370 Resisting Publics
ally, the freedoms of speech and assembly so dear to the hearts Fin
of the “civilized races” could hardly be suspended in the streets of Europe
when a colonial walked on them. Thus, the nationalists were free to dis-
seminate their propaganda to foreign sympathizers, other colonial expa-
triates, and even back to the colony by dodging the censors. The many
papers started in Europe were able to print texts that were impossible
to circulate within the colony; even calls for the elimination of colonial
officials could not be stopped if printed in Berlin or Geneva. Financed
by older established figures but manned by the young colonials who put
together the articles in addition to (and sometimes at the expense of)
their studies, these papers were zealously distributed and smuggled into
the colonies or paraphrased by other papers to the same effect.
n response to Ashis Nandy’s argument about the ambivalence of the I
colonial encounter, I would argue that a reverse effect was also in motion.
Even as the elites of the colonial world became more “English” or “French”
they were also simultaneously becoming more “native.” This observation
is not to deny Nandy’s claim that colonialism included the transformation
of “the concept of the modern West from a geographical and temporal
entity to a psychological category ... (embedding it) in structures and in
minds.”^41 Rather, the effort of the colonized to define themselves by the
internalized values of the colonizer existed along with a paradoxical desire
to differentiate themselves from the same. Thus, even as the Indians we
have met here were emphasizing the “martial” or “virile” aspects of classi-
cal Hindu mythology against the British image of their “effeminacy,” they
were celebrating their “spirituality” in opposition to Western “material-
ism.” Though the colonials accepted many of the dichotomies defined by
their colonial masters, they also questioned the value ascribed to each ele-
ment of the dichotomies.
n a concrete sense, living in the metropole affected the colonials I
in completely different ways than did contact with the colonizer or with
one another in the colony. The very act of leaving home made these
young men more aware of their nationality, just as the role of minority
or even second-class citizen opened them up to perceiving inequities that
might naturally be accepted in their home countries. The relationship
between colonial and colonizer was also very different in the metropole
not only because the colonial was now in the minority, but also because