3 - Decolonization, community, nationalism: Gandhi, Nandy and the Subaltern Studies Collective

Summary

If Fanon and Sartre's writing on colonial Manichaeism, emergent nationalism and the new humanism is clearly directed against French colonialism in Algeria, Africa and the Caribbean, then the undoing of British colonialism required, at least for the major Indian anti-colonial thinkers, a rather different form of critique. French colonialism, in particular in Algeria, promoted the assimilation of the foreign territory to French control and to French culture, whereas British colonialism tended to privilege a form of paternalism or indirect rule. Moreover, the conquest and control of Algeria had been from beginning to end a bloody process and, despite the French policy of assimilation, resulted in repeated violent clashes and ongoing segregation. The French “mission civilisatrice” also produced, according to Fanon and Sartre, a disturbing form of racism that utterly severed and destroyed the colonized's very self-image. In exploring British colonialism in India, thinkers such as Mahatma Gandhi, Ashis Nandy and Partha Chatterjee stress less strikingly the Manichaeism of the colonial vision and focus instead on its administrative structures, its association with capitalism and economic and social inequality. Fanon and Sartre were also clearly virulently anti-capitalist in their writings on colonialism but, unlike these thinkers, in their writing on India Gandhi and the others do not conceive the shortcomings of the European economic and political system as related to such a distinct binary opposition between colonizer and native.

Indeed, one of Gandhi's persistent preoccupations was why the British had colonized India or, more precisely, why the Indians had apparently surrendered the control of their territory to them.