Themes

Colonialism has always been a site of cultural exchange. The “contact zone”, a concept popularized by Mary Louise Pratt, could be the royal court, the bazaar, the club or the school, where the colonial “master” and the colonized subject met, examined each other’s cultural practices and assimilated some while being troubled by the others, a process called.  “transculturation”.

The English language took into itself words from their colonial subjects, translated texts from, say, Sanskrit, into English, and in an attempt to understand their subjects better, studied “native” religions, cultural practices and attitudes. Societies such as the Asiatic and organizations like the Zoological and Archaeological Surveys, were modes through which the European tutor, statesman, memsahib, trader encountered native temples, art, food practices, superstitions and systems of healing. European literary texts began to introduce “themes” and motifs from the colonies – whether this was the Indian widow’s sati or the African tribalisms.

For knowledge production, cultural exchange was particularly significant for colonizer and colonized. Afrikaans evolved through the standardisation of the Creolized language of the Dutch colonials in Southern Africa. The laying out of fields in Papua New Guinea adapted the order and pattern in Europe. The Europeans adapted the compass from the Chinese and Arabs, and even Europe’s Enlightenment was effected through the assimilation of information from diverse sources: the platypus that derailed Enlightenment zoological taxonomies, or the ‘discovery’ of Polynesians that recast human taxonomies of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach. Local knowledge producers and translators were an integral component of the European companies/governments in the colonies. Account books, histories and scientific reports were produced through such collaborative projects. Events like the Colonial and Indian Exhibition of 1886 in London were sites of cultural exchange, as English viewers “consumed” other cultures visually. European artists adapted styles from the Mughals, Ottomans, Incas, Safavids, the Ching dynasty over centuries of proto- and colonial interactions.

Colonial subjects received European education, medicine and the legal system with some trepidation. Adapting to the language, codes of conduct and behaviour – especially if they were employed by the European government – and cultural practices, the colonial subjects were often caught between their established traditions, itself heteroglossic, and the master’s. Religion was a site of fraught cultural exchanges, when the European tried to alter native practices, and the native attitudes oscillated between colonial reform and native resistance. Social movements such as temperance were also instances of imperial intervention.

In architecture the “bungalow” and the hill station are examples of cultural hybridization. Gardens and museums – Kew and the Paris Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle – became nodal points for international scientific exchange. Nautical information from travellers contributed to European maritime knowledge.

Colonial protocols of conduct – the Durbars in India, the “Empire Day” in Nigeria are examples – appropriated local practices, and instantiate a form of cultural exchange too

Jyotsna Singh’s Colonial Narratives/Cultural Dialogues: ‘Discoveries’ of India in the Language of Colonialism focuses on how the trope of “discovery” informed the colonial discourse, right from the early modern period. Jon Davidann and Marc Jason Gilbert’s Cross-Cultural Encounters in Modern World History, 1453-Presentexplores the multiple layers of cross-cultural encounters in world history, while Robert Aldrich, Kirsten McKenzie’s The Routledge History of Western Empires is a massive account of the social, economic and cultural features of European colonization.