Date: Sun, 4 Feb 1996 21:17:39 -0500 (EST)
From: Arindam Dutta <adutta-AT-phoenix.Princeton.EDU>
Subject: Re: masculinity and postcoloniality




> "Nothing" is a pretty strong and sweeping retort of my statment. I say 
> that the feudal values are much more prominent in making the characters 
> and understanding them in Shaolay than those affected by urban-centered 
> colonialism . Ifsomeone deconstructs Sholay through colonialist cannons 
> and does not recognise the pre-ponderance of the millenium old feudal 
> values that would be looking a thing upside down .


Hmmmmmmm,

"millenium old feudal values", hello?

Nothing in my following statement should be taken as saying that there is 
no oppression of any kind in third-world rural areas. Totally the 
opposite, I totally share your anger at continuing scenarios of rural 
exploitation.

But, is the term "feudal" with regard to the rural an adequate 
terminology? Shouldn't one look at it also in terms of being a formal 
category, in the great materialist theories of production of the 
nineteenth century, including Marx, whom you seem to lean towards? The 
"continuing feudalisation of the periphery" as Gayatri Spivak has put it, 
and I take her to mean precisely that model by which models of production 
(such as "Asiatic production") can be subsumed under the broad rubric of a 
"bad" feudalism (read pre-capitalist in the Hegelian view of history; 
Asiatic despotism) could be appropriated by the  civilisational  
benevolence of the "West" into the capitalist process.

Sholay is merely complicit in this process, by depicting an ideal 
construction of the "feudal", it equally well founders on the edges of 
the "modern". Jai cannot, in the end, marry Radha (widow remarriage) even 
after the act of marriage has been secured by virtue of sacrament in the 
gift of the daughter from Radha's father to the Thakur to Jai. Radha, the 
widow, the woman unhinged from a generic feudalism must see Jai's death 
as a (literally) closing of the windows to her future; the failure of a 
"progressive" feudalism must be seen as the denial of the possibility of 
the "modern". In any case, the net effect is the same, the terms of 
tradition/feudalism and modernity, must be seen more as PRAGMATIC features 
of the post-colonial state, but precisely THAT (i.e. pragmatism) which it 
holds IN COMMON with Old World empire.

The conforming to the above teleological structure, I believe, that of the 
feudal (pre-capitalist) presaging the modern (capitalist), is exactly the 
kind of sociological bludgeons of typology that marks both colonial 
and post-colonial hegemonic constructions of native identity. Maybe we 
need a different set of words, eh? And less perennialising ones, too, 
perhaps, with less mention of unchanging milleniums? Poor old Marx would 
be laughing in his grave, at us filthy Indians.

Regards, 
Arindam