The Colossal Adstratum
A concept borrowed from Deleuze, which was for a time a war engine against ‘pantheon-logocentrism’: the rhizome, a botanic term, refers to the spreading out and dissemination of
roots, none of them being the main. Traditionally defined as the appropriation of a pidgin as mother tongue, more or less stabilized
and enriched, the so-called substratum no longer activated by linguistic exchanges,
forgotten. And linked to a specific historical and economic situation.Theories of
the adstratum versus spontaneous genesis of a language born without past, i.e. by
the sheer enactment of the innate ‘language faculty’,the most natural in that way. In his works like Traite du, or Poétique de la relation. We may deplore that such a possibility has not yet been taken seriously in the modernization
of major languages, which instead of opening to the new combinations offered by integrating
other languages and dialects into a composite creation has more and more cleansed languages of
impure elements.
COLONIAL LANGUAGE CLASSIFICATION process of linguistic Creolization as Glissantclaims?
That might be true for‘true’ Creole culture, which was robbed at the same time of its language and its culture and religion. Even if Creolized Indian languages like Marathi have not been born out of a cultural disaster, we may say that Indian culture suffered some form of disaster,colonization as a mild form of wiping off. The contemporary writer Nirmal Verma makes it very clear in an illuminating essay about ‘Indian fiction and colonial reality’: He lived in an abnormal situation, where he had to come in contact with the most brutal aspects of western civilization and most moribund version of Indian society—colonialism being the corrupting factor common to both. The alien intervention was not merely confined to political and economic sphere, it was something far more subtle and insidious, it was an intervention on a colossal civilizational scale, uprooting the entire peasantry not merely from land but from all that which connected it from past. As Simone Weil once observed, ‘for several centuries now, men of white race have everywhere destroyed the past, stupidly, blindly, both at home and abroad. Of all the human-soul’s needs, none is more vital than this one of past.
The destruction of past is perhaps the greatest of all crimes’. It is a crime, because it alienates a man from all that gives a meaning to his life on earth. By uprooting him from the past, it distorts man’s relation to his own self. It is precisely this damaged ‘self’ of a common Indian, neither purely traditional, nor completely colonized, a lacerated soul, which became the most sustained, poignant theme of Prem Chand’s novels and short-stories.94 Given these affinities between an authentically pluri-lingual colonized culture as is India, and Glissant’s thought about the challenging power of pluralism and rotundness, India too should be better equipped than mono cultural monolingual cultures to meet the challenges of this century. If we admit, with Touraine, that the major threats against humanity now lie in the uniformization of thought and de-socialization, with its two opposite poles of communalism and massculture, then societies able to deal with pluralism are the best resisting forces to liberal neo-capitalist globalization.
That might be true for‘true’ Creole culture, which was robbed at the same time of its language and its culture and religion. Even if Creolized Indian languages like Marathi have not been born out of a cultural disaster, we may say that Indian culture suffered some form of disaster,colonization as a mild form of wiping off. The contemporary writer Nirmal Verma makes it very clear in an illuminating essay about ‘Indian fiction and colonial reality’: He lived in an abnormal situation, where he had to come in contact with the most brutal aspects of western civilization and most moribund version of Indian society—colonialism being the corrupting factor common to both. The alien intervention was not merely confined to political and economic sphere, it was something far more subtle and insidious, it was an intervention on a colossal civilizational scale, uprooting the entire peasantry not merely from land but from all that which connected it from past. As Simone Weil once observed, ‘for several centuries now, men of white race have everywhere destroyed the past, stupidly, blindly, both at home and abroad. Of all the human-soul’s needs, none is more vital than this one of past.
The destruction of past is perhaps the greatest of all crimes’. It is a crime, because it alienates a man from all that gives a meaning to his life on earth. By uprooting him from the past, it distorts man’s relation to his own self. It is precisely this damaged ‘self’ of a common Indian, neither purely traditional, nor completely colonized, a lacerated soul, which became the most sustained, poignant theme of Prem Chand’s novels and short-stories.94 Given these affinities between an authentically pluri-lingual colonized culture as is India, and Glissant’s thought about the challenging power of pluralism and rotundness, India too should be better equipped than mono cultural monolingual cultures to meet the challenges of this century. If we admit, with Touraine, that the major threats against humanity now lie in the uniformization of thought and de-socialization, with its two opposite poles of communalism and massculture, then societies able to deal with pluralism are the best resisting forces to liberal neo-capitalist globalization.
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