Sarah McCall DeLaRosa

Identity Theft: Colonial Crimes Against the Self

            Looking over the texts we have read for this colonial and postcolonial literature class since the midterm, a theme that stands out to me is the issue of identity. Many of the texts address identity in a significant way, and they can be evaluated along colonial or postcolonial lines. To illustrate this phenomenon, I will use Rudyard Kipling’s The Man Who Would be King (1888) as the representative colonial text; and Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine (1989), Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan (1956), and two poems from the negritude movement, Aimé Césaire’s “A Tempest” (1968) and Langston Hughes’ “Dream Variations” (1932), to represent the postcolonial point of view. All of these texts deal with identity in a meaningful way. The colonizers present themselves as a powerful alpha-race while enforcing a new, European-tinged identity on the colonized peoples; eventually, once the native peoples throw off the shackles of colonialism, they (re)create and celebrate their identities. Both sides of colonialism use literature to work through their struggles over identity, and it is through reading these varied texts that we can get a feel for the reality of the situation as it is now and was in history.

            Rudyard Kipling’s 1888 novel, The Man Who Would be King, chronicles the political over-taking of the Middle-Eastern nation of Kafiristan by two young Englishmen, Daniel Dravot and Peachey Carnehan. Dravot and Carnehan are crafty and confident, and slyly play the native tribes off each other and become co-kings of unwitting Kafiristan. Introducing themselves to the narrator, Dravot says: “Brother Peachey Carnehan, that's him, and Brother Daniel Dravot, that is me, and the less said about our professions the better, for we have been most things in our time. Soldier, sailor, compositor, photographer, proof-reader, street-preacher, and correspondents of the Backwoodsman when we thought the paper wanted one” (Kipling). The men form a quick bond with the narrator, as all three are Masons (indicated here by the title “Brother”), and continue to list the many and varied professions they have held. They are clearly well-traveled, skilled, capable men; and to top off their resume they are so daring as to add “king” to their list. They can do anything, and it seems they have, so to travel to another country and install themselves as ruler seems a fitting next step for Dravot and Carnehan. They are arrogant colonizers who are willfully inconsiderate of the native people who will be affected by their lofty aspirations.

            Helping them to forget about the people whom they are quashing beneath their colonizing feet, and to ease communication, Dravot and Carnehan rename several of the local Kafiristanis. They explain that they “gave them names according as [the Kafiristani chiefs] was like men we had known in India—Billy Fish, Holly Dilworth, Pikky Kergan that was Bazar-master when [they] was at Mhow, and so on and so on” (Kipling). Later on they mention that they called one of the chiefs Kafuzelum because “it was like enough to his real name” (Kipling, my emphasis); apparently his real name was not worth trying for. It does not even occur to these inconsiderate colonizers, Dravot and Carnehan, that the native chiefs should be respected enough to be called by their own names. For the sake of easing the new kings’ tongues they shall all have English names, except for Kafuzelum, whose butchered name is a mocking insult. By renaming the locals, Dravot and Carnehan are revoking their Kafiristani identity, and replacing it with an English one, to make them more manageable.

            The way postcolonial cultures have responded to generations of colonial management and identity suppression has been to reassert their own personal and national identities. In some textual instances, like Train to Pakistan (1956), the postcolonial identity seems confused and ill-established because of the long-running influence of the colonizer and the shock of decolonization. Literature of the negritude movement in the mid-twentieth century focuses on brotherhood and pride in their black identity and heritage—even if the people cannot fully remember what that was. Jasmine (1989) is a striking example of third-wave colonialism, in a way, and the title character readily changes her identity to survive her winding path across America. All of these postcolonial texts that I will cover represent people—nations—dealing with the identity-vacuum left when their colonizers were ousted. They are struggling to (re)create themselves.

            Iqbal Singh is one of the main characters in Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan (1956); a story that portrays a ground-level view of the Partition of India in 1947, after the British Empire gave up the colony. Iqbal is an Indian man who has returned from his studies in England. A postcolonial character more highly educated than the other characters around him, he is singled-out, deferred to, and treated as an outsider in the small town of Mano Majra, where the story takes place. His name, however, helps him to blend in with the two warring factions that have sprung out of the Partition—the Sikhs and the Muslims. “Iqbal,” we are told in the novel, is “one of the few names common to the three communities” that reside in India, the Muslims, the Hindus, and the Sikhs. When he arrives in Mano Majra, where he plans to plant the seeds of communism in the newly liberated India, Iqbal repeatedly introduces himself with only his first name, and the people around him politely assume he is a friend. “He did not have to say what Iqbal he was. He could be a Muslim, Iqbal Mohammed. He could be a Hindu, Iqbal Chand, or a Sikh, Iqbal Singh” (Singh 35). Iqbal is able to flex his identity to fit anywhere in this volatile postcolonial nation, and it is how he survives some of the more dangerous action in the novel. The focus on Iqbal’s ambiguous identity through out the novel is significant, but he ultimately becomes a disappointing character as he does nothing to save the people of the town because he spends too much time thinking and never decides to act.

            The other main character in Train to Pakistan, perhaps a foil to Iqbal, is Juggut Singh, a person very secure in his identity as a Sikh “budmash” or “bad character”. Juggut embraces “budmash” like a title that he is proud of; an explanation of his life and his actions rather than the result of them. At times it is even taken as his last name, “Jugga Budmash.” Juggut says that what makes him a budmash “is our fate. It is written on our foreheads and on the lines of our hands. I am always wanting to do something. When there is plowing to be done or the harvest to be gathered, then I am busy. When there is no work, my hands still itch to do something. So I do something, and it is always wrong” (Singh 61). He takes pride in his budmash identity; he believes it is inseparable from who he is. It is this powerful sense of identity that makes Jugga the hero of the novel. He saves Nooran and the rest of the villagers on the train, just like he promised her he would at the opening of the novel: “No one can harm you while I live […] I am not a budmash for nothing” (Singh 16).

            The focus on Iqbal’s and Juggut’s identity is highlighted throughout Train to Pakistan. Iqbal has been influenced by British colonization and is now trying to make his way in postcolonial India. His postcolonial attitude contributes to his lack of religion and traditional values, thus he has no qualms associating himself with whoever is safest at the time. Iqbal takes advantage of the popularity of his name and slips between identities and religious/political groups. Juggut is a character unaffected by colonialism or postcolonialism, as far as he can see. As the townspeople say, “Freedom must be a good thing. But what will we get out of it? […] We were the slaves of the English, now we will be slaves of the educated Indians—or the Pakistanis” (Singh 48), but their lives in Mano Majra, far away from any major civilization, will not change. Juggut and his fellow villagers did not feel the influence of England much, and they do not expect the effects of postcolonialism to reach them either. Juggut is perhaps a representation of pure India. He knows who he is; he is traditional and proud. At the end of the novel, Juggut, the pure, unaffected man strong in his identity is our hero; and Iqbal, who was always so ambiguous and opportunistic, fades into obscurity.

            The poets of the negritude movement of the mid-twentieth century admire people like Juggut, who have a strong sense of their country’s tradition and history, because this contributes to their identity. The negritude movement was an “[e]ffort to redeem blackness from associations with ugliness or evil and establish its inherent beauty or value” (White)—associations that had been forced on black people by their colonizers. Just like Dravot and Carnehan renaming the Kafiristanis, European colonizers found their African and Caribbean victims easier to manage if they forced a new identity on them. Blackness became a quick cue to ridicule, disrespect, and belittlement. Negritude poets like Aimé Césaire and Langston Hughes work to recreate an identity for black people that is a positive and proud one. In an excerpt from Césaire’s “A Tempest” (1968), Caliban says:

            Prospero, you are the master of illusion.

            Lying is your trademark.

            And you have lied so much to me

            (lied about the world, lied about me)

            that you have ended by imposing on me

            an image of myself.

            underdeveloped, you brand me, inferior,

            That ís the way you have forced me to see myself

            I detest that image!  What's more, it's a lie!

            But now I know you, you old cancer,

            and I know myself as well. (Cesaire 162)

Prospero is the colonizer of Caliban’s home island, and (like Robinson Crusoe to Friday, before the midterm) Prospero takes Caliban as his slave and re-identifies him. In this passage at the end of “A Tempest,” Caliban throws off the image of himself forced on him by his colonizer and, when Prospero leaves, Caliban will be ready to (re)create his identity as a postcolonial person. Meanwhile, Langston Hughes’ speaker in “Dream Variations” (1932), is celebrating his identity as a beautiful, peaceful black person. The speaker relates himself to the night “tenderly,” “gently” coming “dark” and “black like me” (Hughes). Both Césaire and Hughes are helping to redeem the identity of black people that was taken from them and distorted by their colonizers.

            This identity crisis that postcolonial people are put through can perhaps find no better voice than in Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine (1989). The title character’s birth-name is Jyoti; she is a Hindu woman born and raised in rural India. With the novel’s quick pace, the leading-lady is flung from one city to another, from one side of the world to the other. In each city she takes on a new life and a new name. She is Jyoti in Hasnapur, India; Jasmine in metropolitain Jullundhar, India; Jazzy in Florida; Jase in New York City; Jane in Baden, Iowa. Everywhere that Jasmine (the name she is most often referred to as in criticism because of the novel’s title) goes she takes on a new identity to fit in. I believe that Jasmine can be understood as a third-wave postcolonial person, leaving her previously colonized India and traveling to a western country—not the same one that had colonized her home country, but America and Great Britain are similar in culture and language, so the theory still holds. Jasmine feels pressure from others—her husband, benefactors, friends, lovers—to (re)create an identity for herself but she says she “felt suspended between worlds,” as she “shuttled between identities” (Mukherjee 76-7). The trend starts when she moves to Jullundhar with her modernist husband; “[t]o break off the past, he gave me a new name: Jasmine” (Mukherjee 77). Several times, she compares her many identities against each other, as in this passage:

“Jyoti of Hasnapur was not Jasmine, Duff’s day mummy and Taylor and Wylie’s au pair in Manhattan [Jase]; that Jasmine isn’t this Jane Ripplemeyer, […] And which of us is the undetected murderer […] which of us has held a dying husband, which of us was raped?” (Mukherjee 127, her emphasis)

Each name has its own history, its own personality. Jasmine is a third-wave postcolonial victim, in a way, suffering from a lack of clear identity. By the end of the novel, Jasmine runs away with one of the (several) men she has truly loved (but can a person without a real sense of their personhood really love another person?). Maybe she will finally settle down and be herself, or maybe that chance at a true identity was lost. Jasmine leaves us feeling melancholy and wondering what can happen to this unfortunate woman.

            Colonial works like The Man Who Would be King help us to look back centuries into history and understand the way colonizers felt about and dealt with their colonized others. The more contemporary works of postcolonial literature struggle with the identity crises left in the wake of colonialism, and illuminate for us their issues and aspirations for a better future. Postcolonial people represent through their literature a search for an identity; a (re)creation of their culture, their history, and their personhood.

Works Cited

Césaire, Aimé. “A Tempest.” 1968.

            <http://coursesite.cl.uh.edu/HSH/Whitec/xauthors/cesaire.htm>. 11 December 2009.

 Hughes, Langston. “Dream Variations.” 1932.

            <http://coursesite.cl.uh.edu/HSH/Whitec/texts/poems/hughesdreams.htm>. 11   December 2009.

Kipling, Rudyard. The Man Who Would be King. 1888.

            <http://coursesite.cl.uh.edu/HSH/Whitec/texts/manking/manwhoking.htm>. 11   December 2009. 

Mukherjee, Bharati. Jasmine. New York: Grove Press. 1989.

Singh, Khushwant. Train to Pakistan. New York: Grove Press. 1956.

White, Craig. “Negritude.” <http://coursesite.cl.uh.edu/HSH/Whitec/terms/negritude.htm>. 11

            December 2009.