G.K. Bhambra
India, Europe and postcolonialism
“Provincialising Europe both begins and ends by acknowledging the indispensability of European political thought to representations of non-European political modernity, and yet struggles with the problems of representations that this indispensability invariably creates.” (p. 22) Chakrabarty’s stated purpose in the writing of this book “is to explore the capacities and limitations of certain European social and political categories in conceptualising political modernity in the context of non-European life-worlds. … The point is not to reject social science categories but to release into the space occupied by particular European histories sedimented in them other normative horizons specific to our existence and relevant to the examination of our lives and their possibilities.” (p. 20) The first section of his book is organised “under the sign of Marx” where he presents “certain critical reflections on historicist ideas of history and historical time, and their relationship to narratives of capitalist modernity in colonial India.” (p. 19) The second half is organised “under the sign of Heidegger” and “presents some historical explorations of certain themes in the modernity of literate upper-caste Hindu Bengalis.” (p. 19)
Chakrabarty argues that from around the middle of the twentieth century the “European age” in modern history began to yield place to other regional and global configurations which called into question the idea of European history as the embodiment of a ‘universal human history’. Although these historical shifts were mirrored to some degree within the academic field, primarily with the emergence of ‘postmodernism’ and the increasing predominance of feminist and postcolonial scholarship, Europe remains deeply embedded within the discourse, and the very constitution, of the social sciences. The phenomenon of political modernity, for example, is impossible to think of anywhere in the world without invoking categories and concepts that come out of the European intellectual and theological traditions. Recognising that he, too, writes within this inheritance, Chakrabarty seeks the spaces created by the contradictions in the application of European thought to instances of political modernity outside its parameters (in this instance India) to rethink two concepts integral to the idea of modernity: historicism – the idea that to understand anything it has to be seen both as a unity and in its historical development – and the idea of the political. In doing this, Chakrabarty explores the simultaneous indispensability of engaging with the universals that underlie the human sciences and the inadequacy of those sciences in thinking through the various life practices that constitute the political and historical in India.
Chakrabarty asserts that historicism enabled European domination of the world in the nineteenth century by way of making modernity/capitalism “look not simply global but rather as something that became global over time, by originating in one place (Europe) and then spreading outside it.” (7) He goes on to argue that the positing of historical time as the measure of cultural distance that was assumed to exist between the West and non-West legitimated the idea of civilisation in the colonies and allowed for a completely internalist history of Europe whereby Europe was understood as the site of the first occurrence of capitalism, modernity, and so forth. In implicitly, and often explicitly, denying the coevalness of humanity, historicism can be seen as fundamental to modernity and modernising practices. It was “somebody’s way of saying ‘not yet’ to somebody else. … a recommendation to the colonised to wait.” (8) This ‘not yet’ existed in tension with the insistent ‘now’ of the subaltern and insofar as this relationship worked its way through the decolonisation movements of the forties, fifties and sixties Chakrabarty suggests that it now marks all popular movements towards democracy.
Subaltern historiography has often criticised the unreflexive use of categories and, in doing so, has both, pluralised the history of power in global modernity, and radically questioned the nature of historical time. Chakrabarty’s project, of provincialising Europe, is not one of rejecting European thought, but more of renewing it “from and for the margins.” (p. 16) He sees the problem of modernity no longer simply as a sociological problem of historical transition, but as one of translation as well. Before the globalisation of scholarship “the process of translating diverse forms, practices, and understandings of life into universalist political-theoretical categories of deeply European origin seemed to most social scientists an unproblematic proposition. That which was considered an analytical category (such as capital) was understood to have transcended the fragment of European history in which it may have originated” (p. 17) and was applied unreflexively in contexts not its own. In writing narratives and analyses that bring together non-Western histories and European thought Chakrabarty hopes to produce a translucence (not transparency) in that relationship that will allow for the expansion of those analytical categories.
Prakash’s Another Reason starts by stating that his point “is neither that there was no difference between Europe and India, nor that the two were locked in an implacable dialectic, now to be reversed in favor of the repressed other to explain Europe’s originality.” Instead, what he wishes to highlight “is the historical undoing of the self/other binarism, the unravelling of the narrative which posits that Western knowledge, fully formed in the centre, was tropicalised as it was diffused in the periphery.” (p. 47)
Prakash sees the emergence and existence of India as inseparable from the authority and freedom of science, with the story of science’s history in India being seen as a sign of its modernity. In this book he seeks to chart the development of science’s cultural authority in India, an authority that he sees as having its beginnings in the ‘civilising mission’ introduced by the British in the early nineteenth century (p. 3) Prakash suggests that the ideology of domination as the way to liberation that was inherent in this ‘mission’ led to the development of contradictory enterprises that meant “trafficking between the alien and the indigenous, forcing negotiations between modernity and tradition, and rearranging power relations between the coloniser and the colonised.” (6) It was through this ‘dialogue’ that the dominant Western concepts were ‘nativised’, internalised, and then produced as irreducibly different by the predominantly Western-educated ‘nationalising’ elites. “The idea of India as a nation, then, meant not a negation of the colonial configuration of the territory and its people but their reinscription under the authority of science.” (p. 7)
Prakash is not so much concerned with the history of scientific disciplines in India, but rather, with identifying science’s functioning as culture and power, particularly in its association with the state. In the first part of the book he places the development of science in British India in historical context and charts the dispersal of its authority. He then goes on to analyse the displacement of the coloniser/colonised binary that ensued from this dispersal. If Indians were to be conceded the capacity for understanding that being modern subjects entailed then science had to be performed as magic to establish its authority. Prakash suggests that it was the irruption of this dislocation that facilitated the reformulation of science within a ‘nationalist’, or ‘nationalised’, discourse. (p.8)
To claim that India needed to be raised from the depths of ignorance and superstition “was to acknowledge power as the secret dynamic of the narrative of progress. … [and] If the truths of Western science were gained in the exercise of Western power, then why should Hindu traditions give way to Copernican astronomy?” (pp.70-2) The movement from this question to the hybridisation of Western science with the science of their own past was, suggests Prakash, not simply an example of cultural syncretism, mixture, and pluralism, what this hybridisation renegotiated was power. “To situate science in the language of the other was to hybridise its authority, to displace its functioning as a sign of colonial power. Hybridisation, therefore, served as a counter-hegemonic ground upon which the elite pressed their entitlement to modernity” (p. 84)
In the second section, Prakash looks at the ‘governmentalisation’ of the state, the development of India under colonisation such that both it, and Indians, were configured as resources to be exploited. He also looks at the relationship between technics and the state and argues that “India as a territory, that is, as a geographical entity, had become organised as a space constituted by technics. As the nationalists reinscribed this technological order as the space of the nation, they also staked their claim on the state.” (p. 11) Being an anticolonial project, Indian nationalism articulated “its aspirations as a critique of Western modernity and as a desire to institutionalise a culturally specific community.” (p. 201) The story of Indian modernity according to Prakash has, therefore, “to be understood as a project that was bound to engage in a critique of Western modernity in the process of founding India as a modern nation.” (p. 203) For Prakash, then, the dialogue initiated in India between modernity, as represented by the colonising powers, and the traditions of their own past, anchors the very existence of India – both as a rational polity and a cultural identity. He asserts that in the Indian case power has attempted to overcome the limits imposed upon it by alien domination and has reconfigured the territory forged by colonial technics into the space of the Indian nation. (pp. 13-14)
Both Chakrabarty and Prakash, are historians by academic specialisation, with South Asia as their particular site of analysis. The import of their work, however, is not confined within these boundaries – neither academically nor geographically. Both books come out of substantial archival and historical research and attempt to recast how we understand the knowledge gleaned from such research. Neither book is a simple historical exposition of ‘what actually happened’ but instead uses the ‘evidence’ of the past to reconstruct anew mentalities from which to understand that past. ‘Understanding’ itself is problematised and headway is made in working through that problematisation. Having outlined the general issues of concern to both Chakrabarty and Prakash, it is now possible to highlight a number of contentious isues in critical engagement with the arguments made by the two authords.
With reference to Chakrabarty’s book, my primary point of contention would be with regard to his stated aim of bringing forth the translucence in the relationship between European thought and non-Western worlds. Chakrabarty seeks to explore the limitations of European categories of thought by examining the disjunction that occurs when they are used to understand non-Western worlds and, in doing so, hopes to expand, or perhaps ‘correct’, those limitations. This ‘decentring’, or provincialising of Europe fits perfectly into the tradition of postcolonial scholarship in which he locates himself. However, insofar as this tradition highlights such disjunctures it also implicitly -and occasionally explicitly- replicates the very arguments it is contesting.
To offer but one example: Chakrabarty suggests that the “dominance of ‘Europe’ as the subject of all histories is a part of a much more profound theoretical condition under which historical knowledge is produced in the third world.” (p. 29) He later goes on to argue that “[E]urope’s acquisition of the adjective ‘modern’ for itself is an integral part of the story of European imperialism within global history; and … that this equating of a certain version of Europe with ‘modernity’ is not the work of Europeans alone; third world nationalisms, as modernising ideologies par excellence, have been equal partners in the process.” (p. 43) If it is understood that the third world has been an ‘equal partner’ in this process of ascribing dominance to Europe then surely that suggests a need to reinterpret the idea of dominance and to understand the constitution of these categories as being in common? The dominance of Europe - either through its history, or its categories, or both - within academic discourse is not denied. What is in question however is the adequacy, both historical and theoretical, of the dominant understanding that gives Europe that primacy in the world. And as much as Chakrabarty alludes to making this argument, of calling that primacy fully into question, he never really does it.
Whereas Chakrabarty seeks to ‘decentre’ Europe and therefore European categories, Prakash deals with the issue of categories by bringing in the concept of ‘hybridisation’. He asserts at the very end of Another Reason that hybridisation means that ideologies can no longer organise themselves along polarities of particular categories such as tradition and modernity and possibly be true to their representations. There are no pure positions and the choices presented are therefore false one. He goes on to argue that criticism means identifying new arrangements out of the complexities and complicities of concepts such as tradition and modernity. (p. 237) The question remains: if today there are no pure positions, why assume there were any in the past? If that assumption is made and hybridisation is understood as the way of today, when did it become so and why?
The problem of categories and what to do with them is a perennial one and although both Chakrabarty and Prakash suggest innovative and persuasive reinterpretations and re-understandings, I for one, am not fully convinced. The problem arises at the macro level of understanding and so any and all attempts to deal with the problem at the level of methodology is bound to fail. The paramount misconception within the academic world, and one not completely avoided by those involved in postcolonial scholarship, is the notion that the concepts and paradigms utilised within the various disciplines emerged from an observation and analysis of the European experience. This misconception itself rests on inadequate socio-historical interpretations of the world which see it as being fundamentally based on the idea of spatial and temporal ‘disjunction’. It is this notion of ‘discontinuity’, or rupture, that has formed the basis upon which subsequent theorising developed. Put in other words, the theoretical concepts and paradigms used within academic thought have been based upon an understanding of a particular experience that was assumed to be bounded in time and space and differentiated from that which preceded it and that which was outside of its cultural boundaries. So long as this interpretation is based upon the universalisation of a partial understanding of a particular experience, it is arguably inadequate. This is not to suggest, however, that any understanding is as good as another. In asserting the inadequacy of particular interpretations I am looking at the consequences that those interpretations have in the world and through an examination of those, hoping to suggest alternatives.
Postcolonial critiques, in accepting the categories of the prevailing methodologies, and seeking only to tinker with their surface manifestations are in danger of replicating what it is that they critique. In his book The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism Ashis Nandy states that the “[W]est has not merely produced modern colonialism, it informs most interpretations of colonialism. It colours even this interpretation of interpretation.” (Nandy 1983: xii) The point is not that the concepts and paradigms we use in understanding the world today derive from the analysis and observation of the European experience, but that this is what we think. Modern Europe has never existed as a bounded entity in time or space: its boundaries have not only been porous but the relationships that exist, exist both in their action and in their pre-existence.
G.
K. Bhambra is a doctoral candidate in Social and Political Thought at the
University of Sussex. Email: g.k.bhambra@sussex.ac.uk