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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 April 2018
This article examines the travel writing of the well-known author from Kerala state, India, S. K. Pottekkatt, who is now recognized as a national literary figure. Recent readings of his African travelogues have pointed to the deep racism that informs them. This article probes further, seeking to place Pottekkatt's ethnocentrism in the context of decolonization, which formed the backdrop of his travels and writing. I argue that Pottekkatt's ethnocentrism also contains a strand which is underpinned by nationalist biopolitics. While we find his writings deeply entrenched in racist colonial stereotypes about native Africans, they are also shaped by nationalist biopolitics that were emerging during decolonization, which led him to strongly condemn prominent groups of Indian immigrants in Africa as well. Dipesh Chakrabarty's reflections on the ambiguities of decolonizing discourses provide a useful springboard for a fresh reading. This preliminary reading of Pottekkatt's African travelogues, however, complicates Chakrabarty's observations about both pedagogic and dialogic modes of decolonizing discourses. It also points to the importance of the regional, and not the national, in the possibilities of South-South dialogue—to which Pottekkatt's accounts point, if only in a cursory manner.
1 This word refers to the speakers of the Malayalam language, presently the dominant language in the state of Kerala, India.
2 Rameshchandran, V., Pottekkatttinte Kathalokam (The World of Pottekkat's Stories), Kerala Sahitya Akademi, Thrissur, 1991Google Scholar; Guptan Nair, S., ‘Introduction’, in S. K. Pottekkatttinte Cherukathakal (Short Stories of S. K. Pottekkatt) Vol. III, Mathrubhumi Publications, Kozhikode, 1981, pp. i–ix (first published 1956)Google Scholar.
3 In his preface to the latest edition of Pottekkatt's collected travel writings, the prominent Malayalam writer Paul Zacharia claims that Pottekkatt was the first Indian writer of his generation to have produced such prolific travel writing and covering such diverse places. See Paul Zacharia, ‘Preface’, in Pottekatt, S. K., Sancharasahityam (Travel Writing) Vol. I, Books, D. C., Kottayam, 2004, p. 3Google Scholar.
4 Mark Frost, Ravinder, ‘“Beyond the limits of nation and geography”: Rabindranath Tagore and the Cosmopolitan Moment, 1916–1920’, Cultural Dynamics 24, no. 2, 2012, pp. 143–58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
5 For a detailed account of Kesari as an interstitial thinker and critical cosmopolitan, see Menon, Dilip M., ‘A local cosmopolitan: “Kesari” Balakrishna Pillai and the invention of a Europe for modern Kerala’, in Bose, Sugata and Manjapra, Kris (eds), Cosmopolitan Thought Zones: South Asia and the Global Circulation of Ideas, Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2010, pp. 131–58Google Scholar. That Pottekkatt belonged to Malabar, which was part of British India, where nationalist politics had a strong presence, while Kesari belonged to Travancore, where nationalism was ‘vernacularized’ to the imperatives of lower caste/non-Hindu community politics, may be important when thinking of their differences.
6 Pottekkatt, S. K., Tales of Athiranippadam, trans Nair, Sreedevi K. and Menon, Radhika P., Orient Blackswan, Hyderabad, 2013Google Scholar.
7 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, ‘The legacies of Bandung: decolonisation and the politics of culture’, Economic and Political Weekly 40, no. 46, 2005, p. 4813Google Scholar.
8 Ibid., p. 4812.
9 Menon, Dilip M., ‘Caste and colonial modernity: reading Saraswativijayam’, Studies in History 13, no. 2, New Series, 1997, pp. 219–312CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Devika, J., ‘Migration, transnationalism and modernity: thinking of Kerala's many cosmopolitanisms’, Cultural Dynamics 24, nos 2–3, 2013, pp. 127–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
10 Usually referred to as the Aikya Kerala Movement (Movement for United Kerala).
11 Rameshchandran, Pottekkattinte Kathalokam, p. 38.
12 Indeed, in a short story set in Malaysia, he explicitly says that ‘It is Malayalis outside Kerala who brought United Kerala into being without anybody else's advice or prompting. Ananthan from Kannur, Sudhindran from Mayyanad, Pankajaksha Menon from Kollengode, Muhammed Kunhi from Tirur, Kunhunni Nambiar from Katirur, Varghese from Pala and Kunhaappu from Kozhikode, all have played a role in it. Spreading the sounds and scents of Kerala, they have come together in alien lands to celebrate Onam (Kerala's national festival).’ Pottekkatt, S. K., ‘Avalute Keralam (Her Kerala)’, in S. K. Pottekkatttinte Cherukathakal Vol. III, p. 7Google Scholar. For a more detailed, if analytically unclear, account of his travel writings and their ‘Malayaliness’, see, P. Dhishna, ‘Cultural encounters in the travel narratives of D. H. Lawrence, V. S. Naipaul, Bruce Chatwin, and S. K. Pottekkatt’, PhD thesis, Pondicherry University, India, 2012: http://hdl.handle.net/10603/5364, [accessed 18 January 2018].
13 See, for instance, the preface to the 2004 edition of his collected travel writing, which claims that he produced ‘eyewitness accounts with a Malayali eye, for Malayalis’: Zacharia, ‘Preface’.
14 T. P. Sabitha, ‘Darkness invisible: difference and indifference in Pottekkatt's travelogues on Africa’, Tapasam 5, nos 1–4, 2009, pp. 153–75. It is readily evident that Pottekkatt's travel writing made full use of the genre's hybrid nature. As Terry Caesar notes, it is a genre that is not easy to define and straddles categories and disciplines. Caesar, T., Forgiving the Boundaries: Home as Abroad in American Travel Writing, University of Georgia Press, Athens, Georgia, 1995, p. 115Google Scholar. In Malayalam the genre clearly leaned towards literature and fiction, hence the term denoting it is ‘sancharasahityam’, literally, ‘travel literature’. This probably sheds some light on Pottekkatt's enthusiastic use of materials gathered from his travels in his fictional writing as well.
15 Ibid.
16 The four are: Pottekkatt, ‘Kappirikalute Naattil (In the Land of the “Kafirs”)’, in Sancharasahityam Vol. I, pp. 11–92 (first published 1951); ‘Simhabhoomi (Lion-land)’, in ibid., pp. 93–254 (first published 1954–55); ‘Nile Diary’, in ibid., pp. 255–330 (first published 1956); and ‘Cairo Kathukal (Letters from Cairo)’, in ibid., pp. 331–434 (first published 1956). The short stories were also written largely in the 1950s. The novel Kabeena, which is also set in Africa, is not considered because it comes much later, in the 1960s. All translations from the Malayalam are mine.
17 Hofmeyr, Isabel, ‘The idea of “Africa” in Indian nationalism’, South African Historical Journal 57, no. 1, 2009, pp. 60–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
18 Burton, A., Brown Over Black: Race and the Politics of Postcolonial Citation, Three Essays Collective, Gurgaon, 2012Google Scholar. Burton mentions that Moraes’ Goan origins cannot be a pretext for distancing his take on Africa from Indian post-colonial identity (p. 76). Nevertheless, she pays much less attention than necessary to reflecting on the many layers of his identity.
19 This was deeply woven into the fabric of the traditional caste order, taken for granted in everyday life. For instance, the famous Vishnu temple at Thiruvalla in south-central Kerala did not permit women to worship inside, and this prohibition was related to a myth about a female devotee's passion for the deity. The deity, Srivallabha, who is represented as a scholar and celibate, took offence, and women were permitted inside on only two occasions every year. On these days, however, the deity would be turned ‘black’—covered with soot, mud, and ashes and dressed as a lower caste, male field labourer, apparently to make him unattractive to female devotees!
20 See, for example, Pottekkatt, ‘Balidwip (The Island of Bali)’, in Sancharasahityam Vol. I, pp. 728–29 (first published 1958).
21 Pottekkatt's use of the term ‘Kappiri’ need not by itself be evidence for his racist bias—a corruption of the word ‘kafir’, the Malayalam word is a loan-word from the Portuguese cafre, referring to black Africans who they brought to Cochin as slaves in the sixteenth century. The memory of these slaves who are said to have died for their masters, and who were ill-treated, is preserved through worshipping their spirits as folk-gods—the Kappiri Muthappans—to whom offerings are regularly made. This worship was part of traditional Hindu faith in Malabar, and not of the discursive universe of social reform that Pottekkatt inhabited.
22 Pottekkatt, ‘Kappirikalute Naattil’, p. 31.
23 Ibid., p. 24.
24 Ibid., p. 26.
25 Ibid., p. 20.
26 However, more generally in modern Malayali elite reformist discourse, ‘African Negroes’ were identified as a unitary group that stood for cultural inferiority or lack of civilization. See, for example, the early Malayalam novel Parangodiparinayam (1892), which criticised Nair-centred social reformism in Kerala, and in which the ‘modern heroine’ finds traditional dancing by her peers distasteful, and quite like ‘the devil-dancing of African Negroes’. As I argue later, Pottekkatt's racism deviated from this somewhat. See Menon, Kizhakkeppatt Ramankutty, Parangodiparinayam, in Irumbayam, George (ed.), Naalu Novelukal (Four Novels), Kerala Sahitya Akademi, Thrissur, 1985, p. 257Google Scholar. In sharp contrast is the lower-caste writing of the same period, in which, as Menon points out, the connection between racism/slavery and caste/oppression is quickly made, and this ‘extraterritorial affinity offers a vantage-point for critique’: see Menon, Dilip M., ‘Religion and colonial modernity: rethinking belief and identity’, Economic and Political Weekly 37, no. 17, 2002, p. 1165.Google Scholar
27 Pottekkatt, ‘Kappirikalute Naattil’, p. 15.
28 Ibid.
29 For example, ibid., pp. 46; 54–56; 71; 78–79; 80.
30 For example, Pottekkatt, ‘Karutha Kamadevan (The Black God of Love)’, in S. K. Pottekkatttinte Cherukathakal Vol. III, pp. 519–22 (first published 1951); ‘Karutha Kaumudi (Black Moonlight)’, in ibid., pp. 273–82 (first published 1953); ‘Katturumbukal (Black Ants)’, in Sampoornakathakal (Complete Short Stories) Vol. I, Poorna Publications, Kozhikode, 2004, pp. 420–28 (first published 1956).
31 See, for instance, Hofmeyr, ‘The idea of “Africa”’.
32 Cooper, Frederick, ‘Modernizing bureaucrats’, in Cooper, F. and Packard, R. (eds), International Development and the Social Sciences: Essays on the History and Politics of Knowledge, University of California Press, Los Angeles, 1996, p. 87.Google Scholar
33 Ibid.
34 Pottekkatt, ‘Kappirikalute Naattil’, pp. 15–16.
35 Pottekkatt, ‘Samaagamam (The Union)’, in S. K. Pottekkatttinte Cherukathakal Vol. III, pp. 337–45 (first published 1942).
36 Dhishna, ‘Cultural encounters’, p. 16.
37 Pottekkatt, ‘Kappirikalute Naattil’, p. 14. It is worth noting that other, alternate accounts of the ancient history of human migration in Africa were available by this time, such as W. E. B. Du Bois’ The Negro (1915).
38 Pottekkatt, ‘Kappirikalute Naattil’.
39 Ibid., p. 16.
40 Ibid., p. 14.
41 Pottekkatt, ‘Viplavabeejam (The Seed of Revolution)’, in Sampoornakathakal Vol. 1, pp. 193–99 (first published 1934).
42 Devika, J., En-gendering Individuals, Orient Blackswan, Hyderabad, 2007Google Scholar.
43 Pottekkatt, ‘Vallikadevi’, in Sampoornakathakal Vol. I, pp. 172–92 (first published 1938). It has been noted that his early work, of the 1930s, was marked by explicit social-reformist predilections, which become more implicit later. Rameshchandran, Pottekkatttinte Kathalokam, p. 28.
44 Pottekkatt, ‘Vallikadevi’, p. 192.
45 Pottekkatt, ‘Simhabhoomi’, p. 174.
46 Ibid., p. 233.
47 Soon, this was to inform the discourse of international development aid through which ‘culturalist racism’ would perpetuate itself. Kothari, Uma,‘An agenda for thinking about “race” in development’, Progress in Development Studies 6, no. 1, 2006, pp. 9–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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50 Pottekkatt, ‘Simhabhoomi’, p. 250.
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56 Hofmeyr, ‘The idea of “Africa”’, pp. 68–70.
57 Therefore it is not surprising that Pottekkatt, when he meets educated Africans, for example, the Kabaka of Bunyaro and an African priest from Sudan, has very respectful conversations with them. Pottekkatt, ‘Simhabhoomi’, pp. 249–51; Pottekkatt, ‘Cairo Kathukal’, p. 364.
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62 Foucault, Michel, ‘ Society Must be Defended’: Lectures at the College de France 1975–76, Allen Lane, London, 2003Google Scholar.
63 Historians have noted the deleterious consequences of such racism. Frederick Cooper, for instance, points out that this actually involved a sociological determinism that still drew upon colonial categories, and ‘(T)he casting out of all but the True Anticolonialist from the political arena and the reduction of entire categories of people to class enemies gave an exhilarating legitimacy to state projects, which were often deflected into less liberationist goals. . .’. See F. Cooper, ‘Conflict and connection: rethinking colonial African history’, in Le Sueur, James D. (ed.), The Decolonization Reader, Routledge, New York, London, 2003, pp. 23–44Google Scholar.
64 Foucault, ‘Society Must be Defended’, pp. 261–62. See also, Kelly, Mark, ‘Racism, nationalism, and biopolitics: Foucault's Society Must Be Defended, 2003’, Contretemps 4, 2004, pp. 58–70Google Scholar. Antoinette Burton too points to the ‘racial logic embedded in postcolonial states from the moment of their inception: about the enduring power of “blood and nation”, in other words’: Burton, Brown Over Black, pp. 6–7.
65 Nandini Patel draws on the work of Blalock Hubert to characterise Asians in Africa as ‘middlemen minorities’ or ‘sojourners’. They are marked by the fact that the role they played in East Africa was primarily an economic one; further, they were largely concerned with accumulating capital and tended to remain confined within their community circles. She argues that they retained ‘an insular inscrutability that hampered understanding and inter-racial engagement within and outside Africa, and the divergent interests of the host community and the middlemen minority created an incompatibility that was compounded by lack of initiatives towards social integration or assimilation. The resultant hostility has, therefore, emanated from economic issues spilling over to other spheres.’ Patel, Nandini, A Quest for Identity: The Asian Minority in Africa, Institute of Federalism, Fribourg, 2005, p. 6Google Scholar. It was no surprise, then, that they could readily be demonized as harmful to the ‘health of the nation’.
66 Ibid., p. 8.
67 Pottekkatt, ‘Kappirikalute Naattil’, p. 22.
68 Ibid., pp. 40–49.
69 Pottekkatt, ‘Nile Diary’, p. 271.
70 Ibid., p. 43.
71 Pottekkatt, ‘Simhabhoomi’, p. 236.
72 Pottekkatt mentions incidents in which his national pride came close to being bruised—such as at the British consulate at Beira, where the officer refused to recognize his Indian passport. Pottekkatt, ‘Kappirikalute Naattil’, p. 20.
73 Hofmeyr discusses in detail the contexts in which African-Indians demanded separate consideration, and the completely different contexts from which Indian nationalist leaders such as C. F. Andrews, Tagore, and Nehru responded negatively to such demands. Hofmeyr, ‘The idea of “Africa”’.
74 Pottekkatt, ‘Kappirikalute Naattil’, p. 43.
75 Ibid., pp. 43–44. Indeed, his demonizing of Banias is a recurrent feature of his travel writing—he makes similar comments about them in his Southeast Asian travelogues as well. He accuses them of greed, avarice, and lack of commitment to either India or Indonesia. Worse, Banias apparently misused their Indian identity and Nehru to gain favours: ‘They wheedle their way into the Indonesian government Secretariat and meet Heads of various Departments and start whining: “Don't you know that it was Nehru who got Indonesia freedom and self-rule? We, who are Nehru's people, are not able to make any profit in our trade—Sir, just grant us an import permit!”’ Pottekkatt, ‘Indonesian Diary’, in Sancharasahityam Vol. II, D, pp. 498–99 (first published 1955).
76 Ibid., p. 49.
77 Ibid.
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80 Hofmeyr, ‘The idea of “Africa”’, p. 80. Importantly, she points out how such a frame of reference continued to inform the discourse of Afro-Asian solidarity post-Indian independence, well past Bandung.
81 Pottekkatt, ‘Cairo Kathukal’, pp. 365–66.
82 Ibid., pp. 368–69.
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85 For example, see ibid., pp. 171, 193.
86 Pottekkatt, ’Kappirikalute Naattil’, pp. 82–83.
87 Ibid., p. 86.
88 Pottekkatt, ‘Kwahe-ri’, in Sampoornakathakal Vol. I, pp. 236–45 (first published 1952).
89 Ibid., pp. 240–41.
90 See Dhishna, ‘Cultural encounters’.
91 Pottekkatt, ‘Nile Diary’, p. 285.
92 Pottekkatt, ‘Simhabhoomi’, p. 162.
93 See Pottekkatt, ‘Malaya Nadukalil (In Malayan Lands)’, in Sancharasahityam Vol. II, pp. 342–43 (first published 1977). These are accounts of his travels in the region in 1952–53.
94 See Pottekkatt, ‘Balidwipu (The Island of Bali)’, in ibid., p. 837 (first published 1977).
95 Ibid., pp. 813–14.
96 Chakrabarty, ‘The legacies of Bandung’.
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