Saturday, 8 February 2014

Liminality and the Liberal Colonial

The role of the liberal colonials characterized in ‘A passage to India’ is indeed of utmost importance. Yet the question is, what exactly does it mean to be a liberal colonial, and whether even such a category, or type can or could exist. In this vein, I like to understand the liberal colonial as occupying a sort of liminal space. This is so because of their characteristic of being ‘neither here, nor there’, with one extreme being the rigid, imperialistic, orthodox colonials like Ronny Queaslop, also known as the Anglo-Indian, and the other extreme being ‘a friend of India’ perhaps. Moreover this is also so because of the potential that exists by the very essence of their occupying that space.
With Mrs Moore and Adela, the case is relatively obvious and simple to understand in terms of liminality, for they are ‘new’, in coming as well as in their attitudes, they would like to see the ‘real’ India, have a fascination for it, and have sufficient distance from the Anglo-Indian perspective to India at the start, to sense the god-like attitude of the British and how its problematic. Fielding however, is somewhat an inhabitant of this liminal space, and by now seems to be well at home with this idea, yet he has not crossed over to either sides, and seems to have no wish to do so either, until of course the incident of the rape where arguably, he has to take a side. This can be shown through the following excerpt:
‘Goodbye, my dear Fielding, and you actually are on our side against your own people?’
‘Yes. Definitely.’
He regretted taking sides. To slink through India unlabeled was his aim. Henceforward he would be called anti-British


The advantage of occupying this liminal space is that there is the potential for change, for reformation, and social hierarchies are challenged or put into question. Yet the problem is firstly that it is a place of uncertainty, and uncertainty has a hard time putting up a concerted front to established tradition. Secondly, since it is a threshold means that at some point in time, it will have to be crossed, even though future outcomes may be unsure. Thus by this very nature, I feel there is little hope for attaining some utopian ideal of a kind of egalitarian co-existence between the colonials and subjects, even for people like Fielding. The very term liberal colonial thus puts a limit on this, for though they might be liberal, they remain colonials that are there to govern India, which is not a drawing room where liberality and liminality can exist.

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