Colonial Discourse in the British-India Military System

49 religious matter. After the Mutiny of 1857, most Indians reacted that religion in its existing state could not withstand English encroachment, thus, managed to purify the religion to secure the heritage. If in the novel Ghosh focuses on the military utilization to strengthen the Empire, it is just a subsequent subject growing from this religious intention. If we come back to Arjun and realize that within him there is only a weak sense of national identity, probably it is because the national identity has very little functionality. Thus, if an Indian questions his identity, it is not really surprising if it will only produce bewilderment, especially to those who live in higher castes or those who betray that Hinduism is the real means of unity in India. We may suppose that this national awareness will grow hand in hand with the progress of the nationalist movement and its Congress, but I can say that in The Glass Palace this project cannot tackle down the imbalance within the society; a vision of national movement still belongs to those small numbered, westernized middle class Indians, while the rest of the country remain loyal to the British.

B. Colonial Discourse in the British-India Military System

This subchapter is dedicated to analyze colonial discourse which is rearticulated in the British Indian Army. The importance of colonial discourse in the Army is that it may develop identity hybridization, which to some soldiers, like Arjun in The Glass Palace, becomes the most bewildering experience. Not only does its form mandate direct imperial relation between the Army and the 50 British Empire, but this military institution also becomes a place for the colonizer to productively exercise colonial discourses. As Bhabha suggests 2004:119, in a form of governmental institution colonial ideologies can collaborate more openly because there coexist progressive ‘Western’ systems that bestow justification for the colonial subjectification and hierarchization. Bhabha’s argument is resonant with the military experience in The Glass Palace where stereotypical knowledges go hand in hand with the discourse of modernity and freedom. What follows from this fact is I use mainly Bhabha’s theories of hybridization, stereotypes and discourse of mimicry to scrutinize the military phenomena in The Glass Palace. I deliberately chose his theories because in his Location of Culture 2004, he has established a thorough analysis on the core of colonial discourse, its ‘regime of truth’, and its rearticulation in other forms which from my limited readings does not exist in other postcolonial theories. I identified three major phenomena in the British Indian Army. All of them explicate the characteristics of British colonialism in India. Moreover, the divisions are very advantageous because they can esablish holistic understanding on the major occurrences in the Army. I would also add that my aim for this subchapter is to answer my second problem formulation and to establish the link of Arjun’s re-negotiation process which indicates the participation of colonial discourses he has learnt to adopt. Without analysing colonial discourse in the Army, I think it is impossible to understand Arjun’s identity development. 51

1. The Mission of Liberation

The British Empire had long been attributed by historians as the most controversial government. The Empire kept ruling a colony while acting like the Britain was the only power its colony could hope for freedom and liberty. However, the colony dwellers at some point came to interpret that such appealing responsibility is only another disguise to advance the imperialism. In The Glass Palace, Ghosh portrays this controversy of the Empire mainly by its military institution in India, the British Indian Army. Ghosh’s choice of military deployment is inevitable. Ghosh emphasizes the proximity of Indians in this case by saying that in British invasion to Burma in 1885, from ten thousand soldiers “almost two-thirds [are Indian] sepoys” Ghosh, 2001:26. From this fact, I then inferred on how deeply involved the Indian soldiers are in enforcing the British mission of liberation throughout the Empire; while at the same period, the Indians, institutionalised within the British Indian Army, become a means for the British Empire to tighten her grip on India. The method to propagate the British liberation mission varies. In India, it is the Indian soldiers who become the direct object of such propaganda. They become an easy target of surveillance for they are concentrated within the British Indian Army. A firsthand observation of what happen in the Army is best inferred from a statement by Giani Amreek Singh, formerly working for British Empire but then deserting the British Indian Army: We were told that we were freeing those people. That is what they said – that we were going to set those people free from their bad kings or their evil customs or some such thing. We believed it because they believed it too Ghosh, 2001:224. 52 . Arjun’s letter to his twin-sister, Manju, also describes how Indians are used by the Empire. In his letter, Arjun tells about his amazement of how his battalion, the 11 Jats, has long been praised for its history: During the Mutiny our troops stayed loyal – one of our companies was in the column that captured the old Emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar, at his hidy-hole at Humaun’s tomb. I noticed something that I bet would interest Dinu and Neel – the Royal was in Burma during General Prendegast’s advance on Mandalay and it fought so well that it came to be known as ‘Jarnail-sahib ki dyni haat ki paltan’ – the general’s right-hand battalion Ghosh, 2001:262 [my emphasis]. The Empire’s mission to ‘liberate’ the peoples is not monopolised by the British. Indians, as the soldiers, are invited to follow the British to bear peace and freedom in India and other colonies. Indian involvement to such enforcement at least has a consequence. A loyalty for Indian soldier inevitably forges into two ways. Most often an Indian sepoy cannot identify whose safety should come first: India from the coming colonizer or Britain from the warring and barbaric native emperors. We can analyze such duality from Arjun’s letter. Notice how Arjun sees the honors. His awe shows his agreement with the imperial authority regarding the captures of Bahadur Shah Zafar and the loyalty of his battalion during the Mutiny in 1857. Within his awe, it is visible that he believes the British have done excellent works. However, his reverence to British expansion is confused by his reference to himself. In the same letter he would proudly announce that he is going to be “the first Indian officer in the 11 Jats… as though [he’s] representing the whole country” Ghosh, 2001:262. One in thinking about his claim as an ‘Indian’ officer would wonder how he defines India, how he can think himself as representing the ‘whole country’. The confusion may spring from his ignorance 53 that Bahadur Shah Zafar is the former native Emperor of India and that the rising of Indian Mutiny of 1857 is caused by military dissatisfaction toward the British. Arjun’s statement, at least, points out to the tendency of Indian soldier to believe what the British believe. Offered by this fact, I thought of how the deprivation of one’s own nation is regarded acceptable for the native people, the deprived. If Indian soldiers admit colonial displacement as a kind of success, there must be other factors that coexist with colonial ideology. Justification may be produced by cultural boons of colonialism. Within the Army, Indians learn about freedom and other ‘Western’ way of thinking. Confined inside the wall of Army institution, Indian soldiers stimulate a kind of pride. They use metaphors in strengthening, and emphasizing, the fellowship they take with immense fuss. At some times they call themselves ‘brothers’ but at different times they extend the bond among themselves beyond mere kinship. It is when they see themselves as the First True Indians: ‘Look at us-‘ they would say, - ‘Punjabis, Marathas, Bengalis, Sikhs, Hindus, Muslims. Where else in India would you come across a group such as ours – where region and religion don’t matter – where we can all drink together and eat beef and pork and think nothing of it?’ Ghosh, 2001:278 [my emphasis]. That narcissistic view of themselves makes Indian soldiers replicate the British. Giani Amreek Singh witnesses how the British think that “in their eyes freedom exists wherever they rule” Ghosh, 2001:224. Similarly, Indian soldiers argue a totalizing definition of freedom and civilized peoples. At least what differentiates Indian soldiers is their emphasis on unity. They see the ‘True Indians’ are those Indians who can get rid off the usual traditions, customs and castes which often 54 encapsulate Indian society into a fixed class and castes order. Here, by the term ‘True Indians’, they regard common Indians, or said reversely as the ‘untrue’ or ‘false’ Indians, from a Western perspective which is alien and unrepresentative. Obviously, the trace of freedom or modernity discourse where traditional Indians ‘can all drink together and eat beef and pork and think nothing of it’ has given the men a sense of liberation from old usages. However, that the Indian soldiers believe their ideas, either about their imperial masters or their nation root, as better than the conception of common Indians, it only reveals the pleasure in accepting colonial discourse. Bhabha suggests that colonial discourse is made productive by ‘the regime of scopic drive’ see Bhabha, 2004:109. It emphasizes the visibility or the look as the primal means of colonial identification. It is worked out by relating the appearance of colonial subject with the Imaginary, the Ideal ego, which in the context of British colonialism in The Glass Palace only make the British to appear superior than the Indians. A repertoire of this Ideal concept is visible in the monumentality of history, modernity, freedom or progressive development that assume ‘white’ representation. So, the attributes of ‘Royal’, signifying a direct relation with the British kinghood, or the ‘general’s-right-hand’ battalion, are pleasurable for the Indians for it matches them with the Ideal conception. However, the ideal image is just a myth of identity and is often confronted by alienating reality. As it is pervasive in The Glass Palace, the British colonizers, in order to strenghten their ‘white’ identity, then produce stereotypes and infamoulsy represent the indigenous culture as if it is within their area of knowledge. Bhabha 55 argues 2004:104 that the representation of Other is a strategy to control the people who seem to confront some established way of thinking. Therefore, in the Army, we find a British officer thinking that Indian officers “would destroy the army; everyone would be at each other’s throats and the whole thing would fall apart” Ghosh, 2001:283; concomitantly, the majority of Indian soldiers really believe in what the British are doing: “they believe that the British stand for freedom and equality” Ghosh, 2001:284. And finally, the discourse gains its succes by making the distinction of the British and Indian officers as a ‘nature’ among the men: Every institution has its own logic, and the British Indian army has always functioned on the understanding that there was to be a separation between Indians and Britishers. It was a straightforward system: they stayed apart, and obviously both sides felt that this was to their benefit. It’s no easy thing you know, to make men fight. The Britishers found a way of doing it, and they made it work Ghosh, 2001:283-284. From my analysis, the word ‘separation’ dims out the truth of ‘hierarchization’. Ghosh narrates in his novel, that from the Army’s beginning the class of officers only belongs to the Englishmen and the Indian soldiers, as if obediently complicit with the caste rule of their borrowings, accept the strata and proudly maintain the position. This colonial subjectification powered by the mythical relationship with the Imaginary of ‘white’ identity at one time and another keeps flashing the wrapped intention of the British. The myth of ‘white’ identity leaves some sites of ‘lack’ that should be masked by other stereotypes. At times, when the Indian soldiers feel that the equality and freedom they have been told about is “a carrot on a stick – something that’s dangled in front of their noses to keep them going, but always kept just out 56 of reach” Ghosh, 2001:284, the British officers produce other stereotypes or discourses that will ensure the necessity of British colonialism. Such as this: I think we both know that our morale is not what it might be. But this is, of all times, the last in which anybody should waver in their loyalties. The reverses we’ve suffered are temporary – in a way they are a blessing in disguise … Ghosh, 2001:417 [my emphasis]. It is true that within the Army, a strong sense of loyalty among the men exists. It is only estranged by the imperial status, the in-between position of British Indian Army. There could be any blessings, but from whom? The Indians who help the colonizers to maintain their authority in India are not accepted by native Indians, on the other side, the Empire with its sterotypical knowledge of the Indians is incompatible for it problematizes “the signs of racial and cultural priority” of colonised subjects Bhabha, 2004:125. This promise of blessings implies the aggressivity of colonial subjectification. At other times, the stereotype is rearticulated afresh by other consideration: there’s only one reason why England holds on any more – and that is out of a sense of obligation... There’s a feeling that we can’t go under duress and we can’t leave a mess behind. And you know as well as I do that if we were to pack our bags now, then you chaps would be at each other’s throats in no time – even you and your friend Hardy, what with him being a Sikh and you a Hindu, a Punjabi and a Bengali’ Ghosh, 2001:417. Those stereotypes only explicate the urgency to maintain the myth, the historicity of ‘white’ identity. This need to keep the supremacy of the white British, however, is only aimed to justify the colonial subjectification. The mission to liberate people using the British Indian Army, or specifically the Indians, at least only reflect the symbolic struggle of the colonizers in defining their identity. The Glass Palace witnesses the decline of the 57 British Empire; and the subjectification of colonies and the peoples is an important strategy to fortify the Empire. By strengthening its authority in the colonies, and distributing the vision of modernity and freedom, the Empire is thus establishing a colonial consciousness that conforms any stereotypes which able to keep the assumption of the British as superior peoples,

2. The Ambivalent Representation of British Indian Army

The core problem of the British Indian Army is its ambivalent relationship with India as the colony of the British Empire. It implies the Empirecolony relationship in which the Army is somehow placed in-between the two powers. The relationship forms every Indian soldier as implacable, homeless; his existence is blasted from assured identification as an Indian. To begin this point, I will discuss a scene in The Glass Palace that mentions an inscription at the Indian Military Academy which deeply puzzles Hardy, Arjun’s Indian compatriot. Despite its name as pointing to India, the Academy projects itself to produce imperial soldiers: The safety, honour and welfare of your country come first, always and every time … Where is this country? The fact is that you and I don’t have a country… why was it that when we took our oath it wasn’t to a country but to the King Empreror – to defend the Empire? Ghosh, 2001:330 [original italics]. In the British India military system, every Indian soldier takes his oath to the British Kinghood. It projects the Indians to serve directly to the Empire, thus neglecting the presence of India as geographical location from which the people originate. That is the source of confusion for an Indian soldier: he is disturbed by uncertain nationality. Becoming a dweller of a colony urges any Indians to 58 subordinate their service, trust and loyalty to the Empire so distant and untouchable, only represented by some Englishmen and alien rules. We can compare this phenomenon with military behaviors of Indian soldiers, or ksatriyas, hundreds of years before the coming of British invaders. According to Arjun, soldiers at that time “had fought out of religious belief, or because of allegiance to their tribes, or to defend their kings” Ghosh, 2001:347. In my perspective, proximity and distance constitute the differences. It was the allegiance to certain actual surrounding tribes and religious belief that gave assurance to past Indian soldiers about what they were doing. The British Empire, on the other hand, is quite alien in culture and religious belief; moreover, the strangeness is doubled by geographical distance between India and Britain. Logically, if there is no stable statement of nationality, the mission of the Army shall be so ambivalent. The mission to liberate other nations should not be workable at all, for it is uncertain upon whom the soldiers should defend. However, the British India Army has strategically pushed every Indian to align himself in the business of the Empire and accept the uncertainty. The Army has been successful in establishing false- consciousness within the troops by deploying masked conception that give illusory perspective. Even to overcome the distractions, some soldiers like Arjun manage to look at soldiering as “a job, a profession, a career” Ghosh, 2001:347 thus ignoring his ambivalent nationality and illogical colonial enterprise; and Arjun submits himself wholeheartedly to the Empire. In colonial phase, such decision only directs the soldiers to be utilized freely by the ruling power. Soldiering is no more including any conscious volition; Indian soldiers are only 59 means in the hand of colonizers. In British India Army then, as Arjun believes it, “there was none who was not a mercenary” Ghosh, 2001:347. I now want to shift this discussion to the attribute of ‘mercenary’ of Indian soldiers. Throughout the narrative of military deployment in The Glass Palace, majority of people regard the British India Army as robbing psychological awareness of the Indians. Mahatma Gandhi thinks that India would only benefit from having “men of conscience in the army. India needs soldiers who wont blindly obey their superiors” Ghosh, 2001:258. Different figure, Saya John, also refers to the spirit of Indian soldiers as ‘evil’ whenever the soldiers fight from “neither enmity nor anger,… without protest and without conscience” Ghosh, 2001:30. But the most explicit attribution, and condemnation, is when Burmese people call the British India Army as “the army of slaves” Ghosh, 2001:288. This case, actually, only signifies psychological pathology.The guilty of this absentia should not be pointed only to the British colonizers; the job itself, soldiering, has a nature of ‘mindlessness’ in the form of order and loyalty. I agree with Hardy, who argues that there is “something very primitive” about what they do when someone wants to risk his life without knowing the reason, “it was as if my heart and my hand had no connection” Ghosh, 2001:407. I imagine that this characteristic does not only exist in the British India Army; every Army does and works the same way. It is impossible to betray the order because Army works in obedience to it. However, I do not suppose to annihilate the problem and see it for granted. My curiosity is then pointed toward why it is so problematic in the context of India. 60 Taking order to ‘kill without conviction’ becomes inevitable to every soldier; it is the nature of the job. The problem lies on the master of operation, the British Empire. The British colonizers are called as ‘satanic’ for they order the Indians to kill other people ‘that should be their friends’. The Empire failed to understand who the Indians are, and how they think about others. There is a cultural gap that makes India would not stand anymore British encroachment. Therefore, I suppose that the resistance springs from different assumption of ‘Self’, or cultural identity, between Indians and the Britishers. It then manifested in conflicting interests and religious beliefs. As a colony, India is positioned on the periphery of the Empire. This positioning seems deliberate when the result is India working as the ‘garrison’ of the Empire; the colony fortifies the central home from the coming attacks by providing Indians as the soldiers. Positioned like this, India will be the most damaged subject. The development on modern lives, freedom and progressive government, therefore, are only a strategy to validate subjectification and subjugation of India because it will give way for British colonialism to sap India’s resources, “the impoverished Indian peasant who paid both for the upkeep of the conquering army and for Britains eastern campaigns Ghosh, 2001:221. The peripheral position of India, and Indian soldiers, within the Empire also yields on the forgetting of the colony in the Empire’s business or victories. An Indian soldier, however good he is, will never be credited. They should be accustomed to know “how all those brave young soldiers were always Australian or Canadian or British” Ghosh, 2001:406. Here, the British Empire would assume its victory as 61 the victory of the whole colonies. But this representation of wholeness does not work in British colonialism. Perhaps some examples can describe the case. The first example is a quarrel between Arjun as an Indian soldier with Burmese people: ‘We aren’t occupying the country,’ Arjun said, as lightly as he could. ‘We are here to defend you .’… ‘From whom are you defending us? From ourselves? From other Indians? It’s your masters from whom the country needs to be defended Ghosh, 2001:288 [my emphasis]. Another scene is at the outset of World War II. During the war, the British India Army is fragmented. Some soldiers remain in the Army, and the others are turning against British and then fight for Japanese. The perspective in welcoming the Indian prisoners underlines the case: To the British they were JIFs – Japanese Inspired Fifth Columnists. They were regarded as traitors – both to the Empire, and to the Indian army,.. The Indian public, however, saw the matter quite differently. To them… it was the defeated prisoners of the Indian National Army that they received as heroes – not the returning victors. Ghosh, 2001:479. The assumption of part as a whole is unattainable. I think it is because in the way to represent the colony, the Empire has deprived and displaced first the peoples and native authority. Moreover, the promise of progress and modernity is betrayed by unjust and perverse articulations of its praised civilization. So, it seems unavoidable when India then has a mechanism to differentiate herself with the British when the Empire declares the war against Germany on the behalf of its colonies. In a mocking tone, most Indians believe that “Indians should refuse to participate in this war… a competition for supremacy among nations who believed it to be their shared destiny to enslave other peoples” Ghosh, 2001:319. 62 Thus, the tension of mastercolony, centralperiphery is maintained by both powers to produce significant stance in colonial relationship. After all, when the centre and the colony are going restless, the soldiers in the British India Army become deeply disturbed. Indian soldiers are caught in- between the two. They are offered two responsibilities, that is, to work in the Army and serve the Empire, or to defend India and its peoples from further deprivation from the colonizers. Therefore, the only decisive and discerning factor in the Army, of choosing which economy should prevail, is the only way an Indian soldier personally justifies his vision in soldiering and his perspective of the Empire or its colonialism.

3. The Discourse of Mimicry

Besides its unsettling position, there is another colonial mechanism within the British India Army which is utilized to foster Western superiority. The discourse, called by Bhabha 2004:122 as ‘mimicry’, teaches every Indian soldier to have a desire on Englishness. This mechanism is found so significant in The Glass Palace when Indians have entered the rank of Officers, thus working in the same level with their British counterparts. However, though giving some access to Indian soldiers, this discourse will only disrupt Indian subjectivity, for without provision it will mold every person into delusional identity. On the other side, mimicry also progressively estranges the authenticity of Western, or English, identity of which the colonizers assert in appropriating colonial subjugation. In the Army, the discourse of mimicry is firstly introduced through the medium of language and culture. For example, the first letter Arjun sends to his 63 sibling while he has got into the Indian Military Academy has shown the change in his language. The narration is written as below: How well he wrote - in proper sentences and paragraphs. When they were together they always spoke Bengali, but the letters were in English - an unfamiliar, idiomatic English, with words of slang that she didnt recognise and couldnt find in the dictionary Ghosh, 2001:259. Language is a means of communication; moreover, it is a signifier of culture and way of life. The use of English marks the shift Arjun made in order to appear more British, thus a possible sign of cultural betrayal. However, we may beware that the change is inevitable since Arjun is “the only Bengali in sight” Ghosh, 2001:283; in order to get in tune with other soldiers from different races, he is forced to use a unifying language. The fact is such language does not exist in India, since its regions have varieties of linguistic differences that resist fusing with each other. Therefore, the colonizer, with their economy to unite the Army, finds it beneficial to enforce the using of English. It is also to the advantages to the British when the use of English makes the reality then is represented within English philosophical system. However, the colonizers do not stop at that point. They thrust further in proposing English culture within the Army. To make successful the discourse of mimicry, they unethically deprive cultural differences, in which Indian culture, as Other, is then represented as inferior than the English. What I mean with cultural deprivation is the norms on dining table represented in The Glass Palace. Foods become the means in articulating mimicry discourse. In Manju’s wedding, after a dinner, there is a conversation: Every meal at an officers’ mess… was an adventure, a glorious infringement of taboos... Not was this just a matter of satisfying appetites: every mouthful had a meaning – each represented an advance towards the 64 evolution of a new, more complete kind of Indian …They tested not just their manhood, but also their fitness to enter the class of officers. They had to prove, to themselves as well as to their superiors, that they were eligible to be rulers, to qualify as members of an elite: that they had vision enough to rise above the ties of their soil, to overcome the responses instilled in them by their upbringing Ghosh, 2001:278-279 [my emphasis]. Food regulation in the Officers’ rank informs the differentiating process within the Army. By only serving English foods, it implies that whoever has come up to the Officers’ rank must be British or adopt British identity. This presumption, besides giving a sign of stereotyped elite-ness of the British, informs the necessity for an Indian to accept mimicry as a demand of the rank. The productivity of the discourse is made visible by the rank’s historicity; Englishness is instilled to be the nature of the rank which requires qualification of certain taste distinct to the Indian’s. What it yields then is a ‘cultural miscegenation’, which from T. B. Macaulay’s vision is to form a class of “Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes” Macaulay, 1958:49. In such regulation, however, we can suspect why Officers’ rank demands an adaptive desire for English culture and what is imagined by the British when they manage to do so. I suppose that this mimicry in the Officers’ rank, the requirement to resemble the British, is a strategy to reform Indians, the inappropriate Others. Such colonial mimicry, as is theorized by Bhabha, is “the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite” Bhabha, 2004:122. To depart for an object that is ‘almost the same, but not quite’ the Army, to mention only particular examples depicted in The Glass Palace, uses language and food choice. These articulations of the discourse should firstly direct every Indian to conform the existing definition of superiority 65 that secure the identification to colonizer’s Self; and the discourse is after all productive in theorizing the elite-ness of Englishmen. It is proven when the Indian soldiers identify the destination of their being within the Army as a losing free from their Indian upbringing: “’Look at us ... we’re the first modern Indians… we’re the first Indians who’re not weighed down by the past’” Ghosh, 2001: 279. What more is a unique pride of the Indians for being related to the colonizers. The reasons are analyzed by Dinu, Arjun’s nephew, who states his analysis below: In the army… Indian officers were a band of the elect; they lived in a proximity with Westerners that was all but unknown to their compatriots. They shared the same quarters, ate the same food, did the same works: in this their situation was unlike that of any of the Empire’s other subjects Ghosh, 2001:279. Such is an interpretation of British identity. In my analysis, the focus here is not to the colonial relation of colonizercolonized, but the ‘superiority’, elite-ness of British identity. Every Indian soldier does not assume his position in the Army as a colonizer toward India, but he portrays himself as a civilized, ‘true’ and different from his compatriots. Thus, it shows that the identification wihin the Army is built upon the object relation with the orientalist imagery which underestimates or devalues Eastern knowledges and cultures and previleging Western Self. Obviously, I can say this phenomenon as a cultural bragging of which the assumed quality is, however, delusional, mythical. Mimicry leads an Indian soldier to have a desire for delusional myth of identity; and I think this is the core problem. This delusion of identity-image is not realized when the Indians are still roaming within the exact boundaries of the 66 Army, when discourse distributions are assured by homogenous society. Estrangement, however, happens outside the usual limit of the Army; it is when the Indians are mobilized outside the disciplined colonial society of India and granted chances to meet people of other British colonies. An Indian soldier who has ever claimed a superior image – ‘Look at us... we’re the first modern Indians’ – will be shocked when out of uniform they were often mistaken for “coolies… At other times – and this was worse still – they would find themselves being looked upon with something akin to pity” Ghosh, 2001:346. Moreover, their assumed ‘Englishness’ – manners, tastes, language – cannot keep them from social seclusion when it comes to racial signs: “No Asiatics allowed” Ghosh, 2001:345. Therefore, those estrangements of identification disclose their ambivalent image which recalls Macaulay’s object of colonial mimicry – ‘Indian in blood and skin, but British in manner and tastes’ – a creature of hybrid quality. However, mimicry in the Army diiferentiates its strategy; it does not reflect the partial development as is theorized by Bhabha 2004:pp.123-124. If the mimicry in general context of India still negotiates civilization with social castes or indigenous culture, that is producing “low mimetic literary effect” of civilizing idealism that can prevent revolutionary acts Bhabha, 2004:122, within the Officers’ rank, civilization and other discourses to make the Indians resemble the British seem at first total and complete. It is as if an Indian is able to represent himself as an Englishman, outside and beyond Indian culture that has shaped his past. However, the difference between Indian and British is irreconcilable from the visibility of skin color. ‘Asiatics’, for example, should signify certain complex 67 definition of physical characteristics often recognized from visual perception – distributed through film, printed materials, direct appointment. As this visibility becomes a primal identification, an Anglicized Indian is ceased to be identified as an Englishman. However, I do not understand why it is easier for a colonized individual to identify his Anglicized compatriots as ‘English’, as is shown by Kumar, Arjun’s batman: “[Arjun is] the one who’s the most English” Ghosh, 2001:297, while the colonizers seem to cling to the epidermal schema in colonial identification. After all, it only makes way to Bhabha’s emphasis that the mimic men can only “repeats rather than re-presents Bhabha, 2004:125. It is why Arjun, in his bewilderment before going over to the Japs in World War II, asks Hardy how then to place all values that they have learnt: Just look at us, Hardy… What are we? We’ve learnt to dance the tango and we know how to eat roast beef with a knife and fork. The truth is that except for the colour of our skin, most people in India wouldn’t even recognise us as Indians. When we joined up we didn’t have India on our minds: we wanted to be sahibs [foreigners] and that’s what we’ve become. Do you think we can undo all of that just by putting up a new flag?’ Ghosh, 2001:439 [my emphasis]. By asking ‘What are we?’ there is a sign that the image – dancing and eating mannerism – signifies nothing. It never settles down identification. Nevertheless, though the Indian Officers are never recognized as ‘English’ despite their learning and Western civilized being, this resemblance to the British counterparts after all erradicates the assumed superiority of English Self; it agrees Bhabha’s conception that “mimicry is at once resemblance and menace” Bhabha, 2004:123. The discourse of mimicry besides giving a sense of traumatic homelessness to an Indian Officer also disrupts colonial discourse in general. I 68 argue that it is caused by the destruction of oriental stereotypes of the East as childish, barbaric or stupid. This phase signifies that a stereotyped Indian can raise to the rank of Officers and thus is equivalent to the British Officers. Positioned equal with the British, Indian Officers begin to assume the rights for just proportion within the Army: You see we all do the same work, eat the same food and so on. But the chaps who’re trained in England get paid a lot more than we do… chaps like Hardy care very much about these things. To them this is not just a job Ghosh, 2001:284. Indian officers of the battalion also realize the perverse articulation of civilization brought about by the colonizers. They refers further for a refusal to participate in World War II: “that this was a competition for supremacy among nations who believed it to be their shared destiny to enslave other peoples – England, France, Germany” Ghosh, 2001:319. The observer now becomes the observed; and observing the British pervert civilization, war and subjugation, the Indians then realize how the colonizers are no more civilized then them. It is in this realization that some Indian Officers then turn their gaze from the British, and after being psychically and physically subjugated, they start to recollect bits of their past history as Indian that can ease them with a sense of Self.

C. Arjun’s Re-Negotiation of Self