'Primitives' and the Writing of History in Colonial Bengal Prathama Banerjee

The Politics of Time : ‘primitives’ and the writing of history in colonial Bengal Prathama Banerjee Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy School of Oriental and African Studies London University July 1998 ProQuest Number: 10672626 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a com plete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. uest ProQuest 10672626 Published by ProQuest LLC(2017). Copyright of the Dissertation is held by the Author. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States C ode Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. ProQuest LLC. 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106- 1346 Contents Preface Introduction The Subject of Time, the Subject in Space: the 'historical’ and the ‘primordial’ in colonial Bengal Tracing the Nation: travel, migration and the conduct of time Money, Thought and the ‘Primitive’: exchange and the politics of time Time to Act: historical event and the practice of rebellion Neutralising Time: knowledge and the disciplining of practice Conclusion Bibliography Preface This thesis is the product of three years of research, funded by the Felix Trust and housed by the department of history, School of Oriental and African Studies, London University. Professor David Arnold has supervised the thesis, from the very beginning when it seemed as if ‘time’ as a problematic could never become a viable historical project. Not only has he given an enormous amount of time and energy in the details of the writing, he has also relentlessly provided counter-arguments and counter-factuals, without which I could never have convinced myself of my own thoughts. He has also shared his own published and published works, frequently prevented my confidence from sagging, and unleashed a freedom of thought from the many constructed categories, which I had unwittingly ‘normalised’ myself into. Much of this work belongs to him. The best way to preface my thesis is perhaps to admit that it is nothing if not a collective exercise. The errors are solely mine, but the ideas and the questions have always emerged in everyday conversations with my friends and colleagues. Special thanks are due to Dipesh Chakravarty, who demonstrated, amongst other things, how one’s own past and biography must be relocated if one has to problematise temporality and history. Gautam Bhadra very kindly shared his insights about popular consciousness and his political enthusiasm, and remains an ideal of intellectual and personal emulation for me. Romilla Thapar directed me towards understanding pre-colonial Indian philosophies of time, which I was hitherto unaware of. Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, who had also taught me in my M. A. days, shared his experiences of ‘tribal’ practices in the Birbhum area. Sruti Kapila and Kriti Kapila have been friends, confidantes and colleagues in one. Vinayak Chaturvedi, Veena Naregal, Anish Ahluwalia, Daud A!i, Javed Majid and many others have offered crucial suggestions in course of these three years. My work would have been impossible without help from Ananda Bhattacharya of the West Bengal State Archives, Asim Mukhopadhyay of the National Library, India, the staff of the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences in Calcutta, the staff of the Old Records Room, Dumka, Santal Parganas and those of the India Office Library, London. iii At home, Javed, Jitendra, J. N. Singh, Pankaj, Uma, Sanjay and others have always given me perspective. Lata-di and Naga gave given unconditional affection and hope. Debu-da, perhaps my oldest and best friend, Aiay-da and Julte-da, who supplied me with many Bengali texts and provoked me with their extraordinary thoughts and lifestyles, and others have always welcomed me back from my detours. Without Mala-di, I would never have had the luxury of undisturbed days of study- Dadu and dida have demonstrated what resilience can mean. I must also remember my friends and comrades from the earlier days of political activism. Though we have had some differences, they still remain an intrinsic part of my thoughts and research. It is my duty to especially remember my debt to Chandrashekhar, who died before his time, in a struggle and at a place where we should have all been there with him. My father, among other things, taught me to read Marx. I wish he was here to share in my thoughts. Clem Alford has given me a home away from home, constantly reminded me that without music no language is complete and that it is not impossible to maintain a certain radicalism in the most despairing of days. Jayasri Banerjee - musician, thinker, incorrigible enthusiast, and luckily for me, also my mother - reminds me that origins and beginnings occur more than once in life. She keeps up hope for better days, not only for herself but also on my behalf, and on behalf of strangers whom I still hope to meet. Without her, this work could not have been conceived. And of course, Shailendra, even though so far away, offers me surprising proximities. And reminds me of the imminence of the future everyday. Prathama Banerjee London, July 1998. Introduction The future is what is not grasped, what befalls us and lays hotet-of us. The other is the future. - Emmanuel Levinas1 This thesis seeks to understand what can be called the ‘temporal politics’ of colonial modernity. It begins from the premise that modernity - and colonialism, which was both the precondition and the supplement of modernity - changed the world first and foremost by re-deploying time and the idea of time. Of course, the notion of modernity as an-attribute of society and of the thinking subject has multiple usages. The term ‘modern’ may be an adjective of technology, or of an individual who defies 'tradition’ and professes ‘freedom’ of choice. Modernisation may indicate processes of institutional and economic development of a society towards greater complexity. It may also imply a history thematised and generated through the state-civil society binary. The ’modern man’ may intend to mean a secular subject, or the ideal of the pure homo economicus. It may indicate a psychology, which is aware of itself and its own internal contradictions. Or it may indicate a being a la Descartes who cogitates and thinks about the reason to be. Or even a being a la Kant who differentiates between reason and intuition, rationality and aesthetics. Modernity may also be taken to characterise a self-conscious vanguard of self-propelled change. Or it may even be an oblique comment on the breakdown of morality, of gender-roles, of peace and leisure. However, underlying these multiple and everyday usages of the term 'modern1, lies a common sensibility of time - the sensibility that despite some social costs, what comes later is generally an improvement on what came earlier. This evaluation of the passing of time might seem truistic to us today. However, it must be remembered that this temporal assessment was by no means common to all times and all places. To rationalise the contemporary as both morally and practically better than the past, or to nostalgically see the past, the pastoral and the ancestral as the ethical and aesthetic inversion of the present, is an eminently specific and modern attitude. For, as Bruno Latour shows us, modernity was the effect of a process of back-projection, through which the present made itself into a unity - by bracketing and 1 Time and the Other, Pittsburgh, 1987, pp. 76-7. stabilising an ‘archaic’ past and by historicising itself through periodisations and temporal hierarchies. Modernity was thus not so much a historical period as a reconfiguration of time itself, which is why no dateable rupture can be identified as the beginning of modernity in Europe.2 With the rise of capitalism, as time seemed to accumulate like money, it appeared as if the more advanced a society, the greater the pile of time, experience and value that accrued to it. Therefore, modernity appeared to itself primarily as a temporal competence, an advantage that the posterior possessed over the prior, exclusively because of the former’s advanced position in time. This temporal competence was that of the monumental accumulation of time as in production and in evolution, and at the same time that of the advantage of hindsight, as in history and ethnology. With the rise of capitalism, the West appeared to control time itself, as capital shaped, to use Lyotard’s phrase, the ‘sequence of moments in such a way that it accepted a high rate of contingency.’3 In other words, through capital, the modern subject owned up to the risks and vicissitudes of even temporality, seizing time, as it were, by putting interest and profit on its accumulation, deferral and return.4 Capital even claimed the capacity to explode all ‘autarchies’, to translate all kinds of local and social labour into quantifiable and therefore commensurable labour time units. Time - which was conceptualised in non-modern philosophies as the limit to thought5 - became in colonial modernity the possession of the rational and thinking subject, who henceforth could judge others in terms of their lack and lag of temporality. Time thus itself became the ‘universal’ parameter of judgement, as colonised people became constituted as ‘primitive’ or ‘archaic’ or timeless. The secular time of natural history, and later of ethnology, classified the world into separate categories, species and locations.6 As Johannes Fabian shows us, this was fundamentally different from earlier sacred and theological time-senses, which sought to battle, convert and win over non believers and ‘barbarians’ rather than categorise them as another time.

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