Blog 6 – The Hindustan of the Americas

Blog 6 – The Hindustan of the Americas

The historian’s experiences in Mexico City presented a world strangely similar to the one she belonged to. There was an exploration of the similarities in culture and history and this was in contrast to the conventional explorations of economic similarities between the two nations. I find that the history of the two peoples were also markedly different. Mexico was populated by the Aztecs and other civilisations that departed significantly from the Mughals in terms of their forms of hierarchy and administration.  I argue that the existence of the similarities and differences are reasons why these questions are worth contending with. If postcolonial literature is also a discussion on what has been lost, then to understand colonization through a literary lens is requires comparison between the different forms of colonialism.

Colonisation existed in time periods that differed widely from each other, governed by different epistemological frameworks. Yet key fundamentals overlap. Dr. Zaman stated that white Americans in the United States would continue to see her as an ‘other’, despite living there for years. Whereas the Mexican people saw her as no different and only realized she is a foreigner when her Spanish sounded distinct. It could not have been the skin colour alone that dictated this difference. The white American seems curious to know the origins of the ‘other’; and the Mexican could not care as much. Perhaps there were slight differences in actions, countenance and behaviours that the white person can notice that did not seem out of place in Mexico.

But the differences in our approach to our colonial history also shed light on how the two nations, the Indian subcontinent and Mexico, view their postcolonial period. The Mexican people care less for their colonial past. For them, the binaries are not so, whereas we neatly bifurcate what belongs to the colonized and to the colonizer. This is also seen in Fanon’s defence of the Algerian veil or Kenyatta’s defence of FGM. This stems from the fact that Mexico decolonized in the formal sense long before the Indian subcontinent.   Racial mixing was far more prevalent in the Americas then in India. The entry of the colonizer into your very DNA makes it difficult to isolate the colonizer and his legacy. This bifurcation exists in the subcontinent, yet British modes of life have so deeply entered into our societies. Therein lies a lesson for us. The culture before colonization cannot be reclaimed and to rid ourselves of all that is British is a fruitless endeavor. Our efforts may be better served in deriving for ourselves a way that is pragmatic and charts a path for us that is neither subservient to our colonized past nor our imagined history.