Reading as resistance: anti-colonial practices and radical egalitarianism in Indian political thought

Colonialism and resistance to it has taken many forms. Colonisation, an economically extractive project was justified as a mission of civilising sans modernising ‘barbarians’ by spreading enlightenment values. Hence, resistance to colonial domination and anti-colonialism became an ideational-political battle. The processes of colonisation and anti-colonial resistance have both been subjected to scholarly analysis. This review essay, based on J Daniel Elam’s study of the reading practices of four heroes of the freedom struggle, seeks to look at reading as resistance. Anti-colonialism here is defined as anti-authoritarianism achieved through the radical egalitarianism of reading practices. The revolutionaries through their ‘inconsequential’ reading in Elam’s analysis seek to subvert the enlightenment values of attaining ‘expertise’. The essay contextualises the arguments forwarded by ‘World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth: Anticolonial Aesthetics, Post-Colonial Politics’ in the larger debates on identity formation and nationalism emerging from postcolonial scholarship.