Decolonized Experience: Similarities and Difference

“There is something timeless in the formation of change”

To understand decoloniality is to understand what has changed- in the cultural, linguistic, political, economic sense. But as Dr. Zaman so eloquently puts it, you study change because there is something fixed, unchanging, timeless about a region as well; this timeless “essence” of a place, violently corroded at some junctures, celebrated at others, is intriguing. Its intriguing because you cannot study a decolonized region without trying to understand its essence, but always in conjunction with change. Maybe it was Mexico’s adaptability, resilience, inter-linkages that formed the basis of its unchanging essence, while the languages, customs and political leaders changed. I wonder what the essence of the Indian subcontinent is. With high levels of segregation between castes and classes- some who embraced the colonial changes, some who rejected them completely and reverted to the old, some who selectively made some changes their own, some who looked to the West to create new things, some who propagated for the completely new, can a historian ever find the timelessness of Hindustan? Maybe it’s the existence of the “many”- views, approaches, cultures, religions, that is permanent in India.

“You are the thing you think is the opposite”

Of all the contradictions present in the world, the one existing within each colonized individual is the most important to understand. Dr. Zaman used this sentence to break the Orientalist dichotomy and explain how Muslims were not much different from Europeans even before colonization. While she did not expand on this analysis, the history of the Mughal Empire (a Muslim, elitist minority with claims of a higher culture ruling over India) can serve as one example, particularly given her area of expertise. However, her sentence can be studied on multiple layers. An Indian man would be oppressed by the English colonizer, but the oppressor to the Indian woman. An Indian Brahman wife of a landlord would be oppressed by the Indian landlord, but the oppressor to the women of lower castes and classes. The phrase “Everyone is Hitler”, although studied differently in class, can also come to signify the existence of a colonizer’s vision in all of us. Taking a more contemporary example, the Muslims who fought against the British in 1857, and 1947 and ended up attaining a nation-state for themselves, could not (in a perfectly colonized/colonizer dichotomized world) be expected to claim religious, cultural superiority for the purpose of subjugating a group, and yet the treatment of the Ahmadiyya, Christian, Hindu communities of Pakistan stand as examples.

“We made Spanish our home”

Dr. Zaman saw the future of our country in Mexico- a place that has had more time to recover from colonization. This analysis recurred throughout her talk as she empathized with Mexicans having little patience for the post-colonial woes of people from the Indian subcontinent. Taking only the adoption of the colonizer’s language as an example, its interesting to think about how decolonized individuals choose to heal. Does making Spanish their home mean that they simply let go of their native languages, along with the cultural significance that the languages embodied. Or does it mean that being a decolonized individual means that you cannot go back to what you were before, and you cannot reject all that you had to become during colonization. When a family’s home is burnt down and they’re given a new home, they don’t just inhibit the new home; they might color it differently, change the furniture and redesign it. Maybe making Spanish their home means that Mexicans made the language of Spain, the language of Mexico by altering what it embodied. Maybe that is the way forward for us.