Beyond Nationalist Frames: Postmodernism, Hindu Fundamentalism, History

272 Pages·80.927 MB·English

by  Sumit Sarkar

. Beyond
Nationalist Frames
Postmodernism,
Hindu Fundamentalism, History
SUMIT SARKAR
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BEYOND NATIONALIST FRAMES
Postmodcrnism,
Hindu Fundamentalism, History
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Contents
Aclmowledgnnmts
Vl
Introduction 1
~Colonial
Times: Clocks and Kali-yuga 10
II Identities and Histories: Some Lower-caste
Narratives from Early Twentieth-century Bengal 38
t.JIY'Intimations of Hindutva: Ideologies, Caste, and
- ~lass in Post-Swadeshi Bengal 81
\N
Two Muslim Tracts for Peasants:
~ngal 1909-1910 96
~ Nationalism.and 'Stri-Swadhinata': The Contexts
/3'1d Meanings of Rabindranath's Ghare-Bai" 112
~ Pomnodcrnism and the Writing of Hjstory 154
~
The BJP Bomb and Nationalism 195
~
Christianity, Hindutva, and the Question of
- _..>Dnvers1ons 215
~ Hindutva and History 244
/Nia 263
Acknowledgements
~~A
174i>
TH E IDEA of this book came from Aditya, who has helped also
through criticisms and suggestions. To Tanika, as always, I
remain grateful for uenchant criticism, abundant help, and ins
piration from her own work. It will be obvious how much many pans
of the book owe to Pradip Datta's findings and stimulating ideas.
The specific occasions for which earlier versions ofs everal chapters
were prepared have been mentioned at the appropriate places. In
addition, I have been trying out some of the material and interpre
tations presented here with many different audiences and locations:
in Delhi University and several of its colleges; at Jadavpur, Pune, and
Mumbai Universities; at the School of Oriental and African Studies
(London), on mare than one occasion; at Toronto, Ottawa, Johannes
burg, Cape Town, and in lectures to the University of Hawaii at
Manoa; and at research institutes and universities in Berlin, Heidel
berg, Pavia, Bologna, and Rome. I have benefited much from the res- ·
ponses and criticisms everywhere.
The chapter on nuclearisation is heavily indebted to Praful Bidwai
and Achin Vanaik. Among the very many who have helped, through
comments, conversations, work on conjoint themes, I ~t to men
tion particularly Jasodhara Bagchi, Himani Bannerji, Neeladri Bhatta
charya, Sekhar Bandopadhyay, Amiya Sen, and Radhika Singha.
Rukun Advani has been the most patient and helpful of editors. The
responsibility for omissions and errors remains mine alone.
And a very special word of thanks for all who came forward, in
friendship and solidarity, during the attack on the Towards Frttdom
volumes.
Introduction
T
HE CHAPTERS of this volume were originally written between
1996 and 2001. Chapters VI, VIr; and VIII are substantially re
vised; the others are published here for the first time. Though
written for varied occasions, without any thought, till quite recently,
of incorporation into a single format, I think they do have a certain
unity.·& in my earlier collection oflong essays, Writing Sodld History
(1997), this has emerged from an unity of contexts: the vicissitudes
of our times, at once political and academic
I had defined such contexts in 1997 in terms of the advance oft he
Hindu Right and of 'globalised' forms of capitalism; a worldwide
marginalisation of Marxisms, whether 'orthodox' or 'revisionist',
after the sudden demise of most 'acrually existing' socialist regimes;
and the academic shift from social history cowards cultural srudies
and varied 'postmodcrnistic' moods. The challenges such dcvdo~
mcnts have posed evidently continue, often in aggravated form, and
arc in some mys particularly acute for a historian who retains an
unfashionable commitment ro socialist-feminist values and a vision
I
of democratic and humane forms of socialism, and who thcrtfore
finds any simple, nostalgic return to the orthodoxies ofy esteryears as
unpalarable as swimming with the current tides of history and poli-·
ucs.
& in the earlier volume, I have tried here to explore the possibilities
ofa renewal ofr adical, flexibly Marxian social history, in pan through
J a series of research-based articles on late-colonial Bcngal\._Jhcsc arc
followed by one explicitly theoretical essay which seeks to explicate
a complicated position about postmodernism, refusing both rotal
2
BEYOND NATIONALIST FRAMES
rejection and uncritical acceptance of the dominant postmodernist
positions. The book ends with three political interventions about cur
rent Hindutva policies and values.
Re-reading and revising the essays for publication, I have been
struck by another unifying theme more directly linked to my profes
sional concerns as a historian working on colonial India. The domi
nant historiographical assumption here-one that has cut across
many widely-varied approaches-has been of a single, overwhelm
ingly predominant, colonial/anti-colonial binary. This is at its most
obvious in conventional nationalist histories and textbooks, where
quite often virtually nothing seems to have happened between the
1880s and 1947 except the 'freedom snuggle', colonial repression,
and sundry 'separatist' tendencies acting in tandem with British
divide-and-rule to tarnish the coming of freedom with a tragic Parti
tion. Left-nationalist, Marxist, and, above all, early Subaltern Studies
and other attempts at 'histories from below' considerably compli
cated and improved this modd. The initiatives and mentalities of
peasants, adivasis, and workers, previously marginalised or assumed
to have been capable of being mobilised from 'above' alone, came to
be highlighted, and there was a search for clements ofs ubaltern auto
nomy having complicated relations, of simultaneous impetus and
onstraint, with 'mainstream' nationalism. But the implicit standard
~
or the evaluation of such movements reinained the degree of their
conuibution', or otherwise, to anti-colonialism. 1 Today, of course,
critiques of nationalism have become extremdy influential among
many intellectuals. Yet I think there remains a paradoxical continuity
through rejection, for denunciations of the 'nation-state project' are
based primarily on the grounds ofits origin in the modern West. They
.1 In an earlier essay I drew attention to such an 'unnoticed drift' in Ranajit
Guha's initial formulation of the Subaltern Studies project in the first volume
of that series. His essay was entided 'On Some Aspects of the Historiography
. of Colonial India': it dealt almost cxdwivcly with the historiography of Indian
nationalism and described as its fundamental lacuna the f.illure 'to acknowledge
the contribution made by the people on their own to the making and develop
ment of this nationalism.' Subalurn Studin I (Delhi, 1982), pp. 2-3; Swnit
Sarkar, 'The Decline of the Subaltern in Subaltern Studies', in Writing Socitzl
History (Delhi, 1997), p. 92.
3
INTRODUCTION
commonly take the form of a colonial discourse/indigenous authen
ticity binary which often seems a 'culturalist' variant of that earlier
dichotomy.
But not everything in late-colonial subconti.nental history can or
should be reduced to a single colonial/anti-colonial &ame. Evaluation
in terms ofc ontribution to anti-colonial politics or degree of cultural
authenticity can be particularly constrictive for histories of gender
and women's rights, as well as of subordinate-caste movements. For
such affirmations by the underprivileged among the colonised often
used as important resources, id~ derived from Western-colonial
modernity, and sought assistance from the institutions oft he colonial
state. Similar complications arise with some tribal, peasant or labour
protests, as well as concerning many communities sought to be cons
tructed around particular languages, ethnicities, or religions. We need .
to be open to the pcmibilicy ofm any histories and trajectories, in need
ofe valuation by multiple criteria, and here some aspects ofp osttnod
ernistic scepticism about homogenised, unilinear models do provide
hdpful warnings.
Yet there can be no question, obviously, of any denial of the cru
cialness ofc olonialism and ofa nti-colonial struggles in modern South
Asian history, least of all when so many forms of imperi~t domi
nation are staging a massive, worldwide comeback camouflaged by
the anodyne rhetoric of'g lobalisation'. There remains a need to make
distinctions between different kinds of 'nation-state' projects, with
specific contours and locations in time. Homogenisation quite often
operates nowadays through homogenised rejections. Nor do I find at
all hdpful efforts to push rejection ofu nilinearity towards an assut:np
tion that only 'fragments' or non-processual fleeting moments can be
studied. The search for interconnections must not be abandoned, but
made much more complicated and freed from all forms of reduction
ism. The imposition of a single frame, and values derived from it, on
an entire immensely varied subco~tinental history is harmful and
indeed impossible, but it remains vital to explore the multitude of
interrelations and crosscurrents. We may take a cue from the deve
lopment of the more fruitful kinds of feminist history in the West,
in recent decades. It could not have emerged without a rejection of
tendencies towards collapsing gender into class and production
4
BEYOND NATIONALIST FRAMES
relations in reductive manner (characteristic ofm uch orthodox Marx
ism) but-at its best--does not abstract gender studies from histories
~g capitalist social forms.
'Colonial Times: Clocks and Kaliyuga', the earliest of the essays
( 1996), is less connected with the problematic just outlined and indi
cated through the title of the present volume. Nationalist frames,
however, have often shared with the more aggressive kinds of' civilising
mission' writings an assumption of an over-sharp pre-colonial/colo
nial disjunction, with ofc ourse the value judgements invened. I argue
that this may have contributed to the strange neglect in historiogra
phy so far both of the advent of mechanical clock-time in South Asia,
as well as oft he persistence-through-change oft he motifo fK ali-yuga.
My essay speculates about possible reasons for the delayed entry,
despite no lack of contacts with the West from at least the sixteenth
century onwards, and explores some of the complicated responses
through a study of nineteenth-century printed vernacular material.
Like clock-time, the late entry of mechanical print has been inade
quately problematised. Both, I feel, have been somewhat occluded by
the specific form which the current focus on colonial cultural domi
nation has tended to adopt-a concentration on 'English education',
once widely hailed as the harbinger of a 'renaissance', nowadays de
nounced as a mere instrument of alien hegemony. Predominantly
vernacular print-culture had, howeY-er, a much wider social range,
and, arguably, greater historical)ignificance. Delayed entty--4ttribut
able in both cases not to teszhnological non-availability, but social
conditions stimulating, or ·hindering, demands for deployment
sccms to have meant a telescoping of phases of change that had been
much more spread out temporally in the West, and consequently,
perhaps, a greater impact at times. Thus print-4.tlture in nineteenth
century Bengal came to be quickly associated not just with the sti
mulus to vernacular publication via reductions in price and exact
reproduction inseparable from its entry everywhere, but also with in
sertion of punctuation, vastly enhanced portability, and a great ex
pansion in prose genres. Some of these developments had taken place
at times within scribal culture in the West, as for instance the shift
from volumina to a much more portable codex manuscript form in
later Roman-Imperial cimes, or the coming of Latin puncruation in