The Invention of Private Life

Literature and Ideas

Sudipta Kaviraj

• Editorial: Columbia University Press
• Año: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780231539548
• Categoría: Politics & International Relations
• Categoría: Political History & Theory

The essays in this volume, which lie at the intersection of the study of literature, social theory, and intellectual history, locate serious reflections on modernity's complexities in the vibrant currents of modern Indian literature, particularly in the realms of fiction, poetry, and autobiography. Sudipta Kaviraj shows that Indian writers did more than adopt new literary trends in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They deployed these innovations to interrogate fundamental philosophical questions of modernity. Issues central to modern European social theory grew into significant themes within Indian literary reflection, such as the influence of modernity on the nature of the self, the nature of historicity, the problem of evil, the character of power under the conditions of modern history, and the experience of power as felt by an individual subject of the modern state.

How does modern politics affect the personality of a sensitive individual? Is love possible between intensely self-conscious people, and how do individuals cope with the transience of affections or the fragility of social ties? Kaviraj argues that these inquiries inform the heart of modern Indian literary tradition and that writers, such as Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, Rabindranath Tagore, and Sibnath Sastri, performed immeasurably important work helping readers to think through the predicament of modern times.

1

On the Advantages of Being a Barbarian

Ideally, I would like to be taken as a Barbarian (in the Greek sense of a person whose language is unintelligible) but a cosmopolitan one. This is not simply being provocative. The first hope is that it will be seen that I have a different natural and conceptual language from my academic interlocutor, and a different cultural apparatus. However, the second hope qualifies the first. People like us should not, even for temptations of nationalism, exaggerate our difference with intellectuals of the West, since we are formed, in one very significant part of our intellectual deliberative life, precisely by intellectual influence from the West. We thus have much higher levels of ordinary curiosity than can be expected in any modern person in the spectacle of the West; we are formed and shaped by those influences, and by that history. But cosmopolitanism means at least two things: first the acceptance in advance of the possibility that your own culture can be inadequate, or fallible. Or, it may not have developed a particular skill of human creativity in a certain way. In that case, we should be easily prepared to draw upon the other cultures we know to give us a more satisfactory intellectual life. I try to emphasize these two things by teaching not merely Indian politics, but also Western political theory. Yet this cosmopolitanism is of a very complicated kind.

One of the most interesting features of intellectual inhabitancy in the modern world is that the West can be indifferent towards the rest of the world’s cultures; but they can’t similarly neglect the West. I wish to argue that this is grounded in the partly unfounded assumption of progress and Western superiority in everything, a strangely unsustainable intellectual stance. Though, equally strangely, it is held as a general framework of belief by an astonishingly large number of Western academics. This does not mean that, if asked, they would assent to this view; but their entirely comfortable ignorance about how the rest of the world thinks—though they primarily think about thinking—can be made intelligible only by this unstated, unreflective belief. I wish to argue further that this is considerably to our advantage, for the rather uncomplex reason that access to two cultures is, in some ways, better than one. Our presence as academics in the Western academy should, ideally, contribute to a dialogue. I think it is rash to be too hopeful about this in the short run: in the present state of the constitution of knowledge and the rewards that go to its various forms, it is likely that we will continue in the present state in which we know too much about the West, while the West knows too little about us.

My academic interest has been in three different areas: political theory, the study of the Indian state, and the study of Indian literary culture—apparently subjects without much connection. I have, however, felt over time that there are serious and subtle interconnections which actually drove me from one field to the next. I shall try to explain what each of these means to me, because in each case I think I have been forced to take an intellectual position which is rather different from the mainstream academic thinking on these subjects. I would therefore like to give a justification of how I see these subjects, and second, whether these have any seriously defensible connection except my purely adventitious liking for them.

The Present State of Knowledge about India—Orientalism and Political Correctness/The Composition of Internal and External Knowledge

My impression about Western knowledge about knowledge of India is that it has made immense strides in one respect at the cost of falling back strikingly in another. It does not have to be seriously argued now that a great part of the earlier forms of Western knowledges about India were Orientalist in Said’s sense of the term. There were, that means, at least three things wrong about it. First, it was quite often cognitively misleading or absent-minded. Either it was so absorbed about its images about itself that it emphasized and usually exaggerated the difference between the West and the Orient, casually translating every bit of difference into inferiority. Second, it admitted the existence of internal knowledges in those societies only if these found a place in a knowledge organization produced by Western Orientalists. The pandits’s views about Hindu scriptures were considered trivially arcane, but their information, reorganized by Western scholars, was acceptable. Thus there was a strong prejudice in favour of Westerners knowing these societies better than their inhabitants. Finally, these cognitive inadequacies were never detected because this knowledge had another non-cognitive purpose connected to the power of colonialism. We can add to these a fourth bias: the tendency to neglect contemporary events in Oriental societies and the tendency to concentrate on its rich cultural history.

Compared to that kind of Orientalist knowledge, the present state of Western knowledge about India is certainly less tainted by Orientalism. However, I am deeply struck by a kind of double standard I come across quite often, at times in surprisingly clever people. There is a tendency among Indianists to treat Indians’ work as nationalist and politically tendentious, while adopting a crass and unreflexively nationalist, or Western-dominant attitude in their own, and seeing their lingering pride in the British empire as the legitimate afterglow of a glorious past. I am surprised by the sensitivity of British academics when we speak about racial attitudes in British rule in India; surprisingly, even now imperialism is not seen retrospectively as a totally indefensible business. There is little understanding that just as in the West there is a kind of moral consensus against the holocaust, in India there is, understandably, a similar consensus against colonialism. Some academic work in India in recent years has sought to be self-conscious about that and tried to get out of that bias. Subaltern Studies history creates such outrage precisely because it has sometimes attempted to read history against the grain of nationalist thinking.

I have tried to stress the need to step out of what I call ‘the nationalist history of nationalism’. But two points should be made about this as well. The first is that because nationalism of a certain kind forms a kind of ‘cultural habitus’ for most of us, simply to say we should step out of the nationalist history of nationalism is not necessarily to be able to do it. I am sure, despite our conscious or declared intention, our actual historical practice must constantly fall short of it. It is the task of our European colleagues to point that out to us without the pleasant and defensible dishonesty produced by politeness; and when it is done, we should not, on our side, react viscerally to that as the rebirth of colonialism.

Second, the resolve to relate to nationalist assumptions critically does not necessarily mean that we reject every one of them. I feel surprisingly unapologetic about Indians wanting to be politically independent; I find the general business of colonialism rather unattractive. And to prove our credentials as people liberated from nationalist parochialism, we need not adopt the Cambridge history resolve to show that Indian nationalism was inspired entirely by slovenly self-interest of the lowest possible kind. I can be critical and supportive of some nationalist ideas: I feel moderately pleased that we became independent of Britain, though I am not beside myself in joy with what Indian politicians have done with that freedom. I do not find the crass Namierite premises of Cambridge history attractive or acceptable. But I think today it is difficult to find advocates of that kind of post-imperial history among people in Western universities. It has become generally politically incorrect to be a supporter of colonialism, even retrospectively, which, to imitate a famous book on British history, ‘is a good thing’.

Third, the two great spectacles of Indian contemporary life, the one of poverty and the other of democracy, and the rather more complex wonder about how the two can stay alive together, have drawn a lot of attention in Western scholarship. This has, understandably, led to a huge shift in the Western academic output and curiosity about India. Instead of the earlier interest primarily in India’s past, and what were conventionally known as Orientalist/Orientological studies consisting of philology, religious philosophy, linguistics, classical Sanskrit literature, and drama, academic interest has been enormously redistributed and the main emphasis has shifted towards social sciences: history, sociology, economics, cultural studies, and politics, etc. This is a huge advance in some ways. It is true in some cases—mainly among lower levels of academic work—that, occasionally, traditional colonial attitudes express themselves, but that is generally a negligible problem: and such uninformed or unsympathetic writing should be answered by ignoring them rather than answering them.

But I feel this advance has been at the cost of something else which is quite vital. Although earlier Orientalist studies often treated the difference as inferiorized, they took the difference and some aspects of it quite seriously. One of the most serious, I personally feel, is the ordinary cognitive courtesy of registering that Indians have their own languages—Sanskrit, Arabic-Persian, and the vernaculars—apart from the ubiquitous existence and convenience of English. The first step of taking someone culturally seriously is to accept the seriousness of his language. Sadly, this is slowly slipping in the new studies of social sciences. This can be for several reasons, three of which can be specified clearly. First, often social scientists simply take on unconsciously the unheedingly universalistic assumptions of positivistic social sciences, and assume that the state either is or is not; democracy exists or does not; there is no sense in asking complicated and delay-causing questions like ‘is it quite a state?’ Second, more often, they simply find enough people with English producing enough writing in English to maintain the illusion that, given that they are reliably bilingual, scholars do not have to know the vernacular. And finally, in some cases, scholars engage in painstaking fieldwork—not merely once, but over long years, nursing their identical field; thus, even if they do not speak the language, the recurrent opportunity of checking the statements of politicians against others, and checking statements against behaviour, gives them ample opportunity to test what they say. Anthropologists are the only branch of social scientists who—usually because their fieldwork is in relatively remote areas, and among people who usually speak only a vernacular, and because they mistrust mediated reports—usually learn languages. But this I think causes an enormous problem.

Accessibility is not necessarily an antidote to intellectual prejudice. It is a truism that people in the West now know much more about the rest of world, if knowing means primarily viewing. But the increased traffic of images also means a repetitive opportunity for reconfirming prejudices—in which the Western media, including the liberal segment, plays an intensely active role. The task of academic knowledge, I would think, is to slowly criticize and counteract this ritual of self-congratulation.

Study of the History of Political Theory

Since Marxist theory is interrelated on all sides with other forms of European social thought, even to assert its incontrovertible superiority over other ‘ideologies’ we had to acquire some understanding of other theoretical arguments.

More systematic study of social theory tended to show me that instead of what Marxists claimed about Marx—that his work was separated by an unbridgeable gulf from ideological theories before and around him—his thought was actually a part of a process of thinking about European modernity. It seemed that despite their enormous theoretical differences, most modern European theorists acknowledged that for some reasons modernity as a historical period was particularly difficult to grasp cognitively. Each one of them suggested a way of finding a process that was centrally causal to modernity. Each offered a theory of that particular process, which, because of the assumption of causal primacy, thus became a theory of modernity in general. I still retain my belief that Marxism is a most powerful theory in this group, but I have been forced to abandon the more orthodox certainty that it can simply, entirely unassisted, provide us with an understanding of the sociology of the modern West. It has to be complemented, in proper contexts by theoretical arguments from Hegel, Weber, Tocqueville, Durkheim, and others. However, this kind of enquiry forced me into another question which forms the basis of much I have written in the last decade.

In the case of people like me, the reading of these theories happened always in the inescapable context of an everyday life in modern urban India. Reading these theories gave rise to an irrepressible sense of both their familiarity and their distance: it appeared that things in my historical experience were both similar and different: it was essential to separate them. Schematically, I concluded that modernity comprised processes like industrialization, secularization, étatization, and individuation, which were universal: but this did not imply that the actual events or end-states would be similar to those in the West. This made Western social theory indispensable and inadequate at the same time: that corpus showed us what modernity was as well as what was involved in making theoretical sense of it, but it was idle to expect it to produce a theory of our experience as well. I lost my faith in a transitionist theory of modernity: the belief that the European past showed us the image of our future.

But this naturally leads to another question: did not Indian culture produce some form of self-reflection on our experience of modernity? If it did, where was it? I felt we have traditionally looked at the wrong place. Theory is a form of reflection, just as poetry and drama are. For complex historical reasons, this form was not highly developed in Indian culture; literature, by contrast, was. It was hardly surprising that when Indian intellectuals reflected upon these questions, particularly the nature of our modernity, they did it through literary forms. I have accordingly tried to read literature, at least literary texts, with questions of social theory in mind.

Begriffsgeschichte

In doing Begriffsgeschichte I have tried to combine the careful, historical, contextual study of texts with the method of focusing on concepts that are central to the prosecution of a particular type of social practice, inclining probably a bit towards the latter. I tried this, with a slightly Bengali frivolousness, in a study of the idea of ‘filth’ and public space by looking at the history of a particular park in Calcutta.¹ Personally, I have felt that the intellectual discourses we ought to study with particular care are the vernacular, since that is the theatre of greater intellectual and artistic originality. Often, the English discourse is produced by the same figures, but they are a pale shadow of the passion, argumentative force and eloquence they show in their own language. Evidently, when they wrote to other interlocutors in other regions, or about more general questions, they often wrote in English, and those texts and discourses have to be taken with the utmost seriousness. But we should not slip into the easy supposition that what comes out in vernaculars is inferior in quality. Happily, the idea that when Indians write in vernaculars they are more original than in English has got wider support, and young scholars have turned to vernacular material, often producing compelling studies of intellectual history. But other scholars find it impossible to admit of this possibility. Oddly enough, Indian education is increasingly becoming more monolingual than before, with the unfortunate result that academics trained in modern methodological skills often lack the more basic skills of a confident use of vernaculars. But in some ways the line of argument about enumeration of communities has had a great deal of support—both within India and outside—among scholars working primarily in history and anthropology. This in part is a consequence of the wide interest in Subaltern Studies, where this argument first appeared.

Study of the State in India

My second substantial interest in a longer-term historical sociology of power stemmed from the realization that in the Indian context, unlike in the European, modernity had been introduced by the power of the state—first colonial, then nationalist. The meaning of the phrase ‘primacy of the political’ appeared to me in a much stronger and altered light. But the study of the state became infinitely tangled and deferred by a mass of problems. I became convinced that to understand both the effectiveness of the state—what it has been able to do in modern India and its failures, what we expect it to do but which it cannot—it is essential to see it as part of a historical sociology over the long term. To understand the vexed question of how much the national state has taken over from the colonial state it is essential to understand the state of colonial power. After all, all this is a study of modernity in India, and I became convinced that in India, if not in the Third World, the forces of modernity have entered primarily by the expedient of the state and its initiatives rather than by the unassisted causal powers of capital—however impressive it may have been in Europe. Even capitalism in India requires the crucial support of the state. We have to understand the state because it occupies such a large part of the story of modernity in India.

However, the major problem is to work out a way of communicating between the disciplinary languages of political scientists and historians. By academic convention, political scientists did not look at the problems of political life historically; historians, by contrast, did not always ask the question about the global nature of political authority and its place in society, though they generated a highly detailed picture of political processes in society. I have tried to argue in works over the last decade or so that the major change in Indian modernity was not even the extension of the capitalist mode of production as much as the state mode of power, i.e. the primary change in India’s modernity is the conversion of a society in which order was produced primarily by religious authority to one in which it is mainly produced by the state. The entire story of India’s modernity is how this society has become centred on the state.

The Study of Literature and its Links with Social Theory

I also have serious differences with people practising history of ideas in relation to the study of literature. I cannot deny that my interest in literary texts is driven at least in part by my sense of enjoyment of literary texts; but I can now see a deeper connection between literature and my general interest in theoretical ideas. Modernity brings in a general instability of the most fundamental conditions of social existence, and in no society can it pass without causing the greatest and deepest intellectual disquiet. Some of the most important European thinkers put this disquiet quite directly at the heart of their theories: nearly all of them imply that modernity, because of the instability at its heart, because it is so difficult to equate it with any single social arrangement or state of affairs, is particularly hard to grasp and encompass cognitively. Although modernity, out of all social systems of human existence, is the one created as a result of the deliberate designs and acts of human groups, it is also the most difficult to understand. It would have been utterly surprising if modernity did not cause a similar disquiet in India, or if Indian intellectuals did not try to understand its nature. However, every society applies to its great and most complex tasks those skills it has developed for a long time, in which it is intellectually adept and confident. Indian culture did not have a preexisting tradition of social theory; but it did have a long and distinguished literary tradition. It is hardly surprising therefore that the self-reflection of modernity that happens in Europe in the form of social theory does so in India in the form of literary writing. It is necessary to modify the hardness of this distinction, however. I think, in Europe theoretical reflection in the more abstract conceptual form was always followed by a commentary in an artistic-literary form. It is hardly surprising that those contemporary historians of ideas who have sought to understand the peculiar constellation of ideas Europe has lived with for the last three centuries have often supplemented the chronicle of theory with a history of literary reflection, particularly ...