The Post-Colonial State in Our Time

Yesterday, I attended a talk given by Vijay Prashad, professor at Trinity College in Connecticut and author, most recently, of The Darker Nations: A People's History of The Third World. Much of what he said is not strictly speaking original, but the interpretive framework he is after promises to bring together many disparate phenomena operating across the developed/developing world divide, from urban gentrification to the creation of financial bubbles. To understand the current world order, Prashad takes us back to the imagination of an alternative path, the Third World dream of liberation and self-assertion; through it, as Fanon once said, formerly colonised societies would achieve what Europe could not.

From an economic and geographic perspective, this vision is decidedly not new: we see the invocation of the old I.S.I. (import-substitution-industrialisation) model set against today's neoliberal tyranny, the South-North resource flow as "accumulation by dispossession" (Prashad quotes David Harvey on this), and so on. But in a cultural sense, the awareness of the immediate postwar aftermath as an age of new global connections, which I discussed earlier in the context of Amitav Ghosh's essay on Hindi films in the non-Western world, is a fruitful area of historical thinking that is just now coming to the fore. Prashad's focus on major state figures like Nehru, Nasser and Sukarno, and on high-level events like the Bandung conference, thus serves a dual purpose: to render new cultural meanings to traditional diplomatic and political narratives (showing how these figures were important to a deep and wide movement that thought of the world differently, not just seeing them as another Cold War power bloc), and to argue that the idea of the Third World was institutionally anchored in state and transnational power (the implicit contrast is to today's fragmented, subterranean, ragtag resistances epitomised by the World Social Forum). The destruction or "assassination," in his term, of these power structures represented the real death of the dream in the late 1970s.

After his vibrant and provocative presentation, I asked Prashad a nagging question. On the one hand, he still views the "Global South" as a viable force in international relations, and he is interested in studying the developmental models and pathways of "BRIC" (Brazil-India-China) nations as an alternative to the current U.S.-dominated world order. But on the other hand, he rightly pointed out that India's current government continues to send heavy subscriptions to the IMF and is even seeking to restart the Doha round. Is the post-colonial state not now part of the very process that creates an "accumulation by dispossession"? Can it be part of a "globalising" world economy and a source of resistance to it at the same time? Prashad's answer was that elections matter and things may change. The Indian state does not essentially have one role or another, but its policies swing back and forth; therefore, it is also susceptible to influence, to the contingent democratic process. An electoral victory, for example, would presumably reconfigure the state on the world stage. Such a faith in popular democracy to triumph over large-scale structures is in many ways not traditional Marxism at all. It relies instead on forging innovative links between local resistances and state power, and not in the least on a considerable degree of optimism.

The Curious Indian Life of Archie

From an outsider's perspective, it is odd to observe what appears to be a national obsession with Archie comics in India. This summer, when he proposed to brunette vixen Veronica over wholesome blonde Betty, newspapers ran story after story of analysis. The Times of India conducted a poll asking its readers, "Should Archie Marry Veronica?" 78% said No and emphatically argued the point on the comments page. Another earnest headline in DNA proclaimed, "Betty fans protest as Archie proposes to Veronica." What makes Archie so popular in India that mainstream culture so actively concerns itself with its fictional universe?

A few years ago, there were plans to "Indianise" Archie, perhaps even going to extent of clothing Veronica and Betty in saris. It was noted that the books had been selling well in India for over forty years, and had the largest circulation of any comic in English. In the Indian context, Archie takes on a range of meanings and references, which tenuously reconcile the all-American world of Riverdale High with a very different cultural milieu.

On one level, there is a certain colonial genealogy to Archie. In Aparna Sen's 36 Chowringhee Lane, elderly Anglo-Indian teacher Violet Stoneham visits her brother Eddie in a Calcutta nursing home to bring him tins of biscuits and Archie comics. Here the book itself becomes a symbol of a colonial past, pleasantly quaint yet fundamentally anachronistic. It is also a marginal relic, separated from the surrounding post-colonial cultural world of Calcutta and circulated in an intimate ceremony that memorialises the shared past of Violet and Eddie.

However, despite this highly specific use of the Archie book to suggest a vanishing past, its story is actually deeply implicated in India's post-colonial modernity. In Amit Chaudhuri's essay on America in Granta, which appeared in 2002, he recalls from his childhood "the much thumbed and perused copy, in the 'circulating library', of the Archie Comics Digest; the thin line that separated us from Riverdale." This remarkable statement asserts a connection to America in a non-official space, nurtured by the English language and a particular imagination. Chaudhuri writes that American comic books taught him how to read and "somehow entered our lives in Bombay and became indistinguishable from them." In other words, the universe of the comic book becomes a constituent part of the Indian cultural milieu into which it has been transported.The "thin line" that separates Bombay and Riverdale is finally crossed in Karan Johar's now-classic 1998 melodrama Kuch Kuch Hota Hai. This film has been acknowledged as a sort of turning point in recent Hindi cinema, marking the full bloom of the romantic comedy aimed at young, cosmopolitan audiences. The first half of the film takes place in St. Xavier's College, an ambiguously Americanised space that is part India, part Riverdale. The love triangle between Shah Rukh, Rani and Kajol has even been described as an outright Archie adaptation. What is important here is that Karan Johar deliberately chooses to reference Archie and its universe as a way to express a new modernity for India. His characters live on a stage that is only partly constructed by observing how young Indians actually behave with each other; it also uses comforting allusions and symbols of a "foreign" world that has, for the better part of the last half-century, in fact been India's own.