Are you a "Native Informant"?

Transcript of a conversation between a Graduate Advisor (G.A.)of a Comparative Literature in USA and a Newly Arrived Indian student(NAIS):

G.A.: You should get in touch with C.B. immediately—you know, she is the leading South Asianist in this campus. She will be a great resource for you.

N.A.I.S.: Of course. But I think it would be a lot more convenient for me, professionally, if I could establish contacts with the African-Americanists on campus. I don’t have much formal training in the history of African-American literatures.

G.A.: You would be real “hot” in the job-market if you write on South Asian women writers. And hey, you are the best person for it! Come on! You can read, write and speak 2 major Indian languages. Your English is perfect. It would be great if you write a dissertation comparing women writers writing in English and women writers writing in South Asian languages!

N.A.I.S.: But, Prof. X, I don’t really need to be here to do that, right? (with a smile) In that case, I should have stayed in India. The archives are there, the experts are there….you know…here, I want to do things which I wouldn’t really be able to do back at home. I want to know more about the radical traditions in American literature.

G.A.: But it would be really hard for you to get a job. No department is going to hire you as an African-Americanist!

Our N.A.I.S. didn’t argue with her Graduate Advisor after that. But then, the N.A.I.S. who have never really resisted much of anything in her life, decided to resist with all her might the academic processes which would transform her into a native informant. And after a year. Soon after she learnt that in order to be a “native informant” you need to have one or more “abnormalities”—a non-white skin, a vagina in between your thighs, a desire to sleep with a person of the same-sex, a surgery etc. etc. It would be great if you have more than one of these attributes, but you if you have only one, you can “pass” too. A white, heterosexual man cannot be a native informant! A year later, she was invited to present a paper at the Annual Departmental Symposium and this is what she wrote:

“I have no knowledge of either Sanskrit or Arabic. — But I have done what I could to form a correct estimate of their value. I have read translations of the most celebrated Arabic and Sanskrit works. I have conversed both here and at home with men distinguished by their proficiency in the Eastern tongues. I am quite ready to take the Oriental learning at the valuation of the Orientalists themselves. I have never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia. . . .”


“. . . It will hardly be disputed, I suppose, that the department of literature in which the Eastern writers stand highest is poetry. And I certainly never met with any Orientalist who ventured to maintain that the Arabic and Sanscrit poetry could be compared to that of the great European nations. But, when we pass from works of imagination to works in which facts are recorded and general principles investigated, the superiority of the Europeans becomes absolutely immeasurable. It is, I believe, no exaggeration to say, that all the historical information which has been collected from all the books written in the Sanskrit language is less valuable than what may be found in the most paltry abridgements used at preparatory schools in England. In every rank of physical or moral philosophy the relative position of the two nations is nearly the same.”
----Thomas Babington Macaulay, Minutes on Indian Education, 1835

Macualay, here, is making certain comparisons. The question is, what gives his comparison a level of validity. The fact that he was a British parliamentarian and served as a member of the supreme council of the East India Company from 1834 to 1838, where he oversaw major educational and legal reforms. What I am trying to point out in this context is that, what legitimizes Macaulay’s comparison is his specific administrative powers which he yielded as a colonial official. I brought up Macaulay in this context because I would like to place before the house two specific questions, which I will now address.

The question before us is, “Who are we to compare?” I believe this is not a question of comparisons per se, but rather of the legitimization that is attached to certain comparisons. That is, the right to embark upon valid comparisons must always be backed by certain structures of power. And it is in this context of power configurations that the question of who makes the comparison gets inevitably entangled with the questions of what are the kinds of comparisons being made. That is, the kind of power structures that validate my right to compare also decide the kind of comparison that I am going to undertake. So in this context it is extremely important to consider the following question: what are the power structures right now that are giving us the power and the legitimate authority to engage in comparisons? Since the title of the symposium is, “Who we are to compare?” I am assuming that by ‘we’ we mean the professional comparatists, who spend at least five years of their life in graduate school trying to write a dissertation and who then join single literature or comparative literature programs as teachers. So, obviously, to me it is a question of class more than anything else. Our comparisons or rather the rights to undertake comparisons are considered valid because we are the people who have certain socio-cultural-economic factors to our advantage to do it. We are paid by the state to read literature, to theorize and to write books. What I am trying to get at here is that, like anthropologists, sociologists, historians or physicists, comparatists belong to a certain specialized institution called the university, within whose infrastructure their acts of knowledge production are undertaken. That is, whether we like it or not, we are already operating within certain structures of exclusion, where we are not the ones excluded but rather the included few. And inclusion in this context possesses the possibility of appropriation. That is, in lots of instances, our subject position as a comparatist would be constructed upon our attempts to represent those who have been excluded. I would like to pose an open question to the house that in the context of such acts of inclusion and exclusion, how we are to comprehend our locations vis-à-vis the power structures which validate us?

I think it might be useful here to talk a little about what I’m trying to do as a graduate student in Comparative Literature. I plan to write my dissertation on the late twentieth century rewritings of colonization by South Asian writers, North American writers (with special reference to Native American and African-American literature), and African writers. I have based my work upon certain assumptions:
1) Colonialism or writings which emerge from various interactions with colonialism can never be studied from a single language literature approach.
2) I want to include North America within the purview of my dissertation because I feel strongly that it is important to dispel the so-called division between ethnic studies and postcolonial studies. That is, North America is ‘ethnic’ and the rest of the world is ‘postcolonial’ is just a convenient way of legitimizing North American colonialism. Again, this brings us back to the question of the validity of the word ‘post’ within the term ‘postcolonialism’.
So I base my premise upon the assumption that literature is a cultural and social artifact, that literature possesses a dialogic and dialectical relationship with social and historical processes and literature can be an important form of history writing. I know that with a project such as this, I would not have been admitted to a North American Comparative Literature Program thirty years ago. Which means, in the last thirty years or so, Comparative Literature, like all other disciplines, has opened itself to debates surrounding race, class and gender, that is to actual social movements that have taken place around the globe. But I would locate a particular source of potential danger at this point. Why is my project being funded by the state? If my dissertation is trying to show that the foundation of the American nation-state is itself an act of colonialism, then, why is the state so enthusiastic about my writing it? Is it because what I write is not as much of a threat to the status quo as I would like it to be, or rather as much as I imagine it to be? Which I guess brings us to the question of the relationship between the university, the discipline of Comparative Literature, and society in general. Do the universities, and even the most radical among their programs, serve as some kind of a safety valve, a sort of a safe space which enables the potential radical elements to stay out of actual social actions or activism? Evoking our theme for this lecture series, “Subjects and Objects,” I ask: Do we actually have a subject position vis-à-vis the state, the university structures, or the broader social structures, which sustain our academic projects?

Am I the most ‘authentic’ person to undertake studies of African or North American ethnic literatures? This is a question which the so-called big schools asked me a couple of years ago when I was filing my pre-applications. No one ever doubted the South Asian part---the fact that I come from that region thrusts upon me the inherent right and authority to work with South Asian texts. Again it’s a open question to the house ,that if I am not qualified to read and write about the slavery in the Americas, in what way am I qualified to write about the tea plantations in India? What I’m trying to conclude is that, neither the slave nor the tea plantation laborer is going to be a part of the university system except as objects of enquiry. I am extremely middle-class in my ways, all my academic and non-academic writings are extremely middle-class in their basic content and that’s what qualifies me as a comparatist more than anything else. Like all of my colleagues, I am an well-intentioned human being. I would like to see the empowered subaltern. But I am not an subaltern. And no matter how conscious and well-intentioned I am, within the present structures of knowledge generation, my attempts to derive some sort of subjectivity from my academic projects will always objectify others.

After her presentation, her Graduate Advisor tapped her on the shoulder and said, "It is my duty to inform you that the state is not too enthusiastic to fund our projects right now." She smiled. It would be really hard to get into that argument.Yes, she knows about the reality--she knows how education is being privatized throughout the world. She knows, how in her own country, a fairly renowned university has abolished the History Department on the ground of its being totally non-utalitarian. But still, she was determined to hold her ground. She knew what she was speaking of.