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Discipline and colony: TheEnglish Patient and the crow'snest of post colonialityQadri IsmailPublished online: 19 Aug 2010.

To cite this article: Qadri Ismail (1999) Discipline and colony: The English Patientand the crow's nest of post coloniality, Postcolonial Studies, 2:3, 403-436

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Postcolonial Studies, Vol 2, No 3, pp 403 ± 436, 1999

Discipline and colony: The EnglishPatient and the crow’ s nest of postcoloniality

QADRI ISMAIL

I would rather think of the text as my accomplice, than my patient or my analysand.

Gayatri Spivak, `The New Historicism’

Read ¼ slowly ¼ Your eye is too quick and North American ¼

Almasy, to Hana

Introduction

Not long after his appearance in the narrative, in the second chapter of TheEnglish Patient, the actant Caravaggio, presented as a spy for the Anglo-American and allied forces during what history calls the Second World War,

explains to another actant, Hana, a nurse for these same forces during this same

war, how he came to lose his thumbs.1

Hana and Caravaggio meet in an

abandoned and bombed-out Italian villa towards the end of the war; weary of

which, and opposed any longer to working `for the greater good’ , she has retreatedinto the villa, or so the story goes, to look after just a single invalidÐ Almasy, the

dying and allegedly English patient of the novel’ s title.2 Nurse and spy are

acquainted from a prior novel, also bearing the same signatureÐ which is not to

be confused with author, or narratorÐ Michael Ondaatje, In the Skin of a Lion.

Caravaggio identi® es the authoriser of his injury, sustained after being captured bythe Nazis and accused of spying against them, thus: `They found a woman to do

it ¼ one of their nurses ¼ But the man who called her in, he was really in charge

¼ Ranuccio Tommasoni. She was an innocent ¼ ’ .3

While a woman, then, may

have actually sliced off Caravaggio’ s thumbs in this story, she is not to be blamed

(which suggests that this text may enable a feminist reading);4

this nurse, whocommits an act antithetical to the ideology of her profession, and who is therefore

in counterpoint to Hana, will not be accused. Doer is separated from deed, author

from work. Caravaggio blames the man, the person in charge, who made the

order, named Ranuccio Tommasoni.

This may appear a relatively insigni ® cant moment in the story, or unit of theplot. Tommasoni makes just one further appearance in the novel, connected to

this same unit. His function, to resort to another set of terms from Barthes,

would appear to be catalytic, not cardinal:5

only to help move the plot along, not

to supply `meaning’ , or be of consequence. (To say which is to implyÐ cf

Qadri Ismail, Department of English, University of Minnesota, USA.

1368-8790/Print/1466-1888 On-line/99/030403-34 Ó 1999 The Institute of Postcolonial Studies 403

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BarthesÐ that the text is a hierarchical object: all of its units are not of equal

signi ® cance.) But, to read this unit thus, to ignore it, to not investigate its

possible signi® cance, would be to misread it, to misread the novel itself. Whichis why I begin this paper, on The English Patient, with an apparently in-

signi ® cant moment: for very little in this most carefully constructed narrative is

without signi ® cance; it demands to be read slowly, with its myriad gestures to

moments outside the narrative explored and their own signi ® cance explained.

Thus, exploring Tommasoni, one would discover that, like Hana, Caravaggioand many another actant in this text, he has had a prior `existence’ : not only, in

his case, a recognisable historical existenceÐ one recognisable, or comprehen-

sible, to the discipline of historyÐ and, like the other actants, that he has

appeared in other texts. To understand the importance, not of the actant

Tommasoni, but of the unit of plot he appears in, to The English Patient, oneneeds access to a further story: the biography of the painter Michaelangelo

Caravaggio.

Such biographical information is not contained in The English Patient; to seek

it, then, is to imply, if not assert, that one cannot encounter it as the discipline

of literature says one shouldÐ as simply a novel, a self-contained or boundedwhole.6 To say which is to state one of the axioms of the theory of textuality.

(To recall Barthes quickly: `the metaphor of the text is that of the network’ .)

This thought bears repeating, despite its obviousness, because this particular

novel, The English Patient, relentlessly asserts its textuality, its unboundedness:

it demands to be read againstÐ alongside as well as in opposition toÐ manyother texts. In so doing, The English Patient insists that the responsible reader

seek the biographical information mentioned above (and reminds us of the

intertextuality of every novel); in making demands of the reader, it privileges the

reader over the author, the text over the work; separates, as we saw earlier,

author from work.7

It challenges, in other words, the protocols of the verydiscipline that enables itÐ literature, which (still) insists upon the irreducible

singularity of the novel (coded as the `work ’ );8 indeed it challenges the discipline

that honoured itÐ with the Booker Prize. This challenge is staged not by seeking

a point outside the disciplineÐ that would be impossibleÐ but from within; not

by producing an anti-literary piece of writing, but by being literary, if nothyperliteraryÐ by being poetic in its prose, extreme in its references. It goes

further: by foregrounding its textuality (for, the text is always already intertex-

tual) it challenges not just the protocols, but the very concept of literature as a

disciplinary object.9

Or, to be precise, it reopens an old debate that has not been

concluded. It invites us to take John Mowitt seriously and work towards`® nishing’ theorising the text. For, as he forcefully argues, following Barthes,

text is not a homonym for book (a material object); and upon being reduced to

the latter, upon being domesticated, by the discipline of literature, the term has

lost much of its conceptual and critical force. But I should not anticipate my

argument.To return to the biographical (which is also, given the importance of

Caravaggio to the discipline of art history, the historical): the painter Caravag-

gio, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica, `on May 29, 1606 ¼ during a

furious brawl over a disputed score in a game of tennis ¼ killed one Ranuccio

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Tomassoni’ .10

This statement bears all the marks, is enabled by the protocols, of

the discipline of history: it is factual, referential, veri ® able and happened in a

time characterisable as other to the present. Authorised as it is by the Encyclo-pedia Britannica, we must rest assured that this event occurred. In history, then,

once upon a time, one Caravaggio killed one Tomassoni (single `m’ , double `s’ ).

In literature, in this text I propose to read, this event is reversed, though not with

perfect symmetry: one Tommasoni dis® gures one Caravaggio. One can read this

reversal as made against what Michel de Certeau has called the `dogmatism’ ofhistory (1986) , its fundamentalist and foundationalist falling-back upon the facts,

its insistence that past events can be recaptured in their integrity.11 One can also

read it as implying that literature can rewrite history, avenge it even; but that we

know, even if we do not ® nd the strategy particularly convincing. Beyond this

simple suggestion, however, by drawing attention to the presence of thehistorical in the literary, perhaps this text argues that literature is impossiblewithout history and perhaps also, that literature does historyÐ that it sometimes

accomplishes the work done by history, and maybe even more effectively

(because, in this case, literature works unconsciously, surreptitiously). But that

is yet to be discovered. What this textual moment suggests, apart from the pointalready noted that one needs to read many texts in order to read one, and beyond

the point that literature can rewrite (which is not the same as re-imagine) history,

is that, given the explicit presence of the historical in the literary, a presence that

cannot be ignored when reading this text, there may be some necessary

connection, a conceptual interdependence, a bind even, between literature andhistory. Literature may not turn out to be what both disciplines say it is: the other

of history, ® ction to its fact (as is sometimes supposed);12 the two maybe bound

more intimately than as antonyms; literature may need history in order to

constitute itself.

Investigating this possibility, without also investigating the relation of this textto the discipline that most immediately authorises it (the novel) as its (the

discipline’ s) object: literature. Some of the labour that would be involved here

has already been hinted at: in that it privileges the reader, and reading, at the

expense of the author; in its insistence upon its (inter) textuality; in its

embodiment, as it were, of the theory of textuality. In this connection, given theabundance of texts this one gestures towards, it must be stressed that The EnglishPatient does more than suggest that literature can rewrite literature; that, after

all, is an old, even an ancient position. The clue to the relation it has to its

discipline lies in the speci® c text this text re-reads/writes: Kim, by Rudyard

Kipling. The English Patient insists that the story told about India, and aboutBritain, and about colonizing Britain’ s relation to colonised India, in Kim, be

recognised as one that uncritically inhabits, or in Ondaatje’ s marrowy phrase

inhales, disciplinary knowledgeÐ most particularly, history and anthropologyÐ

and reproduces, or exhales it; it is in that sense that this text draws our attention

to the possibility that literature does the work of history. In so doing, in drawingthe reader’ s attention to a possible nexus between disciplinarity and colonialism,

The English Patient aligns itself with a network of texts which could be called

postcolonial, which I metonymically refer to as Subaltern Studies.I understand this controversial term, postcolonial, not in contradistinction to

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just colonial, but also to anti-colonial. I use these terms, for want of better ones,

to identify a momentÐ which one might call our disciplinary presentÐ in which

the critique of colonialism is recognisably mature.13

By mature I mean that thiscritique now asks, and has been asking for a while, whether the categories of

colonialism, through which this rebuttal was ® rst advanced, but which have now

been identi® ed by an impressive body of scholarship as Eurocentric, are

adequate to the task;14

whether, in fact, using those same categories, would not

simply further reinforce the dominance of this same Eurocentrism;15

whether, insubstantive terms, nationalism is/wasÐ as Chatterjee (1986) convincingly ar-

guedÐ derivative of, and can therefore only reproduce the same structures of

thought as, colonialism. To say this is not to imply that this critique is unaware

of the dif ® culty, if not the impossibility, of getting beyond these categories. It

is in this very speci® c sense, then, that this moment, and this novel, can be calledpostcolonial: as characterised not by the calendar, but by an argument. In

particular, that The English Patient’ s recasting of Kim must be read as being

informed not by the social condition of the postcolonialÐ which the novel, in

any case, grants but the barest narrative attention toÐ but by certain (theoretical)

concerns; must be read against the text’ s interrogation of the disciplines ofliterature and history (which will now appear to be Eurocentric not just in

substance but in conceptualisation). Thus making such an inquiry (also) the task

of postcoloniality. Postcoloniality, I want to argue, should not be understood in

the temporal or social terms it is usuallyÐ and inadequatelyÐ discussed, but in

conceptual ones. There is nothing to be gained from the position that it refers totemporal or social conditions, rather than logical and political ones; though the

two are often confused.16

Postcoloniality can be speci® ed to begin with (this position will be defended

and developed later) as a moment in which the adequacy of the claims of

nationalism to represent the colonized (and, subsequently, decolonized) subjectsunder the name/community nation, has been called into question. Put simply (for

the time beingÐ this formulation will have to be amended later): postcolonialityis the name of the argument that nationalism is an inadequate response tocolonialism .

17Or, again: postcoloniality must demand that nationalism be dis-

charged from the responsibility of being the exclusive, exemplary and exhaustiveresponse to colonialism.18 Postcoloniality, then, is not the signi ® er of some

utopian assertion that we have gotten beyond the consequences of colonialism;

rather, it is the name of that project that seeks to ® nish (cf Mowitt) the inquisitionof colonialism inaugurated by anti-colonial nationalism, a project that postcolo-niality recognises as incommensurate with its task. For reasons that will beevident and discussed later, I take as emblematic of this inquisition the work of

Subaltern Studies an intellectual and political project that interrogates history as

such.

The English Patient, in rewriting Kim, is performing a task analogous to the

subalternist project; it must be read as a postcolonial novel (also) because itdraws attention to the colonial mission, the colonialism, of English literature as

a discipline (cf Viswanathan). By aligning this rewriting, which is also a

(re)reading, with the inquisition of nationalism mentioned above, it contends that

the chore of postcoloniality is not integrationist, not to seek an equal place at the

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table, not to demand, with multiculturalism, that the postcolonial novel be

recognised by the discipline as good as any other.19

Rather, in recognising that

the concept `postcoloniality’ (as opposed to the social condition), while emer-gent within literature, is to be situated at the con¯ uence of literature and history,

The English Patient, which stages an encounter between literature and history,

invites the reader to consider the possibility that a responsible deploymentÐ if

not habitationÐ of the term postcolonial demands not just the critique of

nationalism but an interrogation of literature and historyÐ which, as we will see,cannot be without nationalism. In other words, reading The English Patientnecessitates coming to terms with literature, history and nationalism from the

perspective of postcoloniality. Accounting for how these terms are connectedÐ

the bind between literature, history and (nationalism as a product and rejection

of) colonialism Ð is the central task of this paper; a task to be located not at therealm of the ontological, but the conjunctural. That is to say, I am concerned

with the uses of the term postcoloniality at the present (disciplinary) moment.

We may well discover, at the end of this investigation, that the term postcolonial,

despite its many critics, still has some work to do; that its theorising, in Mowitt’ s

sense, is yet to be done. Indeed we may discover that postcoloniality may requirean inquisition not just of literature and history, but of disciplinarity as such; that,

in short, what is at stake in its name is not just nationalism as inadequate

response to colonialism, but an argument of more profound consequence.

***

What appears here is not an exhaustive, or even a comprehensive, reading of the

text. To read responsibly is to follow the gestures, the suggestions and the

directions of the text, wherever they may lead. But such a task is, ultimately,

impossible. To remember Barthes again: `the text is a tissue of quotations’ ,

identifying every one of which is beyond the reach of a single reading. Thus, letthis be presented as an interested reading; interested, that is, in the questions

mentioned above. To limit myself to them is not to negate the importance of the

other questions this text raises, including: CanadaÐ as (North) American space,

and as an (ideologically) multicultural State; ItalyÐ as that place in which,

within the autobiography of Europe, the RenaissanceÐ modern humanismÐ orig-inated; HungaryÐ as a country with a tenuous claim on a past, and one that, if

not exactly colonized, was often dominated by non-indigenous States; nuclear

bombs and bombing; war; art; espionage.

More immediately than the above, from the perspective of this argument, the

novel also contains critical interrogations of ethnography/anthropology andcartography/geography. Indeed, the text’ s discussion of these two disciplines is

arguably more explicit, and detailed, than its treatment of literature and history.

I give the text’ s treatment of those two disciplines less attention than is perhaps

necessary; and not just because of space constraints. I do so in part because the

bind between those disciplines and colonialism has been investigatedÐ excel-lently so, in the case of anthropology.20 Thus, while the postcolonial inquisition

of anthropology cannot be regarded as ® nished, one can still contend that the

more urgent work still left for the concept postcoloniality, at the presentdisciplinary moment, is to examine the disciplines where this critique still needs

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to be established.21

Thus the necessity to confront history, and to continue the

quarrel against literature. The other pressing reason to do this, to read history

from literatureÐ or literarilyÐ is because colonialism was launched, justi® ed,established, protracted in the name of history; postcoloniality, therefore, mightrequire its most urgent quarrel with history. Nevertheless, this novel’ s fore-

ground ing of the presence of many disciplines, and our commitment to following

the gestures of the text, does raise the possibility of identifying a nexusÐ as

indicated aboveÐ between postcoloniality and disciplinarity (as such), a questionthat will be considered in the conclusion. My use of the term `crow’ s-nest’ will

also be explained there.

Taking all this into account makes The English Patient an enormously

complex novel, one that networks with a multiplicity of other texts, making it

very dif ® cult to read. In being dif ® cult, and elaborately networked, the textmakes itself a very rare one in that it seems to positively deny itself the

possibility of an implied reader. The implied reader, as Spivak reminds us, is of

the culture or nation `supposedly indigenous to the literature under consider-

ation’ (1992, p 276). In not being identi® ably, or even arguably, the product of

any particular culture/nation, this novel in yet another way challenges theprotocols of its discipline; it challenges those who would theorise the discipline

to advance and sustain other means of comprehending and situating it (the novel

as such), outside a national frame.

If this text, then, can only be read as one node in a network, does this make

a summary of its plot impossibleÐ at least without reference to some of theseother texts? Yes and no. One can, of course, argue that this novel is the story

of some (® ve) cardinal, and many more catalytic, actants, or characters; and one

could produce a summary of this story, or stories, and present it (aÁ la

Hollywood) as the plot of this novel. But, I want to insist, to do so would be to

misread this text, to refuse to follow its suggestions, to fail to account for thewords on the page or, more properly, for some of the most cardinal units of

text.22 The plot of this novel, therefore, can only be summarised thus: it is about

concepts, disciplines, texts; about literature, history, disciplinarity, nationalism,

postcoloniality, feminism, community; it shows, as Spivak argues postcolonial

texts should, `that the alternative to Europe’ s long story ¼ [is] tampering withthe authority of storylines’ (1993, p 65). Thus it is most decidedly not a

romance.23

Having said that, some `context’ : the novel’ s argument is staged in a bombed

out villa in Italy, the country thatÐ though not exactly a country thenÐ in the

® fteenth century, imitated the Indian/Hindu and rebirthed, or so we are told, notjust itself but European civilisation. The date is 1945; the time, the conclusion

of a momentous war that, to this text, is marked most signi ® cantly by two

eventsÐ the atom bombing of Japan, and the decolonisation of India.24

Despite

the signi ® cance of these two events to the text, Hiroshima and Nagasaki are

mentioned only towards the very end of the narrative; and then, too, indirectlyÐthe plot never actually visits Japan. We do visit India, but only in the

epilogueÐ which does not strictly speaking belong to the narrative proper . As we

will see, both these events overdetermine, to abuse a metaphor, the entire plot.

What, then, are we to make of the fact that they get scant narrative attentionÐ

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compared to the factÐ or at least ® gureÐ that some 165 of its 216 interludes

(76%) are set in Italy? Obviously it means that postcoloniality necessitates

coming to terms with the West, the modern West, with modernity; that onecannot tell any postcolonial story without (re)telling the story of the West/

modernity.

Reading

¼ the Text requires that one try to abolish (or at least diminish) the distance

between reading and writing

Roland Barthes, `From Work to Text’

The English Patient, as said before, makes a careful series of contentions about

reading and writing; and, as must be expected by now, following Barthes I refuse

to distinguish between the two. To read a text is not simply to engage in aphysical act, but to produce an argument about it; consequently, to read is to

situate the text with respect to the other texts that inform it, to demonstrate how

it is networked. To read a text, in other words, is to produce one.25

If that much

is Barthes, I also seek to work with Mowitt’ s important argument, which I

cannot reproduce here, that reading requires calling attention to the presence inthe (literary) text of the many disciplines that enable it, but which it does not

(usually) acknowledge; to read textually is `to oppose the discipline(s) that’

make the text (p 14). It is in that sense that the text, the product of a disciplinary

crisis, must not be seen as an interdisciplinary object but, as Mowitt powerfully

contends, an anti-disciplinary one. Thus making The English Patient that rarenovel: it argues, from postcoloniality, against disciplinarity.

***

The English Patient could be considered to have ® ve, perhaps six, cardinal

actants: Almasy, Hana, Kip, Caravaggio, Katharine, certainly; and maybe Lord

Suffolk. The latter appears in but one chapter, still is quite central to the plot,

so could be considered cardinal. Suffolk, Katharine and Almasy are aristocrats:

the ® rst two English; the third, Hungar ianÐ a detail that simply cannot beignored when discussing his political choices. Hana and Caravaggio are petit-

bourgeois Canadians: Caravaggio, a ® rst generation immigrant from Italy, was

a thief before the war; Hana, whose patronymic we are not given, even in that

prior novel she ® rst appears in, In the Skin of a LionÐ and we will have to

remember this when discussing the text’ s relation to feminismÐ is the daughterof an Italian immigrant. Kip, since we know his family had a `tradition’ of

sending their ® rst son to the army, is presumably to be considered comprador

bourgeois.

Hana, Almasy, Caravaggio and Kip are the actants who inhabit the Italian

villa in which the argument of this novel is staged. It is only an extraordinarycircumstance, like war, that could bring about an extended meeting of people

like them in circumstances enabling non-hierarchical fraternisation. What the

four have most in common is their relationship to their nationalityÐ and this is

of fundamental importance to a reading of this text: they are all, to take a phrase

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from the novel itself, `supplementary to the main argument’ of their nations:26

Hana and Caravaggio, though White, are not Anglo, or of the dominant

Canadian `ethnicity’ ; Kip is a Sikh, and not Hindu, or what would become thedominant Indian `communal’ group. Almasy, being an aristocrat, must be read

differently; not in terms of his relationship to his nation, but in terms of his

nation’ s, and his country’ s, relationship to its continent: being eastern, Hungar-

ian, of an often dominated country, he can and should be considered `supple-

mentary’ to the dominant principle of Europe.Almasy is also the most literate and erudite of all the cardinal actants: he was

schooled in England, speaks at least four languages. In only the second

interlude of the narrative, we are told that he recites stories `quietly into the

room’ , to his single listener, Hana; stories, mostly, about his recent experiences

mapping the Libyan desert with a group of cartographers from many coun-triesÐ including Kemal el-Din (Egypt), Bagnold, Madox (Britain), Bermann

(Austria)Ð culminating in the crash and explosion of his aeroplane and the

injuries that are killing him as the narrative begins. She, we are told in the same

interlude, reads him books taken from the library of the villa. Thus, what binds

these two actants is not only a relation of dependenceÐ he the patient on she thenurseÐ but one of mutuality: they tell each other stories. At the very com-

mencement of the narrative, then, it is clear that this is a text about reading, a

story about stories, stories that connect, form or enable community, however

modest.

The signi ® cance of the placement of this interlude cannot be stressed toomuch. But, what is an interlude? I use the term, for want of another, to denote

a unit of narrative demarcated by blank space. The narrative itself demands

such a term. For, one cannot read The English Patient carefully without paying

attention to one of the ways it is structured: into what one might as well call

chapters, which are in turn broken down into smaller units. These units aredemarcated sometimes by somewhat more than an inch or so of blank space,

sometimes by two-thirds that, sometimes by as much as half a page. They need

to be named; and their narrative function is quite accurately captured by the

term `interlude’ . It suggests that the narrative is structured as a series of

interventions: not discrete units, that have no relation, or do not follow, fromanother; but not perfectly associated ones, either. To take a term from Althusser

out of its context, and to treat it less as a concept than as a metaphor, one might

understand interludes as articulated. One especially needs `interlude’ , or a term

like it, to read this narrative because it is not linear, it does not order its units

by the logic of the calendar, does not confuse or con¯ ate date and time. Instead,it is deliberately anachronistic (cf Genette): the time of the narrative and that of

the plot do not coincide. Faced with this, one can read purely for plot (the

author’ s intention), or pay attention to the structure of the narrative as well. I

would contend that the latter approach is the responsible one to take even when

reading the most ostensibly linear of realist narratives; as we shall see when weget to Kim.27 It is inevitable here because, to keep with the metaphor, plot is

articulated with narrative. The deliberately anachronistic narrative structure calls

our attention to the fact, mentioned earlier, that the plot of this novel is not to

be located in the lives, or stories, of its actants, but elsewhere; and it is also, of

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course, one of the ways in which the text works against what Salman Rushdie

calls the `what-happened-nextism’ of the realist novel and of history.

What, then, is the signi ® cance of this interlude, of its positioning in thenarrative? Like all cardinal units positioned early, it is meant to inform, if not

determine, one’ s reading of what follows. It implies that stories, and reading,

will be encountered throughout the text. A promise kept in the very next

interlude, which informs us how Hana occupied herself at the villa, when not

gardening or nursing: she read, from books out of a library that, notablyanalogous to Barthes’ s text, is not closed but open. As a consequence of mortar

attacks during the war, one wall was exposedÐ to the sky, rain, birds. Hana,

¼ fell upon books as the only door out of her cell. They became half her world.

She sat at the night table, hunched over, reading of the young boy in India who

learned to memorize diverse jewels and objects on a tray, tossed from teacher to

teacherÐ those who taught him dialect those who taught him memory those who

taught him to escape the hypnot ic (p 7).

One must notice in passing that Hana is identi® ed here as a prisoner: the villa,

perhaps the war itself, is a `cell’ she ® nds herself in. As for the boy in thatpassage, he is Kimball O’ Hara, referred to in the story as Kim, the actant after

whom the Kipling novel is titled. That is to say, the ® rst of the many texts this

text refers to is Kim. Let us follow the logic of this reference, this reading. What

does it say of India, Kipling’ s India, of Hana’ s reading of Kipling’ s India? Of

India: that the White boy there had to be taughtÐ to speak different, toremember, to escape magic. India, then, is to be learned, known; more impor-

tantly, it can be learned and known, by the White man. India is also, of course,

the place of difference, the place of jewels and magic. Perhaps it is the one

because it is the other: different because it is not known; to be known because

it is different. If India, then, is different and to be discovered, known, it emergeshere not as a place in the geographic sense, but as an object of study, a

disciplinary object.

But, the question arises: when she reads, what critical methods does Hana

adopt? Indeed, does she read critically at all? No; in that unit of narrative, we

are told that she reads conventionally: books were half her world. And later, ofher reading of another novel: `She entered the story knowing she would emerge

from it feeling she had been immersed in the lives of others’ (p 12).28 Literature,

to Hana, is about the lives of others, it is a representation of life. She could not,

that is, be more thoroughly interpellated by the discipline. She is an instance of

how, as Spivak puts it, literature `buys your assent in an almost clandestine way’(1992, p 278). When Hana reads to Almasy, however, she reads very differently:

¼ the books for the Englishman ¼ had gaps of plot like sections of a road washed

out by storms, missing incidents as if locusts had consumed a section of tapestry,

as if plaster loosened by the bombing had fallen away from a mural at night.

The villa that she and the Englishman inhabited now was much like that (p 7).

Here the villa is related to reading; and reading itself is discontinuous, destruc-

tive, violent evenÐ compared to storms, locusts, bombs. Reading, then, can

happen in two ways: continuously or discontinuously. It also can happen quickly

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or slowly. When reading Kipling, Almasy himself calls Hana’ s `eye ¼ too quick

and North American’ (p 94), and asks her to read slowly, an injunction the actant

took as a lesson in reading. (She had identi® ed herself, earlier, as being from`Upper America’ .)

How does the English patient read? He explains in an early interlude: `I have

always had information like a sea in me. I am a person who if left alone in

someone’ s home walks to the bookcase, pulls down a volume and inhales it. So

history enters us’ (p 19). Ladislaus de Almasy, an aristocrat, is used to houseswith books and bookcases. But many other points are made in this dense passage

and need to be unpacked. The ® rst: that history is to be found in books, and not

just history books, but all books. If history is books, then history is writingÐ

and, therefore, indistinguishable from historiography which would, given this, be

a redundancy. The second concerns how, to Almasy, history does its work: likethe air we breathe, it enters (or interpellates) us unconsciously, without our

knowledge or attentive participation; it does its work through books, all books.

Like the facts, it is something we take for granted; something we imbibe when,

like Hana, we read with what Coleridge memorably termed the willing suspen-

sion of disbelief. We, not Almasy; for the claim is about a general body ofreaders. In contrast, the English patient himself inhabits a critical relation to

history. He carries around a copy of Herodotus’ s The Histories. To the discipline

of history, as Francois Hartog reminds us, Herodotus is both the `father of

history’ and the `father of lies’ . Almasy, then, in having the book close to him,

in being aware of how history does its (interpellative) work, demands that weread history, perhaps as a lie, certainly as a story. In writing in the pages of TheHistories, in `cutting and gluing in pages from other books or writing in his own

observationsÐ so they all are cradled within the text of Herodotus’ (p 16), in

pasting maps, and even a fern in it, he reminds us that history is dependent upon

other disciplines, like cartography and even biology; that it is perhaps to bethought of as an articulated pickle of stories and other objectsÐ and most

decidedly not an objective record.

Hana, then, is both the implied reader of the discipline of literature and its

potential critic; one might say she is learning how to read slowly, could be

understood as being in transit from the former to the latter. Almasy is a criticalreader of the discipline of history; he is also a cartographer, and therefore reads

(and writes) mapsÐ a topic to which we will return. How do the other cardinal

actants of The English Patient read? Kip is a sapper; he essentially reads

spaceÐ for (hidden) bombs, and reads bombs in order to defuse them. As for

literature, we are told that, at the moment he encounters the other actants, he `didnot yet have a faith in books’ (p 111), a statement that is most suggestive for

thinking about the bind between colonialism and literature. Caravaggio, too,

reads spaceÐ but unlike both Kip and Almasy. He is a thief, a spy, and reads

space to take from it, not to preserve it, or prevent its destruction, as does Kip,

or to ® x it, as does Almasy.29

We are left, then, to conclude this section of the paper, to consider the reading

practice of the two remaining cardinal actantsÐ Suffolk and Katharine Clifton.

She reads, as one must by now expect in this enormously complex novel, very

differently from the others: she reads for pleasure; she reads to seduce. In the

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same interlude that she makes her ® rst appearance in the narrative, well into the

mid-point of the narrative itself, though close to the outset of the plot, she reads

a poem, some lines from MiltonÐ which makes Almasy fall in love with hervoice. Later, she will seduce Almasy, and invite him in return to seduce her, by

reading the story of Candaules and Gyges from Herodotus. Subsequently, the

two have an affair, upon the discovery of which Katherine’ s husband plots to kill

them and commit suicide; but succeeds, only, in killing himself and fatally

injuring his wife.Like Katherine, Suffolk is an English aristocrat; and, also like her, he dies in

the course of the story. Suffolk dies because he misreads: in this case, a bomb.

In so doing, however, he provides us with an important lesson in reading. For,

with regard to literature, Suffolk is a literalist: `until war broke out his passion

was the study of Lorna Doone and how authentic the novel was historically andgeographically’ (p 185). When we get to this point in the narrative, chapter

seven, we know that the question of historical and geographic `authenticity’ has

been carefully dismantled; history, indeed, has been likened to a story, not to

fact; and geography’ s pretences also exposed. Suffolk ’ s reading practice, which

seeks to authenticate, is not endorsed by the narrative; a point only reinforced byhis death. We can take this to be a criticism of one method of reading literature.

In Katharine’ s death, we can see the text being critical of anotherÐ the

aesthetic, that reads purely for pleasure. What is of crucial signi® cance here is

that these reading subjects are English aristocratsÐ both of whom die violently.

Though expressed metaphorically, a more damning literary condemnation ofaristocratic, or canonical, English reading habits would be dif ® cult to conceive;

thus my contention that this novel works within the protocols of literature only

to dismantle them. For, surely, it is not moving too far from here to conclude

that, in killing Katharine and Suffolk, the text also rejects the conventional

reading habits associated with the discipline of English literature and its impliedreaders, or disciples. To fully understand how the text itself reads literature, and

suggests we do too, we need to see how it rewrites Kim; after which we can get

to the question of how it reads history.

Kim

Without empire ¼ there is no European novel.

Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism

Why is it not possible for this novel, The English Patient, to tell its story withoutrewriting another, Kim?30 Why is it Kim, and not another colonial novel about

India, that has to be rewritten? What exactly of Kim does The English Patientactually recastÐ the actants, plot, politics? What, in turn, does this do to the

story of the Ondaatje novel, how does it in¯ uence our reading of it? Can one

read The English Patient without reading Kim? The answer to the last questionis a simple no: for, it is in this rewriting that the postcoloniality, the politics, of

the contemporary novel is to be located; a rewriting, or reading, that is in many

respects analogous to the subalternist reading of the colonial archiveÐ for

implicit in such a practice is the belief that the postcolonial story cannot be told

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without confronting the colonial one, that the former will always contain marks

of the latter.

Kim is a novel of conquest; it is the pre-eminent novel depicting andnaturalising the conquest of India within the canon of English literature; thus its

selection by The English Patient. That India is a conquered country is made clear

in its very opening sentences:

He sat, in de® ance of municipal orders, astride the gun Zam-Zammah on her brick

platform opposite the old Ajaib-GherÐ the Wonder House, as the natives call the

Lahore Museum. Who hold Zam-Zammah, that ` ® re-breathing dragon’ , hold the

Punjab, for the great green-bronze piece is always ® rst of the conqueror ’ s loot.

There was some justi® cation for KimÐ he had kicked Lala Dinanath’ s boy off the

trunnionsÐ since the English held Punjab and Kim was English (p 49).

This extremely dense passage must be examined closely. Just two words into the

narrative, the plot pauses: description (`He sat’ ) gives way to information (`in

de® ance of municipal orders’ ). Indeed, after this sentence is completed by that

rather cumbersome object complement, the plot pauses for four whole para-

graphs to give the reader information about O’ Hara’ s biography.31

We are notencountering perfectly straightforward narrative realism here;32 no isochrony,

where the plot moves forward with, and at the same time as, the narrative, but

anachronyÐ or, to use a more precise term from Genette, analepsis, looking

back. Why does the narrative, just two words long at this point, need to look

back, and change voice? What does that dependent clause say about the impliedreader of Kim? That he, or she, would not be a resident of India, native or

British, for residents would know what the municipal regulations were. Thus

(and not surprisingly) making the implied reader of Kim the metropolitan

subject; who is told, in the very ® rst unit of this textÐ given information, in other

words, that is to determine the reading of the rest of the novelÐ that India is® rmly dominated by the English, a dominance symbolised by the British

possession of the famous gun, one paralleled, narratively reinforced, in the

allegorical statement that O’ Hara had to displace an Indian (boy) to sit on top

of Zam-Zammah.

The metropolitan reader is given these data, to use an inelegant term, in aparticular narratorial voice that the text itself requires we distinguish from the

strictly descriptive. One might call this voice informative: presenting data that

only the narrator can know. This is to be distinguished from what might be

termed a descriptive voice, which presents data that the reader can in fact

visualise; realism, of course, purpor ts to work primarily by description. Such adistinction is of acute importance in order to understand how the colonial novel

worksÐ often by narratorial determination, that seeks to take the burden of

evaluation away from the reader.33

In the next few chapters, both the informa-

tional and judgmental voices are used often, in order to depict the basis of the

English dominance of India; there, all India is quite literally put on display forthe metropolitan reader. But, before getting there, it is necessary to examine TheEnglish Patient’ s response to the opening of Kim.

The very beginning of the postcolonial novelÐ `She stands’ Ð is a reversal of

the `He sat’ of the colonial one. It also, of course, calls attention to the presence

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of women as cardinal actants in the former, in contrast to the masculine world

of Kim. From its onset, then, The English Patient announces itself as a response

to Kim. But it also makes an explicit argument about the opening of the latterin a crucial interlude in the third chapter. At the beginning of that interlude, the

narrator states: `Most books open with an author’ s assurance of order ¼ But

novels commenced with hesitation or chaos’ (p 93). Then the narrative repro-

duces the opening passage from Kim; which, as discussed above, is an assurance

of order: it tells us the British held Punjab, metonym for India, withoutresistance; and it does not fail to symbolise howÐ by a combination of power

(gun) and knowledge (museum). What, then, do we make of that statement in

The English PatientÐ for Kim is surely a novel? In drawing the distinction, and

insisting that we read Kim not as a novel but as a `book ’ , we are compelled to

recall what, earlier in the narrative, Almasy asserted that books do: theyimplement history. It does not follow from this that we must read Kim as

something other than a novel; rather, that we also understand it, perhaps

understand literature itself as doing, or at least enabling, the work of history. As

we will encounter in its other chapters, Kim does precisely that; but we are not

done with its ® rst one yet.In it, the English boy O’ Hara, whom we quickly learn is actually Irish, meets

a Tibetan lama outside the Lahore museum, and takes him inside. The lama

learns, from the curator, `of the labors of European scholars, who ¼ have

identi® ed the Holy Places of Buddhism’ (p 56). The two converse, and the text

takes great pains to notice that the lama is further impressed by the curator’ scomprehensive knowledge of Buddhism. In other words, (British) colonialism

understands what it rulesÐ because it makes the effort to do so; scholars have

laboured; and the native informantÐ for that is the narrative function of the lama

at this momentÐ af® rms the accuracy of the effort. The signi ® cance of this early

textual unit cannot be stressed too much; it prepares the reader for what is tocome, a known India. Before leaving the museum, the Tibetan’ s battered

spectacles are noticed by the curatorÐ who hands over his newer pair as a

replacement, as a gift. Thus, at the very beginning of the narrative, colonialism

is depicted as dominant, as well as understanding and benevolentÐ to the point

of being self-sacri® cing. The British are clearly in India for the good of thenatives.

The lama and O’ Hara then depart on a journey that takes them, in the next

chapters, across northern India, a journey that could be called Kipling’ s discov-

ery of India. India, here, is known, and retailed. As Edward Said reminds us,

realism as a narrative form allows the country to be seen `from the vantage ofcontrolled observation’ (1987, p 36). In the chapters following this depiction, the

method by which India came to be conceived, classi® ed and comprehended, and

thus capable of being controlled, is detailed. The narrative structure of Kim, as

stated above, is realist. Its plot, except in one chapter, proceeds forward through

the calendar in a way that is carefully measured and easily apprehensible. The® rst occupies one day in Lahore. The second and third chapters of Kim occupy

two consecutive days on the road, one day per chapter; the fourth chapter takes

the next day and a half; the ® fth, the evening of that fourth day on the Grand

Trunk Road. In these early units of narrative, native India is displayed,

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catalogued almostÐ slowly, meticulously, as noisy, contentious, heterogeneous;

the narrative voice at work is ostensibly descriptive, but cannot be distinguished

from the judgmental. Once done, once India is spread out, depicted as known,the speed of the narrative picks up. Chapter six, in which O’ Hara meets

Creighton, encompasses six days. Chapter seven, in which O’ Hara, rescued from

the road and from being damned to live the rest of his life as Indian, is sent to

an English school in Lucknow, deals with ® ve whole months in the life of the

boy. What one ® nds here, if not a lack of narrative consistency, is certainly arevelation of narrative priority: it is more necessary for this text to describe India

than O’ Hara’ s education. Thus providing us with another clue about the implied

reader of this text: s/he would presumably be more familiar with the latter, with

the British education system; whereas India needs to be, if not exactly discov-

ered, then rediscoveredÐ as ® rmly under British control after the events of 1857,events Indian nationalism understands as the ® rst war of independence.

For, one of the most striking things about this story, the narrative time of

which can easily be ® gured out, is that the timeÐ or, to be precise, the dateÐ of

the story itself cannot. All we can be certain about is that it is said to take place

some time after 1887, when the rissaldar (equivalent in rank to a captain), theIndian of ® cer who assisted the British in 1857, says he received a medal for his

collaboration. Since the events of 1857 are referred toÐ as a `madness’ , by the

rissaldarÐ we should not assume that this lack of a date for the novel places it

outside the calendar. Rather, the effect of this is to suggest a very speci® c

moment: one in which (what the language of command would term) post-MutinyIndia may be seen as a place that saw resistance once, but not anymore; it is now

a place that has been completely secured. Thus, the traveller in this India can

tour it untrammelled, observe it undisturbed, unthreatened; like the reader, to

whom India is exhibited in the most detailed fashion in chapters two, three and

four, when O’ Hara and the lama are on the road. In none of them do weencounter regular British soldiers; clearly, no exhibition of force is required to

keep the Indian under control. The colonial State depicted here is almost

identical to that found by Gyan Pandey in the same narrative moment, in late

nineteenth century British writings, which `promote a picture of the colonial

state as a wise and neutral power, ruling almost without a physical presence, bythe sheer force of its moral authority’ (p 49).

Indeed, the India depicted here also resonates with that to be found in colonial

history. Vincent Smith, who saw himself as writing the ® rst `connected relation’

of India’ s story before the Mughal period, can serve as symptomatic and

metonymic instance. To Smith, Indian history peaked in the third and fourthcenturies BC, was stable for about a thousand years, and declined from the

seventh century AD. The story, since, of `the bewildering annals of Indian petty

states when left to their own devices for several centuries’ , is the story of `what

India always has been when released from the control of a supreme authority,

and what she would be again, if the hand of the benevolent power which nowsafeguards her boundaries should be withdrawn’ .34 The story of India, in other

words, is the story of conquest and/or domination by a strong centre; in the

absence of this, Indians quarrel. Smith’ s colonial history sees this in the relations

between Indian States (in the past); Kipling’ s colonial novel, which can only tell

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its story through individuals, sees this is the relations between Indian castes (in

the present)Ð who quarrel all the time. There is perfect continuity, and conver-

gence, from the one to the other, from the past to the present; the story of Indiahas remained the same. History informs, suffuses literature; literature inhales,

then exhales, history. Thus my contention that the colonial novel does the work

of history.

What, then, of the other disciplines? On the train from Lahore to Umballa, we

begin to encounter Indian heterogeneity: a `Hindu Jat’ farmer and his wife, an`Amritzar courtesan’ , a `fat Hindu money-lender’ , a `Dogra soldier’ , a `Sikh

artisan’ . A motley crew representing the ethnographic variety of northern

IndiaÐ which is what colonialism saw when it saw India. For, to another eye,

say Nehru, these actants may have more in common than the difference depicted

by Kipling. One must also note what the British eye does not see, for this is avery classed group: the elite, the professional, upper caste elite, is missing here,

as is the poorest sections of the peasantry. What we have in Kim is a motley

crew that only colonialismÐ in its modernising and taxonomic incarnationÐ

could have assembled. Without colonialism, without modernisation, without the

trainÐ that symbol of industrial modernity that Gandhi famously declared Indiacould do withoutÐ India would not be so visible from one place, from the

vantage point of controlled observation. And what is visible is not simply a

description but a judgment, contentious diversity: people of many castes,

religions, occupations; people who argue with everybody about everything.

Colonialism may have brought India together; but it cannot produce communityfrom this jumble. Indianness, to be understood as the lack of a unifying

principle, will inevitably assert itself; hierarchy (tradition) will triumph over the

egalitarian potential (modernity) of the train. This point is reinforced in the next

two chapters, which give us more ethnography. On the Grand Trunk Road, the

`backbone of all Hind’ , as O’ Hara calls it, `all India [is] spread out’ to his gaze,to the reader’ s gaze alongside his. On this road, O’ Hara encountered `castes he

knew and castes that were altogether out of his experience’ (p 109); he

encountered, in sum, a summary of India as a caste and castist society:35

and

caste, as Dirks has demonstrated, was seen by colonialism in this post-1857

narrative moment `as the foundation and core of Indian civilization’ (1992, p57).36 Thus the identi® cation by Kim, of every Indian actant, whether cardinal or

catalytic, either in terms of his/her caste or religion. India, to the colonial

imagination, could not be known otherwise; or, perhaps, is to be known

otherwise. Kim, here, is accomplishing the work ofÐ or exhalingÐ ethnography.

Thus my contention that the colonial novel is fundamentally dependent upondisciplinary knowledge.

All India is on the move, in these chapters, whether on foot or by train, but

it is going nowhere. There is activity, but there also is not much purpose to these

journeys. Those on the train, unlike Benedict Anderson ’ s travellers, are by no

means ® nding imagined community.37

And those on the road are on pilgrimageat best: they will be back in their villages, where they started from, at journey’ s

end; some statues would have been worshiped, some alms given, some favours

requested, but nothing fundamental would have changed as a consequence of all

this movement. What we have here is a classic depiction of the country in terms

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of almost all of the tropes through which, as Ron Inden has argued, Orientalism

grasped India: Hindu (overwhelmingly), castist, rural, static. Once this is done,

the story can move from evidence to method; Creighton can enter the plot; or,to be exact, Creighton, whom we did meet earlier, brie¯ y, in his incarnation as

military of ® cer and spy, can now enter as ethnographer. In other words, once this

text has produced this heterogeneous India (as known), it can and must explain

how this knowledge was acquired, must certify the expertise of its ethnogra-

phers.Creighton, a colonel without a regiment, is head of the Survey of India by

occupation, a spy by conviction and a scholar at heart.38 He yearns to join the

Royal Geographical Society but, duty bound, will serve his country rather than

himself. He would get to know the natives, both in general, ethnographically,

and in particular, or politically, so that they could be better understood and ruled.Ranajit Guha has described the ® rst generation of colonial of ® cials as, `quite

candid about their political motivation ¼ [In their work] ¼ anthropology

exudes a self-con® dence which parallels and complements that of politics. It is

the con® dence of the coloniser in his dual role of conquistador and scholar’

(1997, p 74). Creighton is not quite the conquistador; he is of the British State,not the East India Company. But he too is candid about his politics and

supremely self-con® dent in his knowledge.

Given his senior rank, we do not actually see him practicing ethnography; that

narrative function is left for one of his assistants, Lurgan. Lurgan knew

everything, was the ethnographer par excellence; he `would explain ¼ [toO’ Hara] how such and such a caste talked, or walked, or coughed, or spat, or

sneezed, and, since ª howsº matter little in this world, the ª whyº of everything’

(p 207). There is no purpose in reaching for the critique of essentialism here; we

just need to notice that Orientalism essentialised. To notice that, given such a

teacher, his own aptitude and, most importantly, the possibility of such knowl-edge, O’ Hara quickly learns how to imitate, and pass off as, the various castes

that make up India. With the addition of a little make-up and different clothes

to his knowledge of sneezes and coughs, he tests his skills on the roadÐ success-

fully. In other words, the coloniser does not simply, and comprehensively, know

the native; this knowledge can and is be used to pass for and spy upon the native.In that sense, the coloniser knows the native better than s/he knows her/himself.

Thus my contention that Kim exhales both history and ethnography; that the

colonial novel is fundamentally dependent upon these disciplinesÐ disciplines

that, like literature as well, are impossible without colonialism, as we will see.

Thus, when the story of Kim is rewritten by the postcolonial novel, it has got tonot only change the plot, or give agency and/or voice to those denied it, but it

must interrogate the disciplines that produced India.

***

The most obvious point of contact between Kim and The English Patient lies inthe actants Kimball O’ Hara and Kirpal Singh; Kim and KipÐ even their names

resonate. Where the former is British who successfully passes for Indian, the

latter is an Indian who tries, but fails, to be accepted by the English. But mere

role reversal through actant is not at work here. For one thing, despite being told

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that Kip `entered their lives, as if out of this ® ction’ , we are also told that Hana

could be compared to Kipling’ s actantÐ because it was she who served the

English patient, much like O’ Hara served the lama. Then, Kip is also comparedto CreightonÐ on the grounds that both are soldiers. To complicate matters

further, Almasy acts as teacher (of reading, if nothing else) to Hana, and is thus

a possible counterpoint to the lama; however, being a cartographer and surveyor

makes him comparable to Creighton himself. One can play this game end-

lesslyÐ and meaninglessly; or one can argue that The English Patient rewritesKim not through its actants, but through its plot: most particularly, where the

colonial novel does not, because it cannot, be self- conscious about the presence

of other disciplines in its text, the postcolonial novel foregrounds this.

This happens most forcefully with respect to ethnography, and through the

® gure of Almasy. The Hungarian actant is actually a member of the RoyalGeographical Society, a cartographer, amateur ethnographer and an explorer of

the Libyan desert.39 But, for a variety of reasons, he is unlike his fellow members

of the Society. The latter are likened by the narrative to `Conrad’ s sailors’ (p

133), a clearÐ if easily missed because made in passingÐ indicator that their

stories, their accounts, their journals are meant to be read alongside the text ofimperialism. Patrick Ryan has written, of the journals kept by members of the

Society:

There is a generic expectation in a journal of exploration that the explorer will be

multi-faceted; its varying discourses create a narrator familiar with, if not an expert

on, geology, cartography, anthropology, meteorology and biology (p 31).

Almasy is, indeed, such an expert; we are made to realise his familiarity with the

above knowledges (excepting meteorology), plus history and literature. But he is

also very different from the traditional explorer, of whom Ryan adds:

Journals create the heroic explorer, and he is the vehicle for the production of a

centralized visual discourse ¼ It is important for the journals to have this central

point of view, as their authority relies on a monolithic and non-contradictory

discourse (p 8).

Almasy’ s journal could not be more different. For one thing, it is private, notmaintained for publication. For another, it is palimpsestic, written over the text

of Herodotus, with the explorer’ s own ruminations being in a sense footnotes to

the Greek’ s peregrinations. Most importantly, if obviously, the story it contains

is not his own, but that of Herodotus; it therefore cannot produce the explorer

as heroÐ or, for that matter, as original author. And if, as Ryan points out, for`discovery to be possible, all [prior] knowledge of the land must be denied’ (p

23), then the point of Almasy’ s journal, the work done by Herodotus, is to

demonstrate the opposite. For, the Greek (Helicarnassan) is of interest to the

Hungarian because he knew and wrote about those places, deserts, oases the

modern day explorer was trying to ® nd; thus making Almasy just anothertraveller in a long list, not a great, heroic and original discoverer in classic

colonial mode. The English Patient, in other words, subverts the story of the

explorer-as-hero and discoverer, and of the ethnographer as producer of objec-

tive/objecti ® ed knowledge of the native.

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This is nowhere more evident than in the early interludes of the novel, which

depict Almasy’ s rescue by the Bedouin from the burning aeroplane. It is their

knowledge of medicine, not the superior science of the West, that keeps Almasyalive. The Bedouin (their `tribe’ is unnamed) keep the victim for a while because

he is of use to them: he can identify and value the many different weapons that

have been accumulated in the course of the war in the desert. When he stopped

being useful they handed him over to the British. This is a reversal of the usual

story of anthropology: here, it is the `object’ of ethnography that possesses theknowledgeÐ and makes use of the practicing subject of the discipline. In this

context, the fact that none of the Bedouin are ever represented as speaking, or

even having proper names, takes on a different signi ® cance. To a conventional

reading, this could be evidence that, since the subaltern is represented (proxy)

but does not speak, this novel subalternises the Bedouin. In the context of thepolitics of this text, however, and given that the Bedouin are depicted here as the

instigators, the subjects, of the search for knowledge (about Western weapons),

I think this narrative unit is more usefully read an instantiation of Gayatri

Spivak’ s famous claim. Thus making it a part of the text’ s critique of ethnogra-

phy, since it draws our attention to the unrepresentability (portrait) of theethnographic object.40 As does Almasy himself who, despite being an `expert’ on

the desert, cannot even identify the `tribe’ that saved him:

They unwrapped the mask of herbs from his face. The day of the eclipse. They were

waiting for it. Where was he? What civilization was this that understood the

predictions of weather and light? El Ahmar or El Abyadd, for they must be one of

the northwest tribes (p 9).

The depiction of the Bedouin `tribe’ here, and consistently throughout the novel,

is of a group of people knowledgeable, but essentially unknowable to the

outsider passing through. Contrast this with the known natives of KimÐ in which

colonialism even knew how certain castes sneezed.

This interrogation of ethnography is, of course, not a novel argument: asfootnoted above, the critique of anthropology has not just contended this but, in

my view, established the case. That, precisely, is my point: that The EnglishPatient is informed, in the textual sense, by this examination; or, that it inhabits

the same network. Which takes us back to the questions posed at the beginning

of this section. Fuller answers will have to wait till the conclusion, but one thingshould now be clear: The English Patient is a thoroughgoing critique, from the

crow’ s nest of postcoloniality, of the disciplines of ethnography and history.41

And the novel makes this critique from within literature, by presenting itself as

a response to the colonial novel; by demonstrating that novel’ s dependence upon

the disciplines of ethnography and history; by illustrating how the colonial novelinhales and exhales them. How, in short, literature does the work of history and

ethnography. The section following the next takes a more detailed look at this

novel and history; we need, ® rst, to examine its relation to the discipline that

most immediately authorises it.

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Literature

It is ¼ dif ® cult to see literature as a concept.

Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature

How might one begin to comprehend literature? A thorough answer to the

question would have to proceed genealogically, examine how the term has been

deployed and the work it performed at various moments. Given space con-

straints, however, I have to rely on someone else’ s discussion of this; and what

better text is there, for such a purpose, than Terry Eagleton’ s Literary Theory?Its `Introduction’ contains perhaps the most devastating dismantling there is of

the notion of literature. But even this most profound of iconoclastic exercises

contains an uninterrogated assumption. Eagleton makes it impossible, or at least

illogical, to treat literature as an object independent of its study, as an object

lying out there created by hands untainted by criticism, waiting to be studied.But his contentions do contain an uninterrogated assumption: that all literature

is to be comprehended within a national frame. Take the following passage:

You can de® ne ¼ [literature] as `imaginative’ writing in the sense of ® ction ¼ But

even the briefest re¯ ection on what people commonly include under the heading ¼

suggests that this will not do. Seventeenth century English literature includes

Shakespeare, Webster, Marvell and Milton; but it also stretches to the essays of

Francis Bacon, the sermons of John Donne, Bunyan ’ s spiritual autobiography and

whatever it was that Sir Thomas Browne wrote. It might even at a pinch be taken

to encompass Hobbes’ s Leviathan or Clarendon’ s History of the Rebellion . French

seventeenth-century literature contains, along with Cornielle and Racine, La

Rochefoucauld’ s maxims, Bousset’ s funeral speeches, Boileau’ s treatise on poetry,

Madame de Sevinge’ s letters to her daughter and the Philosophy of Descartes and

Pascal. Nineteenth-century English literature usually includes ¼ (p 1).

The ® rst point to note of the passage is Eagleton’ s empiricism: the facts, hedemonstrates in the fourth sentence, do not suppor t the case that literature has

anything to do with the imagination. But this, presumably, is an inadequate basis

upon which to rest the case; after all, someone can objectÐ and no doubt people

haveÐ that whatever it was that Thomas Browne wrote should not be included

in the category. So, Eagleton proceeds to historicise the emergence of literature.This, as we will see, is also an inadequate basis upon which to rest the case; but

there are other points to be noted about that passage ® rst.

Most crucially from the perspective of this argument, English literature is,

almost naturally (ideologically?), distinguished from French literature by Eagle-

ton. The question animating him the entire chapter is to inquire whether and howwe know what literature is, whether the category is self-evident; Eagleton does

an amazing job with that question. But, what is naturalised here, what emerges

as a truism that needs no accounting, is that English literature is different from

French literature. That maybe trueÐ but it cannot be held to be self-evident. To

hold such a positionÐ and it is not clear that Eagleton does, merely that he doesnot interrogate all his assumptionsÐ one must also hold that languages, as

opposed to language, will produce literatures that are not just radically heteroge-

neous but uncomparable. As Madhava Prasad reminds us in his important paper,

such a position would make literature as such unconceptualisable.

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Alternative taxonomies are, of course, conceivable to that of Eagleton:

Shakespeare and Racine could have been categorised together as dramatists, as

producers of a genre that relates to the public, and the performative, verydifferently from novel(ists); Bacon and Pascal could have been classi® ed as

essayists. But the national frame intervenes. The other important point to notice

about that excerpt is that, to it, literature is something that happens in and

through calendrical time and that, therefore, it could be catalogued accordingly.

Eagleton himself does not mention any works of eighteenth century Englishliterature in the passage, but we can rest assured that such works must exist, that

English writers did not stop writing and/or publishing between 1700 and 1799.

In other words, to have a literature is to not just to have a body of work, but to

have several centuries of them; to have a literature is to have works throughtime; to have a literature is to enable an F. R. Leavis to speak of a `greattradition ’ . If time, as conventionally understood, is the province of history, as

conventionally understood, then one can appreciate why I contended earlier that

literature needs, cannot think itself without, history; and not only for a policing

functionÐ as an other, to demarcate a difference. Literature needs history to

constitute itself as an (ample, worthy) object of study.It is also not clear, or at least not explicit, from that passage above what

exactly Eagleton means when he says `English’ : does it refer to nation, country

or language?42

That it is not the third term is borne out by the fact that, to resort

to sociological evidence, in the passage quoted and throughout the `Introduc-

tion’ , no `authors’ from countries other than England in which `literature’ wasbeing written in EnglishÐ Australia, India, the USÐ are mentioned. If country,

as I will somewhat schematically put it here, equals state plus territory, then it

would be somewhat meaningless to understand literature as `belonging’ to or

being produced by a country; and Eagleton does not so understand literature.

That becomes evident in the next chapter of the book, where he discusses `TheRise of English’ .

He argues there that literature in the sense we have inherited it today, which refers

to `creative’ or `imaginative’ works `was invented sometime around the turn of the

eighteenth century’ (p 8). It was consolidated, in the next century, as an ideology:

one that offered an alternative to history;43 and also to religion.

The English nation had to be bound , uni ® ed, produced as an integer, in Guha’ s

pithy phrase. Literature, it was claimed, could do this work; at the level of

ideology, ® nds Eagleton, it did: in literature, the ruling classes devised an

ideology to hegemoniseÐ hoodwink might be a more accurate termÐ the masses.Rather than leave them to contemplate the historicity of their misery, literature

would communicate to them `the moral riches of bourgeois civilization’ (p 25).

Eagleton’ s contentions are determinist: his understanding of literature (as

ideology) is dangerously close to seeing it as one of dogmatic Marxism’ s

favourite insultsÐ false consciousness.44

His historicism prevents him fromnoticing literature’ s conceptual dependence upon history; it is only by taking

history for granted, only by assuming that the discipline of history cannot be

susceptible to a critique analogous to the one he performs on literature, only by

assuming that history is real, stable and not the equally unde ® nable object of

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another discipline, only by holding history to be outside disciplinarity, that he

can make his argument. Nevertheless his evidence and conclusions do enable the

conceptual claim I have been leading toward: that it is impossible to thinkliterature without nation. For, within Eagleton’ s thesis, literature is distinguished

(into English, French, etc.) on one level (the international) by the same

categoryÐ nationÐ that makes it cohere (as ideology across class) at another

level (the intra-national); a category that also has a temporal, or historical,

dimension. Eagleton himself does not quite make the case in these terms. But itis manifest from his argument that one cannot think literature without thinking

nation; or, rather, that literature cannot (historicism would say did not) think

itself without nation (and history).45

***

Eagleton also fails to investigate the possibility of a bind between literature and

colonialism.46

The most detailed empirical work on this question is to be foundin Viswanathan (1997 is a condensed version of 1989) . Her argument, like

Eagleton’ s, is historicistÐ and susceptible to the same critique; she also sees

colonialism as a hegemonic successÐ rather than, in Guha’ s more convincing

demonstration, a dominance without hegemony (1997) .47

But her work does

allow one to conceptualise a bind between literature and colonialism.Viswanathan dates her argument to `the passing of the English Education Act

in 1835 ¼ which of ® cially required the natives of India to submit to the study

of that literature’ (1997, p 119). Submission, one might note in passing, is a

notion incompatible with that of hegemony; but that need not detain us. The crux

of Viswanathan’ s claim is as follows:

Provoked by missionaries, on the one hand, and fears of native insubordination, on

the other, British administrators discovered an ally in English literature to support

them in maintaining control of the [Indian] natives under the guise of a liberal

education. With both secularism and religion appearing as political liabilities,

literature appeared to represent a perfect synthesis of these two opposing positions

(1997, p 121).

Within Viswanathan’ s terms, one actually needs a notion of ideology to clinch

this case: otherwise, one cannot explain how liberal education was actually a

`guise’ to maintain political control; hegemony, let us recall again, is about

consent not control. But the point to take from this is that literature was

conceptualised by `British administrators’ (read colonialism) as a weapon in thewar to maintain itself: it would serve to interpellate the natives. Consequently,

regardless of whether we choose to understand that prior disciplinary moment,

of the emergence of literature, through a resort to history, or to genealogy, it

should be evident why I contend not just that novel is impossible without

empire, but that one cannot think literature itself without thinking colonialism;or, rather, that literature cannot (historicism, again, would say did not) thinkitself without colony. For literature emerges here as something metropolis

conceptualised (Eagleton would say invented) to be given to colony. One of the

consequences of this, of course, is that the colony is, by de® nition, without

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literature. To put this differently: while literature and colony may be accom-

plices, literature and postcolony are not.

History

¼ the text of History is not a text in which a voice (the Logos) speaks ¼

Louis Althusser, Reading Capital

The project of historicism sometimes seeks to merely explain its object (whether

`creative’ work or past event) sometimes to demystify it. Eagleton, for instance,

adopts the latter approach with literature: the argument of the ® rst two chapters

of Literary Theory: An Introduction, is that the implied reader of the discipline

cannot take the notion literature very seriously because: (i) it is inde® nable andtherefore an ideological construct, as opposed to a real object; (ii) it is of recent

provenance, anywayÐ the literary establishment is lying when it says literature

always existed. The latter is the weaker of the two propos itions because it is

always susceptible to counter arguments from the canon, which would dispute

the historicising claim: contending that, whether conceptualised as literature ornot, the objectÐ plays, poems, novels and whatever it was that that Thomas

Browne wroteÐ always existed; or fall back on the position that, regardless of

whether it is a recent or an ancient term, `literature’ is nevertheless true, useful,

goodÐ and not, as Eagleton contends, ideological. Unlike Eagleton’ s,

Viswanathan’ s contentions about literature are not critical; she has no (explicit)quarrel with the category itself; she merely seeks to explain its emergence, to

inform us that literature is bound to colonialismÐ and that this can be seen if we

investigate its origins, its history. I indicated above that this methodÐ histori-

cismÐ a foundation of the discipline itself, is susceptible to critique; and that

reading The English Patient necessitates coming to terms with that critique.48

Again, space constraints necessitate a summary argument, a turning to a couple

of arguments, rather than a survey of the ® eld.

Historicism insists upon denying any distance between the moment of the

event and the moment of its writing or narration; it insists that the event (or

concept, or textÐ in short the object) can only be understood in relation to its`own’ time. History itself, of course, would be impossible without such insist-

ence, for the discipline maintains that its putative object, the past, can be

(re)captured in its integrity; that this attempt to write (about) the past is not

infected by the present, the moment of the narration, the pressures, questions,

concerns of a different (institutional, disciplinary, intellectual) moment; that thequestion of anachronism is not damning; that, as Barthes put it, it enables `the

referent to speak itself’ (1989, p 132). Thus history must distinguish between

itself (accurate representation) and historiography (re¯ ection, philosophy) .

Whereas, and again as de Certeau (1988) points out, if history is writing,

historiography is simply an oxymoron; an argument, as we saw before, alsomade by The English Patient.

But what makes de Certeau’ s investigation of history truly radical is not his

claim that we cannot know the past; or, at least, not know it in its integrity. That

idea has been around at least as long as Thucydides. He asks us, also, to consider

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why we need history. Or, to rephrase that a little more carefully, he asks us to

consider the work done by history at any moment. In the case of France, one can

extrapolate from his argument that the work done by history at its moment ofemergence is to enable nation.49 He situates the emergence of history at a

moment when religion, or the religious institution became `incapable of provid-

ing the references that integrate social life’ (1988, p 153).50

Consequently, truth

becomes relative, and:

a nonreligious type of certitudeÐ that is, participation in civil society [occurs].

Because of its fragmentation into coexisting and mutually warring churches, the

values once invested in the Church appear directed toward political or national unity

¼ Thus the nation is born. (1988 p 127)

What does this have to do with the nation? Is not noticing that the emergence

of history coincided with that of the nation being historicist? Only if one sees

a causal relation between the two. But the question to ask pertains not to the

coincidence, not to the chronological, but to the logical: why does nationalismneed history? Can it do without it? No, because, as many recent commentators

on the subject have pointed out, nationalism must present its (imagined or

otherwise) community, nation, as having an existence through time.57

That is the

work that history enables for nationalism. Without history, which enables an

argument about continuity through time, nationalism cannot legitimise its com-munity, nation. But, if nation needs history, does the converse follow: does

history need nation? Yes, because history is a secular story, of human (as

opposed to divine) agency; it needs a notion of both individual and collective

human agency (cf Hegel) in order to constitute or think itself; and, in order to

do so, it binds a group of these humans (nation) into a place through time.Indeed it legitimates and authorises the (exclusive) claim of a speci® c group of

humans (nation) to a speci® c territory (country) by enabling the argument that

this group occupied this place through time. Or, to put it in the terms used above,

history cannot think itself without nation. The two are accomplicesÐ and what

they have accomplished, they have together.

***

De Certeau has also contended that the emergence of history coincided with

colonialism. The Writing of History begins with a reference to a painting

depicting Vespucci’ s `discovery’ of `America’ , and the claim that what is

represented in the painting is `the beginning of a new function of writing in theWest’ (p xxiv). This is not an argument that is developed fully; but, again, one

can extrapolate. What colonialism enabled, as we well know, is a depiction of

the parts of the world it conquered as inhabiting a prior time in human

civilization;52

it enabled the West to see itself as progress; in a word, it enabled

Hegel. For, without colonialism the contention cannot be made that historymoves from East to West; without Orientalism, the contention cannot be made

that the East is decadent and the West civilised. History, as we well know, is not

just an argument about change through time, but one about progress. Thus, my

conclusion (to an argument that must be fully developed elsewhere): history is

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impossible without colonialism. Or, as I prefer to phrase it: history cannot thinkitself without colony; colony is the accomplice of history.

The other side, as it were, of this critique is to be found in Subaltern Studies.While it is in the work of Guha that Indian historyÐ whether colonialist,

neoucolonialist, or nationalistÐ has been submitted to the most damning inquiry,

it is in that of Dipesh Chakrabarty (1998) that the question has been explicitly

asked of the discipline of history itself. I cannot reproduce the entire argument

of this paperÐ which should be required reading for anyone interested in thequestion of history, if not required reading periodÐ but just his main point,

which is disarmingly simple: that the postcolonial (subject) has no history. By

that he does not mean that the postcolonial has no past (however one might

conceive that). Rather, that the terms, concepts, categories, through which we

think `postcolonial’ history are European ones; the frame of reference for thepostcolonial story must always be some variant of a prior European narrative. If

to have a history is to be able to tell your own story on its own terms, this option

is not available to the postcolonial story. In other words, while history and

colony may be accomplices, history and postcolony are not. Indeed, postcolo-

niality might imply the interrogation of history.53

A point to which we willreturn.

***

But what, you may wonder, does any of this have to do with The EnglishPatient? It, too, as indicated earlier in this paper, partakes of this critique of

history, occupies the same network, is its accomplice. Its dispute with histori-

cism has already been noted: in its inversion of the Caravaggio/Tomassoni

altercation, in its having its actant Kemal el Din alive in 1936, in taking liberties

with the historical record, in its privileging of Herodotus (the `father of lies’ ), inits very narrative structureÐ as a series of interludes that refuse to move forward

chronologicallyÐ it calls attention to the constructed nature of that record and

refuses to be contained by a dogmatic understanding of time, causality, narrative

and factualityÐ the foundations of the discipline.

The novel’ s most powerful denunciation of history, however, lies in itstreatment of the atom bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, depicted in an

interlude towards the very end of the narrative. Of the four actants in the villa,

it is the Sikh, the Indian, Kirpal Singh alone who has a radio and who is

therefore the ® rst to hear the news. Upto this point in the story, Singh is depicted

as not having a critique of imperialism, or colonialism; and as not havinganything but the vaguest one of racism (that he experiences as an Indian in the

British army and is tempted to excuse). Still, he does not by the US’ s story of

the atom bombing even for an instant. For, one possible way of understanding

the US bombing of the two Japanese cities is to accept that accountÐ that in the

face of Japanese intransigence this was the only way of quickly ending the war.54

To Singh the bombing is racist, the particular cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

metaphor and metonym for all of AsiaÐ which we are told is the real target of

this bomb, the map of which itself, the lines separating one country from

another, is destroyed by the explosion that fuses discrete countries into one

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continent. At this point, Singh recalls the words of his brother, who told him to

never trust Europe; then tells the group in the Italian villa:

I’ ll leave you the radio to swallow your history lesson ¼ All those speeches of

civilization from kings and queens and presidents ¼ Listen to the radio and smell

the celebration in it. (p 285)

In one part of the world, that (colonial) cartography calls Asia, hundreds of

thousands of non-combatant civilians are killed instantly, unnecessarily; in

another part of the world, which that same cartography calls Europe (in

contradistinction to that Asia which Europe de® nedÐ cf Said), others celebrate.Given this, Singh asks us to consider, can we accept that Europe’ s de® nition of

itself as civilised? Can we accept the (hi)story of Europe as progress?

Singh addresses Almasy, whom he still believes to be English:

I sat at the foot of this bed and listened to you ¼ I believed I could carry that

knowledge, slowly altering it, but in any case passing it beyond me to another.

I grew up with traditions from my country, but later, more often, with traditions

from your country. Your fragile white island that with customs and manners and

books and prefects and reason somehow converted the rest of the world ¼ Was it

just ships that gave you such power?

Was it, as my brother said, because you had the histories and the printing presses?

You and then the Americans converted us ¼ How did you fool us into this? (p 283)

We know, both from Singh’ s brother and from Guha, that this `conversion’ was

far from successful. But what that passage speci® es is the history lesson alluded

to above: a lesson about history itself. Ships, printing and history are aligned

here; just as much as, in another passage in this same chapter, Singh quotes hisbrother aligning deals, contracts and maps as things that make Europe, and make

it untrustworthy. It was in the name of history itself, as we well know, in the

name of civilisation and progress (ships, printing presses, contracts, Hegel), that

India was colonised. That is the lesson about history that this text wants its

reader to consider: that history, at the end of the day, is a story; a powerful story,but only a story. In other words, that while literature, or the colonial novel, may

do the work of history, the postcolonial novel, or text, canÐ perhaps mustÐ call

this story’ s bluff, call history itself into account.

Postcoloniality

Nationalism ¼ [is]a tissue of contradictions, with its emancipatory and unifying

urge resisted and modi ® ed signi ® cantly by the disciplinary and divisive forces of

social conservatism. Ranajit Guha, Dominance Without Hegemony

I stated at the beginning of this paper that postcoloniality was the name of an

argument that nationalism was an inadequate critique of colonialism. Since it isSubaltern Studies that made this argument, I contended that it is synonymous

with postcoloniality (though it does not, of course, exhaust the latter). Though

not theorised as such, it is both within and revitalises that long standing Marxist

argument which refuses to see the nation as democratic community.55

The

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subalternist critique of nationalism is both political and epistemological (in so far

as, of course, a distinction can be drawn between the two, it can for analytic

purposes). The political critique has been articulated most powerfully by Guha.The Congress, the party of the bourgeoisie, never successfully represented the

peasantry; or, more generally, the subaltern classes, he has argued; thus making

the postcolonial nation a `dominance without hegemony’ . The possibility of

conceptualising the subaltern, in other words, points to the failure of the nation

as community.If not always expressed in the exact same terms, a similar understanding of the

nation is to be seen in the work of the collective as a whole. Whether in the

`thick description’ of Shahid Amin, or in Chatterjee’ s now classic volume, in

which it is argued that Gandhism enabled `the political appropriation of the

subaltern classes by a bourgeoisie aspiring for hegemony’ (1993, p 100,emphasis added), the contradictionÐ or, from an Althusserian perspective, the

overdetermined contradictionsÐ between the elite and the subaltern has been

carefully elucidated.56

Indeed, Chatterjee’ s own thesis is twofold: (i) that

nationalism cannot to be observed through the lens of community (thus making

his book an extended response to Anderson ’ s argument); rather, that the work ofnationalism is to enable the passive revolution (cf Gramsci) of capital; (ii) that

nationalism is not to be observed through the lens of difference, as a negation

of Eurocentrism, which is how nationalism presents itself, but as the product of

its logic.

The signi ® cance of this last point cannot be stressed too much from theperspective of the present argument: that to think nation is to think within what

Chatterjee calls the thematic of Eurocentrism. Thus his argument, in the often

forgotten conclusion of his book, that reason has not met its match in anti-col-

onial nationalism:

Nowhere in the world has nationalism qua nationalism challenged the legitimacy of

the marriage between Reason and capital. Nationalist thought ¼ does not possess

the means to make this challenge. (p 168)

This point has also been made, if differently, by Chakrabarty, who says that to

think `the nation-state ¼ [is] to think a history whose theoretical subject ¼ [is]Europe’ (1998, p 272). Thus my own contention, at the beginning of this paper,

that nationalism is an inadequate response to colonialism. Not because it

represents the failure of community, or a structure of dominance; of course it

doesÐ but colonialism is not the explanatory category in that regard. National-ism is an inadequate response to colonialism because its fundamental politicalcritique of Eurocentrism is not accompanied by an equally fundamental episte-mological one. To do the former without the latter is to make an incomplete

critique, is not to work towards overhauling the structures of Eurocentrism.57

Thus postcoloniality is the name of the preceding argument because it has

exposed nationalism as epistemologically Eurocentric (and, in this instancesecondarily as politically undemocratic). Anti-colonial nationalism, as Chatterjee

demonstrates in his reading of Nehru, thought within the thematic of national-

ism; the pre ® x `post’ is correctly af® xed to this argument because it signi ® es an

attempt if not quite to get beyond the structures and strictures of Eurocentrism,

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at least to think through them; an attempt that may not be particularly successful

at the present moment (thus Chakrabarty’ s `politics of despair’ ) but one that

must be identi® ed, named and undertaken nevertheless. An attempt that would,given the preceding argument about literature and history, necessarily include

the inquisition of disciplinary knowledge, because nationalism has been shown

to be conceptually bound to it.

***

But, how does all this converge with The English Patient’ s own contentions

about the nation as community? The novel’ s quarrel with nationalism isfundamental, relentless, but not, in a certain sense, exhaustive. The case against

nationalism is made very strongly by the actant Almasy; nevertheless the next

also leaves room for another, af® rmative story, that of Kirpal Singh’ s brother.

Almasy’ s disgust with nationalism happens with the onset of war. `We were

German, English, Hungarian, African,’ he tells Hana of the time before 1939.`Gradually we became nationless’ (p 139). That it was colonialism that enabled

this community of mostly Europeans (and aristocratic or comprador Africans)

should not be forgotten; thus it was community that did not, could not, last.

Nationalism, in the form of the war, intervened, placing English and German/

Hungarian on opposite camps. Disgusted, dismayed, Madox, Almasy’ s closestfriend in that community, committed suicide in a Somerset church after hearing

a pro-war sermon. Nationalism, that is, disables community.

The subjectivity it offers is also found by Almasy to be classed, privileged:

Erase the family name! Erase nations! I was taught such things by the desert. Still,

some wanted their mark there. On that dry water-course, on this shingled knoll ¼

Fenelon-Barnes wanted the fossil trees he discovered to bear his name. He even

wanted a tribe to take his name, and spent a year on the negotiations ¼ But I

wanted to erase my name ¼ (p 139)

Name and nation are aligned here. To have a name in this double-barrelled

fashion, of course, is to be of the aristocracy, what Subaltern Studies would term

the elite. When name and nation are aligned, therefore, the nation is associated

by this text with the elite. Thus, again, my contention that this text inhabits thesame network as the postcolonial critique of nationalism.

And it does so responsibly, without dismissing the accomplishment of anti-

colonial nationalism. Of the latter, Chakrabarty has stated, that one should not

`overlook the anti-imperial moments in the[ir] careers’ (1998, p 287). Despite its

critique of nationalism, The English Patient does not, as can be seen in itsepilogue.58 The novel’ s narrative proper ends in August 1945, after the atom

bombing; we then have an epilogue, consisting of two interludes, set in India and

in Canada, 1958. Given that this text does not work within the dogmatism of the

calendar, it is not the exact date of the epilogue that is signi ® cant. Rather, the

question is: what happens in this interim, what story is it that this narrative doesnotÐ or cannotÐ tell? The story, surely, of Indian independence, of freedom at

midnight, the heroic story of Nehru and GandhiÐ represented in the novel by

Singh’ s nationalist brother and Congress volunteer; who, signi ® cantly enough, is

not named, and whom we never meet or hear from directly.59

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Why does The English Patient not tell this story? Why is there a gap in its

plot? Is the reader supposed to ® ll this gapÐ and how exactly? It is possibly to

contend that, by calling attention to a gaping hole in its plot, the text leaves roomfor another narratorial voice. That it invites the reader to ® nd out Kirpal Singh’ s

bother’ s storyÐ the story, that is, of Nehru and/or GandhiÐ by him/herself. The

story even, one must add, of Jinnah: after all, Singh, whom we are told was born

in Lahore, ends the novel in AmritsarÐ a clear gesture towards what Indian

history terms Partition. This, in turn, leaves the reader with several other possiblesupplementary narratorial choices in this connectionÐ from the sociology of

Urvashi Butalia, Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin to the novel of Bapsi Sidhwa;

for Partition also meant the murder, rape, abduction and brutalisation of

women.60

***

Hana’ s story is not reducible to the feminist critique of nationalism. Indeed, in

many respects her’ s is the most undeveloped story, the one that represents the

most potential, that demands the most supplementation Ð for the narrator

himself (?) admits, in the epilogue signi ® cantly enough, that she `is a woman Idon’ t know well enough to hold in my wing, if writers have wings, to harbor for

the rest of my life’ (p 301). This can be read as an instance of narrative

irresponsibility, of a refusal to deal with the woman questionÐ and to a certain

extent the novel does suppor t such a reading. But it can also be read as

signifying that Hana’ s story must be told by Hana herself; that, like with theanti-colonial Indian, this text leaves gaps deliberately, to be ® lled by readers;

that this text does not hold that one narrative voice can capture the whole story,

any story. That the responsible reader must shuttle between novel and theory and

sociology, reading all these texts against each other. What exactly this particular

reader is meant to be the text leaves no doubt about; for, at the end of the plot,we are told that Hana has remained `idealistic’ Ð but `has not found her own

company, the ones she wanted’ (p 301). The latter being, one can only presume,

a gesture towards feminist community that is yet to be.

In other words, what may at ® rst glance appear to be Hana’ s individualism

cannot be read thus. She did return her uniform before the war ended, but shedid not stop nursing. her leaving the medical corps is not to be seen as a sel® sh

actÐ she did, after all, spend much of the war working under the direst

conditionsÐ but as a gesture against carrying out `duties for the greater good’ (p

14), the good of the nation, of courseÐ always de® ned elsewhereÐ which told

her that she had to put up with the insults and the advances of the (dying) menshe tended, and that she had no option but to serve these men because she was

a woman. Thus she resists the call of the nation, which has already determined

(cf Anthias/Davis) that the only role it would allow women is to serve it. Hana,

then, also represents this text’ s critique of nationalism, of the nation as undem-

ocratic community.But she does much more. She is, let us recall, without patronymic, not

burdened by a paternal or patriarchal name. This is a gesture in sync with the

feminist move one is familiar with today; one that, as Joan Scott points out, is

by no means new. Of Olympe de Gouges, one of the ® rst post-1789 French

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feminists (and the aptness of this analogy will be apparent soon), who changed

her name, Scott wrote:

By rejecting the names of her father(s) and her husband, she in effect declared her

autonomy, her refusal of the secondary status that patriarchal law assigned women.

No name other than the one she had given herself could designate (and de® ne) her

existence. She was unique; herself originated with herself. (p 23)

Hana, of course, is not quite the same; her `lack’ of a patronymic is not the result

of agency; for, and much more powerfully, it is the text itself that refuses to

identify her in terms of patriarchal authority. But, that her condition is to be readas one in which the woman will de® ne and designate her own existence, as a

feminist one, is quite clear. Hana’ s lack of a surname is also a sign that she is

to be read against the other woman who dominates this novel, Katherine, the

aristocrat who believed in the family nameÐ and thus, given the logic of the text,

is identi® ed with nation. The text’ s critique of Katherine is reinforced, asmentioned above, in her narrative death, in that she does not get narrative

continuity. Her story is not endorsed, whereas Hana’ s story, in a very explicit

sense, is yet to be.

This is best seen in that interlude towards the end of the narrative, in which

the nurse sings the `Marseillaise’ Ð on her twenty ® rst birthday, her legal comingof age. A tri¯ e ironic, the choice of song, given its violent lyrics and its

association with French nationalism; but then it is also, if only in a clinched way,

signi ® er of the Rights of Man (sic), ofÐ in another registerÐ the emergence of

modernity. Hana had sung it passionately, Caravaggio remembered, at 16. This

time, on the assumption of `adulthood’ her mood was different:

She was singing it as if it was something scarred, as if one couldn’ t ever again bring

all the hope of the song together. It had been altered by the ® ve years leading to

this night of her twenty-® rst birthday in the forty-® fth year of the twentieth century.

Singing in the voice of a tired traveler ¼ There was no certainty to the song any

more, the singer could only be one voice against all the mountains of power ¼

Caravaggio realized she was singing with and echoing the heart of the sapper. (p

269)

Hana the woman, subordinated by patriarchy, and Kip the Indian, subordinated

by colonialism, ® nd community hereÐ if momentarily. For the atom bombing

would remind Kip that he was Indian and she, though Canadian (and therefore

not English or American), still white. Remind them, or at least Singh, that

community across race is not possible with colonialism. But the point to note inthis passage lies elsewhere: that there `was no certainty to the song any more’ ,

the song of modernity, the song of freedom, the song of individualism. In Italy,

alleged birthplace of humanism, at the end of a war that we now know also

brough t about a crisis in humanism, the woman, the (proto)feminist declares that

certainty, one of the foundations of modernity, is over. The (soon-to-be)postcolonial concurs.

The convergence in this narrative unit between Hana and Kip, feminism and

postcoloniality, is analogous to the convergence that can be read between the

arguments of Joan Scott and Partha Chatterjee. His argument, as indicated above,

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was that nationalism only sought to contest what he terms the thematic of

Eurocentrism, not its problematic, or larger structural logic, in which the world

is divided into an us (Europe, modern) and a them (Oriental/Indian, traditional);nationalism, he demonstrates, accepts an essential distinction between Orient and

Occident; only, at the level of the thematic, to assert agency and the possibility

of progress where Eurocentrism sees passivity and decadence. Scott makes an

analogous argument: that postrevolutionary French feminism thought within

what we might now want to term the problematic of patriarchy, which assertedan inherent difference between men and women, while insisting upon women’ s

equality and concomitant rights; thus the `paradox’ in the title of her book: `they

invoked the very difference they sought to deny’ (p x). Within the terms of my

argument, this makes postcoloniality and feminism accomplices in a larger

encounter against the consequences of modernity.

***

Very few critics of a postcolonial persuasion have considered that last possibil-ityÐ one that could very well take the general debate over postcoloniality out of

its current impasse.61 For this debate appears stuck between the dismissive

position that sees those who ® nd the term useful as complicitous with global

capital (cf Dirlik);63

or that which sees those who denounce the term as

complicitous with Eurocentrism (Prakash). David Scott has tried, recently andmost impressively, to break out of this impasse. I cannot enter that debate here.

I just wish to point out that the work of postcoloniality is theoretical, not

empirical; that it concerns the politics of global knowledge productionÐ which

includes conceptual knowledge; that this cannot happen without looking at

colonialism as an epistemological, as much as it was a political, event. Thus, inmy book, post coloniality is synonymous with Subaltern Studies. That brilliant

collective endeavour has initiated the critique of nationalism and disciplinary

knowledge. One must, now, take the critique forward.

Conclusion

¼ the resistance to theory is ¼ a resistance to reading. Paul De Man, The

Resistance to Theory

I have argued in this paper that reading the postcolonial novelÐ or, to be precise,

reading a novel that one is compelled to call postcolonial by virtue of its texture,

the network of texts it is most intimately related to Ð is a demanding task. Sucha novel assumes and/or demands knowledge of both the West and the critique

of colonialism; it has gaps in its plot some of which the reader must ® ll inÐ most

necessarily, in this particular reading of this particular novel, the arguments of

anti-colonial nationalism and of feminism; in other words, it makes reading a

collaborative activity; the novel also, and this is not very different from theprevious statement, gestures towards other texts that the reader must also make

him/herself familiar withÐ Kim, the biography of Caravaggio, Barthes, de

Certeau; and, perhaps most crucially, the postcolonial novel interrogates the

production of disciplinary knowledgeÐ especially that of history. Reading this

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novel thus is also a gesture against the domestication of textuality by literature,

against the insularity of literature.

If reading textually, as I have argued following Barthes and Mowitt, requirescoming to terms with disciplinary knowledge, exposing its work; then reading

postcolonially, I have argued following The English Patient and SubalternStudies, also requires the same. This suggests, of course, the possibility of a

relationship between the theory of textuality and postcoloniality. Exploring some

moment in the 1960sÐ work that happened between 1962 in Algiers and 1968in Paris, perhapsÐ does recommend itself as a starting point for such an inquiry;

but going there is beyond the scope of the present endeavour. What remains to

be done here is to make clearer how one might begin to think the nexus between

postcoloniality and disciplinary.

Once again, a proper , comprehensive answer is not possible. But Althusserenables a hint at one. Speaking of the `structure of empiricist knowledge’ in that

door-opening ® rst chapter of Reading Capital, he characterises it `as a concep-

tion which thinks the knowledge of that real object itself as a real part of the

real object to be known’ (p 37). In this sense even Hegel is an empiricist: not

because he followed the method of BaconÐ that would be an absurd claim; butbecause his method shares the same conceptualisation of the relation of the

knowing subject to its object of knowledge. Empiricism, of course, is not at

stake in the present argument, but disciplinarity is; and disciplinarity is premised

on a relation of the subject to its object homologous to that predicated about

empiricism by Althusser: both understand the object as possessing evidence;methodologically, they are about the recovery of this evidence from the object;

about the discovery of knowledge `in its most literal sense ¼ removing the

covering’ (p 37). And discovery, of course, is how colonialism troped itself.

If it is possible, then, to see a relationship between postcoloniality (which

begins as the critique of the inadequacy of nationalism) and disciplinarity, thenit should be clear why I contend that postcoloniality still has much work to

accomplish; and why reading textually, which involves the production of

knowledge without recourse to a notion of evidence as internal to the object, is

a cardinal constituent of this project. Which leaves me to explain one last thing,

the crow’ s nest: it is, as we know, a position of vantage on a ship. It was, nodoubt, a sailor in the crow’ s nest of the Nina, the Pinta or the Santa Maria who

was the ® rst member of Columbus’ s crew to sight what came to be called the

Americas. To me, reading colonialism at a very different moment, the crow’ s

nest is an apt metaphor for a conceptual space. One that is the task of

postcoloniality to occupy, settle, explore; and in so doing to ® nish its theorising.

Acknowledgements

This paper is the result of conversations with Pradeep Jeganathan, Premesh Lalu,John Mowitt, Gyan Pandey, Rita Raley, Ajay Skaria and Milind Wakankar. My

heartfelt thanks to them all; and to Pradeep, Premesh, Ajay, Nelufer de Mel,

Sanjay Seth and an anonymous reader for their comments on earlier versions of

this paper.

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Notes1

The term `actant’ , of A J Greimas, is taken from Roland Barthes, Image± Music± Text, Stephen Heath (trans),New York, H ill & Wang, 1977, see p 88.

2`The English patient’ , referred to as such throughout the novel, is not identi® ed as Almasy by the plot tillthe very end of the narrative. I use both terms to refer to this actant. Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient,London, Picador.

3Michael Ondaatje, In the Skin of a Lion, London, Picador, 1992, p 55.

4This text has a complicated depiction of women’ s agency: Caravaggio is caught trying to retrieve aphotograph of himself taken, while he was spying at a Nazi social occasion, by a womanÐ whom, since sheapparently meant him no harm, Caravaggio will (also) not blame. This could be read as yet anotherindication that it is not the author’ s intention, but the consequences of her actions, not cause but consequencethat matters; but it is still troubling that, often in this story, women make trouble for men. Of course,feminism is not reducible to the question of agency.

5See Barthes, p 94.

6Throughout this paper, I deploy `literature’ as synonymous with `English literature’ (which is not to implythat the two terms are in fact synonymous); or, to be precise, it is the discipline of English literature, andits conceptualisation of `literature’ that I seek to interrogate here.

7To speak of responsibility here is to be aware, of course, that reading itself is a privileged practice. Thereare, as we know only too well, situation in which, for want of resources, readings cannot be even partiallycomplete; and then there is the question of illiteracy ¼

8One of the many ways this challenge manifests itself lies in the fact that some of the other arguments thenovel relies upon are actually acknowledged by OndaatjeÐ constituting an all too rare admission within thenovel form that literature is not self-contained.

9At the risk of stating the obvious: literature is understood here not as an entity with an autonomousexistenceÐ `works’ Ð which may or may not be then studied by literary critics, but as that which thediscipline of literature characterises as its object. For an excellent account of the untenability of the ® rst(canonical) argument, see Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction, Oxford, Blackwell, 1983.

10Britannica Online. http://www.eb.com:180/cgi-bin/g? DocF 5 micro/104/17.html.

11As should be clear by now, I do not understand history on its own terms, as a discipline having as objectthe past. Rather, I seek in this paper to contribute to the critique of history made, amongst others, by deCerteau and Althusser. The quickest summary exposition of this position could be put thus: to believe inthe past (diachrony) is also to believe in the present (synchrony); to believe in the possibility of neatlydistinguishing the one from the other. But the question arises: when does the present begin?

12The best explication of how history de® nes itself in relation to literature is to be found in the work ofMichael de Certeau, Heterologies: Discourse on the Other, Brian Massumi (trans), Minneapolis, Universityof Minnesota Press, 1986. Of history, he argues that ` ª ® ctionº is that which the historiographer constitutesas erroneous; thereby, he delimits his proper territory’ (p 201). The converse, as I argue later, does notnecessarily work with literature. At the risk of stating the obvious, I should add here that, while ® ction andliterature are not synonymous, the concept of literature relies heavily on the notion (necessary ® ction?) of® ction.

13A moment, then, is to be understood in logical, not chronological, terms.

14An extensive bibliography is required here. I will, however, restrict myself to stating that this critique wasinaugurated by Edward Said’ s now classic Orientalism . I seek in this paper to continue the project begunthere.

15While these questions have been raised from many places, within the argument of this paper, the mostrelevant references are: Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World, Minneapolis,University of Minnesota Press, 1986; Dipesh Chakrabatty, Rethinking Working Class History, Princeton,Princeton University Press, 1989; and `Postcoloniality and the arti® ce of history’ , in A Subaltern StudiesReader Ranajit Guha (ed), Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1998; Ranajit Guha, Dominancewithout Hegamony, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1997; Gyan Pandey, The Construction ofCommunalism in Colonial North India, New Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1990; Gayatri Spivak, `TheRani of Sirmur’ , History and Theory, 24(3), 1985; `Can the subaltern speak?’ , in Marxism and theInterpretation of Culture Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (eds), Urbana, Illinois University Press,1988.

16To say this is not to argue, of course, that such a social condition cannot be speci® ed and talked about.

17It should be stressed that the critique of nationalism, at least in modern India, is not just the product of somepostcolonial angst, or disappointment, but almost as old as its heroic self-representation. (To say which isto reiterate that postcoloniality cannot be reduced to a temporal condition, a moment in the calendar thathappens after independence.) A momentous signpost in this critique is the writings of Rabindranath Tagore.Engaging with them is beyond the scope of this paper. The reader might be reminded here, though, that his(nationalist) novel Gora is (also) a reading, a rewriting, of Kim; on this, see Gayatri Spivak (1992).

18I owe to Gyan Pandey the crucial point that interrogating colonialism is not an end in itself; but that to doso is also to interrogate modernity.

19Such a strategy would, of course, only serve, ultimately, to strengthen the discipline. It is also unacceptablebecause, as Madhava Prasad has pointed out, the demand of multiculturalism at the local (US) level isanalogous to that of nationalism at the global.

20Some of the work I have in mind is, on anthropologyÐ Arjun Apadurai, `Putting hierarchy in its place’ ,

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Cultural Anthropology, 3(1), 1989; Talal Asad, `Introduction’ , Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter,New York, Humanities Press, 1973; Bernard S. Cohn, An Anthropologist Amongst the Historians, NewDelhi, Oxford University Press, 1987; Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other, New York, ColumbiaUniversity Press, 1983; Edward W. Said, `Representing the colonized: anthropology’ s interlocutors’ , CriticalInquiry, 15, 1989; David Scott, Formulations of Ritual, Minneapolos, University of Minnesota Press, 1994;Simon Ryan, The Cartographic Eye, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996; Mary Louise Pratt,Imperial Eyes, New York, Routledge, 1992.

21What I take from Mowitt is that, to `® nish’ theorising is, in a sense, to keep making an argument until itbecomes axiomatic; one recent work that takes the anthropological references in the previous footnote in thisdirection is Jeganathan. Many immanent critiques of anthropology we have seen in the last couple ofdecades disassemble anthropology only to reassemble it; Clifford is a symptomatic text hereÐ he blithelyassumes that, following decolonization (the Negritude movement is his reference), `people interpret others’(p 22) outside a ® eld of power. The response to this, of course, is Chatterjee’ s demonstration that we `willnever have a Kalabari anthropology of the white man’ (p 17). Like Chatterjee, Jeganathan refuses easyprescriptions for a discipline that emerged alongside colonialism, that invented the decadent or primitivenative, and thus can be regarded as the discipline par excellence of Eurocentrism (cf Said, 1989, Fabian).As for Negritude, Chatterjee’ s work allows one to see something Fanon understood instinctivelyÐ that itinhabits the same structure of thought of Eurocentrism.

22It is probably necessary to indicate here that `novel’ is a category that enables me not so much to point toa referent (that would be `book’ ) as to allow the possibility of claiming that misreadings can occur. It doesnot follow, of course, that misreadings are not texts.

23This is Nicholas Dirks’ s (1998) claim; that, despite the text’ s critique of colonialism through Kip andAlmasy, it is in the end a romance; such a reading is more inspired by Hollywood than an engagement withthe text.

24Since this argument is not out of date, it may not be a waste of time to repeat that date and time refer totwo very different things.

25I reproduce this old argument, as stated before, to remind ourselves of the conceptual force of the text, andof readingÐ as understood not only by Barthes, but by Althusser, whose argument that reading is production(`transforming ¼ something which in a sense already exists, 1997, p 34) is not, one might stress, an agentialunderstanding of reading.

26Within the more familiar rhetoric of liberal democracy, the term that is used to describe and conceptualisethis condition is `minority’ .

27Though even there, as Genette points out, one confronts anachronies.

28This recalls a passage in Barthes, about the aesthete-reader: she `takes pleasure in the words ¼ in certainarrangements of words; in the texts ¼ certain isolates are formed and in their fascination the reader±subjectis lost’ (Roland Barthes, The Rustle of Language, Richard Howard (trans), Los Angeles, University ofCalifornia Press, 1989, p 40).

29Discussing these objects of reading, while necessary for a comprehensive account of this text, are beyondthe concern of this paper. But they do remind one that the text is not merely a literary object, that the theoryof textuality insists that objects other than the written/verbal can and should be read, that the theory can anddoes accommodate them.

30The English Patient, of course, is not unique in this regard: Midnight’ s Children is also a response to Kim,and other colonial novels. Indeed, this is a familiar trope within the postcolonial novelÐ Things Fall Apart,for instance, being a reading of Heart of Darkness; Wide Sargasso Sea, of Jane Eyre. The consequences forpost colonial studies generally of The English Patient being a rewriting of Kim has been written about; seeRaheja, and Watson.

31The Irish boy is consistently referred to throughout the novel as `Kim’ ; I use his surname instead, in orderto emphasise the raced nature of this actant. To do otherwise, I believe, would be to assent to this text’ srepresentation of itself as an innocent tale of boyish adventure.

32Though it must also be added that, broadly speaking, this novel is isochronous: the chapters, at anyrateÐ except nine and ten, which depict the same 3 years from different perspectivesÐ move forwardthrough the calendar. I might add here that this novel is structured, like all realist novels, into chapters ofmore or less equal length; thus making the notion of an interlude irrelevant in this context.

33Later in this section, I speak of a third kind of evaluative narrative voice, the judgmental; and I stress theevaluative nature of these voices because, of course, there is no such thing as pure, objective, description.I should add here that my use of the term voice differs from that of Genette.

34Quoted in Inden: 9. This entire paragraph is very indebted to Inden.

35The novel, of course, can do this; it is, as Said reminds us, an `incorporative, quasi-encyclopedic’ (EdwardW. Said, Culture and Imperialism , New York, Vintage, 1993, p 71) form.

36As Dirks’ s paper convincingly establishes, colonialism did not always comprehend India thus. In its earlyincarnation, it did not see India as riven by caste.

37They might have, of course, if they were professionalÐ which raises the question of the classed nature ofthis imagination, something Anderson does not address.

38One cannot underestimate the importance of surveying to the production of India. As Arjun Appadurai haspointed out: `the measurement and classi® cation of land was the training ground for the culture of numberin which statistics’ underpinned and authorised the measurement and classi® cation of the natives (ArjunAppadurai, `Theory in anthropology: center and periphery’ , Comparative Studies in Society and History,

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28(2), 1986. 1996, p 125). On this topic, see also Cohn, Dirks (Nicholas Dirks, `Castes of mind’ ,Representatives, 37, 1992) and Edney.

39Almasy too, not incidentally, is an actant who has a prior record in other texts; in the 1930s the journal of

the Society, Geographical Journal, mentions `Ladislaus Edward de Almasy’ often (see, for instance,Bermann).

40The reference here, of course, is to Spivak (1988).

41And also, of course, cartography/geography: thus the signi ® cance of Almasy attempting to map the

impossibleÐ the desert, `where nothing was strapped down or permanent, everything drifted’ (p 22). Thehyperbolic instance of the desert obviously draws our attention to the essential impossibility of mapping anypart of the earth with any ® xity; but also, I would add, most particularly to the map of colonial Africa, drawn

as it was in Berlin.42

For the distinction between nation and country, two terms often con¯ ated, see Qadri Ismail, `Constitutingnation, contesting nationalism’ , in Subaltern Studies XI Partha Chatterjee and Pradeep Jeganathan (eds),

New Delhi Oxford University Press, forthcoming.43

By stressing `the sovereignty and autonomy of the imagination ¼ [literature also emphasised] its splendidremoteness from the merely prosaic matters of feeding one’ s children or struggling for political justice’ (p

20). History, here, is not the past but, consistent with his Marxism, the class struggles of the present.44

By dogmatic (`orthodox’ ) Marxism I mean that body of work that, in this instance, conceives of the socialas an economic base determining an ideological superstructure. This position has been dismantled, within

Marxism, in Louis Althusser, For Marx, Ben Brewster (trans), New York, Verso, 1996.45

Raymond Williams, incidentally, implies as much.46

One need not labour this point; nevertheless, one must also note the inadequacy of dogmatic Marxism withregard to this question: as Spivak (1985) reminds us, the story of imperialism cannot be reduced to that of

political economy.47

To Viswanathan, `the Gramscian notion is not merely a theoretical construct but an uncannily accuratedescription of historical process’ (1997, p 113).

48It might be necessary to add here that it does not follow from the critique of historicism that one does notwant to locate the emergence of concepts; of, in particular, that of literature and history in modernity; rather,that locating their emergence in terms of the calendar is an inadequate and ill-levelled critique.

49His explicit argument is that history, in a world becoming secularised, represents continuity, a victory overdeath analogous to that guaranteed by religion. While persuasive, following that insight is not germane tothe purpose of this paper.

50Again I must insist that I cannot rehearse these carefully developed arguments here, and invite the readerto acquaint him/herself with De Certeau. I might stress, though, that it is important to know that we did notalways have history as we know it today: narratives about a past carefully and ® rmly demarcated from a

present are a product of the Enlightenment. Medieval chronicles, in contrast, brought their stories right intothe present (time of narration), without demarcating a time past (see Hayden White). Given all this, DeCerteau concludes that the past is `the ® ction of the present’ (1988). This argument, of course, is the sameas that made earlier, about the impossibility of de® ning the synchronic. Thus my contention that the past

is the putative object of history.51

This argument is made, amongst others, by Anderson.52

The reference here is, of course, Said (1979) and also Fabian.53

A similar argument about anthropology could be taken from Fabian.54

For revisionist accounts of this position, see Bird and Lifshultz.55

The key text in this critique is Luxemburg; though in works like The Eighteenth Brumaire, Marx himself

sees the nation as fractured. Prasad has complained, correctly, that `the failure to explicitly retheorize theMarxist paradigm as the basis of the subalternist intervention has led to its appropriation by a kind of politicsthat ® nds its meaning and effectivity in self-effacement and regards celebration of the other as the only

possible source of a new politics’ (p 147).56

To say this is not to imply that Amin’ s interventions are not theoretical: a more effective dismantling thanEvent-Metaphor-Memory of the impossibility of doing history, from within history, a better instantiation of

Althusser’ s claim that `the ª actorsº of history are [not] the authors of its texts’ , is dif ® cult to conceive.57

This is a crude summary of the arguments of Chatterjee (1986) and Prasad, which I cannot discuss at anylength here.

58In this context, it would be intriguing to compare the relation to disciplinary knowledge of the anti-colonial

novelÐ whether Gora or, to cite but one Anglo-Indian text, Kanthapura , to the present argument. But sodoing would be way beyond the scope of this paper. Still, it is to be expected that that novel, likeanti-colonial nationalism (cf Nehru) is to be very dependent upon colonial/disciplinary knowledge.

59Since an interlude of the epilogue is also set in Canada, there must be a Canadian story, too, to beinvestigated here; but, as said before, going there is beyond the scope of this paper.

60Needless to add, a comprehensive reading of The English Patient would also attend to these texts.

61Spivak’ s work, again, is an exemplary exception.

62It is perhaps unnecessary to state again that this kind of thinking is susceptible to the Althusserian critiqueof categorical confusion: you must respond to theory at the level of theory, not at that of political economy.

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