A Post-Colonial View of the East and the West

Abstract

Western colonialism brought with it, not merely economic exploitation and political oppression, but also the unrelenting thrust of a ‘civilizing’ mission based on a world-view which believed in the absolute superiority of the human over the non-human, of the masculine over the feminine, of the historical over the ahistorical, and of the modern over the traditional. This world-view was calculated to disrupt the cultural identities and subvert the cultural priorities of the subject societies.

This paper sees the ensuing battle, not as an adventitious one between the East and the West, but as an immanent one between the Appolonian and Dionysian within each civilization and culture. It illustrates, with the case study of Rudyard Kipling and his ambivalent attitude to India, how, while this encounter of two cultures produced in the subject societies small sections of men comically imitative of the Western lifestyle, it also produced among the rulers a small section of men who found themselves painfully suspended between two worlds. As for the peoples in general in the subject societies, they were not troubled by such a dilemma. They learned to cope with transient defeat by making a shield out of their suffering to protect their authentic selves and the core values of their cultures, and thus showed that co-optation could be successfully resisted.