Revisiting Colonial Encounters in Maitreyi Devi’s It Does Not Die: A Romance : A Postcolonial Perspective

Abstract

The Indian novelist, Maitreyi Devi’s account of her love story with Romanian novelist, Mircea Eliade came out in 1974 as Na Hanyate in the Bengali language and its English version was titled It Does Not Die in 1976 by the author herself. Following Nirmala Menon’s critical insights on Bhabha’s (post)colonial hybridity discourse, this study aims to reinterpret the novel as an illustrative text of postcolonial “interrogative hybridity.” Devi employs hybridity in such a way that it unsettles a linear narrative with constant shifts in focus and style. It is upheld that her ingenious hybridity originates from her position as an off-center postcolonial female writer who critiques colonial stereotypes and mimicry by revisiting/challenging colonial discourse constructed against the colonized by the colonizers. Hence, the study explores how her novel is a postcolonial hybrid counter-narrative text to colonial fantasies. To conclude, postcolonial hybridity can only problematize colonial individuations and representations, if it reverses the seemingly sound effects of colonial discourse in such a way that “other ‘denied’ knowledges” enter upon the dominant discourse and estrange the basis of its authority—its rules of recognition.

Plain Language Summary

By revisiting colonial encounters as articulated in the Indian novelist, Maitreyi Devi’s It Does Not Die, from Menon’s insights on hybridity discourse, the aim of this study is to investigate how her novel provides a postcolonial hybrid counter-narrative to colonial narratives. Hence, the study is a conscious effort to contribute to the prevailing scholarship on postcolonial hybridity discourse in some significant ways. Following Nirmala Menon’s (2016) critical insights on Bhabha’s (post)colonial hybridity discourse, the aim of this study is to reinterpret the novel as an illustrative text of postcolonial ‘interrogative hybridity.’ Devi employs hybridity in such a way that it unsettles a linear narrative with constant shifts in focus and style. It is upheld that her ingenious hybridity originates from her position as an off-center postcolonial female writer who critiques colonial stereotypes and mimicry by revisiting/challenging colonial discourse constructed against the colonized by the colonizers. Hence, the study explores how her novel is a postcolonial hybrid counter-narrative text to colonial fantasies. To conclude, postcolonial hybridity can only problematize colonial individuations and representations, if it reverses the seemingly sound effects of colonial discourse in such a way that “other ‘denied’ knowledges enter upon the dominant discourse and estrange the basis of its authority – its rules of recognition” (Bhabha, 1994, p. 114).

Introduction

In the view of Camilleri and Kapsali (2020), hybridity refers to the mixture and fusion of species, races, plants or cultures (p. 1). For Meijuan et al (2020), the notion of hybridization is considered “an effective tool that can enhance cultural vitality and facilitate the development of literary works” (p. 27). From this viewpoint, cross-cultural fusion is reinforced in the process of hybridization. According to John Thieme (2016), Bhabha finds hybridity in both colonial as well postcolonial locations (p. 46). Kapchan and Strong (1999) have expressed the idea that Bhabha’s postcolonial hybridity does not require its readers to disentangle the influences of modernity or tradition: “Rather, the postcolonial hybrid stands in resistance to such disarticulations: instantiating identity at the same time that it is subverted” (p. 245). In the views of Ashcroft et al (2002) postcolonial literature is essentially a cross-cultural and hybridized construction. They maintain that hybridity is “the primary characteristic of all post-colonial texts, whatever their source” (p. 184).

Besides, as a theoretical tool, hybridity does not chronicle the cultural and historical differences with flat narratives containing balanced cultural exchanges. Rather, it is a multilayered and twisted imperial saga based on unequal relations and forced encounters. Likewise, Yazdiha (2010) is of the view that in postcolonial literatures, “hybridity is becoming normalized as an accepted form of literature and the purist notion of genre is diminishing” (p. 34). In a recent study, Azada-Palacios (2021) used hybridity as a “conceptual foundation for teaching national identity in post-colonial schools” (p. 3). While talking about hybridity in postcolonial literature, Menon (2016) has pointed out the fact that hybridity has been limited to postcolonial diasporic writers’ works and this tendency has substantially constricted its scope. Confining hybridity to the works of postcolonial diasporans is akin to the celebration of metropolitan cultural values (p. 72). She also maintains that the “migrant hybridity” (p. 73) is not disruptive to colonial authority as it usually relegates the local cultures to a secondary position at the cost of western metropolitan centers. In other words, simply the “presence of certain hybrid elements should not be automatically considered radical without critical scrutiny of how the specific hybridity is deployed” in postcolonial writings (p. 87). In order to clarify her point further, she divides the postcolonial narratives which embody hybridity as their formative essence into two discrete concepts, that is, accommodative hybridity and interrogative hybridity. The two types have been differentiated as follows:

Accommodative hybridity fulfills all the criteria of a hybrid narrative but may not be radical. Interrogative hybridity consistently questions and challenges any hegemonic status quo. In other words, interrogative hybridity should, when necessary, interrogate the hybridity of the narrative so as to evaluate whether it challenges any dominant discourse. (Menon, 2016, p. 76)

With regret, Menon (2016) notes that during the last two decades, the conscious or unconscious emphasis of postcolonial scholarship on considering the “migrant diasporic hybridity” (p. 27) as representative of all postcolonial hybridity has resulted in centralizing the discourse on hybridity in favor of diasporas. She upholds that the emphasis on migrant hybridity suggests that for a literary work to be categorized as a postcolonial hybrid narrative, it must fulfill the following four requirements. First, the narrative should have an intermingling of migrant/diasporic as well as native characters. Secondly, the story must be dealing with transcontinental travels—preferably from postcolonial locations to Western cosmopolitan centers. Thirdly, the narrative should have conveyed an understanding of cosmopolitanism and finally, the events that constitute the plot must take place in seemingly the hybrid third space of the metropolitan and postcolonial localities (p. 74). She concludes that such postcolonial diasporic narratives in an attempt to win global appraisal fall short in furnishing an intervening example of radical postcolonial hybridity that in turn may challenge the supremacy of western metropolitan centers as the hub of civilization (p. 104). Therefore, she recommends that hybridity will only work as a radical and disruptive tool to colonial discourse if postcolonial theory discontinues restricting it “within narrow boundaries of diaspora, migrancy and transnational travel” (p. 28). I argue that as Devi’s novel has nothing to do with the issues of migrancy, diaspora or transnational travels, this study is instrumental in broadening the scope of hybridity discourse to the writings produced in local languages.

Paranjape (2012) also affirms:

What better example can we find of the plight of the colonial subject, forever locked in a relationship of dependence and gratitude to the metropolis! Grateful first for being colonized, for having an alien language imposed on us; grateful again when our efforts in that language are evaluated by our masters; grateful finally for the privilege of having our books published in the metropolis and for a subsequent re-import to our colonized country. (p. 181)

By revisiting the text from Menon’s perspective on hybridity, the objective of the study is to establish that the novel is an “interrogative hybrid” product and not an accommodative one. It is maintained that while undermining any possibility of cultural purity in the colonial backgrounds, the novel also reflects a constant presence of heterogeneous sites of resistance/defiance which simultaneously go with the process of hybridization in the colonial contact zone. Menon (2016) argues that in postcolonial theory, hybridity was visualized as a tool to theorize the ambivalences/uncertainties, margins and fissures in the context of colonial encounters. Poignantly, by restraining the focus on the selected texts of diaspora, writing in the English language, the theory has become noticeably a uniform entity/discourse which privileges a select class of writers by overriding the interrogative hybridity-based literary illustrations, mostly written in indigenous languages of the colonized. It is this interrogative hybridity that actually complicates our understanding of the postcolonial writers’ subjectivities and makes their work truly disruptive to hegemonic discourses (p. 27). By revisiting colonial encounters from Menon’s insights on hybridity, the aim is to investigate how Devi’s (1995) novel provides a hybrid counter-narrative to colonial narratives. Hence, the study is a conscious effort to contribute to the prevailing scholarship on postcolonial hybridity discourse in some significant ways.

Camilleri and Kapsali (2020) also assert that “hybridity, while still operative at various levels of interaction, requires careful consideration and adjustment to reflect rather than deflect the socio-material circumstances” of the encounters that it shapes (p. 5). In Culture and Imperialism, Said (1994) has drawn a distinction between colonialism and imperialism. He defines imperialism as “thinking about, settling on, controlling land that you do not possess, that is distant, that is lived on and owned by others” (p. 7). Treating both the terms as interrelated, his definition suggests that imperialism has survived the desertion of the colonial empires. He wishes colonized cultures to have a global scope identical to that of the European empires of the nineteenth century. In this way, Said (1994) contrasts the views of postcolonial/third world and colonial writers and emphasizes that the novelists of the Third World wrote mostly in the late postcolonial period and hence they were not as effective as their contemporary colonial writers such as Joseph Conrad. Out of these unequal spatial juxtapositions, Said develops what he calls “contrapuntal readings” through which he investigates how postcolonial authors critique Western views: “contrapuntal reading must take account of both processes·, that of imperialism and that of resistance to it, which can be done by extending our reading of the texts to include what was once forcibly excluded” (pp. 66–67). Accordingly, it is upheld that the general context of Devi’s (1995) counterpoint also involves an alteration between the awareness of colonialism as a usurping force and resistance to it on simultaneous basis, paving the way for an “interrogative hybridity” and contrapuntal critique of colonial discourse.

Devi’s (1995) novel (as will be proved shortly) is one of such texts which questions and interrogates the status quo by challenging the prevailing systems of suppression and injustice, be it colonialism or patriarchy. Equally important is the fact that she utilized the novel as a medium to record her very private world which went disregarded in colonial India. The novel also delineates her ideas about the tousle between colonizers and colonized. Menon (2016) is of the view that by exploring postcolonial locations’ literature especially written in indigenous languages, one can expand the scope of hybridity as in this way it can house both the hybridities in plural, that is, accommodative hybridity which comes from the migrant-narratives written in English language and interrogative hybridity which is an offshoot of the local-narratives generally written in indigenous languages of the colonized (pp. 105–106). Nonetheless, when both the hybridities are compared, it is the interrogative hybridity that seems to be more disruptive and interventionist than the accommodative hybridity which ultimately upholds the supremacy of the erstwhile colonial metropolitan centers (Menon, 2016, pp. 107–108). Pieterse (2001) has also remarked that “hybridity carries different meanings in different cultures, among different strata within cultures and at different times” (p. 235).

Accordingly, I argue that this revisiting of colonial encounters emphasizes the epistemological limits of Bhabha’s (post)colonial hybridity discourse because of its overwhelming stress on diasporic meditations, for such a focus failed to grasp the complications involving the interpretation of colonial encounters documented in local languages. To this, Said (1994) has argued that “cultural resistance to imperialism” has often taken the form of “a private refuge” (p. 275). Said (1994) further maintains that “a pronounced awareness of culture as imperialism” has created a “reflexive moment of consciousness that enabled the newly independent citizen to assert the end of Europe’s cultural claim to guide and/or instruct the non-European” (p. 224). In the novel, Devi’s (1995) reflexive moment of consciousness has materialized itself in the form of ‘interrogative hybridity’ which enabled her to reclaim her lost cultural identity under British colonialism in India. Strikingly, Devi’s (1995) novel if viewed from an accommodative hybridity perspective can never be considered a hybrid novel as it does not fulfill any of the conditions considered necessary for a work to be characterized as postcolonial hybrid text. It is to be noted that Devi as a member of the community that was strictly patriarchal, was denied her basic rights. Hers is a postcolonial hybrid counter-narrative to colonial fantasy. Devi, at sixteen years, was a budding poet under the patronage of Rabindranath Tagore. In her novel, she vehemently denies spending any night of passion with Eliade during the period of their secret wooing and the novel is a personal justification of the love story between her and Eliade. Devi’s (1995) soul seems to be on wings and her liberated self profoundly rippling with poetry and folk songs, reveals a world immersed in literature (Sarkar, 2013, p. 39). As the story moves on, we see Devi (1995) commenting on eastern and western cultures on the one hand and resistance to colonial regimes and patriarchy on the other in a critical manner.

Being local in setting as well as in content, it does not have any concerns with the questions of migrancy, diaspora or transnational journeys; the prominent features of postcolonial migrants’ hybridity. But as a matter of fact, as we will observe shortly, the novel, while critical of patriarchy, is an illustration of what Menon (2016) calls “interrogative hybridity” (p. 74). Hence, revisiting these colonial encounters from Menon’s (2016) viewpoint will not only expand the scope of hybridity to indigenous postcolonial novels but also envision new avenues to the theoretical basis of postcolonial hybridity discourse. Because, the novel has a critique of colonial stereotypes, postcolonial insurgencies, mimicry, ambivalence and hybridity as the leading themes in itself. The storyline is sprinkled with Hindi verses and cross-cultural allusions to the Eastern and Western religions, rituals and philosophies. If there is a hybrid language, there is a hybridity of culture too. In fact, hybridity is instrumental in challenging the colonial authority and contradicting its catalogues “by creating new cultural artifacts and practices that no longer fit the colonisers’ records of ‘pure’ native culture” (Azada-Palacios, 2021, p. 6).

The novel under discussion has been interpreted on multifarious levels. For example, for Azim (1996), Devi’s novel is a tale of unrequited love and accounts of colonial problematics in the history of British India. S. Sarkar, in her assessment of the novel, determines that the book is the encoded mysteries of Devi’s love with Eliade written only for each other (pp. 39–41). In quite a challenging manner, Devi (1995) plunges into Indian conventions of marriage, the caste system and the primacy of divine insights that her society assigns to these cultural observances (p. 39). Basu (2001) claims that Devi’s novel is a description of her romantic encounter with Eliade. Devi (1995) relies on Indian cultural nationalism and poses questions about the colonized’s eroticized representation in colonial narratives. So far, how these historical and colonial exchanges envisage the ways for in-between relations or third space are yet to be explored and scrutinized. Equally, the novel has not been appraised from a postcolonial “interrogative” hybridity perspective and therefore the current study is a contributory effort in this regard. However, the present study aims at explicating the novels by applying Bhabha and Menon’s (post)colonial hybridity discourse. Devi’s novel can be read as an expression of imperfect copy-with difference from the western mode of writing novels therefore I argue that the existing studies on the novel have tended to focus more on the writer’s life and there exists very little analysis of how Devi’s (1995) novel records an effective resistance to a colonial discourse which degenerated her cultural identity and subjectivity.

Research Methodology

Before I proceed to do a critical reading of the novel, a methodological note is at hand. The study focuses on how inclusionary and exclusionary processes take place in the colonial encounters and serve as the primary soil from where colonizers/colonized relationships sprout and ultimately blossom as hybrid interactions. Because, within the scope of cultural studies, “hybridization refers to the fusion of diverse cultural elements or forms which ultimately generates new cultural forms yet are inter-connected with one another” (Meijuan et al, 2020, p. 28). Indeed, postcolonial theory put forward the idea that the study of omitted practices and silenced voices is invariably fragmented and scattered over distinct periods of colonial rule in India and the same has been validated particularly in Devi’s novel. The research is qualitative in nature and the theoretical framework consists of Postcolonial Critical Theory garnered from Bhabha’s (1994) (post)colonial hybridity discourse.

Furthermore, Menon (2016) and Pieterse (2001) have complicated Bhabha’s theory of hybridity discourse by introducing the concepts such as “accommodative/interrogative hybridity” and “critical hybridity” respectively. To these writers, colonizers and colonized co-mingle to create cultural hybrids. Building on Menon’s (2016) and Pieterse’ (2001) critical ideas on Bhabha’s hybridity discourse, I will read the text of Devi (1995) to discover how colonial encounters can be revisited in terms of colonized/colonizers’ standing opposite to each other but instantaneously providing ambivalent and third spaced colonial encounters in which resistance to colonization alongside the hybridization of the contacting cultures takes place. Notably, Devi (1995) uses the same third space for the promotion of local/non-western Indian norms in her novel. The technique of textual analysis is used for carrying out a critical consideration of the selected lines/passages from the novel in the light of the above-referred theoretical framework. In the words of Azada-Palacios (2021), “in emphasising the creativity of hybridity, Bhabha provides an alternative to both the anti-colonial nostalgia for an imagined indigenous purity, as well as to the anti-colonial longing for future cultural coherence, both of which are common in many post-colonial curricula” (p. 8). In what follows, we shall see how this hybridity plays out in her narrative and meritoriously challenges the dominant discourses which in any case contribute to marginalizing her voice/self.

Textual Analysis

“Interrogative Hybridity” and Revisiting Colonial Stereotypes in It Does Not Die

Bhabha (1994) has pointed out that colonizers’ stereotypical expressions against colonized and vice versa abound in (post)colonial discourse (p. 75). According to Azada-Palacios (2021) instead of using hybridity in the analysis of the historical colonial encounter, Bhabha imagines it to be an ongoing post-colonial project (p. 6). We find such instances in the novel as Devi (1995) tells us that once she visited the Empire Theatre along with her parents and as her parents’ ears were not tuned to “western music,” they described it as “howling of Jackals and barking of dogs” (p. 28). Thus, terming western music as “barking of dogs” is an example of a clichéd expression against western music. She also informs us that western music was only for those who had the privilege of getting western education and such persons were known as “Ingabangas, the Anglo-Bengalis” (p. 28). The designation, “Anglo-Bengalis” signposts how colonial encounters breed new identities which are hybrid in their very essences: “Hybridity has come to be associated with the effect of modern contact between colonizer and colonized. As a postcolonial motif, there is no dispute that hybridity can function as a questioning, skeptical tool of representation” (Menon, 2016, p. 107).

Moreover, she suggests that the colonizers should leave the habit of forming stereotypical knowledges against the colonized; only then the colonial world would become discernible to them. This makes her novel a counter-narrative to colonial discourse. Devi’s (1995) father’s prophetic advice to Eliade reestablishes my claim: “India will speak through you whenever you open your mouth. The most important thing is the change that came over you …. Your real transformation will come through your studies” (p. 50). In other words, he wants him to get firsthand knowledge about India and avoid relying on pre-established stereotypical assumptions in describing and understanding it. Bhabha (1994) has upheld that “to judge the stereotyped image on the basis of a prior political normativity is to dismiss it, not to displace it, which is only possible by engaging with its effectivity; with the repertoire of positions of power and resistance, domination and dependence that constructs colonial identification subject (both colonizer and colonized)” (p. 67). Eliade tells Devi (1995) that the Anglo-Indians do not think very highly of the Indians. They consider themselves superior to them. This is because they regard themselves as the “pure descendants of British” (p. 87). As they are proud of their race so because of this self-acclaimed ethnic preeminence and narrow-mindedness, they consider Indians uncivilized. But Devi (1995) is of the view that one’s opinion should not be based on hearsay as these foreigners “have such muddleheaded and wrong ideas” about the Indians whom they don’t even know (p. 87). The remarks clearly communicate her philosophical understanding of how stereotypical discourse is formed: “Overdetermined by stereotype, the characterization of indigenous peoples tended to screen out their agency, diversity, resistance, thinking, voices” (Boehmer, 2005, p. 21). In the words of Walsh (2011): “The basic Anglo-Indian view that India was a decadent and uncivilized society much in need of British tutelage became specific and concrete through demonstrations of the superior virtues of the Anglo-Indian home. Anglo-Indian domesticity became an important part of the broader “civilizing mission” of British imperial rule in India” (p. 132).

In the same way, Devi (1995) proposes that as the Indians do not know about the English people’s manners/customs, they should also avoid passing clichéd remarks against them (p. 87). Neither the colonized nor the colonizer should form partial views against each other. For Menon (2016), for a literary work to be truly interrogative and disruptive of colonial discourse, it should drastically transform and question the use of stereotypical colonial discourse which institutes knowledges about Others (p. 106). Devi (1995) has practically proved this as we have seen how philosophical and balanced opinions, she holds about colonial encounters. She discourages the stereotypes which otherwise proliferate and dominate colonial discourse. Bhabha (1994) therefore recommends that postcolonial hybridity can problematize colonial individuations and representations by reversing the seemingly sound effects of colonial discourse and in this way “other ‘denied’ knowledges enter upon the dominant discourse and estrange the basis of its authority–its rules of recognition” (p.114). Azada-Palacios (2021) has accordingly maintained that Bhabha’s concept of hybridity expresses “the reality that cultures not only inevitably intermingle with each other but also inevitably transform each other” (p. 8).

Acheraïou (2008) observes that when the colonizers reduce the colonized to beasts, they actually deny their existential substance as well as moral significance. In this process, the natives are dismissed as nonstandard species and vigilantly kept at a safe distance in order to inhibit chaos and degeneracy (p. 7). In this respect, Devi (1995) informs us that the English used to hate the Indians to the extent that they “won’t travel in the same compartment with us, for they feel they belong to the superior race, the British” (p. 88). We see Devi (1995) brilliantly deconstructing the stereotypical mentality of the colonizers against the colonized: “The colonized ‘Other’ must construct herself as an autonomous (speaking) subject by destabilizing those discourses that produced her” (Hyland,2013, p. 5). For Devi (1995), the English never came out of their self-drawn boundaries based on distorted perceptions of Indians: “The colonised, confined in an everlasting dumbness, had for long been prevented from telling their stories and defining themselves in their own words” (Acheraïou, 2008, p. 65). Likewise, she is honest enough to disclose the colonized’s biased mentality against the Anglo-Indians: “But let’s be truthful, don’t we also hate them? We call them ‘crossbreeds’. Is that a decent word?” (p. 88). The line commendably displays her subjective position on the typical misrepresentation of the colonizers at the hands of the colonized. McLeod (2007) has stressed that “by challenging and changing the ways in which we make the world meaningful, we might find new conceptual modes (however modest) of resisting, challenging and even transforming prejudicial forms of knowledge in the past and the present” (p. 5). Accordingly, by speaking from the borderlines and transgressive positions, the postcolonial women novelists “have forged their own singular voices and styles of self-expression” (Boehmer, 2005, p. 202). Devi (1995) is in favor of terminating the centuries-old stereotypes-oriented misunderstandings proliferating between colonized/colonizers because in the words of Byrne (2009): “The stereotype would be constantly working against itself from within, undoing its meanings, unable to keep them stable, and anxiously repeating them in every new situation, but never gaining the desired closure” (p. 80).

The unique feature of her writing is that we get her judgments on the phenomenon of colonial encounters in a balanced manner. We also observe her advocating for putting a full stop to the biased judgments that colonizers and colonized use against each other. She asserts: “I know that we hate each other only because we don’t know each other” (p. 88). She seems to be suggesting that the prejudiced perceptions will only end if the concerned parties determine to reevaluate and revisit their self-justifying conduct. Nandy (1978) argues that “the oppressed of the world often feel that they are constrained not merely by partial, biased or ethnocentric history, but by the idea of history itself,” therefore, a postcolonial ethic that is an inter-civilizational alliance against institutionalized suffering and oppression will only be possible, if we recognize that “the differences between the so-called privileged and underprivileged parts of the world are only notional” (p. 180). In other words, respecting each other’s views might be the only way to end racial prejudices. This is what Devi (1995) herself has adhered to in her novel. For example, if any aspect of the Anglo-Indians’ manners, appeals to her, with an open heart and mind, she praises that: “I like to watch their houses because they know how to hang a curtain properly, they tend to their flower pots carefully. Bengalis are very slovenly in these matters” (p. 88). We have seen how distinct, minute and at the same time hybrid her observations are to the problems of colonial encounters: “Hybridization was but one of the many types possible for Indians writing in English before this literature found some stability and depth” (Paranjape, 2012, p. 55). Said (1994) has claimed that many of the conflicting experiences “most interesting post-colonial writers bear their past within them—as scars of humiliating wounds, as instigation for different practices, as potentially revised visions of the past tending toward a new future … in which the formerly silent native speaks and acts on territory taken back from the empire” (p. 31). This is what Devi’s (1995) novel has spoken about as by potentially revisiting her past experiences in terms of colonial encounters, she is able to reinterpret and redeploy them for the sake of a better understanding of the colonial subject.

She not only challenges the colonizers’ supremacy but also praises them for their artistic sagacity and this is enough to indicate how ambivalent and hybridized colonial interactions are in their very essence. In fact, the postcolonial narratives based on interrogative hybridity “may choose to define a different aesthetics of storytelling, may not fit well into Western publishing norms, and may write in different linguistic and cultural idioms” (Menon, 2016, p. 106). While hinting at the inherent paradox of colonizers’ thinking, Devi (1995) tells us that the British who despise slavery and long for personal and political freedom have nevertheless enslaved the population of their empires, denying them the same freewill for which they themselves aspire, but she asserts that “logic is seldom used” (p. 158) in political matters. She recalls her passionate participation in the funeral procession of martyr Jatin Das, a nationalist who died fasting in jail and expresses her personal feelings as follows, “an enthusiasm a patriotic zeal moved through our frames; it gives us a strong sense of elation. It was not death, it was life. It was not mourning; it was a festival” (p. 156). The lines clearly reveal Devi’s (1995) nationalist spirit, zeal for freedom and her emotional attachment to the person who sacrificed his life for the cause of ensuring prisoners’ rights and India’s sovereignty. From the very outset, the leading features of anticolonial narratives had been to celebrate the cultural and political instances other than those bestowed by Europe, support anti-colonial uprisings and investigate “histories of anti-imperialist struggle and their own legends of ancestral valour against invading powers” (Boehmer, 2005, p. 179).

Furthermore, Devi (1995) used to admire the positive aspects of western culture. When her father introduced her to Eliade, he stood up in order to respectfully greet her. Being amazed at his behavior, she says: “I like this habit of Westerns—they stand up to greet a woman. Our boys never care … and take no notice of you at all, or are atrociously servile” (p. 31). We can say that as colonial encounters go on, the minds of the colonized do not passively assimilate whatever is given to them by the colonizers; rather they actively and critically examine the interaction and then decide about its dismissal or recognition. Menon (2016) has claimed that “the third space of intervention should be guarded against discursive appropriation by powerful centers—be they of language or location” (p. 108). To this end, at Mantu’s marriage ceremony, Eliade on spotting Devi carrying a heap of parcels readily extends his help and takes the luggage from her. She is amazed at this and so are the ladies of her family: “Getting up to greet a woman, drawing the curtain, and not sitting till she sits-all these are European customs. Ladies of our family are tremendously impressed” (p. 95). We have seen that even in the wake of a cultural divide, she goes on to praise Europeans whenever an aspect of their manners/culture enchants her and seems more logical or reasonable in approach: “Hybridity is a mixture of entities, in particular, those related to culture, tradition, race, ethnicity, or religion that have been commonly considered in the past to be self-standing, reasonably definable, and distinct from others” (Kato, 2016, p. 13).

On the one hand, she accepted that she was fascinated by the amazing home decoration style of the English women: “I was amazed to see a flower arrangement by an English lady … I watch and I learn. I have learnt many things in the Thakur household; I now learn much from the British ladies” (p. 178). The very combination of Indian and British arts of flower arrangements is enough to indicate her hybrid personality. On the other, we also come to know that out of the four English families living in her neighborhood, she liked only one of them and about the rest, she did not even like to talk about because the English women of these families used to:

Kill their time over tennis, bridge, drinking, dancing, and intermittent flirtation with each other’s husbands. They care for nothing else. Their men folk are ignorant and drunkards. May be in their inner self they are as human as we are but I have not the eye to see it, nor sensitivity enough to feel it. My mind has become too fine; it shrinks in their company. I know this is a fault. They see this fault from another point of view—they are British, we are despicable natives. (p. 178)

The lines clearly designate the difference that lies in the perceptions of an English woman and an Indian woman regarding everyday life matters. The lines also convey that the colonized’s minds do not uncritically welcome whatever comes to them from the colonizers’ so-called treasure house of knowledge. Instead of becoming passive receivers, the colonized’s minds actively compare and contrast those cultural values with their indigenous cultural values. In effect, if anything admirable comes from the British ladies, Devi (1995) is not hesitant to appreciate that but if their manners contradict her basic societal values then she severely decries them. Hence, being a postcolonial female writer, she does not celebrate or uncritically accept European values. But at the same time, her assertion that “they see the fault from another point of view” (p. 178) is ample to showcase how balanced approach she has in dealing with the views pertaining to the colonizers/colonized respective moral positioning. We have seen that the colonial encounters apart from paving the way for hybridization of the interacting cultures also establish the difference between the colonized’s cultures from that of colonial centers. The conflicting exigencies that Devi (1995) practices while describing colonial encounters are actually the indicators of her postcolonial consciousness which not only shapes her criticism against colonialism but also furnishes the conceptual and historical necessity of exhausting ideas from the West for the sake of negotiating with the past for a better prospect. Devi’s (1995) novel escapes from the polarities of self/other or us/them and takes us to a world that may result in understanding/tolerating each other and celebrating hybridity instead of purity. Said (1994) pertinently remarked that “to rejoin experience and culture is of course to read texts from the metropolitan center and from the peripheries contrapuntally, according neither the privilege of “objectivity” to “our side” nor the encumbrance of “subjectivity” to “theirs” (p. 259). I argue that Devis’ (1995) novel contrapuntally interprets colonial encounters as it neither accords the privileges of “us” nor the encumbrances of “them.” Rather, in the novel, hybridity functions as a skeptical and questioning tool of representation and thereby powerfully reveals “the interstitial; insists in the textile superfluity of folds and wrinkles; and becomes the unstable element of linkage, the indeterminate temporality of the in-between, that has to be engaged in creating the conditions through which newness comes to the world” (Bhabha, 1994, p. 227).

In the same vein, Devi’s (1995) father tells Eliade that in spite of the teargas and lathi-charge on the Indian protesters by the colonial forces, he is living with his family as one of their members and this very act in itself may be taken as a symbol of great revolution (p. 50). He further tells him that had he been living with his parents, his eating pots/plates would have been kept separate and he might have not been allowed to touch their food. Similarly, he might have been treated as an “untouchable” due to the complex network of religious and ethnic prejudices: “Compared to that a revolution is going on right here in this house itself, even now” (p. 51). The episode not only hints at the gradual transformation that Devi’s family was going through under the colonial rule in India but also shows the investigative critique of her own society which divides humans in the name of caste and creed: “Hybridity might function not as a conflict or struggle between two racial identities, but instead as constant movement between spaces, passing through and between identity itself without origin or arrival” (Yazdiha, 2010, p. 33). The unique feature of her novel is that it frankly talks about the stereotypical mindset of the colonized against the colonizers: “Hybridity calls into question the boundaries of racial consciousness as a hybrid consciousness defies the imposed limits of race” (Yazdiha, 2010, p. 33).

Also, her father informs Eliade that that had he been living with his parent, his wife would have observed veil from him and his daughter might not have been studying in boy’s college, rather she “would have been behind the curtains” in her in-laws, under the constant surveillance of an “over-critical mother-in-law” (p. 50). Thus, she might have been confined within the four walls of home and would have been steadfastly performing domestic chores. This shows that the Indian society bit by bit was experiencing a change in its lifestyle as well as in its attitude towards women. We see how under colonialism; hybridity has been paving its way to the colonizer’s lives and how colonial culture compels the colonized to revisit their previously held ideals which might not have been based on rationality/reasoning. According to Guignery (2011), hybridity is such a productive site that “it shifts power, questions discursive authority and suggests that colonial discourse is never wholly in control of the colonizer. Dominating discourses are thus revealed to be fractured, which opens the ground for their subversion” (pp. 4–5). Likewise, she asks her father that we should not allow a European (Eliade) to stay at our home because the same Europeans are committing atrocities against our people. Her father responds that all Europeans are not our enemies and goes on to proclaim that “a day will come when patriotism will be considered a crime” (p. 34). Therefore, Guignery (2011) suggests that colonial hybridity not only opposes the myth of cultural and racial authenticity/purity but also negates the presence of any fixed and unaffected identity by embracing and encouraging blending, syncretic, impure, composite, eclectic and heterogeneous identities as the natural outcome of colonial encounters (p. 3). According to Menon (2016), for a postcolonial work to be considered an example of interrogative and interventionist hybridity, it is necessary that it should offer radical alternative views and complicate choices (p. 104). This is what we have observed in the case of Devi’s (1995) novel which approaches the subject of colonialism from absolutely different perspectives.

Furthermore, Mantu, her father’s cosine was a nationalist and his elder brother was jailed for staging a revolt against the colonial rule in India. She used to boast of his stories of adventures and struggle for India’s self-rule but her father never approved of such sentiments and discouraged her “patriotic zeal” (p. 33). He used to downplay the activities of the revolutionaries and never eulogized their sacrifices. She herself tells us that when she retrospectively thinks of those revolutionary events and patriotic passions; these now seem merely delusions and even the nationalists’ claim “that the whole nation rose against the British” also seems to be a constructed myth (p. 33). The reason was that “most of the educated and affluent never thought that the British Empire could really disintegrate or even wished it would” (p. 33). The lines tell us that considering colonialism a suppressing institution is not uniformly acknowledged by the colonized: “A violent and oppressive society produces its own special brands of victimhood and privilege and ensures a certain continuity between the victor and the defeated, the instrument and the target, and the interpreter and the interpreted. As a result, none of these categories remain pure” (Nandy, 1978, p. 173).

It is interesting to note that, unlike her father, Devi (1995) considered the British colonial regime as based on an “unsympathetic government” (p. 33) but as her father regarded patriotism as a crime (p. 34), she could not take part in the otherwise countrywide processions staged against the tyrannizing rule: “We could take no part in the country-wide enthusiasm that nevertheless stirred us to the depths. But we did what we could. We gave up the foreign goods totally” (p. 33). It is clear from the ongoing lines that she could not stand against colonialism because of her father’s commands. In implied manners, she seems to be questioning both the hegemonies i.e. colonialism and patriarchy. But it is the patriarchy that she should defeat first if she desires to stand against the imperial forces. In short, being suppressed by patriarchy as well as by colonialism, she is not allowed to make decisions according to her aspirations, so she utilizes the hybrid third space to enunciate her suppressed voice: “Hybridity is to culture what deconstruction is to discourse: transcending binary categories … recognizing the in-between and the interstices means going beyond dualism, binary thinking” (Pieterse, 2001, p. 238).

By the same token, the intricate and intersecting identities of Devi and her father and the argument between them on the point of whether to support the cause of freedom or remain neutral suggest their different perspectives/attitudes towards colonial atrocities. Besides, the dialogue also exhibits how patriarchy as a usurping force just like colonialism blurs the history of marginalized women by suppressing their voice. In this way, Devi’s (1995) thought-provoking critique of the powerful forces of imperialism, has not only productively expanded the scope of her novel but also made it an illustration of ‘investigative hybridity’ which is a form of conscious and deliberate intervention against hegemonic discourse “not to simplify differences but to account for and anchor specific complexities” and “such negotiation between vastly different texts in different languages will, of itself, complicate the critical rubric” (Menon, 2016, p. 106).

Colonial Mimicry and Interrogative Hybridity in It Does Not Die

In Pieterse’s (2001) views despite the fact that hybridity differs in its implication from culture to culture but its importance will continue as long as it effectively challenges the borderlines which have been essentialized in the name of cultural purities (p. 220). In this regard, as Devi’s (1995) father was a great scholar of Sanskrit literature, the foreigners used to visit him quite often and due to these foreign visitors’ influence, their “ways began changing” and gradually they “were getting westernized” (p. 23). However, her grandmother never liked the variation and therefore “her disapproval of the western style of eating was total” (p. 23). But quite opposite to her grandmother, Devi (1995) liked the transformation in her family’s mores: “We young ones liked the change” (p. 23). We observe that in the context of colonialism, the hybridization process and ambivalence go side by side in giving new meanings to colonial encounters: “Cultural hybridity is theorised as the result of the continual process of translation which is internal to any culture, which in turn stems from an apprehension of cultural difference” (Byrne, 2009, p. 33). Majumdar (2007) has maintained that the Indo-British ethnic and cultural encounters made the colonial family a hybrid formation: “Western ideas of domestic management were combined with Indian ideals of hierarchy and devotion to produce the dyadic couple form by the turn of the century in urban, Indian life” (p. 437).

Similarly, when the foreigners’ visits to Devi’s home increased, they decided to redecorate their house so that it looks attractive and modern: “It was an extremely painstaking job to keep a half-westernized, half-orthodox house like ours tidy the way I wished” (p. 31). The lines not only show the colonized’s mimicry of the western home decoration style but also tell us how simulation poses threat to the self-loving demand of colonial power, for “mimicry inaugurates the process of anti-colonial self-differentiation through the logic of inappropriate appropriation” (Gandhi, 1998, p. 150). Significantly, for Bhabha (1994) the ambivalence of mimicry does not simply challenge the hegemonic discourse, rather the anxiety is transformed into such indecision which fixes the colonial subjects’ partial presence (p. 86). For Bhabha (1994), the nuisance of mimicry acts like a double-edged sword. It not only discloses the ambivalence-based colonial discourse but also disconcerts its authority (p. 88). Devi’s (1995) insistence on keeping her home as “half-westernized” and “half-orthodox” (p. 31) reinforces her incomplete presence which in turn underscores a menace to colonial authority: “A desire that, through the repetition of partial presence, which is the basis of mimicry, articulates those disturbances of cultural, racial and historical difference that menace the narcissistic demand of colonial authority” (Bhabha, 1994, p. 88).

Unlike Devi (1995), the Tagore family instead of following what she calls “cheap western imitations” (p. 58) for the interior decoration as well as jewelry ornaments; rather preferred to employ oriental/indigenous artistic designs. Hence, the West which is admired due to its etiquettes of respectfully greeting women is being ridiculed and its home decoration techniques are termed as “cheap” (p. 58). Menon has therefore emphasized that the postcolonial writers’ hybrid identities should not strengthen consciously or unconsciously the hegemony of the metropolitan centers, from where these identities have been peripheralized, for postcolonial hybridity is all about “mixed metaphors, blurred borders and intermingled identities in different proportions and overlaps” (p. 98). Equally noticeable is the fact that although western jewelry designs lack artistic qualities, she along with her sister liked to mimic/imitate them for innovation and beauty: “The ambivalence of mimicry—almost but not quite—suggests that the fetishized colonial culture is potentially and strategically an insurgent counter-appeal” (Bhabha, 1994, p. 91). We can say that if her desire of keeping the home “half westernized” signals mimicry then discrediting the western styles as “cheap” and “weak imitations” (p. 58) underlines the subversiveness of the same act: “The success of colonial appropriation depends on a proliferation of inappropriate objects that ensure its strategic failure, so that mimicry is at once resemblance and menace” (Bhabha, 1994, p. 86). Bhabha (1994) has highlighted the fact that the recognition of “the split-space of enunciation may open the way to conceptualizing an international culture; based not on the exoticism of multiculturalism or the diversity of cultures, but on the inscription and articulation of culture’s hybridity” (p. 38).

Ambivalence-Based Cultural Differences and Interrogative Hybridity in It Does Not Die

Notably, in Devi’s (1995) novel, colonial ambivalence is never absent. Paranjape (2012) has maintained that although the colonizers and the colonized co-mingle to produce biological and cultural hybrids yet as a matter of fact such hybridities are not identical and equal: “Indeed, it is unwise to collapse entirely the distinction, even the division, between the colonizers and the colonized even if we refuse to see them as binaries” (p. 82). To this end, despite the fact that Devi (1995) used to praise European manners and literature but she preferred to communicate with Eliade in her own language. She did not like to speak English for his sake. She maintained that “why need we talk in English just because of Mircea. It is not our language” (p. 101). This shows how in her response to colonial encounters ‘celebration’ and ‘confrontation’ operate on a simultaneous basis and in this process, colonial ideals also momentarily enchant her and then disappear, paving the way for her divided/hanged self between the two cultures: “These colonial relationships, often characterized by an ambivalent mix of dependency and disdain, consequently were much more complex and variable than that implied by the simple, stark polarity of colonizer and colonized” (McLeod, 2007, p. 2). Such sort of inconsistency according to Nandy (2001) takes place, whenever the colonized as an outsider tries “to integrate in an alien culture of cosmopolitanism by exiling his past or by reading parts of his own self as only a romantic, nostalgic beckoning of the past” (p. 85). Consequently, hybridity serves as a prominent feature of postcolonial critical as well as creative texts (Ashcroft et al, 2002, p. 178).

We see Devi (1995) highlighting the subtle differences between the two cultures and this makes her novel a representative text of interrogative hybridity. Boehmer (2005) has pointed out that the postcolonial female “writers retrieve in their work suppressed oral traditions, half-forgotten histories, unrecorded private languages, moments of understated or unrecognized women’s resistance” (p. 220). I say that by writing back to the center, she has successfully registered her views about colonial encounters and in this process, she does not disregard even the subtle matters related to her life. It is this autobiographical form of writing that provided enunciatory space to the discriminated women in the context of male dominance and colonialism: “The autobiographical form allowed them to mould and voice an identity grounded in these diverse experiences of endurance and overcoming, of both typicality and singularity” (Boehmer, 2005, p. 217).

To illustrate the point further, I argue that in colonial encounters, union with colonizers and separation from them takes place on a simultaneous basis. Although, at the surface level, union and separation contradict each other and their combination will not yield any positive meanings, in the words of Devi’s (1995) father: “It is only these contradictories that can reveal the whole, the full, the infinite” (p. 47). Therefore, for Bhabha (1994), contradictions and ambivalence are central in constituting and organizing human subjectivity and the systems of its cultural representations (p. 19). Similar is the case with Devi’s (1995) loving passions for Eliade in which union and separation go hand in hand, due to Eliade’s playing the role of a colonizer and Devi’s (1995) that of a colonized. They fail to bridge the cultural gap that keeps them separate from each other. Devi (1995) confessed that whenever they looked at each other, she used to feel “the ‘togetherness’ of separation and union and its infinite yearnings” (p. 47). As a result, it is the ambivalence-based third space of enunciation that she employs in order to express her views regarding her relationship with him: “The subject of cultural discourse—the agency of a people—is split in the discursive ambivalence that emerges in the contest of narrative authority between the pedagogical and the performative” (Bhabha, 1994, p. 148). Camilleri and Kapsali (2020) have rightly argued that Bhabha’s influential reading of the hybridity concept in the context of colonialism, has marked the presence of interstitial and liminal spaces in processes like those of mimicry, which reproduces “the dominant culture in an ‘alien’ indigenous/colonized setting” and “such perspectives resonate with others that emerge when two (or more) cultural worlds collide” (p. 1).

In addition, colonial ambivalence not only renders her relationship with him ambiguous but also deprives her of the power of making decisions regarding her cultural affiliations. In this regard, the girl whom we saw slapping Eliade when he touched her body has readily/willingly given herself to his demands (p. 68). The following lines convey the psychological agony that she suffered from in deciding whether this was a sin that she committed against her religion or simply an act of love: “I feel no sense of sin—and why should I? I committed no sin. I tried to stop him, didn’t I? Let him commit a sin—but this is not considered a sin in their country—so I have presumed from all the stories he told me” (p. 77). The recurring use of question-marks in the above-cited lines indicates how the concept of sin loses its cultural associations and becomes relative under colonial influence. It is this ambivalence that pushes her to a state of in-betweenness, “neither One nor the Other but something else besides, in-between” (Bhabha, 1994, p. 219). In short, she could not decide whether she committed a sin in permitting him access to her body or was it an act based on love. Moreover, she never expressed her feelings to him because she was not certain about them: “I am not sure of myself, I do not know whatever this constant longing to see him, to be near him is really love—who can assure me on that point?” (p. 100). This shows her indecisiveness in her attachment to him. Kalua (2009) has stressed the fact that the third space/liminality is “a response to and a real moment of intervention in people’s daily lives as they try to grapple with the cosmic eddies of change around them. Because of such change, the notion of culture is not defined holistically but as enunciation” (p. 23).

Conclusion

To conclude, Devi’s (1995) imperfect imitation of the colonizers with a difference has enabled her to imprint her distinct thoughts on the phenomenon of colonial encounters. In her case, colonial supervision repeatedly eclipsed her voice so within the parameters of hegemonic context, her novel dealing with her very private world has effectively questioned the use of stereotypical colonial discourse against the colonized and this makes her novel an illustration of what Menon (2016) calls “interrogative hybridity” (p. 27). From this perspective, Devi’s (1995) novel becomes archetypal of her split-psyche/alter-ego whose duality/contrast visibly celebrates hybridity by undermining the possibility of a well-composed pure self. In short, colonial hybridity provides such lodgings for the colonized from where they can reconstruct their “hybrid selves” and record their colonial traumas. Pieterse (2001) affirms:

Acknowledging the contingency of boundaries and the significance and limitations of hybridity as a theme and approach means engaging hybridity politics; this is where critical hybridity comes in, which involves a new awareness of and new take on the dynamics of group formation and social inequality. This critical awareness is furthered by acknowledging rather than suppressing hybridity. (p. 239)