Interview 10/05/04
In this transcript:
[1: post-colonialism; personal history]
[2: translation; right to narrate]
[3: WEF; "the right sort of migrant]
[4: abu ghraib; the world social forum; cosmopolitanism ]
[5: revolution; the internet; deleuze & guattari]
Description: Dapper man, accent like Tariq Ali, British with a lilt, very intense and engaged. Periodically leans forward and touches my wrist to emphasis a point. Wearing dark blue, brushed cotton suit with mandarin collar over blue and white striped shirt with white cuffs. Gold cufflinks with emeralds? Jacket sleeves folded up very stylishly. Sunglasses until almost the very end when he took them off and turned more to face me, intense brown eyes, but friendly with crinkled smile lines around the edges. White beard. Salt and pepper hair, balding in front and most of the way to the back. Hair collar length.
(Photograph from The Age; by Rebecca Hallas)
Setting: Treasury Gardens, Melbourne. Sunny day. We are sitting on a park bench, half shaded. We have had a brief discussion about Victorian architecture in Melbourne and colonial impulses to recreate home.
“This could be Hyde Park in London!” he says as we enter Treasury Gardens. The streets of Naples, he says, remind him of Bombay. “Standing at one end of the bay in Naples, I can almost see how if I just turn right down that corner, I’d be at my grandmother’s house. It’s like my history is laid out along the bay.”
I talked a little about my experiences of Kiev and how I didn’t expect it to look like that. He talked about his expectations of Ulster because of media representation. At this point, the tape recorder is switched on for a tape check.
HB: Talking about Baghdad, and what’s it like because your view of it’s so fixed in a situation which is so desperate and dismal, and with the circulation of images through the media now you really only have your most intimate engagement with places either when they’re sites of huge disaster or when they’re sites of some particular celebration.
So you know they get fixed in that moment.
[actual interview begins here]
RB: I’m incredibly honoured to be interviewing you, because I’m a lowly Master’s student. [explains stuff]
Because this is a mainstream newspaper, could you give us a quick definition of post-colonialism?
HB: I think I want to say three things to start off with. Initially, I think the word post-colonial, which as you know is very problematic, is rejected by some who think it means after colonialism; repudiated by others who that in the global world we’re really in a neo-colonial situation so why have these fuzzy definitions of post-colonial; still opposed by those who wonder why the independent world, the third world which was engaged in such desperate and anti-colonial movements should still be seen and spoken of as post-colonial, I mean, does freedom never come? Can you never shake off a history and move into your own space?
And a definition is very difficult because of these three definitions and I think there is truth in all of them.
But if you take a historical approach and ask yourself when did this term emerge, then I think you get some sort of sense of what at its best it was trying to suggest. The 50s of course was the great period of anti-colonial thinking — earlier than that of course, but that was the mid-century moment of anti-colonial thought, Indian independence, the North African situation. And then I think there was a sense running through the 60s and even the 70s that independence was in many ways only another name for economic dependence of the third world on western powers, it was the time of the great superpowers that really strode the world like colossi and there was a great pressure to join up on one side or another, so at that point, economically and politically, it was neo-colonialism, it was a new kind of dependence.
I think when the term post-colonialism most significantly in the 80s it was to try and give a sense of the very contradictory nature of the once colonised world. First of course I say that there are these three definitions, these three moments which are wrapped into the term, but I think it was also to suggest that, yes, economic and political and cultural dependence did exist in many ways, that on the other hand, these were countries that had had at least 30 or 40 years of independence and that many of the internal social and cultural dynamics had developed after colonialism, in a post-colonial world but that did not mean they were not related to the earlier, so they had developed in that moment and they should be seen as cultural energies, political energies, sometimes seen as coming out of that locality. You could no longer simply tie those countries back to the colonial past, however dominant politically and culturally those colonial powers had been. In this sense, post-colonialism was an attempt to look at grassroots movements (and I’m using that more metaphorically, I don’t mean simply movements of the underclass or the peasants, but look at these areas, these countries, these cultures as producing their own forms of cultural identification, their own values, their notions of [unintelligible].
Postcolonial doesn’t mean after colonialism, simply. The post is just there in a way as a marker. And it’s a marker that points in two directions. It says that there is a moment where a certain form of dominant hegemonic colonialism has passed but its effects continue. And that there are societies now that are coming to terms with their own cultural destinies, past and present, producing their own social forms, their own cultural forms and in that sense they are in a process of transformation. I think the best sense of the postcolonial is to acknowledge transformation. And transition.
RB: How does your personal history inform your understanding of this transformation?
HB: You know, I belong to a small community, a Zoroastrian community, of people called the Parsis, who migrated from Persia in the 7th century to India and settled along the Western coast of the country, were largely a peasant community and then in the 18th and 19th century became significant participants in the urbanisation and the metropolitanisation of India. Largely a community, it’s a very small community of 120,000 people worldwide, now a diasporic community to the extent of which of course Bombay is still the hub of Parsis and there’s some in the rest of India, in Pakistan, and so on but lots in Canada, Australia, United States to some extent. So if I suggested that the concept of the post-colonial is interesting for its attempt to think about historical and cultural contradictions and confluences and the sense of transition and transformation that that creates, the Parsi community, as a small, unpersecuted minority, very interesting, one of the very few, tiny minorities in India, largely or I would say, no persecution by any kind of standard of minority, but the community in a way reflected many of the themes we’ve already started talking about. It was commercially very successful, largely professional class, a community that John Stuart Mill described as the utilitarians of India, it’s a community that was quite cosmopolitan in its way and became a bridging community between the British and the Hindus and the Muslim community. It did not have the regulative cultural practices; it was much more open, no meat eaters. It was like a translational community and that’s why I find the Parsi community rather resonant with the fate of the post-colonial or the definition. Just as the postcolonial as I suggest is a complex of contradictions, you know it’s a state of translation and transformation, you know the Parsi community is a lot like that. So, it was a community that really lived its life in many languages, in my home we spoke Gujaratiwe spoke English, my grandmother spoke English and Gujarati and Hindi and also learnt German. My mother was quite interested in learning French. It was very cosmopolitan. Rather euro-centred in its cultural tastes. And until quite recently it had no great cultural renaissance in the 18th and 19th century, you know the sort of moment where many peoples sort of re-invented modernity. There were no great 19th century novels written by Parsi, no great classical musical traditions. Individuals participated in both but it was not defining of the Parsi community. Parsis were great translators between cultures. They had a sustained ethic of tolerance. They knew exactly and were very strategic in their affiliations to various communities, so it doesn’t surprise you that somebody like John Stuart Mill who was the great proponent of the modern notion of toleration would see them as very tolerant, utilitarian and successful.