James Cobb, Colonial Cacophony, and the Enlightenment.(Critical Essay)

Publication: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900

Publication Date: 22-JUN-01

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COPYRIGHT 2001 Rice University

Could it be that with the increasing strength of the Abolition movement and the eventual outlawing of the slave-trade, slavery became capable of functioning as its opposite, a metaphor for freedom?

In an age of rapid global changes triggered by commerce and global warfare, the British dramatist James Cobb (1756-1818) celebrated "Anglo-Saxon liberty" against that volatile global backdrop, exemplifying the Enlightenment's brief flirtation with a global cacophony of cultures, languages, and performances. [1] Cobb was an officeholder of the East India Company; his plays about cross-cultural encounters provide long-neglected examples of the Enlightenment colonial imagination at work on fictions of domestic and colonial reform. "Reform" is a critical aspect of Cobb's plots, and it will also be the focus of the critique in this essay. Far from being stable, unitary, and unquestionable, by the late eighteenth century, British coloniality was fragmented. A heterogeneous but regulated British colonial identity was constructed by dramatists as well. The anxiety produced in England by the cacophony of global others--endlessly subjugated and "resurrected" in various relations of difference or identity with the self --created a colonial fantasy (occasionally a nightmare) of self as an outcome of encounters with difference. [2] Such self-constructions then necessitated reformist intervention to reassert Britishness.

Cobb's plays depict at least two scenarios for constructing British national identity. [3] The first is the romance and marriage scenario: familial comedy of manners involving disguises, crossed identities, and happy rediscoveries and reunions (including cynical age rebutted and youth vindicated). European women, like slaves, acted in this scenario as the keepers of children as well as of ancestral memories. But, besides being receptacles of European racial identity, they were also what Joseph Roach has called "sacrificial effigies" or "surrogates": "The effigy is a contrivance that enables the processes regulating performance--kinesthetic imagination, vortices of behavior, and displaced transmission--to produce memory through surrogation." [4] Like slaves, European women as sacrificial effigies or surrogates symbolized subversive excess, always nodes of anxiety in a culture. [5] In Cobb's plays, therefore, women's role of "savior" is the bright side of their containment.

Racial others in the second scenario dramatized public British male identity based on homosociality and aggression. The second scenario involved masculine exploration in the context of maritime commerce and military engagements. In reality, each scenario incorporated some tincture of the other, demonstrating that private, conjugal mores were actually inseparable from public discourse. [6] For instance, both plots are liberally sprinkled with music, spectacle, and performances. Cobb's Love in the East, for instance, opened on 25 February 1788, at Drury Lane, with a variety of new scenery, including a view of Calcutta from an on-the-spot painting by William Hodges with dress and decorations to match. [7] The incorporation of colonial margins as scenery in these spectacles metonymizes the nation represented as both home and mart, private and public realms. Heterotopic and hybrid cultural images and performance linked together representations of private, public, and global. In remembering themselves as a nation refulgent in past and present glory, the British implicitly understood their intimate history through their relations with colonial subjects and neighbors. The anxiety caused by such sutured narratives of identity leads to Cobb's divided plots: an engagement with the other is inevitably corrected by sentimentalized repression of that other, a repression characterized by the use of romance plots as an ideological tool for appropriating difference. [8]

The hesitant, divided quality of Cobb's triumphalist plots and declarations is precisely what makes him worth study. Their dividedness is demonstrated by his constant de-centering of static and stable nation-state and national identity. In his dramatic universe, encounter with difference repeatedly changes determinations of self and other, difference being defined both by gender and by race. Also significant, Cobb's uncannily oracular plays appeal to twentieth-century readers of colonial and postcolonial texts. Like many other late-eighteenth-century dramatists caught in the colonial moment, the melodramatic Cobb prefigures the peculiar struggles of postcolonial nation builders to reconcile essentialism and purity with globalism, neocolonialism, and reform agendas and agencies. An extensive analysis of the eighteenth-century roots of the postcolonial imagination is beyond the scope of this essay. [9] However, one analogy will be helpful to demonstrate how Cobb's melodrama and the postcolonial national imager y and imaginary show similar perspectives on women and reform.

Through the lens of postcolonial storytelling, we see that Cobb's tales of colonial reformers anticipate, albeit with different political intent, the ongoing torment of the Enlightenment's bequest to postcolonial nationality. For instance, Salman Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh is a trenchant postcolonial mise-en-scene of the reformer's implication in the very oppression that she seeks to eradicate. [10] In this postcolonial staging of Indian nationalism, a family of the indigenous elite--the Zogoibys--initiate social reform in pre-independence India. In Rushdie's rich imagery of national struggle and subaltern self-representation, elephants signify legitimate national authority--traditional, indigenous, and ancient--not unlike the imagery of Mughal legitimacy. later appropriated by the British themselves to justify their own rule. [11] Thus, Lambajan Chandiwalla--the one-legged gatekeeper of the protagonist's family home Elephanta in Bombay--tells the protagonist that Elephanta island near Bombay preserves r eminders of an earlier, grander era, when elephants ruled the land philosophically over their subjects, monkeys. In the novel's pre-independence Indian national imaginary, elephants were deified emblems of a glorious national past. Through historical irony, the elephant god later becomes the rallying emblem of Hindu fundamentalist forces in independent India, a continuing appropriation of originary myths. Local festivals celebrating the power of the elephant deity parade along the thoroughfare well below the elegant Elephanta. Elephanta's lofty perch on the Malabar

Hills reflects the hierarchy of indigenous elite and masses in late colonial India. The reformer--the protagonist's mother, Aurora Zogoiby--is distanced from India's teeming, hybrid masses by her immense wealth. But it is she who has named her mansion Elephanta and hobnobs with the rabble everyone else considers dangerous. She ostensibly identifies with the colonized masses, as only the very rich and self-willed can do.

Elephants, reminders of a golden Indian past and also of hydra-headed imperialism and nationalism in this allegory, are thus contested metaphors to be appropriated by a chain of post-Enlightenment reformers. Aurora Zogoiby teaches the "monopod" gatekeeper's pet parrot to repeat "peesay saafed haathi," a distortion of "pieces of eight! my hearties!" the lusty cry of British seafaring. Peesay saafed haathi translates roughly into "mashed white elephants." [12] The "saafed haathi" of the parrot's unconsciously resistant nationalist articulation can very well be the "white" English who appropriated an indigenous, nationalist symbol of political legitimacy for their own ends: the British, as Guha has pointed out, did in fact evoke the golden age mythos of a "real" India and appropriated the mantle of the Mughals, claiming succession. Thus far, Aurora's appropriation of and identification with the elephant suggest resistant mimicry of the British appropriation of Indian "essence": "peesay saafed haathi" or "mashed white elephant." But her gatekeeper memorializes a different "mashing" of the masses themselves by Aurora that alerts us to Aurora's links to her historic prototypes: reformist Englishwomen in Cobb's plays.

Once, in revolt against the Indian National Congress capitulating to England and abandoning striking Indian labor, Aurora herself "mashed" Lambajan Chandiwalla's leg under her elephantine Buick in a moment of panic. She tries to atone for this by setting him up as gatekeeper of her own home, an ambiguous act through which her son later understands his mother's implication in the colonial project and...

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