The World in a Grain of Sand

Postcolonial Literature and Radical Universalism

Nivedita Majumdar

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781788737463
• eBook ISBN:
  9781788737470
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

The World in a Grain of Sand offers a framework for reading literature from the global South that goes against the grain of dominant theories in cultural studies, especially, postcolonial theory. It critiques the valorization of the local in cultural theories typically accompanied by a rejection of universal categories - viewed as Eurocentric projections. But the privileging of the local usually amounts to an exercise in exoticization of the South. The book argues that the rejection of Eurocentric theories can be complemented by embracing another, richer and non-parochial form of universalism. Through readings of texts from India, Sri Lanka, Palestine and Egypt, the book shows that the fine grained engagement with culture, the mapping of ordinary lives not just as objects but subjects of their history, is embedded in much of postcolonial literature in a radical universalism - one that is rooted in local realities, but is able to unearth in them the needs, conflicts and desires that stretch across cultures and time. It is a universalism recognized by Marx and steeped in the spirit of anti-colonialism, but hostile to any whiff of exoticism.

PART ONE

A Grain of Sand

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1

Political Agency and Postcolonial Studies

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Though born in the narrow confines of literature departments in the wake of Asian and African decolonization, the influence of post-colonial theory has increasingly become associated more with direct political commitments. Postcolonial theory today is viewed as an indispensable framework for understanding how power works in modern social formations and, in particular, how the West exercises its dominance over the global South. Even more, it is lauded for its attentiveness to the marginal, the oppressed—those groups that have been relegated to obscurity even by political traditions ostensibly committed to social justice. In academia, the concepts associated with this theoretical stream have increasingly displaced the more traditional vocabulary of the Left, particularly among younger academics and students. Indeed, the two most influential political frameworks of the past century on the Left, Marxism and progressive liberalism, are often described not just as inadequate sources of critique, but as tools of social control.

This chapter proposes to take up an issue that is at the very heart of postcolonial theory—the relationship between social domination and agency, and specifically, how gender is conceptualized as a site of struggle within this framework. It does so via an examination of several of the classic, agenda-setting essays in the field by Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha and Ranajit Guha. Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?”¹ and her commentary on Mahasweta Devi’s “Draupadi,”² Guha’s germinal foray into gender history in “Chandra’s Death,”³ and Bhabha’s influential “The Commitment to Theory,”⁴ which seeks to reinstate women’s agency into a reading of the British miners’ strike of 1984 and 1985, thus comprise my focus.

The themes of agency and resistance are, of course, the signposts of the entire postcolonial turn. While the emphasis in the field’s early years was on how forms of political agency arose in a colonial and postcolonial context, and became embedded in movements for self-determination, this is no longer the case. Postcolonial theory today, under the influence of Bhabha, Spivak and others, has taken on a far more ambitious agenda, going beyond the specificities of geographic location to generate more encompassing arguments about the nature of agency itself. In this respect, it has, as many commentators have observed, become one of the most influential political theories on the contemporary scene, certainly to the point of rivaling the traditions inherited from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. What makes the postcolonial turn especially important is that it foregrounds precisely those forms of agency and political identity that have tended to remain at the periphery of Marxist and liberal considerations—gender, sexuality and race in particular. Whereas these forms of oppression have only recently become analytical foci within the traditional Left, they have been central to postcolonial theory from its inception.

The decision to focus on a small number of central texts is intended to serve a specific purpose. In part, it is motivated by the fact that the works in question have been hugely influential in the field—indeed, so much so that some of them are even identified with it. But, precisely because they exercise such inordinate influence, to criticize them without a careful engagement would be to invite skepticism toward, if not outright dismissal of, my claims. Just as importantly, it is through close examination of these texts that one can also raise the natural question about their reception and canonization in the field. Although other critics have cast doubt on some of the arguments made by Spivak, Guha and Bhabha,⁵ the more specific issues that I raise—about the manner in which they conceptualize resistance and subalternity—have rarely been taken up, much less debated. In crucial ways, postcolonial studies has tended to take on board the very aspects of these essays that I find most objectionable. The indictment of the arguments in these texts should also, then, raise some worries about the intellectual culture in the field.

Guha’s Small Drama

Ranajit Guha’s essay “Chandra’s Death” occupies a special place in post-colonial scholarship. Even though it is not as influential as some of the other canonical works in the field, it has been recognized as an agenda-setting piece, not only by postcolonial theory’s proponents but also by its detractors. Thus, Sumit Sarkar, an early defector from the Subaltern Studies project, of which Guha was a founding member, regards the essay as offering “glimmerings of an alternative approach” that was, sadly, abandoned by the project.⁶ Priyamvada Gopal, also a critic of the subalternists, aligns with Sarkar in her assessment of the essay as a “profoundly humanist” engagement with the histories of the oppressed in its investigation of the layered complexity of human predicaments.⁷ What is especially praiseworthy to many readers is its engagement with gender. “Chandra’s Death” was published in the pivotal fifth volume of Subaltern Studies and was, in some measure, a response to admonishments from feminist scholars that the subalternist project, in its first four volumes, had been largely blind to gender issues. After this essay, the historian Florencia Mallon lauded Guha for having provided a “powerful answer” to charges of ignoring women’s agency.⁸ Gayatri Spivak praised the essay, too, as having inaugurated the incorporation of gender into the subalternist project.⁹

The essay is thus unusual in its elicitation of praise from all sides, not just from advocates for Subaltern Studies or postcolonial theory. Indeed, there is much in it to admire, not least Guha’s prodigious research into the context for the events he recounts, the clarity with which he presents his case, and, of course, the commitment to bringing gender to the center of the subalternist project. Guha’s concern in the essay is to recover an instance of women’s gendered agency in which they forge solidarity in a highly patriarchal setting to preserve their autonomy against the weight of male authority. I will argue, however, that it fails to make the case on either of these counts—of showing female agency or solidarity. My contention is that Guha mistakes self-preservation for solidarity. Insofar as he tries to make a case for women’s agency, he does so by redefining the concept in such a way as to turn it into its opposite. In other words, Guha constructs a narrative in which an act of acquiescence is brandished as resistance. This amounts not to a recovery of women’s agency, but to its effacement.

The essay describes the circumstances leading to the death of a young woman named Chandra in mid-nineteenth-century rural Bengal. Chandra has had an affair with her brother-in-law Magaram and discovers that she is pregnant. Upon discovering this, Magaram approaches Chandra’s mother, Bhagobati, and informs her that Chandra has two options available to her: to have an abortion or to be ostracized from the village as an adulteress—a punishment known as bhek, which Guha aptly describes as a “living death in a ghetto of social rejects.”¹⁰ Bhagobati decides in favor of the abortion and mobilizes her familial network to procure the necessary drugs. These are then administered to Chandra by her sister; they have the intended effect, but they also result in Chandra’s own demise. Chandra’s death is deemed a murder by the colonial authorities, and Chandra’s relatives are tried for the crime.

To Guha, this event has an intrinsic significance, which we will consider shortly. But it is also important because of the way it has been absorbed into Indian historiography. Guha observes that the dominant tradition of historical analysis has little interest in small events like Chandra’s death, since it is preoccupied with the master narratives of nation building, statehood, capitalism and so on—making historians oblivious to “the small drama and fine detail of social existence.”¹¹ Second, Guha questions the appropriation of the event in legal discourse, which has the effect of reducing the “complex tissue of human predicament”¹² to a mere case. The experience of the event and the humanity of the actors are all erased in the “abstract legality”¹³ that turns Chandra’s relatives into “murderers.”¹⁴ Legal and historiographic discourses remain deaf to the “sobs and whispers”¹⁵ in which the subaltern voices speak.

Against the established weight of such renderings, Guha takes on the task of reconstructing a history of Chandra’s death that “by bending closer to the ground … [would] pick up the traces of a subaltern’s life in its passage through time.”¹⁶ So Chandra’s death is important not only as an event but also as an analytical exercise, an act of historical recovery that both excavates and honors the agency of actors buried under the weight of academic convention, while also demonstrating the shortcomings of dominant intellectual traditions. Even more, Guha seeks to establish the central role of gender as both a site of oppression and a fount of resistance, which the grand narratives of class and nation inevitably marginalize in their reconstructions of the events.

Guha begins by establishing the context for the decisions Chandra made. Her family belonged to the Bagdi caste, a stratum of landless laborers who resided in a western district of Bengal in the mid-nineteenth century. As rural proletarians, the Bagdis were at the bottom of the agricultural society and reviled as a “filthy deposit” by higher-status castes in the village. In addition to being agricultural laborers, the men were also employed as the village’s night watchmen, guarding their employers’ property. Yet the men were branded as “incorrigibly prone to criminality,” and while Bagdi women were routine victims of sexual exploitation by upper-caste men, they were labeled as women of “easy virtue.”¹⁷

In this setting of acute scarcity, the Bagdis relied on a complex system of local caste and subcaste alliances as a survival strategy. Bagdi children would marry within the sections of the subcaste to which they belonged, which amounted to several families in the two or three neighboring villages, so the village cluster was a “kinship region for six Bagdi families.”¹⁸ In common with the rest of India and many rural societies, the marriage circles served not only as a site of biological reproduction but also as a crucial source of material support. Finding an appropriate household for their children to marry into was a central part of the survival strategy of these landless laborers. Anything that threatened the viability of that strategy, by extension, also posed a grave threat to the material welfare of the entire subcaste.

When Magaram approached Chandra’s mother and confessed his affair with Chandra, the implications were clear. If it were revealed that she had been impregnated by her brother-in-law, it would, of course, disgrace Chandra’s mother and immediate family. But it would also land a severe blow to the reputation of the larger group of families within the marriage circle. A woman’s honor, her fidelity, was among the most important elements in the reputation of any family and constituted an important marker of a village’s ability to establish internal order. The prestige of a caste, Guha points out, was primarily based on its “degree of purity,” which translated as a “maiden’s virginity, a widow’s chastity and a wife’s sexual fidelity.”¹⁹ A child born out of wedlock in such a setting therefore threatened the delicate system of mutual dependence into which the Bagdis were inserted.

For Magaram, it made little difference whether Chandra opted for bhek or for abortion. Either choice would have insulated him from exposure. But the fact that her mother, Bhagobati, decided in favor of abortion is, for Guha, significant, since it brought with it tasks and risks that bhek would not. The drugs to induce the abortion had to be procured from another village. Her own daughter, her sister, and their husbands and brothers had to be mobilized to arrange the matter. Each of these tasks carried an additional risk of exposure or failure. Chandra’s sister Brinda was responsible for administering the drugs, but several men played an important role in arranging payment and then, when it resulted in Chandra’s demise, in burying her body nearby. In spite of the greater burdens, what is clear is that Bhagobati managed to secure the cooperation of much of her clan in covering up her daughter’s illicit affair.

These are the basic facts about the events and the roles of the various actors involved. Guha does an admirable job of adding context and texture to the fragment that recounts the case, and we are able to locate Bhagobati and her family in their setting and also to understand the awful choice with which she was confronted. Guha brilliantly exposes the brutality of the patriarchal order, the cold logic of which is manifested especially in Magaram, who impregnated Chandra, and in the women’s attempts to minimize the inevitable damage to their well-being. As I have noted, Guha carries this out with exemplary clarity and sensitivity. But this is not what has made the essay a classic within post-colonial studies: there, it is seen, we will recall, as a demonstration of subaltern agency, an act of recovery that traditions blinded by master narratives of class and nation systematically marginalize.

For Guha, the acts of resistance are to be found in Bhagobati’s decision to abort Chandra’s fetus and the women’s consequent actions to carry it out. He presents these actions as an assertion of women’s autonomy and solidarity. He reads Bhagobati’s initiatives to prevent Chandra’s excommunication as “a choice made by women entirely on their own in order to stop the engine of male authority from uprooting a woman from her place in the local society.”²⁰ For Guha, the women’s actions in the hour of crisis were nothing short of an “act of resistance” against a patriarchal order and in defense of “another woman, to fight for her right to a life of honour within her own society.”²¹ Further, Guha argues that the response was not merely dictated by the women’s desire to protect an immediate family member; to read the “resistance merely in terms of the obligations of kin and kutum is to ignore what is distinctive about it … [it is] an alternative solidarity—a solidarity of women.”²²

So what makes Bhagobati’s choice, and those of the other women involved, acts of resistance is that they were motivated by empathy and were intended to undermine patriarchy. The women enacted their agency in ways that are not picked up by dominant historiographic traditions, as a small history, in ways that do not conform to the image of struggle that Marxism, for example, has handed down. Hence, it is only through an approach of “bend[ing] closer to the ground” that we can locate this agency and see the resistance for what it was.²³

But Guha’s argument strains credulity. Take, first, the issue of the women’s motivation. Guha observes that much of what transpired was clearly impelled by a pervasive fear among the principals of losing status within the village. This fear bred a kind of solidarity among all the actors, men and women, which was expressed in their cooperation to effectuate Chandra’s abortion. Yet, he insists, if we look deeper, we will see that the women were not fundamentally driven by fear: “The solidarity born out of fear contained within it another solidarity activated by a different, indeed contradictory, principle—namely empathy. If it was the power of patriarchy that brought about the first, it was the understanding of the women which inspired the second.”²⁴

What understanding? From Guha’s own account, had Chandra’s indiscretion been discovered, the consequences would have been dire for the whole clan, women included. Chandra would have had to accept bhek; in addition, however, for the wider clan, the mere association with her transgression could entail sanctions directed toward them. Guha explains their predicament:

Any violation of the norms in this respect could pollute all of an offender’s kin, especially her consanguines, and undermine the group’s ability to sustain and reproduce itself … the object of solidarity was also the person who could, by her transgressions, bring shame upon those she would most expect to stand by her when found guilty and share the rigour of all penalties prescribed by the samaj.²⁵

Given the likelihood of sanctions for Bhagobati and other kin, one can only wonder how Guha can present Bhagobati’s actions as soli daristic rather than self-interested. The choice of abortion had one unambiguous merit for the family—unlike bhek, which left a stigma for the entire clan, a successful abortion erased any evidence of Chandra’s sin once and for all. Indeed, what risk it entailed was borne overwhelmingly by her. This is not to say that Bhagobati’s choice for her daughter could not have been motivated by empathy. Perhaps Chandra expressed a greater fear of social ostracism than of the dangers that came with abortion; perhaps the women were aware of her preferences and acted on these, even though they turned out to also benefit them. I...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Radicalizing Universalism
• Part One: A Grain of Sand
• Part Two: The World in the Grain
• Notes
• Index