Specific Research Methodology

BY
Marjan Nanaje(0934104)
The first essay I read is ‘The beginning of English literary study’ by Gauri
Vishwanathan. This essay is about the introduction of English
studies in India. It sets out to demonstrate in part that the discipline of
English came into its own in an age of colonialism, as well as to argue that
no serious account of its growth and development can afford to ignore the
imperial mission of educating and civilizing colonial subjects in the literature
and thought of England.
The article unfortunately left me with more questions than answers.
The author goes into lengthy discourses about the problems
between the East India Company and the English Parliament, but
does not clearly define why English language study was introduced. English
was introduced in India when in England itself classical study was the norm.
The author does not explain the reason why English rather than Latin or
Greek was chosen. Also she explains the introduction was to facilitate better
communication between the natives and the colonizers. But how did
language serve so many purposes and why did it become a symbol of
culture?
Was it a strategy of containment? Considering the military prowess
of the British why did they use literature instead of direct force?
How did literary texts come to signify religious fate, verifiable truth
and social duty? Finally, why in the first place introduce English only
to work out a strategy to balance secular tendencies with moral and
religious ones?
The author focuses primarily on the English side of
the event. Every incident in history has two sides to their story;
there is always an action and a reaction. India, in the narration, is
largely silenced and invisible. Considering the introduction of English would
have brought about pretty strong reactions among Indians, especially when
the English way of life was to ‘tame and civilize’ them it would have been
ideal to know more about the Indian side of the story.
I am also opposed to her view that the introduction of English was
detrimental to the missionary’s cause because it exposed the natives to their
own religious or moral tenets. The introduction of English brought into the
country a whole new barrage of literature that both described and glorified
Christianity. I feel that the introduction of Orientalism in no way negated
conversions.
The author, in my opinion is very successful in arousing a thirst for
knowledge on the subject but does very little in an attempt to
quench it. It made me think of lines uttered by Caliban to Prospero
in ‘The Tempest’: “You taught me language, and my profit it is, I
know how to curse. The red plague rid you for learning me your
language.”

The second essay is ‘The ambivalent homecoming of the

homopsychologist’ by Ashish Nandy. In this article the author
attempts to give a more complete if lesser known version of the
twentieth century. Nandy reckons the twentieth century is an age of
self-awareness; but ambiguously so. On one hand it was heralded
by Freud publishing “Interpretation of Dreams”; but on the other it
was also an age of passive citizenry, distance and denial. The
questions the article poses to my mind are “Has the human race
surfaced and triumphed?” and “Do we really learn from the past?”
As a critical reader, I was intrigued by the introduction of the essay
where the author says he would talk about lesser known pasts of
ordinary people. Though he very eloquently quotes that every
person has a past and each past is not the same as history; while
reading the rest of the essay, I was disappointed to find that he
stuck with the better known route, and the pasts of only well-known
figures in history.
Being native to a country of revolution, I also was strongly affected
by the way the author treated evidence. In an attempt to explain a
shift in the psychological mindset of people from the nineteenth to
the twentieth century, the author says that violence in the prior
centuries was at least remotely human as it was connected with
hatred – a human emotion. I beg to differ as I strongly feel that
violence irrespective of the cause is inhuman.
He also talks of passive citizenry and one-way communication. I
don’t find our situation very different from the centuries of the past.
Rumors, mis-conceptions and wrong ideas have always reigned;
and there have always been means of propagation of thought and
blind followers.
Though this essay gave me many new parallels of thought; it was
unable to fulfill what the author set out to do; that is give the
reader a new comprehensive vision of the twentieth century.