A Postcolonial Reading of Donald Sinderby’s The Jewel of Malabar: An Analysis of Colonial Engagement in Twentieth-Century Malabar

Abstract

Several historical accounts of colonialists’ entanglements in Malabar have been recorded. Colonialist historiography aimed to popularize the achievements of Europeans stationed in the empire. The representation of European characters in The Jewel of Malabar, a novel published in 1927 by the English soldier and writer Donald Ryder Stephens under the pen name Donald Sinderby, accepts the colonizers’ righteous intent of introducing Western culture and religion and the scientific temperament into the colonies. The article argues that a power nexus existed between the colonizers and natives (perceived as elites by various social groups) and shows how the social transactions between the two led to an internalization and proliferation of the need of the white savior. A close analysis of The Jewel of Malabar examines the nature of social transactions between the colonizer and the colonized, and demonstrates the creation of a dependency that is perceived as a symbiotic arrangement, by which some natives are protected from others while giving the colonizers a firmer command of the colony’s resources. Furthermore, the article also explores how Western modernization was used to provide a righteous intent cloaking the colonizers’ motives (conquest and exploitation) while intensifying the existing binary within colonies, that of nondangerous natives needing protection from dangerous ones, with Hindus and Moplahs playing these roles.