Imperialism and Exile: The Habitus and Self-conscious Exclusionary Tactics of the Colonized (Saad Hafeez)

It is a well-established fact that imperialism created ruptures, discontinues, and exilic situations. But what is seldom discussed is the role of the colonial subjects in reaffirming, reinventing and emboldening exclusionary categories that drive people to the borders.  In the modern age, termed as the “age of the refugee”, large scores of faceless peoples are driven to seek refuge, only to be turned back at every arbitrarily drawn border. Pierre Bourdieu terms the amalgam of practices that gives a community their identity as their habitus, a notion usually appraised for its inclusionary nature but seldom viewed in light of the violence it imposes.

In his Reflections on Exile, Said established the dialectic between nationalism and exile, in which successful nationalisms maintain a monopoly over truth by relegating falsehoods and inferiority to outsiders (Said 176). In the case of South Asia, the British used tools such as employment quotas, census information, curricula segregation and cartographic representation to impose borders and lines on a seemingly cosmopolitan society. While nationalistic narratives portray the rupture of cosmopolitanism as a specifically top-down process, texts such as Nazir Ahmad’s Ibnul-Vaqt elucidate the role of the colonized in consolidating these identity boundaries by tenaciously holding onto cultural symbols of language, dress and speech.

This sentiment is clearly voiced in two distinct moments of the text- the first being the case of the pupil who fails to speak English in a coherent manner, despite his intellectual prowess. While multilingualism may have been applauded before the imperialist rupture, the pupil (voiced by the author) self-consciously reaffirms these linguistic boundaries when he states that “Aadmi Maadri Zaba’an kay elawaya doosri zaba’an ka zaba’an daan … ho hee nahi sakta” (Ahmad 54). These types of rifts created in indigenous habitus-es again re-surface on Mr. Noble’s dinner table, where it is in fact the locals who constantly remind each other of exclusionary categories. This materializes in the servant’s disdain for Ibnul-Vaqt’s ignorance of the proper gentleman-like ‘tehrikekar’ (Ahmad 99), while simultaneously glorifying the self for successful acculturation into a foreign cultural practice.

By reading Said and Ahmad in conjunction, my gut response points to these hypocritical moments of typecasting which caused local peoples to draw borders and take responsibility in uprooting the pre-existent cosmopolitan culture that existed in the region. The exclusionary nature of these self-conscious reenactments of difference may seem self-evident, but a deeper understanding of their relevance in the texts is required to tease out the nuances of the phenomenon at hand.