The ‘ruined savage’

It is true that Pottekkatt shares many mainstream Malayali prejudices around colour, which were rooted in local caste oppression as well,Footnote ¹⁹ such as the preference for fair skin and the idea that dark skin, curly hair, and shorter noses represent ‘inferior’ breeding.Footnote ²⁰ However, it is immediately apparent, even from a preliminary reading of Pottekkatt's work—not just the African travelogues but all of it—that his ethnocentrism is complicated. For one, it is peppered with critical accounts of the blatant racism of the dominant white colonizers, for instance when he openly sympathizes with its targets: Asians and Africans. He also condemns the history of colonial domination in Africa and pays his respects to African leaders that it decimated. For instance in ‘Kappirikalute Naattil (In the Land of the “Kafirs”)’,Footnote ²¹ in which he describes his visit to Cecil John Rhodes's grave, he says that he was far more moved by the last resting place of the founder of the Matabele tribe, and that he felt much greater respect for the African king than for the white oppressor.Footnote ²² He also implicitly acknowledges that Asians had a responsibility to combat racism in the colonies whenever possible. In the same book, he recounts his train journey into Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and recalls how the British instituted a rule by which all Asians had to submit their thumb impressions as a mode of racial identification,Footnote ²³ and that in Japan, ‘which was at that time a courageous independent nation’, the British were taught a lesson when the Japanese forced them to set it aside.Footnote ²⁴ Among the Europeans he encounters in Africa, he sees many types and, indeed, they are implicitly classified on the basis of the degree of racism they exhibit. In the abovementioned story, he relates encountering the Portuguese at Beira and remarks that, while they are ‘drunkards and indolent’, they are less racist than the British and better-looking, too.Footnote ²⁵

However, Africa is always introduced in Pottekkatt's writing using received categories from British racist knowledge, such as the ‘dark continent’. Perhaps his reference to black Africans as ‘Negroes’ is understandable, given the fact that this description was used by the very champions of African Americans at that time; however, he goes on to state his belief that Africans have a poorly developed sense of morality and an even more mutilated sense of agency.Footnote ²⁶ Apparently this makes them feel quite easy about stealing, breaking contracts, and behaving violently and irresponsibly—thereby keeping them well below the capacity for liberal citizenship. However, the African (implicitly portrayed as a group) is now rising from their slumber and shaking off the oppression that consigned them to moral turpitude. But turning immediately to the ‘average’ African, he adds, ‘. . . it appears as if it will take decades, nay, centuries, for this stupor to vanish. That's why his nature and gestures foil even psychologists. He cannot make sense of mental states familiar to us like love, gratitude, and trust. He is ruled by selfishness and fear. He has no thought of “tomorrow”. That is why he does not desist from extreme actions. Give a chance, he will not fail to steal . . .’.Footnote ²⁷ He further claims that white colonial masters, taking full note of the unpredictable and uncontrollable responses of Africans, instituted disciplinary practices accordingly.Footnote ²⁸ Perhaps the most recurrent stereotypes in his work are portrayals of Africans as lacking moral compunction about stealing: devoid of practical common sense, they are easily and irrationally violent even towards their own children.Footnote ²⁹ These representations recur in many of his short stories set in Africa.Footnote ³⁰

Clearly, the stories conform to prominent racist stereotypes, but it appears also that their roots are hardly biological or even biological-foundationalist. Writing in the early 1950s, Pottekkatt's portrayal of African tribes as, first and foremost, lacking in culture, is likely to draw upon ethnocentric, racist discourses of ‘African cultural inferiority’ that circulated freely in India too.Footnote ³¹ It has been noted that ‘[I]t is striking how quickly discussion of racial superiority was banned from colonial vocabularies in the 1940s.’Footnote ³² Instead, cultural inferiority was presented as the chief ill of the African tribes. There was of course a remedy implied in such analysis—acquiring Western culture. In contrast to positions which maintained that Africans were inherently incapable of acquiring Western culture, in this later discourse, Africans who did not do so could be considered to be ‘ . . . wilfully obstructionist rather than quaintly backward’.Footnote ³³ Pottekkatt gives this a twist, influenced undoubtedly by Indian nationalism. He blames history—of defeat and brutal conquest—which left African tribes deprived of the ability to choose better from worse, the moral from the immoral, and the long term from the short term.Footnote ³⁴ Also implied here is the argument that Africans’ ‘inferior’ condition could be remedied not through individual choice but by remedying historical injustice.

This inferiority is clearly not seen as an essential quality, nor is it viewed as a result of the inherent, irremediable absence of cultural capacity. It is viewed, rather, as an unfortunate result of cultural development distorted by colonialism. Pottekkatt does not always depict people whom he perceives as ‘cut off from culture’ as ruined savages. From his nationalist-developmentalist perspective, tribal people anywhere are located ‘further back in time’ compared with the agent of elite nationalism, but all are not equally devastated. For instance, ‘Samaagamam (The Union)’ is set among the Toda tribes of the Nilgiri Hills in South India. The tribal here too is depicted as removed from (the modernized, elite Indian national) ‘culture’, but is indeed a noble savage, unperturbed by sexual restraint and enjoying ‘the highest freedom of humanity’.Footnote ³⁵ There is even reason to think that Pottekkatt thought the same of the tribal people of Africa as well. To a leading Malayalam literary critic who had asked him why he was eager to visit Africa, he apparently replied that he had read somewhere that ‘true humanity’ could be found only in Africa and he was driven by a desire to know such people—the truly human.Footnote ³⁶ However, he finds in Africa not the serendipitous isolation of black people but their forcible displacement by others. Thus he traces a history in which the ‘Negrito races’ were beaten into the interiors of Africa and shut out from ‘civilization’ by the Caucasians: ‘We see the white race beat and shove the Negro by sheer force into interior regions twenty-five thousand years back. It is the same lamentable sight that we see in Africa even in this twentieth century.’Footnote ³⁷ Initially, some branches of these races did have some culture, but these people were driven to total isolation: ‘. . . the centuries-long solitary confinement dragged them back to the savagery—the bestiality—of the old . . . if only those who pass the opinion that “the African negro is an untrustworthy animal” would indeed remember this regrettable earlier history!’Footnote ³⁸ However, when the white colonizer, though ostensibly in possession of a ‘superior culture’, descends into bestiality he escapes scrutiny because of his dominant position. Speaking of the Africans’ total lack of freedom in their own homelands, he points out that while a black man who rapes a white woman will surely receive a death sentence, ‘Nobody cares much about the sexual promiscuity of the white man which surely sticks out prominently in the lakhs of coloured folk that may be found in African today.’Footnote ³⁹

Interestingly, in Pottekkatt's retelling of the history of black African people, there is even a strand that connects their descent into subservience to the whites with the loss of their ancient ‘Indianness’. His account of ancient migration to Africa by the Negrito people identifies India as their original homeland—and he refers to the ‘Indian Negro race’.Footnote ⁴⁰ The stripping away of this original ‘Indianness’, therefore, seems somehow connected to the loss of civilization the African peoples are alleged to have suffered. Pottekkatt's ethnocentrism is further distinctive in the way in which individual African tribespeople and individual members of lower-caste communities in early twentieth-century Malayali society are made to share many features in his short stories. Again, his narration of the damage suffered by the latter is marked by elitist condescension. The oppressed lower caste individual, when they appear in Pottekkatt's stories, are much like his (individual) ‘Negro’—submissive to power, lacking morality, ignorant, and with no thought for the future. Like the Africans, the Malayali ‘Untouchable’ too has a long history of oppression. In a short story titled ‘Viplavabeejam (The Seed of Revolution)’, he describes a lower caste labourer's momentary arousal towards self-respect: ‘Suddenly, Keeran's expression changed. Within his soul, an uncommon strength, one which someone unknown had lulled into slumber through intimidation, stirred awake. The memory that he too was human came to him. He forgot himself. His manhood revealed itself for a brief while like a cobra leaping out of its hole, its hood rising threateningly.’Footnote ⁴¹ However, Keeran's awakening is momentary; like the Africans who are ruthlessly exploited and kept in total unfreedom, so are the Untouchables of mid-twentieth century Malayali society. Both ‘Samaagamam’ (1942) and ‘Viplavabeejam’ (1934) predate his African travel writing.

However, Pottekkatt espies in Malayali society a force he portrays as capable of rousing the ‘essential humanity’ of the Untouchable castes. This is undoubtedly the upper-caste, male social reformer, who sets the terms of modernity and unleashes the forces of change—someone who, in other words, steps forward as the chief agent of social change in society still ruled by traditional hierarchies. Pottekkatt began to write in a period when debates about the liberation of the oppressed from the traditional order revolved around the pivotal role of a modern, educated, elite male reformer.Footnote ⁴² Indeed, prominent among Pottekkatt's early short stories is ‘Vallika Devi’:Footnote ⁴³ set in a feudal upper-caste landowner's homestead, it relates the struggles of Madhava Menon, a young, elite reformer. He opposes physical cruelty towards the heavily exploited Untouchable labourers attached to his homestead; reduces wastage and improves efficiency on his farm; breaks free from a traditional, unsatisfying marriage; and shows mercy, tenderness, and a keen interesting in reforming his labourers. The story relates his struggles in the face of stiff opposition from his own relatives and other members of the upper-caste elite, and culminates in his success. Structured by gender—the reformer is elite and male; the reformed, subaltern and female—it ends in marriage between the reformer and the (ex-) Untouchable girl whom he has elevated to his own cultural strata. The change is inaugurated through changing her name to a more Sanskritic one—from ‘Vellayi’ to ‘Vallika’—and achieved through her education in a convent school. The narration concludes with Madhava Menon's speech introducing his beautiful and accomplished young wife to an upper-caste audience:

It appears that Pottekkatt dons the garb of this social reformer as he travels through Africa. Though at times he fancies himself becoming the ‘Indian bwana’ (boss or master), his elite, reformist self does actively intervene at crucial moments. The latter not only differs from, but is also deeply critical of, the ‘Indian bwana’. Importantly, the elite, reformist self is deeply informed by nationalist-developmentalist concerns. Pottekkatt's trenchant criticism of African-Indians, especially the Bania community there, must be read in this light. Very clearly, here we have the pedagogic mode of politics that Chakrabarty mentions, which is allied to developmentalism, and openly endorses Nehru's vision of Indian-African relations. It is indeed a yardstick—and a thoroughly reformist-elitist, modernized, upper caste one. Thus those African (and Asian-African) peoples who seem to conform better to his notions of nationalist-reformist, upper caste, elitist values, appearance, and ways are deemed better than others. In ‘Simhabhoomi (Lion-land)’, Pottekkatt describes travelling in a bus in Kenya, where he describes the women's skin as malodorous as rotten meat.Footnote ⁴⁵ But Ugandan women impress him: he sees them as having an ‘extraordinary dignity and charm unseen among other Negro races. They walk ramrod-straight, heads poised unmoving, their buttocks moving gently in rhythm.’Footnote ⁴⁶

The failings he ascribes to various groups of African people are always declared to be the result of historical injustice, repression, and denial. The remedy, then, is to acquire ‘culture’ and the mode of such acquisition is unmistakably pedagogic.Footnote ⁴⁷ The disgust and admiration that Pottekkatt expresses alternately when he writes in the reformer's mode refer to his own putatively ‘civilized’ standards, and they are not always in tension. Indeed, expressions of disgust towards aspects and features of socio-cultural lives that appear uncivilized or ‘backward’ very often marked the commencement of social or community reformist ventures in early to mid twentieth-century India. While writing about Africa in the mode of a reformer, Pottekkatt's expressions of disgust are often followed by reflections on the origins of political subjugation, which makes it utterly amenable to removal through social and cultural reform led by the nationalist-reformist elite. It is widely argued now that post-colonial developmentalism in the South ‘secularized’ racism. Morgan Brigg, for example, points out that even as newly liberated peoples’ self-rule and human rights were approved, they were still classified as ‘underdeveloped’ or ‘developing’, needing ‘uplift’ through aid and expertise from the West.Footnote ⁴⁸ Others have pointed to the manner in which many key terms of development discourse, including ‘tribalism’, ‘ethnicity’, ‘tradition’, culture’, and so on stood in for ‘race’.Footnote ⁴⁹ Like the social and community reformism that was strongly prevalent in the Malayali society in which Pottekkatt lived, which ‘secularized’ caste and stressed the need to ‘uplift’ lower caste people, development too ‘secularized’ race and implicitly approved of non-reciprocal relations between the reformer and the object of reform. Not surprisingly, the reformer, rooted in Malayali social reformism, and the proud Indian nationalist, committed to Nehruvian developmentalism and internationalism, seem to have converged to shape Pottekkatt's ethnocentrism. Writing about political troubles in Africa, he notes that nationalist sentiment is growing but Africans are hasty by nature:

It is important to note that the overweening presence of the elite, male reformer in modernizing social reform in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was not exclusively a regional feature. It was typical in most prominent regions in India and, indeed, underlay Indian nationalism quite decisively.Footnote ⁵¹ Also, by the mid-twentieth century, dominant social and community reformism in India was characterized by ‘secularized’ caste elitism.Footnote ⁵² In other words, the hierarchies of caste were thoroughly modernized, both in and through social and community reformism and nationalist politics. In the Malayalam-speaking regions (which were later joined together to form the state of Kerala in 1956), while traditional lower caste servitude was condemned, upper caste culture and social norms were refurbished and modernized to form the core of the emergent Malayali national-popular. These new hierarchies were made to rest on modern defences—on contemporary pastoral power, justifications from anthropological knowledge, or pragmatic politics.Footnote ⁵³ Pottekkatt belonged to the Ezhava/Tiyya community, a formerly Untouchable social group which, by the mid-twentieth century, had successfully challenged its marginalization in the traditional order by amassing a great deal of wealth and influence after the opening up of the local economy to the capitalist world system in the late nineteenth century.Footnote ⁵⁴ Ezhava/Tiyya community reformism sought to actively embrace a thoroughly modernized version of Hinduism that was no less elitist and the horizon of which was, most often, the Indian nation (with a few exceptions, which were not dominant). Indeed, if this reformism was a powerful force against the traditional order of caste, it was certainly implicated, wittingly or unwittingly, in the emergent order of secularized caste and naturalized gender.Footnote ⁵⁵ Thus when Pottekkatt donned the reformer's garb, he was assuming the position of an elite, male, nationalist reformer—certainly a ‘new Malayali’ but one who did not necessarily identify exclusively with his region and who experienced no conflict at all with the emergent elite Indian nationalist identity.

In an important essay Hofmeyr notes that the idea that racism was a form of caste domination was pervasive among the Indian upper-caste, elite, nationalist-reformist authors who wrote in the reformist Kolkata journal, the Modern Review, in the early twentieth century. These authors argued that caste differences among the diaspora must be eliminated through the efforts of the privileged; this would ‘broaden’ the mental horizons of Indians abroad and turn them into true Indian nationalists.Footnote ⁵⁶ In Africa, as I shall now argue, Pottekkatt is concerned about the absence of the agent of such reformist pedagogy, who must necessarily be of the elite.Footnote ⁵⁷ The African-Indians who he meets in his travel seem either apathetic or reluctant to take up this role.

The ‘negligent Indian’ in Africa

It has been noted that the project of development emerged with the intensification of capitalism and ‘progress’ in Europe. Its task was to alleviate ills such as the impoverishment of rural peoples, and the unchecked urbanization and urban poverty that follow ‘progress’. Development was thought of as a means of reconciling affected populations with ‘progress’.Footnote ⁵⁸ In the context of decolonization, the ideology of development (first introduced into the colonies by the colonizers) was offered as a remedy for the ravages of colonialism and projected as an entitlement. Development remained a form of biopolitics for which absolute state sovereignty was indeed necessary.Footnote ⁵⁹ In East Africa, both the development interventions of the British and their political policies in the 1950s and afterwards contributed to the growing distrust of the Asian minority by the African majority.Footnote ⁶⁰ Accused of being exploiters and collaborators, Asians found themselves increasingly unwelcome and under the perpetual threat of expulsion. For instance, when the Kenyan African National Union was formed, it refused to enrol Asians as members.Footnote ⁶¹

The kind of animosity against Asians that would emerge from these legacies is probably better understood as a form of racism bolstered by the biopolitics of the national state which relies not on biology or phenotypes alone but on the extent to which a population is believed to affect the ‘health of the nation’ because of certain qualities they are believed to possess.Footnote ⁶² Indeed, given that it was framed, among other things, by the organic metaphors of growth and development, the national revival on which decolonization was pegged could not but view itself as a project of restoring the nation's health. The demand to expel those sections of the population deemed detrimental to the health of the nation, therefore, was implicit in the logic of much nationalist decolonization.Footnote ⁶³ Nationalist states, which have the biopolitical aim of raising the welfare of the majority, as Michel Foucault points out, may need some form of ‘social racism’ through which unhealthy elements can be controlled or eliminated.Footnote ⁶⁴ In decolonizing Africa, the widespread condemnation of Indians as harmful to the health of the black majority of emergent nations, and the state biopolitics that affirmed this, approximated such racism.

Even as he criticized very strongly the attempts of the dominant white community in East Africa in the late 1940s to demonize Asians of Indian origin there, Pottekkatt's views, articulated in the 1950s, especially about the money-lender and merchant community of the Gujarati Banias, aligned closely with those of the leaders of decolonization and their successors in East Africa.Footnote ⁶⁵ Nandini Patel writes: ‘The manner in which independent African governments dealt with such a small minority that constituted less than 3% of the total population should be analysed in the context of the perceptions regarding Asian communities harboured by African leaders such as Jomo Kenyatta, Daniel Arap Moi, Idi Amin Dada, Kamuzu Banda and Robert Mugabe, who assumed powers after independence. All of them unhesitatingly used epithets such as “looters”, “hoarders” and “exploiters” when referring to the Asian community as a whole.’Footnote ⁶⁶

To begin with, Pottekkatt does not rely on any unified notion of ‘Indian’ but pays attention to the different groups of Indian origin. Indeed, recounting his experiences in Beira in ‘Kappirikalute Naattil’, he draws a sharp contrast between the rich Indian merchants who were indifferent to the travails of Indian travellers (resulting from the fact that the hotels they can use are scarce) and a certain Tamil notable who, by contrast, extended warm hospitality to them. ‘This is how he displays his love for his motherland,’ Pottekkatt wrote.Footnote ⁶⁷ However, the latter is by no means a ‘pure Indian’—he was married to a half-white woman. (Pottekkatt probably intended to contrast him to the Banias who remained strictly endogamous.) In a chapter on Indians in East Africa in the same book, he describes the merchants and the Indians who worked in the colonial administration (largely as clerks, and the Tamils as labourers).Footnote ⁶⁸ These are a very diverse set: from Goans who do not identify as Indians and consider themselves ‘faded Portuguese’ to Gujaratis who think of Africa as their home. He notes here and elsewhere that there was plenty of ‘internal racism’, with the Gujaratis discriminating against South Indians. There was no common language binding these groups and Gujaratis were very ignorant about South India. Elsewhere, in ‘Nile Diary’, Pottekkatt recounts his own experience of regional discrimination. During the trip to Merchiston Falls, he was denied a place on a boat hired by African-Indians because he was a South Indian. His outburst leads him to question his pride in being Indian—and, indeed, decry the fact that ‘Indian’ appears to encompass an exclusively North Indian origin:

Pottekkatt reserves his harshest criticism for Gujarati Bania merchants who, he felt, exploited the gullibility of uneducated Africans while refusing to devote resources to the latter's uplift. ‘In Southern Rhodesia, one may meet some Indian merchants who are extremely wealthy. It is clear that all their wealth was extracted from the impoverished people of this land. The travails of Indians in Africa? They start protesting when their ways of exploiting the locals more and more intensely are stopped!’Footnote ⁷⁰ Clearly, Pottekkatt's criticisms are shaped by biopolitical concerns that could well be implicit in decolonizing local nationalist-developmentalisms.

Pottekkatt obviously shares the spirit of Bandung when he mentions favourably Nehru's offer of scholarships to African students in India. He also acknowledges with pride that the colonial rulers did not want African students to take up these scholarships because then they would learn the ropes of anti-colonial struggle and gain nationalist consciousness in India.Footnote ⁷¹ Alongside this, the superiority that he often assumes—of an ‘Indian’ from an India that had thrown off the foreign yoke—also emerges, which prevents him from empathizing fully and genuinely with the demonized African-Indians.Footnote ⁷² He castigates African-Indians for not paying heed to Nehru's exhortation that they ought to devote themselves to building congenial relations with their ‘hosts’, as their primary loyalties should lie with Africa.Footnote ⁷³ He claims to have asked all the Indian merchants he met in Africa whether they were making any contribution to the welfare of the Africans. ‘“Why should we?”—This was their reply. Yes, they have but one aim in Africa: amass wealth. For that, they are willing to perform any task, however heinous, sacrifice anything.’Footnote ⁷⁴ Further, he asked them where their loyalties would lie if they were asked to choose between Britain, India, or Africa for citizenship. Their response—that, if pressed, they would choose Africa because all their wealth lay there and that it was not possible for them to abandon it—shocked him and hurt his pride as an Indian citizen:

In other words, Pottekkatt found the Bania community completely inimical to operating in the pedagogic mode so crucial to nationalist-developmentalism. The Indian employees in the colonial government, he claims, discovered self-respect with Indian independence: ‘With India gaining freedom, the educated Indians here do not like to continue here suffering the white man's despicable behavior and oppression.’ But not the Banias, he says, whose first concern is wealth—and they comprised the larger number of Indians.Footnote ⁷⁶ He cautions that the only way Indians can survive in Africa is through assuming the reformer's role wholeheartedly: ‘It will serve both parties if Indians here become friendlier in their interactions with the local people, contribute sincerely a portion of their accumulated wealth for their progress, and help local people to gain education.’Footnote ⁷⁷

This is not to claim that Nehru or the other architects of Bandung explicitly, evenly, or identically shared a concern about engineering populations in ways ‘healthful to the nation’ in their respective countries—in India, nation-state biopolitics had gone down a different track, which, however superficially, proclaimed the equality of all Indian peoples in its democratic parliamentary form of government. In Africa and Southeast Asia, the coming of nationalism was accompanied by a great deal of distrust against Indian migrants, even those who had been settled there over many generations, which Pottekkatt does note in his travelogues in both places. He was also deeply aware of the extent to which this discourse of distrust was generated by the colonialists. However, his reflections on this issue rarely reflect the relatively inclusive Indian nationalist response to the question of ‘the health of the nation’. In his travelogue Pottekkatt quotes Nehru's speech of 1947 in which he described African-Indians as ‘guests’ in Africa, an idea deeply contested by all African-Indians in Kenya, both Bania and non-Bania.Footnote ⁷⁸ Both he and Nehru seem to implicitly equate the structural position of African-Indians and the Indian reformist elite in their respective societies, implying that they were in a position to become the major agents of nation-building. In her recent study of Indians in Kenya, Sana Aiyar remarks that Kenyatta quoted Nehru's speech to warn Indians against ‘engulfing’ Africa: ‘Both Nehru and Kenyatta cast Indians as outsiders in Kenya, juxtaposing their diasporic origins with the indigenity of Africans, limiting their right to belong, and making it peripheral to Africans’ claims and dependent on Africans’ acceptance.’Footnote ⁷⁹

There can be no doubt that Pottekkatt's views were those of mainstream Indian nationalists, to the extent that they almost mirror those of C. F. Andrews. As Hofmeyr says:

In sharp contrast is the keen interest Pottekkatt shows in black Sudanese nationalist intellectuals who were struggling against both British and Egyptian domination. In ‘Cairo Kathukal (Letters from Cairo)’, his account of travel in Sudan is almost completely dominated by descriptions of anti-colonial politics there. Here again, he notes with pride, and a tinge of guilt about the inability of Indians to reciprocate, the deep respect that the anti-colonialists in Sudan have for India. ‘I was deeply surprised by the considerable knowledge and interest that the politically conscious people of Sudan have about Indian history and Indian national leaders. We do not know much about Sudan. But they have paid much attention to study events in India . . . I saw pictures of Jawaharlal Nehru grace the walls of many homes in Khartoum.’Footnote ⁸¹ In his account of Sudan, Pottekkatt's empathy is undoubtedly with the Sudanese, and not with Arabs or the British, even when he notes that the large majority of the population ‘is uncultured and unlettered’, and that freedom would surely bring greater troubles, ‘as there is shortage of political experts, and even of educated people among them’.Footnote ⁸²

Nevertheless, is Pottekkatt merely reproducing the blind spots in Nehru's and mainstream Indian nationalists’ idea of the new post-colonial global and cosmopolitan world, which privileged nations and paid less attention to assuring the full acceptance of diasporic populations? Perhaps here, Pottekkatt's affiliation with the reformist elite—represented by Nehru—as opposed to the ‘traditional’, ‘culturally backward’, and exploitative Bania—is evident. After all, the stereotype of the ‘Bania’ was quite well entrenched in India by Pottekkatt's time; it even entered Nehru's Autobiography where he makes a derogatory reference to ‘the bania civilisation of the capitalist west’.Footnote ⁸³ In other words, Pottekkatt seems to share in the stereotype of the Banias being culturally backward and unwilling to integrate fully into plural societies—and this produces important blind spots in his writing. This seems evident from the fact that he does not condemn a Malayali he meets in Mombasa, a contractor and merchant who seems to harbour utter contempt towards black African workers. Unlike the (stereotypical) Bania, he had mastered all the local languages and blended in completely with local culture, and therefore earns Pottekkatt's admiration.Footnote ⁸⁴ There are many other instances in these travelogues where he is hosted and befriended by Malayalis who appear to have practised intense discrimination against black Africans and harboured the same racist stereotypes as others—yet Pottekkatt rarely condemns them and ostensibly forgives them because of their modernist lifestyles and views.Footnote ⁸⁵ Thus the fractures within the Indian elite which surface in Pottekkatt's writing are revealed: between the modernizing, reformist, nationalist elite and the ‘culturally backward’, non-reformist diasporas; and between the Bania merchant-migrant classes and the Malayalis who worked mostly in the service professions or for the colonial government.

To conclude, the ethnocentric lens that Pottekkatt uses to view Africa is poorly and incompletely characterized if its moorings in the secularized, upper-caste, reformist sensibility that characterized Indian nationalism in general, and Malayali social reform in particular, are not distinctly recognized. It would not be a mistake to simply characterize his writing as ‘racist’, yet such a description would doubtless be insufficient The secularized caste sensibility that underlay elite Indian nationalism and Malayali reformism found ‘cultural backwardness’ intolerable and replaced a critique of the Bania's class exploitation with condemnation of their cultural insularity, framed in racist terms. A more complex account of power in Pottekkatt's writing would consider the role these views played in shaping the ambiguities of his accounts. The superior eye that he claims as an educated man—schooled in Eurocentric wisdom about the world, endowed with decolonizing nationalism as a member of an independent nation, and shaped in the matrix of modern Malayali social reformism—does distance him from the ‘average’ African. However, it does not draw him any closer to the Asians of Indian origin in Africa. A decolonizing nationalist sensibility leads him to feel only partial empathy towards African leaders of decolonization: he shares their concern about reviving the ‘health of the nation’.

Complicating Chakrabarty's division between the pedagogic and the dialogic modes, a stream of dialogue seems to be present here. It seems to be fully within the pedagogic mode, unfolding between the nationalist-reformist elite across nations and between regions within the Indian nation, and excluding the Indian diaspora stereotyped as ‘traditional’, greedy, and self-seeking, on the one hand, and the black Africans on the other, who are viewed as being in need of ‘uplift’.

The glimmers of ‘dialogue’?

Nevertheless, glimmers of what may potentially develop into dialogue do appear in parts of Pottekkatt's writings, especially when he writes about local language. Many a time, he glimpses the goodness in African people through their language. Of the Swahili language and its speakers, he says: ‘The nature and mental make-up of a people is reflected in their language and phrases. In the language of the Negroes too, there are several phrases that reflect their goodness of heart.’ He then compares the practices of visiting and welcoming in Kerala and finds them crude: ‘Negroes have no such antics. They go to the door of the hut and ask, “hodi?” Instantly, the reply comes from inside, “karibu” . . . how sweet these sounds are! How heart-warming the welcome!’Footnote ⁸⁶ Later, in a conversation with a bus driver, which he conducts in his extremely meagre Swahili, Pottekkatt draws upon what he calls a ‘universal’ trait—the fondness of bus drivers, ‘irrespective of they being Indian, Negro, or white’, for praise about their vehicles and driving skills.Footnote ⁸⁷ Language again appears as evidence for the goodness of Africans in the short story ‘Kwahe-ri’ in which a British settler who has thrown in his lot with the Africans tells the narrator (who finds Africa dry and unattractive) that he has missed the internal beauty of the continent.Footnote ⁸⁸ It is his farewell greeting, however, that catches the narrator's imagination. Here again he juxtaposes the casual manner of bidding goodbye in the Malayalam language with the poetic farewell greeting ‘kwahe-ri’, saying that it is the most simple, beautiful, musical, and captivating farewell greeting he had ever heard.Footnote ⁸⁹ It is worth noting that he is not comparing meanings here but referring to the sound of ‘farewell’ in both languages. The manner of bidding goodbye in Malayalam is found to be fumbling, awkward, and guttural, while the Swahili farewell greeting is praised for its euphony.

What appears important in such instances is that when he speaks concretely of actual cultural practices he encounters, Pottekkatt almost never makes comparisons between African and ‘Indian’ culture as constructed in and through Indian nationalism of the time. It is almost unfailingly the practices and ideas from Malabar that are compared with the African, as in the abovementioned instance. Further, and importantly, many of these practices are fully traditional, not inaugurated or prescribed by Malayali community reformism, many of which were often regarded as superstitious and blind by the modernizers. Other such instances occur in his writing—for example, the dress codes of particular African tribes described in ‘Kappirikalute Naattil’ are compared to the dress of Malayali pilgrims to the Palani and Sabarimala temples.Footnote ⁹⁰

It seems that such ‘affectionate comparisons’ become possible precisely in the moments when Pottekkatt's persona as a reformer slips. In other words, although Pottekkatt proudly describes himself as Indian, it is mostly a political and elite-reformist identity—of being a citizen of a country liberated from colonialism and as a member of the male reformist national elite—which he seems to embrace. This, as I argued before, was not in contradiction with the emergent modernized, reformist Malayali identity. But at times he shifts between this reformist Malayali/Indian identity and a persistent sense of a non-reformist cultural identity associated with traditional Malabar, which does allow for greater cultural respect for Africans.

But while his cultural comparisons do not refer to traditional Malabar, many of them rest upon judgements flowing from the vantage point of an allegedly superior culture, ‘far ahead’ of its time. Indeed, the ambiguity of his position is quite intriguing. It is here that one feels a tension between his expressions of disgust and admiration for African society and culture. In some instances he seems to be holding fast to stereotypical representations of Africa which are full of expressions of disgust and revulsion; however, he also concedes that Africans do have cultural practices of their own that may not be comprehensible to outsiders. On the one hand, he notes that Africans are very musical and finds the youth, even in remote areas, enjoying and playing music. He writes in ‘Nile Diary’: ‘I have thought many times about how this musical gift came to rise and spread among these uncultured Negroes.’Footnote ⁹¹ In other instances too, Pottekkatt appears willing to concede that Africans do possess art and the means of aesthetic enjoyment but still feels disgusted by some of it. He calls some of the sexually charged dances in Africa ‘ugly and ghastly’, but then immediately argues strongly against banning them:

His attempt to resolve these tensions, albeit shakily and somewhat condescendingly, is by citing Havelock Ellis—in other words, referring to an ostensibly culture-neutral ‘scientific authority’.

In the Southeast Asian travelogues, however, there is often more than just a glimmer. Here, Pottekkatt often subscribes to colonial racist stereotypes about the Malaysians and others, such as the Bali people. This is then filtered through the lens of Indian national superiority, and in ways that contribute to nationalist biopolitical racism in those countries.Footnote ⁹³ But unlike his travels in Africa, Pottekkatt met a very large number of Malayali people, of different sorts, settled in Southeast Asia during his travels there. This is not surprising, given the very early trade connections between these regions. There is, then, a much stronger pull in these writings towards comparing societies in Southeast Asia with Malabar and other Malayalam-speaking regions. His interaction with the Banias either in Africa or Southeast Asia is neither as direct nor as intimate—and this seems to make a really palpable difference to his judgement.

In these writings, remarkably, one finds Pottekkatt's Indian nationalism and near-‘Aryan’ hubris vanishing almost completely in certain moments. The glimmer of the dialogic mode is evident: often, he connects deeply to local cultures, finding in them remarkable parallels with traditional cultural practices in his native Malabar. For example, about Bali, he remarks:

Women and men leaving their upper bodies uncovered was common in Pottekkatt's Malabar as well, and widely criticized by social reformers, yet one finds no echoes of the reformer here. He also found great similarities between Balinese mecharu ceremonies and the pottiyaatu in Malabar:

Pottekkatt's reflections on similar cultural features here are clearly marked by their divergence from the modern. He thus sets aside his social reformer's eye when he engages in such reflections. Indeed, what one might find in them is not a well-defined dialogue based on such instruments as rational comparison, but the opening of an arguably less well-articulated ethical connection that does not need justifications grounded in modernity.