The Postcolonial Predicament
While nationalism nurtured colonial and anti-colonial movements, nationalism has continued to shape the legacies of empires in the wake of decolonization and postcoloniality. Nations and political parties regularly invoke public memories to authorize a particular claim to the past or to promote a particular conception of the community.
It is not surprising that the political use of memory, especially the memory of empire, stirs up debate, rouses fierce passions, or provokes conflict. But these divisions are as much about the community’s conception of itself in the present and future as they are about judging the past. Longing to shape the public agenda or to implement dearly held policies, political leaders are driven to memorialize histories, to refashion or repudiate traditions, and to insist on accounts congenial to their own interests.Nationalist passions and imperial memories fueled each other, for instance, long after France was compelled to withdraw its troops from Algeria and accept the independence of its colony. In the years following the Algerian War of Independence (Thawra al-Jazairiyya, 1954-1962), the French government seemed not to want to acknowledge or mention either that there had been a war or that the nation was a colonial power in Algeria. Instead of a reckoning or a formal acceptance of the colonial war, there was a prolonged evasion—despite, or because of, an official death toll in the tens of thousands, the destruction of entire communities, and the widespread use of torture. It was the war that dared not speak its name: until 1999, the official name for the conflict used to be “des operations de securite et de maintien de l'ordre.” Why was the war not acknowledged officially for 40 years? Patricia Lorcin explains the situation thus:
For France, the relinquishing of Algeria was a political, economic, and psychological loss....
There was a measure of shame attached to the loss, whether it was shame at having indulged in the deplorable experience of colonization and colonial warfare, which dishonored France's humanitarian traditions, or shame at having lost what was perceived to be “rightfully French” and thus at diminishing France's world status. These conflicting sentiments meant that no dominant memory could satisfactorily emerge. Instead, there was silence—a silence resonating with France's inability to forget.[1329]And so, for all the critiques of the war by thinkers of the stature of Jean-Paul Sartre, the official position of the French government remained unchanged for decades after the formal end of hostilities.
Yet, this combination of nationalism and official amnesia did not pass uncontested, with the debate joined by loud voices on all sides. As one would expect, the use of torture in the French-Algerian war sparked particularly heated controversies, accusations, and denunciations. Soon after Louisette Inghilahriz, a member of the Front de liberation nationale (FLN), spoke about her torture to Le Monde, in 2000, others attempted to recount their own experiences, and prominent writers and activists, including Henri Alleg and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, “called on France to acknowledge and condemn torture during the guerre d’Algerie”[1330] Notoriously, a French general, Paul Aussaresses, admitted to the use of torture. But after Aussaresses's declaration, former soldiers of the Algerian War published a collection entitled Le livre blanc de larmee fran^aise en Algerie, which, according to Alleg, “justified the torture and assassinations committed under their orders, as well as the methods they had been ‘obliged' to use against the ‘rebels' and their accomplices.”[1331] Were the French justified in using torture during the colonial war? Who tortured whom? How should allegations of torture be addressed so many years after the event, given that people's memories and official records can be so tendentious and partial? These are some of the questions that circulated in France as the nation sought to resolve the consequences of its colonial occupation of a part of North Africa.
In Algeria, meanwhile, the post-1992 civil violence between government and non-government forces has provided a different context to torture. The practice of torture in postcolonial Algeria has meant that discussions of the subject cannot avoid accounting for its use during the more recent violence (when Algerians tortured Algerians) as well as during the Algerian War (when the French tortured Algerians): in Algeria, past and present regimes stand to be indicted in the matter. As David Prochaska writes, “Intellectually, the stakes in recovering a previously occluded historical past in Algeria are even higher than in France, where it is about recovering a key episode in recent French history, because in the Maghreb it is ultimately a matter regarding the history of the Algerian nation in the past half-century, the history of Algerian nationalism, and the FLN’s claim of embodying Algerian nationalism.”[1332] In this scenario, the contemporary political situation colors the reception of memories of the war and potentially implicates Algerians in a brutal practice with a long history in the country. While the violence has been relatively less intense since 2006, memories of the colonial era are not yet fully worked through: the complicity of their own elites in acts of torture, repression, and kidnapping has made it difficult for Algerians to arrive at a historically sensitive reckoning of an earlier period in which torture was practiced on Algerians. If the national euphoria that followed decolonization allowed Algerians to gloss over the different roles (for or against French colonialism) they played during the war, the civil unrest of the last two decades reopened the wounds and allowed them to fester anew.
The French government’s trouble with the naming of the war in Algeria reminds us that the names we give to events reveal a great deal about how we want to talk about them. The question of “the proper name” haunts not just former colonizers but also many postcolonial societies, as the latter seek control over signs and symbols in the public sphere and over narratives that are told about the past.
Here, again, the contemporary national situation intersects with the memory traces left behind by empire. India is no stranger to the politics of naming, as Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras have yielded to Mumbai, Kolkata, and Chennai. Bombay was officially renamed “Mumbai” in 1995, for example, when the central government of India acceded to the formal demands of the state government of Maharashtra, then ruled by an alliance of two parties, the Shiv Sena and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The renaming of the city was consistent with the nativist and nationalist ideologies of the parties: the Shiv Sena is a regional right-wing party that has aggressively promoted what it considers Maharashtrian culture, and the BJP is a national right-wing Hindu party. For members of these parties, the act of renaming was an assertion of a regional identity and a repudiation of a colonial European past; it was the declaration of a Maharashtrian and a Hindu claim on the city. The passage from Bombay to Mumbai indicated that “the city could be reinscribed in a national territory as a ‘proper’ Indian city, within a national history and an emerging national modernity that recognized its indigenous cultural and linguistic roots, and its name could be properly enunciated in the vernacular.”[1333] In fact, the change also corresponded to other nominal changes that had occurred, or were about to occur, in the city. The name of the main railway station, Victoria Terminus, was altered to Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, in 1996, while, in 1975, the Victoria & Albert Museum had been rechristened the Dr Bhau Daji Lad City Museum. Numerous roads, monuments, and institutions acquired new names, often to the exasperation of residents. But the demand to change the city's name was inspired by movements going back at least to the 1960s, and no political party opposed the change of name. The renaming was supported by socialists, leftists, moderates, and many others, even though the formal change was implemented during a fanatically right-wing administration. At one level, therefore, the change to Mumbai can be understood as the recognition and reassertion of native agency in the age of postcolonialism.Not everyone, however, celebrated the change in the city's name or the implications of that metamorphosis. At the time of the change, in 1995, a prominent individual from a rival political party described the action as a diversion from the socioeconomic problems of the city, a view echoed by contemporary commentators.[1334] Many complained that the city's varied, flexible, and open identity was obscured by the new designation, that its cosmopolitan history had been hijacked by right-wing supremacists, and that the Shiv Sena was attempting to turn Bombay into a Maharashtrian Hindu enclave, emptied of Muslims and other minorities. “And there was no good reason to change the name of Bombay,” Suketu Mehta writes in Maximum City, a book that is not misty-eyed about the city's darker histories or its structures of oppression. “It is nonsense to say that Mumbai was the original name. Bombay was created by the Portuguese and the British from a cluster of malarial islands, and to them should go the baptismal rights. The Gujaratis and Maharashtrians always called it Mumbai, when speaking Gujarati or Marathi, and Bombay when speaking English. There was no need to choose. In 1995, the Sena demanded that we choose, in all our languages, Mumbai. This is how the ghatis took revenge on us. They renamed everything after their politicians, and finally they renamed even the city.”[1335] Mehta here is ventriloquizing the lament of the upper classes and the bourgeoisie and he suggests that their conception of the city clashed with the aspirations of those who sought to evoke a different history or communal identity. The names Bombay and Mumbai, thus, mask different interpretations of urban space: the question of the name is not just about the overthrow of colonial rule or a change into the linguistic vernacular; it is also about competing visions of the postcolonial city and what the city has come to signify to its inhabitants.
When memories of empire are mobilized in the nation-state, these memories often run up against competing desires, priorities, and programs. Algerians ought to have repudiated torture, especially given the prevalence of the practice in colonial times and the devastation it wrought then. But torture continued all too patently, and its use in domestic conflict forestalled a fuller analysis of the colonial period, in the fear that such an analysis might lead to unfortunate truths about the present situation. The inhabitants of Bombay ought to have greeted the erasure of the city's old name as the joyful rejection of a time when they, along with other Indians, lived under a colonial regime. Many were jubilant. But others saw the renaming as proof that their city was taken over by a violent, neo-fascist, anti-Muslim party and feared that their polity had lost its vibrant, multiethnic, and hospitable character. Unfortunately, subsequent developments, including horrifying violence and civic dysfunction, appeared to bear out their anxieties. The cold realities of postcoloniality require the state to repress or manipulate colonial memories, to bully minorities into submission, and to give fresh dreams to an unsettled populace.