COLONIALISM, CULTURE AND RESISTANCE By K.N. Panikkar, Oxford, Rs 595

K.N. Panikkar, who taught at Jawaharlal Nehru University, remains a classical Marxist. This book is a collection of his articles on different aspects of the anti-colonial resistance. For Panikkar, resistance to colonialism took four forms — armed uprisings, social protests, cultural revivalism and intellectual opposition. The objective of this protest was to create alternative cultural, political and ideological spaces.

Panikkar asserts that the cultural critique of colonialism, by the colonized, explodes the myth of the civilizing mission of the colonizers. Although he is a classical Marxist, cultural consciousness plays a pivotal role for Panikkar. He quotes a letter by Friedrich Engels, dated January 20, 1894, where Engels states that though consciousness constitutes an element of the superstructure, which in turn is determined by economic conditions, occasionally the very evolution of the superstructure has a dialectical effect on the base. Hence, serious studies of cultural changes in the colonial context are necessary.

However, one of the principal limitations of the cultural and ideological baggage generated by the colonial intellectuals was the fact that the Indian intellectuals of the time remained under the bourgeois ideological hegemony. Therefore, they failed to develop a truly universalistic and humanistic outlook. Panikkar contends that even Vivekananda, the disciple of the universalist Ramakrishna, turned universalism upside down by declaring Hinduism as the only universal religion.

In a multi-religious society like India, religious identities and communal loyalties continuously come into play in social and political life. A suggested remedy is the “secularization of religion”. But, for Panikkar, this is precisely the weakness of the Indian notion of secularism. India’s historical experience of the 19th century proves that neither respect for all religions nor the idea of the unity of the godhead leads to secularism. Such ideas keep open the possibility of particularistic and antagonistic tendencies re-emerging. It is necessary to shift the discourse from accepting religion as a component of secularism to divorcing it from secularism altogether. A critique of religion and the struggle for secularization must be an integral part of transforming an exploitative socio-economic structure through social revolution.

Instead of being submerged within the national consciousness, religious identities became the rallying point for political mobilization in India.

However, colonial intervention did not culturally affect a majority of Indians. Even in the emergent culture of the English-educated middle-class, forms of residual culture were prominent. Hence, Lord Macaulay’s notion of this class as the recipient and reproducer of colonial culture was not quite successful.

The cultural and ideological struggle in colonial India inevitably assumed two dimensions. The first involved a struggle against the backward elements of traditional culture, while the second was the critical interrogation of the hegemonic influence of the colonial culture itself.

The past figured prominently in the quest for modernization in colonial India. Inquiry into the meaning of the past, and an assessment of its relevance to contemporary society, were part of the search for an authentic though inward-looking tradition, which became an alternative to the development charted by colonial modernization.

Transforming indigenous culture was an agenda central to the colonial domination of India. But the historiography of colonial India does not show such a simplistic opposition between colonialism and the resistance to it in the form of a nationalism. There was no unilateral development of an anti-colonial consciousness, instead there were contradictions and contesting voices.

Based on a variety of sources, in both English and Indian languages, Panikkar’s volume provides a balanced interpretation of the intellectual and cultural history of colonial India. It will thus interest historians, sociologists and scholars of cultural studies.