Dipesh Chakrabarty and the Global South

Subaltern Studies, Postcolonial Perspectives, and the Anthropocene

Saurabh Dube, Sanjay Seth, Ajay Skaria, Saurabh Dube, Sanjay Seth, Ajay Skaria

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429576362
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Asian Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Over the last four decades, Dipesh Chakrabarty's astonishingly wide-ranging scholarship has elaborated a range of important issues, especially those of modernity, identity, and politics – in dialogue with postcolonial theory and critical historiography – on global and planetary scales. All of this makes Chakrabarty among the most significant (and most cited) scholars working in the humanities and social sciences today. The present text comprises substantive yet short, academic yet accessible essays that are crafted in conversation with the critical questions raised by Chakrabarty's writings.

Now, Chakrabarty holds the singular distinction of making key contributions to some of the most salient shifts in understandings of the Global South that have come about in wake of subaltern studies and postcolonial perspectives, critiques of Eurocentrism together with elaborations of public pasts, and articulations of climatic histories alongside problems of the Anthropocene. Rather than exegeses and commentaries, these original, commissioned, pieces – written by a stellar cast of contributors from four continents – imaginatively engage Chakrabarty's insights and arguments, in order to incisively explore important issues of the politics of knowledge in contemporary worlds.

This book will be of interest to scholars and graduate students interested in a wide variety of interdisciplinary issues across the humanities and social sciences, especially the interplay between postcolonial perspectives and subaltern studies, between man-made climate change and the human sciences, between history and theory, and between modernity and globalization.

1 Engaging Dipesh Chakrabarty

An introduction

Saurabh Dube, Sanjay Seth, and Ajay Skaria

Across the past four decades, the work of Dipesh Chakrabarty has offered wide-ranging reflections on history, modernity, and the character and limits of the disciplines that constitute the human sciences. A central challenge issued by these writings has turned, in distinct yet overlapping ways, on the “un-thought” and “under-enunciated” of theory and practice in the disciplines, at large.¹ Thus, in work of the 1980s on jute-mill workers, Dipesh queried the historiographical assumption of absolute individuation of the modern worker, which obscured the hierarchical relations of the working-classes in Bengal. In these ways, Chakrabarty pointed to how “culture” and “consciousness” intimated “the ‘unthought’ of Indian Marxism.” Throughout the long 1990s, Dipesh raised key questions concerning the pervasive ways in which a spectral yet tangible Europe/West stands reified and celebrated as the site and scene of the birth of the modern, working as a silent referent that dominates the discourse of history. Alongside, he opened up issues of historical difference, revealing glimmers of heterogeneous temporal-spatial terrains, through various measures that each underscored the under- and un-enunciation of “place.” Finally, over the past decade Dipesh has highlighted how “public pasts” are at once invoked yet occluded, routinized and obscured, as they variously break upon professional practices of history-writing. He has pointed as well to the requirements of thinking through the rift between the “global” the “planetary,” so that the human species as a geological force of the Anthropocene does not remain “un-thought” and “under-enunciated” following the protocols of human historical experience.

Clearly, in taking up such tasks Chakrabarty has brought to the fore critical matters of method and theory, concept and evidence, philosophical thought and historical understanding. This book is offered as a sustained engagement – critical conversations rather than mere exegeses – with the main themes in Dipesh’s oeuvre.

Dipesh Chakrabarty: a profile

Born and raised in Calcutta (now Kolkata), Dipesh Chakrabarty was formatively trained across a number of disciplines. He received his first degree in physics from Presidency College of the University of Calcutta, acquired a master’s in business management from the Indian Institute of Management (Calcutta), and subsequently went to the Australian National University, Canberra, to pursue a PhD in history. Soon after the formation of the Subaltern Studies group in the late 1970s, he joined the collective while based in Australia. Dipesh was the only one of the core members of the Subaltern Studies collective whose research focused on the working-classes rather than the peasantry. Yet in his work, the jute-mill workers of eastern India were not readily separated from peasant groupings in terms of conventions of hierarchy, and did not always display the class consciousness expected of the working-class, especially in Marxist writings. Dipesh’s work thus offered a challenge to Marxist scholarship on as well as to the mainstream historiography of the working-classes, extending the Subaltern Studies initiative in newer directions, including through a close engagement with the writings of Michel Foucault, well before the French philosopher was ensconced on the historical scene.

Here, in a series of essays and his first monograph, based on his PhD research, Dipesh called for a critical understanding of the everyday experience of hierarchical relations in order to attend to forms of culture and consciousness of the working-classes. As just noted, at stake was “the ‘unthought’ of Indian Marxism.”² On the one hand, this was the central question for the writing of working-class history in South Asian society, where the assumptions of a hegemonic bourgeois culture did not apply. On the other hand, on offer was an important invitation to read difference into the dominant understandings of labour and capital, the past and the present.

Unsurprisingly, in the early 1990s, Dipesh’s important essay “Postcoloniality and the artifice of history” raised, with care and imagination, key questions concerning the presence of Europe in the writing of history.³ Implicitly construing his arguments against the backdrop of Heidegger’s interrogation of the artifice of a meaning-legislating reason, in the essay Chakrabarty focused on history as a discourse that is produced at the institutional site of the university, making a compelling case for the ways in which Europe remains the sovereign theoretical subject of all histories. Acknowledging that Europe and India are “hyperreal” terms that refer to certain figures of the imagination, Chakrabarty nonetheless pointed toward how – in the “phenomenal world”, in everyday relationships of power – Europe stands reified and celebrated as the habitus of the modern, a deep and distended sign that orchestrates and overwhelms the designs of history. In this essay, Chakrabarty unravels the consequences of such theoretical privileging of Europe as the universal centrepiece of modernity and history: namely, that the past and present of India or Mexico – indeed, of all that is not quite an imaginary yet palpable West – come to be cast in terms of failure, lack, and absence, since they are always and already measured against apparent developments in the European/Euro-American arenas.

This essay announced the wider project subsequently pursued in Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference.⁴ As the title of the work intimates, Chakrabarty here argues that displacing, or at least challenging, the positioning of Europe as the sovereign theoretical subject of all histories (and thereby “provincializing Europe”) requires making a place for difference in historical thought. The difference of the non-Western world is in fact already registered in history-writing, as well as in other disciplines and in quotidian forms of thought, but this takes the form of what Chakrabarty calls “historicism” – regarding the non-Western world as “backward” ’ and “behind” the West, and thus destined, one (distant) day, to recapitulate its trajectory. Against this, Chakrabarty counterpoises two modes of thought for studying the past: an analytic mode, which is indispensable to accounting for the common world we all now inhabit, decisively remade by capital (what he labels “History 1”); and a hermeneutic mode, more attentive to that which has not been remade and homogenized by capital, where “difference” inheres without (necessarily) being in opposition to the homogenizing drive of capital (what he labels “History 2”). While the first mode of thought is usually deemed to be sufficient, Chakrabarty insists that both are indispensable, for without the latter, difference is erased and the temporally disjointed nature of human pasts and presents (what he calls “time knots”) is elided and, indeed, illegitimately “smoothed out.”

It should be barely surprising that alongside Dipesh equally raised key questions of historical difference through various measures: explorations of the deferral-difference of a Bengali modernity in colonial India; discussions of the time of gods and the writing of history; and avowals of the plurality of life-worlds against an overweening historicism.⁵ Here, Dipesh imaginatively inserted “difference into the history of our [Bengali/Indian] modernity in a mode that resists the assimilation of this history to the political imaginary of European-derived institutions … which dominate our lives;” he sought to recuperate the difference of subaltern pasts (and the time of gods and spirits); and he articulated the alterity of “necessarily fragmentary histories of human belonging that never constitute a one or a whole” as existing alongside yet exceeding the authority of historicism.⁶

Following these twin projects, embodied in Provincializing Europe and Habitations of Modernity, Dipesh continued his explorations into the discipline of history, but now focusing on what he – and his fellow editors (Bain Atwood and Claudio Lomnitz) of a special issue of Public Culture – called “The Public Life of History,” which was published in 2008. In his own essay there, Dipesh distinguished between the “cloistered” of the discipline of history, on the one hand, and its “public life,” on the other. Here, the public life of history appeared as “the connections that such a discipline might forge with institutions and practices outside the university and the official bureaucracy.”⁷ At stake was the status and role of the academic discipline of history in the domain of popular culture in democracies, particularly turning on disputes centred around the claims of groups that have seen themselves as oppressed or marginalized, and who sought/seek the validation of history for acknowledgement of past injustices. Dipesh noted that such histories were written in ways not consonant with, and often actively indifferent to, the conventions and protocols of the discipline. What was/is the role/place of the discipline of history when the past exists as a domain of public contestation in everyday life?

This question is a central concern of his next book The Calling of History, but with the important difference that Dipesh sought to show that in India the cloistered life of the discipline has been shaped by, indeed forged within, the course of its public life: “history’s cloistered or academic life began in colonial India in disputations that took place in what I have called its ‘public life,’ and this decades before the discipline found a home in the research programmes of Indian universities.”⁸ Though The Calling of History is not a biography or even an intellectual biography, the figure of Sir Jadunath Sarkar – once regarded as the pre-eminent historian of India – is central to the study. Sarkar was denounced by some of his contemporaries; his reputation declined as subsequent generations of social historians found his emphasis on the character of rulers quaint and unpraiseworthy; and a still later generation considered his obsessive concern with facts and truth to be old-fashioned and even reactionary. Yet Dipesh writes of Sarkar with sympathy. Not surprisingly, this has led some scholars to see Chakrabarty as retreating from his earlier positions. It is an abiding irony that Dipesh Chakrabarty’s works can now be cited in support of those on either side of the polemical divisions of history-writing, an irony that speaks as much of the shifting fault lines of the historical discipline and its cloistered publics as it does of the wide-ranging interests and distinctive sensibilities of Dipesh’s arguments and narratives.

The Calling of History is possibly better read as an attempt to practice a crucial aspect of the historian’s craft: to hermeneutically recreate and narratively articulate – without not necessarily endorsing – the convictions and conventions of an earlier time. In this case, we are in the face of conventions and convictions concerning the practice of history itself. As Dipesh writes, “I was interested to find out more about why the idea of historical truth could seem so plausible to a past generation of scholars and about the architecture of ideas that may have subtended the conception of such truth. I did not want to consign the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to a land of ‘errors,’ from which the progression of knowledge and ideas had simply rescued us.”⁹ In the case of colonial India, this includes making sense of Sarkar’s “near-fanatic zeal for a positivist idea of ‘fact’ and his spiritual pursuit of a metaphysical idea of ‘truth’ in history.”¹⁰ The Calling of History is in part a long answer to basic questions: What made Sarkar’s history once so compelling? And, as a corollary to that, what were the stakes in the disputes of that time? How was history-writing defined and practiced at a time when academic historiography was being forged in the fire of the public disputes that characterized the Indian colony? In addressing these questions, one of the most creative Indian historians of postcolonial times engages sympathetically with one of the most distinguished historians of imperial India.

Even as he crafted historical narratives while exploring the pasts of the discipline, Dipesh also turned to a very different subject: climate change. The first foray here was “The Climate of History: Four Theses.”¹¹ This has been followed by a series of essays that explore the implications of climate change for the human sciences and for history in particular. At stake is man-made climate change, marking the advent of what scientists are beginning to call the Anthropocene: an epoch when humankind has become a geological force, collapsing the distinction between nature and the social that had authorized different protocols for the study of the natural- and the human-sciences, respectively.

To face up to the Anthropocene, Dipesh provocatively suggests, requires thinking in/upon two registers at once, mixing together “the immiscible chronologies of capital and species history,” a combination that “stretches, in quite fundamental ways, the very idea of historical understanding.”¹² He argues that climate change introduces rifts into our thinking, including “a growing divergence in our consciousness between the global and – a singularly human story – and the planetary, a perspective to which humans are incidental.”¹³ Relatedly, here is to be found a rift, too, between, on the one hand, ourselves as a species, the modes through which we have become geological agents (modalities that we cannot actually experience), and, on the other hand, ourselves as individuals and groups and classes, which is the basis of historical experience and of history-writing.

Once again, these essays have been widely circulated and much discussed, also arousing controversy. Some have seen in these arguments a glossing over of the causal role and moral obligation of the Western countries that have been responsible for much of our carbon footprint. Dipesh does not seek to minimize such processes and culpabilities, and he acknowledges also the importance of articulating a global history that is attentive to human inequality. Yet he also brings to the fore the concerns of a planetary history attentive to what that global history does not allow us to think. The global and the planetary operate on different scales and levels of abstraction, where “one level of abstraction does not cancel out the other or render it invalid.”¹⁴ At the same time, Dipesh also insists that “the current conjuncture of globalization and global warming leaves us with the challenge of having to think of human agency over multiple and incommensurable scales at once.”¹⁵

Clearly, all of this is immense achievement, posing formidable challenge to the disciplines, especially in their articulations of history and modernity, the past and the present, each understood in the widest of ways. It is this challenge that the contributions to this volume take up and think through, as they engage, extend, and exceed Dipesh’s arguments, insights, and emphases.

Affect and intellect

Our deliberations appropriately open with contributions by four of Dipesh’s students, all important scholars now. Each chapter is located on the cusp of affect and intellect, and together they all point to Dipesh’s influence in the study of a vast range of historical subjects.

Miranda Johnson seizes upon two statements of Dipesh, separated by almost a quarter of a century, in order to explore the tension between the distinct intellectual-political positions these represent. Following Chakrabarty’s own usage of “History 1” and “History 2,” these positions are described in a tongue-in-cheek manner as “Dipesh 1” and “Dipesh 2”: they are represented, respectively, by Chakrabarty’s 1992 essay on provincializing Europe and his more recent book on Jadunath Sarkar. On the one hand, “Dipesh 1 is the fierce critic of Europe’s hegemonic narrative of modernity, that which forces other pasts into submission or simply jettisons them, and that must itself therefore be held in check by searching for the possibility of plurality.” On the other hand, “Dipesh 2 is the heir of Enlightenment curiosity, the free inquirer and seeker after Truth, perhaps with a dash of the Romantic idealist and something of a believer in the idea tha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Preface
• 1 Engaging Dipesh Chakrabarty: an introduction
• Part I Affect and intellect
• Part II Critical conversations
• Part III Global pasts and postcolonial differences
• Part IV Historical disciplines and modern universals
• Part V The Anthropocene and other affiliations
• Index