Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies

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Dipesh Chakrabarty is professor of history and of South Asian languages and civilizations at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Provincializing Europe: Portcolon¡al 7 hought and Historical Difference and Rethinking Working-Clan Hzrtory: Bengal

To ASHIS NANDY

and KRISHNA RAJ

1890-1940The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2002 by The Universiry of Chicago Al! rights reseeved. Published 2002 Printed in the United States ofAmerica

in appreciation

Biblioteca Daniel Cesio Villegas

11 10 09 08 07 06 05 040302 1 2 3 4 5

Ir:ventario j(J( ISBN: 0-226-10038-3 (cloth) ISBN: 0-226-10039-1 (paper) Library of Congress Cataloging - in-Publication Data Chakrabarry, Dipesh. Habitations ofmodernitv : essays in the wakc of subaltern studies / Dipesh Chakrabarty ; with a forcword by Homi K. Bhabha. Includes bibliographical referentes and índex. ISBN 0-226-10038-3 (eloth : alk. paper) - ISBN 0-226-10039-1 (paper : alk. papa) 1. India-Historiography. 2. India Politics and governmcnt. 3. Social justice-India. 1. Tide. DS435 C46 2002 954'.007'2-dc21

3 9 0 5 i3 wr 75 4 06

2002019210 ®The paper uscd in this publicaron meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Informaton Scicnces-Permanence of Paper fot Printed Libran Materials,ANSI Z39.48-1992.

000IM

F'oreword by Homi K. Bhabha Acknowledgments xv Introduction xix

ix

PART ONE: QUESTIONS OF HISTORY

1 A Small History of Subaltern Studies 3 2 Subaltern Histories and Post - Enlightenment Rationalism 20

3 Moderniry and the Past: A Critica¡ Tribute to Ashis Nandy 38 PART TWO: PRACTICES OF MODERNITY

4 IChadi and the Political Man 51 5 Of Garbage, Modernity, and the Citizen's Gaze 65

6 GovernmentalRootsofModernEthnicity 80

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VIII / ( >.TGSTS

PART THREF THE ETHICAL AND THE IN-HUMAN 7

The Subject of Law and the Subject of Narrativos 101

g vIemories of Displacement: fhe Poetrv and Prejudice of Dwclling 115 9 The In-Human and die Ethical in Communal Violcncc 133 Notes Tndex

149 165

The essence of language is frierdsbbp ana hospltality. -Emmanuel Levinas

To be asked to write a foreword purely out of friendship is to be granted a raro and generous freedom. While the professional critic may squint at the work's brillianee, aud the acolvte is often overcome by its aura, the fricnd approaches the work unburdened hy the need to praise or blame. The spirit of friendship lives in the shadows cast by raised banners and gleaming standards, and in thc midst of the cut and thrust of argumentation, friendship seeks out the unconditional voice of conversation. For conversation, as vou might hear it atnong the Chatterjees and the Banterjees at a Calcutta adda, chooses to follow the improvisational over the instrumental. Wandering away from thc "gravitational pulí of any explicit purpose," the conversation transforms sahat is contingent, turning what comes up in the course of conversation finto the sufficient grounds of a common, collaborative dialogue of interests and affiliations. All that 1 know about the utter seriousness of idle conversation, 1 learned from Dipesh Chakrabarty during our early morning telephone calls in Chicago. While those around us of firmer resolve and fleeter foot pulled on their Adidases and headed for the lake, we would retire to the telephone, teacups in hand, to resume our little adda á deux. While they jogged, our tongues wagged. Suddenly the midwestern morning would be painted in the distant colors of other daos, dawning belatedly in Calcuna and Bombay, or turning to dusk in Canberra and 1 ondon. AVe

X / FOREWORD FOREWORD / Xi

spoke each day, looking out opto the same bleached sky, Dipesh there and 1 here, the distante between os measured by a telephone wire along which wc threaded Che narratives of our lives and days. What we shared in [hose mcetings of everyday voices was a desire to be at honre in Che place and time in which we found ourselves. And that desire was no less true for being unrealizable. The uncannyhoming instinct that we shared did not come from a belief, or a sense ofrelief, in Che sufficiency of our present situations. Far from it. Wc were anchored in Che wayward memories of our making, and what drew us together in the midst of our journeys was our desire to shadow each other, ro be each other's stranger and friend, to share our different darknesses and doubts. No one has understood better than Joseph Conrad what compels Che joyous and difficult conversations of those who wander "over the face of Che earth, Che illustrious and Che obscure, earning beyond thc seas our fame, our money or only a trust of bread." For it is they-or indeed we-who are bound to each other, in history and story, "in Che name of that doubt which is Che inseparable parí of our knowledge" (LordJim, chap. 21).

What is Che task of Che foreword written out of friendship, and cast in Che conversarional mude? The friend toros to the finished text in a spirit of dialogue that is contingent, interruptive, insurgent. His purpose is to protect Che author from Che embrace of Che sententious. For [here is always an urgen[, if invisible, fine to be drawn between the author's sovereignrv and Che writer's survival. This is Che jagged lifeline of the text that will be revived, long afrer thc work is published, each time it is read and reread. The author performs his histrionic gestures of sincerity and authenticity in order ro conquer the world with Che facility of Che phrasemaker or the compass of Che mapmaker. The writer, on the other hand, risks his very integrity and singulariry in order to touch a world that he can no more conquer [han he can master language. In disclosing what human history renders disjunct or diverse, the wrirer reveals a worldly knowledge that draws humaniry together in a practice ofdoubt, a kind of knowledge that avises not hecause modero man knows roo much for trush to be resolved, but because "human kind cannot bear very much reality." The conversational friend plays on such doubts and distinctions berween sovereignry and survival. And in so doing, he draws forth Che unquiet spirit of writing that haunts Che author's histrionic gesture. The task of the foreword is to ask, What, my friend, have you risked in this work? Are you willing to drive us beyond Che limit of our understanding and Che directive line ofyour reasoning? Are you declaiming these truths from Che repose of your disciplinary divan, making disciples of os all? Or will you set us free to wander in [hose places that you leave open to the future-

those gaps where emotions and insights have yerto find adequate forms of speech? Tell os why suddenly your voice fails, and your passion Cakes shape, in Che inchoate, the interruptive, the contingent? And why is it that in that very fading of your voice we see you practice Che art of a darker doubt in which your words bind us to a common history and a shared conversation? My friendship with Dipesh has provoked [hese questions "in Che name of that doubt which is Che inseparable part of our knowledge," and reading Habitations of Modernity now helps me understand them. The historian's practice of doubt, Dipesh suggests, must not be read merely as a heuneneutic of suspicion, peeling away Che protocols of disciplinary power to reveal Che presente of Che obscure, subaltern subject. This line of argument often leads to the injunction "Only Historicize" and seeks to emancipare [hose who have been "hidden from history." But [hese outlaws, [hese peoples without a history, are frequently delivered to his. tory by being marched through Che defiles of a secular modernity. When they arrive at Che signposts ofprogress, they are shorn oftheir stories and traditions; they are no longer hidden from history, but they have turned into spectral figures, transparent testimonies to Che worldly triumph of a secular capitalist moderniry. When modero world history contemplares its achievements and transformations in this light, it fails to represen[ the passions and perversities of those modernities that have a pre- or postcolonial genealogy. In Che company of Ranajit Guha and Ashis Nandy, Dipesh argues that Che modero social sciences may develop philanthropic pedagogies that seek to spread "scientific rationality, democratic politics, and modera aesthetics" (p. 39) across the world, but in so doing, they endow themselves with a surveillant vision and a disciplinary prescience, failing to understand that "[here are parts of society that remain opaque to Che theoretical gaze of Che modere analyst.... [I]t seems ... that cultural practices have a dark side. We cannot see finto them, noteverywhere" (p. 45).

When Che glass of theory turras dark, must we abandon ourselves to experience and pragmatism? Do we espouse a practice of doubt only when our speculative systems are defeated? Enter that historical and theoretical darkness, Dipesh argues, free oneself and others from Che benighted conditions of oppression, but also register a deep doubt about Che enlightened career of Che "self-inventing hero of modero life" (p. 46). The dynamic of darkness and doubt leads Dipesh ro probe what progressive historians have roo easily dismissed as the "problem of the undesirable pass" as it encroaches on contemporary politics. There is no question that [hese dark cides of history-sati, child marriage, communal violente, infanticide, poverry-must be transformed finto a growing

FORI'.tA'oUU / x111 XII j FoRF\4o], l,

"a mod e otrelating... in No hilo( hi Sto'leal a ti,¡ contingenr difternxela democratic dialogue berreen empowercd groups and freer uadividuals. But the dream of a total root-and-hranch social nanstormation-be it liberal, socialist, anarchist, or marxist- -e ven uc hen it is dreamed on behall of the righrs of the subaltern or thc oppressed, is parr of a political imaginary that can onla think in terms of "the wltole called thc sea te" (p. 35 ). ]n resisting ihe sublatorv narrarives of statc-ccntered transccndent histories and polirics, Dipesh dares us ro imagine a modal and moral form ofpolitical agency ftxmded on thc suhaltern's °fragmentarV and episodic" experience ofhistorv and citizenship:

Can we imagine another moment of subaltern history, une in which we stay-permanently, not simply as a master of political tactic-with that which is fragmentary and episodic? ... lf the stadst idea of the political defined the mainstream of political thought, then here may he an alternative conceptual pote to it: in idea of the political that did nos require us to imagine totatitics.... What kind of (modern) social justice would one envisage as one embraced the fragment? ... ... This is an ideal figure. No actual member of the subaltern ctasses would resemble what 1 imagine here. The question is, Are there moments in the life practices of the subaltern ctasses that would allow us to construct such an agent? The Buddhist imagination once saw the possibiliny of the joyful, renunciare bhikshu (monk) in the miserable and deprived image of the bhikshuk (beggar). We have not yen learned to see the spectrat doubles that may inhabit our Marxism-inspired images of the subaltern. (pp. 34, 36) In these concluding figures of spectral doubles we see, once again, the struggle berween the author's sovercign sententiousness and tire writer's subaltern, survivalist ethic played out in the act of identifying tire subaltern spirit of the Buddhist imagination. Dipesh's call for a political imaginary of the future-"Can we imagine ... [Tjhere may be ..."-at once casts doubt on the present stare of theory and pofitics, while sowing seeds to be harvested in die history of another time. In our contemporary moment we suddenly see the passing of a proleptic future, a,vayward passage of time-future's present-that only the conversation of friends can bring to life. As the subaltern agent doubles as monk and beggar, we are warned that Chis may be only an idealized figure, history's wager with fiction, as no actual member of the subaltern classes mav resemble the image. Indeed, we have ves to learn to see, ... And yet, ove do see. In Chis counterfactual dialogue ofspectral doubting, where the Buddha and Gramsci grect each other in a virtual embrace, a kind of actualitv is revealed. For the spectrat signifies in inviolable, ethical proximity

oeither reified nor erased hut negotiated° p 140;- that Dipe>h has brought to lite in his remarkahle hlunting of historo, mane human and in -Itunrao habit ations.

Homi K. 13habha

HC6[IOWEEDGME113

The essays included here were written over the past ten years or so. The intellectual and personal debts that 1 incurred in those years are acknowledged in more detail in my Provincializing Europe. In order to avoid repetition, let me just say that discussions with members of the editorial collective of Subaltern Studies and the experience of reading their work have been absolutely essential to chis enterprise. Friends such as Shahid Amin, David Arnold, David Bennett, Gautam Bhadra, Alice Bultard, Philip Darby, Greg Dening, Simon During, Michael Dutton, Leeta Gandhi, Keya Ganguly, David Hardiman, Christopher Healy, Robin Jeffrey, Sudipta Kaviraj, David Lloyd, Shail Mayaram, Jon Mee, Donna Merwick, Meaghan Morris, Stephen Muecke, Aamir Mufti, che late D. R. Nagaraj, Gyan Pandey, Rajyashree Pandey, M. S. S. Pandian, Sanjay Seth, Ajay Skaria, Susie Tharu, and Patrick Wolfe have been patient listeners and have given affection, encouragement, and criticism in equal pares. They deserve very special thanks. Two institutions have supported my work in the past ten years: che University of Melbourne and che University of Chicago. I am grateful to my colleagues at and the students, staff, and administrators of these universities for all che help and stimulation that they have afforded me. The Australian Nacional University (ANU) has, on several occasions, hosted me as a visiting fellow in various departments: che Department of Asian and Pacific History in che Research School of Pacific Studies, che Department of History in che School of Social Sciences, che Humanities Research Centre (HRC), and the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research. .xv

ACICN( xvl In ,a\ XVI 1 A(KN)R9F.DG^1 E> I5

Iain VIcCalman, che director of che H RC:, and Benjamin pennv ot AN U deserve a special cxpression of grateful and warm thanks tbr tire tintiring support that thev have given ntv- vcork. Intellectual collaboration over che vcars with Lcila AbuLughod, Sara Castro-Klaren, Fernando Coronil, l\ alter Mignolo, -1 imothv- Mitchcll, and Stephen Vlastos, among others, has given me a sharpcr sensc rhan 1 would have liad othcrvvisc of Clic divel sity that global nx)daunv contains. 1 also vvarnila acknovvlcdgc tire czccllenr assistancc ami good counsel that 1 reccived from Richard Delacv in preparing chis book tor publication.

The friendship ofArjun Appadurai, Homi Bhabha, Carol Breckenridge, C. M. Naim, Sheldon Pollock, and Clinton Seely at the University of Chicago has been a privilege thatI have had che good fortune to enjoy sincc 'joining that institution. My rich interactions with these colleaguesespecially my daily carly-morning phone conversations with Bhabha, conversations that seem to course their wav through the mundane, the spiritual, and the philosophical with equal Base-and their warm affection have been among the assets of my life. To Bhabha 1 am also grareful for agreeing to write a foreword to this book. Mv existence in Chicago has also been enriched by Ihe recent presence of Kunal and Shubhra Chakrabarti from Delhi and Beppe Karlsson froni Uppsala, all three visitors to the university in the academic year 2000-2001. Over the years, Partha Chatterjee, Barun De, Ranajit Guha, Anthony Low, Asok Sen, and Gayatri Spivak have taught me a grcat deal through their writings, criticisms, and conversations. 1 continue to learn from their work. The warm and generous friendship of my editor, Alan Thomas, has eased the path of this book through che procedures of che press. My thanks to him and to che readers he chose for the critica) and helpfatl comments that guided tire work of revision. 1 also thank him for suggesting rhe book's title. And, last but not least, it is a pleasure to acknowledge che support that I have received from nty parents, from my sister and hcr fatnily, from Kaveri, and from Arko. Itwill remain a lasting regret that ntv father, who lived and emotionally supported me through the years during vvhich 1 worked on these essays and on Provincializing Europe, did not live ro see che resulting books in princ. Earlier versions of the essays collected here were published in che following journals and anthologies and are reprinted here with permission: Chapter 1 in A Companion to Posteolonial Studies, ed. Henry Schwartz and Sangeeta Ray (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), and in Nepantla: Vieras from South 1, no. 1 (2000): 9-32. Chapter 2 in Economic and Political

Isus r, rlnires, nos. -R licekly, 8 April 1995, 751 59. Chaprer 3 in Jovrnal a/ H711995- 96): 168-7, (vvv-vv-tandhco.uk). ('haprer 4 in 1 1999): 3- l3 (Copen ^ht C^ D1anagcmcnt ( Crinc mar) l'alncs 5, no. ti)r Hunnn Aalues, 1odian 1nstitutc of ^Alanagcmcnt. (alcutia. 1999 Al! rights scrvcd. Rcproduccd with che permission o1 thc opNIight re holder and ncc publishcrs, Sage Publications India I'vt 1 ti., Ncu Delhi, 14, no. 1 : lunc 1991 I. 1,-32, and in India) Chapter 5 in Soatb Asta W,¿k/v, _ 14 Mach 1992. 541 47. ( hapter 6 Eraaeomrc and Political 1, no_ 1 , 1993) ivcvv vc randLco ul. Chapret in in Cornnzunal/Pl/(r, 1, ed. Donna Mervvick (MAlclbournc Departmcnt ot Dangerotis Liaison, History, University of Melbourne, 1994). Chapter 8 in a special issuc of Economic and Political Weekly, 10 SouthAsia 18 (1995): 109-30, and in August 1996, 21-43. 1 dedicate rhe book to Ashis Nandy and Krishna Raj. Nandy strikcs me as one of the most democratic of Indians whom 1 have personalhy raer. His faith in Indian democracy is profound and moving. IUisltna Raj 1 hace never met personally. Yet 1 have admircd from a distancc tire breadth of vision and rhe spirit of toleranee for rival vievvs vvith vvhich he Economic and Political Yl'c€klr. 1 cdits thc distinguishcd Indian journal offer chis book to them as a token of my apprcciation ofnccir contributions to Indian democracy.

111115111111

Moderniry is easy to inhabit but difficult to define. If modernityis to be a definable, delimited concept, we must identify some people or practices or concepts as nonmodern. In the nineteenth century and che early twentieth, the task seemed clear to political philosophers such as J. S. Mil¡ and L. T. Hobhouse. Following the tenets of the European Enhghtenment, many Western intellectuals thought of modernity as the rulo of institutions that delivered us from the thrall of al( that was unreasonable and irracional. Those who fell outside its ambit could be described as premodern. Western powers in their imperial mode saw modernity as coeval with the idea of progress. Nationalists saw in it the promise of development. Many Indian writers continued, as we shall see, to think along these fines well roto the 1970s. But today-after anticolonial, feminist, environmentalist, and other new social movements have radicalized our sense of democracy-these older definitions produce a moral dilemma. Can the designation of something or some group as non- or premodern ever be anything but a gesture of the powerful? For a country such as India, the question takes very specific forms. India is, constitutionally, a democracy. It holds elections that are, on the whole, regular, fair, and free. It has an active and free press. Every adult Indian, theoretically speaking, enjoys political rights guaranteed by the country's constitution. Even the nonliterate members of the peasantry and the urban working classes enjoy these entitlements. Pubtic life in India is necessarily influenced by che active political presence of these classes. They bring roto che sphere of the politcal their own ideas xix

t 1 IU>t,t-( rtf)N / xxi xx / IArR01,1 ( 1ION

of weIl-hein„ lustice, gods, spirits, rcligion, magic, and so ora. This is not a case oí ncc so-called intrusion ot ncc tradicional loto clic rcalm of the modem. ¡'he subalte n ciasses are as caught up in modero insriru tions as thc middle and uppcr classes are And Chis is w-hat produces somc ofthc most challenging questions of Indian modernity.

How do wc, for instance, characterizc ncc intellectual worlds of clic pcasant and che subaltern classes svho are our contcmporaries vet ,rhose lile practicas consrantly challengc our "modern" distinctions bet,vecn che secular and che sacred, boceen che feudal and che capitalist, betwecn che nonrational and che racional? The old imperial option of looking down on them through some version of che idea of backwardness has lost lis appeal. Increasingly, we want the process of democratization to be itsclf democratic. The farther afield the process of democratization ranges, and tic more radical thatprocess becomes, che more we are challenged to rethink our stance as self-conscious political subjects oí' modernitv. So how would one write of forms of modernitv that have deviated from all canonical understandings of the term? Therc have been several scholarly responses to chis question. Most revolve around contesting the idea that modernity has any necessary, ideal- 'pical form. Some scholars prefer the label alternativa or plural modernities, while ochers write about modernity at large.> These are useful, critical,ideas, but they still leave us with the problem that we must first distinguish what modernity is before we can go on to determine what it is not. And che concept modernity loses value as a concept if evervthing in che world is by definition modero (altcrnatively or not). Some, of course, question the value of che verv idea of modernity, but che word is all around Lis, and it may already be roo late to legislare its uses.2 It is, of course, entirely possible that che word modernity has outlived its utility as a rigorous concept and is naostly of rhetorical value in today's debates. Yct it is a word that we cannot do without in che everydav context of discussions of democracy and developmenc. It comes into use in che lame way as words like medieval or feudal circulare in ordinary speech. as expressions of moral value. Premodern, backward, medieval-these historicist tropes survive in our rhetoric even when wc no longer unquestioningly believe in che universalit or applicability of these ideas. But the rhetoric itself may be taken as a sigo that, in, spite of our contemporarv intellectual incredulirv toward them, historicist or stagist ideas of history and modernin' are never fiar from our thoughts. Wc mu st, thercfore, engage and reengage our ideas about modernity in a spirit of constant vigilance. This is where Chis book mav have a claim on che actention of che non

specialist reader. The primarv questionc that moneare it are not peculiar ro India. Al ncc hcart ofthem al) arecertaiu problcros nuty sltared manta postcolonial historiaras all ovar the woild. Hosv do wc think about cite global legacv of the }iurope.m 8nlightennunt in lands tar aun tion, in or documcnt u❑ avFs .uo-t geography or historv? How do >ve cnisio rope heing modcrn that will speak to that wthich is shared across che world

as wcll as u> citar ,vhich belong, to humeo cultural divcrsitt? Hosv do wc resist che tendencv in our chinking to justito che violence that accompanies imperial or criumphalist nxnnents of modanito? Hose do tve also construct critiques of popular violence citar have, frc,m umc ro time, toro apart-and/or given birth to-communicies and nations ot modero times?

My work has been associated for about tw o decades now witlr the Oxford Universiry Press series Subaltern Studies, launched in 1982 andar clic intellecmal lcadership of Ranajit Guita. In the discussions that followcd che publication of these volumes, modernity, the nation-state, and che idea of history itself emerged as important atad controversiel Copies. The risa of an aggressive, cultural nationalism in India in the 1980sa Hindu Right that deliberately targeted Muslim and Christian minorides for discriminatory treaunent-understandably colored much ofwhat was said in these debates. Feeling besieged, Indian scholars ora che Left often pinned their hopes for che fttture to a purist allegiance to che tenets of Marxism and liberalism. They argued citar che "linguiscic" and "posthistoriaras-along structuralist" turra in the writings of Subaltern Studies with che "critiques of modernity" developed by writers such as Ashis Nandy-played straight finto che hands of Hindu cultural nationalists. The critics of modernity, if thev can be so called, argued, ora che other hand, that the ailments of India belonged to che pathologies of modernity itself. The debate, thus, became completely polarized, both cides elaborating murually exclusive positions encouraged by che contingencies of political and social conflicts in India and feeding on similar ideologically driven controversies in che universities of che West.3 But che polarization exaggerared the differences betwcen nce rwo sides. My purpose in this book is to suggest wavs of going hevond che sterile opposition of entrenched black-and-N\ hite distinctions thar has been produced by diese controversies. We'are al¡, one cvav or another, producís of world capitalism and the institutions, practices, and ideas that have accompanied it. Whar is at issue in thcse essays is che veny sature of modernity in colonial and postcolonial India. India, one piar reasouabk argue, became decidedlr capitalist through tito period of British cale and afcer, hut Chis has not meanr the hegemony of bourgeois or liberal practices in Indian social lifc. It is now aceepted almost universally citar che

XXII / INTRODUCTION INTRODUCTION / XXIII

electoral and populist aspeces of Indian democracy have encouraged people tu challenge older hierarchies ofpower and status. But that does not cocan that social relations and the relations of produdtion in the country have become bourgeois or liberal in any recognizable way. Today's India is more democratic if one considers the impact of universal adult fianchise on Indian public lile generally. More and more conflicts in contemporary India gel caught up in political processes than ever before. A small, local conflict can burgeon loto a massive drama drawing loto its dynamics political parties, institutions, and personalities. Yet greater democracy does not mean that ehe rules of public debate in India or rhe cultural codes for the expression ofauthority and power in everyday lile are necessarily liberal or even nonviolent. Yes, Indian public life is more democratic than before-and, in rhat sense, modero-but ir is flor thereby necessarily rendered more civil. Verbal, physical, and symbolic violence underwriting relations of dominarion and subordination are tu be seen in every deparement of life: from relations of production to rclationships in rhe family. The ftmdamental problem ofhow one might characterize Indian modernity has remained at the center of scholarly disputatioris on the subject. The labeling exercise on rhe part of rhe Left and the liberal intelligenrsia has, on the whole, been an attempt to qualify categories characteristic of European metahistories by attaching to them negative particles or prefixes. Not bou geois, not capitalist, not liberal, and so onthese have been our predominant ways of summing up Indian modernity. "Incomplete modernity" oran "incomplete bourgeois revolution," as sorne of rhe essays collected here will show, was the catchphrase of Indian intellectuals on rhe Left in rhe 1970s and 1980s. Ranajir Guha's label-dovninance withour1bourgeoisj hegemony-was perhaps rhe most successfid attempt of al] to find a positive way of describing the situation, hut, even there, rhe negative function of rhe word without can hardly be missed. The negative labeling of positive phenomena is, ultimately, unsatisfactory. But it cannot be ascribed to any failure of intelligence or erudition. The problem, it has seemed to me for some time, lies in ehe very categories of social science and political philosophy with which we think. Unlike in rhe case of the categories of rhe mathematical sciences or other disciplines that allow a formal presentation of problems, iris difficult for social-science categories to attain a universality rhat is completely free of historical and contingent differences berween societies. While such categories are cminently translatable across societies and should, indeed, be so rranslated in rhe inrerest of social justice, they are also dogged by problems ehat arise from such acts of translarion. This happens because

societies are not tabulae rasae. They come with their own plural histories that have already been imbibed by their members through certain shared dispositions, skills, competencies, and sentiments. Our use of negative labels may be read as an índex of the problems of translation that we, academic intellectuals, encounter in describing Indian social acts through rhe filler of European-derived social sciences and political philosophies. These questions are taken up in rhe essays that follow. There is, as such, no one single argument to which the essays sum, but they contain intersecting themes. 1 have found it convenient to collect the essays in three pares in order to highlight some of rhe themes addressed in them. The flrst parí, "Questions of History," is organized around historiographic debates. 1 begin with a "small history" of Subaltern Studies. It explains how Subaltern Studies carne to speak to certain problems of political modernity and democracy in India and attempts to give a thumbnail sketch of the history of ehe series. The next two essays broaden the scope of the discussion by raising questions about rhe role of the past in constructions of modernity in colonial countries. Sumit Sarkar's critieisms of Subaltern Studies and Ashis Nandy's critiques of rhe discipline of history, respectively, provide my starting points in these chapters. The second part, "Practices of Modernity," contains essays ehat focus on specific cultural and institutional sites of modero India. 1 have included here a speculative reading of khadi, rhe Gandhian dress of the male politician in India; an essay un the politics of civic consciousness (or the lack thereof) visible in Indian public spaces; and a piece examining nhe governmental roots ofmodern ethnicity. The third parí, "The Ethical and rhe In-Human," contain rhree essays working their way toward an appreciation of some of the ethical dilemmas and ambiguities that arise when we write-as, indeed, we must-on behalf of projects for greater social justice. The first of [hese essays investigates rhe relation between law and narrative in the srructuring of modem political desires. The final two essays relate tu the memories and politics of rhe popular violente that rocked British India when it was divided in 1947 ro creare ehe modern nation-states of India and Pakistan. Both [hese esgays relate primarily to contemporary discussions in India of rhe significance ofthe Partition. I must acknowledge here a criticism that is ofen made of this discussion by Pakistani intellectuals that Indian scholars tend to see rhe Parririon predominantly as a rragedy, missing rhe fact that,it gaye birth to rhe new nation of Pakistan. 1 do not think that 1 escape Chis criticism. Some of rhe essays included here bear the birthmarks of the debates within which they were boro I worked on these essays during rhe same years I was working on my Provincialtzing Europe.4 There is, naturally,

XXIV / INIAODUCIION

some overlap berween the intelectual concerns of rhe two books.'Ihis is partieularly true of chapter 7 and parís of chapter I in Chis book. Bar 1 Nave let the sha red sitnilatities stand because 1 tclt thar 1 pursued a direc tion of analvsis here that 'vas significantlc different from the goals that 1 had set mvself in wrinng Prorincializing Errope. What all these essavs are searching for is a berter understanding of thc complexitics ofmodernity in India and tor principies of humaneness rhat mav elude our political theorics. Thev seek to write about modernirv self-reflexivelv.'I'he turn tovvard che ethical at the ene ofthe book is also a pica to keep in view-even as we write politically and in search of a more justworld-the dilernmas ofwhat Hannah Arendt once sagaciously called "the human condition."s Far too hastily, it has often seemed to me, upe now equate being human with being political. I recognize the equation as one belonging to the mood of contemporary democracies. 1 inevitably share in that mood but recognize that it sometimes maíces us cut intellectual corners. The essays here struggle with that tendencv-from which 1 claim no immunirv-by pointing tovvard problems of analvsis that admit no casv solutions. It would be foolish to elaim either success or finality for the intellectual positions that 1 adopt in these essays. 1 bring them together in the knowledge that the debates in which rhev participate are still with us, in one form or another. 1 obviously make an assumption here: that self-reflexivity about the political and the modern is itself something political. The more we become aware that some of the intellectual and moral quandaries thrown up by the exigencies of democracy and development may not admit of any a priori solutions, the less capable we are ofjustifying-in an a priori manner-the violen and undemocratic steps that the process of becoming modem appears also to entail.

OII^ A Small History of Subaltern Studies

de-ranging critique of postcolonial studies, Arif Dirlik suggests that, while the historiographic innovations of Subaltern Studies are welcome, they are mere applications of methods pioneered by British Marxist historians, albeit modified by "Third World sensibilities." Dirlik writes: "Most of the generalizations that appear in the discourse of postcolonial intellectuals from India may appear novel in the historiography of India but are not discoveries from broader perspectives.... [T]he historical writings of Subaltern Studies historians ... represent the application in Indian historiography of trends in historical writings that were quite widespread by the 1970s under the impact of social historians such as E. P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, and a host of others."t Without wishing either to inflate the claims oí Subaltern Studies scholars or to deny what they may, indeed, have learned from the British Marxist historian, 1 would like to demonstrate that Dirlik's reading of Subaltern Studies seriously misjudges that which makes the series a postcolonial project. To that end, 1 provide here a "small" history o£ the series. I call chis history small, not simply because of its brevity, but also because, 3

" 1"s s1l "11 F / ) A SMMAIJ. i i i S I ( O Í R } ' oP SI "1 4 ) (:HAPTER O,Ar

following Benjamin's `small historc" of photographv, the narrativo hese has a verv particular cnd in focas. 1 argue -ac,ainst crines srho have adrised othernise-ISI1v subaltern stLi iies could mesar he a mere repro duetion in India of the ;_nglish rradition of wiiting °historc trom hc lose."

SUBALTERN STUDIES AND DEBATES !N MODERN

gifts co 1ndia as tnüts of stru gglcs undaimcd, viere flor sItM jo VN.6A1/21

carne in (br a substnntial aoIount of iosIn tic 1990s, Subaltern Studies , tilc criticism, parcicularla in India, on thc grounds that thc Maryist err tique that informed the eadicr (jumes in tic series had beca replaced bv a critique of the rationalism that markcd tic FUI ')¡'Can 1- nli0hte0 thc Hindu Righr,nc ^ enucssav 011 the "fascist' sature ot mear. In nn

1110

Subaltern Histories and Post-Enlightenment

Rationalism Yes, 1 know ali that. 1 should be modero. Marry again. See strippers at the Tease. Touch Africa. Go to thc Movies. Impale a six-inch spider under a leas. Join the Testban, or become The Outsider. Or pay to shake my fist (or whatever-you-call-it) ata psychoanalyst. And when I burra I should smile , dry-eyed, and nurse martinis like the Marginal Man. But sorry, 1 cannot unlcarn conventions of despair. They have their pride. 1 must seek and will find my particular hell onh' in mv Hindu mirad: must translate and turn till 1 blister and roast. A. K. Ramanujan, "Convcnrions ofDcspalr"

20

ncnt lndian historian Suma Sarkar spelled out why a critique of Enlight al, enment rationalism is dangerous in India today. His propostit°nd so as follows: (1) "Fascist idcolorn in Europc . . thing to a general turra-of-the-centnrv move away from what viere felt to be the sterilc rigidities of Enlightenment rationalism." l2 "Not dissiwilar ideas have become current intellectual coro in the West, and bs estension, they have started to influence lndian academic life." (3) It has "already become evident" that these "current academic fashions" (Sarkar menúons "postmodernism") "can reduce the resistance of intcllectuals to the ideas of Hindutva [Hinduness]." Sarkar is critical of the kind of social analysis that carne out of, for instante, tlte "History of Consciousness" program at the University oí` California, Santa Cruz: `1711e `critique of colonial discoñrse' ... has stimulated fonos of indigenism not easy to distinguish from the standard Sangh parivar [a collection of organizations belonging to che Hindu Right] argument ... that Hindutva is superior to Islam and Christianity (and by, extension to the creations of the modera West like science, democracy or Marxism) because of its allegedly unique roots." He warns that "an uncritical cult of the `popular' or `subaltern,' particulady when combined with thc rejection of Enlightenment rationalism ... can lead even radical historians down strange paths" that, for him, bear "ominous" resemblance to Mussoliui's condemnation of the "teleological" idea of progress and t to H1tler's over hairsplitting intelligence. exaltation of the German volk Subaltern Gautum Bhadra and 1, identified as two "members of the editorial team," are Sarkar's examples ofhistorians who have been Studies led down "strange paths" by their "uncritical adulation of the subaltern" have and their "rejection of Enlightenment rationalism"a Similar points scholars in recent times.3 The been made agairist other Subaltern Studies accusations are not unique to the Jadian situation. Readers may be reThe Truth of postmodernism, which arminded of Christopher Norris's gued that postmodernist critiques of universalism and Enlightenment rationalism preached, in effect, a form of cultural relativism that cuas at least politically irresponsible, if not downright dangerous 4 Maintaining a critical position with respect to the legacies of the Europeas Enlightenment docs not, however, entail a wholesalc rejection of the tradition of rational argumentation or of rationalism itself. Responding to Sar-

22 / CHAPTER TWU

kar's cliarges allows me to demonstrate why a critical take on the legacies ofthe Enlightenment may, in fact, be parí of the contemporary struggle to democratizo historiography.

HYPERRATIONALISM AND THE COLONIAL MODERN At stake in this Indian debate is an important question about how and in what tercos one may, in writing subalternhistories, see the subaltern classes as political actors. Theoretical conceptions of the political are always secular. But political action by peasants during and alter the nationalist movement often involved the agency ofgods and spirits. Is this necessarily an undesirable form of political imagination? Should the peasant be educated out of this tendency? The constitution makers of India accepted the need for a separation of religious and political institutions. By talking about Hinduness and the Hindu heritage, the new Hindu Right appears to mix politics with religion. But what is religion? The idea of a personal religion-the freedom to pursue religion as parí ofone's rights ofcitizenship-is guaranteed by the Indian constitution. But what of religious practices that do not base themselves on the idea of a personal or spiritual preferente or quest? Most Hindu religious festivais and rituals having to do with different deities are of that nature. What happens when these particular gods come into the sphere of the modern political? There has been since colonial times an intellectual tradition in India that has often equated idolatry with the practices of the superstitious. Intcllectuals of the Left belong, on the whole, to that tradition. Basing political action on sentiments having to do with the birthplace of the urythical god-king Ram and inciting anti-Muslim and anti-Christian feelings in the narre of Hinduness-as the Hindu Right has done-have been, for them, examples of the irrational in political life. They have sought to secure Indian secularism in the cultivation of a rational outlook. Subaltcrn histories that appeared to emphasize and endorse political imaginations in which gods have agency have, therefore, incurred the wrath of the Indian old Left. Yet, however unhappy the category may be, religion is a major and enduring fact of Indian political Iife. Political sentiments in the subcontinent are replete with elements that could be regarded as religious, at least in origin. But Indian historian-the best of whom today are of a Marxist or Left-liberal persuasion-have never been able to develop any framework capable of comprehending the phenomenon. Sarkar's own handling of it in the past reflects Chis shared failure, His The Swadeshi Movementin Bengal, a study of the nationalist movement that broke out

SUBALTERN HISTORIES AND RATIONALISM / 23

in Bengal around the year 1905 against the British decision to partition Bengal, is undoubtedly one of the most important monographs of modem Indian historys Yet there is a remarkable failure of the intellect in Chis book every time it is a question of interpreting or explaining the role that religion played in this political movement. The Swadeshi movement was, as Sarkar himself so carefully documenta, absolutely tull pf Hindu religious sentiments and imagination. It was this movement that, more than any other pitase in modern Bengali history, helped bring to Iife and immortalize, for both Muslims and Hindus, the image of Bengal as a mother goddess demanding love and sacrifice from her children. But Sarkar's understanding of chis religious imagination remains wholly instrumentalist. He is willing to grant that a modern political movement may have to use religion as a mean to a political end (and particularly so in a peasant society), but he can only disapprove of moments when, for the historical actors involved, religion looked like becoming an end in itself. He writes: What seems indisputable is that the other-worldly pull of religion tended to assert itself particularly at moments ofstrain and frustration. Religion cultivated atfirst as a mean to the end of mass conraer and stimulation of morale, could all toa easily become an end in itself. The process of inversion is reflected clearly in Aurobindo's [a nationalist leader] famous Uttarpara speech ... "I spoke once before with this force in me and 1 said then that this movement is not a political movement and that nationalism is not politics but a religion, a creed, a faith. 1 say it again today, but I put it in another way. 1 say no longer that nationalism is a creed, a religion, a faith; 1 say that it is the Sanatan Dharma which for us is nationalism." (emphasis added)6 The pulí of Hindu gods and goddesses is hardly of a kind that one could call otherworldly. But, even setting that point to one side, it is olear that, while religion as a means is acceptable to Sarkar, religion as an end in itself is not. For him, the political as a domain necessarily remains separate from the religious. He never considers the possibility that a religious sensibiliry might also use a political structure and a political vocabulary as means to achieve an end or in the interest of an imagined life form in which the political could not be told apart from the religious. For that is indeed the borden ofAurobindo's speech, from which Sarkar seems to have his ear turned away. Why does Chis happen? Why does one of our most capable and knowledgeable historians fail to give us any insight into moments in the history of our political and public Iife when the European distinction between

Slti-RC HIS9tuRn

>S ANI) ItA'rI(^^a.ISSI 2^

24 / (11 APSER T\S0

thtc shcred and the secular appears to collapsd Ihe answer is not far to seek. Ir is because Sarkar looks on histurv as the stonv of a perpetual struggle benveen the forces of rcason in(¡ humanran, on the one side, and thosc of emotion and faith, un thc othcr, and sve are lcft in no doubt as to which side Sarkar himself is on. Of the Ssvadeshi movement he writes in a manner that also discloses to us his s iew of this ideological hatdegrouud on svhich he positions himself "[Au1 . important theme 1 of the Ssvadeshi movement 1 is the ideulugical conflict benveen modernista and traditionalism-betsvecn an attitude svhich broadly speaking demands social reforms, tries to evalnatc things and ideas bv the criteria of reason and present-dav utility, and bases itself on a humanism seeking to transcend limits of caste and religion; and a logically opposite trend which defends and justifies existing social mores in the name of immemorial tradition and the glorious past, and which tends to substitute emotion and faith for reason."7

This strong split between emotion and rcason, I suggest, is part of the story of colonialism in India. Scientific rationalism, or the spirit of scientific inquiry, was introduced ¡tito colonial India from the very beginning as an antidote to (Indian) religion, particularly Hinduism, which was scen-both by missionaries and by adntinistrators, and in spite of tire Orientalists-as a bundle of superstition and magic. Hinduism, wroee the Scottish missionary Alexander Duffin 1839, is "a stupendous system of error."s Indeed, early missionary-founded schools in Bengal were more liberal and secular in their curricula than were their counterparts in England. Missionaries did not perceive much contradiction benveen rationalism and the precepts of Christianity and assumed that an awakening to reason, rather than the more provocative strategy of direct conversion, would itself lead to the undermining of the superstition that made up Hinduism. As Michael Laird writes of the period: "Apara from a genuine desire to advance learning for its own sake, the missionaries also believed that western science would undermine belief in the Hindu scriptures; the new geography, for example, could hardly be reconciled with the Puranas.... ['Phey] thus acted as instigators of an intellectual awakening, or even revolution, ... [and their] schools were obvious agents of such a Christian Enlightemment. There is incidentally an instructive contrast with contemporary England, where the wide curriculum that was.beginning to appear in Bengal was still very unusual in cielnentary schools." Even the very act of mastering English, wrote Alexander Duff, must make "the student ... tenfold less the child of Pantheism, idolatry and superstition than before."° It is this simultaneous coding of (Western) knowledge itself as rational and Hinduism as something that was both a religion and a bundle of

superstirions thar launched the career of a certain kind o¡ c(110111,11 hvperconsciously carne tu re ratioualism among Indian intellectuals ssbo self Of course, there hase beca important Ingard thcroselves a, modern . and atter- Raminohun Roe dian intellectuals both beforc British role d Ssvami Davanand Sarasss ati and even the natiunallst scicnust j an <solio strovc , nur unlike tanta' intel Bose svould fall into this catcgoty to develop dialogues hetAvicen science and lectuals in European bistorv , re 11,1 teligiun.10 But rescarch on hosv diese he itages hasc intluaucd ti In India is still in rus tuse of modern academic htxtsvledgc tbrnraduns carly stages. The se¡¡-image uf modern lndian secular scholarship, tiadarly the strands that flow'ed into Marxtst social history wrning, 'oí view of the world as "disenchanted," only partakes of the social sciences ' but even displays antipathy to anything that smacks of the religious. The , remarkable for result has been a certain kind of paralysis of imagination a country whpse people have never shown any sense of emharrassment about being able to imagine the supernatural in a variety of forros. these developments in India shared something of the To be sure , century Enlightenment in Europe to the extent spirit of the eighteenth " meant repudiation that, for al¡ its internal diversity, the Enlightenment ofthe irrational and the superstitious": "Insofar as it was concerned with the l8th cemury Enlightemment ... prosocial and political questions , duced a great variety of mutually incompatible ideas.... Eor all Chis, there were points on which people with any claim to being nevertheless , Particularly , Enlightenment enlightened were agreed in every country . .... To be meant the repudiafion of the irrational and the superstitious superstitious was to believe in the supernatural." 1 t

Historians today are generally more sensitive to the divcrsity within Nor would they be unaware of the many connecthe Enlightenment . tions forged in Europe between science and religion. But what propagated itself among modem Indian intellectuals was something like-to -" the protake Preserved Smith's expression somewhat out of context paganda of Reason," which equated modernity with the possessiun of the scientific outlookand ignorance with superstition-as, indeed, Smith himself did in his ostro book on thc Enlightenment. 12 The secular rationalism of the Indian intellectual carried with it an aggressively hostile attitude toward religion and.everything that the practices of Hinduism, or public life-secmed whether in the context ufkinship , life-cycle rituals to sanctify.13 and, on the whole, unreWhv this carne to be so is a long, involved , searched story. The problem is not the so-called alienation ofthe secular s religious elements. The Hindu intellectual in India from tbe countrv ' Right often makes Chis criticism of the Left, and Sarkar is quite right to

26 / CILll'TER I WU

reject ¡t.14 The problem is, rather, that we do not have analytic categories in our aggressively secular academic discourse that do justice to che real, everyday, and multiple connections that we have to what we, in becoming modern, have come to see as nonrátional. Tradition/modernity, racional/nonrational, intellect/emotion-these untenable and problematic binaries have haunted our self-representations in social-science language since the ninereenth century. Andreu, Sartori's work on che nineteenth-century Bengali Orientalist and Indologist Rajendralal Mitra has recently drawn our attention to Chis problem. As Sartori shows, the split between Che analytic and che affective is something that is itselfproduced by che colonial discourse and that marks forever the speech of the colonized intellectual. Sartori has given ns a telling example of this phenomenon from che colonial period. He quotes Mitra, writing in the 1870s, on che custom of "blood sacrifice" in ancient India. The Orientalist in Mitra no doubt saw Chis custom as barbarie and uncivilized. However, Chis ancient practice was in no sensc antiquated in Mitra's own times, And Mitra himself had had some personal exposure to it. Yet he categorized his own, lived connection to che ritual as parí of his affective, rather than racional or reasoning, self. In a memorable passage at che end of an essay discussing the custom, he wrote: "The offering of one's blood to the goddess [Kali] is a medieval and modero rite.... The last time I saw che ceremony was six years ago when mv late revered parent, tottering with age, made the offering for my recovery from a dangerous and long-protracted attack of pleurisy. Whatever may be thought of it by persons brought up under a creed differentfrom that of che Indo-Aryans, I cannot Tecali to memory che fact without feeling the deepest emotionfor the boundless affection which prompted it" (emphasis added). ts This strong spirit of hostility between the racional and che affective, or henveen reason and emotion, characteristic of our colonial hyperrationalism, has generally afflicted Indian Marxist historians' attempt to understand the place of che religious in Indian public and policical life. What else is chis bur an unreflexive (re)statement of che struggle of the Enlightenment with superstition? Reason and truth on the side of democracy and humanism, faith-a "tissue of superstitions, prejudices and errors," as a famous philosopher of the Enlightenment put ¡t-on che si de of tyranny.16 This conflict, for Sarkar, structures che whole narrative of Bengali modernity. He traces it "right through che nineteenth century from the days of the Atmiya Sabha and the Dharma Sabha [che 1820s]" and sees it "continu[ing] at the heart of che Swadeshi movement just as in che [Bengal] `renaissance' which had preceded and prepared the way for it":

SUB4LTERN HISTORIES AND RATIONALISM / 27

"Insofar as che Swadeshi age saw a determined though not entirely successful effort to give che nacional movement a solid mass basis, che period can be regarded as a sort of test for che relevante of these opposed ideological trends in che work of nacional awakening."n This is Enlightenment rationalism, indeed, but now (re)visiting che history of the colonized as a modernity dogma and wreaking intellectual havoc in its trail. Sarkar's failure to give us any insighcs into the religious cha[ constantly erupts roto the political in Indian modernity is not a personal failure. It is a failure of hyperrationalism, a failure that marks the intellect of the colonial modero. It occurs within a paradigm that sees science and religion as ultimately, and irrevocably, opposed to each other. It is no wonder, then, that, to Sarkar and many other secular historians of India, modernity in India has seemed "grievously incompleta."` The 1970s Marxist critique of colonial India argued, as one respected historian put it, that "alíen rule and modernity are never compatible" and deduced, therefore, that what India had received as a legacy of the colonial period could be characterized only as "enclaves" of modernity: There were indeed variances in western European early modern developments ... on a comparative scale. Yet each particular pattern in western Europe was clearer and more spontaneous, and where foreign interferente could be resisted, more secular and rational than conditions in che previous period.... What is normally described as modernity represents che superstructure of a given culture, whose economic base is che emergente of capital¡sin. It is unrealistic to define a superstructure without its base, to expect che fruits of modernity without the uneven development and hardheaded exploitative practices of a European modernity which often [in places like India] carne to tercos with feudal remnants ... and which took to colonialism for maintaining progress in ics capitalist development.I9 This language of a "base and superstructure" Marxism was representative of what would have passed for common sense in Indian Marxist historiography of che 1970s. For the purpose of chis discussion, however, 1 wish to highlight what this statement shares with Sarkar's understanding of what it meant to be modera. True, modernity boro in Europa had been productive of colonialism in India, but it still had a discernable "progressive content" thatwas diluted in che colony because ofunderdevelopment (remember that chis was also the period of dependency theory). This progressive content had in parí to do with "the racional outlook," "che spirit of science," "free inquiry," etc. "It is possible," wrote Barun De, "that some future historians ... might put the

sCNAI TERS IIISTORIPA ANI> ItA IION.-V .19.U / 2q

28 / CHA PT E R Iwo

19th and carly 20th centuries at the end oía medieval pcriod of uneci= tainry, instead of the beginning of the ni odern pcriod, which still auairs os'io the thedivorld."-0 "Modernity still asvaits us"-this is the refiain ot ncc hvpcrrational colonial modem. Why should niodernin- still await us ni India, more than nao hundred vears afrer its career was launched in India by European imperialism? How long does it take fui an Indian to become modcrn? This historiographv nevar entertained thc possibilit v that what we had, wrrts and all, ivas, indccd, our niodernit*. Historiaras wcrc prono to think that what India possesscd as a result of colonial modernization 'vas only a bad version of soniething that, in itself, was an unmixed good. The blame, it was decided, lay with colonialism. Colonialism stopped us from being fully modern. Scholars would repeat Barun De's lament: we are incompletely modern. Sumir Sarkar would open his Modern India, published a decade after Barun De's cssay, on this elegiac note: India's is a story of a "bourgeois moderniry" that is "grievously incomplete"2i The mourning will speak through Susie Tharu and K. Lalitha's impressive and sensitively edited collection Wornen Writing in India.: Scholars who have questioned ... a linear or progressive understanding of history claim that the liberal ideals óf refonners [of women's condition] could not have been realised under the economic and political conditions of colonial rule, and warn against applying such simple, linear narratives of progress to the study of nineteenth century India. What appears as retrogressive in nationalism was not a conservative backlash, but the logical limits of reformist programmes in a colonial situation that would never, as Sumir Sarkar writes, allow more than a "weak and distorted" caricature of "full blooded" bourgeois modernity, either for women or for men.22

The Enlightenment's story of the struggle of scienee/rationalism against faith/religion-which in Europe produces all kinds of hybrid solutions-gets repeated in India without attention to the process of translation and the resultant hybridities.23 For both cides of the equation are violated in translating them froin the European context into our past and present practices. The history of our hyperrationalism is not die same as that of Enlightenment rationalism, and the practices that we gather under the narre religion do not repeat the history of that European category of thought. Such transladons are by definition hybrid or incomplete. Ir may precisely be an irony of any modernist understanding of moderniry that we are constantiv called on to study with the purest of categories that which is necessarily impuro and hybrid, to treat transla-

boas that are necessarily incompleto as though their incompleta ncss is raorhing but a hurtful bctraval ofhistorvAn attitudc of incredulity toward tlic metanarratives of thc liutopcan fnlightenment, hosvever, mov es us ti oin the register ot lanicnt ro that of ironv. But, while that is oniv tic first stop, it prepares us tor opening up our histories to other possibiliries, some of which 111 ill consider in the final section of this essav.

UNREASONABLE CRIGINS OE REASON Salman Rushdie ' s Midnight's Children contains a subplot that illustrates how the problem of force or coercion may arise in the conversation between the so-called modera and the nonmodern and, indeed, how strategies of domination emerge as a neccssarv move to being to a close arguments in this conversation that cannot be settlcd through purely rational procedures. It is significant that the subaltern of this particular narrative ofmoderniry should be a woman. Adam Aziz , the European - returned medical doctor who is also tic grandfather of the narrator , Saleem Sitia¡ , inaugurares a nationalist project in his domestic life when he marries Naseem Ghani . As a modero person, Aziz knows that women in Islam / tradition have been confined/ unfree. He instructshis wife "to come out of purdah" and , as a demonstration of his will, burras her veils, saying : " Forget about being a good Kashmiri girl. Start thinking about being a modero Indian woman." Naseem, later the Reverend Mother of Saleem Sinai ' s description, the daughter of a Muslim landlord, is from the beginning portrayed as tradition herself. Readers of the novel will recail that , whcn Adam Aziz first encountered her as a patient in a conservative / traditional Muslim family, she could be examinad only through a seven-inch hule in a bedsheet hcld over her body with only the relevant parí of her body made visible. The doctor fell in love with this fragmented body and discovered or—lly alter their wedding the formidably traditional heart that beat within it. Their mutual incomprehension starts with their lovemaking , when, on their second night, Aziz asks her " to move a little": `Move Ivhere?' she asked. `Move how?' He became awkward and said, `Only move . 1 mean, like a woman ...' She shrieked in horror . ` My God v, liar have I niarricd? I know you European - returned men. You find terrible women and thcn vou try to make us girls be like them! Listen Doctor Sahib , husband or no husband , 1 am not ... any bad woman."'24 The barde continues throughout their marriage , Aziz conducting it from the position of tlie knowing , willing, and judging subjcct of

30 / (HAPTER TWO SURAt,TERN HISTORIES AND RATIONALISM / 31

moderniry . His modernizing political will sometimes expresses itself in the form of physical force. He physically throws out of the house the Muslim maulpi (a rcligious teacher) whom the Reverend Mother had appointed for their children's religious education, the only element in the children's education that was her choice. The reason he gives to his wife in defense of his action will probably warm the heart of every "secular-rationalist" Indian: "He was teaching them [the children] to hate, wife. He tells them to hate Hindus and Buddhists and Jains and Sikhs and who knows what other vegetariana ."2s The Reverend Mother is in the position of the classic subaltern of many modernist narratives. The reasonableness of the doctor's position is never self-evident to her. So the battle goes on in the lives of the Reverend Mother and her husband, a battle organized around mutual incomprehension. This mutual incomprehension is what, one could argue in Aziz's defense, drives both the good doctor and his wife to their respective desperate measures. If 1 were to read this parí of the novel asan allegory of che history of moderniry, historians would object. It would be said that Chis allegory, powerful because it ran such a strong black-and-white binary of tradition/modernity right through the story line, was not true to the complexities of real history (which historians are fond of picturing in the color gray). A historical narrative could have gone differently and might nor have been structured by such a strong opposition between the modernizer and the yet to be modernized. In such possible alternative accounts, the Reverend Mother might, in fact, have needed Aziz as an ally against other patriarchal authorities, her father, or a possible mother-inlaw and could have been more amenable to his suggestions. Similarly, the peasants held down by tyrants might seek out the help of the modern in their own struggles. And what if, through their own agency, the subaltern discovered the pleasures of the modern: of the autonomous self, ofinterioriry, of science, of technology, of post-Enlightenment rationalisin itself? In such historical recall, the coming of Enlightenment rationalism svould not be a story of domination. Have not the critics of the modcrn state liad it said to them that the people actually want the state or the critics of modern medicine that the people, once introduced to modcrn medicine, actually want it? Granted, but then what is the relation between Rushdie's story and the history of modernity? Rushdie's is an allegory of the origins of moderniry. It tells us about the beginnings of the historical process through which women in the Aziz family became modern. This process was flor benign, and that is not an unfamiliar tale to historian of modernity, even in the homeland of the Enlightenment, Western Europe. The

door by which one enters citizenship or a nationality always has a durwan (gatekeeper )-himself usually only partially admitted to the rites of equality-posted outside. His job is to be mean, to abuse, bully, insult, and exclude, or to humiliate-even when he Jets you in. The fact that one is often ushered into moderniry as much through violente as through persuasion is recognized by European historians and intellectuals. The violence of the discourse of public health in nineteenth-century England directed itself against the poor and the working classes.20 The process by which rural France was modernized in the nineteenth century was described by Eugen Weber as something akin to "internal colonizadon .»27

Derrida discusses the same problem from within the experience of being French. "As you know," he writes, "in many countries, in the past and in the present, one founding violence of the law or of the imposition of the state law has consisted in imposing a language on national or ethnic minorities regrouped by the state. This was the case in France on at least two occasions, first, when che Villers-Cotteret decree consolidated the unity of the monarchic state by imposing French as the juridicoadministrative language and by forbidding... Latín.... The second major moment of imposition was that of the French Revolution, when linguistic unification took the most repressive pedagogical turn." Derrida distinguishes between " rwo kinds of violence in law, in relation to law ...: the founding violence, the one that instimtes and positions law ... and the violence that conserves, the one that maintains, confirms, insures the permanente and enforceabiliry of law."2S These are known facts and are probably features of the history of moderniry anywhere. Thé question is, What is out relation, as intellectuals, to these iwo kinds of violence in Indian moderniry? It is easy to see that an intellectual's attitude to the first kind of violence-the founding one-is determined largely by his or her relation to the second. For Eugen Weber, for instante, the fact that something like an "internal colonization" was needed to make peasants into Frenchmen arouses no ire, for the end result has been good for everybody. "The past," he writes, "was a time of misery and barbarism, the present a time of unexampled comfort and securiry, of machines and schooling and services, of all the wonders that are translated into civilization." 29 Beginnings, however ugly, do nor matter for Weber-they cannot act as a site from which to develop a critique of the present (as Foucault teaches us to do with his genealogical method)-for he tells, and believes in, a story of progress. His teleology saves him from having to be critical. The pain of the nineteenth-century peasant is not his own. It is a wound over which time has formed a scab; it does nor bleed anymore.

Si I1ALTEI(Y Hl SIC 11(1 ES ASII RAU I)Sa1.1 Sil / 33 32 / lust."10 Sexualinv forros a complex theme both in Gandhi's lile and in descriptions of it, including bis otvn. Tbar Gandhi vvas haunted bv bis otvn sesualin is a point made by mame obset vcts, partieularly rhose looking at his life frona a psvchoanalytic augle, thc most támous being, of conrse, ErikErikson.z0 And, ofcourse, gossip columnists and authors of sensationalist histories have been fascinated by his descriptions of the experimenta that he conducted in old age to test his self-control. So it is by now a commonplace to find Gandhi obsessed with sexualitv.21 1 am not concerned with the clinical accuracy of such assessments, for 1 am not competent to judge what constitutes obsession. Besides, it is olear from the available literature that Gandhi's ideas about sexualiry and cclihacy were influenced by many different sources. There were at work IndianHindu practices and ideals of asceticism and abstinente (brahmacharya) and of sacrifice (ryag) and other such notions. As Gandhi himself wrote on the technique of fasting in a chapter on brahmacharya in the autobiography: "It may be said that extincrion of the sexual passion is as a rule impossible without fasting, which may be said to be indispensable for the observante of brahmacharya."22

What I intend to do here is to move away from the question of whether Gandhi's detailed discussion of the problem of his sexuality constitutes, clinically speaking or otherwise, an obsession on his part. That is not relevant ter my attempt to read in the Gandhian representation of the body a semiotic system of (alternative) modernity. For the purpose of my analysis, 1 will read as confessional what is commonly seen as obsessive in Gandhi. Once we do chis, we will see in clearer outlines the alternative conceptions of public life that Gandhi artieulated and of which khadi now aets as an extremely condensed statement. Gandhi's is, in fact, the only confessional autobiography ever to be written by a prominent Indian public leader, and it shares much with the tradition ofAugustine and Rousseau. Not only does Gandhi adopt from certain monastic strands in Christianity the idea of a universal ¡ove that can be fostered only bv destroying all traces of self-love (sexualiry) in oneself, but he also uses a Christian confessional technique-central, as Foucault would remind us, to the construction ofthe modero subjectto narrate hiniselfin the public sphere (his autobiography N\ as written in parí tu fill the pagel of his aveekly magazine, Navajivan). One can, in-

read his obsessive deseriptions of his guilt ridden xsual experidccd , ences as so naauv coniessi nis ut his sin3.

Rut there remaíns one tete interesting difterence bettvecn a Chriss. On tlus dificie ce hinges tian tonfcssional autobiography and Gandhi' , al gucs \A 1111ana tipenge A contession a critical parí of mc argument . makes the work ofsdt ou sclf t isiblc lo) a mann in discussmg Augustine , an all knowing God. (arntcssions are narrarions Of selt higher self, knotvledge addressed to a being sebo knotvs evervtbing anea av . 21 Gan, rathcr , thev are dedhi's confessions are, interesringh , not called that Thc add1 essec ot scribed as provisional results ofongoing eyperiments . the higher being to whom rhe work of selt on self Gandhi's narration , cxperernent the word , knosying selt is being revealed , is, thus, no all carrying within itself an inexorable comtotation of openness and unCrandhi makes it quite clear that God is not the addressee of certain y . his autobiography is not tonfcssional. his autobiography ; in this sense , "There are sume things which are known only to oneself and one's Maker," he writes , adding: "These are clearly incommunicable. 1'he exare spiritual, or periments 1 am about to relate are nos as such. Rut they ' rather moral."24

In thus shifting the addressee from the register of Christian godhood, Gandhi converts the confessional finto a mere technique and orients tt toward a secular engagement, the tasé of building a modern public life. In so doing , however, he constructs a new modern subject of political and public life, onewho has been neither theurized nor deconstructed in European thinking. The gaze that Gandhi invites on himself, the gaze to was.his inwhich he exposes himself, is relentless . " Watch me closely ," struction to those who wanted to study him. He deliberately shunned any idea of privacy. When the anthropologist Nirmal Bose sought his Gandhi said: "One permission to study him close - up in the 1940s , should actually see me at work and not merely gathcr from mv vritings." On another occasion , the instruction was even more forthright: "You nave drunk all that 1 have written.... But iris necessary that s ou should observe me at work.... 1 have called you to my sido. You must examine Self-interest mav be of two Idnds, one is if it was dictated by self- interest . and thc other is in relation to avhat une stands for.... entirely personal , Examine my motives carefully."25 sleeping naked and conr Gandhi, thus , shunned the idea of privacy pletely asexually with others was une of his experiments in Chis regard. Nothing in his life was tu be hidden from public gaze. Eserything was Not that there could nos he a prn-ate copen to observation and narration . vvas not for narration to Gandhi, but , whatever the private man teas, it

62 / CHAPTER FOUR -

others: "Things which are known only to oneself and one's Maker ... are clearly incommunicable." Gandhi marks here the emergence of a modero whose difference from the Europeas/Christian modero is measured precisely by this statement. The interiority of the European modcrn subject-the interiority that pours out in novels, autobiographies, diaries, and letters-contained within itself a secularized version ofwhat one once confessed to God.26 The European modero is boro on this eondition-that the private be narratablc-and, in that sense, the private self of the European exceeds or transcends the body. The European private, one might say, is a "deferred public." Give it time, and the private of the European becomes available for public eonsumption in many different forros of narration or representation. The Gandhian private is nonnarratable and nonrepresenrable. Not that it does not exist, but it is beyond representation, and it dies with the body itself. In one stroke, as it were, Gandhi, thus, collapsed the distinction between the private and the public on which the theoretical side of the political arrangements of Western moderniry rest. CONCLUSION The Gandhian modern was , thus, in a relation of both affinity and tension with the modernit of the citizen ofEuropean political theory. With the latter, the Gandhian modern shares a concern for public health, freedom of speech and inquiry, and civic awareness . Yet it does not fulfill the condition of interiority that the discourse of rights both produces and guarantees for the citizen of the modero state. Three fines of tension are easily detected: First, the idea of a completely narratable public lile and a completely nonnarratable private one corresponda to the idea of a completely transparent government-"Examine my motives carefully," as Gandhi said . The modern state, however, cannot ever fulfill this requirement - nacional security, political intelligence , etc., are its watchwords . Second, the moral claim to representation does not go with the idea of politics as a profession. The Mother Teresas are not politicians in our everyday understanding, whereas, in Gandhian moderniry , such a distinction would be difficult to sustain. Third , the relation between the Gandhian construction of the public sphere and the logic of capital accumulation is not straightforward, for, if public life valorizes renunciation as a supreme value, how would one write acquisitiveness finto a universal model of thc human being? I read tire khadi that adoros the body of the "hypocritical " Indian politician as a condensed statement of this tension betm,cen an untheo-

KHADI ANO THE POLITICAL MAN / 63

rized and increasingly unacknowledged subject of colonial modernityto which 1 will now apply the collective appellation Gandhi-and the actual rapacity of Indian capitalism. For our capitalist practices promote values quite the opposite of those that Gandhian politics taught us to desire. Those desires have receded, but not disappeared, from Indian public life. We do not think about them, but we do, in a manner ofspeaking, practice them, however perversely, in our politicians continuing with the collective habit of still sporting khadi or some metonymic substitute for it. This cultural statement, however, does not belong to the order of intentional or conscious transactions. To read khadi as a conscious statement of intent can, as mentioned earlier, only lead us to see it as rirualistic and hypocritical. That reading is not invalid, but it carnes a post-Protestant understanding ofrituals as "empty." The fallacy here is of the lame order as the one that SlavojGizek discusses in his fhe Sublime Object ofIdeology-the reduction of ideology to conscious intentions and beliefs. Zizek argues against the idea that "a belief is something interior and knowledge something exterior"; rather, he says, "it is belief, which is radically exterior, embodied in the practical, effective procedures of people." The point is repeated in his discussion of the law: "Belief, far from being an `intímate,' purely mental state, is always materializad in out effective social activity: belief supports the fantasy which regulates social realiry."27 What appears inGizek as theory may be recognized as a home truth of the Hindu tradition. Within that tradition, the so-called rituals have never been empty, for they have always been nonsubjective and nonintentional means of communication. There is, thus, a question of (practiced) belief involved in the wearing of khadi. This question is both logically and culturally valid, although the reduction today of die Gandhian alternative to what looks like an empty ritual is understandable, for the qualities that Gandhi demanded of the public man do not, as I have explained, sic easily with the logic of capital accumulation. The condition of Gandhi's success was colonial rule. The very fact that, except during moments of limited devolution of power, the actual instruments of government belonged to the colonizers allowed Indian nationalists to fabricate for themselves arenas-outside the sphere of formal institucional politics-that could act as the theater for the self-expression of the Gandhian modern. With the dawn of Independence, Indian capitalism and democracy have developed their own distinctive characteristics, different from both the tenets of Gandhian politics and those of European classical wrirings on either of these phenomena.28 Yet che survival to this day of che Gandhian uniform-for all the historical mutations that ir has undergone-cannot be explained as just an

64 / crt.+ruc It roc'la einpt , or hypocritical ritual, tor we would then llave to think of the Indian aoters as enormously gullible. 1 Nave, the refiere, read it as che si te ot tic desire for an altcrnative modernin, a desire madc possible bv the contingencies of British colonial role, now impossihle ot realization under tire conditions of capitalism, vet circulating insistently wirhin are evcrydav object of Indian public life, che (male ) politician's uniform. 1 do not think that kladi convinces anvbodv anv longer of the Gandhian convictions ofthe wcarer, but, itnn' reading of it bas am point Yo ir, rhen its disappearance, sucre that Yo happen, svould signifv tire demise of a deeper structurc of desire and svould signal Indias complete integration

QUE

into the circuits of global capital.

I

Of Garbage, Modernity, and the Citizen's Gaze

ntjl Salman Rushdie and bis followers arrived ore the scene in,¡ nade

more the intellcetual ferment of modeun india visible tothe outsider, India rcnrained, m tlic dominant grids of Western perceptions, a place of "heat and dust" where tire Europeans had once founded a resplendent raj. To hcat and dust was often added another familiar lista crowds, flirt, and disease. Continuous with all this was a conception of are Indian nature that highlighted Indians' capacity to remain blind to the unwholesome aspects of their public places. A recent example of this perennial theme in discussions of what Indian might do in public is the way in which V. S. Naipaul begins his India: A Miiiion Mutinies Now. Truc, this hook repte-

' sents Naipaul's second thoughts on India and does capture some of the movements that India canses in the soals of its people. Nevertheless, Naipaul's travelogue begins by offering the reader a path that has been beaten into familiarity now for at least a century and a half: "Bombay is a crowd.... Traffic roto the ciw moved slovvlc because of the crowd.... With me, in the taxi, were fumes and hcat and din.... Thc shops, even when small, even where dingo, had big, 65

66 / CHAI'TFR FIVE OF GARBAGE, MODERNITY, AND THE CITIZEN'S GAZE / 67

bright signboards.... Often, in front of these shops, and below those signboards, was just dirt; from time to time depressed-looking, dark people could be sean sitting down on this dirt and eating, indifferent to everything but their food."' It would be unfair, however, to think of this perception as simply Western. What it speaks is the language of modernity, ofcivic consciousness and public health, even of certain ideas of beauty related to the management of public space and interests, an order of aesthetics from which the ideals of public health and hygiene cannot be separated.2 It is the language of modero governments, both colonial and postcolonial, and, for that reason, it is the language, not only of imperialist officials, but of modernist nationalists as well. Lord Wellesley's street policy for Caleutta, minuted in 1803, embodies this connection between order, public health, and a particular aesthetics of the cirvscape. He virote: "In those quarters of the town occupied principally by the native inhabitants, the houses have been built without order or regularity, and the streets and lanes have heen formed without attention to the health, convenience or safety of the inhabitants.... The appearance and beauty of the tocan are inseparably connected with the health, safety and convenience of the inhabitants, and every improvement ... will tend to ameliorate the climate and to promote and secure ... a just and salutary system of police."s These sentiments viere echoed in European writings on India throughout the nineteenth century. M. A. Sherring's 1868 description of Banaras in rerms of its "foul wells and tanks" with their "deadly" water breeding cholera and fever, the "loathsome and disgusting state" of its temples where offerings decomposed rapidly from "the intense heat of the sun,': the "stagnant cesspools, accumulated refuse and dead bodies of animals" crowding its "narrow streets," can now be read, not simply as realist prose, but also as evidente of a particular way of seeing.4 While this way of sceing is no longer exclusively European, its main bearers in nineteenth-century India viere, no doubt, the Europeans themselves, whole modernist categories public and privare viere constantly challenged by the ways in which Indians used open space. In the many different uses to which it was put, the street presented, as it viere, a total confusion of the privare and the public. People washed, changed, slept, and cien urinated and defecated in the open. As a traveler to India put it in the nineteenth century: "As to any delicacy about taking his siesta, or rodead doing anything in public, nothing is farther from the Hindoo mirad, and it is a perpetual source of wonder and amusement to sea the unembarrassed case with which employments of a personal nature are earried on in the most crowded streets."5

The scene of the bazaar added yet another side to this perception of the Indian character: ever-present dirt and disorder. "Filthy drains," "disgusting" sellers ("corpulent to the last degree"), crowded and noisy lanes, people, birds, "goats, dogs and fowls," all worked together to produce the effect of a nightmare: "The whole seems at first more like some strange phantasmagoria, the imagery of a hideous magic lantern or a bewildered dream, than like a sober, waking reality." To this Indian chaos was opposed the immaculate order of the European quarters, where "pleasant squarcs," "white buildings with their pillared verandas," and "gracefr l foliage" lent, to European eyes, a "fairy-like loveliness" to "the whole scene."6 If these pictures seem tainted by Orientalism, let us remember that they are by no means outdated. We need only recall the time when Naipaul still wrote-out of his own (historie) wounds, he explains in India: A Million Mutinies Now-in a tone that made many sea him as a brown Englishman. According to his An Area of Darkness (1965): "Indians defecare everywhere. They defecare, mostly beside the railway tracks. But they also defecate on the hills; they defecate ora the river banks; they defecate on the streets; they never look for cover. Indians defecate everywhere."7 These aeeusations have hurt nationalists no less than the sights themselves have. Gandhi himself once commented acidly on the national character that expressed itself on Indian streets. "Everybody is selfish," he said, "but cae seem to be more selfish than others": "We do not hesitate to rhrow refuse out of our courtvard on to the street; standing on the balcony, cae throw out refuse or spit, without pausing to consider whether %e are not inconveniencing the passer-by.... In cides, cae keep the tap open, and thinking that it is not out water that flows away, we allow it to run watee.... Where so much selfishness exits, how can one expect self-sacrifica?"s Nirad Chaudhuri's autobiography presents the problem, in sarcasm mixed with irony, as a cultural puzzle. In sharp contrast to the "extremely tidv" interiors of Bengali households-"the mistress or mistresses never permitted the slightest displaeement of any object from its place"-remained their habit of rubbishing che outside. Oblivious to the classist and sexist biases of his statement, Chaudhuri describes this phenomenon as "the most complete [case of] non-cooperation between the domestic servants and the municipal sweepers": "The streets viere regularly watered, swept and even scrubbed. But while the street-cleaning ended by about six o'clock in the morning and three in che afternoon, the kitchenmaids would begin ro deposit the off-scouring exactly at quarter past six and quarter past three. Nothing seemed capable of making either party

oP CARaAGF, Moni RNI1T' A>'n 11 u. c rnzr..'s erais. / 6y

68 [ CHArrrti rnVr-

modifv its hours. So lit tic piles of svaste tood, aspes, ami vegetables crap, and peelings lay in individualistie autonomv near the kerb from ose ssveeping time to another."O Roth Gandhi's and Chaudlhuri's are narionalist commans deploring the absence of a cittzen culture on she parí of she peopie 1'hev are also at she samc rime atrempts (employing vcrv different rhetorical devices) ro inculcare in their hvporhetical Indian readers a sense of civie lile and public intcrest. Yet, as we all knovv, Indian historv hears a constanr testi mony to a gap that persists wcll roto shc present day, benvecn she modernist desires inherent in imperialist/nationalist projects of social reform-and 1 shall later argue the complicity of d c social sciences as well in Chis-and popular practices. The complaint about popular blindness in India toward dirt and disease has nos lost any of its force (although, as a slander ora some eternally condemned Indian character, it no longer circulates much).

Nita Kmnar's sensitive-and, in the present context, understandably somewhat coy-ethnosociology of the artisans of Banaras reports Chis blindness: "These same galis [laves] are notorious among visitors for being dark, narrow, tortuous, filthy and even dangerous.... None of shc Banarasis themselves ever described their galis as anyaf these things-.. . Queries about their rather `unsanitary conditions' could elicit no response because these ideas seemingly fell outside Banarasis' conceptions of their cits ... Most ignore the master altogether, as'they do most government offcers.... Men ofren told me that one aspect of the overall friendliness and conveniente of she city was that they could urinate wherever they liked. This, 1 realized after months of unwilling observation, was notan exaggeration."10 While Kumar is careful to distante her prose from that of the publichealth inspector by putting quotation marks around unsanitary conditions, and while she reports, perceptively and with good humor, a mismatch benveen, say, che modernist view of she cuy and she urbanism of the Banarasi, her description of thegalis, of she supposed ineapacity of the Banarasi to respond to questions of sanitation and heálth, invests she modernist complaint (about popular blindness to these questions) with a certain degree ofobjectivity. This is precisely she objectivity of she outsider, which is the only position from which an aggressively modernist observer can speak on this subject. (lt nmtters little.for mv argument whether she particular speaker is white skinned or brovvn.) As Tbompson says of the passage from Naipaul quoted earlier: "Oitly she outsider can see that all of India is she Indian's latrine. It is all ton easy as an outsider to spot tire Indians' conspiracy of blindness."1 t I should clarifv, however, that, unlike Thompson, 1 do not by outsider

cocan a non-Indias person. The outsider here is the ubscrver svho docs rnot inhabit she eoneeprual or thcoretical 1}amcsvork of clic actor svhom he or she observes. It is tic obscrcing position that 1 'ave tagged here as modernist, and 1 shall return larerto shc qucstion ot she relation betssrcn modernism and ethnosociologv. My ami in Chis essav is to eontest anci critique ['ese modernist readings of uses of opera space in India bv opposing ro thcm ccrrain strucnualist speculations based on a preliminarv-, al](¡ bv no mearas exhaustive, study of some of shc relevant historical and anrhropological material. I am aware of the limitations of seructuralist methodologv and also ofthat which arises from she somewhat ahistorical character of mv argument. This essav is in the nature of a beginning, with all the rentativeness that beginnings entail. A deeper and more convíncing analvsis would no doubt need to locate she argmnent in a more historically grounded context.

1 should also clarifv that a major aim ofthis exercise is methodophilosophieal. It is to show, through a critical reading of some aspects of Kumar's otherwise excellent ethnosociology, that, when it comes to questions relating to health, that is, to life rather than death, she nonbourgeois subaltern citizen is always already condemned in our social seience, however sympathetie the stance of our ethnography. As social scicntists, we ahgn ourselves with those who want to build citizen cultures. The moral consequences of wanting to do otherwise can, as some of Kunaar's most honest remarks berras', be excruciatingly painful. LOCATING DIRT: SOME STRUCTURALIST SPECULATIONS Since 1 have allowed nryself she speculative freedoms of a structuralist,1 shall begin by taking a leaf out of Mary Douglas's cclcbrated book on dirt and start with she proposition that che problem of dirt poses; in turra, the probleni of she ourside . 12 For, whether we are talking about radioactive waste from she industrialized countries or the vvaste of a household or village in India, she dirt can go only to a place that is designated as outside. It is this problem ofthe outside that 1 vvanr to explore in Chis section of the essav. Lct us begin aith she probleni of household rubbish. The fact that she dirt goes out ofshc hoose iniplies a boundary between shc inside and she outside This boundary docs not simple dclincate a hygienic space where cleanliness is practiced. Housekeeping is also mean[ to express the auspicious qualities of she mistress of thc household, her Lakshmi - like nature that protects the lincagc finto which shc has niarried .' 3 As outsiders who musa be reccived finto shc bosom of shc

70 / CHAPÍF.R FIVE OF GAREAGE, MODERNITY, AND THE Cl rIZEN's GAZE / 71

patrilineal and patriarchal family, women are particularly subject to the rimals ofauspiciousness. For, in Chis conception, the outsider always carrics "substances" that threaten one's well-being. The "negative qualities and substances that may afflict persons, families, houses and villages," as Gloria Goodwin Raheja has recently noted, are seldom "one's own": they achieve their "entry" through lapses in the performance of auspicious actions. "All forros of inauspiciousness are said to originate in entities and events that are `different' and `distant' from the person or other afflicted entity," writes Raheja; "they are alien."14 Auspicious acts protect the habitat, the inside, from undue exposure to the malevolente of the outside. They are the cultural performance through which Chis everyday inside is both produced and enclosed. The everyday practice of classifying certain things as household rubbish marks the boundary of this enclosure. Nirad Chaudhuri's cultural puzzle thus contains themes that, I suggest, pervade Indian popular culture. The figure of the outsider as troublemaker was strongly conveyed by the Santal term diku so prominently used in the rebellion of 1855.15 In the Munda country, jealousy, which is seen as corrosiva of communal bonds, is attributed to mischievous outsiders.1ó Hatred of people conceived of as outsiders is a universal feature of so-called ethnic conflict in India and elsewhere.17 Correspondingly general is the practice of enclosing a place as a gesture of protection. The more-enduring boundaries-such as the wall of a fort city or a mohalla-of course also signify ownership and authority, but that is not a point that 1 will pursue here.l8 The general connection, however, becween the mohalla and the insider/outsider division of identity is widely accepted in che literature. '9

Out nonmodernist ways of handling disease are replete with these themes of the enclosed inside and the exponed outside. Only a few examplcs are necessary to make the point. Whitehead's well-known study of the village gods of south India makes several connections between boundaries and their protective power. "The boundary-stone of the village lands is verv commonly regarded as a habitation of a local deity, and might be callada shrine or symbol with equal propriecy," writes Whitehead. Thc propitiation of the cholera goddess at Iralangur (Trichinopoly district) or of Pedamma, an epidemic goddess ofthe Telugu country, involved, in both cases, symbolic enactments of che village boundary. In che former case, it was the duty of a washerman to place, at the end of che propitiation ceremony, the offerings to the deity "at the pointwhere his village border[ed] on the adjoining village": "The deity is thus propitiated and carried beyond the village limits. The villagers of the adjacent village in their turn carry the karagam [the offerings] to the border of

the next village, and in Chis way che baleful influence of the goddess is transferred to a safe distance." The worship of Pedamma also included activities that ritually inscribed village boundaries.20 Catanach has written of Punjab villages where, during the plague scare of 1896-98, "the village site [was] surrounded with a cirele ofstakes, with demons' heads roughly carved on top to serve as supernatural guardians."21 More contemporary evidente comes from Ralph Nicholas's study of the smallpox goddess Sitala in southwestern Bengal, where worship rituals include the taking out of processions that circumambulate the village "planting flags where paths cross the village borders, or otherwise bounding the village before her [Sitala's] puja is begun."22 Diane Coccari has studied similar processes in urban Banaras-the Bir babas who act as boundary gods of neighborhoods: "The deity is described as 'the god' or 'the protector of the neighbourhood.' ... There are hundreds of Bir ... shrines in the city.... Like the village deities, the urban Bir control the boundaries of their domains, especially with regard to the exit and entry of the intangible agents of illness, misfortune and disease."23 If the house, thus, is only an instance of a theme general co South Asia-an inside produced by symbolic enclosure for the purpose of protection-what, chen, is the symbolic meaning of the outside, which can, indeed, be rubbished? To answer this question, T shall Cake the bazaar as the paradigmatic forro of the outside. The bazaar, the street, and the fair (mela), it seems to me, have for quite some time formed a spatial complex in India. Streecs, for good or bad, all too often become, effectively, bazaars, and metas combine the different purposes ofpilgrimage, recreation, and economic exchange.24 1 take the bazaar as a space that serves the needs of transportation as wcll as those of entcrtainment and the buying and selling of goods and services. 1 am aovare that there have been different kinds of bazaars in India, going by different names (hats, mandil ganjes, etc.), and varying in their fimctional specializations.25 1 also ignore the interesting problem of connections between the bazaar and the structures and relationships of power in its vicinity. The bazaar of which 1 speak is obviously an abstraction of certain structural characteristics that, to my mind, define the experience of the bazaar as a place. Everyday linguistic practices involve and permit such an abstraction-in the Bengali language, for instance, the word bajar (bazaar) is ofren used in a metaphoric way to represent an outside to ghar-shangsbar (the way of the householder, i.e., domesticity); thus, prostitutes are called bajarer meye (women of che bazaar) to distinguish them from gharer meye (housewivcs or women of the household). In chis

Or (IARRA( 1,, YiODIJtV I'1'l, ANI 11.111 (11171 N'5 CIAR.1'.

72 / CHAPt en PIv Y-

, nalysis, bazaar is the narre thar 1 gire to that unencloseel, exposed, and interstitial outside that acts as the meeting P()¡ lit of several communities. It should also be clear bv nosy thatthe division inside/outsideincoRcs a metaphoric use of space tbr the purposc of making boundaries, hoyycycr transient these boundaries mav be. Actual spatial arrangements mas, cmbodv this division, but the cultural practices productiva of boundary markers cannot be reduced to tbe qucstion ufboss phvsical space is used ¡ti particular ci rcu msta'Ices.

Structurally speaking, in my tercos, then, thc bazaar or the outside is a place where one costes across strangers. And, if, as 1 have argued, strangers, being outsiders, are alyvays suspect and potentially dangerous, it is only logical that the themes of familiarity/utifamiliarity and trust/ mistrust should play themselves out in many different aspccts of the bazaar. All "economic" transactions here-bargaining, lending and borrowing, buying and selling-are marked by these themes. The cultural material uncovered in Jennifer Alexander's study of the bazaar (pasar) in rural Java will not surprise those used to the marketplaces of South Asia (for the bazaar is obviously an institution belonging to a much larger culture zone than the subcontinent alone). Protestations of honesty, for example, are a recursive fearure ofbargaining talk. The copperwarc seller in Alexander's extended rccording of a particular case of haggling repeats several times: I'm not lying. If vou can discover a repair there's no need to pay! How could I he lo you and your daughter! I'm not lying to you! Yes, [the seller's mother says,] she's not lying to you. I swcar it! If I am lying to you, don't buy another one. I'd be extremely ashamed if 1 vas Ring to you, truly126 In these transactions, often conducted in tercos of weights and incasures that are only approximate, the economic cannot be separated from the social, for priccs reflect the concern with trust and familiarity. As Ostor observes in his study of a Bengali bazaar: "Regular customers do not need to haggle, but those who are mainly strangers or out-of-toyvners."22 In other matters, too, the social remains a prominent part of the econoriaic. In a group of rural markets in Gujarat studied in rhe late 1950s, the owners of han (market) Lands, it was reported, "generally levied fixed charges" once "the traders ... [became] accustomed to the place and the people." Even the bonds of credit forged ¡ti these (predominantly tribal) markets followed the fines offamiliarity and acquaintance: "[The cloth merchants] ... maintained close and intimate ties with the

in tluential sections of tribal society 1 their customers and debtors ^... Thev nade it a point to attend social occasions like marriage, death, illness, etc. in these tribal housebolds. Interestingly, syhen these houscholds purchased cloth for wedding occasions tuna thcir shups. thesc rraders invariabiv gave them [a tribal «edding parte) une meter ot clorh and a cash amount of Rs 1.25. Tbcv said that this gift is ¡ron) thcir sidc.... Ibis is a rime-honoured practica among ciorh mercltanrs in 25 thc hats. That familiarity reduces risk in economic transactions i5 obrious. What 1 want to highlight is the svay in svhkh kinshnp categories are used in the bazaar in this making familiar ofthe strange, in this process oí tanr ing, as it mere, thc potentially malevolent outsider. "Most commonlp mes of the bazaar, are dada [older brother] and bhai [brother] to each other," writes Ostor. "In the bazaar bhai expresses a continuing rdationship and enjoins a codo of conduct."29 Alexander reports a similar practice from her pasar in Java: "Yinship tercos are the most common mude of address and usage is governed by age. Bakul [the seller] addresses most mate adults as pak (lit. father) and females as bu (lit. mother), young women as mbak or va (lit. older sister) and vuung men as mas or kan (lit, older brother).1'30

Not surprisingly, then, unlike the modern marketplacc, the bazaar (i.e., the outside) is geared to the production of social life.31 Unlike its modern counterpart, it privileges speech. The physical urganization of shops in the bazaar encourages, as Anthony King has observed, "N isual" and "verbal" inquiry and helps convert the former into the latter.32 The centraliry of speech and linguistic competente to the economic transactions ofthe bazaar is also underlined in S. P. Punalekar's study ufthe Gujarat market. "The cloth merchants," reports Punalckar, "knew and spoke fluently in tribal dialects," for they feared that, without this skill, they "[would] be in the dark about what they [the tribals] [viere] commenting among themselves: about price, quality or about mvself [the merchantj."33 The strect or the bazaar, thus, serves the "multiple purposes" of "recreation, social interaction, transport and economic activity."34 Mamy obscrvers have noted this. Ostor, for example, writes: "Drinking tea, chewing pan [betel leaf] and smoking, the mcn discuss evers,thing from business, to theatre and rituals.... Newspapers are read and exchanged, radio news broadcasts are heard and interpreted."35 In contrast to the ritually enlosad inside, then, the outside, for whieh I have used tic bazaar as a paradigm, has a deeply ambiguous character. It is exposed and, therefore, malevolent. It is not subject to a single set of (enclosing) rules and rituals defining a community. it is svhere misce-

74 / CIIAPTER ME

genation occurs. All that do not belong to the inside (family/kinship/ community) he there, check by jowl, in an unassorted collection, violating rules of mixing: from feces to prostitutes. It is, in other words, a place against which one needs protection. Some of the devices mean[ to provide such protection are bodily and personal, ranging from the mark of kaajal (collyrium), which little children are given to protect them from the evil eye, to subh naam (auspicious narre), which all uppcr-castc Hindus use in dealing with outsiders and formal situations. Ofren, the community-forming rituals of enclosure are thenuelves replicated in the bazaar. Shopkeepers will use their own rituals for marking che area of the shop as enclosed space. Some of [hese strongly resemblc housekeeping activities: worshiping a deity (Ganesh rather [han Lakshmi since Ganesh is the lord who removes obstacles); sweeping with a broomstick the area of the street immediately adjacent to the front of the shop.36 The more permanent traders in a particular bazaar sometimes even develop a sense of communiry and patronize a single bazaar temple 37 Speech and face-to-face interaction have to do, as we have leen, with overcoming the mistrust of the outsider in a space where transactions are contingent on trust. The inside/ outside dichotomy, therefore, is a matter of constan[ performance in the exchanges of the bazaar. The duality of this space is inescapable. It harbors qualities that thrcaten one's well-being (strangers embodv [hese qualities). Yet it provides a venue for linkage across communities (linkages with srrangers). Speech and direct interaction produce such solidariry. The bazaar or che chnwk is, as Freitag has noted, often the most public of arenas in Indian cities-public in the sense of "publiciry"-and has, for that reason, hosted traditionally colorful religious/political spectacles involving large numbers.38 The connection between the chowk, the bazaar, and the spectacle of public events is also drawn by Kumar in her study of Banaras.39 And Guha has recently drawn out attention to the importante of rumors, that is, speech par excellence, in che political mobilization of peasants.40 Spaces like the bazaar are, as Guha shows, central to the disseminarion of rumors, which goes some way toward explaining why riots or rebellions often start in the bazaar. Ambiguiry and risk are, thus, inherent to the excitement of the bazaar. Punalekar's survey of tribal markets in che Surat-Valsad arca gives a striking example of this. Here, people who specialize in providing entertainmcnt at the bazaar are often those who are trusted che leas[ "Acrobats, rope walkers, snake charmers, singers and mimics," as well as owners of performing monkeys and bears, gamblers, and others who performed in these bazaars, all were, Punalekar notes, ofren srrangers to

OF GAREACE, MODERNITY, AND THE CITIZEN'S GAZE / 75

particular markets. Belonging to che poorest sections of the bazaar populace, these entertainers "moved from one hat to another" without "a regular schedule," not only thereby violating the codes offamiliariry and trust, but also deriving from this violation itself the mysterious attractions of their presence as srrangers 4r It is, therefore, easy to see why roaming the streets of the neighborhood is a pleasurable activiry for most Indian men. (I say men advisedly, for the pleasure is gendered even when it is not class specific.) As Kumar says of her Banarasi respondents: "In their free time, they like to indulge in ghumna-phirna: to stroll in che galis, wander in the bazaars, hang around the ghats, visir temples, Cake in the ambiente of the evening lights, crowds, bustle, and activiry. But if you ask them what they like to do bes[ in their free time, it is, to go outside."42 Or, as Paj Chandavarkar says of che textile workers of Bombay: "Street life imparted its momentum to leisure and politics as well.... Thus, street entertainers or the more `organised' tamashaplayers constitured the working man's theatre. The street corner offered a meeting place."43 The bazaar or the street expresses through its own theater the juxtaposirion of pleasure and danger that constitutes the outside or the open, unenclosed space. The street is where one has interesting, and sometimes marvelous, encounters. Even when nothing out of che ordinary happcns, the place is still pregnant with possibility. And such pleasures are, by nature, transgressive because they are pleasures of the inherently risky outside. DIRT, CAPITALISM. ANDTHE LOGIC OF CITIZENSHIP This analysis is admittedly parcial and incomplete . To refine it , 1 would need to accommodate within my argument the subtle and critical distinctions that have been made in different regions of India berween, say, the road and che bazaar. I have also ignored dif ferences between different kinds of bazaars or between different kinds of pathways . Nor have I paid attention to che very distinctive constructions of communal space thar che Gaste svstem, with its varied rules of puriry and pollution, can create. Studying che roles assigned in Indian villages to Gastes associated with dirt would be ofparticular relevante in this regard. Also, the idea of the outside would have been modified by the kinds of changes in the experience of public space that British rule created . Besides, as movements such as "temple entry" or "breas [ eloth" agitations in south India in che late nineteenth century and the early twentieth would suggesr, che decline oflandlords ' privare control over roads must have brought to many a new sense of public space . In a fascinating analysis of Muslim reactions to British rule in north India, for instante , Faisal Devji has recently

' pc. tt} ^7 OP GAIi13AG1 ', . SiuIi}..R>t9 Let us put acide for the moment what to our ears mas sound racist in these remarks. My point is that the social assumptions on whieh the classification and organization of census figures rested were fundamentally

90 / CHAPI ER SIX

modern: they showed India to be a collection of communities whose progress or backwardness could be measured by che application of some supposedly universal indices. That is exacely how che modern world of nation-states is structured: it is a united but internally hierarchized world where some countries are described as measurably-or shottld 1 say immeasurably?-more advanced than others. This structure of relations has che nature of what scientists call fractals or self-similar patterns: it is capable of reproducing itself at many different levels-between nations, bctween modern ethnic groups, between perceived races, and so on. It is what constitutes the liberal idea of competitive pluralism. As the French historian Lucien Febvre once reminded us, as an idea it has been with us since the second half of che eighteenth century.20 It was packed into the idea of civilization, a word that che French started to use in the 1760s and that soon found its way into the English language to provide che noblest justification for England's work in India. The word civilization has long since fallen out of favor-wc preferred to talk about progress in che nineteenth century and development in the twentieth-but che idea of a united world with an internally articulated hierarchy measurable by some universally agreed on indices has remained with us. How strongly che Indian middle classes internalized Chis idea is suggested by che following quotation from a Bengali book of morals that was published in Calcutta about 140 years ago for consumption by children. Notice how che world is seen as both one and hierarchic, che observable differences in standards of living between countries beingto make a conscious gesture toward the idea of measurement-proportional to their "total nacional efforts": "Countries where people are averse to labor ... are uncivilized. The Aboriginais ofAmerica and Australia as well as che Negroes are still in chis stare. They live in great hardship without adequate food and clothes, and they do not save anything for bad times.... The Germans, che Swiss, che French, che Dutch, and che English are the most industrious nation/races [ jatil of che world. That is why they enjoy che best circumstances among all nation."21 Use of such language today would be offensive, but there is a homology berwcen what Chis children's primer said and che sensibility that nlákes of che modern industrialized nations a model for che rest of che world to follow. Wc all partake of chis sensibility, and 1 am no exception. All 1 am saving is that Chis sensibility, what we hold to be common sense with respect to these matters, is undergirded by che mechanisms of che modern state and the universal requirements of governmentality, che sane mechanisms that influence out constructions of competitive blocs of ethnicicv in che public sphere. Hindus, Muslims, che scheduled and

GOVERNMENTA[. ROOTS OF MODERN ETHNICITY / 91

lower castes of India, both dirring and after British rule, have, in a sense, done no more than apply this sensibility to their public, political lives. ETHN1CITY AND/OR THE NATION AN IRONIC PERSPECTIVE But, of course, they have done more than that. Were India simply a place where ethnicity is contained within che liberal structure of competitive pluralism, it would not Nave made news, and 1 would not be discussing it today. Ethnic strife in India has resulted in che deaths of hundreds of thousands in che past hundred years. Recent skirmishes in Assam, Punjab, and Kashmir have been particularly deadly. What, then, is che difference between che recent Western and che contemporary Indian experience of ethnicity? What che difference is carne to me forcefully in 1989 when 1 received a (forro) letter from che Australian prime minister encouraging me to become an Australian citizen. In that letter, che prime minister went to some trouble to spell out what it means to be an Australian. It is not che color of your skin, or your religion, or che language that you speak that makes you an Australian, he said. It is helieving in freedom of speech, in freedom of association, in everyone having "a fair go," etc. This letter prompted me to subject myself to some imaginary tortures-of che Geoffrey Robertson kind 22 For example, 1 asked myself, If chis is alI there is to being an Australian, then what would be my proper patriotic response if Australia ever went ro war with a nation that professed che same liberal values bur was much better equipped to protect them and, hence, by definition, to protect my Australianness as well? (Of course, a Margaret Thatcher would argue that a liberal-democratic country would never start a war and that che question is, therefore, moot! ) Alitcle reflection made it clear that che prime minister was speaking in a historica context that afforded him one rare luxury: he felt no pressure to spell out what made Australians different from other people. The letter was, by implication, relegating cultural difference to che sphere ofthe personal. If pressed, a liberal would no doubt tell me that-as che British Muslims who burned lije Satanic Verses at Bradford were ofren reminded-ethnicicy can find a place in public life so long as its expression is in conformity with che core values of che nation (as defined by che state). Ethnicity funetions here under che aegis of equal-opportunity principies, in che forro of a pressure group-in my case, an Indian Association that demands things like time slots on Australian public radio or funding for community schools as part ofliberal-pluralist multiculturalism.

92

N I I Ai R0Oa s aP Molnacu E•riI NI([ tr / $

/ CHAPTFR SIx

As Talal Asad has shows ¡n his discussion of dhe Rushdie aftá¡r, there are lridden demographic assumptions bcitind this posirion, particularly that ofa continuous dominante of a Europeas-dcrivcd, if nor an F?nglishspcaking, wajority-as Of cocarse, ose must also take finto account particular Australian institunons-rhe wclfare state, a rclatively prosperous

parties to ccntverr1linduism ¡Tiro a strong, monolithic, and militant religion liase given mane Indian Muslims and (h ri stians u rde rsrand ah le

economv, the srructure of rhe Ausrralian Labor Parn, rhe official policv ofmulticuituralism, crc_ ruar havc historieally playcd a role in manag-

centralism. Unlike rhe former Soviet Union, howcver, rhose centralist tendencies exisr within, and must svork through, a democraric political

Ing ethnic conflicr in public life. [ hat Australia would be able to retain Chis mulricultural tolerante oferhnicin° in public lile ifthe cultural dominance of its Anglo-Celtic or at leasr European majority serte evcr senously rhrcatened is far from cerrain.

Modere ethnic conseiousnesses in India have been fashioned under circumstances inwhich the politics ofcultural difference has been ofpreeminent value. The quesnon of Indian unity has never been settled beyond doubt or disputation, nor has there been any one, culturally homogeneous and dominant majority ethnic group that could both dominare and effectively claim to represent all lndians (at least until Independence-one might argue that the Hindu extremist party, the Bharatiya Janat, Party [rhe BJP 1, has been trying to develop such a position for itself, precisely bv denying the heterogeneity that characterizes Hinduism). The British cobbled a political India togetherfor reasons of administrative conveniente. The nationalir question was muddled from the beginning. In the public sphere that rhe British created, there was no one, universally agreed on "Indian" ethnicity. The struggle to produce a serie of cultural unir, against the British made mainstream Indian nationalism culturally Hindu. The Muslim search for Pakistan emphasized Islam. The lower castes' struggle for social justice produced anti-Brahmanism. After Independence, in che 1950s and the 1960s, rhere were the tribal communities of che Nagas and the Mizos on che northeastern frontier of the country that had to be bludgeoned finto becoming Indian. The past fifreen or avenry vears have seen an explosive combination of democracy and demography. The Indian population has almost trebled sine Independence. The growth and diversity of the middle class may be judged from rhe fact that, while at Independence there was consensus that the number of important languages was fourteen, there are now daily newspapers published in atore than sevenry-eight languages 24 This middle class has tasted consumerism, and rhe result has been an increased cense of competition in urban life. The secessionist movements in Kashmir and parís of rhe northeast have gained in strength in recent vears. Caste-particularly the Indian policy of positive discrimination in favor of the lower castes-has ofren been an extremely contenrious issue in public life. And che latest attempts by the extremist Hindu political

pause. Likc ncetLrmcr Soviet Union, India rcmains in part_ alrhough unh' in part, an imperial strucnuc hcld together by srrong tcndencics toward

srructure that also gises che stare more popular legitimacv and un,rv than nce Stalinist srates evcr liad. Ltdians havc ut insestmcnt in electoral dcmocrac}, as was proved bv nccacure popular rescnrmcnt of ncc Emer gency declared by Mrs. Gandhi during rhe period 1976-77. Set rhe ¡deological seene has changed.

This eentralizing tendency was most powerhrlly exprcssed in the ¡deology of Jawaharlal Nehru, which represented some kind of consensus among rhe political elite. This ideology, called in India secularism, drew heavily on rhe Western liberal herirage to argue for a separation between religion and the ideas •that governed public lile. In India, svhere a religious idiom and imagination had always been very strongly present, this ideology never described the actual culture of political practice. Bur, so long as rhe nacional leadership lay in rhe hands of a tina cure reared ni and respectfil ofthe British traditions ofpolities, rhe everyday religiousness of Indian political culture could be kepí separare froni rhe decisionmaking boards of rhe government. The custodial nature of rhis elite was reflected in the uniry of rhe Congress Parry, in which Nehru ahvavs remained a Bonapartist figure. The combination of demography, democracy, and political growth in India has ensured that the policical elite is no longer riny. There are no Bonapartist figures in India today. Nehruvian secularism, a Glose cousin of Western liberalisni represented now by Marxists and che Lefr-liberals in India, is on rhe defensive (remember Salman Rushdie's character talking about rhe battle lines?). Why Chis has happened will require a different analysis. But it should be clear from rhe preceding discussion that rhe problem of competitive and official constructions of ethnicity is a feature inherent ¡n modera civil society. In the best of cines, one expects to find lawful, bureaucratic means of resolving there tensions. Even then, rhe mobilizarion ofethnic sentiments always risks spilling over ¡tito racism in public places, as widely reported incidents of harassment of che Ausrralian Muslims during rhe Gulf War would confiran. There are, however, other tintes in history when bureaucratic solucions lose thcir appeal. The difference here ¡s flor due to a total opposition berween fascism and liberalism as political pltilosophies. The difference here is ¡Ti historical context. Imagine che

94 /

CHAPIER

SIX

conflict benveen the Bengali Muslim sense oferhniciry and Pakistani nationalism in what was, before 1971, East Pakistan. Clearly, a model of pluralism that recommended thac all signs of cultural difference be matters of private belief became untenable in that situation. Kashmir today represents, for many, a similar situation. The point is that, as 1 have argued, the very structure of modern governmentaliry carries with it the secds of competitive constructions of ethnicity. Whether [hose seeds will ever gcrminate and bloody conflict spring forth is a mattcr of the particular moment of history that one inhabits. This is not a counsel of despair. But it is a plea for our political analysis to be informad by a larger sense of irony. Advocating che cultivation of a sense ofirony about che civilizing narratives of modernity does not imply political passivity. The relation benveen philosophical positions and political action is seldom straightforward. Not only is there no alternative to action-we are condemned to act politieally in Chis world Whether we want to or not-but the subject who acts, and is mobilized to act in the face of events, is also more than an intellectual-philosophical subject. Action involves emotions, memories, tastes, feelings, will, asid values-and these things have histories over which we have much less control [han we have over our consciously thought out philosophical positions. I have been irreversibly conditioned by che histories of my childhood, my education, and my socialization (all influenced by British and nationalist critiques of Indian socice) to be revolted by such practicas as sati, female infanticide, human sacrifica, and thagi-to use che names by which British colonial discourse described (always inaccurately) and condemned Indian (yet another name) civilization-whatever my theoretical underscanding today of their problematic histories. How, in what mode of action, Chis revulsion will express itselfdepends on particular situations and che opportunities that 1 read checo as presenting. What, then, is che relation between this critique and political or state policies that might be established to combar racism under conditions of modernization? First, this critique is about the limits of poficy making under present institucional arrangements. I have argued that, given che connection benveen governmentality and measurement, both che modern nation-state and civil sociery necessarily set up certain competitive semctures of identiry chrough che very distributive processes over which thev preside. The question, Distribution among whom? always takes identities for granted. Identities here are not seen as porous. In fact, identities are not mcasurable or enumerable except on che assumption that their houndaries are abrupt and not vague. In che language of distrihutive justice, identities represen[, at any one point of time, some kind

GOVERNMENTAL ROO 1-5 OF MOMEAN ETHNICHY / 95

of narrative consensus in which everybody or every group knows who or what chey are and Chis knowledge is shared by che institution that administers well-bcing. In other words, che existing models of modern political and economic institutions handle che question of cultural difference in identity prccisely by fixing and freezing differences into divisions that are not permeable (a Hindu cannot be a Muslim) and thus are amenable to measurement and enumeration. Even ifwe moved from che idea of allocarive justice to that ofprociedural justice in che sphere of discribution, as John Rawls did in his classic A Theory ofJustice, we would still have no way of handling differences in identities. Rawls's search for "justice as fairness," as readers of that famous text will know, led him to posit an "original position" (a perspectival position, really, as he himselfexplains) in which individuals met without any conception of their social or class locations-that is to say, as humans from whom all differences had been abstracted away.25 Even leftist intellectuals who try to modify Rawls's arguments in order to infuse a more self-consciously political life finto his theory find it difficult not to universaliza a discinetion that is historically very particular, that is, che distinction between public and private. Chantal Mouffe's attempt to move away from che Rawlsian position of holding on to che idea of an original rational agreement and, instead, to ground democraey in a permanent state of disputation (lince there can no longer be a "single idea of a substancial common good") is instructive in this regard. Pluralism here is seen as possible on che condition that che political is definad around a minimum shared agreement, that "che principies of che liberal-democratic regime qua political association"-"equaliry and liberty"-be defined as che "common political good." As Mouffe clarifies: "A liberal-democratic regime, ifit must be agnostic in tercos of moraliry and religion, cannot be agnostic concerning political values since by definition it asserts the principies that constirute its specificiry qua political association, i.e., che political principies of equafiry and liberty. "26 Where, then, will be che place for moraliry and religion in this (post)modern, socialist idea ofliberal-democratic politics, one that accepts disputation as a foundation for democracy-or, indeed, for anything else that is not parí ofthis minimum shared political good? Mouffe is clear on this: these ideas will exist as "private" belief, che sphere of privacy implicitly defined in such a way as to be incapable, by its very definition, of endangering che institutions that embody "che political principies of equaliry and liberty."27 What eise can an intellectual thinking out of Indian history do but experience a sense of irony at what European political theory offers us?

l:ni a question . Of a>urscaround tic globc rodar of scholarship tic of rhe concerns rhere pare beca specifically South Asian events lnriting--and cien incit iug the study ot Partition violence. One inav nlention che olganizcd politics anti- Sikh pogronl of 1984, tire anti - 1Muslinl and anri (.hristian of rhe Bharativa Janata Party ( BJP), tire endless taking of lives in hashnur . But there is and Sri Lanka , the fiftieth birthday ol che nation, and so on . Behind che contenlporar irte] esr also a global contest tbr these srudies , ncu nnuderin ncc Nazi Holocaust , the ethnic clcansingin che Balkans Burundi, is a fundamental question of contenlpoous events in Rwanda rary democratic thought.

The concept of diversiry has become more satient in democracies today than that of development . All democraticatly minded people are wrestling with the question , How do we live with difference at a time when democracies inereasingly accept and embrace the principie of infinite diversity ? The carlier histories of the Partition were odien straightforwardly historical . They sought to explain whv the division of the country happened , its timing, the different potitical personalities, parties, and formations that contributed to it. The new histories-Menor The Other Side of Silence, and Bhasin's Borders and Boundaries, Butalia's Critical Events, for exaniDas's and , Pandey's Remembering Partition ple-focus more consciously on the experience of violente, suffering, The Other Side of Silence also and survival . z Borders and Boundaries and participate in our times by presenting powerful and cutting feminist critiques of the different , patriarehal ways in which nations and commumties seek ro possess "their " women. At the heart of these histories and memories of violence is not so much the political - institutional history of che nation-although this still remains important - as the question of how humans create absolute others out of orher humans . There is no act of human cruelty that is not accompanied by a certain lack of identification . In Chis sense , studies of theviolence of the Partition are studies of the politics ofdifference. Thc ideologies that both rhe perpetrators and the victims of collective and social violence used to justify / understand the act of violence involved ibis process of "othering ." As Butatia found out in che course of her research, memories of violence tended to locate it "somewhere outside, a distante awav from the houndaries of che famity and the communit y." "Violente is sien ," she writes , " as relating only to che orher." A funin rhe narration ot social-and not damental problem , in orher words , pathological, or casual-violence is tire difficulty of recogindividual ,

142 / CHAPFER NINE ]'HE IN-HUMAN AND THE ErHICAL / 143

nizing this violente as also belonging to the self that speaks. "Somehow," sas s Butalia, "whcn we speak of che violente of Partition, we do not touch the violente within ourselves."3 It is clear that the inhumanity of collective. violence is, afrer all, human. The inhuman is in human and, in that sense, is better written as in-human. Yet both fictional and autobiographical depictions of violence that was nothing but social consign it to a time and space marked, paradoxically, by an assumed death of the social. "You see," said Krishna Thapar talking to Menon and Bhasin, "we did not do less to the Muslims-we liad also become such bruces.... We lost all humanity." Or you Nave the trope of what 1 call thingification. (Commodification would be a special case of thingiñcation.) Women were sold, said the former activist Kamlaben Patel, "in the séme way that baskets of grapes or oranges are sold or gifred."4 In conversation with Butalia, Patel said: "I found it difficult to believe human beings could be like this. It was as if the demons had come down on earth." Butalia herself resorts to the nonhuman image of the thing to capture the moment when the othering ofothers becomes absolute: "The transformation ofthe `orher' from a human being to the enemy, a thingto be destroyed before it destroyed you, became the all-important imperative."s Kavita Daiya has uncovcred a similar series of rhetorical moves in representations of Partition violence in fiction and film. Stories such as "The Woman in the Red Raincoat" or "Colder than Ice" by Manto, for example, portray the desire for "ethnic sexual violence" by reducing women to mere bodily rhings, sometimes even dead bodies.b These narratives ofPartition violence, then-to use words once written by Sartre-"lay claim to and deny the human condition at the same time," such is the contradictorv explosiveness of their rhetoric? It is obvious that, for all the rendering of the human roto a mere thing that collective violence may appear to perform, the recognition by one human of another as human is as fundamental precondition. It is humans who torture, rape, oppress, exploit, orher humans. We cannot do these things to objects. We cannot call objects Muslim or Hindu except in reference to thcir relation to humans. Humans can torture orher live beings, but they do not do so in a collective spirit of historical revenge. That is why it must be said that, even in denyingthe humanity of the victim of violence, the perpetrator of violence and torture does, to begin with, recognize che victim as human. In Chis unintentional practice of mutual human recognition lies che ground for the conception of proximity. The denial of che victim's humanity, thus, proceeds necessarily from this inicial recognition of it. Tris che very perverse nature of chis recognition of one human by another rhat [he language of memories seeks to capture

through a paradoxical set of images and metaphors that speak of the death of the human. This paradox cannot be resolved. We cannot produce narratives that relive and celebrare the momenr of inhumaniry even though we can all imagine the boastful stories of cruelry that would have circulated among men who killed in the days of the riots. But they are like the well-known yet suppressed stories of barbarism of yesterday that underlie today's civiliry in every sociery. That barbarism is a practice of a certain kind of social, one that can be written about only as though it signified the death of the social. Faced with such banality of evil, the question arises, Why remember? Is not remembering potentially dangerous? Is not murderous violence better dealt with simply by forgetting it? Butalia tackles this question head-on. She writes: "Over the years, despite many uncertainties, I have become increasingly convinced that while it may be dangerous to remember, it is also essential to do so-not so that we can come to terms with it but because unlocking memory and remembering is an essential parí of beginning the process of resolving, perbaps even of forgerting."s So the call to memory is a plea for a talking cure. And, as in the case of all talking cures, there is no guarantee that the cure will be permanent. It is an ethical call. Tris a call that issues from one's immersion in the present, amid violence, as one asks the question, How do 1 comport myself toward the politics of difference? The new histories of the Partition and its attendant violence depart from older social-science histories in abjuring aspirations toward social engineering. When we recognize the banal ity of evil, we do not look for utopian blueprints of social orders from which the evil ofviolence will be eternally banished. The call to remember that Butalia, Menon and Bhasin, Pandey, and others issue is not in search of permanent, a priori solutions to the ways in which modernity, governmentaluy, and their institucional arrangements can exacerbare che in-human. What animares conten]porary investigations of the mcmories of che violence of 1947 and beyond is che question of how to live with difference todas It was with this larger question in mind that 1 made the distinction between proximity and identity. 1 see the distinction illustrated by che memories incired to speech by the new historians. Depending on the circumstances surrounding them, both the practices of proximity and those of identiry can kill us or save us. Sometimes, I see both principies embodied in che same narrarive. Consider. che story of a tahsildar [holder of an administrative office] in the western Punjab as told ro Menon and Bhasin by Dayawati Kalra of Gandhi Vanita Ashram in Jalandhar. This man "would Cake Hindu young

TIIF IN-IItTMAN ANU TnL LtHI( AL / 145 144 ) ClIAPTEIk NINI':

men from thc camp and kilt them." Surely, this act was Lo do with extir-

termarried, the rest was fine").t I Yet Butalia cites the case of a Bir Bahadur Singh for whom such practices ofproxinaity, in retrospect, lool:cd

pating that whieh seas not identical to rhe self. Yet, ¡si an opposite gesturc of making the diffetent the same, rhe sane man rrcated an abducted non-Muslim svoinan "like a daughrer for over a vear. Onlc syhcn no nnc

likc exclusionarv politice of identity : "Ties Muslims i svould eat ¡si our houses but sve would not eat in thcirs and this is a had thing, whidt 1

came tur her did he suggest marriage to pis son. No one else svould hace done so much. He ss as honourable." A more complicated case is that of a svoman-"k hose ro blenon and Bhasin s hcn thec met hila in Jammu in 1991 This non-Muslim svoman liad been torced into a Muslini family-an example, we couid sao, ofthe pracrice of identity tending to kill. We are told that she "lived on in Pakistan, liad txko sons and tour daughters and commanded great respect in her family and comtnuniry." Yet "she liad complete freedom, ... didn't believe in Islam, was not obliged to read tire Qoran or say her namaaz. But her nahte was changed to Sarsvar Jahan. "9 In this instante, practices boro of identity clearly gave way-within historical limits-to those of proximiry in the beart of the new family that was once foisted on her.

The new studies of the memories of Partition violente are salutary in reminding us that there is no a priori way of resolving, apead of any concrete investigation, ehether rhe practices of proximiry are necessarily better tiran those of identity, or cite versa. Uncovering the patriarchal violente and undemocracy of rhe Indian and Pakistani governments' program to recover "abducted women" and restore them to their families, Menon and Bhasin effectively use tire universalist and allegedly unmarked identity of the citizen to produce a cogent feminist critique of the program. They write: "The process of recovery, of putting abducted women back into place, was not eonceived by the state as a relationship of women as missing citizens of rhe new state (if so, it would hace endowed them with civil rights); rather, it chose to treat them as missing members of religious and cultural communities on whose behalf choices had to be madc."10 As this particular example illustrates, tire ethical space within which I am seeking to locate the practices of identity asad proximiry is never completely autonomous of the larger political field of governments, political parties, movements, and other institutions. Some practices of proximity, for instante, fell into disrepute once tire larger movements for nationalisms, democracy, and social equality took hold,of people's imagination. Menon and Bhasin quote a Hindu woman who saw the past as a time of peace in whieh practices of proximiry and nonidentiry did not necessarily give offense. She said, speaking of the pass of Hindu-Muslim relations in the Pnnjab: "Roti-beti ka risita nahin rakhte the, baki saab theek tha" (Menon and Bhasin give a somewhat Christian-sounding translation of this sentence: "We neither broke bread svith them nor in-

nosc realizo. lf thev svould come to our houses sce svould hace two un-nsils in une comer ofthe huirse, and w e svould tcll theni, pide riese up aud eat in thena; thev svould then svash them and kcep them asido and tbis Sras soda a terrible thing. This'vas tic rcason Iakistan seas eicated... Al! out dealings scith nccni svere so loss that 1 am esto ashamed Lo sao n.,, 12

There is no gainsaying tire fact that rhe larger political context of 1947 influenced one's reading of diese practices. Think of Beth Roy's documenting a rural riot betwecn Hindu and Some Trouble with Cows Muslim peasants in East Pakistan soon after Independence. Surely, it was the larger political fact of Pakistan having been established that encouraged the Muslim peasants involved in Chis conflict to say to their Hindu neighbors, "Wc won't allow any Hindus to stay here," and tire Hindus to say, "Wc won't allow any Muslims to stay this side of the nver. We'll push them to the other side."13 There is, in that sense, no "small voice of history" autonomous of rhe larger political sphere.14 But the practices of proximiry and identity still wrestled in many narratives as possiblealternative ethical ways of relating to diffcrence. They do not admit of resolutions that are free of all contexts. But, in bringing this essay to a close, let me repeat here a story from the life of the noted Bengali filmmaker Mrinal Sen. It is a story that 1 have recounted elsewhere, but it is relevant to the issues under discussion. Sen grew np in rhe 1920s and 1930s in a nationalist Congressite family in Paridpur, His family did not shun the company of Muslims. Once, says Sen, his oldest brother, then a high school student, showed their father a poem written by a Muslim boy from his class. Moved by rhe writing, Sen's father encouraged his son to invite this boy home. Thc young Muslim poet carne, was befriended by tire family, asid, in Sen's words, became one of them: "My eldest brother brought his friend home. The boy turned up with his feet covered with dust, a pure pcasant boy. The nickname of this poet was Sadhu. He would move in and out of our household as though he were a boy of this family. It was afrer 1 had grown up a litrle more that 1 came to know that he was not out brother.i15 This poet, Sen reveals, was nene other than the famosas and gifted Muslim Bengali poet Jasimuddia. Bur Sen's narrative lets us see hose a crisis set in, threatening to undermine this bond of putative kinship as tire demand for Pakistan gathered strength. Jasitnuddin was nos: unaf-

146 / CHAPTER NENE

fected by the sentiments growing in the minds of many Bengali Muslims. Nor, from an opposing point of view, was Sen's father. Sen writes: Thcre were no communal troubles in Faridpur. But Hindu-Muslim conflict was on the rise in other places and had an impact on Faridpur as well. The grown-ups had ro be a little careful therefore.... 1 noticed that a certain Hinduness asserted itself in my father whenever there was a communal conflict somewhere else. There would be furious arguments and counterarguments. And Jasimuddin would argue taking the side of Muslims. One day Jasimuddin said to my mother, "Mother, ifit is true that I am one ofyour sons, why do you leed me searing me outside? Why is it that you never let me sit with your sons to eat from che same plate?"I6 It is Scn's narrative resolution of the emocional impasse that this moment creares that allows us to see the contestation berween the practices of proximiry and those of identiry. He continues: "My mother found herself in difficulry. What Jasim said was nor untrue after all. But Eny mother was helpless. She explained to him that she had no objection to having him sic inside while feeding him but that rhe servants of the household would flor accept [his arrangement. Her eyes glistening with tears, she said, `Sadhu, you may nor know this, but it is 1 who washes up after you"'v

This is a poignant moment in stories of Hindu Bengali generosity. The Hindu Bengali mother, who acts as a critical nodal point in che affective structure of kinship, speaks here for Hindu liberalism (in a loose, nor a doctrinal, sense) in acknowledging the cal) for justice in the grievance o£the Muslim person whom she has recognized as her son. At the same time, she pleads helplessness, blaming-like men everywhere have done at many critica) moments in che history of modernity-tradition and unreason, now allegedly embodied in che subaltera characters of the household, che ignorant servants. But she does nor stop there. Tearfully, she makes a claim on che Muslim's sentimenr the mother has both accepted and transgressed difference for che sake of her feelings for her Muslim son. Why would nor the Muslim reciprocare? Yer, however full of pathos chis gesture may be, there is a deafness to che other that srructures her question from within. Jasimuddin, che Muslim in Sen's story, was declining che role of good guest in a household that defined itselfas Hindu. He was asking for a change in che rules rhat defined hospitaliry and that decided che question of who was in the position of offering it. Was he within his rights ro do so? It is Ibis larger political question that goes unacknowledged and undiscussed in che Hindu response in Chis story. Like numerous Hindu Bengali stories of

THE IN-HUMAN ANn THE ETHICAI, / 147

Chis kind, Sen's stands witness to a historie Hindu Bengalí deafness to che cali of the other. This deafness was as constitutive of ethnic distance as may be che more explicit elements of violente. It was a mark, indeed, ofone's participation in che politics ofethnicity. To be deaf to che cal) for justice in Muslims' historical demand for a home embodying their own imagination of dwelling was to express prejudice, however silent that expression may have been. In saying chis, 1 do nor mean to blame the Hindus, in particular those who were displaced, for their cup of suffering was more than full. 1 myself grew up around such suffering, as did many of my contemporaries. I mean, rather, to emphasize che importante of being sensitive ro the larger field o£the political within which che ethical must be situated. As 1 have said, there is no way of choosing benveen identiry and proximiry in an a priori manner. But lcr me end wirh a personal anecdote about che practice of proximiry in a post-Partition context. It suggests, I think, that che relation benveen identiry and proximiry is nor one of an either/ or qualiry 1 rock my parenrs to Bangladesh in 1991 to visir my ancestral homes on both sides. My parenrs had nor been back since che Partition. We went to che village in Bikrampur where Iny father spent his childhood and later his holidays when he studied and worked in Calcutta. We discovered that che Muslim family that used to work for my father's family was in occuparion of che house. They had lived there since Independence. Their first worry was that we might have come back to reclaim property. They were a little tense in che beginning. The old man in che family was my father's age and remembered our family. He remembered some of che weddings thar took place in that house. The first thing he said, to che consternation of his family, was: "AII chis is yours. You can Cake it back if you want." That was che field of [he political coming finto our conversations. Once we assured them, however, that we had come simply to see rhe house, rhat 1 lived outside India and had no practical interest in acquiring properry in Bangladesh, they relaxed. And then a space opened-up for what 1 have called the practice ofproximity, that is, che practice of relatiüg to historical and contingenc difference by acknowiedging and negotiating it. They asked us to sic down in che garden outside che house. My mother was wirh che women of [he household. A number of curious children had thronged around us. The old man's son, a politically active member of che local village council, was keeping a courreous but cautious eye on che proceedings. And [he question arose about che seating arrangement. They had two comfortable chairs out and one nor-socomfortable stool. Whoever sat on che stool would also be at a lower

1

48 / CH HAT'T LA Ni NI

level than those on the chairs. i Le old finan offered me and mv father the two chairs and made a gestare of taking the stool for himself, saving, "You are the masters, vou should sit on the chairs." Mv farher immediately countered saving, "No, no, those davs are gone; wc are flor masters and servants. You should sir on the ehair." The situation carne to a suc cessfül resolution through mv saving, "But vou are both old and senior to me; it is 1 who should sit on the stool." Fvervbodv found thar acceptable. Wc had each acknowledged differenr kinds of difference, and even inequalities and equalities, without letting them give offense, We had, in other words, suceessfully negotiated some verv historical and contingent differences. My parents and 1 returned that evcning with verv pleasant memories of the generous hospitality offered to us by the Muslim family.

I know that this resolution was contingent and temporary. It would not havc happened if we werc therc in the larger political field and made a claim en the property. The larger field of thc politiGal exists, and we, as individuals, are rarely in a position to choose it. We find ourselves in it, we feel called no it, and we try to mold it to the extent that we can. But the political does not exhaust or foreclose the space of the ethical. Purely political and sociological histories ofren lose themselves in the impulse of causal analysis and, thus, in the designs of utopian social engineering. The new historians of the Partition remind us of the profound banality of evil. Their focus is on the normal and the everyday. The category of the everyday has now received a positive and theoretical valorization through our readings of Henri Lefebvre and Walter Benjamin and the like. The new histories of the Partition point to the irruptions into the moment of the everyday of the practices of both proximity and identity in the politics of difference. Thc explorations of.history and memory show that only a capaeity for a humanist critique can create the ethical moment in our narratives and offer, not a guarantec against the prejudice that kills, but an antidote with which to fight it. Historv must, like literature and philosophy, imbibe Chis spirit of critique.

I NTRO D U CTI ON

1. Sce che thoughtful discussions in Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, "On Alterna11, no. 1(1999): 1-l8; Arjmt Appadurai, Modertive Modernidcs," Public Cultura (Minneapolis: Lnivervnv of Minnity at Larga: Cultural Dimensions nf Globalization nesota Press, 1996), in particular, chaps. 1 and 5; and Lisa ROM, "Rethinking Culture, Power, Place: ExplaModernity: Space and Factory Discipline in China," in ed. Akhil Gupta and James Fcrguson (Durham, nations in Critical Anthropology, N.C.: Duke Universiry Press, 1997). 2. My position is, thus, somewhat different from that adoptad in Brumo La(trans. Carherine Porter [New York: Harvcster, tour's Wc Have Never Been Modern 1993]). 3. Aijaz Ahmad's in Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures(London: Verso, 1992) is a good example of such polarizad debate betwecn Marxism and postmodernism. 4. Dipesh Chakrabarry, Provincializing Europa:PostcolonialThoughtandHistor(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Universiry Press, 2000). ical Difference 2d ed. (Chicago. Universin° of 5. See Hannah Arendt, '17)e Human Condition, Chicago Press, 1998). CHAPTER ONp.

1. Arif Dirlik, "The Aura of postcolonialism:Thed World Criticism in the Age of P. Mongia Contemporar_v Postcolonial Theory: A Reader, ed. Global Capiralism," in (London: Arnold, 1996),302 . One-Way so-cet 2. See Walter Benjamin, "A Small Historv of Phorogrnphv," in trans. Edmund jephcott and 1Cingslcy Shorter (London: Nc s and Other Writings, Left Books, 1979). 3. Ser my discussion of the relation benveen nanonalism and Marxism ¡ti htdian After the End of'Hittor_v, ed. A. historiography in "Marxism and Modera india," in Marsurn, Theory, Ryan (London: Collins & Brown, 1992), 79-84. Sanjev Seth's (Delhi: Saga, 1995) provides a Politics '171e Ciase of Colonial India an d Nationalist

149

150 / NOTES r0 PACES 4-9 NOTES To PACES 9-17 / 151

good analysis of che historical connections between Marxist thought and nationalist ideologies in British India. 4. Sce Bipan Chandra , Tire Rise and Growth of Economic Nacional jo» in India: Economic Policies ofIndian Nacional Eeadership , 1880-1905 ( Delhi: People ' s, 1969); Anil Sea], The Emergente ofIndian Nationalism : Competition and Collaboration in che Later Nineteenth Century ( Cambridge: Cambridge Universiry Press, 1968); A. R. Desai, S ocial Background ofIndian Nationalism ( Bombay: Asia , 1966 ); D. A. Low, cd., Soundings in Modern South Asian History ( Canberra : Austrahan Naconal Universiry Press , 1968 ); B. S. Cohn, An Anthropologist among che Historiaras and Other Essays ( Delhi: Oxford Universiry Press, 1988 ); and Morris David Morris and D. Kumar, eds., Indian Economy in che Nineteenth Century: A Symposium ( Delhi: Indian Economie and Social History Association , 1969). 5. The subtitle of SeaPs Emergente of Indian Nationalism refers to the two themes of competition and collaboration. 6. See John Gallagher , Gordon Johnson , and Anil Seal , eds., Locality, Province, and Nation: Essays ora Indian Politice, 1870-1940 ( Cambridge : Cambridge Universiry Press, 1973). 7. In contradistinction to che so-called horizontal affiliations of class. 8. Astil Sea[, "Imperialism and Nationalism in India," in ¡bid., 29. Sec Bipan Chandra , Nationalism and Co lonialism inModern India ( New Delhi: Orient Longman , 1979). 10. As one respected Indian historian wrote responding to the work of the Carobridge scholars : " Once, not so very long ago , to countless Indians nationalism was a fire in the blood " ( Tapan Raychaudhuri , " Indian Nationalism as Animal Politics," Hsttorical fournal22 , no. 3 [1979]: 747-63). 11. See Gyanendra Pandey, The Ascendancy of che Congress in Uttar Pradesh, 1926-1934:: A Study in Imperfect Mobilization (Delhi: Oxford Universiry Press, 1978 ); Majid Siddigi , Agrarian Unrest in North India : The United Provinces, 19181922 ( Delhi: Vikas , 1978 ); Kapil Kumar , Peasanes in Revolt. Tenants, Landlords, Congres, and che Raj in Oudh, 1886 -1922 ( New Delhi : Manohar, 1984 ); David Arnold, The Congress in Tamilnadu : Nacional Politics in South Asia, 1919-1937 (New Delhi: Manohar , 1977); Histesranjan Sanyal, Swarajer Pathe ( Calcutta: Paparus, 1994 ); and David Hardiman , Peasant Nacionalista ofGujarafi Kheda District (Delhi: Oxford Universiry Press, 1981 ). See also the essays in D . A. Low, ed., Congress and che Raj ( London: Heinemann , 1977). 12. See Ranajit Guha, introduction to A Subaltern Studies Reader, ed. Ranajit Guha ( Minneapolis : Universiry of Minnesota Press, 1998). 13. Ranajit Guha, " On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India," in Subaltern Studies I. Writings on South Asían History and Soeiety, ed. Ranajir Guha (Delhi: Oxford Universiry Press, 1982), 3. 14. See Antonio Gramsci, "Notes on Italian History," in Selections from the Prison Notebooks, cd. and trans . Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International , 1973). 15. Ranajit Guha, preface to Subaltern Studies IIL Writings ora Indian History and Society, ed. Ranajit Guha ( Delhi: Oxford Universiry Press, 1984), vi¡. 16. Ranajit Guha , " On Some Aspects•of the Historiography of Colonial India," in Selected Subaltern Studies, ed . Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (New York: Oxford Universiry Press, 1988), 3-4.

17. Ibid., 4-5.

18. E. J. Hobsbawm , Primitive Rebele Studies in Archaic Forros of Social Move-

mentin che Nineteenth and Tiventieth Centuries (Manchester: Manchester Universiry Press, 1978), 2. 19. See Ranajit Guha,ElementaryAspects ofPeasantlnsurgency in Colonial India ( Delhi : Oxford Universiry Press, 1983), chaps. 1 and 2. 20. Sea[, Emergente ofIndian Nationalism, 1. 21. Guha examines and critiques such Marxist positions in "TheProseofCounterInsurgency," in Selected Subaltern Studies, ed . Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988 ), 45-86. 22, Guha, Elementary Aspects, 75. 23. Ibid., 6. 24. Hobsbawm , Primitive Rebel, 3. 25. Guha, ElementaryAspect, 6. 26. Guha, "On Some Aspects," 4. 27. Ibid., 5-6. 28. Ranajit Guha , "Colonialism in South Asia : A Dominante without Hegemony and Its Historiography," in Dominante without Hegemony : History and Power in Colonial India (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Universiry Press, 1997 ), 97-98. 29. Guha, "On Some Aspects," 5-6. 30. This aspect of che project later carne to be developed by Partha Chatterjee, Gyanendra Pandey, and Shahid Amin ( sce che discussion below). 31. Eugen Weber, Peasants finto Frenchmen : The Modernization ofRural France,: 1870-1914 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Universiry Press, 1976), xvi. 32. See E. P. Thompson on experience: "A category which, however imperfect it may be, is indispensable to the historian , sine it comprises mental and emotional response, whether of an individual or of a social group, to many inter-related events" ("The Poverry of Theory; or, An Orrery of Errors," in The Poverry of Theory and Other Essays [London: Merlin, 1979], 199). See also Keith Thomas, "History and Anthropology," Past and Present, no. 24 (April 1963): 3-18. 33. See Guha, Elementary Aspects, chaps . 1 and 2. 34. Guha's own reading strategies are spelled out in "The Prose of CounterInsurgency" and are implicit throughout ElementaryAspects. 35. To be fair, not only does Thompson ("The Poverry of Theory," 210, 222) write about " voices clamour [ ing] from che past"-" not the historian ' s voice, please observe; their [ i.e., the historical characters '] own voices"- but he also has much to say about how historian interrogate their sources in order to listen to the lost voices of history. 36. This is best exemplified in Guha's "The Prose of Countcr-Insurgeney." See also Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, introduction to Guha and Chakravorty Spivak, eds., Selected Subaltern Studies. 37. On this retirement, see Guha's introduction to Subaltern Studies VI (Delhi: Oxford Universiry Press, 1988). 38. Edward Said, foreword to Guha and Chakravorty Spivak, eds ., Selected Subaltern Studies, v. 39. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography," in Guha and Chakravorty Spivak eds ., Selected Subaltern Studies, 3-32. 40. Rosalind O'Hanlon, "Reeovering the Subjecn Subaltern Studies and Histories of Resistance in Colonial South Asia," Modern Asian Studies22 , no. 1 (1988): 189-224.

NOrrsr1) PACES 19-27 / ' 53 152 / NOTES 10 PACES 17- 19 41. Gavatri Chakravorn Spivak, "Can ehe Suhalrern Spcak?" m Co/osea! DismurseandPostcolonia l'ibcors: A 1<ende cd P\Vi1]iamsruui 1.- Ch,nman¡ Nos York:

50. 1hase devcloped soma of rhese thoughrs hu drer m an essay nn amtemp°rarv Ahoriginal hisvav in Australia-"Rcamciliatlon and Its Hiansioeraphr. Sume I're 6 -16. aro. I ID4ar 20111 _ lin{loare l hnu ghn;' OTS Reviro 7,

Columbia Universirv Press, 19941.66-111.

42. Ser Ranajir Guha CI,andra's Death," in Guha, e,1., A So/mitren Studies Readen; 34-62; Partha Ch tlterjee, "fhe Nationalist Resolwion of tllc vv'nman Ques rion," reptil red as "The Nanon and Irs \Aomeu" in his 7 1, h'ation wrd Its Fista in en es: Colonial and Post'Colonial Histories (Princeron, N1-: Princeton Universirv Press, 1993 and Sosia 1 hato and l ejz rr mi Niranjam "I'roblemo fts a Coniempo rarv Theon of Gender," ni Subaltern Seodi, s IX, ed Shahid Amin and Dipcsh (hakrabarn Delhi: Oxthrd I:niversin 1 ress 1996¡,232- 60. 43. Partha Charrerjee, Aeinnalist Tbought and che Colon%al WOrld

London-

Zed, 1986). 44. Gvanendra Paney, Remembering Partition : Violente, Nationalism, and History in India (Cambridgc Cambridge Univcrsiry Press, 2001). 45. Gvanendra Pandee , The Construction ofCommunalism in Colonial North India (Delhi: Oxford Univcrsiry Press, 1990 ), and "In Defense of rhe Fragmene Writing about Hindu iMuslim Riots in India Today" in Guha, ed., A Subaltern Studies Reader, 1-33 ; Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragmentg Shahid Amin, Evenr, Memory, Metaphor ( Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univcrsiry of California Press, 1995). 46. Gyan Prakash has lcd the debate on nonfoundational histories with his wellknown essay "Wriring Post- Orientalisr Histories of the Tlatrd World: Perspecttves from Indian Historiography " ( Comparative Studies in Society and History 32 [April 1990]: 383-408 ). Ranajit Guha ' s "An Indian Historiography ofIndia: Hegemonic Implications of a Ninereenth-Century Agenda" ( in his Dominante tviehout Hegemony), Chatterjee ' s "The Nation and Its Pasts " ( in his Pie Nation and Its Fragments), Gyanendra Pandey's "Subaltern Studies: From a Critique of Narionalism to a Critique of History" ( Johns Hopkins University, 1997, rypescript), and Shahid Amin's "Alternative Histories : AView from India " ( University of Delhi, 1997, typescript ) are contributions to che debates on historiography and che status of historical knowledge to which Subaltern Studies has given risa . In chis connection , see also Shail Mayaram's rreatment of memory and history in her "Speech, Silente, and che Making ofPartition Violente in Mewat," in Amin and Chakrabarty , cds., Subaltern Studies IX, 126-64; and Ajay Skaria, Hybrid Histories (Delhi: Oxford Universirv Press, 1999). 47. Exemplified by the analysis of che discourses of scienee and modernity in colonial India in Gyan Prakash ' s Another Reason: Science and che Imagination of Modern•India (Princeton , N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999). See also, e.g., Gyan Prakash , " Science benveen che Lines," in Amin and Chakrabarry, cds., Subaltern Studies IX, 59-82. 48. David Arnold , Colonizing che Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Distases in Nineteenth - Century India ( Berkeley and Los Angeles : Universirv of California Press, 1993 ); David Hardiman , The Coming of che Devi: Adivasi Assertion in Western India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987), and Peeding che Baniya: Peasants and Usurers in Western India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996 ); Gautam Bhadra, Iman o nishan : Unish shotoke bangaly krishak chaitanyer ek adhyay , c. 1800-1850 ( Caleutta : Subarnarekha for the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences , 1994). 49. For a more detailed exposition of this poinr , see my Provincialezing Europa: Postcolonial Thoughtand Historical Difference ( Princeton , N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000).

( ti Tvv(1

," l- Sumir Sarkar,'°I hc Faxlsm ofr]leSal qh l'ancar

Roonmi aird I ,litiral lt'reAlr.

201 anuary 1993, 164-652. Ibid., 167. 3. See. c. g fino Brass ' 'A-Ah'ac a'Ith heir W r l kit. Rural 1 sbom ers chi uu;h lí . ,k¡,,, 5 lune 199 1162 -68; anal rhe I'usmwdern Prisco, Eeonnmie and 1`01'11'n1 Froreonitaud l'uliti;nl ll: ,l.h. F. Balagopal,`V4'hy Lid Drccmbcr 6, 1992, ilappcn: 24 Apol 1993, 790-93. (Oxford: Oxlbrd Ll nicersnc The 7i utb ofPusennnder'nism 4 . Christopher Norris, -1908 (Delhi. Pcop c s, Press, 1993). The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, 1903 5 Sumit Sarkar ,

1977). 6. Ibid., 316. 7. Ibid., 24. 8. Alexander Duff quoted in M. A. Laird, 1793-1837(Oxford:Clarendon, 1972), 207.

Messionarses and Educaaox

11

9. Ibid., 86-87, 207-8.

10. It is a well-worn point of European hstory tha[ che idea of an irrevocable opposirion benveen scicnce/rationalism and religion goas agatnst all aea,Iable evidente. set David C. Llndberg and Ronald 1. of careful discusstons , For a recen [ eollec[io ❑ Essays of che Encnunter hernien Chris: Historical Numbers, eds ., (Ad and Nature Universry, of California Press, 1986) . : The Experstianity and Science ( Berkeley and Los Angeles Society, Grvernmeny and che Enlightenment : 11. C. B. A. Behrens , London: Thames cec Hudson,1985 ), ( entes of Eighteenth-Centdry Pandee and Prussia 26.

117.

, 1687-1776 (New York, 1966), 12. Preservad Smith, Pie Enlightenment , " Is There an Indian Way

13. See the interesdng discussion in A. K. Ramanujan india through Hindu Categories, ed. McKim of Thinking ? An Informal Essay," in 45-58. Ramanujan discusses ehe case of his own 1990 ), ": " I had just Marriott ( New Delhi: Sage , scientist father, who was botlr an astronomer and "an expert a,trologer been converted by Russell to che `seientific attitude.' ... 1 looked for eons¢tency io (mv father], a eonsistcncv he did not seco to tare ahout or even think about" (4243). 14. Sec Sarkar, "The Fasusm of rhe Sangh Parrvan" 15. Rajendralal Mitra quoted in Andrew Sartori, "Raja Rajendralal Mitra and the master's thesis, Universirv of MelFractured Foundations of National Identity " ( hourne, 1993), 60. The thoughts expressed here owe much to Sartori's analysis of chis passage. trans. A.V. Millar (Oxford: C acenPhenomenology of Spirit, 16. G. W. F. Hegel, don, 1977), 330. , 34-35. 17. Sarkar , The Swadeshi Movement my Provincializing Europa: Pnsteolonial Thougbt and 18. See che discussion in (Princeron, N.J.: Princeton Umversi ' Press, 2000), cliap. Indian SoHistarical Difference The Colonial Context of che Bengal Renaissanea," in 19, 19. Barun De , " Phill'ps amad Mars ed. C. H. , and che Beginnidgs of Modernisation , 1830-1850

154 / NOTES T0 PACES 28-37

NOTES TO PACES 40-58 / 155

Dorecn Wainwright ( London: Universiry of London , School of Oriental and African Studies, 1976), 123-24.

20. Ibid., 121-25. 21. Sumit Sarkar , Modera India ( Delhi: Macmillan, 1983), 1. 22- Susie Tharu and K. Lalitha , eds., Women Writing in India: 600 B.C. to the Early20th Century ( Delhi: Oxford Universiry Press, 1991), 184. 23. Gyan Prakash ' s Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modera India (Princeton , N.J.: Princeton Universiry Press, 1999 ) goesa long way toward addressing this problem.

24. Salman Rushdie , Midnight 's Children (London: Cape , 1984), 34. 25. Ibid., 42. 26. On this aspect of English history , see Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politíes and Poetics of Transgression ( London: Methuen, 1986). 27. Eugen Weber, Peasants finto Frenchmen : The Modernization ofRural France, 1870-1914 ( Stanford , Calif.: Stanfdrd Universiry Press, 1976). 28. Jacques Derrida, "Force of Iaw: The ` Mystical Foundation ofAuthoriry,"' in Deconstruction and the Possibility ofJustice, ed. Drucilla Cornell , Michel Rosenfeld, and David Gray Carlson ( New York: Routledge , 1992 ), 21, 31. 29. Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen, 478. 30. The police in India are routinely accused by civil - liberties groups of violating human rights. 31. Roland Barthes , Image-Music - Text, trans. Stephen Heath ( London: Fontana, 1977), 95. 32. See Ranajit Guha , Elementary Aspecto ofPeasantInsurgency in Colonial India (Delhi: Oxford Universiry Press, 1983). 33. Antonio Gramsci, Selectionsfrom the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans . Quintin Hoare and Gcoffrey Nowell Smith ( New York: International , 1972 ), 52, 54-55. 34. For more extensive discussion ofthe concept of the fragment , see Gyanendra Pandcy, "In Defense of the Fragment : Writing about Hindu-Muslim Riots in India Today," in A Subaltern Studies Reader, ed. Ranajit Guha ( Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 1-33; and Partha Chatrerjee , The Nation and Its Fragmenta: Colonial and Post- Colonial Histories ( Princeton , N.J.: Princeton Univcrsity Press, 1993). 35. Heidegger speaks about ridding "ourselves of the habit of always hearing only what we already undcrstand " ( see Martin Heidegger , " The Nature of Language," in On che Way ofLanguage, trans. Peter D. Hertz [1971 ; reprint, New York: Harper & Row, 1982], 58 ). Should Heidegger's name raise politically correct hackles because of his Nazi past, let us remember that the Nazis sometimes mounted che some objection to his thought as those raised by the old Le & against poststructuralism: "In his last rector's speech [ said a Nazi evaluation of Heidegger ] philosophy rends in practicc to ... dissolve into an aporetic ofendless questioning .... In any case, une ought not to be silent about certain themes of the philosophy of `tare' [Sorge] which , likc our anguish, could lead to trulvparalyzing effects" ( Victor Farias, Heidegger and Nazism, trans. Paul Burrelli [Philadelphia : Temple University Press, 1989], 165). 36. My debt to Levinas and Derrida and their numerods commentators will be obvious at this point. 37. Lydia Liu , " Translingual Practice: The Discourse of Individualism between China and the Wesr," Positions: EastAsia Cultures Critique 1, no. 1 ( spring 1993): 191.

CHAPTER THEEE

1. Ashis Nandy, " Science, Authoritarianism , and Culture," in Traditions, Tyranny, and Utopia : Essays in the Polities of Awareness (Delhi: Oxford Universiry Press, 1987), 121, 124. Nandy complicares the issuc in a later essay (see his "From Outside the Imperium," in ¡bid., 153). 2. Nandy, "Science, Authoritarianism , and Culture," 125. 3. Ashis Nandy, " Reconstructing Childhood," in Traditions, Tyranny, and Utopia: Essays in the Polities ofAwareness (Delhi: Oxford Universiry Press, 1987 ), 73-74. 4. Nandy, "From Outside the Imperium ," 147-48. 5. My referente here is obviously to Foucault' s well-known discussion (in "What Is Enlightenment?" in The FoucaultReader, ed. Paul Rabinow [New York: Pantheon, 1984 p of Baudelaire's essav "The Painting of Modera Life." 6. Ashis Nandy, " Sati in Kali Yuga," in The Savage Freud and Other Essays on Possible and Retrievable Selves ( Princeton , N.J.: Princeton Universiry Press, 1995), 47, 41 o. 1 S. Kumkum Sangari quoted in Rajeswari Sundar Rajan , Real and Imagined Women: Gender, Culture, and Postcolonialism ( London: Routledge , 1993), 7-

7. Nandy, "Sati in Kali Yuga ," 40-41. 8. Ibid., 38-39. 9. Ibid-, 49. 10. Jacques Derrida , Specters ofMarx: The State ofthe Debt, the Work ofMourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routlcdge, 1994). CHAPTER TOUR 1. Gandhi quoted in Susan Bean , "Gandhi and Khadi, the Fabric of Indian Independence," in Glotis and Human Experience, ed- Annette B. Weiner and Jane Schneider (Washington , D.C.: Smithsonian Institute Press, 1991), 367.

2. Ibid. 3. 'See Emma Tarlo, Clothing Matters: Deess andIdentity in India (Chicago: Untversity of Chicago Press, 1996), chaps. 3 and 4. 4. Gopalchandra Ray, Saratchandra, 3 vols. (Calcutta: Mitra O Ghosh, 1966), 2143. The italicized portions appear in English in the original. 5. Sunday (Calcutta), 27 November-3 December 1994, front cover. 6. Bean, "Gandhi and Khadi," 366 (Nehru), 366. 7. On this question, see Uday Mehta, Liberalism and Empire (Chicago: Uníversiry of Chicago Press, 1999). 8. There is some discussion of the issue in my Rethinking Working-ClassHistory: Bengal, 1890- 1940 (Princeton , N.J.: Princeton Universiry Press, 1989 ), chap. 4. 9. See the discussion in John Rosselli , "The Self- Image of Effereness : Physical Education and Nationalism in Nineteenth -Century Bengal ," Past and Preseng no. 86 (Fchruary 1980): 121-48. 10. The tradition goes back to onc of the earliest Bengali tracts of history, Banglar itihas ( 1848 ), writren by the nineteenth-century social reformer Vidyasagar. The test was a direct translation of John Clark Marshman's Outlines of the History of Bengal for the Use ofYouths in. India, published in the 1830s. 11. J. C. Ghosh, Bengafi Literature ( 1948; reprint; New York: AMS, 1978), 145. 12. See the discussion in Asitkumar Bandyopadhyay, preface to Vidyasaagar rachanabali (4 vols. ), ed. Debkumar Bosu (Calcutta: Mandal, 1966), 1:36-37. 13. Tapan Raychaudhuri, Europe Reconsidered: Perceptions of the West in Nineteenth Century Bengal (Delhi: Oxford Universiry Press, 1988), 306.

ur mace 1P,,:1;, 69-71 / 57

156 ( so ir, -ro IAC r-.S 59-68 14. M. K Gandhi, An Autobiggra phi, or, 1 he Stor s o f Mv Feper nmentr wátb Truti 11927), trans. Mahadee DevaA 11966; repunt, Boston Bcaenr,, 1957 , 13 -14. 15- See Lloed Rudolph and Susanne Rudolph The Maderrrrm of lradition llerkeleN and Les Ange les Ums et,m d (alitbrnia Jreas, 1968 i. 16. See chap. 5 belosv. 17. Mv ti ti derstandint, of this point is indebted to Madhu Kishssar, `Gandhi nn 'Voceen," Econontic ami Polancal Pl%eckli: 5, 12 Ocrober 1985, 1691 1702, 175368.

18. Gandhi quoted in i id , 1693. 19. U. II lendulkar quotcd in ibid 1 5 20. Erik Erikson, Gandhi Irztth( Nese Y(,rk: Norton, 1969). 21. In her effeedve feminist critique ot Gamihr's s iews on svonien, Kishwar, e.g., repcats a eommonly made observation: "There are obsessive and repeated references tu 'lust' in his autobiography" ("Gandhi on 1'(>men," 1754-S5),

22. Gandhi, Autobiography, 157. 23. See William C. Spengemann, The Forms ofAutobiographv: Episodes in the History of a Literary Genre (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1980), S. 24. Gandhi, Autobiography, xiv. 25. Ninnal Kumar Bosc, MyDaysivith Gandhi(Bombav: Oricnt Longmau, 1974), 20,67-68. 26. See the discussion in mv Provincializing Europe: Posicolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Universiry Press, 2000), chap. 1. 27. Slavoj Zifck, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 30, 36-

37. 28. For a beginning on these questions , see Sudipta Kaviraj, 'Filth and the Public Sphere : Concepts and Practices abone Space in Calcutta ," Public Culture 10, no. 1 (fal11997 ): 83-114. CHAPTER FIVE

1. V. S. Naipaul,India: AMillion Mutinies Now(New York: Viking, 1990), 1-2. 2. See Paul Rabinow, FrenchModern: Norma and Forms ofthe Social Environment (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989), 30-34; and Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (London: Methuen, 1986). 3. Wellesley quoted In S. W. Goode, Municipal Calcutta: Ite Institutions in Their Growth and Origin (Edinburgh, 1916), 237. 4. Sherring quotedin Nira Kumar, lbeArtisans ofBanaras: Popular Culture arui Identity(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Universiry Press, 1988), 78. 5. A. U., Overland, Inland, and Upland: A Lady's Notes of Per-sonal Observations and Adventure (London: Secley, Jackson & Hallidav, 1874), 55-56.

6. Ibid., 47-50, 51-53. 7. Naipaul quoted in Michael Thompson, Rubbish Theory: The Creation and Destruction of Value (Oxford: Oxford Universiry Prcss, 1979), 3. For Naipaul's later rhoughts on his early writiogs on India, see his India, esp. 6-9. 8. Gandhi quoted in Bhikhu Parekh,Gandhi's Political Philosophy:ACriticalExarnination (Notre Dame, lnd.: Universiry of Notre Dame Press, 1989), 49-50. 9. Nirad C. Chaudhuri, The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian (Calcutta: Jaico, 1968), 269, 376. 10. Kumar, TheArtisans ofBanaras, 78-79. 11. Thompson, Rubbish Thearv, 4.

11966; reprint. Londom Koudnlge 12 Mar, Douglas, "'