A View from Afar (South Asia)— an Interview with Gyan Prakash

A VIEW FROM AFAR (SOUTH ASIA)— AN INTERVIEW WITH GYAN PRAKASH • Robert Borofsky: One of the key questions regarding the colonial period is how to write about it. Both Sahlins and Kituai use colonial documentation to discuss the complex ways various parties were entangled. To what extent do you think it is possible to write about the colonial period without staying within the silences and framings of the data collected by the colonial regimes—without getting entangled, that is to say, in the colonial entanglements themselves? • Gyan Prakash: To begin with, one cannot simply use colonial documents as repositories of information. One needs to take into account not only the purposes for which they were produced but also how and why they were preserved. Secondly, one must read them for the kind of knowledge they authorize, a point Sahlins and Kituai are both concerned with. One needs to pay attention to the ruling con- cepts of the documents, to what they render thinkable as well as to what they imply is unthinkable. If I were to put it in Foucaultian terms, one needs to consider the type of truth regime the documents establish. Rather than claiming an all-seeing eye—that allows one to grasp what colonial officials could not—the intent would be to make the documents confront their own contradictions, their own silences. I do not mean the object should be to fill in the silences as a sort of com- pensatory history, to give the colonized a voice denied them by colonialism. Instead I would make the silences, contradictions, and ambiguities essential elements in the colonial story. If I can offer an example from my own book on Indian labor bondage for a moment, the problem I confronted when reading colonial documents in the archives was that I found the history regarding this topic had already been written. The question of bondage had already been posed and answered. Free labor was assumed to be the natural human condition. And this assumption shaped inquiries con- 296 Gyan Prakash 297 ducted both by colonial officials and others into the reasons for labor bondage in India. The frame of reference was: Given free labor, or freedom, is the natural human condition, why then does India differ from this universal pattern? I confronted this framework by treating the archive—and how documents were framed in it—as an inextri- cable part of the history of bonded labor itself. The second step I took was to write about the visions of the past that these bonded laborers had. Their visions could not be accommo- dated within the same framework as existing historical documents. As a result, I discussed the nature of oral testimony, especially how its principles of construction differed radically from the kind of ratio- nalist histories historians generally write. In other words, my response to the silences and the fabrications of the archives about the people constituted as bonded laborers was not to recover a more authentic history. Instead, I argued that the bonded laborers’ narratives of their past stood at odds with history as a discipline. The narratives were antidisciplinary, in a Foucaultian sense. Or to put it another way, the silences, myopias, contradictions, and fail- ures of the colonial archive served as a basis for outlining forms of knowledge that were incommensurate with those within the archive itself. • RB: Building on these comments, one of the common critiques of anthropology and history today is that they often succumb to certain essentialisms, certain simplistic oppositions, in discussing colonialism. Certain nationalist writers seem to do the same. What dy- namics are at work, in your opinion, and to what degree does it seem possible to step outside of nationalist and Western essentialisms in writing histories of colonial entanglements? • GP: Generally, I do not think the issue is essentialism versus nonessentialism. It is true that essentialisms of various kinds have served domination, both colonial and nationalist. But I think it would be too simplistic to just declare oneself against essentialisms. We are dealing with essentialisms with widely different historical functions and effects. Many writers—here I am thinking particularly of Partha Chatterjee, for example—have written about how nationalists employed many of the same essentialisms as the colonial rulers. But it is also true they were employed with different aims and effects. The primary nationalist aim and effect, of course, was to over- throw the colonial rulers. In doing so, it is true the nationalists im- posed their own elitist, majoritarian cultural definition of the nation 298 Colonial Engagements—A View from Afar (South Asia) that rendered other definitions and other aspirations minor and subordinate. Even though Indian nationalism represented itself as universal and secular, for example, it was deeply colored by the Hindu ethos and symbols. I am not saying the nationalist essentialisms are better. I am saying they are different. The general point I would make is that for students of colonialism, it is necessary to leave aside the essentialism versus nonessentialism question. Our analyses should focus on the nature and effects of the complicity between essentialism and domination rather than searching for a nonessentialist epistemology. • RB: In discussing the tensions of empire, both Thomas and Panoff emphasize colonial regimes were never simple, unified affairs. One model did not fit all sizes: Each European country and each locale contained its own contradictions and ambiguities in respect to colonial rule. How would you suggest we go about trying to make sense—in a general way—of the differences, conflicts, and contradictions within colonial regimes? • GP: I agree with both Thomas and Panoff that colonialism was not a uniform process. French differed from British colonies, German from American. The Spanish colonization of the Americas in the six- teenth century differed radically from the nineteenth-century Anglo- French pattern. Nor were colonial regimes free from contradictions, as these authors also point out. One can see contradictions, variations, and ambivalences as essential characteristics of colonial regimes. Different interests were at work in different places and different times. Mission- aries, businessmen, administrative officials, and military commanders frequently differed regarding the nature of colonialism’s “civilizing mission.” And Europeans in the colonies often found themselves split by class, rank, culture, and gender. A lot has been written about these complexities arguing that neither the colonized nor the colonizers were monolithic entities. Many motives, many interests were in play. There is a tendency in the literature, however, to use these complexities to argue against and undo the colonizer-colonized divide— to argue that reality was far more complicated than the myth and ideology of the divide. Another version of this is to argue the Euro- peans subjected their own working classes and women to oppressions comparable to those experienced by the colonized. I do not disagree with this. But I have a sense that this leads into a contest in victimhood: the Gyan Prakash 299 Europeans claiming they were as victimized as the colonized. What this overlooks is a crucial point about power. Namely, while the Euro- pean working classes and women were subjected to various kinds of oppressions, they also were citizens. The colonized, on the other hand, were not acceptable as citizens but only as subjects. This is the point that Mahmood Mamdani makes in his book on Africa. It is a signifi- cant distinction. So the issue is not whether regimes of power and discipline were not applied to Europe as well. Of course they were. But they were applied with different effects. That is one of the points that I would in- sist on in thinking about the complexities of colonial regimes. If we come to the colonies themselves, for all the differences between the missionary and the colonial official, between the poor white soldier and the general, colonial ideology still mobilized them as the ruling race, however incompletely. Colonial ideology emphasized the poor tommy soldier, no matter how subordinate, was still part of the ruling race. And, as a result, he was expected to behave according to the standards of that race. Different categories of Europeans may have held more or less posi- tive views of the natives. But colonial power still authorized certain representations of the colonized. There is the example of Las Casas. Las Casas, in the famous 1550 debate with Sepulveda, held that Amer- ican Indians were human and therefore possessed certain rights. But we should not forget that underlying this favorable view of the Indians was the proposition that the Indians were humans insofar as their con- duct and beliefs suggested that they were potential Christians. To the extent that they manifested feelings and practices that he interpreted as religious, or to put it another way, insofar as they appeared as crypto-Christians, the Indians met Las Casas’ standard of what constituted human. The point is that the power of representation still be- longed to Las Casas. This is what I take to be the great lesson of Edward Said’s Orientalism: It teaches us something about the power of representation and the power that authorizes such representation. Keeping this in view, I would say the complexities, contradictions, and historical variations in colonial regimes have to be seen as pro- cesses that the colonial divide itself engendered and encountered as well as something that it sought to contain and control. I do not see the two as opposites. Contradictions and variations go together with the colonial divide. • RB: The chapters by Belich, Grimshaw and Morton, and Merwin 300 Colonial Engagements—A View from Afar (South Asia) explore colonial strategies of domination.

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