Postcolonialism is a study of the interrelationship between the colonized and the colonizer. It is a strange relationship that involves resistance, repression, abhorrence, fascination, dependence and independence. While the colonized fight for independence, they also have a habit of aping the colonizers and glorifying them. In India, Vikram Seth has called it ‘Anglophilia’. Mahatma Gandhi justifiably pointed out that India literally gave away her independence. The blacks also, for instance, suffer from immense trauma because of the unjustified distinctions created in society on the basis of color, as Fanon has vividly pointed out; but the blacks too are moving into an order of resistance and acceptance that is creating a new translucent mixed society. This paper attempts to study this kind of relationship on the basis of the given postcolonial theories.

Since the early 1980s, postcolonialism has developed as a body of writing that attempts to study the relation between the western and the non-western world in the light of resistance, struggle, independence and also interdependence. Postcolonial theory is not a grand narrative; it directs its attention to that very cultural production through which colonized and formerly colonized people engage the cultural power of the empire. It is basically a relationship between the whites and the non-whites, where white men are looked upon as symbolic of civilization and non-whites as a marker for resistance. Colonial rule has been a history of resistance in positive or active form. The Indian revolutionaries in Russia, for instance, in the 1920s and 1930s, formed groups like Revolutionary Committee of the Indian Democrats of Abul Fazl; Indian Revolutionary Association (IRA); Group of M N Roy, Abani Mukherjee; Berlin Group of Chato; Gadar activists like Pritam Singh, Amir Haider, etc. The Berlin Group held that India was an agrarian country along with class, religion and caste and the Comintern should continue to assist bourgeois-democratic and national revolutionary movement in India. Thus, throughout the period of colonial rule, the history of the colonized people had been one of resistance— be it in Asia, Africa or Latin America.

English Studies, Postcolonialism, study, interrelationship, the colonized, colonizer.