“THE night of the sword and the bullet was followed by the morning of the chalk and the blackboard.” Few sentences capture the ironic but inevitable sequence of the different stages of colonialism—the military violence of the battlefield followed by the psychological violence of the classroom. Hard and soft power in perfect symbiosis for Europe to control Africa.
These words by the Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o never fail in the classroom. So far, they have never failed in my teaching career—not in the years in North America where power is easily understood in terms of race relations, not here in India where power, status, and privilege are just as easily grasped as colonial inheritances from the Western world. I’ve often taught Ngũgĩ ’s powerful, polemical plea for the use of African languages in literary creation. It is one of the most vivid and incisive illustrations of the power of ideology—the soft power of religion, culture and education, as that has been pointed out by Marxist critics of the capitalist State. Leading among these critics is the French political philosopher Louis Althusser, whose essay on the ideological work of family, church, and education prepares the ground richly for the class’ understanding of the ideological invasion by European colonialism when we read Ngũgĩ ’s polemic.
Althusser is the creator of some of the most pointed and trenchant insights into power and control in the modern state and the free market. Althusser also killed his wife, the sociologist and activist Hélène Rytmann-Légotien—strangled her in a fit of depression, for which he was sent to the clinics, not to prison. How does one square these two facts with each other? And how do I feel teaching his works for so many years, writing about his ideas, sometimes taking recourse to them to articulate my own? A fatal agent of male violence on women, no matter what his mental state?
Denne historien er fra August 11, 2024-utgaven av Outlook.
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Denne historien er fra August 11, 2024-utgaven av Outlook.
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Criminal Amnesia
The focus may have now shifted to the Kolkata gang rape case, but questions about the sexual violence in Manipur since May 2023 remain unanswered
To Rape A Wife
Survivors of marital rape face twin hurdles: a lack of legal framework to deal with these cases and the social stigma that comes with reporting them
A City Violated
Public outburst of anger over the rape and murder of a junior doctor in Kolkata has left the Mamata Banerjee government puzzled, worried
The Forest of Loss
From a legal perspective, justice appears to have been served in the 2017 Gudiya rape and murder case at Kotkhai, Himachal Pradesh. But several questions persist
Here, Nobody Speaks of the Wounds
Muhammad Iqbal Shah's 14-year-old cousin was gang-raped and murdered at Handwara town, Kupwara, in 2007. The family is still trudging along the long road to justice
She Must Have Been Afraid
The 2012 Delhi gang rape is reflective of a systematic failure to cleanse the societal malaise
The Burning Woman
UP has the highest rate of crimes against women, and the district of Unnao has seen some of the State's most gruesome cases
Naked (vs.) Justice
On March 14, 2006, Latabai and her son, six, were paraded naked in a village in Solapur. Less than six months later, four members of a Dalit family were paraded naked; mother & daughter were allegedly gang-raped
Songlines of Chambal
How do the residents of Sheikhpur Gudha, Phoolan Devi's village in Uttar Pradesh, remember her: as a survivor, a rebel, a leader?
Don't You Remember My Story?
A child gang rape survivor's 12-year long ordeal in Sikar, Rajasthan shows how calls for punishment of perpetrators don't always mean empathy for the victim
