Exile, according to Said, "is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home." The rift, in this case, is primarily a physical one that has a secondary psychological manifestation in the form of certain emotions, characteristics, and states of mind embodied in various persons in exile throughout history. The curious effect of imperialism on an indigenous people is the ability to bring forth the characteristics of exile in a people who never underwent the primary physical uprooting from their homeland. There is a psychological rift that occurs when the land belonging to a people is no longer theirs, not because they left, but rather because someone else has come in.
It is an odd phenomenon that is hard to put into words. How can a people who belonged, only a while back, to this exact same land now feel out of place here? In my opinion, it has much, if not everything, to do with power and its sudden concentration in the hands of a very visible 'other'. Because while the culture(s), religion(s), language(s), etc. of the indigenous population may still be that of the vast majority of the people inhabiting the land, they are all suddenly wrong in light of the new power dynamic. The ways of the imperialists, instead of being out of place as they are new and belong to a foreign minority, are given legitimacy and considered right solely because they belong to those who now hold power, relegating all indigenous tradition to inferiority in a way that has a great and averse impact on those who revered, without question, these ways of life.
There is a great pain, I think, in witnessing traditions dear to you or dear to a people that you love being declared obsolete, 'backward', and worthy of the trash-bin of history by an alien power that does not comprehend, on any level, the worth of native practices.
Said explains that "an exile is always out of place," and how "no matter how well they may do, exiles are always eccentrics who feel their difference." These lines, though they did not mean to, encapsulate very well the experience of the colonized and specifically, the experience of the colonized upper class. Because it is the upper class that feels the loss of power most acutely, it is the upper class that tries its utmost to integrate into the new power dynamic, and it is the upper class that must learn that no matter how much they adopt the lifestyle and ways of the colonizers they will never be them--only to reach a point where they are out of place among both their own native people and the new society that they tried to join. This series of events is precisely what is captured in Nazir Ahmed's Ibn-ul-Vaqt and moments from this book show, better than any explanation, the unique dilemma of being surrounded by homeland and yet still being out of place.
There is one instance in particular that I would like to bring attention to, and it is the event of the British mocking the English of the Indians. In this case the natives are made to feel inferior and estranged all while within their homeland because power rests in the hands of outsiders. This estrangement is further intensified because what is native is deemed so wrong and what is of the colonizers is deemed so right, that the colonizers have no shame in not learning Urdu/Hindi as English has been given precedence in the homeland of Urdu/Hindi itself. How does one make sense of such an arrangement of alienation? How does one escape an alienation that has made its bed within the natural place of belonging itself? It cannot be called exile simply because it is not but perhaps the mind relegates itself to a state of psychological exile when the homeland becomes too unfamiliar to remain present in.
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