colonialism - provincialising summary

Question 1

summary

Answer 1

• Enlightenment philosophy assumes the human as an abstract figure – does not acknowledge diversity of histories
• Criticises historicism
• Set in middle ground of subaltern studies and postcolonial theory
• Looks at Marxist idea of ‘abstract labour’ – goes against his idea of universal history of capital
  o History 1 = histories posited by capital
  o History 2 = histories outside of ‘capital’s life process’.
  ♣ H2 should modify H1
• Secular histories do not adequately describe postcolonial conditions

Question 2

preface

Answer 2

• Concerned about the ‘tension between the European roots of Marx’s thoughts and their global significance’ (xi). He noted that this was not a general concern of Indians
• How have European ideas drawn from intellectual/historical tradition?
• Starting point = EU thought in Indian life e.g. importance of Marx
• EU has haunting presence on Indian modernity – result of colonial action
• ‘Critical thought fights prejudice and yet carries prejudice at the same time’ (xvi)
• colonisers never lost aspect of their language/culture when colonising, only the colonial territories did

Question 3

intro – relationship between historicism and colonialism

Answer 3

• political modernity cannot be separated from genealogy of EU
• ‘the Indian constitution tellingly begins by repeating certain universal Enlightenment themes celebrated, say, in the American constitution’ (4)
• history forces us to rethink historicism – ‘the idea that to understand anything it has to be seen both as a unity and in its historical development’ (6)
• ‘historicism enabled EU domination in 19th century’ (7) and ‘legitimised the idea of colonisation’ (7)

Question 4

intro – historicism and not yet

Answer 4

• historicism meant ‘not yet’ in 19th century
  o Mill viewed Indians/Africans as not yet rational enough to self-govern
  o Sense of teleology – will all get to same destination, but some take longer
• In comparison, anticolonial movements etc. placed emphasis on the now
• limits to historicist distinction between modern and non modern = the rejection of ‘not yet’ as a reason for colonisation vs. the peasant as a full participant of political life before formal education of citizenship

Question 5

intro – guha

Answer 5

• Peasant = key part of the modernising of a colonial world
• Criticises the term ‘prepolitical’
• ‘examining, for instance, over a hundred known cases of peasant rebellions in British India in 1783 and 1900, Guha showed that practices which called upon gods, spirits… were part of the network of power and prestige which both the subaltern and elite operated in South Asia’ (14)
• they symbolised a greater, political and secular struggle
• for Guha, tradition pre-originates colonialism

Question 6

intro – key assumptions in EU thought

Answer 6

• humans exist in a secular and single historical time

- the human is ontologically singular - that social exists prior to gods etc.

Question 7

intro - hinduism

Answer 7

• ‘Indian-bengali anticolonial nationalism implicitly normalised the ‘Hindu’’ (21)

Question 8

1 – scholars and non-western histories

Answer 8

• Telling the story of history is just that – not meaning that it is not factual – but history often involves constructing a story from the facts
• scholars produce work that does not acknowledge non-western histories
• sense of ignorance in writing – people are not expected to name authority when they speak of non-West countries in books etc. e.g. Rushdie
• Europe = main subject of study as it is the only place that is theoretically knowable. Non-Western countries are depicted as mythical and naïve

Question 9

1 – indian inadequacy

Answer 9

• There is a tendency to read Indian history as inadequate
  o ‘the British conquered and represented the diversity of Indian pasts through a homogenising narrative of transition from a medieval period to modernity’ (32)
  o first seen in celebration of colonial violence
  o indian history was dichotomous: feudal vs. capitalist

Question 10

1– absolute theoretical insights

Answer 10

• For C, the Greek world that underlies European thought aspires to produce ‘absolute theoretical insights’
  o We assume that things have ‘practical universal’ or ‘mythical religious’ nature – this derives from naïve understanding of the world
  o European thought sees things in a universal sense, seeking to explain everything through its approach
  o E.g. Ethiopia – accept many interpretations of Bible. Value is in number of interpretations
  o We rather seek to universalise things and have a single, truthful interpretation of things – results in assumptions
  o It was Marx that said that capitalism gives rise to a theoretical study of history – but all from the perspective of this category

Question 11

1 – the nature of history

Answer 11

• accounts of history are gendered – men’s are public, women’s deal with the extended family
• the reason that history is still studied in school lies in ‘what European imperialism and third-world nationalisms have achieved together: the universalisation of the nation-state as the most desirable form of political activity’ (41)
• need to recognise that desire for equality has often been a force of empowerment for marginalised groups

Question 12

1 – what history has been understood as e.g. in case of India

Answer 12

• India, for instance (Chakrabarty’s reference point) has been understood to be in an incomplete transition from medieval to modern outlook
  o The ‘Indian’ is understood to have failed to realise this
  o It assumes that Imperial Britain laid the foundation and gave instruction to reach ‘citizenship and nation-state’
  o British colonial history has homogenised Indian history
  o Sense of ‘inadequacy’ associated with Indian history
• But this is (according to Chakrabarty) an adoption of values and outlooks that are in line with the European ideal
• This view cannot be accommodated without adopting the European assumptions, rooted in the Enlightenment

Question 13

1 – nationalism

Answer 13

• Nationalism, it seems, among many things, sought to affirm the ‘sanctified and patriarchal extended family’ in a sense, in order to take back the role of subject in the discussion of what it meant to be part of society, using ‘devices of collective memory that were both antihistorical and nonmodern’. This, of course, brings its own problems, because the approach, within the bigger narrative, is to adopt rules of evidence, and an understanding of the ‘secular, linear calendar that the writing of “history” must follow.’ The scope from this position to be properly theoretical, and reasoning is limited. The flow of ‘European’ history is towards ‘modernisation’ in terms of views of citizenship and other aspects of society. As he states:
  o Why is history a compulsory part of education of the modern person in all countries today, including those that did quite comfortably without it until as late as the eighteenth century? Why should children all over the world today have to come to terms with a subject called “history” when we know that this compulsion is neither natural nor ancient?

Question 14

1 – provincializing Europe

Answer 14

• Not a rejection of modernity and science, reason, etc.
  o Do not need to reject Western thought, but need to recognise that not everyone thinks in the same way as us
• Not cultural relativism – the scientific outlook cannot be dismissed as merely ‘European’ and so cultural
• Show ‘its “reason,” which was not always self-evident to everyone, has been made to look obvious far beyond the ground where it originated’
• We must see the paradoxes, contradictions and extreme force accompanying the European project, and expose its mistakes!
• Need to undertake a project of ‘provincialising “Europe”, the Europe that modern imperialism and…nationalism have, by their collaborative venture and violence, made universal’ (42)
• Need to go beyond liberalism
• Need to recognise that the depiction of the West as modern is rooted in imperialism
• Not a nationalist project
• Need to infuse history with the tragedy/force that has characterised it

Question 15

2 - marx

Answer 15

• two main parts of Marx’s critique of ‘capital’
  o abstract human of Enlightenment
  o idea of history
• uses these to understand ‘the capitalist mode of production and modern European imperialism’ (47)
• key for looking at anti-imperial thought
• Abstract labor = combines Enlightenment ideas of rights and the concept of the universal human with these rights
  o Indifference to specific kind of labour – not enough for capitalism enough
  o Capitalist convention
  o Both descriptive and a critique of capital
  o Key to hermeneutic of capital – how capital reads human activity
  o Abstract labour is where the life process of capital begins

Question 16

2 - india resistance of modernity

Answer 16

• Dissolution of hierarchies of birth
• Sovereignty of individual
• Consumer choice

Question 17

3 – difficulty in approaching supernatural historically e.g. south asia

Answer 17

• south asia
  o ‘labor, the activity of producing, is seldom a completely secular activity in India; it often entails, through rituals big and small, the invocation of divine or superhuman presence’
  o the secular translates into the supernatural when it comes to the purpose of writing history
  o labor is associated with presence/agency of gods
• tend to view supernatural as incompatible with history
  o ‘its existence is independent of such events and in a sense it exists prior to them’ (73)
  o viewed as ‘belonging to ‘nature’ itself’ (73)
  o nature/culture division

Question 18

3 – machinery festival

Answer 18

• e.g 1930s festival in India that involves worshipping of machinery by workers
  o sacrifice involved next to mechanics
  o named after the engineer god Vishvakarma
  o public holiday for working class
  o not sure whether workers had doctrinal belief
  o ‘more often than not, their presence is collectively invoked by rituals rather than by conscious belief’ (78)

Question 19

3 – Islam in Bengal

Answer 19

• Eaton’s study of Islam in Bengal
  o Considers the translation of gods
  o Case of an Arabic-Sanskrit bilingual inscription from a 13th century mosque in coastal Gujarat
  ♣ Arabic part of inscription 1264 – refers to Allah
  ♣ Sanskrit text of same inscription addresses gods by names Visvanatha, Sunyarupa, Visvarupa etc.
• ‘the interesting point… is how the translations in these passages take for their model of exchange barter rather than the generalised exchange of commodities’ (85)
  o no appeal to ‘implicit universals’

Question 20

4 - the word minority

Answer 20

• A loaded word (in the Ottoman Empire ‘minorities’ was used in a way that subjugated Christians and Jews – the word ‘minority’ is charged)
• Minority is used to imply ‘minor’ ‘inferior’ – the Europeans were not in the ‘majority’ in their empires! – they had the ‘majority’ influence – ‘minor’ also implies not coming of age
• Christians in the Middle East were in the majority numerically for about 400 years after the Arab invasions put them under Islamic rule, but they were treated as a minority.

Question 21

4 – the word major

Answer 21

• ‘Major’ has been used in the European project (drawing on the Enlightenment) to assume ultimately ‘rational’ and ‘minor’ nonrational – represents the Er
  o colonial powers were never the majority in terms of numbers. But conceived themselves the rational majority

Question 22

4– the word subaltern

Answer 22

• ‘subaltern’ = refers to histories that have been subordinated
  o subaltern refers to persons or groups of ‘inferior rank or station’ for whatever reason (race, class, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity or religion). The very act of historicizing often implies the assumption of such a subordinated position by some groups.
• Even if pure objectivity is unattainable, but we can be aware of our tendency to subordinate some to others

Question 23

4 - Guha, the prose of counter insurgency

Answer 23

• Looked at history of Santal rebellion of 1855
• Common phenomenon = agency of supernatural beings
• ‘Santal leaders explained the rebellion in supernatural terms, as an act carried out at the behest of the Santal god Thakur’ (103)
• religion motivated rebellion – reasoning was religious
• religious motivation must be ‘anthropologised (that is, converted into somebody’s belief or made into an object of anthropological analysis) before it finds a place in the historian’s narrative’ (105)

Question 24

4 - art of history

Answer 24

• How do you write a history of a group that has left no sources?
  o We consider that history must be ‘rational’ – excluding arbitrary, eccentric or ‘mad’ views
  o The working class, women etc. are now written into history because traditional views have been challenged
  o ‘the discipline of history renews and maintains itself’
• Leads to deeper philosophical questions
  o Does multiplicity of histories lead to an undermining of ‘truth’ or ‘the facts’?
  o Nations need, it seems, a fundamental basis in the form of ‘truth’ and ‘facts’ to ‘adjudicate between conflicting stories and interpretations.’
• True objectivity may not be achievable, but ‘plausibility’ may be
  o Most historians are not postmodern in abandoning the distinction between fact and fiction

Question 25

4 – summary of santal rebellion

Answer 25

• (focus is on how the history of the rebellion is reported)
  o Reports of the rebellion did not describe things as the Santal would themselves
  ♣ How different groups report the rebellion
  o Historiography described the rebels as members of a group, or class
  ♣ History cannot have been written by the Santal – it would have made no sense to them
  o Rebellion was not regarded as something reasoned by the Santal, rather it was construed as something external – rebellion is an action that they took, and they took this action in place of what could be regarded as reasonable
  o The Santal themselves construed this very differently – they were assured that Thakur, their god, had assured them of protection from British bullets
  ♣ Used it to comfort themselves in a difficult situation
  o Importantly ‘these were not public pronouncements meant to impress their followers’ they were instead the words of prisoners who faced execution – not propaganda – the Santal apparently had no concept of lying, for them this was the straightforward truth

Question 26

4 – paradox of santal rebellion

Answer 26

o The Santal – not an independent agent
♣ The god Thakur was the initiator of the rebellion
♣ In retelling this story, the Santal refuse to take personal agency – this role is for their deity - they recast the story with another agency

Question 27

4 - interpretation of rebellion

Answer 27

• Guha in his study does not see religion as ‘simply a displaced manifestation of human relationships that are in themselves secular and worldly’
  o Marxism is at the root of subaltern studies, but its critique of religion is inadequate
  o The secular historian will resist giving Thakur the agency – this would abandon the rules of evidence that western thought requires
  ♣ The Enlightenment driven approach is condescending towards a religious outlook
• Story of rebellion is told in different ways
  o Need to be careful in how we judge/interpret accounts
  o Come into situation with assumptions that possibly don’t match

Question 28

4 - problems with guha

Answer 28

• Guha, according to Chakrabarty, has significant problems as he takes:
  o An ‘anthropologist’s’ view – respecting the view, but not accepting it as his own
  ♣ Respects, but doesn’t engage
  o A Marxist/modern approach – religion in public life is a ‘displaced consciousness’ – to attribute the rebellion to the will of another is an estrangement implying that the act is another will, not the rebels
  ♣ Religion explains away problem
  o In the historicising approach of the Enlightenment, invoking the supernatural is not regarded as either an explanation or a legitimate description of what happened. It becomes impossible within this framework to describe the Santal’s actions in the way that they themselves would

Question 29

4 – outcome of problems with interpretation

Answer 29

• Not just a matter of extending the sources and using larger archives of information
• Potential resolution = live with paradoxes and contradiction that different histories present – we need to accommodate heterogeneity
  o History is not homogeneous – must recognise that the analyst Guha and his view cannot be reconciled with the Santal

Question 30

7 – adda in general

Answer 30

• adda = social practice in Calcutta in first half of 20th cent
• involves friends having vigorous conversations
• predominantly male
• slowly faded from Calcutta’s urban life – sense of mourning has followed
• trying to preserve it
• apparent nostalgia has raised the following question: ‘how does one sing to the ever-changing tunes of capitalist modernisation and retain at the same time a comfortable sense of being at home in it?’ (182)
• ‘the individually distinct ambiences of modernism that the metropolitan cities of India built up in the first half of the twentieth century are now faced with serious challenges in the context of demographic changes and – compared to the past – greater globalisation of the media and the economy’ (182)
• adda has become a way of distinguishing Bengali culture
  o it a ubiquitous part of culture
• however, accounts of the practice can be tinged with colonial-Victorian prejudices

Question 31

7 – adda and colonialism

Answer 31

• e.g. Chaudhuri’s description in The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian
  o suggests that adda ‘denotes a lethargy of spirit’ (185)
  o argued that adda signified ‘the absence of a controlled sociality which, according to him, only individuals with a developed sense of individuality were capable of achieving’ (185)
• ‘the modern and hybrid space of Bengali adda thus does not in any way resolve the tensions brought about by the discourses of modernity and capitalism’ (212)
  sense of exclusion/domination in very structure of adda – link to gender

Question 32

8 - bengal

Answer 32

• ‘Sumit Sarkar has suggested that the Bengali middle class’s resistance to capitalist discipline was caused by the nature of colonial capitalism itself. Colonial rule, contends did not allow for a leisured pace of transition to capitalist production’ (214-5)
  o result = Bengali workers did not internalise the capitalist work ethic
• ‘european domination of public life and civil society in Bengal, argues Tanika Sarkar, left the ‘home’ as the only (conceptual) space in which nationalist Bengali men could act with some sense of autonomy and sovereignty over women and other social groups subordinate to them’ (215)
• Bengali modernity has an inherently colonial context
• The terms grihalakshmi and griha (home) ‘belonged to the evolving lexicon of the new patriarchy and gender relations that developed in Bengal under British rule’ (217)

Question 33

Epilogue – danger with reason

Answer 33

• ‘the tendency to identify reason and rational argumentation as a modernist weapon against ‘premodern’ superstition ends up overdrawing the boundary between the modern and the premodern’ (238)

Question 34

epilogue – historicising

Answer 34

• ‘for so long as we have historicism in place, the task of conceptualising the nature of political modernity in colonial and postcolonial India baffles us’ (249)
• we must ‘reconceptualise the present’ and move beyond historicism
• provincialising Europe is done ‘in an anticolonial spirit of gratitude’ (255)
• Historicising is a limited but useful exercise
• Considering subaltern histories shows good aspects but also limitations of process of historicising
• Modern and non-modern coexist and this needs to be acknowledged in historicising
  o However, even these terms are questionable
  o Assumption that modern = good

Question 35

Epilogue – analytical strategies

Answer 35

• The doubling of voice: when a participant in ‘magic’ becomes the analyst of ‘magic’ (they may be simultaneously).
• Citing work done by Jomo Kenyatta when studying anthropology in the UK, where he appears to rationalise telepathic messaging practices in magic which was subsequently critiqued by his teacher, Malinowski. Kenyatta asserted that there would be scientific proof for this telepathic transmission if it were investigated. This process was something that Kenyatta had been part of. Malinowski’s approach was to state that such superstition was part of all societies, including those in Europe, and so we should not criticise the outlook.

Question 36

Epilogue – modern historical consciousness

Answer 36

• Modern historical consciousness argues that we need to think about the past in order to consider the ‘true present’
  o This = a state that that has progressed from the past, and has wiped it out
  o Goal is often social justice
  o If we consider ‘reason’ as something external to history, then we can consider the past as dead, and a new generation as free from the chattels of that past. The possibilities for our future are created by our own reason, and not constrained by tradition, or suchlike.
  ♣ Locke considered the past as dead and therefore not a constraint on the future, which would be determined by our own reason, not constrained by tradition, etc. – we can call this nonhistorical or even antihistorical
  o Marx saw the struggle as emerging from history, so the past becomes both an opportunity to act, but a constraint that limits that action
  ♣ Breaking with past = good thing, but there remains a risk that nothing will change

Question 37

Epilogue – Ghandi vs. ambedkar

Answer 37

• Ghandi – didn’t need to understand caste or where it had come from – it was
  o simply harmful
  o For him the sacred texts of Hinduism were a means to build something new, provided that they are understood to be reasonable
  o Chakrabarty calls this ‘historicism’ – not bound in the past but understands and masters the structures of the past
• Ambedkar – sought to overhaul Hinduism and how it understood human life
  o Sought to reconstruct society on the basis of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity
  o A more Lockean abandonment of the past, Chakrabarty terms ‘decisionism’
• These need not be in contradiction, however. Ambedkar was decisionist in that wanted to abandon the caste system of India’s past. He also, however, adopted a historicist approach in seeking to understand why things had happened – he sought to understand what the causes and origin of practices such as sati and child marriage.
• Chakrabarty seeks to develop a more sophisticated outlook. One that goes beyond the limits of historicism, with its narratives that may constrain new approaches and outlooks. The challenge, he asserts, it to think of the present not one single thing.

Question 38

Summary - emphasis on present

Answer 38

• We must think about past and present in a nontotalising manner, and so avoid concepts that limit how we conceive the present – so for Marx the understanding of capital and how it was used presented a constraint on how the present was to be understood.
• He encourages us to think as ‘now’ as incomplete, and something that can be better understood more fully as time passes
• Humans are oriented towards the future, yet they live consciously with the knowledge of the past
• Our knowledge of the past forms a framework of constitutive principles for building a future – although this is not deterministic
• Enlightenment universal values mean then that the future aligns itself with the version of history that we have accepted.
• Or others align themselves with their histories
• Political modernity seeks to override these histories that we are already aligned with, and produce another one – this is what Marx sought to do. This requires the objectification of the past, one that seeks to construct a new narrative.

Question 39

Summary – tension involved in provincializing

Answer 39

• To provincialise Europe means living in tension
  o There are overarching principles – see for instance his chapter on Capital, or the Enlightenment’s goal to realise a universal humanity – important for social change
  o This needs to remain in tension with ‘ontic belonging’ which in religion gives us a sense of rooting and belonging that modernity cannot provide
  ♣ Ontic belonging – need to take seriously the impact of religion on wellbeing of adherents

Question 40

Summary – is that all there is to religion?

Answer 40

• There seems in the end of Chakrabarty’s book a sense that this might be all the value that he sees in religion – however, maybe he is just leaving it open so that individuals may decide its value beyond this….
• Does he suffer from an anthropological perspective?
• Does he purely view religion as valuable in its emotional function?