Subaltern Studies: Writings on South Asian History and Society, Vol. 8: Essays in Honour of Ranajit Guha (v. 8)

248 Pages·33.197 MB·English

by  David Arnold (editor), David Hardiman (editor)

.§UBALTERNS TUDIESV III
:,,,'
Essays in Honour of Ranajit Guha
edited by
DAVID ARNOLD
and
DAVID HARDIMAN
DELHI
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
BOMBAY CALCUTTA MADRAS
1994
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Oxford University Press, Walton Street, Oxford OX2 6DP
Oxford New Ym·k Toronto
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C Oxford UniversityP ress 1994
ISBN O 19 563411 X
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Contents
Prefac.e vii
Notes on Contnoutors ix
1. Claims on the Past: The Genealogy of
Modem Historiography in Bengal ..1.. .. .
PARTHA CHATTERJEE
2. The Difference-Defe rral of a Colonial Modernity: .,
P~blic Debates on Domesticity in British India · .50
DIPESH CHAKRABARTY
3. Power in the Forests: The Dangs, 1820-1940 89
DAVID HARDIMAN
4. The Colonia l Prison: Pow er, Know ledge and
Penology in Nine teenth-Century India 148
DAVID ARNOLD
( .~~
5. The Prose of Otherness
GYANENDRA PANDEY
6. Ranajit Guha : A Biographical Sketch 222
SHAHID AMIN AND GAUTAM BHADRA
7. A Bibliography of Ranajit Guha's Writings 226
COMPILED BYG AUTAM BHADRA
Index 229
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Preface
T
his volum~ of SubaJte,71S tud~e~i s dedicated. t~ Ra~aji~ Guha.
Through his research and wnting, through his mspuation and
vision, his encouragement and guidance, and through his keen and
energetic editorship of the first six volumes of SubalternS tudies, Ranajit
Guha has been more than just the founder of the series: he has been
the intellectual driving force behind it. We are pleased to recognize
his leader ship and scholarly contribution through the publication of
these essays in his honour by five of the Subaltern Studies collective
and to include a biographical note and bibliography of his published
works by two further members of the editorial team
October 1993 DAVID ARNOLD
DAVID H ARDIMAN
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N otes on
Contributor s
DAVID ARNOLD is Professor of South Asian History at the School
of Oriental and African Studies, London, and the autho r of PoliceP ower
and ColonialR ule: Madras, 1858- 1947 (1986); Famine:S ocia(Ci'isis--rmd
Historical Change (1988); and Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and
EpidemicD iseasei n Nineteenth-Centu1-yIn dia (1993).
DIPESH CHAKRABARTY is Director of the Ashworth Centre for
Social Theory at the University of Melbourne. He is the author of
Rethinking Working-ClassH isto1-yB: engal,1 890-1940 (1989). His current
work is on gender and domesticity in modem Bengal.
P ARTHA CHATTERJEE is Professor of Political Science, Centre for
Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta. His publications include Bengal,
1920-47: The lAnd Question (1985); Nationalist Thought and the Colonial
World( 1986); and The Nation and Its F1·agments:C oloniala nd Post-colonial
Histories (1993).
DAVID HARDIMAN is currently a Simon Research Fellow at the
Unive rsity of Manchester. He has written Peasant Nationalists of
Guja1·at: Kheda District, 1917-34 (1981) , and The Coming of the Devi:
Adivasi Assertion in Western India (1987), and has edited PeasantR esis
tance in India, 1858- 1914 (1992).
GYANENDRA PANDEY is Professor of History at the University of
Delhi. He is the author of The Ascendancy of the Cong,·essi n Uttar
Pradesh, 1926-34 (1978), and The Construction of Communalism in
ColonialN orth India (1990). He has also edited The Indian Nation in 1942
(1988).
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1
Claims on the Past:
The Genealogy of
Modern
Historiography in
Bengal
P ARTHA CHATTERJEE
H
istory is today, not implicitly, but in the most explicit way pos
sible, the pretext for violent political conflict in India. It is a
conflict which threatens to tear apart what was for several decades
taken to be the consensus about the fundamental character of the
nation -state which the Constitution calls 'India, that is Bharat . For
almost three years now, the most contentious debate with which the
very centre of organized political life in India has been preoccupied
is a dispute over the statu s of a certain mosque in a small town in
Uttar Pradesh. The reason why this dispute is producing such shat
tering reverberations in the central corridors of Indian politics is that
it has become implicated in the increasingly powerful claims now
being made by the organized proponents of political Hinduism. The
central demand of this campaign is that the past, present and future
of the Indian nation be constituted around a notion of hindutva, Hindu
ness.
I will not go into the question of why the campaign of Hindu
extren1is1n should have acquired such a mon1entum at this particular
time in Indian politics. Nor will I discuss here the complex question
of the evolution of 'communalis t' politics in India, the contradictions
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2 SUBALTERNS TUDIESV III
in the politics of 'secularism', and the problematic involvement of the
state and the 'secular' political parties in the politics of religious iden
tity. My focus in this essay will be on the construction of the historical
claims of 'Hindutva'.
My argument will be that such claims become possible only within
the modem forms of historiography, a historiography which is neces
sarily constructed around the complex identity of a people-nation
state. To the extent that the genealogy of modern historiography in
India is deeply implicated in the encounter with British colonialism,
these historical claims of political Hinduism are also a product of
contestations with the forn,s of colonial knowledge. I will also show
that many of the themes that run through the contemporary rhetoric
of Hindu-extremist politics were in fact part and parcel of the historical
imagining in the nineteenth century of 'India' as a nation. This implies
that with respect to the fragile consensus over 'na\jon-ness' in India
today, the tendency which en,phasizes the singularity of a historically
constituted national formation called 'India, that is Bharat' -a sin
gularity often demanded by the need to legitimize the centralized
apparatu ses of a modern nation-state-will always have available for
its sectarian use the common resources of a single 'national' history
of 'the Hindus'.
Finally, I will show that a genealogical investigation of modem
historiography, at least in the case of Bengal, reveals other possibilities
for the imagining of 'nation-ness', possibilities that were suppressed
or erased by the onward march of the dominant history of 'Indian
nationalism'.
'WE MUST HAV E A HISTORY!'
In a series of lectures delivered in Calcutta in 1988, 1 Ranajit Guha
discussed the conditions and limits of the agenda developed in the
second half of the nineteenth century for 'an Indian historiography of
India '. It was an agenda for self-representation, for setting out to claim
for the nation a past that was not distorted by foreign interpreters.
Reviewing the developn1ent of historiography in Bengal in the nine
teenth century, Guha shows how the call sent out by Bankimchandra -
1
Ranajit Cuha, An Indian Historiog,·aphyo f India:A Nineteenth-CenturyA genda
and its Implications( Calcutta, 1988).
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