Dr. Priya Gopal is a Reader in English at the University of Cambridge, where she is a scholar of colonial and post-colonial literature and theory. A noted public intellectual, she has contributed to India Today, The Guardian, National Public Radio and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Her latest book, Insurgent Empire, explores the history of resistance and dissent towards British colonial rule, both at home and abroad.  Dr. Gopal spoke with Cambridge alum and KR editor Karishma Patel about her new book, as well as her engagement with the decolonisation movement in UK higher education.  

K:

You are a well-known public figure with a sizeable Twitter following. Sadly, there have been flat-out racist and misogynistic responses to some of your tweets concerning.race and class at the university and beyond.  Can you speak a little about the relationship between the personal and political in your life?  

P:

There are different ways in which one can approach that. I’ll speak about the caste relationship. Precisely because we all live at the intersections of identities, none of us are purely victims. Many of us, particularly in relatively comfortable contexts like Cambridge, can be at the receiving end of certain kinds of dominance and oppression, but we can also simultaneously be participants in disadvantaging or marginalising others. My relationship to racism has always been one of thinking about it from the point of view of the margins and minorities, but also quite actively turning that lens onto situations in which I am actually part of the structure that is doing the oppressing, the marginalizing and disadvantaging. I try to put those in some sort of dialogue in my head. I never talk about changing institutions without thinking about how I might want to change my relationship to certain formations. This is a practice everyone needs to undertake.

K:

So, essentially, it is important for people to recognise the ways in which they are beneficiaries of inequitable systems, while understanding that they are sometimes at the receiving end of them. And these inequitable systems intersect and shape one another, which is why your critics are mistaken to see them as mutually exclusive?  

P:

They do shape one another. It is no accident that Empire, which had race hierarchies, was also happy to work with caste hierarchies, and that the British, when they went into either India or parts of Africa, they always sought out either the upper priestly castes or aristocratic classes. The idea that hierarchy helps hierarchy is very much part of the imperial project.  

K:

Exactly. And after certain decolonisation processes, national bourgeoisies took over from the British Empire, moving power from hierarchy to hierarchy. Can you talk about the ways in which similar systems intersect and shape one another at the University?  

P:

You have people of colour who are from India or other parts of the non-European world, who are potentially subject to certain forms of marginalization and discrimination here, but who at the same time also belong to the elite milieus of their home societies. Very often people, especially international students, can have the feeling of suddenly being at the receiving end of discrimination, which they have never experienced before, and that does create cognitive dissonance. People make one of two choices in that situation: they either decide to work with that dissonance and try to consider their own position in the institution and how critical change might come about, or they choose to move with the dominant forces and are deployed for saying things like “racism isn’t that bad here” or “I’ve never felt any racism here”. When people are at these watershed moments, the choices that they make – in terms of how they see themselves and how they see the University – are quite important. Similarly, there have been conversations on gender and on sexism that lots of women at Cambridge have been involved in, and often those discussions have actively marginalized race and class. It seems to me that it’s problematic if we just do gender in terms of pay and promotions, and don’t think about the ways that class, race and ability might also complicate the terrain. If we want to have a genuinely transformative University, then everybody has to do a degree of hard thinking about their positions, and not along the lines of single identity.  

K:

How do these issues relate to the decolonisation movement at the University? Some argue that the term “decolonisation” has become a buzzword, signifying a broad spectrum of ideas to do with colonization and imperialism. How would you define “decolonisation” and the University decolonisation movement? What is its purpose and importance?  

P:

I would begin by saying what it is not. Diversity is not the same thing as decolonisation. Diversity is important and has its place, and is obviously something that institutions have to foster, but it is not the same thing. Decolonisation is fundamentally understanding how central the European imperial project of the last five to six centuries has been in shaping the world, and in shaping pretty much anyone who attends a university, not just in the western world, but in the postcolonial or neo-colonial world as well. Decolonisation is about understanding the centrality of the project that was also congruent with the emergence of capitalism, the world system in which we all live today. So, for me, decolonisation is about understanding the centrality of those two projects, and thinking critically about how selves, societies, institutions and economies have been formed by that dual project of capitalism and imperialism. Decolonisation is a complicated project which requires intellectual understanding, of both how things came to be the way they are, and how individuals came to be the way they are. For me, it is primarily a project of historical reconstruction, cultural understanding and epistemological reflection on what constitutes knowledge and what kinds of questions we should ask of ourselves and the world around us.

K:

How is the discourse around decolonisation translated into praxis? What can people do to support the decolonisation movement within the University?  

P:

In general, I am wary of providing toolkits, because I think that the practice of decolonisation is a difficult one, and is one that we formulate in relation to our deferring positions to the project of empire. Broadly, I would say that it requires critical teaching and learning, putting history and the question of what happened more centrally on the table than it is. For instance, simply looking at history in terms of needing more people of colour in the curriculum, or paying reparations for involvement in slavery, is a good start but is not where things need to stop. In practical terms, it’s about bringing history back into our self-understanding and into the work that we do and challenging oneself. Jamaica Kincaid had a nice word for it – she doesn’t talk about decolonisation but I think it implicit – when she says that we all need to develop a more “demanding relationship to ourselves and to the world”. The word “demanding” is central to understanding what decolonisation might mean. How can we make our studies more demanding? How can we make our teaching more demanding? How can we ask more demanding questions in research? How might we develop more demanding practices of relating to each other than we currently do?

K:

Would you be able to talk about your own methods of resistance? You write critically, are active on social media, have demonstrated outside Trinity and boycotted undergraduate teaching at King’s due to unconscious bias. Did you have specific aims with these methods and, if so, were they achieved?  

P:

The Guardian referred to me the other day as an “anti-racism campaigner”. I emphatically do not see myself as this. I don’t see myself as any kind of campaigner at all and always do a double take when I see the word attached to references to me. I am certainly not a single-issue campaigner. My position is Edward Said’s position in the lectures he gave on the BBC, which is that intellectuals have a position and a responsibility to speak up about the things that don’t get sufficiently spoken about, and to speak for those who may not yet have a platform – they always have a voice but perhaps not a platform. My agenda, inasmuch as I have one, is that I have a platform and when I see that something is wrong, I use it. The question of efficacy is not one that I spend much time on. This may well be a critique of me, but I do things that I think are right and I speak up when I think I should, and then I let what happens happen. I can’t say that I’m particularly given to a great deal of planning around saying things. I say things when I consider it right and sometimes it may not work out at all. It might blow up in my face. I think, in many ways, the King’s affair blew up in my face. I still get trolled on social media as the upper class, upper-caste “bitch” who oppressed the salt of the earth, which is far from the case.

As an aside, I don’t rate terms like “unconscious bias”. I think they are evasive; we are dealing with fairly clear structures of discrimination that are not especially unconscious, though they might have unconscious dimensions to them. We’re dealing with very clear hierarchies and very well-entrenched practices in an institution that has yet to shake of its white supremacist leanings and so, for me, I find terms like “unconscious bias” unhelpful. I found it evasive when King’s used it because we have to confront race and racism head-on and with honesty, and if we start with an evasive term, that goes nowhere.  

K:

So terms like “unconscious bias” and “micro-aggression” fall under the umbrella of evasive terminology, and calling them out results in white fragility since these forms of racism present as indiscernible or unobvious. If someone exhibits unconscious bias, for example, it’s easy to claim that they were merely having a bad day or doing their job.  

P:

I come back to caste here. It’s true that, in many ways, I don’t see caste violence or how caste operates. That doesn’t make it “unconscious”. It’s not a helpful thing to say that caste is an unconscious bias. It is a fairly willful and convenient blindness. It is not particularly in my interest to see caste violence, as it isn’t in the interests of white people to see racial violence. Is that “unconscious”? Sure, it’s unconscious but the structures operate in conscious and deliberate ways, and it is up to us to be very conscious about seeing how we are complicit in these structures. I think that taking refuge in the unconscious is not a good start. We need to be conscious about seeing our complicities.

K:

What has your experience been like in terms of dealing with “white fragility” at the University? You mentioned the term in your recent Guardian article about Naga Munchetty and the difficulties in challenging racist and inflammatory language.  

P:

I think it’s a tremendously useful concept. I had picked that book up with skepticism, thinking it was another sociological, fairly simple undertaking, but I have found it useful. I think it tremendously useful that a white woman wrote it. That book could not have been written by anybody in another subject position. It needed her to say, “As a white woman I am telling you…” and then she lays it out, in much the way that I try to think about caste, as an upper-caste Brahmin woman. But it’s useful because Cambridge, like any other institution of its ilk, is rife with white fragility and it is weaponised. I’ve certainly been at the receiving end of weaponised white fragility and I’ve known lots of people, particularly women of colour students, who have been at the receiving end of it. The term has given us a useful descriptor of our experiences, whereby to speak about racism – I mention this in the article and am not the first to - is far worse than being racist. If you use the word “racist”, even if you simply say that “race is at play here”, you will be met with everything from umbrage to tears. There are elements and people in the university accepting that a conversation needs to happen but I think that the default is white fragility when you raise questions of race. As I said in my article, this is familiar to me from caste; there’s such a thing as caste fragility and I’ve seen people in my family deny that caste is at play or get wounded when caste questions are brought up. It’s a familiar dynamic. As I often say to white friends, “I know what it’s like to be white when I’m in India.”  

K:

Naturally, it’s confronting to admit to being the beneficiary of an inequitable system, and you’ve found the concept of white fragility is useful in tackling the defensiveness arising from the realisation.  

P:

It’s hard and it’s painful. But I’m more concerned about weaponised white fragility because my experience is that it’s used in punitive ways against people who raise questions of race.  

K:

Let’s talk about your latest book, Insurgent Empire. You take on the myth that emancipation radiated out from the metropole as an exportable imperial franchise and is thus a triumph of imperialism, by arguing for “reverse influence”, that "resistance in the periphery” dialogically and dialectically shaped metropolitan, specifically British, dissent. How timely do you think this project is? And what is its importance as part of postcolonial discourse in the academy?  

P:

I hadn’t thought about it in terms of timeliness, but it has been striking to me in public events I’ve done, not just here but in the US, that people in the audiences would come up to me and say “this is incredibly relevant to our present”. Some people are seeing things in it that I didn’t explicitly see when I was writing it, but I think that people are ready to start thinking about their relationship, not just to empire and colonialism, but to the project of resistance. I think that people are ready to start questioning the idea that change comes from above. What has resonated with different audiences is the idea I begin the book with – I use a quote from Frederick Douglass: “Power concedes nothing without a demand.” That has caught on for people. For instance, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation has just done a one-hour radio programme with Insurgent Empire as the anchor book, but they’ve taken it into directions that I didn’t consider. They dealt with first nations resistance to the tar sands pipeline and first nations activism around protecting indigenous lands from resource exploitation. I also hope that postcolonial studies will take up, rather than mindlessly reject the idea of the universal, trying to think of the different sites from which the universal has been theorized. The concept of the human has also been theorised from different sites. There is a tendency in postcolonial studies to mirror retrograde tendencies and to see the theorization of the universal or the human as itself western, when this is simply not the case. We haven’t actually challenged that sufficiently in the field.

K:

Is there anything more you hope will come of the book, or anything else you wish to say about it?  

P:

It ends with discussing where we might want to take debates in the future. One thing I hope resonates – and someone tweeted this the other day – is that whatever else we do from now on, after this book, let no one ever say that in the nineteenth century, everybody was pro-empire. The argument made against the Rhodes Must Fall students, that they were using anachronistic values, need to be retired once and for all. What is clear is that this is a condescension that we affect towards the past: that everybody then thought the same way. There have always been dissidents, in all times and places, and the connections between dissidents need to be made across space and time.

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This essay was originally printed in FLIGHTS 2020.