3. Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse

Abstract

Mimicry reveals something in so far as it is distinct from what might be called an itself that is behind. The discourse of post-Enlightenment English colonialism often speaks in a tongue that is forked, not false. If colonialism takes power in the name of history, it repeatedly exercises its authority through the figures of farce. The effect of mimicry on the authority of colonial discourse is profound and disturbing. A classic text of such partiality is Charles Grant’s ‘Observations on the state of society among the Asiatic subjects of Great Britain’ which was only superseded by James Mills’s History of India as the most influential early nineteenth-century account of Indian manners and morals. The absurd extravagance of Macaulay’s ‘Minute’ (1835) – deeply influenced by Charles Grant’s ‘Observations’ – makes a mockery of Oriental learning until faced with the challenge of conceiving of a ‘reformed’ colonial subject.