Colonization as an Emasculating Experience: The Symbolic Castration of the Colonized Men in Pre/Partition Fiction

Abstract

The colonizing powers have always been viewed as forces which render the colonized powerless. In the sub-continent also, colonization acted as an agent ofvanquishing the male power, and at the same time of damaging the myth of the male figure as a symbol of power. Thus puncturing the image of the male as all powerful, the men of the sub-continent were reduced to diminutives and pigmies who may be viewed as notfar different from the cringing and crawling shadows one finds in Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. This chapter aims to discuss selected male characters in Pre / Partition fiction who were castrated (symbolically, if not otherwise) and divested of allsort of power, be it identity, faith or any other source of deriving strength. The research intends to read this castration as a kind of victimization which left the men not only incapacitated in the face of Partition’s violence but also left them boggled, weak, fearful, indecisive, and drained of all the positive attributes. So if the country, as a motherland, was considered to be raped through the process of colonization, as a fatherland, it was castrated. Castration meant the ripping out of all the spring of power and giving it away to someone else i.e. the colonizer. in other words, the country as a mother figure was raped because as a father figure it was castrated and thus rendered impotent and thereby incapable of protecting its honour, religion, communities, families and even its own self.