myth of “free labour” from slave labour in the “accumulation by dispossession” stage of capitalism.
The “Systems of knowledge” should be especially relevant to academics in our local university. Quijano writes, “Europe’s hegemony over the new model of global power concentrated all forms of the control of subjectivity, culture, and especially knowledge and the production of knowledge under its hegemony.” How do we break out? The Atlantic Reader, rather than the Royal Reader, suffices?
The third element of coloniality of power is the creation of cultural systems that revolve around a Eurocentric hierarchy, and that enforce Eurocentric economic and knowledge production systems. We all ape Eurocentric norms in which we would invariably be second class. We therefore all live within a multiplicity of colonialities: Conquest and modernity; race; ethnicity; gender, the nation; the hegemonic and hegemonised mind etc. For us to have a clear idea as to what we hope to accomplish for our people, we need to appreciate the constraints at the individual, group, state/nation and global levels. For instance, why look down racially/ethnically at other groups when we ourselves are suffering that scorn from others through hierarchies of race?
Shouldn’t we fight for equity and equality of opportunity for all groups in each country we live in, plus gender justice and environmental sustainability?
