By Amita Nijhawan.
In the many years I knew him before he died in 2007, my grandfather would casually throw into conversation the time when he had worked in Gandhi’s sevagram and that time when Annie Besant offered him a lift in her car. Back in the 1940s, my grandfather was active in the anti-colonial movement in India. He was part of peaceful protests against British colonialism that put him in situations where he said he was afraid he was going to be executed at any moment.
Yet, at the same time, my grandfather studied English Literature in colleges established by the British in India. After the British left India, he and my grandmother moved to London, he to study psychoanalysis in the Tavistock Institute, and she to get a PhD in Psychology.
While my grandparents could see the brutal nature of the imperialist project, they were also fully participating subjects of the enlightenment. They believed in the place of higher education (in a higher education system established by the British that as good as eradicated older systems of education in the sub-continent) in doing away with ‘superstition’ and ‘backward’ beliefs. They could see the violent nature of colonialism when it was violent to their bodies, but couldn’t necessarily see the way power conditioned, even formed, their minds and made them ‘primitive’ to themselves. Their bookshelves were full of Austen, Hardy, Dickens and the Brontë sisters, and it was only in his later years that my grandfather started delving more into Tagore and Narayanan.
I was struck afresh with these conundrums when listening to the wonderful talk by Dr Adam Elliot-Cooper and Dr Amit Singh in the series Discussing Decolonisation at York St John University. As Dr Elliot-Cooper pointed out, race has not only justified but in fact been used to organise the imperialist project. Britain, as a nation-state, was established in the 1700s, as Dr Elliot-Cooper reminded us, a time when Britain already had colonies around the world. Imperialism is not just a facet of British-ness, but an integral part of it. British education systems that were set up in British colonies deployed race to justify their ‘civilising’ mission, and, in fact, they were self-avowedly installed so that colonial subjects could be ‘almost’ but not quite British (if I may paraphrase Homi Bhabha, 1984).
Dr Elliot-Cooper pointed out something that I am forced to confront every time I listen to the news. Colonialism was carried out through deploying racism, but it was achieved through what Sven Beckert (2015) calls ‘war capitalism’. It was essentially a profit-driven enterprise supported by guns and warfare that deeply connected colonial practices of annexation and extraction in Asia with slavery in Africa, the Caribbean and the Americas. This, unfortunately, isn’t just ‘history.’ It is very much how large nation states still make sure their investments in oil and weapons (as Dr Elliot-Cooper said, and I paraphrase) are realised to the full – through war-backed capitalism around the globe.
In higher education, then, it is our job to uncover and disrupt how imperialism works and how it is intrinsically connected to race. Dr Singh pointed out that we need to explore and study not colonial history, but in fact, history! In order to disrupt the imperialist fabric of our education systems, we need to rethink how we do community and humanity, instead of punishment and war. We need to think not only about how we have enacted and deployed race elsewhere, but how we continue to do so in Britain.
The talk was attended by over a hundred and sixty participants. It was co-facilitated and led by Dr Laura Key and Lucy Potter and it led to a lively Q&A. This event was part of an incredibly important series to bring together participants from around the UK and beyond to discuss the enduring nature of imperialism and neo-liberal ideals around which our education systems are based. Thinking differently about community and human rights and values is a step towards dismantling these top-down and often-violent structures.
References
Beckert, S. (2015) Empire of Cotton: A Global History. Harlow: Penguin Books.
Bhabha, H. (1984) ‘Of mimicry and man: the ambivalence of colonial discourse’. Discipleship: A Special Issue on Psychoanalysis 28, pp. 125-133.
Dr Amita Nijhawan is an Educational Developer, with a focus on co-creation and social justice, at the University of the Arts London. One of her key projects is to explore decoloniality not just in terms of teaching and learning, but to think of it in relation to decolonising forms and hierarchical structures of academic writing, and to explore decoloniality alongside feminist and social/climate justice projects. Her academic writing has appeared in New Theatre Quarterly, South Asian Popular Culture and Media Culture. Her creative writing has appeared in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Wasafiri, Berkeley Fiction Review, Brand and other literary magazines. She has been a writer-in-residence with Spread the Word, Literature Works, British Council and Leverhulme. Her decolonising resources can be found at: https://researchers.arts.ac.uk/1833-amita-nijhawan.