Writing Social History

400 Pages·1998·27.584 MB·English

by  Sumit Sarkar

“Writing
Social
History
Sumit Sarkar
Delhi
Oxford “Untoerstty Press
Calcutta Chennat Mumbat
1997
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© Oxford University Press 1997
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MAY 2 6 1998
To Aditya
Preface
he essays in this volume were written at various times since
1986, mostly between 1991 and 1996. Two of them, Chapters 4
and 8, are reprints with minor modifications. The others are being
published for the first time, though parts of them have had earlier
incarnations as seminar papers or articles. Details of past publication
appear at the end of the Preface,
The unity these essays have come to acquire is largely on account
of their composition amidst the pressures and stimuli of a decade
of massive change: the transformations in Indian life signified by
the destruction of the Babri Masjid and lower-caste affirmations,
and, on a world scale, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the
apparently irresistible advance of new forms of global capitalism,
and what often seems to be a general displacement of the politics

of class by that of ethnic or religious identity. Within my own
discipline the historiographical tradition that has attracted me most
— namely the radical social history of the 1960s and 1970s associated
with flexible patterns of Marxian thinking and visions of more
democratic and humane forms of socialism, epitomized best perhaps
by E.P. Thompson — has come under formidable attack. The evident
shift from social history to forms of cultural studies largely ab-
stracted from ‘material’ contexts, and the accompanying displace-
ment of Marxism, whether orthodox or revisionist, by a variety of
postmodernistic (and postcolonial) moods, appear to many today
to be both inevitable and salutary. There is also an occasional

opposite tendency towards nostalgic evocations of the lost verities
of Marxist dogma and bureaucratic socialist regimes.
The essays that follow should make clear my unhappiness with
both these trajectories. Part I seeks to develop an argument about
the new orthodoxy of colonial discourse analysis via essays on the
changing social contexts of modern Indian history-writing, the extent
and forms of relevance today of Thompsonian social history, and a
vill PREFACE
critique of Subaltern Studies. I find Saidian moods generally unhelpful
for understanding colonial middle-class culture, and a hindrance in
the exploration of areas which current developments make increas-
ingly crucial: notably, studies of gender and subordinate castes. At
the same time, there are elements of great value in the ‘linguistic
turn’ and the selfreflexivities they can stimulate among historians.
An unproblematized return or adherence to old patterns and styles
of historical writing is neither possible nor desirable.
Part II moves from critique towards the probing of alternatives,
through specific research. The essay on the elder Thompson apart
~— chronologically the earliest, which I am reprinting with a new
Postscript -- the focus is on late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-
century Bengal. The colonial middle class, I have argued, should not
be treated as a homogenized bloc, as both ‘renaissance’ historio-
graphy and its latter-day critics have tended to treat it. The trajectory
of this middle class was not determined, again, entirely by English
education — no matter whether its impact be seen as worthy inspira-
tion or disastrous cultural conquest. There is need to give due weight
also to other institutional innovations, all of them replete, like
education itself, with multiple implications: print-culture and the
vernacular public space it helped to create, open to small but growing
numbers of women and upwardly-mobile lower-caste men; clock-time;
and office-work (chakri) under foreign bosses in mercantile firms and
government departments. Studies of Calcutta and of the modulations
of Kaliyuga myths in late-nineteenth-century urban and village set-
tings lead up to the two long essays on Vidyasagar and Ramakrishna
— to my mind, the core of this book. The first tries to look at the
forms and contexts of Vidyasagar’s initiatives concerning education
and gender in what are perhaps somewhat novel ways. The second
attempts, through a textual study of the Kathamrita, a social history
of the religious world of Ramakrishna. The concluding essay is a
preliminary stocktaking of some work I have recently started on the
discourses and manifestations of caste in late-colonial Bengal.-
Many ideas in the book have evolved through discussions with
my Delhi University students, and I would like to thank them for
helping to keep teaching still a pleasure, and, for me, inseparable
from research. Among the very many who have helped, through
criticisms, comments, suggestions, and sometimes by simply being
there, helping to maintain spaces of meaningful, free discussion
through difficult times, I must mention particularly Aijaz Ahmed,
G. Arunima, Rajeev Bhargava, Akeel Bilgrami, Mahmood Mamdani,
PREFACE ix
Dilip Menon, Nivedita Menon, Gautam Navlakha, Kumkum San-
gari, and Achin Vanaik. Neeladri Bhattacharya’s comments and
suggestions for rearrangement proved enormously helpful at the
moment of going to press. I am grateful to Rukun Advani for the
great interest he has taken, and for valuable editorial corrections.
Stimulating discussions with Pradip Datta have been part of our
family’s life for years, and it will be evident that I have benefited in
exceptional ways from his pioneering research on communal forma-
tions in early-twentieth-century Bengal.
Tanika, as always, has been my severest critic and greatest inspira-
tion. Without her, there would have been no book.
The responsibility for errors and inadequacies must remain mine
alone.
This book is for Aditya, who has helped in many more ways than
he knows.
An early version of “The Many Worlds of Indian History’ was
presented at the International Congress of Historians, Madrid,
August 1990, and published in Italian in Storia della Historiographia,
19, 1991. More recently, parts of it went into my talk.on ‘Indian
History: The State of the Art’, at the School of Social Sciences,
Jawaharlal Nehru University, in November 1995. I am very grateful
for the criticisms and comments made there.
‘The Relevance of E.P. Thompson’ had its origins in my article,
‘E.P. Thompson’, published, shortly after Thompson’s death, in
Economic and Political Weekly (xxv 39, 25 September 1993), and in
two presentations at memorial meetings in Delhi University and
the India International Centre, September-October 1993.
Earlier versions of ‘The Decline of the Subaltern in Subaltern
Studies’ were presented at seminars on E.P. Thompson at the Max
Planck Institut fiir Geschichte, Gottingen (June 1994) and History
Workshop, London (July 1994), and subsequently at the Sociology
Department, Delhi University (December 1994). I have benefited
greatly from comments and criticisms, particularly at the Delhi
presentation.
‘Edward Thompson and India: The Other Side of the Medal’ is being
reprinted, with slight modifications and a new Postscript, from my
Afterword to a new edition of Edward Thompson’s The Other Side of
the Medal, ed. Mulk Raj Anand (New Delhi, Sterling, 1989).
‘The City Imagined: Calcutta of the Nineteenth and Early
xX PREFACE
Twentieth Centuries’ includes material from my ‘Calcutta and the
Bengal Renaissance’ in Sukanta Chaudhuri, ed., Calcutta: The Living
City (Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1990), and ‘Calcutta in the
Early Years of the Twentieth Century’ in J. Racine, ed., Calcutta
1905-1971: Au coeur des créations et des révoltes du siecle (Paris, Editions
Autrement, 1997, in French).
A version of ‘Renaissance and Kaliyuga: Time, Myth and History
in Colonial Bengal’ was presented at the International Round Table
of Historians and Anthropologists-at Bellagio, August 1989, and has
been accepted for publication in Gerald Sider and Gavin Smith, eds,
Between History and Histories: Making Silences and Commemorations
(Toronto University, forthcoming).
‘Vidyasagar and Brahmanical Society’ is a modified version of
two lectures given at Vidyasagar University (Midnapur, West Bengal)
in December 1996.
‘Kaliyuga, Chakri and Bhakti: Ramakrishna and His Times’ is
being reprinted, with minor changes, from Economic and Political
Weekly, 18 July 1992. Another version has been published as An
Exploration of the Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Tradition in the series
Socio-Religious Movements and Cultural Networks in Indian Civilisation:
Occasional PaperI (Shimla, Indian Institute of Advanced Study, 1993).
Versions of parts of ‘Identity and Difference: Caste in the For-
mation of Ideologies of Nationalism and Hindutva’ have been
presented in seminars at the universities of Pennsylvania (Philadel-
phia, February 1994), Melbourne (October 1994), and Chicago (May
1995) and published as ‘Indian Nationalism and the Politics of
Hindutva’ in David Ludden, ed., Making India Hindu (Delhi, OUP,
1996).
Contents
Preface Vil
PART ONE
1 The Many Worlds of Indian History
2 The Relevance of E.P. Thompson 50
3. The Decline of the Subaltern in Subaltern Studies 82
PART TWO
4 Edward Thompson and India: The Other Side of
the Medal 109
5 The City Imagined: Calcutta of the Nineteenth
and Early Twentieth Centuries 159
6 Renaissance and Kaliyuga: Time, Myth and History
in Colonial Bengal 186
7 Vidyasagar and Brahmanical Society 216
8 Kaliyuga, Chakri and Bhakti: Ramakrishna and
His Times 282
9 Identity and Difference: Caste in the Formation
of the Ideologies of Nationalism and Hindutva 358
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PART ONE
The Many Worlds of
Indian History
[pterection about their own location in society has not been
too common among Indian historians. Our historiographical
essays tend to become bibliographies, surveys of trends or move-
ments within the academic guild. They turn around debates about
assumptions, methods, ideological positions. Through these his-
torians. get pigeon-holed into slots: Neo-colonial, Nationalist, Com-
munal, Marxist, Subaltern. The existence of not one but many
levels of historical awareness attracts much less attention. But outside
the world of metropolitan centres of learning and research there
are provincial universities and colleges, schoolteachers, an immensely
varied student population, and, beyond these, vast numbers more
or less untouched by formal courses, yet with notions about history
and remembrances of things past, the nature and origins of which
it could be interesting to explore. What is neglected is the whole
question of the conditions of production and reception of academic
knowledge, its relationships with different kinds of common sense.!
We lack, in other words, a social history of historiography.
This problem of levels has become exceptionally acute in India
in recent years, with the growth of right-wing Hindu communal
forces, and the multiple responses to the Mandal proposals for
affirmative action in favour of ‘backward’ castes. In very different
1 Which, as Gramsci reminded us, must be understood as a ‘collective noun’,
and as ‘a product of history and a part of the historical process... “Common
sense” is the folklore of philosophy, and is always halfway between folklore
‘properly speaking and the philosophy, science and economics of the specialists.’
Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. Quentin Hoare and
Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York, 1971), pp. 325-6.