I have been asked to write on the heritage of postcolonial studies. I separated myself from postcolonial studies in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, published in 1999. I am still separated from it. But “separation” is, of course, a relationship; and there are different kinds of separation. Perhaps this relationship constitutes itself by way of the fact that, in the country of my citizenship, the heritage of the postcolonial is dubious.

Can we use India’s example for the general postcolonial predicament? I do not believe so. Yet some details can be shared.

It is well known that Lenin rethought anti-colonialism by emphasizing the role of the bourgeoisie in working out a national liberation. Rosa Luxemburg, like Marx, had emphasized that “the true [eigentlich] task of bourgeois society is the establishment of a world market, at least following its outline, and a production resting upon the basis of this world market.”1 Today, with the globe financialized, we are aware of the truth of this. (We remember of course that for teutophones like Marx and Luxemburg, “bourgeois” is Bürgerlich—citizen-ly— and does not carry only a negative connotation.) Competitive nationalisms are still being used to ideologize the self-determination of capital. We are complicit in this.

Lenin suggested that national struggles which were, in part, generated by the development of capitalism, and whose content and goals were bourgeois-democratic, were nevertheless in an important sense anti-capitalist. In fact, it has to be taken into account that sometimes these struggles were led by representatives of decayed feudal cliques. In other words, Lenin did not consider the possibility that the nationalism of even an oppressed country might be in some sense reactionary. At the second meeting of the Communist International [Comintern] Congress in 1920, M.N. Roy (a pseudonym assumed to avoid punishment by the British colonial government of India), attended as a delegate for the newly formed Communist Party of Mexico. Roy was encouraged by Lenin to present his views in the form of theses. The theses Roy drafted urged that the Comintern support the revolutionary movement of workers and peasants in the colonies in preference to the bourgeois nationalist movement. Roy argued that the former movement, which according to him was developing with great rapidity at the same time that it was separating from the merely bourgeois nationalist movement, would combine the struggle for national independence with a struggle for social transformation. Lenin forced major changes to Roy’s theses in the Colonial Commission of the Congress, in particular deleting all those references where the nationalist movement and the revolutionary class movement were counterposed to each other. Lenin then recommended that Roy’s theses be adopted in their amended form as “Supplementary Theses” to his own. They were so adopted but were ignored in subsequent discussions of the colonial question.

Roy was no doubt somewhat over enthusiastic about the rapid development of the movement of workers and peasants everywhere. Yet the work of the capitalization of land (the simplest definition of “originary [primitive] accumulation” making way for full-fledged industrial capitalism offered by Marx) now with direct access to the world market is not finished. The Amazon forest is of course the greatest example.2 Closer to home, accessible to my activist experience, is the example of Nigeria, and the agriculture of West Bengal

In the Indian case, the negotiated independence (1947-49) was brought in for the most part by men belonging to the feudal-bureaucratic classes that were out of touch with the underclass, and the peasant, with the subaltern at the bottom. One of them, famously, had to “discover” India, and the India that he discovered did not really represent what was going on in the country. It is a great orientalist dream text (Nehru 1946). Of course, the liberators made sacrifices and spent a lot of time in jail. I am not trying to be mean. But having inherited their legacy, I am proposing that they taught us that national liberation is not a revolution. Khushwant Singh, in his novel Train to Pakistan, rather different from his other writings, captures the distance between the mind-set of the liberators and of the general public (1956, 185-90). Gandhi, who was certainly a grand political strategist, took off the suit he had put on when he went to Britain and South Africa, and donned the high dhoti and chador that staged him as a man of the people internationally. A good deal has been said about his prejudice against black Africans, a tendency quite strong in India today and therefore part of our postcolonial heritage in spite of the acceptance and respect of progressive bourgeoisie such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Joseph Appiah, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Kofi Awoonor by the national liberators and their ideological descendants today.3

From a more “traditional” and less westernized upper middle class family from a mid-level caste, living in one or another of the princely states that were ruled by local potentates who acknowledged British suzerainty in return for local sovereignty, Gandhi was thus removed from India as such. The Gandhi family had fairly close contacts with the British administrators, but with no social contact at all. Thus, in the impressionable time of childhood and adolescence, Gandhi’s intuition of a relationship with the British might have been described as “strategic.” His four years living in Britain and training as a barrister was unaffected by racial prejudice because, outside of his classes, he lived under the auspices of the Vegetarian Society and the Theosophists. He thus developed what may be described as a canny relationship to the upper classes (his fellow students at the Inner Temple) and, outside his classroom, with the socially liberal British, especially how to dress and behave in an acceptable way. His first book, although unpublished, “was his ‘Guide to London,’ drafted . . . during his first year in South Africa, when he hoped still to make a career as an Anglicized barrister in Bombay. [It] was a paean to English education and English manners, written, appropriately, in English” (Guha 2013, 395).

To this combination—steady strategic behaviour with regard to the ruling British in India and admiration and assimilation to dress code and acceptable behaviour with regard to the British in Britain—was added the experience of the open prejudice and despotism of British policy in a British colony when he went to South Africa to represent Indians living there. This extended combination of his sense of the British was operative in his participation in the national liberation in India. In South Africa immediately before his final arrival in India, however, he operated with the strongly held assumption that Indians and the British, unlike the culturally insufficiently advanced “native[s],” were “different members of the Imperial family in South Africa [and] would be able to live in perfect peace in the near future” (Guha 2013, 175). He fought for the British, as the Sergeant Major of an East Indian Ambulance Corps during the Anglo-Boer War in 1906. As he staged himself in costume as a kind of liberated Hindu saint, wittingly or unwittingly, he was also able to embarrass the British in Britain by breaking the dress code completely and turning up at Buckingham Palace or formal dinners at conferences in dhoti-chador and thick sandals. This embarrassment led to the international moral outrage already stressed by the Americans, speaking of the superiority of their Constitution, that would not outrage an Indian renouncer. So far, the freedom struggle in India had been marked by armed guerrilla attempts, most strikingly taken up in Bengal, by young men and women who had none of the strategic relationships with the ruling British, nor the in-house relationship with the liberal British. They had simply been punished by law and deported or hanged. Gandhi turned it into a different kind of nationalism by “discovering” ahimsa or non-violence in the Hindu tradition and shaming the British once again—through passive resistance and spectacular, truth-seeking boycotts—into a negotiated independence that ensured the victory of a Labour government.4 His first 20 years in India and his own inclinations after his return from South Africa did not allow him to get to know and gain the support of the common people of India, although he certainly gained a species of cultic devotion. His cohorts were mostly conscientized business folks like the Sarabhais. His politics of shaming and moral embarrassment on the subcontinent often took the form of emotional blackmail, such as hunger strikes against his own cohorts. The most remarkable of these was at the Poona Pact of 1932, which obliged Dr B.R. Ambedkar, who represented the out-castes and tribals on the new Indian constitution, to abandon his motion to establish a separate electorate(already in existence for Muslims and Sikhs) for the out-castes and the tribals, today called the Dalits.5

The other leaders of the national liberation movements were from a liberal to traditional background, more or less progressive, but just as certainly out of touch with the peasants and working folks of the country. Because of the lack of connection between the national liberators and the country at large, the old structures slowly re-established themselves. 6 The largest sector of the electorate is illiterate or semi-literate (I know something first-hand of the production of statistics in this context) and exists within a structure of feeling that may be described as feudal, looking to be led. Democracy became theocracy. Hindu nationalism easily took hold. But India—with its software growth embracing Silicon Valley, its good, cheap hospitals (way beyond the reach of the Indian poor, of course), its Bollywood and art cinema, the fantastic literature in English produced by Indian diasporics, the many art galleries—is internationally popular. Given the general level of Islamophobia in the world today, the virulence of Islamophobia in India is perhaps underestimated.

There are legalized attempts at restricting citizenship to Hindus only. I am part of the 80% Hindu majority, so this heritage of postcoloniality is particularly difficult for me to bear. I respond with the call to re-imagine secularism, with the imperative to touch the transcendental, what we must assume yet cannot legally prove. We cannot mourn or judge without the intuition of the transcendental, strictly and persistently to be distinguished from the supernatural, into which it can too easily slip. You cannot imagine and broach, persistently, a robust non-Euro-specific secularism without that intuition. This requires the sort of holistic education from elite to subaltern, primary to post-tertiary, everything nestled within the humanities beyond the disciplines that can only be a dream. My parents sent us to a school where the teachers were mostly so-called lower-caste Hindus and Christianized aboriginals: St. John’s Diocesan Girls’ High School. The teachers there taught with the passion of the newly liberated. I do often say, “Diocesan made me.” As the days go by, Miss Charubala Dass, the principal of the school, becomes my role model. Her affectionate dignity, and her gentle sternness, are not things that I can hope to imitate. That she had a hand in putting in place the openness to the need for ethical reflexes that might be produced can be made clear by the following story, the significance of which I did not recognize at the time.

I have been training teachers among the landless illiterate in western West Bengal for 30 years. I am myself not at all religious, not a believer. In 2012, at one of the meetings where all the rural teachers had come together for training, I gave them a lesson in English prepositions by repeating Miss Dass’s school prayer: “be thou, O Lord, before us to lead us, behind us to restrain us, beneath us to sustain us, above us to draw us up, round about us to protect us.” I turned this school day prayer for ethical action into a different kind of lesson, translated for people rather far removed from the metropolitan center of Calcutta. Make of it what you wish, but remember, we caste-Hindus treated the direct ancestors of my teachers like animals. It was the missionaries who Christianized them. And, because the national liberators were rather far away from “the people,” that contemptuous treatment is creeping back. Sitting in the heritage of postcolonialism, I realize more and more that so-called national liberation is not a revolution because it is not in fact a national liberation. As Marx and Engels warned us in 1872: “The Commmune [Paris Commune of 1871] has provided a particular piece of evidence, that ‘the working class [read “the national liberators”] cannot simply take possession of the ready-made state-machine and set it in motion for its own goals’” (105; translation modified). And that is what the liberators of India did: take possession of the already existing colonial state-machine and modify it for postcolonial purposes, with a new constitution, whose land reform statutes were quickly suppressed (Bardhan 1984; 2003; 2018).

I work with a group called Radiating Globality. As we visit country after country, we are obliged to conclude that with the simultaneity brought in by globalization, precolonial structures of power and corruption are coming back and beginning to inhabit the polity. This catches the relay of the difference between the national liberators and the masses and becomes part of the difficult burden of the heritage of postcolonialism. In India it is the caste system, which never quite went away and is much older than colonialism. Colonialism was yesterday. This is thousands of years old.

In order to come to grips with the heritage of postcoloniality, the only solution that I have so far proposed has been a holistic education—from elite to subaltern, primary to post-tertiary, everything nestled within the humanities beyond the disciplines—that can only be a dream. By subaltern I mean Gramsci’s minimal definition: “social groups in the margins of history” (1975, 2277). At the conference, I mentioned my continuing work with the education of the children of the landless illiterate in western West Bengal. I also mentioned my first proposal of “planetarity” to a Swiss philanthropic organization in 1997, inviting them to think of the asylum seeker in a different way, not as an obligation, not as a white man’s burden, but as a human birthright. The difference may not seem to be much in English verbal articulation, but if imagined, say, in the language of the ground-level Islam of my home-state of West Bengal and Bangladesh, it would combine rights and responsibility in the tremendous concept-metaphor of haq. It is the para-individual structural responsibility into which we are born that is our true being. Indeed, the word “responsibility” is an approximation for this structural positioning that is only roughly translated as “birth-right.” Whether it is a right or responsibility, it is the truth of my being. (As it will be argued later, Talal Asad works the “truth of being” approach in terms of Islamic philosophy, relating it to his repeated use of “translation.”) Given this “structure of feeling” in those being “saved,” the Swiss philanthropists would be mistaken in perceiving their own task as integrating the underclass immigrants into an economic dynamic, perhaps with some cultural instruction. In order to learn to learn from the below, to learn to mean to say, not just with the required and deliberate non-hierarchicality: I mean to learn from you what you practice. I need it even if you didn’t want to share a bit of my pie, but there is something I want to give you which will make our shared practice flourish. You don’t know, and indeed I didn’t know, that civility requires your practice of responsibility as preoriginary. It should be mentioned here that, like most cultural power institutionalizing responsibility, Islam has historically allowed women to take the other’s part within it. Asad makes an intriguing argument, by way of a comparison with Christian monks, that women’s submission might be thought of as a willing submission of the will and, if I understand rightly, places it within the context of what early Christianity learned from Islam. If one were to criticize such submission as an ideological determination of the will, Asad would probably dismiss it as a modernist misunderstanding of the internal reality of an earlier dispensation, from which one cannot escape.

This brings us to the point where the heritage of postcoloniality leads to global labour export and migration. Let us look at the most recent version of my response to this, written for the United Nations Mission of the European Public Law Organization:

Listen to me as you would to those who bear what you impose and see if that imaginative shift is possible. For ruling is, in actual practice, enforcement. And those of us who think about these things as having human purchase—teaching in the humanities beyond the disciplines—think, perhaps somewhat idealistically, that one must persistently, generation after generation, work towards acceptance of the other as agent rather than victim, so that enforcement is not the main method. The desire for social justice is to want the law—and the goal of the general humanities education is to work at the impossible task of producing a general will for social justice, which can be minimally defined as the willingness to turn capital away from capitalism to diversified social good.

But this is a desire for those who have access to capital outside of the possible practitioners of capitalism. This can translate even into a different attitude toward fiscal policy. And I think here, if we are thinking, as best we can, of the entire world, we must learn how to speak to the largest sectors of the electorate, in terms of what Professor Margaret MacMillan, great granddaughter of the British Prime Minister David Lloyd-George, would think of as a basic affect: “these affects, greed, violence, fear—do, of course, drive capitalism’s dark side, a side that most of us can afford not to notice.”7 Language becomes more parabolic to break down enforcement alone. We expand, we repeat with many acknowledgeable instances: one person’s profit brings death to many. Keep what you need but use the rest for greater good. Narrative as instantiations of the ethical is an altogether “universal” method with a millennial history. If some of us do not learn to use it in an intensive and hands-on way of attempting movement from feudal loyalties and convictions to gendered democratic intuitions: namely, autonomy and equality for me and my group as well as other people, other groups, unlike us—then we are at best looking forward to a “democratic” world ruled by tyrants, where democracy is body count disguised as rule of law.

It is this insistence upon accessing the other’s structure of feeling through an imaginative activism that trains for epistemological performance that links to Talal Asad’s understanding of the anthropological experience of fieldwork as living another form of life in order to learn about it. For Asad, this anthropological experience is a unique and perhaps inadequately appreciated way of understanding, to go towards the other, to enter into the other’s space. I connect this idea to the idea of the humanities teaching imaginative activism to train the imagination to be flexible. And indeed I have described my attempt to learn to learn from below how to teach the subaltern a species of fieldwork, without transcoding. To transcode, as in the ethnographic session in the evening when the fieldwork is organized by the anthropologist into academic systematicity, would take my focus away from my masters, the subaltern.

Indeed, this skill of the underclass immigrant has been one of this writer’s themes for many decades. Here let me quote a piece of fiction that I taught in the 1980s at the University of Pittsburgh, as adjunct faculty in the department of philosophy, in a course on ethics. I quote from Peter Dickinson’s The Poison Oracle at length to show how fiction stages the argument that I am trying to establish. In the novel, a chimpanzee trained by the visiting British anthropologist on a whim, solves the murder mystery, which is the ostensible subject of the novel. The potential object of his anthropological investigation, the “native” girl, in a curious subplot that takes over, undoes the boundary between knowing and known and exits the book on a staging of the reader’s uncertain expectation that she will “get back into the machine”—the airplane—with “the pilot…ready to go.” But she has climbed up to the slab that the marshmen (the “natives”) called:

the House of Spirits. Really, [Morris the anthropologist] thought with exasperation, she is worse than Dinah [the chimpanzee]…[N]one of the tribesmen moved, or even looked at the white men. They stared at Peggy, waiting. Morris couldn’t believe that she had climbed up there for anything except adventure, with perhaps an element of scorn for superstitions which she had grown out of. But as soon as she saw that she was a focus of attention she accepted her role,…and at last began to dance. Now the marshmen crept towards her silently, and it seemed unwillingly, like birds or small beasts hypnotized by the coiling and writhing of a snake…she sang in English. She had insisted that Morris should teach her his own language, and what right had he to refuse? What property had he in her marsh mind? As a research tool, if she chose to put it away? Besides, her will was stronger than his. All he could do was tape the learning process, to record whatever problems she faced in adapting to alien modes of thought. The answer had been almost none. ‘You are fools,’ she sang to the marshmen… ‘You do not know cause and effect. Cause and effect.’ It was Morris’s own voice, piping triumphant and scornful through the steamy air.

The fiction makes it deliberately uncertain as to who speaks the final lines, which appear as the shared voice of the rule of law: “Soon all you fools will be dead. Cause and effect. Cause and effect. Cause and effect” (Dickinson 1974, 190-1).

Peggy has transformed the philosophy of the people who had come to her island to know her into a repeatable formula, and here the writer paints in bold strokes the task of the imagination of the host. Peter Dickinson (1927-2015), a white Englishman educated at Eton and Oxford, who worked in British counterintelligence, here shows us through his dramatization of an anthropologist’s experience, the possibility of an author’s creative imagination grasping the peculiarities of the master-slave relationship with the other, whom we feel we are liberating by subjecting to the rule of law.

Indeed, this fiction stages the experience that would be impossible for the subject proposing a universal rule of law. If you succeed in putting it in place, the other would banalize that impossibility, slipping into your space, imitating reason. Accept the invitation to do likewise, and inhabit the banal impossibility together: the rule of law; turning the key that makes the cohabitation possible: redistribution rather than rejection, built by soul-making education, on both sides. 8

Comparative Literature, my discipline, at its best tries to learn language the child’s way, the impossible way: it attempts to enter the lingual memory, memory of the language in the language. It attempts a private and singular hold on its history, which also requires such deep language learning, suspending itself in it. By so doing, it enlarges the scope and range of ethical practice.

At the beginning of October 2012, I was at a conference on “Ethnicity, Identity, Literature” in upper Assam in northeast India, which informed what I write here. Upon the border between the state of Assam and upper Bangladesh, there is a great deal of ethnic conflict, resembling such conflicts on the US-Mexico border, the Israel-Palestine border, and other well-known international boundaries. Studying some literature from the area, I read the novel Rupabarir Palas (1980) by Sayed Abdul Malik, a member of the migrant community. Malik describes the way in which the migrant, especially the underclass migrant, makes the language of the ironically named host state his or her own and how, for the second generation, it becomes a first language. Coupled with this, in the last section of Malik’s novel, there is a lament that, in spite of such an effort, voting rights are denied. I realized through this novel that the model of deep language learning is not just the institutional humanities model of comparative literature, but the practical humanities model of these so-called illegal immigrants—a global phenomenon, a group that I have described as “the new subaltern.” I believe that the sensibility trained in the humanities as I have been describing them, can also begin to see that the border between the new subaltern and disciplinarized humanities teachers and students is an unstable border. Subaltern classes cannot use the state despite the fact that in a democracy, the people supposedly control the state.

In Abdul Malik’s novel, we find the words “those who, thinking to stay alive, have sacrificed the enchantment of the motherland, come to Assam and taken her for mother, forgetting their own language have made Assamese their own language” (Malik 1980, translation mine). In a passage that I often quote, Karl Marx provides a less affective description of this as revolutionary practice: “In the same way, the beginner who has learnt a new language always retranslates it into his mother tongue: he can only be said to have appropriated the spirit of the new language and to produce in it freely when he can move within it without rememoration, and forgets his inherited language within it” (Marx 1852, 147; translation modified)

For the actively translating teacher and student in our classrooms, this practice brings the awareness that the first step in translation is violent, the destruction of the body of the language, the sound that is so deeply tied to the structure of feeling, especially but not only if one is translating from the first language. Perhaps it is a reminder of the setting aside of the interest in the self that must accompany translation as an encompassing model of ethical practice as such, if that can be described. We must imagine that this violence is called for in all efforts at communication. In other words, I am trying to explain the difficult set of ideas that crowd my mind when I try to open up the unexamined conviction that translation can naturally create cultural exchange and global community. Yet, we have no other way of proceeding here.

Let me sum up these words aphoristically: may translating rather than translation be the future of the humanities. We will be a global community, each one of us globalizable, upstream from politics, an island of languaging in a field of traces. The trace of an “unknown” language is where we know meaningfulness is operating, but we don’t know how. Our task as teachers and translators calls us into this challenge, the recognition that a fully translated globe is nothing that we should desire. May translating rather than translation be the future of the humanities. And the final project of translating is an epistemological project upon ourselves that is, like all translation, necessary but impossible. Postcolonialism was focused on the nation state. To supplement globalization, we need archipelago-thought. Édouard Glissant, the thinker of creolity, has said: “Translation is therefore one of the most important kinds of this new archipelagic thinking” (1996, 27). We must displace the heritage of postcoloniality into island-thinking. Japan can move into this with brilliance.

We are all islanders. I am from the island of Eurasia. And I have lived for sixty years on the island of the Americas, called the Greater Caribbean by Jack D. Forbes (1993, 270). These are big islands.

In 2001, I taught for a semester at the University of Hawai’i and fell in fascination, as one falls in love, with the idea of Oceania. I began to think, then, that neither “Europe” nor the “United States of America” could think of itself as an island, and therefore, they were out of touch with the reality of the world—not only that “no man is an island,” but that we are all islanders.

In 2004, Maryse Condé invited me to speak to the descendants of indentured Indian laborers on the island of Guadalupe. I sang to them an island-dream song by Rabindranath Tagore and demonstrated to them how distanced we mainlanders had been, in our island fantasies, from the reality of their lives. India could not think of itself as an island, a corner of an island. I began to think, then, that the idea of nations, older than nationalisms—something like “born same-s,” men harnessing reproductive heteronormativity to push away the bigger heterogeneity of the island—was ever in a double bind with our islanded-ness. History nestles in that denial of the impossible truth of space.

I now think of Oceania as a heterogeneous place, a model for the worldisland, an invitation to develop island-consciousness beyond continentality. There is no mainland.

In today’s world everything is modern. The promise is of a level playing field. If we develop island-consciousness, know that the globe is a cluster of islands in a sea of traces, and approach the heterogeneity of the ocean-world with patience, collectively, and bit by bit, rather than all at once, it’s maybe the only way to find out why that field, that cluster, floating in the world-ocean, is so uneven a relief-map.

Postcoloniality celebrates a national liberation based on an orientalist nationalism, I have argued. Creolity as history celebrates archipelagic thinking.

Think creolity as history, then, rather than the bounded nation upon a bounded continent which was colonialism and its heritage.

A hard task, to save a world.