Humanism has its roots deeply engraved within Eurocentrism. The Cartesian hubris has transcended Europe from a geo-political entity to a socio-pedagogical entity marked by its self-reflexive reasoning. It is in this context the orient has been a ‘bete-noire’ for Europe and it has bestowed ‘bete-machine’ qualities in order to relegate the ‘natives’ to the level of animals, marking them with “the mechanistic limits of purely instinctual behaviour”. Postcolonial literature has been a scathing critique of such anomality of the natives. Amitav Ghosh’s novel Gun Island refers to a native mythological narrative of ‘Banduki Sodagorer Dham’ (The Shrine of the Gun Merchant) in order to revive the exoticism of ‘quirkish’ native myths as a site of postcolonial resistance. This revival has been constantly accompanied by the fall of colonial rationalistic logic(s) and whether this ‘rupturing’ of the Cartesian hubris can be considered as a posthuman imagination is the principal focus of the present essay.
To begin, I would like to discuss a little bit on the idea of ‘animality’. The construction of the idea of ‘animal’ is a post-cartesian phenomena and before Descartes there were no animals as such in the occident. There were creatures, beasts but no animals in a pre-cartesian world of the West. According to Laurie Shannon, “animal never appears in the benchmark English of the Great Bible (1539) the Geneva Bible (1560), or the King James Version (1611).” (Moore 303). Shannon further comments that the word ‘creature’ historically included the demons and angels that posited the humans within a complex multilayered cosmology. Then, what is the problem with the construction of an idea, ‘animal’? The idea in a post-cartesian world brought out a fundamental sense of animal in the modern world, that is essentially the solitary opposite of humanity (Moore 303). What Descartes did was, he bestowed the rationalistic behaviors exclusively on human and consigned all others beings as ‘bete-machine’, meaning, their behavior is completely instinctual and can be equated with a cog in the machine (like a clock) with automatic moving parts. Therefore, the animality has been a ‘bete-noire’ for the human world in post-cartesian times. This Cartesian binaric division elevated the human subjectivity and juxtaposed human and animals in a complete oppositional and hierarchical structure.
Therefore, West with its idea of the post-cartesian ‘animal’ found an oppositional construction that would essentially elevate the idea of the ‘human’. This elevation of the human eventually resulted in the Eurocentric humanism that had been started by the doctrine of Protagoras, “At the start of it all there is He: the classical ideal of ‘Man’… ‘the measure of all things’” (Braidotti 13). Later on, this was concretized and renewed by Leonardo da Vinci’s vitruvian man as a part of the Italian renaissance, that, later on was universalized as the model of human perfectibility. This idea of universality started setting standards not only for individuals but also for their cultures. Therefore, historically humanism developed as a model of civilization that coincided Europe with the “universalizing powers of self-reflexive reason” (Braidotti 13). This transformation of humanism into a cultural hegemony gained its gigantic stature due to its defense by various philosophers such as Hegel and Husserl. (Chakraborty 86).
While on one hand Hegel with his self-aggrandizing views assumed that Europe is just not a geo-political entity but an attribute, and has the capability of lending its qualities on any other subject (irrespective of race, culture, identity, etc), on the other Husserl in his celebrated essay, ‘The crisis of European Sciences’ argues that Europe announces itself as the harbinger of self-reflexivity and critical reason thereby universalizing humanistic norms. This argument posits Eurocentrism into a place that does not entail it as a contingent matter but transcends it as a structural practice, embedded within cultural and pedagogical matters as well. (Chakraborty 86).
This sense of transcendence not only placed Europe in a position to impose itself on the rest of the world but it also allowed them to relegate the rest of the world as a site of anomalous animality or anomanimality as Stephen D. Moore would put it (Moore 302). This anomanimality bestowed on the rest of world and predominantly the orient, was an off shoot of Eurocentric humanism and this fuelled the ‘imperial destinies’ of the West as Tony Davies points out (Davies 23). Therefore, the forcibly imposed anomanimality of the orient handed the West a historical prescription that legitimized the colonization and cultural violence. The cultural violence perpetrated by the West resulted in the need for the revival of supressed languages and cultures from a postcolonial angle. According to Edward Said, in a colonial setting the defence and revival of supressed languages and cultures as well as the assertion of national identity is necessary and understandable (Said 37).
In this juncture the essay tries to usher in a posthuman imagination. According to Erica Cudworth and Stephen Hobden, “The term posthumanism has been used in three principal ways: in the sense of a world after humanity; as forms of body modification and transhumanist ‘uplift’; and, our own usage, in the sense of a world comprised of more than human.”. It is a kind of resistance to humanistic ideals (Cudworth and Hobden 5). Therefore, as Rosi Braidotti argues, Said’s comment on the revival of supressed languages and cultures made the posthuman imagination even more nuanced regarding its resistance to humanistic ideals (Braidotti 16). In this context the essay explores whether, a text like Gun Island manifests a sense of revival of supressed cultural traditions as a reproach towards Eurocentric humanism.
The novel begins with a native word ‘bundook’ and it tries to revive a native myth as a site of postcolonial resistance. Due to the cultural violence of colonialism, the native folklores, legends and myths have remained on the fringes of history. These cultural edifices have been relegated to the margins by branding them as naïve, inadequate, insufficiently elaborated in the hierarchical structure of knowledge system. (Gordon 82). This cultural domination is well depicted in the text when the narrator Dinanath Datta says,
“There was a time in my childhood when the merchant Chand and his enemies, Manasa Devi, were as much part of my dream-world as Batman and Superman would become after I had learnt English and started to read comic books.” (Ghosh 6)
This subjugation of the indigenous cultural traditions and languages is more accentuated when the narrator meets his distant relative Kanai Dutt and the relative calls him as ‘Dinu’, his childhood indigenous nickname instead of the newly conceived ‘Deen’. (Ghosh 11) These cultural traditions and languages are what Foucault calls ‘les savoir des gens’ or popular knowledges (Gordon 82). These popular knowledges for Foucault are not as simple as common sense, these are the ‘rupturing’ elements in the concretized and systematic power structures that posit the colonial rationality in a hierarchical position and relegates the native peculiarity as naïve and nonsense.
Here the essay attempts to explore the Foucauldian grounding of ‘insurrection of subjugated knowledges’ (Gordon 82) as a site for postcolonial resistance. These subjugated native traditions have a sense of revival and reproach through Amitav Ghosh’s dealing of them. To assert this sense of reproach Ghosh takes the narrator to the exotics of the Sundarbans and there we see the narrator’s rationality being stripped off and there is a unification of the narrator and his native land. While travelling to the gun merchant’s shrine the narrator had to strip off his trousers and take recourse to a more indigenous ‘lungi’ and had to get rid of his wallet, phone and other equipment that represented technology and rationality, as they would be of no use in the exotics of nativity. The hierarchical knowledge structure of the colonial institutionalized rationality has been stormed with the narrator’s filthy fall on the muds of the Sundarbans. The narrator says, “Mud seeped into my mouth, my ears, my eyes: it was as if my body were being reclaimed by the primeval ooze”. (Ghosh 67)
This unification results in the complete abolishment of institutionalized knowledges inside the shrine. The narrator Dinu, (I also prefer using this as a mark of resistance) when confronted with the uncanny symbols engraved on the walls, finds them incomprehensible despite his institutionalized education. It is his affiliation to the native mythologies that allow him to interpret some of those engravings and for the other ones he has to take help of Rafi, a native boy. Here the boy with the aid of his memory and knowledge about the myth presents a sense of resistance towards colonial rationality. The narrator depicts him by saying “With his mop of unkempt hair and glistening, watchful eyes, he was at once feral and delicately graceful, like some wild, wary creatures that could at any moment take flight” (Ghosh 72). Here the term ‘creature’ brings into context the pre-cartesian times when it also included angels and demons, there by blurring the human-animal distinction. Here the boy Rafi becomes the harbinger of Derridean ‘khora’. Khora for Derrida is, “it is neither this nor that or that it is both this and that. It is not enough to recall that khora names neither this nor that, or, that khora says this and that” (Derrida 89). Therefore, Rafi is neither a ‘rationale’ like Dinu nor an ‘animal’ who can be relegated. He is a perfect example of the native who through his access to indigenous cultures ruptures and reconstructs hierarchical knowledge system.
So, the Sundarbans and its exoticism work as a counter space of practice, i.e a ‘heterotopia’. The text constantly questions the subjugation of native ‘quirks’ or instantiations of locally rooted belief by colonial modernity or its accompanying logic(s) of rationalistic knowledge. Here, the exoticism and its quirkish resistance regulate as a ‘heterotopic space’ (Cudworth and Hobden 154). According to Cudworth and Hobden these spaces work as ‘posthuman communities’ because they provide us with ‘negative emancipation’ (Cudworth and Hobden 72). Put simply, negative emancipation is that where we have to look for “heterotopias as multiple and heterogeneous spaces of alternative practice, rather than envisage utopias”. (Cudworth and Hobden 154) Amy Allen suggests that we should not look for Utopias because they are realistically unfeasible. Therefore, we have to look for counter spaces of practice that allow us to question the existing ways of living (Cudworth and Hobden 154). This is where the heterotopias, for Cudworth and Hobden, become posthuman communities and the work tries to look at the insertion of these native myths as a counter space of practice in order to usher in a posthuman imagination.
Works Cited
Braidotti, Rosi. The Posthuman. Polity Press, 2013.
Chakraborty, Saikat. ‘Possibilities of Conversation between Posthumanism and Postcolonialism: A Case study of Public Bus Names’. New Literaria, Vol 1, No. 2. pp. 85-92.
Cudworth, Erica and Stephen Hobden. The Emancipatory Project of Posthumanism. Routledge, 2018.
Davies Tony. Humanism. Routledge, 1997.
Derrida, Jacques. On the Name. Stanford University Press, 1995.
Ghosh, Amitav. Gun Island. Penguin Random House India, 2019.
Gordon, Colin. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977 by Michel Foucault. Pantheon Books, 1980.
Moore, Stephen d. ‘Ruminations on Revelation’s Ruminant, Quadrupedal Christ; or, the Even-Toed Ungulate That Therefore I Am’. The Bible and Posthumanism. Ed. Jennifer L. Koosed. The Society of Biblical Literature, 2014.
Said, Edward. Humanism and Democratic Criticism. Columbia University Press, 2004.