Tintin in our Soul

If invaders play it easy, the mutiny can be forgotten

Ankita Chawla Delhi

As the arts revived themselves in Europe, they ticked off colour coding. White, yellow, brown, black - probably the only crayons on the palette then - and used very conveniently to colour the map of the world they do not live in. A world that really did not have much to do with them and wasn't a curious cat like them either.

Cartographers made little brown countries, little yellow lands, and black lines at their whim and placed it all suitably in miles and miles of blue, the fathomable sea. But it wasn't for guile, for glory or for gold. It was for the 'greater good'.

You see, they were burdened with the divine scheme of things. A burden to get rid off. What better place to do so than unknown coasts that can easily believe someone else's burden is their boon. They scampered off once the burden left itself behind. And we are carrying it like an honour for centuries now. It was then  the White Man's Burden, now it's the colonial fixation.

The past few years have worked brilliantly at dismissing racial disparity; however, discrimination makes way into our everyday life one way or another. The hullabaloo that follows reminds of the shackles the 'slaves' had to fight to break out of. But the shackles left white stains where they caught on for so many centuries. A little bit of the coloniser's blood spills into the consciousness of the one colonised. Spell this as the obsession with broken conversation in English, a wide profusion of beauty products to lighten your complexion, a stamp on the passport to a country you need a TOEFL to visit.

So, how can one blame a man for writing a comic book in the 1930s, about Belgian Congo, sitting comfortably at the imperialist end? The fact that he acknowledges it as a "the sin of his youth", claiming to have been influenced by the naive, colonist views of the time is more than one could bargain for. To get rid of the ingrained colonial views the edition was re-drawn in 1948 and a few more changes followed in 1975.

It is only understandable that the publishers of Tintin in Congo intended to make the youth aware of colonial values. The colonial values that defined the values of the world at large; masters and slaves, the education system, imperialist superiority and the inferiority of the ones who belonged to the land annexed.

As neo-colonialism became the order of the day, the lines that were drawn by Europeans became national boundaries. And the literature that defined the  colonial ethos has been canonised as must-read classics.

To do justice to my country, one with a bloody colonial past, I would push for members of the ex-colonies to rise and read between the lines. Why shouldn't the Jamaicans create uproar at Bertha Mason being the 'Madwoman in the Attic' in Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre?  While Bronte's book is one of the classics, Bertha Mason is burnt and killed. Or why shouldn't Shakespeare be summoned from his grave, to clarify why exactly is Othello the violent Moor and why Shylock has to pay with his flesh?

The answer is that time has gone and the writers are dead. What they wrote was a depiction of a social situation and power dynamics of their time. Erasing sentences may not wash away history. And what good can questioning old ideologies do, when the change they have undergone over the years is not radical enough?