The Burden of English

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

Burden- 2 chief senses.

First- the content of a song or an account. In this case, the import of the task
of teaching and studying English in the colonies.

Second- a singular load to carry, in a special way.

Not about English language policy but of the teaching, specifically, of the
predicament of the teaching of English literature in postcolonial India.
• What is the basic difference between teaching a second language as an
instrument of communication and teaching the same language so that the
student can appreciate literature?

▪ Teaching second language > mechanics of the language.

▪ Teaching literature > To shape the mind of the student so that it can
resemble the mind of the so-called implied reader of the literary text, even
when that is a historically distanced cultural fiction.
• Implied Reader

▪ The figure of an implied reader is constructed within a consolidated system of

cultural representation. The appropriate culture in this context is the one
supposedly indigenous to the literature under consideration.

▪ Our ideal student of British literature (who becomes the implied reader here)
was expected so to internalize this play of cultural self-representation that she
would be able to "relate to the text,“ and "identify" with it. (Spivak calls them
two most naïve kind of literary pedagogy)
Implied Reader (contd)

▪ The implied reader is imagined, in relation to persons, places, and times.

▪ One cannot make sense of anything written or spoken without at least implicitly
assuming that it was destined for you, that you are its implied reader.

▪ When this sense of the latent destiny of the texts of a literary tradition is
developed along disciplinary lines, it creates an alienating cultural indoctrination
that is out of step with the historical moment.
Spivak discusses a few literary figurations of the gradual cultural alienation for the
successful teaching of English literature in India.

Figurative as opposed to literal

▪ When a piece of prose reasonably argues a point, we understand this as its literal
message.
▪ When it advances this point through its form, through images, metaphors, and
indeed its general rhetoricity (quality of being rhetorical; seeking to influence the
response of the reader) we call it figuration or figuring-forth.
▪ The literal and the figurative depend upon each other even as they interrupt
each other. They can be defined apart but they make each other operate.
• Literature buys your assent in an almost clandestine way and therefore it is an
excellent instrument for a slow transformation of the mind. For good or for ill.

• The so called successful reader > Reads with pleasure > identifies implicitly with
the value system figured forth by literature and gives assent to it.

• Spivak wants the teacher to make visible what is merely clandestine.

Tagore’s “Didi” - "The Elder Sister"

• Objective

▪ To illustrate how the implied reader is drawn into patterns of cultural value as
she assents to a text, says "yes" to its judgments, in other words, reads it with
pleasure.

▪ When we teach our students to read with pleasure texts where the implied
reader is culturally alien and hegemonic, the assent might bring a degree of
alienation.
Plot of “Didi”

Shoshi was the only daughter of an elderly couple. Her husband Joygopal was
hoping to inherit their property. Her parents had a son in late middle age. After
their death, Shoshi takes her orphaned \infant brother to her bosom almost in
preference to her own sons. Joygopal, enraged by the loss of his inheritance, does
everything to take it away from the orphan boy, and indeed tries to precipitate his
death by neglecting a serious illness. At this point, the English magistrate for the
area comes on tour. Shoshi delivers her brother over to the magistrate. She soon
dies mysteriously and is cremated overnight.
• The implied reader of this story > one who reads it with pleasure and gives
assent to it. (upper middle class female in urban Bengal)
• Tagore’s female characters > emancipated women
• Shoshi > a village woman whose love for her brother emancipates her >
she delivers her brother to the Englishman as she sees that the impartial
white colonial administrator will be a better ma-baap (parent) than her self-
interested Indian kin.
• Shoshi remains a prisoner of the patriarchal system.
• At any rate, the implied reader is not sure if Shoshi chooses to remain with
or is a prisoner of patriarchy, and, indeed, still cannot be sure where she
stands within this situation.
• Here the assent to the story is given by seeing the entire colonial system as
a way out of indigenous patriarchy, thus deriving pleasure from reading.
Why study “Didi,” a high-culture vernacular text as we think of the burden of
English?
▪ The goal of teaching literature is epistemological and epistemic: transforming the
way in which objects of knowledge are constructed. The human being that is
inevitably gendered is the chief object of knowledge.
▪ Tagore- "the Bengal Renaissance.”
▪ Tagore’s participation in the epistemic transformation by way of a rural woman.
▪ Implied reader > women who are cultural representatives of Colonial India.
Women constituted by, and constituting such "minds" (as that of the characters)
become the culturally representative "implied reader." Therefore the problem of
the teaching of English literature is not separated from the development of the
colonial subject.
Implied reader- Educated upper class women who do not belong to Shoshi’s class.
Class-separation > feeling of identity-in-difference > a site of negotiations.
Shoshi’s subjectivity

• Mixture of Sanskritised and colloquial Bengali.

• romantic love or prem (in descriptive third person with no hint of indirect free
style- denied access to Sanskritized subjectivity)
• biraho or love-in-absence
• sneho or affection for her brother Nilmoni. Eg: "krishokaay brihatmastak
gombheermukh shyambarno chheleti." . The available English translation, "the
heavy-pated, grave-faced dusky child," is, of course, hopeless at catching these
mechanics.
Soshi’s subjectivity

• The subordination of love or prem for her husband to affection or sneho for her
orphan brother. (as romantic love is not the legitimate model of the cementing
emotion of the institution of the Indian marriage.)
• Shoshi remains in her gendered private sphere, patriarchal enclosure.
• Shoshi enters the public sphere > direct contact with the British colonial
authority and chooses to re-enter the patriarchal enclosure. She is destroyed by
this choice.
• Shoshi chooses to remain in the static culture, sending the young male into the
dynamic colonial culture. This according to the patriarchal system, is more like a
‘woman.’
• A richly constructed, richly praised female subject who chooses to remain within
the indigenous patriarchal structure; with confidence in the Magistrate as foster-
father, another mark of her heroism.
▪ The Magistrate is constructed as a subject who is aware of this ambivalence > he
smiles at Shoshi’s reply that she will return to her husband’s house and that she
has nothing to worry about.

▪ The student reader’s limited and divided assent > says “yes” and “no” to
Shoshi’s decisions. (This limited and divided assent is parodied in Kipling’s Kim)

▪ Neighbour Tara > rages against husbands at the beginning of the story, but is
displeased when Shoshi leaves her husband's house to look after her sick
brother: "If you have to fight your husband why not sit at home.”
 Rudyard Kipling- Kim
• Kim is an Irish orphan who earns his living by running errands on the streets of
Lahore. He is attached to the local culture and becomes the disciple of a Tibetan
Lama who is in search of a sacred river, and proceeds on a journey covering the
whole of India. Kim eventually becomes a spy and a mapmaker for the British
army. (Great Game- land survey for the British/ defence against the Russians)
• Hurree Babu - Indian Bengali intelligence official working for the British > hybrid
(obligations of immersion in and resistance to Englishness) “How am I to fear the
absolutely non-existent?" said Hurree Babu, talking English to reassure himself. It
is an awful thing still to dread the magic that you contemptuously investigate-to
collect folklore for the Royal Society with a lively belief in all the Powers of
Darkness.
Shoshi and Huree Babu

• Shoshi > productive and chosen contradiction

• Self-sacrifice to culture, while bequeathing the future to the colonist.

• Huree Babu > unproductive contradiction.

• Bondage to a superstitious, indigenous culture while mouthing sublime
doctrine.
• Stands for the distinctive failure of the colonial subject.
 Task of the English Teacher

• To undo the divide between English and vernacular literatures.

• The complexity of their relationship, collaborative/parasitical/contrary/resistant,

be allowed to surface in literary pedagogy. They are different but complicit.
(involved in a common activity- here of buying assent from the reader)
Tagore’s Gora
• Irish orphan, adopted by a Hindu woman- closely associated with Orthodox
Brahmin culture, but later agrees with the ideals of Brahmo Samaj (opposed
ritual- ridden Hinduism)

• Gora > Counter Kim

• The heroes of both novels are Irish orphans of the Indian Mutiny, turned Indian.
But there the resemblance ends. Gora becomes both a nationalist Indian and a
tremendously orthodox Brahman. At the end of the novel he finds out that he is
not a Brahman, not even a Hindu or an Indian by birth.
Gora and Soshi
• Soshi is a divided subject. (She chooses to return to her culture and she perishes)
• Gora not a divided subject- if he chooses a return to culture, he is also the
inheritor of the future.
• The theme of sacrifice is less ambivalent in Gora.
• The colonial reader of Gora will be race and gender divided in Gora (Gora being a
European male) and class divided from Shoshi. (reader- upper class, Shoshi-
lower class)
• In the case of Gora, the reader looks from below and in the case of Shoshi, from
above.
• It is in the difference and deferment between the hero and the reader (whether from
above or below, in the context of gender and class) that readership thrives.
• The teacher of literature can open this space of difference (never an identity) by
undoing the institutional difference between imperialist literature and native literature
(typical difference as indicated by the institutions). The actual difference will appear
only then. (gender, race and class)
• An example of this undoing of institutional difference can be found in Binodini Dasi’s
My Life. (autobiography of Binodini Dasi, a Bengali theatre actress)
• Explains how Girish Babu (an actor) gave her lessons narrating about British actresses
and writers > thus learned to do things with knowledge and intelligence.
• The idea that apprenticeship with the West introduces analytic learning in place of rote
learning. (continues to this day)
• Clearly shows the construction of the colonial subject as contradictory implied reader
of the imperial text. (saying only yes, yes)
• Her master, Bankim is the typical successful colonial subject by the Babu culture of
Bengal that Kipling mocks.
• Binodini> not a rural subaltern, but born in urban Calcutta- financially poor- her
grandmother conducted the marriage between Binodini’s five year old brother
and a 2 ½ year old balika- ornaments sold- Binodini, a female individualist is not
upset about the selling of ornaments of the child bride- but pleased with her
mother and grandmother who buys food for them- the child groom dies soon
after marriage- no mention of the child bride who is deprived of her ornaments
and life- as an artist, male suppression of the competitive female- the feminist
has the dubious task of marking the division in womanspace- Binodini is more
expressive than Shoshi- displeased with her men’s refusal to have a share in the
B- Theatre.
The Buddha of Suburbia- Hanif Kureishi
• Coloniality> postcoloniality> migrancy
• Karim, the central character not allowed to be English. In performances, he
is asked to be Indian> plays Mowgli in The Jungle Book- outside the theatre,
he lives in the incredible violence of racism.
• We like to keep alive the divide between real Indian and migrant Indian.
• Binodini’s imagined England and Karim’s imagined India.
• Karim’s account of his Indian identity> how he tries to deny it. “But I did
feel, looking at these strange creatures now- these Indians-that in some
way these were my people, and that I'd spent my life denying or avoiding
that fact.”
• Sacrificial choice of Shoshi-
• Unfetishized choice of a culture accessible to the white migrant.
• Leisurely classroom consideration of the difference will make appear how
the representations of ‘race,’ of ‘gendering,’ of religion/ culture construct
the chain of displacements upon these examples.
• Students must be encouraged to place them on the chain of
displacements. Attention should be given to the rhetorical conduct of each
link on the chain and the student should be encouraged to figure out
gender and class difference in complicity.
• Spivak wants the classrooms and the studies inter-literary, not
comparative.
• A kind of homeopathic gesture- scratching at the epistemic fracture, by
awkwardly assuming a language to be an epistemic system and staging a collision
between Kipling and Tagore, Didi and Binodini, Mary Oraon (The Hunt) and
Karim.
• Allows floating reading- into Commonwealth Literature.
• Spivak’s objective was to undo the imported distinction between centre and
periphery as well as some native institutional divisions by looking at literature as
the staged battle- ground of epistemes.
• One looks forward to an alternative literary historiography of postcoloniality
critical of the hierarchical imprint of “the Commonwealth.”
• To a thinking that situates the postcolonial as a moment in the history of cultural
politics.
 Thank You
Nayomi Rajan Dept. of

English St. Peter’s College,

Kolenchery