Vol. 6, Issue 1, Jul-Dec 2018

Page: 90-96

LOOKING FROM THE WRONG END OF THE TELESCOPE: REVERSAL AND ITS LIMITS IN AMITAV GHOSH’S “THE IMAM AND THE INDIAN”

Pankaj Sharma

Received Date: 2018-10-14

Accepted Date: 2018-11-15

Published Date: 2018-11-27

Amitav Ghosh's essay "The Imam and the Indian" gives its title to his 2002 prose collection. It restages a colonial hierarchy inside one Egyptian village. An imam presses an Oxford-trained Indian anthropologist for numbers. Which country has more tanks, he asks: Egypt or India? Neither man built that scale of value. Neither can step outside it. This paper reads the exchange as a study in reversal and its limits within postcolonial criticism. Reverse the gaze, and the instrument stays the same. Ghosh's telescope is still ground in Enlightenment categories of progress and civilisation. The argument draws on four thinkers. Ashis Nandy supplies colonialism's civilising claim. Homi Bhabha's theory of colonial mimicry explains why Ghosh's English prose cannot escape the apparatus it describes. Edward Said's critique of representational authority sharpens the point. Gayatri Spivak's warning against ventriloquising the subaltern sharpens it further, and together they frame the imam as neither mouthpiece nor dupe. Ghosh's essay, the paper argues, refuses a comforting counternarrative in which the once-colonised author simply wins. Neither the imam's insistence on hardware nor Ghosh's retreat into civilisational depth escapes one inherited hierarchy of nations. The essay even implicates its own Western-published form in the mimicry it names. That self-implicating restraint, not a triumphant reversal, is the paper's real argument. It recasts "The Imam and the Indian" as a methodological statement for postcolonial criticism at large. Reversing who holds the telescope, the paper concludes, is not the same task as grinding a new lens.

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References

• Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. Routledge, 1994.
• Ghosh, Amitav. The Imam and the Indian: Prose Pieces. Ravi Dayal Publisher / Permanent Black, 2002.
• Nandy, Ashis. The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism. Oxford University Press, 1983.
• Said, Edward W. Orientalism. Pantheon Books, 1978.
• Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 'Can the Subaltern Speak?' Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, University of Illinois Press, 1988, pp. 271–313.