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Provincializing Europe This content downloaded from 136.167.3.36 on Tue, 11 Dec 2018 02:40:59 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms PROVINCIALIZING EUROPE POSTCOLONIAL THOUGHT AND HISTORICAL DIFFERENCE With a new preface by the author Dipesh Chakrabarty PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS PRINCETON AND OXFORD This content downloaded from 136.167.3.36 on Tue, 11 Dec 2018 02:40:59 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Copyright © 2000 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 3 Market Place, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1SY All Rights Reserved Reissue, with a new preface by the author, 2008 ISBN 978-0-691-13001-9 The Library of Congress cataloged the original edition of this book as follows Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe : postcolonial thought and historical difference / Dipesh Chakrabarty. p. cm. — (Princeton studies in culture/power/history) Includes bibliographical references and index ISBN 0-691-04908-4 (alk. paper)—ISBN 0-691-04909-2 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Historiography—Europe. 2. Europe—History—Philosophy. 3. Eurocentrism. 4. India—Historiography. 5. Decolonization. I. Title. II. Series. D13.5. E85 C43 2000 901—dc21 99-087722 British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available This book has been composed in Sabon Printed on acid-free paper. ∞ press.princeton.edu Printed in the United States of America 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 This content downloaded from 136.167.3.36 on Tue, 11 Dec 2018 02:40:59 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms For Anne, Fiona, Robin Debi, Gautam, Shiloo IN FRIENDSHIP This content downloaded from 136.167.3.36 on Tue, 11 Dec 2018 02:40:59 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Contents Preface to the 2007 Edition ix Acknowledgments xxiii Introduction: The Idea of Provincializing Europe 3 PART ONE: HISTORICISM AND THE NARRATION OF MODERNITY Chapter 1. Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History 27 Chapter 2. The Two Histories of Capital 47 Chapter 3. Translating Life-Worlds into Labor and History 72 Chapter 4. Minority Histories, Subaltern Pasts 97 PART TWO: HISTORIES OF BELONGING Chapter 5. Domestic Cruelty and the Birth of the Subject 117 Chapter 6. Nation and Imagination 149 Chapter 7. Adda: A History of Sociality 180 Chapter 8. Family, Fraternity, and Salaried Labor 214 Epilogue. Reason and the Critique of Historicism 237 Notes 257 Index 299 This content downloaded from 136.167.3.36 on Tue, 11 Dec 2018 02:41:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Preface to the 2007 Edition Provincializing Europe in Global Times I For all the criticisms that could be leveled at him, Roland Barthes’ idea that a myth works by making the historical seem “natural” had something to it. Of course, by “historical,” Barthes did not mean anything we could find in books about history, because, for him, such books would them- selves belong to mythic systems of representation. “History,” in Barthes’s famous essay on “myth today,” referred to the activity of living, an activ- ity that, at least according to Barthes, was all about closing the gap to some degree (for it could never be fully closed) between the word and the world by orienting language more directly toward its referents “out there.”1 When caught up in the activity of living, words would mainly possess direct and practical connotation. “Europe” was not a word that ever bothered me in my middle-class Bengali childhood or youth as I was growing up in postcolonial Calcutta. The legacy of Europe—or British colonial rule, for that is how Europe came into our lives—was every- where: in traffic rules, in grown-ups’ regrets that Indians had no civic sense, in the games of soccer and cricket, in my school uniform, in Bengali- nationalist essays and poems critical of social inequality, especially of the so-called caste system, in implicit and explicit debates about love-match versus arranged marriages, in literary societies and film clubs. In practical, everyday living “Europe” was not a problem to be consciously named or discussed. Categories or words borrowed from European histories had found new homes in our practices. It made perfect sense, for instance, when radical friends in college would refer to someone—say, an obstruc- tionist would-be father-in-law—as being full of “feudal” attitudes, or when we debated—for interminable hours over cheap cups of coffee or tea in inexpensive restaurants or tea shops where we generally overstayed our welcome—if the Indian capitalists were a “national bourgeoisie” or a “comprador” class playing second fiddle to foreign capital. We all knew, practically, what these words meant without having to put them under any kind of analytic microscope. Their “meanings” did not travel beyond the immediate environment in which they were being used. This content downloaded from 136.167.3.36 on Tue, 11 Dec 2018 02:41:13 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms x PREFACE TO THE 2007 EDITION Why, then, speak of “provincializing Europe”? The answer to this ques- tion has to do with the story of my own dislodgment from this everyday life in ways that were both metaphorical and physical. I will recount the story briefly, for the implications of it go, I think, beyond the merely auto- biographical. My metaphorical dislodgment from my everyday middle- class life happened as I trained, in Marxist circles in the city, to be a profes- sional historian for whom Marx’s ideas were to be a conscious analytical tool. Words familiar from their everyday use (I should explain that I had been a student of science and business management before) now grew analytical wings, soaring into the level of what Barthes would have called “second- or third-order” metalanguages. Marxism, even more than liber- alism, was the most concentrated form in which one encountered the intel- lectual pasts of Europe in Indian social-science circles. It was about two decades ago, as I completed the manuscript for my book Rethinking Working-Class History: Bengal 1890–1940, that the question this book addresses began to formulate itself.2 The roots of my effort in labor history went back to some passionate debates in Bengali and Indian Marxism of my youth about the world-historical role the pro- letariat might play in a country such as India that was, still, predomi- nantly rural. There were obvious things to be learned from the Chinese and the Vietnamese revolutions. Yet, the more I tried to imagine relations in Indian factories through categories made available by Marx and his followers, the more I became aware of a tension that arose from the pro- foundly—and one might say, parochially—European origins of Marx’s thoughts and their undoubted international significance. To call historical characters whose analogues I knew in everyday life as familiar types by names or categories derived from revolutions in Europe in 1789 or 1848 or 1871 or 1917 felt increasingly like a doubly distancing activity. There was, first of all, the distance of historical objectivity that I was trying to enact. But there was also the distance of comical misrecognition similar to what I had often experienced watching performances of Bengali plays in which Bengali actors, cast as colonial Europeans, acted out their heav- ily Bengali-accented imitations of how Europeans might have spoken Ben- gali, that is to say, their own stereotypes of how Europeans may have perceived us! Something similar was happening to my characters from Bengali and Indian history now clad, in my text, in the European costumes lent by the Marxist drama of history. There was a sense of comicality in my own earnestness that I could not ignore. Yet in the discussion of Marx that I was an heir to in Calcutta—the discussion was always mediated, for historical reasons, by the available This content downloaded from 136.167.3.36 on Tue, 11 Dec 2018 02:41:13 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms PREFACE TO THE 2007 EDITION xi English-language literature on the subject—there was no room for think- ing about Marx as someone belonging to certain European traditions of thought that he may have even shared with intellectuals who were not Marxists or who thought in a manner opposed to his. This was not some- thing that arose from a deficiency of reading. Calcutta had no dearth of bibliophiles. People knew nooks and crannies of European scholarship. But there was no sense of academic practices as part of living, disputed intellectual traditions in Europe. No idea that a living intellectual tradi- tion never furnished final solutions to questions that arose within it. Marxism was simply “true.” The idea of “uneven development,” for ex- ample, so central to much of Marxist historiography, was treated as a piece of truth, at most an analytical tool, but never as a provisional way of organizing information, or as even something that was originally in- vented in the workshop of the Scottish Enlightenment. Marx was right (though he needed updating) and anti-Marxists were plain wrong if not immoral: such were the stark political antinomies through which we thought. Even a Weber did not get much of a serious look-in in the 1970s in the passionate scholarship of Indian historians of Marxist persuasion. There were, indeed, some gifted non-Marxist social scientists and histori- ans in India. The names of Ashis Nandy and the late Ashin Das Gupta or Dharma Kumar easily come to mind.
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