Aging and the Drain of Empire: Postcolonial Age Studies

From the expansion of the British Empire in the nineteenth century to its decline in the twentieth, writers from both Great Britain and India used age to figure the asymmetry of power between colonizer and colonized. Yet, the role of older age in shaping the discourse of empire has been largely overshadowed by a critical focus on youth. Troy Boone’s Youth of Darkest England (2004), Jed Esty’s Unseasonable Youth (2012), and David Pomfret’s Youth and Empire (2015) suggest that colonial modernity—the drive to progress and reform, the rationalization of sovereignty—was contested through the bodies and cultural significance of children. However, the evolution of imperial ideology was mediated not only through the youthful discourses of metropolitan renewal and burgeoning nationalism, but also through the dusky figures of colonial enervation and a liberalism in decline. This chapter provides an account of the age ideology underpinning the relationship between colonizer and colonized through an analysis of the “Grand Old Man of India,” Dadabhai Naoroji. Through an analysis of how Naoroji deployed senescence in his political and economic writing, I argue that the figure of older age not only served as a site of resistance to nationalist sentiment, but also provided a set of affordances for connecting—through literature, political treatises, and scientific discourse—a geographically dispersed empire.