Organizing Empire: Individualism, collective agency and India By Purnima Bose, Zubaan, Rs 495

One of the significant aspects of what Bill Ashcroft calls “the post-colonial transformation” is the creation of allegory. Purnima Bose allegorizes “the individual” in the colonial context by projecting him or her as a representational site where collective agencies play themselves out. Bose touches on the problematics of this representation by foregrounding the ambiguity implicit in the process on the one hand, and by capturing the tension that this representation entails on the other.

In the four chapters of the book, Bose compares the colonial and nationalist discourses about certain events of colonial India. She identifies an individual who emerges as a key figure in these discourses and goes on to examine how his individualist action is “overdetermined” by prevalent social norms, moral codes and ideological biases. Since this examination is carried out in written documents, Bose’s study of individual subjecthood concurs with her analysis of “the political economy” of language as a system of signs. Bose’s encounter with the rhetorical strategies employed by both the parties in the bargain helps her to explore the semiotic continuum between the signifier and the signified in a given political context of India.

As Bose maps out the individual response to and resistance against the colonial “dominance without hegemony”, she is alert to the inescapable duality of individual subjecthood. She draws upon Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s formulation of the elitist-subaltern subject, indicating that an individual (a woman, for example) can be a member of an elite class economically, whereas, from the perspective of gender, can represent the subaltern.

The first chapter of the book, titled “Rogue-Colonial Individualism”, focuses on General Reginald Edward Harry Dyer, the perpetrator of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre. Bose shows how he was “pathologized” in colonial discourses as an aberrant individual, transgressing the colonial ‘rule of law’, which presumably precludes any use of force. Dyer comes through as an individual strategically disowned by the very collective agency he sought to represent.

In the concluding chapters of the book, Bose discusses three other forms of individualism — the feminist-nationalist, the heroic-nationalist and the heroic-colonial, on a similar vein. These discussions, more than anything else, demonstrate the liminality of the subject-position of the individuals. The book is a case-study of the allegory of representation, which harbours a ‘deep structure’ of meaning, sending occasional ripples to the surface.