In his Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon, the Martinican psychoanalyst and political thinker, says: “We are aiming at nothing less than to liberate the black man from himself.” And for him, furthermore, such liberation will also be a liberation of the white man.
In 1952, when his book was published, the European colonial powers were still in control of swaths of Africa, the Caribbean, and Asia. For long long stretches, Fanon himself was in Algeria, which at the time was in the throes of an armed struggle against the French colonial occupiers. At such a time, why did Fanon, instead of focusing on the territorial liberation of the colonies from the colonisers, say that his aim was to liberate the black man from himself?
Moreover, the black man in Fanon is a manifestation of the oppressed, allied to all the other oppressed. So, what would it mean today to say that the aim is nothing less than to liberate the oppressed – the communities of Dalits, Adivasis, Muslims, and women, among others – from themselves?
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In the book, Fanon also describes, almost in passing, how to identify a “colonised people”: they are people in whom an inferiority complex has taken root, whose “local cultural originality has been committed to the grave”.
Something very distinctive happens here: colonialism is described in psychological terms, or in terms of a violence that the colonised also inflict on themselves. (Fanon declares in the introduction: “The analysis we are undertaking is psychological.”) He is acutely aware, of course, that this violence originates, so to speak, in the external world – that is precisely what makes it colonial.
Nevertheless, the self-inflicted dimension is what is distinctive to psychological colonialism, and to psychic violence more broadly. Unlike socioeconomic and political colonialism and violence, which can remain primarily external, psychic violence embeds itself in the soul.
And it embeds itself in the soul of both the oppressor and the oppressed. So, unlike socioeconomic and political violence, psychic violence dehumanises not only the oppressed but also the oppressor. This dehumanisation is why Fanon says: “The black man wants to be white. The white man is desperately trying to achieve the rank of man.”
Fanon is hardly alone in underscoring the psychological dimension of colonial power, and of domination, more broadly. Much of the same theme runs through Gandhi’s writing. In Hind Swaraj, he strongly criticised the concept of an independence that would merely be ‘English rule without the Englishman’. Similarly, Ambedkar recognised that caste oppression involves not just socioeconomic and political violence, but psychic violence.
In retrospect, we can see that psychic violence is also far more insidious and difficult to escape than socioeconomic or political violence. Thus, despite India having been free for more than 70 years now, many Indians – especially Indian elites, but not only them – still yearn for the approval of “western” authorities for “Indian” achievements.
Also read: As the 2024 Elections Approach, India Is Entering the Most Dangerous Phase of Its Existence
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But psychic violence is inseparable from epistemic violence – the violence that occurs when knowledge about a subject is organised in such a way that it systematically silences or obliterates the very groups it targets, usually, as Abhay Xaxa notes, through “a denial of legitimacy, dignity or self respect to the groups it is targeted at.” Epistemic violence inevitably accompanies and enables all domination, and colonial rule is one specially powerful systematisation of epistemic violence.
Epistemic violence usually begins externally. But epistemic violence also becomes psychic violence in the sense that the colonised, and the dominated, all too often – though not always – internalise the language and categories of the dominant.
Some examples might help illustrate what I mean. The discourse of development in post-independence India involved an epistemic violence of both form and content: development as a form involves assuming that socioeconomic well-being involves a modernity based on the industrial domination of nature, and development as content involves a waiting room theory of history, where countries like India are constantly behind the West.
At its heart, however, epistemic violence is more about form than content, sometimes even infusing the same form with content antithetical to that which the oppressors ascribe to it.
In the 19th and early 20th century, thus, before the language of development displaced it, there was the language of civilisations. In Eurocentric thought, Europe was clearly the highest civilisation. Many Indian thinkers (Vivekananda comes to mind most readily) adopted this form. However, they insisted that while the West was a materialist civilisation, India as a spiritual civilisation held a higher stature.
Similar is the case with the epistemic violence of caste. Those amongst the oppressed castes who acquiesced in their subordinate position accepted both the form and the content of the Brahmanical order. By contrast, “Sanskritisation,” or the adoption of Brahmanical values by the oppressed castes, enabled them to challenge the actual dominance of Brahmins, but left the form of the Brahmanical order in place.
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Hindutva is an especially illuminating example of the tortuous forms that epistemic violence can take. In terms of knowledge, it sees itself as a return to Indian traditions. In Fanon’s terms, we might even say that it is seeking to restore a “local cultural originality”. This is why it truly believes itself to be decolonialising India more thoroughly than the secular tradition ever did.
Something strange happens in this process, however. In the very process of seeking this local cultural originality, it enslaves itself to a Eurocentric epistemology, for it is that epistemology which produces the very distinctions and categories that Hindutva works with: Hindu and Muslim as monolithic and inimical communities, Indian civilisation as continuous, and so on. While attempting to free itself from Eurocentrism, it becomes a self-imposed slavish reproduction of the form of Eurocentrism, even if this form is imbued with new content.
Hindutva is, thus, the site of a doubled epistemic violence. On the one hand, it works with a certain vision of Muslims, Dalits, and Adivasis, especially, on whom it inflicts an enormous epistemic violence – quite apart from all the other violence – as it tries to realise this vision. On the other hand, this vision is itself the result of, or maybe the corollary of, a profoundly impoverished vision of Hindu traditions that it presumes constitute it.
In other words, Hindutva is constituted most of all by an immense violence towards itself – towards those who have come to call themselves Hindus by its terms.
Centuries earlier, whiteness was fashioned by a similar internal violence – both psychological and epistemic – towards those who now call themselves white. Hence, Fanon’s remark that the white man is desperately trying to achieve the rank of man.
One might go a little further: even if the oppressed suffer more in material and political terms, the oppressors are structurally at least more vulnerable to psychic violence, regardless of whether they suffer more or less of it. This is because the oppressed can at least in principle (though it is very hard in practice, as both Gandhi and Ambedkar in different ways realised) sidestep or step back from the psychological dimension of the violence that the oppressors inflict on them. By contrast, oppression involves inflicting psychological violence on oneself; it involves becoming incapable of staying non-privatively with our vulnerabilities.
Also read: Why Hindutva Is a Racist Supremacism – Not Merely Communalism or Majoritarianism
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How might the oppressed liberate themselves from themselves – that is to say, from psychic violence? This is the question that follows from Fanon’s aim to liberate the black man from himself.
With modernity, the most common answer has been that the oppressed should return to some local cultural originality. Hindutva and white nationalism are especially zealous iterations of this answer. But some version of the same answer runs through even mainstream nationalist movements, such as that led by the Congress in 20th century India – what else is the idea of India as an eternal or continuous civilisation but the assertion of an inextirpable local cultural originality.
And that answer can never succeed in realising itself, because there is no local cultural originality to return to – that originality is itself the product of the reification that constitutes the dominant forms of our modernity. There are only everywhere the messy relations of the pre-modern world – as messy as those of the modern world turn out to be when we let go of our reifications.
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How else then might the oppressed liberate themselves from themselves? Fanon himself has a very distinctive answer: “Man is not only the potential for self-consciousness or negation. If it is true that consciousness is transcendental, we must also realise that this transcendence is obsessed with the issue of love and understanding. Man is a “yes” resonating from cosmic harmonies. Uprooted, dispersed, dazed, and doomed to watch as the truths he has elaborated vanish one by one, he must stop projecting his antinomy into the world.”
This passage steps back from so much so crisply: from Hegel’s emphasis on a transcendental consciousness arrived at through negation, from the Marxist tradition of dialectics, negative or not, from the psychoanalytic scepticism of love. And it affirms a world too – the world of love and understanding, of a “yes” resonating from cosmic harmonies.
Both in what Fanon draws back from and in what he affirms, we can find allies for him both in the Indian subcontinent – Gandhi and Ambedkar, and Iqbal, most evidently – and in other parts of the world, including Hannah Arendt, James Baldwin, Martin Luther King, Audre Lorde and Simone Weil. What they all share is a desire to not only oppose socioeconomic and political violence, but to also to liberate themselves and others from the sociopolitical forms of psychic violence.
Much has been written about these thinkers and actors. But the vistas they open up are immense, and much of what they and others of their ilk have thought and done and initiated remains to be explored further. If we are to think with them, think otherwise with them, then we must think of both the sociopolitical forms of psychic violence, and the ways which we have and might resist such violence.
Ajay Skaria teaches history at the University of Minnesota. This essay is part of an irregular series reflecting on contemporary forms of violence and resistance to it, with a focus especially on psychic and epistemic violence.
