Postcolonialism: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies [4, 1 ed.] 0415193648, 0415193605

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POSTCOLONIALISM

POSTCOLONIALISM Critical concepts in literary and cultural studies

Edited by Diana Brydon Volume IV

O Routledge

S^^ Taylor & Francis Group LONDON AND NEW YORK

To maintain the integrity of the original articles, references which refer the reader to text not included within these volumes have been retained. However, figures and any reference to them within the text, have been omitted.

First published 2000 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX 14 4RN 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Selection and editorial material © 2000 Diana Brydon; individual owners retain copyright in their own material Typeset in Times by Wearset, Boldon, Tyne and Wear All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Postcolonialism: critical concepts in literary and cultural studies / edited by Diana Brydon. p. cm. Collection of previously published articles, essays, etc. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-415-19360-5 (set) — ISBN 0-415-19361-3 (v. 1) — ISBN 0-415-19362-1 (v. 2) — ISBN 0-415-19363-X (v. 3) — ISBN 0-415-19364-8 (v. 4) — ISBN 0-415-19367-8 (v. 5) 1. Postcolonialism. I. Brydon, Diana. JV51.P67 2000 325'.3—dc21

99-0599119

The publishers have made every effort to contact authors/copyright holders of works reprinted in Postcolonialism. This has not been possible in every case, however, and we would welcome correspondence from those individuals/companies whom we have been unable to trace. ISBN 13: 978-0-415-19360-3 (set) ISBN 13: 978-0-415-19364-1 (hbk) (volume 4)

CONTENTS

VOLUME IV PART 9

Internal Colonialisms and Subaltern Studies

9.1

Towards an Understanding of the Internal Colonial Model

1345 1347

JOHN LIU

9.2

South Africa and Imperialism

1365

OLIVER TAMBO

9.3

The Prose of Counter-Insurgency

1370

RANAJIT GUHA

9.4

Living in the Interregnum

1406

N A D I N E GORDIMER

9.5

Can the Subaltern Speak?

1427

GAYATRI CHAKRAVORTY SPIVAK

9.6

Subaltern as Perspective

1478

VEENA DAS

9.7

Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for "Indian" Pasts?

1491

DIPESH CHAKRABARTY

9.8

Was There a Hegemonic Project of the Colonial State?

1519

PARTHA CHATTERJEE

9.9

The Promise and Dilemma of Subaltern Studies: Perspectives from Latin American History FLORENCIA E. MALLON V

1524

CONTENTS 9.10

Dalitization Not Hinduization

1554

KANCHA I L A I A H

PART 10

Challenging Eurocentrism

1569

10.1

1571

Resume J.J. THOMAS

10.2

The West Indian Intellectual

1583

C.L.R. JAMES

10.3

Foreword to Kanthapura

1604

RAJA RAO

10.4

Tradition and the West Indian Novel

1606

WILSON H A R R I S

10.5

On the Abolition of the English Department

1619

N G U G I WA THIONG'O

10.6

Two European Images of Non-European Rule

1625

TALAL ASAD

10.7

Anthropology and Pacific Islanders

1640

EPELI HAU'OFA

10.8

An Apologia as Prelude

1647

CLAUDE ALVARES

10.9

Chapter Five: Conclusions

1653

J O H A N N E S FABIAN

10.10

The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House

1670

A U D R E LORDE

10.11

The Construction of Eurocentric Culture

1674

SAMIR A M I N

10.12

History Inside Out

1692

J.M. BLAUT

10.13

Greece: Aryan or Mediterranean? Two Contending Historiographical Models

1739

MARTIN BERNAL

10.14

Towards a Third World Utopia ASHIS N A N D Y VI

1749

Part 9 INTERNAL COLONIALISMS AND SUBALTERN STUDIES

9.1

TOWARDS AN UNDERSTANDING OF THE INTERNAL COLONIAL MODEL John Liu From Emma Gee (ed) Counterpoint: Perspectives on Asian America, Los Angeles Asian American Studies Centre: UCLA, 1976,160-8

The civil rights movement, the outbreak of racial violence, and the growth of nationalist and separatist movements among America's racial minorities during the sixties were events social scientists failed to foresee. This was because the dominant model in the area of race relations up to this time was the assimilation/integration model, which was based on the proposition that America was willing to extend to her racial minorities the same rights and privileges enjoyed by white Americans. Within the framework of this model, social scientists focused on the barriers to assimilation and proposed strategies nonwhite minorities could adopt in order to facilitate their transition to full political and social equality.1 The subsequent events of the sixties, however, forced social scientists to reassess this basic proposition. From this reassessment, a new model in the field of race/ethnic relations emerged. Advanced by both social scientists and political activists, it is referred to as the internal colonial model. Those who advocate it assert that American society has never been willing to incorporate her racial minorities as equals. They contend, on the contrary, that racial minorities in America have been relegated to a position of underdevelopment and dependency in a socio-economic structure similar to that of a classical colony. Based on this contention, they assert that the situation of America's racial minorities is essentially that of an internal colony and that this approach in marked contrast to the assimilation one leads to a better understanding of race relations in America.

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The purpose of this essay is to discuss the various interpretations of the internal colonial model as presented by its proponents. Since they base their analysis on the similarities between classical colonialism and internal colonialism, I will first discuss their views on the similarities. Then I will analyze important differences between the two. In this essay, colonialism refers to the process by which Europeans established their dominance over nonwhite people during the past three hundred years. The basic characteristics of the colonial process are: (1) the forced entry of nonwhite populations into the colonizer's society; (2) the creation of a dual labor market economy; (3) the sharing of a single polity by the colonizer and the colonized in which the former is totally dominant; and (4) racial and cultural oppression, leading to the development of racist rules or norms. These characteristics form the framework in which the following examination of the similarities between classical and internal colonialism will proceed.2 Classical and internal colonialism - a comparison Forced entry Writers using the internal colonial approach argue that the development of internal colonialism in the U.S. is directly linked to the colonization of North America by the European colonists. This colonization not only involved the subjugation of the indigenous population but also the importation of slaves via the trade triangle, namely, the movement of commodities between the colonial powers, Africa and the colonies in the New World. The colonial powers provided the exports and the ships, Africa, the manpower (i.e., the slaves), and the colonies, the raw materials. Finished products were exported to Africa in exchange for slaves who, in turn, were shipped to the colonies and exchanged for raw materials such as sugar, tobacco, and cotton. These raw materials were then sent back to the "mother countries" to be made into finished products, thus completing the triangle. This trade triangle was one of the bases of capital accumulation in both the colonies and the mother country.3 Even after American independence, this triangle continued for another sixty years, except that the New England states now provided the ships and exports instead of the mother country while the Southern states continued to supply the raw materials. The continuance of the trade triangle after American independence, according to this view, provides a linkage between internal and classical colonialism. As Casanova contends: "It is well known that upon reaching independence, the old colonies' international and internal social structure does not suddenly change."4 In other words, the policies and structures which arise in the classical colonial situation continue to exist in an internal colonial situation.5 After 1776, the continuance of slavery and the 1348

UNDERSTANDING THE INTERNAL COLONIAL MODEL

slave trade as well as the retention of a genocidal policy towards Native Americans are other examples of this linkage. Moreover, the continuity of social and economic structures of former colonies further demonstrates that the political separation between a colony and its mother country is not the essential feature in understanding colonialism. A people may be colonized on the very territory which they have lived for generations or they may be forcibly uprooted by the colonial power from their traditional territory and colonized in a new territorial environment so that the very environment itself is 'alien' to them. In defining the colonial problem it is the role of the institutional mechanisms of colonial domination which are decisive. Territory is merely the stage upon which these historically developed mechanisms of super exploitation are organized into a system of oppression. (Emphasis added.)6 Blauner contends one of the processes common to both the internal and classical colonial situation is the forced entry of the colonized people. Just as classical colonies were forcibly established by the colonialists through conquest, so the entry of racial minorities into American society has also been accompanied by some degree of coercion exerted by the host society.7 Schermerhorn also argues that the continued existence of ethnic and racial minorities has been dependent upon the degree of coercion exerted by the receiving society. He presents a sequence of migration which reflects a descending order of coercion on the part of the receiving society: (1) slave transfers to a receiving society; (2) movements of forced labor from one area of the host society to another; (3) contract labor transfers including the so-called "coolie trade."8 Applying Schermerhorn's construct, it can be seen that racial minorities have entered under some degree of coercion on the part of American society. Blacks experienced both slave transfers and the forced movement of slaves from one area of the host society to another. An example of the latter is the mass movement of slaves from the tobacco-producing border states of Kentucky, Virginia, Tennessee and Maryland to the cottonproducing states of the Deep South. Asians entered the U.S. as contract laborers, particularly those who went to Hawaii.9 In addition to this migration sequence, Schermerhorn suggests that the experience of Chicanos offers a fourth type of forced entry. Although Chicanos have recently entered this country as contract laborers, their initial entry was through annexation of the Southwest. Schermerhorn distinguishes annexation from colonization as being contiguous vs. noncontiguous domination, but he recognizes that both processes result in relatively identical relations of subordination. This is especially true in instances

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INTERNAL COLONIALISMS AND SUBALTERN STUDIES

where annexation is historically preceded by an experience of colonization, as in the case of the U.S. annexation of the Southwest from Mexico. In these situations, the subsequent racial and cultural gaps that developed closely resemble the barriers that emerge in a colonial situation.10 Under conditions of forced entry, two options available to voluntary immigrants but denied to the colonized are: (1) free geographical and status mobility within the host society; and (2) the chance to develop mutually reciprocal ties with the host population.11 The relative absence of these two options in the U.S. is reflected by the continued concentration of homogenous racial groups within certain urban areas (ghettos, barrios, and Chinatowns) as well as in certain geographical regions (e.g., Chicanos in the Southwest). Economic dependency - dual labor market A second common feature of both classical and internal colonial situations is the development of a split-labor or dual labor market economy. In both situations, there is a primary market "offering relatively high-paying wages, stable employment, with good working conditions, chances of advancement and equitable administration of work rules" for members of the dominant group (the colonizers).12 However, for the colonized, those people who experienced a forced entry, there is a secondary market where wages, employment, working conditions and chances for advancement are well below those available to the colonizing population.13 Some writers have argued that a dual labor market creates a condition in which the colonized are "super-exploited." As Harris states: One way of putting the idea of an internal colony would be to argue that the rate of exploitation is higher for black labor than for white labor or that, in other words, there is 'super-exploitation' of black labor . . . The question to be asked is whether there is a systematic pattern of underpayment of black labor relative to whites for the same task, same level of skill, and same level of productivity.14 Bonacich's definition of a split labor market also implies superexploitation. According to her, a split labor market "must contain at least two groups of workers whose price of labor differs for the same work, or would differ if they did the same work." (Emphasis added.)15 While these writers have defined a dual labor market in terms of super-exploitation, it is suggested here that a clearer indicator of a split labor market can be seen in the existence of task segregation which tends to minimize the actual competition between white and colonized labor. Task segregation is apparent in the persistent over-representation of minorities in the semi1350

UNDERSTANDING THE INTERNAL COLONIAL MODEL

skilled occupations and their corresponding underrepresentation in the professional occupational categories. A pattern of task segregation can also be historically demonstrated. Although the classical example is the sole use of black slaves in growing cotton, task segregation occurred with other racial minorities as well. In California during the second half of the 19th century: There were several labor markets co-existing in time and space. Each was relatively insulated from the income and job competition of the others. The Chinese labor was concentrated in the lowpriced, low-wage fields, primarily in agriculture and importcompeting industries. The majority of the white workers were in the high-priced, high-wage fields and in non-competing industries.16 The Japanese and Filipino workers in Hawaii developed the sugar industry, an occupation which attracted few white laborers. Mexican labor provided between 65% to 85% of the common labor used to develop the Southwest's agriculture between 1900 and 1929, which in that year produced 40% of the nation's supply of vegetables, fruit, and truck crops.17 Using either super-exploitation or task segregation to define a split labor market does not change what Blauner has referred to as the "colonial labor principle," i.e., the use of colonized labor solely to advance the development of the colonizer's economy. In the classical colonial situation, the cheap labor force provided by the colonized and the exploitation of the colony's natural resources are regulated by the colonizer for the purpose of maintaining the hegemony of the mother country - not only in relation to the colonized but also with regards to competing international rivals. As Maunier notes, colonial possession functions to guarantee the economic and political autonomy of the mother country by providing the latter with an uncontested market for finished products as well as a readily available source of raw materials.18 Similarly, in the internal colonial situation, colonized labor has frequently been engaged in one sector of the economy in order to produce a single commodity (e.g., gold, silver, tobacco or cotton).19 Blauner asserts that: Like European overseas colonialism, America has used African, Asian, Mexican and to a lesser degree, Indian workers for the most unskilled jobs, in the least advanced sectors of the economy, in the most industrially backward regions of the nation. In a historical sense, people of color provided much of the hard labor (and the technical skills) that built up the agricultural base and the mineral-transport-communication infrastructure necessary for industrialization and modernization, whereas the Europeans worked primarily within the industrialized, modern sector.20

1351

INTERNAL COLONIALISMS AND SUBALTERN STUDIES

As a general rule, the colonized labor force has been typically concentrated in those areas where labor has been most needed.21 In contemporary times, this has meant an increasing urbanization of racial minorities and their concentration in the service sectors of the economy. Although the geographical setting has changed, the economic development of the ghettos and barrios is still tied to the decisions made in the white community and continues to reflect the pattern of white economic dominance.22 Expansion into the petty bourgeois market by the corporate sector is limited since few business ventures within the ghetto can generate enough profits to sustain an extended period of corporate growth. Furthermore, the cost of training labor and innovating technical procedures may be prohibitive in many areas. But most important, corporate expansion into ghetto markets is inherently unstable, following the ineluctable pattern of boom and recession that characterizes the international market.23 This economic dependency is experienced by other racial minorities as well. Almaguer notes that Chicanos have been affected by the decreasing number of unskilled jobs in the private sector of the economy. This decrease has resulted in the need to train a new educated work force. But because Chicanos in general are excluded from higher levels of education, they have continued to remain dependent upon unskilled jobs.24 Dean Lan, in his study of San Francisco Chinatown's sweatshops, also demonstrates how garment factory employment in the Chinese-American ghetto is directly tied to the economic fluctuations in the white economy.25 In addition to economic dependency in the labor market, the dependency of racial minorities as well as their supporting role within the colonizer's economy can also be seen in the function that welfare fulfills. Because the income of many racial minorities are below the poverty levels, they receive welfare payments to help them survive. However, these payments also play a significant role in maintaining the circulation of commodities for the benefit of the dominant white economy: Government spending in poor communities is as transient as water in a dishrag. No sooner is money poured into them than private entrepreneurs wring it out again . . . The people we call welfare recipients are, in fact, conduits. They conduct money from one sector of the economy (the public treasury) to another (into the hands or private entrepreneurs). The real welfare recipients are those people who prey on the conduits every welfare check day.26 Political dependency The maintenance and perpetuation of this economic dependency point to a third dimension shared by both the internal and classical colonial situ-

1352

UNDERSTANDING THE INTERNAL COLONIAL MODEL

ations: the fostering of political arrangements which institutionalize the inequities between the dominant society and her racial minorities. In the classical colonial situation, political dependency is maintained by keeping the colonized people in a separate and subordinate legal category. In an internal colonial situation, political dependency persists in spite of the legal equality between the colonizer and colonized. Viewing the barrio as an internal colony, Barrera outlines several mechanisms that have been employed to perpetuate political dependency among Chicanos.27 1

2 3

4 5

The most obvious and direct mechanisms are those involving force and intimidation. Notable examples are the actions taken by the Texas rangers to prevent Chicanos from politically organizing and the violence encountered by civil rights marchers in Selma, Alabama. Disenfranchisement measures such as poll taxes, English literacy tests and grandfather clauses. Gerrymandering of voting districts to dilute the voting strength of racial minorities. Thus, while the Mexican community in East Los Angeles is the largest outside of Mexico City, Chicanos have been able to elect only one Congressman (Roybal), one State Assemblyman (Alatorre) and no city council-person. Setting candidacy requirements which hinder the participation of racial minorities in the electoral process. Co-opting selected individuals which serves not only to deprive the community of potential leadership but also provides the colonizer with tokens to be displayed. "Tokenism," according to Flores, perpetuates the system in two ways because: (1) it offers a member of the nonwhite community as success symbols for each group and thus makes a truly closed system appear open through selective social mobility, and (2) it provides the system with apologists of individualism.28

Another means of maintaining political dependency is to grant a limited amount of local or community autonomy while remaining in control of the local tax base. Without control of the local tax base, communities cannot sustain or carry out any programs without prior approval from the white political structure.29 In short, racial minorities do not control either the institutions which affect their immediate lives or those institutions which could effect meaningful change. Racial and cultural oppression One final feature shared by classical and internal colonialism is the use of racial and cultural oppression in maintaining social order. Unlike previous

1353

INTERNAL COLONIALISMS AND SUBALTERN STUDIES

race models, the colonial theory asserts that racism is not merely an ideology but an integral part of the social structure. Balandier's comment on the importance of race and culture in the classical colonial situation could also apply to internal colonialism: "The colonized society is different from the colonial society by race and culture. In these respects, the antinomy appears absolute: it was expressed in the language by the opposition of 'primitive' and civilized, pagan and Christian, technical culture and 'backward cultures.' "30 This polarization of the dominant and the subordinates is essential for the maintenance of colonial society. As Memmi states: The colonizer-colonized, people to people relationship within nations can, in fact, remind one of the bourgeoisie-proletariat relationship within a nation. But the almost airtight colonial groupings must also be mentioned. All the efforts of the colonialist are directed toward maintaining this social immobility and racism is the surest weapon for this aim. In effect, change becomes impossible.31 Racism allows the colonialist to exert economic and political domination and is crucial to perpetuating the system. By destroying any unique sense of history or humanity that the colonized may entertain, racism and cultural oppression perpetuates the system which nurtures it. Malcolm X points to some of the mechanisms involved in this destruction. One means is to destroy a people's tongue, through which their history and ways of living are transmitted from generation to generation. Thus slaves were forbidden to speak in their native tongues.32 But specific sanctions against the colonized using their native tongue may not be necessary. The fact that economic and political transactions are conducted in the language of the colonizer dictates the learning of that language. As Memmi eloquently shows, this dependency on the language of the colonizer leads eventually to a cultural dependency. The colonized must not only rely on the colonizer's language to conduct daily affairs but also to express their sentiments (e.g., in petitions of grievance), even if this means using terms which rob the colonized of their historical identity.33 Malcolm X notes that when Blacks accept the designation "Negro," nothing is revealed of their past, their native tongue, or even their color.34 In lieu of the colonized's displaced culture, the culture of the colonizer is set as the standard. This culture socializes both the colonized and the colonizer to the "rule of the game." These rules, in turn, serve three functions: first, they legitimize the system of stratification based on the colonizer's presumed racial and cultural superiority as well as their actual monopoly of power; second, they instruct both the colonized and the colonizer as to how they should socially interact with each other; and third, they direct economic behavior. Fanon comments on one such rule:

1354

UNDERSTANDING

THE INTERNAL COLONIAL MODEL

The native intellectual had learnt from his masters that the individual ought to express himself fully. The colonialist bourgeoisie had hammered into the native's mind the idea of a society of individuals where each person shuts himself up in his own subjectivity, and whose only wealth is individual thought.35 Applied to the political realm, this means that the colonized are socialized to present any grievance on an individual rather than collective basis. In fact, the rules define any collective action not only as illegitimate but also as an admission of the individual's weakness to stand up and fend for him/herself. The colonizers, on the other hand, are socialized into a paternal role of treating grievances as evidence of the colonized's inability to understand their obligations. The colonizers often view the demands of the colonized as equivalent to the tantrums of small children, who, because of their immaturity, are unable to see that the actions of the parents are in the best interests of the children. These rules of behavior are not only crucial in providing a rationale for the current state of affairs but instrumental in socializing each new generation to its proper role in society. The social structure of a colonial society is erected so as to reinforce the illusion that the existing inequitable social relations are immutable. In sum, according to the internal colonial approach, internal and classical colonialism share a common social structure, characterized by an inequitable dual labor market, based on the forced entry or participation of colonial labor, and fostered by a political system which seeks to perpetuate these inequalities through the socialization and institutionalization of racial and cultural oppression. Now let us turn to the differences between classical and internal colonialism. Classical and internal colonialism - a contrast The literature dealing with the internal colonial model has mainly been concerned with drawing parallels between the classical and internal colonial situations. As yet there has been no systematic attempt to analyze the differences. This section will contrast these two situations by focusing on three areas: (1) the legal status of the colonized; (2) the colonizer/colonized population ratio; and (3) the nature of decolonization. Legal status One of the basic differences between the two situations is that the classical colonial model considers the colonized legally subordinate while the internal colonial model considers them legally equal.36 Although the presence or absence of formally equal legal status may seem trivial on its face, 1355

INTERNAL COLONIALISMS AND SUBALTERN STUDIES

the consequences of de jure equality are important. First, the granting of the rights of citizenship to the colonized tends to obscure their condition from the outside world. Thus, while the U.S. has been criticized for its treatment of her racial minorities, this criticism has never approached the gravity of criticism that has been leveled against either Rhodesia or the Union of South Africa, where the Africans are legally kept in an inferior position. Nor has there ever been any type of official sanction placed against the U.S. such as the official U.N. embargo against Rhodesia. While it may be argued that such criticism and sanctions are by and large ineffectual, such actions nonetheless affect the exercise of power by these countries both in terms of international and domestic politics. Secondly, critics argue that the granting of de jure rights to racial minorities in the U.S. also has a bearing on the goals of their political movements. Because of the existence of equal rights, the direction of their political movements has tended to be channeled towards the exercise of these rights rather than towards the fundamental reconstruction of society. According to O'Dell, the civil rights movement has primarily been directed against the ideology of white supremacy rather than against the institutional basis of that power.37 Population ratio A second difference between classical and internal colonialism can be seen in the colonizer/colonized population ratio. In classical colonialism, the colonizers are numerically the minority while the colonized are the numerical majority.38 In the internal colonial situation, the colonizer/colonized population ratio favors the colonizer either because of: (1) massive settlement; (2) intermarriage; (3) genocide of the indigenous population; (4) immigration restrictions; or (5) a combination of these four courses of action. This situation has ramifications. First, a principal reason as to why the colonizers in an internal colonial situation can grant de jure equality to the colonized is simply due to the fact that the latter does not constitute a numerical threat to the political and economic hegemony of the colonizer.39 To grant such equality in the classical colonial situation would be tantamount to being expelled. This is precisely why Rhodesia cannot allow Black majority rule. In the U.S., statehood was not granted to New Mexico and Arizona until sixty years after the signing of the Guadalupe-Hidalgo Treaty, even though one of the provisions of the Treaty called for the granting of early statehood to the territories of the Southwest.40 A prominent factor in this delay was that New Mexico alone, at the conclusion of the Mexican-American War, had over 50,000 Mexican inhabitants who would have been eligible for immediate citizenship.41 McWilliams, observing this point, suggests that "when one compares the celerity with which California and Nevada were admit-

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UNDERSTANDING THE INTERNAL COLONIAL MODEL

ted to the Union with the prolonged struggle for statehood in New Mexico, it is readily apparent that forces were at work, both within and without the states, to delay admission until an Anglo-American majority had been established."42 For the U.S. to have granted New Mexico statehood immediately after the Mexican-American War would have meant giving political control to the majority Mexican population. In short, the numerical strength of the colonizers generally allows them to grant de jure rights without affecting their political, economic, and cultural dominance. A second ramification of this ratio is its effect on political strategies. In the classical colonial situation, strategies of the colonized leaders are centered on winning the majority's participation in a national liberation movement to counterbalance the colonizer's technological and military superiority. The determination of political strategy in an internal colonial situation would be more complex. As mentioned earlier, the existence of de jure rights has tended to channel political movements in the direction of political reform. Yet, being a numerical minority prevents their effecting any of these reforms. Hechter observes that "this often results in politics of 'stable unrepresentation.' "43 The size of the colonized population also would greatly reduce the possibility of successful armed rebellion on the basis of their strength alone. In either case, their population size necessitates establishing broader support by forming coalitions or alliances with other minorities or with members of the larger society, or with both. Such a strategy offers a wide range of possible outcomes, depending on the resolution of two problems: (1) with whom to form coalitions (e.g., white liberals, the working class, students); and (2) what the basis of these alliances are to be (e.g., the pooling of legal resources, acceptance of a revolutionary program, third world coalitions). Nature of decolonization The third area - and the most controversial - in which internal and classical colonialism differs centers around the nature of decolonization. Classical colonialism is usually thought of as involving a process which includes the conquest of an overseas territory and the establishment of an administration to run the political and economic affairs of that territory by a colonial power.44 Casanova states that the term "colony" has come to be understood "in both official circles and in common language, as possession of a territory in which European emigrants dominated indigenous people."45 Given this usurpation of territory and of political and economic administration, national liberation movements have fought not only for political independence but also for the immediate return of their land and control of its administration. Decolonization in this situation involves the simultaneous and inseparable demands for political autonomy and for nationhood with the returning of native land. 1357

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In the internal colonial situation, there are two different positions concerning the nature of decolonization. One position agrees with the classical demand for both political independence and territory. However, given the circumstances of an internal colonial situation, this position contends that the two demands should be separated for strategic reasons. Eldridge Cleaver in discussing the black power movement contended in 1968 that: Black power as a slogan does not attempt to answer the land question. It does not deny the existence of the question, but rather frankly states that at the present moment the land question cannot be dealt with, the black people must put things first, that there are a few things that must be done before we can deal with the land question. We must first get some power so that we will be in a position to force a settlement of the land question. (Emphasis added.)46 Following a similar line of reasoning, Earl Ofari argues that one of the things that needs to be accomplished is the establishment of an economic base capable of supporting an independent black nation. According to his observation: Simple ownership [of land] means little. Blacks must have complete collective control over the means of production. If this is not the case then the land is either rendered useless and nonproductive or becomes prey for neo-colonialism.47 People who support this position contend that internally colonized people have neither the political nor economic resources to immediately establish an independent nation. This lack of resources dictates the separation of political independence from its territorial aspects. Decolonization, according to this position, means that these goals are sequential rather than simultaneous as in the case of classical colonialism. Critics of advocates for the establishment of a separate nation represent a second position. They view the demand both for political independence and for a separate territory as unrealistic. These critics argue that while racial minorities in America have suffered many of the same grievances that other colonized people in the Third World have undergone, their strategies and goals cannot be similar because the establishment of an independent nation is no longer a viable option. While assessing the Chicano experience as internal colonization, Almaguer concludes: Unlike his brother in the Third World, the Chicano because of his internal colonization, no longer holds the classical option of national independence.48

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Concerned about the possible implications of depicting the situation of blacks in America as an internal colony, William Tabb writes: The colony analogy becomes misleading when it is used to suggest the possibility of meaningful black independence within the context of American society.49 Writing from a Marxian perspective, James Boggs' comments catch the essence of this second position. He remarks: In developing a revolutionary ideology for the U.S., it is necessary to be very scientific about the difference between the role that black people have played in the development of this country and the role that colonized people play in the development of the imperialist country which exploits them. In relation to U.S. capitalism, blacks have played a role which is both like and unlike that of colonial peoples, but they have also played an integral part in the internal development of this country from its very beginning. This country has no history separate and apart from the history of black people inside it. By the same token, the history of black Americans can't be separated from their history in the development of this country. Therefore, nationalism can't possibly have the same meaning as nationalism in countries like Kenya, or Ethiopia or Ghana. (Emphasis added.)50 The source of disagreement between both these positions, as Boggs suggests, revolves around the issue of whether or not the colonized have an extant history and culture independent from that of the colonizer's. For those who answer in the affirmative, the demand for independence and nationhood is a reaffirmation of the colonized's distinct identity. For those who answer in the negative, the absence of a distinct history and culture removes any objective basis for creating a separate nation. Thus, they believe the efforts of America's racial minorities during the decolonization stage could be directed toward reconstructing the society of which they are an integral part. In summary, the essence of both classical and internal colonialism is the colonizer's monopoly of political, economic and military power. In both situations, racism provides the rationale for the colonizer's dominance. It is reflected both in the split labor market based upon the forced participation of the colonized and in the development of a political system designed to maintain the colonizer's privileged position. The differences between internal and classical colonialism result from the manner in which political dominance is exercised. In the classical colonial situation, because the colonized are the numerical majority, the

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colonizer is prevented from granting the former rights of citizenship. While the size of the colonized population inhibits obtaining de jure equality, it does provide a basis for the establishment of an independent nation. In the internal colonial situation, the colonized have de jure as distinguished from de facto legal rights principally because they are in the numerical minority and therefore are not in a position to effectively use the colonizer's political system to their advantage. These legal rights in no ways change the colonized's economic and political dependency upon the colonizer but instead tend to obscure the latter's monopoly of power. The size of the colonized population also makes the attainment of independence and nationhood more problematic than is the case in classical colonialism. Conclusion This essay has presented some of the defining characteristics of the internal colonial model by examining the similarities and the differences between the classical and internal colonial situations. In discussing these characteristics, at least two major discrepancies between the internal colonial and the assimilation/integration models appear. First, the assimilationist model approaches the problem of race relations in terms of nonwhite adaptation to the dominant white society. This follows from their assumption that America is an open society for anyone willing to adopt the dominant group's values and norms. In contrast, the internal colonial model emphasizes the political and economic struggles that occur between the colonizer and the colonized. From this perspective, racial minorities are not passive actors merely adopting the standards of the dominant society but rather are active participants in conflict with the dominant group over differing conceptions of self-interest. Second, the assimilationist model tends to analyze race relations in terms of class - as defined by income, occupation, consumption patterns and self-perception - rather than race. In simplified form, its supporters contend that racial minorities are at the base of the social hierarchy not because of race per se but because they possess lower class characteristics (e.g., present as opposed to future time orientation, large families, lack of education). These theorists argue that once racial minorities acquire middle class habits and orientations, they like previous immigrant groups will be upwardly mobile. On the other hand, race or more specifically racism, plays a crucial role in the internal colonial mode. Unlike assimilation theorists, advocates of the internal colonial model do not conceive of racism only in terms of attitudes. On the contrary, they assert that racism is built into the very social fabric of society, to such an extent that explicit racist attitudes are no longer needed to maintain the super-subordinate relationship between the colonizer and the colonized. They contend that 1360

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racism has been institutionalized and therefore will continue to exert an influence on social interaction relatively independent of class and status criteria. These contrasts between the assimilation/integration and internal colonial models indicate that the latter in challenging the status quo raises different questions. For instance, because a racial minority in an internal colonial situation is a numerical minority, if any particular minority wants to effectively challenge the colonizer's authority, political coalitions would be needed. Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, and Koreans are all racial minorities. But what is the nature of social interaction among these various groups? If these groups form alliances with each other, will the basis strictly be political or will cultural elements be involved? If Asian Americans decide to act as a bloc, what will their relationship be to other minorities in America such as Blacks and Chicanos? When the model is applied to these various racial minorities, will the model be equally applicable to the experiences of each of the nonwhite minorities in American society?51 Only by answering these types of questions, will we be able to determine to what extent the internal colonial model contributes to our understanding of race/ethnic relations in American society? In writing this essay, I have tried to present the internal colonial argument as concisely as possible. I did so not in the belief that the model is necessarily valid. On the contrary, the internal colonial and the assimilation models share one glaring deficiency, the inability to state succinctly the relationship between race and class. Any model that is valid will need to handle this complex relationship. However, while the model is not necessarily valid, this in no way means that the model is not significant. A model can be wrong or poorly constructed yet still provide valuable insights. The internal colonial model falls into this category. As the previous paragraph suggests, the internal colonial model directs attention toward areas which by and large have been ignored by previous race/ethnic models. For instance, the internal colonial model raises the whole problem of the relationship among the various racial minorities in American society. Obviously, there can be no theory which ignores this problem. Yet, besides the internal colonial model, no other perspective has explicitly examined this question. Because the internal colonial model raises many important unexplored questions, the model should be further explicated. The tentative answers it provides may be of value in the development of a valid and comprehensive theory of race/ethnic relations in American society.

Notes 1 For a prime example of this approach, see Nathan Glazer's "America's Race Paradox" in Peter I. Rose, ed., Nation of Nations: the Ethnic Experience and the Racial Crisis (New York: Random House, 1972), pp. 165-180.

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2 The approach used here is largely adapted from Robert Blauner's work. See his Racial Oppression in America (New York: Harper and Row, 1972). This essay, however, will be based on the proposition that internal colonialism is one possible outcome of the colonial process. Neo-colonialism represents an alternative outcome. Since both situations are possibilities, the variables which differentiate internal from classical colonialism should also explain some of the differences between internal and neo-colonialism. 3 Ronald Bailey, "Economic Aspects of the Black Internal Colony" in Frank Bonilla and Robert Girling, eds., Structures of Dependency (n.p., 1973), pp. 164-165. 4 Pablo Gonzalez Casanova, "Internal Colonialism and National Development," Studies in Comparative International Development, 1:4 (1965), p. 32. 5 Ibid, p. 32. 6 J. H. O'Dell, "A Special Variety of Colonialism," Freedomways, 7:1 (Winter, 1967), p. 8. See also William K. Tabb, "Race Relations Models and Social Change," Social Problems, 18:4 (1965), p. 32. 7 Blauner, pp. 53-54. 8 R. A. Schermerhorn, Comparative Ethnic Relations: A Framework for Theory and Research (New York: Random House, 1970), p. 98. 9 While "contract labor" does not imply coercion per se, conditions, such as the credit ticket system, under which the Chinese, for example, were brought to the U.S. constituted a form of economic coercion. 10 Schermerhorn, pp. 96-97. 11 Blauner, p. 56. 12 Michael J. Piore, "Public and Private Responsibility in On-the-Job Training of Disadvantaged Workers" (Cambridge: M.I.T., Dept. of Economics, Working Paper, no. 23, June, 1968), cited by Tabb, p. 439. See also Harold M. Baron, "Black Powerlessness in Chicago" in Norman R. Yetman and C. Hoy Steele, Majority & Minority: the Dynamics of Racial and Ethnic Relations (Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 1972), pp. 391-400. 13 Tabb, p. 439. 14 Donald J. Harris, "The Black Ghetto as Colony: A Theoretical Critique and Alternative Formulation," The Review of Black Political Economy, 2:4 (1972), pp. 10-11. 15 Edna Bonacich, "A Theory of Ethnic Antagonisms: the Split Labor Market," American Sociological Review, 37:10 (October, 1972), p. 549. 16 Ping Chiu, Chinese Labor in California, 1850-1880: An Economic Study (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, for the Dept. of History, University of Wisconsin, 1963), p. xi. 17 Tomas Almaguer, "Toward the Study of Chicano Colonialism," Aztlan, 2:1 (Spring, 1971), p. 12. 18 Renee Maunier, Sociology of Colonies, trans. E. O. Lorimer (London: Routledge, 1949). 19 Casanova, p. 30. 20 Blauner, p. 62. 21 Bailey in Bonilla, p. 170. 22 Tabb, p. 436. 23 Harris, pp. 19-25. 24 Almaguer, pp. 16-17. 25 See Dean Lan, "The Chinatown Sweatshops: Oppression and an Alternative," Amerasia Journal, 1:3 (Nov., 1971), pp. 40-57. 26 Quote by Charles V. Hamilton, cited by Bailey in Bonilla, p. 178.

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27 Manuel Barrera et al., "The Barrio as an Internal Ghetto" in Harland Hahn, ed., Urban Affairs Annual Review, 6 (1972), pp. 488-490. 28 Guillermo V. Flores, "Race and Culture in the Internal Colony: Keeping the Chicano in His Place" in Bonilla, p. 214. 29 Almaguer, pp. 18-19 and Tabb, p. 436. 30 George Balandier, "The Colonial Situation" in Pierre L. van den Berghe, ed., Africa: Social Problems of Change and Conflict (San Francisco: Chandler, 1965), p. 43. 31 Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972), p. 74. 32 Malcolm X on Afro-American History (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1970), p. 36. 33 Memmi, pp. 108-109. 34 Malcolm X, pp. 31-37. 35 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Garden Grove Press, 1968), p. 47. 36 "The crucial distinguishing characteristic between internal and external colonialism does not appear to be so much the existence of separate territories corresponding to metropolis and colony, but the legal status of the colonized. According to our usage, a colony can be considered 'internal' if the colonized population has the same formal legal status as any other group of citizens, and 'external' if it is placed in a separate legal category." Barrera, p. 483. 37 J. H. O'Dell, "Colonialism and the Negro American Experience," Freedomways, 6:4 (Fall, 1966), pp. 296-297. 38 "The important fact is that this dominant society (i.e., the society of the colonizer) remains a very small minority: there is a great disequilibrium between the colonials and the mass of the colonized. The colonials fear, more or less consciously, that group size alone will become the criterion of hierarchy." Balandier in van den Berghe, p. 39. 39 In calculating the colonizer/colonized population ratio, the numerator refers to the total colonizing population. However, in geographical regions which are isolated in terms of communication and transportation and not yet under the effective economic and political control of the colonizer, the numerator is determined by the number of colonizers in that region. When these regions are populated primarily by colonized people, they are unlikely to be granted citizenship rights until the region achieves a population ratio in favor of the colonizer; or the region becomes integrated into the colonizer's politicaleconomic-communication infrastructure. The experience of Mexicans between 1848-1900 exemplifies the first case while Asian Americans in Hawaii exemplify the second. Mexicans did not receive citizenship until an Anglo majority was achieved in the Southwestern states. On the other hand, when Hawaii was admitted to the Union, Asian Americans still constituted the majority population. However, because Hawaii was already effectively integrated into the U.S.'s economic and political system, their numbers no longer constituted a threat to the overall system. 40 Almaguer, p. 17. 41 Joan W. Moore, "Colonialism: the Case of the Mexican-American," Social Problems, 17:4 (Spring, 1970), p. 465. Moore also notes that the Spanish population of this area was politically organized. Even today, political participation of Mexican-Americans is higher in this state than in any other. 42 Quoted in Almaguer, p. 17.

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43 Michael Hechter, Internal Colonialism: the Celtic Fringe in British National Development, 1536-1966 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), p. 40. 44 O'Dell, A Special Variety ..., p. 8. 45 Casanova, p. 29. 46 Eldridge Cleaver, "The Land Question," Ramparts, 6:9/10 (May, 1968), p. 52. 47 Earl Ofari, "Marxism, Nationalism and Black Liberation," Monthly Review, 22:10 (March, 1971), p. 32. 48 Almaguer, p. 18. 49 Tabb,p.442. 50 James Boggs, "Beyond Nationalism," Monthly Reivew, 25:8 (January, 1974), p. 42. 51 Barrera cautions users of the internal colonial model that "the general concept appears to apply to a number of cases and is valuable in emphasizing the structural similarities and common historical origins of the positions of Third World peoples inside and outside the U.S. However, it should not be used to obscure variations in individual cases." p. 467.

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SOUTH AFRICA AND IMPERIALISM (Statement to the Preparatory Meeting of the Non-Aligned States, May 1970) Oliver Tambo From Preparing For Power: Oliver Tambo Speaks, Heinemann, 1987; George Braziller, 1988, 63-9

Your Excellencies, the purpose of this brief statement is to draw attention to the flagrant violation by the white minority South African regime of those fundamental principles to which all member states here are committed: the right to self-determination and national independence; the equality of all peoples, irrespective of race, colour or creed; the defence of all persons, groups and nations from oppression and exploitation; the raising of the standard of living and culture of all, without discrimination; and the promotion of international co-operation and world peace. The stubborn persistence of the white minority regime in pursuing its racialist and fascist policies is certainly no accident. It is a carefully planned and systematically prosecuted criminal conspiracy, to consolidate and extend their ideology of racialism and fascism whose basic economic objective is the ruthless exploitation of the African people, whose military and political aim is the defence of imperialism, fascism and the subversion of national independence in Africa and Asia. The South African white minority regime has over the past few years matured to become a fully fledged member of the imperialist conspiracy both financially and militarily. The South African racists' allies, the imperialist powers, Britain, the US, France, Portugal, West Germany, Japan and others, have been building the white regime into a dangerous, aggressive and expansionist state. It is this imperialist conspiracy which today is guilty of the crimes and atrocities against the people of South Africa, southern Africa, Africa, Asia, and Latin America for which

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Hitler's Nazi bandits were arraigned and convicted by the world at the Nuremberg trials. Just as in the case of Hitler's Nazi Germany this criminal conspiracy is aimed at regaining lost colonial territories and countries, the plunder and exploitation of the peoples and the resources of their country, and the perpetuation of a system of amassing fabulous profits for industrial and armaments monopolies. It is a desperate plot for the imperialist second Reich in an era when socialist and national revolutions have made empires shrink. South Africa clearly demonstrates the wolfish nature of this conspiracy. The natural wealth of South Africa is, to say the least, fabulous. It is the source of 75 per cent of the gold in the capitalist world. Minerals like copper, iron ore, coal, manganese, diamonds, chromium, nickel, thorium, vanadium, uranium and numerous others are mined there. It is a treasure chest for foreign capital and investment. Foreign investment is estimated at £3,000 million of which Britain accounts for about 60 per cent and the US 13 per cent. Through the ruthless exploitation of African labour the rates of profits in South Africa are higher than anywhere else in the world. The British monopolies are guaranteed 12.5 per cent as against 8.5 per cent in the rest of the world; the US, 20.6 per cent as against 8.5 per cent in the rest of the world. Japan, West Germany and other western countries have made South Africa the hunting ground for super-profits. South African companies, like the Anglo-American Company under Harry Oppenheimer and many others, have all got interlocking interests and directorships with British and US companies. Economically therefore, the South African racists who cling to apartheid are an integral and key part of the sinister plot of exploitation by the imperialists on an international scale. The merger of white South African capital with international finance has been a specific feature of South African penetration in the economies in many countries in Africa and elsewhere. There is no other country in the world in which the imperialists have been prepared to relegate their differences to the background and unite their efforts economically, technically and militarily as they have done in South Africa. The beneficiaries of Nazi Germany and the paymasters of Hitler were I. G. Farben, Siemens, Krupp, Deutsche Bank and others. It is hardly surprising that these companies have joined their South African, British, French and US counterparts in supporting the colonialist and racialist regimes of southern Africa. The Cabora-Bassa project exposes once more the dangerous alliance of South African and international finance in the consolidation of the bulwark of reaction in southern Africa. Financially, South Africa is the spearhead in Africa for imperialist capital penetration and the subversion of the achievement of genuine national and economic independence in Africa, Latin America and Southeast Asia. The aggressive, offensive and expansionist policies of the South

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African racist Government have been expressed in different ways at different times by spokesmen of the racialist Government itself. Sometimes these were blatant threats of armed aggression against Zambia and Tanzania. At other times they were couched in terms of extending the 'hand of friendship' to independent African states. Spokesmen for the racist regime have stated over and over again that they were an integral part of the western system and boasted that the western imperialist powers were dependent on the racist state for the defence of the western way of life in Africa. Vorster's Government even claims that it has the same role to play in Africa as the US has in the world - the policeman against 'communism'. Vorster arrogantly claims the right of the South African Government to intervene in the affairs of African states, as the US has done in so many instances in the world and brutally in Vietnam now. The watchdog for the imperialists in southern Africa against the achievement and consolidation of national independence in southern Africa is the racist minority regime of South Africa, and her allies Smith and Caetano. The white minority regime does not act merely as an agent but also as a partner. Recently the racists' spokesmen have made this abundantly clear. In October 1969 the Minister of Defence, P. Botha, stated that whatever the situation might be with other western countries, South Africa was already involved in a Third World War, militarily, economically and diplomatically. On 25 October, Hildgard Muller stated in Britain that South Africa is no longer on the defensive, her priority was Africa. He also deplored Britain's compliance with the arms embargo. The 'hand of friendship' which Vorster constantly extends to African independent states is an octopus tentacle for the domination of Africa, politically and economically, by South African and imperialist powers. The 'outward or northward policy' is a neo-colonialist device to expand and spread the ideological and financial interests of South African and international finance, to subvert political and economic independence and support for the national liberation struggle. Militarily, too, South Africa is part of the aggressive imperialist bloc. It is an important detachment in the imperialist global military strategy. The role of imperialist powers in giving massive all-round assistance in building that monstrous fascist army in South Africa is systematic and deliberate. When the army was reorganized in 1969, the then Minister of Defence, Erasmus, justified the arms build-up as 'a measure to ward off a threat from loud-mouthed Afro/Asians in the North'. The purpose of the reorganization of the South African armed forces, and the swelling of the military machine was in fact, firstly, to suppress the national liberation movement not only in South Africa, but in the whole of southern Africa, secondly, to threaten African independent states and where necessary in pursuance of expansionist policies to invade them, and

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finally to give support to the imperialists in the event of a global war. The imperialists gave and still give assistance for the building of the armed forces of South Africa to fulfil the above aims. France openly defies the UN embargo on arms and is today the biggest single supplier of arms to South Africa. The US, despite its avowed claim that it is abiding by the arms embargo, last year sold 10 million dollars worth of arms to South Africa. South Africa does not merely confine her military role to Africa. With the closure of the Suez Canal and the withdrawal of Britain from the Far East, the imperialists and the South African fascists regard the South African military force as the most important alternative in filling the vacuum in the southern hemisphere. Hence the continued overt and clandestine military support. The proposals to find a place for the fascists in NATO and the plans for a South Atlantic Treaty Organization in which the racists will play a major role are part of the sinister plot against the national liberation struggle and national independence in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Apartheid has been extended and entrenched in Rhodesia by Smith with the full support of South Africa and the imperialist powers. Both Britain and the US have systematically sabotaged all effective international action. South African fascists and their imperialist allies have set themselves the task to suppress the national liberation movement and to subvert national independence. The struggle for national liberation and the consolidation of national independence are inextricably interlinked and bound together, because the greatest enemies of national freedom, the oppressors and exploiters allied internationally, remain the greatest enemies of national independence throughout the world. The achievement of national independence and the consolidation of independence are themselves a great contribution to the whole antiimperialist struggle. This has been clearly demonstrated by the change in the balance of forces in the international forums and particularly the massive onslaught on racialism and colonialism in the UN and its agencies, the OAU and other international and continental agencies. This is a great achievement. The joint strength of the progressive movements and states has a great potential. Imperialists have through their armed repression in southern Africa compelled the oppressed and exploited peoples to meet this repression with armed revolt. The whole area has become the theatre of what will be one of the most fierce armed confrontations between the racialists and fascists on the one hand, and the people's forces on the other. In this struggle the imperialists' involvement on the side of reaction is complete and irrevocable. The involvement of the democratic and progressive forces on the side of the armed national liberation struggle should be equally complete. . . . Your Excellencies, the armed struggle in South Africa will be pro-

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tracted and costly in terms of human life. This is not the choice of the people. However protracted it might be, whatever the cost may be, its victory is assured. We are confident that this meeting will draw the attention of the summit meeting to the urgency and gravity of the armed struggle in South Africa, and the need to give it massive and all-round assistance.

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THE PROSE OF COUNTERINSURGENCY 1 Ranajit Guha From Ranajit Guha (ed.) Subaltern Studies II: Writings on South Asian History and Society, Oxford University Press, 1983,1-40

I When a peasant rose in revolt at any time or place under the Raj, he did so necessarily and explicitly in violation of a series of codes which defined his very existence as a member of that colonial, and still largely semi-feudal society. For his subalternity was materialized by the structure of property, institutionalized by law, sanctified by religion and made tolerable—and even desirable—by tradition. To rebel was indeed to destroy many of those familiar signs which he had learned to read and manipulate in order to extract a meaning out of the harsh world around him and live with it. The risk in 'turning things upside down' under these conditions was indeed so great that he could hardly afford to engage in such a project in a state of absent-mindedness. There is nothing in the primary sources of historical evidence to suggest anything other than this. These give the lie to the myth, retailed so often by careless and impressionistic writing on the subject, of peasant insurrections being purely spontaneous and unpremeditated affairs. The truth is quite to the contrary. It would be difficult to cite an uprising on any significant scale that was not in fact preceded either by less militant types of mobilization when other means had been tried and found wanting or by parley among its principals seriously to weigh the pros and cons of any recourse to arms. In events so very different from each other in context, character and the composition of participants such as the Rangpur dhing against Debi Sinha (1783), the Barasat bidroha led by Titu Mir (1831), the Santal hool (1855) and the 'blue mutiny' of 1860 the protagonists in each case had tried out petitions, deputations or other forms of supplication before actually declaring war on their oppressors.2 Again, the revolts of

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the Kol (1832), the Santal and the Munda (1899-1900) as well as the Rangpur dhing and the jacqueries in Allahabad and Ghazipur districts during the Sepoy Rebellion of 1857-8 (to name only two out of many instances in that remarkable series) had all been inaugurated by planned and in some cases protracted consultation among the representatives of the local peasant masses.3 Indeed there is hardly an instance of the peasantry, whether the cautious and earthy villagers of the plains or the supposedly more volatile adivasis of the upland tracts, stumbling or drifting into rebellion. They had far too much at stake and would not launch into it except as a deliberate, even if desperate, way out of an intolerable condition of existence. Insurgency, in other words, was a motivated and conscious undertaking on the part of the rural masses. Yet this consciousness seems to have received little notice in the literature on the subject. Historiography has been content to deal with the peasant rebel merely as an empirical person or member of a class, but not as an entity whose will and reason constituted the praxis called rebellion. The omission is indeed dyed into most narratives by metaphors assimilating peasant revolts to natural phenomena: they break out like thunder storms, heave like earthquakes, spread like wildfires, infect like epidemics. In other words, when the proverbial clod of earth turns, this is a matter to be explained in terms of natural history. Even when this historiography is pushed to the point of producing an explanation in rather more human terms it will do so by assuming an identity of nature and culture, a hallmark, presumably, of a very low state of civilization and exemplified in 'those periodical outbursts of crime and lawlessness to which all wild tribes are subject', as the first historian of the Chuar rebellion put it.4 Alternatively, an explanation will be sought in an enumeration of causes—of, say, factors of economic and political deprivation which do not relate at all to the peasant's consciousness or do so negatively—triggering off rebellion as a sort of reflex action, that is, as an instinctive and almost mindless response to physical suffering of one kind or another (e.g. hunger, torture, forced labour, etc.) or as a passive reaction to some initiative of his superordinate enemy. Either way insurgency is regarded as external to the peasant's consciousness and Cause is made to stand in as a phantom surrogate for Reason, the logic of that consciousness. II

How did historiography come to acquire this particular blind spot and never find a cure? For an answer one could start by having a close look at its constituting elements and examine those cuts, seams and stitches— those cobbling marks—which tell us about the material it is made of and the manner of its absorption into the fabric of writing. The corpus of historical writings on peasant insurgency in colonial India

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is made up of three types of discourse. These may be described as primary, secondary and tertiary according to the order of their appearance in time and their filiation. Each of these is differentiated from the other two by the degree of its formal and/or acknowledged (as opposed to real and/or tacit) identification with an official point of view, by the measure of its distance from the event to which it refers, and by the ratio of the distributive and integrative components in its narrative. To begin with primary discourse, it is almost without exception official in character—official in a broad sense of the term. That is, it originated not only with bureaucrats, soldiers, sleuths and others directly employed by the government, but also with those in the non-official sector who were symbiotically related to the Raj, such as planters, missionaries, traders, technicians and so on among the whites and landlords, moneylenders, etc. among the natives. It was official also in so far as it was meant primarily for administrative use—for the information of government, for action on its part and for the determination of its policy. Even when it incorporated statements emanating from 'the other side', from the insurgents or their allies for instance, as it often did by way of direct or indirect reporting in the body of official correspondence or even more characteristically as 'enclosures' to the latter, this was done only as a part of an argument prompted by administrative concern. In other words, whatever its particular form—and there was indeed an amazing variety ranging from the exordial letter, telegram, despatch and communique to the terminal summary, report, judgement and proclamation—its production and circulation were both necessarily contingent on reasons of State. Yet another of the distinctive features of this type of discourse is its immediacy. This derived from two conditions: first, that statements of this class were written either concurrently with or soon after the event, and secondly, that this was done by the participants concerned, a 'participant' being defined for this purpose in the broad sense of a contemporary involved in the event either in action or indirectly as an onlooker. This would exclude of course that genre of retrospective writing in which, as in some memoirs, an event and its recall are separated by a considerable hiatus, but would still leave a massive documentation—'primary sources' as it is known in the trade—to speak to the historian with a sort of ancestral voice and make him feel close to his subject. The two specimens quoted below are fairly representative of this type. One of these relates to the Barasat uprising of 1831 and the other to the Santal rebellion of 1855. TEXT I5 To the Deputy Adjutant General of the Army Sir, Authentic information having reached Government that a body

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of Fanatic Insurgents are now committing the most daring and wanton atrocities on the Inhabitants of the Country in the neighbourhood of Tippy in the Magistracy of Baraset and have set at defiance and repulsed the utmost force that the local Civil Authority could assemble for their apprehension, I am directed by the Hon'ble Vice President in Council to request that you will without delay Communicate to the General Officer Commanding the Presidency Division the orders of Government that one Complete Battalion of Native Infantry from Barrackpore and two Six Pounders manned with the necessary compliment (sic) of Golundaze from Dum Dum, the whole under the Command of a Field Officer of judgement and decision, be immediately directed to proceed and rendezvous at Baraset when they will be joined by 1 Havildar and 12 Troopers of the 3rd Regiment of Light Cavalry now forming the escort of the Hon'ble the Vice President. 2nd. The Magistrate will meet the Officer Commanding the Detachment at Barraset and will afford the necessary information for his guidance relative to the position of the Insurgents; but without having any authority to interfere in such Military operations as the Commanding Officer of the Detachments may deem expedient, for the purpose of routing or seizing or in the event of resistance destroying those who persevere in defying the authority of the State and disturbing the public tranquil[\]ity. 3rd. It is concluded that the service will not be of such a protracted nature as to require a larger supply of ammunition than may be carried in Pouch and in two Tumbrils for the Guns, and that no difficulties will occur respecting carriage. In the contrary event any aid needed will be furnished. 4th. The Magistrate will be directed to give every assistance regarding supplies and other requisites for the Troops. Council Chamber I am & ca 10th November 1831 (Sd.) Wm. Casement Coll. Secy, to Govt. Mily. Dept. TEXT 26 From W. C. Taylor Esqre. To F. S. Mudge Esqre. Dated 7th July 1855 My dear Mudge, There is a great gathering of Sontals 4 or 5000 men at a place about 8 miles off and I understand that they are all well armed with Bows and arrows, Tulwars, Spears & ca. and that it is their intention to attack all the Europeans round and plunder and murder them. The cause of all this is that one of their Gods is supposed to have

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taken the Flesh and to have made his appearance at some place near this, and that it is his intention to reign as a King over all this part of India, and has ordered the Sontals to collect and put to death all the Europeans and influential Natives round. As this is the nearest point to the gathering I suppose it will be first attacked and think it would be best for you to send notice to the authorities at Berhampore and ask for military aid as it is not at all a nice look out being murdered and as far as I can make out this is a rather serious affair. Sreecond Yours & ca 7th July 1855 /Signed/W. C. Taylor Nothing could be more immediate than these texts. Written as soon as these events were acknowledged as rebellion by those who had the most to fear from it, they are among the very first records we have on them in the collections of the India Office Library and the West Bengal State Archives. As the evidence on the 1831 bidroha shows,7 it was not until 10 November that the Calcutta authorities came to recognize the violence reported from the Barasat region for what it was—a full-blooded insurrection led by Titu Mir and his men. Colonel Casement's letter identifies for us that moment when the hitherto unknown leader of a local peasantry entered the lists against the Raj and thereby made his way into history. The date of the other document too commemorates a beginning—that of the Santal hool. It was on that very day, 7 July 1855, that the assassination of Mahesh daroga following an encounter between his police and peasants gathered at Bhagnadihi detonated the uprising. The report was loud enough to register in that note scribbled in obvious alarm at Sreecond by an European employee of the East India Railway for the benefit of his colleague and the sarkar. Again, these are words that convey as directly as possible the impact of a peasant revolt on its enemies in its first sanguinary hours. Ill

None of this instantaneousness percolates through to the next level—that of the secondary discourse. The latter draws on primary discourse as materiel but transforms it at the same time. To contrast the two types one could think of the first as historiography in a raw, primordial state or as an embryo yet to be articulated into an organism with discrete limbs, and the second as the processed product, however crude the processing, a duly constituted if infant discourse. The difference is quite obviously a function of time. In the chronology of this particular corpus the secondary follows the primary at a distance and opens up a perspective to turn an event into history in the perception not only of those outside it but of the participants as well. It was thus that

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Mark Thornhill, Magistrate of Mathura during the summer of 1857 when a mutiny of the Treasury Guard sparked off jacqueries all over the district, was to reflect on the altered status of his own narrative in which he figured as a protagonist himself. Introducing his well-known memoirs, The Personal Adventures And Experiences Of A Magistrate During The Rise, Progress, And Suppression Of The Indian Mutiny (London, 1884) twentyseven years after the event he wrote: After the suppression of the Indian Mutiny, I commenced to write an account of my adventures . . . by the time my narrative was completed, the then interest of the public in the subject was exhausted. Years have since passed, and an interest of another kind has arisen. The events of that time have become history, and to that history my story may prove a contribution . . . I have therefore resolved to publish my narrative . . . Shorn of contemporaneity a discourse is thus recovered as an element of the past and classified as history. This change, aspectual as well as categorial, sites it at the very intersection of colonialism and historiography, endowing it with a duplex character linked at the same time to a system of power and the particular manner of its representation. Its authorship is in itself witness to this intersection and Thornhill was by no means the only administrator turned historian. He was indeed one of many officials, civilian and military, who wrote retrospectively on popular disturbances in rural India under the Raj. Their statements, taken together, fall into two classes. First, there were those which were based on the writers' own experience as participants. Memoirs of one kind or another these were written either at a considerable delay after the events narrated or almost concurrently with them but intended, unlike primary discourse, for a public readership. The latter, an important distinction, shows how the colonialist mind managed to serve Clio and counterinsurgency at the same time so that the presumed neutrality of one could have hardly been left unaffected by the passion of the other, a point to which we shall soon return. Reminiscences of both kinds abound in the literature on the Mutiny, which dealt with the violence of the peasantry (especially in the North Western Provinces and central India) no less than with that of the sepoys. Accounts such as ThornhilPs written long after the event, were matched by near contemporary ones such as Dunlop's Service and Adventure with Khakee Ressallah', or Meerut Volunteer Horse during the Mutinies of 1857-58 (London, 1858) and Edwards' Personal Adventures during the Indian Rebellion in Rohilcund, Futtehghur, and Oudh (London, 1858) to mention only two out of a vast outcrop intended to cater for a public who could not have enough of tales of horror and glory. The other class of writings to qualify as secondary discourse is also the

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work of administrators. They too addressed themselves to a predominantly non-official readership but on themes not directly related to their own experience. Their work includes some of the most widely used and highly esteemed accounts of peasant uprisings written either as monographs on particular events, such as Jamini Mohan Ghosh's on the Sannyasi-and-Faqir disturbances and J. C. Price's on the Chuar Rebellion, or as statements included in more comprehensive histories like W. W. Hunter's story of the Santal hool in The Annals of Rural Bengal. Apart from these there were those distinguished contributions made by some of the best minds in the Civil Service to the historical chapters of the District Gazetteers. Altogether they constitute a substantial body of writing which enjoys much authority with all students of the subject and there is hardly any historiography at the next, that is, tertiary level of discourse that does not rely on these for sustenance. The prestige of this genre is to no mean extent due to the aura of impartiality it has about it. By keeping their narrative firmly beyond the pale of personal involvement these authors managed, if only by implication, to confer on it a semblance of truth. As officials they were carriers of the will of the state no doubt. But since they wrote about a past in which they did not figure as functionaries themselves, their statements are taken to be more authentic and less biased than those of their opposite numbers whose accounts, based on reminiscences, were necessarily contaminated by their intervention in rural disturbances as agents of the Raj. By contrast the former are believed to have approached the narrated events from the outside. As observers separated clinically from the site and subject of diagnosis they are supposed to have found for their discourse a niche in that realm of perfect neutraility—the realm of History—over which the Aorist and the Third Person preside.

IV How valid is this claim to neutrality? For an answer we may not take any bias for granted in this class of historical work from the mere fact of its origin with authors committed to colonialism. To take that as self-evident would be to deny historiography the possibility of acknowledging its own inadequacies and thus defeat the purpose of the present exercise. As should be clear from what follows, it is precisely by refusing to prove what appears as obvious that historians of peasant insurgency remain trapped— in the obvious. Criticism must therefore start not by naming a bias but by examining the components of the discourse, vehicle of all ideology, for the manner in which these might have combined to describe any particular figure of the past. The components of both types of discourse and their varieties discussed so far are what we shall call segments. Made up of the same linguistic

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material, that is strings of words of varying lengths, they are of two kinds which may be designated, according to their function, as indicative and interpretative. A gross differentiation, this is meant to assign to them, within a given text, the role respectively of reporting and explaining. This however does not imply their mutual segregation. On the contrary they are often found embedded in each other not merely as a matter of fact but of necessity. One can see in Texts 1 and 2 how such imbrication works. In both of them the straight print stands for the indicative segments and the italics for the interpretative. Laid out according to no particular pattern in either of these letters they interpenetrate and sustain each other in order to give the documents their meaning, and in the process endow some of the strings with an ambiguity that is inevitably lost in this particular manner of typographical representation. However, the rough outline of a division of functions between the two classes emerges even from this schema—the indicative stating (that is reporting) the actual and anticipated actions of the rebels and their enemies, and the interpretative commenting on them in order to understand (that is to explain) their significance. The difference between them corresponds to that between the two basic components of any historical discourse which, following Roland Barthes' terminology, we shall call functions and indices? The former are segments that make up the linear sequence of a narrative. Contiguous, they operate in a relation of solidarity in the sense of mutually implying each other and add up to increasingly larger strings which combine to produce the aggregative statement. The latter may thus be regarded as a sum of micro-sequences to each of which, however important or otherwise, it should be possible to assign names by a metalinguistic operation using terms that may or may not belong to the text under consideration. It is thus that the functions of a folk-tale have been named by Bremond, after Propp, as Fraud, Betrayal, Struggle, Contract, etc. and those of a triviality such as the offer of a cigarette in a James Bond story designated by Barthes as offering, accepting, lighting, and smoking. One may perhaps take a cue from this procedure to define a historical statement as a discourse with a name subsuming a given number of named sequences. Hence it should be possible to speak of a hypothetical narrative called The Insurrection of Titu Mir' made up of a number of sequences including Text 1 quoted above. Let us give this document a name and call it, say, Calcutta Council Acts. (Alternatives such as Outbreak of Violence or Army Called Up should also do and be analysable in terms corresponding to, though not identical with, those which follow.) In broad terms the message Calcutta Council Acts (C) in our text can be read as a combination of two groups of sequences called alarm (a) and intervention (b), each of which is made up of a pair of segments—the former of insurrection breaks out (a') and information received

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(a"), and the latter of decision to call up army (b') and order issued (b"), one of the constituents in each pair being represented in its turn by yet another linked series—(a') by atrocities committed (a^ and authority defied (a2), and (b") by infantry to proceed (b^, artillery to support (b2) and magistrate to co-operate (b3). In other words the narrative in this document can be written up in three equivalent steps so that C = (a + b) C = (a' + a")+ (b' + b") C = (ai + a 2 )+ a" + b'+ (bi + b2 + b3)

I II Ill

It should be clear from this arrangement that not all the elements of step II can be expressed in micro-sequences of the same order. Hence we are left at step III with a concatenation in which segments drawn from different levels of the discourse are imbricated to constitute a roughly hewn and uneven structure. In so far as functional units of the lowest denomination like these are what a narrative has as its syntagmatic relata its course can never be smooth. The hiatus between the loosely cobbled segments is necessarily charged with uncertainty, with 'moments of risk' and every micro-sequence terminates by opening up alternative possibilities only one of which is picked up by the next sequence as it carries on with the story. 'Du Pont, Bond's future partner, offers him a light from his lighter but Bond refuses; the meaning of this bifurcation is that Bond instinctively fears a booby-trapped gadget.'9 What Barthes identifies thus as 'bifurcation' in fiction, has its parallels in historical discourse as well. The alleged commitment of atrocities (a x ) in that official despatch of 1831 cancels out the belief in the peaceful propagation of Titu's new doctrine which had already been known to the authorities but ignored so far as inconsequential. The expression, authority defied (a2), which refers to the rebels having 'set at defiance and repulsed the utmost force that the local Civil Authority could assemble for their apprehension', has as its other if unstated term his efforts to persuade the Government by petition and deputation to offer redress for the grievances of his co-religionists. And so on. Each of these elementary functional units thus implies a node which has not quite materialized into an actual development, a sort of zero sign by means of which the narrative affirms its tension. And precisely because history as the verbal representation by man of his own past is by its very nature so full of hazard, so replete indeed with the verisimilitude of sharply differentiated choices, that it never ceases to excite. The historical discourse is the world's oldest thriller.

V Sequential analysis thus shows a narrative to be a concatenation of not so closely aligned functional units. The latter are dissociative in their opera-

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tion and emphasize the analytic rather than the synthetic aspect of a discourse. As such they are not what, by themselves, generate its meaning. Just as the sense of a word (e.g. 'man') is not fractionally represented in each of the letters (e.g. M, A, N) which make up its graphic image nor of a phrase (e.g. 'once upon a time') in its constituting words taken separately, so also the individual segments of a discourse cannot on their own tell us what it signifies. Meaning in each instance is the work of a process of integration which complements that of sequential articulation. As Benveniste has put it, in any language 'it is dissociation which divulges to us its formal constitution and integration its signifying units'.10 This is true of the language of history as well. The integrative operation is carried out in its discourse by the other class of basic narrative units, that is, indices. A necessary and indispensable correlate of functions they are distinguished from the latter in some important respects: Indices, because of the vertical nature of their relations are truly semantic units: unlike 'functions' . . . they refer to a signified, not to an 'operation'. The ratification of indices is 'higher up' . . . a paradigmatic ratification. That of functions, by contrast, is always 'further on', is a syntagmatic ratification. Functions and indices thus overlay another classic distinction: functions involve metonymic relata, indices metaphoric relata; the former correspond to a functionality of doing, the latter to a functionality of being.11 The vertical intervention of indices in a discourse is possible because of the disruption of its linearity by a process corresponding to dystaxia in the behaviour of many natural languages. Bally who has studied this phenomenon in much detail finds that one of several conditions of its occurrence in French is 'when parts of the same sign are separated' so that the expression, 'elle a pardonne' taken in the negative, is splintered and reassembled as 'elle ne nous a jamais plus pardonne'.12 Similarly the simple predictive in Bengali 'she jabe' can be re-written by the insertion of an interrogative or a string of negative conditionals between the two words to produce respectively 'she ki jabe' and 'she na hoy na jabe. In a historical narrative too it is a process of 'distension and expansion' of its syntagm which helps paradigmatic elements to infiltrate and reconstitute its discrete segments into a meaningful whole. It is precisely thus that the co-ordination of the metonymic and metaphorical axes is brought about in a statement and the necessary interaction of its functions and indices actualized. However these units are not distributed in equal proportions in all texts: some have a greater incidence of one kind than of the other. As a result a discourse could be either predominantly metonymic or metaphorical depending on whether a significantly larger number of its

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components are syntagmatically ratified or paradigmatically.13 Our Text I is of the first type. One can see the formidable and apparently impenetrable array of its metonymic relata in step III of the sequential analysis given above. Here at last we have the perfect authentication of the idiot's view of history as one damn'd thing after another: rising—information— decision—order. However, a closer look at the text can detect chinks which have allowed 'comment', to worm its way through the plate armour of 'fact'. The italicized expressions are witness to this paradigmatic intervention and indeed its measure. Indices, they play the role of adjectives or epithets as opposed to verbs which, to speak in terms of homology between sentence and narrative, is the role of functions.14 Working intimately together with the latter they make the despatch into more than a mere register of happenings and help to inscribe into it a meaning, an interpretation so that the protagonists emerge from it not as peasants but as 'Insurgents', not as Musalman but as 'fanatic'', their action not as resistance to the tyranny of the rural elite but as 'the most daring and wanton atrocities on the inhabitants'', their project not as a revolt against zamindari but as 'defying the authority of the State', not as a search for an alternative order in which the peace of the countryside would not be violated by the officially condoned anarchy of semi-feudal landlordism but as, 'disturbing the public tranquillity'. If the intervention of indices 'substitutes meaning for the straightforward copy of the events recounted,15 in a text so charged with metonymy as the one discussed above, it may be trusted to do so to an even greater degree in discourses which are predominantly metaphorical. This should be evident from Text 2 where the element of comment, italicized by us, largely outweighs that of report. If the latter is represented as a concatenation of three functional sequences, namely, armed Santals gathering, authorities to be alerted and military aid requested, it can be seen how the first of these has been separated from the rest by the insertion of a large chunk of explanatory material and how the others too are enveloped and sealed off by comment. The latter is inspired by the fear that Sreecond being 'the nearest point to the gathering . . . will be first attacked' and of course 'it is not at all a nice look out being murdered'. Notice, however, that this fear justifies itself politically, that is, by imputing to the Santals an 'intention to attack . . . plunder . . . and put to death all the Europeans and influential Natives' so that 'one of their Gods' in human form may 'reign as a King over all this part of India'. Thus, this document is not neutral in its attitude to the events witnessed and put up as 'evidence' before the court of history it can hardly be expected to testify with impartiality. On the contrary it is the voice of committed colonialism. It has already made a choice between the prospect of Santal self-rule in Damin-i-Koh and the continuation of the British Raj and identifies what is allegedly good for the promotion of one as fearsome and catastrophic for the other—as 'a rather

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serious affair'. In other words the indices in this discourse—as well as in the one discussed above—introduce us to a particular code so constituted that for each of its signs we have an antonym, a counter-message, in another code. To borrow a binary representation made famous by Mao Tse-tung,16 the reading, 'It's terrible!' for any element in one must show up in the other as 'It's fine!' for a corresponding element and vice versa. To put this clash of codes graphically one can arrange the indices italicized below of Texts 1 and 2 in a matrix called TERRIBLE' (in conformity to the adjectival attribute of units of this class) in such a way as to indicate their mapping into the implied, though unstated terms (given in straight types) of a corresponding matrix 'FINE'. TERRIBLE

FINE

Insurgents fanatic daring and wanton atrocities on the Inhabitants defying the authority of the State disturbing the public tranquil(l)ity intention to attack, etc one of their Gods to reign as a King

peasants Islamic puritan resistance to oppression revolt against zamindari struggle for a better order intention to punish oppressors Santal self-rule

What comes out of the interplay of these mutually implied but opposed matrices is that our texts are not the record of observations uncontaminated by bias, judgement and opinion. On the contrary, they speak of a total complicity. For if the expressions in the right-hand column taken together may be said to stand for insurgency, the code which contains all signifiers of the subaltern practice of 'turning things upside down' and the consciousness that informs it, then the other column must stand for its opposite, that is, counter-insurgency. The antagonism between the two is irreducible and there is nothing in this to leave room for neutrality. Hence these documents make no sense except in terms of a code of pacification which, under the Raj, was a complex of coercive intervention by the State and its proteges, the native elite, with arms and words. Representatives of the primary type of discourse in the historiography of peasant revolts, these are specimens of the prose of counter-insurgency.

VI How far does secondary discourse too share such commitment? Is it possible for it to speak any other prose than that of a counter-insurgency? Those narratives of this category in which their authors figure among the protagonists are of course suspect almost by definition, and the presence of the grammatical first person in these must be acknowledged as a sign of complicity. The question however is whether the loss of objectivity on this

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account is adequately made up by the consistent use of the aorist in such writings. For as Benveniste observes, the historical utterance admits of three variations of the past tense—that is, the aorist, the imperfect and the pluperfect, and of course the present is altogether excluded.17 This condition is indeed satisfied by reminiscences separated by a long enough hiatus from the events concerned. What has to be found out therefore is the extent to which the force of the preterite corrects the bias caused by the absence of the third person. Mark Thornhill's memoirs of the Mutiny provide us with a text in which the author looks back at a series of events he had experienced twentyseven years ago. The events of that time' had 'turned into history', and he intends, as he says in the extract quoted above, to make a contribution 'to that history', and thus produce what we have defined as a particular kind of secondary discourse. The difference inscribed in it by that interval is perhaps best grasped by comparing it with some samples of primary discourse we have on the same subject from the same author. Two of these18 may be read together as a record of his perception of what happened at the Mathura sadar station and the surrounding countryside between 14 May and 3 June 1857. Written by him donning the district magistrate's topee and addressed to his superiors—one on 5 June 1857, that is, within forty-eight hours of the terminal date of the period under discussion, and the other on 10 August 1858 when the events were still within vivid recall as a very recent past—these letters coincide in scope with that of the narrative covering the same three weeks in the first ninety pages of his book written nearly three decades later donning the historian's hat. The letters are both predominantly metonymic in character. Originating as they did almost from within the related experience itself they are necessarily foreshortened and tell the reader in breathless sequences about some of the happenings of that extraordinary summer. The syntagm thus takes on a semblance of factuality with hardly any room in it for comment. Yet here again the welding of the functional units can be seen, on close inspection, to be less solid than at first sight. Embedded in them there are indices revealing the anxieties of the local custodian of law and order ('the state of the district generally is such as to defy all control'', 'the law is at a stand-stilV), his fears ('very alarming rumours of the approach of the rebel army'), his moral disapprobation of the activities of the armed villagers ('the disturbances in the district . . . increasing . . . in ... enormity'), his appreciation by contrast of the native collaborators hostile to the insurgents (. . . 'the Seths' house . . . received us most kindly'). Indices such as these are ideological birth-marks displayed prominently on much of this type of material relating to peasant revolts. Indeed, taken together with some other relevant textual features—e.g. the abrupt mode of address in these documents so revealing of the shock and terror generated by the emeute—they accuse all such allegedly 'objective' evidence on the

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militancy of the rural masses to have been tainted at its source by the prejudice and partisan outlook of their enemies. If historians fail to take notice of these tell-tale signs branded on the staple of their trade, that is a fact which must be explained in terms of the optics of a colonialist historiography rather than construed in favour of the presumed objectivity of their 'primary sources'. There is nothing immediate or abrupt about the corresponding secondary discourse. On the contrary it has various perspectives built into it to give it a depth in time and following from this temporal determination, its meaning. Compare for instance the narration of events in the two versions for any particular day—for, say, 14 May 1857 at the very beginning of our three-week period. Written up in a very short paragraph of fiftyseven words in Thornhill's letter of 10 August 1858 this can be represented fully in four pithy segments without any significant loss of message: mutineers approaching; information received from Gurgaon; confirmed by Europeans north of the district; women and non-combattants sent off to Agra. Since the account starts, for all practical purposes, with this entry, there are no exordia to serve as its context, giving this instant take-off the sense, as we have noticed, of a total surprise. In the book however that same instant is provided with a background spread over four and a half months and three pages (pp. 1-3). All of this time and space is devoted to some carefully chosen details of the author's life and experience in the period preceding the Mutiny. These are truly significant. As indices they prepare the reader for what is to come and help him to understand the happenings of 14 May and after, when these enter into the narrative at staggered stages. Thus the mysterious circulation of chapatis in January and the silent but expressive concern on the narrator's brother, a high official, over a telegram received at Agra on 12 May conveying the still unconfirmed news of the Meerut uprising, portend the developments two days later at his own district headquarters. Again the trivia about his 'large income and great authority', his house, horses, servants, 'a chest full of silver plate, which stood in the hall and . . . a great store of Cashmere shawls, pearls, and diamonds' all help to index, by contrast, the holocaust which was soon to reduce his authority to nothing, and turn his servants into rebels, his house into a shambles, his property into booty for the plundering poor of town and country. By anticipating the narrated events thus, if only by implication, secondary discourse destroys the entropy of the first, its raw material. Henceforth there will be nothing in the story that can be said to be altogether unexpected. This effect is the work of the so-called 'organization shifters'19 which help the author to superimpose a temporality of his own on that of his theme, that is 'to "dechronologize" the historical thread and restore, if only by way of reminiscence or nostalgia, a Time at once complex, parametric, and non-linear . . . braiding the chronology of the subject-matter

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with that of the language-act which reports it'. In the present instance the 'braiding' consists not only in fitting an evocative context to the bare sequence related in that short paragraph of his letter. The shifters disrupt the syntagm twice to insert in the breach, on both occasions, a moment of authorial time suspended between the two poles of 'waiting', a figure ideally constituted to allow the play of digressions, asides and parentheses forming loops and zigzags in a story-line and adding thereby to its depth. Thus, waiting for news about the movements of the mutineers he reflects on the peace of the early evening at the sadar station and strays from his account to tell us in violation of the historiographical canon of tense and person: 'The scene was simple and full of the repose of Eastern life. In the times that followed it often recurred to my memory.' And, again, waiting later on for transport to take away the evacuees gathered in his drawing room, he withdraws from that particular night for the duration of a few words to comment: Tt was a beautiful room, brightly lighted, gay with flowers. It was the last time I thus saw it, and so it remains impressed on my memory.' How far does the operation of these shifters help to correct the bias resulting from the writer's intervention in the first person? Not much by this showing. For each of the indices wedged into the narrative represents a principled choice between the terms of a paradigmatic opposition. Between the authority of the head of the district and its defiance by the armed masses, between the habitual servility of his menials and their assertion of self-respect as rebels, between the insignia of his wealth and power (e.g. gold, horses, shawls, bungalow) and their appropriation or destruction by the subaltern crowds, the author, hardly differentiated from the administrator that he was twenty-seven years ago, consistently chooses the former. Nostalgia makes the choice all the more eloquent—a recall of what is thought to be 'fine' such as a peaceful evening or an elegant room emphasizing by contrast the 'terrible' aspects of popular violence directed against the Raj. Quite clearly there is a logic to this preference. It affirms itself by negating a series of inversions which, combined with other signs of the same order, constitute a code of insurgency. The pattern of the historian's choice, identical with the magistrate's, conforms thus to a countercode, the code of counter-insurgency. VII

If the neutralizing effect of the aorist fails thus to prevail over the subjectivity of the protagonist as narrator in this particular genre of secondary discourse, how does the balance of tense and person stand in the other kind of writing within the same category? One can see two distinct idioms at work here, both identified with the standpoint of colonialism but unlike each other in expressing it. The cruder variety is well exemplified in The

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Chuar Rebellion of 1799 by J. C. Price. Written long after the event, in 1874, it was obviously meant by the author, Settlement Officer of Midnapur at the time, to serve as a straightforward historical account with no particular administrative end in view. He addressed it to 'the casual reader' as well as to any 'future Collector of Midnapore', hoping to share with both 'that keen interest which I have felt as I have read the old Midnapore records'.20 But the author's 'delight . . . experienced in pouring over these papers' seems to have produced a text almost indistinguishable from the primary discourse used as its source. The latter is, for one thing, conspicuous by its sheer physical presence. Over a fifth of that half of the book which deals specifically with the events of 1799 is made up of direct quotations from those records and another large part of barely modified extracts. More important for us, however, is the evidence we have of the author's identification of his own sentiments with those of that small group of whites who were reaping the whirlwind produced by the wind of a violently disruptive change the Company's Government had sown in the south-western corner of Bengal. Only the fear of the beleaguered officials at Midnapur station in 1799 turns seventy-five years later into that genocidal hatred characteristic of a genre of post-Mutiny British writing. 'The disinclination of the authorities, civil or military, to proceed in person to help to quell the disturbances is most striking', he writes shaming his compatriots and then goes on to brag: In these days of breech-loaders half a dozen Europeans would have been a match for twenty times their number of Chuars. Of course with the imperfect nature of the weapons of that day it could not be expected that Europeans would fruitlessly rush into danger, but I should have expected that the European officers of the station would have in some instances at least courted and met an attack in person and repulsed their assailants. I wonder that no one European officer, civilian or military, with the exception of perhaps Lieutenant Gill, owned to that sensation of joyous excitement most young men feel now-a-days in field sports, or in any pursuit where there is an element of danger. I think most of us, had we lived in 1799, would have counted it better sport had we bagged a marauding Chuar reeking with blood and spoils, than the largest bear that the Midnapore jungles can produce.21 Quite clearly the author's separation from his subject-matter and the difference between the time of the event and that of its narration here have done little to inspire objectivity in him. His passion is apparently of the same order as that of the British soldier who wrote on the eve of the sack of Delhi in 1857: 'I most sincerely trust that the order given when we attack Delhi will be ... "Kill every one; no quarter is to be given" '.22 The

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historian's attitude to rebels is in this instance indistinguishable from that of the State—the attitude of the hunter to his quarry. Regarded thus an insurgent is not a subject of understanding or interpretation but of extermination, and the discourse of history, far from being neutral, serves directly to instigate official violence. There were however other writers working within the same genre who are known to have expressed themselves in a less sanguinary idiom. They are perhaps best represented by W. W. Hunter and his account of the Santal insurrection of 1855 in The Annals of Rural Bengal. It is, in many respects, a remarkable text. Written within a decade of the Mutiny and twelve years of the /zoo/,23 it has none of that revanchist and racist overtone common to a good deal of Anglo-Indian literature of the period. Indeed the author treats the enemies of the Raj not only with consideration but with respect although they had wiped it off from three eastern districts in a matter of weeks and held out for five months against the combined power of the colonial army and its newly acquired auxiliaries— railways and the 'electric telegraph'. One of the first modern exercises in the historiography of Indian peasant revolts, it situates the uprising in a cultural and socio-economic context, analyses its causes, and draws on local records and contemporary accounts for evidence about its progress and eventual suppression. Here, to all appearances, we have that classic instance of the author's own bias and opinion dissolving under the operation of the past tense and the grammatical third person. Here, perhaps, historical discourse has come to its own and realized that ideal of an 'apersonal . . . mode of narrative . . . designed to wipe out the presence of the speaker'?24 This semblance of objectivity, of the want of any obviously demonstrable bias, has however nothing to do with 'facts speaking for themselves' in a state of pure metonymy unsullied by comment. On the contrary the text is packed with comment. One has to compare it with something like the near contemporary article on this subject in Calcutta Review (1856) or even K. K. Datta's history of the hool written long after its suppression to realize how little there is in it of the details of what actually happened.25 Indeed the narration of the event occupies in the book only about 7 per cent of the chapter which builds up climactically towards it, and somewhat less than 50 per cent of the print devoted specifically to this topic within that chapter. The syntagm is broken up again and again by dystaxia and interpretation filters through to assemble the segments into a meaningful whole of a primarily metaphorical character. The consequence of this operation that is most relevant for our purpose here is the way in which it distributes the paradigmatic relata along an axis of historical continuity between a 'before' and an 'after', forelengthening it with a context and extending it into a perspective. The representation of insurgency ends up thus by having its moment intercalated between its past and future so that

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the particular values of one and the other are rubbed into the event to give it the meaning specific to it. VIII To turn first to the context, two-thirds of the chapter which culminates in the history of the insurrection is taken up with an inaugural account of what may be called the natural history of its protagonists. An essay in ethnography this deals with the physical traits, language, traditions, myths, religion, rituals, habitat, environment, hunting and agricultural practices, social organization and communal government of the Santals of the Birbhum region. There are many details here which index the coming conflict as one of contraries, as between the noble savage of the hills and mean exploiters from the plains—references to his personal dignity ('He does not abase himself to the ground like the rural Hindu'; the Santal woman is 'ignorant of the shrinking squeamishness of the Hindu female', etc.) implying the contrast his would-be reduction to servitude by Hindu moneylenders, his honesty ('Unlike the Hindu, he never thinks of making money by a stranger, scrupulously avoids all topics of business, and feels pained if payment is pressed upon him for the milk and fruit which his wife brings out'), the greed and fraud of the alien traders and landlords leading eventually to the insurrection, his aloofness (The Santals live as much apart as possible from the Hindus'), the diku's intrusion into his life and territory and the holocaust which inevitably followed. These indices give the uprising not only a moral dimension and the values of a just war, but also a depth in time. The latter is realized by the operation of diachronic markers in the text—an imaginary past by creation myths (appropriate for an enterprise taken up on the Thakur's advice) and a real but remote past (befitting a revolt steeped in tradition) by the sherds of prehistory in ritual and speech with the Santals' ceremony of 'Purifying for the Dead' mentioned, for instance, as the trace of 'a faint remembrance of the far-off time when they dwelt beside great rivers' and their language as 'that intangible record on which a nation's past is graven more deeply than on brass tablets or rock inscriptions'. Moving closer to the event the author provides it with a recent past covering roughly a period of sixty years of 'direct administration' in the area. The moral and temporal aspects of the narrative merge here in the figure of an irreconcilable contradiction. On the one hand there were, according to Hunter, a series of beneficial measures introduced by the government— the Decennial Settlement helping to expand the area under cultivation and induce the Santals, since 1792, to hire themselves out as agricultural labourers; the setting up, in 1832, of an enclosure ringed off by masonry pillars where they could colonize virgin land and jungle without fear of harassment from hostile tribes; the development of 'English enterprise' in

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Bengal in the form of indigo factories for which 'the Santal immigrants afforded a population of day-labourers'; and last but not the least of bonanzas, their absorption by thousands into labour gangs for the construction of railways across that region in 1854. But there were, on the other hand, two sets of factors which combined to undo all the good resulting from colonial rule, namely, the exploitation and oppression of the Santals by greedy and fraudulent Hindu landlords, money-lenders and traders, and the failure of the local administration, its police and the courts to protect them or redress the wrongs they suffered.

IX This emphasis on contradiction serves an obviously interpretative purpose for the author. It makes it possible for him to locate the cause of the uprising in a failure of the Raj to make its ameliorative aspects prevail over the still lingering defects and shortcomings in its exercise of authority. The account of the event therefore fits directly into the objective stated at the beginning of the chapter, that is, to interest not only the scholar 'in these lapsed races' but the statesman as well. 'The Indian statesman will discover', he had written there referring euphemistically to the makers of British policy in India, 'that these Children of the Forest are . . . amenable to the same reclaiming influences as other men, and that upon their capacity for civilisation the future extension of English enterprise in Bengal in a large measure depends'. It is this concern for 'reclamation' (shorthand for accelerating the transformation of the tribal peasantry into wage labour and harnessing them to characteristically colonialist projects for the exploitation of Indian resources) which explains the mixture of firmness and 'understanding' in Hunter's attitude to the rebellion. A liberalimperialist he regarded it both as a menace to the stability of the Raj and as a useful critique of its far from perfect administration. So while he censured the government of the day for not declaring Martial Law soon enough in order to cut down the hool at its inception, he was careful to differentiate himself from those of his compatriots who wanted to punish the entire Santal community for the crime of its rebels and deport overseas the population of the districts involved. A genuinely far-sighted imperialist he looked forward to the day when the tribe, like many other aboriginal peoples of the subcontinent, would demonstrate its 'capacity for civilisation' by acting as an inexhaustible source of cheap labour power. This vision is inscribed into the perspective with which the narration ends. Blaming the outbreak of the hool squarely on that 'cheap and practical administration' which paid no heed to the Santals' complaints and concentrated on tax collection alone it goes on to catalogue the somewhat illusory benefits of 'the more exact system that was introduced after the revolt' to keep the power of the usurers over debtors within the limits of

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the law, check the use of false weights and measures in retail trade, and ensure the right of bonded labourers to choose freedom by desertion or change of employers. But more than administrative reform it was 'English enterprise' again which radically contributed to the welfare of the tribe. The railways 'completely changed the relation of labour to capital' and did away with that 'natural reason for slavery—to wit, the absence of a wagefund for free workmen'. The demand for plantation labour in the Assam tea-districts 'was destined still further to improve the position of the Santals' and so was the stimulus for indenturing coolies for the Mauritius and the Caribbeans. It was thus that the tribal peasant prospered thanks to the development of a vast sub-continental and overseas labour market within the British Empire. In the Assam tea gardens 'his whole family gets employment, and every additional child, instead of being the means of increasing his poverty, becomes a source of wealth', while the coolies returned from Africa or the West Indies 'at the expiry of their contracts with savings averaging £20 sterling, a sum sufficient to set up a Santal as a considerable proprietor in his own village'. Many of these so-called improvements were, as we know now looking back at them across a century, the result of sheer wishful thinking or so ephemeral as not to have mattered at all. The connection between usury and bonded labour continued all through British rule well into independent India. The freedom of the labour market was seriously restricted by the want of competition between British and indigenous capital. The employment of tribal families on tea plantations became a source of cynical exploitation of the labour of women and children. The advantages of mobility and contractuality were cancelled out by irregularities in the process of recruitment and the manipulation of the contrary factors of economic dependence and social differentiation by arkatis. The system of indenturing helped rather less to liberate servile labour than to develop a sort of second serfdom, and so on. Yet this vision which never materialized offers an insight into the character of this type of discourse. The perspective it inspired amounted in effect to a testament of faith in colonialism. The hool was assimilated there to the career of the Raj and the militant enterprise of a tribal peasantry to free themselves from the triple yoke of sarkari, sahukari and zamindari to 'English enterprise'—the infrastructure of Empire. Hence the objective stated at the beginning of the account could be reiterated towards the end with the author saying that he had written at least 'partly for the instruction which their [the Santals'] recent history furnishes as to the proper method of dealing with the aboriginal races'. The suppression of local peasant revolts was a part of this method, but it was incorporated now in a broader strategy designed to tackle the economic problems of the British Government in India as an element of the global problems of imperial politics. 'These are the problems', says Hunter in concluding the

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chapter, 'which Indian statesmen during the next fifty years will be called upon to solve. Their predecessors have given civilisation to India; it will be their duty to render that civilisation at once beneficial to the natives and safe for ourselves.' In other words this historiography was assigned a role in a political process that would ensure the security of the Raj by a combination of force to crush rebellion when it occurred and reform to pre-empt it by wrenching the tribal peasantry out of their rural bases and distributing them as cheap labour power for British capital to exploit in India and abroad. The overtly aggressive and nervous prose of counterinsurgency born of the worries of the early colonial days came thus to adopt in this genre of historical writing the firm but benign, authoritarian but understanding idiom of a mature and self-assured imperialism.

X How is it that even the more liberal type of secondary discourse is unable thus to extricate itself from the code of counter-insurgency? With all the advantage he has of writing in the third person and addressing a distinct past the official turned historian is still far from being impartial where official interests are concerned. His sympathies for the peasants' sufferings and his understanding of what goaded them to revolt, do not, when the crunch comes, prevent him from siding with law and order and justifying the transfer of the campaign against the hool from civilian to military hands in order to crush it completely and quickly. And as discussed above, his partisanship over the outcome of the rebellion is matched by his commitment to the aims and interests of the regime. The discourse of history, hardly distinguished from policy, ends up by absorbing the concerns and objectives of the latter. In this affinity with policy historiography reveals its character as a form of colonialist knowledge. That is, it derives directly from that knowledge which the bourgeoisie had used in the period of their ascendancy to interpret the world in order to master it and establish their hegemony over Western societies, but turned into an instrument of national oppression as they began to acquire for themselves 'a place in the sun'. It was thus that political science which had defined the ideal of citizenship for European nation-states was used in colonial India to set up institutions and frame laws designed specifically to generate a mitigated and second-class citizenship. Political economy which had developed in Europe as a critique of feudalism was made to promote a neo-feudal landlordism in India. Historiography too adapted itself to the relations of power under the Raj and was harnessed more and more to the service of the state. It was thanks to this connection and a good deal of talent to back it up that historical writing on themes of the colonial period shaped up as a highly coded discourse. Operating within the framework of a many-sided

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affirmation of British rule in the subcontinent it assumed the function of representing the recent past of its people as 'England's Work in India'. A discourse of power in its own right it had each of its moments displayed as a triumph, that is, as the most favourable upshot of a number of conflicting possibilities for the regime at any particular time. In its mature form, therefore, as in Hunter's Annals, continuity figures as one of its necessary and cardinal aspects. Unlike primary discourse it cannot afford to be foreshortened and without a sequel. The event does not constitute its sole content, but is the middle term between a beginning which serves as a context and an end which is at the same time a perspective linked to the next sequence. The only element that is constant in this ongoing series is the Empire and the policies needed to safeguard and perpetuate it. Functioning as he does within this code Hunter with all the good-will so solemnly announced in his dedicatory note (These pages . . . have little to say touching the governing race. My business is with the people') writes up the history of a popular struggle as one in which the real subject is not the people but, indeed, 'the governing race' institutionalized as the Raj. Like any other narrative of this kind his account of the hool too is there to celebrate a continuity—that of British power in India. The statement of causes and reforms is no more than a structural requirement for this continuum providing it respectively with context and perspective. These serve admirably to register the event as a datum in the life-story of the Empire, but do nothing to illuminate that consciousness which is called insurgency. The rebel has no place in this history as the subject of rebellion.

XI There is nothing in tertiary discourse to make up for this absence. Farthest removed in time from the events which it has for its theme it always looks at them in the third person. It is the work of non-official writers in most cases or of former officials no longer under any professional obligation or constraint to represent the standpoint of the government. If it happens to carry an official view at all this is only because the author has chosen it of his own will rather than because he has been conditioned to do so by any loyalty or allegiance based on administrative involvement. There are indeed some historical works which actually show such a preference and are unable to speak in a voice other than that of the custodians of law and order—an instance of tertiary discourse reverting to that state of crude identification with the regime so characteristic of primary discourse. But there are other and very different idioms within this genre ranging from liberal to left. The latter is particularly important as perhaps the most influential and prolific of all the many varieties of tertiary discourse. We owe to it some of the best studies on Indian peasant insurgency and more and more of these are coming out all the time as evidence both of a

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growing academic interest in the subject and the relevance that the subaltern movements of the past have to contemporary tensions in our part of the world. This literature is distinguished by its effort to break away from the code of counter-insurgency. It adopts the insurgent's point of view and regards, with him, as 'fine' what the other side calls 'terrible', and vice versa. It leaves the reader in no doubt that it wants the rebels and not their enemies to win. Here unlike in secondary discourse of the liberalimperialist type recognition of the wrongs done to the peasants leads directly to support for their struggle to seek redress by arms. Yet these two types, so very different from and contrary to each other in ideological orientation, have much else that is common between them. Take for instance that remarkable contribution of radical scholarship, Suprakash Ray's Bharater Krishak-bidroha O Ganatantrik Samgram26 and compare its account of the Santal uprising of 1855 with Hunter's. The texts echo each other as narratives. Ray's being the later work has all the advantage of drawing on more recent research such as Datta's, and thus being more informed. But much of what it has to say about the inauguration and development of the hool is taken—in fact, quoted directly—from Hunter's Annals.21 And both the authors rely on the Calcutta Review (1856) article for much of their evidence. There is thus little in the description of this particular event which differs significantly between the secondary and the tertiary types of discourse. Nor is there much to distinguish between the two in terms of their admiration for the courage of the rebels and their abhorrence of the genocidal operations mounted by the counter-insurgency forces. In fact, on both these points Ray reproduces in extenso Hunter's testimony, gathered first-hand from officers directly involved in the campaign, that the Santals 'did not understand yielding', while for the army, 'it was not war . . . it was execution'.28 The sympathy expressed for the enemies of the Raj in the radical tertiary discourse is matched fully by that in the colonialist secondary discourse. Indeed, for both, the hool was an eminently just struggle—an evaluation derived from their mutual concurrence about the factors which had provoked it. Wicked landlords, extortionate usurers, dishonest traders, venal police, irresponsible officials and partisan processes of law—all figure with equal prominence in both the accounts. Both the historians draw on the evidence recorded on this subject in the Calcutta Review essay, and for much of his information about Santal indebtedness and bond slavery, about moneylenders' and landlords' oppression and administrative connivance at all this Ray relies heavily again on Hunter, as witness the extracts quoted liberally from the latter's work.29 However, causality is used by the two writers to develop entirely different perspectives. The statement of causes has the same part to play in Hunter's account as in any other narrative of the secondary type—that is, as an essential aspect of the discourse of counter-insurgency. In this

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respect his Annals belongs to a tradition of colonialist historiography which, for this particular event, is typically exemplified by that racist and vindictive essay, The Sonthal Rebellion'. There the obviously knowledgeable but tough-minded official ascribes the uprising, as Hunter does, to banias' fraud, mahajani transaction, zamindari despotism and sarkari inefficiency. In much the same vein Thornhill's Personal Adventures accounts for the rural uprisings of the period of the Mutiny in Uttar Pradesh quite clearly by the breakdown in traditional agrarian relations consequent on the advent of British rule. O'Malley identifies the root of the Pabna bidroha of 1873 in rack-renting by landlords, and the Deccan Riots Commission that of the disturbances of 1875 in the exploitation of the Kunbi peasantry by alien moneylenders in Poona and Ahmednagar districts.30 One could go on adding many other events and texts to this list. The spirit of all these is well represented in the following extract from the Judicial Department Resolutions of 22 November 1831 on the subject of the insurrection led by Titu Mir: The serious nature of the late disturbances in the district of Baraset renders it an object of paramount importance that the cause which gave rise to them should be fully investigated in order that the motives which activated the insurgents may be rightly understood and such measures adopted as may be deemed expedient to prevent a recurrence of similar disorders?1 That sums it up. To know the cause of a phenomenon is already a step taken in the direction of controlling it. To investigate and thereby understand the cause of rural disturbances is an aid to measures 'deemed expedient to prevent a recurrence of similar disorders'. To that end the correspondent to the Calcutta Review (1856) recommended 'that condign retribution', namely, 'that they [the Santals] should be surrounded and hunted up everywhere . . . that they should be compelled, by force, if need be, to return to the Damin-i-koh, and to the wasted country in Bhaugulpore and Beerbhoom, to rebuild the ruined villages, restore the desolate fields to cultivation, open roads, and advance general public works; and do this under watch and guard . . . and that this state of things should be continued, until they are completely tranquillized, and reconciled to their allegiance'.32 The gentler alternative put forward by Hunter was, as we have seen, a combination of Martial Law to suppress an ongoing revolt and measures to follow it up by 'English enterprise' in order (as his compatriot had suggested) to absorb the unruly peasantry as a cheap labour force in agriculture and public works for the benefit respectively of the same dikus and railway and roadwork engineers against whom they had taken up arms. With all their variation in tone, however, both the prescriptions to 'make . . . rebellion impossible by the elevation of the Sonthals'33—indeed,

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all colonialist solutions arrived at by the casual explanation of our peasant uprisings—were grist to a historiography committed to assimilating them to the transcendental Destiny of the British Empire.

XII Causality serves to hitch the hool to a rather different kind of Destiny in Ray's account. But the latter goes through the same steps as Hunter's— that is, context-event-perspective ranged along a historical continuum—to arrive there. There are some obvious parallelisms in the way the event acquires a context in the two works. Both start off with prehistory (treated more briefly by Ray than Hunter) and follow it up with a survey of the more recent past since 1790 when the tribe first came into contact with the regime. It is there that the cause of the insurrection lies for both—but with a difference. For Hunter the disturbances originated in a local malignance in an otherwise healthy body—the failure of a district administration to act up to the then emerging ideal of the Raj as the ma-baap of the peasantry and protect them from the tyranny of wicked elements within the native society itself. For Ray it was the very presence of British power in India which had goaded the Santals to revolt, for their enemies the landlords and moneylenders owed their authority and indeed their existence to the new arrangements in landed property introduced by the colonial government and the accelerated development of a money economy under its impact. The rising constituted, therefore, a critique not only of a local administration but of colonialism itself. Indeed he uses Hunter's own evidence to arrive at that very different, indeed contrary, conclusion: It is clearly proved by Hunter's own statement that the responsibility for the extreme misery of the Santals lies with the English administrative system taken as a whole together with the zamindars and mahajans. For it was the English administrative system which had created zamindars and mahajans in order to satisfy its own need for exploitation and government, and helped them directly and indirectly by offering its protection and patronage.34 With colonialism, that is, the Raj as a system and in its entirety (rather than any of its local malfunctions) identified thus as the prime cause of rebellion, its outcome acquires radically different values in the two texts. While Hunter is explicit in his preference of a victory in favour of the regime, Ray is equally so in favour of the rebels. And corresponding to this each has a perspective which stands out in sharp contrast to that of the other. It is for Hunter the consolidation of British rule based on a reformed administration which no longer incites jacqueries by its failure to

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protect adivasis from native exploiters, but transforms them into an abundant and mobile labour force readily and profitably employed by Indian landlords and 'English enterprise'. For Ray the event is 'the precursor of the great rebellion' of 1857 and a vital link in a protracted struggle of the Indian people in general and peasants and workers in particular against foreign as well as indigenous oppressors. The armed insurrection of the Santals, he says, has indicated a way to the Indian people. 'That particular way has, thanks to the great rebellion of 1857, developed into the broad highway of India's struggle for freedom. That highway extends into the twentieth century. The Indian peasantry are on their march along that very highway.'35 In fitting the hool thus to a perspective of continuing struggle of the rural masses the author draws on a well-established tradition of radical historiography as witness, for instance, the following extract from a pamphlet which had a wide readership in left political circles nearly thirty years ago: The din of the actual battles of the insurrection has died down. But its echoes have kept on vibrating through the years, growing louder and louder as more peasants joined in the fight. The clarion call that summoned the Santhals to battle . . . was to be heard in other parts of the country at the time of the Indigo Strike of 1860, the Pabna and Bogra Uprising of 1872, the Maratha Peasant Rising in Poona and Ahmednagar in 1875-76. It was finally to merge in the massive demand of the peasantry all over the country for an end to zamindari and moneylending oppression... . Glory to the immortal Santhals who . .. showed the path to battle! The banner of militant struggle has since then passed from hand to hand over the length and breadth of India.36 The power of such assimilative thinking about the history of peasant insurgency is further illustrated by the concluding words of an essay written by a veteran of the peasant movement and published by the Pashchimbanga Pradeshik Krishak Sabha on the eve of the centenary of the Santal revolt. Thus, The flames of the fire kindled by the peasant martyrs of the Santal insurrection a hundred years ago had spread to many regions all over India. Those flames could be seen burning in the indigo cultivators' rebellion in Bengal (1860), in the uprising of the raiyats of Pabna and Bogra (1872), in that of the Maratha peasantry of the Deccan (1875-76). The same fire was kindled again and again in the course of the Moplah peasant revolts of Malabar. That fire has not been extinguished yet, it is still burning in the hearts of the Indian peasants .. ,37

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The purpose of such tertiary discourse is quite clearly to try and retrieve the history of insurgency from that continuum which is designed to assimilate every jacquerie to 'England's Work in India' and arrange it along the alternative axis of a protracted campaign for freedom and socialism. However, as with colonialist historiography this, too, amounts to an act of appropriation which excludes the rebel as the conscious subject of his own history and incorporates the latter as only a contingent element in another history with another subject. Just as it is not the rebel but the Raj which is the real subject of secondary discourse and the Indian bourgeoisie that of tertiary discourse of the History-of-the-Freedom-Struggle genre, so is an abstraction called Worker-and-Peasant, an ideal rather than the real historical personality of the insurgent, made to replace him in the type of literature discussed above. To say this is of course not to deny the political importance of such appropriation. Since every struggle for power by the historically ascendant classes in any epoch involves a bid to acquire a tradition, it is entirely in the fitness of things that the revolutionary movements in India should lay a claim to, among others, the Santal rebellion of 1855 as a part of their heritage. But however noble the cause and instrument of such appropriation, it leads to the mediation of the insurgent's consciousness by the historian's—that is, of a past consciousness by one conditioned by the present. The distortion which follows necessarily and inevitably from this process is a function of that hiatus between event-time and discourse-time which makes the verbal representation of the past less than accurate in the best of cases. And since the discourse is, in this particular instance, one about properties of the mind—about attitudes, beliefs, ideas, etc. rather than about externalities which are easier to identify and describe, the task of representation is made even more complicated than usual. There is nothing that historiography can do to eliminate such distortion altogether, for the latter is built into its optics. What it can do, however, is to acknowledge such distortion as parametric—as a datum which determines the form of the exercise itself, and to stop pretending that it can fully grasp a past consciousness and reconstitute it. Then and only then might the distance between the latter and the historian's perception of it be reduced significantly enough to amount to a close approximation which is the best one could hope for. The gap as it stands at the moment is indeed so wide that there is much more than an irreducible degree of error in the existing literature on this point. Even a brief look at some of the discourses on the 1855 insurrection should bear this out.

XIII Religiosity was, by all accounts, central to the hool. The notion of power which inspired it, was made up of such ideas and expressed in such words

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and acts as were explicitly religious in character. It was not that power was a content wrapped up in a form external to it called religion. It was a matter of both being inseparably collapsed as the signified and its signifier (vdgarthaviva samprdurktau) in the language of that massive violence. Hence the attribution of the rising to a divine command rather than to any particular grievance; the enactment of rituals both before (e.g. propitiatory ceremonies to ward off the apocalypse of the Primeval Serpents—Lag and Lagini, the distribution of tel-sindur, etc.) and during the uprising (e.g. worshipping the goddess Durga, bathing in the Ganges, etc.); the generation and circulation of myth in its characteristic vehicle—rumour (e.g. about the advent of 'the exterminating angel' incarnated as a buffalo, the birth of a prodigious hero to a virgin, etc.).38 The evidence is both unequivocal and ample on this point. The statements we have from the leading protagonists and their followers are all emphatic and indeed insistent on this aspect of their struggle, as should be obvious even from the few extracts of source material reproduced below in the Appendix. In sum, it is not possible to speak of insurgency in this case except as a religious consciousness—except, that is, as a massive demonstration of selfestrangement (to borrow Marx's term for the very essence of religiosity) which made the rebels look upon their project as predicated on a will other than their own: 'Kanoo and Seedoo Manjee are not fighting. The Thacoor himself will fight.'39 How authentically has this been represented in historical discourse? It was identified in official correspondence at the time as a case of 'fanaticism'. The insurrection was three months old and still going strong when J. R. Ward, a Special Commissioner and one of the most important administrators in the Birbhum region, wrote in some desperation to his superiors in Calcutta, T have been unable to trace the insurrection in Beerbhoom to any thing but fanaticism.' The idiom he used to describe the phenomenon was typical of the shocked and culturally arrogant response of nineteenthcentury colonialism to any radical movement inspired by a non-Christian doctrine among a subject population: 'These Sonthals have been led to join in the rebellion under a persuasion which is clearly traceable to their brethren in Bhaugulpore, that an Almighty & inspired Being appeared as the redeemer of their Caste & their ignorance & superstition was easily worked into a religious frenzy which has stopped at nothing.'40 That idiom occurs also in the Calcutta Review article. There the Santal is acknowledged as 'an eminently religious man' and his revolt as a parallel of other historical occasions when 'the fanatical spirit of religious superstition' had been 'swayed to strengthen and help forward a quarrel already ready to burst and based on other grounds.'41 However, the author gives this identification a significantly different slant from that in the report quoted above. There an incomprehending Ward, caught in the blast of the hool, appears to have been impressed by the spontaneity of 'a religious frenzy which . . .

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stopped at nothing'. By contrast the article written after the regime had recovered its self-confidence, thanks to the search-and-burn campaign in the disturbed tracts, interprets religiosity as a propagandist ruse used by the leaders to sustain the morale of the rebels. Referring, for instance, to the messianic rumours in circulation it says, 'All these absurdities were no doubt devised to keep up the courage of the numerous rabble.'42 Nothing could be more elitist. The insurgents are regarded here as a mindless 'rabble' devoid of a will of their own and easily manipulated by their chiefs. But elitism such as this is not a feature of colonialist historiography alone. Tertiary discourse of the radical variety, too, exhibits the same disdain for the political consciousness of the peasant masses when it is mediated by religiosity. For a sample let us turn to Ray's account of the rising again. He quotes the following lines from the Calcutta Review article in a somewhat inaccurate but still clearly recognizable translation: Seedoo and Kanoo were at night seated in their home, revolving many things . . . a bit of paper fell on Seedoo's head, and suddenly the Thakoor (god) appeared before the astonished gaze of Seedoo and Kanoo; he was like a white man though dressed in the native style; on each hand he had ten fingers; he held a white book, and wrote therein; the book and with it 20 pieces of paper . . . he presented to the brothers; ascended upwards, and disappeared. Another bit of paper fell on Seedoo's head, and then came two men . . . hinted to them the purport of Thakoor's order, and they likewise vanished. But there was not merely one apparition of the sublime Thakoor; each day in the week for some short period, did he make known his presence to his favorite apostles . . . In the silvery pages of the book, and upon the white leaves of the single scraps of paper, were words written; these were afterwards deciphered by literate Sonthals, able to read and interpret; but their meaning had already been sufficiently indicated to the two leaders.43 With some minor changes of detail (inevitable in a living folklore) this is indeed a fairly authentic account of the visions the two Santal leaders believed they had had. Their statements, reproduced in part in the Appendix (Extracts 3 and 4), bear this out. These, incidentally, were not public pronouncements meant to impress their followers. Unlike 'The Thacoor's Perwannah' (Appendix: Extract 2) intended to make their views known to the authorities before the uprising, these were the words of captives facing execution. Addressed to hostile interrogators in military encampments they could have little use as propaganda. Uttered by men of a tribe which, according to all accounts had not yet learnt to lie,44 these represented the

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truth and nothing but the truth for their speakers. But that is not what Ray would credit them with. What figures as a mere insinuation in the Calcutta Review is raised to the status of an elaborate propaganda device in his introductory remarks on the passage cited above. Thus: Both Sidu and Kanu knew that the slogan (dhwani) which would have the most effect among the backward Santals, was one that was religious. Therefore, in order to inspire the Santals to struggle they spread the word about God's directive in favour of launching such a struggle. The story invented (kalpitd) by them is as follows.45 There is little that is different here from what the colonialist writer had to say about the presumed backwardness of the Santal peasantry, the manipulative designs of their leaders and the uses of religion as the means of such manipulation. Indeed, on each of these points Ray does better and is by far the more explicit of the two authors in attributing a gross lie and downright deception to the rebel chiefs without any evidence at all. The invention is all his own and testifies to the failure of a shallow radicalism to conceptualize insurgent mentality except in terms of an unadulterated secularism. Unable to grasp religiosity as the central modality of peasant consciousness in colonial India he is shy to acknowledge its mediation of the peasant's idea of power and all the resultant contradictions. He is obliged therefore to rationalize the ambiguities of rebel politics by assigning a worldly consciousness to the leaders and an otherworldly one to their followers making of the latter innocent dupes of crafty men armed with all the tricks of a modern Indian politician out to solicit rural votes. Where this lands the historian can be seen even more clearly in the projection of this thesis to a study of the Birsaite ulgulan in Ray's subsequent work. He writes, In order to propagate this religious doctrine of his Birsa adopted a new device (kaushal)—just as Sidu, the Santal leader, had done on the eve of the Santal rebellion of 1885. Birsa knew that the Kol were a very backward people and were full of religious superstition as a result of Hindu-Brahmanical and Christian missionary propaganda amongst them over a long period. Therefore, it would not do to avoid the question of religion if the Kol people were to be liberated from those wicked religious influences and drawn into the path of rebellion. Rather, in order to overcome the evil influences of Hindu and Christian religions, it would be necessary to spread his new religious faith among them in the name of that very God of theirs, and to introduce new rules. To this end, recourse had to be had to falsehood, if necessary, in the interests of the people.

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Birsa spread the word that he had received this new religion of his from the chief deity of the Mundas, Sing Bonga, himself.46 Thus the radical historian is driven by the logic of his own incomprehension to attribute a deliberate falsehood to one of the greatest of our rebels. The ideology of that mighty ulgulan is nothing but pure fabrication for him. And he is not alone in his misreading of insurgent consciousness. Baskay echoes him almost word for word in describing the Santal leader's claim to divine support for the hool as propaganda meant 'to inspire the Santals to rise in revolt'.47 Formulations such as these have their foil in other writings of the same genre which solve the riddle of religious thinking among the Santal rebels by ignoring it altogether. A reader who has Natarajan's and Rasul's once influential essays as his only source of information about the insurrection of 1855, would hardly suspect any religiosity at all in that great event. It is represented there exclusively in its secular aspects. This attitude is of course not confined to the authors discussed in this essay. The same mixture of myopia and downright refusal to look at the evidence that is there, characterizes a great deal more of the existing literature on the subject.

XIV Why is tertiary discourse, even of the radical variety, so reluctant to come to terms with the religious element in rebel consciousness? Because it is still trapped in the paradigm which inspired the ideologically contrary, because colonialist, discourse of the primary and secondary types. It follows, in each case, from a refusal to acknowledge the insurgent as the subject of his own history. For once a peasant rebellion has been assimilated to the career of the Raj, the Nation or the People, it becomes easy for the historian to abdicate the responsibility he has of exploring and describing the consciousness specific to that rebellion and be content to ascribe to it a transcendental consciousness. In operative terms, this means denying a will to the mass of the rebels themselves and representing them merely as instruments of some other will. It is thus that in colonialist historiography insurgency is seen as the articulation of a pure spontaneity pitted against the will of the State as embodied in the Raj. If any consciousness is attributed at all to the rebels, it is only a few of their leaders—more often than not some individual members or small groups of the gentry—who are credited with it. Again, in bourgeois-nationalist historiography it is an elite consciousness which is read into all peasant movements as their motive force. This had led to such grotesqueries as the characterization of the Indigo Rebellion of 1860 as 'the first non-violent mass movement'48 and generally of all the popular struggles in rural India during the first hundred

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and twenty-five years of British rule as the spiritual harbinger of the Indian National Congress. In much the same way the specificity of rebel consciousness had eluded radical historiography as well. This has been so because it is impaled on a concept of peasant revolts as a succession of events ranged along a direct line of descent—as a heritage, as it is often called—in which all the constituents have the same pedigree and replicate each other in their commitment to the highest ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity. In this ahistorical view of the history of insurgency all moments of consciousness are assimilated to the ultimate and highest moment of the series—indeed to an Ideal Consciousness. A historiography devoted to its pursuit (even when that is done, regrettably, in the name of Marxism) is ill-equipped to cope with contradictions which are indeed the stuff history is made of. Since the Ideal is supposed to be one hundred per cent secular in character, the devotee tends to look away when confronted with the evidence of religiosity as if the latter did not exist or explain it away as a clever but wellintentioned fraud perpetrated by enlightened leaders on their moronic followers—all done, of course, 'in the interests of the people'! Hence, the rich material of myths, rituals, rumours, hopes for a Golden Age and fears of an imminent End of the World, all of which speaks of the self-alienation of the rebel, is wasted on this abstract and sterile discourse. It can do little to illuminate that combination of sectarianism and militancy which is so important a feature of our rural history. The ambiguity of such phenomena, witnessed during the Tebhaga movement in Dinajpur, as Muslim peasants coming to the Kisan Sabha 'sometimes inscribing a hammer or a sickle on the Muslim League flag' and young maulavis 'reciting melodious verse from the Koran' at village meetings as 'they condemned the jotedari system and the practice of charging high interest rates',49 will be beyond its grasp. The swift transformation of class struggle into communal strife and vice versa in our countryside evokes from it either some well-contrived apology or a simple gesture of embarrassment, but no real explanation. However, it is not only the religious element in rebel consciousness which this historiography fails to comprehend. The specificity of a rural insurrection is expressed in terms of many other contradictions as well. These too are missed out. Blinded by the glare of a perfect and immaculate consciousness the historian sees nothing, for instance, but solidarity in rebel behaviour and fails to notice its Other, namely, betrayal. Committed inflexibly to the notion of insurgency as a generalized movement, he underestimates the power of the brakes put on it by localism and territoriality. Convinced that mobilization for a rural uprising flows exclusively from an overall elite authority, he tends to disregard the operation of many other authorities within the primordial relations of a rural community. A prisoner of empty abstractions tertiary discourse, even of the radical kind, has thus distanced itself from the prose of counter-insurgency only

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by a declaration of sentiment so far. It has still to go a long way before it can prove that the insurgent can rely on its performance to recover his place in history.

Abbreviations BC: JC: JP: MDS:

Board's Collections, India Office Records (London). Fort William Judicial Consultations in BC. Judicial Proceedings, West Bengal State Archives (Calcutta). Maharaja Deby Sinha (Nashipur Raj Estate, 1914).

Glossary adivasi amla arkati bakasht

baksheesh, bakshish bandh bataidar batta begar benami bhoodan

bidroha chaukidar, chowkidar cutcherry daroga dhing diara diku

Autochthonous population; member of a scheduled tribe. Landlord's managerial staff. A recruiter of labour for plantations, roadworks, railways, etc. Land originally cultivated by tenants but 'resumed' by landlords on the ground of nonpayment of rent and let out again usually though not always to share-croppers;—malik: lit, under the owner's cultivation. Gratuity; tip. Mud bank built for flood control. Share-cropper. Commission. Forced labour. Land fraudulently held under a fictitious name. Lit. gift of land; name of a movement initiated by Vinoba Bhave in the wake of the Telengana peasant uprising to persuade landlords to part voluntarily with one-sixth of their estates for distribution among the landless villagers. Uprising; rebellion. Village watchman; locally appointed member of auxiliary police force. Landlord's estate office. Sub-inspector of police. Word for disturbance, uprising, etc. in a dialect of northern Bengal. Alluvial land gained by recession of a river. Foreigner; outsider.

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diwan gramdan hool inqalab zindabad jila kari karori katcha seer khadi kisan kotha kutcherry larai ma-baap

makai khet mansab mustajir padyatra paik prakhand rabi raiyat, ryot sadar sardar salami thana thanadar tola

Manager of a landlord's estate. Gift made of an entire village as a part of the land distribution movement inspired by Vinoba Bhave's 'sarvodaya' doctrine. Uprising; disturbance. Used often to describe the Santal insurrection of 1855. 'Long live revolution': words often chanted in the course of militant demonstrations. District. Archer. Revenue collector. Unit of weight amounting approximately to 900 gms. Fabric made of hand-spun yarn and used mostly for wear as a sign of commitment to the nationalist cause. Cultivator; farmer; peasant; agricultural worker. Small plot of land given to an attached or bonded labourer in lieu of cash wages. See cutcherry. Fight; struggle. Lit. mother and father. A term often used to represent the relation between the peasants and superordinate elite authorities as one between children and parents. Maize field. A rank in the bureaucracy of the Mughal State. A revenue-farmer in Mughal India. Ritual walk for a cause practised on a large scale during the bhoodan (q.v.) movement. Foot-soldier. Community Development Block. Winter crop such as wheat, gram, etc. in Bihar. Tenant cultivator. Small town serving as the headquarters of district administration in colonial India. Chief; leader. Commission. Police station: its jurisdiction; the building where it is located. A local military commander in Mughal India. Hamlet.

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vagarthavivasamprktau waqai-navis

Lit. 'blended like word and meaning'. A phrase used by Kalidasa in Raghuvamsam. News reporter.

Notes 1 I am grateful to my colleagues of the editorial team for their comments on an initial draft of this essay. Note: For a list of Abbreviations used in the footnotes of this chapter, see p. 1402. 2 The instances are far too numerous to cite. For some of these see MDS, pp. 46-7, 48-9 on the Rangpur dhing; BC 54222: Metcalfe & Blunt to Court of Directors (10 April 1832), paras 14-15 on the Barasat uprising; W. W. Hunter, Annals of Rural Bengal (7th edition; London, 1897), pp. 237-8 and JP, 4 Oct. 1855: The Thacoor's Perwannah' for the Santal hool C. E. Buckland, Bengal Under the Lieutenant-Governors, vol. I (Calcutta, 1901), p. 192 for the 'blue mutiny'. 3 See, for instance, MDS, pp. 579-80; Freedom Struggle in Uttar Pradesh, vol. IV (Lucknow, 1959), pp. 284-5, 549. 4 J. C. Price, The Chuar Rebellion of 1799, p. cl. The edition of the work used in this essay is the one printed in A. Mitra (ed.), District Handbooks: Midnapur (Alipore, 1953), Appendix IV. 5 BC 54222: JC, 22 Nov. 1831: 'Extract from the Proceedings of the Honorable the Vice President in Council in the Military Department under date the 10th November 1831'. Emphasis added. 6 JP, 19 July 1855: Enclosure to letter from the Magistrate of Murshidabad, dated 11 July 1855. Emphasis added. 7 Thus, BC 54222: JC, 3 Apr. 1832: Alexander to Barwell (28 Nov. 1831). 8 My debt to Roland Barthes for many of the analytic terms and procedures used in this section and generally throughout this essay should be far too obvious to all familiar with his 'Structural Analysis of Narratives' and 'The Struggle with the Angel' in Barthes, Image-Music-Text (Glasgow, 1977), pp. 79-141, and 'Historical Discourse' in M. Lane (ed.), Structuralism, A Reader (London, 1970), pp. 145-55, to require detailed reference except where I quote directly from this literature. 9 Barthes, Images-Music-Text, p. 102. 10 Emile Benveniste, Problemes de linguistique generale, I (Paris, 1966), p. 126. The original, 'la dissociation nous livre la constitution formelle; 1'integration nous livre des unites signifiantes', has been rendered somewhat differently and I feel, less happily, in the English translation of the work, Problems in General Linguistics (Florida, 1971), p. 107. 11 Barthes, Image-Music-Text, p. 93. 12 Charles Bally, Linguistique Generale et Linguistique Franqaise (Berne, 1965), p. 144. 13 Barthes, Elements of Semiology (London, 1967), p. 60. 14 Barthes, Image-Music-Text, p. 128. 15 Ibid., p. 119 16 Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, vol. 1 (Peking, 1967), pp. 26-7. 17 Benveniste, op. cit., p. 239. 18 Freedom Struggle in Uttar Pradesh, vol. V, pp. 685-92. 19 For Roman Jakobson's exposition of this key concept, see his Selected Writings, 2: Word and Language (The Hague and Paris, 1971), pp. 130-47. Barthes devel-

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20 21 22 23

24 25 26 27 28 29 30

31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44

45 46

47 48 49

ops the notion of organization shifters in his essay 'Historical Discourse', pp. 146-8. All extracts quoted in this paragraph are taken from that essay unless otherwise mentioned. Price, op. cit, p. clx. Ibid. Reginald G. Wilberforce, An Unrecorded Chapter of the Indian Mutiny (2nd edition; London, 1894), pp. 76-7. It appears from a note in this work that parts of it were written in 1866. The dedication bears the date 4 March 1868. All our references to this work in quotation or otherwise are to Chapter IV of the seventh edition (London, 1897) unless otherwise stated. Barthes, Image-Music-Text, p. 112. Anon., The Sonthal Rebellion', Calcutta Review (1856), pp. 223-64; K. K. Datta, 'The Santal Insurrection of 1855-57', in Anti-British Plots and Movements before 1857 (Meerut, 1970), pp. 43-152. Vol. I (Calcutta, 1966), Ch. 13. For these see ibid., pp. 323, 325, 327, 328. Ibid., p. 337; Hunter, op. cit., pp. 247-9. Ray, op. cit., pp. 316-19. Anon., op. cit., pp. 238-41: Thornhill, op. cit., pp. 33-5; L. S. S. O'Malley, Bengal District Gazetteers: Pabna (Calcutta, 1923), p. 25; Report of the Commission Appointed in India to Inquire into the Causes of the Riots which took place in the year 1875 in the Poona and Ahmednagar Districts of the Bombay Presidency (London, 1878), passim. BC 54222: /C, 22 Nov. 1831 (no. 91). Emphasis added. Anon., op. cit., pp. 263-4. Ibid., p. 263. Ray, op. cit., p. 318. Ibid., p. 340. L. Natarajan, Peasant Uprisings in India, 1850-1900 (Bombay, 1953), pp. 31-2. Abdulla Rasul, Saontal Bidroher Amar Kahini (Calcutta, 1954), p. 24. The instances are far too numerous to cite in an essay of this size, but for some samples see Mare Hapram Ko Reak Katha, Ch. 79, in A. Mitra (ed.), District Handbooks: Bankura (Calcutta, 1953). Appendix: Extract 2. JP, 8 Nov. 1855: Ward to Government of Bengal (13 Oct. 1855). Emphasis added. Anon., op. cit., p. 243. Emphasis added. Ibid., p. 246. Emphasis added. Ibid., pp. 243-4. Ray, op. cit., pp. 321-2. This is generally accepted. See, for instance, Sherwill's observation about the truth being 'sacred' to the Santals 'offering in this respect a bright example to their lying neighbours, the Bengalis'. Geographical and Statistical Report of the District Bhaugulpoor (Calcutta, 1854), p. 32. Ray, op. cit., p. 321. Emphasis added. Ray, Bharater Baiplabik Samgramer Itihas, vol. I (Calcutta, 1970), p. 95. Emphasis added. The sentence italicized by us in the quoted passage reads as follows in the Bengali original: 'Eijanyo prayojan hoiley jatir svarthey mithyar asroy grahan karitey hoibey'. Dhirendranath Baskay, Saontal Ganasamgramer Itihas (Calcutta, 1976), p. 66. Jogesh Chandra Bagal (ed.), Peasant Revolution in Bengal (Calcutta, 1953), p. 5. Sunil Sen, Agrarian Struggle in Bengal, 1946-47 (New Delhi, 1972), p. 49.

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LIVING IN THE INTERREGNUM (1982)1 Nadine Gordimer From Stephen Clingman (ed.) The Essential Gesture: Writing, Politics and Places, Jonathan Cape, 1988, 261-84

I live at 6,000 feet in a society whirling, stamping, swaying with the force of revolutionary change. The vision is heady; the image of the demonic dance - and accurate, not romantic: an image of actions springing from emotion, knocking deliberation aside. The city is Johannesburg, the country South Africa, and the time the last years of the colonial era in Africa. It's inevitable that nineteenth-century colonialism should finally come to its end there, because there it reached its ultimate expression, open in the legalised land- and mineral grabbing, open in the labour exploitation of indigenous peoples, open in the constitutionalised, institutionalised racism that was concealed by the British under the pious notion of uplift, the French and the Portuguese under the sly notion of selective assimilation. An extraordinarily obdurate crossbreed of Dutch, German, English, French in the South African white settler population produced a bluntness that unveiled everyone's refined white racism: the flags of European civilisation dropped, and there it was unashamedly; the ugliest creation of man, and they baptised the thing in the Dutch Reformed Church, called it apartheid, coining the ultimate term for every manifestation, over the ages, in many countries, of race prejudice. Every country could see its semblances there; and most peoples. The sun that never set over one or other of the nineteenth-century colonial empires of the world is going down finally in South Africa. Since the black uprisings of the mid-seventies, coinciding with the independence of Mozambique and Angola, and later that of Zimbabwe,

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the past has begun rapidly to drop out of sight, even for those who would have liked to go on living in it. Historical co-ordinates don't fit life any longer; new ones, where they exist, have couplings not to the rulers, but to the ruled. It is not for nothing that I chose as an epigraph for my novel July's People a quotation from Gramsci: The old is dying, and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum there arises a great diversity of morbid symptoms.'* In this interregnum, I and all my countrymen and women are living. Ten thousand miles from home, I speak to you out of it. I am going, quite frequently, to let events personally experienced as I was thinking towards or writing this paper interrupt theoretical flow, because this interaction this essential disruption, this breaking in upon the existential coherence we call concept - is the very state of being I must attempt to convey. I have never before spoken publicly from so personal a point of view. Apart from the usual Joycean reasons of secrecy and cunning - to which I would add jealous hoarding of private experience for transmutation into fiction there has been for me a peculiarly South African taboo. In the official South African consciousness, the ego is white: it has always seen all South Africa as ordered around it. Even the ego that seeks to abdicate this alienation does so in an assumption of its own salvation that in itself expresses ego and alienation. And the Western world press, itself overwhelmingly white, constantly feeds this ego from its own. Visiting journalists, parliamentarians, congressmen and congresswomen come to South Africa to ask whites what is going to happen there. They meet blacks through whites; they rarely take the time and trouble, on their own initiative, to encounter more than the man who comes into the hotel bedroom to take away the empty beer bottles. With the exception of films made clandestinely by South African political activists, black and white, about resistance events, most foreign television documentaries, while condemning the whites out of their own mouths, are nevertheless preoccupied with what will happen to whites when the apartheid regime goes. I have shunned the arrogance of interpreting my country through the private life that, as Theodor Adorno puts it, 'drags on only as an appendage of the social process't in a time and place of which I am a part. Now I am going to break the inhibition or destroy the privilege of privacy, whichever way you look at it. I have to offer you myself as my most closely observed specimen from the interregnum; yet I remain a writer, not a public speaker: nothing I say here will be as true as my fiction. * t

[In a slightly different translation in] Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, edited and translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1971), p. 276. 'Cultural Criticism and Society', in Critical Sociology: Selected Readings, (ed.) Paul Connerton (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), p. 271.

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There is another reason for confession. The particular segment of South African society to which I belong, by the colour of my skin, whether I like it or not, represents a crisis that has a particular connection with the Western world, to which you in this audience belong. I think that may become self-evident before I arrive at the point of explication; it is not, I want to assure you, the old admitted complicity in the slave trade or the price of raw materials. * * * I have used the term 'segment' in defining my place in South African society because within the white section of that society - less than one fifth of the total population now, predicted to drop to one seventh by the year 2000* there is a segment preoccupied, in the interregnum, neither by plans to run away from nor merely by ways to survive physically and economically in the black state that is coming. I cannot give you numbers for this segment, but in measure of some sort of faith in the possibility of structuring society humanly, in the possession of skills and intellect to devote to this end, there is something to offer the future. How to offer it is our preoccupation. Since skills, technical and intellectual, can be bought in markets other than those of the vanquished white power, although they are important as a commodity ready to hand, they do not constitute a claim on the future. That claim rests on something else: how to offer one's self. In the eyes of the black majority which will rule, whites of former South Africa will have to redefine themselves in a new collective life within new structures. From the all-white Parliament to the all-white country club and the separate 'white' television channels, it is not a matter of blacks taking over white institutions, it is one of conceiving of institutions - from nursery schools to government departments - that reflect a societal structure vastly different from that built to the specifications of white power and privilege. This vast difference will be evident even if capitalism survives, since South Africa's capitalism, like South Africa's whites-only democracy, has been unlike anyone else's. For example, free enterprise among us is for whites only, since black capitalists may trade only, and with many limitations on their 'free' enterprise, in black ghettos. In cities the kind of stores and services offered will change when the life-style of the majority - black, working-class - establishes the authority of the enfranchised demand in place of the dictated demand. At present the consumer gets what the producer's racially-estimated idea of his place in life decrees to be his needs. *

Total population 1980, 23.7 million, of which 4.5 million are white. Survey of Race Relations in South Africa 1981, (ed.) M. Horrell (Johannesburg: South African Institute of Race Relations, 1982), p. 52.

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INTERREGNUM

A more equitable distribution of wealth may be enforced by laws. The hierarchy of perception that white institutions and living habits implant throughout daily experience in every white, from childhood, can be changed only by whites themselves, from within. The weird ordering of the collective life, in South Africa, has slipped its special contact lens into the eyes of whites; we actually see blacks differently, which includes not seeing, not noticing their unnatural absence, since there are so many perfectly ordinary venues of daily life - the cinema, for instance - where blacks have never been allowed in, and so one has forgotten that they could be, might be, encountered there. I am writing in my winter quarters, at an old deal table on a verandah in the sun; out of the corner of my eye I see a piece of junk mail, the brochure of a chain bookstore, assuring me of constantly expanding service and showing the staff of a newly opened branch - Ms So-and-So, Mr Such-and-Such, and (one black face) 'Gladys'. What a friendly, informal form of identification in an 'equal opportunity' enterprise! Gladys is seen by fellow workers, by the photographer who noted down names, and - it is assumed readers, quite differently from the way the white workers are seen. I gaze at her as they do ... She is simply 'Gladys', the convenient handle by which she is taken up by the white world, used and put down again, like the glass the king drinks from in Rilke's poem.* Her surname, her African name, belongs to Soweto, which her smiling white companions are less likely ever to visit than New York or London. The successfully fitted device in the eye of the beholder is something the average white South African is not conscious of, for apartheid is above all a habit; the unnatural seems natural - a far from banal illustration of Hannah Arendt's banality of evil. The segment of the white population to which I belong has become highly conscious of a dependency on distorted vision induced since childhood; and we are aware that with the inner eye we have 'seen too much to be innocent.'t But this kind of awareness, represented by white guilt in the 1950s, has been sent by us off into the sunset, since, as Czeslaw Milosz puts it, 'guilt, which is so highly developed in modern man . . . saps his belief in the value of his own perceptions and

* t

Rainer Maria Rilke, 'Ein Frauenschicksal' (A Woman's Fate), in Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by C. F. Maclntyre (Berkeley and Los Angeles, Ca.: University of California Press, 1941), p. 71. Edmundo Desnoes, Memories of Under development (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), p. 104.

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judgments',* and we have need of ours. We have to believe in our ability to find new perceptions, and our ability to judge their truth. Along with weeping over what's done, we've given up rejoicing in what Giinter Grass calls headbirths,t those Athenian armchair deliveries of the future presented to blacks by whites. Not all blacks even concede that whites can have any part in the new that cannot yet be born. An important black leader who does, Bishop Desmond Tutu,4 defines that participation: what I consider to be the place of the white man in this - popularly called the liberation struggle. I am firmly non-racial and so welcome the participation of all, both black and white, in the struggle for the new South Africa which must come whatever the cost. But I want . . . to state that at this stage the leadership of the struggle must be firmly in black hands. They must determine what will be the priorities and the strategy of the struggle. Whites unfortunately have the habit of taking over and usurping the leadership and taking the crucial decisions - largely, I suppose, because of the head start they had in education and experience . . . of this kind. The point is that however much they want to identify with blacks it is an existential fact . . . that they have not really been victims of this baneful oppression and exploitation . . . It is a divide that can't be crossed and that must give blacks a primacy in determining the course and goal of the struggle. Whites must be willing to follow.t Blacks must learn to talk; whites must learn to listen - wrote the black South African poet Mongane Wally Serote, in the seventies.§ This is the premise on which the white segment to which I belong lives its life at present. Does it sound like an abdication of the will? That is because you who live in a democracy are accustomed to exerting the right to make abstract statements of principle for which, at least, the structures of practical realisation exist; the symbolic action of the like-minded in signing a letter to a newspaper or the lobbying of Congress is a reminder of constitutional rights to be invoked. For us, Tutu's premise enjoins a rousing of *

Native Realm: A Search for Self-Definition, translated by Catherine S. Leach (New York: Doubleday, 1968), p. 125. t Headbirths, or The Germans are Dying Out, translated by Ralph Manheim (London: Seeker & Warburg; New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; 1982). t Bishop Desmond Tutu, letter to Frontline (Johannesburg), vol. 2, no. 5 (April 1982), p. 4. § Paraphrased from the poem 'Ofay-watcher, throbs - phase', in YakhaV Inkomo (Johannesburg: Renoster, 1972), pp. 50-1.

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the will, a desperate shaking into life of the faculty of rebellion against unjust laws that has been outlawed by the dying power, and faculties of renewal that often are rebuffed by the power that is struggling to emerge. The rider Desmond Tutu didn't add to his statement is that although white support is expected to be active, it is also expected that whites' different position in the still-standing structures of the old society will require actions that, while complementary to those of blacks, must be different from the blacks'. Whites are expected to find their own forms of struggle, which can only sometimes coincide with those of blacks. That there can be, at least, the coincident co-operation is reassuring; that, at least, should be a straightforward form of activism. But it is not; for in this time of morbid symptoms there are contradictions within the black liberation struggle itself, based not only, as would be expected, on the opposing ideological alignments of the world outside, but also on the moral confusion of claims - on land, on peoples - from the pre-colonial past in relation to the unitary state the majority of blacks and the segment of whites are avowed to. So, for whites, it is not simply a matter of followthe-leader behind blacks; it's taking on, as blacks do, choices to be made out of confusion, empirically, pragmatically, ideologically, or idealistically about the practical moralities of the struggle. This is the condition, imposed by history, if you like, in those areas of action where black and white participation coincides. I am at a public meeting at the Johannesburg City Hall one night, after working at this paper during the day. The meeting is held under the auspices of the Progressive Federal Party, the official opposition in the all-white South African parliament. The issue is a deal being made between the South African government and the kingdom of Swaziland whereby three thousand square miles of South African territory and 850,000 South African citizens, part of the Zulu 'homeland' KwaZulu, would be given to Swaziland. The principal speakers are Chief Gatsha Buthelezi, leader of 5.5 million Zulus, Bishop Desmond Tutu, and Mr Ray Swart, a white liberal and a leader of the Progressive Federal Party. Chief Buthelezi has consistently refused to take so-called independence for KwaZulu, but - although declaring himself for the banned African National Congress - by accepting all stages of so-called self-government up to the final one, has transgressed the non-negotiable principle of the African National Congress, a unitary South Africa. Bishop Tutu upholds the principle of a unitary South Africa. The Progressive Federal Party's constitution provides for a federal structure in a new, non-racial South Africa, recognising as de facto entities the 'homelands' whose creation by the apartheid government the party nevertheless opposes. Also

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on the platform are members of the Black Sash, the white women's organisation that has taken a radical stand as a white ally of the black struggle; these women support a unitary South Africa. In the audience of about two thousand, a small number of whites is lost among exuberant, ululating, applauding Zulus. Order - and what's more, amicability - is kept by Buthelezi's marshals, equipped, beneath the garb of a private militia drawn from his tribal Inkatha movement, with Zulu muscle in place of guns. What is Bishop Tutu doing here? He doesn't recognise the 'homelands'. What are the Black Sash women doing here? They don't recognise the 'homelands'. What is the Progressive Federal Party doing - a party firmly dedicated to constitutional action only - hosting a meeting where the banned black liberation salute - and battle cry - 'Amandla! Awethuf: Tower - to the people!' - is shaking the columns of municipal doric, and a black man's tribal army instead of the South African police is keeping the peace? What am I doing here, applauding Gatsha Buthelezi and Ray Swart? I don't recognise the homelands nor do I support a federal South Africa. I was there - they were there - because, removed from its areas of special interest (KwaZulu's 'national' concern with land and people belonging to the Zulus), the issue was yet another government device to buy off surrounding states that give shelter to South African freedom fighters, and create support for a proposed 'constellation' of southern African states gathered protectively around the present South African regime; finally, to dispossess black South Africans of their South African citizenship, thus reducing the ratio of black to white population. Yet the glow of my stinging palms cooled; what a paradox I had accommodated in myself! Moved by a display of tribal loyalty when I believe in black unity, applauding a 'homelands' leader, above all, scandalised by the excision of part of a 'homeland' from South Africa when the 'homelands' policy is itself the destruction of the country as an entity. But these are the confusions blacks have to live with, and if I am making any claim to accompany them beyond apartheid, so must I. The state of interregnum is a state of Hegel's disintegrated consciousness,5 of contradictions. It is from its internal friction that energy somehow must be struck, for us whites; energy to break the vacuum of which we are subconsciously aware, for however hated and shameful the collective life of apartheid and its structures has been to us, there is, now, the unadmitted fear of being without structures. The interregnum is not only between

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two social orders but also between two identities, one known and discarded, the other unknown and undetermined. Whatever the human cost of the liberation struggle, whatever 'Manichaean poisons'* must be absorbed as stimulants in the interregnum, the black knows he will be at home, at last, in the future. The white who has declared himself or herself for that future, who belongs to the white segment that was never at home in white supremacy, does not know whether he will find his home at last. It is assumed, not only by racists, that this depends entirely on the willingness of blacks to let him in; but we, if we live out our situation consciously, proceeding from the Pascalian wager that the home of the white African exists, know that this depends also on our finding our way there out of the perceptual clutter of curled photographs of master and servant relationships, the 78 rpms of history repeating the conditioning of the past. A black man I may surely call my friend because we have survived a time when he did not find it possible to accept a white's friendship, and a time when I didn't think I could accept that he should decide when that time was past, said to me this year, 'Whites have to learn to struggle.' It was not an admonition but a sincere encouragement. Expressed in political terms, the course of our friendship, his words and his attitude, signify the phasing out or passing usefulness of the extreme wing of the Black Consciousness movement, with its separatism of the past ten years, and the return to the tenets of the most broadly based and prestigious of black movements, the banned African National Congress: non-racialism, belief that race oppression is part of the class struggle, and recognition that it is possible for whites to opt out of class and race privilege and identify with black liberation. My friend was not, needless to say, referring to those whites, from Abram Fischer to Helen Joseph and Neil Aggett,6 who have risked and in some cases lost their lives in the political struggle with apartheid. It would be comfortable to assume that he was not referring, either, to the articulate outriders of the white segment, intellectuals, writers, lawyers, students, church and civil rights progressives, who keep the whips of protest cracking. But I know he was, after all, addressing those of us belonging to the outriders on whose actions the newspapers report and the secret police keep watch, as we prance back and forth ever closer to the fine line between being concerned citizens and social revolutionaries. Perhaps the encouragement was meant for us as well as the base of the segment - those in the audience but not up on the platform, young people and their parents' generation, who must look for some effective way, in the living of their own personal lives, to join the struggle for liberation from racism. For a long time, such whites have felt that we are doing all we can, short *

Czeslaw Milosz, The Accuser', in Bells in Winter (New York: The Ecco Press, 1978), p. 62.

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of violence - a terrible threshold none of us is willing to cross, though aware that all this may mean is that it will be left to blacks to do so. But now blacks are asking a question to which every white must have a personal answer, on an issue that cannot be dealt with by a show of hands at a meeting or a signature to a petition; an issue that comes home and enters every family. Blacks are now asking why whites who believe apartheid is something that must be abolished, not defended, continue to submit to army call-up. We whites have assumed that army service was an example of Czeslaw Milosz's 'powerlessness of the individual involved in a mechanism that works independently of his will.'* If you refuse military service your only options are to leave the country or go to prison. Conscientious objection is not recognised in South Africa at present; legislation may establish it in some form soon, but if this is to be, is working as an army clerk not functioning as part of the war machine? These are reasons enough for all - except a handful of men who choose prison on religious rather than on political grounds - to get into the South African army despite their opposition to apartheid.7 These are not reasons enough for them to do so, on the condition on which blacks can accept whites' dedication to mutual liberation. Between black and white attitudes to struggle there stands the overheard remark of a young black woman: T break the law because I am alive.' We whites have still to thrust the spade under the roots of our lives; for most of us, including myself, struggle is still something that has a place. But for blacks it is everywhere or nowhere. What is poetry which does not save nations or peoples? Czeslaw Milosz8 I have already delineated my presence here on the scale of a minority within a minority. Now I shall reduce my claim to significance still further. A white; a dissident white; a white writer. If I were not a writer, I should not have been invited here at all, so I must presume that although the problems of a white writer are of no importance compared with the liberation of 23.5 million black people, the peculiar relation of the writer in South Africa as interpreter, both to South Africans and to the world, of a society in struggle, makes the narrow corridor I can lead you down one in which doors fly open on the tremendous happening experienced by blacks. For longer than the first half of this century the experience of blacks in South Africa was known to the world as it was interpreted by whites. The first widely read imaginative works exploring the central fact of South * Native Realm, p. 120.

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African life - racism - were written in the 1920s by whites, William Plomer9 and Sarah Gertrude Millin.10 If blacks were the subjects but not the readers of books written about them, then neither white nor black read much of what have since become the classics of early black literature - the few works of Herbert and Rolfes Dhlomo,11 Thomas Mofolo, and Sol Plaatje. Their moralistic essays dealt with contemporary black life, but their fiction was mainly historical, a desperate attempt to secure, in art forms of an imposed culture, an identity and history discounted and torn up by that culture. In the 1950s urban blacks - Ezekiel Mphahlele, Lewis Nkosi, Can Themba, Bloke Modisane, following Peter Abrahams12 - began to write in English only, and about the urban industrial experience in which black and white chafed against one another across colour barriers. The work of these black writers interested both black and white at that improvised level known as intellectual, in South Africa: 'aware' would be a more accurate term, designating awareness that the white middle-class establishment was not, as it claimed, the paradigm of South African life, and white culture was not the definitive South African culture. Somewhere at the black writers' elbows, as they wrote, was the joggle of independence coming to one colonised country after another, north of South Africa. But they wrote ironically of their lives under oppression; as victims, not fighters. And even those black writers who were political activists, such as the novelist Alex La Guma and the poet Dennis Brutus, made of their ideologicallychannelled bitterness not more than the Aristotelian catharsis, creating in the reader empathy with the oppressed rather than rousing rebellion against repression. The fiction of white writers also produced the Aristotelian effect - and included in the price of hardback or paperback a catharsis of white guilt, for writer and reader. (It was at this stage, incidentally, that reviewers abroad added their dime's worth of morbid symptoms to our own by creating 'courageous' as a criterion of literary value for South African writers . . .) The subject of both black and white writers - which was the actual entities of South African life instead of those defined by separate entrances for white and black - was startlingly new and important; whatever any writer, black or white, could dare to explore there was considered ground gained for advance in the scope of all writers. There had been no iconoclastic tradition; only a single novel, William Plomer's Turbott Wolfe, written thirty years before, whose understanding of what our subject really was was still a decade ahead of our time when he phrased the total apothegm: The native question - it's not a question, it's an answer.'13 In the 1970s black writers began to give that answer - for themselves. It had been vociferous in the consciousness of resistance politics, manifest in political action - black mass organisations, the African National Congress, the Pan-Africanist Congress, and others - in the 1960s. But except at the

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oral folk-literature level of 'freedom' songs, it was an answer that had not come, yet, from the one source that had never been in conquered territory, not even when industrialisation conscripted where military conquest had already devastated: the territory of the subconscious, where a people's own particular way of making sense and dignity of life - the base of its culture, remains unget-at-able. Writers, and not politicians, are its spokespeople. # ** With the outlawing of black political organisations, the banning of freedom songs and platform speeches, there came from blacks a changed attitude towards culture, and towards literature as verbal, easily-accessible culture. Many black writers had been in conflict - and challenged by political activists: are you going to fight or write? Now they were told, in the rhetoric of the time: there is no conflict if you make your pen our people's weapon. The Aristotelian catharsis, relieving black self-pity and white guilt, was clearly not the mode in which black writers could give the answer black resistance required from them. The iconoclastic mode, though it had its function where race fetishists had set up their china idols in place of 'heathen' wooden ones, was too ironic and detached, other-directed. Black people had to be brought back to themselves. Black writers arrived, out of their own situation, at Brecht's discovery: their audience needed to be educated to be astonished at the circumstances under which they functioned* They began to show blacks that their living conditions are their story. South Africa does not lack its Chernyshevskys to point out that the highroad of history is not the sidewalks of fashionable white Johannesburg's suburban shopping malls any more than it was that of the Nevsky Prospect.t In the bunks of migratory labourers, the 4 a.m. queues between one-room family and factory, the drunken dreams argued round braziers, is the history of blacks' defeat by conquest, the scale of the lack of value placed on them by whites, the degradation of their own acquiescence in that value; the salvation of revolt is there, too, a match dropped by the builders of every ghetto, waiting to be struck. The difficulty, even boredom, many whites experience when reading stories or watching plays by blacks in which, as they say, 'nothing happens', is due to the fact that the experience conveyed is not 'the development of actions' but 'the * t

Walter Benjamin, 'What is Epic Theatre?' in Illuminations, edited with an introduction by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn (London: Fontana, 1973), p. 152. [Gordimer's italics.] Nikolai G. Chernyshevsky, Polnoye sobraniye sochinenii [v. 10-i tomakh (St Petersburg, 1906)], vol. 8. Paraphrased from the translated quotation, The highroad of History is not the sidewalk of the Nevsky Prospect', in Tibor Szamuely, The Russian Tradition, edited with an introduction by Robert Conquest (London: Seeker & Warburg, 1974), p. 167.

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representation of conditions',* a mode of artistic revelation and experience for those in whose life dramatic content is in its conditions. This mode of writing was the beginning of the black writer's function as a revolutionary; it was also the beginning of a conception of himself differing from that of the white writer's self-image. The black writer's consciousness of himself as a writer comes now from his participation in those living conditions; in the judgment of his people, that is what makes him a writer - the authority of the experience itself, not the way he perceives it and transforms it into words. Tenets of criticism are accordingly based on the critic's participation in those same living conditions, not on his ability to judge how well the writer has achieved 'the disposition of natural material to a formal end that shall enlighten the imagination' - this definition of art by Anthony Burgesst would be regarded by many blacks as arising from premises based on white living conditions and the thought patterns these determine: an arabesque of smoke from an expensive cigar. If we have our Chernyshevskys we are short on Herzens. Literary standards and standards of human justice are hopelessly confused in the interregnum. Bad enough that in the case of white South African writers some critics at home and abroad are afraid to reject sensationalism and crass banality of execution so long as the subject of a work is 'courageous'. For black writers the syllogism of talent goes like this: all blacks are brothers; all brothers are equal; therefore you cannot be a better writer than I am. The black writer who questions the last proposition is betraying the first two.14 As a fellow writer, I myself find it difficult to accept, even for the cause of black liberation to which I am committed as a white South African citizen, that a black writer of imaginative power, whose craftsmanship is equal to what he has to say, must not be regarded above someone who has emerged - admirably - from political imprisonment with a scrap of paper on which there is jotted an alliterative arrangement of protest slogans. For me, the necessity for the black writer to find imaginative modes equal to his existential reality goes without question. But I cannot accept that he must deny, as proof of solidarity with his people's struggle, the torturous inner qualities of prescience and perception that will always differentiate him from others and that make of him - a writer. I cannot accept, either, that he should have served on him, as the black writer now has, an orthodoxy - a kit of emotive phrases, an unwritten index of subjects, a typology. The problem is that agitprop, not recognised under that or any other name, has become the first contemporary art form that many black South Africans feel they can call their own. It fits their anger; and this is taken as proof that it is an organic growth of black creation freeing itself, instead of the old shell that it is, inhabited many times by the anger of others. I know * Benjamin, 'What is Epic Theatre?', p. 152. t 'Creativity', Observer (London), 9 May 1982, p. 27.

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that agitprop binds the artist with the means by which it aims to free the minds of the people. I can see, now, how often it thwarts both the black writer's common purpose to master his art and revolutionary purpose to change the nature of art, create new norms and forms out of and for a people re-creating themselves. But how can my black fellow writer agree with me, even admit the conflict I set up in him by these statements? There are those who secretly believe, but few who would assert publicly, with Gabriel Garcia Marquez: The writer's duty - his revolutionary duty, if you like - is to write well.'15 The black writer in South Africa feels he has to accept the criteria of his people because in no other but the community of black deprivation is he in possession of selfhood. It is only through unreserved, exclusive identification with blacks that he can break the alienation of having been 'other' for nearly 350 years in the white-ordered society, and only through submitting to the beehive category of 'cultural worker', programmed, that he can break the alienation of the artist/elitist in the black mass of industrial workers and peasants. And, finally, he can toss the conflict back into my lap with Camus's words: 'Is it possible . . . to be in history while still referring to values which go beyond it?'* The black writer is 'in history' and its values threaten to force out the transcendent ones of art. The white, as writer and South African, does not know his place 'in history' at this stage, in this time. * ** There are two absolutes in my life. One is that racism is evil - human damnation in the Old Testament sense, and no compromises, as well as sacrifices, should be too great in the fight against it. The other is that a writer is a being in whose sensibility is fused what Lukacs calls 'the duality of inwardness and outside world',t and he must never be asked to sunder this union. The coexistence of these absolutes often seems irreconcilable within one life, for me. In another country, another time, they would present no conflict because they would operate in unrelated parts of existence; in South Africa now they have to be co-ordinates for which the coupling must be found. The morality of life and the morality of art have broken out of their categories in social flux. If you cannot reconcile them, they cannot be kept from one another's throats, within you. For me, Lukacs's 'divinatory-intuitive grasping of the unattained and therefore inexpressible meaning of life't is what a writer, poorly evolved for the task as he is, is made for. As fish that swim under the weight of * t t

Garnets 1942-51, p. 104. The Theory of the Novel [as quoted by Walter Benjamin, in the translation by Harry Zohn: see 'The Storyteller', Illuminations, p. 99]. Ibid. [Both here and in the previous quotation the extracts differ somewhat from the standard translation by Anna Bostock, The Theory of the Novel (London: Merlin Press, 1971), pp. 127,129.]

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many dark fathoms look like any other fish but on careful examination are found to have no eyes, so writers, looking pretty much like other human beings, but moving deep under the surface of human lives, have at least some faculties of supra-observation and hyperperception not known to others. If a writer does not go down and use these - why, he's just a blind fish. Exactly - says the new literary orthodoxy: he doesn't see what is happening in the visible world, among the people, on the level of their action, where battle is done with racism every day. On the contrary, say I, he brings back with him the thematic life-material that underlies and motivates their actions. 'Art . . . lies at the heart of all events,' Joseph Brodsky writes.* It is from there, in the depths of being, that the most important intuition of revolutionary faith comes: the people know what to do, before the leaders.16 It was from that level that the yearning of black schoolchildren for a decent education was changed into a revolt in 1976; their strength came from the deep silt of repression and the abandoned wrecks of uprising that sank there before they were born. It was from that level that an action of ordinary people for their own people made a few lines low down on a newspaper page, the other day: when some migrant contract workers from one of the 'homelands' were being laid off at a factory, workers with papers of permanent residence in the 'white' area asked to be dismissed in their place, since the possession of papers meant they could at least work elsewhere, whereas the migrant workers would be sent back to the 'homelands', jobless. 'Being an "author" has been unmasked as a role that, whether conformist or not, remains inescapably responsible to a given social order.' Nowhere in the world is Susan Sontag's statement! truer than in South Africa. The white writer has to make the decision whether to remain responsible to the dying white order - and even as dissident, if he goes no further than that position, he remains negatively within the white order or to declare himself positively as answerable to the order struggling to be born. And to declare himself for the latter is only the beginning; as it is for whites in a less specialised position, only more so. He has to try to find a way to reconcile the irreconcilable within himself, establish his relation to the culture of a new kind of posited community, non-racial but conceived with and led by blacks. I have entered into this commitment with trust and a sense of discovering reality, coming alive in a new way - I believe the novels and stories I have written in the last seven or eight years reflect this - for a South Africa in which white middle-class values and mores contradict realities has long * t

'Homage to Yalta', in A Part of Speech (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1980), p. 12. From 'Approaching Artaud', in Under the Sign of Saturn (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1980), p. 14.

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become the unreality, to me. Yet I admit that I am, indeed, determined to find my place 'in history' while still referring as a writer to the values that are beyond history. I shall never give them up. Can the artist go through the torrent with his precious bit of talent tied up in a bundle on his head? I don't know yet. I can only report that the way to begin entering history out of a dying white regime is through setbacks, encouragements and rebuffs from others, and frequent disappointments in oneself. A necessary learning process . . . I take a break from writing. I am in a neighbouring black country at a conference on Culture and Resistance.11 It is being held outside South Africa because exiled artists and those of us who still live and work in South Africa cannot meet at home. Some white artists have not come because, not without reason, they fear the consequences of being seen, by South African secret police spies, in the company of exiles who belong to political organisations banned in South Africa, notably the African National Congress; some are not invited because the organisers regard their work and political views as reactionary. I am dubbed the blacks' darling by some whites back home because I have been asked to give the keynote address at a session devoted to literature; but I wonder if those who think me favoured would care to take the flak I know will be coming at me from those corners of the hall where black separatists group. They are here not so much out of democratic right as of black solidarity; paradoxically, since the conference is in itself a declaration that in the conviction of participants and organisers the liberation struggle and post-apartheid culture are non-racial. There is that bond of living conditions that lassos all blacks within a loyalty containing, without constraining or resolving, bitter political differences. Do I think white writers should write about blacks? The artless question from the floor disguises both a personal attack on my work and an edict publicly served upon white writers by the same orthodoxy that prescribes for blacks. In the case of whites, it proscribes the creation of black characters - and by the same token, flipped head-to-tails, with which the worth of black writers is measured: the white writer does not share the total living conditions of blacks, therefore he must not write about them. There are some whites - not writers, I believe - in the hall who share this view. In the ensuing tense exchange I reply that there are whole areas of human experience, in work situations on farms, in factories, in the city, for example - where black and white have been observing one another and interacting for nearly

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350 years. I challenge my challenger to deny that there are things we know about each other that are never spoken, but are there to be written - and received with the amazement and consternation, on both sides, of having been found out. Within those areas of experience, limited but intensely revealing, there is every reason why white should create black and black white characters. For myself, I have created black characters in my fiction: whether I have done so successfully or not is for the reader to decide. What's certain is that there is no representation of our social reality without that strange area of our lives in which we have knowledge of one another. I do not acquit myself so honestly a little later, when persecution of South African writers by banning is discussed. Someone links this with the persecution of writers in the Soviet Union, and a young man leaps to reply that the percentage of writers to population is higher in the Soviet Union than in any other part of the world and that Soviet writers work 'in a trench of peace and security'. The aptness of the bizarre image, the hell for the haven he wishes to illustrate, brings no smiles behind hands among us; beyond the odd word-substitution is, indeed, a whole arsenal of tormented contradictions that could explode the conference. Someone says, out of silence, quietly and distinctly: 'Bullshit.' There is silence again. I don't take the microphone and tell the young man: there is not a contrast to be drawn between the Soviet Union's treatment of writers and that of South Africa, there is a close analogy - South Africa bans and silences writers just as the Soviet Union does, although we do not have resident censors in South African publishing houses and dissident writers are not sent to mental hospitals. I am silent. I am silent because, in the debates of the interregnum, any criticism of the communist system is understood as a defence of the capitalist system which has brought forth the pact of capitalism and racism that is apartheid, with its treason trials to match Stalin's trials, its detentions of dissidents to match Soviet detentions, its banishment and brutal uprooting of communities and individual lives to match, if not surpass, the gulag. Repression in South Africa has been and is being lived through; repression elsewhere is an account in a newspaper, book, or film. The choice, for blacks, cannot be distanced into any kind of objectivity: they believe in the existence of the lash they feel. Nothing could be less than better than what they have known as the 'peace and security' of capitalism.* *

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I was a coward and no doubt often shall be one again, in my actions and statements as a citizen of the interregnum; it is a place of shifting ground, forecast for me in the burning slag heaps of coal mines we children used to ride across with furiously pumping bicycle pedals and flying hearts, in the Transvaal town where I was born. And now the time has come to say I believe you stand on shifting ground with me, across ten thousand miles, not because I have brought it with me, but because in some strange pilgrimage through the choices of our age and their consequences the democratic left of the Western world has arrived by many planned routes and plodding detours at the same unforeseen destination. It seems to be an abandoned siding. There was consternation when, early this year, Susan Sontag had the great courage and honesty publicly to accuse herself and other American intellectuals of the left of having been afraid to condemn the repression committed by communist regimes because this was seen as an endorsement of America's war on Vietnam and collusion with brutish rightist regimes in Latin America.* This moral equivocation draws parallel with mine at the writer's congress, far away in Africa, she has given me the courage, at second hand, to confess. Riding handlebar to handlebar across the coal slag, both equivocations reveal the same fear. What is its meaning? It is fear of the abyss, of the greater interregnum of human hopes and spirit where against Sartre's socialism as the 'horizon of the world' is silhouetted the chained outline of Poland's Solidarity, and all around, in the ditches of El Salvador, in the prisons of Argentina and South Africa, in the roofless habitations of Beirut, are the victims of Western standards of humanity. I lie and you lie not because the truth is that Western capitalism has turned out to be just and humane, after all; but because we feel we have nothing to offer, now, except the rejection of it. Because communism since 1917 has turned out not to be just or humane either, has failed this promise even more cruelly than capitalism, have we to tell the poor and dispossessed of the world there is nothing else to be done than to turn back from the communist bosses to the capitalist bosses? In South Africa's rich capitalist state stuffed with Western finance, fifty thousand black children a year die from malnutrition and malnutrition-related diseases, while the West piously notes that communist states cannot provide their people with meat and butter. In two decades in South Africa, three million black people have been ejected from the context of their lives, forcibly removed from homes and jobs and 'resettled' in arid, undeveloped areas by decree of a white government supported by Western capital. It is difficult to point out to black South Africans that the forms of Western capitalism are changing towards a *

Text of speech by Susan Sontag, 6 February 1982, Town Hall, New York (Nation, 27 February 1982, pp. 230-1).

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broad social justice in the example of countries like Sweden, Denmark, Holland, and Austria, with their mixed welfare economies, when all black South Africans know of Western capitalism is political and economic terror. And this terror is not some relic of the colonial past; it is being financed now by Western democracies - concurrently with Western capitalist democracy's own evolution towards social justice. The fact is, black South Africans and whites like myself no longer believe in the ability of Western capitalism to bring about social justice where we live. We see no evidence of that possibility in our history or our living present. Whatever the Western democracies have done for themselves, they have failed and are failing, in their great power and influence, to do for us. This is the answer to those who ask, 'Why call for an alternative left? Why not an alternative capitalism?' Show us an alternative capitalism working from without for real justice in our country. What are the conditions attached to the International Monetary Fund loan of approximately $1 billion18 that would oblige the South African government to stop population removals, to introduce a single standard of unsegregated education for all, to reinstate millions of black South Africans deprived of citizenship?* If the injustices of communism cannot be reformed, must we assume that those of capitalism's longer history, constantly monitored by the compassionate hand of liberalism, can be? Must we accept that the workers of the Third World may hope only to be manipulated a little for their betterment and never to attain worker self-rule because this has been defeated in Poland by those very people in power who professed to believe in it? The dictum I quoted earlier carried, I know, its supreme irony: most leaders in the communist world have betrayed the basic intuition of democracy, that 'the people know what to do' - which is perhaps why Susan Sontag saw communism as fascism with a human face. But I think we can, contrary to her view, 'distinguish' among communisms, and I am sure, beyond the heat of an extemporary statement, so does she. If the US and Sweden are not Botha's South Africa, was Allende's Chile East Germany, though both were in the socialist camp? We must 'distinguish' to the point where we take up the real import of the essential challenge Susan Sontag levelled - to love truth enough, to pick up the blood-dirtied, shamed cause of the left, and attempt to re-create it in accordance with what it was meant to be, not what sixty-five years of human power-perversion have made of it. If, as she rightly says, once we did not understand the nature of communist tyranny - now we do, just as we have always understood at first * The US has a 20 per cent slice under the weighted voting system of the IMF and so outvoted all loan opponents combined. The US consequently surely has corresponding responsibility for how the money South Africa receives is spent. Is there any evidence that this responsibility is being taken up?

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hand the nature of capitalist tyranny. This is not a Manichaean equation which is god and which the devil is not a question the evidence could decide, anyway - and it does not license withdrawal and hopelessness. We have surely learned by now something of where socialism goes wrong, which of its precepts are deadly dangerous and lead, in practice, to fascist control of labour and total suppression of individual freedom. Will the witchcraft of modern times not be exorcised, eventually, by this knowledge? If fascist rule is possible within the framework of communist society, does this not mean we must apply the kind of passion that goes into armaments research to research a socialism that progressively reduces that possibility? Let the West call us traitors once again, and the East deride us as revisionists. Is it really inconceivable that socialism can ever be attained without horrors? Certainly Lech Walesa and his imprisoned followers don't find it so. As for capitalism, whatever its reforms, its avowed self-perpetuation of advancement for the many by creation of wealth for the few does not offer any hope to fulfil the ultimate promise of equality, the human covenant man entered into with himself in the moment he did the impossible, stood up, a new self, on two feet instead of four. In the interregnum in which we co-exist, the American left - disillusioned by the failure of communism needs to muster with us of the Third World - living evidence of the failure of capitalism - the cosmic obstinacy to believe in and work towards the possibility of an alternative left, a democracy without economic or military terror. If we cannot, the possibility itself will die out, for our age, and who knows when, after what even bloodier age, it will be rediscovered. There is no forgetting how we could live if only we could find the way. We must continue to be tormented by the ideal. Its possibility must be there for peoples to attempt to put into practice, to begin over and over again, wherever in the world it has never been tried, or has failed. This is where your responsibility to the Third World meets mine. Without the will to tramp towards that possibility, no relations of whites, of the West, with the West's formerly subject peoples can ever be free of the past, because the past, for them, was the jungle of Western capitalism, not the light the missionaries thought they brought with them.

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Notes 1 Given as the William James Lecture, New York University Institute of the Humanities, 14 October 1982. First published in a slightly different version, New York Review of Books, vol. 29 nos. 21 and 22 (20 January 1983), pp. 21-2, 24-9. 2 July's People (London: Jonathan Cape; New York: Viking; Johannesburg: Ravan Press; 1981). 3 The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, translated by Michael Henry Heim (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), p. 87. 4 In 1984 the second South African to win the Nobel Prize for Peace. 5 Gordimer's source for this was Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), p. 114. See her footnote, 'Relevance and Commitment', p. 136. 6 Dr Neil Aggett, Transvaal organiser of the African Food and Canning Workers' Union, was detained on 27 November 1981, and died in detention on 5 February 1982. Though the inquest brought evidence of extraordinary brutality and torture during his detention, the magistrate found his death not caused by any act or omission on the part of the police. 7 This is something which changed as the decade progressed. For Gordimer's remarks on the growth of a small, but significant resistance to army service among whites, see her 'Letter from Johannesburg, 1985'. 8 From 'Dedication', Selected Poems (New York: The Ecco Press, 1980), p. 45. 9 William Plomer, Turbott Wolfe (London: The Hogarth Press, 1925; New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1926; reprint, Johannesburg: Donker, 1980). 10 Sarah Gertrude Millin, God's Step-Children (London: Constable; New York: Boni & Liveright; 1924); reprint, introduced by Tony Voss (Johannesburg: Donker, 1986). 11 The Dhlomo brothers are among the major black South African writers of this century, though their legacy has been largely ignored until recently. Rolfes Dhlomo wrote mainly in Zulu, but for his one novel in English, see R. R. R. Dhlomo, An African Tragedy (Lovedale: Lovedale Press, [1928]). For Herbert Dhlomo, see H. I. E. Dhlomo, Collected Works, (eds.) N. Visser and T. Couzens (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1985). 12 For representative works of the time by these writers, see Mphahlele, Down Second Avenue (1959; London: Faber; New York: Doubleday; 1971); Nkosi, Home and Exile (1965; London and New York: Longman, 1983); Themba, The Will to Die (London: Heinemann, 1972; Cape Town: David Philip, 1982), and The World of Can Themba, (ed.) E. Patel (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1985); Modisane, Blame Me On History (London: Thames & Hudson; New York: Dutton; 1963; Johannesburg: Donker, 1986); Abrahams, Mine Boy (1946; New York: Macmillan, 1970; London: Heinemann, 1976). See also 'Censored, Banned, Gagged', n. 6, above, and introduction to 'One Man Living Through It'. 13 Paraphrased from Turbott Wolfe (1925), p. 122; (1980), p. 65. 14 Again, this is something which has changed to some extent since Gordimer gave this lecture. For her account of a renewal of aesthetic preoccupations in black writing in the mid-1980s, see 'The Essential Gesture'. 15 In Fragrance of Guava, Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza in conversation with Gabriel Garcia Marquez, translated by Ann Wright (London: Verso, 1983), p. 59. 16 This thought, deriving from Rosa Luxemburg, forms a significant motif in Burger's Daughter.

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17 Held in Gaborone, Botswana, July 1982. Gordimer gave a version of 'Relevance and Commitment' at this conference. 18 This was a loan given to South Africa by the IMF in 1982. With regard to Gordimer's remarks which follow, after the outcry over the loan the United States imposed restrictions on money going to South Africa via the IMF.

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9.5

CAN THE SUBALTERN SPEAK? Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak From Gary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (eds) Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, University of Illinois Press, 1988, 271-313

An understanding of contemporary relations of power, and of the Western intellectual's role within them, requires an examination of the intersection of a theory of representation and the political economy of global capitalism. A theory of representation points, on the one hand, to the domain of ideology, meaning, and subjectivity, and, on the other hand, to the domain of politics, the state, and the law.

The original title of this paper was "Power, Desire, Interest."1 Indeed, whatever power these meditations command may have been earned by a politically interested refusal to push to the limit the founding presuppositions of my desires, as far as they are within my grasp. This vulgar threestroke formula, applied both to the most resolutely committed and to the most ironic discourse, keeps track of what Althusser so aptly named "philosophies of denegation."2 I have invoked my positionality in this awkward way so as to accentuate the fact that calling the place of the investigator into question remains a meaningless piety in many recent critiques of the sovereign subject. Thus, although I will attempt to foreground the precariousness of my position throughout, I know such gestures can never suffice. This paper will move, by a necessarily circuitous route, from a critique of current Western efforts to problematize the subject to the question of how the third-world subject is represented within Western discourse. Along the way, I will have occasion to suggest that a still more radical decentering of the subject is, in fact, implicit in both Marx and Derrida. And I will have recourse, perhaps surprisingly, to an argument that Western intellectual production is, in many ways, complicit with Western

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international economic interests. In the end, I will offer an alternative analysis of the relations between the discourses of the West and the possibility of speaking of (or for) the subaltern woman. I will draw my specific examples from the case of India, discussing at length the extraordinarily paradoxical status of the British abolition of widow sacrifice. I

Some of the most radical criticism coming out of the West today is the result of an interested desire to conserve the subject of the West, or the West as Subject. The theory of pluralized "subject-effects" gives an illusion of undermining subjective sovereignty while often providing a cover for this subject of knowledge. Although the history of Europe as Subject is narrativized by the law, political economy, and ideology of the West, this concealed Subject pretends it has "no geo-political determinations." The much-publicized critique of the sovereign subject thus actually inaugurates a Subject. I will argue for this conclusion by considering a text by two great practitioners of the critique: "Intellectuals and Power: A Conversation between Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze."3 I have chosen this friendly exchange between two activist philosophers of history because it undoes the opposition between authoritative theoretical production and the unguarded practice of conversation, enabling one to glimpse the track of ideology. The participants in this conversation emphasize the most important contributions of French poststructuralist theory: first, that the networks of power/desire/interest are so heterogeneous that their reduction to a coherent narrative is counterproductive a persistent critique is needed; and second, that intellectuals must attempt to disclose and know the discourse of society's Other. Yet the two systematically ignore the question of ideology and their own implication in intellectual and economic history. Although one of its chief presuppositions is the critique of the sovereign subject, the conversation between Foucault and Deleuze is framed by two monolithic and anonymous subjects-in-revolution: "A Maoist" (FD, 205) and "the workers' struggle" (FD, 217). Intellectuals, however, are named and differentiated; moreover, a Chinese Maoism is nowhere operative. Maoism here simply creates an aura of narrative specificity, which would be a harmless rhetorical banality were it not that the innocent appropriation of the proper name "Maoism" for the eccentric phenomenon of French intellectual "Maoism" and subsequent "New Philosophy" symptomatically renders "Asia" transparent.4 Deleuze's reference to the workers' struggle is equally problematic; it is obviously a genuflection: "We are unable to touch [power] in any point of its application without finding ourselves confronted by this diffuse mass, so that we are necessarily led ... to the desire to blow it up completely. Every

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partial revolutionary attack or defense is linked in this way to the workers' struggle" (FD, 217). The apparent banality signals a disavowal. The statement ignores the international division of labor, a gesture that often marks poststructuralist political theory.5 The invocation of the workers' struggle is baleful in its very innocence; it is incapable of dealing with global capitalism: the subject-production of worker and unemployed within nation-state ideologies in its Center; the increasing subtraction of the working class in the Periphery from the realization of surplus value and thus from "humanistic" training in consumerism; and the large-scale presence of paracapitalist labor as well as the heterogeneous structural status of agriculture in the Periphery. Ignoring the international division of labor; rendering "Asia" (and on occasion "Africa") transparent (unless the subject is ostensibly the "Third World"); reestablishing the legal subject of socialized capital - these are problems as common to much poststructuralist as to structuralist theory. Why should such occlusions be sanctioned in precisely those intellectuals who are our best prophets of heterogeneity and the Other? The link to the workers' struggle is located in the desire to blow up power at any point of its application. This site is apparently based on a simple valorization of any desire destructive of any power. Walter Benjamin comments on Baudelaire's comparable politics by way of quotations from Marx: Marx continues in his description of the conspirateurs de profession as follows: " . . . They have no other aim but the immediate one of overthrowing the existing government, and they profoundly despise the more theoretical enlightenment of the workers as to their class interests. Thus their anger - not proletarian but plebian - at the habits noirs (black coats), the more or less educated people who represent [vertreten} that side of the movement and of whom they can never become entirely independent, as they cannot of the official representatives \Reprasentanten] of the party." Baudelaire's political insights do not go fundamentally beyond the insights of these professional conspirators. . . . He could perhaps have made Flaubert's statement, "Of all of politics I understand only one thing: the revolt," his own.6 The link to the workers' struggle is located, simply, in desire. Elsewhere, Deleuze and Guattari have attempted an alternative definition of desire, revising the one offered by psychoanalysis: "Desire does not lack anything; it does not lack its object. It is, rather, the subject that is lacking in desire, or desire that lacks a fixed subject; there is no fixed subject except by repression. Desire and its object are a unity: it is the machine, as a machine of a machine. Desire is machine, the object of desire also a

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connected machine, so that the product is lifted from the process of producing, and something detaches itself from producing to product and gives a leftover to the vagabond, nomad subject."7 This definition does not alter the specificity of the desiring subject (or leftover subject-effect) that attaches to specific instances of desire or to production of the desiring machine. Moreover, when the connection between desire and the subject is taken as irrelevant or merely reversed, the subject-effect that surreptitiously emerges is much like the generalized ideological subject of the theorist. This may be the legal subject of socialized capital, neither labor nor management, holding a "strong" passport, using a "strong" or "hard" currency, with supposedly unquestioned access to due process. It is certainly not the desiring subject as Other. The failure of Deleuze and Guattari to consider the relations between desire, power, and subjectivity renders them incapable of articulating a theory of interests. In this context, their indifference to ideology (a theory of which is necessary for an understanding of interests) is striking but consistent. Foucault's commitment to "genealogical" speculation prevents him from locating, in "great names" like Marx and Freud, watersheds in some continuous stream of intellectual history.8 This commitment has created an unfortunate resistance in Foucault's work to "mere" ideological critique. Western speculations on the ideological reproduction of social relations belong to that mainstream, and it is within this tradition that Althusser writes: "The reproduction of labour power requires not only a reproduction of its skills, but also at the same time, a reproduction of its submission to the ruling ideology for the workers, and a reproduction of the ability to manipulate the ruling ideology correctly for the agents of exploitation and repression, so that they, too, will provide for the domination of the ruling class 'in and by words' [par la parole]."9 When Foucault considers the pervasive heterogeneity of power, he does not ignore the immense institutional heterogeneity that Althusser here attempts to schematize. Similarly, in speaking of alliances and systems of signs, the state and war-machines (mille plateaux), Deleuze and Guattari are opening up that very field. Foucault cannot, however, admit that a developed theory of ideology recognizes its own material production in institutionality, as well as in the "effective instruments for the formation and accumulation of knowledge" (PK, 102). Because these philosophers seem obliged to reject all arguments naming the concept of ideology as only schematic rather than textual, they are equally obliged to produce a mechanically schematic opposition between interest and desire. Thus they align themselves with bourgeois sociologists who fill the place of ideology with a continuistic "unconscious" or a parasubjective "culture." The mechanical relation between desire and interest is clear in such sentences as: "We never desire against our interests, because interest always follows and finds itself where desire has placed it" (FD, 215). An undifferentiated

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desire is the agent, and power slips in to create the effects of desire: "power . . . produces positive effects at the level of desire - and also at the level of knowledge" (PK, 59). This parasubjective matrix, cross-hatched with heterogeneity, ushers in the unnamed Subject, at least for those intellectual workers influenced by the new hegemony of desire. The race for "the last instance" is now between economics and power. Because desire is tacitly defined on an orthodox model, it is unitarily opposed to "being deceived." Ideology as "false consciousness" (being deceived) has been called into question by Althusser. Even Reich implied notions of collective will rather than a dichotomy of deception and undeceived desire: "We must accept the scream of Reich: no, the masses were not deceived; at a particular moment, they actually desired a fascist regime" (FD, 215). These philosophers will not entertain the thought of constitutive contradiction - that is where they admittedly part company from the Left. In the name of desire, they reintroduce the undivided subject into the discourse of power. Foucault often seems to conflate "individual" and "subject";10 and the impact on his own metaphors is perhaps intensified in his followers. Because of the power of the word "power," Foucault admits to using the "metaphor of the point which progressively irradiates its surroundings." Such slips become the rule rather than the exception in less careful hands. And that radiating point, animating an effectively heliocentric discourse, fills the empty place of the agent with the historical sun of theory, the Subject of Europe.11 Foucault articulates another corollary of the disavowal of the role of ideology in reproducing the social relations of production: an unquestioned valorization of the oppressed as subject, the "object being," as Deleuze admiringly remarks, "to establish conditions where the prisoners themselves would be able to speak." Foucault adds that "the masses know perfectly well, clearly" - once again the thematics of being undeceived "they know far better than [the intellectual] and they certainly say it very well" (FD, 206, 207). What happens to the critique of the sovereign subject in these pronouncements? The limits of this representationalist realism are reached with Deleuze: "Reality is what actually happens in a factory, in a school, in barracks, in a prison, in a police station" (FD, 212). This foreclosing of the necessity of the difficult task of counterhegemonic ideological production has not been salutary. It has helped positivist empiricism - the justifying foundation of advanced capitalist neocolonialism - to define its own arena as "concrete experience," "what actually happens." Indeed, the concrete experience that is the guarantor of the political appeal of prisoners, soldiers, and schoolchildren is disclosed through the concrete experience of the intellectual, the one who diagnoses the episteme.12 Neither Deleuze nor Foucault seems aware that the intellectual within socialized capital,

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brandishing concrete experience, can help consolidate the international division of labor. The unrecognized contradiction within a position that valorizes the concrete experience of the oppressed, while being so uncritical about the historical role of the intellectual, is maintained by a verbal slippage. Thus Deleuze makes this remarkable pronouncement: "A theory is like a box of tools. Nothing to do with the signifier" (FD, 208). Considering that the verbalism of the theoretical world and its access to any world defined against it as "practical" is irreducible, such a declaration helps only the intellectual anxious to prove that intellectual labor is just like manual labor. It is when signifiers are left to look after themselves that verbal slippages happen. The signifier "representation" is a case in point. In the same dismissive tone that severs theory's link to the signifier, Deleuze declares, "There is no more representation; there's nothing but action" "action of theory and action of practice which relate to each other as relays and form networks" (FD, 206-7). Yet an important point is being made here: the production of theory is also a practice; the opposition between abstract "pure" theory and concrete "applied" practice is too quick and easy.13 If this is, indeed, Deleuze's argument, his articulation of it is problematic. Two senses of representation are being run together: representation as "speaking for," as in politics, and representation as "re-presentation," as in art or philosophy. Since theory is also only "action," the theoretician does not represent (speak for) the oppressed group. Indeed, the subject is not seen as a representative consciousness (one re-presenting reality adequately). These two senses of representation - within state formation and the law, on the one hand, and in subject-predication, on the other - are related but irreducibly discontinuous. To cover over the discontinuity with an analogy that is presented as a proof reflects again a paradoxical subjectprivileging.14 Because "the person who speaks and acts . . . is always a multiplicity," no "theorizing intellectual . . . [or] party or ... union" can represent "those who act and struggle" (FD, 206). Are those who act and struggle mute, as opposed to those who act and speak (FD, 206)? These immense problems are buried in the differences between the "same" words: consciousness and conscience (both conscience in French), representation and re-presentation. The critique of ideological subjectconstitution within state formations and systems of political economy can now be effaced, as can the active theoretical practice of the "transformation of consciousness." The banality of leftist intellectuals' lists of self-knowing, politically canny subalterns stands revealed; representing them, the intellectuals represent themselves as transparent. If such a critique and such a project are not to be given up, the shifting distinctions between representation within the state and political economy, on the one hand, and within the theory of the Subject, on the

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other, must not be obliterated. Let us consider the play of vertreten (''represent" in the first sense) and darstellen ("re-present" in the second sense) in a famous passage in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, where Marx touches on "class" as a descriptive and transformative concept in a manner somewhat more complex than Althusser's distinction between class instinct and class position would allow. Marx's contention here is that the descriptive definition of a class can be a differential one - its cutting off and difference from all other classes: "in so far as millions of families live under economic conditions of existence that cut off their mode of life, their interest, and their formation from those of the other classes and place them in inimical confrontation \feindlich gagenuberstellen], they form a class."15 There is no such thing as a "class instinct" at work here. In fact, the collectivity of familial existence, which might be considered the arena of "instinct," is discontinuous with, though operated by, the differential isolation of classes. In this context, one far more pertinent to the France of the 1970s than it can be to the international periphery, the formation of a class is artificial and economic, and the economic agency or interest is impersonal because it is systematic and heterogeneous. This agency or interest is tied to the Hegelian critique of the individual subject, for it marks the subject's empty place in that process without a subject which is history and political economy. Here the capitalist is defined as "the conscious bearer [Trager] of the limitless movement of capital."16 My point is that Marx is not working to create an undivided subject where desire and interest coincide. Class consciousness does not operate toward that goal. Both in the economic area (capitalist) and in the political (world-historical agent), Marx is obliged to construct models of a divided and dislocated subject whose parts are not continuous or coherent with each other. A celebrated passage like the description of capital as the Faustian monster brings this home vividly.17 The following passage, continuing the quotation from The Eighteenth Brumaire, is also working on the structural principle of a dispersed and dislocated class subject: the (absent collective) consciousness of the small peasant proprietor class finds its "bearer" in a "representative" who appears to work in another's interest. The word "representative" here is not "darstellen"', this sharpens the contrast Foucault and Deleuze slide over, the contrast, say, between a proxy and a portrait. There is, of course, a relationship between them, one that has received political and ideological exacerbation in the European tradition at least since the poet and the sophist, the actor and the orator, have both been seen as harmful. In the guise of a post-Marxist description of the scene of power, we thus encounter a much older debate: between representation or rhetoric as tropology and as persuasion. Darstellen belongs to the first constellation, vertreten - with stronger suggestions of substitution - to the second. Again, they are related, but running them together, especially in order to say that

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beyond both is where oppressed subjects speak, act, and know for themselves, leads to an essentialist, Utopian politics. Here is Marx's passage, using "vertreten" where the English use "represent," discussing a social "subject" whose consciousness and Vertretung (as much a substitution as a representation) are dislocated and incoherent: The small peasant proprietors "cannot represent themselves; they must be represented. Their representative must appear simultaneously as their master, as an authority over them, as unrestricted governmental power that protects them from the other classes and sends them rain and sunshine from above. The political influence [in the place of the class interest, since there is no unified class subject] of the small peasant proprietors therefore finds its last expression [the implication of a chain of substitutions - Vertretungen - is strong here] in the executive force [Exekutivgewalt - less personal in German] subordinating society to itself." Not only does such a model of social indirection - necessary gaps between the source of "influence" (in this case the small peasant proprietors), the "representative" (Louis Napoleon), and the historical-political phenomenon (executive control) - imply a critique of the subject as individual agent but a critique even of the subjectivity of a collective agency. The necessarily dislocated machine of history moves because "the identity of the interests" of these proprietors "fails to produce a feeling of community, national links, or a political organization." The event of representation as Vertretung (in the constellation of rhetoric-aspersuasion) behaves like a Darstellung (or rhetoric-as-trope), taking its place in the gap between the formation of a (descriptive) class and the nonformation of a (transformative) class: "In so far as millions of families live under economic conditions of existence that separate their mode of life . . . they form a class. In so far as ... the identity of their interests fails to produce a feeling of community . . . they do not form a class" The complicity of Vertreten and Darstellen, their identity-in-difference as the place of practice since this complicity is precisely what Marxists must expose, as Marx does in The Eighteenth Brumaire - can only be appreciated if they are not conflated by a sleight of word. It would be merely tendentious to argue that this textualizes Marx too much, making him inaccessible to the common "man," who, a victim of common sense, is so deeply placed in a heritage of positivism that Marx's irreducible emphasis on the work of the negative, on the necessity for defetishizing the concrete, is persistently wrested from him by the strongest adversary, "the historical tradition" in the air.18 I have been trying to point out that the uncommon "man," the contemporary philosopher of practice, sometimes exhibits the same positivism. The gravity of the problem is apparent if one agrees that the development of a transformative class "consciousness" from a descriptive class "position" is not in Marx a task engaging the ground level of conscious-

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SPEAK?

ness. Class consciousness remains with the feeling of community that belongs to national links and political organizations, not to that other feeling of community whose structural model is the family. Although not identified with nature, the family here is constellated with what Marx calls "natural exchange," which is, philosophically speaking, a "placeholder" for use value.19 "Natural exchange" is contrasted to "intercourse with society," where the word "intercourse" (Verkehr) is Marx's usual word for "commerce." This "intercourse" thus holds the place of the exchange leading to the production of surplus value, and it is in the area of this intercourse that the feeling of community leading to class agency must be developed. Full class agency (if there were such a thing) is not an ideological transformation of consciousness on the ground level, a desiring identity of the agents and their interest - the identity whose absence troubles Foucault and Deleuze. It is a contestatory replacement as well as an appropriation (a supplementation) of something that is "artificial" to begin with - "economic conditions of existence that separate their mode of life." Marx's formulations show a cautious respect for the nascent critique of individual and collective subjective agency. The projects of class consciousness and of the transformation of consciousness are discontinuous issues for him. Conversely, contemporary invocations of "libidinal economy" and desire as the determining interest, combined with the practical politics of the oppressed (under socialized capital) "speaking for themselves," restore the category of the sovereign subject within the theory that seems most to question it. No doubt the exclusion of the family, albeit a family belonging to a specific class formation, is part of the masculine frame within which Marxism marks its birth.20 Historically as well as in today's global political economy, the family's role in patriarchal social relations is so heterogeneous and contested that merely replacing the family in this problematic is not going to break the frame. Nor does the solution lie in the positivist inclusion of a monolithic collectivity of "women" in the list of the oppressed whose unfractured subjectivity allows them to speak for themselves against an equally monolithic "same system." In the context of the development of a strategic, artificial, and secondlevel "consciousness," Marx uses the concept of the patronymic, always within the broader concept of representation as Vertretung: The small peasant proprietors "are therefore incapable of making their class interest valid in their proper name [im eigenen Namen], whether through a parliament or through a convention." The absence of the nonfamilial artificial collective proper name is supplied by the only proper name "historical tradition" can offer - the patronymic itself - the Name of the Father: "Historical tradition produced the French peasants' belief that a miracle would occur, that a man named Napoleon would restore all their glory. And an individual turned up" - the untranslatable "es fand sich" (there

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found itself an individual?) demolishes all questions of agency or the agent's connection with his interest - "who gave himself out to be that man" (this pretense is, by contrast, his only proper agency) "because he carried [trdgt - the word used for the capitalist's relationship to capital] the Napoleonic Code, which commands" that "inquiry into paternity is forbidden." While Marx here seems to be working within a patriarchal metaphorics, one should note the textual subtlety of the passage. It is the Law of the Father (the Napoleonic Code) that paradoxically prohibits the search for the natural father. Thus, it is according to a strict observance of the historical Law of the Father that the formed yet unformed class's faith in the natural father is gainsaid. I have dwelt so long on this passage in Marx because it spells out the inner dynamics of Vertretung, or representation in the political context. Representation in the economic context is Darstellung, the philosophical concept of representation as staging or, indeed, signification, which relates to the divided subject in an indirect way. The most obvious passage is well known: "In the exchange relationship [Austauschverhaltnis} of commodities their exchange-value appeared to us totally independent of their usevalue. But if we subtract their use-value from the product of labour, we obtain their value, as it was just determined [bestimmt]. The common element which represents itself [sich darstellt} in the exchange relation, or the exchange value of the commodity, is thus its value."21 According to Marx, under capitalism, value, as produced in necessary and surplus labor, is computed as the representation/sign of objectified labor (which is rigorously distinguished from human activity). Conversely, in the absence of a theory of exploitation as the extraction (production), appropriation, and realization of (surplus) value as representation of labor power, capitalist exploitation must be seen as a variety of domination (the mechanics of power as such). "The thrust of Marxism," Deleuze suggests, "was to determine the problem [that power is more diffuse than the structure of exploitation and state formation] essentially in terms of interests (power is held by a ruling class defined by its interests)" (FD, 214). One cannot object to this minimalist summary of Marx's project, just as one cannot ignore that, in parts of the Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari build their case on a brilliant if "poetic" grasp of Marx's theory of the money form. Yet we might consolidate our critique in the following way: the relationship between global capitalism (exploitation in economics) and nation-state alliances (domination in geopolitics) is so macrological that it cannot account for the micrological texture of power. To move toward such an accounting one must move toward theories of ideology - of subject formations that micrologically and often erratically operate the interests that congeal the macrologies. Such theories cannot afford to overlook the category of representation in its two senses. They must note how the staging of the world in representation - its scene of writing, its

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Darstellung - dissimulates the choice of and need for "heroes," paternal proxies, agents of power - Vertretung. My view is that radical practice should attend to this double session of representations rather than reintroduce the individual subject through totalizing concepts of power and desire. It is also my view that, in keeping the area of class practice on a second level of abstraction, Marx was in effect keeping open the (Kantian and) Hegelian critique of the individual subject as agent.22 This view does not oblige me to ignore that, by implicitly defining the family and the mother tongue as the ground level where culture and convention seem nature's own way of organizing "her" own subversion, Marx himself rehearses an ancient subterfuge.23 In the context of poststructuralist claims to critical practice, this seems more recuperable than the clandestine restoration of subjective essentialism. The reduction of Marx to a benevolent but dated figure most often serves the interest of launching a new theory of interpretation. In the Foucault-Deleuze conversation, the issue seems to be that there is no representation, no signifier (Is it to be presumed that the signifier has already been dispatched? There is, then, no sign-structure operating experience, and thus might one lay semiotics to rest?); theory is a relay of practice (thus laying problems of theoretical practice to rest) and the oppressed can know and speak for themselves. This reintroduces the constitutive subject on at least two levels: the Subject of desire and power as an irreducible methodological presupposition; and the self-proximate, if not self-identical, subject of the oppressed. Further, the intellectuals, who are neither of these S/subjects, become transparent in the relay race, for they merely report on the nonrepresented subject and analyze (without analyzing) the workings of (the unnamed Subject irreducibly presupposed by) power and desire. The produced "transparency" marks the place of "interest"; it is maintained by vehement denegation: "Now this role of referee, judge, and universal witness is one which I absolutely refuse to adopt." One responsibility of the critic might be to read and write so that the impossibility of such interested individualistic refusals of the institutional privileges of power bestowed on the subject is taken seriously. The refusal of the sign-system blocks the way to a developed theory of ideology. Here, too, the peculiar tone of denegation is heard. To Jacques-Alain Miller's suggestion that "the institution is itself discursive," Foucault responds, "Yes, if you like, but it doesn't much matter for my notion of the apparatus to be able to say that this is discursive and that isn't . . . given that my problem isn't a linguistic one" (PK, 198). Why this conflation of language and discourse from the master of discourse analysis? Edward W. Said's critique of power in Foucault as a captivating and mystifying category that allows him "to obliterate the role of classes, the role of economics, the role of insurgency and rebellion," is most pertinent here.24 I add to Said's analysis the notion of the surreptitious subject of

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power and desire marked by the transparency of the intellectual. Curiously enough, Paul Bove faults Said for emphasizing the importance of the intellectual, whereas "Foucault's project essentially is a challenge to the leading role of both hegemonic and oppositional intellectuals."25 I have suggested that this "challenge" is deceptive precisely because it ignores what Said emphasizes - the critic's institutional responsibility. This S/subject, curiously sewn together into a transparency by denegations, belongs to the exploiters' side of the international division of labor. It is impossible for contemporary French intellectuals to imagine the kind of Power and Desire that would inhabit the unnamed subject of the Other of Europe. It is not only that everything they read, critical or uncritical, is caught within the debate of the production of that Other, supporting or critiquing the constitution of the Subject as Europe. It is also that, in the constitution of that Other of Europe, great care was taken to obliterate the textual ingredients with which such a subject could cathect, could occupy (invest?) its itinerary - not only by ideological and scientific production, but also by the institution of the law. However reductionistic an economic analysis might seem, the French intellectuals forget at their peril, that this entire overdetermined enterprise was in the interest of a dynamic economic situation requiring that interests, motives (desires), and power (of knowledge) be ruthlessly dislocated. To invoke that dislocation now as a radical discovery that should make us diagnose the economic (conditions of existence that separate out "classes" descriptively) as a piece of dated analytic machinery may well be to continue the work of that dislocation and unwittingly to help in securing "a new balance of hegemonic relations."26 I shall return to this argument shortly. In the face of the possibility that the intellectual is complicit in the persistent constitution of Other as the Self's shadow, a possibility of political practice for the intellectual would be to put the economic "under erasure," to see the economic factor as irreducible as it reinscribes the social text, even as it is erased, however imperfectly, when it claims to be the final determinant or the transcendental signified.27 II

The clearest available example of such epistemic violence is the remotely orchestrated, far-flung, and heterogeneous project to constitute the colonial subject as Other. This project is also the asymmetrical obliteration of the trace of that Other in its precarious Subject-ivity. It is well known that Foucault locates epistemic violence, a complete overhaul of the episteme, in the redefinition of sanity at the end of the European eighteenth century.28 But what if that particular redefinition was only a part of the narrative of history in Europe as well as in the colonies? What if the two projects of epistemic overhaul worked as dislocated and unacknowledged

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parts of a vast two-handed engine? Perhaps it is no more than to ask that the subtext of the palimpsestic narrative of imperialism be recognized as "subjugated knowledge," "a whole set of knowledges that have been disqualified as inadequate to their task or insufficiently elaborated: naive knowledges, located low down on the hierarchy, beneath the required level of cognition or scientificity" (PK, 82). This is not to describe "the way things really were" or to privilege the narrative of history as imperialism as the best version of history.29 It is, rather, to offer an account of how an explanation and narrative of reality was established as the normative one. To elaborate on this, let us consider briefly the underpinnings of the British codification of Hindu Law. First, a few disclaimers: In the United States the third-worldism currently afloat in humanistic disciplines is often openly ethnic. I was born in India and received my primary, secondary, and university education there, including two years of graduate work. My Indian example could thus be seen as a nostalgic investigation of the lost roots of my own identity. Yet even as I know that one cannot freely enter the thickets of "motivations," I would maintain that my chief project is to point out the positivist-idealist variety of such nostalgia. I turn to Indian material because, in the absence of advanced disciplinary training, that accident of birth and education has provided me with a sense of the historical canvas, a hold on some of the pertinent languages that are useful tools for a bricoleur, especially when armed with the Marxist skepticism of concrete experience as the final arbiter and a critique of disciplinary formations. Yet the Indian case cannot be taken as representative of all countries, nations, cultures, and the like that may be invoked as the Other of Europe as Self. Here, then, is a schematic summary of the epistemic violence of the codification of Hindu Law. If it clarifies the notion of epistemic violence, my final discussion of widow-sacrifice may gain added significance. At the end of the eighteenth century, Hindu law, insofar as it can be described as a unitary system, operated in terms of four texts that "staged" a four-part episteme defined by the subject's use of memory: sruti (the heard), smriti (the remembered), sastra (the learned-fromanother), and vyavahara (the performed-in-exchange). The origins of what had been heard and what was remembered were not necessarily continuous or identical. Every invocation of sruti technically recited (or reopened) the event of originary "hearing" or revelation. The second two texts - the learned and the performed - were seen as dialectically continuous. Legal theorists and practitioners were not in any given case certain if this structure described the body of law or four ways of settling a dispute. The legitimation of the polymorphous structure of legal performance, "internally" noncoherent and open at both ends, through a binary vision, is the narrative of codification I offer as an example of epistemic violence. The narrative of the stabilization and codification of Hindu law is less

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well known than the story of Indian education, so it might be well to start there.30 Consider the often-quoted programmatic lines from Macaulay's infamous "Minute on Indian Education" (1835): "We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect. To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population."31 The education of colonial subjects complements their production in law. One effect of establishing a version of the British system was the development of an uneasy separation between disciplinary formation in Sanskrit studies and the native, now alternative, tradition of Sanskrit "high culture." Within the former, the cultural explanations generated by authoritative scholars matched the epistemic violence of the legal project. I locate here the founding of the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1784, the Indian Institute at Oxford in 1883, and the analytic and taxonomic work of scholars like Arthur Macdonnell and Arthur Berriedale Keith, who were both colonial administrators and organizers of the matter of Sanskrit. From their confident utilitarian-hegemonic plans for students and scholars of Sanskrit, it is impossible to guess at either the aggressive repression of Sanskrit in the general educational framework or the increasing "feudalization" of the performative use of Sanskrit in the everyday life of Brahmanic-hegemonic India.32 A version of history was gradually established in which the Brahmans were shown to have the same intentions as (thus providing the legitimation for) the codifying British: "In order to preserve Hindu society intact [the] successors [of the original Brahmans] had to reduce everything to writing and make them more and more rigid. And that is what has preserved Hindu society in spite of a succession of political upheavals and foreign invasions."33 This is the 1925 verdict of Mahamahopadhyaya Haraprasad Shastri, learned Indian Sanskritist, a brilliant representative of the indigenous elite within colonial production, who was asked to write several chapters of a "History of Bengal" projected by the private secretary to the governor general of Bengal in 1916.34 To signal the asymmetry in the relationship between authority and explanation (depending on the race-class of the authority), compare this 1928 remark by Edward Thompson, English intellectual: "Hinduism was what it seemed to be ... It was a higher civilization that won [against it], both with Akbar and the English."35 And add this, from a letter by an English soldier-scholar in the 1890s: "The study of Sanskrit, 'the language of the gods' has afforded me intense enjoyment during the last 25 years of my life in India, but it has not, I am thankful to say, led me, as it has some, to give up a hearty belief in our own grand religion."36

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These authorities are the very best of the sources for the nonspecialist French intellectual's entry into the civilization of the Other.37 I am, however, not referring to intellectuals and scholars of postcolonial production, like Shastri, when I say that the Other as Subject is inaccessible to Foucault and Deleuze. I am thinking of the general nonspecialist, nonacademic population across the class spectrum, for whom the episteme operates its silent programming function. Without considering the map of exploitation, on what grid of "oppression" would they place this motley crew? Let us now move to consider the margins (one can just as well say the silent, silenced center) of the circuit marked out by this epistemic violence, men and women among the illiterate peasantry, the tribals, the lowest strata of the urban subproletariat. According to Foucault and Deleuze (in the First World, under the standardization and regimentation of socialized capital, though they do not seem to recognize this) the oppressed, if given the chance (the problem of representation cannot be bypassed here), and on the way to solidarity through alliance politics (a Marxist thematic is at work here) can speak and know their conditions. We must now confront the following question: On the other side of the international division of labor from socialized capital, inside and outside the circuit of the epistemic violence of imperialist law and education supplementing an earlier economic text, can the subaltern speak? Antonio Gramsci's work on the "subaltern classes" extends the class-position/class-consciousness argument isolated in The Eighteenth Brumaire. Perhaps because Gramsci criticizes the vanguardistic position of the Leninist intellectual, he is concerned with the intellectual's role in the subaltern's cultural and political movement into the hegemony. This movement must be made to determine the production of history as narrative (of truth). In texts such as 'The Southern Question" Gramsci considers the movement of historical-political economy in Italy within what can be seen as an allegory of reading taken from or prefiguring an international division of labor.38 Yet an account of the phased development of the subaltern is thrown out of joint when his cultural macrology is operated, however remotely, by the epistemic interference with legal and disciplinary definitions accompanying the imperialist project. When I move, at the end of this essay, to the question of woman as subaltern, I will suggest that the possibility of collectivity itself is persistently foreclosed through the manipulation of female agency. The first part of my proposition - that the phased development of the subaltern is complicated by the imperialist project - is confronted by a collective of intellectuals who may be called the "Subaltern Studies" group.39 They must ask, Can the subaltern speak? Here we are within Foucault's own discipline of history and with people who acknowledge his influence. Their project is to rethink Indian colonial historiography from

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the perspective of the discontinuous chain of peasant insurgencies during the colonial occupation. This is indeed the problem of "the permission to narrate" discussed by Said.40 As Ranajit Guha argues, The historiography of Indian nationalism has for a long time been dominated by elitism - colonialist elitism and bourgeoisnationalist elitism . . . shar[ing] the prejudice that the making of the Indian nation and the development of the consciousness nationalism - which confirmed this process were exclusively or predominantly elite achievements. In the colonialist and neocolonialist historiographies these achievements are credited to British colonial rulers, administrators, policies, institutions, and culture; in the nationalist and neo-nationalist writings - to Indian elite personalities, institutions, activities and ideas.41 Certain varieties of the Indian elite are at best native informants for firstworld intellectuals interested in the voice of the Other. But one must nevertheless insist that the colonized subaltern subject is irretrievably heterogeneous. Against the indigenous elite we may set what Guha calls "the politics of the people," both outside ("this was an autonomous domain, for it neither originated from elite politics nor did its existence depend on the latter") and inside ("it continued to operate vigorously in spite of [colonialism], adjusting itself to the conditions prevailing under the Raj and in many respects developing entirely new strains in both form and content") the circuit of colonial production.421 cannot entirely endorse this insistence on determinate vigor and full autonomy, for practical historiographic exigencies will not allow such endorsements to privilege subaltern consciousness. Against the possible charge that his approach is essentialist, Guha constructs a definition of the people (the place of that essence) that can be only an identity-in-differential. He proposes a dynamic stratification grid describing colonial social production at large. Even the third group on the list, the buffer group, as it were, between the people and the great macrostructural dominant groups, is itself defined as a place of inbetweenness, what Derrida has described as an "antre":43 ,. f 1. Dominan Dominantt foreig foreignn groups groups.. elite { I 2. Dominan Dominantt indigenou indigenouss group groupss on th thee all-Indi all-Indiaa level level.. 3. Dominant Dominant indigenou indigenouss groups groups at th thee regional regional an and d loca locall levels levels.. 4. Th Thee terms terms "people "people"" an and d "subaltern "subaltern classes" classes" have have bee been n use usedd as synonymou synonymouss throughout throughout this this note note.. The The social social groups groups and and elements elements included included in thi thiss categor categoryy represent represent the demographic difference between the total Indian

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population and all those whom we have described as the "elite." Consider the third item on this list - the antre of situational indeterminacy these careful historians presuppose as they grapple with the question, Can the subaltern speak? ''Taken as a whole and in the abstract this . . . category . . . was heterogeneous in its composition and thanks to the uneven character of regional economic and social developments, differed from area to area. The same class or element which was dominant in one area . . . could be among the dominated in another. This could and did create many ambiguities and contradictions in attitudes and alliances, especially among the lowest strata of the rural gentry, impoverished landlords, rich peasants and upper middle class peasants all of whom belonged, ideally speaking, to the category of people or subaltern classes."44 "The task of research" projected here is "to investigate, identify and measure the specific nature and degree of the deviation of [the] elements [constituting item 3] from the ideal and situate it historically." "Investigate, identify, and measure the specific": a program could hardly be more essentialist and taxonomic. Yet a curious methodological imperative is at work. I have argued that, in the Foucault-Deleuze conversation, a postrepresentationalist vocabulary hides an essentialist agenda. In subaltern studies, because of the violence of imperialist epistemic, social, and disciplinary inscription, a project understood in essentialist terms must traffic in a radical textual practice of differences. The object of the group's investigation, in the case not even of the people as such but of the floating buffer zone of the regional elite-subaltern, is a deviation from an ideal the people or subaltern - which is itself defined as a difference from the elite. It is toward this structure that the research is oriented, a predicament rather different from the self-diagnosed transparency of the first-world radical intellectual. What taxonomy can fix such a space? Whether or not they themselves perceive it - in fact Guha sees his definition of "the people" within the master-slave dialectic - their text articulates the difficult task of rewriting its own conditions of impossibility as the conditions of its possibility. "At the regional and local levels [the dominant indigenous groups] . . . if belonging to social strata hierarchically inferior to those of the dominant all-Indian groups acted in the interests of the latter and not in conformity to interests corresponding truly to their own social being.'" When these writers speak, in their essentializing language, of a gap between interest and action in the intermediate group, their conclusions are closer to Marx than to the self-conscious naivete of Deleuze's pronouncement on the issue. Guha, like Marx, speaks of interest in terms of the social rather than the libidinal being. The Name-of-the-Father imagery in The Eighteenth Brumaire can help to emphasize that, on the level of class or group action,

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"true correspondence to own being" is as artificial or social as the patronymic. So much for the intermediate group marked in item 3. For the "true" subaltern group, whose identity is its difference, there is no unrepresentable subaltern subject that can know and speak itself; the intellectual's solution is not to abstain from representation. The problem is that the subject's itinerary has not been traced so as to offer an object of seduction to the representing intellectual. In the slightly dated language of the Indian group, the question becomes, How can we touch the consciousness of the people, even as we investigate their politics? With what voiceconsciousness can the subaltern speak? Their project, after all, is to rewrite the development of the consciousness of the Indian nation. The planned discontinuity of imperialism rigorously distinguishes this project, however old-fashioned its articulation, from "rendering visible the medical and juridical mechanisms that surrounded the story [of Pierre Riviere]." Foucault is correct in suggesting that "to make visible the unseen can also mean a change of level, addressing oneself to a layer of material which had hitherto had no pertinence for history and which had not been recognized as having any moral, aesthetic or historical value." It is the slippage from rendering visible the mechanism to rendering vocal the individual, both avoiding "any kind of analysis of [the subject] whether psychological, psychoanalytical or linguistic," that is consistently troublesome (PK, 49-50). The critique by Ajit K. Chaudhury, a West Bengali Marxist, of Guha's search for the subaltern consciousness can be seen as a moment of the production process that includes the subaltern. Chaudhury's perception that the Marxist view of the transformation of consciousness involves the knowledge of social relations seems to me, in principle, astute. Yet the heritage of the positivist ideology that has appropriated orthodox Marxism obliges him to add this rider: "This is not to belittle the importance of understanding peasants' consciousness or workers' consciousness in its pure form. This enriches our knowledge of the peasant and the worker and, possibly, throws light on how a particular mode takes on different forms in different regions, which is considered a problem of second-order importance in classical Marxism."45 This variety of "internationalist" Marxism, which believes in a pure, retrievable form of consciousness only to dismiss it, thus closing off what in Marx remain moments of productive bafflement, can at once be the object of Foucault's and Deleuze's rejection of Marxism and the source of the critical motivation of the Subaltern Studies group. All three are united in the assumption that there is a pure form of consciousness. On the French scene, there is a shuffling of signifiers: "the unconscious" or "the subject-in-oppression" clandestinely fills the space of "the pure form of consciousness." In orthodox "internationalist" intellectual Marxism, whether in the First World or the Third, the pure form of consciousness

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remains an idealistic bedrock which, dismissed as a second-order problem, often earns it the reputation of racism and sexism. In the Subaltern Studies group it needs development according to the unacknowledged terms of its own articulation. For such an articulation, a developed theory of ideology can again be most useful. In a critique such as Chaudhury's, the association of "consciousness" with "knowledge" omits the crucial middle term of "ideological production": "Consciousness, according to Lenin, is associated with a knowledge of the interrelationships between different classes and groups; i.e., a knowledge of the materials that constitute society. . . . These definitions acquire a meaning only within the problematic within a definite knowledge object - to understand change in history, or specifically, change from one mode to another, keeping the question of the specificity of a particular mode out of the focus"*6 Pierre Macherey provides the following formula for the interpretation of ideology: "What is important in a work is what it does not say. This is not the same as the careless notation 'what it refuses to say,' although that would in itself be interesting: a method might be built on it, with the task of measuring silences, whether acknowledged or unacknowledged. But rather this, what the work cannot say is important, because there the elaboration of the utterance is carried out, in a sort of journey to silence."47 Macherey's ideas can be developed in directions he would be unlikely to follow. Even as he writes, ostensibly, of the literariness of the literature of European provenance, he articulates a method applicable to the social text of imperialism, somewhat against the grain of his own argument. Although the notion "what it refuses to say" might be careless for a literary work, something like a collective ideological refusal can be diagnosed for the codifying legal practice of imperialism. This would open the field for a political-economic and multidisciplinary ideological reinscription of the terrain. Because this is a "worlding of the world" on a second level of abstraction, a concept of refusal becomes plausible here. The archival, historiographic, disciplinary-critical, and, inevitably, interventionist work involved here is indeed a task of "measuring silences." This can be a description of "investigating, identifying, and measuring . . . the deviation" from an ideal that is irreducibly differential. When we come to the concomitant question of the consciousness of the subaltern, the notion of what the work cannot say becomes important. In the semioses of the social text, elaborations of insurgency stand in the place of "the utterance." The sender - "the peasant" - is marked only as a pointer to an irretrievable consciousness. As for the receiver, we must ask who is "the real receiver" of an "insurgency?" The historian, transforming "insurgency" into "text for knowledge," is only one "receiver" of any collectively intended social act. With no possibility of nostalgia for that lost origin, the historian must suspend (as far as possible) the clamor of his or

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her own consciousness (or consciousness-effect, as operated by disciplinary training), so that the elaboration of the insurgency, packaged with an insurgent-consciousness, does not freeze into an "object of investigation," or, worse yet, a model for imitation. "The subject" implied by the texts of insurgency can only serve as a counterpossibility for the narrative sanctions granted to the colonial subject in the dominant groups. The postcolonial intellectuals learn that their privilege is their loss. In this they are a paradigm of the intellectuals. It is well known that the notion of the feminine (rather than the subaltern of imperialism) has been used in a similar way within deconstructive criticism and within certain varieties of feminist criticism.48 In the former case, a figure of "woman" is at issue, one whose minimal predication as indeterminate is already available to the phallocentric tradition. Subaltern historiography raises questions of method that would prevent it from using such a ruse. For the "figure" of woman, the relationship between woman and silence can be plotted by women themselves; race and class differences are subsumed under that charge. Subaltern historiography must confront the impossibility of such gestures. The narrow epistemic violence of imperialism gives us an imperfect allegory of the general violence that is the possibility of an episteme.49 Within the effaced itinerary of the subaltern subject, the track of sexual difference is doubly effaced. The question is not of female participation in insurgency, or the ground rules of the sexual division of labor, for both of which there is "evidence." It is, rather, that, both as object of colonialist historiography and as subject of insurgency, the ideological construction of gender keeps the male dominant. If, in the context of colonial production, the subaltern has no history and cannot speak, the subaltern as female is even more deeply in shadow. The contemporary international division of labor is a displacement of the divided field of nineteenth-century territorial imperialism. Put simply, a group of countries, generally first-world, are in the position of investing capital; another group, generally third-world, provide the field for investment, both through the comprador indigenous capitalists and through their ill-protected and shifting labor force. In the interest of maintaining the circulation and growth of industrial capital (and of the concomitant task of administration within nineteenth-century territorial imperialism), transportation, law, and standardized education systems were developed even as local industries were destroyed, land distribution was rearranged, and raw material was transferred to the colonizing country. With so-called decolonization, the growth of multinational capital, and the relief of the administrative charge, "development" does not now involve wholesale legislation and establishing educational systems in a comparable way. This impedes the growth of consumerism in the comprador countries. With modern telecommunications and the emergence of advanced capitalist

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economies at the two edges of Asia, maintaining the international division of labor serves to keep the supply of cheap labor in the comprador countries. Human labor is not, of course, intrinsically "cheap" or "expensive." An absence of labor laws (or a discriminatory enforcement of them), a totalitarian state (often entailed by development and modernization in the periphery), and minimal subsistence requirements on the part of the worker will ensure it. To keep this crucial item intact, the urban proletariat in comprador countries must not be systematically trained in the ideology of consumerism (parading as the philosophy of a classless society) that, against all odds, prepares the ground for resistance through the coalition politics Foucault mentions (FD, 216). This separation from the ideology of consumerism is increasingly exacerbated by the proliferating phenomena of international subcontracting. "Under this strategy, manufacturers based in developed countries subcontract the most labor intensive stages of production, for example, sewing or assembly, to the Third World nations where labor is cheap. Once assembled, the multinational re-imports the goods - under generous tariff exemptions - to the developed country instead of selling them to the local market." Here the link to training in consumerism is almost snapped. "While global recession has markedly slowed trade and investment worldwide since 1979, international subcontracting has boomed. . . . In these cases, multinationals are freer to resist militant workers, revolutionary upheavals, and even economic downturns."50 Class mobility is increasingly lethargic in the comprador theaters. Not surprisingly, some members of indigenous dominant groups in comprador countries, members of the local bourgeoisie, find the language of alliance politics attractive. Identifying with forms of resistance plausible in advanced capitalist countries is often of a piece with that elitist bent of bourgeois historiography described by Ranajit Guha. Belief in the plausibility of global alliance politics is prevalent among women of dominant social groups interested in "international feminism" in the comprador countries. At the other end of the scale, those most separated from any possibility of an alliance among "women, prisoners, conscripted soldiers, hospital patients, and homosexuals" (FD, 216) are the females of the urban subproletariat. In their case, the denial and withholding of consumerism and the structure of exploitation is compounded by patriarchal social relations. On the other side of the international division of labor, the subject of exploitation cannot know and speak the text of female exploitation, even if the absurdity of the nonrepresenting intellectual making space for her to speak is achieved. The woman is doubly in shadow. Yet even this does not encompass the heterogeneous Other. Outside (though not completely so) the circuit of the international division of labor,

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there are people whose consciousness we cannot grasp if we close off our benevolence by constructing a homogeneous Other referring only to our own place in the seat of the Same or the Self. Here are subsistence farmers, unorganized peasant labor, the tribals, and the communities of zero workers on the street or in the countryside. To confront them is not to represent (vertreten) them but to learn to represent (darstellen) ourselves. This argument would take us into a critique of a disciplinary anthropology and the relationship between elementary pedagogy and disciplinary formation. It would also question the implicit demand, made by intellectuals who choose a "naturally articulate" subject of oppression, that such a subject come through history as a foreshortened mode-ofproduction narrative. That Deleuze and Foucault ignore both the epistemic violence of imperialism and the international division of labor would matter less if they did not, in closing, touch on third-world issues. But in France it is impossible to ignore the problem of the tiers monde, the inhabitants of the erstwhile French African colonies. Deleuze limits his consideration of the Third World to these old local and regional indigenous elite who are, ideally, subaltern. In this context, references to the maintenance of the surplus army of labor fall into reverse-ethnic sentimentality. Since he is speaking of the heritage of nineteenth-century territorial imperialism, his reference is to the nation-state rather than the globalizing center: "French capitalism needs greatly a floating signifier of unemployment. In this perspective, we begin to see the unity of the forms of repression: restrictions on immigration, once it is acknowledged that the most difficult and thankless jobs go to immigrant workers; repression in the factories because the French must reacquire the 'taste' for increasingly harder work, the struggle against youth and the repression of the educational system" (FD, 211-12). This is an acceptable analysis. Yet it shows again that the Third World can enter the resistance program of an alliance politics directed against a "unified repression" only when it is confined to the third-world groups that are directly accessible to the First World.51 This benevolent first-world appropriation and reinscription of the Third World as an Other is the founding characteristic of much third-worldism in the U.S. human sciences today. Foucault continues the critique of Marxism by invoking geographical discontinuity. The real mark of "geographical (geopolitical) discontinuity" is the international division of labor. But Foucault uses the term to distinguish between exploitation (extraction and appropriation of surplus value; read, the field of Marxist analysis) and domination ("power" studies) and to suggest the latter's greater potential for resistance based on alliance politics. He cannot acknowledge that such a monist and unified access to a conception of "power" (methodologically presupposing a Subject-ofpower) is made possible by a certain stage in exploitation, for his vision of geographical discontinuity is geopolitically specific to the First World:

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This geographical discontinuity of which you speak might mean perhaps the following: as soon as we struggle against exploitation, the proletariat not only leads the struggle but also defines its targets, its methods, its places and its instruments; and to ally oneself with the proletariat is to consolidate with its positions, its ideology, it is to take up again the motives for their combat. This means total immersion [in the Marxist project]. But if it is against power that one struggles, then all those who acknowledge it as intolerable can begin the struggle wherever they find themselves and in terms of their own activity (or passivity). In engaging in this struggle that is their own, whose objectives they clearly understand and whose methods they can determine, they enter into the revolutionary process. As allies of the proletariat, to be sure, because power is exercised the way it is in order to maintain capitalist exploitation. They genuinely serve the cause of the proletariat by fighting in those places where they find themselves oppressed. Women prisoners, conscripted soldiers, hospital patients, and homosexuals have now begun a specific struggle against the particular form of power, the constraints and controls, that are exercised over them. (FZ), 216) This is an admirable program of localized resistance. Where possible, this model of resistance is not an alternative to, but can complement, macrological struggles along "Marxist" lines. Yet if its situation is universalized, it accommodates unacknowledged privileging of the subject. Without a theory of ideology, it can lead to a dangerous utopianism. Foucault is a brilliant thinker of power-in-spacing, but the awareness of the topographical reinscription of imperialism does not inform his presuppositions. He is taken in by the restricted version of the West produced by that reinscription and thus helps to consolidate its effects. Notice the omission of the fact, in the following passage, that the new mechanism of power in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (the extraction of surplus value without extraeconomic coercion is its Marxist description) is secured by means of territorial imperialism - the Earth and its products "elsewhere." The representation of sovereignty is crucial in those theaters: "In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, we have the production of an important phenomenon, the emergence, or rather the invention, of a new mechanism of power possessed of highly specific procedural techniques . . . which is also, I believe, absolutely incompatible with the relations of sovereignty. This new mechanism of power is more dependent upon bodies and what they do than the Earth and its products" (PK, 104). Because of a blind spot regarding the first wave of "geographical discontinuity," Foucault can remain impervious to its second wave in the middle decades of our own century, identifying it simply "with the collapse

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of Fascism and the decline of Stalinism" (PK, 87). Here is Mike Davis's alternative view: "It was rather the global logic of counter-revolutionary violence which created conditions for the peaceful economic interdependence of a chastened Atlantic imperialism under American leadership. . . . It was multi-national military integration under the slogan of collective security against the USSR which preceded and quickened the interpenetration of the major capitalist economies, making possible the new era of commercial liberalism which flowered between 1958 and 1973."52 It is within the emergence of this "new mechanism of power" that we must read the fixation on national scenes, the resistance to economics, and the emphasis on concepts like power and desire that privilege micrology. Davis continues: "This quasi-absolutist centralization of strategic military power by the United States was to allow an enlightened and flexible subordinancy for its principal satraps. In particular, it proved highly accommodating to the residual imperialist pretensions of the French and British . . . with each keeping up a strident ideological mobilization against communism all the while." While taking precautions against such unitary notions as "France," it must be said that such unitary notions as "the workers' struggle," or such unitary pronouncements as "like power, resistance is multiple and can be integrated in global strategies" (PK, 142), seem interpretable by way of Davis's narrative. I am not suggesting, as does Paul Bove, that "for a displaced and homeless people [the Palestinians] assaulted militarily and culturally . . . a question [such as Foucault's 'to engage in politics . . . is to try to know with the greatest possible honesty whether the revolution is desirable'] is a foolish luxury of Western wealth."53 I am suggesting, rather, that to buy a self-contained version of the West is to ignore its production by the imperialist project. Sometimes it seems as if the very brilliance of Foucault's analysis of the centuries of European imperialism produces a miniature version of that heterogeneous phenomenon: management of space - but by doctors; development of administrations - but in asylums; considerations of the periphery - but in terms of the insane, prisoners, and children. The clinic, the asylum, the prison, the university - all seem to be screen-allegories that foreclose a reading of the broader narratives of imperialism. (One could open a similar discussion of the ferocious motif of "deterritorialization" in Deleuze and Guattari.) "One can perfectly well not talk about something because one doesn't know about it," Foucault might murmur (PK, 66). Yet we have already spoken of the sanctioned ignorance that every critic of imperialism must chart. Ill

On the general level on which U.S. academics and students take "influence" from France, one encounters the following understanding: Foucault 1450

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deals with real history, real politics, and real social problems; Derrida is inaccessible, esoteric, and textualistic. The reader is probably well acquainted with this received idea. "That [Derrida's] own work," Terry Eagleton writes, "has been grossly unhistorical, politically evasive and in practice oblivious to language as 'discourse' [language in function] is not to be denied."54 Eagleton goes on to recommend Foucault's study of "discursive practices." Perry Anderson constructs a related history: "With Derrida, the self-cancellation of structuralism latent in the recourse to music or madness in Levi-Strauss or Foucault is consummated. With no commitment to exploration of social realities at all, Derrida had little compunction in undoing the constructions of these two, convicting them both of a 'nostalgia of origins' - Rousseauesque or pre-Socratic, respectively and asking what right either had to assume, on their own premises, the validity of their discourses."55 This paper is committed to the notion that, whether in defense of Derrida or not, a nostalgia for lost origins can be detrimental to the exploration of social realities within the critique of imperialism. Indeed, the brilliance of Anderson's misreading does not prevent him from seeing precisely the problem I emphasize in Foucault: "Foucault struck the characteristically prophetic note when he declared in 1966: 'Man is in the process of perishing as the being of language continues to shine ever more brightly upon our horizon.' But who is the 'we' to perceive or possess such a horizon?" Anderson does not see the encroachment of the unacknowledged Subject of the West in the later Foucault, a Subject that presides by disavowal. He sees Foucault's attitude in the usual way, as the disappearance of the knowing Subject as such; and he further sees in Derrida the final development of that tendency: "In the hollow of the pronoun [we] lies the aporia of the programme."56 Consider, finally, Said's plangent aphorism, which betrays a profound misapprehension of the notion of "textuality": "Derrida's criticism moves us into the text, Foucault's in and out."57 I have tried to argue that the substantive concern for the politics of the oppressed which often accounts for Foucault's appeal can hide a privileging of the intellectual and of the "concrete" subject of oppression that, in fact, compounds the appeal. Conversely, though it is not my intention here to counter the specific view of Derrida promoted by these influential writers, I will discuss a few aspects of Derrida's work that retain a longterm usefulness for people outside the First World. This is not an apology. Derrida is hard to read; his real object of investigation is classical philosophy. Yet he is less dangerous when understood than the first-world intellectual masquerading as the absent nonrepresenter who lets the oppressed speak for themselves. I will consider a chapter that Derrida composed twenty years ago: "Of Grammatology As a Positive Science" (OG, 74-93). In this chapter

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Derrida confronts the issue of whether "deconstruction" can lead to an adequate practice, whether critical or political. The question is how to keep the ethnocentric Subject from establishing itself by selectively defining an Other. This is not a program for the Subject as such; rather, it is a program for the benevolent Western intellectual. For those of us who feel that the "subject" has a history and that the task of the first-world subject of knowledge in our historical moment is to resist and critique "recognition" of the Third World through "assimilation," this specificity is crucial. In order to advance a factual rather than a pathetic critique of the European intellectual's ethnocentric impulse, Derrida admits that he cannot ask the "first" questions that must be answered to establish the grounds of his argument. He does not declare that grammatology can "rise above" (Frank Lentricchia's phrase) mere empiricism; for, like empiricism, it cannot ask first questions. Derrida thus aligns "grammatological" knowledge with the same problems as empirical investigation. "Deconstruction" is not, therefore, a new word for "ideological demystification." Like "empirical investigation . . . tak[ing] shelter in the field of grammatological knowledge" obliges "opperat[ing] through 'examples' " (0G, 75). The examples Derrida lays out - to show the limits of grammatology as a positive science - come from the appropriate ideological self-justification of an imperialist project. In the European seventeenth century, he writes, there were three kinds of "prejudices" operating in histories of writing which constituted a "symptom of the crisis of European consciousness" (0G, 75): the "theological prejudice," the "Chinese prejudice" and the "hieroglyphist prejudice." The first can be indexed as: God wrote a primitive or natural script: Hebrew or Greek. The second: Chinese is a perfect blueprint for philosophical writing, but it is only a blueprint. True philosophical writing is "independent] with regard to history" (0G, 79) and will sublate Chinese into an easy-to-learn script that will supersede actual Chinese. The third: that Egyptian script is too sublime to be deciphered. The first prejudice preserves the "actuality" of Hebrew or Greek; the last two ("rational" and "mystical," respectively) collude to support the first, where the center of the logos is seen as the Judaeo-Christian God (the appropriation of the Hellenic Other through assimilation is an earlier story) - a "prejudice" still sustained in efforts to give the cartography of the Judaeo-Christian myth the status of geopolitical history: The concept of Chinese writing thus functioned as a sort of European hallucination. . . . This functioning obeyed a rigorous necessity. . . . It was not disturbed by the knowledge of Chinese script . . . which was then available. . . . A "hieroglyphist prejudice" had produced the same effect of interested blindness. Far from proceeding . . . from ethnocentric scorn, the occultation takes the form of an hyperbolical admiration. We have not finished demon-

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strating the necessity of this pattern. Our century is not free from it; each time that ethnocentrism is precipitately and ostentatiously reversed, some effort silently hides behind all the spectacular effects to consolidate an inside and to draw from it some domestic benefit. (OG, 80; Derrida italicizes only "hieroglyphist prejudice") Derrida proceeds to offer two characteristic possibilities for solutions to the problem of the European Subject, which seeks to produce an Other that would consolidate an inside, its own subject status. What follows is an account of the complicity between writing, the opening of domestic and civil society, and the structures of desire, power, and capitalization. Derrida then discloses the vulnerability of his own desire to conserve something that is, paradoxically, both ineffable and nontranscendental. In critiquing the production of the colonial subject, this ineffable, nontranscendental ("historical") place is cathected by the subaltern subject. Derrida closes the chapter by showing again that the project of grammatology is obliged to develop within the discourse of presence. It is not just a critique of presence but an awareness of the itinerary of the discourse of presence in one's own critique, a vigilance precisely against too great a claim for transparency. The word "writing" as the name of the object and model of grammatology is a practice "only within the historical closure, that is to say within the limits of science and philosophy" (OG, 93). Derrida here makes Nietzschean, philosophical, and psychoanalytic, rather than specifically political, choices to suggest a critique of European ethnocentrism in the constitution of the Other. As a postcolonial intellectual, I am not troubled that he does not lead me (as Europeans inevitably seem to do) to the specific path that such a critique makes necessary. It is more important to me that, as a European philosopher, he articulates the European Subject's tendency to constitute the Other as marginal to ethnocentrism and locates that as the problem with all logocentric and therefore also all grammatological endeavors (since the main thesis of the chapter is the complicity between the two). Not a general problem, but a European problem. It is within the context of this ethnocentricism that he tries so desperately to demote the Subject of thinking or knowledge as to say that "thought is ... the blank part of the text" (OG, 93); that which is thought is, if blank, still in the text and must be consigned to the Other of history. That inaccessible blankness circumscribed by an interpretable text is what a postcolonial critic of imperialism would like to see developed within the European enclosure as the place of the production of theory. The postcolonial critics and intellectuals can attempt to displace their own production only by presupposing that text-inscribed blankness. To render thought or the thinking subject transparent or invisible seems, by contrast, to hide

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the relentless recognition of the Other by assimilation. It is in the interest of such cautions that Derrida does not invoke "letting the other(s) speak for himself but rather invokes an "appeal" to or "call" to the "quiteother" (tout-autre as opposed to a self-consolidating other), of "rendering delirious that interior voice that is the voice of the other in us."58 Derrida calls the ethnocentrism of the European science of writing in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries a symptom of the general crisis of European consciousness. It is, of course, part of a greater symptom, or perhaps the crisis itself, the slow turn from feudalism to capitalism via the first waves of capitalist imperialism. The itinerary of recognition through assimilation of the Other can be more interestingly traced, it seems to me, in the imperialist constitution of the colonial subject than in repeated incursions into psychoanalysis or the "figure" of woman, though the importance of these two interventions within deconstruction should not be minimized. Derrida has not moved (or perhaps cannot move) into that arena. Whatever the reasons for this specific absence, what I find useful is the sustained and developing work on the mechanics of the constitution of the Other; we can use it to much greater analytic and interventionist advantage than invocations of the authenticity of the Other. On this level, what remains useful in Foucault is the mechanics of disciplinarization and institutionalization, the constitution, as it were, of the colonizer. Foucault does not relate it to any version, early or late, proto- or post-, of imperialism. They are of great usefulness to intellectuals concerned with the decay of the West. Their seduction for them, and fearfulness for us, is that they might allow the complicity of the investigating subject (male or female professional) to disguise itself in transparency.

IV Can the subaltern speak? What must the elite do to watch out for the continuing construction of the subaltern? The question of "woman" seems most problematic in this context. Clearly, if you are poor, black, and female you get it in three ways. If, however, this formulation is moved from the first-world context into the postcolonial (which is not identical with the third-world) context, the description "black" or "of color" loses persuasive significance. The necessary stratification of colonial subjectconstitution in the first phase of capitalist imperialism makes "color" useless as an emancipatory signifier. Confronted by the ferocious standardizing benevolence of most U.S. and Western European humanscientific radicalism (recognition by assimilation), the progressive though heterogeneous withdrawal of consumerism in the comprador periphery, and the exclusion of the margins of even the center-periphery articulation (the "true and differential subaltern"), the analogue of class-consciousness

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rather than race-consciousness in this area seems historically, disciplinarily, and practically forbidden by Right and Left alike. It is not just a question of a double displacement, as it is not simply the problem of finding a psychoanalytic allegory that can accommodate the third-world woman with the first. The cautions I have just expressed are valid only if we are speaking of the subaltern woman's consciousness - or, more acceptably, subject. Reporting on, or better still, participating in, antisexist work among women of color or women in class oppression in the First World or the Third World is undeniably on the agenda. We should also welcome all the information retrieval in these silenced areas that is taking place in anthropology, political science, history, and sociology. Yet the assumption and construction of a consciousness or subject sustains such work and will, in the long run, cohere with the work of imperialist subject-constitution, mingling epistemic violence with the advancement of learning and civilization. And the subaltern woman will be as mute as ever.59 In so fraught a field, it is not easy to ask the question of the consciousness of the subaltern woman; it is thus all the more necessary to remind pragmatic radicals that such a question is not an idealist red herring. Though all feminist or antisexist projects cannot be reduced to this one, to ignore it is an unacknowledged political gesture that has a long history and collaborates with a masculine radicalism that renders the place of the investigator transparent. In seeking to learn to speak to (rather than listen to or speak for) the historically muted subject of the subaltern woman, the postcolonial intellectual systematically "unlearns" female privilege. This systematic unlearning involves learning to critique postcolonial discourse with the best tools it can provide and not simply substituting the lost figure of the colonized. Thus, to question the unquestioned muting of the subaltern woman even within the anti-imperialist project of subaltern studies is not, as Jonathan Culler suggests, to "produce difference by differing" or to "appeal... to a sexual identity defined as essential and privilege experiences associated with that identity."60 Culler's version of the feminist project is possible within what Elizabeth Fox-Genovese has called "the contribution of the bourgeois-democratic revolutions to the social and political individualism of women."61 Many of us were obliged to understand the feminist project as Culler now describes it when we were still agitating as U.S. academics.62 It was certainly a necessary stage in my own education in "unlearning" and has consolidated the belief that the mainstream project of Western feminism both continues and displaces the battle over the right to individualism between women and men in situations of upward class mobility. One suspects that the debate between U.S. feminism and European "theory" (as theory is generally represented by women from the United States or Britain) occupies a significant corner of that very terrain. I am generally sympathetic

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with the call to make U.S. feminism more "theoretical." It seems, however, that the problem of the muted subject of the subaltern woman, though not solved by an "essentialist" search for lost origins, cannot be served by the call for more theory in Anglo-America either. That call is often given in the name of a critique of "positivism," which is seen here as identical with "essentialism." Yet Hegel, the modern inaugurator of "the work of the negative," was not a stranger to the notion of essences. For Marx, the curious persistence of essentialism within the dialectic was a profound and productive problem. Thus, the stringent binary opposition between positivism/essentialism (read, U.S.) and "theory" (read, French or Franco-German via Anglo-American) may be spurious. Apart from repressing the ambiguous complicity between essentialism and critiques of positivism (acknowledged by Derrida in "Of Grammatology As a Positive Science"), it also errs by implying that positivism is not a theory. This move allows the emergence of a proper name, a positive essence, Theory. Once again, the position of the investigator remains unquestioned. And, if this territorial debate turns toward the Third World, no change in the question of method is to be discerned. This debate cannot take into account that, in the case of the woman as subaltern, no ingredients for the constitution of the itinerary of the trace of a sexed subject can be gathered to locate the possibility of dissemination. Yet I remain generally sympathetic in aligning feminism with the critique of positivism and the defetishization of the concrete. I am also far from averse to learning from the work of Western theorists, though I have learned to insist on marking their positionality as investigating subjects. Given these conditions, and as a literary critic, I tactically confronted the immense problem of the consciousness of the woman as subaltern. I reinvented the problem in a sentence and transformed it into the object of a simple semiosis. What does this sentence mean? The analogy here is between the ideological victimization of a Freud and the positionality of the postcolonial intellectual as investigating subject. As Sarah Kofman has shown, the deep ambiguity of Freud's use of women as a scapegoat is a reaction-formation to an initial and continuing desire to give the hysteric a voice, to transform her into the subject of hysteria.63 The masculine-imperialist ideological formation that shaped that desire into "the daughter's seduction" is part of the same formation that constructs the monolithic "third-world woman." As a postcolonial intellectual, I am influenced by that formation as well. Part of our "unlearning" project is to articulate that ideological formation - by measuring silences, if necessary - into the object of investigation. Thus, when confronted with the questions, Can the subaltern speak? and Can the subaltern (as woman) speak?, our efforts to give the subaltern a voice in history will be doubly open to the dangers run by Freud's discourse. As a product of these considerations, I have put together the sentence "White men are saving

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brown women from brown men" in a spirit not unlike the one to be encountered in Freud's investigations of the sentence "A child is being beaten."64 The use of Freud here does not imply an isomorphic analogy between subject-formation and the behavior of social collectives, a frequent practice, often accompanied by a reference to Reich, in the conversation between Deleuze and Foucault. So I am not suggesting that "White men are saving brown women from brown men" is a sentence indicating a collective fantasy symptomatic of a collective itinerary of sadomasochistic repression in a collective imperialist enterprise. There is a satisfying symmetry in such an allegory, but I would rather invite the reader to consider it a problem in "wild psychoanalysis" than a clinching solution.65 Just as Freud's insistence on making the woman the scapegoat in "A child is being beaten" and elsewhere discloses his political interests, however imperfectly, so my insistence on imperialist subject-production as the occasion for this sentence discloses my politics. Further, I am attempting to borrow the general methodological aura of Freud's strategy toward the sentence he constructed as a sentence out of the many similar substantive accounts his patients gave him. This does not mean I will offer a case of transference-in-analysis as an isomorphic model for the transaction between reader and text (my sentence). The analogy between transference and literary criticism or historiography is no more than a productive catachresis. To say that the subject is a text does not authorize the converse pronouncement: the verbal text is a subject. I am fascinated, rather, by how Freud predicates a history of repression that produces the final sentence. It is a history with a double origin, one hidden in the amnesia of the infant, the other lodged in our archaic past, assuming by implication a preoriginary space where human and animal were not yet differentiated.66 We are driven to impose a homologue of this Freudian strategy on the Marxist narrative to explain the ideological dissimulation of imperialist political economy and outline a history of repression that produces a sentence like the one I have sketched. This history also has a double origin, one hidden in the maneuverings behind the British abolition of widow sacrifice in 1829,67 the other lodged in the classical and Vedic past of Hindu India, the Rg-Veda and the Dharmasastra. No doubt there is also an undifferentiated preoriginary space that supports this history. The sentence I have constructed is one among many displacements describing the relationship between brown and white men (sometimes brown and white women worked in). It takes its place among some sentences of "hyperbolic admiration" or of pious guilt that Derrida speaks of in connection with the "hieroglyphist prejudice." The relationship between the imperialist subject and the subject of imperialism is at least ambiguous.

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The Hindu widow ascends the pyre of the dead husband and immolates herself upon it. This is widow sacrifice. (The conventional transcription of the Sanskrit word for the widow would be sati. The early colonial British transcribed it suttee.) The rite was not practiced universally and was not caste- or class-fixed. The abolition of this rite by the British has been generally understood as a case of "White men saving brown women from brown men." White women - from the nineteenth-century British Missionary Registers to Mary Daly - have not produced an alternative understanding. Against this is the Indian nativist argument, a parody of the nostalgia for lost origins: "The women actually wanted to die." The two sentences go a long way to legitimize each other. One never encounters the testimony of the women's voice-consciousness. Such a testimony would not be ideology-transcendent or "fully" subjective, of course, but it would have constituted the ingredients for producing a countersentence. As one goes down the grotesquely mistranscribed names of these women, the sacrificed widows, in the police reports included in the records of the East India Company, one cannot put together a "voice." The most one can sense is the immense heterogeneity breaking through even such a skeletal and ignorant account (castes, for example, are regularly described as tribes). Faced with the dialectically interlocking sentences that are constructible as "White men are saving brown women from brown men" and "The women wanted to die," the postcolonial woman intellectual asks the question of simple semiosis - What does this mean? and begins to plot a history. To mark the moment when not only a civil but a good society is born out of domestic confusion, singular events that break the letter of the law to instill its spirit are often invoked. The protection of women by men often provides such an event. If we remember that the British boasted of their absolute equity toward and noninterference with native custom/law, an invocation of this sanctioned transgression of the letter for the sake of the spirit may be read in J. M. Derrett's remark: "The very first legislation upon Hindu Law was carried through without the assent of a single Hindu." The legislation is not named here. The next sentence, where the measure is named, is equally interesting if one considers the implications of the survival of a colonially established "good" society after decolonization: "The recurrence of sati in independent India is probably an obscurantist revival which cannot long survive even in a very backward part of the country."68 Whether this observation is correct or not, what interests me is that the protection of woman (today the "third-world woman") becomes a signifier for the establishment of a good society which must, at such inaugurative moments, transgress mere legality, or equity of legal policy. In this particular case, the process also allowed the redefinition as a crime of what had been tolerated, known, or adulated as ritual. In other words, this one item

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in Hindu law jumped the frontier between the private and the public domain. Although Foucault's historical narrative, focusing solely on Western Europe, sees merely a tolerance for the criminal antedating the development of criminology in the late eighteenth century (PK, 41), his theoretical description of the "episteme" is pertinent here: 'The episteme is the 'apparatus' which makes possible the separation not of the true from the false, but of what may not be characterized as scientific" (PK, 197) - ritual as opposed to crime, the one fixed by superstition, the other by legal science. The leap of suttee from private to public has a clear and complex relationship with the changeover from a mercantile and commercial to a territorial and administrative British presence; it can be followed in correspondence among the police stations, the lower and higher courts, the courts of directors, the prince regent's court, and the like. (It is interesting to note that, from the point of view of the native "colonial subject," also emergent from the feudalism-capitalism transition, sati is a signifier with the reverse social charge: "Groups rendered psychologically marginal by their exposure to Western impact . . . had come under pressure to demonstrate, to others as well as to themselves, their ritual purity and allegiance to traditional high culture. To many of them sati became an important proof of their conformity to older norms at a time when these norms had become shaky within."69) If this is the first historical origin of my sentence, it is evidently lost in the history of humankind as work, the story of capitalist expansion, the slow freeing of labor power as commodity, that narrative of the modes of production, the transition from feudalism via mercantilism to capitalism. Yet the precarious normativity of this narrative is sustained by the putatively changeless stopgap of the "Asiatic" mode of production, which steps in to sustain it whenever it might become apparent that the story of capital logic is the story of the West, that imperialism establishes the universality of the mode of production narrative, that to ignore the subaltern today is, willy-nilly, to continue the imperialist project. The origin of my sentence is thus lost in the shuffle between other, more powerful discourse. Given that the abolition of sati was in itself admirable, is it still possible to wonder if a perception of the origin of my sentence might contain interventionist possibilities? Imperialism's image as the establisher of the good society is marked by the espousal of the woman as object of protection from her own kind. How should one examine the dissimulation of patriarchal strategy, which apparently grants the woman free choice as subject! In other words, how does one make the move from "Britain" to "Hinduism"? Even the attempt shows that imperialism is not identical with chromatism, or mere prejudice against people of color. To approach this question, I will touch briefly on

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the Dharmasastra (the sustaining scriptures) and the Rg-Veda (Praise Knowledge). They represent the archaic origin in my homology of Freud. Of course, my treatment is not exhaustive. My readings are, rather, an interested and inexpert examination, by a postcolonial woman, of the fabrication of repression, a constructed counternarrative of woman's consciousness, thus woman's being, thus woman's being good, thus the good woman's desire, thus woman's desire. Paradoxically, at the same time we witness the unfixed place of woman as a signifier in the inscription of the social individual. The two moments in the Dharmasastra that I am interested in are the discourse on sanctioned suicides and the nature of the rites for the dead.70 Framed in these two discourses, the self-immolation of widows seems an exception to the rule. The general scriptural doctrine is that suicide is reprehensible. Room is made, however, for certain forms of suicide which, as formulaic performance, lose the phenomenal identity of being suicide. The first category of sanctioned suicides arises out of tatvajnana, or the knowledge of truth. Here the knowing subject comprehends the insubstantiality or mere phenomenality (which may be the same thing as nonphenomenality) of its identity. At a certain point in time, tat tva was interpreted as "that you," but even without that, tatva is thatness or quiddity. Thus, this enlightened self truly knows the "that"-ness of its identity. Its demolition of that identity is not atmaghata (a killing of the self). The paradox of knowing of the limits of knowledge is that the strongest assertion of agency, to negate the possibility of agency, cannot be an example of itself. Curiously enough, the soli-sacrifice of gods is sanctioned by natural ecology, useful for the working of the economy of Nature and the Universe, rather than by self-knowledge. In this logically anterior stage, inhabited by gods rather than human beings, of this particular chain of displacements, suicide and sacrifice (ataghdta and atmadana ) seem as little distinct as an "interior" (self-knowledge) and an "exterior" (ecology) sanction. This philosophical space, however, does not accommodate the selfimmolating woman. For her we look where room is made to sanction suicides that cannot claim truth-knowledge as a state that is, at any rate, easily verifiable and belongs in the area of sruti (what was heard) rather than smirti (what is remembered). This exception to the general rule about suicide annuls the phenomenal identity of self-immolation if performed in certain places rather than in a certain state of enlightenment. Thus, we move from an interior sanction (truth-knowledge) to an exterior one (place of pilgrimage). It is possible for a woman to perform this type of (non)suicide.71 Yet even this is not the proper place for the woman to annul the proper name of suicide through the destruction of her proper self. For her alone is sanctioned self-immolation on a dead spouse's pyre. (The few male

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examples cited in Hindu antiquity of self-immolation on another's pyre, being proofs of enthusiasm and devotion to a master or superior, reveal the structure of domination within the rite). This suicide that is not suicide may be read as a simulacrum of both truth-knowledge and piety of place. If the former, it is as if the knowledge in a subject of its own insubstantiality and mere phenomenality is dramatized so that the dead husband becomes the exteriorized example and place of the extinguished subject and the widow becomes the (non)agent who "acts it out." If the latter, it is as if the metonym for all sacred places is now that burning bed of wood, constructed by elaborate ritual, where the woman's subject, legally displaced from herself, is being consumed. It is in terms of this profound ideology of the displaced place of the female subject that the paradox of free choice comes into play. For the male subject, it is the felicity of the suicide, a felicity that will annul rather than establish its status as such, that is noted. For the female subject, a sanctioned self-immolation, even as it takes away the effect of "fall" (pataka) attached to an unsanctioned suicide, brings praise for the act of choice on another register. By the inexorable ideological production of the sexed subject, such a death can be understood by the female subject as an exceptional signifier of her own desire, exceeding the general rule for a widow's conduct. In certain periods and areas this exceptional rule became the general rule in a class-specific way. Ashis Nandy relates its marked prevalence in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Bengal to factors ranging from population control to communal misogyny.72 Certainly its prevalence there in the previous centuries was because in Bengal, unlike elsewhere in India, widows could inherit property. Thus, what the British see as poor victimized women going to the slaughter is in fact an ideological battle-ground. As P. V. Kane, the great historian of the Dharmasastra, has correctly observed: "In Bengal, [the fact that] the widow of a sonless member even in a joint Hindu family is entitled to practically the same rights over joint family property which her deceased husband would have had . . . must have frequently induced the surviving members to get rid of the widow by appealing at a most distressing hour to her devotion to and love for her husband" (HD II.2, 635). Yet benevolent and enlightened males were and are sympathetic with the "courage" of the woman's free choice in the matter. They thus accept the production of the sexed subaltern subject: "Modern India does not justify the practice of sati, but it is a warped mentality that rebukes modern Indians for expressing admiration and reverence for the cool and unfaltering courage of Indian women in becoming satis or performing the jauhar for cherishing their ideals of womanly conduct" (HD II.2, 636). What Jean-Francois Lyotard has termed the "differend" the inacessibility of, or untranslatability from, one mode of discourse in a dispute to another, is vividly illustrated here.73 As the discourse of what the British

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perceive as heathen ritual is sublated (but not, Lyotard would argue, translated) into what the British perceive as crime, one diagnosis of female free will is substituted for another. Of course, the self-immolation of widows was not invariable ritual prescription. If, however, the widow does decide thus to exceed the letter of ritual, to turn back is a transgression for which a particular type of penance is prescribed.74 With the local British police officer supervising the immolation, to be dissuaded after a decision was, by contrast, a mark of real free choice, a choice of freedom. The ambiguity of the position of the indigenous colonial elite is disclosed in the nationalistic romanticization of the purity, strength, and love of these self-sacrificing women. The two set pieces are Rabindranath Tagore's paean to the "self-renouncing paternal grandmothers of Bengal" and Ananda Coomaraswamy's eulogy of suttee as "this last proof of the perfect unity of body and soul."75 Obviously I am not advocating the killing of widows. I am suggesting that, within the two contending versions of freedom, the constitution of the female subject in life is the place of the differ end. In the case of widow self-immolation, ritual is not being redefined as superstition but as crime. The gravity ofsati was that it was ideologically cathected as "reward," just as the gravity of imperialism was that it was ideologically cathected as "social mission." Thompson's understanding of sati as "punishment" is thus far off the mark: It may seem unjust and illogical that the Moguls, who freely impaled and flayed alive, or nationals of Europe, whose countries had such ferocious penal codes and had known, scarcely a century before suttee began to shock the English conscience, orgies of witch-burning and religious persecution, should have felt as they did about suttee. But the differences seemed to them this - the victims of their cruelties were tortured by a law which considered them offenders, whereas the victims of suttee were punished for no offense but the physical weakness which had placed them at man's mercy. The rite seemed to prove a depravity and arrogance such as no other human offense had brought to light.76 All through the mid- and late-eighteenth century, in the spirit of the codification of the law, the British in India collaborated and consulted with learned Brahmans to judge whether suttee was legal by their homogenized version of Hindu law. The collaboration was often idiosyncratic, as in the case of the significance of being dissuaded. Sometimes, as in the general Sastric prohibition against the immolation of widows with small children, the British collaboration seems confused.77 In the beginning of the nineteenth century, the British authorities, and especially the British in England, repeatedly suggested that collaboration made it appear as if the

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British condoned this practice. When the law was finally written, the history of the long period of collaboration was effaced, and the language celebrated the noble Hindu who was against the bad Hindu, the latter given to savage atrocities: The practice of Suttee . . . is revolting to the feeling of human nature. . . . In many instances, acts of atrocity have been perpetrated, which have been shocking to the Hindoos themselves . . . Actuated by these considerations the Governor-General in Council, without intending to depart from one of the first and most important principles of the system of British Government in India that all classes of the people be secure in the observance of their religious usages, so long as that system can be adhered to without violation of the paramount dictates of justice and humanity, has deemed it right to establish the following rules.... (HD 11.2, 624-25) That this was an alternative ideology of the graded sanctioning of suicide as exception, rather than its inscription as sin, was of course not understood. Perhaps sati should have been read with martyrdom, with the defunct husband standing in for the transcendental One; or with war, with the husband standing in for sovereign or state, for whose sake an intoxicating ideology of self-sacrifice can be mobilized. In actuality, it was categorized with murder, infanticide, and the lethal exposure of the very old. The dubious place of the free will of the constituted sexed subject as female was successfully effaced. There is no itinerary we can retrace here. Since the other sanctioned suicides did not involve the scene of this constitution, they entered neither the ideological battleground at the archaic origin the tradition of the Dharmasastra - nor the scene of the reinscription of ritual as crime - the British abolition. The only related transformation was Mahatma Gandhi's reinscription of the notion of satyagraha, or hunger strike, as resistance. But this is not the place to discuss the details of that sea-change. I would merely invite the reader to compare the auras of widow sacrifice and Gandhian resistance. The root in the first part of satyagraha and sati are the same. Since the beginning of the Puranic era (ca. A.D. 400), learned Brahmans debated the doctrinal appropriateness of sati as of sanctioned suicides in sacred places in general. (This debate still continues in an academic way.) Sometimes the cast provenance of the practice was in question. The general law for widows, that they should observe brahmacarya, was, however, hardly ever debated. It is not enough to translate brahmacarya as "celibacy." It should be recognized that, of the four ages of being in Hindu (or Brahmanical) regulative psychobiography, brahmacarya is the social practice anterior to the kinship inscription of 1463

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marriage. The man - widower or husband - graduates through vanaprastha (forest life) into the mature celibacy and renunciation of samnyasa (laying aside).78 The woman as wife is indispensable for garhasthya, or householdership, and may accompany her husband into forest life. She has no access (according to Brahmanical sanction) to the final celibacy of asceticism, or samnyasa. The woman as widow, by the general law of sacred doctrine, must regress to an anteriority transformed into stasis. The institutional evils attendant upon this law are well known; I am considering its asymmetrical effect on the ideological formation of the sexed subject. It is thus of much greater significance that there was no debate on this nonexceptional fate of widows - either among Hindus or between Hindus and British - than that the exceptional prescription of self-immolation was actively contended.79 Here the possibility of recovering a (sexually) subaltern subject is once again lost and overdetermined. This legally programmed asymmetry in the status of the subject, which effectively defines the woman as object of one husband, obviously operates in the interest of the legally symmetrical subject-status of the male. The self-immolation of the widow thereby becomes the extreme case of the general law rather than an exception to it. It is not surprising, then, to read of heavenly rewards for the sati, where the quality of being the object of a unique possessor is emphasized by way of rivalry with other females, those ecstatic heavenly dancers, paragons of female beauty and male pleasure who sing her praise: "In heaven she, being solely devoted to her husband, and praised by groups of apsaras [heavenly dancers], sports with her husband as long as fourteen Indras rule" (HD II.2, 631). The profound irony in locating the woman's free will in self-immolation is once again revealed in a verse accompanying the earlier passage: "As long as the woman [as wife: stri] does not burn herself in fire on the death of her husband, she is never released [mucyate] from her female body [strisaris - i.e., in the cycle of births]." Even as it operates the most subtle general release from individual agency, the sanctioned suicide peculiar to woman draws its ideological strength by identifying individual agency with the supraindividual: kill yourself on your husband's pyre now, and you may kill your female body in the entire cycle of birth. In a further twist of the paradox, this emphasis on free will establishes the peculiar misfortune of holding a female body. The word for the self that is actually burned is the standard word for spirit in the noblest sense (atmari), while the verb "release," through the root for salvation in the noblest sense (muc —> moska) is in the passive (mocyate), and the word for that which is annulled in the cycle of birth is the everyday word for the body. The ideological message writes itself in the benevolent twentiethcentury male historian's admiration: "The Jauhar [group self-immolation of aristocratic Rajput war-widows or imminent war-widows] practiced by the Rajput ladies of Chitor and other places for saving themselves from

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unspeakable atrocities at the hands of the victorious Moslems are too well known to need any lengthy notice" (HD 11.2, 629). Although jauhar is not, strictly speaking, an act of sati, and although I do not wish to speak for the sanctioned sexual violence of conquering male armies, "Moslem" or otherwise, female self-immolation in the face of it is a legitimation of rape as "natural" and works, in the long run, in the interest of unique genital possession of the female. The group rape perpetrated by the conquerors is a metonymic celebration of territorial acquisition. Just as the general law for widows was unquestioned, so this act of female heroism persists among the patriotic tales told to children, thus operating on the crudest level of ideological reproduction. It has also played a tremendous role, precisely as an overdetermined signifier, in acting out Hindu communalism. Simultaneously, the broader question of the constitution of the sexed subject is hidden by foregrounding the visible violence of sati. The task of recovering a (sexually) subaltern subject is lost in an institutional textuality at the archaic origin. As I mentioned above, when the status of the legal subject as propertyholder could be temporarily bestowed on the female relict, the selfimmolation of widows was stringently enforced. Raghunandana, the late fifteenth-/sixteenth-century legalist whose interpretations are supposed to lend the greatest authority to such enforcement, takes as his text a curious passage from the Rg-Veda, the most ancient of the Hindu sacred texts, the first of the Srutis. In doing so, he is following a centuries-old tradition, commemorating a peculiar and transparent misreading at the very place of sanction. Here is the verse outlining certain steps within the rites for the dead. Even at a simple reading it is clear that it is "not addressed to widows at all, but to ladies of the deceased man's household whose husbands were living." Why then was it taken as authoritative? This, the unemphatic transposition of the dead for the living husband, is a different order of mystery at the archaic origin from the ones we have been discussing: "Let these whose husbands are worthy and are living enter the house with clarified butter in their eyes. Let these wives first step into the house, tearless, healthy, and well adorned" (HD 11.2, 634). But this crucial transposition is not the only mistake here. The authority is lodged in a disputed passage and an alternate reading. In the second line, here translated "Let these wives first step into the house," the word for first is agre. Some have read it as agne, "O fire." As Kane makes clear, however, "even without this change Apararka and others rely for the practice of Sati on this verse" (HD IV.2, 199). Here is another screen around one origin of the history of the subaltern female subject. Is it a historical oneirocritique that one should perform on a statement such as: "Therefore it must be admitted that either the MSS are corrupt or Raghunandana committed an innocent slip" (HD II.2, 634)? It should be mentioned that the rest of the poem is either about that general law of brahmacarya-in-stasis for widows,

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to which sati is an exception, or about niyoga - "appointing a brother or any near kinsman to raise up issue to a deceased husband by marrying his widow."80 If P. V. Kane is the authority on the history of the Dharmasastra, Mulla's Principles of Hindu Law is the practical guide. It is part of the historical text of what Freud calls "kettle logic" that we are unraveling here, that Mulla's textbook adduces, just as definitively, that the Rg-Vedic verse under consideration was proof that "remarriage of widows and divorce are recognized in some of the old texts."81 One cannot help but wonder about the role of the word yoni. In context, with the localizing adverb agre (in front), the word means "dwelling-place." But that does not efface its primary sense of "genital" (not yet perhaps specifically female genital). How can we take as the authority for the choice of a widow's self-immolation a passage celebrating the entry of adorned wives into a dwelling place invoked on this occasion by its yom-name, so that the extracontextual icon is almost one of entry into civic production or birth? Paradoxically, the imagic relationship of vagina and fire lends a kind of strength to the authority-claim.82 This paradox is strengthened by Raghunandana's modification of the verse so as to read, "Let them first ascend the fluid abode [or origin, with, of course, the yom-name - a rohantu jalayonimagne], O fire [or of fire]." Why should one accept that this "probably mean[s] 'may fire be to them as cool as water' " (HD II.2, 634)? The fluid genital of fire, a corrupt phrasing, might figure a sexual indetermincy providing a simulacrum for the intellectual indeterminacy of tattvajnna (truth-knowledge). I have written above of a constructed counternarrative of woman's consciousness, thus woman's being, thus woman's being good, thus the good woman's desire, thus woman's desire. This slippage can be seen in the fracture inscribed in the very word sati, the feminine form of sat. Sat transcends any gender-specific notion of masculinity and moves up not only into human but spiritual universality. It is the present participle of the verb "to be" and as such means not only being but the True, the Good, the Right. In the sacred texts it is essence, universal spirit. Even as a prefix it indicates appropriate, felicitous, fit. It is noble enough to have entered the most privileged discourse of modern Western philosophy: Heidegger's meditation on Being.83 Sati, the feminine of this word, simply means "good wife." It is now time to disclose that sati or suttee as the proper name of the rite of widow self-immolation commemorates a grammatical error on the part of the British, quite as the nomenclature "American Indian" commemorates a factual error on the part of Columbus. The word in the various Indian languages is "the burning of the sati" or the good wife, who thus escapes the regressive stasis of the widow in brahmacrya. This exemplifies the race-class-gender overdeterminations of the situation. It can

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perhaps be caught even when it is flattened out: white men, seeking to save brown women from brown men, impose upon those women a greater ideological constriction by absolutely identifying, within discursive practice, good-wifehood with self-immolation on the husband's pyre. On the other side of thus constituting the object, the abolition (or removal) of which will provide the occasion for establishing a good, as distinguished from merely civil, society, is the Hindu manipulation of female subjectconstitution which I have tried to discuss. (I have already mentioned Edward Thompson's Suttee, published in 1928. I cannot do justice here to this perfect specimen of the justification of imperialism as a civilizing mission. Nowhere in his book, written by someone who avowedly "loves India," is there any questioning of the "beneficial ruthlessness" of the British in India as motivated by territorial expansionism or management of industrial capital.84 The problem with his book is, indeed, a problem of representation, the construction of a continuous and homogeneous "India" in terms of heads of state and British administrators, from the perspective of "a man of good sense" who would be the transparent voice of reasonable humanity. "India" can then be represented, in the other sense, by its imperial masters. The reason for referring to suttee here is Thompson's finessing of the word sati as "faithful" in the very first sentence of his book, an inaccurate translation which is nonetheless an English permit for the insertion of the female subject into twentieth-century discourse.85) Consider Thompson's praise for General Charles Hervey's appreciation of the problem of sati: "Hervey has a passage which brings out the pity of a system which looked only for prettiness and constancy in woman. He obtained the names of satis who had died on the pyres of Bikanir Rajas; they were such names as: 'Ray Queen, Sun-ray, Love's Delight, Garland, Virtue Found, Echo, Soft Eye, Comfort, Moonbeam, Love-lorn, Dear Heart, Eye-play, Arbour-born, Smile, Love-bud, Glad Omen, Mist-clad, or Cloud-sprung - the last a favourite name.' " Once again, imposing the upper-class Victorian's typical demands upon "his woman" (his preferred phrase), Thompson appropriates the Hindu woman as his to save against the "system." Bikaner is in Rajasthan; and any discussion of widowburnings of Rajasthan, especially within the ruling class, was intimately linked to the positive or negative construction of Hindu (or Aryan) communalism. A look at the pathetically misspelled names of the satis of the artisanal, peasant, village-priestly, moneylender, clerical, and comparable social groups in Bengal, where satis were most common, would not have yielded such a harvest (Thompson's preferred adjective for Bengalis is "imbecilic"). Or perhaps it would. There is no more dangerous pastime than transposing proper names into common nouns, translating them, and using them as sociological evidence. I attempted to reconstruct the names on

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that list and began to feel Hervey-Thompson's arrogance. What, for instance, might "Comfort" have been? Was it "Shanti"? Readers are reminded of the last line of T. S. Eliot's Waste Land. There the word bears the mark of one kind of stereotyping of India - the grandeur of the ecumenical Upanishads. Or was it "Swasti"? Readers are reminded of the swastika, the Brahmanic ritual mark of domestic comfort (as in "God Bless Our Home") stereotyped into a criminal parody of Aryan hegemony. Between these two appropriations, where is our pretty and constant burnt widow? The aura of the names owes more to writers like Edward FitzGerald, the "translator" of the Rubayyat of Omar Khayyam who helped to construct a certain picture of the Oriental woman through the supposed "objectivity" of translation, than to sociological exactitude. (Said's Orientalism, 1978, remains the authoritative text here.) By this sort of reckoning, the translated proper names of a random collection of contemporary French philosophers or boards of directors of prestigious southern U.S. corporations would give evidence of a ferocious investment in an archangelic and hagiocentric theocracy. Such sleights of pen can be perpetuated on "common nouns" as well, but the proper name is most susceptible to the trick. And it is the British trick with sati that we are discussing. After such a taming of the subject, Thompson can write, under the heading "The Psychology of the 'Sati\" "I had intended to try to examine this; but the truth is, it has ceased to seem a puzzle to me."86 Between patriarchy and imperialism, subject-constitution and objectformation, the figure of the woman disappears, not into a pristine nothingness, but into a violent shuttling which is the displaced figuration of the "third-world woman" caught between tradition and modernization. These considerations would revise every detail of judgments that seem valid for a history of sexuality in the West: "Such would be the property of repression, that which distinguishes it from the prohibitions maintained by simple penal law: repression functions well as a sentence to disappear, but also as an injunction to silence, affirmation of non-existence; and consequently states that of all this there is nothing to say, to see, to know."87 The case of suttee as exemplum of the woman-in-imperialism would challenge and deconstruct this opposition between subject (law) and object-ofknowledge (repression) and mark the place of "disappearance" with something other than silence and nonexistence, a violent aporia between subject and object status. Sati as a woman's proper name is in fairly widespread use in India today. Naming a female infant "a good wife" has its own proleptic irony, and the irony is all the greater because this sense of the common noun is not the primary operator in the proper name.88 Behind the naming of the infant is the Sati of Hindu mythology, Durga in her manifestation as a good wife.89 In part of the story, Sati - she is already called that - arrives at her father's court uninvited, in the absence, even, of an invitation for her

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divine husband Siva. Her father starts to abuse Siva and Sati dies in pain. Siva arrives in a fury and dances over the universe with Sati's corpse on his shoulder. Visnu dismembers her body and bits are strewn over the earth. Around each such relic bit is a great place of pilgrimage. Figures like the goddess Athena - "father's daughters self-professedly uncontaminated by the womb" - are useful for establishing women's ideological self-debasement, which is to be distinguished from a deconstructive attitude toward the essentialist subject. The story of the mythic Sati, reversing every narrateme of the rite, performs a similar function: the living husband avenges the wife's death, a transaction between great male gods fulfills the destruction of the female body and thus inscribes the earth as sacred geography. To see this as proof of the feminism of classical Hinduism or of Indian culture as goddess-centered and therefore feminist is as ideologically contaminated by nativism or reverse ethnocentrism as it was imperialist to erase the image of the luminous fighting Mother Durga and invest the proper noun Sati with no significance other than the ritual burning of the helpless widow as sacrificial offering who can then be saved. There is no space from which the sexed subaltern subject can speak. If the oppressed under socialized capital have no necessarily unmediated access to "correct" resistance, can the ideology of sati, coming from the history of the periphery, be sublated into any model of interventionist practice? Since this essay operates on the notion that all such clear-cut nostalgias for lost origins are suspect, especially as grounds for counterhegemonic ideological production, I must proceed by way of an example.90 (The example I offer here is not a plea for some violent Hindu sisterhood of self-destruction. The definition of the British Indian as Hindu in Hindu law is one of the marks of the ideological war of the British against the Islamic Mughal rulers of India; a significant skirmish in that as yet unfinished war was the division of the subcontinent. Moreover, in my view, individual examples of this sort are tragic failures as models of interventionist practice, since I question the production of models as such. On the other hand, as objects of discourse analysis for the non-self-abdicating intellectual, they can illuminate a section of the social text, in however haphazard a way.) A young woman of sixteen or seventeen, Bhuvaneswari Bhaduri, hanged herself in her father's modest apartment in North Calcutta in 1926. The suicide was a puzzle since, as Bhuvaneswari was menstruating at the time, it was clearly not a case of illicit pregnancy. Nearly a decade later, it was discovered that she was a member of one of the many groups involved in the armed struggle for Indian independence. She had finally been entrusted with a political assassination. Unable to confront the task and yet aware of the practical need for trust, she killed herself. Bhuvaneswari had known that her death would be diagnosed as the outcome of illegitimate passion. She had therefore waited for the onset of

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menstruation. While waiting, Bhuvaneswari, the brahmacarini who was no doubt looking forward to good wifehood, perhaps rewrote the social text of sati-suicide in an interventionist way. (One tentative explanation of her inexplicable act had been a possible melancholia brought on by her brother-in-law's repeated taunts that she was too old to be not-yet-a-wife.) She generalized the sanctioned motive for female suicide by taking immense trouble to displace (not merely deny), in the physiological inscription of her body, its imprisonment within legitimate passion by a single male. In the immediate context, her act became absurd, a case of delirium rather than sanity. The displacing gesture - waiting for menstruation - is at first a reversal of the interdict against a menstruating widow's right to immolate herself; the unclean widow must wait, publicly, until the cleansing bath of the fourth day, when she is no longer menstruating, in order to claim her dubious privilege. In this reading, Bhuvaneswari Bhaduri's suicide is an unemphatic, ad hoc, subaltern rewriting of the social text of sati-suicide as much as the hegemonic account of the blazing, fighting, familial Durga. The emergent dissenting possibilities of that hegemonic account of the fighting mother are well documented and popularly well remembered through the discourse of the male leaders and participants in the independence movement. The subaltern as female cannot be heard or read. I know of Bhuvaneswari's life and death through family connections. Before investigating them more thoroughly, I asked a Bengali woman, a philosopher and Sanskritist whose early intellectual production is almost identical to mine, to start the process. Two responses: (a) Why, when her two sisters, Saileswari and Raseswari, led such full and wonderful lives, are you interested in the hapless Bhuvaneswari? (b) I asked her nieces. It appears that it was a case of illicit love. I have attempted to use and go beyond Derridean deconstruction, which I do not celebrate as feminism as such. However, in the context of the problematic I have addressed, I find his morphology much more painstaking and useful than Foucault's and Deleuze's immediate, substantive involvement with more "political" issues - the latter's invitation to "become woman" - which can make their influence more dangerous for the U.S. academic as enthusiastic radical. Derrida marks radical critique with the danger of appropriating the other by assimilation. He reads catachresis at the origin. He calls for a rewriting of the Utopian structural impulse as "rendering delirious that interior voice that is the voice of the other in us." I must here acknowledge a long-term usefulness in Jacques Derrida which I seem no longer to find in the authors of The History of Sexuality and Mille Plateaux?1 The subaltern cannot speak. There is no virtue in global laundry lists with "woman" as a pious item. Representation has not withered away.

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The female intellectual as intellectual has a circumscribed task which she must not disown with a flourish. Notes 1 I am grateful to Khachig Tololyan for a painstaking first reading of this essay. 2 Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), p. 66. 3 Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), pp. 205-17 (hereafter cited as FD). I have modified the English version of this, as of other English translations, where faithfulness to the original seemed to demand it. It is important to note that the greatest "influence" of Western European intellectuals upon U.S. professors and students happens through collections of essays rather than long books in translation. And, in those collections, it is understandably the more topical pieces that gain a greater currency. (Derrida's "Structure, Sign, and Play" is a case in point.) From the perspective of theoretical production and ideological reproduction, therefore, the conversation under consideration has not necessarily been superseded. 4 There is an implicit reference here to the post-1968 wave of Maoism in France. See Michel Foucault, "On Popular Justice: A Discussion with Maoists," Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 7972-77, trans. Colin Gordon et al. (New York: Pantheon), p. 134 (hereafter cited as PK). Explication of the reference strengthens my point by laying bare the mechanics of appropriation. The status of China in this discussion is exemplary. If Foucault persistently clears himself by saying "I know nothing about China," his interlocutors show toward China what Derrida calls the "Chinese prejudice." 5 This is part of a much broader symptom, as Eric Wolf discusses in Europe and the People without History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982). 6 Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Verso, 1983), p. 12. 7 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Richard Hurley et al. (New York: Viking Press, 1977), p. 26. 8 The exchange with Jacques-Alain Miller in PK ("The Confession of the Flesh") is revealing in this respect. 9 Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy, pp. 132-33. 10 For one example among many see PK, p. 98. 11 It is not surprising, then, that Foucault's work, early and late, is supported by too simple a notion of repression. Here the antagonist is Freud, not Marx. "I have the impression that [the notion of repression] is wholly inadequate to the analysis of the mechanisms and effects of power that it is so pervasively used to characterize today (PK, 92)." The delicacy and subtlety of Freud's suggestion that under repression the phenomenal identity of affects is indeterminate because something unpleasant can be desired as pleasure, thus radically reinscribing the relationship between desire and "interest" - seems quite deflated here. For an elaboration of this notion of repression, see Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. 88f. (hereafter cited as OG); and Derrida, Limited inc.: abc, trans. Samuet Weber, Glyph 2 (1977), p. 215. 12 Althusser's version of this particular situation may be too schematic, but it

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23 24 25 26 27

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nevertheless seems more careful in its program than the argument under study. "Class instinct," Althusser writes, "is subjective and spontaneous. Class position is objective and rational. To arrive at proletarian class positions, the class instinct of proletarians only needs to be educated; the class instinct of the petty bourgeoisie, and hence of intellectuals, has, on the contrary, to be revolutionized" (Lenin and Philosophy, p. 13). Foucault's subsequent explanation (PK, 145) of this Deleuzian statement comes closer to Derrida's notion that theory cannot be an exhaustive taxonomy and is always formed by practice. Cf. the surprisingly uncritical notions of representation entertained in PK, pp. 141, 188. My remarks concluding this paragraph, criticizing intellectuals' representations of subaltern groups, should be rigorously distinguished from a coalition politics that takes into account its framing within socialized capital and unites people not because they are oppressed but because they are exploited. This model works best within a parliamentary democracy, where representation is not only not banished but elaborately staged. Karl Marx, Surveys from Exile, trans. David Fernbach (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), p. 239. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, trans Ben Fowkes (New York: Vantage Books, 1977), p. 254. Marx, Capital, I, p. 302. See the excellent short definition and discussion of common sense in Errol Lawrence, "Just Plain Common Sense: The 'Roots' of Racism," in Hazel V. Carby et al., The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in 70s Britain (London: Hutchinson, 1982), p. 48. "Use value" in Marx can be shown to be a "theoretical fiction" - as much of a potential oxymoron as "natural exchange." I have attempted to develop this in "Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value," a manuscript under consideration by Diacritics. Derrida's "Linguistic Circle of Geneva," especially p. 143f., can provide a method for assessing the irreducible place of the family in Marx's morphology of class formation. In Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). Marx, Capital, I, p. 128. I am aware that the relationship between Marxism and neo-Kantianism is a politically fraught one. I do not myself see how a continuous line can be established between Marx's own texts and the Kantian ethical moment. It does seem to me, however, that Marx's questioning of the individual as agent of history should be read in the context of the breaking up of the individual subject inaugurated by Kant's critique of Descartes. Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Martin Nicolaus (New York: Viking Press, 1973), pp. 162-63. Edward W. Said, The World, the Text, the Critic (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983). p. 243. Paul Bove, "Intellectuals at War: Michel Foucault and the Analysis of Power," Sub-Stance, 36/37 (1983), p. 44. Carby, Empire, p. 34. This argument is developed further in Spivak, "Scattered Speculations." Once again, the Anti-Oedipus did not ignore the economic text, although the treatment was perhaps too allegorical. In this respect, the move from schizo- to rhyzo-analysis in Mille plateaux (Paris: Seuil, 1980) has not been salutary. See Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the

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29

30 31 32

33 34 35 36

37

38

39

Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Pantheon Books, 1965), pp. 251,262, 269. Although I consider Fredric Jameson's Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981) to be a text of great critical weight, or perhaps because I do so, I would like my program here to be distinguished from one of restoring the relics of a privileged narrative: "It is in detecting the traces of that uninterrupted narrative, in restoring to the surface of the text the repressed and buried reality of this fundamental history, that the doctrine of a political unconscious finds its function and its necessity" (p. 20). Among many available books, I cite Bruse Tiebout McCully, English Education and the Origins of Indian Nationalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1940). Thomas Babington Macaulay, Speeches by Lord Macaulay: With His Minute on Indian Education, ed. G. M. Young (Oxford: Oxford University Press, AMS Edition, 1979), p. 359. Keith, one of the compilers of the Vedic Index, author of Sanskrit Drama in its Origin, Development, Theory, and Practice, and the learned editor of the Krsnayajurveda for Harvard University Press, was also the editor of four volumes of Selected Speeches and Documents of British Colonial Policy (1763 to 1937), of International Affairs (1918 to 1937), and of the British Dominions (1918 to 1931). He wrote books on the sovereignty of British dominions and on the theory of state succession, with special reference to English and colonial law. Mahamahopadhyaya Haraprasad Shastri, A Descriptive Catalogue of Sanskrit Manuscripts in the Government Collection under the Care of the Asiatic Society of Bengal (Calcutta: Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1925), vol. 3, p. viii. Dinesachandra Sena, Brhat Banga (Calcutta: Calcutta University Press, 1925), vol. 1, p. 6. Edward Thompson, Suttee: A Historical and Philosophical Enquiry into the Hindu Rite of Widow-Burning (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1928), pp. 130, 47. Holograph letter (from G. A. Jacob to an unnamed correspondent) attached to inside front cover of the Sterling Memorial Library (Yale University) copy of Colonel G. A. Jacob, ed., The Mahanarayana-Upanishad of the Atharva-Veda with the Dipika of Naryana (Bombay: Government Central Books Department, 1888); italics mine. The dark invocation of the dangers of this learning by way of anonymous aberrants consolidates the asymmetry. I have discussed this issue in greater detail with reference to Julia Kristeva's About Chinese Women, trans. Anita Barrows (London: Marion Boyars, 1977), in "French Feminism in an International Frame," Yale French Studies, 62 (1981). Antonio Gramsci, "Some Aspects of the Southern Question," Selections from Political Writing: 1921-1926, trans. Quintin Hoare (New York: International Publishers, 1978). I am using "allegory of reading" in the sense developed by Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979). Their publications are: Subaltern Studies I: Writing on South Asian History and Society, ed. Ranajit Guha (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1982); Subaltern Studies II: Writings on South Asian History and Society, ed. Ranajit Guha (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983); and Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983).

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INTERNAL COLONIALISMS AND SUBALTERN STUDIES 40 Edward W Said, "Permission to Narrate," London Review of Books (Feb. 16, 1984). 41 Guha, Studies, 1, p. 1. 42 Guha, Studies, I , p. 4. 43 Jacques Derrida, "The Double Session," Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981). 44 Guha, Studies, 1, p. 8 (all but the first set of italics are the author's). 45 Ajit K. Chaudhury, "New Wave Social Science," Frontier, 16-24 (Jan. 28, 1984), p. 10 (italics are mine). 46 Chaudhury, "New Wave Social Science," p. 10. 47 Pierre Macherey, A Theory of Literary Production, trans. Geoffrey Wall (London: Routledge, 1978), p. 87. 48 I have discussed this issue in "Displacement and the Discourse of Woman," in Mark Krupnick, ed., Displacement: Derrida and After (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), and in "Love Me, Love My Ombre, Elle: Derrida's 'La carte postale,' " Diacritics 14, no. 4 (1984), pp. 19-36. 49 This violence in the general sense that is the possibility of an episteme is what Derrida calls "writing" in the general sense. The relationship between writing in the general sense and writing in the narrow sense (marks upon a surface) cannot be cleanly articulated. The task of grammatology (deconstruction) is to provide a notation upon this shifting relationship. In a certain way, then, the critique of imperialism is deconstruction as such. 50 "Contracting Poverty," Multinational Monitor, 4, no. 8 (Aug. 1983), p. 8. This report was contributed by John Cavanagh and Joy Hackel, who work on the International Corporations Project at the Institute for Policy Studies (italics are mine). 51 The mechanics of the invention of the Third World as signifier are susceptible to the type of analysis directed at the constitution of race as a signifier in Carby, Empire. 52 Mike Davis, "The Political Economy of Late-Imperial America," New Left Review, 143 (Jan.-Feb. 1984), p. 9. 53 Bove, "Intellectuals," p. 51. 54 Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), p. 205. 55 Perry Anderson, In the Tracks of Historical Materialism (London: Verso, 1983), p. 53. 56 Anderson, In the Tracks, p. 52. 57 Said, The World, p. 183. 58 Jacques Derrida, "Of an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adapted in Philosophy," trans. John P. Leavy, Jr., in Semia, p. 71. 59 Even in such excellent texts of reportage and analysis as Gail Omvedt's We Will Smash This Prison! Indian Women in Struggle (London: Zed Press, 1980), the assumption that a group of Maharashtrian women in an urban proletarian situation, reacting to a radical white woman who had "thrown in her lot with the Indian destiny," is representative of "Indian women" or touches the question of "female consciousness in India" is not harmless when taken up within a first-world social formation where the proliferation of communication in an internationally hegemonic language makes alternative accounts and testimonies instantly accessible even to undergraduates. Norma Chinchilla's observation, made at a panel on "Third World Feminisms: Differences in Form and Content" (UCLA, Mar. 8,1983), that antisexist work in the Indian context is not genuinely antisexist but antifeudal, is another

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60 61 62

63 64

65 66 67

case in point. This permits definitions of sexism to emerge only after a society has entered the capitalist mode of production, thus making capitalism and patriarchy conveniently continuous. It also invokes the vexed question of the role of the " 'Asiatic' mode of production" in sustaining the explanatory power of the normative narrativization of history through the account of modes of production, in however sophisticated a manner history is construed. The curious role of the proper name "Asia" in this matter does not remain confined to proof or disproof of the empirical existence of the actual mode (a problem that became the object of intense maneuvering within international communism) but remains crucial even in the work of such theoretical subtlety and importance as Barry Hindess and Paul Hirst's Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production (London: Routledge, 1975) and Fredric Jameson's Political Unconscious. Especially in Jameson, where the morphology of modes of production is rescued from all suspicion of historical determinism and anchored to a poststructuralist theory of the subject, the "Asiatic" mode of production, in its guise of "oriental despotism" as the concomitant state formation, still serves. It also plays a significant role in the transmogrified mode of production narrative in Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus. In the Soviet debate, at a far remove, indeed, from these contemporary theoretical projects, the doctrinal sufficiency of the "Asiatic" mode of production was most often doubted by producing for it various versions and nomenclatures of feudal, slave, and communal modes of production. (The debate is presented in detail in Stephen F. Dunn, The Fall and Rise of the Asiatic Mode of Production [London: Routledge, 1982].) It would be interesting to relate this to the repression of the imperialist "moment" in most debates over the transition from feudalism to capitalism that have long exercised the Western Left. What is more important here is that an observation such as Chinchilla's represents a widespread hierarchization within third-world feminism (rather than Western Marxism), which situates it within the long-standing traffic with the imperialist concept-metaphor "Asia." I should add that I have not yet read Madhu Kishwar and Ruth Vanita, eds., In Search of Answers: Indian Women's Voices from Manushi (London: Zed Books, 1984). Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), p. 48. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, "Placing Woman's History in History," New Left Review, 133 (May-June 1982), p. 21. I have attempted to develop this idea in a somewhat autobiographical way in "Finding Feminist Readings: Dante-Yeats," in Ira Konigsberg, ed., American Criticism in the Poststructuralist Age (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1981). Sarah Kofman, L'enigme de la femme: La femme dans les textes de Freud (Paris: Galilee, 1980). Sigmund Freud, " 'A Child Is Being Beaten': A Contribution to the Study of the Origin of Sexual Perversions," The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey et al. (London: Hogarth Press, 1955), vol. 17. Freud, " 'Wild' Psycho-Analysis," Standard Edition, vol. 11. Freud, " 'A Child Is Being Beaten'," p. 188. For a brilliant account of how the "reality" of widow-sacrifice was constituted or "textualized" during the colonial period, see Lata Mani, "The Production of Colonial Discourse: Sati in Early Nineteenth Century Bengal" (masters thesis,

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68

69 70 71

72 73 74

75 76 77 78 79

80

University of California at Santa Cruz, 1983). I profited from discussion with Ms. Mani at the inception of this project. J. D. M. Derrett, Hindu Law Past and Present: Being an Account of the Controversy Which Preceded the Enactment of the Hindu Code, and Text of the Code as Enacted, and Some Comments Thereon (Calcutta: A. Mukherjee and Co., 1957), p. 46. Ashis Nandy, "Sati: A Ninteenth Century Tale of Women, Violence and Protest," Rammohun Roy and the Process of Modernization in India, ed. V. C. Joshi (Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1975), p. 68. The following account leans heavily on Pandurang Vaman Kane, History of the Dharmasastra (Poona: Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, 1963) (hereafter cited as HD, with volume, part, and page numbers). Upendra Thakur, The History of Suicide in India: An Introduction (Delhi: Munshi Ram Manohar Lai, 1963), p. 9, has a useful list of Sanskrit primary sources on sacred places. This laboriously decent book betrays all the signs of the schizophrenia of the colonial subject, such as bourgeois nationalism, patriarchal communalism, and an "enlightened reasonableness." Nandy, "Sati." Jean-Francois Lyotard, Le differend (Paris: Minuit, 1984). HD, II. 2, p. 633. There are suggestions that this "prescribed penance" was far exceeded by social practice. In the passage below, published in 1938, notice the Hindu patristic assumptions about the freedom of female will at work in phrases like "courage" and "strength of character." The unexamined presuppositions of the passage might be that the complete objectification of the widow-concubine was just punishment for abdication of the right to courage, signifying subject status: "Some widows, however, had not the courage to go through the fiery ordeal; nor had they sufficient strength of mind and character to live up to the high ascetic ideal prescribed for them [brahmacarya]. It is sad to record that they were driven to lead the life of a concubine or avarudda stri [incarcerated wife]." A. S. Altekar, The Position of Women in Hindu Civilization: From Prehistoric Times to the Present Day (Delhi. Motilal Banarsidass, 1938), p. 156. Quoted in Sena, Brhat-Banga, II, pp. 913-14. Thompson, Suttee, p. 132. Here, as well as for the Brahman debate over sati, see Mani, "Production," pp.71f. We are speaking here of the regulative norms of Brahmanism, rather than "things as they were." See Robert Lingat, The Classical Law of India, trans. J. D. M. Derrett (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), p. 46. Both the vestigial possibility of widow remarriage in ancient India and the legal institution of widow remarriage in 1856 are transactions among men. Widow remarriage is very much an exception, perhaps because it left the program of subject-formation untouched. In all the "lore" of widow remarriage. It is the father and the husband who are applauded for their reformist courage and selflessness. Sir Monier Monier-Williams, Sanskrit-English Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1899), p. 552. Historians are often impatient if modernists seem to be attempting to import "feministic" judgments into ancient patriarchies. The real question is, of course, why structures of patriarchal domination should be unquestioningly recorded. Historical sanctions for collective action toward social justice can only be developed if people outside of the discipline question standards of "objectivity" preserved as such by the hegemonic tradition. It

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81 82

83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90

91

does not seem inappropriate to notice that so "objective" an instrument as a dictionary can use the deeply sexist-partisan explanatory expression: "raise up issue to a deceased husband"! Sunderlal T. Desai, Mulla: Principles of Hindu Law (Bombay: N. M. Tripathi, 1982), p. 184. I am grateful to Professor Alison Finely of Trinity College (Hartford, Conn.) for discussing the passage with me. Professor Finley is an expert on the RgVeda. I hasten to add that she would find my readings as irresponsibly "literary-critical" as the ancient historian would find it "modernist" (see note 80). Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1961), p. 58. Thompson, Suttee, p. 37. Thompson, Suttee, p. 15. For the status of the proper name as "mark," see Derrida, "Taking Chances." Thompson, Suttee, p. 137. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1980), vol. 1, p. 4. The fact that the word was also used as a form of address for a well-born woman ("lady") complicates matters. It should be remembered that this account does not exhaust her many manifestations within the pantheon. A position against nostalgia as a basis of counterhegemonic ideological production does not endorse its negative use. Within the complexity of contemporary political economy, it would, for example, be highly questionable to urge that the current Indian working-class crime of burning brides who bring insufficient dowries and of subsequently disguising the murder as suicide is either a use or abuse of the tradition of sYZft-suicide. The most that can be claimed is that it is a displacement on a chain of semiosis with the female subject as signifier, which would lead us back into the narrative we have been unraveling. Clearly, one must work to stop the crime of bride burning in every way. If, however, that work is accomplished by unexamined nostalgia or its opposite, it will assist actively in the substitution of race/ethnos or sheer genitalism as a signifier in the place of the female subject. I had not read Peter Dews, "Power and Subjectivity in Foucault," New Left Review, 144 (1984), until I finished this essay. I look forward to his book on the same topic. There are many points in common between his critique and mine. However, as far as I can tell from the brief essay, he writes from a perspective uncritical of critical theory and the intersubjective norm that can all too easily exchange "individual" for "subject" in its situating of the "epistemic subject." Dews's reading of the connection between "Marxist tradition" and the "autonomous subject" is not mine. Further, his account of "the impasse of the second phase of poststructuralism as a whole" is vitiated by his nonconsideration of Derrida, who has been against the privileging of language from his earliest work, the "Introduction" in Edmund Husserl, The Origin of Geometry, trans. John Leavy (Stony Brook, N.Y.: Nicolas Hays, 1978). What sets his excellent analysis quite apart from my concerns is, of course, that the Subject within whose History he places Foucault's work is the Subject of the European tradition (pp. 87, 94).

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SUBALTERN AS PERSPECTIVE Veena Das From Ranajit Guha (ed.) Subaltern Studies VI, Oxford University Press, 1989, 310-24

The five volumes of Subaltern Studies represent a formidable achievement in historical scholarship. They are an invitation to think anew the relation between history and anthropology from a point of view that displaces the central position of the European anthropologist or historian as the subject of discourse and Indian society as its object. This does not mean a rejection of Western categories but signals the beginning of a new and autonomous relation to them. As Gayatri Spivak has often pointed out, to deny that we write as people whose consciousness has been formed as colonial subjects is to deny our history. However, the consciousness of ourselves as colonial subjects is itself modified by our own experience and by the relation we establish to our intellectual traditions. Let me begin with some of the 'taken for granted' concerns in anthropology which should be interrogated through the endeavour of creating subaltern history. Much of the theoretical arsenal of anthropology consists of concepts that can render other societies knowable in terms of 'laws', 'rules' and patterns of authority. This is equally true whether we take cultural phenomena that belong to the public domain, such as village festivals, or to the intensely private domain such as the incest taboo. In each case anthropologists are interested in seeing how order is created out of chaos—how, for instance, does the incest taboo create enduring relations between men—not how it is violated to create structures of power within the family. In other words, the entire field of transgression, disorder and violence remains outside the anthropologist's privileged domains of enquiry. We create order by eliminating the chaos that the introduction of the subject might create. It is this aspect to which Levi-Strauss made a reference (with approval) when he responded to a critique made by Ricoeur

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charging him with having posited a categorizing system unconnected with a thinking Subject in his own words: But far from considering this reservation as indicating some deficiency, I see it as the inevitable consequence on the philosophical level of the ethnographic approach I have chosen since my ambition being to discover the conditions in which systems of truth become mutually convertible and therefore simultaneously acceptable to several different subjects, the pattern of those conditions takes on the character of an autonomous object, independent of any subject... I believe that mythology more than anything else makes it possible to illustrate such objectified thought and to provide empirical proof of its reality.1 It seems to me that this emphasis upon objectified thought that is simultaneously acceptable to several different subjects, hence is not the thought of any particular thinking subject, makes the savage knowable in a way in which his or her subjectivity can be completely denied. These finished products of collective consciousness are always seen to be representationally complete. In showing the rationality of these systems of thought the processes of their formulation have rarely been considered. The formidable achievements of structuralism notwithstanding, it repeats in a different key the themes of order out of chaos which were typical of the classical functionalist approaches. If the undue emphasis upon order and constraint makes it difficult to recognize the subject in theories of social structure, do theories of social action fare better? In its classic formulation in Max Weber, the characteristic of social action was that it was meaningful. Sociological explanation, cautioned Weber, must be able to take the subjectivity of the individual actor into account. Yet a close examination of Weber's theory of social action shows that the paradigm of social action is defined by rational action. Affective action, for example, is only considered to the extent that it is capable of deflecting the course of a well-defined rational action. All the examples of affective action that Weber takes pertain to negative emotions such as anger, jealousy and desire for revenge. Despite his stated intention of treating action as subjective action, there is an overdetermination of man as rational being; hence the category of affective action becomes a residual category in which all that cannot be explained by the paradigm of rational action is sought to be fitted. The individual in Weber's theory of social action is the actor in the capitalist system who exercises an alert control over himself. The category of meaning is reduced to the category of motive; the rationally controlled individual who exercises a constant and alert control over himself in the interest of transforming the world becomes the measure. All other forms of being—whether of

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non-western man or western woman—are understood in terms of a lack, a deflection from the ideal typical action represented by the paradigm of rational action.2 In this context the question is not whether we can completely obliterate the objectified character of social institutions, but rather whether it is at all possible to establish a relation of authenticity towards these institutions. After all, even the work of Goffman and Foucault, committed to recovering the knowing subject, has shown how the reified and alienating power of society flows through the tiniest capillary branches of society. How can the representational closure with which thought presents itself be shown to be the product of thinking subjects? In other words, are there reflexive devices which act as 'corrections' or 'interrogations' in relation to a given society? In this context the contributions to Subaltern Studies make an important point in establishing the centrality of the historical moment of rebellion in understanding the subalterns as subjects of their own histories. Although there are some essays of the typological kind, as for instance Chatterjee's attempt to create a typology of power,3 or some which study thought as an objectified system of representations, these are the exceptions. All the other essays are concerned with the historical moment of defiance. These are precisely those moments in the life of Indian society when the representational order is in conflict with the emergence of a new order. We have, in such a case, what Castoriadis called the magma of significations,4 for the representational closure which presents itself when we encounter thought in objectified forms is now ripped open. Instead we see this order interrogated. What, then, is the nature of this interrogation? The first question that we may ask is: how is this moment of rebellion constituted? What comes out in stark clarity in all the contributions to these volumes is that the historian is not engaged here in the understanding of the family, the kinship group or the tribe in its everyday life, but rather that the object of study is the 'contract'5 which such groups have been compelled to establish with forms of domination belonging to the structures of modernity—Western law (Amin and Guha),6 Western medicine (Arnold),7 bureaucracy (Hardiman),8 police (Arnold, Sarkar).9 In other words when we encounter the traditional groups of this society in the volumes of Subaltern Studies we see them engaged in a struggle with courts of law, with bureaucracy or the police—all signs of the new forms of domination that have been established over them. The very choice of this moment for analysis, I contend, poses a serious challenge to some of the dominant conceptions about tribes or castes in anthropological theory. One of the ways in which anthropological theory looks at the contrast between what are described as primitive/archaic societies on the one hand, and societies with a feudal past on the other, is in terms of the contrast between cold and hot societies, further translated into the distinction

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between synchrony and diachrony. At the foundation of this opposition is the contrast between nature and history, coming from the dominance of 'Western, Christian, codes of thought' as Baudrillard stated.10 Societies which are defined as cold have laws which are like the laws of nature; whereas the succession of feudalism to capitalism belongs to the interior laws of other kinds of societies, namely European societies. As the distinguished theologian Abraham Heschel pointed out, theologically nature reflects submission to God's will whereas history is the record of man's defiance. The first emancipatory act that the Subaltern Studies project performs in our understanding of tribes, castes or other such groups is to restore to them their historical being. It is no longer possible to think, for instance, of tribes or inhabitants of the hill regions deprived of their rights to forests (Guha) as simply inhabiting a world of nature.11 This is because it is their very relation to nature that has been destroyed by the enactment of new laws, which favour the commercial use of forests rather than their preservation as the habitat of tribes. The traces of the past that are left for the historian are, in fact, generated by the oppressive 'contract' that the tribe, caste or village is compelled to make with the modern institutions of domination. These are in the form of bureaucratic reports, police accounts or proceedings of law courts. Other kinds of traces are sometimes analysed, for instance in a remarkable paper by Pandey on modes of history-writing that are indigenous to the culture. However, as Pandey himself states, The history of colonial India has generally been written on the basis of British official records for the simple reason that non-official sources are neither quite so abundant nor as easily accessible.12 Reserving comment on the supposed 'inaccessibility' of non-official records, I would agree with Pandey's sensitive statement that what made an event in colonial history was focused around the question of 'law and order', its consolidation and breakdown. Thus, to construct the moment of defiance is also to construct the form of legal-rational domination. What is important, however, is that the subjects of this power are not treated as passive beings but are rather shown at the moment in which they try to defy this alienating power. Yet the very fact that this moment is encapsulated in the form of a bureaucratic report or the proceedings of a law court (the form in which it becomes available for study) would imply that the moment of rebellion is also the moment of failure or defeat. It is possible that in the face of the massive institutional structures of bureaucratic domination, subaltern rebellions can only provide a night-time of love, to use the evocative phrase of the Greek philosopher Castoriadis; it cannot be transformed into a life-time of love. Yet perhaps in capturing this defiance the historian has given us a means of constructing the objects of such power as subjects. In view of the massive evidence of defiance and rebellion meticulously presented in these volumes, the anthropologist can never again be justified

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in looking at the social forms of tribes or lineage structures leading an 'as if natural existence. The global encompassment of these institutions must be studied in order to understand them as historical entities. I would like to spell out the implications of this statement as it is embodied in the descriptions in Subaltern Studies in greater detail. Once we acknowledge that traces of rebellion are embodied in the form of a record produced in the context of the exercise of bureaucratic and legal domination, we also have to accept that the speech of the subaltern, when it becomes available for study, has already been appropriated by these superior forms of authority. This aspect of the record has been repeatedly emphasized by Guha. In the case of Chandra's death described by him,13 we can see that speech is literally wrenched from the person: T administered the medicine in the belief that it would terminate her pregnancy and did not realize that it would kill her' says Brinda, the sister of the dead Chandra. But she says this in the context of a trial in which, to use Guha's words, death is made a murder, a caring sister a murderess, and the participants within a tragedy defendants. Or to take another case: when Amin analyses the speech of Shikari who appeared as an approver in the Chauri Chaura case, we note that the speech is produced in first person form for, 'the more Shikari-as-approver implicates himself, the better the chance of his being pardoned'.14 The formulaic question of the judge posed before the approver's testimony is recorded—namely, is the confession voluntarily made—and has to be understood in the context in which penal truth is being produced. Hence, despite the reference to the supposed voluntary nature of the confession, direct speech here is not evidence of the greater nearness of the subject to his speech, but rather of the distance he is compelled to establish from all others who were participants in the same 'transgression' in order to implicate himself in the hope of being pardoned. That this is not a procedure free from risks is shown by the fate of the other approver in this case, Ramrup Barai, who was convicted of murder and hanged, precisely because he had implicated himself in the hope of being pardoned. Amin's stunning achievement in looking at an approver's testimony in the context of the distribution of roles in a court (roles being viewed as in theatre) is that he is able to show how the order of narration—the appearance of direct versus indirect speech as well as the relation between the production of penal truth and the forms of speech—creates a semiotic web within which judicial discourse may be viewed. Particularly important is his view of the final judgement as being the master discourse which is selfcontained and internally consistent, but which has to be analysed in the context of the processes for the construction of penal truth. In terms of method, this should open up new possibilities of looking at legal records not only as evidence of disorders within society, but also as evidence of the forms through which legal domination is established on all spheres of life.

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Further analysis on these promising lines, however, would require a greater attention to the splitting of the various types of speech produced into statements of referential truth in the indicative present, and those which appear in the past tense that have reference to the particular events under examination. For example, in this case the judge made references to what an ordinary crowd would have done and then compared this to the behaviour of the crowd. The former, in that it seems to embody a timeless truth, would show us how nature was constituted in judicial discourse and the relation of this construction to the form of domination established by institutions responsible for disciplining and punishing. It seems to me that apart from the emphasis upon referential statements, the occurrence of imperative statements would mark off a judicial text at the level of legislation as well as judicial practice. Although the penal institutions figure so prominently in many essays, one wishes that the contributors had given more attention to the manner in which this legality is established as legitimate, in contradistinction to the alternative legalities of the people. This aspect is particularly important for the understanding of medical models of dominance and the legal models through which customary rights over nature were eroded. Despite the important contributions of Arnold and Guha to this range of issues,15 we are never really told how the Epidemic Diseases Act, for instance, which established new rights of the state over the bodies of the people, came to be formulated; or the form of the Forest Act through which rights of people over their own forests were eliminated in favour of the interests of the new bourgeoisie. These acts are studied in terms of their consequences but not in terms of the forms through which their authority was established. The construction of the subaltern as person In the first section I noted that in theories of social action formulated by Weber and sociologists of his persuasion, we find an over-determination of man as rational actor so that all other forms of action take on a residual character. Some of the essays in the volumes of Subaltern Studies, it seems to me, are not quite able to displace this view of man. Hardiman, in his essay on the Bhils,16 points out the problems in treating peasants as rational agents of neo-classical economics but then goes on to say that social limitations and religious beliefs prevent tribal people from making rational economic calculations. This seems to assert that the normative behaviour is that of the rational agent, from which the tribal person deviates because of his social limitations. Although Hardiman wants to understand the social practice of the Bhils in terms of its own logic and points out how much the drinking behaviour of the tribal person was viewed from the prism of Brahmanical morality, he cannot resist pointing out that drinking 1483

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was excessive only on ceremonial occasions, or that it provided for nutritional needs. Thus, far from the way of life of the tribe being seen as a critique of the overdetermination of man as rational being, the drinking behaviour is sought to be explained by a hidden rationality. The emphasis upon rationality is also evident in Tanika Sarkar's essay on the movement of Jitu Santal.17 This is a meticulous and detailed working out of a movement to establish what Upendra Baxi has called 'alternative legality' among the Santals. Yet the picture of the Santals that is built constructs them primarily in the language through which they have been appropriated for bureaucratic reports. For instance, it is stated that the principal distinction between a Santal and a Hindu is in terms of the pleasure orientation of the former; the Hindu deity which figures in their cult, Kali, is unhesitatingly described as 'malignant'; and it is stated that an all-powerful benevolent figure was lacking in Santal culture. The authority for the latter statement is Hunter, who stated that 'Of a supreme and beneficent God, the Santal has no conception . . . Hunted and driven from country to country by a superior race, he cannot understand how a Being can be more powerful than himself without wishing to harm him.'18 The entire language here presupposes the civilized—savage dichotomy on which the civilizing mission of the colonial state as well as the missionaries was based. It is also a mute question as to whether this statement is about the Santal or about Hunter. A careful deconstruction of how the Santal was constituted in this discourse would have been more appropriate than the straightforward acceptance of these categories. The problem with using such adjectival renderings as the 'pleasure loving Santal' or the 'malignant goddess Kali'—which are taken to be authoritative on the characteristic of the Santal or of Kali—is precisely that, coined in colonial discourse, such words objectify a social ethic and retain their earlier function of describing other cultures in alienating if not degrading forms. In each case we would have to restore the experiential content of what is sociologically objectified. Jitu Santal wanted to establish an alternative legality through his movement, as Tanika Sarkar's descriptions clearly show. He repeatedly stated that the bichar, the judgments of the British courts, were bad and unjust. He wished to substitute for it the processes of adjudication that were indigenous to the Santals. But we are not given a description of the kind of authority that Jitu Santal was propagating as more just and representative of the Santals than that of the alien British authority. The alternative form is too easily assimilated in Tanika Sarkar's description into categories of bureaucratic authority, such as 'law maker' and 'law giver'. Further, many aspects of his movement are discussed much more with reference to the concept of sanskritization than in terms of its aims of establishing alternative legalities. In the process, the author criticizes the concept of sanskritization and states that the Sanyasi Dol formed by Jitu Santal took a

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renunciatory stance towards Hinduism. Yet the renunciatory stance is not seen as capable of providing a simultaneous critique of caste society and of the alien British rule. The critique gets firmly placed in the framework of caste and sanskritization rather than in its potential of becoming a new symbol through which opposition to the British raj could be articulated. The discussion of the final act of Jitu Santal, which was to barricade himself with his followers in a mosque when surrounded by the British police and to claim that the bullets of the British could not hurt his followers and him, is seen by Tanika Sarkar to have an irrational magical quality, for she says that this rested upon a belief in the magical transformation of the world. Broader political forces, she states further, were filtered through tribal logic and needs. Yet I wonder whether it is Jitu Santal or Tanika Sarkar here who shows better understanding of the broader political forces. In what way would Jitu have chosen a better death if he had handed himself to the British police and British justice which he profoundly distrusted? He would surely have ended up either as another Shikari, an approver on whose testimony others were hung, or proclaimed a traitor and given the kind of punishments described by Gautam Bhadra,19 serving ultimately only as a demonstration to the world of the futility of rebellion and protest. Indeed, nothing shows with greater clarity that punishments meted out by the British were not intended to show the power of the 'rule of law', but rather bore the marks of ritual deaths, than Bhadra's discussion of the lives of four rebels in 1857. One of these, the maulavi, a Muslim, was burnt and thus deprived of his body as the most important witness of his deeds in life on the day of judgement. A second was Shah Mai, whose head was carried on a spear for all to see the fate of rebels who defied British authority. In profound violation of the moral codes of their society, the bodies of the dead were not handed over to the relatives. Hence, if ritual death is what Jitu Santal chose, it was no different from the deaths prescribed by the British for the four rebels. This leads us to the question of how to characterize and describe subaltern consciousness, the question directly addressed by Sumit Sarkar.20 He argues that there is a coexistence and complex interaction between different types of consciousness—e.g. caste, class, regional and national. Starting methodologically from Gramsci's position that the objective formation of subaltern social groups have their origin in pre-existing social groups whose mentalities, ideologies and aims they observe for a while, Sarkar goes on to define subaltern consciousness as having positive and negative dimensions. Examples of positive consciousness are participation in railway strikes, for instance, whereas to strike for cow protection is seen as evidence of negative consciousness. Yet, careful historian that he is, Sarkar also points out that there are recurring patterns that are similar in militant protests of this period, regardless of whether we are examining

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mass participation on a national issue, a regional issue, or a communalist or caste movement. It seems to me that in view of these similarities the distinction between positive and negative dimensions of subaltern consciousness is not very useful. First, it is important to recognize that the repertoire of collective action at any particular historical period is limited and groups can innovate only on the margins, as suggested by Tilly.21 Second, it is not easy to characterize caste or ethnic consciousness as 'negative', as if it had an essence of its own, for it also depends on the interactional context within which this consciousness is being articulated. The cases described in all these volumes show that organizational patterns of caste may be used to articulate rebellion against the power of the state, or the justice of the caste or tribal panchayat to reject an illegitimate legality. Hence, it is the nature of the conflict within which a caste or tribe is locked which may provide the characteristics of that historical moment; to assume that we can know a priori the mentalities of castes or communities is to take an essentialist perspective which the evidence produced in the very volumes of Subaltern Studies would not support. Most of the contributions in these volumes show the importance of charismatic leadership in subaltern rebellion, in the sense that the leaders are not bearers of either traditional or rational-legal authority in Weberian terms. Rather than characterize this as evidence of a mentality that places emphasis upon magical transformation, as Sumit Sarkar suggests, it may be better to systematize the nature of charismatic leadership as well as the community that forms around a charismatic leader. Sarkar's work suggests that we can think of three moments in the emergence of a charismatic leader. First, there is his acceptance as an avatar, or a being with extraordinary power. Second, he is seen to confer an immunity to his followers. And third, there is a call for total transformation of the world. Sarkar discusses Gandhi as one such leader and traces his success to the fact that religious faith provides a built-in explanation for failure. This is disappointing, for it is not in the generality of religious faith but in the particularities of that moment that an understanding may be sought. What we find in the case of charismatic leadership is the extraordinarily open character of the message. Amin's analysis of the rumours about Gandhi in Gorakhpur shows that there is a stitching together of motifs that places Gandhi in popular consciousness as both belonging to their world and yet being an outsider to it.22 The destinateur of the communication is not a follower but a witness, whereas the destinator is the one who does not believe or believes only partially in the divinity of Gandhi and is sought to be persuaded. Important though the study of the carriers of symbols is, it would be even more interesting to see the coherence, the objectified forms, and the nature of communication established in such volatile historical moments around the figure of the charismatic leader. It is unfortunate that, while discussing such extraordinary historic

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moments, none of the contributors have examined the nature of the crowds which seemed to have been so important as an instrument of protest. Bhadra's essay does show that existing networks of relationships are important for understanding the organization of protest as well as the communication of messages.23 Similarly, Hardiman argues that violent protests by Bhils against moneylenders took place within a moral economy.24 This view of crowds is strongly influenced by the work of E. P. Thompson. In the social science literature, however, we also have an opposite view of crowds as capricious, emotional and fickle. It is a pity that the nature of the crowds that are an instrument of protest is not taken up seriously by the contributors to these volumes. It would be very interesting to see what historical evidence has to suggest on these two opposite views of crowds.

Power and the body The dominance of the medical model in the exercise of modern forms of power has been established by the work of Foucault. We have a very sensitive description of this process in a paper by Arnold on the colonial modes of handling the epidemic of plague.25 He shows how disease became a means of reorganizing the physical habitat, of assaulting the body, and violating private spaces—especially the home. Arnold is, however, not willing to see the objects on whom this power is exercised as passive beings. He shows how protest was organized around such imperatives as prescribing the modes of disposal of the dead, of removing patients from their families to hospitals, and especially against the seizure of women and their removal to hospitals. Protest cannot be seen as the expression of superstition against a scientific rationality, and the collage of rumours that he has examined for this period shows that in popular consciousness the British rulers were thought of as being contemptuous towards the sentiments, lives and bodies of the Indian subjects. This is a very important contribution for restoring the experiential content of such categories as superstition or rationality, around which such discussions often tend to be organized. It would, however, have been useful to examine the forms through which the medical model and the legal model come to be related in the exercise of colonial power. The Epidemic Diseases Act is mentioned, but its language is not analysed to show how human nature was sought to be constituted. Nor, indeed, is it shown how various categories were called into existence, and what model of imperatives was used. Arnold makes the fascinating suggestion that this opportunity was used to strike at the militancy of Tilak, and also to reorganize municipal councils. Thus the colonial context within which the medical model was used gave it a different tonality from the descriptions of Foucault. The relation between the objects on whom power is exercised and the historical

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moment in which such models get formulated will perhaps be analysed in greater detail in the future volumes of Subaltern Studies. The question of gender in the constitution of the subaltern has been largely absent from the purview of the studies mentioned here. An exception is Guha's paper on Chandra's death,26 in which he analyses a historical document about a case of abortion in 1849. A widow developed a liaison with a man and became pregnant. The man disowned all responsibility and threatened the woman's mother that he would send the woman, Chandra, away to a Vaishnava bhek. The women of the family tried to arrange an abortion and Chandra died in the process. This story, by no means exceptional, becomes the medium through which the nature of women's subordination within the patriarchal structures of family, religion and law are examined, and Guha is able to create a remarkable narrative issue around the speech of the witnesses. Judicial discourse, as he says, is a reductive discourse which transforms the loving act of female relatives into crime, but does not have to take notice of the lover in the whole process of fixing responsibility for the crime. The speech in the judicial process is referential, but there is a rupture of the referential even in the referential mode. For instance, when the mother quotes the speech of the lover we do not hear even a remote memory of the sexual desire that might have given the relationship life. Guha's analysis of male dominance here is remarkable—the lover who takes the body of his beloved in passion, yet becomes the pronouncer of the law when there is a risk of social opprobrium. I would extend this even further and argue that it is not the case of the illegitimate lover alone but the entire structure of patriarchy within which sexual desire is articulated. The lover of the night (whether husband or adulterous lover) becomes the law giver of the morning, and in this lies the oppressive nature of heterosexual desire. I am not certain that I would agree with Guha that the woman's entry into a Vaishnava bhek would have simply substituted one form of dominance by another, for the material on female ascetics described by Obeyesekere would point to a different direction—asceticism as a means of transforming the oppressive demands of heterosexuality into the power to heal.27 The quotidian and the historic In these concluding comments I come back to the question I posed between the relationship of the anthropological and the historical. Guha raises the question of the relation between everyday life and the historic moment which needs to be conceptualizd further. In this attempt it is necessary that the institution of time is conceptualized with some seriousness. Many contributors in the Subaltern volumes are content with the opposition between synchrony and diachrony, or between search for static laws and search for sequence and motion. These concepts of time end up 1488

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spatializing time, hence have very limited relevance for an understanding of the sociohistorical. It seems necessary to state here that the relevance of the concept of synchrony for the anthropologist is not that it denies time, but rather that it allows the present to be constituted as a spectral present rather than a point present. It is not that sequences are not important for the anthropologist, but rather that these are absorbed within the concept of repetition. The construction of reality as intersubjective requires that the self must be seen as simultaneously the self and the non-self or the other. Hence simultaneity has been privileged over succession in the description of everyday life For the historian, on the other hand, it is the origin of novelty which is of far greater relevance. The most exciting descriptions in the volumes of Subaltern Studies show precisely the emergence of this novelty. The attempt to relate this to the everyday life of the subaltern, I hope, will be the next theoretical task of this group of scholars. Subalterns are not in my opinion morphological categories, but represent a perspective in the sense in which Nietzsche used this word. The development of this perspective, I hope, will also mean a new relationship with the chroniclers of the cultures under study. The kind of attempt that Pandey makes in relating colonial history to locally-produced histories will expand the possibilities of the writing of history in Indian society.28 It is not that non-official sources are not abundant or not easily accessible, but rather that the legitimacy of those who are producing these materials needs to be recognized by official history.

Notes 1 See Claude Levi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked (Harper and Row, 1975),

p-11-

2 Veena Das, 'Force as a residual category in Max Weber', in Surendra Munshi (ed.), Marx and Weber: Modern Society on the Drawingboard (forthcoming). 3 Partha Chatterjee, 'More on modes of power and the peasantry', in Ranajit Guha (ed.), Subaltern Studies II: Writings on South Asian History and Society (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983). 4 Cornelius Castoriadis, L 'institution imaginaire de la societe (Paris: Editions de Seuil, 1975). 5 The word 'contract' is used here in the semiotic sense of the intersubjective space between two characters in a narrative. 6 Shahid Amin, 'Approver's testimony, judicial discourse: The case of Chauri Chaura' and Ranajit Guha, 'Chandra's death' in Guha (ed.), Subaltern Studies V: Writings on South Asian History and Society (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987). 7 David Arnold, Touching the body: Perspectives on the Indian plague', in Ranajit Guha (ed.), Subaltern Studies V: Writings on South Asian History and Society, (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987). 8 David Hardiman, 'From custom to crime: The politics of drinking in colonial 1489

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9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

South Gujarat' in Ranajit Guha (ed.), Subaltern Studies IV: Writings on South Asian History and Society (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1985). David Arnold, 'Bureaucratic recruitment and subordination in colonial India: The Madras Constabulary, 1859-1947', in Guha, SSIV. J. Baudrillard, Le miroir de la production (Paris editions Galilee: 1985). Ramachandra Guha, 'Forestry and social protest in British Kumaon, c. 1893-1921', in Ranajit Guha (ed.), Subaltern Studies IV (Delhi: OUP, 1985). Gyanendra Pandey, 'Encounters and Calamities: The history of a North Indian Qasba in the Nineteenth Century', in Ranajit Guha (ed.), Subaltern Studies HI (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1984). Ranajit Guha 'Chandra's death', in Guha (1987), SS V. Shahid Amin, see note 6. Arnold, see note 6, and Guha, see note 11. Hardiman, 'The Bhils and Sahukars of Eastern Gujarat', in SS V (1987). Tanika Sarkar, 'Jitu Santal' movement in Malda, 1924-1932: A study in tribal protest', in Guha (1985), Subaltern Studies IV. Quoted in Tanika Sarkar, ibid. Gautam Bhadra, 'Four rebels of Eighteen-Fifty-Seven', in Guha (1985), SS IV. Sumit Sarkar, The Conditions and Nature of Subaltern Militancy: Bengal from Swadeshi to Non-co-operation, c. 1905-22', in Guha (1984), SS HI. Charles Tilly, The Contentious French: Four Centuries of Popular Struggle (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986). Shahid Amin, 'Gandhi as Mahatma: Gorakhpur district, Eastern UP, 1921-2' in Guha (1984) 55IV. Gautam Bhadra, see note 19. Hardiman, see note 14. David Arnold, 'Touching the Body: Perspectives on the Indian Plague', in Guha (1987), SS V. Guha, see note 13. However, there is an interesting analysis of this question as it occurs in a literary text by Gayatri Spivak in the same volume, which I am unable to consider here. See Gananath Obeyesekere, Medusa's Hair (Princeton University Press, 1984). See Pandey, note 12.

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POSTCOLONIALITY AND THE ARTIFICE OF HISTORY Who Speaks for "Indian" Pasts? Dipesh Chakrabarty From Representations 37 (Winter 1992): 1-26

Push thought to extremes.—Louis Althusser

I It has recently been said in praise of the postcolonial project of Subaltern Studies that it demonstrates, "perhaps for the first time since colonization," that "Indians are showing sustained signs of reappropriating the capacity to represent themselves [within the discipline of history]."1 As a historian who is a member of the Subaltern Studies collective, I find the congratulation contained in this remark gratifying but premature. The purpose of this article is to problematize the idea of "Indians" "representing themselves in history." Let us put aside for the moment the messy problems of identity inherent in a transnational enterprise such as Subaltern Studies, where passports and commitments blur the distinctions of ethnicity in a manner that some would regard as characteristically postmodern. I have a more perverse proposition to argue. It is that insofar as the academic discourse of history—that is, "history" as a discourse produced at the institutional site of the university—is concerned, "Europe" remains the sovereign, theoretical subject of all histories, including the ones we call "Indian," "Chinese," "Kenyan," and so on. There is a peculiar way in which all these other histories tend to become variations on a master narrative that could be called "the history of Europe." In this sense, "Indian" history itself is in a position of subalternity; one can only articulate subaltern subject positions in the name of this history. While the rest of this article will elaborate on this proposition, let me enter a few qualifications. "Europe" and "India" are treated here as hyperreal terms in that they refer to certain figures of imagination whose geographical referents remain somewhat indeterminate.2 As figures of the imaginary they are, of course, subject to contestation, but for the moment

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I shall treat them as though they were given, reified categories, opposites paired in a structure of domination and subordination. I realize that in treating them thus I leave myself open to the charge of nativism, nationalism, or worse, the sin of sins, nostalgia. Liberal-minded scholars would immediately protest that any idea of a homogeneous, uncontested "Europe" dissolves under analysis. True, but just as the phenomenon of orientalism does not disappear simply because some of us have now attained a critical awareness of it, similarly a certain version of "Europe," reified and celebrated in the phenomenal world of everyday relationships of power as the scene of the birth of the modern, continues to dominate the discourse of history. Analysis does not make it go away. * ** That Europe works as a silent referent in historical knowledge itself becomes obvious in a highly ordinary way. There are at least two everyday symptoms of the subalternity of non-Western, third-world histories. Thirdworld historians feel a need to refer to works in European history; historians of Europe do not feel any need to reciprocate. Whether it is an Edward Thompson, a Le Roy Ladurie, a George Duby, a Carlo Ginzberg, a Lawrence Stone, a Robert Darnton, or a Natalie Davis—to take but a few names at random from our contemporary world—the "greats" and the models of the historian's enterprise are always at least culturally "European." "They" produce their work in relative ignorance of non-Western histories, and this does not seem to affect the quality of their work. This is a gesture, however, that "we" cannot return. We cannot even afford an equality or symmetry of ignorance at this level without taking the risk of appearing "old-fashioned" or "outdated." The problem, I may add in parenthesis, is not particular to historians. An unselfconscious but nevertheless blatant example of this "inequality of ignorance" in literary studies, for example, is the following sentence on Salman Rushdie from a recent text on postmodernism: "Though Saleem Sinai [of Midnight's Children] narrates in English . . . his intertexts for both writing history and writing fiction are doubled: they are, on the one hand, from Indian legends, films, and literature and, on the other, from the West—The Tin Drum, Tristram Shandy, One Hundred Years of Solitude, and so on."3 It is interesting to note how this sentence teases out only those references that are from "the West." The author is under no obligation here to be able to name with any authority and specificity the "Indian" allusions that make Rushdie's intertexuality "doubled." This ignorance, shared and unstated, is part of the assumed compact that makes it "easy" to include Rushdie in English department offerings on postcolonialism. This problem of asymmetric ignorance is not simply a matter of "cultural cringe" (to let my Australian self speak) on our part or of cultural arrogance on the part of the European historian. These problems exist but

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can be relatively easily addressed. Nor do I mean to take anything away from the achievements of the historians I mentioned. Our footnotes bear rich testimony to the insights we have derived from their knowledge and creativity. The dominance of "Europe" as the subject of all histories is a part of a much more profound theoretical condition under which historical knowledge is produced in the third world. This condition ordinarily expresses itself in a paradoxical manner. It is this paradox that I shall describe as the second everyday symptom of our subalternity, and it refers to the very nature of social science pronouncements themselves. For generations now, philosophers and thinkers shaping the nature of social science have produced theories embracing the entirety of humanity. As we well know, these statements have been produced in relative, and sometimes absolute, ignorance of the majority of humankind—i.e., those living in non-Western cultures. This in itself is not paradoxical, for the more self-conscious of European philosophers have always sought theoretically to justify this stance. The everyday paradox of third-world social science is that we find these theories, in spite of their inherent ignorance of "us," eminently useful in understanding our societies. What allowed the modern European sages to develop such clairvoyance with regard to societies of which they were empirically ignorant? Why cannot we, once again, return the gaze? There is an answer to this question in the writings of philosophers who have read into European history an entelechy of universal reason, if we regard such philosophy as the self-consciousness of social science. Only "Europe," the argument would appear to be, is theoretically (i.e., at the level of the fundamental categories that shape historical thinking) knowable; all other histories are matters of empirical research that fleshes out a theoretical skeleton which is substantially "Europe." There is one version of this argument in Edmund Husserl's Vienna lecture of 1935, where he proposed that the fundamental difference between "oriental philosophies" (more specifically, Indian and Chinese) and "Greek-European science" (or as he added, "universally speaking: philosophy") was the capacity of the latter to produce "absolute theoretical insights," that is "theoria" (universal science), while the former retained a "practicaluniversal," and hence "mythical-religious," character. This "practicaluniversal" philosophy was directed to the world in a "naive" and "straightforward" manner, while the world presented itself as a "thematic" to theoria, making possible a praxis "whose aim is to elevate mankind through universal scientific reason."4 A rather similar epistemological proposition underlies Marx's use of categories like "bourgeois" and "prebourgeois" or "capital" and "precapital." The prefix pre here signifies a relationship that is both chronological and theoretical. The coming of the bourgeois or capitalist society, Marx argues in the Grundrisse and elsewhere, gives rise for the first time to a

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history that can be apprehended through a philosophical and universal category, "capital." History becomes, for the first time, theoretically knowable. All past histories are now to be known (theoretically, that is) from the vantage point of this category, that is in terms of their differences from it. Things reveal their categorical essence only when they reach their fullest development, or as Marx put it in that famous aphorism of the Grundrisse: "Human anatomy contains the key to the anatomy of the ape."5 The category "capital," as I have discussed elsewhere, contains within itself the legal subject of Enlightenment thought.6 Not surprisingly, Marx said in that very Hegelian first chapter of Capital, vol. 1, that the secret of "capital," the category, "cannot be deciphered until the notion of human equality has acquired the fixity of a popular prejudice."7 To continue with Marx's words: Even the most abstract categories, despite their validity—precisely because of their abstractness—for all epochs, are nevertheless . . . themselves . . . a product of historical relations. Bourgeois society is the most developed and the most complex historic organization of production. The categories which express its relations, the comprehension of its structure, thereby also allow insights into the structure and the relations of production of all the vanished social formations out of whose ruins and elements it built itself up, whose partly still unconquered remnants are carried along within it, whose mere nuances have developed explicit significance within it, etc. . . . The intimations of higher development among the subordinate animal species . . . can be understood only after the higher development is already known. The bourgeois economy thus supplies the key to the ancient.8 For "capital" or "bourgeois," I submit, read "Europe." II

Neither Marx nor Husserl spoke—not at least in the words quoted above— in a historicist spirit. In parenthesis, we should also recall here that Marx's vision of emancipation entailed a journey beyond the rule of capital, in fact beyond the notion of juridical equality that liberalism holds so sacred. The maxim "From each according to his ability to each according to his need" runs quite contrary to the principle of "Equal pay for equal work," and this is why Marx remains—the Berlin Wall notwithstanding (or not standing!)— a relevant and fundamental critic of both capitalism and liberalism and thus central to any postcolonial, postmodern project of writing history. Yet Marx's methodological/epistemological statements have not always successfully resisted historicist readings. There has always remained enough ambi-

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AND THE ARTIFICE OF HISTORY

guity in these statements to make possible the emergence of "Marxist" historical narratives. These narratives turn around the theme of "historical transition." Most modern third-world histories are written within problematics posed by this transition narrative, of which the overriding (if often implicit) themes are those of development, modernization, capitalism. This tendency can be located in our own work in the Subaltern Studies project. My book on working-class history struggles with the problem.9 Sumit Sarkar's (another colleague in the Subaltern Studies project) Modern India, justifiably regarded as one of the best textbooks on Indian history written primarily for Indian universities, opens with the following sentences: The sixty years or so that lie between the foundation of the Indian National Congress in 1885 and the achievement of independence in August 1947 witnessed perhaps the greatest transition in our country's long history. A transition, however, which in many ways remains grievously incomplete, and it is with this central ambiguity that it seems most convenient to begin our survey.10 What kind of a transition was it that remained "grievously incomplete"? Sarkar hints at the possibility of there having been several by naming three: So many of the aspirations aroused in the course of the national struggle remained unfulfilled—the Gandhian dream of the peasant coming into his own in Ram-rajya [the rule of the legendary and the ideal god-king Ram], as much as the left ideals of social revolution. And as the history of independent India and Pakistan (and Bangladesh) was repeatedly to reveal, even the problems of a complete bourgeois transformation and successful capitalist development were not fully solved by the transfer of power of 1947. (4) Neither the peasant's dream of a mythical and just kingdom, nor the Left's ideal of a socialist] revolution, nor a "complete bourgeois transformation"—it is within these three absences, these "grievously incomplete" scenarios that Sarkar locates the story of modern India. It is also with a similar reference to "absences"—the "failure" of a history to keep an appointment with its destiny (once again an instance of the "lazy native," shall we say?)—that we announced our project of Subaltern Studies: It is the study of this historic failure of the nation to come to its own, a failure due to the inadequacy [emphasis added] of the

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bourgeoisie as well as of the working class to lead it into a decisive victory over colonialism and a bourgeois-democratic revolution of the classic nineteenth-century type . . . or [of the ] "new democracy" [type]—it is the study of this failure which constitutes the central problematic of the historiography of colonial India.11 The tendency to read Indian history in terms of a lack, an absence, or an incompleteness that translates into "inadequacy" is obvious in these excerpts. As a trope, however, it is an ancient one, going back to the hoary beginnings of colonial rule in India. The British conquered and represented the diversity of "Indian" pasts through a homogenizing narrative of transition from a "medieval" period to "modernity." The terms have changed with time. The "medieval" was once called "despotic" and the "modern," "the rule of law." "Feudal/capitalist" has been a later variant. When it was first formulated in colonial histories of India, this transition narrative was an unashamed celebration of the imperialist's capacity for violence and conquest. To give only one example among the many available, Alexander Dow's History of Hindostan, first published in three volumes between 1770 and 1772, was dedicated to the king with a candor characteristic of the eighteenth century when one did not need a Michel Foucault to uncover the connection between violence and knowledge: "The success of Your Majesty's arms," said Dow, "has laid open the East to the researches of the curious."12 Underscoring this connection between violence and modernity, Dow added: The British nation have become the conquerors of Bengal and they ought to extend some part of their fundamental jurisprudence to secure their conquest. . . . The sword is our tenure. It is an absolute conquest, and it is so considered by the world. (l:cxxxviii) This "fundamental jurisprudence" was the "rule of law" that contrasted, in Dow's narrative, with a past rule that was "arbitrary" and "despotic." In a further gloss Dow explained that "despotism" did not refer to a "government of mere caprice and whim," for he knew enough history to know that that was not true of India. Despotism was the opposite of English constitutional government; it was a system where "the legislative, the judicial and the executive power [were] vested in the prince." This was the past of unfreedom. With the establishment of British power, the Indian was to be made a legal subject, ruled by a government open to the pressures of private property ("the foundation of public prosperity," said Dow) and public opinion, and supervised by a judiciary where "the distributers of justice ought to be independent of everything but law [as]

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otherwise the officer [the judge] becomes a tool of oppression in the hands of despotism" (l:xcv, cl, cxl-cxli). In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, generations of elite Indian nationalists found their subject positions, as nationalists, within this transition narrative that, at various times and depending on one's ideology, hung the tapestry of "Indian history" between the two poles of the homologous sets of oppositions, despotic/constitutional, medieval/modern, feudal/capitalist. Within this narrative shared between imperialist and nationalist imaginations, the "Indian" was always a figure of lack. There was always, in other words, room in this story for characters who embodied, on behalf of the native, the theme of "inadequacy" or "failure." Dow's recommendation of a "rule of law" for Bengal/India came with the paradoxical assurance (to the British) that there was no danger of such a rule "infusing" in the natives "a spirit of freedom": To make the natives of the fertile soil of Bengal free, is beyond the power of political arrangement. . . . Their religion, their institutions, their manners, the very disposition of their minds, form them for passive obedience. To give them property would only bind them with stronger ties to our interests, and make them our subjects; or if the British nation prefers the name—more our slaves. (l:cxl-cxli) We do not need to be reminded that this would remain the cornerstone of imperial ideology for many years to come—subjecthood but not citizenship, as the native was never adequate to the latter—and would eventually become a strand of liberal theory itself.13 This was of course where nationalists differed. For Rammohun Roy as for Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, two of India's most prominent nationalist intellectuals of the nineteenth century, British rule was a necessary period of tutelage that Indians had to undergo in order to prepare precisely for what the British denied but extolled as the end of all history: citizenship and the nation state. Years later, in 1951, an "unknown" Indian who successfully sold his "obscurity" dedicated the story of his life thus: To the memory of the British Empire in India Which conferred subjecthood on us But withheld citizenship; To which yet Everyone of us threw out the challenge "Civis Britanicus Sum" Because All that was good and living

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Within us Was made, shaped, and quickened By the same British Rule.14 In nationalist versions of this narrative, as Partha Chatterjee has shown, it was the peasants and the workers, the subaltern classes, who were given to bear the cross of "inadequacy," for, according to this version, it was they who needed to be educated out of their ignorance, parochialism, or, depending on your preference, false consciousness.15 Even today the Anglo-Indian word communalism refers to those who allegedly fail to measure up to the "secular" ideals of citizenship. That British rule put in place the practices, institutions, and discourse of bourgeois individualism in the Indian soil is undeniable. Early expressions—that is, before the beginnings of nationalism—of this desire to be a "legal subject" make it clear that to Indians in the 1830s and 1840s to be a "modern individual" was to become a "European." The Literary Gleaner, a magazine in colonial Calcutta, ran the following poem in 1842, written in English by a Bengali schoolboy eighteen years of age. The poem apparently was inspired by the sight of ships leaving the coast of Bengal "for the glorious shores of England": Oft like a sad bird I sigh To leave this land, though mine own land it be; Its green robed meads,—gay flowers and cloudless sky Though passing fair, have but few charms for me. For I have dreamed of climes more bright and free Where virtue dwells and heaven-born liberty Makes even the lowest happy;—where the eye Doth sicken not to see man bend the knee To sordid interest:—climes where science thrives, And genius doth receive her guerdon meet; Where man in his all his truest glory lives, And nature's face is exquisitely sweet: For those fair climes I heave the impatient sigh, There let me live and there let me die.16 In its echoes of Milton and seventeenth-century English radicalism, this is obviously a piece of colonial pastiche.17 Michael Madhusudan Dutt, the young Bengali author of this poem, eventually realized the impossibility of being "European" and returned to Bengali literature to become one of our finest poets. Later Indian nationalists, however, abandoned such abject desire to be "Europeans" themselves. Nationalist thought was premised precisely on the assumed universality of the project of becoming individuals, on the assumption that "individual rights" and abstract

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"equality" were universals that could find home anywhere in the world, that one could be both an "Indian" and a "citizen" at the same time. We shall soon explore some of the contradictions of this project. Many of the public and private rituals of modern individualism became visible in India in the nineteenth century. One sees this, for instance, in the sudden flourishing in this period of the four basic genres that help express the modern self: the novel, the biography, the autobiography, and history.18 Along with these came modern industry, technology, medicine, a quasibourgeois (though colonial) legal system supported by a state that nationalism was to take over and make its own. The transition narrative that I have been discussing underwrote, and was in turn underpinned by, these institutions. To think this narrative was to think these institutions at the apex of which sat the modern state,19 and to think the modern or the nation state was to think a history whose theoretical subject was Europe. Gandhi realized this as early as 1909. Referring to the Indian nationalists' demands for more railways, modern medicine, and bourgeois law, he cannily remarked in his book Hind Swaraj that this was to "make India English" or, as he put it, to have "English rule without the Englishman."20 This "Europe," as Michael Madhusudan Dutt's youthful and naive poetry shows, was of course nothing but a piece of fiction told to the colonized by the colonizer in the very process of fabricating colonial domination.21 Gandhi's critique of this "Europe" is compromised on many points by his nationalism, and I do not intend to fetishize his text. But I find his gesture useful in developing the problematic of nonmetropolitan histories. Ill

I shall now return to the themes of "failure," "lack," and "inadequacy" that so ubiquitously characterize the speaking subject of "Indian" history. As in the practice of the insurgent peasants of colonial India, the first step in a critical effort must arise from a gesture of inversion.22 Let us begin from where the transition narrative ends and read "plenitude" and "creativity" where this narrative has made us read "lack" and "inadequacy." According to the fable of their constitution, Indians today are all "citizens." The constitution embraces almost a classically liberal definition of citizenship. If the modern state and the modern individual, the citizen, are but the two inseparable sides of the same phenomenon, as William Connolly argues in Political Theory and Modernity, it would appear that the end of history is in sight for us in India.23 This modern individual, however, whose political/public life is lived in citizenship, is also supposed to have an interiorized "private" self that pours out incessantly in diaries, letters, autobiographies, novels, and, of course, in what we say to our analysts. The bourgeois individual is not born until one discovers the pleasures of privacy. But this is a very special kind of "private"—it is, in fact, a 1499

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deferred "public," for this bourgeois private, as Jtirgen Habermas has reminded us, is "always already oriented to an audience [Publikum]"24 Indian public life may mimic on paper the bourgeois legal fiction of citizenship—the fiction is usually performed as a farce in India—but what about the bourgeois private and its history? Anyone who has tried to write "French" social history with Indian material would know how impossibly difficult the task is.25 It is not that the form of the bourgeois private did not come with European rule. There have been, since the middle of the nineteenth century, Indian novels, diaries, letters, and autobiographies, but they seldom yield pictures of an endlessly interiorized subject. Our autobiographies are remarkably "public" (with constructions of public life that are not necessarily modern) when written by men, and they tell the story of the extended family when written by women.26 In any case, autobiographies in the confessional mode are notable for their absence. The single paragraph (out of 963 pages) that Nirad Chaudhuri spends on describing the experience of his wedding night in the second volume of his celebrated and prize-winning autobiography is as good an example as any other and is worth quoting at some length. I should explain that this was an arranged marriage (Bengal, 1932), and Chaudhuri was anxious lest his wife should not appreciate his newly acquired but unaffordably expensive hobby of buying records of Western classical music. Our reading of Chaudhuri is handicapped in part by our lack of knowledge of the intertextuality of his prose—there may have been at work, for instance, an imbibed puritanical revulsion against revealing "too much." Yet the passage remains a telling exercise in the construction of memory, for it is about what Chaudhuri "remembers" and "forgets" of his "first night's experience." He screens off intimacy with expressions like "I do not remember" or "I do not know how" (not to mention the very Freudian "making a clean breast of"), and this self-constructed veil is no doubt a part of the self that speaks: I was terribly uneasy at the prospect of meeting as wife a girl who was a complete stranger to me, and when she was brought in ... and left standing before me I had nothing to say. I saw only a very shy smile on her face, and timidly she came and sat by my side on the edge of the bed. I do not know how after that both of us drifted to the pillows, to lie down side by side. [Chaudhuri adds in a footnote: "Of course, fully dressed. We Hindus . . . consider both extremes—fully clad and fully nude—to be modest, and everything in-between as grossly immodest. No decent man wants his wife to be an allumeuse"] Then the first words were exchanged. She took up one of my arms, felt it and said: "You are so thin. I shall take good care of you." I did not thank her, and I do not remember that beyond noting the words I even felt touched. The horrible suspense about European music had

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reawakened in my mind, and I decided to make a clean breast of it at once and look the sacrifice, if it was called for, straight in the face and begin romance on such terms as were offered to me. I asked her timidly after a while: "Have you listened to any European music?" She shook her head to say "No." Nonetheless, I took another chance and this time asked: "Have you heard the name of a man called Beethoven?" She nodded and signified "Yes." I was reassured, but not wholly satisfied. So I asked yet again: "Can you spell the name?" She said slowly: "B, E, E, T, H, O, V, E, N." I felt very encouraged . . . and [we] dozed off.27 The desire to be "modern" screams out of every sentence in the two volumes of Chaudhuri's autobiography. His legendary name now stands for the cultural history of Indo-British encounter. Yet in the 1500-odd pages that he has written in English about his life, this is the only passage where the narrative of Chaudhuri's participation in public life and literary circles is interrupted to make room for something approaching the intimate. How do we read this text, this self-making of an Indian male who was second to no one in his ardor for the public life of the citizen, yet who seldom, if ever, reproduced in writing the other side of the modern citizen, the interiorized private self unceasingly reaching out for an audience? Public without private? Yet another instance of the "incompleteness" of bourgeois transformation in India? These questions are themselves prompted by the transition narrative that in turn situates the modern individual at the very end of history. I do not wish to confer on Chaudhuri's autobiography a representativeness it may not have. Women's writings, as I have already said, are different, and scholars have just begun to explore the world of autobiographies in Indian history. But if one result of European imperialism in India was to introduce the modern state and the idea of the nation with their attendant discourse of "citizenship," which, by the very idea of "the citizen's rights" (i.e., "the rule of law"), splits the figure of the modern individual into "public" and "private" parts of the self (as the young Marx once pointed out in his On the Jewish Question), these themes have existed—in contestation, alliance, and miscegenation—with other narratives of the self and community that do not look to the state/citizen bind as the ultimate construction of sociality.28 This as such will not be disputed, but my point goes further. It is that these other constructions of self and community, while documentable in themselves, will never enjoy the privilege of providing the metanarratives or teleologies (assuming that there cannot be a narrative without at least an implicit teleology) of our histories. This is so partly because these narratives often themselves bespeak an antihistorical consciousness; that is, they entail subject positions and configurations of memory that challenge and undermine the subject that speaks in the name

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of history. "History" is precisely the site where the struggle goes on to appropriate, on behalf of the modern (my hyperreal Europe), these other collocations of memory. To illustrate these propositions, I will now discuss a fragment of this contested history in which the modern private and the modern individual were embroiled in colonial India.29

IV What I present here are the outlines, so to speak, of a chapter in the history of bourgeois domesticity in colonial Bengal. The material—in the main texts produced in Bengali between 1850 and 1920 for teaching women that very Victorian subject, "domestic science"—relates to the Bengali Hindu middle class, the bhadralok or "respectable people." British rule instituted into Indian life the trichotomous ideational division on which modern political structures rest, e.g., the state, civil society, and the (bourgeois) family. It was therefore not surprising that ideas relating to bourgeois domesticity, privacy, and individuality should come to India via British rule. What I want to highlight here, however, through the example of the bhadralok, are certain cultural operations by which the "Indians" challenged and modified these received ideas in such a way as to put in question two fundamental tenets underlying the idea of "modernity"—the nuclear family based on companionate marriage and the secular, historical construction of time. As Meredith Borthwick, Ghulam Murshid, and other scholars have shown, the eighteenth-century European idea of "civilization" culminated, in early nineteenth-century India, in a full-blown imperialist critique of Indian/Hindu domestic life, which was now held to be inferior to what became mid-Victorian ideals of bourgeois domesticity.30 The "condition of women" question in nineteenth-century India was part of that critique, as were the ideas of the "modern" individual, "freedom," "equality," and "right." In passages remarkable for their combination of egalitarianism and orientalism, James Mill's The History of British India (1817) joined together the thematic of the family/nation and a teleology of "freedom": The condition of women is one of the most remarkable circumstances in the manners of nations. . . . The history of uncultivated nations uniformly represents the women as in a state of abject slavery, from which they slowly emerge as civilisation advances. . . . As society refines upon its enjoyments . . . the condition of the weaker sex is gradually improved, till they associate on equal terms with the men, and occupy the place of voluntary and useful coadjutors. A state of dependence more strict and humiliating

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than that which is ordained for the weaker sex among the Hindus cannot be easily conceived.31 As is well known, the Indian middle classes generally felt answerable to this charge. From the early nineteenth-century onward a movement developed in Bengal (and other regions) to reform "women's conditions" and to give them formal education. Much of this discourse on women's education was emancipationist in that it spoke the language of "freedom," "equality," and "awakening," and was strongly influenced by Ruskinian ideals and idealization of bourgeois domesticity.32 If one looks on this history as part of the history of the modern individual in India, an interesting feature emerges. It is that in this literature on women's education certain terms, after all, were much more vigorously debated than others. There was, for example, a degree of consensus over the desirability of domestic "discipline" and "hygiene" as practices reflective of a state of modernity, but the word freedom, yet another important term in the rhetoric of the modern, hardly ever acted as the register of such a social consensus. It was a passionately disputed word, and we would be wrong to assume that the passions reflected a simple and straightforward battle of the sexes. The word was assimilated to the nationalist need to construct cultural boundaries that supposedly separated the "European" from the "Indian." The dispute over this word was thus central to the discursive strategies through which a subject position was created enabling the "Indian" to speak. It is this subject position that I want to discuss here in some detail. What the Bengali literature on women's education played out was a battle between a nationalist construction of a cultural norm of the patriarchal, patrilocal, patrilineal, extended family and the ideal of the patriarchal, bourgeois nuclear family that was implicit in the European/imperialist/universalist discourse on the "freedoms" of individualism, citizenship, and civil society.33 The themes of "discipline" and "order" were critical in shaping nationalist imaginings of aesthetics and power. "Discipline" was seen as the key to the power of the colonial (i.e., modern) state, but it required certain procedures for redefining the self. The British were powerful, it was argued, because they were disciplined, orderly, and punctual in every detail of their lives, and this was made possible by the education of "their" women who brought the virtues of discipline into the home. The "Indian" home, a colonial construct, now fared badly in nationalist writings on modern domesticity. To quote a Bengali text on women's education from 1877: The house of any civilised European is like the abode of gods. Every household object is clean, set in its proper place and decorated; nothing seems unclean or smells foul. . . . It is as if [the

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goddess of] order [srinkhala, "order, discipline"; srinkhal, "chains"] had become manifest to please the [human] eye. In the middle of the room would be a covered table with a bouquet of flowers on it, while around it would be [a few] chairs nicely arranged [with] everything sparkling clean. But enter a house in our country and you would feel as if you had been transported there by your destiny to make you atone for all the sins of your life. [A mass of] cowdung torturing the senses . . . dust in the air, a growing heap of ashes, flies buzzing around . . . a little boy urinating into the ground and putting the mess back into his mouth. . . . The whole place is dominated by a stench that seems to be running free. . . . There is no order anywhere, the household objects are so unclean that they only evoke disgust.34 This self-division of the colonial subject, the double movement of recognition by which it both knows its "present" as the site of disorder and yet moves away from this space in desiring a discipline that can only exist in an imagined but "historical" future, is a rehearsal, in the context of the discussion of the bourgeois domestic in colonial India, of the transition narrative we have encountered before. A historical construction of temporality (medieval/modern, separated by historical time), in other words, is precisely the axis along which the colonial subject splits itself. Or to put it differently, this split is what is history; writing history is performing this split over and over again. The desire for order and discipline in the domestic sphere thus may be seen as having been a correlate of the nationalist, modernizing desire for a similar discipline in the public sphere, that is for a rule of law enforced by the state. It is beyond the scope of this paper to pursue this point further, but the connection between personal discipline and discipline in public life was to reveal itself in what the nationalists wrote about domestic hygiene and public health. The connection is recognizably modernist, and it is what the Indian modern shared with the European modern.35 What I want to attend to, however, are the differences between the two. And this is where I turn to the other important aspect of the European modern, the rhetoric of "freedom" and "equality." The argument about "freedom"—in the texts under discussion—was waged around the question of the Victorian ideals of the companionate marriage, that is, over the question as to whether or not the wife should also be a friend to the husband. Nothing threatened the ideal of the Bengali/Indian extended family (or the exalted position of the mother-inlaw within that structure) more than this idea, wrapped up in notions of bourgeois privacy, that the wife was also to be a friend or, to put it differently, that the woman was now to be a modern individual. I must mention here that the modern individual, who asserts his/her individuality over the

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claims of the joint or extended family, almost always appears in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Bengali literature as an embattled figure, often the subject of ridicule and scorn in the same Bengali fiction and essays that otherwise extolled the virtues of discipline and scientific rationality in personal and public lives. This irony had many expressions. The most well-known Bengali fictional character who represents this moral censure of modern individuality is Nimchand Datta in Dinabandhu Mitra's play Sadhabar ekadashi (1866). Nimchand, who is Englisheducated, quotes Shakespeare, Milton, or Locke at the slightest opportunity and uses this education arrogantly to ignore his duties toward his extended family, finds his nemeses in alcohol and debauchery. This metonymic relationship between the love of "modern''/English education (which stood for the romantic individual in nineteenth-century Bengal) and the slippery path of alcohol is suggested in the play by a conversation between Nimchand and a Bengali official of the colonial bureaucracy, a Deputy Magistrate. Nimchand's supercilious braggadocio about his command of the English language quickly and inevitably runs to the subject of drinks (synonymous, in middle-class Bengali culture of the period, with absolute decadence): I read English, write English, speechify in English, think in English, dream in English—mind you, it's no child's play—now tell me, my good fellow, what would you like to drink?—Claret for ladies, sherry for men and brandy for heroes.36 A similar connection between the modern, "free" individual and selfishness was made in the literature on women's education. The construction was undisguisedly nationalist (and patriarchal). Freedom was used to mark a difference between what was "Indian" and what was "European/English." The ultra-free woman acted like a memsahib (European woman), selfish and shameless. As Kundamala Devi, a woman writing for a women's magazine Bamabodhini patrika, said in 1870: "Oh dear ones! If you have acquired real knowledge, then give no place in your heart to memsahib-like behaviour. This is not becoming in a Bengali housewife."37 The idea of "true modesty" was mobilized to build up this picture of the "really" Bengali woman.38 Writing in 1920, Indira Devi dedicated her Narir ukti [A Woman Speaks]—interestingly enough, a defense of modern Bengali womanhood against criticisms by (predominantly) male writers—to generations of ideal Bengali women whom she thus described: "Unaffected by nature, of pleasant speech, untiring in their service [to others], oblivious of their own pleasures, [while] moved easily by the suffering of others, and capable of being content with very little."39 This model of the "modern" Bengali/Indian woman—educated enough to appreciate the modern regulations of the body and the state but yet

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"modest" enough to be unselfassertive and unselfish—was tied to the debates on "freedom." "Freedom" in the West, several authors argued, meant jathechhachar, to do as one pleased, the right to self-indulgence. In India, it was said, freedom meant freedom from the ego, the capacity to serve and obey voluntarily. Notice how the terms freedom and slavery have changed positions in the following quote: To be able to subordinate oneself to others and to dharma [duty/moral order/proper acton] . . . to free the soul from the slavery of the senses, are the first tasks of human freedom. . . . That is why in Indian families boys and girls are subordinate to the parents, wife to the husband and to the parents-in-law, the disciple to the guru, the student to the teacher . . . the king to dharma . . . the people to the king, [and one's] dignity and prestige to [that of] the community [samaj].40 There was an ironical twist to this theorizing that needs to be noted. Quite clearly, this theory of "freedom-in-obedience" did not apply to the domestic servants who were sometimes mentioned in this literature as examples of the "truly" unfree, the nationalist point being that (European) observers commenting on the unfree status of Indian women often missed (so some nationalists argued) this crucial distinction between the housewife and the domestic. Obviously, the servants were not yet included in the India of the nationalist imagination. Thus went the Bengali discourse on modern domesticity in a colonial period when the rise of a civil society and a quasimodern state had already inserted the modern questions of "public" and "private" into middle-class Bengali lives. The received bourgeois ideas about domesticity and connections between the domestic and the national were modified here in two significant ways. One strategy, as I have sought to demonstrate, was to contrapose the cultural norm of the patriarchal extended family to the bourgeois patriarchal ideals of the companionate marriage, to oppose the new patriarchy with a redefined version of the old one(s). Thus was fought the idea of the modern private. The other strategy, equally significant, was to mobilize, on behalf of the extended family, forms and figurations of collective memory that challenged, albeit ambiguously, the seemingly absolute separation of "sacred" and "secular" time on which the very modern ("European") idea of history was/is based.41 The figure of the "truly educated," "truly modest," and "truly Indian" woman is invested, in this discussion of women's education, with a sacred authority by subordinating the question of domestic life to religious ideas of female auspiciousness that joined the heavenly with the mundane in a conceptualization of time that could be only antihistorical. The truly modern housewife, it was said, would be so auspicious as to mark the eternal return of the cosmic

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principle embodied in the goddess Lakshmi, the goddess of domestic wellbeing by whose grace the extended family (and clan, and hence, by extending the sentiment, the nation, Bharatlakshmi) lived and prospered. Thus we read in a contemporary pamphlet: "Women are the Lakshmis of the community. If they undertake to improve themselves in the sphere of dharma and knowledge .. . there will be an automatic improvement in [the quality of] social life."42 Lakshmi, regarded as the Hindu god Vishnu's wife by about A.D. 400, has for long been held up in popular Hinduism, and in the everyday pantheism of Hindu families, as the model of the Hindu wife, united in complete harmony with her husband (and his family) through willful submission, loyalty, devotion, and chastity.43 When women did not follow her ideals, it was said, the (extended) family and the family line were destroyed by the spirit of Alakshmi (not-Lakshmi), the dark and malevolent reverse of the Lakshmi principle. While women's education and the idea of discipline as such were seldom opposed in this discourse regarding the modern individual in colonial Bengal, the line was drawn at the point where modernity and the demand for bourgeois privacy threatened the power and the pleasures of the extended family. There is no question that the speaking subject here is nationalist and patriarchal, employing the cliched orientalist categories, "the East" and "the West."44 However, of importance to us are the two denials on which this particular moment of subjectivity rests: the denial, or at least contestation, of the bourgeois private and, equally important, the denial of historical time by making the family a site where the sacred and the secular blended in a perpetual reenactment of a principle that was heavenly and divine. The cultural space the antihistorical invoked was by no means harmonious or nonconflictual, though nationalist thought of necessity tried to portray it to be so. The antihistorical norms of the patriarchal extended family, for example, could only have had a contested existence, contested both by women's struggles and by those of the subaltern classes. But these struggles did not necessarily follow any lines that would allow us to construct emancipatory narratives by putting the "patriarchals" clearly on one side and the "liberals" on the other. The history of modern "Indian" individuality is caught up in too many contradictions to lend itself to such a treatment. I do not have the space here to develop the point, so I will make do with one example. It comes from the autobiography of Ramabai Ranade, the wife of the famous nineteenth-century social reformer from the Bombay Presidency, M. G. Ranade. Ramabai Ranade's struggle for selfrespect was in part against the "old" patriarchal order of the extended family and for the "new" patriarchy of companionate marriage, which her reform-minded husband saw as the most civilized form of the conjugal bond. In pursuit of this ideal, Ramabai began to share her husband's

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commitment to public life and would often take part (in the 1880s) in public gatherings and deliberations of male and female social reformers. As she herself says: "It was at these meetings that I learnt what a meeting was and how one should conduct oneself at one."45 Interestingly, however, one of the chief sources of opposition to Ramabai's efforts were (apart from men) the other women in the family. There is of course no doubt that they, her mother-in-law and her husband's sisters, spoke for the old patriarchal extended family. But it is quite instructive to listen to their voices (as they come across through Ramabai's text), for they also spoke for their own sense of self-respect and their own forms of struggle against men: You should not really go to these meetings [they said to Ramabai]. . . . Even if the men want you to do these things, you should ignore them. You need not say no: but after all, you need not do it. They will then give up, out of sheer boredom. . . . You are outdoing even the European women. Or this: It is she [Ramabai] herself who loves this frivolousness of going to meetings. Dada [Mr. Ranade] is not at all so keen about it. But should she not have some sense of proportion of how much the women should actually do? If men tell you to do a hundred things, women should take up ten at the most. After all men do not understand these practical things! . . . The good woman [in the past] never turned frivolous like this. . . . That is why this large family . . . could live together in a respectable way. . . . But now it is all so different! If Dada suggests one thing, this woman is prepared to do three. How can we live with any sense of self-respect then and how can we endure all this? (84-85) These voices, combining the contradictory themes of nationalism, of patriarchal clan-based ideology, of women's struggles against men, and opposed at the same time to friendship between husbands and wives, remind us of the deep ambivalences that marked the trajectory of the modern private and bourgeois individuality in colonial India. Yet historians manage, by maneuvers reminiscent of the old "dialectical" card trick called "negation of negation," to deny a subject position to this voice of ambivalence. The evidence of what I have called "the denial of the bourgeois private and of the historical subject" is acknowledged but subordinated in their accounts to the supposedly higher purpose of making Indian history look like yet another episode in the universal and (in their view, the ultimately victorious) march of citizenship, of the nation state, of themes of human emancipation spelled out in the course of the European

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Enlightenment and after. It is the figure of the citizen that speaks through these histories. And so long as that happens, my hyperreal Europe will continually return to dominate the stories we tell. "The modern" will then continue to be understood, as Meaghan Morris has so aptly put it in discussing her own Australian context, "as a known history, something which has already happened elsewhere, and which is to be reproduced, mechanically or otherwise, with a local content." This can only leave us with a task of reproducing what Morris calls "the project of positive unoriginality."46

V Yet the "originality"—I concede that this is a bad term—of the idioms through which struggles have been conducted in the Indian subcontinent has often been in the sphere of the nonmodern. One does not have to subscribe to the ideology of clannish patriarchy, for instance, to acknowledge that the metaphor of the sanctified and patriarchal extended family was one of the most important elements in the cultural politics of Indian nationalism. In the struggle against British rule, it was frequently the use of this idiom—in songs, poetry, and other forms of nationalist mobilization—that allowed "Indians" to fabricate a sense of community and to retrieve for themselves a subject position from which to address the British. I will illustrate this with an example from the life of Gandhi, "the father of the nation," to highlight the political importance of this cultural move on the part of the "Indian." My example refers to the year 1946. There had been ghastly riots between the Hindus and the Muslims in Calcutta over the impending partition of the country into India and Pakistan. Gandhi was in the city, fasting in protest over the behavior of his own people. And here is how an Indian intellectual recalls the experience: Men would come back from their offices in the evening and find food prepared by the family [meaning the womenfolk] ready for them; but soon it would be revealed that the women of the home had not eaten the whole day. They [apparently] had not felt hungry. Pressed further, the wife or the mother would admit that they could not understand how they could go on [eating] when Gandhiji was dying for their own crimes. Restaurants and amusement centres did little business; some of them were voluntarily closed by the proprietors. . . . The nerve of feeling had been restored; the pain began to be felt. . . . Gandhiji knew when to start the redemptive process.47 We do not have to take this description literally, but the nature of the community imagined in these lines is clear. It blends, in Gayatri Spivak's

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words, "the feeling of community that belongs to national links and political organizations" with "that other feeling of community whose structural model is the [clan or the extended] family."48 Colonial Indian history is replete with instances where Indians arrogated subjecthood to themselves precisely by mobilizing, within the context of "modern" institutions and sometimes on behalf of the modernizing project of nationalism, devices of collective memory that were both antihistorical and antimodern.49 This is not to deny the capacity of "Indians" to act as subjects endowed with what we in the universities would recognize as "a sense of history" (what Peter Burke calls "the renaissance of the past") but to insist at the same time that there were also contrary trends, that in the multifarious struggles that took place in colonial India, antihistorical constructions of the past often provided very powerful forms of collective memory.50 There is then this double bind through which the subject of "Indian" history articulates itself. On the one hand, it is both the subject and the object of modernity, because it stands for an assumed unity called the "Indian people" that is always split into two—a modernizing elite and a yet-to-be-modernized peasantry. As such a split subject, however, it speaks from within a metanarrative that celebrates the nation state; and of this metanarrative the theoretical subject can only be a hyperreal "Europe," a "Europe" constructed by the tales that both imperialism and nationalism have told the colonized. The mode of self-representation that the "Indian" can adopt here is what Homi Bhabha has justly called "mimetic."51 Indian history, even in the most dedicated socialist or nationalist hands, remains a mimicry of a certain "modern" subject of "European" history and is bound to represent a sad figure of lack and failure. The transition narrative will always remain "grievously incomplete." On the other hand, maneuvers are made within the space of the mimetic—and therefore within the project called "Indian" history—to represent the "difference" and the "originality" of the "Indian," and it is in this cause that the antihistorical devices of memory and the antihistorical "histories" of the subaltern classes are appropriated. Thus peasant/worker constructions of "mythical" kingdoms and "mythical" pasts/futures find a place in texts designated "Indian" history precisely through a procedure that subordinates these narratives to the rules of evidence and to the secular, linear calendar that the writing of "history" must follow. The antihistorical, antimodern subject, therefore, cannot speak itself as "theory" within the knowledge procedures of the university even when these knowledge procedures acknowledge and "document" its existence. Much like Spivak's "subaltern" (or the anthropologist's peasant who can only have a quoted existence in a larger statement that belongs to the anthropologist alone), this subject can only be spoken for and spoken of by the transition narrative that will always ultimately privilege the modern (i.e., "Europe").52

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So long as one operates within the discourse of "history" produced at the institutional site of the university, it is not possible simply to walk out of the deep collusion between "history" and the modernizing narrative(s) of citizenship, bourgeois public and private, and the nation state. "History" as a knowledge system is firmly embedded in institutional practices that invoke the nation state at every step—witness the organization and politics of teaching, recruitment, promotions, and publication in history departments, politics that survive the occasional brave and heroic attempts by individual historians to liberate "history" from the metanarrative of the nation state. One only has to ask, for instance: Why is history a compulsory part of education of the modern person in all countries today including those that did quite comfortably without it until as late as the eighteenth century? Why should children all over the world today have to come to terms with a subject called "history" when we know that this compulsion is neither natural nor ancient?53 It does not take much imagination to see that the reason for this lies in what European imperialism and third-world nationalisms have achieved together: the universalization of the nation state as the most desirable form of political community. Nation states have the capacity to enforce their truth games, and universities, their critical distance notwithstanding, are part of the battery of institutions complicit in this process. "Economics" and "history" are the knowledge forms that correspond to the two major institutions that the rise (and later universalization) of the bourgeois order has given to the world—the capitalist mode of production and the nation state ("history" speaking to the figure of the citizen).54 A critical historian has no choice but to negotiate this knowledge. She or he therefore needs to understand the state on its own terms, i.e., in terms of its self-justificatory narratives of citizenship and modernity. Since these themes will always take us back to the universalist propositions of "modern" (European) political philosophy—even the "practical" science of economics that now seems "natural" to our constructions of world systems is (theoretically) rooted in the ideas of ethics in eighteenth-century Europe55—a third-world historian is condemned to knowing "Europe" as the original home of the "modern," whereas the "European" historian does not share a comparable predicament with regard to the pasts of the majority of humankind. Thus follows the everyday subalternity of non-Western histories with which I began this paper. Yet the understanding that "we" all do "European" history with our different and often non-European archives opens up the possibility of a politics and project of alliance between the dominant metropolitan histories and the subaltern peripheral pasts. Let us call this the project of provincializing "Europe," the "Europe" that modern imperialism and (third-world) nationalism have, by their collaborative venture and violence, made universal. Philosophically, this project must ground itself in a

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radical critique and transcendence of liberalism (i.e., of the bureaucratic constructions of citizenship, modern state, and bourgeois privacy that classical political philosophy has produced), a ground that late Marx shares with certain moments in both poststructuralist thought and feminist philosophy. In particular, I am emboldened by Carole Pateman's courageous declaration—in her remarkable book The Sexual Contract—that the very conception of the modern individual belongs to patriarchal categories of thought.56 VI

The project of provincializing "Europe" refers to a history that does not yet exist; I can therefore only speak of it in a programmatic manner. To forestall misunderstanding, however, I must spell out what it is not while outlining what it could be. To begin with, it does not call for a simplistic, out-of-hand rejection of modernity, liberal values, universals, science, reason, grand narratives, totalizing explanations, and so on. Fredric Jameson has recently reminded us that the easy equation often made between "a philosophical conception of totality" and "a political practice of totalitarianism" is "baleful."57 What intervenes between the two is history—contradictory, plural, and heterogeneous struggles whose outcomes are never predictable, even retrospectively, in accordance with schemas that seek to naturalize and domesticate this heterogeneity. These struggles include coercion (both on behalf of and against modernity)—physical, institutional, and symbolic violence, often dispensed with dreamy-eyed idealism—and it is this violence that plays a decisive role in the establishment of meaning, in the creation of truth regimes, in deciding, as it were, whose and which "universal" wins. As intellectuals operating in academia, we are not neutral to these struggles and cannot pretend to situate ourselves outside of the knowledge procedures of our institutions. The project of provincializing "Europe" therefore cannot be a project of "cultural relativism." It cannot originate from the stance that the reason/science/universals which help define Europe as the modern are simply "culture-specific" and therefore only belong to the European cultures. For the point is not that Enlightenment rationalism is always unreasonable in itself but rather a matter of documenting how—through what historical process—its "reason," which was not always self-evident to everyone, has been made to look "obvious" far beyond the ground where it originated. If a language, as has been said, is but a dialect backed up by an army, the same could be said of the narratives of "modernity" that, almost universally today, point to a certain "Europe" as the primary habitus of the modern. This Europe, like "the West," is demonstrably an imaginary entity, but

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the demonstration as such does not lessen its appeal or power. The project of provincializing "Europe" has to include certain other additional moves: 1) the recognition that Europe's acquisition of the adjective modern for itself is a piece of global history of which an integral part is the story of European imperialism; and 2) the understanding that this equating of a certain version of Europe with "modernity" is not the work of Europeans alone; third-world nationalisms, as modernizing ideologies par excellence, have been equal partners in the process. I do not mean to overlook the anti-imperial moments in the careers of these nationalisms; I only underscore the point that the project of provincializing "Europe" cannot be a nationalist, nativist, or atavistic project. In unraveling the necessary entanglement of history—a disciplined and institutionally regulated form of collective memory—with the grand narratives of "rights," "citizenship," the nation state, "public" and "private" spheres, one cannot but problematize "India" at the same time as one dismantles "Europe." The idea is to write into the history of modernity the ambivalences, contradictions, the use of force, and the tragedies and the ironies that attend it. That the rhetoric and the claims of (bourgeois) equality, of citizens' rights, of self-determination through a sovereign nation state have in many circumstances empowered marginal social groups in their struggles is undeniable—this recognition is indispensable to the project of Subaltern Studies. What effectively is played down, however, in histories that either implicitly or explicitly celebrate the advent of the modern state and the idea of citizenship is the repression and violence that are as instrumental in the victory of the modern as is the persuasive power of its rhetorical strategies. Nowhere is this irony—the undemocratic foundations of "democracy"—more visible than in the history of modern medicine, public health, and personal hygiene, the discourses of which have been central in locating the body of the modern at the intersection of the public and the private (as defined by, and subject to negotiations with, the state). The triumph of this discourse, however, has always been dependent on the mobilization, on its behalf, of effective means of physical coercion. I say "always" because this coercion is both originary/foundational (i.e., historic) as well as pandemic and quotidian. Of foundational violence, David Arnold gives a good example in a recent essay on the history of the prison in India. The coercion of the colonial prison, Arnold shows, was integral to some of the earliest and pioneering research on the medical, dietary, and demographic statistics of India, for the prison was where Indian bodies were accessible to modernizing investigators.58 Of the coercion that continues in the names of the nation and modernity, a recent example comes from the Indian campaign to eradicate smallpox in the 1970s. Two American doctors (one of them presumably of "Indian" origin) who participated in the process thus describe their operations in a village of the Ho tribe in the Indian state of Bihar:

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In the middle of gentle Indian night, an intruder burst through the bamboo door of the simple adobe hut. He was a government vaccinator, under orders to break resistance against smallpox vaccination. Lakshmi Singh awoke screaming and scrambled to hide herself. Her husband leaped out of bed, grabbed an axe, and chased the intruder into the courtyard. Outside a squad of doctors and policemen quickly overpowered Mohan Singh. The instant he was pinned to the ground, a second vaccinator jabbed smallpox vaccine into his arm. Mohan Singh, a wiry 40-year-old leader of the Ho tribe, squirmed away from the needle, causing the vaccination site to bleed. The government team held him until they had injected enough vaccine. . . . While the two policemen rebuffed him, the rest of the team overpowered the entire family and vaccinated each in turn. Lakshmi Singh bit deep into one doctor's hand, but to no avail.59 There is no escaping the idealism that accompanies this violence. The subtitle of the article in question unselfconsciously reproduces both the military and the do-gooding instincts of the enterprise. It reads: "How an army of Samaritans drove smallpox from the earth." Histories that aim to displace a hyperreal Europe from the center toward which all historical imagination currently gravitates will have to seek out relentlessly this connection between violence and idealism that lies at the heart of the process by which the narratives of citizenship and modernity come to find a natural home in "history." I register a fundamental disagreement here with a position taken by Richard Rorty in an exchange with Jiirgen Habermas. Rorty criticizes Habermas for the latter's conviction "that the story of modern philosophy is an important part of the story of the democratic societies' attempts at self-reassurance."60 Rorty's statement follows the practice of many Europeanists who speak of the histories of these "democratic societies" as if these were self-contained histories complete in themselves, as if the self-fashioning of the West were something that occurred only within its self-assigned geographical boundaries. At the very least Rorty ignores the role that the "colonial theater" (both external and internal)—where the theme of "freedom" as defined by modern political philosophy was constantly invoked in aid of the ideas of "civilization," "progress," and latterly "development"—played in the process of engendering this "reassurance." The task, as I see it, will be to wrestle ideas that legitimize the modern state and its attendant institutions, in order to return to political philosophy—in the same way as suspect coins returned to their owners in an Indian bazaar—its categories whose global currency can no longer be taken for granted.61 And, finally—since "Europe" cannot after all be provincialized within the institutional site of the university whose knowledge protocols will

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always take us back to the terrain where all contours follow that of my hyperreal Europe—the project of provincializing Europe must realize within itself its own impossibility. It therefore looks to a history that embodies this politics of despair. It will have been clear by now that this is not a call for cultural relativism or for atavistic, nativist histories. Nor is this a program for a simple rejection of modernity, which would be, in many situations, politically suicidal. I ask for a history that deliberately makes visible, within the very structure of its narrative forms, its own repressive strategies and practices, the part it plays in collusion with the narratives of citizenships in assimilating to the projects of the modern state all other possibilities of human solidarity. The politics of despair will require of such history that it lays bare to its readers the reasons why such a predicament is necessarily inescapable. This is a history that will attempt the impossible: to look toward its own death by tracing that which resists and escapes the best human effort at translation across cultural and other semiotic systems, so that the world may once again be imagined as radically heterogeneous. This, as I have said, is impossible within the knowledge protocols of academic history, for the globality of academia is not independent of the globality that the European modern has created. To attempt to provincialize this "Europe" is to see the modern as inevitably contested, to write over the given and privileged narratives of citizenship other narratives of human connections that draw sustenance from dreamed-up pasts and futures where collectivities are defined neither by the rituals of citizenship nor by the nightmare of "tradition" that "modernity" creates. There are of course no (infra)structural sites where such dreams could lodge themselves. Yet they will recur so long as the themes of citizenship and the nation state dominate our narratives of historical transition, for these dreams are what the modern represses in order to be.

Notes Many different audiences in the United States and Australia have responded to versions of this paper and helped me with their criticisms. My benefactors are too numerous to mention individually but the following have been particularly helpful: the editorial board of Representations for criticisms conveyed through Thomas Laqueur; Benedict Anderson, Arjun Appadurai, David Arnold, Marjorie Beale, Partha Chatterjee, Natalie Davis, Nicholas Dirks, Simon During, John Foster, Ranajit Guha, Jeanette Hoorn, Martin Jay, Jenny Lee, David Lloyd, Fiona Nicoll, Gyanendra Pandey, Craig Reynolds, Joan Scott, and Gayatri Spivak. And very special thanks to Christopher Healy for sharing both the intellectual and the physical labor that went into this paper. 1 Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, eds., Selected Subaltern Studies (New York, 1988); Ronald Inden, "Orientalist Constructions of India," Modern Asian Studies 20, no. 3 (1986): 445. 2 I am indebted to Jean Baudrillard for the term hyperreal (see his Simulations [New York, 1983]), but my use differs from his.

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3 Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism (London, 1989), 65. 4 Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Philosophy, trans. David Carr (Evanston, 111., 1970), 281-85. See also Wilhelm Halbfass, India and Europe: An Essay in Understanding (New York, 1988), 167-68. 5 See the discussion in Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Martin Nicholas (Harmondsworth, Eng., 1973), 469-512; and in Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, 3 vols. (Moscow, 1971), 3:593-613. 6 See Dipesh Chakrabarty, Rethinking Working-Class History: Bengal, 1890-1940 (Princeton, N.J., 1989), chap. 7. 7 Marx, Capital, 1:60. 8 Marx, Grundrisse, 105. 9 See Chakrabarty, Rethinking Working-Class History, chap. 7, in particular. 10 Sumit Sarkar, Modern India, 1885-1947 (Delhi, 1985), 1. 11 Guha and Spivak, Selected Subaltern Studies, 43. The words quoted here are Guha's. But I think they represent a sense of historiographical responsibility that is shared by all the members of the Subaltern Studies collective. 12 Alexander Dow, History of Hindostan, 3 vols. (London, 1812-16), dedication, vol. 1. 13 See L. T. Hobhouse, Liberalism (New York, 1964), 26-27. 14 Nirad C. Chaudhuri, The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian (New York, 1989), dedication page. 15 Partha Chatter]ee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? (London, 1986). 16 Mudhusudan rachanabali [Bengali] (Calcutta, 1965), 449. See also Jogindranath Basu, Michael Madhusudan Datter jibancharit [Bengali] (Calcutta, 1978), 86. 17 My understanding of this poem has been enriched by discussions with Marjorie Levinson and David Bennett. 18 I am not making the claim that all of these genres necessarily emerge with bourgeois individualism. See Natalie Zemon Davis, "Fame and Secrecy: Leon Modena's Life as an Early Modern Autobiography," History and Theory 27 (1988): 103-18; and Davis, "Boundaries and Sense of Self in Sixteenth-Century France," in Thomas C. Heller et al., eds., Reconstructing Individualism: Autonomy, Individuality, and the Self in Western Thought (Stanford, Calif., 1986), 53-63. See also Philippe Lejeune, On Autobiography, trans. Katherine Leary (Minneapolis, 1989), 163-84. 19 See the chapter on Nehru in Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought. 20 M. K. Gandhi, Hind swaraj (1909), in Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, vol. 10 (Ahmedabad, 1963), 15. 21 See the discussion in Gauri Visvanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Studies and British Rule in India (London, 1989), 128-41, passim. 22 Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (New Delhi, 1983), chap. 2. 23 William E. Connolly, Political Theory and Modernity (Oxford, 1989). See also David Bennett, "Postmodernism and Vision: Ways of Seeing (at) the End of History" (forthcoming). 24 Jiirgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), 49. 25 See Sumit Sarkar, "Social History: Predicament and Possibilities," in Iqbal

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26

27 28 29 30

31 32 33

34 35 36 37 38 39 40

41 42 43

Khan, ed., Fresh Perspective on India and Pakistan: Essays on Economics, Politics, and Culture (Oxford, 1985), 256-74. For reasons of space, I shall leave this claim here unsubstantiated, though I hope to have an opportunity to discuss it in detail elsewhere. I should qualify the statement by mentioning that in the main it refers to autobiographies published between 1850 and 1910. Once women join the public sphere in the twentieth century, their self-fashioning takes on different dimensions. Nirad C. Chaudhuri, Thy Hand, Great Anarch!: India, 1921-1952 (London, 1987), 350-51. See Karl Marx, On the Jewish Question, in Early Writings (Harmondsworth, Eng., 1975), 215-22. For a more detailed treatment of what follows, see my paper "Colonial Rule and the Domestic Order," to be published in David Arnold and David Hardiman, eds., Subaltern Studies, vol. 8. Meredith Borthwick, The Changing Role of Women in Bengal, 1849-1905 (Princeton, N.J., 1984); Ghulam Murshid, Reluctant Debutante: Response of Bengali Women to Modernisation, 1849-1905 (Rajshahi, 1983). On the history of the word civilization, see Lucien Febvre, "Civilisation: Evolution of a Word and a Group of Ideas," in Peter Burke, ed., A New Kind of History: From the Writings of Febvre, trans. K. Folca (London, 1973), 219-57.1 owe this reference to Peter Sahlins. James Mill, The History of British India, vol. 1, ed. H. H. Wilson (London, 1840), 309-10. Borthwick, Changing Role. The classic text where this assumption has been worked up into philosophy is of course Hegel's Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford, 1967), 110-22. See also Joanna Hodge, "Women and the Hegelian State," in Ellen Kennedy and Susan Mendus, eds., Women in Western Philosophy (Brighton, Eng., 1987), 127-58; Simon During, "Rousseau's Heirs: Primitivism, Romance, and Other Relations Between the Modern and the Nonmodern" (forthcoming); Joan B. Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca, N.Y., 1988); Mary Ryan, Women in Public: Between Banners and Ballots, 1825-1880 (Baltimore, 1990). Anon., Streesiksha, vol. 1 (Calcutta, 1877), 28-29. I develop this argument further in Dipesh Chakrabarty, "Open Space/Public Place: Garbage, Modernity, and India," South Asia (forthcoming). Dinabandhu racanabali, ed. Kshetra Gupta (Calcutta, 1981), 138. Borthwick, Changing Role, 105. I discuss this in more detail in Chakrabarty, "Colonial Rule." Indira Devi, Narir ukti (Calcutta, 1920), dedication page. Deenanath Bandyopadhyaya, Nanabishayak prabandha (Calcutta, 1887), 30-31. For a genealogy of the terms slavery and freedom as used in the colonial discourse of British India, see Gyan Prakash, Bonded Histories: Genealogies of Labor Servitude in Colonial India (Cambridge, 1990). Peter Burke, The Renaissance Sense of the Past (London, 1970). Bikshuk [Chandrasekhar Sen], Ki holo! (Calcutta, 1876), 77. David Kinsley, Hindu Goddesses: Visions of the Divine Feminine in the Hindu Religious Tradition (Berkeley, 1988), 19-31; Manomohan Basu, Hindu acar byabahar (Calcutta, 1873), 60; H. D. Bhattacharya, "Minor Religious Sects," in R. C. Majumdar, ed., The History and Culture of the Indian People: The Age of Imperial Unity, vol. 2 (Bombay, 1951), 469-71; Upendranath Dhal, Goddess Lakshmi: Origin and Development (Delhi, 1978). The expression everyday 1517

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44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51

52 53 54

55

56 57 58

59 60 61

pantheism was suggested to me by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (personal communication). See the chapter on Bankim in Chatter] ee, Nationalist Thought. Ranade: His Wife's Reminiscences, trans. Kusumavati Deshpande (Delhi, 1963), 77. Meaghan Morris, "Metamorphoses at Sydney Tower," New Formations 11 (Summer 1990): 10. Amiya Chakravarty, quoted in Bhikhu Parekh, Gandhi's Political Discourse (London, 1989), 163. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak?," in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, eds., Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Urbana, 111., 1988), 277. See Subaltern Studies, vols. 1-7 (Delhi, 1982-91); and Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism (Delhi, 1983). Subaltern Studies, vols. 1-7, and Guha, Elementary Aspects. Homi Bhabha, "Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse," in Annette Michelson et al., eds., October: The First Decade, 1976-1986 (Cambridge, Mass., 1987), 317-26; also Bhabha, ed., Nation and Narration (London, 1990). Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" Also see Spivak's interview published in Socialist Review 20, no. 3 (July-September 1990): 81-98. On the close connection between imperialist ideologies and the teaching of history in colonial India, see Ranajit Guha, An Indian Historiography of India: A Nineteenth-Century Agenda and Its Implications (Calcutta, 1988). Without in any way implicating them in the entirety of this argument, I may mention that there are parallels here between my statement and what Gyan Prakash and Nicholas Dirks have argued elsewhere. See Gyan Prakash, "Writing Post-Orientalist Histories of the Third World: Perspectives from Indian Historiography," Comparative Studies in Society and History 32, no. 2 (April 1990): 383-408; Nicholas B. Dirks, "History as a Sign of the Modern," Public Culture 2, no. 2 (Spring 1990): 25-33. See Amartya Kumar Sen, Of Ethics and Economics (Oxford, 1987). Tessa Morris-Suzuki's A History of Japanese Economic Thought (London, 1989) makes interesting reading in this regard. I am grateful to Gavan McCormack for bringing this book to my attention. Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford, Calif., 1988), 184. Fredric Jameson, "Cognitive Mapping," in Nelson and Grossberg, Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, 354. David Arnold, "The Colonial Prison: Power, Knowledge, and Penology in Nineteenth-Century India," in Arnold and Hardiman, Subaltern Studies, vol. 8. I have discussed some of these issues in a Bengali article: Dipesh Chakrabarty, "Sarir, samaj, o rashtra: Oupanibeshik bharate mahamari o janasangskriti," Anustup, 1988. Lawrence Brilliant with Girija Brilliant, "Death for a Killer Disease," Quest, May/June 1978, 3.1 owe this reference to Paul Greenough. Richard Rorty, "Habermas and Lyotard on Postmodernity," in Richard J. Bernstein, ed., Habermas and Modernity (Cambridge, Mass., 1986), 169. For an interesting and revisionist reading of Hegel in this regard, see the exchange between Charles Taylor and Partha Chatterjee in Public Culture 3, no. 1 (1990). My book Rethinking Working-Class History attempts a small beginning in this direction.

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WAS THERE A HEGEMONIC PROJECT OF THE COLONIAL STATE? Partha Chatterjee From Dagmar Engels and Shula Marks (eds) Contesting Colonial Hegemony: State and Society in Africa and India, British Academic Press and St. Martin's Press, 1994, 79-84

A certain quibbling over words is, I think, necessary, if only to clarify for ourselves where exactly the quibble lies. This collection deals with the legitimacy of the colonial state: the ways in which consent for colonial rule was produced among the subject population, the demographic sections and political domains over which such consent was effective, and the ideological forms and institutional practices through which consent was made an integral part of the business of ruling itself. In its most general sense, legitimacy is something which all states seek to achieve. The traditional political histories of kingdoms and empires, following the classic 'rise and fall' narrative sequence, more often than not told a story of armed conquest, succeeded by the 'imposition of order' and finally the erosion and breakdown of that order. The traditional narratives of colonialist historiography also told much the same story. If by 'imperial hegemony' all we mean is this ubiquitous phenomenon of the legitimization of domination, then we are not raising any significantly new theoretical problem. The reason why, I think, we still feel that the investigation should be continued is that we all suspect that there was more to the history of the colonial experience than simply the legitimization of domination in this general sense. This is why it becomes so important to clarify in theoretical terms the distinction between 'legitimacy' and 'hegemony'. The appropriation of traditional forms of authority If we look at the overall pattern of consent-production in colonial India, the instrumentalities can be reduced to a series of strategic and contingent 1519

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alliances between the colonial power and sections of the indigenous elite exercising varying degrees of 'traditional' authority over the mass of the people. These alliances were contingent: the contingencies were assessed, as in all strategic calculations, in terms of the prospective gains and losses to each party, i.e. of the presumed costs and benefits of alliance measured against those of opposition. Strategies were not necessarily determined once and for all. With changing contingencies, these calculations could vary and so could the pattern of alliances. But in adopting these instruments for creating a certain legitimacy for its rule, the colonial state was only seeking to appropriate for its own purposes some of the 'traditional' forms of authority in India - 'traditional' in the Weberian sense - specifically, by eliciting the consent of at least some sections of the traditionally dominant classes. The strategy was 'imperial' in its most conventional meaning: the political histories of the Mughal empire, for instance, talk of much the same sort of strategy. There were other more direct ways of appropriating 'traditional' signs of authority for the purposes of legitimizing colonial rule. Bernard Cohn has written about the cultural-symbolic representation of British imperial authority in India in which the ritual signs of political dominance which had been current especially in the Mughal period were appropriated into a new imperial code of precedence, rank, title, dress, prestation and the symbolic arrangement of political space. Cohn has talked of the contradiction in British colonial thinking between two views of Indian society: one, as a feudal society consisting of lords, chiefs and peasants, the other as a society of distinct communities which had to be represented by leading individuals.1 In either case, the political sociology of colonial India can be seen as having been directed towards the formulation of suitable strategies for the appropriation of 'traditional' forms of authority. If this was the only foundation of the legitimacy of the colonial state, then its success or otherwise ought to be measured in terms of the effectiveness of the strategies of appropriation of traditional authority, whether through alliances with dominant indigenous elites or directly by taking over the signs of imperial authority. If these strategies were effective in producing their desired results, the colonial state could well have prolonged its legitimate life without our having to suspect an underlying hegemonic project. In other words, the mere durability of the colonial state is not a sufficient ground for inferring that a project of hegemony was necessarily at work. The rational justification of colonial rule We know, of course, that British colonial rule in India was not 'imperial' only in the conventional sense in which Mughal rule, for instance, was imperial. To identify the crucial difference between the two, we need to 1520

WAS THERE A H E G E M O N I C PROJECT OF THE COLONIAL STATE? consider two simultaneous and related processes, both of which were entirely novel phenomena in the countries colonized by European powers in the 18th and 19th centuries, and both attributable to the colonial presence. One is the incorporation of large sectors of production and exchange, and hence of the population, in India into the global network of capitalism. The other is the introduction into India of the procedures of law and administration associated with the modern state. We now know that the consequences of these two processes cannot be reduced to a simple narrative of progress and modernization, as the liberal historiography of an earlier era wanted us to believe. There were many contradictory effects of the implantation in Europe's colonies of 'rational' procedures of law, of economic transactions and of governance. If there was a hegemonic project of colonial rule, it must be extracted from out of these profoundly ambiguous effects of the legitimization of 'rationality' as the central thematic of a new social order in the colonies. These were very distinct in their consequences, quite different from the institutionalization of hegemonic practices in Western Europe or North America, which is why it becomes an interesting theoretical problem. It becomes possible to understand these ambiguities if one remembers that colonial discourse as it emerged through the 19th century necessarily occupied a middle ground between two very different discursive formations. On the one hand, colonial rule had to justify itself to its colonized subjects. This meant, necessarily, a justification of conquest and the continued use of force to suppress rebellion and disorder. It produced, consequently, a discourse of sovereignty and unassailable dominance. Not surprisingly, a principal mode of legitimization here was the demonstration of an excess of power, the theatrical representation of the utter superiority and inviolability of imperial authority. In order to present itself as the legitimate sovereign power, the colonial state adopted, as we have mentioned before, many of the 'traditional' signs of sovereign power prevalent in indigenous culture. But the curious aspect of this was that it could subsist in this mode of legitimization only by constantly marking its relation of externality to the colonized people. It was not merely a historical accident that the new colonial power was alien; it was indeed a historical necessity - 'divine providence' was a phrase much used in this connection - that it should be an alien power, unrelated to any of the local interests and power blocs, and hence standing above the divisions in local society, the final repository of justice and guarantee of order. It is not difficult to see how this mode of justification of colonial rule fostered the attitude of externalizing its own presence in the colony, demarcating in as many ways as possible the distance between the rulers and the ruled, while arrogating to itself the sovereign privilege of 'knowing' the colonized 'other'. But colonial rule also had to justify itself to its metropolitan public.

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Institutionally, this operated through the networks of control over colonial trade, and later over colonial government, and often spilled over into wider debates in which sections of metropolitan 'public opinion' took part. There was, in other words, an aspect of colonial rule in which it was an integral part not only of the metropolitan economy but also of its politics, and therefore required justification in the terms of that politics. But underlying these institutional connections was a more profound force which shaped the overall terms of the emergent colonial discourse and gave it a place within the unity of post-Enlightenment European discourse itself. It could not, of course, be a simple transference of the norms and practices of the modern state and economy from Britain to the colony, since the differences in the 'conditions' which prevailed in the two regions were seen as being both fundamental and self-evident. What made the two commensurable was a discursive strategy that sought in every case to classify colonial conditions and slot them within a universal framework in which differences could be mapped as deviations from the norm. Fundamentally, it was a 'scale of civilization' argument which justified the deviations in colonial practice from the norms prevalent in Europe. This 'rationalized' the differences between metropolis and colony as differences on a scale of 'social conditions', with the implication that an advance along the scale would justify practices closer to the norm. 'Improvement' and 'progress' were the key terms which made colonial discourse in the 19th century both different from metropolitan discourse and consistent with it; in the 20th century the more fashionable terms would be 'development' and 'modernization'. The internalization of rational norms The Weberian sociologists who laid down the tenets of 'modernization theory' in the 1950s and 1960s saw this, of course, as the gradual institutionalization of rational-bureaucratic norms in traditional society. However, for rational-bureaucratic norms to be firmly embedded in societies that did not produce them, they could not remain the exclusive preserve of a small group of alien rulers. Those norms had to be shared by increasingly large sections of the colonized people. That, in essence, was the hegemonic project of the colonial state, and 'education', in its wider sense, was to become its chief instrument. In fact, seen in the light of its hegemonic claims, the entire business of colonial rule was to appear as one great experiment in the education of a backward people in the ways of modern social life. We know that only a small section of the colonized elite - a new elite was successfully educated in this fashion. With the zeal of new converts, these people set about the task of enlightening their fellow countrymen. If the hegemonic project of the colonial state required the transformation of 1522

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indigenous tradition into the universal forms of a rational and scientifically ordered social life, then it was the new intelligentsia among the colonized which emerged as the crucial mediating agency, turning the external force of the colonial critique of indigenous tradition into an internal critique. To pursue hegemony, the colonial state had to create an agency outside itself. And this gave rise to a fundamental paradox. It was the alienness of the colonial state which was now called into question. If the universalistic claims of the modern regime of power were to be taken seriously, there was little justification for the exclusive rights of sovereignty of an alien colonial power. In fact, as the colonized elite, turned into a nationalist leadership, was soon to argue, it was the very presence of an imperial power that had become the principal obstacle to the full flowering of a rational and modern society. The inherent contradictoriness of colonial discourse, shifting uneasily between the ritual demonstration of sovereign power and the implantation of modern disciplinary regimes, now turned back on itself. The very pursuit of its hegemonic project required that the state cease to be colonial.

The post-colonial postscript Happily for historians of a future era, the internalization of the hegemonic project and its transference from the colonial to the post-colonial state did not mean the end of history. Having transformed the hegemonic project into a national task, the new nationalist leadership sought to extend as well as deepen the disciplinary regimes of homogenization and normalization. However, several histories overlapped in the making of this project. There were domains over which nationalism extended its disciplinary sway before the formal transfer of political power - domains such as language, literature, education, cultural production and the organization of the family. Others such as law, administration, penal institutions, economic production, health etc. had to wait until the inauguration of the new national state. However, here too the 'internalization' of the hegemonic project would remain problematic. The normalization of differences which is the principal strategy adopted under the modern regime of power requires the preponderance of one discursive formation - the national and the exclusion of other voices. Like all hegemonic exercises, the pursuit of a nationalist hegemony too meets with the resistance of voices that refuse to be suppressed. Ironically, what began as a hegemonic project of the colonial state is now living its true life in the contemporary histories of the post-colonial states.

Note 1 'Representing authority in Victorian England', in B. S. Cohn, An Anthropologist among the Historians and Other Essays (Delhi, 1987), 632-82.

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THE PROMISE AND DILEMMA OF SUBALTERN STUDIES Perspectives from Latin American History Florencia E. Mallon From American Historical Review 99.5 (December 1994): 1491-515

This is not an easy time for scholars who work on Latin America. Over the past five years or so, many of our most important and inspirational historical narratives have come undone. The Cuban Revolution is dying a slow death after the collapse of the Soviet Union, dragged down by the morass of global capitalism, the internal erosion of social gains, and a leadership grown old in the holding of centralized power. The Sandinistas lost control of the state in 1990 and face the future internally divided, needing to make broad coalitions if they are to regain a place in the executive branch. (Where is their stunning political majority of 1979-1981?) In Chile, the post-Pinochet Christian Democrats have hailed the dictatorship's radical privatization and free market reforms as "modernization," tarnishing the memory of Chilean aspirations for social justice under Salvador Allende and the Chilean statist model of economic development that emerged from the first "popular unity" government of the late 1930s. In Peru, Sendero Luminoso has confused and confounded those of us accustomed to supporting people's struggles, first by killing an astounding number of the people they were supposedly struggling for, then because their "maximum leader" reached an agreement with an authoritarian, free market-oriented president after only a few weeks in captivity. One could go on and on. But the main question, simply put, is, what is a progressive scholar to do? If we continue to commit to emancipatory, bottom-up analysis and yet can no longer simply ride one of our various

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Marxist or Marxian horses into the sunset, what are the alternatives? Are there other horses to ride, or must we eschew the enterprise entirely? It is in this context that, for a few of us, the Subaltern Studies Group— organized around their series of collected essays, occasional conferences, and additional monographic publications on India and colonialism—has provided inspiration. A handful of Latin Americanists, from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds, are beginning to pepper their citations with references to the series and perhaps more often to some of its individual luminaries, such as Ranajit Guha, Partha Chatterjee, or Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.1 Latin Americanists, often Eurocentric in our borrowing from other historical or theoretical traditions, have in this instance taken as a model a school born and bred in another part of the so-called Third World. What is afoot?2 One partial explanation might lie in the nature of the intellectual and political crisis we presently face. It is precisely the models earlier imported from Europe—Marxisms, a belief in progress and modernity, a commitment to revolution as forward-looking, linear, developmentalist transformation—that are now in doubt. Many of us have thus been reluctant simply to pick up the most recent Eurocentric remedy to earlier Eurocentric ills and have hesitated before embracing the trends offered by postmodernism or poststructuralism. Some Latin American intellectuals, for example, have questioned the applicability of postmodernism to an area of the world not yet modern—at least not in the European or U.S. sense of the word. Others have doubted the ability of postmodernism to facilitate political engagement and commitment. And, in reading the work of those who have embraced the postmodern turn, some of us have been surprised by ahistorical claims that this approach has created a "new sense of modernity as paradoxical and contradictory" or that "[n]ew, 'horizontal' relations between intellectuals and both new and traditional social movements are emerging with the redefinition of political agency suggested by postmodernist perspectives."3 So doesn't Subaltern Studies offer us the perfect compromise? Formulated by a group of intellectuals based in the "Third World," anticolonial and politically radical yet conversant with the latest in textual analysis and postmodern methods: what more could a cautious, progressive scholar hope for? It is in this context that I reflect on the relevance of Subaltern Studies for the case of Latin America.

I begin by providing some background on and analysis of the Subaltern Studies Group as a whole, situating its project and its internal tensions and contradictions in the Gramscian tradition the group claimed at its inception. Next, I discuss how Subaltern approaches have been received and consumed so far in the Latin American literature, providing as well the historical, political, and historiographical context that might help us to extend and enrich the future application of Subaltern methods to the Latin

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American case. Finally, I use my reflections from Latin America to rethink the internal conflicts of Subaltern Studies as such, offering some suggestions for future work and dialogue that might contribute to extending the applicability of the project beyond its present reach. These three goals, taken together, constitute the essence of nonhierarchical cross-regional dialogue, where neither of the two cases is taken as the paradigm against which the other is pronounced inadequate. Such an approach is a welcome corrective to the many instances in which European theories had been placed next to Third World cases and the latter have been found wanting. The Subaltern project itself has been involved, to some extent, in this kind of dialogue, especially in its attempts to extend and rethink, from the perspective of the colonial and postcolonial world, the messages of Antonio Gramsci, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault. In Latin America, too, scholars have participated in more effective forms of mutual dialogue, especially on issues such as economic dependency, liberation theology, and indigenous movements. But it bears repeating that non-hierarchical cross-regional dialogue is not the application of a concept, part and parcel, without contextualization, to another area. Nor can it be framed in the assumption that one side of the exchange has little to learn from the other. It is my hope that in these kinds of dialogues and exchanges, perhaps not accidentally among socalled Third World regions, we can find the seeds for a method of postorientalist comparison.4 * ** In the preface to the first volume of Subaltern Studies, dated in Canberra in August 1981, Ranajit Guha defined the subaltern very broadly as anyone who is subordinated "in terms of class, caste, age, gender and office or in any other way." He declared all aspects of subaltern life— historical, social, cultural, political, or economic—to be relevant to the Subaltern Studies Group's efforts to recover subaltern contributions to Indian history. He further stated that, because subordination is a two-way relationship involving both dominated and dominant, elite groups would also receive consideration in the work of the Subaltern Studies scholars. In a disclaimer tucked away among the various purposes that have constituted the group project as a whole, he firmly set its Gramscian genealogy: "It will be idle of us, of course, to hope that the range of contributions to this series may even remotely match the six-point project envisaged by Antonio Gramsci in his 'Notes on Italian History.' "5 It seems worthwhile to reflect briefly on Guha's choice in citing "Notes on Italian History." Gramsci's six-point project for the study of the subaltern was ambitious, indeed. He devoted only one point to research on "the objective formation of the subaltern social groups" in the economic transformations of a particular society and "their origins in pre-existing social groups, whose mentality, ideology and aims they conserve for a time." The

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five remaining points address the political formation of both dominant and subaltern social forces, which he saw as mutually interdependent. Gramsci asserted that subaltern groups attempt to influence "dominant political formations" from the start and that this critical engagement was crucial to the transformation of both dominant and subaltern political organizations. In response to pressure from below, dominant groups attempt to enlist the cooperation of subalterns through the formation of new reformist political parties. At the same time, when subalterns struggle politically to create their own increasingly autonomous organizations, they do so in dialogue with, and struggle against, dominant political forms.6 This was precisely the purpose of the Subaltern Studies Group's proposed revision of Indian history: to demonstrate how, in the political transformations occurring in colonial and postcolonial Indian society, subalterns not only developed their own strategies of resistance but actually helped define and refine elite options. But there was more to Guha's choice. "Notes on Italian History" is one of Gramsci's most detailed and historically dynamic writings, in which he pondered the question of why Italy did not develop into a strong nationstate in the nineteenth century, a question linked in his mind to the rise of fascism in the twentieth century. The constant shadow presence in his analysis, against which he defined the Italian "passive revolution" that led to state formation without the effective creation of a nation, is the French Revolution of 1789, and the Jacobin party as the political mediator channeling popular energy into an alliance with the bourgeoisie. Italy, as "notFrance," does not have an active, transformative bourgeois revolution and thus emerges as a weak nation, in which dominant social groups "have the function of 'domination' without that of 'leadership'; dictatorship without hegemony."7 This is also the central problematic that Guha defines in the first volume of Subaltern Studies: It is the study of this historic failure of the nation to come to its own, a failure due to the inadequacy of the bourgeoisie as well as of the working class to lead it into a decisive victory over colonialism and a bourgeois-democratic revolution of either the classic nineteenth-century type under the hegemony of the bourgeoisie or a more modern type under the hegemony of workers and peasants, that is, a 'new democracy'—it is the study of this failure which constitutes the central problematic of the historiography of colonial India* The compelling parallels between India and Italy, both "not-France," are bounded by the existence of colonialism. The "historic failure of the nation to come to its own," "the inadequacy of the bourgeoisie as well as of the working class," these, according to Guha, are "the central

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problematic of the historiography of colonial India." Not simply precapitalist or underdeveloped India but colonial India. This put a particular spin on the concept of subalternity and on the role of peasants in subaltern politics. In the case of a European "not-France," Gramsci had envisioned the need for a broad class alliance that, by uniting workers and peasants, would radicalize both groups and make them, along with their organic intellectuals, the leaders of a social revolution. But in the case of a colonial "not-France," the obstacles to overcome were even steeper. A smaller working class was even more isolated from a larger peasantry, and questions of social justice were inextricably intertwined with issues of national self-determination. Since nationalist elites had often benefited from the social arrangements reproduced under colonialism, subaltern movements and political visions had to attain an even larger and more militant presence in nationalist coalitions if the nation was ever to come into its own. Given the smaller size of the proletariat, peasants and rural communities had to take the lead in the forging of an Indian people-nation.9 As is the case in Gramsci's work, then, the Subaltern Studies commitment to the recovery of subaltern politics, culture, and traditions of resistance is not simply empirical but also political. Gramsci hoped to discover, in an understanding of subaltern practices and histories, a potential for building the Jacobin party of the left: the hegemonic party that truly led, rather than simply dominated, by channeling, understanding, and incorporating popular energies and beliefs. The Subaltern Studies Group also leaves open the possibility for a future reconstruction of an emancipatory and hegemonic postcolonial political order: if subaltern traditions and practices are better understood, they can still serve as the basis for building alternative political communities that will truly liberate "the people." In fact, as Guha himself laid out in 'The Prose of Counter-Insurgency," the Subaltern Studies Group was united first and foremost in its critique of neo-colonialist, nationalist, and traditional Marxist approaches to the study of "the people." What unified these historiographies, according to Guha, was their inability to see and hear subaltern insurgents as they really were. "Blinded by the glare of a perfect and immaculate consciousness," Guha concluded, historians of all political persuasions had yet to investigate subaltern politics in all its contradictory complexity.10 Because all schools of Indian historiography were complicit in their failure to investigate the potential countertraditions in Indian popular politics, the potential for constructing a Gramscian Jacobin party of the left in India was close to zero. Indeed, according to C. A. Bayly, during the decade preceding the founding of Subaltern Studies, Indian intellectuals found comfort, amidst all the signs of embourgeoisement, in the Maoist violence of the Naxalites. Later in the 1970s many who were not on the pro-Chinese left sniffed danger

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in the hegemonic ideology of the Indian National Congress, elevating 'national unity' into an icon which could keep it permanently in power (the subaltern group, it must be remembered, came together not long after Mrs. Gandhi's Emergency). There was concern that, in official discourse, tribal resistance movements, poor peasant protest and working class rising could be bundled into the category of archaic disturbance, communalism, or 'Naxalism'. The ease with which many elements of the old left, particularly in Bengal, compromised with the authoritarian claims of the Congress, and the way in which their orthodox Marxist-Leninist theorists were able to accommodate this to economistic developmental theories of class-struggle set alarm bells ringing.11 Beyond all this complicity with official nationalist narratives, there was also the Gramscian critique of orthodox Marxist activists and intellectuals who continued to believe that politics was the direct translation of class— defined as position in or relation to the means of production—to the arenas of political action and consciousness. The necessity of such a critique was demonstrated by some of the answers appearing in Indian academic journals. "[Tjhere is a strong anti-Marxist bias in some of the essays collected in the two volumes," wrote Girish Mishra in 1983. After quoting extensively from Lenin for over two of the five pages in his review, Mishra suggested that Subaltern Studies scholars idealized the spontaneity of popular mobilization, when in fact it was "wrong to say that the workers or peasants start having a clear understanding of politics after one or two rounds of agitation. They need to be organized and trained." Instead, Mishra proposed, "It will be better and more fruitful if the researchers into popular movements concentrate more on their internal weaknesses and limitations of perspectives and outlook than on finding a scapegoat in the form of some leader or the other of the Indian National Congress betraying them." This was true, according to Mishra, because the "hackneyed" accusations of betrayal did not hold up to close class analysis. If the Indian National Congress was the party of the bourgeoisie and of the petty bourgeoisie, then it was interested in increasing agricultural production. Of necessity, therefore, the Indian National Congress would ally with all anti-feudal forces and could not possibly betray the peasants.12 It was in the light of such a deductive analysis of politics that the need for a Subaltern Studies approach made the most sense. A hegemonic alternative for the future needed to be built with what already existed. Activists and intellectuals concerned with building an alternative needed to know, through investigation, what traditions they had to work with. They could not deduce them simply through the application of Marxist categories. "Every trace of independent initiative on the part of subaltern groups should therefore be of incalculable value for the integral

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historian," Gramsci wrote. "Consequently, this kind of history can only be dealt with monographically, and each monograph requires an immense quantity of material which is often hard to collect."13 Herein lies the deepest, most irresolvable, and also the most fertile tension in the Subaltern Studies project. The recovery of subaltern practices, beliefs, and actions necessitated the use of new documents but especially of new methods for reading old documents. This laborious and methodologically complex task led many members of the group increasingly into semiotics, literary criticism, and many forms of textual analysis. Yet, by encouraging the deconstruction of texts along lines of power and hierarchy and by decentering all subjects that emerged in the documents, these techniques have ultimately questioned two assumptions central to the group's political purpose: that subaltern practices had some autonomy from elite culture and that subaltern politics had a unity and solidarity of its own.14 By January 1986, when the second Subaltern Studies conference was held in Calcutta, this tension came out into the open. As summarized by David Hardiman, himself a contributor to the project from its inception, the school was "standing at something of a crossroads . . . One road leads towards greater concentration on textual analysis and a stress on the relativity of all knowledge; another towards the study of subaltern consciousness and action so as to forward the struggle for a socialist society." As reported by Hardiman, both positions received well-argued support. The proponents of textual analysis emphasized the value of the group's deconstruction of existing theories and pointed out the inevitable relativism of such an endeavor; Guha himself stressed that the school was "born under a sign of negation—'negation' is inscribed on the subaltern banner." The proponents of a more openly political purpose, however, emphasized the constructive rather than deconstructive aspects of the school's original purpose, the need to focus on politics and on the interactions of elites and subalterns over time. If, indeed, the Subaltern School sought to "make the subaltern classes the subjects of their own history," some scholars argued, deconstruction was of necessity a tool rather than a goal. Guha also supported the need for an ultimately political purpose, and he suggested that this division might be a strength rather than a weakness. Hardiman, however, concluded his report by suggesting that this division could very well prove difficult to overcome in the long run, especially since "the debate during the conference served more to reveal these differences rather than to work towards their resolution."15 Can these differences be resolved? Is resolution in one direction or the other even the most desirable goal? I think not. In an essay published in 1985, Gayatri Spivak reflected on the productive aspects of these contradictions. By insisting that subalterns possessed positive human agency and could be thinking and autonomous historical subjects, she argued, the Sub-

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altern Studies school was placing itself in a subaltern position within historiography. Yet the very act of doing so, Spivak insisted, could be "reinscribed as a strategy for our times." Subaltern identities and consciousness will always remain slightly out of reach, resisting attempts to fit them into a linear narrative. But historians must persist in their efforts at recovering subaltern subjectivity, even though they know it is an ultimately impossible task. "It is a hard lesson to learn," Spivak concluded. "[B]ut not to learn it is merely to nominate elegant solutions to be correct theoretical practice." By continuing to explore the politically positive, liberating potential of subaltern histories, then, by marshaling semiotics and postmodern techniques for emancipatory purposes that they can never entirely meet, by persisting in these apparently impossible attempts at combination, the Subaltern Studies Group can continue to make its greatest and broadest contribution.16 Obviously, the authors in this group are not the only ones involved in such a project. And, as Hardiman's report and much of the work in the seven Subaltern Studies volumes I have seen makes clear, not all scholars associated with the group agree on what has been accomplished or what the best strategy for the future might be. Further, as is evident from the different emphases presented here and in Gyan Prakash's essay that is also a part of this AHR Forum, the same theorists and the same contradictions can be interpreted as leading to quite distinct prescriptions for the future. But in having developed, over more than a decade, a commitment to the attempted combination of postmodern method and radical politics, the Subaltern Studies Group has provided scholars who have similar concerns, especially in other parts of the "Third World," with an important model to discuss. And it is along these lines of discussion and debate that Subaltern methods have begun to be invoked and debated in Latin America. * ** To my knowledge, the first major public invocation of the Subaltern Studies Group among Latin Americanists occurred in the pages of the 1990 Latin American Research Review. In an influential review article on Latin American banditry, Gilbert Joseph suggested that the project and methods provided by Ranajit Guha in volumes I and II of Subaltern Studies might help the field move beyond a sterile debate over whether bandits were socially motivated or simply complicit with the existing order. In an attempt to move the field back toward subaltern agency, Joseph used Guha's insights in "The Prose of Counter-Insurgency"—as well as the work of James Scott and others on "everyday forms of peasant resistance"—to underscore the problems of relying on documents provided by state agencies oriented toward social control when assessing the motives and behavior of bandits and their supporters. As an alternative, which he hoped would help recover as well as recast the insights in E. J. Hobsbawm's original formulations, Joseph proposed a more flexible and

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multi-layered approach to rural unrest and protest that took into account the interactions among many forms of resistance and put bandit studies firmly back in the field of agrarian studies. He also suggested that historians take more seriously the power relations that underwrote all the documents on which they based their claims.17 Joseph struck a nerve, especially in Richard Slatta, who edited the volume on Latin American bandits extensively discussed in the original review essay. Slatta had a particularly sharp barb ready for anything that smacked of "Foucaultism or other strains of poststructuralism. Serious philosophical differences divide the practitioners," he wrote. "The cacophony of conflicting discourses and competing projects often is too abstract, rarified, and sectarian to help working historians . . . Philosophers are still working on what Foucault means by dispositif and other concepts. How, then, can practicing historians employ his ideas with any confidence?" In the footnote to this statement, he also summarily disposed of Gramsci: "Similar problems face historians taking up Gramscian hegemony. The term suffers confusing 'slippage' at the hands of the master and his disciples."18 So Joseph's effort to link questions of textual analysis, subaltern agency, and recent advances in agrarian history to the history of banditry received a slap on the wrist from a "working historian" who found all the theories associated with Foucault and Gramsci to be too confusing and half-baked. In order to dismiss methodological criticisms associated with an overreliance on typology, an under-emphasis on social analysis, and an uncritical use of official records, Slatta invoked the twin ghosts of poststructuralist and Gramscian slippage. Although the celebration of the linguistic turn was never Joseph's purpose in the first place, it is interesting to note that his attempt to use the dual purposes of Subaltern Studies to overcome a dead end in Latin American bandit studies was answered by an attempt to collapse both purposes into a morass of postmodern confusion.19 Not long after the debate on banditry, the Subaltern Studies Group was once again invoked in the pages of the Latin American Research Review. In a review essay on colonial and postcolonial discourse, Patricia Seed stated that, in the historical field, "members of the subaltern studies movement have been the leaders of the postcolonial discourse movement." Although Joseph's original article on banditry had appeared in the same journal a year before, Seed did not demonstrate an awareness of it, or of other recent discussions on politics, ethnicity, and the state that had begun to appear in various subfields of Latin American history. In works that spanned the geographical and temporal spectrum from the early colonial period to the twentieth century, historians had begun to show that all subaltern communities were internally differentiated and conflictual and that subalterns forged political unity or consensus in painfully contingent ways.

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Some scholars had also uncovered the multiple ways in which oppressed peoples had engaged and used state institutions and the law, demonstrating that the same strategy increased people's room to move and made impossible a frontal assault on the existing balance of power. Authors actively questioned more linear or top-down renditions of major transitions, such as the conquest, the abolition of slavery, or the Nicaraguan Revolution, engaging in dynamic debate with other historians over the importance of subaltern political struggles in these transitions. It was only by ignoring this literature that Seed was able to conclude that "historians have been relatively reluctant to consider any form of reflexivity or reflexive self-critique of their practices."20 Seed shared with Richard Slatta an impatience for what can be loosely termed resistance studies. [Anthropologists' and historians' versions of what happened were usually tales of either heroic resistance in which natives dramatically defended their homelands or accounts of manipulative accommodation in which colonial goals were maneuvered to serve the interests of the native community or some combination of the two story lines. In the late 1980s, these tales of resistance and accommodation were being perceived increasingly as mechanical, homogenizing, and inadequate versions of the encounters between the colonizers and the colonized. In contrast to Slatta, however, who warned against postmodern slippage, Seed saw poststructuralism as the answer. "As narratives of resistance and accommodation were losing credibility," she wrote, "a major new intellectual movement was emerging in association with thinkers loosely grouped as poststructuralists." But she also agreed with Slatta when she linked poststructuralism, the linguistic turn, and postcolonial discourse studies directly to Subaltern Studies, once again collapsing the linguistic and textual analysis methods of the school into their more political goals and purposes, neatly covering over their Gramscian genealogy.21 In a sense, it could not have been otherwise for her. Openly to discuss the Gramscian project of Subaltern Studies would have led back into a part of the resistance studies literature Seed had summarily dismissed. It would have necessitated a more careful reading and analysis of the last generation of historical studies on subaltern practices, culture, politics, and resistance in Latin America.22 It would have made the panacea of the linguistic turn seem less complete and therefore less attractive. And it would have led back into the deep creative tension centrally present in the Subaltern Studies Group itself. Here we encounter, to my mind, the gravest problem with the kind of conceptual and methodological borrowing that the application of

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Subaltern Studies to other parts of the world entails. In the process of the dialogue itself, either or both sides can be flattened out, simplified, misrepresented. If this occurs, the nuances, internal tensions, and contradictions—in short, the very stuff of which meaningful academic discussion is made—are pushed aside in favor of defining the correct way. Once this has been done, it is no longer necessary to understand what has gone before, since it has become entirely irrelevant. Latin Americanists who rediscovered Marxism and its many varieties in the 1960s and 1970s also tended to fall into this methodological trap. Dismissing earlier traditions and works as irrelevant and passe, we often missed important clues concerning the explanatory power of ethnicity, race, family, ecology, and demography because our newly discovered theoretical correctness told us that it all came down to class and mode of production.23 Besides, what better way to circumvent entire literatures, often prohibitive in size and overwhelming in detail and complexity, than by lumping them into categories that were no longer theoretically current? Especially in today's academic world, with its notorious overproduction, such techniques of dismissal are especially attractive. They make it possible for scholars such as Patricia Seed to pretend that a single approach to an issue such as resistance and accommodation—in the African, Asian, and Latin American fields, for the colonial and postcolonial periods—dooms the entire project and makes it irrelevant. "Such tales of 'adaptation and response,' " Seed concluded in her response to a query by Rolena Adorno, relying on notions of oppositional identity as untouched, authentic, and unproblematically created, coincided well with the narratives that were being produced by the leaders of emergent postcolonial states as well as by those opposing the largely economic domination and occasional direct political domination of the United States in Central and South America. Often producing a political redemptive narrative based on liberation from an evil oppressor, such tales found congenial readerships not simply in Latin America but throughout current and former colonial worlds. To back up these broad generalizations, Seed cited only James Scott's work on Indonesia and a single introductory work on Latin American popular culture.24 One is left to wonder, for example, how it is possible to lump together questions of economic dependency with issues of nationalist redemption throughout the Third World. True, in the Latin American region, where political independence had been gained long before, questions of economic dependency were central to newly developmentalist policy makers

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interested in limiting the economic influence of the United States after World War II. In Africa, by contrast—as Frederick Cooper makes abundantly clear in his essay in this Forum—the dependency literature was used to counteract celebratory nationalisms and to question the value of redemptive political liberation. The interconnections between national liberation and economic autonomy or development, moreover, varied greatly from socialist to nonsocialist states, no matter what part of the Third World they inhabited.25 Turning back to Latin America, the existing historiography simply does not fit Seed's generalization. As Adorno has pointed out for the colonial Andes, issues of complicity, adaptation, collaboration, and resistance have been systematically articulated in complex ways by historians since the early to mid-1980s. Even in the early 1970s, with Karen Spalding's groundbreaking articles on Andean ethnic leaders (kurakas) as both protective of their communities and complicit with the colonial power structure, "oppositional identity" could no longer be seen as "untouched, authentic, and unproblematically created." Work on agrarian history and rural rebellions in Mexico, whether for the colonial period, the nineteenth century, or the Mexican Revolution of 1910, has also taken on questions of political mediation and complex, cross-cutting alliances that muddled questions of resistance and complicity, and has done so since the early 1980s. Finally, historians of slavery and the African diaspora have picked up on cues from historically minded anthropologists such as Sidney Mintz or Richard Price, producing multifaceted analyses of enslaved people's confrontations with and resistant adaptations to planter classes and state structures. These studies were not "politically] redemptive narrative[s] based on liberation from an evil oppressor." Instead, many explored the minute contradictions in power relations and in the alliances formed among the oppressed, tracing the various and sometimes internally conflictual strategies for coping developed by subaltern peoples.26 Although an in-depth treatment of all the available literature is beyond the scope and focus of this essay, let me cite a series of local confrontations with cases, people, and sources that challenged historians of Latin America, since the early 1980s, to begin struggling with many of the same issues that led, in India, to the founding of the Subaltern Studies school. Was there an alternative to deducing subaltern consciousness from theoretical categories? Was it possible to forge a politically committed intellectual project that respected the political cultures and political debates existing among subaltern groups? What could appropriately take the place of existing political and academic paradigms? In addition to the authors and studies already discussed above, Alberto Flores Galindo confronted the challenge of Sendero Luminoso in Peru by arguing for the centrality of Andean Utopian thought to all emancipatory political projects. In Mexico, students of ethnic politics and indigenous communities told a very

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different history from that represented in the national or regional stories of revolutionary and postrevolutionary politics. In Argentina, Daniel James investigated Peronism from below and from the shop floor, and he found a very different phenomenon from the national-level histories of Juan Peron, whether laudatory or not. In these and other cases, analysts sought new ways to make sense of the multi-layered and contradictory nature of subaltern polities, cultures, and struggles. Whether or not they had discovered the postmodern turn, a confrontation with their work and its contradictions must be a crucial part of our attempt to move Latin American history forward self-reflexively.27 Shortly after the dust settled on the colonial and postcolonial discourse debate, the "Founding Statement" of the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group appeared in the special issue of boundary 2 devoted to postmodernism in Latin America. Composed of fifteen members—one historian, two anthropologists, and the rest literary critics—the group began by citing Guha's familiar foundational pieces in volumes I and II of Subaltern Studies in approvingly postmodern terms. Guha's original complex arguments, which involved methodological as well as political calls to action, were summarized by the group as a project for reading existing South Asian historiography " 'in reverse' to recover the cultural and political specificity of peasant insurrections." This project was then defined as involving two techniques: "identifying the logic of the distortions in the representation of the subaltern in official or elite culture; and uncovering the social semiotics of the strategies and cultural practices of peasant insurgencies themselves."28 Once again, it seemed that Subaltern Studies was being reduced to half of its complexity: the methods and techniques of postmodernism. But the Latin American Subaltern Studies Grop went further and approached Gilbert Joseph's earlier efforts to (re)prioritize subaltern agency. Among their "founding concepts and strategies," the group included the need to call the nation into question as a concept and as a boundary. Not only had recent world events increasingly called the nation into question, they argued, but the nation itself was an elite creation that "has obscured, from the start, the presence and reality of subaltern social subjects in Latin American history." In addition, wrote the group, the subaltern was a "mutating, migrating subject" whose identity was varied and situational. It was necessary, therefore, to move beyond the privileging of particular subaltern groups—workers, peasants, men—"to access the vast (and mobile) array of the masses."29 So far so good, but what strategies and methods did the group propose in order to bring their project to fruition? Here, the picture got a little sketchy. "To represent subalternity in Latin America, in whatever form it takes wherever it appears . . . requires us to explore the margins of the state." "[Rjetaining a focus on the intelligentsia and on its characteristic intellectual practices—centered on the cultivation of writing, science, and

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the like—leaves us in the space of historiographic prejudice and 'notseeing' that Guha identified in his studies of peasant insurgency." "Not to acknowledge the contribution of the people to their own history manifests the poverty of historiography and points to crucial reasons for the failures of national programs of 'popular' entitlement."30 How do we get beyond statements of intent, beyond programmatic calls to action? We need the complexity on both sides of the dialogue—in Subaltern Studies itself and in the fields of Latin American history, politics, and anthropology. It is perhaps not surprising, in this context, that Patricia Seed, the only historian in the group, has specialized in colonial Mexico and colonial studies, while both anthropologists are Central American specialists— Carol Smith on Guatemala and Roger Lancaster on Nicaragua. The rest of the group's members are spread more widely across the region—including people who work on the Andes, the Caribbean, and the southern cone31— and they confront the challenge of Subaltern Studies from literary criticism and textual analysis. This preferred method comes out clearly in the founding statement, in which, aside from the early citations to Guha and one later reference to Carlos Vilas's book on revolutionary Nicaragua, almost all the specificity of the essay revolves around artistic and literary movements.32 No wonder there is a "poverty of historiography"! This is true not only on the Latin American side but also on the Subaltern Studies side. As a result, the transparency, the innovation, and the simplicity of the project are all overrepresented. Missing, on both sides of the dialogue, is a sense of what happens once the attempt to "access the vast (and mobile) array of the masses" is under way. What sources provide such access? Through what particular analytic methods? If we wish to place the new information into a narrative structure, how do we decide which one to choose? These questions have both technical and political answers; and, sometimes, as the experience of the original Subaltern group has shown, there is a strong tension between technique and politics. If we wish to get beyond "the cultivation of writing, science, and the like," we may well find that we are squarely back in the terrain of the "resistance studies" and ethnographic practitioners so roundly castigated by postmodern critiques. One alternative, practiced by most of the members of the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group and quite a few of the Indian Subaltern scholars, is to read existing documents "against the grain." This technique can provide useful and fascinating alternative interpretations of elite projects, tantalizing bits of evidence about the subversive presence of subaltern voices, new and gendered readings of classic texts, or visions of the counter-identities being elaborated by "peripheral" or "minority" intellectuals. Some Latin Americanist anthropologists, also inspired by this method, have moved away from field work and toward the analysis of travel writings, photographs, and the practices or writings of other

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anthropologists.33 But, beyond a certain point, one must admit that, with this method, access to most subalterns—after all, the word is Gramscian to its very roots—remains elusive. Do we continue down the road of seeking access to subaltern voices, and, if so, how? It is hard to return to the archive or the field after engaging in a postmodern critique of the transparency of the enterprise. If we are no longer looking for "truth" as irrefutable, clearly knowable information, what are we looking for? I believe we are looking to maintain the irresolvable tension that is at the center of the Subaltern Studies project: the tension between technique and political commitment, between a more narrowly postmodern literary interest in documents as "constructed texts" and the historian's disciplinary interest in reading documents as "windows," however foggy and imperfect, on people's lives. If we privilege textual criticism as technique, and declare this the answer to the quandaries we face in our intellectual work, we start down the road to what Hernan Vidal has called "technocratic literary criticism: the presumption that when a new analytic and interpretive approach is being introduced, the accumulation of similar efforts in the past is left superseded and nullified."34 Yet if we privilege documents as repositories of information, forgetting or ignoring them as constructed texts, we return to the deduction of consciousness, culture, and socio-political practice from abstract, sometimes implicit categories that often masquerades as "objective history." Consequently, we are left with the tension, an irresolvable and fertile tension, that can continue to inspire and energize our work. In an article in 1985 on the methods and problems of archival work, Gayatri Spivak commented on this tension and the need to maintain it. A literary critic by training, someone steeped in the writings of Jacques Derrida, among others, Spivak expressed her dismay at historians who had begun to privilege literary criticism. Although conscious of the limitations involved in any effort to retrieve the voice or identity of women and other subalterns through records constructed by patriarchal and colonial forces, Spivak had nevertheless become involved in tracing, through archival sources, the life of the Rani of Sirmur, an Indian woman of privileged status. Her experience had led her consciously to inhabit the contradiction: she wanted to touch the Rani's picture yet rejected any retrieval of the Rani as empirical information. In the resulting study, she admitted, theoretical colleagues would find "too much concern with 'historical realism' and too little with 'theory,' " while "custodians of Critical Thought" would find "the linguistic nihilism associated with deconstruction." But, in the end, suggested Spivak, there was no other way.35 Like Spivak, I, too, want to touch the pictures of the historical subjects I struggle to retrieve; yet I, too, know that "there is no 'real Rani' to be found."36 This is precisely the point. The contradictory attempt to "know" the past, to become acquainted with the human beings who made it, leads us

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through archival sources that refuse to yield clear pictures. But because the archives provide unique clues about power relations, and about the human, moral, and philosophical quandaries faced by the people who produced them and by the people whose shadows inhabit them, we cannot afford to do without them. In my experience, it is the process itself that keeps us honest: getting one's hands dirty in the archival dust, one's shoes encrusted in the mud of field work; confronting the surprises, ambivalences, and unfair choices of daily life, both our own and those of our "subjects." However poignantly our search is conditioned by the understanding that we will never know for sure, occasionally, just for a moment, someone comes out of the shadows and walks next to us. When, in a flash of interactive dialogue, something is revealed; when, for a brief span, the curtain parts, and I am allowed a partial view of protagonists' motivations and internal conflicts— for me, those are the moments that make the quest worthwhile. * * * The archive and the field are constructed arenas in which power struggles—including those generated by our presence—help define and obscure the sources and information to which we have access. The nuance and variation in those power struggles are themselves unique forms of information. We experience and learn from them in contentious documents such as judicial records, military or local municipal archives; in the confrontation between different kinds of sources, both written and oral; in the debates we have with others, be they local intellectuals, historical figures, or political authorities; in the local conflicts we may observe, whether in present-day human relations or in the documents themselves. The contentiousness of these arenas provides us with clues we do not get from the analysis of published works alone, even though both kinds of sources are constructed texts. The processes of production and preservation of archival versus published sources are distinct. The social relations that accompany the reading of one or the other are also different. Understanding these differences, and confronting their consequences, forces us continually to rethink our assumptions. Before I am accused of sneaking empiricism in through the back door, let me reemphasize that reclaiming the centrality of the archive and the field can no longer be done in isolation from textual analysis or literary sources. The existence of published primary sources and manuscript literary sources makes it impossible to establish an always clear dividing line between the two in any case. What I object to is the privileging of textual analysis and literary sources to the exclusion of archival sources and field work, as well as the tendency to assume that, because both are constructed texts, they can be substituted for each other. From a Subaltern Studies perspective, Inga Clendinnen's excellent monograph on the early postconquest Yucatan, based entirely on published archival sources, makes especially clear the limitations of relying only on published documents.

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Clendinnen's highly original analysis of the confrontation between the Maya and the Franciscan missionaries in sixteenth-century Yucatan offers us an extremely variegated and sophisticated reading of early colonial missionary documents and of the written sources left by Maya literati. She uses these materials to probe the political, religious, cultural, and moral implications of the crisis that ensued when, in 1562, Franciscan missionaries on the Yucatan peninsula discovered "idolatry" and human sacrifice continuing among "their" Indians. Clendinnen reads the texts provocatively to suggest that the Maya's enduring, culturally constructed need to gain access to "high knowledge" as a strategy for ensuring the continuity and safety of life encouraged the "blasphemous" use of only partially understood Christian symbols in Maya rituals of human sacrifice. The Franciscans interpreted this use as conscious, sarcastic betrayal and, cut to the very quick of their abnegated paternalism, reacted with violent physical rage. On the basis of published archival and literary sources alone, therefore, Clendinnen provides us with an original interior reading of both the Spanish and Maya, dominant and subaltern, sides of the colonial encounter in the Yucatan. Given the nature of her sources, however, the balance in detail and interior complexity is of necessity skewed toward the dominant Spanish side. The section of the book dealing with the missionaries is twice as long as the section dealing with the Indians. Although the internal conflicts and dissensions among the missionaries are discussed in depth, the Maya are represented through their intellectuals and spokesmen as a seamless whole, with little sense offered of whether internal disagreements animated their strategies or responses in the face of conversion and exploitation.37 In some cases, of course, access to the complexity and dissension present within subaltern communities is impossible. Yet the fractures of presentation and preservation in the archive and field can provide, in ways that published collections cannot, potential openings for getting inside. That these openings may take us in uncomfortable new directions is clear from some of the work of the original Subaltern Studies Group. When Ranajit Guha published "Chandra's Death," for example, I read it first as a powerful answer to the criticisms advanced by some scholars that Subaltern Studies was not dealing well with gender or caste issues. Chandra, a Bagdi widow who got pregnant while living in the house of her dead husband's family, faced the choice between permanent exile and the termination of a pregnancy deemed illegitimate in samaj law. Magaram, her lover, delivered the ultimatum to Chandra's female kin: either abortion or bhek, the forced removal from caste relations. With the help of the female kin, "an abortion demanded by a man speaking for all of the local patriarchy" is set up; yet, ultimately, the potion obtained from a local healer kills Chandra as well as the fetus.38

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In his conclusion, Guha reflected on the implications of this experience for the women of Chandra's kin network. "It is this knowledge of man's bad faith which makes woman wiser about the limits of a solidarity that pretends to be neutral to gender," he wrote. "The rounded, unitary world of kinship can never be the same for her again. 'Soiled and humiliated' she has recourse to an alternative solidarity—a solidarity of women. Not an 'open revolt' armed with trumpet and banner, it is still a visible and loud enough protest in a society where initiative and voice are given to man alone." Nevertheless, as Guha stated in his final sentence, women's solidarity was both strong and limited. Limited, because "[t]hey could not defy the authority of the samaj to the extent of enabling a widow with a child born out of wedlock to live honourably in the local society." Strong, because they surrounded Chandra with the support she needed in order not to submit to bhek, in order to go through with the abortion as "the only means available for them to defeat the truly cock-eyed morality which made the mother alone culpable for an illicit childbirth, threw her out of society and allowed the father to go scot-free."39 After empathetically recounting the incident and mourning the lack of additional alternatives for Bengali women, however, Guha took the discussion no further. One possible line of further reflection is provided by Upendra Baxi in a discussion of the role of the law in Subaltern Studies. What if Chandra's female kin had chosen to kill Chandra's lover instead? Not only would they have fallen afoul of samaj law, Baxi contends, they would also have been forced to deal directly with colonial law. Another kind of choice emerges: surveillance, discipline, punishment, yes, but by the community or by the colonial state? Does either provide any liberation for women?40 The question of whether colonial law—with its debates on sati, female infanticide, and the like—might have provided alternative spaces for women is an old and contentious one. As Lata Mani has recently pointed out, colonial debates on the status and welfare of women were never about women's rights but about which legal or patriarchal entity was to exercise authority over women. Analogous conflicts erupted in many parts of the colonial world: debates over veiling in the Islamic world, over female genital surgeries in parts of East and West Africa. In most of these cases, neither side was interested in greater equality or autonomy for women. To the contrary, as Mani contends in the case of sati: women were the "ground" rather than the subject of a debate over ethnic/religious authority and customary versus colonial law.41 Ultimately, the message seems to be that neither native/subaltern legal practices nor colonial legal practices were in and of themselves liberating to women. In a sense, women could only choose between systems of hierarchy, colonial or ethnic/communal. Occasionally, depending on the specific historical situation, the changes brought about by colonial rule gave

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some women greater access to education or other privileges or opened up new social or economic opportunities through the market or in urban centers. Sometimes, the fissure between systems of rule allowed some personal autonomy for women. But, in many cases, colonialism simply added a new and invasive kind of domination to the old, increasing the protective value of communal, ethnic, and kinship networks that were themselves organized around patriarchal principles.42 When reintegrated into broad questions of colonialism and resistance, a gendered analysis that begins at the local level puts subaltern choices and alternative practices in a sobering new light. "Every trace of independent initiative on the part of subaltern groups should . . . be of incalculable value for the integral historian," Gramsci wrote.43 Yet, as Guha's essay demonstrates, when those traces of independent initiative are systematically investigated and local power relations are taken into account, the solidarity and unity of the subaltern presence—of subaltern culture and thus of subaltern resistance—begins to come apart in our hands. If there is no subaltern unity, if half of the subaltern community is oppressed and silenced by the other half, if anticolonial heroism has as a subtext the partial coercion of subaltern women, what happens to our Gramscian quest? The question of complicity, hierarchy, and surveillance within subaltern communities and subaltern cultures is a thorny one indeed, one that cries out for nuanced and sympathetic treatment. On one side, raising this question makes clear that no subaltern identity can be pure and transparent; most subalterns are both dominated and dominating subjects, depending on the circumstances or location in which we encounter them. A leader of a movement can become a collaborator or go home and beat up a wife or children; a collaborator can use power to protect a subaltern community or individual; or, as happened repeatedly in anticolonial rebellions, individuals who had profited personally from the power structure reneged on their earlier complicity and led major upheavals. On the other side, complicity or hierarchy does not make impossible, in any larger sense, the occasional, partial, contingent achievement of a measure of unity, collaboration, even solidarity. These ever-shifting lines of alliance or confrontation, then, are not deduced from specific, already existing subaltern identities or subject positions. They are constructed historically and politically, in struggle and in discourse. To see both sides at the same time, to mark the heroism and the treachery, is most certainly a challenge. Baxi suggests that it can also be liberating, not only to subaltern subjects themselves but also to the scholars who follow their trails through the labyrinth of surviving documentation. Expanding on an essay by Shahid Amin that treats the figure of the "Approver"—"a rebel who has shifted his locus within the event from protagonist of rebellion to agent of counter-insurgency"44—Baxi imagines

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what Shikari, Amin's "Approver," might have said in response to Amin's definition of him. "I accept your condemnation of me," the imagined Shikari says. But, at the same time, Shikari points out that his testimony served to increase the number of acquittals and lower the number of death sentences. Of course his actions made him "an 'instrument' of colonial justice," Baxi's Shikari admits. "But surely you can read my act of reneging as an act of service to most of my ex-comrades as well, some of whom have just before their natural death, secured pensions as 'freedom fighters' despite the longevity, as you put it, of the imputation of criminality."45 Reassuming an academic voice, Baxi argues that reneging did not make Shikari "any the less subaltern." And doesn't the project of Subaltern Studies involve rescuing "all subalterns from the categorization of criminal law"? If all the participants in the colonial legal system became, in a sense, its victims, must the subaltern historian also become one? "Would it be too much to ask of the subalternist historian," Baxi concludes, "that while she shows to the rest of the world how Shikari was a victim of the colonial law, she too, like sister Chandra, may be redeemed by Subaltern Studies, if not wholly, to some degree?"46 It is not clear, however, what this redemption would entail. Would subalternist historians be redeemed from their blindness in ascribing to subaltern subjects the identities already given them by the dominant power structure? Would subalternist historians be redeemed "to some degree" if they accepted the version of events and the discourse of morality constructed by one faction within subaltern society? Would complete redemption be the ability to question all constructed versions and to empathize with all subaltern groups, collaborationist, oppressive, or not? Finally, who gets to answer the question, "Are we there yet?" One way out of this dilemma, which seems to be reflected in Guha's most recent work in Subaltern Studies, is to avoid it entirely by abandoning the local level and reclaiming more general and abstract ground. At the level of the whole social formation, where the main contradiction is still between colonialism and resistance, or collaborationist elites and "the people," it is still possible to gloss over hierarchies internal to the subaltern community. The discussion can remain at the level of the failure of capitalism or of liberalism in colonial formations, or at the level of the failure of a dependent nationalist elite truly to mobilize the masses. Hegemony, as a general and seamless concept, survives intact in this context: Guha defines it as "0 condition of Dominance (D), such that, in the organic composition of the latter, Persuasion (P) outweighs Coercion (C)."41 The promise of hegemony, tied in Gramsci's writings to the promise of the Jacobin party truly leading rather than dominating the masses, can remain pure, for it has yet to be attained. Indian nationalists sold out the masses, dominating rather than leading them, disciplining rather than mobilizing them.

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In Guha's more recent essays, India (re)joins—along with Italy and Germany—the ranks of "not-France." Guha quotes approvingly Marx's analysis of the French Revolution: 'The French bourgeoisie of 1789 never left its allies, the peasants, in the lurch. It knew that the abolition of feudalism in the countryside and the creation of a free, landowning peasant class was the basis of its rule." This is in direct contrast to the Indian bourgeoisie, which sold out the masses "in its bid for hegemonic dominance." In so doing, Guha concludes, the Indian bourgeoisie "never arrived."48 An alternative answer to the challenge of local analysis lies in the deconstruction of subaltern cultures and communities and their rearticulation, as factionalized and complex wholes, to questions of regional, national, and international power relations. As I have recently argued, this alternative method does not make the concept of hegemony irrelevant or passe. Rather; it makes it more flexible and multi-layered. In this context, hegemony is not only the greater presence of persuasion over domination in national-level political systems, it is also a similar balance in local and regional political relations. How particular societies constructed hegemonic political systems becomes less a question of the bourgeoisie, the proletariat, or an organic political party. It becomes instead a historical question, to be answered through the kind of complex and never definitive confrontation with sources that a combination of Gramsci and Foucault makes necessary.49 It is perhaps not surprising that, in Latin America, the first efforts to engage in this new kind of Gramsci/Foucault combination, inspired openly by the work of the original Subaltern Studies Group, has occurred for the case of modern Mexico. From the standpoint of critical intellectuals, the Mexican case shares a number of similarities with India. A twentiethcentury upheaval overthrew the old order in both cases, creating a new balance of power in which the party that led the upheaval rendered itself as the representative of the masses. Attempts by new generations of intellectuals to question the status quo floundered on the combined obstacles of an orthodox left and a still powerful official party. Local level, empirical analyses inspired by linguistic and textual techniques led to a questioning of revolutionary myths and to the beginnings of a deconstruction of local and subaltern cultures. A recent and especially relevant effort in this regard is the collection of essays edited by Gilbert Joseph and Daniel Nugent titled Everyday Forms of State Formation. The product of a conference on twentieth-century Mexico that brought Mexicanists and nonspecialists together to debate questions of the state, popular culture and popular resistance, hegemony, and cultural revolution, the volume examines the dynamic intersection between popular cultures and state formation, tracing the multiple interactions between national power holders and internally conflictual popular cultures and communities. Different voices speak in the pages of the text,

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but they carry on a spirited conversation and debate with each other. Several cite directly from Subaltern Studies or from Gramsci; some debate the usefulness of the term hegemony, and most, at the very least, question its solidity and longevity. In the empirical essays, authors delve deeply into case studies and establish dialogues between critical theory and the information they have gathered. All the articles, whether theoretical, empirical, or both, question the transparency of domination and of resistance to it.50 * ** The combination of Gramsci and Foucault, as practiced by the original Subaltern Studies Group and some historians of Latin America, does not provide a single, Utopian, and technocratic answer to the quandaries we scholars face in the present. As the work of Subaltern Studies scholars and others makes clear, it is easy to privilege one tradition over the other and retire from the challenge of the contradiction between the two. The theoretical and methodological contradiction between Gramscian hegemonic politics and Foucauldan regimes of decentered power is great and can sometimes make research and analysis close to impossible. Moreover, as South Asianist scholars Rosalind O'Hanlon and David Washbrook argued in their recent exchange with historian Gyan Prakash, "It is simply very difficult to combine arguments concerning fundamental rights and possibilities for emancipation with a postmodernist refusal of any kind of unitary or systematizing perspective as to what these rights might be or what emancipation is from or into." But, as Prakash emphasizes in his answer, the difficulty of this combination does not justify a mandate to choose between the two sides. Picking up on O'Hanlon and Washbrook's conclusion that he is trying "to ride two horses at once" and that one of the two—I assume the class analysis, Marxist one—"may not be a horse that brooks inconstant riders," Prakash extends the metaphor to exclaim, "As for me, I say, let us hang on to two horses, inconstantly."51 An exploration of the contradictions, tensions, and internal conflicts within the Subaltern project leads me one step further, partially into selfreflection. When traveling the territory between Foucault and Gramsci, I have been personally unable to ride the horse provided by Jacques Derrida. To be fair, much of the more militantly textual and postcolonial influence in Subaltern Studies—whether on the Spivak-associated wing of the original school or among the more literalily inclined of the Latin American group—leans in what seems to me to be a Derrida-influenced direction. Spivak herself makes clear, in the works I have cited in this essay, that a Derrida-derived focus on language and textual construction is not sufficient. But the tendency among many practitioners of the Derrida side within Subaltern approaches is to transform the category of the subaltern into what Prakash calls, in this essay, "less of a sociological category and more of a discursive effect."

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Such a turn in the Subaltern literature—as both Prakash and I argue, in differing ways—is especially friendly to concepts such as postcolonial criticism. However, it is only one of four possible directions in which the original tension in the Subaltern Studies school could lead. The other three are: maintaining the tension no matter what but relying more on Foucaultinspired emphases on regimes of power and less on Derrida-derived methods of textual and linguistic deconstruction; moving back more exclusively toward Gramsic, which I think Guha's last essays suggest, but with the cost of losing part of the critical postmodern edge in the understanding of historical metanarrative; and an attempt to use discursive/textual/linguistic analytical techniques to analyze subaltern practices/debates/discourses themselves—insofar as we can have partial and foggy access to them—as contested and constructed arenas of struggle over power. I hope that one of the benefits and contributions of this Forum will be to demonstrate how all four directions exist in dynamic relationship and tension with each other and how they can be further developed through "SouthSouth" dialogues. The final option I mentioned, which in my mind is the most potentially productive, would combine the Derrida and Foucault sides of postmodern criticism and use them in the service of a Gramscian project. Yet perhaps it is also the most dangerous and improbable option, one that O'Hanlon and Washbrook might liken not to "riding two horses at once" but to the physically impossible stunt of riding several steeds at all times! But if we are willing to learn from the struggles of scholars who have gone before, I think we must admit that riding many horses may be the only way to negotiate the pitfalls of a postmodern and politically committed intellectual project. Indeed, in the present state of the world, subalterns in Latin America and elsewhere—as well as the scholars who research them, accompany them, learn from them, and argue with them—must of necessity become stunt riders. Otherwise, we do not ride at all.

Notes I wish to thank my co-participants in the Forum, Frederick Cooper and Gyan Prakash, who shared early drafts of their essays and helped me improve mine through dialogue with theirs. Steve J. Stern read several versions of the essay and, as usual, offered insightful criticism and collegial support. 1 As I will discuss in more detail below, the theoretical positions of the different scholars associated with Subaltern Studies—as well as the uses to which their work is being put among Latin Americanists—are conflictual and contradictory and have changed over time. Although I will analyze many of the Latin Americanist scholars citing Subaltern Studies more extensively below, the main authors I am referring to here are: Gilbert Joseph, "On the Trail of Latin American Bandits: A Reexamination of Peasant Resistance," Latin American Research Review (hereafter, LARR), 25 (1990): 7-53; Patricia Seed, "Colonial

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and Postcolonial Discourse," LARR, 26 (1991): 181-200; Latin American Subaltern Studies Group, "Founding Statement," boundary 2, 20 (Fall 1993), special issue on the Postmodern Debate in Latin America, 110-21; Florencia E. Mallon, "Dialogues among the Fragments: Retrospect and Prospect," in Frederick Cooper, Allen F. Isaacman, Florencia E. Mallon, William Roseberry, and Steve J. Stern, Confronting Historical Paradigms: Peasants, Labor, and the Capitalist World System in Africa and Latin America (Madison, Wis., 1993), 371-401; Mallon, Peasant and Nation: The Making of Postcolonial Mexico and Peru (Berkeley, Calif., 1994); Gilbert M. Joseph and Daniel Nugent, eds., Everyday Forms of State Formation: Revolution and the Negotiation of Rule in Modern Mexico (Durham, N.C., 1994); Fernando Coronil, "Listening to the Subaltern: The Poetics of Neocolonial States," forthcoming, Poetics Today, 15 (1994); Julie Skurski and Fernando Coronil, "Country and City in a Postcolonial Landscape: Double Discourse and the Geo-Politics of Truth in Latin America," in Views beyond the Border Country: Raymond Williams and Cultural Politics, Dennis L. Dworkin and Leslie G. Roman, eds. (New York, 1993), 231-59; Skurski and Coronil, "Dismembering and Remembering the Nation: The Semantics of Political Violence in Venezuela," Comparative Studies in Society and History, 33 (April 1991): 288-337; Joanne Rappaport, "Fictive Foundations: National Romances and Subaltern Ethnicity in Latin America, History Workshop Journal, 34 (Autumn 1992): 119-31. 2 This is not to say that "South-South" dialogue has not occurred before. Examples include the work of James C. Scott on Southeast Asia, especially The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia (New Haven, Conn., 1976); and Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, 1985), and the field of peasant studies of which it formed a part; the field of slavery and African diaspora studies, which has connected the histories and cultures of Afro-America to African and especially West African cultures and histories; and the various literatures debating concepts such as dependency, world systems, and articulation of modes of production. Other examples of such "South-South" dialogue are discussed and modeled in Confronting Historical Paradigms. But the main point continues to be that Latin American history, as a field, has tended to connect more readily to historical and theoretical traditions based in Europe. In this sense, of course, it is quite similar to other historical fields, including those based in Europe or the United States, which are indeed a great deal less conversant across the "South-North" divide than are scholars who work on so-called Third World areas. 3 The various sources for hesitancy in using poststructuralism and postmodernism in Latin America are summarized by John Beverley and Jose Oviedo in their "Introduction," boundary 2, special issue on the Postmodernism Debate in Latin America, 1-17, quotations on 7 and 7-8, respectively. With regard to the second quotation, it is especially interesting to note that, directly following, Beverley and Oviedo point out that Xavier Albo, a contributor to the issue, models these "new" relationships in his work with the Aymara people, which, among other things, involves "writing radio soap opera scripts in Aymara for them" (emphasis added). See also, in the same issue, Martin Hopenhayn, "Postmodernism and Neoliberalism in Latin America," 93-109; Anibal Quijano, "Modernity, Identity, and Utopia in Latin America," 140-55; Hernan Vidal, "Postmodernism, Postleftism, Neo-Avant-Gardism: The Case of Chile's Revista de Critica Cultural," 203-27. Pointed reflections around the limitations of "post" perspectives, whether

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4

5 6 7

8 9

10 11 12

13 14

postmodernism or postcolonialism, can be found in Mallon, "Dialogues among the Fragments"; Kwame Anthony Appiah, "Is the Post-in Poststructuralism the Post-in Post-Colonial?" Critical Inquiry, 17 (Winter 1991): 336-57; Fernando Coronil, "Can Postcoloniality Be Decolonized? Imperial Banality and Postcolonial Power," Public Culture: Bulletin of the Project for Transnational Cultural Studies, 5 (Fall 1992): 89-108; Jorge Klor de Alva, "Colonialism and Post Colonialism as (Latin) American Mirages," Colonial Latin American Review, 1 (1992): 3-23. For a further discussion of postcolonial as applied to Latin America, see below, this essay. For a discussion of post-orientalist history, see Gyan Prakash, "Writing PostOrientalist Histories of the Third World: Perspectives from Indian Historiography," Comparative Studies in Society and History, 32 (1990): 383-408; Rosalind O'Hanlon and David Washbrook, "After Orientalism: Culture, Criticism, and Politics in the Third World, CSSH, 34 (1992): 141-67; Prakash, "Can the 'Subaltern' Ride? A Reply to O'Hanlon and Washbrook," CSSH, 34 (1992): 168-84. The original inspiration here belongs to Edward Said, Orientalism (New York, 1978). Ranajit Guha, "Preface," Subaltern Studies I, as reprinted in Selected Subaltern Studies, Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, eds. (New York, 1988), 35-36; quotations on 35. Antonio Gramsci, "Notes on Italian History," in Selections from the Prison Notebooks, Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, ed. and trans. (New York, 1971), 44-120. The six-point research project appears on 52. Gramsci, "Notes on Italian History," esp. 55-106; quotation on 106.1 am grateful for discussions with William Roseberry on the question of Gramsci and "Notes on Italian History," as well as on hegemony more broadly, that helped to focus and inspire my analysis. For a summary of Roseberry's views, see William Roseberry, "Hegemony and the Language of Contention," in Joseph and Nugent, Everyday Forms of State Formation, 355-66. Ranajit Guha, "On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India," in Subaltern Studies I, reprinted in Selected Subaltern Studies, 37-44; quotation on 43, emphasis in the original. On the ways in which the Indian case helped modify and expand Gramscian understandings of subalternity and peasant politics, see especially David Arnold, "Gramsci and Peasant Subalternity in India," Journal of Peasant Studies, 11 (July 1984): 155-77. Ranajit Guha, "The Prose of Counter-Insurgency," in Subaltern Studies II, reprinted in Selected Subaltern Studies, 45-86; quotation on 84. C. A. Bayly, "Rallying around the Subaltern," Journal of Peasant Studies, 16 (October 1988): 110-20, quotation on 112-13. Girish Mishra, "Elite-People Dichotomy: An Exaggerated View," Indian Historical Review, 10 (July 1983-January 1984): 133-38; quotations on 133,135. For other critiques that began from Marxism, see Javeed Alam, "Peasantry, Politics and Historiography: Critique of New Trend in Relation to Marxism," Social Scientist, 11 (February 1983): 43-54; Sangeeta Singh, et al, "Subaltern Studies II: A Review Article," Social Scientist, 12 (October 1984): 3-41; Bayly, "Rallying around the Subaltern." Gramsci, "Notes on Italian History," 55. The tension of influences on the Subaltern Studies Group, which combined—in addition to Gramsci—Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes, structuralist anthropology, Russian structuralist literary criticism, and Althusserian Marxism, was pointed out relatively early by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in

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15 16 17 18 19 20

21 22

23 24

"Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography," Subaltern Studies IV (Delhi, 1985), rev. version printed in Selected Subaltern Studies, 3-32. Another important discussion around questions of the unitary subject in Subaltern Studies appeared in Rosalind O'Hanlon, "Recovering the Subject: Subaltern Studies and Histories of Resistance in Colonial South Asia," Modern Asian Studies, 22 (1988): 189-224. David Hardiman, " 'Subaltern Studies' at Crossroads," Economic and Political Weekly (February 15,1986); 288-90; quotations on 290. Spivak, "Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography," reprinted in Selected Subaltern Studies', quotation on 16. For a similar point, see Prakash, "Can the 'Subaltern' Ride?" Joseph, "On the Trail of Latin American Bandits," 7-53. Richard W. Slatta, "Bandits and Rural Social History: A Comment on Joseph," LARR, 26 (1991): 145-51; quotations on 150 and 150 n. 19. Joseph clarifies his position on the linguistic turn and reemphasizes his desire to reconnect bandit studies to agrarian history more generally in " 'Resocializing' Latin American Banditry: A Reply," LARR, 26 (1991): 161-74. Patricia Seed, "Colonial and Postcolonial Discourse," LARR, 26 (1991): 181-200; quotations on 193, 200. Some of the new reflections within Latin American history are the following. On the construction of the colonial state: Karen Spalding, Huarochiri: An Andean Society under Inca and Spanish Rule (Stanford, Calif., 1984); and Steve J. Stern, Peru's Indian Peoples and the Challenge of Spanish Conquest: Huamanga to 1640, 2d edn. (Madison, Wis., 1993). On the nature of slave emancipation and the role of African Americans in the formation of political culture: Walter Rodney, A History of the Guyanese Working People, 1881-1905 (Baltimore, Md., 1981); and Rebecca J. Scott, Slave Emancipation in Cuba: The Transition to Free Labor, 1860-1899 (Princeton, N.J., 1985). On the nature of Nicaraguan politics and the 1979 revolution: Jeffrey L. Gould, To Lead as Equals: Rural Protest and Political Consciousness in Chinandega, Nicaragua, 1912-1979 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1990). Other attempts to innovate in the understanding of rural and subaltern politics include: Catherine Legrand, Frontier Expansion and Peasant Protest in Colombia, 1850-1936 (Albuquerque, N. Mex., 1986); Florencia E. Mallon, "Peasants and State Formation in Nineteenth-Century Mexico: Morelos, 1848-1858," Political Power and Social Theory, 7 (1988): 1-54; and Steve J. Stern, ed., Resistance, Rebellion and Consciousness in the Andean Peasant World: 18th to 20th Centuries (Madison, 1987). Seed, "Colonial and Postcolonial Discourse," esp. 182-83, 192-93; quotations on 182. Rolena Adorno pointed to this superficiality for the case of the Andean colonial literature in her response to Seed. See Adorno, "Reconsidering Colonial Discourse for Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Spanish America," LARR, 28 (1993): 135-45, esp. 136-37. Similar arguments could be made in the cases of the nineteenth and twentieth-century Andes, Mexico, Brazil, and Cuba. Some initial references, in addition to Radical History Review, 27, the issue on colonialism and resistance (1983), can be found herein, notes 20 and 26. See also below for a systematic examination of a few of the sources in this literature. For critiques, see Mallon, "Dialogues among the Fragments"; and William Roseberry, "Beyond the Agrarian Question in Latin America," in Confronting Historical Paradigms, 318-68. Patricia Seed, "More Colonial and Postcolonial Discourses," LARR, 26 (1993): 146-52; quotation and footnote on 149. This level of broad and lightly

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25

26

27

28

substantiated generalization is not, however, typical of all Seed's work on colonialism. See "Taking Possession and Reading Texts: Establishing the Authority of Overseas Empires," William and Mary Quarterly, 49 (April 1992): 183-209, where she does a fine-grained comparative analysis of early Spanish and British colonialisms in the Americas. Similar problems occur with the too facile use of such terms as postcolonial without proper context or historical framing. See Coronil, "Can Postcoloniality Be Decolonized?"; and Klor de Alva, "Colonialism and Post Colonialism," for critiques. Karen Spalding, "Kurakas and Commerce: A Chapter in the Evolution of Andean Society," Hispanic American Historical Review, 53 (November 1973): 581-99; Spalding, "Social Climbers: Changing Patterns of Mobility among the Indians of Colonial Peru," Hispanic American Historical Review, 50 (November 1970): 645-64. On the Andes, see also, in addition to the sources listed in note 19, Brooke Larson, Colonialism and Agrarian Transformation in Bolivia: Cochabamba, 1550-1900 (Princeton, N.J., 1988); Florencia E. Mallon, The Defense of Community in Peru's Central Highlands: Peasant Struggle and Capitalist Transition, 1860-1940 (Princeton, 1983); Stern, Peru's Indian Peoples and the Challenge of Spanish Conquest. On Mexico, see, for example, David A. Brading, ed., Caudillo and Peasant in the Mexican Revolution (Cambridge, 1980); Marcello Carmagnani, "Local Governments and Ethnic Governments in Oaxaca," in Karen Spalding, ed., Essays in the Political, Economic, and Social History of Colonial Latin America (Newark, Del., 1982), 107-24; Carmagnani, El regreso de los dioses: El proceso de reconstitucion de la identidad etnica en Oaxaca, siglos XVII y XVIII (Mexico City, 1988); Nancy M. Farriss, Maya Society under Colonial Rule: The Collective Enterprise of Survival (Princeton, 1984); Antonio Garcia de Leon, Resistencia y Utopia, 2 vols. (Mexico City, 1985); Gilbert M. Joseph, Revolution from Without: Yucatan, Mexico, and the United States, 1880-1924, rev. edn. (Durham, N.C., 1988); Friedrich Katz, ed., Riot, Rebellion, and Revolution: Rural Social Conflict in Mexico (Princeton, 1988); Mallon, "Peasants and State Formation"; Cheryl English Martin, "Haciendas and Villages in Late Colonial Morelos," Hispanic American Historical Review, 62 (February 1982): 19-48; Ilene V. O'Malley, The Myth of the Revolution: Hero Cults and the Institutionalization of the Mexican State, 1920-1940 (Westport, Conn., 1986). On slavery and African diaspora studies, see C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, 2d edn., rev. (New York, 1963); Verena Martmez-Alier, Marriage, Class and Colour in Nineteenth-Century Cuba: A Study of Racial Attitudes and Sexual Values in a Slave Society, 2d edn. (New York, 1989); Sidney W. Mintz and Richard Price, An Anthropological Approach to the Afro-American Past: A Caribbean Perspective (Philadelphia, 1976); Richard Price, First-time: The Historical Vision of an Afro-American People (Baltimore, Md., 1983); Walter Rodney, A History of the Guyanese Working People, 1881-1905 (Baltimore, 1981); Stanley J. Stein, Vassouras: A Brazilian Coffee County, 1850-1900, 2d edn. (Princeton, 1985). Alberto Flores Galindo, Buscando un inca: Identidad y Utopia en los Andes (Havana, 1986); Carmagnani, "Local Governments and Ethnic Governments"; and El regreso de los dioses; Garcia de Leon, Resistencia y Utopia', Daniel James, Resistance and Integration: Peronism and the Argentine Working Class, 1946-1976 (Cambridge, 1988). "Founding Statement," 110-21; discussions of Guha on 110-11, quotations on 111. The founding members, listed on page 237 of the issue, were: Robert Carr,

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29 30 31

32 33

34 35 36 37

Ileana Rodriguez, Patricia Seed, Javier Sanjines, John Beverley, Jose Mazzotti, Jose Rabasa, Roger Lancaster, Robert Conn, Julio Ramos, Maria Milagros Lopez, Carol Smith, Clara Lomas, Norma Alarcon, and Monica Szurmuk. "Founding Statement," 117-21; quotations on 118,121. "Founding Statement," quotations on 119,120,119. Of the fifteen members of the group, I was able to identify the disciplines of, and find works, by, twelve of them. Of these twelve, nine were literary critics. In addition to her work as one of the forces in Chicana feminism and literary criticism, Norma Alarcon produced a dissertation in 1983 titled "Rosario Castellanos' Feminist Poetics: Against the Sacrificial Contract," and a later book on Castellanos, who is today considered one of Mexico's premier twentieth-century feminist writers. John Beverley co-edited the special issue of boundary 2 and has also published on Spanish and Latin American literature more broadly, including two books dealing with Central America. A literary critic of Caribbean origin, Robert Carr is working on a book on black nationalism and has published an article dealing with testimonial literature and transnational feminisms that focuses on the testimony of Guatemalan activist Rigoberta Menchu. Roger Lancaster is an anthropologist who has published two books based on oral history in Nicaragua; he is also known for groundbreaking work on gender, sexuality, and sexual orientation in contemporary Nicaragua. Clara Lomas is the author of a 1985 dissertation on three novels by Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa. Jose Rabasa has published on early colonial Latin American literature and on issues of conquest and mapping. Julio Ramos's speciality is nineteenth-century literature, especially the work of Jose Marti, around whom he organized his 1989 book Desencuentros de la modernidad en America Latina\ he has also published on literature concerning "the other," both for Argentina and Cuba. An active force in the University of Minnesota's Ideologies and Literature group, Ileana Rodriguez co-edited a 1983 conference volume called Process of Unity in Caribbean Society and has also published on Nicaragua. Javier Sanjines works on Bolivian literature, especially on the effect of the 1952 revolution on Bolivian fiction. In addition to her work already discussed extensively in this essay, Patricia Seed is the author of several articles on class and race in colonial Mexico and of a book concerning marriage choices and the Catholic church. Carol Smith's anthropological work on Guatemala has included important rethinking of the relationship between indigenous peoples and the national state. Monica Szurmuk is the author of articles on Rosario Castellanos and Reina Roffe. "Founding Statement." See, for example, Deborah Poole, "A One-Eyed Gaze: Gender in 19th Century Illustration of Peru," Dialectical Anthropology, 13 (1988): 333-64; and "Figueroa Aznar and the Cusco Indigenistas: Photography and Modernism in Early Twentieth Century Peru," Representations, 38 (Spring 1992): 39-75; Paul Sullivan, Unfinished Conversations: Mayas and Foreigners between Two Wars (New York, 1989). Hernan Vidal, "The Concept of Colonial and Postcolonial Discourse: A Perspective from Literary Criticism," LARR, 26 (1993): 113-19; quotation on 117. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "The Rani of Sirmur: An Essay in Reading the Archives," History and Theory, 24 (1985): 247-72, see esp. 249, 271-72. Spivak, "Rani of Sirmur," 271. Inga Clendinnen, Ambivalent Conquests: Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan, 1517-1570 (Cambridge, 1987).

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38 Ranajit Guha, "Chandra's Death," Subaltern Studies V (Delhi, 1986), 135-65; quotation on 163. 39 Guha, "Chandra's Death," quotations on 165,161. 40 Upendra Baxi, " The State's Emissary': The Place of Law in Subaltern Studies," Subaltern Studies VII, Partha Chatterjee and Gyanendra Pandey, eds. (Delhi, 1992), 247-64; esp. 256. 41 Lata Mani, "Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India," in Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid, eds., Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History (New Brunswick, N.J., 1990), 88-126. On the veil, see Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate (New Haven, Conn., 1992). On female genital surgeries, see Stanlie James, "Shades of Othering: Reflections on Female Circumcision/Genital Mutilation," unpublished manuscript, 1994; Olayinka Koso-Thomas, Circumcision of Women: A Strategy for Eradication (London, 1985); Hanny Lightfoot-Klein, Prisoners of Ritual: An Odyssey into Female Genital Circumcision in Africa (New York, 1989); Alison T. Slack, "Female Circumcision: A Critical Appraisal," Human Rights Quarterly, 19 (1988); Robin Cerny Smith, "Female Circumcision: Bringing Women's Perspectives into the International Debate," Southern California Law Review, 65 (July 1992); 2449-504; Alice Walker and Pratibha Parmar, Warrior Marks: Female Genital Mutilation and the Sexual Blinding of Women (New York, 1993). 42 For examples of the complexities of the situation for higher status women, see the following essays in Sangari and Vaid, Recasting Women: Uma Chakravarti, "Whatever Happened to the Vedic Dasil Orientalism, Nationalism and a Script for the Past," 27-87; Sumanta Banerjee, "Marginalization of Women's Popular Culture in Nineteenth Century Bengal," 127-79; Vir Bharat Talwar, "Feminist Consciousness in Women's Journals in Hindi: 1910-1920," 204-32; Susie Tharu, "Tracing Savitri's Pedigree: Victorian Racism and the Image of Women in Indo-Anglian Literature," 254-68. On questions of choice between hierarchies, and how this affects nationalist movements, see Partha Chatterjee, "The Nationalist Resolution of the Women's Question," Recasting Women, 233-53; and, in Andrew Parker, Mary Russo, Doris Sommer, and Patricia Yaeger, eds., Nationalism and Sexualities (New York, 1992): Rhonda Cobham, "Misgendering the Nation: African Nationalist Fictions and Nuruddin Farah's Maps" 42-59; Ketu H. Katrak, "Indian Nationalism, Gandhian 'Satyagraha,' and Representations of Female Sexuality," 395-406; R. Radhakrishnan, "Nationalism, Gender, and the Narrative of Identity," 77-95. 43 Gramsci, "Notes on Italian History," 55. 44 Shahid Amin, "Approver's Testimony, Judicial Discourse: The Case of Chauri Chaura," Subaltern Studies V (Delhi, 1987), 166-202; quotation defining the Approver on 168. 45 Baxi, " The State's Emissary,'" 247-64; Quotations on 263. 46 Baxi, " The State's Emissary,'" 264. 47 Ranajit Guha, "Dominance without Hegemony and Its Historiography," Subaltern Studies VI (Delhi, 1989), 210-309, quotation, 231; Guha, "Discipline and Mobilize," Subaltern Studies VII, 69-120. 48 Guha, "Dominance without Hegemony," 227; Guha, "Discipline and Mobilize," 119-20. Of course, the increasing certainty in French historical literature that the French bourgeoisie never arrived either—indeed, that "arriving" was and is itself an increasingly problematic concept—conveniently gets left out. This allows for a seamless reconstruction of the attraction of the original

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national-revolutionary project at a time when the project as a whole has been subject to growing criticism in literatures throughout the world. 49 Mallon, Peasant and Nation. 50 See, for example, Marjorie Becker, "Torching La Purisima, Dancing at the Altar: The Construction of Revolutionary Hegemony in Michoacan, 1934-1940," Everyday Forms of State Formation, 247-64; Joseph, "Rethinking Mexican Revolutionary Mobilization: Yucatan's Seasons of Upheaval, 1909-1915," 135-69; Joseph and Nugent, "Popular Culture and State Formation in Revolutionary Mexico," 3-23; Florencia E. Mallon, "Reflections on the Ruins: Everyday Forms of State Formation in Nineteenth-Century Mexico," 69-106; Daniel Nugent and Ana Maria Alonso, "Multiple Selective Traditions in Agrarian Reform and Agrarian Struggle: Popular Culture and State Formation in the Ejido of Namiquipa," 209-46; Roseberry, "Hegemony and the Language of Contention"; Derek Sayer, "Everyday Forms of State Formation: Some Dissident Remarks on 'Hegemony,'" 367-77; James C. Scott, "Forword," vii-xii. Becker, Joseph, Joseph and Nugent, and I also explicitly engage the Subaltern Studies school. 51 Prakash, "Writing Post-Orientalist Histories of the Third World," 383-408; Rosalind O'Hanlon and David Washbrook, "After Orientalism: Culture, Criticism, and Politics in the Third World," Comparative Studies in Society and History, 34 (1992): 141-67; Prakash, "Can the 'Subaltern' Ride?" quotations on 158,164,184.

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9.10 DALITIZATION NOT HINDUIZATION Kancha Ilaiah From Why I Am Not A Hindu: A Sudra Critique of Hindutva Philosophy, Culture and Political Economy, Samya, 1996, 114-32

As I have argued in the preceding chapters, the life-world of the Dalitbahujans of India has hardly anything in common with the socio-cultural and political environment of Hindu-Brahminism. The Dalitbahujans live together with the Hindus in the civil society of Indian villages and urban centres, but the two cultural worlds are not merely different; they are opposed to each other. Hindu thinking is set against the interests of Dalitbahujan castes; Hindu mythology is built by destroying the Dalitbahujan cultural ethos. Dalitbahujan castes were never allowed to develop into modernity and equality. The violent, hegemonic, brahminical culture sought to destroy Dalitbahujan productive structures, culture, economy and its positive political institutions. Everything was attacked and undermined. This process continues in post-Independence India. While conducting the anti-colonial struggle, brahminical leaders and ideologues did not attempt to build an anti-caste egalitarian ideology. On the contrary, they glorified brutal Hindu institutions. They built an ideology that helped brahminical forces reestablish their full control which had, to some extent, been weakened during the political rule of the Mughals and the British. In the building of brahminical nationalism, Raja Rammohan Roy, at one stage, and Gandhi, at another, played key roles in recreating 'upper' caste hegemony. After 1947, in the name of democracy, the Brahmins, the Baniyas and the neo-Kshatriyas have come to power. Postcolonial development in its entirety has been systematically cornered by these forces. The Brahmins have focussed their attention on politicobureaucratic power, the Baniyas established their hegemony on capitalist markets and the Neo-Kshatriyas established their control over the agrar-

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ian economy. This modern triumvirate restructured the state and society to affirm and reproduce their hegemonic control. In spite of the immense hold of modern Brahminism on various structures of power, the intellectual forces that emerged from the womb of the Dalitbahujan social structure as a result of both education and reservations have attempted to fracture modern Brahminism in many ways. The elite of modern Brahminism recognized this force and ressurected Brahminism in the more aggressive form of Hindutva in the anti-Mandal ideologies, the Ayodhya-based Rama slogan, as well as in the Sangh Parivar's theory of 'Akhandabharat' and 'minority appeasement'. All these are part of the anti-Dalitbahujan package. Such a basically anti-Dalitbahujan thesis is advanced to modernize classical Hindu varnadharma to suit post-colonial capitalist structures, so that Hinduism itself can modernize in a way that will sustain the hegemony of brahminical forces. This is the reason why the thesis is put forward that Hinduization should be within the broad framework of urbanization, modernization, and so on. We reject the Hinduization programme in toto for two reasons. One, Hinduism has never been a humane philosophy. It is the most brutal religious school that the history of religions has witnessed. The Dalitbahujan castes of India are the living evidence of its brutality. Second, even if Hinduization expresses a desire to humanize itself in future, there is no scope for this to happen, since the history of religion itself is coming to an end. We must, therefore, dalitize our entire society as Dalitization will establish a new egalitarian future for Indian society as a whole.

What is Dalitization? Dalitization requires that the whole of Indian society learns from the Dalitwaadas (here I am speaking specifically about Scheduled Caste localities). It requires that we look at the Dalitwaadas in order to acquire a new consciousness. It requires that we attend to life in these waadas; that we appreciate what is positive, what is humane and what can be extended from Dalitwaadas to the whole society. It is common sense knowledge that the starting point of Dalitbahujan society is the collective of 'untouchable' houses, the homesteads of the Maadigaas and Maalaas (similar castes exist in almost all linguistic regions of India). What is most striking about Maadigaa and Maalaa society is its collective living and collective consciousness. The human being in the Dalitwaadas is not only a collective being but also a secular social being. Here human relationships operate in a mode that has been sensitized to human needs. Though Dalitbahujan society does have contradictions, these contradictions are not antagonistic. They are friendly and can be resolved. Their social context is productive and distributive. Equality is its innate

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strength. In the current repressive social structure of the village, it is only the Dalitbahujan masses who have had the strength to survive as productive beings. Consciousness in the Dalitwaada is not individual but collective. Human beings relate to each other basically on humane terms. The material basis of the society is rooted not in wealth but in labour power. However Dalitbahujan labour power earns diminishing returns. Such diminishing returns have the effect of completely alienating them. In fact, there is a triple process of alienation taking place in the Dalitwaadas: (/) They are alienated from village production and marketing; (ii) they are alienated from the main village social setting; and (Hi) they are alienated from themselves. In this respect, the Dalitbahujans of India live in far more adverse conditions than the working classes in the West. Yet the hope of life among them is greater and stronger. Where does this hope come from? This hope comes from their own inner strength that expresses itself in the form of Dalitbahujan culture and consciousness. Its soul lies in its collective consciousness. In the Dalitwaada the individual is subsumed into the collectivity. While being a member of that collectivity, this individual retains a certain individuality. The interaction with nature on a day-to-day basis reproduces the freshness of life. To ensure that life within the Dalitwaada is not free, within every village the 'upper' castes, particularly the Brahmins and the Baniyas, have created mini-states that constantly oppress the Dalitbahujans both physically and spiritually. Despite all this Dalitbahujans have been re-energizing themselves to struggle to improve their lives. This is possible because of their collective consciousness. What are the implications of Dalitbahujan collective consciousness? Everything—good or bad—that takes place within the Dalitwaada is shared by everyone. Pleasure, pain and social events are all shared. If there is a birth in one house, both the pleasures and the pains of that birth are also social. The mother's labour pains are at least emotionally shared by all the womenfolk of the Dalitwaada. The pleasure of giving birth to a new human being, who will add to the number of working hands, a human being who is never regarded as a burden on society, this pleasure is not merely that of the mother and the father but of the whole waada. If there is a death, the whole Dalitwaada shares in it emotionally. Men and women are both part of the funeral procession, cremation or burial. All the women and the men gather to mourn the loss of a human being who had been part of their labour collective; a human being who ate with them, drank with them and smoked with them; a human being who was never a burden as long as that person was able-bodied. It is commonly observed by the villagers that Dalitbahujan women and men go to every house where death has taken place—even to the 'upper' caste houses. There they recount as they mourn, the 'good' that the person has done. On this occasion, they do not mention shortcomings or evil deeds. But in the normal

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course of life the defects of 'upper' castes occupy the principal place in their discourse. Very recently I happened to visit a village where a rich Reddy's only son (aged twenty) had committed suicide, ostensibly because his stingy father had refused to spend money on his education. The first people to reach the Reddy's house to abuse the stingy father were the Maadigaas of the village. They abused the father and mourned for the boy. The response of the other Dalitbahujans, by and large, was the same, whereas the 'upper' castes 'understood' the father-son relations of that family within the context of private property. The so-called upper castes saw what was 'wrong' in the boy's anger against his property-conscious father. A father who was ultimately accumulating property in the interest of the lone son. The Dalitbahujan understanding of the father-son relationship was the opposite of that of the 'upper' castes. For them the question was totally different. They posed the question as follows: Is property meant for human beings, or human beings meant for property? To appreciate the implications of this question we must understand the whole notion of private property among the Dalitbahujan masses. Dalitbahujan notion of private property The Maalaa-Maadigaa society has not become a society structured by private property. The notion of private property has not become part of their thinking in any major way. Individuality and possession of property has not acquired the pride of place in Dalitbahujan consciousness that it has in Hindu consciousness. If Dalitbahujans get hold of a goat or a sheep or a bull or a cow they share the meat. Even today, they do not weigh the meat first but simply distribute it by dividing it into equal shares, one share for each family. Such distribution has become central to the Dalitbahujan consciousness. Even the welfare doles that the government gives are shared equally. This is one of the main reasons why welfare inputs disappear into collective consumption within no time. Why is it that they do not acquire the consciousness of retaining something for tomorrow, for two days, for two months or for two years, thus forming private property of their own? The main reason for not acquiring such private property is rooted in the confidence they have in their power to labour. Dalitbahujans are the most hard-working people in village society. For them it is their labour power that is property. If the Dalitwaadas had disengaged themselves from the labour process, the village economies would have collapsed long ago. The Dalitwaada knows that for the labour that they invest in the production—whether agrarian or nonagrarian—very little comes back to them. Every day they consume something less than what they need to re-energize themselves. Thus, they know that every day they are also being alienated from their own selves. Yet 1557

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they are not disillusioned about life. They take life as a struggle in both production and procreation. Far from being a burden to the society, they are the productive pillars that keep the whole society standing, the blood that keeps the whole society alive. In contrast to this, the 'upper' castes are the most non-productive and lazy forces. Their values have been completely distorted by their life of perennial luxury. Their notion of private property is inhuman and exploitative. They can live tomorrow only on the property they preserve and to acquire that property, any brutality can be committed and it can be regarded as part of Hindu dharma. Among the brahminical forces there is no notion of 'work'. Labour is negated. All relations among human beings are reduced to relations of private property and distrust. Human values stand destroyed to the core. Eating and sleeping become the two principal tasks of human beings. Not that all Brahmin-Baniyas are rich. There are poor among them. Even they do not make their living by manual work (small pockets like Uttarakhand are exceptions). Dalitbahujans, on the other hand, layer by layer, keep working for the well-being of these so-called upper castes. Clearly what needs to be changed is the culture of 'upper' castes who live by exploiting Dalitbahujan labour and by converting the fruits of that labour into their property. All human beings including the Brahmins and the Baniyas must learn to live with the kind of confidence that the Dalitbahujans have. What is that confidence? The confidence that 'our tomorrow is guaranteed by our labour'. That is possible only when they begin to think in terms of the Dalitization of brahminical society. As a result of brahminical alienation from productive work, Hindu society has created a very powerful notion of private property. The nonproductive life of the 'upper' castes can survive only on private property. Unlike in non-caste systems, the accumulation of private property by brahminical Hinduism did not come about through a mixture of labour, investment and exploitation. The caste system has given enormous scope for accumulation of private property with a single instrument: exploitation. The spiritual mantra alone was brahminical investment. The whole world knows about the Brahmins' fear of labour and their disgust for work. Brahminical greed and gluttony ensure that property is accumulated only through exploitation. Moreover, property accumulated through such exploitation is given the highest social status. Brahminical literature concerns only the rich. Brahminical Hindu society has assigned all virtues to the rich and all vices to the poor. As far as I know, this is not true of the priesthood of other religions. The foundations of 'upper' caste culture lies in this brahminical notion of private property and non-productive living. Accumulation of property is designed to enable people to live without working. In Hindu society private property is not a social reserve to be used when society as a whole needs it. This is one place where Gandhi was

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wrong. For Brahmins, all that is in their possession becomes sacred, and is untouchable by others. If a Brahmin has some extra rice, it will not be given away. Even Baniya property is sacred property. The casteization of property destroys the social basis of property. In fact, it is because of the caste system, which in turn casteized property, that the system of property could not play a progressive role in India at any stage.

Labour as life For Dalitbahujans labour is life. For a Dalitbahujan body, labour is as habitual as eating is to the stomach. In fact, every Dalitbahujan body produces more than it consumes. As a result, Dalitbahujan life recreates itself in labour more than it recreates itself through eating and drinking. While labouring, a Dalitbahujan mind does not disengage from thinking but goes on producing ideas that make labour a pleasure. If labour is not pleasure, if Dalitbahujan minds do not derive pleasure out of that labouring process, given the low levels of consumption on which they subsist, Dalitbahujan bodies would have died much earlier than they do. Even if Dalitbahujans were to consider work as a monotonous, tortuous course of life, given the amount of labour that they expend during their lifetimes, death would have invited them much earlier than it does today. If without giving up such a practice of labouring, and labouring with pleasure, when adequate calories of food are provided, a Dalitbahujan body will live longer and more healthily than the non-labouring 'upper' caste/class body. In the process of labour Dalitbahujans engage in a constant intercourse with the land. Their thorough understanding of land and its productivity, its colour and combination, is solely responsible for increase in productivity. Even before 'knowledge from without' (what we call urban-based, expert knowledge) influenced Dalitbahujan productive skills, they had been experimenting constantly to improve their labour productivity, trying to understand scientifically the relationship between land and seed. They also tried to understand the relationship between the seed and human biological systems. Before cross-breeding was studied in modern laboratories, the Dalitbahujans had cross-bred seed systems. Dalitbahujan women selected and preserved seeds for planting. They maintained huge stores of plant genes. They grafted plants and worked out whole systems of hybridization. All this knowledge was a product of their labour and its creative intercourse with land and nature. Dalitbahujan labour has creatively interacted with a whole range of non-agrarian plant systems. Dalitbahujans who were engaged in sheep-, goat- and cattle-breeding made tireless investigations of plants and their medicinal values. These investigations were done with an exemplary combination of physical labour and mental acumen. Dalitbahujan knowledge

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never separated physical labour from mental labour. In India this bifurcation took place in a caste/class form. For Dalitbahujans, physical and mental labour was an integrated whole. If we want to understand the process by which the contradiction between mental and physical labour is resolved as Mao did in the Chinese context, we must return to studying carefully the way the Dalitbahujan societies of Indian combined mental and physical labour, without a so-called wise man intervening, in the process of labouring to integrate, break open, reintegrate and finally discover new systems. The Dalitbahujan masses have enormous technological and engineering skills which are not divorced from their labour. One who lifts dead cattle also knows the science of skinning it. They themselves know how to process the skin and make chappals, shoes or ropes. All these tasks involve both mental and physical labour. This work is not like reading the Vedas or teaching in a school. Reading the Vedas or teaching in a school does not require much investment of physical labour or creative thought. Certain types of mental labour may not involve physical labour, but all physical labour involves mental labour. Dalitbahujan society has shown exemplary skill in combining both. Take, for example, the Goudaas who climb the toddy trees and combine in themselves the talent of mind and the training of body. While climbing the tree a Goudaa has to exercise his muscle power. He has also to invent ways of climbing tall trees which do not have branches. While climbing, if he does not focus his mind on every step the result is death. A Brahmin dance teacher, while dancing certainly combines both physical and mental labour but does not encounter a risk in every step. Despite this, why is it that brahminical dance has acquired so much value? Why is it that brahminical dance is given so much space in literature? Why not celebrate the beauty and skill of a Goudaa, which over and above being an art, science and an exercise has productive value. As I have already discussed, the tapping of a toddy tree layer by layer, involves enormous knowledge and engaged application besides physical and mental skill. Tapping the gela in a way that makes the toddy flow, but does not hurt the tree, cannot be done by everybody. It needs training and cultivation of mind. Training in this specialization is much more dangerous and difficult than training in reading the Vedas. All the same a Hindu is told to respect and value the training to read Veda mantras, but not the Goudaa skills of producing something which has market-value and consumption-value. Hindu Brahminism defied all economic theories, including feminist economic theory, that all market-oriented societies valued labour which produced goods and commodities for market consumption. Feminist economic theory points out that though women's labour in the house contributes to the economy, it does not find social respectability or receive economic compensation. In the brahminical economy Dalitbahujan labour

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(male or female) even if it is produced for market consumption has no value. On the contrary, the so-called mental labour of the Brahmins and the Baniyas reciting mantras and extracting profit by sitting at the shop desk has been given enormous socioeconomic value. Herein lies the Hindu delegitimization of productive creativity. The brahminical economy even devalued production for the market and privileged its spiritual-mental labour over all other labour processes. Brahminical scholarship legitimized leisure, mantra, puja, tapasya and soothsaying, though these are not knowledge systems in themselves. Scientific knowledge systems, on the contrary, are available among the Dalitbahujan castes. A pot maker's wholistic approach to knowledge which involves collecting the right type of earth, making it into clay, turning it on the wheel, and firing it requires knowledge of local materials and resources, scientific knowledge of the clay and the firing process, besides a sharp understanding of the market. It requires mental skill to use the fingers, while physically turning the wheel, skill to convert that clay into pots, pitchers and jars—small or big—of all kinds. Firing is an equally skill-intensive process. The oven has to be heated to an exact temperature and the pots baked just long enough for them to become durable and yet retain their attractive colour. This whole scheme is a specialized knowledge in itself. Thus, Kamsalies (goldsmiths) have their own scientific knowledge, Kammaris (blacksmiths) theirs, and Shalaas (weavers) theirs. But all these arts and sciences, all these knowledge systems have been delegitimized. Instead of being given social priority and status, mantric mysticism has been given priority. These knowledge systems will get socioeconomic value only when their legitimacy is established. Hinduism constructed its own account of Dalitbahujan knowledge systems. As discussed earlier, while the Dalitbahujans live labour as life, the Hindus inverted this principle and privileged leisure over labour. The ancient theoretical formation of the thesis 'leisure as life' was propounded by Vatsyayana in the Kamasutra, where he constructs a nagarika (citizen) as one who embodies this notion. This very theory was reinstated at different stages of history whenever brahminical Hinduism was in crisis, or whenever Dalitbahujan organic forces rebelled against Hindu theory and practice. As we saw, the 1990 anti-Mandal Hindutva wave again aimed at reviving the 'leisure as life' theory as against the Mandal movement that aimed at universalizing 'labour as life' (irrespective of caste, everyone should do both manual labour and work in an office). In other words, it aimed at dalitizing Indian society. The whole world has overcome the theories of privileging leisure over labour. Whether it is countries like Japan and China or in the West itself, labour has acquired more market value and social status than leisure. Mandalization of the Indian state and society would have integrated us into these universal systems. But Hindu Brahminism reacted to this

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historical transformation and started the counter-revolutionary Hindutva movement by reemphasizing leisure, mantra and moksha as basic principles which will undermine the onward march of Indian society. But a quicker development of Indian society lies in privileging labour over leisure. Only Dalitization of the whole society can achieve this goal. Dalitbahujan democracy Dalitbahujan social systems are democratic in nature, structuring themselves in social collectivity and in a collective consciousness. Collectivity and collective consciousness are reinforced by the negation of the institution of private property. As I have discussed earlier, Dalitbahujan society has negated private property because it has tremendous confidence in its own labour power and because of its concept of labour as life. In political terms, Dalitbahujan democracy expresses itself in several ways. The relationship between wife and husband, though patriarchal, is also democratic. The wife does not have to be known in her husband's name. She can learn and practise all skills. Human strengths and weaknesses are integrated into Dalitbahujan life. Men and women can abuse each other, at times beat each other, though it is true that often women will be at the receiving end. Between wife and husband, there exists a loving relationship based on shared work that plays a positive role. Though marriages are often arranged and child marriage is practised, divorce and remarriage (maarumaanam) are socially accepted. Divorce is made possible for both wife and husband in an open discussion in the Dalitwaada. The caste panchayat, village panchayat and the ammalakkala muchhatlu, women's collectives, all debate the rights and wrongs of the couple and come to a socially acceptable conclusion. Where there is no possibility of continuing to live as a wife and husband, the two may divorce because that is the practical alternative. Of course, the Hindu problem regarding widow-remarriage has never been a problem in Dalitbahujan society. The democracy in the Dalitwaadas is a democracy that works. The relations between parents and children are far more democratic in Dalitbahujan houses than in Hindu houses. A son or daughter addresses the parents in the familiar singular mode and eats and drinks along with them. There is very little of a hierarchy in the house, waada and caste; vices and virtues are debated more openly in the family, waada and caste than it is in Hindu society. While illiteracy in the Dalitwaadas (illiteracy is imposed on them by the brahminical system) places limitations on their levels of knowledge, the available productive knowledge is freely shared by all. People in the Dalitwaadas live on the basis of equality. We generally do not find huge buildings on the one hand and poor sheds on the other. By and large the whole of the Dalitwaada lives in poverty, but within that poverty there is equality as they all live in similar houses, eat 1562

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similar food and wear similar clothes. This equality minimizes jealousy and competition among them. The persistent theory that human beings are by nature, selfish or iniquitous or that the scope for selfishness is removed only when inequality is reduced (as was done in some of the former socialist systems) and its obverse: the theory that human systems do not survive if inequalities are totally removed, both these theories can be disproved by any systematic study of Dalitwaadas, where there is no negative cut-throat competition and no withdrawing into lethargy. There are umpteen examples to show that if there is work for three human days for a person, and a Dalitbahujan is assigned to finish that work, he or she would take two more people along and finish the task in one day—even if it means unemployment for the next two days. This is because of the democratic humanism that the Dalitwaadas are vested with. Amidst poverty there is no dearth of humanity. This is the rich heritage that Dalitwaadas can extend to the whole of Indian society. In contrast to this, life in the Hindu waadas, particularly the Brahmin or the Baniya households, is marked by selfishness, inequality and cut-throat competition. This is primarily because Hindus are non-productive and anti-labour people. Naturally, therefore, a Hindu family visualizes its survival only in a totally hierarchical and competitive system. This competition is for greater pleasure and 'better' living but even within the same Hindu 'upper' caste they do not appreciate equality. For them equality goes against human nature itself which they regard as thriving on inequality and selfishness. The principle of 'selfishness as natural' has become the philosophical foundation of Hinduism. This was the reason why it could not build a society of internal strength and internal dynamism. The 'upper' caste political structure is basically authoritarian. Authoritarianism begins within a brahminical home and extends to the rest of civil society. Given the socio-political hegemony of the 'upper' castes, the structures that the brahminical family have evolved are projected to be the structures of Indian society as a whole. Its opposite, that is, Dalitbahujan structures, though they encompass a far larger number of people, indeed the whole working mass of India, is treated by brahminical literary, political and legal texts as nonexistent. As a result, even historians and social scientists from other parts of the world constructed Indian culture and history either in conformity with brahminical theocracy or critiqued it in its own terms without comparing it with the secular and democratic social systems of the Dalitbahujans. If only that had been done, every observer (if not from India, at least from abroad) could have realized that India has always been divided into two cultures and two civilizations: the Dalitbahujan and the brahminical. But this fact has been systematically glossed over. Dalitbahujan democracy and brahminical authoritarianism express themselves in a conflicting manner in civil society. This conflict is an

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ongoing process and can be found everywhere. If civil society and the structures of the polity had not been hegemonized by brahminical consent and coercion systems, Dalitbahujan democratic structures would have gained the upper hand and the social system would have been built on the much stronger ethics of production. Indian development would have been set on an entirely different course. The defeat of the Indian systems by colonialists would have become impossible. The resilience of the system would have been thousand times greater. Hinduism is solely responsible for the tragedy of this country. What is important, however, is that though Hinduism has made every attempt to destroy Dalitbahujan culture and civilization, it has not succeeded. Attempts to provide respectable social status to Dalitbahujan culture and civilization were made by Jyotirao Phule and Ambedkar. As we have seen, the attempts to create a Dalitbahujan hegemony began with the Mandal struggle in 1990. Thus the 1990 Mandal struggle posed several new questions. The forces of democracy, that is, the Dalitbahujans and the minorities, and the forces of brahminical authoritarianism are getting polarized. This polarization places the Dalitization of society on the national agenda.

Dalitbahujan man-woman relations Man-woman relations among Dalitbahujan castes are far more democratic and humane than among the Hindus. This aspect has been examined in some detail in preceding chapters, but it can be usefully reviewed here. Though the institution of patriarchy has its sway over even the Dalitwaadas, a certain degree of freedom for women is guaranteed by inbuilt structures. Since Dalitbahujans do not have property reserves and every individual must therefore work for the family, women are thoroughly integrated into their productive labour system. Not only that, the women are the main driving force of Dalitbahujan society. It is also true that because of the lack of social reserves even young children need to work, which has built a tremendous work ethic among them. All the same it is necessary for the well-being of Dalitbahujan society that these children be provided education. Education is an essential condition of life. As part of this process, both women and men need to be educated. The important point here is that the skills that Dalitbahujan women have are enormous. They are excellent soil examiners, planters, breeders and selectors of seeds. They have huge stores of medical knowledge. Most of these skills are absolutely lacking among 'upper' caste women. Brahminical society has reduced women to sex objects. The taboo system that was built into Hindu families destroyed their creative abilities. The creativity of these women must be restored. Drawing upon the experiences of Dalitbahujan women is the only way other societies of India can change

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their course. Similarly, Dalitbahujan men are also productive beings. They have huge reserves of the knowledge of nature. Their knowledge of plants, animals, insects is extremely important for the preservation of the human species. Dalitbahujan men and women's knowledge about soils, seeds, tools and other materials is essential for the growth of science and technology in this country. Without this source knowledge, which forms the core of the knowledge systems, the apex knowledge systems would not have developed. The future The future is that of Dalitbahujans in India. In order to dalitize society, the Dalitbahujan leadership must know its strengths and weaknesses. The Dalitbahujans of India have suffered hardships all through history. Modern democratic socialist revolutions have now given them some scope to liberate themselves. It is only through their liberation that the rest of the society, namely, the 'upper' castes, can be liberated. But this process can be very painful and tortuous. This was clear from two historic struggles that have taken place so far. The first was the 1990 Mandal struggle and the second was the 1993 Uttar Pradesh elections. In 1990 the Dalitization of the administration was violently resisted. The Janata Dal government was pulled down for the simple reason that it implemented a small section of the Mandal Commission Report. In 1993, after the first Dalitbahujan government was formed at the state level, brahminical forces turned the Uttar Pradesh Assembly into a place of bloody battle. As the house assembled on its first day, 16 December 1993, the brahminical forces of Uttar Pradesh began throwing chappals and missiles at the Dalitbahujan legislators. It was because the brahminical forces now realized that the Dalitbahujan 'raakshas', 'mlecchaas', 'Dravidas' and 'Chandalas' had come to rule. But the Dalitbahujans have shown their determination by retaliating. For the first time in Indian history, as we have read in newspapers and seen on television, the Brahmins have tasted what Dalitbahujan power can be. Perhaps this could be a pointer to the future course of history. Dalitization of civil society, state and administrative apparatus is not going to be an easy task. The Dalitbahujans want that it should be achieved as peacefully as possible; they have never been lovers of violence. But the enemy forces have survived only through violence. Dalitbahujans have all the sympathies for 'upper' caste women as they have also been victims of Hinduism. But a complex problem arises with the fact that they have been integrated into Brahminism in caste and class terms. Even Brahmin women think that Dalitbahujans are Others. However, the best way to push Dalitization into 'upper' caste houses, is to address the women. The recent past has shown that the women's 1565

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movement is receptive to Dalitbahujan questions. They see a parallel in the nature of oppression. Though by and large 'upper' caste women live in better economic/class conditions, at least the most conscious among them will quickly realize the need for Dalitization. Already the 'upper' caste women are choosing Dalitbahujan man-woman relations to brahminical patriarchal relations. They seem to prefer the Dalitbahujan concepts of divorce and remarriage to the wife-murder politics of 'upper' caste families. The educated among them seem to think that the family must be open, as against the wish of 'upper' caste men who feel that the family must be a closed and hidden system. The attempt to dalitize temples—though that in itself does not have much positive implications in terms of democratizing the system—is being demanded. Brahminical forces are resisting this in a big way. But, whatever it is worth, it is important to capture the Hindu temples by expelling the Brahmins from them as there is a lot of wealth in the temples in the form of gold, silver and land. This wealth has to be seized. At the same time it is important to see that the brahminical God-culture does not get assimilated into Dalitbahujan culture. Dalitbahujans whose consciousness has been brahminized must be made aware of its danger. Productive Dalitbahujan culture should constantly be privileged over Hindu 'swaha' culture. The thousands of existing temples could be converted into public education centres, where the Dalitbahujans begin to reschool the 'upper' castes. This of course will require that they unlearn many things. The task is much more difficult with the Brahmins and the Baniyas than it will be with the neo-Kshatriyas. Yet another major area of Dalitization will be to push the Brahmin-Baniyas into productive work, whether it is rural or urban. Both men and women of the so-called upper castes will resist this with all the strength at their command. This is because among them Hinduism has destroyed all positive elements that normally exist in a human being. During the post-colonial period their energies were diverted to manipulate education, employment, production and development subtly. Their minds are poisoned with the notion that productive work is mean and that productive castes are inferior. No ruling class in the world is as dehumanized as the Indian brahminical castes. They can be rehumanized only by pushing them into productive work and by completely diverting their attention from the temple, the office, power-seeking, and so on. Even in this respect the neo-Kshatriyas are in a slightly advantageous position. Their roots are still in productive work, but because they are slowly gaining political ascendancy, they are becoming more and more brahminized even in terms of production relations. In socio-political terms they must be first neutralized and then dalitized. Transforming them is not as difficult as transforming the Brahmins and Baniyas since their sociopolitical roots are within the Dalitbahujan culture.

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It must be remembered, however, that the anti-caste revolution in India may take a more tortuous course than even the 'proletarian cultural revolution' did in China. The Brahmins will make it so difficult that even if they are asked to undertake productive work, they will shout from their rooftops that atrocities on the 'intellectuals' are on the increase. As of today, the Non-Resident Indians (NRIs) belong mostly to the 'upper' castes. The post-capitalist markets into which these NRIs are integrated did not de-caste them. This is very clear from their proHindutva proclamations from abroad. These are the forces that financed Hindutva with dollars. The categorical shift of the Delhi 'intelligentsia' towards Hindutva, as against the Uttar Pradesh illiterate Dalitbahujan masses who preferred the Bahujan Samaj party and the Samajwadi party shows the direction of the future. The Dalitbahujan movements, therefore, should be aware of the hurdles and complications that modern brahminical intellectuals—those who are abroad and those who are within India—are going to create. The hue and cry that they are going to raise against Dalitization among international circles will be great. We should aim for a cultural revolution that will avoid the loss of life. Dalitization must be handled very skilfully. All the theories that brahminical intellectuals have created in the name of nationalism, modernity, secularism and democracy bear the diabolical seal of Brahminism and Hinduism. The Dalitbahujan movements have not produced enough organic intellectuals to reinterpret the whole literature that emerged during the nationalist period and the post-colonial period. In order to dalitize society and de-Hinduize it thoroughly, every word and every sentence that has been written by brahminical thinkers, writers, politicians, historians, poets and art critics—virtually everything in every field—must be reexamined thoroughly. The task, however, is not going to be easy. To some extent, capturing political power is easy. But the Dalitization process is much more difficult, and if the Dalitization of society is not taken as a serious task, the question of sustenance of political power will not be possible. If the defeat of Shambhuka rajya or Ravana rajya are ancient examples, the drifting of the Dravida Munnetra political power into the hands of a Brahmin woman in Tamil Nadu is a recent example. It may not be long before the same state is recaptured by Brahmin men themselves. The only way to historicize the past and safeguard the future is to create an army of organic intellectuals—men and women—from Dalitbahujan forces. Dalitbahujan organic intellectuals must work out a long-term strategy, both political and economic, to restructure social relations in a massive way. If the intellectual domain is as tortured today as the sociopolitical domain, it is because brahminical forces refuse to recognize the new ideas of Dalitbahujan organic intellectuals. Everything is shown in reverse order. If we say one thing, they understand it only in ways that suit

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them. When we did not ask them any questions they preached the 'correct' theories to us. Now that we are raising questions, they raise counterquestions. They doubt our intentions or integrity and our ability to sustain the battle. They suspect us in every respect. When we point out that they may be wrong, suspicion becomes their ideology. Now it is our turn to declare that suspecting them is a prime tenet of our ideology. Then they will stop asking questions. If they come at us from one end, we should begin from the other end. If the Brahminwaada represents the ideal for them, the Dalitwaada should be the ideal for us. Just as they are shouting from their rooftops (and they have very big houses) 'Hinduize India', we must shout from our toddy palms, from the fields, from treetops and from Dalitbahujan waadas, 'Dalitize India'. We must shout 'we hate Hinduism, we hate Brahminism, we love our culture and more than anything, we love ourselves'. It is through loving ourselves and taking pride in our culture that we can live a better life in future.

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Part 10 CHALLENGING EUROCENTRISM

10.1 RESUME /./. Thomas From Froudacity: West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude. Explained by J.J. Thomas. New Beacon, 1969,179-95. First published by T. Fisher Unwin, 1889.

Thus far we have dealt with the main questions raised by Mr Froude on the lines of his own choosing; lines which demonstrate to the fullest how unsuited his capacity is for appreciating—still less grappling with—the political and social issues he has so confidently undertaken to determine. In vain have we sought throughout his bastard philosophising for any phrase giving promise of an adequate treatment of this important subject. We find paraded ostentatiously enough the doctrine that in the adjustment of human affairs the possession of a white skin should be the strongest recommendation. Wonder might fairly be felt that there is no suggestion of a corresponding advantage being accorded to the possession of a long nose or of auburn hair. Indeed, little or no attention that can be deemed serious is given to the interest of the Blacks, as a large and (out of Africa) no longer despicable section of the human family, in the great worldproblems which are so visibly preparing and press for definitive solutions. The intra-African Negro is clearly powerless to struggle successfully against personal enslavement, annexation, or volunteer forcible 'protection' of his territory. What, we ask, will in the coming ages be the opinion and attitude of the extra-African millions—ten millions in the Western Hemisphere—dispersed so widely over the surface of the globe, apt apprentices in every conceivable department of civilised culture? Will these men remain for ever too poor, too isolated from one another for grand racial combinations? Or will the naturally opulent cradle of their people, too long a prey to violence and unholy greed, become at length the sacred watchword of a generation willing and able to conquer or perish under its inspiration? Such large and interesting questions it was within the province and duty of a famous historian, laying confident claim to prophetic insight, not to propound alone, but also definitely to solve. The sacred power of forecast, however, has been confined to finical

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pronouncements regarding those for whose special benefit he has exercised it, and to childish insults of the Blacks whose doom must be sealed to secure the precious result which is aimed at. In view of this ill-intentioned omission, we shall offer a few cursory remarks bearing on, but not attempting to answer, those grave inquiries concerning the African people. As in our humble opinion these are questions paramount to all the petty local issues finically dilated on by the confident prophet of The Bow of Ulysses, we will here briefly devote ourselves to its discussion. Accepting the theory of human development propounded by our author, let us apply it to the African race. Except, of course, to intelligences having a share in the Councils of Eternity, there can be no attainable knowledge respecting the laws which regulate the growth and progress of civilisation among the races of the earth. That in the existence of the human family every age has been marked by its own essential characteristics with regard to manifestations of intellectual life, however circumscribed, is a proposition too self-evident to require more than the stating. But investigation beyond such evidence as we possess concerning the past—whether recorded by man himself in the written pages of history, or by the Creator on the tablets of nature—would be worse than futile. We see that in the past different races have successively come to the front, as prominent actors on the world's stage. The years of civilised development have dawned in turn on many sections of the human family, and the Anglo-Saxons, who now enjoy preeminence, got their turn only after Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Greece, Rome, and others had successively held the palm of supremacy. And since these mighty empires have all passed away, may we not then, if the past teaches aught, confidently expect that other racial hegemonies will arise in the future to keep up the ceaseless progression of temporal existence towards the existence that is eternal? What is it in the nature of things that will oust the African race from the right to participate, in times to come, in the high destinies that have been assigned in times past to so many races that have not been in anywise superior to us in the qualifications, physical, moral, and intellectual, that mark out a race for prominence amongst other races? The normal composition of the typical Negro has the testimony of ages to its essential soundness and nobility. Physically, as an active labourer, he is capable of the most protracted exertion under climatic conditions the most exhausting. By the mere strain of his brawn and sinew he has converted waste tracts of earth into fertile regions of agricultural bountifulness. On the scenes of strife he has in his savage state been known to be indomitable save by the stress of irresistible forces, whether of men or of circumstances. Staunch in his friendship and tender towards the weak directly under his protection, the unvitiated African furnishes in himself the combination of native virtue which in the land of his exile was so prolific of good results for the welfare of the whole slave-class. But distracted

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at home by the sudden irruptions of skulking foes, he has been robbed, both intellectually and morally, of the immense advantage of Peace, which is the mother of Progress. Transplanted to alien climes, and through centuries of desolating trials, this irrepressible race has bated not one throb of its energy, nor one jot of its heart or hope. In modern times, after his expatriation into dismal bondage, both Britain and America have had occasion to see that even in the paralysing fetters of political and social degradation the right arm of the Ethiop can be a valuable auxiliary on the field of battle. Britain, in her conflict with France for supremacy in the West Indies, did not disdain the aid of the sable arms that struck together with those of Britons for the trophies that furnished the motives for those epic contests. Later on, the unparalleled struggle between the Northern and Southern States of the American Union put to the test the indestructible fibres of the Negro's nature, moral as well as physical. The Northern States, after months of hesitating repugnance, and when taught at last by dire defeats that colour did not in any way help to victory, at length sullenly acquiesced in the comradeship, hitherto disdained, of the eager African contingent. The records of Port Hudson, Vicksburg, Morris Island, and elsewhere, stand forth in imperishable attestation of the fact that the distinction of being laurelled during life as victor, or filling in death a hero's grave, is reserved for no colour, but for the heart that can dare and the hand that can strike boldly in a righteous cause. The experience of the Southern slave-holders, on the other hand, was no less striking and worthy of admiration. Every man of the twelve seceding States forming the Southern Confederacy, then fighting desperately for the avowed purpose of perpetuating slavery, was called into the field, as no available male arm could be spared from the conflict on their side. Plantation owner, overseer, and every one in authority, had to be drafted away from the scene of their usual occupation to the stage whereon the bloody drama of internecine strife was being enacted. Not only the plantation, but the home and the household, including the mistress and her children, had to be left, not unprotected, it is glorious to observe, but, with confident assurance in their loyalty and good faith, under the protection of the four million of bondsmen, who, through the laws and customs of these very States, had been doomed to lifelong ignorance and exclusion from all moralising influences. With what result? The protraction of the conflict on the part of the South would have been impossible but for the admirable management and realisation of their resources by those benighted slaves. On the other hand, not one of the thousands of Northern prisoners escaping from the durance of a Southern captivity ever appealed in vain for the assistance and protection of a Negro. Clearly the head and heart of those bondsmen were each in its proper place. The moral effect of these experiences of the Negroes' sterling qualities was not lost on either North or South. In the North it effaced

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from thousands of repugnant hearts the adverse feelings which had devised and accomplished so much to the Negro's detriment. In the South—but for the blunders of the Reconstructionists—it would have considerably facilitated the final readjustment of affairs between the erewhile master and slave in their new-born relations of employer and employed. Reverting to the Africans who were conveyed to places other than the States, it will be seen that circumstances amongst them and in their favour came into play, modifying and lightening their unhappy condition. First, attention must be paid to the patriotic solidarity existing amongst the bondsmen, a solidarity which, in the case of those who had been deported in the same ship, had all the sanctity of blood-relationship. Those who had thus travelled to the 'white man's country' addressed and considered each other as brothers and sisters. Hence their descendants for many generations upheld, as if consanguineous, the modes of address and treatment which became hereditary in families whose originals had travelled in the same ship. These adopted uncles, aunts, nephews, nieces, were so united by common sympathies, that good or ill befalling any one of them intensely affected the whole connection. Mutual support commensurate with the area of their location thus became the order among these people. At the time of the first deportation of Africans to the West Indies to replace the aborigines who had been decimated in the mines at Santo Domingo and in the pearl fisheries of the South Caribbean, the circumstances of the Spanish settlers in the Antilles were of singular, even romantic, interest. The enthusiasm which overflowed from the crusades and the Moorish wars, upon the discovery and conquest of America, had occasioned the peopling of the Western Archipelago by a race of men in whom the daring of freebooters was strangely blended with a fierce sort of religiousness. As holders of slaves, these men recognised, and endeavoured to their best to give effect to, the humane injunctions of Bishop Las Casas. The Negroes, therefore, male and female, were promptly presented for admission by baptism into the Catholic Church, which always had stood open and ready to welcome them. The relations of god-father and god-mother resulting from these baptismal functions had a most important bearing on the reciprocal stations of master and slave. The god-children were, according to ecclesiastical custom, considered in every sense entitled to all the protection and assistance which were within the competence of the god-parents, who, in their turn, received from the former the most absolute submission. It is easy to see that the planters, as well as those intimately connected with them, in assuming such obligations with their concomitant responsibilities, practically entered into bonds which they all regarded as, if possible, more solemn than the natural ties of secular parentage. The duty of providing for these dependants usually took the shape of their being apprenticed to, and trained in the various arts and vocations that

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constitute the life of civilisation. In many cases, at the death of their patrons, the bondsmen who were deemed most worthy were, according to the means of the testator, provided for in a manner lifting them above the necessity of future dependence. Manumission, too, either by favour or through purchase, was allowed the fullest operation. Here then was the active influence of higher motives than mere greed of gain or the pride of racial power mellowing the lot and gilding the future prospects of the dwellers in the tropical house of bondage. The next, and even more effectual agency in modifying and harmonising the relations between owner and bondspeople was the inevitable attraction of one race to the other by the sentiment of natural affection. Out of this sprang living ties far more intimate and binding on the moral sense than even obligations contracted in deference to the Church. Natural impulses have often diviner sources than ecclesiastical mandates. Obedience to the former not seldom brings down the penalties of the Church; but the culprit finds solace in the consciousness that the offence might in itself be a protection from the thunders it has provoked. Under these circumstances the general body of planters, who were in the main adventurers of the freest type, were fain to establish connections with such of the slave-women as attracted their sympathy, through personal comeliness or aptitude in domestic affairs, or, usually, both combined. There was ordinarily in this beginning of the seventeenth century no Vashti that needed expulsion from the abode of a plantation Ahasuerus to make room for the African Esther to be admitted to the chief place within the portals. One great natural consequence of this was the extension to the relatives or guardians of the bondswoman so preferred of an amount of favour which, in the case of the more capable males, completes the parallel we have been drawing by securing for each of them the precedence and responsibilities of a Mordecai. The offspring of these natural alliances came in therefore to cement more intimately the union of interests which previous relations had generated. Beloved by their fathers, and in many cases destined by them to a lot superior to that whereto they were entitled by formal law and social prescription, these young procreations—Mulattos, as they were called—were made the objects of special and careful provisions on the fathers' part. They were, according to the means of their fathers in the majority of cases, sent for education and training to European or other superior institutions. After this course they were either formally acknowledged by their fathers, or, if that was impracticable, amply and suitably provided for in a career out of their native colony. To a reflecting mind there is something that interests, not to say fascinates, in studying the action and reaction upon one another of circumstances in the existence of the Mulatto. As a matter of fact, he had much more to complain of under the slave system than his pure-blooded African relations. The law, by decreeing that every child of a freeman and a slave woman must follow the

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EUROCENTRISM

fortune of the womb, thus making him the property of his mother exclusively, practically robbed him before his very birth of the nurture and protection of a father. His reputed father had no obligation to be even aware of his procreation, and nevertheless—so inscrutable are the ways of Providence!—the Mulatto was the centre around which clustered the outraged instincts of nature in rebellion against the desecrating mandates that prescribed treason to herself. Law and society may decree; but in our normal humanity there throbs a sentiment which neutralises every external impulse contrary to its promptings. In meditating on the varied history of the Negro in the United States, since his first landing on the banks of the James River in 1619 till the Emancipation Act of President Lincoln in 1865, it is curious to observe that the elevation of the race, though in a great measure secured, preceded from circumstances almost the reverse of those that operated so favourably in the same direction elsewhere. The men of the slave-holding States, chiefly Puritans or influenced by Puritanic surroundings, were not under the ecclesiastical sway which rendered possible in the West Indies and other Catholic countries the establishment of the reciprocal bonds of god-parents and god-children. The self-same causes operated to prevent any large blending of the two races, inasmuch as the immigrant from Britain who had gone forth from his country to better his fortune had not left behind him his attachment to the institutions of the motherland, among which marrying, whenever practicable, was one of the most cherished. Above all, too, as another powerful check at first to such alliances between the ruling and servile races of the States, there existed the native idiosyncrasy of the Anglo-Saxon. That class of them who had left Britain were likelier than the more refined of their nation to exhibit in its crudest and cruellest form the innate jealousy and contempt of other races that pervades the Anglo-Saxon bosom. It is but a simple fact that, whenever he condescended thereto, familiarity with even the loveliest of the subject people was regarded as a mighty self-unbending for which the object should be correspondingly grateful. So there could, in the beginning, be no frequent instances of the romantic chivalry that gilded the quasi-marital relations of the more fervid and humane members of the Latin stock. But this kind of intercourse, which in the earlier generation was undoubtedly restricted in North America by the checks above adverted to, and, presumably, also by the mutual unintelligibility in speech, gradually expanded with the natural increase of the slave population. The American-born, English-speaking Negro girl, who had in many cases been the playmate of her owner, was naturally more intelligible, more accessible, more attractive—and the inevitable consequence was the extension apace of that intercourse, the offspring whereof became at length so visibly numerous. Among the Romans, the grandest of all colonisers, the individual's

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Civis Romanus sum—I am a Roman citizen—was something more than verbal vapouring; it was a protective talisman—a buckler no less than a sword. Yet was the possession of this noble and singular privilege no barrier to Roman citizens meeting on a broad humanitarian level any alien race, either allied to or under the protection of that world-famous commonwealth. In the speeches of the foremost orators and statesmen among the conquerors of the then known world, the allusions to subject or allied aliens are distinguished by a decorous observance of the proprieties which should mark any reference to those who had the dignity of Rome's friendship, or the privilege of her august protection. Observations, therefore, regarding individuals of rank in these alien countries had the same sobriety and deference which marked allusions to born Romans of analogous degree. Such magnanimity, we grieve to say, is not characteristic of the race which now replaces the Romans in the colonising leadership of the world. We read with feelings akin to despair of the cheap, not to say derogatory, manner in which, in both Houses of Parliament, native potentates, especially of non-European countries, are frequently spoken of by the hereditary aristocracy and the first gentlemen of the British Empire. The inborn racial contempt thus manifested in quarters where rigid selfcontrol and decorum should form the very essence of normal deportment, was not likely, as we have before hinted, to find any mollifying ingredient in the settlers on the banks of the Mississippi. Therefore should we not be surprised to find, with regard to many an illicit issue of 'down South', the arrogance of race so overmastering the promptings of nature as to render not unfrequent at the auction-block the sight of many a chattel of mixed blood, the offspring of some planter whom business exigency had forced to this commercial transaction as the readiest mode of self-release. Yet were the exceptions to this rule enough to contribute appreciably to the weight and influence of the mixed race in the North, where education and a fair standing had been clandestinely secured for their children by parents to whom law and society had made it impossible to do more, and whom conscience rendered incapable of stopping at less. From this comparative sketch of the history of the slaves in the States, in the West Indies and countries adjacent, it will be perceived that in the latter scenes of bondage everything had conspired to render a fusion of interests between the ruling and the servile classes not only easy, but inevitable. In the very first generation after their introduction, the Africans began to press upward, a movement which every decade has accelerated, in spite of the changes which supervened as each of the Colonies fell under British sway. Nearly two centuries had by this time elapsed, and the coloured influence, which had grown with their wealth, education, numbers, and unity, though circumscribed by the emancipation of the slaves, and the consequent depression in fortune of all slave-owners, never was or could be annihilated. In the Government service there were

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many for whom the patronage of god-parents or the sheer influence of their family had effected an entrance. The prevalence and potency of the influences we have been dilating upon may be gauged by the fact that personages no less exalted than Governors of various Colonies—of Trinidad in three authentic cases—have been sharers in the prevailing usages, in the matter of standing sponsors (by proxy), and also of relaxing in the society of some fascinating daughter of the sun from the tension and wear of official duty. In the three cases just referred to, the most careful provision was made for the suitable education and starting in life of the issues. For the god-children of Governors there were places in the public service, and so from the highest to the lowest the humanitarian intercourse of the classes was confirmed. Consequent on the frequent abandonment of their plantations by many owners who despaired of being able to get along by paying their way, an opening was made for the insinuation of Absenteeism into our agricultural, in short, our economic existence. The powerful sugar lords, who had invested largely in the cane plantations, were fain to take over and cultivate the properties which their debtors doggedly refused to continue working, under pretext of the entire absence, or at any rate unreliability, of labour. The representatives of those new transatlantic estate proprietors displaced, but never could replace, the original cultivators, who were mostly gentlemen as well as agriculturists. It was from this overseer class that the vituperations and slanders went forth that soon became stereotyped, concerning the Negro's incorrigible laziness and want of ambition— those gentry adjusting the scale of wages, not according to the importance and value of the labour done, but according to the scornful estimate which they had formed of the Negro personally. And when the wages were fixed fairly, they almost invariably sought to indemnify themselves for their enforced justice by the insulting license of their tongues, addressed to males and females alike. The influence of such men on local legislation, in which they had a preponderating share, either as actual proprietors or as the attorneys of absentees, was not in the direction of refinement or liberality. Indeed, the kind of laws which they enacted, especially during the apprenticeship (1834-8), is thus summarised by one, and him an English officer, who was a visitor in those agitated days of the Colonies: It is demonstrated that the laws which were to come into operation immediately on expiration of the apprenticeship are of the most objectionable character, and fully established the fact not only of a future intention to infringe the rights of the emancipated classes, but of the actual commencement and extensive progress of a Colonial system for that purpose. The object of the laws is to circumscribe the market for free labour—to prohibit the possession or sale of ordinary articles of produce on sale, the obvious

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intention of which is to confine the emancipated classes to a course of agricultural servitude—to give the employers a monopoly of labour, and to keep down a free competition for wages— to create new and various modes of apprenticeship for the purpose of prolonging predial service, together with many evils of the late system—to introduce unnecessary restraint and coercion, the design of which is to create a perpetual surveillance over the liberated negroes, and to establish a legislative despotism. The several laws passed are based upon the most vicious principles of legislation, and in their operation will be found intolerably oppressive and entirely subversive of the just intentions of the British Legislature. These liberal-souled gentry were, in sooth, Mr Froude's 'representatives' of Britain, whose traditions steadily followed in their families, he has so well and sympathetically set forth. We thus see that the irritation and rancour seething in the breast of the new plantocracy, of whom the majority was of the type that then also flourished in Barbados, Jamaica, and Demerara, were nourished and kept acute in order to crush the African element. Harm was done, certainly; but not to the ruinous extent sometimes declared. It was too late for perfect success, as, according to the Negroes' own phrase, people of colour had by that time already 'passed the lock-jaw'3 stage (at which trifling misadventures might have nipped the germ of their progress in the bud). In spite of adverse legislation, and in spite of the scandalous subservience of certain Governors to the Colonial Legislatures, the Race can point with thankfulness and pride to the visible records of their success wherever they have permanently sojourned. Primary education of a more general and undiscriminating character, especially as to race and colour, was secured for the bulk of the West Indies by voluntary undertakings, and notably through the munificent provision of Lady Mico, which extended to the whole of the principal islands. Thanks to Lord Harris for introducing, and to Sir Arthur Gordon for extending to the secondary stage, the public education of Trinidad, there has been since Emancipation, that is, during the last thirty-seven years, a more effective bringing together in public schools of various grades, of children of all races and ranks. Rivals at home, at school and college, in books as well as on the playground, they have very frequently gone abroad together to learn the profession they have selected. In this way there is an intercommunion between all the intelligent sections of the inhabitants, based on a common training and the subtle sympathies usually generated in enlightened breasts by intimate personal knowledge. In mixed communities thus circumstanced, there is no possibility of maintaining distinctions based on mere colour, as advocated by Mr Froude.

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The following brief summary by the Rev P. H. Doughlin, Rector of St Clement's, Trinidad, a brilliant star among the sons of Ham, embodies this fact in language which, so far as it goes, is as comprehensive as it is weighty: Who could, without seeming to insult the intelligence of men, have predicted on the day of Emancipation that the Negroes then released from the blight and withering influence of ten generations of cruel bondage, so weakened and half-destroyed—so denationalised and demoralised—so despoiled and naked, would be in the position they are now? In spite of the proud, supercilious, and dictatorial bearing of their teachers, in spite of the hampering of unsympathetic, alien oversight, in spite of the spirit of dependence and servility engendered by slavery, not only have individual members of the race entered into all the offices of dignity in Church and State, as subalterns—as hewers of wood and drawers of water—but they have attained to the very highest places. Here in the West Indies, and on the West Coast of Africa, are to be found Surgeons of the Negro Race, Solicitors, Barristers, Mayors, Councillors, Principals and Founders of High Schools and Colleges, Editors and Proprietors of Newspapers, Archdeacons, Bishops, Judges, and Authors—men who not only teach those immediately around them, but also teach the world. Members of the race have even been entrusted with the administration of Governments. And it is not mere commonplace men that the Negro Race has produced. Not only have the British Universities thought them worthy of their honorary degrees and conferred them on them, but members of the race have won these University degrees. A few years back a full-blooded Negro took the highest degree Oxford has to give to a young man. The European world is looking with wonder and admiration at the progress made by the Negro Race—a progress unparalleled in the annals of the history of any race. To this we may add that in the domain of high literature the Blacks of the United States, for the twenty-five years of social emancipation, and despite the lingering obstructions of caste prejudice, have positively achieved wonders. Leaving aside the writings of men of such high calibre as F. Douglass, Dr Hyland Garnet, Prof Crummell, Prof E. Blyden, Dr Tanner, and others, it is gratifying to be able to chronicle the Ethiopic women of North America as moving shoulder to shoulder with the men in the highest spheres of literary activity. Among a brilliant band of these our sisters, conspicuous no less in poetry than in prose, we single out but a solitary name for the double purpose of preserving brevity and of giving in

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one embodiment the ideal Afro-American woman of letters. The allusion here can scarcely fail to point to Mrs S. Harper. This lady's philosophical subtlety of reasoning on grave questions finds effective expression in a prose of singular precision and vigour. But it is as a poet that posterity will hail her in the coming ages of our Race. For pathos, depth of spiritual insight, and magical exercise of a rare power of self-utterance, it will hardly be questioned that she has surpassed every competitor among females—white or black—save and except Elizabeth Barrett Browning, with whom the gifted African stands on much the same plane of poetic excellence. The above summary of our past vicissitudes and actual position shows that there is nothing in our political circumstances to occasion uneasiness. The miserable skin and race doctrine we have been discussing does not at all prefigure the destinies at all events of the West Indies, or determine the motives that will affect them. With the exception of those belonging to the Southern States of the Union, the vast body of African descendants now dispersed in various countries of the Western Hemisphere are at sufficient peace to begin occupying themselves, according to some fixed programme, about matters of racial importance. More than ten millions of Africans are scattered over the wide area indicated, and possess amongst them instances of mental and other qualifications which render them remarkable among their fellow-men. But like the essential parts of a complicated albeit perfect machine, these attainments and qualifications so widely dispersed await, it is evident, some potential agency to collect and adjust them into the vast engine essential for executing the true purpose of the civilised African Race. Already, especially since the late Emancipation Jubilee, are signs manifest of a desire for intercommunion and intercomprehension amongst the more distinguished of our people. With intercourse and unity of purpose will be secured the means to carry out the obvious duties which are sure to devolve upon us, especially with reference to the cradle of our Race, which is most probably destined to be the ultimate resting-place and headquarters of millions of our posterity. Within the short time that we had to compass all that we have achieved, there could not have arisen opportunities for doing more than we have effected. Meanwhile our present device is: 'Work, Hope, and Wait!' Finally, it must be borne in mind that the abolition of physical bondage did not by any means secure all the requisite conditions of 'a fair field and no favour' for the future career of the freedmen. The remnant of Jacob, on their return from the Captivity, were compelled, whilst rebuilding their Temple, literally to labour with the working tool in one hand and the sword for personal defence in the other. Even so have the conditions, figuratively, presented themselves under which the Blacks have been obliged to rear the fabric of self-elevation since 1838, whilst combating ceaselessly the obstacles opposed to the realising of their legitimate aspirations.

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Mental and, in many cases, material success has been gained, but the machinery for accumulating and applying the means required for comprehensive racial enterprises is waiting on Providence, time, and circumstances for its establishment and successful working.

Notes 1 A West Indian official superstition professes to believe that a British barrister must make an exceptionally good colonial SJP, seeing that he is ignorant of everything, save general English law, that would qualify him for the post! In this, to acquit oneself tolerably, some acquaintance with the language, customs, and habits of thought of the population is everywhere else to be of prime importance—native conscientiousness and honesty of purpose being definitively presupposed. 2 'Est deus in nobis, agitante calescimus illo.'—Ovid. 3 lYo ie'ja passe mal macho?—in metaphorical allusion to new-born infants who have lived beyond a certain number of days.

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THE WEST INDIAN INTELLECTUAL C.L.R. James From Introduction to Froudacity: West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude. Explained by JJ. Thomas, New Beacon, 1969, 23-49

In republishing FROUDACITY by Jacob Thomas (London, 1889), New Beacon Books have rendered a signal service not only to the West Indian community but to the rest of the world, interested either positively or negatively in the fate and capacities of peoples of the underdeveloped countries. The origin of this publication is typical of the relation between imperialism and its colonial dependencies. Imperialism maintains a constant attack upon and a prevailing depreciation of the people it rules (or has ruled). The attack is not always malicious. Quite often it is worse, a genuine sense of outraged superiority stimulating political ignorance and myopia and not averse to plain lying. FROUDACITY is a reply to an imperialist attack, an attack ignorant and myopic as usual, but this time malign and motivated. The attack was a sitting duck for a counter-blow. The reply to imperialist grime unfortunately is not often, even to this day, as clear, as firm and as precise as was the reply of this West Indian to this attack upon his people. The book is a masterpiece, that is to say worth reading and study—close study—today, nearly a century after it was written. These are the circumstances.

I In the last quarter of the nineteenth century powerful elements in Great Britain were denying the use and importance of colonies to British economy and British society. The distaste for colonialism was to end well

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before the century was finished, and the new attitude was signalised by the Boer War, and Rudyard Kipling. However, in established territories with a long history behind them, there are always forces which will be hurt by any new policy, and there were certainly people in Britain at the time who were opposed to the dissolution of the Empire: particularly there were elements who wanted to maintain the West Indies. They wanted not only to maintain them but thought that the only way to maintain them in the relation which existed was to suppress any ideas of West Indian selfgovernment: in those days the idea of self-government for all colonial dependencies was very widespread. The supporters of the retention of the West Indies in the British Empire decided on an offensive. And they called upon—they were able to get for their needs a man whom it seemed providence had created and developed for the sole purpose of being able to assist the West Indian colonialists. His name was James Anthony Froude, and he was one of the most distinguished professors, authors and journalists in Great Britain. He was further much more than a remarkable writer and a historian. He was an intimate friend, in fact perhaps the closest friend, of Thomas Carlyle, and forty years before Carlyle had made clear that he, among all others, was foremost in his attack upon not only coloured people on the whole but on the West Indian black people in particular. The viciousness of his attack was due to the fact that the West Indian people, the Negroes in particular, spoke the English language, the God they worshipped was more or less of English origin, and the West Indian blacks seemed to be the first of the non-white colonial people who would acquire some sort of independence and function in their society according to the principles of parliamentary democratic self-government. The West Indian planters and merchants had, for the most part, welcomed the abandonment of the limited electoral systems (limited to themselves) and approved of the subjection of government by the Colonial Office, Crown Colony Government. This was the only way of blocking the inevitable black majorities. Carlyle was at his Carlylean worst in his denigration of the Caribbean blacks. He popularised the synonym Quashie for the West Indian Negroes, and Froude was an intimate friend of Carlyle. In addition, Froude had some political reputation. He had been chosen by the British Government to carry out investigations and official negotiations in various parts of the Empire, and one of these places that he had visited on an official mission was South Africa. The interests concerned got hold of Froude or, as may easily have happened, Froude was one of them from the beginning, and in 1887 he paid a visit to the West Indies. He made it clear that he had gone for the purpose of writing a book about the English in the West Indies. That was the title of his book: The English in the West Indies. The sub-title, The Bow of Ulysses, could be taken as a reminder of the failure of the rivals for the hand of Penelope to satisfy her demands that any suitor should be able to

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bend the formidable bow of her absent husband, Ulysses. The blacks were thus unsubtly labelled as seeking a self-government which they could not exercise. At any rate the sub-title would remind the reader of the great reputation for classical scholarship of Mr Froude, a most distinguished scholar. He was warmly welcomed by all sorts of people in the West Indies. He returned to England and wrote his book. Immediately there were many replies to what he had had to say, indignant replies I gather, in the West Indian press by West Indian writers. But Froude had written for the English public. It was those people whom he was aiming to influence, and a West Indian writer, from Trinidad, Jacob Thomas, decided that the reply to Froude should be made in England for the information and education of the English people. So, in 1889, the year following Froude's publication, he published a book entitled FROUDACITY, which seems to me an appropriate and arresting title. The sub-title was equally good: West Indian Fables Explained. The cover of the book was arranged in such a way as to ensure that the British public would know what the book was about and whose audacity and whose fables were being exposed. It is not my business here to expose the lies, the follies and the fallacies, historical fallacies included, of James Anthony Froude. That has been done adequately in FROUDACITY and the book is in your hands. But after nearly 100 years there are certain things that it is necessary to say today. I can sum these up under three heads. 1.

It was impossible to do a more thorough and more destructive job on a great English historian than John Jacob Thomas, this schoolmaster from Trinidad, did on this work of Froude. Froude we must remember had had much practice in writing history and in writing reports of this kind. As far as we know, all that Thomas had produced in book form was a grammar, a Creole grammar of the French patois at that time widely spoken in the island. But polemical or historical writings of any kind we may safely assume was not his province. However, he absolutely destroyed whatever Froude had to say. In this he had the advantage of being a native of the West Indies and being familiar with the topics that Froude was rash enough to undertake, not only from a somewhat casual journey, but with the specific purposes that he had in mind. 2. Thomas did not only deal with the West Indian information that he obviously had at his fingers' end from immediate knowledge and from long study. He showed in every possible way that his whole attitude to these questions was not only the attitude of an indignant historian, but the attitude of a person with a mind and mentality, a social conception and a historical method, which was vastly superior to that of the highly educated and famous English historian and writer. 3. This I think of great significance today. The West Indians have over

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the years produced a body of remarkable individuals who have played a striking role in international politics and made an important contribution to them, both in activity and in writing. We have also produced a remarkable body of writers. It is true that practically all of this, except for the Haitian and Cuban revolutions, has been done by people who have gone abroad and lived abroad. But in re-reading Jacob Thomas's book today, I was continually struck by the fact that the attitudes of many of us who have won the attention of the great world outside were precisely those which distinguished the work of Jacob Thomas, the black schoolmaster who passed most of his life in the West Indies. From Toussaint L'Ouverture to Fidel Castro, our people who have written pages on the book of history, whoever and whatever they have been, are West Indian, a particular social product. To avoid any misunderstanding or misconceptions, I re-state this last point, without which Thomas's book would be for us important only as part of our limited historical past, and, for the world, a historical curiosity. This work of John Jacob Thomas, the Trinidad schoolmaster, without European or university education of any kind, shows that the impact which the West Indian writers, our writers of fiction and the politicians and political writers of the day, have made upon the consciousness and the civilisation of Western Europe and the United States, is the result not of the work of certain brilliant individual men, but is due in reality to our historical past, the situation in which our historical past has placed us. This historical situation has produced a particular type of social and intellectual activity which we can definitely call West Indian. This is what I think we can learn definitively from this book, and although we shall take care to point out some of the mistakes and misconceptions which were natural to a writer in those days, we can emerge with an increased confidence and certainty of the role we are playing in the world and the role we shall play in the future. Let us take another look at the audacious Mr Froude. His audacity was no casual impertinence. James Anthony Froude was a very learned man indeed in addition to his acknowledged brilliance as a writer of English prose. He was born in 1818, the youngest son of an archdeacon. He went to a great public school, Westminster, and then to Oriel College at Oxford and afterwards obtained a fellowship at Exeter. He wrote some massive histories dealing with England and Ireland. He finally became Regius professor of Modern History at Oxford and if his accuracy and attention to detail were generally considered as unworthy of a serious historian, he was one of the greatest intellectuals of his time, ranking with Macaulay, John Richard Green, and other famous writers of the day. In addition to his great histories, Froude published one of his most reputed volumes: Short Studies on Great Subjects. A list, or rather a partial

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list, of the subjects he treated in these short studies would convey some idea of his range. He wrote on Erasmus and Luther, on the Book of Job, on Spinoza, on a Bishop of the Twelfth Century, on various aspects of Protestantism, on society in Italy during the last days of the Roman Republic, on the life and times of Thomas Beckett. Besides numerous other subjects of the same range and variety, he periodically philosophised on the science of history, the philosophy of Catholicism, and on party politics. He wrote and published short stories which were parables on modern politics. So in dealing with the West Indies he did us the honour of descending from a very high perch. We need not be too concerned here about Froude's blunders because Thomas's book is in our hands, his surgery is clean and his medication, where necessary, admirable. More important to us are an examination, as exact as is convenient, of where he was mistaken, and, also, where he was more far-seeing than many, i.e. in fact, nearly all, of our establishment pundits. II

Writing in the year 1889 he goes to great lengths to show that American white people, after the Civil War and the emancipation from slavery, had gone out of their way to incorporate able Negroes into the American system of government. He waxes almost lyrical on the opportunities that were being opened up for American Negroes, and he praises the American white Government extravagantly. This was not a crude mistake, it was a legitimate response to what was taking place in the United States at the time. After the Civil War there was not, as Thomas seems to think, any excessive incorporation of educated Negroes into the American government and social system. What happened and what misled him was this. There was definitely an attempt made to incorporate some educated Negroes into the American system. Not only that. There were Negroes in the House of Representatives; there were Negroes in the Senate; there were Negroes taking part in the government of some of the southern states. You will find a valuable account of the work and aims of the blacks in that magnificent book, Black Reconstruction, by Dr W. E. B. Du Bois. In fact it is their work and their aims, sedulously lied about up to today, despite Dr Du Bois's work, which lies behind the name of his book. The systematic persecution of Negroes is something that really began officially at the end of the century. Violence and gangsterism there was in the South after the Civil War. But the systematic official persecution was not taking place in 1890, and I think this is the time when something should be said about it, because the Americans themselves, even up to today, are not clear on Negro history, and the reason is because the

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American historians on the whole are not clear on American history. Towards the end of the century, there was a tremendous political movement in the United States, the Populist Movement. It was a movement chiefly of farmers and these farmers sought a policy and a party which would protect them from the policies pursued by the Republican Party. The question for them was whether to break with the Democratic Party or not. Not only were there a million organised coloured farmers in the Populist agitation, but at the conference which decided whether the Populist Party should remain within the Democratic Party or form an entirely new party and upset completely the traditional political arrangements in the United States, all the Negroes of the Southern Farmers Coloured Alliance who were present at the conference voted for the formation of the new party. Thus within and around the Populist Party southern whites and southern Negroes, a vast section of the southern population, had united together for common political aims. This startled the white southerners and it was after this Populist menace that the most savage legislation was organised and legalised by the states themselves. They made Negro persecution a state policy and gave to the illegal violence and persecution of Negroes an official status. By special legislation and the official encouragement of violence, Negroes were excluded from the House of Representatives and the Senate at Washington and driven out of the state assemblies and state governments. When Jacob Thomas was writing, therefore, in 1889, he had no idea of this. All he knew was that after the Civil War an attempt had begun to introduce Negroes into the social life and government organisations of the United States. So that we have to remember that when he wrote he was entitled to say what he did. If even we can see today that there was exaggeration in it, that does not matter in the slightest. It wasn't a mistake at the time. Froude either knew of the developments in the United States and hid them, or he did not know. In either case this great historian lags far behind the Trinidad schoolmaster. One of the most important points in this book which differentiates Jacob Thomas from Professor James Anthony Froude, and completely to Froude's discomfiture and exposure, is the view of world history and the place of coloured people in it. Froude had found it impossible not to make some observation about the achievements of early peoples, in Egypt and in India. But of this, he had said that we did not know the exact cause, and in any case that was of no importance. Thomas quotes Froude with aptness and apt comment. The statements and counter-statements form an admirable presentation of the two styles. Froude: Generation has followed generation, and the children are as like their fathers as the successive generations of apes.

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Now Thomas: To this we can have nothing to object; especially in view of what the writer goes on to say, and that on his own side of the hedge— somewhat qualified though his admission may be:—"The whites, it is likely enough, succeeded one another with the same similarity for a series of ages." Our speculator grows profoundly philosophic here; and in this mood thus entertains his readers in a strain which, though deep, we shall strive to find clear: Thomas quotes Froude again: It is now supposed that human race has been on the planet for a hundred thousand years at least; and the first traces of civilisation cannot be thrown back at furthest beyond six thousand. During all this time mankind went on treading in the same steps, century after century making no more advance than the birds and beasts. Thomas takes this very easy: In all this there is nothing that can usefully be taken exception to; for speculation and conjecture, if plausible and attractive, are free to revel whenever written documents and the unmistakable indications of the earth's crust are both entirely at fault. Warming up with his theme, Mr Froude gets somewhat ambiguous in the very next sentence. Says he: Now for more froudacity: In Egypt or India or one knows not where, accident or natural development quickened into life our moral and intellectual faculties; and these faculties have grown into what we now experience, not in the freedom in which the modern takes delight, but under the sharp rule of the strong over the weak, of the wise over the unwise. Now Thomas has him in the historical prison in which he has placed himself, and he overwhelms the great historian: Our author, as we see, begins his above quoted deliverance quite at a loss with regard to the agency to which the incipience, growth and fructification of man's faculties should be attributed. "Accident", "natural development", he suggests, quickened the human faculties into the progressive achievements which they have accomplished. But then, wherefore is this writer so forcible, so confident in his prophecies regarding Negroes and their future 1589

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temporal condition and proceedings, since it is "accident", and "accident" only, that must determine their fulfilment? Has he so securely bound the fickle divinity to his service as to be certain of its agency in the realisation of his forecasts? And if so, where then would be the fortuitousness that is the very essence of occurrences that glide, undesigned, unexpected, unforeseen, into the domain of Fact, and become material for History? So far as we feel capable of intelligently meditating on questions of this inscrutable nature, we are forced to conclude that since "natural development" could be so regular, so continuous, and withal so efficient, in the production of the marvellous results that we daily contemplate, there must be existent and in operation—as, for instance, in the case of the uniformity characterising for ages successive generations of mankind, as above adduced by our philosopher himself—some controlling LAW, according and subject to which no check has marred the harmonious progression, or prevented the consummations that have crowned the normal exercise of human energy, intellectual as well as physical. What is important is not the difference in tone and temper of the two writers. It is that Thomas bases himself on a sense of history which he defines as a controlling LAW. And if you have no sense of historical law, then anything is what you choose to make it, and history almost automatically becomes not only nonsense, i.e. has no sense, but is usually a defence of property and privilege, which is exactly what Froude has made of it.1 After further admirable observations on historical judgment, Thomas goes on to take up the point that Froude develops as to the relation between men like Chief Justice Reeves of Barbados and Frederick Douglass of the United States. First of all he gives Brother Froude a blow, serious for a man who has been examining the West Indies. Froude has stated that Justice Reeves was a black man, and that Frederick Douglass was also a black man. Now, as Froude was making a great play between black, white and coloured, Jacob Thomas is quite correct to tell him that Frederick Douglass was not a black man; his father was a white man. And Reeves we all know was also the offspring of a mixed association between white and black. Those relations are still of significance in the West Indies today. In Thomas's time they were of enormous importance. Physiologically they were even at that time not only untenable but ridiculous. How in particular could a man of mixed blood legitimately complain of discrimination (and contempt) from a white man on the score of race when his claim to superiority over the black man could be based only on his share of the white man's race? Such patent absurdities always have some basis in social reality. After emancipation the imperialists and the colonists, seeking some support in the population, did everything possible—and much was

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possible—to build the Mulattoes as a wall between themselves and the freed blacks. But that is not Thomas's chief concern. Thomas goes on to take up what is of extreme importance to us today. He makes the point that Frederick Douglass in the United States grew up how he could. He was a slave. He grew up in the greatest degradation. When he became a man he had to struggle against all sorts of difficulties and obstacles that were put in his way by the social system and individuals who represented it. You will find that Herculean struggle in Frederick Douglass's own Autobiography. Jacob Thomas goes on to say that such was not the education of Chief Justice Reeves, and here we touch something of profound importance to the understanding of the West Indian situation and achievements today. It is true that we were slaves up to 1838, but even while we were slaves we had the opportunities that the American slaves in the southern part of the United States did not have. But when Chief Justice Reeves came into the world, (Jacob Thomas emphasises) he did not enter into a world as 'heir to a lot of intellectual darkness and legalised social and political proscription', (p. 140.) He was associated from his earliest days with Samuel J. Prescod, the greatest leader of popular opinion whom Barbados has yet produced. (And here I may say that Prescod was a man of exceptional character and ability and it is a great disgrace that we of the West Indies today have not produced a study of his life and achievements.) Reeves therefore, in addition to the general high standard of education which the Barbadians in particular had achieved, had the opportunity to assimilate and reflect on the principles and salient characteristics and political activity of a man like Prescod. Therefore, Thomas goes on to say that Reeves achieved what he did not only because of his exceptional abilities, we take that for granted in any case, but he emphasises the social circumstances which produced this remarkable West Indian. But although Thomas probably knew the circumstances that produced Reeves he probably had good reason not to tell them. No such inhibitions stand in our way. After the revolution of 1865 in Jamaica, it is known that the planters decided that they would no longer have any kind of elections because in any elections with an inevitably extended franchise the black people, a substantial majority of the population, would soon vote them out and themselves assume at least the form if not the content of power. That, the planters and merchants were not prepared to face, and they asked the British Government to abolish the elective system and take over the Colonies. This resulted in Crown Colony government as we know it today, at least until quite recently. In Barbados, however, the planters were completely dominant. Barbados was a very small island, there had been no land for the emancipated slaves to start a new life and the planters controlled the elective system even after emancipation. The British Government established Crown Colony government in all

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the West Indies territories. Where they failed was in Barbados, and it was because of the peculiar circumstances of Barbados that Conrad Reeves was able to emerge. Reeves was undoubtedly a man of great intellectual ability and force of personality, able to handle politics, and a very fine speaker. But that is only a subordinate part of what is important about Reeves. The British Government aimed at taking away the Constitution of Barbados and instituting Crown Colony government there. The British Government, however, knew that it wouldn't be easy to institute Crown Colony government and destroy the Barbados Constitution with its voting and representative government, representative of course only for the planters and their close and immediate supporters: the franchise was very high. They therefore sent down a governor, Sir John Pope-Hennessey, whose business it was to carry on political activities and manoeuvres and prepare the way for the destruction of planter-type representative government, and the substitution of Crown Colony government. (He was also to federate Barbados with other West Indian Islands.) But everything depended on the abolition of the planter Constitution. Barbados at that time showed very sharply the distinction, in fact the contradiction, the antagonism, between the white planters, or predominantly white planters, and the black masses of the population. And the black masses of the population were militant and ready to do something to change the situation in which they found themselves. Without doubt what had happened in Jamaica meant something to them. In those days there used to be a legal official known as the Solicitor General. The Attorney General was usually a white man, an Englishman from abroad. But there were very able black men, even in those days, who were distinguished lawyers, and the government, to incorporate them into the legal institutions and organisation of the government (and to protect itself from these highly capable opponents), appointed them usually to the post of Solicitor General. The Solicitor General had certain privileges and prestige, not too much, and he got a salary as one of the law officers of the Crown. However, he was allowed private practice. So that he had a foot in both camps. The government had him nobbled and yet as a coloured man he served as some sort of representative (token) of the coloured people. That was the position Reeves held in Barbados, and I have no doubt he used to talk up and say a few words, perhaps not a few but many, but not such as to cause any serious disorder between himself and the government. When Sir John Pope-Hennessy came down, he turned naturally to Reeves as the representative of the coloured people. He turned to Reeves and he told Reeves, this is what we are informed (and a very fine book has recently been written on it), he told Reeves his plans and his policies for breaking the political power of the Barbados planters and transferring it to the Colonial Office, through a Crown Colony government.

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Reeves, it was said, went along with Sir John Pope-Hennessy up to a certain point. I don't want to say that when he had learnt all that PopeHennessy planned, he then turned against him: it is quite impossible to say these things with any confidence. But at a certain stage, after close collaboration with Pope-Hennessy and Pope-Hennessy's plans, what he intended to do and how he intended to carry it out, Reeves resigned his post of Solicitor General. The words he used for the Barbados House of Assembly, or was supposed to use, are to this day household words in Barbados: 'I resign my post of Solicitor General in order to defend the ancient constitution of the people of Barbados.' It was then clear that he was supporting the planters, and with this representative of the coloured people, now in alliance with the planters, Pope-Hennessy had no chance. In fact there is a story that I like to repeat (though I may say like Herodotus that I don't believe it), there is a story that he sent a famous telegram to a lady friend of the Prime Minister, which said, 'Save me or I perish.' Well, PopeHennessy had to resign and the Constitution of Barbados was saved. There are some things to be said about Reeves and I think it is worthwhile saying them. He received a present of 5,000 golden sovereigns from the planters. It's a lot of money in these days; it would be far more in those days, 5,000 golden sovereigns. They promised him that when the post of Attorney General became vacant they would give it to him and also that when the post of Chief Justice became vacant they would give him that too. They had promised him and when the time came they stuck to it and Reeves became Chief Justice of Barbados. It is difficult to keep a proper historical balance if it is your habit to rejoice in proving the moral fallibility of famous men. Reeves was not a worm. He insisted that the franchise of elections to the Assembly should be lowered: in other words, more people should be able to vote. He proposed a progressive reorganisation of the government. This he carried through and lived to become a man of genuine distinction. I think I should go on telling you one or two things that I have learnt about Reeves. He was a very tall, slender, very handsome man, a man who spoke English very well, obviously a distinguished person from the way he spoke and the things he used to say. And Barbados, that land of prejudice, particularly in those days, racial prejudice, class prejudice, faced the fact that this non-white Conrad Reeves had become Attorney General and then Chief Justice. Everything depended on him as far as they were concerned, and these planters at home were constantly talking about Conrad, Conrad, Conrad. I gather that the Barbados ladies, especially the dowagers, finally said, 'Well this Conrad, Conrad, Conrad, that you all are talking about, bring him here, let us have a look at him.' Conrad was invited to tea. In addition to great facilities of speech and intellectual capacity, I gather that Conrad was a wonderful man with a teacup. He could handle it with elegance and while doing so display the little finger of

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the right hand in a manner that was devastating. The Barbados dowagers looked at him and decided that they approved of Conrad. Conrad was incorporated into Barbados white society and died in it. The story is worthwhile repeating, not only for itself but to show that in the Caribbean in particular race prejudice is a question that can be and often is subordinated to urgent social necessities. Conrad became a member of Barbados white society. He was a very distinguished man and I believe that we should know more about him than we do. But we don't bother about these things, we continue to learn about Pitt and Wilberforce and Gladstone and Joseph Conrad and God knows who else, but we don't pay attention to our own people. Conrad more than ever is a very important character, at least in West Indian history. The question of men who carry on a certain progressive agitation and then betray the cause is a commonplace of history. Everywhere that takes place. But in Conrad we have an example of a man who carried out a serious change of policy. It can be looked upon as a betrayal. I am not sure it was. I have no doubt that the matter is worthy of close study and widespread public information. We have a glimpse into the profound question of the relation of personality to politics. Froude either did not know or did not care. All he was concerned with was the colour of the skin of Conrad Reeves. And even on that he was wrong. Thomas, a genuine historian, makes the genuine historical generalisations. Frederick Douglass, the American Negro, was a man of abilities exceeded by few in the whole history of the United States. But Thomas says: In the final success of Reeves, it is the man himself who confronts one in the unique transcendency and victoriousness of personal merit. On the other hand, a million times the personal merit of Reeves combined with his own could have availed Douglass absolutely nothing in the United States, legal and social prescript that he was, with public opinion generally on the side of the laws and usages against him. To this he then adds what is an inspiration for historical understanding of the West Indies yesterday, today and tomorrow: The very little countries of the world are proverbial for the production of very great men. But, on the other hand, narrowness of space favours the concentration and coherence of the adverse forces that might impede, if they fail of utterly thwarting, the success which may happen to be grudged by those possessing the will and the power for its obstruction. In Barbados, so far as we have heard, read and seen ourselves of the social ins and outs of that little sister-colony, the operation of the above-mentioned

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influences has been, may still be, to a certain extent, distinctly appreciable. Although in English jurisprudence there is no law ordaining the proscription, on the ground of race or colour, of any eligible candidate for social or political advancement, yet is it notorious that the ethics and practices of the "Anglo-West Indians"—who, our author has dared to say, represent the higher type of Englishman—have, throughout successive generations, effectually and of course detrimentally operated, as though by a positive Medo-Persian edict, in a proscriptive sense. It therefore demanded extraordinary toughness of constitutional fibre, moral, mental, and, let us add, physical too, to overcome the obstacles opposed to the progress of merit, too often by persons in intelligence below contempt, but, in prosperity and accepted pretension, formidable indeed to fight against and overcome. We shudder to think of the petty cabals, the underbred indignities, direct and indirect, which the eminent Judge had to watch against, to brush aside, to smile at, in course of his epic strides towards the highest local pinnacle of his profession. But with him, as Time has shown, it was all sure and safe. Thomas obviously knew more than he was writing. I for one would like to know more about Reeves. One would expect that in studying the English in the West Indies, a serious historian would have studied the history of the West Indies in general in order to seek what are the inherent movements and motives that are expressed in the West Indian development. Particularly it would be necessary to study the emergence of a West Indian nation in the revolution which founded the state of Haiti. It is in such periods of upheaval that the fundamental features of a people emerge. Quite often they become submerged again or modified for long periods, but they are there, and a historian (or politician) ignores them at his peril. And while this is a general necessity for anyone, for a historian with training and reputation in the study and writing of history who is attempting a political analysis, it becomes all the more necessary to do this. A page of Froude's book, p. 161, is entitled 'France and Hayti', and there and elsewhere he actually does some analysis of the Haitian Revolution. I shall now show that on p. 161 every single sentence that Froude writes is absolutely and completely wrong. Every single sentence. And the only way to prove this is to take the sentences in sequence, I will not leave out any, and then demonstrate what is the correct historical event and analysis. When the French Revolution broke out, and Liberty and the Rights of Man became the new gospel, slavery could not be allowed to continue in the French dominions.

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That is not true. When the French Revolution broke out, though we may accept the slack formulation that Liberty and the Rights of Man became the new gospel, slavery continued in the French dominions until 1791 when the slave revolution broke out, and it was only in 1794 that slavery was abolished, as a result first of the revolt in San Domingo and secondly as a result of the need of the French government to use a French army of former French slaves to resist a British invasion. Froude then says: The blacks of the colony were emancipated and were received into the national brotherhood. Again historically false. The blacks of the colony were not emancipated and received into any brotherhood. They made a tremendous revolution and they were received into the national brotherhood only after it was obvious that the revolutionary government had not the forces to suppress them, and that the new black army was needed to save the colony for France from the Spanish and British invasions. Next sentence: In sympathy with the Jacobins of France, who burnt the chateaux of the nobles and guillotined the owners of them, the liberated slaves rose as soon as they were free, and massacred the whole French population, man, woman, and child. That is a vicious piece of ignorance if not deliberate lying. It was the French peasants, not the Jacobins, who burnt the French chateaux. When the chateaux were burnt, no Jacobin organisation or Jacobins existed; as late as 1791 Robespierre was still a monarchist. The slaves did not rise as soon as they were freed. The slaves rose and thus achieved their freedom. They did not massacre the whole French population, man, woman, and child. That massacre took place, not at the time of the revolt in 1791, not at the time the Convention passed the laws recognising the freedom the slaves had won. The massacre took place in 1803 after the French under Napoleon had made the attempt to restore slavery, some eight years after slavery had been abolished by the National Assembly. The freed slaves defeated a French royalist invasion, they defeated the Spanish invasion, they defeated the French invasion sent to restore slavery, and only when they feared that another French invasion was on the way to attempt once more to restore slavery, it was only then that the massacre took place. And they did not massacre every man, woman and child. Not at all. They carefully saved the priests, the teachers, and the persons who were doing important artisan work for them. In other words they made a clear distinction between those persons

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who were contributing to this new state of Haiti and those who only wished to restore the old regime. And here I take the liberty of introducing a quotation from my own study of the San Domingo revolution, The Black Jacobins (p. 371): Let us grant freely that Dessalines wanted to destroy all the whites. He had arranged with Rochambeau to protect the French wounded. As soon as Rochambeau left, he massacred them. But Christophe had certainly no such intention, and all Clairvaux' history shows him to have been a man who would not harbour any such ideas. But when the Congress met at Gonaives in December, there were three Englishmen present, one of them Cathcart an English agent. They swore that the English would trade with San Domingo and accord their protection for its independence only when the last of the whites had fallen under the axe.2 These civilised cannibals in their greed for trade wanted to drive a wedge between Haiti and France to break all possibilities of unity, and instead of using their influence in the right direction chose to make these propositions to a people exasperated by centuries of provocation and strained to breaking point by Leclerc's invasion and Rochambeau's cruelties. This is one of the most infamous and unjustifiable crimes in all this wretched history. The inciters of the massacre were the British capitalists. Not too differently did the analytical Anthony Froudacious Froude massacre the history of the Haitian people. To continue with Froude's mendacities: Napoleon sent an army to punish the murderers and recover the colony. Napoleon's army was not sent to punish the murderers because there were no murderers at the time. What happened was that the great massacre took place after Napoleon's army had been defeated and it was feared that he was sending yet another invasion. Toussaint, who had no share in the atrocities, and whose fault was only that he had been caught by the prevailing political epidemic and believed in the evangel of freedom, surrendered and was carried to France, where he died or else was made an end of. Toussaint had never been caught up by any prevailing political epidemic. Toussaint's failure was due to the fact that while he did all that he could first of all to establish some sort of orderly government in San

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Domingo Domingo as it continue continued d to be called, called, he hope hoped d to come come to some some underunderstandin standing g wit with h th thee French French.. That That wa wass th thee caus causee of hi hiss failure. failure. He wa wass no nott caugh caughtt up by any any prevailin prevailing g politica politicall epidemic. epidemic. He believe believed d in the the aboli aboli-tio tion n of slavery slavery,, which which was was not not par partt of any any epidemic epidemic.. He got got into into trouble trouble becaus becausee he di didd no nott develo develop p sufficiently th thee resource resourcess of hi hiss ow ownn people people both both materially materially an and d ideologicall ideologically y in order order to resis resistt th thee inevitable inevitable French French attempt. attempt. The yellow fever avenged him, and secured for his countrymen the opportunity of trying out to the uttermost the experiment of negro self-government. It was not the yellow fever which avenged Toussaint, if we ignore the unhistorical Froudism of avenging fever. I quote from the correspondence of General Leclerc, commander of the expedition and brother-in-law of Napoleon. General Leclerc to the Minister of Marine—August 25th, 1802: It is not enough to have taken away Toussaint, there are 2,000 leaders to be taken away. And Leclerc's final summing up of his disastrous failure in a letter to Bonaparte himself: We have in Europe a false idea of the country in which we fight and the men whom we fight against. That was freedom fighters, not fever. Let us conclude this monstrous accumulation by a professional historian of historical blunder, error and malice. The French troops perished in tens of thousands. They were reinforced again and again, but it was like pouring water into a sieve. The climate won a victory to the black man which he could not win for himself. They abandoned their enterprise at last, and Hayti was free. Lies and nonsense from the first word to the last. This is the kind of thing we of the Caribbean suffer from to this day. At the time he wrote Thomas could not know these details, but his sense of history was strong and headed in the right direction, the direction which has strengthened and illuminated all our finest Caribbean politicians and writers, the struggle for human emancipation and advancement. One last word on the crimes and blunders of Froude, not for his sake but for the sake of history.

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He perpetrated these falsifications because he started from a premise, the inferiority and instinctive barbarism of black people. This it was that shaped or twisted every historical fact. I repeat and repeat. This goes on today, a little less crudely but perhaps for that reason more effectively. Where does one get a serious and honest study of the rise and fall of Kwame Nkrumah? Nowhere. Ill

I shall prepare for my summation of what Thomas represents by a footnote from the invaluable analytic of Kant.3 One who sees the issue clearly, and who has a command of language in its wealth and its purity, and who is possessed of an imagination that is fertile and effective in presenting his ideas, and whose heart, withal, turns with lively sympathy to what is truly good—he is the vir bonus dicendi peritus, the orator without art, but of great impressiveness, as Cicero would have him, though he may not himself always have remained faithful to this ideal. Cicero might not be faithful to this ideal. In FROUDACITY Thomas never departed from it. In passing let us note that one of Thomas's chapters is headed 'West Indian Confederation'. We must respect this but the term should not awaken expectations which are illegitimate. Jacob Thomas does not mean federation or confederation of the type to the maltreatment of which we in recent years have grown accustomed. He uses the word in a special sense which we have not yet overcome. He seeks to explain why there should be a confederation of the various types of people, the various classes, the various races in the West Indies, and the very posing of the question as well as the arguments of 1889 are still valid and worth listening to. I think, however, that in view of what has happened during the last few years we should be more suitably involved in one of the finest chapters in the book, a significant contribution not only to thought and politics of the modern day but to our understanding of who and what we are. He entitles the chapter 'Resume' and he begins it by saying that throughout 'the bastard philosophising' of James Anthony Froude he (Thomas) has sought for a phrase giving a promise of an adequate treatment of the important subject which Froude has tackled. For Thomas the question that Froude is fooling around with is a tremendous question, no less than what, in the coming ages, is to be 'the opinion and attitude' of the extra-African millions, ten millions in the Western Hemisphere, who are dispersed so widely over the surface of the globe. And here he uses a phrase which I ask you to note because it is a splendid phrase and one that thickens with age. He calls us 1599

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'apt apprentices in every conceivable department of civilised culture'. Today Thomas would be quite at home with the concept of Black Power. The black population today is three or four times what it was in his day, its social potential infinitely expanded. But looking at the Caribbean people in his day Thomas could envisage the future. The stupid Froude had poisoned his intellect with rubbish about race and had not even seen what the real issue was. And, 'In view of this illintentioned omission', Thomas proposes 'to offer a few cursory remarks bearing on, but not attempting to answer these grave inquiries concerning the African people'. He knows the magnitude of the problem, is conscious of his own limitations, but he has no choice. 'As in our humble opinion these are questions paramount to all the petty local issues finically dilated on by the confident prophet of The Bow of Ulysses, we will here briefly devote ourselves to its discussion.' In that sentence you can see his innate and indeed his express superiority over as learned and distinguished a man as Froude. All these questions that are being discussed, he says, will not be understood unless we have a profound historical conception of where the African people are going and where they have come from. That is the ocean of thought and feeling from which emerge historical manifestations as Marcus Garvey, Aime Cesaire, George Padmore, Frantz Fanon—I confine myself for the moment to Thomas's descendants. That is exactly the driving force of those Caribbean politicians (and writers) who have distinguished themselves in their impact on Western civilisation. Thomas did not have to go abroad to learn it. In 1889, facing an unexpected necessity, after dealing very precisely with Froude's absurdities and falsifications, almost automatically he told the famous historian what was the real issue and how it should be treated. I have long believed that there is something in the West Indian past, something in the West Indian environment, something in the West Indian historical development, which compels the West Indian intellectual, when he gets involved with subjects of the kind, to deal with them from a fundamental point of view, to place ourselves in history. That is not merely a historical or philosophical conception. We of the Caribbean are a people more than any other people constructed by history, and therefore any attempt not only to analyse but to carry out political or social activity, in connection with ourselves and in relation to other peoples, any such attempt has got to begin and constantly to bear in mind how we came into being, where we have reached, who we are and what we are. We were brought from Africa and thrown into a highly developed modern industry and a highly developed modern language. We had to master them or die. We have lived. We are not dealing with abstractions that concern people who are intellectuals and historians. We are dealing with concrete matters that penetrate into the very immediate necessities of our social existence. Every line of George Lamming is per-

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meated with a sense of the origins, alignments and movements of classes in the Caribbean. Landscape, the primitive instincts of race in what Jaspers and Sartre call 'extreme situations', these stimulate the imagination of Wilson Harris to create a wider and deeper reality beyond the thin scraps of our recorded history. Vidia Naipaul is being consumed by impotence at the vanities and hypocrisies which claim to be West Indian nationhood. Thomas is of the same breed. There is need and space only for the gist of his argument. This is his approach: Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Greece, Rome and other countries have successively held the palm of supremacy. What is it now that will oust the African race from the right to participate in times to come in the high destinies that have been assigned in times past to so many races, races that have not been superior to us in the physical, moral and intellectual qualities which mark out a race for prominence amongst other races. He is as confident as Marcus Garvey and is far stronger in history. It is unlikely that Thomas would have known that in the seventeenth century when the Europeans invaded India and sought to adapt the people of the Orient to their own purposes and needs, the civilisation then achieved by the Indian populations was notably superior, in many respects, to the civilisation of large areas of Western Europe. And in regard to Africa itself, people today are being brought to a sharp review of the relations of people of different races to the question of civilisation and future development. That has been the result of two world wars of unprecedented barbarism by the advanced nations, and the emergence of the people of under-developed countries as independent forces in the development of civilisation. People have begun to rewrite and reread and restudy the history of Russia, the history of China, and today the history of Africa. They realise that what they have done in the past was always to see these peoples not only as actual hewers of wood and drawers of water, but as historically conditioned to be so by an organic inability to adopt the ways of civilisation. In 1890 Thomas could not see history and in particular the history of African peoples in contemporary particulars. But strategically he saw that it should be seen as we see it today. How did this black schoolmaster without University training see the movement of history not only in advance of the historical racialism of Froude but arrive at the perspective of the best contemporary minds as they respond to the breakdown of contemporary society and the dissolution of its traditional modes of thought? I want to put the point as simply as possible. No black man living in the Caribbean could accept the theory of the organic racial inferiority of certain races. In the early years (which it seems establish the logical premises of maturity) he could see that a white skin conferred no mental superiority. If he thought at all in historical or political terms he was impelled to historical laws which saw the relationship of races in a historical progression. On such an instinctual premise, reading and study abroad

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or at home would add fortitude and develop flexibility. Thomas did it in 1890. Experience of advanced civilisations with their immense accumulations of knowledge, and their highly organised social institutions, these made of our native Thomases, a Garvey, a Padmore, a Fanon. In 1968 Thomas is more important than when he wrote in 1888. I began this section with a simple statement by Kant which contained the essence of what I had to say about the process that went to the creation of Thomas's writing. I can now use a modern writer, a famous exponent of modernist psychology. In a lengthy footnote Merleau-Ponty concludes a chapter of his book, The Phenomenology of Perception. I know no better synthesis of the intellectual development of a black man in the Caribbean. The act of the artist or philosopher is free, but not motiveless. Their freedom resides in the power of equivocation of which we spoke above, or in the process of escape discussed earlier; it consists in appropriating a de facto situation by endowing it with a figurative meaning beyond its real one. Thus Marx, not content to be the son of a lawyer and student of philosophy, conceives his own situation as that of a 'lower middle class intellectual' in the new perspective of the class struggle. Thus does Valery transmute into pure poetry a disquiet and solitude of which others would have made nothing. Thought is the life of human relationships as it understands and interprets itself. And after further exposition he concludes: The question whether the history of our time is preeminently significant in an economic sense, and whether our ideologies give us only a derivative or secondary meaning of it is one which no longer belongs to philosophy, but to politics, and one which will be solved only by seeking to know whether the economic or ideological scenario fits the facts more perfectly. Philosophy can only show that it is possible from the starting point of the human condition. It was the Caribbean human condition which produced Jacob Thomas. To know him well is to know ourselves better. C. L. R. James

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Notes 1 H. A. L. Fisher, of either Oxford or Cambridge, has written a history in which he states that he has never been able to discern any pattern in historical development. This does not prevent his book having a distinct pattern. But on the basis that he professes there is no reason why he should not begin and spend a few pages on the length of Cleopatra's nose. Where there is no pattern everything is legitimate—or if you prefer illegitimate. 2 Guy, La Perte de Saint-Domingue. Du Traite d'Amiens au Couronnement de Dessalines. D'apres les memoires . . . conserves aux Archives des Colonies. Fonds Moreau, f. 283; M. Camille Guy, Bulletin de geographic historique et descriptive, No. 3,1898, pp. 17-18. 3 The Critique of Judgement.

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10.3 FOREWORD TO KANTHAPURA Raja Rao From Kanthapura, New Directions, 1963, vii-viii. First published, George Allen & Unwin, 1938.

My publishers have asked me to say a word of explanation. There is no village in India, however mean, that has not a rich sthalapurana, or legendary history, of its own. Some god or godlike hero has passed by the village,—Rama might have rested under this pipal-tree, Sita might have dried her clothes, after her bath, on this yellow stone, or the Mahatma himself, on one of his many pilgrimages through the country, might have slept in this but, the low one, by the village gate. In this way the past mingles with the present, and the gods mingle with men to make the repertory of your grandmother always bright. One such story from the contemporary annals of my village I have tried to tell. The telling has not been easy. One has to convey in a language that is not one's own the spirit that is one's own. One has to convey the various shades and omissions of a certain thought-movement that looks maltreated in an alien language. I use the word "alien," yet English is not really an alien language to us. It is the language of our intellectual makeup - like Sanscrit or Persian was before, - but not of our emotional makeup. We are all instinctively bilingual, many of us writing in our own language and in English. We cannot write like the English. We should not. We cannot write only as Indians. We have grown to look at the large world as part of us. Our method of expression therefore has to be a dialect which will some day prove to be as distinctive and colourful as the Irish or the American. Time alone will justify it. After language the next problem is that of style. The tempo of Indian life must be infused into our English expression, even as the tempo of American or Irish life has gone into the making of theirs. We, in India, think quickly, we talk quickly, and when we move we move quickly. There must be something in the sun of India that makes us rush and tumble and run on. And our paths are paths interminable. The Mahabharatha has

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214,778 verses and the Ramayana 48,000. Puranas there are endless and innumerable. We have neither punctuation nor the treacherous "ats" and "ons" to bother us—we tell one interminable tale. Episode follows episode, and when our thoughts stop our breath stops, and we move on to another thought. This was and still is the ordinary style of our story-telling. I have tried to follow it myself in this story. It may have been told of an evening, when as the dusk falls, and through the sudden quiet, lights leap up in house after house, and stretching her bedding on the veranda, a grandmother might have told you, newcomer, the sad tale of her village. Raja Rao MENTON November 1937

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10.4 TRADITION AND THE WEST INDIAN NOVEL Wilson Harris

From Tradition the Writer and Society, New Beacon Publications, 1967, 28-47

I would like first of all to point out that the conventional approach to the 'West Indian' which sees him in crowds—an underprivileged crowd, a happy-go-lucky crowd, a political or a cricketing crowd, a calypso crowd— is one which we have to put aside at this moment for the purposes of our discussion. The status of the West Indian—as a person in world society—is of a much more isolated and problematic character. West Indians in their national context, in their nation-state, as such, are a minority in the world of the twentieth century, a very small minority at that. What in my view is remarkable about the West Indian in depth is a sense of subtle links, the series of subtle and nebulous links which are latent within him, the latent ground of old and new personalities. This is a very difficult view to hold, I grant, because it is not a view which consolidates, which invests in any way in the consolidation of popular character. Rather it seeks to visualize a fulfilment of character. Something which is more extraordinary than one can easily imagine. And it is this possible revolution in the novel—fulfilment rather than consolidation—I would like first of all to look at in a prospective way because I feel it is profoundly consistent with the native tradition—the depth of inarticulate feeling and unrealized wells of emotion belonging to the whole West Indies. The potential of the novel The consolidation of character is, to a major extent, the preoccupation of most novelists who work in the twentieth century within the framework of the nineteenth-century novel. Indeed the nineteenth-century novel has 1606

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exercised a very powerful influence on reader and writer alike in the contemporary world. And this is not surprising after all since the rise of the novel in its conventional and historical mould coincides in Europe with states of society which were involved in consolidating their class and other vested interests. As a result 'character' in the novel rests more or less on the self-sufficient individual—on elements of 'persuasion' (a refined or liberal persuasion at best in the spirit of the philosopher Whitehead) rather than 'dialogue' or 'dialectic' in the profound and unpredictable sense of person which Martin Buber, for example, evokes. The novel of persuasion rests on grounds of apparent common sense: a certain 'selection' is made by the writer, the selection of items, manners, uniform conversation, historical situations, etc, all lending themselves to build and present an individual span of life which yields self-conscious and fashionable judgements, self-conscious and fashionable moralities. The tension which emerges is the tension of individuals—great or small—on an accepted plane of society we are persuaded has an inevitable existence. There is an element of freedom in this method nevertheless, an apparent range of choices, but I believe myself that this freedom—in the convention which distinguishes it, however liberal this may appear—is an illusion. It is true of course that certain kinds of realism, impressive realism, and also a kind of fateful honesty distinguished and still distinguishes the novel of individual character especially where an element of great suffering arises and does a kind of spiritual violence to every 'given' conception. . . . I would like to break off here for a moment to say that the novel of the West Indies, the novel written by West Indians of the West Indies (or of other places for that matter), belongs—in the main—to the conventional mould. Which is not surprising at this stage since the novel which consolidates situations to depict protest or affirmation is consistent with most kinds of overriding advertisement and persuasion upon the writer for him to make national and political and social simplifications of experience in the world at large today. Therefore the West Indian novel—so-called—in the main—is inclined to suffer in depth (to lose in depth) and may be properly assessed in nearly every case in terms of surface tension and realism—as most novels are assessed today—in the perceptive range of choices which emerges, and above all in the way in which the author persuades you to ally yourself with situation and character. I shall return to this point and to a close look at the work of certain West Indian writers. . . . But at the moment I would like to pursue the subtler prospective thread I have raised to your attention. I believe it is becoming possible to see even now at this relatively early time that the ruling and popular convention, as such, is academic and provincial in the light of a genuine—and if I may use a much abused term—native tradition of depth.

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Native and phenomenal environment The native and phenomenal environment of the West Indies, as I see it, is broken into many stages in the way in which one surveys an existing river in its present bed while plotting at the same time ancient and abandoned, indeterminate courses the river once followed. When I speak of the West Indies I am thinking of overlapping contexts of Central and South America as well. For the mainstream of the West Indies in my estimation possesses an enormous escarpment down which it falls, and I am thinking here of the European discovery of the New World and conquest of the ancient American civilizations which were themselves related by earlier and obscure levels of conquest. This escarpment seen from another angle possesses the features of a watershed, main or subsidiary, depending again on how one looks at it. The environment of the Caribbean is steeped—as I said before—in such broken conceptions as well as misconceptions of the residue and meaning of conquest. No wonder in the jungles of Guiana and Brazil, for example, material structural witnesses may be obliterated or seem to exist in a terrible void of unreality. Let us look once again at the main distinction which for convenience one may describe as the divide preColumbian/post-Columbian. The question is—how can one begin to reconcile the broken parts of such an enormous heritage, especially when those broken parts appear very often like a grotesque series of adventures, volcanic in its precipitate effects as well as human in its vulnerable settlement? This distinction is a large, a very large one which obviously has to be broken down into numerous modern tributaries and other immigrant movements and distinctions so that the smallest area one envisages, island or village, prominent ridge or buried valley, flatland or heartland, is charged immediately with the openness of imagination, and the longest chain of sovereign territories one sees is ultimately no stronger than its weakest and most obscure connecting link. Vision of consciousness It is in this light that one must seek to relate the existing pattern of each community to its variable past, and if I may point to the phenomenal divide again, the question which arises is how one can begin to let these parts act on each other in a manner which fulfils in the person the most nebulous instinct for a vocation of being and independent spirit within a massive landscape of apparent lifelessness which yields nevertheless the essential denigration and erosion of historical perspectives. This indeed is a peculiarly West Indian question, strange as it may appear to some, and in fact a question peculiar to every phenomenal society where minorities (frail in historical origin or present purpose) may exist, and where compar1608

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atively new immigrant and racial cells sometimes find themselves placed within a dangerous misconception and upon a reactionary treadmill. And it is right here—if one begins to envisage an expanding outward and inward creative significance for the novel—that the monument of consolidation breaks down and becomes the need for a vision of consciousness. And this vision of consciousness is the peculiar reality of language because the concept of language is one which continuously transforms inner and outer formal categories of experience, earlier and representative modes of speech itself, the still life resident in painting and sculpture as such, even music which one ceases to 'hear'—the peculiar reality of language provides a medium to see in consciousness the 'free' motion and to hear with consciousness the 'silent' flood of sound by a continuous inward revisionary and momentous logic of potent explosive images evoked in the mind. Such a capacity for language is a real and necessary one in a world where the inarticulate person is continuously frozen or legislated for in mass and a genuine experience of his distress, the instinct of distress, sinks into a void. The nightmare proportions of this are already becoming apparent throughout the world. The point I want to make in regard to the West Indies is that the pursuit of a strange and subtle goal, melting pot, call it what you like, is the mainstream (though unacknowledged) tradition in the Americas. And the significance of this is akin to the European preoccupation with alchemy, with the growth of experimental science, the poetry of science as well as of explosive nature which is informed by a solution of images, agnostic humility and essential beauty, rather than vested interest in a fixed assumption and classification of things. Let us look at the individual African slave. I say individual deliberately though this is an obviously absurd label to apply to the persons of slaves in their binding historical context. But since their arrival in the Americas bred a new and painful obscure isolation (which is difficult to penetrate in any other terms but a free conceptual imagination) one may perhaps dream to visualize the suffering and original grassroots of individuality. (In fact I believe this is one of the growing points of both alienation and feeling in modern West Indian literature.) He (the problematic slave) found himself spiritually alone since he worked side by side with others who spoke different dialects. The creative human consolation—if one dwells upon it meaningfully today—lies in the search for a kind of inward dialogue and space when one is deprived of a ready conversational tongue and hackneyed comfortable approach. Irony I would like to stress again the curious irony involved in this. To assume that the slave was an individual is historically absurd since the individual 1609

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possesses certain distinguishing marks, education, status, background, morality, etc, while a slave—in the American context of which we are speaking, as in most situations I imagine—was like an animal put up for sale. (The same qualitative deprivation—though not in terms of absolute coercion—exists for the illiterate East Indian peasant, for example, in the twentieth century in the West Indies.) When therefore one speaks of an inarticulate body of men, confined on some historical plane, as possessing the grassroots of Western individuality one is creatively rejecting, as if it were an illusion, every given, total and self-sufficient situation and dwelling within a capacity for liberation, a capacity for mental and unpredictable pain which the human person endured then or endures now in or for any time or place. To develop the point further it is clear that one is rejecting the sovereign individual as such. For in spite of his emancipation he consolidates every advance by conditioning himself to function solely within his contemporary situation more or less as the slave appears bound still upon his historical and archaic plane. It is in this 'closed' sense that freedom becomes a progressive illusion and it is within the open capacity of the person—as distinct from the persuasive refinements of any social order—within the suffering and enduring mental capacity of the obscure person (which capacity one shares with both 'collective' slave and 'separate' individual in the past and in the future) that a scale emerges and continues indefinitely to emerge which makes it possible for one (whoever that one may be, today or tomorrow) to measure and abolish each given situation.

Scale The use of the word 'scale' is important, a scale or a ladder, because bear in mind what we are saying is that the capacity of the person in terms of words and images is associated with a drama of living consciousness, a drama within which one responds not only to the overpowering and salient features of a plane of existence (which 'overpoweringness', after all, is often a kind of self-indulgent realism) but to the essence of life, to the instinctive grains of life which continue striving and working in the imagination for fulfilment, a visionary character of fulfilment. Such a fulfilment can never be intellectually imposed on the material; it can only be realized in experiment instinctive to the native life and passion of persons known and unknown in a structure of time and space. Therefore it is clear that the change which is occurring slowly within the novel and the play and the poem is one which has been maturing slowly for centuries. Some of the most daring intimations exist in the works of modern writers, Proust, Joyce, Faulkner, and I would also venture to say in the peculiar style and energy of Australian novelists like Patrick White and Hal Porter, a French novelist like Claude Simon, an English/Canadian

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novelist like Malcolm Lowry and an African problematic writer like Tutuola. Lowry's novel Under the Volcano is set in Mexico where it achieves a tragic reversal of the material climate of our time, assisted by residual images, landscape as well as the melting pot of history, instinctive to the cultural environment of the Central and South Americas. Let us apply our scale, for example, to the open myth of El Dorado. The religious and economic thirst for exploration was true of the Spanish conquistador, of the Portuguese, French, Dutch and English, of Raleigh, of Fawcett, as it is true of the black modern pork-knocker and the porkknocker of all races. An instinctive idealism associated with this adventure was overpowered within individual and collective by enormous greed, cruelty and exploitation. In fact it would have been very difficult a century ago to present these exploits as other than a very material and degrading hunger for wealth spiced by a kind of self-righteous spirituality. It is difficult enough today within clouds of prejudice and nihilism; nevertheless the substance of this adventure, involving men of all races, past and present conditions, has begun to acquire a residual pattern of illuminating correspondences. El Dorado, City of Gold, City of God, grotesque, unique coincidence, another window within upon the Universe, another drunken boat, another ocean, another river; in terms of the novel the distribution of a frail moment of illuminating adjustments within a long succession and grotesque series of adventures, past and present, capable now of discovering themselves and continuing to discover themselves so that in one sense one relives and reverses the 'given' conditions of the past, freeing oneself from catastrophic idolatry and blindness to one's own historical and philosophical conceptions and misconceptions which may bind one within a statuesque present or a false future. Humility is all, says the poet, humility is endless. Such moments in a scale of reflection (which affect the medium of the arts, however obscurely) are not, of course, peculiar to our time alone. The work of Dante, I believe, was associated with one such 'timeless' moment of reality and fulfilment. And it is interesting to recall Eliot's words: 'Dante,' Eliot remarks, 'more than any other poet, has succeeded in dealing with his philosophy, not as a theory or as his own comment or reflection, but in terms of something perceived. When most of our modern poets confine themselves to what they had perceived, they produce for us, usually, only odds and ends of still life and stage properties; but that does not imply so much that the method of Dante is obsolete, as that our vision is perhaps comparatively restricted.' Some may interpret the ground of distinction lying between 'most of our modern poets' and Dante as one of personal habit (the character of most of our modern poets) and impersonal vision (the character of Dante). I cannot help feeling, however, that the distinction actually is one between the historical self-sufficient individual, as such, and a living open

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tradition which realizes itself in an enduring capacity associated with the obscure human person. I want now to approach the work of certain West Indian writers bearing in mind the background of tradition we have been quickly exploring.

Tragic premises One of the most interesting novelists out of the West Indies is George Lamming. Lamming was—and still is—regarded as a writer of considerable promise. What is the nature of his promise? Let us look at his novel Of Age and Innocence. This is a novel which somehow fails, I feel, but its failure tells us a great deal. The novel would have been remarkable if a certain tendency—a genuine tendency—for a tragic feeling of dispossession in reality had been achieved. This tendency is frustrated by a diffusion of energies within the entire work. The book seems to speak with a public voice, the voice of a peculiar orator, and the compulsions which inform the work appear to spring from a verbal sophistication rather than a visual, plastic and conceptual imagery. Lamming's verbal sophistication is conversational, highly wrought and spirited sometimes: at other times it lapses into merely clever utterance, rhetorical, as when he says of one of his characters: 'He had been made Governor of an important colony which was then at peace with England.' It takes some effort—not the effort of imaginative concentration which is always worthwhile but an effort to combat the author's self-indulgence. And this would not arise if the work could be kept true to its inherent design. There is no necessary difficulty or complexity in Lamming's novels—the necessary difficulty or complexity belonging to strange symbolisms—and I feel if the author concentrated on the sheer essentials of his experience a tragic disposition of feeling would gain a true ascendancy. This concentration is essential if the work is not to succumb to a uniform tone which gives each individual character the same public-speaking resonance of voice. I would like to stress a certain distinction I made earlier once again. In the epic and revolutionary novel of associations the characters are related within a personal capacity which works in a poetic and serial way so that a strange jigsaw is set in motion like a mysterious unity of animal and other substitutes within the person. Something which is quite different to the over-elaboration of individual character within the conventional novel. And this over-elaboration is one danger which confronts Lamming. For in terms of the ruling framework he accepts, the individuality of character, the distinctions of status and privilege which mark one individual from another, must be maintained. This is the kind of realism, the realism of classes and classifications—however limited it may be in terms of a profound, poetic and scientific scale of values—the novel, in its orthodox mould, demands. Lamming may be restless within this framework (there are signs and shadows of this in his

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work) but mere extravagance of pattern and an inclination to frequent intellectual raids beyond his territory are not a genuine breakthrough and will only weaken the position of the central character in his work. He must school himself at this stage, I believe, to work for the continuous development of a main individual character in order to free himself somewhat from the restrictive consolidation he brings about which unfortunately, I find, blocks one's view of essential conflict. This becomes a necessity in terms of the very style and tone of his work. He cannot afford to crowd his canvas when the instinctive threat of one-sidedness is likely to overwhelm all his people and in fact when this one-sideness may be transformed into a source of tremendous strength in a singleness of drive and purpose which cannot then fail to discipline every tangential field and exercise. The glaring case is Shephard whom you may recall in Of Age and Innocence. Here was an opportunity which was not so much lost—as lost sight of—to declare and develop the tragic premises of individual personality by concentrating on the one man (Shephard) in order to bring home a dilemma which lay in his coming to terms with the people around him by acting— even when he was playing the role of the great rebel—in the way everyone else appeared to see him rather than in the way he innocently may have seen himself.

Comedy of pathos It is illuminating at this point to compare V. S. Naipaul's A House for Mr Biswas with George Lamming's Of Age and Innocence. Naipaul never loses sight of his Mr Biswas throughout a very long chronicle in the way Lamming disposes of Shephard again and again. Naipaul's style is like Lamming's in one respect: it is basically conversational though without the rhetoric and considerable power Lamming displays and it follows a flat and almost banal everyday tone. On this flat conversational level the novel has been carefully and scrupulously written. The possibility for tragedy which lay in Of Age and Innocence, the vein of longing for a lost innocence associated with Shephard's world is nowhere apparent in A House for Mr Biswas. Mr Biswas is essentially comic—a mixture of comedy and pathos—where Shephard may have been stark and tragic. Naipaul's triumph with Mr Biswas is one which—in the very nature of the novel—is more easily achieved, I feel, than a triumph with Shephard for Lamming would have been. To achieve the nuclear proportions of tragedy in Shephard, Lamming needed a remarkable and intense personal centre of depth; this he never held, overlooking the concrete challenge which stems from such a presence in his novel whose status is obscure. On the other hand the sad figure of Mr Biswas lends itself to a vulgar and comic principle of classification of things and people which gives the novel a conventional centre. In the first place Naipaul's world is one which is devoid of

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phenomenal and therefore corrosive sensibility. He builds his chronicle around a traditional Hindu family in Trinidad and therefore persuades his readers to identify with an assumption of individual status, of historical context. The inner and outer poverty of Naipaul's characters—while achieving at times memorable pathos—never erupts into a revolutionary or alien question of spirit, but serves ultimately to consolidate one's preconception of humanity, the comedy of pathos and the pathos of comedy. It is this 'common picture of humanity' so-called on which Naipaul's work rests. The novel for him, as for many contemporary readers and writers, restricts the open and original ground of choice, the vision and stress of transplantation in the person out of one world into another, the necessity for epic beyond its present framework, or tragedy within its present framework, since the assumption remains to the end a contemporary and limited one of burial and classification, a persuasion of singular and pathetic enlightenment rather than a tragic centrality or a capacity for plural forms of profound identity. Moral distinctions It is interesting to look at John Hearne in the light of the problems we have been discussing—the problem of centrality which appears to be an essential goal for Lamming and historical status of individual character as it emerges in Naipaul. Hearne's solution of this problem I find to be unsatisfactory. He is a writer of much talent, capable of acute organization and story-telling, whose aim, it seems to me, is to achieve a certain moral distinction. This distinction, however, unfortunately, reveals a poverty of creative perception which springs, to a large extent, from the pure logic of the conventional novel. Hearne is not instinctively a tragic writer nor is he comic and therefore since he is a serious novelist all his characters have to be taken seriously in depth within a moral context. The tragic writer achieves a certain rejection of the 'given' historical situation, the comic writer thrives on the poverty of historical situations once he can maintain the illusion of a common rather than uncommon humanity, but the moral writer has to be truer than anyone else to a proportionate even classical ground of responsibility. In order to achieve this classical ground Hearne imposes a moral directive on his situations and this is a considerable creative shortcoming, especially in a context such as the Caribbean and the Americas where the life of situation and person has an inarticulacy one must genuinely suffer with and experience if one is to acquire the capacity for a new relationship and understanding. Hearne's methods can be seen in a nutshell in his short story At the Stelling, which appears in 'West Indian Stories' edited by Andrew Salkey. The story, as such, is told with a certain brilliance and economy but once 1614

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we examine the way in which the moral directive is imposed we are disappointed. What is this moral directive? It has to do with the relationship between master and servant, the officer-in-command and the men he commands, the necessity for proportion and responsibility. John, of Carib descent, shoots his leader Cockburn who is a mulatto, as well as seven or eight men in a survey party. Cockburn has allowed his private sentiment and jealousy of John's prowess in certain matters to obtrude into his public duties. In the end Cockburn is seen as an unfortunate whose training in the traditions of leadership is still lacking at this particular time. The lesson is driven home by the arrival of the previous surveyor and party leader, Mr Hamilton, an Englishman, and Shirley, also an Englishman, the superintendent of police. Their arrival sets a different tone to the whole affair which would never have happened if Cockburn, who has been shot dead, had been equipped to lead the survey party in the way Hamilton was and still is. What Hearne is doing here is to arrive at a plausible moral ground by investing heavily in two characters, whose historical status (they are both educated Europeans) allows him to achieve his classical proportion. He has in so doing turned away from the real moral depth and challenge in his material. Let us imagine that the shooting had occurred and Cockburn, the half-baked new leader, had been an Englishman with the given status of Hamilton or Shirley. Then the situation would have opened up and become no longer a matter of relative training and lack of training but of relevant conception and misconception. The full peril of the situation would have invaded all the characters—whose image of themselves would have begun to suffer in a new and unpredictable way—and the obscure status of the Carib descendant as well as the transforming imperative to endure (which is the highest moral principle) would have begun to grow into a creative scale and capacity for self-judgment within the person of each and everyone. It is in this respect I recall Lukacs, the Marxian critic, who points out that a simple affirmation of classical tradition is not enough. And he says a renewal of the classical form can only come by repudiating much in the historical apparatus of the novel or as he puts it in Hegel's words 'in the form of a negation of a negation'. Model of realism It is at this point that we can see the paradoxical place C. L. R. James occupies in relation to West Indian literature. The Black Jacobins is not a novel but it has a curious bearing on the problems we have been discussing. I am not concerned here with James's economic theories of history, which in regard to slavery, in particular, may have exercised some influence since they appear to bob up again in that distinguished book Capitalism and Slavery by Eric Williams. 1615

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The Black Jacobins first appeared in 1938. The central historical character is Toussaint L'Ouverture. And James seeks to discover him within a dimension of suffering—the stark world of the slaves—and a dimension of revolution—the world of ideological France. The fact that James seeks to implicate both worlds—the world of the slave and the ambivalent world of the free—is consistent with the mainstream tradition and melting pot of the Caribbean. Some may feel the emphasis is too harsh at times, even repulsive and abnormal, but this harshness belongs to a school of extreme realism and to the very nature of many an emotional close-up of historical perspective. James's study therefore is one of the models which may have influenced the realism of certain West Indian novelists who thought they saw an opportunity for commercial investment in historical sensationalism. It is now possible to see how dubious these Mittelholzerian enterprises were and in fact the rise of the comic novel in the West Indies, Selvon and Naipaul, came as a necessary corrective. The dust, however, is now beginning to settle and it is also possible to discover The Black Jacobins in relation to the genuine and native capacity of the West Indian. It is a severe and imaginative reconstruction of the historical figure of Toussaint L'Ouverture—Africa, the Caribbean, Europe. The very harshness of line is a repudiation of melodrama and a repudiation of permanent fixtures of value—fascist ornament or liberal self-deception. Toussaint—and this is the curious almost unwitting irony of the work—emerges not because he fits in where James wants him to stand, but because he escapes the author's self-determination in the end. James seeks to smooth over a number of cracks in building his portrait but each significant flaw he wrestles with begins to make its own independent impact. Toussaint's friendship with and expulsion of Sonthonax, the Frenchman, whom he genuinely appeared to like and admire is one such recalcitrant split or bulge. It seems much more reasonable, in my view, to accept Toussaint's explanation of his action in regard to Sonthonax as one inspired by a reluctance to entertain the counsel of Sonthonax to declare Haiti a sovereign and independent state. In fact this uncertainty of design in Toussaint's mind seems to be borne out by his otherwise inexplicable dealings with his black generals, his equivocation, his secrecy and his alienation from many who were waiting on him to give the final and decisive word. Toussaint was a man of genius, and genius in such phenomenally difficult circumstances must entail, I feel, a strange involvement with both the salvation of grassroots and the harvest of achievement and labour. The question was—how to reconcile the depth of sacrifice, the freed slave must now voluntarily make, with an abstract freedom? Such a vision of reconciliation—slavery with freedom—was essential to retain a continuity of growth and survival in the world at large, the world of Europe, of France, Spain and Britain with whom Toussaint had had diplomatic and strategic dealings—and the world of America, North and South.

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It was a tragic problem which was to be taken out of his hands with fearful chaotic consequences for Haiti. Furthermore it would appear that this was inevitable. For Toussaint may well have been an agnostic as far as contemporary political faiths are concerned. He may well have had peculiar doubts about the assumption of sovereign status and power. And this was profound heresy even then, much more so now. Where would he have found a real nucleus and following? It is a significant attempt James has made which reflects dedication, self-sacrifice and clarity of intention. Nevertheless in my view—as I said before—the weight of evidence he brings forward refuses ultimately to bow to his fixed purpose. The obscurities and cracks in Toussaint's armour are not amenable to his interpretation of them as a misfortune of secretive temperament. Rather they appear to indicate, when one takes each consistent inconsistency into account, a groping towards an alternative to conventional statehood, a conception of wider possibilities and relationships which still remains unfulfilled today in the Caribbean. The failure to contain Toussaint sheds a certain paradoxical light beyond the historical framework James set up, upon the seeds of tragedy which are native to a cultural environment whose promise of fulfilment lies in a profound and difficult vision of the person—a profound and difficult vision of essential unity within the most bitter forms of latent and active historical diversity.

Literature and society This talk may have been somewhat different, perhaps, to the line I may have been expected to take. But it seems to me vital—in a time when it is easy to succumb to fashionable tyrannies or optimisms—to break away from the conception so many people entertain that literature is an extension of a social order or a political platform. In fact it is one of the ironic things with West Indians of my generation that they may conceive of themselves in the most radical political light but their approach to art and literature is one which consolidates the most conventional and documentary techniques in the novel. In fact many of the great Victorians—Ruskin, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Dickens in Bleak House for example, where a strange kinship emerges with the symbolism of both Poe and Kafka—are revolutionaries who make the protestations of many a contemporary radical look like a sham and a pose. The fact is—even when sincerely held, political radicalism is merely a fashionable attitude unless it is accompanied by profound insights into the experimental nature of the arts and the sciences. There are critics who claim that the literary revolution of the first half of the twentieth century may well stem from the work of Pound and Eliot, Joyce and Wyndham Lewis. I am not prepared to go into this claim now but the point is—how is it that figures such as these, described in

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some quarters as conservative, remain 'explosive' while many a fashionable rebel grows to be superficial and opportunistic? Literature has a bearing on society, yes, a profound and imaginative bearing wherein the life of tradition in all its complexity gives a unique value to the life of vocation in society, whether that vocation happens to be in science, in education, in the study of law or in the dedicated craft of one's true nature and life. For if tradition were dogma it would be entirely dormant and passive but since it is inherently active at all times, whether secretly or openly, it participates the ground of living necessity by questioning and evaluating all assumptions of character and conceptions of place or destiny. A scale of distinctions emerges, distinctions which give the imagination room to perceive the shifting border line between original substance and vicarious hollow, the much advertised rich and the hackneyed caricature of the poor, the overfed body of illusion and the underfed stomach of reality—room to perceive also overlapping areas of invention and creation, the hair-spring experiment of crucial illumination which divides the original spiritual germ of an idea from its musing plastic development and mature body of expression. It is this kind of scale which is vital to the life of the growing person in society. And this scale exists in a capacity for imagination. A scale which no one can impose since to do so is to falsify the depth of creative experience, the growth and feeling for creative experience. It is a scale which at certain moments realizes itself in a range and capacity which are phenomenal—the peaks of tragedy, of epic, of myth have been such moments in the dialogue of culture and civilization—while at other times we must be grateful if we are allowed to work at the humility of our task with all of our creative suffering instincts, leaving ourselves open, as it were, to vision. And this is the germ of the thing the writer feels when he says in everyday talk that 'a work begins to write itself, to live its own life, to make its author see developments he had not intellectually ordered or arranged. One last word. As you may have observed I have said nothing about V. S. Reid whose novel The Leopard I admire for certain reasons which I leave you to judge after all I have been saying. Nevertheless I feel it is necessary to wait and see what his third novel will be. After all, many West Indian writers—whose novels have been, or are being now written to be published—are relatively young men. And this, of course, is a tremendously hopeful thing. And in this connection I recall Roger Mais, whose work may be naive in some respects, and unfulfilled in others, but whose life is a symbolic reminder of the brutal philistinism of the middle classes and the upper ruling classes in the West Indies which have thwarted, on many occasions, the rise of the liberal imagination.

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10.5 ON THE ABOLITION OF THE ENGLISH DEPARTMENT1 Ngugi wa Thiong'o From Homecoming: Essays on African and Caribbean Literature, Culture and Politics, Heinemann, 1972,145-50

1. This is a comment on the paper presented by the Acting Head of the English Department at the University of Nairobi to the 42nd meeting of the Arts Faculty Board on the 20th September, 1968. 2. (a) That paper was mainly concerned with possible developments within the Arts Faculty and their relationship with the English Department, particularly: (i) The (ii) The (iii) The (iv) The

place of modern languages, especially French; place and role of the Department of English; emergence of a Department of Linguistics and Languages; place of African languages, especially Swahili.

(b) In connection with the above, the paper specifically suggested that a department of Linguistics and Languages, to be closely related to English, be established. (c) A remote possibility of a Department of African literature, or alternatively, that of African literature and culture, was envisaged. 3. The paper raised important problems. It should have been the subject of a more involved debate and discussion, preceding the appointment of a committee with specific tasks, because it raises questions of value, direction and orientation. 4. For instance, the suggestions, as the paper itself admits, question the role and status of an English Department in an African situation and environment. To quote from his paper: The English Department has had a long history at this College and has built up a strong syllabus which by its study of the historic

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continuity of a single culture throughout the period of emergence of the modern west, makes it an important companion to History and to Philosophy and Religious Studies. However, it is bound to become less 'British', more open to other writing in English (American, Caribbean, African, Commonwealth) and also to continental writing, for comparative purposes. 5. Underlying the suggestions is a basic assumption that the English tradition and the emergence of the modern west is the central root of our consciousness and cultural heritage. Africa becomes an extension of the west, an attitude which, until a radical reassessment, used to dictate the teaching and organization of History in our University.2 Hence, in fact, the assumed centrality of English Department, into which other cultures can be admitted from time to time, as fit subjects for study, or from which other satellite departments can spring as time and money allow. A small example is the current, rather apologetic attempt to smuggle African writing into an English syllabus in our three colleges. 6. Here then, is our main question: If there is need for a 'study of the historic continuity of a single culture', why can't this be African? Why can't African literature be at the centre so that we can view other cultures in relationship to it? This is not mere rhetoric: already African writing, with the sister connections in the Caribbean and the Afro-American literatures, has played an important role in the African renaissance, and will become even more and more important with time and pressure of events. Just because for reasons of political expediency we have kept English as our official language, there is no need to substitute a study of English culture for our own. We reject the primacy of English literature and culture. 7. The aim, in short, should be to orientate ourselves towards placing Kenya, East Africa, and then Africa in the centre. All other things are to be considered in their relevance to our situation, and their contribution towards understanding ourselves. 8. We therefore suggest: A. That the English Department be abolished; B. That a Department of African Literature and Languages be set up in its place. The primary duty of any literature department is to illuminate the spirit animating a people, to show how it meets new challenges, and to investigate possible areas of development and involvement. In suggesting this name, we are not rejecting other cultural streams, especially the western stream. We are only clearly mapping out the directions and perspectives the study of culture and literature will inevitably take in an African university. 9. We know that European literatures constitute one source of influence 1620

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on modern African literatures in English, French, and Portuguese; Swahili, Arabic, and Asian literatures constitute another, an important source, especially here in East Africa; and the African tradition, a tradition as active and alive as ever, constitutes the third and the most significant. This is the stuff on which we grew up, and it is the base from which we make our cultural take-off into the world. 10. Languages and linguistics should be studied in the department because in literature we see the principles of languages and linguistics in action. Conversely, through knowledge of languages and linguistics we can get more from literature. For linguistics not to become eccentric, it should be studied in the Department of African Literature and Languages. In addition to Swahili, French, and English, whenever feasible other languages such as Arabic, Hindustani, Kikuyu, Luo, Akamba, etc., should be introduced into the syllabus as optional subjects. 11. On the literature side, the Department ought to offer roughly: (a) The oral tradition, which is our primary root; (b) Swahili literature (with Arabic and Asian literatures): this is another root, especially in East Africa; (c) A selected course in European literature: yet another root; (d) Modern African literature. For the purposes of the Department, a knowledge of Swahili, English, and French should be compulsory. The largest body of writing by Africans is now written in the French language. Africans writing in the French language have also produced most of the best poems and novels. In fact it makes nonense to talk of modern African literature without French. 12. The Oral Tradition The Oral tradition is rich and many-sided. In fact 'Africa is littered with Oral Literature'. But the art did not end yesterday; it is a living tradition. Even now there are songs being sung in political rallies, in churches, in night clubs by guitarists, by accordion players, by dancers, etc. Another point to be observed is the interlinked nature of art forms in traditional practice. Verbal forms are not always distinct from dance, music, etc. For example, in music there is close correspondence between verbal and melodic tones; in 'metrical lyrics' it has been observed that poetic text is inseparable from tune; and the 'folk tale' often bears an 'operatic' form, with sung refrain as an integral part. The distinction between prose and poetry is absent or very fluid. Though tale, dance, song, myth, etc. can be performed for individual aesthetic enjoyment, they have other social purposes as well. Dance, for example, has been studied 'as symbolic expression of social reality reflecting and influencing the social, cultural and personality systems of which it is a part'. The oral tradition also comments on society because of its intimate relationship and involvement. The study of the oral tradition at the University should therefore lead 1621

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to a multi-disciplinary outlook: literature, music, linguistics, Sociology, Anthropology, History, Psychology, Religion, Philosophy. Secondly, its study can lead to fresh approaches by making it possible for the student to be familiar with art forms different in kind and historical development from Western literary forms. Spontaneity and liberty of communication inherent in oral transmission - openness to sounds, sights, rhythms, tones, in life and in the environment - are examples of traditional elements from which the student can draw. More specifically, his familiarity with oral literature could suggest new structures and techniques; and could foster attitudes of mind characterized by the willingness to experiment with new forms, so transcending 'fixed literary patterns' and what that implies - the preconceived ranking of art forms. The study of the Oral Tradition would therefore supplement (not replace) courses in Modern African Literature. By discovering and proclaiming loyalty to indigenous values, the new literature would on the one hand be set in the stream of history to which it belongs and so be better appreciated; and on the other be better able to embrace and assimilate other thoughts without losing its roots. 13. Swahili Literature There is a large amount of oral and written classical Swahili Literature of high calibre. There is also a growing body of modern Swahili literature: both written and oral. 14. European Literature Europe has influenced Africa, especially through English and French cultures. In our part of Africa there has been an over-concentration on the English side of European life. Even the French side, which is dominant in other countries of Africa, has not received the importance it deserves. We therefore urge for freedom of choice so that a more representative course can be drawn up. We see no reason why English literature should have priority over and above other European literatures where we are concerned. The Russian novel of the nineteenth century should and must be taught. Selections from American, German, and other European literatures should also be introduced. In other words English writings will be taught in their European context and only for their relevance to the East African perspective. 15. Modern African Literature The case for the study of Modern African Literature is self-evident. Its possible scope would embrace: (a) The African novel written in French and English; (b) African poetry written in French and English, with relevant translations of works written by Africans in Portuguese and Spanish; (c) The Caribbean novel and poetry: the Caribbean involvement with Africa can never be over-emphasized. A lot of writers from the West Indies have often had Africa in mind. Their works have had a big 1622

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impact on the African renaissance - in politics and literature. The poetry of Negritude indeed cannot be understood without studying its Caribbean roots. We must also study Afro-American literature. 16. Drama Since drama is an integral part of literature, as well as being its extension, various dramatic works should be studied as parts of the literature of the people under study. Course in play-writing, play-acting, directing, lighting, costuming, etc. should be instituted. 17. Relationship with other Departments From things already said in this paper, it is obvious that African Oral and Modern literatures cannot be fully understood without some understanding of social and political ideas in African history. For this, we propose that either with the help of other departments, or within the department, or both, courses on mutually relevant aspects of African thought be offered. For instance, an introductory course on African art - sculpture, painting - could be offered in co-operation with the Department of Design and Architecture. 18. The 3.1.13 should be abolished. We think an undergraduate should be exposed to as many general ideas as possible. Any specialization should come in a graduate school where more specialized courses can be offered. 19. In other words we envisage an active Graduate School will develop, which should be organized with such departments as the Institute for Development studies. 20. Conclusion One of the things which has been hindering a radical outlook in our study of literature in Africa is the question of literary excellence; that only works of undisputed literary excellence should be offered. (In this case it meant virtually the study of disputable 'peaks' of English literature.) The question of literary excellence implies a value judgement as to what is literary and what is excellence, and from whose point of view. For any group it is better to study representative works which mirror their society rather than to study a few isolated 'classics', either of their own or of a foreign culture. To sum up, we have been trying all along to place values where they belong. We have argued the case for the abolition of the present Department of English in the College, and the establishment of a Department of African Literature and Languages. This is not a change of names only. We want to establish the centrality of Africa in the department. This, we have argued, is justifiable on various grounds, the most important one being that education is a means of knowledge about ourselves. Therefore, after we have examined ourselves, we radiate outwards and discover peoples and worlds around us. With Africa at the centre of things, not existing as an appendix or a satellite of other countries and literatures, things must be seen from the African perspective. The dominant object in that perspective is African literature, the major branch of African culture. Its roots go

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back to past African literatures, European literatures, and Asian literatures. These can only be studied meaningfully in a Department of African Literature and Languages in an African University. We ask that this paper be accepted in principle; we suggest that a representative committee be appointed to work out the details and harmonize the various suggestions into an administratively workable whole. James Ngugi Henry Owuor-Anyumba Taban Lo Liyong 24th October 1968

Notes 1 This debate resulted in the establishment of two departments: Languages and Literature. In both, African languages and literature were to form the core. In the case of the Literature Department, Caribbean and black American literature were to be emphasized. It thus represents a radical departure in the teaching of literature in Africa. 2 Then University of East Africa with three constituent colleges at Makerere, Dar es Salaam, and Nairobi. Since then the three have become autonomous universities. 3 This is a course for those who want to specialize in literature: 1st year - three subjects; 2nd and 3rd years - literature only.

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10.6

TWO EUROPEAN IMAGES OF N O N - E U R O P E A N RULE Talal Asad From Talal Asad (ed.) Anthropology & the Colonial Encounter, Humanities Press, 1973,103-18

I

In order to understand better the relationship between social anthropology and colonialism, it is necessary to go beyond the boundaries of the discipline and of the particular epoch within which that discipline acquired its distinctive character. The descriptive writings of functional anthropology are largely devoted to Africa, are in effect virtually synonymous with African sociology during the twentieth century colonial period. But we need to see anthropology as a holistic discipline nurtured within bourgeois society, having as its object of study a variety of non-European societies which have come under its economic, political and intellectual domination—and therefore as merely one such discipline among several (orientalism, indology, sinology, etc.). All these disciplines are rooted in that complex historical encounter between the West and the Third World which commenced about the 16th century: when capitalist Europe began to emerge out of feudal Christendom; when the conquistadors who expelled the last of the Arabs from Christian Spain went on to colonise the New World and also to bring about the direct confrontation of 'civilised' Europe with 'savage' and 'barbaric' peoples;1 when the Atlantic maritime states, by dominating the world's major seaways, inaugurated 'the Vasco Da Gama epoch of Asian history';2 when the conceptual revolution of modern science and technology helped to consolidate Europe's world hegemony.3 The bourgeois disciplines which study non-European societies reflect the deep contradictions articulating this unequal historical encounter, for ever since the Renaissance the West has sought both to subordinate and devalue other societies, and at the same time to find in them clues to its own humanity. Although modern colonialism is merely one moment in that long encounter, the way

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in which the objectified understanding of these modern disciplines has been made possible by and acceptable to that moment needs to be considered far more seriously than it has. The notes that follow constitute an attempt to examine some of the political conclusions of functional anthropology (African studies) and of orientalism (Islamic studies) in order to explore the ways in which the European historical experience of subordinate non-European peoples has shaped its objectification of the latter. I hope that such a comparison will make somewhat clearer the kind of determination exerted by the structure of imperial power on the understanding of European disciplines which focus on dominated cultures. Such an attempt is not without its dangers for someone who is trained in only one of these disciplines, but it must be made if we are to go beyond simplistic assertions or denials about the relationship between social anthropology and colonialism. I should stress that I am not concerned with all the doctrines or conclusions of functional anthropology—or for that matter of orientalism. What I propose to do in the rest of the paper is to concentrate on two general images of the institutionalised relationship between rulers and ruled, objectified by the functional anthropologist and the Islamic orientalist. As we shall see, the images are very different, for the first typically stresses consent and the other repression in the institutionalised relationship between rulers and ruled. After sketching in these two images, I shall go on to indicate significant omissions and simplifications that characterise each of them, and follow this up with some more general theoretical observations concerning what they have in common. I shall then turn to the wider historical location of the two disciplines which, so I shall argue in my conclusion, help us to understand some of the ideological roots and consequences of these images. II

I begin by characterising what I call the functional anthropologist's view of political domination. In general, the structure of traditional African states is represented in terms of balance of powers, reciprocal obligations and value consensus— as in the following passage by Fortes and Evans-Pritchard: A relatively stable political system in Africa represents a balance between divergent interests. In [centralised political systems] it is a balance between different parts of the administrative organisation. The forces that maintain the supremacy of the paramount ruler are opposed by the forces that act as a check on his powers; [. . .] A general principle of great importance is contained in these arrangements, which has the effect of giving every section and

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every major interest of the society direct or indirect representation in the conduct of government [. . .] Looked at from another angle, the government of an African state consists in a balance between power and authority on the one side and obligation and responsibility on the other [. . .] The structure of an African state implies that kings and chiefs rule by consent.4 Echoes of the same view are also found in a comparatively recent paper by P. C. Lloyd, "The Political Structure of African Kingdoms": The political elite represent, to a greater or lesser degree, the interest of the mass of the people. In African kingdoms permanent opposition groups within the political elite are not found [. . .] A vote is never taken on any major issue, but all concerned voice their interests and the king, summing up, gives a decision which reflects the general consensus.5 This, then is the functional anthropological image of political domination in the so-called tribal world: an emphasis on the integrated character of the body politic, on the reciprocal rights and obligations between rulers and ruled, on the consensual basis of the ruler's political authority and administration, and on the inherent efficiency of the traditional system of government in giving every legitimate interest its due representation. The orientalist's image of political domination in the historic Islamic world is very different. Here there is a tendency to see the characteristic relationship between rulers and their subjects in terms of force and repression on the one side, and of submission, indifference, even cynicism on the other. The following brief quotation from Gibb's essay "Religion and Politics in Christianity and Islam" illustrates the kind of view I am thinking of: . . . [the governor's] administrative regulations and exactions on land, industry and persons, and the processes resorted to by [their] officers were regarded as arbitrary and without authority in themselves, and directed only to the furthering of their private interests. In the eyes of the governed, official 'justice' was no justice. The only authoritative law is that of Islam; everything else is merely temporary (and more or less forced) accommodating to the whims of a changing constellation of political overlords.6 A similar kind of image underlies the following remarks by von Grunebaum: As an executive officer, the [Islamic] ruler is unrestricted. The absoluteness of his power was never challenged. The Muslim liked

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his rulers terror-inspiring, and it seems to have been bon ton to profess oneself awestruck when ushered into his presence [. . .] [The medieval Muslim] is frequently impatient with his rulers and thinks little of rioting, but on the whole he is content to let his princes play their game.7 The same author, tracing the political theories of Muslim canonical jurists writes: So the requirements of legitimate power had to be redefined with ever greater leniency, until the low had been reached and the theoretical dream [of a civitas dei} abandoned. The believer was thought under obligation to obey whosoever held sway, be his power de jure or merely de facto. No matter how evil a tyrant the actual ruler, no matter how offensive his conduct, the subject was bound to loyal obedience.8 He then proceeds, with the aid of further quotations to characterise what he calls "that disillusionment bordering on cynicism with which the Oriental is still inclined to view the political life". The essential features of this image are to be found in the pioneering works of orientalism at the turn of the last century—as in this passage by Snouck Hurgronje: The rulers paid no more attention to the edicts of the fuqaha, the specialists in law, than suited them; these last in their turn, were less and less obliged to take the requirements of practice into account. So long as they refrained from preaching revolt directly or indirectly against the political rulers, they were allowed to criticise the institutions of state and society as bitterly as they liked. In fact, the works on [religious law] are full of disparaging judgements on conditions of 'the present day'. What is justice in the eyes of princes and judges is but injustice and tyranny . . . Most taxes which are collected by the government are illegal extortions . . .; the legally prescribed revenue . . . is collected in an illegal manner and spent wrongly . . . Muslim rulers, in the eyes of the fuqaha, are not the vice regents of the Prophet as the first four Caliphs had been, but wielders of a material power which should only be submitted to out of fear of still worse to follow, and because even a wrongful order is at least better than complete disorder . . . [In fact in Islamic history] the people obeyed their rulers as the wielders of power, but they revered the ulama [learned men of religion] as the teachers of truth and in troubled times took their lead from them . . . In this way, the [religious] law, which in

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practice had to make ever greater concessions to the use and custom of the people and the arbitrariness of their rulers, nevertheless retained a considerable influence on the intellectual life of the Muslims.9 So the orientalist's image may be characterised briefly as follows: an emphasis on the absolute power of the ruler, and the whimsical, generally illegitimate nature of his demands; on the indifference or involuntary submission on the part of the ruled; on a somewhat irrational form of conflict in which sudden, irresponsible urges to riot are met with violent repression; and, finally, an emphasis on the overall inefficiency and corruption of political life. Ill

The historical realities, of course, are more complicated than these views. But the remarkable thing in both cases is the direction in which the simplification occurs. In Africa, a basic political reality since the end of the nineteenth century was the pervasive presence of a massive colonial power—the military conquest of the continent by European capitalist countries, and the subsequent creation, definition and maintenance of the authority of innumerable African chiefs to facilitate the administration of empire.10 Everywhere Africans were subordinated, in varying degree, to the authority of European administrators. And although according to functionalist doctrine "Every anthropologist writes of the people he works among as he finds them",11 the typical description of local African structures totally ignored the political fact of European coercive power and the African chiefs ultimate dependence on it. For example Fortes's The Dynamics of Clanship among the Tallensi describes Tale political structure with only a few brief ambiguous references to British rule in the introduction and then again in the final section of the final chapter. Yet in a paper published seven years earlier ("Culture Contact as a Dynamic Process") he had noted that the local District Commissioner among the Tallensi was: 6 miles from a police station, and some 30 miles from a permanent administrative headquarters. The political and legal behaviour of the Tallensi, both commoner and chief, is as strongly conditioned by the ever-felt presence of the District Commissioner as by their own traditions [. . .] The District Commissioner is in direct communication with the chiefs. To them he gives his orders and states his opinions. They are the organs by which he acts upon the rest of the community, and conversely, by which the community reacts to him.12 1629

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In spite of all this, Fortes had seen the District Commissioner essentially as a "Contact Agent" between European and native cultures, and not as the local representative of an imperial system. It was this non-political perception of a profoundly political fact which led him to assert that the District Commissioner was not regarded "as an imposition upon the traditional constitution from without. With all that he stands for, he is a corporate part of native life in this area". One might suggest that, in spite of methodological statements to the contrary, functional anthropologists were really not analysing existing political systems but writing the ideologically loaded constitutional history of African states prior to the European conquest. This would certainly help to explain the following remarks by the editors of African Political Systems'. "Several contributors have described the changes in the political systems they investigated which have taken place as a result of European conquest and rule. If we do not emphasise this side of the subject it is because all contributors are more interested in anthropological than in administrative problems".13 One reason why developments in indigenous political structures due to European conquest and rule were seen as "administrative problems" by European anthropologists was that real political forces in all their complexity formed the primary objects of administrative thinking and manipulation on the part of European colonial officials. Yet the result of identifying the constitutional ideology of 'centralised' African polities with the structural reality meant not analysing the intrinsic contradictions of power and material interest—a form of analysis which could be carried out only by starting from the basic reality of present colonial domination. Even when later anthropologists began to refer to the colonial presence as part of the local structure they generally did so in such a way as to obscure the systematic character of colonial domination and to mask the fundamental contradictions of interest inherent in the system of Indirect Rule.14 The role of new political-economic forces brought about by European colonialism (labelled "Social Change") were usually not thought to be directly relevant to an understanding of the dynamic of African political structures operating within the colonial system of Indirect Rule (labelled "Political Anthropology"). With regard to the orientalist's view of typical Islamic political rule there are several negative features I want to point to. The first is that no serious attempt was made until relatively recently15 to explore in detail the process of mutual accommodation between Islamic rulers and their subjects—as noted, surprisingly enough, by Gibb, who has been so ready elsewhere to project the orientalist's image of Islamic rule: We know, in fact, exceedingly little of the inner relations between the government and the people . . . It can scarcely be doubted that

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government, in its administrative aspect, was not merely a set of forms imposed upon the people by the will of the conqueror, but an organism intimately associated with the structure of society and the character and ideas of the governed, and that there was a constant interplay between governors and governed. It is necessary to clear the ground of the misconceptions engendered by the abuse of European terms such as despotism and autocracy, and to submit all the traditional organs and usages of government to reexamination, in order to bring out the underlying ideas and relations, and the principles which guided their working.16 But something that we do know a little about is the populist tradition in Muslim societies as expressed in the repeated popular revolts17 deriving their legitimation from Islamic ideology, as well as in the popular distrust of aristocratic institutions18 (which is by no means the same thing as "oriental cynicism in relation to political life"). Most orientalists have tended to see these revolts as evidence of disorder and decay rather than as the re-affirmation of a populist tradition in Islamic politics.19 Why, instead of emphasising disorder and repression and explaining this by reference to an intrinsic flaw in Islamic political theory (usually invidiously contrasted with Greek and Christian political theory) did orientalists not attempt to account for the continuing vitality of a populist tradition within changing socio-economic circumstances? More important, why, when generalising about the essence of Islamic political rule, did orientalists not recognise that their textual sources represented the particular moral stance of a mobile class of religious literati-cum-merchants with a need for political orderliness in particular periods of great social upheaval? Finally, why did orientalists make no attempt to analyse the way in which developing class relations within late medieval Islam were affected by its changing commercial position vis-a-vis Europe and Asia (especially under the impact of European mercantilism) and the significance of such developments for relations between Islamic rulers and their subjects?20

IV Despite the great differences in the images I have been talking about, one pre-disposition that both disciplines appear to have shared is the reluctance to talk explicitly and systematically about the implications of European development for the political systems of non-European societies. There are other parallels also, in the orientation of the two disciplines, to which I now turn. The functional anthropologist stressed consent and legitimacy as important elements in the political systems of relatively small homogeneous ethnic groups in Africa whose history was assumed in most cases

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to be inaccessible, and which were seen and represented as integrated systems. In general he equated empirical work with fieldwork, and therefore tended to define the theoretical boundaries of the system under investigation in terms of practical fieldwork. His interest in a-historical, 'traditional' systems (set within an imperial framework which was taken for granted) led him to emphasise the unifying function of common religious values and symbols, and of 'age-old' custom and obligations in the relationship between tribal rulers and ruled. Where the anthropologist was faced with available historical evidence relating to conquest—as among the Zulu and Ngoni of southern Africa, or among the Fulani-Hausa of Northern Nigeria—he was of course aware of the importance of force and repression in African political history. But the functionalist perspective made it difficult for him to absorb the full significance of such events into his analysis and so they were generally seen as preludes to the establishment of integrated on-going African political systems which constituted his principal object of enquiry. It is common knowledge that this mode of analysis in social anthropology derives from Durkheimian sociology, which never really developed an adequate framework for understanding historical political processes. The interesting thing is that for a long time the social anthropologist writing about African political systems felt no need to overcome these theoretical limitations. The role of force in the maintenance of African systems of political domination (or of the colonial system of which they were a part) received virtually no systematic attention. The primary focus was usually on the juridical definition of rights and duties between the chief and his subjects.21 At this point it should be noted that the orientalist's image of political rule in Islamic society covers a historical span of several hundred years, from the middle ages (the so-called formative period of Islam) until the eighteenth century—a period of economic development and decline, of conquests and dynastic wars, and rule by successive military elites, notably Mamluke and Ottoman. The orientalist, concerned to present a relatively coherent picture of typical rule for such an epoch, could scarcely leave the element of force unmentioned. But the interesting point is that the element of force is not only mentioned, it is made the defining feature of the total political picture, which is then sometimes contrasted with the allegedly different character of political rule in Medieval Christendom. (The suggestion being that since Islamic society lacked a true conception of political authority, i.e., of political domination based on general consent, it was inevitable that force should play such a central role in the Islamic political order).22 The orientalist concerned to generalise was here faced with a theoretical problem with which the functional anthropologist has not been much troubled. For the anthropologist reared on a-historical Durkheimian sociology, society and polity were usually coterminous. The horizontal

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links of 'tribal society' were conveniently definable in terms of the vertical links (whether hierarchical or segmentary) of 'tribal political organisation'. But for the orientalist concerned with Islam there was hardly ever such a convergence after the de facto break up of the Abbasid Empire. So in his desire to characterise a distinctive 'Islamic society', on the basis of a considerable body of textual material relating to many eventful centuries, he is led to adopt a partly functionalist perspective: for the emphasis on the integrative role of Islam as a religion is reminiscent of the social anthropologist's treatment of the integrative function of 'tribal' religious values in many African political systems. Islamic history thus collapses into an essentialist synchrony, for much the same reasons as African history does in the hands of the functional anthropologist. Since the orientalist is concerned by definition with 'a society' of much complexity, he must stress what may be called a form of horizontal integration: the fact that Muslims seemed bound together, despite their subjection to different secular rulers, by their common loyalty to Islam as a religious system—an Islam which was interpreted by, and indeed embodied in, an 'international' community of learned men—the ulama, the sufi shaikhs and so forth. This horizontal religious consensus is then opposed by the orientalist to a vertical political dissensus, in which "everything else is merely temporary and more or less forced accommodation to the whims of a changing constellation of political overlords". This contrast between an integrated Islamic society and a fragmented Islamic polity has encouraged orientalists to oppose the supposedly universal authority of the sharia (Islamic law) to the changing constellation of political regimes and practices, often accompanied by violence—an opposition with which the medieval Muslim writers were themselves much preoccupied. In fact it may be argued that insofar as the modern orientalists can be said to have an explicit interpretive theory, this is largely quarried from the historically conditioned writings of the great medieval Muslim theorists—ibn Khaldun, Mawardi, ibn Taymiyya. The result is a remarkable blurring between historical object and interpreting subject. My suggestion here is that ultimately the functional anthropologist and the orientalist were concerned with the same theoretical question: what holds society together? How is order achieved or destroyed? The former, viewing 'tribal' society as defined by (normative) polity, focused on the consensual relations between African rulers and ruled. The latter, viewing sharia-defined society as fragmented by (secular) polity, focused on the repressive relations between Islamic rulers and ruled.

V I have been trying to argue that both functional anthropology and orientalism, by selecting certain phenomena, by not asking certain questions, by

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approaching history in a certain way, by taking the problem of social order as their basic theoretical concern, tended to project characteristic images of the political structure of the non-European societies they studied. I am now going to suggest that the historical formation of these European disciplines helps us understand better why the selection and omission occurred as they did. What I want to emphasise here is this: that in contrast to the modern discipline of Islamic orientalism, functional anthropology was born after the advent of European colonialism in the societies studied—after, that is, the First World War when the Pax Britannica had made intensive and long-term fieldwork a practicable proposition. Tribal rulers could be viewed as representative partly because the anthropologist in the field coming from a crisis-ridden Europe, experienced them as conforming to 'traditional' political norms (as these had come to be underwritten by a paternalist colonial administration). Colonial ideology generally stressed the essential continuity, and therefore the integrity, of African political cultures under colonial rule. The anthropologist, it may be argued, was prepared to accept the total colonial system (while quarrelling with particular colonial policies in relation to 'his tribe') because he was impressed by its obvious success in maintaining itself and in securing an apparently benign form of local order within the ethnic group he observed so intimately. He was concerned, as the European administrators for their own reasons were equally concerned, with protecting subordinate African cultures, and was therefore prepared to accept the colonial definition of African polities, and to restate that definition in terms of consent. (Consider to what extent this image has begun to break down with decolonisation in the '60s.) The point is that unlike nineteenth century anthropology, the objectification of functional anthropologists occurred within the context of routine colonialism, of an imperial structure of power already established rather than one in process of vigorous expansion in which political force and contradiction are only too obvious. Orientalism belongs to a different historical moment, and its methods, assumptions and pre-occupations are rooted in the European experience of Islam prior to the advent of Western colonialism in the Middle East. Among the cultural forebears of the modern orientalists were the medieval Christian polemicists who sought to defend the values of Christendom against the threat of Islam.23 Although modern orientalists rarely engage in overt propaganda, and have adopted a more secular and detached tone, they have still been concerned to contrast Islamic society and civilisation with their own, and to show in what the former has been lacking. In particular, they have been concerned to emphasise the absence of 'liberty', 'progress' and 'humanism' in classic Islamic societies, and in general to relate the reasons for this alleged absence to the religious

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essence of Islam.24 Thus in contrast to the social anthropologist whose intention has often been to show that the rationality of African cultures is comprehensible to (and therefore capable of being accommodated by) the West, the orientalist has been far more occupied with emphasising the basic irrationality of Islamic history. Norman Daniel, in his valuable study Islam, Europe and Empire, (Edinburgh, 1966) has traced the European experience of Islam—and especially of the aggressive Ottoman Empire of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—which helped to fashion its image of the tyrannical Islamic polity in the nineteenth century. He suggests that the three most important elements in this experience were fear of Turkish power, the absence of a Muslim gentry and the subordinate position of Muslim women. "To the mind of aristocratic Europe", Daniel writes, "tyranny was common to all three—to the external threat, to a polity internally servile and to an enslavement of women. As time passed, there was increasing communication with eastern countries and gradually, as the centres of power in the world shifted, fear gave way to patronage", (p. 11). But the image of a tyrannical Ottoman structure, as Daniel goes on to show, remained unquestioned throughout the nineteenth century, and became reinforced through the special notion of Islamic misrule—in the double sense of inefficient government and fiscal oppression (both, he might have added, grave sins in the eyes of a self-consciously progressive capitalist Europe). It was towards the end of the nineteenth century on the eve of massive imperial expansion, that the foundations of modern orientalism were laid.25 The literary, philological method of his study (based on chronicles and treatises acquired from Islamic countries and deposited in European libraries) meant that the orientalist had little need for direct contact with the people whose historical culture he objectified, and no necessary interest in its continuity. In so far as he addressed himself to the contemporary condition of Islamic peoples, he saw in it a reflection of his idealist vision of Islamic history—repression, corruption and political decay. Most members of the European middle classes before the First World War viewed the imperialist ambitions of their governments as natural and desirable.26 In keeping with these attitudes the opinions that prevailed among them regarding prospective or recent victims of colonial conquest were usually highly unflattering. This was as true of Asia as it was of Africa in the latter half of the nineteenth century.27 In this period, influential writers such as Ranke and Burkehardt, Count Gobineau and Renan, although in disagreement on important matters, were significantly united in their contemptuous views of Islam.28 In this respect, their perspective was not profoundly different from that of the founders of modern orientalism—e.g. Wellhausen and Noldeke,29 Becker and Snouck Hurgronje.30 It would have been surprising had it been otherwise. Leone Caetani, an Italian aristocrat, was exceptional among orientalists in condemning

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European colonial expansion into Islamic countries.31 In his commitment to empire and the White Man's Burden, Snouck Hurgronje was far more typical.32 The orientalist's image of repressive relations between Islamic rulers and their subjects is thus rooted not only in the historic Christian experience of aggressive Islam (an experience the West had never had in relation to Africa),33 but more importantly in the bourgeois European evaluation of 'unprogressive' and 'fanatical' Islam that required to be directly controlled for reasons of empire. As recent rulers of vast Muslim populations, the imperialist rulers could attempt to legitimise their own governing position with arguments supplied by the orientalists: that Islamic rule has historically been oppressive rule (colonial rule is by contrast humane), that Islamic political theory recognises the legitimacy of the effective de facto ruler (colonial rule is manifestly better than the corruption, inefficiency and disorder of precolonial rule), that political domination in Muslim lands is typically external to the essential articulation of Islamic social and religious life (therefore no radical damage has been done to Islam by conquering it as its central political tradition remains unbroken).34 It is therefore at this ideological level, I would suggest, that the two objectifications of political rule again converge. For the orientalist's construct, by focusing on a particular image of the Islamic tradition, and the anthropologist's, by focusing on a particular image of the African tradition, both helped to justify colonial domination at particular moments in the power encounter between the West and the Third World. No doubt, this ideological role was performed by orientalism and by functional anthropology largely unwittingly. But the fact remains that by refusing to discuss the way in which bourgeois Europe had imposed its power and its own conception of the just political order on African and Islamic peoples, both disciplines were basically reassuring to the colonial ruling classes.

Notes 1 "The Americas were therefore the scene of the first true empires controlled from Europe, and Western imperial theory originated in sixteenth-century Spain." P. D. Curtin, (ed.) Imperialism, London, 1972, p. xiv. For further information on this subject, see J. M. Parry, The Spanish Theory of Empire in the Sixteenth Century, Cambridge, 1940. 2 Cf. K. M. Panikkar, Asia and Western Dominance, London, 1959. 3 Cf. J. D. Bernal, Science in History, London, 1965, especially Part 4. 4 M. Fortes and E. E. Evans-Pritchard, (eds.), African Political Systems, London, 1940, pp. 11-12. 5 M. Banton, (ed.), Political Systems and the Distribution of Power, London, 1965, p. 76 and pp. 79-80. 6 J. H. Proctor, (ed.), Islam and International Relations, London, 1965, p. 12.

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7 G. E. Von Grunebaum, Islam, Essays in the Nature and Growth of a Cultural Tradition, London, 1955, pp. 25-6. 8 G. E. Von Grunebaum, Medieval Islam, Chicago, 1946, p. 168. 9 Selected Works of C. Snouck Hurgronje, edited by G. H. Bousquet and J. Schacht, Leiden, 1957, pp. 265 and 267. TO For a summary of these developments with special reference to East Africa (including the southern Sudan) see chapter 11 of L. Mair's Primitive Government, London, 1962. 11 L. Mair, op. dr., p. 31. 12 Methods of Study of Culture Contact in Africa, International African Institute Memorandum XV, London, 1938, pp. 63-4. 13 M. Fortes and E. E. Evans-Pritchard, op. cit., p. 1. 14 For example L. A. Fallers in his well-known study of the Basoga of Uganda, Bantu Bureaucracy, (Cambridge, 1956) focuses on the way in which "co-existence in a society of corporate lineages with political institutions of the state type [introduced by the colonial government] makes for strain and instability" (p. 17)—an essentially Parsonian problem. He is not concerned with the colonial system as such, but with role conflicts inherent in the positions of African headman and civil-servant chief, and European District officers. 15 An example is I. Lapidus's excellent monograph Muslim Cities in the Later Middle Ages, Cambridge, Mass., 1967. 16 H. A. R. Gibb and H. Bowen, Islamic Society and the West, Vol. I, Part I, London, 1950, p. 9. 17 Arab historiography from Tabari to Jabarti is full of information on these revolts. Useful summaries of revolts in the early period of Islam are available in W. Montgomery Watt, Islam and the Integration of Society, London, 1961. For a work on working-class organisation and rebellion in medieval urban Islamic society, see C. Cahen, Mouvement Populaires et Autonomisme Urbain dans I'Asie Musulmane du Moyen Age, Leiden, 1961. But in both works there is little discussion of the dialectical relationship between political-economic experience and ideological response—although Montgomery Watt makes some attempt in that direction. 18 This point is interestingly made by M. G. S. Hodgson, "Islam and Image", in History of Religions, Vol. II, Winter, 1964. 19 See E. Abrahamian, "The Crowd in Iranian Politics 1905-1953" (Past and Present, no. 41,1968) for an attempt at describing the active rationality of political crowds in the modern Islamic world. (I am indebted to Peter Worsley for this reference.) "While European journalists have invariably portrayed oriental crowds as 'xenophobic mobs' hurling insults and bricks at Western embassies," observes Abrahamian, "local conservatives have frequently denounced them as 'social scum' in the pay of the foreign hand, and radicals have often stereotyped them as 'the people' in action. For all, the crowd has been an abstraction, whether worthy of abuse, fear, praise, or even of humour, but not a subject of study." (p. 184). It seems that sometimes there is little to distinguish the attitudes of European journalists from that of orientalists. 20 Social and economic history of the Islamic world is in its infancy (see M. A. Cook (ed.), Studies in the Economic History of the Middle East, London, 1970)—an indication of the extent to which idealist explanations in terms of "the religious essence of Islam" have been in vogue among orientalists. This is not unrelated to the fact that orientalists have typically worked on composed literary texts and not in archives. See also R. Owen's critical review of The Cambridge History of Islam in The Journal of Interdisciplinary History (in press). 1637

CHALLENGING EUROCENTRISM 21 This is also true of Gluckman, who is usually cited as being one of the first anthropologists to have dealt directly with problems of force and conflict in traditional African societies. Gluckman's view of conflict has typically been a juristic, legalistic one, whence his particular interest in "discrepant and conflicting rules of succession" which he sees as the primary focus of traditional African rebellions" (See his Introduction to Order and Rebellion in Tribal Africa, London, 1963). For this reason he fails to make an analytic distinction between 'popular' armed uprisings and dynastic rivalries. The question as to whether a particular internal military challenge against the state's authority is rooted in (actual or potential) class consciousness is more basic than the task of labelling it 'rebellion' or 'revolution'. His failure to appreciate this helps to explain why Gluckman paid no attention to the question of African popular rebellions against European colonial rule. 22 See Gibb in Proctor (ed.), op. cit. 23 See N. Daniel, Islam and the West, The Making of an Image, Edinburgh, 1960; and R. W. Southern, Western Views of Islam in the Middle Ages, Cambridge, Mass., 1962. 24 Thus the influential orientalist von Grunebaum: "It is essential to realise that Muslim civilisation is a cultural entity that does not share our primary aspirations. It is not vitally interested in analytical self-understanding, and it is even less interested in the structural study of other cultures, either as an end in itself or as a means toward clearer understanding of its own character and history. If this observation were to be valid merely for contemporary Islam, one might be inclined to connect it with the profoundly disturbed state of Islam, which does not permit it to look beyond itself unless forced to do so. But as it is valid for the past as well, one may perhaps seek to connect it with the basic antihumanism of this civilisation, that is, the determined refusal to accept man to any extent whatever as the arbiter or the measure of things, and the tendency to be satisfied with truth as the description of mental structures, or, in other words, with psychological truth." Modern Islam, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1962, p. 40. For an extremely interesting response by a Muslim intellectual see Mohammed Arkoun, "LTslam moderne vu par le professeur G. E. von Grunebaum" mArabica, vol. xl, 1964. 25 Cf. C. J. Adams, "Islamic Religion" (Part I), in Middle East Studies Association Bulletin, vol. 4, no. 3, October 15,1970, p. 3. 26 Cf. H. Gollwitzer, Europe in the Age of Imperialism: 1880-1914, London, 1969. For a study of British public opinion in relation to events preceding the British occupation of Egypt in 1882, see H. S. Deighton's excellent article, "The Impact on Egypt on Britain", in P. M. Holt, (ed.), Political and Social Change in Modern Egypt, London, 1968. 27 Cf. V. G. Kiernan, The Lords of Human Kind, London, 1969, and the documentary collection edited by P. D. Curtin, op. cit. 28 Cf. J. W. Ftick, "Islam as an Historical Problem in European Historiography Since 1800" in B. Lewis and P. M. Holt, (eds.), Historians of the Middle East, London, 1962. 29 J. W. Fuck, op. cit. 30 Cf. J.-J. Waardenburg, E'Islam dans le miroir de I'Occident, The Hague, 1962. 31 J. W. Flick, op. cit. For further details on Prince Caetani, see A. Bausani, "Islamic Studies in Italy in the XIX-XX cc." in East and West, vol. VIII, 1957. 32 With respect to Holland's colonial role in Indonesia, Snouck Hurgronje wrote: "H ne s'agit que d'eveiller une prise de conscience . . . considerant que 1'independence de la vie spirituelle et la liberation de son developpement de toute

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pression materielle est Tune des plus grandes benedictions de notre civilisation. Nous nous sentons pousses par un zele missionaire de la meilleure sorte afin de faire participer le monde musulman a cette satisfaction." This was what ultimately justified colonialism: "Notre domination doit se justifier par 1'accession des indigenes a une civilisation plus elevee. Us doivent acquerir parmi les peuples sous notre direction la place que meritent leurs qualites naturelles." Quoted in J.-J. Waardenburg, op. tit., pp. 101 and 102. See also W. F. Wertheim, "Counter-insurgency research at the turn of the century—Snouck Hurgronje and the Acheh War" in Sociologische Gids, vol. XIX, September/December 1972. (I am grateful to Ludowik Brunt for this last reference.) 33 For a discussion about the various elements that went into the making of European views about Africa at the end of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth, see P. D. Curtin, The Image of Africa, London, 1965. According to Curtin this earlier image was on the whole far more favourable than the one prevalent in the latter part of the nineteenth century—i.e. on the eve of the Partition of Africa. 34 The orientalist's image is still very much alive and still rooted in a structure of sentiments remarkably akin to that displayed by the founders. ("Although there are exceptions," observes C. J. Adams in his survey article, "in the cases of individuals or particular fields of study (Sufism, for example, or Islamic Art and Architecture), to be sure, on the whole one is struck with the negative tone—or if negative be too strong a word, with the tone of personal disenchantment—that runs through the majority of [orientalist] writing about Muslim faith." Op. cit., p. 3). I attribute this persistence to the fact that despite profound changes in the world since the late nineteenth century, the power encounter between the West and the Muslim countries continues to express itself typically in the form of hostile confrontations (for reasons too involved to discuss here) and the methods and techniques of orientalism as a discipline, with its basic reliance on philological analysis, remain unaffected. These facts and not mere 'excellence' account for the continuity noted by Adams: "In fact, basic nineteenth-century Islamic scholarship was so competent and exhaustive that it has intimidated many later scholars from attempting re-examinations of fundamental issues. Much of what the pioneers of Islamology wrote has scarcely been improved upon, not to say superseded; it has merely been transmitted and continues to be the most authoritative scholarship we possess in many fields." (loc. cit). Of how many other historical or social science disciplines can such a statement be made?

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10.7 ANTHROPOLOGY AND PACIFIC ISLANDERS 1 Epeli Hau'ofa* From Oceania 45 No. 4 (June 1975): 283-9

It is a painful experience for people to sit and listen to someone talking about himself. But the theme of this symposium and my rather peculiar situation warrant a personal statement which I shall make as briefly as possible. I speak this morning from two standpoints: firstly, as someone who is undergoing training in a particular academic discipline which binds me intellectually with fellow anthropologists, mostly from the West; and secondly as a native of the South Pacific Islands whose cultures have provided, for nearly a century, a very substantial part of the field of exploitation for our anthropological enterprise. As an aspiring anthropologist, I am intellectually part of an international community bound together by a particular discipline; as a Pacific Islander, I am emotionally tied to peoples in a geographical region, some of whom have achieved independent nationhood, and some who have yet to become autonomous. Whatever their political situations may be, most educated people in the Pacific, like myself, are trying to redefine their cultural identities, or endeavouring to shed a kind of mentality bred under conditions of colonialism. And it is within this context that I shall discuss some aspects of what I consider to be the position of our discipline in the esteem of the peoples of the South Seas. As a former tutor in the University of Papua New Guinea and as someone to whom islanders talk with little self-conscious politeness or deference, I have been struck by the claims by people that 'anthropologists do not really understand us', 'do not present a complete or fair picture of us', and as Tongans say, 'they do not know how we feel'. Recently, I have been told that in New Guinea, among some sensitive university graduates, we are regarded with distaste. This attitude, of course, is not confined to peoples in our traditional fieldwork areas; I am

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certain that many people of the New South Wales town of Bowral feel the same way about Dr Wilde, as is evident in the views that they expressed in a Four Corners T.V. programme last year. But I am not dealing with what New South Welshmen think about anthropologists; I am specifically concerned with the reactions of educated Pacific Islanders to us, and their attitudes to the products of our work. Before we dismiss the complaints about the shortcomings of anthropology as uninformed, subjective outbursts by those who are incapable of standing back from their cultural milieu and looking at it with the disinterested objectivity of trained social scientists, we should try first to see what are the grounds, if any, for such complaints. A discussion of these is important in that it may help us in reassessing our relationships with Pacific peoples who are living in a world considerably different from that which Malinowski and his intellectual descendants saw. I exclude from this paper the Maori of New Zealand and the Aborigines of Australia because these groups live in predominantly Western-type societies and their problems are different from those of the largely indigenous populations of the rest of the Pacific isles. I believe that a major part of the problem is the disjunction between people's expectations of us—probably they would like us to draw portraits of them—and of our special social scientific aims. At times this arises from the fact that when we explain our purposes to those among whom we conduct our fieldwork, we feel unable to explain fully to them our real aims. This is so partly because of the problems of communication which we all know. What we often end up saying is that we are there to learn their customs and to write books about them. They cooperate with us thinking that we are going to tell their stories taking their points of view into consideration. When we produce our articles and monographs and they and their children or grandchildren read them, they often cannot see themselves or they see themselves being distorted and misrepresented. In many cases our field of discourse, and our special social scientific language, preclude any comprehension of what we are talking about even to those who have started training in anthropology. Thus for example, in the late 1960's perhaps the most popular first year subject taught at the University of Papua New Guinea was the introductory course in social anthropology. Students flocked to it partly because of the belief that anthropology, which purportedly deals with their traditional cultures and societies, would help them with their problems of alienation, and partly to see what we are saying about them. Their interest dropped rapidly once they were confronted with our esoteric language. I do not think that we have produced at the University of Papua New Guinea a native graduate who has entered our profession. As in other parts of the Pacific, students are attracted more to history which deals with their past as people. Essentially, what Pacific peoples expect of us is to be more of the novelist and the social historian and less of the scientist who speaks in jargon.

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We do not see ourselves as novelists, and rightly so; but we could benefit from the approach of the social historian, and from writing in plain, elegant English. In discussing the attitudes of Africans to Europeans in Ghana before independence, Gustav Jahoda has this to say: The skilled writer or novelist sometimes succeeds in conveying to his readers a balanced impression and the 'feel' of the strengths and weaknesses, joys and fears, of a whole people. When a psychologist or sociologist digs below the level of overt behaviour, some of the generalisations he comes up with are apt to look odd, distorted, and unflattering . . . (1961:134). I would go a bit further than Jahoda and assert that some of our writings, especially about Melanesians, actually distort the images of those whom we have studied. Some of the titles of our books, for example The Sexual Life of Savages, are very offensive. It needs only one or two instances of gross distortion, especially in books or articles regarded as influential and essential reading, for our discipline to come under wholesale condemnation by the increasingly sensitive educated men and women. Let me take a good example. Somehow or other we have projected onto Melanesian leaders the caricature of the quintessential Western capitalist: grasping, manipulative, calculating, and without a stitch of morality. Lest it be charged that I am grossly exaggerating, I shall quote an extract from an eminent anthropologist, Marshall Sahlins, in his paper on political types in Melanesia and Polynesia: Here I find it useful to apply characterisations—or is it caricature?—from our own history to big-men and chiefs . . . The Melanesian big-man seems so thoroughly bourgeois, so reminiscent of the free enterprising rugged individual of our own heritage. He combines with an ostensible interest in the general welfare a more profound measure of self-interested cunning and economic calculation. His gaze . . . is fixed unswervingly to the main chance. His every public action is designed to make a competitive and invidious comparison with others, to show a standing above the masses that is product of his own personal manufacture (1963:164). The language used here has been taken straight out from the factory and the boardroom. The writer denies that traditional Melanesian leaders have any genuine interest in the welfare of their people, and that their public actions are all motivated purely by selfishness. This is erroneous, and it would have mattered less had it not been for the fact that Sahlins' article is required reading in Pacific Anthropology. It is a clever, thoughtless and insulting piece of writing. I have quoted only the most offending

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part; the whole article is an invidious pseudo-evolutionary comparison, in Sahlin's terminology, between the 'developed' Polynesian polities and the 'underdeveloped' Melanesian ones. It belongs to a pedigree of literature on Oceania—going back at least two hundred years—written by explorers, navigators, beachcombers, missionaries, colonial officials and the like, who have romanticised Polynesians and denigrated Melanesians. It has been read by hundreds and probably thousands of university students and other interested readers in the English-speaking world, and now by students in the Pacific. It has been reprinted in a number of anthropological textbooks. It has the potential of bolstering the long-standing Polynesian racism against Melanesians; and Melanesian students were, in my time, not particularly pleased to read about themselves being unfavorably compared with their eastern neighbours. This may be an extreme example but it is indicative of the fact that after decades of anthropological field research in Melanesia we have come up only with pictures of people who fight, compete, trade, pay bride-prices, engage in rituals, invent cargo cults, copulate and sorcerise each other. There is hardly anything in our literature to indicate whether these people have any such sentiments as love, kindness, consideration, altruism and so on. We cannot tell from our ethnographic writings whether they have a sense of humour. We know little about their systems of morality, specifically their ideas of the good and the bad, and their philosophies; though we sometimes get around to these, wearing dark glasses, through our fascination with cargo cults. We have ignored their physical gestures, their deportment, and their patterns of non-verbal communication. By presenting incomplete and distorted representations of Melanesians we have bastardised our discipline, denied people important aspects of their humanity in our literature, and we have thereby unwittingly contributed to the perpetuation of the outrageous stereotypes of them made by ignorant outsiders who lived in their midst. We should not, therefore, be surprised when we see equally distorted pictures of themselves painted by angry nationalists, as being more moral and better human beings than us. These are reactions against years of indignities heaped upon them. We talk about these in conversations among ourselves but we do not care enough to write it down. We are not even aware that in Papua New Guinea we, and through us, our discipline, are being increasingly blamed for most of the nasty stereotypes of the people. We are generally innocent of the sins of commission, but we are guilty of the sins of omission and of insensitivity. We tend to be smug and complacent in our self-generated, self-perpetuated, and self-righteous image of our being better than any other category of foreigners in Melanesia. We congratulate ourselves for being of economic and medical benefit to the communities we study through our free dispensation of medicines, old clothes, some money, and sticks of tobacco to the natives. We assume

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that because we live for one and a half years or so in their villages and partake in their foods, people must judge us kindly. Today we are judged not so much on that as on our writings. It will not be through our interference in the affairs of Pacific nations that we improve our relationships with Pacific peoples; rather it will be on the basis of what we have written, what we are writing, and what we will write. It is fair to say that in general we have contributed insufficiently in our professional writings toward redressing the distorted image of Melanesians. We have neglected to portray them as rounded human beings who love as well as hate, who laugh joyously as well as quarrel, who are peaceful as well as warlike, and who are generous and kindly as well as mean and calculating. It is these ignored qualities of the people which have enabled us to enter unsolicited and live among them. How then have we anthropologists neglected these aspects of human existence in Melanesia? Have the models, for example that of conflict, which we have taken to the field, blinded us to these? If we are really concerned with our relationships with peoples among whom we have lived as well as with the future of our discipline in the region, then we have to take into serious consideration the people's increasing sensitivity and touchiness about their image, and to infuse into our scientific writings about their cultures and societies some elements of the humanist outlook. I do not advocate compromising our discipline to suit changes in the political winds; what I and many other Pacific men and women would appeal for is balance. When we distort the realities with which we are concerned, we not only offend people who have given us their hospitality and confidence, but we also bring into question the validity of our science. In 1972, Freeman published an article in which he specified and corrected the spelling errors of more than one hundred and seventy Samoan words made by Mead in her book, Social Organization of Manu'a. He notes Mead's failure to consult Pratt's Samoan dictionary which sets down the orthography of the language, and of the failure of the Bishop Museum to take heed of his warning about the errors before it issued a new edition of the book. As we are so particular about the spelling of English words I find it deplorable that we do not apply the same standard to our spelling of Pacific languages. Those of us who see and understand the indignation in Freeman's publication are already on the road towards comprehending a little of the reactions of Pacific peoples when important elements of their cultures are abused, and their feelings are thoughtlessly or contemptuously disregarded by eminent anthropologists. A fair indication of the interest in our discipline that we have aroused among the educated people of the region is the fact that after so many years of involvement, we have produced only one native professional anthropologist, the late Dr Rusiate Nayacakalou, and that was about fifteen or so years ago. I am a probable poor second. Yet we do not seem

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to care. We are eager to give all manner of advice to Pacific governments on how to handle their developmental problems; and we are willing to give handouts; but we have not discussed as a serious proposition the desirability for the existence of fully qualified native anthropologists to work side by side with their international colleagues on the basis of equality. Since I have been in Australia as a student of anthropology, only one person, Professor Peter Lawrence, has raised the subject with me. So far our concern in this direction has been to involve Pacific peoples in our research projects only in the capacity of field assistants, which is paternalism in extreme. While we are steeped in our preoccupation with our own problems of trying to maintain access to our traditional fieldwork areas, we should also give serious thought to encouraging actively the rise of fully trained local colleagues, as far as is possible, in each Pacific country. If we act on this it will be a more lasting and valuable contribution on our part to the region and to our discipline than the kinds of tokenism which we have so far entertained. There are several good reasons for this. Firstly, the longer we, as outsiders, monopolise the research in the region, the stronger will be the feelings against us, and the more difficult will be our task of extricating our discipline from the taint of imperialism and exploitation. Secondly, things being equal, local anthropologists, by their very presence in their own societies, should be in an excellent position for conducting continuous research, and for keeping in touch with local happenings. Those of us who live outside the region, have our own commitments to our institutions and societies, and we find it difficult to visit our fieldwork areas as often as we would like to. We tend to be absent for many years, and sometimes we do not even return at all. We thus lose the sense of the immediacy of the lived-in reality; people and events become blurred images in our memories, so we inevitably write things which come out flat and lifeless, or we escape into ever refined analyses of kinship terminologies which are of no value or interest to mankind except to ourselves. Thirdly, local anthropologists should have the advantage that most of us lack, namely a thorough knowledge and a deep appreciation of the nuances of their own languages. I suggest that a main reason why we are often unable to produce multi-dimensional representations of the realities we deal with is that although we may be proficient in the languages of those among whom we conduct our fieldwork, we generally do not have the kind of appreciation of them that local speakers do. The time we spend in the field is too short. I speak here in terms of averages; there are notable exceptions. Finally, local anthropologists should have the intuitive knowledge and a built-in 'feel' for the subtleties of their cultures and of their human relationships. Cynics and people without vision say that natives are too stupid

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or too closely involved in their own societies to be objective in their research. Let us face facts: everywhere men and women of ability and wisdom can and do overcome great difficulties. Professor Meyer Fortes (pers. comm.) has pointed out that West African anthropologists—who, significantly, call themselves sociologists—are not different from their British and other non-African colleagues in terms of their products. He added that despite their initial advantages, African social scientists have not produced anything that others have not been, or are not able to accomplish. It is obvious that non-Western anthropologists, such as me for example, have received their training mostly in metropolitan countries under Western mentors, or in their own lands under Western-trained teachers. Any special 'feel' for or subjective insights they may have into their own communities and people could have been effectively suppressed by their rigorous training in the uncompromising empiricist tradition in outside settings. We must devise ways or better still, widen the horizon of our discipline, in order to tap instead of suppressing the 'feel' and the subjectivity to which I have referred, and thereby to humanise our study of the conditions of Man in the Pacific.

References Freeman, D. (1972): "Social Organization of Manu'a (1930 and 1969), By Margaret Mead: Some Errata", in The Journal of the Polynesian Society, 81,1. Jahoda, G. (1961): White Man, London, O.U.P. Sahlins, M. G. (1963): "Poor Man, Rich Man, Big Man, Chief: Political Types in Melanesia and Polynesia". Reprinted in Hogbin I. and Hiatt L. R., Readings in Australian and Pacific Anthropology. Melbourne University Press. 1966.

Notes * Research School of Pacific Studies, Australian National University. 1 This paper is a revised form of one which I read to a symposium on The Future of Anthropology in Melanesia at the 46th ANZAAS Congress held in Canberra in January 1975. From the original paper I have deleted some words, and added to it roughly one typed page. I wish to express my appreciation to: Marie Reay, who was immensely helpful in discussing some of the ideas expressed in the paper; Inge Riebe, who read an early draft and pronounced it too tame; and Barbara Hau'ofa who reads my mind and says wise and critical things which are not always flattering.

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10.8 AN APOLOGIA AS PRELUDE Claude Alvares From Decolonizing History: Technology and Culture in India, China and the West: 1492 to the Present Day, The Apex Press and the Other India Press, 1991, xv-xxi. First published as Homo Faber: Technology and Culture in India, China and the West: 1500 to the Present Day, Allied Publishers, 1980.

The rising generation will inevitably look back over the twentieth century with different priorities from ours. Born into a world in which - as all present indications suggest - the major questions will not be European questions but the relationships between Europe, including Russia, and America and the peoples of Asia and Africa, they will find little relevance in many of the topics which engrossed the attention of the last generation. The study of contemporary history requires new perspectives and a new scale of values. - Geoffrey Barraclough

Our descriptive and evaluatory ideas of the various technological systems that men and women have created in different regions of the world and of the cultures involved with them have been formulated, over the past couple of centuries, with reference to the Western experience of these phenomena. Concepts and categories, reflected from a limited area of the human world, have been indiscriminately and illegitimately used to explain, assess, and move all other great chains of being. While some Western scholars may claim that such actions were set forth in honour, it is a fact that the extension of the personality of the West to the non-Western world can be directly correlated with an increase in the sum total of poverty, pain, and destruction in that part of the globe. We are gradually reaching the stage when it will be possible to proclaim the arrival of a new principle: "the greatest unhappiness of the greatest possible number." The non-Western experience of the West through the past two centuries and up to the present day, normally subsumed under the mantle of colonial and neo-colonial history, occupies a considerable portion of this book. But I have not intended to repeat what others have already said. On

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the contrary, I would agree with those historians who tend to see the colonial and neo-colonial disruptions of Southern nations as having been very often exaggerated. My point is different: that the colonial impact has been small precisely because we are at the beginnings of the real colonial age. The comprehensive disintegration of non-Western societies is yet to come. That traumatic event might only be precluded, in my opinion, if what I term the "Western paradigm" is checked immediately in its influence over the southern real world and its mind: in other words, if it is relativized, or relegated to where it once had its origins. The unorthodox character of the ideas proposed then in this book is not an inherent quality of the ideas themselves, but owes rather to the unorthodox nature of the framework that has been formulated to contain them. The framework enables, I hope, a sharp criticism of Western images of the world, while simultaneously pushing forward a more positive and objective alternative. The framework itself may appear as being wholly new (and partly audacious), but on no account is it absolutely original. A similar perspective has been outlined in an earlier work, albeit in an area of scholarly endeavour other than mine. I have here in mind Geoffrey Barraclough's An Introduction to Contemporary History^ and I am certain it would be in the reader's interest if I did present now, quite briefly, Barraclough's alluring perspective of his field of involvement. For, although our areas of enquiry are not identical (mine is more inclusive, more unwieldy), our points of reference converge, and Barraclough understood, could (but I am not too sure) make my own central concerns more digestible. In his book, Barraclough sets out to argue a case for a new discipline of study: contemporary history, to be understood as a new phase of historical investigation that takes for its canvas a wider field than the limited Europo-centric preoccupations of modern or conventional history.2 Contemporary history, he observes, distances itself from its predecessor through the simple discovery that it is world history, "and that the forces shaping it cannot be understood unless we are prepared to adopt worldwide perspectives". The excuse for Barraclough's proposal is his charge, unanswerable, that modern history, in dwelling too exclusively on Europe, has expended more energy than was warranted on the old world that was dying, rather than on the new world that was coming to life. Let me present a random example of what he would criticize: a 1975 edition of a history text, prepared by four scholars, titled, Civilizations: Western and World? Of the thirty chapters in the volume, one is on Asia! It is difficult to deny that the histories of the past couple of decades have been parochial "accounts of the two world wars, the peace settlement of 1919, the rise of Fascism and National Socialism, and, since 1945, the conflict of the communist and capitalist worlds".

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The nature of Barraclough's proposal should not be underrated. He is not merely arguing for more extensive accounts of events, on a world-wide scale: far less does he mean the hasty, embarrassed addition of a few chapters on extra-European affairs. He is demanding, in fact, a new framework and new terms of reference, all of which implies a re-examination and revision of the whole structure of assumptions on which modern history is based. "Precisely because American, African, Chinese, Indian and other branches of extra-European history cut into the past at a different angle, they cut across the traditional lines: and this very fact casts doubt on the adequacy of the old patterns and suggests the need for a new groundplan." Finally, and this is where our interests coincide, Barraclough suggests that such a new ground-plan, concerning nothing less than the globalization of the focus of historians, demands the invention of a new scale of values. Formerly, a modern historian had one central referent: Europe. What happened within Europe was significant; extra-European affairs were literally extra—not integral to his concern. Today, European dominance is no longer even theoretically defensible. And any historian, consciously or otherwise setting out to chart the general lines of history, and at the same time fundamentally convinced that the rise of Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Communist economies can still be treated as tangentially interesting, will severely test the credibility of his readers. Yet, such an historian is faced with the choice of criteria and selectivity, above all else, of reference. In place of one point of reference, he now has half a dozen, even more.4 Perhaps we have not so much a problem here as we have an almost impossible requirement of absolute impartiality and neutrality, which would place any consequent undertaking beyond the terms of most cultures. Barraclough has succeeded very well here, by abdicating the European perspective. For that reason alone, he might well prove to be the first universal historian of the twentieth century, which means that universities in any part of the world, north and south, could prescribe him with little unease. There is, however, one crucial difference between Barraclough's intentions and mine, which might weil serve to underline what this book is not about. Barraclough intends to follow up his ground-plan with an actual narrative history of the contemporary world-picture based on it. I am interested in the mere establishment of a similar ground-plan and the problems this involves, in our understanding of technology and culture. The writing of an actual history of technology, for example, is beyond my intentions, and more important, beyond my competence. This is not to deny that I have used a considerable quantity of material from the history of technology: but this material should be seen as illuminating a point or the more general themes of the book. The reader should

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not look for any systematic, even representative treatment of the history of technology. Similar observations may be made of the other disciplines encountered in the volume: history, anthropology, sociology, or political science. While discussing the historical development of societies, for example, I have left out detailed considerations of Japan, the United States of America, or the Soviet bloc. Thus, while the book seems ambitious in aim, it is not so in actual fact. For, unlike Barraclough, I am not an historian. Neither, for that matter, am I an anthropologist. I was trained principally in philosophy, within the "generalist" tradition. I am therefore naturally disposed to enquire into facts, or rather, into the manner in which our values or pre-suppositions determine our approach to and selection of facts. It is a happy coincidence that only "generalists" (an ever dwindling species) dare take on studies of this kind, for I remember Geertz once saying that an accurate adequate understanding of new countries demands that one pursue scientific quarry across any fenced-off academic field into which it may happen to wander. Further, a fresh understanding of technology and culture and the invention of a new framework for the purpose are only really justified if I can show that existing frameworks have proved inadequate: at numerous places in the book, I shall indicate the inadequacies. Since most of these limitations are easily betrayed in print, I have focused my sights on the literature traditionally dealing with the twin issues: therefore, the bookish quality of some of the ideas presented here. Barraclough is useful here again: he accepts the fact of Europocentric studies as a given, then works to avoid it. I feel it necessary to delve deeper to discover some answer to how we arrived at a situation where Europe could appropriate to itself a position of absolute referent.5 I believe that world history began earlier, about 1800 as an average point, when the balance between Asia and Europe turned into European dominance over Asia, thereby completing the total rule over the south by the northern hemisphere. I am also keen to examine the lateral "spread" of this idea of dominance from politics to our ideas of technology and culture. In other words, how did Europeans come to believe (unlike the Chinese) that evolution had created two different human minds—one for themselves, another for everybody else? Here we come across a very crucial problem, contained in the principle enunciated to me (in jest) by Dr. Ward Morehouse, that all cultures may be equal, but some continue to be more equal than others. A culture is a system of values, or as Geertz put it, a web of meanings. By definition, values, meanings and the systems based on or incorporating them are incomparable. There is in reality no independent standard in relation to which one could compare Indian, Chinese, Euro-American, or African culture to come up with a result of one being better or superior to the rest. Let me explain this with an example.

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Random example. In the assemblage, maintenance or overhaul of a machine tool, one of the considerations the engineer has to keep in mind is how to measure the geometrical accuracy of the tool. His task in this regard is made un-complicated by the existence of internationally agreed standards that prescribe the required specifications. His access to these standards and the fact that they exist, enable him, through comparison, to test the corresponding accuracy of his own tools. In other words, there is an independent reference point in relation to which his tools might be assessed, found wanting, or adequate in precision. When we deal with cultures, however, there is no extra-culture standard which would enable us to opt for a cultural system on the basis of rational choice, or to judge another as inferior. Yet it is not so long ago that educated men were arguing in favour of a Second Genesis, the creation of all men in the image of Western man. The Europeanization of the worldpicture (Barraclough's complaint) was repeated (and still is) in other areas of human experience. Thus, a history of art turned out to be a history of European art,6 and a history of ethics, a history of Western ethics.7 Now as far as my knowledge goes, there has been no society that did not have a congruent system of ethics. As Professor Levi-Strauss wrote in Race and History, "men whose culture differs from our own are neither more nor less moral than ourselves: each society has its own moral standards by which it divides its members into good and evil". Recently, Dr. Joseph Needham, sinologist, suggested quite bluntly that Western moral philosophers might profit from a serious study of how the Chinese went about inventing an ethical system that, unlike the Western one, was not based or dependent on a religious standard. The assumption of Euro-American primacy in humanness has not been without effect on studies of non-Western societies and civilizations. I have used the phrase, "an imperialism of categories", to condense the meaning of the illegitimate examination and evaluation of non-Western societies through criteria fashioned in the Western context. For an analogous situation in technology discussions, I have spoken of the "tyrannization of historical possibility", that is, the refusal on the part of a great majority of learned men in the West, and their pale imitations in the Southern hemisphere, to accept that there are possibilities, theoretically defensible, of technological futures other than the ones they were indoctrinated with. Though, practically speaking, Guatemala, Greece, Chile, Vietnam and so on constitute proof that any choice of new societal directions may be subverted by big-power politics. Thus it is through a critical assessment of the presentation of various intellectual traditions that I attempt to bring forth a ground-plan that is more realistically oriented to the exploding perspective of our times. Here, in a sense, Barraclough's task is easier than mine: the relativization of the places of Churchill or Hilter is hastened through the weaving of a larger

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net of human foci: Mao and Nehru and Nkrumah. All that is possible for me here is a re-instatement of Herder's conviction of the relativity of cultures.8 For technology, my task is easier: there is enough evidence to establish a plurality of technical histories for the past and the possibility of different, alternative technological systems for the future. Two final observations, one, on the context of this book, the other, on its style. The reader may judge it paradoxical to learn that this volume was completed within the portals of a Western university, the Technological University of Eindhoven, in the Netherlands. The incongruity is more apparent than real, for nothing more is being attempted in this work (if argument is needed) than pushing the demands of Western scholarship to their rigorous limits. I have been brought up to believe that all Communist scholarly works are ideological, not objective, therefore untrustworthy. I have left these works aside for they are easy prey. But the reader will surely be surprised to find that a large majority of Western works have been equally ideological, and as this book will show, equally untrustworthy. The nature of objectivity is greatly transformed when we assume a world-wide perspective on human matters: in its new form, it makes large, nearly impossible demands. All the same, that is no reason why these demands should be refused. I am not so sure, in the final analysis, whether this book would have been permitted in any university outside Dutch borders. The Dutch are like the Hindus in their great tolerance. Not only did they finance my bread-and-butter needs while I was in their country, they even awarded me a doctorate for my trouble, and the Department of International Affairs at the Ministry for Education and Science Policy contributed a substantial grant towards the printing costs of the University edition, from which this work is condensed. Where the Dutch saw difficulty was the style in which this book was written. You may be as tolerant as a Hindu, but that still does not prepare you for a Hindu actually operating in your midst. Certainly, no Western scholar would have written a book in this manner. For myself, I confess to a culturally acquired disinclination to present a linear argument that runs all the way from the inception of a book to its terminus: I prefer to pick up a theme, and while discussing it, pick up another, and a third, a fourth, and so on. The final chapter is the jigsaw puzzle complete. So much for the wisdom that the Indian mind tends to work in ever widening spirals of thought. The unaccustomed reader is forced to pay greater attention as the book unfolds. Perhaps, here is his or her chance to make a small contribution to cross-cultural understanding. My compatriots, I think, will be infinitely pleased. Claude Alvares The first of January, 1978.

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10.9 CHAPTER FIVE: CONCLUSIONS Johannes Fabian From Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object, Columbia University Press, 1983,143-65

These petrified relations must be forced to dance by singing to them their own melody. „ , m, , Karl Marx1 All knowledge, taken at the moment of its constitution, is polemical knowledge. _ „ , , J9 Gaston Bachelara1

Formulated as a question, the topic of these essays was: How has anthropology been defining or construing its object—the Other? Search for an answer has been guided by a thesis: Anthropology emerged and established itself as an allochronic discourse; it is a science of other men in another Time. It is a discourse whose referent has been removed from the present of the speaking/writing subject. This "petrified relation" is a scandal. Anthropology's Other is, ultimately, other people who are our contemporaries. No matter whether its intent is historical (ideographic) or generalizing, (nomothetic), anthropology cannot do without anchoring its knowledge, through research, in specific groups or societies; otherwise it would no longer be anthropology but metaphysical speculation disguised as an empirical science. As relationships between peoples and societies that study and those that are studied, relationships between anthropology and its object are inevitably political: production of knowledge occurs in a public forum of intergroup, interclass, and international relations. Among the historical conditions under which our discipline emerged and which affected its growth and differentiation were the rise of capitalism and its colonialist-imperialist expansion into the very societies which became the target of our inquiries. For this to occur, the expansive, aggressive, and oppressive societies which we collectively and inaccurately call the West

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needed Space to occupy. More profoundly and problematically, they required Time to accommodate the schemes of a one-way history: progress, development, modernity (and their negative mirror images: stagnation, underdevelopment, tradition). In short, geopolitics has its ideological foundations in chronopolitics. Retrospect and summary Neither political Space nor political Time are natural resources. They are ideologically construed instruments of power. Most critics of imperialism are prepared to admit this with regard to Space. It has long been recognized that imperialist claims to the right of occupying "empty," underused, undeveloped space for the common good of mankind should be taken for what they really are: a monstrous lie perpetuated for the benefit of one part of humanity, for a few societies of that part, and, in the end, for one part of these societies, its dominant classes. But by and large, we remain under the spell of an equally mendacious fiction: that interpersonal, intergroup, indeed, international Time is "public Time"—there to be occupied, measured, and allotted by the powers that be. There is evidence—to my knowledge not touched upon by historians of anthropology—that such a political idea of public Time was developed in the years after World War II, with help from anthropology. Perhaps it was needed to fill the interstices between relativist culture gardens when, after cataclysmic struggle between the great powers and just before accession to political independence of most former colonies, it became impossible to maintain temporal pluralism in a radical way. Theoreticians and apologists of a new international order perceived the need to safeguard the position of the West. The necessity arose to provide an objective, transcultural temporal medium for theories of change that were to dominate Western social science in the decades that followed.3 F. S. C. Northrop was an important figure during that period. As a thinker who had achieved an astounding command and synthesis of logic, philosophy of science, political theory, and international law, he radiated the optimism of Western science on the threshold of new discoveries. It is impossible to do justice to his prolific writings by quoting a few passages. Nevertheless, to recall some of Northrop's ideas will help to clarify our argument about political uses of Time and the role anthropology was to play in this. The scene may be set, as it were, by quoting from his programmatic essay, "A New Approach to Politics": The political problems of today's world, both domestic and international, center in the mentalities and customs of people and only secondarily and afterwards in their tools—whether those tools be economic, military, technological or eschatological in the sense of 1654

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the Reverend Reinhold Niebuhr. Since customs are anthropological and sociological, contemporary politics must be also. (1960:15; my emphasis) Northrop expected much from anthropology and took initiatives to prod anthropologists into formulating their contributions to a new theory of international relations. At a time when he served as the moderator of a symposium on "Cross-Cultural Understanding"4 he professed to be guided by two premises. One was the anthropological doctrine of cultural relativism which he accepted as an appropriate philosophical and factual foundation of international pluralism. The other was his interpretation of the epistemological consequences of Einstein's space-time postulates. In a formula he also uses in other writings Northrop describes these consequences as "anyone's knowledge of the publicly meaningful simultaneity of spatially separated events" (1964:10). While the premises of cultural relativism posed the problem (the multiplicity of cultures as spatially separated events), the Einsteinian conception of relativity suggested to Northrop the solution. "Public" Time provided meaningful simultaneity, i.e., a kind of simultaneity that is natural because it is neural and independent of ideology or individual consciousness.5 With that solution (which, I believe, is identical with Levi-Strauss' recourse to neural structure) coevalness as the problematic simultaneity of different, conflicting, and contradictory forms of consciousness was removed from the agenda of international relations. Anthropology, of whose accomplishments Northrop had the highest regard, was to continue its role as the provider of cultural difference as distance. Distance, in turn, is what the forces of progress need so that it may be overcome in time. That is the frame for an autocritique of anthropology which might have a chance to amount to more than a global confession of guilt or to ad hoc adjustments in theory and method designed to fit the neocolonial situation. Let me now recapitulate my attempts to draw at least the outlines of the task that lies before us. In chapter I the terms of the argument were laid down. The rise of modern anthropology is inseparable from the emergence of new conceptions of Time in the wake of a thorough secularization of the JudeoChristian idea of history. The transformation that occurred involved, first, a generalization of historical Time, its extension, as it were, from the circum-Mediterranean stage of events to the whole world. Once that was achieved, movement in space could become secularized, too. The notion of travel as science, that is, as the temporal/spatial "completion" of human history, emerged and produced, by the end of the eighteenth century, research projects and institutions which can be called anthropological in a strict sense. Precursors of modern anthropology in the eighteenth century have been called "time voyagers,"6 a characterization which is acceptable

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as long as one keeps in mind that their fascination with Time was a prerequisite as much as a result of travels in space. It would be naive to think that Enlightenment conceptions of Time were the simple result of empirical induction. As the "myth-history of reason," they were ideological constructs and projections: Secularized Time had become a means to occupy space, a title conferring on its holders the right to "save" the expanse of the world for history. The secularization of Judeo-Christian Time was a mild change, however, compared to its eventual naturalization which had been under way for several generations until it became finalized in the first third of the nineteenth century. Naturalization of Time involved a quantitative explosion of earlier chronologies so as to make available enough time to account for processes of geological history and biological evolution without recourse to supernatural intervention. Qualitatively, it completed the process of generalization by postulating coextensiveness of Time and planetary (or cosmic) Space. Natural history—a notion unthinkable until the coextensiveness of Time and Space had been accepted—was based on a thoroughly spatialized conception of Time and provided the paradigm for anthropology as the science of cultural evolution. Its manifest concerns were progress and "history," but its theories and methods, inspired by geology, comparative anatomy, and related scientific disciplines, were taxonomic rather than genetic-processual. Most importantly, by allowing Time to be resorbed by the tabular space of classification, nineteenth-century anthropology sanctioned an ideological process by which relations between the West and its Other, between anthropology and its object, were conceived not only as difference, but as distance in space and Time. Protoanthropologists of the Renaissance and Enlightenment philosophes often accepted the simultaneity or temporal coexistence of savagery and civilization because they were convinced of the cultural, merely conventional nature of the differences they perceived;7 evolutionary anthropologists made difference "natural," the inevitable outcome of the operation of natural laws. What was left, after primitive societies had been assigned their slots in evolutionary schemes, was the abstract, merely physical simultaneity of natural law. When, in the course of disciplinary growth and differentiation, evolutionism was attacked and all but discarded as the reigning paradigm of anthropology, the temporal conceptions it had helped to establish remained unchanged. They had long become part of the common epistemological ground and a common discursive idiom of competing schools and approaches. As conceptions of Physical, Typological and Intersubjective Time informed anthropological writing in turn, or in concert, each became a means toward the end of keeping anthropology's Other in another Time. There was one historical development, though, which prevented

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anthropology from finally dissolving into a "temporal illusion," from becoming a hallucinatory discourse about an Other of its own making. That was the undisputed rule requiring field research carried out through direct, personal encounter with the Other. Ever since, ethnography as an activity, not just as a method or a type of information, has been regarded as the legitimation of anthropological knowledge, no matter whether, in a given school, rationalist-deductive or empiricist-inductive conceptions of science prevailed. The integration of fieldwork into anthropological praxis had several consequences. Sociologically, field research became an institution which consolidated anthropology as a science and academic discipline; it was to serve as the principal mechanism of training and socializing new members. Epistemologically, however, the rule of fieldwork made anthropology an aporetic enterprise because it resulted in a contradictory praxis. This remained by and large unnoticed as long as ethnographic research was thought to be governed by positivist canons of "scientific observation." As soon as it is realized that fieldwork is a form of communicative interaction with an Other, one that must be carried out coevally, on the basis of shared intersubjective Time and intersocietal contemporaneity, a contradiction had to appear between research and writing because anthropological writing had become suffused with the strategies and devices of an allochronic discourse.8 That ethnography involves communication through language is, of course, not a recent insight (Degerando insisted on that point; see 1969:68 ff). However, the importance of language was almost always conceived methodologically. Because linguistic method has been predominantly taxonomic, the "turn to language" actually reinforced allochronic tendencies in anthropological discourse. There are ways to sidestep the contradiction. One can compartmentalize theoretical discourse and empirical research; or one defends the contradiction aggressively, insisting that fieldwork is a requisite of the professionalization of anthropology, a ritual of initiation, a social mechanism that only has incidental connections with the substance of anthropological thought. Both strategies provide a cover-up, they do nothing to resolve the contradiction. Worse, they obstruct critical insight into the possibility that those ritually repetitive confrontations with the Other which we call fieldwork may be but special instances of the general struggle between the West and its Other. A persistent myth shared by imperialists and many (Western) critics of imperialism alike has been that of a single, decisive conquista, occupation, or establishment of colonial power, a myth which has its complement in similar notions of sudden decolonization and accession to independence. Both have worked against giving proper theoretical importance to overwhelming evidence for repeated acts of oppression,9 campaigns of pacification, and suppression of rebellions, no matter whether these were carried out by military means, by religious and educational indoctrination, by administrative measures, or, as is more common

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now, by intricate monetary and economic manipulations under the cover of foreign aid. The ideological function of schemes promoting progress, advancement, and development has been to hide the temporal contingency of imperialist expansion. We cannot exclude the possibility, to say the very least, that repetitive enactment of field research by thousands of aspiring and established practitioners of anthropology has been part of a sustained effort to maintain a certain type of relation between the West and its Other. To maintain and renew these relations has always required coeval recognition of the Other as the object of power and/or knowledge; to rationalize and ideologically justify these relations has always needed schemes of allochronic distancing. The praxis of field research, even in its most routinized and professionalized conception, never ceased to be an objective reflex of antagonistic political relations and, by the same token, a point of departure for a radical critique of anthropology.10 There is a need to formulate these conclusions simply and brutally. At the same time, one must avoid the mistake of concluding from the simplicity of effect to a simplicity of intellectual efforts that brought it about. In chapter 2 I analyzed two major strategies for what I called the denial of coevalness. Relativism, in its functionalist and culturalist varieties, undoubtedly has its roots in romantic reactions against Enlightenment rational absolutism. But romantic ideas regarding the historical uniqueness of cultural creations were only too vulnerable to chauvinistic perversion. What started perhaps as a movement of defiance, of an appropriation of "our Time" by peoples (and intellectuals) resisting French intellectual imperialism, soon became a way of encapsulating Time as "their Time" or, in the form of taxonomic approaches to culture, a plea for ignoring Time altogether. The purpose of that chapter was to illustrate accomplished forms of the denial of coevalness as these express dominant trends in modern anthropology. Continued efforts to counteract these dominant trends were, therefore, not given adequate attention and this remains, of course, a historical gap. I doubt that it will be closed soon. As long as the historiography of anthropology continues to be the story of those schools and thinkers who can be credited with the "success" of our discipline we cannot expect to find much in it that allows us to appreciate its failure. Having demonstrated allochronism as a pervasive strategy of anthropological discourse, I tried in chapter 3 to address the problem in a more pointed fashion. Above all, my questions were directed to one of the more powerful defenses construed at about the same time that anthropology's aggressive allochronism became entrenched: Can we accept the claim that anthropology's allochronic conception of its object may be carried out with impunity because that object is, after all, "only" semiotic? If the Other is but a semiotic Other, goes the argument, then he remains internal to the discourse; he is signified in sign relations and must not be confused with the victim of "real" relations. We found that a semiotic approach is

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useful, up to a point, when it comes to analyzing the intricacies of temporalization. Yet when we proceeded from general considerations to reflexions on two specific discursive practices—the ethnographic present and the autobiographic past—we found serious limitations. In both cases, semiotic, i.e., self-contained linguistic explanations proved to be afflicted by logical "leaks" causing critical analysis to consider links between communicative practices (or literary conventions) and the political economy of scientific activities: Time, the real Time of human action and interaction, does seep into the systems of signs which we construct as representations of knowledge. We may even have to consider, following a suggestion by M. Serres, that setting up a semiotic relation, especially if it is part of a taxonomy of relations, is itself a temporal act. While pretending to move in the flat space of classification, the taxonomist in fact takes a position on a temporal slope—uphill, or upstream, from the object of his scientific desire. The allegation that sign theories of culture inevitably rest on temporal distancing between the decoding subject and the encoded object can obviously not be demonstrated "semiotically;" such a project would necessarily get lost in an infinite regress of sign-relations upon sign-relations. There is a point at which sign-theories must be questioned epistemologically. What sort of theory of knowledge do they presuppose, or: what sort of theory of knowledge can be inferred from the history of sign-theories bearing on anthropology? Chapter 4 attempts to probe into such deeper connections by tracing the current prominence of semiotics and semiology to a long history of visualist and spatialist conceptions of knowledge. Specifically, I situated "symbolic anthropology" in a tradition dominated by the "art of memory" and Ramist pedagogy. The gist of that argument was that sign-theories of culture are theories of representation, not of production; of exchange or "traffic,"11 not of creation; of meaning, not of praxis. Potentially, and perhaps inevitably, they have a tendency to reinforce the basic premises of an allochronic discourse in that they consistently align the Here and Now of the signifier (the form, the structure, the meaning) with the Knower, and the There and Then of the signified (the content, the function or event, the symbol or icon) with the Known. It was this assertiveness of visual-spatial presentation, its authoritative role in the transmission of knowledge, which I designated as the "rhetoric of vision." As long as anthropology presents its object primarily as seen, as long as ethnographic knowledge is conceived primarily as observation and/or representation (in terms of models, symbol systems, and so forth) it is likely to persist in denying coevalness to its Other. Issues for debate I expect that the sweeping character of this account of temporal distancing might be disturbing to many readers. My intent has not been to express a 1659

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summary repudiation of anthropology. Rather, I wanted to outline a program for dismantling identifiable ideological devices and strategies which have been functioning to protect our discipline from radical epistemological critique. I do believe that allochronism consists of more than occasional lapses. It is expressive of a political cosmology, that is, a kind of myth. Like other myths, allochronism has the tendency to establish a total grip on our discourse. It must therefore be met by a "total" response, which is not to say that the critical work can be accomplished in one fell swoop. Such a project must be carried out as a polemic. However, polemic is not just a matter of style or taste—bad taste by some canons of academic civility. Polemic belongs to the substance of arguments if and when it expresses intent on the part of the writer to address opponents or opposing views in an antagonistic fashion; it is a way of arguing that does not dress up what really amounts to dismissal of the other as "respect" for his position; nor does it reject the other view as depasse. The ideal of coevalness must of course also guide the critique of the many forms in which coevalness is denied in anthropological discourse. This is perhaps a Utopian goal. I realize that certain ways of summarily designating trends and approaches as so many isms border on allochronic dismissal. For instance, anthropologists have used the term animism (which they invented in order to separate primitive mentality from modern rationality) as a means to indicate that an opponent is no longer in the contemporary arena of debate.12 That sort of arguing from upstream of historical progress is unproductive; it merely reproduces allochronic discourse. In contrast, polemic irreverence is, or ought to be, an acknowledgment of the coeval conditions of the production of knowledge. Above all, polemic is future oriented. By conquering the past, it strives to imagine the future course of ideas. It is conceived as a project and it recognizes that many of the ideas it needs to overcome have been both selfserving, interest oriented and objective, project oriented. Evolutionism established anthropological discourse as allochronic, but was also an attempt to overcome a paralyzing disjunction between the science of nature and the science of man. Diffusionism ended in positivist pedantry; it also hoped to vindicate the historicity of mankind by taking seriously its "accidental" dispersal in geographic space. Relativist culturalism encapsulated Time in culture gardens; it derived much of its elan from arguments for the unity of mankind against racist determinisms,13 a project that, in a somewhat different fashion, is carried on by taxonomic structuralism. All these endeavors and struggles are present and copresent with this critique of anthropology. To incorporate them into an account of the history of allochronism makes them past, not passe. That which is past enters the dialectics of the present—if it is granted coevalness. Another objection could be formulated as follows: Aren't you in fact

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compounding allochronism by examining anthropology's uses of Time while disregarding time-conceptions in other cultures? There is no simple way to counter that objection. I am not ready to accept the categorical verdict that Western anthropology is so corrupt that any further exercise of it, including its critique by insiders, will only aggravate the situation. I also believe that the substance of a theory of coevalness, and certainly coevalness as praxis, will have to be the result of actual confrontation with the Time of the Other. I am not prepared to offer an opinion on how much of this has been accomplished by extant ethnographies of Time. If there is any merit to my arguments one would expect that anthropology, in studying Time as much as in other areas, has been its own obstacle against coeval confrontation with its Other. This is putting it mildly, for denial of coevalness is a political act, not just a discursive fact. The absence of the Other from our Time has been his mode of presence in our discourse—as an object and victim. That is what needs to be overcome; more ethnography of Time will not change the situation. Other questions are even more vexing. Is not the theory of coevalness which is implied (but by no means fully developed) in these arguments a program for ultimate temporal absorption of the Other, just the kind of theory needed to make sense of present history as a "world-system," totally dominated by monopoly- and state-capitalism?14 When we allege that the Other has been a political victim; when we, therefore, assert, that the West has been victorious; when we then go on to "explain" that situation with theories of social change, modernization, and so forth, all of which identify the agents of history as the ones that hold economic, military, and technological power; in short, when we accept domination as a fact, are we not actually playing into the hands of those who dominate? Or, if we hold that the political-cognitive interests of Western anthropology have been manipulation and control of knowledge about the Other, and if it is true (as argued by critics of our discipline) that precisely the scientistic-positivistic orientation which fostered domineering approaches has prevented anthropology from ever really "getting through" to the Other, should we then conclude that, as a by and large unsuccessful attempt to be a "science of mankind," Western anthropology helped to save other cultures from total alienation? Are there, finally, criteria by which to distinguish denial of coevalness as a condition of domination from refusal of coevalness as an act of liberation? Answers to these questions, if there are any at the present time, would depend on what can be said, positively, about coevalness. If it meant the oneness of Time as identity, coevalness would indeed amount to a theory of appropriation (as, for instance, in the idea of one history of salvation or one myth-history of reason). As it is understood in these essays, coevalness aims at recognizing cotemporality as the condition for truly dialectical

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confrontation between persons as well as societies. It militates against false conceptions of dialectics—all those watered-down binary abstractions which are passed off as oppositions: left vs. right, past vs. present, primitive vs. modern. Tradition and modernity are not "opposed" (except semiotically), nor are they in "conflict." All this is (bad) metaphorical talk. What are opposed, in conflict, in fact, locked in antagonistic struggle, are not the same societies at different stages of development, but different societies facing each other at the same Time. As J. Duvignaud, and others, are reminding us, the "savage and the proletarian" are in equivalent positions vis-a-vis domination (see 1973:ch. 1). Marx in the nineteenth century may be excused for not giving enough theoretical recognition to that equivalence; certain contemporary "Marxist" anthropologists have no excuse. The question of Marxist anthropology is not resolved in my mind.15 In part this is so because we have (in the West) as yet little Marxist praxis on the level of the production of ethnographic knowledge. As long as such a practical basis is lacking or badly developed, most of what goes by the name of Marxist anthropology amounts to little more than theoretical exercises in the style of Marx and Engels. These exercises have their merits: the best among them have helped to confound earlier approaches and analyses. They are bound to remain disconnected forays, however, as long as their authors share with bourgeois positivist anthropology certain fundamental assumptions concerning the nature of ethnographic data and the use of "objective" methods. An even more serious problem with Marxist anthropology appears when we view it in the perspective of this book: the construction of anthropology's object. In what sense can Marxist anthropology be said to offer a counterposition to the deep-rooted allochronic tendencies that inform our discourse? Do allochronic periodizations of human history which play such an important role in Marxist analyses belong to the substance of Marxist thought or are they just a matter of style inherited from the nineteenth century? How is the Other construed in the anthropological discourse generated in societies which are not part of the West-and-the-Rest complex? Antagonism with the capitalist world notwithstanding, these societies have built analogous spheres of colonial expansion and, more recently, of foreign aid and development. Does the routinized world revolution construe a different Other than the capitalist world market?16 Coevalness: points of departure Those who have given the matter some thought developed outlines of a theory of coevalness through critical confrontation with Hegel. Here I can offer little more than a few comments on what I consider significant steps in the development of Hegel's insights. In doing so I want to indicate 1662

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points of departure, not solutions; appeals to the history of philosophy as such will not save the history of anthropology. There is no need for a "Hegelian" anthropology. What must be developed are the elements of a processual and materialist theory apt to counteract the hegemony of taxonomic and representational approaches which we identified as the principal sources of anthropology's allochronic orientation.17 Affirmations of coevalness will not "make good" for the denial of coevalness. Critique proceeds as the negation of a negation; it calls for deconstructive labor whose aim cannot be simply to establish a Marxist "alternative" to Western bougeois anthropology, one that would have to beg for recognition as just another paradigm or scientific culture garden. This being said, what are the points of departure for a theory of coevalness? A first step, I believe, must be to recuperate the idea of totality. Almost all the approaches we touched on in these essays affirm such a notion—up to a point. This explains why the (totalizing) concept of culture could have been shared by so many different schools. Practically everybody agrees that we can make sense of another society only to the extent that we grasp it as a whole, an organism, a configuration, a system. Such holism, however, usually misses its professed aims on at least two accounts. First, by insisting that culture is a system (ethos, model, blueprint, and so forth) which "informs" or "regulates" action, holistic social science fails to provide a theory of praxis; it commits anthropology forever to imputing (if not outright imposing) motives, beliefs, meanings, and functions to the societies it studies from a perspective outside and above. Moral compliance, aesthetic conformity, or systemic integration are, as bad substitutes for dialectic conceptions of process, projected onto other societies. As demonstrated by Kroeber, T. Parsons, and more recently by M. Sahlins, culture will then be ontologized, i.e., given an existence apart. These so-called holistic approaches to culture result in a dualistic theory of society which, in turn, invites spurious solutions of the kind represented by M. Harris' cultural materialism. Second, failure to conceive a theory of praxis blocks the possibility, even for those who are prepared to reject a positivistic epistemological stance, to perceive anthropology as an activity which is part of what it studies. Scientistic objectivism and hermeneutic textualism often converge.18 The We of anthropology then remains an exclusive We, one that leaves its Other outside on all levels of theorizing except on the plane of ideological obfuscation, where everyone pays lip service to the "unity of mankind." Among the most scandalizing of Hegel's pronouncements have been those that affirm the all-inclusiveness of historical process—its totality— and, as a consequence, the copresence of the different "moments" through which the totality realizes itself. In the Phenomenology of the Spirit he

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stated: "Reason (Vernunft) now has a general interest in the world because it is assured to have presence in the world, or, that the present is reasonable (verniiinftig)" (1973 [1807]: 144). To be sure, that sort of equation of the reasonable and the present can serve to justify evolutionist Realpolitik, which would argue that a state of affairs must be accepted because it is a present reality. Marx criticized Hegel for just that. At the same time he insisted, with Hegel, on the present as the frame for historical analysis. Here the present is conceived, not as a point in time nor as a modality of language (i.e. a tense) but as the copresence of basic acts of production and reproduction—eating, drinking, providing shelter, clothes, "and several other things." In the German Ideology Marx ridicules German historians and their penchant for "prehistory" as a field of speculation, an area outside of present history. Research into the principles of social organization must not be relegated to a mythical time of origins, nor can it be reduced to the construction of stages. Forms of social differentiation must be seen as "moments" which, "from the beginning of history, and ever since human beings lived, have existed simultaneously and still determine history" (1953:355 f: my emphasis; see also 354 f.). This is the "materialist connection among human beings which is conditioned by their needs and the mode of production and is as old as mankind itself" (ibid. 356). To be sure, there are problems with the concept of needs; and Marx did return to phases, periods, and stages (even in the text from which we just quoted) but the point is that a Hegelian view of the totality of historical forces, including their contemporality at any given time, prepared Marx to conceive his theory of economy as a political one. The same awareness underlies his critique of Proudhon: The relations of production of every society form a totality. Mr. Proudhon looks at economic relations as so many social phases generating one another such that one can be derived from the other. . . . The only bad thing about this method is that Mr. Proudhon, as soon as he wants to analyze one of these phases separately, must take recourse to other social relations. . . . Mr. Proudhon goes on to generate the other phases with the help of pure reason, he pretends to be facing newborn babies and forgets that they are of the same age as the first one. (1953:498; my emphasis) This is the passage—from The Poverty of Philosophy—which was to be a cornerstone for L. Althusser's arguments for a structuralist interpretation of Marx. In Reading Capital he concluded "that it is essential to reverse the order of reflection and think first the specific structure of totality in order to understand both the form in which its limbs and constitutive

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relations co-exist and the peculiar structure of history (1970 [1966]: 98). The valid point in Althusser's reading is to have demonstrated that Marx cannot be dismissed as just another historicist. Marx's contribution to critical social thought has been his radical presentism which, in spite of all the revolutionary talk to which Marx and especially Engels resorted, contained the theoretical possibility for a negation of allochronic distancing. What else is coevalness but recognizing that all human societies and all major aspects of a human society are "of the same age" (a distinctly romantic idea, incidentally, if we remember Herder and Ratzel (see chapter 1). This does not mean that, within the totality of human history, developments did not occur which can be viewed in chronological succession. T. Adorno, in a reflection on Hegel, summarized the difference between allochronic historism and a dialectical conception of coevalness in one of his inimitable aphorisms: "No universal history leads from the savage to humanity, but there is one that leads from the slingshot to the megabomb" (1966:312). Hegel and some of his critical successors19 opened up a global perspective onto questions which we raised from the particular vantage point of anthropology. If allochronism is expressive of a vast, entrenched political cosmology, if it has deep historical roots, and if it rests on some of the fundamental epistemological convictions of Western culture, what can be done about it? If it is true that ultimate justification is provided by a certain theory of knowledge, it would follow that critical work must be directed to epistemology, notably to the unfinished project of a materialist conception of knowledge "as sensuous-human activity [conceived as] praxis, subjectively." Concrete, practical contradiction between coeval research and allochronic interpretation constitutes the crux of anthropology, the crossroads, as it were, from which critique must take off and to which it must return. We need to overcome the contemplative stance (in Marx's sense) and dismantle the edifices of spatiotemporal distancing that characterize the contemplative view. Its fundamental assumption seems to be that the basic act of knowledge consists of somehow structuring (ordering, classifying) ethnographic data (sense data, fundamentally, but there are levels of information beyond that). It matters little whether or not one posits an objective reality beneath the phenomenal world that is accessible to experience. What counts is that some kind of primitive, original separation between a thing and its appearance, an original and its reproduction, provide the starting point. This fateful separation is the ultimate reason for what Durkheim (following Kant, up to a point) perceived as the "necessity" of culturally structuring the material of primitive perception. It is the necessity to impose order and the necessity of whatever order a society imposes. From Durkheim's theory of the sacred and the profane, to Kroeber's notion of the superorganic and Malinowski's culture as "second nature" down to Levi-Strauss' ultimate "opposition" of nature and culture

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—anthropology has been asserting that mankind is bound together in communities of necessity. So much is clear and readily admitted by most anthropologists who care to be explicit about their theories of knowledge. But one issue is usually left in the dark of undisputable assumptions and that is the Lockean phenomenalism shared by empiricists and rationalists alike. No matter whether one professes belief in the inductive nature of ethnography and ethnology or whether one thinks of anthropology as a deductive, constructive science (or whether one posits a sequence of an inductive ethnographic phase and a constructive theoretical phase), the primitive assumption, the root metaphor of knowledge remains that of a difference, and a distance, between thing and image, reality and representation. Inevitably, this establishes and reinforces models of cognition stressing difference and distance between a beholder and an object. From detaching concepts (abstraction) to overlaying interpretive schemes (imposition), from linking together (correlation) to matching (isomorphism)—a plethora of visually-spatially derived notions dominate a discourse founded on contemplative theories of knowledge. As we have seen, hegemony of the visual-spatial had its price which was, first, to detemporalize the process of knowledge and, second, to promote ideological temporalization of relations between the Knower and the Known. Spatialization is carried on and completed on the next level, that of arranging data and tokens in systems of one kind or another. In this respect there is little that divides otherwise opposed schools of anthropology, be they committed to a superorganic concept of culture, to a Saussurean model, or to Max Weber's Eigengesetzlichkeit. In fact, even vulgar biological and economic determinism should be added to the list. Nor does it really matter—and this is certain to scandalize some—that several of these schools profess to follow an historical, even processual approach to culture (as opposed to those that stress systemic and synchronic analysis). All of them have strained, at one time or another, to attain scientific status by protecting themselves against the "irruption of Time," that is, against the demands of coevalness which would have to be met if anthropology really took its relation to its Other to constitute a praxis. Anthropology's allochronic discourse is, therefore, the product of an idealist position (in Marxian terms) and that includes practically all forms of "materialism," from nineteenth-century bourgeois evolutionism to current cultural materialism. A first and fundamental assumption of a materialist theory of knowledge, and this may sound paradoxical, is to make consciousness, individual and collective, the starting point. Not disembodied consciousness, however, but "consciousness with a body," inextricably bound up with language. A fundamental role for language must be postulated, not because consciousness is conceived as a state internal to an individual organism which would then need to be "expressed" or "represented"

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through language (taking that term in the widest sense, including gestures, postures, attitudes, and so forth). Rather, the only way to think of consciousness without separating it from the organism or banning it to some kind of forum internum is to insist on its sensuous nature; and one way to conceive of that sensuous nature (above the level of motor activities) is to tie consciousness as an activity to the production of meaningful sound. Inasmuch as the production of meaningful sound involves the labor of transforming, shaping matter, it may still be possible to distinguish form and content, but the relationship between the two will then be constitutive of consciousness. Only in a secondary, derived sense (one in which the conscious organism is presupposed rather than accounted for) can that relationship be called representational (significative, symbolic), or informative in the sense of being a tool or carrier of information It may come as a surprise but on this account I find myself in agreement with N. Chomsky when he states: it is wrong to think of the human use of language as characteristically informative, in fact or in intention. Human language can be used to inform or mislead, to clarify one's own thoughts or to display one's cleverness, or simply for play. If I speak with no concern for modifying your behavior or thoughts, I am not using language any less than if I say exactly the same things with such intention. If we hope to understand human language and the psychological capacities on which it rests, we must first ask what it is, not how or for what purpose it is used. (1972:70) Man does not "need" language; man, in the dialectical, transitive understanding of to be, is language (much like he does not need food, shelter, and so on, but is his food and house). Consciousness, realized by the [producing] meaningful sound, is selfconscious. The Self, however, is constituted fully as a speaking and hearing Self. Awareness, if we may thus designate the first stirrings of knowledge beyond the registering of tactile impressions, is fundamentally based on hearing meaningful sounds produced by self and others. If there needs to be a contest for man's noblest sense (and there are reasons to doubt that) it should be hearing, not sight that wins. Not solitary perception but social communication is the starting point for a materialist anthropology, provided that we keep in mind that man does not "need" language as a means of communication, or by extension, society as a means of survival. Man is communication and society. What saves these assumptions from evaporating in the clouds of speculative metaphysics is, I repeat, a dialectical understanding of the verb to be in these propositions. Language is not predicated on man (nor is

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the "human mind" or "culture"). Language produces man as man produces language. Production is the pivotal concept of a materialist anthropology. Marx was aware of the material nature of language as well as of the material link between language and consciousness. In the light of what has been argued so far, the following two passages need no comment: The element of thought itself—the element of thought's living expression—language—is of a sensuous nature. The social reality of nature, and human natural science, or the natural science about man, are identical terms. (Marx 1953:245 f.) Translation from The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 1964:143). Only now, after having considered four moments, four aspects of the fundamental historical relationships, do we find that man also possesses "consciousness"; but, even so, not inherent, not "pure" consciousness. From the start the "spirit" is afflicted with the curse of being "burdened" with matter, which here makes its appearance in the form of agitated layers of air, sounds—in short of language. Language is as old as consciousness; language is practical consciousness, as it exists for other men, and for that reason is really beginning to exist for me personally as well. (see Marx 1953:356 f. Translation quoted from Marx and Engels 1959:251) A production theory of knowledge and language (in spite of Engels and Lenin) cannot be built on "abstraction" or "reflection" (Widerspiegelung} or any other conception that postulates fundamental acts of cognition to consist of the detachment of some kind of image or token from perceived objects. Concepts are products of sensuous interaction: they themselves are of a sensuous nature inasmuch as their formation and use is inextricably bound up with language. One cannot insist enough on that point because it is the sensuous nature of language, its being an activity of concrete organisms and the embodiment of consciousness in a material medium—sound—which makes language an eminently temporal phenomenon. Clearly, language is not material if that were to mean possessing properties of, or in, space: volume, shape, color (or even opposition, distribution, division, etc.). Its materiality is based on articulation, on frequencies, pitch, tempo, all of which are realized in the dimension of time. These essentially temporal properties can be translated, or transcribed, as spatial relations. That is an undisputable fact—this sentence proves it. What remains highly disputable is that visualization-spatialization of consciousness, and especially historically and culturally contingent spatializations

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such as a certain rhetorical "art of memory," can be made the measure of development of human consciousness. The denial of coevalness which we diagnosed on secondary and tertiary levels of anthropological discourse can be traced to a fundamental epistemological issue. Ultimately it rests on the negation of the temporal materiality of communication through language. For the temporality of speaking (other than the temporality of physical movements, chemical processes, astronomic events, and organic growth and decay) implies cotemporality of producer and product, speaker and listener, Self and Other. Whether a detemporalized, idealist theory of knowledge is the result of certain cultural, ideological, and political positions, or whether it works the other way round is perhaps a moot question. That there is a connection between them which is in need of critical examination, is not. At one time I maintained that the project of dismantling anthropology's intellectual imperialism must begin with alternatives to positivist conceptions of ethnography (Fabian 1971). I advocated a turn to language and a conception of ethnographic objectivity as communicative, intersubjective objectivity. Perhaps I failed to make it clear that I wanted language and communication to be understood as a kind of praxis in which the Knower cannot claim ascendancy over the Known (nor, for that matter, one Knower over another). As I see it now, the anthropologist and his interlocutors only "know" when they meet each other in one and the same cotemporality (see Fabian 1979a). If ascendancy—rising to a hierarchical position—is precluded, their relationships must be on the same plane: they will be frontal. Anthropology as the study of cultural difference can be productive only if difference is drawn into the arena of dialectical contradiction. To go on proclaiming, and believing, that anthropology is nothing but a more or less successful effort to abstract general knowledge from concrete experience and that, as such, it serves universal goals and human interests, should be difficult if the arguments advanced in these essays are valid. In order to claim that primitive societies (or whatever replaces them now as the object of anthropology) are the reality and our conceptualizations the theory, one must keep anthropology standing on its head. If we can show that our theories of their societies are our praxis—the way in which we produce and reproduce knowledge of the Other for our societies—we may (paraphrasing Marx and Hegel) put anthropology back on its feet. Renewed interest in the history of our discipline and disciplined inquiry into the history of confrontation between anthropology and its Other are therefore not escapes from empiry; they are practical and realistic. They are ways to meet the Other on the same ground, in the same Time.

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10.10 THE MASTER'S TOOLS WILL NEVER DISMANTLE THE MASTER'S HOUSE* Audre Lorde From Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, Crossing Press, 1984,110-13

I agreed to take part in a New York University Institute for the Humanities conference a year ago, with the understanding that I would be commenting upon papers dealing with the role of difference within the lives of american women: difference of race, sexuality, class, and age. The absence of these considerations weakens any feminist discussion of the personal and the political. It is a particular academic arrogance to assume any discussion of feminist theory without examining our many differences, and without a significant input from poor women, Black and Third World women, and lesbians. And yet, I stand here as a Black lesbian feminist, having been invited to comment within the only panel at this conference where the input of Black feminists and lesbians is represented. What this says about the vision of this conference is sad, in a country where racism, sexism, and homophobia are inseparable. To read this program is to assume that lesbian and Black women have nothing to say about existentialism, the erotic, women's culture and silence, developing feminist theory, or heterosexuality and power. And what does it mean in personal and political terms when even the two Black women who did present here were literally found at the last hour? What does it mean when the tools of a racist patriarchy are used to examine the fruits of that same patriarchy? It means that only the most narrow perimeters of change are possible and allowable. The absence of any consideration of lesbian consciousness or the consciousness of Third World women leaves a serious gap within this conference and within the papers presented here. For example, in a paper on material relationships between women, I was conscious of an either/or

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model of nurturing which totally dismissed my knowledge as a Black lesbian. In this paper there was no examination of mutuality between women, no systems of shared support, no interdependence as exists between lesbians and women-identified women. Yet it is only in the patriarchal model of nurturance that women "who attempt to emancipate themselves pay perhaps too high a price for the results," as this paper states. For women, the need and desire to nurture each other is not pathological but redemptive, and it is within that knowledge that our real power is rediscovered. It is this real connection which is so feared by a patriarchal world. Only within a patriarchal structure is maternity the only social power open to women. Interdependency between women is the way to a freedom which allows the / to be, not in order to be used, but in order to be creative. This is a difference between the passive be and the active being. Advocating the mere tolerance of difference between women is the grossest reformism. It is a total denial of the creative function of difference in our lives. Difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic. Only then does the necessity for interdependency become unthreatening. Only within that interdependency of different strengths, acknowledged and equal, can the power to seek new ways of being in the world generate, as well as the courage and sustenance to act where there are no charters. Within the interdependence of mutual (nondominant) differences lies that security which enables us to descend into the chaos of knowledge and return with true visions of our future, along with the concomitant power to effect those changes which can bring that future into being. Difference is that raw and powerful connection from which our personal power is forged. As women, we have been taught either to ignore our differences, or to view them as causes for separation and suspicion rather than as forces for change. Without community there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between an individual and her oppression. But community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist. Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society's definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference - those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are Black, who are older - know that survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to stand alone, unpopular and sometimes reviled, and how to make common cause with those others identified as outside the structures in order to define and seek a world in which we can all flourish. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us

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temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master's house as their only source of support. Poor women and women of Color know there is a difference between the daily manifestations of marital slavery and prostitution because it is our daughters who line 42nd Street. If white american feminist theory need not deal with the differences between us, and the resulting difference in our oppressions, then how do you deal with the fact that the women who clean your houses and tend your children while you attend conferences on feminist theory are, for the most part, poor women and women of Color? What is the theory behind racist feminism? In a world of possibility for us all, our personal visions help lay the groundwork for political action. The failure of academic feminists to recognize difference as a crucial strength is a failure to reach beyond the first patriarchal lesson. In our world, divide and conquer must become define and empower. Why weren't other women of Color found to participate in this conference? Why were two phone calls to me considered a consultation? Am I the only possible source of names of Black feminists? And although the Black panelist's paper ends on an important and powerful connection of love between women, what about interracial cooperation between feminists who don't love each other? In academic feminist circles, the answer to these questions is often, "We did not know who to ask." But that is the same evasion of responsibility, the same cop-out, that keeps Black women's art out of women's exhibitions, Black women's work out of most feminist publications except for the occasional "Special Third World Women's Issue," and Black women's texts off your reading lists. But as Adrienne Rich pointed out in a recent talk, white feminists have educated themselves about such an enormous amount over the past ten years, how come you haven't also educated yourselves about Black women and the differences between us - white and Black - when it is key to our survival as a movement? Women of today are still being called upon to stretch across the gap of male ignorance and to educate men as to our existence and our needs. This is an old and primary tool of all oppressors to keep the oppressed occupied with the master's concerns. Now we hear that it is the task of women of Color to educate white women - in the face of tremendous resistance - as to our existence, our differences, our relative roles in our joint survival. This is a diversion of energies and a tragic repetition of racist patriarchal thought. Simone de Beauvoir once said: "It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our lives that we must draw our strength to live and our reasons for acting." Racism and homophobia are real conditions of all our lives in this place

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and time. / urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives there. See whose face it wears. Then the personal as the political can begin to illuminate all our choices.

Note * Comments at "The Personal and the Political Panel," Second Sex Conference, New York, September 29,1979.

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10.11 THE CONSTRUCTION OF EUROCENTRIC CULTURE Samir Amin From Russell Moore (trans.) Eurocentrism, Monthly Review Press, 1989, 89-117. First published as L'eurocentrisme: Critique d'une ideologic, Anthropos, 1988.

1. Modern ideology was not constructed in the abstract ether of the pure capitalist mode of production. In fact, consciousness of the capitalist nature of the modern world came relatively late, as a result of the labor and socialist movements and their critique of nineteenth-century social organization, culminating in Marxism. At the moment when this consciousness emerged, modern ideology already had three centuries of history behind it, from the Renaissance through the Enlightenment. It had therefore expressed itself as a particularly European, rationalist, and secular ideology, while claiming a worldwide scope. The socialist critique, far from forcing bourgeois ideology to take a better measure of its historical scope and social content, led it, beginning in the nineteenth century, to strengthen its culturalist side. The Eurocentric dimension of the dominant ideology was placed even more in relief. This dominant culture invented an "eternal West," unique since the moment of its origin. This arbitrary and mythic construct had as its counterpart an equally artificial conception of the Other (the "Orients" or "the Orient"), likewise constructed on mythic foundations. The product of this Eurocentric vision is the well-known version of "Western" history—a progression from Ancient Greece to Rome to feudal Christian Europe to capitalist Europe—one of the most popular of received ideas. Elementary school books and popular opinion are as or even more important in the creation and diffusion of this construct as the most erudite theses developed to justify the "ancestry" of European culture and civilization. This construct, like the analogous Orientalist construct: (i) removes Ancient Greece from the very milieu in which it unfolded and developed—the Orient—in order to annex Hellenism to Europe arbitrarily; (ii) retains the mark of racism, the fundamental basis on which

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European cultural unity was constructed; (iii) interprets Christianity, also annexed arbitrarily to Europe, as the principal factor in the maintenance of European cultural unity, conforming to an unscientific vision of religious phenomena; (iv) concurrently constructs a vision of the Near East and the more distant Orients on the same racist foundation, again employing an immutable vision of religion. These four elements combined in different ways at different times. For Eurocentrism is not, properly speaking, a social theory, integrating various elements into a global and coherent vision of society and history. It is rather a prejudice that distorts social theories. It draws from its storehouse of components, retaining one or rejecting another according to the ideological needs of the moment. For example, for a long time the European bourgeoisie was distrustful—even contemptuous—of Christianity, and, because of this, amplified the myth of Greece. In what follows, I will examine the four constituent elements of the Eurocentric construct, showing how emphasis has been placed on different elements. 2. The myth of Greek ancestry performs an essential function in the Eurocentric construct. It is an emotional claim, artificially constructed in order to evade the real question—why did capitalism appear in Europe before it did elsewhere?—by replacing it, amidst a panoply of false answers, with the idea that the Greek heritage predisposed Europe to rationality. In this myth, Greece was the mother of rational philosophy, while the "Orient" never succeeded in going beyond metaphysics. The history of so-called Western thought and philosophy (which presupposes the existence of other, diametrically opposed thoughts and philosophies, which it calls Oriental) always begins with Ancient Greece. Emphasis is placed on the variety and conflicts of the philosophical schools, the development of thought free from religious constraints, humanism, and the triumph of reason—all without any reference to the "Orient," whose contribution to Hellenic thought is considered to be nonexistent. According to this view of history, these qualities of Greek thought are taken over by European thought beginning in the Renaissance and come of age in the modern philosophies. The two thousand or so years separating Greek antiquity from the European Renaissance are treated as a long and hazy period of transition in which no one is able to go beyond Ancient Greek thought. Christianity, which is established and conquers Europe during this transition, appears at first as a not very philosophical form of ethics, entangled for a long time in dogmatic quarrels hardly conducive to the development of the mind. It continues with these limitations, until, with the development of scholasticism in the later Middle Ages, it assimilates the newly rediscovered Aristotelianism and, with the Renaissance and Reformation, frees itself from its origins, liberating civil society from the monopoly of religion on thought. Arab-Islamic philosophy is treated in this account as if it had no other function than to transmit the

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Greek heritage to the Renaissance world. Moreover, Islam, in this dominant vision, could not have gone beyond the Hellenic heritage; even if it had attempted to do so, it would have failed badly. This construct, whose origins go back to the Renaissance, filled an essential ideological function in the formation of the honest, upright bourgeois citizen, freed from the religious prejudice of the Middle Ages. At the Sorbonne, as at Cambridge, successive generations of the bourgeois elite were nourished on respect for Pericles, a respect that was even reproduced in elementary school texts. Today this emphasis on Greek ancestry is no longer as strong. Perhaps this is because the fully developed capitalist system has acquired such self-confidence that it can henceforth do without this kind of constructed legitimacy. The construct in question is entirely mythic. Martin Bernal has demonstrated this by retracing the history of what he calls the "fabrication of Ancient Greece."1 He recalls that the Ancient Greeks were quite conscious that they belonged to the cultural area of the ancient Orient. Not only did they recognize what they had learned from the Egyptians and the Phoenicians, but they also did not see themselves as the "anti-Orient" which Eurocentrism portrays them as being. On the contrary, the Greeks claimed that they had Egyptian ancestors—who were perhaps mythical, though that is beside the point. Bernal shows that the nineteenth-century "Hellenomania" was inspired by the racism of the Romantic movement, whose architects were moreover often the same people whom Said cites as the creators of Orientalism. Bernal illustrates how the impulse to remove Ancient Greece from its Levantine context forced linguists into some dubious acrobatics. In fact, up to half of the Greek language was borrowed from the Egyptian and the Phoenician tongues. But linguistics invented a mysterious "Proto-Aryan" language to take the place of this borrowing, thereby safeguarding a myth dear to Eurocentrism, that of the "Aryan purity" of Greece. The North-South split, running through the Mediterranean—which only replaced the East-West division at a late date, as we have seen—is therefore falsely projected backward. This error sometimes yields amusing results. Carthage is a Phoenician city: It is thus classified as "Oriental" and the rivalry between Rome and Carthage is said to prefigure the conquest of the "Maghreban Orient" by imperialist Europe—a curious contradiction in terms since Maghreb in Arabic means West. From the works of apologists for the French colonial conquest to the speeches of Mussolini to the textbooks still in use throughout Europe, this North-South cleavage is presented as permanent, self-evident, and inscribed in geography (and therefore—by implicit false deduction—in history). The annexation of Greece by Europe—first declared by the artists and thinkers of the Renaissance, then forgotten during the two subsequent centuries of Ottoman expansion, and declared anew by Byron and Hugo at the

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CULTURE

moment when the rising imperial powers began to divide their spoils— continues to this day with the decision of the contemporary European Community to make Athens the "cultural capital" of Europe. It is amusing to note that this homage comes at the very moment when, due to the effects of the Common Market, the last vestiges of Hellenic identity are in the process of being effaced by the endless waves of tourists, bearers of homogenizing American mass culture. To point out this false annexation is not to reduce by one iota the importance of the "Greek miracle" in the philosophy of nature, its spontaneous materialism. However, it should be pointed out that this advance was the product of Greece's backwardness, which allowed it to make the transition from the communal mode to the tributary one successfully. Marx, whose intuition was often very keen, well in advance of his time, attributed our sympathy for Greek antiquity to the fact that it recalls our "childhood" (the childhood of all humanity, not just of Europe); Engels never failed to express an analogous sympathy not only toward the "barbarians" of the West, but also for the Iroquois and other native peoples of North America, reminders of our even more distant infancy. Later, many anthropologists—European but not Eurocentric—experienced the same feeling for other so-called "primitive" peoples, undoubtedly for the same reason. 3. The Renaissance is separated from Classical Greece by fifteen centuries of medieval history. How and on what basis is it possible, under these circumstances, to claim continuity in European culture? The nineteenth century invented the racist hypothesis for this purpose. By borrowing the methods of classification of animal species and of Darwinism and transposing them from Linnaeus, Cuvier, and Darwin to Gobineau and Renan, the human "races" were said to inherit innate characteristics that transcend social evolutions. These psychological predispositions were presented as more or less the major source of divergent social evolutions. Linguistics, a new science in formation at that time, found its inspiration for the classification of languages in the methods of the biological sciences and associated the supposedly unique characters of peoples with the characteristics of their languages. The resulting opposition between Indo-European and Semitic (Hebrew and Arab) languages, pompously elevated to a "scientifically established" and indisputable dogma, constitutes one of the best examples of the lucubrations required for the construction of Eurocentrism. The examples could be multiplied: "assertions concerning the innate taste for liberty and free and logical cast of mind of one group, contrasted with the predisposition to servility and the lack of rigor of another," etc; or Renan's claims about the "monstrous and backward" character of Semitic languages, opposed to the "perfection" of the European ones. From these premises, Eurocentrism directly deduced the contrast between Oriental

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philosophies, exclusively directed toward the "search for the absolute," and the humanist and scientific philosophies of "the West" (Ancient Greece and Modern Europe). The conclusions of the racist thesis were also transposed into the domain of religion. For Christianity, after all, like Islam and other religions, is based on a search for the absolute. Moreover, Christianity was born among Orientals before it conquered the West. It thus becomes necessary to propose subtle, yet allegedly fundamental, differences that make it possible to speak of the essences of Christianity and Islam, beyond their historical expressions and transformations, as if these religions had permanent qualities that transcend history. It is amusing to point to the extent to which these so-called intrinsic characters of peoples are associated with various preconceived ideas that change with the fashion of the day. In the nineteenth century, the alleged inferiority of Semitic Orientals is based on their so-called "exuberant sexuality" (an association subsequently transferred to black peoples). Today, with the help of psychoanalysis, the same defects of Orientals are attributed to a particularly strong "sexual repression"! In this particular case, the old European antiSemitic prejudice was given the appearance of scientific seriousness by combining Jews and Arabs in a single category. This racist contrast between Europe and the Semitic Orient was continued with a series of analogous theses, based on the same model of reasoning, that posited similar oppositions between the Europeans and other non-European peoples (blacks and Asiatics). However, the "IndoEuropean" foundation, located at the level of linguistics, was being undermined. Indians, for example, scorned because they are underdeveloped and conquered, speak Indo-European languages. Gradually a progression was made from genetic racism (that is to say, based on biology) to a "geographic" racism (explained by acquired and transmissible traits produced by the geographic milieu). This geographic determinism, widely accepted by politicians, individuals in authority, and popular opinion, has no scientific value whatsoever. Visiting Europe in the fourteenth century, a Europe that was still backward with respect to the Islamic world, the Arab traveller ibn-Batuta—not knowing that the course of history would so thoroughly prove him wrong—simply attributed this lag to the inhospitable European climate! The inverse argument obviously has no greater value. Judgments of this type, which attribute more or less permanent characteristics to a people or group of peoples and consider them to be pertinent elements for explaining their condition and evolution, always proceed from the same superficial method, which consists in drawing totalizing conclusions from single details. Their force depends largely on the detail chosen, which, when it is true and widely recognized, inspires a sweeping conclusion. A more serious analysis must be based on other grounds. The question must first be inverted: Is the alleged defining trait

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the cause or consequence of historical evolution? Then the degree of pertinence of the phenomenon in question must be considered, for it might only be the simple form of expression of a more complex and flexible reality. This mode of reasoning is not limited exclusively to Eurocentrism. Innumerable discourses on the character of the French, the English, or the Germans have been constructed in this same manner, outside of time and social development. "European" identity, constructed to distinguish it from the identity of "Others," leads almost necessarily to a search for these European traits among Europeans themselves. Each nation is defined by its closeness or distance from a "model type." Lord Cromer speaks for the entire British intellectual and ruling class when he proclaims—as if there were evidence to support the judgement—that the English and the Germans (in that order) are more "European" than, and hence obviously superior to, the French and other Latins, as well as the "semi-Asiatic" Russians. Hitler does little more than reverse the order of priority between the English and the Germans, retaining the rest of the discourse. The most primitive form of the racist line is somewhat discredited these days. Genetic racism claims that biological traits, sometimes called "racial" characteristics, are the source of cultural diversity and create a hierarchy within that diversity. From the nineteenth century until the rise of Hitler, Europe was steeped in such inanities, even in its educated milieux. But a diluted form of racism persists, assigning durable transsocial effects to conditioning by geography and ecology. More diluted still is cultural racism, which holds that the individuals, whatever their origins, are malleable and therefore capable of assimilating another culture: the black child raised in France becomes French. 4. Recent developments since the Second World War have helped reinforce a sense of common European identity and reduced the emphasis that was previously placed on contrasts between European nations. Simultaneously, racism, especially of the genetic sort, has lost the scientific prestige that it previously had in cultured circles. Europe needed to find a new basis for its collective identity. Europe's predominantly Christian character offered a way out of this double crisis of European nationalism and racism. To my mind, the Christian revival of our period is, at least in part, an unconscious response to this situation. But in order for Christianity to become the foundation of European identity, a sweeping, totalizing and historical interpretation had to be developed, stressing its alleged timeless characteristics and opposing it to other religions and philosophies, such as Islam and Hinduism. The theoretical presupposition had to be made that these characteristics were pertinent, in the sense that they could constitute the basis for an explanation of social evolutions.

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This choice of Christianity as the basis of Europeanness obviously posed some thorny questions for social theory in general and the Eurocentric construct in particular. Since Christianity was not born on the banks of the Loire or the Rhine, it was necessary to assimilate its original form— which was Oriental, owing to the milieu in which it was established—to Eurocentric teleology. The Holy Family and the Egyptian and Syrian Church Fathers had to be made European. Non-Christian Ancient Greece also had to be assimilated into this lineage, by accentuating an alleged contrast between Greece and the ancient Orient and inventing commonalities between these civilized Greeks and the still barbaric Europeans. The core of genetic racism therefore remains. But above all, the uniqueness of Christianity had to be magnified and adorned with particular and exclusive virtues that, by simple teleology, account for the superiority of the West and its conquest of other peoples. The Eurocentric construct was thus founded on the same interpretation of religion used by all religious fundamentalisms. Simultaneously, the West sees itself as Promethean par excellence, in contrast with other civilizations. Faced with the threat of an untamed nature, primitive humanity had two choices: Blend into nature or deny it. Hinduism, for example, chose the first attitude, which renders human impotence tolerable by reducing humankind to a part of nature. In contrast, Judaism and its later Christian and Islamic heirs proclaimed the original separation of humankind and nature; the superiority of humankind, made in the image of God; and the submission of nature, soulless and reduced to the object of human action. This thesis had the potential to develop into a systematic quest for the domestication of nature; but, at the first stage of development of the Semitic religions, it only formed an ideal and, with no real means for acting on nature, an appeal is made instead to a protecting God. Christianity also faced this decisive choice, all the more so because it developed in the heart of a advanced, complex society in crisis, leading it to develop the second dimension of religion. The same is true for Islam, especially once it has the responsibility of organizing a new empire. The West's claim contains a grain of truth, since capitalist civilization is obviously Promethean. But Prometheus was Greek, not Christian. The Eurocentric, so-called Judeo-Christian, thesis glosses over what I have tried to highlight, that in the Hellenistic synthesis the Greek contribution is situated precisely at this level: The philosophy of nature calls for action upon nature, in contrast with metaphysics, which inspires a passive attitude of reflection. From this point of view, Christian or Islamic metaphysics is not fundamentally different from the metaphysics of Hinduism, for example. The Egyptian contribution to the Hellenistic construct (in its successive versions up to and including Islam) lies in the accent it places on the moral responsibility of individuals. Christianity is more marked, in

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a certain respect, by this last contribution, which it develops within universalist ethics stressing the love for human beings and God, than it is by Hellenistic Prometheanism, which is forgotten in the long feudal transition period in the Christian West and does not genuinely reappear until the Renaissance. In Islam, on the other hand, because Arab-Islamic civilization at its height is more advanced than the civilization of Western feudalism, the two contributions remain balanced. One last remark concerning the ideological veil through which Europe sees itself: Christianity, by which Europe defines itself, is, like Hellenism and Islam, Oriental in origin. But the West has appropriated it, to the point that, in the popular imagination, the Holy Family is blond. It does not matter. This appropriation is not only perfectly legitimate, but has even shown itself to be fruitful. Corresponding to the peripheral character of the European feudal mode of production, this peripheral, appropriated version of Christianity has revealed itself to be remarkably flexible, allowing a rapid passage to the capitalist stage. 5. "Orientalism" is not the sum of the works of Western specialists and scholars who have studied non-European societies: This clarification is necessary to avoid misunderstandings and quarrels. This term refers to the ideological construction of a mythical "Orient," whose characteristics are treated as immutable traits defined in simple opposition to the characteristics of the "Occidental" world. The image of this "opposite" is an essential element of Eurocentrism. Edward Said has demonstrated the influence and dominance of this construct. The precision of his argument frees us from having to reproduce its details here.2 Once it became capitalist and developed the power to conquer, Europe granted itself the right to represent others—notably "the Orient"—and even to judge them. This right is not in itself objectionable, except from a provincialist standpoint. It is even necessary to go further. "The Orient" was incapable of representing itself with the same force that Europeans, armed with bourgeois thought, could. The Chinese of the Confucian Empire and the Arabs of the Abbassid Caliphate, like the Europeans of the Middle Ages, could analyze their own society only with the conceptual tools at their disposal, tools defined and limited by their own development. But the representation that capitalist Europe constructs of others is, in turn, limited by the nature of capitalist development. This development was polarizing: It transformed Europe (along with North America and Japan) into the centers of the system and reduced other regions to the status of peripheries. European representations of others remain marked by this polarization, and in fact serve as a means of justifying it. Orientalism merits reproach for the simple reason that it produced false judgments. The first task for anyone who wishes to construct a genuine universalism is to detect these errors in order to determine their origins. The critique of Orientalism that Edward Said has produced has the

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fault of not having gone far enough in certain respects, and having gone too far in others. Not far enough to the extent that Said is content with denouncing Eurocentric prejudice without positively proposing another system of explanation for facts which must be accounted for. Too far, to the extent that he suggests that the vision of Europeans was already Eurocentric in the Middle Ages. This error by Said, which Maxime Rodinson has corrected by distinguishing earlier European visions of the Islamic Orient from those of the triumphant Eurocentrism of the nineteenth century, illustrates the danger of applying the concept of Eurocentrism too freely. It also shows that Said has not freed himself entirely from provincialism, leading Sadek Jalal el-Azm to qualify his analysis as "inverted Orientalism."3 Complementary to the right of Europeans to analyze others is the equal right of others to analyze the West. The universal right to analyze and critique entails dangers, to be sure, whose risk must nevertheless be assumed. Not only the danger of being mistaken, due to ignorance or conceptual shortcomings. But also the danger of not knowing how to take the exact measure of the various sensibilities engaged by any given statement and, as a consequence, the danger of becoming involved in false debates where vigorous polemics mask a mutual lack of understanding and impede the advancement of ideas. Propositions concerning the cultural dimension of social reality lend themselves to this type of danger. There is always the risk of colliding with convictions situated on, for example, the terrain of religious beliefs. If the goal is to advance the project of universalism, this risk must be accepted. It is a right and a duty to analyze texts, whether or not they are considered sacred, and to examine the interpretations that different societies have made of those texts. It is a right and a duty to explore analogies and differences, suggest origins and inspirations, and to point out evolutions. I am persuaded that no one's faith will be shaken as a result. By definition, faith answers needs to which science cannot respond. Edward Said, for example, cites with disapproval a European Orientalist who compared Islam to the Christian Arian heresy.4 The analysis of religions used by the social sciences is not the same as that employed by theology, even comparative theology. The question is whether a given comparison is plausible and well argued or erroneous. It must be considered at the level of science, which considers religion to be a social fact. In his study on Shiism and Sufism, the Egyptian and practicing Moslem Kamel Mustapha el-Chibi analyzes, without any discomfort, the interpenetrations of Islam, Christianity, and the other religions of the Orient.5 To the extent that he denies the right to make this kind of comparison, Said falls, in my opinion, into the error of provincialism. 6. In imposing itself on a worldwide scale, capitalism, born in Europe, created a demand for universalism as much at the level of scientific analy-

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sis of society as at the level of elaboration of a human project capable of transcending its historical limits. Are the dominant ideology and culture produced by capitalism capable of responding to this challenge? To answer this question, it is obviously necessary at the outset to discover the axioms and theorems on which this ideology is founded and to uncover their corollaries in every domain of social thought—from the conceptions of the contemporary world system that it inspires ("underdevelopment" and "strategies of development") to its visions of world history—just as it is necessary to understand fully the historical limits and contradictions of the system. The dominant ideology and culture of the capitalist system cannot be reduced solely to Eurocentrism. Eurocentrism is only one dimension of the prevailing ideology, though one that has developed like an invasive cancer suppressing the essential force—that is to say, economism—in the hidden recesses of the corpulent body it has produced. It has replaced rational explanations of history with partial pseudo-theories, patched together and even self-contradictory at times, but which nevertheless function admirably in the construction of a myth that reassures Europeans, ridding their subconscious of any complex about their responsibilities. But if Eurocentrism does not have, strictly speaking, the status of a theory, neither is it simply the sum of the prejudices, errors, and blunders of Westerners with respect to other peoples. If that were the case, it would only be one of the banal forms of ethnocentrism shared by all peoples at all times. Ignorance and mistrust of others, even chauvinism and xenophobia, testify to nothing more than the limits of the evolution of all societies that have existed until now. The Eurocentric distortion that marks the dominant capitalist culture negates the universalist ambition on which that culture claims to be founded. As has been noted, Eurocentrism is a relatively modern construct. Bourgeois Enlightenment culture had asserted itself not only out of universalist aspirations, but also as a counterbalance to the universalist ambitions of Christianity. The culture of the Enlightenment had no particular sympathy for the Christian Middle Ages, a period it qualified as obscurantist. Its praise for rediscovered Graeco-Roman antiquity was, at least in part, intended not so much as a means of constructing a new sense of European identity, but as a way of denouncing the obscurantism of the Christian church. But Enlightenment culture confronted a real contradiction that it could not overcome by its own means. For it was selfevident that nascent capitalism which had produced Enlightenment culture had unfolded in Europe. Moreover, this embryonic new world was in fact superior, both materially and in many other aspects, to earlier societies, both in its own territory (feudal Europe) and in other regions of the world (the neighboring Islamic Orient and the more distant Orients, which had just been discovered). The culture of the Enlightenment was unable to

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reconcile the fact of this superiority with its universalist ambition. On the contrary, it gradually drifted toward racism as an explanation for the contrast between it and other cultures. At the same time, it had little success in harmonizing its original European cosmopolitanism with the nationalist conflicts on which the crystallization of European capitalism came to be based. The culture of the Enlightenment thus drifted, beginning in the nineteenth century, in nationalistic directions, impoverished in comparison with its earlier cosmopolitanism. Thus the social theory produced by capitalism gradually reached the conclusion that the history of Europe was exceptional, not in the sense that the modern world (that is to say, capitalism) was constituted there, which in itself is an undeniable fact, but because it could not have been born elsewhere. This being the case, capitalism in its Western model formed the superior prototype of social organization, a model that could be reproduced in other societies that have not had the good fortune of having initiated this superior form on the condition that these societies free themselves of the obstacles posed by their particular cultural traits, responsible for their backwardness. The prevailing capitalist ideology thinks that this view restores the earlier universalist aspirations of Christianity, against which it had revolted in an earlier time. For Christianity, like Islam, Buddhism, and a few other religions, had been nurtured on a universalist yearning. These religions hold that the human being is by nature a creature whose vocation is identical from one individual to another. By an act of deep-seated conviction, anyone can become a human being of the highest quality, regardless of his or her origins and material and social situation. Undoubtedly, religious societies have not always functioned according to this principle of universalism: Social hypocrisy (justifying inequality) and intolerant fanaticism with regard to other religions and nonbelievers, or simply nonconformists, have been and remain the most frequent rule. But let us stay at the level of principles. The universalist aspirations of Christianity and capitalism, Europeans believed, could unite in the common expression of "Western Christian civilization." Eurocentrism is, like all dominant social phenomena, easy to grasp in the multiplicity of its daily manifestations but difficult to define precisely. Its manifestations, like those of other prevailing social phenomena, are expressed in the most varied of areas: day-to-day relationships between individuals, political information and opinion, general views concerning society and culture, social science. These expressions are sometimes violent, leading all the way to racism, and sometimes subtle. They express themselves in the idiom of popular opinion as well as in the erudite languages of specialists on politics, the Third World, economics, history, theology, and all the formulations of social science. I will therefore begin with this set of common ideas and opinions transmitted by the media, on which

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a broad consensus exists in the West, in order to summarize the Eurocentric vision. The European West is not only the world of material wealth and power, including military might; it is also the site of the triumph of the scientific spirit, rationality, and practical efficiency, just as it is the world of tolerance, diversity of opinions, respect for human rights and democracy, concern for equality—at least the equality of rights and opportunities— and social justice. It is the best of the worlds that have been known up until this time. This first thesis, which simply repeats facts which are in themselves hardly debatable, is reinforced by the corollary thesis that other societies—the socialist East and the underdeveloped South—have nothing better to offer on any of the levels mentioned (wealth, democracy, or even social justice). On the contrary, these societies can only progress to the extent that they imitate the West. And this is what they are doing, in any case, even if they are doing it slowly and imperfectly, because of elements of resistance based on outmoded dogmatisms (like Marxism) or anachronistic motivations (like tribalism or religious fundamentalism). Consequently, it becomes impossible to contemplate any other future for the world than its progressive Europeanization. For the most optimistic, this Europeanization, which is simply the diffusion of a superior model, functions as a necessary law, imposed by the force of circumstances. The conquest of the planet by Europe is thus justified, to the extent that it has roused other peoples from their fatal lethargy. For others, non-European peoples have an alternative choice: either they can accept Europeanization and internalize its demands, or, if they decide against it, they will lead themselves to an impasse that inevitably leads to their decline. The progressive Westernization of the world is nothing more than the expression of the triumph of the humanist universalism invented by Europe. The Westernization of the world would impose on everyone the adoption of the recipes for European superiority: free enterprise and the market, secularism and pluralist electoral democracy. It should be noted that this prescription assumes the superiority of the capitalist system, as well as this system's capacity to respond, if not to every possible challenge in the realm of the absolute, at least to all potential demands on the conceivable horizon of the future. Marxism and the socialist regimes that it has inspired are only avatars of history, brief detours in the forward march toward Westernization and capitalism. Under these circumstances, the European West has little to learn from others. The most decisive evolutions, destined to shape the future of humanity, continue to have their origin in West, from scientific and technological progress to social advances like the recognition of the equality of men and women, from concern with ecology to the critique of the fragmented organization of labor. The tumultuous events that shake the

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rest of the world—socialist revolutions, anti-imperialist wars of liberation—are, despite the more radical appearance of the ambitions that nourish them, in fact less decisive for the future than the progress being made almost imperceptibly in the West. These tumultuous events are only the vicissitudes through which the peoples concerned have been compelled to pass in order to attempt to correct their backwardness. The composite picture of Eurocentrism presented here is, by force of circumstances, simplistic, since it only retains the common denominator of varied and sometimes contradictory opinions. The political Left and Right in the West, for example, claim to have, if not radically different conceptions of economic efficiency, social justice, and democracy, at least widely divergent views of the means necessary for progress in these areas. These differences nevertheless remain inscribed in the general framework that has been described here. This vision of the world rests on two axioms that have not always been correctly described, both of which are erroneous in their principal formulations. The first is that internal factors peculiar to each society are decisive for their comparative evolution. The second is that the Western model of developed capitalism can be generalized to the entire planet. No one contests the self-evident fact that worldwide capitalist expansion has been accompanied by a flagrant inequality among its partners. But are these the result of a series of accidents due for the most part to various detrimental internal factors that have slowed the process of 4 'catching up?" Or is this inequality the product of capitalist expansion itself and impossible to surpass within the framework of this system? The prevailing opinion is in fact that this inequality is only the result of a series of accidents, and that, consequently, the polarization between centers and peripheries can be resolved within the framework of capitalism. This opinion finds expression in the claim that "people are responsible for their condition." Is it not obvious that this simple and comfortable affirmation is analogous to the bourgeois invocation of the responsibility of individuals, designed to attribute the fate of the proletarian to his or her own deficiencies, disregarding objective social conditions? At this point, generalizations are no longer sufficient for the development of social theory. For here two social theories and explanations of history collide which have been presented as being different, even contradictory. Nevertheless, despite this apparent divergence, we again find the Eurocentric consensus at work. For example, everyone knows that per capita income is fifteen times higher in the West than in the Third World. Bourgeois social theories and the dominant versions of Marxism interpret this fact in the same way, concluding that the productivity of labor in the West is fifteen times greater on average than at the periphery. This commonly held opinion, shared by the general public, is greatly mistaken and leads to fallacious conclusions.6

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This consensus rests on the axiom that the achievements of different partners in the world system depend principally on "internal factors" that are favorable or unfavorable to their development within the world system, if it were possible for backward societies to "catch up" as soon as their internal factors evolved in a more propitious direction. As if integration into the world system had not rendered the internal factors unfavorable, when in fact the linkage of external factors and internal factors generally operates in a negative way, accounting for polarization of centers and peripheries. It is claimed, for example, that the West's progress was the result of class struggles, which imposed a less unequal distribution of national income and democracy. This proposition is certainly true, if somewhat out of style, given the success of right-wing ideology in asserting that inequality was the driving force of progress. But a second proposition cannot be derived from the first: namely, that the development of similar struggles at the periphery would bring about the same result. For the international class alliances by means of which capital rules on a global scale make the development of progressive internal class alliances, particularly those of the type that allowed European society to advance, extremely difficult and improbable. In reality, internal factors take on a decisive role in societal evolution only when a peripheralized society can free itself through delinking from the domination of international value. This implies the break-up of the transnational alliance through which the subordinated local comprador classes submit to the demands of international capital. As long as this delinking does not take place, it is futile to speak of the decisive role of internal factors, which is nothing more than a potential, and artificial to separate these factors from worldwide factors, which remaindominant. The dominant ideology under consideration does not only propose a vision of the world. It is also a political project on a global scale: a project of homogenization through imitation and catching up. But this project is impossible. Isn't the proof of this impossibility contained in the popular opinion that the extension of the Western way of life and consumption to the 5 billion human inhabitants of the planet would run against absolute obstacles, ecological among others? What is the point, then, in exhorting others, "Do as we do," if it is obvious from the start that it is impossible? Common sense is sufficient proof that it is impossible to imagine a world of 5 to 10 billion people benefitting from comparable high standards of living without gigantic transformations at every level and in every region of the globe, the West included. My purpose is not to characterize the necessary mode of organization of this ideal homogenized world, as socialist, for example. Let us simply acknowledge that such a world could not be managed the way it is at the present time. Within the framework of Eurocentrism's impossible project, the

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ideology of the market—with its democratic complement, assumed to be almost a given—has become a veritable theology, bordering on the grotesque. For the progressive unification of the commodities and capital markets alone, without being accompanied by gigantic migrations of populations, has absolutely no chance of equalizing the economic conditions in which different peoples live. Four centuries of history of capitalist expansion have already demonstrated this fact. The last thirty years, during which the "ideology of development," founded on the fundamental hypotheses of Eurocentrism, has inspired redoubled efforts to efface what it considered to be the negative effects of colonization, have not brought about even the smallest reduction in the North-South gap. Eurocentrism has quite simply ignored the fact that the demographic explosion of Europe, caused, like the analogous explosion in the Third World, by capitalist transformation, was accompanied by massive emigration to the Americans and a few other regions of the world. Without this massive emigration, Europe would have had to undertake its agricultural and industrial revolutions in conditions of demographic pressure analogous to those in the Third World today: The number of people of European ancestry living outside of Europe is currently twice the size of the population of the migrants' countries of origin. The litany of the market cure, invoked at every turn, comes to a dead halt here: To suggest that in a henceforth unified world, human beings, like commodities and capital, should be at home everywhere is quite simply unacceptable. The most fanatical partisans of the market suddenly find at this point an argument for the protectionism that they fustigate elsewhere as a matter of principle. Is it necessary to moderate our indictment? Negative external factors are not always ignored. Within left-wing ideological currents in the West, it is recognized that the colonization which accompanied the European expansion favored European progress. If a few extremists only see the "civilizing role of colonization," that does not mean that this opinion is common to all of Western thought. Not everyone denies the brutality and devastating effects of the slave trade and the massacre of the American indigenous peoples. It is nevertheless the case that the dominant currents of Western social thought stress the internal transformations of European society and are content to note that identical transformations were not realized elsewhere, placing the blame almost exclusively on factors internal to these non-European societies. The recognition of the role of colonialism in the unequal development of capitalism is not enough. For, despite this recognition, the dominant view is based on a refusal to accept the principle that the centersperipheries contradiction constitutes the fundamental contradiction of the modern world. Certainly, until 1914 the world system was built on the basis of a centers-peripheries polarization that was accepted de facto at the time. Since then, this polarization is no longer accepted as such. Socialist

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revolutions and the successful independence struggles in former colonies are proof of this change. To the extent that modern media places the aspiration for a better fate than that which is reserved for them in the system within the reach of all peoples, frustration mounts each day, making this contrast the most explosive contradiction of our world. Those who stubbornly refuse to call into question the system that fosters this contrast and frustration are simply burying their heads in the sand. The world of "economists," who administer our societies as they go about the business of "managing the world economy," is part of this artificial world. For the problem is not one of management, but resides in the objective necessity for a reform of the world system; failing this, the only way out is through the worst barbarity, the genocide of entire peoples or a worldwide conflagration. I therefore charge Eurocentrism with an inability to see anything other than the lives of those who are comfortably installed in the modern world. Modern culture claims to be founded on humanist universalism. In fact, in its Eurocentric version, it negates any such universalism. For Eurocentrism has brought with it the destruction of peoples and civilizations who have resisted its spread. In this sense, Nazism, far from being an aberration, always remains a latent possibility, for it is only the extreme formulation of the theses of Eurocentrism. If there ever were an impasse, it is that in which Eurocentrism encloses contemporary humanity. The dream of progress within the context of a "single world economy" remains impossible. That is why, in the conclusion of Class and Nation, in arguing that the centers/peripheries contradiction, immanent to actually existing capitalism, is insurmountable within the framework of this system, I suggested that the reconstruction of an egalitarian world would require a long transition in order to break up the world economy. Proposing an analogy with the Roman Empire, I argued that—just as the centralization of tribute on a wide scale throughout the Empire became an obstacle to a process that required feudal fragmentation, the condition for the subsequent recentralization on capitalist foundations—the capitalist centralization of surplus has today become the obstacle to the progress of peoples who are its victims. "Delinking," understood in this context, is the only reasonable response to the challenge. Therefore, socialist experiments and the efforts of Third World countries must be analyzed and appraised in some other way than by the yardstick of Eurocentrism. The soothing discourse that declares, "They could have done as we (Westerners) did; they did not, it is their fault," eliminates from the outset the real problems encountered by the peoples who are victims of capitalist expansion. The Eurocentric dimension of the dominant ideology constitutes a veritable paradigm of Western social science which, as Thomas Kuhn observes about all paradigms, is internalized to the point that it most often operates without anyone noticing it.7 This is why many specialists, historians, and

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intellectuals can reject particular expressions of the Eurocentric construct without being embarrassed by the incoherence of the overall vision that results. Some will agree that Greece does not form the cradle of Europe; others, that Christian universalism is not different from that of other religions; still others will refuse to let themselves be locked in the OccidentOrient dichotomy. I do not contest this nor harbor any intention of making a "collective" judgment. I am only claiming that if the general laws governing the evolution of all segments of humanity are not clarified, the way is left open for the false Eurocentric ideas. This paradigm must therefore be contrasted with another, founded on explicit hypotheses derived from general social laws, that simultaneously accounts for the precocious advance of Europe and the challenges that face the contemporary world as a result of this advance. This goal will undoubtedly seem ambitious to some, even if I am not attempting to propose a complete formulation of a system to replace the current one. I simply hope that the reflections proposed here will constitute a useful contribution to the elaboration of a universalism liberated from the limits of Eurocentrism. Resistance to the critique of Eurocentrism is always extreme, for we are here entering the realm of the taboo. The calling into question of the Eurocentric dimension of the dominant ideology is more difficult to accept even than a critical challenge to its economic dimension. For the critique of Eurocentrism directly calls into question the position of the comfortable classes of this world. This resistance is made in multiple ways. Among them is the conceptual vulgarization to which I have alluded. But there is also the recourse to an alleged realism, since, in effect, the socialist East and the underdeveloped South have not yet succeeded in proposing a better model of society and sometimes even give the impression of abandoning such an attempt in favor of rallying to the Western model. The shock provoked by this apparent adherence to the Western model has been all the greater since it has come after a long period in which Stalinism and Maoism each gave the impression that they had found the definitive answer to the question of the construction of socialism. The search for another road than the capitalist one is therefore, apparently, Utopian. Allow me to suggest that the Utopians are, on the contrary, those who obstinately pursue an objective—the Europeanization of the world—that is clearly impossible. Delinking is in fact the only realistic course of action. It is necessary to recognize, however, what this course entails and what hardships it imposes over the long phase of transition that it requires. It also must be understood that delinking hinges on equally necessary change in the West, as part of a total reconstruction on a global scale. In other words, patience is required, as well as a vision that extends over a much longer term than that implicitly presented by the media.

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Notes 1 Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization. Vol. 1: The Fabrication of Ancient Greece 1785-1985 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987). 2 See Said, Orientalism. 3 Sadek Jalal el-Azm, Orientalism and Inverted Orientalism [in Arabic] (Beirut, 1981). 4 Said, pp. 62-63. 5 Kamel Mustapha el-Chibi, Shiism and Sufism [in Arabic] (Beirut and Cairo, 1982). 6 For further discussion of the fallacious character of the discourse on underdevelopment, see my observations in Class and Nation, Historically and in the Current Crisis (New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1980) pp. 131-248; The Law of Value and Historical Materialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978), pp. 19-36, 57-82, and 107-125; and Delinking (London: Zed Books, forthcoming). 7 Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press; 1970).

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10.12 HISTORY INSIDE OUT The Argument J.M. Blaut From The Colonizer's Model of the World: Geographical Diffusionism History, Guildford Press, 1993,1-49

and Eurocentric

The purpose of this book is to undermine one of the most powerful beliefs of our time concerning world history and world geography. This belief is the notion that European civilization—"The West"—has had some unique historical advantage, some special quality of race or culture or environment or mind or spirit, which gives this human community a permanent superiority over all other communities, at all times in history and down to the present. The belief is both historical and geographical. Europeans are seen as the "makers of history." Europe eternally advances, progresses, modernizes. The rest of the world advances more sluggishly, or stagnates: it is "traditional society." Therefore, the world has a permanent geographical center and a permanent periphery: an Inside and an Outside. Inside leads, Outside lags. Inside innovates, Outside imitates. This belief is diffusionism, or more precisely Eurocentric diffusionism. It is a theory about the way cultural processes tend to move over the surface of the world as a whole. They tend to flow out of the European sector and toward the non-European sector. This is the natural, normal, logical, and ethical flow of culture, of innovation, of human causality. Europe, eternally, is Inside. Non-Europe is Outside. Europe is the source of most diffusions; non-Europe is the recipient.1 Diffusionism lies at the very root of historical and geographical scholarship. Some parts of the belief have been questioned in recent years, but its most fundamental tenets remain unchallenged, and so the belief as a whole has not been uprooted or very much weakened by modern scholarship. The most important tenet of diffusionism is the theory of "the

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autonomous rise of Europe," sometimes (rather more grandly) called the idea of "the European Miracle." It is the idea that Europe was more advanced and more progressive than all other regions prior to 1492, prior, that is, to the beginning of the period of colonialism, the period in which Europe and non-Europe came into intense interaction. If one believes this to be the case—and most modern scholars seem to believe it to be the case—then it must follow that the economic and social modernization of Europe is fundamentally a result of Europe's internal qualities, not of interaction with the societies of Africa, Asia, and America after 1492. Therefore: the main building blocks of modernity must be European. Therefore: colonialism cannot have been really important for Europe's modernization. Therefore: colonialism must mean, for the Africans, Asians, and Americans, not spoliation and cultural destruction but, rather, the receipt-by-diffusion of European civilization: modernization. This book will analyze and criticize Eurocentric diffusionism as a general body of ideas, and will try to undermine the more concrete theory of the autonomous rise of Europe. The first chapter of the book discusses the nature and history of diffusionism. Chapter 2 analyzes the theory of the autonomous rise of Europe as a body of propositions about European superiority (and "the European miracle"), then tries to disprove these propositions, one after the other. Chapter 3 discusses world history and historical geography prior to 1492, attempting to show that Europe was not superior to other civilizations and regions in those times. Chapter 4 argues that colonialism was the basic process after 1492, which led to the selective rise of Europe, the modernization or development of Europe (and outlying Europeanized culture areas like the United States), and the underdevelopment of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Chapter 4 also argues that the conquest of America and thereafter the expansion of European colonialism is not to be explained in terms of any internal characteristics of Europe, but instead reflects the mundane realities of location. The chain of argument in Chapters 2, 3, and 4, as a whole, therefore, is an attempt to show that Europe did not have historical priority—historical superiority—over what we now call the Third World. This may seem to be too ambitious a project for one small book. I am really making just one claim. I am asserting that a fundamental and rather explicit error has been made in our conventional past thinking about geography and history, and this error has distorted many fields of thought and action. I am going to present enough evidence to show that the belief in Eurocentric diffusionism and Europe's historical superiority or priority is not convincing: not well grounded in the facts of history and geography, although firmly grounded in Western culture. It is in a sense folklore.

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The tunnel of time If you had gone to school in Europe or Anglo-America 150 years ago, around the middle of the nineteenth century, you would have been taught a very curious kind of history. You would have learned, for one thing, that every important thing that ever happened to humanity happened in one part of the world, the region we will call "Greater Europe," meaning the geographical continent of Europe itself, plus (for ancient times only) an enlargement of it to the southeast, the "Bible Lands"—from North Africa to Mesopotamia—plus (for modern times only) the countries of European settlement overseas. You would have been taught that God created Man in this region: the Garden of Eden was mentioned as the starting point of human history in typical world history textbooks of the period, and these textbooks placed Eden at various points between the shores of the Mediterranean Sea and the mountains of Inner Asia. Some of your teachers would have also claimed that only the people of this region are really human: God created the people of other places as a different, nonhuman, or rather infrahuman, species. And all of your teachers of science as well as history would have agreed that non-Europeans are not as intelligent, not as honorable, and (for the most part) not as courageous as Europeans: God made them inferior. If you had asked your teachers why Europeans are more human and more intelligent than everyone else you would perhaps have been chastised for asking such a question. You would have been told that a Christian God created and now manages the world, and it would be both silly and blasphemous to suggest that He might show the same favor to non-Europeans, non-Christians, that He does to those people who worship the True God and moreover worship Him with the proper sacrament. If you had been studying geography as well as history back in the middle of the nineteenth century, you would indeed have learned something about the non-European world. The people living in Africa and Asia would have been depicted not only as inferior but as in some sense evil. They are the people who refused to accept God's grace and so have fallen from His favor. Africans are thus cruel savages, for whom the best possible fate is to be put to useful work, and Christianized. Chinese and Indians for some unknown reason managed to build barbaric civilizations of their own, but because they are not Europeans and not Christians, their civilizations long ago began to stagnate and regress. And, for all their splendor, these never were real civilizations: they are cruel "Oriental despotisms." Only Europeans know true freedom. Ideas of course change, and if you had gone to school some 50 years later, around the turn of the century, you would have been taught a much more secular form of history, and it would have had a strongly evolutionary (though not yet Darwinian) flavor. You would have learned that the

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earth is very old, that life is old, and that our species itself has been around for a long time. But everything important still happened in Europe (that is, in Greater Europe). The first true man, Cro-Magnon, lived in Europe. Agriculture was invented in Greater Europe (perhaps in the continent, perhaps in the Bible Lands, Europe's self-proclaimed cultural hearth). You would have been told in world history class that the first barbaric beginnings of civilization occurred in the Bible Lands. There in the Bible Lands emerged the two Caucasian peoples who make all of history. The Semites invented cities and empires, and gave us monotheism and Christianity, but stopped at that point and then sank back into Oriental decadence. The Aryans or Indo-Europeans, freedom-loving though backward folk, built on these foundations, migrating from southeastern Europe or western Asia into and through geographical Europe, and creating the first genuinely civilized society, that of ancient Greece. Then the Romans raised civilization to its next level, and thereafter world history marched inexorably northwestward. If your school was in England you would have been told that History marched from "the Orient" (the Bible Lands) to Athens, to Rome, to feudal France, and finally to modern England—a kind of westbound Orient Express. By now a secular picture of the geography of non-Europe had begun to be taught in European schools. Africans continued to be described as savages and Oriental societies as decadent and despotic. But important changes had taken place in the relations between Europe and non-Europe during the course of the nineteenth century, and by 1900 a particular theory about this relationship had become fixed in popular discourse and was now taught in schools as standard world geography. This was the theory (described later in this chapter) according to which non-Europeans can and do rise to a civilizational level, if not equal to that of Europeans at least near that level, under European tutelage, that is, under European colonial control. Suppose we move forward another half century, to the history and geography taught around the end of World War II. Not much change. The first True Man is still the Cro-Magnon of Europe. Agriculture was invented in the Bible Lands; so too was barbaric civilization. True civilization still marches from Athens to Rome to Paris to London, and perhaps sets sail then for New York. Non-Europeans do not contribute much to world history, although they begin to do so as a result of European influence. (Colonial peoples learn from their tutors; Japanese imitate successfully, and so on.) Europeans are still brighter, better, and bolder than everyone else.2 We can sum all of this up with an image that will prove quite useful in this book. This is the idea that the world has an Inside and an Outside. World history thus far has been, basically, the history of Inside. Outside has been, basically, irrelevant. History and historical geography as it was

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taught, written, and thought by Europeans down to the time of World War II, and still (as we will see) in most respects today, lies, as it were, in a tunnel of time. The walls of this tunnel are, figuratively, the spatial boundaries of Greater Europe. History is a matter of looking back or down in this European tunnel of time and trying to decide what happened where, when, and why. "Why" of course calls for connections among historical events, but only among the events that lie in the European tunnel. Outside its walls everything seems to be rockbound, timeless, changeless tradition. I will call this way of thinking "historical tunnel vision," or simply "tunnel history." The older form of tunnel history simply ignored the non-European world: typical textbooks and historical atlases devoted very few pages to areas outside of Greater Europe (that is, Europe and countries of European settlement overseas plus, for ancient history and the Crusades, the Near East), until one came to the year 1492. Non-Europe (Africa, Asia east of the Bible Lands, Latin America, Oceania) received significant notice only as the venue of European colonial activities, and most of what was said about this region was essentially the history of empire.3 Not only was the great bulk of attention devoted to Greater Europe in these older textbooks and historical atlases, but world history was described as flowing steadily westward with the passage of time, from the Bible Lands to eastern Mediterranean Europe, to northwestern Europe. This pattern is readily discernible if we notice the salience of places mentioned in these sources, that is, the frequency of place-name mentions for different regions at different periods. For the earliest period, place-name mentions cluster in the Bible Lands and the extreme eastern Mediterranean. For successively later periods, place-name mentions cluster farther and farther to the west and northwest, finally clustering in northwestern Europe for the period after about A.D. 1000: this is the "Orient Express" pattern to which we referred previously. After World War II, however, history textbooks began to exhibit another, more subtle, form of tunnel history. The non-European world was now beginning to insert itself very firmly in European consciousness, in the aftermath of the war with Japan and in the midst of the intensified decolonization struggles, the Civil Rights movement in the United States, and the like. Most newer textbooks enlarged the discussion of nonEuropean history, and said something about the historical achievements of non-European cultures. Most textbooks gave a flavor of historicity, of evolutionary progress, to non-European history, thus departing from the older pattern, which dismissed these societies as stagnant and nonevolving. Asian societies were now described as having had an evolutionary motion, though a motion slower than that of Europe. Africa was still described as stagnant, history-less, prior to the colonial era. More salience was given to Asia. However, Africa and the Western Hemisphere still received little

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mention for eras prior to 1492. The pattern of place-name mentions in most (not all) texts and historical atlases still suggested a flow to the west and northwest, from the Near East to western Europe. And tunnel history dominated most textbooks in the most important matter of all, the question of "why," of explanation. Historical progress still came about because Europeans invented or initiated most of the crucial innovations, which only later spread out to the rest of the world. So the textbooks depicted a world in which historical causes were to be found basically inside the European tunnel of time, although historical effects were to be seen basically everywhere.4 Textbooks are an important window into a culture; more than just books, they are semiofficial statements of exactly what the opinionforming elite of the culture want the educated youth of that culture to believe to be true about the past and present world.5 As we have seen, European and Anglo-American history textbooks assert that most of the causes of historical progress occur, or originate, in the European sector of the world. Textbooks of the early and middle nineteenth century tended to give a rather openly religious grounding for this Eurocentric tunnel history. In later textbooks the Bible is no longer considered a source of historical fact, but causality seems to be rooted in an implicit theory that combines a belief that Christian peoples make history with a belief that white peoples make history, the whole becoming a theory that it is natural for Europeans to innovate and progress and for non-Europeans to remain stagnant and unchanging ("traditional"), until, like Sleeping Beauty, they are awakened by the Prince. This view still, in the main, prevails, although racism has been discarded and non-Europe is no longer considered to have been absolutely stagnant and traditional. Schools are always a little behind the time when it comes to the teaching of newer topics and ideas. I wish I could report that the old notions about Inside and Outside are today just artifacts, still taught in some schools because of the usual lag between research and pedagogy, but which have been discarded by Real Scholars, those who pursue historical research and write the important and influential books on world history. But this is not the case. In the matter that concerns us most, that of explaining the larger flows of world history, the views put forward by historical scholars today tend to be quite consonant with the theories projected in textbooks. We can set aside the fact that many of the most widely used textbooks, today as in the past, are written by prominent historical scholars. There are many complex cultural reasons why historical scholarship remains committed to Eurocentric explanations for most of the crucial developments in world history: we will discuss some of these reasons later in the present chapter and return to the question at various points throughout the book. Suffice it at this point to notice a very peculiar paradox. Historians have amassed a fine record of meticulous scholarship,

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EUROCENTRISM

and rarely indeed do we encounter prejudice or deliberate distortion in their work. Moreover, their judgments about historical causation are constrained by the same methodological rigor as we find in any other field of scholarship. It is only when we come to the larger issues of causation, matters of explaining historical progress over long periods and for larger regions, and matters of explaining profound revolutions in history, that Eurocentrism exerts an important influence on discourse, and often—as we will see—leads to the acceptance of poor theories in spite of a lack of supporting evidence. Most European historians still maintain that most of the really crucial historical events, those that "changed history," happened in Europe, or happened because of some causal impetus from Europe. ("Europe" continues to mean "Greater Europe.") To illustrate this fact, I will list now, in historical order, a series of crucial Europe-centered propositions. All of them are accepted as true by the majority, in some cases the great majority, of European historical scholars. Some of them indeed are true, but that is beside the present point, which is to show that historical reasoning still focuses on Greater Europe as the perpetual fountainhead of history. 1 The Neolithic Revolution—the invention of agriculture and the beginnings of a settled way of life for humanity—occurred in the Middle East (or the Bible Lands). This view was unopposed before about 1930, and is still the majority view. 2 The second major step in cultural evolution toward modern civilization, the emergence of the earliest states, cities, organized religions, writing systems, division of labor, and the like, was taken in the Middle East. 3 The Age of Metals began in the Middle East. Ironworking was invented in the Middle East or eastern Europe and the "Iron Age" first appeared in Europe. 4 Monotheism appeared first in the Middle East. 5 Democracy was invented in Europe (in ancient Greece). 6 Likewise most of pure science, mathematics, philosophy, history, and geography. 7 Class society and class struggle emerged first in the Greco-Roman era and region.6 8 The Roman Empire was the first great imperial state. Romans invented bureaucracy, law, and so on. 9 The next great stage in social evolution, feudalism, was developed in Europe, with Frenchmen taking the lead.7 10 Europeans invented a host of technological traits in the Middle Ages which gave them superiority over non-Europeans. (On this matter there are considerable differences of opinion.) 11 Europeans invented the modern state.

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12 Europeans invented capitalism. 13 Europeans, uniquely "venturesome," were the great explorers, "discoverers," etc. 14 Europeans invented industry and created the Industrial Revolution. . . . and so on down to the present. All of the propositions in this list are widely accepted tenets of European historical scholarship today, although (as we will see) there is scholarly dispute about some of the propositions. All of this means that you and I learned these things, perhaps in elementary school, perhaps in university, perhaps in books and newspapers. We learned that all of this is the truth. But is it? Clearly, some of these propositions are true. Some others are true with qualifications. But some, as I will argue in this book, are not true at all: they are artifacts of the old tunnel history, in which Outside plays no crucial role and Inside is credited with everything important and everything efficacious.

Eurocentric diffusionism Eurocentrism What we are talking about here is generally called, these days, "Eurocentrism."8 This word is a label for all the beliefs that postulate past or present superiority of Europeans over non-Europeans (and over minority people of non-European descent). A strong critique of Eurocentrism is underway in all fields of social thought, and this book is certainly part of that critique. There is, however, a problem with the word "Eurocentrism." In most discourse it is thought of as a sort of prejudice, an "attitude," and therefore something that can be eliminated from modern enlightened thought in the same way we eliminate other relic attitudes such as racism, sexism, and religious bigotry. But the really crucial part of Eurocentrism is not a matter of attitudes in the sense of values and prejudices, but rather a matter of science, and scholarship, and informed and expert opinion. To be precise, Eurocentrism includes a set of beliefs that are statements about empirical reality, statements educated and usually unprejudiced Europeans accept as true, as propositions supported by "the facts." Consider, for instance, the 14 propositions about Europe's priority in historical innovation which we listed above. Historians who accept these propositions as true would be most indignant if we described the propositions as "Eurocentric beliefs." Every historian in this category would deny emphatically that he or she holds any Eurocentric prejudices, and very few of them actually do hold such prejudices. If they assert that Europeans invented democracy, science, feudalism, capitalism, the modern

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nation-state, and so on, they make these assertions because they think that all of this is fact. Eurocentrism, therefore, is a very complex thing. We can banish all the value meanings of this word, all the prejudices, and we still have Eurocentrism as a set of empirical beliefs. This, in a way, is the central problem for this book. We confront statements of presumed historical and scientific fact, not prejudices and biases, and we try to show, with history and science, that the presumptions are wrong: these statements are false. How is it that Eurocentric historical statements which are not valid— that is, not confirmed by evidence and sometimes contradicted by evidence—are able to gain acceptance in European historical thought, and thereafter survive as accepted beliefs, hardly ever questioned, for generations and even centuries? This is a crucial problem for historiography and the history of ideas. To deal with it satisfactorily would take us well beyond the scope of this book, the main concern of which is empirical history and geography. Yet the problem cannot be avoided here. Libraries are full of scholarly studies that support the Eurocentric historical positions we are rejecting and refuting in this book. The sheer quantity of this work, and the respect that is properly owed to the scholars who assembled it, makes it certain that one cannot convincingly refute these positions with the factual arguments that can be presented in one book. No matter how persuasive these arguments may be, they cannot be placed, so to speak, on one arm of a balance and be expected to outweigh all of the accumulated writings of generations of European scholars, textbook writers, journalists, publicists, and the rest, heaped up on the other arm of the balance. So, in this book, we must make a sort of two-level argument. The main level is the empirical one: What did happen inside and outside of Europe in the medieval and early modern centuries, and what connections did take place between the two sectors in that period? At the second level, we will look at some pertinent aspects of the history of Eurocentric ideas and the social context surrounding these ideas. This will be done mainly in the present chapter, which analyzes the nature and history of diffusionist ideas and concludes with a discussion of the process of social licensing by which these ideas gain currency and hegemony, and in Chapter 2, which rather systematically examines the most important arguments for European superiority prior to 1492 and to an extent discusses their historical genealogies. Scholars today are aware, as most were not a few decades ago, that the empirical, factual beliefs of history, geography, and social science very often gain acceptance for reasons that have little to do with evidence. Scholarly beliefs are embedded in culture, and are shaped by culture. This helps to explain the paradox that Eurocentric historical beliefs are so strangely persistent; that old myths continue to be believed in long after

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the rationale for their acceptance has been forgotten or rejected (as in the arguments grounded in belief in the Old Testament as literal history); that newer candidate beliefs gain acceptance without supporting evidence if they are properly Eurocentric; and that, most generally, the Eurocentric body of beliefs as a whole retains its persuasiveness and power. But there is more to the matter than this. Eurocentrism is, as I will argue at great length in this book, a unique set of beliefs, and uniquely powerful, because it is the intellectual and scholarly rationale for one of the most powerful social interests of the European elite. I will argue not only that European colonialism initiated the development of Europe (and the underdevelopment of non-Europe) in 1492, but that since then the wealth obtained from non-Europe, through colonialism in its many forms, including neocolonial forms, has been a necessary and very important basis for the continued development of Europe and the continued power of Europe's elite. For this reason, the development of a body of Eurocentric beliefs, justifying and assisting Europe's colonial activities, has been, and still is, of very great importance. Eurocentrism is quite simply the colonizer's model of the world. Eurocentrism is the colonizer's model of the world in a very literal sense: it is not merely a set of beliefs, a bundle of beliefs. It has evolved, through time, into a very finely sculpted model, a structured whole; in fact a single theory; in fact a super theory, a general framework for many smaller theories, historical, geographical, psychological, sociological, and philosophical. This supertheory is diffusionism. Diffusionism When culture change takes place in a human community, that change can be the result of an invention that occurred within this community. Or it can be the result of a process in which the idea or its material effect (such as a tool, an art style, etc.) came into the community, having originated in some other community, in some other part of the landscape. The first sort of event is called "independent invention." The second is called "diffusion."9 Both processes occur everywhere. So far so good. But some scholars believe that independent invention is rather uncommon, and therefore not very important in culture change in the short run and cultural evolution in the long run. These scholars believe that most humans are imitators, not inventors. Therefore diffusion, in their view, is the main mechanism for change. The scholars who hold this view are called "diffusionists." Whenever they encounter a cultural innovation in a particular region, they are inclined to look diligently for a process of diffusion into that region from somewhere else, somewhere the trait is already in use. For instance, the fact that the blow-gun is traditionally used among some Native American 1701

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peoples as well as some Old World peoples is explained by diffusionists as being the result of the diffusion of this trait from the Old World to the New: the New World people, they believe, probably did not invent the trait for themselves. Why? Because they probably were not inventive enough to do so. A larger form of this same diffusionist argument claims that the great pre-Colombian civilizations of the Americans must be, ultimately, the result of transpacific or transatlantic diffusions, because these civilizing traits (agriculture, temple architecture, writing, and so on) were found much earlier in the Old World than the New, and Native Americans probably were not inventive enough to think up these things on their own.10 Some scholars, those who have been traditionally described as "extreme diffusionists," believe that all civilization diffused from one original place on earth: some of them think that this original source of civilization was ancient Egypt, others place it somewhere in Central Asia (for instance, the Caucasus region—which scholars used to think was the original home of the "white" or "Caucasian" race).11 The debates between diffusionists and their opponents have been going on for more than a century in anthropology, geography, history, and all fields concerned about long-term, large-scale cultural evolution.12 The antidiffusionists (often called "evolutionists" or "independent-inventionists") have tended to level two basic charges against the diffusionists: 1

2

Diffusionists hold much too sour a view of human ingenuity: people are in fact quite inventive and innovative, so the possibility that new culture traits will appear as a result of independent invention is actually vastly greater than diffusionists admit. So investigators should consider the possibility of independent invention in any given case, rather than assuming a priori that a diffusion process explains the situation at which one is looking. Diffusionists are elitists. Every diffusion must start somewhere. An invention must take place in some one community before it begins to spread (diffuse) to others. If we accept the quite fundamental assumption that all human groups are truly human in their thinking apparatuses, and therefore broadly similar in their ability to invent and innovate—this assumption is known as "the psychic unity of mankind," a nineteenth-century label that is quaint but still in use— we would expect inventions to occur everywhere across the human landscape.13 But most diffusionists claim that only certain select communities are inventive. In other words, most communities change only as a result of receiving new traits by diffusion, but some places are uniquely inventive and are the original sources of the new traits. The people of these communities are more inventive than are people elsewhere. The psychic unity of mankind is denied: some people, or

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cultures, are simply smarter than others. They are permanent centers of invention and innovation. This is spatial elitism. If we make a map of this landscape, we find that it has a permanent center and a permanent periphery. For the "extreme diffusionists" the entire world was mapped out this way, at least for the preChristian era: the permanent center of invention and innovation was thought to be Egypt, or the "Ancient Aryan Homeland" (a mythical place located somewhere in western Asia or southeastern Europe), or the Caucasus, or some other supposed navel of the ancient world. But the charge was leveled more broadly: diffusionists as a group tended to imagine that some few places, or some one place, was the primary source from which culture spread to all the other places. It should be evident that diffusionism is very nicely suited to the idea that the world has an Inside and an Outside. In fact, diffusionism was the most fully developed scientific (or pseudoscientific) rationale for the idea of Inside and Outside. That idea, as we saw, postulates one permanent world center for new ideas; cultural evolution everywhere else results, broadly, from the diffusion of new ideas from this permanent center. This is simply the diffusionists' map on a world scale. We come now to a fascinating anomaly. The critics of diffusionism, in the nineteenth century and even in the twentieth century, failed entirely to grasp the full implications of their critique. None of them denied that the world has an Inside and an Outside. While criticizing the diffusionists for their rejection of the principle of the psychic unity of mankind, the antidiffusionists nonetheless believed that cultural evolution has been centered in Europe, and they therefore accepted the idea—explicitly or implicitly— that Europeans are more inventive, more innovative than everyone else.14 This is made explicit when they write about recent centuries, and particularly when they discuss the modernizing, missionarizing effect of European colonialism. It is also implicit in their writings about ancient times, these anthropologists, archaeologists, geographers, and historians of the second half of the nineteenth century and the present century do not focus on the Bible Lands, and their scholarly writings do not display any acceptance of religious assumptions. Yet Inside and Outside are explicit. They write about the Near Eastern origins of agriculture, of urbanization, and so forth. They then move smoothly to arguments about European origins of most of the rest of civilization. My basic argument is this: all scholarship is diffusionist insofar as it axiomatically accepts the Inside—Outside model, the notion that the world as a whole has one permanent center from which culture-changing ideas tend to originate, and a vast periphery that changes as a result (mainly) of diffusion from that single center. I do not argue that the formal theory of diffusionism, as it was advanced and defended by scholars in the

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nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, explains the Inside-Outside model, the mythology of Europe's permanent geographical superiority and priority. Rather, the theory developed as a result of broad social forces in Europe, and entered the world of scholarship from outside of that world—from European society. Diffusionist scholars were, in essence, elaborating and codifying this theory in the realms of scholarship within which they worked: realms like archaeology, world history, and so on. Before we proceed further I must post a warning: the word "diffusionist" has some ambiguities, and these should not be allowed to bring confusion into the present discussion. In any given debate as to whether a novel trait in a certain place was invented by the people of that place or was received from elsewhere by diffusion, those scholars who take the latter view are supporters of a "diffusionist" position, that is, they favor the specific hypothesis of diffusion as against that of independent invention. This does not necessarily mean that they have a general propensity to favor diffusion as a causal formula. Sometimes the specific issue can be a very major problem. For instance, some scholars argue that important West African culture traits diffused across the Atlantic to America before 1492. Whether they are right or wrong in this matter, they are not arguing any sort of Eurocentric diffusionism, nor do they necessarily favor diffusion over independent invention in other contexts. But most scholars who are consistent diffusionists are also Eurocentric diffusionists. Now I will describe Eurocentric diffusionism in somewhat formal terms as a scientific theory. That theory has changed through time, but its basic structure has remained essentially unchanged. I will describe what can be called the classical (essentially nineteenth-century) form of the theory, leaving until a later section of this chapter a discussion of the not very dissimilar modern form. Diffusionism is grounded, as we saw, in two axioms: (1) Most human communities are uninventive. (2) A few human communities (or places, or cultures) are inventive and thus remain the permanent centers of culture change, of progress. At the global scale, this gives us a model of a world with a single center—roughly, Greater Europe—and a single periphery; an Inside and an Outside. There are a number of variants of this two-sector model. Sometimes the two sectors are treated as sharply distinct, with a definite boundary between them. (This form of the model is the familiar one. It is sometimes called the "Center-Periphery Model of the World.") Another form sees the world in a slightly different way: there is a clear and definite center, but outside of it there is gradual change, gradual decline in degree of civilization or progressiveness or innovativeness, as one moves outward into the periphery. Another variant depicts the world as divided into zones, each representing a level of modernity or civilization or development.15 The classical division was one with three great bands: "civilization," "barbarism," and "savagery."

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The basic model of diffusionism in its classical form depicts a world divided into the prime two sectors, one of which (Greater Europe, Inside) invents and progresses, the other of which (non-Europe, Outside) receives progressive innovations by diffusion from Inside. From this base, diffusionism asserts seven fundamental arguments about the two sectors and the interactions between them: 1 2

Europe naturally progresses and modernizes. That is, the natural state of affairs in the European sector (Inside) is to invent, innovate, change things for the better. Europe changes; Europe is "historical." Non-Europe (Outside) naturally remains stagnant, unchanging, traditional, and backward. Invention, innovation, and change are not the natural state of affairs, and not to be expected, in non-European countries. Non-Europe does not change; non-Europe is "ahistorical."

Propositions 3 and 4 explain the difference between the two sectors: 3

4

The basic cause of European progress is some intellectual or spiritual factor, something characteristic of the "European mind," the "European spirit," "Western Man," etc., something that leads to creativity, imagination, invention, innovation, rationality, and a sense of honor or ethics: "European values." The reason for non-Europe's nonprogress is a lack of this same intellectual or spiritual factor. This proposition asserts, in essence, that the landscape of the non-European world is empty, or partly so, of "rationality," that is, of ideas and proper spiritual values. There are a number of variations of this proposition in classical (mainly latenineteenth-century) diffusionism. Two are quite important: a For much of the non-European world, this proposition asserts an emptiness also of basic cultural institutions, and even an emptiness of people. This can be called the diffusionist myth of emptiness, and it has particular connection to settler colonialism (the physical movement of Europeans into non-European regions, displacing or eliminating the native inhabitants). This proposition of emptiness makes a series of claims, each layered upon the others: (i) A nonEuropean region is empty or nearly empty of people (hence settlement by Europeans does not displace any native peoples), (ii) The region is empty of settled population: the inhabitants are mobile, nomadic, wanderers (hence European settlement violates no political sovereignty, since wanderers make no claim to territory, (iii) The cultures of this region do not possess an understanding of private property—that is, the region is empty of property rights and claims (hence colonial occupiers can freely give land to settlers since no one owns it). The final layer, applied to all of the Outside

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sector, is an emptiness of intellectual creativity and spiritual values, sometimes described by Europeans (as, for instance, by Max Weber) as an absence of "rationality."16 b Some non-European regions, in some historical epochs, are assumed to have been "rational" in some ways and to some degree. Thus, for instance, the Middle East during biblical times was rational. China was somewhat rational for a certain period in its history.17 Other regions, always including Africa, are unqualifiedly lacking in rationality. Propositions 5 and 6 describe the ways Inside and Outside interact: 5

The normal, natural way that the non-European part of the world progresses, changes for the better, modernizes, and so on, is by the diffusion (or spread) of innovative, progressive ideas from Europe, which flow into it as air flows into a vacuum. This diffusion may take the form of the spread of European ideas as such, or the spread of new products in which the European ideas are concretized, or the spread (migration, settlement) of Europeans themselves, bearers of these new and innovative ideas.

Proposition 5, you will observe, is a simple justification for European colonialism. It asserts that colonialism, including settler colonialism, brings civilization to non-Europe; is in fact the natural way that the non-European world advances out of its stagnation, backwardness, traditionalism. But under colonialism, wealth is drawn out of the non-European colonies and enriches the European colonizers. In Eurocentric diffusionism this too is seen as a normal relationship between Inside and Outside: 6

Compensating in part for the diffusion of civilizing ideas from Europe to non-Europe, is a counterdiffusion of material wealth from nonEurope to Europe, consisting of plantation products, minerals, art objects, labor, and so on. Nothing can fully compensate the Europeans for their gift of civilization to the colonies, so the exploitation of colonies and colonial peoples is morally justified. (Colonialism gives more than it receives.)

And there is still another form of interaction between Inside and Outside. It is the opposite of the diffusion of civilizing ideas from Europe to non-Europe (proposition 5): 7

Since Europe is advanced and non-Europe is backward, any ideas that diffuse into Europe must be ancient, savage, atavistic, uncivilized,

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evil—black magic, vampires, plagues, "the bogeyman," and the like.18 Associated with this conception is the diffusionist myth which has been called "the theory of our contemporary ancestors." It asserts that, as we move farther and farther away from civilized Europe, we encounter people who, successively, reflect earlier and earlier epochs of history and culture. Thus the so-called "stone-age people" of the Antipodes are likened to the Paleolithic Europeans. The argument here is that diffusion works in successive waves, spreading outward, such that the farther outward we go the farther backward we go in terms of cultural evolution. But conversely, there is the possibility that these ancient, atavistic, etc., traits will counterdiffuse back into the civilized core, in the form of ancient, magical, evil things like black magic, Dracula, etc. The main oppositions between the two sectors can be shown in tabular form. The following contrast-sets are quite typical in nineteenth-century century diffusionist thought: Characteristic of Core

Characteristic of Periphery

Inventiveness Rationality, intellect Abstract thought Theoretical reasoning Mind Discipline Adulthood Sanity Science Progress

Imitativeness Irrationality, emotion, instinct Concrete thought Empirical, practical reasoning Body, matter Spontaneity Childhood Insanity Sorcery Stagnation

What I have described thus far is, of course, a highly simplified version of the diffusionist world model. We will add qualifications and modifications as we proceed, and in particular we will see that there are significant differences between the classical form of diffusionism and the modern form of the model. So much for what diffusionism is. What does it do! In this book I will show in some detail how diffusionism has shaped our views of history, both European and non-European. Later in the present chapter and in Chapter 2 I will show some of the concrete influences of diffusionism on theories outside of history, some in psychology, some in geography, some in economics, some in sociology. But this discussion will be more meaningful after a different question has been addressed. This is the question of how and why diffusionism became such a foundation theory in Western thought. To this question we now turn.

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The colonizer's model Perhaps all civilizations have a somewhat ethnocentric view of themselves in relation to their neighbors, believing themselves better, brighter, and bolder than every other human community and constructing empirical theories to explain why this is the case, and to explain away embarrassments. Perhaps we would find the seeds of diffusionism in all these beliefs: the idea that progress is natural and calls for no explanation in "our" society but is unnatural or at, any rate, less impressive in "their" societies; the idea that "they" progress by borrowing from "us" and imitating "our" ideas; and so on. But this does not add up to the theory of diffusionism, nor is it very important for an understanding of diffusionism. Diffusionism as I have been discussing it is a product of modern European colonialism. It is the colonizer's model of the world. Origins Diffusionism became a fully formed scientific theory during the nineteenth century. The origins of the theory, however, go back to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Western Europe, where a belief system was being constructed to give some coherence to the new reality of change within Europe and colonial expansion outside Europe. The conception of a twosector world, the diffusionist distinction between Inside and Outside, emerged from a very old conception of Christendom and the Roman imperial legacy (which meant, for most of western and southern Europe, a common source of legitimacy for the political and landholding elites). But it is certainly not true that medieval Europeans saw Christendom as a sharply defined space, naturally in conflict with surrounding societies. Nor did medieval European thinkers have many illusions about the relative power, wealth, and technological prowess of Christendom as compared with Islamic and Oriental civilizations. But certainly they had some idea, not of a collective identity, but of a distinction between the lands inhabited by Christians, given divine guidance and protection for this reason, and the lands of non-Christians. Nevertheless, it was only after 1492 that Inside acquired a sharp geographical definition, less as a result of medieval ideas than of colonialism in the early modern period. European ideas about European progressiveness, Europe's somehow inevitable progress, are also essentially postmedieval. Obviously, these ideas were being discussed during the Middle Ages, and certainly there was hope, prayer, and struggle for betterment, but medieval folk tended rather to see their society as being in a relative state of equilibrium; their religion spoke of the Fall, and of the need to accept existing conditions (and rules), while the reality of medieval life (particularly fourteenth- and fifteenth-century life) was not one of perceptible forward progress for the 1708

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mass of people. But European thinkers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were coming to conceive of history—their own history—as a progressive process. Real progress (or at any rate accelerating change) indeed was taking place in the communities occupied by these thinkers, and the climate of ideas was changing in a complex but close association with the rise of capitalism, the expansion of opportunity for individuals in many regions, and the like. One of the main problems confronted by these early modern thinkers, both secular and religious, was the need to establish a belief system, an ideology, that would convince conservative sectors of the European community to accept the idea that progress is inevitable, natural, and desirable, and thus to accept changes in the legal system which would permit more rapid and widespread capital accumulation, to persuade the landowning classes to treat land as a commodity and invest their real holdings in risk enterprises, to introduce laws and practices to mobilize labor for emerging capitalist activities at home and abroad, to persuade Europeans in general to accept the painful changes being imposed on them, and so on. Equally important was the need to explain progress in ways that accorded with religion. This was done by seeing God's guidance of (European) history, and by conceptualizing progressive innovations as being products of the European mind or spirit and thus ultimately products of the Christian soul. (We will go into these matters later in this book.) Thus emerged the conception of Inside as being naturally progressive (diffusionist proposition 1), and as being progressive because of the workings of an intellectual or spiritual force, "European rationality" (diffusionist proposition 3). By the eighteenth century it had become the practice in secular writings to discuss causality in history and philosophy without referencing God and Scriptures, but the basic model of European progress as natural, as rational, remained unchanged in its essence; became, indeed, much fortified.19 In none of this thought was there any real suspicion that non-European civilizations might have had much to do with the earlier, medieval progress of Christian Europe, or much to do with its modern (sixteenth- to eighteenth-century) progress except in the purely passive role of provider of labor, commodities, and land for settlement, and, marginally, in some traits of technology and art. Nor was there very much awareness that colonialism and its windfalls—inflow of capital, intensification of intra-as well as extra-European trade, increase in employment opportunities in mercantile centers and in the colonial world, and much more—was an important cause of European progress. Then, as later, the European conception of its own dynamic society attributed dynamism not to external causes but to internal causes, and to God. This relatively constant blindness to the importance of colonialism, historically and even today, will claim our attention at various points in this book. The development of a conception of Outside proceeded in a more

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complicated way. The sixteenth-century Spanish debates about the nature of New World Indians—Are they human? Can they receive the True Religion and, if so, can they be made slaves?—was a crucial part of the early formulation of diffusionism, because it entailed an attempt to conceptualize European expansion and explain why it was, somehow, natural, desirable, and profitable, and to conceptualize the societies that were being conquered and exploited, explaining why it was, again, natural for them to succumb and to provide Europeans with labor, land, and products.20 European views of New World peoples were formed rather quickly because in that region the basic pattern of colonialism emerged quickly. The enterprise was immensely profitable from the very beginning, from the first great shipments of gold in the early sixteenth century (see Chapter 4). Resistance was rapidly overcome in Spanish colonies and surviving Americans were rather quickly forced to submit to colonial exploitation. (I refer here to the major centers of early colonialism, such as central Mexico, the Greater Antilles, and the Andes.) In the next century the profitability of slave plantations in Brazil and the Antilles, and the fact that African slaves could, in spite of their resistance, be forced to work and produce profit for Europeans, added further to the conception of Outside: these people were naturally inferior to Europeans, naturally less brave, less freedom loving, less rational, and so on, and progress for them depended on acceptance of European domination, hence diffusion. In sum, the New World experience, with Native Americans, Africans, mestizos, and mulattos, in areas of mining, large-scale estate agriculture, commercial plantations, and so forth, produced the kernel of the diffusionist propositions (2, 4, and 5), which assert that non-Europe naturally depends on Europe for progress and this is due to a lack of the intellectual and spiritual qualities that Europeans possessed. It also produced the diffusionist proposition (6) that European expansion is natural and leads naturally to the transfer of wealth from non-Europe to Europe. But these activities were taking place only in the New World and the slave-trading coasts of Africa. The civilizations of Sudanic, southern, and eastern Africa were not conquered by Europeans until (in most cases) the nineteenth century; the Ottoman Empire was not only formidable throughout this period, but was indeed expanding its territorial control in southeastern Europe at the same time that Iberians were conquering the New World. And the other great empires did not begin to succumb to colonialism before the mid-eighteenth century: European activities in nearly all parts of Asia and Africa were mainly matters of trade, with dominance of long-distance maritime trade, small territorial footholds here and there on certain coasts, and the like (see Chapter 4). Thus, in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, the diffusionist model of Outside which had been applied to Americans and to the groups of

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Africans transported to America as slaves could not be applied to the civilizations of the Old World. For these Eastern Hemisphere civilizations a limited and somewhat tentative form of the diffusionist model was accepted during this period. These civilizations were indisputably rich and technically advanced. Rationality in the sense of inventiveness was clearly present, or at least had been present in the past, when the great and impressive innovations (technology, architecture, banking, and so on) had occurred. What these civilizations lacked was the moral component of rationality, because, fundamentally, they were not Christians. These were "Oriental despotisms," societies in which there was, naturally, cruelty, lack of freedom, lack of a decent life for the common people (while the elite wallowed in decadence and sin), etc. (We discuss this concept at some length in Chapter 2.) The moral failing necessarily led to an inability of these societies to progress in the present, the era when Europe is naturally progressing, although Europeans could not deny, even though they found it most puzzling, that these despotic civilizations had, indisputably, progressed in the past. (At times the puzzle was resolved by declaring that they had progressed in pre-Christian times, and had lost the Grace of God through having refused to accept Christianity.21) Only in the nineteenth century, with the rapid colonization of India, Southeast Asia, interior Africa, and (as a kind of collective colony) China, did the diffusionist propositions about Outside, and about the natural relations between Inside and Outside, become generalized to all of non-Europe. It was in this late period, I think, that the final diffusionist proposition, the notion of counterdiffusion of evil and savagery and disease from Outside to Inside, become fully developed. The bogeyman (from the Malay Buginese people) came from Outside. So too did Dracula, whose homeland lay on the edge of Asia.22 Classical diffusionism The nineteenth century was the classical era for colonialism, and the era when Eurocentric diffusionism assumed what I will call its classical form. After the Napoleonic Wars colonialism expanded and intensified with remarkable rapidity. Between 1810 and 1860 or thereabouts Europeans subdued most of Asia, settled most of North America, and began the penetration of Africa. Between 1860 and the start of World War I, the rest of Asia and Africa was occupied and the profits from colonialism, the value of capital accumulated in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, along with the riches flowing from newly settled areas of European settlement, expanded enormously. In the latter part of the century the rate of growth in colonial agricultural enterprise exceeded that of industrial development on a world scale, and other forms of development, such as the mining of nonprecious 1711

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metals, were becoming important for the first time.23 There is profound disagreement as to how important all of this was for European social and intellectual evolution in this period. I will enter this debate in Chapter 4, but for the present it is sufficient to assert that the overall effect of European expansion, through colonialism in the narrow sense, through settlement, and through semicolonial economic dominance, was profound enough to create a very large intellectual model, the classical form of diffusionism. By 1870 or thereabouts there was broad agreement among European thinkers about the basic nature and dynamics of the world. Few doubted that biological and social evolution—that is, progress—were fundamental truths, although evolutionary processes were more often explained in religious or metaphysical ways than in naturalistic ways, as in Darwin's theory.24 It seemed clear that Europeans were naturally to experience permanent social evolution, that this had been God's or Nature's plan throughout history. Some historical thinkers described the general process in holistic terms, as the evolution of society or the state; others treated it in reductionist (in a sense, psychological) terms as an intellectual ascent, a matter of the steady advance of human reason, with capitalism, industry, and so on, treated as products of mind; but many thinkers (among them Herbert Spencer) saw no opposition between the social and intellectual models, treating progress as a kind of flowing stream, which carried with it an evolution both of society and of mind.25 All of this was explicit with regard to Europe and Europeans including of course Anglo-Americans. Thus by the 1870s at the latest the central diffusionist proposition, the notion of natural, continuous, internally generated progress in the European (or west European) core, was very firmly in place. Its truth was no longer really questioned by mainstream thinkers. There was, at the same time, a convergence of views about the nature and historical dynamics of the non-European world. By the middle of the nineteenth century the biblical time scale had been rather definitively rejected (through not yet in all history textbooks), and it was no longer necessary to argue that differences between Europeans and all other cultures had to have evolved in the space of a few thousand years unless they had been there from the start, unless, that is, polygenists were right and some human groups had been created separately from, and perhaps much earlier than, Adam and Eve. This gave room for wide-ranging theorization about the way cultural differences had evolved. Paralleling this change was a general rejection of the literal biblical beliefs about the original nature of human society. Culture was now (after midcentury) quite generally seen as a product of evolution from very primitive beginnings, exemplified in the notion of a primordial "stone age." (According to the Old Testament, humans had possessed advanced technology, including agriculture and the use of metals, in the days of Genesis.)

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The reasons for the rapid crystallization of beliefs about non-Europeans are complex, but the most important underlying reason was the progress of colonialism. This produced two effects in particular. One was a flood of information about non-European people and places, such that, for the first time, a coherent—though highly distorted—description could be given in the European literature about non-Europeans, both civilized and "savage." The second reason was a practical, political and economic interest in proving certain things to be true, and other things untrue, about the extra-European world and its people. The two processes were tightly interconnected. Colonialism in its various forms, direct and indirect, was an immensely profitable business and considerable sums of money were invested in efforts to learn as much as possible about the people and resources of the regions to be conquered, dominated, and perhaps settled, and to learn as much as possible about the regions already conquered in order to facilitate the administration and economic exploitation of these regions. The nineteenth century was the age of scientific exploration—Darwin in the Beagle, Livingstone in Africa, Powell in the Rockies, and so on—but the sources of support for these efforts tended to be institutions with very practical interest in the regions being studied. Paralleling all of this was the great surge of missionary activity that supported some exploration (including Livingstone's) but most crucially led to the gathering of important, detailed, information about ethnography, languages, and geography by hundreds of dedicated missionaries throughout the non-European world. Also of great importance were the detailed reports that colonial administrators everywhere were required to submit, reports providing information about native legal systems, land tenure rules, production, and much more. Most of what was learned about non-Europeans came from these sources. It is not necessary for me to dwell on the fact that the people who supplied the information were Europeans with very definite points of view, cultural, political, and religious lenses that forced them to see "natives" in ways that were highly distorted. A missionary might have great love and respect for the people among whom he or she worked but could not be expected to believe that the culture and mind of these nonChristians was on a par with that of Christian Europeans. A colonial administrator not only had cultural distortions but usually worked with economic interests and classes (European planters, mining corporations, zamindars, and so on) and consciously or unconsciously put forward views about common people, and about resources, that reflected the biases and concrete interests of these elite groups. Strictly speaking, missionaries and colonial administrators were in the business of diffusing Europe to nonEurope. Thus the entire corpus of information about non-Europeans that was gathered in this process has certain quite definite distortions. It was immensely valuable in spite of this fact, but the plain fact is that theories

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constructed from this information—and this includes the great bulk of nineteenth-century anthropological, geographic, and politicoeconomic theories about non-Europeans—are systematically distorted. The distortions are, broadly, those of diffusionism. But colonial interest added an additional kind of distortion, a matter of shaping knowledge into theories that would prove useful for colonialism. Scientific and legal theories were constructed in general by policymakers and by intellectuals who were either themselves policymakers or were close to policy. (In England, for instance, an extraordinary percentage of the influential historians, social theorists, even novelists and poets, had direct connections with the East India Company, the Colonial Office, and other private and public agencies of empire.26) I include under the label "theory" a wide range of general arguments, including the larger constructs of history. At the most general level, intellectuals were shaping theories of social evolution which were in essence demonstrations that the postulates of diffusionism are natural law. As we noticed previously, the nineteenth-century debates between those called "evolutionists" and those called "diffusionists" were essentially debates between two versions of diffusionism. A great range of theories in both camps were constructs aimed to assist in colonial activity, and to develop and strengthen the doctrine that European colonialism is scientifically natural, a matter of the inevitable working out of social laws of human progress (development of the family, law, the state, etc.). Also at the very general level, seminal works of the middle and later nineteenth century on ancient and modern history presented various sophisticated diffusionist ideas, mainly about the reasons for and the facts of Europe's natural and persistent progress compared with other peoples, those now being colonized. These historical constructs were important in building support for colonial activities among European populations; and later, as colonial educational systems appeared, for convincing the natives that colonialism was natural, inevitable, and progressive. In Chapter 2 I will discuss a number of these diffusionist theories which emerged, or became concrete, in the nineteenth century in the complex association of scholarship and colonialism, focusing on those theories that today underlie the myth of Europe's historical and cultural superiority. Here I need only show how classical diffusionism arose in tandem with classical colonialism, and for this purpose a pair of representative theories can be singled out by way of illustration. One such theory was the postulate that non-Europeans have not developed concepts of private property in important material resources such as land. The theory asserted that private property emerged from ancient European roots, notably Roman land law and various putative Germanic traits relating to individualism; that other civilizations, lacking this history (and, by implication, lacking the mental and cultural qualities

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associated with this history), remained in a stage of evolution in which true individual ownership could not be fully conceptualized. These people, therefore, needed to have capitalism imposed on them. In fact, the theory was developed mainly by lawyers and administrators in the European colonial corporations and colonial offices, and had one very concrete purpose: to establish the legal basis for expropriating land from colonized peoples, on the fiction that the colonized had no property rights to this land because they had no concept of property rights in land.27 Yet the theory became essentially an axiom in nineteenth-century intellectual thought. Even Karl Marx accepted it, and doing so produced a large theory about the evolution of private property—a major part of his theory about the origins of capitalism—in which it was argued (or rather assumed) that this evolution was peculiarly a European phenomenon, and that colonialism, for all its horrors, did at least bring about the diffusion of capitalism to the non-European world, a necessary though painful process for the non-Europeans. Thus even Marxism, perhaps the most antisystemic doctrine to come out of nineteenth-century Europe, was strongly shaped by diffusionism.28 A larger form of this doctrine, the more general "myth of emptiness," the diffusionist idea that a colonized or colonizable territory was empty of population, or was populated only by wandering nomads, people with no fixed abode and therefore no claim to territory, or lacked people with a concept of political sovereignty or economic property, had similar colonialist functions, and arose in a similar way. The same is true of a closely related doctrine, the theory of "Oriental despotism" (older in point of origin, but developed fully in nineteenth-century diffusionist thought), according to which non-Europeans lack the concept of freedom, hence suffer despotic governments that stifle all progress—until Europeans bring freedom to them in the form of colonialism (which ironically is the purest negation of freedom). These and other theories that arose from classical diffusionism are still employed today to reinforce the myth of Europe's historical and cultural superiority; we will discuss them in Chapter 2, which seeks to refute this myth. The era of classical diffusionism was the era of classical colonialism, the era when European expansion was so swift and so profitable that European superiority seemed almost to be a law of nature. Diffusionism, in its essence, codified this apparent fact into a general theory about European historical, cultural, and psychological superiority, non-European inferiority, and the inevitability and absolute righteousness of the process by which Europe and its traits diffused to non-Europe. Diffusionism then ramified the general theory into innumerable empirical beliefs in all the human sciences, in philosophy, in the arts.29 And it applied these beliefs in particular cases, explaining and justifying the individual acts of conquest, of repression, of exploitation. All of it was right, rational, and natural.

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diffusionism

The nineteenth century, or more precisely the interval between the defeat of Napoleon and the beginning of World War I, was a time of relative peace and relative progress for Europeans. Colonialism fueled this process with resources, markets, cheap labor, and lands for settlement by Europeans, and colonialism resolved many of Europe's internal contradictions in the process. The idea that progress in European civilization and expansion of that civilization in space were different dimensions of the same historical force was the dominant idea of the time, and this was, of course, the central notion of diffusionism. But all of this changed early in the twentieth century. The world is finite in size, so spatial expansion had to come to an end, and by 1900 all of the non-European world had been carved up into colonies, semi-colonial spheres of control, and territories of settlement. This change of conditions produced a change in thought: the essential problem now was exploitation and the maintenance of control in the face of native resistance. Thus it became a question not of expansion but of equilibrium. At the same time tensions among European powers—some of the tensions were connected to conflicts over colonies—boiled over into general war among the European powers. Soon after World War I came the Great Depression. Then, immediately, World War II. Between 1914 and 1945, then, the minds of European intellectuals were focused not on the idea of progress and expansion, but on the question of how to prevent disaster: how to maintain, or return to, peace and prosperity. The code word was "normalcy." The central notion of diffusionism did not fit this intellectual mood. The prevailing doctrines of this period were theories of stasis, of equilibrium, not theories of expansion. Economics dwelled on Keynesian ideas of equilibrium. In geography, the doctrine known as "regionalism" prevailed, the idea that the various parts of the world are stable, coherent, welldemarcated regions and tend to remain that way. Anthropology was emphasizing two equilibrium theories: "functionalism," a model of social systems (and cultures) as stable and self-correcting systems, and "cultural relativism," a doctrine that declared in essence that each culture has intrinsic worth. Anthropologists of course worked primarily among colonized peoples, and these two theories were closely integrated with colonial policy, mainly as a basis for policies designed to prevent native unrest while allowing European exploitation of land, minerals, and labor.30 Thus equilibrium doctrines were very widespread, probably dominant, in European thought throughout most of the first half of the twentieth century. Diffusionism, in this period, seems to have gone into a partial eclipse. History and geography textbooks were still sublimely diffusionist, in an essentially nineteenth-century mood, emphasizing the beneficial spread of civilization of Africa, Asia, and Latin America ("where our bananas come

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from"), the teleological rise of "the West," and so on. In social thought, the doctrines of "extreme diffusionism" (discussed earlier) were still being advanced, and still debated.31 And it should not be thought that the decline of diffusionism as a doctrine of cultural dynamics implied a decline in prejudice. The notion that non-European are less rational, less innovative, and so on, was as intense as ever: perhaps even more intense since this was the period of Nazism and like doctrines, and since genetic racism seemed, in this era, to be science, not prejudice. We return to this matter in Chapter 2. A new and modern form of diffusionism gained prominence after the end of World War II, in the period of collapsing colonial empires and an emerging 'Third World" of underdeveloped but legally sovereign countries. This doctrine, generally known today by the title "modernization," or "the diffusion of modernization," arose in the late 1940s and the 1950s. Immediately after the Japanese surrender in 1945 it became clear that a number of colonies would gain independence immediately: liberation forces were now very strong and, in the wake of the world war, all of the colonial powers except the United States were now quite weak. All of them wanted to hold on to their colonies, the sources of great profit in the past and presumably also in the future. Each of the colonial powers maneuvered in its own way to hold on to its colonies, sometimes resorting to forcible efforts to suppress independence movements, sometimes conceding political independence grudgingly but peacefully where continued colonial control seemed patently impossible.32 All colonies had been saturated during the classical colonial era with the ideological message that economic and social progress for the colonial people had to come through the diffusion of "modernization" from the colonizing power. "Modernization" meant the diffusion of a modern economy (with major corporations owned by the colonizer), a modern public administration (the colonial political structure), a modern technical infrastructure (bridges, dams, and the like, built by the colonizer), and so on. I call this an ideological message, but it was in fact believed in profoundly by the colonizers, who felt that their mission was, indeed, to diffuse their own civilization to the peoples who were under their "colonial tutelage," and the fact that this mission produced wealth for their own country seemed only logical (recall diffusionist proposition 6). In the new situation the colonizers had to persuade the colonized that the "modernization" message was still valid. Doing so, they might convince the colonized to voluntarily relinquish the ideal of political independence in favor of the more pragmatic ideal of economic and social development under a wise and benevolent colonial rule. Or, if independence was insisted upon, this ideology would convince the people of the country now acquiring freedom that the only way to develop that country economically and socially was to retain the colonial economy, that is, to allow the colonizer's

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corporations and banks to continue their (profitable) work under the new regime: a system everyone today describes as "neocolonialism." Now all colonial powers began a major campaign to intensify the process of colonial economic development.33 This should not be thought of as cynical or hypocritical: remember that diffusionism defined the colonial process as beneficial for the colonized as well as the colonizer, and the technical and other personnel involved in the new colonial development activities were utterly convinced that they were working for the advancement of the colonized people. At the same time, a parallel campaign was developed to further the same form of economic development in the independent countries, partly through agencies of the United Nations, partly through bilateral aid agreements.34 The United States, now the leading economic power, began to establish its own aid programs in countries throughout the underdeveloped world. Again, this should not be dismissed as cynical and political: there was, in this period, a tremendously euphoric ideology that saw the end of the world war as the beginning of an Age of Development, a time when the advanced nations would work to bring—that is, diffuse—prosperity and advancement to the poor nations. Decolonization spread, and many liberation movements and newly independent countries refused to accept the neocolonial option, either ejecting foreign corporations (as did Indonesia) or opting for a specifically socialist society. This added a new impetus to the diffusion-ofmodernization project. Efforts to bring about development through diffusion were intensified in hopes that their success would lead countries to reject the anticapitalist and antiforeign options. But the choice of either of these two options seemed to imply a political alignment with the Soviet Union and China, so the diffusion-of-modernization project now became important as a matter of foreign policy in the Cold War. In 1959 the Cuban revolutionary victory gave the project very high priority for the United States, which now treated modernization and economic development, particularly in Latin America, as a matter of the highest priority, calling for very large investment.35 Modern diffusionism is the body of ideas which underlay, and still underlies, this new set of conditions in the Third World. The diffusion of modernization, as it is carried out by public policy makers and private corporations and theorized by intellectuals (at least in the metropolitan, formerly colonizing, countries), is considered to be essentially the process by which Third World countries gain prosperity by accepting the continuous and increasing diffusion of economic and technological plums from the formerly colonial countries, a process that now, as in the past, is supremely profitable for the latter. In the diffusionist belief system, it is profitable for everybody, and also is right, rational, and natural, just as it had been a century earlier. The ideas of 1993 are of course very different from the ideas of 1893, so

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it would be wrong to think that modern diffusionism is the same as classical diffusionism. Biological racism is no longer part of the model (as we will see in Chapter 2), and few modern European thinkers believe that non-Europeans simply do not have the potential to develop eventually to the level of Europeans. Religious undertones are largely absent, and the notion that a Christian god began things with the putative ancestors of Europeans, in the Bible Lands, and thereafter guided Europeans, Christians, to persistent superiority over all others, is no longer very popular. The historical greatness of some non-European civilizations is now fully conceded. (But with one vital qualification: less rationality, less innovativeness, than European civilization. We deal with this in Chapter 2.) After about a quarter-century of blind faith that the diffusion of modernization would bring about economic development everywhere, European experts and scholars now qualify their belief in this model, and in particular draw back from their former naive faith that the diffusion of modern technology, particularly in agriculture, is the key to economic development, the key to what used to be called "the take-off into sustained growth." But, all of this notwithstanding, the basic propositions of diffusionism remain in place. Europeans still believe that Inside has one fundamental cultural nature and Outside another, now admitting Japan into the Inside sector. It is still believed that Europe in the past displayed a progressiveness not found in any other civilizations, except in one or two places, at one or two moments of history. Although European scholars no longer insist that this fundamental difference between a progressive Inside and a stagnant or slow-moving Outside will persist into the indefinite future, most of them write and speak about the present and future as though this fundamental dynamic will continue (again qualifying the picture to admit Japan, and perhaps a few small East Asian societies, into the dynamic of Inside). But today, as we will see in the next chapter, there is a growing, though still small, group of European scholars, mainly responding to the newer ideas that now emanate from non-European scholarship in postcolonial societies, who question the overall diffusionist model, and who deny its historical conceptions about the superiority of Inside over Outside. World models and worldly interests Diffusionism is a poor theory. Diffusionism, as I argue in this book, is not good geography and not good history. Yet it exerts a tremendous influence on scholarship, and has done so for a very long time. How do we account for the fact that a bad theory can be so widely believed to be true, and for such a long time? We should briefly consider this question before we shift from the discussion of the nature and evolution of diffusionism as a theory to the discussion of empirical history, the topic of later chapters. It is 1719

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important to understand how this (and every) theory interlocks with other ideas and responds to social interests. The ethnography of beliefs In this discussion we will look at ideas as cultural facts: we will look at them ethnographically, as beliefs held by human beings who belong to specific sorts of communities and categories. We will see that a study of ideasas-beliefs is quite different from an inquiry into the validity or truth of ideas, and that the study of ideas-as-beliefs is in some cases the more important and more basic of the two sorts of inquiry. We will see, in addition, that scientific beliefs arrange themselves in larger structures, belief systems, and that belief systems (like diffusionism) have certain crucial relationships of compatibility to one another and conformality to the values or interests of the groups of people who hold them to be valid. Pursuing this ethnographic exploration of the character of ideas-as-beliefs we will, I think, discover why the theory of diffusionism has had a life history that is more clearly explained by the life history of European society, and more particularly European colonialism, than it is by any intellectual or social process within the scientific community. Scientific ideas, and empirical ideas in general, can be examined in two ways. One is comfortable and traditional. It considers ideas in terms of their communicated meaning. Are they logical; that is, do they reflect an internally consistent argument? Are they valid in the sense that what they assert about the real world seems to have evidential support? This combination of logic, or structure of argument, and evidential basis is the kind of thing we look for whenever we evaluate scientific ideas—indeed all ideas that concern empirical reality. The second way of looking at ideas inquires about the people who believe a given idea, who communicate it to others as a belief, and about the people who listen and in turn accept the idea as a belief. The question whether a person believes in the validity of an idea is not at all the same as the question whether the idea is in fact a valid one. Questions about belief status are matters of ethnography: of finding out why beliefs are held by given people; how beliefs come to be accepted and rejected by these people; how given beliefs are connected in the minds of these people with other beliefs held by them; how new candidate beliefs are weighed and accepted or rejected; and how beliefs as such are connected to other parts of culture, including values, social organization, class organization, politics, and so on. What makes this kind of inquiry threatening is the fact that it can provide independent and reliable evidence that a given group of people holds a given idea to be true for reasons that have little to do with logic and evidence, for reasons grounded in culture. Interestingly, we experience no discomfort and sense no threat when we read an account written by some anthropologist or cultural geographer 1720

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about the beliefs, values, myths, and so on, of some small and obscure society in some far corner of the earth. Indeed, we expect an anthropologist to tell us more about the social or cultural reason why the "natives" hold to these ideas than about the validity of the ideas. In this kind of context it is quite normal to have a description of ideas that distinguishes between the matter of their logical and evidential basis and the matter of their cultural binding. But when this ethnographic approach is applied to what are called "Western" ideas, in the realms of science, history, and the like, the results are disturbing and the enterprise itself seems somehow improper. Ideas are, so to speak, surrounded by culture, and we can examine the surroundings and the way ideas are embedded in their surroundings. This is the ethnographic study of ideas. Now it happens to be a terminological convention in the field of anthropology to attach the prefix ethno- to a word designating a particular field of knowledge, such as medicine, botany, geography, and the like, when our purpose is to study that body of knowledge ethnographically. The study of "medicine," for instance, is different from the study of "ethnomedicine." The latter is an ethnographic field, asking what the medical beliefs are in a given culture, how these beliefs relate to the rest of that culture, and how to generalize crossculturally about medical beliefs in all (or some set) of cultures. When we put together along with ethnomedicine all the other scientific fields prefixed by "ethno-," we get, naturally enough, ethnoscience, meaning the ethnographic study of all sciences; more broadly, all fields of empirical belief. Ethnohistory is part of that corpus.36 So, too, is ethnogeography. The subject matter of ethnoscience is belief. Ordinarily we look at beliefs as they are enshrined in empirical statements, generally sentences that assert some predicate to be true about some subject. The fundamental, though not the smallest, unit of study in ethnoscience is the statement of belief and the person or group who makes—and holds to—this belief statement. For every empirical statement in social science there is an ethnoscientific question about its belief status and there is a profoundly different question about its truth status. The two questions do not forever remain separate, but they come together only at the conclusion of a long analysis. That analysis explains in the end why so many diffusionist statements in which historians and geographers firmly believe are really false. The study of beliefs is also the study of belief-holding groups. Two very important points have to be made about belief-holding groups. A beliefholding group can be a group of any type. However, among the various types of belief-holding groups, the most fundamentally important are cultures, classes, and combinations that can be thought of as ethnoclasses. None of these types is an abstraction, except in the matter of defining units and boundaries. Cultures are highly variable from place to place and person to person, but the analytical unit itself is real and concrete. Its

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individual members also have concrete reality. There is no philosophical conundrum about the cultural whole "versus" its individual (human) parts in the matters we are discussing now. Thus there is an ethnoscience of each individual human being and also an ethnoscience of groups as collectives. Classes are a bit more problematic. However, most people accept the broad idea that there is a basic division between two class communities, one, the working class, the other an elite class, deploying political power and generally accumulating wealth. I will simply take it as given here that a rough class bifurcation exists in most societies of this and the preceding century, while conceding that it is not always possible to tell whether a given group in a given society belongs to the working (producing) class or to the elite class or to some ambiguous or uncertain grouping that does not fit comfortably in either of the two. One such problematic grouping that relates closely to the issues discussed in this book includes professors and others engaged in studying and writing about society and the environment. They are not members of the accumulating class, the elite, but scholars and writers are in most cases (not all) strongly bound to that class, and for all their intellectual penetration, discipline, and honesty, they tend to think, say, and write down ideas that are useful to the elite. This is true most pointedly for ideas of the sort related to diffusionism. Culture and class intersect in ethnoclass communities. There is a crucial use in this book for the concept of an ethnoclass community. I will argue strongly that the elite groupings of European countries together, in spite of their cultural (and national) differences, are a basic and permanent belief-holding group, and that their beliefs form, to a large extent, a single ethnogeography and ethnoscience. This reflects the fact that, for the period with which we are mainly concerned, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, these elites have had a common set of interests in relation to the working classes of their own countries and of the non-European world, and they have together underwritten the production of a coherent belief system about the European world, the non-European world, and the interactions between the two. The most important proposition in this book, in fact, is the assertion that diffusionist ideas are at the core of the single belief system generated under the influence of, and for the interests of, the European elite. Although it should not be thought that the science and history produced under the stimulus of this ethnoclass is "biased," nevertheless we will see that the entire body of ideas concerning geography, history, and social science are strongly influenced by their ethnoclass patronage. Overall, and through the two-century-long flow of ideas, the product is a body of diffusionist beliefs which persist, and continue to influence social practice, although they are quite unscientific. Beliefs assemble themselves into belief systems. The difference is not exactly a matter of relative complexity. Most simple beliefs are just those ideas that can be expressed in simple declarative sentences (although some

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call for a poem or a painting), and which people do express as assertions, with more or less confidence as to their veracity. We are interested in three things about these belief sentences and the acts in which they are expressed. They are empirical (not purely logical or purely evaluative). They are expressed as true, or possibly true. And they are thought of by the belief holders as cognitively whole or discriminable, as, putting it crudely, "concept," "ideas." What makes such a hard-to-be-precise-about unit important is the fact that individual humans do not simply think up such ideas or concepts out of thin air or immediate perceptual experience. These unit beliefs tend to retain their character as beliefs through long intervals of time, often generations, and among large numbers of people. Still more structure is to be found in a belief system that consists of chains of statements connected together by implication ("because . . ."). This kind of belief system I will call, unoriginally, an argument. It simply needs to be noted that the chain of statements in an argument may or may not proceed from simple to complex. A tighter structure is to be found in those systems called theories. Simple beliefs, then, are aggregated in various ways into belief structures, belief systems. Each belief system, in turn, is assembled (psychologically) into various sorts of higher order systems. The highest level, comprehending all of the empirical beliefs held by a given belief-holding unit—including some beliefs that contradict one another—is the group's (or individual's) ethnoscience as a whole. Included here are all of the beliefs held to be true, or possibly true, about the external world, natural and social; beliefs about the self or person; and beliefs about technique—the self's capability to manipulate and influence the world. The ethnoscience, in a way, is an encyclopedia. How does it happen that a new belief is admitted into a belief system? The question is not where new ideas come from but how they become validated, that is, given a kind of social license that admits them to the status of a belief, a belief that is at least accepted as a tenable hypothesis, a "reasonable idea," and at most accepted as fact. Three quite distinct judgments—I think also distinct procedures—are involved in this licensing process. One is a judgment of compatibility. The second is a judgment of verifiability (the matter of empirical verification). The third is a judgment of conformality (or value conformality). Scholarly conceits to the contrary notwithstanding, verification is the least important of the three. All the belief systems held by a given group are in one way or another interrelated. Some are tightly connected: one theory may seem to follow directly from another, for example. Normally the relationship is much looser. But all belief systems have one basic and common relationship with all other belief systems held by a group. They are compatible. This means that they can coexist peacefully in the same ethnoscience: they are not cognitively or culturally dissonant. Although beliefs may occasionally

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contradict one another, total lack of relationship is not in principle possible: directly or indirectly, all beliefs held by a given belief-holding group (or individual) are somehow linked together, and some judgment of their compatibility will be made more or less often. Typically, belief systems reinforce one another: "If P is true, it is reasonable to suppose that Q is true." Or "If P is true, it follows necessarily that Q is true." What counts here, because this is an ethnographic scenario, is the fact that the belief systems are judged to be compatible. The judgment of compatibility is not simply a definition, an assertion to the effect that when the group holds two or more beliefs at the same time they are merely labeled "compatible." Compatibility is the outcome of an important social process. The process is most transparent when new candidate beliefs are introduced: when some new hypothesis is proposed within a belief-holding group and must, as it were, apply for a license. One of the most crucial tests it must pass is that of compatibility with existing beliefs. Compatibility is the loosest of all relations among theories and other beliefs within an ethnoscience. Compatibility is, in a sense, a bridge that must be built over gaps in the overall body of thought. One sort of gap is obvious: it is the incompleteness of knowledge. The other sort, less obvious, is highly significant for the argument of this book. Here, the gap among theories (and other beliefs) is actually filled, but not by argument. In ordinary language, "it seems reasonable" to suppose that one theory lends support to another, or one historical belief is explained by another. This matter of "reasonableness" bears very close examination, because "reasonableness" is that form of the relation of compatibility which allows the most absurdly treasonable ideas to pass for well-founded scientific argument. Broadly speaking, there are two important ways in which gaps are bridged with "reasonableness" in place of—and disguising the lack of—an explicit, defensible argument. One way calls for an insertion of value statements in place of belief statements; we will explore this device in the next section. The other device lies within the belief system itself. It substitutes, for an explicit argument, an implicit one. To understand how it works we have to distinguish between explicit and implicit beliefs. Implicit beliefs are usually matters "too obvious to mention," "beneath notice," "obviously true," "taken for granted." They are ordinary beliefs (and theories) which tend not to surface in discourse. There is nothing mysterious about most implicit beliefs; they are not somehow buried in the unconscious, or deliberately hidden from view. Some beliefs simply tend to be more often thought about consciously and verbalized than others, for a variety of unsurprising reasons. Those readily verbalized are explicit beliefs, those not, are implicit beliefs. There is no hard line of demarcation in a case of this sort, involving informal communication of belief. But the demarcation is quite sharp in the case of formal, written and

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published, expositions of belief. The implicit beliefs are simply not written about. If they emerge in print at all, it is in the form of explicitly stated assumptions, or "axioms." Here, the conclusion that terminates an implicit argument is exposed to view, but not the argument itself. Rarely is there any attempt to deceive or obfuscate. The writer merely takes it for granted that the reader holds the same set of implicit beliefs and is willing to accept the "reasonableness" of unsupported assumptions. Both share the same ethnoscience and the same value system. Implicit beliefs, as we will see, are the weakest link in the diffusionist world model. Throughout this book we will encounter diffusionist theories that simply hang in the air, unsupported by argument and evidence. In fact we will find, for large chunks of the diffusionist world model, that most of the propositions which would be needed to make these areas of belief coherent and sound are simply missing. In other words, relatively few of the beliefs are explicit and grounded. And these few are not connected together, so the fabric as a whole is incomplete. It seems complete only to those who are prepared to take a great deal for granted, who fill in the gaps with implicit beliefs. Verification is the matter of testing a candidate belief to see whether it fits the facts. There are various kinds of test and various controversies about the nature of verification, but such questions need not detain us. The normal sort of verification involves a search for evidence that would seem to support or contradict the new hypothesis, the candidate belief. The process is never complete: everyone, of every culture and community, has to be satisfied with partial confirmation (and disconfirmation) of empirical beliefs. For us the important point about verification is this: verification is never sufficient grounds for converting a hypothesis into an accepted belief. Not is it even necessary. The judgment of compatibility is more crucial than that of verifiability, and this holds true among social scientists as it does among all other groups of natives. Part of verification is itself a matter of judging compatibility. The words and procedures used in verification, the criteria on which a test is deemed adequate, and much more besides, are drawn from the stock of existing beliefs, and the test of a candidate belief is therefore only partly a matter of direct confrontation with new evidence. But this is not the main point. In any belief-holding group, a new idea, a candidate belief, tends to be judged more on the basis of the way it fits into the existing belief system than on the basis of its directly apprehended meaning. The same thing happens in self-conscious scholarship. It has long been a truism that existing scientific beliefs tend to be defended in the face of new hypotheses that question them, and the defense is often fierce, bitter, and dogmatic. (Whitehead once called scientists "the leading dogmatists. Advance in detail is admitted: fundamental novelty is barred."37) The truism was popularized by Thomas Kuhn in a dramatic scenario that he

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called a theory of scientific revolutions: in essence, crucial scientific beliefs gain a position of suzereignty, their supporters gain positions of academic power, and so the beliefs become entrenched and hold sway for long periods of time, even after evidence against these beliefs has massively accumulated. Eventually there is a historic break: a "scientific revolution" which overthrows the existing ruling theory or paradigm and installs another one, which, in turn, holds sway for a period of time.38 But Kuhn's frame of reference (in his Structure of Scientific Revolutions) was physical science, and we are told very little about the historic process by which beliefs gain, and retain, hegemony in social science, including history and cultural geography. In these fields the process is fundamentally different. For one thing, influential beliefs hold sway for reasons that reflect much more directly the interests of elite groups outside of the scholarly field itself, and the replacement of one theory by another reflects mainly these external interests, not a Kuhn-like intellectual revolution within the community of scholars itself. Secondly, in these fields it is much less easy to attack old theories with new evidence, in part because scientific methods here are usually very inexact and in part because the collecting of evidence itself is guided and sometimes determined by existing beliefs. Thus it is that large belief structures, like diffusionism, persist for generations, untroubled by "scientific revolutions." People have a tendency, sometimes slight, sometimes strong, to believe what they want to believe. Another way of putting this is to say that beliefs are influenced by values, or that cognition interacts with valuation to produce what Tolman elegantly called the "belief-value matrix."39 The most straightforward (or at least modest) notion of "values" finds them to be judgments of preference, assertions of what is good and bad, right and wrong, liked and disliked, by individuals and groups. Values, like beliefs, are aggregated into systems. But value systems are very different from empirical belief systems. The latter, broadly put, assert things to be true (or untrue) about the world; the former assert things to be preferable (or not), hence they call for action upon the things uncovered by belief, and John Dewey was right in describing such assertions as "agendas."40 Viewed in this way, the realm of value is not autonomous and opaque. It is mainly a transition zone between belief and practice. Values are interests. Values interact with beliefs in a belief-value matrix. A belief system and a value system tend to maintain some degree of consistency with each other during limited periods (except in times of very rapid social change). This somewhat regular relation between the two systems I will call conformality, and it works both ways. Statements do not ordinarily become validated beliefs if they do not conform to the values, and therefore the interests, of the group. But value judgments indicate preferences for future action, and a given judgment is likely to be rejected by a group, sooner or later, if the future action it calls for is flagrantly impractical: if the action

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clearly cannot succeed given the nature of the real world as depicted in the belief system. Obviously, matters are more complex than this and also less predictable. In any case, the dominant belief system for a group must in the long run conform to the value system, and when the two fall out of conformality, one or the other will be forced to change. Since values are the expression of concrete worldly interests, the belief system will tend, in ordinary times, to bend more readily to the value system, and to worldly interests, than vice versa. The judgment of value conformality is a crucial part of the binding of belief to culture. The notion that beliefs are culture-bound is of course a familiar one, but the idea that this proposition applies fully to the belief systems of scholars is not really accepted except in the most general and abstract way and therefore in a way that does not usually permit an analysis of the manner in which a particular scholar's values (or interests) affect his or her empirical statements. The stronger proposition, that all new idea in social science are vetted for their conformality to values, and more precisely to the value system of the elite of the society—which is not necessarily the value system of the scholars themselves—and that this process of validation normally and frequently leads to the acceptance and persistence of really unscientific ideas, is hardly even considered, even though it is normal doctrine in ethnoscience (normal, at least, when applied to natives other than ourselves). But there is an even stronger proposition that I will defend in this book with concrete arguments and evidence: the proposition that our worldscale models, and many of our specific theories and factual truisms, are accepted mainly—and in some cases only—because of their conformality to the values of the European elites; that this has been the case since the beginning of the nineteenth century, and is true today. Many of these demonstrably false beliefs are built into the world model of diffusionism, and this is so because diffusionism is the central intellectual doctrine that explains and rationalizes the actions and interests of European colonialism and neocolonialism. Conformality is really the crucial part of validation. This is not ordinarily a matter of the "establishment" suppressing free speech (although this happens quite frequently). The judgment of conformality is a complex binding process. At all times the dominant group (a class or ethnoclass) has a fairly definite set of concrete worldly interests. Some of these conflict with others, but all tend toward the maintenance of the elite group's power and position. Because of its power to reward, punish, and control, this group succeeds in convincing most people, including most scholars, that its interests are the interests of everyone. These interests are social, economic, and political agendas, and it is a simple transformation to insert the word "ought" and turn them into values. Viewed statically, the interests are always clear, and the values derived from them cohere into a

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dominant value system that more or less mirrors these interests. Hence we have at all times a kind of environment of values, surrounding and influencing the ongoing validation process in scholarship. The way this influence is exerted is very complex in our society today, but it was quite simple and transparent in the last century, when the main lineaments of diffusionism and other beliefs related to colonialism were being sketched in. In those days, not only was it true, as Marx said, that the ruling ideas are the ideas of the ruling class, but it was also true that almost nobody but the ruling class, and its subalterns, had the opportunity to render those ideas effective, in the form of publication, lecturing at influential schools and universities, and participating in policy formation and execution. Conformality, in those times and places, was accomplished largely through the social vetting process by which only those people who adhered to the dominant value system were in a good position to tender hypotheses as candidate beliefs. I do not believe that the process is altogether different today, but it would take us far afield to discuss it here at length. We can simply take note of the background of most professors (very few of whom are the offspring of poor or minority families), the reward structure in universities and consultantships, and other elements that jointly produce this result: few professional social scientists want to propose candidate beliefs which do not conform. This explains why, in spite of the most rigorous adherence to scientific method and scholarly canons, our theories remain, to a large degree, conformal. In sum, validation proceeds by subjecting any candidate belief to three tests: compatibility, verifiability, and value conformality. Of these three, perhaps only conformality is essential (and then only in relatively tranquil times). Verification can be waived on occasion, provided that the hypothesis is both conformal to interests and nicely compatible with existing beliefs, be they explicit theories or implicit beliefs emerging as stated or unstated assumptions. Strong verification is, in any case, pretty hard to come by in the social sciences (a methodological fact that is often mistaken for an epistemological verity). In these fields, a judgment of compatibility is always rendered—if not on the candidate belief then on the person who proposes it—and it is most unusual for a new hypothesis or theory to become accepted as a belief if it contradicts the corpus of accepted beliefs in its field. But it is always the case that society and its elite need to be supplied with answers to pressing problems confronting them. So there is an important countercurrent. New hypotheses that display a touch of the novel and hold some possibility of solving an already recognized problem are encouraged, indeed rewarded. They must be compatible but not completely so. There is simply no way that a scholar, once installed in the profession, can prevent conformal values from creeping into his or her work. This in spite of the fact that nearly all are honest, careful, and competent. The

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reason why my argument seems, incorrectly, to be an attack on scholarship is because the problem is almost always seen in connection with explicit beliefs, and with consciously held attitudes. The fields that study human society are a weak infusion of explicit theory within a body of belief that is largely implicit. Scientific method prevents us from accepting the arguments of an explicit theory merely because we want to do so. But the main grounding for each such theory is its compatibility with other beliefs in the system, expressed as a matter of "reasonableness." It is "reasonable" to accept certain assumptions (reflecting certain implicit beliefs) and not others. One theory seems "reasonable," or plausible, because it is compatible with another, accepted theory, although no explicit chain of connection exists: most links in the chain are buried in the realm of implicit belief. Finally, it seems "reasonable" to seek verification for a hypothesis with certain observations and not with others. It should be added that the disciplined work of social scientists usually prevents them from unwittingly validating a hypothesis on grounds of value conformality. The problem, and it is a severe one, is that, thinking that our explicit beliefs are not validated by value conformality, we let value conformality control our implicit beliefs. These then provide a bridge across gaps between explicit theories, rendering them compatible, or serve up the assumptions which provide the starting point for new explicit theories, formal and informal. Scientific and scholarly method demands rigor only for the explicit theories. Diffusionism as a belief system The discussion thus far has been designed to lay the foundation for an understanding of three aspects of the diffusionist belief system: its structure, its binding to certain groups in certain societies, and its evolution, this last aspect including the important questions of why diffusionism became prominent and why it has persisted. It would not be much of an oversimplification to say that diffusionism developed as the belief system appropriate to one powerful and permanent European interest: colonialism. From 1492 to the present the wealth drawn into Europe—meaning, as in all of this discussion, Greater Europe—from the non-European world has been a vital nutriment for the elite classes of Europe: for their maintenance of status within their societies, and for their progress. Whether this statement can be generalized to include all classes within European society, whether, that is, colonialism was an interest of the nonelite classes of Europe in most times and places, is a contentious issue which I do not need to address. I am merely asserting that (1) Europe's elite depended on colonialism; (2) Europe's elite was tremendously influential in the evolution of European ideas and more specifically European scholarship; and (3) Europe's elite held a permanent social interest in the creation and

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development of a conformal belief system, a body of thought that would rationalize, justify, and, most importantly, assist the colonial enterprise. As that enterprise evolved and changed, so too did the body of ideas constituting diffusionism. Most of this book is devoted to a delineation and critique of diffusionist beliefs, so I do not need to review the nature of the belief system here. Suffice it to say, the doctrine ranges over all scales of fact, from world geography and world history to ideas about the qualities of individual human beings, European and non-European, and descriptions and explanations of particular local events. The scope of the diffusionist belief structure encompasses a fair share of European ethnoscience. That is, a fair share of the licensed belief statements in European ethnoscience are used within the diffusionist belief structure, although they are also used in other structures. (Some examples to be discussed in Chapter 2 are: beliefs about demographic behavior, about intelligence, about the origins of civilization, about the fertility of tropical soils.) These statements range from modest assertions of evidential fact to complex and elaborate theories, both formal and informal. They enter the diffusionist canon through all of the licensing procedures for belief acceptance discussed above. Over time, all of them go through the screening process of conformality with the value or interest of colonialism, or go through the indirect screening process that accords them the status of being compatible with other beliefs which are themselves conformal. Over time, the belief system accretes new diffusionist beliefs and discards those that contradict the canon or that have lost their relevance in a changing world. Since colonialism, in various newer forms such as neocolonialism, remains an interest of the elite, and since implicit beliefs go unnoticed and uncriticized, the process of adding, subtracting, and modifying diffusionist beliefs continues in the present. Were this not the case, the multitude of beliefs about Eurocentric history which claim our attention in this book would long since have been discarded. Diffusionist beliefs at the space-time scale that embraces the whole world and the whole of history, tend to form a rather tightly structured theory, as we saw earlier in this chapter. The theory, in brief, describes the essential processes that take place in an "inner," essentially European, core sector of the world, describes those that take place in an "outer," essentially non-European sector, and describes the modes of interaction between the two sectors, the most important of which is the inner-to-outer diffusion of innovative ideas, people, and commodities. We can describe this world-scale space-time theory as the "diffusionist world model." It is the colonizer's model of the world. The obvious question arises: what would we conceive to be a nondiffusionist world model? This would be a world in which the processes at work in any one sector are expected also to be at work in the other sectors. In essence, this model is driven by a concept of equal capability of human

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beings—psychological unity—in all cultures and regions, and from this argument it demands that any spatial inequalities in matters relating to cultural evolution, and more specifically economic development, be explained. Stated differently: equality is the normal condition and inequalities need to be explained. Diffusionism, in contrast, expects basic inequality between the Inner and the Outer sectors of the world—and of humanity. The uniformitarian principle is not one of uniformity; it is the principle of human equality. At space-time scales smaller than the world, the diffusionist belief system is very diffuse, parts of it hanging together as formally elegant theories, parts of it floating around as compatible but weakly connected belief statements. It would take us far beyond the scope of this book to attempt a description of all of the parts, levels, and subsystems in the diffusionist model as a whole, ranging upward and downward from the world model to the level of particular space-time event descriptions. But we can make a start.

Notes 1 In this book the word "Europe" refers to the continent of Europe and to regions dominated by European culture elsewhere, regions like the United States and Canada. 2 This quick survey of 150 years or so of world history textbooks is, of course, very schematic and impressionistic. Some further comments may be of use. In textbooks of the first period, around 1850 (plus or minus a decade or so), the original home of Man is often stated to be the Garden of Eden, which is located by different textbook writers in different parts of western Asia. For instance: somewhere east of Canaan and near Mesopotamia (Robbins, The World Displayed in its History and Geography, 1832, p. 13); somewhere in the "healthful" mountains between the Caspian Sea and Kashmir or Tibet (Miiller, The History of the World to 1783, 1842, pp. 27, 43-44); perhaps near the borders of the Mediterranean Sea (Tytler, Universal history, From the Creation to the beginning of the Eighteenth Century, vol. 1, 1844, p. 17); in the Vale of Kashmir (Willard, Universal History in Perspective, 1845, p. 34); somewhere between the Caucasus Mountains and the Himalayas (Keightley, Outlines of History, 1849); in the Himalayas (Weber, Outlines of Universal History, 1853, p. 6); in Armenia (Collier, Outlines of General History, 1868). There seems to be a kind of median location of Eden near the Caucasus Mountains, which was also, by no coincidence, the supposed place of origin of the "Caucasian race." Noah, of course, began postdeluvian history on Mt. Ararat, in Armenia (also roughly in the region of the Caucasus). Noah is supposed to have migrated then to Europe (Whelpley, A Compound of History, From the Earliest Times, vol. 1, 1844, p. 10), or Mesopotamia (Robbins, 1832, p. 20), or Palestine, or some other part of the Bible Lands. Noah's three sons are supposed, then, to have dispersed and to have founded the branches of mankind—the first great diffusion process. In most textbooks of this period history tends to move west; some textbooks present the Hegelian notion that history proceeds inexorably westward, following the sun, with the implication that the United States, farther west still, will replace Europe as the next center of world civilization.

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CHALLENGING EUROCENTRISM It was widely believed in this period that nonwhites were not truly and fully human. One version of this theory, the notion of "polygenesis," claimed that God had created true humans in the Garden of Eden and other races—or at least the "black race"—in other places and times. This theory questioned the standard interpretation of the Old Testament (that everyone is descended from Adam and Eve), so, not surprisingly, it was not stated as truth in the textbooks I consulted. (I have not, however, looked at textbooks used in the antebellum South, and the theory of polygenesis was most popular in slaveholding regions, as an ideological grounding for the treatment of blacks as things rather than people.) Yet polygenesis was important enough to be mentioned and then rejected—in favor of the view that all humans are descendants of Adam and Eve—in some textbooks, down to the end of the century (see, for example, Dew, A Digest of the Laws, Customs, Manners, and Institutions of the Ancient and Modern Nations, 1853; Fisher, Outlines of Universal History, 1885; Duruy and Grosvenor, A General History of the World, 1901). But polygenesis was not needed; the belief that nonwhites are inferior to whites is asserted in one way or another in all the textbooks I examined. The theory of "degeneration" served just as well as polygenesis. It was the notion that the descendants of Ham, and perhaps other biblical peoples, migrated away from the Bible Lands, eastward and southward, and degenerated from civilization toward savagery, or even lower, as they did so, because they had not accepted Christ, or because they migrated into inferior environments, or for some other reason. (See, for instance, Keightley, 1849, 5-6; "the savage is a degeneration from the civilized life," and Africans are near the apes.) Degeneration was asserted in some textbooks, but in most the simple fact of white superiority was stated and left unexplained. The history of the world is, in general, the history of the white race, or the Semitic and Aryan peoples (see below). For times later than the Roman era, non-Europe is scarcely discussed, except as a backdrop for discussions of the Crusades, the building of colonial empires, and the like. (See Harris, The Rise of Anthropological Theory, 1968, for an excellent discussion of polygenesis and degeneration.) Nearly all textbooks of the period around 1900 (give or take a few years) accepted the newer scientific theories about the age of the earth and the fact of biological evolution (though not the Darwinian theory of evolution). The biblical account of human history, however, was retained in many books, although fewer of them accepted the formerly standard Old Testament chronologies (for instance, that things began in 4004 B.C.). Books of this period tended to present the so-called "Aryan theory," a theory derived from philology but expanded into a theory of culture history. Earlier philologists had identified an "Aryan" or "Indo-European" language family, and also a "Semitic" family (which many authorities, including textbook writers, identified with Noah's sons Japheth and Shem, respectively). The white race consists of these two peoples. One branch of the Aryans supposedly migrated west into Europe (from the supposed "Arayan hearth," somewhere southwest or northwest of the Caucasus). These were progressive, energetic people, who founded European civilization mainly after they had acquired Christianity from the Semites, who invented the first barbaric civilizations and monotheism but then stagnated into a dreamy, decadent, unambitious culture and thereafter ceased to advance civilization. No other culture, apart from these two, had much to do with history. (According to Freeman, General Sketch of History, 1872, p. 2, history "in the highest and truest sense is the history of the Aryan nations of Europe"; see also Collier, 1868; Swinton, Outlines of the World's History, 1874;

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Gilman, First Steps in General History, 1874; Anderson, New Manual of General History, 1882; Steele and Steele, A Brief History of Ancient, Medieval, and Modern Peoples, 1883; Fisher, 1896; Quackenbos, Illustrated School History of the World, 1889; Thalheimer, Outline of General History for the Use of Schools, 1883; Sanderson, History of the World from the Earliest Time to the Year 1898', Duruy and Grosvenor, 1901. Ploetz and Tillinghast presented this theory in Epitome of Ancient, Medieval, and Modern History, first published in 1883, in its many editions down to 1925 when, in an edition edited by H. E. Barnes, the theory was finally eliminated.) See Bernal's Black Athena (1987, 1991) for an insightful discussion of the Aryan theory and related topics in the history of European thought. Because the Old Testament spoke of agriculture—Cain knew farming and Abraham herded domesticated animals—the history textbooks tended not to address the problem of where agriculture was invented until very late in the nineteenth century, the period when science was beginning to deal with this problem. Some scientists and some textbook writers then began to speculate that, just possibly, agriculture was as old in continental Europe as it was in western Asia and Egypt. (From the point of view of science, see Joly, Man Before Metals, 1897.) But the idea that agriculture originated in the Bible Lands remained dominant although now it was viewed (by most) as an invention, not an artifact of original creation. The ethnographic fact that some tribal peoples (for instance, in Australia) did not practice agriculture was commonly explained, in the textbooks of the earlier nineteenth century, in terms of the theory of degeneration: their ancestors had somehow lost the art. Later in the century it became more common to use the diffusionist conception that agriculture had been invented by west Asian or (conceivably) European peoples, then diffused outward over the rest of the world, and cultures that did not practice it in modern times simply had not yet acquired it, either because of their isolation or because they were too stupid to take it up. The Orient Express was a famous train that ran between western Europe and western Asia. Although various routes were used in different eras, the basic line ran from Constantinople (Istanbul) through Greece to northern Italy or Austria, then on to France, and (via Ostend) England. Most of the history textbooks write about world history as though it marched northwestward, rather like the westbound Orient Express, with stations (so to speak) in Athens, Rome, Paris, and London. (See Chapter 2 for further discussion of the Orient Express model.) 3 In nineteenth-century world history textbooks, Turkey was given some attention because of its political involvement with European affairs. World geography, in contrast to world history, always covered the entire world, and textbooks as well as the great multivolume descriptive geographies (like Reclus's classic 19-volume Nouvelle Geographic Universelle, published between 1876 and 1894) gave considerable attention to Asia, Africa, and Latin America. This should not mislead us, however. One of the primary functions of geography throughout this entire period was to teach European children what they needed to know about non-Europe in order to participate in their countries' imperial and commercial activities in these regions. See Hudson, "The New Geography and the New Imperialism: 1870-1918" (1977) and McKay, "Colonialism in the French Geographical Movement" (1943), on the close relation between geography and colonial activities. 4 The character of this newer approach can be seen if we look at two well-known modern university-level texts, one written by W. H. McNeill of the University

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CHALLENGING EUROCENTRISM of Chicago (A World History, 3rd ed., 1979), the other by J. M. Roberts of Oxford University (The Hutchinson History of the World, 2d ed., 1987; published in the United States as The Penguin History of the World). For preChristian-era world history, more than three-quarters of the place-name mentions in both books are places in Europe and the Middle East (including North Africa); less than one-quarter of the place-name mentions are places in other parts of the world and only about 1 % are in Africa. For the Christian era to A.D. 1491 there is significant divergence between the two books. In Roberts's text, European and Middle Eastern places constitute about 85% of place-name mentions. In McNeill's text, European and Middle Eastern places constitute only 60% of the place names mentioned, a significant departure from the older tradition although still well out of proportion to this region's size in area and population. (Sub-Sharan Africa accounts for only 2% of mentions for the period A.D. 1-1491.) In both books, therefore, the region I have been calling "Greater Europe" has considerably lower salience for pre-1492 history than was typically the case in older world history textbooks. As to explanation, however, both books retain much of the traditional perspective. Roberts gives almost no causal role to the cultures and regions of the world other than Europe and the Middle East (including North Africa) for any period prior to 1492. McNeill gives considerable weight to East Asia and some to South Asia for certain historical periods, but almost all of the world history-making forces emanate from Europe, western Asia, and North Africa for the period before 1492. (An exception is the Black Death, which, according to McNeill, swept westward into these regions from farther Asia. On this matter, see also McNeill's Plagues and Peoples, 1976.) Examples of the Eurocentric explanations offered by both authors will be given in Chapter 2 of the present book. It is, however, insufficient to look only at those present-day textbooks that are clearly identified as "world history" textbooks. Quite frequently university courses covering the subject of world history use history textbooks that carry titles like "The History of Western Civilization." (See, for instance, Lerner, et al., Western Civilizations: Their History and Their Culture, 1988; Kagan, et al., The Western Heritage, 1987; Chambers, et al., The Western Experience, 1987.) If such a textbook neglects the non-Western world, there can be no complaint that it is misleading: the title clearly specifies "West" not "World." But if the course is designated as "world history" and the textbook is designated as "Western history," then we have a problem. The worst scenario would be one in which world-history teaching continues to be Eurocentric history in disguise. I do not know of any research which tests the following hypotheses: (1) Given that, today, historians are sensitive to the need to avoid Eurocentric bias in the teaching of world history, do some of them simply change the title to "Western" so that Eurocentrism becomes, then, licit? And (2) is it possible that there is a trend away from the teaching of "World" history and toward "Western" (etc.) history and that this trend reflects a reaction (or adjustment) to present-day demands for nonethnocentrism and "fairness?" A school textbook is truly a key social document, a kind of modern stele. In the typical case, a book becomes accepted as a high school (or lower-level) textbook only after it has been reviewed very carefully by the publisher, school boards, and administrators, all of whom are intensely sensitive to the need to print acceptable doctrine; they are concerned to make it certain that children will read only those facts in their textbook which are considered to be acceptable as facts by the opinion-forming elite of the culture. The resulting textbook is, therefore, less an ordinary authored book than a vetted social statement of

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6 7

8

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what is considered valid and acceptable for entry into the mind of the child. For this reason, research on textbooks (including college textbooks, in which the same process is at work, though more subtly) is, in fact, ethnographic research. It tells us about the belief system of the opinion-forming elite of the culture as a whole. Therefore, geography texts in the United States are really ethnogeography documents. Likewise, history texts are really ethnohistory documents. They are probably as useful as cultural artifacts as any old potsherd or inscription. See the final section of this chapter. This argument is given much weight by Eurocentric Marxists, since class struggle, for Marxists, is the central force in historical evolution. A form of political feudalism is sometimes conceded to have been developed earlier by the Chinese, but the great majority of European scholars, including most Marxists, believe that European feudalism was unique in representing a form of society that was a crucial, essential, stepping stone to modernity. See Chapter 3. See Samir Amin's Eurocentrism (1988) for an excellent discussion of this notion. The word "Eurocentrism" apparently was coined quite recently, to assemble "European ethnocentrism" into one word. However, I (like Amin) do not think of Eurocentrism as merely a species of ethnocentrism, as the following paragraphs will make clear. I use the word "community" to refer to any social unit, of any size. In this discussion, for the sake of simplicity, the "communities" will be thought of as villages distributed across a rural landscape. I neglect here the cases in which culture change results from the combination of an independent invention and a diffusion event. See my "Two Views of Diffusion" (1977) and "Diffusionism: A Uniformitarian Critique" (1987a). See Jett, "Further Information on the Geography of the Blowgun and Its Implications for Transoceanic Contact" (1991); also see Carter, Man and the Land (1968), and Edmonson, "Neolithic Diffusion Rates" (1961). See, for instance, Eliot Smith, The Diffusion of Culture (1933), Perry, The Primordial Ocean (1935), and Taylor, Environment and Nation (1945). Eliot Smith flatly asserts that the ancient diffusion process radiating mainly from Egypt and Phoenicia "continued for many centuries to play upon the Pacific littoral of America, where it is responsible for ... the remarkable Pre-Columbian civilizations" (quoted in Zwernemann, Culture History and African Anthropology, 1983, p. 15). On these matters, see Harris, The Rise of Anthropological Theory (1968) and Steward, Theory of Culture Change: The Methodology of Multilinear Evolution (1955). See Koepping, Adolf Bastian and the Psychic Unity of Mankind (1983), Stocking, Race, Culture, and Evolution (1968), and Harris, The Rise of Anthropological Theory (1968). Often the antidiffusionist camp was labeled the "cultural evolutionist" camp, and the debate as a whole was labeled "diffusionism versus evolutionism." But, as I argue here, evolutionists were to some extent diffusionists and diffusionists were to some extent evolutionists. Moreover, I want to use the term "cultural evolution" in this book in a much broader and much less controversial sense, as indicating merely the search for explanation in larger questions of historical and cultural change. A problem that is "historical" becomes a problem of "cultural evolution" when we ask, broadly, "why?" Some scholars, of course, are not comfortable with this usage of the phrase "cultural evolution." For some it carries baggage of economic determinism or environmental determinism or

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15

16 17 18

19

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technological determinism, or it signifies the notion of an invariant sequence of cultural stages through which all human groups must pass—but I mean none of that. Most cultural geographers use the phrase "cultural evolution" just about as I use it here. Both forms are sometimes combined; for instance, in the nineteenth century northwestern Europe was considered (by northwestern Europeans) to be absolutely civilized, Africa absolutely uncivilized, and all other areas (of the Eastern Hemisphere) somewhere in between. These matters are discussed later in this book. Max Weber's notion of "European rationality" is discussed in Chapter 2. The varying conceptions of China, and also India, as semirational or intermittently rational or rational in some ways but not in others are discussed in Chapters 2 and 3. The "bogeyman" refers to the Buginese, a Malay people who fought fiercely against the Europeans and so were stigmatized in this way. The most famous fictional vampire, Count Dracula, came to England from Outside (a barbarous mountain region on the frontier of the Turkish empire). On the history of the idea of progress in European thought, see, for instance, G. H. Mead, Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century (1936), Toulmin and Goodfield, The Discovery of Time (1965), Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress (1980), and Bowler, The Invention of Progress (1989). It is true that the idea of progress as the normal condition was doubted by some thinkers during the nineteenth century (and especially in opposition to the idea of biological evolution), but this was a minor and intermittent countercurrent. See Stocking, Race, Culture, and Evolution (1987) and Bowler, The Invention of Progress (1989). See Huddleston, Origins of the American Indians: European Concepts, 1492-1729 (1967), Williams, The American Indian in Western Legal Thought (1990); Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean 1492-1797 (1992); Gossett, Race: The History of an Idea in America (1963). At times the notion was advanced that these civilizations had somehow evolved in antediluvian times and had not been wiped out in the Flood (see, for example, Keightley, Outlines of History, 1849). Haskel (Chronology and Universal History, 1848, p. 9) speculates that Noah migrated to China where he or his descendants founded the Chinese monarchy. "The early improvement and populousness of the east, seems to favor this idea." From the mid-nineteenth century or perhaps earlier, the literature on the occult, on ghosts and monsters, and the like, tended to focus on extraEuropean origins or homes or sources of the witches, monsters, demons, zombies, walking mummies, evil spells ("black magic"), artifacts with supernatural powers, and so on, all of which have a tendency to diffuse into Europe as a kind of counterdiffusion, an undertow beneath European expansionism. See Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism (1988). See W. A. Lewis, ed., Tropical development, 1880-1913 (1970). See Bowler, The Invention of Progress (1989), Stocking, Victorian Anthropology (1987), Mandelbaum, History, Man and Reason (1971). Spencer, The Man Versus the State (1969). The complex interplay between individualistic and holistic theories of historical progress during the nineteenth century is discussed in G. H. Mead, Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century (1936) and Mandelbaum, History, Man and Reason (1971). I try to show in Blaut, The National Question: Decolonizing the Theory of Nationalism (1987b) how most theories of nationality and national evolution emerge from

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one or the other of these intellectual streams, one essentially Kantian and psychologistic, the other essentially Romantic and Hegelian. Among them: Malthus, J. S. Mill, T. Macauley, and Thackeray. See Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830-1914 (1987). Also see Williams, British Historians and the West Indies (1966) and Said, Orientalism (1979). See Thapar, Ancient Indian Social History: Some Interpretations (1978) and "Ideology and the Interpretation of Early Indian History" (1982), and B. Chandra, "Karl Marx, His Theories of Asian Societies, and Colonial Rule" (1981). We return to this issue in Chapter 2. See in particular Marx's article, "The British Rule in India" (1979). In later work, Marx and Engels adopted a much more negative opinion about colonialism, developing to some extent the idea of colonial underdevelopment: see Blaut, The National Question: Decolonizing the Theory of Nationalism (1987b) for a discussion. See Chapter 2. See Asad, Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter (1975), and Temu and Swai, Historians and Africanist History (1981). Important examples are Eliot Smith The Diffusion of Culture (1933), Perry, The Primordial Ocean (1935), Schmidt, The Culture Historical Method of Ethnology (1939), Griffith Taylor, Environment and Nation (1945). See critiques in Radin, The Method and Theory of Ethnology (1965), Lowie, The History of Ethnological Theory (1937), and Harris The Rise of Anthropological Theory (1968). Here I am of course rejecting the view, common among European scholars, that colonies were relinquished voluntarily. This view has been rejected almost universally by scholars in the formerly colonial world. It may conceivably have been true for a few small islands from which profits no longer flowed to the colonizing power, but even such cases are debatable. It is worth noting that the United States has not given independence to any of the colonies it held at the close of World War II; has not even formally conceded the right of full selfdetermination (including independence) to Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, the Marianas, etc. The other colonial powers would presumably have taken the same position, had they had the power to do so in the face of colonial proindependence forces; in such cases as the Dutch East Indies, French Indochina, Kenya, Angola, Mozambique, and so on, the colonizers tried to hold on to their possession by force of arms and failed. My view is set forth in Blaut, The National Question (1987b), chap. 4, and Blaut and Figueroa, Aspectos de la cuestion nacional en Puerto Rico (1988). Representative examples include "Operation Bootstrap" in Puerto Rico, the Colonial Development and Welfare programs in parts of the British Empire, the increased funding for colonial agriculture and health departments, the establishment of colonial universities, and so on. These programs, regardless of their underlying political purposes (often hidden from the technical personnel involved) were, overall, very impressive. Often this work was a direct continuation of colonial technical work, often with the same personnel, now "foreign advisor" or "United Nations expert" rather than "colonial technical officer." Thus the Alliance for Progress, the Peace Corps, the elevated funding of technical and financial agencies of the Organization of American States, and the like. On ethnoscience, see, for example, Conklin, "Lexicographical Treatment of

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Folk Taxonomies" (1969), Frake, "The Ethnographic Study of Cognitive Systems" (1969), Blaut, "Some Principles of Ethnogeography" (1978), and Spradley and McCurdy, Anthropology: A Cultural Perspective (1975). In my view, the categories "history" and "science" cannot be distinguished ontologically, although historiography is hardly an exact science. Whitehead, Science and Philosophy (1948), p. 129. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1970). More relevant is Fleck's Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact (1979). Tolman, "A Psychological Model" (1951). Dewey, "The Logic of Judgements of Practice," in his Essays in Experimental Logic (1916).

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GREECE Aryan or Mediterranean? Two Contending Historiographical Models Martin Bernal From Silvia Federici (ed.) Enduring Western Civilization: The Constructions of the Concept of Western Civilization and Its 'Others', Praeger, 1995, 3-11

In 1978, when Edward Said published Orientalism, he argued that, far from being shaped by disinterested scholarship, Orientalism as "a mode of discourse" corroborated by "supporting institutions, vocabulary, scholarship, imagery, doctrines" was largely a self-referential system, developed in conjunction with Western imperialism for which it served important functions (Said, 1978: 2). Orientalism, in other words, was more valuable "as a sign of European-Atlantic power over the Orient" than "as a veridic discourse about the Orient" (Said: 6). The publication caused a furor among orthodox Orientalists, and in June 1982 there came the official response. Writing in The New York Review of Books, the eminent historian of the Middle East, Bernard Lewis, counter-attacked. Lewis used the tactic of reductio ad absurdum. He imagined a hypothetical situation in which modern Greeks supposedly objected to what they saw as the biases of classical scholarship and consequently tried to overthrow it. Lewis presented this situation as analogous to that of modern Arab malcontents questioning the scholarly objectivity of Orientalism. Thus framed, the charge inevitably appeared ridiculous. In response to Lewis, in The New York Review of Books of August 12, Said argued that there could be no comparison between the pure scholarship of the classicists and the use of Orientalism as a handmaid of imperialism. He contrasted the great liberal German Hellenist Ulrich Willamovitz-Moellendorff and the Orientalist Professor Menachem Milsom, who, at the time, was the Israeli governor of the West Bank.

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Thus, despite their opposition on almost every other issue, both Lewis and Said agreed on one fundamental point: the discipline of the Classics was the epitome of disinterested, objective scholarship. My book, The Fabrication of Ancient Greece 1785-1985, which is the first of a four-volume series titled Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Western Civilization, is an attempt to challenge this assumption. Here I argue that, far from being neutral and peripheral, the German academic discipline of Altertumswissenschaft, transposed into England as "Classics," has been a central element of Northern European culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and has performed a key political function: fostering the notion that Europe possesses a categorical superiority over all other continents, a claim that has been used to justify imperialism and neo-colonialism as missions civilisatrices. I maintain that it is to the work of the Classicists that we owe the construction of that cultural trajectory that has served to establish Greece as the sole birthplace of "Western Civilization" and the site of a unique, almost miraculous spiritual development that supposedly elevates "Western Man" to humanity's pinnacle. In Black Athena, I illustrate this thesis by examining the paradigms that have governed the Classicists' presentation of Greek culture, and the conceptual shifts that have characterized the historiographical approach to Greek history in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In this context, I distinguish between two schemes of interpretation of the origins of Ancient Greece, which I have called the "Ancient" and the "Aryan" models. The Ancient Model, simply defined, is the view the Greeks had of their history, beginning with the assumptions they made about both their origins and the debt they owed to other cultures. The Aryan Model— which is the paradigm in which most of us have been educated—is the nineteenth-century product of classical studies. Its main tenet is that the culture and people that made classical Greece originated from a Northern homeland. According to this model, Greek culture developed as a result of the mixing between an aboriginal "Pre-Hellenic" population and one or more invasions from the North by Indo-European speakers. Very little is known about these "Pre-Hellenes," apart from their having been "white" or "Caucasian," and definitely not Semitic or African. But the Aryan Model reconstructs their presence from what are supposedly the many linguistic traces of their culture in Greek language and proper names. Nobody disputes the fact that, although Greek is an Indo-European language, it contains an extraordinarily high proportion of non-IndoEuropean elements. The Aryan Model accounts for this pattern by attributing, these non-Indo-European elements to the Pre-Hellenes. Thus, it admits that Greek is by no means a homogeneous language; however, it claims that, while there was ethnic and linguistic mixing, both invaders and natives were "racially pure," although the conquest was carried on by a

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"superior race." In this model, the Aryan conquest of Greece is contrasted to the Aryan conquest of India, as the latter occurred in a subcontinent where the aborigines were "dark." In the case of India, it could be argued, the conquest led, in the long run, to the "racial degradation" of the conquerors. By contrast, the conquest of Greece was likened to the Germanic destruction of the Roman Empire, in line with nineteenth-century ideology that pictured the Teutons as infusing new vigor into the Celtic and Latin-speaking European populations. The Aryan Model had to confront one major problem, however. While the Germanic invasions are historical events, and there is strong linguistic and legendary evidence suggesting that there were Aryan conquests of India, such a tradition is completely lacking in the case of Greece. The solution was to appeal to oblivion. As the early twentieth-century Classicist J. B. Bury put it in A History of Greece, which is still a standard work: "The true home of the Greeks before they won dominion in Greece had passed clean out of their remembrance, and they looked to the east, and not the north, as the quarter from which some of their ancestors had migrated" (75). What Bury believed to be the product of the faulty memory of the Greeks I call the Ancient Model. This was the conventional view among the Greeks of the Classical and Hellenistic Age. It is the historical scheme referred to by the playwrights Aeschylus and Euripides, the historians Herodotus and Diodorous Siculus, the orator Isocrates, the guidebook writer Pausanias, and others. It was omitted by one or two writers who might have mentioned it, and it was denied only by Plutarch in what is generally seen as an outburst of spleen against Herodotus ("On the malice of Herodotus"). In other writings (On Isis and Osiris), Plutarch admitted Greece's deep cultural debt to the Near East, and he considered it axiomatic that Greek religion came from Egypt. The Ancient Model acknowledged the central role played by the Egyptians and the Phoenicians in the formation of Greek culture. According to this model, Greece had once been inhabited by primitive tribes—Pelasgians and others. Then, around 1500 B.C., it had been colonized by Egyptians and Phoenicians, who built cities and civilized the natives. The Phoenicians had introduced the alphabet, while the Egyptians had taught the Pelasgians such things as irrigation and both the name and the worship of the gods (see, e.g., Herodotus, The Histories, Book II). The Ancient Model did not need to postulate a Pre-hellenic, non-IndoEuropean-speaking population on Greek soil, and it could satisfactorily account for the presence of non-Indo-European elements in Ancient Greek. Thus, it cannot be argued that it was overthrown because it lacked explanatory power, nor that it was superseded by a superior theory. The Ancient Model was not seriously challenged until the end of the eighteenth century. It was overthrown only in the 1820s, when Northern European scholars began to deny that there had been colonizations in

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Greece from the East and the South, and began to downplay Egyptian and Phoenician influences on Greek culture. These historiographical developments cannot be linked to the appearance of any new evidence of the type that was later provided by the great discoveries of the nineteenth century. The first archaeological discoveries of Bronze Age Greece by Heinrich Schliemann, who in the 1870s excavated at Troy and Mycenae, and the gradual decipherment, in the 1840s and 1850s, of Cuneiform scripts took place decades after the change of model; Champollion's decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphics was not accepted by most Classicists until the 1850s. Thus, we must look for the reasons for the demise of the Ancient Model not in developments internal to the disciplines, but in external factors, beginning with the early nineteenth-century Zeitgeist and its role in shaping the contemporary political and cultural milieu. In Europe, the years between 1815 to 1830 were outstanding for their political reaction and religious revival. In the aftermath of Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo, European governments strove to erase all traces of the French Revolution. They attempted to purge all ideas and theories which in their view had served to subvert the constituted order. One of the main outcomes of this process was the the devaluation of Egyptian culture. The reaction against Ancient Egypt can be understood in light of Egypt's centrality to the creed of the Freemasons, whom the reactionaries believed to have been at the heart of the revolutionary project. Especially reviled was the Freemasons' anti-Christian "religion" (Deism). This doctrine denied the centrality of Christ and transcended what the highranking Masons saw as the limited religion or superstition of Christianity. Hellenism came to the rescue of the Christian order that was threatened by Freemasonry. In the long run, however, the Ancient Model was destroyed not because of any threat it posed to Christianity, but because of the pervasive impact of racism and the concomitant development in the nineteenth century of Romanticism and Progress Theory. The growing importance of the American colonies, with their twin policy of enslavement of African Blacks and extermination of Native Americans, and later the growth of nationalism, is behind the tidal wave of racialism and the cult of ethnicity that swept Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Racism was reinforced by the development both of evolutionary theories, which looked at cultures as different stages in the progress of the human spirit, and of Romanticism, which in its antiEnlightenment stance emphasized the importance of place and kinship in cultural formation. Unlike the philosophers of the Enlightenment, who admired large empires (Egypt, China, and Rome), the Romantics favored small communities, for they believed that these were more conducive to the development not merely of virtue but of intellectual creativity. They also believed that these qualities best thrived in stimulating, cold, mountainous,

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Northern regions such as Scotland and Switzerland. Thus, the Ancient Greeks, who were beginning to be promoted as paragons of virtue, were proclaimed to be Northerners, whose values could not have derived from the luxurious and decadent South/East. At the intersection of Romanticism and Progress Theory there is the assumption that cultures follow the same stages as biological organisms, developing in ascending cycles from youth to old age. By the late eighteenth century, this produced the concept and cult of childhood as a uniquely pure and creative period. Soon Ancient Greece came to represent the childhood of Europe. This notion was partially inspired by Plato's Timaeus, where the Athenian law-giver Solon is reminded by an aged Egyptian priest that "you Greeks are always children . . . you are always young in soul, everyone of you. For . . . you possess not a single belief that is ancient" (Plato, Timaeus 22B: 33). From antiquity to the Renaissance, such an identification was a damning condemnation of Greek cultural shallowness. After the eighteenth century, the opposite was true. By the same token, the greater antiquity of the Egyptians and the Phoenicians, which previously had given them a reputation for cultural superiority, now became a liability. As later became better, the Greeks became the epitome of youthful dynamism and purity. Thus, the traditional view of Greece as the ethnic melting pot of the East Mediterranean became increasingly distasteful. Even more unacceptable was the idea that the most significant conquerors of Greece might have been the Egyptians and the Phoenicians, who were beginning to be categorized as Africans and Semites. Such a picture was offensive in the climate of sweeping racism that prevailed at the turn of the nineteenth century. As the century progressed, colonial expansion and the arrogant optimism that flowed from it sealed the fate of the Ancient Model. North Europeans needed to denigrate the people they were enslaving, exploiting, and exterminating in other continents. Less and less could they afford to acknowledge any debt to cultures rooted in Africa or the Middle East. Accordingly, the image of the Greeks changed as well. They were no longer seen as intermediaries, who had transmitted the wisdom of the East to the West; they became absolute creators. Similarly, the essence of their contribution was redefined. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the Ancient Greeks were admired because of Homer and the later poets. By the middle of the century, led by the German J. J. Winkelmann, the revered founder of art history, cultivated Europeans began to see Greek art as an expression of universal, transcendent values. Finally, in the 1780s, historians of philosophy agreed that there had been no philosophy before the Greeks. That Greece seemed to excel in poetry, art, and philosophy— that is, in two fields usually identified, respectively, with the youth and the maturity of a "race"—gave the Ancient Greeks a superhuman status as

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the models of a balanced and integrated humanity. The image of the ''divine Greeks" was particularly strong in Germany, where NeoHellenism had become identified with a passionate quest for social regeneration. In 1793, at the peak of the French Revolution, a young aristocrat and polymath, Wilhelm Von Humboldt, conceived a plan for a new education that would cure contemporary men and women, spiritually alienated by modernity, by putting them in contact with the most harmoniously integrated people of the past: the Ancient Greeks. Thirteen years later, in 1806, the Prussian government, in panic after its military humiliation by Napoleon at the battle of Jena, put Humboldt in charge of national education. Humboldt was thus able to implement many of his ideas, and through the institution of the Gymnasium and the University Seminar, he established a humanist education, focused on the science of antiquity (Altertumswissenschaft) and especially the study of the Greeks. He consciously aimed at providing an alternative to those who, being dissatisfied with the status quo, might look at political change for spiritual reintegration—a danger made all too real by the enthusiasm generated in Europe by Napoleon's armies. That the new education had meritocratic tendencies, and thus was seen as a threat to the aristocracy (who frequently opposed it), enhanced its sociocultural appeal. Similarly, its English offshoot, the "Classics," provided a middle way between reaction and revolution. From the beginning, the chief purpose of those advocating a humanistic education centered on the study of Ancient Greece was to forestall or avoid revolution. Indeed, the cult of the Classics served quite effectively to maintain the status quo, despite some minor trouble caused by the radicals associated with the Philhellenic movement that had been formed in support of the Greek War of Independence. Considering the rise of popular and institutionalized Philhellenism, which naturally intensified after 1821, it is remarkable that the Ancient Model survived as long as it did. It was a very tough nut to crack, as Connop Thirlwall, the first writer of a history of Greece in the "new" way, wrote in the 1830s: "It required no little boldness to venture even to throw out a doubt as to the truth of an opinion sanctioned by such authority and by prescription of such a long and undisputed possession of the public mind" (Thirlwall, vol. 1,1835-44: 63). The man who accomplished this task was one of the first products of Humboldt's new educational system: Karl Ottfried Miiller. Claiming a base in "science," which his predecessors had lacked, Miiller maintained that the reports that we find in ancient Greek literature referring to settlements by Phoenicians and Egyptians, and the Egyptians' civilizing influence on Greece, were the result of liaisons between the Egyptian, Phoenician, and Greek priesthoods of later times and therefore were not to be trusted. Miiller also insisted that, since none of the legends that

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made up the Ancient Model could be proven, they should not be believed (see Introduction to a Scientific System of Mythology, 1844). There were two sleights of hand involved in these recommendations. The first was the requirement of "proof" in an area where the best that can be hoped for is competitive plausibility. The second was the fact that Mliller was placing the onus of proof on those who accepted the massive ancient testimony rather than on those who challenged it. The unspoken assumption behind this move was apparently the new axiom that Europe was and had always been categorically separate from and superior to Asia and Africa. Thus, proof was required to justify something as "unnatural" as the Ancient Model. It is ironic, indeed, that the more the Ancient Greeks were admired, the less their views on their own history were trusted. Miiller's discrediting of the Egyptian colonization gained rapid acceptance, showing how well attuned he was to his times. Miiller's denial of a Phoenician influence on Greece was less easily accepted. Thus, during most of the nineteenth century, the dominant image of the origins of Greece was what I call the "Broad Aryan Model." It rejected the Greek traditions concerning the Egyptians; it accepted, however, those concerning the Phoenicians, who, by the mid-nineteenth century, were the object of much interest and admiration in Britain. Men like William Gladstone, who wrote extensively on early Greece, felt a great sympathy for the upright, manufacturing, trading Phoenicians, who spread civilization while selling cloth and carried on a little bit of slaving on the side. Interestingly, the identification of the Phoenicians with the English was shared by the French and, somewhat later, the Germans, who therefore detested them. (It seems that the French image of Perfide Albion derived from the Roman stereotype of the "bad faith" Phoenician Carthago.) Nevertheless, the Phoenicians were then, as they had been at least since the Renaissance, chiefly associated with the Jews, with whom they shared a common language (Canaanite) and many religious and other customs. Thus, the peak of the Phoenician reputation in historical writing tallies well with the years of relative tolerance for the Jews, between the dwindling of the traditional Christian religious hatred and the development of "racial antiSemitism." With the rise of racial, as opposed to religious, anti-Semitism in the 1880s and 1890s, the belief in the Phoenicians' formative role in the creation of Greek civilization plummeted. At the peak of the imperial conquest, we have not only the Dreyfus case, but also the publication of very influential articles denying the existence of any significant extra-European influence in the formation of Greece. The Broad Aryan Model survived, however, until the period between 1925 and 1935, when ostracism of the "Semites"—now made responsible for the Russian Revolution and world communism—became almost universal, spreading not only among the

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"disreputable right," but also within regular academic circles in Europe and North America. Although "external" forces provided the chief impetus for this shift of paradigms, an important impulse for the creation of the Aryan Model in the 1830s and 1940s came from developments "internal" to the field of linguistics—namely, the working out of the Indo-European language family and the consequent belief that, at some time, there must have been a single Proto-Indo-European language, spoken probably to the northeast of the Black Sea. The argument was that if Greek was an Indo-European language, then it must have been introduced, at some stage, from the North. On this basis, it was possible to postulate an Aryan invasion, despite the absence of any archaeological evidence for it or any ancient authority testifying to its occurrence. The situation has changed sharply since 1945, when the moral revulsion at the consequences of anti-Semitism, now made visible by the genocide of the Jews, stimulated a revision of conceptual frameworks in all disciplines. Even more important have been the simultaneous rise of anticolonial liberation movements throughout the Third World and the building of Israel as a bastion of imperialism and "Western Civilization." All of these changes have led to the acceptance of Jews as Europeans, while there has been a much smaller movement to restore the reputation of the Phoenicians. Since the 1960s, a battle has raged about the restoration of the Broad Aryan Model. Resistance by the "extremists" seems to have come largely from inertia and respect for authority, which is naturally very high in such "traditional" disciplines as the Classics and Historical Linguistics. Still, the defenders of the Extreme Aryan Model have been weakened both by the changing intellectual climate and by the increasing evidence of Egyptian and Levantine influence in the Aegean during the Late Bronze and Early Iron Ages. The Broad Aryanists—led largely by Jewish scholars—are now gaining ground and will almost certainly succeed by the end of the century. The restoration of the Ancient Model will take somewhat longer. It is important here to stress that, even if we accept the idea that the Aryan Model was conceived amidst the sins and errors of racialism and anti-Semitism, it does not follow that all of its assumptions have to be rejected. All that is necessary is to reopen the "competition" between the Aryan and Ancient models and to see which one has superior heuristic possibilities. This competition should be made not in terms of certainty, but in terms of competitive plausibility, and should be judged in light of the evidence provided by contemporary documents of the Late Bronze Age, by archaeological findings, linguistic materials (e.g., place names, divine and mythological names), and religious rituals. In some cases, documentary and archaeological evidence verifies the Ancient Model; in others, it supports the Aryan Model. We cannot doubt, for instance, the

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achievements of the early Indo-European linguists and the fact that, despite its many foreign aspects and elements, Greek is fundamentally an Indo-European language. The framework for conceptualizing the relation between the Ancient and the Aryan models is presented in outline in the introduction to Volume I of Black Athena. However, the full arguments are developed only in Volume II, The Archaeological and Documentary Evidence (1991), and Volume III, The Linguistic Evidence (1997). My work does not call for a complete restoration of the Ancient Model, but for a synthesis, incorporating the linguistic advances made in the nineteenth century and adjusting some traditional dates in the light of archaeological evidence from the twentieth. This "Revised Ancient Model" accepts the notion not only that there must, at some stage, have been substantial migrations or conquests from the North, but also that there were Egyptian and Phoenician settlements in Greece, and massive and fundamental cultural influences on the Aegean from the South and East. All in all, I see the need for a radical reassessment of the image of Ancient Greece. We must abandon the view that Greek civilization sprang, like Athena, from the head of Zeus virgin and fully formed. We must recognize, instead, that Greece developed at the intersection of Europe, Egypt, and the Middle East. The greatness of Greek civilization, and the central role Greece played in the formation of European cultures, were the result not of isolation and cultural purity, but of frequent contacts between the many surrounding peoples of the Mediterranean Basin and the already heterogeneous natives of the Aegean.

References Bernal, Martin. (1987). Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Western Civilization, Vol. I: The Fabrication of Ancient Greece, 1785-1985. London: Free Association Books/New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. . (1991). Black Athena, Vol. II: The Archaeological and Documentary Evidence. London: Free Association Books/New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Bury, J. B. (1900). A History of Greece to the Death of Alexander the Great. London: Macmillan. Gladstone, W. (1896). Juventus Mundi: The Gods and Men of the Heroic Age. London. Mtiller, K. O. (1844). Introduction to a Scientific System of Mythology, trans. J. Leite. London. Plato. (1975). Timaeus, trans. R. J. Bury. Loeb translation. Vol. XI. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Plutarch. (1934-35). De hide et Osiride, trans. F. C. Babbit, in Plutarch's Moralia, Vol. V (Loeb). Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press/London: Heinemann (Vol. V).

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. (1934-35). De Herodoti Malignitate, trans. L. Pearson and F. H. Sandbach in Plutarch's Moralia, Vol. XI. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press/London: Heinemann. Said, Edward. (1978). Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books. Thirlwall, C. (1835-44). A History of Greece, Vols. I-VIII. London, von Humboldt, W. (1903-36). Wilhelm von Humboldt gesammelte Schriften, Vols. I-XVII. Berlin: Letzmann and Gebrhardt. Winckelmann, J. J. (1764). Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums, ed. W. Senff. Weimar.

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10.14 TOWARDS A THIRD WORLD UTOPIA Ashis Nandy From Traditions, Tyranny and Utopias: Essays in the Politics of Awareness, Oxford University Press, 1987, 20-55

Alas, having defeated the enemy, we have ourselves been defeated. . . . The . . . defeated have become victorious. . . . Misery appears like prosperity, and prosperity looks like misery. This our victory is twined into defeat. The Mahabharata1

I

Theories of salvation do not save. At best, they reshape our social consciousness. Utopias, too, being ideas about the end-products of salvation, cannot hope to do more. They, too, can only promise a sharper awareness and critique of existing cultures and institutionalized suffering—the surplus suffering which is born, not of the human condition, but of faulty social institutions and goals. In this sense, all Utopias and visions of the future are a language. Whether majestic, tame, or down-to-earth, they are an attempt to communicate with the present in terms of the myths and allegories of the future. When such visions are vindictive, they are a warning to us; when they are benign or forgiving towards the present, they can be an encouragement. Like history, which exists ultimately in the minds of the historian and his believing readers and is thus a means of communication, Utopian or futurist thinking is another aspect of—and a comment upon—the existent, another means of making peace with or challenging man-made suffering in the present, another ethic apportioning responsibility for this suffering and guiding the struggle against it on the plane of contemporary consciousness.2 Thus, no Utopia can be without an implicit or explicit theory of suffering. This is especially so in the peripheries of the world, euphemistically

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called the third world. The concept of the third world is not a cultural category; it is a political and economic category born of poverty, exploitation, indignity and self-contempt. The concept is inextricably linked with the efforts of a large number of people trying to survive, over generations, quasi-extreme situations.3 A third-world Utopia—the South's concept of a decent society, as Barrington Moore might call it—must recognize this basic reality.4 To have a meaningful life in the minds of men, such a Utopia must start with the issue of man-made suffering which has given the third world both its name and its uniqueness. This essay is an inter-civilizational perspective on oppression, with a less articulate psychology of survival and salvation as its appendage. It is guided by the belief that the only way the third world can transcend the sloganeering of its well-wishers is, first, by becoming a collective representation of the victims of man-made suffering everywhere in the world and in all past times; second, by internalizing or owning up the outside forces of oppression and, then, coping with them as inner vectors; and third, by recognizing the oppressed or marginalized selves of the first and the second worlds as civilizational allies in the battle against institutionalized suffering.5 The perspective is based on three assumptions. First, that as far as the core values are concerned, goodness and right ethics are not the monopoly of any civilization. All civilizations share some basic values and such cultural traditions as derive from man's biological self and social experience. The distinctiveness of a complex civilization lies not in the uniqueness of its values but in the gestalt which it imposes on these values and in the weights it assigns to its different values and subtraditions. So, certain traditions or cultural strains may, at a certain point of time, be recessive or dominant in a civilization, but they are never uniquely absent or exclusively present. What looks like a human potentiality which ought to be actualized in some distant future, is often only a cornered cultural strain waiting to be renewed or rediscovered. Second, that human civilization is constantly trying to alter or expand its awareness of exploitation and oppression. Oppressions which were once outside the span of awareness are no longer so, and it is quite likely that the present awareness of suffering, too, will be found wanting and might change in the future. Who, before the socialists, had thought of class as a unit of repression? How many, before Freud, had sensed that children needed to be protected against their own parents? How many believed, before Gandhi's rebirth after the environmental crisis in the West, that modern technology, the supposed liberator of man, had become his most powerful oppressor? Our limited ethical sensitivity is not a proof of human hypocrisy; it is mostly a product of our limited cognition of the human situation. Oppression is ultimately a matter of definition, and its perception is the product of a worldview. Change the worldview, and what once seemed natural and legitimate becomes an instance of cruelty and sadism.

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Third, that imperfect societies produce imperfect remedies of their imperfections. Theories of salvation are always soiled by the spatial and temporal roots of the theorists. Since the solutions are products of the same social experiences that produce the problems, they cannot but be informed by the same consciousness and, if you allow a psychologism, unconsciousness. Marx wrote about the process of declassing oneself and about breaking through the barriers of ideology and false consciousness; Freud, about the possibility of working through one's personal history or, rather, the defences against such history. I like to believe that these intellectual folk heroes of our times were only reflecting an analytic attitude that allows a human aggregate to work through its own past, and to critically accept, reject or use that past as a part of the aggregate's living tradition. Contrary to what they themselves believed, our heroes were reflecting a continuity with the tradition of exegesis-as-criticism that was associated with some mythopoeic traditions as well as with some forms of classical scholasticism. It is perhaps in human nature to try to design— even if with only limited success—a future unfettered by the past and, yet, inevitably informed with the past.6

II

What resistance does a culture face in working through its remembered past and through the limits that past sets on its worldview? What are the psychological techniques through which the future is controlled or preempted by an unjust system or by the experience of injustice? What are the inner checks that a society or civilization erects against eliminating man-made suffering? What can liberation from oppression in the most Utopian sense mean? What is minimum freedom and what is maximum? We cannot even begin to answer these questions without recognizing three processes which give structured oppression its resilience. The first is the anti-psychologism which oppression breeds and from which it seeks legitimacy. The fear of soft answers to hard questions is a fear of cultures which refuse to give an absolute value to hardness itself. Many years ago Theodor Adorno and his associates had found a link between authoritarian predisposition and anti-psychologism (which they, following Henry Murray, called anti-intraceptiveness).7 Implicit in that early empirical study of authoritarianism was the recognition that one of the ways an oppressive social system can be given some permanence is by promoting a tough-mindedness which considers all attempts to look within to the sources of one's consciousness, and all attempts to grant any autonomy to culture or mind, as something compromising, soft-headed and emasculating. Twenty-five years afterwards Adorno recast that argument in broader cultural terms:

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Among the motifs of cultural criticism one of the most longestablished and central is that of the lie: that culture creates the illusion of a society worthy of man which does not exist; that it concedes the material conditions upon which all human works rise, and that, comforting and lulling, it serves to keep alive the bad economic determination of existence. This is the notion of culture as ideology. . . . But precisely this notion, like all expostulation about lies, has a suspicious tendency to become itself ideology. . . . Inexorably, the thought of money and all its attendant conflicts extend into the most tender erotic, the most sublime spiritual relationships. With the logic of coherence and the pathos of truth, cultural criticism could therefore demand that relationships be entirely reduced to their material origin... . But to act radically in accordance with this principle would be to extirpate, with the false, all that was true also, all that however impotently strives to escape the confines of universal practice, every chimerical anticipation of a nobler condition, and so to bring about directly the barbarism that culture is reproached for furthering indirectly. . . . Apart from this, emphasis on the material element, as against the spirit as a lie, has given rise to a kind of dubious affinity with that political economy which is subjected to an immanent criticism, comparable with the complicity between police and underworld. Since Utopia was set aside and the unity of theory and practice demanded, we have become all too practical. . . . Today there is growing resemblance between the business mentality and sober critical judgement.8 In a peculiar reversal of roles, the vulgar materialism Adorno describes is now an ally of the global structure of oppression. It colludes with ethnocide because culture to it is only an epiphenomenon. In the name of shifting the debate to the real world, it reduces all choice to those available within a single culture, the culture affiliated to the dominant global system. In such a world, ruled by a structure that has co-opted its manifest critics, the search for freedom may have to begin in the minds of men, with a defiance of those cultural themes which endorse oppression by themselves endorsing the conventional defiance of oppression. As we know, oppression to be know as oppression must be felt to be so, if not by the oppressors and the oppressed, at least by some social analyst somewhere. There is a second issue involved here. Theories of liberation built on ultra-materialism invariably inherit a certain extraversion. The various perspectives upon the future emerging from the women's liberation movement, from debates on the heritability of IQ and from the North-South conflicts all provide instances of how certain forms of anti-psychologism are used to avoid the analysis of deeper and long-term results of cruelty,

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exploitation and authoritarianism. The idea that the problem is exclusively the political position of women and not the politics of femininity as a cultural trait, the idea that racial discrimination begins and ends with the racial difference in IQ and does not involve the definition of intelligence as only productive intelligence and as a substitute for intellect, the belief that North-South differences involve only unequal exchange of material goods and not unequal exchange in theories of salvation themselves—these are all significant tributes to a global culture which is constantly seeking new and more legitimate means of short-changing the peripheries of the world. Yet, most debates around these issues assume that the impact of political and economic inequality is skin-deep and short-term. Remove the inequality and oppression, they say in effect, and you will have healthy individuals and healthy societies all around. This anti-psychologism, partly a reaction to the over-psychologization of the age of the psychological man, is another means of belittling the long-term cultural and psychological effects of violence, poverty and injustice—effects which persist even when what is usually called political and economic oppression is removed. Continuous suffering inflicted by fellow human beings, centuries of inequity and deprivation of human dignity, generations of poverty, long experience of authoritarian political rule or imperialism, these distort the cultures and minds, especially the values and the self-concepts, of the sufferers and those involved in the manufacturing of suffering. Long-term suffering also generally means the establishment of powerful justifications for the suffering in the minds of both the oppressors and the oppressed. All the useful modes of social adaptation, creative dissent, techniques of survival, and conceptions of the future transmitted from generation to generation are deeply influenced by the way in which large groups of human beings have lived and died, and have been forced to live and forced to die. It is thus that institutionalized suffering acquires its self-perpetuating quality. In sum, no vision of the future can ignore that institutional suffering touches the deepest core of human beings, and that societies must work through the culture and psychology of such suffering, in addition to its politics and economics. This awareness comes painfully, and each society in each period of history builds powerful inner defences against it. Perhaps it is in human nature to try to vest responsibility for unexplained suffering in outside forces—in fate, in history or, for that matter, in an objective science of nature or society. When successful, such an effort concertizes and exteriorizes evil and makes it psychologically more manageable. When unsuccessful, it at least keeps questions open. Predictably, every other decade we have a new controversy on nature versus nurture, a new incarnation of what is presently called sociobiology, and a new biological interpretation of schizophrenia. Biology and genetics exteriorize; psychology owns up.

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The second process is a certain continuity between the victors and the victims. Though some awareness of this continuity has been a part of our consciousness for many centuries, it is in this century—thanks primarily to the political technology developed by Gandhi and the cultural criticisms ventured by at least some Marxist thinkers and some interpreters of Freud—that this awareness has become something more than a pious slogan. Though all religions stress the cultural and moral degradation of the oppressor and the dangers of privilege and dominance, it is on the basis of these three eponymous strands of consciousness that a major part of our awareness of the subtler and more invidious forms of oppression (which make the victims willing participants and supporters of an oppressive system) has been built. The most detailed treatment of the theme can be found in Freudian metapsychology. It presumes a faulty society which perpetuates its repression through a repressive system of socialization at an early age. Its prototypical victim is one who, while trying to live an ordinary 'normal' life, gives meaning and value to his victimhood in terms of the norms of an unjust culture. Almost unwillingly Freud develops a philosophy of the person which sees the victim as willingly carrying within him his oppressors. In other words, Freud takes repression seriously. He does not consider human nature a fully open system which can easily wipe out the scars of man-made suffering and can thus effortlessly transcend its past. Like all history, the history of oppression has to be worked through. This piercing of collective defences is necessary, Freud could be made to say, because human groups can develop exploitative systems within which the psychologically deformed oppressors and their psychologically deformed victims (both seeking secondary psychological gains) find a meaningful life-style and mutually potentiating cross-motivations. Such cross-motivations explain the frequent human inability to be free even when unfettered, a tendency which Erich Fromm, as early as in the 1940s, called the fear of freedom. That is the warning contained in Bruno Bettelheim's and Victor Frankl's psychoanalytic accounts of the Nazi extermination camps based on their personal experiences.9 Both describe how some of the victims internalized the norms of the camps and became the exaggerated, pathetic, but dangerous, versions of their oppressors. Losing touch with reality out of the fear of inescapable death and trying to hold together a collapsing world, they internalized the norms and worldview of their oppressors and willingly collaborated with them, thus giving some semblance of meaning to their meaningless victimhood, suffering and death, and to the degradation and satanism of their tormentors. Elsewhere Bettelheim affirms that this was, everything said, an instance of the death drive wiping out the victim's will to live.10 It is possible to view it also as part of a dialectic which offsets the ego defence called 'identification with the aggressor' against the moral majesty of the human spirit which, when faced with the

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very worst in organized repression, would rather give up the last vestiges of self-esteem and see itself as an object of deserved suffering than believe that another social group could deliberately inflict suffering without any perceivable concern for justice.11 The killers in this case of course skilfully built upon this resilience of the victim's social self, particularly the persistence of his moral universe, and used it as a vital element in their industry of suffering.12 The Nazis, one is constrained to admit, knew a thing or two about organized violence. The third process which limits human visions of the future is the refusal to take full measure of the violence which an oppressive system does to the humanity and to the way of life of the oppressors. Aime Cesaire says about colonialism that it 'works to decivilize the colonizer, to brutalize him in the true sense of the word'.13 And, that decivilization and that brutalization one day come home to roost: 'no one colonizes innocently,... no one colonizes with impunity either'.14 If this sounds like the voice of a Black Cassandra speaking of cruelties which takes place only outside the civilized world, there is the final lesson Bettelheim derives from his study of the European holocaust: 'So it happened as it must: those beholden to the death drive destroy also themselves.'15 Admittedly we are here close to the palliatives promoted by organized religions, but even in their vulgarized forms religions do maintain some touch with the eternal verities of human nature. At least some of the major faiths have never faltered in their belief that oppressors are the ultimate victims of their own systems of violence; that they are the ones whose dehumanization goes farthest even by the conventional standards of everyday religion and everyday morality. We have come here full circle in post-modern, post-evolutionary, social consciousness. It is now fairly obvious that no theory of liberation can be morally acceptable unless it admits the continuities between its heroes and its villains and perhaps even its chroniclers. This general continuity between the slaves and the masters apart, there are, however, the more easily identifiable secondary victims: the human instruments of violence and oppression. Their brutalization is planned and institutionalized;16 so is the displaced hostility they attract as a 'legitimately' violent sector protecting those more central to the system. The ranks of the army and the police in all countries come from the relatively poor, powerless or low-status sectors of society. Almost invariably, imperfect societies arrive at a system under which the lower rungs of the army and the police are some of the few channels of mobility open to the plebians. That is, the prize of a better life is dangled before the deprived socio-economic groups to encourage them to willingly socialize themselves into a violent, empty life-style. In the process, a machine of oppression is built; it has not only its open targets but also its dehumanized cogs. These cogs only seemingly opt for what Herbert Marcuse calls 'voluntary servitude': mostly they have no escape.

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Though India is one country which was colonized and ruled with the help of Indians—under colonialism the number of white men in India rarely exceeded 50,000 in a population of about 300 million—I shall pick my example of this other oppression from another society in more recent times. The American experience with the Vietnam war shows that even antimilitarism, in the form of draft-dodging or other forms of collective protest, can become a matter of social discrimination. Pacifism can be classy. The better-placed dodge more skilfully the dirty world of military violence. In the case of Vietnam, this doubly ensured that most of those who went to fight were the socially under-privileged—men who were already hurt, bitter and cynical. As is well known, a disproportionately large number of them were blacks, who neither had any respite from the system nor from their progressive, privileged fellow citizens protesting the war and feeling self-righteous. They were people who had seen and known violence and discrimination—manifest as well as latent, direct as well as institutional, pseudo-legitimate as well as openly illegitimate. Small wonder, then, that in Vietnam many of them tried to give meaning to possible death and injury by developing a pathological overconcern with avenging the suffering of their compatriots or 'buddies', by stereotyping the Vietnamese or the 'commies', or by being aggressive nationalists. The Vietnam war on this plane was a story of one set of victims setting upon another, on behalf of a reified, impersonal system of violence.17 Ill

An insight into these processes helps us visualize Utopias different from the ones yielded by a straight interpretation of some of the third-world cultures. This does not mean that cultural patterns or cosmologies are unimportant. It means that the experience of man-made suffering is a great teacher. Those who maintain, or try to maintain, their humanity in the face of such experience perhaps develop the skill to give special meaning to the fundamental contradictions and schisms in the human condition—such as the sanctity of life in the presence of omnipresent death; the legitimate biological differences (between the male and the female, and between the adult, the child and the elderly) which become stratificatory principles through the pseudo-legitimate emphases on productivity, performance and potency; and the search for spirituality and religious sentiment, for human values in general, in a world where the search almost always ends up as a new sanction for the infliction of new forms of suffering. Like Marx's 'hideous heathen god who refuses to drink nectar except from the skulls of murdered men', human consciousness has used the experience of oppression to sharpen its sensitivities and see meanings which are otherwise lost in the limbo of over-socialized thinking. One element in their vision which many major civilizations in the third 1756

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world have protected with care is the refusal to think in terms of clearly opposed, exclusive, Cartesian dichotomies. For long, this refusal has been seen as an intellectual stigmata, the final proof of the cognitive inferiority of the non-white races. (Except at those moments when the idea of holism comes home to roost in someone like General Smuts or Heinrich Himmler seeking in the idea a marker of European supremacy.) The defensive third-world response to the issue has ranged all the way from those who hold the West guilty of not living up to its own values (Cesaire, for one, mentions the 'barbaric repudiation' by Europe of Descartes' charter of universalism: 'Reason . . . is found whole and entire in each man'18) to those who repudiate the values themselves—who would like Cesaire to admit that Descartes is not the last word on the intellectual potentials of humankind or to endorse Leopold Senghor when he declares on behalf of the non-whites: 'I feel, therefore I am'. Rarely has the range of responses included the non-Cartesian reply that what was once a cultural embarrassment may have already become a reason for hope. Many have shed tears over the genetic or social gap between intellect and passions in the homo sapiens—the way our moral capacities have not kept up with our cognitive skills or our left brain with the right. Arthur Koestler and Julian Jaynes are only the last in a long line of thinkers to feel that in this matter nature and evolution have let us down.19 Perhaps what looks like a failure of nature is after all one civilization's death wish. Perhaps reason and morality are bound to part company dramatically in a culture in which reason has to be defined so narrowly. Let us not forget that Freud had, unwittingly and by implication, worked out a psychopathology and a name for the 'Cartesian sickness'; he called it isolation, an ego defence which isolates reason from feelings.20 It is a defence which turns into an inner technology Holderlin's maxim, 'If you have understanding and a heart, show only one. Both they will damn, if both you show together.'21 It is remarkable in this context that, despite all the indignity and oppression they have faced, many defeated cultures refuse to draw a clear line between the victor and the defeated, the oppressor and the oppressed, the rulers and the ruled.22 They recognize that the gap between cognition and affect tends to get bridged outside the Cartesian world, whether the gap be conceived as an evolutionary trap or as a battle between two halves of the human brain. Drawing upon the non-dualist traditions of their religions, myths and folkways, these cultures try to set some vague, halfeffective limits on the objectification of living beings and on the violence which flows from it. They try to protect the faith—increasingly lost to the modern world—that the borderlines of evil can never be clearly defined, that there is always a continuity between the aggressor and his victim, and that liberation from oppressive structures outside has at the same time to mean freedom from an oppressive part of one's own self.23 This can be

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read as a near-compromise with the powerful and the victorious; it can be read as cultural resistance to the 'normal', the 'rational' and the 'sane'. The cleansing role Frantz Fanon grants to violence in his vision of a post-colonial society sounds so alien to many Africans and Asians mainly because it is insensitive to this cultural resistance.24 Fanon admits the internalization of the oppressor. But he calls for an exorcism in which the ghost outside has to be finally confronted in violence, for it carries the burden of the ghost within. The outer violence, Fanon suggests, is the only means of making a painful break with a part of one's own self. If Fanon had more confidence in his culture he would have sensed that his vision ties the victim more deeply to the culture of oppression than any collaboration can. Cultural acceptance of the major technique of oppression in our times, organized violence, cannot but further socialize the victims to the basic values of his oppressors. Once given intrinsic legitimacy, violence converts the battle between two visions of the human society into a contest for power and resources between two groups sharing the same frame of values. Perhaps if Fanon had lived longer, he would have come to admit that in his method of exorcism lies a partial answer to two vital questions about the search for liberation in our times, namely, why dictatorships of the proletariat never end and why revolutions always devour their children. Hatred, as Alan Watts reminds us at the cost of being trite, is a form of bondage, too. In our times, no one understood better than Gandhi this stranglehold of the history of oppression on the human future. That is why for him the meek are blessed only if they are, in Rollo May's terms,25 authentically innocent, and not pseudo-innocents living out the values of an oppressive system for secondary psychological gains. Gandhi acted as if he knew that non-synergic systems, driven by zero-sum competition and search for power, control and masculinity, forced the victims to internalize the norms of the system, so that when they displaced their exploiters, they built a system which was either an exact replica of the old one or a tragicomic version of it. Hence, his concept of non-violence and non-cooperation. It stresses that the aim of the oppressed should be, not to become a first-class citizen in the world of oppression instead of a second- or third-class one, but to build an alternative world where he can hope to win back his humanity. He thus becomes a nonplayer for the existing system—one who plays another game, refusing to be either a player or a counter-player. Perhaps this is what Erik Erikson means when he suggests that Gandhi's theory of conflict resolution imputes an irreducible minimum humanity to the oppressors and militantly promotes the belief that this humanity could be actualized.26 The basic assumption here is that the dehumanized tyrant is as much a victim of his system as those tyrannized; he has to be liberated, too. The Gandhian stress on austerity and pacifism comes as much from the tradi-

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tional Indian principles of renunciation and monism as from a deepseated, early-Christian belief in the superiority of the culture of the victims and from an effort to identify with that culture both as a defiance and as a testament. All his life, Gandhi sought to free the British as much as the Indians from the clutches of imperialism; the caste Hindu as much as the untouchable from untouchability. In this respect, too, he was close to some forms of Marxism and Christianity. Father G. Gutierrez, trying to reconcile Marxism and Christianity, almost inadvertently captures the spirit of Gandhi when he says: One loves the oppressors by liberating them from their inhuman condition as oppressors, by liberating them from themselves. But this cannot be achieved except by resolutely opting for the oppressed, i.e. by combating the oppressive classes. It must be real and effective combat, not hate.27 This two-tier identification with the aggressor, which Gandhi so effortlessly made, is the obverse of the identification with the victim which allows a freer expression of aggressive drive. The Gandhian vision defies the temptation to equal the oppressor in violence and to regain one's selfesteem as a competitor within the same system. The vision builds on an identification with the oppressed which excludes the phantasy of the superiority of the oppressor's life-style, so deeply embedded in the consciousness of those who claim to speak on behalf of the victims of history. The vision includes the sensitivity that even those fighting an exploitative system may internalize the norms of the system and even when openly resisting the exploiters, even when speaking of the loneliness, mental illness or decadence of the victorious, may continue to believe that the privileged are powerful not merely economically but culturally and, thus, deserve to invite jealousy or hatred, not compassion.28 I have tried to understand how Gandhi's future began in the present, why he viewed the global struggle against oppression as a dialectic between inter-group and within-person conflicts, and why his Utopia was, in Abraham Maslow's sense, a eupsychia.29 For better or for worse, this is the age of false consciousness; it is the awareness of the predicament of self-awareness which has shaped this century's social thinking and helped the emergence of the psychological man. In this age, Gandhi's concept of self-realization could be seen as the most serious effort to locate within the individual and in action the subject-object dichotomy (man as the maker of history versus man as the product of history; man as a self-aware aspect of nature versus man as a product of biological evolution; the ego or reality principle versus the id or pleasure principle; praxis versus dialectic or process).30 Such a concept of self-realization is a challenge to the postEnlightenment split in the vision of the liberated man. For two and a half

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centuries—starting probably with Giovanni Vico—the modern sciences of man have worked with a basic contradiction. Reacting to various forms of pre-modern fatalism, they have sought to make man the maker of his own fate—or history—by making him an object of the modern incarnations of fate—of natural sciences, social history, evolutionary stages and cumulative reason. Gandhi seemed to sense that this overcorrection could only be remedied by worldviews which re-emphasized man's stature as a subject, seeking a more humble participation in nature and society. These are worldviews in which man is a subject by virtue of being a 'master' of nature and society within. They acknowledge the continuities between the suffering outside and the suffering within, and for them the self includes the experiences of the sufferings of both the self and the non-self.31 Using this sensitivity, Gandhi, more than anyone else in this century, tried to actualize in politics what the more sensitive social thinkers and litterateurs had already rediscovered for the contemporary awareness—that any culture of oppression is only overtly a triad of the oppressor, the victim and the interpreter. Covertly the three roles merge. A complex set of identifications and cross-identifications makes each actor in the triad represent and incorporate the other two. This view—probably expressed in its grandest form in the ancient epic on greed, violence and selfrealization, Mahabharata—is the flip side of Marx, who believed that even the cultural products thrown up by the struggle against capitalism and by the enemies of capitalism were flawed by their historical roots in an imperfect society.32 On this plane, Gandhian praxis is the logical extension of radical social criticism, for it insists that the continuity between the victim, the oppressor and the observer must be realized in action, and that one must refuse to act as if some constituents in an oppressive system were morally uncontaminated. To sum up, a violent and oppressive society produces its own special brands of victimhood and privilege and ensures a certain continuity between the victor and the defeated, the instrument and the target, the interpreter and the interpreted. As a result, none of these categories remain pure. So even when such a culture collapses, the psychology of victimhood and privilege continues and produces a second culture which becomes, over time, only a revised edition of the first. Not to recognize this is to collaborate with violence and oppression in their subtler forms. This is what most social activism and analysis begin to do once the intellectual climate becomes hostile to manifest cruelty and expropriation.

IV A second example of the non-dual consciousness of man-made suffering can well be the refusal of many cultures to translate the principles of

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biopsychological continuities, such as sex and age, into principles of social stratification. Many of the major Eastern civilizations, in spite of all their patriarchal elements, see a continuity between the masculine and the feminine, and between infancy, adulthood and old age. Perhaps this is not all a matter of 'traditional wisdom'. At least in some cases it is a reaction to the colonial culture which assumed clear breaks between the male and the female, the adult and the child, and the adult and the elderly, and then used these biological differences as the homologues of secular political stratifications. In the colonial ideology, the colonizer became the tough, courageous, openly aggressive, hyper-masculine ruler and the colonized became the sly, cowardly, passive-aggressive, womanly subject. Likewise, the culture of the colonizer became the prototype of a mature, complete, adult civilization while the colonized became the mirror of a more simple, primitive, childlike cultural state. In some cases, confronted with their own ability to subjugate complex ancient civilizations, the historically-minded colonial cultures were forced to define the colonized as the homologue of the senile and the decrepit, deservedly falling under the suzerainty—and becoming the responsibility—of more vigorous cultures. Once again I shall invoke Gandhi, who built an articulate frame of political action to counter the models of manhood and womanhood implicit in the colonial situation in India. British colonialism in India, drawing strength from aspects of the 'mother culture', made an explicit order out of what it felt was the major strength of the Western civilization vis-a-vis the Indian. It declared masculinity to be superior to femininity which, in turn, it saw as superior to effeminacy. It then gave a structural basis to this cultural stratarchy by emphasizing the differences between the so-called martial and non-martial races of India. The obverse of this stratarchy was a similar stratarchy in some Indian subtraditions which acquired a new cultural ascendancy in British India. One example can be the various religious reform movements which stressed kshatriyahood as the future core of post-colonial Hinduism. There were many forms of reaction to this cultural order: some Indians desperately sought instances of hyper-masculinity in the Indian past; others accepted the order and sought to excel their rulers in martial valour. Gandhi's response was to posit two alternative sets of relationships against the imperial ideology and its native versions. In one, masculinity was seen to be at par with femininity and the two had to be transcended or synthesized for attaining a higher level of public functioning. Such 'bisexuality' or 'trans-sexuality' was seen as not merely spiritually superior both to masculinity and to femininity, as in many Indian ascetic traditions, but also politically more creative. Gandhi's second model saw masculinity as inferior to femininity which, in turn, was seen as inferior to femininity in man. Here the assumption was that femininity in men, especially in the form of maternity, provided a self-critical masculinity which could subvert

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the values of the modern civilization more successfully than the mere affirmation of the rights of women. I have discussed the psychological and cultural contexts of these concepts in some detail elsewhere.33 All I want to add here is that the formal equality which is often sought by various movements fighting for the cause of women is qualitatively different from the synergy Gandhi sought. For the former, power, achievement, productivity, work, control over social and natural resources are seen as fixed quantities on which men have held a near-monopoly and which they must now share equally with women. For Gandhi, these values are indicators of a system dominated by the masculinity principle, and the system and its values must both be seen as standing in the way of a non-oppressive world. To fight for mechanical equality, Gandhi seems to suggest, is to accept or internalize the norms of the existing system and to pay homage to masculine values under the guise of pseudo-equality. Similarly with age. While societies which have built upon the traditions of hyper-masculinity have conceived of adulthood as the ultimate in the human life-cycle because of its productive possibilities, many of the older cultures of the world, left out of the experience of the industrial and technological revolutions, refuse to see childhood as merely a preparation for, or an inferior version of, adulthood. Nor do they see old age as a decline from full manhood or womanhood. On the contrary, each stage of life in these cultures is seen as valuable and meaningful in itself. No stage is required to derive its legitimacy from some other stage of life, nor need it be evaluated in terms of categories entirely alien to it. It has been said in recent times that alternative visions of the human future must derive their ideas of spontaneity and play from the child.34 Implied in this very proposal is the tragedy of Western adulthood which has banished spontaneity and play to a small reservation called childhood, to protect the adult world from contamination. Spontaneity, play, directness of experience, and tolerance of disorder are for children or their homologues, the primitives in their sanctuaries.35 Power, productive work and even revolutions are for mature adults and their homologues, the advanced historical societies with their experience with modern urban-industrialism and ripened revolutionary consciousness. The dominance of the productivity principle in the modern West and the unending search for the new or the novel is a direct negation of visions which see age as giving a touch of wisdom to social consciousness and transmitting to the next generation valued elements of culture, elements which cannot be precisely formulated or transmitted as packaged products, but must be handed down to the young in the form of shared experiences. Old age is seen by the moderns primarily as a problem of management of less productive or non-productive lives. With the decline in physical prowess in men and sexual attractiveness in women, the self-

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image of the modern man or woman becomes something less than that of a complete human being. The pathetic worship of youth and the even more pathetic attempts to defend oneself against the inner fears of losing youthfulness and social utility—sometimes with the help of pseudorespectful expressions such as 'senior citizens'—are produced not merely by rampant consumerism and limitless industrialism but also by a worldview associated with complex systems of oppression trying to deny the reflective or contemplative strains in the human civilization. Gerontocracy may be a false alternative to such a worldview, but it nonetheless provides another baseline for envisioning an alternative cosmology in which age and sex would not serve as principles of social ordering, and in which respect for the qualities of old age would give completeness to youth and young adulthood, too.

V This brings me to my third example of a non-dual vision of 'positive freedom': the cultural refusal in many parts of the savage world to see work and play as clearly demarcated modalities of human life. Many oppressed cultures, in trying to keep alive an alternative vision of a normal civilization and resisting some of the modern forms of man-made suffering, have sought to defy the modern concept of productive work and the totally instrumental concept of knowledge which goes with it. Once again I shall invoke the experience with modern colonialism, not so much because it is a shared legacy of the third world but because it did better than most other exploitative systems of the modern era in terms of having an articulate ideology, a culturally rooted legitimacy and in avoiding counterproductive violence. That colonialism was, for this very reason, one of the most dangerous forms of institutionalized violence is part of the same argument. It is not accidental that while the British empire in India lasted two centuries, the Third Reich existed for a paltry decade. Successful institutionalization of a large-scale oppressive system is not an easy achievement. It needs something more than martial skills and nihilistic passions; it needs some awareness of human limits. One belief the colonial cultures invariably promoted was that the subject communities had a contempt for honest work, that they consisted of indolent shirkers who could not match the hard work or single-minded pursuit of productive labour of the colonizers. This was a belief sincerely held by the rulers. But sincerity in such matters, one knows, is only a defence against recognizing one's deeper need to justify a political economy which expects the subject community to work without dignity, without an awareness of being exploited, and without meaningful work goals. The oppressed, I have argued, is never a pure victim. One part of him

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collaborates, compromises and adjusts; another part defies, 'non-cooperates', subverts or destroys, often in the name of collaboration and under the garb of obsequiousness. (The second part of the story creates problems for the social sciences. The modern tradition of social criticism is unidirectional. It can demystify some forms of dissent and show them to be nondissent. It has no means of demystifying some forms of collaboration to discover secret defiance underneath. For modern social criticism equates interpretation with debunking, and this debunking must always reveal the base of 'evil' beneath the super-structure of the 'good'.) The colonized soon learnt, through that subtle communication which goes on between the rulers and the ruled, to react to and cope with the obsessive concept of productive work brought into the colonial cultures by some European and Christian subtraditions.36 At a certain level of awareness, the subjects knew they could retaliate, tease and defy their oppressors—'fools attached to action', as the Bhagavad Gita might have called them—by refusing to share the imposed concepts of the sanctity of work and such workvalues as productivity, control, predictability, discipline and utility. The differences between work and play, stressed by a repressive conscience which had to idealize colonialism as a civilizational mission, could only be resisted through an unconscious non-cooperation which included 'malingering', 'shirking' and 'indiscipline'. If this vaguely reminds the reader of the folk response of American Blacks to slavery,37 it only shows that there is something in the experience of man-made suffering which cuts across cultures and across the folk and the classical. In India at least the much-venerated Gita was waiting to be 'misused' by those caught on the wrong side of history: Who dares to see action in inaction, and inaction in action he is wise, he is yogi, he is the man who knows what is work.38 This may not be the Brahmanic scholar's idea of the true meaning of the sloka, but what are religious texts for, if they cannot provide folk guides to survival? If colonialism sought to do away with the human dignity of its subjects, the subjects unconsciously tried to protect their self-esteem by subverting the dignity of their rulers, by forcing the rulers to use naked force to make their subjects work, produce and be 'useful'. That is the way helpless victims are often forced to control and monitor their oppressors and to maintain an 'internal locus of control'. In their near-total impotency, they strip the authorities of the pretences to civilized authority, humane governance and, ultimately, self-respect. That is the inner logic of all domination. It ensures that if the victims are sometimes pseudo-innocent

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part-victims, the victors too are all too often pseudo-autonomous partvictors. Rejection of the principle of productivity and work also means rejection of the concept of workability. Many defeated cultures have preserved with some care the banished awareness of the first and second worlds: that knowledge is valuable not because it is applicable, useful or testable, but also because it represents aesthetics, relatedness to man and nature, and self-transcendence. Certain intuitive and speculative modes of perception have come naturally to these cultures, giving rise, on the one hand, to an institutionalized dependence on music, literature, fine arts and other creative media for the expression of social thought and scientific analysis; on the other, to dependence upon highly speculative, deductive, mathematical and, even, quantitative-empirical modes of thinking as vehicles of normative passions and as expressions of religious or mystical sentiments. I have in mind here not the feeling man which Leopold Senghor offsets against the Cartesian man of the West, but cultures which refuse to partition cognition and affect, both as a matter of conviction and as a technique of survival.39 This blurring of the boundaries between science, religion and the arts is also of course a defiance of the modern concept of classification of knowledge.40 It represents an obstreperous refusal to be converted to the modern worldview and accepting the imperialism of categories the worldview has established. It defies the total autonomy of technology and the idea of workability which has come to dominate all modern systems of knowledge. Defeated cultures know that technology now legitimates modern science and it is the spirit of instrumentality which gives a sense of personal potency, self-esteem, social status and political power in the modern sector. Technology, these cultures know, has cannibalized science. As opposed to this culture of instrumentality, which 'works' with a concept of a universal, perfectly objective, cumulative science and admits at best only the existence of peripheral folk-sciences from which modern science may occasionally pick up scraps of information, the marginalized parts of the world—the second-class citizens of the third world, marginalized even in their own societies—protect their dignity by viewing the world of science as an area of a number of coexisting, universal ethnosciences, one of which has become dominant and usurped the status of the only universal and the only contemporary science.41 Various traditional systems of medicine, artisan skills which retain the individuality of the producer and refuse to draw a line between art and craft, agricultural practices which have resisted the destructive pull of modern agronomy—these are not only aspects of a resilient cultural self-affirmation; these are indicators of a spirit which defies the power of a way of life which seeks to cannibalize all other ways of life. The third world has a vested interest in refusing to grant sanctity to a science which sees human beings and nature

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as the raw material for vivisectional experimentation. What seems an irrational, impractical or unworkable resistance to the products of modern science and technology in the peripheries of the world is often a deeply rooted suspicion of the instrumental vision of sectors which live off these peripheries and a desperate attempt to preserve alternative concepts of knowledge, technique and work in the interstices of the savage world.

VI Fourth, the experience of suffering of some third world societies has added a new dimension to utopianism by sensing and resisting the oppression which comes as 'history'. By history as oppression I mean not only the limits which our past always seems to impose on our visions of the future, but also the use of a linear, progressive, cumulative, deterministic concept of history—often carved out of humanistic ideologies—to suppress alternative worldviews, alternative Utopias and even alternative self-concepts. The peripheries of the world often feel that they are victimized not merely by partial, biased or ethno-centric history, but by the idea of history itself. One can give a psychopathological interpretation of such scepticism towards history, often inextricably linked with painful, fearsome memories of man-made suffering. Defiance of history may look like a primitive denial of history and, to the extent the present is fully shaped by history in the modern perception, denial of contemporary realities. But, even from a strictly clinical point of view, there can be reasons for and creative uses of ahistoricity. What Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich say about those with a history of inflicting suffering also applies to those who have a history of being victims: A very considerable expenditure of psychic energy is necessary to maintain this separation of acceptable and unacceptable memories; and what is used in the defence of a self anxious to protect itself against bitter qualms of conscience and doubts about its worth is unavailable for mastering the present.42 The burden of history is the burden of such memories and anti-memories. Some cultures prefer to live with it and painfully excavate the antimemories and integrate them as part of the present consciousness. Some cultures prefer to handle the same problem at the mythopoetic level. Instead of excavating for the so-called real past, they excavate for other meanings of the present, as revealed in traditions and myths about an ever-present but open past. The anti-memories at that level become less passionate and they allow greater play and lesser defensive rigidity. What seems an ahistorical and even anti-historical attitude in many non-modern cultures is often actually an attempt on the part of these cul-

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tures to incorporate their historical experiences into their shared traditions as categories of thinking, rather than as objective chronicles of the past.43 In these cultures, the mystical and consciousness-expanding modes are alternative pathways to experiences which in other societies are sought through a linear concept of a 'real' history. In the modern context these modes can sometimes become what Robert J. Lifton calls 'romantic totalism'—a post-Cartesian absolutism which seeks to replace history with experience.44 But that is not a fate which is written into the origins of these modes. If the predicament is the totalism and not the romance, the history of civilization after Christopher Columbus and Vasco da Gama also shows that that totalism can also come from a history which seeks to replace experience. Especially so when, after the advent of the idea of scientific history, history has begun to share in the near-monopoly science has already established in the area of human certitude. Albert Camus once drew a line between the makers of history and the victims of history. The job of the writer, he said, was to write about the victims. For the silent majority of the world, the makers of history also live in history and the defiance of history begins not so much with an alternative history as with the denial of history as an acreage of human certitude. In their scepticism of history, the ahistorical cultures have an ally in certain recessive orientations to the past in the Western culture, which have re-emerged in recent decades in some forms of structuralism and psychoanalysis, in attempts to view history either as semiotics or as a 'screen memory' with its own rules of dream-work. As we well know, the dynamics of history, according to these disciplines, is not in an unalterable past moving towards an inexorable future; it is in the ways of thinking and in the choices of present times.45 The rejection of history to protect self-esteem and ensure survival is often a response to the structure of cognition history presumes. The more scientific a history, the more oppressive it tends to be in the experimental laboratory called the third world. It is scientific history which has allowed the idea of social intervention to be cannibalized by the ideal of social engineering at the peripheries of the world. For the moderns, history has always been the unfolding of a theory of progress, a serialized expression of a telos which, by definition, cannot be shared by communities on the lower rungs of the ladder of history. Even the histories of oppression and the historical theories of liberation postulate stages of growth which, instead of widening the victims' options, reduce them. No wonder that till now the main function of these theories has been to ensure the centrality of the cultural and intellectual experiences of a few societies, so that all dissent can be monitored and framed in the idiom of domination. The ethnocentrism of the anthropologist can be corrected; he is segregated from his subject only socially and, some day, his subjects can talk back. The ethnocentrism towards the past mostly goes unchallenged. The

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dead do not rebel, nor can they speak out. So the subjecthood of the subjects of history is absolute, and the demand for a real or scientific history is the demand for a continuity between subjecthood in history and subjection in the present. The corollary to the refusal to accept the primacy of history is the refusal to chain the future to the past. This refusal is a special attitude to human potentialities, an alternative form of utopianism that has survived till now as a language alien to, and subversive of, every theory which in the name of liberation circumscribes and makes predictable the spirit of human rebelliousness.

VII As my final example, I shall briefly discuss the so-called dependency syndrome in some third world cultures. When offset against the Occidental man's unending search for autonomy or independence, it is this syndrome in the non-Western personality which allegedly explains the origin, meaning and resilience of colonial subjugation. Such explanations have been savagely attacked by both Cesaire and Fanon as racist psychoanalysis. Cesaire quotes the following words of Octave Manoni as virtually final proof of the Western psychologist's prejudice against all oppressed cultures: It is the destiny of the Occidental to face the obligation laid down by the commandment Thou shall leave thy father and thy mother. This obligation is incomprehensible to the Madagascan. At a given time in his development, every European discovers in himself the desire . . . to break the bonds of dependency, to become the equal of his father. The Madagascan, never! He does not experience rivalry with the paternal authority, 'manly protest', or Adlerian inferiority—ordeals through which the European must pass and which are civilized forms . . . of the initiation rites by which one achieves manhood.46 I have not been able to locate this passage in Manoni's Prospero and Caliban and do not know in which context it occurs.47 Nor do I know Manoni's politics which presumably can provide the other context of these sentences. Thus, I have to accept at face value Cesaire's and Fanon's plaint that Manoni vends 'down-at-heel cliches' to justify 'absurd prejudices' and 'dresses up' the old stereotype of the Negro as an overgrown child. Yet, I have a nagging suspicion that a third view on the subject is sustainable. That view would recognize that the modern West has not only institutionalized a concept of childhood shaped by the ideology of masculine, non-dependent adulthood and societies which represent such adulthood, it has also popularized a devastatingly sterile concept of autonomy

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and individualism which has increasingly atomized the Western individual. Many non-Western observers of the culture of the modern West—its lifestyle, literature, arts and its human sciences—have been struck by the way contractual, competitive individualism—and the utter loneliness which flows from it—dominates the Western mass society. From Friedrich Nietzsche to Karl Marx to Franz Kafka, much of Western social analysis, too, has stood witness to this cultural pathology. What once looked like independence from one's immediate authorities in the family, and defiance of the larger aggregates they represented, now looks more and more like a Hobbesian worldview gone rabid. The individual in the mass society is not only in an adversary relationship with everyone else, his individuality increasingly depends upon his becoming an independent consumption unit to which 'machines' would sell consumables and from which other machines would get work in order to produce more consumables. To the extent Manoni imputes to the Madagascan some degree of antiindividualism, to the extent the Madagascan is not a well-demarcated person, he unwittingly underscores the point that modern individualism— and the insane search for absolute autonomy it has unleashed—cannot be truly separated from the thirst for colonies, lebensraum and domination for the sake of domination. In an interdependent world, total autonomy for one means the reduction of the autonomy of others. Hence, while the much-maligned dependency complex may not be the best possible cultural arrangement in the face of modern oppression, it could be seen as a more promising baseline for mounting a search for more genuine social relatedness and for maturer forms of individuality than the one which now dominates the world. That baseline may not meet the exacting standards of the Westernized critics of the West in the third world, it may not yield the virile anti-Imperialism by which they swear, but those who have lived for centuries with only the extremes of relatedness and dependency will never guess that in a world taken over by the autonomy principle and by the extremes of individualism, dependency and fears of abandonment could represent a hope and a potentiality. The pathology of relatedness has already become less dangerous than the pathology of unrelatedness. What looks like an 'ego wanting in strength' in the Malagasy or a case of a 'weak ego' in the Indian can be viewed as another kind of ego strength. What looks like poor independence training in the non-achieving societies and 'willing subservience' and 'self-castration' in the Hindu may be read also as an affirmation of basic relatedness and a recognition of the need for some degree of reverence in human relations.48 At one place in his Discourse on Colonialism, Cesaire traces Nazism to Europe's blood-stained record in the colonies. Nazism, he says, was only a way of life coming home to roost.49 Cesaire seems unaware that some have already traced Nazi satanism to the unrestrained spread in Europe, over the previous century, of the doctrines of amoral realpolitik

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and sacro egoismo and of the 'morals of a struggle that no longer allows for respect'.50 All that remains to be done is to relate the colonial impulse, too, to the search for non-reverential autonomy and total individualism, even though the same search is now part of many anti-colonial ideologies. VIII I have chosen these examples to describe what I have called the indissoluble bond between the future of the peripheries of the world and that of the apparently autonomous, powerful, prosperous, imperial centres. This is necessarily an essay on the continuity between winners and losers, seen from the losers' point of view. The reader must have noticed that each of the examples I have given also happens to be a live problem in exactly those parts of the world which are commonly considered privileged. The various forms of neo-Marxism, the various versions of the women's liberation movement, the numerous attempts to build alternative philosophies of science and technology by giving up the insane search for total control and predictability are but a recognition that the gaps between the so-called privileged and underprivileged of the world are mostly notional. As the peripheries of the world have been subjected to economic degradation and political impotency and robbed of their human dignity with the help of dionysian theories of progress, the first and the second worlds too have sunk deeper into intellectual provincialism, cultural decadence and moral degradation. In my version of an old cliche, no victor can be a victor without being a victim. In the case of nation-states as much as in the case of two-person situations, there is an indivisibility of ethical and cognitive choices. If the third world's vision of the future is handicapped by its experience of man-made suffering, the first world's future, too, is shaped by the same record. The reader might also have noticed that I have tried to give moral and cultural content to some of the common ways in which the savage world has tried to cope with modern oppression and then projected these common ways as possibilities or opportunities. How far is this justified? After all, as one popular argument goes, history is made through the dirty process of political economy; it has no place for human subjectivity or for any defensive moralizing about human frailties and attempts to make a virtue out of necessity. Perhaps, in line with some non-modern traditions of interpretation, I could be allowed to argue that the so-called ultimate realities of political economy too could be further demystified to obtain clues to new moral visions of the human future. The frailties of human nature produced by a given social arrangement in the context of a given political economy, too, can begin to look like the baseline of a new society, once another social arrangement is envisioned. The frailty of human frailties, too, is an open question and an open text. I take heart from a brain 1770

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researcher who has recently said, summing up comparative zoological work on evolution, that there also is a 'survival of the weak', and the weak do inherit the world.51 Such an approach is not negated by the blood-drenched history of manmade suffering in the third world—I am speaking of possibilities and opportunities, not offering a prognosis based on a trend analysis. Exactly as one cannot stop the magical mystery tours of the third world undertaken by many first-world environmentalists (in defiance of the totalist anthropocentrism and the arrogant ecocidal world-conception they see around them) by drawing attention to the poor conservationist record of the third world. For what is being proposed is a new cultural selfexpression of an ancient man-nature symbiosis, not a statistical projection of the past or the present into the future. I hope all this will not be seen as an elaborate attempt to project the sensitivities of the third world as the future consciousness of the globe or a plea to the first world to wallow in a comforting sense of guilt. Nor does it, I hope, sound like the standard doomsday 'propheteering' which often prefaces fiery calls to a millennial revolution. All I am trying to do is to affirm that ultimately it is not a matter of synthesizing or aggregating different civilizational visions of the future. Rather, it is a matter of admitting that while each civilization must find its own authentic vision of the future and its own authenticity in future, neither is conceivable without admitting the experience of co-suffering which has now brought some of the major civilizations of the world close to each other. It is this co-suffering which makes the idea of cultural closeness something more than the chilling concept of One World which nineteenth-century European optimism popularized and promoted to the status of a dogma.52 The intercultural communion I am speaking about is defined by two intellectual co-ordinates. The first of them is the recognition that the 'true' values of different civilizations are not in need of synthesis. They are, in terms of basic biopsychological needs, already in reasonable harmony and capable of transcending the barriers of particularist consciousness. The principle of cultural relativism—that I write on the possibilities of a distinct eupsychia for the third world is a partial admission of such relativism—is acceptable only to the extent it accepts the universalism of some core values of humankind. Anthropologism is no cure for ethnocentrism; it merely pluralizes the latter. Absolute relativism can also become an absolute justification of oppression in the name of ethnic tolerance, as it often becomes in the 'apolitical' anthropologist's field report. The second co-ordinate is the acknowledgement that the search for authenticity of a civilization is always a search for the other face of the civilization, either as a hope or as a warning. The search for a civilization's Utopia, too, is part of this larger quest. It needs not merely the ability to interpret and reinterpret one's own traditions, but also the ability to

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involve the often-recessive aspects of other civilizations as allies in one's struggle for cultural self-discovery, the willingness to become allies to other civilizations trying to discover their other faces, and the skills to give more centrality to these new readings of civilizations and civilizational concerns. This is the only form of a dialogue of cultures which can transcend the flourishing intercultural barters of our times.

Notes 1 The Mahabharata, Sauptik Parva: 10\ Slokas 9, 12, 13, trans. Manmatha Nath Dutt (Calcutta: Elysium, 1962), p. 20. 2 Such utopianism is of course very different from the ones Karl Popper or Robert Nozick have in mind. See Karl Popper, 'Utopia and Violence', in Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), pp. 355-63; and Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1974), Part III. 3 I have in mind the extremes Bruno Bettelheim describes in his 'Individual and Mass Behaviour in Extreme Situations' (1943), in Surviving and Other Essays (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1979), pp. 4-83. 4 Barrington Moore, Jr., 'The Society Nobody Wants: A Look Beyond Marxism and Liberalism', in Kurt H. Wolff and Barrington Moore, Jr. (eds.), The Critical Spirit: Essays in Honour of Herbert Marcuse (Boston: Beacon, 1968), pp. 401-18. 5 Though this is not relevant to the issues I discuss in this essay, the three processes seem to hint at the cultural-anthropological, the depth-psychological and the Christian-theological concerns with oppression respectively. 6 I have argued elsewhere that whereas the modern West has specialized in speaking the language of discontinuity or creative breaks, at least some traditional societies have chosen to speak the language of continuity or renewal. See Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983). 7 T. W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel J. Levinson and R. Nevitt Sanford, The Authoritarian Personality (New York: Harper, 1950). 8 T. W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: NLB, 1977), pp. 43-4. 9 Bettelheim, 'Individual and Mass Behaviour'; and Victor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning (New York: Pocket Book, 1959). See also the excellent summary of related studies by Barrington Moore, Jr., Injustice: The Social Bases of Obedience and Revolt (New York: Macmillan, 1978), pp. 64-77. Moore also covers the untouchables of India from this point of view, pp. 55-64. 10 Bettelheim, 'The Holocaust—One Generation Later', in Surviving, pp. 84-104. 11 That this is not merely wishful thinking is partly evidenced by Helen Fein, Accounting for Genocide: National Responses and Jewish Victimization during the Holocaust (New York: Free Press, 1979), chapter 12. Gerda Klein says so movingly, 'Why? Why did we walk like meek sheep to the slaughter house? Why did we not fight back? . . . I know why. Because we had faith in humanity. Because we did not really think that human beings were capable of committing such crimes.' All But My Life (New York: Hill and Wang, 1957), p. 89, quoted in Terence Des Pres, The Survivor (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), p. 83. 12 Adorno, Minima Moralia, p. 108.

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13 Aime Cesaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1972), p. 11. Italics in the original. 14 Ibid., p. 170. 15 Bettelheim, The Holocaust', p. 101. 16 See, for example, Chaim F. Shatan, 'Bogus Manhood, Bogus Honor: Surrender and Transfiguration in the United States Marine Corps', Psychoanalytic Review, 1977, 66, pp. 585-610. 17 This issue has been approached from a slightly different perspective in Maurice Zeitlin, Kenneth Lutterman and James Russell, 'Death in Vietnam: Class, Poverty and Risks of War', in Ira Katznelson, Gordon Adams, Philip Brenner and Alan Wolfe (eds.), The Politics and Society Reader (New York: David McKay, 1974), pp. 53-68. 18 Cesaire, Discourse, pp. 35, 51-2. 19 Arthur Koestler, The Ghost in the Machine (London: Pan, 1976), ch. 18; and Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (Boston: Houghton Miflin, 1976). 20 See a fuller discussion of this subject in 'Science, Authoritarianism and Culture' in this volume. 21 J. C. F. Holderlin, quoted in Adorno, Minima Moralia, p. 197. 22 The post-Renaissance Western preoccupation with clean divisions or oppositions of this kind is of course a part of the central dichotomy between the subject and the object, what Ludwig Binswanger reportedly calls 'the cancer of all psychology up to now'. Charles Hampden-Turner, Radical Man (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1977), p. 33. For 'psychology' in the Binswanger quotation, one must of course read 'modern Western psychology'. 23 See, for example, an interesting cultural criticism of Hinduism by a person as human and sensitive as Albert Schweitzer (Hindu Thought and Its Development, New York: Beacon, 1959) for not having a hard, concrete concept of evil. For discussions of the debate around this issue, see W. F. Goodwin, 'Mysticism and Ethics: An Examination of Radhakrishnan's Reply to Schweitzer's Critique of Indian Thought', Ethics, 1957, 67, pp. 25-41; and T. M. P. Mahadevan, 'Indian Ethics and Social Practice', in C. A. Moore (ed.), Philosophy and Culture: East and West (Honolulu: University of Hawaii, 1962) pp. 579-93. 24 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967); and Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967). 25 Rollo May, Power and Innocence: A Search for the Sources of Violence (New York: Delta, 1972). 26 Erik H. Erikson, Gandhi's Truth: On the Origins of Militant Nonviolence (New York: Norton, 1969). 27 G. Gutierrez, A Theology of Liberation (New York: Orbis Books, Maryknoll, 1973), p. 276. 28 The obverse of this is of course the oppressors' search for the 'proper' worthy opponent among the oppressed. For an analysis of such a set of categories in an oppressive culture, see Nandy, The Intimate Enemy, chapter I. 29 In fact, Gandhi was clearly influenced by important strands of Indian traditions which did stress such interiorization and working through. Being an internal critic of his tradition, he therefore had to do the reverse too, namely, exteriorize the inner attempts to cope with evil as only an internal state. His work as a political activist came from that exteriorization. 30 This formulation is derived from the somewhat casual comments made by Neil Warren in his 'Freudians and Laingians', Encounter, March 1978, pp. 56-63;

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31

32

33 34

35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42

see also Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic (New York: Harper, 1966). Though some Western scholars like Alan Watts would like to see such location of others in the self as a typically Eastern enterprise—e.g. Alan Watts, Psychotherapy East and West (New York: Ballantine, 1969), this has been occasionally a part of Western philosophical concerns, too. See, for instance, Jose Ortega y Gasset, Meditations on Quixote (New York: Norton, 1967). Within the Marxist tradition Georg Lukacs has argued that in the area of cognition and in the case of the proletariat at least, the subject-object dichotomy is eliminated to the extent self-knowledge includes molar knowledge of the entire society. Georg Lukacs, History and Class-Consciousness (London: Marlin, 1971). Many of Marx's disciples sought to place Marx outside history and culture, while he himself knew better. See 'Evaluating Utopias' in this volume, where I have briefly discussed how far any theory of salvation, secular or otherwise, can shirk the responsibility for whatever is done in its name. Ashis Nandy, 'Woman Versus Womanliness: An Essay in Social and Political Psychology', At the Edge of Psychology: Essays in Politics and Culture (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 32-46; and The Intimate Enemy. See a strong plea for this in Johan Galtung, 'Visions of Desirable Societies', written for a seminar on Alternative Visions of Desirable Societies, Mexico City, 1978. This of course is complementary to the idea of 'graceful playfulness' in Ivan Illich; see his Tools for Conviviality (Glasgow: Fontana/Collins, 1973). For the same awareness within 'proper' Marxism see Evgeny Bogat, 'The Great Lesson of Childhood', Eternal Man: Reflections, Dialogues, Portraits (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1976), pp. 288-93. The somewhat prim psychoanalytic idea of 'regression at the service of the ego' can also be viewed as an indirect plea for the acceptance of the same principle. It is possible to hazard the guess that these are all influenced in different ways by the association Christ made between childhood and the kingdom of God. That association survives within Christianity in spite of what Lloyd deMause considers to be the faith's overall thrust. See Lloyd deMause, The Evolution of Childhood', in History of Childhood (New York: Harper Torchbook, 1975), pp. 1-74. See 'Reconstructing Childhood' in this volume. On activity and work as the first postulates of a Faustian civilization, see a brief statement in Roger Garaudy, 'Faith and Liberation', in Eleonora Masini (ed.), Visions of Desirable Societies (London: Pergamon, 1983), pp. 47-60. Cf. E. D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Pantheon, 1974). See also Moore, Injustice, pp. 465-6. The Bhagavad Gita, IV: 18, transcreated by P. Lai (New Delhi: Orient Paperback, 1965), p. 33. For a fuller treatment of the psychology of partitioning cognition and affect, see 'Science, Authoritarianism and Culture' in this volume. See on this subject J. P. S. Uberoi, Science and Culture (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1979). See Ashis Nandy, 'Science in Utopia: Equity, Plurality and Openness', India International Centre Quarterly, 1983,10(1), pp. 47-59. Alexander Mitscherlich and Margarete Mitscherlich, 'The Inability to Mourn', in Robert J. Lifton and Eric Olson (eds.), Explorations in Psychohistory: The Wellfleet Papers (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974), pp. 257-70, quotation on p. 262.

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43 See a fuller discussion of these themes with reference to Gandhi's worldview in Nandy, The Intimate Enemy. 44 Robert J. Lifton, Boundaries: Psychological Man in Revolution (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1969), pp. 105-6. On a different plane, Alvin Gouldner has drawn attention to the close links between utopianism and ahistoricity. See his The Dialectic of Ideology and Technology: The Origins, Grammar and Future of Ideology (London: Macmillan, 1976), pp. 88-9. 45 I need hardly add that within the modern idea of history, too, this view has survived as a latent—and, one is tempted to add, unconscious—strain. From Karl Marx to Benedetto Croce and from R. G. Collingwood to Michael Oakeshott, philosophers of history have often moved close to an approach to history which is compatible with traditional orientations to past times. 46 Octave Manoni, quoted in Cesaire, Discourse, p. 40. Italics in the original. 47 O. Manoni, Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization, trans. Pamela Powesland, 2nd ed. (New York: Praeger, 1964). 48 For instance, Manoni, Prospero and Caliban, p. 41; G. Morris Carstairs, The Twice Born: A Study of a Community of High-Caste Hindus (Bombay: Allied Publishers, 1971), p. 160. I have of course in mind a galaxy of other wellmotivated academics and writers, such as, to give random examples, David C. McClelland and David G. Winter, Motivating Economic Achievement (New York: Basic Books, 1969); Alex Inkeles and Donald H. Smith, Becoming Modern (London: Heinemann, 1974); Nirad C. Chaudhuri, The Continent of Circe (London: Chatto and Windus, 1965); V. S. Naipaul, India: A Wounded Civilization (London: Andre Deutsch, 1977); and Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey (London: Andre Deutsch, 1981). 49 Cesaire, Discourse, passim. 50 Friedrich Meinecke and Gerhard Ritter, quoted in Renzo De Felice, Interpretations of Fascism, trans. Brenda H. Everett (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University, 1977), pp. 17-18. 51 Paul D. MacLean, The Imitative—Creative Interplay of Our Three Mentalities', in Harold Harris (ed.), Astride the Two Cultures: Arthur Koestler at 70 (New York: Random House, 1976), pp. 187-213. 52 As Fouad Ajami recognizes, The faith of those in the core in global solutions came up against the suspicions of those located elsewhere that in schemes of this kind the mighty would prevail, that they would blow away the cobwebs behind which weak societies lived. . . . In a world where cultural boundaries are dismantled, we suspect we know who would come out on the top.' See Fouad Ajami, The Dialectics of Local and Global Culture: Islam and Other Cases', paper presented at the meeting of the group on Culture, Power and Transformation, World Order Models Project, Lisbon, 1980, mimeographed. Ajami advises us to walk an intellectual and political tightrope, avoiding both the 'pit of cultural hegemony' and 'undiluted cultural relativism'.

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