The Sin of Colonialism and the Love it has Robbed

 

The relationship between the colonizer and the colonized is complex. At first glance, it might just appear to be exploitation – which it is – but a deeper analysis reveals that beneath all of that cruelty there is something more.

This is why novels such as ‘A Passage to India’ withstands the test of time. It manages to capture the brutally imposing colonizer and match him with a human beneath the colonizer. Masterfully written, it does not justify colonialism nor does portrays the colonizer to look like a victim who had no choice.

Those people were cruel and the natives suffered from their cruelty but cruelty isn’t the only part of their personality. Neither is this cruelty binary. It exists on a spectrum.

For instance, both Mr. McBryde and Mr. Turton are colonizers but their attitude is slightly different. Mr. Turton is hateful towards Indians while Mr. McBryde has a heavy prejudice towards Indians. In the grand scheme of things, these differences don’t matter but it is very important to keep them in mind before analysing the characters in colonial literature.

I can give another example. This is from Juhea Kim’s novel ‘Beasts of a Little Land’. The novel speaks about the tussle between the Japanese and the Koreans during Japan’s occupation of Korea. We get a spectrum of Japanese characters. From Colonial Hayashi, who shoots a Korean in the back and rapes a teenager, to General Major Yamada, who rescues the son of a Korean hunter out of gratitude.

Both of them occupied and exploited the natives. They committed war crimes for their nation with almost no regrets yet their perception towards life sets them apart by miles.

Yamada, a man who believed in a warrior’s death, turns tail and abandons the battlefield as he gets disillusioned with war. In the end while he freezes to death, he remembers rescuing a Korean from freezing years ago.

This scene parallels him with a Korean and shows the superficiality of colonialism which masks the vulnerability of humans.

Humans are not superior nor are they invulnerable as some narrative tend to portray.

Both the novels presents us with interactions between the colonizer and the natives. Aziz’s friendship with Fielding in 'A Passage to India' and the conversation between Jung Ho and Yamada in 'Beasts of a Little Land' gave us a glimpse of what would the lives of these characters would have been, if they had lived in a world where one of them did not possess power over the other. A world without power imbalance.

A world where they would have been equals.