Human psychology works in a funny way. It lives for
association and it craves for immortality. It dies for identity and it kills
for supremacy. The dichotomy at hand has been highlighted in the essay, Reflections
on Exile, by Edward Said in order to bring forth the most important question of
whether exile is simply a by-product of a need to spread the “one-true”
ideology by the westerner culture (so called ethnocentric approach to life) or
probably the mother of a diversified world as we see it today?
Being an exile is to have been driven away from the identity
you were born in and to be striped of any physical association with a nation.
It is to have been secluded to a place of land that is as new and alien to you
as to a baby newly born into this world. The exile figures have long served as
the memoirs of a revolution or a great romantic tale of reconciliation in the
efforts of overcoming the sorrow of estrangement, as in the words of Said. On
the other hand, Imperialism as known to the world is the creation of the state
of being “exiled”. It strips you of the national identity that you strive for,
you live on and it instills in you the feeling of being stranded and homeless. The
state of Muslims in the British Indian sub-continent is the classic example of both
the imperialist and exile figures. Through the tenure of Mughal Empire, Muslims
were considered as the foreigners who with the sheer power of sword and army
created a gold throne on the land that rightfully belonged to the Hindus, the
rightful inheritors of the true Indian Sanskrit culture in the words of William
Jones and adopting the role of an Imperialist. But after the British took over
the sub-continent, Muslim emperors and the local citizens were thrown to the
shadows and deserted streets to taste the feeling of being exiled. As depicted
in a heart-warming tale of Ibn-ul-Vaqt by Deputy Nazir Ahmed, we see the
cultural isolation of Muslims at the hands of Hindus. Without physically
exiling them from the homeland, Hindus carefully separated the Muslim
literature, as one of the examples from that of the sub-continent. Furthermore,
it highlights the power dynamics of the sub-continent whereby a civilian, the
protagonist in this case, is attracted towards becoming a part of a “superior”
culture, becoming a “master servant” of the British who have the right to make
fun of you whenever they please and take away the integrity of your language as
they may.
As Simon Weil said, “To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul”, the condition of Muslims of India in the late 1800s was a sheer depiction of how being in an exile precedes the creation of nationalism in its very true essence and hence leads to the brute force required to shatter the shackles of imperialism. Whether through the use of pen or sword, it gives one a chance to build the set of ideologies anew and to spread the feeling of belonging to a culture from scratch. It creates a feeling of self-realization that can only be followed by a mass nationalist movement directed towards a reformation of its kind. The living example of this self-realization is the land of Pakistan, which was born out of sheer desperation or need to associate one’s self with a name, a tangible ideology and status that you been stripped off of in order to protect the culture.
In its simplest forms, it takes us back to the words of Erich Auerbach who blatantly refuses to accept the negativities or the sorrow depicted in the writings of exile figures and instead forces us to think of the state where this exile is actually an instigator of widening our intellectual horizons and becoming critical of the world we live in so that we see it’s positivity and negativity together. He believes that beyond the state of exile is a greater form of knowledge that ultimately should be the focus of a human race. Exiles, in this sense, are the selected few who have granted the chance to see the world at its hinges, from the inside and the outside and to observe its merits and demerits. Hugo of St. Victor also summarized the same feeling that the perfect man is the one who takes everything to be a foreign land and then learns to survive and develop the ideologies that would stay with him forever.
In this state of affairs, exile can be seen to be a rather positive instigator of producing new ideologies, reflections on our world and the sheer force to build nationalism from the ground. It can be seen to be evolving with the power dynamics of today’s world in order to help us get rid of whatever effects remain of the brutality of Imperialism and help us re-kindle the spirits that help us reconnect to not just the people who look like us or live like us, but who belief in a critical approach to life and do what sets good as the precedence for each other. It serves to be the competitor of ethnocentrism in its very basic form and the promoter of self-realization.
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