Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for "Indian" Pasts? Author(S): Dipesh Chakrabarty Reviewed Work(S): Source: Representations, No

Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for "Indian" Pasts? Author(s): Dipesh Chakrabarty Reviewed work(s): Source: Representations, No. 37, Special Issue: Imperial Fantasies and Postcolonial Histories (Winter, 1992), pp. 1-26 Published by: University of California Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2928652 . Accessed: 31/07/2012 17:18

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http://www.jstor.org DIPESH CHAKRABARTY

Postcoloniality and the Artificeof History: Who Speaks for "Indian" Pasts?

Pushthought toextremes. -Louis Althusser

IT HAS RECENTLY BEEN SAID in praise of the postcolonial project of SubalternStudies that it demonstrates,"perhaps for the firsttime since coloniza- tion,"that "Indians are showingsustained signs of reappropriatingthe capacity to representthemselves [within the disciplineof history]."'As a historianwho is a member of the SubalternStudies collective, I findthe congratulationcontained in this remark gratifyingbut premature.The purpose of this articleis to problematize the idea of "Indians" "representingthemselves in history."Let us put aside for the momentthe messyproblems of identityinherent in a transnational enterprisesuch as SubalternStudies, where passports and commitmentsblur the distinctionsof ethnicityin a manner thatsome would regard as characteristically postmodern.I have a more perverseproposition to argue. It is thatinsofar as the academic discourse of history-that is, "history"as a discourse produced at the institutionalsite of the university-isconcerned, "Europe" remainsthe sovereign, theoreticalsubject of all histories,including the ones we call "Indian," "Chinese," "Kenyan," and so on. There is a peculiar way in which all these other histories tend to become variationson a masternarrative that could be called "the history of Europe." In this sense, "Indian" historyitself is in a position of subalternity; one can only articulatesubaltern subject positions in the name of thishistory. While the restof thisarticle will elaborate on thisproposition, let me enter a few qualifications."Europe" and "India" are treated here as hyperrealterms in that they refer to certain figuresof imaginationwhose geographical referents remain somewhatindeterminate.2 As figuresof the imaginarythey are, of course, subjectto contestation,but forthe momentI shall treatthem as thoughthey were given,reified categories, opposites paired in a structureof dominationand sub- ordination. I realize thatin treatingthem thus I leave myselfopen to the charge of nativism,nationalism, or worse, the sin of sins, nostalgia. Liberal-minded scholarswould immediatelyprotest that any idea of a homogeneous, uncontested

REPRESENTATIONS 37 * Winter 1992 ? THE REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIF9RNIA "Europe" dissolves under analysis. True, but just as the phenomenon of orien- talismdoes not disappear simplybecause some of us have now attained a critical awareness of it,similarly a certainversion of "Europe," reifiedand celebrated in the phenomenal world of everydayrelationships of power as the scene of the birthof the modern,continues to dominatethe discourseof history.Analysis does not make it go away.

That Europe worksas a silentreferent in historicalknowledge itself becomes obvious in a highlyordinary way. There are at least two everydaysymptoms of the subalternityof non-Western,third-world histories. Third-world historians feel a need to refer to works in European history;historians of Europe do not feel any need to reciprocate.Whether it is an Edward Thompson, a Le Roy La- durie, a George Duby,a Carlo Ginzberg,a Lawrence Stone, a RobertDarnton, or a Natalie Davis-to take but a few names at random from our contemporary world-the "greats"and the models of the historian'senterprise are alwaysat least culturally"European." "They" produce theirwork in relativeignorance of non- Westernhistories, and thisdoes not seem to affectthe qualityof theirwork. This is a gesture,however, that "we" cannot return.We cannot even affordan equality or symmetryof ignorance at thislevel withouttaking the riskof appearing "old- fashioned" or "outdated." The problem, I may add in parenthesis,is not particularto historians.An unselfconsciousbut neverthelessblatant example of this"inequality of ignorance" in literarystudies, for example, is the followingsentence on Salman Rushdie from a recent text on postmodernism:"Though Saleem Sinai [of Midnight'sChildren] narratesin English ... his intertextsfor both writinghistory and writingfiction are doubled: theyare, on the one hand, fromIndian legends,films, and literature and, on the other,from the West-The Tin Drum,Tristram Shandy, One Hundred Yearsof Solitude, and so on."3 It is interestingto note how thissentence teases out onlythose referencesthat are from"the West." The author is under no obligation here to be able to name withany authorityand specificitythe "Indian" allusions that make Rushdie's intertexuality"doubled." This ignorance, shared and unstated,is part of the assumed compact thatmakes it "easy" to include Rushdie in English departmentofferings on postcolonialism. This problem of asymmetricignorance is not simplya matterof "cultural cringe" (to let my Australianself speak) on our part or of culturalarrogance on the part of the European historian.These problems exist but can be relatively easilyaddressed. Nor do I mean to take anythingaway fromthe achievementsof the historiansI mentioned. Our footnotesbear rich testimonyto the insightswe have derived fromtheir knowledge and creativity.The dominance of "Europe" as the subject of all historiesis a part of a much more profound theoreticalcon- dition under which historicalknowledge is produced in the third world. This

2 REPRESENTATIONS condition ordinarilyexpresses itselfin a paradoxical manner. It is this paradox that I shall describe as the second everydaysymptom of our subalternity,and it refersto the verynature of social science pronouncementsthemselves. For generationsnow, philosophers and thinkersshaping the nature of social science have produced theoriesembracing the entiretyof humanity.As we well know,these statementshave been produced in relative,and sometimesabsolute, ignorance of the majorityof humankind-i.e., those livingin non-Westerncul- tures. This in itselfis not paradoxical, for the more self-consciousof European philosophershave alwayssought theoreticallyto justify this stance. The everyday paradox of third-worldsocial scienceis thatwe find these theories, in spiteof their inherent ignorance of "us," eminentlyuseful in understanding our societies. What allowed the modern European sages to develop such clairvoyancewith regard to societiesof whichthey were empiricallyignorant? Why cannot we, once again, returnthe gaze? There is an answer to thisquestion in the writingsof philosopherswho have read into European historyan entelechyof universalreason, if we regard such philosophy as the self-consciousnessof social science. Only "Europe," the argument would appear to be, is theoretically(i.e., at the level of the fundamentalcat- egories that shape historicalthinking) knowable; all other historiesare matters of empirical research that fleshes out a theoreticalskeleton which is substan- tially "Europe." There is one version of this argument in Edmund Husserl's Vienna lecture of 1935, where he proposed that the fundamental difference between "oriental philosophies" (more specifically,Indian and Chinese) and "Greek-European science" (or as he added, "universallyspeaking: philosophy") was the capacity of the latter to produce "absolute theoreticalinsights," that is "theoria"(universal science), while the formerretained a "practical-universal,"and hence "mythical-religious,"character. This "practical-universal"philosophy was directedto the world in a "naive" and "straightforward"manner, while the world presented itselfas a "thematic"to theoria,making possible a praxis "whose aim is to elevate mankind throughuniversal scientific reason."4 A rather similar epistemologicalproposition underlies Marx's use of categories like "bourgeois" and "prebourgeois" or "capital" and "precapital." The prefixpre here signifiesa relationshipthat is both chronologicaland theoretical. The coming of the bourgeois or capitalistsociety, Marx argues in the Grundrisse and elsewhere, gives rise for the firsttime to a historythat can be apprehended through a philosophical and universalcategory, "capital." Historybecomes, for the firsttime, theoretically knowable. All past historiesare now to be known (theoretically,that is) fromthe vantage point of thiscategory, that is in termsof their differencesfrom it. Things reveal theircategorical essence onlywhen theyreach theirfullest development, or as Marx put itin thatfamous aphorism of the Grund- risse:"Human anatomycontains the keyto theanatomy of theape."5 The category "capital,"as I have discussed elsewhere,contains within itself the legal subject of

WhoSpeaks for "Indian" Pasts? 3 Enlightenmentthought.6 Not surprisingly,Marx said in thatvery Hegelian first chapter of Capital,vol. 1, that the secret of "capital," the category,"cannot be deciphered untilthe notionof human equalityhas acquired the fixityof a popular prejudice."7To continue withMarx's words: Even the most abstractcategories, despite their validity-precisely because of their abstractness-forall epochs,are nevertheless. . . themselves... a productof historical relations.Bourgeois society is themost developed and themost complex historic organi- zationof production.The categorieswhich express its relations, the comprehension of its structure,thereby also allowinsights into the structure and therelations of productionof all thevanished social formations out of whose ruins and elementsit built itself up, whose partlystill unconquered remnants are carriedalong within it, whose mere nuances have developedexplicit significance within it, etc. ... The intimationsof higherdevelopment amongthe subordinate animal species ... can be understoodonly after the higher devel- opmentis alreadyknown. The bourgeoiseconomy thus supplies the key to theancient.8

For "capital" or "bourgeois,"I submit,read "Europe."

Neither Marx nor Husserl spoke-not at least in the words quoted above-in a historicistspirit. In parenthesis,we should also recall here thatMarx's vision of emancipation entailed a journey beyond the rule of capital, in fact beyond the notionofjuridical equalitythat liberalism holds so sacred. The maxim "From each according to his abilityto each according to his need" runs quite contraryto the principle of "Equal pay for equal work,"and this is why Marx remains-the Berlin Wall notwithstanding(or not standing!)-a relevant and fundamentalcritic of both capitalismand liberalismand thuscentral to any postcolonial, postmodern project of writinghistory. Yet Marx's methodological/epis- temologicalstatements have not alwayssuccessfully resisted historicist readings. There has always remained enough ambiguityin these statementsto make possible the emergence of "Marxist" historicalnarratives. These narrativesturn around the theme of "historicaltransition." Most modern third-worldhistories are writtenwithin problematics posed by this transitionnarrative, of which the overriding(if often implicit)themes are those of development,modernization, capitalism. This tendencycan be located in our own workin the SubalternStudies project. My book on working-classhistory struggles with the problem.9Sumit Sarkar's (another colleague in the SubalternStudies project) Modern India, justifiably regarded as one of the best textbookson Indian historywritten primarily for Indian universities,opens withthe followingsentences: The sixtyyears or so thatlie betweenthe foundation of theIndian National Congress in 1885and theachievement of independence in August 1947 witnessed perhaps the greatest transitionin ourcountry's long history. A transition,however, which in many ways remains

4 REPRESENTATIONS grievouslyincomplete, and it is withthis central ambiguity that it seemsmost convenient to beginour survey.'0

What kind of a transitionwas it that remained "grievouslyincomplete"? Sarkar hintsat the possibilityof there havingbeen severalby naming three:

So manyof the aspirations aroused in thecourse of the national struggle remained unful- filled-theGandhian dream of thepeasant coming into his own in Ram-rajya[the rule of thelegendary and theideal god-king Ram], as muchas theleft ideals of social revolution. And as thehistory of independent India and Pakistan(and Bangladesh)was repeatedly to reveal,even the problems of a completebourgeois transformation and successfulcapitalist developmentwere not fully solved by the transfer of powerof 1947.(4)

Neither the peasant's dream of a mythicaland just kingdom,nor the Left'sideal of a social[ist]revolution, nor a "completebourgeois transformation"-itis within these three absences, these "grievouslyincomplete" scenarios thatSarkar locates the storyof modern India. It is also witha similarreference to "absences"-the "failure"of a historyto keep an appointmentwith its destiny (once again an instanceof the "lazy native," shall we say?)-that we announced our projectof SubalternStudies:

It is the studyof thishistoric failure of the nation to come to its own, a failuredue to the inadequacy[emphasis added] of thebourgeoisie as wellas of theworking class to lead itinto a decisivevictory over colonialismand a bourgeois-democraticrevolution of the classic nineteenth-centurytype ... or [of the] "new democracy"[type]-it is thestudy of this failure whichconstitutes the central problematic of the historiography ofcolonial India. 1

The tendencyto read Indian historyin termsof a lack, an absence, or an incom- pletenessthat translates into "inadequacy" is obvious in theseexcerpts. As a trope, however,it is an ancient one, going back to the hoarybeginnings of colonial rule in India. The Britishconquered and representedthe diversityof "Indian" pasts through a homogenizing narrative of transitionfrom a "medieval" period to "modernity."The termshave changed withtime. The "medieval"was once called "despotic"and the "modern,""the rule of law.""Feudal/capitalist" has been a later variant. When it was firstformulated in colonial historiesof India, thistransition narrativewas an unashamed celebrationof the imperialist'scapacity for violence and conquest. To give only one example among the manyavailable, Alexander Dow's Historyof Hindostan, first published in threevolumes between 1770 and 1772, was dedicated to the kingwith a candor characteristicof the eighteenthcentury when one did not need a Michel Foucault to uncover the connectionbetween violence and knowledge: "The success of Your Majesty'sarms," said Dow, "has laid open the East to the researches of the curious."'2 Underscoring this connection between violence and modernity,Dow added:

WhoSpeaks for "Indian" Pasts? 5 The Britishnation have become the conquerors of Bengal and theyought to extendsome part of their fundamentaljurisprudence to secure theirconquest.... The sword is our tenure.It is an absoluteconquest, and itis so consideredby the world. (1 :cxxxviii)

This "fundamentaljurisprudence" was the "rule of law" that contrasted,in Dow's narrative,with a past rule thatwas "arbitrary"and "despotic."In a further gloss Dow explained that "despotism" did not refer to a "governmentof mere caprice and whim,"for he knew enough historyto know thatthat was not true of India. Despotism was the opposite of English constitutionalgovernment; it was a systemwhere "the legislative,the judicial and the executivepower [were] vested in the prince."This was the past of unfreedom.With the establishmentof British power,the Indian was to be made a legal subject,ruled by a governmentopen to the pressures of private property("the foundation of public prosperity,"said Dow) and public opinion, and supervised by a judiciary where "the distributers ofjustice ought to be independent of everythingbut law [as] otherwisethe officer [thejudge] becomes a tool of oppression in the hands of despotism" (l:xcv, cl, cxl-cxli). In the nineteenthand twentiethcenturies, generations of elite Indian nation- alistsfound theirsubject positions, as nationalists,within this transition narrative that, at various times and depending on one's ideology,hung the tapestryof "Indian history"between the two poles of the homologous sets of oppositions, despotic/constitutional,medieval/modern, feudal/capitalist. Within this narrative shared between imperialistand nationalistimaginations, the "Indian" was always a figureof lack. There was always,in other words,room in thisstory for charac- ters who embodied, on behalf of the native, the theme of "inadequacy" or "failure."Dow's recommendationof a "rule of law" for Bengal/India came with the paradoxical assurance (to the British)that there was no danger of such a rule "infusing"in the natives"a spiritof freedom":

To make the nativesof the fertilesoil of Bengal free,is beyondthe powerof political arrangement.... Theirreligion, their institutions, their manners, the very disposition of theirminds, form them for passive obedience. To givethem property would only bind themwith stronger ties to our interests,and makethem our subjects;or if the British nationprefers the name-more our slaves.( :cxl-cxli)

We do not need to be reminded that this would remain the cornerstoneof imperial ideology for many years to come-subjecthood but not citizenship,as the native was never adequate to the latter-and would eventuallybecome a strandof liberaltheory itself.l3 This was of course where nationalistsdiffered. For Rammohun Roy as for Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay,two of India's most prominentnationalist intellectuals of the nineteenthcentury, British rule was a necessary period of tutelage that Indians had to undergo in order to prepare preciselyfor what the Britishdenied but extolledas the end of all history:citizen-

6 REPRESENTATIONS ship and the nation state.Years later,in 1951, an "unknown"Indian who success- fullysold his "obscurity"dedicated the storyof his lifethus: To thememory of the BritishEmpire in India Whichconferred subjecthood on us Butwithheld citizenship; To whichyet Everyoneof us threwout the challenge "CivisBritanicus Sum" Because Allthat was good and living Withinus Wasmade, shaped, and quickened Bythe same British Rule.'4

In nationalistversions of thisnarrative, as ParthaChatterjee has shown,it was the peasants and the workers,the subalternclasses, who were given to bear the cross of "inadequacy,"for, according to thisversion, it was theywho needed to be educated out of their ignorance, parochialism,or, depending on your preference, false consciousness.'5Even today the Anglo-Indian word communalismrefers to those who allegedly fail to measure up to the "secular" ideals of citizenship. That British rule put in place the practices,institutions, and discourse of bourgeois individualismin the Indian soil is undeniable. Early expressions-that is, before the beginnings of nationalism-of this desire to be a "legal subject" make it clear thatto Indians in the 1830s and 1840s to be a "modern individual" was to become a "European." TheLiterary Gleaner, a magazine in colonial Calcutta, ran the followingpoem in 1842, writtenin English by a Bengali schoolboyeigh- teen yearsof age. The poem apparentlywas inspiredby the sightof ships leaving the coast of Bengal "forthe glorious shores of England": Oftlike a sad birdI sigh To leavethis land, though mine own land it be; Itsgreen robed meads,-gay flowers and cloudlesssky Thoughpassing fair, have but few charms for me. ForI havedreamed of climes more bright and free Wherevirtue dwells and heaven-bornliberty Makeseven the lowest happy;-where the eye Dothsicken not to see manbend the knee To sordidinterest:-climes where science thrives, And geniusdoth receive her guerdon meet; Whereman in hisall histruest glory lives, And nature'sface is exquisitelysweet: Forthose fair climes I heavethe impatient sigh, Therelet me liveand therelet me die.'6

WhoSpeaks for "Indian" Pasts? 7 In its echoes of Milton and seventeenth-centuryEnglish radicalism, this is obviously a piece of colonial pastiche.17Michael Madhusudan Dutt, the young Bengali author of thispoem, eventuallyrealized the impossibilityof being "Euro- pean" and returnedto Bengali literatureto become one of our finestpoets. Later Indian nationalists,however, abandoned such abject desire to be "Europeans" themselves.Nationalist thought was premised preciselyon the assumed univer- salityof the project of becoming individuals,on the assumptionthat "individual rights"and abstract"equality" were universalsthat could findhome anywherein the world, that one could be both an "Indian" and a "citizen"at the same time. We shall soon explore some of the contradictionsof thisproject. Many of the public and privaterituals of modern individualismbecame visible in India in the nineteenthcentury. One sees this,for instance, in the sudden flourishingin this period of the four basic genres thathelp express the modern self: the novel, the biography,the autobiography,and history.18Along withthese came modern industry,technology, medicine, a quasibourgeois (thoughcolonial) legal systemsupported by a state that nationalismwas to take over and make its own. The transitionnarrative that I have been discussingunderwrote, and was in turn underpinned by,these institutions.To thinkthis narrativewas to think these institutionsat the apex of which sat the modern state,19and to thinkthe modern or the nation state was to thinka historywhose theoreticalsubject was Europe. Gandhi realized thisas early as 1909. Referringto the Indian nationalists'demands for more railways,modern medicine,and bourgeois law,he cannily remarked in his book Hind Swaraj thatthis was to "make India English"or, as he put it,to have "Englishrule withoutthe Englishman."20This "Europe," as Michael Madhusudan Dutt's youthfuland naive poetryshows, was of course nothingbut a piece of fictiontold to the colonized by the colonizer in the very process of fabricatingcolonial domination.21Gandhi's critiqueof this"Europe" is compro- mised on many pointsby his nationalism,and I do not intendto fetishizehis text. But I find his gesture useful in developing the problematicof nonmetropolitan histories.

III

I shall now returnto the themesof "failure,""lack," and "inadequacy" that so ubiquitouslycharacterize the speaking subject of "Indian" history.As in the practiceof the insurgentpeasants of colonial India, the firststep in a critical effortmust arise froma gestureof inversion.22Let us begin fromwhere the transition narrativeends and read "plenitude" and "creativity"where this narrative has made us read "lack" and "inadequacy." According to the fable of theirconstitution, Indians today are all "citizens."

8 REPRESENTATIONS The constitutionembraces almost a classicallyliberal definitionof citizenship.If the modern stateand the modern individual,the citizen,are but the two insepa- rable sides of the same phenomenon, as William Connolly argues in Political Theoryand Modernity,it would appear that the end of historyis in sightfor us in India.23This modern individual, however,whose political/publiclife is lived in citizenship,is also supposed to have an interiorized"private" self that pours out incessantlyin diaries, letters,autobiographies, novels, and, of course, in what we say to our analysts.The bourgeois individualis not born untilone discoversthe pleasures of privacy.But this is a veryspecial kind of "private"-it is, in fact,a deferred "public,"for thisbourgeois private,as JurgenHabermas has reminded us, is "alwaysalready oriented to an audience [Publikum]."24 Indian public life may mimicon paper the bourgeois legal fictionof citizenship-the fictionis usually performedas a farce in India-but what about the bourgeois privateand its history?Anyone who has triedto write"French" social historywith Indian materialwould know how impossiblydifficult the task is.25It is not that the formof the bourgeois privatedid not come withEuropean rule. There have been, since the middle of the nineteenthcentury, Indian novels,diaries, letters,and autobiographies,but theyseldom yield picturesof an endlessly interiorized subject. Our autobiographies are remarkably"public" (with constructionsof public life that are not necessarilymodern) when writtenby men, and theytell the storyof the extended familywhen writtenby women.26In any case, autobiographiesin the confessionalmode are notable fortheir absence. The single paragraph (out of 963 pages) thatNirad Chaudhuri spends on describing the experience of his wedding nightin the second volume of his celebrated and prize-winningautobiography is as good an example as any other and is worth quoting at some length. I should explain that this was an arranged marriage (Bengal, 1932), and Chaudhuri was anxious lest his wife should not appreciate his newly acquired but unaffordablyexpensive hobby of buying records of Westernclassical music. Our reading of Chaudhuri is handicapped in part byour lack of knowledge of the intertextualityof his prose-there may have been at work,for instance, an imbibedpuritanical revulsion against revealing "too much." Yet the passage remains a tellingexercise in the constructionof memory,for it is about what Chaudhuri "remembers"and "forgets"of his "firstnight's experience." He screens offintimacy with expressions like "I do not remember"or "I do not know how" (not to mentionthe veryFreudian "makinga clean breastof"), and thisself-constructed veil is no doubt a part of the selfthat speaks:

I wasterribly uneasy at theprospect of meeting as wifea girlwho was a completestranger to me,and whenshe wasbrought in ... and leftstanding before me I had nothingto say. I saw onlya veryshy smile on her face,and timidlyshe came and satby my side on the edge ofthe bed. I do notknow how after that both of us driftedto thepillows, to lie down side by side. [Chaudhuriadds in a footnote:"Of course,fully dressed. We Hindus ...

WhoSpeaks for "Indian" Pasts? 9 considerboth extremes-fully clad and fullynude-to be modest,and everythingin- betwelenas grosslyimmodest. No decentman wants his wife to be an allumeuse."]Then the firstwords were exchanged. She tookup one ofmy arms, felt it and said: "Youare so thin. I shalltake good care of you."I did notthank her, and I do notremember that beyond notingthe words I evenfelt touched. The horriblesuspense about European music had reawakenedin mymind, and I decidedto makea cleanbreast of it at once and lookthe sacrifice,if it was called for, straight in theface and beginromance on suchterms as were offeredto me. I asked her timidlyafter a while:"Have you listenedto any European music?"She shookher head to say"No." Nonetheless, I took another chance and thistime asked:"Have youheard the name of a mancalled Beethoven?" She noddedand signified "Yes."I was reassured,but not wholly satisfied. So I askedyet again: "Can you spellthe name?"She said slowly:"B, E, E, T, H, 0, V, E, N." I feltvery encouraged ... and [we] dozed off.27

The desire to be "modern" screamsout of everysentence in the two volumes of Chaudhuri's autobiography.His legendaryname now stands for the cultural historyof Indo-Britishencounter. Yet in the 1500-odd pages thathe has written in English about his life,this is the onlypassage where the narrativeof Chaudhu- ri's participationin public lifeand literarycircles is interruptedto make room for somethingapproaching the intimate.How do we read thistext, this self-making of an Indian male who was second to no one in his ardor forthe public lifeof the citizen, yet who seldom, if ever, reproduced in writingthe other side of the modern citizen,the interiorizedprivate self unceasingly reaching out foran audience? Public withoutprivate? Yet another instance of the "incompleteness"of bourgeois transformationin India? These questions are themselvesprompted by the transitionnarrative that in turn situatesthe modern individual at the veryend of history.I do not wish to confer on Chaudhuri's autobiography a representativenessit may not have. Women's writings,as I have already said, are different,and scholars have just begun to explore the world of autobiographiesin Indian history.But ifone result of European imperialismin India was to introducethe modern stateand the idea of the nation with theirattendant discourse of "citizenship,"which, by the very idea of "the citizen'srights" (i.e., "the rule of law"), splitsthe figureof the modern individual into "public" and "private"parts of the self (as the young Marx once pointed out in his On theJewish Question), these themes have existed-in contestation,alliance, and miscegenation-with other narrativesof the self and communitythat do not look to the state/citizenbind as the ultimateconstruction of sociality.28This as such will not be disputed, but my point goes further.It is that these other constructionsof self and community,while documentable in themselves, will never enjoy the privilegeof providingthe metanarrativesor teleolo- gies (assuming that there cannot be a narrative without at least an implicit teleology)of our histories.This is so partlybecause these narrativesoften themselves bespeak an antihistoricalconsciousness; that is, theyentail subject positions

10 REPRESENTATIONS and configurationsof memory that challenge and undermine the subject that speaks in the name of history."History" is preciselythe site where the struggle goes on to appropriate, on behalf of the modern (my hyperrealEurope), these other collocationsof memory. To illustratethese propositions,I willnow discussa fragmentof thiscontested historyin which the modern privateand the modern individualwere embroiled in colonial India.29

What I present here are the outlines,so to speak, of a chapter in the historyof bourgeois domesticityin colonial Bengal. The material-in the main textsproduced in Bengali between 1850 and 1920 forteaching women thatvery Victoriansubject, "domestic science"-relates to the Bengali Hindu middle class, the bhadralokor "respectable people." Britishrule institutedinto Indian life the trichotomousideational divisionon which modern politicalstructures rest, e.g., the state,civil society, and the (bourgeois) family.It was thereforenot surprising that ideas relating to bourgeois domesticity,privacy, and individualityshould come to India via Britishrule. What I want to highlighthere, however,through the example of the bhadralok,are certain cultural operations by which the "Indians" challenged and modifiedthese received ideas in such a wayas to put in question two fundamental tenets underlying the idea of "modernity"-the nuclear familybased on companionate marriageand the secular,historical constructionof time. As Meredith Borthwick,Ghulam Murshid,and other scholars have shown, the eighteenth-centuryEuropean idea of "civilization"culminated, in early nineteenth-centuryIndia, in a full-blownimperialist critique of Indian/Hindu domestic life,which was now held to be inferiorto what became mid-Victorian ideals of bourgeois domesticity.30The "condition of women" question in nineteenth-centuryIndia was part of that critique, as were the ideas of the "modern"individual, "freedom," "equality," and "rights."In passages remarkable for theircombination of egalitarianismand orientalism,James Mill's TheHistory of BritishIndia (1817) joined togetherthe thematicof the family/nationand a teleologyof "freedom": The conditionof womenis one of themost remarkable circumstances in themanners of nations.... The historyof uncultivatednations uniformly represents the women as in a stateof abjectslavery, from which they slowly emerge as civilisationadvances.... As societyrefines upon its enjoyments. . the conditionof the weakersex is gradually improved,till they associate on equal termswith the men, and occupythe place of volun- taryand usefulcoadjutors. A stateof dependencemore strict and humiliatingthan that whichis ordainedfor the weaker sex among the Hindus cannot be easilyconceived.31

WhoSpeaks for "Indian" Pasts? 11 As is well known,the Indian middle classes generallyfelt answerable to this charge. From the early nineteenth-centuryonward a movementdeveloped in Bengal (and other regions) to reform"women's conditions"and to give them formaleducation. Much of thisdiscourse on women's education was emancipa- tionistin that it spoke the language of "freedom,""equality," and "awakening," and was stronglyinfluenced by Ruskinian ideals and idealization of bourgeois domesticity.32If one looks on this historyas part of the historyof the modern individual in India, an interestingfeature emerges. It is thatin thisliterature on women's education certain terms,after all, were much more vigorouslydebated than others.There was, for example, a degree of consensus over the desirability of domestic"discipline" and "hygiene"as practicesreflective of a stateof modernity,but the word freedom,yet another importantterm in the rhetoricof the modern, hardly ever acted as the registerof such a social consensus. It was a passionatelydisputed word, and we would be wrong to assume thatthe passions reflecteda simple and straightforwardbattle of the sexes. The word was assimi- lated to the nationalistneed to constructcultural boundaries thatsupposedly separated the "European" fromthe "Indian." The dispute over this word was thus central to the discursivestrategies through which a subject position was created enabling the "Indian" to speak. It is this subject position that I want to discuss here in some detail. What the Bengali literatureon women's education played out was a battle between a nationalistconstruction of a cultural norm of the patriarchal,patri- local, patrilineal,extended familyand the ideal of the patriarchal,bourgeois nuclear family that was implicit in the European/imperialist/universalistdis- course on the "freedoms"of individualism,citizenship, and civil society.33The themesof "discipline"and "order" were criticalin shaping nationalistimaginings of aestheticsand power. "Discipline"was seen as the keyto the power of the colonial (i.e., modern) state,but it required certainprocedures forredefining the self. The Britishwere powerful,it was argued, because theywere disciplined,orderly, and punctual in every detail of their lives, and this was made possible by the education of "their"women who broughtthe virtuesof disciplineinto the home. The "Indian" home, a colonial construct,now fared badly in nationalistwritings on modern domesticity.To quote a Bengali texton women'seducation from1877: The houseof anycivilised European is likethe abode of gods.Every household object is clean,set in itsproper place and decorated;nothing seems unclean or smellsfoul.... It is as if[the goddess of] order[srinkhala, "order, discipline"; srinkhal, "chains"] had become manifestto pleasethe [human] eye. In themiddle of theroom would be a coveredtable witha bouquetof flowerson it,while around it wouldbe [a few]chairs nicely arranged [with]everything sparkling clean. But entera housein ourcountry and youwould feel as if you had been transportedthere by your destiny to makeyou atonefor all thesins of yourlife. [A massof] cowdungtorturing the senses ... dustin theair, a growingheap of ashes,flies buzzing around ... a littleboy urinating into the ground and puttingthe mess backinto his mouth.... The wholeplace is dominatedby a stenchthat seems to be run-

12 REPRESENTATIONS ningfree .... Thereis no orderanywhere, the household objects are so uncleanthat they onlyevoke disgust.34

This self-divisionof the colonial subject,the double movementof recognitionby whichit both knowsits "present" as the siteof disorderand yetmoves away from thisspace in desiringa disciplinethat can onlyexist in an imaginedbut "historical" future,is a rehearsal, in the contextof the discussionof the bourgeois domestic in colonial India, of the transitionnarrative we have encountered before. A historical constructionof temporality(medieval/modern, separated by historical time),in other words, is preciselythe axis along which the colonial subject splits itself.Or to put it differently,this split is what is history;writing history is per- formingthis split over and over again. The desire for order and disciplinein the domesticsphere thus may be seen as having been a correlate of the nationalist,modernizing desire for a similar disciplinein the public sphere, thatis fora rule of law enforcedby the state. It is beyond the scope of this paper to pursue this point further,but the connection betweenpersonal disciplineand disciplinein public lifewas to reveal itselfin what the nationalistswrote about domestichygiene and public health. The connection is recognizablymodernist, and itis whatthe Indian modern shared withthe Euro- pean modern.35What I want to attend to, however,are the differencesbetween the two. And thisis where I turn to the other importantaspect of the European modern, the rhetoricof "freedom"and "equality." The argumentabout "freedom"-in the textsunder discussion-was waged around the question of the Victorianideals of the companionate marriage,that is, over the question as to whetheror not the wifeshould also be a friendto the husband. Nothing threatened the ideal of the Bengali/Indian extended family (or the exalted positionof the mother-in-lawwithin that structure) more than this idea, wrapped up in notions of bourgeois privacy,that the wifewas also to be a friendor, to put it differently,that the woman was now to be a modern individual. I mustmention here thatthe modern individual,who assertshis/her individuality over the claims of the joint or extended family,almost always appears in nineteenth-and early twentieth-centuryBengali literatureas an embattled figure, oftenthe subjectof ridiculeand scorn in the same Bengali fictionand essays that otherwiseextolled the virtuesof disciplineand scientificrationality in personal and public lives. This ironyhad manyexpressions. The mostwell-known Bengali fictionalcharacter who representsthis moral censure of modern individualityis Nimchand Datta in Dinabandhu Mitra'splay Sadhabar ekadashi (1866). Nimchand, who is English-educated,quotes Shakespeare, Milton,or Locke at the slightest opportunityand uses this education arrogantlyto ignore his duties toward his extended family,finds his nemeses in alcohol and debauchery.This metonymic relationshipbetween the love of "modern"/Englisheducation (which stood for the romanticindividual in nineteenth-centuryBengal) and the slipperypath of

WhoSpeaks for "Indian" Pasts? 13 alcohol is suggested in the play by a conversationbetween Nimchand and a Ben- gali officialof the colonial bureaucracy,a Deputy Magistrate.Nimchand's super- cilious braggadocio about his command of the English language quickly and inevitablyruns to the subjectof drinks(synonymous, in middle-classBengali culture of the period, withabsolute decadence): I read English,write English, speechify in English,think in English,dream in English- mindyou, it's no child'splay-now tell me, my good fellow, what would you like to drink?- Claretfor ladies, sherry for men and brandyfor heroes.36

A similarconnection between the modern, "free"individual and selfishness was made in the literatureon women's education. The constructionwas undis- guisedly nationalist (and patriarchal). Freedomwas used to mark a difference between what was "Indian" and what was "European/English."The ultra-free woman acted like a memsahib(European woman), selfishand shameless. As Kun- damala Devi, a woman writingfor a women's magazine Bamabodhinipatrika, said in 1870: "Oh dear ones! If you have acquired real knowledge,then give no place in your heartto memsahib-likebehaviour. This is not becomingin a Bengali housewife."37The idea of "true modesty"was mobilized to build up thispicture of the "really"Bengali woman.38Writing in 1920, Indira Devi dedicated her Narirukti [A Woman Speaks]-interestingly enough, a defense of modern Bengali wom- anhood against criticismsby (predominantly)male writers-to generations of ideal Bengali women whom she thus described: "Unaffected by nature, of pleasant speech, untiringin theirservice [to others],oblivious of theirown pleasures, [while] moved easily by the sufferingof others,and capable of being con- tentwith very little."39 This model of the "modern" Bengali/Indian woman-educated enough to appreciate the modern regulationsof the body and the state but yet "modest" enough to be unselfassertiveand unselfish-was tied to the debates on "freedom." "Freedom" in the West,several authorsargued, meantjathechhachar, to do as one pleased, the rightto self-indulgence.In India, it was said, freedommeant freedom fromthe ego, the capacityto serve and obey voluntarily.Notice how the termsfreedom and slaveryhave changed positionsin the followingquote: To be ableto subordinateoneself to others and todharma [duty/moral order/proper acton] ... tofree the soul from the slavery of the senses, are thefirst tasks of human freedom.... That is whyin Indianfamilies boys and girlsare subordinateto theparents, wife to the husbandand to theparents-in-law, the disciple to theguru, the student to theteacher . .. theking to dharma... thepeople to theking, [and one's] dignity and prestigeto [thatof] thecommunity [samaj]40

There was an ironicaltwist to thistheorizing that needs to be noted. Quite clearly, thistheory of "freedom-in-obedience"did not apply to the domesticservants who were sometimesmentioned in this literatureas examples of the "truly"unfree, the nationalistpoint being that(European) observerscommenting on the unfree

14 REPRESENTATIONS status of Indian women often missed (so some nationalistsargued) this crucial distinctionbetween the housewifeand the domestic.Obviously, the servantswere not yetincluded in the India of the nationalistimagination. Thus went the Bengali discourseon modern domesticityin a colonial period when the rise of a civilsociety and a quasimodern statehad already insertedthe modern questions of "public" and "private"into middle-classBengali lives. The received bourgeois ideas about domesticityand connections between the domestic and the national were modified here in two significantways. One strategy,as I have sought to demonstrate,was to contraposethe culturalnorm of the patriarchalextended familyto the bourgeois patriarchalideals of the companionate marriage,to oppose the new patriarchywith a redefinedversion of the old one(s). Thus was foughtthe idea of the modern private.The other strategy, equally significant,was to mobilize,on behalf of the extended family,forms and figurationsof collectivememory that challenged, albeit ambiguously,the seem- ingly absolute separation of "sacred" and "secular" time on which the very modern ("European") idea of historywas/is based.41 The figureof the "trulyedu- cated," "trulymodest," and "trulyIndian" woman is invested,in thisdiscussion of women's education, with a sacred authorityby subordinatingthe question of domesticlife to religiousideas of female auspiciousness thatjoined the heavenly withthe mundane in a conceptualizationof timethat could be onlyantihistorical. The trulymodern housewife,it was said, would be so auspicious as to mark the eternal return of the cosmic principle embodied in the goddess Lakshmi, the goddess of domestic well-beingby whose grace the extended family(and clan, and hence, byextending the sentiment,the nation,Bharatlakshmi) lived and pros- pered. Thus we read in a contemporarypamphlet: "Women are the Lakshmisof the community.If theyundertake to improvethemselves in the sphere of dharma and knowledge . . . there will be an automatic improvementin [the quality of] social life."42Lakshmi, regarded as the Hindu god Vishnu's wife by about A.D. 400, has for long been held up in popular Hinduism, and in the everyday pantheismof Hindu families,as the model of the Hindu wife,united in complete harmonywith her husband (and his family)through willful submission, loyalty, devotion, and chastity.43When women did not followher ideals, it was said, the (extended) familyand the familyline were destroyedby the spiritof Alakshmi (not-Lakshmi),the dark and malevolentreverse of the Lakshmi principle.While women'seducation and the idea of disciplineas such were seldom opposed in this discourse regardingthe modern individualin colonial Bengal, the line was drawn at the point where modernityand the demand forbourgeois privacythreatened the power and the pleasures of the extended family. There is no question thatthe speaking subjecthere is nationalistand patriarchal, employing the cliched orientalistcategories, "the East" and "the West."44 However, of importance to us are the two denials on which this particular momentof subjectivityrests: the denial, or at least contestation,of the bourgeois

WhoSpeaks for "Indian" Pasts? 15 privateand, equally important,the denial of historicaltime by makingthe family a siteiwherethe sacred and the secular blended in a perpetual reenactmentof a principlethat was heavenlyand divine. The cultural space the antihistoricalinvoked was by no means harmonious or nonconflictual,though nationalistthought of necessitytried to portrayit to be so. The antihistoricalnorms of the patriarchalextended family,for example, could only have had a contestedexistence, contested both by women's struggles and bythose of the subalternclasses. But thesestruggles did not necessarilyfollow any lines thatwould allow us to constructemancipatory narratives by puttingthe "patriarchals"clearly on one side and the "liberals"on the other.The historyof modern "Indian" individualityis caught up in too many contradictionsto lend itselfto such a treatment. I do not have the space here to develop the point,so I willmake do withone example. It comes fromthe autobiographyof Ramabai Ranade, the wife of the famous nineteenth-centurysocial reformerfrom the Bombay Presidency,M. G. Ranade. Ramabai Ranade's strugglefor self-respect was in part against the "old" patriarchalorder of the extended familyand for the "new" patriarchyof companionate marriage,which her reform-mindedhusband saw as the mostcivilized formof the conjugal bond. In pursuitof thisideal, Ramabai began to share her husband's commitmentto public life and would oftentake part (in the 1880s) in public gatheringsand deliberationsof male and female social reformers.As she herselfsays: "It was at these meetingsthat I learntwhat a meetingwas and how one should conduct oneself at one."45 Interestingly,however, one of the chief sources of opposition to Ramabai's effortswere (apart from men) the other women in the family.There is of course no doubt that they,her mother-in-law and her husband's sisters,spoke for the old patriarchalextended family.But it is quite instructiveto listento theirvoices (as theycome across throughRamabai's text),for theyalso spoke for theirown sense of self-respectand theirown forms of struggleagainst men: You shouldnot reallygo to thesemeetings [they said to Ramabai] .... Even if the men wantyou to do thesethings, you should ignore them. You need notsay no: butafter all, you need notdo it.They will then give up, out of sheerboredom.... You are outdoing eventhe European women.

Or this: It is she [Ramabai]herself who lovesthis frivolousness of goingto meetings.Dada [Mr. Ranade]is notat all so keenabout it. But shouldshe nothave some sense of proportion of how muchthe womenshould actually do? If men tellyou to do a hundredthings, womenshould take up tenat themost. After all mendo notunderstand these practical things!... The goodwoman [in the past] never turned frivolous like this.... Thatis why thislarge family ... could livetogether in a respectableway.... But nowit is all so different!If Dada suggestsone thing,this woman is preparedto do three.How can we live withany sense of self-respectthen and howcan we endureall this?(84-85)

16 REPRESENTATIONS These voices,combining the contradictorythemes of nationalism,of patriarchal clan-based ideology,of women's strugglesagainst men, and opposed at the same time to friendshipbetween husbands and wives, remind us of the deep ambivalences that marked the trajectoryof the modern private and bourgeois individualityin colonial India. Yet historiansmanage, by maneuvers reminiscent of the old "dialectical"card trickcalled "negationof negation,"to deny a subject position to this voice of ambivalence. The evidence of what I have called "the denial of the bourgeois privateand of the historicalsubject" is acknowledgedbut subordinated in their accounts to the supposedly higher purpose of making Indian historylook like yet another episode in the universaland (in theirview, the ultimatelyvictorious) march of citizenship,of the nation state,of themes of human emancipation spelled out in the course of the European Enlightenment and after.It is the figureof the citizenthat speaks throughthese histories.And so long as thathappens, myhyperreal Europe willcontinually return to dominate the stories we tell. "The modern" will then continue to be understood, as Meaghan Morris has so aptlyput it in discussingher own Australiancontext, "as a knownhistory, something which has alreadyhappened elsewhere, and which is to be reproduced, mechanicallyor otherwise,with a local content."This can only leave us with a task of reproducing what Morris calls "the project of positive unoriginality."46

Yet the "originality"-I concede thatthis is a bad term-of the idioms through which struggleshave been conducted in the Indian subcontinenthas often been in the sphere of the nonmodern. One does not have to subscribe to the ideology of clannish patriarchy,for instance,to acknowledge that the meta- phor of the sanctifiedand patriarchalextended familywas one of the mostimpor- tantelements in the culturalpolitics of Indian nationalism.In the struggleagainst Britishrule, it was frequentlythe use of thisidiom-in songs, poetry,and other formsof nationalistmobilization-that allowed "Indians" to fabricatea sense of communityand to retrieve for themselves a subject position from which to address the British.I willillustrate this with an example fromthe lifeof Gandhi, "the fatherof the nation,"to highlightthe politicalimportance of this cultural move on the part of the "Indian." My example refersto the year 1946. There had been ghastlyriots between the Hindus and the Muslims in Calcutta over the impending partitionof the countryinto India and Pakistan. Gandhi was in the city,fasting in protestover the behavior of his own people. And here is how an Indian intellectualrecalls the experience:

WhoSpeaks for "Indian" pasts? 17 Men wouldcome back fromtheir offices in theevening and findfood preparedby the family[meaning the womenfolk] ready for them; but soon it wouldbe revealedthat the womenof thehome had noteaten the whole day. They [apparently] had notfelt hungry. Pressedfurther, the wife or themother would admit that they could not understand how theycould go on [eating]when Gandhiji was dying for their own crimes. Restaurants and amusementcentres did littlebusiness; some of themwere voluntarily closed by the pro- prietors .... The nerve of feelinghad been restored; the pain began to be felt .... Gan- dhijiknew when to startthe redemptive process.47

We do not have to take this descriptionliterally, but the nature of the com- munityimagined in these lines is clear. It blends, in GayatriSpivak's words, "the feelingof communitythat belongs to national links and politicalorganizations" with"that other feelingof communitywhose structuralmodel is the [clan or the extended] family."48Colonial Indian historyis replete with instances where Indians arrogated subjecthood to themselvesprecisely by mobilizing,within the context of "modern" institutionsand sometimeson behalf of the modernizing projectof nationalism,devices of collectivememory that were both antihistorical and antimodern.49This is not to deny the capacityof "Indians" to act as subjects endowed withwhat we in the universitieswould recognize as "a sense of history" (what Peter Burke calls "the renaissanceof the past") but to insistat the same time that there were also contrarytrends, that in the multifariousstruggles that took place in colonial India, antihistoricalconstructions of the past oftenprovided very powerfulforms of collectivememory.50 There is then thisdouble bind throughwhich the subjectof "Indian" history articulatesitself. On the one hand, it is both the subjectand the object of modernity,because it stands for an assumed unitycalled the "Indian people" that is alwayssplit into two-a modernizingelite and a yet-to-be-modernizedpeasantry. As such a splitsubject, however, it speaks fromwithin a metanarrativethat cele- brates the nation state; and of thismetanarrative the theoreticalsubject can only be a hyperreal"Europe," a "Europe" constructedby the tales thatboth imperialism and nationalismhave told the colonized. The mode of self-representation that the "Indian" can adopt here is what Homi Bhabha has justly called "mimetic."51Indian history,even in the most dedicated socialist or nationalist hands, remains a mimicryof a certain "modern" subject of "European" history and is bound to representa sad figureof lack and failure.The transitionnarrative willalways remain "grievouslyincomplete." On the other hand, maneuvers are made withinthe space of the mimetic- and thereforewithin the project called "Indian" history-to representthe "difference"and the "originality"of the "Indian," and it is in thiscause thatthe anti- historicaldevices of memoryand the antihistorical"histories" of the subaltern classes are appropriated. Thus peasant/workerconstructions of "mythical"king- doms and "mythical"pasts/futures find a place in textsdesignated "Indian" his- toryprecisely through a procedure thatsubordinates these narrativesto the rules

18 REPRESENTATIONS of evidence and to the secular,linear calendar thatthe writingof "history"must follow.The antihistorical,antimodern subject, therefore, cannot speak itselfas "theory"within the knowledge procedures of the universityeven when these knowledgeprocedures acknowledgeand "document"its existence. Much like Spi- vak's "subaltern" (or the anthropologist'speasant who can only have a quoted existencein a larger statementthat belongs to the anthropologistalone), thissub- ject can only be spoken for and spoken of by the transitionnarrative that will alwaysultimately privilege the modern (i.e., "Europe").52 So long as one operates withinthe discourse of "history"produced at the institutionalsite of the university,it is not possible simplyto walk out of the deep collusionbetween "history" and the modernizingnarrative(s) of citizenship,bourgeois public and private,and the nation state."History" as a knowledgesystem is firmlyembedded in institutionalpractices that invoke the nation state at every step-witness the organizationand politicsof teaching,recruitment, promotions, and publicationin historydepartments, politics that survive the occasional brave and heroic attemptsby individual historiansto liberate"history" from the meta- narrativeof the nation state. One only has to ask, for instance: Why is historya compulsory part of education of the modern person in all countries today includingthose thatdid quite comfortablywithout it until as late as the eighteenth century?Why should childrenall over the worldtoday have to come to termswith a subject called "history"when we know that this compulsion is neithernatural nor ancient?53It does not take much imaginationto see that the reason for this lies in what European imperialismand third-worldnationalisms have achieved together: the universalizationof the nation state as the most desirable form of politicalcommunity. Nation stateshave the capacityto enforcetheir truth games, and universities,their critical distance notwithstanding, are part of the batteryof institutionscomplicit in this process. "Economics" and "history"are the knowledge formsthat correspond to the two major institutionsthat the rise (and later universalization)of the bourgeois order has given to the world-the capitalist mode of production and the nation state ("history"speaking to the figureof the citizen).54A criticalhistorian has no choice but to negotiatethis knowledge. She or he thereforeneeds to understand the state on its own terms,i.e., in termsof its self-justificatorynarratives of citizenshipand modernity.Since these themes will always take us back to the universalistpropositions of "modern" (European) political philosophy-even the "practical"science of economics that now seems "natural" to our constructionsof world systemsis (theoretically)rooted in the ideas of ethics in eighteenth-centuryEurope55-a third-worldhistorian is con- demned to knowing"Europe" as the originalhome of the "modern,"whereas the "European" historiandoes not share a comparable predicamentwith regard to the pasts of the majorityof humankind. Thus followsthe everydaysubalternity of non-Westernhistories with which I began thispaper. Yet the understandingthat "we" all do "European" historywith our different

WhoSpeaks for "Indian" Pasts? 19 and oftennon-European archivesopens up the possibilityof a politicsand project of alliance between the dominant metropolitan histories and the subaltern peripheral pasts. Let us call this the project of provincializing"Europe," the "Europe" that modern imperialismand (third-world)nationalism have, by their collaborativeventure and violence, made universal.Philosophically, this project must ground itselfin a radical critiqueand transcendenceof liberalism(i.e., of the bureaucratic constructionsof citizenship,modern state,and bourgeois privacy that classical political philosophy has produced), a ground that late Marx shares withcertain momentsin both poststructuralistthought and feministphi- losophy. In particular,I am emboldened by Carole Pateman'scourageous decla- ration-in her remarkablebook TheSexual Contract-that the veryconception of the modern individualbelongs to patriarchalcategories of thought.56

The project of provincializing"Europe" refersto a historythat does not yet exist; I can thereforeonly speak of it in a programmaticmanner. To forestallmisunderstanding, however, I mustspell out whatit is notwhile outlining what it could be. To begin with,it does not call fora simplistic,out-of-hand rejection of modernity,liberal values, universals,science, reason, grand narratives,totalizing expla- nations, and so on. Fredric Jameson has recentlyreminded us that the easy equation oftenmade between"a philosophicalconception of totality"and "a political practiceof totalitarianism"is "baleful."57What intervenesbetween the two is history-contradictory,plural, and heterogeneousstruggles whose outcomes are never predictable,even retrospectively,in accordance withschemas that seek to naturalize and domesticatethis heterogeneity. These strugglesinclude coercion (both on behalf of and against modernity)-physical,institutional, and symbolic violence,often dispensed withdreamy-eyed idealism-and it is thisviolence that plays a decisive role in the establishmentof meaning, in the creation of truth regimes,in deciding,as itwere, whose and which"universal" wins. As intellectuals operating in academia, we are not neutralto these strugglesand cannot pretend to situateourselves outside of the knowledgeprocedures of our institutions. The projectof provincializing"Europe" thereforecannot be a projectof "cultural relativism."It cannot originatefrom the stance thatthe reason/science/uni- versalswhich help defineEurope as the modern are simply"culture-specific" and thereforeonly belong to the European cultures.For the point is not thatEnlight- enment rationalismis always unreasonable in itselfbut rathera matterof docu- menting how-through what historical process-its "reason," which was not always self-evidentto everyone,has been made to look "obvious" far beyond the ground where it originated.If a language, as has been said, is but a dialectbacked

20 REPRESENTATIONS up by an army,the same could be said of the narrativesof "modernity"that, almost universallytoday, point to a certain "Europe" as the primaryhabitus of the modern. This Europe, like "the West,"is demonstrablyan imaginaryentity, but the demonstrationas such does not lessen itsappeal or power.The projectof provincializing "Europe" has to include certainother additional moves: 1) the recogni- tion thatEurope's acquisitionof the adjectivemodern for itself is a piece of global historyof whichan integralpart is the storyof European imperialism;and 2) the understandingthat this equating of a certainversion of Europe with"modernity" is not the work of Europeans alone; third-worldnationalisms, as modernizing ideologies par excellence,have been equal partnersin the process. I do not mean to overlookthe anti-imperialmoments in the careers of these nationalisms;I only underscore the point that the project of provincializing"Europe" cannot be a nationalist,nativist, or atavisticproject. In unravelingthe necessaryentanglement of history-a disciplined and institutionallyregulated form of collective memory-with the grand narrativesof "rights,""citizenship," the nation state, "public" and "private"spheres, one cannot but problematize"India" at the same time as one dismantles"Europe." The idea is to writeinto the historyof modernitythe ambivalences,contra- dictions,the use of force,and the tragedies and the ironies that attend it. That the rhetoricand the claims of (bourgeois) equality,of citizens' rights,of self- determination through a sovereign nation state have in many circumstances empowered marginal social groups in theirstruggles is undeniable-this recog- nitionis indispensable to the projectof SubalternStudies. What effectivelyis played down, however,in historiesthat either implicitly or explicitlycelebrate the advent of the modern stateand the idea of citizenshipis the repressionand violence that are as instrumentalin the victoryof the modern as is the persuasive power of its rhetoricalstrategies. Nowhere is this irony-the undemocratic foundations of "democracy"-more visible than in the historyof modern medicine, public health, and personal hygiene, the discourses of which have been central in locatingthe body of the modern at the intersectionof the public and the private (as defined by,and subject to negotiationswith, the state). The triumphof this discourse,however, has alwaysbeen dependent on the mobilization,on itsbehalf, of effectivemeans of physicalcoercion. I say"always" because thiscoercion is both originary/foundational(i.e., historic)as well as pandemic and quotidian. Of foundational violence, David Arnold gives a good example in a recent essay on the historyof the prison in India. The coercion of the colonial prison,Arnold shows, was integral to some of the earliest and pioneering research on the medical, dietary,and demographic statisticsof India, for the prison was where Indian bodies were accessible to modernizinginvestigators.58 Of the coercion that continues in the names of the nation and modernity,a recentexample comes from the Indian campaign to eradicate smallpox in the 1970s. Two American doctors

WhoSpeaks for "Indian" pasts? 21 (one of them presumablyof "Indian" origin)who participatedin the process thus describe theiroperations in a village of the Ho tribein the Indian stateof Bihar: In themiddle of gentleIndian night, an intruderburst through the bamboo door of the simpleadobe hut. He was a governmentvaccinator, under ordersto breakresistance againstsmallpox vaccination. Lakshmi Singh awoke screaming and scrambledto hide herself.Her husbandleaped out of bed, grabbedan axe, and chasedthe intruder into the courtyard.Outside a squad ofdoctors and policemenquickly overpowered Mohan Singh. The instanthe was pinnedto the ground,a secondvaccinator jabbed smallpoxvaccine intohis arm. Mohan Singh, a wiry40-year-old leader of the Ho tribe,squirmed away from theneedle, causing the vaccination site to bleed. The governmentteam held him until they had injectedenough vaccine .... Whilethe two policemen rebuffed him, the rest of the teamoverpowered the entire family and vaccinatedeach in turn.Lakshmi Singh bit deep intoone doctor'shand, but to no avail.59

There is no escaping the idealism thataccompanies thisviolence. The subtitleof the articlein question unselfconsciouslyreproduces both the militaryand the do- gooding instinctsof the enterprise.It reads: "How an armyof samaritansdrove smallpox fromthe earth." Histories that aim to displace a hyperrealEurope from the center toward which all historicalimagination currently gravitates will have to seek out relent- lesslythis connection between violence and idealism thatlies at the heart of the process by which the narrativesof citizenshipand modernitycome to finda natural home in "history."I registera fundamentaldisagreement here witha position taken by Richard Rorty in an exchange with Jurgen Habermas. Rorty criticizesHabermas for the latter'sconviction "that the storyof modern philosophy is an importantpart of the storyof the democraticsocieties' attempts at self- reassurance."60Rorty's statement follows the practiceof many Europeanists who speak of the histories of these "democratic societies" as if these were self- contained historiescomplete in themselves,as if the self-fashioningof the West were somethingthat occurred only withinits self-assignedgeographical boundaries. At the very least Rortyignores the role that the "colonial theater" (both external and internal)-where the theme of "freedom" as defined by modern political philosophy was constantlyinvoked in aid of the ideas of "civilization," "progress,"and latterly"development"-played in the process of engendering this "reassurance." The task, as I see it, will be to wrestleideas that legitimize the modern state and its attendant institutions,in order to return to political philosophy-in the same way as suspect coins returned to their owners in an Indian bazaar-its categorieswhose global currencycan no longer be taken for granted.61 And, finally-since "Europe" cannot after all be provincializedwithin the institutionalsite of the universitywhose knowledgeprotocols will always take us back to the terrainwhere all contoursfollow that of my hyperrealEurope-the project of provincializingEurope must realize withinitself its own impossibility.

22 REPRESENTATIONS It thereforelooks to a historythat embodies this politicsof despair. It will have been clear by now that this is not a call for cultural relativismor for atavistic, nativisthistories. Nor is thisa programfor a simplerejection of modernity,which would be, in many situations,politically suicidal. I ask for a historythat deliber- atelymakes visible,within the verystructure of itsnarrative forms, its own repres- sive strategiesand practices,the part it plays in collusion withthe narrativesof citizenshipsin assimilatingto the projectsof the modern stateall other possibilities of human solidarity.The politicsof despair will require of such historythat it lays bare to its readers the reasons whysuch a predicamentis necessarilyines- capable. This is a historythat will attempt the impossible:to look towardits own death by tracingthat which resistsand escapes the best human effortat transla- tion across culturaland other semioticsystems, so thatthe world may once again be imagined as radicallyheterogeneous. This, as I have said, is impossiblewithin the knowledge protocolsof academic history,for the globalityof academia is not independent of the globalitythat the European modern has created. To attempt to provincializethis "Europe" is to see the modern as inevitablycontested, to write over the given and privilegednarratives of citizenshipother narrativesof human connectionsthat draw sustenancefrom dreamed-up pasts and futureswhere col- lectivitiesare definedneither by the ritualsof citizenshipnor bythe nightmareof "tradition"that "modernity" creates. There are of course no (infra)structuralsites where such dreams could lodge themselves.Yet theywill recur so long as the themes of citizenshipand the nation state dominate our narrativesof historical transition,for these dreams are what the modern repressesin order to be.

Notes

Many differentaudiences in the United States and Australiahave responded to ver- sions of this paper and helped me with their criticisms.My benefactors are too numerous to mention individuallybut the followinghave been particularlyhelpful: the editorial board of Representationsfor criticismsconveyed through Thomas Laqueur; Benedict Anderson, Arjun Appadurai, David Arnold, Marjorie Beale, Partha Chatterjee,Natalie Davis, Nicholas Dirks, Simon During,John Foster,Ranajit Guha, JeanetteHoorn, MartinJay, Jenny Lee, David Lloyd, Fiona Nicoll, Gyanendra Pandey, Craig Reynolds,Joan Scott,and GayatriSpivak. And veryspecial thanks to ChristopherHealy for sharingboth the intellectualand the physicallabor thatwent into thispaper. 1. Ranajit Guha and Gayatri ChakravortySpivak, eds., SelectedSubaltern Studies (New York, 1988); Ronald Inden, "OrientalistConstructions of India," ModernAsian Studies 20, no. 3 (1986): 445. 2. I am indebted toJean Baudrillard forthe termhyperreal (see his Simulations[New York, 1983]), but myuse differsfrom his. 3. Linda Hutcheon, ThePolitics of Postmodernism (London, 1989), 65.

Who Speaks for "Indian"lPasts? 23 4. Edmund Husserl, The Crisisof European Sciences and TranscendentalPhilosophy, trans. David Carr (Evanston, Ill., 1970), 281-85. See also Wilhelm Halbfass, India and Europe:An Essayin Understanding(New York, 1988), 167-68. 5. See the discussion in Karl Marx, Grundrisse:Foundations of the Critiqueof Political Economy,trans. Martin Nicholas (Harmondsworth,Eng., 1973), 469-512; and in Marx, Capital:A Critiqueof Political Economy, 3 vols. (Moscow, 1971), 3:593-613. 6. See Dipesh Chakrabarty, RethinkingWorking-Class History: Bengal, 1890-1940 (Princeton,N.J., 1989), chap. 7. 7. Marx, Capital,1:60. 8. Marx, Grundrisse,105. 9. See Chakrabarty,Rethinking Working-Class History, chap. 7, in particular. 10. Sumit Sarkar,Modern India, 1885-1947 (Delhi, 1985), 1. 11. Guha and Spivak,Selected Subaltern Studies, 43. The wordsquoted here are Guha's. But I thinkthey represent a sense of historiographicalresponsibility that is shared by all the membersof the SubalternStudies collective. 12. Alexander Dow, Historyof Hindostan, 3 vols. (London, 1812-16), dedication,vol. 1. 13. See L. T. Hobhouse, Liberalism(New York, 1964), 26-27. 14. Nirad C. Chaudhuri, TheAutobiography ofan UnknownIndian (New York, 1989), dedication page. 15. Partha Chatterjee, NationalistThought and theColonial World:A DerivativeDiscourse? (London, 1986). 16. Mudhusudanrachanabali [Bengali] (Calcutta, 1965), 449. See also JogindranathBasu, MichaelMadhusudan Datterjibancharit [Bengali] (Calcutta, 1978), 86. 17. My understandingof this poem has been enriched by discussionswith Marjorie Lev- inson and David Bennett. 18. I am not making the claim thatall of these genres necessarilyemerge withbourgeois individualism.See Natalie Zemon Davis, "Fame and Secrecy: Leon Modena's Lifeas an Early Modern Autobiography,"History and Theory27 (1988): 103-18; and Davis, "Boundaries and Sense of Self in Sixteenth-CenturyFrance," in Thomas C. Heller et al., eds., ReconstructingIndividualism: Autonomy, Individuality, and the Self in Western Thought(Stanford, Calif., 1986), 53-63. See also Philippe Lejeune, On Autobiography, trans. Katherine Leary (Minneapolis, 1989), 163-84. 19. See the chapter on Nehru in Chatterjee,Nationalist Thought. 20. M. K. Gandhi, Hindswaraj (1909), in CollectedWorks ofMahatma Gandhi, vol. 10 (Ahmed- abad, 1963), 15. 21. See the discussion in Gauri Visvanathan,Masks of Conquest: Literary Studies and British Rule in India (London, 1989), 128-41, passim. 22. Ranajit Guha, ElementaryAspects of PeasantInsurgency in ColonialIndia (New Delhi, 1983), chap. 2. 23. WilliamE. Connolly,Political Theory and Modernity(Oxford, 1989). See also David Ben- nett, "Postmodernism and Vision: Ways of Seeing (at) the End of History" (forthcoming). 24. Jirgen Habermas, The StructuralTransformation of the Public Sphere:An Inquiryinto a Categoryof Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), 49. 25. See Sumit Sarkar,"Social History:Predicament and Possibilities,"in Iqbal Khan, ed., FreshPerspective on India and Pakistan:Essays on Economics,Politics, and Culture(Oxford, 1985), 256-74. 26. For reasons of space, I shall leave thisclaim here unsubstantiated,though I hope to have an opportunityto discuss it in detail elsewhere.I should qualifythe statementby

24 REPRESENTATIONS mentioningthat in the main it refersto autobiographiespublished between 1850 and 1910. Once women join the public sphere in the twentiethcentury, their self- fashioningtakes on differentdimensions. 27. Nirad C. Chaudhuri, ThyHand, GreatAnarch!:India, 1921-1952 (London, 1987), 350- 51. 28. See Karl Marx, On theJewish Question, in EarlyWritings (Harmondsworth, Eng., 1975), 215-22. 29. For a more detailed treatmentof what follows,see my paper "Colonial Rule and the Domestic Order," to be published in David Arnold and David Hardiman, eds., Subal- ternStudies, vol. 8. 30. Meredith Borthwick,The ChangingRole of Womenin Bengal,1849-1905 (Princeton, N.J., 1984); Ghulam Murshid,Reluctant Debutante: Response of Bengali Womento Mod- ernisation,1849-1905 (Rajshahi, 1983). On the historyof the word civilization,see Lucien Febvre, "Civilisation:Evolution of a Word and a Group of Ideas," in Peter Burke, ed., A NewKind ofHistory: From the Writings of Febvre, trans. K. Folca (London, 1973), 219-57. I owe thisreference to Peter Sahlins. 31. James Mill, The Historyof British India, vol. 1, ed. H. H. Wilson (London, 1840), 309- 10. 32. Borthwick,Changing Role. 33. The classic text where this assumption has been worked up into philosophy is of course Hegel'sPhilosophy of Right, trans. T.M. Knox (Oxford, 1967), 110-22. See also Joanna Hodge, "Women and the Hegelian State," in Ellen Kennedy and Susan Mendus, eds., Womenin WesternPhilosophy (Brighton, Eng., 1987), 127-58; Simon During, "Rousseau's Heirs: Primitivism,Romance, and Other Relations Between the Modern and the Nonmodern" (forthcoming);Joan B. Landes, Womenand thePublic Spherein theAge of theFrench Revolution (Ithaca, N.Y., 1988); Mary Ryan, Womenin Public: BetweenBanners and Ballots,1825-1880 (Baltimore, 1990). 34. Anon., Streesiksha,vol. 1 (Calcutta, 1877), 28-29. 35. I develop this argument furtherin Dipesh Chakrabarty,"Open Space/Public Place: Garbage, Modernity,and India," SouthAsia (forthcoming). 36. Dinabandhuracanabali, ed. Kshetra Gupta (Calcutta, 1981), 138. 37. Borthwick,Changing Role, 105. 38. I discuss thisin more detail in Chakrabarty,"Colonial Rule." 39. Indira Devi, Narirukti (Calcutta, 1920), dedication page. 40. Deenanath Bandyopadhyaya,Nanabishayak prabandha (Calcutta, 1887), 30-31. For a genealogy of the termsslavery and freedomas used in the colonial discourse of British India, see Gyan Prakash,Bonded Histories: Genealogies of Labor Servitude in ColonialIndia (Cambridge, 1990). 41. Peter Burke, TheRenaissance Sense of the Past (London, 1970). 42. Bikshuk [Chandrasekhar Sen], Ki holo!(Calcutta, 1876), 77. 43. David Kinsley,Hindu Goddesses:Visions of the Divine Feminine in theHindu ReligiousTra- dition(Berkeley, 1988), 19-31; Manomohan Basu, Hindu acar byabahar(Calcutta, 1873), 60; H. D. Bhattacharya,"Minor Religious Sects,"in R. C. Majumdar, ed., The Historyand Cultureof the Indian People: The Age ofImperial Unity, vol. 2 (Bombay, 1951), 469-71; Upendranath Dhal, GoddessLakshmi: Origin and Development(Delhi, 1978). The expressioneveryday pantheism was suggestedto me by GayatriChakravorty Spivak (personal communication). 44. See the chapter on Bankim in Chatterjee,Nationalist Thought. 45. Ranade: His Wife'sReminiscences, trans. Kusumavati Deshpande (Delhi, 1963), 77.

Who Speaks for "Indian" Pasts? 25 46. Meaghan Morris, "Metamorphoses at Sydney Tower,"New Formations11 (Summer 1990): 10. 47. Amiya Chakravarty,quoted in Bhikhu Parekh, Gandhi'sPolitical Discourse (London, 1989), 163. 48. GayatriChakravorty Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak?," in Cary Nelson and Law- rence Grossberg,eds., Marxismand theInterpretation ofCulture (Urbana, Ill., 1988), 277. 49. See SubalternStudies, vols. 1-7 (Delhi, 1982-91); and Ashis Nandy,The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recoveryof Self Under Colonialism (Delhi, 1983). 50. SubalternStudies, vols. 1-7, and Guha, ElementaryAspects. 51. Homi Bhabha, "Of Mimicryand Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse," in AnnetteMichelson et al., eds., October:The First Decade, 1976-1986 (Cambridge,Mass., 1987), 317-26; also Bhabha, ed., Nationand Narration(London, 1990). 52. Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" Also see Spivak's interviewpublished in Socialist Review20, no. 3 (July-September1990): 81-98. 53. On the close connectionbetween imperialistideologies and the teachingof historyin colonial India, see Ranajit Guha, An IndianHistoriography ofIndia: A Nineteenth-Century Agendaand ItsImplications (Calcutta, 1988). 54. Withoutin any way implicatingthem in the entiretyof thisargument, I may mention thatthere are parallels here betweenmy statement and what Gyan Prakash and Nich- olas Dirks have argued elsewhere. See Gyan Prakash, "WritingPost-Orientalist His- tories of the Third World: Perspectivesfrom Indian Historiography,"Comparative Studiesin Societyand History32, no. 2 (April 1990): 383-408; Nicholas B. Dirks, "His- toryas a Sign of the Modern,"Public Culture 2, no. 2 (Spring 1990): 25-33. 55. See Amartya Kumar Sen, Of Ethics and Economics(Oxford, 1987). Tessa Morris- Suzuki's A Historyof Japanese Economic Thought (London, 1989) makes interesting reading in this regard. I am gratefulto Gavan McCormack forbringing this book to myattention. 56. Carole Pateman, TheSexual Contract (Stanford, Calif., 1988), 184. 57. Fredric Jameson, "Cognitive Mapping," in Nelson and Grossberg,Marxism and the InterpretationofCulture, 354. 58. David Arnold, "The Colonial Prison: Power,Knowledge, and Penologyin Nineteenth- Century India," in Arnold and Hardiman, SubalternStudies, vol. 8. I have discussed some of these issues in a Bengali article:Dipesh Chakrabarty,"Sarir, samaj, o rashtra: Oupanibeshik bharate mahamari ojanasangskriti,"Anustup, 1988. 59. Lawrence Brilliantwith Girija Brilliant,"Death fora Killer Disease," Quest,May/June 1978, 3. I owe thisreference to Paul Greenough. 60. Richard Rorty,"Habermas and Lyotardon Postmodernity,"in RichardJ. Bernstein, ed., Habermasand Modernity(Cambridge, Mass., 1986), 169. 61. For an interestingand revisionistreading of Hegel in this regard, see the exchange between Charles Taylor and Partha Chatterjee in Public Culture3, no. 1 (1990). My book RethinkingWorking-Class History attempts a small beginningin thisdirection.

26 REPRESENTATIONS