The Amateur as a Radical Rule-Breaker

Saikat Majumdar's new book explores colonial literary history to understand the evolution of the figure of the amateur

- Uttaran Das Gupta

In his 1929 essay, Wordsworth in the Tropics, English writer Aldous Huxley ridiculed 19th-century British romantic poet William Wordsworth and his followers for waxing eloquent about the uplifting potential of nature. Huxley argued that in the temperate weather of Europe, experiencing nature might inspire delicate poetry, but that is hardly how people in other parts of the world encounter it. "Nature, under a vertical sun, and nourished by the equatorial rains, is not at all like that chaste, mild deity who presides over...the prettiness, the cozy sublimities of the Lake District," he wrote. "A few weeks in Malay or Borneo would have undeceived him (Wordsworth)."

Though literary scholars have since challenged Huxley's appraisal of Wordsworth's relationship to nature, almost every school student in the former British colonies forced to read The Daffodils (sometimes called I Wander Lonely As a Cloud) in English literature classes is aware of the irony of doing so.

For most of them, sweating under the slowly rotating fans in stuffy schoolrooms of tropical Asia, Africa or the Caribbean, summer hardly evokes images of pleasant excursions into meadows. Yet, reading Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Dickens, Shakespeare and other British literary giants was essential for the colonial subject in the 19th and 20th centuries. It was the key tool for acquiring "white masks," to borrow a term from French Afro-Caribbean philosopher Franz Fanon, that was the primary aim of a colonial education system. Fanon uses the metaphor of "white masks" to describe Black people or people of colour adopting the behaviour and culture of white people in a racist society to gain more acceptance.