The project of colonialism in India needed for its ongoing reproduction the "babu," trained in English and cultivated to serve his colonial master.
The babu is educated with techniques of servitude, being taught the everyday practices of serving his master, while at the same time, subjugating the underclasses to extract the resources for his master. The babu worked in clerical jobs, various colonial administrative services, and in a wide array of intelligence functions that served the colonial machine.
The "babu" therefore has historically been the very face of oppression among the poor and the underclasses in colonial Bengal. You see this in the mistrust toward the figure of the "babu" among the underclasses in present-day Bengal.
The phenomenon of the colonial babu has cultivated entire generations of opportunist servants to power starting from the colonial times, ingraining in middle-class English speaking Bengalis the habits of servitude.
These opportunists have been trained right from their convent schooling to subsequent college education in elite Calcutta colleges on techniques of controlling the poor, selling out to power, and doing the very dirty work of/for powerful forces.
All this is done under the guise of civility learned from the British, decorated with multi-syllable English words that remain impervious to the people. This knack for longer-than-long English words and even longer sentences in English marks the babu, distinguishing him from the masses.
In contemporary versions of colonialism, the "babu" syndrome is often embodied in the postcolonial academic.
The postcolonial academic migrated to the centers of Empire in the U.S. and U.K. from the commonwealth since the 1960s, and in large numbers amid the neoliberal transformation of the globe in the 1980s onward. This moment of migration of the postcolonial academic into the U.S./U.K. academe coincided with the accelerated transformation of the globe under the neoliberal logic, having declared the death of socialism. The language of multiculturalism offered neoliberal expansionism the tool of conquest through the incorporation of difference into capitalist logics.
The poctcolonial "babu" found in this climate of rapid neoliberal transformation the perfect opportunity for building her career. Distanced from the structures of class and caste hierarchies that constitute her privilege and mobility, the postcolonial academic carved out an aggrieved identity. She could erase her roots of postcolonial privilege and familial mobility through opportunism and instead carve out a fashionable marginalized identity.
She/he is adept at mouthing all the correct postcolonial jargons, whining about Whiteness and White power, inventing ever-new terms to cry hoarse about marginalization.
This facade of cultivating a critical self is integral to postcolonial academic opportunism. The critical self is very much a self that sells to the White academic the figure of the aggrieved postcolonial scholar.
She will suck up to the very White power she critiques at the first instance. She will then turn around and complain about the same White power. The critique of White power sustains her career progression.
To retain this very place of privilege, she will follow whatever techniques of bootlicking that suit her. She will turn on other academics, especially those that are putting their bodies on the line to challenge structures, and throw them under the bus in order to ensure her cozy access to power. She will then go on to bad mouth these very academics that she has thrown under the bus.
When cornered on her vicious campaigns and opportunism, she will throw out some impervious language, "strategic ambiguity," quote Stuart Hall etc.
She will dismiss junior academics and quickly label their work as of poor quality so she can serve her Masters. Using her access to power as a way to further reproduce power, she will set herself up as the arbiter of quality, often repeating the same old arguments, usually plagiarized from somewhere.
After spending her time in her elite Calcutta Club and other places of babudom, she will go claim to her White colleagues how she is now writing the next innovative book on some new hot topic, digitality and displacement. She will go for a day trip to a village, walk around, not seek the consent of villagers, and then write about the plight of villages in the digital century.
Parochial careerist opportunism forms the very basis of babudom in the postcolonial academe. To ensure her access to power, the postcolonial academic will resort to every form of vicious undermining of spaces of resistance for she knows from her intergenerational class and caste priviege that collectivized resistance of any form stands to disrupt the very foundational privilege that underlies her cosmopolitan mobility.
In this sense, the postcolonial academic is a necessary instrument of neoimperial power.
When perplexed about the behavior of the postcolonial academic in spouting the language of power and cozying up to it while making a career out of posturing an aggrieved self, this analysis of the figure of the babu offers an interpretive framework. It is this deep-seated opportunism that guides the viciousness, mimicking the lines of power, and performance of grievance, all held together.