Kunapipi XXVI:2

R. AZHAGARASAN
Interrogating Indian Nationalism in the Postcolonial Context

I
Nationalism in India, as we see from the wheel in the centre of the flag, and as we know from the story of Gandhi, has been constructed partly on the economics and symbolism of textiles. Emma Tarlo has catalogued the development of ‘national dress’, and state governments in India enshrine certain kinds of textile production as national culture by propping up handloom cooperatives. This text of identity and cloth has become so accepted that Dipesh Chakrabarty now reports we can tell a politician on the make by his hypocritically rigorous adherence to khaddar wear. Such a national text/ile overlooks a different story of cloth in one non-British colony, India. Its politics reveal how, nationally, the symbolism of Gandhian homespun has masked the perpetuation of caste discrimination.

The histories of marginalised communities in India testify not only to their oppression at the hands of an alien imperial power but also to internal oppression and the continued struggle to survive. Postcolonial theory has worked mainly with nation frameworks and needs to respond to this double-colonisation in post-colonial societies. In the Indian context, the uprising of dalits (who include ‘untouchables’) informs us how different social, economic, political and religious institutions excluded them from the constructions of national identity according to traditional Hinduism. According to Gail Omvedt, this poses a major challenge to the way nationalism is constructed as Gandhian/Hindu and fails to be questioned even in Marxist contexts:
The theoretical challenge posed by the dalit and anti-caste movement was not simply concerned with replacing ‘class’ by ‘caste’. It sought a revised methodology of exploitation, a combined class-caste analysis. (122)

The limits of the national story as a Gandhian anti-British movement are revealed if we consider the texts and textile work of French Pondicherry. The literature available on Pondicherry can be broadly classified as colonial and post-colonial. The Diary of Ananda Ranga Pillai (1736–1761), and V. Subbaiah’s Saga of the Freedom Movement: A Testament of my Life (1973), constitute the colonial phase and the novels of Pirabajan (in Tamil) — Vaanam Vasappadum (1993) and Kanneeraal Kaappomme (1998) — belong to the post-colonial phase. Of the two texts in the colonial phase, the Diary of Ananda Ranga Pillai gives us a detailed picture of how the French handled caste and managed their textile trade. (Fundamentally, whereas the British prevented dalits from entering the army and civil services, the French sought to empower them. They did not, however, disturb the caste structure of textile production in Pondicherry, and so avoided anti-colonial unrest.) Subbaiah’s autobiography gives an account of the industrialisation of the textile trade in Pondicherry, the birth and growth of trade unions, and their complex relationship with the union of India. Subbaiah’s support for unionising mill workers left him unmoved by Gandhi’s traditionalist cultural nationalism. Rather, he contacted the socialist leader Jawaharlal Nehru and at his suggestion went to Paris. There, he negotiated a ten-point plan for labour reform and Pondicherry had the honour of being the first state in Asia to have an eight-hour week with weekly holiday for its factory workers.